Mythmaking

A few nights ago we were watching one of those shows where a celebrity goes round the country and pretends not to have visited places before. You know the kind of thing – the kind that makes you pull a website and check hotel prices. Anyway, this particular show was in our patch – much to the relief of our bank manager. The credulous celebrity took the viewers across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, including a visit to Chesterfield where they looked at the crooked spire of St Mary’s and All Saints church. The sight might not have made us want to go on holiday, but allegedly it drew in Edwardian tourists by the bucket-load, which is why it was included in a commercially available photo album of the day. So far, so straightforward. But the programme went further and started looking at the mystery of why the church spire became crooked. There were no definite theories – unseasoned wood was about the best they could manage – but one thing they completely debunked was what my wife, who was educated in Derbyshire, was taught at school. Back then they were told that the spire had been partially melted by an incendiary bomb during the Second World War. A perfectly reasonable theory – but not if it was already drawing tourists before a single shot was fired. Clearly, my wife had been sold a pup.

Now I’m not a local myself, but this prompted me to scurry onto the Internet to look for corroboration. Not because my wife is one of those the moon landing was faked types, but simply because it intrigued me that a myth could get started a mere few decades after the events it claimed to represent and then have such a great deal of traction. But the Internet, despite its reputation for disseminating and prolonging myths, drew a blank. Had the Internet been extant when my wife was at school, I suspect it would have been a different story – or at least a more widely disseminated version of the same story.

Now you may be asking yourself at this point whether I’m going anywhere with this. The answer is yes, because of course Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is a story about myths. In particular it is a story about the myth of Robin Hood and one man’s quest to establish the truth of it. Because the myth of Robin Hood is fascinating, not because of the stories themselves but because – unlike the other great British myth, King Arthur – it is a thoroughly anti-establishment myth. And in an age where writing was largely the province of the nobility and the clergy, it tells a story which aims squarely at both.



Of course we know how this happened: whether or not there is a kernel of truth within the myth, the stories themselves were first delivered as ballads – songs or rhymes performed to the people on festive occasions. Some therefore see Robin as an embodiment of The Green Man and Marian as The Queen of May because these characters were very much part of those festival traditions. Whether real or fabricated, the stories would have been adapted to their audiences as they were performed. People would have heard the tales set, not in Sherwood Forest – of which they may not have heard – but somewhere closer to home. This is why there is a conflicting tradition which places Robin Hood in Yorkshire and why there are Robin Hood related landmarks across the country. When the printing press was invented, however, writers began to gather the folk tales together, and perhaps because the major seats of learning – Oxford and Cambridge – were closest to the East Midlands the Sherwood version of the legend came to dominate, with the Sheriff of Nottingham and King John cast as the villains of the piece. There have been more recent attempts to set the legend elsewhere and elsewhen – including a fairly credible attempt to set it in the time after the Norman Conquest, when we know Hereward the Wake served a very similar role – but apart from a few superficial elements such as the Robin Hood look established by Hollywood and the connection to the Crusades established by more recent film versions, the story has proved remarkably resistant to change. Yorkshire, whatever the history, has lost the mythology.



And this means that there is hope for that myth about St Mary’s Chesterfield. Because the truth is little more than theory and considerably less interesting than the myth and because, in years to come, the documentary evidence may yet be buried under the digital mass of half-truths that is the Internet; because most people outside the East Midlands have barely heard of Chesterfield, let alone the crooked spire; because of all these things, it is entirely possible for some spinner of tales to come forward and propagate the myth in a best-selling novel and make it simply more attractive than the truth. It could happen. And maybe then people really will go to Chesterfield to look at that spire, because that’s another myth: most people who pass through Chesterfield aren’t looking for twisted architecture – they’re heading for the Peak District.