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The Scarlet Forest:
A Tale of Robin Hood
Robin Hood Country is the phrase used to mean the four counties where Robin Hood is most often said to have roamed: Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Derbyshire. Though the outlaw has connections to other counties, these four are usually held to be at the heart and, while not all of the following destinations lie within their borders, most do.
​Sherwood Forest: Sherwood Forest still exists, though in a much smaller form than under King Henry III. Often mistakenly called Robin Hood’s home, Sherwood Forest in The Scarlet Forest is only Robin’s part-time home; he also spends much of his time in Barnesdale, where he lives in the medieval tales.
A forest in medieval England, was not a cluster of trees, but any land under forest law, meaning that open fields, and villages were once a part of Sherwood Forest, including Edwinstowe, Rufford Abbey, and even part of Nottingham. Though we know Marian is a literary character, and not a historical one, she and Robin are said to have been married in St. Mary’s Church in Edwinstowe.
Foresters still patrol the paths, sometimes hosting guided walks. Sherwood also has have-a-go archery and medieval fairs at times. Three regular trails of different distances are marked out for visitors, the blue trail leading past Major Oak, a behemoth at least eight centuries old. If you would like to visit Sherwood Forest, you can catch the Sherwood Arrow bus from the north side of Victoria Centre in Nottingham, getting off at Rufford Abbey, in Edwinstowe, or at some times right in front of the Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre. Just know that, in the evening, the bus only picks up passengers back to Nottingham at certain stops. Check the schedules, but know that they are not as accurate as asking a local.
Ferns give good cover for outlaws
Autumn oaks November 1
Yew trees provide the best wood for carving bows
Nottingham Castle: In Nottingham’s city centre is its castle, bordered on three sides by sandstone cliffs. In The Scarlet Forest, Robin’s friend since childhood, Will Stutely, is captured by the Sheriff and held in the tunnels running through these cliffs. If you visit the castle, be sure to take a tour of the tunnels to see Mortimer’s Hole (which played a crucial role in teenaged King Edward III wresting control of England from his mother’s lover), and the spot where Stutely’s character was imprisoned, beneath the kitchens where he could smell the bread baking.
Outside Nottingham Castle is the garden gnome, a statue of Robin Hood surrounded by bronzes of his friends and scenes from his adventures.
You can enter through the nearby thirteenth century gatehouse, the oldest surviving part of the castle, which was founded by William the Conqueror in 1067. While the castle today is more of a manor house, due to past destruction, the bailey is green with trees, a sign that Robin Hood has invaded the castle and won.
Gatehouse
Rufford Abbey: Robin Hood and Will Scarlet visit Rufford Abbey in The Scarlet Forest when they learn through Will Stutely’s reconnaissance that the abbey’s Cistercian monks are “trespassing against the vert,” or chopping down trees in Sherwood Forest without the king’s permission. Rufford Abbey’s monks conveniently interpreted a 1252 charter from King Henry III to excuse the felling of some eight thousand trees in the next thirty-five years. There are also records of the abbot and probably other brothers selling timber.
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Rufford became a country house. Falling into disrepair, much of it was torn down in the 1950s. Its ruins still stand, however, and can easily be visited from Sherwood Forest on foot (mind the traffic along the way), or from Nottingham (using the Sherwood Arrow bus from the north side of Victoria Centre). The frater, where the monks ate, houses an exhibit on monastic life, beneath the brick hall, now open to the air, but still bearing replicas of its grotesques - small, distorted stone figures - on its walls. Also open to guests are the lake walk, the orangery, and the cellars where Robin and Will confront the great-headed monk, who is stealing the king’s timber, and selling it to line his own purse.
Cellars
Brick hall
The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Nottingham: Just as in the medieval Robin Hood and the Monk, in The Scarlet Forest, Robin is cornered by the Sheriff and his men inside St. Mary’s Church, and captured, due to the snitching of a great-headed monk.
Since the Anglo-Saxon period, this site has hosted a church. It was likely burned down twice, once during the Anarchy in 1140 by forces opposed to King Stephen, and once in 1171 by rebels fighting King Henry II. The present church is mostly fourteenth and fifteenth century, with the south porch and part of the south wall of the south transept being the oldest elements. The south porch was the usual entrance to English churches, and also where weddings would have taken place before the couple and their guests went inside the church to hear a mass. As a parish church, St. Mary’s was looked after and funded by the community that it served. Members of the Samon family were particularly active in rebuilding the church in its present form, selecting the English Perpendicular style, and also devising a plan to build the new church around the old one before demolishing the latter, so that services integral to daily life could continue uninterrupted. St. Mary’s continues to welcome locals and visitors at its multiple weekly services, and to be a place of community that is well worth seeing if you are in Nottingham.
National Justice Museum: When the Sheriff captures Robin Hood inside St. Mary’s parish church, he takes the outlaw across the street to the Shire Hall, now called the National Justice Museum. Here, in The Scarlet Forest, Robin is thrown down into the oubliette, a bottle-shaped cell in the caves beneath the hall.
When visiting the National Justice Museum, you can explore the caves, climbing down via the prisoners’ dock in the nineteenth century courtroom, led by a guide costumed as the medieval Sheriff of Nottingham. You can see a number of cells, including the entrance to the one said to be where Robin was held, according to interpretations of the medieval Robin Hood and the Monk. As you travel through these caves, you also travel through time as your guides change century to century until you reach the modern day.
Barnsdale: In West Yorkshire, this is the home of Robin Hood, or at the very least of his legend. Barnsdale was not a forest, and it’s difficult to say whether it had many trees. Barnsdale was so small (about four or five miles square, from Wentbridge to Skelbrooke north to south, though Barnsdale never had fixed boundaries, and seems to have crawled northward from its original location, probably in the Skell river valley) that, wooded or not, Robin’s men were not really hiding. What made Barnsdale such an advantageous place for outlaws was instead its location. Less than forty miles from Sherwood, and approximately fifty miles from Nottingham, travellers journeying the popular north-south road would have to pass right by Robin Hood’s stronghold, which meant plenty of opportunities for theft. People in the 1300s feared being robbed when passing through Barnsdale; whether this was due to real danger, or to stories, true or not, of Robin Hood, we cannot be sure. It may also have been that real robbers, or rumours of them, were the cause of Robin’s tales being centred on Barnsdale.
Walking up to the Sayles
Fountains Abbey: Robin Hood and Little John in The Scarlet Forest make a wager, Little John saying that a barefoot friar leads the merrier life, Robin that such a life belongs to a travelling beggar. To settle the matter, they each set off to spend a day in these vocations and, in the course of doing so, Little John joins a pair of monks from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.
In the “ballad” of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, the unnamed friar (later associated with Friar Tuck) meets Robin outside of Fountains Abbey. After they take turns carrying one another across the stream, the friar dumps Robin in the water and a swordfight ensues. This stream still runs outside the abbey, reached after a walk along a lake, accompanied by local poultry. The story takes on another dimension when you realize that the stream would have been carrying all of the waste water away from the abbey. Fountain Dale in Sherwood was later given its name in order to associate Friar Tuck with a Nottinghamshire location, rather than a Yorkshire one. This effort to drag the Robin Hood stories south out of their West Yorkshire home is encountered time and again.
Fountains began in 1132, when thirteen monks fled St. Mary’s Abbey in York after a riot. Wanting to devote themselves to pious living, rather than indulge in the growing extravagance in York, the monks came to found Fountains as one of the first Cistercian abbeys in England, and soon its wealthiest.
You can take guided tours of the ruined, but impressive abbey that start in the porter’s lodge. Many of the monastic buildings have survived, as well as the church, with the manuscript room now inhabited by bats that live inside its walls. Fountains stands next to Studley Royal, with its deer park, making it easy to imagine Robin Hood visiting this place.
St. Mary’s Abbey, York: The Scarlet Forest recounts the story found in the medieval A Gest of Robyn Hode, where Little John accompanies a knight to St. Mary’s Abbey in the great northern city of York. York is the seat of one of England’s two archbishops, and the abbey ruins are near York Minster, in the gardens surrounding the Yorkshire Museum.
Founded in 1080, most of the abbey is gone, though parts of the church, built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, survive. Stone coffins, a Roman tower, and the medieval undercroft of St. Leonard’s Hospital are also free to visit in the gardens, as is a wonderful spot where the archaeological layers of the city can be seen accumulating over time.
The height of York’s prosperity occurred during the late medieval period, meaning that buildings from that time, including many parish churches, are still extant. They were built during the peak, and left unreplaced during the subsequent decline. Clifford’s Tower, the thirteenth century keep of one of the two castles founded in York by William the Conqueror, is all that survives of them, standing on its yellow-flower-speckled motte overlooking York Castle Museum. This museum is particularly interesting, featuring a reconstructed Victorian city street complete with shops and sunsets, plus the prison cell from which the famous highwayman Dick Turpin was taken to his hanging. Other highlights in York include Jorvik Viking Centre (an hour and a half is enough time to read every sign, see every artefact - it also has an amazing gift shop that can be visited without having to pay for the attraction), Barley Hall (a fifteenth century merchant’s home with an audio guide and rotating exhibitions), and the Merchant Adventurers’ Guild Hall, among many others.
St. Mary's Abbey
Nearby ruins
The Graves: Robin Hood is widely claimed to have been buried near West Yorkshire’s Kirklees Priory, along Nun Bank Lane. A grave with a modern inscription is present. When excavated in the eighteenth century, the ground was found to have never before been disturbed. The grave and the priory ruins are on private land, with tours being offered only one weekend a year through Calderdale Heritage Walks.
Little John has three supposed graves, the most popular lying in St. Michael’s churchyard, Hathersage, Derbyshire. Excavated in 1784, it allegedly held a thigh bone belonging to a man over seven feet tall. This bone was subsequently stolen off a window sill by a baronet, so there is no remaining physical proof of the grave belonging to a giant, though none of the surviving medieval sources ever call Little John a giant.
At Blidworth’s St. Mary of the Purification is an unusually shaped stone said to mark Will Scarlet’s grave. This connection could have been inspired by the church’s 1608 monument to a Sherwood Forest ranger, featuring his hunting paraphernalia.
The Kirkless Priory gatehouse, where Robin Hood is said to have died
Robin Hood's grave
Little John's grave
Will Scarlet's grave
Peveril Castle: On a hill overlooking Castleton in Derbyshire, Peveril is the now ruined castle in The Scarlet Forest where Will Stutely and Much the miller’s son, disguised as monks, meet with King Henry III in an effort to free Robin Hood from imprisonment by the Sheriff.
Peveril Castle is named after the baron who built it soon after 1066, during William the Conqueror’s reign. Upon passing to the Conqueror’s great-grandson (and Henry III’s grandfather), at the bailey’s highest crest Peveril gained a square Norman keep, which is still substantially intact. It also became a hunting lodge, controlling the newly created Forest of the Peak, whose deer had few trees to live amongst, instead ranging over craggy hills and valleys. Both Henry III and Edward I spent money improving Peveril Castle. In its heyday, the keep would have shone white with lime-wash inside the bailey, which was enclosed by a castellated wall-walk over seventeen feet high.
Lincoln: Robin sends Little John to Lincoln to fetch the band’s liveries, which are a part of their yearly pay. Due to unforeseen happenings, Little John never reaches the city.
Lying about an hour’s train ride from Nottingham, Lincoln provides good exercise, as visitors arriving by rail walk up Steep Hill to reach the main draws: a largely thirteenth century Gothic cathedral next to the ruins of a mid-twelfth century bishop’s palace, and a castle founded by William the Conqueror. Tours of the castle include the rare Victorian prison chapel. A free archaeological museum sits partway up Steep Hill, on a side road that branches off by the Jew’s House: one of the oldest surviving medieval domestic buildings in England, likely once owned by a wealthy merchant.
Lincoln Castle is home to an exhibit featuring King Henry III’s Forest Charter, a later companion to Magna Carta addressing the issues of forest law Magna Carta leaves out. Henry III orders that poaching should no longer be punished with death or mutilation, but only with fines, imprisonment, or exile. In The Scarlet Forest, a young Robin crosses a gang of foresters who favour the old punishments. The thirteenth century saw many corrupt foresters, Robin Hood himself likely numbering among them.
Lincoln Castle is also linked to Henry III’s son and heir, Edward I, who plays an important role in The Scarlet Forest. One of a small number of medieval kings truly devoted to his wife, Edward was distraught when Queen Eleanor died in a village six miles west of Lincoln. Her body was brought to Lincoln and embalmed (the tomb containing her entrails lies at the east end of Lincoln Cathedral), then transported south in stages. Edward had crosses erected at each place where her body rested. The Lincoln cross now stands by the castle entrance.
Lincoln Castle prison chapel
View of Lincoln Cathedral from castle wall
Canterbury Cathedral: This is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ranking churchman in England. In The Scarlet Forest, when Robin, Little John, Anne, and Will Scarlet undertake the delivery of a letter for the archbishop, they also find Queen Eleanor’s page bearing unexpected news.
Canterbury Cathedral occupies the site of a church from the Roman occupation. Its first archbishop was St. Augustine, who brought Christianity back to what had become England, and baptized King Ethelbert of Kent in 597. Another archbishop was St. Thomas a Becket, who was killed in the cathedral by four knights in 1170, while the monks were singing vespers. You can come see the spot where the top of Becket’s skull was sliced off, as well as the tomb of King Henry IV, and that of Edward the Black Prince, whose 1376 funeral achievements include his helmet, surcoat, and gauntlets.
Tomb of Edward the Black Prince
Tower of London: In The Scarlet Forest, Robin Hood, Little John, Anne, and Will Scarlet are conducted to the Tower of London to meet with Queen Eleanor. England’s first stone castle, begun about 1078 by William the Conqueror, has been expanded over a period of centuries by a number of kings. A palace, a prison, and a symbol of power, the Tower is where a number of royals lived and died.
The Conqueror’s keep, the White Tower, boasts walls fifteen feet thick. King Henry III whitewashed it and surrounded it with towers connected by stout walls. The Tower was fortified even further by his son, Edward I. Hot water would have been readily available to guests. Henry III also used the Tower to house his gifts from foreign kings: a camel, buffaloes, three leopards from Emperor Frederick II, a bear from Norway and, from St. Louis IX of France, a lion and the first elephant seen west of the Alps.
The Tower of London contains chapels, prison cells, a portion of the Royal Armouries, the crown jewels, and the yeoman warders: the most elite military special force in the world. If you visit, be sure to see the furnished medieval apartments to get a sense of everyday royal life.
Anglesey: An island off the northwest coast of Wales, Anglesey is now connected by a road bridge, and easily accessible by vehicle. In The Scarlet Forest, Robin fights with King Edward I when he campaigns on the island in 1277.
Edward I later built the castle of Beaumaris on Anglesey (though it was never finished) as part of his strategy of erecting a series of strongholds to cement his conquest of Wales. Other notable castles include Caernarfon (where the future Edward II was born), Harlech (where in the thirteenth century a boat could sail right up to the moat), and Conwy (where Edward I was besieged over Christmas with dangerously dwindling supplies).
