Robin Hood is a tricky subject for a serious novel. He has become so overlaid with heritage kitsch that the very name is all but inseparable from green tights, food called fayre, the “merry men”, and his comical sidekick Friar Tuck.

Adam Thorpe’s carefully crafted novel bypasses all that, first by avoiding the pitfalls of imitating medieval English. Instead of ye olde codswalloppe, the text of Hodd is understood to be written in Latin by a monk around 1305, and translated in 1921 by Francis Belloes, an English amateur scholar who has recently lived through the horrors of the Somme.

Belloes finds the manuscript in the ruins of a shelled French church, and part of the book’s interest is in its layering. This is Belloes’s translation of what he judges to be a 15th-century copy of an original, now lost, composed by a monk in his nineties. The monk, Moche, is looking back across nearly a century to his very different early life, when he was kidnapped on the road by the outlaw Hodd, joined his band and went on to commit murder.

Almost as much as he does the murder, old Moche regrets getting the Robin Hood legend started as a ballad, back in the days when he was an orphan with a stolen harp and needed to ingratiate himself with the half-mad robber and his gang. The real Hodd, in Thorpe’s version, is a kind of medieval Charles ­Manson, with a perverted religious vision. He is “more than God”, and the only possible sin (and a grievous one) is to believe that sin could exist: everything is permitted.

Hodd has a conspicuously bad set of teeth, so uneven that he always seems to be “sucking upon a plum”, and Thorpe’s medieval England is realistically ugly. Feet are blue with cold, noses run and bands of lepers wander the countryside. Far from being in a state of sinless perfection, it is a brutal world of throat-cutting and eye-gouging, where captured women are penned up in a hut for ­communal use and a quack doctor is nailed high in a tree with an arrow through his hand. In one of the few moments that stretch belief, the quack stays dangling, gibbet-style, long after death, with the occasional piece falling down, although you might think the hand would tear through first.

For the most part it is a convincing performance, right down to ­little textual touches such as missing ­sections, marginalia, editorial comments and Belloes’s 1921 aside “as every schoolchild knows” (a comment that has now come to seem like a joke introducing arcane information, in this case about the Venerable Bede). Thorpe is also good on the rare beauties of a grisly time, with its stained glass, church song, Latin language and even the shadows of ivy that fall across the monk’s manuscript as he writes beside a window.

Belloes knows the manuscript is of great significance to “the deep culture of England” and it fits Thorpe’s larger interest in the organic and unreliable nature of historical record, as in his most memorable novel, Ulverton, about a fictional village. Hodd is a densely imagined evocation of medieval England’s green and bloody land, and not a merry man in sight.

Hodd by Adam Thorpe
Cape £17.99 pp336

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