Note 41 — 117 A GEST OF ROBYN HODE

The only one of these ballads entered in the Stationers’ Registers, or known to have been printed, at a date earlier than the seventeenth century is No 124, ‘Of Wakefylde and a Grene,’ 1557–58.

The earliest known copy of Robin Hood’s Garland is one in the Bodleian Library, Wood, 79, printed for W. Gilbertson, 1663. This contains seventeen ballads. An edition of 1670, in the same library, Douce, H. 80, for Coles, Vere and Wright, omits the first of these, a version of Robin Hood and Queen Katherine which is found nowhere else. There is an edition, printed by J. M. for J. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passinger, among Pepys’s Penny Merriments, vol. iii, and Gutch had a copy, printed for the same, to which he gives the date 1686. Garlands of the eighteenth century increase the number of ballads to twenty-seven.