Heritage Month Day Fifteen: Robin Hood

Happy Robin Hood Day!

It is day fifteen of Heritage History month and we are halfway though! Today we are once again celebrating our heroes of legend; heroes that shape our cultural instincts and reflect the elements of the inner spirit of Western man. Robin Hood, of course, is a heroic figure of the late twelfth century England. He represents the blossoming age in English history right before what can call Merry England.

Robin Hood was an outlaw, unable to live within the constraints of what he considered to be the illegitimate authority of King John and his lackey the Sheriff of Nottingham. Really, as with so many heroic legends in our history, he was a proxy dissident for common Englanders who stood loyal to John’s brother Richard, the rightful king who was absent during his involvement in the Crusades.

Robin Hood also plays the role of a good leader, earning the loyalty and honor of his merry men, a band of outlaws that continues to grow over the course of his various adventures. In one ballad, the king notices that “His men are more at his bidding, than my men be at mine!” This is reflected all throughout the ballads and tales—they follow him into conflict, stand off when the moments are not right, trust his judgement, and look to him as the one with superior shrewdness.

Robin Hood was a menace for the Sheriff, constantly embarrassing him, undermining his tyrannical instincts, and acting as a counter to his power-hungry exploits. Robin was not an opponent of law and order in the abstract, as can be seen in his loyalty toward King Richard, but recognized that there are some regimes not worth living under submissively. Wikipedia expresses this well when it notes: “He appears not so much as a revolt against societal standards as an embodiment of them, being generous, pious, and courteous, opposed to stingy, worldly, and churlish foes.”

In this way, Robin Hood gets to the heart of so many of us: we are loyal to the rightful political orders in our history, we love our countrymen, and we stand for the well-being of the realm. But at the same time, we’d rather be forest rebels and structural outlaws than legitimize a power that exercises itself against our rightful way of love. It’s not just that Robin Hood was “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,” but he was a hero because he was taking back from the political cronies what legitimately belonged to the victims of the corrupt regime.