mindful of the common saying, that


"'God hears the man who often hears the mass.'"


In another place Bower writes to the same effect: "In this year [1266]
the dispossessed barons of England and the royalists were engaged in
fierce hostilities. Among the former, Roger Mortimer occupied the
Welsh marches, and John Daynil the Isle of Ely. Robert Hood was now
living in outlawry among the woodland copses and thickets."

Mair, a Scottish writer of the first quarter of the sixteenth century,
the next historian who takes cognizance of our hero, and the only
other that requires any attention, has a passage which may be
considered in connection with the foregoing. In his "Historia Majoris
Britanniae" he remarks, under the reign of Richard the First: "About
this time [1189-99], as I conjecture, the notorious robbers, Robert
Hood of England and Little John, lurked in the woods, spoiling the
goods only of rich men. They slew nobody but those who attacked them,
or offered resistance in defence of their property. Robert maintained
by his plunder a hundred archers, so skilful in fight that four
hundred brave men feared to attack them. He suffered no woman to be
maltreated, and never robbed the poor, but assisted them abundantly
with the wealth which he took from abbots."

It appears, then, that contemporaneous history is absolutely silent
concerning Robin Hood; that, excepting the casual allusion in "Piers
Ploughman," he is first mentioned by a rhyming chronicler who wrote
one hundred years after the latest date at which he can possibly be