49 pages • 1 hour read
Roger Lancelyn GreenThe Adventures of Robin Hood
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Maid Marian of Sherwood Forest”
Sir Guy of Gisborne goes to visit Sir William of Gamwell, Robin’s uncle, to try and find a lead on him. Sir William invites Sir Guy to a festival near Sherwood Forest, and there, Sir Guy recognizes a peasant woman named Clorinda as Lady Marian Fitzwalter. He follows her to an archery contest, where Clorinda and a forester—Robin in disguise—are contending for the prize. Sir Guy recognizes Robin, and after asking Sir William for aid in arresting him, he is told to go back to Nottingham, as tenants will not necessarily help him. Sir Guy rides hard to Nottingham, gathers the Sheriff and an armed band of men, and, on their way back, encounters Clorinda and Brother Michael, her confessor. The friar blocks the men’s path from getting to Robin and engages them, pushing them back with only his staff. The next morning, armed men go to Lord Fitzwalter, Marian’s father, and accuse Marian of brutalizing the King’s men. Her father sends them off, but Marian confesses her actions and plans to escape from her father’s stronghold disguised as a forest ranger so that he will avoid retribution from Prince John, and she will go be with Robin in Sherwood Forest. Knowing Robin to be an honorable man, her father agrees, welcomes Prince John to his home, and makes a show of acting surprised when Marian has disappeared. During her escape, Robin encounters Marian in disguise and fights with her, finding her as skilled as he is, if a bit weaker. When her identity is revealed, he brings her back to Sherwood Forest, where she is deemed the Maiden Queen of Sherwood Forest.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Coming of Friar Tuck”
One day, Marian mentions that she does not know what has happened to Brother Michael. When Will Scarlet mentions an impressive hermit at Copmanhurst, Robin, disguised as a minstrel, goes to find him. He believes the hermit is Brother Michael, and he wants to invite him to the forest if he proves himself a virtuous priest and a good man. He finds the friar acting as a ferryman at a river, and the friar asks for alms before ushering him to the other side of the river. Robin, however, threatens him with his sword and makes the friar carry him across the river instead of using the boat. Just as they arrive on the other side of the river, the friar throws Robin to the ground and makes Robin carry him back the way they came. Robin does, but he throws the friar into the deepest part of the water. They fight with one another, then, after a time, call a truce. The friar brings Robin back to his home and offers him only “pease” and water. After Robin bribes him, however, the friar reveals a giant venison pasty, and Robin entices him to break his fast and join him in the meal. They drink together, and after revealing himself to be Robin, he invites Friar Tuck to be part of his men in the forest.
Chapter 9 Summary: “How Sir Richard Paid Robin Hood”
A year passes since Robin lent Sir Richard of Legh money, and as Sir Richard embarks on his journey to repay Robin, he encounters a festival in Barnsdale where a competitor by the name of Arthur-a-Bland, who had won at the festival, is being hassled for defeating the favored champion. As Sir Richard intervenes for Arthur-a-Bland, he is made late for his appointment with Robin. While they wait for the knight, Little John and Much the Miller’s son find two monks, one of whom is the High Cellarer of the Abbot of St. Mary’s, with a band of serving men on the road. They scare off the attending men and coerce the monks into having dinner with Robin. The High Cellarer lies to Robin when asked if he has any money, and Robin’s men search him and his belongings; they uncover over 800 pounds of gold and more in silver meant for Prince John. The High Cellarer also admits that he has a message from the Abbot to Prince John, asking him “to humble the treasonable pride of a certain Sir Richard of Legh who is a law-breaker that defies the Holy Church” (110). Robin decides to keep all their money, using the gold for King Richard and the silver to pay for the monks’ dinner with him. As the monks eventually scurry away, Sir Richard appears and tries to repay Robin the money he owes him, but Robin argues that his debt has been settled by the Abbot already through the money he took from his High Cellarer.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Silver Arrow”
Prince John announces a great archery contest to try and ingratiate himself with commoners, and Robin decides to attend along with a few of his men. Robin competes in the contest, disguised, and wins the silver arrow. When Prince John bestows it on him, he recognizes Robin, but as Robin is there as a competitor and a guest, he cannot make a scene and arrest him. He allows him to leave, but Sir Guy of Gisborne has already planned for Robin’s presence and has blocked off all exit points and roads. They chase Robin and his men as they leave, with men dying on both sides, and eventually, Little John is hurt at the knee. He tells Robin to leave him behind, but Robin refuses and carries him in the darkness to a stone house belonging to Sir Richard of Legh. Sir Richard takes them in and tends to them, and Robin fears reprisals against Sir Richard, but as Ranulph, Earl of Chester, is his only overlord, Sir Richard claims he is safe from Prince John. The next morning, Sir Guy arrives at the house and asks that Sir Richard surrender Robin and his men. He refuses, invoking the laws of chivalry and hospitality as his reasons. Sir Guy leaves, and for 12 days, Robin and his men recover, after which they leave for Sherwood Forest. Sir Guy, however, waits and ambushes Sir Richard when he is alone and imprisons him in Nottingham. Sir Richard’s lady rides to Sherwood and asks for Robin’s help; together, they go to the Earl of Chester, explaining how Sir Richard was wrongfully imprisoned. With his assistance, Sir Richard is set free, and the Earl of Chester is noted as defying Prince John for the rest of his life.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Robin Hood and the Butcher”
On a day when they are bored, Robin and Little John find a Butcher walking the forest road. They ask that he pay tribute for passage, and when he refuses, he and Robin fight each other with quarterstaff. Robin wins, and to undo his boredom, he decides to pay the Butcher for his horse, cart, and meat. He then disguises himself as a butcher and goes into town with the Butcher’s wares. He sells the meat far too cheaply and garners the attention of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s wife. She invites him to dinner, and there, Robin is treated as an honored guest. Not knowing his true identity, the Sheriff asks whether Robin could sell him live cattle, and they make plans for Robin to bring the Sheriff to see his alleged herd of animals the next morning. Robin, however, brings the Sheriff deep into the forest and coerces the Sheriff to dine with him as he reveals his identity and robs the Sheriff of all the money he’d planned to use for cattle. When he sends back the Sheriff and his two attending men home in blindfolds, the Butcher asks to become one of Robin’s men.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Adventure of the Beggars”
Little John takes inspiration from what happened with the Butcher and makes a wager with Robin on who can bring back the bigger spoils while disguised as a beggar. They find a beggar, and both he and Robin try to fight him for his clothes, but both lose, and the beggar takes all of their clothes and valuables instead. As both Robin and Little John look worse for wear, they set off to find spoils on their separate ways. Robin encounters Prince John’s appointed captain of the guard, who is trying to put three yeomen to death for hunting the King’s deer in the forest. While the gathered crowd decries the captain for following the Prince’s instructions, Robin takes the opportunity to incapacitate the executioner and take his place. He frees the young men, blinds the captain with a hot iron, and together, he and the three young men escape to the forest.
Meanwhile, Little John finds four other beggars, one of whom was the man who’d stolen his clothes, another with one leg, one who is blind, and the last who is deaf. They quickly come to a fight, where Little John beats them all and ransacks their goods, finding more than 300 pounds in gold between them. When he returns to meet with Robin, he claims to be the better beggar, but when Robin states that his begging has saved three lives and is a better booty than gold, Little John concedes.
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
In the second part of the narrative, Green uses the episodic nature of his chapters to flesh out the dynamics of Robin’s outlaw society and his—at times problematic—whimsical decision-making to demonstrate Robin’s qualities as a leader. Throughout every chapter of this section, Robin acquires new members to his merry men, all from very different walks of life and including his would-be wife, Lady Marian. To become part of Robin’s band and the outlaw society he is building in Sherwood Forest, Green intimates that there is something akin to an unspoken rite of passage wherein the individual in question must fight with Robin—the only exception being those whom Robin saves from Prince John and his men. Even Marian is subjected to this same ritual, though Robin engages her unknowingly because she is disguised as a forester. The rite is reminiscent of the medieval practice of trial by ordeal, specifically trial by combat (duella), an inherited process from Germanic law that would see individuals prove their innocence or honesty through battle. Whoever won the battle would be deemed the honest party, as the belief was that God would help the innocent individual to achieve victory. In Robin’s case, fighting against the eventual members of his outlaw society proves a variety of aspects, namely their ability to fight and hold their own in the battles against the Sheriff of Nottingham or other members of Prince John’s entourage, but also their trustworthiness.
Though Green makes no comment on Robin’s inner thoughts during the matches, there is nevertheless always a watershed moment after someone loses or Robin calls a truce that would have him seemingly decide whether the person before him is worthy of being among his men. Robin, after all, does like to fight and often seeks it out when he is bored, but in this section, Robin’s violence has more to do with one’s pride than necessarily exerting dominance, as Green intimates in Chapter 8. Robin’s fight with Friar Tuck is rather unnecessary, as he expressed a desire to include a holy man in Sherwood since he is devout in his religion and knows that the man at the hermitage is Marian’s confessor. Yet even so, and despite being a noble and deemed a Christ-like figure in the previous section, the second part of the narrative demonstrates that at heart, Robin is a mischievous character, one who is prone to indulge his whimsy. Robin cannot resist issuing bargains and deals to gain the upper hand in any given situation—including recruiting Friar Tuck. When a fight inevitably begins, however, Robin will put his pride and honor on the line and will not relent until an unknown quotient of worth in his opponent has been determined, and he can stop the fight with satisfaction, as Green points out in this passage:
After that they set at one another with great staves, smiting and feinting and raining blows like two lusty farmers threshing the corn. At last they paused through sheer weariness—and though neither was beaten, both had paid the toll of a broken sconce. ‘Honour, me thinks, is satisfied!’ puffed the friar (99).
Robin agrees with the friar, then, and though what led them to fight borders on the nonsensical, the author suggests that fighting another person in Robin’s world translates to the measurement of a person’s honor and, by extension, their trustworthiness.
Knowing the mettle of a person and whether Robin can rely on them is an understated but vital component to Robin’s survival as an outlaw. Though Robin will only confront Worman in the third section of this narrative, his former steward’s betrayal is not without impact. Robin, after all, lost his home, his tenants, his position in society, and his ability to finish marrying Marian because his steward, a man he had trusted, sold him off to Prince John’s greed. Actively challenging the members he allows in his court of outlaws, therefore, shows growth in Robin’s development as a leader, as testing the men who follow him allows for a deep-seated trust between him and his men and guarantees that he can lead them without doubting their intentions.
This section also introduces the theme of The Ambiguity of Robin’s Social Justice. The narrative discusses how Robin steals from the High Cellarer of the Abbot of St. Mary’s money intended to pay Prince John to come down hard on Sir Richard. Given his relationship with Sir Richard and his disdain for Prince John, Robin’s theft can be seen as a way of preventing an injustice from happening to Sir Richard while preventing Prince John from gaining more wealth—in both aspects, Robin’s aspects appear linked to relationships with Sir Richard and Prince John and less about social justice. Later, Robin blinds one of Prince John’s guards for being willing to execute three young men for the crime of killing deer from Prince John’s forest. This action is a more straightforward example of social justice in that Robin prevented a punishment that was disproportionate to the crime. Robin later tells Little John that his actions, which did not result in financial spoils, were more important because he saved three men, an indication that he values the lives of those he views as innocent more than gold or booty.
Related Titles
By Roger Lancelyn Green
