Bluegrass Messengers

Recordings & Info 142. Little John a- Begging

[There are no known US versions or recordings of this ballad.]

CONTENTS:

 1) Alternative Titles
 2) Traditional Ballad Index 
 3)  Little John Goes A Begging: Introduction
  
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
  1) Roud No. 3988: Little John a- Begging (8 Listings)  

Alternative Titles

Little Johns Begging
Little John and the Beggars

Traditional Ballad Index: Little John a Begging [Child 142]

DESCRIPTION: Little John (goes/is assigned by Robin to go) a-begging. He meets up with beggars feigning disabilities who do not want his company and they fall to blows. Little John overcomes them and is much enriched by their stores which he takes to Sherwood.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: before 1663 (broadside printed by William Gilbertson); also a garland of 1663
KEYWORDS: Robinhood begging fight disability
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (6 citations)
Child 142, "Little John a Begging" (2 texts)
Bronson 142, comments only
Leach, pp. 406-408, "Little John a Begging" (1 text)
BBI, RZN2, "All you that delight to spend some time"
ADDITIONAL: Stephen Knight, editor (with a manuscript description by Hilton Kelliher), _Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript_ (British Library Additional MS 71158), D. S. Brewer, 1998, pp. 2-5, "Little Johns Begging" (1 text, close to the 1670 garland)
Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, editors, _Robin Hood and Other Oudlaw Tales_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000, pp. 521-526, "Little John a Begging" (1 text,based on one of the garlands)
Roud #3988
ALTERNATE_TITLES:
Little John and the Beggars
NOTES: For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117].
Knight/Ohlgren, p. 525, note the inherent improbability of this song -- would Robin Hood, a "proud outlaw," permit his men to go begging? And would Little John, himself a proud man, consent, even under constraint? Unlikely. I find myself wondering if there might not have been an earlier song about someone exposing feigned beggars which some enterprising, but hardly competent, hack writer converted to a Robin Hood ballad. - RBW

Little John a Begging appears in the Percy folio in a form too damaged by torn pages to be used as the basis for a text, but the earliest broadside is of a similar date as it was printed for William Gilbertson, who was active between 1640 and 1663. This text describes it as a "merry new song" (line 86) and while broadside publishers were not above claiming modernity for something borrowed, it does have the characteristics of a new creation. Both the internal rhyme in the third line and the stylistic fluency argue against antiquity, the refrain line "With a hey down down a down down" is common to many of the mid-century ballads, and the plot appears to be a composite of earlier narratives, focused for a change on Little John. This ballad appears towards the end of the Forresters manuscript and is one of the late texts apparently related, with some minor variations to the 1670 garland, so it has the curious status of apparently having been twice copied in manuscript from print.

The story opens with John being sent to beg for the outlaws in a palmer's clothes (reminiscent of Robin Hood Rescues Three Young Men, including the "bag" motif in lines 12-17). He meets beggars who claim poverty as do the monks met by outlaws in earlier ballads; he finds in their bags two lots of gold in hundreds of pounds, and the outlaws celebrate their new wealth. The plot is simple, and its only added complexity is the idea of false beggars who pretend to be dumb, blind, and crippled. The notion is found as early as Langland's Piers Plowman and its exposure of "faitours," but it has a contemporary ring in its critique of "sturdy beggars." A different formation lies in the idea that the hero can disguise himself as a beggar; this is central to the popular ballad "Hind Horn" (Child, no. 17, 1965, I, 202-07), Robin Hood does it in Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires, and William Wallace does the same in a major episode in the late fifteenth-century epic that bears his name. A recurring structural feature is that the outlaws disguise themselves to expose the falsity of their enemies, with Robin appearing as a friar in Robin Hood's Golden Prize, and as a shepherd in Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford. In one sense John plays a tradesman (at the "begging-trade," line 66) with the same success as Robin had playing potter or butcher, or even sailor, and yet these beggars are morally corrupt in a way that the mercantile figures whom Robin imitated were not. In this case the polymorphic capacity of the hero is an instrument of his power of social evaluation: like Hamlet he pretends only to expose pretense.