Robin Hood says there is no match for Little John within a hundred miles; Will Scadlock tells him that a friar at Fountains Abbey can.
He finds him by a riverside and forces the monk to carry him over, except that the friar throws him in halfway across.
In the later version, Little John shoots twenty of them, and the Friar agrees to make peace with Robin.
Howard Pyle used this tale in his The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood as part of the tale of Alan-a-Dale: Robin needed a priest who would perform the wedding ceremony in defiance of authority, and Will Scarlet proposed Friar Tuck.
[1] The Percy Folio version of the ballad begins with the stanza: Robert Graves in his English and Scottish Ballads used this stanza to support his argument for pagan survivals in the Robin Hood legend, and for the popular survival of a supposedly pagan thirteen-month calendar.