On this blog over the past few years we have looked at some
of the earliest ballads of Robin Hood. These survive from the early fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. But apart from the ballads, there are also
place-names, proverbs, dramatic records and tantalizing references to ‘rymes’
about the allusive outlaw. The most famous reference is in William Langland’s
Piers Plowman (1377), where Sloth, the lazy priest confesses that:
‘I can nouĐ—te perfitly my paternoster as the prest it
syngeth,
But I can rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf erle of
Chestre.’
A page from Langland's Piers Plowman
Sadly none of these ‘rymes’ survive before the fifteenth
century. The earliest existing poem comes from Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale
Cronykil, which was compiled about 1420. In short rhymed couplets it has:
Litil Iohun and Robert Hude
Waythmen war commendir gud;
In Ingilwode and Bernnysdaile
Thai oyssit al this time that trawale.
Little John and Robert Hood
Were well praised as forest outlaws
In Inglewood and Barnsdale
They practised their labour all the time.
One of the most interesting ‘rhymes’ for me is the
fragment discovered in Lincoln Cathedral Library in the 1940’s by George E
Morris. I am indebted to Adele Treskillard and Trish Bazallgette for their
invaluable help. Adele managed to locate an image of the scribbled two rhymed
couplets from the manuscript and Trish has helped me obtain information on how
and when it was discovered.
The fragment was found amongst a miscellany of
grammatical texts, dating from the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. It appears
that a student from the early fifteenth century hastily wrote or scribbled two
rhymed couplets from a Robin Hood poem as an exercise in translating English
into Latin:
Robyn hod in scherewod stod
Hodud and hathud hosut and schold
Ffour and thuynti arowes he bar in hit hondus.
Robin Hood in Sherwood stood
Hooded and hatted, hosed and shod
Four and twenty arrows
He bore in his hands.
Robyn hod in scherewod stod
Evidence from the dialect locates the poem to
the North Midlands of England and the use of the ‘weak preterite verbs’ (hodud,
hathud, hosut) give it a date of c.1425.
In the past scholars have assumed that Langland’s ‘rymes
of Robyn Hood’ were the long narrative ballads such as Robin Hood and the Monk, but scholars are now having a re-think. The evidence from Wyntoun and
the Lincoln manuscript suggests that they were originally easily remembered
short lyrics, passed on orally in rhymed couplets. In time, some would then
eventually be expanded into what we describe as the Robin Hood ballads.
