Will the real Robin Hood please stand up?

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen...

Robin Hood has a personal appeal to me, since I'm from Nottingham and my childhood was spent visiting Sherwood Forest, the Major Oak, the castle, and admiring the statue of Robin in front of its walls, while enjoying one of the tv series that happened to be aired at the time.

It's a simple, romantic, adventurous legend, and one enveloped in a love of nature.

The forest is emblematic of a haven. It represents freedom from oppressive authority, rather than terror (as in northern European folk stories where forests are populated by wolves, giants, elves and evil stepmothers), and it is a source of sustenance – both food and riches to be plundered from rich barons haplessly passing through.

Robin is popular amongst his peers, and will typically be protected by the peasantry to whom he donates such riches. There are no consequences to their having received stolen goods!

The legend of Robin Hood – around 800 years old – continues to excite both children and adults around the world.

Yet another movie is coming out next year, and there have been at least three tv series.

Disney brought out what's probably the worst ever version for children in 1973 where, bizarrely, Robin is anthropomorphised as a fox:

The most appealing aspect of the legend nowadays is that of social justice (perhaps it was always so): hence his name is given to a proposed tax on banking transactions, and he is a hero of the Occupy movement, while the myth has inspired a fictional character in a modern setting seeking justice in the novel Sherwood Nation.

For a while now I've been working on a reinvention of the legend which has involved some interesting research, and this month I returned to the forest, which has its own educational visitor centre, exploring the myth and catering for the half a million visitors it gets every year.

Chief exhibit is the Major Oak, where Robin and his merrie men were supposed to have hidden from the Sheriff's men:

First celebrated in 1803, it is now supported and protected by a team of specialists, and is both stupendously huge and fulsomely thriving.

It's estimated to be around 800 years old, although it's impossible to be sure without cutting it down and counting the rings, which would be like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. If it is that old, it couldn't possibly have hidden the outlaws in its copious hollow – it might have been an acorn twinkling in its parent's metaphorical eye.

When I was a kid, the public could still enter the hollow of the oak. It smelt rather unromantically of urine. Perhaps it was really Robin Hood's toilet.

The forest is chiefly birch and oak and quite beautiful. Nowadays there are no wolves, boar or deer to keep the brambles and bracken down. There's a good case to be made for rewilding at least parts of Sherwood Forest.

Encountering a wild boar would add to the atmosphere – and sense of adventure!

But you can still think yourself back to the old days, if you wander off the beaten track and sit alone for a while, quietly, just listening and looking.

I've also visited the caves. Nottingham is riddled with them, like a giant piece of Gorgonzola, the town being built mostly on a seam of (getting geological here) Bunter Sandstone, which is soft and easy to carve out.

In Brythonic times it was known as the Place of Caves, and, since before records began, it's said that the caves were populated. Many buildings in the old town are built into the rock, with back rooms or cellars that are caves.

Most famous of these is what is probably the oldest Inn in the world, the Trip to Jerusalem (first port of call on a Chaucerian type pilgrimage), built into the foot of the castle rock. This is the best picture I could get looking from the upper bar up the old chimney that wound its way to the top, where the old castle was:

The passage is blocked off now, but I remember when it wasn't.

The caves that I explored (with permission from the council) are situated behind a cemetery close to my old school. There's evidence they are still lived in – nowadays by the  otherwise homeless.

There are several succinct cave networks, and some of them still haven't been fully explored. There's a visitor centre for the caves too.

At risk that this post is beginning to sound like it's sponsored by Nottingham Council's tourism department (it isn't, but donations gratefully received), let's move on to a little bit of other history, namely, what was it like to be a child in 1190?

Children were free until the age of 7 or 8, when they would begin schooling. This lasted until the age of 11 or 12. 

After that boys had to either work or be apprenticed to a trade, and non-peasant girls would begin learning etiquette and the skills to be a noble wife. 

The sons of nobleman had to learn how to be vicious in combat in order to be successful knights. I mean REALLY vicious. 

If a boy could not afford to be a knight (it cost a lot to buy chain mail, armour, swords and horses), then they lost their right to land.

Many of these boys had no choice but to live in the forest amongst the other outlaws, stealing and butchering to survive.

For the most part the common people were otherwise left to fend for themselves, as long as they gave their tithes to the manor and respected the church and Norman law. Otherwise they were steeped in beliefs in magic, the Green Man and fayries...

A tough life – but you knew your place. 27 generations ago.  I quite like to think one of my ancestors might have been an outlaw and lived with Robin Hood. A bit of him or her lives on in me....

David's  writing course can be found here. He is the author of Hybrids, Stormteller and Marvel's Captain Britain amongst others. His new short story imagining a future Britain – For The Greater Good – is featured in this free ebook: Weatherfronts: The Stories We Tell.  Hybrids and Stormteller can be found and bought here.

Going Underground: The City Where People Continue To Live In Caves

Nottingham Rock Cemetery cave interior.

On a recent weekend I took a small tour of some of the tunnels under Nottingham as research for my next novel, which is partly set in the city; and one of the main characters is, for a while, forced to live in the caves.

It was a fascinating experience.

Nottingham is a city that is built on a system of caves that have been expanded by the city's occupants over the centuries for living and working space. Some of them are available for the public to tour, others continue to be used by homeless people as they always have.

The city, which dates back over 1000 years, was built a particularly soft form of sandstone called Bunter sandstone. It has played a major part in the way that the city has expanded. This is the city that I grew up in and to which I regularly return.

Nottingham is most famous for being the city of Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham. The castle which now sits on top of the splendid rock overlooking the city centre is not the original one, which burned down in a fire in the 18th century.

A cave system extends from the castle down to the ground level and into neighbouring built-up areas. Directly below, at the bottom of the cliff, is probably the oldest pub in the world: the Trip to Jerusalem Inn.

In the days of pilgrimages to the Holy Land documented in the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, pilgrims would begin their journey at the castle gate and the first stop would be the Inn. The habits of Brits travelling abroad have not changed much over the centuries! The Inn is carved out of the cliff base. Looking up to the ceiling you can see a chimney extending right upwards to the castle above.



The Trip to Jerusalem Inn chimney carved in the rock.

Many of the buildings in central area of Nottingham have cellars and extended underground areas that were carved out, particularly in the 17th and 18th century.

The reason for this is that during the Industrial Revolution tens of thousands of people migrated from the countryside to work in the factories in the cities of England. In Nottingham's this was in the lacemaking factories.

The city could not expand beyond its tight boundaries because of a complex system of land ownership around the outside. Everybody living inside had the rights to farm strips of land outside the city walls to grow food, a relic of the feudal system. They also had the right to walk in the surrounding countryside to get fresh air.

Inside the city walls conditions were dire due to pollution from burning coal and the lack of a sewerage system. Overcrowding was terrible and in an effort to make more space people burrowed into the soft sandstone, carving out more rooms for both workspace and living space. The dispossessed lived in the caves.



But this was not a sustainable solution. As in many English cities at this time there was an outbreak of cholera in Nottingham. Hundreds of people died. The proper solution was not just to build sewers but to extend the city and build on the surrounding land.

This was the time of the Enclosure Acts in England which were used to appropriate agricultural land for building and development. In many cases this led to agricultural land, much of which was common land which everybody had a right to use, being grabbed by the rich and fenced off. Many people starved as a result.

But in Nottingham it was different. The 1845 Enclosure Act specified that developers or builders must come to an agreement with the owners of the land and those who had the right to use it before it could be built upon. This process took 15 years to pan out in the courts. But it was worth it because it was done amicably. Everyone benefited.



The map extract above from George Sanderson’s ‘Twenty Miles Around Mansfield’, published in 1835, gives some idea of the density of development and overcrowding which Nottingham suffered from prior to the enclosure of the fields around the town. Also visible are the Sand Field and Clay Field which were enclosed to the north of Nottingham. The field pattern is clearly visible.

One result of this is that certain corridors of green space and parks were kept and are still there today for all people to enjoy. They provide a vital means by which the city can breathe.

Today you can look at Nottingham from the air or walk around it and see the result of this expansion. Outside the original compact city is a ring of Victorian buildings, large homes which would have had a room for servants. These are now in the main subdivided into apartments or used by businesses.

Around that was built rows of small tenement homes for the workers. Many of these still remain, as in Hyson Green, but others have been since demolished because they grew to be slums, such as the notorious Meadows area between the castle and the River Trent immortalised in local author Alan Sillitoe's novel (and film adaptation) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.



The 1930s saw further urban sprawl (above) in the form of large, planned estates of council houses on the lines of garden cities, with generous gardens for the workers to grow their own vegetables, two or three bedrooms and wide roads. Nowadays hardly anybody unfortunately grows vegetables in these gardens and the front gardens have been paved over for cars, because nobody thought that workers would own one, let alone two or three cars, in those days so no room was provided for them.

Nottingham has sprawled much more since then, with endless badly designed housing estates extending into the countryside. Very little of Sherwood Forest remains although in mediaeval times it came almost up to the castle itself.

Who knows? Perhaps Robin Hood and his outlaws used to live in some of the cave systems and used them to creep up upon the Sheriff in his castle.

When I visited one small part of the caves yesterday I found evidence that they are still being used by the homeless.

The part I accessed is through Rock Cemetery, one of the green spaces preserved by the Enclosure Act in the area known as the Forest (although it does not resemble a forest at all).



Rock Cemetery.

The entrance to the system is meant to be protected by iron railings but they had been tampered with to provide enough space for someone to crawl through.



Inside is evidence that people do in fact sleep there:



There is also evidence of drinking and drug use:



I talked to Dwayne, the council officer responsible for the upkeep of the cemetery, who confirmed that drug users and homeless people do use the caves. He had a relaxed, laissez-faire atitude to this. I met a German journalist doing a feature on Nottingham who told me she had told by a charity official that cutbacks in council spending have caused an increase in homelessness.

It's very dark and quiet in the caves. The rock is soft and crumbly and dry. It's also quite scary at first. There are occasionally roof-falls.

While some of the caves in Nottingham are accessible only through private property, and some are available for visitors to tour, the full extent of the system is unknown and it's possible to find entrances all over the central part of the city.

Nottingham's underground culture looks set to continue far into the future.

For further information about the 1845 Enclosure Act in Nottingham see John Beckett and Ken Brand, ‘Enclosure, Improvement and the Rise of “New Nottingham”, 1845-67′ (PDF), Transactions of the Thoroton Society, XCVIII (1994, published in 1995), pp. 92-111.