Chris Thorndycroft's Blog, page 6

Food and Fiction: A Ploughman’s Lunch

If you take a look at any English pub menu worth its salt you’ll come across something called a ‘ploughman’s’. This is basically a combination of various items such as bread, cheese, ham, pate and pickled onions. Often you can choose a ‘ham ploughman’s’ or a ‘cheese ploughman’s’ etc. The idea is that this is the traditional lunchtime fare of field workers in days gone by who might take a simple lunch out with them to eat on the ditch-side or stop by the local country pub for a tankard of ale and whatever grub the landlord could throw together.

While the name ‘ploughman’s lunch’ only seems to have come into use in the 1950s, beer, bread and cheese has been a staple of the English diet for centuries. The 14th century poem Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede described this triumvirate as the traditional ploughman’s meal and it wasn’t until the 20th century that many pubs served anything else. It’s a simple meal born of rural poverty. Cheese has always been a cheaper source of protein than meat and pickled onions provide a lively condiment in the absence of expensive seasoning.

It’s exactly the sort of thing the characters in my novel The Rebel and the Runaway would enjoy at the White Hart after a day working in the fields (or driving smuggled contraband up country lanes). To make an authentic 18th century pub lunch, I really wanted to make a ‘cottage loaf’. This traditional English bread is made by baking two round loaves, one (slightly smaller) on top of the other. I followed this great recipe and it turned out a treat.

This pewter tankard is something I picked up on Ebay. I’ve tried to research how old it is but the design seems to have been pretty consistent all the way up to the 1960s. It’s not too dissimilar to what might have been found in an 18th century pub. The glass-bottomed tankard has been the source of much speculation. Some theories maintain that a glass bottom allowed the drinker to see if anybody was aiming a sneaky punch at them while they were taking a sup. Another one is that it enables the drinker to avoid accepting the ‘king’s shilling’ which was reportedly slipped into the drinks of sailors by press gangs looking to recruit them into the Royal Navy. Given the other more thuggish methods in which press gangs compelled men into service, this seems unnecessary and therefore unlikely. It’s more probable that the purpose of the glass bottom was to judge the clarity of the beer (beer glasses being quite expensive at the time).

A good dark ale went well with my cottage loaf, chunk of Cheddar cheese and some pickled onions. The ongoing popularity of the ploughman’s in English pubs proves that hundreds of years later, this rural staple is still a satisfying meal.

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[image error]The Rebel and the Runaway tells the story of Alice Sinclair who, after running away from home, finds work at a grubby inn on the border between Hampshire and Sussex. Here she falls in with the notorious Hawkhurst Gang; the most feared and violent group of smugglers in all England and becomes embroiled in one of England’s most shocking murder cases. Based on true events!

 

New Book Alert! – The Unconquered Sun

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That special time of the year is approaching once more and this year I’ve finally got my Christmas anthology ready for publication. I’ve been working on this every December for a few years now, adding a little bit each year. It’s taken so long because who wants to write about Christmas in the summertime?

Well, it’s finally done and I’m pleased as Christmas punch with it. It’s aimed at a slightly younger readership then my usual books but I hope that all ages can enjoy it. And, in keeping with the spirit of Christmas, I will be donating all profits to the charity Save the Children. I have been in contact with them and they have kindly allowed me to use their logo in my promotional material.

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7 tales of the mysterious, the mythological and the fantastical from the darkest part of the year.

Christmas (or Yule) means many things to many people. From sacrifice to the sun at Stonehenge to the Roman festival of light to the birth of Jesus and beyond, it is the time for rebirth and rejoicing. It is the anonymous gift-giving spirit of Saint Nicholas, the survival of evergreens during cold winters (and puritan outlawry). It means warmth, friendship, charity and of course, Santa Claus…

These stories delve deep into the past and reveal the origins of traditions we still carry with us today. From Neolithic Britain to Ancient Rome, from Judea to puritan England, from Spain to New York and beyond, take this time-travelling trip to the traditions of our ancestors and discover the magical story of Christmas through the eyes of the people who experienced it.

The Unconquered Sun: Tales of Yule, Christmas and the Winter Solstice is available for pre-order from Amazon and will be released on December 1st 2019 along with a paperback edition.

Food and Fiction: Chicken and Beer Stew

One thing that is fun to do is whip up a meal mentioned in your favorite book or consider what characters in a historical novel were eating all those years ago. Fictitious Dishes looks at meals from Alice in Wonderland and The Great Gatsby among others. I was inspired to take a crack at some historical dishes characters from my own novels might have been eating. So, what would Hengest and Horsa tuck into in their native Jute-land or while on campaign in Post-Roman Britain?

Anglo Saxon food differed little from what was eaten in the rest of Northern Europe or in the later Viking period. Barley was an important grain used to make bread and beer while vegetables included onions, carrots, peas, cabbages and turnips (no potatoes or tomatoes which were’t native to Europe at this time).

The Viking Answer Lady Webpage has a great section on Viking food well worth checking out and, although she tells us that no recipes have survived from Viking times, there have been cookbooks that try to recreate some dishes. One recipe that caught my eye was Chicken Stew with Beer from Vikingars Gästabud (The Viking Feast). It seemed simple enough and sounded a sight more tasty than nettle soup.

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Chicken, carrots, onions, turnip and thyme are all easy enough to come by these days but authentic Anglo-Saxon or Viking age beer is a bit more tricky. Brewing techniques have changed in the last thousand years with the addition of hops as a preservative (as well as a flavouring) being the biggest difference. Failing to find anything approaching 5th century beer, I settled for some of the local Norwegian brew. The Hansa brewery in Bergen has been making beer since 1891 and ‘Bayer’ was one of its first products. It’s a ruddy brown lager which is quite sweet and malty and smelt wonderful once the stew got bubbling.

Flatbread is still a popular accompaniment with stews in Scandinavia and this simple mixture of barley flour and water turned out eight nice little loaves. I used a flat stone to bake them on and was put in mind of poor King Alfred when one or two of them got a little burnt!

So there we have it. A reasonably authentic meal the likes of Hengest and Horsa may have enjoyed in the 5th century and up into the Viking period.

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[image error]A Brother’s Oath is the first book in the Hengest and Horsa trilogy which follows the legendary Anglo-Saxon brothers who arrived in Britain in the 5th century and founded the kingdom of Kent; the first English kingdom.

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A cool surprise on Google Maps!

Every Wednesday I do a #BookLocations post on twitter and my Facebook page with a little snippet from one of my books and a corresponding picture of what the location looks like today. Google maps has been invaluable in scouting out historic locations to get the details right in my books and while I was taking a look for my next post, I came across something rather cool.

Richborough Castle is a ruined Roman fort in Kent and is one of the Saxon Shore Forts (so-called because they were either built to defend the coast against Saxons or because they were manned by Saxon auxiliaries – this is debatable). The town serves as Hengest and Horsa’s base in my Hengest and Horsa trilogy. While zooming in on the ruins I stumbled across this panoramic picture which seems to be a computer generated reconstruction of the town viewed from its docks.

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I’ve never seen anything like this on Google maps before. As an author it is so cool to see this level of detail in a reconstruction of a location I have written about! I’m determined to find any more gems like this scattered across Google Maps. The picture looks like it was created by somebody called Peter Lorimer. I googled him and came up with another CG reconstruction of the town from the English Heritage collection. I can’t find much else on him but if anybody out there has some more info, I’d love to hear from you!

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My small role in a documentary

[image error]This summer I was asked to take part in a documentary being made by CRAY (Crayford Reminiscence and Youth) – a group set up with the aim of involving children in heritage activities outside of school. Their topic was the Battle of Crayford mentioned in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle as one of Hengest’s great victories over the Britons.

I was asked as my Hengest and Horsa trilogy covers this event and I jumped at the chance to be involved. The interview was conducted at the British Museum in London –  somewhere I’ve never been – and boy is that a place I could spend a year or so in. I had a few hours to kill before my interview so I made a bee-line for the Anglo-Saxon exhibition, determined to set my eyes upon the famous Sutton Hoo helmet which is on the cover of just about every book about the Anglo-Saxons. There’s a ton of cool stuff there and I wish I’d had more time to look at everything. Definitely a place to revisit. [image error]

[image error]The interview itself was conducted by the kids of CRAY who were getting some real hands on experience in film making. One asked me the questions while two others handled the light and sound. Really impressive.

The documentary went live online a few days ago and is part of a much larger project including a booklet intended for schools filled with information and activities as well as an excerpt from my trilogy that covers the Battle of Crayford. I’ve linked to the video below, but seriously, check out the rest of the website here as it has tons of stuff including a very cool 3D reconstruction of 5th century Crayford and its nearby Roman villa.

A Spot Called Crayford – The Legend of Hengest from digital:works on Vimeo.

 

A Glimpse at Folk Horror

My recent novella is a creepy tale set in the Welsh valleys and concerns a bit old folklore I learned about during the writing of my next historical novel (I love it when research yields double the fruit). There is a burgeoning genre for this sort of thing called ‘Folk Horror’ and I thought it was worth doing a post on.

A retrospective genre, the term can be traced to a 2003 interview in Fangoria magazine when Piers Haggard used it to refer to his 1971 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The term was popularised by Mark Gatiss in his BBC 4 documentary A History of Horror (2010) and he referred to a ‘little moment of folk horror’ that included Haggard’s atmospheric creeper about the impact on a small community by the discovery of a deformed skull in a ploughed field. The other two films in Gatiss’s ‘unholy trinity’ of Folk Horror were The Wicker Man (1973); a tale of a Christian policeman investigating the disappearance of a girl on a remote Scottish island, and Witchfinder General (1968); the Vincent Price-starring shocker of persecution in Civil War England. All dealing with nasty goings on in pastoral communities, these films, Gatiss claimed, share an obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and its superstitions.

[image error]The children of a 17th century village turn to the devil in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

There was something about 1970s Britain that made it a golden age of Folk Horror. Perhaps the disillusionment with the return-to-nature hippie optimism of the late ’60s played a part as the counterculture generation awoke from the Summer of Love in a gloomy Britain of strikes and power cuts. In such times perhaps the flower power and dancing in stone circles of the previous decade seemed like hopeless nostalgia for a pastoral innocence that had never existed. Instead, a darker interpretation of our pagan past emerged.

[image error]Stigma (1977)

Even more than cinema, it was British television that showcased the strongest manifestations of Folk Horror in the 1970s. ITV’s The Owl Service (1969) and BBC’s Red Shift (1978) – both based on young adult novels by Alan Garner – dealt with events of the past echoing into the present with catastrophic consequences. The latter was part of BBC’s Play for Today; a drama series that also gave us Robin Redbreast (1970); a terrifying tale of a pregnant woman’s isolation in a village where paganism has survived, and Penda’s Fen (1974); a surreal blend of ’70s politics, class war and sexual repression. The BBC series A Ghost Story for Christmas ran throughout the ’70s and mostly consisted of adaptations of M. R. James stories; eerie tales of specters and hauntings set against bleak countryside landscapes. The last three episodes broke with tradition and included an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Signalman along with two original contemporary-set stories. Of these Stigma (1977) is perhaps the most Folk Horror of the entire series, blending the mysteries of Britain’s standing stones with some gruesome body horror.

[image error]Although the ’70s is indelibly linked with Folk Horror, it hardly spawned the genre. Much of its roots can be seen in the short fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries in particular the works of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood. A hugely influential entry is Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella The Great God Pan. When published, it caused an uproar due to its handling of sex and its surprising (for the time) gruesomeness. It tells of a botched brain surgery on a young woman by a scientist dabbling in the heightening of spiritual awareness. The woman makes contact with Pan, the wild spirit of nature and becomes a ‘hopeless idiot’ for the rest of her days. What follows is a series of conversations and journal entries that describe the effects of this horrific experiment passing from one generation to the next.

[image error]The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Folk Horror isn’t entirely peculiar to British shores. America, while often labelled a ‘young nation’ is not without its folklore or indeed, its horror. I have already done a post on Southern Gothic; a genre whose rural settings, mysterious folklore and preoccupation with the macabre shares many characteristics with Folk Horror. The films Deliverance (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) both deal with out-of-towners falling afoul of rural locals and Stephen King’s short story Children of the Corn is Folk Horror to a tee with its small town of juvenile killers and their worship of ‘he who walks behind the rows’. The Blair Witch Project (1999) is perhaps the best known take on the friends-getting-lost-in-the-woods trope and was all the more terrifying in the days when the found footage genre (and the internet) was in its infancy while M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) perfectly encapsulated the age-old division between community and wilderness.

There have been Folk Horror novels too. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon treads similar territory to King’s Children of the Corn and Sheep by Simon Maginn combines the tropes of the genre with the psychological thriller. The Ritual by Adam Nevill (not to be confused with the 1967 novel Ritual by David Pinner which Anthony Shaffer used as a basis for his script for The Wicker Man) is a terrifying account of a hiking trip in the Swedish forests gone wrong and was recently adapted into the 2017 film of the same name.

[image error]Folk Horror has gained momentum ever since it was defined a mere few years ago. Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013), both by director Ben Wheatley, are artsy, vague but altogether chilling entries and the sublime but terrifying 2015 film The Witch bears the subtitle; A New-England Folktale. Folk Horror’s defining attributes of urbanity vs. pastoralism, old vs. new, preservation of culture and suspicion of the outsider have always carried uncomfortable political undertones and seem to find continued relevancy in a world where terrorism, xenophobia, national identity and climate change fill the headlines. Britain has recently undergone one of the most brutal political debates in living memory and on an island that seems to hum with anti-metropolitan sentiment and vague patriotic mumblings about ‘taking back control’, the divide between those who are content to be part of a wider world and those who crave isolation and traditionalism seems greater than ever.

[image error]My own novella – Cabal’s Stone – tells of a historian who gets more than he bargained for when he goes looking for an ancient artifact connected to King Arthur. It explores the two-way suspicion that lingers between outsiders and small communities and draws upon the Folk Horror tradition of the past being a source of national identity, fiercely guarded against intruders.

 

 

New Release! – Cabal’s Stone

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It’s that time of year again and I’m sticking to a tradition I’ve kept going the past three years. Every October I release a horror novella in time for Halloween. Previous years I released The Visitor at Anningley Hall, Old Town and Whispering in the Cypresses. This year I’ve tied in the subject matter of my novella with my upcoming historical novel; namely King Arthur.

How is King Arthur scary, you ask? Well, there is a little sub-genre called Folk Horror that has grown in popularity in recent years and it basically sees the sinister in the British countryside, its superstitions and folklore. Think The Wicker Man and you’re on the right track. Bits of folklore relating to King Arthur (or more accurately, the 5th century warlord who inspired him) are found all over Britain, especially in Wales and one of them deals with a stone supposedly marked by the paw print of Cabal; Arthur’s dog. According to legend, if the stone is removed from its cairn, it will reappear there a day later, no explanation given. This was all I needed for the basis of a creepy tale set in the Welsh valleys.

History graduate Ollie Preston has worked himself to the point of a nervous breakdown. A long weekend at a cottage in the Welsh valleys with his girlfriend Jan and old university friend Johnathan is just what he needs; no books, no stress, just clean mountain air and healthy companionship.

But there are some things Ollie can’t let go. According to local folklore there is a cairn on a nearby hill that marks the grave of King Arthur’s faithful hound. Ignoring all the warnings, Ollie takes a stone from the cairn and unleashes an ancient power. In a nightmarish flight through the Welsh valleys, Ollie desperately tries to outrun figures from Britain’s distant past who force themselves in on the present; figures who will not relinquish the land’s ancient secrets without a fight…

Cabal’s Stone is available from Amazon now.

New website, new book and a mailing list!

You may notice that my blog/webiste looks a bit crisper and more professional. I decided that it needed a long overdue facelift. I’ve also taken the plunge and finally got around to setting up a mailing list. I’ve long avoided these things as I figured that a blog with a ‘follow’ function was enough but I’ve been getting more into the business side of things recently and have heard again and again that a mailing list is the way to go in retaining old readers and hooking new ones.

Now the thing with mailing lists is that you need something to offer subscribers. Free novellas is a popular way forward and I will be doing one of those as soon as I can. This novella will tie into a new series I’m writing which will be a sequel trilogy to my Hengest and Horsa trilogy. But that trilogy is a long way from finished yet. I usually wait until about a month before release before I do a cover reveal but felt it was right to hook potential subscribers to my mailing list with some info on what I am currently working on.

Sign of the White Foal will be the first book in the Arthur of the Cymry trilogy and will probably be ready for release early next year. That’s quite a wait but I wanted to get my mailing list up and running ASAP. The tie-in novella (once I’ve written it) will be free and exclusive for subscribers. Here is the clickable image I’ve spent the last couple of days laboriously inserting into the back matter of all of my ebooks. Feel free to click on it and subscribe! I can’t promise any great activity yet but will be in touch when I have something to report!

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The Death of Robin Hood – an Analysis

But before then of a shot-windowe

Good Robin Hood he could glide,

Red Roger, with a grounden glave,

Thrust him through the milke-white side.

Take a look at the rest of this blog series here.

In an effort to place these ballads in some rough biographical order, I have saved The Death of Robin Hood for last. As with Gisborne, the Death exists in the Percy Folio but in a very poor state. Fortunately the story also survives in a 1786 garland called The English Archer. Modern reprintings of the ballad construct the narrative using both sources with the garland filling in the blanks in the Folio manuscript.

Robin, feeling a weakness in his arms, decides to go to Churchlees where his cousin the prioress, will bleed him. Will Scarlett warns him of a ‘good yeoman’ there who is sure to quarrel with him and advises Robin to take a hundred of his best bowmen. Robin refuses and brings only Little John for company.

On the way they come to a black water with a plank lain over it. An old woman is kneeling there, banning (lamenting) Robin Hood. She claims that she and other women are weeping for Robin’s body which ‘that this day must be let bloode’.

Robin and John arrive at Churchlees and the prioress bleeds Robin to the point of weakness. Sensing treachery, Robin blows his horn and Little John breaks in. ‘Red Roger’ also appears and he and Robin fight. Robin, despite his weakened state, manages to slay Roger.

The distraught Little John threatens to burn all Churchlees down but Robin stays his hand for he has never harmed a woman and is not about to start now. Instead, he tells John to fetch his bow. He shoots an arrow (presumably through the window) and tells John to bury him where it lands. Robin dies and is buried ‘within the fair Kirkleys’.

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The Passing of Robin Hood by N. C. Wyeth, 1917

It’s a confusing end to England’s greatest hero. The old woman banning at the water is a motif of Celtic origin which made it into the chivalric romances of the middle ages. She may be connected to the Irish banshee (bean sídhe); a female spectre whose wailing heralds the imminent death of whoever hears it.

Churchlees/Kirkleys is generally considered to be Kirklees in West Yorkshire although South Kirkby near Pontefract has also been put forward (1). At Kirklees the guesthouse of a medieval priory still stands as well as a grave which has long been associated with Robin Hood. The inscription on it reads;

Hear Underneath dis laitl Stean

Laz robert earl of Huntingtun

Ne’er arcir ver as hie sa geud

An pipl kauld im robin heud

Sick utlawz as hi an iz men

Vil england nivr si agen

Obiit 24 kal Dekembris 1247

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Nathanial Johnston’s 1665 sketch of ‘Robin Hood’s’ grave at Kirklees

The pseudo-archaic English suggests that the current monument may have replaced an earlier one. The 1569 chronicle of Richard Grafton and a sketch done by historian Nathanial Johnston in 1665 describe a very different stone engraved with a long cross and Hood’s name as well as that of William of Goldesborough, whoever he was (2). The current inscription may have been taken from the 1630 ballad A True Tale of Robin Hood by Martin Parker which gives the text as;

Decembris quarto die, 1198 : anno regni Richardii Primi 9.

Robert Earle of Huntington

Lies under this little stone

No archer was like him so good

His wildnesse named him Robbin Hood

Full thirteen yeares, and something more

These northern parts he vexed sore

Such out-lawes as he and his men

May England never know agen.

Robin Hood was first associated with the Earl of Huntington in Anthony Munday’s 1598 play The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington. Nobody knows where Munday got this idea from or if it was just fantasy but the name has stuck and is often used in modern interpretations along with Locksley as the true name of Robin Hood.

The date of Robin’s death is also a matter of debate. The antiquarian Joseph Hunter found a Robert Hood of nearby Wakefield in the Wakefield court rolls and calculated his death to be 1347. That this is exactly a century after the date on the tomb could be a coincidence or a scribal error on the part of the one who carved the current inscription (if indeed they believed the person interred was Robert Hood of Wakefield). But then why call him Robert Earl of Huntington? Incidentally, the Earl of Huntington is a non-existent title. There have been earls of Huntingdon but none of them were called Robert.

Red Roger is most likely Roger of Doncaster from the Gest, mentioned in that ballad as the prioress’s lover. Why they both wished Robin ill is never explained. The Wakefield court rolls have a Roger de Doncaster living at nearby Crigglestone in 1327 (3).

No name is given for the treacherous prioress of Kirklees which makes the search for her identity even harder. Joseph Hunter suggested Elizabeth de Stainton (4). According to Hunter, the twelve-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Alice, were placed under the care of the nuns at Kirklees when their widowed mother married Hugh de Tutehill circa 1344. Elizabeth eventually became prioress of Kirklees although the date of her incumbency is unknown.

John Walker (5) claims that Hugh de Tutehill/Toothill had a daughter called Matilda who lived at Wakefield. One Matilda mentioned in the Wakefield court rolls is Matilda Hood, wife of Robert. But before we get carried away with the idea that Elizabeth de Stainton was Robert Hood’s sister in law,  it must be said that we do not know Matilda Hood’s maiden name.

Stainton’s grave (which can still be seen) was discovered in the priory’s grounds in 1706. Unfortunately there is no date on it but, if she was around twelve-years-old in 1344 (as Hunter tells us), it is unlikely that she would have been the prioress a mere three years later when Robert Hood of Wakefield met his end.

There have been various lists of Kirklees’s prioresses but the dates of their tenures are debatable and there are many gaps in the line of succession. The mystery of the wicked prioress’s identity is perhaps an even more tightly locked secret than that of Robin Hood.

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The original ballads of Robin Hood formed much of the basis for my latest novel – Lords of the Greenwood. I blended elements of the ballads with historical events and characters to present a realistic take on the character while attempting to remain true to the spirit of the legend. Check it out here.

Sources:

The Robin Hood Project at the University of Rochester has been invaluable in my research and is well worth a look at here. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood

Read The Death of Robin Hood here.

David Hepworth. A Grave Tale in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. by Helen Phillips (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005)
W. Walker. The Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol xxxvi
Harris, P.V. Wakefield Manor Rolls, in: The Truth about Robin Hood. Mansfield, 1973.
Hunter, Joseph. South Yorkshire. 1831
John Walker. The True History of Robin Hood. 1973

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne – an Analysis

A sword and a dagger he wore by his side,

Had beene many a mans bane,

And he was cladd in his capull-hyde,

Topp, and tayle, and mayne.

Read my other posts in this series here.

Continuing my series of blog posts on the five early ballads of Robin Hood, let’s take a look at the first appearance of a man who would become a nemesis for Robin Hood in later tradition, even eclipsing the villainy of the sheriff.

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne exists in the famous Percy Folio; a collection of ballads compiled sometime in the 17th century that formed the basis of Percy’s own Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) and part of Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882 – 1898). Despite the late hand of the Percy Folio, the ballad itself is considered to be one of the earliest of Robin Hood.

We’re back in the locality of Barnsdale this time and Robin tells Little John of a nightmare he just had of two men who wish him ill. John tries to comfort him by saying that dreams pass swiftly as wind over the hills which I think is nicely poetic. Robin isn’t deterred however and sets out to confront these two men, wherever and whoever they may be.

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Robin and Guy fighting by Walter Crane

They come across a yeoman dressed in a horse’s hide, complete with its head. He is heavily armed. Not trusting him one bit, John makes to approach him while Robin waits safely behind but Robin is having none of it. As in the Monk, Robin and John have another row and John leaves him in a huff (will he ever learn?).

John goes to Barnsdale and runs into the Sheriff of Nottingham (out of his jurisdiction again). The sheriff has slain two of John’s companions and his men are pursuing Scarlett (presumably Will, but no first name is given here). John shoots one of the soldiers (who is surprisingly given a name; William a Trent) but his bow breaks and he is set upon by the rest of the sheriff’s men.

Meanwhile Robin Hood and the stranger have struck up conversation and we learn who he is; Guy of Gysborne and according to his own boasts, he’s a nasty piece of work. He’s looking for Robin Hood and Robin, wisely, does not let on. The two have an archery contest and Robin eventually reveals himself. They fight and Robin slays Guy. In a rather shocking act, he decapitates Guy and disfigures his face with his ‘Irish knife’. Then he puts on the horse’s hide and sticks Guy’s bloody head on the end of his bow (can you see where this is going?)

Robin finds his way to the sheriff where Little John is bound fast to a tree. Thinking Robin is the bounty hunter he hired to kill Robin Hood, the sheriff lets Robin approach Little John assuming he means to finish the second outlaw off. Instead, Robin cuts John’s bonds and gives him his bow. The sheriff panics and flees towards Nottingham but is felled by an arrow from Little John that ‘did cleave his heart in twain’.

Guy of Gisborne’s portrayal here is a startling one considering the powerful knight and rival for Maid Marion’s hand we so often see in movies and on TV. Here he is a grubby bounty hunter and fellow yeoman dressed, inexplicably, in a whole horse’s hide. This has been the cause of much debate on the mythical origins of the legend as it seems a suspiciously pagan and ceremonial thing to wear but so far no reasonable explanation for Guy’s strange getup has been reached.

So where exactly was ‘Gysborne’ anyway? As with most Robin Hood locations, there is more than one candidate. Gisburn in Lancashire, once part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, seems likely but John C. Bellamy suggests Guisborough in the North Riding of Yorkshire which was known in the middle ages as ‘Giseburne’. (1)

This ballad is also the first appearance of another important character. Actually, that depends on how you look at it. The character ‘Scarlett’ in Gisborne is generally accepted to be the same character as ‘Willyam Scarlok’ in the Gest and ‘Wyll Scathlok’ in the Monk. It does seem likely as research into the etymology of the three names suggests a link.

If we employ the Old English pronunciation of ‘sc’ then ‘Scarlok’ and ‘Scathlok’ become ‘Sharlok’ and ‘Shathlok’. There are several theories on the meaning of these words ranging from the Old English sceððan + loc meaning ‘burst lock’ (2) (a good name for a robber) to sc(e)afan + locc meaning ‘shave lock’ (of hair, suggesting a shaven-headed outlaw) (3).

But John H. Munro offers a different theory (4). I discussed the original meaning of scarlet being a type of fine cloth and not the colour red in a previous post. The etymology of scarlet, according to Munro, could come from the Flemish or Low Germanic components schaeren (to shear) and laken (cloth) suggesting that it took its name from the process used in cutting it. Admittedly Munro does state that the process of cutting the expensive ‘scarlet’ cloth did not differ from the cutting of other cloths, but it is still possible that ‘Scarlok’ was the etymological ancestor of the word ‘scarlet’, just as Wyll Scarlok was the literary ancestor of Will Scarlet.

[image error]The end draws near and my next and final post in this series will look at the eventual fate of Robin Hood.

Read Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne here.

Sources

The Robin Hood Project at the University of Rochester has been invaluable in my research and is well worth a look at here. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood

Bellamy, John C. Robin Hood: An Historical Inquiry. London: Croom Helm, 1985.
Reaney, P. H. and R. M. Wilson. A Dictionary of English Surnames. Rev. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Jönsjö, Jan. Studies on Middle English Nicknames: Volume 1: Compounds. Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1979.
Munro, John H. “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour,” in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson. 1983.