I Can’t Sleep - Robin Hood | Relaxing Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

Drift off with this calm bedtime reading on Robin Hood, a peaceful way to ease insomnia and invite rest. Benjamin’s soothing voice shares the legendary tales of the heroic outlaw, from his origins in English folklore to his enduring role in stories, plays, and films. His gentle cadence transforms folklore into soft, fact-filled narration that helps quiet the mind. This is not whispering or hypnosis—just calm storytelling and education designed to reduce stress, ease anxiety, and support restful sleep. Press play, close your eyes, and let the story of Robin Hood carry you into dreams. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Robin Hood, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Robin Hood. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw, originally depicted in English folklore, and subsequently featured in literature and film. According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman.

In some versions of the legend, he is depicted as being of noble birth, and in modern retellings, he is sometimes depicted as having fought in the Crusades before returning to England to find his lands taken by the sheriff. In the oldest known versions, he is instead a member of the yeoman class. Traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln Green, he is said to have robbed from the rich and given to the poor. Through retellings, additions, and variations, a body of familiar characters associated with Robin Hood has been created. These include his lover made Marion, his band of outlaws, the merry men, and his chief opponent, the Sheriff of Nottingham. The sheriff is often depicted as assisting Prince John and usurping the rightful but absent

King Richard, to whom Robin Hood remains loyal. His partisanship of the common people and his hostility to the Sheriff of Nottingham are early recorded features of a legend, but his interest in the rightfulness of the king is not, and neither is his setting of the of Richard the first. He became a popular folk figure in the late Middle Ages, and the earliest known ballads featuring him are from the 15th century. There have been numerous variations and adaptations of the story over the subsequent years, and the story continues to be widely represented in literature, film, and television.

Robin Hood is considered one of the best known tales of English folklore. the historicity of Robin Hood is not proven and has been debated for centuries. There are numerous references to historical figures with similar names that have been proposed as possible evidence of his existence, some dating back to the late 13th century. At least eight plausible origins to the story have been mooted by historians and folklorists, including suggestions that Robin Hood was a stock alias used by or in reference to bandits.

Ballads and Tales The first clear reference to Rhymes of Robin Hood is from the alliterative poem Pierce Plowman, thought to have been composed in the 1370s, but the earliest surviving copies of the narrative ballads that tell his story date to the second half of the 15th century or the first decade of the 16th century. In these early accounts, Robin Hood's partisanship of the

lower classes, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and associated special regard for women, his outstanding skills in archer, his anti-clericalism, and his particular animosity towards the sheriff of Nottingham are already clear. Little John, Much, the Miller's son, and Will Scarlet, as Will Scarlock or Skathlock, all appear, although not yet made Berrien or Friar-Tuck. The latter has been part of the legend since at least a later 15th century when he has mentioned in a Robin Hood play script. In modern popular culture, Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late 12th century King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's brother John while Richard was away at Third Crusade. This view first gained currency in the 16th century.

It is not supported by the earliest ballads. The early compilation, a guest of Robin Hood, names the king as Edward, and while it does show Robin Hood accepting the king's pardon, he later repudiates it and returns to the Greenwood. The oldest surviving ballad, Robin Hood and the monk, gives even less support to the picture of Robin Hood as a partisan of the true king. The setting of the early ballads is usually attributed by scholars to either the 13th century or the 14th, although it is recognized they are not necessarily

historically consistent. The early ballads are also quite clear on Robin Hood's social status. He is a yeoman. While the precise meaning of this term changed over time, including free retainers of an aristocrat and small landlorders, it always referred to commoners. The essence of it in the present context, was neither a knight nor a peasant or a husband, but something in between. Artisans, such as Millers, were among those regarded as yeomen in the 14th century. From the 16th century on, there were attempts to elevate Robin Hood to the nobility, and in two extremely influential plays, Anthony Munday, presented him at the very end of the 16th century as the Earl of Huntington, and he is still commonly presented in modern times. As well as back to the most of

the legend was also transmitted by Robin Hood games, or plays that were an important part of the late medieval and early modern May Day festivities. The first record of a Robin Hood game was in 1426 in Exeter, but the reference does not indicate how old or widespread this custom was at the time. The Robin Hood games are known to have flourished in the later 15th and 16th centuries, as commonly seen as, stated as fact that made Marion and a Jolly Friar, at least partly identifiable with Friar Tuck, entered the legend through the May Games. Early ballads The earliest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad is the 15th century Robin Hood and the monk. This is preserved in Cambridge University manuscript FF5.48.

Written after 1450, it contains many of the elements still associated with the legend from the Nottingham setting to the bitter enmity between Robin and the local sheriff. The first printed version is a guest of Robin Hood, circa 1500, a collection of separate stories that attempts to unite the episodes into a single continuous narrative. After this comes Robin Hood and the Potter, contained in a manuscript of circa 1503. The Potter is markedly different in tone from the monk, whereas the earlier tale is a thriller, the latter is more comic, its plot involving trickery and cunning rather than straightforward force. Other early texts are dramatic pieces,

the earliest being the fragmentary Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, circa 1475. These are particularly noteworthy, as they show Robin's integration into May Day rituals towards the end of the Middle Ages. Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, among other points of interest, contains the earliest reference to Friar Tech. The plots of neither the monk nor the potter are included in the guest, and neither is the plot of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, which is probably at least as old as those two ballads, although preserved in a more recent copy. Each of these three ballads survived in a single copy, so it is unclear how much of the medieval legend has survived, and what has survived may not be typical of the medieval legend. It is but argued that the fact that the surviving ballads were preserved in written form in itself makes it unlikely they were typical.

In particular, stories with an interest for the gentry were by this view more likely to be preserved. The story of Robin's aid to the poor knight that takes up much of the guest may be an example. The character of Robin in these first texts is rougher-edged than in his later incarnations. In Robin Hood and the Monk, for example, he is shown as quick-tempered and violent, assaulting Little John for defeating him in an archery contest. In the same ballad, Much the Miller's son, casually kills a little page in the course of rescuing Robin Hood from prison. No extant ballad early actually shows Robin Hood giving to the poor, although in a guest of Robin Hood, Robin does make a large loan to an unfortunate night, which he does not in the end require to be repaid.

And later in the same ballot, Robin Hood states his intention of giving money to the next traveler to come down the road if he happens to be poor. Of my good, he shall have some if he be a poor man. As it happens, the next traveler is not poor, but it seems in context that Robin Hood is stating a general policy. The first explicit statement to the effect that Robin Hood habitually robbed from the rich to give the poor can be found in John Stowe's Annals of England, 1592, about a century after the publication of the guest. From the beginning, Robin Hood is on the side of the poor. The guest quotes Robin Hood as instructing his men that when they rob,

Look ye do no husband harm, that tilleth with his plow. No more shall ye good yemen that walketh, by Grenwood Shaw, nay, no knight, nay no squire, that will be a good fellow. And in its final lines, the guest sums up, he was a good outlaw, and did poor men much good. Within Robin Hood's band, medieval forms of courtesy rather than modern ideals of equality are generally in evidence. In the early ballad, Robin's men usually kneel before him in strict obedience. In a guest of Robin Hood, the king even observes that his men are more at his bidding than my men be at mine.

Their social status as Yeomen is shown by their weapons, a sword rather than quarterstaffs. The only character to use the quarterstaff in the early ballads is the potter, and Robin Hood does not take to a staff until the 17th century Robin Hood and Little John. The political and social assumptions underlying the early Robin Hood ballads have long been controversial, It has been influential argued by J.C. Hold that the Robin Hood legend was cultivated in the households of the gentry, and that it would be mistaken to see him a figure of peasant revolt. He is not a peasant, but a yeoman, and his tales make no mention of the complaints of the peasants, such as oppressive taxes.

He appears not so much as a revolt against societal standards as an embodiment of them, being generous, pious and courteous, opposed to stingy, worldly, and churlish foes. Other scholars have, by contrast, stressed the subversive aspects of the legend, and see in the medieval Robin Hood ballads of plebeian literature hostile to the feudal order. Early plays, May Day games, and fairs. By the early 15th century at the latest, Robin Hood had become associated with May Day celebrations, with revelers dressing as Robin or as members of his band for the festivities. This was not common throughout England,

but in some regions the custom lasted until Elizabethan times and during the reign of Henry VIII was briefly popular at court. Robin was often allocated the role of a May king, presiding over games and processions. But plays were also performed with the characters in the roles, sometimes performed at church ails, a means by which churches raised funds. A complaint of 1492 brought to the Star Chamber

accuses men of acting riotously by coming to a fair as Robin Hood and his men. The accused defended themselves on the grounds that the practice was a long-standing custom to raise money for churches, and they had not acted riotously but peaceably. It is from the association with the May games that Robin's romantic attachment to made Marion, or Marion, apparently stems.

A Robin and Marion figured in 13th century French pasturals, of which Jeux de Robin and Marion, circa 120, is a literary version, and presided over the French May festivities. This Robin and Marion tended to preside in the intervals of the attempted seduction of the latter by a series of nights over a variety of rustic pastimes. In the Jeanne and Robine and Marion, Robin and his companions have to rescue Marion from the clutches of a lustful night. His play is distinct from the English legends. Although Dobson and Taylor regarded as highly probable that this French Robin's name and functions traveled to the English May games, where they fused with the Robin Hood legend,

both Robin and Marion were certainly associated with May Day festivities in England, as was Friartuck, but these may have been originally two distinct types of performance, Alexander Barclay in the Ship of Fools, writing in circa 1500, refers to some merry fit of Maid Marian or else of Robin Hood, but the characters were brought together. Marion did not immediately gain the unquestioned role in Robin Hood's birth, breeding, valor, and marriage. His sweetheart is Clorinda, the queen of the shepherdesses.

Chlorinda survives in some later stories as an alias of Marion. The earliest preserved script of a Robin Hood play is the fragmentary Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. This apparently dates to the 1470s, and circumstantial evidence suggests it was probably performed at the House of Sir John Paston. His fragment appears to tell the story of Robin Hood and Guy of Kisbury. There's also an early playtext appended to a 1560 printed edition of the guest. This includes a dramatic version of the story of Robin Hood and the Curdell Friar and a version of the first part of the story of Robin Hood and the Potter. Neither of these ballads are known to have existed in print at the time,

and there is no earlier record known of the Curdell Friar story. The publisher describes the text as a play of Robin Hood very proper to be played in May games, but does not seem to be aware that the text actually contains two separate plays. And a special point of interest in the friar play is the appearance of a ribald woman who is unnamed, but apparently to be identified with the body made Marianne of the May Games. She does not appear annexed versions of the ballad. Robin Hood on the early modern stage. In 1598, Anthony Monday wrote a pair of plays on the Robin Hood legend,

The Downfall and the Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, published 1601. These plays drew on a variety of sources, including apparently a guest of Robin Hood, and were influential in fixing the story of Robin Hood to the period of Richard I. Stephen Thomas Knight has suggested that Monday drew heavily on Folk Fitzwarran, a historical 12th century outlawed nobleman and enemy of King John, and creating his Robin Hood. The play identifies Robin Hood as Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, probably for the first time and identifies Maid Marian with one of the semi-mythical Matilda's persecuted by King John.

The plays are complex and plot and form, the story of Robin Hood appearing as a play within a play, presented at the court of Henry VIII, and written by the poet, priest, and courtier John Skelton. Skelton himself is presented in the play as acting the part of Friar Tuck. Some scholars have conjectured that Skelton may have indeed written a lost Robin Hood play for Henry the Eighth's court, and that this play may have been one of Monday's sources. Henry VIII himself, with eleven of his nobles, had impersonated Robin Hood's men as part of his maying in 1510. Robin Hood is known to have appeared in a number of other lost and exed Elizabethan plays. In 1599, the play George Agree, the pender of Wakefield Places Robin Hood in the reign of Edward VIII. Edward I, a play by George Peel, first performed in 1590 to 91, incorporates a Robin Hood game played by the characters.

Lill Well and the Great, the last independent Prince of Wales, is presented playing Robin Hood. Fixing the Robin Hood story to the 1190s had been first, proposed by John Major in his Historia Majoris Britannia, 1521. And he also may have been influenced in so doing by the story of Warren. This was the period in which King Richard was absent from the country, fighting in the Third Crusade. William Shakespeare makes reference to Robin Hood in his late 16th century play,

The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In it, the character Valentin is banished from Milan and driven out through the forest where he is approached by outlaws, who upon meeting him desire him as their leader. They comment, By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar, this fellow were a king for our wild faction. Robin Hood is also mentioned in As You Like It.

When asked about the exiled Duke Sr., the character of Charles says that he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry man with him. And there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. England. Justice Silence sings a line from an unnamed Robin Hood ballad. The line is, Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John, and Act 5, Scene 3 of Henry IV, Part 2. In Henry the 4th, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 3, False Staff refers to Maid Marian, implying she is a byword for unwomanly or unchaste behavior. Ben Johnson produced the incomplete mask, The Sad Shepherd, or A Tale of Robin Hood,

in part as a satire on Puritanism. It is about half-finished, and writing may have been interrupted by his death in 1637. It is Johnson's only pastoral drama. It was written in sophisticated verse and included supernatural action and characters. It has had little impact on the Robin Hood tradition, but needs mention, as the work of a major dramatist. In 1642, London Theatre closure by the Puritans interrupted the portrayal of Robin Hood on the stage. The theaters would reopen with the restoration in 1660. Robin Hood did not appear on the restoration stage unless one includes Robin Hood and his

crew of soldiers, acted in Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II in 1661. This short play adapts the story of the King's pardon of Robin Hood to refer to the restoration. However, Robin Hood appeared on the 18th century stage in various farces and common operas. Alfred Lord Tennyson would write a four-act Robin Hood play at the end of the 19th century, the Forrestors. It is fundamentally based on the guest, but follows the tradition of placing Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntington in the time of Richard I, and making the Sheriff of Nottingham and

Prince John rivals with Robin Hood for Maid Marianne's hand. The return of King Richard brings about a happy ending. Broadside Ballads and Garlands With the advent of printing came the Robin Hood Broadside Ballads. Exactly when they displaced the oral tradition of Robin Hood ballads is unknown, but the process seems to have been completed by the end of the 16th century. Near the end of the 16th century, an unpublished prose life of Robin Hood was written, and included in the Sloan manuscript.

Largely a paraphrase of the guest, it also contains material, revealing that the author was familiar with early versions of a number of Robin Hood broadside ballads. Not all of the medieval legend was preserved in the broadside ballads. There is no broadside version of Robin Hood and Guy F. Gisborne, or of Robin Hood and the monk, which did not appear in print until the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively. However, the guest was reprinted from time to time throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. No surviving broadside ballad can be dated with certainty before the 17th century. But during that century, the commercial broadside ballad became the main vehicle for the popular Robin Hood legend.

These broadside ballads were in some cases newly fabricated, but were mostly adaptations of the older verse narratives. The broadside ballads were fitted to a small repertoire of pre-existing tunes, resulting in an increase of stock formulaic phrases. making them repetitive and verbose. It commonly feature Robin Hood's contest with artisans, tinkers, tanners, and butchers. Among these ballads is Robin Hood and Little John, telling the famous story of the quarterstaff fight between the two outlaws. Dobson and Taylor wrote,

More generally, the Robin of the Broad Sides is a much less tragic, less heroic, and in the last resort, less mature figure and his medieval predecessor. In most of the broadside ballads, Robin Hood remains a plebeian figure, a notable exception being Martin Parker's attempt at an overall life of Robin Hood, a true tale of Robin Hood,

which also emphasizes the theme of Robin Hood's generosity to the poor more than the broadsheet ballads to in general. The 17th century introduced the minstrel Alan Nadell. He first appeared in his 17th century broadside ballad, and unlike many of the characters, thus associated, managed to adhere to the legend. The prose life of Robin Hood and Sloan manuscript contains the substance of the Alan Adale ballad, but tells the story about Will Scarlet. In the 18th century, the stories began to develop a slightly more farcical vein. From this period there are a number of ballads in which Robin is severely drubbed by a succession of tradesmen including a Tanner, a Tinker, and a Ranger. In fact, the only character who does not get the better hood is the luckless sheriff.

Yet even in these ballads, Robin is more than a mere simpleton. On the contrary, he often acts with great shrewdness. The tinker, setting out to capture Robin, only manages to fight with him after, he has been cheated out of his money and the arrest warrant he is carrying. In Robin Hood's golden prize, Robin disguises himself as a friar and cheats two priests out of their cash. Even when Robin is defeated, he usually tricks his foe into letting him sound his horn, summoning the merrymen to his aid. When his enemies do not fall for this ruse, he persuades them to drink with them instead. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Robin Hood ballads were mostly sold in garlands of 16 to 24 Robin Hood ballads.

These were crudely printed chapbooks aimed at the poor. The garlands added nothing to the substance of the legend, but ensured that it continued after the decline of the single broadside valid. In the 18th century, also Robin Hood frequently appeared in criminal biographies and histories of highwaymen, Pindia. Rediscovery of the medieval Robin Hood, Percy and Ritson. In 1765, Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromor, published relics of ancient English poetry, including ballads from the 17th century Percy Folio manuscript, which had not previously been printed, most notably Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, which generally regarded as, in substance, a genuine late medieval ballad. In 1795, Joseph Ritzen published an enormously influential edition of the Robin Hood ballads, Robin Hood,

a collection of all the ancient poems, songs, and ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated outlaw. By providing English poets and novelists with a convenient source book, Ritson gave them the opportunity to recreate Robin Hood in their own imagination. Ritson's collection included the guest and put the Robin Hood and the Potter ballad in print for the first time. The only significant omission was Robin Hood and the Monk, which would eventually be printed in 1806. Ritson's interpretation of Robin Hood was also influential, having influenced the modern concept of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as it exists today. Himself a supporter of the principles of the French Revolution and admirer of Thomas Payne, Ritson held that Robin Hood was a genuinely historical and genuinely heroic character.

who had stood up against tyranny in the interests of the common people. In his preface to the collection, Ritson assembled an account of Robin Hood's life from the various sources available to him, and concluded that Robin Hood was born in around 1160, and thus had been active in the reign of Richard I. He thought that Robin was of aristocratic extraction, with at least some pretension to the title of Earl of Huntingdon, that he was born in an unlocated Nottinghamshire Village of Loxley, and that his original name was Robert Fitzhitz. Ritson gave the date of Robin Hood's death as 18th November 1247, when he would have been around 87 years old.

In copious and informative notes, Ritson defends every point of his version of Robin Hood's life. In reaching his conclusion, Ritzen relied or gave weight to a number of unreliable sources, such as the Robin Hood plays of Anthony Monday and the Sloan manuscript. Nevertheless, Dobson and Taylor credit Ritson with having an incalculable effect in promoting the still continuing quest for the man behind the myth, and note that his work remains an indispensable handbook to the outlaw legend even now.

Ritson's friend Walter Scott used Ritzen's anthology collection as a source for his picture of Robin Hood in Ivanhoe, written in 1818, which did much to share. shapes the modern legend.