Recordings & Info 149. Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage
[There are no known US or Canadian traditional versions of this ballad, however the ballad is mentioned in Coffin's 1977 edition apparently reffering to Aunt Molly Jackson's original version of Child 149- see excerpt by Greenway below. There are three known recordings.]
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage: Introduction-- Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
4) Child Ballad Collection
5) Greenway excerpt from Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation
6) Wiki
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 3991: Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage (6 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Pedigree Education and Marriage of Robin Hood
Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage [Child 149]
NAME: Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage [Child 149]
DESCRIPTION: Robin and his mother visit her brother, who makes Robin his heir and gives him Little John as a page. Robin takes Little John to his band in the forest. He meets shepherd Clorinda who impresses by shooting a buck. They go to Titbury feast and are married.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1716; Wing dated one of the broadsides before 1685, according to Knight/Ohlgren
KEYWORDS: Robinhood family mother brother servant outlaw marriage
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (3 citations)
Child 149, "Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor and Marriage" (1 text)
BBI, RZN17, "Kind gentlemen will you be patient awhile"
ADDITIONAL: 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. 527-540, "Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage" (1 text,based primarily on the Roxburghe copy)
Roud #3991
NOTES: Child notes that this ballad has several elements at variance with the bulk of the Robin Hood tradition. - KK
That is being very polite to a rather dreadful piece of hack work. For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]. As for this monstrosity, well, Child gave it a bit of what it deserves when he notes that "The jocular author of this ballad... would certainly have been diverted by any one's supposing him to write under the restraints of tradition."
Knight/Ohlgren, p. 527, note that the texts borrows many materials not in the Robin Hood tradition, and concludes with a hope that the King will have heirs. They suggest that this is a wish for Charles II (reigned 1660-1685), who in fact had no legitimate children, which caused the throne to go to his Catholic brother James and eventually producing the Glorious Revolution.
This seems highly likely, but is not a logical necessity, since there were other childless English kings. One of them, of course, was Richard I, who why the mid-seventeenth century had become the usual King of the Robin Hood story.
The ballad implies that Robin is no longer a pure yeoman; he is the nephew of a "Squire Gamwell" (compare the Young Gamwell of "Robin Hood Newly Revived" [Child 128]), and his mother is the niece of the romance hero Guy of Warwick.
The song rings in not only the Pindar of Wakefield but also Adam Bell and Company.
To top it all off, Robin's love is not Maid Marian (who, admittedly, is no part of the early legend, but at least comes from the May Games) but Clorinda (Queen) of the Shepherdesses.
Just in case that isn't unreality enough for you, consider the claim in the third stanza that Robin's father could should an arrow a distance of two miles and an inch. (It would never do to forget the inch!)
Of course, a little work with the basic formulae of physics shows that, if we assume no air resistance and that Robin's father shot at an exact 45 degree angle (the optimal angle for propelling an object the maximum distance), the arrow would have needed an initial velocity of about 177 meters per second to cover that distance before falling to earth.
That's about 635 kilometers per hour. Or 380 miles per hour.
I don't know the ballistic properties of an arrow well enough to calculate the effects of air resistance. but I would estimate that, in English conditions, the arrow would have to be fired at least 900 kilometers per hour/550 miles per hour.
Right. - RBW
Child Collection- Child Ballad 149: Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valor and Marriage
Child --Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length --Have
149 Ed McCurdy & Michael Kane Robin Hood’s Birth The Legend of Robin Hood 1973 :23 Yes
149 Hester NicEilidh Robin Hood's Xmas at Gamwell Hall (Cold Winter Tune) Robin Hood Ballad Project 2006 4:35 Yes
149 Hester NicEilidh Robin Hood's Xmas at Gamwell Hall (Ranger Tune) Robin Hood Ballad Project 2006 5:08 Yes
ROBIN HOOD'S BIRTH, BREEDING, VALOUR, AND MARRIAGE: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage: 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 was moderately well-known, with three versions surviving from the seventeenth century, that in the Roxburghe collection seeming earlier than the two collected by Pepys, and therefore the basis for this text. It appeared in three eighteenth-century collections before Ritson, but is not included in the early garlands, which may suggest it is less than fully popular in its distribution. That accords with its character: it is patently a literary confection, and unlike the author of Robin Hood and Queen Catherin the composer has wandered well outside the Robin Hood tradition for materials. The final reference to the King and the national hope for heirs appears to locate it soon after the Restoration in 1660 when there was a good deal of activity in constructing new forms of the Robin Hood tradition, as in Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers, the 1662 Life, and what appears to be the first of the garlands from 1663.
The title alone suggests an overview close to the gentrified tradition of heroic biography, but the ballad is actually less grand than its title might suggest. Robin has gentry connection, in that he is the nephew of Squire Gamwell of Gamwell Hall - a connection to be made much of in the lengthy development of the Victorian novel, especially Pierce Egan the Younger's Robin Hood and Little John (1840). Yet Squire George is a robust character, who could hardly be accused of gentrification, even though he comes from the gentry. He resembles Fielding's Squire Western in this, and another character projects a similar surprising rural directness. Robin has the good fortune to meet and instantly become engaged to a woman from the realms of pastoral, Clorinda the Queen of the Shepherdesses. But although she resembles Ben Jonson's Maid Marian (from The Sad Shepherd) in being a serious hunter, there is a direct quality to her instant agreement to marriage and her felling a buck, and also in her glee at the Tutbury Christmas fair - not to mention her shout to her forest lover as he has just killed five foresters:
The bumpkins are beaten, put up thy sword, Bob,
And now let's dance into the town. (179-80)
The same vigorous eclecticism infects the author's assemblage of material. After two relatively familiar opening stanzas, Robin's father is introduced, to be instantly supplanted by a flood of characters from parallel traditions (the Pinder of Wakefield, already connected to Robin in a famous ballad), and the Cumberland outlaws Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie, whose ballad was extremely popular through the period. From further off he brings Robin's mother's uncle, Sir Guy of Warwick, from medieval romance and popular tradition. And then there is the question of the origin of the name Gamwell. As has been discussed in the context of Robin Hood and Will Scarlet (see p. 499) this may well have been another parallel outlaw story which simply becomes entangled in various ways with the Robin Hood story, much as that of Owein, Yvain, or Ywain did with the Arthur saga. After this improbably wide-ranging presentation of characters comes a brisk story in a highly competent style which celebrates the jovial squire and especially the bold, entrancing Clorinda, dark of hair and quick to shoot. But there is also rough action and comedy: Robin and John kill five of the eight foresters and then all involved enjoy the direct pleasures of the Tutbury Christmas fair, including the now defunct English market town sport of bull-running.
Tutbury, in Staffordshire, is in just the region of the Robin Hood riot that broke out in Walsall in 1497 (Knight, 1994, p. 108), and there are indications that this ballad is concocted with some local reference. The emphasis on specific personal names in lines 185-96 and at line 215 suggest that this ensemble of styles and stories is also locally connected, much as the nineteenth-century pantomimes, with just the same range of transgressiveness, also focus at times on local personalities and events.
Child found this ballad "jocular" (1965, III, 214), and while purists might frown at the mixed nature of its materials and tone, it has an undeniable vigor, not unlike some of the crass but energetic outlaw films of this century. It is particularly interesting that here, as in Robin Hood and Queen Catherin, some elements of gentrification are visible, yet the ballad as a whole lacks the constraint and the conservatism of that part of the tradition. While respectability was closing about some elements of the outlaw myth, the tricksterish and carnival forces that so often energize the material are seen, here at least, to be a good match for the forces of respectability: in later versions of this ballad the King offers Robin a place at court but, in the spirit of the Gest, he refuses.
Excerpt from Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation:
Aunt Molly extends the tradition of Robin Hood's illegitimate birth further in two ballads unquestionably of her own composition. [16] The first borrows the early framework of Child I49 ("Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage"): Robin's grandmother, Lady Huntington, takes him with her to her brother's house on the Christmas of Robin's fifteenth year- "to test his ale and beer," as Aunt Molly puts it. Her real purpose in this last ride together is to tell Robin the circumstances of his birth. She has little to add to the Earl's knowledge of the tragic birth in the woods except that ". . . we found a note that your mother had wrote / . . . and this is all it had to say:/ 'I am going to be married to a hard-working man; / Forgive me, Dad, I pray.'" Robin's mind is disturbed by this knowledge, and he resolves to dedicate his life to helping all unfortunate hard-working men. So, when the Earl dies early the next year, and "The squire was called to make an equal divide / (For Robin Hood was only fifteen), / So it was none other than young Robin's step-grandmother/ That was appointed his guardian [gardeen]," Robin spends his inheritance altruistically". When he had nothing more to give to the poor" he took to the woods, with what results we all know.
Aunt Molly then clears up the mystery of Archibald, whom we left cowering behind the green oak tree, in another ballad set to the tune of "John Hardy." One day while Robin, now a man, is traveling along in the northern woods, he chances upon a log cabin. Curiosity was ever one of his traits, "So Robin Hood pushed open the door / And such a sad and pitiful sight / He neverh ad seen before." " Laying" there upon his bed is an old white-haired man, at the point of expiration. He is "too weak to walk," but "Thank heavens ... he is still strong enough to talk," so he identifies himselfa s the absconded steward of the Earl of Huntington. Gratuitously- the motivation is weak here-he tells Robin of the birth of his son many years before, concluding: "'Oh, how I have prayed that my own dear son / Would find me here some day, / And I could tell this story to him / As I am telling you today.' // Then the tears were falling from Robin Hood's eyes / As he said, 'Your story has made me so sad.' / Then he clasped him in his arms and said, / 'I know you are my dad."' After this bathetic reunion the old man prepares for a happy death: "'My prayer is answered, I am happy today, / I know you are my son; / Now I am willing and ready to die- / Lord, let thy will be done.'"
Except for the framework borrowed from Child 149 and one stanza carried over from "The Birth of Robin Hood," there is no apparent source for these two ballads in folk material, although the frequent internal rimes of the first ballad are in the genuine Robin Hood ballad tradition. They have little to recommend them as folk poetry; they are irregular in rime and meter, prolix and prosaic, and rather mawkish for a person of Aunt Molly's spirit to sing. Still they have an importance beyond their intrinsic worth.