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The legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood are the only two literary legacies of the Middle Ages still strongly present in popular culture. Stephen Lawhead wrote his version of the Arthurian story some years ago, very creditably and, for this reviewer, very enjoyably. Hood is the first volume of a projected "King Raven" trilogy, which does not promise so well.
by Steven R. Lawhead |
It is true that the Robin Hood cycle, though so often reproduced by moviemakers, producers of tv series, and children's authors, has long presented the most serious problems of adaptation. To start with, there is no clear story of Robin Hood, in the sense of a connected sequence of events like the conception of Mordred, the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere, the vengeance of Sir Gawain, the Morte Arthur itself. Instead, what we have is a powerful scenario: outlaws, greenwood, merry men, longbows, inept officers of justice like the Sheriff of Nottingham. Merry Men are captured and rescued, the rich are robbed to feed the poor, traps are set and escaped from, in the end the king turns up and forgives everyone. But there's not much story in it, and there's no canonical version like Malory's Arthur.
Another problem (now significantly so unwelcome as to be all but forgotten) is that while the earliest literary versions we have may be weak on narrative, they are remarkably clear about their social positioning. The figure of the man in the greenwood, Robin Hood, or Robin 'Ood, or (T.H. White's idea) Robin Wood, may go back centuries into the time of myth, but Robin as we have him in the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages is a representative of the yeomanry. His weapons are the cheap ones of the rural peasantry, bow and quarterstaff. Sometimes he has a sword, but he never wears armor and does not ride to battle. His social prejudices are those of the rural peasantry as well—and this is where the embarrassment starts for the modern rewriter. Medieval Robin has nothing against the aristocracy at all, indeed he likes them, and is ready to assist them, as long as they are real aristocrats (i.e., men who have inherited their rank from old time), and as long as they are prepared to be "good fellows." His enemies and victims are tax-collectors, officers of the central government, the upper ranks of the clergy, especially abbots of well-endowed monasteries, and in particular lawyers: the literate classes, in other words. Modern writers, perhaps uneasily aware that they themselves would get very short shrift from a modern Robin, find this hard to sympathize with, while Marxist and sub-Marxist academics feel that Robin is much too like the surly, independent, white male Republican or Conservative citizens who voted in Presidents Bush, Bush, and Reagan, and Mrs. Thatcher too.
The medieval ballads indeed seem very clearly to spring from a particular time, the time of Edward, "our comely king," as they loyally call him. Which Edward? Surely Robin's archery gives the answer. It is Edward III (d. 1376), whose smashing, unexpected, and successive victories over Scots, French, and Spanish relied as heavily on the unique skills of the English bow-using yeomanry as they did on the more familiar ones of the English armored aristocracy—with whom the yeomen (as in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales portraits) formed both a social unit and a weapon-system. That cohesion did not last long, dissolved by cannon and handguns, and the yeomanry's moment in the sun soon passed, to be remembered only in the titles of some British military units, recruited for generations from the upper ranks of the rural peasantry, officered by the rural gentry, and, like their redneck successors, always ready for an excuse to break the heads of the urban proletariat whom they despised.
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