Friar Tuck and the Jews

In my recent article on the subject of the relationship between the early ballads of Robin Hood and the jews. (1) I deliberately didn't discuss one of the most famous of all the characters in the Robin Hood legend: Friar Tuck.

The reason for this anomaly - which you my reader may well have noticed - is that the debate around the character of Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood ballads is a complicated one and requires us to in a sense separate out Friar Tuck from the rest of Robin Hood's 'Merry Men'. This is in order to better understand the debate that surrounds this particular character and if he was - as Robin Hood is likely to have been - based on a historical individual. We can then use this to inform our judgement in relation to his inclusion in the ballads of Robin Hood and the character's relationship with the jews as part of the 'Merry Men's' overarching struggle with them as the principle moneylenders of Henry III's and his son Edward I's reigns. (2)

The common image of Friar Tuck - as depicted in modern plays, films and television series - is a stout holy man - often a drunkard - who joins the 'Merry Men' out a mix of Christian conviction and boredom with his religious vocation. This - like some of the other popular ideas about Robin Hood - stems largely from Sir Walter Scott's best-seller 'Ivanhoe' (3) and thus is of a far more recent vintage than many suspect.

Behind this narrative of Friar Tuck being dissatisfied with his religious vocation and finding in Robin Hood's 'Merry Men' a new Christian cause: there is an element of truth, however. That is because the first mention of a friar in the context of the Robin Hood ballads is in a ballad - included in one of the early printings of the 'Gest of Robin Hood' - called 'Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar'. (4)

The term 'curtal' is probably a reference to the gown of a friar in the sense that it was 'curtailed' (i.e., short) and thus easier to travel in than the normal monastic habit. (5) It can however have other meanings such as a short and stout person, a prostitute or an individual who had their ears removed as a punishment for theft. (6)

Any or all of these potential meanings could be appended to the Friar Tuck of the Robin Hood ballads as he is portrayed in them as being very strong (i.e. stout), he could be seen as having prostituted himself to material wealth in consequence of his service to a band of outlaws and/or he could very easily have had his ears lopped off after being caught stealing (which is after all what the 'Merry Men' do).

The general approach however is to assume that 'curtal' is simply a reference to the friar's shortened habit and that the 'curtal' is simply to identify the friar concerned as being a member of either the Dominicans (the 'Black Friars'), the Franciscans (the 'Grey Friars') or the Carmelites (the 'White Friars') as opposed to an unaffiliated (and usually self-appointed) wandering friar.

An additional element to why we generally read 'curtal' as being a reference to a friar's shortened habit is because 'Tuck' - as in 'Friar Tuck' - actually means the same thing. (7) Thus 'Friar Tuck' can be reasonably read as simply an alternative nickname to the 'Curtal Friar' as opposed to a proper name by itself.

The two likeliest communities to have provided the friar in Robin Hood's 'Merry Men' are Fountain's Abbey in Yorkshire (which would make him a Cistercian monk rather than a friar) (8) or the Franciscan house at Broadmarsh in Nottingham. (9)

The Franciscan community at Broadmarsh is easily the most appealing of the two possibilities given that it was established in 1250 and thus precedes the first mention of 'Robin Hood' as an alias used by an outlaw which occurred in a court case in the southern English county of Berkshire in 1261-1262. (10)

Thus, making the arrival of Franciscan friars a relatively recent event to the historical time period in which the 'Rhymes of Robin Hood' almost certainly took initial shape. It also raises the speculative possibility that the 'Curtal Friar' was one of these newly arrived Franciscans or a member of the local community who had applied for and gained admittance to that order. This is itself attractive because the Franciscans emphasized the vow of poverty and living among their flock in order to be living examples of their faith in Christ which others could follow and profit from.

It is thus not hard to see why a Franciscan friar could have attached himself to Robin Hood's 'Merry Men' and saw in them a group of devout Christians - and remember that Robin Hood was himself extremely devout and the 'Merry Men' seemed to have lived quasi-monastic lifestyles - (11) who were worthy and suitable to be taken under his ecclesiastical wing.

Now - if as I have elsewhere argued - the original stories relating to Robin Hood would have almost certainly been directed not against the greed of monasteries, but rather against the greed of the jewish moneylenders who - we should recall - held substantial elements of England's nobility in thrall as their debtors (12) (as they also did in medieval Germany for example), (13) acted as the principle financial agents for some monastic houses at this time, (14) and were the people who had the kind of liquid assets (hard currency as opposed to wealth in terms of property [the latter being the norm among the non-jews of England given that there were relatively few coins in circulation]) that Robin Hood was principally robbing. (15)

Then it goes without saying that the principal motivation of Friar Tuck - if he was one of the original members of the 'Merry Men' as I suspect - was opposition to the usurious money-lending of the jews, which we know the Franciscans strenuously fought and frequently condemned in general. (16) As well as knowing more specifically that the Franciscans in England at this time (specifically in 1271) were spearheading laws preventing jews from owning too much property (17) (although we know of one or two cases of individual Franciscan's trying to help individual jews (18) we also know that the Franciscans were central in at least one planned massacre of jews at around this time) (19) and that the Church was the principle champion of anti-jewish legislation specifically targeted at the practice of usury in England. (20)

It thus not hard to see Friar Tuck's rationale for joining Robin Hood and the 'Merry Men' as being one of attaching himself to a group of devoutly Christian outlaws who were fighting the abusive practices of jewish moneylenders and their mercenary bounty hunters, like Guy of Gisborne, and the corruption of royal officials to further jewish interests at the expense of those of the people, the nobility and the Church.

This accounts for some of the brutality with which Robin Hood treats the jewish hireling Guy of Gisborne (using his impaled head a symbol of patriotic insurrection against the power of the jewish moneylenders) as well as why he is usually magnanimous towards those who are honest about their wealth to him (i.e. an idealized Christian value) and ruthless towards whose who try to hide their wealth from him (i.e. the values of anti-Christianity as represented by the followers of Judaism).

It is not outside of the realm of possibility that Friar Tuck could have been the man urging Robin Hood and the 'Merry Men' on in their crusade to rid the land of the jewish moneylenders. Hence the very positive reference to 'our comely King Edward' in the early ballads given that Edward I was the king who expelled the jews from England and confiscated all their ill-gotten gains.

Indeed a fanatically anti-jewish Friar Tuck - along the lines of Girolamo Savonarola in Florence - (21) who is in trouble with the local sheriff (who is regarded rightly or wrongly by Tuck as being in the pay of the jews) himself after fierce public denunciations of the jews in general and/or usurious jewish activities specifically (we know of a Franciscan Friar who was imprisoned for similar activities around this time) (22) and has to flee to prevent his own imprisonment becoming an outlaw and finding common cause with Robin Hood and his 'Merry Men' in the process.

Thus, we can see that an anti-jewish Friar Tuck actually makes a great deal of sense out of several contradictory elements within the early Robin Hood ballads.

The only fly in the ointment to this identification however is that 'Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar' is not usually dated back to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, but rather to the early fifteenth century. (23) Further the so-called 'Dramatic Fragment' - which is our first explicit mention of Friar Tuck - is securely dated to circa 1475. (24)

The medieval historian James Holt is the principal source of this dating due to his discovery of the first use of name of Friar Tuck (which also happened to be an alias being used by an outlaw) was in 1417 in relation to the activities of a chaplain-turned-highwayman named Robert Stafford in Sussex in southern England. (25) Stafford was fairly notorious in his day given that by 1429 he still hadn't been caught despite the authorities knowing his name and his former (or current) occupation as well as his general location. (26)

Holt's argument is not unreasonably that because we know of Friar Tuck in the ballads no earlier than 1475, the language of the ballads including him is less archaic and we also know of a famous robber using that alias from 1417 to 1429. Then we should conclude that Robert Stafford is the historical Friar Tuck and that accordingly Friar Tuck is a later addition to the Robin Hood ballads.

This is fairly sound and typically for Holt cautious reasoning, but what a lot of writers on Robin Hood have missed is that Holt himself pointedly stated that we cannot rule out the fact Robert Stafford used an existing alias as opposed to inventing the name 'Friar Tuck'. (27) A similar note of caution is echoed by Holt's fellow medievalist David Baldwin (28) in so far as while we know that 'Friar Tuck' could not be a traditional name for a clerical bandit it is entirely possible that Stafford was merely copying it from elsewhere.

We should also add that there are two substantial objections to Holt's suggestion that Stafford should be equated with Friar Tuck in that while 'Friar Tuck' might not be a traditional name for a clerical bandit: it might well be that Stafford - a churchman himself - simply invented or was awarded the nickname of Friar Tuck as way of saying 'Curtal Friar' given that 'Curtal' and 'Tuck' can mean the same thing.

The other is simply that Holt is allowing only between forty-six and fifty-eight years at most for a significant ballad tradition about Stafford's character to arise and then merge fully formed into the wider cycle of Robin Hood ballads gaining wide dissemination into the north of England as well as the south. Also, we have to question why - if Holt is correct - we then have no independent ballads of Stafford's exploits survived (as they have with other characters merged with Robin Hood such as Gamelyn, Adam Bell, Hereward the Wake and Eustace the Monk) and why we find no mention of such a tradition in the medieval sources?

It seems more likely that 'Friar Tuck' is simply a re-phrasing of the 'Curtal Friar' (which remember is only dated to circa 1417-1429 because of Stafford) and that - with Robin Hood's devout religious views expressed in the ballads - the friar of the Robin Hood ballads is actually one of the original characters with 'Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar' filling a similar function for the friar in explaining his origin in a band of outlaws as 'Robin Hood's Death' does in telling the listeners where Robin Hood himself went.

Thus, if in the Friar of the Robin Hood ballads can reasonably suggested to be one of the original characters and quite possibly a historical one, then we can see that he is very likely to be less the drunk and jolly Friar of popular legend, but rather a fanatical Franciscan on the run from the authorities for inciting anti-jewish mob violence!

References

(1) https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/robin-hood-and-the-jews

(2) Cf. Robert Chazan, 2006, 'The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500', 1^st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 162-167

(3) Stephen Knight, 2003, 'Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography', 1^st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, pp. 41; 115

(4) Nick Rennison, 2012, 'Robin Hood: Myth, History and Culture', 1^st Edition, Pocket Essentials: Harpenden, p. 23

(5) Knight, Op. Cit., p. 41

(6) Nigel Cawthorne, 2010, 'A Brief History of Robin Hood: The True History behind the Legend', 1^st Edition, Constable and Robinson: London, p. 189

(7) David Baldwin, 2011, 'Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked', 1^st Edition, Amberley: Stroud, p. 69;  James Holt, 1989, 'Robin Hood', 2^nd Edition, Thames and Hudson: London, p. 200 n. 3

(8) Barbara Green, 1991, 'The Outlaw Robin Hood: His Yorkshire Legend', 1^st Edition, Kirklees Cultural Services: Huddersfield, p. 21

(9) Baldwin, Op. Cit., p. 69

(10) Ibid, p. 53

(11) John Paul Davis, 2009, 'Robin Hood: The Unknown Templar', 1^st Edition, Peter Owen: London, pp. 78-80; Holt, Op. Cit., p. 37; John Bellamy, 1985, 'Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry', 1^st Edition, Croom Helm: Sydney, p. 4

(12) For example Baldwin, Op. Cit., p. 146

(13) Michael Toch, 1995, 'Local Credit in an Agrarian Economy: The Case of Bavaria, 14^th to 15^th Centuries', pp. 800-801 in Michael Toch (Ed.), 2003, 'Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany', 1^st Edition, Ashgate: Burlington

(14) Rodney Hilton, 1975, 'The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages', 1^st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 183

(15) Chazan, Op. Cit., pp. 157-165

(16) Jeremy Cohen, 1982, 'The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval anti-Judaism', 1^st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, pp. 84; 234

(17) Ibid, p. 43

(18) Ibid, p. 42

(19) Ibid, pp. 43-44

(20) Chazan, Op. Cit., pp. 165-166

(21) John Najemy, 2006, 'A History of Florence 1200-1575', 1^st Edition, Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 391-392

(22) Cohen, Op. Cit., p. 44

(23) Holt, Op. Cit., pp. 16; 192

(24) Ibid, p. 33

(25) Ibid, pp. 58-59

(26) Ibid, p. 58

(27) Ibid, p. 73

(28) Baldwin, Op. Cit., pp. 68-69

(29) Ibid, p. 69; Holt, Op. Cit., p. 200 n. 3