Topics
The recurring questions - was he real, where does the slogan come from, who was the audience, what got suppressed.
The Matter of Britain (Arthur) — 10
Was Arthur real?
The evidence is two texts written three to four centuries after the supposed events (Historia Brittonum, Annales Cambriae), plus a contested line in Y Gododdin. Gildas, writing closest to the period, describes the victory at Badon without naming a commander. Padel and Green argue the folkloric…
The Sarmatian and Scythian origins thesis
Littleton and Malcor's From Scythia to Camelot derives Arthurian motifs (the sword in the stone, the sword returned to water, the draco standard) from Sarmatian cavalry stationed in Britain under Lucius Artorius Castus and from Ossetian Nart sagas. Not accepted by mainstream Arthurian…
Did the Grail have a Celtic prehistory?
Preiddeu Annwn's cauldron of the Otherworld, the Irish cauldron of the Dagda, and the horn of plenty in Welsh tradition have all been proposed as ancestors of Chretien's graal. Others hold that Chretien invented a serving dish and everything afterwards is literary elaboration. Juliette…
The Glastonbury exhumation of 1191
The monks of Glastonbury announced the discovery of the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere with a lead cross reading HIC IACET SEPULTUS INCLITUS REX ARTURIUS IN INSULA AVALONIA. The abbey had burned in 1184 and needed funds; the Angevin crown benefited from a demonstrably dead Arthur who could not…
The Round Table as object and as idea
Wace introduces the table in 1155 to prevent quarrels over precedence. The physical Round Table at Winchester Great Hall is a fourteenth-century construction, repainted for Henry VIII with a Tudor rose at its centre and Henry's own face on Arthur. A clean case of a literary device becoming…
Arthur in Norse and Rus transmission
The Arthurian cycle travelled north through Norwegian court translation (the Riddarasogur, from Hakon Hakonarson's reign) into Icelandic saga and eventually into Belarusian and Russian versions. A useful reminder that the tradition is not only Franco-British.
The silence of Gildas
Gildas writes within living memory of Badon, names Ambrosius Aurelianus as the British leader, and says nothing about Arthur. Every argument for a historical Arthur has to explain this away - usually by arguing that Gildas was writing a sermon rather than a history and named only who suited his…
What the tradition does to its women
Morgan begins in the Vita Merlini as a benign healer of the Isle of Apples and ends as a malevolent schemer. Guinevere goes from an abducted queen in Welsh triad-material to the cause of a civil war. Nimue is split across several incompatible roles. The pattern is consistent: as the cycle…
The English Arthur is not the French one
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative Morte Arthure and Layamon's Brut form a line that runs from Geoffrey through Wace into English alliterative verse, largely bypassing Chretien and the Grail cycles. In it Gawain stays the best knight, Lancelot is marginal or absent, and the…
Avalon and the Breton hope
Geoffrey says only that Arthur was carried to Avalon 'to have his wounds tended'. Wace reports in 1155 that the Bretons still expect him. The belief was live enough that a riot broke out at Bodmin in 1113 when French visitors denied Arthur was still alive, and useful enough that the…
The Matter of the Greenwood (Robin Hood) — 13
Barnsdale or Sherwood?
The Gest places Robin in Barnsdale, South Yorkshire, and names real local landmarks (the Sayles, Watling Street), yet his enemy is the Sheriff of Nottingham, whose jurisdiction is a county away. Sherwood becomes the default location only later. The mismatch is one of the strongest arguments that…
When does 'rob from the rich, give to the poor' actually appear?
Not in the early ballads. The Gest's Robin lends money, extracts it from a lying monk, and returns a knight's estate - redistribution within the gentry, not to the poor. He instructs his men to spare husbandmen and yeomen and to beat bishops. The first surviving statement that he…
The yeoman question: Hilton, Keen and Holt
Hilton (1958) read the ballads as peasant discontent; Keen (1961) agreed; Holt (1960, and Robin Hood 1982) argued the audience was the households of gentry and crown, and that 'yeoman' in the later Middle Ages spanned prosperous free peasants and middling household officials alike.…
Was Robin Hood real?
The best candidates are Robert Hod of York, a fugitive in the 1225-26 assize rolls (possibly the Robert of Wetherby hunted as an outlaw), and the Robert Hood of Wakefield favoured by earlier antiquarians. The strongest datum is negative: in 1262 a clerk renamed the Berkshire fugitive William son…
Robin Hood's Marian devotion
Not Maid Marian - the Virgin Mary. The Gest's Robin hears three masses daily, refuses to eat before doing so, spares any company containing a woman for Our Lady's sake, and treats her as the surety on Sir Richard's loan. The legend's most consistently ignored feature, and the…
How violent are the early ballads?
Very. Much murders a child in Robin Hood and the Monk to silence him. Robin beheads Guy of Gisborne, mutilates the face so it cannot be identified, and carries the head on his bow. Little John shoots the Sheriff. The Gest's Robin dies of deliberate over-bleeding by a kinswoman. Ted's…
Where Maid Marian comes from
From the French pastoral tradition - Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion (c. 1283) pairs a shepherd Robin with a Marion - by way of the English May games, where the two became the summer king and queen. She joins the Robin Hood story from the games, not the ballads, and Munday then…
Robin Hood and the 'social bandit'
Hobsbawm's category of the social bandit - the outlaw the peasantry protects because he embodies their sense of justice - has been applied to Robin Hood repeatedly and contested just as often, since the early Robin is not embedded in a peasant community and the ballads are not peasant…
Robin Hood is a genre, not an original
Hereward the Wake (c. 1070s, written up c. 1109-31), Eustace the Monk (d. 1217), Fouke le Fitz Waryn (d. 1258) and the Tale of Gamelyn (c. 1350-70) all predate or parallel the earliest Robin Hood texts and share the same grammar: unjust dispossession, flight to the forest, disguise and trickery,…
Every chronicler puts Robin in a different reign
Wyntoun (c. 1420) dates him to 1283-85 under Edward I. Bower (c. 1440) puts him in 1266 among Simon de Montfort's disinherited. Major (1521) moves him to the 1190s under Richard I, and that is the version that stuck. The Gest itself says the king is 'Edward'. Three chroniclers…
Who actually invented 'rob from the rich'?
Not Ritson alone. John Major states it in 1521 - Robin took only from the rich, and was the most humane of robbers. What Ritson did in 1795 was different and larger: he gave the claim a scholarly apparatus, a radical politics, a biography and a birth-date, and made it the organising principle…
The pagan Robin was invented in 1984
Herne the Hunter appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor as a local Windsor ghost story and has no connection to Robin Hood until Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood. Within a decade the mystical, green-man, earth-religion Robin was widely assumed to be the oldest layer of the legend rather…
The greenwood is a legal category
Forest in this period does not mean woodland; it means land under forest law, where the king's venison and vert are protected by a separate and notoriously resented jurisdiction with its own courts and officers. Poaching is not theft but an offence against the crown's private pleasure.…