The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 3 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 3 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
performed at Angers, at Whitsuntide, and we cannot doubt that it was a
stock-piece in many places, as from its merits it deserved to be. There
are as many proverbs about Robin and Marion as there are about Robin
Hood, and the first verse of the play, derived from an earlier song, is
still (or was fifty years ago) in the mouths of the peasant girls of
Hainault.[57] In the May-game of June, 1559, described by Machyn, after
many other things, they had “Robin Hood and Little John,” and “Maid
Marian and Friar Tuck,” some dramatic scene, pantomime, or pageant,
probably two; but there is nothing of Maid Marian in the two
(fragmentary) Robin Hood plays which are preserved, both of which, so
far as they go, are based on ballads. Anthony Munday, towards the end of
the sixteenth century, made a play, full of his own inventions, in which
Robert, Earl of Huntington, being outlawed, takes refuge in Sherwood,
with his chaste love Matilda, daughter of Lord Fitzwaters, and changes
his name to Robin Hood, hers to Maid Marian.[58] One S. G., a good deal
later, wrote a very bad ballad about the Earl of Huntington and his
lass, the only ballad in which Maid Marian is more than a name.
Neglecting these perversions, Maid Marian is a personage in the May-game
and morris who is not infrequently paired with a friar, and sometimes
with Robin Hood, under what relation, in either case, we cannot
precisely say. Percy had no occasion to speak of her as Robin’s
concubine, and Douce none to call her Robin’s paramour.
That ballads about Robin Hood were familiar throughout England and
Scotland we know from early testimony. Additional evidence of his
celebrity is afforded by the connection of his name with a variety of
natural objects and archaic remains over a wide extent of country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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