Recordings & Info 139. Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Wiki
4) Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham: Introduction
5) Child Collection Index
6) 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
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 1790: Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham (13 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Robin Hood
Robin Hood and the Fifteen Forresters
Robin Hood and the Forresters
Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham [Child 139]
DESCRIPTION: Robin at age 15 falls in with 15 foresters in Nottingham. He intends to enter a shooting match. They taunt him with his youth. He wagers on his ability and wins by killing a hart, but they refuse to pay. He kills them all, escapes to the merry green wood.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1663 (garland; title found 1656 in the Stationer's Register)
KEYWORDS: Robinhood hunting contest escape money youth
FOUND_IN: Canada(Mar)
REFERENCES: (9 citations)
Child 139, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (1 text)
Bronson 139, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (2 versions)
Creighton/Senior, pp. 69-70, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (1 text (composite from 2 singers), 1 tune) {Bronson's #2}
Creighton-NovaScotia 7, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (1 fragment, 1 tune) {Bronson's #1}
Leach, pp. 400-402 "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (1 text)
BBI, RZN19, "Robin Hood he was a tall young man"
DT 139, RHPROGNT
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. 2-5, "Robin Hood and the Forresters 1" (1 text, with substantial differences from Child's text based on the garlands)
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. 507-512, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham" (1 text)
Roud #1790
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Wood 402(14, 15), "Robin Hoods Progresse to Nottingham," F. Grove (London), 1623-1661; also Wood 401(37) [partly illegible], "Robin Hoods Progresse to Nottingham"; Douce Ballads 3(120a), "Robin Hood's progress to Nottingham" [subtitle "Shewing how he slew fifteen foresters"]
NOTES: For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]. This seems to be the earliest ballad to explain why Robin Hood became an outlaw, but we note that it is much more recent than ballads such as the "Gest" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" [Child 121].
It is interesting to note that the Forresters Manuscript version of this (but not Child's texts) begin "Randolph kept Robin fifteen winters." Since our first literary reference to Robin Hood is Langland's line "But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Erl of Chestre," Knight speculates that the editor of the Forresters Manuscript (or someone) added this line to link the two. This is certainly possible, but the line as it stands makes very little sense in the Forresters text; "Randolph" is not identified, nor his relationship to Robin. On the other hand, that first stanza follows a different form from the rest of the piece, so it does look editorial. - RBW
This, according to broadside Bodleian Douce Ballads 3(120a) and all other broadsides which list a tune, is to be sung to the tune of "Bold Robin Hood." But Bronson notes that this song cannot be identified, and that several Robin Hood ballads use the same stanza form. - BS, RBW
Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham is Child ballad 139, a Robin Hood ballad, and in fact an original story.
Synopsis
A fifteen-year-old Robin Hood set out to Nottingham to compete in a shooting contest. The king's foresters make fun of him, offering a bet that he could not kill a deer. When he does so, they refuse to pay. Robin shoots fourteen of them and flees to the forest.
In the late 16th century Sloane Life of Robin Hood a version of this story is told, probably from a lost earlier version of the ballad. The Sloane version makes Robin Hood's actions more explicable and less gratuitously bloodthirsty; the foresters had bet their money against Robin Hood's "head" or life, and one of them tried to put him off his aim. Having won the wager Robin waived the debt for all of the foresters except that one, suggesting that they drink the money together. This was not good enough for the foresters and the quarrel developed with fatal results for them. The Sloane account, unlike the extant ballad, makes no mention however of a general mayhem of Nottingham townsmen.
Adaptions
Although this tale never became as definitive as many origin stories for the Merry Men, Howard Pyle used it in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, modifying it slightly: the foresters also threaten to arrest him for poaching, one tries to shoot him, and that one is the only one he kills.
The Location
Nottingham was founded as an Anglo-Saxon settlement and in the 9th Century by the Danes conquered. Under the Danelaw Nottingham was one of five boroughs.From the beginning, there were parts of the settlement of caves that were carved into the soft sandstone. The town was name as Tigguo Cobauc ('House of Caves') and Snottingham.The present inhabitants of the city are certainly grateful that the S was lost with time, as snotty as much as to say in English, snotty 'or' common '.
Nottingham was founded as an Anglo-Saxon settlement and in the 9th Century by the Danes conquered. Under the Danelaw Nottingham was one of five boroughs.From the beginning, there were parts of the settlement of caves that were carved into the soft sandstone. The town was name as Tigguo Cobauc ('House of Caves') and Snottingham.The present inhabitants of the city are certainly grateful that the S was lost with time, as snotty as much as to say in English, snotty 'or' common '.
External links
Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham
ROBIN HOOD'S PROGRESS TO NOTTINGHAM: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham: 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 appears in several seventeenth-century broadsides and the early garlands, and is the first to appear in the Forresters manuscript, under the title Robin Hood and the Forresters: that text seems a retelling, with some literary effect, of the Wood text preferred by Child. It represents a story that was certainly known by the time of the Sloane Life of Robin Hood in the late sixteenth century, so it is not clear why Child calls it "a comparatively late ballad" (III, 175) and prints it so late in his volume (no. 139), when, because of the earlier nature of the story, it should stand between The Jolly Pinder and Robin Hood and Little John (as no. 125).
The fierce tone of the ballad is very different from most that first appear in the seventeenth century: it tells how Robin, harassed by fifteen foresters, shoots them down in what seems an orgy of self-defence. Even the people of Nottingham are badly hurt as they chase the young hero, and there seems to be a grand guignol relish about the fact that in the process Some lost legs, and some lost arms (line 67). There is no sign that the ballad was meant to be read as grotesque or ironic, and it remained popular in the garlands. It harks back to the violent anti-forester spirit of Johnie Cock (which Child carefully placed just before the Robin Hood ballads) and has similarities in that way with the conflict between Robin and Guy of Gisborne.
The language and rhyme suggest this is a fairly old ballad, quite possibly of sixteenth-century origin as the Sloane Life would suggest, though it was presumably produced in prequel mode as a way of explaining how Robin became an outlaw, quite different from the gentrified explanations that he was over-generous (Grafton and Parker) or simply had clerical enemies (Munday). In this respect this ballad shows the multiple character of the tradition, and that the earlier severity of the outlaw survived in contrast to more sophisticated versions. The garlands of 1663 and 1670 print somewhat gentrified pieces like Robin Hood and Queen Catherin (Child no. 145) alongside this ballad's powerful assertion of how a social bandit can be created by the violent malice of the agents of law.
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
139. ROBIN HOOD'S PROGRESS TO NOTTINGHAM
Texts: Creighton, Sgs Bids N Sc, 15.
Local Titles: Robin Hood.
Story Types: A: A brief song tells how Robin Hood kills fourteen or fifteen foresters with one arrow, routs ten men who come to capture him, and escapes to the greenwood.
Examples: Creighton.
Discussion: The story (see Child, III, 175) in full tells how Robin Hood when fifteen years old fell in with fifteen foresters who were drinking at Nottingham. He made a bet he could kill a deer at one hundred yards. However, when he did it, the men refused to pay. Robin Hood, therefore, killed them all, as well as the men who were sent from Nottingham to capture him. The
story is from the Sloane Ms. 715, 7, fol. 157 and was made into a popular ballad in the seventeenth century. The Canadian fragment is close to Child 139, stanzas 12, 16, and 17.