In one of these pageants there is
introduced a man on horseback, who carries in his hands a bow and
arrows. The other furnishes nothing peculiar except a name: the
ceremony is called a _hoodening,_ and the hobby-horse a
_hooden_. In the rider with bow and arrows Kuhn sees Robin Hood
and the Hobby-Horse, and in the name _hooden_ (which is explained
by the authority he quotes to mean wooden) he discovers a provincial
form of wooden, which connects the outlaw and the divinity.[19] It
will be generally agreed that these slender premises are totally
inadequate to support the weighty conclusion that is rested upon them.
Why the adventures of Robin Hood should be specially assigned, as they
are in the old ballads, to the month of May, remains unexplained. We
have no exquisite reason to offer, but we may perhaps find reason good
enough in the delicious stanzas with which some of these ballads
begin.
"In summer when the shawes be sheen,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowles song;
To see the deer draw to the dale,
And leave the hilles hee,
And shadow them in the leaves green
Under the green-wood tree.
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