Robyn and the Hoodettes (31 page)

Eventually they broke away. Through a grin, Robyn said,
“Kissing is a very good way to stay warm in winter.”

Marion snuck in one more kiss. “That is a brilliant
plan.”

***

The End

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have
been a fan of the Robin Hood legend for as long as I can remember.
I’ve loved the various movies and TV series, especially the 1980s
British version starring Michael Praed. (Showing my age here.) I
also loved the reboot with Jonas Armstrong, Lucy Griffiths and
Richard (swoon) Armitage. All that leather! Yowzers!

But it always bothered me that there was only one girl in the
story, Marian. This never sat well with me, as all my friends
growing up happened to be girls. That meant we couldn’t ‘play’
Robin Hood because we couldn’t all be Marian, right?

Where was our female folk hero?

Historically, the time Robin was supposed to be ‘robbing from the
rich and giving to the poor’ was around the 1190s. History tells us
Prince John (Boo! Hiss!) was regent of England while his older
brother King Richard (The Lionheart) was off fighting the first of
many crusades.

King Richard wasn’t on his own, he had a whole army with
him. Armies made of strapping young men, with their families in tow
to source food, cook meals, tend the wounded, make and repair
armour and so on.

So why, every time there was an adaptation of the Robyn
Hood legend, the forest of ‘Sherwood’ in England is full of
healthy, able-bodied blokes? Those blokes should have been on the
Crusades as well.

Marion used to be a common boy’s name. It meant ‘son of
Mary’ and was incredibly popular until the early 20th century. It
fell out of favour around 1922, when a massively successful movie
of Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was released. The next
Robyn Hood movie in the 1930s, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de
Havilland, felt like the nail in the coffin for Marion as a boy’s
name.

The most famous male Marion would probably be John Wayne, who was
born Marion Morrison, in 1907. His first screen credit was in 1929,
as ‘Duke Morrison”. He became John Wayne for his 1930 role
in
The Big
Trail
.

But enough mining Wikipedia for information. I love
history, and I know women played a much bigger role than we’re led
to believe. After all, if not for women, we wouldn’t actually be
here. If you think about it, at the time of Robyn’s exploits, just
about everyone except for royalty and the clergy were illiterate.
People told news and shared stories verbally or with paintings, so
it’s easy to understand why a flutterby later came to be called a
butterfly, and a norange was slowly turned into an orange. Pies
made of umbles (offal) became ‘humble pie’ and even earned an idiom
to go with it.

If you have a
listen to the names of Robyn’s ‘merry band’ so
many of the crew sound like women. Allan a’Dale is easily Ellen.
George a’Green is Georgia Green, Robyn is such a girl’s name and as
I’ve already said, Marion is totally a boy. The rest of the roles
all fell into place. Little John was clearly Joan, from a hamlet
called Littleton. Much is Madge. (Some stories have Midge for Much,
but this too could still be a woman.)

But who was Friar Tuck? It had to be Robyn’s mum, the ‘mother hen’
of the group, advising them to keep nice and ‘tie their frocks’.
Will Scarlet, however, didn’t undergo gender re-assignment. He also
didn’t wear red, not in the green and brown forest where he would
have stood out like a beacon. No, he’s red because of his allergies
(which were a totally new thing in the 1190s.)

When it did come time to write the stories of Robyn’s
outlaws down, to share them widely, the times had changed. Two
hundred years had passed. That’s plenty of time for the names and
tales to get muddled up. Old stories were looked at through
contemporary eyes, altered to fit the prevailing moods and tastes
of the time. Who were the writers? Royalty and monks. Mostly
blokes. They wrote about what they knew, and they wedged a
religious sort in there (Friar Tuck) to make sure Robin’s soul
didn’t burn in the fires of everlasting hell. Or they simply loved
the idea of having a kick-arse monk, because religious clerics
yearned for adventures themselves.

My deep and abiding love for history couldn’t help sneaking into
this book. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that
nobody called the particular wooded area of England ‘Sherwood
Forest’ until the 1800s. Earlier than that the region was referred
to as the Shire Wood. I loved it, so I used it.

Although I was playing with history, I wanted the characters’
daily lives to feel authentic. They couldn’t jump in a car and
drive to Nottingham, but digital maps showed me how far someone
could reasonably walk (or ride a horse) in one day. How convenient,
Sheffield is a day’s walk from Loxley!

Of yet more interest was the city and castle of Sheffield
itself. This was one of the first castles in England to be
reinforced with stone walls. Prior to about 1150, most castles in
England (and these were mott and bailey-style buildings consisting
of a single tower and a big fence around a flattened bailey, or
yard) were made from timber. They burned magnificently when under
attack, and had to be rebuilt.

Imagine my utter delight to discover a very real Maud of
Sheffield! The real Maud was born in the 1170s in Sheffield itself.
She was the only surviving child of the Lord of Hallamshire and the
last of the De Lovetots. I lost days to researching the people of
the time, but it was so much fun. In my story, Maud remains
unmarried and therefore retains control of the castle estate. In
real life, she was married off and had six surviving children. Her
husband joined one of the later crusades, and was never seen again.
Secretly I think Maud wanted it that way.

Yes, I donate every year to the Wikipedia appeal, because
Wikipedia is so very useful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ebony McKenna is the author of the ONDINE series, about a
teen whose pet ferret starts talking with a Scottish
accent.

The titles in reading order are:

The Summer of Shambles

The Autumn Palace

The Winter of Magic

The Spring Revolution

Other works:

1916-ish

Novellas:

Lara’s Christmas Gamble
(set in the Ondine’s world of
Brugel)

Dangerous Honesty
(from the anthology Dangerous Boys)

www.ebonymckenna.com

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