This book is to be warmly welcomed as it brings together specialists in different historical fields who can all contribute to a full picture of an area of scholarship which needed to be co-ordinated. The editor has contributed not just a substantial introduction, but two chapters and an appendix, and has recruited and encouraged twelve other scholars to join the enterprise.
Robin Hood must be the best-known figure from the English (and Scottish) Middle Ages in the modern world. Those who have not seen him on the screen or read of his deeds have heard the name and something of his reputation. He is widely identified as a popular hero who righted wrongs and redistributed wealth. One of the authors in this book expresses doubts that Robin was celebrated universally in the late medieval England, a view that is based on written sources, but Robin Hood’s fame was transmitted orally, in everyday speech, in personal names, and in proverbs. Of course he did not exist, and in his own day (stretched over three centuries) the fictional character was represented in different roles, and since then he has been constantly remoulded and repackaged.
Literary scholars for much of the twentieth century did not take much interest in the Robin Hood ballads and plays. They were not included in the canon because their authorship was not known, and they had little literary substance in the sense that the narrative tends to consist of a succession of incidents, and the characters are two-dimensional. Robin’s motives are simple desires for revenge, to display prowess, or to defeat enemies. He displays an uncomplicated religious faith. Women are almost invisible, so gender relations provide no interest.
While Robin Hood was ignored in English Literature departments, historians, who had also neglected him for many decades, came to his rescue in the 1950s. Almost all of the contributors to this book recognise that Rodney Hilton’s article, published in 1958, was a striking and fertile starting point, though they all disagree with his arguments. The article began a new phase of modern interpretation of the Robin Hood literature. It sparked an immediate response from such historians as Holt and Keene, stimulated a new edition of the texts by Dobson and Taylor in 1976. Then followed in the 1990s a new surge of interest, in which Stephen Knight’s work played a major role. Writing about Robin Hood flourished in the new century, and this book is a worthy addition to a run of recent titles.
Rodney Hilton had analysed the feudal economy and peasant revolts from a Marxist perspective in his early writings. When his world was turned upside down by the discrediting of the Communist Party in 1956, he turned to Robin Hood as a relief, but of course he interpreted the outlaw as a peasant rebel against corrupt government and rich lords. He did not suggest that the ballads belonged to a programme of opposition to feudalism, but rather was expressing a fantasy of escape into the freedom of the greenwood. Hilton was unusual in his time for his interest in literature—his first publication had been an edition of a thirteenth-century poem—but in the long run the gap between history and literature has closed, with many historians engaging with the subject, while literary scholars, in such movements as the New Historicism in 1980s, have adopted an historical approach.
The authors of this book take for granted that the disciplines have converged. The editor sets the scene with an explanation of the rather confusing array of Robin Hood texts. There are a few in manuscript, but most of them survive only in printed form, some like the Gest, from the very early days of printing around 1500, and others later but apparently based on medieval manuscript versions. He reviews our knowledge of Robin from other sources, including the many references to plays and games around 1500, and the debate about dating which takes us from origins in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the texts were written and printed. A number of the specialist essays are concerned with social aspects of the poems, including a detailed examination of the term “yeoman” which is used in the poems and is applied to Robin himself. An essay on social mobility, again in the context of the historical background, makes the interesting point that Robin Hood himself belongs to that rarely identified category of the downwardly mobile, as a yeoman living insecurely in the greenwood, with no ambition for social advancement. An essay on gender uses the example of Robin to define medieval notions of masculinity, but the audience was not exclusively male, as a woman was one of the earliest known readers. An examination of the urban audience concludes that the poems were not expressing mercantile attitudes or appealing primarily to an audience of townspeople. The essay on social banditry finds that Robin had some of the characteristics of other social bandits, though the author expresses doubts about the whole concept. Did social bandits give the proceeds of their crimes to the poor? The answer is that some lined their own pockets, but Robin did not, and helped a poor knight. The idea that Robin Hood could be linked to social and political rebellion is treated sceptically. The political attitudes expressed in the ballad include a conventional respect for the king, who is believed to be concerned with the welfare of his subjects. The ballads show some knowledge of the law, though the use of archaic language suggests that the authors are looking back to an earlier legal system. The outlaws were not seeking specific changes in the law, but promoted a moral ideal in which honest men dealt fairly with one another. Robin’s religious attitudes include a regard for the Mass and the Virgin, and he seems not to be anti-clerical, though he was highly critical of some monks. The plays were an integral part of parish sociability and fundraising. The elaborate and expensive arrangements for mounting the plays and collecting money from the audience included selling “liveries” (badges) which those attending pinned to their clothes to show that they had paid, and perhaps to indicate that they had joined Robin’s “meyne” (band of followers). A contribution on warfare compares the “mery men” to a military retinue. Robin Hood attracted limited attention from the Welsh, who had many alternative heroes, but he was well-known in Scotland from the thirteenth century, and later in urban contexts became embedded in official civic ceremonial.
Readers will appreciate the wide range of these essays, but may be puzzled at the absence of a full treatment of rural society. We learn little about the “husbonde...that tilleth with his ploughe” who features in the ballads, nor is there discussion of the social structure of the villages which sponsored and attended Robin Hood games. If a scholar could have been found to write about the peasant and village background, he or she might also have considered the landscape depicted in the ballads, or perhaps that could have been another essay.
The book has no conclusion, though most of the authors end their essays with general observations. There are disagreements, for example as to whether the occasional references to “poor men” and Robin’s good treatment of them would encourage his audience to believe that he practised redistribution of wealth and power. Most authors accept that Robin was represented as being hostile to rich monks, but some doubts are expressed on this point. Were the ballads subversive? Many of the contributors notice the disapproval voiced by contemporaries, most of them clergy, but the main complaint was not the ideas expressed, but the popularity of the stories and plays that distracted potential church goers. The plays in particular could be seen as socially conservative, because they inverted social norms in a festive context, after which the routines were reasserted. There is general agreement that the ballads appealed to no single audience. Their messages were multi-layered, and different listeners or readers, kings and commons, clergy and laity, country people and town dwellers, gentry, yeomen, husbandmen and labourers all enjoyed them and understood them in varied ways. This leaves us with a greater appreciation of the complexity of the Robin Hood phenomenon, but the 1958 article, though it can be questioned, gave its readers the excitement of innovation.