Sources of the Legend

I live in Robin Hood's village. Edwinstowe Church is, according to local legend, where Robin and Marion tied the knot. Given that my novel, Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow, revolves around Robin Hood, it's easy to assume the two are in some way connected and that the book was triggered by the location. It's not a bad theory, but it suffers from one minor flaw: namely that I wasn't living in Edwinstowe when I wrote it.

How much our environment influences our writing is, of course, something that varies from writer to writer. Tolkien had never been to Mordor and Adams hadn't taken lunch in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but there probably were real-world experiences which gave them some of their resonance. I've long been familiar with Sherwood, but a version of Robin Hood where his pursuits were inhibited by little wooden fences or where the Sheriff needed only to follow the signposts to get to the Major Oak would have been a different type of humour, more Python than mine. I therefore drew from a more idealised forest, stripping away the thinly wooded birchlands of the present for the denser, oakier woods that stood before. Likewise, with the current Nottingham Castle a manor house built on the site of the original mediaeval fortress, I used my experience of other, better preserved castles to inform the picture. It's rather like creating film or television - you use the best approximations you can from what's available and make the rest up on the computer.

But there were elements of the Nottinghamshire environment which informed my tale. Nottingham Castle may be history, but the rock on which it stood remains. The tanning pit, used quite graphically in one scene, is part of a tourist route through Nottingham's ancient caves.

Elsewhere I reference the Major Oak, which like Edwinstowe Church has tenuous links to the Robin Hood legend. Nobody is sure exactly how old this venerable tree is, but since the best estimates put it at between eight hundred and a thousand years old it wouldn't have been particularly impressive in the early thirteenth century - if it was there at all. I play on this in the book. I also play on the broader geography of the area. Because, for all the scorn that is heaped on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for its shaky grasp of England, there isn't a single version of Robin Hood where he doesn't escape from Nottingham Castle and pop up in the heart of Sherwood Forest a few minutes later. Given that the distance from Nottingham to the heart of Sherwood is over twenty miles, this suggests either a serious turn of speed or a slight lassitude with regard to the facts. In fact it was niggles such as these which made me think about having a time-traveller go back and find the truth in the first place. From there it was only a short leap to the idea that the truth would be - for reasons I won't reveal here - considerably different to what the legend suggests.

From such small triggers do inspirations come. We all have those moments of insight, but an author's mind is trained to recognise them and pounce on them as the seed of a book - just like a comedian's mind is trained to recognise similar ideas and use them as the basis of a joke. The real craft, of course, comes in taking that small seed - or acorn, if you will - and nurturing it to become a novel. To soak up the environment is then to clad the sapling with the autumn leaves that lend the colour and character. Sherwood may not have inspired the book, but it made it whole.

And what of Edwinstowe? Does Robin Hood's village take kindly to my treatment of their most famous visitor? There's an amusing little story I was told by a woman who once ran a local free newspaper which sums up the attitude of Robin Hood's village to Robin Hood. The story goes that it was decided to create a tapestry for the village church. Various locals suggested things they associated with the village, from Thoresby Mine to the Major Oak. It was only when the tapestry was complete they realised that nobody had suggested Robin Hood. They hastily stitched an image into a corner to finish it off. Such apathy speaks volumes - but not necessarily volumes I'd be inclined to write.