Recordings & Info 121. Robin Hood & the Potter
[There are no known recordings of this ballad. According to Niles, he collected a version of this ballad from Mattie Cobb in 1934 in Madison Co., KY.]
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Child Collection Index [no listings]
4) Niles' version is not listed in The British Traditional Ballad in North America by Tristram Coffin 1950.
5) Wiki
6) Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
7) Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 3979: Robin Hood & the Potter (7 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Robin Hode and the Potter
Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood and the Potter [Child 121]
NAME: Robin Hood and the Potter [Child 121]
DESCRIPTION: A potter defeats Robin. Robin disguises himself as the potter. He sells pots in Nottingham, giving some to the Sheriff's wife. She invites him home. He offers to take the Sheriff to Robin. Robin robs the Sheriff, sending him home with a horse for his wife
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1795 (Ritson); manuscript copy almost certainly made by 1505, and probably before 1470
KEYWORDS: Robinhood fight trick disguise gift
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (5 citations)
Child 121, "Robin Hood and the Potter" (1 text, with "The Playe of Robyn Hode" in an appendix)
Leach, pp. 352-360, "Robin Hood and the Potter" (1 text)
Niles 44, "Robin Hood and the Potter" (1 text, 1 tune -- as dubious as any other JJN Robin Hood ballad. In this case, he claimed it was from, ahem, the wife of "Potsie" Cobb. Like the Niles text of "Robin Hood and the Monk," this is a summarization of the plot of the Child text in what appears to be deliberately dumbed-down verse)
ADDITIONAL: R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 125-132, "Robin Hood and the Potter" (1 text, newly edited from the manuscript); also a facsimile of the first page of the manuscript facing p. 124
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. 57-79, "Robin Hood and the Potter" (1 text, newly edited from the sources)
Roud #3979
ALTERNATE_TITLES:
The Potter and Robin Hood
NOTES: This is considered by J. C. Holt (following Child and others), to be one of the five "basic" Robin Hood ballads. (For more details on the history of the early texts, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]).
Although early, the "Potter" can hardly be considered an original piece; there is a similar story told of Hereward the Wake, the English rebel against the Norman Conquest. Hereward, knowing an attack on his stronghold of Ely was coming, decided to try to spy out the plan. Leaving the island, he met a potter, and persuaded him to lend the outlaw enough pots to pretend to be a potter. Hereward then visited the Norman camp, and (pretending not to understand French) learned what he needed to learn to foil the plot (Keen, p. 18). On pp. 23-25, Keen notes that the story was also told of Eustace the Monk, who was constantly disguising himself in one way or another -- and Eustace wasn't even English; he was from Flanders. Clearly the tale was adapted to Robin Hood rather than original to him.
It is widely stated that "Robin Hood and the Butcher" [Child 122] is an updated version of this song. This is highly likely, but, given the number of similar tales, we perhaps must consider the matter not quite proved; the "Butcher" might just possibly be derived from a tale of Hereward or Eustace or someone.
Fully half the Robin Hood ballads in the Child collection (numbers (121), 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, (133), (134), (135), (136), (137), (150), with this one being the earliest) share all or part of the theme of a stranger meeting and defeating Robin, and being invited to join his band. Most of the others are late, but it makes one wonder if Robin ever won a battle.
This is probably the earliest, and in many ways the best, example of this genre, though it is hardly typical (since it has a second part dealing with the trick played on the Sheriff). Paul Stamler offers the following only-mildly-exaggerated description of the typical ballad of this type:
"Robin Hood meets just about anyone and they quarrel about something really stupid. Robin picks a fight, and since the other person is always bigger, stronger, and a better fighter, he wins. Robin then makes nice with him and invites him to join all the other people who've beaten him up. Somewhere during all this, Robin raises an extremely symbolic horn to his lips. Privately, everyone in Robin's band agrees that Robin would do better if he stayed on his meds."
It appears the sole manuscript of the Potter was owned by someone who gave the Latin version of his name as Ricardo Calle; his merchant's mark and signature ("Iste liber constat Ricardo calle") is in the manuscript (a copy can be seen on p. 71 of Ohlgren/Matheson).
The hand used is not overly neat, and I notice some minor differences with the letterforms used in the text of the "Potter" itself (there is a specimen facing p. 124 of Dobson/Taylor), but they are similar enough that they might be from the same scribe. (If so, then Calle was not the neatest writer; Dobson/Taylor, p. 124, say that the manuscript shows curious orthography and erroneous repetitions.)
I am not a paleographer, but the curved subscripts of the "Potter" manuscript clearly did not come into use until the fifteenth century and continued into the sixteenth (see the samples on pp. 480-490 and 540-560 of Thompson). Solely on the basis of the writing, a date c. 1500 for the manuscript (as given, e.g., by Child) seems about right.
Ohlgren believes the owner was a man he titles Richard Call, a servant of the Pastons of Norfolk (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 21). The earliest Robin Hood play, which parallels the story of "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne" [Child 118], also gives indications of being from the Paston archives, and we know that one of the Paston servants had played Robin Hood in a drama. Thus there is a strong Paston link to our earliest substantial Robin Hood materials, making it likely that the Pastons' Call, or some member of his family, was indeed the owner of the manuscript.
We know a good deal about this Richard Call from other sources, although few others use the surname "Call"; most give him the name "Calle" -- so e.g. Paston/Davis, p. 178; Caster, p. 131; Kendall, p. 394. The Pastons sometimes called him by the initials "R.C." (Paston/Davis, p. 177), but often spell it out as "Richard Calle"; (e.g. Fenn/Ramsay, vol. I p. 109); in vol. I p. 36, we find the man himself signing his name "Richard Calle". There are quite a few letters from Calle in the Paston correspondence (e.g. Paston/Davis, p. 17=Fenn/Ramsay, Vol. II, p. 25 is a love letter to Margery Paston).
Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 72, suggests that Calle died some time after 1504, and conjectures that he was born around 1431. Castor, p. 215, suggest that he was in his late thirties when Margery Paston was 20 or 21, which comes to about the same date. He is first mentioned in one of the Paston letters from 1453 (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 72). Paston/Davis, p. 61, says that he became head bailiff of the Paston lands around 1455, four years before the death of Sir John Fastolfe in 1459, which set in motion a decades-long inheritance problem involving the Pastons (and, as a result, Calle) and kept the post for at least a quarter of a century. The Pastons spent many years struggling to make good their claim to the Fastolfe inheritance (cf. Wagner, p. 196; Kendall, p. 394. According to Castor, pp. 155-156, Calle was imprisoned in 1461 as an innocent sort-of-bystander in the dispute).
In 1469, against the family's wishes, Calle married a Paston daughter. (John Paston III exploded to John Paston II, "he shall never have my good will for to make my sister to sell candle[s] and mustard at Framlingham"; Paston/Davis, p. 177=Fenn/Ramsay, vol. II, p. 24). Castor, p. 215, thinks that their anger was the result of a family newly risen in status not wishing to have any links to those of lower classes. But, given the state of the conflict between the Pastons and their neighbors, it appears Calle was vital enough to the Pastons that they did not deprive him of his office even though he had stolen their daughter (Kendall, p. 400).
There is no record of an earlier marriage for Calle, although it is hard to believe that a man who was seemingly adult in 1453 would have waited that long to become engaged. (Margery Paston was much younger; Castor, p. x, estimates her as born c. 1448 and most online estimates place her birth between 1447 and 1450.)
Richard Calle and Margery had three sons, John, William, and Richard, before Margery Paston Calle died, probably in or before 1482 (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 73). Paston/Davis, p. xxix, states that she was dead by 1479; Castor, p. x, gives her death date as c. 1480. On p. 284, Castor notes that Margery was not included in her mother's 1482 will -- although she admits this might have been a matter of long-held pique over Margery's marriage. Their oldest son may have been named for her Paston grandfather or uncles; at least, when Margaret the mother of Margery died, she left the substantial sum of 20 pounds to John Calle son of Richard (Kendall, p. 400; Castor, p. 284).
Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 73, says that after Margery Paston died, Richard Calle remarried and had two additional sons, Andrew and John. There are sundry references to Richard Calle in rental records from 1508/1509, and a chancery reference that can be dated sometime between 1500 and 1515. We should note that the 1508/1509 reference is to Richard Call, not Calle (but, of course, spellings of names were not really standardized at that time).
There is another issue. The inscription in the manuscript is not in the same hand as Richard Calle's letters in the Paston correspondence -- a point even Ohlgren admits (Ohlgren/Matheson, pp. 73-74), although his suggestion is that the scribe of the book added the inscription on Calle's behalf.
All this raises a real problem. Can we be certain that the Richard Calle of the Cambridge manuscript is the same as the Calle of the Paston letters? Many scholars have said they were not. It is true that there would not have been many literate Richard Calles in fifteenth and sixteenth century England -- but one who would have been literate was Richard Calle junior, the third son of Richard Calle and Margery Paston Calle.
This is an issue of significant concern, because there are three indications of date in the Cambridge manuscript. One, the weakest, is the handwriting. The second is the ownership mark of Richard Calle. The third is a precise but ambiguous date reference. The manuscript refers to the "espences of fflesche at the mariage of my ladey Margaret, that sche had owt off Eynglonde."
This has been taken to refer to the marriage of Margaret Tudor, the elder daughter of Henry VII of England, to James IV of Scotland in 1503 (Dobson/Taylor, p. 123). But if Ohlgren is right about Richard Calle Senior owning the manuscript, this would mean that Calle was about seventy at the time it was written -- not an impossible age, but hardly the way to bet. Ohlgren's data on Calle would have us believe he lived until at least 1508, but this is even less likely.
There are two other possibilities: Either the Calle involved is Richard Calle junior (in which case all difficulties disappear, since he was probably born around 1475), or the Margaret is some other royal Margaret.
Ohlgren, even though he thinks Richard Calle senior was the owner of the book, plumps for the second possibility. Ohlgren/Matheson, pp. 21, suggest that the wedding involved was that of Margaret of York, the sister of King Edward IV, who married Charles Duke of Burgundy in 1468 (Wagner, p. 160). This certainly fits Calle senior's dates -- and there are references in the Paston letters to the event; Ohlgren suggests based on a few hints in the letters that Calle may even have been present (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 75).
But the phrasing of the inscription is interesting. It sounds as if this Margaret had to be given some sort of grant to pay her expenses. This fits an earlier royal wedding, that between King Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. Margaret brought no dowry at all, except a brief truce in the Hundred Years' War (Gillingham, p. 59), and even that was at the cost of major territorial concessions. And, because the English were broke, she had to be granted property in Lancashire to pay her expenses (Rubin, p. 231). The whole wedding was so obscure that most chroniclers didn't even know where it took place! This fits the description in the manuscript very well.
Admittedly the marriage took place in the 1440s, which is before any known references to Richard Calle, but this is not impossibly early. Thomas Wright, indeed, referred the manuscript of the "Potter" to the reign of Henry VI (1422-1461, briefly restored 1470-1471). Wright also dated the "Monk" to the reign of Edward II, a dating of which Dobson/Taylor, p. 123n1, are frankly contemptuous, but in the case of the "Potter" Wright may have been onto something.
"Robin Hood and the Monk" [Child 119] is usually described as the oldest Robin Hood ballad. But the strong evidence (discussed in the entry on that ballad) is that it must date from 1465 or after, later than the usual dating. If the Margaret of the inscription in the "Potter" is indeed Margaret of Anjou, then we must redate the "Potter" early enough to make it probably the earliest Robin Hood ballad, and it might be the earliest even if the Margaret of the inscription is Margaret of York.
Ohlgren quotes Julia Boffey as saying that the manuscript of the "Potter" appears to be the work of someone who was "someone used to writing [but] not a professional scribe" (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 69). Based on the lack of ruling and other characteristics described by Boffey, this sounds right -- the scribe was literate, and indeed wrote quite frequently, but did not as a matter of course write books, and did not know the scribal methods of ruling the pages to assure an attractive result.
Turning to the manuscript's contents, Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 69, count no fewer than six different hands involved, although (based on Ohlgren/Matheson's folio count) the main hand is responsible for some 90% of the text, including the entire text of the "Potter" (the tenth of 17 items in the manuscript, based on the list on p. 70 of Knight/Matheson, and one of only two items in the book longer than three folio).
Several of the items are clearly for educating children. Others are religious -- one consists of four proverbs in English (at least two of which Richard Calle quoted to his wife in letters; Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 80). These appear, interestingly, to be from the Wycliffe translation -- which was, of course, very heterodox. It is also ironic, because "The Miracle of the Lady who Buried the Host" is a thoroughly unlikely justification of the doctrine of transubstantiation, which had been Catholic dogma since 1215 but which was denied by Wycliffe. All of these pieces, however, are short. The four longest pieces in the manuscript are the most interesting:
* "The Adulterous Falmouth Squire" -- a tale known in eight copies, and seemingly intended as an exemplum, or story with a moral attached. The key story involves two brothers who die on the same day. The younger, who was innocent of fornication, is in heaven; the older, who was an adulterer, is in hell suffering extreme torture.
* "The Cheylde and hes Stepdame" -- Otherwise known as "The Frere/Friar and the Boy." This too was popular enough to be found in multiple manuscripts, and was printed by Wynken de Worde, perhaps around 1500. A more recent version is found on pp. 250-254 of Briggs.
This is interesting in light of Calle's marital story, because it is a tale of a boy with a wicked stepmother, who one day shares his meal with a stranger and is rewarded with gifts (a bow that cannot miss, and a pipe that always makes the hearers dance, plus the power to cause his stepmother to break wind or, in cleaned-up versions, suffer laughing fits) which save him from his troubles. Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 85, note that the version in the Cambridge MS. has a different ending from the usual versions. It is fascinating to note that another copy of "The Friar and the Boy" was also bound with the Wynken de Worde print of the "Gest" (Ohlgren/Matheson, p. 117).
* "Robin Hode and the Potter"
* "The Kynge and the Barker." A unique text, printed by Child as an appendix to "King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth" [Child 273], it is one of the many sorts of tales of a commoner meeting the king in disguise. Child considers it to be ancestral to ballad #273, although he says that it has been much modified over time.
Ohlgren sees many reasons why Richard Calle might have liked the tale of the "Potter." Ohlgren/Matheson, pp. 25, 82, suggests that Calle had reason to enjoy the idea of a sheriff being outwitted, having himself suffered badly at the hands of a sheriff during the interminable conflicts between the Paston family and the other Norfolk landowners -- he even expressed a hope for a better sheriff in future. And on pp. 80-81 Ohlgren argues that Calle would have liked the image of Robin flirting with the sheriff's wife, a woman above his station, just as Calle courted Margery Paston. He also thinks this might have influenced Calle's decision to include "The Cheylde and the Stepdame."
On the other hand, the "Potter" also sees Robin Hood violating the standards of the merchant class by selling pots too cheaply (charging just three pennies rather than the usual five). Ohlgren/Matheson, pp. 88-89, thinks Calle would approve of this trickery, but I strongly doubt that a man from a family of grocers would like being so badly undercut. And on pp. 89-90, Ohlgren starts edging toward claiming Robin Hood learned game theory, or at least Adam Smith style economics, in the course of the ballad. This would perhaps be possible in the Tudor era, when the great joint stock companies were formed, but this goes against Ohlgren's claim of a Yorkist date.- RBW
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Briggs: Katherine Briggs, _British Folktales_ (originally published in 1970 as _A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales_), revised 1977 (I use the 1977 Pantheon paperback edition)
Castor: Helen Castor, _Blood & Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century_, Faber & Faber, 2004
Dobson/Taylor: R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976
Fenn/Ramsay: John Fenn, editor, revised by A. Ramsay, _Paston Letters_, two volumes, Charles Knight & Co., 1840 ("Digitized by Google." The Google edition combines both files in one PDF; page references are to volume I or II and page)
Gillingham: John Gillingham, _The Wars of the Roses_, Louisiana State University, 1984
Keen: Maurice Keen, _The Outlaws of Medieval Legend_, Dorset, 1961, 1977, 1987
Kendall: Paul Murray Kendall, _The Yorkist Age: Daily Life during the Wars of the Roses_, 1962 (I use the 1970 Norton paperback edition)
Laynesmith: J. L. Laynesmith, _The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503_, Oxford, 2004 (I use the 2005 paperback edition)
Ohlgren/Matheson: Thomas H. Ohlgren, _Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465-1560, Texts, Contexts, and Ideology_, with an Appendix: The Dialects and Languages of Selected Robin Hood Poes by Lister M. Matheson, University of Delaware Press, 2007
Paston/Davis: _The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling_, edited with an introduction by Norman Davis, compiled 1963; reissued with the new introduction, Oxford, 1983
Rubin: Miri Rubin, _The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages_, Penguin, 2005
Thompson: Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, _An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography_, Oxford, 1912 (I use the recent reprint, undated but probably from the 1990s)
Wagner: John A. Wagner, _Encyclopedia of the Wars of the Roses_, ABC-Clio, 2001
ROBIN HOOD AND THE FRIAR and ROBIN HOOD AND THE POTTER: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997
The survival of Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter, our next earliest play script following the fragment of c. 1475, is due to printer William Copland's decision to append it to his edition of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode and of Hys Lyfe, dated somewhere between 1549 and 1569, but most likely printed in 1560 when he entered a Robin Hood play in the Stationers' Register. There are no extant manuscript versions. The appended text preserves two dramatic pieces: lines 1-122 in this edition contain the well-known account of Robin's initial confrontation with Friar Tuck, in which physical and verbal sparring of the two is followed by the cleric carrying Robin on his back through a stream before dropping him into the water. After further fighting Robin seeks help from his men and then offers Friar Tuck gold and "a lady" (a precursor to Maid Marian as bawd?) in exchange for service. Lines 123-203 recount a second example of "Robin meets his match," this time with a potter who refuses to pay road-toll, for which Robin breaks his pots and engages in a fencing duel.
Unlike Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham, which is linked with a particular gentleman's household in late fifteenth-century East Anglia, no specific auspices can be found for this drama, although Copland's introductory remark that it is "verye proper to be played in Maye Games" suggests that the two dramatic pieces were typical of the numerous Robin Hood plays sponsored by parishes and civic organizations all across Britain throughout the Tudor era. The lengthy festive season for May games often extended from May 1 through Whitsuntide (a holy day celebrated seven weeks after Easter) when towns and villages chose a May King and Queen (or Lord and Lady) to preside over various festivities, including dances around the Maypole, nights sleeping in the greenwood, sporting contests (e.g., wrestling and archery) and processions around town and to neighboring villages, often for the purpose of raising money for poor relief and church maintenance.
By the end of the fifteenth century, many villages and towns renamed their May king (also known as Summer Lord, Lord of Misrule, Abbot of Bon Accord) Robin Hood, and followed suit by calling the May Queen Maid Marian and their attendants, Friar Tuck, Little John, and the rest of the merry band of outlaws bearing pipes, tabors, and drums. In some towns the change of title is very deliberate and can be precisely dated, as in Aberdeen, Scotland, where an order of 17 November 1508 formally announces that the traditional procession through town will be led by "Robert huyd and litile Iohn" formally known as "Abbot and priour of Bonacord" (Mills, p. 135). E. K. Chambers and others speculate that Robin and Marian entered the May game via the old French pasteurella popularized in England by French minstrels (Medieval Stage, I, 160-81). This lyric poem is about a shepherdess called Marion who rejects the advances of a knight out of fidelity to another lover named Robe. However, this alone is not an adequate explanation. The already legendary home-grown hero's associations with nature and the forest, with physical prowess, generosity, camaraderie, as well as the subversive spirit of summer games themselves, made him the perfect choice as the fictional persona of the Summer Lord. Moreover, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and their colorful entourage of outlaws gave an added theatrical dimension to the May revels. As David Mills asserts, "identification by costume was essential," indicated in the churchwarden's accounts of Kingston-on-Thames, 1507-29, which show "regular expenditure on the costumes and appurtenances ('banner,' 'cote,' 'gloves and shoes') of 'Robyn Hode,"' and other dress items displaying Maid Marian as the May Queen and the Friar as one of the morris dancers (Mills, p. 135). This is not to suggest that communities dispensed with the traditional generic role of the Summer Lord. At Wells in May 1607, for example, the "Lord of the May" led a procession which included Robin Hood and his men as one of ten such groups of characters (Lancashire, p. 280). By the latter part of the sixteenth century, the May-game Marian developed her own separate persona as a figure of sexual license, frequently presented as a conspicuously cross-dressed male, as illustrated in an anti-Marprelate play of the 1580s where Martin appears on stage as the "Maide marian," possibly to satirize puritan opposition to boys playing female roles (see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV, 231).
Contemporary records indicate that civic and parish sponsored Robin Hood plays, like most of the other May games, took place outdoors, and indeed the first sequence involving Friar Tuck may have been performed next to a river or stream, for the dialogue has the Friar, with Robin on his back, wading into water before Robin is dropped in (Blackstone, pp. 6-7). A body of water, however, is not necessary for the action to be effective, and since local actors often took their productions to neighboring towns, little if any scenery and only a few properties (e.g., clubs and staves, a horn, and perhaps some musical instruments) would be expected. If the two dramatic pieces are performed together, a minimum of seven actors are required. Since one of the characters is "a lady," six men and one woman may have participated, but considering Tudor conventions of acting and of the depiction of Maide Marian at the time (noted above), the female character was likely impersonated by a cross-dressed male. An intriguing feature of Robin Hood and the Friar is the evident requirement of three dogs who accompany Friar Tuck when he enters ("these dogs all three"). Animals, in fact, were not infrequent participants in productions of the time (see White, p. 120 and p. 221 n. 67). However, whereas in the ballad version of the play the Friar's dogs fight Robin's men, in the play (where this might have been too dangerous to stage) they are replaced by the Friar's own men (albeit with canine names like Cut and Bause) who fight with staves and clubs (see Blackstone, p. 4).
The relationships of the two dramatic texts to their narrative and visual sources are problematic. The first play antedates its corresponding ballad, Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, by at least one hundred years. A late medieval ballad probably existed because a fighting friar appears in the Paston fragment of c. 1475. The play's anti-fraternal satire recall's Chaucer's depiction of Frere Huberd, who was himself strong "as a champioun," and yet it is also representative of Protestant ballads and plays of the mid-sixteenth century in which the boasting, lecherous, and merrymaking mendicant is widely featured and often conflated with the comic Vice (see, for example, John Bale's anti-Catholic plays). It's worth noting that Francis Child omitted the eight-line bawdy speech of the Friar near the end in his truncated version of the play, and by so doing destroyed the continuing anti-clerical satire and carnivalesque atmosphere of the May games in which social conventions were mocked or inverted. The Friar's remark Here is an huckle duckle/An inch above the buckle (lines 115-16) suggests he may have sported an artificial phallus to signify sexual virility like that of comic figures in the folk drama (for example, Robin Goodfellow appeared with horns, goat-feet and a phallus [see White, pp. 31-32 and fig. 4]). Child's omission also deprives the play of the dramatic resolution inherent in the dance in which Friar Tuck joins with "the lady." A stained glass window in Betley Hall, Staffordshire, pictures Friar Tuck participating in a morris dance with a lady who appears to be Maide Marian, but whether the play's female figure is Marian is questionable, even if she does suggest the licentious Marian of the May games (see Blackstone, p. 13 and fig. 3). In the case of the second play text, the ballad, Robin Hood and the Potter, antedates the play by about sixty years. We may be witnessing, as Dobson and Taylor claim, the "transformation from recited tale to dramatic version" (p. 215). Two pairs of lines are virtually identical:
ballad: Ne was never so corteys a man
On peney of pawage to pay(lines 19-20)
play: Yet was he never so curteyse a potter
As one peny passage to paye (lines 132-33)
ballad: Yend potter well steffeley stonde (line 66)
play: And I wyll styfly by you stande (line 199)
However, if the play were a dramatized version of the first fitt of the ballad, one would expect to find many more borrowings, such as the amount of the bet -- forty shillings versus twenty pound in the play. Also, Jack the potter's boy is not found in the ballad. If the play script was adapted from the longer and more complex ballad, one would also expect a minor character to be omitted rather than added. There is no question that the play is based upon the story of the potter, but it is probably not the exact one that survives.
Select Bibliography
Early Printed Texts
Copland, William. A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode and of Hys Lyfe. Printed at Three Cranes Wharf, London, c. 1560. British Library copy, press-mark C.21.C.63.
White, Edward. A Merry Jest of Robin Hood. Printed at London, c. 1590. Bodleian Library copy, 2.3 Art, Seld.
Editions
Blackstone, Mary A., ed. Robin Hood and the Friar. PLS Performance Text 3. Toronto: Poculi Ludique Societas, 1981.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor, eds. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. London: William Heinemann, 1976.
Farmer, John S., ed. Robin Hood c. 1561-9. Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Texts 102, 1914.
Greg, W. W., ed. "A Play of Robin Hood for May-games from the Edition by William Copland, c. 1560." Collections Part II. The Malone Society. Oxford, 1908.
Manly, John Matthews, ed. Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama. 2 vols. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1897. I, 281-88.
Commentary and Criticism
Blackstone, Mary A., pp. 1-24.
Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.
------. The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor, pp. 210-14, 216-19.
Jones, William Powell. The Pasteurella: A Study of the Origins and Tradition of a Lyric Type. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.
Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. 100-01.
Lancashire, Ian. Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Mills, David. "Drama and Folk-Ritual." In The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume I: Medieval Drama. London: Methuen, 1983. Pp. 122-51.
Wiles, David. The Early Plays of Robin Hood. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981. Pp. 39-40.
White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
ROBIN HOOD AND THE POTTER: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997
The ballad survives only in one manuscript, Cambridge E.e.4.35, a collection of popular and moral poems dated around 1500. It is written in what Dobson and Taylor call "a clear bastard hand" (1976, p. 123) and the text is complete, though at line 271 a line appears to be missing through scribal error. Child thought there were other gaps, but if a six-line stanza is acceptable (as is found elsewhere), and since there is no break in the sense, all the other gaps he identified disappear except that before line 224, and that too may be the result of an irregular stanza.
Like the other early manuscript ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Potter plays no part in the popular printed tradition, though Robin Hood and the Butcher, based closely on this ballad, is in both Pepys's and Wood's collections and also in the earliest surviving garlands of 1663 and 1670. Although this Potter version was not reprinted until Ritson's edition of 1795, which gave it its present name (as in other early ballads, the title focusses on the first action, before the encounter with the sheriff is developed from it), the story was clearly well known, since Copland's edition of the Gest (c. 1560) also prints two short plays, one of which is a dramatized encounter with a potter that begins like the ballad.
The relation between the play and the ballad has been misunderstood. Child said the play was "founded on" the ballad (III, 108) and this is also the conclusion come to by Steadman, as is suggested by the title of his essay on "The Dramatization of the Robin Hood Ballads" (1919); the same view has been proffered by Simeone (1951, p. 266) and Nelson (1973, pp. 47-51). Ritson's comment is somewhat subtler, saying the play "seems allusive to the same story" (1795, p. 60). In fact the plays and ballads are generically different treatments of the same themes, covering the issues central to the myth to different degrees and in genre-appropriate ways (Knight, 1994, pp. 112-13). The Potter play has a quite different narrative from the parallel ballad; it shapes a vivid dramatic action which, as in most of the early plays, leads up to a good rousing fight as finale.
The events and structure of the ballad are a good deal more complex. There are three sections, here represented as fitts, as suggested by the language of the texts (see lines 119-20, 237). Fitt 1 occurs in the greenwood, and is basically a "Robin Hood meets his match" sequence. Fitt 2 transfers the action to Nottingham, with Robin in disguise. He encounters the sheriff, and this is fleshed out with an archery competition, as found in the Gest and in the later ballad Robin Hood's Golden Prize. Fitt 3 sees the return to the greenwood, where the sheriff is surprised and the outlaws gather about Robin at the sound of his horn.
Among these familiar events are a set of themes central to the myth. Major features are: Robin is a yeoman among yeomen; recurrent suspicion of the towns and its activities; Robin's innate skill at archery; the full and free ethics of the forest. These mesh fully with the values found in other early texts, a fact which seems to contradict Holt's view that this is a "tale very dependent on comic situations" (1989, p. 34), but Robin Hood and the Potter also adds some other themes. The generosity and honesty characteristic of Robin in other early texts are here interwoven with more obvious aspects of the trickster: this is, as Dobson and Taylor note, "more deliberately light-hearted" than parallel texts (1976, p. 124), and the humor of the outlaws, the wry responses of Robin and the ironic tricking of the Sheriff are all stressed and realized with buoyant humor: presumably it is this element that Holt downgrades as "trite" (1989, p. 34).
This text makes specific the suspicion of towns and business practices touched on elsewhere, as when in the Gest Little John refuses to measure cloth like a draper, or when Robin returns the knight's repayment to honor them both. Robin is a comically bad marketeer, and the canny folk of Nottingham throng to buy his pots (Robin Hood and the Butcher relishes this motif): Robin's largesse is continued when he pays the potter with reckless generosity for his whole cartload at the end. Throughout the ballad the world of mercantile values is mocked and dismissed.
With the same sense of excess, Robin smashes the feeble townsmen's bows offered to him by the sheriff, trounces professional marksmen and thoroughly trivializes the threat of the sheriff - who is found much more deadly in other texts, where his own death is a reflex of that threatening personality. The conflict with the sheriff is also, it seems, fought in part on the terrain of masculinity: Robin Hood and the Potter is the only early text which shows Robin in relation with any woman (except the Virgin Mary and the treacherous Prioress). The text seems deliberately to insinuate that the sheriff's wife is more than a little interested in the powerful potter. When they first meet she speaks more respectfully than might be expected, addressing the quasi-potter as "sir" and by the end of the ballad she compares this enigmatic masculine figure favorably to her mocked husband: Holt saw in this contact "a distant distorted echo of courtly love" (1989, p. 126).
These thematic features might well be held to compensate in their complexity for what has been seen as a relative simplicity in style. Dobson and Taylor find this "a much less skilful work of literary composition" than other early texts (1976, p. 124) and Ritson went so far as to say "the writing is evidently that of a vulgar and illiterate person" (1795, p. 60). There is a fairly limited use of cliché and line filler (lines 30, 52, 54, 62, 102, 122, 166, 226, 252, 275, 314), but the rhyme pattern is decidedly irregular, exhibi-ting various departures from the standard abcb: either incomplete rhyme (114/6, 134/6, 193/5, 201/3, 234/6, 254/6, 282/4), rhyme varied to abac (33-36, 53-56, 77-80, 101-04, 117-20, 200-03, 245-48), varied to abcc (85-88), or even abbc (89-92, 168-71, 293-96?), at times a lack of rhyme altogether (93-96, 191-94, 249-52) and the last of these variants, full rhyme abab (1-4, 37-40, 57-60, 137-40, 176-79, 208-11, 214-17, 225-28, 233-36, 259-62; because of the possibility of half rhyme being acceptable, some of the abac and abcb cases could be taken as abab).
Less than polished as the ballad certainly is in terms of style, it also has, as Dobson and Taylor remark a "direct form of address" (1976, p. 124). It uses dialogue more than other early Robin Hood ballads (55% of the lines, as against 45% in Robin Hood and the Monk and 50% in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, the other two dialogue-heavy texts). In keeping with that it is notable for a rapid change of viewpoint, especially in the opening greenwood sequence. This dramatic yet simple quality has led to the connection of the ballad to the minstrel style, that is a rather casual technique based on direct communication and emotive effects, assumed to indicate a popular context. But it is notable that this technically simple ballad has some complexities. Though Robin Hood is firmly a yeoman, he is also, as in Robin Hood and the Monk, noted for his quality of being corteys and free, the latter adjective having both its senses of lordly generosity and yeomanly independence. The tone and impact of the ballad may well show more art than has sometimes been assumed: its plot is quick-moving and highly effective, its tone vigorous and direct, with a strong and well-maintained level of irony. Gray, in connection with these elements, sees aspects of the fabliau behind the ballad (1984, p. 18).
These subtleties may also be thematic. At the beginning and end the ballad asserts the elusive value of god yemanrey, and it may well be that this text, like other early Robin Hood ballads, is something of an exploration and realization of just what these values might be. As with other newly formed genres, they may relate to new social formations: Tardif has argued for the importance of disaffected craftsmen in the formation of the Robin Hood genres (1983, pp. 131-32). This ballad appears to develop some values consistent with this thesis, promulgating ideas of a newly identified social stratum, neither serf nor lord, interested in communal values and threatened by a new world of towns and laws imposed from a distance. For them the youthful, witty, brave, and cunning hero, representing and leading his band of near equals, is a good deal more than trite, and his mythic values come strongly through a text whose literary surface is simple and, therefore, capable of wide diffusion.
Selected Bibliography
Texts
Cambridge University MS E.e.4.35.
Child, F. J., ed. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1882-98. rpt. New York: Dover, 1965. Vol. III, no. 121.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor. Rymes of Robin Hood. London: Heinemann, 1976. Pp. 123-32.
Gutch, J. M., ed. A Lyttele Gest of Robin Hood with other Auncient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to the Celebrated Yeoman. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1847.
Vol. II, 21-35.
Ritson, Joseph, ed. Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw. 2 vols. London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795. Rpt. London: William Pickering, 1832. Vol. 1, 81-96.
Commentary and Criticism
Child, F. J, pp. 108-09.
Dobson, R.B., and J. Taylor, pp. 123-25.
Gray, Douglas. "The Robin Hood Poems." Poetica 18 (1984), 1-39.
Holt, J. C. Robin Hood. Second ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.
Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Nelson, Malcolm A. The Robin Hood Tradition in the English Renaissance. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, English Drama 14. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1973.
Simeone, W. E. "The May Games and the Robin Hood Legend." Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951), 265-74.
Steadman, J. M., Jr. "The Dramatization of the Robin Hood Ballads." Modern Philology 17 (1919), 9-23.
Tardif, Richard. "The 'Mistery' of Robin Hood: A New Social Context for the Texts." In Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture. Eds. Stephen Knight and S. N. Mukherjee. Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1983.