Bluegrass Messengers

Recordings & Info 145. Robin Hood & Queen Katherine

[There are no known US or Canadian versions of this ballad.]

CONTENTS:

 1) Alternative Titles
 2) Traditional Ballad Index 
 3)  Wiki
 4) Robin Hood and Queen Catherin: Introduction
  
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
  1) Roud No. 72: Queen Katherine (12 Listings)  

Alternative Titles

Robin Hood and Queen Catherin 

Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood and Queen Katherine [Child 145]

NAME: Robin Hood and Queen Katherine [Child 145]
DESCRIPTION: The king proposes a wager with Queen Katherine, his archers against any she may choose. She sends for Robin and his men, giving them false names. They win and are revealed but the king has promised not to be angry with any in the queen's party.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1663 (garland); a song that was likely this one was entered into the Stationer's Register in 1656, and a broadside probably printed by 1655
KEYWORDS: Robinhood contest trick royalty
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (6 citations)
Child 145, "Robin Hood and Queen Katherine" (3 texts)
Bronson 145, (extensive) comments only
Leach, pp. 413-417, "Robin Hood and Queen Katherine" (1 text)
BBI, RZN10, "Gold tane from the Kings harbengers"
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. 53-61, "Robin Hood and Queen Catherin" (1 text, much longer than the printed versions known to Child)
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. 563-580, "Robin Hood and Queen Catherin" (1 text, based primarily on the Forresters manuscript)
Roud #72
CROSS_REFERENCES:
cf. "Robin Hood's Chase [Child 146]"
NOTES: According to Knight/Ohlgren, this must have been in existence by 1655, because one of the Wood broadsides (Child's B.a) was printed by Grove, who ceased operations in that year. Given the uncertainty about most such dates, I decided to leave the other possible dates in the "Earliest Date" field.
There is no historical "Queen Katherine"; the wife of King Stephen (reigned 1135-1154) was Matilda; the wife of Henry II (1154-1189, the first king usually associated with Robin Hood) was Eleanor of Aquitaine; Richard I (1189-1199) married Berengeria of Navarre; John (1199-1216) has as his primary wife Isabella of Angouleme; Henry III (1216-1272) married Eleanor of Provence; Edward I (1272-1307) married first Eleanor of Castile and then Margaret. Edward II married Isabella of France. Edward III married Philippa of Hainault. The first English Queen Catherine/Katherine was Catherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France, who married Henry V of England in 1420 -- impossibly late for a historical Robin Hood, although she does precede the earliest known copies of the Robin Hood ballads. Nor was there a Scottish Queen Katherine
Leach speculates that one of Henry VIII's wives (either Catherine of Aragon or Katherine Howard) is meant! This involves a major difficulty, pointed out in Nigel Cawthorne, _A Brief History of Robin Hood: The True History Behind the Legend_, Running Press, 2010, p. 187: This ballad involves Friar Tuck, and while both Catherines were Catholic, friars would not have been popular in the reign of Henry VIII (especially in the time of Katherine Howard, after the dissolution of the monasteries. In any case, how can we possibly have a Robin Hood alive after the reformation?) Nonetheless, Knight/Ohlgren, p. 563, also think Catherine of Aragon is meant, because she was the one Queen Catherine who played an active role in English government -- and there are records of Henry VIII playing at Robin Hood.
I would have to say that Henry V seems genuinely more likely -- he of course was deeply involved in recruiting archers, and because his wife was not only foreign but a daughter of Henry's long-time enemy, she might well have been willing to show him up.
The sequel to this story is told in Child 146, "Robin Hood's Chase."
Most versions of the ballad are rather incoherent; it is possible that the broadside prints have been shortened. 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. 52-53, observes that the version in the Forresters Manuscript is about a dozen stanzas longer than most of the others (about a 20% increase in length), and that it resolves many of the inconsistencies.
For background on the Robin Hood legend, including a possible connection between this song and the story of Queen Isabella, the wife of Edward II, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]. - RBW

Robin Hood and Queen Katherine: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Robin Hood and Queen Katherine" is Child ballad 145.[1] "Robin Hood's Chase", Child ballad 146, takes up after it.

The Queen Katherine of the title is not certainly identified. The periods of time with which Robin Hood has normally been associated did not have any queens named Katherine. Because the king is sometimes called Henry, she may be meant as Katherine of Aragon, placing the story in the time of Henry VIII of England.

Synopsis
Queen Katherine makes a bet about winning an archery contest. She summons Robin Hood and his men, and they win it for her.

Adaptations
Howard Pyle included this tale in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood but, to make the tale historically consistent, made it about Eleanor of Aquitaine making a bet with Henry II. Others have followed his lead in the substitution.[2]

References
1.^ Francis Child, "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, "Robin Hood and Queen Katherine"
2.^ Allen W. Wright, The Search for the Real Robin Hood

Robin Hood and Queen Catherin was a popular ballad in the seventeenth century. It is in Percy's Folio, but too much of the text has been lost through ripped pages for this to be used as a basis for the text. A closely related version, entitled Renowned Robin Hood, exists in six separate broadsides and the two early garlands of 1663 and 1670. The earliest full text of this version in the Wood collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, must have been produced by 1655 when Grove, the printer, ceased operations. To judge from its royal content its publication is likely to have derived from before the Civil War began in earnest in 1642: Wing dates the earliest copy c. 1630. However, this ballad has always seemed somewhat incoherent in its opening section and quite unfollowable in its account of the archery contest: it was not clear how many of Robin's men shoot and what aliases they used -- and was Clifton one of their disguises or the name of the king's leading archer? These problems were resolved with the discovery of the Forresters manuscript in 1993. This is one of the two ballads where Forresters is clearly superior to Child's versions, apparently because they represent a fuller text before it was cut down to fit a broadside page (the other is Robin Hood's Fishing). This is the text printed here.

The ballad seems to have been derived from a number of sources. The Gest, Parker's A True Tale of Robin Hood, Robin Hood and the Bishop, probably Munday's Downfall and perhaps Adam Bell were all known to the compiler of what is effectively a Robin Hood adventure within the framework of the court of Henry VIII. Although Robin is on good terms with the queen and becomes accepted by the king, this is not really a gentrified ballad, in that Robin is merely a highway robber and fine archer. The only truly gentrified touch is in the ending added to the ballad in the 1663 garland, where the king finally pardons Robin and makes him "Earle of fair Huntington." Both Wood and Forresters (the end of Percy is missing) conclude with a disagreement between Robin and John, rather unusual for this late date, and reminiscent of their earlier differences of opinion as in Robin Hood and the Monk or Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne.

Even in its somewhat confused broadside form, this was an effective and popular ballad. Child found it "very pleasant" (1965, III, 197), but he also recognized its "exaggeration" and that it was a "piece of regular hack work." It clearly is a made-up ballad drawing on several popular elements. The idea that the queen sympathizes with outlaws is also found in the very popular Adam Bell. Robin Hood and Queen Catherin is constructed for an audience in what the Percy version calls "lovely London," apart from Nottingham which is placed, perhaps in irony, far in the North, line 60. It is tempting to think the ballad may have been produced soon after Martin Parker's A True Tale of Robin Hood, which has royal connections, action in the north, and a sense of the conflict among the outlaws with which this full and, in the Forresters version, well-constructed ballad ends.