Outlaw

by Angus Donald

  ‘John . . . what have you done?’ asked Robin. His voice was weak, uncertain, quavering. He sounded like an old man. Still nobody moved. Then John bent over the body for a moment. He had a knife in his hand and I saw him prise open the dead man’s mouth, pull forth the limp tongue and make one swift cut. He released the lolling head and it fell back on to the stone floor with a dull clunk.

  ‘I gave him my word I would not harm him,’ said Robin. His voice had a disbelieving quality; he seemed appalled by John’s actions.

  ‘By God’s great swinging testicles, I did not,’ said John, tucking the scrap of red flesh into the pouch at his belt. ‘He needed to die, if any man ever did. And you would have given him forgiveness? You? He needed to die, if not for you, then for all those good men, your men, who died at Linden Lea. That is justice.’

  Robin still seemed dazed by his brother’s death. He stared down at the body. For the first time since I had met him he seemed almost weak. ‘I’m an Earl now,’ he said slowly, ‘a companion of the King, a knight sworn to the Cross. I am no longer a common outlaw, a murderer. I have fought so long, so hard to get to this point . . . Does an Earl break his oath, murder his brother, mutilate men?’

  ‘In my experience, that’s exactly what Earls do,’ said John.

  Historical Note

  On Sunday September 13, 1189, Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey to enormous popular acclaim. He immediately started preparing to embark for what later generations would call the Third Crusade. Henry II had left a decent sized treasury in England when he died, but Richard, his war-loving son, needed a lot more money for the glorious adventure he was planning to undertake.

  Although he was now King of England, Richard’s heart always remained further south in his mother’s homeland of Aquitaine and, during his ten-year reign, he was to spend no more than ten months in his northern realm. Indeed, he seems to have considered England as a sort of enormous piggy bank, valuable only because of the money he could extract from it. To fund his crusade, however, Richard was not able to increase taxation upon the people of England: the Saladin Tithe, instituted by his father in 1187 to pay for a future expedition to recapture Jerusalem, had squeezed the country almost dry. So Richard decided to auction off all the titles, rights and positions that were within his gift - a perfectly normal kingly practice in the 12th century. Roger of Howden, a contemporary chronicler, wrote of Richard: ‘He put up for sale everything he had - offices, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, lands . . .’ Indeed Richard himself said, half-jokingly: ‘I would sell London, if I could find a buyer.’

  The result was a massive influx of cash and a major political reshuffle right across the country - Henry’s men were out and Richard’s were in. Of the twenty-seven men who had been sheriffs at the end of Henry’s reign, only five retained their office, and the new men paid handsomely for their appointments. One such casualty of Richard’s need for quick cash was Sir Ralph Murdac, the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests (there was no such position of sheriff of Nottingham until the middle of the 15th century). He was removed from his position and replaced by Roger de Lacy in 1190. Ralph Murdac was a real man but, personal facts about 12th-century individuals being rather thin on the ground, I have invented almost everything else about him apart from his name. The same is true of other historical characters in my story, such as Ralph FitzStephen, the constable of Winchester; Robert of Thurnham, the loyal king’s man who held a castle in Kent; his brother Stephen, and Fulcold, Eleanor’s chamberlain.

  Piers, the unfortunate sacrificial victim is, of course, an invention, but the way he died is based on archaeological evidence of Celtic human sacrifices, specifically that of the Lindow Man, a mummified corpse from the 1st century AD found in Cheshire in 1984. The Lindow Man, a high-status individual, quite possibly a druid, had been hit on the head, strangled and then had his throat cut as part of a pre-Christian ritual, before being thrown in a peat bog where the body was perfectly preserved for hundreds of years.

  There is little evidence that paganism was widespread in 12th century England; indeed, most scholars now agree that the country was almost universally Christian. But I like to believe, perhaps fancifully, that there would have been pockets of people, in the wild inaccessible places, who still clung to the older gods, who still practised witchcraft and magic and who were fiercely resistant to the spiritual authority of the ubiquitous Church. To my mind, Robin Hood himself is an incarnation of a wild forest spirit; a manifestation of all that is non-urban, uncivilised and unchristian. And I think that part of his enduring appeal lies in that exciting ‘otherness’.

  So was Robin Hood a real man? This is a tough question. Was there once an outlaw named Robert who hid in Sherwood Forest, or perhaps Barnsdale, during the high middle ages and made a name for himself by robbing travellers? Almost certainly. In fact, Robert being a common name, robbery being the last resort of many a starving peasant - and the choice of many an impecunious knight - there were probably several men who could fit that description. Perhaps dozens. Would we recognise any of these pretenders to the title as the Robin Hood of our modern legends, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, trading quips with his merry men while slapping a green-clad thigh? Almost certainly not.

  In literature, Robin Hood first makes an appearance in a 1370s poem by William Langland, known as the ‘Vision of Piers Plowman’. In it, there is a lazy cleric who knows the popular stories of Robin Hood better than he knows his prayers. So we know that the soap-opera-style tales of Robin were a byword in the second half of the 14th century when Langland was writing his poem. But some scholars even claim to have traced the man himself. The first references to a possible Robin Hood figure occur in legal documents in the first half of the 13th century. In 1230, the sheriff of Yorkshire accounted for the goods he had seized from a fugitive called Robert Hood. Another Robert Hod of Burntoft, County Durham, is mentioned as owning property in a legal document of 1244. He subsequently lost his property, so could this man have become an outlaw? The issue is further confused because by the second half of the 13th century the names ‘Robinhood’ and ‘Robehod’ occur frequently in the court records of several northern counties. Were they real names, or a generic word for any highwayman, or aliases given by criminals hoping to borrow some glamour from the association with a famous outlaw? I don’t think we will ever know. But what we can assume is that Robin Hood, if he existed, operated during the beginning of 13th century or earlier. And I have chosen to set my stories at the end of the 12th century and start of the 13th century purely because the films and TV programmes that I watched when I was growing up set Robin’s exploits in this era.

  Whether Robin was a real person, or the personification of a pagan woodland sprite, or a ‘brand name’ co-opted by boastful criminals, or an amalgamation of several outlaws, I still find the stories about him strangely gripping. I hope you do, too; and I hope you will enjoy the next book in the series, Crusader, published in 2010, which deals with Robin and Alan’s adventures on the long, dusty road to the Holy Land.

  Angus Donald

  Kent, January 2009

  Acknowledgements

  This book has taken nearly seven years to turn from idle pub chat to actual printed volume, and during that time I have been helped enormously by a great number of people: literary professionals, librarians, journalists and historians, friends and family. I’d first like to thank my agent Ian Drury, of Sheil Land Associates, who spotted some potential in the few rough chapters I sent him; I‘d also like to thank David Shelley at Sphere for agreeing to publish this book and his colleague Thalia Proctor for doing such a good editing job. The staff of the British Library have been brilliantly helpful over the years, as have the kind folk at Tonbridge Library. I’d also like to thank Kieron Toole for being so patient while he was teaching me to stalk deer.

  My long suffering friends and former work-mates at The Times, I thank, for putting up with
endless conversations in The Caxton about me and my literary ambitions, when we could have been talking about much more interesting things (such as them and their literary ambitions). My brothers, Jamie, John and Alex deserve a special mention, too, as we have worked out many a knotty plot point together while tromping through the fields of Kent on a Sunday morning, or while getting outside a pint or three to refresh us afterwards. My parents Alan and Janet have been very helpful, too, bringing me old books and relevant newspaper articles, offering suggestions and, of course, for giving me more than forty years of love and support.

  Some of the people who have been most helpful, I have not had the plesure of meeting, namely those professional historians whose books I have enjoyed: I particularly want to thank John Gillingham for his masterful work Richard I, Alison Weir for Eleanor of Aquitaine, A.J. Pollard for Imagining Robin Hood, Mike Dixon Kennedy for The Robin Hood Handbook, which always sits beside my desk, Robert Hardy and Matthew Strickland for The Great Warbow, and David Boyle for Blondel’s Song.

  I apologise in advance for any historical errors made; despite the huge amounts of help I have had in writing this book, these mistakes remain entirely my own.