Yeoman Robin survived long in broadside form and in small ballad-collections called garlands, which circulated into the nineteenth century through Britain and were sold and even reprinted in America, which had its own take on resistance to the king and his officials. But there was an early modern rival to yeoman Robin in the gentrified earl of Huntington. One of the conservative moves of Tudor culture was to reverse the politics of Robin
Hood, first in chronicles (John Major, 1521, and Richard Grafton, 1569) and then in the prestigious genre of drama, in Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington (1598-99). Elevated as an earl, Robin falls out with a bad king: his resistance to royalty is now in the service of true kingship and lordship, the opposite of the politics of the yeoman outlaw. King John provided the bad monarch (Richard III must have been too recent)—and the return of Richard I from Crusade brings a happy resolution to Robin’s noble, pro-royal resistance. In the Gest Robin had been pardoned and taken to court by the king, but the king was called Edward and had no number, and in any case Robin soon left for the forest.
Other features are also new in gentrification. Lord Robin has a lady, presumably to provide his lands with an inheritor, and we see the return of Marian from the pastourelles: she had appeared occasionally in the play-games but was, with outlaw credibility, absent from the forest of the ballads. Though the king restores Robin, this is a tragic story. Robin’s enemies—in Munday a Catholic clergyman and a faithless steward (archetypal threats to the Tudor aristocracy)—cause his death by poison (they are aiming for the king), and in the gloomy sequel, The Death of Robert Earle of Huntington (1599), after Robin’s early murder Marian is hounded by John to her eventual death.
Ennobled though the gentrified tradition is, it had little literary power. Munday is not a weak writer, but Lord Robin has almost nothing to do. It is his “downfall” to be in the forest, where the yeoman flourished, and the lively, comic, violent deeds of ballad Robin are below this lordly self—in Munday’s first play the widow’s sons are rescued, but Robin only initiates the sequence. The problem for gentrification was that it had no focal heroic action. Ben Jonson wrote half an outlaw masque in The Sad Shepherd, elevating the tradition with pastoral material, writing some fine scenes between Robin and Marian and cranking up some masculine anxiety with a witch who impersonates Marian, but even though he had synopsized a full plot, he never finished it. Scholars suggest that Jonson started writing The Sad Shepherd shortly before his death and this is why it is unfinished, but it may be more likely that his noble-outlaw story just ran out of narrative steam.
Gentrification does generate one other outlaw genre: with Robin as a man who owns both land and powerful identity, there is reason to memorialize him with a formal biography and an epitaph. Starting with the manuscript Sloane Life of about 1600, short prose accounts appear for over two centuries, sometimes prefacing garlands; there also emerges a frequently deployed epitaph, dated to 1247, in splendidly fake Middle English:
Hear underneath this laitl stean laiz Robert erl of Huntingtun near arcir ver az hie sa geud an pipl kauld im robin heud sick utlaws as hi an iz men vil england nivr si agen.
Material culture is also fabricated for the heroic afterlife. A grave slab lies in the grounds of what was Kirklees Abbey, where the Gest has Robin dying. Improbably located in a wood near the road, it bears the epitaph, but no body lies underneath. Then a dramatically extended grave in Hathersage churchyard is the alleged resting place of Little John. This is a masculine memoriality: though she died onstage like Robin, a grave has never been created for Marian.
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