Жанр баллад. Основные персонажи баллад о Робин Гуде и их функции.

1. Genre of ballad. Difference of ballad and epic poems
2. Basic cycles of the Scottish and English ballads. Their genre modifications
2.1. Correlation to the genre of pastoral
2.2. Comic ballads
2.3. Mystical ballads
2.4. Motive of bewitched beauty in ballads. Likeness of ballad and fairy tale
3. The basic characters of ballads about Robin Hood and their functions
4. Functions of Robin Hood as a character
4.1. Embodiment of the national idea of justice
4.2. Robin Hood as the myth creator about himself
5. The basic themes and motives: Motive of transformation of rival into companion-in-arms
Bibliography

Many occupations such as clothier, or fuller, or butcher, or smith, or even potter, in town and country generated as much income, or more, and endowed a similar social status.
In the late fourteenth century yeomanry also implied freeborn blood and free tenure. Robin, the storyteller reminded his audience, was both courteous and free. But it is evident that a century later substantial customary tenants, some even of questionable birth, styled themselves yeomen and were accepted by their neighbours as such.
A yeoman was in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries a respectable local worthy, one who might serve as churchwarden, as a juror on his local manorial court, or even find himself empanelled by the king's sheriff.
Not a gentleman, still a working farmer, artisan or tradesman who worked with his hands, he was nevertheless a man of local substance and importance, employing one or two of his own servants. The privileged were anxious to draw a clear distinction between a gentleman and a yeoman, even though in practice, at the margins, it was sometimes difficult to discern. No gentleman, it was asserted, worked with his hands.
Yet yeomen liked to think of themselves as being sufficiently courteous and free to be a cut above the common sort. Some may have had pretensions to gentility, but they were all proud to be respectable.
The numbers of yeomen, at least proportionally to a reduced population, grew during the fifteenth century in line with the rise of the standards of living of those in the intermediate ranks of society, and they were swollen by downward as well as upward mobility. In a world of primogeniture, the younger sons of gentlemen, and even more so their grandsons, came to rest in the same social group. They were to be found throughout England.
Yet the word yeoman was still current at the end of the fifteenth century in its older and original meaning. It still continued to be employed in noble and royal households. In the great noble households there remained three grades of servant - now gentlemen, yeomen and grooms (sometimes knaves).
5. The basic themes and motives: Motive of transformation of rival into companion-in-arms
The critique of the religious orders seems, on the surface, to be devastating. Monks concerned more with maintaining a worldly estate (the cellarer declares as he leaves that he is off to deal with the reeves of the abbey's estates) and, living like lords, have abandoned their true vocation. A nun, who it is hinted has broken her vow of chastity, plots murder. A band of yeoman outlaws living in the woods serve God far more devoutly than they. In this, there is much that comes from the common tradition of complaint and satire. Monks did not escape the barbs of the fourteenth-century preachers. In particular Bromyard drew a sharp distinction between the manner in which the wealthy monastery fawned to the great and powerful, but shunned and humiliated the poor and indigent. And so it is at St Mary's, York. The abbot dines in splendour with the justice, sheriff, lords and his convent rubbing their hands in anticipation of how they will all profit from the knight's ruin.
It is monks outside the monastery who are particularly satirized. Monasteries needed to engage with the world, to be involved in corporate entertainment and maintain good public relations. Indeed, conventional satire notwithstanding, it may well be that many contemporaries accepted this.
Robin Hood's dealings with monks are largely with those who are riding out on the business of their abbey, whether they are met continually changing social relationships and social messages. They were texts, in the jargon, which were being constantly renegotiated and contested. Thus they appealed to the gentry because Robin was courteous and respectful of those that lived up to the values of that status and rank. On the other hand, they also appealed to the non-gentry because the hero, and more particularly his lieutenant, Little John, could be a prankster who mocked aristocratic values and flouted the authority of the sheriff. Robin was a conventionally pious and devoted son of the Church who loved the Virgin Mary. On the other hand he despised Benedictine monks. These differences and contradictions should be neither ignored nor reconciled in one composite figure. They are the consequence of the kaleidoscopic character of the texts.
However, it is possible to find a set of dominant motifs, especially as they emerge in the Gest, which, after it established itself as the central narrative of the story of Robin Hood at the end of the fifteenth century, became the basis of all later developments of it. As we have seen, there are certain significant differences between the narrative as it emerged then and what it later became. It is this version, in its printed form, that received the widest circulation and became best known to audiences of all ranks. In it, more than any other working of the stories, a mirror is held up to Merry England.
First, it is crucial to our understanding that in all the stories, not just the Gest, Robin Hood and all his merry men are yeomen. He is not a gentleman, but he is not a peasant either. He is in between. The 'in-between' is a much contested area. It is part of the argument of this work that he, and all his men, are something altogether more precise than the generalized representation of a particular intermediate status group in late-medieval English society. He is figured as a particular type of yeoman - a yeoman of the forest, or a forester. He is also a 'strenuous' yeoman, who exercises great prowess in combat, for foresters as we have seen were believed to make some of the best archers in English armies. As a diligent and well-informed forester, he also knows the codes and skills not only of woodcraft, appropriate to a working man, but also of venery appropriate to a gentleman. This positions him as a figure not just intermediary but straddling the worlds of the gentry and non-gentry. It is one reason why it is possible to hang on him adventures of different sorts that appealed to one or the other, or sometimes both audiences. Nevertheless, he is quintessentially of the middling sort. He is, in fifteenth-century context, most closely linked in social standing to those men in town and village who carried the local government of the kingdom at the lowest level, who led parish or ward communities and frequently represented them in their dealings with higher authority, especially in legal and fiscal matters. The relationship between middling sort and higher authority was ambiguous. These men accepted their place in the social order and willingly acted as agents for royal government. But they were also independently minded and when they were so moved were not afraid to remonstrate and protest against the abuses of royal authority. Robin Hood can thus be located in a specific social space from which particular historical significance arises.
The forest bathing in perpetual springtime, which his fellow outlawed foresters inhabit, and he rules, is a paradigm of a just and well-ordered society. Being northern it is distanced from many of the audience. While it is a wilderness, as the north was stereotypically imagined in the south to be, it is benign. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a 'real' setting. Yet neither does it represent mere escapism,- nor is it an elegy for a lost world of liberty,- nor is it a Utopian dream of a world which will never be. In the relationship with the action of the story, the greenwood represents something with a far sharper edge: awareness that the dreams and aspirations of spring always end in the disappointment of autumn. It thus grounds the stories psychologically in that human contradiction between optimism and pessimism,- between recurring hope that things can be made better and a realization that this never happens.
The greenwood is home to a fellowship of the forest outlaws. The words 'fellow' and 'fellowship' are key words in the texts, not only of the Gest. In encounters with Robin, even within the band itself, men have to prove themselves 'good fellows'. There are many different shades of meaning of this term, and the ambiguity not insignificant. A duality of association is evoked. One connotation is the fellowship of men in arms with its Arthurian overtones and its association with aristocratic affinities and retinues of war, of the kind in which it would be no surprise to find these outlawed yeomen. But another mirrored in the texts is the late medieval fraternity or guild, of which there were thousands of different types and sizes in England on the eve of the Reformation. Fraternities were societies of respectable men and women bound together in virtuous common purpose, for religious, charitable, economic and, in some cases, administrative ends. It is the evocation of this kind of fellowship rather more than the military fellowship which links the outlaw band to the world of the middling sort with which yeomen of all kinds, including foresters, were associated. Paradoxically, Robin Hood and his fellowship, exiles in the greenwood who violently live by theft like an irregular military fellowship, also maintain the true values of such peaceful, respectable and law-abiding associations.
A contrast is drawn between the true fellowship to be found in the forest fraternity and the false fellowship to be found in a great monastery. The outlaw feasting in the forest represents true conviviality and hospitality, the celebration of inclusive brotherly love and charity, while the feast in the hall at St Mary's, York, is exclusive, selfish and lacking in charity. Robin has a true devotion to St Mary,- the monks in an abbey dedicated to her do not. No doubt, as in so much in these stones, there is much that is stereotypical and humorous. However, one cannot escape the conclusion that there is also a significant strain of anti-monasticism, and specifically anti-Benedictine feeling, in them. The repetition of ridicule tends to undermine the standing of the ridiculed. In the great debate about anticlericalism on the eve of the Reformation this needs to be taken into account. It suggests not a general distrust of the clergy, but a particular cynicism about the richest and most worldly of the religious orders. As such it may reflect growing lay involvement in religious practice and, in certain contexts, control over ecclesiastical affairs discernible among the gentry and at parochial level in the later middle ages.
The motive of anti-monasticism is opposed to the belief of Robin and his team in justice that is rooted in their belief of God. The motive of devotion to the team of outlaws is opposed to transformation of rival into companion-in-arms. The given transformation takes place, for example in chapter II “How Robin Hood met Little John”:
But Robin cared little for such a handicap. Taking a running start, his nimble legs carried him easily over and balanced neatly upon the end of the broad log. But he was no sooner started across than he saw a tall stranger coming from the other side. Thereupon Robin quickened his pace, and the stranger did likewise, each thinking to cross first. Midway they met, and neither would yield an inch.
"Give way, fellow!" roared Robin, whose leadership of a band, I am afraid, had not tended to mend his manners.
The stranger smiled. He was almost a head taller than the other.
"Nay," he retorted, "fair and softly! I give way only to a better man than myself."
"Give way, I say", repeated Robin, "or I shall have to show you a better man."
His opponent budged not an inch, but laughed loudly. "Now by my halidom!" he said good-naturedly, "I would not move after hearing that speech, even if minded to it before; for this better man I have sought my life long. Therefore show him to me, an it please you."
[…]
"Give him a bow, and find a full sheath of arrows for Little John," said Robin joyfully. "Can you shoot as well as fence with the staff, my friend?"
"I have hit an ash twig at forty yards," said Little John.
Thus chatting pleasantly the band turned back into the woodland and sought their secluded dell, where the trees were the thickest, the moss was the softest, and a secret path led to a cave, at once a retreat and a stronghold. Here under a mighty oak they found the rest of the band, some of whom had come in with a brace of fat does. And here they built a ruddy fire and sat down to the meat and ale, Robin Hood in the center with Will Stutely on the one hand and Little John on the other. And Robin was right well pleased with the day's adventure, even though he had got a drubbing; for sore ribs and heads will heal, and 'tis not every day that one can find a recruit as stout of bone and true of soul as Little John.
Here we see that what makes little John so quickly change his mind is a sort of intuition as well as gratitude for Robin Hood’s noble actions.
Sir Richard of the Lea, who could have been victim in the hands of Robin Hood and his team had he been as rich and dishonest as the Sheriff turns out to be rewarded as he had run out of money and needed help:
"Take this loan from us, Sir Knight, and pay your debt to the Bishop," then said Robin. "Nay, no thanks; you are but exchanging creditors. Mayhap we shall not be so hard upon you as the Christian Bishop; yet, again we may be harder. Who can tell?"
There were actual tears in Sir Richard's eyes, as he essayed to thank the foresters. But at this juncture, Much, the miller's son, came from the cave dragging a bale of cloth. "The knight should have a suit worthy of his rank, master—think you not so?"
"Measure him twenty ells of it," ordered Robin.
"Give him a good horse, also," whispered Marian. "'Tis a gift which will come back four-fold, for this is a worthy man. I know him well."
So the horse was given, also, and Robin bade Arthur-a-Bland ride with the knight as far as his castle, as esquire.
The knight was sorrowful no longer; yet he could hardly voice his thanks through his broken utterance. And having spent the night in rest, after listening to Allan-a-Dale's singing, he mounted his new steed the following morning an altogether different man.
"God save you, comrades, and keep you all!" said he, with deep feeling in his tones; "and give me a grateful heart!"
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See Аверинцев С.С. Риторика и истоки европейской литературной традиции. - М., 1996.
Мощанская О.Л. Народная баллада Англии (цикл о Робине Гуде). Автореф. канд. филолог. наук. — Горький, 1967. c. 10.
Аринштейн Л. Вступительная статья. //Английские и шотландские баллады. –M., 1988. – C.12.
See Мелетинский Е.М. Введение в историческую поэтику эпоса и романа. - М., 1986.
Кулагина А.В. Русская народная баллада. - М., 1977. С. 42.
Gest of Robyn Hode - www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/gest.htm
Аринштейн Л. Вступительная статья. //Английские и шотландские баллады. –M., 1988. – C.13.
Мощанская О.Л. Народная баллада Англии (цикл о Робине Гуде). Автореф. канд. филолог. наук. — Горький, 1967. c. 14.
Алексеев М. П. Английская литература - http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/Literat/Ist_Ang_1/index.php
Bridget Ann Henish, The Medieval Calendar Year. NY, 1978. - p.96.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoral
Скотт В. Собрание сочинений в двадцати томах. Т. 20. М.-Л., Художественная литература, 1965. C. 24.
See Висковатый П. М.Ю. Лермонтов. Юность поэта. - Гл. V. - Шотландский бард Фома Лермонт//Русская мысль, 1882. — № 2. — С. 152-155.
The Twa Magicians // Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 24; Motherwell’s MS., p. 570.
See Мощанская О.Л. Образ мятежника в народно-поэтическом творчестве Англии средних веков и последующая литературная традиция// Литературные связи и проблема взаимовлияний.- Горький, 1984.-С. 58—65.
Мощанская О.Л. Народная баллада Англии (цикл о Робине Гуде). Автореф. канд. филолог. наук. — Горький, 1967. C. 15.
www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/gest.htm
The Tale of Gamelyn - http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/gamelyn.htm
See Keen М. The outlaws of medieval legend.— London: Routledge, 1961.
McSpadden W. J. Robin Hood - http://www.gutenberg.org
McSpadden W. J. Robin Hood - http://www.gutenberg.org
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