Robbin Hood and His Are at It Again

Child ballad

Robin Hood and Little John, past Louis Rhead, 1912

Robin Hood and Little John is Child ballad 125. It is a story in the Robin Hood canon which has survived as, among other forms, a late seventeenth-century English broadside ballad, and is one of several ballads about the medieval folk hero that form part of the Child carol collection, which is 1 of the well-nigh comprehensive collections of traditional English language ballads.

When Robin Hood is twenty years old he meets some other brisk and fit beau named Little John. Although called "picayune", John is seven feet tall, big-limbed, and fearsome to behold. This is the story of how they met: Robin is out and almost with his men and leaves them on phone call to rove the forest on his ain in search of "[s]port" (5.1). In his roving, Robin meets a stranger on a bridge over a beck who won't give way. They challenge each other with their respective weapons, and the stranger remarks it'due south unfair that Robin has a bow and arrows while he has only a staff, so Robin agrees to take up a staff for the fight. He goes to a thicket and chooses a thick oaken staff, and so runs dorsum to the bridge where they hold to fight with their staffs until one of them falls off. They fight as viciously as if they were thrashing corn, neither willing to requite in and Robin becoming especially incensed when the stranger cracks him on the crown hard plenty to draw claret. The stranger responds to Robin's ire fifty-fifty more powerfully and sends him into the beck, whereupon Robin agrees to call a truce.

As soon as Robin is out of the brook, he blows on his horn to summon his men. The men come up and one of them named William Stutely asks why Robin is all wet and he says information technology is because he has been thrown into the brook past the stranger on the bridge. The men desire to punish the stranger, but Robin holds them back, proverb he can bring together his band and learn how to shoot a bow and pointer. The stranger agrees and reveals himself every bit John Piffling. William Stutely decides to exist Little John's "Godfather", and the men gloat their new comrade by shooting some fat doe for their meat, changing John Little'southward proper name by switching his Christian name and surname in a "Baptismal" ceremony, and then avid on meat and drink (thirty.2). Little John is too dressed in greenish like the other merry men and given a long bow. Robin says he will learn to shoot with the best and will roam the forest with him and his men, owning no state or coin, because whatsoever they need they tin can steal from the clergy passing through. The men finish the day with music and dancing and then retreat to their caves, Petty John now among them.^[1]

Historical and cultural significance [edit]

This ballad is part of a group of ballads most Robin Hood that in turn, similar many of the popular ballads nerveless past Francis James Child, were in their time considered a threat to the Protestant organized religion.^[2] Puritan writers, like Edward Dering writing in 1572, considered such tales "'childish follye'" and "'witless devices.'"^[3] Writing of the Robin Hood ballads subsequently A Gest of Robyn Hode, their Victorian collector Francis Child claimed that variations on the "'Robin met with his match'" theme, such every bit this ballad, are "sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening", and that "a considerable role of the Robin Hood poetry looks like char-work done for the picayune press, and should be judged as such."^[four] Kid had also chosen the Roxburghe and Pepys collections (in which some of these ballads are included) "'veritable dung-hills ..., in which but after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate gem.'"^[v] Notwithstanding, as folklorist and ethnomusicologist Mary Ellen Brownish has pointed out, Child'southward denigration of the later Robin Hood ballads is bear witness of an ideological view he shared with many other scholars of his time who wanted to exclude inexpensive printed ballads such as these from their pedigree of the oral tradition and early on literature.^[6] Child and others were reluctant to include such broadsides in their collections because they thought they "regularized the text, rather than reflecting and/or participating in tradition, which fostered multiformity."^[6] On the other manus, the broadsides are meaning in themselves every bit showing, as English jurist and legal scholar John Selden (1584-1654) puts it, "'how the current of air sits. As take a straw and throw it up in the air; you lot shall encounter by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting upward a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.'"^[7] Even though the broadsides are cultural ephemera, different weightier tomes, they are important because they are markers of contemporary "electric current events and pop trends."^[7] It has been speculated that in his time Robin Hood represented a effigy of peasant revolt, but the English medieval historian J.C. Holt has argued that the tales developed amid the gentry, that he is a yeoman rather than a peasant, and that the tales practise not mention peasants' complaints, such as oppressive taxes.^[8] Moreover, he does not seem to rebel against societal standards merely to uphold them past being munificent, devout, and affable.^[9] Other scholars accept seen the literature around Robin Hood as reflecting the interests of the common people against bullwork.^[10] The latter interpretation supports Selden's view that pop ballads provide a valuable window onto the thoughts and feelings of the common people on topical matters: for the peasantry, Robin Hood may accept been a redemptive figure.

Library and archival holdings [edit]

The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the Academy of California, Santa Barbara holds two seventeenth-century broadside ballad versions of this tale: a re-create in the Roxburghe ballad drove at the British Library (3.728-729) and another held in the Crawford collection at the National Library of Scotland (1320).^[11]

Adaptations [edit]

Howard Pyle adapted many tales well-nigh Robin Hood, Lilliputian John, and other characters of the legend in his The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. The fight between Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge is also frequently portrayed in film and television versions of the legend.

References [edit]

1. ^ The parenthetical citations in this synopsis refer to the stanzas and lines of a text transcription of a seventeenth-century broadside carol version of this tale in the Roxburghe ballad collection at the British Library
2. ^ Cheap Print and Pop Piety, 1550-1640 by Tessa Watt, pp. 39-40.
3. ^ Cheap Impress and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 by Tessa Watt, pp. 39-40. Quoting Edward Dering, A cursory and necessary instruction (1572), sig.A2v.
4. ^ The English and Scottish Pop Ballads. Vol. three. Ed. Francis James Child. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1888 and 1889. Republished 1965 and 2003. p. 42.
5. ^ "Child's Ballads and the Broadside Conundrum" by Mary Ellen Brown. Ch. iv in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee. Burlington, Vermont, USA: Ashgate Publishing Visitor, 2010. p. 67; Brown's italics
6. ^ ^{a b} "Child's Ballads and the Broadside Conundrum" by Mary Ellen Chocolate-brown. Ch. four in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee. Burlington, Vermont, USA: Ashgate Publishing Visitor, 2010. p. 69.
7. ^ ^{a b} "Introduction: Straws in the Air current" by Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini. Ch. 1 ibid., p. i
8. ^ J. C. Holt, Robin Hood. Thames and Hudson, 1989, pp. 37-38
9. ^ J. C. Holt, Robin Hood. Thames and Hudson, 1989, p. 10.
10. ^ Singman, Jeffrey L. Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend, 1998, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 46, and offset chapter every bit a whole.
11. ^ "Carol Archive Search - UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive". Ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Retrieved 2015-05-28 .

External links [edit]

• Link to a facsimile canvass of an early modern version of this carol at the English Broadside Carol Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara: [1]
• Link to an audio recording of this ballad
• Website of The Robin Hood Project, a drove of webpages chronicling the development of Robin Hood from his medieval origins to mod depictions, at the Robbins Library at the Academy of Rochester
• Website on all things Robin Hood, including historical background on the real Robin Hood and other characters of the legend, texts and recordings of Robin Hood stories, resources for teachers and students, information well-nigh adaptations, and more

fostergavempurneth.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_and_Little_John

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