Latest Robin Hood Movies Miss the Target

Robin Hood was not the political rebel that two recent movies have made him out to be--he was only an outlaw. Yet, neither Patrick Bergin nor Kevin Costner ever became serious highwaymen in their TV and film versions.

It was obvious from the beginning of both portrayals that the bandit gang each joined would be transformed by them into more sophisticated political movements against the corrupt and repressive authorities. However, in “elevating” Robin Hood from bandit to rebel, the legend’s message has been severely weakened.

Robin Hood stole from the rich because he didn’t like them; he especially disliked the higher clergy and in particular the Abbot of St. Mary’s Monastery, landlord and moneylender extraordinaire . The robberies of this most famous bandit had little to do with the welfare of the poor.

Robin Hood’s “headquarters” was in Barnsdale, northern England, near a stretch of the Great North Road that was by his time (probably the early 14th Century) and for decades thereafter an ideal spot to commit highway robbery. From an elevated point nearby (still known as Robin Hood’s Stone), bandits could observe traffic along this major highway for miles in both directions, yet not be seen. Sometimes, Robin and his band, at its strongest consisting of 140 yeomen-archers (“of free blood and bold”), operated as far south as Nottinghamshire and Sherwood Forest, about 40 miles from their Barnsdale lair. It was in this second zone that the crafty outlaw challenged the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham. In fact, the mature Robin Hood legend of the Middle Ages probably emerged from two separate and earlier tales, one about an outlaw-hero centered in Barnsdale and the other about a villain-sheriff centered in Nottinghamshire.

When Robin Hood was not engaged in highway robbery, he delighted in hunting the king’s deer, which was a crime according to the law but cause for admiration from the common people, who found it difficult to accept that wildlife should belong to the aristocrats.

Since Robin Hood was only a bandit, he did not steal for the benefit of the poor . Neither in the original medieval verses celebrating Robin Hood, nor in the many spinoffs that appeared down through the centuries, are there any episodes in the legend that actually demonstrate his kindness to the poor, much less his distribution of largess to them.

Therefore, it should be clear to any attentive reader of his story that the original celebration of Robin Hood as a hero rested solely on his hostility to the rich and the powerful. The people admired him for the enemies he had made, not for any favors he bestowed on the poor.

The shift of emphasis in the legend’s message from Robin Hood, the avenger of the downtrodden-- but only in the figurative sense-- to Robin Hood, the patron of the poor, was the result of two developments: (1) the appropriation of his person by the English upper class in two 17th-Century plays that asserted that he was an aristocrat transformed into a charitable prankster for whom life in the greenwood was simply jolly good fun; (2) authors of 19th-Century juvenile literature who were uncomfortable in presenting their hero as a bald-faced highwayman so they perpetuated that false image of the charitable prankster.

The two recent portrayals of Robin Hood by Bergin and Costner have only managed to reproduce this major alteration of the medieval legend, but their “Robin of Locksley” is not Robin Hood!

The fine message of the unexpurgated medieval legend--which rested on the belief/hope of the common people (probably the yeoman in particular) that justice should prevail over a law that unfairly favored the rich and well-born--was lost by making its hero a “defrocked” aristocrat. It is a shame because that message is still valid today.