French Jacquerie, an actual revolution on the continent of France, planned and carried into execution for the very same purposes which the romance of Robin Hood was theoretically to establish in the adjacent country of England if it could.
This French plague, as others since have done, crossed the Channel, and was greeted as a friend by the discontented yeomanry of England, to whom it supplied the programme which they perhaps lacked the intelligence to originate. More than this was not practicable in the time of the great king, and nothing was then open to the yeomen but to indulge their venom in a medium which all ages have employed in a like propaganda. Poetry was therefore resolved upon, and poetasters now unknown stirred up the class animosities of the sullen farmer.
This is the origin of the "Rimes of Robin Hood," a true epic if there ever was one, and to this epic the master-mind of the old poet or poets found a most appropriate hero to conduct its action and enforce its moral. He was to be an English forester, the representative of the most adventurous and self-asserting section of the English yeomanry, and the name he was to be dubbed with was consonant to his calling. It was to be Robin a Wood, which English phonetics, according to their wont, soon afterwards softened into Robin Hood, a name which promises to be immortal.
This imaginary form of name was familiar to English speech and to English ears. Jack Upland figures in a poem of the Piers Ploughman series. Jack Straw is known to all men. Allan a Dale (a nearer resemblance still) was afterwards one of the personæ dramatis of the epos itself, similarly with John a Green. The same reference to forestry, as in the name of his master, is found in the pseudonym given to Little John in the Lytel Geste—Reynold Greenleaf.
In the name of the hero, therefore, there was nothing mysterious or even romantic, as in the names of the knights and giants who figured in the ballads of chivalry. It was intended to be plain and popular, and its universal acceptance shows that the choice was excellently made.[1]
- ↑ There was a familiarity also in the use of the name Robin, which made it eligible as the appellation of the communistic forester, and better adapted to fly per ora virûm. For this reason of familiarity "our hoste" of the Canterbury Tales, in addressing the Drunken Miller, says, "Robin, abyde, my leve brother."
