Yet More Merry Men
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Marian Marian Locksley, nee Fitzooth, once "Maid Marian", is an mystery even to herself. |
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| Independent,
brave, capable, freethinking. Marian is all these, yet remains a
prisoner in her own mind, trapped by the hidebound thinking of
the Middle Ages. All her life, Marian has wanted more, yet is never sure what "more" is. She yearns for freedom and equality - physical, intellectual, marital - yet can't fully express her desires because she can't conceive them. In other words, she's a proto-feminist AND a product of her time. Her problem with advancing any feminist agenda is, "Where do you begin?" Noble women had two choices: aut virum aut murum, "a husband or a wall". Married to a man or sent to a nunnery. Marian rejects both choices, yet her only other option is to behave like a man. To dress, shoot, and fight like a man is not a real choice, it's a cop-out and surrender. Still, it's her only choice, so she embraces it. She refuses to cook and sew, and trains and fights harder than any man. Yet Marian always wishes for more. |
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| As
a girl, Marian was a tomboy, refusing to learn a noblewoman's skills
and running off to the woods. By age nine she was adventuring
with a boy from a nearby castle, telling him, "We're to be married, you
and me, Robert Locksley." Marian also terrorized her brothers. She would pick fights and thrash them, and once pushed a brother out of the window, breaking his arm. Considered out of control, her parents consigned her to a nunnery for schooling. Outnumbered and ganged, Marian acquised to her temporary fate. Settling in, she sought out skills that would prove useful in the forest: herbology, healing, reading, languages, bookkeeping, and more. Older, she began to slip out of the nunnery by night to visit Robin Hood, who'd become a dashing and hunted outlaw. Yet she couldn't live permanently in Sherwood Forest for, before Robin took command, the outlaw band was grim, rough-and-tumble, and dangerous. Still, the two would go roaming. Eventually Marian was gone so many nights the nunnery expelled her. With no other options, she joined the newly-named Merry Men as their first woman. And just when things were perfect, Robin "heard the call" and left to crusade in the Holy Land. Marian was, to put it mildly, ticked. Her parting words were, "I won't be here waiting when you come back - if ever!" How she spent the intervening years with Robin away have yet to be chronicled... |
| Robin
did return, and after some time, Marian forgave him. He reformed
the Merry Men. On paper, Little John is his chief
lieutenant. Marian is unofficial "co-chief" in that everyone
defers to her. As "chieftess" of the outlaw band, Marian encourages women to mimic her "yeoman" model, or to be a "cook" performing normal womanly duties. Yet even then the cooks must learn to shoot, in the mode that "Every Marine is a first a Marine." In later years, Marian more or less gives up fretting over her peculiar role. Robin Hood slows down because of a recurring injury. Marian finds she's needed at the nunnery for healing and justice-dealing. Working under the name Matilda, she continued to do good works. Marian was a major obstacle to King John's plan to eliminate nunneries, as will be detailed in MAID MARIAN AND KING JOHN. Art is Madeleine Stowe swiped from |
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view the rare and dazzling plates of English Medieval Clothing taken from the 1906 book by Dion Clayton Calthrop. |
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