Phyllyp Sparowe, John Skelton, ballads of Robin Hood, rector of Diss, Tudor, Protestant

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71

compare himself with his adversary’s irreverence:

Holde me excusyd for why my wyll is gode
Men to induce vnto vertue and goodnes
I wryte ne Jest ne tale of Robyn hode
Nor sawe no sparcles ne sede of vyciousnes;
Wyse men loue vertue, wylde people wantones;
It longeth nat to my scyence nor cunnynge
For Phylyp the Sparowe the (Dirige) to synge. (sig. Yyii^r) ¹³²

Phyllyp Sparowe is grouped together here with the doggerel ballads of Robin Hood which contained obvious connotations of social dissent and of independence from royal authority and which were criticised for spreading secularism at the expense of godly texts. ¹³³ It seems an outrageous insult to associate Skelton, who had held the temporal roles of the king’s tutor and laureate and the spiritual one as rector of Diss, with such dissidence. The association of such outlawry with Skelton’s poem does contribute towards fostering a more or less accurate impression, however, of the intransigent, self-opinionated imperiousness of which he is capable.

Skelton appears to have rejoined in an appendage to Phyllyp Sparowe (‘Thus Endeth the Boke of Philip Sparow, and Here Foloweth an Adicyon made by Maister Skelton’):

The gyse now a dayes
Of some ianglynge jayes
Is to discommende
That they cannot amend,
Though they wold spend
All the wyttes they haue. (ll.1268-73)

Barclay has been set up here. Skelton reneges upon his earlier promise to be receptive to criticism of his work and make amendments accordingly, suggests that anyone attempting to

¹³² The Ship of Fooles, Wherin is Shewed the Folly of all States … Translated out of Latin into Englishe by Alexander Barclay Priest (printed for Richard Pynson, 1509), sig. Yyii^r, STC 3545 (this edition lacks a colophon, the title is taken from the 1570 edition, STC 3546).

¹³³ Barclay is perhaps alluding to a proverb cited by Fuller in the next century: “Many talk of Robin Hood, who never shot his Bow”, in which case his inference would be that, unlike Skelton, he avoids discoursing of “matters wherein [he has] no skill or experience”, Fuller (1662), sig. Sssi^r(2). See also Tilley R148. On complaints against the secularism of the Robin Hood ballads see John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982), pp.213-14.

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