Robin Hood

by Rennison, Nick

  The first record of Tuck in a ballad has to wait until the seventeenth century, although ‘Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar’ may well have existed in earlier versions that have not survived. In it, Robin forces a friar at Fountains Abbey to carry him on his back across a stream. When they are halfway across, the friar hurls his passenger into the water and the two launch themselves on a fight which only ends when Robin, impressed by his foe’s valour, invites him to join the Merry Men. In the ballad, the friar is never named as Tuck but the story has nonetheless become the most familiar of all those involving the fat cleric and it makes an appearance in many of the books and films perpetuating the legend in the last century and a half. (It probably owes much of its popularity to Howard Pyle’s use of it in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.)

  In the nineteenth century, Friar Tuck became firmly established as a crucial character in the stories. He appears in Ivanhoe under the guise of the ebullient Clerk of Copmanhurst and in Peacock’s novel Maid Marian as the title character’s spiritual adviser. Ironically, as the Robin Hood stories, in the course of the century, became more and more firmly associated with the reign of Richard the Lionheart, Tuck became, in effect, an almost ever-present anachronism. He nearly always had a role to play but, since mendicant friars did not appear in England until well after Richard I’s reign, he shouldn’t really have been around to take it. However, few people seem to have been bothered by the historical inaccuracy and, when the movie versions of Robin’s story began to appear, Tuck proved once again an essential element. In nearly all the adaptations of the Robin Hood story that have appeared on screen, he has been portrayed as a fat, ale-loving bon vivant and the actors who have taken the role, from Eugene Pallette in the 1938 film to Mike McShane in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, have all tended to be almost as notable for their girth as for their thespian talents. The one significant exception to the rule that Friar Tuck should be played as plump and jolly is the casting of black actor David Harewood as a version of the character in the third season of the recent BBC TV series.

  Maid Marian

  Everyone knows that Robin Hood has his Maid Marian but the close association between the two of them is actually more recent than many people suspect. Like Friar Tuck, Marian is conspicuous by her absence from the Gest and the early ballads and it seems almost certain that she was first paired with Robin in the May Games. In turn, scholars have traced her character in these folk dramas back to an old French tradition of a shepherdess called Marion who had her own Robin, a shepherd rather than an outlaw. Le Jeu de Robin et Marion by a poet named Adam de la Halle, for example, dates from the late thirteenth century. Somehow, knowledge of the character and her link with another character named Robin made the journey across the Channel and was incorporated into the performances of the May Games.

  Yet the association was not necessarily fixed. Even as late as the first decade of the sixteenth century, one Alexander Barclay could write of ‘some merry fytte of Maid Marian or else of Robin Hood’ which suggests that he saw them as belonging to two different narratives. Move forward another century and a half, and ballads were being printed in which Robin had a lady love, indeed a wife, but her name was not Marian. In ‘Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage’, Robin engages in a rather coy but successful courtship of a feisty, buck-hunting young woman named Clorinda and the same name was used in some of the ballad operas of the eighteenth century. ‘Robin Hood and Maid Marian’ is the only ballad in which the outlaw’s lover plays a part under her familiar name. It dates from the second half of the seventeenth century and reads as if it was written as a deliberate attempt to create a place in the ballad tradition for a character who was already known from other literary genres. Anthony Munday had included her in his play The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington in the 1590s where he makes Robin’s love ‘chaste Matilda, the Lord Fitzwater’s daughter’, and ‘afterwardes his faire Maide Marian’. It may well be significant that ‘Robin Hood and Maid Marian’ is one of the very few ballads which gentrify Robin. It too refers to him as the Earl of Huntington. Telling a tale in which she ventures into the greenwood dressed as a page boy and fights with a disguised Robin, it provides an early example of Maid Marian as a mettlesome and independent woman.

  It was the nineteenth century that turned Marian into a rather insipid love interest, pushed to the background while Robin and the Merry Men engaged in fighting, feasting and male bonding. In some of the most influential interpretations of the old stories, she has no role at all to play. As noted previously, Howard Pyle chose to exclude her from his book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood altogether, apart from the briefest of passing mentions. The relegation of Marian to decorative supporting player, or less, continued when film became the principal means of telling the story. Even in the Warner Brothers movie of 1938, Olivia de Havilland is little more than a pretty prize to reward Errol Flynn’s Robin for his swashbuckling heroics. It is only in on-screen performances in the last decade, such as Lucy Griffiths’ in the 2006 BBC series and Cate Blanchett’s in the 2010 Ridley Scott film, and in the deliberately feminist novels of the last twenty years like Jennifer Roberson’s Lady of the Forest and Robin McKinley’s The Outlaws of Sherwood, that Marian regains the spirit and vitality she originally had. However, perhaps the most improbable of all incarnations of Maid Marian is also one of the most recent. Supermodel Kate Moss fetchingly donned a forester’s outfit but struggled to give conviction to her handful of lines when she appeared in a cameo role as Robin’s sweetheart in the 1999 time-travel comedy Blackadder: Back and Forth.

  Will Scarlet

  Will Scarlet is one of the first of the merry men, associated with Robin from the very earliest ballads. In the Gest, he assists in the capture of Sir Richard at the Lee, although the name is given there as Will Scarlock. Indeed, Will is the merry man whose name seems most flexible. He appears regularly in other ballads but under such various identities as Will Scathelocke, Will Scadlock and Will Scatheloke. This has caused nothing but confusion in later versions of the story. Anthony Munday, in his plays of the 1590s, featured both a Scarlet and a Scathlocke as half-brothers. Three hundred years later, Howard Pyle also made them two separate individuals. To add to the complications surrounding the character, Will Stutely, who is one of the merry men in several ballads, and appears both in Pyle’s book and in plenty of other re-tellings, may well be no more than yet another corrupted variant of Will Scarlet’s name.

  The ballad ‘Robin Hood and Will Scarlet’ provides a story to explain Will’s arrival in Sherwood. Robin is walking in the forest when he meets ‘a deft young man’ whose ‘stockings like scarlet shone’. The young man is hunting deer with his bow and, when he downs a buck with a particularly good shot, Robin offers him a place among the merry men. The young man turns down the opportunity and the two men fight. Robin is getting the worst of it when he asks his opponent about himself. The stranger replies that his name is Young Gamwell and that he has come to the woods to seek out his uncle whom some call Robin Hood. Robin owns up to being that very man and the two of them throw down their arms and embrace. When Little John arrives on the scene, eager as ever for a scrap, Robin acknowledges Young Gamwell as ‘my own dear sister’s son’. He tells John that the newcomer ‘shall be a bold yeoman of mine/My chief man next to thee’ and that ‘Scarlet he shall be’, presumably because of the colour of his stockings. Although this is not one of the early ballads and its narrative is no more than a variant on a recurring one in which Robin encounters a stranger in the forest who ends up as a member of his band, the story has been used in many re-tellings over the centuries.

  Most of the film and TV versions of the story find room for Will Scarlet in the cast. In the Errol Flynn movie of 1938, David Niven was originally pencilled in to play the role but he was holidaying in England at the time of filming and the job eventually went to Patric Knowles. More recently, Christian Slater in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a Will Scarlet who turns out to be Robin’s brother.
(The tradition of making Will some kind of relation of Robin, established in the seventeenth-century ballad, has continued.) On TV, Paul Eddington, later famous for The Good Life and Yes, Minister, appeared as Will in the fourth series of the 1950s series. A young Ray Winstone, playing an inexplicably Cockney Will, gave what is still the most energetic and vigorous of all onscreen portrayals of the character in Robin of Sherwood.

  The Sheriff of Nottingham

  The Sheriff was established as Robin’s chief antagonist in the earliest of the ballads, appearing in the Gest (in which the outlaw eventually kills him and strikes off his head) and in others such as ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and ‘Robin Hood and Sir Guy of Gisborne’. Just as many historians have pursued the will-of-the-wisp figure of the ‘real’ Robin Hood, so various attempts have been made to identify an actual Sheriff of Nottingham, present in the historical record, who could have been the outlaw’s great enemy. One of the names most frequently cited is that of Philip Mark who was Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire from 1209 to 1224 but other candidates (Roger de Lacy, William Brewer, Eustace of Lowdham) have also had their advocates. In truth, the Sheriff is important only insofar as he represents the corrupt authority against which Robin and his men are fighting. His ‘real’ identity is almost irrelevant.

  In literature, the character has occasionally lost the prominence he had in the early ballads. Some writers have ignored him altogether. However, from the late nineteenth century onwards, most children’s versions of the stories have identified him as the chief villain. In the movies and on TV, the Sheriff has sometimes been ignored in favour of other bad guys (in the 1938 film, Basil Rathbone’s virile Guy of Gisbourne completely overshadows Melville Cooper’s wimpish and cowardly Sheriff) but he has also been played on a number of occasions with considerable style and panache. Villains are often much more satisfying to play than heroes and, over the years, the Sheriff has provided a number of actors with the ideal opportunity to enjoy themselves in the depiction of cold-hearted cynicism and nastiness. Nickolas Grace in Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s and Keith Allen in the recent BBC Robin Hood series have great fun with the character. The most memorable, if also the most bizarre, delineation of the Sheriff of Nottingham on screen is undoubtedly that of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

  However, even the villainous Sheriff is not entirely beyond fictional rehabilitation. In 1992, the American writer Richard Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his non-fiction, published a novel which turned the legend on its head and made the Sheriff the embattled and misunderstood hero of his narrative. The outlaw Robin Hood is only peripheral to the story. The Sheriff of Nottingham focuses on the real historical figure of Philip Mark, and Kluger makes him a protagonist of genuine moral complexity. Faced with the difficulties of an embezzling servant and an unfaithful wife, the Sheriff is for once the character who gains our sympathies.

  Alan a Dale

  The minstrel Alan-a-Dale is a relatively late addition to the Merry Men, appearing for the first time in a seventeenth-century ballad entitled ‘Robin Hood and Allin a Dale’. After first taking his bow as a cheery young man who did ‘frisk it over the plain/And chanted a roundelay’, Alan is a thwarted lover when seen the next day by Robin and his men. The woman he loves is being forced against her will to marry an elderly knight. The outlaws take a liking to Alan and agree to help him, invading the church where the marriage is taking place and making sure that the girl weds her true love. Alan-a-Dale was soon established as a regular member of the outlaw band and he has featured in most of the versions of the legend, both in print and on the screen, in the last century and a half. He has usually been relegated to the role of supporting player, although the ballad story of his love and marriage is repeated, with variations, in many of the children’s Robin Hood books published in the twentieth century. In two re-tellings in different media in the last decade, he has been more prominent than usual. As played by Joe Armstrong in the 2006 BBC series, he has lost all his musical ability and become a small-time thief. He claims to come from Rochdale (hence his name) and joins the outlaws after Robin rescues him from hanging. With the unfolding of the story, he becomes a more complex character than the cheery songsmith most frequently portrayed. He turns traitor to his fellow merry men at one point before later returning to the fold and his internal debate about where his true loyalties lie provides the motive force behind the plots of several episodes. In Angus Donald’s novel Outlaw and its sequels, Alan is the narrator of the book and, although he retains his minstrel skills, he is also a warrior who travels to the Holy Land with Robin and wreaks much bloody havoc there.

  Much the Miller’s Son

  Like Little John and Will Scarlet, Much the Miller’s Son is named as one of Robin’s followers in the earliest of the ballads. In the Gest, he is present at the capture of Sir Richard at the Lee and takes part in the archery contest. In ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, a ballad notable for the casual violence shown by Robin and his men, Much kills a page boy in order to prevent him bearing witness to the murder of the monk of the title. He is sometimes called ‘Midge’ in other ballads and it is this name that Howard Pyle appropriates for use in one of the stories in his 1883 book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Much is more or less ever present in film and TV versions of the Robin Hood legend, although he rarely has a major role to play. In any scene involving the Merry Men, he is usually the one on the edge of the group, grinning gormlessly and awaiting his opportunity to deliver the one or two lines the scriptwriter has allotted him. The exceptions to this rule are two TV series. In Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s, Much (played by Peter Llewellyn Williams) is the simple-minded son of the miller who takes in Robin when he is a boy and he becomes a kind of foster brother in regular need of Robin’s protection. In the more recent BBC series, Much is no longer a miller’s son but has been transformed by the writers into Robin’s manservant and fellow fighter in the Crusades. Played by Sam Troughton (grandson of Patrick Troughton who was the very first TV Robin in 1953), he is portrayed as both comic relief and the outlaw leader’s closest and most loyal comrade. Adam Thorpe takes the story from ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ as the basis for some of the pivotal events in his 2009 novel Hodd and the narrator of the newly-discovered medieval manuscript at the heart of the book turns out to be Much, although the character is very different from the traditional portrait of him. In the last few years, Much has also taken centre stage in an award-winning webcomic by Steve LeCouilliard. Although Robin can never remember his name correctly (‘This is Mike the Mule-Skinner’, he says, introducing him to the rest of the gang), Much becomes one of the merry men, nursing an unrequited passion for Maid Marian and being forced by Will Scarlet into a succession of improbable money-making schemes that usually end with him standing on the Sheriff of Nottingham’s gallows, awaiting a last-minute rescue.

  Sir Guy of Gisbourne

  Introduced in the early ballad usually entitled ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’, this character is the most frequently named of Robin’s opponents other than the Sheriff of Nottingham. His name probably derives from either the village known today as Gisburn, once in the West Riding of Yorkshire but now in Lancashire, or possibly Guisborough in the North Riding. In the ballad, Sir Guy is a bounty hunter who has been hired by the Sheriff to track down Robin. The outlaw leader chances upon him in Sherwood, curiously clad in a horse’s hide outfit (a detail that has suggested to some scholars that the character entered the Robin Hood story from an older narrative tradition involving ritual disguise), and the two men fight. Robin kills Guy and mutilates his body. Although he is a corpse at the end of the ballad, Sir Guy has been resurrected many times over the years and he has often played the part of Robin’s brutish rival for the love of Maid Marian.

  He is regularly portrayed in film and TV versions of the stories. Occasionally, as in the 1938 Warner Brothers film in which he is played by Basil Rathbone, he takes the role of chief villain from the Sheriff of Nottingham but he is more
often shown as the Sheriff’s nasty but none too bright sidekick. Robert Addie, for example, in Robin of Sherwood, plays him as the blunt military man, perennial butt of the more sophisticated baddies who have brains as well as brawn. In a clever twist, the consequences of which are never fully explored, Addie’s character is revealed in the third season of the series as the illegitimate son of the Earl of Huntingdon and therefore the half-brother of Jason Connery’s Robin. By far the most interesting and complex portrayal of Sir Guy is that of Richard Armitage in the BBC series that began in 2006. Intense and darkly handsome, Armitage plays the character as an apparent villain who nonetheless is always teetering on the brink of decency. His tormented love for Marian offers him a redemption which fate and his own failings are forever snatching from him. In the course of two series, the deeply ambivalent relationship between Gisborne and Marian, although it ends in tragedy, is markedly more compelling than her wishy-washy love affair with Jonas Armstrong’s Robin.