national, just such a regular army as we possess nowadays. From the Black Prince down to the meanest soldier, every man had his fixed scale of pay. Thus was trained a class of professional English soldiers whose mercenary services came to be in demand all over the Continent and who, under Sir John Hawkwood, made the name of Englishman almost as formidable in Italy as it was in France-a proof, by the way, of how woefully imperfect English patriotism still was.

The middle of the fourteenth century witnessed not only Cressy and Poictiers, but the sea victories of Sluys and Winchelsea. The career of the army is parallel to that of the navy, and indeed the two services were as yet but faintly differentiated, for we find the same leaders, and the same weapons, playing their part indifferently on sea and land. A feudal levy was supplied by the Cinque Ports, but like all products of feudalism, it easily got out of hand, and was not above attacking other English shipping. How easily incidents like this could take place will be understood by any one who has witnessed a standup fight between the members of the Norfolk and Cornish fishing fleets. In the Middle Ages, fights of this kind used to happen on a big scale, the greatest of all being one between the English and Norman fisherfolk in which our men were signally victorious, and on account of which the French King presented an indignant claim for compensation to Edward I. Indeed, it was natural that marine warfare of a private or local nature should survive longer than on land, owing to the difficulty of policing the high seas. It was the wish of Chaucer's merchant that this should be done between Middleburgh and Orwell, and certainly from the time of Edward III some effort was made to collect and convoy fleets of merchantmen at stated times. Tonnage and poundage was given to the King "pur pur le sauf garde et custodie del mer." But for a long time this protection was far from being effective.

There was, beside the feudal force, a kind of naval militia, for on critical occasions the King would be allowed to impress ships and make the ports pay their expenses. Out of these, and blending with them in various proportions, emerges a royal navy, which takes permanent shape in the time of John, though his claim to the sovereignty of the seas, on which Selden was to lay stress four centuries later, is probably apocryphal. The result of this confused and imperfect system was that by the middle of the fourteenth century the English navy had defeated its two most formidable rivals and gained temporary command of the sea.

But the navy occupied a place second to the army in the popular imagination, and Edward himself did not take the requisite steps for its maintenance. Round English archery, and not seamanship, the bravest legends gather. It is in Piers Plowman that we first hear of Robin Hood, and it is evident that rhymes about him must have been current among the poorer classes during the reign of Edward III. The emergence of this new group of legends marks as important a development in our history as the Arthurian cycle in the twelfth century. Arthur and Brutus were aristocrats, and as they take shape in the pages of Geoffrey, were Normans, but Robin is cast in a different mould. He is an English hero, the man of the people, champion of archers, and above all, by the adoption of a French word to express an untranslatable and peculiarly English attribute, he is " jolly Robin," and it is not strange that conjecture has connected him with the Saxon resistance to the Conquest, and even with Simon de Montfort. There is something peculiarly Saxon about Robin's lusty individualism; he is always represented as being "agin the Government," a quality which he shares with the three northern outlaws, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudesley, good yeomen all, who on one occasion held up the city of Carlisle, and, as

the ballad approvingly records, slew three hundred men and more:

"

"

"First the Justice and the Sheriff,

And the Mayor of Carlisle town,
Of all the constables and catchpolls
Alive were scarce left one.

The bailiffs and the beadles both,
And the sergeants of the law,
And forty fosters of the fee

These outlaws had yslaw;

And broke his [the King's] parks and slain his deer
Of all they chose the best ;

Such perilous outlaws as they were

Walked not by east or west."

A tenderness for the enemies of society, provided they can be represented as jolly fellows, has always been a trait of English character. Even Shakespeare's Barnardine, who is too lazy to get up and be hanged, awakens a chord of sympathy in most of our breasts, and despite the laudable efforts of realists like Fielding and Dickens to dissipate the glamour of misdoing, the devotees of such heroes as Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, Jack Sheppard, Captain Kidd, and the smugglers have been numbered by the thousand. Only a short time ago there was running, and may be running still, a music-hall catch which goes somewhat as follows:

"Down our court lives ole Billy Sikes,

'E always does whatever 'e likes,

A copper once followed 'im down our court,
And now the police force is one copper short!"

It would not be just to ascribe this trait to a sympathy with crime for crime's sake, on the part of the most lawabiding people in the world. It is rather the overflowing love of individual freedom which, for good or evil, distinguishes us from most Continental peoples. It is for this reason that Englishmen have, up to a quite recent date, been wont to taunt the French with being slaves,

and Fortescue actually goes so far as to deduce their inferiority to Englishmen, from the fact that they had not pluck enough to indulge in highway robbery! The sheriffs, judges, turnkeys, and "coppers" of different ages are not so much the defenders of society, as the embodiments of officialdom, and the clown who prods the policeman with a red-hot poker, and Punch, that archanarch, who triumphs uproariously over all matrimonial, social, and even professional conventions, and is only vanquished by the clown, the humorist of the drama, minister to a deep-seated and not wholly reprehensible craving of the English soul.

Robin Hood and three northern outlaws represent this defiance of law in its noblest aspect, for though they are outlaws, poachers, and robbers, they are in no sense what we should now call criminals. On the contrary, they attain as high and exquisite a standard of character as Sir Launcelot himself, in that wonderful lament of Sir Ector de Maris :

No chivalrous knight could display greater courtesy than Robin, and he was beloved of all poor folk, and even the lesser knights, the "minores barones," came within the scope of his beneficence, for he helped Sir Richard of the Lea to pay off a debt to a greedy abbot, who would have robbed him of all that he had, and he refused to

accept repayment. The three northern yeomen were just as kind-hearted, and it was an ungrateful old woman whom he had sheltered and befriended, that betrayed William of Cloudesley to the citizens of Carlisle. Every trace of inferiority, of the melancholy resignation which had marked the attitude of the Saxon in relation to his masters, has now disappeared. The poor yeoman, with a long-bow in his hands and the good greenwood for his fortress, feels himself quite a match for sheriffs and abbots and all their kind. Again and again he sings the awakening of the spring in the forest, and the spirit of May runs riot in his blood all the year round. His land has become

merry England," and it is good to be alive in it. The lyric ecstasy begins to awaken, and as early as the middle of the thirteenth century we have the perfect little "cuckoo song," so full of spontaneous happiness:

As we might expect, though Robin and William of Cloudesley set their faces, and draw their bows, against the feudal magnates, they are not disloyal to the King, except to the extent of shooting his fat deer. Around the throne, all Englishmen could now unite, and William and his two friends rise to high favour at Court, and so for a time does Robin, until he gets tired of high life, and returns to more congenial pursuits in the greenwood.

I Christ have mercy on his soul

That died upon the Rood!
For he was a good outlaw,

And did poor men much good."

Most of the Robin ballads that we know are of the fifteenth century, but it is evident that the legend dates at least from the first half of the fourteenth, and it is not likely that the tales of the common folk would have