‘Now give me moud,’ Robin said to Little John, ‘Now give me moud with thy hand; I trust to God in heaven so high My housel will me bestand.’
And he refuses to let Little John burn the house of the treacherous Prioress where he had come by his death. This is heroic poetry in its simplest form, and quite true to its proper nature.
The beauty of the ballads is uncertain and often corrupted by forgetfulness and the ordinary accidents of popular tradition. It is not always true that the right subject has the best form. But the grace of the ballads is unmistakable; it is unlike anything in the contemporary romances, because it is lyrical poetry. It is often vague and intangible. It is never the same as narrative romance.
He’s tane three locks o’ her yellow hair, _Binnorie, O Binnorie!_ And wi’ them strung his harp so fair _By the bonny mill-dams o’ Binnorie_.
It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference of thought as well as of style.
France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time—hardly before Chaucer and Gower—to imitate the French style properly; the French sentiment was beyond them, not appreciated; they took the stories, the action and adventures, and let the sentiment alone, or abridged it. The reasons for this are obvious. But there seems to be no reason, except accident, for the way in which the English writers in those times neglected the French comic literature of the twelfth century. Very little of it is represented in the English of the following centuries; yet what there is in English corresponding to the French _fabliaux_ and to Reynard the Fox is thoroughly well done. The English wit was quite equal to the French in matters such as these; there were no difficulties of style or caste in the way, such as prevented the English minstrels from using much of the French romantic, sentimental rhetoric. There might have been a thirteenth-century English _Reynard_, as good as the High or Low German _Reynards_; that is proved by the one short example (295 lines) in which an episode of the great medieval comic epic is told by an English versifier—the story of _The Vox and the Wolf_. This is one of the best of all the practical jokes of Reynard—the well-known story of the Fox and the Wolf in the well. It is told again, in a different way, among the Fables of the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; it is also one of the stories of Uncle Remus.