CHAPTER ICHAP-BOOKS AND BALLADS

CHAPTER ICHAP-BOOKS AND BALLADSChildren and the Supernatural—Steele’s Account of a boy’s reading—Characteristics of chap-book “histories”—Folk-lore and legendary settings—The History of Friar Bacon—Fortunatus—Other chap-book survivals—The Georgian Autolycus—Travellers’ tales—A great chap-book—Books for men and children—Chap-books and ballads—Treatment of romances—The fairy world—Legend and history—Border and Robin Hood ballads.

Children and the Supernatural—Steele’s Account of a boy’s reading—Characteristics of chap-book “histories”—Folk-lore and legendary settings—The History of Friar Bacon—Fortunatus—Other chap-book survivals—The Georgian Autolycus—Travellers’ tales—A great chap-book—Books for men and children—Chap-books and ballads—Treatment of romances—The fairy world—Legend and history—Border and Robin Hood ballads.

Steele’s account of his two god-children[1](perhaps the choicest of hisTatlerpapers) discovers the weak point of Locke’s philosophy. Nothing could so shake a blind faith in Æsop as the frank words of Steele’s little boy who, at eight years old, although he was “a very great Historian in Æsop’s Fables”, declared “that he did not delight in that Learning, because he did not believe they were true”.

His sister Betty defied Mr. Locke upon another side, for she dealt “chiefly in Fairies and Sprights”; and would “terrifie the Maids with her Accounts” till they were afraid to go up to bed.

Now, neither of these children had the least difficulty about the supernatural. The boy could have believed in beasts that talked; but he detected the man inside the lion’s skin: the man that pointed a moral. TheseFables, once understood as ridiculing the follies of mankind, were no longer “true”; but there were other stories of the boy’s own choosing which, though full of magic, were true to the spirit of their kind.

Steele says he had “very much turned his studies for about a Twelvemonth past into the Lives and AdventuresofDon Bellianis of Greece,Guy of Warwick, theSeven Champions, and other Historians of that Age”.

Not only does the sympathetic godfather enter into these literary adventures, as Mr. Locke, with all his wisdom, never could have done, but he knows the virtue of an unpointed moral: the boy, he says, “had made Remarks, which might be of Service to him during the Course of his whole Life. He would tell you the Mismanagements ofJohn Hickathrift, find Fault with the passionate Temper inBevis of Southamptonand lovedSt. Georgefor being the Champion ofEngland; and by this Means had his Thoughts insensibly moulded into the Notions of Discretion, Virtue and Honour”.

In the reign of Anne, these stirring “Histories” were a part of every pedlar’s stock-in-trade. They were sold at fairs or hawked from door to door; and a boy that could never stumble through the maze of a seventeenth century folio might read as many romances as he had halfpence. Some had been among the earliest printed books. They were mostly from French originals, though Sir Bevis and Sir Guy had been “Chevaliers d’Angleterre” from the beginning. The chap-bookSeven ChampionsandLife and Death of St. Georgewere both based on Richard Johnson’sHistory of the Seven Champions, a medley of other romances in which Caxton’s “Saynt George of Capadose” had become St. George of Coventry. But the romance spirit was cosmopolitan, born of the Crusades, and foreign champions like Don Bellianis of Greece were hardly less popular.[2]

Late writers varied the old adventures; but the chap-book printer, who did his own editing, cut down the heavy matter of the folios to a bare chain of incidents. His words were few and ill-chosen, he had neither style nor grammar; but the core of interest was sound: the storiestouched the imagination of his readers like ballads and fairy tales.

Gallant Knights came straight from the fields of France to the magnificence of Eastern cities; youths, setting out from the English towns, adventured among dwarfs and Saracens, giants and dragons, and won their knighthood by the way.

If the hero never failed to subdue his enemies and win a lady of surpassing beauty, there was still a doubt (enough to keep the reader curious) whether a rival would snatch her from him and put him upon a more dangerous adventure to win her back; or whether, if they fared on together, they would meet an enchanter or a giant first.

Repetition seldom tires a child. The feats of Acquitaine could be repeated at Damascus; and the wood-cuts in the chap-books proved that Montelion and Parismus could fight in the armour of Don Bellianis or St. George. Nor was it a chance association of the pedlar’s pack which threw these champions into the company of a village strongman, John Hickathrift, more commonly called Tom; for although Hickathrift fought with a cart-wheel and axle-tree for shield and sword, he could beat the best of them at giant-killing.[3]

The romances, indeed, are full of the common stuff of folk-lore. If the hero blow a trumpet at a castle-gate, a giant may be expected; if he blow it at the mouth of an enchanted cave, a prophetic voice replies, or if he enter the cave by chance, he may find the prophecy inscribed on a pillar of sapphire—the prelude, inDon Bellianis, to the coming of the Enchantress through a pair of ivory gates.

A hundred folk-tales tell of the Princess rescued from a dragon; transformation is an affair of every day: Don Bellianis slays a magician “in the shape of a griffin”;St. Denis, in theSeven Champions, is transformed into a hart, the Princess of Thessaly into a mulberry-tree; and St. David sleeps seven years in an enchanted garden—the Magic Sleep of the fairy tales. Nor is the champion of romance without his wonderful sword or cloak.

The Sword “Morglay” (no more than a stout weapon in the old version ofSir Bevis) is called “wonderful” in the chap-books. Don Bellianis draws a magic sword from a pillar, as Arthur pulled his out of the stone; St. George has invincible armour; and the laterHistory of Fortunatusis the tale of a Wonderful Purse and a Wishing Cap.

But whoever looks upon a child as a pure romantic, has learned but half his lesson; for in many tales that have stood the test of time, there is little interest outside sheer matter of fact; and even the romances owed something to legendary settings which touched a borderland of truth. To know that Bevis lived in the reign of Edgar, that Guy, returning from his pilgrimage, found King Athelstane at Winchester, beset by the Danes, would confirm a child’s belief; but the little reader of chap-books knew more than this; he could give the exact measurements of Tom Hickathrift’s grave in Tilney Churchyard, knew where to find Guy’s armour and his porridge-pot at Warwick, and never doubted that Bevis built Arundel Castle for love of his horse.

It might be done indeed, for such a horse: no mere product of a wizard’s cunning, but a steed fit to carry a champion: alive as the persons of the romances never were. He figures in every adventure, carries the thread of the story from point to point, and yet stands out, a very symbol of romance.

The chap-book writer makes no picture of the knighting of Bevis, and never mentions his shield with the three blue eagles on a field of gold; but he remembers well enough how the Saracen King’s daughter, Josian the fair, presentedBevis with the sword “Morglay” and the “wonderful steed called Arundel”.

From that point the story goes to a sound of hoofs; and though the King betrayed Bevis into the hands of his enemy and gave the horse Arundel to Bevis’s rival, King Jour, and though Bevis lay in a dungeon for seven years, Josian herself was not more faithful to him than Arundel; for when at last he escaped, and came, disguised as a poor pedlar, to the castle of Jour, Josian knew him not; but Arundel, hearing his master speak, “neighed and broke seven chains for joy”.

As to the men and women of romance, they borrowed life from their adventures, but apart from these, were mere types of strength or beauty. The original portraits, though vague, were not without poetry: the impression of “The Squyere Guy” has a hint of Chaucer:

“Feyre he was and bryght of face,He schone as bryght as ane glace.”

“Feyre he was and bryght of face,

He schone as bryght as ane glace.”

The chap-book writer contents himself with the remark that King Ermine was “prepossessed with Guy’s looks”. He bestows more care on the heroine, Felyce, but covers the faint outline with his trowel. Felyce, once

“the Erlys Doghtur, a swete thynge”,

becomes “this heavenly Phillis, whose beauty was so excellent that Helen the pride of all Greece might seem as a Black a Moor to her”.

Many striking situations and dramatic incidents of the older stories are lost in the chap-books, for want of picture-making phrases and live speech. A name here and there, such as Brademond, King of Damascus, would lift a boy like a magic carpet, and set him down among Saracen pavilions; bare facts might call up pictures; there was the ransom of King Jour,—“Twenty tun of gold and three hundred white steeds”; but the unlettered writer shirkedmost of the details which, in telling the story aloud, he would express by gestures. The fine fight with the dragon, inGuy of Warwick, makes but a paragraph in the chap-book; the monster’s head is off before the fight is well begun. Not even a “picture of the dragon, thirty feet in length, worked in a cloth of arras and hung up in Warwick Castle for an everlasting monument” could make amends for this.

Yet a child, making his own pictures out of the poor phrases of these writers, might have in his mind’s eye something not unlike the images of the old translator: the boy Bevis on a hillside with his sheep, looking down at the Castle “that should be his”; the four Knights selling him to the Saracen merchantmen; or the giant Ascapart wading out to the ship, with Bevis and Josian and the horse Arundel tucked under his arm.

These stand in clear outline, and, in the roughest shape, have suggestions of pathos or incongruity; but they pass at once into action, which is what a child wants: the boy comes down from the hill, forces his way into the castle and attacks the usurper with his shepherd’s crook; the Saracens carry him overseas, and set him in the way of adventure; Ascapart proves himself “a mariner good at need”, hoists sail and brings his master and mistress safely into harbour.

Laughter is rare in the romances, but this story of Ascapart has a humour of its own. Bevis, having beaten the giant, spares his life on condition that he becomes his servant; and in the course of their adventures the vanquished rescues the victor, the servant picks up his master and carries him about like a toy. Such a feat measures the great creature more effectually than the exact method of the chap-book writer: “thirty Foot high and a Foot between his eyebrows”.

Another “famous History” which came with theseinto the chap-books, was that ofValentine and Orson, first printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and reprinted at the close of the nineteenth century as an “old fairy tale”. It has some novel features besides the usual stage properties of romance. Of the twin brothers separated in childhood, one is brought up at Court and trained in knightly exercises; the other carried off by a bear and nourished with her cubs. This is a foretaste ofThe Jungle Book:

“In a cave, the bear had four young ones, among whom she laid the child to be devoured, yet all the while the young bears did it no harm; but with their rough paws stroked it softly. The old bear, perceiving they did not devour it, showed a bearish kind of favour towards it, inasmuch that she kept it and gave it suck among her young ones for the space of one year”.

The second chapter records how the bear’s nursling, Orson, grew up into a Wild Man, and how the young knight Valentine, his brother, meeting him in a wood, won a victory of skill against strength; after which, still unconscious of their relationship, he tamed the Wild Man and taught him the arts of chivalry.

The more magical elements of the story have a flavour of the East, and doubtless belong to the older strata of Eastern romance. The adventure of the Dwarf Pacolet suggests the tale of the “Magic Horse” in theThousand and One Nights; for by his art this dwarf, who was an Enchanter, “had contrived a horse of wood, and in the forehead a fixed pin, by turning of which he could convey himself to the farthest part of the world”.

Many such marvels, related during the Middle Ages by merchants or Crusaders returning from the East, had been caught up in the weavings of romance; but it is a sort of magic that has little to do with the myth-making power of childhood. Pacolet’s flying horse is made of wood; the touch of its hoof never brought water from a mountain-side.It represents the magic of ingenuity which comes half-way between pure romance and the practical marvels of a scientific age.

Indeed, it is but a step from the flying horse of Eastern tales to Roger Bacon’s horseless chariots and flying “instruments”. The “Learned Friar”, a clerk of Oxford in the thirteenth century, foretold many things to be performed by “Art and Nature”, wherein should be “nothing magical”. Yet he studied such strange matters that he was persecuted for practising magic, and the chap-books set him down a conjurer. The Enchanted Head of Brass which inValentine and Orsonreveals the parentage of the brothers, reappears in theFamous History of Friar Bacon, as the Brazen Head, wrought in so many sleepless nights by the Friar and his brother-in-magic, Friar Bungay.

Greene, in his play ofFryer Bacon and Fryer Boungay(1591), follows this well known tract,[4]which came down with few changes to the eighteenth century. Here the old magic machinery goes with the light movement of a popular tale. The Brazen Head should have disclosed a secret whereby Friar Bacon “would have walled England about with brass”; but the stupidity of his servant Miles prevented it. For when the two magicians, worn out with toil, lay down to sleep, they set him to watch the Head, commanding him to call them the moment it should speak; and he, the while, kept up his spirits “with tabor and pipe and song”.

When at last the Head spake these words: “Time Is,” and no more, Miles, understanding nothing by that, fell to mockery: “If thou canst speak no wiser, they shall sleep till doomsday for me. Time is! I know Time is, that you shall hear, Goodman Brazen Face!”

So saying, he fitted the words to the tune of “Dainty,come thou to me”, and sang for half-an-hour. Thereupon the Head spake again, saying two words and no more: “Time Was”; whereat the Simpleton railed afresh, and another half-hour went by.

Then the Brazen Head spake again, these words: “Time is Past”, and then fell down; and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half-dead with fear.

“Out on thee, villain,” cried Friar Bacon, “thou hast undone us both; hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all England had been walled about with brass, to its glory and our eternal fame.”

Locke’s followers were never tired of setting the “plain Magique of tru Reason’s Light” against Friar Bacon’s conjurings. There were later moralists who recognized the Wizard as a pioneer of science; but these would have none of his magic, and rejected all tales of undeserved good fortune.

Wordsworth alone had the courage to tum a child loose in the enchanted woods. He praisedThe History of Fortunatus, which is more like “Aladdin” than any tale of chivalry. By sheer luck the Spendthrift finds a Galley of Venice lying at anchor and gets his choice of gifts. These vanished like fairy gold in the hands of his sons, and children remembered little else but his Wishing Cap and his Purse that never was empty. Yet Fortunatus was a name to conjure by, and the pure spirit of adventure was in his first setting out, as the woodcut shows, “with a Hawk in his Hand”.

It seems odd that the eighteenth century child should have ballads about King Arthur and his Knights, but no account of them in prose. Malory’s “Noble Histories”, like the once famous cycles of Amadis and the Palmerins, escaped the chap-book writers; but they had one or two relics of the oldHistoryes of Troye, in which Priam’spalace had become an enchanted castle, and Hector a knight errant.

The pedlar had no chronology. Patient Grissel, fresh from a new translation of Boccaccio, was a lady of the eighteenth century, and what pleased the country fireside of 1700 still pleased it in 1760. The tales that Mr. Burchell gave the children inThe Vicar of Wakefieldmight have come out of a chapman’s bundle in almost any part of the century: “the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the History of Patient Grissel, the Adventures of Catskin and then Fair Rosamond’s Bower.”

Among other “useless Trumpery” were riddles, nonsense-books and farcical tales of rogues or simpletons.[5]These are full of the topsy-turvy nonsense that children love, and the coarse jests from which they were seldom guarded. The older stories, even when they deal with everyday life, give it a romantic flavour. The Cobbler feasts with the King; the Valiant London Prentice leaves his shop on London Bridge, and sets out to joust with eastern princes. A Tudor pedlar, Tom Long, in the course of his absurd adventures, visits the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, whose story makes a welcome interlude:

“Coming to the town, they found everything altered, the inhabitants being other sort of people than they were the night before. So, going to buy food, the people refused to take their money, saying they knew not the coin; but enquiring further, found that since their being there, three generations had been dead and the fourth was in being”.

Tom Long was the puppet of a nonsense-book; but other chap-books, following Deloney, told the “true histories” of industrious fortune-makers who were not out of place in a commercial age; and the life of an eighteenth century pedlar was plain enough to pass for truth. An account (in a late Stirling tract)[6]of the “FlyingStationer”, Peter Duthie, shows that he took up his trade in 1729, when he was eight years old, and was upon the road for eighty years—a Georgian Autolycus, known for his quaint wit “in every city, town, village and hamlet in great Britain”. At some time, perhaps, he sold “lives” of his brethren Dougal Graham and John Cheap the Chapman, whose story was “moralised” by Hannah More.

The traveller is always a romantic figure. No amount of fact can take the pleasure of expectation and surprise out of a journey, and the setting of most chap-books was a journey by land or sea. The “Flying Stationer” asked no more for the Wonderful Voyages of Sir John Mandeville than for the rough yarn of a ship-wrecked sailor.

This last, if it pointed a moral, might serve a double purpose, for the old allegories were dying out, except in burlesques. Abstractions always had a way of coming alive when they set foot on English ground, andThe History of Laurence Lazy, of “Lubberland Castle in the County of Sloth” was no mere allegory of Idleness, but the tale of a scapegrace who, to the joy of all children, got the better of the Schoolmaster, the Squire’s Cook and the Farmer. His “Arraignment and Trial” in the Town Hall of “Never Work” was a triumphant apology for idlers; yet a scene like this may have suggested the symbolic trial of Christian and Faithful in the Town of Vanity.

That splendid chap-book,The Pilgrim’s Progress,[7]is built up of such things. Bunyan’s reading, outside the Bible (although he counted it among his sins) had acquainted him with romances, tales of magic and enchantment, “histories” of live persons; and all these, or nearly all, were concerned with adventures upon the road.[8]

Bible stories and Christian legends were common in Bunyan’s youth. There was a versified “history” of Joseph and his Brethren, and the beautiful legend of the Glastonbury Thorn was as well known as that ofThe Seven SleepersorThe Wandering Jew.

ButThe Pilgrim’s Progressdealt in terms of unmistakable experience with the journey that every man must go; the figures of its allegory were live persons, such as a man might meet upon any road, and its setting changed as the way ran through towns and villages, past fields and sloughs and thickets, over hills where the surest-footed might fall “from running to going and from going to clambering upon his hands and knees, because of the steepness of the place”, or beside rivers that ran through meadows and orchards, with lilies underfoot, and above, “green trees with all manner of fruit”.

These things give place at certain points, as they do in life, to the scorched plains of torment, the overwhelming Shadow of Death, or, where the river and the way for a time part, to the Dungeon of Despair. There are glimpses by the way of strange and beautiful lands, of vineyards and mountains upon which “the sun shineth night and day”; but here also is the road running through the midst of the country to a city more splendid than the cities of romance, for “it was builded of pearls and precious stones, also the streets thereof were paved with gold”.

The child would start on this journey with some knowledge of his bearings, for, like Bunyan, he had set out on an earlier pilgrimage with Guy of Warwick.[9]At the Palace Beautiful, he would remember how Montelion had been armed by nymphs, and at Doubting Castle, how Bevis had escaped from his prison in Damascus.

No knight ever strove with giant or dragon as Christian struggled with Apollyon; none of the Seven Champions had encountered the dangers of this road. Yet these were adventures that might happen to a man in the midst of his ordinary business; that much a child might understand beneath the surface of romance which for him is the chief matter of the book.

This was the first of three great books which pleased both men and children in the eighteenth century. The others areRobinson Crusoe[10]andThe Travels and Adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver.[11]Each, in its own kind, is aVoyage Imaginaireand the unwrought matter of all three was to be found in chap-books. The tale of the shipwrecked man had never been told with such apparent truth as inRobinson Crusoe. Readers of the chap-book history of Drake, who were familiar with accounts of “Monsters and Monstrous People”, would read this sober journal as the purest matter of fact; nor was there anything beyond belief in Gulliver’s adventures, to anyone who knew the pedlar’s book ofSir John Mandeville. For here, among greater marvels, was a notable account of giants and pigmies.

The island setting ofRobinson Crusoe, the figure of Friday, the footprint in the sand, belong to the world of romance; so do the giants and dwarfs ofGulliver. Yet in both books, the things that happen are human and practical; the setting gives scope for the chief interests of the century: men and morals and matters of fact. Defoe pointed his moral, and as an afterthought explained the Voyage of Robinson Crusoe as an allegory of his life; Swift used the contrary device of satire. But no child was ever concerned with an under-sense, where he couldfollow every turn of the adventure. A philosopher would not have discovered Crusoe’s allegory, and a child is more likely to suspect satire inReynard the Foxthan inGulliver.

The adventures of Lilliput and Brobdignag are the convincing “history” of a nation of Tom Thumbs and a nation of Blunderbores; only a little Gradgrind would question their truth. A child readingThe Pilgrim’s Progressis himself the Pilgrim; in the adventure of the island he is the shipwrecked man; and in the Travels, first the big man upon whose body the little men climb with ladders, then the little man, paddling his toy boat to amuse the giants.

These books, like the romances, were for little men as well as big ones; but their authors renewed the old devices by a masterly simple style. They made pictures such as were never found in chap-book prose, and rarely in tales that had passed into ballad form.

The eighteenth century pedlar had fewer ballads than his predecessors; yet those he had, like the songs of Autolycus, were “for man or woman, of all sizes”.

Ballad tunes, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, were “Food for the hungry ears of little ones,” and there is something in the simple conventions of ballads that suggests the story-telling of a child. Those printed ballads, “darling songs of the common People”, which Addison found upon the walls of eighteenth-century houses, attracted him by their classic simplicity, but the two he liked the best: “Chevy Chase” and “The Two Children in the Wood”, had been the joy of Elizabethan nurseries.[12]

Most of the chap-book stories were sung as ballads. “The Seven Champions”, “St. George”, “Patient Grissel” and “The London Prentice” were all in theCollection of Old Balladsprinted in 1723, with “The Noble Acts of King Arthur” from Malory;[13]and others were reprinted in Percy’sReliques(1765) from a folio manuscript of the seventeenth century.

The ballad maker, dealing with romances, preferred short episodes. A tedious story would never go to his quick measures; but by laying his chief stress on speech and movement, or adding a refrain, he made a thing quite unlike the short versions of the chap-books, and gave a certain dramatic unity to the separate parts.

Thus the incident of “Guy and Colebrande”, in Percy’s folio, had been chosen fromGuy of Warwick, and the ballad of St. George, in the Collection of 1723, deals only with the dragon story. Some ballads, it is true, cover a sequence of adventures. “The Lord of Lorn,”, likeBevis of Southampton, gives the whole story of a child robbed of his inheritance: a shepherd boy that should have been a lord; and the scene changes from Britain to France and back again; but so much is told in dialogue that the story dances to its end:

“Do thou me off thy sattin doublettThy shirtband wrought with glistering gold,And doe mee off thy golden chaineAbout thy necke so many a fold.“Do thou me off thy velvett hat.With fether in that is so ffine;All unto thy silken shirtThat’s wrought with many a golden seam....“‘What must be my name, worthy Steward?I pray thee now, tell it me:’‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware,To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’”

“Do thou me off thy sattin doublettThy shirtband wrought with glistering gold,And doe mee off thy golden chaineAbout thy necke so many a fold.

“Do thou me off thy sattin doublett

Thy shirtband wrought with glistering gold,

And doe mee off thy golden chaine

About thy necke so many a fold.

“Do thou me off thy velvett hat.With fether in that is so ffine;All unto thy silken shirtThat’s wrought with many a golden seam.

“Do thou me off thy velvett hat.

With fether in that is so ffine;

All unto thy silken shirt

That’s wrought with many a golden seam.

...

“‘What must be my name, worthy Steward?I pray thee now, tell it me:’‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware,To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’”

“‘What must be my name, worthy Steward?

I pray thee now, tell it me:’

‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware,

To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’”

Of the fairy world revealed in “Thomas Rymer”, the ghostly suggestion of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” thereis no trace till the close of the century. The true ballads of Elfland are more song than story, and rise by suggestion above the simplicity of fairy tales:

“O they rade on and farther on,And they waded rivers abune the kneeAnd they saw neither sun nor moon,But they heard the roaring of the sea.”

“O they rade on and farther on,

And they waded rivers abune the knee

And they saw neither sun nor moon,

But they heard the roaring of the sea.”

The breath of enchantment is rare in English ballads. There is nothing in print before Scott’sMinstrelsylike the magic of these lines; but Percy reprinted a sixteenth century ballad, “The Mad-Merry Prankes of Robbin Goodfellow” which Puck himself might have sung:

“From Oberon in FairylandThe King of ghosts and shadows there,Mad Robbin I at his commandAm sent to view the night-sports here.What revell routIs kept aboutIn every corner where I goeI will oreseeAnd merry beAnd make good sport with ho, ho, ho.”

“From Oberon in Fairyland

The King of ghosts and shadows there,

Mad Robbin I at his command

Am sent to view the night-sports here.

What revell rout

Is kept about

In every corner where I goe

I will oresee

And merry be

And make good sport with ho, ho, ho.”

This is the triumphant laughter of a child. The “shrewd and knavish sprite” has neither the delicacy of smaller fairies nor the courtly dignity of his master. He is the spirit of childish mischief: greeting night-wanderers “with counterfeiting voice”, shape-changing, “whirrying” over hedges and pools, or playing tricks on lads and lasses at village feasts. “Hobgoblin” or “sweet Puck”, half-child, half-fairy, he roams the English country,

“Through woods, through lakes,Through bogs, through brakes,Ore bush and brier”,

“Through woods, through lakes,

Through bogs, through brakes,

Ore bush and brier”,

and boasts of greater powers.

There is no doubting either voice or words:

“More swift than lightning can I flyeAnd round about this ayrie welkin soone.And in a minutes space descryEach thing that’s done belowe the moone”.

“More swift than lightning can I flye

And round about this ayrie welkin soone.

And in a minutes space descry

Each thing that’s done belowe the moone”.

There are two more fairy songs in theReliques: one given “with some corrections” from a seventeenth century garland, the other, Bishop Corbet’s “Farewell” to the fairies. The first contradicts the second, for obeying the invocation

“Come, follow, follow meYou fairy elves that be”,

“Come, follow, follow me

You fairy elves that be”,

a team of little atomies appear, proving that they were never out of England since Shakespeare wrote, but “unheard and unespy’d”, were gliding through Puritan key-holes and spreading their feasts while the Bishop was composing his lament,

“Farewell, rewards and fairies!”

Yet these, like Robin Goodfellow, are spirits of Earth; they eat more than fairy bread. A mortal surely suggested the details of their feast, but they dance a fairy measure:

“The grasshopper, gnat and fly,Serve for our minstrelsy;Grace said, we dance awhile,And so the time beguile;And if the moon doth hide her head,The gloe-worm lights us home to bed.“On tops of dewie grasseSo nimbly do we passe;The young and tender stalkNe’er bends when we do walk:Yet in the morning may be seenWhere we the night before have been.”

“The grasshopper, gnat and fly,Serve for our minstrelsy;Grace said, we dance awhile,And so the time beguile;And if the moon doth hide her head,The gloe-worm lights us home to bed.

“The grasshopper, gnat and fly,

Serve for our minstrelsy;

Grace said, we dance awhile,

And so the time beguile;

And if the moon doth hide her head,

The gloe-worm lights us home to bed.

“On tops of dewie grasseSo nimbly do we passe;The young and tender stalkNe’er bends when we do walk:Yet in the morning may be seenWhere we the night before have been.”

“On tops of dewie grasse

So nimbly do we passe;

The young and tender stalk

Ne’er bends when we do walk:

Yet in the morning may be seen

Where we the night before have been.”

Rhymed nursery tales seldom show the true ballad quality. The only children’s stories in the Collection of1723 are “The Children in the Wood”, and “Sir Richard Whittington”: the one a true ballad, newly licensed and approved by Addison; the other (also mentioned in theSpectator) taking precedence of such rhymes as “Catskin” and “Tom Thumb” for a popular grafting of the romance of Fortune upon a stock of historical fact.

Southern ballad-printers favoured the merry or tragic themes of legend and history,[14]and if few of their songs had the trumpet-note of “Chevy Chase”, they lacked neither freshness nor vigour. Some, like “the Blind Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall-Green”, gave a fresh turn to Elizabethan traditions, and made up for indifferent workmanship by a plentiful force of rhythm. Late nursery poets could not better this trick of the ballad-maker’s:

“It was a blind beggar that long lost his sight,He had a fair daughter of beauty most bright;And many a gallant brave suitor had she,For none was so comely as pretty Bessee.”

“It was a blind beggar that long lost his sight,

He had a fair daughter of beauty most bright;

And many a gallant brave suitor had she,

For none was so comely as pretty Bessee.”

Another of these old broadsides, “Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night” appeared among Dryden’s Miscellanies in 1702, in the Collections of 1723 and 1724, and again in Evans’sOld Ballads(1777).

“The music of the finest singer is dissonance,” wrote Goldsmith, “to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong’s last Good Night or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen.”

These are the true stuff of ballads; but a child cares most about action, and, asked to choose between them, would be pretty sure to call for the Border Song.

The story of John Armstrong, which came down to prose in the chap-books, has points in common with “Robin Hood”, but John and his “Merry Men” have no touch of Robin’s careless humour. They fight like the heroes of Chevy Chase, and ask no quarter:

“Said John, Fight on, my merry men all,I am a little hurt, but I am not slain.I will lay me down for to bleed a whileThen I’le rise and fight with you again.”

“Said John, Fight on, my merry men all,

I am a little hurt, but I am not slain.

I will lay me down for to bleed a while

Then I’le rise and fight with you again.”

The pirate song of “Sir Andrew Barton”[15]is a sailor’s variant of this. Lord Howard defies Sir Andrew upon the high seas much as Erle Percy, in despite of the Douglas, takes his pleasure in the Scottish woods. There was never a better fight on shore, and when at last the pirate falls to an English bowman, he repeats the border cry:

“‘Fight on, my men!’ says Sir Andrew Barton,‘I am hurt, but I am not slain;I’le lay mee downe and bleed awhile,And then I’le rise and fight again’.”

“‘Fight on, my men!’ says Sir Andrew Barton,

‘I am hurt, but I am not slain;

I’le lay mee downe and bleed awhile,

And then I’le rise and fight again’.”

Sir Andrew stands out from his fellows, though the portrait is not to be compared with Robin Hood’s; and the king himself speaks his epitaph:

“‘I wo’ld give a hundred pound,’ says King Henrye‘The man were alive as he is dead!’”

“‘I wo’ld give a hundred pound,’ says King Henrye

‘The man were alive as he is dead!’”

Another of these narrative ballads, “Adam Bell”,[16]has a forest background that suggests Robin Hood:

“Merry it was in grene forestAmong the leves greneWhere that men walke both East and WestWyth bowes and arrowes kene.”

“Merry it was in grene forest

Among the leves grene

Where that men walke both East and West

Wyth bowes and arrowes kene.”

The full title, “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley”, has a sufficing rhythm, and the story is good; not unlike a Norse Saga, where they set fire to the outlaw’s house, and likeWilliam Tell, where Cloudesley splits an apple on his son’s head at six score paces.

But the true Robin Hood ballads take a child into his owncountry, and he finds it peopled with his friends. From the first stanzas of “The Curtall Friar”, he is Robin’s man:

“In summer time, when leaves grow greenAnd flowers are fresh and gayRobin Hood and his merry menWere disposed to play.”

“In summer time, when leaves grow green

And flowers are fresh and gay

Robin Hood and his merry men

Were disposed to play.”

In this play-humour, the outlaws themselves are children, as every child is by nature an outlaw. They know better than to take life for a serious business. To them, as to a child, it is one long and absorbing game of make-believe.

Robin, like Fulk Fitz-Warine or Hereward, could play at any trade—a potter, a beggar, a shepherd, a fisherman. His band were mostly men who had forsaken some dull craft for this great game of hiding and hunting and robbery. In the midst of active enjoyment, they set themselves to redress the unequal balance of fortune; but they never doubted their own solid advantages over sheriffs and abbots,—the people who dwelt in towns and cloisters, and had forgotten how to play.

Early collectors of the eighteenth century found no ballads that echoed the sound of the greenwood:

“notes smallOf Byrdis mery syngynge”,

“notes small

Of Byrdis mery syngynge”,

or that made pictures of the deer shadowed in green leaves; but there were imitations of the older songs, and the setting was always implied.

After 1765, there must have been children who knew the prelude to “Guy of Gisborne”, from Percy’sReliques:

“When shaws been sheene and shradds full fayre,And leaves both large and longe,It is merrye walking in the fayre forrest,To heare the small birdes songe.“The woodweele sang and wold not cease,Sitting upon the sprayeSo lowde, he wakened Robin HoodIn the greenwood where he lay.”

“When shaws been sheene and shradds full fayre,And leaves both large and longe,It is merrye walking in the fayre forrest,To heare the small birdes songe.

“When shaws been sheene and shradds full fayre,

And leaves both large and longe,

It is merrye walking in the fayre forrest,

To heare the small birdes songe.

“The woodweele sang and wold not cease,Sitting upon the sprayeSo lowde, he wakened Robin HoodIn the greenwood where he lay.”

“The woodweele sang and wold not cease,

Sitting upon the spraye

So lowde, he wakened Robin Hood

In the greenwood where he lay.”

A child cares little about landscape for its own sake, but much for the things which it suggests. Here, the setting is essential to the game these outlaws are playing; they are as much a part of it as the deer they chase. The beauty of the forest and the song of birds lead on to the adventure; but they are as nothing compared to the romantic fact that this is a place where any man may meet with Robin Hood.

In the same way, a child appreciates character as it affects the course of events. Robin Hood’s men are neither an army nor a clan; they join his company of their own free choice, after proof of sportsmanship; and the chief of them—Little John, Scarlett and Much the miller’s son, are distinct personalities. The result is a spirit of individual adventure which gives the stories unusual interest and variety.

The earliest songs of Robin Hood had grown into a ballad-epic, “A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood”,[17]in which Robin’s character was proved in talk and incidents, and further shown by the story-teller’s comments on his courage and gentleness, his respect for women, his love of the forest; but gentle attributes failed to impress the writers of eighteenth century broadsheets. They recall the more obvious traits by a few epithets:

“I will you tell of a bold outlaw,”

“A story of gallant brave Robin HoodUnto you I will declare.”

“A story of gallant brave Robin Hood

Unto you I will declare.”

Taking the rest for granted, they deal directly with Robin’s combats and escapes, his farcical adventures with bishops and beggars, his daring rescues; and in these, the quality that comes uppermost is the roguish humour which above all distinguishes him from the conventional knight of chivalry.

A single attempt to connect him with the romances—the late ballad of “Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon”—marks the difference of kind; for though Robin kills the prince, and John and Scadlock bag a giant apiece, they move like live men among shadows.

The children of the eighteenth century did not meet the outlaws of the “golden world”. They knew the Curtal Friar and Alan a Dale, and what happened when Robin Hood

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