Matter of the Greenwood: Friar Tuck - Evolution
I examine how the character of Tuck has evolved over the centuries. Image: Woodcut by F. W. Fairholt for an 1847 ballad collection. Credit: lib.rochester.edu. Tuck, though absent from early ballads, is a major character from the very beginning of the surviving dramatic tradition of Robin Hood. In the early sixteenth century play Robin Hood and the Friar (first printed as an appendix to a 1560 edition of the Gest, but clearly pre-Reformation), he begins in the same classic rol
Matter of the Greenwood: Friar Tuck - Origins
I examine the literary, folkloric, and perhaps historical origins of one of the most iconic characters in the Robin Hood mythos. Image: a Victorian painting of St Robert. Credit: I'm afraid I've lost my record of where this image came from. Are you the photographer? Let me know! Like Maid Marian, though not quite to the same extent, Friar Tuck is remarkable by his absence from most of the ballad tradition, originating instead on the stage. He is, however, named in considerabl
