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. 

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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.

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.

The Lion in Winter: Did Richard the Lionhearted Do It in the Butt?

Tags

Anthony Hopkins, Homosexuality, James Goldman, Medieval Europe, Philip II, Richard the Lion-Hearted, The Lion in Winter, Timothy Dalton

At the start of this blog, I discussed perhaps my favorite movie of all time, The Lion in Winter (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey). But there was one facet of the movie that I didn’t discuss in that post, namely the claim that the movie makes that Richard the Lionhearted was homosexual. So I want to look at that today.

In the film, Richard (Anthony Hopkins) meets with Philip II (Timothy Dalton) and reminds him of a night that happened several years earlier, during which they had been physically affectionate (the film doesn’t specify exactly what they did, but the implication is that they had sex). Richard clearly feels something for Philip, and is distressed when Philip cruelly tells him that he submitted to Richard’s advances purely to gain a weapon to use against Richard and his father. He viciously describes how disgusted he felt when he pretended to be attracted to Richard. Richard is deeply distressed by the revelation. Later, Philip shocks King Henry (Peter O’Toole) by describing the encounter to him, and then taunts him “What is the royal policy on boys who do with boys?”

Richard and Philip

When The Lion in Winter came out, it was still a year before the Stonewall Riots ignited the Gay Liberation movement. Homosexuality was a taboo issue, and Philip’s revelation would have been as shocking then as an admission of incest might be today. Because homosexuals were stereotypically depicted as effeminate, the notion that the great medieval soldier Richard the Lionhearted might be homosexual was startling. But was author James Goldman just making this detail up, or is there something to this claim?

In 1948, historian John Harvey, in his book The Plantagenets, put forward the argument that Richard was homosexual. Among the evidence for this claim is the fact that Richard married rather late to Spanish princess Berengaria of Navarre, and never had children with her, and that according to the very well-informed medieval chronicler Roger of Hoveden, Richard had been rebuked by a hermit for not sleeping with his wife and for indulging in ‘the sin of Sodom’. He twice confessed and performed penance, possibly for sodomy. Since Harvey put forward the idea, a number of other authors have explored it, adding one or two pieces of evidence. In particular, it has been pointed out that Hoveden also says that they shared a bed chamber, or perhaps a bed. If you want to see the passages in question, you can read them here.

John Gillingham, perhaps the most expert scholar on Richard, has argued against this claim and asserted Richard’s heterosexuality. Richard had at least one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac, and he is noted in some accounts as raping women. The fact that he never had children with his wife might be partly due to the fact that soon after he married her, he was  separated from her by events around the 3rd Crusade, and on his return home, he was captured in Germany and held prisoner for more than a year. This would obviously have reduced his opportunity to sleep with his wife in the early years of his marriage. He does not seem to have had much affection for her; after his return to England, he did not spend time with Berengaria until Pope Celestine III ordered him to be faithful to her. Thereafter he attended worship with her on a weekly basis. Thus he may simply not have liked her as a person, since this was a political marriage. And, of course, it is possible that she was barren.

Berengaria of Navarre

Jean Flori, another expert on Richard, has come down in the middle, arguing that Richard was probably bi-sexual. (All of this assumes, of course, that medieval sexuality can be analyzed in terms of the modern notion of sexual orientation.)

The specific claim that Richard and Philip were lovers is based on a reference to them having once shared a bed or bed chamber (the Latin is ambiguous on this). While two adult men sleeping in the same bed would certainly be sexually suggestive nowadays, in the 12th century, this was a much less sexually-loaded practice. 12th century households had much less furniture than modern houses do, and the royal household carried its furniture with it as it traveled about from one estate to the next. Servants very commonly slept on the floor in their master’s bedroom. So even a king might not have spare beds in which to put up a royal guest, and inviting a visiting king to share one’s bed would have been much more about courtesy and hospitality than it would have been an opportunity to conduct a personal examination of the royal jewels. So even scholars who support the notion that Richard slept with men generally discount the claim that Richard and Philip were ever lovers.

However, at the time Goldman wrote his play, Harvey’s book was much closer to the cutting edge of scholarship than it is today, and his assertion that Richard and Philip had been lovers creates a good deal of interesting tension in the script. And certainly to audiences of the 60s, the revelation of the relationship would have seemed quite shocking, especially since Richard the Lion-hearted is one of the most celebrated warriors of the Middle Ages, whereas in America, the US military was still issuing dishonorable discharges for homosexual activity in 1967.

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.

John Gillingham’s study of Richard I focuses heavily on the myths that have developed around this king. As I noted, Gillingham disagrees with the notion that Richard was homosexual. I’m not sure I entirely buy his argument, but it deserves serious consideration.

The Lion in Winter: The Reason I Became a Medievalist

Tags

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.