Great Tales From English History (19 page)

W
HEN THE ROYAL JUDGES ARRIVED IN
York in the summer of 1225, they found that one of the cases before them involved a certain Robert Hod (or Hood), an outlaw. Hod had failed to appear in court, so the judges duly confiscated his worldly goods, valued at the sum of thirty-two shillings and sixpence, which was about what it cost in the thirteenth century to live modestly for a year. Hod, or Hood, continued to steer clear of the justice system, for his penalty remained unpaid, and it was carried forward to the ledger for the following year under the name of ‘Hobbehod’ - which could mean ‘that devil Hood’, or might have been a spelling mistake for ‘RobbeHod’.

That is the extent of the historical evidence we have for the possible existence of Robin Hood, the dashing outlaw of Sherwood Forest. But court records from Berkshire in 1261 tell us of another outlaw, this one described as ‘William Robehod’, and in the years that follow the Robehods or Robynhods proliferate in the records. Whether or not this particular bandit actually existed, his exploits were so famous that ‘Robin Hood’ became the medieval nickname for a fugitive from justice. Some outlaws chose it; others had it thrust upon them. By around 1400 a priest was complaining that people would rather hear ‘a tale or a song of Robyn Hood’ than listen to a sermon.

Robin and his Merrie Men have proved to have a timeless appeal, but in their own day they had a specific significance. You were proclaimed an outlaw if you repeatedly failed to show up at court to answer a charge. As with Hobbehod, a fugitive from the judges in 1225, your goods and chattels and any land you held were confiscated, and you would then have to take your chances outside the law. If you were captured, your death by hanging would be ordered without further trial, and if you resisted arrest anyone was entitled to kill you. To be a legally proclaimed fugitive was a perilous state of affairs, so no wonder that people’s imaginations were captured by the dream of life under the greenwood tree, where you could live according to your own laws. It was a particularly satisfying option if the forest was one of those preserved for the king’s hunting.

There had been legends about heroic brigands, bandits, and resistance fighters before Robin Hood, notably the stories surrounding Hereward, the Saxon nobleman deprived of his lands by the Normans. But Robin came a step or two down the social ladder from Hereward. The tales of the time described Hood as a ‘yeoman’, from the Danish word
yongerman
, a free peasant of the artisan class. He was a ‘yeoman of the forest’, spending his days in harmony with nature. And if the primitive philosophy of this ‘good life’ did not quite make Hobbehod a working-class hero, it could fairly be claimed that he was the original ‘green’ warrior.

Today you can visit the huge hollow oak tree in Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood and his band are supposed to have hidden from the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. Sadly, the tree was not even an acorn at the end of the twelfth century, when legend claims the outlaw roamed the forest. King Richard was certainly in Nottingham in March 1194. He made a beeline for the town when he returned from imprisonment after the Crusades, for Nottingham had supported Prince John’s attempts to supplant him, and its castle was the last to hold out for John’s cause.

Richard instantly set up gallows in front of the castle walls, and proceeded to hang several soldiers, whose resistance may be attributed to their not knowing, or their refusal to believe, that the King was finally back.

‘Well, what can you see?’ asked Richard when at last the defenders sent envoys to negotiate. ‘Am I here?’

The garrison promptly surrendered, and the King went off to celebrate with a day’s hunting in Sherwood Forest. But there is no record of him ever meeting Robin Hood - and he cannot possibly have met Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Much the Miller’s son, or any other of the subsequently named Merrie Men. Maid Marion would not appear in the proliferating network of Robyn Hood ballads, masques, and morris dances until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when she was often played for laughs by a male impersonator - an early example of the pantomime dame. It was around this period, three hundred years after Hobbehod’s first non-appearance in court, that the national anti-hero’s penchant for relieving passers-by of their spare cash was finally given a serious social purpose. In all his early portrayals Robin was a sturdy rascal - jovial, maybe, but basically a robber. Not until 1589 do we first read the claim that his followers ‘tooke from rich to give the poore’.

So that devil Hood finally became England’s symbol of resistance to tyranny, the archer of the green wood, daredevil justice maker, with his own programme of wealth redistribution in the days before the welfare state. Those are the noble and romantic aspects of the legend. But it is surely ironic that the national heart has been so stirred down the centuries by a man who started out a thief.

AD 1265

M
AGNA CARTA DID NOT VANISH INTO THE
Wash with the rest of King John’s baggage in October 1216. On the contrary, his death revived the Great Charter - along with the fortunes of the monarchy. John’s heir was his nine-year-old son Henry, and the prospect of this child being in charge of England somehow purged the bitterness between Crown and barons. The country’s quarrel had been with John, and few people had welcomed the French army that had come to the aid of the rebels. It is often said that no foreign army has set foot on English soil since 1066, but from May 1216 French troops were tramping over much of south-east England, and during John’s last desperate months Louis, the son of the French king, was holding court in London.

To win over domestic opinion and help get rid of the French, who finally departed in September 1217, the young Henry III’s guardians rapidly reissued the Great Charter - in modified form. They reworded or deleted a number of clauses, removing the controversial watchdog council of twenty-five barons that had sparked the civil war, but promised that the new king would rule according to the remaining provisions. When the boy king presided over a council meeting at Westminster the following year the charter was issued again, then affirmed for a third time in 1225 when Henry, by then seventeen, had been declared old enough to play a formal role in government. So, triply restated and confirmed, the idea of a contract between king and subjects became once more the basis of rule and law. When lawyers started collating English law in later centuries they listed the 1225 version of Magna Carta as the first in the Statute Book.

The trouble was that the new king himself had not the slightest intention of being accountable. A regulation-bound monarchy was not for Henry III. Humiliated by what he knew of his father’s unhappy end, a fugitive in his own country skulking around the Fens, the latest Plantagenet was dedicated to the vision of glorious and absolute kingship. As he saw it, he was a ruler consecrated by God, with enough divinity in his fingertips to cure the sick with his touch.

The keynote project of Henry’s reign was the rebuilding of Edward the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, which he demolished and had redesigned in the new, soaring gothic style - a temple to the historic past and, he hoped, to the magnificent future of England’s kings. Henry installed the Confessor as the patron saint of this triumphal cult of royalty, reburying his remains in a shrine behind the high altar, the centrepiece of the new abbey. Henry even had a mural of Edward painted in his bedroom, so his saintly hero was the last thing he saw before he went to bed and the face that he woke up to in the morning.

Gazing up at the vaulted arches of Westminster Abbey, one can see that Henry III had a fine taste in architecture. But his judgement was poor when it came to just about everything else. A court jester is said to have remarked that, like Jesus Christ himself, Henry was as wise on the day of his birth as he would ever be. The contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris described him as ‘of medium stature and compact in body. One of his eyelids drooped, hiding some of the dark part of the eyeball. He had robust strength, but was careless in his acts.’

In the eyes of England’s barons, Henry was particularly careless in the choice of advisers and favourites, who, like his wife Eleanor of Provence, were almost all from southern France. In previous reigns, French dominance at court had reflected the powerbase of William the Conqueror. But King John had lost Normandy, Anjou and all of Aquitaine except for Gascony, the wine region around Bordeaux, and in trying to regain the lost territories Henry proved as much a ‘Softsword’ as his father. His wars, coupled with his ambitious building and the grandiose style of his court, got him hopelessly into debt. His predictable solution - taxation - provoked the predictable response.

While Henry was formulating his lofty view of royal power, reform was in the air. The notion of a ‘community of the realm’ was taking shape among the thinking classes who were getting more numerous. Educated at the growing number of cathedral schools and in the colleges that were just starting up in the market towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the increasing ranks of graduates went into the Church for the most part. But some found work in the Exchequer and in the other developing offices of government, where the leading lights among the ‘king’s clerks’ took pride in their work. They saw good and efficient government as an aim in itself, and they were starting to ask how this could be maintained when the King himself did not practise it?

The daring idea of controlling an unreliable monarch had been inherent in the thinking behind Magna Carta’s twenty-five-strong watchdog committee, and as discontent mounted during Henry’s long reign, calls grew to bring back this crucial feature of the Great Charter. By 1258 the fifty-one-year-old king was virtually bankrupt following an expensive foreign-policy adventure in which he had tried to make one of his sons king of Sicily. Now, under pressure from his barons, he finally gave way. Twelve of his nominees met at Oxford with twelve of the discontents to hammer out, Runnymede-style, how ‘our kingdom shall be ordered, rectified, and reformed in keeping with what they think best to enact’.

The twenty-four-man think tank convened on 11 June 1258 at a moment of great national distress. The previous year’s harvest had been catastrophic, and as the ‘hungry month’ of July approached, famine was becoming widespread. ‘Owing to the shortage of food,’ wrote Matthew Paris, ‘an innumerable multitude of poor people died and dead bodies were found everywhere, swollen through famine and livid, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties and dunghills in the muddy streets.’

Extreme times produce extreme measures - in the summer of 1258, a ‘New Deal’ for England. The Provisions of Oxford which the twenty-four wise men produced that summer effectively transferred England’s government from Henry to a ‘Council of Fifteen’. These men would appoint the great officers of state, control the Exchequer, supervise the sheriffs and local officials, and have the power of ‘advising the King in good faith regarding the government of the Kingdom’. The Provisions, which count alongside Magna Carta as milestones in England’s constitutional history, were drawn up loyally in the name of the King. But they made a crucial distinction between the human fallibility of any particular king and the superior institution of the Crown, whose job it was to guarantee the well-being of
all
the people, the ‘community of the realm’.

One of the twenty-four wise men who had gathered at Oxford and subsequently a member of the Council of Fifteen was the Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort - a prickly and imperious Thomas Becket-like character, who, like Becket, began as his king’s close friend but would end up as his nemesis. Years earlier, de Montfort had secretly wooed and won Henry III’s sister, another Eleanor, and he was never afraid to take on his royal brother-in-law. The two men had savage stand-up rows in public, which de Montfort, with his overbearing manner, tended to win. Henry was rather in awe of him. Being rowed along the Thames one day, the King was overtaken by a thunderstorm and, terrified, ordered his watermen to make for the nearest landing-steps, which happened to belong to a house where de Montfort was staying. ‘I fear the thunder and lightning beyond measure, I know,’ the King candidly confessed as de Montfort came out to greet him. ‘But by God’s head, Sir Earl, I dread you even more.’

De Montfort came from northern France and had grown up in the same martial atmosphere as Richard the Lionheart. Like Richard, he went on crusade to the Holy Land, and distinguished himself there in battle. He was an inspiring general - and a pious one. He would frequently rise at midnight to spend the hours until dawn in silent vigil and prayer. His best friend was Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who wrote a treatise setting out the difference between good rule and tyranny. De Montfort, who had sipped self-righteousness, it sometimes seemed, with his mother’s milk, came to believe over the years that his royal brother-in-law was little more than a coward and a tyrant. Furthermore, he had no doubt that he alone knew the way to achieve just rule.