Bluegrass Messengers

Recordings & Info 148. The Noble Fisherman, Robin Hood's Preferment

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

CONTENTS:

 1) Alternative Titles
 2) Traditional Ballad Index 
 3)  Robin Hood's Fishing: Introduction
  
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
  1) Roud No. 3958: The Noble Fisherman, Robin Hood's Preferment (10 Listings)  

Alternative Titles

Robin Hood's Fishing

Traditional Ballad Index: The Noble Fisherman, Robin Hood's Preferment [Child 148]

NAME: Noble Fisherman, The, or, Robin Hood's Preferment [Child 148]
DESCRIPTION: Robin goes to sea as a fisherman. He is scoffed at as a lubber, but when the fishing vessel is approached by a French ship of war his prowess with the bow permits the fishermen to take it and its cargo of gold.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1663 (garland); a song that was likely this one was entered into the Stationer's Register in 1631
KEYWORDS: Robinhood ship battle
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (7 citations)
Child 148, "The Noble Fisherman, or, Robin Hood's Preferment" (1 text)
Bronson 148, comments only
OBB 124, "The Noble Fisherman or Robin Hood's Preferment" (1 text)
BBI, RZN15, "In summer time when leaves grow green"
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. 17-22, "Robin Hood's Fishing" (1 text, with substantial differences from the broadside and garland versions)
R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 180-182, "The Noble Fisherman (Robin Hood's Preferment)" (1 text)
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. 581-591, "Robin Hood's Fishing" (1 text, primarily from the Forresters manuscript rather than the broadsides used by Child)
Roud #3958
NOTES: For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117].
Dobson/Taylor, p. 179, say that Robin Hood has never "undergone a more bizarre transformation" than the one that sent him to sea, but the ballad nonetheless proved popular -- and it's worth noting that some similar outlaw tales also have interludes at sea.
Child mentions, in his notes on this ballad, that the romance of Eustac(h)e the Monk also has an episode in which the hero goes to sea. A stronger parallel might be the tale of Hereward the Wake, Hereward too takes on the disguise of a fisherman (chapter 25). Both the Hereward tale and Eustace's story are considered sources for the Robin Hood legend. But I would incline to consider the Hereward tale a more likely source for this later ballad, even though the parallel may not be as close. The tale of Eustace survives in only a single manuscript, and is unlikely to have been well known in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century; Hereward's tale was always popular.
Chambers, p. 131, notes the existence of a ship _Robyn Hude_  at Aberdeen in 1438, which is another interesting nautical link (cf. Knight/Ohlgren, p. 581), but the significance of this is unclear.
Similarly, Bett, p. 17, mentions a Robin Hood's Bay near Whitby in Yorkshire, but there are so many sites named for Robin Hood that they cannot all be associated with the original form of the legend (whatever that original form was).
For additional details on the Eustace version, see the summary in Cawthorne, pp. 121-131, or the translation in Knight/Ohlgren. For Hereward, see Linklater, pp. 238-239, Baldwin, pp. 35-26, or, again, the translation in Knight/Ohlgren.
Knight/Ohlgren, p. 582, suggest that this is sort of a "Robin Hood and the Potter" [Child 121]  converted to a sea setting; they give it relatively high praise for one of the late ballads. It is true that Robin goes incognito and takes up a trade -- but the direction of the song is completely different. And I am not impressed with the internal logic of the piece.
To be fair, piracy was definitely a problem in the medieval period; with no international agreements and no world-spanning navy (no navies at all, really), it was often "every ship for itself." Hewitt, p. 24, notes fourteen instances of piracy during the reign of Edward III, including five by English mariners in the year 1354 alone. Given the scantiness of our records, and the fact that many victims of pirates would not have survived to report it anyway, it would seem likely that there were in fact dozens of incidents involving English ships each year -- although in many cases the English were the pirates, not the victims.
The first few verses of this often contain a sort of an ode to the sailor's life, calling it a profitable calling. It can hardly have been more profitable than being an outlaw, if the "Gest" is accurate describing Robin's fortune. For that matter, according to Hewitt, p. 76, a sailor in the king's service early in the Hundred Years' War earned three pence a day. A good archer in Edward III's armies earned twice that. So it makes no sense for Robin to turn sailor even if he wanted to "go legit." I suspect these have floated in from a song praising fishermen. Possibly a fisherman decided that he wanted his own Robin Hood ballad....  - RBW
>>BIBLIOGRAPHY<<
Baldwin: David Baldwin, _Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked_, Amberley, 2010
Bett: Henry Bett, _English Myths & Legends_, being apparently a single volume edition of two separate volumes, _English Myths_ and _English Legends_, published with separate pagination and separate indices and no indication of the original date (I use the 1991 Dorset Press edition of the combined volumes)
Cawthorne: Nigel Cawthorne, _A Brief History of Robin Hood: The True History Behind the Legend_, Running Press, 2010
Chambers: E. K. Chambers,  _English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages_, Oxford, 1945, 1947
Dobson/Taylor: R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976
Hewitt: H. J. Hewitt, _The Organization of War under Edward III_, 1966 (I use the 2004 Pen & Sword edition with a new introduction by Andrew Ayton)
Linklater: Eric Linklater, _Conquest of England_, Doubleday, 1966

This ballad is found in seventeenth-century broadsides and garlands and was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1631. The earliest of the Wood texts, which Child relied on (dated by Wing at 1650?), is quite unclear in the final action and appears to have been cut down to fit onto a broadside sheet. The version found in the Forresters manuscript has a fuller and more lucid sequence of final action, and, as its sense of completeness appears most unlikely to have been generated editorially from the broadside version, its text is used here.

Robin Hood's Fishing has Robin leaving the forest to make more money as a fisherman in Scarborough, Yorkshire. He is very poor at that trade, but proves his heroic quality with the bow and sword when a French pirate ship tries to steal the catch. Unique as this theme is, other connections of Robin with the sea are not completely absent -- for example the remarkable occurrence of a ship named "Robin Hood" in Aberdeen as early as 1438, as well as the coastal village named Robin Hood's Bay (known as a smuggler's haven), south of Whitby and only twenty miles from Scarborough. The ballad itself has some connection with the north and probably with Yorkshire in what appears to be its underlying dialect, clearest in the Forresters version.

In its broadside versions the ballad is usually called The Noble Fisherman, with the subtitle Robin Hood's Preferment, which implies something like "professional advancement." It was entered in the Stationers' Register under the title Robin Hood's Great Prize, but this title was lost, perhaps confused with Robin Hood's Golden Prize, an archery contest ballad. Commentators have been severe on the ballad in general: Child thought it "may strike us as infantile" (III, 21), and Dobson and Taylor felt it was a "bizarre metamorphosis" for the hero (1976, p. 179). Yet the ballad was also extremely popular, appearing in "an exceptionally large number" of seventeenth-century broadsides (Dobson and Taylor, 1976, p. 179).

They attributed this to the "commercial attractions" of a song about Britain's most popular hero set in "the almost equally popular genre of a successful sea victory over the national enemy" (1976, p. 180). But it is not so clear that France was the only national enemy at the time, and it is an act of piracy, not national aggression, that Robin single-handedly frustrates. Dobson and Taylor do not follow up the interesting possibilities of their own term "metamorphosis": this ballad, for all its nautical setting is in many respects structured like Robin Hood and the Potter. In both, the hero goes from a greenwood setting to a mercantile trade, which he handles badly and so receives humiliation; yet his innate courage and skill bring him to both victory and wealth, which he shares generously. Curiously, both ballads involve Robin more or less platonically with a woman, here the widow and owner of the ship, there the Sheriff's wife.

In style the ballad has traces of a commercial author in the first attention-catching stanza, and some occasional Grub-Street-like usages -- most desperatly (line 80), most gallantly (line 122). But otherwise it is straightforward in diction and technique, without the third-line internal rhyme of the commercial songsters. The name Robin chooses, Symon of the Lee, sounds like a reference to the Gest, which also seems in mind when the hero wishes to be back in Plumpton Park (line 71). In general Robin Hood's Fishing is a skilful reorientation of the outlaw tradition, certainly exploiting a range of national feeling against the French, but also more in tune with the spirit of the Robin Hood material than has been realized by those who have treated this ballad simply as an oddity.