Boyo in the Hood. Warren Draper We live in bandit country. To the north west of Doncaster lies the village of Hampole. It sits at the very heart of what was once the vast and ancient Barnsdale Forest. During the early medieval period this wooded expanse, rich with game and deer, stretched from Wakefield to Sheffield, covering much of what is now South Yorkshire. The imposing forest may be long gone, but there are still small patches of woodland that were seeded from trees which once knew the impenetrable shadow of the wildwood. Further north, where Yorkshire’s internal borders huddle together like newborn kittens, lies Wentbridge, the only village to be named in ‘A Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode’. Dating from the 15th Century, the ‘Gest’ is one of the earliest known ballads of Robin Hood and suggests that it was Barnsdale Forest, rather than Sherwood Forest, which originally provided home and sanctuary to the kind-hearted bandit and his bold outlaw kinsmen. After proving himself in various adventures, Robin was invited to live with the king in Nottingham Castle, but he soon grew tired of courtly life and longed to return to his beloved Barnsdale. “I made a chapell in Bernysdale, That semely is to se, It is of Mary Magdaleyne, And there to wolde I be.” We cannot be absolutely sure of the chapel Robin speaks of, but a few miles south of Wentbridge lies Campsall, home to one of the oldest churches in our
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region. The church is dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. Local legend says that Robin and his beloved Maid Marion were married in this church, but Marion does not appear in the Gest. The Gest itself can be a struggle to read in its original form, but luckily the talented Mr Simon Heywood, expert in South Yorkshire folklore, is working on new versions of the Robin Hood ballads more in tune with modern ears. Here too Barnsdale gets good mention: “I live on dales and downs,” he said, “and done many a cursed turn; and if you want to know my name, I’m Guy of good Gisburn.” And I’m from Barnsdale,” Robin said; “to names I give no thought; because my name is Robin Hood; you’ve found the man you’ve sought!” Not only was Robin more likely a Yorkshireman (Nottingham can keep their bloomin’ sheriff), but he was also a bit of a boyo. It was a former Earl of Doncaster, Sir Walter Scott, who gave us the modern, Errol Flynn-esque image of a cheerful, aristocratic, tight-wearing Robin Hood. Scott’s 1819 heroic adventure novel, Ivanhoe, which was inspired by the same landscape which had played muse to the writer of the Gest hundreds of years earlier, gentrified the outlaw and portrayed him as a noble who had lost his ‘rightful’ lands through duplicity. But in the original ballads Robin is a
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hard man in a hard world. The modern children’s story portrays Guy of Gisburn as a romantic rival for the attentions of Maid Marion, but in the original stories he is a hired assassin sent to kill Robin. Not only does Robin kill the assassin, but he mutilates the body to fool the Sheriff of Nottingham: Then Robin drew his Irish knife and cut sir Guy’s dead face till never a man from woman born could tell whose head that was. “Now back you come with me, sir Guy, since now I cooled your wrath. I had the better luck, but you must wear the better cloth.” Robin pulled off his hood of green, and wrapped the bloody head, and then put on the horse-hide hood, and this is what he said: “Your bows, your arrows, head and all, I’ll borrow and I’ll bear from here right back to Barnsdale, for I guess the Sheriff’s there.” This may seem utterly brutal (or maybe not, if you’re a fan of The Walking Dead), but we’re talking about people trying to survive under a feudal system. It wasn’t until the dawn of capitalism that the idea of Robin ‘robbing the rich and giving to the poor’ became popular. Money and possessions meant much less to the people of pre-capitalist England than they do to today’s more consumer-minded brood and the Robin of the Gest was more than happy to keep