The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

by Howard Pyle

  Then Little John’s heart was mad with grief and fear for his master’s life. Wildly he looked about him, and his sight fell upon a heavy stone mortar, such as three men could not lift now-a-days. Little John took three steps forward, and, bending his back, heaved the stone mortar up from where it stood, deeply rooted. Staggering under its weight, he came forward and hurled it crashing against the door. In burst the door, and away fled the frightened nuns, shrieking, at his coming. Then Little John strode in, and never a word said he, but up the winding stone steps he ran till he reached the room wherein his master was. Here he found the door locked also, but, putting his shoulder against it, he burst the locks as though they were made of brittle ice.

  There he saw his own dear master leaning against the gray stone wall, his face all white and drawn, and his head swaying to and fro with weakness. Then, with a great, wild cry of love and grief and pity, Little John leaped forward and caught Robin Hood in his arms. Up he lifted him as a mother lifts her child, and carrying him to the bed, laid him tenderly thereon.

  And now the Prioress came in hastily, for she was frightened at what she had done, and dreaded the vengeance of Little John and the others of the band; then she stanched the blood by cunning bandages, so that it flowed no more. All the while Little John stood grimly by, and after she had done he sternly bade her to begone, and she obeyed, pale and trembling. Then, after she had departed, Little John spake cheering words, laughing loudly, and saying that all this was a child’s fright, and that no stout yeoman would die at the loss of a few drops of blood. “Why,” quoth he, “give thee a se’ennight and thou wilt be roaming the woodlands as boldly as ever.”

  But Robin shook his head and smiled faintly where he lay. “Mine own dear Little John,” whispered he, “Heaven bless thy kind, rough heart. But, dear friend, we will never roam the woodlands together again.”

  “Ay, but we will!” quoth Little John, loudly. “I say again, Ay—out upon it—who dares say that any more harm shall come upon thee? Am I not by? Let me see who dares touch—” Here he stopped of a sudden, for his words choked him. At last he said, in a deep, husky voice, “Now, if aught of harm befalls thee because of this day’s doings, I swear by Saint George that the red cock shall crow over the roof-tree of this house, for the hot flames shall lick every crack and cranny thereof. As for these women,”—here he ground his teeth,—“it will be an ill day for them!”

  But Robin Hood took Little John’s rough, brown fist in his white hands, and chid him softly, in his low, weak voice, asking him since what time Little John had thought of doing harm to women, even in vengeance. Thus he talked till, at last, the other promised, in a choking voice, that no ill should fall upon the place, no matter what happened. Then a silence fell, and Little John sat with Robin Hood’s hand in his, gazing out of the open window, ever and anon swallowing a great lump that came in his throat. Meantime the sun dropped slowly to the west, till all the sky was ablaze with a red glory. Then Robin Hood, in a weak, faltering voice, bade Little John raise him, that he might look out once more upon the woodlands; so the yeoman lifted him in his arms, as he bade, and Robin Hood’s head lay on his friend’s shoulder. Long he gazed, with a wide, lingering look, whilst the other sat with bowed head, the hot tears rolling one after another from his eyes, and dripping upon his bosom, for he felt that the time of parting was near at hand. Then, presently, Robin Hood bade him string his stout bow for him, and choose a smooth fair arrow from his quiver. This Little John did, though without disturbing his master or rising from where he sat. Robin Hood’s fingers wrapped lovingly around his good bow, and he smiled faintly when he felt it in his grasp; then he nocked the arrow on that part of the string that the tips of his fingers knew so well. “Little John,” said he, “Little John, mine own dear friend, and him I love better than all others in the world, mark, I prythee, where this arrow lodges, and there let my grave be digged. Lay me with my face toward the east, Little John, and see that my resting-place be kept green, and that my weary bones be not disturbed.”

  As he finished speaking, he raised himself of a sudden and sat upright. His old strength seemed to come back to him, and, drawing the bowstring to his ear, he sped the arrow out of the open casement. As the shaft flew, his hand sank slowly with the bow till it lay across his knees, and his body likewise sank back again into Little John’s loving arms; but something had sped from that body, even as the winged arrow sped from the bow.

  For some minutes Little John sat motionless, but presently he laid that which he held gently down, then, folding the hands upon the breast and covering up the face, he turned upon his heel and left the room without a word or a sound.

  Upon the steep stairway he met the Prioress and some of the chief among the sisters. To them he spoke in a deep, quivering voice, and said he, “An ye go within a score of feet of yonder room, I will tear down your rookery over your heads so that not one stone shall be left upon another. Bear my words well in mind, for I mean them.” So saying, he turned and left them, and they presently saw him running rapidly across the open, through the falling of the dusk, until he was swallowed up by the forest.

  The early gray of the coming morn was just beginning to lighten the black sky toward the eastward when Little John and six more of the band came rapidly across the open toward the nunnery. They saw no one, for the sisters were all hidden away from sight, having been frightened by Little John’s words. Up the stone stair they ran, and a great sound of weeping was presently heard. After a while this ceased, and then came the scuffling and shuffling of men’s feet as they carried a heavy weight down the steep and winding stairs. So they went forth from the nunnery, and, as they passed through the doors thereof, a great, loud sound of wailing arose from the glade that lay all dark in the dawning, as though many men, hidden in the shadows, had lifted up their voices in sorrow..

  Thus died Robin Hood, at Kirklees Nunnery, in fair Yorkshire, with mercy in his heart toward those that had been his undoing; for thus he showed mercy for the erring and pity for the weak through all the time of his living.

  His yeomen were scattered henceforth, but no great ill befell them thereafter, for a more merciful sheriff and one who knew them not so well succeeding the one that had gone, and they being separated here and there throughout the countryside, they abided in peace and quietness, so that many lived to hand down these tales to their children and their children’s children.

  A certain one sayeth that upon a stone at Kirklees is an old inscription. This I give in the ancient English in which it was written, and thus it runs:—

  bear undernead die laitl stean lais robert earl of buntingtun nea arrir her as hie sae gend an pipl kauld im Robin beud sick utlams as hi an is men hil England nidir si agen. ohiit 24 kal. Dekembris 1247.

  And now, dear friend, we also must part, for our merry journeyings have ended, and here, at the grave of Robin Hood, we turn, each going his own way.

  AFTERWORD

  The great children’s books combine an entertaining surface and rich depths with a vigorously innovative style, from the personalized imperial adventure of Robinson Crusoe through Huckleberry Finn’s colloquial American politics to the fey Freudian fantasies of Peter Pan.

  Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is in that highest class. Acclaimed by his biographer Charles D. Abbott as “a masterpiece of writing for children” (page 88) and seen as “the apex of children’s literature” (Taimi Ranta, page 213), it is recognized as the finest creation of the man who perfected the mix of story and illustration. The book reshaped Robin Hood as a figure compatible with American ideals, passing him on to the worldwide influence of Hollywood: Pyle’s dialogue for Robin’s fight on the bridge with Little John reappears in the 1938 Errol Flynn film. But the book’s richness lies not only in strong and subtle prose. Pyle’s special gift to his audience is the illustrations, at once strong and elegant, which dramatize the most exciting and most meaningful moments of this densely packed book of outlaw adventures.

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p; Born into a Quaker family in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1853, Pyle grew up in rural and small-town America. Like his mother, he loved reading, both contemporary stories and the medieval past described in anthologies and historical fiction. They also studied the new-style illustrated magazines. Because galleries were very rare, the young Pyle saw art mostly as illustrations embedded in prose, and this was to shape his own genius. After attending art school in Philadelphia, he went to New York in 1876 to work as an illustrator in the booming magazine world led by Scribner’s and Harper’s. Success was limited—mostly he sold ideas and sketches that established artists developed for publication—but already he was ambitious: in November 1876, he wrote to his mother about his plans to use Robin Hood as the basis for a series of illustrated stories and asked for the family volume of “Percy.” Commentators have thought he meant the eighteenth-century Reliques of Early English Poetry by Thomas Percy, but this contains only one Robin Hood ballad. Pyle surely meant Stephen Percy’s 1843 collection for children, Robin Hood and his Merry Foresters, which told many of the stories, and was illustrated, if very poorly.

  After a couple years of increasing success in New York, now placing his own work in magazines, including some prose, he moved home and while still freelancing worked steadily on Robin Hood. The Merry Adventures appeared in 1883 from Scribner’s. It was a splendid book, expensive at $4.50, with a green-and-gold tooled cover, full-page illustrations and fine paper. Its first edition of thirty-five hundred copies (five hundred of them sent to Britain) sold slowly because of the price, but in both America and Britain it was recognized—including by the master of Arts and Crafts, William Morris—as a magnificent achievement.

  In addition to Stephen Percy, Pyle used as a source Joseph Ritson’s great collection of Robin Hood ballads (first published in 1795 and widely reprinted), as well as traditional Robin Hood “garlands.” These booklets celebrating a hero who resisted corrupt officials and an oppressive state had naturally been popular in pre-Revolutionary America, and were quite often reprinted there. He added excellent songs of his own composition and references to other medieval stories—at least some of these drew on Thomas Percy’s Reliques, while the idea of indented narrative summaries came from his reading of early printed books.

  In Pyle’s reading, he would have found two different versions of Robin Hood. One was the yeoman outlaw of the medieval ballads, a tough but playful man of the people who resisted bad authority in the name of true justice. The other was a gentrified Robin created in the sixteenth century to conceal the radical politics of the yeoman Robin (see Stephen Knight for an account of this development). The gentrified Robin was presented as the Earl of Huntington, outlawed by bad Prince John and only living in the forest until his restoration to true aristocratic hierarchy. Most of the novels and children’s Robin Hood stories produced in England in the nineteenth century, including the very influential Thomas Love Peacock, preferred the conservative nobleman, but Pyle went firmly for the yeoman and his democratic sense of resistance. Very late in the story, the king makes Pyle’s Robin an earl “seeing how faithful and loyal he was” (page 363), but the impact of The Merry Adventures as a whole reenergized the democratic tradition of Robin Hood as essentially a man of the people.

  But having chosen the ballads’ robust yeoman, Pyle made many changes to their very robust stories. His Robin is much less violent. In the ballad “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham,” Robin becomes an outlaw after the foresters abuse and cheat him, and in his anger, he kills all fifteen. Pyle’s Robin shoots (and kills) one man, who shot first—and he regrets this act long and deeply. Where the ballad Robin and his men did not hesitate to kill—including the sheriff—in Pyle it is only when Robin is fiercely attacked by the renegade forester Guy of Gisbourne, late in the book, that he kills again. Not all the euphemism is so serious: at the end of the ballad of “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne,” Little John shoots the escaping sheriff through the head, but in Pyle, as in Percy’s Reliques, John merely shoots him “into the backside.”

  A more wide-ranging change is Pyle’s careful and often very skillful linking of the disparate ballads. As in the garlands and Stephen Percy, the Merry Adventures have a coherent sequence in time. But Pyle also creates interconnections: when the outlaws decide to help Alan a Dale marry his beloved, instead of seeing her given to a rich old man, they decide Friar Tuck should hold the ceremony. So Robin journeys to fetch him, and we enjoy the famous encounter with the friar, not to mention his dogs, and perhaps the finest of all Pyle’s illustrations: “the exultant conflict between Robin and the Friar” was used as a frontispiece for the whole edition. With similar integrative skill, Pyle puts the Prior of Emmett and the Bishop of Hereford behind the inappropriate marriage and casts them as the enemies in the story of the poor knight Robin helps, taken from the early-sixteenth-century The Gest of Robin Hood.

  Toward the end the source ballads are interwoven and developed with real fictional flair—the king’s chase after Robin in part seventh is as dramatic as anything by Scott or Dickens and brilliantly amplifies a short, banal ballad; the earlier account of Robin shooting for Queen Eleanor sorts out the distinctly confused story of its source, “Robin Hood and Queen Katherine,” and also streamlines history by substituting Eleanor (the mother of Kings Richard and John) for Henry VIII’s wife Katherine, who lived three hundred years later. Overall Pyle steadily builds up structure and meaning like a novelist: having shown how Robin develops the band, outwits the sheriffs guile and force and helps those in need, by part sixth Pyle establishes the hero’s role as “redistributor of wealth and arbiter of social and economic justice” and finally, face-to-face with the king, he has “assumed national prominence” (Agosta, page 35).

  The Merry Adventures also, like much nineteenth-century fiction, gives us rich set pieces. A feeling for nature is briefly but intensely conveyed in the medieval ballads and Pyle brings this out with all his childhood awareness of the beautiful natural world:

  It was at the dawn of the day in the merry Maytime, when hedgerows are green and flowers bedeck the meadows; daisies pied and yellow cuckoo buds and fair primroses all along the briery hedges; when apple buds blossom and sweet birds sing, the lark at dawn of day, the throstle cock and cuckoo; when the lads and lasses look upon each other with sweet thoughts; when busy housewives spread their linen to bleach upon the bright green grass. (page 3)

  This natural world is an inhabited one, not a distant romantic view, and in the same essentially human way, Pyle visualizes his characters, as with the friar:

  His cheeks were as red and shining as a winter crab, albeit they were nearly covered with a close curly black beard, as were his chin and upper lip likewise. His neck was thick like that of a north country bull, and his round head closely set upon shoulders e’en a match for those of Little John himself. Beneath his bushy black brows danced a pair of little gray eyes that could not stand still for very drollery of humor. (page 161)

  But if The Merry Adventures luxuriates in the leisurely scene setting of the novel, it can also offer a novel’s close interpretations. As Agosta comments: “Pyle clarifies the logic, causal connections, and character motivations so conspicuously absent from the ballad tradition” (page 28). Early on, Little John is tempted to the Blue Boar Inn rather than his mission to Lincoln: Robin is annoyed, but John’s failing is ultimately covered up because of Robin’s desire to conceal his own failure in battle with the tinker. This is just ironic motivation, but character can be more thoughtfully explored: Will Stutely is “over-cautious” after his escape from hanging by the sheriff (page 146), and later Robin will not stand for being hit by Will Scarlet, but will accept a blow from the king who, though disguised as a friar, still carries real authority.

  In this way Pyle can lay out some splendid scenes and also search into the characters and their relations more deeply than did the ballads. A similar mix of richness and subtlety is to be found in the illustrations. For Robin Hood, as in his later stories of King Art
hur, Pyle used what Henry Pitz calls his “decorative” style (page 104), relying on the tradition of bold line drawing in an elaborate frame that goes back to Dürer, whom he admired enormously. His experience with working for magazines had taught him to draw with pen and ink in a way that could be engraved dramatically: early experiments with color printing were too crude for his satisfaction, and at this stage, he kept to the black and white he made so famous. But Pyle could also use what Pitz calls his “impressionist” style, filling his drawings with drama like the pre-Raphaelites’ realistic but passionate treatment of medieval themes and surpassing in emotive power the technical skill of the dominant London illustrators Kate Greenaway, Ralph Caldecott and Walter Crane.

  Not only are the illustrations full of fascinating detail, the sort of thing children—and adults—love to pore over. They are also subtly structured. The outlaws, noble and upright in their nature, are normally presented in a vertical plane; their enemies are horizontal. The death of Guy of Gisborne (page 322) is the classic instance, but it is a common pattern. And the outlaws are very often represented beside a road that stretches up into the vertical distance: theirs is a world of motion and ascent. This can change: the king’s blow lays Robin almost horizontal (page 355) and the brilliant illustration of Robin nearly trapped by the king’s men (page 306) shows him bent over, encased. The lateral is essentially hostile: the few scenes at court or in an abbey are heavily horizontal in design, even when depicting the Merry Men, as when Alan a Dale sings to Queen Eleanor, though there is still a window behind them to suggest their continuing liberty (page 274).