Maid Marian

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-poolThe 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.

1

Roasting by a slow fire for the love of God.

2

Of these lines all that is not in italics belongs to Mr. Wordsworth: Resolution and Independence

3

Harp-it-on: or, a corruption of (greek ‘Erpeton), a creeping thing.

4

 And therefore is she called Maid MarianBecause she leads a spotless maiden lifeAnd shall till Robin’s outlaw life have end.—Old Play.

5

“These byshoppes and these archbyshoppesYe 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.

6

Alcofribas Nasier: an anagram of Francois Rabelais, and his assumed appellation.