In 1225, a man called Robert Hod appeared in the Yorkshire pipe rolls as a fugitive whose goods had been seized by the Crown. The entry is brief. In 1936 the historian L.V.D. Owen identified it, and in the 1980s David Crook argued that Robert Hod was the same man as Robert of Wetherby, an outlaw pursued across Yorkshire by Eustace of Lowdham, a royal officer who had previously served as deputy sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Scholars will doubtless continue to debate the connection, and this is not my argument in its favour. It is a work of fiction built around the question of what might have happened if the connection had been real. If a minor landholder with a legitimate grievance against royal authority found himself pushed into outlawry. The Robin Hood of this story is not the one most readers will recognise. There is no Sherwood Forest, no Sheriff of Nottingham, no Maid Marian. What there is, I hope, is a plausible man living through plausible consequences in a world where legend and myth had not yet had their say, surrounded him with merry men and put them in tights.
Robert of Wetherby had never thought of himself as a man at odds with the king. He had served on juries, witnessed charters, and more than once ridden to York on business that required coin and the favour of clerks. His holding was not great enough to trouble the Percys, nor old enough to impress the Nevilles, but he had learned to value possession almost as much as honour.
The demand arrived in winter, carried under seal and explained by a royal officer who spoke as though the matter had already been settled. Robert was told what was owed, when it was due, and what would follow if payment were delayed. He listened until the man had finished, then asked under what right the sum had been assessed.
The officer shrugged. “Under the king’s right.”
Robert looked again at the parchment. The figure was not ruinous. Had it been impossible, there would have been no shame in pleading inability. It was excessive. That was the problem. Imposed upon land which Robert believed should not bear it, and presented with an implicit message that objection would be seen as insolence, or worse.
He said that he would answer at the county court.
The officer smiled. “You may answer where you please. The amount will persist.”
That night Robert spread his charters across the table and read them until the words blurred. His steward, John, urged him to pay first and dispute later. Robert refused. Once paid, he said, the Crown would remember only that Wetherby had paid before and could be made to pay again. He was not alone in thinking so. Two neighbouring landholders had already complained of similar demands. One had surrendered cattle rather than risk further penalties. Another had borrowed at ruinous terms from a merchant in York. Men cursed the collectors in private, then quieted when royal servants neared.
Robert did neither.
He sent messages to men who had witnessed earlier grants. He asked for copies of old entries. He spoke to a clerk who believed the assessment doubtful but advised caution. Even Richard Percy, when the matter reached him, was said to have remarked that Robert might have the law on his side and still lose. Robert had always believed the king’s peace rested upon law. Now he began to wonder what remained when law served only the king.
The county court met in York, with men arriving from half of the county, wrapped in cloaks soaked with rain. Robert came early with John, two neighbours willing to speak for him, and a bundle of charters. By the time his case was called, the hall was already tense and impatient. He made his argument without garnish and in plain language. The land had not borne such a charge before. The earlier grant was clear enough, and the men beside him could remember its terms. He expected questions, but the clerk only listened, glanced at the parchment, and asked whether the sum had been paid.
“No.”
“Then the debt stands.”
John fidgeted beside him. “The debt is what I dispute.”
The clerk looked towards the royal officer seated further along the bench. There followed a quiet exchange over entries, names and dates. Robert was asked for a fee, then another, and told that one of his witnesses could not be received without further proof. The charter was examined again. Nobody declared it false. Nobody declared Robert incorrect either. The machinery just continued around him until the matter became a question of whether he had obeyed the assessment. Its lawfulness was never in question.
Outside, Richard Percy found him beneath the eaves. Percy had listened to enough of the hearing to understand what had happened.
“You pressed them too hard,” he said.
“I asked them to read.”
“That is often the same thing.”
Robert looked back towards the hall. “You think me wrong?”
“I think you may be right. I also think being right is a poor shield, Robert.”
Later, a Neville retainer who Robert knew from other sittings offered colder advice. ‘Pay what was demanded, submit the grievance properly, and keep the king’s peace.’ Robert rode home with less money than he had brought and a larger debt than the one he had challenged. The court had added costs, and payment was now required within days.
John said little until Wetherby was in sight. “You could still settle it.”
Robert looked across his fields, and thought of cattle taken from poorer men, and of the clerk who never quite answered the question asked of him. There was also Percy’s warning.
“I could.” But he already knew he would not.
They came three mornings later. John saw them first from the yard and called Robert from the hall. Four men were riding up from the road with a packhorse behind them, one wearing the sheriff’s colours and another carrying the writ. They had not brought enough men for trouble.
He met them by the gate. The officer produced the writ and began reading, and Robert let him finish. “You have heard my answer.”
“And the court has heard yours.”
“The matter is disputed.”
“The debt is not.”
The men moved past him. One began unfastening the tether of a brindled cow while another marked two more beasts for seizure. John stepped forward, but Robert raised a hand and stopped him. He remembered Percy beneath the eaves at York, saying that being right was a poor shield. The debt had not been paid and, as with the clerk, that answered every other question.
The officer tugged at the cow’s rope.
Robert took it from him.
“Leave her.”
The man stared at him. “Stand aside.”
“No.”
The first blow was not Robert’s. One of the sheriff’s men shoved John hard enough to send him against the fence, and another seized Robert by the shoulder. Robert turned, struck the man across the mouth, and the yard broke open into violence.
It all lasted less than a minute.
A stave came down on Robert’s arm. John grappled with another man in the mud. The officer drew a short blade and was knocked backwards before he could use it. He fell badly against the mounting block and did not rise. Robert saw the blood beside the man’s ear.
One of the others whispered, “Christ preserve us.”
Robert knew that the argument was finished. No charter would matter now. No witness would speak loudly enough. Whatever had been done to him before this morning would be buried beneath what had happened right there, in that moment.
John was breathing hard. “What do we do?”
Robert looked towards the road. “We go.”
Soon, Wetherby was behind them, and Robert had become something the court had already decided he was.
◆ ◆ ◆
For the first two days Robert still thought of their flight as a temporary measure. He and John rode west by lesser roads, keeping away from York and avoiding villages where news travelled fast. Robert feared that John would suffer for the loyalty he had shown, and that staying behind at the hall might yet protect him. He told John to go home.
John looked at him as though the suggestion were foolish. “Home to what?”
There was no answer once it became clear to Robert what such an instruction could mean.
By then the sheriff’s men had already returned to Robert’s holding. They learned later that the remaining cattle were taken, along with two horses, stores of grain and anything else that might be entered against the debt. Servants were questioned. Neighbours were warned against assisting him. The hall itself was not destroyed. It remained standing, waiting for a man who could no longer safely return to it.
Robert sent word to York through a man he trusted in Fulford, still hoping some distinction might be made between resisting distraint and deliberate assault. The answer that came back brought no comfort. He was required to present himself and answer for what had happened.
John read the message twice. “You could surrender.”
“And be judged by the same men? No, John.”
Robert folded the parchment away. He had spent years believing that a man who kept records, paid what was lawfully due and appeared when summoned had little to fear from royal justice. Now every road open to him seemed to lead directly towards a cell.
They moved south, to places where Robert had friends enough to find shelter, yet not enough to feel safe. John also knew woods and tracks Robert had never needed to learn. He knew which houses could be approached when the light had faded. They both discovered how quickly respectability vanished once a man depended upon back doors.
Word eventually reached them that all movable goods from the hall had been entered against Robert’s name and that clerks were calling him a fugitive. The record gave his name as Robert Hod. He stared at it. This was not carelessness. It was deliberate. A rogue’s name for the mouths of common men. John wondered whether it mattered.
Robert folded the copy and put it away. “No, I suppose not,” he said. But he knew that something had been removed from him besides property. Robert of Wetherby belonged to the court rolls, the charters and the house he had lost. Robert Hod belonged to the road.
The chance came sooner than Robert expected. A carter from Tadcaster, a man who had once sold oats to his household, brought word that money gathered from fines, debts and other royal dues was to be carried south under a light guard. The sum was not enormous by the standards of the Exchequer, but it was enough to tempt men who had begun measuring every meal and every safe night by the coin remaining in Robert’s purse.
John heard the news in silence. When the carter had gone, he asked Robert what he intended to do.
“Take back what was taken.”
John stood somewhat aghast. “All of it?”
Robert looked away towards the trees. “Enough.”
They watched the road for two days before choosing the place. It narrowed between a bank thick with thorn and a stand of oak where horses could be hidden from view. By then John had drawn a few men around them. Two had served at Wetherby before the hall was stripped, while the others came through neighbours who had suffered seizures of their own and had little love for the sheriff’s officers. Robert did not mistake them for devoted followers. Some came out of loyalty, some out of anger, and some because outlawry offered better prospects than hunger. They were willing to stand with him, and that was enough. Robert did not want bloodshed and said so repeatedly. He was not yet accustomed to giving orders of this kind. The men were to show their bows, block the road, and make it clear that resistance would be foolish. No one was to loose unless Robert gave the word.
The riders came near noon, four men escorting two packhorses. They had the dull look of officials expecting inconvenience but not danger. Robert and his men waited beneath plain travelling cloaks with their hoods drawn down, looking at a distance like men sheltering from the weather rather than a band preparing to take the road. Robert stepped into the road, John beside him, and called for them to halt.
One reached for his sword, but soon saw that John’s bow was already bent. “Leave it.”
The man looked at John, then at the others emerging from the trees, and slowly let his hand fall. Robert ordered the packs opened. Inside were leather bags of coin, rolls of account and a small chest containing silver pennies bundled by tally. He felt anger and disappointment at the sight of it. Somewhere in those rolls were names like his own, sums owed by men who had protested, delayed, borrowed and surrendered livestock because of a clerk’s judgement and calculations.
He took the money and the records. One of the officials found his courage. “This is the king’s property.”
Robert turned to him. “It was ours first.”
No one was hurt. When the officials were released and the road was empty again, Robert felt relief. The act had been clean. Ordered. Perhaps just.
For several days he called it restitution. Some of the money was hidden, buried in sealed pots beneath the floor of an abandoned croft, and divided among places known only to Robert and John. Some paid for food, horses and the silence of men who had begun helping them. The rest left Robert’s hands quietly. A farmer whose ox had been seized found that the debt against him had been settled. A widow received enough through her parish priest to keep her two children fed. Another man recovered tools he had pawned in York.
Robert gave no speeches and asked for no gratitude. When John remarked that people were beginning to talk, Robert frowned. “Let them talk of the money.”
“They talk of you.”
“That will pass.”
But it did not pass. The story travelled faster than either of them expected. By the time they heard it again, Robert had taken a great royal treasure, humbled a troop of armed men and returned every penny to the poor. John roared when he heard that version.
Robert did not.
◆ ◆ ◆
Midge kept a mill beside a beck where three roads met, and for that reason heard more than most men. Farmers came with grain, servants came with gossip, and drovers stopped for water. Usefully, clerks also complained freely when they thought the miller too ordinary to matter. Midge listened to all of them.
Robert knew him by sight from market days and had once bought flour from him, but it was John who understood his value. They went to the mill after dark and found Midge alone, sweeping meal from the stones.
He looked at them and laughed. “So the stories are true.”
“Some of them,” Robert replied.
Midge had heard of an estate steward moving rent money before the end of the week. The steward had hired two armed men and meant to leave early, hoping to reach safer roads before dark. Midge knew the route because one of the carters had complained about the state of a particular ford and mentioned where they intended to cross.
Robert asked why he was telling them. Midge leaned on the broom. “Because I have paid toll twice on the same grain this year and been told both times that the king required it.”
“That does not make robbery lawful.”
“No. But it makes it easier to look the other way.”
Robert almost smiled.
This ambush was smoother than the first. They chose a hollow where trees crowded the road, and the ground turned softer near the water. By then Robert had learned not to complicate the plan. John placed two men behind the bank, another further up the track, and Midge remained back with the horses. He had insisted on coming, though Robert made it clear that knowing a road was not the same as standing in one with drawn weapons.
The steward surrendered quickly. He protested that the money belonged to his lord, not the Crown, and Robert believed him. For a moment that troubled him a little, but the estate had prospered under arrangements Robert increasingly regarded as part of the same order that had ruined him, and once the bags were in his hands the distinction became easier to ignore. They took coin, left the steward his papers and released every man unharmed.
Midge laughed when John handed him a share. “I only told you where they would be.”
“And now you know what became of them,” Robert said.
Midge understood the implication. Within a month he had become useful enough that Robert stopped pretending otherwise. He knew who was moving grain, who had sold wool, which abbey servant drank too much, and which road a merchant would choose when he wished to avoid a toll. He never joined Robert’s company completely, yet his mill became one of the places where information gathered before finding its way into the woods.
Tewkes was a stockily built brother from a small religious house whose duties often took him between estates, granges and market towns. He knew how rents were gathered, which houses kept plate beyond what was needed for worship, and those who could be trusted to drink themselves loose-tongued after vespers. Robert first heard his name from Midge, who described him as a holy man with an unholy interest in the business of others.
Their meeting took place in a barn behind the mill. Tewkes arrived alone, carrying a staff, and examined Robert with open curiosity. He showed neither nervousness nor fright. He sat without an invite, produced an apple, and began eating it. He stared at Robert between bites.
“You have made yourself difficult to ignore, Robert Hod,” he said.
Robert replied that this was not the same as being worth knowing.
Tewkes smiled. “Ah, but it so often is.”
He had learned that a consignment of silver plate and coin was to be moved from one ecclesiastical holding to another before the next feast day. The official explanation was safekeeping, though Tewkes doubted that all of it had ever served an altar. He knew the road, the likely escort and the house where the men intended to stop overnight. Robert asked what he wanted in return.
“Nothing that would trouble your conscience more than mine.”
The attack took place in the early morning, when the escort had left its lodging, but the road was still empty. Robert’s men blocked the way near a copse while John approached from behind. There was shouting, one frightened horse nearly threw its rider, but no blade was drawn and no blood spilled. The guards surrendered when they realised they were enclosed. The packs contained more than Tewkes had promised, much more. Alongside coin were silver vessels, rings, small reliquaries and a casket of unset stones wrapped in wool. Robert held one of the rings to the weak morning light and knew immediately that this was no ordinary load.
Tewkes watched him. “You could stop now. You have enough.” He looked at the silver. ‘I have known three abbots. Every one of them began by wanting enough and finished by taking more. None of them noticed the difference.”
He knew it to be true. They divided the spoils carefully and carried it away by separate routes. Tewkes accepted no obvious share, though news emerged that repairs had begun on a neglected chapel not long afterwards. When John mentioned it, Robert said nothing.
Tewkes did not become one of them, no more than Midge had. Yet after that morning his name began to travel with theirs, because men remember a religious brother in a robbery far more readily than they remember six ordinary companions. And before long, every tale about Robert Hod seemed to contain a holy man somewhere in the trees.
The value of the taking was not fully understood until they had carried it beyond the roads and opened every wrapping in a ruined shepherd’s hut a distance away. Coin was easy enough to reckon, but the silver vessels, rings and stones were another matter. Tewkes had named some of them before parting, and John had remembered enough to know that they were looking at wealth beyond anything Robert had expected. He turned a small red stone between his fingers. It seemed absurd that something so light might equal the price of cattle, seed and winter stores for a household. Even after allowing for what could never safely be sold nearby, the haul was enough to change everything.
John knew it. He sat back against the wall and said that they no longer needed the road. “We could stop, Robert.”
The words had been spoken before, but this time it was indisputable. Robert knew what remained hidden from the first two robberies, and he knew what men still owed him for favours, silence and shelter. Added to what now lay before them, it was enough to buy horses, food, forged papers, perhaps even land far from Yorkshire if they were careful. They could divide the wealth and vanish into places where Robert Hod meant nothing. Yet for reasons known only to himself, Robert began deciding where to hide it.
They used three places rather than one. Some of the coin was buried. The jewels and smaller pieces of silver went into a sealed jar beneath stones near a stream that flooded most winters. A third portion remained with a man Robert trusted, named only as Faukes, who was told only that it must be returned if John came asking.
The rest moved out more slowly. A priest received money for burials where poor families could not meet the fee. A tenant whose tools had been taken recovered them without knowing who had paid. A chapel with rain coming through the roof found enough silver to replace part of the timber. Robert insisted that none of these gifts bear his name. John once asked whether he feared pride more than hanging.
“I fear both.”
There was truth in the answer. Robert had become more attentive to Mass than he had been before his flight, and he sometimes paid for prayers for men he had frightened or struck. He never thought that charity cancelled theft. He only seemed increasingly determined that stolen wealth should not lie idle while others suffered.
Yet the hoard changed him in another way. Before, every taking could be explained by hunger, dispossession or revenge. Now those explanations had weakened. Robert had enough to live quietly for years, and he knew it.
When the next opportunity came his way, he listened anyway.
◆ ◆ ◆
The merchant was called Stephen of Selby, a wool buyer who travelled often enough between York and the southern markets that Midge had heard his name many times. He was known to carry coin when trade was good and to hire guards only when the roads seemed especially hazardous. When word reached Robert that Stephen would be travelling with two packhorses and a single armed servant, the opportunity appeared insultingly easy.
John was less certain. “You have enough. We all do.”
Robert had begun to dislike hearing it said aloud. “Enough does not last forever, John.”
“Nor does luck.”
Robert ignored him. He had begun to think of the road as something he understood, with its rhythms, weaknesses and small betrayals. He knew where merchants rested, which crossings slowed them, and which inns sold gossip with their ale. What had once frightened him had become familiar, and it had made his earlier caution begin to feel like cowardice.
They chose a wooded stretch south of Tadcaster where the road roughened below rising ground. Robert took only four men. He wanted speed, no unnecessary shouting and no blood. Stephen arrived later than expected. He was a thickset man of perhaps forty, wrapped in a good cloak and riding a well-kept horse. His servant rode behind, leading the packs.
Robert stepped into the road with his hood drawn down and told them to halt. The servant obeyed at once. Stephen did not. “You again,” he said.
Robert felt the words more sharply than he expected. “You know me?”
“I know the name men give you.”
That was enough to change the air between them. Stephen looked at John, then at the others emerging from the trees. “If you want coin, take coin. But you will not have the packs.”
Robert asked what they contained.
“My business.”
Stephen reached for the lead rein of the nearer horse. John moved to stop him, and everything that followed happened too quickly for command to matter. The merchant twisted away, drew a short blade from beneath his cloak and lunged towards Robert. John spotted the attack and struck him. Just once. The blow landed high on his shoulder and neck. Stephen stumbled, dropped the knife and fell heavily onto the road. Everyone expected him to rise. He did not.
John knelt beside him, then looked up, but Robert already knew. The servant had gone white, and one of Robert’s men muttered a prayer. They all stared at Stephen’s body, and Robert felt something inside himself refuse to arrange the scene into any of the explanations he had used before. This was not a collector, not a sheriff’s man, not someone carrying what Robert could call stolen dues. It was a merchant lying dead because Robert had wanted what was in his packs.
They opened them anyway. Inside were bolts of fine cloth, silver, several small packets of coin and a casket containing rings and worked jewellery. Robert looked at the wealth with no satisfaction.
The servant told them Stephen had a wife in York. Her name was Mariota.
Robert waited nearly a fortnight before going there. By then he knew where Mariota lived, who dealt with Stephen’s accounts, and which servants still remained in the household. He went alone, leaving John outside the city with strict instructions not to follow unless Robert failed to return before dark. The purse beneath his cloak contained more silver than most men would see in a year.
Mariota received him in a small upper room overlooking a yard. She was younger than Robert had imagined, though grief had darkened her face. She did not ask his name.
“You were there? My husband’s servant said there were several men.”
“There were.”
“And which of them killed him?”
Robert hesitated. “The blow was not mine.”
Mariota looked at him for so long that he became aware of her in a way he had not expected. “But the robbery was, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He placed the purse on the table between them and explained that it was enough to meet immediate debts, keep the business standing and provide for anyone who had depended upon Stephen. He was struggling not to make the offer sound like payment for a life. Mariota did not touch it.
“Do you think I am ruined?”
“I think his death may leave burdens you did not choose.”
“So did your quarrel with the king.”
That caught Robert’s attention. She had heard of him. But perhaps everyone had by then.
Mariota rested one hand on the table. “You lost property and decided that made other men’s property yours. Now my husband is dead, and you have brought me money as though the same rule should comfort me.”
Robert explained that he had not intended Stephen’s death.
“No,” she replied. “You intended everything around it.”
There was nothing he could say to that. At last she opened the purse and removed only a small portion. She said it would meet wages owed to two servants and keep one apprentice from being turned out. The rest she pushed back towards him.
Robert frowned. “Please take it all.”
“I will take what Stephen would have paid. I will not take enough to make you feel forgiven.”
He left with most of the silver he had arrived with. Outside the walls, John asked nothing until they were well clear of York. Robert told him only that Mariota had accepted some of the money. He did not say that the coins she had refused seemed far heavier now than when he carried them in.
For several days Robert kept away from the road. There were messages waiting at two of the houses he used, one concerning a merchant carrying silver towards Doncaster and another about rents being moved from an abbey estate. He read both and put them aside. John noticed but did not press him.
The hoard had become harder to ignore. Robert went alone to one of the hiding places and uncovered the jar beneath the stones. He emptied part of it onto a cloth and sat looking at the rings and loose stones in the afternoon light. There was enough there to feed men, buy horses, purchase silence and carry him far beyond Yorkshire. There had been enough before Stephen of Selby died.
That was what Mariota had left him with.
He had told himself that the first taking was restitution and the next few were necessity. Eventually, he had stopped examining the distinction because success made any scrutiny inconvenient. Yet Stephen had not been part of the machinery that ruined him. He had simply been a man on the road with goods worth stealing.
John came looking for Robert, and found him around dusk. “You have been quiet.”
Robert gathered the jewels back into the jar. “I have been counting.”
John glanced towards the cloth. “We counted it before.”
“Not this way.”
He told John that the taking on the roads would cease for a time. There were too many men who now depended upon them to vanish without thought, and too many houses whose kindness had exposed them to danger. They would settle what was owed, move some of the stores and decide what could be done without drawing further attention. John accepted the plan gladly. He was quiet for a moment, then said that a girl in Fulford had expected him to return to her. That had been two winters ago. Robert asked whether she had waited. John shook his head, and the conversation ended there.
Robert looked again at the buried wealth and, for the first time since Wetherby, he could see that continuing was no longer something forced upon him by a king, a court or hunger. It was a choice.
◆ ◆ ◆
The order to send Eustace of Lowdham north was made after another complaint reached the royal council from Yorkshire. The sheriff had spent money, men and patience pursuing the elusive Robert Hod, yet the roads remained unsafe, and the stories surrounding him had grown more troublesome than the robberies themselves. Each failure made Robert larger in the telling, while every man who helped him seemed to know somebody else prepared to do the same.
Lowdham came with no great company. He brought clerks, a handful of experienced men and letters carrying more authority than any troop of soldiers. He had served in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and knew how quickly an outlaw could become a local hero when officials gave people reasons to protect him.
He began by reading.
Accounts of seized goods, statements from assaulted officers, reports of robberies, names of suspected helpers and lists of households visited by sheriff’s men passed across his table. He noticed what others had missed. There were patterns in Robert’s wanderings. He moved through places where he had once been known, relied upon men whose loyalty predated his outlawry, and disappeared whenever pressure became too obvious.
Lowdham asked who among the local gentry had dealings with him, and the answers became cautious. Percy’s name surfaced more than once, though never beside an accusation that could be proved. Neville retainers had reported sightings and offered assistance, though even their information often arrived after Robert had moved on. Lowdham understood the difficulty. Push too hard, and the county would remember older quarrels with the Crown. Show too much restraint, and Robert would continue to be untouchable. He must avoid a spectacle.
Men were questioned in corners. Inns were watched. Carters were stopped and their journeys noted. Priests were reminded of their duties. Tenants who had received unexplained money were asked where it came from. Lowdham did not need everyone to betray Robert. He needed only one frightened man to contradict another.
News of his arrival reached Robert through Midge.
John read the message and frowned. “Another sheriff’s man.”
Robert shook his head. “No. This one has been sent because the others failed.” For the first time in months, the thought of the road gave him no sense of freedom. It felt like something softening beneath his feet.
Lowdham could not chase Robert through the woods, but he could make the woods smaller. The first loss was a house near Pontefract where Robert had slept a few times. Its owner sent word that royal men had questioned his sons and examined his accounts. He had not betrayed anyone, but he asked that Robert stay away until the trouble passed. A week later another refuge closed to them, then a third. None of the refusals came angrily, but they were firm.
Midge reported strangers lingering near the mill and strangers asking who came after dark. He still passed information when he could, though less often now. Tewkes disappeared altogether for a time, leaving no message beyond a warning that men attached to Lowdham had begun asking questions among religious houses.
Robert knew what was happening. Lowdham was not trying to find him in one stroke. He was removing every place in which he could safely become invisible. John urged him to leave Yorkshire while they still could. Robert considered it, but departure was no longer simple. Men had hidden money for him, carried messages, lied to officials and opened doors after nightfall. If he vanished without warning, Lowdham would continue squeezing them for answers they did not have.
The Percys could offer no sanctuary, though Robert learned that Richard Percy had refused to condemn him publicly. The message was plain enough. Percy would not deliver him to the Crown, but neither would he risk his own standing by sheltering him. The Nevilles were less patient. One of their men warned Robert through Midge that any armed company found on Neville land would be treated as a threat, whatever private sympathy might exist for the grievance that began it all.
Robert could not resent either answer. Lowdham had made neutrality expensive.
Then the arrests began. A farrier who had once carried food to Robert was taken for questioning. Two former servants from Wetherby were detained overnight. One returned bruised and unwilling to speak of what had happened. The other did not return at all.
John wanted to strike back, but Robert refused. “That is precisely what he wants. He wants us frightened. Moving.”
John looked towards the dark line of trees beyond the field. For months the roads had belonged to them because they chose when to appear and when to vanish. Now every decision seemed anticipated. Every friendly door carried risk. Every messenger might have been followed. Lowdham had not found Robert Hod. He had ensured that, sooner or later, Robert would have nowhere left to go.
The man was taken near Wakefield with a bow, a knife and enough coin to make suspicion easy. He gave one name when questioned, and another when pressed, neither of them Robert’s, but one of Lowdham’s clerks had already decided that the prisoner could be useful. Word spread before any formal judgement was made. A fugitive had been caught. A man travelling armed and alone, who had been identified by someone claiming to have seen him near Tadcaster. Another witness remembered a scar that the prisoner did not possess until questioning left one across his cheek.
Lowdham saw him on the second day. The resemblance was poor. The man was slimmer, darker in the face and several years older than the descriptions gathered from Wetherby. Yet descriptions altered with every telling, and those who had actually known Robert were proving difficult to bring before him.
“What is your name?” Lowdham asked.
The prisoner answered. “Ropp.”
Lowdham asked again. The same answer came back. A clerk placed the depositions before him. There was enough to continue but not enough to satisfy him.
That distinction mattered less with each passing hour. The sheriff’s men had spent months failing to produce Robert Hod. The council wanted an end to the matter. Local officers wanted their authority restored. Those already questioned wanted to believe the hunt had reached its conclusion.
By the third day, the prisoner had become Robert of Wetherby in every report that left the town. News reached John through a frightened associate. Robert listened as the man described the capture and the assuredness with which officials were speaking.
“He says he is not you,” the man added.
John asked whether they should send word to somebody who could challenge the identification. Robert hesitated and thought it through. To do so would mean proving that Robert Hod still lived. It would draw Lowdham back towards every road, house and man they had struggled to protect. At last Robert said that they must learn what was intended before doing anything. Even as he spoke, he knew delay was a choice.
Somewhere beyond the woods, another man had begun to carry his name, and the law was already preparing to make that name permanent.
◆ ◆ ◆
Ropp was hanged three days later.
By then he was so eclipsed by the myth of Robert of Wetherby that denial was useless. The men who guarded him repeated it, clerks entered it into their records, and those permitted to see the prisoner came away saying that the king’s men had finally caught the outlaw who had troubled Yorkshire for so long. Ropp continued to insist upon his own name, but each repetition seemed only to confirm that he was lying.
Robert learned of the execution from Midge, who came after dark and spoke with him while John stood watch outside. Ropp had been taken to the gallows under heavy guard. His body was left hanging long enough for the news to spread, then cut down and beheaded. The head was displayed separately as proof that Robert of Wetherby was dead. Robert listened, and when Midge finished, there was nothing between them but the sound of the wind outside and the knowledge of what had been done.
John eventually asked whether they should leave at once. Robert understood his meaning. The hunt had ended. Roads that had been watched might loosen. Houses that feared questioning might open again. For the first time since Lowdham arrived, escape was not only possible but offered to them by the Crown itself, albeit after another man had purchased it.
Robert went out early and walked alone until he reached the edge of the wood. He imagined Ropp beneath the rope, trying to give his own name while strangers insisted upon another. He remembered Mariota telling him that he had intended everything around Stephen’s death, even if he had not intended the blow itself. The same truth followed him now. He had not chosen Ropp, but Ropp had died inside a life Robert had made. If Robert appeared again, the lie would collapse. Lowdham would know that the wrong man had been killed. The questioning would begin again, and everyone who had sheltered Robert would become useful to the Crown once more. To continue would be worse still, because every new theft would announce that Ropp had died for nothing.
When he returned, John saw the answer before Robert gave it.
“We stay dead,” Robert said.
He had escaped the gallows, but he could no longer pretend that his survival had been won by cunning alone. Somewhere on a road outside Wakefield, an innocent man had carried Robert of Wetherby into death. Robert would not ask another to carry him back.
He spent the following weeks putting his affairs in order as discreetly as he could. The buried coin was divided between those who had remained loyal, and debts were settled through trusted parties. He gave instructions carefully and never twice to the same man. John stayed close, though even he understood that companionship had become a risk. The roads were beginning to open again, and men who had once watched every stranger now spoke with relief of Robert of Wetherby’s death. Lowdham’s people withdrew from some villages and stopped questioning others. The county wanted the matter finished.
Richard Percy received no message, yet Robert suspected he knew. A warning reached him indirectly that certain men would be wise to travel far from Yorkshire before winter. Nothing in it named Robert, and nothing needed to. From the Neville side came only silence, which Robert took as another kind of understanding. Mariota knew more than either house. Robert returned once to York, under cover of darkness, to reveal to her that the man executed had not been him. She showed little surprise. He told her he intended to disappear and asked whether she would speak if questioned. She said that one dead man had already been made to answer for another, and that was enough.
He and John parted soon afterwards. John would travel north under another name, while Robert intended to go south before turning west. Neither man knew whether they would meet again, and neither tried to make the parting grander than it was.
Quite quickly, Robert Hod ceased to appear on the roads. No new robberies could be proved against him, no messenger admitted carrying his word, and no house was found sheltering him.
The Crown had wanted silence. Now, it had it.
The silence did not last in the telling, though. Within a year there were men in taverns who swore Robert had escaped the gallows by trickery, though none could agree how. Others insisted that the man who died had been his brother, his servant, or a thief paid to take his place. Travellers claimed to have seen Robert on the road after his death, always at a distance and with details that changed each time the story was repeated.
The robberies changed with them. A handful of armed men became twenty. A frightened escort became a company routed beneath the trees. Money quietly returned to debtors became treasure scattered among the poor. Midge was remembered as the miller who always knew when rich men travelled, while Tewkes became a fighting brother with a taste for wine and an easy contempt for bishops. John grew taller with every account until no ordinary man could have stood against him.
Mariota changed too. Few who repeated the stories knew why Robert had once gone to her house in York. They knew only that a woman had kept his secret after the king’s men declared him dead. Before long she was said to have hidden him, then loved him, and finally waited for him while he lived beneath the greenwood.
Even the name moved around. Robert Hod became Robin Hod in some mouths, Robyn in others, and the distinction between the fugitive from Wetherby and the man who had died as Ropp disappeared almost completely. The appeal of the tale was more important than its accuracy. There had been a man wronged by authority who took to the road, robbed those richer than himself, gave more freely than expected, kept strange companions, and could not quite be killed by the king.
Years passed, and those who had known Robert died or grew tired of correcting people who preferred the better story. The court rolls remained in their chests and the old debts remained in the Exchequer, but neither travelled as quickly as a song.
Robert of Wetherby disappeared from Yorkshire and from memory. Robyn Hode lingered.
I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy Merlin and the Unburied King
Leave a Reply