The tolk ballads. Robin Hood Ballads contents: Introduction chapter the life of Robin Hood

CHAPTER 1. The life of Robin Hood.
1.1. The Robin Hood Ballads
‘It will scarcely be expected that one should be able to offer an authentic narrative of the life and transactions of this extraordinary personage. The times in which he lived, the mode of life he adopted, and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circumstances sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to historical truth.’ In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to associate the outlaw with ‘historical truth,’ begins his ‘Life of Robin Hood,’ an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and illustrated through the following one hundred and five pages. The Dictionary of National Biography includes Robin Hood, as it includes King Arthur; but it is better to face the truth, and to state boldly that Robin Hood the yeoman xiioutlaw never existed in the flesh. As the goddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, Robin Hood sprang from the imagination of the English people.¹
That being so, he is a creation of whom the English people, who have kept him so long alive where he was born and bred, should be proud; and after reflecting on his essential characteristics—his love of the poor, his courteous robbery of the higher orders both spiritual and temporal, his loyalty to the king, his freedom with the king’s deer, and his esteem of all women for the sake of the Virgin—an Englishman should be the first to resent any attempt to identify so truly popular a hero either with one of several historical nonentities, or with a member of the aristocracy, or worst of all, with an Aryan sun-myth.
All these attempts have been made at one time or another, but not until the spirit which begot him had begun to dwindle in the English heart. If King Arthur is the ideal knight of Celtic chivalry, Robin is the ideal champion of the popular cause under feudal conditions: his enemies are bishops, fat monks, and the sheriff who would restrain his liberty. It is natural that an enfranchised yeoman, who took toll of the oppressors, and so effected what we still call xiiia redistribution of wealth, should be the hero of the oppressed and the law-abiding poor; and it is natural that, as social conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the national prosperity under Elizabeth, and classes and masses reconsidered their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a noble title and a wife of high degree.
The deer with which the royal forests then abounded (every Norman tyrant being, like Nimrod, “a mighty hunter before the Lord”) would afford our hero and his companions an ample supply of food throughout the year; and of fuel, for dressing their vension, or for the other purposes of life, they could evidently be in no want. The rest of their necessaries would be easily procured, partly by taking what they had occasion for from the wealthy passenger who traversed or approached their territories, and partly by commerce with the neighbouring villages or great towns.
It may be readily imagined that such a life, during great part of the year, at least, and while it continued free from the alarms or apprehensions to which our foresters, one would suppose, must have been too frequently subject, might be sufficiently pleasant and desirable, and even deserve the compliment which is paid to it by Shakespeare in his comedy of As you like it, where, on Oliver’s asking, “Where will the old duke live?” Charles answers, “They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the OLD ROBIN HOOD OF ENGLAND; and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.” Their gallant chief, indeed, may be presumed to have frequently exclaimed with the banished Valentine, in another play of the same author:
“How use doth breed a habit in a man!
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
better brook than flourishing peopled towns:
Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And, to the nightingale’s complaining notes,
Tune my distresses and record my woes.”
He would doubtless, too, often find occasion to add:
“What hallooing and what stir is this to-day?
These are my mates, that make their wills their law,
Have some unhappy passenger in chace:
They love me well; yet I have much to do,
To keep them from uncivil outrages.”
But, on the other hand, it will be at once difficult and painful to conceive,
“When they did hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In that their pinching cave, they could discourse
The freezing hours away!” .
That our hero and his companions, while they lived in the woods, had recourse to robbery for their better support is neither to be concealed nor to be denied. Testimonies to this purpose, indeed, would be equally endless and unnecessary. Fordun, in the fourteenth century, calls him “ille famosissimus siccarius,” that most celebrated robber, and Major terms him and Little John “famatissimi latrones.”
But it is to be remembered, according to the confession of the latter historian, that, in these exertions of power, he took away the goods of rich men only; never killing any person, unless he was attacked or resisted: that he would not suffer a woman to be maltreated; nor ever took anything from the poor, but charitably fed them with the wealth he drew from the abbots. I disapprove, says he, of the rapine of the man: but he was the most humane and the prince of all robbers . In allusion, no doubt, to this irregular and predatory course of life, he has had the honour to be compared to the illustrious Wallace, the champion and deliverer of his country; and that, it is not a little remarkable, in the latter’s own time . Our hero, indeed, seems to have held bishops, abbots, priests, and monks, in a word, all the clergy, regular or secular, in decided aversion.²
The earliest known reference to Robin Hood the outlaw was first pointed out by Bishop Percy, the editor of the Reliques, in Piers Plowman, the poem written by Langland about 1377, where Sloth says.
‘But I can [know] rymes of Robyn hood, and Randolf erle of Chestre.’
Observing that this first mention of Robin is as the subject of ballads, and that he is coupled with another popular hero, one of the twelfth-century Earls of Chester, we pass to the next reference.
‘Lytill Ihon and Robyne Hude
Waythmen ware commendyd gude;
In Yngilwode and Barnysdale
Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale.’
This passage, from Wyntoun’s Chronicle of Scotland (about 1420), is referred to the year 1283, and means that Robin and his man Little John were known as good hunters (cf. ‘wight yeomen,’ constantly in the ballads), and they carried on their business in Inglewood and Barnsdale at this time. In 1439 a petition was presented to Parliament concerning a certain Piers Venables, of whom it is stated that, having no other livelihood, he ‘gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers’ and ‘wente into the wodes in that contrë, like as it hadde be Robyn-hode and his meyne.’
About the same time (c. 1437), a longer description is given in Fordun’s Scotichronicon, which was revised and continued by Bower, where the latter states that Robin Hood, ‘that most celebrated robber,’ was one of the dispossessed and banished followers of Simon de Montfort. He proceeds, however, to couple with him ‘Litill Johanne’ and their associates, ‘of whom the foolish vulgar in comedies and tragedies make lewd entertainment, and are delighted to hear the jesters and minstrels sing them above all other ballads,’4 and to describe briefly one of the ‘tragedies.’ An extract from one more chronicler will suffice, and it should be noted that these three, Wyntoun, Bower, and Major, are all Scottish. John Major (or Mair) was born about 1450, and his Historia Maioris Britanniæ was published in xvi1521. In the part dealing with the reign of Richard I.