Exclusive interview with author Brenda Marshall and a review of her re-imagined Robin Hood based on ballads and historic facts
Rating: Three Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I was startled to read an inscription which suggested that Robin Hood and his Merry Men were most likely a coven of witches,” says Robin author Brenda Marshall. “That incident, visiting the newly opened London Dungeon while sightseeing in London with my 13-year-old son in 1979, sparked more than 30 years of research.”
Marshall offers a new look at Robin Hood, a Robin who was not in Sherwood Forest and who lived 100 years later than was thought.
As you read Robin you get to know Robin as a young boy named Robert and follow him through adulthood to his death. The subject of Marshall’s first novel is exciting and provides fresh insight into Robin Hood, along with his merry men and maid Marian. The cults and covens make the story more supernatural. When Marshall gives descriptions she transports the reader to the lush English countryside and how unspoiled it seems. However, the story would flow better if there was more description and dialog, less exposition.
In Robin, seven-year-old Robert Hode is the son of Adam Hode, the appointed forester in Earl Warren’s park. Robert’s family has never gone without. His mother Joan takes care of him and his father, but occasionally she disappears overnight. Robert’s father teaches him how to use a bow and arrow from a young age. Robert defies his parents and quits school. When his father finds out he’s sent away to be a squire. When Robert returns home, it’s to help his father as a forester and he’s just old enough to join his mother’s coven.
“Robin was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, not Nottingham, and most of his adventures did not take place in Sherwood Forest but in the forest of Barnsdale, a few miles north of Doncaster,” says Marshall. “He was not an earl, but Robert Hode, the yeoman son of a forester. He was not an outlaw supporting King Richard, but among the hundreds of troops who fled into the forests after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 following the Earl of Lancaster’s defeat by the armies of Edward II. His wife, Matilda, joined him later in the forest.”
“As soon as we returned to Los Angeles (in 1979), I began researching the Robin Hood legend,” says Marshall. “I was startled to discover the stories of Robin Hood had been set in the wrong period of history. I concluded he did not live in the reign of Richard I, who ruled from 1189 to 1199. Robin was born 100 years later, in 1290, and murdered in 1346 at the age of 56. This would mean he lived during the reigns of the three Edwards, who ruled between 1272 and 1377.”
Marshall’s research consisted of digging through old manuscripts in the library at UCLA, searching used bookstores for the history of that period and of witchcraft, and correspondence with organizations and libraries in Wakefield, Yorkshire.
“In the early 1970s, I co-wrote The Occult with my best friend, the late Terry Mayo, a TV news anchorwoman,” says Marshall who has two published books on psychic phenomena and works as a ghostwriter and screenplay editor. She works part-time at the Mayflower Club, a British/American social club in North Hollywood. Marshall was a newspaper reporter in England and for 17 years freelanced for movie magazines such as Photoplay.
Marshall has lived in Los Angeles since 1965. She was born in Birmingham, England.
Robin: A Historical Adventure Novel by Brenda Marshall. Paperback Paperback: 478 pages Publisher: AuthorHouse Language: English. ISBN: 9781477282717 $26.95
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