What is it about the legend of Robin Hood—or, more properly, the collection of legends surrounding him—that has given this character such an enduring appeal? On the surface, he is an unlikely hero: an outcast, a mugger, a murderer. Yet he is still as popular as ever, popping up in films and on television with astonishing regularity. When I was researching Outlaw, my first book in a series of novels about Robin Hood, I was looking for the hero of my boyhood: the quip-trading, do-gooding gentleman-archer, who stole from the rich only to give the loot to the poor. Instead, I discovered a bloodier, more mercenary man.
There is little indication of giving money to the poor in the original stories: our boy merely stops innocent travellers and demands money with menaces—albeit with a joke or two thrown in. And, despite his deep Christian faith, this Robin is quite prepared to kill, and even to condone the murder of noncombatants. In "Robin Hood and The Monk" (c1450), the earliest surviving poem centred on him, the outlawed Robin is spotted by a monk while praying at a church in Nottingham. The monk reports Robin to the sheriff, who captures our hero. Later, the monk is executed by Little John for informing, while Much the miller's son casually kills a little boy who witnesses the act to stop him giving evidence. It's difficult to imagine one of Errol Flynn's merry men slaughtering a child.
The more I read of the early stories, the more I realised how large the gulf is between the modern perception of Robin and the way our ancestors saw him. Robin is primarily out for himself. He is, essentially, a thief. All the class-warfare, romantic-hero guff was bolted on by the Victorians. Then, one day, when I was watching The Godfather for the umpteenth time, a little light bulb flickered above my head. Don Corleone, I realised, was behaving exactly like a medieval feudal lord. And if 20th-century gangsters behaved like medieval lords then, I figured, I could make my medieval Robin behave like a gangster.
In my stories, you'll find Robin being paid for "protection" by entire villages; he is deep in the 12th century money-lending rackets and he extorts cash from passing pilgrims with the threat of violence. And heaven help anyone who even thinks of squealing on Robin to the authorities. The very least he can expect is to have his tongue ripped out.
It is this buried side of Robin Hood that is at least partly responsible for his enduring appeal. Robin does the things that we would all secretly like to do. He doesn't just thumb his nose at authority figures—he goes out, takes their money and hacks their heads off. The current anger that people feel towards greedy bankers and corrupt MPs is a faint echo of the impotent rage a medieval peasant must have felt towards greedy tax-collectors and corrupt churchmen. How great must have been the vicarious pleasure felt by a downtrodden serf hearing tales of his ruthless champion sticking it to the Man.
Or maybe not. What has been established is that, from as early as 1262, outlaws were being referred to by the courts as Robin Hoods. This could mean two things. Either there was an existing legend about a man named Robin Hood by the middle of the 13th century, and other outlaws were nicknamed after him; or a Robin Hood (that is, a "robber of the wood") was the stock name given to any outlaw—and was later given to a real man, or men.
Determined to make the background to my stories as authentic as I could, I unearthed a wealth of material about the circumstances of ordinary medieval people. Our lives, today, are unreasonably constrained. We are locked into place by our mortgages, by the tyranny of the nine-to-five working day, by traffic jams, by an ever increasing weight of laws, by petty tyrants like traffic wardens and office managers—and so on. Yet, compared to the life of an ordinary person in the 12th century, ours is a life of extraordinary freedom. A serf could never leave the land he worked for his lord and owned literally nothing but his hungry belly. He had to attend church or be fined, and could not even marry without permission.
Despite the vast differences between us, what we share with these people is the perception of lack of freedom. This, I believe, explains why Robin Hood is as popular today as in the medieval past. We still feel the urge to throw off the chains of our culture and run wild in the woodland, merrily whacking the sheriff's men (or other authority figures). Just as a peasant, trudging year after endless year behind a plough, daydreamed of kicking over the traces and breaking free to murder and plunder in the wildwood with Robin and his men.
