St Mary's Church is the largest medieval building left standing in Nottingham, and its current structure dates substantially from the 15th century, built on a site with a much older history of worship reaching back before the Norman Conquest. Its scale and setting at the heart of the old Lace Market district have long made it a natural anchor point for the city's folklore, and none more so than its traditional connection to Robin Hood.
In the medieval ballads, Robin Hood enters Nottingham in disguise to attend a shooting contest or, in some versions, simply to visit the town, and is recognised inside St Mary's by a treacherous monk who alerts the sheriff's men. Robin is captured, and the story continues with his loyal men, sometimes led by Little John, storming into the church to free him, killing the monk in the process in some tellings. This is folklore in the fullest sense: the Robin Hood ballads existed and were reshaped over centuries before being written down, and there is no way to verify that any of it happened at St Mary's specifically rather than being attached to the building later because of its size and prominence in the town.
What can be said with more confidence is that St Mary's has functioned for centuries as the physical landmark onto which Nottingham's most famous piece of folklore has been mapped, giving visitors a real building to stand in while imagining an entirely legendary event, which is itself a fairly common and honest way that folklore attaches itself to a landscape.
Comments