Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John have left the highway and made a path over the corn,[105] apparently in defiance of the Pinder of Wakefield, who has the fame of being able to exact a penalty of trespassers, whatever their rank. The Pinder bids them turn again; they, being three to one, scorn to comply. The Pinder fights with them till their swords are broken. Robin cries Hold! and asks the Pinder to join his company in the greenwood. This the Pinder is ready to do at Michaelmas, when his engagement to his present master will be terminated. Robin asks for meat and drink, and the Pinder offers him bread, beef, and ale. The adventure of the ballad is naturally introduced into the play of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, printed in 1599, reprinted in Dodsley’s Old Plays (the third volume of the edition of 1825), and by Dyce among the works of Robert Greene. George a Greene fights with Scarlet, and beats him; then with Much (not John), and beats him; then with Robin Hood. Robin protests he is the stoutest champion that ever he laid hands on, and says: George, wilt thou forsake Wakefield And go with me? Two liveries will I give thee every year, And forty crowns shall be thy fee. George welcomes Robin to his house, offering him wafer-cakes, beef, mutton, and veal. (Dyce, II, 196 f.) The scene in the play is found in the prose history of George a Green, London, 1706, of which a copy is known, no doubt substantially the same, of the date 1632. The Pinner here fells ‘Slathbatch,’ Little John, and the Friar, before his bout with Robin. See Thoms, A Collection of Early Prose Romances, II, 44–47, and the prefaces, p. viii ff, p. xviii f, for more about the popularity of the Pinner’s story. Wakefield is in the West Riding of the county of York. Richard Brathwayte, in a poetical epistle “to all true-bred northerne sparks of the generous society of the Cottoneers,” Strappado for the Divell, 1615 (cited by Ritson, Robin Hood, ed. 1795, I, xxvii-ix), speaks of The Pindar’s valour, and how firme he stood In th’ townes defence gainst th’ rebel Robin Hood; How stoutly he behav’d himselfe, and would, In spite of Robin, bring his horse to th’ fold: from which we might infer that according to one account the Pinder had impounded Robin’s horse. But as Robin Hood, in this passage, is confounded with the rebel Earl of Kendal, or some one of his adherents, it is safe to suppose that Brathwayte has been twice inaccurate.[106] The ballad is so imperfect that one might be in doubt whether the Pinder fights with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John all together or successively. But to suppose the Pinder capable of dealing with all three at once would be monstrous, and we see from the History and from Greene’s play that the Pinder must take them one after the other, and Robin the last of the three.