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Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation: The Evidence of the Robin Hood Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

Sean Field
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Extract

The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.

An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2002 , pp. 6 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2002

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References

1 Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation, 2d ed. (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

2 Haigh, Christopher, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For a recent assessment of this debate, see Marshall's, Peter introduction to The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–1640 (London, 1997), pp. 1–11Google Scholar.

4 Bessinger, J. B. Jr., “The Gest of Robin Hood Revisited,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Knight, Stephen (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 39–50Google Scholar, quotation on p. 41. For the sake of convenience, wherever possible, references will be to articles as they appear in this anthology. For original publication information, see Knight, , ed., Anthology, pp. xi–xiiiGoogle Scholar.

5 For a recent survey of Robin Hood scholarship, see the introduction to Singman, Jeffrey L., Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend (Westport, Conn., 1998)Google Scholar.

6 Knight, Stephen, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994), pp. 262–72Google Scholar, with the appendix collected by Lucy Sussex.

7 Ibid., p. 263.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., p. 269.

10 Maddicott, J. R., “The Birth and Setting of the Ballads of Robin Hood,” in Knight, , ed., Anthology, p. 235Google Scholar. A long-running historical debate over which class and era should be given credit for the origins of the Robin Hood tradition has shifted attention away from this pervasive late medieval popularity. One position advanced by R. H. Hilton saw Robin Hood as a hero of the fourteenth-century peasant class and its dislocating experience in the difficult years before 1381, while J. C. Holt and others countered with an argument for the literary origins of the outlaw among the thirteenth-century gentry. See Hilton, R. H., “The Origins of Robin Hood,” pp. 197–210Google Scholar; and Holt, J. C., “The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood,” pp. 211–32Google Scholar, both reprinted in Knight, ed., Anthology. This debate continues to simmer. See, e.g., DeVries, Kelly, “Longbow Archery and the Earliest Robin Hood Legends,” in Robin Hood and Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Hahn, Thomas (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 41–59Google Scholar; and R. B. Dobson, “Robin Hood: The Genesis of a Popular Hero,” in ibid., pp. 61–77. But the important point for this article is that ultimately both positions are compatible with Dobson and Taylor's conclusion that “by the end of the middle ages there can be no doubt that knowledge of the outlaw was widely diffused throughout all levels of society”; Dobson, R. B. and Taylor, J., Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, 2d ed. (Gloucester, 1989), p. 2Google Scholar. Or, in Knight's terms, “the world of oppression in the early Robin Hood texts is relevant in a symbolic and displaced way to a multiple audience which no doubt includes and may indeed combine the laborer and the proprietor”; Knight, , Complete Study, p. 52Google Scholar. See also Knight, Stephen and Ohlgren, Thomas, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1997), p. 8Google Scholar.

11 There is a fragment of another poem in a Lincoln Cathedral manuscript mentioned by Singman, , Robin Hood, p. 12Google Scholar. The seventeenth-century ballads Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn and Robin Hood's Death are generally assumed to be based on medieval sources since they agree closely with the medieval play Robin Hood and the Sheriff (discussed below) and a shorter account of Robin's demise found in the Gest, respectively. Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 140–45Google Scholar and 133–39. I have not treated these two ballads as part of the pre-Reformation evidence in the present article, since there is no way of knowing whether seventeenth-century versions would preserve or alter the religious outlook of late medieval Catholicism.

12 On this debate see n. 10 above. See Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 36–53Google Scholar, for a survey of the ways in which the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thoroughly refashioned the Robin Hood legend.

13 The manuscripts are Cambridge University Library, Ff 5.48, fols. 128v–135v, and Ee 4.35, fols. 14v–19v. See , Dobson and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 113–15, 123–25Google Scholar. Both of these manuscripts include the narratives A Father and His Son and A Lady Who Buried the Host, as well as treatises on the seven deadly sins. Ff 5.48 also contains directions to parish priests. See David, C., “Rymnes of Robin Hood,” in Fowler, Knight, ed., Anthology, pp. 72–76Google Scholar, who believes that this manuscript served primarily as a priest's source book. Closer study of the context provided by these unique manuscripts would seem to be a profitable line of further inquiry into the fifteenth-century Robin Hood tradition.

14 Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 71–79Google Scholar. There is an edition attributed to the press of Jan van Doesborch at Antwerp and dated 1510–15; a Wynkyn de Worde edition that can only be dated to 1500–34; and various fragments, the most important being those of an early edition by Richard Pynson (d. 1530) that may have been the exemplar for the Antwerp printing.

15 Child, Francis James, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 3 (1888; reprint, New York, 1956), p. 40Google Scholar; Clawson, William Hall, The Gest of Robin Hood (Toronto, 1909), pp. 3–6Google Scholar.

16 Knight, , Complete Study, p. 47Google Scholar; also Knight, and Ohlgren, , eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 80–81Google Scholar.

17 Fowler, , “Rymes of Robyn Hood,” pp. 65–72Google Scholar; Bessinger, , “The Gest of Robin Hood Revisited,” in Knight, , ed., Anthology, pp. 46–50Google Scholar.

18 Trinity College, Cambridge, Ms. R. 2. 64. Transcription with conjectural reconstruction in Marshall, Dobson and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 203–7Google Scholar, and more recently in John, , “Playing the Game: Reconstructing Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham,” in Hahn, , ed., Robin Hood in Popular Culture, pp. 161–74Google Scholar.

19 There is a very brief earlier chronicle entry written before 1420 by Andrew of Wyntoun that is too short, however, to tell us anything about the religious component of the Robin Hood stories. See Knight, , Complete Study, pp. 32–33Google Scholar.

20 Full English translations can be found in Knight, , Complete Study, p. 35Google Scholar; Knight, and Ohlgren, , eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, p. 26Google Scholar; and Singman, , Robin Hood, p. 13Google Scholar, who also provides the Latin text.

21 Knight, and Ohlgren, , eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, p. 25Google Scholar.

22 “‘Ye[a], on thyng greves me,’ seid Robyn / ‘And does my hert mych woo; / That I may not no solem day / To mas nor matyns goo. / ‘Hit is a fourtnete and more,’ seid h[e], / ‘Syn I my savyour see; / To day wil I to Notyngham,’ seid Robyn / ‘With the myght of mylde Marye.’” Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, p. 115Google Scholar.

23 Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, p. 125Google Scholar. In this instance I have modernized the original orthography for clarity. Although the ballad Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne has only an indirect claim to origins in the pre-Reformation period (see n. 11 above), it is worth noting that here too Robin calls on the Virgin Mary for inspiration and aid. Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, p. 144Google Scholar. See also Clawson, , The Gest of Robin Hood, p. 39Google Scholar, n. 1, on this evidence and parallel cases of outlaws devoted to the Virgin.

24 Major, John, Historia Majoris Britanniae, ed. Freebairn, R. (Edinburgh, 1740)Google Scholar. This work is translated by Constable, A. as A History of Greater Britain, Publication of the Scottish History Society, vol. 10 (Edinburgh, 1892)Google Scholar, cited in Knight, , Complete Study, p. 37Google Scholar.

25 On this play, see Marshall, John, “Playing the Game,” in Hahn, , ed., Robin Hood in Popular Culture, pp. 161–74Google Scholar; Knight, and Ohlgren, , eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 269–80Google Scholar; and Wiles, David, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar. Wiles argued that the Robin Hood plays and games predate the ballads. In this view, Friar Tuck would certainly take on a greater significance in the medieval tradition. However, Wiles's position remains controversial, and the issue of the relationship between the Robin Hood of plays and games and the outlaw of the ballads has yet to be settled.

26 Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 210–14Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., p. 79. The inclusion of Mary for her son here is striking, although a stress on Christ's humanity and sacrifice is continually present in these stories, since the most common oath sworn by Robin and others is “By hym that dyed on tree,” or some variation thereof.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 80.

30 On the history of this basic plot in medieval miracle stories and exempla, see Clawson, , The Gest of Robin Hood, pp. 25–41Google Scholar; and Knight, and Ohlgren, , eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, pp. 32, 82–83Google Scholar.

31 Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, p. 83Google Scholar.

32 See also the ballad Robin Hood's Death in Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, pp. 133–39Google Scholar.

33 Gray, Douglas, “The Robin Hood Poems,” in Knight, , ed., Anthology, pp. 3–37Google Scholar, quotation on p. 27. My intention is not to unduly criticize Gray's article (first published in 1984), which analyzes the “various kinds of comedy and irony” found in the Gest but merely to assert that whatever irony is involved in this text does not undermine my argument about the Virgin's importance to Robin's religiosity.

34 A point in fact made by Gray, , “The Robin Hood Poems,” p. 27Google Scholar and n. 67.

35 Richmond, Colin, “An Outlaw and Some Peasants: The Possible Significance of Robin Hood,” in Knight, , ed., Anthology, pp. 363–76Google Scholar, quotation on p. 371. Richmond's brief discussion of religion is part of his general argument that Robin Hood should be seen primarily as a yeoman hero, and seems intended to downplay religion as a defining characteristic of Robin's appeal in favor of class or social standing. Although Richmond may well be correct when he further observes that “men and women did not listen to these tales for religious reasons” (ibid., p. 371) this fact does not negate the importance of their religious content. While audiences probably enjoyed Robin Hood stories primarily for nonreligious reasons, it is nonetheless likely that they found both their hero's pious devotion and his antagonism toward monks congenial and sympathetic, or the stories would not have enjoyed such universal renown.

36 The picture I have drawn here of the religious sentiments found in the Robin Hood stories changed rapidly after the middle of the sixteenth century, tending to lambaste the medieval Catholic Church wholesale. See Furnivall, Knight, Complete Study, pp. 92–95Google Scholar. One exception to this trend deserves mention. BL, Harley MS 367, fol. 150, probably dating from the last quarter of the sixteenth century, contains a unique “Tale of Robin Hood,” of which “the moral is the overthrowe of the Abbyes, the like being attemted by the puritane, whiche is the wolfe; and the poltician which is the ffox, agaynst the bushops.” In this fragmentary tale, Robin represents the bishops or, more broadly, the early and pure church. He institutes the monasteries and universities with the figure of Adam Bell representing the abbots and Little John the colleges. But Adam becomes lazy and corrupt with time, “till with fatnes of his fare hee grew iolly, past all care.” Henry VIII, in the form of a lion, tears him to pieces and divides the spoils, to the delight of the “wolves and foxes.” Since the manuscript ends at this point, it is impossible to say exactly how Robin fits into the entire story. The tale is in one sense a break with tradition in that it clearly places Robin on the side of the monasteries. In another sense, however, it represents a fulfillment of the medieval tradition in juxtaposing the original honest state of the monasteries with their later corruption and sloth. The tale is edited by Frederick, J., Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. 1 (London, 1868), 1:295–98Google Scholar. See also Cooper, Helen, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1977), pp. 195–96 and p. 232Google Scholar, n. 11, for date; and Knight, , Complete Study, p. 95Google Scholar. I would like to thank Ethan Shagan for bringing this text to my attention.

37 Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), p. 7Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 2.

39 Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), pp. 51–52Google Scholar.

40 Dickens, , The English Reformation, p. 78Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., p. 76.

42 Haigh, Christopher, “Anticlericalism and the English Reformation,” in Haigh, , ed., The English Reformation Revised, pp. 56, 74Google Scholar. Compare Dickens's, A. G. response, “The Shape of Anticlericalism and the English Reformation,” in his Late Monasticism and the Reformation (London and Rio Grande, 1994), pp. 151–75Google Scholar.

43 Haigh, , “Anticlericalism and the English Reformation,” pp. 59–60Google Scholar.

44 Historians on both sides have argued that the unwieldy concept of anticlericalism needs to be pulled apart and each of its strains examined if it is to be of use. See Marshall, Peter, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), p. 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scarisbrick, J. J., Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 243–44Google Scholar; and Haigh, , “Anticlericalism and the English Reformation,” p. 57Google Scholar.

45 One might well argue that the chronicle entry by Bower discussed above qualifies as late medieval propaganda on behalf of the church, but this work does not deal with the antimonastic element found in the remaining stories.

46 See Shagan, Ethan H., “Popular Politics and the English Reformation, c. 1525–1553” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000)Google Scholar, chap. 5, for a reconsideration of this question. On dwindling enthusiasm for the religious orders and the generally acquiescent attitude of laypeople toward the dissolution, see Whiting, Robert, “Local Responses to the Henrician Reformation,” in The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety, ed. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (Houndsmills, 1995), pp. 205–7Google Scholar, Local Responses to the English Reformation (Houndsmills, 1998), pp. 16–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 118–25Google Scholar.

47 For a summary of regional responses to the Henrician Reformation and the many factors that could influence them, see Palliser, D. M., “Popular Reactions to the Reformation during the Years of Uncertainty, 1530–1570,” in Haigh, , ed., The English Reformation, Revised, pp. 94–113Google Scholar. While this regionally-based sort of resistance certainly points out the dangers of geographic overgeneralization, my present point is not to argue that some parts of the country were more or less familiar with the Robin Hood tales and hence more or less likely to be influenced by them in a causal way, but rather that these sorts of ubiquitous stories made narratives of antimonastic resentment culturally available across geographic divisions both for those seeking to express their discontent and for those hoping to exploit existing resentment.

48 In this context see the related discussion in Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 91–93Google Scholar.

49 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, “Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church,” in MacCulloch, , ed., The Reign of Henry VIII, pp. 159–80Google Scholar.

50 Smith, Lacey Baldwin, This Realm of England: 1399 to 1688, 7th ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1996), p. 128Google Scholar.

51 Cited by Smith, Lacey Baldwin, “A Matter of Conscience,” in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. Rabb, Theodore K. and Siegel, Jerrold E. (Princeton, N.J., 1969), p. 37Google Scholar. Scarisbrick expresses some reserve about Henry's true level of devotion to the Mass; see Henry VIII, pp. 419–20.

52 For a recent and convincing argument for continuity in Henry VIII's ceremonial practices in the 1530s and 1540s, see Kisby, Fiona, “‘When the King Goeth a Procession’: Chapel Ceremonies and Services, the Ritual Year, and Religious Reforms at the Early Tudor Court, 1485–1547,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2001): 44–75Google Scholar.

53 “His grace, therles of Essex, Wilshire, and other noble menne, to the number, of twelue, came sodainly in a mornyng, into the Quenes chambre, all appareled in short cotes, of Kentish Kendal, with hodes on their heddes, and hosen of the same, euery one of them, his bowe and arrowes, and a sworde and a bucklar, like out lawes, or Robyn Hodes men, whereof the Quene, the Ladies, and al other there, were abashed, as well for the straunge sight, as also for their sodain commyng, and after certayn daunces and pastimes made, thei departed.” Hall, Edward, Hall's Chronicle (London, 1809; reprint, New York, 1965), p. 513Google Scholar.

54 “The king & the quene accompanyed with many lordes & ladies roade to the high ground of shoters hil to take the open ayre, and as they passed by the way, they espied a company of tall yomen, clothed all in grene with grene whodes & bowes & arrowes, to the number of .ii.C. Then one of them which called him selfe Robyn hood, came to the kyng, desyring him to se his men shoote, & the kyng was content. Then he whisteled, & al the. ii.C. archers shot & losed at once, & then he whisteled agayne, & they likewyse shot agayne, their arrowes whisteled by s, so that the noyes was straunge and great, & muche pleased the kynge the quene and all the company. All these archers were of the kynges garde and had thus appareled them selues to make solace to the kynge. Then Robyn hood desyred the kynge and quene to come into the grene wood, & to se how the outlawes lyue. The kyng demaundede of ye quene & her ladyes, if they durst aduenture to go into the wood with so many outlawes. Then the quene sayde, that if it pleased him, she was content […] Then said Robyn hood, Sir Outlawes brekefastes is venyson, and therefore you must be content with such fare as we vse. Then the kyng and quene sate doune, & were serued with venyson and wyne by Robyn hood and his men, to their great contentacion. Then the kyng departed and hys company, & Robyn hood and hys men them conduicted.” Hall's Chronicle, p. 582.

55 Dobson, and Taylor, , Rymes, p. 106Google Scholar.