Robin Hood: The Movie That We Didn’t Get

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Brian Helgeland, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Paul Webb, Ridley Scott, Robert of Thornham, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe, Tom Stoppard

Over the past several posts, I’ve looked at Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott) and tried to figure out its insanely convoluted and somewhat absurd plot, as well as its misappropriation of the Magna Carta and its silly climactic amphibious beach assault battle. Nearly everyone agrees that this isn’t a good film, although it deserves points for trying to do something new with the Robin Hood story. And what makes this particularly said is that the original script was, by all accounts, a much better idea.

The film began its life as Nottingham, a script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, who created the TV series Sleeper Cell. Their concept was to write a lighthearted movie focusing on the Sheriff of Nottingham, who is trying to locate a “terrorist” who is robbing people. The Sheriff would use what passed for forensic science in the 12^th century, like following the trajectory of the arrow back to where it was loosed from. Robin is a less virtuous figure, and he and the Sheriff become embroiled in a love triangle with Marion. It’s essentially CSI: Sherwood Forest, and while it’s a totally anachronistic idea, since 12^th century law enforcement operated very differently from modern American law enforcement, but it would certainly have been a very fresh take on the material, because it treated the traditional villain of the story as the hero. Given the popularity of forensic crime shows on TV, it might have been quite successful at the box office.

The Sheriff was based on Robert of Thornham, one of Richard the Lionhearted’s lieutenants, who helped lead the conquest of Cyprus during the Third Crusade and whom Richard appointed as one of the island’s administrators. The script opened with a siege of a castle, a detail that somehow managed to survive the massacre that awaited the rest of the script. They also included Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard’s mother, because she was an important figure in England at this time and she had never been used in a Robin Hood story. For a lot more about the original script, here’s an interview with Reiff about it.

Ethan Reiff

The script became a hot commodity in Hollywood, and a bidding war broke out for it. Eventually, Reiff and Voris earned seven figures on their script, and Russell Crowe was signed to play the Sheriff, perhaps because he shared the same agent as Reiff and Voris. Crowe’s involvement meant that the studio needed to get a director that Crowe was comfortable with, and so Ridley Scott was brought in. But Scott didn’t like the script and insisted on a substantial re-write. Reiff and Voris were dismissed from the project, discovering that they’d been fired when they learned that there was opening for a writing assignment on their own movie.

Scott felt that the script didn’t have enough archery in it and wanted the archery to be the focus of the film, because apparently the archery focus of literally every other Robin Hood story ever filmed was fresher than never-been-done medieval forensic science. Despite the fact that the script had been highly sought-after, he declared that “It was fucking ridiculous…It was terrible, a page-one rewrite.” Crowe also stated that he “just wasn’t into doing” CSI: Sherwood. So basically, Crowe and Scott decided that they knew better than the rest of Hollywood (granted, not necessarily implausible), threw out the script, and started massaging the concept into something they liked more.

Ridley Scott

Scott brought in Brian Helgeland, the writer of LA Confidential, Payback, A Knight’s Tale, and Mystic River, to rewrite the script. The Sheriff was now Richard the Lionhearted’s lieutenant, who returns to England after Richard’s assassination, only to find that John is tyrannically trying to establish the whole concept of taxation in England and that an outlaw is inciting anarchy. So the Sheriff would be caught between two unreasonable men, trying to do what’s right. That’s still an interesting take on Robin Hood, although Scott found an absurd way to twist things. Robin Hood and the Sheriff are the same man, so the detective is chasing the killer without realizing it’s him. Given that this is the plot of Oedipus Rex, it’s striking that Scott thought what is literally one of the oldest plots in Western drama was somehow fresh.

Scott envisaged this script as the first in a series of films in which Robin battles the villainous King John repeatedly, with the storyline culminating in the signing of the Magna Carta. So that’s how the whole Magna Carta/Freedom element crept into the script.

Brian Helgeland

Eventually, however, someone talked sense into Scott and made him realize that his ideas were dumb. In July of 2008, when filming was supposed to have started for a movie that would open in November of 2009, Paul Webb was brought in to do another rewrite, perhaps because he had written a well-received play about the 1170 assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket; Webb would go on to work on the scripts for Lincoln and Selma. In this draft, Robin becomes the Sheriff of Nottingham after he sees the Sheriff killed in a battle, and then later returns to banditry. That’s where the whole ‘Robin pretends to be Robert Loxley’ bit came from. The script also lost its humor and became much more serious at this point.

Filming started, but then Scott decided he didn’t like Webb’s script, so he brought back Helgeland for yet another rewrite during which the film took its current sewn-together form. But the script at that point was a Frankenstein’s Monster of dialog from at least five different rewrites. Reportedly, Robin’s personality veered so wildly that he seemed to have Multiple Personality Disorder. So the studio brought in Tom Stoppard to rewrite the dialog as the movie was being filmed. At this point, the script had pretty much become the exact opposite of what Reiff and Voris had penned and Crowe and Scott had signed on for. The filming process was so fraught with difficulty that it reportedly severely damaged Crowe’s relationship with Scott.

Tom Stoppard

The result, as we’ve seen, is a movie that’s ‘fresh’ in all the wrong ways, like raw kumquats on your dinner plate (something I experienced as a child and will never forget). Perhaps, some day, someone will find a way to resurrect Reiff and Voris’ original script and get it made, not that I’m holding my breath. This is Hollywood we’re talking about.

This is, I expect, my last post on this movie. I’d like to thank Lyn R for her generous donation that made this series of reviews possible. If you have a particular movie that you’d like me to tackle, please make a donation to my Paypal account and let me know what film you’d like me to look at. As long as I think the movie is appropriate and I can get access to it, I’ll give you a review.

 

Want to Know More? 

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

It’s not like there’s a book on the making of this movie. I had to piece together the story from a host of sites across the internet. But I’ve got a lot of work to do, so I’m going to be lazy and not document my work. But the place to start is this blog.

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Robin Hood: The Battle on the Beach

Tags

Cate Blanchett, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

 

After a lot of exam grading and brief digression for Westworld, it’s time to get back to the Russell Crowe Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott). The film culminates in a battle on the beach somewhere along the southeast coast of English. The evil French are launching an invasion, and it’s up to Robin Hood to help King John stop them.

You can watch the scene on Youtube.

There is so much wrongness here it’s hard to know where to begin. So let me just count the problems.

• The French are using amphibious vehicles to get their troops onto the shore. This is technology way beyond anything medieval people had. The earliest amphibious vehicle was built in 1787. I’m not aware of one being used for military purposes until World War II.
• Initially, the English forces are on top of the cliffs watching the French land. They have archers, and open fire on them. But then they decide to send their troops down to the beach to fight. This is just dumb. Up on the cliffs, the French can do nothing except take casualties until they can get up the cliffs somehow. But sending troops down to the beach means that the archers need to stop firing to avoid hitting the English soldiers. So the English forces throw away their advantage for no reason at all.
• Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) is an archer. That’s what he was doing on crusade. There’s no evidence that he has any military experience beyond that. He’s a lowly foot soldier. He’s certainly not a knight, since his father was a stonemason. So why the hell is he given command of the English forces?
• The English charge on the beach is totally undressed; there’s no line of horses to allow a lance charge to have a massed impact. These knights clearly don’t know how to make a charge as a unit.
• Why is Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) fighting?
• Why is Marion (Cate Blanchett) fighting? Why did they even bring her to a battle? So she can be attacked and inspire Robin to fight harder?
• Why does Robin jump off his horse and tackle Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong)? On horseback, he has an advantage over Godfrey; on foot he doesn’t. He immediately draws his sword, so he doesn’t jump because he has no weapon.
• Why does Sir Godfrey suddenly turn, jump on a horse and ride off? There’s no sign the French are losing, although some of their boats are crashing together. And where the hell is he riding to? He’s riding away from the boats. Is his horse going swim back to France?

Basically, there’s no way this battle ever happened anywhere in the Middle Ages.

This review was made possible by a generous donation from Lyn R. If you want me to review a specific film, please donate $10 or more 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.

Robin Hood: The Magna Carta

Tags

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

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

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

King John

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

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

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

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

The right to arrange marriages from heirs in wardship

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

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

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

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

Only a douchebag sits on a throne like that

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

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

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

One of four surviving copies of the Magna Carta

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

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

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

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

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

Robin Hood: The King is Dead

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

Henry III of England

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

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

Robin Hood: A Whole Lotta Plot Going On

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin fighting in the Siege of Chalus

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

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

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

Mark Strong as the villainous Sir Godfrey

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

Meanwhile, At Nottingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cate Blanchett as Maid, err Wife Marion

Enter Robin

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

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

But Wait, There’s More!

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

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

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Cheerfully Disregarding the Past

Tags

Alan Rickman, Caesarian Sections, Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Needlepointing the Bayeux Tapestry, Robin Hood, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

I saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) when it first came out. I was a budding young medievalist in grad school, and I hated the movie. Over the years it’s acquired a fairly negative reputation for its many egregious anachronisms (like Robin Hood’s mullet). So I sat down to watch it was some trepidation. But about half way through the film, I realized that I just couldn’t hate it. It’s not that it’s a good movie; it wasn’t when it came out, and it hasn’t aged especially well. It’s just that the movie so obviously doesn’t take itself even remotely seriously. It’s not a comedy, but the movie just gleefully doesn’t give a damn about anything other than the story it wants to tell, even if that story isn’t especially good. Alan Rickman completely dominates the film with his manically villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, who is basically Snidely Whiplash made flesh. This movie is interested in history about the same way that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was interested in talent.

The film is mostly a paint-by-numbers version of the Robin Hood story with a few new touches thrown in. Robin Hood (Kevin Costner) is trying to thwart the evil Sheriff, who is planning to depose the absent King Richard by marrying Richard’s cousin Marion (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), which will somehow allow Nottingham to ignore the fact that there are several closer claimants to Richard’s throne, such as his brother John and his nephew Arthur (at the end of the film, Nottingham is so monomaniacally-focused on this goal that even as Robin is literally battering down the chapel door to kill him, Nottingham just wants to finish forcing Marion to wed him so he can have sex with her. That’s real commitment to villainy). Robin Hood is a former crusader who rescues and brings back to England a black Muslim named Azeem (Morgan Freeman), who repeatedly demonstrates that Islam is more scientifically advanced than late 12^th century England by inventing things that won’t actually be invented for centuries. And Nottingham is working with a witch, Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), as part of some sort of Satanic cult. Oh, and Will Scarlett (Christian Slater) is actually Robin’s long-lost half-brother.

Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham

 

The Top Ten Biggest Anachronisms in the Film

• Azeem gives Little John’s wife Fanny (Soo Druet) an emergency caesarian section. He knows how to do this because he’s watched horses delivered this way. That in itself is possible, since the earliest-known c-section was performed in 320 BC in India. But what’s more problematic is that Fanny not only survives but is up and running around literally the next day. Prior to the 16^th century, c-sections were generally performed only when it was already accepted that the mother was not going to survive the birth or had actually died; the procedure was a last-ditch effort to rescue the child. Prior to the 19^th century, they were performed without anesthesia or blood transfusions, making them insanely risky for the mother; most women probably died of shock or bloodloss before the process was finished. And even if the mother did somehow survive the procedure itself, in the absence of modern hygiene, there was a very good chance of severe infections setting in. (See Update below)
• Azeem owns a primitive telescope, two glass lenses than he fits into a leather tube. It’s not clear where he got this; since he’s first met in a prison and literally escapes with nothing, the most obvious explanation is that he made it after Robin and he escape. Given that the first known telescope was invented by the Dutchman Hans Lippershey in 1608, and the film is set in 1194, Azeem’s telescope is roughly 400 years too early.
  

  Azeem and his telescope

• Mortianna and the Satanist coven. But that deserves its own post.
• Robin’s father has a framed portrait of Robin hanging on his wall, which is pretty much about 200 years too early for framed portraits.
• Robin and his men all use the so-called Welsh Longbow, like pretty much all other Robin Hoods. Longbows themselves date back to the Neolithic period, the Welsh only began to use them in the late 12^th century (within a decade or so of 1194), and the English only generally acquired them in the late 13^th century, after Edward I’s conquest of Wales. The bow came to play a very important role in English warfare in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and given that the original tales of Robin Hood seem to originate in exactly that period, it was as natural for Robin to use a longbow as it was for Dirty Harry to use a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. But in 1194, it’s about a century out of place unless Robin Hood is actually just a Welsh bandit wandering around England.
  

  Robin and his longbow

• Azeem manufactures gunpowder so they can blow stuff up in the climactic confrontation at Nottingham Castle. Black powder certainly existed; it may have been invented in China around 492 AD. The Islamic world acquired knowledge of gunpowder some time between 1240 and 1280, and the earliest European recipe for it dates to around 1300. So Azeem basically has to invent black powder. Apparently he’s a 12^th century Thomas Edison. (See the previous picture for a nice example of a Stuff Blows Up scene.)
• Nottingham decides to hire some “Celtic” mercenaries, and what we get is a bunch of Time-Traveling Killer Picts. They are dressed in ragged furs and kilts and paint their faces, and several of them actually wield Stone Age axes. These guys are even more out of place than the Viking mercanaries King John hires in Ironclad.
• Nottingham’s men pretty much all wear Norman helmets, a simple bullet-shaped metal helmet that left the face and cheeks exposed, but provided a nasal strip to give a little protection to the nose and eyes. This style of helmet was widely used in the 10^th and 11^th century, but in the 12^th century it gave way to the closed helmet (for those who were better equipped) and a helmet that left the face exposed but provided coverage for the cheeks (for those less well-equipped). So I suppose we could say that Nottingham is just a cheapskate who gave his men very old, crappy helmets, but it’s sort of like making a movie about the 21^st century American military and giving all the soldiers doughboy helmets. (See the above photo for a guard in a Norman helmet.)
  

  Christian Slater’s largely useless Will Scarlett

• After Robin Hood begins the whole ‘stealing from the rich to give to the poor’ routine, Nottingham’s men post wanted posters (an anachronism in itself) that are written in modern English and look pretty clearly printed rather than hand-written.
• Friar Tuck is a friar wandering around England in 1194. St Francis didn’t invent the concept of the friar (a wandering monk, basically) until 1209. The Franciscans didn’t come to England until 1224. Tuck seems to be a priest, since he presides over Robin and Marion’s wedding at the end of the film, but the early Franciscans were generally not priests. So everything about Tuck is wrong.
• Bonus Anachronism 1: Marion’s female servants are named Rebecca and Sarah, which means they’re Jewish, since in medieval Europe, most Old Testament names were associated with Jewishness (the major exceptions being David and Adam). Because English Jews were a despised minority, Christian women would not have used Jewish names, and Marion would have been very unlikely to hire Jewish servants.
  

  Gotta love that totally non-medieval neckline on Marion’s dress!

• Bonus Anachronism 2: In one scene, Marion is needlepointing a panel from the Bayeux Tapestry, a now-famous but then fairly obscure embroidery from the late 11^th century. Marion is Richard’s cousin, meaning she must be French, so I suppose we could hypothesize that she paid a visit to the bishop of Bayeux at some point and fell in love with his wall-hanging and did a quick sketch of it, but why bother actually trying to explain the little details? The film sure doesn’t.

Update: A couple of readers have asserted that Azeem doesn’t perform a caesarian section, merely turn the baby. At the start of the scene, he declares that the baby has not turned and so cannot be born. Then he tells Marion to get a needle, thread, and water. Then he says that he has seen some technique used on horses. He never says exactly what he’s going to do, but it’s presented as some exotic Middle Eastern knowledge. So I suppose there’s some room for debate about exactly what the film wants us to think is going on. However, if he’s only planning to turn the baby, asking for a needle and thread makes no sense. That request only makes any sense at all if he’s planning on cutting Fanny open and then sewing her up after the baby is out.

The whole scene is quite silly. There is approximately 0% chance that a Muslim man without specialized medical training would know anything about gynecology and midwifery. Even most trained physicians in the Islamic world knew nothing beyond some vague theories about childbirth, because gender segregation and the practice of women veiling meant that even physicians almost never had physical contact with unrelated women. Honestly, Robin Hood had more chance of knowing something about delivering a baby than a Muslim man did, because Western men had somewhat greater familiarity with women’s bodies (since veiling and segregation were not as rigidly enforced in the West as they were in the Middle East). Childbirth was women’s work and not something men would get involved in.

Furthermore, breeched babies are, if not common, still a recognized phenomenon across the medieval world. Being able to recognize it and address it was not something that required exotic Middle Eastern knowledge. Marion probably would have at least known the concept, even if she hadn’t encountered it before.

 

Want to Know More?

I’m not sure why you’d want to know more about this film, but Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

Medieval illuminators loved scenes like this

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

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

Prince John and Sir Hiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Know More?

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

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