![]() But don’t let any of that deter you from visiting Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. That is, he would have existed then if he’d existed at all. The fifteenth-century Gest mentions the good King Edward, but never specifies whether this is Edward I, Edward II or Edward III, which means it could be referring to any time between 12. In the ballads, specific dates are rarely given, though the early ones seem to reflect a time roughly in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Secondly, the placement of Robin into the historical period from 1189 to 1199, the reign of Richard I, is the brainchild of Sir Walter Scott, who includes Robin Hood and his men in his novel Ivanhoe, set during that time. But an Elizabethan dramatist named Antony Munday wrote two plays, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington, which rewrote Robin’s story and made him a fallen nobleman, and that is reinforced in the film version. In the original ballad tradition, though, Robin is pure English yeoman stock, definitely no nobleman, and delights in robbing those of aristocratic rank and in flouting the authorities who enforce the status quo. The film shows the outlaw hero as a disgraced nobleman, Robin of Locksley, who remains loyal to the absent crusading King Richard the Lionhearted against the machinations of his usurping brother Prince John and his allies, Sir Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff of Nottingham. The 1938 film marks perhaps the starting point for contemporary versions of the Robin Hood legend. For today’s common reader, a comprehensive collection of Robin Hood ballads is readily available in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (1997), to which I refer anyone who’d like to read these texts first hand. ![]() ![]() In the following century, the most definitive collection of Robin Hood ballads was included by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (volume III). In the 18th century, these fragments were collected, first in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, then more completely in Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood collection in 1795 (complete with a fictional “biography” of the outlaw). These ballads record separate instances and tell Robin’s story in fragments. What survive are many shorter ballads that would serve as brief entertainments, plus one long (1824-line) 15th century poem in ballad stanzas, the Gest of Robin Hood, comprising seven loosely connected “fits” telling stories of Robin and Little John. There are no great Robin Hood epic poems and no Sir Thomas Malory to compile the Robin Hood story into a single long and complex narrative. The ballads of Robin Hood were composed by popular minstrels and storytellers for the common folk, often in a rough-and-tumble comic vein. There, he’s the subject of stories the allegorical character of Sloth likes to hear while hanging around the tavern. Robin’s first appearance in recorded history comes in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman around 1377. Statue of Robin Hood (he’s on the right). The legendary Robin Hood is historical only in the sense that he personifies a spirit of independence among the common people of later medieval England, a kind of resentment of the rich nobles and prelates to whom Robin gives their come-uppance. And then of course here was Howard Pyles’ famous 1883 novel for boys, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, the most influential Robin Hood novel of all time and the book that, I suppose, made us refer to his men as “merry.” So I’ve always wanted to visit Nottingham (where Robin’s arch-enemy was sheriff).īut if you think you’re going to go there and see a lot of sights related to the historical Robin Hood, you’ve got another think coming. I watched the Richard Greene The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series (1955-59) when I was quite young (“Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen,/ Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men”), and saw the famous 1938 Errol Flynn version of The Adventures of Robin Hood replayed on TV when I was a bit older. If you grew up reading and/or watching tales of the great medieval outlaw hero Robin Hood robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, you probably dreamt of visiting Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.
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