Recordings & Info 118. Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Child Collection Index
4) Excerpt from The British Traditional Ballad in North America by Tristram Coffin 1950, from the section A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America
5) Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne: Introduction
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 3977: Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne (9 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Robin Hood and Guy of Gusborne (Brown Collection)
Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne [Child 118]
NAME: Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne [Child 118]
DESCRIPTION: Little John and Robin separate; Little John is taken after trying to stop an invasion by the Sheriff. Meanwhile, Robin meets Guy; they fight, and Robin slays Guy. He then takes his clothes and horn and rescues John
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1765 (Percy)
KEYWORDS: Robinhood outlaw fight rescue
FOUND_IN: US(SE)?
REFERENCES: (11 citations)
Child 118, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text)
Bronson 118, comments only; cf. Chappell/Wooldridge I, p. 277, "The Chirping of the Lark" (1 tune)
Percy/Wheatley I, pp. 102-116, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, rewritten and with lacunae filled by Percy)
BrownII 32, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, said in the Brown collection to "certainly derive" from this piece, but this is a stretch. It may be this, but it is only a disordered fragment, which looks to me to combine aspects of several Robin Hood ballads; the only real link with this is the reported title "Robin Hood and Guy of Gusborne")
Leach, pp. 334-340, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text)
OBB 116, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, probably a modernized version of Child's text)
Gummere, pp. 68-76+320-321, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, conflating Hales/Furnivall and Child)
TBB 26, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, probably a modernized version of Child's text)
DT 118, RHGISBOR
ADDITIONAL: R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 141-145, "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, newly edited from the Percy manuscript)
Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, editors, _Robin Hood and Other Oudlaw Tales_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000, pp. 169-183, "RObin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" (1 text, newly edited from the sources)
Roud #3977
NOTES: This is considered by J. C. Holt (following Child and others), to be one of the five "basic" Robin Hood ballads. (The earliest known copy (from the Percy folio) is somewhat corrupt, but shows survivals of a much older text, and seems to be at least two centuries older than the manuscript. It is noteworthy that a fragment of the same story, in dramatic form, appears on the back of a slip of financial sheets from 1475/6 C.E. For more details on chronology see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]).
Observe that, although the modern version of the legend calls Guy of Gisborne "Sir Guy," implying that he is a knight, stanza 22 clearly says that he and Robin are both yeomen.
Bronson notes that Chappell associated a tune with this piece, but that the association was Chappell's own, on weak grounds, and therefore does not cite the melody. - RBW
Child Collection- Child Ballad 118: Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne
Child --Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length --Have
118 Hester NicEilidh Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne Robin Hood Ballad Project 2006 14:12 Yes
Excerpt from The British Traditional Ballad in North America
by Tristram Coffin 1950, from the section A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America
118. ROBIN HOOD AND GUY OF GISBORNE
Texts: Brown Coll.
Local Titles: Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne.
Story Types: A: A distorted text tells how Robin Hood lived in the forest killed men and deer, and frightened people. One day a stranger speaks to this outlaw, saying that he is searching for one Robin Hood. As they travel together, Robin Hood reveals himself and then slays the stranger.
Examples: Brown Coll.
Discussion: The story given in this American ballad tells only a small fragment of the original tale. Robin Hood, having dreamed that two yeomen beat and bound him, sets out with Little John for revenge. In the greenwood they encounter a yeoman. John wishes to ask the stranger his intentions, but Robin, thinking this too bold, objects so roughly that John is hurt and goes home. At home, John finds Robin's men pressed by the sheriff, and he is captured and tied to a tree when his bow breaks. Meanwhile, Robin learns from the yeoman that he is seeking Robin Hood, but has lost his way. Robin offers to be his guide, and they go off. A shooting match is proposed, and, when Robin excels, the stranger in admiration wishes to learn his name. They identify themselves as Guy of Gisborne and Robin Hood, and a fight ensues. After scumbling and being hit, Robin lolls Guy with the aid of the Virgin. He then nicks Guy's face beyond recognition, switches clothes, and blows Guy's horn. The sheriff hears in the sound tidings that Guy has slain Robin and believes it is Guy he sees approaching. Robin, as Guy, refuses a reward, but frees John. The sheriff then takes flight, but is slain by an arrow which John sends from Guy's bow.
The North Carolina text is meterically poor and almost prose in spots. Belden in his editing of the Brown Collection notes that the state of the text is likely "due to imperfect recollection on the part of the reporter".
ROBIN HOOD AND GUY OF GISBORNE: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997
Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne only survives in the folio manuscript acquired by Thomas Percy (British Library Add MSS 27879), which is dated in the mid seventeenth century and clearly is a collection of pre-existing materials; this is the only one of the six Robin Hood ballads in the manuscript that Percy printed in his Reliques of 1765. He gave it the title used here, though in other more recent versions of the title Robin's opponent is called Sir Guy. This honorific is used frequently in the text, but Percy may have omitted it, as Child does, from the ballad's title because the text states that he and Robin are both yeoman (line 87), and so the knightly title seems anomalous, though Percy did add a note that "Sir" was used outside the knightly class (1765, p. 86). He edited the manuscript version considerably for meter and comprehension, though in his fourth edition he reinstated some of the original readings; Ritson also edited the text fairly heavily for his 1795 collection.
Child prints this text first after the Gest, presumably because of the evident antiquity of the story: Sir Guy is mentioned in Dunbar's poem Of Sir Thomas Norry, to be dated by the early sixteenth century, but before that a similar plot is told in a play found in a manuscript written about 1475 (see pp. 281-84 in this edition). Because Child assumed the plays were based on ballads, this might have led him to assume a date for the ballad even earlier than Robin Hood and the Monk, hence his ordering of the texts. This assumption would seem questionable: although the difference between play and ballad is not so great in this instance as in that of the Potter story, it still seems that they are generic variants of the same theme, and one cannot be placed before the other. But the ballad may well date from the fifteenth century in something very much like its present form, and as Fowler remarks it "may well be one of the earliest of all the Robin Hood ballads" (1980, p. 1782).
In making his judgment on date, Child might have been influenced by Percy's comment that this ballad bore "marks of much greater antiquity than any of the common popular songs on this subject" (1765, p. 124), though Robin Hood and the Monk was apparently unknown to Percy. Child's early location of the ballad may also be influenced by what seem to be quite ancient motifs in the ballad, notably Guy's horse-hide and head, which seems more like a ritual costume than a disguise, and also by what Dobson and Taylor call the ballad's "exceptionally violent tone" (1976, p. 141). When Robin defaces this enemy's head and places it on his bow's end, both ritual and savagery seem to be invoked. The importance of the "mythic" Robin Hood is a matter for debate, but if that interpretation has any force, this ballad is one of its locations. The idea of a conflict between a true and a false forester (who has some resonances of the devil in Chaucer's Friar's Tale), the hero's unflinching ferocity against his enemies, his understanding of their rituals (including his appropriation of their own ritual costume), his capacity to be polymorphous -- at the end, both false Guy and a quasi-priest -- his insistence on facing this enemy himself even at the expense of his own fellowship, these are all elements which create a slightly different Robin (also found in the equally fierce Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham), more emphatic, more inspired, more like the mythic international hero than the inherently human friend to many found in other early texts.
The ballad is set in the Yorkshire Barnsdale area (line 181) and Gisborne, wherever precisely it may be, is in the same region (see note to line 138). This makes it seem odd that the outlaw's major enemy is the Sheriff of Nottingham. Though sheriffs did have some duty to pursue felons outside their precincts, this is too far for credibility, and this ballad, early though its origins are, must represent to some extent a conflation -- oral or literary -- of the differently located Robin Hood myths, a process taken further in the Gest. In the suggestion that the sheriff has employed Sir Guy (lines 99-100 and 187-90), we may well see a conscious articulation of two separate enemies, and at least one element of rationalization within this emotively intense text.
The power of this ballad also derives from its speed and its capacity to exploit the elisions and emphases of the ballad form. Though these qualities have been noted -- Dobson and Taylor speak of its "concisely dramatic qualities" (1976, p. 141), the extent of the significance of these features has not been fully appreciated by most commentators, more meshed in the tradition of realist humanism than aware of what Gray calls "the inherently expressionist form" of ballads (1984, p. 16). One example of this misinterpretation is the problem allegedly caused by the fact that Robin, having argued with John and set off on his own, cannot know that John has been seized by the sheriff -- and yet goes straight to rescue him. Child thinks this shows "considerable derangement of the story" (III, 90), and Dobson and Taylor agree (1976, pp. 140-41). Yet this sort of instinctive certainty is just what empowers the hero of romance: he is led to his heroic encounter by fortune and self-confidence. Narrative elisions of this dramatic kind are common enough throughout the ballads -- Sir Patrick Spens being a famous example.
A more striking example of this failure to "read" the genre of the poem lies in the assumption by commentators that there is a substantial sequence missing in the early stanzas. While it is evident that Robin Hood and the Monk has lost a leaf (and so about 48 lines) after line 120, and the Percy Folio has some pages torn in half, there is in fact no need to assume, as rationalists requiring the comfort of a blow-by-blow narrative have done, that there is anything missing between lines 6 and 7 of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Rapid moving the text certainly is -- but then John says in line 13 that sweavens are swift, and the ballads characteristically slip very quickly into their action, often giving the impression that the audiences knew quite well who these people were and what they did, so that fussier introductions would be superfluous; compare the opening of Robin Hood and the Monk, which has a very cursory introduction to the characters; Adam Bell is another case.
In terms of style this ballad is not unlike Robin Hood and the Monk: it has a relatively consistent metrical pattern and a recurrent abcb rhyme (with one six-line stanza, lines 21-27), occasional use of the abab pattern (lines 26-30, 35-38, 43-46, 59-62), and relatively few poor rhymes (lines 6/8, 36/8, 48/50, 88/90, 100/02, 112/14). Compared with Robin Hood and the Potter the language of the ballad is in general sure-footed, lacking the element of line-filler and cliché common to the popular ballad as it develops. This vigorous language emphasizes the effect of the pace and rapid variation of the narrative, the poetic drive which is the central instrument of this fierce and powerful ballad, creating powerfully its dramatic story and deepening the thematic impact of its "mysterious story" (Holt, 1989, p. 30).
In a number of ways it summarizes major themes that are to work strongly in the myth right through to the present. The argument between Little John and Robin that makes them separate leaves them both vulnerable: in this respect the poem is a partner piece to Robin Hood and the Monk. Robin's opponent is a personal enemy, with a vengeful, almost diabolic character, and his humiliation and destruction are an essential part of the story. The whole encounter has elements of natural myth about it, suggested rather than expressed. The final triumph is dependent not only on courage and fidelity among the outlaws but also on some supreme piece of trickery that stamps their spirit as well as their success on the story. This ballad also creates vividly the essential agon versus the villain. In nineteenth-century tradition the name of Sir Guy had just the right ring for a melodramatic villain, but the mixture of menace and mystery borne by Robin Hood's central opponent is originally and splendidly created in this strong ballad, which, by combining a dramatic fight with a bold rescue, remains at the core of the whole myth.
Selected Bibliography
Texts
Child, F. J. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vol. (1882-98). Rpt. New York: Dover, 1965. Vol. III, no. 118.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor. Rymes of Robyn Hood. London: Heinemann, 1976.
Gutch, J. M. A Litell Gest of Robin Hood with other Auncient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to the Celebrated Yeoman. London: Longman, 1847. Vol. II, pp. 68-83.
Thomas Percy's Folio Manuscript (c. 1640-50).
Percy, Thomas, ed. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3 vols. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
Ritson, Joseph, ed. Robin Hood, A Collection of All the Auncient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw. 2 vols. London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795. Rpt. 1832. Vol. I, pp. 114-25.
Commentary and Criticism
Bellamy, John C. Robin Hood: An Historical Inquiry. London: Croom Helm, 1985.
Child, F. J., pp. 89-91.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor., pp. 140-41.
Fowler, D. C. "Ballads." In The Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050-1550, new series. Ed. A. E. Hartung. New Haven, Connecticut: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980. Pp. 1753-1808.
Gray, Douglas. "The Robin Hood Ballads." Poetica 18 (1984), 1-39.
Holt, J. C. Robin Hood. Second ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.