Barnsdale Forest and the Yorkshire Robin Hood
Ask most people where Robin Hood lived and they will say Sherwood. The oldest stories say Barnsdale: a stretch of woodland on the Great North Road in South and West Yorkshire, along the main road between London and York. This is a guide to Barnsdale and to the rest of the Robin Hood country north of Nottingham, from the Saylis at Wentbridge and the well under the A1 to the outlaw’s supposed birthplace at Loxley, Little John’s grave at Hathersage and Robin’s own at Kirklees, with a few rocks in the Peak that took his name on the way.
Where Barnsdale is
There is no village called Barnsdale and no parish, so it has never had proper boundaries. The name survives at Barnsdale Bar, the junction of the A1 (the old Great North Road) and the A639, about eight miles north-north-west of Doncaster, on the edge between the Doncaster and Wakefield districts. Around it are Wentbridge and Skelbrooke, both of which turn up in the Robin Hood stories.
The name means “Beorn’s valley”: an Old English man’s name, Beorn, and dale. The valley was probably the shallow one cut by the Skell, running south-east through Skelbrooke and Skellow towards the Don. The same personal name is in Barnsley, about 18 kilometres to the west-south-west, which Domesday Book calls Berneslai, “Beorn’s wood or clearing”. The two places share a name, not necessarily a Beorn: it was a common enough name, and nobody can say whether the man in the valley and the man in the clearing were the same. Over the centuries Beornsdale became Bern(e)sdale and then, as the vowel shifted to an a before the r, Barnsdale.
The oldest stories put him here
The first clear mention of Robin Hood is in Piers Plowman, a long alliterative poem from the 1370s, which mentions “rhymes of Robin Hood”, so the stories were already being told. Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Chronicle, around 1420, sets Robin Hood and Little John in Barnsdale and Inglewood under the year 1283. The early ballads, “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne” and A Gest of Robyn Hode, make Barnsdale Forest his base.
The Gest is written in a northern dialect, probably a Yorkshire one, and it is precise about one spot in particular: “the Saylis at Wentbridge”. The antiquarian Joseph Hunter tracked the place down, and the historians Dobson and Taylor think it survives today as Sayles Plantation. Sherwood does appear, in “Robin Hood and the Monk”, the oldest ballad to survive in writing, but the medievalist J. C. Holt noted how thin its geography is, and suggested that Robin picked up his Nottinghamshire connection through his dealings with the city’s sheriff. Most historians now accept that the legend starts in Yorkshire.
Robert Hod and the Robehods
Was there a real one? The earliest legal record anyone has found of a Robert Hod is from 1226, at the York assizes, and the same man was later recorded as “Hobbehod”. From 1261 on, names like “Robehod” and “Robbehod” turn up in the English justices’ rolls. None of it proves a single man behind the ballads, but all of it is in the north.
Robin Hood’s Well
Beside the A1 near Barnsdale Bar stands Robin Hood’s Well, the most visible thing the legend left on the road. It isn’t quite where it was: it was moved around 1960 when the junction was rebuilt, so the real well is under the A1.
Robin of Loxley
Sheffield has its own claim. A tradition going back at least to the late 16th century has Robin Hood born at Loxley, in the valley west of the city, and in the 1630s Roger Dodsworth wrote of a “Robert Locksley, born in Bradfield parish in Hallamshire”. The full story of that claim, from the Sloane manuscript to the cottage foundations in Loxley Firth, is in the Sheffield folklore guide.
Little John at Hathersage
Little John is said to be buried not in Barnsdale or Sherwood but in the churchyard at Hathersage, in Derbyshire, under an old yew, where a modern headstone now marks the supposed spot. The grave belonged to the Naylor family, and some versions of the story give John the surname “Nailer”. In 1780 James Shuttleworth claimed to have dug up a thigh bone 72.39 centimetres long, which would have made its owner about two and a half metres tall, eight feet and an inch. Hathersage has other stories too: Charlotte Brontë stayed at the vicarage in 1845 while she was writing Jane Eyre, the Eyres were a local gentry family, and North Lees Hall is widely taken to be the model for Thornfield. Little John’s death has other claimants: a legend in Dublin says he was hanged there.
Robin Hood in the Peak
The Peak is full of rocks with his name on them. Robin Hood’s Cave is a well-known hollow in the cliff of Stanage Edge (the edge is in the Dark Peak geography guide). Further south, near Elton on the Limestone Way between Haddon Hall and Winster, Robin Hood’s Stride is a rock formation, also known as Mock Beggar’s Mansion, named for the legend that Robin jumped between its “chimneys”. Nine Stones Close, a stone circle with four stones still standing, is just next to it.
The death at Kirklees
The ballads end in Yorkshire too. In Robin Hood’s Death the old outlaw, sick, goes to the prioress of Kirklees to be bled, and she lets out too much blood on purpose and kills him. Kirklees Priory was a real house of nuns, founded in 1155 in what is now Kirklees Park at Clifton, near Brighouse in Calderdale. A monument in the woods near the River Calder is pointed out as Robin Hood’s grave.
From Loxley to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, sits on the same ground as the Loxley Robin, and the real valley is in the S6 field guide. The rest of the Sheffield legends are in the Sheffield folklore guide, the Harrying of the North covers the Yorkshire Robin’s country two centuries earlier, and Foked is the free solo RPG set in the world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: Barnsdale Bar, the ballads and the well from Wikipedia; the meaning of Barnsdale, the link with Barnsley and the change from Beorn to Barn from the International Robin Hood Bibliography’s From Beornsdale to Barnsdale, citing A. H. Smith, and the valley of the Skell from Robin Hood Legend, citing J. C. Holt; Barnsley’s Domesday name and meaning from Wikipedia; Piers Plowman, Wyntoun, the Gest’s dialect and the Saylis, Holt, the Robert Hod records and the Loxley tradition from Wikipedia; Little John’s grave, the Naylors and Dublin from Wikipedia; Shuttleworth’s thigh bone, the Brontës and North Lees Hall from Wikipedia; Robin Hood’s Cave from Wikipedia; Robin Hood’s Stride from Wikipedia; Kirklees from Wikipedia.
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