 Robin and his men tie the Bishop to a tree, force him to say Mass, and then set him back on his horse with the sarcastic command that he pray for Robin.This ballad is part of a group of ballads about Robin Hood that in turn, like many of the popular ballads collected by Francis James Child, were in their time considered a threat to the Protestant religion.Puritan writers, like Edward Dering writing in 1572, considered such tales "'childish follye'" and "'witless devices.'"