133: Robin Hood and the Beggar, I

This ballad appeared in the 1663 and 1670 Garlands and the same version in the Wood, Pepys and Roxburghe broadside collections.

We can do no better than quote Child himself here: 'The copy in the Wood and in the Roxburghe collections is signed T. R., like RH and the Butcher, B, and, like the latter ballad, this is a refacimento, with middle rhyme in the third line. It is perhaps made up from two distinct stories; the Second Part, beginning at stanza 20, from RH rescuing Three Squires, and what precedes from a ballad resembling RH and the Beggar, II. 'But no seventeenth-century version of RH and the Beggar, II, is known, and it is more likely that we owe the fight between RH and the Beggar to the folly and bad taste of T. R.'

Child goes on to relate some of its lines to lines in other RH ballads.

Bronson reports no versions and just mentions the usual designated tune of 125/126.