Robert Fitzwalter - Legacy

Legacy

A large legendary and romantic history gradually gathered round the memory of the first champion of English liberty. A picturesque tale, first found in the manuscript chronicle of Dunmow, tells how Fitzwalter had a very beautiful daughter named Matilda, who indignantly rejected the immoral advances of King John. At last, as the maiden proved obdurate, John caused her to be poisoned, so that the bitterest sense of personal wrong drove Fitzwalter to take up the part of a constitutional leader. So generally was the story believed that an alabaster figure on a grey altar-tomb in Priory Church, Little Dunmow is still sometimes pointed out as the effigy of the unfortunate Matilda.

Several poems and plays have been based upon this picturesque romance. In them, Matilda is curiously mixed up with Maid Marian, the mistress of Robin Hood. Such are the 1601 plays by Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday called The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, afterwards called Robin Hood, with his Love to Chaste Matilda, the Lord Fitzwater's daughter, afterwards his faire Maid Marian, and The Death of Robin Hood with the lamentable Tragedy of Chaste Matilda, his faire Maid Marian, poisoned at Dunmowe by King John. Michael Drayton also published in 1594 a poetical account, called Matilda, the faire and chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwalter, as well as two letters in verse, purporting to be written between her and King John. Before 1639 Robert Davenport wrote another play, The Tragedy of King John and Matilda. It was also believed in the seventeenth century that Robert Fitzwalter, "or one of his successors", was the founder of the flitch of bacon custom in Little and Great Dunmow.