Imagining Robin Hood

The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context

A.J. Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134595389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

A.J. Pollard takes us back to the earliest surviving stories, tales and ballads of Robin Hood, and re-examines the story of this fascinating figure. Setting out the economic, social and political context of the time, Pollard illuminates the legend of this yeoman hero and champion of justice as never before.

Imagining Robin Hood questions:

• what a 'yeoman' was, and what it meant to be a fifteenth-century Englishman
• Was Robin Hood hunted as an outlaw, or respected as an officially appointed forest ranger?
• Why do we ignore the fact that this celebrated hero led a life of crime?
• Did he actually steal from the rich and give to the poor?

Answering these questions, the book looks at how Robin Hood was 'all things to all men' since he first appeared; speaking to the gentry, the peasants and all those in between. The story of the freedom-loving outlaw tells us much about the English nation, but tracing back to the first stories reveals even more about the society in which the legend arose.

An enthralling read for all historians and general readers of this fascinating subject.

1

Texts and Context

Everyone knows about Robin Hood is a myopic formula which makes an historian’s hackles rise. Everyone knows, alas, what everyone knows. But the pearl richer than all his tribe is You can’t start messing around with Robin Hood. What, my dear Jeff, do you think History is? Some lucid, polyocular transcript of reality? Tut, tut, tut. The historical record of the mid- to late-thirteenth century is no clear stream into which we might trillingly plunge.¹

So pontificates Dr Max, a parody of a media don, in Julian Barnes’ novel, England, England. The novel is a dystopia in which a media magnate, Jack Pitman, unmistakably based on Robert Maxwell, has turned the Isle of Wight into a themed heritage park encapsulating the quintessence of England. ‘Robin Hood and his Merrie Men’ came seventh in a worldwide survey (results adjusted by Sir Jack) of what people associated with Englishness, and so it becomes one of the main attractions, a team of actors performing ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff’ daily at 4.00 p.m. to huge crowds.²

This book follows Dr Max’s path and messes about with Robin Hood. On the other hand, it disagrees with his judgement that the stories of Robin Hood provide a historical record of the mid-to late thirteenth century. It begins with the premise that the earliest surviving written version of the stories of Robin Hood dates from the fifteenth century, and probably the second half of that century. And it follows with the deduction that therefore they talk to us from and tell us about that century. Certainly history is no lucid, polyocular transcript of reality, and the book would not have been undertaken if I believed that everyone knew what I wanted to write. But history is nothing if not messing about with the past.

Everyone knows the story of Robin Hood. The Anglo-Saxon earl of Huntingdon, Sir Robin of Locksley, has been evicted from his estates by the Normans and outlawed. He lives by highway robbery and poaching. England is under the corrupt and oppressive rule of the wicked Prince John, regent while his brother the king, Richard I, is on crusade. Prince John is in league with the Sheriff of Nottingham and with Guy of Gisborne. They are terrorising the people. Locksley has taken to Sherwood Forest, and, as Robin Hood with his merry men leads the resistance of free-born Englishmen to the alien rule of the Normans, Robin runs rings round the sheriff. After many adventures, including an archery contest in Nottingham and fighting free of arrest, he triumphs. King Richard returns to England in disguise, observes what is amiss and discovers that Robin is his true subject. Prince John and his allies are removed. Locksley is restored to his lands, gets the girl (Maid Marian), good government is reinstated and freedom restored. This, with many variations on it, is the story that twentieth-century cinema and television audiences knew.

It is not, however, the story that was familiar to fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century audiences. In fact, to begin with, they knew several stories, for Robin Hood the forest outlaw was a stock character on which different adventures were hung. One can identify as many as eight surviving stories, or ‘rymes’ as they were called, of Robin Hood set down in writing by c.1500, or containing elements which can be reasonably identified as of that time. We can look at them like episodes in a twentieth-century adventure series in ‘comics’, on radio, in film and on television, woven around stock characters – the hero, Little John, the sheriff, the monk, the king – in which the hero has various adventures, triumphing against the same set of villains in an infinitely changing set of circumstances. Plot lines, actions and incidents are endlessly repeated and varied. Outlaws go into Nottingham in disguise and fool the sheriff, there are archery contests, daring rescues and pitched battles between Robin’s and the sheriff’s men. In the eight ‘stories’ on which this study focuses the sheriff dies twice, a monk is robbed twice, the king intervenes twice. There were probably many more in circulation than have survived in writing. We have the testimony of the Scottish chronicler Walter Bower writing in c. 1440 to this effect. He wrote of Robin Hood and Little John and their companions: ‘These men the stolid commons remember, at times in the gay mood of comedy, at others in the more solemn tragic vein and love besides to sing of their deeds in all kinds of romances, mimes and snatches’. He then proceeded to summarise a story, which has not itself survived.³ Robin Hood was originally a popular (in the senses of both ‘of the people’ and ‘enjoyed by many’) late-medieval hero, about whom many tales were told. The survival of a number of different stories about him is the principal feature that separates Robin Hood from the other outlaw heroes of late-medieval England, such as Gamelyn or William of Cloudesly, about each of whom there survives but one self-contained narrative.⁴

The earliest stories of Robin Hood nevertheless contained features which everyone does know and which have survived the messing about of the centuries. Robin Hood is an outlaw. He is accompanied by his merry men, among whom are Little John (his principal lieutenant), Will Scarlet (or Scarlock) and Much the Miller’s son. There is no Friar Tuck among his merry men, but there is a friar Tuck in a surviving play fragment. There is no Maid Marian, but Robin is devoted to the Virgin Mary. They reside in Sherwood Forest (but also float freely northwards to Barnsdale in south Yorkshire). They poach the king’s deer, they hold up travellers through the forest whom they always invite to dine before they rob them. They are skilled archers, most of all Robin Hood, who can split the wand, the peg on which the target is hung in an archery contest. Robin in more than one story goes into Nottingham in disguise to take part in an archery contest, and in one he is recognised, betrayed and fights his way out. His archenemy is the Sheriff of Nottingham, who is frequently humiliated as well as killed twice. He is particularly unenamoured of monks, especially the Benedictine monks of St Mary’s Abbey, York, who feature in two stories. He robs from the undeserving and helps the deserving, but he does not rob from the rich to give to the poor. He professes loyalty to his king, who in one story pardons him and in another condones his behaviour, but this is a King Edward, not Richard I. He is not an Anglo-Saxon, let alone a dispossessed earl. He is a plain yeoman.

A most significant moment in the development of the Robin Hood story was the drawing of five of these separate tales together in the fifteenth century into a compilation called the Gest of Robyn Hode, in which a single connecting narrative was supplied. One of the stories woven together is about ‘Robin Hood and the Knight’, sometimes known as the ‘sorry knight’ because of his plight. This provides the central thread. A second is about ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff’ in which the hero goes into Nottingham to participate in an archery contest, is betrayed and fights his way out. A third is ‘Little John and the Sheriff’, in which Little John disguises himself as Reynolde Grenelefe and enters the sheriff’s service and leads him into a trap in the forest. A fourth is ‘Robin Hood and the King’, which tells how the king pursues Robin, only catching up with him when he is disguised as a monk and is waylaid, and then pardons him and takes him into his service. And the last is ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ which tells how Robin, having abandoned the court and fled to the forest again, is finally killed through the treachery of the prioress of Kirklees, in Yorkshire.

After a few introductory stanzas, the narrative begins with Robin Hood’s men waylaying the knight, who tells his sorry story. Robin lends him money to help redeem his mortgaged lands from the abbot of St Mary’s, York. He goes with Little John to York, revealing that he has the money only after being humiliated by the abbot and the ‘high justice’, who had conspired to defraud him. Having recovered his lands he goes home, and a year later returns to the forest to repay the loan. But by this time Robin has waylaid the cellarer of the abbey, who was journeying south and relieved him of more than twice the amount. So Robin waives his loan. But when later Robin escapes from the sheriff in Nottingham and is pursued by him, he is given refuge by the knight in his castle, and the two withstand the siege. Now both the knight and Robin are outlawed. The sheriff seizes the knight, but he cannot capture Robin. So the king comes down to restore order, but not even he can catch him until he disguises himself as a monk who is waylaid by Robin. The king reveals himself, recognises Robin’s loyalty, pardons him and takes him into his service. But after a year or so in royal service Robin flees back to the forest, where he remains at large for a further twenty years before his final betrayal and death.

The dominant narrative is thus woven together, in such a way as to form a coherent story in which Robin assists the knight, they are both pursued by the sheriff and in the end pardoned by the king. Yet close examination reveals the stitching as it were: the unnamed knight in the early part becomes Sir Richard at the Lee in the later sections. It is divided into eight ‘fyttes’ roughly representing the stories. Although the repetition of the call to the audience to pay attention is characteristic of these long recitations, sometimes they fail to disguise the joins. On the one hand the reminder to pay attention at the beginning of the sixth fytte,

Lythe and listen, gentlemen,
And herkyn to your [sic] songe,⁵

is followed immediately by the narrative where it left off at the end of the previous fytte, with the sheriff pursuing Robin to the knight’s castle. On the other hand the third fytte, beginning with a similar refrain, is the beginning of a new story. This is the tale of ‘Little John and the Sheriff’, which seems to be included for comic relief. The tone is completely different. Whereas the thread provided by the dominant narrative is lofty and serious minded, ‘Little John and the Sheriff’, concerning the mockery of the sheriff, is knockabout farce. Even the story of ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff’, while it is linked to the main narrative, is different in spirit, for this is an all-action, swashbuckling yarn in which Robin proves his fighting prowess. Their positioning in the compilation as the third and fifth fyttes, however awkwardly handled, suggests a deliberate change of key by the compiler to introduce light relief. ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ is but a short condensation of a longer story appended as an epilogue. An independent, longer fragment of the same story survives.

Nevertheless, as the first attempt to create a unified narrative, the Gest is clearly recognisable as the basis of all later versions of the story of Robin Hood. Textual and linguistic analysis has suggested a possible date of composition of the elements as early as c. 1400, and dates for the compositions to be committed to writing after 1450. The first surviving complete printed edition possible appeared in 1492. There are no earlier surviving manuscript copies. Dating the Gest is complicated by the difficulty of distinguishing between what might have possibly been earlier, orally transmitted stories and the subsequent commitment of them to writing, of disentangling interpolations and adaptations at that stage, and of discerning manipulations of the text by compositors in setting the printed editions. Who was responsible for bringing this complex compilation together, when and why is not known. However, one can be reasonably certain that, while its constituent parts were in circulation earlier, it took the form we now have by the end of the fifteenth century.⁶

Of the other three, free-standing ‘rymes’, Robin Hood and the Monk, which survives in a manuscript version of the second half of the fifteenth century, and is probably the oldest surviving tale in writing, tells of how Robin is captured by the sheriff in Nottingham after he has been identified by a monk and how Little John rescues him. This has a sub-plot in which Little John rebels against Robin’s authority, but is reconciled with his leader after he has rescued him. It ends with a speech by the king who had heard that Robin Hood had escaped the sheriff again, but concedes that Little John had in the end done his master good service.⁷ Robin Hood and the Potter, also surviving in manuscript form, which has recently been dated to the last third of the fifteenth century, is more in the spirit of ‘Little John and the Sheriff’ and tells how Robin, switching places with a potter, goes into Nottingham, sells the pots deliberately at a loss, becomes engaged in an archery contest with the sheriff and tricks him into returning to the forest with him where the sheriff is relieved of his horse and goods.⁸ Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, although the earliest surviving copy is much later, can be dated by its language and content to the late fifteenth century. It is a straightforward tale of how the sheriff hires a bounty hunter to hunt down and kill Robin and of how Robin reverses the tables and kills both of them.⁹

This then is the corpus of early Robin Hood stories. Inevitably the Gest has pride of place. As the first and influential attempt to construct one coherent story of Robin Hood, it quickly established the dominant narrative thread. It is also pre-eminent because it offered closure; it took the story to an end, Robin’s return to the outlaw life, his betrayal and death, which give it an authority beyond the other tales of episodes in Robin’s life. Later ballads, starting with the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, Robin Hood and the Butcher and Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, dating from the second half of the sixteenth century, may also be reworkings of pre-Reformation rymes. Robin Hood and the Butcher is so close to the story of the potter that it must be a variation on the same theme. Robin Hood and the Friar has many elements, which suggest an earlier, pre-Reformation origin. It is the tale that first introduces the story of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, who appears as a character in the play text.¹⁰ While these three have been excluded from the texts upon which this study is founded, they give further substance to the notion that there were many more tales in circulation before the mid-sixteenth century than have survived and been compressed into what became the story of Robin Hood in later centuries.

The surviving texts of the early stories, in rhyme, seem to have been originally composed to have been chanted or recited. They are addressed to, and might have been designed to appeal to, different audiences. The Gest calls upon freeborn gentlemen to take note and listen, an address which is repeated in the middle of the text.¹¹ It is a moot point whether this is to be taken literally. The storyteller might well be flattering his audience. The constituent stories, however, seem to have been originally addressed to different listeners. Both ‘Robin Hood and the King’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Knight’ have strong associations with a gentle audience and feature issues that would appear to have been of concern to the privileged. ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff’ and ‘Little John and the Sheriff’, on the other hand, although amalgamated into the Gest, seem to be more appropriate for an audience of commoners. The mixed and wider audience seems then to be recognised in the envoi:

Cryst have mercy on his soule,
That dyed on the rode!
For he was a good outlawe,
And dyde pore men much god.¹²

This sits oddly with what has gone before, suggesting that it originally belonged to the separate story of the death of Robin Hood. It is also the only reference to Robin helping the poor.

Robin Hood and the Potter, on the other hand, in which the sheriff is again humiliated, is unequivocally addressed to good yeomen, ending with a blessing for all good yeomanry.¹³ The comic action, in which Robin changes places with the potter to sell his wares in Nottingham and to be entertained, incognito, by the sheriff and his wife perhaps had an appeal to an urban audience. In this, as well as in ‘Robin Hood and the King’, mockery is made of commerce. Robin sells the pots for next to nothing; he gets his profit by liberating the sheriff of his horse and other equipment. In the Gest, too, the king is fitted out in a new livery in which the cloth is cut with lavish abandon by Little John. The target here, which perhaps both gentle and yeoman audiences would...