ABSTRACT
There is plenty in the legend of Hereward which has little or no connexion with outlaw mythology—the long opening passages in the Gesta with their heroic flavour, the fights with the champions, the magic which conjures up will o' the wisps and spectral wolves to conduct his men through the dark forest. Nevertheless the affiliation with Robin Hood is clear enough. It is not merely his way of life that is so similar, the forest lair, the enmity of rich lords and abbots, the living off the wild, which stamps Hereward as of the same breed. It is more than this; it is more too than the name and fame of outlaw; it is rather, for instance, the fact that whole incidents of his story are shared with his later counterpart, that another age attributed to Robin Hood the precise exploits that the twelfth century attributed to Hereward. The story of Hereward and the potter has been recounted at length here, perhaps tediously, but there was reason for this. Robin Hood and the Potter, one of the earliest ballads of Robin Hood that has survived, tells of him just this story; the dramatis personae are changed, and the Conqueror has become the Sheriff of Nottingham, but the plot is identical. What makes the coincidence the more striking in this case is that it is recounted also of a third character, the Boulonnais outlaw, Eustace the Monk. His story, like Hereward's, 24has other close similarities to those of later outlaws. Already, therefore, in the legend of Hereward, we are beginning to come across a stock of incidents common to the legends of this type, which suggests that we may expect to find other affinities, and at the same time cautions us against attaching any direct historical value to an exploit recounted in the ballads.
