Traditional song
Robin Hood and the Tanner
is
Child ballad
126 (
Roud
332).
[1]
It is a late seventeenth-century English
broadside
ballad
and one of several ballads about the medieval folk hero
Robin Hood
that form part of the
Child ballad
collection, which is one of the most comprehensive collections of traditional English ballads but has now been subsumed and surpassed by the
Roud Folk Song Index
.
Synopsis
[
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]
The story follows the exploits of a
tanner
, or leather-maker, named
Arthur a Bland
. One summer morning, the formidable Arthur, oaken
pikestaff
on shoulder, sets off through
Sherwood Forest
to see the red deer there. Along the way, he encounters
Robin Hood
, who accuses him of
poaching
. Arthur challenges Robin with his pikestaff ("For thy sword & thy bow I care not a straw" [2.6]) and curses at him ("If thou get a knock upon the bare scop, / thou canst as well sh[*]t[*] as shoot" [2.9-10]). Robin cautions him to speak more cleanly, but Arthur refuses, and so Robin intends to discipline him, but wants to fight with a staff of equal length. Arthur rudely challenges him again and Robin knocks him on the head hard enough to make the blood trickle down; when he recovers, Arthur strikes Robin with the same result. The sight of his own blood makes Robin "[rave] like a wild Boar" (3.16). The two men fight so energetically that they are like "two wild Boars in a chase" and "all the wood [rings] at every bang" (3.23, 29). After two hours, Robin calls a stop to the fighting and promises that Arthur is free to roam Sherwood Forest from now on. In return, Arthur promises that he will tan Robin's hide for free. Robin then reveals his identity and makes a further offer: that Arthur give up his trade and come to live with him, for pay, in Sherwood Forest. Arthur accepts and asks after Robin's side-kick,
Little John
, to whom he is related on his mother's side. Robin blows on his horn and Little John appears. Robin explains his combative stance by telling him that Arthur is certainly a tanner, as he has tanned his hide. At first not understanding that Robin approves of Arthur, Little John offers to have his "hide" "tanned," too: "[I]f such a feat he can do / If he be so stout, we will have a bout, / and he shall tan my hide too" (4.30-32). But Robin stops Little John by explaining Arthur's moral character and his relation to him. Little John then throws his pike aside and clasps Arthur around the neck, weeping for joy. The three men dance together around an oak-tree to celebrate their new identity as a band of three.
In other variants, Arthur is not related to Little John.
Historical and cultural significance
[
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]
This ballad is part of a group of ballads about
Robin Hood
that in turn, like many of the popular ballads collected by
Francis James Child
, were in their time considered a threat to the
Protestant 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 after
A Gest of Robyn Hode
, their Victorian collector
Francis Child
claimed that variations on the "'Robin met with his match'" theme, such as this ballad, are "sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening," and that "a considerable part of the Robin Hood poetry looks like char-work done for the petty press, and should be judged as such."
[4]
Child had also called the Roxburghe and Pepys collections (in which some of these ballads are included) "'
veritable dung-hills
[...], in which only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel.'"
[5]
However, as
folklorist
and
ethnomusicologist
Mary Ellen Brown has pointed out, Child's denigration of the later Robin Hood ballads is evidence of an ideological view he shared with many other scholars of his time who wanted to exclude cheap printed ballads such as these from their pedigree of the
oral tradition
and early
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 hand, the broadsides are significant in themselves as showing, as English jurist and legal scholar
John Selden
(1584?1654) puts it, "'how the wind sits. As take a straw and throw it up in the air; you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up 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, unlike weightier tomes, they are important because they are markers of contemporary "current events and popular trends."
[7]
It has been speculated that in his time Robin Hood represented a figure of
peasant
revolt, but the
English
medieval
historian
J. C. Holt
has argued that the tales developed among the gentry, that he is a yeoman rather than a peasant, and that the tales do not mention peasants' complaints, such as oppressive taxes.
[8]
Moreover, he does not seem to rebel against societal standards but to uphold them by being munificent, devout, and affable.
[9]
Other scholars have seen the literature around Robin Hood as reflecting the interests of the common people against
feudalism
.
[10]
The latter interpretation supports Selden's view that popular ballads provide a valuable window onto the thoughts and feelings of the common people on topical matters: for the peasantry, Robin Hood may have been a redemptive figure.
Library and archival holdings
[
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]
The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the
University of California, Santa Barbara
holds three seventeenth-century
broadside
ballad
versions of this tale: one in the Euing collection at the
Glasgow University Library
(304), another in the
Pepys collection
at
Magdalene College
at the
University of Cambridge
(2.111), and another in the
Crawford
collection at the
National Library of Scotland
(665).
[11]
Recordings
[
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An audio recording of this ballad is available online.
[12]
An instrumental recording of this ballad by Richard Searles is available online.
[13]
References
[
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]
- ^
"Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Roud 332 entry"
.
- ^
Watt (1993)
, pp. 39?40
- ^
Watt (1993)
, pp. 39?40, quoting Edward Dering,
A brief and necessary instruction
(1572), sig.A2v.
- ^
Child (2003)
, p. 42
- ^
Brown (2010)
, p. 67; Brown's italics
- ^
a
b
Brown (2010)
, p. 69
- ^
a
b
Fumerton & Guerrini (2010)
, p. 1
- ^
Holt (1989)
, pp. 37?38
- ^
Holt (1989)
, p. 10
- ^
Singman (1998)
, p. 46, and first chapter as a whole
- ^
"Ballad Archive Search - UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive"
. Ebba.english.ucsb.edu
. Retrieved
2015-05-31
.
- ^
"EBBA ID: 31721 - UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive"
. Ebba.english.ucsb.edu
. Retrieved
2015-05-31
.
- ^
"Richard Searles - Robin Hood and the Tanner"
. YouTube.com. 2010-06-19.
Archived
from the original on 2021-12-21
. Retrieved
2015-05-31
.
Bibliography
[
edit
]
- Brown, Mary Ellen (2010). "Child's ballads and the broadside conundrum". In Patricia Fumerton; Anita Guerrini; Kris McAbee (eds.).
Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500?1800
. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 57?72.
ISBN
978-0-7546-6248-8
.
- Child, Francis James
, ed. (2003) [1888?1889].
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
. Vol. 3. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
- Fumerton, Patricia; Guerrini, Anita (2010). "Introduction: straws in the wind". In Patricia Fumerton; Anita Guerrini; Kris McAbee (eds.).
Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500?1800
. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 1?9.
ISBN
978-0-7546-6248-8
.
- Holt, J. C.
(1989).
Robin Hood
. Thames and Hudson.
ISBN
0-500-27541-6
.
- Singman, Jeffrey L. (1998).
Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend
. Greenwood Publishing Group.
ISBN
0-313-30101-8
.
- Watt, Tessa (1993).
Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550?1640
. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.
Cambridge University Press
.
ISBN
9780521458276
.
External links
[
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]