Kuhn, starting with the assumption that the mythical character of Robin Hood is fully established (by traditions posterior to the ballads and contradictory to their tenor), has sought to show that our courteous outlaw is in particular one of the manifestations of Woden. The hobby-horse, which, be it borne in mind, though now and then found in the May-game or morris-dance, was never intimately associated, perhaps we may say never at all associated, with Robin Hood, represents, it is maintained, Woden. The fundamental grounds are these. In a Christmas, New Year, or Twelfth Day sport at Paget’s Bromley, Staffordshire, the rider of the hobby-horse held a bow and arrow in his hands, with which he made a snapping noise. In a modern Christmas festivity in Kent, the young people would affix the head of a horse to a pole about four feet in length, and tie a cloth round the head to conceal one of the party, who, by pulling a string attached to the horse’s lower jaw, produced a snapping noise as he moved along. This ceremony, according to the reporter, was called a _hoodening_, and the figure of the horse a _hooden_, “a wooden horse.”[62] The word hooden, according to Kuhn, we may unhesitatingly expound as Woden; Hood is a corruption of “Hooden,” and this Hooden again conducts us to Woden. Glosyng is a ful glorious thing certayn. The sport referred to is explained in Pegge’s Alphabet of Kenticisms (collected 1735–36), under the name _hooding_, as a country masquerade at Christmas time, which in Derbyshire they call guising, and in other places mumming; and to the same effect in the Rev. W. D. Parish’s Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect (soon to be published) under _hoodening_, which word is an obvious corruption, or secondary form, of hooding. The word hooding, applied to the sport, means just what it does in the old English hooding-cloth, a curtain; that is, a covering, and so a disguise by covering. It is true that wooden is pronounced hooden,[63] or ooden, in Kent, and that the hobby-horse had a wooden head, but it is quite inconceivable that the sport should receive its name from a circumstance so subordinate as the material of which the horse was made. Such an interpretation would hardly be thought of had not hooding in its proper sense long been obsolete. That this is the case is plain from two facts: the hooding used to be accompanied with carol-singing, and the Rev. Mr Parish informs us that carol-singing on Christmas Eve is still called hoodening at Monckton, in East Kent. The form Hooden, from which Robin’s name is asserted by Kuhn to be corrupted, is invented for the occasion. I suppose that no one will think that the hobby-horse-rider’s carrying a bow and arrows, in the single instance of the Staffordshire sport, conduces at all to the identifying of Robin Hood with the hobby-horse. Whether the Hobby-Horse represents Woden is not material here. It is enough that the Hobby-Horse cannot be shown to represent Robin Hood.[64]