Go to A Gest of Robyn Hode: Introduction

ROBIN HOOD AND THE POTTER: NOTES

4 MS: merey now. This is not "merry now," which has little meaning, but is a spelling variant of merey ynow, a familiar phrase in this context which means "completely joyful"; enough in Middle English means "as much as is appropriate."

6 MS: cortessey. Child emends to the required adjective corteys.

12 MS: werschep ye. Child emends both tense and pronoun to werschepyd he; both changes seem necessary.

16 MS: lefe. An easy error for leye (see line 28). Child spells it ley, but the simplification of spelling is not necessary.

21 Wentbridge is a small town on the River Went near the Yorkshire Barnsdale; see note on the Gest, lines 69-70 for a discussion of locations.

24 MS: Yet they cleffe by my seydes. The scribe has clearly misremembered the order of the elements of the line and so lost the rhyme. Child reorders the line to Yet by my seydys cleffe they, that is "The blows are still splitting my sides," and this is accepted.

27 MS: hys. Emended by Child to hus; the error was presumably influenced by ys earlier in the line.

28 MS: hem leffe. The same misreading as in line 16 has again lost the rhyme. The sense is the same here: to leave a pledge or to lay a pledge. Child emends leffe to ley to preserve the rhyme, and this is accepted, though as in 16 the spelling leye is preferred.

41 MS: he seyde. The final attribution to a speaker makes the line very long, but there are similar lines elsewhere, especially in this ballad (lines 81, 222, 225) and the Gest (lines 310, 442, 630, 758). There seems no good reason to omit he seyde.

65 MS: ffelow he. Child makes this ffelowhes, interpreting the he as part of the noun, and adding s because John seems to be addressing more than one companion. There is not much space between the w and the h, but more than is usual in a continuous word, and he must be the pronoun. Dobson and Taylor treat it as such, but also accept Child's notion of a plural audience, and read ffelows he seyde. But the singular idiom is common, and emendation is not necessary.
The line begins with a large capital L, presumably because it is at the top of a new page in the MS.

67 MS: a caward stroke. Child emends to acward, meaning "backhand." Though caward makes sense as " a cowardly blow," it is unlikely, in view of the rest of the ballad, that the Potter would be represented as cowardly. Child's emendation is accepted, and it is also assumed that in misreading acward as caward the scribe also changed an to a. Robin himself defeats Guy with "an awkward stroke" (see Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, line 159).

76 MS: hels. Child emends to els.
MS: sclo. Child emends to slo: this scribe uses sc to begin many words but has here done so wrongly.

77 MS: Thes went yemen. Child inverts the two words to yemen went, but the verb cam follows in the next line. It is more likely that the scribe has miswritten wight, a very familiar word in this context; this would also maintain the rhythm better than Child's emendation.

78 thes. Child emends unnecessarily to ther, but thes is simply a form of "this," as in line 77. See also hes in line 79, which means "his."

87 MS: over. Child reads on, but the manuscript clearly has ou with an abbreviation mark.

100 MS: yede. Child emends to yode to improve the rhyme, but although rhymes in general in this ballad are better than in the Gest, this is unnecessary.

103 MS: eney. Child reads eny, presumably a minor error.

109-12 Child reorders these lines, as he feels they do not make sense in the existing order: he prints:

"Heyt war howte!" seyde Roben,
"Ffelowhes, let me alone;
Thorow the helpe of Howr Ladey
To Notynggam well y gon."

As Dobson and Taylor note (1976, p. 127), the re-arrangement seems "hardly necessary." Although the stanza's first two lines are rather condensed, it does make sense overall, and is printed here as in the manuscript. In the first line of the stanza Robin appeals to Mary to help against the sheriff, and so (line two) feels his fellows can allow him to go alone; then in line three he stirs up his horse to head off to (line four) Nottingham.

113-16 This stanza is wrongly located in the text after line 96 - presumably the scribe's eye has skipped from Nottingham in line 96 to Nottingham in line 113. The fact that the stanza begins a new page may have facilitated the error.

121 The language suggests this is an obvious place to begin a new fitt, as Ritson does (1795, p. 64); Child's text has an extra space here (though not at line 234, here taken as the start of Fitt 3). The MS does not mark a new fitt in either place.

143 MS: car. Child reads care, feeling there is an abbreviated e; but if so (and it is not clear) this would be an erroneous spelling of this word for cart. Dobson and Taylor print car (1976, p. 128).

146 As Child reports, after sche there is a "character" in the manuscript, which he expands to ser and also relocates after Gereamarsey. Here it is expanded as sir. Dobson and Taylor reject this and merely print a stray apostrophe after sche (1976, p. 231). However the abbreviation is clear and is also used in line 243. Child presumably moves it (with than) to improve the rhyme, but in the light of the uncertain rhymes found in this ballad, there seems insufficient reason to move it: the later usage in line 243 has the same structure, separating sir from Gereamarsey, and the line is printed here as it stands. It might seem unusual for a sheriff's wife to address a potter she has just met as "sir," though less so in line 243, after he has given her a gold ring. Perhaps the implication is that Robin from the start is identified by the wife as more than a mere potter, leading to the slight sexual rapport suggested between them later on.

148 MS: the (first instance). Child emends to they (=thy), but it would be a strangely intimate (or perhaps rude) thing for a sheriff's wife to say to a tradesman - especially when she has just called him sir. There is no need for any personal pronoun.
MS: of the. Crossed out after pottys.

151 sche. MS: he.

161 As with line 65, a large initial L starts the line, presumably because it begins a new page.

164 to. MS: to to. Child emends to go to, but it is more likely that the Middle English idiom "let us to meat" is used, and "to" has been accidentally repeated.
When the sheriff suggests that they wash their hands before eating the meal, he is following a custom of "civilized" behavior that originated in the banquet hall of the medieval court. Since food was served in communal bowls, diners picked it out with their hands; hence, the need for clean hands. As Norbert Elias observes, in The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), table manners were adopted by the bourgeois during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (p. 62). This display of "courtly" manners is paralleled by the sheriff's wife calling Robin "sir" and by Robin's gifts to her of five pots, a gold ring, and a white palfrey. For other hand-washing references, see line 125 and line 922 in the Gest and line 527 in Adam Bell.

169 schotyng. Since English armies recruited their archers from rural levies and city militias, the populace was required to own bows and arrows and to practice archery. In the Statute of Winchester of 1285, Edward I "commanded that every man have in his house arms for keeping the peace" and be "sworn to arms according to the amount of his lands and of his chattels." All men having land worth between 40 and 100 shillings a year were required to own a sword, bow and arrows, and a knife (Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents 1189-1327 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975] III, 461-62). In a royal writ, dated 1363, King Edward III ordered all the sheriffs in England to proclaim "that everyone in the shire, on festival days when he has holiday, shall learn and exercise himself in the art of archery, and use for his games bows and arrows, or crossbolts or bolts" (Alec R. Myers, ed., English Historical Documents 1327-1485 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969] IV, 1182). To encourage practice and to identify expert marksmen, municipal and shire competitions were routinely held. In addition to the match in Robin Hood and the Potter, there are four other competitions described in the Gest (578-89, 1130-81, 1586-1614) and in Adam Bell (612-51). More informal archery matches include the games of plucke buffet (Gest, 1690-1705) and shete a peny (Robin Hood and the Monk, 41-50). For a detailed treatment of the history of archery, including a chapter on Robin Hood, see Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Archer (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1985).

170 MS: the tho ther. Child prints as the thother, which Dobson and Taylor accept (1976, p. 129), but this is not a dialectical variant but an error: emend to the tother.

172 MS: wen. The rhyme has been lost, and the original was probably gayne, with the half-rhyme common in this ballad.

179 MS: pottys. Presumably this reading was influenced by the trade Robin has assumed, but it cannot make sense. Child's emendation to bottys, that is "butts," is sensible.

180 MS: bolt yt: boltys.

182 MS: goode. Child accepts this as the final word in the line, with a consequent failure to rhyme; however, this is so common a cliché (often as ful goode) that a scribe has obviously slipped into it and spoiled the rhyme: the rarer word prowe provides a good rhyme and is accepted here. The equally familiar good ynow, which would rhyme, would be metrically very clumsy.

198 In his note Child speculates whether thow should be inserted after And, but he does not print this, and it is unnecessary.
The long bow was very hard to pull to its full extent; the sheriff thinks this will test whether the "potter" is really a bowman. In fact the sheriff's bows are too weak for Robin's mighty arm: this sense of his special strength underlies the well-known proverb "Many men speak of Robin Hood who never bent his bow."

205 MS: a bowthe. As in the Gest, Child treats this like an adverb, modern about, meaning in turn. But the MS does separate the a from bowthe (as is noted by Child at the end of his collations). This is more likely, here and elsewhere, to be a noun phrase, meaning "a round (of a contest)," from which the sense "in turn" develops.

213 There is disturbance in this passage through to line 224. Lines 213-14 are, most unusually, a couplet, with the same rhyme as the following stanza. Line 217 unemended lacks a rhyme in the MS; there may be a line missing after line 223. These problems can be made to disappear by a tissue of emending and reordering; however the policy here has been to print as much of the existing text as possible and show how it does in fact make sense, though metrically unusual.

218 MS: That Robyn gaff me. This is metrically poor and has lost the rhyme. As this stanza appears, apart from this problem, coherent, it would seem the scribe has remembered the line the wrong way round because it is a little strained for rhyme, as in Child's convincing emendation to That gaffe me Robyn Hode.

225 Child feels a line is missing in the manuscript before this line (though no gap occurs) and he leaves a blank. But there is no gap in the sense, and the rhyme runs on from the previous stanza (as emended). This may well be a rare seven-line stanza (see General Introduction, p. 9), perhaps produced as a scribe tried to rework a passage damaged in the original. The text is left as it stands.

226 MS: the B crossed out after seyde.

230 MS: well, not wel as Child has it.

231 meythe. MS: meythey.

233 soper. MS: scoper.

247 MS: Yonder. Child accepts this reading but it does not make sense unless it is seen as a strange spelling of Under - that is a very familiar statement in the outlaw ballads, and emendation seems appropriate.

252 ye. MS: he. Child emends to "I." Dobson and Taylor read "he" with "I" in brackets as a possible emendation. But the obvious reading, easily misread as "he," is ye.

258-59 Child treats these lines as if they are the first and last of a fragmentary stanza, but in fact they fit easily as the end of a six line stanza. They do however start a new page, with a large capital I.

264 Leytyll. MS: I leyty. Child's emendation.

270 Note the ironic repetition from line 223, when the sheriff thought meeting Robin Hood worth £100.

272-73 The manuscript has the line He had west that befforen after line 269, so lacking a rhyme for line 268. Child, assuming the scribe has jumped from He had in line 270 to Had I in line 271, has reconstructed the lost line and this fine piece of editing is accepted.

275 After thes is a canceled abbreviation for five hundred.

280-81 Child regards these two lines as the beginning of a fragmentary stanza, but in fact they fit as the start of a six-line stanza, with, as is common in the four-line stanza, the speaker changing after two lines.

286 Before this stanza the text includes the lines:

Y schall her sende a wheyt palffrey
That ambellet be mey ffey

As Child notes, the scribe mistook the rhyme and started the stanza again, so the lines should be dropped.

297 After hade, haffe is crossed out.

308 The manuscript repeats line 305 after this line, an "eyeskip" error.

309 MS: bowhes. This is a more common version of this familiar statement, but the rhyme calls for emendation to the singular, as found in Child.

312 MS: to nobellys. Two nobles was thirteen shillings and four pence (i.e., two thirds of a pound), quite a large sum. The ten pounds Robin provides would have been something like a year's wages.

314 Child inserts haffe before had presumably on grammatical grounds, but cowde Y had is idiomatic Middle English and is retained.

315 MS: be there. Child inverts the words to there be for a better rhyme, but this is not necessary.

323 After this line the original scribe has added Expleycyt Robyn Hode.