Note 61 — 117 A GEST OF ROBYN HODE

Gough, in the Gentleman’s Magazine, March 8, 1793, cited by Gutch. Wright has, somewhat naively, furnished his own refutation: “A large tumulus we know well in our own county, near Ludlow in Shropshire, which is also called Robin Hood’s But, and which affords us a curious instance how new stories were often invented to account for a name whose original import was forgotten. The circumstances, too, in this case, prove that the story was of late invention. The barrow, as regarded superstitiously, had borne the name of Robin Hood. On the roof of one of the chancels of the church of Ludlow, which is called Fletchers’ chancel, as having been, when ‘the strength of England stood upon archery,’ the place where the fletchers held their meetings, and which is distant from the aforesaid barrow two miles, or two miles and a half, there stands an iron arrow, as the sign of their craft. The imagination of the people of the place, after archery and fletchers had been forgotten, and when Robin Hood was known only as an outlaw and a bowman, made a connection between the barrow (from its name) and the chancel (from the arrow on its roof), and a tale was invented how the outlaw once stood upon the former and took aim at the weathercock on the church steeple; but the distance being a little too great, the arrow fell short of its mark, and remained up to the present day on the roof of the chancel.” (Essays, I, 209 f.)

A correspondent of The Academy, XXIV, 181, remarks that one of the Anglo-Saxon charters in Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus mentions a “place” in Worcestershire called Hódes ác (now Hodsoak), that there is a village in Nottinghamshire called Hodsock, that it is improbable that two men living in districts so widely apart should each have given his name to an oak-tree, and that therefore we may safely conclude Hód to be a mythical personage. Somebody’s tree is given as a boundary mark more than thirty times in these charters, somebody’s thorn at least ten times, somebody’s oak at least five times. How often such a mark might occur in connection with any particular name would depend upon the frequency of the name. Hód or Hóde is cited thirteen times by Kemble, and few names occur oftener. The name, we may infer, was relatively as common then as it is in our century, which has seen three Admiral Hoods (who, by virtue of being three, may be adjudged as mythical by and by) and one poet Hood alive together. Why may not three retired wícings and one scóp, of the name, have been living in Berks, Hants, Wilts, and Worcestershire in the tenth century?