Robin Hood

by Rennison, Nick

  As the century went on, the market for children’s literature gradually developed and it was the Victorian era that increasingly saw the publication of titles on Robin Hood intended solely for the young. The first of these was Stephen Percy’s Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters, published in 1841. ‘Stephen Percy’ was the pen-name of Joseph Cundall, a significant figure in the history of children’s literature, both as author and publisher, and a pioneering photographer who was one of the founders in 1853 of the Royal Photographic Society. Cundall begins his book with the simple statement that, ‘Tales of Robin Hood and his merry foresters were the delight of my boyhood’ and his aim is clearly to pass on that delight to a new generation. Passing off the stories in the volume as transcriptions of the tales he told his schoolfellows many years before, he produces a lively version of the Robin Hood of the ballads and broadsides, mixed with his own, occasional inventions.

  Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters was reprinted several times in the course of the nineteenth century and other novels for boys followed but, as the expert on Robin Hood in children’s literature Kevin Carpenter points out, ‘the number of books presenting his life and adventures for young readers in the nineteenth century is surprisingly low.’ There is a seeming paradox here. Robin was becoming a hero fit only for children and yet many children’s publishers and writers were wary of him. Given the long-lasting popularity of the outlaw hero, the exceptional growth in the market for children’s books during Victoria’s reign and the desire to find patriotic heroes for young people to admire, this is indeed strange. The possibility is that Robin made some Victorian children’s writers uncomfortable. Here was an English hero, undoubtedly, but a hero who was also an outlaw and a robber. Was he really a role model for the young?

  The solution to the apparent paradox – that Robin became a central figure in many children’s reading lives at the same time that many publishers and writers shied away from him – lies in the kind of literature in which he featured. For much of the century, Robin was as likely to be found between the covers of penny dreadfuls, jostling for space with the likes of Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin and Varney the Vampire, as he was in the pages of books hot off the presses of more respectable publishers. The 1860s saw the development of commercially successful boys’ weeklies, retailing at a penny, and an increased production of fiction, published in weekly instalments, also at a penny. The first penny-part Robin Hood novel aimed specifically at boys was George Emmett’s Robin Hood and the Outlaws of Sherwood Forest which was published in 52 weekly instalments during 1868 and 1869. Emmett’s re-telling of the story, which he claims comes from intensive research in old manuscripts and archives but actually owes most to a reading of Ritson, is lively and melodramatic. The language is full of fine-sounding archaisms (‘A malison on thee, thou knave of the blackest dye’), the narrative is full of fighting, feasting and boozing, and Robin himself is a vigorous hero, as eager to perform astonishing feats of archery as he is to battle against Norman tyranny. Curiously, Emmett sets his story in the 1260s, after Simon de Montfort’s defeat at the Battle of Evesham, a time when rivalry between Saxon and Norman was even more of an anachronism than it was in those novels, like Ivanhoe, set in the reign of Richard I.

  Over the next thirty years, Robin and His Merry Men entertained young readers in stories, usually in serial form, published in a succession of boys’ weeklies with titles like Boys of England, Young Britannia, The Young Briton and Young Men of Great Britain. As the names suggest, these might have been dismissed by harsher critics as penny dreadfuls but they were also patriotic productions, designed to inculcate a sturdy love of country in their juvenile readers. The details of these serial stories may be different – and they lent themselves to all kinds of variations and alternative versions – but the fundamental plotlines remain the same. Damsels in distress, usually but not always called Marian, are rescued; the dastardly deeds of the Normans bring down the vengeance of Robin and his men; the rich and proud are robbed and brought low; the poor and deserving are the recipients of the Merry Men’s charity. Interestingly, in a foretaste of what Robin of Sherwood was to offer a century later, many of these stories also include elements of the supernatural – woodland demons and spirits of Sherwood who provide the hero with the kind of magical assistance that Herne the Hunter does in the TV series.

  By the end of the Victorian era, the penny dreadful had run its course. New boys’ magazines had emerged to replace it, most of them published by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. In AA Milne’s memorable words, Harmsworth ‘killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller’. Dreadfuller these cheaper titles may have been but they proved less welcoming to Robin. Only a handful of outlaw stories appeared in Harmsworth titles in the Edwardian period and, although his Amalgamated Press published a Robin Hood Library immediately after the First World War, by then the fashion in boy’s weekly fiction was for school stories and tales of modern adventure rather than historical romance. In fact, during the Edwardian era and the interwar years Robin largely migrated from cheap magazines into the pages of more prestigious, hardcover books, often lavishly and skilfully illustrated. Victorian concerns about the suitability of the outlaw as a hero for the young began to disappear.

  The trend had first shown itself in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the most influential of all these more upmarket versions of the stories was actually by an American. Howard Pyle was an illustrator and author, born in Delaware in 1853. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, published in 1883, was his first great success and it has continued to attract readers for more than 125 years. It has never been out of print and it has appeared in literally hundreds of editions. Part of its appeal lies in the illustrations. Pyle was a skilled draughtsman with an ability to combine romance and realism, which was ideally suited to the depiction of adventure stories like the Robin Hood tales. One unexpected enthusiast for Pyle’s work was Vincent van Gogh who wrote in a letter to his brother Theo that he had seen some of the American’s illustrations in Harper’s Magazine and had been struck ‘dumb with admiration’. However, it is Pyle’s breezy text that really distinguishes The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from earlier books like those by Stephen Percy and George Emmett. His book still has an energy and vitality that nearly all its predecessors lack. He takes much of his material from what he calls the ‘goodly ballads of the olden time’ but he smooths down any rough edges and creates a late romantic idyll of life in the greenwood. In Pyle’s version, Robin and his men are like overgrown boys, breaking off from their feasting and fun in Sherwood only to play violent pranks on one another or on the Sheriff and his men. Women have scarcely any role to play at all. Maid Marian is mentioned only twice and is conspicuous only by her absence from the stories. Pyle’s book is also a relentlessly cheery re-telling of the tales (seldom has any text made such frequent use of the word ‘merry’ in a few hundred pages) and it is written in the kind of faux medieval language that was common enough in historical fiction of the period. Thees, thous and thys are scattered throughout the chapters, people rarely simply ‘say’ anything but ‘quoth’ regularly and ‘God wot’ is the interjection of choice. None of this gets in the way of Pyle’s ability to tell a story. His tales of Robin are, quite simply, enormous fun and it is not difficult, reading them today, to understand why they have proved so successful. His bestseller was not, of course, the first book about Robin Hood published in the USA but it played a hugely significant role in the adoption by Americans of the English outlaw as, in some way, a cultural hero of their own. It is impossible to imagine Robin Hood in the twentieth century without the versions of his story produced in America and it is almost equally impossible to imagine that most of them would have come into existence had it not been for the popularity of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Without Howard Pyle’s book, there would probably have been no Hollywood films about Robin.

  Other artists and writers in the USA followed in Pyle’s pioneerin
g tracks. J. Walker McSpadden’s Stories of Robin Hood and His Merry Outlaws, published in 1904, also made extensive use of the old ballads and indeed prefaced each chapter with a quote, in updated English, from one of them. Louis Rhead was an English-born illustrator who settled in New York in his twenties and went on to become a naturalised US citizen. His Bold Robin Hood and his Outlaw Band was published in 1912. Paul Creswick’s Robin Hood, which appeared five years later, had illustrations by NC Wyeth, perhaps the best-known graduate of the art school Pyle had established in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware and the father of Andrew Wyeth, one of twentieth-century America’s most admired painters. Charlotte Harding, who provided the illustrations for Robin Hood: His Book by the then well-known children’s writer Eva March Tappan in 1903, was another artist who had studied with Pyle in Wilmington.

  Meanwhile, back in Britain, the last flickers of nineteenth-century romanticism’s interest in Robin Hood could still be glimpsed in the work of some Edwardian writers. John Drinkwater wrote a short play entitled Robin Hood and the Pedlar and Alfred Noyes produced a number of poems on the subject of the outlaw. Noyes’s fame has not lasted, although many will know his narrative poem of 1906 entitled ‘The Highwayman’, but the best of his Robin Hood poems, called simply ‘Sherwood’, is a spirited exercise in nostalgia in which the poet imagines the heroes of the greenwood returning to life in the contemporary forest. He also wrote a play about Robin, first published in 1911, entitled Sherwood or Robin Hood and the Three Kings. This is an odd exercise in pseudo-Shakespearean, or perhaps more accurately pseudo-Tennysonian, blank verse in which the outlaw leader and his merry men share the stage with Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen familiar from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Robin is once again identified as the Earl of Huntingdon. The Sheriff of Nottingham becomes a minor character and the chief villains in Noyes’s drama are Prince John and his mother Queen Elinor. The prince lusts after Maid Marian while the queen schemes and plots against Robin. In the final act, both Robin and Marian die at Kirklees Priory, victims of their royal enemies, but they are last seen, triumphing over death, as they join Titania and Oberon in their immortal fairyland. The play now seems a strange marriage of very different legends of the greenwood but it was staged several times in the years just before and just after the First World War. It must have struck some sort of chord with his contemporaries.

  Although it may not be always apparent reading them today, Drinkwater and Noyes were aiming their works at adults but nearly all the other authors of the period who produced Robin Hood tales wrote them for children. In most people’s minds, Robin was firmly established by the early twentieth century as a subject fit only for juvenile literature. Books with titles like Robin Hood and His Merry Outlaws and Tales of the Greenwood began to proliferate and most of the major publishers for children had at least one Robin Hood book on their lists. Some of these Edwardian-era volumes have had surprisingly long lives. Henry Gilbert’s Robin Hood and the Men of the Greenwood, originally published in 1912, was still in bookshops as a ‘Wordsworth Children’s Classic’ in the 1990s. New children’s books about Robin continued to appear regularly in the interwar years. Charles Henry Cannell, a prolific English author of all kinds of genre fiction from detective stories to ‘lost world’ novels, published a re-telling of the tales in 1927 under one of his many pen-names, E. Charles Vivian. Carola Oman, daughter of the military historian Sir Charles Oman, wrote a volume on the outlaw for JM Dent’s Children’s Classics series in 1937 which was still being reprinted decades later. A far better writer than either Cannell or Oman also took an idiosyncratic interest in the legends. With a blithe disregard for even a semblance of historical accuracy TH White included Robin Hood in his Arthurian novel The Sword in the Stone, first published in 1938. Under the name of Robin Wood, the outlaw is one of those figures encountered by the young Arthur during his education by the wizard Merlin.

  Perhaps the most interesting of all these inter-war versions of the stories is Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease, first published in 1934. Like many young writers in the 1930s, Trease was on the left and his radical sympathies are very clear in what was his first novel. The narrative follows Dickon, a teenage boy who kills one of the king’s deer and flees into Sherwood Forest. There he joins Robin Hood and is present as the outlaw leader organises a large-scale peasants’ revolt against the oppression of the local lord Sir Rolf D’Eyncourt and others of his ilk. At times the book reads almost like left-wing propaganda. When he lectures his merry men on the virtues of equality (‘All men are equal in the forest… They should be equal in the whole world. They should work for themselves and for each other – not for some master set over them.’) Robin Hood sounds less like a hero of the greenwood and more like an eloquent member of the Nottingham Communist Party in full flow. It is no great surprise to learn that the book was immensely popular in the Soviet Union and that Trease was able to spend five months travelling there in 1935 on the strength of his Russian royalties. What rescues Bows Against the Barons from tedious didacticism is the narrative skill and vivid writing which Trease went on to demonstrate in more than a hundred other historical novels over the course of a literary career that lasted into the 1990s. Whatever one thinks about his first book, it’s all very different from Enid Blyton who, perhaps surprisingly, also produced a version of the Robin Hood stories in the 1930s.

  After the Second World War, Robin’s continuing popularity, combined with the release of the Disney film and the screening of the Richard Greene series, meant that there was no shortage of new children’s books about the outlaw. Some were directly based on the movie or the TV series and were often illustrated by stills. Others were more substantial and imaginative works. One of the very earliest books written by the historian Antonia Fraser, now known for biographies of Cromwell and Mary, Queen of Scots and for her memoir of her marriage to Harold Pinter, was a re-telling of the Robin Hood stories. Published under her maiden name of Antonia Pakenham in 1955, this appeared in a new edition in 1971 with illustrations by her then teenage daughter Rebecca, now a biographer and historian herself. Rosemary Sutcliff is most famous as the author of The Eagle of the Ninth, a story set in Roman Britain that was recently made into a film, but her first published book, appearing in 1950, was The Chronicles of Robin Hood. Commissioned by Oxford University Press after an editor there had seen a manuscript of Celtic legends Sutcliff had submitted to the publisher, this is a fine version of the traditional stories, much enhanced by the illustrations of C. Walter Hodges. The most influential of 1950s books about Robin, largely because it was in print so long as a Puffin and a Puffin Classic, was Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. For several generations of British children, this was the book that was most likely to provide them with their introduction to the stories. It is a conventional but skilful re-working of the old ballads into narratives suitable for children. Lancelyn Green was a friend of CS Lewis, whose biography he wrote, and a member of the Oxford literary group the Inklings, which also included JRR Tolkien amongst its members. As a writer he came to specialise in the re-telling of myths and legends for younger readers and his bibliography also includes titles on Arthurian stories, Greek myths, Ancient Egyptian mythology and stories of the Norse Gods. His Robin is rooted in a real medieval world but Green also emphasises the hero’s mythic status as a champion of the poor and exemplar of justice and fairness.

  Throughout the second half of the last century, Robin continued to thrive in children’s books. Film and TV versions of the story, such as Disney’s feature-length cartoon of 1973 and the Robin of Sherwood series in the 1980s, provided the pegs on which publishers could hang new volumes but they really needed no excuse. Robin, still one of the most immediately recognisable figures from English folklore or history, could be relied upon to return any investment made in books about him. Story books, picture books, easy reading books with simplified vocabulary, audiobooks, Robin Hood annuals, books in which characters from the Muppets took t
he parts of the heroes of Sherwood, role-playing game-books – all appeared at some time in the seventies and eighties. Even during the last twenty years, when the children’s market has become so competitive and so dominated by fantasy, Robin has certainly not vanished. And some of the most admired writers for children in recent decades have produced their own versions of his story. Michael Morpurgo, Children’s Laureate between 2003 and 2005, published Robin of Sherwood in 1996. This is a clever re-working of the legend which begins in the present when a young blind boy discovers a medieval skull that has been brought to the surface of the earth in the aftermath of a storm. As he handles it, the boy is thrown back into a vision of the past in which he has become Robin, an outcast fighting for survival in the forest. Monica Furlong’s Robin’s Country from 1994 tells the story from the point of view of a mute orphan boy who stumbles on the outlaws’ camp after he is driven into Sherwood by the cruelty of his master.

  For much of the last century, then, Robin was seen as a character suited only to juvenile literature. The total number of Robin Hood titles aimed at children ran into the hundreds. The number intended to be read primarily by adults was negligible. One of the very few was The Good Yeomen by the American historian and novelist Jay Williams which was first published in 1948. Told from the point of view of Little John, a blacksmith who kills a man and flees into the forest where he encounters Robin, this is a book which neatly intertwines reworked material from the ballads, particularly the Gest, and the author’s own inventions, most notably a female character named Lady Agnes with whom both Robin and John fall in love. However, in recent decades, the unwritten rule that Robin Hood is suitable only for younger readers has changed. Since about 1980, all kinds of new versions of the outlaw leader have begun to appear in fiction written for adult readers. Robin has been reinvented in a succession of different guises. Most of these novels of the last three decades have fallen, unsurprisingly, into the broad category of historical fiction, although there have been Robin stories that fit more readily into other genres. And there have been two very noticeable trends in Robin Hood fiction. Firstly, some writers, nearly all women, have found imaginative means to reinterpret the legends from a feminist standpoint. This has usually, although not always, involved the transformation and adaptation of the character of Maid Marian. Secondly, there have been writers, nearly all men, who have overturned the idea of the outlaw as chivalric hero and presented Robin in their fiction as an amoral, even thuggish figure.