Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
For example, the person who recorded the poem seems to have made errors, such as writing some lines twice.
Additionally, the scribe seems to have had a heavy Midlands dialect, which probably affected the wording.
Nonetheless, it's a priceless early window into the legend.
Another of the early ballads that shows the more ruthless version of the outlaw is Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, which is from a famous compilation now called the Percy Folio.
This collection of manuscripts was compiled by Bishop Thomas Percy during the 17th century, but its contents were much older.
dating back as far as the 12th century.
It had a lot of treasures in it, including some Arthurian legends, and there were eight ballads about Robin Hood.
Although Percy and his predecessors appear to have really put these old manuscripts through the wringer, writing on them and accidentally lopping off words and the like,
The stories survive today in the British Museum.
The story about Guy of Gisborne may date to about the same time as Robin Hood and the Monk, and it contains some pretty graphic retribution.
Again, it shows how Robin Hood's image changed as time went on and he was viewed as a more altruistic character.
It's entirely possible that all three of these ballads were circulating via the oral tradition at about the same time, but there's no way to know their exact chronology now.
Suffice to say that Robin Hood was a many faceted legend right from the start.
The next breadcrumb in our search takes us to the ballad often called A Little Guest of Robin Hood.
Numerous copies of this piece survive, having been apparently widely distributed about 30 years after the printing press came to England.
Although that printing took place in the early 16th century, scholars believe the content may have existed much earlier, even as far back as the year 1400.
Similar characters appear in the ballad, and Robin is again a commoner.
But one very interesting detail is that the story is clearly set during the reign of one King Edward.
Regardless of which of the five Edwards it refers to, this would have occurred between the years 1272 and 1483.
Another evolution this ballad shows versus Robin Hood and the Monk is that he is depicted as a man of the people who obeys a strict moral code.
Showing 1581–1600 of 2,981 · page 80 of 150
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