ROUD 71: Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires
AKA: Robin Hood rescuing the Widow's Three Sons from the Sheriff when going to be executed, Robin Hood rescuing the Three Squires from Nottingham Gallows, Robin Hood, Bold Robin Hood
In my experience, the sound of a Robin Hood ballad ringing out from a folk club has been a rare thing. One can’t help but wonder if that might be due to the popular flavour of most modern Robin Hood adaptations making the whole idea of the Nottinghamshire outlaw what might colloquially be described as “a bit naff”. The other issue is that a lot of the ballads overlap a great deal in terms of content, with many sharing verses wholesale, which has the overall effect of making them something of an indistinct mass. This is certainly the case in this instances, as this tale of Robin Hood rescuing three deer-poaches from an over-zealous sheriff overlaps considerably with Robin Hood and the Beggar, and shares several stanzas with Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar. This particular facet of the Robin Hood ballad oeuvre is amplified by the fact that the wordy titles of these songs means that recording artists are often moved to list their album track by the truncated and vague title “Robin Hood”.
That said, this is one of the more popular to have been collected, with a healthy number of tunes collected with it, and accounts of it having been sung around Britain and the US, and we have a decent handful of excellent recordings from the mid 20th century folk revival and beyond.
Music
It’s not the longest Youtube playlist you will find, but for a Robin Hood ballad, it’s huge. Quite a pleasing variety too, from the traditional giant that is John Kirkpatrick:
to the aggressive folk-punk stylings of one Mr. Paul Carbuncle:
Outside of the corporate hegemony of streaming audio, there are a couple of harder to find versions out there in the physical world. The first I came across accidentally in my friend’s excellent record shop in Stockport, SK1 Records. The have an interesting little second hand folk selection, and I picked up this album from The Songwainers back when I was researching somewhere in the 20s of the Roud Index, and the Robin Hood ballads were a mere twinkle in my eye. But frankly, any album where the band members are portrayed on the cover posing on or around agricultural equipment has got to be a winner. And win it did, as it opens with a cracking version of this ballad. Following is a clip. The full track (again, apologies for the sound quality, I promise to rectify this once building works have finished on my house and I can move back into my home office) can be heard by paid subscribers after the break.
(A side note - among the second hand folk records in SK1 were quite a considerable number of Welsh origin, many in the Welsh language. Surprised by this finding I asked the proprietor where he got them from, and he replied, with disarming brevity, “Wales”. I had no rejoinder. Anyway, if you’re looking for a rich repository of Welsh traditional song, it’s the place to be.)
Finally, in 1968, heavyweight folk trio The Halliard (Nic Jones, Dave Moran & Nigel Paterson) recorded 15 songs as demos for an album that was never released. In 2006 these demos (plus some additional re-recorded material) were released as a CD called “The Last Goodnight!”, which includes their version of Roud 71, under the title “Robin Hood”. As far as I can see, it’s not available anywhere online, but I managed to find a relatively rare secondhand CD. Following is a clip:
Again, paid subscribers can hear the full track after the paywall.
Robin Hood’s Garland
Most of the tales we have of the outlaw Robin Hood, including this one, were collected in an 87 page publication of unknown authorship called “Robin Hood’s Garland”, the first known printing coming from W. Gilbertson in London in 1663. It was probably conceived more as a book of verse for reading rather than songs for singing (for evidence of this, see this article by Stephen Basdeo in the 2018 edition of the delightfully specific journal “The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies”) and was frequently reprinted by many publishing houses thereafter. It’s easy to imagine Francis Child working his way through this for his ballad collection, and it’s almost certainly why they primarily appear all in one chunk, from Child Ballad 117: “A Gest of Robyn Hode”, to Child Ballad 154: “A True Tale of Robin Hood”.
A Gallery of Garlands
Here’s a small selection of the title pages of some of the editions of the Garlands.
You can see a fuller (although far from exhaustive) list of printed sources for Robin Hood’s adventures, including a number of the early Garlands, here.
Other sources
Aside from Francis Child’s extensive account that you can read as usual here, specific mentions of this particular ballad are rare. As I mentioned at the top, Robin Hood ballads are often taken as an amorphous blob of mythology rather than separate tales. However, there is one important reference to this story that predates the publication of the Garland in the dramatic play “The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington” written in 1598 by English playwright Anthony Munday. In Act 2, Scene 2, Robin rescues two sons of a widow from the gallows in Nottingham, using the same horn-based conceit as in this ballad, a clear antecedent. You can read it here.
Another small mention comes in the delightfully niche work “The Beggars of England in Prose and Poetry” from German one-hit-wonder author Albert Tschopp:
Draft pages and audio guide
And those full hard-to-find versions of the song:
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