by Adam Thorpe
186 This suggests, rather remarkably, that stone circles such as Avebury or Stonehenge were regarded as having the same kind of healing properties as saints’ relics, and may even have been the object of secret ‘pilgrimage’ in an age when folk magic jostled persistently and no doubt dangerously with orthodox beliefs.
187 This last is a marginal interpolation in an approximately sixteenth-century hand, Hand A.
188 This is a common exaggeration of medieval misogyny and not to be understood literally.
189 Cf. Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’.
190 Traditionally, Robin Hood’s ‘merry men’ were of yeomen stock; the presence of disaffected minor nobility (apart from ‘bad eggs’, this might include younger sons unwilling to join the Church) does not, however, conflict with the documentary evidence.
191 Cf. Bartholomew.
192 Not necessarily in marriage, alas. King John, for instance, was a notorious borrower of his nobles’ womenfolk. By such means men still think to gain influence and power.
193 There is mention of ‘a stone of Robin Hood’ in a 1422 Chartulary of Monkbretton Priory (erroneously dated 1322), to the east of the Great North Road some four miles south of Wentbridge, probably identical to the present-day ‘Robin Hood’s Well’.
194 Strange as it may seem, women rode astride until the late fourteenth century.
195 Worth, at present-day prices (1921), about £7,000.
196 This brilliant simile seems to draw upon experience, and certainly gives our prosaic narrator the flash of a great poet.
197 Magpie: compare Chaucer’s ‘janglynge pye’ (The Parliament of Fowls, l. 345).
198 A remarkable anticipation of stanza 7 (out of 90) in the earliest surviving ‘Robin Hood’ ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, wherein Robin expresses the same heedless desperation, but from an orthodox Christian desire to see his Saviour: ‘“Hit is a fourtnet and more,” seid h[e], / “Syn I my savyour see; / To day I to Notyngham,” seid Robyn, / “With the myght of mylde Marye.”’ (All citations from F. J. Child’s masterly edition: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1888.)
199 Compare stanza 8 of the same ballad, in which ‘Moche, the mylner sun’ (the miller’s son), makes the identical suggestion: ‘Take twelve of thi wyght yemen, / Well weppynd, be thi side.’ To which comes the reply: ‘“Off all my mery men,” seid Robyn, / “Be my feith I wil none have, / But Litull John shall beyre my bow …”’ It would be henceforth tedious to indicate the parallels, there are so many. Effectively, this part of the action of our present document is more or less replayed, in a conventional and popular form less displeasing to the Church, in the later ballad. We can thus make the extremely probable hypothesis that our narrator is also the minstrel-author of Robin Hood and the Monk in its original lost version, as is suggested later in the manuscript.
200 A colourful episode of competitive archery is inserted here in the ballad, ending in a banal quarrel over the wager of a few shillings.
201 Lout.
202 i.e. ‘Hoodman’s Blind’, a kind of blind man’s bluff where the blindfolded player was hit by knotted capuchons instead of touched – clearly a much rougher game than its modern counterpart.
203 Possibly a nickname given for its comic inappropriateness: ‘flawnes’ being a medieval baked dish of eggs, cheese, sugar and saffron.
204 In the sense, clearly, of his ‘catamite’ – a boy kept for unnatural purposes. See also Chaucer’s description of the effeminate Pardoner as a ‘geldying’.
205 The official punishment for this offence – mutilation or removal of the privy members before being hung in chains – was seldom carried out, however.
206 There is corruption of the text here: I have taken terramentum as a clerical error for ferramentum, and assumed the loss of two or three words before convivae.
207 Pepper being a costly luxury at this period.
208 Marsh samphire.
209 Pre-Reformation church fonts would be closed with a heavy lid, to prevent witches and sorcerers stealing drops of the holy water within, for use in spells.
210 ‘Carnal’ here is in the sense of ‘worldly’ or ‘unsanctified’, as opposed to the spiritual relations between the devout, united in the service of God. A view common to the age, if somewhat naive (or even hypocritical).
211 Carmenta Nicostrata, reputed to have brought the alphabet to Italy.
212 This contradicts what was said in an earlier episode and what is then recounted, although a softness can indeed coexist happily in the same person with a harshness; I’m thinking particularly of certain schoolmasters and army officers known to me. A solitary man on a near-starvation diet will, if not listless, be likely to show an instability of temperament.
213 This last sentence is in Anglo-Norman, the language of judicial authority.
214 As they did St Cuthbert’s on Farne Isle.
215 I have translated the Latin for ‘porpoise’ literally. It was much prized for its fat.
216 Sea wrack (most likely the beached seaweeds of bladderwrack or kelp).
217 ‘And forgive us our sins’ [lit. ‘debts’]: domitte should be dimitte, of course, but in this form could be heard or misread as domito (to tame), presumably.
218 He has the schoolchild’s timeless habit of tracing progress with a dirty finger pressed to the page.
219 A marginal interpolation in Hand A.
220 Stencils (the general comment is less startling than it appears – medieval shop signs, for example, were usually pictorial).
221 Marginal interpolation in the same sixteenth-century hand (Hand A).
222 A long outdoor garment with a slit in the hanging sleeves for the arms; it became fashionable at about this time.
223 The south door being the usual main entrance to a church, via the graveyard. Little remains of the original building, as it was entirely rebuilt in the late fourteenth century, ‘classicised’ in the eighteenth, and heavily restored to ‘Gothic’ some sixty years ago by Sir G. G. Scott.
224 As in MS: a common type of dress in the period, for both men and women, with a low belt for the latter to make a fullish skirt, and very graceful in its simplicity.
225 Therefore he was not of the nobility, who wore their cotte to the ankle. Any higher than the calf risked denoting a peasant (whose skirt reached no lower than the knee).
226 A clasp.
227 Churches then were not only lively places compared to their forlorn modern state, but brightly painted, for the age loved colour. Churchyards even held host to markets until forbidden to in 1285.
228 The very sheriff, it seems, who was to play such an important part in later versions of the outlaw legend. The sadistic baron’s identity remains unknown, although future scholars may narrow down the many possible contenders from the assortment of powerful northern nobles who had been responsible for the Magna Carta ten years earlier (see later note) – of whom some were little more than gangsters.
229 Compare the medieval Spanish poem, Tyran le Blanc, where the victim is the hero’s own mother.
230 Marriage vows at this time could be exchanged anywhere, without witnesses or ceremony or the consent of relatives, and still be valid in canon law.
231 Low-set and narrow, enabling lepers to watch the service while hygienically removed from their fellows. There is currently, however, a fierce scrimmage among specialists over this issue, some believing that the open shutter enabled the sound of the ‘sacring’ bell to be heard outside on the raising of the Host, and that lepers never squinted through them at all.
232 As in MS: perhaps no other passage illuminates better the stealthy wit and verve of the writer, somehow surviving the prejudices of his recaptured faith. Brick (moulded narrower than our own day) was coming back into ‘fashion’ in the thirteenth century.
233 Yew wood (the finest being imported; lesser bows used willow or elm).
234 Most Englishmen, including peasants, owned a bow and arrows.
235 Where he and Hod had s
lept, evidently, on their journey to Nottingham.
236 As in MS: ‘sheriff’ – this being the High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests, the city only being given its own sheriff in 1449. However, it appears the sheriff’s HQ is Nottingham at the time of our account.
237 Iceland.
238 Although the passage is exaggerated, the walled and gated part of the average medieval city would have surprised us by its small surface area.
239 The seven deadly sins were commonly referred to as ‘the daughters of the Devil’.
240 That of the minority of Henry III, who (as every schoolboy knows) forty years later was to face the rebellious barons headed by Simon de Montfort. In fact, Henry visited the north very seldom during his long subsequent reign.
241 None of this sorry tale is surprising: the medieval court’s ravenous procession through the country, in a swarm of camp followers, was dreaded by all. See also the famous letters of Peter of Blois (died 1200).
242 One of the greatest solaces on my return from our very real Hell-Front, was to find the clean fields and blooming meadows of England untainted by poison gas or chemicals, and torn only by the cutting plough and trampling hoof of quiet labour.
243 A black man, probably captured in the Holy Land; medieval prejudice equated very dark skin with the Devil, though not of any specific hue. Such odious comparisons survive into our own day, alas.
244 See earlier note: about forty minutes.
245 This is an unclear indication of distance: a cart drawn by horses can haul for eight hours a day, that pulled by oxen can manage only five.
246 More precisely, the somewhat ineffectual Henry III had a drooping eyelid, inherited by his son – the much more confident and effective, if unpleasantly belligerent, Edward I.
247 Usually with three leather lashes each ending in a lead weight.
248 i.e. on their way down to Nottingham, as no doubt described in the relevant missing leaf. Evidently they descended via Bakewell and the moorland of the Derbyshire ‘peaks’ (which remains a somewhat desolate area to this day), well west of Sherwood Forest, and avoiding the main roads. It may be of interest to note that the area boasts a Robin Hood’s Stride and an eponymous Cross.
249 Namely (as every schoolchild knows), by the Venerable Bede. History being regularly disturbed by the baleful presence of such types as Robert Hod (necessarily in positions of great power, as opposed to running a ramshackle band of cut-throats), we must be thankful that our modern era, in the wake of the War’s terrible price, has brought a new, albeit shamefaced spirit of construction, hope and common sense, inimical to such ‘poison fruits’. [‘B Company’ scrawled in left margin of footnote in FB’s hand, with ‘ramshackle band’ double underlined.]
Nathless that very same fellow is now crouched at this awful writing work, with the autumn sea-blasts blowing through the cloister’s open arches and flinging sprinkles of salt spume on his page; and lo, he doth tremble like any threadbare clerk that is paid tuppence for translating into Latin, and who, if he do not finish the piecework, be clapped in iron bonds in a filthy cell by his master, till the work be completed.
250 i.e. those raised by the hue and cry; although the law declared that ‘all’ local men should answer the call, certain hand-picked citizens must answer it ‘swiftly and hastily’.
251 The powerful, acquisitive and conservative Ranulph III, earl of Chester (c.1170–1232), was reputed to be short; he owned numerous estates and castles in the north, and would have been in his mid-fifties at this time. However, although ruthlessly ambitious in the Anglo-Norman manner, and probably pious, he was not particularly noted for cruelty in the fashion of his most important master, King John.
252 This is an undoubted reference to what was about to be the first form of the ballad, as we shall see. In that ballad (Robin Hood and the Monk), the malefactor leaves twelve men dead from the attentions of the ‘too-hond sworde’, before the said sword breaks apart upon the sheriff’s head.
253 Such affrays, not uncommon in the medieval period, might seem alarming from the perspective of modern standards. Preferring our violence to be thoroughly organised and in foreign parts (though of far more horrendous cost in lives and damage), we are able to retain the illusion that we are much more civilised than our pre-industrial forebears (see Peter N. Carter’s essay on riots in Medieval Lawbreaking, London, 1909).
254 Presumably from their coats of mail, though this may refer to their ‘activation’ of the buffoon’s wrist-bells.
255 The judicial powers of the sheriff were being increasingly replaced at this time by travelling courts (justices-in-eyre). The situation was complicated in Nottingham by dint of its two boroughs, Saxon English and Norman French, having quite separate administrations until c.1300.
256turba: presumably referring to the nineteen years of King Stephen’s quite-recent reign (1135–54), when, according to the famous entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (R.S., vol. 11, p. 231), ‘Christ and his saints slept.’
257 ‘Bad King John’ having been dead only some ten years.
258 Coincidentally (unless the passage is a confusion of memory), the prior of Lenton at this time was also called Damascenus. One presumes brother Thomas preferred to meet his page there, in safety, after betraying Hod. Lenton Priory was a Cluniac house; St Mary’s was one of their endowments. Damage, from red-hot shrapnel during a shelling at the foot of Messines Ridge, soon after the document came into my possession, has rendered several lines of this leaf illegible. It is quite possible that my life was thereby saved.
259 The eleventh-century author of a popular herbal.
260 As he himself seems to recognise, this is not fair in either case: concerning the hermit, he left voluntarily some time after Edwin had departed; of brother Thomas, he risked the outlaws’ camp in order to retrieve his harp.
261 My metonymic translation is more likely, I think, than ‘plague’ or ‘pestilence’.
262 King John, whose men were apparently responsible for the father’s death.
263 As in MS: Middle English for a malignant boil or growth, that those historians favouring an Old World origin for syphilis, see also as a syphilitic eruption or chancre.
264 Henry came of age in 1227, two years after the date of our narrative.
265 The wooden walls, originally dating from the Conquest and extended thereafter on an earth rampart, were rebuilt in stone only in the late thirteenth century.
266 Oblates being strictly limited in their daily allowance of speech.
267 The rack, between a trot and a canter, is the most likely pace when speed is required but a horse is being led behind, as I frequently witnessed myself in the late mass slaughter (which incidentally was as injurious to poor, long-suffering equus as any medieval battle, if in proportionately far greater numbers).
268 The ‘tristil-tree’ or ‘trusty-tree’ (trysting- or meeting-tree) is a stock feature of the ballads – though this particular giant oak has been mentioned before, of course, and seems realistic. The ensuing scene with Little John is remarkably close to the corresponding moment in Robin Hood and the Monk, from which a missing leaf has deprived the reader of Robin’s capture.
269 Presumably fermented: the present translator, having voluntarily imbibed the unfermented variety for medicinal purposes, found its humble taste delightful – indeed, the closest one might get to drinking a summer wood.
270 Suspicion of urban life and its mercantile properties, rapidly expanding then as now (though without the gobbling horrors of the suburban brick box), are a singular theme of the ballads.
271 According to a royal charter of 1155, the town’s market was held on Friday and Saturday. The journey between Nottingham and Doncaster could be done (on horseback) in a day.
272 It seems the outlaws have not recalled Much’s original connection with the monastic house of St Edmund’s, after many months. The situation is, in fact, rather more delicate than the narrative admits.
273 The
word is made unclear by a stain. Possibly ‘lupa’ (a she-wolf; also a prostitute).
274 A scholarly pun, clari being the Latin for ‘shining’, and clavus for ‘a nail’. In the later ballad, John tells the outlaws to hunt deer.
275 The terror of forgery is allied to the vital importance of knowing what is true and what is false, upon which knowledge an ordered society depends; much of the ‘paranoia’ of medieval society derives from this recognition, and the concomitant sense that the Devil is a master of deception. This naturally necessitated a similar ruse on the part of God: so He became man, in the unexpected guise of a Jewish carpenter’s son.
276 A common term in Middle English, of which the Latin is a skilful echo, though hard to render successfully in modern English. Compare ‘al this world of prees’ in Chaucer’s ‘The Monk’s Tale’ (Skeat, l. 3327).
277 In the surviving ballad, which our narrative is now closely conjoined with, our two heroes wait in Much’s uncle’s house (‘Moch emrys hows’), overlooking the highway. This curious, rather unlikely detail is nowhere present in our earlier account, but I venture boldly to suggest that ‘emrys hows’ may be an oral distortion or smoothing, through repeated use in minstrel performance over some two hundred years, of ‘embusshementz’, meaning ‘ambushes’.
278 The narrative is presumably being written into a ‘book’ of blank pages, no doubt as simply bound as its copy; the extended metaphor of this passage is already a familiar one at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
279 At this time (the early thirteenth century), cash was a rarity in the peasant economy, most transactions using barter or payment in kind; a state some utopians would like to return to, understandably – regarding economics as responsible for the dubious entry of industrialism.
280 Likely to have been required for the campaigns in Aquitaine, led by Henry’s powerful but unsatisfactory regent, Hubert de Burgh.
281 i.e. cool the metal in a water-trough at very high temperature, thus hardening it. Plate armour was not yet in use at this time, though it was to prove much more effective against penetration.
