Bang in the Middle

Not that Mansfield is without history: it actually received its royal charter as far back as 1227. As its moniker might lead you to expect, Mansfield is full of men, real men at that, but its name is actually derived from ‘Maun’, the name of the river on which it stands. It used to be a mining town and – perhaps the two go hand in hand – it also used to be home to the largest independent brewery in the UK, Mansfield Bitter, until the latter was sold off in 1999. The skyline-dominating brewery building has now been demolished and the local bitter’s glory days – encapsulated in the quaintly provincial Eighties ad campaign featuring a picture of Ronald Reagan and the tag line ‘He may be president of the most powerful nation on Earth but he’s never had a pint of Mansfield’ – are now little more than a folk memory.

Mansfield may mark the spot where the North meets the Midlands. In fact, some people question whether there’s any difference between the North Midlands and the ‘real’ North at all. As I mentioned before, some anxious Derbyshire- and Potteries-based posters on that Amazon thread don’t seem to think there is. Others see subtle differences. ‘Midlanders are a bit more sophisticated, like – we can string a few sentences together. Northerners swear more,’ one eccentric friend told me. ‘On the other hand, we’re both from Viking stock. We both like to plunder and pillage,’ he added wolfishly. There’s a takeaway called Viking’s in Mansfield, and it’s certainly the Nordic-invader legacy rather than what is normally considered the more socially cohesive Anglo-Saxon heritage that permeates the atmosphere around here. In the good old days, when pubs used to close in the afternoon, you could see gangs of men (and the occasional woman) marauding across the streets at three in the afternoon, stopping the traffic while they pissed all over the traffic bollards. Part of the recent ‘regeneration’ of the town centre included the installation of a showpiece fountain, prompting fears that local merrymakers would use it as an open-air urinal.

Football is very important in Mansfield, as is violence. The two have often combined to striking effect at Field Mill (or the One Call Stadium, as it’s currently known), the home of Mansfield Town Football Club. A noteworthy outburst of aggro came when the Stags (nicknamed in homage to the regal fauna of that nearby long-vanished Edenic idyll, Sherwood Forest, where Norman and Plantagenet monarchs disported themselves and Robin Hood and his Merry Men evaded the attentions of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham) were relegated from Division 2 and consigned to non-league status in April 2008: fans showed their displeasure by physically attacking club owner Keith Haslam. The resulting head wounds were severe enough to necessitate a visit to the big local hospital, King’s Mill – it has to be big to accommodate Mansfield’s legions of unhealthy inhabitants: the town’s poor health record is one of the principal reasons for its appearance in that chart of the top ten worst places to live in the UK, and for the ubiquity of those mobility scooters.

Field Mill, King’s Mill … As you may be beginning to surmise, mills and millers play a major role in Mansfield folklore. The naming craze can probably be traced to a tale involving Henry II and the ‘Miller of Mansfield’ found in an eighteenth-century collection of ballads and songs known as Percy’s Reliques. The story goes that King Henry lost his way while hunting in Sherwood Forest and met a miller, who, failing to recognise his regal interlocutor, kindly offered him hospitality for the night. When the monarch’s retinue turned up at the miller’s humble cottage the following morning, the host was astonished to discover the true identity of his guest. The king, of course, thought it all very amusing and bestowed a knighthood on the miller, who henceforth gloried in the name of Sir John Cockle (there’s still a local pub of that designation). Percy’s Reliques wraps the story up:

Then Sir John Cockle the King call’d unto him,

And of merry Sherwood made him o’er-seer;

And gave him out of hand three hundred pound yearlye;

‘Now take heed you steale no more of my deer;

And once a quarter let’s here have your view;

And now, Sir John Cockle, I bid you adieu.’

The tale’s slightly patronising tone sums up the classic relationship between the Southern Establishment and Midlanders. The latter, usually presented in a slightly yokelish light – the men-in-tights vibe is inescapable – are tolerated or occasionally even encouraged in a mildly condescending manner, but are never treated as equals.

Olympic and Commonwealth swimming champ Rebecca Adlington aside, few famous people have come from Mansfield. There’s Richard Bacon, a Blue Peter presenter unceremoniously sacked after the News of the World suggested he took cocaine, who’s clawed his way back to respectability and a huge following on Radio 5 Live. Bernard William Jewry made his stage debut here at age four, but coo-coo-ca-choo’d his way out of town long before metamorphosing into Alvin Stardust, glam rock icon. The incestuous, club-footed Romantic poet Lord Byron inherited an ancestral pile just down the road, Newstead Abbey, which is now a highly atmospheric ruin – not unlike Mansfield town centre, come to think of it. And twenty minutes up the dual carriageway, ‘where the Peak District meets Robin Hood Country’, you can find the historic market town of Chesterfield, home to the Crooked Spire, the 228-foot-high thirteenth-century church steeple that twists some nine and a half feet from true centre and is to the Midlands what Pisa’s Leaning Tower is to Tuscany.

Unimpressed? Good. That’s the way Midlanders like it. Unlike Northerners, we don’t believe in blowing our own trumpets all the time. All the same – let’s call it the Midland Catch-22 – some of us would still like to know what it means to be a Midlander, especially when, for our son’s sake, we need a cultural identity to rival that of Parisians. That kind of thing usually involves locating a foundation myth for your tribe, discovering your rootedness in history.

So what are the deeds that tell Midlanders who they are? The South has King Alfred repelling the Vikings, the North has the Venerable Bede – and, perhaps more influentially these days, Oasis’s first album. But what about the Midlands?

Foundation myths are usually just that: more acts of creative imagination than actual heroic deeds – our idea of ‘The North’ is largely the result of a very successful branding exercise. To define and unite a culture, what you need above all else is the chutzpah to make up something grandiose-sounding. All that stuff about Alfred being the first king to unite England has been overstated and, let’s be honest, Definitely Maybe is mediocre at best. But, as cultural gathering points, they’ve proved extremely successful.

Hungry for possible leads on this unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, I scout feverishly through the magazine racks at Mansfield town library and the local WH Smith. Eventually I alight on an issue of Nottinghamshire Life and Countryside that looks promising: the cover announces a piece about ‘The Pyramids of Nottinghamshire’. I can’t remember any mention of a ‘Sutton Sphinx’ when I was a boy or of Mansfield’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian civilisation, but that doesn’t put me off. Anticipation growing, I turn rapidly to the article and discover that the ‘pyramids’ in question are actually dovecotes, and fairly recent ones at that, but I’m nonetheless full of admiration for the magazine’s feverish overstatement and it persuades me to think big. If the Midlands was the source of my family, why shouldn’t it have been the source of everything else too? Why shouldn’t civilisation itself have begun here?

Well, for one reason – which is that the Midlands is usually said to have no ‘deep’ history. (As a Midlander you sometimes get the impression that the principal aim of history in general is to let you know that you and your kind have played no part in it.) The immemorial mists of time are typically thought to have dispersed to reveal that nothing actually happened here until around 1842. To quote one twentieth-century source on the subject: ‘England’s prehistoric antiquities are mostly to be found south of a line drawn from Worcester to Ipswich; and north of a line drawn from Blackpool to Hull’ – lines that seem almost deliberately conceived to exclude the Midlands.

But history is a remarkable thing. Although by definition it’s all in the past, it keeps turning up again and transforming itself – and everything else with it – in the present. What if evidence suddenly emerged that Nottinghamshire genuinely did have pyramids, and a corresponding Pharaonic era? Unlikely, I know, since everyone seems to agree that the middle band of the country has no prehistory, but a development of the sort isn’t entirely out of the question. After all, think of the evolution of our own species. Even on a matter as fundamental as that, the question isn’t entirely settled. We know that Homo sapiens first appeared on the African continent about 200,000 years ago, before gradually migrating north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia. But, around the time of my writing this, fresh archaeological finds in Israel, Spain and China emerged to throw into question some of the finer details of the development of modern man. Even prehistory is in the process of rewriting itself. And if Israel, Spain and China can get in on the evolutionary act, why not the Midlands?

* * *

After Hector has gone to bed, I explain the challenge I’ve set myself to my parents.

‘Don’t you think you’re taking it all a bit seriously?’ says my mother, the queen of taking-things-too-seriously: most nights she can’t sleep for thinking about all the things that worry her but over which she has zero control. ‘Just tell Hector’s school mates it’s a good place for a punch-up and have done with it.’

‘Hey!’ interjects my father. ‘We’re worth a bit more than that. Tell them about Cloughie and Forest.’

‘Fighting and football’ I scribble down on my notepad.

‘There’s Robin Hood, of course,’ I say. ‘I thought we could go and look at the Major Oak tomorrow. Hector will like that.’

‘Well, there you go then,’ says my mother encouragingly. ‘Robin Hood’ll do, won’t he? What more do you need?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply earnestly. ‘He might be a start. I want to know what makes us Midlanders: where we came from, who we are, where we’re going, to borrow a phrase from Gauguin.’

‘Go what?’ mugs my mother. ‘Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing: I don’t think people from Blidworth [where my mother was born] are much like people from Sutton [a couple of miles away, where my father was born]. For one thing, we used to make fun of people in Sutton because they said “bwaan bwead”.’

‘I’m not really interested in the microscopic differences between Blidworth and Sutton, Mum. I’m looking for the bigger picture.’

‘Well, if I’m not allowed to make fun of your father, I don’t want to play. Shift yersen, Denis, I need to walk around a bit. My leg’s killing me,’ she huffs as she pulls herself to her feet.

‘Shift yersen’ provides the cue for a brief discussion of local dialect terms. With the help of one of those mysterious photocopied documents that seem to circulate among old people keen to relive the linguistic glories of their youth, we laugh over ‘Ayer masht?’ (Have you made a cup of tea?), ‘Arkattit’ (Listen to the rain), ‘Ittle norrocha’ (You won’t feel any pain) and ‘Mekitt goo bakuds’ (Put the car into reverse gear): all classic Notts locutions. My personal favourite is ‘Ittim weeya poss’, or ‘Hit him with your purse’. It perfectly captures the delicacy of the local female population – by which I mean my mother really: no offence to anyone else.

I’m not sure these phrases are getting me any closer to my grail of a foundation myth, however.

‘This used to be the centre of the hosiery trade, didn’t it, Dad?’ I say airily to move the conversation along a little.

A bit of an obvious question, really, since that was my father’s line of work and, across a forty-odd-year career, it carried him from one end of the Midlands to the other.

‘Yes, I’ve got a couple of books about it upstairs,’ he responds. ‘They’ll tell you more about it than I can.’

‘But it’s your impressions I want. You worked in the industry for five decades. I want to tap into your experiences.’

He shifts uneasily in his seat. This kind of waffle doesn’t really appeal to him. He’s not the sort of man who likes the idea of being ‘tapped into’, thank you very much. To escape further questioning he gets up to put TalkSport on the radio, ostensibly because former England manager Steve McLaren, aka ‘the Wally with the Brolly’, has just quit as boss of Nottingham Forest – my dad’s team for the past seventy years – and he thinks they might be discussing it.

I turn my attention back to my mother.

‘All right, Mum. Answer me this: is Mansfield civilised?’

‘Not totally, no,’ she begins after reflection. ‘For instance, we’ve got two supermarkets: Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Now if you ask me about the people who go into Sainsbury’s, I’d say maybe. If you ask me about those who go into Tesco, I’d say maybe not. And then there’s the way they stack the shelves …’

(For the record, I should say that my mother happily shops in both Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which by her own reckoning makes her simultaneously both maybe civilised and maybe not civilised. Which sounds about right – maybe.)

‘All right,’ I stop her. ‘Let me ask you this: Do you think that people from Mansfield and Nottinghamshire and the Midlands generally have contributed much to world civilisation?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replies with surprising certainty.

‘In what way?’

‘We’ve turned a lot of good people out. This region invented the hosiery industry. That was worldwide. Then there was Raleigh bikes in Nottingham. And Metal Box in Mansfield: that was good for trays. It was worldwide too. Cars of course were Birmingham. Birmingham’s the Midlands too, of course, although Brummies are very different from us. And our coalmines were very profitable. So yes, we’ve contributed quite a bit really.’

‘Okay. Now I’d like to take it one step further, perhaps going further back in history.’ I’m beginning to sound like Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time on Radio 4. ‘If I said to you, human civilisation first developed in North Nottinghamshire, what would you say? Does that sound likely, Mum?’

‘Erm …’

‘If I told you that the wheel was invented in Mansfield, for instance.’

‘Yes, I could believe that. A lot of damn good engineers have come from Mansfield. There was a lot of talent in Blidworth – not much in Sutton, of course … Was the wheel invented in Mansfield, Robbie?’

‘It hasn’t been disproved.’

‘Well, we’ve got Robin Hood anyway,’ concludes my mother, growing weary. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’

* * *

Actually, how much longer Nottinghamshire and the Midlands will have Robin Hood is open to question. Ever since someone noticed that the early ballads mention a few locations across the border in Yorkshire – principally Barnsdale – there’s been a campaign to turn the original Nottinghamshire Man in Tights into a Salt-of-the-Earth NorthernerTM. Not so long ago, a Yorkshire MP could be heard demanding that roadside signs proclaiming Nottinghamshire ‘Robin Hood Country’ be taken down. ‘We believe very strongly that Robin Hood was a Yorkshireman and we are aggrieved to read that we are now entering Robin Hood country [when we drive south into Nottinghamshire],’ David Hinchliffe, the absurdist ex-Member for Wakefield, was quoted as saying in the New York Times in 2004. ‘It’s a very, very serious business. The way things are going, the signs are going to get torn down by angry Yorkshiremen.’ Perhaps it was the report in the NYT that gave Russell Crowe the idea of basing his accent on Michael Parkinson’s dour growl when he played the lead in the most recent Hollywood Robin Hood movie, or perhaps it was the fact that Doncaster in Yorkshire suddenly developed a ‘Robin Hood Airport’ in 2005. If Yorkshire nationalists get their way, one day in the not too distant future ’Oodie is likely to find himself transformed into a plain-talking Yorkshireman, with a whippet instead of a bow under one arm and a flat cap instead of a green feathered hat on his head. There’s a small conceptual problem that might need to be addressed before that can happen, though. It’s hard to see how Robin Hood’s reputation for stealing from the rich to give to the poor can be reconciled with the stereotype of Yorkshire folk as tight-fisted – an image that’s been actively embraced and promulgated by many of the natives of ‘God’s own county’ (such modesty!). As the ‘Yorkshireman’s Creed’ has it: ‘If ever tha does owt for nowt / Do it for tha sen.’ In that sense, Robin of Sherwood is the antithesis of the classic Northerner.

On Sunday morning we all pile into the car and drive out through Clipstone, past the overgrown pit heads and towards the little village of Edwinstowe and the Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve, which contains the Major Oak, the mystical thousand-year-old tree that – legend has it – served as the Merry Men’s meeting place.

What does Robin Hood stand for exactly? What values does he represent? Social justice (stealing from the rich to give to the poor), obviously; but more resonantly he’s also a symbol of ‘Merrie England’. ‘Merrie England’ is the way that nostalgic Victorians, dismayed by the effects of the growing urbanism of their own age, liked to idealise their country’s pre-industrial past. Indeed, it was with a reference to Robin and his crew that the nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt popularised the concept of England’s idyllic, liberty-loving medieval past: ‘The beams of the morning sun shining on the lonely glades, or through the idle branches of the tangled forest, the leisure, the freedom … were sufficient to justify the appellation of “Merry Sherwood”, and in like manner, we may apply the phrase to Merry England.’ It’s interesting that the most romantic representative of this pastoral paradise of ancient freedoms should have hailed from the East Midlands, the area characterised as ‘Industrial, built-up, heavily populated, busy, no countryside’ in that recent tourist-board survey. That’s obviously not how an earlier age thought of the region. John Hamilton Reynolds elaborated on the idea of Robin as the symbol of this Edenic utopia in a sonnet to his friend John Keats:

Robin the outlaw! Is there not a mass

Of freedom in the name? …

It tells a tale of forest days – of times

That would have been most precious unto thee:

Days of undying pastoral liberty:

Sweeter than music old of abbey chimes –

Sweet as the virtue of Shakespearian rhymes –

Days, shadowy with the magic greenwood tree!

‘Now, Hector, what we’re about to go and look at,’ I explain enthusiastically as we set off along a winding path from the car park, ‘is Robin Hood’s special tree. It’s absolutely enormous. Robin and Alan-a-Dale and Friar Tuck and Little John and all the rest of the merry band used to climb up inside it to hide from the nasty Sheriff of Nottingham.’

I can see I’m losing his attention.

‘I’m a little bit bored, Dad,’ he says, pulling his beloved Ben 10 figurine from my bag.

‘Smile and I’ll get you an ice cream.’

He gives me a pained grin so I buy him a 99. A deal’s a deal.

My mother begins to recount a favourite family story as we near our destination. ‘Your Auntie Madge brought the Americans here when they came over for Jeff and Karrie’s wedding,’ she begins. ‘She told them she was going to show them the biggest tree they’d ever seen. So they drove over and Madge gave them the spiel as they were walking over from the car park – I think she even called it the biggest tree in the world – and then when they got into the clearing she said: “Well, isn’t it amazing?” And Karrie’s parents were really nice about it but Madge could see they were a bit underwhelmed. Anyway a few years later she went over to California to visit Jeff and Karrie, and while she was there they took her to Yosemite. That made her feel a bit embarrassed. “And you know, Kath, you couldn’t even see the tops of the trees there. That’s how tall they were,” Madge said to me. Well over 200 feet, Californian sequoias are. The Major Oak seemed a bit diddy by comparison. That put her in her place.’

At this point we emerge into a clearing and there it stands – history, mystery, majesty, all rolled together in the eye-filling spectacle of the glorious Major Oak …

‘Ooh, look at it!’ my mother exclaims mockingly. ‘It’s only just a bit taller than your dad.’

‘It stands 52 feet,’ I correct her. I don’t want Hector going back to school and telling his friends that the Major Oak is barely the size of a domestic Christmas tree.

‘Well, your dad’s a good size,’ my mother replies. ‘That’s one of the main reasons I married him, so that I’d produce decent-sized children.’

She scrutinises me briefly. She’s never quite forgiven me for not being as tall as my father.

It’s true that the Major Oak isn’t much to look at. Gnarled and bloated, as fat as it is high, these days it has to be held upright with an elaborate system of ropes and poles. Hector is decidedly underwhelmed. Crestfallen, I decide to abandon any further attempts at tour-guide propaganda with my little boy.

Afterwards we wander back for lunch at the visitor centre, where my mother declares herself astonished by the freshness of the rolls. (‘Who’d have thought you’d get such fresh rolls in Edwinstowe?’ she says with genuine wonderment, holding the admirable sandwich up for us all to coo over. She doesn’t then go so far as to actually eat it – she doesn’t really like food – but she’s still eulogising its memory a couple of days later.)

Like the Major Oak itself, the centre isn’t particularly spectacular – but that’s no surprise since Midlanders don’t go in much for ‘look at me’-style self-congratulatory display. They hold a festival here every August in ‘celebration of the life and times of the world’s most famous outlaw’, with jousting, falconry displays and court jesters by the dozen, so that’s probably the best time to come if you want the medieval scenery to be painted in for you. You hardly need it, though. There’s an ancient atmosphere here that you can still tap into if you give it a chance; you’ll soon find your imagination responding to its promptings. That friend of Keats wrote another sonnet, in 1818, on just this theme:

The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good,

The grass beneath them now is dimly green;

Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,

With loose slung bugle met within the wood?

No arrow found – foil’d of its antler’d food –

Struck in the oak’s rude side? Is there nought seen,

To mark the revelries which there have been,

In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

Go there with summer, and with evening, go

In the soft shadows, like some wandering man,

And thou shalt far amid the Forest know

The archer-men in green, with belt and bow,

Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,