Robin Hood, according to some accounts, lived in the fourteenth century. It is worth considering both the roads of that period and the travellers who made their way along them. This will help to give some idea of what a highway robber like Robin might have expected to encounter when he and his men went in search of sustenance at the expense of others.
England had a considerable network of roads, many of which dated back to Roman times. The Romans were civil engineers ahead of their time who built an effective system of highways linking places of military and commercial importance. It speaks volumes for them as road builders that many of their works were extant in spite of the neglect to which they had been subjected after the Romans had left. The bridges, however, had mostly collapsed and their successors did not have the technological expertise to repair them effectively. The growing shortage of timber in early medieval England meant that raids were frequently made on Roman roads to extract the stone and take it away for building purposes. That some major trunk roads were maintained in passable condition is strongly suggested by the fact that in 1066 King Harold’s forces took only four days to reach London after beating a Norse army at Stamford Bridge near York. They then continued southwards to take on the forces of Duke William of Normandy which had landed near Hastings. However, much of the road system consisted of nothing better than muddy morasses riddled with potholes in the winter and choking dustbowls in periods of hot, dry weather.
When there was a strong monarch on the throne conditions encouraged a slow but perceptible growth in trade and commerce. This brought traffic on to the roads, as did the business of the Church, which was building up its store of worldly wealth. Many priests used the roads to reach scattered cathedral and monastic landholdings in order to collect rents and other tribute. It was this consideration rather than for charitable or pious reasons that led some monasteries to become involved with road maintenance and bridge-building and upkeep. Useful additional sources of funds were found. Bishops granted indulgences to those who contributed money and labour to road and bridge work, while some toll roads were also established. Additionally, it became a common practice to build chapels on bridges. It was made clear that the Church maintained such bridges and travellers were encouraged to express their gratitude by making a financial offering. Fine examples of these chapels can still be seen at Wakefield and Rotherham in Yorkshire and Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire.
Also travelling the road might be richly accoutred and well-guarded caravans containing the King on one of his royal progresses, officials of the Crown such as tax collectors, judges travelling to towns on the assize circuit and sheriffs and their underlings touring the districts over which they had jurisdiction, eminent nobles with their retainers and court messengers. There were also great lumbering wagons and trains of pack animals belonging to merchants and traders, livestock on the move ushered along by harassed drovers, and people, of humble and middling estate, going to and from local markets or travelling to the fairs that were such an important medium for trading at this time. Passenger carriages were few and far between and those who could afford to do so rode on horseback. Other proceeded on foot, slowly and laboriously.
There were other travelling folk for whom the robbers would be on the lookout. Some were virtually highway robbers in their own right. Prominent among these were the mountebanks and quacks who went around selling what they mendaciously claimed were health-giving, therapeutic and restorative potions, pills and other nostrums.
Other disreputable travellers included the pardoners who could justifiably be described as robbers. The function of the pardoner originated with the Catholic Church’s practice of granting indulgences. These were commutations or mitigations of penance for committed sins and had initially involved much hardship. At a later stage offenders were allowed to lessen this hardship by atoning for sin at least partly through the giving of alms and suitable declarations of contrition. In the fourteenth century, the Vatican officially declared that Christ, the Virgin Mary and the Saints provided a repository of goodness and mercy, the benefits of which could be passed on to truly repentant trespassers. This could be done through the good offices of licensed pardoners. In effect these pardoners offered salvation in exchange for cash. It was not long before freelance pardoners appeared on the scene. They were usually equipped with sacred relics and a glib line in sales talk. Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales drew an extremely unflattering portrait of one such pardoner whose relic purported to be the sail of St Peter’s boat. He clearly regards the pardoner as a confidence trickster infesting the highway and preying on the gullible. Even hardened recidivists made use of the services of pardoners. They continued to practise the worst turpitudes imaginable knowing that they could buy atonement. The trade of the pardoner could be extremely lucrative and it was only in 1562 that they were suppressed.
Away from those roads that were under the control of the ecclesiastical authorities neither the great landlords nor their tenants chose to undertake their theoretical responsibility for maintenance. Sometimes the lord of the manor might fill a few potholes but all too frequently bridges collapsed, trees fell obstructing the way and ruts widened into large, sometimes deep and dangerous pools. Travellers merely picked their way round obstacles and so the route of the trackway tended to become wider and increasingly indistinct.
As well as physical difficulties, there was the constant danger presented by bands of robbers. Although they usually consisted of outlaws, outcasts, ne’er-do-wells and those down on their luck, it was not unknown for the barons, who were really little more than gangsters masquerading behind fancy titles, to organise gangs of highway robbers. Among the most notorious was a band operating around Alton in Hampshire. This gang was eventually rounded up and no fewer than 300 of them were hanged. A gang operating in Lancashire in the late fourteenth century numbered at least 500 men. It was against the threat they posed that the Statute of Winchester was passed in 1285. This required that on highways between market towns, all the hedges, shrubbery and other features that could harbour skulking thieves should be removed to a distance of 200 feet from either side of the track. However, it took more than a statute of this sort to stop determined highway robbers. Most travellers believed there was safety in numbers and whenever possible they travelled in groups. They went in terror of being benighted in the pitch blackness of the countryside, victim to fears of hobgoblins and all manner of frightful fiends as well as marauding robbers and wild beasts. Therefore, they hastened on as dusk approached, listening anxiously for the sound of the curfew bell that announced the imminent closure of the town gates or to catch sight of the cresset lamps that were often placed on one of the town’s church towers to provide a guiding light for belated travellers.
The English chronicler Matthew Paris (1200–59) gives one of the best contemporary accounts of medieval highway robbery. The date was 1248 and King Henry III was at Winchester when two merchants from Brabant in the Netherlands appeared in high dudgeon having just been robbed at nearby Alton. They claimed that the robbers were members of Henry’s own court and said that they recognised some of them there. Obviously not browbeaten by being in the presence of a crowned head, they proceeded to say that unless they received full and immediate restitution, they would try to ensure that all the English merchants in Brabant would be expropriated. The King was angry and ordered a jury of local people to be assembled and to submit the names of those they knew to be responsible for the theft. This they could not or would not do, and the King, now beside himself with wrath, was with difficulty dissuaded from casting the entire jury into the most stygian dungeon in Winchester Castle. A further twelve jurymen were found and, mindful no doubt of the fate so narrowly avoided by their predecessors, they proceeded to name enough people for an entire robber army, not just a gang. Some escaped into exile, while of those arrested and proven guilty, many were fined but sixty were executed.
Despite these drastic sentences, the forest around Alton continued to be a favourite base for bandits and brigands. In 1260 a gang of robbers had the temerity to attack the King’s baggage train and a few years later when Henry III had defeated the rebel Simon de Montfort at Evesham one of his chief supporters, Adam de Gurdun, fled to the area rather than surrender. He used the forest as a base from which to terrorise and plunder the roads and small settlements in Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire. His reign of terror was only terminated by a very strong force of troops under the able leadership of the future Edward I. No popular ballads or folk-tales record the life of Gurdun.
The problems posed by powerful and well-organised bands of robbers became more acute as the fourteenth century progressed. Even monks resorted to highway robbery. In 1317 six monks from Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire were charged with having held up and robbed a traveller and demanding a ransom. The matter of highway robbery came before the Commons who stated:
Whereas it is notoriously known throughout all the shires of England that robbers, thieves, and other malefactors on foot and on horseback, go and ride on the highway through all the land in divers places, committing larcenies and robberies; may it please our lord the King to charge the nobility of the land that none such be maintained by them, privately or openly; but that they help to arrest and take such bad ones.1
In 1342 merchants at Lichfield in Staffordshire were suffering from the depredations of a local gang of robbers and finding it very difficult to obtain protection. The gang was led by Sir Robert de Rideware and struck such fear into travellers in the area that business at Lichfield Fair was seriously threatened. A posse was eventually organised which caught most of the gang but no effort was made to apprehend Sir Robert himself, a clear case of preferential law for the rich.
The pursuit and apprehension of robbers was made needlessly difficult by the existence of the Right of Sanctuary. Even the perpetrator of the most heinous of crimes could claim sanctuary within the precincts of certain cathedrals, monasteries and churches. Pursuers were prevented from forcibly removing such fugitives on threat of the appalling punishment of excommunication. Within forty days the offender could confess his crime and swear to submit to banishment. He then donned a distinctive white tunic of sackcloth and, carrying a cross, made his way as quickly as possible by a prescribed route to an agreed port where he took the first available ship. There were twenty-two major ecclesiastical establishments that had the right of granting sanctuary for life. This privilege was sometimes abused and the result was that the precincts might become full of idle and shiftless good-for-nothings who expected to be fed and looked after while simultaneously cocking a snook at the authorities. Worse than that, at Westminster Abbey at least, the fugitives used the inviolable precincts of the Abbey as a base for systematic robbery. Just after Henry IV had ascended the throne in 1399 there were indignant complaints that apprentices who had robbed their masters were living in some comfort at St Martin-le-Grand on the proceeds of their crimes. The Right of Sanctuary was progressively reduced through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Other wayfarers gained their living by their ability to amuse, probably doing more good than the medical men and quacks of their time. They included minstrels, tumblers, buffoons, jugglers and singers. In the almost complete absence of books, minstrels had an important role in transmitting a very loose version of oral history that told especially of the lives of the ancient heroes, the King Arthurs and the Robin Hoods. By the fourteenth century, these legends, enormously embellished, were often recited rather than sung. Minstrels and others played for their dinner and for their ale wherever they could attract a crowd but the rewards were greatest when they obtained admission to the house of a grandee and put on a programme of entertainment.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century the House of Commons specifically denounced minstrels as subversives who cunningly used the medium of entertainment to sow the seeds of rebellion among the common people. Certainly, when they were entertaining their peers minstrels included in their repertoire many satirical songs in which the so-called good and great took an almighty tumble. Tales of Robin Hood would have been in this category. They told how Robin, with insouciant audacity, robbed great lords and hypocritical prelates while showing his practical concern for the poor and weak. From such tiny seeds as these came ideas that were to make a contribution to later radical and democratic movements. While minstrels generally comported themselves with dignity, the same could not be said of buffoons and tumblers. They combined physical clowning and tomfoolery with a ready patter of jokes. These were probably coarse and bawdy and would have made their audiences laugh uproariously. The ability of minstrels and buffoons to entertain and provide some light relief from everyday worries did not concern the highway robbers in the audience. They had a very shrewd idea of how much the takings were and therefore what they could expect when they caught up with the entertainers later on the road.
Others on the highway included messengers carrying correspondence and pronouncements on behalf of the King or other powerful figures. These men who were often liveried moved as swiftly as was possible on horseback, given the condition of the roads and they often took short cuts across the fields. Contrasting in pace with the messengers were the pedlars, chapmen and itinerant hucksters who tended to be merry souls, ever ready to exchange banter and witty repartee with all and sundry while wending their ponderous way, often with heavy loads, up and down the King’s highways. Somewhat superior to the humble pedlars were the merchants, perhaps in the wool trade. They mostly rode, although not very quickly, with an accompanying horse often well laden with samples. All were grist to the highway robbers’ mill.
The fairs of medieval England were enormously important to the business community and ordinary people, and all sorts of travellers were to be found on the roads making their way to and from these great events. Among the largest were St Giles’s Fair at Winchester, Sturbridge Fair at Cambridge, Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield in London and Knott Mill Fair at Manchester. Medieval fairs played a major part in the economic and social life of the nation. They attracted very large numbers and robbers preyed on them on the road and by theft in the densely packed crowds.
In medieval England those travellers who had the means stayed at wayside inns and hostelries, many of which had originally been set up by the Church authorities along the major routes taken by pilgrims. These were not luxurious establishments, even by the standards of the day. Complaints were many concerning the unpleasantness of sharing sleeping quarters with numbers of uncongenial fellow travellers who perhaps snored or coughed all night or were pox-ridden. Another source of acrimony was the cost of the accommodation and food and drink, of gratuities and of the fleas and other loathed parasites that infested these establishments.
The poorest and the very richest of wayfarers sought accommodation at monasteries. These had the charitable duty of catering for travellers and for this reason appealed to the humble. They also appealed to the rich and powerful because, as favoured guests, the facilities and hospitality they enjoyed were greatly superior to what was offered at the inns. Simple rustic alehouses would also be found along the way. These were distinguished by the horizontal poles protruding from their façades usually decorated with some greenery which were the forerunners of today’s pub-signs. Brewing was woman’s work and the ‘alehouse’ was usually nothing more than the main room of her simple hovel. It was not the custom to offer sleeping accommodation in such places but a glass of good English ale must have been gratefully received to slake the thirst of a dusty, footsore traveller on a hot, sunny day.
Among the interesting characters to be found by the wayside were hermits. For all those hermits who were genuinely reclusive, living lives of rigorous austerity and piety there seem to have been many others who preferred regular contact with their fellow humans and performed such services for travellers as showing them the way or sometimes providing shelter. Many lived close to bridges and this gave them something of a captive audience, and it must have been a very brazen traveller crossing a bridge who could ignore the supplications of a hermit calling on him for alms. As a result those hermits who had the most prized sites waxed fat and found that they had an ideal existence. No work was required of them while enjoying a steady income and there was plenty of time to swap yarns with passers-by. Not surprisingly false hermits put in an appearance. This development came to the attention of the Church authorities who were forced to issue licences for ‘approved hermits’ and to categorise all other hermits as impostors and vagabonds. The existence of such unscrupulous pretenders gave hermits a bad name, which was hard on the genuine ones.
It is clear that in medieval times brigands, cut-throats and similarly violent robbers had to compete with other villains who, although employing less violence, found a range of ways of gulling or deceiving wayfarers and depriving them of their possessions. The scene was being set for the emergence of the legendary highwaymen of yore.