The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (81 page)

As to this “English connection”, Lincoln has an amusing but fascinating speculation. Early in his investigation into Rennes-le-Chateau, he went to the Bibliotheque Nationale with Gerard de Sede, and de Sede suggested he should request a book called
Le Vraie Langue Celtique
(
The True Celtic Tongue
) by the Abbe Henri Boudet, who was, as we have noted, priest of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, and a close friend of Saunière.

Lincoln was able to obtain Boudet’s book, and found it baffling as well as funny. Boudet seemed to think that the original language of
mankind before the Tower of Babel was English, or rather Celtic. This part of the book Lincoln describes as “linguistic tomfoolery”. And since Boudet was known to be an intelligent man, Lincoln suspects he had his tongue in his cheek. But the volume then turns into something far more interesting. Boudet goes on to discuss the complex megalithic structures of the area. The subtitle of the book is “The Cromlech of Rennes-les-Bains” – a cromlech is a megalith made up of large flat stones resting on two upright stones, rather like a huge dining table.

It looks as if Boudet’s job was simply to hint at the mystery of the whole area, and imply that it dates back to megalithic times. But Lincoln is also inclined to suspect that his intention is to tell his reader that one major key to the secret of the area lies in English – perhaps in English measures, such as the English mile. And is Boudet also hinting that the original measures of mankind are English – such as the mile?

Let me try to summarize the conclusions of this postscript.

The Rennes-le-Chateau area appears to be an enormous sacred site centred on a natural pentacle. Lincoln believes it has been sacred for at least a thousand years, for the “temple” – consisting of churches, castles and villages – must have been designed at least a thousand years ago.

But the pentacular structure of the mountains of the area can only be seen from the air or from a good map. And we know that there were no good maps a thousand years ago, except portolans, the maps sailors used to navigate from port to port. And we will see in the section on the “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings” that Professor Charles Hapgood believed that some of the portolans may date back to the age when there was no ice covering Antarctica – at least 5.000 BC, and perhaps earlier.

A.E. Berriman’s conclusions about the Greek stade point in the same direction. If the ancient Greeks – before Eratosthenes, about 200 BC – did not know the size of the earth, then how is it possible that the Greek stade should be a very precise measure of the earth’s polar circumference?
Someone
knew the size of the earth. That “someone” may have been the ancient Egyptians, or perhaps even the Sumerians, whose civilization dates from around 4,000 BC. But then, neither the Egyptians nor the Sumerians had any means of measuring the size of the earth so precisely. Was the earth, in fact, measured by some much earlier civilization, dating back long before the Egyptians or the Sumerians? In our book
The Atlantis Blueprint
, Rand Flem-Ath and I have argued that Antartica was Atlantis and that a great civilization existed in Atlantis – as Plato suggests – as long ago as 10,500 BC.

But even if a “worldwide maritime civilization” existed at that time, as Hapgood suggests, it would still have been virtually impossible to
measure the earth’s polar circumference except by the rather inaccurate geometrical means used by Eratosthenes. (See Chapter on the Ancient Sea Kings.)

Erik van Daniken would undoubtedly argue that the earth was measured from spacecraft in ancient times. Rand Flem-Ath and I (CW) are both inclined to suspect that the real answer lies in the notion that civilization may be tens of thousands of years older than anyone suspects.

If that is so, then the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau may stretch back much further than the Templars or the Merovingians and have its origin in some remote period of prehistory.

45

Did Robin Hood Really Exist?

Next to King Arthur, Robin Hood is the most famous of British heroes, and he shares with King Arthur the indignity of having his existence doubted by modern scholarship. The folklorist Lord Raglan concluded that he was really a Celtic god, while in
The God of the Witches
Margaret Murray argues that his name means
Robin of the Hood
, and that he was probably the devil (or horned god) in ancient witchcraft festivals. Yet there is also convincing evidence that Robin was a real person, and that – as the ballads declare – he plundered the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest and had a long-standing feud with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The first literary reference to Robin Hood occurs in William Langland’s
Piers Plowman
, dating from around 1377. Langland makes a priest remark that he could not say his paternoster without making mistakes, but “I know rhymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Earl of Chester”. So there were already ballads of Robin Hood by that date. In 1510 Wynkyn de Worde, one of the earliest printers, brought out
A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood
, which did for Robin Hood what Malory had done for King Arthur in the middle of the previous century. And by the time he appears in Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
(1847) Robin had become the boon-companion and ally of Richard the Lion Heart, the heroic outlaw of the woods. All that was needed then was for some folklorist to notice how often Robin Hood’s name is associated with folk festivals, like the Hobby Horse ceremony which takes place on May Day in Padstow, Cornwall,
²²
to suggest that Robin Hood was really Robin Wood, and that his name is derived from the Norse god Woden . . . In fact he appears as Robin Wood in T.H.White’s
Sword in the Stone
, in which he becomes a contemporary of King Arthur, who (if he ever existed) was said to have died about
AD
540.

Those who assume there is no smoke without fire are inclined to believe that Robin Hood was a real outlaw who at some time lived in Sherwood Forest, and who became so popular during his own lifetime that, like Billy the Kid, he soon became the subject of tales and ballads. Yet it seems unlikely that he was around as early as Richard the Lion Heart (1157–99), or he would surely have been mentioned in manuscripts before
Piers Plowman
two centuries later. In his
Chronicle of Scotland
, written about 1420, Andrew Wyntoun refers to Robin Hood and Little John for the year 1283, which sounds altogether more likely – about a century before
Piers Plowman.

And where precisely did he operate? One important clue is that there is a small fishing town called Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, not far from Whitby, and that up on the nearby moors there are two tumuli (or barrows) called Robin Hood’s Butts. Another is that in medieval England the forest of Barnsdale in Yorkshire joined Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. A sixteenth-century life of Robin Hood among the Sloane Manuscripts says he was born in Locksley, in Yorkshire, about 1160.
The Chronicle of Scotland
associates Robin with “Barnysale” presumably Barnsdale. So the evidence suggests that he was a Yorkshireman.

Later legends declare that he was “Sir Robin of Locksley”, or even the Earl of Huntingdon. But it is clear from the earlier ballads that he was a yeoman – a farmer who owns his own land – and that this is partly why he became such a hero: not because he was a nobleman, but because he was a representative of the people. (A small tenant farmer would be only one stage above a landless peasant.)

One of the most important clues to Robin’s identity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Historic Documents Commission was cataloguing thousands of documents which represented eight centuries of British history. It was in 1852 that the antiquary Joseph Hunter claimed that he had stumbled upon a man who sounded as if he might be the original Robin Hood. His name in fact was Robert, and he was the son of Adam Hood, a forester in the service of the Earl de Warenne. (Robin was simply a diminutive of Robert – not, in those days, a name in its own right.) He was born about 1280, and on 25 January 1316 Robert Hood and his wife Matilda paid two shillings for permission to take a piece of the earl’s waste ground in “Bickhill” (or Bitch-hill) in Wakefield. It was merely the size of a kitchen garden – thirty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The rent for this was sixpence a year. The Manor Court Roll for 1357 shows a house “formerly the property of Robert Hode” on the site – so by that time Robert Hood was presumably dead.

Now, 1316 was midway through the reign of Edward the Second, the foppish, homosexual king who was finally murdered – by having a red-hot spit inserted into his entrails – in September 1327. After his coronation (in 1307) he dismissed his father’s ministers and judges and made his lover, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall – to the fury of his barons. It was the most powerful of these, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who forced Edward to accept the rule of twenty-eight barons (called Ordainers), and who finally executed Piers Gaveston in 1312. Edward’s lack of attention to affairs of state allowed the Scots – against whom his father Edward I had fought so successfully – to throw off their English masters. Edward II was defeated at Bannockburn in 1314, two years before Robin Hood hired the piece of waste ground and set up home with his wife Matilda. So it is understandable that when the Earl of Warenne was ordered by the king to raise a troop to fight the Scots Robert Hood failed to oblige, and the records show that he was accordingly fined. But when a second muster was raised in 1317 Hood’s name was not listed among those fined – which led J.W.Walker, a modern historian, to conclude that this time Robin Hood joined the army. Five years later it was the Earl of Lancaster who raised the army, to fight against the king. Again, Hood’s name is not among those fined, so it again seems that he answered the summons. Lancaster’s army was defeated at Boroughbridge, and Lancaster was captured and beheaded. The quarrel had been about Edward’s new favourites, the Despensers, father and son, whom he had been forced to banish; now he was able to recall them.

Many of Lancaster’s supporters were declared outlaws, and Walker discovered a document that stated that a “building of five rooms” on Bichhill, Wakefield, was among the property confiscated. Walker believes that this was Robert Hood’s home, and that the outlaw now took refuge in the nearby forest of Barnsdale, where he soon became a highly successful robber.

Now, it must be understood that if Robert Hood
was
the legendary Robin, and he took refuge in the forest, living off the deer population, he was risking horrible penalties. When William the Conqueror brought the Normans to England he declared that the forests – which covered a third of the land – were his own property; any peasant who killed deer risked being literally flayed alive. Under William the Saxons suffered as much as countries occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War. Two and a half centuries later the Normans regarded themselves as Englishmen, and the French language had ceased to be used in England, but the laws were still harsh. The “forest laws” had been mitigated, so a
man could no longer have his hands or his lips sliced off for poaching a deer; but the penalty was still a heavy fine, a year’s imprisonment, and sureties for his future good behaviour. If he could not find guarantors he had to “abjure the realm” – quit the kingdom for ever.

The battle of Boroughbridge was fought on 16 March 1322, near the Ure river in Yorkshire; dismounted men-at-arms and archers drove back the cavalry, then another royalist army moved up behind the rebels and forced them to surrender. Lancaster was captured and tried; evidence revealed that he had been contemplating an alliance with the king’s old enemy Robert the Bruce. Lancaster – the king’s cousin – was beheaded. And Robin Hood, deprived of his home, became an outlaw in the king’s forest.

But if Walker is correct in identifying Robert Hood of Wakefield as Robin Hood, he was not an outlaw for long. In the spring of the following year the king made a progress through the north of England, reaching York on 1 May. From 16 May to 21 May he stayed at Rothwell, between Wakefield and Leeds, and spent three days hunting at Plumpton Park in Knaresborough Forest. And the
Lytell Geste
makes this visit a part of the story of Robin Hood, describing how the king “came to Plumpton Park/And failed [missed] many of his deer”. Where the king was accustomed to seeing herds of deer, now he could find only one deer “that bore any good horn”. Which made the king swear by the Trinity “I wish I could lay my hands on Robin Hood”:

So, according to this ballad, one of the foresters suggested that the king should disguise himself as an abbot, riding through the greenwood with a band of monks. The ruse was successful; Robin and his men stopped the “abbot”, but recognized him as the king. And the king thereupon found Robin so likable that he invited him to join the royal household as a
vadlet
, a gentleman of the royal bedchamber. The king continued on his travels until February 1324, when he returned to Westminster. The royal household accounts for April record payment of the past month’s wages to Robyn Hod and twenty-eight others. The first record of a payment to Robyn Hod is in the previous June. The ballad tells us that after being a servant of the king for somewhat over a year Robin asked the king’s permission to return to Barnsdale. And the household accounts for November 1324 record that Robyn Hod, formerly one of the “porteurs” (gentlemen of the bedchamber) had been given five
shillings “because he is no longer able to work”. The ballad says that Robin asked the king’s leave to return to Barnsdale, and was given permission to stay for seven days. But he never returned; instead he regrouped his merry men, and lived on in the greenwood for another twenty-two years. If this is based on fact, then he died about 1346, in his mid-sixties.