The Legendary Bandit of Sherwood Forrest
One of England’s greatest legendary heroes is the medieval outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. A bandit who fought the Sheriff of Nottingham and the evil King John, and helped the rightful monarch Richard the Lionheart regain his throne. Surprisingly, for a figure who stole from the rich, Robin Hood first gained widespread popularity as a result of plays originally staged for Elizabethan England’s upper classes. First, however, the playwrights had to gentrify Robin Hood from a commoner bandit, and transform him into a nobleman to whom the well-heeled could better relate. Such gentrification can be traced to the playwright Anthony Mundy, who reinvented the outlaw as an aristocrat, Earl Robert of Huntington, who was wrongfully disinherited by his uncle.
So he fled to Sherwood Forrest where he became an outlaw, met and fell in love with Lady Marion, and kicked off the legend. In real life, of course, nobody performed all the noble deeds of derring-do ascribed to Robin Hood. However, there were plenty of outlaws, nearly all commoners, who thumbed their noses at upper class oppressors, and thus became popular with the lower classes. In the medieval era, “Robinhood” or “Rabunhod” or “Robehod” were common nicknames for criminals, that appear in numerous twelfth century court records. However, those Robin Hoods were the kinds of criminals who acted out of any highbrow motives. Instead, they stole for the mundane reasons that led most people into crime back then, and that still put people on the paths of criminality today.
