resisted corrupt officials and an oppressive state had naturally been popular in pre-Revolutionary America, and were quite often reprinted there. He added excellent songs of his own composition and references to other medieval stories—at least some of these drew on Thomas Percy’s Reliques, while the idea of indented narrative summaries came from his reading of early printed books.

In Pyle’s reading, he would have found two different versions of Robin Hood. One was the yeoman outlaw of the medieval ballads, a tough but playful man of the people who resisted bad authority in the name of true justice. The other was a gentrified Robin created in the sixteenth century to conceal the radical politics of the yeoman Robin (see Stephen Knight for an account of this development). The gentrified Robin was presented as the Earl of Huntington, outlawed by bad Prince John and only living in the forest until his restoration to true aristocratic hierarchy. Most of the novels and children’s Robin Hood stories produced in England in the nineteenth century, including the very influential Thomas Love Peacock, preferred the conservative nobleman, but Pyle went firmly for the yeoman and his democratic sense of resistance. Very late in the story, the king makes Pyle’s Robin an earl “seeing how faithful and loyal he was” (page 363), but the impact of The Merry Adventures as a whole reenergized the democratic tradition of Robin Hood as essentially a man of the people.

But having chosen the ballads’ robust yeoman, Pyle made many changes to their very robust stories. His Robin is much less violent. In the ballad “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham,” Robin becomes an outlaw after the foresters abuse and cheat him, and in his anger, he kills all fifteen. Pyle’s Robin shoots (and kills) one man, who shot first—and he regrets this act long and deeply. Where the ballad Robin and his men did not hesitate to kill—including the sheriff—in Pyle it is only when Robin is fiercely attacked by the renegade forester Guy of Gisbourne, late in the book, that he kills again. Not all the euphemism is so serious: at the end of the ballad of “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne,” Little John shoots the escaping sheriff through the head, but in Pyle, as in Percy’s Reliques, John merely shoots him “into the backside.”

A more wide-ranging change is Pyle’s careful and often very skillful linking of the disparate ballads. As in the garlands and Stephen Percy, the Merry Adventures have a coherent sequence in time. But Pyle also creates interconnections: when the outlaws decide to help Alan a Dale marry his beloved, instead of seeing her given to a rich old man, they decide Friar Tuck should hold the ceremony. So Robin journeys to fetch him, and we enjoy the famous encounter with the friar, not to mention his dogs, and perhaps the finest of all Pyle’s illustrations: “the exultant conflict between Robin and the Friar” was used as a frontispiece for the whole edition. With similar integrative skill, Pyle puts the Prior of Emmett and the Bishop of Hereford behind the inappropriate marriage and casts them as the enemies in the story of the poor knight Robin helps, taken from the early-sixteenth-century The Gest of Robin Hood.

Toward the end the source ballads are interwoven and developed with real fictional flair—the king’s chase after Robin in part seventh is as dramatic as anything by Scott or Dickens and brilliantly amplifies a short, banal ballad; the earlier account of Robin shooting for Queen Eleanor sorts out the distinctly confused story of its source, “Robin Hood and Queen Katherine,” and also streamlines history by substituting Eleanor (the mother of Kings Richard and John) for Henry VIII’s wife Katherine, who lived three hundred years later. Overall Pyle steadily builds up structure and meaning like a novelist: having shown how Robin develops the band, outwits the sheriffs guile and force and helps those in need, by part sixth Pyle establishes the hero’s role as “redistributor of wealth and arbiter of social and economic justice” and finally, face-to-face with the king, he has “assumed national prominence” (Agosta, page 35).

The Merry Adventures also, like much nineteenth-century fiction, gives us rich set pieces. A feeling for nature is briefly but intensely conveyed in the medieval ballads and Pyle brings this out with all his childhood awareness of the beautiful natural world:It was at the dawn of the day in the merry Maytime, when hedgerows are green and flowers bedeck the meadows; daisies pied and yellow cuckoo