Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham

Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham is Child ballad 139, a Robin Hood ballad, and in fact an original story.

Synopsis

A fifteen-year-old Robin Hood set out to Nottingham to compete in a shooting contest. The king's foresters make fun of him, offering a bet that he could not kill a deer. When he does so, they refuse to pay. Robin shoots fourteen of them and flees to the forest.

In the late 16th century Sloane Life of Robin Hood a version of this story is told, probably from a lost earlier version of the ballad. The Sloane version makes Robin Hood's actions more explicable and less gratuitously bloodthirsty; the foresters had bet their money against Robin Hood's "head" or life, and one of them tried to put him off his aim. Having won the wager Robin waived the debt for all of the foresters except that one, suggesting that they drink the money together. This was not good enough for the foresters and the quarrel developed with fatal results for them. The Sloane account, unlike the extant ballad, makes no mention however of a general mayhem of Nottingham townsmen.

Adaptions

Although this tale never became as definitive as many origin stories for the Merry Men, Howard Pyle used it in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, modifying it slightly: the foresters also threaten to arrest him for poaching, one tries to shoot him, and that one is the only one he kills.

External links

• Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham