ubleflask (which some grave historians have related of
the abbot of Saint Mary's, and others of the bishop of Hereford): how
the abbot, returning to his abbey in company with his high selerer,
who carried in his portmanteau the rents of the abbey-lands, and with a
numerous train of attendants, came upon four seeming peasants, who
were roasting the king's venison by the king's highway: how, in just
indignation at this flagrant infringement of the forest laws, he asked
them what they meant, and they answered that they meant to dine: how he
ordered them to be seized and bound, and led captive to Nottingham,
that they might know wild-flesh to have been destined by Providence
for licensed and privileged appetites, and not for the base hunger of
unqualified knaves: how they prayed for mercy, and how the abbot swore
by Saint Charity that he would show them none: how one of them thereupon
drew a bugle horn from under his smock-frock and blew three blasts, on
which the abbot and his train were instantly surrounded by sixty bowmen
in green: how they tied him to a tree, and made him say mass for their
sins: how they unbound him, and sate him down with them to dinner, and
gave him venison and wild-fowl and wine, and made him pay for his fare
all the money in his high selerer's portmanteau, and enforced him to
sleep all night under a tree in his cloak, and to leave the cloak behind
him in the morning: how the abbot, light in pocket and heavy in heart,
raised the country upon Robin Hood, for so he had heard the chief
forester called by his men, and hunted him into an old woman's cottage:
how Robin changed dresses with the old woman, and how the abbot rode in
great triumph to Nottingham, having in custody an old woman in a green
doublet and breeches: how the old woman discovered herself: how the
merrymen of Nottingham laughed at the abbot: how the abbot railed at the
old woman, and how the old woman out-railed the abbot, telling him that
Robin had given her food and fire through the winter, which no abbot
would ever do, but would rather take it from her for what he called the
good of the church, by which he meant his own laziness and gluttony; and
that she knew a true man from a false thief, and a free forester from a
greedy abbot.

"Thus you see," added the sheriff, "how this villain perverts the
deluded people by making them believe that those who tithe and toll upon
them for their spiritual and temporal benefit are not their best fr