Robin of Where, You Say?

A recent article on the BBC news site had the county of Kent laying claim to the Robin Hood legend. As a man of Kent myself (not a Kentish man - that's the other side of the Medway) should I be pleased with this? Or should I be worried that Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is on historically shaky foundations?

Of course there always has been some to and fro over the genesis of Robin Hood. For years, Nottinghamshire's claim to the hero has been disputed by neighbouring South Yorkshire, with Barnsdale Forest near Doncaster taking the role of Sherwood. Why does it matter? To be honest, most of it is just friendly rivalry, but at its heart is a potential tourist goldmine. Sherwood Forest attracts thousands of visitors every year and the new Robin Hood attraction planned for the fields outside Edwinstowe will no doubt increase those numbers. If Yorkshire or Kent could make good their claims they could, they think, have those tourist pounds for themselves.

The trouble is the idea is fundamentally flawed and I don't just mean the idea that Robin Hood came from Kent (which I'll come back to in a moment). When it comes to tourism, history is in eye of the viewer. It's why Doune Castle attributes ninety percent of its visitor numbers to the fact it was used as Camelot (and nearly every other castle) in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's why, when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was a hit at the box office, Old Wardour Castle - the historically anachronistic home of Robin in the film - experienced a boom in visitor numbers.

But Robin Hood is more than just a film - it's a legend. So, whilst tourist numbers will ebb and flow as silver screen interpretations bring him in and out of focus, there is always a background level of visitors. Some of these are people who are making a once in a lifetime trip to the UK and want to visit the outlaw's home as part of the tour, others are more regular visitors - American Robin Hood societies and suchlike. For these people what matters is the associations of the legend, the vein which runs through every interpretation of the story, from the big screen matinee idol versions of the golden age of cinema, through to popular television interpretations of more recent years. And Hollywood has long accepted the idea of Sherwood as Robin's home. Sometimes that Sherwood will be a back-lot in America, sometimes a sparse East European woodland, but it's always Sherwood. Which means that is where the tourists go. And unlike Arthur's Camelot, which has an uncertain location, Sherwood is a fact of geography. So when the tourists decide to visit Sherwood, they know - more or less - exactly where it is. They might occasionally end up at Sherwood Pines, no doubt wondering which of Robin's men inspired the "Go ape" treetop obstacle course, but they will at least reach Nottinghamshire.

Could an alternative truth take hold? Could a popular film which had Robin of Aylesford pitched against the evil Sheriff of Maidstone change perceptions enough to rewrite the legend and reroute the tourists? Let's consider the lemming. Up until relatively recently, most people had never heard of lemmings. Then, in 1958, Disney made a documentary called "White Wilderness" in which lemmings were seen to throw themselves from cliffs. It was faked - the filmmakers actually threw the lemmings off - but the discovery of this didn't change the perception of suicidal lemmings any more than it changed the idea that Disney were a family friendly company. After all, which family hasn't used a turntable to throw helpless rodents to the deaths for fun? The point is that ideas have a certain traction: once they find a place in the public consciousness they tend to hang on there, regardless of what comes after. The Robin Hood legend has evolved over the years (the connection with the crusades being a relatively new addition, for example) but anything which actually flies in the face of the kernel of the legend is seen as counter-factual. So, for example, a recent series of books which reset the stories as part of the fallout from the Norman Conquest was accepted as interesting rather than as overturning what went before. It's conceivable that if nobody told a Robin Hood story for a couple of centuries that you could effectively reset the legend, but that's about as likely as two decades going by without someone doing another series of Batman films. Popular characters are good box office and it's when they remain true to the key points of their precursors that they do best.

So what of the veracity of the claims themselves? If we can agree they won't make a blind bit of difference to the public perception, could they at least be historically valid? Traditionally, the Robin Hood legend has been set during the tail end of King Richard's reign in the thirteenth century. At this time, Richard's brother John was in effective charge of the country. Whilst Richard's wars in the Holy Land were draining the country's coffers, much of the blame for this fell on John, who was widely seen to be using the situation to line his own pockets using place-men like the Sheriff of Nottingham to enforce his tyranny. The Kent claim places him slightly later, when John had assumed Richard's throne and the country was invaded by the French Prince Louis. The theory is that Robin was a resistance fighter against Louis and would therefore have been seen as an outlaw to the invader.

This is, of course, somewhat tenuous, not least because it would place Robin on the side of King John. Louis' invasion is a matter of record - in fact some historians believe there is a credible argument that Louis was, for six months, King Louis I of England - but the Robin Hood of the original tales was fighting against an oppressive state, not against an invading army. For an invader to become an effective oppressor in six months would, for the thirteenth century, be something of a record. In fact, it would require there to be little or no resistance to the invasion amongst the ruling classes, which can only happen if - like William the Conqueror - Louis replaced the aristocracy, or if - like William of Orange - he was actually used by the aristocracy to stage a coup. Either case would have resulted in a successful invasion and a longer reign - which isn't what happened. A Robin Hood who was fighting against the local Sheriff would therefore not have seen Louis as the cause of his problems - he might even have seen an invader as a solution to them.

And there's a lot of difference between an outlaw and what in later years would be called a partisan. Outlaws weren't uncommon in Mediaeval England: noblemen traditionally passed their entire estates to their eldest sons and sent their second sons to the priesthood. This left any further offspring as disinherited and landless, which led many of them to live outside the law, robbing and killing to support themselves. Some of these would have become mercenary soldiers, but this again would have been for profit rather than from some sense of patriotism. Some versions of the Robin Hood legend explicitly refer to him as the son of a nobleman, which would certainly be in keeping with the historical outlaw.

That's not to say the original legend isn't without problems, of course. Robin Hood is said to have robbed from the rich to give to the poor. This robbery almost always takes the form of currency. But prior to the Black Death, currency was very limited: serfdom meant people worked the land of their masters in return for a plot of land they could work for themselves. They weren't paid at all, which means that oppression could only take the form of having their own food confiscated (which sometimes happened in times of war) or of being expected to work longer on the master's land to the neglect of their own. Serfs weren't cash poor as we'd understand it - they had little or no money at all. They certainly weren't subject to taxation. There were rent-paying freemen, who would have been taxed on the value of their land, but these were in the minority (estimated at less than 10% of the population). A serf turning up with a handful of money to spend would, therefore, have been highly suspicious. They would probably have been arrested - automatically assumed to be the recipient of the proceeds of crime.

The Black Death changed all this. Suddenly, some feudal lords found themselves without peasants to work their land. Offering serfs from other parts of the country a promotion to freeman was a way of trying to address this shortfall. At the same time, the tax take fell and when the administration of Richard II attempted to raise land taxes and restrict labour rights to maintain their income they triggered the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, in which a man of Kent, Wat Tyler, played a prominent role. This makes the fourteenth century a much more credible setting for a Robin Hood character - in Nottingham or Kent.

But that's not where the legend originates: according to Wikipedia, the first references to Robin and Marion are dated to about 1280 and are found, not in Kent, but in France. The story doesn't mention any robbing of the rich to give to the poor, but is a simple chivalric tale of a noble man rescuing his lady. whether the story originated in France or crossed the Channel from England in the same way that Arthurian tales did we don't know - literary tradition at the time was full of people stealing stories and characters from each other - but Robin endured and the character eventually became rooted in thirteenth century Nottingham. No doubt, as the character became popular, his legend grew - minstrels taking other stories and attributing them to Robin to please their audiences. Some might also have grafted a little contemporary politics into the tales - criticising the tax policies of their own times by telling stories of a man who dared to stand up against arbitrary government in the past. By setting the stories in the reign of an earlier king already judged by history to be a tyrant the canny minstrel would have been securing themselves against charges of treason or sedition. Shakespeare took out a similar insurance policy in writing a study of tyranny using the fictional King Lear.

As the legend grew, Robin changed. He went from being a romantic hero to the archetypal folk hero. Chauceresque satires of authority accreted round the central story, giving it a richness which made it a credible shorthand for Merrie England and an attractive target for novelists and film-makers right up to the present day.

So was there a Robin Hood? Personally, I don't know but I doubt it. There may have been someone called Robin Hood from whom the original romance arose, but it is more likely that the name was whipped up by an author when they wanted to write a thirteenth-century bodkin ripper. Certainly the character is a composite, which means that any historical original would bear no resemblance to our perception of him. For the purposes of Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow, however, there had to be a Robin and he had to be where the legends placed him. A book where Erasmus went back and didn't find Robin would have been at best misleading and at worst incredibly dull. As a writer of comic fiction, therefore, I feel entirely justified in writing something which may not be historically accurate. I certainly don't feel any need to reset the story in Kent (although it's amusing to note that Erasmus' school is actually a Kentish one reset in Nottinghamshire).

As to the security of the legend itself... Well, Hollywood has already made its decision. They might not know where Nottingham is, how its locals speak or what thirteenth century architecture actually looked like, but that doesn't matter. Like horns on Viking helmets, once something becomes the accepted filmic vision, that is what tends to inform the wider world. That is why, despite the fact there hasn't been a Robin Hood with a green feathered cap since Disney's version, they still sell them to the tourists at the Sherwood Forest visitor centre. And that's why foreign tourists will continue to come to Nottinghamshire whatever the BBC claims.