The day the parish chose Robin Hood
By his saying, “It is no laughing matter, my friends,” you can tell that the congregation was laughing in the wrong place in the sermon. The preacher was Hugh Latimer.
Henry VIII had deprived him of the see of Worcester for opposing the king’s doctrinally conservative Six Articles, but in 1549, after Henry’s death, he was free to preach before Edward VI, aged 11. Latimer, with a radical intellectual’s beard, was the learned elder statesman of Protestantism.
He was travelling towards London, as he related in his sermon, and thought he might preach at a town on the way, since it was a holy day, May 1, the feast of St Philip and St James, Apostles. He expected a great number at church, but to his surprise the door was locked. After half an hour the key was found, and a parishioner explained to him in all innocence: “Sir, this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you. It is Robin Hood’s day. The parish are gone abroad.”
The man could hardly have found a more susceptible churchman to scandalise with such news, since Latimer saw such old customs of Popish times as idolatry. He had thought his clerical dress would be heeded if his own person was not, but “it was fain to give place to Robin Hood’s men.” It was then that the congregation laughed.
I came across this anecdote in Eamon Duffy’s impressive new book Reformation Divided. But now I find it had been one of the nuggets gathered in Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Bonnie Blackburn’s entertaining and learned Oxford Companion to the Year. They also included a story about Henry VIII celebrating the same day, which illustrates the change in progressive attitudes from his day to his son’s.
In 1515, when he was 23, the king rode with Queen Catherine from Greenwich Palace up Shooter’s Hill “a-maying”. They found 200 yeomen dressed in green with hoods and bows and arrows. Their chieftain for the day was called Robin Hood and he “required” the king to stop and see them shoot. This was a high-risk jape, as monarchs can dislike being told what to do, especially by armed men. But the king was delighted when, at Robin’s whistle, the bowmen shot off their arrows together, so that their sound overhead “was strange and loud”. The king and his company were then served with venison and wine in flowery arbours in the greenwood, to “their great contentment”.
It was John Stow the antiquary, fond of customs at which Latimer would blench, who tells this tale. It was a piece of make-believe, but also culture in common between Henry VIII and his people, celebrating merrie old England. In his sermon, Latimer called Robin Hood “a traitour and thief ”, but that missed the point.
Now Jeremy Corbyn has promised that when he is prime minister we shall all have a holiday on the feasts of St George, St Andrew, St David and St Patrick. The thought of St George’s day in Glasgow is beyond me, but might the Labour leader have had in mind May Day as imagined by William Morris and depicted by Walter Crane, who followed him into socialist activism?
Crane’s annual designs for May Day featured garlanded oxen, smocked labourers, and maidens in rational dress. His garland for 1895 included a ribbon inscribed “The plough is a better backbone than the factory,” which may be true but did not prove to be the engine of revolutionary socialism.
Monday is May bank holiday, this year falling on the day of St Philip and St James for the Church of England. Round the world it is now the feast of St Joseph the Worker, neither Robin Hood nor a ploughman, but a good patron for a bank holiday.