Folklorists, Literary Scholars and Historians: Robin Hood in the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the end of the nineteenth century the battle lines of the debate about the origins of the Robin Hood legend had been drawn, and no previously unidentified early tales were found subsequently. Child, as editor of the texts of the tales, assigned them to literary creativity alone, the ‘ballad muse’, and his conclusion became the orthodox view of Robin Hood among literary scholars. Hunter's historical approach, searching for evidence indicating the existence of an original individual bearing the name of the outlaw in the records of medieval government and administration, receded in the wake of Child's criticisms. Perhaps as a result, professional historians paid very little attention to Robin Hood scholarship for many years, as they concentrated on political and constitutional history at a national level, largely ignoring the local and regional sources used by Hunter and his antiquarian predecessors, from William Dugdale (d. 1686) and Robert Thoroton (d. 1678) onwards, in compiling county histories. In the earlier twentieth century, some progress was made in the interpretation and understanding of the tales, but this was entirely within the province of the literary scholars. The most notable contribution was the detailed examination of the Gest published in 1909 by the Canadian scholar W. H. Clawson, which included no historical material. He analysed the Gest to determine how many different stories it contained, and to identify links to analogue tales. It was the only one of the early Robin Hood ballads to have received further detailed literary analysis between the time of Child and the late twentieth century. E. K. Chambers took a literary historical approach to the outlaw in an influential volume of the Oxford History of English Literature published in 1945, in a chapter covering ‘Popular Narrative Poetry and the Ballad’. He was aware of the discovery of a reference to a ‘Gilbert Robynhod’ in Sussex in 1296, but thought it ‘very likely’ that the story of the outlaw ‘took its start’ from the Robin Hood imprisoned in Rockingham castle in 1354 while awaiting trial for breaking the forest law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".