Did Robin Hood Exist?

It's a story that's been around for a good 800 years, but is there any evidence that Robin Hood actually existed? Find out what really went on inside Sherwood Forest, how medieval outlaws lived, and why the Sheriff of Nottingham was a hated figure in the time. Delving into the historical records with us is medieval expert and co-host of our sister podcast, Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis. This episode was edited by Hanna Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  Robin Hood, the outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. It's one of the most famous stories from medieval England, but there's just one problem. We don't actually know if Robin Hood even existed. Medieval records give tantalizing traces. Outlaws with his name appear in legal records, his story was sung in 14th century folk songs, and his life documented in chronicles written beyond his own lifetime. His story and heroism still lives with us today, but was it all just that? A story? Or, deep within the ancient oaks of Sherwood Forest, can we find traces of the real man they called Robin Hood?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Welcome to After Dark.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And I'm Anton.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  In today's episode, we're going to be exploring whether the story of Robin Hood, which has been told for about 800 years, was based on any kind of real person. Joining us today is the co-host of our sister podcast here at History Hit, Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis. Welcome to After Dark, Matt.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  It's so nice to have you here.

• 3:01Speaker 05

  I feel like it's a sleepover.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  I know.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  And maybe that's because we're all so tired.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  We should have dressed before we started.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, we should be in pyjamas. Okay, before we get properly started into the history of this, because there is some history, there is proper solid history. Who's your favourite Robin Hood in popular culture, please? And why is it the fox from Disney? It has to be. There's no other answer.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  That's yours, definitely, right?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  100%. Every millennial woman fancied him growing up.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's just women. I mean, if ever there was a sexy fox.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  That was the one.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  It's the Disney Robin Hood.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  It really was. I don't know what it is about him.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I think it's caused everyone to ask questions about themselves over the years, but probably going to have to really unfashionably go for Kevin Costner.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Same.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Despite the accent, despite all of the flaws in the film, in no small part because of Alan Rickman's performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham as well.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  So camp, the campus sheriff of Nottingham.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he's perfect.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  And I struggle to get past that. I mean, Carrie Elwes in Men in Tights also.

• 4:00Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Silly Robin Hood.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  What was going on around that time? Because they're relatively close by, right?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  And I definitely watched those a million times growing up as a kid. So I have never seen the Disney Fox thing, so it is Kevin Costner for me as well.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  We need to remedy that ASAP because you will approve.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Do we need to pause?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Thank you for coming, Matt. We're off to watch this.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Join us after we've watched this. Thoughts on the Russell Crowe strange, not very Yorkshire Yorkshire accent version?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I haven't seen that. I like the Russell Crowe film to a point, and then I don't like it anymore.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  What's the cutoff point for you?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  The shifting accent is tricky to deal with.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I think the grittiness of the story as it begins is really nice and actually reflects much more the historical Robin Hood. But then when you start getting into early 13th century D-Day landings, fighting on the beaches.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  The beaches.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  It gets a little bit crazy when they feel the need for Robin Hood to only be important because his dad wrote Magna Carta. Oh, you've lost me.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  It's a wild ride. It's a wild ride. Okay, well, you've mentioned some real history there, Matt, so let's get into some. The idea of Robin Hood, we can trace it back to legal records, right? There are some, there's some documentation relating to someone vaguely called Robin Hood.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  There's a few people that begin to crop up in the 13th century. And what's interesting to wonder is, so the first written stories that we have about Robin Hood don't come till the 15th century, so right at the end of the medieval period. But that's got to be tapping into some kind of oral tradition that's been around for some time. The question we don't know is how long that oral tradition has been going. So we begin to get, early in the 13th century, we get people using names that aren't dissimilar to Robin Hood. So in 1226, there's a guy in Yorkshire who was a fugitive named Robert Hod. So Robert can become Robin.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Hod could become Hood. Don't know. Maybe we're stretching it a little bit.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  I always think, and you might be able to speak to this a bit more, Matt, but I always think when you see sort of medieval names or medieval English written down, sometimes it makes you kind of think about the pronunciation, actually. And Robin Hod could have been what we would now say as Robin Hood, right? Like, I mean, I'm not an expert in medieval pronunciation, but in terms of, I don't know. I think, I always think, like, if you were to time, if you time travel back to the medieval period and you had to have a conversation with someone, you would be able to tell what they were saying, kind of. But it would also sound very odd to our ears and like they were sort of doing a slightly odd voice or something or pronouncing things for a comic effect.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And probably quite close to something like a Yorkshire accent. So we're before the great vowel shift, before all of those sounds have changed. They pronounce the word light, L I G H T, as licht. They still said those letters in the middle. That's why we have those letters there. They did use to be pronounced.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  So they would have perhaps pronounced that Hod as more like Hood. And it might have sounded something more like Robert Hood becomes Robin Hood.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  I can get on board with that. I think, like, yeah, and this is a legal document, right? This isn't a literary flourish. This is not a fiction. This is a real person doing a real thing.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the I R O's of the Yorkasizes, so court records. This guy has been proclaimed an outlaw and he's going by the name Robert Hood.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Sidebar to this, when I was reading this script in preparation for this episode, I saw the I R O's of the Yorkasizes, and I misread it as I Rolls, and I thought it was like some kind of quite sassy list of like, these people again. Okay, so we have Robert Hod potentially in 1226. In Berkshire as well, there are court records. We've got a man called William, who's the son of Robert Smith, who is outlawed for robbery. And he, his, his kind of alias that he's given is, is it Rob Hod? Something like that? Rob Hod?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Rob Hood. So again, it could be something like Rob Hood, Robert Hood. I mean, people aren't using hereditary surnames by this point necessarily, so he's just given a name that reflects his status. But if people are giving you a name, something like that to reflect your status perhaps as an outlaw, it speaks to perhaps a memory already or an association of Robin Hood.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  It's already in the culture.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  With the idea of being an outlaw, living in the green forest. So, you know, he becomes William Rob Hood.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. Again, I'll buy it. You're like, I know you're doing the professional thing of couching it, but I'm fully sold on both of those, I'm afraid. Talk to me then about, God, the dire of my undergrad English life, was Piers Plowman. We're in the 14th century now and we're starting to get some literary allusions here.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the first kind of written reference that we have to anything to do with Robin Hood, definitely as Robin Hood, the outlaw, comes in Piers Plowman, so William Langland's famous poem that he writes about this plowman out in the field, kind of daydreaming his life away and all of the visions that he has. And there is a character in that called Sloth, who is a priest. And Sloth is such an awful lazy priest, he doesn't know how to say his Pater Noster, can't recite the Lord's Prayer.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Listen, we've all been there.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  But.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Not great for a medieval priest, though.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it should be basics for a medieval priest. Can't recite his Pater Noster, can tell you a story about Robin Hood.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And so he's showing up there as someone who knows rhymes of Robin Hood. He knows stories of Robin Hood. So by the time we're in 1377 with Piers Plowman, Robin Hood is established as a folk story, a tale that people are telling to each other. They're not written down yet, but William Langland here is writing down the fact that people are telling stories about Robin Hood.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And also that Robin Hood is already counterculture, right? The fact that he is positioned in the Piers Plowman poem as being kind of the opposite of like dutiful and religious and sort of moral, that he is like this outsider and it's the last thing that a priest should know about is.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And the idea is there's something subversive about him, you know, he's off the curriculum, or at least should be. Which the church has a really, really interesting relationship with Robin Hood throughout the medieval period. Because he flips from being this example of everything that's bad. You should know your Pater Noster, you shouldn't tell stories about Robin Hood. And he is, in lots of the early stories, he's famous for robbing from rich priors in particular. So attacking the wealth of the church. But the church is also very keen to adopt him when they want him. So in lots of the early stories, he's very, very devoted to the Virgin Mary. He's positioned as an incredibly pious man. He won't attack bands of women or bands in the forest that contain women because of his

• 10:47Speaker 01

  devotion to the Virgin Mary. And whenever churches are perhaps doing some building work or something like that, they'll put on some fairs that include allusions to Robin Hood and stories about Robin Hood because they're popular. And now they're generating wealth for the church, which is absolutely fine.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  So there's a kind of fluidity to him, right? He can be what people need him to be in that moment. There's a poem called, is it Friar, Friar Dawes' Reply, which is kind of written around fourteen oh two. And in that, there's a quotation that sort of becomes later a bit of a sort of common proverb, I think, which says, many men speak of Robin Hood and never shot his bow. And I suppose the message of that is that plenty of people can kind of talk the talk, but Robin lived that life and also was robbing from the rich to feed the poor. So is that what that message is that, that you can talk about doing good deeds or being heroic, but you actually, you need to have shot his bow, you need to have done what he did?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I think that's it. I think it's talking about people who love to snipe at the government and the nobility and complain about the structures of society that are keeping everyone oppressed. By the time we're getting to the beginning of the 15th century here, you've had the peasants revolt, you've had the Black Death all through the earlier century, you've seen people develop opportunities that have then been snatched away from them by the government, you've seen them crushed in the peasants revolt by the, the power, the weight of the government. And I think what you develop is people who will talk about those who complain, but don't do anything. So the stories of Robin Hood are about taking on the establishment, about fighting back against wrongfully used power and authority, about standing up to corruption in a way that most people, you know,

• 12:28Speaker 01

  complain down the pub about it, but they don't actually do anything. I won't risk anything for it.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  We see this iconic status start to come in as we push into the early modern period then. And I think we have a, some reference to Henry VIII dressing as Robin, which talk about stealing from the church and perhaps not then passing it on to the poor, but like, is, is this, is he seeing himself in that kind of a guise?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I think he is. So, I mean, Henry VIII's deluded in so many ways. It's hard to tell what's going on in his head. But he does put on one of, he's fond of these pageants, fond of dressing up and putting on shows for people. And so he, he and a bunch of his men burst into Catherine of Aragon's rooms. He's dressed as Robin Hood. He's bought a maid Marian with him. Might have been a signal to the future for Catherine of Aragon. He's bought his own girlfriend into the room to see his wife. But yeah, so he, he positions himself as Robin Hood. This, this isn't a Robin Hood that's necessarily standing up to the establishment, who isn't robbing from the rich to give to the poor. This, this, and it's during this period that we begin to see a real shift in the societal

• 13:36Speaker 01

  background, the position, the rank of Robin Hood. So in those really early stories, he is a gritty, tough yeoman. And a yeoman is someone who isn't necessarily a peasant working on the field, but definitely isn't nobility or gentry either. They're somewhere in the middle. They're a respectable class. They have good manners. There's lots of talk about how courteous Robin Hood always is in the ballads, but he's definitely a very low ranking yeoman. Once we get into the 16th century, we begin to see this change of him becoming a deprived, wronged member of the nobility. And I think that's what appeals to Henry. Because in the earlier stories, you have

• 14:16Speaker 01

  this ordinary man who is noble by his deeds. By the time, I think you're getting into the 16th century, there's a, a push from the establishment against that. Ordinary people can't be noble. We can't have any of that. He must be a deprived nobleman who's being forced to try and take back what he wants. That's the only explanation for, for his noble spirit and his, his nature. He can't have learned that from anywhere else because peasants are horrible.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  I think we, we need the Russell Crowe version to have like the, you know, I'm a, a, just a yeoman wronged and had my land taken off me.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  But that's where that does work, that he's just an archer who falls into this situation. There is nothing special about him until they ruin the film at the end by making something special about him.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Really bashing this film and rightly so. And yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's so interesting that he kind of, he creeps into, he becomes almost like a, a sort of iconic figure in culture, doesn't he? He's sort of a, I don't know, a stereotype, I suppose, to, to be drawn out. Like, for example, he's, he's mentioned in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Rona, which is performed first, I think in fifteen ninety-eight. And, you know, he's, is a kind of passing reference to him. So I suppose there's a sense that everyone in, in England, certainly at this time, it's a shorthand for these ideas that you're saying are shifting in that moment. And this idea of him being, being sort of wronged, not quite an aristocrat, I suppose, but you know, someone from the upper

• 15:36Speaker 00

  classes is kind of interesting. Also, side note about Henry VIII, what exhausting man. He'd just turn up and be like, I'm dressed up, aren't I amusing? And he'd be like.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Imagine setting up in the morning and be like, I've got a really good idea. You're all gonna love it. And everyone just being, oh, not another one.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right. And who's making these costumes, Henry? You're not doing that? Yeah, no, kind of valid. Let's talk a little bit then about, let's, let's wind the clock back to when these, the story of Robin Hood is supposed to have been set because we've talked about, you know, this idea of this quite lowly ordinary man with extraordinary deeds. And that's what makes him noble. And then by the time we get to the early modern period, you know, he's transformed into this kind of wronged nobleman. But most typically, when we tell this story and in, you know, Hollywood retellings of it, we were talking off mic earlier about, I loved the, the Ladybird book

• 16:33Speaker 00

  version, which was so good. If anyone's got that out there, I need a copy. Mostly though, we, we set this story in the, the late 12th, early 13th century. And that context is really important in terms of the history that was actually happening, right?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  It is, but it's not where Robin Hood kind of begins.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  It's interesting, isn't it? That he's sort of, he's sort of plonked into this moment because he fits with the sort of political landscape, I guess.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And again, I think it speaks to his malleability that he can move around socially, but he can move around in time and space a little bit as well, because he's not always in Nottingham either. So he begins, we get these stories being written down from the, the middle of the 15th century. So fourteen fifty, we have the Robin Hood and the Monk story first written down. We get the Jester of Robin Hood a little bit later too. And these position him as being in the reign of a King Edward. They don't tell us which Edward it is, but they definitely tell us the king at the time is Edward. So that means Edward the first, second, or third, which gives us from twelve seventy-two

• 17:39Speaker 01

  to thirteen seventy-seven. There's some suggestion, it could even be Edward the fourth, who's kind of fourteen sixty-one to fourteen eighty-three. That gives a really broad window and no concept of where he might be. Perhaps the most plausible location for him there is during the reign of Edward the second, when there is lots of civil conflict, he's having, you know, wars, civil wars with his cousin, the Duke of Lancaster. There is lots of disruption, people on opposing sides at various moments. If we go a little bit earlier to Edward the first, we've got a king who's away on crusade when he comes to the throne. So there is this idea of absent kingship and the corruption that can fill the void when the king isn't there to represent justice and the need to fight back

• 18:23Speaker 01

  against that. We also have other stories around this time that begin to place him as in the reign of Henry the third. So when Simon de Montfort's rebellion takes place, after Simon de Montfort is killed in twelve sixty-five, we have a bunch of people who are known as the dispossessed, a load of noblemen who've had their lands taken away from them. So there are some stories that position him as one of those dispossessed, fighting to recover his lands too. So he can move around a little bit in time, but he seems to settle and has settled for a long time now. In the reign of Richard the first, eleven eighty-nine to eleven ninety-nine, most clearly when Richard is away on crusade at the beginning of his reign.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  And absent kingship.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  So again, you've got absent kingship. You've got the idea that the king is away doing something good. He's crusading, considered good at the time. We can question whether it's good now. But he's away doing something that the kingdom is championing. And into that void, you've got the perfect grand villain in King John, who will later become king at least, the king's brother who is desperately trying to steal his authority, who is terribly corrupt, who is very, very badly behaved. And you need someone like Robin to stand up to that, to try and represent good rule. Robin is frequently positioned as being very loyal to the king, whoever the king is. And so this idea that he is representing in most of those stories, Richard the first, as a good king,

• 19:50Speaker 01

  fighting against the bad rule, the corruption that is, is seeping in with John. He is, he is the dam that is preventing that from flooding the kingdom.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  I sort of, I suppose people can get behind him because he's a good excuse to go against local government and taxation, for example. And obviously that's a huge part of his story, right? But also that ultimately you can be like, well, I'm still on the side of the king. I don't think taxation's right and I'm pissed off at the local sheriff, but I'm not committing treason. And he is the sort of perfect shorthand for that. And you mentioned, Matt, that he's, he's usually placed in or around Nottingham. Why was Nottingham important in King John's regime? Because it's a significant place, isn't it? And that's presumably why we position, why we sort of plonk down Robin Hood within that.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  There are a few reasons why he ends up in Nottingham, I think. There is early stories that place him in Barn Dale in Yorkshire too. And that seems to be a recurring theme. Sometimes he's in forests in Yorkshire. Most often, he's in Sherwood Forest. Interestingly, even when he's in Yorkshire, his enemy is the Sheriff of Nottingham. Not the Sheriff of Yorkshire.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Basically just hates the Midlands.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  There's a reason to hate the Sheriff of Nottingham that we can definitely talk about.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  But Nottingham, yes, is important to John. He bases himself there a fair bit, but Nottingham Castle during the medieval period is considered to be the centre of the kingdom.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Geographically. So kings will often position themselves there. So, because I need to talk about Richard III at some point. When he's expecting Henry II's invasion in 1484 and 1485, he doesn't know where that invasion's coming from. So he bases himself in those summers at Nottingham because it's considered the geographic centre of the kingdom. And you can get to everywhere as quickly as you possibly can. So Robin is right in the heart of the kingdom here. And John has connections there. So in 1212, towards the end of his kingship, he's associated with the hanging of 28 Welsh hostages at Nottingham, which is just another example of John being horrible. You know, John is absolutely vile, but he's being vile in Nottingham.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Some of those people that are executed are young boys, possibly between the age of 12 and 14.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  So there's John.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Unusual even for the medieval period?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this isn't great from John, who's not a great person.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  He spends Christmases at Nottingham. He visits it fairly frequently as king. He will ultimately die not far from there at Newark Castle as well, trying to get to that Midlands area to protect himself and his kingdom as everything is slipping away from him, including his health and ultimately his life. He's got a royal hunting lodge there that he likes as well. So he has lots of connections to Nottingham. Nottingham has a great forest, as does lots of England at this point. But there's a perfect place there in Sherwood Forest to plonk Robin and oppose him. And the Sheriff of Nottingham is particularly interesting because he is, the Sheriff of Nottingham in the early 13th century is a man named Philip Mark.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  He is the only royal official named in the 1215 Magna Carta. So for all everyone is complaining about everything, all the things that John is doing, they're very general. But Philip Mark, the Sheriff of Nottingham, is singled out as someone that the barons want removed from his office. Him and his family are to be ejected from any form of authority in England.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Wow, okay, that's extreme.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  But he's clearly, yeah, he's clearly a hated, hated figure. And throughout the Robin Hood legends, the ones that we have written down, the Sheriff of Nottingham is always his enemy.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  But it's never explained why.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Because there must be this assumption that people know the story well enough

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  to either know why Robin hates the Sheriff of Nottingham or to understand that the Sheriff of Nottingham has this long history of being a terrible, evil person. He's the perfect foil for Robin Hood then. But the idea that sheriffs, again, represent royal authority, you have to have an absent king for this to work, for Robin to still be loyal to the king. So it fits really well in Richard's reign when he's absent, John is trying his best to take over and you've got this terrible, terrible Sheriff of Nottingham emerging who is collecting all of the taxes. And sheriffs, I mean, the system of taxation via sheriffs is essentially sheriffs go to the exchequer at the start of the year and they're given a figure to raise from their county. They're then responsible at the end of the year for delivering that amount of money to the exchequer.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  If they happen to raise any more than that, they're allowed to keep it.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  They're in.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  So there is a built-in incentive for them to be corrupt and grasping and avaricious. That's how they make themselves rich, but also how they make themselves horrendously unpopular.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  You mentioned there the forest and this is going to become a key part of this story. And we're going to find out all about that when we come back after this short break.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 25:33Speaker 06

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• 26:40Speaker 05

  Right, Matt, the forest laws, I did not know they existed, that there were medieval laws that needed to govern the forest. How do they play a role in this particular legend?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  The forest law becomes a key way in which people are oppressed, firstly by the Norman government. So when the Norman kings arrive in 1066, they love a good hunt.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And what do you want if you want a good hunt? You want some nice open space.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Lots of prey that you can look for, deer, boar, anything like that. What you don't want is a bunch of peasants getting in the way. And so the Norman kings begin to section off more and more land. They call it royal forest. That doesn't mean it's full of trees. Royal forest can be open fields.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  So this, this surprised me when we were prepping for this episode, that it is trees, but then also villages, open land. Really surprising, yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Anything. And the key problem here is Norman conquest ends Anglo-Saxon England. In Anglo-Saxon England, you can use all of these forests to collect your firewood, to hunt for meat to feed your family with, to forage for berries and whatever else you might be able to find. And the Normans arrive and they're like, oh, that's nice. I'll keep that, I'll take that, get out of there. You can't go in there anymore. And the boundaries of this are constantly expanding. And they make it a crime to take anything from the king's royal forest. You can't collect wood in there.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  Definitely can't hunt.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  No, you definitely can't hunt, you definitely can't take meat. You can be killed for killing

• 28:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  one of the king's deer.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  And this is land that presumably people have been hunting on, have been, you know, taking the wood from for centuries at this point. This is normal, everyday life that's now suddenly illegal and could cost you your life.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. For generations, this is how people have found wood to burn through the winter to keep their families warm and alive. It's how they've got meat to supplement their diet.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And suddenly you can't do that.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  As an 18th centuryist, it's interesting because we talk about the enclosure acts all of the time.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Literally thinking about it right now, yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  This is happening in the medieval period in a way that we don't really talk about in terms of the history of landscape in this country as much as we do the enclosures because it is closer in time, I suppose, and more sort of, there's maybe just more sort of written response to it in terms of protest. But I mean, this must have been, this is a huge moment, a sort of carving up of England and its resources and just complete reallocation to the very wealthiest in society.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And that separation would have become very, very clear. There are still places in this country where you can see the boundaries of royal forests that were built. And that's because they were built as literal big fences. You know, they were sectioned off from everybody else. Who do you think's building those fences? The people who are no longer allowed in that land to collect their wood. So they're having to block themselves out of the ways that they have always fed their families and provided.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  So the resentment is growing.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Can I ask about this? Sorry, just, this is a slight tangent, but I am very interested. How, why and how did they make them do that? Because I was going to answer the Normans, but that's not the case. How did they convince these people? Just brutality?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the point of a sword. You know, if you want to keep your home, you know, very nice hut you have there, it'd be a shame if it burnt down in the night.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Or you can come and build this fence that keeps you out of the way you've always fed your family. So though, you know, those scars in the landscape still exist today. There are places where you can still see where people were forced to do that. And all of a sudden now, if you're so hungry that you need a bit of meat or so cold that you want some wood to burn, you're literally risking your life

• 30:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  going in there. And over the couple of centuries that follow, those royal forests are just expanded and expanded and expanded because no one can tell the king he can't have it. If he goes somewhere and he thinks, oh, this'd be a nice place for a hunting lodge.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Mine now.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I'll just build one and section a whole load of land off. Off you all go, this isn't yours anymore.

• 30:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And there's no one stopping. One of the big complaints around Magna Carta is this kind of behaviour. Because it's about bringing the king beneath the law, rather than him allowing to be continuing above it. And one of the things that we don't talk about very often, that's parallel to Magna Carta, is the Charter of the Forests. And this is published sort of alongside it. Eventually they become amalgamated, they'll be pushed together. But it's only the Charter of the Forests around about 1217 that actually prevents.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Corporal punishment for taking meat from the king's. You can no longer lose life or limb for killing the king's deer.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  So some good sense does prevail.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  But only under huge pressure. John is is being chased around his kingdom. He's been invaded by the French. Prince Louis of France is in control of half of England. Half of the barons of England are on the side of the French prince. It's only at this point that John is is forced to sit down and agree to this, and then he will rip it up entirely afterwards.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  I suppose we have this, the political and sort of practical context of the forest, as you've described, Matt. But we also have the forest in literature, even in the medieval period, and presumably for centuries, millennia before, this idea of the forest as a magical place, as a place where the rules don't apply. And you see it in fairy tales, in Gothic novels. It's a trope that has, you know, just has this through line throughout human history, because they are dangerous places. They're places where, you know, day is night, the light is blocked out, where wild animals can maul you to death in a way that you are safe from if you're not in the forest. All these things don't apply. And we have this idea of outlaws living in this space where the

• 32:27Speaker 00

  the rule of society does not apply or has been upturned. Do you think that comes into Robin Hood as well, thinking particularly about this idea of him as, you know, sort of counterculture, as turning the world upside down, ruining the hierarchy, the distribution of wealth? Is that at play here?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Definitely. I mean, he's, the idea that he literally robs from the rich and gives to the poor comes later into the story.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  The first stories that we have talk about him helping a poor knight. So there is an idea that he's there to to help the less well off. But the the full development of the idea of of literally robbing from the rich and giving it to the poor comes a little bit later. But I think if you've got someone who is fighting against royal authority, what represents royal authority better than the royal forest now? So plonk Robin in there. He's right on the inside of all of these things. Everything that he's doing in that place he shouldn't be doing.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Hmm. And also that it's, even though, you know, these sites you talk about, you know, they're very geographically specific in that there are literal boundaries, and yet they cover vast areas. And so there's something kind of fluid about that. And this idea that Robin is somewhere in our imagination in this space. We don't quite know where, and that's how he survives, and he's an outlaw. But that he can pop up and help someone anytime. He's almost a sort of spiritual creature, as well as a practical man. He can literally, you almost call upon him if you're in need and he will come to you.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. See, I also grew up watching the Robin of Sherwood series, which, go and look it out. I don't know how well it's aged. I don't know.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Cancelled.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Possibly. But that has Robin interacting with with the idea of Hearn the Hunter. So this forest god that existed. So he's he's in this sort of liminal space on the edge of society, but also on the edge of religion. Is he part of an old world? Or is he part of a new world? And I think I always found that series really, really fun and interesting. I hope I don't get cancelled.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Now, when you go back and watch it on YouTube, you're like, no, I do not find it fun or interesting. Yeah, so I distanced myself from it entirely. Best depiction of Hearn the Hunter, and this is another sidebar, is 1980s as well. Not to age myself, because I was not born when this was on.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  You weren't born in the 80s at all?

• 34:41Speaker 00

  No, not at all, mate.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  And not only just, but sure. Was the Box of Delights. Surely you guys have seen that?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Okay, it's all on YouTube. If you're watching, go and find it now. Just stop what you're doing and go and watch it. It's absolutely phenomenal. Very Christmasy. Okay, we're going to go to a break. And afterwards, we're going to be talking about another famous element of this story, the bow and arrow.

• 35:17Speaker 06

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• 36:55Speaker 00

  All right, Matt, we've talked about stealing from the rich to give to the poor. We've talked about the forest. We've talked about the Sheriff of Nottingham. There's a key element that we're missing here, and that is

• 37:05Speaker 01

  The green tights.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, green tights, very tight green tights. It's a bow and arrow. I'm looking at what we think might be the first potentially visual depiction of Robin Hood. And it's a woodcut from the late 15th century that seems to have been recycled in in various texts. So it's it's used in a late 1490s Canterbury Tales. It's used to illustrate specifically Robin Hood elsewhere. So it's like, it's a little bit woolly. It's a little bit vague, but it is. I will describe it for listeners. It's a man on a completely insane horse, even by medieval standards. I mean, he's sort of a lion. He's got like lion-esque feet crawling and this tiny, tiny head for what is

• 37:49Speaker 00

  quite a large bodied horse. And there is a man on it who is just far too big for the horse, who, I mean, he's essentially, he's got the tights on. He's dressed as Robin Hood, right? He's got a bow and arrow. He's got, I mean, it looks like a hat that is held onto his head by a bandage. It's not really the hood necessarily that we would, we would associate with Hollywood versions. Is this an accurate photographic depiction of Robin Hood, the real historical figure, please and thank you?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  It is, captured on a speed camera in Sherwood Forest. This is what people imagine Robin Hood looking like. So this is, this is very much the yeoman on his horse, in his bow, in his functional clothes. You know, he's not wearing the clothes of a nobleman who's sitting at table all day and doesn't have a real job. This is

• 38:38Speaker 00

  He's out and about.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is what people imagine Robin Hood being. He's ready to fight. He's off in the forest. He's on some adventure. He's on a horse. He's going to get away quickly. You won't catch him. You're going to lose him in in the greenery of Sherwood Forest. I think, like you say, this is, this image is used for several things. But it's a perfect one for Robin Hood in the medieval mind, because it kind of gives us everything that he represents to a medieval person.

• 39:04Speaker 05

  One of the things that he also represents is this idea of romantic righteousness and just just belonging to the romantic tradition more generally. Personally, I find nothing romantic in the least about an outlaw. It's just boring and dirty. But like, no, I don't have time. Are you surprised?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Disappointed, but not surprised.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  No, no. It's, it's, it's, I just, I just don't have time.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Dick Turfitt, come on. Oh, my god.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  But here he is.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Is it just sleeping in the woods, not having a comfy bed that you don't like the idea of?

• 39:40Speaker 05

  No.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  No one's asking you to be the outlaw, though.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  I'm not good, because that's a role I cannot fulfill. But but he does fulfill that, doesn't he? And he has this, this is where, this is where he annoys me a little bit. Is that all right to say that?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  You can say whatever you like. This is a safe space.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Um, where I'm just a bit like, I don't know. This is where my frustration level starts to peak a little bit, where I'm just like, how romantic is this really, though? You know what I mean? But he is part of that tradition. But what do you think the outlaw-ness of him is trying to tell? Is it that counterculture thing that we've been talking about? Is that, is that where this pinpoints itself?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  I think it is. I mean, outlawery is a real thing in the medieval world. By this point, for centuries, by the time people are writing about it in the 15th century, it's been around for a long time. And outlaw is someone who literally lives outside the law. That means if you were to encounter an outlaw, perfectly legal to murder them, because they exist outside the law. There is no comeback.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  You said that, like, you were about to change your mind and be like, oh, no, I want to be an outlaw now. That sounds great.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  No, no, I just, I was like

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I'm going to find tonight, bro. Legal murder.

• 40:46Speaker 05

  No, I was a little bit like, oh, okay, they're annoying me, but I don't need to kill them, was was my my thought there. But, okay. So but that's interesting, because they've placed themselves outside the law. And then if you occupy a space that usually is within the law, you can transgress that and join their world for a little bit, and then come back into your world and have no consequences.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Because the point is, they've removed themselves from normal, acceptable society. They're no longer like you and I.

• 41:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  They don't abide by the same rules as us. Therefore, we don't want them in our society, in our community. They have removed themselves from the law of the land.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  So they don't pay tax, but they also can be killed. So there's kind of two sides of everything that's going on. So Robin being an outlaw becomes romanticised, definitely. But again, it returns us to this gritty idea of him as this yeoman who is is living a life of desperation. We will later develop this idea of him and his band of merry men in their green tights, flying through the forest, swinging on ropes and.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  But but even that, right, is kind of, you can see the DNA of that in this idea of living outside the law, that the merry men, you think about medieval society as very strictly structured, right? You've got households, you've got villages, you've got, you know, sort of these hierarchies and and your domestic life is so tightly organised and everyone knows their role. And the outlaws living not in that space and in this different environment, in this different world of their own creating, set themselves up domestically as well, sort of politically, in this chaotic way that they are, you know, it's a, they're sort of, they create their own families or their own sort of kinship, I suppose, within that, that for the medieval world that's set around, you know, the the sort

• 42:32Speaker 00

  of the the spiritual and practical rigor of how to do life and society is, even though, you know, we we think of the merry men now in tights on on screen, and there's a sort of, almost a threatening element to that, right, that this band of outlaws don't operate or live by the ordinary norms of the medieval world.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they are outside of everything that is acceptable. And and maybe that camaraderie is part of the reason that they become romanticised a little bit, this idea of brotherhood, that they're relying on each other, that they they're forming their own little society that doesn't have the same rules and oppression as the one outside, because for all societal rules are are generally accepted and taken by the overwhelming majority. That doesn't mean they're a good thing. Who doesn't dream of living in a place with no taxation and all of that sort of stuff?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  So they're they're kind of living the life that nobody else can, but there are consequences for them when they do that. I mean, the first story that we have written down of Robin Hood, that one in fourteen fifty, is a pretty brutal story of Robin getting captured by the authorities and he's about to be killed. He he falls out with Little John on his way there, and Little John abandons him. He ends up getting captured. Little John and several of the other key characters much, Will Scarlett, people like that. They hear that Robin's been captured and they they attack the prison where he's being held. And, you know, well, they kill a monk and his associate to steal their clothes to get into the city, so not afraid of killing monks.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  They break in, they kill all of the jailers, all of the people that are keeping Robin hostage. So they're just slaughtering their way to Robin here. It's not romantic, it's not, you know, saving him by trickery.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, bashing gods over the head.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, this isn't the Disney version.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  They're killing everybody that gets between them and Robin. And Robin, when he he realises that, having fallen out with Little John, Little John has come and saved him, Robin offers to go into the service of Little John and to be his man. And Little John is like, no, no, we're not having any of that. That's not how we operate.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, we don't have that hierarchy.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't have that question.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Then, despite the romanticisation that happens later, in in real terms of historical living with outlaws in the medieval period, are they seen as an annoyance then? Are they seen as as unsavoury, as unwanted, and and like, just just really disruptive to everyone else's life?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, because they don't play by the rules. And they can be dangerous. They don't have to worry about the consequences of the law because they're already living outside of it. So what's to stop them stealing from you or breaking into your home or attacking you

• 45:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  in the street? They tend to to rely on hospitality, so they might rely on sympathetic peasants who understand why they've chosen that life. They might rely on on members of the church who perhaps take pity on them. They might find, you know, networks of safe houses that they're able to use. They're not necessarily all living out in the forest. They're not all necessarily completely outside of society, but they have to be very careful, because if you come across someone who doesn't like you, or, you know, it's like the purge. It's it's

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Your fair game.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  open season on outlaws all of the time.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Let's talk specifically about the bow and arrow for a second then, because you've talked about in certain versions of this history, there is extreme violence and they are just slaughtering people left, right and centre to maintain the outlaw lifestyle and sort of political stance that they're taking. The bow and arrow is obviously a weapon used against human beings in this period, but it's also a tool for hunting. What does it represent? Why is it significant that that Robin Hood has a bow and arrow instead of, say, a sword?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaks his status slightly to begin with, because swords are high status weapons. They're expensive, they cost a lot of money. The the carrying of swords is frequently regulated by law, so that only those above a certain social rank. So Robin has a sword, it would distinguish him as a member of a higher social rank. In the early stories, he isn't. Much more likely to have carried a bow.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Later on, when he is identified as being part of the nobility, is there any element of the story that creeps him where he has a sword or it's been taken off him as part of the injustice against him?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I think as as the legends go on, you, he becomes much more of a swashbuckling hero, doesn't he? He is getting into those one on one sword fights with people, insinuating that he's someone who knows how to use a sword.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  You're in Kevin Costner territory now.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you have to be trained to do that.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  The the bow, and again, it's significant that these stories are beginning to be written down in the middle of the fifteenth century, because by this point, the bow is synonymous with English armies.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Edward III in the Hundred Years' War has used it to all but conquer France. It seems like an unstoppable weapon on the continent. We're not that far after Agincourt in fourteen fifteen, where the, you know, tiny number of English archers suffering from dysentery have beaten the flower of French chivalry and stood against a heavy cavalry charge. There is a a romanticisation of the use of the bow by that point. But also, what's significant is that from, so from thirteen sixty-three, Edward III brings in that famous archery law that most people have probably heard of, that you have to practise archery in England every Sunday after church in the butts. If you're a fighting age male.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  You have to go to, because you have to go to church, legally required to go to church. Unless you've got a really, really good excuse, you're going to get fined for not going. And so everybody should be in church. Immediately after church, you have to go and practise with a bow and arrow.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  There's a lot of admin on a Sunday, isn't it? You'd be quite annoyed if you already had to go to church and now you've got to do archery as well.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. This is Edward III trying to make sure he's got a constant supply of archers to send over to France. The side effect of this is the militarisation of the entirety of English society. Everyone in England can use a bow. And so that becomes a part of Robin Hood that everyone can identify with. They're familiar with this.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  He's an everyman.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And I think a significant part of the threat of Robin Hood becomes the idea that he could be anyone. He's almost representing the entire English nation in that we can be pushed so far. If feudalism requires us to put up with your boot on our neck, but if you press a little bit too hard, just be aware that any one of us could pick up a bow and turn on you. And we know how to use it. So it almost becomes this this idea that, not that Robin Hood is out there somewhere, that he's a secret that's lost in the woods and you might never find him. Actually, maybe we're all Robin Hood.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Do you think that's why it's endured so long?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, it's a great story. You know, aside from Antony, who doesn't love?

• 49:25Speaker 05

  No, I actually like the Robin Hood story, I just don't like outlaws.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  You are going to regret saying this, when you're approached to play Dick Turpin in a film and you'll be like, no, sorry, I can't.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Yeah, no, it it's, it is a great story and and like, we've all, we all have stakes in it, like, we've just seen, not not financial stakes, unfortunately, but like, you know, Kevin Costner, the Fox in Disney, whatever it is, we all have a thing. And I'm really reminded, I think I've referenced her on this before in another medieval episode, my my lovely early English professor at undergrad, Professor Margaret Robson. She talked about Arthurian legend and how everything becomes, everything is legitimate because it's all legendised and over the generations, what we, you know, that she she would reference The Simpsons, saying that is just as legitimate as whatever's happening in the eleven hundreds and because it it's all fabrication in that sense.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Canon as well.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. And and that's one of the things I think about this in a in a similar way, where it's it's it's everybody's, kind of as you're saying there, in terms of this could be anyone. I'm also really intrigued. I know I would say this and there's obviously a bias here on my side, but I love that that message that you're saying there, Matt, about, you know, this could be anyone in England, step on our necks too much and blah, blah, blah. And I just think it's interesting how that disappears over the next three or four hundred years in terms of how the English interact with Ireland, for instance, because it it's very much that, it's very much foot on neck. And it's interesting that the the same doesn't apply. And I wonder if he disappears a little bit in that kind of early modern eighteenth century, but he does a little bit, like.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  I'm thinking now, does he appear in any eighteenth century protest culture? I don't, I don't think I've ever come across him as a

• 51:12Speaker 05

  No, this is what I'm thinking. In the eighteenth century.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Like, when does he reappear again? Is it the Victorians?

• 51:16Speaker 05

  I bet it's the Victorians.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  And I bet it's a really twee, the tights version, right? Like, I bet that's when we see him again.

• 51:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  That's super interesting. Arthurian legend, of course, full of magical forests as well. We need to do a forest episode.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  But there is also that element, picking up on on what you're saying, Antony, is is this why he becomes the wronged aristocrat and nobleman? It's almost like taking him away.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  When when Henry VIII is interacting with Robin Hood.

• 51:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  It's taking him away from the ordinary people. He's no longer that yeoman who knows how to use a bow.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  He's actually

• 51:51Speaker 00

  That political bite has been removed.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's coming from that elite. So he's been. Co-opted by the nobility to start to tell romantic stories about themselves, which requires taking him away and perhaps taking away the threat.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  Which coincides timewise, right? Like, you start to see it during the Tudors, and then by the time we get to the 18th century or whatever, well, of course, he's going to be almost assimilated and then reemerged later again.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you get Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and stuff like that, you know, stories of Robin Hood cropping up around those kinds of times.

• 52:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Against this romanticised image.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, literally a romantic figure. Be interesting to see if he comes back again. I'm thinking about, you know, the forest, we've got environmental concerns now. Lots of billionaires wrecking the planet, taking everyone's money. I wonder if he'll crop back up.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  You can be him.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  I will be Robin Hood. Give me a bow and arrow.

• 52:43Speaker 05

  You haven't got time, actually. I don't know what I'm saying. Why would I volunteer you for that?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  This was fascinating, Matt. And do you know what? It's when we talked about doing a Robin Hood episode, I was like, I don't know if we should do that. Is there any history? You know, is it just one of those stories where we're going to be talking around it, but there's no material? Do you know what? There's been so much history in here. I feel like we've waded through so much of the medieval period and got such a flavour for it. And actually, I would say, the answer to the question, did Robin Hood exist? Yes, in terms of, he was an everyman, he was there throughout the medieval period. He shapeshifted, he was something new for every generation. But he is absolutely in the popular imagination. You know, we talk so much on this podcast about it's difficult to access the mentalities

• 53:31Speaker 00

  of the past, the imaginations of the past, the minds of people who've lived before us, because, you know, you have the written record, you have the archaeological record. You still can't get into the brains, the thought process, the imagination of these people. And I think a story like Robin Hood actually allows us to do that, that we can have a glimpse of what it was to be a medieval person, to be a medieval peasant, to be a medieval yeoman, and to feel that you had the potential to embody someone who represented hope, who represented rebellion, a little bit of pushback, a little bit of creating space for yourself in an oppressive world. I think he absolutely did exist in those terms.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  Do you know what my takeaway from this is? And it came from the very beginning of the episode, and I was like, oh, I get it. My favourite character in all of the Robin Hood legend is Maid Marian.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  And I'm gay, if you didn't know. And you said at the very, very beginning that there was an association with the Cult of Mary. The Cult of Mary is a Marian cult. Maid Marian then obviously carries over into that. And I was like, oh, that's... I love when those things drop in.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  So, I mean, Maid Marian doesn't appear in Robin Hood stories till the 16th century. She's quite a late addition. She seems to have come from an old French story that's called Robin and Marian, that is about two people on a farm who fall in love and everything else, nothing to do with outlaws.

• 54:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  But people know of a Robin and Marian. So if you're looking for a love interest for Robin, Marian just works. People make that connection already.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  And it's also like their relationship's kind of chivalric, right, as well? That she is a high-status woman, and he kind of wins her heart by doing these good deeds and things. And we need to do a whole episode on Maid Marian now.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Let's do that. Matt, we have lots more episodes coming up with you, but for now, we're going to say goodbye to everyone. Thank you so much. If you've enjoyed this episode, we've got plenty more medieval history coming your way. Leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts. Comment below if you're watching on YouTube, and we will see you next time.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Dear honeys, this is goodbye.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts.