Robin Hood: Outlaw

They paid me 3 silver pennies a day then. That was a good wage for a man like me who didn’t have a trade. I was just a labourer, working with my muscles and sweat but, because of the huge number of people who had died from the pestilence of some 40 years before, there was always a demand for a man who was willing to work hard. When I was younger, I worked on farms, but I was never sure if I could find work every day. In the good times like spring planting and harvest in the autumn, there was more work and not enough people to be sure of finishing what we had to do before the weather turned. But then in winter, we were lucky if we had a roof over our heads and thin gruel to eat once a day. Winters were hard because there was little work, so we didn’t earn and betimes we had to borrow as an advance from our wages of the next year. It was a way of making sure that a man stayed close to where he was born and reared, so that we were there when the farmers needed us.

The summers were the best because there was plenty of work, and any man who was from our village had the right to till a strip of land on the common. That’s where we could grow our own food and tend our crops in the evenings after work was done and on Sundays after Mass. I saw how my father and uncles worked hard to feed and clothe us children, and I swore that I would have a better life than them. At first, I had to work as a farm labourer too because that was the only work available. But while my brother and my friends all married and had children as soon as they began to earn money, I remained single. It was not for want of finding a comely wench to bear my children, but because I had thoughts to find another way to earn my daily bread.

In the summer, I had my own strip of land on the common, and together with my father’s strip, and the hens that my mother tended, we had enough food to feed me, my father and my mother until late winter. My sister and brother had left home to start their own families and were barely surviving through the winters, but I was thinking of the future. I saved most of my wages, and I often went to the green wood called Sherwood Forest to set snares for rabbits. I always gave my mother a fat rabbit when I wanted some meat in the cooking pot. But most times I sold the rabbit carcases to the flesher who provided the nearby town with meat. I also sold the skins to anyone who had the means to tan them. It amused me when I saw the wife of a burgher or an artisan wearing a rabbit skin collar as if she was the wife of a lord because although she was proud to show the world how rich her husband was, I and the craftsman who made the collar were paid for something that was free for the taking.

And so, little by little, my store of silver pennies grew. There was no secure place to keep them in our one-room cottage, but there was a loose stone in the hearth, and I made a hole in the earth under that stone and that was where my treasure lay. My father and mother knew where I had my silver pennies and my father also used that place for his pennies that he had to save for the rent of 60 pennies a year. This rent was paid every year on Lady Day, 25^th of March, when the Sheriff of Nottingham sent his steward to collect rents. Although the land and all the cottages in the village belonged to the Lord of the Manor, he gave the task of managing his estates to the Sheriff of the town near where we lived.