13. The Gentrification of Robin Hood
The tale of the medieval outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, fought the Sheriff of Nottingham and the evil King John, and helped the rightful monarch Richard the Lionheart regain his throne, is one of England’s greatest folkloric legends. Surprisingly, for a fictional figure whose story revolved around armed robbery of the rich, Robin Hood first gained widespread popularity as a result of plays originally staged for the upper classes in Elizabethan England. First, however, the playwrights had to gentrify Robin Hood.
So he was transformed from a commoner bandit and remade into a nobleman to whom the well-heeled could better relate. Such gentrification can be traced to the playwright Anthony Mundy, who reinvented the fictional outlaw as an aristocrat, Earl Robert of Huntington. He had gone away to the fight in the Crusades and returned to discover that he had been wrongfully disinherited by his uncle. So he flees to Sherwood Forrest where he becomes a bandit, meets and falls in love with Lady Marion, and kicks off the legend.
