136. 'I will teach thee some play with the buckler.' An allusion to the
'sword and buckler play,' described in Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, bk.
iii. ch. 6. § 22. Not unlike our modern 'single-stick,' but with the
addition of a buckler in the left hand. Strutt gives a picture from a
Bodleian MS., dated 1344, in which clubs or bludgeons are substituted for
swords; and, no doubt, the swords used in sport were commonly of wood.
Gamelyn is speaking jocosely; he had no buckler, but he had a wooden
'pestel,' which did very well for a sword.
137. '_by Saint Richard_ was a favourite oath[30] with the outlaws of Robin
Hood's stamp, probably because of his Saxon extraction'; Jephson. Mr.
Jephson adds the following quotation from the English Martyrologe, 1608:
'Saint Richard, King and Confessor, was sonne to Lotharius, King of Kent,
who, for the love of Christ, taking upon him a long peregrination, went to
Rome for devotion to that sea [_see_], and, on his way homeward, died at
Lucca, about the year of Christ 750, where his body is kept until this day,
with great veneration, in the oratory and chappell of St. Frigidian, and
adorned with an epitaph both in verse and prose.' But this is altogether
beside the mark; for Mr. Jephson certainly refers to the wrong saint. There
were four St. Richards, commemorated, respectively, on Feb. 7, April 3,
June 9, and August 21; see Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. The day of
[481] the Saxon king is Feb. 7; but he could hardly have been so fresh in
the memory of Englishmen as the more noted St. Richard, bishop of
Chichester, who died in 1253, and was canonized in 1262; his day being
April 3. There is a special fitness in the allusion to this latter saint,
because he was a pattern of _brotherly love_, and Johan is here deprecating
Gamelyn's anger. Alban Butler says of him: 'The unfortunate situation of
his eldest brother's affairs gave him an occasion of exercising his
benevolent disposition. Richard condescended to become his _brother's
servant_, undertook the management of his farms, and by his industry and
generosity effectually retrieved his brother's before distressed
circumstances.' His name still appears in our Prayer-books.
141. _I mot nede_ is used for 'I must needs'; see examples in Mätzner,
Alteng. Sprachproben, i. 302 (182). _Mot_ is the present tense; whereas
_moste_ (mod. E. _must_) is the past tense, and was once grammatically
incorrect as a form of the present tense.