Lisa Hendrix

(Follow along on the Google map for IMMORTAL OUTLAW. Be sure to play with the various options like terrain and satellite for different views.)

At their grandest, around the year 1200, the Royal Forests covered somewhere between a quarter and a third of England (click on map below to see larger image). These weren’t forests as we understand them now (i.e. thickly wooded land), but were made up of heath and meadow and bog as well as woods — any ground, in other words, that provided habitat for the game and fowl needed to support the royal household. Provisions and sport were the reason for the forests’ existence: William the Conquerer’s love of hunt had led him to create the Forest system almost as soon as he landed in England. His son, William Rufus (who made an appearance in IMMORTAL WARRIOR) was actually killed while hunting in the New Forest, by a bowman who I can only surmise was an ancestor of Dick Cheney.

The Shire Wood (Sherwood) was not the biggest of the Royal Forests, but it is definitely the most famous today because of it’s association with the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Like all the royal forests it contained areas of open woodlands and mixed vegetation, but it was especially well-known for its dense canopies of ancient oaks, so thick in some areas that they made the roads nearly impassable and threatened to sweep riders off their horses. These wild woods, which extended into southern Yorkshire and eastern Derbyshire, made a perfect place for outlaws to accost travelers and then disappear out of reach of the law.

It was just such a group of bandits that Marian and Robin encountered as they travelled from Loxley to their first goal of the Lady Well at Headon. They would have just entered the edge of the forest along what is now more or less the M1 Motorway when attacked, but roads in this northwestern border area were especially dangerous because the maze of caverns at Creswell Crags were close enough to provide even more cover for miscreants (Steinarr hid in the Crags himself in earlier years).

Sadly, only 165 square miles of Sherwood Forest remain today, less than 0.5% of its original size, and it’s populated by a mere 1000 or so of the millions of oaks that once blanketed the land. Fortunately, one of those surviving oaks is the Major Oak, the immense tree in which Robin Hood once hid from the Sheriff, and my model-very rough model-for the elf house (more on that later in our journey).

Once he’d rescued his “pilgrims,” Steinarr escorted them to the nearest village of any size that was properly along their route—Maltby, So. Yorkshire—even though he had to veer well north to do so. In the village, which dates back to ancient times, Marian might have noted the remains of several Roman roads that ran through the village, which was surrounded by rich farmlands. The current church building dates back only to 1859, but the square-topped tower you can see in the picture dates back to Norman times and would have been watching over Steinarr and Marian’s first kiss.

Next up: Headon and the Lady Well

From the time I started IMMORTAL OUTLAW, I intended to take you all on a tour of the locations  in the book and reveal the fact and fiction in the story.  However, I didn’t want to post too much too soon and end up with spoilers.

The book has been out about 6 weeks now, so I think it’s safe to begin our trek. First though, a bit about a question I’ve gotten over and over during the past couple of months:

Why Robin Hood?

Well, why not? It’s a story that has been around for at least 600 years, so it clearly resonates: A good man outlawed for either an unfortunate mistake (accidentally killing a forester) or for standing up to tyranny (refusing to do homage to a usurper trying to steal the throne) depending on the version you’re reading, making his way in the wilds, gathering a band of like-minded men around him to redress the wrongs of society by robbing only the rich to aid the poorest around them. Bows and arrows, horses, great chase scenes through the woods, comic relief, and a love for the ages. Great stuff, even if it’s likely based on the romanticized story of a tax-evading scofflaw.

But really why are these two:

That’s Bernadette O’Farrell as Marion and Richard Green as  Robin from The Adventures of Robin Hood, an ITV series rebroadcast in the US on CBS. I grew up on these two (and Patricia Driscoll, who took over the role of Marion, as they spelled it, in seasons 3 and 4). [Photo used without permission.]

I watched TARH in syndicated re-runs, and I loved it from the first. I fantasized about being Marian, who in the series was brave and bold and every bit as good with a bow as Robin. No victimized Olivia de Haviland here. She was a tough cookie (and even tougher after pixie-like Driscoll took over), and she fought the bad guys alongside the men. This was probably because the producer was Hannah Weinstein, one tough cookie herself (she hired blacklisted writers like Ring Lardner to write episodes under psuedonyms, which explains the solid, socially conscious storylines).

As a bonus, bits of the series were shot on location in the meadow at Runnymede where the English barons—including a descendant of the real Ivo from Immortal Warrior—forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. The production values on TARH were pretty high for the time (it was shot on 35 mm film), so even now, some 50+ years later, the images are crisp. You can find the DVDs at Amazon (all four seasons/143 episodes for under $25).

So, yeah, Robin Hood, and not for the first time. My first published romance, Hostage Heart, was totally Robin Hood gone cowboy, a straightforward western version of the legend complete with robber-cattle-barons and unsavory sheriffs—unlike this one, which is my fantasy about how such a story might have come about if our boy Ari had been around.

I hope you’ll follow along as we retrace Steinarr and Marian’s zig-zag route through Nottinghamshire. You’ll be able to see their path on the interactive map available from my Extras page or at GoogleMaps. Invite a few friends to come along. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

So, what was your favorite version of Robin Hood (book, movie, or tv)? Did you ever dream of going outlaw for the sake of justice? Were you a fan of Little John, Alan-a-Dale, or Will Scarlet?

UP NEXT: The Road to Maltby