“As you will,” the outlaw leader replied, nodding. “It’s not our rest that risks any serious disturbance. Of course, we must make shift with ropes. We have no iron shackles here in merry Sherwood.”
“You astound me,” said Denis. “You appear to have all the other pleasantries of life here in merry Sherwood.”
CHAPTER 5
THE TAPESTRY OF THE PAST
The high sheriff of Nottingham lay sleepless much of that night, carefully remembering yet again all her previous affrays with the master outlaw of Sherwood and Barnsdale, especially his greatest misdeed; and also those three occasions on which she had seen him, and recognized him too late.
Five years ago, when Roger of Doncaster had still been alive and fulfilling the actual duties of sheriff in his wife’s stead, the man who called himself Robin Hood (when he was not going about in some other guise) had come boldfaced into Nottingham town during the midsummer fair, wearing a three-months’ beard and passing for a butcher, his cart piled high with good meat slaughtered not two days before. Establishing his stall unauthorized in the shade of Saint Mary’s Church, he undersold all the honest butchers, vending more meat for a single penny than they could afford to sell for five, and several times, so rumor said, handing out a fine cut in exchange for a pretty maid’s kiss or a withered crone’s blessing.
At last the honest butchers, joining together, had marched him to the castle to demand justice: that he should abide by the laws of fair trade and not ruin their business. But he brought along his cart, rolling it into the courtyard with his last unsold quarter of beef, which he presented as a free gift to Dame Alice as lady of the castle, along with a fair gold ring.
She had been five years younger, comparatively innocent, and not displeased with her first glimpse of the handsome young fellow. Though the gift could be called a bribe, as the honest butchers were quick to protest, she and her husband judged that so madwag a butcher could not continue long in trade. Rather, he must be some young prodigal out for a jolly brief fling. Scenting at once a compromise to placate the other butchers and a bargain for himself, Sir Roger offered to buy out all the other beasts the mad butcher possessed, whether slaughtered or on the hoof. Aye, willingly, the fellow replied—three hundred head and more of horned beasts alive, yours for three hundred pounds if your lordship pleases to ride out with me tomorrow and see them all.
So the honest butchers were appeased, for what was sold to the sheriff could no longer glut the common market; and, moreover, the vice sheriff promised them the carving of his purchase. Sir Roger and Dame Alice were content, because spreading dinners every high feast day for the commoners and peasants, at their three manors as well as at Nottingham castle, in addition to feeding their own households and garrison throughout the year, required a great deal of meat, so if for once their larder could be filled cheaply, all the better. And the mad butcher appeared happiest of all, staying to eat and drink and toast his pretended fellow butchers at one of the low tables in the castle hall.
Next day Sir Roger had ridden out with the supposed butcher, taking along as escort only his captain Sir Hugh of Doncaster, and the seven complainant butchers. The outlaws had been fairly quiet that spring, content with poaching and one or two robberies unaccompanied by outrage. Nevertheless, on seeing the butcher’s way about to lead into Sherwood forest, the vice sheriff grew apprehensive. “God save us today from Robin Hood!” he remarked, and the mock butcher replied, “Pooh! I met him yestermorn on my way through Sherwood to town. A blustering, cowardly knave—I thrashed him well.”
Whether he had indeed fought with the true butcher, reached a truce and bought meat, horse, and cart from him, as the silly folks’ ballads later explained; or whether he had murdered him and hid the body, they were never able to learn. Certainly no man had ever appeared in Nottingham, Doncaster, or any other place they knew admitting to be that same butcher. But meanwhile the bold fellow led them on into Sherwood—Sir Roger, Sir Hugh, and the seven honest tradesmen—until they came to a glen with a large, fair herd of roe deer grazing.
“Here be some of them now,” the false butcher had said. “Well, Master Sheriff, what think you of my fine, horned beasts?”
“The king’s beasts, rather,” Sir Roger had replied, “and I find, fellow, that I dislike thy company.”
But before they could depart, the man revealed as Robin Hood had set horn to mouth and summoned threescore rough outlaws from hiding, most of them armed with longbows.
That day it had ended expensively but not bloodily. Seeing themselves so far outnumbered and menaced with arrows, the vice sheriff, his captain, and the honest butchers submitted to go and dine with Hood’s outlaws in the forest, paying three hundred pounds for the enforced hospitality, which was Robin Hood’s usual pretext for robbing travelers. But they came home safe, and that time Master Hood sent back a white palfrey worth at least sixty pounds as a gift for Dame Alice. So, in spite of their total losses, she had not then been too much disinclined to chuckle at the affair. The gold ring still lay locked in her coffers, lest the owner from whom Hood must have stolen it ever come forth, or it otherwise prove evidence some day. The palfrey she had kept for a while and sometimes ridden.
After Hood’s masquerade as butcher, however, the outlaws’ depredations had worsened. The following spring and summer their outrages reached such a height that it came very near to pitched battle between them and the Law. That year toward the end of August, Sir Hugh and two men at arms apprehended the renegade steward William Stutely, suspected but not yet known to have joined Hood’s band after flying from the courts and thus earning his own outlawry. In resisting arrest Stutely killed one of Sir Hugh’s men, Adam FitzStephen of Skelbrooke, and maimed the second in his right arm. For this alone he would have deserved the death sentence, had he not merited it already for the murder of his master, David of Netherfield.
Outlaws being subject to summary execution with no further appeal to court or assizes, Sir Roger had caused scaffold and gallows to be readied in the town square for hanging Stutely the next day. Dame Alice herself had not been present. That month she, along with her dames, her squires, and other personal attendants, was attending to matters at Roecourt, the manor which Sir Roger had given her as a wedding gift. She learned of the morning’s events in Nottingham and Sherwood only the following day, when Sir Hugh reached Roecourt after riding all night to bring her the news.
When they had led Stutely out to the gallows, he begged leave to be unbound and die by the sword instead, fighting the sheriff’s men singly or all at once.
“Any man’s last request should be honored,” Sir Roger had replied, “but you go too far! What, do you ask for the chance to kill and maim more of us?”
Stutely had persisted, begging to fight weaponless but unbound, anything to escape the noose. “Not for my own sake,” he even said, “but for my master’s honor”—clearly meaning the outlaw Hood and not the rightful lord whom he himself had defrauded of fifty pounds in gold and then murdered—”since my master never yet lost any man to the gallows.”
Such panic was not uncommon in face of the slow, strangling, shameful death, preferable to very little save death by burning or by gutting and quartering. Sir Roger, of course, had held firm. Stutely was an outlaw who merited death for at least two murders, and the sooner hanged, the better.
But now a crippled and bent-over old pilgrim had hobbled up out of the crowd, craned his hooded face up at the acting sheriff, and asked in a raspy voice what he would pay a silly old palmer to serve as hangman.
The official hangman of Nottingham had been standing there ready, and Sir Hugh would have pushed the beggar away; but Sir Roger seemed to take pity on his rags. “Thirteen pence, old pilgrim,” he promised, “and the condemned man’s garments, once he has no further use for them.”
Sir Hugh had guessed the vice sheriff was having a little sport with the beggar. Dame Alice thought that in this her worldly-wise captain judged his lord’s motives by his own. Knowing
her husband better and more deeply, she believed that Sir Roger had meant to let the supposed pilgrim stand beside the hangman, perhaps lending some small token help, which would supply the acting sheriff with a pretext to give alms under the guise of honest wages.
But no sooner had the pilgrim mounted the scaffold than, hopping about like a madman, he raised a little horn to his lips and blew three loud blasts. For a few heartbeats they must have thought him frenzied—until at least a fullscore of men jumped forth from the crowd, laying about them with swords, quarterstaves, and even pitchforks. Others, with longbows, stood back on the fringes and shot arrows. The townsfolk fled for shelter, and all who could still move were already dispersed before the next wave of outlaws charged in at the town gates, to hold them open.
Meanwhile, the palmer had thrown off his rags to stand revealed in Lincoln green, with two swords at his side. Drawing one, he felled the hangman, cut Stutely free, and passed him the second blade. A giant outlaw seven or eight feet tall leaped up and seized Sir Roger from behind. Sir Hugh strove to mount the scaffold, but was beaten back by Hood—the rogue was as good at swordplay as archery—and knocked senseless, which no doubt saved his life, as they must have let him lie for dead. Only the attendant priest was allowed to scrabble away freely from beneath the gallows.
Besides the hangman, four good men of Nottingham garrison and six townsfolk had died that day, in addition to a dozen or more wounded at the hands of these scoundrels who pretended to love the poor. And in the rout and riot, the outlaws had time to pluck down the gallows—both uprights and crosspiece—from the scaffold, carry it away with the vice-sheriff, and set it up again in a cursed small glade within the bounds of Sherwood forest.
And there they had hanged good Sir Roger of Doncaster, the acting sheriff of Nottingham. They even stripped his body and left it dangling bare.
In her first grief and rage, Dame Alice had rushed down to hack into pieces the palfrey that had been Hood’s gift to her. Restrained in time, she later sold the beast, for a quarter of its worth, to a trader in horseflesh who promised he would take it to London or farther before reselling it, so that she need never set eyes on it again.
But she had been cold and calm when she vowed on her husband’s bier to have vengeance. So as to have it directly and personally, she took upon herself the duties of her hereditary office of sheriff.
Also, by acting in person, she did not put another male deputy in the way of Robin Hood’s murderous sport.
There had been another outlaw, a renegade knight called Guy of Gisbourne, who used to lead his own pack of rogues and vagabonds amok through the king’s Lancashire forests. In many things Sir Guy’s band was actually worse than Hood’s. Robin Hood made rough sport of those whom he robbed, but he did not attack peasants for the sake of a few farthings, nor kill unarmed travelers gratuitously, nor cause riot except for the sake of rescue, nor (so far as was known) outrage women. But the murder of Roger of Doncaster made Robin Hood so much the more odious to Dame Alice that the following summer, when she hatched the scheme of playing the two bands one against the other, it was Sir Guy whom she approached with the offer of pardon and knight’s fee for bringing her his rival’s head.
That had been a tricksome and dangerous scheme, journeying with six chosen men, in the guise of wealthy merchants, through the Lancashire forests; managing capture by Guy’s men without losing one of her own or being raped herself; bargaining in a close, malodorous cave with the unsavory renegade knight, whose coat of arms was a horse’s hide worn as cloak— and all without the knowledge of the local authorities (for she was out of her own jurisdiction and shrewdly guessed that no Lancashire sheriff, justice, or mayor would have agreed to help arrange pardon for the infamous Guy of Gisbourne).
But in the end their plans had been laid. Between his spies and her own, they finally discovered one of Robin Hood’s campsites in Barnsdale, to the north of Sherwood; though two of the sheriff’s garrison who claimed to have seen Hood well the day of the Nottingham massacre said that he himself was not there, nor could anyone spy the man seven feet tall. While Sir Guy and others reconnoitered the area, singly and in pairs, for these two chiefs, the sheriff and her posse closed in on the outlaws’ glade.
Between her own men at arms, Sir Guy’s, and a dozen from Doncaster and local manors, she had commanded almost sevenscore, although for the sake of stealth they had brought no horses into the greenwood. Taking the still drowsy camp by surprise at early dawn, they killed two outlaws in the first charge. But the rest were amazingly nimble to scatter and vanish, most of the posse in hot pursuit.
At the height of the rout, Hood’s giant had appeared at the edge of the glade. Dame Alice glanced up to see him raise his longbow, and she thought he aimed at her heart, woman’s or not.
But his bow had snapped, the arrow flying wide of her to lodge in the forehead of William a Trent at her side—a good man and one of Sir Hugh’s most trusted lieutenants.
Even as William fell, the sheriff had dashed forward, shouting for men to her aid, and between her sword and those of the half dozen who joined her, they had subdued and captured the giant and bound him fast to the nearest stout tree.
All the others, save the two slain, were escaped and gone; but this giant had long been rumored to be Hood’s chief captain and dearest friend. “Your name!” Dame Alice demanded.
He had answered with stiffnecked pride. “They do call me Little John.”
She had thought she could use him to bait a very pretty trap for his master, and in any case she guessed that John’s guilt likely equalled Robin Hood’s own in the death of her husband. “Well, Little John,” she told him, “we shall need a high gallows indeed for you, and I think that we will draw you to it on a hard hurdle over Nottingham’s cobbled streets.”
“Thou’lt fail in that,” he had replied, “if it be Christ’s will.”
Such pious cant in the mouth of a murderer had soured her own reply beyond speaking, and she might have raised her hand to strike him, but for the sound of Sir Guy’s horn, signaling that he had found and slain Robin Hood. “Ah!” she cried. “Hear that, Little John! Thy master is dead already! There will come no rescue this time.”
The man who had come into the clearing wore Sir Guy’s horsehide cloak pulled well over his face, and high on his bow’s tip he bore a head hacked and bloodied beyond all recognition. Dame Alice was all too ready to see it as that of her chief enemy. In due time she would offer Christian repentance for the unholy joy that had filled her at that sight; as yet, she could repent only that it had blinded her to the facts that the head was mutiliated out of measure and that the living man did keep his face hidden and his voice hoarsened.
“Good Sir Guy!” she had hailed him. “Well done, well done! You shall have your pardon, your knight’s fee, and gold in addition, as much as you ask and I have to give.”
“Nay, I like my present life very well,” he had rasped in reply. “All I ask is to pay yonder giant as I have paid his master.”
In her delirium of victory, not even that had waked her suspicion. Hood was dead, what further need had she for Little John? “Well, well, madman, that’s cheap enough. Go to it, then.”
Thus she herself had let him get close enough to cut the ropes, hiding what he was about by keeping his back to them. When he stepped away, the giant stood free with Sir Guy’s longbow in his hand.
A shake to throw off its bloody trophy, an arrow nocked to the string, a whizz past her ear, and the constable of Doncaster had crumpled at her side. When the supposed Guy of Gisbourne cast off his horse’s hide, stood revealed as Robin Hood, and raised his bugle to his lips, the dozen posse men who had not scattered in pursuit of the outlaws at their first rush, did not stay to see how many regrouped outlaws might answer Hood’s call. Away they fled in their turn; and Dame Alice, faced with bows to sword, was forced to follow willy-nilly.
Encountering Sir Guy, Hood had proved the better man, whether by fair fight or foul. And either he had
spies of his own, or some of his routed followers must have found him with the news of his camp attacked and favorite captain captured.
The following winter a traveling party of merchants had reported a version of the incident as it was already being sung in their parts, according to which the sheriff was Red Roger of Doncaster, revived in the popular fancy to be slain over again by Little John’s last arrow. That the shire to the west had been rid of its chief scourge was a great comfort to that part of the country, but to Dame Alice a very small and bitter consolation, the more so in that a number of Sir Guy’s former followers appeared to have swollen Master Hood’s ranks.
The summer after that, having brooded throughout the winter, she had tried one more trick: a great archery contest to be held within Nottingham town walls. The prize to be a golden arrow ... well, a silver-shafted arrow with head and feathers of the noblest metal—she could not readily afford the whole thing fashioned of solid gold ... a golden arrow after her own family’s name of Flechedor, for the ancester who had claimed, rightly or wrongly, to have shot the shaft that slew Duke Harold at Hastings. Aye, that would tempt Master Hood, to win such a symbol of victory over her and the Law for which she stood. Since he delighted in disguise, let him come again and test whether he could hoodwink her again this time.
And he had done it. On the day of the contest, full twoscore strangers appeared among the contestants, clad in every color known to the clothdyers, and ten of them each shot well enough to be the famous Robin Hood.
She could not risk arresting so many on mere suspicion, lest it provoke such another massacre as had accompanied Stutely’s infamous rescue. So she had sat and watched, and scratched her head in her efforts to remember those first two occasions when she had seen him, bearded as a madcap butcher three years ago, and unbearded but glimpsed only fleetingly in the confusion last summer. In the end, she had little choice but to award the prize to the strange archer in red who finally outshot all the others.
The Gallows in the Greenwood Page 5