In an Elizabethan play, Anthony Munday identified Maid Marian with the historical Matilda, daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, who had to flee England because of an attempt to assassinate King John (legendarily attributed to King John's attempts to seduce Matilda). If these parallels are not coincidental, then the Marian of Robin Hood fame, whose origins may be distinct from the Marian of the May games or of Monday's play, may derive all her roots from her association with the historical Robert Hood of Wakefield. The 19th century antiquarian, Joseph Hunter, identified a Robert Hood, yeoman from Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the archives preserved in the Exchequer, whose personal story matched very closely the story of Robin in Anthony Munday's play, and this Robert Hood also married a woman named Matilda, who changed her name to Marian when she joined him in exile in Barnsdale Forest (following the Battle of Boroughbridge) in 1322, and who also had a cousin named Elizabeth de Staynton who was Prioress of Kirklees Priory. She also has a cousin called Elizabeth de Staynton who is described as being the Prioress of Kirklees Priory near Brighouse in West Yorkshire. In the play, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon by Anthony Munday, which was written in 1598, Marian appears as Robin's lawfully-wedded wife, who changes her name from Matilda when she joins him in the greenwood. From this time, Maid Marian is cast in terms of a noblewoman, but her role was never entirely virginal, and she retained aspects of her "shepherdess" or "May Day" characteristics in 1592, Thomas Nashe described the Marian of the later May Games as being played by a male actor named Martin, and there are hints in the play of Robin Hood and the Friar that the female character in these plays had become a lewd parody. The "gentrified" Robin Hood character, portrayed as a historical outlawed nobleman, emerges in the late 16th century. Clorinda survives in some later stories as an alias of Marian. The early Robin Hood is also given a "shepherdess" love interest, in Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage ( Child Ballad 149), his sweetheart is "Clorinda the Queen of the Shepherdesses". Marian remained associated with May Day celebrations even after the association of Robin Hood with May Day had again faded.
1500, refers to "some merry fytte of Maid Marian or else of Robin Hood". It isn't clear if there was an association of the early "outlaw" character of Robin Hood and the early "May Day" character Robin, but they did become identified, and associated with the "Marian" character, by the 16th century. Childe argues that she originally was portrayed as a trull associated with a lascivious Friar Tuck: "She is a trul of trust, to serue a frier at his lust/a prycker a prauncer a terer of shetes/a wagger of ballockes when other men slepes." īoth a "Robin" and a "Marian" character were associated with May Day by the 15th century, but these figures were apparently part of separate traditions the Marian of the May Games is likely derived from the French tradition of a shepherdess named Marion and her shepherd lover Robin, recorded in Adam de la Halle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, circa 1283. Jim Lees in The Quest for Robin Hood (p. 81) suggests that Maid Marian was originally a personification of the Virgin Mary.įrancis J. She appears to have been a character in May Games festivities (held during May and early June, most commonly around Whitsun) and is sometimes associated with the Queen or Lady of May or May Day. Maid Marian (or Marion) is never mentioned in any of the earliest extant ballads of Robin Hood. Maid Marion wears a Tyrolean hat and carries a hunting horn. Robin Hood and Marian in their Bower (1912).
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