Agora: Hypatia and the Heliocentric Theory

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Agora, Alejandro Amenábar, Alexandria, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Hypatia of Alexandria, Interesting Women, Middle East, Movies I Love, Oscar Isaac, Rachel Weisz, Roman Empire

Agora (2009, dir. Alejandro Amenábar) is a surprisingly fresh film about ancient Rome. Unlike most films about ancient Rome, which tend to focus on the period from roughly 100 BC to 68 AD, Agora is set in the late 4^th/early 5^th century AD, as the Roman Empire was entering the decline from which its western half would never recover. Instead of focusing on sword-and-sandal heroics, it tells the twin stories of the religious upheavals in Alexandria, Egypt (one of the largest cities of the ancient world) and of the intellectual pursuits of the female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (Rachel Weisz). One of my readers, Jerise, has kindly made a donation to my Paypal account and asked me to review it. I was planning on getting to this film eventually, so thank you Jerise for giving me a reason to get to it sooner rather than later!

Agora tells a complex story, so this review is going to focus specifically on its depiction of Hypatia. We’ll look at the political and religious upheavals in Alexandria in the next post.

Hypatia

Of the historical Hypatia we know only bits and pieces. She was probably born between 350 and 360 AD, and thus was in her 30s or 40s in 391 when the film opens (making Weisz just about the right age to play her). Her father was Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician of some note who was probably responsible for her unusually high degree of education in an era when women were rarely educated at all. She became a Neoplatonic philosopher and taught male students at Alexandria, numbering both pagans and Christians as her pupils. That in itself indicates that she was held in remarkable regard. One of her pupils, Synesius, went on to become the bishop of Ptolemais in Libya, while another, Orestes, became the praefectus Augustalis, essentially the governor of Egypt, although the film simply calls him Prefect.

According to the Greek historian Damascius (d. after 538 AD), one of Hypatia’s students professed his love for her. Damascius gives two different versions of her response. The more polite version (which he discounts) is that she told him that music was the antidote for love. The less polite version is that she handed him a bloody menstrual rag and said “this is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake.” Her point in the latter story is that he is merely infatuated with her body, but her body has an ugly side to it.

Of her scholarly works, comparatively little is known, because none of her writings have survived. She is known to have been a mathematician like her father. She was clearly interested in astronomy, because she edited and corrected the most important ancient work on the subject, the Almagest of the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. The Almagest still survives, so we do have something with Hypatia’s fingerprints on it, as it were. She was also interesting in the geometry of cones. She has incorrectly been attributed as the inventor of the astrolabe and the hydrometer (a device for determining the density of liquids). Beyond that, all we know is that she subscribed to the Neoplatonic school of philosophy and that she was a pagan, a fact that was to become extremely important to her eventual fate. As a Neoplatonist, she probably believed in a single god who had much in common with the Christian Creator.

Since we have no historical images of Hypatia, here’s Rachel Weisz instead

Unfortunately for Hypatia, late Roman Alexandria was an extremely tumultuous place religiously, with intense political and religious disputes between the pagans, multiple sects of Christians, and Jews. The city was subject to frequent religious riots and acts of violence. The patriarch of the city, Cyril of Alexandria, was locked in a struggle with Orestes, and because Hypatia was a good friend of Orestes, Cyril’s supporters became convinced that she was preventing a reconciliation between the two men.

In 415, a group of Cyril’s supporters attacked Hypatia. According to Socrates of Constantinople (an historian who died some time after 439 AD), a religious official named Peter led a crowd who waylaid her as she returned home on day in a chariot, dragged her to one of the major churches, stripped her naked and stoned her to death with tiles. They dismembered her corpse and had it burned. The 7^th century historian John of Nikiu (who seems to have been quite hostile to Hypatia) says that Peter’s crowd seized her, stripped her naked, and dragged her through the streets until she died, and then burned her body. A later and more lurid account claims that the rioting crowd flayed her with sea-shells, a detail that modern scholars entirely discount. Regardless of exactly what happened, it’s clear that a mob of Christians led by Peter murdered her and burned her body. Thus died the most highly-educated woman of the ancient world (at least that we know anything about).

Hypatia in Agora

Amenábar’s film manages to include virtually everything we know about Hypatia, although it fleshes out the details considerably with its own invention. But one of the things I love about this film that, with the exception of two fictitious slaves (Davus and Aspasius), virtually every named character in the film was a real historical person. That in itself suggests that Amenábar (who wrote the script) was serious about trying to be historically accurate.

The film opens in 391 with Hypatia teaching Orestes (Oscar Isaac) and Synesius (Rupert Evans). Since Orestes is a pagan, this correctly captures the fact that she taught both pagans and Christians. Orestes is in love with her, makes a public declaration of his love by playing a tune he has composed on the aulos in a theater, and then giving her the aulos. The next day, she responds by giving him her menstrual rag, which he throws down in disgust, not really getting the point she was making. Historically, Orestes is not the student who professed his love to her, but this modest adjustment to fact allows the film to set up the idea that Orestes will be in love with her his whole life, even after he becomes the Prefect.

Oscar Isaac as Orestes

In the film, Hypatia teaches at the Serapeum, an important temple dedicated to the late Egyptian god Serapis. Her father Theon is described as the ‘director’ of this institution, which contains an enormous library, all that’s left of the Great Library of Alexandria. Although the film does distinguish between the Great Library and the Serapeum library, it doesn’t really go out of its way to do so, giving viewers a sense that Hypatia taught at the Great Library.

The Great Library of Alexandria was founded at the end of the 3^rd century BC by Ptolemy Soter, the first member of the last pharaonic dynasty of Egypt, the Ptolemids. At its height, it had over 500,000 books housed in it, far and away the greatest library of the ancient world. It was large enough that the collection wasn’t all housed in one building. The Serapeum was one of the ‘daughter’ libraries.

One of the little puzzles of ancient history is what happened to the Great Library. Although various people have been accused of destroying it, it probably was destroyed gradually by a series of crises, including Julius Caesar’s siege in 48 BC, Emperor Aurelian’s siege in 269 AD, Emperor Diocletian’s harsh actions in 298 AD, Bishop Theophilius’ destruction of the Serapeum in 391 AD, and the Arab conquest of the city in 641.

The film’s version of the Serapeum. The library is the round building in back

Theon may possibly have been associated with the Serapeum, perhaps being educated there, but there is no evidence either that he was the director of the institution or that Hypatia taught there. As a leading philosopher of Alexandria, it’s not a huge stretch to make her one of the Serapeum’s faculty, but that’s an invention of the film.

Hypatia’s Astronomy

Another thing I love about this film is that one of its two plots is Hypatia’s drive to figure out an astronomical puzzle. The film opens and closes with the shot of the whole Earth, making it clear that this film is to some extent about astronomy. Early in the film, Hypatia lays out the classical Greek understanding of the universe. The Earth must be the center of the universe because while objects in the heavens move in perfect circular orbits, on Earth objects move in a linear direction downward, toward the center of the universe. If the Earth were not the center of the universe, objects would fly off the planet seeking the center of the universe. In the absence of any concept of gravity, the idea that physical things have an inherent attraction to the center of the universe makes a pretty good explanation.

Hypatia’s slave Davus (Max Minghella) is in love with her. Having listened to her lectures, he builds an orrery, a model of the universe according to the astronomer Ptolemy’s system. It shows the Sun and the planets moving in circular orbits around the Earth, but each planet (including the Sun) also rotates around the moving point on their own circular orbits, known as an epicycle. This was Ptolemy’s attempt to explain some of the irregularities in the observed motion of the planets, irregularities actually caused by the fact that we are observing the motion of the planets from a platform that is itself moving. Orestes ridicules this system as needlessly complex. Why, he demands, wouldn’t stationary planets be more perfect than moving ones?

Hypatia looks at Davus’ orrery

That question sets Hypatia off on an intellectual journey that will last throughout the film and through the rest of her life. Every so often the film gives us a scene in which Hypatia and others try to reason out what’s actually going on with the planets.

In my opinion, the film does an excellent job of explaining the logic of ancient astronomy as well as how Hypatia slowly solves the problems inherent to it. In a later scene, she and her students discuss the Heliocentric theory, first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos centuries before. As one of her fellow scholars points out, the Heliocentric theory makes no sense. If the Earth was moving, why wouldn’t there be a constant wind against us as the planet moved? Why wouldn’t objects we dropped fall a distance behind where we were when we dropped them (since the planet would have moved on)? These are entirely reasonable objections to the Heliocentric theory based on what knowledge the Greeks had access to. So while most films tend to depict pre-modern people as scientifically backward and foolish, Agora treats its characters as intelligent, capable of observation and reason, and coming to reasonable conclusions based on what they know.

Later on, Hypatia conducts an experiment in which Aspasius, her slave and research assistant, drops a bag of sand from the mast of a ship as it sails. Instead of falling a distance behind the mast, the bag lands near the mast. So, she reasons, the objection that objects would fall away from us as the Earth moves must be invalid. She begins to think that maybe the Heliocentric theory might be right.

Still later, Hypatia debates the problem of the Earth moving around the Sun with Orestes. She suddenly realizes that the problem is that everyone has been blinded by the perfection of the circle. Maybe the Earth’s movement isn’t circular. But what sort of shape could explain things?

Then she realizes that one of the shapes contained within a cone, the ellipsis, might do the trick. In a scene that is one of the climaxes of the film, she works out the puzzle of the Heliocentric theory as Aspasius watches. It’s a truly beautiful scene that celebrates the joy of intellectual discovery. Have a look.

However, to be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that Hypatia actually did find a way to prove the Heliocentric theory. The film acknowledges in a epilogue text that Johannes Kepler is credited with the discovery. It doesn’t say that everything it’s shown us is hypothetical, which is unfortunate. When the film first came out, I was teaching Early Western Civilization, and I decided to allow my students a little bit of extra credit by going to see the film and then writing a 2 page paper about it. I told them beforehand that there is no evidence that Hypatia proved the Heliocentric theory, but every single student who decided to take the extra credit came away from the film convinced that she had.

That’s why historical accuracy in film matters. Despite the active admonition of a college instructor that the film was going to show them something entirely hypothetical and probably untrue, all of my students found the dramatic visual presentation of the material more persuasive. Film is an incredibly powerful teaching tool, and film makes owe it to their audiences to be more careful about what they teach their audiences. Remember that there is no such thing as ‘just a movie’.

Despite this major flaw in the film, I find myself forgiving Agora on this point. While the film overstates what we know about Hypatia intellectually, Amenábar is careful to base his film’s speculation on two things that we actually do know about Hypatia: she was interested in astronomy, and she was interested in conic sections. Had she combined those two interests with a certain degree of experimentation, it’s not impossible that she could have worked out a proof for the Heliocentric theory 1200 years early. And in the film, she makes her discovery and is then killed by the Christian mob before she has a chance to tell anyone, so her discovery dies with her. In a nice touch, as she’s dying, she looks up and sees an ellipsis in the dome of the room.

It’s also incredibly rare for a film to depict a woman as an intellectual, a scholar, and a discoverer of truth. Typically, our cinema celebrates the intellectual work of men while glossing over the critical contributions of women. So I find myself liking this film the way I like Hidden Figures, for highlighting a woman for her smarts, not her beauty.

But…

There is one really egregious anachronism in the film that bugged me the whole way through. Although it’s set in Alexandria in the late 4^th and early 5^th century AD, the Roman soldiers are shown dressed in gear from about the 2^nd century AD, with rectangular shields, metal breast-plates, pilums, and helmets with a neck-flap, instead of the mail tunics and round shields they should have had. That would be like making a movie set in the modern day and dressing and equipping all the American soldiers as minute men.

Want to Know More?

Agora is available through Amazon.

There hasn’t been a lot written about Hypatia by scholars, since the hard facts about her are so few. But Edward J. Watts’ Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher might be worth your time.

Also, novelist Faith Justice has written a number of blog posts about Agora, so you might find what she has to say worthwhile.

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Robin Hood: The Magna Carta

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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.

Robin Hood: A Whole Lotta Plot Going On

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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.