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.
