Robin Hood is first mentioned as the generic name for an outlaw in the justice rolls of the late thirteenth century, where he appears as ‘Robehod’ or ‘Robinhood’. He was so well known a hundred years later that the idle priest Sloth, in Piers Plowman, admits that he does not know his ‘pater noster’ but he ‘kan rymes of Robyn Hood’. Among those rhymes was one still being sung at the beginning of the fifteenth century, ‘Robyn hode in scherewode stod’. In this period the outlaw also appears as part of the chronicle of England. One chronicler asserts that he was a follower of Simon de Montfort in his insurrection against the rule of Henry III in 1263; a real outlaw, who supported de Montfort at this time, did indeed live in Sherwood Forest. But his name was Roger Godberd. Nevertheless a monkish hand, in the margins of a copy of Polychronicon, refers in 1460 to ‘a certain outlaw named Robin Hood’ who in Sherwood Forest commits innumerable robberies. Andrew of Wynton, compiling his chronicle a few years earlier, places him in Inglewood near Carlisle and then in Barnsdale.
Soon enough Robin Hood begins to appear everywhere as the epitome of the brave and self-reliant Englishman who rejects oppressive authority; he emerges in songs and ballads, in plays and in mummings. In these works he is eventually joined by the most renowned of his forest companions, Little John and Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who between them comprise a veritable pageant play. These characters did in fact become an integral part of the May Games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompting speculation that they may be essentially of pagan origin. They are more interesting, however, as representative of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The early ballads identify Robin as a sturdy ‘yeoman’, a man somewhere between small farmer and gentleman; his enemies are the sheriffs, the bishops and the archbishops. He does not wish to harm other yeomen, or even knights and squires; he will ‘beat and bind’ only the members of the secular and clerical nobility, who can be classed as rapacious landlords. It is the dream of the oppressed. Certainly Robin was not a member of the aristocracy fallen on hard times, as some of his later and more romantic chroniclers insisted. He was always a representative of the ordinary folk of the land, and in that respect the ballads might have been sung in the local tavern as often as in the knight’s hall. A roughly hewn justice or sense of morality lay behind the fights and the pursuits, the themes of disguise and revenge; the motifs of lawlessness and greenwood liberty were also part of the English dream in a land that was continually and closely administered, in particular by the strictures of royal ‘forest law’.
The woods and forests of England are a token of its ancient life, and as such have been feared and protected in equal measure. The charters of the Anglo-Saxons reveal the presence of woods that still exist. ‘Westgraf’, mentioned in 703 as part of the topography of Shottery in Warwickshire, is now Westgrove Wood in the parish of Haselor. Wanelund, a word the Vikings used when they came to Norfolk, has become Wayland Wood a little south of Watton. A charter of 682 refers to ‘the famous wood known as Cantocwudu’; it is now known as Quantockwood in Somerset. There are many other examples of an ancient presence.
Sire-wode, later known as Sherwood, stretched from Nottingham to the centre of Yorkshire. The present Birklands contains the last remnant of the medieval oak forest that covered this region; the trees are now gnarled and dry. The other forest connected to Robin, Inglewood, was also of great extent and lay between Penrith and Carlisle. These had become the natural refuge of outlaws from the king’s justice, those who were deemed to wear ‘the wolf’s head’ and could thus be instantly cut down. Yet the English have always made heroes out of robbers and cutpurses; as a result the outlaws of the forest became representative of national freedom and equality. Robin Hood is supposed in legend to have died at Kirklees in Yorkshire. But in truth he did not die. He became part of England’s mythography.
27
The suffering king
Henry Bolingbroke, now distinguished by the title of Henry IV, had obtained the throne by violence and perhaps by fraudulence. The crown on such a head will not sit easily or securely. He himself had proved that kings can be removed at will, and gain legitimacy by popular acclamation. Henry therefore courted the Lords and Commons. He promised that he would not levy taxes, and repealed some of the previous king’s more oppressive legislation. He resumed the mantle of the warrior, pledging to lead armies into Scotland and into France, and thus adopted the style of previous martial kings. He also attempted to bring God on his side, by promising the bishops that he would be the hammer of heretics.
