Recordings & Info 123. Robin Hood & the Curtal Friar
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar: Introduction
4) Child Collection Index [two listings]
4) Wiki
5) Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud No. 1621: Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar (14 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Robin Hood and the Fryer
Famous Battel Between
Traditional Ballad Index: Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar [Child 123]
NAME: Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar [Child 123]
DESCRIPTION: Robin learns of a friar's prowess and seeks him out. Each submits once to carrying the other over water, then the friar dumps Robin in. They fight long, then Robin's men and the friar's dogs enter the fray. The friar is invited to join the band.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST_DATE: 1663 (garland)
KEYWORDS: Robinhood clergy fight outlaw
FOUND_IN:
REFERENCES: (9 citations)
Child 123, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (2 texts)
Bronson 123, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (1 version)
Leach, pp. 361-365, "Robin and the Curtal Friar" (1 text)
OBB 118, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (1 text)
BBI, RZN13, "In summer time when leaves grow green"
ADDITIONAL: Stephen Knight, editor (with a manuscript description by Hilton Kelliher), _Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript_ (British Library Additional MS 71158), D. S. Brewer, 1998, pp. 72-76, "Robin Hood and the Fryer" (1 text, similar to several of the broadsides)
R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 159-164, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (2 texts, from the Percy Folio and a broadside)
Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, editors, _Robin Hood and Other Oudlaw Tales_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000, pp. 458-468, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (1 text, conflated from the Percy and garland texts)
Leslie Shepard, _The Broadside Ballad_, Legacy Books, 1962, 1978, p. 135, "The Famous Battle between ROBIN HOOD and the Curtal Fryer" (reproduction of a broadside page)
Roud #1621
NOTES: This friar is otherwise known as Friar Tuck, so called because his frock is tucked up. Child says Curtal relates to the keeping of the "curtile", or vegetable garden, but acknowledges that others thought it meant he had a curtailed, or shortened, frock. - KK
For background on the Robin Hood legend, see the notes on "A Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]. Knight/Ohlgren however note that the song does not refer to Friar Tuck by that name, even though the Percy Folio calls the song "Robin Hood and Fryer Tucke."
There is a record of a "Friar Tuck," though not in any way associated with Robin Hood. Two writs of 1417 mention a man of that name who had gathered a gang of outlaws in Surrey and Sussex. He remained at large in 1429 (though nothing was heard of him in the interval); his true name was reported to be Robert Stafford.
The association of Robin Hood and the Friar may have arisen from the May Games (in which both a Friar and Robin were characters), and the Friar may possibly have been associated with Friar Tuck because the latter was an outlaw.
Dobson/Taylor, p. 158, declare that the Friar's association with Fountains Abbey "can only be a post-Reformation fabrication." They give no reason for this statement. Fountains Abbey certainly existed during the Robin Hood era; according to Tatton-Brown/Crook, pp. 112-115, it was a Cisterian community founded in 1152 (meaning that it existed even in the time of Richard I), and it is in Yorkshire.
On the other hand, the fact that it is Cisterian means that it was inhabited by monks, not friars -- indeed, the first friars did not reach England until much later; the first were the Dominicans, who came to England in 1221 (Powicke, p. 24). This doesn't eliminate the idea of a friar being associated with Fountains, but it makes it less likely -- and it does make it impossible to date the Curtal Friar and Robin to the reigns of Richard I (died 1199) or John (died 1216).
Another problem is finding a friar hunting with dogs. First, dogs were barred from the royal forests unless their foretoes were clipped, or "lawed," to prevent them chasing game (Young, p. 41), and second, the Third Lateran Council had tried to prevent hunting with dogs altogether (Young, p. 44).
I do note with interest that Fountains Abbey -- despite being founded on very poor land (Alexander, p. 98), apparently to ensure the poverty of its inhabitants -- seems to have spent a fair bit of money on minstrels, at least in the 1450s (Holt, p. 137). Could the Friar have come to be associated with Fountains because a minstrel came there and decided to praise his patrons?
Fully half the Robin Hood ballads in the Child collection (numbers (121 -- the earliest and most basic example of the type), 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, (133), (134), (135), (136), (137), (150)) share all or part of the theme of a stranger meeting and defeating Robin, and being invited to join his band. Most of these are late, but it makes one wonder if Robin ever won a battle.
Bronson has extensive notes on the dubious nature of the tune of this piece, which is from Rimbault based on an alleged handwritten copy no longer found in the book where Rimbault claimed to find it. - RBW
>>BIBLIOGRAPHY<<
Marc Alexander, _A Companion to the Folklore, Myths & Customs of Britain_, Sutton Publishing, 2002
Dobson/Taylor: R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, _Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw_, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976
Holt: J. C. Holt, _Robin Hood_, second edition, revised and enlarged, Thames & Hudson, 1989
Knight/Ohlgren: Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, editors, _Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000
Powicke: Sir Maurice Powicke, _The Thirteen Century, 1216-1307_, Oxford, 1962 (I use the 1998 Oxford paperback edition
Tatton-Brown/Crook: Tim Tatton-Brown and John Crook, _The Abbeys and Priories of England_, New Holland Publishers, 2006
Young: Charles R. Young, _The Royal Forests of Medieval England_, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979
ROBIN HOOD AND THE CURTAL FRIAR: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Press, 1997
This ballad appears in the Percy folio manuscript but more than half has been torn away. It also appears, in a slightly expanded form, in a number of seventeenth-century versions, and what appears to be the earliest of these, from the garland of 1663, is used here to fill out the gaps. Lines 1-4, 35-67, 109-43 are from the Percy folio, while the garland text provides the remainder, with the insertion of one stanza from the garland at lines 125-28 where the Percy folio appears to have lost a few lines by scribal error; the two versions fit together well, with the change of one rhyme word needed at line 68.
Though this is not one of the earlier ballads in terms of its recording, it appears to have a late medieval origin. Friars themselves became outdated with the reformation, and there seems to be some relation between this fighting friar and the similar figure found in the play dated around 1475 and also in the more humorous play found at the end of Copland's Gest of c. 1560. Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington also presents a comic friar, played by a fictitious version of Skelton the poet. There remains a question whether this well-known figure should be identified with Friar Tuck. Percy's folio calls the ballad Robin Hood and Fryer Tucke, but the ballad itself does not use that name, unlike the plays. Child feels there is a separate tradition about the fighting hermit of Fountains Abbey (III, 122), but this may separate too much the elements of a single but varied tradition, especially as there are some early references to a rebellious Friar Tuck: a play of 1537 called Thersites refers to someone being "as tall a man as Frier Tuck" and, more remarkably, in 1417 a chaplain of Lindfield in Sussex took up a career of robbery under the alias Friar Tuck.
Although this ballad basically has a "Robin Hood meets his match" structure and the friar agrees at the end to join the outlaw band, few ballads, early or late, show the friar in action with the outlaws (Robin Hood and Queen Catherin, Child no. 145, a literary ballad, is an exception; while Robin impersonates a friar in Robin Hood's Golden Prize, there is no connection with Tuck). That absence might have been caused by reformation anti-church feeling, but as Child appears to have sensed, the friar-based material seems in some way extrinsic to the central narrative in the ballad genre, as distinct from its centrality in the performance versions of the outlaw myth.
Child nevertheless felt this "is in a genuinely popular strain and was made to sing, not print" (III, 121). Though the word artillery (line 10) seems thoroughly contemporary and literary, this is not a bookish ballad: the rhymes are occasionally weak as in many early texts, and it is notable how much of the lyrical ballad technique of "repetition with variation" is found. If that suggests considerable antiquity it is also worth noting that the theme of the dogs that could match fighting men also seems to have quite ancient roots; the story is reminiscent of the encounter between Arthur's men and the ferocious ravens belonging to Owein in the medieval Welsh story Breuddwyd Ronabwy, "The Dream of Rhonabwy," found in the Mabinogion collection. While it is in many ways a comic and festal text, Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar also, with a holy warrior, mysteriously powerful dogs, and a conflict at what seems to be a ford, touches some of the deeper resources in the Robin Hood myth.
Child Collection- Child Ballad 123: Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar
Child --Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length --Have
123 Estampie Robin Hood and the Cultural Friar Under the Greenwood Tree 1997 3:14 Yes
123 Wallace House Robin Hood and the Curtall Fryer Robin Hood Ballads 1953 2:30 Yes
Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" is Child Ballad number 123, about Robin Hood.
Synopsis
This ballad is one of those appearing in earlier and later versions, the earlier one appearing in damaged form in the Percy manuscript but, as with Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne the story also appears in May Day plays and there is good reason to think that it goes back at least to the fifteenth century.
The outlaws have a good hunt. Robin Hood says there is no match for Little John within a hundred miles; Will Scadlock tells him that a friar at Fountains Abbey can. Robin sets out to see this monk. He finds him by a riverside and forces the monk to carry him over, except that the friar throws him in halfway across. They battle until Robin asks a favor: to let him blow on his horn. When the friar agrees, Robin's men appear, with bows in hand. The friar asks a favor: to let him whistle. When Robin agrees, many fierce dogs appear. In the later version, Little John shoots twenty of them, and the Friar agrees to make peace with Robin. In the earlier version, Robin Hood good-humoredly refuses further combat; in both earlier and later versions Robin invites him to join the band.
Adaptions
Howard Pyle used this tale in his The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood as part of the tale of Alan-a-Dale: Robin needed a priest who would perform the wedding ceremony in defiance of authority, and Will Scarlet proposed Friar Tuck.[1]
Thirteen months
The Percy Folio version of the ballad begins with the stanza:
But how many merry monthes be in the yeere?
There are thirteen, I say;
The midsummer moone is the merryest of all,
Next to the merry month of May.
Robert Graves in his English and Scottish Ballads used this stanza to support his argument for pagan survivals in the Robin Hood legend, and for the popular survival of a supposedly pagan thirteen-month calendar.[citation needed]
References
1.^ Michael Patrick Hearn, "Afterword", Howard Pyle The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, p. 384 ISBN 0-451-52007-6
.External links INTRODUCTION TO ROBIN HOOD AND THE CURTAL FRIAR
Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar
ROBIN HOOD AND THE FRIAR and ROBIN HOOD AND THE POTTER: INTRODUCTION
Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter: Introduction
Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren
Originally Published in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997
The survival of Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter, our next earliest play script following the fragment of c. 1475, is due to printer William Copland's decision to append it to his edition of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode and of Hys Lyfe, dated somewhere between 1549 and 1569, but most likely printed in 1560 when he entered a Robin Hood play in the Stationers' Register. There are no extant manuscript versions. The appended text preserves two dramatic pieces: lines 1-122 in this edition contain the well-known account of Robin's initial confrontation with Friar Tuck, in which physical and verbal sparring of the two is followed by the cleric carrying Robin on his back through a stream before dropping him into the water. After further fighting Robin seeks help from his men and then offers Friar Tuck gold and "a lady" (a precursor to Maid Marian as bawd?) in exchange for service. Lines 123-203 recount a second example of "Robin meets his match," this time with a potter who refuses to pay road-toll, for which Robin breaks his pots and engages in a fencing duel.
Unlike Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham, which is linked with a particular gentleman's household in late fifteenth-century East Anglia, no specific auspices can be found for this drama, although Copland's introductory remark that it is "verye proper to be played in Maye Games" suggests that the two dramatic pieces were typical of the numerous Robin Hood plays sponsored by parishes and civic organizations all across Britain throughout the Tudor era. The lengthy festive season for May games often extended from May 1 through Whitsuntide (a holy day celebrated seven weeks after Easter) when towns and villages chose a May King and Queen (or Lord and Lady) to preside over various festivities, including dances around the Maypole, nights sleeping in the greenwood, sporting contests (e.g., wrestling and archery) and processions around town and to neighboring villages, often for the purpose of raising money for poor relief and church maintenance.
By the end of the fifteenth century, many villages and towns renamed their May king (also known as Summer Lord, Lord of Misrule, Abbot of Bon Accord) Robin Hood, and followed suit by calling the May Queen Maid Marian and their attendants, Friar Tuck, Little John, and the rest of the merry band of outlaws bearing pipes, tabors, and drums. In some towns the change of title is very deliberate and can be precisely dated, as in Aberdeen, Scotland, where an order of 17 November 1508 formally announces that the traditional procession through town will be led by "Robert huyd and litile Iohn" formally known as "Abbot and priour of Bonacord" (Mills, p. 135). E. K. Chambers and others speculate that Robin and Marian entered the May game via the old French pasteurella popularized in England by French minstrels (Medieval Stage, I, 160-81). This lyric poem is about a shepherdess called Marion who rejects the advances of a knight out of fidelity to another lover named Robe. However, this alone is not an adequate explanation. The already legendary home-grown hero's associations with nature and the forest, with physical prowess, generosity, camaraderie, as well as the subversive spirit of summer games themselves, made him the perfect choice as the fictional persona of the Summer Lord. Moreover, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and their colorful entourage of outlaws gave an added theatrical dimension to the May revels. As David Mills asserts, "identification by costume was essential," indicated in the churchwarden's accounts of Kingston-on-Thames, 1507-29, which show "regular expenditure on the costumes and appurtenances ('banner,' 'cote,' 'gloves and shoes') of 'Robyn Hode,"' and other dress items displaying Maid Marian as the May Queen and the Friar as one of the morris dancers (Mills, p. 135). This is not to suggest that communities dispensed with the traditional generic role of the Summer Lord. At Wells in May 1607, for example, the "Lord of the May" led a procession which included Robin Hood and his men as one of ten such groups of characters (Lancashire, p. 280). By the latter part of the sixteenth century, the May-game Marian developed her own separate persona as a figure of sexual license, frequently presented as a conspicuously cross-dressed male, as illustrated in an anti-Marprelate play of the 1580s where Martin appears on stage as the "Maide marian," possibly to satirize puritan opposition to boys playing female roles (see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV, 231).
Contemporary records indicate that civic and parish sponsored Robin Hood plays, like most of the other May games, took place outdoors, and indeed the first sequence involving Friar Tuck may have been performed next to a river or stream, for the dialogue has the Friar, with Robin on his back, wading into water before Robin is dropped in (Blackstone, pp. 6-7). A body of water, however, is not necessary for the action to be effective, and since local actors often took their productions to neighboring towns, little if any scenery and only a few properties (e.g., clubs and staves, a horn, and perhaps some musical instruments) would be expected. If the two dramatic pieces are performed together, a minimum of seven actors are required. Since one of the characters is "a lady," six men and one woman may have participated, but considering Tudor conventions of acting and of the depiction of Maide Marian at the time (noted above), the female character was likely impersonated by a cross-dressed male. An intriguing feature of Robin Hood and the Friar is the evident requirement of three dogs who accompany Friar Tuck when he enters ("these dogs all three"). Animals, in fact, were not infrequent participants in productions of the time (see White, p. 120 and p. 221 n. 67). However, whereas in the ballad version of the play the Friar's dogs fight Robin's men, in the play (where this might have been too dangerous to stage) they are replaced by the Friar's own men (albeit with canine names like Cut and Bause) who fight with staves and clubs (see Blackstone, p. 4).
The relationships of the two dramatic texts to their narrative and visual sources are problematic. The first play antedates its corresponding ballad, Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, by at least one hundred years. A late medieval ballad probably existed because a fighting friar appears in the Paston fragment of c. 1475. The play's anti-fraternal satire recall's Chaucer's depiction of Frere Huberd, who was himself strong "as a champioun," and yet it is also representative of Protestant ballads and plays of the mid-sixteenth century in which the boasting, lecherous, and merrymaking mendicant is widely featured and often conflated with the comic Vice (see, for example, John Bale's anti-Catholic plays). It's worth noting that Francis Child omitted the eight-line bawdy speech of the Friar near the end in his truncated version of the play, and by so doing destroyed the continuing anti-clerical satire and carnivalesque atmosphere of the May games in which social conventions were mocked or inverted. The Friar's remark Here is an huckle duckle/An inch above the buckle (lines 115-16) suggests he may have sported an artificial phallus to signify sexual virility like that of comic figures in the folk drama (for example, Robin Goodfellow appeared with horns, goat-feet and a phallus [see White, pp. 31-32 and fig. 4]). Child's omission also deprives the play of the dramatic resolution inherent in the dance in which Friar Tuck joins with "the lady." A stained glass window in Betley Hall, Staffordshire, pictures Friar Tuck participating in a morris dance with a lady who appears to be Maide Marian, but whether the play's female figure is Marian is questionable, even if she does suggest the licentious Marian of the May games (see Blackstone, p. 13 and fig. 3). In the case of the second play text, the ballad, Robin Hood and the Potter, antedates the play by about sixty years. We may be witnessing, as Dobson and Taylor claim, the "transformation from recited tale to dramatic version" (p. 215). Two pairs of lines are virtually identical:
ballad: Ne was never so corteys a man
On peney of pawage to pay(lines 19-20)
play: Yet was he never so curteyse a potter
As one peny passage to paye (lines 132-33)
ballad: Yend potter well steffeley stonde (line 66)
play: And I wyll styfly by you stande (line 199)
However, if the play were a dramatized version of the first fitt of the ballad, one would expect to find many more borrowings, such as the amount of the bet -- forty shillings versus twenty pound in the play. Also, Jack the potter's boy is not found in the ballad. If the play script was adapted from the longer and more complex ballad, one would also expect a minor character to be omitted rather than added. There is no question that the play is based upon the story of the potter, but it is probably not the exact one that survives.
Select Bibliography
Early Printed Texts
Copland, William. A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode and of Hys Lyfe. Printed at Three Cranes Wharf, London, c. 1560. British Library copy, press-mark C.21.C.63.
White, Edward. A Merry Jest of Robin Hood. Printed at London, c. 1590. Bodleian Library copy, 2.3 Art, Seld.
Editions
Blackstone, Mary A., ed. Robin Hood and the Friar. PLS Performance Text 3. Toronto: Poculi Ludique Societas, 1981.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor, eds. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. London: William Heinemann, 1976.
Farmer, John S., ed. Robin Hood c. 1561-9. Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Texts 102, 1914.
Greg, W. W., ed. "A Play of Robin Hood for May-games from the Edition by William Copland, c. 1560." Collections Part II. The Malone Society. Oxford, 1908.
Manly, John Matthews, ed. Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama. 2 vols. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1897. I, 281-88.
Commentary and Criticism
Blackstone, Mary A., pp. 1-24.
Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.
------. The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903.
Dobson, R. B., and J. Taylor, pp. 210-14, 216-19.
Jones, William Powell. The Pasteurella: A Study of the Origins and Tradition of a Lyric Type. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.
Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. 100-01.
Lancashire, Ian. Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Mills, David. "Drama and Folk-Ritual." In The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume I: Medieval Drama. London: Methuen, 1983. Pp. 122-51.
Wiles, David. The Early Plays of Robin Hood. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981. Pp. 39-40.
White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.