My Robin has always been a yeoman (yeoman, by the way, is a term that was not generally used till well after the Lionheart’s day-because the position that would come to be known as yeoman was not yet widespread).
There is a variant in which Robin is a disinherited earl, for example. Many people have strong ideas about who Robin was and what he was like and a lot of our ideas are as incompatible with each other as they are with history. I’ve read bits of my Robin Hood aloud several times in the last few years invariably there were questions, not necessarily about the historical veracity of what I was doing, but about why I had chosen this version of the tale over that version-or where this or that portion of the tale had come from. This was some comfort for example, the English were quietly using the longbow as a hunting weapon long before Edward III faced the French at Crécy, which is when the English longbow enters 20th-century textbooks. A cousin of mine, who is an historian, told me that our sense of history in the 20th century is not what it was 700 years ago we have what we call the media now, with the result that history tends to be even-handed and instantaneous. I did, however, wish to write something that was, let us say, historically unembarrassing. I am no historian, and never flattered myself that I would write a story that was historically accurate. Imagine my horror when I discovered that the sheriff of Nottingham did not administer Sherwood Forest that the English did not commonly use the longbow till about 150 years after Richard Lionheart. A third was that the sheriff of Nottingham was his chief enemy. Another was that he lived in the time of Richard Lionheart. Growing up with Pyle there were several things that simply were the truth about Robin Hood. Later I read other Robin Hoods in the last several years, as I worked on mine, I have read over two dozen.įrom my first paragraph I have found myself falling into the gaping crevasses in my knowledge of English history. I grew up with Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood (and with Alfred Noyes’ A Song of But I was slow to recognise the significance of and that therefore Pyle’s was a particular version of the tale rather than the tale itself in some absolute sense.
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