previous | home page | this month | e-mail me | next

Robin . . . & Henry

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary,  Monday,  14th December 2009

previous | home page | this month | e-mail me | next

I’D HAPPILY go on reading about Robin Hood and his times for another year but my deadline for Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire is looming so I’m going to have to leave reading Robin Hood, The Unknown Templar by John Paul Davis and Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England by Alison Wier until later, tempting though it is to make a start on them. I’ve got stacks of information on the back-story of the familiar Robin, of Sherwood Forest fame.

Derek Pearsall has suggested that the Sheriff of Nottingham is the ‘mythical imperative’ of the stories. I certainly find myself cheering on the rare occasions when Keith Alan's sheriff gets the upper hand in the television series! I was so relieved when he returned ‘from the dead’ at the end of the last series and stood with his army outside the gates of Nottingham, then in outlaw hands, and said ‘Now I’d like my town back!’

There’s no point in me focusing solely on Robin Hood himself because without the Sheriff he doesn’t have the opportunity to be Robin Hood. My candidate for Sheriff is Henry de Faucomberg, whose career, what we know of it, is outlined in Robin Hood, The Man Behind the Myth by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman.

I can only go so far with notes, scripts and black and white roughs. I’m now at the stage where I need to populate the comic strip history pages of my booklet with colourful characters. From reading the ballads and the historical material I’ve developed an image in my mind of what I feel Robin would be like if you met him in a medieval market or, more alarmingly, were stopped by him on Watling Street while walking through Barnsdale Forest (the Great North Road was often referred to as Watling Street).

The image in my mind is elusive when I try to transfer it to paper. My Robin isn’t the Jonas Armstrong freedom fighter of the television series. Having Henry de Faucomberg as a contrast is an enormous help. Everything that Faucomberg represents is what my market town Everyman, Robert Hode of Wakefield, finds himself up against. The two characters define each other and need each other to express themselves to the full.

Meanwhile on Planet Bryce

I took a break from my booklet at the weekend and experimented further with landscape design in Bryce 6. Unfortunately it’s looking as if the program isn’t comfortable running in Windows 7, at least not in the 64-bit version that I went to. The main problem is when I try to select objects in the plan and side view, or to be more technical, in orthogonal projection.

Any Bryce fans out there with a solution?

My attempt at the alien planet Bryce tutorial  by John Kennedy from a 1998 copy of PC Format.