He suffered no woman to be
maltreated, and never robbed the poor, but assisted them abundantly
with the wealth which he took from abbots."
It appears, then, that contemporaneous history is absolutely silent
concerning Robin Hood; that, excepting the casual allusion in "Piers
Ploughman," he is first mentioned by a rhyming chronicler who wrote
one hundred years after the latest date at which he can possibly be
supposed to have lived, and then by two prose chroniclers who wrote
about one hundred and twenty-five years and two hundred years
respectively after that date; and it is further manifest that all
three of these chroniclers had no other authority for their statements
than traditional tales similar to those which have come down to our
day. When, therefore, Thierry, relying upon these chronicles and
kindred popular legends, unhesitatingly adopts the conjecture of Mair,
and describes Robin Hood as the hero of the Saxon serfs, the chief of
a troop of Saxon banditti, that continued, even to the reign of Coeur
de Lion, a determined resistance against the Norman invaders,[3]--and
when another able and plausible writer accepts and maintains, with
equal confidence, the hypothesis of Bower, and exhibits the renowned
outlaw as an adherent of Simon de Montfort, who, after the fatal
battle of Evesham, kept up a vigorous guerilla warfare against the
officers of the tyrant Henry the Third, and of his successor,[4] we
must regard these representations, which were conjectural three or
four centuries ago, as conjectures still, and even as arbitrary
conjectures, unless one or the other can be proved from the only
_authorities_ we have, the ballads, to have a peculiar intrinsic
probability.
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