The Road That Refused to Disappear: York, the Coast, and the persistence of an East Yorkshire Corridor - II

Some of you will be aware that I am in the midst of finalising an animated series set in Scarborough in 1264, exploring themes of health, music, a community in crisis, memory, the mind-body connection, and the transmission of history. Working in this space has been a privilege. It has also carried a responsibility: I do not believe it honours the dead to write historical fiction without making a serious effort to recognise the lives that once occupied the landscape.

That effort has taken me further afield than intended — into Byzantine archives, English court rolls, and the records of Norman families in France. I do not expect sympathy for that diversion; I mention it only to explain how this question arose.

In the course of developing later episodes, I have repeatedly encountered Sir John d’Eyvill (variously spelled Deyville / Eyvill), who held Scarborough Keep for Simon de Montfort in 1264 and later led northern resistance following Montfort’s death in 1265–66. d’Eyvill had demonstrable interests in Scarborough and the North Riding, and his activities necessarily intersected with the East Yorkshire coastal corridor.

I should say at once that I would prefer not to write about Robin Hood at all. Like many, I grew up on television retellings, and I have little enthusiasm for later cinematic interpretations. My first reaction, when encountering an old ballad placing a “Hood” figure on the Scarborough coast, was scepticism. The story did not resemble the familiar forest outlaw: it described a man who came to the coast, became part of a local community, settled for a time with a widow, fished badly, yet defended the settlement when needed. It sat awkwardly with the standard narratives and appeared to belong to the wrong time and the wrong place.

I set it aside.

Later, while searching for plausible coastal locations where armed men might conceal a vessel and depart quietly, I found myself circling back — reluctantly — to the stretch of coast now known as Robin Hood’s Bay. Like many others, I initially accepted the most common explanation: that the bay was named after the later Robin Hood stories, adopted locally as folklore. That explanation is neat, but incomplete.

The place was first known as Robin Oode Bay and this name appears in a Flemish letter dating between 1322 and 1346 — well before Robin Hood emerges as a fully formed folk hero. The letter is not addressed to King John, but to one of the Edwards, and complains of “bad people” operating from the bay. This places the name early, coastal, and operational — not literary, not romantic, and not forest-centred.

At this point we have two loose threads: a coastal place-name that resists later folkloric explanation, and a ballad tradition that places a non-heroic Hood figure on the Yorkshire coast. Neither fits comfortably within the conventional Robin Hood framework.

The context that brings these threads together is d’Eyvill’s activity during and after the Second Barons’ War. In 1264, Scarborough was not only a fortress but an escape-capable port within a wider coastal corridor. Factions aligned with de Montfort required redundant routes and maritime fallbacks. When d’Eyvill was later forced from Scarborough by the Percies, it would be entirely unsurprising if he sought an alternative port slightly to the north and entrusted its operation to a loyal subordinate.

Research by Pillings strengthens the case for a sustained association between d’Eyvill and a shadowy figure recorded in late-thirteenth-century court rolls as “Rob Hod / Hobbehod / Hod”. As a criminal lawyer, I am acutely aware of the demands of evidence. We do not possess a letter from d’Eyvill instructing Hod to establish himself in a cleft of the Yorkshire coast — and if we did, it would rightly attract suspicion. Instead, we have something more credible: a neutral third-party reference naming Hod’s port of operation, and a ballad tradition placing him precisely there.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that Rob Hod was the legendary Robin Hood. What I am suggesting is narrower and, I think, more interesting. The earliest coastal Robin Hood tradition — featuring neither a hero nor a peasant rebel, but a flawed, marginal figure engaged in dangerous work — may preserve a memory of resistance logistics rather than romance. In that reading, “Robin Hood” is not yet a character, but a functional name attached to liminal coastal activity. A real person.

That possibility does not require us to abandon caution. It requires only that we allow the landscape, the records, and the timing to speak before the legends do.

Endnote: Method, Collaboration, and Acknowledgement

For a long time, my interest in Scarborough was prompted by something modest: a song.

Scarborough Fair is not a historical document, but it is a vessel of memory: a puzzle-song that has been elaborated, misremembered, repurposed, and carried forward by generations who found something of their own experience inside it.

As a constitutional lawyer, I came face to face with the Icelandic Lawspeaker, Snorre Sturlason (1179-1241) while restructuring the old Imperial law of Britain in far away Australia, and read his account of an attack on Scarborough in 1066. From there, I plunged into the sagas of the old Norse, and the unpleasant Icelandic poet-lawyer, Kormac, who claimed to establish Scarborough with his brother. And, then a couple of distant ancestors, who were keeper of the Castle at Scarborough in the late 14th century, joined the dance, with their trove of coins from Carausius and Allectus.

This short essay emerged through an extended process of informal discussion with historians and writers and musicians, revision, and testing of ideas, including dialogue with an AI-assisted research and writing tool. That collaboration was used not as a source of facts or conclusions, but as a means of stress-testing assumptions, clarifying argument structure, and maintaining explicit guard rails between evidence, inference, and speculation. All interpretations, emphases, and remaining errors are my own.

The argument also draws on conversations with friends and colleagues over many years. If this piece succeeds at all, as I noted in my first discussion of the corridor, it does so by treating uncertainty not as a defect, but as a historically honest condition: one that invites further conversation rather than closure.