by Adam Thorpe
Of Robert Hodd, I saw nor heard no sign more, save from the wayfarers travelling north; these, when questioned by me, would sometimes say that his outlaw band had thinned from internal strife; that Littl John had left for Sherwode with half of the felons, never to return; and that Hodd himself was thought to be dead from poison, raving to the end in his temple-hut, seized by the utmost agony as his devilish vices clawed him within. Others claimed a corrupted branch from the great meeting oak had fallen upon his head, cracking it wide ope just where the heretic’s mark was burned in, for he had dangled many innocents upon that tree; and here I confess to thinking of the poor leech, who was also a tregetour, and the powers he no doubt had of devilish enchantment and subtle revenge.
Some of these wayfarers were minstrels or players of the roughest kind, who played (with greasy fingers and mouths dripping with sop, as they all do) various ballads, among which was ever a mangled version of mine own on Hode, as well as others proliferated from this single seed, their foolish noise emanating from the windows of our guest-house, despite our prohibition.405 Yet none knew that it was my hand had planted that hideous seed, for not only had I never again touched the strings of a harp, but I would say ne’er a word as I listened by the window: to pass on with my head bowed as if in holy contemplation.
Only a few days ago, within this very autumn season, did this happen again; for while I was hobblingly [claudo pede] aiding a young brother feed the pigs in our yard before Vespers, a high voice sounded that I thought mine own in my head, for it sang of Robben Hode and Lytyl John and e’en Moche himself ! Perceiving it to be from the tillage without, that is our oldest domain, and approaching the sound as did the brother of the prodigal son, who was in the field and heard the singing of the feast,406 I saw our workers gathered on our acres hard by the wall, paused from their digging labours, while a young woman among them gladded them boldly with her piercing notes as though within her own home: for it seems as if all the world is singing of Robert Hodd, that in their mouths is ever Robyn, Robbyn, Robyn Hode! And so my dreadful sin is in every ear, like the deathly hoot of an owl, and I might never forget it until Death deafens me from this world for ever and ever.
One time after forty or more years, and already old, I ventured to visit [the holy house of ] St Edmund’s in Dancaster, wherein few, if any, were left who might have remembered me as brother Thomas’s page. Father Gerald having long departed this life, our meal included venison from the chase and plump fish caught by the brothers’ nets and baskets in the part of the river that flowed within the walls,407 boiled and fried and daintily prepared with pepper and spice. Likewise were the liquors as generous as in those former days before father Gerald, for the present abbot followed Isaac in believing wine to be restorative to health; yet I did not rebuke mine hosts for their indulgence, saying merely that porridge of salt and oatmeal heated in old beef-broth customarily sufficed me, as it sufficed the poor.
The coloured windows in the completed chancel were so fine, and the decorations everywhere so costly and precious, with glorious images swarming on every hand (e’en beneath our feet), that I could not help gasping in wonderment. Then did I sudden notice, in the glass of one of the lancets, the figure of a hunter winding his horn, his apparel (pierced by the sunlight) of a most startling green.
‘Ay,’ the brother monk said, ‘that is Robben Hod, that they sing of in the ballads.’ ‘Why,’ I asked, most astonished and dismayed, ‘is such a wicked felon – and notorious heretic – here within the body of your holy church? Pray, tell me!’ ‘I know not if he were a heretic, or e’en a wicked felon,’ said the young monk, ‘but they say he was placed there out of fear, his greenwood lair being the very forest we felled to the last tree.’ I felt a darkness rise within me; and seizing my troubled voice, as it were, to calm it, I said scoffingly: ‘Out of fear, brother? What canst thou mean by such a word?’
‘Fear was indeed the word they used, who remembered,’ he continued, chuckling merrily (being a jolly youth), ‘though all of those be passed away by now, may the Lord rest their souls. For the tale goeth, that he cursed our house most horribly and wrathfully as the trees fell about him, and said he would ne’er set foot under our sacred roof, unless it were to burn it to ashes and charred wood, and that none could stop him but his own shadow. Therefore, as precaution, it were thought wise to include him in the very glass formed by the burning of his forest, that he might cast his own shadow on the abbey floor. Just as we include diverse monsters with beastly [heads?] or goat’s legs, or women with fish’s tails, or green men spewing out roots and leaves, that such freaks and fiends be weighed under by the burden of the presence of the Lord – as He does certainly seem burdensome to them, from their expressions!’
Most troubled was I anon, when I saw the sun alighting suddenly on the glass, that made the figure sail unto the floor, where it glimmered greenly by my feet like a snake: and I heard the mournful wail of a Jew’s horn travelling to my ears, as if from mine own past, that I have here set down in clear letters for our ultimate and divine Master and Holy Father to read, that I might be [forgiven?] and aneled.
The young monk frowned upon me anxiously, and held my arm, for I had begun to turn very pale, and sway from side to side. ‘What ails thee, dear brother?’ he asked.
But I could not say the truth, for none would have believed it, so [discreet?] have I always been in my bearing and my spoken thoughts, until I put my pen to this paper. So likewise must I end now by lifting my sharp-nibbed goosefeather for the last time, as one day soon my lungs will putteth off air for the last time: and since I write this by candle-light, scarce seeing my own words, I will retire gratefully bedward till the bells of Matins ring.408
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to Jas Elsner and Zoë Swenson-Wright for their invaluable help, to Niek Miedema, my editor Robin Robertson and my agent Lucy Luck for their support, and to my wife Jo and my children Joshua, Sacha and Anastasia for their encouragement, humour and love.
Footnotes
3 It is interesting that our manuscript never uses the variant spelling ‘Hood’ or ‘Hoode’, which suggests a difference in pronunciation similar to modern usage; although ‘hode’ is used to mean a hood in, for instance, the fourteenth-century Brut (EETS, 1906, p. 249): ‘the Englisshe-men were clothede alle in cotes and hodes’.
4 This seems optimistic for a wet day, especially in winter and with a pack pony; although York and Doncaster are only some twenty-five miles apart, horses have to feed, and no one travelled out of daylight hours. Watling Street, now the Great North Road, had long lost any serviceable Roman paving.
5 Robin is, of course, a diminutive of Robert.
6 As in MS, meaning a bawdy-house. The whole of this rather startling simile is vindicated later on in the manuscript.
7 A child offered by his or her parents to be a monk or nun for life: a cruel custom already dying out by the fourteenth century – and clearly (from this mention) already somewhat corrupted by the thirteenth.
8 A rare circumstance, evidently: medieval roads (such as they were) were relatively crowded. The speed with which the traffic of hooves and cart-wheels can chop an unmetalled road into a quagmire is, of course, well known even in our own day.
9 What is now called ‘broken wind’.
10 Likely to have been Roman stones, since (as previously noted) the route in the early thirteenth century faithfully followed Watling Street, half a mile west of where a bridge was built soon after. The Great North Road is now finely surfaced but still dangerously steep for motor cars at the eponymous Wentbridge.
11 Now Barnsdale Moor.
12 As in MS (the instrument familiar to us being of northern European origin); from henceforth I will transcribe it in modern spelling. Much loved by medieval painters from whom our only knowledge of it derives, this would have been a small, portable harp for the lap: ‘A simple diatonic instrument with charm of tone … with but one scale … To obtain an accidental semi-tone the only r
esource was to shorten the string as much as was needed by firmly pressing it with the finger, robbing the harpist for the time of the use of one hand.’ (Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1889, Vol. 2, p. 699.)
13 A reference to the first work by Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, in which Enide’s horse is black on one side and white on the other: our monk appears to be familiar with French romances.
14 Mitra is a general term for headdress (in the Greek and Roman world usually female or at least effeminate), the Latin not allowing for medieval distinctions between the ubiquitous ‘capuchon’ – a cape the upper half of which was drawn over the head, or allowed to hang down at the back as a liripipe – and the monkish and more voluminous ‘hood’. Hod clearly wears a type of the latter form, whose term I henceforth mainly use whoever the bearer, for simplicity’s sake.
15 The grey Cistercian monks in monasteries near to the author’s Benedictine house at Whitby.
16 The present translator of this MS lives similarly in a cottage some six hundred years old, whose thatched roof inclines to a level only two feet from the ground at the rear, and is exceedingly warm and cosy. It may be that we have exaggerated, along with the poor state of most medieval people’s teeth (probably superior to our own), the flimsiness and draughtiness of the average of their dwellings superior to the hovel, even in the town – but certainly not the crowdedness, for their homes generally consisted of two rooms divided by a thin partition, with a palliasse (straw-filled sacking) for a bed.
17 Cf. the wretched ploughman in Langland’s Piers Plowman (c.1394), with the graphic picture of his wife staining the ice with the blood from her bare feet, that so haunted me when I first read it (or rather, extrapolated its sense) as a boy, in Mr Skeat’s great edition – unhappily tucked (this being my father’s library) between Sir G. Cornewall Lewis’s An Essay on the Government of Dependencies and Mr C. P. Lucas’s Historical Geography of the British Colonies.
18 This is metaphoric, given the eventual fate of his last harp, revealed towards the end of the narrative.
19 King Henry III, responsible for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey: a minority council ruled in his name until 1232.
20 This passage reminds me of our Padre who, upset by the obscenities issuing from our Company canteen during Church Parade, suggested our language could do with a dose of ‘God’s chlorine’.
21 Sequela, literally ‘litter’.
22 Accuratus, presumably when avarus might have been preferred.
23 The monks’ dormitory.
24 The cloister is similarly exposed to the north (instead of the sunnier south) at Chester, Gloucester and Canterbury, although in the above case the church would at least have blocked easterly winds. Vestiges of an abbey outside Doncaster were discovered by chance a few years before the late war, but they amounted to no more than a few tiles, paving stones and fragments of stained glass.
25 As in MS: chink or cleft.
26 This somewhat digressive simile bears a striking similarity to the entry on Iceland from Bartholomew Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (1250s), the first of many such borrowings in the text. The earliest known surviving MS of ‘The Properties of Things’, which was the standard encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, dates from 1296 (Ashmole Collection), with a French MS dated the following year – thus easily within the period of our author’s composition. Bartholomew was an English Franciscan, the encyclopedia written for those with little, if any, learning.
27 Fern being often used as a cheap source of potash in traditional glass manufacture.
28 Usually taken soon after 5 p.m., for both monks and laity.
29 This pigment being the first coat, that formed the subsequent areas of shadow: the medieval painter had no notion of green deriving from blue and yellow, thus this green was a primary hue. Cherubim were generally painted with red skin, as devils would have red hair, beards and wings.
30 The line was dangerously fine between the approved minstrel and his non-approved colleagues – whose skills placed them on the lowest rung of society, along with prostitutes, and among the advance guard for Hell.
31 Cambridge’s university had only recently begun to rival Oxford’s at this time.
32Sandalii – a very rare instance of this word.
33 Tadcaster, some thirty miles from Doncaster.
34 The absence of toys from the medieval records is only owing to their disposability, and the stuff they were made from: wood, cloth, moulded pottery and so forth. There is no doubt that little girls loved dolls then as now, and boys likewise played as keenly with spinning tops, whips, soldiers and toy horses as do the youngsters of today.
35 Presumably by William the Conqueror in his harrying of the north during the winter of 1069–70.
36 i.e. six minutes.
37 The liver being regarded as the seat of love and voluptuousness, and the spleen the seat of laughter, as Shakespeare well knew.
38 Alehouses, best thought of as types of estaminet where only drink and simple food might be procured, were generally indicated by a bush or corn sheaf on a pole. The average medieval consumption of ale (made from barley, or more cheaply from oats) has been estimated at a gallon per man per day.
39 i.e. the leech or quack doctor.
40Fremere: possibly ‘snarled’, though unlikely.
41 A hedge-sparrow.
42 Possibly in the form of a medicinal mustard bath rather than as a condiment.
43 Now named (from the sixteenth century onwards) as ‘frit’: a calcined mixture that fuses without melting.
44 The distance appears to have grown from Richard’s original description.
45 Presumably the green plover, otherwise known as a lapwing or ‘peewit’.
46 Once the law had termed someone a ‘wolfshead’, anyone could hunt him down and kill him, as they could a wolf.
47 Previously described as the (vaguer) amiculum. Cicero cites the paenula as a sleeveless garment, to be worn on journeys or against wet, cold weather.
48 In a metaphoric sense, as the cloak is not presumably of leather.
49 St Amateur, bishop of Auxerre (died 418), uprooted the pine in whose branches the future St Germain had hung the heads of wild animals.
50 i.e. the autumn colours of yellow or russet, caused by the changing balance of the elements.
51 A miracle play.
52 Presumably more similar to the charcoal-burner’s huts that still survive in our thicker beech woods, than to the flimsy hides of hunters.
53 The medieval writer was altogether more frank about elements which, to us, seem too repulsive to be mentioned in polite (or at least ‘civvy’) society.
54 Archaeological evidence is scanty at present, but if this seems alarming in terms of hygiene, given what we now know of the fly as a carrier of disease, I found its counterpart in farm billets on the Continent, where one generally stepped out of the house into the midden. Cess-pits and drainage systems only began to be introduced in the century of our narrative; during wet periods the smell of the streets’ sludge must have been scarcely endurable. Dwellings no doubt swarmed with louse and rat.
55 Pieces of human dung.
56 This repetition is possibly the copyist’s error.
57 29 October.
58 This eloquent interpolation seems misplaced; possibly a textual mutilation copied by the scrivener.
59 Gutter-dung.
60 Cf. Chaucer’s ‘The Parson’s Tale’ [ll. 423–31], without the colourful detail of ‘the horrible swollen members, that semeth lik the maladie of hirnia’: the similarity suggests a common source – probably Guilielmus Peraldus’s Summa seu Tractatus de Viciis (before 1261). ‘Stockings’ or chausses, rather than breeches or trousers, were worn at this time: the term ‘hose’ belongs to the later fourteenth century.
61 Popular nonsense words of the period, like our ‘fee fi fo’.
62 Juggler or trick magician, familiar on market days.
63 I am assuming a crossbow rather than a longbow
, as the latter is not cradled in the arms. It was a vicious, highly effective weapon dating back to at least second century BC China, firing short, thick bolts released from a catch by a trigger, and so popular that it was banned by the Pope from use against fellow Christians in 1139. Alas, no such ban has at present been made against other mechanical weapons of far crueller disposition.
64 De nihilo nihil fit. A phrase from Boethius which indicates Hod’s learning: in medieval garb, as actually uttered by him, we can imagine it as approximate to this celebrated later rendition: ‘Nothing ne hath his beynge of naught’ (Chaucer, Boece, 5. pr.1. 54); this being echoed two centuries later in Lear’s infamous retort to Cordelia: ‘Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.’
65 The very familiar woody nightshade of our hedgerows, which can reach four or five feet by leaning against a stouter growth.
66 From the description of the arrows as ‘slender’, and their accuracy, this must be the deadly longbow, made of yew, that the later ‘Robin’ legend would fuse to the outlaws with the heat of romance, and which makes such a contrast to our present armoury of stick-bombs, rifles, machine guns and so forth, and the unimaginable din and violence of the greater calibre weapons.
67 This simply means ‘other’, but in medieval clothing. True, there is no precise equivalent in Latin, except perhaps – but rather too feebly – reliquus. The variations in the spelling of what, for this text, is such a key, ambiguous and resonant word may not be the copyist’s responsibility.
68 An interesting use of comminisci, customarily negative.
69 The original Latin is very obscure here, and may well be corrupted.
70 In City of God, Book XIV, cap. 16.
71 Again, the sense of the original is somewhat tortured by curious syntax.
72 Neither class nor position makes much difference to the Middle Ages’ widespread acceptance of physical violence, that we have curiously retained in the sordid arena of modern warfare. See, for example, the Roll of the Justices in Eyre at Bedford, 1227 (recently printed in The Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, Vol. 111, 1916), which, as the editor points out, catalogues ‘an amazing amount of violent death, considering the small population’.
