Hood kr-1

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  EPILOGUE

  Dine days after the searchers returned to Castle Neufmarche in Hereford with the sorry news that they had failed to turn up any sign of the Welsh outlaws' trail, a solitary rider appeared at the door of the Abbey of Saint Dyfrig-the principal monastery of Elfael in the north of the cantref near Glascwm. "I am looking for a certain priest," the rider announced to the brother who met him at the gate. Wearing a dark green hooded cloak and a wide-brimmed leather hat pulled low over his face, he spoke the Cymry of a trueborn Briton. "I was told I might find him here."

  "Who is it you seek?" asked the monk. "I will help you if I can."

  "One called Asaph, a bishop of the church."

  "Then God has rewarded your journey, friend," the monk told him. "He is here."

  "Fetch him, please. My time is short."

  "This way, sir, if you please."

  The brother led the visitor to the guest lodge, where he was given a cup of wine, a bowl of soup, and some bread to refresh himself while he waited. Lifting the bowl to his lips, he drank down the broth and used the bread to sop up the last drops. He then turned his attention to the wine. Sipping from his cup, he leaned on the doorpost and gazed out into the yard at the monks hurrying to and fro on their business. Presently, the doorkeeper appeared, leading a white-robed priest across the yard.

  "Bishop Asaph," said the monk, delivering his charge, "this man has come asking for you."

  The priest smiled, his pale eyes crinkling at the corners. "I am Asaph," he said. "How may I serve you?"

  "I have a message for you," said the stranger. Reaching into a pouch at his belt, he brought out a piece of folded parchment, which he passed to the bishop.

  "How very formal," remarked the bishop. He received the parcel, untied the leather binding, and unfolded it. "Excuse me; my eyes are not what they were," he said, stepping back into the light of the yard so that he could see what was written there.

  He scanned the letter quickly and then looked up sharply. "Do you know what this letter contains?" The rider nodded his assent, and the bishop read the message again, saying, "… and a sum of money to be used for the building of a new monastery on lands which have been purchased for this purpose the better to serve the people of Elfael should you accept this condition." Raising his face to the stranger, he asked, "Do you have the money with you?"

  "I do," replied the rider.

  "And the condition-what is it?"

  "It is this," the messenger informed him. "That you are to preside over a daily Mass and pray for the souls of the people of Elfael in their struggle and for their rightful king and his court, each day without fail, and twice on high holy days." The rider regarded the bishop impassively. "Do you accept the condition?"

  "Gladly and with all my heart," answered the bishop. "God knows, nothing would please me more than to undertake this mission."

  "So be it." Reaching into his pouch, the messenger brought out a leather bag and passed it to the senior churchman. "This is for you."

  With trembling hands the bishop opened the curiously heavy bag and peered in. The yellow gleam of gold byzants met his wondering gaze.

  "Two hundred marks," the rider informed him.

  "Two hundred, did you say?" gasped the bishop, stunned by the amount.

  "Begin with that. There is more if you need it."

  "But how?" asked Asaph, shaking his head in amazement. "Who has sent this?"

  "It has not been given for me to say," answered the rider. He stepped to the bench and retrieved his hat. "It may please my lord to reveal himself to you in due time." He moved past the bishop into the yard. "For now, it is his pleasure that you use the money in the service of God's kingdom for the relief of the folk of Elfael."

  The bishop, holding the bag of money in one hand and the sealed parchment in the other, watched the mysterious messenger depart. "What is your name?" asked Asaph as the rider took up the reins and climbed into the saddle.

  "Call me Silidons, for such I am," replied the rider. "I give you good day, bishop."

  "God with you, my son!" he called after him. "And God with your master, whoever he may be!"

  Later, as the monks of Saint Dyfrig's gathered at vespers for evening prayers, Bishop Asaph recalled the condition the messenger had made: that he perform a Mass each day for the people of Elfael and the king. Lord Brychan of Elfael was dead, sadly enough. If any soul ever needed prayer, his surely did-but who amongst the living cared enough to build an entire monastery where prayers could be offered for the relief of that suffering soul?

  But no… no, the messenger did not name Brychan. He had said "the people in their struggle and for their rightful king and his court…" Sadly, the king and heir were dead-so who was the rightful ruler of Elfael?

  Bishop Asaph could not say.

  Later that night, the faithful priest led the remnant of Elfael's monks, the handful of loyal brothers who had entered exile with him, in the first of many prayers for the cantref, its people, and his mysterious benefactor. "And if it please you, heavenly Father," he whispered privately as the prayers of the monks swirled around him on clouds of incense, "may I live to see the day a true king takes the throne in Elfael once more.

  ROBIN HOOD IN WALES?

  it will seem strange to many readers, and perhaps even perverse, to take Robin Hood out of Sherwood Forest and relocate him in Wales; worse still to remove all trace of Englishness, set his story in the eleventh century, and recast the honourable outlaw as an early British freedom fighter. My contention is that although in Nottingham, the Robin Hood legends found good soil in which to grow, they must surely have originated elsewhere.

  The first written references to the character we now know as Robin Hood can be traced as far back as the early 1260s. By 1350, the Robin Hood legends were well-known, if somewhat various, consisting of a loose aggregation of poems and songs plied by the troubadours and minstrels of the day. These poems and songs bore little relation to one another and carried titles such as "Robin Hood and the Potter," "Robin Hood's Chase," "Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford," "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield," "The Noble Fisherman," "Robin Whood Turned Hermit," "Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires," and "Little John a'Begging."

  As the minstrels wandered around Britain with their lutes and lyres, crooning to high and low alike, they spread the fame of the beloved rogue far and wide, often supplying local place-names to foster a closer identification with their subject and give their stories more immediacy. Thus, the songs do not agree on a single setting, nor do they agree on the protagonist's name. Some will have it Robert Hood, or Whoode, and others Robin Hod, Robyn Hode, Robinet, or even Roger. Other contenders include Robynhod, Rabunhod, Robehod, and, interestingly, Hobbehod. And although these popular tales were committed to paper, or parchment, by about 1400, still no attempt was made to stitch the stories together to form a whole cloth.

  In the earliest stories, Robin was no honourable Errol Flynn-esque hero. He was a coarse and vulgar oaf much given to crudeness and violence. He was a thief from the beginning, to be sure, but the nowfamous creed of "robbing from the rich to give to the poor" was a few hundred years removed from his rough highwayman origins. The early Robin robbed from the rich, to be sure-and kept every silver English penny for himself.

  As time went on, the threadbare tales acquired new and better clothes-until they possessed a whole wardrobe full of rich, colourful, sumptuous medieval regalia in the form of characters, places, incidents, and adventures. Characters such as Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, and Sir Guy of Gisbourne joined the ranks one by one in various times and places as different composers and writers spun out the old tales and made up new ones. The Sheriff of Nottingham was an early addition and, contrary to popular opinion, was not always the villain of the piece. The beautiful, plucky Maid Marian was actually one of the last characters to arrive on the scene, making her debut sometime around the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Others are notable by their absence. In the early ta
les there is no evil King John and no good King Richard-no king at all. And the only monarch who receives so much as a mention is "Edward, our comely king," though which of the many Edwards this might be is never made clear.

  So we have an amorphous body of popular songs and poems about a lovable rascal whose name was uncertain and who lived someplace on the island of Britain at some unknown time in the past. Of all the possibilities to choose from in locating the legend in place and time, why choose Wales?

  Several small but telling clues serve to locate the original source of the legend in the area of Britain now called Wales in the generation following the Norman invasion and conquest of 1066. First and foremost is the general character of the people themselves, the Welsh (from the Saxon wealas, or "foreigners"), or as they would have thought of themselves, the Britons.

  In AD 1100, Gerald of Wales, a highborn nobleman whose mother was a Welsh princess, wrote of his people: "The Welsh are extreme in all they do, so that if you never meet anyone worse than a bad Welshman, you will never meet anyone better than a good one." He went on to describe them as extremely hardy, extremely generous, and extremely witty. They were also, he cautioned, extremely treacherous, extremely vengeful, and extremely greedy for land. "Above all," he writes, "they are passionately devoted to liberty, and almost excessively warlike."

  Gerald painted a picture of the Cymry as a whole nation of warriors in arms. Unlike the Normans, who were sharply divided between the military aristocracy and a mass of peasants, every single Welshman was ready for battle at a moment's notice; women, too, bore arms and knew how to use them.

  Within two months of the Battle of Hastings (1066), William the Conqueror and his barons, the new Norman overlords, had subdued 80 percent of England. Within two years, they had it all under their rule. However-and I think this is significant-it took them over two hundred years of almost continual conflict to make any lasting impression on Wales, and by that late date it becomes a question of whether Wales was really ever conquered at all.

  In fact, William the Conqueror, recognising an implacable foe and unwilling to spend the rest of his life bogged down in a war he could never win, wisely left the Welsh alone. He established a baronial buffer zone between England and the warlike Britons. This was the territory known as the March. Later, this sensible no-go area and its policy of tolerance would be violated by the Conqueror's brutish son William II, who sought to fill his tax coffers to pay for his spendthrift ways and expensive wars in France. Wales and its great swathes of undeveloped territory seemed a plum ripe for the plucking, and it is in this historical context in the year AD 1093) that I have chosen to set Hood.

  A Welsh location is also suggested by the nature and landscape of the region. Wales of the March borderland was primeval forest. While the forests of England had long since become well-managed business property where each woodland was a veritable factory, Wales still had enormous stretches of virgin wood, untouched except for hunting and hiding. The forest of the March was a fearsome wilderness when the woods of England resembled well-kept garden preserves. It would have been exceedingly difficult for Robin and his outlaw band to actually hide in England's ever-dwindling Sherwood, but he could have lived for years in the forests of the March and never been seen or heard.

  This entry from the Welsh chronicle of the times known as Brenhinedd Y Saesson, or The Kings of the Saxons, makes the situation very clear:

  Anno Domini MLXXXXV (1095). In that year King William Rufus mustered a host past number against the Cymry. But the Cymry trusted in God with their prayers and fastings and alms and penances and placed their hope in God. And they harassed their foes so that the Ffreinc dared not go into the woods or the wild places, but they traversed the open lands sorely fatigued, and thence returned home empty-handed. And thus the Cymry boldly defended their land with joy. (emphasis mine

  That, I think, is the Robin Hood legend in seed form. The plucky Britons, disadvantaged in the open field, took to the forest and from there conducted a guerrilla war, striking the Normans at will from the relative safety of the woods-an ongoing tactic that would endure with considerable success for whole generations. That is the kernel from which the great durable oak of legend eventually grew.

  Finally, we have the Briton expertise with the warbow, or longbow as it is most often called. While one can read reams of accounts about the English talent for archery, it is seldom recognized-but well documented-that the Angles and Saxons actually learned the weapon and its use from the Welsh. No doubt, the invaders learned fear and respect for the longbow the hard way before acquiring its remarkable potential for themselves.

  As military historian Robert Hardy has observed, "The Welsh were the first people on the British Isles to have and use longbows. The Welsh became experts in the use of the longbow, and used the longbow very effectively in battles against the invading English." The Welsh repelled Ralph, Earl of Hereford, in 1055 using the longbow. There is a story about Welsh longbowmen penetrating a four-inch-thick, solid oak door with their arrows at the siege of Abergavenny Castle. Hardy goes on to say,

  "Like the Welsh, the English learned an important lesson by fighting against the longbow. That lesson being that the longbow is a formidable weapon when used correctly. With the eventual defeat of the Welsh, and `alliance' of the English and Welsh, the English employed Welsh longbowmen in its own army. During this time, the English began a campaign to train their own longbowmen as well."

  In his book Famous Welsh Battles, British historian Philip Warner writes:

  "There were no easy victories over the Welsh. They were greatly esteemed and widely feared, whether fighting as mercenaries in the Middle Ages or engaging in guerrilla combat. From south Wales came a new weapon, the longbow, as terrifying as modern weapons of mass murder. Some 6 feet long and discharging an arrow 3 feet in length, averaging 12 arrows a minute, they blanketed a target like a dark, vengeful cloud. In the next moment all would be groans, screams and confusion."

  Taken altogether, then, these clues of time, place, and weaponry indicate the germinal soil out of which Robin Hood sprang. As for the English Robin Hood with whom we are all so familiar… Just as Arthur, a Briton, was later Anglicised-made into the quintessential English king and hero by the same enemy Saxons he fought against -a similar makeover must have happened to Robin. The British resistance leader, outlawed to the primeval forests of the March, eventually emerged in the popular imagination as an aristocratic Englishman, fighting to right the wrongs of England and curb the powers of an overbearing monarchy. It is a tale that has worn well throughout the years. However, the real story, I think, must be far more interesting.

  And so, in an attempt to centre the tales of this British hero in the time and place where I think they originated-not where they eventually ended up-I have put a British Rhi Bran, and all his merry band of friends and enemies, in Wales.

  – Stephen Lawhead

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of MieczysXaw Piotrowski and the cooperation of Jozef Popiel, Director of Biaiowieski National Park, Poland, who kindly allowed me to roam freely in the last primeval forest in Europe.

  PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

  Many of the old Celtic words and names are strange to modern eyes, but they are not as difficult to pronounce as they might seem at first glance. A little effort-and the following rough guide-will help you enjoy the sound of these ancient words.

  Consonants – As in English, but with the following exceptions:

  c: hard – as in cat (never soft, as in cent)

  ch: hard – as in Bach (never soft, as in church;

  dd: a hard th sound, as in then

  f. a hard v sound, as in of

  ff. a soft f sound, as in off

  g: hard – as in girl (never soft, as in George)

  ll: a Gaelic distinctive, sounded as tl or hl on the sides of the tongue

  r: rolled or slightly trilled, especially at the beginning of a word

 
rh: breathed out as if h-r and heavy on the h sound

  s: soft – as in sin (never hard, as in his); when followed by a vowel it

  takes on the sh sound

  the soft – as in thistle (never hard, as in then)

  Vowels – As in English, but generally with the lightness of short vowel sounds

  a: short, as in can

  a: slightly softer than above, as in awe;

  e: usually short, as in met

  e: long a sound, as in hey

  is usually short, as in pin

  is long e sound, as in see

  o: usually short, as in hot

  6: long o sound, as in woe

  o: long o sound, as in go

  u: usually sounded as a short i, as in pin;

  u: long u sound as in sue

  6: short u sound as in muck

  w: sounded as a long u, as in hue; before vowels often becomes a soft

  consonant as in the name Gwen

  y: usually short, as in pin; sometimes u as in pun; when long, sounded

  e as in see; rarely, y as in why)

  The careful reader will have noted that there is very little difference between i, u, and y-they are almost identical to non-Celts and modern readers.

  Most Celtic words are stressed on the next to the last syllable. For example, the personal name Gofannon is stressed go-FAN-non, and the place name Penderwydd is stressed pen-DER-width, and so on.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-9a0b9d-2445-8c47-afbe-5ce1-ec86-6a72f2

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 29.08.2010