Ancient Legends Retold: A Little Book of Robin Hood E-Book

Michael Dacre

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This collection of five tales and one play contains the definitive Robin Hood. They are the earliest ballads and play and still the best of the bunch. 'Robin Hood and the Monk' is the earliest surviving manuscript, dated c.1450, and is considered the greatest of the ballads, though it was probably not sung, being described as a 'talkyng'; 'Robin Hood's Death' is one of the most satisfying tragedies in the English language; while 'A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode' is a comprehensive account of the famous English outlaw - complete, unified and pointing quite clearly to the reign of Edward II as a probable time for an historical Robin Hood, despite the opinions of most of the experts.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Ancient Legends Retold: An Introduction to the Series

Introduction

One

Robin Hood and the Monk

Two

Robyn Hode and the Pottere

Three

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne

Four

Robin Hood’s Death

Five

A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode

Six

The Play of ‘Robin Hood and the Friar’

Copyright

Ancient Legends Retold: An Introduction to the Series

This book represents a new and exciting collaboration between publishers and storytellers. It is part of a series in which each book contains an ancient legend, reworked for the page by a storyteller who has lived with and told the story for a long time.

Storytelling is the art of sharing spoken versions of traditional tales. Today’s storytellers are the carriers of a rich oral culture, which is flourishing across Britain in storytelling clubs, theatres, cafés, bars and meeting places, both indoors and out. These storytellers, members of the storytelling revival, draw on books of traditional tales for much of their repertoire.

The partnership between The History Press and professional storytellers is introducing a new and important dimension to the storytelling revival. Some of the best contemporary storytellers are creating definitive versions of the tales they love for this series. In this way, stories first found on the page, but shaped ‘on the wind’ of a storyteller’s breath, are once more appearing in written form, imbued with new life and energy.

My thanks go first to Nicola Guy, a commissioning editor at The History Press, who has championed the series, and secondly to my friends and fellow storytellers, who have dared to be part of something new.

Fiona Collins, Series Originator, 2013

Introduction

In this little book you will find the best of Robin Hood. The five earliest ballads are the cream of the jest. They are violent, earthy, vigorous, passionate, mysterious, funny, frightening and, ultimately, tragic, as a national epic should be. Robin Hood complements King Arthur. As King Arthur is meet entertainment for the nobility, so the merry tales of Robin Hood are meat and drink for the common folk. In these five early ballads, and one later play, Robin is himself a commoner, a yeoman, a working-class hero, not the ousted, disaffected Saxon earl into which the later ballads try to turn him, probably to please a Norman nobility that was beginning to enjoy him in spite of itself.

Here we have the essential Robin Hood, the real Robin Hood, stripped of the romanticism that would clothe him in noble weeds or the mysticism that would seek to make of him some New Age spirit of the forest, related to Herne the Hunter or Robin Goodfellow. Here you will find a Robin Hood of fast action, hot temper and unswerving hatred toward the powers that be, especially the power of the Church and the highly paid flunkies, such as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Was there a real Robin Hood? It is probable that we shall never know. Most of the early collectors of these ballads assumed that Robin Hood was the invention of the ballad-makers, that the mediaeval ballad-mongers created Robin Hood to appease a disaffected peasantry, still largely Saxon, that continued to suffer under an intolerable Norman oppression. However, research carried out in the nineteenth century by a man who had access to mediaeval records points to a possibility for an historical Robin Hood.

In 1838 Joseph Hunter became the assistant keeper of the new Public Record Office and worked on the editing and publishing of mediaeval government records. The son of a Sheffield cutler and a professional antiquarian from South Yorkshire, Hunter could not well ignore the question of Robin Hood’s identity. In The Geste of Robyn Hode, the king is identified as ‘Edward our comely king’ three times. Between April and November 1323, Edward II made a royal progress through Yorkshire and Lancashire, ending up at Nottingham. In 1317 a Robert Hood and his wife Matilda appeared in the court rolls of the manor of Wakefield, which is only ten miles from Barnsdale, the scene of Robin Hood’s exploits in the early ballads; while between 24 March and 22 November 1324, a Robyn Hode was recorded as being in the royal service as one of the porters of the chamber. The names Robert and Robin were interchangeable at that time. This does seem convincing and corroborates the events described in the Geste.

However, J.C. Holt, in his book Robin Hood (considered by many to be the definitive work on the subject), points out that the Robert Hood of Wakefield is not necessarily the Robyn Hode who was later in the king’s service; that there is no evidence that the Wakefield Robert Hood was ever an outlaw; and that on 27 June 1323 Robyn Hode received his wages, according to a day-book of the chamber (only recently made legible by ultraviolet light), confirming that he was already in the king’s service before Edward II came to Nottingham. Even so, I am not entirely convinced by Mr Holt’s arguments. It is feasible that Robyn entered King Edward’s service earlier in the year, on his way north. It is conceivable that Robert Hood of Wakefield was forced into outlawry because he supported the Earl of Lancaster’s rebellion against Edward (the Earl was executed following his defeat at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322) and that the outlaws were all disaffected soldiers who had been on the losing side. That there is no mention of him after 1317 does not necessarily mean that he had died: it might simply mean that he had been outlawed and had gone into hiding in Barnsdale. The final reference to Robyn Hode, porter of the king’s chamber, appears in the day-book for 22 November 1324, when he was paid off: ‘To Robyn Hod, formerly one of the porters, because he can no longer work, five shillings as a gift, by command.’ Holt maintains that ‘This was not the Robin Hood of the Geste who left the court through boredom to return to the greenwood where he lived for twenty-two years before his fatal journey to Kirklees’, as ‘because he can no longer work’ suggests old age.

But I have often found, as a storyteller, that the story can be trusted – that is to say, that the old tales often contain more truth than the historians credit them – and the Geste says that Robin Hood’s king was Edward, and that Robyn ‘dwelled in the kynges courte But twelve monethes and thre’. On 27 June 1323, Robyn Hode received his wages; and on 22 November 1324, Robyn Hod was paid off with 5 shillings. That is a period of eighteen months in which a Robyn Hode served King Edward II as a porter of his chamber. So the author of the Lytell Geste got the timing slightly wrong and forgot to say that Robyn entered the king’s service during his progress north, before he got to Nottingham. This is no more than dramatic licence. The names speak for themselves.

A Geste of Robyn Hode is quite clear about Robin’s reasons for leaving King Edward’s employment. He has spent £100 and all his men’s ‘fee’ on payments to knights and squires ‘To gete hym grete renowne’ and all his men have deserted him, except for Little John and Will Scathelocke. He sees some young men shooting and cries out, ‘Alas! My welthe is went away.’ And later, ‘Alas and well a way. Yf I dwele lenger with the kynge, Sorowe wyll me slay.’ It is all too obvious from this that Robin Hood is heartily sick of the life at court – the bribes, the privilege, the endless spending of money to maintain a place in the pecking order – and that he longs for the clean air of the greenwood.

Edward II’s court was infamous for its decadence and instability, and it may well have been Robin’s intention to get out while the going was good, for the barons were furious about the king’s relationship with his favourites, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser. Gaveston was murdered in 1312, while Despenser was brutally executed in 1326. Edward II himself did not have much longer to live. He was deposed by his wife and Roger Mortimer in 1326, and murdered in Berkeley Castle in 1327. Moreover, Robin Hood, as a simple yeoman and a notorious outlaw, would not have been held in high esteem by the powerful men at court. The greenwood would have been the safest place for him. But I write this as a storyteller, not as a historian, and I have to confess that the Edward II ‘Robyn Hode’ appeals to me as a good story rather than as a plausible historical theory. All the respected writers on Robin Hood, including R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor in Rymes of Robyn Hood, agree with J.C. Holt.

So I must confess to nurturing still a sneaking regard for the Robyn Hode who was most definitely in King Edward II’s employ from 27 June 1323 until 24 November 1324. The name Robert or Robin Hood was like John Smith in the Middle Ages. There were hundreds of them, and perhaps that was the point. Robin Hood was an Everyman, who appealed to every man and woman who hated tyranny and loved a good story about the ordinary yeoman who got one over on the rich and their oppressive authorities. Why, Edward II, ‘our cumlie kynge’, handsome and effeminate as he may have been, was himself cruelly done to death by those very authorities. Perhaps he even paid off his favourite porter to get him out of the way, so that Robyn Hode at least would not fall foul of the unforgiving English barons and Edward’s even more unforgiving wife, Isabella.

However, Sir James Holt points out that fyttes 7 and 8 of the Geste could have been written after Edward’s circuit of the north, to give the legend a contemporary flavour; and we must concede the numerous mentions of ‘Robynhode’ names as far back as 1261, which seriously implies a thirteenth-century Robin Hood. Contemporary scholarship is unanimously in favour of this position, I am bound to admit, and the increase of ‘Robynhod’ surnames and nicknames from the mid-thirteenth century onward certainly points to the already established popularity of Robin Hood the outlaw from the time of Richard the Lionheart and Bad King John. In fact, this multiplication of ‘Robyn Hodes’ may imply that there was more than one of them.

There is one other possible candidate. On 25 July 1225, royal justices held assizes at York. Penalties included 32s6d for the chattels of Robert Hod, fugitive. The account recurred in the following year and it means that Robert Hood had fled the jurisdiction of the court and was now a fugitive. He was an outlaw, and according to J.C. Holt ‘the only possible original of Robin Hood, so far discovered, who is known to have been an outlaw’. This theory also places Robin Hood near the time of King John, when he is most popularly supposed to have operated.

And so Robyn Hode, one of the porters of the royal chamber, went back into the forest of Barnsdale, where he passes out of history and enters into legend; and twenty-two years later he was:

Begyled, I wys,

Through a wycked woman,