EARLY POPULAR SONGS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1680, 14 December 1888, Page 4

EARLY POPULAR SONGS.

In the first yeirs of't'imult following the Conquest the unwritten songs of the people were almost the only literature of the English. The misinterpreted shouts of the Saxons led t > a massacre in L ui don, even while William was being crowned in Westminster. 1 he Lymry n-ver ceased to hold their own and watch every apportunity of recovering what once had be. n tli- irs in the West, and the .-pint of Xorthumbria remained vet tin subdued. Aft r a success on the 1 lumber the Norm mssuffered adisaster at Durham by the rising of the country. Danes came to help the old friends among whom were so many of their kinsmen : but the help was cm 1, and the chief of their expedi t i on was bribed his cause. I hen William, marching from the Humber to the lyne, mas-acred the people, old or young, woman or child, burnt their homes, destroyed their corn and ni?at William of M dmesbury tells how, still in his day, ground that had been fertile, lay here for more than sixty miles bare and uncultiv ated. Manv noble Saxons fled and took servic° abroad Some joined troops of the c minion people, who took shelter in the fastnesses of the woods, and as bands of patriotic outlaws, lived on their oppressors. So were laid the foundations of the popular delight in stories of merry men of the Greenwood. Corn and meat during the Norman massacre bad been brought in from villages, stored in houses and consum d by fire- Rut Sherwood Forest m those days stretched from Nottingham to Whitby, and therein was food for a good marksman, with fuel in plenty ; while it was for the poor and outcast who were strong of limb a castle finer than any of the eleven thousand that the Normans are said in the Saxon Chronical to have already built by Stephen's time. When, a century later—in Henry IP's reiuri—Sherwood Forest, still a stronghold of the oppressed, owned Robin Hood for its king, lib soon became throughout Englmd a more popular sovereign than even Etward the Confessor, all whose ah incomings were lost in the fact that be wis a native king, with the foil of a Dane before him and a Norman after him. Plunder upon the plunderers was no crime, but a virtue in the eyes of a much troubled people. But before Robin Hood was Herward, son of the Lady Godiva, famous in English legend, and of her husband Leofric, the Great Earl of Mer cia, who died in 1057. Herward returned from foreign wars a soldier of fortune to find that his home had been seized and his mother insulted by a Norman. He took to the fens, received bis sword and belt as a knight, from the Saxon Brand, Abbot of Pet Thorough ; carried off the Peterborough plate when a Norman superseded Abbot Brand ; seized the figlning Abbot Turold, and only let him off for a ransom of thirty thousand marks ; thrasbedthe king'tgeneral, IvoTaillebois; and would have thrashed King Williim himself, who marched against him, if the treacherous monks of Ely bad not guided the enemy to Her ward's stronghold. A noble Saxon lady, Alswitha, who loved him foi bis heroism, persuaded the bold w irrior to peace and ease. lie made peace, said later romance, only to find it was no peace. Hifiho iae was surrounded,

and he died in arms, fighting with his Norman assassins. From Professor Morley's " English Wtiters."