Part One: Robin Hood and the Legacy of Outlaws in Medieval England

Margaret talks to Joe Kassabian about how Robin Hood might not have been real, but bandits who supported the peasantry was

Sources:

https://mercian-as.co.uk/chester.html
https://entertablementabroad.com/2026/06/sheriffs-and-shires-the-geography-of-governance/
https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/culture-leisure/country-parks/history-of-sherwood-forest-robin-hood-and-major-oak
https://mercian-as.co.uk/about_sherwood.html
https://www.etymonline.com/word/tithe
https://www.etymonline.com/word/tour
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678889
https://mercian-as.co.uk/outlaws.html
https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/tag/sloth/
https://www.medievalists.net/2021/05/piers-plowman-great-uprising-1381/
https://robinhoodlegend.com/the-legend/
https://web.archive.org/web/20201116124922/https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/gest-of-robyn-hode
https://traditionalbritain.org/blog/walter-scott-as-a-conservative-thinker/
https://web.archive.org/web/20201115204031/https://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood/text/chandler-robin-hood-development-of-a-popular-hero
https://www.academia.edu/6274298/Robin_Hood_and_the_Social_Context_of_Late_Medieval_Archery
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Robin_Hood

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to kopy Boodhed Cool Stuff, your weekly
reminder that there have always been people fighting for what's right.
Usually I have a less cliche introduction than that, but
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I have two very
important things to say right here up top. First, we
have a guest this week, Joe Kasabien.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Hi. How are you hey? Thanks for having me. I'm good.
How about you?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
I am doing well. I'll get to the other thing.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
So you run a military podcast, The Lions Led by Donkeys. Yeah,
I guess military is the only adjective. Doesn't really like
a military history podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
I like it.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
I've listened to it a couple of times. You're also
a military specfic writer and now a regular fantasy writer.
Is that also true?

Speaker 3 (00:47):
That is true?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
What is your new fantasy book?

Speaker 3 (00:50):
So? I wrote a gunpowder fantasy book called The Highlands Burn.
It came out in the end of May. It focuses
mostly on kind of like a libertary story based out
of an area roughly based on the Caucuses. Because I
kind of got sick of I'm a huge fantasy fan,
but I kind of got sick of just reading about

(01:12):
Western European stuff all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, that makes sense. I have bad news for you
about the subject of this episode, but we'll get to
that because I also have sick of it. This is
actually why I had to like do the research on
the thing I'm going to talk about today. Yeah. But
the other thing that I wanted to say before we
even get to anything else. You're a military person, so
you should advise me whether or not should we invade

(01:36):
Canada to get them to stop burning down all their trees.
Because I am way south of Canada, and the sun
is an angry red eye in the sky, and so
I figure instead of blaming climate change, we could blame
other people. And I had to turn off my air
conditioner in my air filter in order to record this
and this West Coast people are supposed to have to
deal with wildfire smoke. That's the natural way of the world.

(01:59):
But I shouldn't.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
As someone who's originally from Michigan, I find myself being
a big fan of Big Michigan. Like I don't want
the United States to take over Canada. I want Canada
to become part of Michigan.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
First of all, I fucking love Michigan. I think that's
a great idea to.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Really finally put those people in Ohio in their place.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, we just make Canada just like an extension of
like the best city in Michigan and Arbor.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
Well, I am a Detroiter, so my opinions on that
are known. Well, I've spent the longest in Lansing, but
that's where I went to university. Lansing is a terrible place.
It sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
My dad's from Detroit, my mom is from Plymouth, so
I got the Michigander and me.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
All right, all right, Still, both of those are better
than Lansing. I will say I.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Spent a lot of time literally sleeping in bushes and
Lansing because one of my friends had been arrested there
and we were waiting for him to get out of jail.
So I'm not a big fan of Lansing. I have
also been arrested at Michigan State Police.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
It was the police in Lancing that convinced me that
horse cops have a trigger by which they can make
their horse poop. I'm convinced of this because I was
busking and Lancing and the cops went by and they
couldn't stop us. It was legal for us to be busking,
but they didn't like us, and they left a line
of horseshit directly in front of us, about five feet long.

(03:27):
I believe you it was perfect. We had to move,
we were done busking.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
The cops would be the people to teach their horses
how to weaponize shit. Yeah, that's a very MSP thing
to do. I mean Lancing PD as well and Michigan
State University's police. They're all assholes.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, So what you're saying is that actually Lancing being
drowned in the fiery smoke was actually Canada doing us
a favor, and the rest of us are just collateral damage.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Possibly. I mean Gretchen Whitmer, the governor's on her way out,
but she's currently trying to sell everything to data centers,
So I mean all of these things are possible.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Okay. Well, unrelated to any of that, I'm actually completely
with you that I want to read mostly fantasy books
that have the furthest from Western Europe and especially the
furthest from England that I can get. That's usually what
I want, especially anything that has to do with like
kings and nobility and stuff. But I really wanted to

(04:29):
talk this week about the most famous outlaw in the
English world, the man whose name is synonymous with outlaw
but good, the person that I'm surprised it took me
into about four or five years of this podcast to
cover Robinhood. Oh hell yeah, what are you coming into
it knowing about Robinhood?

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Only the stuff in like popular media. Certainly, Oh perfect,
And of course I believe there is some kind of
financial ada named after him.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Oh that's true. I'm sure he'd be really happy about that. Well,
what's funny is that actually what we're going to talk
about today and Wednesday is about how Robin Hood, who
probably didn't exist but might have existed, About how Robinhood
his name has like it becoming the weird capitalism for

(05:22):
the people app is not fitting to probably what the
original Robinhood would have wanted, but perfectly fitting with the
direction that Robin Hood's name has been taken over the
last six hundred and fifty years at least.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, that happens to everyone that is like cool from
back in the day. At one point, after several generations,
someone is stealing your shit to sell an app.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Yeah yeah, and just be like this is now something
completely unrelated to anything you had any interest in. Yeah,
we are robbing the rich and giving to the poor
by all investing.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
I mean the only character from history that isn't the
case is like Hitler, because he would love Twitter.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
I give it another hundred years. Yeah, I'm not looking
forward to it. But Leopold, King Leopold, not a lot
of people trying to turn his name around because everyone
who like vaguely supports him and just tries to make
everyone forget that he ever existed, you know, like.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Or they're just Belgian. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, there's like some mass murderers who are just like
trying to quietly get forgotten out of history. And like
Leopold though what second I think is the main one
I think of when I think of those folks.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Oh yeah, he is the crown of being a piece
of shit. Yeah, at least from the low countries, he
comfortably has that title.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah. If people want to hear more about King Leopold,
they can go back and check out our story on
Sir Roger Casement, the gay Irish knight who brought down
the greatest mass murder in his And this person's not
a night. We're not going to talk about a night,
but we are going to talk about a weird thing
that sort of relates to anti colonialism despite happening in England.

(07:10):
We call Robinhood the one and only Robinhood. No one
calls him that, but I did earlier in my script.
But it's entirely possible that Robin Hood was a name
that outlaw after outlaw took aus their own name. Or
it's maybe not the one and only. After all, it's
even more likely that there never was anyone named Robin Hood. Well,
we have records of people named Robinhood, but they're not

(07:31):
the Robin Hood. Probably so he might be the nun
and neither not the one and only. Obviously there's a
certain amount that everyone knows about Robin Hood. There used
to be a plucky fellow who was either a human
or a fox, depending on your source, who lived in
a quirky forest. I went and watched some of these
you know it lives in a quirky forest called Sherwood

(07:51):
in ye oldie sorty times in England. He was an
outlaw with a heart of gold who robbed from the rich,
and I wrote stole from the poor of my script.
But that's not what he's known for. And gave to
the poor alongside his crew of merry men, and his
particular foe was that mean old nasty Sheriff of Nottingham,
who is either a human or a wolf, again, depending

(08:13):
on your source. There is not any confirmed historicity to
any specific tale of Robin Hood, but what we know
for certain is that Robin Hood has been a folk
hero in England for at least six hundred and fifty
years and probably several hundred years longer than that. As
a folk hero, all sorts of people have mapped their

(08:34):
own values onto this poor guy. But what's important to
me and to this week's story is that he started
off firmly a working class hero. We actually don't know
the earliest ballads. We just like straight up don't know them,
but the ones that were written down, the first ones
that were written down. He was not a noble. He
was a yeoman. Are you familiar with yeomen?

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah? Guy, it was kind of just a rank and file,
working class guy working for his shitty feudal lord.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah. It means slightly different things at slightly different times. Overall,
it usually means someone who's like a free commoner instead
of a like in serfed I don't know the word here.
Instead of a serf, you know who is like theoretically
tied to the land, right, A yeoman is like the
upper crust of being a fucking peasant. And you could

(09:27):
even sort of call them the pro to middle class,
but not really. But also they're not the rich. It's
also a word that means servant, which is the other
usage of it, right, the guy who works for the
nobles and things. But as I learned while trying to
research all of this shit, if you want clear cut
definitions of how the medieval world worked, then don't look

(09:49):
to actual history because there's a lot of it, and
most of it isn't written down, and it's written down
in different places at different times, but different people and
everything means different things.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
The word usage evolves heavily over time, to the point
it kind of makes you go mad when you go
far enough back for historical research.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yeah, there's going to be way more etymology drops in
this episode than usual.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Hell yeah, we love a good etymology drop.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
I'm really excited about it. We're going to talk about
the Jest. The jest is my favorite one of them anyway,
and tithings.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Okay, so.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
What I care about is that Robinhood was not a noble,
not at first that idea, like most modern Robinhood films
and things like that. Most modern adaptations have him as
a noble who has been displaced because the wrong guy
is king or whatever right, and he's off to try
and find the right king, and all the robbing from
the rich and giving to the poor is like kind

(10:46):
of almost like a secondary it's like a thing to
pass his time while he's going to do the true
and noble monarchist revolution against the existing monarchy that's later,
although still hundreds of years ago. That's not just a
like modern twentieth century invention. But what Robinhood is more
than anything else is the arc type of the noble outlaw,

(11:08):
which is something that's more common in populist stories because
it gives the working class a hero of their own.
So like the great stories of the Only Sorty Times
England are King Arthur for the nobles and Robinhood for
the peasants, and specifically populist stories for the working class,

(11:30):
like kind of having someone who upends the social order
and someone who acts noble without being a noble. But
later versions, of course they're like, oh, we actually have
to make him a noble because peasants can't be noble.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
They can't act this way. It's too high above their station.
You can't have them thinking that they can't be shoveling
literal shit all day and be named like Billy shit shoveler.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, totally, huh. Yeah, No, he's like, you have to
be groveling around in the dirt. You don't have time
for high minded things like being nice to people or whatever.
Only the rich or nice to people, which is counter
to everyone's experience of the world.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah, But to.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Lay the scene before we get to robin Hood, we
have to do context. My favorite thing in the world.
We're gonna talk about Sherwood Forest, and I'm gonna tie
this whole thing into the enclosure of the commons, because
why not I have to tie everything to the enclosure
of the commons. Sherwood Forest. I've never been to Sherwood Forest.

(12:28):
Have either of you all been to Sherwood Forest.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
Nope.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
I've been to a place called Sherwood Forest, but definitely
not the one in England.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Oh okay, let's say it was in England. It's the
Sherwood Although we're gonna talk about what a generic name
Sherwood Forest is in a second. Sherwood Forest is obviously
a place of legends because of Robinhood. It was fantastically
important as a forest in its day. I don't know
that I can point to anything comparable in the modern world.
The Central Royal Forest of medieval England was like an

(13:00):
entire legislative area that mattered. I'd always assume Sherwood Forest
is like a forest, like, ah, there's a forest over there,
and that's where the outlaw is, you know.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Yeah, I assumed it was the woods. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Well, its name Sherwood basically means county forest forest.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Ah. Okay, really rolls off the tongue.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, really totally, because Sherwood basically means the woodland that's
part of the shire. With shire being an old timing
place administration name, it's not just where hobbits are from,
and shires were administered by representatives of the king called
shire reeves aka sheriffs. So this woodland it was named

(13:49):
I pronounce this skier Uda in nineteen fifty, not nineteen
fifty eight. That was absolutely not fifty eight. It was
literally regular nine fifty eight without the on regardless of
what I wrote in my script in the year nine
fifty eight. It was named scare Udah or something like that,
maybe Sheer Yuda the woods of the shire, the shire

(14:11):
in questions, of course, nottingham Shire. Then in ten sixty
six you have the part that I almost wish I'd
have to talk about, because every single political persuasion wants
to talk about this in really complicated ways. You have
the Norman invasion. Ah, when William the Conqueror from Normandy.
I feel so bad. You were like, oh, man, I
love fantasy that has nothing to do with England, and

(14:33):
I'm like, let me tell you about the fucking Normans.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Oh, don't get me wrong. I love myself some good history.
I just don't want to sit down after a long
day and crack open the next tale about nights or
whatever in fantasy world fighting dragons. When it comes like
we did a series on the English peasant Revolt, wonderful time.
Oh amazing?

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, No, I like I always kind of hated English
history just out of a bo shit, Like my family
calls itself Irish, so we're like, ah, we hate England,
you know. And then also like this is of course
every single fantasy story and I'm sick of it or whatever.
I grew Upretty in a ton of fantasy, but so
I always like kind of had a resistance to learn
about English history, and then slowly I'm like, oh, ancient

(15:16):
English history is interesting as shit, and so are all
the peasant revolts, and so is the history of like
labor struggle, fighting, the enclosure of the commons. Like the
thing that I've learned by doing the show is that
wherever bad stuff starts, people start fighting it right away.
So in the worst places, you have some of the
coolest people, right you have like well, unfortunately a lot

(15:38):
of the resistance to fascism in Germany got kind of
crushed by the early thirties, but like, you still have
all these people to do an amazing shit, and so
you can't just be like, oh, Germany in nineteen thirties,
I hate everyone who's ever from there. You know.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
Yeah, everywhere you know has layers like an ogre.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, But you can grow underground and then
the green sprouts come up out of the ogre.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah, that's how they're grown. I mean, going back to
the Shire and Orcs for that matter.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's the difference between ogres and orcs. Orcs are mined
and then yeah, exactly, ogres are grown, orcs are cultivated. Yeah,
and ogres grow wild, yeah exactly. Yeah, difference between wild onion.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
And whenever somebody says merry men, I think it's just
like a bunch of little Mary the Hobbits. Yeah. Yeah,
so it's just like a guy and then his band
of merry men.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well we're going to talk about the merry men in
a little bit. Great because the merry men actually just
means the pleasant men, not the funny men. I just
it's hobbit.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
They didn't have a tight five. They're just nuice.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
Yeah, yeah, just admit this was an excuse for you
to make as many Lord of the Rings references as possible.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
I didn't write any into the script.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, I know you didn't. You don't need to write
it into script. It comes it's like breathing.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, no, totally, am which is funny because I've never written.
But don't put that in all right, anyway, it's fine,
you're not missing anything in my opinion. Well, it's the
same reason that like I didn't care about history until
I started actually caring about like politics, and like how
power works and stuff like that. You know, It's like

(17:21):
I really struggled with, like, here's a bunch of names
and dates, so why would I read the fantasy version
of that when instead I can read the names and
dates tied into story, like Lord of the Rings, or
like the Norman Invasion when William the Conqueror in ten
sixty six from Normandy invaded Normandy. For those who have
a normal understanding of history where you don't care about

(17:43):
small parts of France, Normandy is this place in northwestern
France that has been settled by Vikings from Denmark and
from elsewhere, but you know, most famously from Denmark, and
it became like mostly French. William was the descendant of Rollo,
the Viking leader who founded the place, who I learned
about through TV, and he conquered England. Which is you

(18:07):
name your kid, as nominative determinism, if I've ever heard it,
you name your kid William the Conqueror. And that's a
lot of pressure to put on a kid.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
It's a big surname to hold.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, yeah, like your dad is like John the Conqueror.
He didn't do shit, you know, and the English called
him William the bastard because they didn't like being conquered.
The Norman invasion fucked England up, and it also fucked
up everything because everyone ever since has like both good
and bad people talk about the Norman invasion. There's a

(18:38):
lot of Anglo Saxon purity people who are not good people,
even though theoretically they are the anti colonial side of
this particular equation. Although the Saxons had also just conquered it.
These islands got conquered a lot.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
I couldn't know anything about that in my surname personally.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Oh, I don't know what the reference is.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
I am Armenian. We are the crossroads of constantly being conquered.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Oh, not Kassabian specifically, but being Armenian.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
If people want to know more about Armenian history and
our podcast, they can check out our four parter or
maybe six part are on Operation Nemesis. When the people
who survived the Armenian Genocide went and hunted down all
of the people who did the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Some of my favorite dudes to ever exist.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yeah, they were fucking cool. I love a like when
your defense in court is fuck that guy. The fuck
that guy defense is the strongest defense, and we've only
had a couple of them on the show. I think
there's been three. Fuck that guy defense. One Russian revolutionary
in the nineteenth century, woman won someone from Ukraine, Ukrainian

(19:47):
Jewish anarchists who went and killed the Ukrainian nationalists who
genocided or led all the programs that killed the man's family,
and then Operation Nemesis. I can't remember the name of
the guy, but one of the Armenians who went to Germany,
Sogamon tet Lerian. Yeah, there is an absolutely sick statue
of him in Armenia for anybody that wants an excuse

(20:09):
to go there, of him standing there holding his pistol,
standing on tallat Pasha's head. I have multiple pictures in
front of it. It is a good time. Yeah, amazing. See,
this is why history is interesting. It's actually full of
all of the best stories in the world because it's
full of all of the stories in the world. Yep,

(20:30):
So the Normans. When the Normans invaded England, it started
England down the track towards becoming the reoccurring villain of
the Pod. The enclosure of the Commons. Basically centuries before
England could go around fucking up the rest of the world.
They had to fuck up their own people first, which
they did by taking all of the lands that were

(20:50):
held in common the commons and saying, never mind someone
owns this. You can't hunt in these woods, you can't
graze your sheep in these fields, or all the ways
of life you've been doing for millennia. And I remember,
I actually don't remember the name of this woman off
the top of my head. Unfortunately, someone won the Nobel
Prize in Science for proving that the tragedy of the

(21:11):
Commons was a bullshit idea, this idea that if you
hold things in common, they just get destroyed. Science says
very clearly otherwise. And it's always been really funny to
me too, Right with like the enclosure of the original comments,
you're like, ah, well, if the peasants had it, they
would destroy it all. And you're like, but that's the
way it's been for thousands of years and everything's still here.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, exactly, pretty sure if they were going to destroy it,
they would have done it by now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, they've been there for a while. And also, you know,
certainly what destroyed Ireland's trees was not the enclosure of
the Commons.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
But the English, Yeah, they have a tendency of doing
that where they go.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
It seems to be their thing. Yeah, I would argue
it's possible that the enclosure of the English Commons was
the worst single thing that happened in the history of
the world, because it is the idea that the British
eventually exported everywhere else. Was this idea of you take
all the common stuff and now it is owned by
one rich guy the poor. Before they could steal all

(22:10):
Robin Hood's style steal from the rich, the rich had
to have stolen from the poor by enclosing all of
the land. And Sherwood is one of the first places
that that enclosure happened. I don't know if it was
specifically framed as the enclosure of the Commons, but that's
what happened. The Norman Kings wanted Sherwood Forest like it
was about one hundred thousand acres. They needed one hundred

(22:32):
thousand acres to be their own private hunting lands. But
if you want private hunting lands, do we still have
a sponsor for private hunting of things that would be
illegal to hunt otherwise, Sophie, I'm not sure. Let's say yes, yeah,
probably you should listen carefully to all of these goods

(22:52):
and services because one of them might be your own
private royal forest. And we're back. So the Norman Kings,
they were like, we want one hundred thousand acres private
hunting lands, just like more than I could imagine whenever

(23:16):
I'm reading about shit way back in the past when
people were like, ah and then the poor person got
forty acres, and I'm like, all right.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me right now. But
they're like, yeah, I get one hundred thousand for me personally,
Like well, fuck.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, totally. That's why no one else can have their
five or whatever you know, or quarter whatever. Anyway, I
live early most of the time, so I would settle
for a yard at this point totally. Oh yeah, you're
a you're in Europe. Yeah, not a lot of wild
land in western Europe.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
I don't even have a balcony.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
So I was calling it county forest forest because I
think that's funny, but they're there. Actually was a legal
distinction between a woodland and a forest, so sherwood forest
does mean something different than sherwood wood. A woodland wasn't
just untouched wilderness. It was tended and managed by generations
of people to be productive. A forest was basically an

(24:17):
enclosed woodland plus the fields, villages, towns, abbeys. And there's
even a palace in Sherwood forest because that's where the
king goes to go hunt, and they have strict rules
about what you can do there. You can do even
less there than you can do in the rest of
the country. Only the king or those he grants permission
to are allowed to hunt beasts of the chase, which
means deer and bore. I think in eleven hundred the

(24:40):
laws included prohibitions on clearing land, cutting firewood, burning fields, hunting,
carrying bows or spears, or grazing livestock, and these laws
and the forest were overseen by a keeper appointed by
the king. The position of Sherwood Keeper was an hereditary title,
and the keeper hired foresters and adjusters. Foresters police the forest,

(25:05):
riding around on horses, making sure no one was killing
any boors that they didn't want them to kill. Can't
eat that wild food.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Got to make sure nobody's hunting the King's most dangerous game.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, it's so such a fantasy trope. I wonder how
many actual kings I know more about fantasy than I
do about actual history of nobility. I wonder how many
kings met their end to a boar. Yep, it's a lot.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
It's got to be more than zero.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, adjusters a word I had never heard before. Collected
tax and made people pay rent. Hundreds of people lived
in the forest. There's like whole villages and stuff there.
Right before they were like, and we just now, this
is the forest. It's its own thing. You can keep
living here. You just can't do any of the stuff
that you need to live here. And they made sure
that people weren't grazing their animals too much. And if

(25:54):
you are caught poaching a deer or a boar for
the first hundred years or so, they blind you and
castrate you.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
Oh that's a bit steep. I know.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
What's funny is the thing I read was like, they
would blind you and castrate you. And then the next
sentence was like, and then they stop the hangings. And
I'm like, so they would blind you, castraight you, and
sometimes hang you. Is that what I'm hearing? But then
peasants got those rights, those pesky rights with the magna
Carta in twelve fifteen, and so after that they were like,
all right, fine, we're just gonna find you which raises

(26:28):
money for the crown, and you'd barely have any money.
So it's still not so great in the Magna Karta
and the Forest Charter that came two years later actually
a big demand for the people. I love how much
old timy politics don't map to modern left to right politics,
right because you're like, stop making all the land public
and let us graze our animals there. That's a modern

(26:49):
right wing talking point in North America, right.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Right, especially like the sage brush Wars and all that
other stuff.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, but when we're talking about the enclosure of the commons,
the forest is the enclosure. So they're like, please stop
making this be legally forest land. And they managed to
get the size of the forest taken down in size.
It doesn't get rid of the trees, it just gets
rid of the legal distinction around the forest. Some of

(27:18):
the oldest trees on the island are there in that forest.
But just last month, in June twenty twenty six, the
oldest tree in the forest died. Its name was major Oak.
It was about one thousand years old. It was between
eight hundred and twelve hundred years old, and it was
legendary as the place that Robin Hood slept was under
this oak. And you want to guess what killed it?

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Men, It's got to be people in some way, right.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
It's the same reason that we have to destroy Canada.
It's not actually Canada's not particularly to blame for climate change.
Climate change. Oh yeah, climate change. Well we don't know,
Oh that Canada doesn't have shooters in those woods. England
has been cut through by heat wave after heat wave
these past few years. You all just had some gnarly ones.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Oh it was terrible and we did our last live
show in London smack dab in the middle of a
heat wave and it was not.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
Fun with or without air conditioning.

Speaker 3 (28:21):
Oh without, of course, yeah, y.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Horrific. I understand. I've been to England a couple of times.
I understand why they don't think they need air conditioning.
Like in any logical world, what they need is an
artificial sun so that they have a sun.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah, it's similar to living in the Netherlands, like we
need a big fake like glow lamp, like an iguana.
But now we have it and our houses are not
built for that, so it's like everything is an oven
all time.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah, God, Yeah. When I was in Netherlands, it was
not hot. That is one of my primary memories of
the Netherlands. When people complained about it being hot. It
was not hot. A lot of really nice evenings biking
around in the snow. And major Oak was destroyed by

(29:12):
climate change and tourism, the one two punch. Basically, the
heat waves destroyed it, but the fame didn't help. In
order to keep it looking majestic, they all put supports
up under it to hold the branches up. So there's
like all these like metal supports holding up the branches,
which meant that the oak kept those branches alive instead
of doing what it naturally does, which is let the
branches that can't support fall off. And so it wasn't

(29:35):
able to shrink down to take care of itself like
old trees do, and trees in crisis will do, is
they'll like retreat back to the oak where I live.
We had this horrible drought a couple years ago last
year Jesus Christ don't even remember, and most of the
oaks on the property died, but a lot of them
kind of came back the next year by like sprouting
little tiny branches just like right out of the trunk.

(29:57):
You know, Yeah, it makes sense. I wasn't able to
do that, so it died. That's Robin Hood's tent died
because of our arrogance. But in ye OLDI sorty times,
the big Highway comparatively big that led from London to
York ran right through Sherwood Forest, which meant it was
a particularly good place to rob people, so outlaws went there.

(30:21):
Respect Yeah, I've always wondered like as soon as GPS
has started routing people their neighborhoods that like weren't used
to having people come through it. I was like, I like,
wouldn't even be mad if someone set up a roadblockade
at this point to started asking people to pay a toll.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
I lived in a neighborhood that you know, wasn't the
worst around where I lived, but it was not a
place you wanted to get lost in at night. Is
where I kind of grew up. Yeah, and as technology
kind of seeped in everybody's life, you definitely got a
lot of really strange people ending up there that you know,
did not mean to end up there. Yeah, and I

(31:00):
didn't rob anybody, but I did ask like, are you lost?

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah. Well, later we're going to talk about some of
the very polite ways that Robin Hood robed people. But
Norman England was a shockingly social controlled space. We've covered
before on the show if you go back and listen
to it. I don't remember what we called. It might
have been called Anglo Saxon democracy, but I probably tried
avoiding putting Anglo Saxon the title because that's a contentious

(31:28):
series of words. Before on this show that there was
an odd democracy that was common in post Roman pre
Norman England, not because there wasn't a monarchy, but because
the monarchy wasn't particularly capable of expressing power outside of
the core areas, and so people practice traditional democratic structures
and that started to wither by the end of the

(31:51):
millennia as the crown got better at controlling people. Well
before the Norman conquest, but once the Normans were there.
Do you ever heard of the Frank Pledge.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
I haven't.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, I had neither, and I have read a lot
of Eyeoldie sword Time books that are basically based in England.
On the other hand, famously, Eeoldie short time books like
to just try and pretend like capitalism has always existed
and everyone's like paying their taxes and coins instead of
like eels or whatever.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, yeah, but the Frank Pledge sure wasn't in any
of these books, because I don't think authors wanted their
books to sound like nineteen eighty four. But if you
ever do write a fantasy book at a eeoldie short
times England, here you go. The frank pledge was a
system of collective punishment. Every single man or boy over
the age of twelve in Norman England was part of

(32:42):
a tithing, a group of ten people, and if any
member of that tithing was supposed to appear before court
and didn't, the rest of the group was fined. This
is particularly important for commoners because the wealthy would like
basically put up their lands as bond to say like, yeah,
up here in court, you can stay my land if
I don't, the commoners don't have any land, so instead

(33:04):
it's yeah, I'll show up in court or otherwise you're
gonna like basically rob everyone.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
I know. Yeah, that sounds about right for a lot
of older civilizations where there's a kind of in this case,
the court is employing it, but a kind of social
shaming to keep everybody in line to some extent totally.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
And there was a little bit of this happening prior
to the Norman conquest, but it wasn't nearly as compulsory,
and like I was a little bit more of just
like yeah, non legislative social shaming. But they also put
in the tithing. They put it in place to stop mergerum,
which is my new favorite crime. Mergerm is the crime

(33:47):
of ambushing colonizers in the woods and then killing them
and leaving their body. We don't call that merger We
call that a loot drop. Yeah, exactly, I care and
all that stuff. What do you expect, there's some nice sandals, motherfucker.
I reread a Heinland book recently. I read a lot

(34:09):
of Heinland when I was a kid, and there's a
loot drop in this book from the fifties where they
like go through a portal to go survive on an
alien planet and one person is all the fanciest gear
and as soon as they walk through, someone just kills them.
It takes their fuckings stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
Oh that's good.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
So Mrdram eventually became the word for killing someone in
secret versus in public, because it was like you have
to kind of solve a crime, like I guess at
the time, most murderer was like two people are angry
and one of them kills the other one, and lots
of people are around. You know.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah, plotting hadn't been invented yet. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, plotting
and scheving.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah, so many Normans were getting got in the forest
that they had to create a special law and once
again an even larger collective punishment, either every ten households
or every ten tithings. I have read things that implied both,
I am not certain. Was called a hundred and this
is like the social unit that everyone was put into. Right,

(35:12):
if a Norman was found dead in your one hundred,
then the whole hundred owed a whole bunch of money,
and you know, if you don't have any money, it's
a bad thing.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
Pretty sure.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
There's debtors prison at this point.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
Oh, for sure. The only thing that you're inventing through
this is the science of how to dump a body
somewhere else.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yes, yeah, they're like, ah, that guy over in that
other hundred was pissing me off, so I'm gonna go
kill a Norman and leave him over there.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, I've come up with a new crime called accessory
to mudroom.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Incidentally, tithing is not the root of the modern word
tithing when you give money to a church. They just
both come from the same route themselves one tenth. You're
supposed to tithe one tenth of your income, and you
are yourself one tenth of a tithing. Twice a year
there was a torn, a mandatory inspection of all the
tithings by the sheriff, and anyone who didn't show up

(36:08):
owed the sheriff a penny for not showing up. So
the sheriff started doing them more and more to trip
people up and get money out of them. Of course,
and torn doesn't come from torny or tournament, even though
those were picking up it around the same time. Instead,
tour comes from like doing one shift of your job,
like one tour, one military tour. That's like the main

(36:31):
place we still use that word, right, Ah, okay, So
it was easy to end up an outlaw, right. The
sheriff is like, ah, there's a torn today, and you're like, fuck,
I'm in the field. I didn't even know about it.
And you're like I don't have a penny, and you're like, oh,
I don't want to go to prison. I'm just gonna
start living in the woods and shooting these deer, Like
that seems nicer.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
I would have shown up for your tour, but I
was way too busy.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Steal of that guy's coat, Yeah, I didn't know you
were coming, which was probably not a crime. He probably
allowed to steal, right, I it's not merger them.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Yeah, I didn't kill him for his coat. I simply
threatened with killing him to get.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
His kills A totally different thing.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
Loophole Bab's right.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
So it's easy to end up an outlaw, and Sherwood
Forest outlaws went hard. In twelve sixty seven, two men
were caught with bows and arrows and were arrested. So again, like,
I think most of the work of being an outlaw
wasn't robbing people. I think most of the work of
being an outlaw was like poaching and just trying to
fucking survive in the woods, you know. So they were arrested.

(37:38):
Two men were arrested for traveling around armed. That night,
twenty of their friends showed up armed to the teeth
with bows and swords, they like stormed the jail, set
the men free beat the guards. The guards were literally
just the local lord's servants, and so they didn't kill them.
They just beat the shit out of them. And then
they went to the steward, the local guy, the guy

(38:01):
who'd arrested their friend, and they broke out all the
windows in his house and then taunted him from the woods.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Oh these dudes rock, I know, I.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Know, And there was a big investigation, but most of
them got away. The number of outlaws from this period
who simply evaded capture their entire lives is like shockingly high.
I keep reading about stuff now. Whenever I read about
like a jail break, it's like almost every single person
who breaks out of jail in the modern world is caught.
It's depressingly high. But do you know what's not depressingly high?

(38:33):
Do you know what's amazing and low? The prices on
the goods and services that are actually probably not discounted
at all. They're probably actually a regular price. But they're
the ones who support the show and we're back. History

(38:55):
knows the name of at least one of these Sherwood
Forest outlaws, a guy named Roger god Burg, He's probably
not Robin Hood, but like, I don't know, he could be. Yeah,
of the people we know about, I have some other
ones that I'm like, I feel a little more likely,
but he certainly could be. England was just like full
of civil wars. They just like kept having various revolts.

(39:17):
I kind of understood why peasants were, like, there's like
peasants wars when they would uprise, But usually it's just
like barons being like, I don't actually really want you
to have all the power. I want to have all
the power, you know. Yeah, And so Roger had sided
with the barons in the Second Baron's War, which is
a war in the thirteenth century when a bunch of
barons were like, why doesn't the king have us on
his council? We should make that happen, And they had

(39:39):
a war about it and the barons lost. Roger Godberg
fought on the losing side, so we wound up an
outlaw because he was like, I don't really want to
get arrested for that, And he and his men likely
went around robbing and killing people before they were tracked
down and he was either pardoned or died in jail,
depending on your ancient and untrustworthy sources, and there's a
bunch of outlaw gangs the people that I feel like

(40:00):
a little bit more likely there's a bunch of outlaw
gangs flourishing in the early fourteenth century, like the thirteen
twenties or so in the English country side. You know
how the golden age of piracy was like fifteen years
long or whatever. It was like just like this one
little brief moment where it made a lot of sense
to become a pirate in the Caribbean.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, and there's a big enough gap in power where
you could hypothetically get away.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, Like it didn't just seem like a death sentence.
It was a kind of a death sence, but like
a little bit more fond of a death sentence than
other things. You know. I feel like there was kind
of that moment in early fourteenth century English countryside where
all of these gangs are roving around, these outlaw gangs
and kind of similarly just sort of living outside the

(40:47):
law but actually being like pretty well respected by the
people around them. There's all this constant war going on
between the monarchs and their barons, and so you have
this fairly non power structure place right, and so these
bandits they ended up dispensing justice that was otherwise wanting,

(41:10):
like kidnapping and ransoming corrupt nights.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Hell yeah, yeah, So they were just.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
Like kind of being like, oh, those powerful people are
fucking with you. We're gonna fuck them up. They often
themselves were pardoned when they were caught, like that's how
much the people around them liked them.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
It's because the sheriff to learned last upblic Well, if
we just arrest them, they're gonna come over, they're gonna
beat the shit out of me. They're gonna break out
my window, and then they're gonna make fun of me
from the woods about how much they beat the shit
in me and broke my windows.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Exactly, guys, don't rub it in. Do you know how
expensive glass is. It's the thirteenth century. I didn't even
think about that when I realized they broke those windows.
I don't even know when they started moving to glass.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
That's a much bigger like fuck you than anything else
they could have done. I don't even know what the
modern equivalent of that would be, because if you just
like burn someone's Bentley or whatever, they could just go
buy a new one.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, windows hard to come by, I don't remember. I know,
you go back far enough and poor enough people have
like scraped hide as their windows, you know, just a's
like thin and let's in a little bit of light.
But so two of these gangs, the Coderal Gang and
the Fullville Gang, named after families that were doing it.

(42:26):
Families that rob together stay together, And the Fullville Gang
is the main one that I read about. They regularly
cooperated with each other, these various gangs. They formed a
sort of interesting counterpower. Low level administrators of the church
and state seem to support them, the people absolutely supported
them and hid them all the time, and the upper
levels fucking despised them. And the Fullville Gang was often

(42:52):
at war with the Sheriff of Nottingham. So they're my pick,
Margaret's most likely to be Robin Hood pick. It's the
Fullville Gang, except for the fact that none of them
were named Robinhood. But I honestly don't care about that.
I have a feeling that you're incentivized to not use
your legal name when you rob people for a living.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
It's probably a good idea, especially in an era where
you just were who you said you.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Were yeah, totally checked my ID.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my name is Steve. Proved me wrong.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
I have like some like he gets sent from the
future with IDs. The Kings would have loved that. They yeah,
they know exactly what tithing you're in. That's the future shit.
The current British government would love that. They've been trying
to get IDs out there for fucking years. They're gonna
be fucking They're bringing back tithings. That's my nightmarish prediction.

(43:45):
Most of the names I found for these outlaws were men,
but not all of them. Alice Fulville, Like, I read
about eight names of specific outlaws at this time, and
one of them was Alice. So working on that set
of information, I can tell you for certain that one
in eight of them were women. I can't tell you

(44:06):
that for certain, but I can tell you that all
throughout history, especially when you leave like the like civilized world,
I get to air quotes whenever there's a role that
is supposed to be men, women do it too, just
not as much, you know.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, of course, and then they, you know, slowly over
time get written out of history unless it's advantageous for
someone to be like hey.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Look, yeah, no, like I'm like, hey, I found a
woman outlaw from this golden age of outlaws that no
no one can There might be papers about it. I
didn't find them. I read enough papers this week. Most
of the research I read is academic papers and like
things in Middle English. But anyway could have been more.

(44:47):
It's not a not an all men thing. Most everything
written about these outlaws was written by people who could write,
so it was critical of them to say the least
these outlaws do foul deeds. They are evil according to
the writing. But the peasants weren't doing the writing, and

(45:08):
so basically everyone is saying, oh, these evil bandits are
doing evil? Why do people keep being nice to them?
I don't understand, you know. The historian ELG. Stones, writing
in the nineteen fifties, describe the way that authorities at
the time describe the Fulville Gang and the whole moral
panic that the rich were trying to drum up around

(45:29):
these people. Quote, disturbers of the peace are said to
gather daily to do evil. They ride in force by
day and night, taking and robbing people at their will,
imprisoning some of them until they have made grievous ransoms.
They form congregations and wander in the woods and other
public and private places, ambushing wayfarers, whom they rob and

(45:52):
sometimes slay. In all these things, they are aided and
embedded by local people who incite them to their evil
deeds and shield them after they are done. So that's
not the history and saying that's what they did. That's
a historian saying that's what the contemporary authorities said about
them at the time. And I think it's telling that.
It's like, it's like they rob people and they took

(46:15):
them ransom. You're not taking commoner's ransom.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
No, what are you going to get like a handful
of dirt in exchange? And why do you think normal
ass people are hiding them knowing the punishment that they're
going to get.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Right, So I think there's some class stuff that's not
This is why I'm like, this is fucking robinhood. Like
they also probably did evil shit, for sure, I'm not
sure to be like, there's no moral army that hasn't
committed war crimes. There's no group of bandit outlaws writ
large that isn't also like doing horrible shit, you.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
Know, Yeah, I mean their outlaws for every cool thing
they do like helping their community with whatever ransom they
get for a night. They're definitely killing someone over the
Sherwood Forest version of like Jordan's like they're doing petty
murderers shit on top of the cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, Like there's probably not a really high value of
life when you're a fucking yeoman living as an outlaw
in Sherwood Forest in thirteen twenty four.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah, knowing if you get caught, you're gonna die really
really bad life.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, yeah, that's true. I didn't even include this in
this episode. Whenever I end up doing like ee all
these short times in England, I'm like, and then here's
another horrible way they invented to murder the people that
they caught, which is the other thing is like outlaws
like cut people's heads off. The state draws and quarters people.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Yeah, they burn your entrails in front of your eyes.
Like in comparison, they're merciful, like exactly.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Like it's like funny because I I which I assumed
came out of like, well, we tried killing them to
make it stop, but they're not afraid of death. What's
worse than death? All Right, we gotta come up with
new bad shit, like what if that's just not a
good system, Like what that's not a way to compel
people to behave properly. By the time you're fucking literally
ripping them apart with horses, Like I don't think you're

(48:09):
on the good side anymore.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Perhaps state violence has never been a good way to
exact justice.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Who can say, interesting argument that would collapse everything we
understand about society. It is in this general atmosphere that
the first stories of robin Hood arise. We actually don't
know for certain what these stories were, because they're an
oral tradition, and historians and pop historians like me regularly

(48:37):
lament that we only tend to know about the upper
classes because the poor people weren't writing. We do know, though,
that eventually the tales of Robinhood become so ubiquitous that
they do show up in writing. So robin Hood there's
no historical figure that we can point to and say
that is robin Hood, not that we know of. Robinhood
is and likely has always been a legend, a folk here,

(49:00):
a character like honestly, I was talking to my friend
about this. Miriam is often a guess on the show
I Love You, Miriam Miriam is great. Miriam was like, oh,
a superhero, like it's a Marvel character, you know. Yeah, yeah,
because this is just a character that everyone includes in everything.
But there's one important distinction. For now, at least, people

(49:24):
understand that superheroes aren't real. If you're listening one hundred
years from now, you'll be like whoa. People. Anyway, Importantly,
people believed Robin Hood was real, that he was a character,
but he was a real person that they were telling
like fictional stories about. That's kind of what most ballads were.
And it's possible that one of these old timey bandits

(49:47):
was named Robinhood. We don't know. Most guests actually put
him about one hundred years before the like thirteen twenties people,
and because of basically because of how much the legends
had grown, right, they were like, oh, it couldn't have
grown that fast, so it must be even before then,
which I think is neat because it means is a
decent chance that the romantic outlaws of the thirteen twenties

(50:09):
were themselves inspired by Robinhood's stories. And it's also possible
that they went by the name Robin Hood in order
to evoke those stories.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Yeah, it makes sense. When you form a kind of community, legend,
mythos or whatever, it inspires a sense of justice and
good can be done in one community and inspires fear
and other We still do this in the modern era,
oh totally for I mean nowadays you know, propaganda purposes
or whatever. But we've seen that happen during the opening

(50:40):
stages of the war in Ukraine. We've seen this happen
during the troubles in Northern Ireland during the Iraq War,
where these folk characters get built and most of the
time either a they didn't exist at all, or it's
a group of people that have taken up the mantle
to scare people and inspire others.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, what was the Ukraine one?

Speaker 3 (51:05):
It was that lone fighter jets. Oh that's right, Yeah,
that shot down an infinity number of jets or whatever. Yeah,
inspired confidence and in a really dark time. You know.
The Belfast Sniper is another good example during the troubles
where like you know, they put signs up and you
know there was a sniper in Belfast, but it was
certainly a cell of people operating, and in Iraq there

(51:27):
was Juba the sniper Hut videos. There's definitely a group
of dudes.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Snipers are usually this person, right, because you have Lady
Death in World War Two, like.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
Yeah, Ludmiya Pavlachenko. Because snipers are this like adventurous loan
character stalking their target, like there's a purpose behind them
that there isn't with like a normal soldier.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
Oh, which is interesting because Robinhood is a tale of archery, right.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
Yeah, it's pretty much sniper right.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
No, like guns hadn't been invented yet, dudes still gotta
get shot in ahead with something.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
No, totally, huh. We're actual gonna a whole thing on
Wednesday about archery and robin Hood because I spend way
too much of my time learning the class and social
implications of various medieval weapons. Because I have a normal
set of interests.

Speaker 3 (52:12):
I empathize.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Yeah, I thought you might. I was like, oh, what
am I going to do with Jocosavian on the Guest
And I was like, Oh, this is what I'm finally
going to do this one. And the oldest writing we
have about Robin Hood isn't about him as a person,
but about the popularity of his myth, which is to say,
he is always from the very start represented a sort
of populist counterpower to the state and church. So he's

(52:33):
like always been this myth. The oldest writing we have
about him is from the classic of Middle English long
non rhyming poem aka story We'll actually it supposed to
be called him, a literative poem called Pier's Plowman, which
was published in thirteen seventy seven, probably by a guy
named William Langland. Pier's Plowman is the story of a plowman,

(52:58):
a commoner. I haven't read this thing yet, I read
a lot of excerpts of it. In the story, this
commoner Pierce Plowman is teaching lessons to a night on
the finer points of how to live a virtuous life,
like because the night hasn't gotten it, but the peasant
does right. How to be a good Christian, how to
be brave in the face of temptation, and be responsible

(53:20):
to both yourself and to others, and be humble no
matter who you encounter, but also how to avoid those
dastardly sins like covetousness, sloth and hunger. Hunger. I bet
I meant to write anger, that seems I don't know
what I meant to write there. I think you had hunger.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
I don't know if hunger is a sin. I'm sitting right.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Yeah, No, I got no idea what was supposed to
be there in my script? Sorry everyone, And I have
a feeling I'll come back to this poem and partly
to figure out what the fuck I got wrong. But
I want to do and actually maybe I'll just listen
to your episodes first. I want to do it a series,
an epic, long series about all the peasant uprisings all
across Europe, because they are fascinating and this story, one

(54:07):
of the oldest pieces of English literature, led to one
of the largest class rebellions in English history only four
years later, the Peasant Revolt of thirteen eighty one, which hell,
which customer volts y'all go for?

Speaker 3 (54:21):
That was the one.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Yeah, all right, you know way more about it than me.
Here's what I got, but you can correct me on things.
So the actual inciting incident was a poll tax. England
keeps trying this shit. The last poll tax riot i've
read about England was a nineteen ninety A lot of
like punks were at it, and I think I covered
it in the harm Reduction in Canada episode, because everything

(54:46):
is connected in this strange world we live in. The
king was like, everybody not in nineteen ninety, but eeoldie times.
Nineteen ninety is ee oldie times for some of you.
But the King was like, everybody give me a shilling.
I don't care how poor you are, rich or poor.
Everyone give me a shilling, which is funny because modern
right wing interpretations of Robinhood are like, and he was
taxing everyone horribly, even the rich people, you know, Oh no, yeah,

(55:08):
because it's like Robinhood's mad about taxes, and in the
modern world being mad about taxes is like kind of
a right wing rich person coded thing, but it's actually
just different in different times, and so the way people
interpret Robinhood will tell you a lot about their politics.
But the king actual king was like, everybody has to
give me a shilling. I don't care how rich poor
you are. Obviously this impacts poor people more than impacts

(55:30):
rich people, and peasants were like, what if instead of
giving you a shilling, we stormed London and demanded that
you end serfdom. To quote Catherine Walton writing for Medievalist
dot net quote, the revolters wanted an end to the
poll tax, an end to serfdom, and the end to
various other governmental injustices that made the lives of those

(55:51):
in the lower classes difficult. They also wanted lordship to
be divided amongst all men, there to be only one bishop,
and the wealth of the church be spread to the populace.
And the king honestly pulled off some masterful politick. And
he is fourteen years old. Richard the second he rides
out and he's like, oh, yeah, I'm totally gonna listen

(56:12):
to you. I'm the king. Everyone knows kings are like
populous and other people's people in mind, you know. And
people are like, great, we want all this stuff. And
Richard the second he's like, all right, don't worry, I
got you. None of you are going to be punished
for this. We're totally going to meet all your demands.
Just head on home. We got it from here. Thanks
for bringing this to my attention. We're all in it together.

(56:34):
I am putting words in his mouth. People probably realize that,
but that was the idea of it. And you will
be shocked to know. Not you, because you know the story.
Everyone else will be shocked to know the king kept
none of those promises.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
He sure didn't.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Yeah, sure executed a lot of them. He never tried
to pull tax again though. That's the one thing you
can say scared him out of that one particular thing.

Speaker 3 (56:57):
Yeah. It was a very interesting story where like the
taxes back then were pretty much at random, They had
no set schedule. There was wars and stuff going on,
so it's like, oh, well we need another tax for
the army. Well we need another tax for the army. Yeah,
well we need another tax for the army. So people
are like, you know what, we're fucking dune. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Yeah. Every time, like Trump wants a new fighter jet,
he just is like, everyone gave me ten bucks.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Fuck you? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
Yeah. The rebellion almost worked. It was spurred by populism,
and it failed by populism because it failed by trusting
the king and king so for whatever odd reason, usually
trusted unlike the nobility and the wealthy, and a huge
part of what spurred it. One of the leaders, John Ball,

(57:49):
wrote a letter about how this book Pierce Plowman, was,
how he justified his positions, how he used to explain them.
Because Pierce Powman was used as an allegory to mock
the wealth of the and say peasants are fucking great.
The poor are the only people who really know how
to be good Christians, which, again we're gonna get into
our weird right left thing that I kind of appreciate
about the past. Work hard, don't ask for too much.

(58:12):
That's how you be a good Christian. After the revolt,
the guy who wrote Plowman rot another version that toned
it all down, basically to be like, oh, that wasn't me.
I didn't do that. Don't execute me.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
Please, please don't stab me in the face.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Yeah. I feel like that's the part that makes me saddest.
I would like to think that if my book spurred
on a popular revolt, I would just be like, man,
even if it kills me, that kind of goes hard.
That's cool.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
Yeah, my sales are gonna do so well once the
state kills me.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
I used to think about if I got stuck doing
grand jury resistance, where you refuse to testify about the
social movements that you're part of. It's not a crime
to refuse to testify in front of a grand jury,
but they can still put you in jail for it.
To try and compel You can't be punitive, but they
can compel you, right, they can try to force you,
they just can't punish you. And I like have always
kind of had in the back of my mind being like,

(59:09):
you can do it, but it's gonna help my book sales.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Yeah, yeah, you're not wrong.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Not because I would want to go to jail. I'd
rather have fewer book sales in less jail time, but
just as a way to you know, but if you
are gonna.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
Put me in jail anyway, like right, why okay, Like
this is fine. I mean, eventually you have to let
me go and I'll be able to benefit from this.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
But I'd also rather not be right, the clips of
this show are what we're going to use for our
jail support. After your books and my books cause people
to revolt, well maybe they'll just succeed.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
Yeah, then we'll be fine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Actually, yeah, you just got to make sure you write
really good strategy into your books. That's the thing about
writing military sci fi.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
I may have done that all right, including in depth
hit and run tactics in my newest fantasy book, Excellent.
So you know, Dutch government, if you're listening, it is
it is about. It is not the Netherlands. It has
wizards and shit.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
They all live on the Olmstall. I was trying to
come up with some canal. That's the only one I
can remember.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Don't worry, dear immigration services. This is all put in
the fantasy caucuses, and we know that's a part of
the world you do not care about.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Certainly true. So anyway, I found that that story, Pierre's
plowmen and peasant role. It's a complete aside. We haven't
even talked about what he has to do with robin Hood.
But I found it fascinating because fiction has always been powerful,
and storytelling shapes our world, which means myths like Robin
Hood also shape our world. And the other lesson from
that revolt is, don't listen to your leaders when they

(01:00:46):
tell you they're totally going to meet all your demands.
If you just disarm and go.

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
Home, everybody, if you just stop burning down the city.
I happen to be hiding out in in the Tower
of London, and let me live. I'll totally not seek revenge. Yes,
now I'll appreciate your mercy. It'll be great. Everything's gonna
be great. But that is the story. Well, the thirteen
seventy seven story is the first one to talk about

(01:01:11):
robin Hood. How it talks about robin Hood. We're gonna
talk about it on Wednesday, But first, what is the name
of your hit and Run guide, I mean, your fantasy novel.
It is called The Highlands Burn. It's available wherever place
you get a book. It's also available from our website
in case you want to buy it from us directly.
It includes ebooks, audiobooks if you're not sick of my

(01:01:34):
voice because I read it, and paperbacks. I also host
a military history podcast called The Lines Led by Donkeys.
Check it out. If you do, check it out and
enjoy it. We happen to be doing a live show
on September twenty sixth in Cork, Ireland, and tickets are
on sale now.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Ah awesome. Okay, I've been thinking about the name of
your podcast, Lions led by Donkeys. But what do you
think though, now that America is now lyon led by lions.
It's led by a real war fighter who's so god
fucking pete Hegseth, who's going to start mandatory testosterone testing. Yeah,

(01:02:11):
the dude's absolutely hilarious and the darkest way possible because
I was in the military for a while.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
Fucking horrible decision. Nobody should do that. And I've met
a thousand pete heg seths.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Yeah, they're just not in charge of countries.

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
Yeah. You know, he wasn't supposed to be either, he
was just supposed to be some Fox News dipshit. But
that gets you a cabinet position. Now, Yeah, it's great.
Everything's great anyway, everything's going great. The last cabinet of
the Netherlands certainly didn't have a former storm Front poster
in it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
Oh my god. I was like when remember, Like I like, ah, Europe,
that's where everyone's lefty, and I'm like, no, that's where
there's a left It's different, Like Europe is going right
wing just as fast as the US. Just yeah, the
opposition has like slightly nicer points. That's the only thing
it has going.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean things are dark.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Yeah, but there's always in a fantasy land Robbin from
the rich to give to the poor, which we'll talk
about on Wednesday with Robinhood. Cool People Who.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
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