A Brief History of Robin Hood by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

8

REBELS

Later versions of the tale of Robin Hood set him clearly on the side of the solid Anglo-Saxon yeomen who are oppressed by the wicked Normans and parallels have been draw between Robin and Hereward the Wake, the leader of the last-ditch Saxon attempt to resist the Norman invasion on the Isle of Ely in 1070–71. Antagonism between the Saxon peasantry and the Norman gentry is a key element in the tale of Robin Hood. However, the Norman conquest had been completed more than a century before the earliest appearance of Robin Hood and, puzzlingly, Robin and his Merry Men are fiercely loyal to King Richard, a Norman who spoke no English and spent less than six months in the country. Indeed, he used England merely as a cash cow to fund his overseas adventures.

Hereward the Wake’s origins are obscure. It has even been suggested that he was the son of Leofric, earl of Mercia, and his wife Lady Godiva, who famously rode naked through Coventry as part of a campaign to get her husband to lower taxes. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday Book, Hereward was a small-time squire in south Lincolnshire who held lands from the abbeys of Crowland and Peterborough. It is thought that he had already turned outlaw before the Norman conquest, rebelling against Edward the Confessor (1042–66), whose court was more Norman than English in speech, habit and custom.

After William the Conqueror’s victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Normans began to colonize England. However, there was considerable resistance. In 1070, Sweyn II of Denmark (1047–74) arrived at the mouth of the Humber and was expected to make a bid for the crown. He sent soldiers to secure the Isle of Ely as a base for an invasion. At that period it could be reached by sea-going vessels from the Wash and the River Ouse, while being protected to the landward side by swamps and waterways. The Danes were joined by local people, many of whom were of Danish extraction. Hereward’s followers and a band of Danish sailors seized the opportunity to sack Peterborough Abbey to keep its treasures out of the hands of the newly appointed Norman abbot and took refuge on Ely. Soon after Sweyn made peace with William and the Danes returned home. Ely then became home to Anglo-Saxon fugitives, including the earl of Northumbria.

In 1071, William besieged the isle, taking it by building a causeway across the marshes. Hereward escaped, but it is not known what happened to him after that. It is thought that, like other rebel leaders, he was later reconciled with the King. A man named Hereward held lands in Warwickshire at the time of William’s death and the surname Hereward lived on in Ely through the thirteenth century.

The cognomen ‘the Wake’ – thought to signify ‘the wakeful one’ – was added later, appearing first in the fourteenth century. However, it may derive from his relationship with the manor of Bourne in Lincolnshire which, from the mid-twelfth century, belonged to the Wake family.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.