Fact or Fiction E04 Robin Hood

I'm walking down well used to be the Great North Road the medieval version of the m1 and this was one of the most difficult and dangerous stretches because it was banned in country Sherwood Forest now there can't be many characters from history who can immediately identify just by saying a place name but already I'm absolutely confident that all of you will realize this is going to be a program about Robin Hood everyone knows his story he's one of the most famous people in history but what was he really like did he actually exist I'm going to try and establish whether the most celebrated outlaw of all time was just a comic book character or a flesh-and-blood historical figure I've always had a fascination with robbing so this is something of a personal quest we all feel we know the famous outlaw but he comes in a host of shapes and sizes the pictures of him we've all had since childhood maybe a long way from the real truth in the Dictionary of National Biography Robin Hood is the only figure who didn't exist he certainly dropped from the rich but he never got around to giving to the poor a thousand men could not find an outlaw if he didn't want to be found in Sherwood Forest some years ago I wrote a children's series called Maid Marian and her Merry Men it parodied the Robin stories we all know from TV and the movies who'd have thought it Robin Hood and his team of mastermind finalists but what we think of as traditional isn't our modern Robin story is the product of centuries of change and evolution the Robin we know today is Robin of Loxley who returns from the Crusades to find his land have been stolen by evil Prince John and his henchmen the Sheriff of Nottingham its master he flees to the Greenwood and fights on with his merry men stealing from the rich to give to the poor you to go round by the far bank and we'll meet up at the log bridge right he marries his sweetheart Maid Marian and gets his lands back only when King Richard the Lionheart returns from the Holy Land it's a great story but a red herring as far as tracking down a real Robin goes if we want a flesh-and-blood Robin then we're gonna have to look for the original Robin stories in their earliest versions the earliest Robin stories were ballads handed down by word of mouth we know they were around in 1377 by investigating these original stories we should be able to find evidence of Robins real identity I would be a free more blood I shall you tell of a good yield his name is Robin Hood Robin was a fun while ski this earliest fiction is just as exciting as our modern versions but it doesn't offer any clues about how Robin became an outlaw the tale opens abruptly at his camp Robin's there with only three of the usual suspects Little John will Scarlett and much the Millers son they're preparing a meal Robins hungry but he won't eat until he has a guest he sends his men off to line wait by the Great North Road and catch a fellow diner they don't have to wait long before they waylay a threadbare night of course it's a racket Robin offers the nighties hospitality and then once he's eaten tells him he's got a pay for his meal but it emerges the night's penniless his son has killed a man in order to pay a heavy fine the nights taken on a vast loan from the monks it's and marries in York unless he repays the debt tomorrow he stands to lose everything he owes because the night's been honest Robyn sends him on his way with 400 pounds to pay the debt trusting that the Virgin Mary will pay him back on top of that he gives the knight a new set of clothes and a good horse and sends Little John to accompany him to York as a valet when you read The Ballad you start to notice that it's very different from the version we know today Robin here isn't a nobleman he in the outlaws a yeoman low horn Freeman but most obvious is the setting it's not Sherwood Forest this is where the poem set in the forests traditionally known as barn style in South Yorkshire yes Robin Hood was a Yorkshire people perhaps will be surprised that Robin Hood's a York Sherman but it depends on the background historians have known this for a good few years the problem is that other our class perhaps living down round Nottingham in show at forest their stories will be amalgamated with the original ballads which do come from this area and the fact that Nottingham is a much better known place than when bridge our bands Dale which most people to be frank had never heard of outside the area it would help the Nottingham Connection the ballads very specific about the area this track is the remnant of the Great North Road as it dipped down into Barnsdale to cross the river went a twent bridge today the a1 bypasses went bridge half a mile to the east and it's where the viaduct is now that the merry men laid their ambush this is the spot where Little John and will Scarlett lie in wait for the night in the poem Robin sends them to sail to spy on went bridge you can see just beyond those white buildings the road snaking down into when bridge from the other side of the valley the writer knew this place he knew it was the perfect lookout point it may surprise some people to hear the Robin Hood stories coming from here and not from Sherwood but six centuries ago it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow the phrase Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood was illegal saying meaning that something was a well-established fact and a couple of miles down the a1 from when bridge there's further proof of Yorkshire claims this is Robin Hood's well near Skell Brook or rather it's the cover that the eighteenth-century architect van bura designed for it the landmarks been moved to make way for the dual carriageway but for centuries people have stopped here to celebrate Robin Hood this is the earliest known place name that's associated with Robin Hood but over the next three centuries the name starts cropping up all over the place Robin Hood's Bay near Whitby Robin Hood's bats in Cumbria Robin Hood's walk in Richmond Surrey practically everywhere except Sherwood the first name there doesn't appear until the Year 1700 the jumping on the bandwagon at least four centuries after the event so we've got tales set in Barnsdale not Sherwood Robin's not a dispossessed nobleman but a lowborn York Sherman what else do these original stories tell us about him let's make that gentle Knight to Little John Danny say tomorrow I must do your tongue to st. Mary the abbot and monks of --scent Mary's Abbey in York a hoping that the night will fail to show up their loan sharks the Knights only got until sunset to repay his vast debt after that they can claim all his property and land he cometh pilfered a his head it shall be be but in the nick of time the night arrives expecting him to be empty-handed the abbot shows him no respect and leaves him kneeling like a servant he gets a shock when the night hands over the full 400 pounds of his debt it seems as though everything's square but there's a twist back in the Greenwood Robin sends his men out on a carbon copy of their first ambush now and behold this time their dinner guest is none other than the monk from some Mary's unlike the night the monk pleads poverty that is found to have 800 pounds with him the Knights told the truth and was helped the monk lied and lost everything justice prevails and Robin doubles his money but there's no mention of giving to the poor our heroes are just a bunch of highway robbers can you imagine any Aukerman rubbing the rich to give to the poor he almost certainly robbed the rich and kept it that was a product of a much later version the Robin of the ballads is a bit of a thug in one poem he kills a man puts the head on his bow staff and mutilates the face the original Robin Hood is a pretty vicious character but then again in the Middle Ages when people were being entertained by the early ballads and stories of Robin Hood they would expect to find a vicious character as their hero because in those days everyone was used to living a pretty hard life so just because somebody went round locking people's heads off stealing from people as long as he went round killing the people they didn't like it didn't really matter how he did it but why does Robin pick on men of the cloth in particular so Mary's really exists it's here in York but don't be fooled by these romantic ruins it was more than just a religious institution York was the second most powerful political center in the country and the monks who ran Abbey's like these were politicians and captains of industry as well as being in charge of the spiritual welfare of the country the Abbess of northern England controlled the wool trade the money was supposed to be a means to an end supporting a life of prayer but wealth had led to sleaze in Robins day religious communities were notorious for their greed lacks morals and hypocritical lifestyle conversely Robins portrayed as fair and truly religious he may be a criminal but his rough justice restores true values when Robin mugged the monk from some Mary's a great cheer would have gone up this ordinary bloke Robin was striking a blow for justice and true religion everyone knew the system was robbed only an outlaw would have dared do anything about it so far this original version of the Robin stories has given us a good general picture of the sort of hard-bitten character we're looking for but we'll be getting more clues about his actual identity when he comes face-to-face with his archenemy the Sheriff of Nottingham to find the facts about the real Robin Hood we've been looking at the earliest fictional versions of his legend these medieval tales explode the myth of a penniless nobleman in Sherwood in favor of a much tougher out-and-out criminal based in Yorkshire but the stories in these ancient texts also contain evidence pointing us to a real flesh-and-blood historical Robin Littlejohn would escape walk while archers Mugen free Robin and his men of brilliant archers the Sheriff of Nottingham organizes a competition to trap the particles rather than good despite wearing their hoods the sheriff knows that whoever splits the wand to win must be an outlaw they cried out and greenhorns can we blow whoa worthy evil of course he never succeeds the outlaws always escape in the nick of time as chases fights escapes from prison and then the feud with the sheriff climaxes in a showdown Robin takes down his arch enemy with a single shot then moves in for the kill beheading the sheriff with his sword walk might have arrived on his feet he smote off the sheriff's egg with his bright brown Robin beheld our comely King so did Sir Richard up next King Edward himself comes to sort out these rebels in the north with his men disguised as monks he deliberately gets captured in the forest but when he sees that Robin's a loyal subject he forgives the outlaws and takes Robin into his service my lord the keep moving which leaves us with a puzzle the modern Robin stories set in the reign of Richard the Lionheart the evidence and the ballads suggests this is all wrong the ballads say that Robin met an entirely different king edward's the comely King now there have been eight King Edward's who've all Britain through the ages the first mention of the ballads is in the year thirteen seventy seven so that rules all these Kings out because Edward the fourth didn't come to the throne until in the fifteenth century so using this logic Robin must have been around between 1274 when Edward the first comes to the throne and 1377 when we get that first mention of the balance and there's another blindingly obvious piece of evidence that supports that dating is the one thing more than any other that Robin Hood's famous for you it's the rise of the boat the long bow as they call in animals it began to take off 12 13th century that's when it's got to have permeated through the villages and through the towns and begun to become ingrained into our communities and become basically a common man's religion for sport in richard the lionheart reign the bow was a minority weapon there was no cult of the longbowmen and would the 1st 2nd and 3rd made the bow a key part of their military strategy archery was compulsory for every able-bodied male and so being a great Archer was like being a football star today if you got the eye on the strength and you could do the business with the bow you were really one of the best in the community Robin the crack marksman could only be a product of this culture in the early 14th century and closer examination of the ballads leads us to an exact date historians have looked closely at the lives of the three Edwards who are potential candidates to be our comely King and they've come to the conclusion that only one of them could possibly have come face to face with an outlaw in this area in the year 1323 Edwards the second went on a tour of the North ending in Nottingham because of a political crisis that started here at Pontefract castle Pontefract in West Yorkshire was confusingly home to Thomas the Earl of Lancaster the cousin of Edward the second the king was unpopular Lancaster decided to make his own bid for the throne he called up his men from Yorkshire and Lancashire to form an army but as they moved out of Pontefract Edward ambushed them and crushed the rebel the Earl of Lancaster was tried and beheaded his followers were outlawed and fled for their lives to places like Barnsdale the Lancastrian revolt provides a plausible explanation as to why Robin and his men would have been outlaws it also connects Robin to Nottingham through the villain of the piece the period of the revolt was the only time that the Sheriff of Nottingham was also responsible for Yorkshire he'd have been the King's right-hand man in fighting the rebels the Lancaster and rebellion also explains another puzzle the poor knight who Robin originally held up is a recurring character in the stories when the outlaws are fleeing from the sheriff they run to his castle for protection the Knights name is Sir Richard of the Lea and this is where the Ballad says he was from Lee in wire day but this is Lancashire several days ride from barnesdale where Robins based at first glance it seems pretty implausible to have a leading character from so far away but actually it makes perfect sense Plumpton and wired ale are linked with barnesdale through the lands of Thomas Earl of Lancaster they formed a corridor right across the Pennines allowing for easy communication between rebels here and here a knight based in wired ale would have been brother-in-arms to a yeoman outlaw in Barnsdale the Lancastrian revolt is the only time and place where the ballads fit with political history when historians realized this they set about the task of finding a real Robin Hood from this period in the medieval archives today if he wanted to track me down you'd probably try looking in the telephone book and there among all the Robinson's you'd be bound to come across a Tony but whether or not it was this Tony Robinson you'd be hard-pressed to know and in the early 14th century it would be even more difficult because the court roles and the church records of the early Middle Ages weren't catalogued there were no indexes and no one was written down in alphabetical order nevertheless lo and behold when historians were looking for Robin in the early 14th century they found one in the court rolls of the manor of Wakefield in the reign of Edward ii living with his wife Matilda a tenant called Robert Hood - most people that's what that's not Robin Hood that's a totally different name but it isn't Robin is a nickname for Robert for many years the name Robin was used instead of Robert just like for example Jack might be a nickname for the names John hence John F Kennedy is Jack Kennedy so this man is called Robin Hood let's suppose for a moment that this is the real man behind the robbing of the balance Robert Hood was a Forester he's one of the Lancastrian rebels who are outlawed after the rebellion as a result he loses his property in Wakefield and the property was here Robert Hodge house was in Big Hill today it's the site of the bus station okay our Robert hood who lived somewhere under the number 49 stop disappears in 13 22 we don't hear of him again but it's not quite the end of the story alas Lynn said with Robin The Ballad says Robin was taken into the Kings service but after 15 months he was so depressed that he left to return to his former life well um with the key sauna the record tells us that a year after the Lancastrian revolt there was still political unrest the Kings set off on a tour of the north offering an amnesty to the outlaws some of whom he took into his own ranks enter our second candidate this is Robin Hood a valet de chambre a bodyguard who appears on the payroll at edward ii court in 1323 but the following year takes a lump sum of five shillings because he can no longer work when you compare the stories with the history the parallels are striking let's recap the Ballad tells us that the King forgave Robin Hood of his crimes that Robin went to work for him but he left the King's service a year or so later because he felt fed up and depressed and the records tell us that this man Robert Hood of Wakefield fought in the Lancastrian revolt and disappeared but that shortly afterwards this man crops up Robin Hood a king's servant who works the king for about a year and then he too disappears could these two men be the same person our Roberts Hood of Wakefield was a forester he'd have been well equipped for life as an outlaw in the forests of Barnsdale at Babel which church in Sherwood there's a medieval foresters grave that gives us an idea of the essential foresters kit there's a bow and arrow of course and this has sort of shoulder strap with a horn hanging from it is I have to tell you a baldric but living out in the forests required more than this near the church I learned just how tough life on the run could be at the cave known as Robin Hood's stable I met a man who's made a point of surviving in the forest using only the tools of the Middle Ages what were the biggest problems the ring one night it really very heavily one night I resolved it wisely getting into an old tree and sleeping inside the oak tree not far from there what equipment have you got the basic equipment you have to carry your home on your bike really this is a flask because water is very hard to find this is a cup way to an ox horn a blanket for wrapping yourself up in at night an antler for digging a hole to go to the toilet in toilet paper hangs on the trees an axe for making a woodland shelter and in here necessities and a few little luxuries some eating utensils some salt some flour just a basic kit in terms of weapons the you bow simple you bow in a hunting case these are hunting arrows a knife to eat with a knife to kill people with so you've got a hunting horn there it is it's very important to maintain communications in the forest this was the medieval equivalent of Robin Hood's mobile thorne so might Robin Hood really have gone bad about that I could dry so disappointingly tuneless outlaws and there's one more surprise in store if you're still clinging to the image of the merry men living out in the Greenwood they probably went home in winter this place is particularly inhospitable in bad weather you can imagine what it's like in January you will die stiff you stayed out overnight here in January and so they almost certainly went home so we have a plausible if surprising candidate for our real Robin Hood a yeoman York Sherman living as an outlaw during the summer and sneaking back to his home with his wife Matilda here in Wakefield in the winter but every outlaw needs next we have to find the real merry men by matching the clues in the earliest stories of Robin Hood with historic records we found a candidate for the real Robin Hood Robert Hood who lived in Wakefield until 1322 when he fled to the forests of Barnsdale can we also find real versions of the merry men who could have been in league with Robert of Wakefield here again the earliest version of the story doesn't have the outlaw band we know today we have Little John mentioned with Robin from the very beginning and then a few others much wolf Scarlett Friar Tuck comes in later and so in the lot of the early ballads you have Robin and a very small group which is very credible threat was real outlaws it was usually the leader his younger brother a cousin and someone from the same village it also got into trouble that that's realistic and I think it is perfectly possible that there may have been you know folk from Natyam Yorkshire wherever else who had those names who were outlaws so what evidence do we have about the outlaws real identity I was on this bridge first I intend to cross first would you carry that star for just to make yourself look like a bold fellow or do you know how to use it we all know Little John as the giant who joins the merry men after fighting Robin on a bridge but in the earliest thing is there's no fight and John plays a much more central role we have starting new mister and many a rich array there is no merchants in merry England so rich it's actually Little John who starts the whole feud with the sheriff his relationship with Robin is much more democratic than in our modern version Little John isn't afraid of telling Robin what to do and look well Little John took Nana the tourist tradition about Little John is that he's buried in half a sage in Derbyshire so people assume he came from there but the ballads say he comes from Holdernesse near Beverly in Humberside and Little John is just an alias his real name his Reynold Greenleaf I wits all of my game men call me Reynold Greenleaf when we've got records from 1318 and 1323 of John the little being charged with crimes in Wakefield and Beverly it could be the little John was already a criminal who joined Robert Hood of Wakefield in Barnsdale after the Lancastrian revolt as for the other outlaws we don't have a record of much the Miller but there are some fascinating clues about will Scarlett's identity will Scarlett's an odd name because in the earliest texts he seems to have the name of scathed Locke course Catholic perhaps in northern form and scath Locke seems to mean term Locke's masher he says a break an entry merchant some recent versions will scale has got dressed in scarlet you know he's very elaborate I don't think us what they had in mind and yet again there's evidence of a will scatter Locke at the right time and place who could have known Robert Hood of Wakefield he was a monk from the very scenaries in York that's mentioned in The Ballad we don't know why but he was thrown out of the Abbey at the end of the thirteenth century if this real Will's Catholic harbored a grudge against Mary's it would help explain why the abbot ended up as a villain in the story then we come to some really disappointing news Robin Hood may have had a wife but it wasn't made Marian the early versions of the story don't have any love interest in them at all Marian comes into the tradition in a completely different way every year of whitson in the Middle Ages the workers used to have processions and plays to celebrate the coming of summer we still have a remnants of this tradition preserved in Morris dancing and mummers plays Robin was one of the main characters in these rebels which were riotous and disruptive I can see he likes among the other characters there was a Marion too and over time she became Robins partner and it the Robin and Marion characters used to force revelers to give money for good causes which is where we eventually get the tradition of robbing from the rich to give to the poor as Robin changed from bandit to nobleman in Tudor times Marion was brought into the stories Marian appears in full form when Robin becomes gentrified when Robin is a lord yes of a lady and she appears in 1598 ninety-nine in Antony Monday's play the downfall of Robert Robert Earl of Huntington and the second one the death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon but even here there's a link in the play she assumes the name Marian as an alias to conceal her real name Matilda interestingly Robert Hood of Wakefield his wife Matilda is recorded as having fled with him into the forest to join him in the struggle now that is what Maid Marian is supposed to do in the popular legend Robin Hood so Robert hood of Wakefield wife Matilda matches very much the Maid Marian profile Marian's a later addition there's only one woman recorded in the early stories she was a nun and she'd be Robin's nemesis this is the Three Nuns pub on the road between Huddersfield and Dewsbury he's been hostelry here for over 700 years it gets its name from the shenanigans that were rumored to be going on between the guests and through the local nuns from nearby Kirklees Priory if the balance is to be believed the guest house that would have once stood here between the last place that Robin ever saw before the Priory gates closed behind him and he went unwittingly to his death after leaving the King's service Robin lives on in the Greenwood for 22 years then unwittingly he goes to his cousin the Prioress at Kirklees Priory to be bled for his health as they did in the Middle Ages I must be correctly crafted the story gives no motive but this nun betrays Robin and leaves him to bleed to death through their Falls and a later story says that Robin fires one last arrow through the window and asks to be buried where it lands Christ have mercy on his soul the diet on the for he was a good new partner indeed Kirklees Priory was dismantled by Henry the eighth as part of his dissolution of the monasteries the only sign of the actual Priory today had the odd stone and bumps in the ground the guesthouse where Robin is said to have died still stands well though there's no record of how Robert Hood of Wakefield died it's possible that he was the person who was killed here Kirklees is only 10 miles from Wakefield where Robert Hood lived and the relevant dates linked the original stories with historical fact the ballads tell us that Robin Hood was killed by a relative who ran the Priory here 22 years after leaving the King's service dating from the time of Edward the second visit that would be about 1346 or 7 and the records tell us that in 1346 the Prioress here was Elizabeth - Stanton none other than the cousin of Matilda Robert Hood's wife this is the room in which Robin is said to have died the spot marking his graves up there but the business about the arrow can't be right it's 650 yards away and uphill almost twice the longbow range for a skilled Archer it's generally accepted that Robin being buried where his arrow lands is a piece of poetic elaboration round the original simple story of his death the sight of Robins grave at Kirklees has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries but if you expect a nice simple ending you're going to be disappointed searching for robin hood's a bit like being the sheriff of nottingham the moment you think you've got him he slipped through your clutches this is the site of Robin Hood's grave except it isn't the site's been moved at least three times and this is what Robins gravestone looked like according to a sketch from the Year 1665 but it disappeared and the replica was made and it was chipped to pieces by 18th century Canal workers who thought that a little bit of Robin Hood's gravestone would cure their toothache when this site was excavated there was nothing but earth which isn't surprising if the graves been moved to replace the missing grave slab there's a nineteenth-century inscription in cod only English to establish the graves ancient credentials even if we haven't found his last resting place we've built a coherent picture of a historical Robin our man from Wakefield matches the clues given in the earliest sources the Lancastrian revolt gives him opportunity and motive there's real contemporary outlaws from Yorkshire who could have been his Merry Men and Robin Hood was related in real life to characters mentioned in the ballads like the Prioress of Kirklees but as with the grave the truth about Robin is complex and fragile there's always more to him than meets the eye just when we thought we'd found our prime suspect Robert Hood of Wakefield two hundred and fifty miles to the south historians discovered another man who blew the whole thing wide open again this man had never committed a crime in his life the earliest ballads about Robin Hood have given us a picture of a historical suspect Robert ed of Wakefield who seems to have ended up working for King Edward after the Lancastrian revolt of 1322 but in all the best detective stories the neatest of solutions can be upset by a single clue suddenly evidence turned up that pointed to an earlier Robin in the Middle Ages it was the custom to be known by your father's name so if your dad was a yeoman called Robert or Robin Hood then you'd be called fitzrobert or Robertson or Hudson or Hudson or hood or of course Robinson but then out of the blue a historian discovered a man who lived in Sussex in the Year 1296 called Gilbert Robin Hood this was an extremely rare surname and seemed to imply that the name was already known as some sort of nickname but then more and more people called Robin Hood or Robin had started to pop up but these weren't just random individuals we know that a very high proportion of them had at some time in their lives committed criminal acts there's even one case where the clerk of the court changed a man surname from Lefevre to Robin Hood because he was now long later Robin Hood became a common criminal alias this doesn't mean that any of these men are candidates for the real Robin it just proves that people knew about him 50 years or more before Robert Hood of Wakefield so where does that leave our prime suspect well it's still likely that he's the Robin of the ballads but the ballads aren't about the original Robin historians then went scurrying off and came up with another Robert hood in 1225 he was now law who'd been fined 32 shillings and sixpence of the York Assizes but there's no record of him doing anything like the robbing of the stories randomly picking up Robin Hood type names from the records didn't seem to be leading anywhere but there were medieval figures that we know existed whose lives matched the famous stories they just weren't called Robin the best example is a story that started with a dispute over the ownership of Whittington Castle here in Shropshire funnily enough in the reign of Richard the Lionheart in 1197 it was inherited from his father by a man called fook fitzwarren but a rival Lord with better contacts with King John wanted Whittington to charges of treason were trumped up and fitzwarren was outlawed the three years he operated a guerrilla campaign in the forests of the Welsh borders and the stories that grew up about him are eerily similar to those we associate with Robin Hood not only does fitzwarren have a right-hand man called John he Rob's people by inviting them to supper and then getting them to pay he takes shelter with a local knight and kills his sworn enemy in the forest but when the King comes to the forest in disguise fitzwarren is forgiven sound familiar could this man from Shropshire be a new prime suspect whose name got changed in the course of history it's really weird maybe there never ever was a real historical Robin Hood maybe the stories are just that a mishmash of old legends but if that's the case why bother with inventing Robin Hood at all why not just stick with Faulk fitzwarren and have all the stories about him or maybe there actually was a bloke in real life like our Robin Hood of York or our Robin Hood of Wakefield who had adventures and then a lot of fictional stuff was tacked on to them but there is a third possibility suppose both the full fitzwarren stories and the Robin Hood ballads are based on an earlier figure a hidden Robin Hood who we haven't yet discovered the modern Robin Hood story is set in the time of Richard the Lionheart when Robin is also called Robin of Loxley because of the northern connections in the ballots historians always assumed this meant the Loxley in Yorkshire there's another Loxley here in Warwickshire near stratford-on-avon and here the trail leads us to the ancestor of one of the Norman invaders who came over with William the Conqueror in 1193 the Lord of Locksley manor was Robert Fitz Oda a descendant of Bishop odour of by air because Fitz meant an illegitimate descendant it was sometimes dropped leaving us with Robert odour effectively another Robert Hood in the time of Richard the Lionheart he was thrown out of his Manor Locksley Manor and for a while became an outlaw because there are records from that period saying that he is causing trouble in the surrounding woodlands and he was a robber for a while he was finally given his lands back when Richard the Lionheart came back from the Crusades eventually and so he does match quite to some degree the actual historical Robin Hood from the point of view of the later legend so out of the blue another candidate from a part of the country not usually associated with the Robin stories but it gets even weirder the Robert Oder connection comes from a relatively recent piece of research but there's evidence here in Locksley churchyard that it may have simply uncovered a tradition that was known before lying just to the north of the church they found a mysterious gravestones its design seemed to match the original Kirklees grave slab remember in 1665 the Kirklees stone had been sketched in Yorkshire and had then disappeared is this evidence that people were aware that Locksley was part of the story long before the historians this is the gravestone it seems to me there's three possibilities either the whole thing is just a coincidence but that seems unlikely given how similar the original flooring is to what we've got here the patterns the same and the dimensions are so similar or else this could be a copy of the original gravestone in Kurt's Lee's or of maybe just maybe this is the originals Kirklees gravestones which was brought here by someone who believed that this was the real last resting place of robin hood's we've got three historical candidates who together have helped to create the figure of Robin Hood as Robert Hood of Wakefield the Lancastrian rebel there's our historical nan Robins who've added their touches and there's Robert odor the original nobleman Robin Hood but there's another angle to the story and for that we have to return to Sherwood Forest not the usual tourist trail this time the Clues lie in southern Minster when the stonemasons finished the cathedral in the Middle Ages they decided to leave an exhibition piece in the octagonal chapter house the highest form of the stonemasons art was to carve leaves in stone that had the lightness and delicacy of nature and into woven into the fabric of this Christian meeting house is the ancient pagan spirit of the green woods the so-called green man another name for the spirit of the green woods was Robin Goodfellow could this Robin be the inspiration behind the mythic hero of Sherwood Forest now this figure is not clearly associated with outlawry he's much more associated with nature because Robin in the original ballads always appears framed in the forest that's where he is then he moves into action and he returns to the forest don't if you want the original Robin Hood I think he is that figure you know Robin of the wood Robin in the hood it is perhaps this pagan version of Robin that appeals most to us in the 21st century Robin Hood type stories I think of being with us since probably the end of the last ice age about 35,000 years ago but they've been added to and taken away from since then Robin Hood that we know now here in she would fall this is not the Robin Hood we would have known if we were standing here that in the 10th 11th or the 12th century he's now cast as a preservationist the conservationist look after the green woods in those days it was nothing like that at all it was simply watch out for bishops Archbishop's Beetle and whatever you do don't get caught by the sheriff and Natalie when I wrote my children's series about Maid Marian I knew I was joining in a long tradition of telling stories about Robin but until I went to look for the real Robin I never fully appreciated just how much that tradition has evolved to suit the needs of the audience I think Robin Hood is in the process of becoming the secondary character in a feminist set of sagas starring Maid Marian that's well underway what will there be then intergalactic Robin Hood's will there perhaps be a gay Robin Hood I think it's quite likely that that will happen the homeless sociality of the legend will be interpreting that way and one can see good reasons for that but I guess what's really next to Robin Hood is lots of exposure I started my search by trying to find out whether Robin Hood was fact or fiction and the answer is he's both there's a whole host of Robin Hood's there's the mysterious man from Locksley the Lancastrian revolutionary the petty criminal the Kings servant not to mention the countless medieval outlaws who took on his name as an alias in order to try and protect their anonymity they all lived and breathed they were all fact but it took a fiction to make the story great a legend that could touch us more profoundly than the simple story of one human being ever could and whether that legend is about the spirit of the Greenwood or the nature of being a hero of a struggle of the common man they all create for us a Robin who's fair brave heroic and just human enough for us to be able to believe that in a fairer world we too might be Robin Hood for information on this program all related educational resources go to channel 4 comm slash learning you

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Length: 48min 45sec (2925 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2013