How sayest thou, frere, wylt thou be my man, To do me the best servyse thou can? Thou shalt have both golde and fee. 110 * * * * * After ten lines of ribaldry, which have no pertinency to the traditional Robin Hood and Friar, the play abruptly passes to the adventure of Robin Hood and the Potter. #a.# _Ritson has been followed, without collation with Copland._ 35. maister. 64. spede ell. 70. you, you _for_ thou, thou. 82. donee. 104. starte. #b.# 13. he _wanting_. 15. to the. 23. word of. 31. Not. 35. maister. 41. if he. 43. be a. 59. ye _wanting_. 61. in a. 65. had rather: of hell _wanting_. 70. y^u: y^u shalt. 81. choose either sinke. 97. Here is. 103. might thou. 104. stare. 124 THE JOLLY PINDER OF WAKEFIELD #A. a.# Wood, 402, leaf 43. #b.# Garland of 1663, No 4. #c.# Garland of 1670, No 3. #d.# Pepys, II, 100, No 87 a. #e.# Wood, 401, leaf 61 b. #B.# Percy MS., p. 15; Hales and Furnivall, I, 32. Printed in Ritson’s Robin Hood, 1795, II, 16, from one of Wood’s copies, “compared with two other copies in the British Museum, one in black letter:” Evans, Old Ballads, 1777, 1784, I, 99. There is another copy in the Roxburghe collection, III, 24, and there are two in the Bagford. ‘A ballett of Wakefylde and a grene’ is entered to Master John Wallye and Mistress Toye, 19 July, 1557–9 July, 1558: Stationers’ Registers, Arber, I, 76. The ballad is one of four, besides the Gest, that were known to the author of the Life of Robin Hood in Sloane MS., 715, which dates from the end of the seventeenth century. It is thoroughly lyrical, and therein “like the old age,” and was pretty well sung to pieces before it ever was printed. A snatch of it is sung, as Ritson has observed, in each of the Robin Hood plays, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, by Anthony Munday, and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington, by A. Munday and Henry Chettle, both printed in 1601. At Michaelmas cometh my covenant out, My master gives me my fee; Then, Robin, I’ll wear thy Kendall green, And wend to the greenwood with thee. O there dwelleth a jolly pinder At Wakefield all on a green.[104] Silence sings the line ‘And Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John,’ 3^2, in the Second Part of King Henry Fourth, V, 3, and Falstaff addresses Bardolph as Scarlet and John in the first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, V, 4, Dyce, I, 295, we have: “Let not ... your Robinhoods, Scarlets, and Johns tie your affections in darkness to your shops.” Scarlet and John, comrades of Robin Hood from the beginning, are prominent in many ballads.