Robin Hood

The man who lived under the trees

There was once a man who lived in a forest called Sherwood, and he had not always lived there.

He had a name and a house and a field once, the way most people do. Then a powerful man decided he would have them instead, and there was nobody to say no to him. So Robin walked out of his own front door with nothing but a bow, and he kept walking until the houses stopped and the oak trees began.

Sherwood was very big and very green and very quiet. Robin learned which hollow stayed dry in the rain. He learned where the deer crossed, and where the water ran clean, and which branch you could sleep along without falling out of. By the end of the first winter he knew that forest better than the Sheriff knew his own castle.

Other people came too. People who had also lost fields, or arguments, or both. They found Robin under the trees and they stayed, and after a while somebody started calling them the merry men, which was mostly true. They were merry in the evenings. Mornings took a bit longer.

The very large man on the very small bridge

One morning Robin came to a stream with a log laid across it, and on the other end of the log stood the tallest man he had ever seen.

"Let me by," said Robin.

"Let *me* by," said the tall man.

The log was not wide enough for two. So they cut themselves staffs from the hedge — good ones, straight and heavy — and they fought right there over the water, which is a silly thing to do and both of them knew it and neither of them stopped.

They fought for a long time. Robin was quick. The tall man was not quick, but he was extremely difficult to move, and eventually he swung once and Robin went into the stream with a splash you could hear in the next field.

Robin came up spluttering, sat down in the shallow water, and laughed until he had to hold his own ribs.

"What is your name?" he said.

"John Little."

"John Little," said Robin, looking a long way up at him. "We shall have to do something about that."

And that is how the biggest man in Sherwood came to be called Little John for the rest of his life, and how he and Robin became the sort of friends who tell that story at each other for years.

The miller who could not pay

Not everyone in Sherwood was merry.

One evening a miller came along the road with his cart, and his cart was empty, and so was his face. The Sheriff's men had taken his flour that morning. Not bought it. Taken it. And there was a rent to pay at the end of the month, and now nothing to pay it with.

Robin sat him down by the fire and fed him, and listened all the way to the end without interrupting, which is harder than it sounds.

"How much?" he said finally.

The miller told him.

It was a great deal of money. It was more than Robin had. He looked into the fire for a while, and Little John watched him do it, because he had seen that look before and he knew roughly what was coming.

"There's a contest," said Little John. "In Nottingham. The Sheriff's archery contest."

"Go on."

"The prize is an arrow made of silver. A whole arrow, solid silver, worth more than that mill." Little John paused. "It's a trap, Robin. Everyone knows it's a trap. He's put it up to catch *you*."

"Yes," said Robin. "Probably."

And he went on looking at the fire, and the miller looked at Robin, and Little John sighed the enormous sigh of a man who already knows he is going to Nottingham in the morning.

A contest with a trap in it

The Sheriff of Nottingham had thought about it carefully.

He knew Robin Hood was the finest archer in England. He knew that a man like that cannot always help himself. So he set out a target, and he put beside it an arrow of solid silver with a golden head, and he told every town crier for thirty miles to shout about it. Then he filled the field with soldiers and sat down to wait.

The day came and half the county came with it. There were pie sellers and tumblers and a great deal of pushing. And among the crowd, shuffling along in a ragged red cloak with a patch over one eye, came an old beggar who walked with a stoop and did not look at anybody.

The Sheriff's men looked for a man in green. They looked for a tall proud fellow standing straight as a post. They walked past the beggar four separate times.

The shooting began. Archer after archer stepped up, and one by one they fell away, until there were only three left — and then two — and then the Sheriff's own champion, and the old beggar in the red cloak.

The champion shot. It was a beautiful shot. It went into the very center of the target and the crowd made a noise like a wave.

The beggar straightened up. He did it slowly, the way you do when your back really does hurt, and nobody thought anything of it.

Then he drew.

The silver arrow

The arrow went the length of the field and split the champion's arrow straight down the middle.

There was no noise at all for a moment. Then there was a very great deal of it.

The Sheriff came down to present the prize, because he had promised to in front of a thousand people and there was nothing else he could do. He put the silver arrow into the beggar's hands. He looked at the beggar's hands, which were not an old man's hands at all, and then he looked up at the beggar's face.

"Thank you kindly," said Robin Hood, and he was already walking.

What happened next was mostly running. There was shouting, and a gate, and a moment involving a pie stall that the merry men would describe differently for the next twenty years. But Sherwood was close, and Sherwood was Robin's, and once the green closed over them the Sheriff's men might as well have been chasing weather.

What he did with it

That evening they sat in the hollow with the fire going, passing the silver arrow round the circle. It was heavier than it looked. The gold head caught the light and threw it about on everybody's faces.

"It's the finest thing I've ever held," said Little John.

"It is," said Robin.

"You won it off his own champion, on his own field, in front of his own men."

"I did."

"You'll never do anything better than that as long as you live."

"No," Robin agreed. "Probably not."

Then he stood up, and he took the arrow, and he walked over to where the miller was sitting, and he put it into his hands.

"For the mill," he said.

The miller tried to give it back. People do. He said it was too much and it was too fine and he could not possibly, and Robin sat down next to him and waited him out, which is a thing Robin was very good at.

"I had it for one day," he said. "You'll have the mill for the rest of your life. That's a better trade than it sounds."

What Sherwood was for

The mill kept going. The miller's children grew up in the house behind it, and grew up eating, which had not been certain at all that autumn.

And the story went round. It went round the markets and the alehouses and the roads, the way a good story does, and it changed a little each time in the way stories do. But the part that never changed, in any version anybody ever told, was the end of it: that he won the finest thing in England, and he had it in his hands, and he gave it away before he'd even got used to the weight of it.

After that, people who were in trouble knew where the forest was.

They would come along the road at dusk, not quite sure, looking for a path that was not really a path. And somewhere in among the green a voice would say, "You're looking for Robin," and it always turned out that they were.