Subject: Robin Hood Hi Ben, You have a nice site up about Robin Hood! I wanted to mention a couple of things I noticed. First, Dr, Walker is a little over-enthusiastic about the Earl of Huntingdon being Robin Hood. He says Anthony Munday probably did not know that the Rutland Barnesdale belonged to the Earl and was drawing on some other, theretofore unrecorded tradition. The placement of this supposition within a review of Stephen Knight's book suggests that this is also Knight's view, but it is not in fact Knight's position. Knight thinks Munday DID know, as you can see in the interview with him on Allen Wright's site: "Rutland Barnsdale had been owned by the Earl of Huntingdon, the king of Scotland's brother. I can't show any actual link between that fact and Munday's use of the name Earl of Huntingdon [as Robin Hood's title in the Elizabethan plays]. My very strong supposition is that John Stow, the great Elizabethan archivist and historian who was close friend of Munday's, knew about it and told him about it.... There's certainly no other good explanation in my view for Munday making Robin Hood the earl of Huntingdon." As you can see, Knight doesn't even consider as an outside possibility that any Earl of Huntingdon could actually have BEEN Robin Hood; historians know too much about the family to consider this a possibility. It's like suggesting Al Gore, and not Ted Kascynzky, is the real Unabomber; we just know too much about his whereabouts for this to be tenable! Second, Knight is also the scholar who started the whole "Robin Hood is Gay" controversy. He never actually said that Robin Hood was gay (he never even said that Robin Hood existed), but merely that there are homosexual aspects to the legend. Gender issues are fashionable in academia at the moment, so this doesn't actually mean much; every story has homosexual elements if you want them to be there. But Robin Hood does have themes like cross-dressing (as a disguise), men wrestling a lot, tights...you get the picture. So scholars of gender theory are beginning to look at Robin's exploits, and Knight was merely noting that. Allen Wright again provides web coverage of this in his interview with Knight. I don't know if you'll want to change the site at all based on the above. But here's a tidbit you might want to include. Nottingham resident Jim Lees, in an obscure book called The Quest for Robin Hood, suggests that these was a third Barnesdale, IN Sherwood Forest. This dale shows up in medieval documents as Brynnesdale, Briunnesdale, and other variant names. J.C. Holt is disparaging about this theory in his footnotes, but I'm not convinced by Holt's arguments. For example, he argues that Brynnesdale is etymologically "Briun's Dale," while Barnesdale in Yorkshire is etymologically "Beorn's Dale," so the two could not have been confused. This is, in my professional opinion as a folklorist, completely irrelevant. Two words may sound identical and have different etymologies; those identical-sounding words can be confused with one another. However, I'm also not completely convinced by Lees. Most importantly, he never shows that Brynnesdale was actually referred to as Barnesdale! The major points in favor of the Lees theory are these: (1) Like the Rutland Barnesdale, the Sherwood Barnesdale was actually a royal forest, while the Yorkshire Barnesdale never was. So many elements of the story that don't make sense in connection with the Yorkshire locale get straightened out in either the Sherwood or the Rutland locations. (2) In some of the ballads that feature Barnesdale, it is shown as adjacent to Nottingham town and Sherwood Forest. Characters travel between these three locales with virtually no effort or travel time. The Yorkshire Barnesdale is fifty miles away, the Rutland Barnesdale twenty. In Medieval terms, these are pretty long distances. But the Sherwood Barnesdale is actually within Sherwood and only a few miles from Nottingham, so the events recounted in those Ballads become possible. The major points against Lees are that (1) he can't prove the place was known as Barnesdale. (2) Ballad geography ranges from excellent to totally inaccurate, so point #2 above may be giving the ballads too much credence. In conclusion, this appears to be as insoluble as the question of Robin's "true identity." It is just possible, though, that the Brynnesdale within Sherwood was at one time considered the haunt of Robin Hood, and that the name was later changed to Barnesdale by people from Yorkshire, or chroniclers from Scotland, because the latter name was familiar to them. Incidentally, the reason Lees's theories are not well known is that his book was published in a limited, subscribers-only edition; I believe less than 1,000 copies were made. It sells on used book sites for 100-200 dollars. And, of course, Holt made light of Lees's contribution, which was the kiss of death for a Robin Hood scholar at the time. Still, it's an interesting sidelight! All the best. I really did enjoy your site! Steve Winick Stephen D. Winick, Ph.D. Folk Arts Program Director, Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center 2nd and Cooper Streets, Camden, NJ 08102