MO 



DISC.OVr.HY 



Robin Hood: the Man 

 and the Myth 



lU i:. L. Guilford, M.A. 



Sherwood in the twihght, is Robin Hood awake ? 

 Gicy and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake ; 

 Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn. 

 Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn. 



Robin Hood is here again : all his merry thieves 



Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves. 



Calling as he used to call, faint and far away. 



In SherNvood, in Sherwood, about the break of day. 



In his fine poem from which these opening lines are 

 quoted Alfred Noyes has seized on the spirit of Sher- 

 wood Forest — the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood — 

 as no other poet has done since the ballad-writers set 

 down their songs on paper. To every healthy-minded 

 boy Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood are one, insepar- 

 able and for ever associated in one of the finest tales of 

 adventure that we have. 



We have nearly all a joyful recollection of the pleasure 

 we derived from reading the adventures of Robin Hood, 

 Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet and the rest, and 

 even to this day, when the critical spirit of maturity 

 has ousted the omnivorous receptiveness of boyhood, 

 I love to read again the pranks played by this band of 

 joyful sinners on the representatives of authority. 

 Many a time, when wandering in the glades of the 

 Forest I have fancied that the spirit of Robin Hood still 

 haunts the shadows and that the old trees, stately in 

 their glorious antiquity, nod their sage heads as they 

 tell once more of the deeds they saw when they were 

 young. The exploits of Robin Hood cannot be read by 

 anyone without some stirring of the pulse, for surely no 

 popular hero has ever possessed so much joie de vivre ; 

 he was certainly a cheerful sinner, and most people have 

 in their hearts a soft place for all such. 



The modern historical spirit is a critical one. It 

 refuses to accept as a fact anything which cannot be 

 proved by documentary or other irrefutable evidence. 

 All the heroes of our childhood's history must pass 

 through the test, and few, alas, escape unscathed. The 

 passing of these cherished stories into the limbo of 

 legendary history may be a gain to the pure historian, 

 but it is a loss to the spirit of the nation, for in them is 

 embodied much that true history never records, but 

 which is none the less true in spirit if not in fact. 

 No one has suffered more than Robin Hood in this 

 respect. We are told that King Alfred never pro\^ed 

 himself a hopeless failure as a baker, that Canute did 

 not challenge the waves to wet his royal feet, and that 

 Hengist and Horsa arc symbols and no more ; but 



Robin Hood is being taken from us and placed in the 

 realm of fiction. 



It is my object in these lines to try to show how much 

 about Robin Hood we really can discover, and if we must 

 regretfully admit that he was a medieval counterpart 

 of Mrs. Gamp's Mrs. Harris and that there was no such 

 person, let us at least try to save some fragments from 

 the rubbish-heap of history. 



Robin Hood was probably the most popular hero of 

 the medieval ballad-maker, and Mr. F. J. Child, in his 

 monumental collection of English and Scottish ballads, 

 has preserved nearly fifty distinct songs about him. 

 These are really our only source of information, and if 

 we would find anything out about him, we must seek 

 for it within these ballads. 



The earliest recorded mention of the existence of 

 these ballads occurs about 1377 in Piers Plowtnan, 

 where the poet refers to " Rhymes of Robyn Hood and 

 Randolf erle of Chestre," and the earliest ballad that has 

 come down to us appears to have been set down during 

 the first quarter of the fourteenth centur3^ Until 

 recent times no one doubted that Robin Hood was a 

 real person, and it was only when a search was made for 

 facts about his career that it was discovered that no 

 authentic mention of him occurs anj^vhere. He is 

 merely a ballad hero and no more. Persevering seekers 

 have unearthed at least a dozen Robert Hoods from the 

 dusty files of official documents and have tried to fit 

 them into the vacant niche, but none of them are 

 acceptable, for they do not seem to be the kind of men 

 who could even in their youth have lived the life of a 

 chivalrous and cheerful sinner. These men have each 

 their champions who have tried to place them definitely 

 in the reign of Richard I, Henry III, or Edward II. 

 But the evidence is unconvincing, and it is better that 

 these bearers of a famous name should return to their 

 obscurity than that we should seek to spoil the romance 

 of Robin's life by bringing him to end it as a servant of 

 the King, living on a pension because he was too decrepit 

 to do his work. 



On the other hand, as opposed to the school who seek 

 to fix a date for his death we have those who try to 

 convince us that in the story of Robin Hood we have 

 a sun myth ; but personally we are inclined to seek for 

 an approximation to the truth somewhere in between, 

 and perhaps the best way to approach the subject is to 

 see what the name Hood will teach us. 



In the first place it is a common name and is found in 

 use long before the Norman Conquest, and, what is more, 

 it is employed in a suggestive way twice in two very 

 different parts of the country. In an Anglo-Saxon 

 charter relating to Worcestershire we have Hod's Oak, 

 and in Nottinghamshire, within the bounds of Sherwood 

 Forest, there is the village of Hodsock, which means 

 the same and was in existence at the time when the 



