THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

246 ROBIN GOODFELLOW
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, though
placing Robin Goodfellow in a poetic and etherealized
fairy court, as messenger and jester of Oberon, does not
take away his broom. In Act V, Scene 2, he not only
appears with a broom, but calls public attention to it, re-
marking complacently,
I am sent, with broom, before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.l12
That Robin Goodfellow survived the 16th and 17th
centuries without losing his broom or his candlestick,
would argue well for the universality and minuteness of
the knowledge concerning him, and would furnish ample
proof of his folk origin, the recoIlections of which con-
tinued to exist. /
It was surely this origin which would account for one
of his most emphasized traits: namely, his desire for
bread and cream. According to the Discovery of Witch-
craft, a mess of white bread and cream had been recog-
nized for a hundred years as Robin Goodfellow's stand-
ing fee.'l3. And from the " crummed mess of milke "
bestowed upon him in Albions England and the milk
pans which he raided in Rowlands' More Knaues Yet? *I6
to the last years of the 18th century in Scotland when he
was presented with a dish of cream which he sometimes
" eat till he bursted," 116 Robin Goodfellow's appetite
112 Lines 19-20.
1'3 Scot, 165 I ed., p. 66.
Warner, quarto, 1612, Chap. 91, Hazlitt rpt., p. 364.
V01. 11, P. 40.
Heron, Observations made in a Journey through the Western
Counties of Scotland, Vol. 11, p. 227.
In Scotland in 1792, "They had an universal custom of pouring a
cow's milk upon a little hill, or big stone, where the spirit called
Browny was believed to lodge: this spirit always appeared in the