Robin Hood

Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw

By Stephen Knight

Blackwell, 1994. 308 pp., $24.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/9325

The Robin Hood legend has been popular for around 600 years. Amongst the latest to revive the tradition, as related by Stephen Knight's new book on Robin Hood, were demonstrators against Thatcher's poll tax who occupied the Nottingham Council chambers dressed in hoods of Lincoln green. Resistance to bad authority, and the need for redistributive economic justice, are central concepts that give the Robin Hood myth its longevity, argues Knight, despite attempts to conservatise the tradition.

If Robin Hood existed, it was probably in the 13th century, somewhere in Nottingham and South Yorkshire, but finding the "real Robin Hood" is not as important as the history of the legend itself. Unleashing a quiver-full of polemical arrows, Knight routs the academic and lay searchers for an actual R. Hood, those explorers who "heedless of their theoretical danger, have plodded off, saddlebags jingling with footnotes and quasi-technicalities, into the forests of empirical speculation".

We do not know, and probably never will, the actual origins of Robin Hood, but we do know that the earliest ballads celebrate a tradition of forest outlaws who opposed the oppressive forces of state, church and emergent mercantilism which were enclosing the land and destroying the "natural economy" of the medieval peasantry. The outlaws could be cut-throat bandits or "social bandits" who never killed except in self-defence and did rob from the rich to give to the poor.

The first three chroniclers of the Robin Hood ballads were Scots who applauded the English law-breakers because of King Edward I's violence towards the Scots.

Robin Hood was invoked in medieval play-games to express the discontents of the peasantry and urban labourers, sometimes spilling over into real riots during the 15th and 16th centuries.

The potency of the legend prompted the defenders of property to clean up the Robin Hood image. From a bandit of common stock, Robin was gentrified into an aristocratic Earl of Huntingdon, dispossessed of his property by enemies at court under bad King John whilst good King Richard (the Lionheart) was off at the Crusades.

This new loyal, pro-monarchy earl, in the hands of the Tory novelist Sir Walter Scott, becomes an Anglo-Saxon freedom-fighter against Norman oppressors in the name of English nationalism. The Elizabethan theatre made Robin even safer — a love triangle consisting of Robin, Maid Marian and Sir Guy of Gisborne or the sheriff of Nottingham was the cause of Robin's rebellious behaviour, not royal or aristocratic oppression.

The Victorian stage continued the de-politicisation of the tradition with the moustache-twirling villain to be booed rather than the socioeconomic system.

The 1950s TV series (which was still playing in Australia as late as 1974) had Richard Greene playing Robin "the decent officer leading a team of sterling chaps" in the best British tradition. A Kevin Costner film in 1991 plumbed the depths of an apolitical rendition of Robin Hood.

The traffic was not all one way, however. The conservatising efforts were challenged by writers and dramatists influenced by the French Revolution, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Keats, and artists looking for a romantic hero during the Depression such as Michael Tippett, whose 1933 opera had Robin trouncing the aristos (and advocating "Robin's 10-year plan").

Errol Flynn's 1938 Robin Hood, despite promulgating the gentrification of Robin as loyal earl, continues to impress viewers with its portrayal of the rebellious side of a Robin Hood sympathetic to the poor. The '50s TV series, too, had its radical moments, with input from black-listed Hollywood writers and Marxist researchers like Bill Blake, husband of Christina Stead — "Feared by the Bad/Loved by the Good, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood" as the theme song put it, locked into the basic strength and appeal of the legend.

What Robin Hood means, as with all bandit heroes — Pancho Villa, Woody Guthrie's Pretty Boy Floyd, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Ned Kelly — is the dream of freedom and justice. The Robin Hood type of outlaw in an unjust society embodies championship of the poor and expropriation of the rich, humbling the proud by birth and honouring the ordinary person, egalitarianism and fellowship (Robin's band of merry men) against undemocratic authority.

As E.J. Hobsbawm wrote in his book Bandits, the outlaw's is a primitive form of social protest but it does keep hope alive, and the poor and oppressed can not live without hope. As Knight comments, the function of myth is to offer immediate escape and the promise of utopia; above all the legend of Robin Hood shows that "authority can be resisted".

Paul Keating, speaking recently on the 100th anniversary of the song "Waltzing Matilda", made an obligatory nod towards the song's message of freedom, class struggle and the rebellious, free-spirited nature of the Aussie battler. But then he said that none of these elements of the myth of the swaggie hounded to his death by squatters and troopers come to mind when he hears it sung as a national anthem: all the jagged edges of economic and political oppression have been assimilated to Keating's agenda of national sentiment.

The sheriff of Canberra would have no time for Robin Hood either, but the spirit of the 13th century men in green tights, and Maid Marians of political authority and activism, will one day send packing him or other sheriffs and Sir Guys (or Sir Ruperts and Kerrys).