Thus Dunbar and Skelton were two men of ripened power, ready to take rank as our chief poets of the North and South at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

37. To the close of the fifteenth century belong also the earliest remaining traces of old English Ballad Literature. Wynken de Worde, born in Lorraine, came to England with Caxton; and after Caxton's death, in or about the year 1491, succeeded him in his printing-office, and styled himself printer to Margaret Countess of Richmond. He settled afterwards in Fleet Street, and lived until 1534. One of Wynken de Worde's earliest publications was a collection of Robin Hood Ballads into a continuous set called A Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode. In "The Vision of Piers Plowman,” Robin Hood is named as one who was already, in the second half of the fourteenth century, a hero of popular song, Sloth there says:

"I kan noght parfitly my Paternoster,

As the priest it syngeth;

But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood,

And Randolph, Erl of Chestre."

We learn also from the "Paston Letters" that in Edward IV.'s time Robin Hood was a hero of one of the popular mummeries. So he remained. A sermon of Latimer's shows with much emphasis the popularity of country sports on a Robin Hood's Day in the time of Edward VI. There are manuscripts also of the ballads of Robin Hood and the Potter and Robin Hood and the Monk, not older than the last years of the fifteenth century.

The tradition is that Robin Hood was a name corrupted from that of Robert Fitzooth, reputed Earl of Huntingdon, who was born about the year 1160, in the reign of Henry II. After Robin had, in the wildness of youth, consumed his inheritance, he was outlawed for debt, lived in the woods on the king's game, and by his open defiance became an impersonation of the popular feeling against forest laws, which, under the Norman kings, were cruelly iniquitous. Among the woods of England Robin Hood is said to have chiefly frequented Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, Barnsdale in Yorkshire, and Plompton Park in Cumberland. His most trusty friends were, it is said, John Nailor, known as Little John; William Scadlock, called also Scathelock and Scarlet; George à Green Pinder (that is, poundkeeper), of Wakefield; and Much, a miller's sor. But he gathered also, tradition says, a stout company of a hundred archers, equal to any four hundred who could be brought against them. The

TO A.D. 1500]

ROBIN HOOD BALLADS

207 ballads and tales that made Robin Hood representative of English popular feeling not only gave him courage and goodhumour, and connected his name with the maintenance of archery for national defence, but also gave him Friar Tuck for chaplain, and blended in him religious feeling with resistance to oppression :

"A good maner then had Robyn

In londe where that he were,
Every daye ere he wolde dine
Three masses wolde he hear."

His religion took especially the form, once dear to the people, of that worship of the Virgin which softened the harsh temper of mediæval doctrine :

"Robyn loved our dere lady;

For doute of dedely synne,
Wolde he never do company harme

That ony woman was ynne."

Maid Marian being added to his company, fidelity to her would express English domestic feeling; while the same battle against corrupt luxury in the Church which had been represented for the educated courtier by Walter Map's Golias poetry (ch. iii. § 13), was rudely expressed to the people in Robin Hood's injunction to his men :

"These byshoppes and these archebyshoppes,
Ye shall them bete and bynde."

Robin Hood pitied the poor, and gave them part in the wealth stripped from those who lived in sensual excess. The chief representative of rich ecclesiastics in the Robin Hood ballads was the Abbot of St. Mary's at York; and the oppressions of secular authority were especially defied in the person of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is said to have escaped all perils of his way of life, and to have been more than eighty years old when he went to his aunt, the prioress of Kirklees Nunnery, in Yorkshire, to be bled. She treacherously let him bleed to death. As he was thus dying, Robin bethought him of his buglehorn, and "blew out weak blasts three." Little John came to his rescue, and asked leave to burn the nunnery, but Robin said:

"I never hurt fair maid in all my time,

Nor at my end shall it be."

He asked only to shoot an arrow from the window, that he might be buried where the arrow fell; and so, says tradition, he

was buried on a height that overlooks the valley of the Calder, at the distance of a mighty bow-shot from Kirklees.

To the end of the fifteenth century belongs the charming dialogue-ballad of The Nut Brown Maid. She was a baron's daughter, and her love had been won by a suitor who came as "a squyer of lowe degree." Her faith was tried by her lover's feigning himself one who must die or fly as an outlaw to live by his bow like Robin Hood. As he urged the difficulties and dangers that must part them, in stanzas ending with the refrain, For I must to the greenwood go, alone, 3 banished man," the Nut Brown Maid met every argument with faithful resolve to bear all and follow him, the stanzas in which she answered closing steadily with the refrain, " For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone." When she had borne the trial of her faith, she learnt that "the squire of low degree" was neither squire nor banished man, but an earl's son, come to marry her and take her to Westmoreland, which was his heritage. The ballad ended with a moral like that attached by Petrarch and Chaucer to Boccaccio's tale of the "Patient Griselda" (ch. iv. § 46):

"For sith men wolde that wymen sholde be meke to them eche on,
Much more ought they to God obey, and serve but hym alone."

The ballads of The Battle of Otterburn and Chevy Chase do not remain to us in their first form. There is no copy of them written so early as the fifteenth century, to which doubtless they belong. The battle of Otterburn was fought on the 19th of August, 1388, between Scots under James Earl of Douglas, and English under the two sons of the Duke of Northumberland. It began with a sudden entering of England by the Earl of Douglas with 3,800 men, who advanced to Brancepeth, ravaging the country they passed through. In the warfare against English settlements in France, such a raid was called by the French allies of Scotland a chevauchée, and, by a common process, that name was corrupted into Chevy Chase. It lives yet among schoolboys as a “chivy." Now, since there are in Northumberland Cheviot Hills as well as an Otterburn, Chevy Chase was interpreted into the Hunting of the Cheviot. The old ballad of the "Battle of Otterburn," or "Chevy Chase"-the battle of the chevauchée which was its crowning incident-was therefore recast as The Hunting of the Cheviot, always with some confused sense of identity between one incident and the other. The battle of Otterburn is an incident minutely described

TO A.D. 1500]

BALLADS. CHEVY CHASE

209

by Froissart; but there is no record whatever of any similar battle that arose out of a Hunting on the Cheviots. The author of the ballad of the "Hunting" was, in fact, quite right when he said:

"This was the Hontynge of the Cheviot :

That tear began this spurn:

Old men that knowen the grownde well yenough
Call it the Battell of Otterburn."

The ballad literature to which these poems belong came into
strong life in Europe during the thirteenth, and especially the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the thirteenth century
Spain uttered through national ballads the soul of freedom in
her struggle against the Moors. Our English ballads are akin
to those which also among the Scandinavians became a
familiar social amusement of the people. They were recited by
one of a company with animation and with varying expression,
while the rest kept time, often with joined hands forming a
circle, advancing, retiring, balancing, sometimes remaining still,
and, by various movements and gestures, followed changes of
emotion in the story. Not only in Spain did the people keep
time by dance movement to the measure of the ballad, for even
to this day one may see, in the Faroe Islands, how winter
evenings of the North were cheered with ballad recitations,
during which, according to the old northern fashion, gestures
and movements of the listeners expressed emotions of the story
as the people danced to their old ballads and songs.
manner of enjoying them the ballads took their name. Ballare
is a Middle Latin word, meaning to incline to this side and that,
with which the Italians associate their name for dancing, and we
the word "ball" for the name of a dancing party. The balade
of Southern Europe (ch. iv. § 25), a wholly different production,
which is not in the least remarkable for life and energy, took
its name from the same word for another reason. It inclines to
this side and that, in see-saw with a single pair of rhymes.
There is some reason to think that educated gentlewomen were
often the unknown writers of the ballads of England and the
North of Europe.

From this

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE YEAR 1500 TO THE YEAR 1558.

I. OF the reign of Henry VII. (1485–1509), the last nine years have now to be accounted for. They were a time of rest from the feud between the English crown and Scottish people. Perkin Warbeck was, in 1495, a visitor at the court of James IV. of Scotland, and he was there married to a lady of the royal family. James made some attempts to maintain his guest's quarrel with England, but they came to little; and Henry VII. worked for a reversal of the policy that made an enemy of Scotland. Scotland, during the English civil wars free from attack, had increased in prosperity and power. Henry VII.'s England needed peace at home; and in 1502, Margaret Tudor, Henry's daughter, aged thirteen, was affianced to King James IV. of Scotland, then aged thirty. The princess entered Edinburgh a year later, marriage took place on the 8th of August, 1503, and was celebrated by William Dunbar (ch. v. § 36), in his poem of The Thistle and the Rose, not without the homespeaking which usually passed between a Scottish subject and his sovereign. For Dame Nature says to "the thistle keepit with a bush of spears :"

"And sen thou art a king, be thou discreet:
Herb without virtue hald not of sic price

As herb of virtue and of odour sweet;

And let no nettle vile and full of vice

Her fellow to the guidly flour de lis,
Nor let no wild weed full of churlishness
Compare her to the lilie's nobleness."

James IV. of Scotland, to whom such counsel was given, was a handsome man with uncut hair and beard, liberal, active in war or chase, familiar with his people, brave to rashness, well read, and of good address. He could speak Latin, French, German, Flemish, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and broad Scotch. He was attentive to priests, and gave by his life good reason for Dunbar's especial warning in "The Thistie and the Rose" of the Thistle's solemn trust to

Hold no other flow'r in sic deuty

As the fresh rose, of colour red and white;
For gif thou does, hurt is thine honesty.”

Through this weak side of his nature he is said to have been