The Church of Saint Mary Magdalene at Campsall

The Church of Saint Mary Magdalene at Campsall

The historian John Paul Davis wrote of Robin's connection to the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene at Campsall.] A Gest of Robyn Hode states that the outlaw built a chapel in Barnsdale that he dedicated to Mary Magdalene,


‘I made a chapel in Bernysdale, That seemly is to see, It is of Mary Magdaleyne, And thereto wolde I be’.


Davis indicates that there is only one church dedicated to Mary Magdalene within what one might reasonably consider to have been the medieval forest of Barnsdale, and that is the church at Campsall. The church was built in the late eleventh century by Robert de Lacy, the 2nd Baron of Pontefract. Local legend suggests that Robin Hood and Maid Marion were married at the church.

Saint Nicholas's hospital and All Saints Church Pontefract

A recent theory proposes that Robin Hood died at Kirkby, Pontefract. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion Song 28 (67-70) composed in 1622 speaks of Robin Hood’s death and clearly states that the outlaw died at ‘Kirkby’. Acknowledging that Robin Hood operated in the Went Valley, located three miles to the southeast of the town of Pontefract, historians today indicate that the outlaw is buried at what was once the Anglo-Scandinavian town of Kirkby. At the end of the eleventh century Kirkby was home to All Saints Church, which had a priory hospital, the hospital of Saint Nicholas, attached to it. The Tudor historian Richard Grafton stated that the prioress who murdered Robin Hood buried the outlaw beside the road,


‘Where he had used to rob and spoyle those that passed that way…and the cause why she buryed him there was, for that common strangers and travailers, knowing and seeing him there buryed, might more safely and without feare take their journeys that way, which they durst not do in the life of the sayd outlaes’


In a similar fashion, the Gest reads,


‘Cryst have mercy on his soule, That dyed on the rode! For he was a good outlawe, And dyde pore men moch god’.

Saint Nicholas's hospital, which was located approximately three miles from the site of Robin Hood’s robberies at the Saylis, accurately matches both Richard Grafton's and the Gest's description because a road ran directly from Wentbridge to the hospital at Kirkby.