In part one I looked at the location, and in part two I covered some of the candidates. In three I highlighted someone who almost counts as a possible Robin Hood, but may also be the origin behind Will Scarlett. In the next blog I’ll name names, and say who I think is behind the Robin Hood myth. But today I’m going to look at the Kings associated with the legend.
We have a pretty firm idea of the Robin Hood story set in our minds now. A crusader returning ahead of Richard, to find his lands usurped and his people being oppressed by Prince John and/or the Sheriff of Nottingham. The story ends when Robin defeats the Sheriff and Richards returns to restore order. For most modern retellings this is the basic template. Some stick firmly to this outline, whereas others aim to subvert it, but they’re all telling the story with this version in mind. Nathan Makaryk’s recent novel Nottingham used this setting, and all the familiar names, as a way to give readers something to hold onto while he subverted the tropes.
Richard, John, and the crusades were not mentioned anywhere in the earliest ballads.
Playwright Anthony Munday incorporated them into two plays based on the legend in the late 1500’s, and historian Joseph Ritson later used this as his framework to create a biography of the ‘real’ Robin Hood. The idea of Richard returning home to save the day seems to owe most of its popularity to Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe.
William Shakespeare wrote about King John in one of his (generally lesser regarded) plays. Shakespeare and Munday were contemporaries, and I would suggest the complete absence of Robin Hood from Shakespeare’s play is a strong indication that Robin and John were not linked at all before this era. The only King mentioned in any of the early poems and ballads was Edward.
But could any of the story be true? Was Richard a hero fighting in the crusades? Was John a tyrant? Did the Sheriff of Nottingham help John oppress people? The truth, as with all medieval history, is sorta yes and sorta no.
With the caveat that both Richard and John were Kings at a time when Kings did awful things, and that both of them have blood on their hands and would be considered antisemitic and Islamophobic by any reasonable metric, we could also argue that history has been generous to Richard and cruel to John. Richard was an absentee King. He barely ever set foot in England and used the Kingdom mainly as a source of income to fund his holy wars. The wars themselves were, as you can imagine, full of massacres and cruelty. He gained the throne by plotting against his father and spent much of his time trying to find ways to keep his brother, John, from doing the same to him. He was later captured and held to ransom in Austria, and the money to free him was raised through a tax on the barons (and in turn, the landowners) of England.
John used this time to plot against his brother, gaining some support among the unhappy barons. This ultimately led to a mini-civil war, when John seized control of the country, with loyalty across the land split between the two brothers. Richard returned to England to reclaim his throne, and the split ended with a siege at Nottingham Castle, with John and his loyalists inside, and Richard and his own army outside. So anyone looking to set a Robin Hood story during the usual decade of the 1190’s would be wise to look at the siege of Nottingham Castle and the brief return of Richard. Lauren Johnson does this to good effect in The Arrow of Sherwood.
Richard died in 1199, while away on another war, and John finally ascended to the crown. His own reign started off well enough. With an older brother who spent all his time seeking fame and glory on the battle fields, John had grown up much more focused on finer detail. He had been tutored extensively in law and history, and he used the early years of his reign as a time to reform the administrative systems of England. He travelled constantly, using the various royal castles as his stopping points, and held courts up and down the land, hearing the complaints of his people. Our historical records begin to become far more detailed around this time, and that’s largely down to the work of King John. However, his couldn’t escape his own weaknesses, and his time as King is largely a story of a man who couldn’t get out of his own way. Desperate to have the same strong reputation as his brother, he waged disastrous wars in France and managed to lose most of the empire that his family had spent decades building up. He began making extreme financial demands on the barons to cover the expenses of his mistakes, and slowly turned them all against him, leading to the first version of Magna Carta. He became so unpopular towards the end that many of the northern barons invited the King of France to invade and, for a time in his final year, he was at war with both the north and south, with the southern third of England now occupied French territory. The front line of these wars, in both directions, was…of course…Nottingham Castle. (And I should also mention that, while I do argue John deserves a little more credit than we give him, he was also directly responsible for starving a mother and child to death, and quite possibly ordered the murder of his teenaged nephew.) Any authors looking to set a Robin Hood story in a timeframe that feels both familiar and slightly different could look at this time, the end of John’s reign and the various wars and uprisings. Ridley Scott attempted to do a little of that in his 2010 film, by stealing the feeling of this time, but moving it back to the turn of the century. His version is set in 1199 and takes us from the death of Richard through a baron’s rebellion against John, the signing of a great charter, and an attempted French invasion. The film tries to condense around 15 years of genuine history into a few weeks of story, framed around the figure of Russel Crowe’s Robin Hood. It doesn’t entirely work, but I think the film is due a critical reappraisal as one of the better screen versions of the legend.
John’s son, Henry, inherited the throne while still a child. Once he reached adulthood, he issued a new version of Magna Carta as a PR move, to shore up support, though he rarely stuck to any of its principles. He spent much of his reign attempting to seize power back from the barons, which led to two civil wars. The second of which is where we may find the real Robin Hood. Depending on your view, the protagonist or antagonist of this second uprising was Simon de Montfort, a French knight who settled in England and became a very close friend of Henry, before eventually falling out with him and leading an armed rebellion against the crown in the 1260’s. The country was split in two, with a great many earls and barons throwing in their support behind de Montford. For a little over a year in 1265 de Montfort was the de-factor ruler of England, after defeating Henry at the Battle of Lewes and forcing him to accept the control of a government. Because of this, de Montford is often called the ‘father of parliament’ and presented as a hero for English democracy. But it would be more accurate to think of him as the ‘father of the House of Lords,’ because his vision of government didn’t include anyone we would consider ‘common,’ and he had no intention of sharing power with anyone lower down the social ladder than himself and his friends. This is always worth bearing in mind whenever anyone attempts to romanticise Magna Carta for political reasons. None of these fights or charters were about us. They were squabbles amongst the ruling class.
The King’s son, Edward, (later of Braveheart fame) led a royalist campaign against de Montfort that culminated in the battle of Evesham, at which de Montfort was defeated and hacked to pieces, and the crown reasserted it’s authority, albeit with concessions to many of the ideas the de Montfordians had fought for. All of the barons and earls who had rebelled against the king were disinherited. They had their titles and lands stripped and were forced to agree to pay crippling fines to earn them back. Some agreed to this humiliation, others didn’t, and, in a period lasting loosely from 1266 to 1274, the disinherited continued to wage a guerrilla war against the crown, with rolling disturbances and uprisings happening across England. Prince Edward, and his most trusted men, regularly led armies into the forests and marshes of England to suppress the insurrections.
And it’s in this period that I believe we find the real Robin Hood. Not as a noble thief who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but as an outlaw among the disinherited, continuing to wage a war against the King. Although de Montford’s rebellion was a fight between different members of the elite, there were still a great number of common people involved. Firstly, there were the landowners and freemen who owed loyalty to their lords and took up arms in support of the cause. Secondly, as with any time those at the top have tried to lead a mass movement, there were a great many ‘normal folk’ who were convinced that this was also about handing power to them. And this is where I think some of Robin Hood’s noble intentions are rooted. Not just in the gentrification of later centuries, but in the idea that, at the time, normal people of England were being told that the disinherited were fighting for them.
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.
And in my next post I’ll get into just how naughty he really was.