Why Robin Hood was outlawed Today, the yeoman would be a danger tourist

Medieval social hierarchy divided England roughly into three “estates”, according to historian Ian Mortimer: the lords who governed, the clergy who prayed, and everyone else who worked. But as Mortimer also shows, there was huge variation among workers. Pop-history sometimes caricatures feudal life as starkly divided between lords and grubby, miserable peons after the fashion of Monty Python, or perhaps Baldrick in Blackadder. But in reality, the workers’ estate varied immensely — notably in how free they were. 

“Villeins” were tied to a great estate, and entitled to work a portion of its land in exchange labour. They were, in a sense, part of the estate’s “property” and estates that changed hands were sold complete with tied villeins. But over time, and at accelerating pace after the Black Death in the 14th century, much freer working-class groups emerged: the yeomen. Some of these, Mortimer explains, were small farmers with a freehold on their land — a class that gained in prominence with the sharp population fall after the plague. Others might be tradesmen who, again, could command much higher wages due to the labour shortage. 

Meanwhile, over the Hundred Years’ War, yeomen had also become strongly associated with the development of semi-professional soldiery — and particularly with England’s increasingly lethal longbowmen. As one military historian describes, these highly skilled archers came increasingly to typify the rising importance accorded to merit, over inherited rank.

By the time Robin Hood was first mentioned in Piers Plowman, the yeomen’s real-world independence created a class far less compliant than indentured villeins. It was yeomen who led the so-called “Peasants’ Revolt” which erupted in 1381 against John of Gaunt’s excessive taxation. 

Robin Hood emerges, then, as a folkloric representation of this emerging middle class. But in a twist that perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the risks of lawlessness attached to yeomen’s relative freedom, he was also depicted as an outlaw. In medieval justice, this category was reserved for criminals deemed so dangerous they were denied all protection of the law. But in an England whose total population was about half that of modern London, such fugitives would simply flee to forests or other under-populated areas, where they would survive on a mixture of foraging, poaching, and banditry. 

There were many such gangs in the medieval English wilderness, meaning travellers were wise to travel with armed retainers, or as we might call them today “thugs”. But unlike Robin, most historic leaders of outlaw gangs were minor aristocrats, and these gangs would rob, rape, and kill anyone. By contrast, the Robin Hood of early folklore is a yeoman and skilled archer, like the soldiers of the Hundred Years’ War — and while he’s often violent, early stories often emphasise that he directs his attacks only at priests and lords. 

The medieval Robin combines Christian piety with violent contempt for actual priests, and displays a kind of class solidarity even across formal differences in social rank: he often shows sympathy to impoverished knights, while scorning, scamming, or even murdering great lords. In one 15th-century work, The Gest of Robin Hood, for example, Robin lends money to a poor knight so he can reclaim his lands from a villainous abbot. Later, Little John has a huge punch-up with another lord’s personal chef only for both men to shake hands, get drunk together, rob the lord and return to Robin in the greenwood.

The sense that emerges is of a germinal middle class, finding an imaginative language for self-representation. Overall, the sensibility that emanates is volatile, competitive, bloodthirsty, and full of lust for life: a hardy group, independent-minded to the point of recklessness, and shaped against the impersonal forces of church and governance by luck, courage, and in-group loyalty. They are recognisably the class of loyal, warlike Englishmen whom Samuel Johnson would describe in 1760 as possessing “a kind of epidemick bravery”. 

This pious, violent, sentimental but always fiercely vital character couldn’t be further from the purse-lipped, curtain-twitching sensibility commonly associated with England’s modern middle class. This transformation began in the 19th century; it too can be traced via that era’s reimagining of Robin Hood, from the merry and violent medieval hero into the version whose disappearance from Nottingham Building Society has caused such a kerfuffle.

Johnson’s description of “epidemick bravery” among the English soldiery was written amid yet another round of war with France, now intensified and globalised by these rival nations’ competition for colonial territories. Just four years after that conflict concluded with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Sir Walter Scott defined Robin Hood for Britain’s era of peak nationalism, in his epic three-novel reimagining of 12th-century England, Ivanhoe: a text that arguably made an equivalent contribution to Victorian Britain’s self-image as the cowboy myth did in 20th-century America. 

The story centres on an Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family, struggling to survive amid dastardly Norman occupiers that Victorian readers no doubt gleefully identified with their recently defeated French antagonists. It’s all set against the backdrop of the Crusades, and the forest-dwelling “Robin of Locksley” makes numerous appearances and does heroic things before pledging fealty to the returning Richard the Lionheart. More or less every Robin Hood since has the heroic, patriotic outlaw-underdog traits first depicted by Scott, and many repeat his motifs: for example Ivanhoe is the origin of the famous moment, immortalised by Arrow Cam in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin splits his opponent’s arrow in an archery contest. 

It’s thanks to Scott, then, that Robin Hood became indelibly linked to patriotism, Englishness, royalism, and (more obliquely) national triumph against those damnable French (ahem, sorry, Norman) fops. But does this Robin make sense today? After all, the global empire that gave rise to and was legitimised by it was dismantled half a century ago. So there’s little point in writing angry articles about the evaporation of its last symbolic memories, save to spare Telegraph readers the pain of thinking too directly about the political and territorial realities driving that evaporation.

And also follows that in the context of modern post-imperial Britain it probably makes sense to bin the Victorian Robin Hood. Aside from anything else, his high imperial Ivanhoe connotations are surely out of keeping with a Nottingham that, since 2001, has gone from 81% white British to almost half ethnic minority according to the 2021 census. Under those circumstances, we can hardly blame the Nottingham Building Society for pivoting away from British Empire-coded symbology toward the more nebulous and ductile “financial diversity”. 

Meanwhile where are England’s yeomen now? For some time now, the picture for what’s left of this class has been bleak. Commentators have long remarked on the hollowing-out of middle class life in the British Isles, and the way both Tories and, now, Labour, seem always to favour policies that fall hardest on their shoulders. 

But perhaps it’s less that they’ve been obliterated, than — like Robin of old — they’re fleeing the priests and sheriffs who would bind them. In Samuel Johnson’s time, or indeed that of Sir Walter Scott, those with the vitality, courage, and lawlessness of the medieval Robin Hood might have found an outlet Great Britain’s imperial sprawl. But where would such a character flourish today? And the grim answer is: probably not in England. Instead, today’s Robin Hood might be flouting employment law to make a fortune job-stacking from a beach in Indonesia, or outraging polite society as a danger tourist in Afghanistan. Perhaps he’d be a mercenary, in one of the modern world’s less-than-completely-official warzones. Perhaps he’d be across the Atlantic, dreaming of conquering the stars.

For there’s still plenty of wilderness in the world, for those yeomen with a taste for danger and a casual attitude to the rules. But there’s none in Sherwood now: just shabby Victorian terraces. The men of the greenwood are all gone, roaming further afield.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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