Ritson gives a tune which, however, bears no resemblance to the Somerset air, in the text.
Robin Hood is said to have been born in Locksley in Nottinghamshire about 1160, in the reign of Henry II. He was of noble blood, and his real name was Robert Fitzooth, of which Robin Hood is a corruption. He was commonly reputed to have been the Earl of Huntingdon, and it is possible that in the latter years of his life he may have had some right to the title. He led the life of an outlaw in Barnsdale (Yorks), Sherwood (Notts), and in Plompton Park (Cumberland), and gathered round him a large number of retainers. His chief lieutenants were Little John, whose surname is believed to have been Nailor; William Scadlock (Scathelock or Scarlet); George-a-Green, pinder or pound keeper of Wakefield; Much, a miller’s son; and Friar Tuck. It is said that he died in 1247, at the age of eighty-seven, at the Kirkleys Nunnery in Yorkshire, whither he had gone to be bled, and where it is supposed that he was treacherously done to death.
The Robin Hood ballads were no doubt founded upon the French trouvère-drama, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion,” which, in its turn, was only a dramatized version, largely etiological, of the Nature myth, Robin and Maid Marian being the lineal descendants of the King and Queen of the May-day ceremonies. In this connection it is interesting to note that country singers invariably call “Robin Hood,” “Robin o’ the ’ood,” that is, of the wood.
No. 5. The Wraggie Taggle Gipsies, O!
Compare this song with “The Gipsy Countess (Songs of the West, No. 50, 2d ed.) and “The Gipsy” (A Garland of Country Song, No. 32). A Scottish version of the words is in Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany (volume iv); see also “Gypsie Laddie,” in Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (volume ii, p. 95, ed. 1791). In Finlay’s Scotish Ballads (1808), the ballad appears as “Johnnie Faa,” and in Chambers’s Picture of Scotland, a valiant effort is made, after the manner of Scottish commentators, to provide the story with a historical foundation.
The tune is in the Æolian mode. I have noted no less than eighteen variants.
No. 6. Lord Bateman
This, again, is a very popular ballad with English folksingers, and I have noted down nineteen different versions of it. The singer of the Æolian tune given in the text was the old man who gave me “Robin Hood and the Tanner,” and here again he constantly varied his phrases in the several verses of the song (see English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 22). The words that he sang were virtually the same as those printed on broad-sides by Pitts, Jackson, and others.
For versions of this ballad, with tunes, see English County Songs (p. 62); Mr. Kidson’s Traditional Tunes (p. 32); Northumbrian Minstrelsy (p. 64); the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 240; volume iii, pp. 192–200); Sussex Songs (p. 43); Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads (p. 260 and appendix); English Folk Songs for Schools (No. 11); and George Cruikshank’s Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman.
For words only, see Jamieson’s Popular Ballads (volume ii, p. 17); Garret’s Newcastle Garlands (volume i); and the broadsides above mentioned. The ballad is exhaustively analyzed in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (“Lord Beichan,” No. 53).
The story of Lord Bateman, Beichan, or Bekie, is very similar to the well-known and ancient legend concerning Gilbert Becket, father of Saint Thomas the Martyr. This has suggested to some the derivation of the ballad from the legend; but Child thinks that this is not so, although he admits that the ballad has not come down to us unaffected by the legend. He points out that there is a similar story in the Gesta Romanorum (No. 5, Bohn ed.), of about the same age as the Becket legend; that there are beautiful repetitions of the story in the ballads of other nations; and that it has secondary affinities with “Hind Horn.” The hero’s name, allowing for different spellings and corruptions, is always the same; but the name of the heroine varies. In ten of the twelve copies of the ballad that Child gives
