Chris Thorndycroft's Blog, page 7
April 18, 2018
Robin Hood and the Potter – an Analysis
The potter to hes cart he went,
He was not to seke;
A god to-hande staffe therowt he hent,
Beffore Roben he leppyd.
Read my previous posts on A Gest of Robyn Hode and Robin Hood and the Monk.
Like the Gest ballad, the Potter is divided into ‘fitts’ but this is a much shorter ballad and has only three fitts as opposed to the Gest’s eight. It is unclear if the outlaws are Barnsdale or Sherwood men in this story. Nottingham features prominently but Wentbridge is also mentioned which is smack bang in Barnsdale and near to the Sayles where Robin and his companions operate from in the Gest.
The outlaws spot a potter coming down the road who is known for getting out of paying them ‘pavage’ (tax). He even once gave Little John a good drubbing with his staff when he tried to rob him at Wentbridge. Determined to squeeze some coin out of him this time, Robin accosts the potter. A fight ensues and the Potter wins. Impressed, Robin lets him off but asks to borrow his clothes and wares while the potter remains with his men.
Dressed as the potter, Robin heads into Nottingham where he sells the potter’s wares at ridiculously low prices, gathering a big crowd. He attracts the attention of the sheriff’s wife who, after purchasing several pots, asks him to dinner.
While at their meat, Robin overhears some of the sheriff’s men discussing an archery contest. Robin joins in and of course thrashes them all soundly. He then tells the impressed sheriff that he has a bow in his cart that was given to him by Robin Hood. The sheriff shows some excitement at this and Robin agrees to take him to the outlaw on the morrow.
The following morning Robin leads the sheriff into the greenwood and blows his horn, summoning his men. They rob the sheriff but, as his wife showed him such hospitality, Robin lets him live. He sends him home on a white palfrey which he makes a gift of to the sheriff’s wife in return for her hospitality. The ballad closes with the sheriff being mocked by his wife and Robin giving the potter ten pounds for all the pots he sold so cheaply.
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Humber ware chamber pot. Humber ware was produced in North Yorkshire in the 13th to 16th centuries, contemporaneous with the Robin Hood ballads. Photo by York Museums Trust CC BY-SA 4.0
Women are poorly represented in Robin Hood stories, especially in the pre-Maid Marion days. In fact they rarely pop up at all. The Potter is the only early Robin Hood ballad where a female has a role of any importance (excepting the Virgin Mary and the treacherous Prioress of Kirklees). There is some definite flirting between Robin and the sheriff’s wife and the ballad is noted for being more of a humorous tale than the others.
This is the first instance of a trope that grew to be a standard event in Robin Hood legends; Robin meets his match. The most famous of these is his fight with Little John over the bridge which dates from 1680 and has made it into most modern retellings of the legend. Another is his meeting with the curtal friar, usually identified with Friar Tuck.
[image error]In my next post one of Robin’s most famous adversaries finally makes his appearance!
Read Robin Hood and the Potter here.
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
April 12, 2018
Robin Hood and the Monk – an Analysis
He gos in to Seynt Mary chirch,
And knelyd down before the rode;
Alle that ever were the church within
Beheld wel Robyn Hode.
In my previous post I took a look at A Gest of Robin Hood; the most comprehensive of the early Robin Hood ballads but not, in fact, the earliest. That distinction goes to Robin Hood and the Monk, an untitled tale found in a Cambridge University manuscript first printed and titled by Robert Jamieson in Popular Ballads and Songs in 1806. The original manuscript dates to the second half of the 15th century making it possibly fifty years older than the Gest.
Whereas Barnsdale in Yorkshire was the home of Robin and his companions in the Gest, the Monk is a Nottinghamshire tale through and through. This further supports the idea that there were once two Robin Hood traditions that got blended; a Nottinghamshire one and a Yorkshire one.
As with most of the ballads, the story begins with Robin and his band in the greenwood, commenting on the season. Little John is in unusually high spirits and is concerned by Robin’s glumness. Robin complains that he has not attended Mass in a while and determines to head off into Nottingham to rectify this. Concerned for his master’s safety, John insists on going with him but the two quarrel on the way and John storms off.
Robin makes it into Saint Mary’s church in Nottingham but is recognised by a monk he robbed some time back. The outraged monk goes to the sheriff and Robin is promptly seized and cast into a dungeon.
A page is missing in the original manuscript so we don’t know how the rest of the outlaws come to know of Robin’s predicament but they’re not happy. John and Much set out and accost the monk and his page on the road. In a rather shocking act of brutality for the not-so-merry men, they kill both monk and page and steal their letters which are destined for the king.
Little John and Much blag an audience with the king and spin him a tale about the monk dying en route to court. The king gives them his seal with orders to tell the sheriff to send the incarcerated Robin Hood to him. John and Much return to Nottingham and give the sheriff the news along with another cock-and-bull story about the king making the slain monk Abbot of Westminster. While the sheriff drinks himself stupid in celebration at pleasing his king, John and Much sneak into the dungeons and free Robin. The trio leap over the wall at its lowest part and scarper back to the greenwood.
Robin and John make up after their previous tiff, the sheriff does not dare face the king after letting Robin escape and the ballad ends with a wry note of respect from the king who is impressed by John’s loyalty to his master which surely outranks his respect for his king.
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The current St Mary’s Church in Nottingham dates back to the 1370s but a church has existed on the site since Saxon times.
It is tempting to imagine Robin cast into the gloomy dungeons of Nottingham Castle in this ballad but the castle isn’t mentioned once. Instead, the jail seems to be somewhere close to the sheriff’s residence and, contrary to just about every Robin Hood movie, the Sheriff of Nottingham did not live at Nottingham Castle. In fact, there was no Sheriff of Nottingham until 1449. Previous to that the post was called the ‘High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests’ and covered a large jurisdiction not limited to Nottingham alone.
A more likely location for Robin’s incarceration is the Shire Hall or Sheriff’s Hall which once occupied the site where the Museum of Justice currently stands in Nottingham (a mere few feet from St Mary’s). Dating from at least 1375, the Shire Hall served as a county court and jail (1). In 2009 a bottle-shaped pit was found in the sandstone caves beneath the building. This got various tourism-minded people in Nottingham excited who quickly labelled it ‘Robin Hood’s dungeon’. It certainly resembles an oubliette – from the French ‘to forget’ – a cave-like dungeon only accessed through a hole in the top where prisoners were either lowered by a rope or shoved carelessly. It may only have been a storage room of course, but at least we know prisoners of Robin Hood’s day were incarcerated at this site.
The Monk ballad is considered one of the best as it is a classic swashbuckling yarn involving capture, disguise, rescue, escape and even making a fool of the king. Next up is another classic tale of daring-do this time featuring Robin in a more active role as he takes on the guise of a potter.
Read Robin Hood and the Monk 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
Brand, Ken. The Shire Hall and Old County Gaol Nottingham. Nottingham Civic Society
April 11, 2018
Interview at Donna’s Book Blog
The blog tour for Lords of the Greenwood rolls on and I’ve done an interview over at Donna’s Book Blog. Have a look!
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April 10, 2018
EHFA – Roger Godberd of Swannington
[image error]As a follow-up to my post on Robert Hood of Wakefield, I have done another post over at English Historical Fiction Authors on that other historical figure behind my new novel – Roger Godberd. Take a look here!
April 6, 2018
Guest Post – 5 Things Everybody gets Wrong About Robin Hood
I have another guest post out, this time over at Katie’s Book Cave. This one dispels some of the myths and inaccuracies we have seen in Robin Hood books and movies over the years. Read it here!
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April 3, 2018
EHFA – Robert Hood of Wakefield
[image error]There have been many candidates for the historical Robin Hood over the centuries. Robert Hood of Wakefield is one of them and I’ve written a post about him over at English Historical Fiction Authors. Take a look!
April 1, 2018
Guest post: Locksley or Huntington? Robin Hood’s Noble Heritage
Bishop Odo, half-brother of William the Conqueror depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. As well as suppressing rebels like Waltheof the Earl of Huntingdon, he is also the alleged ancestor of Robert Fitz Odo of Loxley.
Robin Hood has been given many titles and fictitious backgrounds over the centuries. Was he the Earl of Huntington? Lord of Locksley? A disgraced nobleman or a common ragamuffin? I’ve done a guest post over at What Cathy Read Next examining the fictional titles of England’s famous hooded outlaw. Take a look!
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A Gest of Robin Hood – an Analysis
Lythe and listin, gentilmen,
That be of frebore blode;
I shall you tel of a gode yeman,
His name was Robyn Hode.
So begins the ballad A Gest of Robin Hood; one of the earliest literary appearances of England’s famous hooded outlaw. There is no single manuscript for the text. Different printed versions of the ballad started to appear around 1500 under various names like A Gest of Robyn Hode(1), A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode(2) and even A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode(3). The printed incarnation was preceded by an oral tradition stretching back to an uncertain point in the Middle Ages, possibly as early as the 1300s in which the story is set.
[image error]The Gest is part of an early cycle of stories about Robin Hood which provided much of the basis for my recent novel Lords of the Greenwood. In this and subsequent posts, I will be taking a look at the five early ballads that gave birth to England’s greatest legend.
First off, the ‘Gest’ in the title does not actually mean ‘guest’ even though the story begins with Robin asking a knight to dine with him. It comes from the Latin ‘res gestae’ which means ‘things done’. As we no longer use this word in the English language, ‘A Deed of Robin Hood’ might be a fair translation of the title.
Those familiar with more recent incarnations of Robin Hood from the movies and television will find some surprises in this early entry. Gone is the wicked Prince John who tries to usurp the throne while his brother King Richard the Lionheart is a prisoner on his way home from the crusades. Instead we find ourselves in the reign of an unspecified Edward. Three Edwards ruled England in succession in the Middle Ages which indicates a timeframe of 1272 to 1377; a good hundred years after the Lionheart’s reign. The backdrop of the third crusade was a contribution of the Tudor playwright Anthony Munday in his 1600 play The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington and has been a fixture of the legend ever since.
Several other characters are missing from the story. Maid Marion and Friar Tuck did not become part of Robin’s circle until the May Day games of the 16th century. Also, far from robbing the rich to give to the poor, Robin and his band of cutthroats are no such philanthropists. While they do help out the aforementioned knight, they are portrayed more as common brigands of whom the local populace live in fear.
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Front page of a 16th century edition of the Gest ballad
The ballad is divided into eight sections known as ‘fyttes’ and the action begins in Barnsdale Forest, not Sherwood. Robin and his companions, William Scarlock, Much the Miller’s son and Little John, are preparing themselves for a feast but Robin refuses to eat until a guest is found to pay for it all. John, Much and William go forth and return with a rather sorry-looking knight.
The knight owes four-hundred pounds to the Abbot of St. Mary’s in York else he will lose his lands. Robin decides to lend the knight the money for the period of a year and kits him out in new livery of scarlet and green. He sends Little John with him to York. The debt paid, the knight and Little John part ways.
Little John then inexplicably turns up in Nottingham and has his own little adventure. After impressing the sheriff with his skill in an archery match, he enters the sheriff’s service under the alias Reynold Greenleaf. After causing much trouble, John escapes with the sheriff’s cook (and the sheriff’s treasure) and flees to Barnsdale to be reunited with Robin. Luring the sheriff into the greenwood with a tale of a good hunting nearby, John leads the sheriff to Robin where he is stripped, robbed and made to swear an oath that he will pursue Robin no longer.
Meanwhile, the knight eventually makes his way to Barnsdale with the money he owes Robin (presumably a year has passed), stopping on the way to aid a young man in a wrestling match. Robin refuses the four-hundred pounds for he has just robbed the cellarer of St. Mary’s Abbey of double that. He gives the knight a further four-hundred pounds when he hears of his rescuing the yeoman at the wrestling match.
The Sheriff of Nottingham arranges an archery tournament with a silver arrow as the prize. Robin, of course, wins and he and his men are ambushed. Fighting their way free, Little John is wounded in the knee but the band make it to a castle in the woods owned by Sir Richard at the Lee, whom we are told is the poor knight Robin helped earlier.
Sir Richard shelters Robin and his men from the sheriff’s assault and the sheriff rides to London to complain to the king. Deeming it safe, the outlaws return to the greenwood but the sheriff captures Sir Richard while his is out hawking and carries him off to Nottingham. Sir Richard’s wife goes to Robin for help and the outlaws mount a rescue mission. Robin shoots and decapitates the sheriff in the streets of Nottingham and his men free Sir Richard.
The king arrives in Nottingham and disguises himself and his men as monks to enter the greenwood. Robin accosts them and, impressed by his honour and skill, the king reveals himself to Robin and invites him into his service.
Robin lives at court for a little over a year but yearns for the greenwood once more. He returns to Barnsdale and lives there with the remainder of his men as outlaws for a further twenty-two years. Robin’s eventual fate is hinted at in an obscure reference to ‘Kirksley’ Priory where he goes to be bled and is betrayed by the prioress and her lover, Sir Roger of Doncaster ‘through their false play’. So ends the ballad.
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Once the largest Benedictine establishment in the north and one of the wealthiest landholders in Yorkshire, St Mary’s Abbey was closed and ruined during the Dissolution. Photo by Kaly99 CC BY-SA 3.0
The story is pretty episodic and was probably composed of several separate adventures woven together to form one long narrative. Barnsdale in Yorkshire is given as the home of the outlaws but Nottingham is presented as a fairly close town (in reality it is a good fifty miles away). Also, the Sheriff of Nottingham, who is Robin’s greatest adversary, would have been out of his jurisdiction in Barnsdale. This suggests that there may have been two literary cycles – a Yorkshire one and a Nottinghamshire one – that got mixed together at some point before the Gest was written down in its present form.
Robin displays the courtly habits and chivalric customs more befitting the knights of King Arthur than a yeoman-turned-outlaw. He refuses to eat until an unknown guest has arrived (as King Arthur does in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), he is devoted to the Virgin Mary (veneration of a single female was common in courtly romances) and, despite giving the clergy and law a hard time, he is fiercely loyal to his king.
Thomas Ohlgren, an authority on the early ballads, has suggested that this transferral of chivalric ideology from the knight to the yeoman represents the rise of the guilds and merchant class in the 14th century(4) Robin and his band follow many rules and traditions of the guilds such as the giving of livery, the lending of money and escorting the king in processions. Ohlgren even goes so far as to say that the Gest may have been written specifically for a draper’s guild to be performed at one of their feasts as there are many references to cloth and livery throughout the ballad. The episode where Little John ham-fistedly measures out cloth with his longbow for the poor knight’s livery and is mocked by Much is picked up on specifically by Ohlgren. He suggests that this represents the opposition of cloth dealers to the strict imposing of a standard measure or ‘Silver Yard’ by the cloth guilds. When Robin meets the king he sells him a quantity of Lincoln green to outfit his retinue, just as various drapers’ guilds did.
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The coronation mantle of Roger II of Sicily made circa 1134. The red colour created from crushed kermes came to be called scarlet.
Lincoln was an important cloth-producing town in the Middle Ages known especially for its shades of green and scarlet. Green was created by first dying the cloth with woad (blue) and then overdying it with weld (yellow). Scarlet was originally the name for a very fine and expensive cloth rather than the colour red(5). There has been some confusion on whether or not the ‘scarlet and grene’ in the ballad actually means red and green or in fact ‘scarlet in the grain’. To dye something ‘in the grain’ meant using dried insects called kermes imported from the Mediterranean to produce a vibrant red colour. These insects resembled grains of wheat hence the name thus, ‘lyncoln grene’ could mean ‘Lincoln red’. However, the spelling ‘grene’ in the Gest is used for other things that couldn’t possibly be scarlet such as the ‘grene-wode’. It is uncertain when scarlet began to mean a shade of red rather than the expensive cloth but in the later Robin Hood ballads at least, scarlet very definitely refers to the colour red.
The Gest is the most comprehensive of the ballads, stringing several separate stories into a single narrative that ends with Robin Hood’s eventual fate at Kirskley. All in all it can be seen as the quintessential early Robin Hood story. Other early ballads bear some similarities to the events within the Gest but they also tell us much more and it is to those that I will turn to in my next post.
Read A Gest of Robin Hood 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
1. A Gest of Robyn Hode (“Lettersnijder” edn.). Antwerp: Van Doesbroch, c. 1510. [Now in National Library of Scotland.]
2. A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode. London: Wynkyn de Worde, ?1506-10. [Now in Cambridge University Library.]
3. A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode. London: Copland, c. 1560. [Now in the British Library.]
5. Zanchi, A. “Melius Abundare Quam Deficere”: Scarlet Clothing in Laxdæla Saga and Njals Saga in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Volume 4, edited by Robin Netherton, Gale R. Owen-Crocker. 2008.
March 30, 2018
Excerpt and Giveaway at Let Them Read Books!
My blog tour for Lords of the Greenwood starts today and kicks off with an excerpt and a giveaway over at Let Them Read Books. This giveaway is for two free ebooks of the novel and ends on the 20th April.
February 14, 2018
Lords of the Greenwood now in Paperback!
The paperback proof has been approved and my newest novel is now available from Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback format. This is the longest novel I’ve written and it’s very satisfying to see my name on such a hefty volume!
The blog tour via Historical Fiction Virtual Blog Tours is set to kick off some time in March.
