What concerns us is the part borne by Robin Hood, John, and the Friar in these games, and Robin’s relation to Maid Marian. In Ellis’s edition of Brand’s Antiquities, I, 214, note h, we are told that Robin Hood is styled King of May in The Book of the Universal Kirk of Scotland. This is a mistake, and an important mistake. In April, 1577, the General Assembly requested the king to “discharge [prohibit] playes of Robin Hood, King of May, and sick others, on the Sabboth day.” In April, 1578, the fourth session, the king and council were supplicated to discharge “all kynd of insolent playis, as King of May, Robin Hood, and sick others, in the moneth of May, played either be bairnes at the schools, or others”; and the subject was returned to in the eighth session. We know from various sources that plays, founded on the ballads, were sometimes performed in the course of the games. We know that archers sometimes personated Robin Hood and his men in the May-game.[52] The relation of Robin Hood, John, and the Friar to the May-game morris is obscure. “It plainly appears,” says Ritson, “that Robin Hood, Little John, the Friar, and Maid Marian were fitted out at the same time with the morris-dancers, and consequently, it would seem, united with them in one and the same exhibition,” meaning the morris. But he adds, with entire truth, in a note: “it must be confessed that no other direct authority has been met with for constituting Robin Hood and Little John integral characters of the morris-dance.”[53] And further, with less truth so far as the Friar is concerned: “that Maid Marian and the Friar were almost constantly such is proved beyond the possibility of a doubt.” The Friar is found in Tollet’s window, which Douce speaks of, cautiously, as a representation of an English May-game _and_ morris-dance. The only “direct authority,” so far as I am aware, for the Friar’s being a party in the morris-dance (unconnected with the May-game) is the late authority of Ben Jonson’s Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsies, 1621, cited by Tollet in his Memoir; where it is said that the absence of a Maid Marian and a friar is a surer mark than the lack of a hobby-horse that a certain company cannot be morris-dancers.[54] The lady is an essential personage in the morris.[55] How and when she came to receive the appellation of Maid Marian in the English morris is unknown. The earliest occurrence of the name seems to be in Barclay’s fourth Eclogue,[56] “subjoined to the last edition of The Ship of Foles, but originally printed soon after 1500:” Ritson, I, lxxxvii, ed. 1832. Warton suggested a derivation from the French Marion, and the idea is extremely plausible. Robin and Marion were the subject of innumerable motets and pastourelles of the thirteenth century, and the hero and heroine of a very pretty and lively play, more properly comic opera, composed by Adam de la Halle not far from 1280. We know from a document of 1392 that this play was annually