How to Be English (17 page)

The real-life Robin Hood is much more elusive. His first mention in literature was in 1377 in William Langland's classic
Piers Plowman
, where a drunken priest criticises himself for knowing the rhymes of Robin Hood better than he knows his prayers.

The legend itself is much older than that. An English troubadour, Adam de la Halle, wrote a song in the 1260s called ‘Jeu de Robin et Marion'. By then the legend must have been so widespread that many people were nicknamed ‘Robinhood', and not all of them criminals.

When the historians started to write about him in the sixteenth century, he was reported as having been born in 1160 in Loxley – in Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire or possibly even Warwickshire – and been called Robert Fitzooth. He was also supposed to have used the title, perhaps ironically, of the Earl of Huntingdon.

He died, so the story goes, at Kirklees Monastery on 18 November 1248 at the age of eighty-seven. In 1690, his gravestone was still in what had been the monastery grounds, with an almost indecipherable inscription – in spelling unknown to antiquarians. It said:

Hear undernead dis laitl stean,

Laiz Robert earl of Huntingtun.

Near archir ver az hie sa geud

And pipl kauld im Robin Heud.

His sidekick Little John was supposed to have been exiled to Ireland, though there was also a grave claimed to be his in Hathersage in Derbyshire. The grave was opened in 1764 and a thirty-inch thigh bone taken out, which was put in the window of the home of the parish clerk. It was stolen from there by the antiquarian Sir George Strickland.

Unfortunately for Robin Hood's gravestone at Kirklees, the earth had not actually been disturbed underneath it and most of the stone disappeared in the nineteenth century, despite Victorian railings, because the navvies working on the Yorkshire & Lancashire Railway believed that fragments from it could cure toothache. It was a fake.

Since then, the hunt for the original Robin Hood has been almost as intense as it was in the stories. The most promising name in the legal records was a fugitive in the Yorkshire assize rolls for 1225/6 called Robert Hod or Hobbehod, who may also have been the hanged outlaw Robert of Wetherby. The man who hunted him down, Eustace of Lowdham, had been deputy sheriff of Nottingham, and later became the sheriff. There was also a Robert FitzOdo from Loxley who was stripped of his knighthood in the 1190s. The sheriff of Nottingham from 1209 to 1224, Philip Mark, was known for his own robberies, false imprisonments and seizure of land.

But for all the work of historians, the story of Robin Hood will always be related to the peculiar period when the king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was in prison in Austria and Germany, and a vast ransom was being collected in silver in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral to pay for his release.

This explains some of Robin's talismanic properties – a lonely, loyal struggle on behalf of the true king, battling against his corrupt officials. Similarly, the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Richard II, fighting in just the same way against his corrupt placemen.

The Robin Hood legend implies a kind of millenarian hope that the king would return, like Odysseus to Ithaca or Christ to the temple – cleansing and righting wrongs. ‘I love not man in all the worlde / So well as I do my King,' says Robin in an early version of the ballad.

It is a legend that says the world is upside down, radical in an English populist way, which is why it still has resonance today.

How hath the knyght his leue i-take,

And wente hym on his way;

Robyn Hode and his mery men

Dwelled styll full many a day.

Lyth and lysten, gentil men,

And herken what I shall say,

How the proude sheryfe of Notyngham

Dyde crye a full fayre play.

From the ‘Gest of Robyn Hode',
c.1460

REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE ALWAYS
found England a frustrating place. They waited on tenterhooks for revolt to spread during the 1926 General Strike, only to find that bored trade union pickets were playing football with the police. This peculiarity goes right the way back – to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 and probably before.

In 1381, the peasants were stirred up by the tensions generated by the Black Death, and the high taxes to pay for the Hundred Years War with France. Their demands seemed pretty radical: lower taxation and changes in the regulations about labourers' pay. Equally radical was the preaching of John Ball and the other leaders, Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and the rest, whose names still echo down the centuries; as was their behaviour, breaking into the Tower of London and murdering the Archbishop of Canterbury. But once they got to Smithfield, there was no question of overthrowing the boy king, Richard II. On the contrary, the peasants regarded themselves as his loyal subjects. It was the king's corrupt officials they wanted to dismiss.

It was the bankers they hated, aspiring to recreate the ancient equality of Anglo-Saxon rule. Those were the slogans shouted by the peasants, innkeepers, clergymen and farmers who burst into London on 13 June 1381, tearing down John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace in the Strand, hunting down lawyers and Flemish traders. Those storming through Aldgate and across the Thames shouted the slogan ‘with Richard and the true commons'.

This needs some investigation. Similar rebellions on the Continent were carried out by semi-terrorists, and it may be that there was a distinction between radicalism in England and continental Europe, at least in southern Europe, where revolutionaries owed their ideas to the so-called Manichean heresy. The English gentry did not pine – as the continental gentry so often did – for urban living. They settled in the countryside. When the countryside rose up against the town, as it did in England too, this was not necessarily the poor against the rich – it was the powerless against the powerful, those who grew vegetables against those who grew money. Even the records of those punished for their involvement in the Peasants' Revolt include a number of well-to-do country types, yeomen farmers, clergymen and tradesmen.

The intellectual descendant of the revolutionaries of 1381, and of Wat Tyler – stabbed by the mayor of London in Smithfield where he was then executed – was William Morris (see Chapter 41). In 1886, he imagined dreaming his way back to the revolt, and meeting John Ball himself in a church in the middle of the night, and talking about the past and future. And afterwards, he said that he ‘pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name'.

This is typically melancholic, but it is also wise, in a distinctively English way. That is the way change happens in England, round and round. It is in some ways the ultimate English antidote to revolutionary change.

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

John Ball

‘
IT IS A
truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' So begins Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
, considered by many to be England's greatest novel. The constant film adaptations, TV series and novel sequels seem to fuel our obsession still further. Perhaps this affection was sparked to some extent by Andrew Davies' hugely successful BBC adaptation (1995) with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr Darcy.

Jane Austen herself was on the reserved side and might be taken aback by the current Austen-mania. She was born into a large and slightly impoverished rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, and lived her life surrounded by hordes of largely impoverished younger cousins. The plight of English women from the minor landed gentry dependent on marriage for financial security, and the intricate economics and interplay between the social divisions were some of her major themes.

Austen died in 1817 and her grave in the nave of Winchester Cathedral mentions her name but not the novels that made her world famous after her death. She published only six –
Sense and Sensibility
(1811),
Pride and Prejudice
(1813),
Mansfield Park
(1814),
Emma
(1815),
Northanger Abbey
(1818, posthumous), and
Persuasion
(1818, posthumous) – most anonymously (attributed as ‘By a Lady'), and struggled with
Pride and Prejudice
for years under the title
First Impressions
.

She did acquire a fashionable following in the royal family, and there was some favourable comment by reviewers, of which two in particular helped make her reputation – Sir Walter Scott, the great Scottish novelist, and Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, a man who had shocked polite society by preaching to Queen Victoria with his leg resting on the top of the pulpit.

As everyone English knows,
Pride and Prejudice
concerns the adventures of a young lady called Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five sisters, her hysterical mother and her laid-back, rather cynical lazy father. It describes how she thoroughly misjudges Mr Darcy, through a series of misunderstandings, especially after his disastrous first, rather snobbish, proposal of marriage – thinking him haughty and cruel. By the end of the book, however, she finds he is quite the reverse – much to the horror of his relative Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

What Jane Austen achieves is an extremely funny novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat, yet centres not on an exotic adventure but on the very ordinary business of finding someone to love. Her enemies, as always, are snobbery, money and pretension.

Jane Austen died at the age of forty-one, and never married.

That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.

Mr Bennet discourages his daughter Mary from playing the piano again

THAT'S THE WAY
to do it! Even these days, when Punch and Judy shows are comparatively rare, and even strings of sausages are a bit of a surprise, we understand where that injunction comes from. We also know it is spoken with a strange, raucous nasal voice, and with gusto and self-satisfaction, the very essence of the phrase ‘as pleased as Punch'.

There is something about Punch and Judy shows, with their casual murders and multiple brutalities, which English children seem to love – not to mention the policeman, the crocodile and the sausages. With its striped red and white booths, it almost smells of ice cream, jelly and the seaside.

But, like many English institutions, the origin of Mr Punch is actually Italian. He derives from the
commedia dell'arte
and the Italian Renaissance, a direct descendant of the character Pulcinella, and he owes as much to the presence of itinerant Italian players in the sixteenth century in London as to anything else. Samuel Pepys saw his first Punch and Judy show, thanks to an Italian called Pietro Gimonde, in Covent Garden on 9 May 1662. He described it as ‘an Italian puppet show'.