Chapter Trovatore to Tulchan Bishops of T by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Tuck (Friar), the “curtal friar of Fountain’s Abbey,” was the father confessor of Robin Hood. He is represented as a sleek-headed, pudgy, paunchy, pugnacious clerical Falstaff, very fat and self-indulgent, very humorous, and somewhat coarse. His dress was a russet habit of the Franciscan order, a red corded girdle with gold tassel, red stockings, and a wallet.

Sir Walter Scott, in his Ivanhoe, calls him the holy clerk of Copmanhurst, and describes him as a “large, strong-built man in a sackcloth gown and hood, girt with a rope of rushes.” He had a round, bullet head, and his close-shaven crown was edged with thick, stiff, curly black hair. His countenance was bluff and jovial, eyebrows black and bushy, forehead well-turned, cheeks round and ruddy, beard long, curly, and black, form brawny (ch. xv.).

In the May-day morris-dance, the friar is introduced in full clerical tonsure, with the chaplet of white and red beads in his right hand, a corded girdle about his waist, and a russet robe of the Franciscan order. His stockings red, his girdle red ornamented with gold twist and a golden tassel. At his girdle hung a wallet for the reception of provisions, for “Walleteers” had no other food but what they received from begging. Friar Tuck was chaplain to Robin Hood the May-king. (See Morris-Dance, p. 729.)

In this our spacious isle, I think there is not one
But he hath heard some talk of Hood and Little John;
Of Tuck, the merry friar, which many a sermon made
In praise of Robin Hood, his outlaws, and their trade.
   —Drayton: Polyolbion, xxvi. (1622).

Tud (Morgan), chief physician of king Arthur.—The Mabinogion (“Geraint,” twelfth century).

Tug (Tom), the waterman, a straight forward, honest man, who loves Wilelmina the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bundle, and when he won the waterman’s badge in rowing, he won the consent of “the gardener’s daughter” to become his loving and faithful wife.— Dibdin: The Waterman (1774).

Tulchan Bishops (The). Certain Scotch bishops appointed in the sixteenth century, with the understanding that they were to share their stipends with their patron. A tulchan (tulka, to entice) was a mock calf set beside a cow at milking-time to induce it to give forth its milk more freely. The “see” was the cow which the patron milked; the bishop the calf, without which the “cow would yield no milk.” Earl Morton, in 1571, appointed John Douglas tulchan archbishop of St. Andrew’s. (See Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary; Burton’s Scottish History, liv.)