Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood

DESCRIPTION: "Robyn hod in scherewod stod hodud and hathud hosut and schod ffour, And thuynti arowus he bar In hits hondus." Or "Robyn hode Inne Grenewode Stode, Godeman was hee." Or he might stand in Barnsdale. Or elsewhere
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE:
KEYWORDS: Robinhood MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #1830.5
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #4508 [the Barnsdale version, attributed to John Rastell], #4509 [the "schere wod"/Sherwood version
ADDITIONAL: R. M. Wilson: _The Lost Literature of Medieval England_, Philosophical Library, 1952, p. 140, (no title)
Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, _I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric_, Four Courts Press, 2002, p. 93, "(no title)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS. Takamiya Deposit 51 [Sotheby’s, 24 June 1980, lot 33], folio 1 [DIMEV #4508]
MANUSCRIPT: Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 132, folio 100 [DIMEV #4509, with Latin parallel]
NOTES [440 words]: This is an entry made based on speculation. There is no extant ballad "Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood." It was Wilson, p. 139, who suggested, correctly I think, that this text is all that remains of a lost ballad.
The evidence for oral transmission comes from the fact that there are diverse copies of the text.
The first text quoted in the description is from MS. Lincoln Cathedral 132, which also has the text in a Latin translation. They are written on what seems to have originally been a blank page. The fact that the Lincoln Manuscript places Robin in Sherwood is interesting, since most early ballads put him in Barnsdate, but unless the graffito can be firmly dated, it does not prove that Robin was associated with Sherwood at an early date. The best guess as to the date is early fifteenth century (Wilson, p. 140); Boklund-Lagopolou, p. 93, quotes a date of c. 1410. The only other piece of Middle English poetry in the manuscript is also an English/Latin diglot.
The second text in the description is from a Wiltshire parliamentary roll for 1432, which lists as participants "Adam, Belle, Clyme, Ocluw, Willyam, Cloudesle, Robyn, hode, Inne, Grenewode, stode, Godeman, was hee, lytel, Joon, Muchette, Millersson, Scathlok, Reynoldyn" (Public Records Office C219/14/3, part 2, number 101; Holt, p. 69; there is a very poor facsimile on p. 70). Thus in 1432, Robin wasn't in Sherwood, he was just in the greenwood in general.
The Barnsdale version also occurs in a manuscript fragment sold at Sotheby's in 1980 and now in the Yale University Library; I know very little about this particular version, which has a different second line, or the manuscript containing it.
In 1429, the phrase "Robin Hode en Barnesdale stode" was, for some reason, used as a legal formula (Dobson/Taylor, p. 3), and apparently was quoted many times in legal contexts after that, although no one seems to know why. This probably explains the John Rastell quotation cited in the references; Rastell printed a lot of legal books and may have been trained in the law (Plomer, p. 51).
Fowler, p. 70, mentions a version "Robyn Hode in Barnysdale Stood, mentioned in Nicholas Udall's 1542 version of Erasmi Apothegmata. Thus we eventually find Robin in both the forests he haunts in ballads, plus generically in the greenwood. Fowler, p. 159 n. 28 says that this was printed by John Rastell, who was not of the Wynkyn de Worde/Robert Copland/William Copland connection responsible for most of our early Robin Hood prints.
Thus, although we don't know what the original of this was about, or when it originated, it seems to have been widely perpetuated. - RBW
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