EARLY POPULAR SONGS.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 11, Issue 833, 14 December 1888, Page 2

EARLY POPULAR SONGS.

In the first years of 'tumult following the Conquest the unwritten songs of the, people were almost the only literature of the Euglish. The misinterpreted shouts of the Saxons led to a massacre in Lon-j don, even while William -was being; drowned in Westminster. The Cymry never ceased to hold their own and watch every apDortunity of recovering what once had beeta 'theirs in the West, and the spirit of, Northumbria remained yet unsubdued: After' a success On the Humber the Normans suffered a disaster 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 cruel, and the chief of their expedi-. tion was bribed his cause. Then William, marching from the Humber to the Tyne, massacred the people, pld or young, woman or child, burnt their. homes, destroyed their corn and meat. - William of Malmesbury tells how, still in his day, grouud that had been fertile,.lay here foV more than sixty miles bare and uncuitiv-j ated. Many noble Saxons fled and took, service abroad! Some joined troops of the common people, who. took shelter in the fastnesses of the wood?, and as bands of patriotic outlaws lived on their oppressors. So were laid the foundations of the popular, delight in stfaieai ;6f tnerry men of the Greenwood. Corn and meat during the Norman massacre had been brought in from villages,, stored in houses, and consumed by fire- But Sherwood Forest in 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 IJ.'s reign — Sherwood Forest, still -a stronghold of the oppressed, owned Robin Hood for its king, he> soon became throughout England a more popular sovereign than even Edward the Confessor,, all whose shortcomings were lost in the fact that he was a native king, withthe.fo.il 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 muchtroubled people. But before Robin Hood was Herward, son qf;t^e|ia^''Godiva, famous in $nglish._ logenJi and of her husband Leofric, the Great Earl of .Mercia, 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 his sword and belt, as a knight, from the Saxon Brand, A.bbot of Peterborough ; carried off the Peterborough plate when a Norman superseded Abbot Brand ; seized the fighting Abbot Turold, and only let him off for a ransom of thirty thousand marks ; thrashed the king's general, IvoTailleboisj and would have thrashed King William himself, who marched against him, if the treacherous monks of Ely had not guided the enemy to Herward's stronghold. A noble Saxon lady, Alswitha, who loved him for his heroism, persuaded the bold I warrior to peace and ease. He made peace, said later romance, only to find it was no peap3 f Uisfcouse w^ surrounded,

and he died in arms, fighting with his Norman assassins., — From Professor Morleys Ci English Writers."