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All clear enough, but a deep embarrassment to even 19th-century liberals, and with little appeal to modern urban consumers of fiction. And then there is the basic contradiction: Robin hates all officers of the crown, but is totally loyal to the king. Again, this is perfectly familiar in certain circles even now, where the "support our troops" bumper sticker may well co-exist with utter hostility to all agents of the government, and especially the irs. But it's not a nice scenario. Accordingly, Walter Scott replaced it. In his version, in Ivanhoe (1819), Robin is an outlaw during an interregnum, during that period when King Richard Lionheart was absent on crusade or in prison, and England was run by his wicked brother John. Rebellion against the government was then compatible with loyalty to the Crown, and moreover—in Scott's version—the whole matter was basically ethnic. The rulers were Normans, the oppressed were Saxons, Robin was a Saxon guerrilla, the future was a coming together of the races as represented by the Saxon-descended but culturally Norman Ivanhoe. To this more modern versions have added the post-medieval notion that Robin must be an aristocrat himself—though of course a very democratic aristocrat, like Kevin Costner rapping out "Don't call me 'Sire'!"
Stephen Lawhead's Hood is now advertised as an entirely new representation, the real Robin at last, rescued from the blurs of antiquity, but it isn't. It's Walter Scott again, with a further ethnic shift. Lawhead has decided that Robin was not originally English, but Welsh—though he prefers the term "British," "Welsh" being an ignorant Saxonism. The Welsh invented the longbow. The Welsh resisted the Normans for centuries, where the Saxons caved in. The Welsh had impenetrable forests, where England had been turned into pasture and garden. It all fits together! And it does, as long as one stays within the realms of comic-book history, as also comic-book geography, botany, sociology, and economics.
Lawhead in fact curiously repeats even Walter Scott's errors, though these were seen and complained about almost two hundred years ago. He sets his story in the reign of William Rufus (d. 1100). On p. 63, however, a fat cleric turns up, "one of the order of begging brothers whom the Ffreinc called Frères and the English called Friars. They were all but unknown among the Cymry." Not just the Cymry, since the Franciscans were not founded till at earliest 1209 and the Dominicans a few years later. But Friar Tuck is in the traditional scenario, so Lawhead has to have him. Lawhead, however, seems completely vague about the medieval church. One of his characters is the head of a monastery, Bishop Asaph. The Celtic church had its peculiarities, but a bishop heads a diocese, not a monastery, the latter controlled by an abbot. To even matters up, later a wicked Norman abbot comes on the scene—an abbot without even a tenuous connection to any monastery. On p. 152 a Norman earl imagines a future scene when civilization shall have been established, churches, "perhaps a monastery or two as well. Maybe, in time, an abbey." What does Lawhead think an abbey is, a cathedral? All this might not matter, if it did not have so much to do with money. As Robin Hood could have told him, monks, unlike friars, depended on large endowments of land, were notoriously rich and notoriously grasping landlords: that's why he targets them.
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