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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Maid Marian, by Thomas Love Peacock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Maid Marian
+
+Author: Thomas Love Peacock
+
+Posting Date: July 27, 2008 [EBook #966]
+Release Date: June 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAID MARIAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller
+
+
+
+
+
+MAID MARIAN
+
+
+by Thomas Love Peacock
+
+
+
+
+MAID MARIAN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+     Now come ye for peace here, or come ye for war?
+     --SCOTT.
+
+
+"The abbot, in his alb arrayed," stood at the altar in the abbey-chapel
+of Rubygill, with all his plump, sleek, rosy friars, in goodly lines
+disposed, to solemnise the nuptials of the beautiful Matilda Fitzwater,
+daughter of the Baron of Arlingford, with the noble Robert Fitz-Ooth,
+Earl of Locksley and Huntingdon. The abbey of Rubygill stood in a
+picturesque valley, at a little distance from the western boundary of
+Sherwood Forest, in a spot which seemed adapted by nature to be
+the retreat of monastic mortification, being on the banks of a fine
+trout-stream, and in the midst of woodland coverts, abounding with
+excellent game. The bride, with her father and attendant maidens,
+entered the chapel; but the earl had not arrived. The baron was amazed,
+and the bridemaidens were disconcerted. Matilda feared that some evil
+had befallen her lover, but felt no diminution of her confidence in his
+honour and love. Through the open gates of the chapel she looked down
+the narrow road that wound along the side of the hill; and her ear was
+the first that heard the distant trampling of horses, and her eye was
+the first that caught the glitter of snowy plumes, and the light of
+polished spears. "It is strange," thought the baron, "that the earl
+should come in this martial array to his wedding;" but he had not long
+to meditate on the phenomenon, for the foaming steeds swept up to the
+gate like a whirlwind, and the earl, breathless with speed, and followed
+by a few of his yeomen, advanced to his smiling bride. It was then
+no time to ask questions, for the organ was in full peal, and the
+choristers were in full voice.
+
+The abbot began to intone the ceremony in a style of modulation
+impressively exalted, his voice issuing most canonically from the roof
+of his mouth, through the medium of a very musical nose newly tuned for
+the occasion. But he had not proceeded far enough to exhibit all the
+variety and compass of this melodious instrument, when a noise was heard
+at the gate, and a party of armed men entered the chapel. The song of
+the choristers died away in a shake of demisemiquavers, contrary to all
+the rules of psalmody. The organ-blower, who was working his musical
+air-pump with one hand, and with two fingers and a thumb of the other
+insinuating a peeping-place through the curtain of the organ-gallery,
+was struck motionless by the double operation of curiosity and fear;
+while the organist, intent only on his performance, and spreading all
+his fingers to strike a swell of magnificent chords, felt his harmonic
+spirit ready to desert his body on being answered by the ghastly rattle
+of empty keys, and in the consequent agitato furioso of the internal
+movements of his feelings, was preparing to restore harmony by the segue
+subito of an appoggiatura con foco with the corner of a book of anthems
+on the head of his neglectful assistant, when his hand and his attention
+together were arrested by the scene below. The voice of the abbot
+subsided into silence through a descending scale of long-drawn melody,
+like the sound of the ebbing sea to the explorers of a cave. In a few
+moments all was silence, interrupted only by the iron tread of the armed
+intruders, as it rang on the marble floor and echoed from the vaulted
+aisles.
+
+The leader strode up to the altar; and placing himself opposite to the
+abbot, and between the earl and Matilda, in such a manner that the four
+together seemed to stand on the four points of a diamond, exclaimed, "In
+the name of King Henry, I forbid the ceremony, and attach Robert Earl of
+Huntingdon as a traitor!" and at the same time he held his drawn sword
+between the lovers, as if to emblem that royal authority which laid its
+temporal ban upon their contract. The earl drew his own sword instantly,
+and struck down the interposing weapon; then clasped his left arm round
+Matilda, who sprang into his embrace, and held his sword before her with
+his right hand. His yeomen ranged themselves at his side, and stood with
+their swords drawn, still and prepared, like men determined to die in
+his defence. The soldiers, confident in superiority of numbers,
+paused. The abbot took advantage of the pause to introduce a word of
+exhortation. "My children," said he, "if you are going to cut each
+other's throats, I entreat you, in the name of peace and charity, to do
+it out of the chapel."
+
+"Sweet Matilda," said the earl, "did you give your love to the Earl
+of Huntingdon, whose lands touch the Ouse and the Trent, or to Robert
+Fitz-Ooth, the son of his mother?"
+
+"Neither to the earl nor his earldom," answered Matilda firmly, "but to
+Robert Fitz-Ooth and his love."
+
+"That I well knew," said the earl; "and though the ceremony be
+incomplete, we are not the less married in the eye of my only saint, our
+Lady, who will yet bring us together. Lord Fitzwater, to your care, for
+the present, I commit your daughter.--Nay, sweet Matilda, part we must
+for a while; but we will soon meet under brighter skies, and be this the
+seal of our faith."
+
+He kissed Matilda's lips, and consigned her to the baron, who glowered
+about him with an expression of countenance that showed he was mortally
+wroth with somebody; but whatever he thought or felt he kept to himself.
+The earl, with a sign to his followers, made a sudden charge on the
+soldiers, with the intention of cutting his way through. The soldiers
+were prepared for such an occurrence, and a desperate skirmish
+succeeded. Some of the women screamed, but none of them fainted; for
+fainting was not so much the fashion in those days, when the ladies
+breakfasted on brawn and ale at sunrise, as in our more refined age of
+green tea and muffins at noon. Matilda seemed disposed to fly again to
+her lover, but the baron forced her from the chapel. The earl's bowmen
+at the door sent in among the assailants a volley of arrows, one of
+which whizzed past the ear of the abbot, who, in mortal fear of being
+suddenly translated from a ghostly friar into a friarly ghost, began
+to roll out of the chapel as fast as his bulk and his holy robes would
+permit, roaring "Sacrilege!" with all his monks at his heels, who were,
+like himself, more intent to go at once than to stand upon the order of
+their going. The abbot, thus pressed from behind, and stumbling over
+his own drapery before, fell suddenly prostrate in the door-way that
+connected the chapel with the abbey, and was instantaneously buried
+under a pyramid of ghostly carcasses, that fell over him and each other,
+and lay a rolling chaos of animated rotundities, sprawling and bawling
+in unseemly disarray, and sending forth the names of all the saints
+in and out of heaven, amidst the clashing of swords, the ringing of
+bucklers, the clattering of helmets, the twanging of bow-strings, the
+whizzing of arrows, the screams of women, the shouts of the warriors,
+and the vociferations of the peasantry, who had been assembled to the
+intended nuptials, and who, seeing a fair set-to, contrived to pick a
+quarrel among themselves on the occasion, and proceeded, with staff and
+cudgel, to crack each other's skulls for the good of the king and the
+earl. One tall friar alone was untouched by the panic of his brethren,
+and stood steadfastly watching the combat with his arms a-kembo, the
+colossal emblem of an unarmed neutrality.
+
+At length, through the midst of the internal confusion, the earl, by the
+help of his good sword, the staunch valour of his men, and the blessing
+of the Virgin, fought his way to the chapel-gate--his bowmen closed him
+in--he vaulted into his saddle, clapped spurs to his horse, rallied his
+men on the first eminence, and exchanged his sword for a bow and arrow,
+with which he did old execution among the pursuers, who at last thought
+it most expedient to desist from offensive warfare, and to retreat into
+the abbey, where, in the king's name, they broached a pipe of the best
+wine, and attached all the venison in the larder, having first carefully
+unpacked the tuft of friars, and set the fallen abbot on his legs.
+
+The friars, it may be well supposed, and such of the king's men as
+escaped unhurt from the affray, found their spirits a cup too low,
+and kept the flask moving from noon till night. The peaceful brethren,
+unused to the tumult of war, had undergone, from fear and discomposure,
+an exhaustion of animal spirits that required extraordinary refection.
+During the repast, they interrogated Sir Ralph Montfaucon, the leader of
+the soldiers, respecting the nature of the earl's offence.
+
+"A complication of offences," replied Sir Ralph, "superinduced on the
+original basis of forest-treason. He began with hunting the king's deer,
+in despite of all remonstrance; followed it up by contempt of the king's
+mandates, and by armed resistance to his power, in defiance of all
+authority; and combined with it the resolute withholding of payment of
+certain moneys to the abbot of Doncaster, in denial of all law; and has
+thus made himself the declared enemy of church and state, and all for
+being too fond of venison." And the knight helped himself to half a
+pasty.
+
+"A heinous offender," said a little round oily friar, appropriating the
+portion of pasty which Sir Ralph had left.
+
+"The earl is a worthy peer," said the tall friar whom we have already
+mentioned in the chapel scene, "and the best marksman in England."
+
+"Why this is flat treason, brother Michael," said the little round
+friar, "to call an attainted traitor a worthy peer."
+
+"I pledge you," said brother Michael. The little friar smiled and filled
+his cup. "He will draw the long bow," pursued brother Michael, "with any
+bold yeoman among them all."
+
+"Don't talk of the long bow," said the abbot, who had the sound of the
+arrow still whizzing in his ear: "what have we pillars of the faith to
+do with the long bow?"
+
+"Be that as it may," said Sir Ralph, "he is an outlaw from this moment."
+
+"So much the worse for the law then," said brother Michael. "The law
+will have a heavier miss of him than he will have of the law. He will
+strike as much venison as ever, and more of other game. I know what I
+say: but basta: Let us drink."
+
+"What other game?" said the little friar. "I hope he won't poach among
+our partridges."
+
+"Poach! not he," said brother Michael: "if he wants your partridges,
+he will strike them under your nose (here's to you), and drag your
+trout-stream for you on a Thursday evening."
+
+"Monstrous! and starve us on fast-day," said the little friar.
+
+"But that is not the game I mean," said brother Michael.
+
+"Surely, son Michael," said the abbot, "you do not mean to insinuate
+that the noble earl will turn freebooter?"
+
+"A man must live," said brother Michael, "earl or no. If the law takes
+his rents and beeves without his consent, he must take beeves and rents
+where he can get them without the consent of the law. This is the lex
+talionis."
+
+"Truly," said Sir Ralph, "I am sorry for the damsel: she seems fond of
+this wild runagate."
+
+"A mad girl, a mad girl," said the little friar.
+
+"How a mad girl?" said brother Michael. "Has she not beauty, grace, wit,
+sense, discretion, dexterity, learning, and valour?"
+
+"Learning!" exclaimed the little friar; "what has a woman to do with
+learning? And valour! who ever heard a woman commended for valour?
+Meekness and mildness, and softness, and gentleness, and tenderness, and
+humility, and obedience to her husband, and faith in her confessor,
+and domesticity, or, as learned doctors call it, the faculty of
+stayathomeitiveness, and embroidery, and music, and pickling, and
+preserving, and the whole complex and multiplex detail of the noble
+science of dinner, as well in preparation for the table, as in
+arrangement over it, and in distribution around it to knights, and
+squires, and ghostly friars,--these are female virtues: but valour--why
+who ever heard----?"
+
+"She is the all in all," said brother Michael, "gentle as a ring-dove,
+yet high-soaring as a falcon: humble below her deserving, yet deserving
+beyond the estimate of panegyric: an exact economist in all superfluity,
+yet a most bountiful dispenser in all liberality: the chief regulator of
+her household, the fairest pillar of her hall, and the sweetest blossom
+of her bower: having, in all opposite proposings, sense to understand,
+judgment to weigh, discretion to choose, firmness to undertake,
+diligence to conduct, perseverance to accomplish, and resolution to
+maintain. For obedience to her husband, that is not to be tried till
+she has one: for faith in her confessor, she has as much as the law
+prescribes: for embroidery an Arachne: for music a Siren: and for
+pickling and preserving, did not one of her jars of sugared apricots
+give you your last surfeit at Arlingford Castle?"
+
+"Call you that preserving?" said the little friar; "I call it
+destroying. Call you it pickling? Truly it pickled me. My life was saved
+by miracle."
+
+"By canary," said brother Michael. "Canary is the only life preserver,
+the true aurum potabile, the universal panacea for all diseases, thirst,
+and short life. Your life was saved by canary."
+
+"Indeed, reverend father," said Sir Ralph, "if the young lady be half
+what you describe, she must be a paragon: but your commending her for
+valour does somewhat amaze me."
+
+"She can fence," said the little friar, "and draw the long bow, and play
+at singlestick and quarter-staff."
+
+"Yet mark you," said brother Michael, "not like a virago or a hoyden,
+or one that would crack a serving-man's head for spilling gravy on her
+ruff, but with such womanly grace and temperate self-command as if
+those manly exercises belonged to her only, and were become for her sake
+feminine."
+
+"You incite me," said Sir Ralph, "to view her more nearly. That madcap
+earl found me other employment than to remark her in the chapel."
+
+"The earl is a worthy peer," said brother Michael; "he is worth any
+fourteen earls on this side Trent, and any seven on the other." (The
+reader will please to remember that Rubygill Abbey was north of Trent.)
+
+"His mettle will be tried," said Sir Ralph. "There is many a courtier
+will swear to King Henry to bring him in dead or alive."
+
+"They must look to the brambles then," said brother Michael.
+
+      "The bramble, the bramble, the bonny forest bramble,
+          Doth make a jest
+          Of silken vest,
+      That will through greenwood scramble:
+      The bramble, the bramble, the bonny forest bramble."
+
+
+"Plague on your lungs, son Michael," said the abbot; "this is your old
+coil: always roaring in your cups."
+
+"I know what I say," said brother Michael; "there is often more sense in
+an old song than in a new homily.
+
+      The courtly pad doth amble,
+      When his gay lord would ramble:
+          But both may catch
+          An awkward scratch,
+      If they ride among the bramble:
+      The bramble, the bramble, the bonny forest bramble."
+
+
+"Tall friar," said Sir Ralph, "either you shoot the shafts of your
+merriment at random, or you know more of the earl's designs than beseems
+your frock."
+
+"Let my frock," said brother Michael, "answer for its own sins. It is
+worn past covering mine. It is too weak for a shield, too transparent
+for a screen, too thin for a shelter, too light for gravity, and too
+threadbare for a jest. The wearer would be naught indeed who should
+misbeseem such a wedding garment.
+
+      But wherefore does the sheep wear wool?
+          That he in season sheared may be,
+      And the shepherd be warm though his flock be cool:
+          So I'll have a new cloak about me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+     Vray moyne si oncques en feut depuis que le monde moynant
+     moyna de moynerie.--RABELAIS.
+
+
+The Earl of Huntingdon, living in the vicinity of a royal forest, and
+passionately attached to the chase from his infancy, had long made as
+free with the king's deer as Lord Percy proposed to do with those of
+Lord Douglas in the memorable hunting of Cheviot. It is sufficiently
+well known how severe were the forest-laws in those days, and with
+what jealousy the kings of England maintained this branch of their
+prerogative; but menaces and remonstrances were thrown away on the earl,
+who declared that he would not thank Saint Peter for admission into
+Paradise, if he were obliged to leave his bow and hounds at the gate.
+King Henry (the Second) swore by Saint Botolph to make him rue his
+sport, and, having caused him to be duly and formally accused, summoned
+him to London to answer the charge. The earl, deeming himself safer
+among his own vassals than among king Henry's courtiers, took no notice
+of the mandate. King Henry sent a force to bring him, vi et armis, to
+court. The earl made a resolute resistance, and put the king's force to
+flight under a shower of arrows: an act which the courtiers declared to
+be treason. At the same time, the abbot of Doncaster sued up the payment
+of certain moneys, which the earl, whose revenue ran a losing race with
+his hospitality, had borrowed at sundry times of the said abbot: for the
+abbots and the bishops were the chief usurers of those days, and, as the
+end sanctifies the means, were not in the least scrupulous of employing
+what would have been extortion in the profane, to accomplish the pious
+purpose of bringing a blessing on the land by rescuing it from the
+frail hold of carnal and temporal into the firmer grasp of ghostly
+and spiritual possessors. But the earl, confident in the number and
+attachment of his retainers, stoutly refused either to repay the money,
+which he could not, or to yield the forfeiture, which he would not: a
+refusal which in those days was an act of outlawry in a gentleman, as
+it is now of bankruptcy in a base mechanic; the gentleman having in our
+wiser times a more liberal privilege of gentility, which enables him to
+keep his land and laugh at his creditor. Thus the mutual resentments and
+interests of the king and the abbot concurred to subject the earl to the
+penalties of outlawry, by which the abbot would gain his due upon the
+lands of Locksley, and the rest would be confiscate to the king. Still
+the king did not think it advisable to assail the earl in his own
+strong-hold, but caused a diligent watch to be kept over his motions,
+till at length his rumoured marriage with the heiress of Arlingford
+seemed to point out an easy method of laying violent hands on the
+offender. Sir Ralph Montfaucon, a young man of good lineage and of an
+aspiring temper, who readily seized the first opportunity that offered
+of recommending himself to King Henry's favour by manifesting his zeal
+in his service, undertook the charge: and how he succeeded we have seen.
+
+Sir Ralph's curiosity was strongly excited by the friar's description
+of the young lady of Arlingford; and he prepared in the morning to visit
+the castle, under the very plausible pretext of giving the baron an
+explanation of his intervention at the nuptials. Brother Michael and the
+little fat friar proposed to be his guides. The proposal was courteously
+accepted, and they set out together, leaving Sir Ralph's followers at
+the abbey. The knight was mounted on a spirited charger; brother Michael
+on a large heavy-trotting horse; and the little fat friar on a plump
+soft-paced galloway, so correspondent with himself in size, rotundity,
+and sleekness, that if they had been amalgamated into a centaur, there
+would have been nothing to alter in their proportions.
+
+"Do you know," said the little friar, as they wound along the banks of
+the stream, "the reason why lake-trout is better than river-trout, and
+shyer withal?"
+
+"I was not aware of the fact," said Sir Ralph.
+
+"A most heterodox remark," said brother Michael: "know you not, that
+in all nice matters you should take the implication for absolute, and,
+without looking into the FACT WHETHER, seek only the reason why? But the
+fact is so, on the word of a friar; which what layman will venture to
+gainsay who prefers a down bed to a gridiron?"
+
+"The fact being so," said the knight, "I am still at a loss for the
+reason; nor would I undertake to opine in a matter of that magnitude:
+since, in all that appertains to the good things either of this world
+or the next, my reverend spiritual guides are kind enough to take the
+trouble of thinking off my hands."
+
+"Spoken," said brother Michael, "with a sound Catholic conscience. My
+little brother here is most profound in the matter of trout. He has
+marked, learned, and inwardly digested the subject, twice a week at
+least for five-and-thirty years. I yield to him in this. My strong
+points are venison and canary."
+
+"The good qualities of a trout," said the little friar, "are firmness
+and redness: the redness, indeed, being the visible sign of all other
+virtues."
+
+"Whence," said brother Michael, "we choose our abbot by his nose:
+
+ The rose on the nose doth all virtues disclose:
+ For the outward grace shows
+ That the inward overflows,
+ When it glows in the rose of a red, red nose."
+
+
+"Now," said the little friar, "as is the firmness so is the redness, and
+as is the redness so is the shyness."
+
+"Marry why?" said brother Michael. "The solution is not
+physical-natural, but physical-historical, or natural-superinductive.
+And thereby hangs a tale, which may be either said or sung:
+
+ The damsel stood to watch the fight
+     By the banks of Kingslea Mere,
+ And they brought to her feet her own true knight
+     Sore-wounded on a bier.
+
+ She knelt by him his wounds to bind,
+     She washed them with many a tear:
+ And shouts rose fast upon the wind,
+     Which told that the foe was near.
+
+ "Oh! let not," he said, "while yet I live,
+     The cruel foe me take:
+ But with thy sweet lips a last kiss give,
+     And cast me in the lake."
+
+ Around his neck she wound her arms,
+     And she kissed his lips so pale:
+ And evermore the war's alarms
+     Came louder up the vale.
+
+ She drew him to the lake's steep side,
+     Where the red heath fringed the shore;
+ She plunged with him beneath the tide,
+     And they were seen no more.
+
+ Their true blood mingled in Kingslea Mere,
+     That to mingle on earth was fain:
+ And the trout that swims in that crystal clear
+     Is tinged with the crimson stain.
+
+
+"Thus you see how good comes of evil, and how a holy friar may fare
+better on fast-day for the violent death of two lovers two hundred
+years ago. The inference is most consecutive, that wherever you catch
+a red-fleshed trout, love lies bleeding under the water: an occult
+quality, which can only act in the stationary waters of a lake, being
+neutralised by the rapid transition of those of a stream."
+
+"And why is the trout shyer for that?" asked Sir Ralph.
+
+"Do you not see?" said brother Michael. "The virtues of both lovers
+diffuse themselves through the lake. The infusion of masculine valour
+makes the fish active and sanguineous: the infusion of maiden modesty
+makes him coy and hard to win: and you shall find through life, the fish
+which is most easily hooked is not the best worth dishing. But yonder
+are the towers of Arlingford."
+
+The little friar stopped. He seemed suddenly struck with an awful
+thought, which caused a momentary pallescence in his rosy complexion;
+and after a brief hesitation, he turned his galloway, and told his
+companions he should give them good day.
+
+"Why, what is in the wind now, brother Peter?" said Friar Michael.
+
+"The lady Matilda," said the little friar, "can draw the long-bow. She
+must bear no goodwill to Sir Ralph; and if she should espy him from her
+tower, she may testify her recognition with a cloth-yard shaft. She is
+not so infallible a markswoman, but that she might shoot at a crow and
+kill a pigeon. She might peradventure miss the knight, and hit me, who
+never did her any harm."
+
+"Tut, tut, man," said brother Michael, "there is no such fear."
+
+"Mass," said the little friar, "but there is such a fear, and very
+strong too. You who have it not may keep your way, and I who have it
+shall take mine. I am not just now in the vein for being picked off at a
+long shot." And saying these words, he spurred up his four-footed better
+half, and galloped off as nimbly as if he had had an arrow singing
+behind him.
+
+"Is this lady Matilda, then, so very terrible a damsel?" said Sir Ralph
+to brother Michael.
+
+"By no means," said the friar. "She has certainly a high spirit; but it
+is the wing of the eagle, without his beak or his claw. She is as gentle
+as magnanimous; but it is the gentleness of the summer wind, which,
+however lightly it wave the tuft of the pine, carries with it the
+intimation of a power, that, if roused to its extremity, could make it
+bend to the dust."
+
+"From the warmth of your panegyric, ghostly father," said the knight, "I
+should almost suspect you were in love with the damsel."
+
+"So I am," said the friar, "and I care not who knows it; but all in the
+way of honesty, master soldier. I am, as it were, her spiritual lover;
+and were she a damsel errant, I would be her ghostly esquire, her friar
+militant. I would buckle me in armour of proof, and the devil might
+thresh me black with an iron flail, before I would knock under in
+her cause. Though they be not yet one canonically, thanks to your
+soldiership, the earl is her liege lord, and she is his liege lady. I
+am her father confessor and ghostly director: I have taken on me to show
+her the way to the next world; and how can I do that if I lose sight of
+her in this? seeing that this is but the road to the other, and has so
+many circumvolutions and ramifications of byeways and beaten paths (all
+more thickly set than the true one with finger-posts and milestones,
+not one of which tells truth), that a traveller has need of some one who
+knows the way, or the odds go hard against him that he will ever see the
+face of Saint Peter."
+
+"But there must surely be some reason," said Sir Ralph, "for father
+Peter's apprehension."
+
+"None," said brother Michael, "but the apprehension itself; fear being
+its own father, and most prolific in self-propagation. The lady did, it
+is true, once signalize her displeasure against our little brother,
+for reprimanding her in that she would go hunting a-mornings instead
+of attending matins. She cut short the thread of his eloquence by
+sportively drawing her bow-string and loosing an arrow over his head;
+he waddled off with singular speed, and was in much awe of her for many
+months. I thought he had forgotten it: but let that pass. In truth,
+she would have had little of her lover's company, if she had liked the
+chaunt of the choristers better than the cry of the hounds: yet I
+know not; for they were companions from the cradle, and reciprocally
+fashioned each other to the love of the fern and the foxglove. Had
+either been less sylvan, the other might have been more saintly; but
+they will now never hear matins but those of the lark, nor reverence
+vaulted aisle but that of the greenwood canopy. They are twin plants of
+the forest, and are identified with its growth.
+
+ For the slender beech and the sapling oak,
+     That grow by the shadowy rill,
+ You may cut down both at a single stroke,
+     You may cut down which you will.
+
+ But this you must know, that as long as they grow
+     Whatever change may be,
+ You never can teach either oak or beech
+     To be aught but a greenwood tree."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+     Inflamed wrath in glowing breast.--BUTLER.
+
+
+The knight and the friar arriving at Arlingford Castle, and leaving
+their horses in the care of lady Matilda's groom, with whom the friar
+was in great favour, were ushered into a stately apartment, where they
+found the baron alone, flourishing an enormous carving-knife over a
+brother baron--of beef--with as much vehemence of action as if he
+were cutting down an enemy. The baron was a gentleman of a fierce and
+choleric temperament: he was lineally descended from the redoubtable
+Fierabras of Normandy, who came over to England with the Conqueror, and
+who, in the battle of Hastings, killed with his own hand four-and-twenty
+Saxon cavaliers all on a row. The very excess of the baron's internal
+rage on the preceding day had smothered its external manifestation: he
+was so equally angry with both parties, that he knew not on which to
+vent his wrath. He was enraged with the earl for having brought himself
+into such a dilemma without his privily; and he was no less enraged with
+the king's men for their very unseasonable intrusion. He could willingly
+have fallen upon both parties, but, he must necessarily have begun with
+one; and he felt that on whichever side he should strike the first blow,
+his retainers would immediately join battle. He had therefore contented
+himself with forcing away his daughter from the scene of action. In
+the course of the evening he had received intelligence that the earl's
+castle was in possession of a party of the king's men, who had been
+detached by Sir Ralph Montfaucon to seize on it during the earl's
+absence. The baron inferred from this that the earl's case was
+desperate; and those who have had the opportunity of seeing a rich
+friend fall suddenly into poverty, may easily judge by their own
+feelings how quickly and completely the whole moral being of the earl
+was changed in the baron's estimation. The baron immediately proceeded
+to require in his daughter's mind the same summary revolution that had
+taken place in his own, and considered himself exceedingly ill-used by
+her non-compliance. The lady had retired to her chamber, and the
+baron had passed a supperless and sleepless night, stalking about his
+apartments till an advanced hour of the morning, when hunger compelled
+him to summon into his presence the spoils of the buttery, which, being
+the intended array of an uneaten wedding feast, were more than usually
+abundant, and on which, when the knight and the friar entered, he was
+falling with desperate valour. He looked up at them fiercely, with his
+mouth full of beef and his eyes full of flame, and rising, as ceremony
+required, made an awful bow to the knight, inclining himself forward
+over the table and presenting his carving-knife en militaire, in a
+manner that seemed to leave it doubtful whether he meant to show respect
+to his visitor, or to defend his provision: but the doubt was soon
+cleared up by his politely motioning the knight to be seated; on which
+the friar advanced to the table, saying, "For what we are going to
+receive," and commenced operations without further prelude by filling
+and drinking a goblet of wine. The baron at the same time offered one
+to Sir Ralph, with the look of a man in whom habitual hospitality and
+courtesy were struggling with the ebullitions of natural anger. They
+pledged each other in silence, and the baron, having completed a copious
+draught, continued working his lips and his throat, as if trying to
+swallow his wrath as he had done his wine. Sir Ralph, not knowing well
+what to make of these ambiguous signs, looked for instructions to the
+friar, who by significant looks and gestures seemed to advise him to
+follow his example and partake of the good cheer before him, without
+speaking till the baron should be more intelligible in his demeanour.
+The knight and the friar, accordingly, proceeded to refect themselves
+after their ride; the baron looking first at the one and then at the
+other, scrutinising alternately the serious looks of the knight and
+the merry face of the friar, till at length, having calmed himself
+sufficiently to speak, he said, "Courteous knight and ghostly father,
+I presume you have some other business with me than to eat my beef and
+drink my canary; and if so, I patiently await your leisure to enter on
+the topic."
+
+"Lord Fitzwater," said Sir Ralph, "in obedience to my royal master, King
+Henry, I have been the unwilling instrument of frustrating the intended
+nuptials of your fair daughter; yet will you, I trust, owe me no
+displeasure for my agency herein, seeing that the noble maiden might
+otherwise by this time have been the bride of an outlaw."
+
+"I am very much obliged to you, sir," said the baron; "very exceedingly
+obliged. Your solicitude for my daughter is truly paternal, and for a
+young man and a stranger very singular and exemplary: and it is very
+kind withal to come to the relief of my insufficiency and inexperience,
+and concern yourself so much in that which concerns you not."
+
+"You misconceive the knight, noble baron," said the friar. "He urges
+not his reason in the shape of a preconceived intent, but in that of
+a subsequent extenuation. True, he has done the lady Matilda great
+wrong----"
+
+"How, great wrong?" said the baron. "What do you mean by great wrong?
+Would you have had her married to a wild fly-by-night, that accident
+made an earl and nature a deer-stealer? that has not wit enough to eat
+venison without picking a quarrel with monarchy? that flings away his
+own lands into the clutches of rascally friars, for the sake of hunting
+in other men's grounds, and feasting vagabonds that wear Lincoln
+green, and would have flung away mine into the bargain if he had had my
+daughter? What do you mean by great wrong?"
+
+"True," said the friar, "great right, I meant."
+
+"Right!" exclaimed the baron: "what right has any man to do my daughter
+right but myself? What right has any man to drive my daughter's
+bridegroom out of the chapel in the middle of the marriage ceremony, and
+turn all our merry faces into green wounds and bloody coxcombs, and then
+come and tell me he has done us great right?"
+
+"True," said the friar: "he has done neither right nor wrong."
+
+"But he has," said the baron, "he has done both, and I will maintain it
+with my glove."
+
+"It shall not need," said Sir Ralph; "I will concede any thing in
+honour."
+
+"And I," said the baron, "will concede nothing in honour: I will concede
+nothing in honour to any man."
+
+"Neither will I, Lord Fitzwater," said Sir Ralph, "in that sense:
+but hear me. I was commissioned by the king to apprehend the Earl of
+Huntingdon. I brought with me a party of soldiers, picked and tried men,
+knowing that he would not lightly yield. I sent my lieutenant with a
+detachment to surprise the earl's castle in his absence, and laid my
+measures for intercepting him on the way to his intended nuptials; but
+he seems to have had intimation of this part of my plan, for he brought
+with him a large armed retinue, and took a circuitous route, which made
+him, I believe, somewhat later than his appointed hour. When the lapse
+of time showed me that he had taken another track, I pursued him to the
+chapel; and I would have awaited the close of the ceremony, if I had
+thought that either yourself or your daughter would have felt desirous
+that she should have been the bride of an outlaw."
+
+"Who said, sir," cried the baron, "that we were desirous of any such
+thing? But truly, sir, if I had a mind to the devil for a son-in-law, I
+would fain see the man that should venture to interfere."
+
+"That would I," said the friar; "for I have undertaken to make her
+renounce the devil."
+
+"She shall not renounce the devil," said the baron, "unless I please.
+You are very ready with your undertakings. Will you undertake to make
+her renounce the earl, who, I believe, is the devil incarnate? Will you
+undertake that?"
+
+"Will I undertake," said the friar, "to make Trent run westward, or to
+make flame burn downward, or to make a tree grow with its head in the
+earth and its root in the air?"
+
+"So then," said the baron, "a girl's mind is as hard to change as nature
+and the elements, and it is easier to make her renounce the devil than a
+lover. Are you a match for the devil, and no match for a man?"
+
+"My warfare," said the friar, "is not of this world. I am militant not
+against man, but the devil, who goes about seeking what he may devour."
+
+"Oh! does he so?" said the baron: "then I take it that makes you look
+for him so often in my buttery. Will you cast out the devil whose name
+is Legion, when you cannot cast out the imp whose name is Love?"
+
+"Marriages," said the friar, "are made in heaven. Love is God's work,
+and therewith I meddle not."
+
+"God's work, indeed!" said the baron, "when the ceremony was cut short
+in the church. Could men have put them asunder, if God had joined them
+together? And the earl is now no earl, but plain Robert Fitz-Ooth:
+therefore, I'll none of him."
+
+"He may atone," said the friar, "and the king may mollify. The earl is a
+worthy peer, and the king is a courteous king."
+
+"He cannot atone," said Sir Ralph. "He has killed the king's men; and if
+the baron should aid and abet, he will lose his castle and land."
+
+"Will I?" said the baron; "not while I have a drop of blood in my veins.
+He that comes to take them shall first serve me as the friar serves my
+flasks of canary: he shall drain me dry as hay. Am I not disparaged? Am
+I not outraged? Is not my daughter vilified, and made a mockery? A girl
+half-married? There was my butler brought home with a broken head.
+My butler, friar: there is that may move your sympathy. Friar, the
+earl-no-earl shall come no more to my daughter."
+
+"Very good," said the friar.
+
+"It is not very good," said the baron, "for I cannot get her to say so."
+
+"I fear," said Sir Ralph, "the young lady must be much distressed and
+discomposed."
+
+"Not a whit, sir," said the baron. "She is, as usual, in a most
+provoking imperturbability, and contradicts me so smilingly that it
+would enrage you to see her."
+
+"I had hoped," said Sir Ralph, "that I might have seen her, to make my
+excuse in person for the hard necessity of my duty."
+
+He had scarcely spoken, when the door opened, and the lady made her
+appearance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+     Are you mad, or what are you, that you squeak out your
+     catches without mitigation or remorse of voice?
+     --Twelfth Night.
+
+
+Matilda, not dreaming of visitors, tripped into the apartment in a dress
+of forest green, with a small quiver by her side, and a bow and arrow
+in her hand. Her hair, black and glossy as the raven's wing, curled
+like wandering clusters of dark ripe grapes under the edge of her round
+bonnet; and a plume of black feathers fell back negligently above it,
+with an almost horizontal inclination, that seemed the habitual effect
+of rapid motion against the wind. Her black eyes sparkled like sunbeams
+on a river: a clear, deep, liquid radiance, the reflection of ethereal
+fire,--tempered, not subdued, in the medium of its living and gentle
+mirror. Her lips were half opened to speak as she entered the apartment;
+and with a smile of recognition to the friar, and a courtesy to the
+stranger knight, she approached the baron and said, "You are late at
+your breakfast, father."
+
+"I am not at breakfast," said the baron. "I have been at supper: my last
+night's supper; for I had none."
+
+"I am sorry," said Matilda, "you should have gone to bed supperless."
+
+"I did not go to bed supperless," said the baron: "I did not go to bed
+at all: and what are you doing with that green dress and that bow and
+arrow?"
+
+"I am going a-hunting," said Matilda.
+
+"A-hunting!" said the baron. "What, I warrant you, to meet with the
+earl, and slip your neck into the same noose?"
+
+"No," said Matilda: "I am not going out of our own woods to-day."
+
+"How do I know that?" said the baron. "What surety have I of that?"
+
+"Here is the friar," said Matilda. "He will be surety."
+
+"Not he," said the baron: "he will undertake nothing but where the devil
+is a party concerned."
+
+"Yes, I will," said the friar: "I will undertake any thing for the lady
+Matilda."
+
+"No matter for that," said the baron: "she shall not go hunting to day."
+
+"Why, father," said Matilda, "if you coop me up here in this odious
+castle, I shall pine and die like a lonely swan on a pool.
+
+"No," said the baron, "the lonely swan does not die on the pool. If
+there be a river at hand, she flies to the river, and finds her a mate;
+and so shall not you."
+
+"But," said Matilda, "you may send with me any, or as many, of your
+grooms as you will."
+
+"My grooms," said the baron, "are all false knaves. There is not a
+rascal among them but loves you better than me. Villains that I feed and
+clothe."
+
+"Surely," said Matilda, "it is not villany to love me: if it be, I
+should be sorry my father were an honest man." The baron relaxed his
+muscles into a smile. "Or my lover either," added Matilda. The baron
+looked grim again.
+
+"For your lover," said the baron, "you may give God thanks of him. He is
+as arrant a knave as ever poached."
+
+"What, for hunting the king's deer?" said Matilda. "Have I not heard you
+rail at the forest laws by the hour?"
+
+"Did you ever hear me," said the baron, "rail myself out of house and
+land? If I had done that, then were I a knave."
+
+"My lover," said Matilda, "is a brave man, and a true man, and a
+generous man, and a young man, and a handsome man; aye, and an honest
+man too."
+
+"How can he be an honest man," said the baron, "when he has neither
+house nor land, which are the better part of a man?"
+
+"They are but the husk of a man," said Matilda, "the worthless coat of
+the chesnut: the man himself is the kernel."
+
+"The man is the grape stone," said the baron, "and the pulp of the
+melon. The house and land are the true substantial fruit, and all that
+give him savour and value."
+
+"He will never want house or land," said Matilda, "while the meeting
+boughs weave a green roof in the wood, and the free range of the hart
+marks out the bounds of the forest."
+
+"Vert and venison! vert and venison!" exclaimed the baron. "Treason
+and flat rebellion. Confound your smiling face! what makes you look so
+good-humoured? What! you think I can't look at you, and be in a passion?
+You think so, do you? We shall see. Have you no fear in talking thus,
+when here is the king's liegeman come to take us all into custody, and
+confiscate our goods and chattels?"
+
+"Nay, Lord Fitzwater," said Sir Ralph, "you wrong me in your report. My
+visit is one of courtesy and excuse, not of menace and authority."
+
+"There it is," said the baron: "every one takes a pleasure in
+contradicting me. Here is this courteous knight, who has not opened
+his mouth three times since he has been in my house except to take in
+provision, cuts me short in my story with a flat denial."
+
+"Oh! I cry you mercy, sir knight," said Matilda; "I did not mark you
+before. I am your debtor for no slight favour, and so is my liege lord."
+
+"Her liege lord!" exclaimed the baron, taking large strides across the
+chamber.
+
+"Pardon me, gentle lady," said Sir Ralph. "Had I known you before
+yesterday, I would have cut off my right hand ere it should have been
+raised to do you displeasure.
+
+"Oh sir," said Matilda, "a good man may be forced on an ill office: but
+I can distinguish the man from his duty." She presented to him her
+hand, which he kissed respectfully, and simultaneously with the contact
+thirty-two invisible arrows plunged at once into his heart, one from
+every point of the compass of his pericardia.
+
+"Well, father," added Matilda, "I must go to the woods."
+
+"Must you?" said the baron; "I say you must not."
+
+"But I am going," said Matilda
+
+"But I will have up the drawbridge," said the baron.
+
+"But I will swim the moat," said Matilda.
+
+"But I will secure the gates," said the baron.
+
+"But I will leap from the battlement," said Matilda.
+
+"But I will lock you in an upper chamber," said the baron.
+
+"But I will shred the tapestry," said Matilda, "and let myself down."
+
+"But I will lock you in a turret," said the baron, "where you shall only
+see light through a loophole."
+
+"But through that loophole," said Matilda, "will I take my flight, like
+a young eagle from its eerie; and, father, while I go out freely, I will
+return willingly: but if once I slip out through a loop-hole----" She
+paused a moment, and then added, singing,--
+
+ The love that follows fain
+     Will never its faith betray:
+ But the faith that is held in a chain
+ Will never be found again,
+     If a single link give way.
+
+
+The melody acted irresistibly on the harmonious propensities of the
+friar, who accordingly sang in his turn,--
+
+ For hark! hark! hark!
+ The dog doth bark,
+     That watches the wild deer's lair.
+ The hunter awakes at the peep of the dawn,
+ But the lair it is empty, the deer it is gone,
+     And the hunter knows not where.
+
+Matilda and the friar then sang together,--
+
+ Then follow, oh follow! the hounds do cry:
+ The red sun flames in the eastern sky:
+     The stag bounds over the hollow.
+ He that lingers in spirit, or loiters in hall,
+ Shall see us no more till the evening fall,
+ And no voice but the echo shall answer his call:
+     Then follow, oh follow, follow:
+     Follow, oh follow, follow!
+
+
+During the process of this harmony, the baron's eyes wandered from his
+daughter to the friar, and from the friar to his daughter again, with
+an alternate expression of anger differently modified: when he looked
+on the friar, it was anger without qualification; when he looked on
+his daughter it was still anger, but tempered by an expression of
+involuntary admiration and pleasure. These rapid fluctuations of the
+baron's physiognomy--the habitual, reckless, resolute merriment in the
+jovial face of the friar,--and the cheerful, elastic spirits that played
+on the lips and sparkled in the eyes of Matilda,--would have presented a
+very amusing combination to Sir Ralph, if one of the three images in
+the group had not absorbed his total attention with feelings of intense
+delight very nearly allied to pain. The baron's wrath was somewhat
+counteracted by the reflection that his daughter's good spirits
+seemed to show that they would naturally rise triumphant over all
+disappointments; and he had had sufficient experience of her humour to
+know that she might sometimes be led, but never could be driven. Then,
+too, he was always delighted to hear her sing, though he was not at all
+pleased in this instance with the subject of her song. Still he would
+have endured the subject for the sake of the melody of the treble, but
+his mind was not sufficiently attuned to unison to relish the harmony
+of the bass. The friar's accompaniment put him out of all patience,
+and--"So," he exclaimed, "this is the way, you teach my daughter to
+renounce the devil, is it? A hunting friar, truly! Who ever heard
+before of a hunting friar? A profane, roaring, bawling, bumper-bibbing,
+neck-breaking, catch-singing friar?"
+
+"Under favour, bold baron," said the friar; but the friar was warm
+with canary, and in his singing vein; and he could not go on in plain
+unmusical prose. He therefore sang in a new tune,--
+
+ Though I be now a grey, grey friar,
+     Yet I was once a hale young knight:
+ The cry of my dogs was the only choir
+     In which my spirit did take delight.
+ Little I recked of matin bell,
+     But drowned its toll with my clanging horn:
+ And the only beads I loved to tell
+     Were the beads of dew on the spangled thorn.
+
+
+The baron was going to storm, but the friar paused, and Matilda sang in
+repetition,--
+
+ Little I reck of matin bell,
+     But drown its toll with my clanging horn:
+ And the only beads I love to tell
+     Are the beads of dew on the spangled thorn.
+
+
+And then she and the friar sang the four lines together, and rang the
+changes upon them alternately.
+
+ Little I reck of matin bell,
+
+sang the friar.
+
+"A precious friar," said the baron.
+
+
+But drown its toll with my clanging horn, sang Matilda.
+
+"More shame for you," said the baron.
+
+ And the only beads I love to tell
+     Are the beads of dew on the spangled thorn,
+
+sang Matilda and the friar together.
+
+"Penitent and confessor," said the baron: "a hopeful pair truly."
+
+The friar went on,--
+
+ An archer keen I was withal,
+     As ever did lean on greenwood tree;
+ And could make the fleetest roebuck fall,
+     A good three hundred yards from me.
+ Though changeful time, with hand severe,
+     Has made me now these joys forego,
+ Yet my heart bounds whene'er I hear
+     Yoicks! hark away! and tally ho!
+
+
+Matilda chimed in as before.
+
+"Are you mad?" said the baron. "Are you insane? Are you possessed? What
+do you mean? What in the devil's name do you both mean?"
+
+ Yoicks! hark away! and tally ho!
+
+roared the friar.
+
+The baron's pent-up wrath had accumulated like the waters above the dam
+of an overshot mill. The pond-head of his passion being now filled
+to the utmost limit of its capacity, and beginning to overflow in the
+quivering of his lips and the flashing of his eyes, he pulled up all
+the flash-boards at once, and gave loose to the full torrent of his
+indignation, by seizing, like furious Ajax, not a messy stone more than
+two modern men could raise, but a vast dish of beef more than fifty
+ancient yeomen could eat, and whirled it like a coit, in terrorem, over
+the head of the friar, to the extremity of the apartment,
+
+ Where it on oaken floor did settle,
+ With mighty din of ponderous metal.
+
+
+"Nay father," said Matilda, taking the baron's hand, "do not harm the
+friar: he means not to offend you. My gaiety never before displeased
+you. Least of all should it do so now, when I have need of all my
+spirits to outweigh the severity of my fortune."
+
+As she spoke the last words, tears started into her eyes, which, as if
+ashamed of the involuntary betraying of her feelings, she turned away to
+conceal. The baron was subdued at once. He kissed his daughter, held out
+his hand to the friar, and said, "Sing on, in God's name, and crack away
+the flasks till your voice swims in canary." Then turning to Sir Ralph,
+he said, "You see how it is, sir knight. Matilda is my daughter; but she
+has me in leading-strings, that is the truth of it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+     'T is true, no lover has that power
+     To enforce a desperate amour
+     As he that has two strings to his bow
+     And burns for love and money too.--BUTLER.
+
+
+The friar had often had experience of the baron's testy humour; but
+it had always before confined itself to words, in which the habit of
+testiness often mingled more expression of displeasure than the internal
+feeling prompted. He knew the baron to be hot and choleric, but at the
+same time hospitable and generous; passionately fond of his daughter,
+often thwarting her in seeming, but always yielding to her in fact. The
+early attachment between Matilda and the Earl of Huntingdon had given
+the baron no serious reason to interfere with her habits and
+pursuits, which were so congenial to those of her lover; and not being
+over-burdened with orthodoxy, that is to say, not being seasoned with
+more of the salt of the spirit than was necessary to preserve him from
+excommunication, confiscation, and philotheoparoptesism, [1] he was not
+sorry to encourage his daughter's choice of her confessor in brother
+Michael, who had more jollity and less hypocrisy than any of his
+fraternity, and was very little anxious to disguise his love of the good
+things of this world under the semblance of a sanctified exterior. The
+friar and Matilda had often sung duets together, and had been accustomed
+to the baron's chiming in with a stormy capriccio, which was usually
+charmed into silence by some sudden turn in the witching melodies of
+Matilda. They had therefore naturally calculated, as far as their wild
+spirits calculated at all, on the same effects from the same causes. But
+the circumstances of the preceding day had made an essential alteration
+in the case. The baron knew well, from the intelligence he had received,
+that the earl's offence was past remission: which would have been of
+less moment but for the awful fact of his castle being in the possession
+of the king's forces, and in those days possession was considerably more
+than eleven points of the law. The baron was therefore convinced
+that the earl's outlawry was infallible, and that Matilda must either
+renounce her lover, or become with him an outlaw and a fugitive. In
+proportion, therefore, to the baron's knowledge of the strength and
+duration of her attachment, was his fear of the difficulty of its ever
+being overcome: her love of the forest and the chase, which he had never
+before discouraged, now presented itself to him as matter of serious
+alarm; and if her cheerfulness gave him hope on the one hand by
+indicating a spirit superior to all disappointments, it was suspicious
+to him on the other, as arising from some latent certainty of being soon
+united to the earl. All these circumstances concurred to render
+their songs of the vanished deer and greenwood archery and Yoicks and
+Harkaway, extremely mal-a-propos, and to make his anger boil and bubble
+in the cauldron of his spirit, till its more than ordinary excitement
+burst forth with sudden impulse into active manifestation.
+
+ But as it sometimes happens, from the might
+     Of rage in minds that can no farther go,
+ As high as they have mounted in despite
+     In their remission do they sink as low,
+ To our bold baron did it happen so. [2]
+
+
+For his discobolic exploit proved the climax of his rage, and was
+succeeded by an immediate sense that he had passed the bounds of
+legitimate passion; and he sunk immediately from the very pinnacle of
+opposition to the level of implicit acquiescence. The friar's spirits
+were not to be marred by such a little incident. He was half-inclined,
+at first, to return the baron's compliment; but his love of Matilda
+checked him; and when the baron held out his hand, the friar seized it
+cordially, and they drowned all recollection of the affair by pledging
+each other in a cup of canary.
+
+The friar, having stayed long enough to see every thing replaced on a
+friendly footing, rose, and moved to take his leave. Matilda told him
+he must come again on the morrow, for she had a very long confession
+to make to him. This the friar promised to do, and departed with the
+knight.
+
+Sir Ralph, on reaching the abbey, drew his followers together, and
+led them to Locksley Castle, which he found in the possession of his
+lieutenant; whom he again left there with a sufficient force to hold it
+in safe keeping in the king's name, and proceeded to London to report
+the results of his enterprise.
+
+Now Henry our royal king was very wroth at the earl's evasion, and swore
+by Saint Thomas-a-Becket (whom he had himself translated into a saint by
+having him knocked on the head), that he would give the castle and lands
+of Locksley to the man who should bring in the earl. Hereupon ensued
+a process of thought in the mind of the knight. The eyes of the fair
+huntress of Arlingford had left a wound in his heart which only she who
+gave could heal. He had seen that the baron was no longer very partial
+to the outlawed earl, but that he still retained his old affection for
+the lands and castle of Locksley. Now the lands and castle were very
+fair things in themselves, and would be pretty appurtenances to an
+adventurous knight; but they would be doubly valuable as certain
+passports to the father's favour, which was one step towards that of the
+daughter, or at least towards obtaining possession of her either quietly
+or perforce; for the knight was not so nice in his love as to consider
+the lady's free grace a sine qua non: and to think of being, by any
+means whatever, the lord of Locksley and Arlingford, and the husband
+of the bewitching Matilda, was to cut in the shades of futurity a vista
+very tempting to a soldier of fortune. He set out in high spirits with
+a chosen band of followers, and beat up all the country far and wide
+around both the Ouse and the Trent; but fortune did not seem disposed
+to second his diligence, for no vestige whatever could he trace of the
+earl. His followers, who were only paid with the wages of hope, began to
+murmur and fall off; for, as those unenlightened days were ignorant of
+the happy invention of paper machinery, by which one promise to pay is
+satisfactorily paid with another promise to pay, and that again with
+another in infinite series, they would not, as their wiser posterity has
+done, take those tenders for true pay which were not sterling; so that,
+one fine morning, the knight found himself sitting on a pleasant bank of
+the Trent, with only a solitary squire, who still clung to the shadow
+of preferment, because he did not see at the moment any better chance of
+the substance.
+
+The knight did not despair because of the desertion of his followers: he
+was well aware that he could easily raise recruits if he could once find
+trace of his game; he, therefore, rode about indefatigably over hill
+and dale, to the great sharpening of his own appetite and that of his
+squire, living gallantly from inn to inn when his purse was full, and
+quartering himself in the king's name on the nearest ghostly brotherhood
+when it happened to be empty. An autumn and a winter had passed away,
+when the course of his perlustations brought him one evening into a
+beautiful sylvan valley, where he found a number of young women weaving
+garlands of flowers, and singing over their pleasant occupation. He
+approached them, and courteously inquired the way to the nearest town.
+
+"There is no town within several miles," was the answer.
+
+"A village, then, if it be but large enough to furnish an inn?"
+
+"There is Gamwell just by, but there is no inn nearer than the nearest
+town."
+
+"An abbey, then?"
+
+"There is no abbey nearer than the nearest inn."
+
+"A house then, or a cottage, where I may obtain hospitality for the
+night?"
+
+"Hospitality!" said one of the young women; "you have not far to
+seek for that. Do you not know that you are in the neighbourhood of
+Gamwell-Hall?"
+
+"So far from it," said the knight, "that I never heard the name of
+Gamwell-Hall before."
+
+"Never heard of Gamwell-Hall?" exclaimed all the young women together,
+who could as soon have dreamed of his never having heard of the sky.
+
+"Indeed, no," said Sir Ralph; "but I shall be very happy to get rid of
+my ignorance."
+
+"And so shall I," said his squire; "for it seems that in this case
+knowledge will for once be a cure for hunger, wherewith I am grievously
+afflicted."
+
+"And why are you so busy, my pretty damsels, weaving these garlands?"
+said the knight.
+
+"Why, do you not know, sir," said one of the young women, "that
+to-morrow is Gamwell feast?"
+
+The knight was again obliged, with all humility, to confess his
+ignorance.
+
+"Oh! sir," said his informant, "then you will have something to see,
+that I can tell you; for we shall choose a Queen of the May, and we
+shall crown her with flowers, and place her in a chariot of flowers,
+and draw it with lines of flowers, and we shall hang all the trees with
+flowers, and we shall strew all the ground with flowers, and we shall
+dance with flowers, and in flowers, and on flowers, and we shall be all
+flowers."
+
+"That you will," said the knight; "and the sweetest and brightest of
+all the flowers of the May, my pretty damsels." On which all the pretty
+damsels smiled at him and each other.
+
+"And there will be all sorts of May-games, and there will be prizes for
+archery, and there will be the knight's ale, and the foresters' venison,
+and there will be Kit Scrapesqueak with his fiddle, and little Tom
+Whistlerap with his fife and tabor, and Sam Trumtwang with his harp,
+and Peter Muggledrone with his bagpipe, and how I shall dance with
+Will Whitethorn!" added the girl, clapping her hands as she spoke, and
+bounding from the ground with the pleasure of the anticipation.
+
+A tall athletic young man approached, to whom the rustic maidens
+courtesied with great respect; and one of them informed Sir Ralph that
+it was young Master William Gamwell. The young gentleman invited and
+conducted the knight to the hall, where he introduced him to the old
+knight his father, and to the old lady his mother, and to the young lady
+his sister, and to a number of bold yeomen, who were laying siege to
+beef, brawn, and plum pie around a ponderous table, and taking copious
+draughts of old October. A motto was inscribed over the interior door,--
+
+EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY:
+
+an injunction which Sir Ralph and his squire showed remarkable alacrity
+in obeying. Old Sir Guy of Gamwell gave Sir Ralph a very cordial
+welcome, and entertained him during supper with several of his best
+stories, enforced with an occasional slap on the back, and pointed with
+a peg in the ribs; a species of vivacious eloquence in which the old
+gentleman excelled, and which is supposed by many of that pleasant
+variety of the human spectes, known by the name of choice fellows and
+comical dogs, to be the genuine tangible shape of the cream of a good
+joke.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+     What! shall we have incision? shall we embrew?
+     --Henry IV.
+
+
+Old Sir Guy of Gamwell, and young William Gamwell, and fair Alice
+Gamwell, and Sir Ralph Montfaucon and his squire, rode together the
+next morning to the scene of the feast. They arrived on a village green,
+surrounded with cottages peeping from among the trees by which the
+green was completely encircled. The whole circle was hung round with one
+continuous garland of flowers, depending in irregular festoons from the
+branches. In the centre of the green was a May-pole hidden in boughs
+and garlands; and a multitude of round-faced bumpkins and cherry-checked
+lasses were dancing around it, to the quadruple melody of Scrapesqueak,
+Whistlerap, Trumtwang, and Muggledrone: harmony we must not call it;
+for, though they had agreed to a partnership in point of tune, each,
+like a true painstaking man, seemed determined to have his time to
+himself: Muggledrone played allegretto, Trumtwang allegro, Whistlerap
+presto, and Scrapesqueak prestissimo. There was a kind of mathematical
+proportion in their discrepancy: while Muggledrone played the tune four
+times, Trumtwang played it five, Whistlerap six, and Scrapesqueak eight;
+for the latter completely distanced all his competitors, and indeed
+worked his elbow so nimbly that its outline was scarcely distinguishable
+through the mistiness of its rapid vibration.
+
+While the knight was delighting his eyes and ears with these pleasant
+sights and sounds, all eyes were turned in one direction; and Sir Ralph,
+looking round, saw a fair lady in green and gold come riding through the
+trees, accompanied by a portly friar in grey, and several fair damsels
+and gallant grooms. On their nearer approach, he recognised the lady
+Matilda and her ghostly adviser, brother Michael. A party of foresters
+arrived from another direction, and then ensued cordial interchanges of
+greeting, and collisions of hands and lips, among the Gamwells and the
+new-comers,--"How does my fair coz, Mawd?" and "How does my sweet coz,
+Mawd?" and "How does my wild coz, Mawd?" And "Eh! jolly friar, your
+hand, old boy:" and "Here, honest friar:" and "To me, merry friar:" and
+"By your favour, mistress Alice:" and "Hey! cousin Robin:" and "Hey!
+cousin Will:" and "Od's life! merry Sir Guy, you grow younger every
+year,"--as the old knight shook them all in turn with one hand, and
+slapped them on the back with the other, in token of his affection. A
+number of young men and women advanced, some drawing, and others dancing
+round, a floral car; and having placed a crown of flowers on Matilda's
+head, they saluted her Queen of the May, and drew her to the place
+appointed for the rural sports.
+
+A hogshead of ale was abroach under an oak, and a fire was blazing in
+an open space before the trees to roast the fat deer which the foresters
+brought. The sports commenced; and, after an agreeable series of
+bowling, coiling, pitching, hurling, racing, leaping, grinning,
+wrestling or friendly dislocation of joints, and cudgel-playing or
+amicable cracking of skulls, the trial of archery ensued. The conqueror
+was to be rewarded with a golden arrow from the hand of the Queen of the
+May, who was to be his partner in the dance till the close of the feast.
+This stimulated the knight's emulation: young Gamwell supplied him with
+a bow and arrow, and he took his station among the foresters, but had
+the mortification to be out-shot by them all, and to see one of them
+lodge the point of his arrow in the golden ring of the centre, and
+receive the prize from the hand of the beautiful Matilda, who smiled on
+him with particular grace. The jealous knight scrutinised the successful
+champion with great attention, and surely thought he had seen that face
+before. In the mean time the forester led the lady to the station. The
+luckless Sir Ralph drank deep draughts of love from the matchless grace
+of her attitudes, as, taking the bow in her left hand, and adjusting the
+arrow with her right, advancing her left foot, and gently curving her
+beautiful figure with a slight motion of her head that waved her black
+feathers and her ringleted hair, she drew the arrow to its head, and
+loosed it from her open fingers. The arrow struck within the ring of
+gold, so close to that of the victorious forester that the points were
+in contact, and the feathers were intermingled. Great acclamations
+succeeded, and the forester led Matilda to the dance. Sir Ralph gazed
+on her fascinating motions till the torments of baffled love and jealous
+rage became unendurable; and approaching young Gamwell, he asked him
+if he knew the name of that forester who was leading the dance with the
+Queen of the May?
+
+"Robin, I believe," said young Gamwell carelessly; "I think they call
+him Robin."
+
+"Is that all you know of him?" said Sir Ralph.
+
+"What more should I know of him?" said young Gamwell.
+
+"Then I can tell you," said Sir Ralph, "he is the outlawed Earl of
+Huntingdon, on whose head is set so large a price."
+
+"Ay, is he?" said young Gamwell, in the same careless manner.
+
+"He were a prize worth the taking," said Sir Ralph.
+
+"No doubt," said young Gamwell.
+
+"How think you?" said Sir Ralph: "are the foresters his adherents?"
+
+"I cannot say," said young Gamwell.
+
+"Is your peasantry loyal and well-disposed?" said Sir Ralph.
+
+"Passing loyal," said young Gamwell.
+
+"If I should call on them in the king's name," said Sir Ralph, "think
+you they would aid and assist?"
+
+"Most likely they would," said young Gamwell, "one side or the other."
+
+"Ay, but which side?" said the knight.
+
+"That remains to be tried," said young Gamwell.
+
+"I have King Henry's commission," said the knight, "to apprehend this
+earl that was. How would you advise me to act, being, as you see,
+without attendant force?"
+
+"I would advise you," said young Gamwell, "to take yourself off without
+delay, unless you would relish the taste of a volley of arrows, a shower
+of stones, and a hailstorm of cudgel-blows, which would not be turned
+aside by a God save King Henry."
+
+Sir Ralph's squire no sooner heard this, and saw by the looks of the
+speaker that he was not likely to prove a false prophet, than he clapped
+spurs to his horse and galloped off with might and main. This gave the
+knight a good excuse to pursue him, which he did with great celerity,
+calling, "Stop, you rascal." When the squire fancied himself safe out
+of the reach of pursuit, he checked his speed, and allowed the knight
+to come up with him. They rode on several miles in silence, till
+they discovered the towers and spires of Nottingham, where the knight
+introduced himself to the sheriff, and demanded an armed force to assist
+in the apprehension of the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon. The sheriff, who
+was willing to have his share of the prize, determined to accompany the
+knight in person, and regaled him and his man with good store of the
+best; after which, they, with a stout retinue of fifty men, took the way
+to Gamwell feast.
+
+"God's my life," said the sheriff, as they rode along, "I had as lief
+you would tell me of a service of plate. I much doubt if this outlawed
+earl, this forester Robin, be not the man they call Robin Hood, who
+has quartered himself in Sherwood Forest, and whom in endeavouring
+to apprehend I have fallen divers times into disasters. He has
+gotten together a band of disinherited prodigals, outlawed debtors,
+excommunicated heretics, elder sons that have spent all they had, and
+younger sons that never had any thing to spend; and with these he kills
+the king's deer, and plunders wealthy travellers of five-sixths of their
+money; but if they be abbots or bishops, them he despoils utterly."
+
+The sheriff then proceeded to relate to his companion the adventure of
+the abbot of Doubleflask (which some grave historians have related of
+the abbot of Saint Mary's, and others of the bishop of Hereford): how
+the abbot, returning to his abbey in company with his high selerer,
+who carried in his portmanteau the rents of the abbey-lands, and with a
+numerous train of attendants, came upon four seeming peasants, who
+were roasting the king's venison by the king's highway: how, in just
+indignation at this flagrant infringement of the forest laws, he asked
+them what they meant, and they answered that they meant to dine: how he
+ordered them to be seized and bound, and led captive to Nottingham,
+that they might know wild-flesh to have been destined by Providence
+for licensed and privileged appetites, and not for the base hunger of
+unqualified knaves: how they prayed for mercy, and how the abbot swore
+by Saint Charity that he would show them none: how one of them thereupon
+drew a bugle horn from under his smock-frock and blew three blasts, on
+which the abbot and his train were instantly surrounded by sixty bowmen
+in green: how they tied him to a tree, and made him say mass for their
+sins: how they unbound him, and sate him down with them to dinner, and
+gave him venison and wild-fowl and wine, and made him pay for his fare
+all the money in his high selerer's portmanteau, and enforced him to
+sleep all night under a tree in his cloak, and to leave the cloak behind
+him in the morning: how the abbot, light in pocket and heavy in heart,
+raised the country upon Robin Hood, for so he had heard the chief
+forester called by his men, and hunted him into an old woman's cottage:
+how Robin changed dresses with the old woman, and how the abbot rode in
+great triumph to Nottingham, having in custody an old woman in a green
+doublet and breeches: how the old woman discovered herself: how the
+merrymen of Nottingham laughed at the abbot: how the abbot railed at the
+old woman, and how the old woman out-railed the abbot, telling him that
+Robin had given her food and fire through the winter, which no abbot
+would ever do, but would rather take it from her for what he called the
+good of the church, by which he meant his own laziness and gluttony; and
+that she knew a true man from a false thief, and a free forester from a
+greedy abbot.
+
+"Thus you see," added the sheriff, "how this villain perverts the
+deluded people by making them believe that those who tithe and toll upon
+them for their spiritual and temporal benefit are not their best friends
+and fatherly guardians; for he holds that in giving to boors and old
+women what he takes from priests and peers, he does but restore to the
+former what the latter had taken from them; and this the impudent varlet
+calls distributive justice. Judge now if any loyal subject can be safe
+in such neighbourhood."
+
+While the sheriff was thus enlightening his companion concerning the
+offenders, and whetting his own indignation against them, the sun was
+fast sinking to the west. They rode on till they came in view of a
+bridge, which they saw a party approaching from the opposite side, and
+the knight presently discovered that the party consisted of the lady
+Matilda and friar Michael, young Gamwell, cousin Robin, and about
+half-a-dozen foresters. The knight pointed out the earl to the sheriff,
+who exclaimed, "Here, then, we have him an easy prey;" and they rode on
+manfully towards the bridge, on which the other party made halt.
+
+"Who be these," said the friar, "that come riding so fast this way? Now,
+as God shall judge me, it is that false knight Sir Ralph Montfaucon, and
+the sheriff of Nottingham, with a posse of men. We must make good our
+post, and let them dislodge us if they may."
+
+The two parties were now near enough to parley; and the sheriff and the
+knight, advancing in the front of the cavalcade, called on the lady,
+the friar, young Gamwell, and the foresters, to deliver up that
+false-traitor, Robert, formerly Earl of Huntingdon. Robert himself made
+answer by letting fly an arrow that struck the ground between the fore
+feet of the sheriff's horse. The horse reared up from the whizzing, and
+lodged the sheriff in the dust; and, at the same time, the fair Matilda
+favoured the knight with an arrow in his right arm, that compelled him
+to withdraw from the affray. His men lifted the sheriff carefully up,
+and replaced him on his horse, whom he immediately with great rage and
+zeal urged on to the assault with his fifty men at his heels, some of
+whom were intercepted in their advance by the arrows of the foresters
+and Matilda; while the friar, with an eight-foot staff, dislodged the
+sheriff a second time, and laid on him with all the vigour of the church
+militant on earth, in spite of his ejaculations of "Hey, friar
+Michael! What means this, honest friar? Hold, ghostly friar! Hold, holy
+friar!"--till Matilda interposed, and delivered the battered sheriff
+to the care of the foresters. The friar continued flourishing his
+staff among the sheriff's men, knocking down one, breaking the ribs of
+another, dislocating the shoulder of a third, flattening the nose of
+a fourth, cracking the skull of a fifth, and pitching a sixth into the
+river, till the few, who were lucky enough to escape with whole bones,
+clapped spurs to their horses and fled for their lives, under a farewell
+volley of arrows.
+
+Sir Ralph's squire, meanwhile, was glad of the excuse of attending
+his master's wound to absent himself from the battle; and put the poor
+knight to a great deal of unnecessary pain by making as long a business
+as possible of extracting the arrow, which he had not accomplished when
+Matilda, approaching, extracted it with great facility, and bound up
+the wound with her scarf, saying, "I reclaim my arrow, sir knight, which
+struck where I aimed it, to admonish you to desist from your enterprise.
+I could as easily have lodged it in your heart."
+
+"It did not need," said the knight, with rueful gallantry; "you have
+lodged one there already."
+
+"If you mean to say that you love me," said Matilda, "it is more than I
+ever shall you: but if you will show your love by no further interfering
+with mine, you will at least merit my gratitude."
+
+The knight made a wry face under the double pain of heart and
+body caused at the same moment by the material or martial, and the
+metaphorical or erotic arrow, of which the latter was thus barbed by a
+declaration more candid than flattering; but he did not choose to put
+in any such claim to the lady's gratitude as would bar all hopes of her
+love: he therefore remained silent; and the lady and her escort, leaving
+him and the sheriff to the care of the squire, rode on till they came in
+sight of Arlingford Castle, when they parted in several directions. The
+friar rode off alone; and after the foresters had lost sight of him they
+heard his voice through the twilight, singing,--
+
+ A staff, a staff, of a young oak graff,
+     That is both stoure and stiff,
+ Is all a good friar can needs desire
+     To shrive a proud sheriffe.
+ And thou, fine fellowe, who hast tasted so
+     Of the forester's greenwood game,
+ Wilt be in no haste thy time to waste
+     In seeking more taste of the same:
+ Or this can I read thee, and riddle thee well,
+ Thou hadst better by far be the devil in hell,
+     Than the sheriff of Nottinghame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+     Now, master sheriff, what's your will with me?
+     --Henry IV.
+
+
+Matilda had carried her point with the baron of ranging at liberty
+whithersoever she would, under her positive promise to return home; she
+was a sort of prisoner on parole: she had obtained this indulgence by
+means of an obsolete habit of always telling the truth and keeping her
+word, which our enlightened age has discarded with other barbarisms,
+but which had the effect of giving her father so much confidence in her,
+that he could not help considering her word a better security than locks
+and bars.
+
+The baron had been one of the last to hear of the rumours of the new
+outlaws of Sherwood, as Matilda had taken all possible precautions to
+keep those rumours from his knowledge, fearing that they might cause
+the interruption of her greenwood liberty; and it was only during her
+absence at Gamwell feast, that the butler, being thrown off his guard by
+liquor, forgot her injunctions, and regaled the baron with a long story
+of the right merry adventure of Robin Hood and the abbot of Doubleflask.
+
+The baron was one morning, as usual, cutting his way valorously through
+a rampart of cold provision, when his ears were suddenly assailed by a
+tremendous alarum, and sallying forth, and looking from his castle wall,
+he perceived a large party of armed men on the other side of the
+moat, who were calling on the warder in the king's name to lower the
+drawbridge and raise the portcullis, which had both been secured by
+Matilda's order. The baron walked along the battlement till he came
+opposite to these unexpected visitors, who, as soon as they saw him,
+called out, "Lower the drawbridge, in the king's name."
+
+"For what, in the devil's name?" said the baron.
+
+"The sheriff of Nottingham," said one, "lies in bed grievously bruised,
+and many of his men are wounded, and several of them slain; and Sir
+Ralph Montfaucon, knight, is sore wounded in the arm; and we are charged
+to apprehend William Gamwell the younger, of Gamwell Hall, and father
+Michael of Rubygill Abbey, and Matilda Fitzwater of Arlingford Castle,
+as agents and accomplices in the said breach of the king's peace."
+
+"Breach of the king's fiddlestick!" answered the baron. "What do you
+mean by coming here with your cock and bull, stories of my daughter
+grievously bruising the sheriff of Nottingham? You are a set of vagabond
+rascals in disguise; and I hear, by the bye, there is a gang of thieves
+that has just set up business in Sherwood Forest: a pretty presence,
+indeed, to get into my castle with force and arms, and make a famine in
+my buttery, and a drought in my cellar, and a void in my strong box, and
+a vacuum in my silver scullery."
+
+"Lord Fitzwater," cried one, "take heed how you resist lawful authority:
+we will prove ourselves----"
+
+"You will prove yourselves arrant knaves, I doubt not," answered the
+baron; "but, villains, you shall be more grievously bruised by me than
+ever was the sheriff by my daughter (a pretty tale truly!), if you do
+not forthwith avoid my territory."
+
+By this time the baron's men had flocked to the battlements, with
+long-bows and cross-bows, slings and stones, and Matilda with her bow
+and quiver at their head. The assailants, finding the castle so well
+defended, deemed it expedient to withdraw till they could return in
+greater force, and rode off to Rubygill Abbey, where they made known
+their errand to the father abbot, who, having satisfied himself of their
+legitimacy, and conned over the allegations, said that doubtless brother
+Michael had heinously offended; but it was not for the civil law to
+take cognizance of the misdoings of a holy friar; that he would summon
+a chapter of monks, and pass on the offender a sentence proportionate to
+his offence. The ministers of civil justice said that would not do.
+The abbot said it would do and should; and bade them not provoke the
+meekness of his catholic charity to lay them under the curse of Rome.
+This threat had its effect, and the party rode off to Gamwell-Hall,
+where they found the Gamwells and their men just sitting down to dinner,
+which they saved them the trouble of eating by consuming it in the
+king's name themselves, having first seized and bound young Gamwell;
+all which they accomplished by dint of superior numbers, in despite of
+a most vigorous stand made by the Gamwellites in defence of their young
+master and their provisions.
+
+The baron, meanwhile, after the ministers of justice had departed,
+interrogated Matilda concerning the alleged fact of the grievous
+bruising of the sheriff of Nottingham. Matilda told him the whole
+history of Gamwell feast, and of their battle on the bridge, which had
+its origin in a design of the sheriff of Nottingham to take one of the
+foresters into custody.
+
+"Ay! ay!" said the baron, "and I guess who that forester was; but truly
+this friar is a desperate fellow. I did not think there could have been
+so much valour under a grey frock. And so you wounded the knight in the
+arm. You are a wild girl, Mawd,--a chip of the old block, Mawd. A wild
+girl, and a wild friar, and three or four foresters, wild lads all, to
+keep a bridge against a tame knight, and a tame sheriff, and fifty tame
+varlets; by this light, the like was never heard! But do you know, Mawd,
+you must not go about so any more, sweet Mawd: you must stay at home,
+you must ensconce; for there is your tame sheriff on the one hand, that
+will take you perforce; and there is your wild forester on the other
+hand, that will take you without any force at all, Mawd: your wild
+forester, Robin, cousin Robin, Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, that beats
+and binds bishops, spreads nets for archbishops, and hunts a fat abbot
+as if he were a buck: excellent game, no doubt, but you must hunt no
+more in such company. I see it now: truly I might have guessed before
+that the bold outlaw Robin, the most courteous Robin, the new thief of
+Sherwood Forest, was your lover, the earl that has been: I might have
+guessed it before, and what led you so much to the woods; but you hunt
+no more in such company. No more May games and Gamwell feasts. My lands
+and castle would be the forfeit of a few more such pranks; and I think
+they are as well in my hands as the king's, quite as well."
+
+"You know, father," said Matilda, "the condition of keeping me at home:
+I get out if I can, and not on parole."
+
+"Ay! ay!" said the baron, "if you can; very true: watch and ward, Mawd,
+watch and ward is my word: if you can, is yours. The mark is set, and so
+start fair."
+
+The baron would have gone on in this way for an hour; but the friar made
+his appearance with a long oak staff in his hand, singing,--
+
+ Drink and sing, and eat and laugh,
+     And so go forth to battle:
+ For the top of a skull and the end of a staff
+     Do make a ghostly rattle.
+
+
+"Ho! ho! friar!" said the baron--"singing friar, laughing friar,
+roaring friar, fighting friar, hacking friar, thwacking friar; cracking,
+cracking, cracking friar; joke-cracking, bottle-cracking, skull-cracking
+friar!"
+
+"And ho! ho!" said the friar,--"bold baron, old baron, sturdy baron,
+wordy baron, long baron, strong baron, mighty baron, flighty baron,
+mazed baron, crazed baron, hacked baron, thwacked baron; cracked,
+cracked, cracked baron; bone-cracked, sconce-cracked, brain-cracked
+baron!"
+
+"What do you mean," said the baron, "bully friar, by calling me hacked
+and thwacked?"
+
+"Were you not in the wars?" said the friar, "where he who escapes
+untracked does more credit to his heels than his arms. I pay tribute to
+your valour in calling you hacked and thwacked."
+
+"I never was thwacked in my life," said the baron; "I stood my ground
+manfully, and covered my body with my sword. If I had had the luck
+to meet with a fighting friar indeed, I might have been thwacked, and
+soundly too; but I hold myself a match for any two laymen; it takes nine
+fighting laymen to make a fighting friar."
+
+"Whence come you now, holy father?" asked Matilda.
+
+"From Rubygill Abbey," said the friar, "whither I never return:
+
+ For I must seek some hermit cell,
+ Where I alone my beads may tell,
+ And on the wight who that way fares
+ Levy a toll for my ghostly pray'rs,
+     Levy a toll, levy a toll,
+     Levy a toll for my ghostly pray'rs."
+
+
+"What is the matter then, father?" said Matilda.
+
+"This is the matter," said the friar: "my holy brethren have held a
+chapter on me, and sentenced me to seven years' privation of wine. I
+therefore deemed it fitting to take my departure, which they would fain
+have prohibited. I was enforced to clear the way with my staff. I have
+grievously beaten my dearly beloved brethren: I grieve thereat; but they
+enforced me thereto. I have beaten them much; I mowed them down to the
+right and to the left, and left them like an ill-reaped field of wheat,
+ear and straw pointing all ways, scattered in singleness and jumbled in
+masses; and so bade them farewell, saying, Peace be with you. But I
+must not tarry, lest danger be in my rear: therefore, farewell, sweet
+Matilda; and farewell, noble baron; and farewell, sweet Matilda again,
+the alpha and omega of father Michael, the first and the last."
+
+"Farewell, father," said the baron, a little softened; "and God send you
+be never assailed by more than fifty men at a time."
+
+"Amen," said the friar, "to that good wish."
+
+"And we shall meet again, father, I trust," said Matilda.
+
+"When the storm is blown over," said the baron.
+
+"Doubt it not," said the friar, "though flooded Trent were between us,
+and fifty devils guarded the bridge."
+
+He kissed Matilda's forehead, and walked away without a song.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+     Let gallows gape for dog:  let man go free.
+     --Henry V.
+
+
+A page had been brought up in Gamwell-Hall, who, while he was little,
+had been called Little John, and continued to be so called after he had
+grown to be a foot taller than any other man in the house. He was full
+seven feet high. His latitude was worthy of his longitude, and his
+strength was worthy of both; and though an honest man by profession, he
+had practiced archery on the king's deer for the benefit of his master's
+household, and for the improvement of his own eye and hand, till his
+aim had become infallible within the range of two miles. He had fought
+manfully in defence of his young master, took his captivity exceedingly
+to heart, and fell into bitter grief and boundless rage when he heard
+that he had been tried in Nottingham and sentenced to die. Alice
+Gamwell, at Little John's request, wrote three letters of one tenour;
+and Little John, having attached them to three blunt arrows, saddled the
+fleetest steed in old Sir Guy of Gamwell's stables, mounted, and rode
+first to Arlingford Castle, where he shot one of the three arrows over
+the battlements; then to Rubygill Abbey, where he shot the second into
+the abbey-garden; then back past Gamwell-Hall to the borders of Sherwood
+Forest, where he shot the third into the wood. Now the first of these
+arrows lighted in the nape of the neck of Lord Fitzwater, and lodged
+itself firmly between his skin and his collar; the second rebounded with
+the hollow vibration of a drumstick from the shaven sconce of the abbot
+of Rubygill; and the third pitched perpendicularly into the centre of a
+venison pasty in which Robin Hood was making incision.
+
+Matilda ran up to her father in the court of Arlingford Castle, seized
+the arrow, drew off the letter, and concealed it in her bosom before the
+baron had time to look round, which he did with many expressions of rage
+against the impudent villain who had shot a blunt arrow into the nape of
+his neck.
+
+"But you know, father," said Matilda, "a sharp arrow in the same place
+would have killed you; therefore the sending a blunt one was very
+considerate."
+
+"Considerate, with a vengeance!" said the baron. "Where was the
+consideration of sending it at all? This is some of your forester's
+pranks. He has missed you in the forest, since I have kept watch and
+ward over you, and by way of a love-token and a remembrance to you takes
+a random shot at me."
+
+The abbot of Rubygill picked up the missile-missive or messenger
+arrow, which had rebounded from his shaven crown, with a very unghostly
+malediction on the sender, which he suddenly checked with a pious and
+consolatory reflection on the goodness of Providence in having blessed
+him with such a thickness of skull, to which he was now indebted for
+temporal preservation, as he had before been for spiritual promotion. He
+opened the letter, which was addressed to father Michael; and found it
+to contain an intimation that William Gamwell was to be hanged on Monday
+at Nottingham.
+
+"And I wish," said the abbot, "father Michael were to be hanged with
+him: an ungrateful monster, after I had rescued him from the fangs of
+civil justice, to reward my lenity by not leaving a bone unbruised among
+the holy brotherhood of Rubygill."
+
+Robin Hood extracted from his venison pasty a similar intimation of the
+evil destiny of his cousin, whom he determined, if possible, to rescue
+from the jaws of Cerberus.
+
+The sheriff of Nottingham, though still sore with his bruises, was so
+intent on revenge, that he raised himself from his bed to attend
+the execution of William Gamwell. He rode to the august structure of
+retributive Themis, as the French call a gallows, in all the pride and
+pomp of shrievalty, and with a splendid retinue of well-equipped knaves
+and varlets, as our ancestors called honest serving-men.
+
+Young Gamwell was brought forth with his arms pinioned behind him; his
+sister Alice and his father, Sir Guy, attending him in disconsolate
+mood. He had rejected the confessor provided by the sheriff, and had
+insisted on the privilege of choosing his own, whom Little John had
+promised to bring. Little John, however, had not made his appearance
+when the fatal procession began its march; but when they reached the
+place of execution, Little John appeared, accompanied by a ghostly
+friar.
+
+"Sheriff," said young Gamwell, "let me not die with my hands pinioned:
+give me a sword, and set any odds of your men against me, and let me
+die the death of a man, like the descendant of a noble house, which has
+never yet been stained with ignominy."
+
+"No, no," said the sheriff; "I have had enough of setting odds against
+you. I have sworn you shall be hanged, and hanged you shall be."
+
+"Then God have mercy on me," said young Gamwell; "and now, holy friar,
+shrive my sinful soul."
+
+The friar approached.
+
+"Let me see this friar," said the sheriff: "if he be the friar of the
+bridge, I had as lief have the devil in Nottingham; but he shall find me
+too much for him here."
+
+"The friar of the bridge," said Little John, "as you very well know,
+sheriff, was father Michael of Rubygill Abbey, and you may easily see
+that this is not the man."
+
+"I see it," said the sheriff; "and God be thanked for his absence."
+
+Young Gamwell stood at the foot of the ladder. The friar approached him,
+opened his book, groaned, turned up the whites of his eyes, tossed up
+his arms in the air, and said "Dominus vobiscum." He then crossed both
+his hands on his breast under the folds of his holy robes, and stood a
+few moments as if in inward prayer. A deep silence among the attendant
+crowd accompanied this action of the friar; interrupted only by the
+hollow tone of the death-bell, at long and dreary intervals. Suddenly
+the friar threw off his holy robes, and appeared a forester clothed in
+green, with a sword in his right hand and a horn in his left. With the
+sword he cut the bonds of William Gamwell, who instantly snatched a
+sword from one of the sheriff's men; and with the horn he blew a loud
+blast, which was answered at once by four bugles from the quarters
+of the four winds, and from each quarter came five-and-twenty bowmen
+running all on a row.
+
+"Treason! treason!" cried the sheriff. Old Sir Guy sprang to his son's
+side, and so did Little John; and the four setting back to back, kept
+the sheriff and his men at bay till the bowmen came within shot and let
+fly their arrows among the sheriff's men, who, after a brief resistance,
+fled in all directions. The forester, who had personated the friar, sent
+an arrow after the flying sheriff, calling with a strong voice, "To the
+sheriff's left arm, as a keepsake from Robin Hood." The arrow reached
+its destiny; the sheriff redoubled his speed, and, with the one arrow in
+his arm, did not stop to breathe till he was out of reach of another.
+
+The foresters did not waste time in Nottingham, but were soon at a
+distance from its walls. Sir Guy returned with Alice to Gamwell-Hall;
+but thinking he should not be safe there, from the share he had had in
+his son's rescue, they only remained long enough to supply themselves
+with clothes and money, and departed, under the escort of Little John,
+to another seat of the Gamwells in Yorkshire. Young Gamwell, taking it
+for granted that his offence was past remission, determined on joining
+Robin Hood, and accompanied him to the forest, where it was deemed
+expedient that he should change his name; and he was rechristened
+without a priest, and with wine instead of water, by the immortal name
+of Scarlet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+          Who set my man i' the stocks?----
+      I set him there, Sir but his own disorders
+      Deserved much less advancement.--Lear.
+
+
+The baron was inflexible in his resolution not to let Matilda leave the
+castle. The letter, which announced to her the approaching fate of
+young Gamwell, filled her with grief, and increased the irksomeness of a
+privation which already preyed sufficiently on her spirits, and began to
+undermine her health. She had no longer the consolation of the society
+of her old friend father Michael: the little fat friar of Rubygill was
+substituted as the castle confessor, not without some misgivings in his
+ghostly bosom; but he was more allured by the sweet savour of the good
+things of this world at Arlingford Castle, than deterred by his awe
+of the lady Matilda, which nevertheless was so excessive, from his
+recollection of the twang of the bow-string, that he never ventured to
+find her in the wrong, much less to enjoin any thing in the shape of
+penance, as was the occasional practice of holy confessors, with or
+without cause, for the sake of pious discipline, and what was in those
+days called social order, namely, the preservation of the privileges
+of the few who happened to have any, at the expense of the swinish
+multitude who happened to have none, except that of working and being
+shot at for the benefit of their betters, which is obviously not the
+meaning of social order in our more enlightened times: let us therefore
+be grateful to Providence, and sing Te Deum laudamus in chorus with the
+Holy Alliance.
+
+The little friar, however, though he found the lady spotless, found the
+butler a great sinner: at least so it was conjectured, from the length
+of time he always took to confess him in the buttery.
+
+Matilda became every day more pale and dejected: her spirit, which could
+have contended against any strenuous affliction, pined in the monotonous
+inaction to which she was condemned. While she could freely range the
+forest with her lover in the morning, she had been content to return
+to her father's castle in the evening, thus preserving underanged the
+balance of her duties, habits, and affections; not without a hope that
+the repeal of her lover's outlawry might be eventually obtained, by
+a judicious distribution of some of his forest spoils among the
+holy fathers and saints that-were-to-be,--pious proficients in the
+ecclesiastic art equestrian, who rode the conscience of King Henry with
+double-curb bridles, and kept it well in hand when it showed mettle
+and seemed inclined to rear and plunge. But the affair at Gamwell feast
+threw many additional difficulties in the way of the accomplishment of
+this hope; and very shortly afterwards King Henry the Second went to
+make up in the next world his quarrel with Thomas-a-Becket; and Richard
+Coeur de Lion made all England resound with preparations for the
+crusade, to the great delight of many zealous adventurers, who eagerly
+flocked under his banner in the hope of enriching themselves with
+Saracen spoil, which they called fighting the battles of God. Richard,
+who was not remarkably scrupulous in his financial operations, was
+not likely to overlook the lands and castle of Locksley, which he
+appropriated immediately to his own purposes, and sold to the highest
+bidder. Now, as the repeal of the outlawry would involve the restitution
+of the estates to the rightful owner, it was obvious that it could never
+be expected from that most legitimate and most Christian king,
+Richard the First of England, the arch-crusader and anti-jacobin by
+excellence,--the very type, flower, cream, pink, symbol, and mirror of
+all the Holy Alliances that have ever existed on earth, excepting
+that he seasoned his superstition and love of conquest with a certain
+condiment of romantic generosity and chivalrous self-devotion, with
+which his imitators in all other points have found it convenient to
+dispense. To give freely to one man what he had taken forcibly from
+another, was generosity of which he was very capable; but to restore
+what he had taken to the man from whom he had taken it, was something
+that wore too much of the cool physiognomy of justice to be easily
+reconcileable to his kingly feelings. He had, besides, not only sent
+all King Henry's saints about their business, or rather about their
+no-business--their faineantise--but he had laid them under rigorous
+contribution for the purposes of his holy war; and having made them
+refund to the piety of the successor what they had extracted from the
+piety of the precursor, he compelled them, in addition, to give
+him their blessing for nothing. Matilda, therefore, from all these
+circumstances, felt little hope that her lover would be any thing but an
+outlaw for life.
+
+The departure of King Richard from England was succeeded by the
+episcopal regency of the bishops of Ely and Durham. Longchamp, bishop
+of Ely, proceeded to show his sense of Christian fellowship by arresting
+his brother bishop, and despoiling him of his share in the government;
+and to set forth his humility and loving-kindness in a retinue of nobles
+and knights who consumed in one night's entertainment some five years'
+revenue of their entertainer, and in a guard of fifteen hundred foreign
+soldiers, whom he considered indispensable to the exercise of a vigour
+beyond the law in maintaining wholesome discipline over the refractory
+English. The ignorant impatience of the swinish multitude with these
+fruits of good living, brought forth by one of the meek who had
+inherited the earth, displayed itself in a general ferment, of which
+Prince John took advantage to make the experiment of getting possession
+of his brother's crown in his absence. He began by calling at Reading
+a council of barons, whose aspect induced the holy bishop to disguise
+himself (some say as an old woman, which, in the twelfth century,
+perhaps might have been a disguise for a bishop), and make his
+escape beyond sea. Prince John followed up his advantage by obtaining
+possession of several strong posts, and among others of the castle of
+Nottingham.
+
+While John was conducting his operations at Nottingham, he rode at times
+past the castle of Arlingford. He stopped on one occasion to claim Lord
+Fitzwater's hospitality, and made most princely havoc among his venison
+and brawn. Now it is a matter of record among divers great historians
+and learned clerks, that he was then and there grievously smitten by the
+charms of the lovely Matilda, and that a few days after he despatched
+his travelling minstrel, or laureate, Harpiton, [3] (whom he retained at
+moderate wages, to keep a journal of his proceedings, and prove them all
+just and legitimate), to the castle of Arlingford, to make proposals to
+the lady. This Harpiton was a very useful person. He was always ready,
+not only to maintain the cause of his master with his pen, and to sing
+his eulogies to his harp, but to undertake at a moment's notice any
+kind of courtly employment, called dirty work by the profane, which the
+blessings of civil government, namely, his master's pleasure, and the
+interests of social order, namely, his own emolument, might require. In
+short,
+
+ Il eut l'emploi qui certes n'est pas mince,
+ Et qu'a la cour, ou tout se peint en beau,
+ On appelloit etre l'ami du prince;
+ Mais qu'a la ville, et surtout en province,
+ Les gens grossiers ont nomme maquereau.
+
+
+Prince John was of opinion that the love of a prince actual and king
+expectant, was in itself a sufficient honour to the daughter of a simple
+baron, and that the right divine or royalty would make it sufficiently
+holy without the rite divine of the church. He was, therefore,
+graciously pleased to fall into an exceeding passion, when his
+confidential messenger returned from his embassy in piteous plight,
+having been, by the baron's order, first tossed in a blanket and set in
+the stocks to cool, and afterwards ducked in the moat and set again in
+the stocks to dry. John swore to revenge horribly this flagrant outrage
+on royal prerogative, and to obtain possession of the lady by force
+of arms; and accordingly collected a body of troops, and marched upon
+Arlingford castle. A letter, conveyed as before on the point of a blunt
+arrow, announced his approach to Matilda: and lord Fitzwater had just
+time to assemble his retainers, collect a hasty supply of provision,
+raise the draw-bridge, and drop the portcullis, when the castle was
+surrounded by the enemy. The little fat friar, who during the confusion
+was asleep in the buttery, found himself, on awaking, inclosed in the
+besieged castle, and dolefully bewailed his evil chance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+     A noble girl, i' faith.  Heart!  I think I fight with a
+     familiar, or the ghost of a fencer.  Call you this an
+     amorous visage? Here's blood that would have served me these
+     seven years, in broken heads and cut fingers, and now it
+     runs out all together.--MIDDLETON.  Roaring Girl.
+
+
+Prince John sat down impatiently before Arlingford castle in the hope
+of starving out the besieged; but finding the duration of their supplies
+extend itself in an equal ratio with the prolongation of his hope,
+he made vigorous preparations for carrying the place by storm. He
+constructed an immense machine on wheels, which, being advanced to the
+edge of the moat, would lower a temporary bridge, of which one end would
+rest on the bank, and the other on the battlements, and which, being
+well furnished with stepping boards, would enable his men to ascend the
+inclined plane with speed and facility. Matilda received intimation of
+this design by the usual friendly channel of a blunt arrow, which must
+either have been sent from some secret friend in the prince's camp,
+or from some vigorous archer beyond it: the latter will not appear
+improbable, when we consider that Robin Hood and Little John could shoot
+two English miles and an inch point-blank,
+
+Come scrive Turpino, che non erra.
+
+
+The machine was completed, and the ensuing morning fixed for the
+assault. Six men, relieved at intervals, kept watch over it during
+the night. Prince John retired to sleep, congratulating himself in
+the expectation that another day would place the fair culprit at his
+princely mercy. His anticipations mingled with the visions of his
+slumber, and he dreamed of wounds and drums, and sacking and firing
+the castle, and bearing off in his arms the beautiful prize through the
+midst of fire and smoke. In the height of this imaginary turmoil, he
+awoke, and conceived for a few moments that certain sounds which rang in
+his ears, were the continuation of those of his dream, in that sort
+of half-consciousness between sleeping and waking, when reality and
+phantasy meet and mingle in dim and confused resemblance. He was,
+however, very soon fully awake to the fact of his guards calling on him
+to arm, which he did in haste, and beheld the machine in flames, and
+a furious conflict raging around it. He hurried to the spot, and found
+that his camp had been suddenly assailed from one side by a party of
+foresters, and that the baron's people had made a sortie on the other,
+and that they had killed the guards, and set fire to the machine, before
+the rest of the camp could come to the assistance of their fellows.
+
+The night was in itself intensely dark, and the fire-light shed around
+it a vivid and unnatural radiance. On one side, the crimson light
+quivered by its own agitation on the waveless moat, and on the bastions
+and buttresses of the castle, and their shadows lay in massy blackness
+on the illuminated walls: on the other, it shone upon the woods,
+streaming far within among the open trunks, or resting on the closer
+foliage. The circumference of darkness bounded the scene on all sides:
+and in the centre raged the war; shields, helmets, and bucklers gleaming
+and glittering as they rang and clashed against each other; plumes
+confusedly tossing in the crimson light, and the messy light and shade
+that fell on the faces of the combatants, giving additional energy to
+their ferocious expression.
+
+John, drawing nearer to the scene of action, observed two young warriors
+fighting side by side, one of whom wore the habit of a forester, the
+other that of a retainer of Arlingford. He looked intently on them both:
+their position towards the fire favoured the scrutiny; and the hawk's
+eye of love very speedily discovered that the latter was the fair
+Matilda. The forester he did not know: but he had sufficient tact to
+discern that his success would be very much facilitated by separating
+her from this companion, above all others. He therefore formed a party
+of men into a wedge, only taking especial care not to be the point of
+it himself, and drove it between them with so much precision, that they
+were in a moment far asunder.
+
+"Lady Matilda," said John, "yield yourself my prisoner."
+
+"If you would wear me, prince," said Matilda, "you must win me:" and
+without giving him time to deliberate on the courtesy of fighting with
+the lady of his love, she raised her sword in the air, and lowered it on
+his head with an impetus that would have gone nigh to fathom even that
+extraordinary depth of brain which always by divine grace furnishes the
+interior of a head-royal, if he had not very dexterously parried the
+blow. Prince John wished to disarm and take captive, not in any way to
+wound or injure, least of all to kill, his fair opponent. Matilda was
+only intent to get rid of her antagonist at any rate: the edge of her
+weapon painted his complexion with streaks of very unloverlike crimson,
+and she would probably have marred John's hand for ever signing Magna
+Charta, but that he was backed by the advantage of numbers, and that her
+sword broke short on the boss of his buckler. John was following up his
+advantage to make a captive of the lady, when he was suddenly felled to
+the earth by an unseen antagonist. Some of his men picked him carefully
+up, and conveyed him to his tent, stunned and stupified.
+
+When he recovered, he found Harpiton diligently assisting in his
+recovery, more in the fear of losing his place than in that of losing
+his master: the prince's first inquiry was for the prisoner he had
+been on the point of taking at the moment when his habeas corpus was
+so unseasonably suspended. He was told that his people had been on the
+point of securing the said prisoner, when the devil suddenly appeared
+among them in the likeness of a tall friar, having his grey frock
+cinctured with a sword-belt, and his crown, which whether it were shaven
+or no they could not see, surmounted with a helmet, and flourishing an
+eight-foot staff, with which he laid about him to the right and to the
+left, knocking down the prince and his men as if they had been so
+many nine-pins: in fine, he had rescued the prisoner, and made a clear
+passage through friend and foe, and in conjunction with a chosen
+party of archers, had covered the retreat of the baron's men and the
+foresters, who had all gone off in a body towards Sherwood forest.
+
+Harpiton suggested that it would be desirable to sack the castle, and
+volunteered to lead the van on the occasion, as the defenders were
+withdrawn, and the exploit seemed to promise much profit and little
+danger: John considered that the castle would in itself be a great
+acquisition to him, as a stronghold in furtherance of his design on his
+brother's throne; and was determining to take possession with the first
+light of morning, when he had the mortification to see the castle burst
+into flames in several places at once. A piteous cry was heard from
+within, and while the prince was proclaiming a reward to any one who
+would enter into the burning pile, and elucidate the mystery of the
+doleful voice, forth waddled the little fat friar in an agony of fear,
+out of the fire into the frying-pan; for he was instantly taken into
+custody and carried before Prince John, wringing his hands and tearing
+his hair.
+
+"Are you the friar," said Prince John, in a terrible voice, "that
+laid me prostrate in battle, mowed down my men like grass, rescued my
+captive, and covered the retreat of my enemies? And, not content with
+this, have you now set fire to the castle in which I intended to take up
+my royal quarters?"
+
+The little friar quaked like a jelly: he fell on his knees, and
+attempted to speak; but in his eagerness to vindicate himself from this
+accumulation of alarming charges, he knew not where to begin; his ideas
+rolled round upon each other like the radii of a wheel; the words he
+desired to utter, instead of issuing, as it were, in a right line from
+his lips, seemed to conglobate themselves into a sphere turning on its
+own axis in his throat: after several ineffectual efforts, his utterance
+totally failed him, and he remained gasping, with his mouth open, his
+lips quivering, his hands clasped together, and the whites of his eyes
+turned up towards the prince with an expression most ruefully imploring.
+
+"Are you that friar?" repeated the prince.
+
+Several of the by-standers declared that he was not that friar. The
+little friar, encouraged by this patronage, found his voice, and pleaded
+for mercy. The prince questioned him closely concerning the burning of
+the castle. The little friar declared, that he had been in too great
+fear during the siege to know much of what was going forward, except
+that he had been conscious during the last few days of a lamentable
+deficiency of provisions, and had been present that very morning at the
+broaching of the last butt of sack. Harpiton groaned in sympathy. The
+little friar added, that he knew nothing of what had passed since till
+he heard the flames roaring at his elbow.
+
+"Take him away, Harpiton," said the prince, "fill him with sack, and
+turn him out."
+
+"Never mind the sack," said the little friar, "turn me out at once."
+
+"A sad chance," said Harpiton, "to be turned out without sack."
+
+But what Harpiton thought a sad chance the little friar thought a merry
+one, and went bounding like a fat buck towards the abbey of Rubygill.
+
+An arrow, with a letter attached to it, was shot into the camp, and
+carried to the prince. The contents were these:--
+
+"Prince John,--I do not consider myself to have resisted lawful
+authority in defending my castle against you, seeing that you are at
+present in a state of active rebellion against your liege sovereign
+Richard: and if my provisions had not failed me, I would have maintained
+it till doomsday. As it is, I have so well disposed my combustibles that
+it shall not serve you as a strong hold in your rebellion. If you hunt
+in the chases of Nottinghamshire, you may catch other game than my
+daughter. Both she and I are content to be houseless for a time, in
+the reflection that we have deserved your enmity, and the friendship of
+Coeur-de-Lion.
+
+"FITZWATER."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+     --Tuck, the merry friar, who many a sermon made In praise of
+     Robin Hood, his outlaws, and their trade.--DRAYTON.
+
+
+The baron, with some of his retainers and all the foresters, halted at
+daybreak in Sherwood forest. The foresters quickly erected tents, and
+prepared an abundant breakfast of venison and ale.
+
+"Now, Lord Fitzwater," said the chief forester, "recognise your
+son-in-law that was to have been, in the outlaw Robin Hood."
+
+"Ay, ay," said the baron, "I have recognised you long ago."
+
+"And recognise your young friend Gamwell," said the second, "in the
+outlaw Scarlet."
+
+"And Little John, the page," said the third, "in Little John the
+outlaw."
+
+"And Father Michael, of Rubygill Abbey," said the friar, "in Friar Tuck,
+of Sherwood forest. Truly, I have a chapel here hard by, in the shape of
+a hollow tree, where I put up my prayers for travellers, and Little John
+holds the plate at the door, for good praying deserves good paying."
+
+"I am in fine company," said the baron.
+
+"In the very best of company," said the friar, "in the high court of
+Nature, and in the midst of her own nobility. Is it not so? This goodly
+grove is our palace: the oak and the beech are its colonnade and its
+canopy: the sun and the moon and the stars are its everlasting lamps:
+the grass, and the daisy, and the primrose, and the violet, are its
+many-coloured floor of green, white, yellow, and blue; the may-flower,
+and the woodbine, and the eglantine, and the ivy, are its decorations,
+its curtains, and its tapestry: the lark, and the thrush, and the
+linnet, and the nightingale, are its unhired minstrels and musicians.
+Robin Hood is king of the forest both by dignity of birth and by virtue
+of his standing army: to say nothing of the free choice of his people,
+which he has indeed, but I pass it by as an illegitimate basis of power.
+He holds his dominion over the forest, and its horned multitude of
+citizen-deer, and its swinish multitude or peasantry of wild boars, by
+right of conquest and force of arms. He levies contributions among them
+by the free consent of his archers, their virtual representatives. If
+they should find a voice to complain that we are 'tyrants and usurpers
+to kill and cook them up in their assigned and native dwelling-place,'
+we should most convincingly admonish them, with point of arrow, that
+they have nothing to do with our laws but to obey them. Is it not
+written that the fat ribs of the herd shall be fed upon by the mighty in
+the land? And have not they withal my blessing? my orthodox, canonical,
+and archiepiscopal blessing? Do I not give thanks for them when they
+are well roasted and smoking under my nose? What title had William of
+Normandy to England, that Robin of Locksley has not to merry Sherwood?
+William fought for his claim. So does Robin. With whom, both? With any
+that would or will dispute it. William raised contributions. So does
+Robin. From whom, both? From all that they could or can make pay them.
+Why did any pay them to William? Why do any pay them to Robin? For the
+same reason to both: because they could not or cannot help it. They
+differ indeed, in this, that William took from the poor and gave to the
+rich, and Robin takes from the rich and gives to the poor: and therein
+is Robin illegitimate; though in all else he is true prince. Scarlet and
+John, are they not peers of the forest? lords temporal of Sherwood? And
+am not I lord spiritual? Am I not archbishop? Am I not pope? Do I not
+consecrate their banner and absolve their sins? Are not they state, and
+am not I church? Are not they state monarchical, and am not I church
+militant? Do I not excommunicate our enemies from venison and brawn,
+and by 'r Lady, when need calls, beat them down under my feet? The state
+levies tax, and the church levies tithe. Even so do we. Mass, we
+take all at once. What then? It is tax by redemption and tithe by
+commutation. Your William and Richard can cut and come again, but our
+Robin deals with slippery subjects that come not twice to his exchequer.
+What need we then to constitute a court, except a fool and a laureate?
+For the fool, his only use is to make false knaves merry by art, and we
+are true men and are merry by nature. For the laureate, his only office
+is to find virtues in those who have none, and to drink sack for his
+pains. We have quite virtue enough to need him not, and can drink our
+sack for ourselves." "Well preached, friar," said Robin Hood: "yet there
+is one thing wanting to constitute a court, and that is a queen. And
+now, lovely Matilda, look round upon these sylvan shades where we have
+so often roused the stag from his ferny covert. The rising sun smiles
+upon us through the stems of that beechen knoll. Shall I take your hand,
+Matilda, in the presence of this my court? Shall I crown you with our
+wild-wood coronal, and hail you queen of the forest? Will you be the
+queen Matilda of your own true king Robin?"
+
+Matilda smiled assent.
+
+"Not Matilda," said the friar: "the rules of our holy alliance require
+new birth. We have excepted in favour of Little John, because he is
+great John, and his name is a misnomer. I sprinkle, not thy forehead
+with water, but thy lips with wine, and baptize thee MARIAN."
+
+"Here is a pretty conspiracy," exclaimed the baron. "Why, you villanous
+friar, think you to nickname and marry my daughter before my face with
+impunity?"
+
+"Even so, bold baron," said the friar; "we are strongest here. Say you,
+might overcomes right? I say no. There is no right but might: and to
+say that might overcomes right is to say that right overcomes itself: an
+absurdity most palpable. Your right was the stronger in Arlingford, and
+ours is the stronger in Sherwood. Your right was right as long as you
+could maintain it; so is ours. So is King Richard's, with all deference
+be it spoken; and so is King Saladin's; and their two mights are now
+committed in bloody fray, and that which overcomes will be right, just
+as long as it lasts, and as far as it reaches. And now if any of you
+know any just impediment----"
+
+"Fire and fury," said the baron.
+
+"Fire and fury," said the friar, "are modes of that might which
+constitutes right, and are just impediments to any thing against which
+they can be brought to bear. They are our good allies upon occasion, and
+would declare for us now if you should put them to the test."
+
+"Father," said Matilda, "you know the terms of our compact: from the
+moment you restrained my liberty, you renounced your claim to all but
+compulsory obedience. The friar argues well. Right ends with might.
+Thick walls, dreary galleries, and tapestried chambers, were indifferent
+to me while I could leave them at pleasure, but have ever been hateful
+to me since they held me by force. May I never again have roof but
+the blue sky, nor canopy but the green leaves, nor barrier but the
+forest-bounds; with the foresters to my train, Little John to my page,
+Friar Tuck to my ghostly adviser, and Robin Hood to my liege lord. I am
+no longer lady Matilda Fitzwater, of Arlingford Castle, but plain Maid
+Marian, of Sherwood Forest."
+
+"Long live Maid Marian!" re-echoed the foresters.
+
+"Oh false girl!" said the baron, "do you renounce your name and
+parentage?"
+
+"Not my parentage," said Marian, "but my name indeed: do not all maids
+renounce it at the altar?"
+
+"The altar!" said the baron: "grant me patience! what do you mean by the
+altar?"
+
+"Pile green turf," said the friar, "wreathe it with flowers, and crown
+it with fruit, and we will show the noble baron what we mean by the
+altar."
+
+The foresters did as the friar directed.
+
+"Now, Little John," said the friar, "on with the cloak of the abbot of
+Doubleflask. I appoint thee my clerk: thou art here duly elected in full
+mote."
+
+"I wish you were all in full moat together," said the baron, "and smooth
+wall on both sides."
+
+"Punnest thou?" said the friar. "A heinous anti-christian offence.
+Why anti-christian? Because anti-catholic? Why anti-catholic? Because
+anti-roman. Why anti-roman? Because Carthaginian. Is not pun from
+Punic? punica fides: the very quint-essential quiddity of bad faith:
+double-visaged: double-tongued. He that will make a pun will---- I say
+no more. Fie on it. Stand forth, clerk. Who is the bride's father?"
+
+"There is no bride's father," said the baron. "I am the father of
+Matilda Fitzwater."
+
+"There is none such," said the friar. "This is the fair Maid Marian.
+Will you make a virtue of necessity, or will you give laws to the
+flowing tide? Will you give her, or shall Robin take her? Will you be
+her true natural father, or shall I commute paternity? Stand forth,
+Scarlet."
+
+"Stand back, sirrah Scarlet," said the baron. "My daughter shall have no
+father but me. Needs must when the devil drives."
+
+"No matter who drives," said the friar, "so that, like a well-disposed
+subject, you yield cheerful obedience to those who can enforce it."
+
+"Mawd, sweet Mawd," said the baron, "will you then forsake your poor
+old father in his distress, with his castle in ashes, and his enemy in
+power?"
+
+"Not so, father," said Marian; "I will always be your true daughter: I
+will always love, and serve, and watch, and defend you: but neither will
+I forsake my plighted love, and my own liege lord, who was your choice
+before he was mine, for you made him my associate in infancy; and that
+he continued to be mine when he ceased to be yours, does not in any way
+show remissness in my duties or falling off in my affections. And though
+I here plight my troth at the altar to Robin, in the presence of this
+holy priest and pious clerk, yet.... Father, when Richard returns from
+Palestine, he will restore you to your barony, and perhaps, for your
+sake, your daughter's husband to the earldom of Huntingdon: should that
+never be, should it be the will of fate that we must live and die in the
+greenwood, I will live and die MAID MARIAN." [4]
+
+"A pretty resolution," said the baron, "if Robin will let you keep it."
+
+"I have sworn it," said Robin. "Should I expose her tenderness to the
+perils of maternity, when life and death may hang on shifting at a
+moment's notice from Sherwood to Barnsdale, and from Barnsdale to the
+sea-shore? And why should I banquet when my merry men starve? Chastity
+is our forest law, and even the friar has kept it since he has been
+here."
+
+"Truly so," said the friar: "for temptation dwells with ease and luxury:
+but the hunter is Hippolytus, and the huntress is Dian. And now, dearly
+beloved----"
+
+The friar went through the ceremony with great unction, and Little John
+was most clerical in the intonation of his responses. After which, the
+friar sang, and Little John fiddled, and the foresters danced, Robin
+with Marian, and Scarlet with the baron; and the venison smoked, and
+the ale frothed, and the wine sparkled, and the sun went down on their
+unwearied festivity: which they wound up with the following song, the
+friar leading and the foresters joining chorus:
+
+ Oh! bold Robin Hood is a forester good,
+ As ever drew bow in the merry greenwood:
+ At his bugle's shrill singing the echoes are ringing,
+ The wild deer are springing for many a rood:
+ Its summons we follow, through brake, over hollow,
+ The thrice-blown shrill summons of bold Robin Hood.
+
+ And what eye hath e'er seen such a sweet Maiden Queen,
+ As Marian, the pride of the forester's green?
+ A sweet garden-flower, she blooms in the bower,
+ Where alone to this hour the wild rose has been:
+ We hail her in duty the queen of all beauty:
+ We will live, we will die, by our sweet Maiden queen.
+
+ And here's a grey friar, good as heart can desire,
+ To absolve all our sins as the case may require:
+ Who with courage so stout, lays his oak-plant  about,
+ And puts to the rout all the foes of his choir:
+ For we are his choristers, we merry foresters,
+ Chorussing thus with our militant friar
+
+ And Scarlet cloth bring his good yew-bough and  string,
+ Prime minister is he of Robin our king:
+ No mark is too narrow for little John's arrow,
+ That hits a cock sparrow a mile on the wing;
+ Robin and Marion, Scarlet, and Little John,
+ Long with their glory old Sherwood shall ring.
+
+ Each a good liver, for well-feathered quiver
+ Doth furnish brawn, venison, and fowl of the river:
+ But the best game we dish up, it is a fat bishop:
+ When his angels we fish up, he proves a free giver:
+ For a prelate so lowly has angels more holy,
+ And should this world's false angels to sinners deliver.
+
+ Robin and Marion, Scarlet and Little John,
+ Drink to them one by one, drink as ye sing:
+ Robin and Marion, Scarlet and Little John,
+ Echo to echo through Sherwood shall fling:
+ Robin and Marion, Scarlet and Little John,
+ Long with their glory old Sherwood shall ring.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+      A single volume paramount: a code:
+      A master spirit: a determined road.
+      --WORDSWORTH.
+
+
+The next morning Robin Hood convened his foresters, and desired Little
+John, for the baron's edification, to read over the laws of their forest
+society. Little John read aloud with a stentorophonic voice.
+
+"At a high court of foresters, held under the greenwood tree, an hour
+after sun-rise, Robin Hood President, William Scarlet Vice-President,
+Little John Secretary: the following articles, moved by Friar Tuck in
+his capacity of Peer Spiritual, and seconded by Much the Miller, were
+unanimously agreed to.
+
+"The principles of our society are six: Legitimacy, Equity, Hospitality,
+Chivalry, Chastity, and Courtesy.
+
+"The articles of Legitimacy are four:
+
+"I. Our government is legitimate, and our society is founded on the one
+golden rule of right, consecrated by the universal consent of mankind,
+and by the practice of all ages, individuals, and nations: namely, To
+keep what we have, and to catch what we can.
+
+"II. Our government being legitimate, all our proceedings shall be
+legitimate: wherefore we declare war against the whole world, and every
+forester is by this legitimate declaration legitimately invested with a
+roving commission, to make lawful prize of every thing that comes in his
+way.
+
+"III. All forest laws but our own we declare to be null and void.
+
+"IV. All such of the old laws of England as do not in any way interfere
+with, or militate against, the views of this honourable assembly, we
+will loyally adhere to and maintain. The rest we declare null and void
+as far as relates to ourselves, in all cases wherein a vigour beyond the
+law may be conducive to our own interest and preservation."
+
+"The articles of Equity are three:
+
+"I. The balance of power among the people being very much deranged, by
+one having too much and another nothing, we hereby resolve ourselves
+into a congress or court of equity, to restore as far as in us lies the
+said natural balance of power, by taking from all who have too much
+as much of the said too much as we can lay our hands on; and giving
+to those who have nothing such a portion thereof as it may seem to us
+expedient to part with.
+
+"II. In all cases a quorum of foresters shall constitute a court of
+equity, and as many as may be strong enough to manage the matter in hand
+shall constitute a quorum.
+
+"III. All usurers, monks, courtiers, and other drones of the great
+hive of society, who shall be found laden with any portion of the honey
+whereof they have wrongfully despoiled the industrious bee, shall be
+rightfully despoiled thereof in turn; and all bishops and abbots shall
+be bound and beaten, [5] especially the abbot of Doncaster; as shall
+also all sheriffs, especially the sheriff of Nottingham.
+
+
+"The articles of Hospitality are two:
+
+"I. Postmen, carriers and market-folk, peasants and mechanics, farmers
+and millers, shall pass through our forest dominions without let or
+molestation.
+
+"II. All other travellers through the forest shall be graciously invited
+to partake of Robin's hospitality; and if they come not willingly they
+shall be compelled; and the rich man shall pay well for his fare; and
+the poor man shall feast scot free, and peradventure receive bounty in
+proportion to his desert and necessity.
+
+"The article of Chivalry is one:
+
+"I. Every forester shall, to the extent of his power, aid and protect
+maids, widows, and orphans, and all weak and distressed persons
+whomsoever: and no woman shall be impeded or molested in any way; nor
+shall any company receive harm which any woman is in.
+
+"The article of Chastity is one:
+
+"I. Every forester, being Diana's forester and minion of the moon, shall
+commend himself to the grace of the Virgin, and shall have the gift of
+continency on pain of expulsion: that the article of chivalry may be
+secure from infringement, and maids, wives, and widows pass without fear
+through the forest.
+
+"The article of Courtesy is one:
+
+"I. No one shall miscall a forester. He who calls Robin Robert of
+Huntingdon, or salutes him by any other title or designation whatsoever
+except plain Robin Hood; or who calls Marian Matilda Fitzwater, or
+salutes her by any other title or designation whatsoever except plain
+Maid Marian; and so of all others; shall for every such offence forfeit
+a mark, to be paid to the friar.
+
+"And these articles we swear to keep as we are good men and true.
+Carried by acclamation. God save King Richard.
+
+"LITTLE JOHN, Secretary."
+
+
+"Excellent laws," said the baron: "excellent, by the holy rood. William
+of Normandy, with my great great grandfather Fierabras at his elbow,
+could not have made better. And now, sweet Mawd----"
+
+"A fine, a fine," cried the friar, "a fine, by the article of courtesy."
+
+"Od's life," said the baron, "shall I not call my own daughter Mawd?
+Methinks there should be a special exception in my favour."
+
+"It must not be," said Robin Hood: "our constitution admits no
+privilege."
+
+"But I will commute," said the friar; "for twenty marks a year duly paid
+into my ghostly pocket you shall call your daughter Mawd two hundred
+times a day."
+
+"Gramercy," said the baron, "and I agree, honest friar, when I can get
+twenty marks to pay: for till Prince John be beaten from Nottingham, my
+rents are like to prove but scanty."
+
+"I will trust," said the friar, "and thus let us ratify the stipulation;
+so shall our laws and your infringement run together in an amicable
+parallel."
+
+"But," said Little John, "this is a bad precedent, master friar. It is
+turning discipline into profit, penalty into perquisite, public justice
+into private revenue. It is rank corruption, master friar."
+
+"Why are laws made?" said the friar. "For the profit of somebody. Of
+whom? Of him who makes them first, and of others as it may happen. Was
+not I legislator in the last article, and shall I not thrive by my own
+law?"
+
+"Well then, sweet Mawd," said the baron, "I must leave you, Mawd: your
+life is very well for the young and the hearty, but it squares not with
+my age or my humour. I must house, Mawd. I must find refuge: but where?
+That is the question."
+
+"Where Sir Guy of Gamwell has found it," said Robin Hood, "near the
+borders of Barnsdale. There you may dwell in safety with him and fair
+Alice, till King Richard return, and Little John shall give you safe
+conduct. You will have need to travel with caution, in disguise and
+without attendants, for Prince John commands all this vicinity, and will
+doubtless lay the country for you and Marian. Now it is first expedient
+to dismiss your retainers. If there be any among them who like our life,
+they may stay with us in the greenwood; the rest may return to their
+homes."
+
+Some of the baron's men resolved to remain with Robin and Marian, and
+were furnished accordingly with suits of green, of which Robin always
+kept good store.
+
+Marian now declared that as there was danger in the way to Barnsdale,
+she would accompany Little John and the baron, as she should not be
+happy unless she herself saw her father placed in security. Robin was
+very unwilling to consent to this, and assured her that there was more
+danger for her than the baron: but Marian was absolute.
+
+"If so, then," said Robin, "I shall be your guide instead of Little
+John, and I shall leave him and Scarlet joint-regents of Sherwood during
+my absence, and the voice of Friar Tuck shall be decisive between them
+if they differ in nice questions of state policy." Marian objected to
+this, that there was more danger for Robin than either herself or the
+baron: but Robin was absolute in his turn.
+
+"Talk not of my voice," said the friar; "for if Marian be a damsel
+errant, I will be her ghostly esquire."
+
+Robin insisted that this should not be, for number would only expose
+them to greater risk of detection. The friar, after some debate,
+reluctantly acquiesced.
+
+While they were discussing these matters, they heard the distant sound
+of horses' feet.
+
+"Go," said Robin to Little John, "and invite yonder horseman to dinner."
+
+Little John bounded away, and soon came before a young man, who was
+riding in a melancholy manner, with the bridle hanging loose on the
+horse's neck, and his eyes drooping towards the ground.
+
+"Whither go you?" said Little John.
+
+"Whithersoever my horse pleases," said the young man.
+
+"And that shall be," said Little John, "whither I please to lead him. I
+am commissioned to invite you to dine with my master."
+
+"Who is your master?" said the young man.
+
+"Robin Hood," said Little John.
+
+"The bold outlaw?" said the stranger. "Neither he nor you should have
+made me turn an inch aside yesterday; but to-day I care not."
+
+"Then it is better for you," said Little John, "that you came to-day
+than yesterday, if you love dining in a whole skin: for my master is the
+pink of courtesy: but if his guests prove stubborn, he bastes them and
+his venison together, while the friar says mass before meat."
+
+The young man made no answer, and scarcely seemed to hear what Little
+John was saying, who therefore took the horse's bridle and led him to
+where Robin and his foresters were setting forth their dinner. Robin
+seated the young man next to Marian. Recovering a little from his
+stupor, he looked with much amazement at her, and the baron, and
+Robin, and the friar; listened to their conversation, and seemed much
+astonished to find himself in such holy and courtly company. Robin
+helped him largely to rumble-pie and cygnet and pheasant, and the other
+dainties of his table; and the friar pledged him in ale and wine, and
+exhorted him to make good cheer. But the young man drank little, ate
+less, spake nothing, and every now and then sighed heavily.
+
+When the repast was ended, "Now," said Robin, "you are at liberty to
+pursue your journey: but first be pleased to pay for your dinner."
+
+"That would I gladly do, Robin," said the young man, "but all I have
+about me are five shillings and a ring. To the five shillings you shall
+be welcome, but for the ring I will fight while there is a drop of blood
+in my veins."
+
+"Gallantly spoken," said Robin Hood. "A love-token, without doubt: but
+you must submit to our forest laws. Little John must search; and if he
+find no more than you say, not a penny will I touch; but if you have
+spoken false, the whole is forfeit to our fraternity."
+
+"And with reason," said the friar; "for thereby is the truth maintained
+The abbot of Doubleflask swore there was no money in his valise, and
+Little John forthwith emptied it of four hundred pounds. Thus was the
+abbot's perjury but of one minute's duration; for though his speech
+was false in the utterance, yet was it no sooner uttered than it became
+true, and we should have been participes criminis to have suffered the
+holy abbot to depart in falsehood: whereas he came to us a false priest,
+and we sent him away a true man. Marry, we turned his cloak to further
+account, and thereby hangs a tale that may be either said or sung; for
+in truth I am minstrel here as well as chaplain; I pray for good success
+to our just and necessary warfare, and sing thanks-giving odes when our
+foresters bring in booty:
+
+ Bold Robin has robed him in ghostly attire,
+ And forth he is gone like a holy friar,
+     Singing, hey down, ho down, down, derry down:
+ And of two grey friars he soon was aware,
+ Regaling themselves with dainty fare,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown.
+
+ "Good morrow, good brothers," said bold Robin
+ Hood,
+ "And what make you in the good greenwood,
+     Singing hey down, ho down, down, derry down!
+ Now give me, I pray you, wine and food;
+ For none can I find in the good greenwood,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown."
+
+ "Good brother," they said, "we would give you full fain,
+ But we have no more than enough for twain,
+     Singing, hey down, ho down, down, derry down."
+ "Then give me some money," said bold Robin Hood,
+ "For none can I find in the good greenwood,
+ All on the fallen leaves so brown."
+
+ "No money have we, good brother," said they:
+ "Then," said he, "we three for money will pray:
+     Singing, hey down, ho down, down, derry down:
+ And whatever shall come at the end of our prayer,
+ We three holy friars will piously share,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown."
+
+ "We will not pray with thee, good brother, God wot:
+ For truly, good brother, thou pleasest us not,
+     Singing hey down, ho down, down, derry down:"
+ Then up they both started from Robin to run,
+ But down on their knees Robin pulled them each one,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown.
+
+ The grey friars prayed with a doleful face,
+ But bold Robin prayed with a right merry grace,
+     Singing, hey down, ho down, down, derry down:
+ And when they had prayed, their portmanteau he took,
+ And from it a hundred good angels he shook,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown.
+
+ "The saints," said bold Robin, "have hearkened  our prayer,
+ And here's a good angel apiece for your share:
+ If more you would have, you must win ere you wear:
+     Singing hey down, ho down, down, derry down:"
+ Then he blew his good horn with a musical cheer,
+ And fifty green bowmen came trooping full near,
+ And away the grey friars they bounded like deer,
+     All on the fallen leaves so brown.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+      What can a young lassie, what shall a young lassie,
+      What can a young lassie do wi'an auld man?
+      --BURNS.
+
+
+"Here is but five shillings and a ring," said Little John, "and the
+young man has spoken true."
+
+"Then," said Robin to the stranger, "if want of money be the cause
+of your melancholy, speak. Little John is my treasurer, and he shall
+disburse to you."
+
+"It is, and it is not," said the stranger; "it is, because, had I not
+wanted money I had never lost my love; it is not, because, now that I
+have lost her, money would come too late to regain her."
+
+"In what way have you lost her?" said Robin: "let us clearly know that
+she is past regaining, before we give up our wishes to restore her to
+you."
+
+"She is to be married this day," said the stranger, "and perhaps is
+married by this, to a rich old knight; and yesterday I knew it not."
+
+"What is your name?" said Robin.
+
+"Allen," said the stranger.
+
+"And where is the marriage to take place, Allen?" said Robin.
+
+"At Edwinstow church," said Allen, "by the bishop of Nottingham."
+
+"I know that bishop," said Robin; "he dined with me a month since, and
+paid three hundred pounds for his dinner. He has a good ear and loves
+music. The friar sang to him to some tune. Give me my harper's cloak,
+and I will play a part at this wedding.
+
+"These are dangerous times, Robin," said Marian, "for playing pranks out
+of the forest."
+
+"Fear not," said Robin; "Edwinstow lies not Nottingham-ward, and I will
+take my precautions."
+
+Robin put on his harper's cloak, while Little John painted his eyebrows
+and cheeks, tipped his nose with red, and tied him on a comely beard.
+Marian confessed, that had she not been present at the metamorphosis,
+she should not have known her own true Robin. Robin took his harp and
+went to the wedding.
+
+Robin found the bishop and his train in the church porch, impatiently
+expecting the arrival of the bride and bridegroom. The clerk was
+observing to the bishop that the knight was somewhat gouty, and that
+the necessity of walking the last quarter of a mile from the road to the
+churchyard probably detained the lively bridegroom rather longer than
+had been calculated upon.
+
+"Oh! by my fey," said the music-loving bishop, "here comes a harper in
+the nick of time, and now I care not how long they tarry. Ho! honest
+friend, are you come to play at the wedding?"
+
+"I am come to play anywhere," answered Robin, "where I can get a cup of
+sack; for which I will sing the praise of the donor in lofty verse, and
+emblazon him with any virtue which he may wish to have the credit of
+possessing, without the trouble of practising.
+
+"A most courtly harper," said the bishop; "I will fill thee with sack; I
+will make thee a walking butt of sack, if thou wilt delight my ears with
+thy melodies."
+
+"That will I," said Robin; "in what branch of my art shall I exert my
+faculty? I am passing well in all, from the anthem to the glee, and from
+the dirge to the coranto."
+
+"It would be idle," said the bishop, "to give thee sack for playing me
+anthems, seeing that I myself do receive sack for hearing them sung.
+Therefore, as the occasion is festive, thou shalt play me a coranto."
+
+Robin struck up and played away merrily, the bishop all the while in
+great delight, noddling his head, and beating time with his foot, till
+the bride and bridegroom appeared. The bridegroom was richly apparelled,
+and came slowly and painfully forward, hobbling and leering, and pursing
+up his mouth into a smile of resolute defiance to the gout, and of
+tender complacency towards his lady love, who, shining like gold at the
+old knight's expense, followed slowly between her father and mother,
+her cheeks pale, her head drooping, her steps faltering, and her eyes
+reddened with tears.
+
+Robin stopped his minstrelsy, and said to the bishop, "This seems to me
+an unfit match."
+
+"What do you say, rascal?" said the old knight, hobbling up to him.
+
+"I say," said Robin, "this seems to me an unfit match. What, in the
+devil's name, can you want with a young wife, who have one foot in
+flannels and the other in the grave?"
+
+"What is that to thee, sirrah varlet?" said the old knight; "stand away
+from the porch, or I will fracture thy sconce with my cane."
+
+"I will not stand away from the porch," said Robin, "unless the bride
+bid me, and tell me that you are her own true love."
+
+"Speak," said the bride's father, in a severe tone, and with a look of
+significant menace. The girl looked alternately at her father and Robin.
+She attempted to speak, but her voice failed in the effort, and she
+burst into tears.
+
+"Here is lawful cause and just impediment," said Robin, "and I forbid
+the banns."
+
+"Who are you, villain?" said the old knight, stamping his sound foot
+with rage.
+
+"I am the Roman law," said Robin, "which says that there shall not be
+more than ten years between a man and his wife; and here are five times
+ten: and so says the law of nature."
+
+"Honest harper," said the bishop, "you are somewhat over-officious here,
+and less courtly than I deemed you. If you love sack, forbear; for this
+course will never bring you a drop. As to your Roman law, and your law
+of nature, what right have they to say any thing which the law of Holy
+Writ says not?"
+
+"The law of Holy Writ does say it," said Robin; "I expound it so to say;
+and I will produce sixty commentators to establish my exposition."
+
+And so saying, he produced a horn from beneath his cloak, and blew three
+blasts, and threescore bowmen in green came leaping from the bushes and
+trees; and young Allen was the first among them to give Robin his sword,
+while Friar Tuck and Little John marched up to the altar. Robin stripped
+the bishop and clerk of their robes, and put them on the friar and
+Little John; and Allen advanced to take the hand of the bride. Her
+cheeks grew red and her eyes grew bright, as she locked her hand in her
+lover's, and tripped lightly with him into the church.
+
+"This marriage will not stand," said the bishop, "for they have not been
+thrice asked in church."
+
+"We will ask them seven times," said Little John, "lest three should not
+suffice."
+
+"And in the meantime," said Robin, "the knight and the bishop shall
+dance to my harping."
+
+So Robin sat in the church porch and played away merrily, while his
+foresters formed a ring, in the centre of which the knight and bishop
+danced with exemplary alacrity; and if they relaxed their exertions,
+Scarlet gently touched them up with the point of an arrow.
+
+The knight grimaced ruefully, and begged Robin to think of his gout.
+
+"So I do," said Robin; "this is the true antipodagron: you shall dance
+the gout away, and be thankful to me while you live. I told you," he
+added to the bishop, "I would play at this wedding; but you did not tell
+me that you would dance at it. The next couple you marry, think of the
+Roman law."
+
+The bishop was too much out of breath to reply; and now the young couple
+issued from church, and the bride having made a farewell obeisance to
+her parents, they departed together with the foresters, the parents
+storming, the attendants laughing, the bishop puffing and blowing, and
+the knight rubbing his gouty foot, and uttering doleful lamentations for
+the gold and jewels with which he had so unwittingly adorned and cowered
+the bride.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+      As ye came from the holy land
+          Of blessed Walsinghame,
+      Oh met ye not with my true love,
+          As by the way ye came?
+
+      --Old Ballad.
+
+
+In pursuance of the arrangement recorded in the twelfth chapter, the
+baron, Robin, and Marian disguised themselves as pilgrims returned from
+Palestine, and travelling from the sea-coast of Hampshire to their home
+in Northumberland. By dint of staff and cockle-shell, sandal and scrip,
+they proceeded in safety the greater part of the way (for Robin had many
+sly inns and resting-places between Barnsdale and Sherwood), and were
+already on the borders of Yorkshire, when, one evening, they passed
+within view of a castle, where they saw a lady standing on a turret,
+and surveying the whole extent of the valley through which they were
+passing. A servant came running from the castle, and delivered to them
+a message from his lady, who was sick with expectation of news from her
+lord in the Holy Land, and entreated them to come to her, that she might
+question them concerning him. This was an awkward occurrence: but there
+was no presence for refusal, and they followed the servant into the
+castle. The baron, who had been in Palestine in his youth, undertook to
+be spokesman on the occasion, and to relate his own adventures to
+the lady as having happened to the lord in question. This preparation
+enabled him to be so minute and circumstantial in his detail, and so
+coherent in his replies to her questions, that the lady fell implicitly
+into the delusion, and was delighted to find that her lord was alive and
+in health, and in high favour with the king, and performing prodigies
+of valour in the name of his lady, whose miniature he always wore in his
+bosom. The baron guessed at this circumstance from the customs of that
+age, and happened to be in the right.
+
+"This miniature," added the baron, "I have had the felicity to see, and
+should have known you by it among a million." The baron was a little
+embarrassed by some questions of the lady concerning her lord's personal
+appearance; but Robin came to his aid, observing a picture suspended
+opposite to him on the wall, which he made a bold conjecture to be that
+of the lord in question; and making a calculation of the influences of
+time and war, which he weighed with a comparison of the lady's age,
+he gave a description of her lord sufficiently like the picture in its
+groundwork to be a true resemblance, and sufficiently differing from
+it in circumstances to be more an original than a copy. The lady was
+completely deceived, and entreated them to partake her hospitality for
+the night; but this they deemed it prudent to decline, and with many
+humble thanks for her kindness, and representations of the necessity of
+not delaying their homeward course, they proceeded on their way.
+
+As they passed over the drawbridge, they met Sir Ralph Montfaucon and
+his squire, who were wandering in quest of Marian, and were entering
+to claim that hospitality which the pilgrims had declined. Their
+countenances struck Sir Ralph with a kind of imperfect recognition,
+which would never have been matured, but that the eyes of Marian, as
+she passed him, encountered his, and the images of those stars of beauty
+continued involuntarily twinkling in his sensorium to the exclusion of
+all other ideas, till memory, love, and hope concurred with imagination
+to furnish a probable reason for their haunting him so pertinaciously.
+Those eyes, he thought, were certainly the eyes of Matilda Fitzwater;
+and if the eyes were hers, it was extremely probable, if not logically
+consecutive, that the rest of the body they belonged to was hers also.
+Now, if it were really Matilda Fitzwater, who were her two companions?
+The baron? Aye, and the elder pilgrim was something like him. And the
+earl of Huntingdon? Very probably. The earl and the baron might be good
+friends again, now that they were both in disgrace together. While he
+was revolving these cogitations, he was introduced to the lady, and
+after claiming and receiving the promise of hospitality, he inquired
+what she knew of the pilgrims who had just departed? The lady told him
+they were newly returned from Palestine, having been long in the Holy
+Land. The knight expressed some scepticism on this point. The lady
+replied, that they had given her so minute a detail of her lord's
+proceedings, and so accurate a description of his person, that she could
+not be deceived in them. This staggered the knight's confidence in
+his own penetration; and if it had not been a heresy in knighthood to
+suppose for a moment that there could be in rerum natura such another
+pair of eyes as those of his mistress, he would have acquiesced
+implicitly in the lady's judgment. But while the lady and the knight
+were conversing, the warder blew his bugle-horn, and presently entered
+a confidential messenger from Palestine, who gave her to understand
+that her lord was well; but entered into a detail of his adventures
+most completely at variance with the baron's narrative, to which not
+the correspondence of a single incident gave the remotest colouring of
+similarity. It now became manifest that the pilgrims were not true
+men; and Sir Ralph Montfaucon sate down to supper with his head full
+of cogitations, which we shall leave him to chew and digest with his
+pheasant and canary.
+
+Meanwhile our three pilgrims proceeded on their way. The evening set in
+black and lowering, when Robin turned aside from the main track, to seek
+an asylum for the night, along a narrow way that led between rocky and
+woody hills. A peasant observed the pilgrims as they entered that narrow
+pass, and called after them: "Whither go you, my masters? there are
+rogues in that direction."
+
+"Can you show us a direction," said Robin, "in which there are none? If
+so we will take it in preference." The peasant grinned, and walked away
+whistling.
+
+The pass widened as they advanced, and the woods grew thicker and darker
+around them. Their path wound along the slope of a woody declivity,
+which rose high above them in a thick rampart of foliage, and descended
+almost precipitously to the bed of a small river, which they heard
+dashing in its rocky channel, and saw its white foam gleaming at
+intervals in the last faint glimmerings of twilight. In a short time all
+was dark, and the rising voice of the wind foretold a coming storm. They
+turned a point of the valley, and saw a light below them in the depth
+of the hollow, shining through a cottage-casement and dancing in its
+reflection on the restless stream. Robin blew his horn, which was
+answered from below. The cottage door opened: a boy came forth with a
+torch, ascended the steep, showed tokens of great delight at meeting
+with Robin, and lighted them down a flight of steps rudely cut in the
+rock, and over a series of rugged stepping-stones, that crossed
+the channel of the river. They entered the cottage, which exhibited
+neatness, comfort, and plenty, being amply enriched with pots, pans,
+and pipkins, and adorned with flitches of bacon and sundry similar
+ornaments, that gave goodly promise in the firelight that gleamed upon
+the rafters. A woman, who seemed just old enough to be the boy's mother,
+had thrown down her spinning wheel in her joy at the sound of Robin's
+horn, and was bustling with singular alacrity to set forth her festal
+ware and prepare an abundant supper. Her features, though not beautiful,
+were agreeable and expressive, and were now lighted up with such
+manifest joy at the sight of Robin, that Marian could not help feeling a
+momentary touch of jealousy, and a half-formed suspicion that Robin had
+broken his forest law, and had occasionally gone out of bounds, as other
+great men have done upon occasion, in order to reconcile the breach
+of the spirit, with the preservation of the letter, of their own
+legislation. However, this suspicion, if it could be said to exist in a
+mind so generous as Marian's, was very soon dissipated by the entrance
+of the woman's husband, who testified as much joy as his wife had done
+at the sight of Robin; and in a short time the whole of the party were
+amicably seated round a smoking supper of river-fish and wild wood fowl,
+on which the baron fell with as much alacrity as if he had been a true
+pilgrim from Palestine.
+
+The husband produced some recondite flasks of wine, which were laid by
+in a binn consecrated to Robin, whose occasional visits to them in his
+wanderings were the festal days of these warm-hearted cottagers, whose
+manners showed that they had not been born to this low estate. Their
+story had no mystery, and Marian easily collected it from the tenour of
+their conversation. The young man had been, like Robin, the victim of an
+usurious abbot, and had been outlawed for debt, and his nut-brown maid
+had accompanied him to the depths of Sherwood, where they lived an
+unholy and illegitimate life, killing the king's deer, and never hearing
+mass. In this state, Robin, then earl of Huntingdon, discovered them
+in one of his huntings, and gave them aid and protection. When Robin
+himself became an outlaw, the necessary qualification or gift of
+continency was too hard a law for our lovers to subscribe to; and
+as they were thus disqualified for foresters, Robin had found them a
+retreat in this romantic and secluded spot. He had done similar service
+to other lovers similarly circumstanced, and had disposed them in
+various wild scenes which he and his men had discovered in their
+flittings from place to place, supplying them with all necessaries and
+comforts from the reluctant disgorgings of fat abbots and usurers. The
+benefit was in some measure mutual; for these cottages served him as
+resting-places in his removals, and enabled him to travel untraced and
+unmolested; and in the delight with which he was always received he
+found himself even more welcome than he would have been at an inn;
+and this is saying very much for gratitude and affection together.
+The smiles which surrounded him were of his own creation, and he
+participated in the happiness he had bestowed.
+
+The casements began to rattle in the wind, and the rain to beat upon
+the windows. The wind swelled to a hurricane, and the rain dashed like
+a flood against the glass. The boy retired to his little bed, the wife
+trimmed the lamp, the husband heaped logs upon the fire: Robin broached
+another flask; and Marian filled the baron's cup, and sweetened Robin's
+by touching its edge with her lips.
+
+"Well," said the baron, "give me a roof over my head, be it never so
+humble. Your greenwood canopy is pretty and pleasant in sunshine; but if
+I were doomed to live under it, I should wish it were water-tight."
+
+"But," said Robin, "we have tents and caves for foul weather, good store
+of wine and venison, and fuel in abundance."
+
+"Ay, but," said the baron, "I like to pull off my boots of a night,
+which you foresters seldom do, and to ensconce myself thereafter in
+a comfortable bed. Your beech-root is over-hard for a couch, and your
+mossy stump is somewhat rough for a bolster."
+
+"Had you not dry leaves," said Robin, "with a bishop's surplice over
+them? What would you have softer? And had you not an abbot's travelling
+cloak for a coverlet? What would you have warmer?"
+
+"Very true," said the baron, "but that was an indulgence to a guest, and
+I dreamed all night of the sheriff of Nottingham. I like to feel myself
+safe," he added, stretching out his legs to the fire, and throwing
+himself back in his chair with the air of a man determined to be
+comfortable. "I like to feel myself safe," said the baron.
+
+At that moment the woman caught her husband's arm, and all the party
+following the direction of her eyes, looked simultaneously to the
+window, where they had just time to catch a glimpse of an apparition of
+an armed head, with its plumage tossing in the storm, on which the light
+shone from within, and which disappeared immediately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+     O knight, thou lack'st a cup of canary.
+     When did I see thee so put down?--Twelfth Night.
+
+
+Several knocks, as from the knuckles of an iron glove, were given to the
+door of the cottage, and a voice was heard entreating shelter from the
+storm for a traveller who had lost his way. Robin arose and went to the
+door.
+
+"What are you?" said Robin.
+
+"A soldier," replied the voice: "an unfortunate adherent of Longchamp,
+flying the vengeance of Prince John."
+
+"Are you alone?" said Robin.
+
+"Yes," said the voice: "it is a dreadful night. Hospitable cottagers,
+pray give me admittance. I would not have asked it but for the storm. I
+would have kept my watch in the woods."
+
+"That I believe," said Robin. "You did not reckon on the storm when you
+turned into this pass. Do you know there are rogues this way?"
+
+"I do," said the voice.
+
+"So do I," said Robin.
+
+A pause ensued, during which Robin listening attentively caught a faint
+sound of whispering.
+
+"You are not alone," said Robin. "Who are your companions?"
+
+"None but the wind and the water," said the voice, "and I would I had
+them not."
+
+"The wind and the water have many voices," said Robin, "but I never
+before heard them say, What shall we do?"
+
+Another pause ensued: after which,
+
+"Look ye, master cottager," said the voice, in an altered tone, "if you
+do not let us in willingly, we will break down the door."
+
+"Ho! ho!" roared the baron, "you are become plural are you, rascals? How
+many are there of you, thieves? What, I warrant, you thought to rob and
+murder a poor harmless cottager and his wife, and did not dream of a
+garrison? You looked for no weapon of opposition but spit, poker, and
+basting ladle, wielded by unskilful hands: but, rascals, here is short
+sword and long cudgel in hands well tried in war, wherewith you shall be
+drilled into cullenders and beaten into mummy."
+
+No reply was made, but furious strokes from without resounded upon the
+door. Robin, Marian, and the baron threw by their pilgrim's attire, and
+stood in arms on the defensive. They were provided with swords, and the
+cottager gave them bucklers and helmets, for all Robin's haunts were
+furnished with secret armouries. But they kept their swords sheathed,
+and the baron wielded a ponderous spear, which he pointed towards the
+door ready to run through the first that should enter, and Robin and
+Marian each held a bow with the arrow drawn to its head and pointed in
+the same direction. The cottager flourished a strong cudgel (a weapon
+in the use of which he prided himself on being particularly expert), and
+the wife seized the spit from the fireplace, and held it as she saw the
+baron hold his spear. The storm of wind and rain continued to beat on
+the roof and the casement, and the storm of blows to resound upon the
+door, which at length gave way with a violent crash, and a cluster of
+armed men appeared without, seemingly not less than twelve. Behind
+them rolled the stream now changed from a gentle and shallow river to a
+mighty and impetuous torrent, roaring in waves of yellow foam, partially
+reddened by the light that streamed through the open door, and turning
+up its convulsed surface in flashes of shifting radiance from restless
+masses of half-visible shadow. The stepping-stones, by which the
+intruders must have crossed, were buried under the waters. On the
+opposite bank the light fell on the stems and boughs of the rock-rooted
+oak and ash tossing and swaying in the blast, and sweeping the flashing
+spray with their leaves.
+
+The instant the door broke, Robin and Marian loosed their arrows.
+Robin's arrow struck one of the assailants in the juncture of the
+shoulder, and disabled his right arm: Marian's struck a second in the
+juncture of the knee, and rendered him unserviceable; for the night.
+The baron's long spear struck on the mailed breastplate of a third, and
+being stretched to its full extent by the long-armed hero, drove him to
+the edge of the torrent, and plunged him into its eddies, along which he
+was whirled down the darkness of the descending stream, calling vainly
+on his comrades for aid, till his voice was lost in the mingled roar of
+the waters and the wind. A fourth springing through the door was laid
+prostrate by the cottager's cudgel: but the wife being less dexterous
+than her company, though an Amazon in strength, missed her pass at a
+fifth, and drove the point of the spit several inches into the right
+hand door-post as she stood close to the left, and thus made a new
+barrier which the invaders could not pass without dipping under it and
+submitting their necks to the sword: but one of the assailants seizing
+it with gigantic rage, shook it at once from the grasp of its holder
+and from its lodgment in the post, and at the same time made good the
+irruption of the rest of his party into the cottage.
+
+Now raged an unequal combat, for the assailants fell two to one on
+Robin, Marian, the baron, and the cottager; while the wife, being
+deprived of her spit, converted every thing that was at hand to a
+missile, and rained pots, pans, and pipkins on the armed heads of the
+enemy. The baron raged like a tiger, and the cottager laid about him
+like a thresher. One of the soldiers struck Robin's sword from his hand
+and brought him on his knee, when the boy, who had been roused by the
+tumult and had been peeping through the inner door, leaped forward in
+his shirt, picked up the sword and replaced it in Robin's hand, who
+instantly springing up, disarmed and wounded one of his antagonists,
+while the other was laid prostrate under the dint of a brass cauldron
+launched by the Amazonian dame. Robin now turned to the aid of Marian,
+who was parrying most dexterously the cuts and slashes of her two
+assailants, of whom Robin delivered her from one, while a well-applied
+blow of her sword struck off the helmet of the other, who fell on his
+knees to beg a boon, and she recognised Sir Ralph Montfaucon. The men
+who were engaged with the baron and the peasant, seeing their leader
+subdued, immediately laid down their arms and cried for quarter. The
+wife brought some strong rope, and the baron tied their arms behind
+them.
+
+"Now, Sir Ralph," said Marian, "once more you are at my mercy."
+
+"That I always am, cruel beauty," said the discomfited lover.
+
+"Odso! courteous knight," said the baron, "is this the return you make
+for my beef and canary, when you kissed my daughter's hand in token of
+contrition for your intermeddling at her wedding? Heart, I am glad to
+see she has given you a bloody coxcomb. Slice him down, Mawd! slice him
+down, and fling him into the river."
+
+"Confess," said Marian, "what brought you here, and how did you trace
+our steps?"
+
+"I will confess nothing," said the knight.
+
+"Then confess you, rascal," said the baron, holding his sword to the
+throat of the captive squire.
+
+"Take away the sword," said the squire, "it is too near my mouth, and
+my voice will not come out for fear: take away the sword, and I will
+confess all." The baron dropped his sword, and the squire proceeded;
+"Sir Ralph met you, as you quitted Lady Falkland's castle, and by
+representing to her who you were, borrowed from her such a number of
+her retainers as he deemed must ensure your capture, seeing that your
+familiar the friar was not at your elbow. We set forth without delay,
+and traced you first by means of a peasant who saw you turn into this
+valley, and afterwards by the light from the casement of this solitary
+dwelling. Our design was to have laid an ambush for you in the morning,
+but the storm and your observation of my unlucky face through the
+casement made us change our purpose; and what followed you can tell
+better than I can, being indeed masters of the subject."
+
+"You are a merry knave," said the baron, "and here is a cup of wine for
+you."
+
+"Gramercy," said the squire, "and better late than never: but I lacked a
+cup of this before. Had I been pot-valiant, I had held you play."
+
+"Sir knight," said Marian, "this is the third time you have sought the
+life of my lord and of me, for mine is interwoven with his. And do you
+think me so spiritless as to believe that I can be yours by compulsion?
+Tempt me not again, for the next time shall be the last, and the fish of
+the nearest river shall commute the flesh of a recreant knight into the
+fast-day dinner of an uncarnivorous friar. I spare you now, not in pity
+but in scorn. Yet shall you swear to a convention never more to pursue
+or molest my lord or me, and on this condition you shall live."
+
+The knight had no alternative but to comply, and swore, on the honour of
+knighthood, to keep the convention inviolate. How well he kept his oath
+we shall have no opportunity of narrating: Di lui la nostra istoria piu
+non parla.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+     Carry me over the water, thou fine fellowe.--Old Ballad.
+
+
+The pilgrims, without experiencing further molestation, arrived at the
+retreat of Sir Guy of Gamwell. They found the old knight a cup too low;
+partly from being cut off from the scenes of his old hospitality and the
+shouts of his Nottinghamshire vassals, who were wont to make the rafters
+of his ancient hall re-echo to their revelry; but principally from being
+parted from his son, who had long been the better half of his flask and
+pasty. The arrival of our visitors cheered him up; and finding that
+the baron was to remain with him, he testified his delight and the
+cordiality of his welcome by pegging him in the ribs till he made him
+roar.
+
+Robin and Marian took an affectionate leave of the baron and the old
+knight; and before they quitted the vicinity of Barnsdale, deeming
+it prudent to return in a different disguise, they laid aside their
+pilgrim's attire, and assumed the habits and appurtenances of wandering
+minstrels.
+
+They travelled in this character safely and pleasantly, till one evening
+at a late hour they arrived by the side of a river, where Robin looking
+out for a mode of passage perceived a ferry-boat safely moored in a nook
+on the opposite bank; near which a chimney sending up a wreath of smoke
+through the thick-set willows, was the only symptom of human habitation;
+and Robin naturally conceiving the said chimney and wreath of smoke to
+be the outward signs of the inward ferryman, shouted "Over!" with much
+strength and clearness; but no voice replied, and no ferryman appeared.
+Robin raised his voice, and shouted with redoubled energy, "Over, Over,
+O-o-o-over!" A faint echo alone responded "Over!" and again died away
+into deep silence: but after a brief interval a voice from among the
+willows, in a strange kind of mingled intonation that was half a shout
+and half a song, answered:
+
+ Over, over, over, jolly, jolly rover,
+ Would you then come over? Over, over, over?
+ Jolly, jolly rover, here's one lives in clover:
+ Who finds the clover? The jolly, jolly rover.
+ He finds the clover, let him then come over,
+ The jolly, jolly rover, over, over, over,
+
+
+"I much doubt," said Marian, "if this ferryman do not mean by clover
+something more than the toll of his ferry-boat."
+
+"I doubt not," answered Robin, "he is a levier of toll and tithe, which
+I shall put him upon proof of his right to receive, by making trial of
+his might to enforce."
+
+The ferryman emerged from the willows and stepped into his boat. "As I
+live," exclaimed Robin, "the ferryman is a friar."
+
+"With a sword," said Marian, "stuck in his rope girdle."
+
+The friar pushed his boat off manfully, and was presently half over the
+river.
+
+"It is friar Tuck," said Marian.
+
+"He will scarcely know us," said Robin; "and if he do not, I will break
+a staff with him for sport."
+
+The friar came singing across the water: the boat touched the land:
+Robin and Marian stepped on board: the friar pushed off again.
+
+"Silken doublets, silken doublets," said the friar: "slenderly lined, I
+bow: your wandering minstrel is always poor toll: your sweet angels of
+voices pass current for a bed and a supper at the house of every
+lord that likes to hear the fame of his valour without the trouble of
+fighting for it. What need you of purse or pouch? You may sing before
+thieves. Pedlars, pedlars: wandering from door to door with the small
+ware of lies and cajolery: exploits for carpet-knights; honesty for
+courtiers; truth for monks, and chastity for nuns: a good saleable stock
+that costs the vender nothing, defies wear and tear, and when it has
+served a hundred customers is as plentiful and as marketable as ever.
+But, sirrahs, I'll none of your balderdash. You pass not hence without
+clink of brass, or I'll knock your musical noddles together till
+they ring like a pair of cymbals. That will be a new tune for your
+minstrelships."
+
+This friendly speech of the friar ended as they stepped on the opposite
+bank. Robin had noticed as they passed that the summer stream was low.
+
+"Why, thou brawling mongrel," said Robin, "that whether thou be thief,
+friar, or ferryman, or an ill-mixed compound of all three, passes
+conjecture, though I judge thee to be simple thief, what barkest thou
+at thus? Villain, there is clink of brass for thee. Dost thou see this
+coin? Dost thou hear this music? Look and listen: for touch thou shalt
+not: my minstrelship defies thee. Thou shalt carry me on thy back over
+the water, and receive nothing but a cracked sconce for thy trouble."
+
+"A bargain," said the friar: "for the water is low, the labour is light,
+and the reward is alluring." And he stooped down for Robin, who mounted
+his back, and the friar waded with him over the river.
+
+"Now, fine fellow," said the friar, "thou shalt carry me back over the
+water, and thou shalt have a cracked sconce for thy trouble."
+
+Robin took the friar on his back, and waded with him into the middle
+of the river, when by a dexterous jerk he suddenly flung him off and
+plunged him horizontally over head and ears in the water. Robin waded to
+shore, and the friar, half swimming and half scrambling, followed.
+
+"Fine fellow, fine fellow," said the friar, "now will I pay thee thy
+cracked sconce."
+
+"Not so," said Robin, "I have not earned it: but thou hast earned it,
+and shalt have it."
+
+It was not, even in those good old times, a sight of every day to see a
+troubadour and a friar playing at single-stick by the side of a river,
+each aiming with fell intent at the other's coxcomb. The parties were
+both so skilled in attack and defence, that their mutual efforts for a
+long time expended themselves in quick and loud rappings on each other's
+oaken staves. At length Robin by a dexterous feint contrived to score
+one on the friar's crown: but in the careless moment of triumph a
+splendid sweep of the friar's staff struck Robin's out of his hand into
+the middle of the river, and repaid his crack on the head with a degree
+of vigour that might have passed the bounds of a jest if Marian had not
+retarded its descent by catching the friar's arm.
+
+"How now, recreant friar," said Marian; "what have you to say why you
+should not suffer instant execution, being detected in open rebellion
+against your liege lord? Therefore kneel down, traitor, and submit your
+neck to the sword of the offended law."
+
+"Benefit of clergy," said the friar: "I plead my clergy. And is it you
+indeed, ye scapegraces? Ye are well disguised: I knew ye not, by my
+flask. Robin, jolly Robin, he buys a jest dearly that pays for it with
+a bloody coxcomb. But here is balm for all bruises, outward and inward.
+(The friar produced a flask of canary.) Wash thy wound twice and thy
+throat thrice with this solar concoction, and thou shalt marvel where
+was thy hurt. But what moved ye to this frolic? Knew ye not that ye
+could not appear in a mask more fashioned to move my bile than in that
+of these gilders and lackerers of the smooth surface of worthlessness,
+that bring the gold of true valour into disrepute, by stamping the baser
+metal with the fairer im-pression? I marvelled to find any such given
+to fighting (for they have an old instinct of self-preservation): but
+I rejoiced thereat, that I might discuss to them poetical justice:
+and therefore have I cracked thy sconce: for which, let this be thy
+medicine."
+
+"But wherefore," said Marian, "do we find you here, when we left you
+joint lord warden of Sherwood?"
+
+"I do but retire to my devotions," replied the friar. "This is my
+hermitage, in which I first took refuge when I escaped from my beloved
+brethren of Rubygill; and to which I still retreat at times from the
+vanities of the world, which else might cling to me too closely, since
+I have been promoted to be peer-spiritual of your forest-court. For,
+indeed, I do find in myself certain indications and admonitions that my
+day has past its noon; and none more cogent than this: that daily of
+bad wine I grow more intolerant, and of good wine have a keener and
+more fastidious relish. There is no surer symptom of receding years. The
+ferryman is my faithful varlet. I send him on some pious errand, that I
+may meditate in ghostly privacy, when my presence in the forest can best
+be spared: and when can it be better spared than now, seeing that
+the neighbourhood of Prince John, and his incessant perquisitions for
+Marian, have made the forest too hot to hold more of us than are
+needful to keep up a quorum, and preserve unbroken the continuity of
+our forest-dominion? For, in truth, without your greenwood majesties, we
+have hardly the wit to live in a body, and at the same time to keep our
+necks out of jeopardy, while that arch-rebel and traitor John infests
+the precincts of our territory."
+
+The friar now conducted them to his peaceful cell, where he spread his
+frugal board with fish, venison, wild-fowl, fruit, and canary. Under the
+compound operation of this materia medica Robin's wounds healed apace,
+and the friar, who hated minstrelsy, began as usual chirping in his
+cups. Robin and Marian chimed in with his tuneful humour till the
+midnight moon peeped in upon their revelry.
+
+It was now the very witching time of night, when they heard a voice
+shouting, "Over!" They paused to listen, and the voice repeated "Over!"
+in accents clear and loud, but which at the same time either were in
+themselves, or seemed to be, from the place and the hour, singularly
+plaintive and dreary. The friar fidgetted about in his seat: fell into a
+deep musing: shook himself, and looked about him: first at Marian, then
+at Robin, then at Marian again; filled and tossed off a cup of canary,
+and relapsed into his reverie.
+
+"Will you not bring your passenger over?" said Robin. The friar shook
+his head and looked mysterious.
+
+"That passenger," said the friar, "will never come over. Every full
+moon, at midnight, that voice calls, 'Over!' I and my varlet have more
+than once obeyed the summons, and we have sometimes had a glimpse of a
+white figure under the opposite trees: but when the boat has touched the
+bank, nothing has been to be seen; and the voice has been heard no more
+till the midnight of the next full moon."
+
+"It is very strange," said Robin.
+
+"Wondrous strange," said the friar, looking solemn.
+
+The voice again called "Over!" in a long plaintive musical cry.
+
+"I must go to it," said the friar, "or it will give us no peace. I would
+all my customers were of this world. I begin to think that I am Charon,
+and that this river is Styx."
+
+"I will go with you, friar," said Robin.
+
+"By my flask," said the friar, "but you shall not."
+
+"Then I will," said Marian.
+
+"Still less," said the friar, hurrying out of the cell. Robin and Marian
+followed: but the friar outstepped them, and pushed off his boat.
+
+A white figure was visible under the shade of the opposite trees.
+The boat approached the shore, and the figure glided away. The friar
+returned.
+
+They re-entered the cottage, and sat some time conversing on the
+phenomenon they had seen. The friar sipped his wine, and after a time,
+said:
+
+"There is a tradition of a damsel who was drowned here some years ago.
+The tradition is----"
+
+But the friar could not narrate a plain tale: he therefore cleared his
+throat, and sang with due solemnity, in a ghostly voice:
+
+ A damsel came in midnight rain,
+     And called across the ferry:
+ The weary wight she called in vain,
+     Whose senses sleep did bury.
+ At evening, from her father's door
+     She turned to meet her lover:
+ At midnight, on the lonely shore,
+     She shouted "Over, over!"
+
+ She had not met him by the tree
+     Of their accustomed meeting,
+ And sad and sick at heart was she,
+     Her heart all wildly beating.
+ In chill suspense the hours went by,
+     The wild storm burst above her:
+ She turned her to the river nigh,
+     And shouted, "Over, over!"
+
+ A dim, discoloured, doubtful light
+     The moon's dark veil permitted,
+ And thick before her troubled sight
+     Fantastic shadows flitted.
+ Her lover's form appeared to glide,
+     And beckon o'er the water:
+ Alas! his blood that morn had dyed
+     Her brother's sword with slaughter.
+
+ Upon a little rock she stood,
+     To make her invocation:
+ She marked not that the rain-swoll'n flood
+     Was islanding her station.
+ The tempest mocked her feeble cry:
+     No saint his aid would give her:
+ The flood swelled high and yet more high,
+     And swept her down the river.
+
+ Yet oft beneath the pale moonlight,
+     When hollow winds are blowing,
+ The shadow of that maiden bright
+     Glides by the dark stream's flowing.
+ And when the storms of midnight rave,
+     While clouds the broad moon cover,
+ The wild gusts waft across the wave
+     The cry of, "Over, over!"
+
+
+While the friar was singing, Marian was meditating: and when he had
+ended she said, "Honest friar, you have misplaced your tradition, which
+belongs to the aestuary of a nobler river, where the damsel was
+swept away by the rising of the tide, for which your land-flood is an
+indifferent substitute. But the true tradition of this stream I think I
+myself possess, and I will narrate it in your own way:
+
+ It was a friar of orders free,
+ A friar of Rubygill:
+ At the greenwood-tree a vow made he,
+ But he kept it very ill:
+ A vow made he of chastity,
+ But he kept it very ill.
+ He kept it, perchance, in the conscious shade
+ Of the bounds of the forest wherein it was made:
+ But he roamed where he listed, as free as the wind,
+ And he left his good vow in the forest behind:
+ For its woods out of sight were his vow out of mind,
+ With the friar of Rubygill.
+
+ In lonely hut himself he shut,
+ The friar of Rubygill;
+ Where the ghostly elf absolved himself,
+ To follow his own good will:
+ And he had no lack of canary sack,
+ To keep his conscience still.
+ And a damsel well knew, when at lonely midnight
+ It gleamed on the waters, his signal-lamp-light:
+ "Over! over!" she warbled with nightingale throat,
+ And the friar sprung forth at the magical note,
+ And she crossed the dark stream in his trim ferryboat,
+ With the friar of Rubygill."
+
+
+"Look you now," said Robin, "if the friar does not blush. Many strange
+sights have I seen in my day, but never till this moment did I see a
+blushing friar."
+
+"I think," said the friar, "you never saw one that blushed not, or
+you saw good canary thrown away. But you are welcome to laugh if it so
+please you. None shall laugh in my company, though it be at my expense,
+but I will have my share of the merriment. The world is a stage,
+and life is a farce, and he that laughs most has most profit of the
+performance. The worst thing is good enough to be laughed at, though
+it be good for nothing else; and the best thing, though it be good for
+something else, is good for nothing better."
+
+And he struck up a song in praise of laughing and quaffing, without
+further adverting to Marian's insinuated accusation; being, perhaps,
+of opinion, that it was a subject on which the least said would be the
+soonest mended.
+
+So passed the night. In the morning a forester came to the friar, with
+intelligence that Prince John had been compelled, by the urgency of
+his affairs in other quarters, to disembarrass Nottingham Castle of
+his royal presence. Our wanderers returned joyfully to their
+forest-dominion, being thus relieved from the vicinity of any more
+formidable belligerent than their old bruised and beaten enemy the
+sheriff of Nottingham.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+                    Oh! this life
+      Is nobler than attending for a check,
+      Richer than doing nothing for a bribe
+      Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk.--Cymbeline.
+
+
+So Robin and Marian dwelt and reigned in the forest, ranging the glades
+and the greenwoods from the matins of the lark to the vespers of the
+nightingale, and administering natural justice according to Robin's
+ideas of rectifying the inequalities of human condition: raising
+genial dews from the bags of the rich and idle, and returning them in
+fertilising showers on the poor and industrious: an operation which more
+enlightened statesmen have happily reversed, to the unspeakable benefit
+of the community at large. The light footsteps of Marian were impressed
+on the morning dew beside the firmer step of her lover, and they shook
+its large drops about them as they cleared themselves a passage through
+the thick tall fern, without any fear of catching cold, which was not
+much in fashion in the twelfth century. Robin was as hospitable as
+Cathmor; for seven men stood on seven paths to call the stranger to his
+feast. It is true, he superadded the small improvement of making the
+stranger pay for it: than which what could be more generous? For Cathmor
+was himself the prime giver of his feast, whereas Robin was only
+the agent to a series of strangers, who provided in turn for
+the entertainment of their successors; which is carrying the
+disinterestedness of hospitality to its acme. Marian often killed the
+deer,
+
+ Which Scarlet dressed, and Friar Tuck blessed
+ While Little John wandered in search of a guest.
+
+Robin was very devout, though there was great unity in his religion: it
+was exclusively given to our Lady the Virgin, and he never set forth in
+a morning till he had said three prayers, and had heard the sweet voice
+of his Marian singing a hymn to their mutual patroness. Each of his men
+had, as usual, a patron saint according to his name or taste. The
+friar chose a saint for himself, and fixed on Saint Botolph, whom he
+euphonised into Saint Bottle, and maintained that he was that very
+Panomphic Pantagruelian saint, well known in ancient France as a female
+divinity, by the name of La Dive Bouteille, whose oracular monosyllable
+"Trincq," is celebrated and under-stood by all nations, and is
+expounded by the learned doctor Alcofribas, [6] who has treated at large
+on the subject, to signify "drink." Saint Bottle, then, was the saint of
+Friar Tuck, who did not yield even to Robin and Marian in the assiduity
+of his devotions to his chosen patron. Such was their summer life, and
+in their winter caves they had sufficient furniture, ample provender,
+store of old wine, and assuredly no lack of fuel, with joyous music and
+pleasant discourse to charm away the season of darkness and storms.
+
+
+The reader who desires to know more about this oracular divinity, may
+consult the said doctor Alcofribas Nasier, who will usher him into the
+adytum through the medium of the high priestess Bacbuc.
+
+
+Many moons had waxed and waned, when on the afternoon of a lovely
+summer day a lusty broad-boned knight was riding through the forest
+of Sherwood. The sun shone brilliantly on the full green foliage, and
+afforded the knight a fine opportunity of observing picturesque effects,
+of which it is to be feared he did not avail himself. But he had not
+proceeded far, before he had an opportunity of observing something
+much more interesting, namely, a fine young outlaw leaning, in the true
+Sherwood fashion, with his back against a tree. The knight was preparing
+to ask the stranger a question, the answer to which, if correctly given,
+would have relieved him from a doubt that pressed heavily on his mind,
+as to whether he was in the right road or the wrong, when the youth
+prevented the inquiry by saying: "In God's name, sir knight, you are
+late to your meals. My master has tarried dinner for you these three
+hours."
+
+"I doubt," said the knight, "I am not he you wot of. I am no where
+bidden to day and I know none in this vicinage."
+
+"We feared," said the youth, "your memory would be treacherous:
+therefore am I stationed here to refresh it."
+
+"Who is your master?" said the knight; "and where does he abide?"
+
+"My master," said the youth, "is called Robin Hood, and he abides hard
+by."
+
+"And what knows he of me?" said the knight.
+
+"He knows you," answered the youth "as he does every way-faring knight
+and friar, by instinct."
+
+"Gramercy," said the knight; "then I understand his bidding: but how if
+I say I will not come?"
+
+"I am enjoined to bring you," said the youth. "If persuasion avail not,
+I must use other argument."
+
+"Say'st thou so?" said the knight; "I doubt if thy stripling rhetoric
+would convince me."
+
+"That," said the young forester, "we will see."
+
+"We are not equally matched, boy," said the knight. "I should get less
+honour by thy conquest, than grief by thy injury."
+
+"Perhaps," said the youth, "my strength is more than my seeming, and my
+cunning more than my strength. Therefore let it please your knighthood
+to dismount."
+
+"It shall please my knighthood to chastise thy presumption," said the
+knight, springing from his saddle.
+
+Hereupon, which in those days was usually the result of a meeting
+between any two persons anywhere, they proceeded to fight.
+
+The knight had in an uncommon degree both strength and skill: the
+forester had less strength, but not less skill than the knight, and
+showed such a mastery of his weapon as reduced the latter to great
+admiration.
+
+They had not fought many minutes by the forest clock, the sun; and had
+as yet done each other no worse injury than that the knight had wounded
+the forester's jerkin, and the forester had disabled the knight's plume;
+when they were interrupted by a voice from a thicket, exclaiming, "Well
+fought, girl: well fought. Mass, that had nigh been a shrewd hit. Thou
+owest him for that, lass. Marry, stand by, I'll pay him for thee."
+
+The knight turning to the voice, beheld a tall friar issuing from the
+thicket, brandishing a ponderous cudgel.
+
+"Who art thou?" said the knight.
+
+"I am the church militant of Sherwood," answered the friar. "Why art
+thou in arms against our lady queen?"
+
+"What meanest thou?" said the knight.
+
+"Truly, this," said the friar, "is our liege lady of the forest, against
+whom I do apprehend thee in overt act of treason. What sayest thou for
+thyself?"
+
+"I say," answered the knight, "that if this be indeed a lady, man never
+yet held me so long."
+
+"Spoken," said the friar, "like one who hath done execution. Hast thou
+thy stomach full of steel? Wilt thou diversify thy repast with a taste
+of my oak-graff? Or wilt thou incline thine heart to our venison which
+truly is cooling? Wilt thou fight? or wilt thou dine? or wilt thou fight
+and dine? or wilt thou dine and fight? I am for thee, choose as thou
+mayest."
+
+"I will dine," said the knight; "for with lady I never fought before,
+and with friar I never fought yet, and with neither will I ever fight
+knowingly: and if this be the queen of the forest, I will not, being in
+her own dominions, be backward to do her homage."
+
+So saying, he kissed the hand of Marian, who was pleased most graciously
+to express her approbation.
+
+"Gramercy, sir knight," said the friar, "I laud thee for thy courtesy,
+which I deem to be no less than thy valour. Now do thou follow me, while
+I follow my nose, which scents the pleasant odour of roast from the
+depth of the forest recesses. I will lead thy horse, and do thou lead my
+lady."
+
+The knight took Marian's hand, and followed the friar, who walked before
+them, singing:
+
+ When the wind blows, when the wind blows
+ From where under buck the dry log glows,
+     What guide can you follow,
+     O'er brake and o'er hollow,
+ So true as a ghostly, ghostly nose?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+     Robin and Richard were two pretty men.
+     --Mother Goose's Melody.
+
+
+They proceeded, following their infallible guide, first along a light
+elastic greensward under the shade of lofty and wide-spreading trees
+that skirted a sunny opening of the forest, then along labyrinthine
+paths, which the deer, the outlaw, or the woodman had made, through the
+close shoots of the young coppices, through the thick undergrowth of
+the ancient woods, through beds of gigantic fern that filled the narrow
+glades and waved their green feathery heads above the plume of the
+knight. Along these sylvan alleys they walked in single file; the friar
+singing and pioneering in the van, the horse plunging and floundering
+behind the friar, the lady following "in maiden meditation fancy free,"
+and the knight bringing up the rear, much marvelling at the strange
+company into which his stars had thrown him. Their path had expanded
+sufficiently to allow the knight to take Marian's hand again, when they
+arrived in the august presence of Robin Hood and his court.
+
+Robin's table was spread under a high overarching canopy of living
+boughs, on the edge of a natural lawn of verdure starred with flowers,
+through which a swift transparent rivulet ran sparkling in the sun. The
+board was covered with abundance of choice food and excellent liquor,
+not without the comeliness of snow-white linen and the splendour
+of costly plate, which the sheriff of Nottingham had unwillingly
+contributed to supply, at the same time with an excellent cook, whom
+Little John's art had spirited away to the forest with the contents of
+his master's silver scullery.
+
+An hundred foresters were here assembled over-ready for their dinner,
+some seated at the table and some lying in groups under the trees.
+
+Robin bade courteous welcome to the knight, who took his seat between
+Robin and Marian at the festal board; at which was already placed one
+strange guest in the person of a portly monk, sitting between Little
+John and Scarlet, with, his rotund physiognomy elongated into an
+unnatural oval by the conjoint influence of sorrow and fear: sorrow for
+the departed contents of his travelling treasury, a good-looking valise
+which was hanging empty on a bough; and fear for his personal safety,
+of which all the flasks and pasties before him could not give him
+assurance. The appearance of the knight, however, cheered him up with
+a semblance of protection, and gave him just sufficient courage to
+demolish a cygnet and a rumble-pie, which he diluted with the contents
+of two flasks of canary sack.
+
+But wine, which sometimes creates and often increases joy, doth also,
+upon occasion, heighten sorrow: and so it fared now with our portly
+monk, who had no sooner explained away his portion of provender, than he
+began to weep and bewail himself bitterly.
+
+"Why dost thou weep, man?" said Robin Hood. "Thou hast done thine
+embassy justly, and shalt have thy Lady's grace."
+
+"Alack! alack!" said the monk: "no embassy had I, luckless sinner,
+as well thou wottest, but to take to my abbey in safety the treasure
+whereof thou hast despoiled me."
+
+"Propound me his case," said Friar Tuck, "and I will give him ghostly
+counsel."
+
+"You well remember," said Robin Hood, "the sorrowful knight who dined
+with us here twelve months and a day gone by."
+
+"Well do I," said Friar Tuck. "His lands were in jeopardy with a certain
+abbot, who would allow him no longer day for their redemption. Whereupon
+you lent to him the four hundred pounds which he needed, and which he
+was to repay this day, though he had no better security to give than our
+Lady the Virgin."
+
+"I never desired better," said Robin, "for she never yet failed to
+send me my pay; and here is one of her own flock, this faithful and
+well-favoured monk of St. Mary's, hath brought it me duly, principal and
+interest to a penny, as Little John can testify, who told it forth. To
+be sure, he denied having it, but that was to prove our faith. We sought
+and found it."
+
+"I know nothing of your knight," said the monk: "and the money was our
+own, as the Virgin shall bless me."
+
+"She shall bless thee," said Friar Tuck, "for a faithful messenger."
+
+The monk resumed his wailing. Little John brought him his horse. Robin
+gave him leave to depart. He sprang with singular nimbleness into the
+saddle, and vanished without saying, God give you good day.
+
+The stranger knight laughed heartily as the monk rode off.
+
+"They say, sir knight," said Friar Tuck, "they should laugh who win: but
+thou laughest who art likely to lose."
+
+"I have won," said the knight, "a good dinner, some mirth, and some
+knowledge: and I cannot lose by paying for them."
+
+"Bravely said," answered Robin. "Still it becomes thee to pay: for it is
+not meet that a poor forester should treat a rich knight. How much money
+hast thou with thee?"
+
+"Troth, I know not," said the knight. "Sometimes much, sometimes little,
+sometimes none. But search, and what thou findest, keep: and for the
+sake of thy kind heart and open hand, be it what it may, I shall wish it
+were more."
+
+"Then, since thou sayest so," said Robin, "not a penny will I touch.
+Many a false churl comes hither, and disburses against his will: and
+till there is lack of these, I prey not on true men."
+
+"Thou art thyself a true man, right well I judge, Robin," said the
+stranger knight, "and seemest more like one bred in court than to thy
+present outlaw life."
+
+"Our life," said the friar, "is a craft, an art, and a mystery. How much
+of it, think you, could be learned at court?"
+
+"Indeed, I cannot say," said the stranger knight: "but I should
+apprehend very little."
+
+"And so should I," said the friar: "for we should find very little
+of our bold open practice, but should hear abundance of praise of our
+principles. To live in seeming fellowship and secret rivalry; to have a
+hand for all, and a heart for none; to be everybody's acquaintance, and
+nobody's friend; to meditate the ruin of all on whom we smile, and to
+dread the secret stratagems of all who smile on us; to pilfer honours
+and despoil fortunes, not by fighting in daylight, but by sapping in
+darkness: these are arts which the court can teach, but which we, by 'r
+Lady, have not learned. But let your court-minstrel tune up his throat
+to the praise of your court-hero, then come our principles into play:
+then is our practice extolled not by the same name, for their Richard
+is a hero, and our Robin is a thief: marry, your hero guts an exchequer,
+while your thief disembowels a portmanteau, your hero sacks a city,
+while your thief sacks a cellar: your hero marauds on a larger scale,
+and that is all the difference, for the principle and the virtue are
+one: but two of a trade cannot agree: therefore your hero makes laws to
+get rid of your thief, and gives him an ill name that he may hang him:
+for might is right, and the strong make laws for the weak, and they that
+make laws to serve their own turn do also make morals to give colour to
+their laws."
+
+"Your comparison, friar," said the stranger, "fails in this: that your
+thief fights for profit, and your hero for honour. I have fought under
+the banners of Richard, and if, as you phrase it, he guts exchequers,
+and sacks cities, it is not to win treasure for himself, but to furnish
+forth the means of his greater and more glorious aim."
+
+"Misconceive me not, sir knight," said the friar. "We all love and
+honour King Richard, and here is a deep draught to his health: but I
+would show you, that we foresters are miscalled by opprobrious names,
+and that our virtues, though they follow at humble distance, are yet
+truly akin to those of Coeur-de-Lion. I say not that Richard is a
+thief, but I say that Robin is a hero: and for honour, did ever yet man,
+miscalled thief, win greater honour than Robin? Do not all men grace him
+with some honourable epithet? The most gentle thief, the most courteous
+thief, the most bountiful thief, yea, and the most honest thief? Richard
+is courteous, bountiful, honest, and valiant: but so also is Robin:
+it is the false word that makes the unjust distinction. They are
+twin-spirits, and should be friends, but that fortune hath differently
+cast their lot: but their names shall descend together to the latest
+days, as the flower of their age and of England: for in the pure
+principles of freebootery have they excelled all men; and to the
+principles of freebootery, diversely developed, belong all the qualities
+to which song and story concede renown."
+
+"And you may add, friar," said Marian, "that Robin, no less than
+Richard, is king in his own dominion; and that if his subjects be fewer,
+yet are they more uniformly loyal."
+
+"I would, fair lady," said the stranger, "that thy latter observation
+were not so true. But I nothing doubt, Robin, that if Richard could hear
+your friar, and see you and your lady, as I now do, there is not a man
+in England whom he would take by the hand more cordially than yourself."
+
+"Gramercy, sir knight," said Robin---- But his speech was cut short by
+Little John calling, "Hark!"
+
+All listened. A distant trampling of horses was heard. The sounds
+approached rapidly, and at length a group of horsemen glittering in
+holyday dresses was visible among the trees.
+
+"God's my life!" said Robin, "what means this? To arms, my merrymen
+all."
+
+"No arms, Robin," said the foremost horseman, riding up and springing
+from his saddle: "have you forgotten Sir William of the Lee?"
+
+"No, by my fay," said Robin; "and right welcome again to Sherwood."
+
+Little John bustled to re-array the disorganised economy of the table,
+and replace the dilapidations of the provender.
+
+"I come late, Robin," said Sir William, "but I came by a wrestling,
+where I found a good yeoman wrongfully beset by a crowd of sturdy
+varlets, and I staid to do him right."
+
+"I thank thee for that, in God's name," said Robin, "as if thy good
+service had been to myself."
+
+"And here," said the knight, "is thy four hundred pound; and my men have
+brought thee an hundred bows and as many well-furnished quivers; which
+I beseech thee to receive and to use as a poor token of my grateful
+kindness to thee: for me and my wife and children didst thou redeem from
+beggary."
+
+"Thy bows and arrows," said Robin, "will I joyfully receive: but of thy
+money, not a penny. It is paid already. My Lady, who was thy security,
+hath sent it me for thee."
+
+Sir William pressed, but Robin was inflexible.
+
+"It is paid," said Robin, "as this good knight can testify, who saw my
+Lady's messenger depart but now."
+
+Sir William looked round to the stranger knight, and instantly fell on
+his knee, saying, "God save King Richard."
+
+The foresters, friar and all, dropped on their knees together, and
+repeated in chorus: "God save King Richard."
+
+"Rise, rise," said Richard, smiling: "Robin is king here, as his lady
+hath shown. I have heard much of thee, Robin, both of thy present and
+thy former state. And this, thy fair forest-queen, is, if tales say
+true, the lady Matilda Fitzwater."
+
+Marian signed acknowledgment.
+
+"Your father," said the king, "has approved his fidelity to me, by
+the loss of his lands, which the newness of my return, and many public
+cares, have not yet given me time to restore: but this justice shall be
+done to him, and to thee also, Robin, if thou wilt leave thy forest-life
+and resume thy earldom, and be a peer of Coeur-de-Lion: for braver heart
+and juster hand I never yet found."
+
+Robin looked round on his men.
+
+"Your followers," said the king, "shall have free pardon, and such of
+them as thou wilt part with shall have maintenance from me; and if ever
+I confess to priest, it shall be to thy friar."
+
+"Gramercy to your majesty," said the friar; "and my inflictions shall
+be flasks of canary; and if the number be (as in grave cases I may,
+peradventure, make it) too great for one frail mortality, I will relieve
+you by vicarious penance, and pour down my own throat the redundancy of
+the burden."
+
+Robin and his followers embraced the king's proposal. A joyful meeting
+soon followed with the baron and Sir Guy of Gamwell: and Richard himself
+honoured with his own presence a formal solemnization of the nuptials of
+our lovers, whom he constantly distinguished with his peculiar regard.
+
+The friar could not say, Farewell to the forest, without something of
+a heavy heart: and he sang as he turned his back upon its bounds,
+occasionally reverting his head:
+
+ Ye woods, that oft at sultry noon
+     Have o'er me spread your messy shade:
+ Ye gushing streams, whose murmured tune
+     Has in my ear sweet music made,
+ While, where the dancing pebbles show
+     Deep in the restless fountain-pool
+ The gelid water's upward flow,
+     My second flask was laid to cool:
+
+ Ye pleasant sights of leaf and flower:
+     Ye pleasant sounds of bird and bee:
+ Ye sports of deer in sylvan bower:
+     Ye feasts beneath the greenwood tree:
+ Ye baskings in the vernal sun:
+     Ye slumbers in the summer dell:
+ Ye trophies that this arm has won:
+     And must ye hear your friar's farewell?
+
+
+But the friar's farewell was not destined to be eternal. He was
+domiciled as the family confessor of the earl and countess of
+Huntingdon, who led a discreet and courtly life, and kept up old
+hospitality in all its munificence, till the death of King Richard and
+the usurpation of John, by placing their enemy in power, compelled them
+to return to their greenwood sovereignty; which, it is probable, they
+would have before done from choice, if their love of sylvan liberty
+had not been counteracted by their desire to retain the friendship
+of Coeur-de-Lion. Their old and tried adherents, the friar among the
+foremost, flocked again round their forest-banner; and in merry Sherwood
+they long lived together, the lady still retaining her former name of
+Maid Marian, though the appellation was then as much a misnomer as that
+of Little John.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[Footnote 1: Roasting by a slow fire for the love of God.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Of these lines all that is not in italics belongs to Mr.
+Wordsworth: Resolution and Independence.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Harp-it-on: or, a corruption of (greek 'Erpeton), a
+creeping thing.]
+
+[Footnote 4:
+
+      And therefore is she called Maid Marian
+      Because she leads a spotless maiden life
+      And shall till Robin's outlaw life have end.
+                                   --Old Play.]
+
+[Footnote 5:
+
+     "These byshoppes and these archbyshoppes
+     Ye shall them bete and bynde,"
+
+says Robin Hood, in an old ballad. Perhaps, however, thus is to be taken
+not in a literal, but in a figurative sense from the binding and beating
+of wheat: for as all rich men were Robin's harvest, the bishops and
+archbishops must have been the finest and fattest ears among them, from
+which Robin merely proposes to thresh the grain when he directs them to
+be bound and beaten: and as Pharaoh's fat kine were typical of fat ears
+of wheat, so may fat ears of wheat, mutatis mutandis, be typical of fat
+kine.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Alcofribas Nasier: an anagram of Francois Rabelais, and his
+assumed appellation.]
+
+
+
+
+VARIANTS IN THE TEXT
+
+Changes in spelling, use of capitals, punctuation and type are not
+recorded.
+
+P. 15, ll. 12-13. and the bishops: and bishops 1822.
+
+P. 46, l. 12. united: re-united 1822.
+
+P. 63, l. 14. a posse of men: fifty men 1822.
+
+P. 74, l. 6. privation: imprisonment and privation 1822.
+
+P. 80, l. 29. tone: toll 1822.
+
+P. 153, ll. 21-23. daily of bad wine... more fastidious relish: every
+day I grow more intolerant of bad, and have a keener and more fastidious
+relish of good wine 1822.
+
+P. 159, l. 20. passed: past 1822.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Maid Marian, by Thomas Love Peacock
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