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Cobalt-60 posted:What exactly does Little John do in the Sheriff's service? Since the historical Sheriff was an extortionate jerk, I'd think any principled man would avoid working for him; let alone one who's supposed to be on the other side. And what was Robin's response? Did Little John run into some of his old colleagues at the blue Boar and they go "Man, WTF?" The Sherrif is recruiting John to be part of his retinue. Every aristocrat had a crew of flunkies, thugs, and henchmen on retainer to carry out various acts of gooning for him. In a time of war (or local political dispute getting out of hand) that would be fighting but retinue guys also might be assigned to oversee various tasks and jobs as needed by the lord they served. Many English kings had a bodyguard of archers who would sometimes be given other administrative offices and roles. As a result of the Hundred Years War, retinue service became increasingly professionalized and almost entirely based on formal contracts of service. A lot of HYW stuff creeps into the Robin Hood legend over time because the 14th/15th centuries are really where this whole English longbow mythology is developed. This is also when you get the image of a big crew of skilled archers hanging out in the woods robbing people and doing crimes, they're demobilized soldiers who are stuck without permanent roles as retainers, or who either didn't want to or didn't find work as garrison troops or foreign mercenary work in between English field campaigns in France. Only instead of being a jolly and kind assortment of Stout English Lads, running into a company of former military archers out in the woods who wanted to rob you was a much more violent and terrifying experience.
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Aug 15, 2020 15:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
Reverend Stafford picking the name based on the growing popularity of the ballad makes sense to me. I remember reading one time about an archer enlisted in the garrison of I think the Isle of Man in the late 1300s who was recorded as "Robin Hood" in the garrison payroll. An archer being cheeky or a former criminal picking the most obvious fake pseudonym in England? We'll never know, sadly.
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Aug 17, 2020 17:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
I don't think Pyle would have known this, but having archers wearing mail armor would also be a pretty big flex for the 14th century, which as mentioned before is where a lot of Robin Hood stuff is from even if the ostensible time period is Richard I's reign. As armor got cheaper over the course of the medieval period, everyone got better protected, but prior to the invention of plate harness (over the course of the 14th century/early 15th), a mail shirt is pretty good for a regular soldier. Using some prices from a purchase of mail by the Tower of London's armory in the 1360s, a cheaper mail shirt could be around 16 shillings. That's over a month's wages for an English mounted archer's pay at 6 pence a day. So not impossible or out of reach, but pretty significant.
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Aug 24, 2020 03:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
Richard's gift of the peacock arrows here is actually not that different from the bows, which are decorated but not so much that it becomes impractical. Peacock arrows were pretty common in medieval arrow fletchings. The Knight's Yeoman in the Canterbury Tales famously has some peacock arrows tucked into his belt, which has been the subject of much debate. Here's the first part of the Yeoman's description, you can see the similarities to the way Robin is always described. Geoffrey Chaucer posted:A yeman hadde he and servantz namo Many literary minded types and people who don't read that much into the military side of scholarship generally portray peacock arrows as being made purely for decorative or ceremonial purposes, but in reality, the fletchings weren't made from the showy feathers you think of in a peacock's tail. A medieval fletcher would have used the "primary pinions," which are still visually distinct from the swan and goose feathers that were also commonly used and were like a reddish-brown color. I'm taking this all from Kenneth Thompson's article "The Yeoman's 'Pecok Arwes'" published in the Chaucer Review. The price of peacock fletchings seems to have been a little more expensive than goose, but not by that much. Thompson thinks the peacock arrows were considered better for performance, and were used mostly in contexts like hunting or target shooting (I think this part of the article is a little more tenuous, but it's plausible). For someone like the Yeoman in Canterbury Tales or Robin and the bros here, it's supposed to show that they know what they're doing and that they can afford quality gear. A little like someone going shooting at a gun range today with basic plinking ammo vs someone going out there with match-grade bullets. The real expense of the arrows Richard is giving is from the nocks and (presumably steel) arrowheads, rather than the fletchings. As far as the bows are concerned, there's accounting records that mention "painted bows" in medieval England that were more expensive than the regular "white" bows but no real description of how they might have been painted. Probably nothing so fanciful as Richard's silver inlays here!
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Aug 27, 2020 03:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's such great detail, thanks! It cycles back to showing how Sir Richard is a Good Knight -- he knows how to equip his friends in the best sweet tactical gear. It's also furthering the dynamic of captain/retainer that has been previously established. Like the corrupt lawyer receiving clothes from the Bishop or Little John getting livery from the Sheriff, Sir Richard is equipping his retinue men with good gear, which historically was often the case. Even though the Merry Men won't be permanently attached to his household, they're still part of Sir Richard's local recruiting ecosystem and military community, so it's important that he maintains ties to them. If Sir Richard wanted to participate in a royal campaign, he would call on his own retainers and men-at-arms to show up, but he would also look to use these ties he's built among the military community to rustle up some additional manpower in a hurry. Instead of having to go out and find forty individual guys who are experienced archers all over the shire, he can go to Robin (their captain) and subcontract them as additional muscle. That way, if his "household" crew and local guys are thirty men-at-arms and sixty archers, he can now show up to the muster with a 130 man force without too much fuss or extra hassle. Edward I once tried to expand the infantry forces available to the English crown by using Commissioners of Array to go out and drag in recruits, but a major problem with that effort was that the knights and aristocrats nearby had already recruited the motivated, equipped soldiers to be part of their retinues. Sir Richard is playing the long game here, paying debts and demonstrating his generosity while also increasing his potential military strength.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:54
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While reading this thread, some of you may have thought to yourselves, "Wow, there were a lot of people running around with longbows all over medieval England, I wonder if that led to a bunch of injuries and deaths." The answer is yes, yes it did. This was an era before the 3 Rules of gun safety were invented and no one had any fucks to give. In 1556, a man named Thomas Curteys challenged his compatriot Richard Lyrence with the words, "Nowe let me se howe thou canst shott at my hatt." In a shocking twist of fate that couldn't possibly have been anticipated, he immediately died from Lyrence's arrow going straight through his head. Ye olde bowe safteye! EDIT: This is from Steve Gunn's article "Archery Practice in Early Tudor England" in case anyone wants more stories about English people accidentally shooting each other with longbows. Grenrow fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 22:18
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Cobalt-60 posted:I know there were bans on crossbows (at least in warfare; don't know if people carried them around normally), but were there any restrictions of longbows? There was never any point where crossbows were banned. People get that myth from the 2nd Lateran Council, which issued a bunch of canons intended to reform the church and establish its authority. It prohibited a lot of things, like hurting clerics, priests having wives or concubines, jousts and tournaments, and any fighting from Wednesday to Monday, none of which were practical to enforce or were going to be enforced. For some reason, the part of the 2nd lateran council people really latch onto in modern times is the prohibition against using missile weapons (not exclusively crossbows) on Christians. No one ever followed this or even thought about it for a second (no one followed any of the other rules either). There's a mythology that goes around the internet and sometimes in pop history that a "crossbow ban" (which never in reality existed) was intended as some kind of class warfare measure, which is absolute nonsense. Knights did not feel threatened by the existence of the crossbow. They loved having more crossbows in their armies, being Master of the Crossbows was a prestigious role at court, and they spent huge amounts of money buying and stockpiling crossbows. Depending on where and who you were, owning a bow or a crossbow might even be legally mandatory. In England, it wasn't really "normal" to carry around a whole longbow and arrows unless you were doing something with them, like traveling or going down to the public archery butts to practice. If you were coming into a city, you were supposed to put up your weapons at whatever location you were staying (like an inn) after you arrived, but just going off death records and murder cases, this wasn't a law people felt a huge reason to follow.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:31
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 04:38 |
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Thanks for a great readthrough! EDIT: Some other comments, upon reflection. I love that the ending fight, which would be the climax and probably ending of a more modern story is conveyed in a more medieval style, where the description of a major battle can sometimes be just a sentence or two. The long-running antagonist, who we've gotten to know so well, is instantly killed with no further reflections from any other character. The medieval historian Andrew Ayton has an article called "Military Service and the Development of the Robin Hood Legend in the Fourteenth Century" where he talks about soldiers turning to banditry in Robin Hood fashion (although in a less jolly way). Some of them probably did so out of legal or financial necessity, but Ayton also suggests that some did it because they had difficulty integrating back into civilian life . He describes the following scene from a chronicle talking about King Jean II of France's captivity in England following the Battle of Poitiers. quote:The convoy bringing the captive King John II of France to London in 1357 is apprehended by a crowd of several hundred green-clad men, equipped 'as if they were a band of robbers and evildoers, with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers'. The French king is justifiably dismayed, but the Black Prince assures him that these were Englishmen 'living rough in the forest by choice, and that it was their habit to array themselves so every day. I wonder whether any of those men were at Crecy or Poitiers with the Black Prince, and whether, upon coming back to England, they found that "where once was the bustle of many busy fellows was now the quietness of solitude" ? Grenrow fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 04:51
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