Places named Robin Hood's Butts

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An archer has just scored a bull's eye during target practice. Notice the shape of the (partially drawn) butts (from the Luttrell Psalter).
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Localities named Robin Hood's Butts. Click cluster marker for locality markers. Click locality marker for link to locality page. Historic county boundary coordinates provided by the Historic Counties Trust.
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By Henrik Thiil Nielsen, 2013-07-11. Revised by Henrik Thiil Nielsen, 2017-05-08.

About a dozen examples of ancient burial mounds named Robin Hood's Butts are known, with a concentration in the north and southwest of England. It has been suggested, with special reference to such mounds on Danby Low Moor and Gerrick Moor in North Yorkshire, that Robin Hood's Butts may in fact owe their name to their having been used as archery butts.[1] While it cannot, of course, be ruled out that anybody ever used an ancient burial mound as a butt for archery, I do not believe this is in general the right explanation for their name. In particular, the remote Robin Hood's Butts high on the North Yorkshire moors seem unlikely ever to have attracted a throng of archers intent on target practice or gathering for an archery contest. Surely the name is due to the general similarity of such mounds, especially when seen in silhouette, to late medieval (and early modern) archery butts? These were typically small mounds of sand, earth and turf, often somewhat resembling in shape the outer joint of a human thumb or a rowboat stood on its end. The similarity of burial mounds to archery butts would have been the more striking when, as was often the case, two (or a few) mounds were situated close to each other, for an archery range usually had one butt at either end (as seen in the illustration from the Luttrell Psalter below). Incidentally, this circumstance explains why the entire archery grounds were often referred to as 'the butts'.[2]

During the 17th to 19th centuries if not earlier, Robin Hood was occasionally endowed with superhuman powers and/or mythical qualities. This is seen, for instance, in the etiological myth about the Standing Stone at Sowerby which Robin Hood was said to have thrown from a nearby hill when digging with his spade. While it is possible such myths may have become attached to some of the places named Robin Hood's Butts, I doubt if these place-names originated in myths of origin. For a couple of centuries during the late medieval and Tudor period, most English males of suitable age were required by law to practice regularly at the archery butts, which were constructed and kept – more or less well – in repair at the cost of the local community. Expenses on construction, maintenance and repair of butts figure often in churchwardens' and chamberlains' accounts from the 15th to the early 17th century.[3] Archery grounds must have been then about as common as football fields are now. When people named ancient mounds after archery butts, a very common type of earthwork at the time, they were hardly being deep or mythical as 19th century "mythologists" or latterday New Age-lithic types might like to believe, nor were they necessarily trying to amuse their children. They simply noted a general similarity between the ancient burial mounds and the more recent ones at archery ranges, and once the idea that a specific burial mound resembled an archery butt had arisen, it was a small step to associate it with Robin Hood, the archer par excellence.

The noun 'butt' in the sense "[a] mark for archery practice; properly a mound or other erection on which the target is set up. Hence in mod. use a mound or embankment in front of which the targets are placed for artillery, musketry, or rifle practice" is first recorded, according to OED, in a source written no later than 1400. The next quotation cited is from c. 1440. The noun 'butt' in the sense "[a] hillock, mound" is first recorded in 1693.[4]

As for the mounds themselves, one could probably do worse than quote this entry from a dictionary on the dialect of the North Riding of Yorkshire:

HOUE, HOWE, HOW, sb. (C.) 1. A tumulus or sepulchral barrow. (D. Hoj.) 2. A natural mound or hill. 1. There are thousands of these on the N.R. Moors; they are of great antiquity. The larger of these houes, especially when on prominent heights and sky-lines have names. They often contain under a cairn of stones a chamber (locally called a YUNE) built of flat, or flag-stones; these contain evidences of cremated human remains with at times earthenware vessels, implements, ornaments, arms, flint arrow-heads, &c. In the smaller houes the traces of human remains have generally disappeared, and also all signs of cremation. A few bronze instruments have been found, stone hammers, jet ornaments, and a great many PANNIKINS, as the earthenware vessels are called. Most of the large houes have been rifled; a great many by so-called antiquarians, and their permanent interest spoiled. In the very large houes there is often evidence of repeated interments. Among the chief desecrators of these moor graves in my time were the late Canon Greenwell and Canon Atkinson; they both made notable finds but acquired no very definite information as to the people who made use of these methods of interment. [...] A BASIN HOUE is a houe which has been rifled or quarried for road [p. 64:] "metal", and is therefore depressed, having lost its summit. [...][5]

Localities

The location of Robinhood Butts (Wiltshire) is not known.

Background

Brief mention

Notes

  1. Midgley – A Yorkshire One-Name Study: Places which carry the name Robin Hood.
  2. OED2, s.n. butt n.4, 2. a.
  3. See for instance entries covering the period from 1428/29 to 1483/84 in the chamberlains' accounts of Lydd (Kent) in Finn, Arthur, ed.; Hussey, Arthur, transl. & transcr.; Hardy, M.M., transl. & transcr. Records of Lydd (Ashford, Kent, 1911), pp. 19, 27 (bis), 76, 86, 117, 134, 150, 155, 163 (bis), 175, 189 (for the year 1459, at least eight entries relating to the butts), 203, 316. For a couple of examples from Berkshire parishes, see Anonymous. 'Costs of the Butts', Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries, vol. 2 (1959), p. 47. Also see Mactaggart, P. 'Hertfordshire Butts', Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries, vol. 5 (1962), pp. 34-36.
  4. OED, butt, n.4, II. 2. a; butt, n.5 (requires paid subscription).
  5. Pease, Alfred Edward, compil.; Fairfax-Blakeborough, John, annot. A Dictionary of the Dialect of the North Riding of Yorkshire (Whitby: Horne & Son, 1928), pp. 63-64.