HISTORY, ETC: MEET THE ORIGINAL ROBIN HOOD

Medieval outlaw tales are exciting, entertaining and ultraviolent. None are more famous than the ballads of Robin Hood. But what was the original Robin really like? And why do we still love him today?

Note to readers: This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing about medieval outlaws. In the coming weeks we’ll cover characters like Fulk Fitzwarin, Eustache the Monk, Gamelyn, Adam Bell and more. Thanks to everyone who asked me to cover this topic. If you’d like to submit more suggestions for content, feel free to comment below. I’ll address the best ideas in future posts, or on the Friday morning podcast, First Draft.

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In summer, when the woods are bright,

And leaves be large and long,

It is full merry in fair forest

To hear the birds’ song.

These four lines, conjuring the pleasures of an early English summer in the woods, begin a poem written in the late fifteenth century on a somewhat mangled manuscript that is today kept in Cambridge University Library.

They faintly echo the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - in praise of April’s sweet showers soothing the drought of March. But they are in fact the first words of an even more famous literary phenomenon.

More famous? Yes.

To say that is not to throw shade on Chaucer — whose poem is bigger, better, subtler and funnier than this one. (And most other poems too.) However, the words above begin Robin Hood and the Monk, one of the earliest ballads of Robin Hood ever written down. For all that we may love the tales of the Canterbury pilgrims, they are art. Robin Hood is box office. He has been for more than 500 years.

Few people today read Robin Hood and the Monk. But almost everyone has encountered Robin in some form or other - as played by Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn in the classics, as Disney’s famous fox, Kevin Costner’s comic hero, or Russell Crowe’s gurning one. Like King Arthur - the only literary survival from the Middle Ages who really rivals Robin for pre-eminence - the success of the character is that it has detached from its original text(s) and is a sort of ‘open-source’ opportunity for each generation of storytellers and screenwriters to make their own.

Yet it is worth us remembering that Robin Hood has not been around forever. He came from somewhere, even if historians have laboured for many generations to pin down exactly where that is. Was Robin Hood a real person? When and where do his adventures take place? Who are his Merrie Men? What’s his beef with the sheriff? Where do the crusades fit in?

Some of these questions are unanswerable. Others misconstrue who Robin Hood actually is (or was) in the first place. I’ll try and explain more about all this in a minute. But before we dig in, let’s take a moment to look at the story of Robin Hood and the Monk, and find out what it tells us about the ‘original’ Robin Hood.

Robin Hood in 1938 (Getty Images)

Robin Hood and the Monk is both an early telling of Robin Hood and a late one.

It’s early in the sense that, with the possible exception of the much longer Gest of Robin Hood (also late-fifteenth century), there is no known written version that predates it. But it’s late in the sense that we know Robin Hood stories had, by the fifteenth century, been popular in England as minstrel ballads and word-of-mouth yarns for at least one hundred years, and probably two hundred.

When the poet William Langland wrote Piers Plowman in the 1370s he made passing reference to the rhymes of Robin Hood. Yet long before that - from the 1260s onwards - we find the name Robin Hood (and variations on it) turning up in English legal records as a pseudonym used by criminals. In other words, there was a time in the later Middle Ages when to set oneself up as ‘a Robin Hood’ seems to have been like putting on Joker make-up and buying automatic rifles in the modern United States.

By definition, all the Robin Hoods who appear in the records of the English courts cannot have been ‘the’ Robin Hood - any more than all the dogs who ever played Lassie on TV were actually Lassie. To cut through a vast historiography in a single sentence, the likelihood is that if there ever was a ‘real’ Robin Hood, he is beyond historical identification. More likely, the character who we know from fiction is just that: a character from fiction. There may have been real individuals who influenced the origins of the legend in some way, but they are lost to history, or else so far removed from the end product as to be irrelevant.

(Incidentally, this is the same conclusion at which most serious scholars of King Arthur eventually arrive. And from what I know of the work of Ian Fleming, it is also where we get to when we go looking for a real James Bond.)

So unless you want to drive yourself truly potty, it is best to accept that the ‘original’ medieval Robin Hood is only knowable through his fictional exploits. Which brings us back to Robin Hood and the Monk.

Robin Hood meets Richard the Lionheart. Somehow. (Getty Images)

When we read Robin Hood and the Monk it’s fascinating to see how much of the mature form of the tales is already present. The plot of the ballad is roughly as follows.

We meet Robin in the pleasant forest of Sherwood, near Nottingham in the English midlands. This is evidently his dwelling-place, since he is wanted for serious crimes and cannot go near towns, or anywhere where ‘regular’ English law (as opposed to the separate code of ‘forest law’) applies.

In the wood, Robin is bickering with his friend, Little John, since Robin wants to go into Nottingham to hear Mass and make devotions to the Virgin Mary, and John does not. The argument with John turns into an archery contest, which Robin loses; they quarrel and part ways. Stubborn Robin goes to Nottingham, and predictably enough he is spotted, by the monk of the ballad’s (modern) title. The monk, being a sneak and a toady, tattles to the sheriff of Nottingham - also a bad sort. The sheriff bars the gates to the city, and takes Robin prisoner.

After this, the monk sets off with his page-boy to take letters from the sheriff to the king of England, informing him of Robin’s capture. But the road to London leads the monk through the forest. There he meets Little John and another of the outlaws, Much the Miller’s Son. Not realising who they are, he lets slip the news about Robin.

This turns out to be a mistake. Without very little hesitation, John beheads the monk and Much slaughters the page-boy, in case he should bear witness to their crime. Then the two outlaws go to see the king themselves, claiming to be messengers from the sheriff, fulfilling the mission of the unfortunate monk, whose death they mention as a tragic passing. The king buys their story, rewards them with cash and sends them back to Nottingham under royal protection to bring Robin to face justice at court.

So far, so good. And it gets better. John and Much go back north as commanded, where they bust Robin out of jail, stabbing the jailer to death for good measure. The outlaws return to the forest, flossing all the way. The sheriff is furious, but can do nothing. And at the end of the ballad, the king hears what has happened, is initially annoyed, but then concludes that Little John only tricked him out of loyalty to his master, Robin, and an acute sense of natural justice. So he washes his hands of the whole affair (‘“Speak no more of this matter,” said our king.’) and goes back to doing whatever a medieval monarch does. Hunting and feasting, and recognising virtue when sees it, mostly. The end.

An ancient oak in Sherwood forest, photographed in 1900, which grew during the Robin Hood years. (Getty Images)

What are we to make of all this? The first thing to say is that many elements of the classic Robin Hood story are present and correct: the greenwood, the outlawry, the location in Nottinghamshire (though other medieval ballads are set in Yorkshire), the sheriff, the trickery, the archery, the anticlericalism, the set-piece battles, the fair king, and the underpinning thesis that law and justice are not the same thing, and that the latter is essentially a matter of good character and sound morals.

Yet of course, plenty is missing. Robin pines not for Maid Marion, but for his devotion to the Virgin. The king is not Richard the Lionheart, fresh back from crusade to correct the abuses allowed under his brother King John; in most medieval versions of Robin Hood it is implied that the king is either Edward I or Edward III, both of whom took a much keener interest in legal reform and the correction of corrupt officialdom than did Richard.

Meanwhile, we are missing Friar Tuck. Will Scarlet only gets a passing mention. There is no Guy of Gisborne - although he features in another early telling of the legend. The sheriff is a poorly fleshed-out character indeed, and the main antagonist is really the monk - who is but a flat caricature of the worldly and venal churchman. The monk is not nice - but then again, the outlaws are also quite hard to love, too. Although we root for Robin and Little John throughout, their callous attitude to murdering innocent bystanders like the jailer and (especially) the little page-boy makes them far more ambiguous characters than Hollywood often allows today. They are closer in spirit to members of Tony Soprano’s gang than to traditional superheroes: charismatic and amusing, but ultimately violent killers whom you would not want to encounter at your next teddy-bear’s tea party.

The way it really happened? (Getty Images)

So in this snapshot of Robin Hood, which shows us the hero in his transition from the oral to the written, written down in a world that was shifting from what we now call the medieval to the early modern, we see a legend in the making. Yet as I hinted at the beginning of this post, in the fifteenth century, Robin Hood was only one of a large number of characters in the broad genre of outlaw tales. One of the most fascinating questions that faces scholars is why Robin has survived in the popular imagination all the way to the twenty-first century, while contemporaries like Gamelyn, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, Eustache the Monk and many others besides have faded away.

I think the answer may lie in the fact that Robin Hood was simply the most popular of the original medieval tales, and by the end of the Middle Ages he had already spawned sufficient different traditions that he was never tied to a completely fixed story: his essence was his mutability, which has made him the most attractive character to writers looking to do new things and make him palatable to the moral code of their own times.

Equally, though, it may have something to do with the timelessness of the themes we find in the early Robin Hood tales: the relationship between law and justice, between officeholding and corruption, between loyalty and obedience, and between violence and charity.

Or I suppose it may just be a matter of good luck. There are plenty of fantastic medieval outlaw tales, but only one can be king. That’s the way of life sometimes - and the randomness of fate is a moving force in history which we ought not to ignore.

All that being said, since there are other medieval outlaw tales, even less well known than Robin Hood and the Monk, it would be a shame if we let them continue to languish in obscurity. So at some point soon I’ll write another of these short essays on another medieval outlaw. If you have a favourite, be sure to let me know.