As I noted in my last post on archery tactics, the bow was long used as a weapon of ambush. In the English-speaking world, the yew longbow has become synonymous with noble outlaws, such as Robin Hood, who defied injustice to live in the green woods, where they ambushed the rich and gave to the poor.

   As with all myths, the story contains kernels of truth but is historically inaccurate. By the time people named Robin Hood appeared in the records in the 1290s, the myth was already deeply ingrained. Most scholars believe that the popularity of the Robin Hood ballads in the early thirteenth century was associated with the increasing importance of archers in English military tactics, combined with the growing numbers of men fleeing the King’s justice or unemployed soldiers finding themselves without a means of survival during times of peace.

   The common story of Robin Hood bravely struggling against the evil Prince John while the noble King Richard was off fighting for Christ in the Holy Land is the product of a sixteenth-century tale by John Major. It is wholly without historical foundation. Richard did pass through Sherwood Forest on his way home from the wars in 1194, but he found no Robin Hood there.

   The sometimes cruel reality of living in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England led to a considerable number of men fleeing the law and forming roaming bands of brigands that preyed on travelers of all kinds. Things were so bad by 1295 that the king “ordered that highways to and from market towns were to be widened so ‘that there may be no ditch underwood or bushes where one could hide with evil intent within two hundred feet of the road’ on either side—in other words, within effective bow range (Strickland, et. al., The Great Warbow, 142).

   Prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066, men could hunt at will so long as they avoided the king’s woodlands. All classes of medieval society shared a passion for hunting. After the Conquest, kings discovered that they could generate considerable revenue by fining men for hunting or settling in the forests. The Crown established a system of royal forests managed by wardens and verderers who were knights or prominent men responsible for protecting the forests and game from trespassers and poachers. The wardens and verderers brought wrongdoers to the justices of the forest for trial. The punishments for poaching the king’s game could range from fines to mutilation or death.

   Contrary popular misconceptions, the historian Matthew Strickland has observed “that the majority of deer poachers were not peasants but ‘barons, bishops, parish priests and local gentry and their households,’ and that ‘particularly for the nobility and higher clergy, poaching was both an entertainment and a way of solidifying connections with local clergy, knights and even royal officials’” (Strickland, et al., The Great Warbow, 148), Likewise, the notion that bandits would rob from the rich to give the poor may play to our sensibilities of justice, but there is no evidence that it ever happened. The truth is the only poor that bandits wished to assist were themselves. No matter what motives we may impute to them, a man who steals for the sole purpose of enriching himself is just a thief.

   The origins of such beliefs are the same that have elevated pirates from the cutthroats they really were to the noble bandits of Hollywood. As the Industrial Revolution took hold in nineteenth-century Europe, people found themselves pushed off the land into fetid slums, their lives ruled over by the factory clock and factory owners who cared as little for them as they did for the rats in the gutters. Deprived of fresh air, freedom, and dignity, people reached for the stories of freer days when men could thumb their noses at authority and escape to the greenwoods. If they robbed from the rich to give to the poor, so much the better. Alas, the stories weren’t true in the thirteenth century, and they aren’t true today. But they do make for fun tales of daring-do, and any story with a bow in it is a story worth telling.

Cheers,

James

For my own modified Robin Hood tale see Archer of the Heathland: Windermere