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November 21, 2020 - March 7, 2021
Wherever we believe Robin Hood lived (see Chapters Three and Thirteen) or even when (see Chapter Three) the common setting for the story is the greenwood; the forest.
The forest, meaning and origin, difference of use. Also see "Forest Law"
oak, elm, ash, hazel, lime, hawthorn, maple and service. The only evergreens in England, highly relevant to the Robin Hood stories, were yew from which longbows were made.
Tree types in Robin's foreat
The forest laws of 1306, drawn up by Edward I, perhaps the king on the throne in Robin’s time, often gave way to local landowners and communities demanding their right to their use. Forest justices employed by the king appeared less regularly and had gone altogether by 1334.
Forest Law and the Sherif motifs.
The term itself comes from an old Saxon term meaning ‘fear’
This is incorrect
The Norman rulers of England introduced the word as a legal term, as seen in Latin texts such as the Magna Carta, to denote uncultivated land that was legally designated for hunting by feudal nobility (see Royal Forest).
Before that the word appears to have originated in French
The word forest derives from the Old French forest (also forès), denoting "forest, vast expanse covered by trees"; forest was first introduced into English as the word denoting wild land set aside for hunting without the necessity in definition of having trees on the land.
The precise origin of Medieval Latin foresta is obscure. Some authorities claim the word derives from the Late Latin phrase forestam silvam, denoting "the outer wood" with forestam meaning "outer" or "outside" a proscribed boundary such as property line.
Trysting Tree.
Trysting trees are trees of any species which have, through their individual prominence, appearance, or position, been chosen as traditional or popular meeting places for meetings for specific purposes.
Although Chaucer does not mention Robin Hood himself, it is interesting that his yeoman’s chief skill should lie in hunting. He is a crack shot with a longbow, even though crossbows had long been used on the battlefield. Such men knew their local woods like the back of their hands and were able to disappear into their depths when required.
Chaucer yoeman discription
May Day, although paganism held on longest here, with the worship of the phallic maypole and the ritual dances of the Morris Men and even Robin Hood
Mayday
the Danelaw – was controlled by Norsemen and their culture permeated Saxon society in the very areas, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, where Robin was supposed to have lived.
Danelaw and Robin stories.
Herne the Hunter,
Herne - mythic huntsman character Cernnunus
We can make a strong case for King Arthur originally being a Celtic god, if only because virtually all his legends are steeped in magic. Robin Hood’s are not.
Not a magical world
The character of Sloth in The Vision of Piers Plowman, written by William Langland c.1377 admits that his Lord’s Prayer (‘pater-noster’) is imperfect – because he had only heard it in Latin in church and could not read it – but he did know the rhymes of Robin Hood.
Piers Plowman
there was something scandalous and shameful about Sloth who preferred the layman’s tales to holy writ. Thomas
Piers Plowman
‘Lythe [attend] and listen, gentilmen, That be of freborne [freeborn] blode, I shall you tel of a gode yeman, His name is Robin Hode.’
Who was Robin intended?
theme, of archery contests and men invited into service, is a common theme of those early ballads.
Themes
John behaves as a complete scoundrel while serving the sheriff, lying in bed for hours, quarrelling with other staff and eventually scuttling off with £300 and the sheriff’s family silver!
noble hero, he cannot simply die in battle (and certainly not of an age-related illness); he must be a victim of treachery.
Noble hero must die of treachery
Although we do not have accurate figures for the population of the Isle of Wight in the fourteenth century, we do have statistics of murder. These were recorded in the coroner’s court proceedings between July 1377 and Michelmas (autumn) 1392.
Where are these statistics
we have men who sheltered in the greenwood or in otherwise inaccessible places to become outlaw bands.
Outlaw relating to outside the law, compare to forest meaning outise jurisdiction
A man on the outskirts of governing, a free man
The Charter of the Forest, 1217,
Major Oak in Sherwood,
The king appointed Roger de Wensley to hunt down the Folvilles and the Coterels, operating in the same part of the county and when he caught them, he threw in his lot with them. The concept of a corrupt sheriff, nominally a royal official but in reality out to line his own pockets, comes out of men like de Wensley.
The sheriff was the king’s man in local matters, the rough equivalent of the chief constable today and was kept very busy. On average, he would receive about 120 royal writs – the equivalent of policy directives from central government – and would have to act on them. If we have the impression that all the Sheriff of Nottingham had to do was to chase Robin Hood all day, the outlaw was either a far worse problem than anyone has realised or the writers of such stories had no idea what a sheriff actually did. That said, the sheriff had huge powers and few landowners would go against him. He had
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Sherif explain
The sheriff was the king’s man in local matters, the rough equivalent of the chief constable today and was kept very busy. On average, he would receive about 120 royal writs – the equivalent of policy directives from central government – and would have to act on them. If we have the impression that all the Sheriff of Nottingham had to do was to chase Robin Hood all day, the outlaw was either a far worse problem than anyone has realised or the writers of such stories had no idea what a sheriff actually did. That said, the sheriff had huge powers and few landowners would go against him. He had
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Sheriff
And if someone is arrested, charged and faces trial – and none of this is a certainty – there will be dozens, sometimes hundreds of protestors who will back a murderer for a hundred and one reasons, almost certainly blaming central government (i.e. the sheriff of Nottingham) for ‘creating’ such criminals in the first place.
See current riots and looting and activist groups
was an historical character and that he lived in the 1190s, the two popes of that decade, chosen then as now from among the cardinals, were Alberto di Morra (Gregory VIII) and Paulo Scolari (Clement III). As was typical for centuries, these two were of noble Italian families. There has only ever been one English pope – Nicholas Breakspear, who took the papal name Hadrian IV in 1154.
Popes
property-owning businessmen all over Europe, eager for promotion and power. Below them, and this is where the Church became regional, came the archbishops. There were two in England, the senior being the Archbishop of Canterbury and the junior, York. Whenever we assume Robin lived, it is likely that York dominated. The
Who was the chruch in york
Below the two archbishops came the bishops and at this level we come into at least an element of the Robin Hood stories. The bishops of Lincoln and Durham were both rich and powerful and represented the pinnacle of the Church’s wealth
Church closest to the domain of the foreat and the eire of robin
No popes visited England before the twentieth century
Lincoln, the cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary was first built in 1074,
The bell in the central tower is Great Tom which clanged out for miles over the surrounding countryside
Durham, the present cathedral dates from the Norman period
Today, County Durham is still referred to as the Land of the Prince Bishops.
It is noticeable that the anti-Church element of the Robin Hood ballads dates not from an earlier, accepting period, but from the time when Henry VIII was breaking with Rome and dissolving the main source of Church wealth, the monasteries.
Robin was devout i. The early storues, but stilll bishops, archebishops and the sheriff were his favorite targeta
Gilbertines. These last were the only ones found in Medieval England, at Sempringham in Norfolk, where, unusually, monks and nuns were able to worship together in the same church.
Monsastic in Robin's england
Early in the thirteenth century, St Francis of Assisi and St Dominic set up their own Orders which went in different directions. Dominic set up the Order of Preachers (Dominicans or Black Friars) which sent missionaries out into the world to combat the heresy of the Cathars in southern France who believed in two Gods – one good, the other evil. Francis, though associated today with animals, chose to follow Jesus through poverty, giving away his cloak to a thief who had stolen his hood. Both these men could be said to have created the friar, a new-priest-on-the-block in the thirteenth century
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Enter Tuck and the weirdness of his personal order
Campsall, Yorkshire, where Robin and Marian are said to have been married (by Tuck?) or Hathersage, where legend has it Little John was buried (see Chapter Thirteen), you are standing on at least seven layers of people, each generation laid down on the one before and below it. And at the bottom, lies Robin Hood.
Robins Church?
Maid Marian is almost an afterthought in the Robin Hood stories. She appears in none of the earliest ballads and may have been invented to become the May Queen to Robin’s King in the Tudor festivities (see Chapter Eight).
Chaucer sneers at such women in The Canterbury Tales. His prioress, for example, speaks French with an East London accent. She spends a fortune feeding her lapdog titbits and wears a gold bracelet which Chaucer hints was given to her by a man; an inscription reads Amor omnia vincit (love overcomes all).
Prioress description for final fytte
villein
A fuedal land tenant obkiged to a Lord to pay a fee and toil as a type of share cropper
Ian Mortimer in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England likens childbirth to ‘Russian roulette played with a fifty-barrelled gun’. Nearly a quarter of women did not survive their pregnancies and it is estimated that over ten per cent of babies were stillborn. A further one in six would not make it past their first birthday, a statistic that actually worsened among the poor in the unbridled development of industrial cities in the nineteenth century.
she enters them so late, in the sixteenth century,
Only in the recent, largely screen-bound variations of Marion does she become a genuine heroine, capable of holding her own
Putting Marian in her place. Sexist AF but also historic
Edward III had issued a royal proclamation that any other sport than archery for the common people was illegal, on pain of death. This had softened to imprisonment by 1363 but it was still frowned upon in official circles until the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603.
Look this up
Successive English kings after Edward III had insisted that all able-bodied men should own a bow and practise regularly.
If we take one retinue size that we know, Edward IV’s 14,000 archers quoted above and even if each archer fired only six arrows a minute, that makes a hail of 84,000 arrows raining on an enemy in sixty seconds.
In September 1465, just to taunt those of us trying to find the outlaw of Sherwood, one of Lord Howard’s bowyers is listed as ‘Robard Hoode’.
Haha
The Puritans detested Robin because he was associated with, at best, the Catholic faith and more probably, an earlier pagan past. Philip
Robin was catholic, though he was fiercly against the excesses of the clergy, so the church hated him, the protestants hated him too, foe his pagan adoption (similarity to cernnonus) and for his catholicism.
Morris dancers
Arbeau’s Orchoegraphie 1589.
Robin Hood games, although it is not clear exactly what those were or when they were first played. The first record of them is at Exeter in 1426 and it may be that both Maid Marian and Friar Tuck were inventions to fit these games rather than linked to the historicity of Robin himself. Robin was the equivalent of the May King, with Marian as Queen.
Origins of friar tuck and marion in later stories could have come from here
