Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s a famous outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin Hood imagery it’s used since 1980. The press release boasts that the new abstract design celebrates something called “financial diversity”; Nottingham residents, meanwhile, expressed bewilderment at what, precisely, is so “outdated” about the folklore hero.
Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.
Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”.
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.
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SubscribeNottingham Building Society: “We’re with the Sheriff now.”
Well-played, sir.
Frontiers are just that, borders between “civilization” and “the wilderness”. And they change as previous badlands become gentrified. So we can’t expect that the yeomen remain where they can no longer find purpose.
Still, no matter the change in demographic, there’s nothing wrong with a symbol that indicates where the city has come from. Indeed, it could have been integrated into the current logo to show a link between past and future, and more than that, a direction.
Great article! Ms Harrington asks where might Robin flourish today? Thanks to the demographic changes outlined in the article, Nottingham is the UK’s gun crime capital. So the latter-day Merry Men in Nottingham can still “survive on a mixture of foraging, poaching, and banditry”, plus welfare benefits, of course. Though not mentioned in Piers Plowman or Ivanhoe, their exploits are glorified in rap lyrics.
“in the context of modern post-imperial Britain it probably makes sense to bin the Victorian Robin Hood”
I enjoyed the article, but it talked as if Robin of Sherwood wasn’t on ITV in the 1980’s in which Robin was explicitly portrayed as a grubby Anglo-Saxon resisting oppressive Norman occupiers. They even had a Saracen as one of the outlaw gang (very woke avant la lettre!).
I don’t really follow the writer’s conflation of the Robin Hood legends and the British Empire.
Yes, I thought that Robin Hood, William Tell, King Arthur, etc, etc were children’s fiction.
Yes, bit of a leap wasn’t it? The Victorians liked it, so…
The Nottingham Building Society should add some French Norman lord, corrupt, excommunicated from the Church and sexually loose, to its brand, all in the name of diversity.
Further decline in the Spirit of England……..off shored to Sarawak…