They fight as viciously as if they were thrashing corn, neither willing to give in and Robin becoming especially incensed when the stranger cracks him on the crown hard enough to draw blood. He goes to a thicket and chooses a thick oaken staff, then runs back to the bridge where they agree to fight with their staffs until one of them falls off. They challenge each other with their respective weapons, and the stranger remarks it's unfair that Robin has a bow and arrows while he has only a staff, so Robin agrees to take up a staff for the fight. In his roving, Robin meets a stranger on a bridge over a brook who won't give way. This is the story of how they met: Robin is out and about with his men and leaves them on call to rove the forest on his own in search of "port" (5.1). Although called "little", John is seven feet tall, large-limbed, and fearsome to behold. When Robin Hood is twenty years old he meets another brisk and fit young man named Little John. It is a story in the Robin Hood canon which has survived as, among other forms, a late seventeenth-century English broadside ballad, and is one of several ballads about the medieval folk hero that form part of the Child ballad collection, which is one of the most comprehensive collections of traditional English ballads. Robin Hood and Little John is Child ballad 125. Robin Hood and Little John, by Louis Rhead, 1912
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