149: Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor and Marriage

This ballad only appeared on broadsides in the latter half of the seventeenth century and it is unlikely that it is older than that. It incorporates characters and bits and pieces from earlier ballads and is almost a pastiche written by a modern hand. Some of the stanzas look like pieces from the eighteenth century pleasure gardens; we even have Clorinda the queen of the shepherds getting in on the action. Copies can be found in the Pepys and Roxburghe Collections. As Child states, ‘It is certainly far from anything found in oral tradition.’

Bronson doesn’t even give it the honour of an entry.