In Our Time - Robin Hood

Episode Date: October 30, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the centuries old myth of the most romantic noble outlaw. The first printed version of the Robin Hood story begins like this:“Lithe and Lysten, gentylmen/That be of frebore blodeI shall tell of a good yeman/His name was Robyn Hode/Robyn was a proude outlawe/Whyles he walked on groundeSo curteyse an outlawe as he was one/Was never none yfound”.Robin Hood is described as a ‘yeoman’ – a freeman, and though he is courteous there is not even a hint of the aristocrat he later became. In fact, in the early ballads there is no Maid Marian, no Friar Tuck, Robin does not live in the time of bad Prince John, or the crusades, does not lead a large and merry gang, and certainly never robs the rich to give to the poor. Though he always remains a trickster, and a man with a bow in a wood.Why does this most malleable of myths go through so many changes and so many centuries? And was there ever a real outlaw Robin Hood on whom the ballads, plays, novels and movies are based?With Stephen Knight, Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and author of Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography; Thomas Hahn, Professor of English Literature at the University of Rochester, New York; Dr Juliette Wood, Secretary of the Folklore Society.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the first printed version of the Robin Hood story begins like this. Listen, listen, gentlemen, that be of freebole blood. I shall tell of a good yeoman. His name was Robin Hood.

Robin was a proud outlaw, whilst he walked on ground, so courteous and outlaw as he was worn was never known he found. Robin Hood is described as a yeoman, a freeman, and though he is courteous, there's not even a hint of the aristocrat he became in later versions. In fact, in the early ballads there's no maid-marion, no friar tuck. Robin does not live in the time of bad Prince John or the Crusades, does not lead a large and merry gang, and certainly never robs the rich to give to the poor.

But he always remains a trickster, an outlaw, and a man with a bow in a forest. So why does this man become a mill? go through so many changes and so many centuries, and was there ever a real outlaw Robin Hood on whom the ballads, plays, novels and movies are based. With me to help unearth, Robin Hood, our Stephen Knight, Professor of English at Cardiff University,

an author of Robin Hood, a mythic biography, Thomas Hahn, Professor of English Literature at University of Rochester, New York, and Julia Wood, Secretary of the Folklore Society. Stephen Knight, where do we find the first reference to Robin Hood in English literature? Well, the first reference is in William Langman's Pears, ploughman, which is dated sometime in the 1370s, and a character called Sloth, who is at this time

a priest, says he doesn't know his paternoster, his Lord's Bray, he's sort of confessing, but I know rhymes of Robin Hood, he says. So 1370s, they're well known, but from this church viewpoint, they're frowned on. They're too popular to be good. So what do you draw from the fact that Sloth, who knows nothing about the things he should know about in the church, yet boasts about knowing about the rhymes of Robin Hood. Where does that place the rhymes of Robin Hood and how much authority do they have? Well, from the start, they are popular,

but in some way butting up against official authority, the church, the state. And, you know, that seems to be, in all the manifest versions of Robin Hood, a core that he is against wrongful or oppressive authority. So you see the fact that he knows Robin Hood, but he doesn't know his church stuff, that means that he, he,

He's a bad priest. He's a bad priest. Yes, I didn't get that. That's fascinating. And Langland completed it in 1370. If that had been an oral recollection, how long would you think would have had to sort of ingrain itself into the popular imagination to appear in a serious poem?

Hard to say. A couple of generations, presumably, but then, as we all know, there are references to Robin Hood and names Robin Hood, which seemed to say, suggest that the story was known in the previous century. But all we can say about rhymes of Robin Hood is they were around in the 14th century and may well have had an early origin. What were these early rounds like, Thomas Hahn, Stephen Knight was talking about other early

realms. What were they like and how well known would the stories have been? Well, to go back to the Sloth episode, he's actually sitting in a tavern, and I think the implication is that that's one of the kind of venues in which the rhymes of Robin Hood would circulate. and it seems to me that what the kind of reference is really suggesting is that you have the official culture, the pot of Noster, which is what you have to learn. In other words, it's a self-conscious learning process that the official culture imposes on people versus these rhymes of Robin Hood, which have been drunk in, as it were, imbibed without any kind of self-consciousness. And clearly the point is that this is the kind of shared cultural baggage that even the most ignorant and low person would have, that is that sloth, even sloth, even sloth. knows the rhymes of Robin Hood completely. One assumes, therefore, that he would actually know them both by participating and singing them.

That is, in other words, that these were participatory rhymes that would bring people together and allow them to perform, as well as by hearing them performed. It's likely, I think, that the earliest ballads, there are two medieval ballads that survive, and then the earliest printed ballads as well were actually performing scripts as well as being reading texts. And so it's quite likely that either in a household level or in a tavern, or in a more commercialized venue that people would actually hear and, I think, participate in the kind of rhymes of Robin Hood. Can you tell us a bit more about these early rhymes, post-langland?

I mean, as soon post-language as we can get to, Thomas. Well, as I said... For example, the Ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk. Right. There are these two surviving ballad copies of Manuscripts, of Rhymes of Robin Hood. And in particular, the monk is, I think, for most modern audiences,

who've either seen movies or read children's... stories or whatever, quite disturbing in terms of its levels of violence. In terms of trying to make some comparisons with popular culture, I mean, it seems to me that it's really at the level of the sopranos in terms of things like dismembered bodies and actual violence and assassinations. Can you give us, can you? Yes, one of the central episodes. Specific, though.

Is that Robin has been turned into the authorities on the plea of a monk, and the monk is riding actually to the king's court to confirm this charge. he is overtaken by much the Miller and Little John, who actually assassinate both him and his boy squire, who is with him, cutting off their heads and then burying them right at the side of the road so that the bodies won't be found. And this is seen to be actually a meritorious deed. That is, in other words, we are clearly, as we listen to the ballot, expected to approve of this, rather than to be appalled by it or to think that, oh, well, these must be bad guys, and something bad will happen to them in turn.

This is clearly an aid of getting Robin Hood off, and it works. So this is setting Robin Hood out as somebody who is against the church, against corruption, a man who will live on his own. Right. I think in general Robin Hood, in this ballad, but more generally, comes across as a somewhat anarchic figure, but also a figure who was opposed to corrupt authority of all different kinds. Often that authority is local in form.

That is, in other words, he's not opposed to royal authority finally in any of the ballads and in fact is often aligned with the king. but what he represents, I think, is a kind of strong and forceful masculinity that operates on its own terms and for its own interests. And that's, I think, what we admire in those stories. There's no do good here. Hewlett Wood in the Exeter County Record book, it states there's a payment made for Robin Hood Games,

but in other records they're banned in Sussex and Kent. So we have games being participation in games, and we have another county's they're banned. So what with these games? And then why were they banned? Well, we have, they're one of the most, the best attested aspects of the Robin Hood story. And we have now several hundred references to these games.

So they're very, very widely known. And they're part of the kind of village self-identity expression is that there would be sometimes a procession through the village, rather like a modern carnival or village fate, but a wilder version of this. Robin would sometimes preside over competitions that followed, archery wrestling, that sort of thing. Sometimes there would be a collection and the money would then be used for the good of the village.

They're very, very localized things. And sometimes there would be a Robin Hood ale and a drinking feast afterwards. Now, the games, whenever you have this kind of civic activity, there's always a danger that it's going to spill over into unrest. and this is where people get very nervous. And again, this is this idea that somehow Robin Hood always butts up against authority. Because if you get civil or political unrest, then various churchmen, various functionaries, would say, look, this is terrible.

And one of them actually says the games take place on Sunday. Well, they did take place on Sunday. They took place on Witt Sunday. They were part of the Witt Sunday celebrations when the forest, and the games are most popular in areas where the villages depended on the woods for their livelihood. They're much less popular in areas where what we would recognize as the beginning of the trade and the Industrial Revolution were starting. So you have these villages who would depend on the woods for their animals,

for firewooding the whole business. And this would be a way of saying, right, it's spring, out we go again, we bring the animals out, whatever. But sometimes these things got out of hand, and it's the civil and the political unrest that they were worried about. They weren't worried about paganism. They weren't worried about that. but they were worried that these would be a focus for the wrong kind of activity.

But the Sirley Robin isn't linked to good King Richard as he was later thought of, or Bad King John, and the Crusade. So when does that happen? It happens when you start to get Robin Hood tacked down in the later ballads and in things like the jests and in formal plays. Then he has to have a historical context. when he becomes a gentleman. Gentleman exists in the world of places and things and events.

The earlier Robin Hood doesn't. He's part of the natural world. And not again, every time you talk about the natural world, one starts to think of the green man, but he certainly isn't this because the figure doesn't exist. But he's a liminal figure, what anthropologist called a liminal figure, and that he exists on the margins.

Before we come to the later metamorphosis, we've been begging the questions in Thomas Hahn really so far. If the story can be changed, as we'll see it, will be changed so radically. Is it based on anyone who actually lived? Is there good evidence for a real outlaw behind the ballads and the village games? Well, there's certainly evidence that someone, people, individuals named Robin Hood, existed. The historical records contain references to particular Robin Hoods,

and in fact, I think there's really a kind of historical industry that turns up new Robin Hoods and reports on them. You know, another Robin Hood would be a typical article title. At the same time, it seems to me that given the endurance and the vitality of the legends, it would be hard to find any single individual who could actually have justified or explained or been the cause of. No village hero, in other words, could have done enough in a single lifetime to actually justify those legends. Stephen, I, two things I would like to offer.

If he was an outlaw, he would be outside the law, which meant anybody could kill him with impunity, steal from him with impunity, and therefore he would be outside a lot of records. That's one thing. so maybe we're looking for somebody who left very little trace. Secondly, you yourself, I think, and one of your point out that in 1324, Edward II was in the Midlands, and he had in his court a man called Robin Hood

who went to London with him and then left and came back. So that, of course, for people like myself, historians, you say, well, we'll be something's there. Yeah. I think that's the closest match, and that is the work of the great Yorkshire archivist, appropriately named Joseph Hunter. and, in fact, one of the first archivists,

who I think was involved in setting up the Public Records Office. And he showed that there was somebody called, I think, Robert Hood, who was with Edward II in the north, and it parallels a bit of the jest story. But later historians and archivists have found earlier people called Robert Hood. They found one in about 1228, who was in trouble with St. Mary's Abbey in York. My take on this is actually Robert Hood is not that uncommon,

name, you know, I mean, I know three other people who work in writing and teaching are called Stephen Knight, you know, it can happen. Did we get the right one? No, I'm a fraud, a trickster. And my take on it is that what the historians have done is tried to construct a sort of an identity because this is a 20th century myth. All of Robin Hood is mythic, but 20th century and now 21st century archivists have wanted to create a Robin Hood with a pin number.

an identity, and that's part of the myth. It is very much part of our 20th century view that someone who exists has to have an existence and has to have a birth and a death place and enough stuff that you can put down into on paper. But I think, too, if you look at some of the early references to historical references, which are in fact in the Scottish chronicles,

we now go north of the border, and we get in many ways the best version of Robin Hood, these writers, and there are several of them, so you can really look at them as a unit, are writing a kind of history where the facts of history, which would concern a modern historian, do not concern them.

It's the purposes of history. It's the meaning of history that they're interested. One of the earliest references to Robin Hood there, although the writer doesn't say this, actually occurs at the time of William Wallace. And it's quite likely he had in his head this other outlaw, this other national figure. So he says, you know, Robin Hood.

And he starts, again, a lot of the... the marginalia are very similar, kind of Robin Hood in the Greenwood stood, Robin Hood and Sherwood stood, Little John and Robin Hood, Good Wath and were they. And it's a very kind of rhyme, repetitive. You really think they're getting this stuff

out of oral traditions, not manuscript traditions, but they see it as real in their terms. There's a fast forward, isn't there, at the end of the 16th century, when the Elizabethan dramatist, they write to play The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon,

It's so successful, it produces a sequel called The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and made Marion's in the story now and away we go. Why was that gear change? What was the need for, why did they need Robin to become an aristocrat? I think it's a form of appropriation. These are plays put on in London by companies owned by the Admiral's Men, the Lord Chamberlain's men. This is posh theatre under state control, as it were.

And the story's brilliantly turned round. that Robin's resistance to authority is now resistance to wrongful authority and this is where poor old Prince John comes in and he gets located John Major first does this and Monday in these plays. We're talking about John Major the 60th century.

Yes, yes, yes, folks, yes. Got to clear this up on a day like that. Scottish a story. And suddenly Robin becomes a king's man by resisting bad authority and what Anthony Monday did in these rather dull plays is create the new story of the Earl of Hunter

He said into the forest, waiting for King Richard to restore him. And this in the forest is his downfall. Our previous Robin Hood celebrates the forest. That's where he loves it, but this one doesn't like it. But it's interesting you say the play's rather dull. I haven't read the plays. But the fact is that they're very successful, like the ballads. We keep coming up against the fact that you say Robin Hood and people are alive to it,

even if he switched trails completely. Tom, sorry. No, I just say they're successful because they create a new Robin Hood. And that catches on, as people know. And I think this very question raises this issue, which I think circulates around all the historical questions as well, of authenticity. That is, is the new Robin Hood has been created on stage somehow not authentic as compared to the ballads or compared to the May games and so on.

And I think that finally what we have is a whole series of different media in which Robin is popular, and he's popular for different audiences in each of those media. So the notion that one of them would actually give us the real Robin Hood or be more authentically in touch with traditions seems to me to mislead us or push us away from the kind of larger question of how did these things give people pleasure and who were the audiences for them?

What was their makeup? And what kind of reactions did they have? Ranging from, for example, the kinds of things that Juliet was talking about, which are really these kind of carnivalesque events to a fairly kind of subdued, you know, theatrical event in London. Well, Henry VIII played Robin Hood in 1510.

He kind of pops up in Queen Catherine's bedroom early in the morning. playing Robin Hood with his courtiers. I mean, you know. Did he take his memory man? Yes, he did. He had about a dozen of them, actually. You know, all of the earls and all of the lords.

What the Queen had thought of it, God only knows. Unclear exactly what the meaning of this event is. Ambiguous event. It is slightly, yes. But let's try to get him clarify a bit in Shakespeare's time, blocking it out. We have had Robin Hood, the sort of people's hero, coming from the people

I'm exaggerating for effect but there you go from the people and he's told of as a yeoman and he's a bow and lots of people have bows he goes into the woods and he's against

the corruption of the church more than anything else which inflamed people in many of England the corruption of the church in many ways and a couple of centuries later he's a noble man

he has a horse when he fights the king and he drops to his knees and says my lord or whatever he says That's a big change. Yeah, but they coexist. The 17th century broadside ballads,

which there are many, they're collected by people at Peeps, they don't celebrate the gentleman. They celebrate the killer. In fact, one of the most popular ballads, Robin Hood's progress to Nottingham. The young Robin Hood meets the foresters, they're rude to him,

and he shoots all 15 of them, and then tackles the people of Nottingham, and off he goes to the Greenwood. This is the most populous Schwarzenegger. So we get layers all the time, and there are lots of Robin Hoods available to you, depending on what your takers on authority. One of the few playgame texts, if it is,

it's a little fragment in a letter, has a very violent story in which this character comes in and tries to kill Robin Hood, and he cuts his head off and sticks it in the hood and takes on the character of this. And I mean, this is what was happening at the village level. And remember, too, we talk about Robin Hood as if he's special. I mean, in Shakespeare's time,

there are all kinds of other outlaw heroes, Harwood, Folk, Chester, whose names we don't know anymore because they didn't survive this period. Robin Hood did survive. Yes, and Robin Hood. And why Robin Hood?

So even in the jester where Robin is very much aligned with the king, the king is searching for Robin, cannot find him, has to go into disguise, dresses up as a monk and so on to find him. When Robin shows him that deference, goes down on his knees and so on, in front of the effigy of the king first and then in front of the king,

that certainly suggests this kind of submission to central authority to royal authority. He's an outlaw, not a rebel. The king actually puts on his livery, and when they emerge from the forest, the people who see them coming out of the forest say, oh, my God, he's killed the king, and he's coming for us, and they begin to scatter.

So there's a very strong sense there, in other words, that this is not a kind of friendly outlaw who lives in the forest and who comes to town to do good, but somebody whose path you should stay out of. So even when we're talking about the Earl, he's still a figure of violence, he can be interpreted as a figure of violence and a figure of terror.

Where's the robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? When does that come in? The very last line, actually, of the jest is, and ever he was poor man's friend. So there's at least a kind of sense there of, if not acting on policy, then at least a kind of general good disposition towards those who are on the outs. But I think that, and I guess, is it Major who actually has a line? It is Major. Again, a Scottish historian.

It's a good man. It's very closely related to gentrification. Robin Hood, the bandit, takes from the rich to give to himself and his mates. Its charity is a so hierarchical act, and it's the gentleman who is really charitable. One persistent characteristic, it seems to me, is anti-the-church, anti-the-corrupt church. There's even a story about him, gilding monks,

because they went around, distributing their seed on innocent maidens around the place. And so he put a stop to this. well and truly, yes. So this is actually a kind of Protestant appropriation, it seems to me. In other words, that is, in that early 17th century ballot, Robin Hood is available to become a kind of, not just an enemy to corrupt authority,

but specifically, you know, an enemy to the old church, the old religion. But the presence of Frya Tuck permits you to think that, Robin is really, there is a true informal church some way. Robin prays to Mary, and from the 16th century on, has Fryer Tuck. Fry's talk to a street priest or rather forestrys. A wood priest really. He doesn't go back in the magnificent abbeism. No, that's right, exactly.

And all of the sources talk about him being devoted to the Virgin. I mean, that's something that comes in very early. In fact, that's how he gets caught in that first ballot among. That is, yes. So it also seems to me that in the jest, the earliest long story, rather than stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,

he actually finds a dispossessed knight to whom he decides he should give very very generous thing. And ultimately he takes the money away from the abbot of St. Mary's in York so that he's taking away money from these people who have too much, the kind of landlords, the filthy rich, but then giving it to the deserving rich as opposed to giving it to the poor. And that seems to me to be the only pattern we can see in some of these early ballads. In the late 80th century, Joseph Ritzen, the scholar had an anthology of Robin Hood material, a massive anthology, so he's becoming institutionalized in various stories,

running together and he becomes a great defender of Robin Hood. But he keeps being used more imaginatively by Walter Scott, with a Saxon Robin Hood pops up in Ivanhoe. Scott actually, one of the things Scott did, as you all know about an idea, was he was massively interested in folk stories and folk tales. He was, but he sort of massively changed the stuff he collected as well. I mean, everyone did, but Scott more than most. So there are hints in some of, again, some of the Scottish historians

who sort of put Robin at an earlier period, although obviously not a Saxon. Indeed, the name Robert Hood isn't Saxon. But Scott really wanted this opposition. He wanted the British to feel their own history. So he creates Ivanhoe. And he virtually creates the modern Robin Hood. I mean, this is where we get kind of Robin in his band of merry men. And the intense loyalty to good King Richard, who in fact,

didn't spend very much time in England at all. He was the absentee kid. Absolutely. Ivan has also Scott's first English novel, and he almost shapes an idea of Englishness in this novel. And it was immensely successful around the world, in America and particularly in France. But in my view, it didn't only make Robin English.

It also made Robin a romantic figure in other ways. He's in the forest, in a sort of lake district sort of way. And there are things in the text, do this. And it also makes Robin a very masculine figure. This is the text where we first find splitting the arrow, which, in my view, is a sort of, you know, phallic competition. You know, there's this French archer, and Robin splits his arrow, and I think that means manly supremacy. And it's a new sort of 19th century hero who is very masculine, very nature-oriented, and very English, and, oh, that takes off. And none of those three formations are really there before.

And in my view, that's why we know Robin Hood and not those other outlaws that Juliet mentioned before. He's reformed by the greatest romantic writers. I mean, Keats, Scott, Thomas Love, Peacock, they recreate this figure. One of perhaps one of the most remarkable developments in the 20th century is the appropriation of Robin Hood by Hollywood.

We get the Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood, immensely successful, the Errol Flea and Robin Hood, who I saw, even more than immensely successful. We have Kevin Costner's Robin Hood. Tom Hahn, can you talk about the attraction there? There's so many things inside this, we haven't got quite the time, because and then there's Robin Hood, a variety,

through the glen, which is written by people in England, American writers who have been kicked out because of the MacArthurite, and they're sending these messages back through Robin Hood to America. I think that's quite a terrific little loop, isn't it? So I think that what Fairbanks achieves in that 1920 film is to actually turn Robin Hood into a kind of mass culture figure. And he does this in part by inserting Mid-Marion into the film so that Robin can actually come back after being an outlaw

and be reintegrated into society and take his proper political role as a subject of the king. And that then becomes the standard element in the stories. Mid-Marion, I think, plays an increasingly significant role as we go through the century so that usually gets to be

from a kind of marginal figure to a spunky feminist and so on. But I think that what that does from the point of view of how the film's constructed is to make it available for much wider audiences. I think the early ballads are in many ways kind of masculine entertainments. They're very much like wrestling or martial arts movies

where what we're interested in is physical violence, body on body, prowess and so on. What do you think Earl Flynn brought to it? Dashing romantic figure. Somebody whose body in tights would like to look at. He's got some of the trickster rogue about him. He does. In that sense, I think he's authentic, although the men in tights is a purely modern thing.

One can't imagine a real Robin running around in tights. He wears fights because it was a principal boy's role in the 19th century. Those tights are a ladies' tights. I'm sure he knew. Who better? But one of the fascinating things when I was the fact that the Robin Hood series

in America, which took off so heavily in their 50s and was so was written in England by American writers who'd come to England quite a few screenwriters because of the Senator McCarley. And it's a wonderful thing, isn't it? The American writer in England, and they're finding a way to write

about an outlaw and they're sending it back to America and it's been taken up by the American public who are being intimidated by this man McCarthy who is against all outlaws and they put a particular spin on in robbing the rich to give to the poor is very much part of their strategy isn't it?

So I think it's a wonderful version of how Robin Hood is popular culture because clearly kids, three, four, five, six, whatever, vastly entertained by this, they had no idea of what the politics of this might have been. So what we get, in other words, is a Robin Hood who is equally available to a whole range of people, those who might read a McCarthyite scenario into it,

as well as kids who just see this as an adventure story and like to sing the song. That's right. It's still, I think, in people's happening. Does he continue to be a subversive character? Yes. I think essentially he's a subversive character. If there's a myth of Robin Hood, it's the myth of how we relate to our environment, whether it's the woodlands, whether it's anti-authority,

whether it's postmodern, whether it's McCarthyite, whether it's simply an adventure. This is a myth, a marginal myth, that allows us to test ourselves, because all marginal myths, although they seem to be about the edge, are actually a way of describing the centre. And that's what Robin Hood does again and again. The other way I think he's subversive is I believe and have argued that Robin Hood is most popular in times of conscious oppression,

the early 19th century, possibly the restoration period. The 1980s, under Reagan and Thatcher, there's a very good time for Robin Hood production. And I think it's a sort of utopian safety valve. you know, but it's very striking that the text seemed a bunch in these periods where people want a safety valve. So I would offer a minority opinion here in terms of the safety valve and suggest that what Robin Hood often does is what Raymond Williams calls a kind of magical resolution of real conflicts. That is, it introduces some sense of injustice,

but then actually has a strong hero like Robin Hood emerge in an unlikely way, resolve those conflicts so that there's no need for structural change. and so I think that the Robin Hood stories often in fact have as part of their comfort, part of their kind of popular appeal, this sense that they do address real inequities, but that they resolve those inequities inside the story, inside the narrative, rather than in the real world. Well, thank you very much, Judith Wood, Thomas Hahn, Stephen Knight. If you'd like to carry on the discussion, you can do so on our In Our Time website. Next week we'll be discussing the Victorian Literary Jaunt sensation. Thank you for listening. Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.