Introduction

One of the most curious characters in the Robin Hood universe is a man from Wakefield named George-a-Green, the Pinder, or ‘pound keeper’, of the town. Before we start it should be noted that, while debate exists as to the identity of the real Robin Hood,[1] George-a-Green is an entirely fictional figure whose name survives as a result of being sung about in songs, celebrated in prose, and brought to life on the stage.

The Role of the Pound-Keeper or ‘Pinder’

In the late medieval and early modern periods a ‘pinder’ was the person responsible for rounding up all stray cattle about the town.[2] Stray animals would be rounded up by the pound keeper and placed in the parish or town pound and if the owner could be identified then he or she would be fined for allowing their animals to go astray. If the animal remained unclaimed, then it would be sold at auction with the proceeds going to the town treasury.

The pound keeper was, therefore, an important parochial office; people lived much more closely with their animals than we do today—even a family of modest means might keep a pig or a cow and perhaps chickens—and the frequency with which these animals might escape and run riot was high.

Importantly, the office of pound keeper commanded the respect of the townsfolk and whose appointment was decided, in boroughs and liberties, by a jury.[3] One imagines quite hardy, stout men were those who were appointed to the role. It wasn’t small cats and dogs which they had to round up but larger and heavier ones. And, to give a sense of the position’s importance, we turn to the court rolls of Allerthorpe Manor in York, which in 1609 listed its primary officials as ‘a greave, a constable, a pinder, 4 bylawmen, 2 aletasters, and 2 overseers of highways’.[4]

Nor was the sight of a pound keeper familiar only to our medieval and early modern ancestors—the role continued at least into the nineteenth century for in 1881, in records of Ifield Manor, a pound keeper is also listed as one of the local functionaries there.[5] With the pinder a common sight in most towns and village since the medieval era, then, it is unsurprising that the profession made its mark on popular culture.

The Literary History of George a Green

The antiquary William Thoms found that the story of the Wakefield’s pound keeper first appeared in an anonymously written ballad, printed by Robert Toye (who died in 1556, with the ballad obviously dating from before his passing), and titled ‘Of Wakefield and a Green’. The text of this ballad does not survive, though it may (or may not), have been the same as the ballad, preserved in the collection of Anthony a Wood and republished by Joseph Ritson in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795) under the title of ‘The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John.’[6]

The outlaw had been associated with the pinder since at least the third quarter of the sixteenth century for Michael Drayton in his Poly-Olbion (written between 1563 and published finally in 1612), when surveying the Calder River, wrote:

It chanc’d she in her course on [Kirklees] cast her eye,

Where merry Robin Hood, that honest thief doth lie;

Beholding fitly too before how Wakefield stood,

She doth not only think of lusty Robin Hood,

But of his merry man, the Pindar of the town,

Of Wakefield, George-a-Green, whose fames so far are blown.[7]

Drayton must’ve been a fan of the outlaws—again in the same poem we read:

In this our spacious isle I think there is not one,

But he [of Robin Hood hath heard] and Little John,

And to the end of time the tales shall ne’er be done,

Of Scarlock, George a Green, and the Much the Millers son,

Of Tuck, the merry friar, which many a sermon made,

In praise of Robin Hood, the outlaws, and their trade.[8]

The subtitle of the ‘Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John’ ballad  was alluded to in William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (written before 1597; first performed in 1602):

SLENDER. By this hat, then, he in the red face had it. For though I cannot remember what I did when you made me drunk, yet I am not altogether an ass.

FALSTAFF. What say you, Scarlet and John?

BARDOLPH. Why, sir, for my part, I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences.

and again, the same playwright, in Henry IV, Part II (written between 1596 and 1597; first performed in 1600):

FALSTAFF. O base Assyrian knight, what is thy news?
Let King Cophetua know the truth thereof.

SILENCE. And Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John. (Singing)

A rather forgettable poem, titled ‘The Cities new Poets Mock-Show’ (1659) makes a further reference (without Robin Hood) to the famous pinder:

At Soaper-lane end stand Watchmen mighty,
Which maketh us in this place to greet ye,
Who are the chief Watchmen of our City
For I know no man, as I am a Sinner,
Fitter then you who are a Skinner,
To be our Cities Wakefield Pinner;
For easiest are by you to be seen,
The Knaves that would get our walls within,
Cloth’d in the Lambs and Foxes skin.[9]

In an anti-Catholic snipe published in the seventeenth century there is another reference to the pinder without Robin Hood:

That the Exorcisms do not contain any unknown Names, for the avoiding of Superstition; that is to say, the Popish Conjurers do forbid all persons whatever to make use of the Names of the Indian Pagods, or any of the Mahometan Saints; nor of the Pinner of Wakefield, nor of the Names of Adam Bell, Climm of the Clough, or William of Cloudeslee, and yet these were Fellows that would have fought with the Devil himself.[10]

The two references just given indicate that the pinder may have been known as a character in his own right, separate from the Robin Hood legend. Hence, too, Richard Brathwaite, in Strappado for the Devil (1615):

So by thy true relation’t may appear

They are no others now, than as they were

Ever esteemed by auncient times records,

Which shall be shadowed briefly in few words.

The first whereof that I intend to show,

Is merry Wakefield and her Pindar too:

Which fame hath balz’d with all that did belong,

Unto that towne in many gladsome song.[11]

‘In many gladsome song’ certainly suggests that there existed several more of George-a-Green, perhaps having adventures on his own, which are now lost in time! Nevertheless it was the song of George-a-Green and Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John which was known by the great bard, and further allusions to the pinder appear in literary and dramatic works around the time that Shakespeare flourished. In fact, that period—the 1590s—was the apogee of George-a-Green’s popularity, when, along with the several ballads about the man which were being sung, three plays appeared:

1. George a Green, performed by Lord Strange’s Company on 28 December 1593;
2. The Pinner of Wakefield, first performed on the 8 January 1594;
3. Robert Greene’s George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield (1599).[12]

It is to Robert Greene’s play which we now turn.

Robert Greene and Questions of Authorship

Robert Greene was born in Norwich, about the year 1550, and was initially educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he took his Bachelor of Arts, which he completed in 1578, before taking his Master of Arts at Clarehall, which he completed in 1583. Between the completion of his BA and MA, Green travelled to Italy and Spain where, by his own admission in The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592)

For being at the Uniuersitie of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as my selfe, with whome I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew mee to trauell into Italy, and Spaine, in which places I sawe and practizde such villaime as is abhominable to de∣clare. Thus by their counsaile I sought to furnish my selfe with coine, which I procured by cunning sleights from my Father and my friends, and my Mother pampered me so long, and secretly helped mee to the oyle of Angels, that I grew thereby proue to all mischiefe: so that beeing then conuersant with notable Braggarts, boon companions and ordinary spend-thrifts, that prac∣tized sundry superficiall studies, I became as a Sien grafted into the same stocke, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities. At my return into England, I ruffeled out in my silks, in the habit of Malcontent, and seemed so discontent, that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause mee to stay my selfe in.[13]

If Green were the author of this autobiography, his time among the European low lives furnished him with ample material with which to write his exposés of the sixteenth-century criminal underworld including A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), The Second Part of Conycatching (1591), The Black Books Messenger (1592), and A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher (1592).

When it comes to assessing Greene’s plays and poetry, the date that he wrote them cannot be fixed with much certainty. Greene died in 1592, The Pinner of Wakefield was probably first performed in 1588–89,[14] but the first extant printed edition of his play was released as a quarto in 1599. Until it was printed, the play probably existed only as a manuscript but even after its publication, there was nothing official in the Stationers’ Register, nor on the printed text on the title page, to indicate that Greene was the man responsible for bringing the pinder to life on the stage.

In fact, the only evidence for Greene’s authorship comes from a handwritten note, on the title page of the 1599 quarto printed by Simon Stafford, which reads thus:

Written by … a minister who ac the piners pt in it him.

Teste W. Shakespea

These lines suggest that Greene himself played the part of George-a-Greene in the first production of the play, for he allegedly spent time as a minister while carrying on his writing activities. And below those lines above are also the following:

Ed. Iuby saith that the play was made by Ro. Gree.[15]

Ed. Iuby, or Edward Juby (d. 1618), was a stage actor and contemporary of Greene’s and there is little reason to doubt Greene’s authorship (this being said: Robin Hood scholar does make a passing remark to the effect that Greene’s authorship of the piece seems ‘unlikely’).[16] First noticed by John Payne Collier—a scholar with a propensity for forgery—the copy with the manuscript note, which was originally in the Huntingdon Library, is now unfortunately missing, thus rendering any definitive ascription to Greene less than watertight.[17] We must, however, take the play and everything that has been written about it as we find it.

George-a-Green, The Pinner of Wakefield (1599)

The play begins with the Earl of Kendal and his men readied for battle.[18] Kendal is a traitor to the King of England and seeks to overthrow him and, for this purpose, he seeks the assistance of the King James of Scotland. Kendal’s rebellion is not an uprising against unjust authority or a war of liberation. His act is one of pure vanity and naked ambition; he seeks power for power’s sake, and to raise up his friends.

I Henry Momford will be king myself

I will make thee Duke of Lancaster

And Gilbert Armstrong Lord of Doncaster (253).

The Scottish presence, as well as the not yet attempted uprising, perhaps suggests that Greene was drawing lightly upon the experience of the so-called Northern Earls’ Rebellion of 1569, when Catholic aristocrats gathered an army of 6,000 soldiers to rise up against Elizabeth I, install Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne of England, and return the nascent Protestant realm to Catholicism. The uprising on this occasion was led by Thomas Percy and Ann Percy, whose eighteenth-century descendant Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811) became a collector of old ballads and poetry and published Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Given the lack of an overt religious element in the play, however, this rebellion casts but a weak shadow on the proceedings of the play.

Be that as it may, Kendal has a major problem—his soldiers want for food and, as he is at heart a tyrant, decides to send some men to the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire and take the food which the people there have stored for themselves. The ‘request’ for food is accompanied with a threat:

Lest I, like Tamurlaine, lay waste

Their bordering countries, leaving none alive

That contradicts my commission (253).

Kendal’s Tyranny, George’s Patriotism

Tamerlane (1320–1405), or Timur, was a brutal Mongolian ruler who ruled with an iron fist, though the reference here is not only signalling Kendal’s tyrannical tendencies but is simultaneously a shout out to a play titled Tamburlaine (1587) by Greene’s friend, the playwright Christopher Marlowe. As the early modern Tamurlaine decreed that Wakefield’s provisions will be taken by force, so Kendal’s henchman, Mannering, vows to be equally as brutal in extracting from Wakefield all the citizens’ provisions. As one character swears:

For whatso’er he be, the proudest knight

Justice or other that gainsay your word,

I’ll clap him fast (253).

When Mannering arrives at Wakefield and demands the town’s food, while threatening them with a siege of 30,000 men, he meets the local Justice of the Peace, some townsmen, and of course our pinder, George who declare that ‘we will send the earl of Kendal no victuals, because he is a traitor to the king and in aiding him we show ourselves no less’ (254).

Yet patriotism and loyalty to king and country are powerful forces, at least for the people of Wakefield and especially George-a-Greene. To Mannering Green thunders:

I’ll lay thy head before thy feet […]

Why, I am George-a-Greene,

True liegeman to my king,

Who scorns that men of such esteem as these

Should brook the knaves of any traitorous squire […]

We are English born, and therefore Edward’s friends,

Vow’d unto him even in our mothers’ womb,

Our minds to God, our hearts unto our king;

Our wealth, our homage, and our carcasses,

Be all King Edward’s. Then, sirrah, we

Have nothing left for traitors but our swords (254).

In a show of defiance against the would-be tyrant Kendal and his henchman, George grabs Kendal’s wax-sealed commission from Mannering’s hands and forces Mannering to eat it, to the rapturous applause and approbation of George’s fellow townsmen.

A World Turned Upside Down

A common townsman humiliating a sixteenth-century earl in this manner would have been quite the shocking sight. But according to George’s philosophy, a person essentially loses their rank when they commit treason. Their titles largely depend on the king. They have no right to them if they attempt to overthrow him. Traitors are lower than the poorest of the poor, as George says:

Why, what care I? A poor man that is true,

Is better than an earl, if he be false.

Traitors reap no better favours at my hands (259).

The traitors are fair game for all kinds of humiliation from every quarter. Thus, when Kendal himself decides to visit Wakefield, (Mannering’s mission having been unsuccessful), and brings with him two more of his men, Bonfield and Gilbert, George shows them no respect when he catches them attempting to steal horses:

Geo. Now, gentlemen, (I know not your degrees,

But more you cannot be, unless you be kings,) […]

I am the Pinner, and, before you pass,

You shall make good the trespass they have done.

Ken. Peace, saucy mate, prate not to us;

I tell thee, Pinner, we are gentlemen […]

Men that, before a month full be expir’d,

Will be King Edward’s betters in the land.

Geo. King Edward’s betters! Rebel, thou liest (258–59).

This flagrant disrespect for the rightful king is too much for George, who strikes the Earl of Kendal with his fist. A duel almost ensues but Kendal requests to parley with George—a parley being, at this point, something which only nobles and knights requested with their opponents, signifying that, through the strike, George has proved himself physically, if not socially, the equal of Kendal—and Kendal tries to get George to join his side. Indeed, Kendal offers to make George a knight, and assures him that

….I rise not against King Edward,

But for the poor that is oppress’d by wrong;

And, if King Edward will redress the same,

I will not offer him disparagement

[…]                                                                                                            

Now wilt thou leave Wakefield and wend with me

I’ll make thee captain of a hardy band,

And, when I have my will, dub thee a knight (259).

George the Trickster

George pretends to be impressed by Kendal’s sophistry and decides to play the role of a trickster, a role which, in certain Robin Hood stories, is usually reserved for Robin Hood himself, being one of the primary means through which he brings about the defeat of his enemies.[19] So George seemingly accepts the commission from Kendal, on the proviso that Kendal goes with one of George’s men to the woods to hear his fortune told by the hermit who resides there.

While George’s manservant leads Kendal and his man Bonville to the fortune teller, George dons the garb and disguise of a hermit and, when he arrives at the hermitage, begins to tell Kendal’s fortune. The prophecy which George issues doesn’t fill Kendal with hope:

Ken. Father, we come not for advice in war,

But to know whether we shall win or leese.

Geo. Lose, gentle lords, but not by good King Edward;

A baser man shall give you all the foil.

Ken. Ay, marry, father, what man is that?

Poor George-a-Greene, the Pinner’ (261).

Kendal, shocked, is stunned still further when George throws off the fortune teller’s disguise and reveals himself and his purpose in leading Kendal and his men there. They are all under arrest; without a leader, Kendal’s rebellion will come to nought. Things go even further south for Kendal when the Justice enters to arrest them and informs them that Kendal’s forces have lost the battle, with the King of Scots having been delivered into King Edward’s hands. With the plot against the king having been foiled, George goes off to meet his sweetheart Bettris, who is currently betrothed to another uglier and older man.

The Return of the King

George-a-Green, as we have seen, is a Robin Hood character (one who probably had his own tradition before being subsumed into the outlaw’s legend). Just as in many Robin Hood tales the King arrives at the end and rewards all who did him good service, and punishes those who have done wrong,[20] so too does this happen towards the end of this play. And just like in ‘A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode’ (1495), the king in The Pinner of Wakefield is an unnumbered ‘King Edward’.

The King, arriving in Wakefield with the Earl of Warwick—another hero of early modern ballads and songs—want to publicly commend George for his loyalty resolves to travel in disguise to Wakefield, seek out the brave pinder, and reward him for his loyalty. The King of Scots, who is now at peace with Edward, and having heard much about George-a-Greene’s bravery, decides to also don a disguise and help Edward find George. Robert Greene had clearly taken a leaf from the ‘old and auncient pamphlet’ of the ‘Geste of Robyn Hode’ and adapted the king-in-disguise storyline from that tale.

Enter Robin Hood, Scarlet, Marian, and Much the Miller’s Son

George is a happy man. He has the respect of the townsmen, and the patriotic pride in having foiled a rebellion against the lawful king. He has preserved his honour as an Englishman. Most importantly, he has a beautiful sweetheart, the fame of whose beauty stretches beyond Yorkshire, all the way to Sherwood Forest. But not everyone is happy for George—Maid Marian, all the way in Sherwood Forest, seems particularly aggrieved and for a very petty reason:

‘Rob. Why is not lovely Marian blithe of cheer?

What ails my leman, that she gins to lour?

‘Mar. Nothing, my Robin, grieves me to the heart

But, whensoever I do walk abroad,

I hear no songs but all of George-a-Greene;

Bettris, his fair leman, passeth me;

And this, my Robin, galls my very soul’ (264).

Robin informs her that it is rather ridiculous to be jealous of someone whom she does not know. But Marian then goads Robin, who seems rather easily manipulated. It is the outlaws and Marian about whom songs should be sung; this should be a matter of personal pride and honour for Robin to prove he can at least beat George-a-Greene. Until he does, Robin will never get a kind look from her—nor will she sleep with him:

Never will Marian smile upon her Robin

Nor lie with him under the greenwood shade,

Till that thou go to Wakefield on a green,

And beat the pinner for the love of me (264).

Thus, the outlaws set out for Wakefield to find George-a-Greene, so that Robin Hood can deliver a beating to the pinder for no crime other than the fact that Marian is jealous of George and his Bettris’s fame. These motives hardly mark Robin Hood out as that noble figure of the late medieval poems; this is so petty a reason that it George’s beating of the three outlaws at a match fought with quarterstaffs seems like poetic justice.

This occurrence is a classic ‘Robin Hood meets his match’ scenario, a storyline followed in many of the seventeenth-century ballads, in which Robin Hood meets a stranger in the forest, challenges him to a fight, loses, and ending with Robin asking the stranger to join his band. Similar events play out when the outlaws encounter Greene, though with one important deviation: The disguised king arrives and, having observed that the notorious outlaw Robin Hood and George, after their fight, raise a glass of ale in honour of the king, the illustrious monarch is so impressed with the outlaws’ loyalty that he pardons them at once.

King Edward then wants to grant George a favour and raise him to the status of a knight and gift him all of Kendal’s lands. But the ‘defiantly monarchist commoner’, as Mark Truesdale dubs him, seeks not for crass material gain. He is, ‘more than happy to remain fixed in his social position’ and thus the social order is never threatened. It is not his place to upend the social order.[21]

‘Then let me live and die a yeoman still:

So was my father, so must live his son.

For ‘tis more credit to men of base degree,

To do great deeds, than men of dignity (269).

Instead, George humbly has two requests: That King James of Scotland pay pensions to all the families whose fathers and brothers have died as a result of his military schemes, and permission to marry Bettris. These requests are immediately granted and what ensues is essentially an almost Disneyesque ending with a soon to be conducted marriage, a friendship, pardon for the outlaws, and everyone remaining in their proper ‘place’ in society.

Conclusion

I remarked earlier that George-a-Green was an entirely fictional character; I don’t intend to contradict that. Nevertheless, there has remained, even to the present day, something special about the Pinder’s Fields in Wakefield—down the road from my hometown of Leeds. Every local still knows the area, and, to Wakefield and outer Leeds residents, at least, the word ‘Pinder’ is still, as Shakespeare might say,

‘familiar in our mouths as household words’.

This is because the former Pinder’s Field in Wakefield is now host to a well-known hospital in the region: Pinderfields Hospital. Given George’s love for his countrymen and women in Greene’s play, were he real, I expect this character would be more than happy to know that on the site of his fields there now stands an NHS hospital.  

References

[1] See David Crook, Robin Hood: Legend and Reality (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020).

[2] ‘The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield’, in Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, ed. by R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor, 3^rd edn (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 146–49 (p. 147n.)

[3] Samuel Lewis, ‘Abbey – Aberfraw’, in A Topographical Dictionary of Wales (London, 1849), British History Online, accessed December 15, 2024, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-dict/wales/pp1-12.

[4] Allerthorpe Manor Court Rolls (with Waplington), 1608–47, Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire Archives and Local Studies Service, DDKP/2/1-2, NRA 24199

[5] Ifield Manor, West Sussex Record Office, TD/W 156.

[6] ‘The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John’, in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. by Joseph Ritson, 2 vols (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795), II, pp. 16–18.

[7] Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, quoted in John M. Gutch, ‘The Life of Robin Hood’, in A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, ed. by John M. Gutch, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1847), II, p. 35.

[8] Drayton, quoted in Ritson, II, p. viii.

[9] Anon., The cities new poet’s mock-shovv (London: [n. pub], 1659), p. 1.

[10] Anon., A Whip for the Devil, or, The Roman conjuror discovering the intolerable folly, prophaneness and superstition of the papists in endeavouring to cast the Devil out of the bodies of men and women by him possest (London: Thomas Malthus, 1683), p. 17.

[11] Richard Brathwaite, Strappado for the Divell (London, 1615), p. 203.

[12] William Thoms, ‘Preface’, in Early English Prose Romances, ed. by William Thoms, 2^nd edn, 3 vols (London: Nattali and Bond, 1858), II, p. 145.

[13] Robert Greene, The repentance of Robert Greene Maister of Artes. Wherein by himselfe is laid open his loose life, with the manner of his death (London: J. Danter, 1592), Sig. C.

[14] Mark Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 190.

[15] H. Dugdale Sykes, ‘Robert Greene and George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield’, The Review of English Studies, 7: 26 (1931), pp. 129–36 (p. 129).

[16] Charles A. Pennell, ‘The Authenticity of the “George a Greene” Title-Page Inscriptions’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 64: 4 (1965), 668–76 (9 pages)

[17] Sykes, p. 130.

[18] References for this article are taken from the following edition: Robert Greene, ‘George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield’, in The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene and George Peele with Memoirs of the Authors and Copious Notes, ed. by Alexander Dyce (London: George Routledge, 1874), pp. 249–68. Greene did not divide his play into acts and scenes, therefore page numbers for this edition are enclosed in parentheses.

[19] Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 19.

[20] Knight, Robin Hood: Mythic Biography, p. 22.

[21] Truesdale, King and Commoner, p. 191.