Robin Hood Read online

  Some of these later ballads probably date back in their entirety far further than their first appearance in print or preserved manuscript. Others re-work or make use of themes and motifs from the earlier ballads. As on an archaeological site, a little digging can soon unearth elements of older structures. Look beneath the surface of ‘Robin Hood and the Butcher’, a ballad which first survives in the seventeenth-century Percy Folio, and it is clear that it is derived from ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’, a ballad which may well date back to the 1460s. In both works, Robin is the trickster figure, who takes possession of a tradesman’s wares (the potter’s pots, the butcher’s meat) and sells them at ridiculously low prices. In both, he first feasts with the Sheriff and then fools him into accompanying him back to Sherwood. There the representative of the law is captured when Robin summons his men. He is only released because of the hospitality his wife had extended to the outlaw when he was disguised as a tradesman.

  The stories told in the other ballads are various and wide-ranging. Some, such as the tale of ‘Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar’, have become part of the tradition and have appeared under assorted guises in dozens of books and films; others have failed to catch readers’ imaginations and have never been repeated in later works. A few stray (usually unsuccessfully) from the standard territory of Barnsdale and Sherwood. In ‘Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon’, for example, the outlaw leader, together with Little John and Will Scadlock, travels to London where the eponymous prince is besieging the city with the help of two giants. There Robin and his men take on the three villains of the piece and slay them in combat. Elements of more fantastical romances are uneasily welded to the down-to-earth tradition of the Robin Hood myth. In ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’, the setting is once again an unusual one but this ballad retains some of the feel of those which take place on more familiar ground. Self-confessedly ‘weary of the woods’ and the ‘chasing of the fallow deer’, Robin decides to leave them and set up as a fisherman in Scarborough. He proves useless at his new trade but, when the fishing vessels are raided by French pirates, he comes into his own. Bound to the main mast so he can aim properly amidst the rolling of the sea, Robin despatches Frenchman after Frenchman with his bow and eventually the fishermen board the pirate ship and take possession of ‘twelve hundred pounds in gold so bright’.

  There are recurring themes and motifs in these ballads. Robin regularly comes across some traveller in the forest and, almost invariably, he offers to fight with him. This happens in ‘Robin Hood and the Ranger’, ‘Robin Hood and the Shepherd’, ‘Robin Hood and the Tinker’ and several more. Almost invariably, Robin is beaten. The outlaw hero then invites the man who has bested him to join the band of merry men. Nearly anyone who has seen a Robin Hood film in the past seventy years has seen a version of this ‘Robin Meets His Match’ encounter but all the versions ultimately derive from the ballads. However, it is not just strangers who end up quarrelling in the greenwood. In the ballads, the outlaws themselves are always falling out with one another. Robin and Little John are forever setting off on journeys through the woods, having words and going their separate ways to meet with separate adventures.

  Disguise and the adoption of another’s identity also have significant roles to play in many of the ballads. Robin frequently appears as a trickster figure who disguises himself to fool or undermine authority, usually in the shape of the Sheriff of Nottingham. As we have seen, this occurs in the earliest of the stories such as ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ but it is also an element in many of the later ones as well. In ‘Robin Hood Rescues Three Young Men’, for example, the outlaw pretends to be the hangman in order to thwart the Sheriff’s plan to hang ‘three squires in Nottingham town’ who have committed no crime other than the killing of the king’s deer. Finally, the forest itself is of huge importance to the Robin Hood ballads. As a place where the normal rules of society do not apply and where the social hierarchy can so easily be overturned, Sherwood (or Barnsdale) is a realm of new possibilities for those who, like Robin, choose to live in it.

  For anyone familiar with Robin Hood largely through movies and TV, or even through any one of the dozens of children’s books based on the character that have appeared in the last hundred years, the outlaw of the ballads can come as a bit of a surprise. He isn’t a gentleman fallen on hard times, forced into the greenwood by his loyalty to Richard the Lionheart, nor has he ever fought with the king in the Crusades. He doesn’t even live in the time of Richard the Lionheart. The king in the ballads, if he is mentioned at all, is called Edward. Robin is happy enough to rob the rich but he doesn’t appear to have any particular desire to hand over his spoils to the poor. (Although the Gest shows his generosity to the poor knight Sir Richard at the Lee and ends with lines assuring readers that he ‘dyde pore men moch god [good]’.) He’s actually a violent and aggressive man who has no qualms about mutilating a dead man’s face with his knife. The goodies in the stories aren’t stalwart Saxons and the baddies nasty Normans. There is no hint whatsoever of any ethnic struggle between Saxons and Normans. Except in one later ballad that may have been deliberately written to add an element to the tradition that wasn’t previously there, Robin doesn’t have a Sherwood romance with a lovely lady known as Maid Marian. In fact, he rarely has any lovely lady friend at all.

  And yet these early ballads do contain familiar foundations of the Robin Hood story on which later generations have built ever more elaborate narrative structures. Robin’s principal friends and allies (Little John, Will Scarlet, Much the Miller’s Son) are all to be found in them. So too are the villains and enemies associated with Robin, most notably the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisbourne. The location in many of the ballads is Nottingham and/or Sherwood Forest, although a handful of them, particularly the earliest, mention Barnsdale and other Yorkshire place names. There are themes and motifs in the ballads – Robin meeting his match, Robin playing the trickster, Robin being rescued from imprisonment or rescuing others from imprisonment – that would be immediately recognised by fans of, say, the recent BBC TV series about the outlaw leader. Look again at A Gest of Robyn Hode, by far the longest and possibly the oldest of all the Robin Hood ballads that we have. There are elements in its narrative that have lasted throughout the centuries. The archery contest appears in various guises in works as different as Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s novel of 1819, and Disney’s 1973 animated feature film entitled Robin Hood. The story of the impoverished knight Sir Richard at the Lee and his debt to the Abbey of St. Mary’s is still being re-enacted 500 years later in episodes of the 1950s TV series starring Richard Greene. Robin of the ballads is still with us.

  Robin in the May Games

  The ballads played a central role in keeping alive the stories of Robin Hood for hundreds of years, from the time of Langland to the time of Sir Walter Scott, but there is a good argument to be made that, for at least two of those centuries, Robin Hood was best-known throughout England in the plays, games, revels and pageants which featured him as a character. For various reasons, Robin became a central figure in the tradition of folk-drama that was particularly associated with the May Games played throughout the country at Whitsuntide. Like Morris men and the summer lord, he was part of the ritualistic fabric of the English year. The very first reference to Robin which relates to these games dates to 1427, at least twenty years before the earliest possible date for any of the surviving ballads. In the municipal records for the city of Exeter for that year, there is an entry detailing the 20d that was paid lusoribus ludentibus lusum Robyn Hode, in other words ‘for the players playing the game of Robin Hood’. For the next two hundred years, these players seem to have been familiar figures in communities throughout southern England, the south Midlands and Scotland. (Curiously, almost no evidence survives for them from the very areas – the north and the north midlands – where the Robin Hood stories are set. Nor is there much recorded activity in East Anglia apart from one major reference discussed below.) There are more than
a hundred surviving records in parish accounts and the like of instances of these Robin Hood games. In Bristol in 1525, we hear of the purchase of ‘two pair of hosyn for Robin Hood and Lytyll John’; in 1536, a parish in Cornwall receives a sum of money from ‘John Marys and his company that playd Robin Hoode’; in Yeovil between the 1510s and 1570s there are more than twenty records of both outgoings (for such things as the refeathering of Robin Hood’s arrows and ribbon lace for Little John’s horn) and the receipt of charitable donations; in Leicester in 1526 there is a reference to money owed to St. Leonard’s Church after a Robin Hood play was acted for its benefit; and eight years earlier and much further north, in Edinburgh, a man is told in a letter that ‘Francis Boithwell your nichtbour is chosin to be Litiljohn for to mak sportis and jocositeis in the toun’.

  These were clearly regular and familiar events through large swathes of the country and Robin Hood was not just popular with ordinary villagers and townsfolk. He was also popular amongst the gentry. The Paston Letters is the name generally given to a large collection of family letters and papers connected to the Pastons of East Anglia, a family rising up the social ladder in the fifteenth century, the period covered in the correspondence. Amongst the Paston Letters is one from 1473 in which Sir John Paston, then head of the family, refers to a servant whom he has kept for three years ‘to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robynhod and the shryff off Notyngham’. The man has now left his employ and Sir John is not best pleased about his departure. Clearly Paston was accustomed to stage Robin Hood plays (and plays involving St. George) in his own household and this particular servant, named as W. Woode and presumably a particularly effective actor, will be missed when they are next performed.

  The very play in which W. Woode might well have acted has survived in fragmentary form in a manuscript, now in the library of Trinity College, which, in all likelihood, was once part of an archive of Paston family documents. Usually known as ‘Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Nottingham’, the drama consists of a mere 21 lines. In the original manuscript there is no division into scenes or any indication of which characters speak which lines but a narrative of sorts can be extrapolated from what we have. It has clear similarities to the ballad ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’. In a first scene, a knight is commissioned by the Sheriff to capture Robin. The unnamed knight and the outlaw meet and compete against one another in various activities including archery and wrestling. The two then fight with swords and Robin wins, cutting off his opponent’s head. In a second scene, Robin and some of his men have been captured and the other outlaws, including Friar Tuck (appearing in the literature for the first time), must effect their rescue. It’s a lot to fit into 21 lines and it is clear that these Robin Hood folk dramas depended for their impact not on the spoken word but on boisterous action and plenty of it. Other texts of May Games plays have survived. One of the sixteenth-century printings of the Gest also includes two short dramatic texts which, according to the man who printed them, ‘are very proper to be played in Maye Games’. The first depicts Robin’s initial meeting with Friar Tuck, a story also told in a ballad entitled ‘Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar’. However, the play text pre-dates the first surviving version of the ballad by a century. The second text shares some of the elements of the ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and is a version of the story, re-told many times and with many variations, in which Robin meets his match in a fight with a stranger in the greenwood. Although these are longer by far than ‘Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Nottingham’ (together they amount to just over 200 lines), they also clearly indicate that the dramas in the May Games depended far more on action than they did on words.

  At the height of the popularity of the May Games, even the king might play at Robin Hood. The royal court, just as much as the village green or the city street, could be the setting for such revels. In Edward Hall’s Chronicle there is an account of Henry VIII and his courtiers imitating the pursuits of lesser folk by indulging in Robin Hood games. On May Day in 1510, according to Hall, Henry, together with the earls of Essex and Wiltshire and other noblemen, burst into the Queen’s chamber, ‘all appareled in short cotes of Kentish Kendal, with hodes on their heddes, and hosen of the same, everyone of them with his bowe and arrowes, and a sworde and buckler, like outlawes, or Robyn Hodes men.’

  What was the purpose of these games when they were played not by king and courtiers but by ordinary townsfolk and villagers? Despite the fact that Robin was an anti-authority figure, metaphorically sticking up two fingers to the forces of law and the higher echelons of the church, there is no indication that they represented popular resistance to authority. They sometimes ended in riots and violence, amidst all the drink and excitement that accompanied them, but they were not intended to trouble the social order. In fact, they were usually organised by village or town officials and substantial amounts of public money were lavished on them. Surviving records from Kingston upon Thames show just how much was spent on ensuring that the players were well-costumed. In 1508, the sizeable sum of 12s 10d was forked out for Kendal green cloth to make coats for the two men taking the roles of Robin and Little John. Ten years later, Robin’s retinue had clearly increased and the old coats had grown threadbare. Another fourteen were commissioned to replace them.

  Yet the Kingston authorities and others like them, through their generosity, were speculating in the hope of accumulating. For the prime purpose of the Robin Hood play-games seems to have been fundraising. In the course of the day’s entertainment, Robin and Little John, Friar Tuck and Maid Marian (often played by a man in drag) processed through town or village, stopping from time to time to perform their mini-dramas but devoting much of their energies to the gathering of money from fellow citizens. Robin was not taking from the rich to give to the poor but from the individual to give to the community. Most often the money went to the churchwardens to be devoted to communal projects. In Croscombe in Somerset, there are records from the 1480s to the 1510s of sums ranging from 23s 8d to £3 6s 8d received as ‘Roben Hode money’ or as a result of ‘the sport of Robart Hode and hys company’ or designated as coming, in some way, from the Robin Hood games in May. In Yeovil in 1544, £5 8s 9½d was received from ‘John Delagryse being R Hood this yere’. Further north in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire in 1556, townwardens’ accounts include 29s 8d gathered by a man named Steven Shaw and his company for their ‘Robyn Hood playe’ performed for the last two years. And, in Kingston itself, outlay on costumes was more than justified by the returns recorded by the churchwardens. From 1506 to the late 1530s sums ranging from 12s up to £5 6s 8d are described in the accounts as received for ‘ye gaderyng of Robyn Hode’ or in similar words.

  Despite the connection with charitable gathering and good works, church disapproval of Robin Hood and the May Games was growing by the middle decades of the sixteenth century. In increasingly Protestant times, these popular rituals and sports smacked too much of Catholic laxity and the papist past. In a sermon delivered before Edward VI in 1549, Bishop Hugh Latimer recalled an incident years previously in which his own attempts to preach in a church he was visiting had been thwarted by popular enthusiasm for the outlaw. ‘Sir, this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you,’ one of the parishioners had told him, ‘it is Robin Hood’s day. The parish are gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood.’ More than a decade later the bishop was still fuming. ‘It is no laughing matter, my friends,’ he thundered, perhaps suspecting that some people would indeed find it a laughing matter, ‘it is a weeping matter, a heavy matter; a heavy matter, under the pretence of gathering for Robin Hood, a traitor and a thief, to put out a preacher, to have his office less esteemed; to prefer Robin Hood before the ministration of God’s word.’ Attempts were made to repress Robin Hood activities in the May Games. In 1528, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports issued an edict banning Robin Hood games in the towns he controlled; nearly thirty years later and several hundred miles further north, the Scottish parliament even went so far as to pass a statute to prevent people f
rom performing the plays. It failed to work. In 1561, the fearsome kirk leader John Knox noted that people were still gathering in Edinburgh ‘efter the auld wikket manner of Robyn Hoode’ and that, although the practice had been condemned, ‘yet would they not be forbidden, but would disobey and trouble the town’. The trouble ended in a riot when one of the Robin Hood revellers was arrested and his fellows descended on the Tolbooth to free him.

  And yet, despite the disapproval of the authorities, the old traditions were still much in evidence. The Tudor diarist Henry Machyn, a clothier in London, refers to May Games in the capital in 1559 which included ‘Robyn Hode and Lytyll John… and Frere Tuke’ alongside ‘Sant Gorge and the Dragon’ and ‘the mores dansse’. Outside the capital, records of Robin Hood continue to be found. In Barnstaple in Devon, in the same year that Machyn was watching May Games, 3s 4d was ‘paid to Robart Hode for his pastime’ and the Yeovil records mention Robin well into the 1570s. In Kent in 1574, younger members of the aristocratic Sidney family were charitably doling out cash to players performing in Robin Hood plays. It is only with the general decline of such rituals and folk dramas in the last decades of the sixteenth century that Robin Hood play-games finally begin to disappear from the records. Even then, in remoter and more conservative regions such as Cornwall, Robin of the May Games could still flourish. There are records of Robin Hood costumes in the town of St. Columb Major in 1588 and of the gathering of ‘Robin hoodes monyes’ six years later. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the assumption may be that such age-old sports were finally gone but the odd reference suggests that there were pockets of the country where Robin still held sway from time to time. He is mentioned in a processional May-game in Wells in 1607 and, in Woodstock in Oxfordshire in 1627, there is a record of £7 7s 1d brought in by Robin Hood and Little John which sounds little different to entries in parish accounts from a hundred years earlier. The most surprising record, and the one most difficult to explain, dates from as late as 1652. In that year, villagers in Enstone in Oxfordshire were, according to the Latin account of two foreign visitors, still celebrating games ‘quos sua lingua Rabben Hut vocabant’ (‘which in their own language, they call Rabben Hut’). Three years after the execution of Charles I, with England under the rule of the Commonwealth, Robin was somehow surviving as a character in folk drama. Perhaps, in a sense, the Robin Hood plays never died. They merely went into hibernation, awaiting the revival of interest in such folk traditions in the twentieth century.