234	NORDIC BALLADS
for public recitations (et nostro adhuc saeculo etiam in triviis
cantitata). The language of this song was doubtless not that of the
sixteenth-century ballads we now read; the plot may have been
more fully expounded, but it cannot have extended to more than
the single significant episode. The poem was of unknown age even
in the middle years of the twelfth century (adhuc etiam). Mimicon
and Roddyngar are named by John Bromton in the fourteenth cen-
tury, and Mimecan by Matthew of Westminster, From the time
of our first quotation there are fixed points in all versions of the
legend: the victim is an empress of Germany, married to a Henry;
she is condemned to be burned if no champion will appear; no
champion dares to fight the accuser save one who is a dwarf or
comes from a distance; the champion belongs to the poet's own
land. The Danish ballad is identical with the English one in all
essentials; Gunhild's name persists in the Icelandic, Faeroese, and
some Danish versions.
Professor R. W. Chambers has indicated, in a lecture delivered
in Manchester, that the function of this legend was consolation.
The ruined Anglo-Saxons comforted themselves with a tale of
their lost dynasty, in which a Saxon hero vanquished an oppressor
seemingly as all-powerful as the Norman lords. If this be so, the
ballad is all the more pertinent to the Norman dynasty. Its later
development is not entirely confined to balladry, since it passed
into romance, with the Earl of Toulouse; to the historical novel in
Gines Perez de Hita's Guerras de Granada] to the moral apologue
in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor; to the opera in Wagner's
Lohengrin. When Ariosto talks of the 'aspre legge di Scozia' as
condemning peccant wives to the flames, he bears witness that the
old English motif has become anybody's plaything. It is not, as we
have seen, original to the English poet; but it was he who gave the
story a definitive form, and sent it rolling among his connexions
over all Europe. He also created, as it seems, the oldest English
ballad.
The cycle of Robin Hood and his merry men is historical in so
far as he was or was believed to be a real person. Some of them,
particularly the older ones, are expressions of a doubtless historical
emotion, the feud of Saxon and Norman. Those who oppress are
Normans: the sheriff of Nottingham and the richer clergy. The
oppressed are Saxons or associated, through their poverty, with
the Saxon lower classes. They find a typical representative in Sir