The written version is below for those who prefer to read ⬇️ Robin and Marian On the high street in Edwinstowe, outside the library, there is a bronze statue of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. They stand hand in hand, looking at each other. The sculptor Neale Andrew made it in 1998. Legend says the two of them were married at St Mary’s, the church at the top of the village. I walk past them most days. A while ago Robin’s hand was damaged so badly that it no longer met Marian’s. For a time they stood side by side and apart. In the spring of 2025 specialist restorers repaired the bronze, and their hands were joined again. I keep coming back to that image. Two figures who belong together, separated by damage, and put back together by careful, skilled work. Marian was not always part of Robin’s story. The oldest ballads of Robin Hood, from the 1400s, don’t mention her at all. She came from France, from a thirteenth-century play about a shepherdess called Marion and her lover Robin. She arrived in the English legend through the May games, the village festivals of spring, where communities dressed as Robin, Marian and the outlaws and danced, collected money for the parish, and celebrated the return of the green. The Tudors loved those games. In 1510 the young Henry VIII and his friends burst into Catherine of Aragon’s chamber dressed as Robin Hood and his men, and the queen and her ladies danced with them. Forty years later the mood had changed. In 1549 the reforming bishop Hugh Latimer complained in a sermon that he had ridden to a town to preach and found the church door locked. The parish had gone out to gather for Robin Hood. Over the following decades reformers attacked the May games as disorderly and pagan, and Marian came in for particular disapproval. The festival, the folk figure and the feminine figure were all pushed out of respectable life together. This special Musings episode is about separations that took shape in England between the 1530s and 1700, and what it would take to bring them back together, at this time when we need healing, as a society, more than ever. When I talk about masculine and feminine, I mean two kinds of energy that every person carries, whatever their gender. One measures, structures and defines. The other interprets, connects and makes meaning. A healthy person uses both. So does a healthy society. The story comes in three parts. The first looks at who was allowed to read and speak sacred knowledge, and exactly the cost of that as we look forwards to modern day. The second looks at astrology as an everyday language, carried in everyday homes and largely by women, and how that language became suspect. Dangerous, even. And the third looks at the formal split between astronomy and astrology, and argues that any reunion between them has to begin with an acknowledgement of both the sidereal and tropical zodiacs. The three parts share a timing frame, which is really why I wanted to share this at this time. Pluto has moved through Aquarius three times in the modern era: roughly 1532 to 1553, 1777 to 1798, and now from 2024 to 2044. Each passage has coincided with a fight over who controls knowledge and who gets access to it. The current one arrives alongside artificial intelligence, and the same arguments are being made again. So let’s look back at how this has played out historically, shall we? Part I: The Father Tongue The question of “Who is allowed to know” On 16 July 1546, Anne Askew was carried to Smithfield in a chair and burned. She was a Lincolnshire gentlewoman in her mid-twenties, and she could no longer walk because she had been racked in the Tower of London. Racking a woman was almost unheard of. Her interrogators wanted names, and the names they pressed for belonged to women at court, close to the queen. That same summer, according to the martyr-ologist John Foxe, Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley (rythesley) secured Henry VIII’s agreement to a warrant for Catherine Parr’s arrest. His wife. Her offence was talking about scripture, the newly English Bible, with the king and holding opinions of her own. Foxe says she learned of the warrant, went to Henry, and told him she had only argued to distract him from the pain in his leg and to learn from him. He forgave her. When Wriothesley arrived with guards the next day, Henry sent him away. The outline is well supported. In 1546 an educated woman reading and discussing the Bible in English was treated as a danger to the state. Holding the wrong opinions about scripture was punishable by death. That’s only 500 years ago. It’s modern history. The Act of 1543 The danger had been written into law three years earlier. In May 1543 Parliament passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion. It allowed noblemen and gentlemen to read the English Bible aloud to their households. Noblewomen and gentlewomen could read it privately. Everyone else was forbidden: women below the gentry, apprentices, journeymen, husbandmen, labourers and servants. The lower classes could not be trusted to think for themselves. They had to be spoonfed. Catherine Parr married Henry two months later, in July 1543. In the same year Copernicus published his model of a sun-centred universe. Both the queen and the book would unsettle the authorities that the 1543 Act was written to protect. The Act was a reversal. William Tyndale had printed his English New Testament abroad in 1526, and copies were smuggled into England and burned. Tyndale was executed near Brussels in 1536. Three years later Henry ordered the Great Bible, an authorised English translation, placed in every parish church. Within four years the crown was trying to take it back from most of the people who could now read it. In a speech to Parliament in December 1545, Henry complained that scripture was being argued over and turned into rhymes in alehouses and taverns. The pattern is consistent. Printed knowledge reached people who had never held it, and the response was to sort readers by rank and sex. To try and re-control who had access to information. To try to control that information. Parr in print Catherine Parr answered by writing. In 1545 she published Prayers or Meditations, the first book an English queen published under her own name. She wrote it in English. After Henry’s death she published The Lamentation of a Sinner in 1547, an account of her own religious conversion that argued for reading scripture directly. Her choice of English mattered. Latin was the language of the church, the universities and the law. It was taught at school and university, and that education was almost entirely closed to girls. Medieval writers called the vernacular materna lingua, the mother tongue, because children learned it at home from mothers and nurses. In 1959 the scholar Walter Ong described Renaissance Latin as a language spoken only by men, learned and taught away from the home, and compared its study to a coming-of-age rite for boys. This gives the story arc its first separation. Latin was the father tongue, the language of institutions and authority. The ‘proper’ or elite language. English was the mother tongue, the language of the household and of ordinary working people. Parr, a woman writing about God in the household language, crossed a line that the law of 1543 had drawn. When union is imposed The story is not as simple as English against Latin. In the same decade Henry pursued another kind of union. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, often called the Acts of Union, absorbed Wales into the English legal system. They required courts to use English and barred anyone who used Welsh from public office unless they also used English. For most people in Wales, English was a foreign language. In 1549, under Edward VI, the English Book of Common Prayer replaced the Latin service. In Devon and Cornwall people rose against it. The Cornish rebels stated that some of them understood no English at all, and they refused the new service outright. The… Get full access to Rebecca’s Substack at rebeccalovatt.substack.com/subscribe
