However, this Yorkshire fugitive is only one of a number of men with the name of ‘Robert Hod’ or something very similar that diligent researchers have unearthed in medieval records. There is a ‘Robert Hod’ who was a servant of a Gloucestershire abbot. He was in trouble in the reign of King John after killing one Ralf of Cirencester. Another ‘Robert Hod’ was among rebels supporting Simon de Montfort who took refuge on the Isle of Ely in the 1260s. Two more Yorkshire Robert Hods fell foul of the law, one in the 1250s and one in the following decade. Move on to the fourteenth century and there is a ‘Robyn Hod’ serving as an archer in a garrison on the Isle of Wight and yet another ‘Robert Hod’ who was imprisoned for stealing venison in the Forest of Rockingham in Northamptonshire in 1354. There are strong arguments against particular Robert Hods being the original of the legendary Robin Hood. The Rockingham thief, for example, is far too close in date to the first mention of Robin Hood ballads in Piers Plowman in 1377 for there to have been time for the ballad stories to develop. The Gloucestershire murderer is too geographically distant from the familiar settings of Sherwood and Barnsdale to make him a likely candidate. However, there is a general argument against all of them in that, because of the limited nature of the records, there is no evidence to link any of them with the activities ascribed to Robin Hood in the earliest stories. Even Robert Hod/Hobbehod from the 1220s, who is specifically described as a ‘fugitive’ and who might seem the best of these candidates, cannot be directly connected with the traditional Robin. The evidence is simply not there and it is never likely to be.
This has not stopped writers regularly stepping forward with new theories about Robin Hood’s identity. Nottingham author Jim Lees has suggested that Robert de Kyme, the eldest son of a minor lord named William de Kyme, who was outlawed for robbery in the 1220s had a career that paralleled some of the events in the Gest. Unfortunately, Lees’s ideas are severely compromised by his continued reliance, to some extent, on the long-discredited pedigree produced by William Stukeley in the 1740s. Lees believes that Stukeley was on to something; most Robin Hood scholars very definitely do not. Another author from the area most associated with the outlaw, Tony Molyneux-Smith, has come up with a theory that Robin Hood was not an individual but a pseudonym adopted by successive generations of the Foliot family from north Nottinghamshire. His book, Robin Hood and the Lords of Wellow, is a short and intriguing read but falls a long way short of proving his case.
Yet a further candidate who has come to the fore in recent years is Roger Godberd. Godberd was undoubtedly a medieval outlaw, a man who had served under Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and suffered as a consequence of being on the losing side. He also had connections with Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. As David Baldwin, Godberd’s most persuasive advocate, writes in his 2010 book Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked, there are certainly ‘several quite striking parallels between what is known of Roger Godberd’s deeds and the earliest ballads’. One of the strengths of Baldwin’s argument is that he makes no outrageous claims on its behalf. He does not state definitively that Godberd is the one and only real Robin. ‘The character of Robin Hood,’ he admits, ‘has drawn on many sources over the centuries (and continues to do so)’ but, he continues, ‘there are enough similarities to conclude that Roger’s career lies at the heart of it.’
There has even been a recent theory that Robin was a Templar. Some unkind souls, when hearing of this, might be reminded of the quote from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which states that a lunatic can always be identified, among other ways, ‘by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars’ but, in fact, the case for Robin the Templar is not an unreasonable one. The argument, put forward in books like John Paul Davis’s Robin Hood: The Unknown Templar is that Robin and his men, in the ballads, show many characteristics which suggest they are Templars escaped to the safety of the greenwood after the often violent dissolution of the order in the first two decades of the fourteenth century. Like members of a Christian military religious order, the Merry Men combine piety with martial skills. They obey one master, Robin Hood, and the ballads indicate that most of them were outlawed together. None appears to be married and indeed women seem to play no part in their lives. Their robberies are designed not to profit themselves as individuals but to contribute to a common fund. They show kindness to one another and to the poor but something approaching contempt for government officials and the richer members of the Church. Superficially the argument is quite appealing but it founders again on the rocky fact that there is no hard documentary evidence for a link between the theory and any of the early stories of Robin Hood. In the unavoidable absence of this, all is speculation. To some, it may seem highly plausible speculation; to others, it is much less so. But it remains speculation. So do all the attempts to identify a real man behind the mask of Robin Hood. The mythical Robin, the Robin of books and films and computer games, lives on and shows few signs of ever dying. The real Robin, if he ever existed, has been sadly lost to history and there is very little likelihood that he will ever be rescued from time’s oblivion.
Robin in Literature
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Robin Hood began his literary life in ballads of the late Middle Ages. At roughly the same time, he became established as a character in the May Games which took place throughout the country to welcome the arrival of summer. Both forms, the ballad and the mumming play, were ephemeral. The Robin Hood folk plays were local rituals, rarely written down and even more rarely preserved for later generations to read. The ballads may have been printed but they were not intended to survive for posterity. They were entertainments of and for the moment. Their writers would be astonished if they could know that some of their productions are still being read and studied four and five centuries after they first appeared in print. It was only in the latter half of the sixteenth century that Robin Hood began to figure in more conventional literature. Writers who were familiar with the stories from the ballads and the games started to include Robin in their own works.
It is a pity that the greatest of English playwrights never chose to write about the greatest of English outlaws. Shakespeare clearly knew the tales and the characters who populated them. There is a throwaway reference to ‘the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar’ in Two Gentlemen of Verona and another in Henry IV Part Two when Justice Silence, boozily crooning to himself, sings of ‘Robin Hood, Scarlet and John’. In As You Like It, in many ways a tale of the greenwood without its most familiar inhabitants, the duke is compared to the outlaw. ‘They say he is already in the Forest of Arden,’ a character remarks in the very first scene, ‘and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.’ In Shakespeare’s mind, Robin is clearly associated with a kind of forest Arcadia. However, Stratford’s greatest son did not make use of the legend in any more extensive way.
In fact, only two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries produced dramatic works that have survived in which Robin Hood is one of the principal characters. (There is evidence of other plays that are no longer extant. A ‘pastorall plesant commedie’ called Robin Hood and Little John, for example, is entered in the Stationers Register in 1594 but has been lost. There are also plays such as George A Greene by Robert Greene and Look About You, written by an anonymous author and printed in 1600, in which Robin appears in a subsidiary role.) The first was Anthony Munday, a prolific author of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, who is credited with the writing of two plays entitled The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington. In truth, these plays, like so many of the dramas of the period, may well have had more than one author. The diary of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe records that he paid Munday £5 for a Robin Hood play in February 1598 but a later entry indicates that another playwright Henry Chettle was paid a further 10s for ‘the mending
of the first parte of Robart Hoode’. Presumably the two plays that we have were, in some sense, collaborative works, although there is no doubt that Munday produced much more of the text than Chettle and it is his name that is usually associated with them. Both works were printed in 1601. The first of them, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, is notable for the fact that its hero, the man who becomes known as Robin Hood, is a dispossessed aristocrat. The idea of the outlaw as a wronged nobleman is very familiar in later works, from nineteenth-century novels to twentieth-century films, but here is its first appearance in a work of art. The earliest hints that Robin might have been something other than a yeoman appear decades before The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington – in the work of the historian John Major and in the 1569 Chronicle at Large by Richard Grafton, a printer and scholar, who summarised what Major had said and then went on to report, ‘In an olde and auncient Pamphlet I finde this written of the sayd Robert Hood. This man (sayth he) discended of a nobel parentage: or rather beyng of a base stocke and linage, was for his manhoode and chivalry advaunced to the noble dignitie of an Erle.’ However, it was Munday who first introduced the notion into a work of the imagination and he was the first to provide his hero with the title of the ‘Earl of Huntington’.
The Downfall is not a particularly good play and it is only remembered today because of its subject matter. It opens with a curious scene in which Munday pretends that what we are about to see is written not by him but by the earlier Tudor poet John Skelton who is also supposed to be playing the role of Friar Tuck. Once this conceit is established and the main action of the drama is underway, Munday wastes no time in despatching his hero into exile in Sherwood. When he gets him there, however, he seems unsure what to do with him. The new gentrified Robin can’t be seen indulging in the activities of the old yeoman Robin of the ballads. He can’t rob and kill and persecute churchmen and noblemen in quite the same way when he now comes, like them, from the upper stratum of society. In the ballads, there was a class antagonism between the outlaw and his victims. In Munday’s plays he comes from the same social group as his enemies and the confrontation between them must be based on personal feelings rather than class tensions. The result is that the story of Robin as outlaw and the romance between him and Marian, identified by Munday as the daughter of Lord Fitzwalter, becomes entangled with plotting and conspiracy between the noblemen surrounding Prince John. The Downfall must have been a successful play at the time since there was sufficient demand for a sequel to be written but The Death provides even less scope for the outlaw hero. In fact, Munday kills him off early in the drama (giving him an improbably extended death scene) and turns his attention to the tribulations of the bereaved Marian.
The second playwright of the period to approach the legend was Ben Jonson. Author of satirical comedies such as Volpone and The Alchemist, Jonson is often considered the most gifted of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The Sad Shepherd, or A Tale of Robin Hood was his last play, unfinished at his death in 1637. We have been left with two acts and a few scenes from what would eventually have been a five-act drama. In The Sad Shepherd almost all sense of Robin as a genuine outlaw and robber has been banished. In its place is Robin Hood as gentle and genteel lord of the forest, planning to preside over feasting and festivities for his followers. He welcomes his ‘friends and neighbours to the jolly bower’ and ‘to the greenwood walks’. He invites them to ‘awake/The nimble hornpipe and the timburine/And mix our songs and dances in the wood’. He acts like the courtly host of upper-class revels. Here too is Robin as devoted lover who spends far more time kissing and embracing Marian than he does engaging in the less lawful pursuits of a traditional outlaw. The celebrations in the forest are interrupted, and the play’s plot set in motion, by two events. One is the arrival of Eglamour, the Sad Shepherd of the title, who believes that his lover Earine has fallen into the Trent near the mill belonging to Much’s father and has been drowned. The other is the interference of a witch who disguises herself as Marian in order to abuse Robin and harass him and his guests. It is difficult to know where Jonson planned to take his play (although it was completed and staged in the late eighteenth century by an actor/writer named Francis Waldron) but what we have demonstrates that he had problems with the material. Once Robin is so thoroughly gentrified and taken away from the illegal and violent activities that fuel the narratives of the ballads, there is not a lot for him to do. In The Sad Shepherd, the figure that provides the play with its subtitle is in danger of being shunted into the background. Even his responsibilities for slaying the deer to feed his guests are passed on to Marian.
It was not just dramatists of the Jacobean and Caroline eras who were drawn to the stories of Robin Hood. As we have seen, anonymous scribblers continued to produce ballads, often naïve in language and versification, throughout the period but more sophisticated poets also began to recognise Robin’s significance and to include him in their work. Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion was first published in 1612, although the poet had been working on it since the late 1590s. The book is a huge poem which attempts to describe successively all the counties of England and Wales. Drayton imagines assorted topographical features (rivers, valleys, hills) boasting in verse of the traditions and myths associated with them and, in the section of his work about Nottinghamshire, Sherwood Forest itself sings of the exploits of the famous outlaw who lived there. Drayton assumes universal knowledge of Robin Hood and writes that, ‘In this our spacious isle, I think there is not one/But he hath heard some talk of him and Little John’. He knows how extensive and wide-ranging the stories are (‘The merry pranks he played, would ask an age to tell/And the adventures strange that Robin Hood befell’) and he knows that one of the fundamental differences between Robin and other outlaws was his generosity and charity. ‘What often times he tooke,’ he writes, ‘he shar’d amongst the poor.’
Twenty years after Polyolbion was published and a few years before Jonson set about working on The Sad Shepherd, a man named Martin Parker produced what was probably the most substantial work on Robin in the ballad tradition since the Gest one hundred and thirty years earlier. Parker was a professional ballad writer living in London. Records suggest that he may also have been an inn-keeper. Where anonymity hides the identities of most of those who produced the broadsides of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his name was attached to A True Tale of Robin Hood, a poem of nearly five hundred lines that was first published in the 1630s and reprinted more than fifty years later. His work is a kind of fusion of the stories from several ballads into one narrative and was clearly aimed at a slightly more upmarket audience than the cheap, single-sheet broadsides sold on the streets and at fairs. The poem also shows clear signs that Parker knew Munday’s two plays and borrowed the idea of an aristocratic Robin from them. Parker’s Robin, like Munday’s, is the one-time Earl of Huntington. Exiled to the forest for debt, he takes to outlawry with enthusiasm. His hatred for religious figures (‘His chiefest spight to the clergie was’) does not seem initially unusual and Parker’s highlighting of his hero’s anti-clerical credentials is unsurprising in an era which had little time for Catholic clergy, past or present. What is rather eye-catching is his casual reference to Robin castrating monks and friars (‘Their stones [testicles] he made them leese [lose]’), a habit that no other ballad records. As a means of preventing clerical lechery and the fathering of bastard children, which the author claims was Robin’s intention, it seems a bit extreme. In fact, as the poem progresses, Parker places more and more emphasis primarily on the outlaw’s opposition to ‘th’crewell clergie’ and twists himself into knots trying to portray him as no real threat to state or rightful king. He ‘never practised any thing/Against the common wealth’, he assures his readers. His eagerness to assert the truth of the tales he is reporting is matched only by his desire to stress how impossible it would be for such lawlessness to take place now. ‘We that live in these latter dayes/Of civill government,’ he comments, ‘have a hundred
wayes/Such outlaws to prevent’. It all seems a little odd until one remembers that Parker was writing in an age when disobedience to the powers that be was no laughing matter. Charles I was on the throne and the Civil War was only a decade away when he published his True Tale of Robin Hood. An outlaw was an ambivalent hero even for a popular ballad and Parker, clearly more royalist than roundhead in the making, produced a Robin Hood tale for his time.
Equally rooted in its era is a strange little play published thirty years later than Parker’s work, after all the upheavals of the Civil War, Cromwell’s rule and the restoration of the king in 1660. Only just over 150 lines long and entitled Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers, the play, according to the title page of the edition printed in 1661, was ‘acted at Nottingham on the day of His Sacred Majesties Corronation’. It shows Robin’s acknowledgement of past crimes and acceptance of a pardon as a counterpart to the submission of former rebels to the new authority of the restored Charles II.
Robin Hood Page 4