The seventeenth-century riches of the Robin Hood ballads were in the mercantile form of the broadside, sold for cash, and they were sold to be sung as well as read. But the tunes that are often mentioned with the broadside texts were usually borrowed from other songs: this is literary work being oralized. Some broadside ballads are derived from the Gest (Robin robs the clergy, outwits the sheriff, wins an archery tournament, encounters the king as a near equal). Two with traceable earlier origins reiterate Robin’s tough side. When young, he becomes an outlaw because the foresters insult him, and he kills them all; then he rescues a widow’s three sons from execution for poaching and hangs the sheriff instead.
In the commonest broadside story, Robin meets a stranger in the forest and fights him, but this is about community, not heroic triumph. The normal outcome is an honorable draw and the opponent joins the band, be he Tanner, Tinker, Pinder (beast-warden), or even a fighting friar (this last appeared in play form at the end of a reprint of the Gest circa 1560; a modernized version of the text is printed as an appendix to this chapter). The broadside ballads, more than 30 of them, flourished in the mid - and late seventeenth century. There appears to have been some identification of Robin with anti-royalism, and in 1661 a short play was staged in Nottingham on the day of Charles Il’s coronation. In it, a spiritless Robin submits to the new (and also old), order, but the continued, even increased, popularity of a somewhat resistant Robin in ballads and increasingly common verse and prose “Lives” suggests that the Robin Hood stories acted as a safety valve for muted dissent.
World History
