Recordings & Info 124. The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Child Collection Index
4) The Jolly Pindar of Wakefield: Introduction
5) Wiki
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 3981: The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield (12 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Robin Hood and the Pinder of Wakefield
Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, The [Child 124]
DESCRIPTION: "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John" trespass on the fields guarded by the Jolly Pinder. The Pinder challenges them; they fight. The Pinder holds off all three. Robin offers the Pinder a place in his band. The Pinder agrees to come once his present job is done
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1663 (garland; there is a Stationer's Register entry for "Robin Hood and the Pinder of Wakefield" from 1558)
KEYWORDS: Robinhood fight
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Child 124, "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield" (2 texts)
Bronson 124, "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield" (2 versions)
Leach, pp. 365-366, "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield" (1 text)
BBI, RZN16, "In Wakefield there lives a jolly pinder"
ADDITIONAL: Stephen Knight, editor (with a manuscript description by Hilton Kelliher), _Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript_ (British Library Additional MS 71158), D. S. Brewer, 1998, pp. 63-67, "Robin Hood and the Pinder of Wakefield 1"; pp. 68-70, "Robin Hood and the Pinder of Wakefield 2" (2 texts, the first being much longer than the garland text and probably edited; the second is close to the garlands)
R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 147-149, "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield"( 2 texts, from a broadside and the Percy folio)
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. 469-475, "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield" (1 text, conflated from the Garland and Percy versions)
Roud #3981
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Wood 402(42), "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield," F. Coles (London), 1658-1664; also Douce Ballads 3(118a), "Robin Hood and the jolly pinder of Wakefield"; Wood 401(61), "The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield: with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and Iohn"
NOTES: A pinder was an official charged with preventing trespassing and gathering strayed/lost/stolen livestock. This was a particularly significant task in towns which had open rather than enclosed fields. The pinder would also be responsible for caring for the livestock while ownership was determined, so the job could become fairly complicated.
For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117].
Although Child has only one ballad of the Pinder, the content of the Forresters manuscript implies that there were two (Knight, p. 62). The two ballads have the same plot, but the texts are of dramatically different lengths; the Forresters text preserves both, with Child's version corresponding to the shorter. The two Forresters texts are so close in plot that they must derive from the same material, but it is clear that there was substantial rewriting involved; the longer Forresters text is probably a rewrite, almost from scratch, of the shorter.
There is also a play, "George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield," about this incident; it was published in 1599, according to Kunitz/Haycraft, p. 236. Knight, p. 62, seems convinced that it was written by Robert Greene (1558-1592), but Kunitz/Haycraft, p. 236, note that several plays were falsely printed under Green's name and allow only a possibility that this is one of his works. Child, who mentions the play in his headnotes, does not even refer to an author. NewCentury, p. 514, says, "ascribed to Green but without much evidence [is] "George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield." Benet does not mention the "Pinner" at all in its entry on Greene.
To be sure, it hardly matters who wrote it; the key point is that the play -- and hence, presumably, this story -- was in existence before 1600 -- as was some ballad on the subject, as shown by the Stationer's Register entry, although we do not know whether it is this or another.
It is interesting to observe that the longer Forresters text of the "Pinder" calls the pinder "George a Green," as in the play (Knight, p. 63).
There actually was a George Green who was a Wakefield Pindar, according to Weinreb/Hibbert, p. 599. Having moved to London, he built in 1517 a building at 328 Gray's Inn Road. This came to be called the "Pindar of Wakefield," and in the time of Weinreb/Hibbert, it hosted "a regular 'Old Time Music-Hall'."
Fully half the Robin Hood ballads in the Child collection (numbers (121 -- the earliest and most basic example of the type), 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, (133), (134), (135), (136), (137), (150)) share all or part of the theme of a stranger meeting and defeating Robin, and being invited to join his band. Most of these are late, but it makes one wonder if Robin ever won a battle.
The connection of Robin Hood and a Pinder of Wakefield is proved to be early by the Stationer's Register entry, but we cannot prove that that entry refers to this song.
Bronson notes that his two tunes for this song are both associated with Rimbault, whose handling of other Robin Hood melodies was, at best, cavalier.
There are other mysteries associated with the piece, which survives only in very defective forms. Baring-Gould-MotherGoose #816, p. 304, notes a stanza which does not seem to appear in the canonical texts:
The hart he loves the high wood,
The hare she loves the hill;
The knight he loves his bright sword,
The lady loves her will. - RBW
Opie-Oxford2 206, "The hart he loves the high wood" (1 text) dates the song quoted above in Baring-Gould-Mother Goose to "a late-fifteenth century commonplace book from Broome Hall, Norfolk." - BS
Bibliography
- Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth edition edited by Bruce Murphy and published 1996 by Harper-Collins)
- Knight: Stephen Knight, editor (with a manuscript description by Hilton Kelliher), Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript (British Library Additional MS 71158), D. S. Brewer, 1998
- Kunitz/Haycraft: Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Editors, British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, H. W. Wilson, 1952 (I use the fourth printing of 1965)
- NewCentury: Clarence L. Barnhart with William D. Haley, editors, The New Century Handbook of English Literature, revised edition, Meredith Publishing, 1967
- Weinreb/Hibbert: Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, editors, The London Encyclopedia, Macmillan, 1983 (I use the 1986 Ader & Adler reprint.
Child Collection- Child Ballad 124: The Jolly Pindar of Wakefield
Child ---Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length --Have
124 Wallace House The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield Robin Hood Ballads 1953 2:14 Yes
The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997
This ballad, like Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, appears in Percy's folio manuscript and also in a number of seventeenth-century ballad and garland collections. It is, like other texts, damaged in the Percy MS: in this case too much is missing for that to be the basis of the text, but the Percy version provides some valuable corrections and extensions to the earliest complete broadside version. There are two versions in the Forresters manuscript, one an independent version of the garland text (A), the other a larger text apparently related to the prose history of George a Greene (B). Forresters' A is close to the Wood version, Child's favored text, but as it seems edited or erroneous, though with some good readings, it is referred to in the notes and occasionally used for emendation.
The story of Robin Hood's encounter with the doughty pinder of Wakefield had clearly existed for at least a century when Percy's manuscript was compiled: a ballad with this title was recorded in the Stationers' Register in 1557-59, is quoted in Anthony Munday's play, and was used in the Sloane Life of Robin Hood which appears to have been compiled in the late sixteenth century. Child suggests the ballad is mentioned in several Shakespeare plays, but he is only referring to the linking of the names "Robin and Scarlet and John": this does occur in a number of other ballads (albeit later recorded and somewhat literary ones, Robin Hood's Delight and Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon), and in any case this evidence is not needed to prove the widespread nature of the Wakefield saga. A prose life of George a Greene, the Pinder's name, existed from the early seventeenth century (by 1632) and, most striking of all, there was a five-act play of the same title, almost certainly by Robert Greene, written by 1594.
The pinder of Wakefield, like the friar of Fountains Abbey, and even like Gamelyn or Gamwell, was one of the local heroes who were drawn into the Robin Hood myth, whose aficionados no doubt enjoyed hearing of his achievements against the great man, and so the range of the tales how Robin met his match was expanded. In some sense the ballad has the simple structure of the "equal fight" ballads where Robin, or more usually Robin, John, and Will (sometimes Much as well or instead) have a good demanding fight with some opponents, and end either by calling a truce or by engaging the antagonist to join the outlaw band.
Stressing the fight as it does, The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield clearly belongs to that genre; yet it has resonances of a richer vein. The pinder is inherently a town official, controlling any stray animals and, as here, protecting the local crops from damage. Robin's conflict with the pinder and winning him over to the outlaws' side is not unlike his encounters with the sheriff and other urban forces. It is interesting to note that the play, George a Greene, incorporates Robin as a hero junior to the pinder, associating the outlaw to some extent with political rebellion and George with total loyalty to the crown (Knight, 1994, pp. 120-21).
These nuances are somewhat hidden in this "thoroughly lyrical" ballad (Child, III, 129) with its use of repeated lines and a number of imprecise rhymes and variation between a four- and six-line stanza. But popular as the ballad was, it does not delineate a central part of the myth so much as illustrate one of the difficult encounters between the hero and other cultural and social forces.
The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield is Child ballad 124, about Robin Hood. The oldest manuscript was published in 1632 but is believed to based on works at least a century older. A fragmentary version appears in The Percy Folio.
Synopsis
A jolly pinder boasts how no one, even a baron, makes a trespass at Wakefield. Robin, Will Scarlet, and Little John hear him. The pinder charges them with leaving the road and going among the corn. They fight with swords.
Robin offers to take him into the band.
The pinder gives them some food and says that when Michaelmas comes, he will take his fee from his current master and then join them.
External links: The Jolly Pindar of Wakefield
"THE JOLLY PINDER OF WAKEFIELD: INTRODUCTION"
"Having a Brawl – Fencing and Grudge Contests in 16th Century Rural England"