Robin Hood: The Magna Carta

Tags

King John, Kings and Queens, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Oscar Isaac, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

In most Robin Hood movies, John is a bad guy because he’s A) hoping to usurp the throne from his older brother King Richard and B) collecting taxes, which is always an evil thing to do in movies. But Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott) takes a totally different approach. The first part of the movie deals with the totally legitimate transfer of the crown from the now-dead Richard to John (Oscar Isaac). John isn’t trying to usurp anything—he’s the lawful king. And while John wants taxes, his attempts to collect the taxes aren’t really the problem. The problem is that the villainous Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong) is abusing the authority John gave him because he wants to stir up a rebellion against John. So the film abandons the standard-issue Bad King stuff that Johns in these movies do. As a result, it has to find other ways to make John a Bad King, as Sellars and Yeatman would put it.

At the start of the film, John’s being a dick. His mother Eleanor discovers his wife Isabel of Gloucester standing outside his bedroom. She’s locked out because John is cavorting inside with Isabella of Angouleme (Léa Seydoux), the niece of his rival King Philip of France. He decides to divorce Isabel so he can marry Isabella. And in fact John did ditch Isabel just after his accession to the throne in favor of Isabella. This plotline, if we want to grace it with such a term, doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just there to signal that John’s a Douchebag with a Crown, even before he has the crown part.

King John

Then he starts getting demanding about tax money, and sends Godfrey off to collect some. But the film gets John’s financial situation all wrong. In the film, he just seems to want lots of money because the government is expensive to run. The reality is a lot messier. John’s financial problem most stemmed from the loss of Normandy to Philip in 1204. He spent the rest of his reign trying to raise the money to finance efforts to recover Normandy. So John was, in fact, trying to recover part of his rightful inheritance that had been confiscated from him.

John’s strategy for raising money had comparatively little to do with taxation, and everything to do with what historians term ‘feudal dues’. As King of England, John was the feudal lord of the English nobility; they held land from him as fiefs, and that gave them obligations to him. These obligations were widely acknowledged, but not really codified. Among the rights that it was universally acknowledged a king had over his vassals were

The right to control the remarriage of a vassal’s widow, or alternately the right to charge her a fee to be free from that control

The right to take a vassal’s orphaned minor heirs into wardship, which allowed him to draw revenues from their fiefs until they were adults

The right to arrange marriages from heirs in wardship

The right to demand a fee (called a relief) when a vassal’s heir took over the fief

The right to demand gifts from his vassals for the marriage of his daughters and the knighting of his sons

The right to demand either 40 days’ military service a year or alternately a cash payment (called scutage) to be free from that service

It needs to be emphasized that these practices were entirely traditional, and in England dated back to the Norman Conquest in the mid-11^th century. John’s father and brother had regularly demanded these dues from their vassals, and when John demanded them he had as much right to do so as his predecessors.

Only a douchebag sits on a throne like that

What John was doing that was problematic was finding ways to use these rights as money-raising devices to help fund a campaign in France. John took advantage of the fact that these dues were only vaguely regulated. It was unclear just how much of a relief a lord could demand from a vassal’s heir, for example, so John charged aggressive reliefs. He ordered his officials to aggressively exploit the fiefs he controlled through wardship, draining money out of them and failing to maintain the properties adequately. He essentially auctioned off the marriages of heiresses and widows, often marrying below their social station (called disparagement). He declared military campaigns, levied scutage, and then cancelled the campaign. These actions were not illegal, but they were distasteful to many of the nobles.

John’s father Henry II had built up royal authority in part by creating a centralized legal system in which plaintiffs paid the crown money to initiate various legal proceedings in royal court. John found various ways to manipulate the legal system to his benefit. Since it was his court, there was nothing illegal about, for example, imposing heaving fines for small offenses, or re-trying a defendant who had been acquitted, or ordering someone imprisoned without a trial. These were all tools that John used to coerce money or obedience out of various subjects.

What offended John’s nobles was not that he was doing these things per se, but rather that he was doing them more than they considered appropriate, and that he was doing these things against them. After nearly a decade of these practices, John’s barons rebelled and seized London. John, working through Archbishop Stephen Langton, negotiated the Magna Carta, an agreement in which John ‘voluntarily’ promised to abide by various enumerated limits. For example, the Magna Carta specifies the amount of money that can be demanded as a relief. It forbids mandatory scutage, the disparagement of widows, and so on. It establishes rules of due process in the legal system and forbids double jeopardy. And it established that if John wished to impose other financial devices, he would have to get the permission of the men who were going to be paying. In other words, if John wanted to impose taxes distinct from the feudal dues, he had to get permission from the tax-payers first. John hadn’t been collecting taxes at all; he was collecting feudal dues and legal fines. But Robin Hood movies translate the issue to modern audiences as taxes because that’s an issue we can understand.

One of four surviving copies of the Magna Carta

In Ridley Scott’s movie, however, the Magna Carta predates John. It was written by Robin’s stonemason father about 25-30 years earlier, during the reign of Henry II. It wasn’t a practical result of negotiations; it was some sort of political manifesto that articulated Enlightenment ideas about ‘freedom’ and human equality 600 years early. It wasn’t a disagreement about the exploitation of feudal rights; it was an attack on royal authority, viewed as tyranny. Needless to say, this is total Hollywood gibberish. Treating the Magna Carta as a sweeping statement of political rights makes no sense whatsoever and situating it in the reign of Henry II rather than late in John’s reign renders it so devoid of context as to be essentially meaningless.

But the movie does get one thing right. John repudiated Magna Carta the moment he thought he could get away with it, and it remained a dead issue until his infant son Henry III inherited the throne the next year. At his coronation, the infant Henry’s representative swore to adhere to the Magna Carta, thus reviving the arrangement. Subsequent monarchs swore to maintain it, thus embedding it in English legal tradition.

This review was made possible by a generous donation from Lyn R. If you want me to review a specific film, please donate and tell me what movie you’d like me to review, and I’ll do my best to track it down and review it, as long as I think it’s appropriate.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

Dan Carpenter’s Magna Carta is a good introduction to the document and its interpretation.

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Robin Hood: The King is Dead

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Edward I, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II, Henry III, King John, King Stephen, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Robin Hood, William Rufus, William the Conqueror

Fairly early in Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott), King Richard the Lionhearted (Danny Huston) gets killed by a crossbow bolt during a siege. When Robin (Russell Crowe) tells a royal official about this, the man replies, “The king is dead; long live the king.” The same thing happens when Robin later tells the Queen Mother Eleanor (Eileen Atkins, doing a not too bad Katherine Hepburn impersonation). The sentence gets said, and Eleanor immediately moves to put Richard’s crown on her son John’s head.

“The king is dead; long live the king” is the sort of thing that people say in historical movies occasionally, but no one ever explains what it actually means. The now-standard wording was first used in 1422 in France, but the concept itself dates back further. The phrase encapsulates the legal principle, expressed in French, of le mort saisis le vif, which means “the dead seizes the living”. In this phrase, ‘seizes’ does not refer to grabbing something but rather to seisin, the legal right to possess landed property. The phrase means that the legal title to a property passes from the deceased to the deceased’s living heir at the moment of death. The instant the father dies, his son gains title to his property; there is no period where the property is left legally ownerless.

When applied to a king, the concept of le mort saisis le vif means that the crown and kingdom pass from the dead king to his heir at the moment of death, so that there is never a moment when the kingdom has no king. So the saying is really expressing that “the (old) king is dead; long live the (new) king.”

However, the concept of “the king is dead; long live the king” had not yet been articulated in England in 1199. It was first expressed as a principle in 1272, when Henry III died while his son and heir Edward was out of the country on the 8th Crusade. Fearing a civil war, when Henry died, the Royal Council declared “The throne shall never be empty; the country shall never be without a monarch.”

Henry III of England

To understand why the Council did this, you only have to look at the previous two centuries of royal successions. In 1066, William the Conqueror took the throne of England by conquest, claiming that he had inherited it from his distant cousin Edward the Confessor and that Harold Godwinson had usurped it. In 1087, William was succeed by his son William II Rufus, even though William had an older son, Robert Curthose. Rufus’ claim, as we’ll see, was based on the fact that William I had not been king of England when Robert was born. The fact that Rufus had Robert in captivity at the time also helped the claim. When Rufus died in a hunting accident (or was it?) in 1100, he was succeeded by his younger brother Henry I.

Henry I’s only legitimate son William Adelin died in a shipwreck in 1120, and Henry spent the last 15 years of his life trying to orchestrate the succession of his daughter Matilda. But when Henry died in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the throne and spent the next two decades fighting first Matilda and then her son Henry. Stephen finally reached a peace deal with Henry that allowed Stephen to stay king on the condition that he disinherit his son in favor of Henry. In 1154, Stephen died and Henry promptly became king as Henry II.

When Henry died in 1189, his son Richard took the throne. When Richard died, his brother John became king. When John died in the middle of a rebellion, his infant son Henry III was crowned, but it was a close thing because so much of the English nobility was hostile to John. So in 1272, when Henry died, in the previous two centuries there had only been one entirely stable father-to-son transmission of the crown (Henry II to Richard I). The Council articulated the principle of le mort saisis le vif to try to clarify the rules around the crown. Edward didn’t have to wait until his coronation to become king, because that event would be months in the future; rather, Edward was already king without knowing it.

Another Problem
Modern Americans tend to assume that monarchy always follows the rule of primogeniture, that the oldest son inherits the crown. But that’s not necessarily true. Many cultures have used other systems to determine who inherits the crown. The ancient Egyptians had no clear rule at all about which son would become pharaoh. Early Germanic society used a rather loose system in which descent from the previous king was only one of several important factors. It was just as important that the new king be a strong military leader, which means that if the old king’s son was a child he would be passed over for some other relative. Perhaps in a few decades he might assert a claim to the throne, but he wasn’t qualified yet because he was simply too young. In early medieval France, there was a strong tendency for a king’s surviving sons to split the kingdom up, so that each one became a king. As a result, the kingdom would fracture into several temporary kingdoms until one branch of the royal family managed to reunify France by conquest.

In the 11th century, French nobility began to embrace the system of primogeniture as a way to prevent the breaking up of family property between multiple sons (which tended to drive the family into poverty over a few generations). The kingdom came to be seen as something that couldn’t be divided, so it should pass to the oldest son. But what about a case like England in 1087? William the Conqueror was king of England, but his oldest son Robert wasn’t heir to the kingdom when he was born because William acquired the kingdom after Robert’s birth. So it made sense to William I that he should divide his property between Robert, who inherited William’s French territories, and Rufus, who got England.

An even messier issue occurred when Henry II died. Henry had four legitimate sons who had survived to adulthood: Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Henry declared his eldest son his heir and had him undergo a coronation ceremony; for that reason the son is often called Henry the Young King. But the Young King died in 1183, while his father was still alive. The system of primogeniture was not yet fully in place. As long as the Young King was alive, there was no disputing that he ought to inherit everything. But now that he was dead, did everything have to pass to Richard, or was there room for Henry to make other arrangements? Ultimately Richard’s political strength compelled Henry to accept Richard as his heir.

But when Richard died, things were murkier. Under normal circumstances, Richard’s heir should have been his younger brother Geoffrey. But Geoffrey had died in 1186, leaving a young son Arthur. Under strict primogeniture, Arthur ought to have inherited from Richard. But Arthur was two generations removed from Henry II, while John was only one generation removed, and the rule of primogeniture was not yet so solidly in place as to exclude John’s claim by proximity to Henry II. Furthermore, Arthur was only twelve years old, while John was an adult.

In 1190, Richard had designated Arthur was his heir, but as he was dying in 1199, Richard declared John his heir, acknowledging that the boy would not be able to stop John from claiming the throne. The idea that the king had to be a strong military leader still mattered and Arthur clearly wasn’t. But Arthur (or perhaps his mother Constance) wasn’t happy with this. Arthur sought support from King Philip II of France, who played Arthur off against John.

In 1202, when Arthur laid siege to Eleanor, Richard and John’s mother, John caught Arthur’s forces by surprise and took him prisoner. In 1203, Arthur died in captivity under mysterious circumstances. There are various stories of what happened to him. Various stories have him stabbed to death by John and thrown into the river or being starved to death. Either way, John’s claim on the English throne was secure.
So when Robin gives Eleanor Richard’s crown and she promptly puts it on John’s head, Ridley Scott is glossing over a whole lot of details and putting an anachronism in her mouth.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about some of the kings mentioned here, David Douglas’ study of William the Conqueror is as old as I am, but still a very good biography, while Frank Barlow has written a nice work on William Rufus. W.L. Warren has written excellent books on Henry II (English Monarchs) and King John (English Monarchs). For Richard, you might look at John Gillingham’s study of Richard I. 

Robin Hood: A Whole Lotta Plot Going On

Tags

Cate Blanchett, Douchebag with a Crown, Eleanor of Aquitaine, King John, Max von Sydow, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Oscar Isaac, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

I haven’t been able post in a long while because my husband and I just bought a house and spent most of last month moving and tackling moving-related stuff. But I’ve finally clawed out the time to tackle a movie, namely Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott). Regular reader Lyn R. made a generous donation to the blog and requested that I review it. So Lyn, this is for you, and thank you again for your donation.

As I’ve already explored, all the evidence points to Robin Hood being a 14^th century fictional character rather than a real historical figure. Most Robin Hood films situate the story in the 1190s, at a point when King Richard the Lionhearted is away on crusade. His brother Prince John is making trouble by governing England unjustly and demanding harsh taxation, which forces Robin Hood and his band out of outlaws into resistance against him. Usually, Richard arrives home and puts a stop to John’s hijinks right at the end of the film.

But Ridley Scott’s film follows a very different story. It opens right at the end of Richard’s reign, in 1199. As the film’s prologue text tells us “King Richard the Lion Heart, bankrupt of wealth and glory, is plundering his way back to England after ten years on his crusade. In his army is an archer named Robin Longstride.”

Right away the film is confused about the facts. Richard departed for the Holy Land in 1190, and left for home in 1192. On his way home he was shipwrecked on the Dalmatian coast, wound up falling into the hands of an enemy, and was held for ransom, finally being released in 1194 after a substantial ransom was paid. He returned to his French lands that same year and was back in control of England quickly, although he spent very little time there. So the typical Robin Hood film ends sometimes in 1194 or 1195, after Richard returns to England after his imprisonment.

But in Scott’s telling of the events, Richard (Danny Huston) has apparently spent four years in captivity, based on a comment his mother Eleanor (Eileen Atkins) makes to Prince John (Oscar Isaac), meaning he was released in 1196 and then apparently fought his way westward, plundering as he went, which is total nonsense. By 1199, he still hasn’t gotten to England and is laying siege to Chalus Castle in France. Robin (Russell Crowe) has apparently been in his service the whole time, which raises the question of what Robin was doing while Richard was in prison for 4 years. Were he and the rest of Richard’s army just killing time somewhere in Germany? That seems to be what the film intends, because no one in his army has been home since they left, including Sir Robert Loxley (who is NOT Robin Longstride).

Robin fighting in the Siege of Chalus

The film loosely follows the actual events of the siege of Chalus, which was a minor castle held by one of Richard’s recalcitrant vassals. During the siege, one of the cooks fires a crossbow bolt and hits Richard, fatally wounding him. (In reality, the injury itself didn’t kill Richard; rather the wound became gangrenous and he died more than a week later in the arms of his mother Eleanor.) So as a result, most of the movie takes place after Richard’s death during the reign of King John (1199-1216). That alone puts the film in a different category from pretty much all other Robin Hood films I can think of. There’s no Richard waiting in the wings to swoop in and stop John and lift Robin Hood’s outlawry.

After Richard dies, Robin and his friends Little John, Will Scarlett, and Alan A’Dayle (a name that makes me violently stabby, because it’s pretending to be the Irish O’Doyle) decide that they are sick of fighting and want to get home to England, so they desert and ride for the English Channel before the cost of a ship’s passage becomes unaffordable.

But unbeknownst to them, King Philip Augustus of France (Jonathan Zaccai) is plotting with Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong), one of John’s henchmen. Not realizing that Richard is dead, they hatch a convoluted plan to ambush and kill Richard and then turn England against the new king John so that Philip can invade and conquer England. This is a stupid plot because a far smarter thing to do would be to capture Richard instead of killing him, and then invade England in Richard’s name, claiming that John is trying to usurp Richard. This is the first, but far from the last, time the film has more plot than it can handle.

Mark Strong as the villainous Sir Godfrey

But Richard is already dead, and instead Godfrey winds up ambushing Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge), who is taking Richard’s crown back to England. He mortally wounds Loxley but then Robin and his men intervene and drive him off. Loxley makes Robin swear to return his sword to his father Sir Walter (Max von Sydow), and then dies. Instead, Robin decides to impersonate Loxley, I think so that he and his men can get free passage to England. They wind up having to deliver Richard’s crown to London, where Eleanor declares John king and immediately crowns him. (In reality, it wasn’t entirely clear that John was the heir. Maybe I’ll do a post on that later.) John, having instantly become a Douchebag with a Crown, decides that instead of rewarding Robin/Loxley with a ring, he will demand that Robin/Loxley go to Nottingham and get the taxes Sir Walter owes him.

Meanwhile, At Nottingham

Apparently Loxley is the Lord of Nottingham, because Sir Walter lives in a castle there. Nottingham itself is depicted as little more than a manor, with a small village of perhaps 200 people outside the castle and the fields in easy walking distance. It seems to have been a great city at some point because there is a massive ruined archway that characters ride through repeatedly.

In reality, Nottingham was a much more substantial settlement. Already by the 9^th century it was of local importance, and by the 1080s it had a population of perhaps 1,500 people, making it by medieval standards a modest-sized town. By 1300, it had maybe 3,000 residents.  Additionally, the castle was just plopped in the middle of some fields, which is a dumb place for a castle because it’s not very defensible; the real Nottingham castle is located on a rocky outcropping above the city. So the film’s depiction of Nottingham is entirely wrong.

Marion (Cate Blanchett) is Loxley’s wife, or rather widow. She is the daughter of some minor knight who for reasons never explained managed to marry Robert Loxley, who is clearly an important figure, since he is the heir to a castle and a close confidant of King Richard. A week after the wedding, Loxley left to join Richard’s forces, and Marion has been living, childless, with Loxley’s blind father Sir Walter. As the semi-evil but largely pointless Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew McFadyen) points out, because she has no children and her husband is thought dead, when Sir Walter dies, she will be penniless because the Crown will claim the castle.

In case you couldn’t guess, THIS IS NOT HOW MEDIEVAL LAW WORKS. As Ranulf de Glanville, the leading English legal scholar of the 12^th century lays out in his Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, when a man marries a women, he is required to give her a dower, property that becomes hers and is intended to support her when she becomes a widow. If Robert did this formally, he would have had to designate a specific property to serve as the dower; if he did not designate a specific property, she automatically gets 1/3 of his property as her dower. The dower property remains in Robert’s hands and out of his wife’s control, but in this case, since he’s out of the country, it would be in Sir Walter’s hands. If Loxley is assumed dead, the dower would now be in Marion’s hands.

Complicating this is the fact that Walter seems to be a vassal of the Crown, although that term is never used. This means that the castle and its manor are probably a fief that Walter holds (enjoys the use of) but doesn’t actually own. When Walter dies, the fief ought to pass to Robert, but if Robert is already dead, it would revert back to the Crown, which still probably has to honor Marion’s status as Robert’s widow and acknowledge whatever dower property she has a claim to. I say probably, because while Robert is the heir, he was never the vassal for the property, so maybe John could be a dick and just ignore Marion’s legal rights. More likely, what John would do is exercise his legal right to control the remarriage of Robert’s widow and sell her marriage to a man who wants to become the new fief-holder. John did that sort thing a good deal during his reign. So Marion would have a problem when Walter dies, because she either has to accept a marriage arranged for her by John or else pay John a sum of money for the right to control her own remarriage. But even if John tries to seize the fief when Walter dies, Marion still gets her dower property and won’t be thrown in a ditch.

And all of this raises the question of why the hell Sir Walter hasn’t remarried to have another son to act as his heir. Apparently he’s surprisingly unconcerned about things like carrying on his family line or taking care of his son’s wife. Given that he was once an extremely important man politically, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

To make matters worse for Marion, there are bandits around Nottingham, and Marion is apparently the only defensive force. She knows how to use a longbow (a century before the English adopted that weapons, but that’s the least of the film’s anachronisms), but despite that, at the start of the film, bandits break into the storehouse and steal all the seed-grain, so Marion has no grain to plant in the fields. The local church has grain that has been tithed to them, but the priest insists that the grain goes to the archbishop of York. Why the archbishop of York should have a claim on the grain from the village church of Nottingham is unexplained, since medieval Nottingham was part of the diocese of Lincoln in the archdiocese of Canterbury, but who knows? Medieval clergy just make up the rules as they go, remember?

Cate Blanchett as Maid, err Wife Marion

Enter Robin

Robin and his men show up as themselves, having apparently forgotten that Robin is supposed to be pretending to be Robert to get John’s taxes. Robin turns over the sword and tells Walter and Marion that Robert is dead, but Walter promptly proposes that Robin pull a Martin Guerre and pretend to be Robert. In exchange he will give Robin the family sword.

Are you starting to notice that this film has way too much plot? The film gives Robin not one but two different bouts of pretending to be Robert Loxley. Godfrey has tricked John into allowing him to rampage around England collecting taxes in a brutal fashion in order to incite the barons of England against John. And Philip’s troops have snuck into England to help Godfrey. But William Marshall (William Hurt) has warned Eleanor about what’s going on, and Eleanor convinces John’s wife, Isabella of Angouleme (Léa Seydoux) who is Philip’s niece, to warn John of what’s going on so John can stop it. But John’s a Douchebag with a Crown and doesn’t want to negotiate with his barons. And meanwhile, Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and Robin/Loxley orchestrate the theft of the church’s grain when it is being shipped to York, and then they sow the grain in the middle of the night.

But Wait, There’s More!

As it turns out, Sir Walter knew Robin’s father. How he connects the two men is unclear, given that he can’t see and Robin’s father has been dead since Robin was a little boy (he only has faint memories of the man). Apparently the connection is that both were called ‘Longstride’, because the movie mistakenly thinks that people had hereditary last names in the 12^th century.

Spurred on by a clue written on the sword’s hilt, Sir Walter tells Robin that his father was a mason who built a monumental cross in Nottingham. But he was also a political revolutionary who wrote a charter of liberties for a group of barons, the same group who are now rebelling. Why a common stonemason would be able to write or to lead a group of nobles is never explained, and is pretty silly. But it turns out that Longstride Sr anticipated the Magna Carta by about half a century, since he seems to have been active in the 1160s or 70s. Sir William now has the charter, and he sends Robin off to the meeting of the barons and John. So Robin/Loxley proposes that John accept a charter of liberties that will establish equality so that John can be stronger because the people will love him, because 12^th century Englishmen think just like 21^st century Americans. John agrees and the barons call off the rebellion just in time for Robin/Loxley to lead their troops to rescue Nottingham from Godfrey’s men, who are plundering the village, killing Sir Walter, trying to burn people alive and trying to rape Marion.

When that’s done with, the film still isn’t over. Robin/Loxley leads everybody, including the bandits and Marion and Tuck, halfway across England to Dover, where King Philip’s troops are trying to stage the most absurd amphibious landing in cinematic history. Robin and Marion both suddenly discover that they know how to fight with swords from horseback, so they lead a charge on the beach and foil Philip’s invasion and force him back to France, and everyone lives happily ever after except that John is Douchebag with a Crown and burns the Magna Carta and outlaws Robin Loxley aka Robin of the Hood (cuz apparently Nottingham is in the Inner City) and that’s how Robin Hood became a bandit and almost established American democracy in 1199.

There’s a lot for me to comment on here, so we’ll be dining out on this movie for several blog posts.

This post was made possible by a generous donation. If you have a movie you particularly want me to review, if you make a donation and tell me what film you want me to review, I’ll do at least one post on the film, assuming A) I can get access to the film somehow and B) I think it’s appropriate for the blog. (If there’s an issue, I’ll let you pick another movie.)

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about Robin Hood, the place to start is J.C. Holt’s Robin Hood (Third Edition). It’s a really good exploration of the historical issues with the Robin Hood legend. But if you want to dig a little further, take a look at Maurice Keen’s The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, which discusses Robin Hood as well as several other real and folkloric outlaws.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Was Robin Hood Real?

Tags

Barnsdale, Earl of Huntingdon, King John, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Nottingham, Richard I, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin of Loxley, Sherwood Forest

Last year, when I reviewed Disney’s Robin Hood, I avoided discussing the question of whether Robin Hood was a historical figure. I figure it’s time that I tackle another Robin Hood movie, so I chose the infamous Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds). And I suppose the place to start is with the whole question of the character’s historicity.

 

Cool! So Is Robin Hood a Real Historical Figure?

No.

Umm…Ok…Could You Go into a Little More Detail?

How do you go into more detail about someone that didn’t exist? By definition, there’s no detail to go into.

Well, Unless You Find More Details to Go Into, This Will Be a Pretty Short Post

That’s a fair point.

The Robin Hood story as we think of it today is set in the early 1190s, when King Richard I, popularly called ‘the Lionhearted’, returned home to his domains after an unexpectedly long absence. Richard had departed on crusade in 1190. Things had gone poorly; the crusade failed in its primary objective of retaking Jerusalem, Richard had been shipwrecked in Dalmatia on his way home, and he had been taken prisoner in the Holy Roman Empire for several years. In his absence, his younger brother and presumed heir John had caused trouble for Richard’s English administration by allying himself with King Philip II of France, Richard’s rival. Richard finally put an end to the political struggles when he returned home in 1194, after being ransomed. So the story as we tell it is set in the period from 1191 to 1194. Most modern versions of the story end with Richard’s return helping to save the day, so we have a fairly clear pair of bookends to Robin Hood’s supposed career.

But the earliest known reference to stories about the outlaw bandit Robin Hood dates from around 1377, when Sloth, a character in Piers Plowman says that he knows the “rimes of Robyn Hood”, meaning that he knows stories or poems about this character. Sloth doesn’t bother explaining who Robin Hood is, which suggests that his audience has at least some idea who the character is because he is mentioned in popular stories. The earliest surviving story about Robin Hood, the poem Robin Hood and the Monk, dates from around 1450. So clearly stories about this outlaw circulated for at least a generation or two before 1377, and then got written down in the mid-15^th century. But there’s absolutely no evidence that stories had been circulating for nearly 200 years, as they would have had to been doing in order for Robin to have been active during King Richard’s reign.

The surviving 15^th century poems, of which there are about a half-dozen, give us our earliest look at how medieval English audiences pictured Robin Hood, and he is a drastically different character than the modern cinematic figure, so different as to be almost unrecognizable except that several of the names are the same. The stories mention Robin Hood, Little John, and Will Scarlett (or Scarlock), along with Guy of Gisbourne and a sheriff who in one poem is the sheriff of Nottingham. There is also a character, Much the Miller’s Son, who has largely vanished from the cinematic Merry Men. But there is no King Richard or Prince John, only a passing mention of King Edward; nor is there any mention of Maid Marion or Friar Tuck.

Robin and his men are not based around Sherwood Forest, but further north, in Barnsdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Robin Hood and his allies use bows and swords, but never quarterstaves. They rob from the rich, but do not give to the poor; in fact, Robin at one point tries to rob an innocent potter and gets beaten up by the man. And there is no mention of taxes, bad government, or oppressive officials; the closest they get to that is poaching the king’s deer and dealing with a greedy abbot. Robin and Little John and Will Scarlett are outlaw bandits, clever enough to trick people, but not defenders of the weak. Robin Hood is devoted to the Virgin Mary, like a lot of figures in later medieval literature. There are a few details that he was murdered by his kinswoman, the prioress of Kirklees Priory, but the story of him marking the place to bury him with an arrow is a later detail not found in the medieval material.

The reference to King Edward situates the stories during the reign of Edward I, II or III, who reigned all in a row from 1272 to 1377. That doesn’t prove the stories originate during that period, but it does demonstrate that the stories were seen to belong to the recent rather than the distant past. There’s just no basis for connecting Robin Hood to the reign of Richard I or John.

So what we have here are vague, generic stories about bandits who bear little resemblance to the modern characters, doing their deeds about 200 years too late for the modern stories. So Robin Hood isn’t a real person; he’s a character out of late medieval folk lore.

The modern statue of Robin Hood outside of Nottingham Castle

 

Ok, But That Doesn’t Mean There Wasn’t a Bandit Named Robin Hood

You’re going to make me do this the hard way, aren’t you? It’s not enough to show that someone named Robin or Robert (since Robin is a diminutive of Robert) Hood actually existed. Robert/Robin was a fairly common name in the 13^th and 14^th century, and ‘Hood’ refers to someone who made or wore hoods, a pretty wide category, given that the hood was a common item of male apparel in this period. In order to say that Robin Hood was a real person, we would at a minimum need to be able to demonstrate that someone with that name had been an outlaw or bandit, and ideally that he had done things suggestive of the literary character.

Think of it this way. In the 27^th century, people are going to be wondering if Batman was a real historical person. It won’t be enough to find evidence that somebody named Bruce Wayne existed. It won’t be enough to find evidence that a real Bruce Wayne was a millionaire. They’ll have to find evidence that a guy named Bruce Wayne was a millionaire who fought crime as a costumed vigilante.

19^th and 20^th century historians dug through records of the period looking for guys with similar-sounding names. And inevitably they found a couple of candidates. There’s a Robyn Hood who served as a royal porter in 1324, but about the only thing we know about him is that Edward II gave him a payment because the man could no longer work. Right about the same time, there’s a Robert Hood of Wakefield, near Barnsdale in Yorkshire. In the mid-19^th century, an amateur historian, Joseph Hunter, published a book arguing that these two men were the same person, that he had gotten involved in Thomas of Lancaster’s rebellion in 1322, that the king had outlawed him and then later pardoned him. But that’s nothing more than wild speculation without any actual evidence to support it, and it’s most likely that these two men were different people, neither of them being a criminal. Robyn Hood can be shown to have been in the king’s service for some time, meaning that he can’t really have been outlawed in 1322.

There’s an early 14^th century court case involve a Yorkshire man named Robert Hood who injured another man with an arrow. But he wasn’t outlawed for it. So he’s unlikely to be our guy.

Another interesting detail is that ‘Robynhod’ was a surname in Sussex, on the southeast coast of England. The earliest known example of this is a Gilbert Robynhod, who turns up in a tax record in 1296. And the name periodically crops up over the 14^th century in that county and in nearby London. But none of these men or women were criminals, and they’re a long way from Yorkshire. (Just because ‘Batman’ happens to be an actual surname doesn’t serve as proof that Batman the superhero is real.) Are you starting to notice that ‘Robin Hood’ and its variant isn’t really a very uncommon name?

The closest match to the known facts comes in 1226, when court record from Yorkshire reports on the moveable goods of a fugitive named Robert Hod. The next year, the man is referred to as ‘Hobbehod’ (‘Hobbe’ being another variant of Robert). He was a tenant of the archbishop of York who had fled his holding because of an unspecified debt. That’s all that’s known about this man. But he’s a very weak candidate for Robin Hood, because he’s not a criminal, merely someone who fled a debt and apparently had his property confiscated. Although this man was based in the right general area, and the archbishop did hold lands not very far from Barnsdale, there’s nothing else to connect him to the stories that emerged probably a century later. One would think that if this man had been an impressive enough criminal that poems were still being recited about him 150 years later that he would have left more of a record in the sources of his time.

 

But Robin was the Earl of Huntingdon, Wasn’t He?

Let’s not get silly now. Nobles turned bandit outlaws? Does that even seem plausible?

The stuff about the earldom of Huntingdon was made up by a 17^th century author, Martin Parker, whose gimmick for his Robin Hood poem was that he was going to tell the real story about Robin Hood (you know, the way that modern movies keep claiming they’re going to tell the real story about King Arthur or whomever). Parker claimed that Robin died in 1198 and is mentioned on a tombstone.

The basic problem with this claim is that the earldom of Huntingdon was a noble title that the kings of England sometimes granted to the kings of Scotland. In 1165, when William the Lion became king of Scotland, he passed the earldom to his younger brother David, who held it for the rest of his life, even after he became king of Scotland; David died in 1219. So there’s no opportunity for Robin Hood to have been earl of Huntingdon in 1198. As a historian, Parker wasn’t very concerned about facts.

 

 

Ok, Well, Everyone Knows that Robin Hood was Actually Robin of Loxley

Everyone knows that because it was made up by Roger Dodsworth in 1620, a little after Parker made up his story, and another local author claimed in 1637 to have identified Robin’s birth place in Loxley. Dodsworth didn’t bother offering any evidence for his claim. He also claimed that it was Little John who was the earl of Huntingdon, so his historical reliability wasn’t any better than Parker’s. Loxley is a real place in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but there’s no evidence that anyone in the Middle Ages associated it with Robin Hood. There may well have been a ‘Robert Hood of Loxley’ at some point, but that’s just a coincidence of names.

But What about the Evidence for His Burial?

Wow, you’re really grasping at straws, aren’t you? In the late 18^th century, a professor of Greek at Cambridge, Thomas Gale, claimed he had found an old epitaph for Robin Hood. The epitaph tells us that Robert earl of Huntingdon was a great archer that people called Robin Hood, that he was an outlaw with his men, and that he died on 24^th of December 1247. But the epitaph is written in fake Middle English and so is therefore almost certainly a forgery, probably by Gale. Another problem with the epitaph is that in 1237, Earl John of Huntingdon died, leaving his estates to his four daughters. King Henry III bought the estates and the title that went with them and never granted the title out again. So there was no earldom of Huntingdon in the 1240s.

Yes, there is a supposed tomb of Robin Hood near Kirklees. But an examination of the site with Ground-Penetrating Radar found no evidence of either a body or any ground disturbance associated with burials. And the tomb site is too far away from Kirklees priory to fit with the story of the bow and arrow anyway. And besides, it’s a FAKE. It was erected in 1850 by George Armytage, who owned the land at the time. Armytage used Gale’s supposed epitaph to make his fake monument look more real. 19^th century landowners were given to putting up fake ruins and monuments because they thought it would look cool.

The Kirklees ‘tomb’

Back in 2003, an amateur enthusiast conducted some rather imprecise “tests” with a bow and arrow and claimed to have pinpointed the location of Robin Hood’s grave at Kirklees within five meters. He found evidence that a body may have been dug up there in the 18^th century, but this proves nothing except that using a bow and arrow to try and locate historical graves is a silly thing to do.

Darn!

Yeah, sorry to bum you out. But when you start digging into the poems, it quickly becomes clear that they’re fiction. The Geste of Robyn Hode (“the deeds of Robin Hood”) is the most substantial of the poems. Robin won’t eat a meal until he has an unexpected guest, who turns up in the form of a desperately poor knight. The knight tells Robin that he had to borrow £400, a truly enormous sum in medieval terms, from the Abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey in York, to bail out his son, who is a criminal. The knight is worrying how he will repay it, but Robin just happens to have £400 laying around, meaning as a bandit, he’s pretty damn wealthy. So he loans it to the knight, who is able to pay off the debt and recover his mortgaged lands. Then Robin has another unexpected dinner guest, a monk of St. Mary’s, who just happens to be carrying £800. The monk lies to Robin, claiming that he barely has any money at all, so Robin takes it all, concluding that the Virgin Mary has sent the money to reward Robin for his generosity. When the knight shows up, having somehow raised another £400 and intending to repay Robin, Robin tells him not to worry and gives him another £400 because he’s just a stand-up guy that way. (This is about as close as the medieval Robin Hood gets to “giving to the poor”, but in this case, he’s giving the money to a knight, who isn’t actually poor by the standards of his day.)

Then Little John sneaks into the service of Sheriff of Nottingham, who is impressed with his archery skills. John persuades the sheriff’s cook to help him steal the sheriff’s treasure, and then lures the sheriff into the forest where he’s taken prisoner and generously allowed to dine off his own stolen plates. When the sheriff gets free, he lures Robin into a trap with an archery contest where the prize is a golden arrow. John is injured and he and Robin wind up taking refuge with the knight they helped earlier in the poem. The sheriff captures the knight, but Robin rescues him. At that point the king (who is not named) and his men ride into the forest disguised as monks, and Robin winds up receiving them at dinner and holding an archery contest in their honor. Eventually the king’s identity is revealed, he pardons Robin and his men because they’re good guys, and he takes them into his service, even going so far as to wear Robin’s green livery. But a year later, Robin gets bored and goes back to being a bandit. The poem ends with a brief story about how his relative, the prioress of Kirklees Abbey, plotted to murder him. She offered to bleed him and just didn’t stop. So the poem ends with a story about how Robin Hood was buried with his bow and a request for a prayer for his soul.

It should be clear from this summary that the poem is a wild fantasy. Robin just happens to have an insanely large sum of money lying around to loan out to the knight, and his generosity is rewarded later on when he recoups twice the sum from the monk, only to give half of it away again. The story relies on comic inversions (the bandit given his captive money, the sheriff dining off his own stolen plates, the bandit hosting the king, the king wearing Robin’s livery instead of the other way around) and the idea that moral decency is rewarded while villainy is punished. The hero is an incorrigible outlaw, and just throws away the king’s pardon because he’s bored. The whole thing reads like a contemporary comic action film, and honestly has a way better plot than Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves does.

Additionally, the historian Maurice Keen, in his Outlaws of Medieval Legend, points out that the Robin Hood poems of the 15^th century share many of their motifs with stories of other medieval outlaws. The detail about the monk who is robbed because he won’t tell the truth comes straight out of the story of the 12^th century pirate Eustace the Monk. In a different poem, Robin Hood disguises himself as a potter, a retelling of a story variously told about Hereward the Wake, an 11^th century rebel; Eustace the Monk; and William Wallace. Keen shows how many elements of the Robin Hood poems are expressions of peasant discontent and in that sense act as a form of social protest. So looking at them for historical facts is probably the wrong approach, sort of like looking at modern action films for historical facts.

So, Basically, What You’re Saying is that Robin Hood is Just the Medieval Version of Batman?

Yeah, pretty much so, except without the plane and the utility belt.

Sort of like this guy

 

Want to Know More?

The place to start is J.C. Holt’s Robin Hood (Third Edition). It’s a really good exploration of the historical issues with the Robin Hood legend. But if you want to dig a little further, take a look at Maurice Keen’s The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, which discusses Robin Hood as well as several other real and folkloric outlaws.

Disney’s Robin Hood: A Bit More Medieval Than You Might Think

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Disney's Robin Hood, King John, Liz Shipe, Medieval England, Reynard the Fox, Robin Hood

A couple weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to tackle a Robin Hood movie, in honor of my friend Liz Shipe’s new play, A Lady in Waiting, and went to Netflix, where I ran across the Disney version (1973, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman), which I loved as a child; I have vivid memories of seeing it in the theater more than once. So I decided to re-watch it, because I haven’t seen it since. I didn’t have high hopes that I would give me much to talk about on this blog, but as it turns out, there is something worth remarking on here.

Robin Hood is a medieval character, dating to at least the 14th century and possibly earlier. There’s a lot to say about the whole question of whether he’s a historical figure or not, but I’m not going to say it here, since I’m pretty sure that anyone watching this film knows that neither Robin Hood nor Maid Marion were foxes. It’s pretty clear that the film isn’t historically accurate.

What’s probably less clear is that the inspiration for this version of Robin Hood isn’t actually Robin Hood at all. Since the 1930s, Walt Disney had been interested in telling a version of the 12th century Alsatian story of Reynard (or Renart) the Fox. In the Roman de Renart, Reynard the Fox is summoned to the court of a cruel lion, King Leo, to answer charges brought against him by Isengrim the Wolf. Leo sends out various agents, including a bear, an ass, and a cat, to get him to court, but Reynard overcomes all three of them (incidentally, the Cat is named Tibert or Tybalt, which is why in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio calls Tybalt a ‘rat-catcher’ and ‘king of cats’), defeats Isengrim, and becomes Leo’s new advisor. This was just the start of a quite complex body of stories about Reynard, many of which were satires directed at aristocratic society.

Medieval illuminators loved scenes like this

The problem with all this material is that it was extremely violent (the bear gets attacked by bees, Tybalt loses an eye, and Reynard decapitates a rabbit and substitutes its head for a secret treasure). Reynard is a crook, and a deeply anti-authoritarian one at that. Walt Disney concluded that the material simply wasn’t appropriate for children. But Ken Anderson, one of the key members of Disney’s creative team, held onto the idea and periodically played around with it. In 1968, when the studio was looking for a follow-up to The Aristocats, Anderson suggested doing a Robin Hood story. But Robin Hood is a problematic story for children since, like Reynard, he is anti-authoritarian. However, by merging the two figures and making an animated fox the hero fighting against a cowardly lion who is not the legitimate ruler, Anderson was able to kill two birds with one stone by taming the violence and reducing the anti-authoritarianism of both stories.  Additionally, making the story animated rather than live-action helped create distance between the characters and the young audience, reducing the likelihood that they would absorb the anti-authoritarianism of the story.

The choice to model Robin Hood loosely off the story of Reynard was an inspired one. While Reynard is not a familiar figure to English-speaking audiences, foxes are still considered clever and sly, which fits well for Robin Hood. Modeling Prince John after Leo but making him a coward is a brilliant contradiction (as well as echoing the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz). Isengrim the wolf becomes the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham. Making Allan-a-Dale a rooster riffs nicely on the character of Chaunticleer the Rooster, who is perhaps the most famous (to English-speakers at least) of all the Reynard cycle characters, because Chaucer wrote a version of his conflict with Reynard in “The Second Nun’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. The addition of two poor church mice as supporting characters is also a clever little joke.

Prince John and Sir Hiss

Sadly, Anderson was disappointed in the film, because the studio made substantial changes to his work to make it conform to a style Disney audiences would recognize; reportedly he cried when he saw how much had been changed. There’s a nice page that shows the original designs and compares them to sketches of the characters as they finally appeared. Friar Tuck is a particular loss.

The first portion of the film details how Robin tricks Prince John out of his treasure, which is clearly inspired by Reynard’s escapades against Leo in the Roman de Renart. The central plot, however, involving the tournament of the Golden Arrow, is drawn from a classic Robin Hood story, but it is probably not medieval. Its source is Child Ballad 152. In the mid-19th century, an American scholar named Francis Child collected a massive body of traditional English, Scottish, and American folk ballads, and this collection, which was first published in 1857, seems to contain the earliest version of that story (at least, I can’t find any earlier reference to it, but see the Update below). Child was not the author of the ballads, merely the man who collected them, so Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow is certainly older than the mid-19th century, but how much older is unknown. My guess would be that it’s mid-18th century. It might be older than that, but it’s unlikely to have originated in the Middle Ages.

Not everything in the film works brilliantly, however. Maid Marion has virtually no role in the film at all, other than to be romanced by Robin. A lot of the animation was re-used from the Jungle Book, and the church mice are lifted from The Aristocats. A few plot points are jarring (why don’t John’s guards see Little John drilling a hole into the treasure chest they’re carrying?). And the film perpetuates false clichés about medieval rulers being able to do anything, like raise taxes at will and throw people in jail for no reason at all.

The choice to cast both American and British voice actors is also problematic, because the accents simply don’t work well together. Roger Miller’s Allan-a-Dale is particularly discordant, because he’s clearly singing in the American country and western tradition rather than anything medieval, and Pat Buttram, who voices the Sheriff, was most famous as Gene Autrey’s sidekick (and from Green Acres). While the idea of Western cowboys could have served as a creative kick to the medieval Robin Hood, in my opinion it’s unsuccessful (although my younger self didn’t have a problem with it, and he was the audience for this film).

Also, as a Wisconsinite, I was rather amused to notice that during the Tournament of the Golden Arrow, when Lady Cluck suddenly turns into a football player while fighting John’s guards, the score shifts to a version of “On Wisconsin”. It’s definitely not medieval and most of the audience is likely to miss the joke, but it’s still a nice touch.

So if you’re in the mood to see Robin Hood if it were staged by furries, Disney’s Robin Hood is the film for you. If you’re in the mood for something more modern and you’re in the Milwaukee area, check out A Lady in Waiting; you’ve still got a week to catch it!

Update: A friend of mine pointed out to me that Child Ballad 152 is partly based on the Gest of Robyn Hode, a mid-15th century poem that does feature an archery tournament. So while Child 152 is probably late 18th century, its source material is genuinely medieval. Thanks, Mark!

Update 2: This blog explores some of the visual links between Disney’s Robin Hood and a 1945 American retelling of Reynard the Fox. It does a good job of showing some of the   inspiration the animators found in illustrator Keith Ward’s artwork. Particularly telling is Disney’s King John, which seems to have been strongly influenced by Ward’s Lion Queen.

Update 3: As was pointed out to me in the comments below, it is the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, not the Second Nun’s Tale, that tells the story of Chauntecleer. I regret the error.

Special Note to IO9 readers: Yes, I know that Disney’s film was the Aristocats, not the Aristocrats. That error was unfortunately introduced by my autocorrect. I caught it and fixed it, but somehow I either failed to save it or I got autocorrected again and didn’t notice. When IO9 requested permission to reblog it, I spotted the error and tried to fix it, but by the time I’d gotten the fix saved, IO9 had already copied the article, so their version got posted with the typo in it. That’s why their version has the error and this version doesn’t.

On the other hand, I’m sort of amused by the idea of a Disney version of the Aristocrats.

Want to Know More?

You can get the Disney Robin Hood-40th Anniversary Edition (DVD + Digital Copy) on Amazon.

As an undergraduate, I studied for a year at the University of Nottingham, and figured I ought to read something about Robin Hood. J.C. Holt’s Robin Hoodremains, in my opinion, the best work on the subject, although I haven’t kept up with the scholarship on it.

Ironclad: Vikings, and Templars, and Magna Carta, Oh My!

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Derek Jacobi, Ironclad, James Purefoy, King John, Knights Templar, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Military Stuff, Monks and Nuns, Paul Giametti

Recently I decided that I needed to review a film on Tudor history. I turned on Netflix and went looking for one of the classics—Anne of the Thousand Days, A Man for All Seasons or perhaps one of Cate Blanchett’s movies about Elizabeth. I discovered two things. 1) Netflix has no films on Tudor history at all, just a bunch of not very good-looking documentaries. 2) Ironclad (2011, dir. Jonathan English). I’m not sure why Netflix suggested this film, because the only thing it has in common with any of the above films is that it’s set in England. But I faintly remembered hearing about it when it first came out, so I watched it.

It’s a small independent film; the financing was apparently such a big challenge that at one point they had to recast all the supporting roles, after Megan Fox dropped out. But despite the modest budget, it’s the largest independent film ever made in Wales. And, a little improbably, it’s based quite solidly in history, albeit with some important liberties.

The Siege of Rochester Castle

On June 15^th, 1215, King John reluctantly signed the Magna Carta, a charter of liberties in which he agreed to a variety of restrictions on his powers as king and lord of vassals. Most of the charter was limited to John’s relationship with his vassals and therefore applied only to nobles, but a few details applied to everyone in the country, most notably the establishment of what can be called the right of due process for all non-serfs and the abolition of double jeopardy in trials.

However, soon after John signed it, he repudiated it, and Pope Innocent III declared John released from his oath to support it. This triggered the First Barons’ War, in which the rebellious barons, supported by King Louis VIII of France, essentially attempted to depose John. The rebels were also supported by Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury.

In October, Langton sent the nobleman William d’Aubigny to occupy Rochester Castle. The castle had been in John’s hands, but the Magna Carta had required John to return it to Langton because it was the property of the archbishopric of Canterbury. John persuaded the castellan, Reginald de Cornhill, to open the gates and D’Aubigny occupied the castle with a small force, much to John’s great frustration. Rochester Castle controlled the southern road to London, which the rebels had taken control of. John could not risk bypassing Rochester, and so he laid siege to the castle for two months.

Rochester Castle. Note how close it is to Rochester Cathedral

John’s forces occupied the city of Rochester and destroyed the bridge linking the city to London, thus making it difficult for the rebels to relieve the siege. For two months, d’Aubigny’s small band of men, variously numbered between 85 and 150, struggled to keep hold off John. John’s forces broke through the outer wall of the castle, forcing the defenders to retreat to the keep. John’s forces sapped the keep, digging a tunnel under it and then burning the tunnel supports. This caused part of the keep to collapse, but the rebels held out in the part of the castle that remained. Some of the less-able-bodied defenders were forced to leave because of dwindling supplies, and some sources report that John cut off their hands and feet. Eventually, the remaining defenders surrendered; John imprisoned all of them, including d’Aubigny, except one archer whom John executed because the man had served him from childhood but then rebelled.

Sadly for John, the capture of Rochester did not improve his position significantly. He was able to force the rebels into a stalemate, but suffered a setback when his baggage train was lost crossing a tidal estuary. He contracted dysentery or something similar and died on October 18^th, 1216, about a year after starting the siege of Rochester.

King John was a complex figure. He was widely disliked by his nobles, and his various defeats sharply colored his posthumous reputation, especially in comparison with his more famous and accomplished father Henry II and brother Richard the Lion-hearted. He has been remembered by derisive nicknames such as ‘Lackland’ and ‘Softsword’, and most historical literature treats him poorly; he is, after all, the main villain in modern Robin Hood stories, and The Lion in Winter makes him seem like a pathetic joke.

King John

But in recent decades scholars have tended to paint a more balanced picture of John. They have pointed out that he was an extremely skilled solider; his forces never lost a battle at which he was present, but his great tragedy was that the two most critical battles of his reign were ones he was unable to be at. He was a talented administrator, who paid far more attention to his kingdom than his older brother did. His servants were deeply loyal to him, but he lacked the skills to manage the nobles and clergy who truly mattered politically. Like his father, he was possessed of both enormous energy and a ferocious temper, but at key moments he seems to have been paralyzed by inaction; one historian has suggested that he might have been bi-polar. All in all, I like John, far more than I like his brother Richard.

Ironclad

The plot of Ironclad focuses entirely on the siege of Rochester, and it follows the events of the siege fairly closely, albeit with some significant deviations. The main character is the entirely fictitious Thomas Marshall (James Purefoy), a Templar knight with some sort of dark secret that is never revealed. The film claims that the Templars were the main reason that John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which is completely untrue. John had good relationships with the Templars, and relied on the advice of Aymeric de St. Maur, the master of the Order in England at the time. Aymeric encouraged him to sign the Magna Carta, but that’s a far cry from claiming that the Templars forced him into it.

Like Arn the Knight Templar, this film seems to suggest that one joins the Templars like one joins the modern military. There are suggestions that Thomas might be allowed to “take a leave” from the Templars, and at the end, Archbishop Langton tells Thomas that he’s “earned his freedom.” But joining a monastic order was a permanent conversion; men did not leave the Order after a period of time. However, an archbishop would have had the authority to release someone from their monastic oaths, although it would have been highly unusual to do so. One of the reasons men joined monastic orders was that it was thought to significantly increase the chance of salvation, so leaving a monastic order would not have been seen as a good thing by most people at the time.

Also, the film claims that Templars had a “vow of silence”. Vows of silence were a real thing, but they’ve been badly misunderstood. In general, monks were expected to focus their thoughts on spiritual matters and to avoid frivolous conversations. Some orders employed a simple form of sign language so that monks could communicate simple ideas without speaking. But most orders allowed monks to talk, at least at certain moments. Monks met regularly in chapter meetings to discuss matters of importance. At meals, they heard texts read to them. Some monastic rules set aside time for the brothers to converse. And of course they sang the liturgy multiple times a day. But these are not formal vows of silence, which was a practice only employed by a minority of medieval monastic orders. The Templars most certainly did not maintain a vow of silence, since as soldiers, they needed to communicate orders on the battlefield. Clearly the screenwriter hasn’t thought this issue through.

Also, Thomas uses a Braveheart-style great sword. If it was too early for William Wallace, it’s way too early for an early 13th century Templar. Thanks, Mel Gibson. Now everybody apparently needs to use great swords.

Purefoy as Thomas Marshall, with his great sword

Early in the film, Thomas and William d’Aubigny (Brian Cox) are sent by Stephen Langton to hold Rochester Castle against John. They do a Seven Samurai number and recruit five more soldiers and then go to Rochester, where they convince Reginald de Cornhill (Derek Jacobi) to let them hold the castle, But Cornhill has only eleven men, so 18 soldiers and a few servants are left to hold off John’s forces. This is an absurdly small group to hold even a small castle; in an actual siege, a group that small would have been overwhelmed on the first day of battle.

Historically, John hired a mixed group of continental mercenaries during the Baron’s War, but in this film he hires a band of pagan Danish Vikings. This is the worst anachronism of the film. The Danes had been Christian for more than 200 years by the Baron’s War. The only purpose served by making John’s men pagan Vikings seems to be to make John look bad, for employing pagans when he’s allied to the pope. It’s an egregiously silly detail in a film that in many respects strives to be true to events.

King John (Paul Giametti) is actually quite well-handled. The script is written to make John seem like a complete asshole, but Giametti manages to capture John’s fierce temper in a way that humanizes him. When John’s forces break into the castle bailey and capture d’Aubigny, John gets a monologue that is written to make him seem petulant, but Giametti transforms it into an angry tirade fueled by John’s quite legitimate complaint that his rights as king are not being respected. It’s a speech that captures something of the actual attitude that medieval kings had about their position.

The best part of this film

The film is also rather naïve about the Magna Carta. It is referenced as being a document “for the people” in a rather vague and unspecified way, as if it were a proto-constitution instead of the peace treaty it actually was. The film frames the Baron’s War as being a conflict between a tyrannical John and a group of nobles who are somehow champions of the common man. John was definitely being unreasonable, but nothing that he did prior to 1215 would have been seen as illegal or tyrannical; rather his nobles felt that he was abusing his rights as their lord, using legal rights in ways they had not been intended.

Despite all these problems, the film does a remarkably good job of following the outlines of the siege. Rochester Castle is realistically depicted (although it’s located out in the countryside, instead of in a city and within an arrow’s flight of Rochester Cathedral). When I watched the film, I thought that the siege details were being a little improbable, but upon researching the actual siege, I saw that the film actually follows the basic sequence of events fairly closely, although it plays with the time-frame of events somewhat, extending the first part of the siege and then compressing the later parts somewhat. But all the major details of the siege in the film have at least some basis in the actual siege, other than Thomas’ romance with Cornhill’s wife, and the deaths of Cornhill and d’Aubigny, both of whom are known to have survived the siege.

An Orgy of Violence

If you decide to watch Ironclad, be warned; it’s extremely violent. I’ve seen my fair share of modern action films, and this film goes somewhat beyond them. The film dwells on graphic violence in ways that I found a little shocking. The camera watches a number of extreme injuries, including the top of a man’s head being chopped off and a man being cut from shoulder to waist. In one particularly graphic shot, a man’s arm is hacked off, with four strokes that gradually hack through the bone. The film also dwells on John’s order to cut off d’Aubigny’s hands and feet.

I’m of two minds about the film’s use of graphic violence. One part of me feels that the film was being true to its nature as a war film and showing what war really looks like. In most Hollywood films, the graphic violence is somewhat ludicrous; limbs are easily chopped off even though most medieval swords weren’t sharp enough to accomplish that feat easily. In this film, the dismemberments actually seem plausible (d’Aubigny’s hands and feet are braced against wooden blocks, for example). The violence is shown as being psychologically brutal to the defenders of the castle; at the end of the film, Thomas and the two other survivors all seem moderately traumatized by what they’ve been through.

However, the other part of me feels that the film is just indulging in the pornography of violence that has become so common in modern action films. Many Hollywood films have decided to take the Grand Guignol approach to storytelling, without paying much attention to the consequences of the violence. So if you watch the film, be prepared for some gore.

Overall, the film takes some liberties with the facts, but fewer liberties than I was expecting. It’s a bit like The Warlord in that it’s a small-scale film, focused on a single conflict within a much larger picture, and it has a similar ending, with the hero worn down by his struggles. While I have some problems with this film, I’d rather watch a dozen films like this than a Braveheart or 300. Now I just have to hunt down a copy of a film on Tudor history.

Update: I review the sequel here.

Want to Know More?

Ironcladis available on Amazon. The best book I know on King John is W.L. Warren’s King John (English Monarchs), but it’s getting on in years. For a more recent take, and one more closely connected to this film, try Stephen Church’s King John: And the Road to Magna Cartadoes a good job of examining the Baron’s War and how it led to Magna Carta.

The Lion in Winter: The Reason I Became a Medievalist

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Anthony Harvey, France, Henry II, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Katherine Hepburn, King John, Medieval Europe, Movies I Love, Peter O'Toole, Richard the Lion-Hearted, The Lion in Winter

When I was 12, my mother and I developed a sort of ritual on Thursday nights. We would lie on my bed and watch PBS, which was mostly running British comedies like To the Manor Born. But one week, I think after the shows that we were watching, they ran The Lion in Winter (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey). My mom remembered having seen it, and so we watched it. I fell in love with it before it was done, and in some ways it is the thing that sparked my life-long fascination with the Middle Ages. It planted a seed that grew when I was in college and began studying history. It’s my all-time favorite movie, for reasons that are too numerous to count.

If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s wonderful. The cast is great. Katherine Hepburn won an Oscar for her performance as the faded beauty Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, while Peter O’Toole chews the scenery something fierce as the aging King Henry II of England. (Four years previously, O’Toole had played a much younger Henry II in Becket.) A young Anthony Hopkins plays his son Richard the Lion-hearted, while an equally-young Timothy Dalton makes his film debut as King Philip II of France. It’s based on a Broadway play of the same name by James Goldman, who adapted it for the screen.

Eleanor and Henry’s tombs. She was smart to bring a good book.

What It’s About

While the performances are solid, the real strength of the movie is in the script. The plot is complex, but it develops entirely out of the actual political situation in 1183. Henry II is king of England, but he’s also the ruler of territories technically within the kingdom of France. He inherited the Duchy of Normandy (as well as England) from his mother and the Counties of Anjou, and Maine from his father. His wife Eleanor is by her own right the Duchess of Aquitaine, a territory that compromised close to a quarter of all of France. As a result, they control close to half of all of France, a much larger chunk of territory than the king of France controls. Their oldest son, the ‘Young King’ Henry, has just died, and the couple have gathered for Christmas at the French castle of Chinon along with their three surviving sons, in part to decide how the Young King’s death will affect the inheritance rights of their other sons.

In the 12^th century, the system of primogeniture (the oldest son inherits almost everything) has not fully taken hold yet. With the oldest son being dead, the possibility is open that any of the sons might receive the lion’s share (if you will) of Henry’s vast domain. Eleanor favors the rights of Richard, her second son and undeniably the best soldier of the three, while Henry favors his youngest son, John (Nigel Terry) but worries that John cannot keep Richard from usurping the kingdom after their father has died. The middle son, Geoffrey (John Castle), resents his parents for ignoring him and schemes to manipulate everyone around him. And into the middle of this family quarrel comes the young French king, Philip, who is determined to take advantage of this political rift to break up Henry’s holdings. Philip’s half-sister Alais (Jane Merrow) is engaged to be married to Richard, and has in fact been raised by Eleanor almost as a daughter, but Henry has taken Alais as his mistress, because he and Eleanor do not get along. And to complicate things further, Eleanor is the ex-wife of Philip and Alais’ late father King Louis VII of France.

The movie follows the shifting plots and alliances that emerge between the characters, as Henry and Eleanor try trick after trick to get the upper hand over each other. They manipulate their rebellious children and their children manipulate them right back. Philip drops a bombshell to Henry that he and Richard were once lovers. Geoffrey betrays both brothers and both parents as the opportunity arises, and Eleanor and Alais struggle to maintain their love for each other in the face of their rivalry over Henry. And through all this, the movie is still a love story about Henry and Eleanor.

The Facts

What is so remarkable about all this tangled mess is that it is basically true to the facts. In 1183, the political situation between France and England and within Henry’s domain really was this complex. What Goldman did was to take the complex political situation and then interpret the people involved as a 20^th century dysfunctional family, in the vein of Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. By projecting modern notions of family tensions back on Henry and Eleanor’s brood, he was able to explore how these real people might have felt about their actual family relationships if they had been more like 20^th century men and women emotionally. So the movie has to be watched with an awareness that much of construction of the characters is hypothetical. We don’t know how Henry and Eleanor felt about each other personally; all we know is that very soon after Eleanor was divorced by the king of France, she very quickly married the man who was to become her ex-husband’s main rival; later on, she rebelled against him, and he had her kept under house arrest for several years while he took concubines. We don’t know what the relationship between Eleanor and Alais was like, but we can imagine that Eleanor’s feelings toward the girl she raised would have become very complex once that girl had displaced her in Henry’s affections (which is not a provable fact, but only a rumor from the period). So while the personal relationships are largely fictitious, they certainly feel plausible and they fit with many of the known facts, and the well-written characters are brilliantly realized by the impressive cast.

What makes the movie even stronger is that Goldman understood a good deal about how politics worked in this period. Whereas current films about the Middle Ages often anachronistically depict politics as being about abstract ideologies such as ‘freedom” and show kings having to justify their rule to their subjects like modern politicians, The Lion in Winter places the medieval politics right where it belongs, at the intersection of land-ownership, marriage, and noble titles. Henry has inherited much of his position and short of open warfare, there is little those around him to do to stop him. Henry’s marriage to Eleanor has created a political situation in which he rules much more of France than Philip does, but Philip is still the king of Henry’s French territories, which gives him an advantage that Henry can’t completely counter. And while Henry technically rules the Aquitaine, he doesn’t actually own it; it belongs to Eleanor but is currently held by Richard. The nobles in that region are more likely to support Eleanor and Richard than Henry, just as Henry is unlikely to support his lord Philip. Henry could try to remove Richard from his position, but that would create an opportunity for Richard and Eleanor to ally themselves with Philip who would support their claim over Henry’s.

Alais’ dowry is a strategically important chunk of land that puts Henry’s troops a day’s march from Paris, so he doesn’t want to give it up, and he doesn’t want to give up Alais for more personal reasons. But Alais is betrothed to Richard, and Philip is pressuring Henry to either go ahead with the marriage or return both Alais and her dowry (which would put Philip’s troops about a day’s march from Rouen, Henry’s continental capital). What the characters are arguing over is who is going to marry Alais, who is going to inherit key pieces of land and Henry’s titles, and how these developments will affect them militarily. What they actually fighting about is whether they love each other. In doing all of this, the characters are being far more true to actual medieval politics than Mel Gibson or Orlando Bloom ever managed in their ventures into the Middle Ages, and at the same time the characters are still deeply modern.

The script even manages to include the role of medieval religion. Eleanor has been on crusade with Louis. Henry contemplates asking the pope to annul his marriage to Eleanor (which would bastardize all his children and allow him to start over with Alais), and his marriage to Eleanor was based on the annulment of her marriage to Louis. The characters generally treat religion very cynically, but even that has at least some basis in medieval realities.

The film does take a few liberties with the facts. It is set at Christmas 1183, by which time Henry had already met with his surviving sons and settled, at least for the time being, the question of their inheritances, and Henry met with Philip on St. Nicholas’ Day, Dec 6^th, to sign a new treaty dealing with Alais’ marriage and wedding. So none of the main events of the film actually happened. The film takes as a fact Henry’s relationship with Alais, which was only a rumor that circulated to explain Henry’s reluctance to marry off Alais; his desire to keep her dowry is more probably the reason for his hesitance. In one scene, the film depicts Hugh de Puiset, the Bishop of Durham, as a doddering old man when in fact he was a sharp politician and regional power in his own right. But when set against a script that feels true to the period if not to all the facts, it’s easy to overlook the film’s inventions. If film-makers have to ignore certain historical facts to tell their story, I’d much rather they did it this way than the way 300 does it.

The castle of Chinon

If the movie has a weakness, it’s Prince John. In the film he’s portrayed as generally being a miserable human being. He’s selfish, petulant, greedy, cowardly, and incompetent, even though the film acknowledges that he’s quite well-educated and intelligent, and it’s not particularly clear why Henry loves this little turd so much. Goldman’s depiction of the future King John has much in common with traditional views of him. But in recent decades, historians have reappraised John and generally acknowledge that he was intelligent, a good administrator (far better than Richard was) and even quite skilled militarily. His servants were deeply loyal to him, and he possessed much of his father’s restless energy. His great problem was that he was not good at building relationships with his nobility, and that caused him a great deal of difficulty toward the end of his reign. Personally, I like the historical John a good deal more than Richard, but it’s hard to find anything likeable about Nigel Terry’s John. (Terry later went on to play a far more likable English king, King Arthur, in John Boorman’s Excalibur.)

The Lion in Winter is, for my money, the best movie ever made about the Middle Ages, not because it gets all the facts right, which it sometimes doesn’t, but because it gets enough of them right, and gets the important bits right. If Goldman’s treatment of Richard is little too philosophical for my sense of Richard and John is unlikable, O’Toole certainly captures Henry’s boundless energy and fiery temper, and Hepburn’s Eleanor is such a believable character that I suspect most medievalists secretly imagine that the real Eleanor looked and acted a lot like Katherine Hepburn. And I’m probably not the only medieval scholar this movie helped produce.

 

Want to Know More?

The Lion in Winter (1968) is available through Amazon. There’s also an, in my opinion, inferior 2004 remake starring Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close, The Lion in Winter. The performances are all good, but they simply can’t compete with the originals.

If you’re looking to learn more about the principle characters in the film, you have a lot of choices so I’ll stick to just one for each character. W.L. Warren’s Henry II (English Monarchs)is an excellent study of the king and his administration, although it’s quite long and not for the casual reader.

There are a lot of not-very-good popular biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, such as Alison Weir’s book. These biographies tend to romanticize Eleanor and make a lot of assumptions about what we can actually know about this intriguing woman. Skip that and get Ralph V. Turner’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of Englandinstead. If you insist on something more popular, Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Harvard Paperbacks) is your best option; it does an excellent job of putting Eleanor in her 12th century context. (Ok, I lied. I just had to give you two books on Eleanor, whom I’m secretly in love with.)

John Gillingham’s study of Richard Iis less a conventional biography than an examination of Richard’s reputation and the many myths that have sprung up around him.

W.L. Warren’s King John (English Monarchs)is getting a little old now, but I still like it for its even-handed treatment of this much-maligned ruler.

There aren’t a lot of works in English on Philip II of France (also called Philip Augustus), which is unfortunate, because he’s one of the most important French monarchs. Jim Bradbury’s Philip Augustus: King of France 1180-1223 (The Medieval World) is probably your best option if you want a biography.