The Major Oak

 

The recent announcement that the great survivor the Major Oak has died is sad news. Located near the village of Edwinstowe in north-western Nottinghamshire this venerable tree was very much a symbol of what remains of the ancient woodland that made up much of Sherwood Forest in the medieval centuries. 

 

The Major Oak

Image: Wikimedia

The Major Oak also had a place in the relatively modern legendary history of Robin Hood. That there probably was an outlaw of skill and cunning - or maybe a series - called or known as Robin Hood seems very likely. It was Sir Walter Scott in “Ivanhoe” who located him in the 1190s. The most recent research places him in the early thirteenth century, and more significantly, not in Sherwood in Nottinghamshire but north of Doncaster in Barnsdale along the Great North Road towards Ferrybridge. Barnsdale was not a royal forest in the legal sense but simply a wooded area along the magnesian limestone ridge which runs northward from the river Don. 

By the fourteenth century Robin Hood was leading protagonist in popular ballads, where avenged individual wrongs, not those of society. It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he became more generally the robber of the rich to give to the poor, and so could become the demotic hero of cinema.

How the Sheriff of Nottingham was drawn into the narrative ms is not clear, but one can reasonably imagine that a lawless group based in Barnsdale would not lose much sleep over heading south and crossing the county boundary into Nottinghamshire for variety or to through the forces of law and order off their trail.

  

Robin Hood has attracted a considerable amount of scholarship from academics in the past half-century or so. The book I always recommend is “Robin Hood” by J.C.Holt, which is careful and scholarly, very readable and well illustrated.

I regret on my various visits to Nottinghamshire over many years that I never bot to see the Major Oak. However its d ace dents will live on. Like the famous Cowthorpe Oak in Yorkshire time has, sadly, finally caught up with this landmark.

Wikipedia has a history of the tree at Major_Oak

and of its wider setting at Sherwood_Forest

 

The BBC News website has an article about its history and its place in the cultural life of Nottinghamshire which can be read at The 'Robin Hood' tree: The history and enduring appeal of the Major Oak