July 22, 2026 • 50 mins
Margaret continuing talking 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
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad
things happening, there's people trying and do good things, even
if they do it in morally complicated ways by being
Robin Hood. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with
me today is my guest Jokasabian. How are you.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I'm good. I'm good. You know, it's a little bit warm,
which I'm not a fan of, but I'm good. How
you doing well.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
The air conditioner has been off this entire time, and
the air filter's been off this entire time, so my
eyes are a little bit burnie and I am sweating
in my chair, but not enough to stop me from
being excited about the topic of this week's episodes, Robin Hood,
who I've wanted to cover since I started this show
(00:47):
we last left our heroes. We barely even introduced him
at all. Actually, Robin Hood has not even entered the
written word yet. But we were talking about a book
called Piers Plowman from thirteen seventy seven, and in that
book there is a character named Sloth. Sloth is not
a good character when I first read just about it.
(01:08):
That's why I fell down a deeper rabbit hole reading
about the whole book and learned about the Peasants Uprising,
which is the whole reason I fell down that rabbit
hole talking about it. Whatever. People listen to this show,
they're probably used to that. But one of the things
I read was like, oh, there's a character named Sloth,
and I was like, that is the most punk rock
name I've ever heard. But actually, rather than being a
self named non binary person named Sloth, it is the
(01:29):
sin personified, and Sloth in the book says I do
not know my Lord's prayer perfectly as the priest sings it,
but I know rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph Earl
of Chester. Or actually it says, I cannot perfectly my
pot or noster as the priest it singeth, but can
(01:51):
rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph Earl of Chester.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That doesn't sound like something Sloth from the Goonies would say.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
How fuck that is slow? Oh my god. Maybe the
whole thing is a Piers Plowman reference. Maybe that's the
whole secret history of that anti gentrification classic, the Goonies.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That's what I believe now for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, And so basically the character Sloth is just like
a populist. I mean, it's like basically like complaining about
like the dumb yokels. Right. I don't go to church
and do good things, but I sure do love my
comic book stories more or less. The first reference to
Robin Hood in English.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I can't believe jd. Vance existed even back then.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
As for this Earl of Chester, the other person referenced
he did not wind up famous today, but he had
the good fortune of actually being a real person who
lived and died. Except we don't know which of the
three Ranulfs of Chester, the third, fourth, and sixth Earl
of Chester was named Ranulf. It might have been the
(03:01):
fourth or the sixth. I'm going to tell you about
the fourth just in case. But this is basically it's like,
this is other people that ballads are about. Right, So
as a comparison, here's someone who's being mentioned in the
same breath as Robin Hood. The second Randolph, Earl of Chester.
The fourth Earl of Chester fought in one of the
Civil Wars, one of the million Civil Wars, specifically the one.
(03:25):
Smoke is really bad for your lungs. I don't know
if y'all knew this anyway, Let's see how my voice
is affected by doing this show. You all didn't hear it,
but we took a brief break because I turned on
my air filter, which I'm glad for because I was
at one hundred and seventy four parts per million two
point five or whatever I was at.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Bad.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
My air filter is read and apparently it's not coming in.
So now I'll be able to tell you about Robin
Hood without further damaging my throat and eyes in the process.
I love living in the apocalypse. There was a civil
war with the sick name the Anarchy Hell yeah, and
(04:05):
it was like when there wasn't central rule of England.
The fourth fought on the behalf of Empress Matilda against
King Stephen, and he helped put the first reigning woman
onto the throne of England. But Scotland decided to back
Matilda too, and Ranolf was like, wait a minute, that's
a step too far. I can't be siding with Scotland,
(04:26):
so he switched sides. But then he tried to switch
sides and then the king that he defected to he
was like, ah, I'm not with Matilda anymore, I'm with you.
The King didn't trust him and had him arrested and
put so many chains on him that he was literally
like buried in chains, like he was just under the chains,
which is again only the medieval English mind would have
(04:47):
bothered to come up with that idea.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Or a sick album cover one of the two.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's true, but it's not Alice from the first one
in chains. That would be a different band, true, true,
and they did eventually let him out of his being
buried under chains. Buried under chains would be like a
I would probably listen to that album like three times.
It would be like New Metal ee but kind of
still go hard with good riffs. Buried under chains.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, it could be post hardcore too, like it's very
like two thousand and six coded at Warped Tour.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
If it was post hardcore from England, I have to
admit the best post hardcore comes from England.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I don't want to shout out anything about England.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Oh God, that hurts me as a person from the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Well that's a different Oh, there's probably multiple things that
are called post hardcore. This hadn't occurred to me almost certainly. No, No, anyway,
this is besides the point buried in chains. Eventually he
was released from jail and he was like, all right,
fuck this Stephen guy, and he kept attacking him. And
during all this restructuring of everything, Randolph the Earl of
(05:53):
Chester was given the hereditary title keeper of the Forest
of Sherwood. This is probably a coincidence, but I just
think it's really interesting because then there's a chance that
that reference of Robin Hood and the Randolf Earl of
Chester was basically being like, I know the story of
Robin Hood versus Randolph, Earl of Chester, but we don't know.
(06:16):
But it's the kind of thing that I when you
study something obsessively for a week, these things get really interesting.
What we do know is that Ranolph was stripped of
all of his titles of the Sherwood thing eventually and
poison to death. So it didn't go great for him.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
That's unfortunate, I suppose, I guess.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
So mear really, you know, I don't know a moral
feeling about the Randolph Ranolf one way or the other,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I don't feel like I should feel sorry for the
guy who is like the cop of the woods.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah no, yeah, yep. So this is the first reference
to Robin Hood thirteen seventy seven, and it's a reference
saying this shit has been going on for years. We've
been talking talking about Robin Hood for so long that
it's this cliche thing that you listen to instead of
the our Father. There's a few more references to these
stories before the stories themselves come into print over the
next few decades. And what I think I mentioned at
(07:13):
the top of the first one, all of the other
names of people that he's referenced with are real people
because they're rich. They were written down in history, so
we know it. That's why I think that this is
the best argument I've seen for why robin Hood might
be real, is that literally everyone else he's mentioned in
the same breath of about ballads is real. It took
(07:34):
another one hundred years or so before the stories themselves
were written down, at least as far as we know.
The printing press hit the scene in the fourteen forties
and more shit started getting written down, and lots of
ballads like robin Hood. Ballads were really popular, so people
sold them. You have ballads like robin Hood and the Monk,
Robin Hood and the Potter, and I think actually literally
(07:56):
like Robin Hood's death is one of them. I know
there's a new movie we'll talk about at the end
called The Robin Hood. A lot of these rifted off
of each other, right, because these are just I mean,
it's folk, it's like folklore for folk music, folk poetry.
The longest one was called A Little Jest of Robin
Hood sometime from around the late fourteen hundreds or early
(08:17):
fifteen hundreds, like fifteen ten or so. It also has
the names the Jest of Robin Hood and Mary Jest
of Robin Hoodie and other shit like that.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Robin Hoodie is like a cool fucking name.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I know. I know it's probably pronounced hood which just
as an e at the end. But I like saying
hoodie because I like saying y oldie sorty times.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
I like hoodie sounds like a skate brand.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, Robin Hoodie, Yeah, it does exactly. Yeah, y'all ever
heard of a jest? A gest?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Is it like a jape? Perhaps? Oh?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I don't think it's japeish?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
But is it like a Kiro's tale? It is? It is, Sophie.
I'm not sure timeline wise, but I had to look
it up. Okay, I haven't really fucked with Middle English
and Early Modern English much on this show. So I
had to look up a bunch of stuff, and just
gest means an adventure tale. Ah. And if you're wondering
(09:17):
if this is somehow where just like a joke comes from,
it is unlike tithe where it was false friends, A
jest is an adventure tale, and a jester was a storyteller. Hm. Okay,
and then became the person who makes one of people
or whatever. And Mary, as in the Mary Men, I
(09:38):
already ruined this one. In part one, Mary didn't mean
like laughter, but instead like pleasant. So the Mary Jest
of robin Hood is the Pleasant Adventures of Robin Hood,
A nice little tale.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Do you want to know where I know the word
just from?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I do from those Red Wall books, those like children.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I love red Wall. Yeah it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
My brother they love them too. You read like every
single look. Yeah. And we even watched the little animated
show when we were kids.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I did too. It was on right before I went
to school.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah, it was really good.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
But that's where I like, I've known that word.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Since I was a child. This is why reading is
so good.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
You like learn weird words.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, you're like, not everyone knows what a crenulation in
a castle is. I don't understand. They are such an
important part of my childhood. I thought they're like quicksand
you know, they're like a thing that, of course I'm
gonna have to worry about at some point.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah. My childhood word that I would use that would
freak out adults was jovial.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I would use the word jovial all the.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Time because it was like in one of my books.
Oh that's that's good. Imagine your like six year old
daughter coming to you and dropping the word jovial. I
would be so proud.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, yeah, just to say I'm a little freak.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
It's fine. Yeah, we all are. How do you think
we ended up here? Yeah? It was a festively jovial jest.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The jest of Robinhood starts. I've done minor translation from
Old English for this attend and listen, gentleman, that be
of freeborn blood. I shall tell you of a good yeoman.
His name was Robin Hood. And the whole thing is
in that rhyming scheme, and it works like it's still
(11:25):
Middle English and like fucking indecipherable. But somehow, when you're
reading it and it's rhyming. You can kind of just
figure more of it out. I read an annotated version
that explained a lot of it to me. That helped
me a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
But hey, bars are universal.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah, the gest of the story, that's my gist joke.
Robin Hood was a good and pious outlaw, especially loyal
to Mother Mary. There's a kind of a specific thing
where he's like, he's very religious and pious, but he
hates the church, so he likes Mother Mary, which gets
into the kind of the pagan accusations. So just like,
(12:01):
I don't know, that's cool. I relate to that. And
he makes sure his men only steal from rich people,
especially bishops and archbishops. He loved Mother Mary so much
that he would never hurt not just any woman, but
any group of people with a woman in it, because
he might hurt the woman by accident. They would often
waylay strangers, and the way they did it, it's fucking sick.
(12:24):
This is the like weird way of robbing that I
was talking about earlier. They'd be like, ah, a lot stranger,
come have dinner with us, and they would bring them
like to their camp and then feed them like really
good food, like pretty elaborate cooked food, and then be like,
but it isn't appropriate that a yeoman should pay for
a night's dinner, now is it, And be like, so now,
(12:48):
now give us money, and like there's versions of this
in like tourist hustling today, you know, yeah, where it's
like it's not the furthest thing from robbery, but it's
also very respectable. Or you're like, oh, you were on
a cruise like I was, did security on a goth
cruise because my life is what it is. And at
the stops people would be like, oh, yeah, totally, come
(13:09):
have dinner with us, and you're like, no, I don't
have any money, don't do this.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
It also leads back to Redwall, because anybody who's read
Redwall dose of how well the author described all of
the food that they're eating.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Those books have made me hungry. I read those books
in middle school, and I honestly I disassociated most of
middle school, so I mostly just remember that there was
a mouse on the cover.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
It's probably for the best.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So they would rob them by basically saying, now you
got to pay for dinner, but it's a still pretty
polite they like, wouldn't beat them up or anything, right,
I mean, unless they didn't pay. And they do this
to a knight who has no money and he's in
debt to the Abbot, he's like broke, right, And he's like, oh,
I'm losing my land. I'm a broke night. I kind
of fallen out of my horse, tired, my hoods hanging
down over my eyes. And so they're like, oh, no,
(14:02):
you don't how any money, and you owe the Abbot money,
and the Abbot sucks. Here's three hundred pounds or whatever
the money is. I can't remember, even though I literally
just read this yesterday. They also give him a yeoman
of his own, a servant. They give him little John
to be his servant for a while. And the knight
then repays Robin Hood and the merry men and gives
them a bunch of guns and ammo, I'm sorry, bows
(14:24):
and arrows, and also one hundred hired mercenaries. Do I
guess the bandits sick?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
This is a good exchange, you're funny? No, yeah, worked
out really well for him who says bartering doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
I know you. It's like a charity right. You're like,
oh shit, we didn't know you were broke. Here will
lend you money, but not in an evil way, but
you're still going to repay us really well. And then
little John stops yeomaning for the night and starts yeomaning
for the sheriff, the evil sheriff of nodding him, and
then he and the sheriff's cook rob the sheriff and
take off and rejoin the bandits. There's more to it,
(14:57):
There's more ins and outs. There's more adventure happening here.
They rob the sheriff again when he comes after them,
but first they offer him dinner served on his own
silverware because they stole all his silverware, and like, ah, yeah,
come and eat.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
But what a shitty sheriff falls for this twice I know, Oh,
you guys are gonna rob me again.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah, well, I guess the first time they stole, right,
because they steal everything and run, so the seconde's a robbery.
And then they make the sheriff and his men sleep
outside without their outer clothes, just like shirt and pants
or whatever, which is actually always cold. Every time I
have slept outside without a sleeping bag, I have been cold, same,
no matter what summer it is. And then the sheriff
(15:38):
tries to arrest Robinhood. He shows up an archery contest wins,
and then the sheriff tries to arrest him. So they
all run away and they hole up in their night
friend's castle. So the sheriff is a little snitch. He
runs to the king and is like, Sir Richard, that's
the NIC's name. It's like he's trying to make himself
a lord using the outlaws. And so the sheriff captures
(15:59):
Sir Richard. So Robin Hood shows up, and I'm just
gonna read the lines. Robin bent a full good bow
an arrow he drove at Will, I drew at Will.
I didn't bother changing this to modern English. So I'm
going to fuck this up.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
He hits.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So the proud Sheriff upon the ground, he lay full still,
and ere he might up arise on his feet to stand.
He smote off the Sheriff's head with his bright brand.
Lie thou there, thou, proud sheriff. Evil mote thou chev badly?
May you end? That's the way it gets translated. There
(16:35):
might no man to the trust thou while thou still
were alive. He shoots the sheriff down he cuts off
his head and says, you died badly and no one
was ever able to trust you.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Fuck you. It's like the Robin Hood version of Dracula Flow,
and I'm here for it.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Why was Dracula Flow?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Oh, I don't even know if we have the time
to go into that. It is this very strange rapper.
I suppose it's an old man dressed up like Dracula
very badly, to the point that he has the Dracula
hair sharp eat on. Yeah, uh huh, and he has
fed incredibly nonsensical rap lyrics by filthy Frank And it's
(17:17):
just something you have to experience.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I want to see him do the jest of Robin Hood.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Then he could do it. I fully believe he could
do it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yeah, so kill the Sheriff of Nottingham. There's no like
long back and forth of who's the villain. They're like,
I fucking killed this guy, cut off his head, and
then I laughed at him while he was dead. The
king shows up and is like, wait, what the fuck happened? Like,
what the fuck just happened? So he goes into disguise
in the forest. The king is like, I'm going to
go as a commoner or whatever meets robin Hood, and
(17:47):
robin Hood is like, oh, you work for the king.
I love the king. You're not the king, but I
do love the king, but you serve him, so I
like you. And then they have an archery contest back
at the in the woods, right at the bandit camp,
and the king is so impressed because Robinhood has humility.
When he loses that when he reveals himself and he's like,
(18:08):
you're all pardoned, You're so great. I love all of you.
You can come live with me at court, which is
the most folklore ass shit in the world. If you
ever read like Russian folklore, it's like and then the
king is like, now you want you get to live
with me at court, but robin Hood is like, look,
I only go if I can bring all my men,
And the King's like, yeah, all right, and then he
(18:28):
goes and he's like he lives there for a year,
and he's like now, fuck this, and he goes back
to the forest and then he lives for another twenty
two years in the forest.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
That's the gist of robin Hood, all right. I appreciate
that he brought all his friends with him.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
I know much like, you can bring your friends, invite
them not to listen to this podcast. The podcast is fine,
invite your friends to listen to the ads of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
And obviously the most important takeaway in this is what's
the deal with class medieval England and archery. That's obviously
where everyone's mind has gone.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I know mine did.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, so I'm going to answer that. You ever, like,
watch the people who are like really big fans of
the English longbow, the war bow I have.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And I know they tend to split hardly into two camps.
One is like, you know, actual enthusiasts who are really
deep in the weeds and the stuff, kind of like
you know, we have become, or people who insist that
it is like some kind of symbol of supremacy.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Oh interesting, yeah, oh wow, Oh that doesn't surprise me.
I wish that didn't surprise me. Everything to do with
history has that camp. Unfortunately, rather than you know, the
longbow generally being the tool of the peasants, that's what
we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Whenever I was watching the nineteen fifty one conservative Robin
Hood for about ten minutes last night, and then I
was like why am I doing this to myself? And
I stopped it? And the like when baby Robin has
like his good and honest, hard working Anglo Saxon Dad
is killed by the Norman usurper, but Anglo Saxon Dad
is still a king or a noble or whatever the
fuck you know. They grabbed Dad's bow that's inscribed off
(20:28):
the wall. It would have been a fucking crossbow, that's what. Yeah,
that was the upper class weapon.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah. Using a long bow effectively required a lifetime of training,
which was mandated because it is insanely strong draw pole.
It is hard to do to the point of deformed
people's bones.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah, and it's also why like England had Well, okay,
we'll get to it all right. So Robinhood starts off
a yeoman in this story, right, the third line is like,
he's a yeoman, don't worry, we got this. He's one
of us. But later stories around the sixteen hundreds, I
think maybe sixteenth century. I always get those two mixed
up in my head when I read them, and don't
put them in my script. Later he becomes a noble.
(21:10):
But it's not a coincidence that he's the most famous
archer in English history and a yeoman. The knights were
nobles and they fought up close and personal or with crossbows.
But it was the yeoman archer who made England the
medieval force that it was. The English longbowmen is one
of the most famous and deadly forces of military history. Ah. Yeah, No,
whenever there's the like these are the best people in
(21:31):
military history, there's like people who are like the Katana's
the best and also I'm a fascist, and you're like,
you could just like Katanas. You don't have to throw
in the fascist part.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, you don't have to uchiomechium of the shit up.
You could just enjoy swords.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You know, Like, no, the mounted horseback rider is the
best possible soldier. And that's why I'm a fascist. You're like, God,
damn it.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I think it always has something to do with And
this is something I run into all the time as
a military historian, is whenever something is revolutionary in a
way and asserts a kind of military supremacy on the
battlefield and then intern in politics, it always has to
be coming from a position of power supremacy. Of course,
(22:14):
that always gets chained to a modern nation state which
didn't exist a race, which is a concept that didn't exist.
Yet this always happens rather than obviously in the case
of the katana, that legitimately is the case. It was
a symbol of the upper class, right, whereas the long
bow is the most peasant thing, the most peasant symbol
(22:34):
that could exist on the battlefield other than just being unarmed.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah. Well, and it's like, because there's still they're like
the peasant middle class of the military, right, and so
it's like it's going to be hundreds of years, but
eventually the Omen are going to come up, right, you know. Yeah,
But the military use of the long bow. You have
the famous battle of I don't know how to pronounce
French agin Court, where there was a muddy field and
(22:58):
the English long woman just killed the shit out of
all the French knights. The French nights were like, we
got this, and then they were just like, now we're
just gonna keep shooting you kind of the original go
charge that machine gun nest.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, uphill in a muddy field while wearing plate armor.
It was one of the dumbest battle plans I think
I've ever talked about on my Well, actually, that's a
high title to give anything at this point.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
But yeah, that is the title of your podcast, basically,
Legend Daily Stupid. Yeah, and the Yeomen were commoners. They're
middle class commoners, but they're commoners. Nonetheless. In thirteen sixty seven,
as you mentioned, England decreed that every Englishman should be
good with either a crossbow or a long bow. And
it's kind of bonkers to imagine that today. The equivalent,
(23:42):
obviously would be everyone should know how to use an
air fifteen. Yeah, and I don't see even the United
States saying, hey, everyone, you'll have to learn how to
use air fifteens. Only the wealthier folks could afford a crossbow,
which is way easier to use with less training and
less like deforming your to pull back one hundred town bow.
And you know, and I wanted to say when I
(24:06):
was first thinking this through, I was like, obviously the
English trusted their people more back then, But it doesn't
really work out for them that they trust their people, right, Like,
I guess it makes good for conscripting everyone and going
to war. I guess because there's not as much like
standing army stuff. I actually know less about the history
of when England picked up standing army stuff, but there's
(24:27):
so many uprisings all throughout English history. Mmmm that maybe
teaching everyone how to use an air fifteen. I don't
know whatever. I like most of the uprisings. I wish
they had won most of them. Got mixed feelings about
the English Civil War.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
So I'm better than others. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, not a big fan of the Puritans. But this
rising middle class. They didn't have jousting tournaments as for
the rich. They had archery competitions, not just in England
but also in the Netherlands and presumably in France. The
wealth if your people did crossbow at these things. The
poorer people used bows, but there's an odd amount of
(25:06):
social mobility that relates to specifically being good with a bow.
It was like a very important class symbol, but like
a complicated one. People formed militias called confraternities and trained
John Block Friedman in his piece Because I Love My Job.
In his academic piece Robin Hood in the social context
(25:28):
of late medieval archery, described archery competitions with a wooden bird.
You may get a wooden bird called a popinjay, and
you put it on top of a pole and quote
whoever knocked the bird off the pole was acclaimed king
for a year, obeyed by other members of the confraternity,
granted a suit of clothes, wine, and other signs of
civic status. If he succeeded three years running, he was
(25:51):
crowned emperor and given hereditary nobility, and you get a
fancy guilt collar that looked like what nobility wore, but
like obbe see the cheap knockoff version. But it's like
a wrestling belt. You have to give it up to
the next person after you.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Okay, oh well, it's kind of like wrestling would be preordained,
so more like mma in a way, right, Like I
assume some things were also rigged, you know, perhaps there
was a hull cogan of archery. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, someone's like over there just kind of kicks the
pole and the popinjay falls off.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. I think this is interesting too, because I don't
even remember which episodes to see large chunks of, especially
when I talked about Irish history. But this idea of
like having like false kings and like being like, ah,
your nobility but kind of in a fun way is
so common all throughout the medieval world and the ancient
world of just this like way of being like, I've
(26:46):
kind of like fucking with actual kings by being like, no,
this guy's kN like turn the world upside down for
a day. It's a very common holiday thing to do.
This isn't quite this is much later than most of that.
But I just think it's interesting that it's like you're
king now because you won. And obviously these competitions are
(27:10):
important in the jest of Robinhood. There are three different
I didn't mention one of them, Little John wins one.
There's three different archery competitions just in the jest of
robin Hood. And I think this is my own conjecture
here that kind of implies that the written versions of
robin Hood were for a yeoman rather than surf audience. Right,
(27:34):
and he is a yeoman, so that's obviously also implied.
But this might be now that these are like written
and printed, this actually might be the first kind of
literal gentrification of Robinhood. It might be the first taking
him up a social class. Right. Yeah, but this is
entirely my own conjecture. Robinhood used the bow, not the crossbow.
(27:56):
But there's a lot of class fantasy, at least in
the jest. I am fascinated by how Robin Hood hates
the middle nobility but loves the good and noble king.
This is so common throughout all monarchies. You live in
a monarchy, I do. Yeah. I remember once walking around
the Netherlands and there was a this is when Beatrix
(28:17):
was queen. I think, hmm, and I just like walking
by and there's just like this giant portrait of the queen,
and I like turn to my friends and I'm like,
I keep forgetting y'all live in a monarchy.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That's kind of like the weird way about it here
is that unlike the UK, where people, you know, have
actual feelings towards the monarchy. Yeah, Like Dutch people don't
give a shit, you know, it's just not a part
of life.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I think they forget too, And that seems
fine until you see like the crown on the paperwork,
Like oh yeah. I remember reading a piece by Jjack
that annoyed me, But then now that I read more history,
I like hate that. I have to hand it to Gjack.
I was talking about how like populist, including lefty populism
(29:05):
in England likes the monarchy like they're kind of the
people's mascots, you know, And so like, there's this idea
that I've read about all throughout history, going back to
fucking three thousand years ago, that the king is the
good protector of the people, while the rich and the
(29:26):
lesser nobility they are the ones who oppress us. They
are the ones because they're the ones you actually see
oppressing people right right, Like the sheriff is coming around
collecting taxes. It's for the king. But everyone's like, ah,
but if the king knew I was starving, he never
would have asked me for my shilling. Like, no, he
he specifically doesn't give a shit and asked for your shilling. John, Yeah,
(29:46):
good or whatever your fucking name is. If you're English,
you know, people would say like, oh, the czar doesn't
know what's happening. If only if the father or good
father knew. Last week I wrote about the first ever
labor strike in recorded history, which was three thousand years ago,
and Egypt and the tomb builders when they went on strike,
they were like, we just got to get a message
to the pharaoh. As soon as the pharaoh learns about
(30:07):
our plate, everything's going to be fine. But in robinhood,
So when Robin Hood's like, oh, I like the real king, right,
And there's also some Pierce Plowman in this story about
how the peasants are the true nobles. And there's also
a cross class idea that I find oddly American. The
ultimate American man, I would argue, is someone who is
(30:30):
both somehow working class and upper class. Yeah, this is
why eighty thousand dollars pickup trucks exist, Yes.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And why like this you know, mid level guy who
works something to do with his hands, but also makes
him upper middle class. Like nobody is like, look at
the manly I don't know, middle manager, investment banker. Yeah, like, no,
(31:00):
nobody's looking at that guy. It's always gonna be semi
indecipherably rustic in a fake way. Like yeah, they have
the duly, that's eighty thousand dollars. They live on a
large piece of land, but they do not use that
truck for any manual labor.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah. Yeah, I think about this so much, partly because
I'm a podcast who owns a truck. But I bought
it while living off grid, and like it's like all
fucked up, you know, because I like, yeah, live in
the fucking woods. But yeah, this this idea. The eighty
thousand dollars truck is just the ultimate fucking example of
this idea of masculinity, because being rich is cool, but
(31:42):
also you have to somehow be working class, and so
you have to be both at once, and it drives
men insane, Like I kind of feel bad for like
some American men who hold themselves to these standards, even
Red Tarzan.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Probably, but I definitely remember the movie better.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I recently, and by recently I mean about fifteen years ago,
but as an adult, so therefore it all conflates down
to itself. I recently read the first Tarzan book, and
I'd always been familiar with the idea of it. Right,
you have a guy who's raised in the jungle, but
don't worry, he's white. And also in the original Tarzan
book he literally hangs the first black man he ever meets.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Oh, if I.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Remember correctly, he is rough and tumble, and he swings
from the vines. But also in these books he cleans
up nice, he learns languages with ease, he can make
himself comfortable and accepted in high society. So he's when
he chooses the woods, he's choosing the woods. This is
what matters. This is what elevates him above the like savages. Again,
(32:43):
these are racist books. That's the America man like. I'm
kind of obsessed with that archetype and how much it
fucks everyone up. And I think robin Hood is playing
with this a little bit. Robinhood is both a man
of the people but also someone who could make it
in high society. He just doesn't want to. He'd rather
be in the woods.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
That does track.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, and I don't like that read because I like
robin Hood. But stories are what they are. I can't
force it into well. Later we'll talk about someone who
forced it into just like straight up a communist narrative.
But before we talk about anyone who wrote Bows against
the Barons, we should talk about the products and services
that support this show. I often rely on both products
(33:29):
and services as part of my life. I don't know
about you will, and we're back. So that's the earliest
robin Hood, the jest of robin Hood. But the idea
of robin Hood has never gone away, and there have
(33:50):
been new robin Hood stories over and over again. I'm
a little sad that there was no real I expect
it to be, like, I'm just writing about outlaws instead
of doing like literary history this particular episode, but it
is what it is. I still find all this shit fascinating.
By the late sixteenth century, he became a dispossessed nobleman.
Right around the start of the nineteenth century, robin Hood
(34:11):
just got fuck off popular in England, which is funny
because like the nineteenth century is when like everything got popular.
I don't know, I'm always like And then the Victorians
discovered this thing and started doing it badly. That's like
they do that with everything. Book after book were written
about robin Hood, plus theater, plus music, operas, and he
becomes Robin of Locksley. He was not Robin of Locksley
(34:34):
until the nineteenth century. His full name is Robin of Locksley,
alias Robin Hood, and that comes from a novel called
Ivanhoe from eighteen nineteen, which was written by this conservative
Scottish guy named Walter Scott. And this is also where
Robin Hood is returning from the Crusades to find everything
fucked up comes from two So Ivanhoe is where we
(34:56):
get a lot of our modern robin Hood, especially the
more annoying part of it. I'm a little out of
my depth here about this Walter Scott guy. You wever
find that there's like the people who are so famous
that you just everyone pretends like they already know about them,
but then you realize no one actually knows about them.
Oh yeah, that's Walter Scott. Yeah. I think if someone
has said, do you know who Walter Scott is? I
(35:16):
would have been like no. But if someone said Ivano,
I would have been like, that's a book. Walter Scott
was one of the most popular writers of his era,
although later people were like, his books are silly and
his politics are bad, which is good because his politics
were bad. The twentieth century Scottish poet Hugh macdarmid basically
(35:40):
said that it was Walter Scott who convinced the Scottish
people that there was no point in trying to revolt
in that they like, literally like, it's it's Walter Scott's
fault that Scotland isn't free.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I'm willing to blame him for that. He doesn't seem
like a nice guy. His last name is Scott, he
should be pro Scottish.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, so he's a Scottish nationalist, but he's one who
insisted that Scotland should stay part of the UK because
he loves our traditions, not our watchly im as Scottish
as I'm Irish, but whatever. He loves the Scottish traditions,
but they're backwards and needed to be advanced by the English,
so they had to join with the English in order
(36:20):
to like move away to a higher stage of human
societal evolution. He believed strongly in stages of history that
every society has to go through. And what's funny is
I read this piece I think was written by conservative
about why Walter Scott's like cool and it specifically had
to spend a lot of time because I read that,
and I was like, that's just Karl Marx, which is
(36:42):
one of the big things that Karl Marx is wrong about, right,
was this like stages of history that everyone has to
go through. But I was like, he's just saying what
Carl Marx said. And so then the whole article is like,
I swear he does it different. I swear it's not
the Carl Marx version, even though he also believed, and
this is a Karl Marx belief too, that people are
generally the same everywhere and it's their material conditions in
(37:04):
society that shape them into who they are. But Ivanhoe
basically puts robin Hood into the Saxon versus Norman conflict
of medieval England and is like, well, the Normans are
invading and like kind of taken away or like cool
Saxon stuff, but honestly they're the more advanced society, so
(37:24):
we should probably let them, right. That is like the
lesson learned. I think I haven't read Ivanhoe, but by
many of the characters in Ivanhoe is that they're like, ah,
I even though we're Saxon, we don't like the Normans.
They are better, so I guess they should win.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It's a very confusing kind of nationalism.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
But okay, I know, well you don't understand the Turkish
are just more advanced than the Armenians. You know, you
all were still living in a more tribal societies. Obviously
kind of just makes sense and nothing ever happened, and
if it did, we deserved it, and it was good
at the end of the day. As long as he
stok it to call yourself Armenian, you can have no
(38:03):
control and you have to accept the society of Turkey.
But you know, yeah, that's a yeah, and it's so
funny because this is how Robin Hood becomes a more
conservative character to people. But it's hard to make stick, right,
Like whenever people are like trying to make Robin Hood
a write wing character, it happens all the time, and
there's like that Robin Hood. I couldn't make it through
(38:26):
where he's just like basically like a modern war on
terror army bro Oh have you seen this one?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I have it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
He's got short hair and he's like basically wearing a
plate carrier, but he has a bow instead of an
AR fifteen or a four or sixteen whatever. I don't
know the military guns. Yeah, anyway, I assume that was
the conservative Robin Hood. I couldn't make it through it.
I was like, I'm not watching this shit. He's wearing
a plate carrier. I can't take this series.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Robin Hood in a fast helmet writing his Navy seal biography, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Exactly, that's the like. And then I came home and
saved the people. Right.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
I can't believe they gave Robin Hood a punisher tattoo.
This sucks.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
The punisher's skull, but with the Robin Hood jaunty cap
with the feather.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Coming no that's that absolutely exists. It has to the
punisher skull is like rule thirty four of being a conservative.
It exists somewhere all forms of the Punishers.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Totaling, which is yet another example of like Punisher didn't
like cops. I'm not coming out in bat in favor
of the Punisher. He killed cops all the time, that
was like his thing. Yeah, and the guy who wrote
The Punisher said, cops fucking suck. Frank Castle would hate you. Yeah. So,
(39:46):
actually robin Hood and the Punisher are a perfect matchup,
kind of in this particular context. Fortunately, most understandings of
robin Hood. At the end of the day, they constantly
give us the like, oh he wants the good king,
blah blah blah, blah blah. The main single thing that
people remember about robin Hood is robed from the rich
and give to the poor.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
That's the most basic thing about robin Hood. Everybody does.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah. Yeah. On the other hand, that's more or less
also what Christianity says, and they keep turning that into
the opposite of that too, So I guess they are
really good at turning things into their opposite. But many
such cases, yeah exactly, I tried watching ten minutes of
nineteen fifty one's Tale of robin Hood, and it is
amazing how much people can make Robin Hood into a
(40:30):
right wing figure. But in the other direction, there's a
book I want to read. I don't know if it's
good or not, but I want to read it. Nineteen
thirty four's published by British communists, Bows against the Barons,
and it was written by Jeffrey Trees, who later felt
bad about He was like, look that was my Like,
I was youthful and naive. And so he later went
(40:51):
through it did a version of it that takes out
most of the uses of the words worker and comrade
from the.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well, how fitting is it a guy with the surname
Trees to write a book about Robin Hood.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Oh that's a good point. It's spelled tra Se And
so I hadn't said it aloud in my head until
just now.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, then we just have to accept it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Yeah. As Robinhood became more popular, his sharp edges were
shaved off. He became unambiguously good, His enemies became unambiguously bad.
The bad Usurper is like, you know, we got to
get rid of the bad usurper. The good King has
to come back.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Have you seen the Death of Robin Hood, the new
robin Hood?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
I have not.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Nope, it reverses the usual Robin Hood. I'm not going
to spoil it, but this is the premise of the movie.
Robinhood is just kind of a brutal outlaw who kills people.
He like kills a kid in like the first scene,
and he's old and he's like, actually, damn, my life
kind of sucks, and it's weird that people tell stories
about me being good. I actually just kill people. I'm
kind of shitty. That's the rough idea of the book,
(41:58):
and it gets into some at a Christian shit. The
movie presents the idea that Robin Hood was only worth
loving in legend, and I liked the movie, but I
also think it misunderstood robin Hood in a different direction,
because it's like, I'm going to get rid of the
shaved off edges of robin Hood. But at the same time,
(42:18):
the real outlaws of Sherwood Forest were killers and thieves
for sure, but they were part of the lower class
community of the area, and they kept getting pardoned byers
sheltered from the law. I think they have more in
common with like modern gang culture, right, Like there are
outlaw cultures where they're also seen as good by the
(42:40):
communities that they're in, or necessary evils, or like better
than the state services that don't exist. You know. Yeah,
I like to believe that the working class hero of
robin Hood was a fucking scoundrel, but he was their scoundrel.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, I'm willing to bet it's a mesh of the two,
you know, Like, I'm sure him and his band of
merry min stacked bodies fucking waist high and did a
lot of horrible shit, but they were still better than
the alternative. Or you know, maybe they were so awful
that their own threat of violence if people did not
(43:16):
shelter them. You know, these things could both be true totally.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah. I think that we do ourselves a disservice when
we file off the edges off over romantic outlaws. But
I think as a folk hero, as a folk story,
I want something built from the synthesis of the class
warrior and the bandit. But I haven't seen that particular
thing represented too well. Maybe one day I will. And
(43:42):
my final note is on robin Hood and mythology and paganism.
By and large, modern scholarship dismisses the idea that Robinhood
has derived from mythology. I don't know if you knew that. Like,
there's like, especially the Victorians, but also modern folks. Whenever
there's an old timey thing in Europe, people are like, ah,
it's from pre Christian it's pagan, it's pagan. It's oh,
it's like this cool thing, right, Oh yeah, And usually
(44:03):
it's not true. You feel really smart when you learn that,
but then it's not true. It's often from syncretic shit anyway,
so people will be like, oh, Robinhood has to be
a representation of the gods or has to be something else.
And it is almost certain that robin Hood was either
a character that someone made up or there was a
bandit named robin Hood that someone wrote a song about,
(44:27):
and it was an idea whose time it had come
and it spread. So it's probably only an old idea
like one thousand, you know, six hundred and fifty to
one thousand years old, not three thousand years old or whatever.
But there are people who feel that it or felt
that it might come from older sources. F. H. Bradley,
who was writing in the Victorian era. Just to present
(44:47):
this argument, he wrote, quote, the whole story is ultimately
derived from the great Aryan Sun myth. Robin Hood is
hod the god of the Wind, a form of Woden,
Made Marian as Morgan dawn Maiden. Friar Tuck is Tokey
the spirit of frost and the snow. I suspect this
isn't true, partly because Made Marion and Friar Talk were
(45:09):
actually later additions to Robin Hood's stories.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
It seems like a bit of a reach.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, and Robin Hood was a Marianist. That was like
such an important part of his character. He holds Mary
in very high esteem within Catholicism, which does have syncretic roots, right,
like I worship the Mother Goddess. Like that's it. Yeah,
that gets old. I'll give it that.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
You know. Some could even go further. The Holy Trinity
is itself evolution of those things?
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, totally, But there was Okay, so I tend not
to buy the like robin Hood is the gods thing.
But there is one mythological element of robin Hood that
stands out to me, and I hadn't seen anyone else
discuss it. So again, this is purely conjecture from my
non historian self, Robinhood and his mary Men remind me
(46:00):
of the fairies. They live in the woods, they invite
you to dinner. The dinner is an astounding and fine banquet,
full of manners and refined beauty, despite the facture in
the woods, and then there's a secret cost at the
end of it that sounds like the fairies to me.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yet it would be a kind of myth making and
storytelling that these people be very familiar with.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah, exactly. It's like I doubt it was like the
fairies turned into Robin Hood. It's just like people were like, No,
we're just like used to having stories about like, oh,
you go hang out in the woods and someone's going
to invite you to dinner and it's going to be
real costly, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
And that's what I got inbou Robin Hood. Very little
of the details about the Robbin and the Rissians giving
to the poor, but it's a cool idea and it
lives on forever.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
I gotta admit, going into this, I assumed Robin Hood
was a real dude at one point, me too, obviously.
With a ballooning of myth over time and all of that.
But like, you know, because the British history is not
my forte I have. My background is military history and
the very uplifting genocidal history, but not British myths, English myths. Yeah,
(47:03):
I assumed he was a real guy.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
No, I know, there's there's about eight people who people
point to and are like, maybe this guy. General scholarly
consensus is probably not of any of those eight specific people.
It's a bunch of people named Robin Hood, you know.
And there's like one guy who was named Robin Hood
who was like worked for a similar place as someone
(47:26):
named Little John or John the Little but there's no
particular outlawry to them, you know. And then there's a
couple like tombstones of Robin Hood, but they've been later
been found to be like I'm gonna make this number
up because I don't remember like eighteenth century forgeries, so
like they're written in like fake Middle English.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
You know. Hell, yeah, the tourist traps almost like people
are gonna go to see that. I'm gonna get through
shit like that rules.
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Yeah, totally. Robin Hood would have probably approved of that, honestly.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Definitely, at least spiritually. I do like the idea that
this might be the first English cryptid.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Oh shit, yeah, don't got w that's where Robinhood is,
which case is fine.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, he only walks very quickly looking over his shoulder
and appears very blurry and photographs.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah totally. I mean that's what it is. The history. Yeah,
there's very blurry ideas about who he might have been. Yeah. No.
I went into this being like, all right, cool, I'm
gonna like, I'm sure there's a guy. There's no the guy,
but that's okay. Well what do you do? Who are you?
You write books? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Podcasts? I write books, I write and record podcasts. If
you like fantasy, which I assume you do because you
just listen to two hours of Robin Hood, I have
a fantasy novel out called The Highlands Burn. It also
involves robbing from the rich and stealing from the poor,
kind of you should check it out. If you like
wizards getting shot with magical revolvers, it might be the
(48:59):
book for you. I also say military street podcast called
The Lines Up by Donkey's podcasts. You can listen to
wherever pods are casts and if you listen to it
and you like it. We're having a live show in Cork,
Ireland on September twenty sixth. Tickets are available now. If
you can't make it, we're also live streaming it with
video on demand and you can find all those links
(49:22):
somewhere below.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Perhaps hell yeah, and if you listener want to be
your very own Robinhood then you can. I think that's
a good idea and probably it's probably a crime. Anyway,
I'll see you all next week. Cool People Who Did
(49:46):
Cool Stuff is a production of pool Zone Media. For
more podcasts and pool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Visit our website gooalzonemedia dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Check us out on the I.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
Heard Radio app, pp A Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Here you
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad
things happening, there's people trying and do good things, even
if they do it in morally complicated ways by being
Robin Hood. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with
me today is my guest Jokasabian. How are you.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I'm good. I'm good. You know, it's a little bit warm,
which I'm not a fan of, but I'm good. How
you doing well.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
The air conditioner has been off this entire time, and
the air filter's been off this entire time, so my
eyes are a little bit burnie and I am sweating
in my chair, but not enough to stop me from
being excited about the topic of this week's episodes, Robin Hood,
who I've wanted to cover since I started this show
(00:47):
we last left our heroes. We barely even introduced him
at all. Actually, Robin Hood has not even entered the
written word yet. But we were talking about a book
called Piers Plowman from thirteen seventy seven, and in that
book there is a character named Sloth. Sloth is not
a good character when I first read just about it.
(01:08):
That's why I fell down a deeper rabbit hole reading
about the whole book and learned about the Peasants Uprising,
which is the whole reason I fell down that rabbit
hole talking about it. Whatever. People listen to this show,
they're probably used to that. But one of the things
I read was like, oh, there's a character named Sloth,
and I was like, that is the most punk rock
name I've ever heard. But actually, rather than being a
self named non binary person named Sloth, it is the
(01:29):
sin personified, and Sloth in the book says I do
not know my Lord's prayer perfectly as the priest sings it,
but I know rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph Earl
of Chester. Or actually it says, I cannot perfectly my
pot or noster as the priest it singeth, but can
(01:51):
rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph Earl of Chester.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That doesn't sound like something Sloth from the Goonies would say.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
How fuck that is slow? Oh my god. Maybe the
whole thing is a Piers Plowman reference. Maybe that's the
whole secret history of that anti gentrification classic, the Goonies.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That's what I believe now for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, And so basically the character Sloth is just like
a populist. I mean, it's like basically like complaining about
like the dumb yokels. Right. I don't go to church
and do good things, but I sure do love my
comic book stories more or less. The first reference to
Robin Hood in English.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I can't believe jd. Vance existed even back then.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
As for this Earl of Chester, the other person referenced
he did not wind up famous today, but he had
the good fortune of actually being a real person who
lived and died. Except we don't know which of the
three Ranulfs of Chester, the third, fourth, and sixth Earl
of Chester was named Ranulf. It might have been the
(03:01):
fourth or the sixth. I'm going to tell you about
the fourth just in case. But this is basically it's like,
this is other people that ballads are about. Right, So
as a comparison, here's someone who's being mentioned in the
same breath as Robin Hood. The second Randolph, Earl of Chester.
The fourth Earl of Chester fought in one of the
Civil Wars, one of the million Civil Wars, specifically the one.
(03:25):
Smoke is really bad for your lungs. I don't know
if y'all knew this anyway, Let's see how my voice
is affected by doing this show. You all didn't hear it,
but we took a brief break because I turned on
my air filter, which I'm glad for because I was
at one hundred and seventy four parts per million two
point five or whatever I was at.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Bad.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
My air filter is read and apparently it's not coming in.
So now I'll be able to tell you about Robin
Hood without further damaging my throat and eyes in the process.
I love living in the apocalypse. There was a civil
war with the sick name the Anarchy Hell yeah, and
(04:05):
it was like when there wasn't central rule of England.
The fourth fought on the behalf of Empress Matilda against
King Stephen, and he helped put the first reigning woman
onto the throne of England. But Scotland decided to back
Matilda too, and Ranolf was like, wait a minute, that's
a step too far. I can't be siding with Scotland,
(04:26):
so he switched sides. But then he tried to switch
sides and then the king that he defected to he
was like, ah, I'm not with Matilda anymore, I'm with you.
The King didn't trust him and had him arrested and
put so many chains on him that he was literally
like buried in chains, like he was just under the chains,
which is again only the medieval English mind would have
(04:47):
bothered to come up with that idea.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Or a sick album cover one of the two.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's true, but it's not Alice from the first one
in chains. That would be a different band, true, true,
and they did eventually let him out of his being
buried under chains. Buried under chains would be like a
I would probably listen to that album like three times.
It would be like New Metal ee but kind of
still go hard with good riffs. Buried under chains.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, it could be post hardcore too, like it's very
like two thousand and six coded at Warped Tour.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
If it was post hardcore from England, I have to
admit the best post hardcore comes from England.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I don't want to shout out anything about England.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Oh God, that hurts me as a person from the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Well that's a different Oh, there's probably multiple things that
are called post hardcore. This hadn't occurred to me almost certainly. No, No, anyway,
this is besides the point buried in chains. Eventually he
was released from jail and he was like, all right,
fuck this Stephen guy, and he kept attacking him. And
during all this restructuring of everything, Randolph the Earl of
(05:53):
Chester was given the hereditary title keeper of the Forest
of Sherwood. This is probably a coincidence, but I just
think it's really interesting because then there's a chance that
that reference of Robin Hood and the Randolf Earl of
Chester was basically being like, I know the story of
Robin Hood versus Randolph, Earl of Chester, but we don't know.
(06:16):
But it's the kind of thing that I when you
study something obsessively for a week, these things get really interesting.
What we do know is that Ranolph was stripped of
all of his titles of the Sherwood thing eventually and
poison to death. So it didn't go great for him.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
That's unfortunate, I suppose, I guess.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
So mear really, you know, I don't know a moral
feeling about the Randolph Ranolf one way or the other,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I don't feel like I should feel sorry for the
guy who is like the cop of the woods.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah no, yeah, yep. So this is the first reference
to Robin Hood thirteen seventy seven, and it's a reference
saying this shit has been going on for years. We've
been talking talking about Robin Hood for so long that
it's this cliche thing that you listen to instead of
the our Father. There's a few more references to these
stories before the stories themselves come into print over the
next few decades. And what I think I mentioned at
(07:13):
the top of the first one, all of the other
names of people that he's referenced with are real people
because they're rich. They were written down in history, so
we know it. That's why I think that this is
the best argument I've seen for why robin Hood might
be real, is that literally everyone else he's mentioned in
the same breath of about ballads is real. It took
(07:34):
another one hundred years or so before the stories themselves
were written down, at least as far as we know.
The printing press hit the scene in the fourteen forties
and more shit started getting written down, and lots of
ballads like robin Hood. Ballads were really popular, so people
sold them. You have ballads like robin Hood and the Monk,
Robin Hood and the Potter, and I think actually literally
(07:56):
like Robin Hood's death is one of them. I know
there's a new movie we'll talk about at the end
called The Robin Hood. A lot of these rifted off
of each other, right, because these are just I mean,
it's folk, it's like folklore for folk music, folk poetry.
The longest one was called A Little Jest of Robin
Hood sometime from around the late fourteen hundreds or early
(08:17):
fifteen hundreds, like fifteen ten or so. It also has
the names the Jest of Robin Hood and Mary Jest
of Robin Hoodie and other shit like that.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Robin Hoodie is like a cool fucking name.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I know. I know it's probably pronounced hood which just
as an e at the end. But I like saying
hoodie because I like saying y oldie sorty times.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
I like hoodie sounds like a skate brand.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, Robin Hoodie, Yeah, it does exactly. Yeah, y'all ever
heard of a jest? A gest?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Is it like a jape? Perhaps? Oh?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I don't think it's japeish?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
But is it like a Kiro's tale? It is? It is, Sophie.
I'm not sure timeline wise, but I had to look
it up. Okay, I haven't really fucked with Middle English
and Early Modern English much on this show. So I
had to look up a bunch of stuff, and just
gest means an adventure tale. Ah. And if you're wondering
(09:17):
if this is somehow where just like a joke comes from,
it is unlike tithe where it was false friends, A
jest is an adventure tale, and a jester was a storyteller. Hm. Okay,
and then became the person who makes one of people
or whatever. And Mary, as in the Mary Men, I
(09:38):
already ruined this one. In part one, Mary didn't mean
like laughter, but instead like pleasant. So the Mary Jest
of robin Hood is the Pleasant Adventures of Robin Hood,
A nice little tale.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Do you want to know where I know the word
just from?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I do from those Red Wall books, those like children.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I love red Wall. Yeah it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
My brother they love them too. You read like every
single look. Yeah. And we even watched the little animated
show when we were kids.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I did too. It was on right before I went
to school.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah, it was really good.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
But that's where I like, I've known that word.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Since I was a child. This is why reading is
so good.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
You like learn weird words.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, you're like, not everyone knows what a crenulation in
a castle is. I don't understand. They are such an
important part of my childhood. I thought they're like quicksand
you know, they're like a thing that, of course I'm
gonna have to worry about at some point.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah. My childhood word that I would use that would
freak out adults was jovial.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I would use the word jovial all the.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Time because it was like in one of my books.
Oh that's that's good. Imagine your like six year old
daughter coming to you and dropping the word jovial. I
would be so proud.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, yeah, just to say I'm a little freak.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
It's fine. Yeah, we all are. How do you think
we ended up here? Yeah? It was a festively jovial jest.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The jest of Robinhood starts. I've done minor translation from
Old English for this attend and listen, gentleman, that be
of freeborn blood. I shall tell you of a good yeoman.
His name was Robin Hood. And the whole thing is
in that rhyming scheme, and it works like it's still
(11:25):
Middle English and like fucking indecipherable. But somehow, when you're
reading it and it's rhyming. You can kind of just
figure more of it out. I read an annotated version
that explained a lot of it to me. That helped
me a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
But hey, bars are universal.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah, the gest of the story, that's my gist joke.
Robin Hood was a good and pious outlaw, especially loyal
to Mother Mary. There's a kind of a specific thing
where he's like, he's very religious and pious, but he
hates the church, so he likes Mother Mary, which gets
into the kind of the pagan accusations. So just like,
(12:01):
I don't know, that's cool. I relate to that. And
he makes sure his men only steal from rich people,
especially bishops and archbishops. He loved Mother Mary so much
that he would never hurt not just any woman, but
any group of people with a woman in it, because
he might hurt the woman by accident. They would often
waylay strangers, and the way they did it, it's fucking sick.
(12:24):
This is the like weird way of robbing that I
was talking about earlier. They'd be like, ah, a lot stranger,
come have dinner with us, and they would bring them
like to their camp and then feed them like really
good food, like pretty elaborate cooked food, and then be like,
but it isn't appropriate that a yeoman should pay for
a night's dinner, now is it, And be like, so now,
(12:48):
now give us money, and like there's versions of this
in like tourist hustling today, you know, yeah, where it's
like it's not the furthest thing from robbery, but it's
also very respectable. Or you're like, oh, you were on
a cruise like I was, did security on a goth
cruise because my life is what it is. And at
the stops people would be like, oh, yeah, totally, come
(13:09):
have dinner with us, and you're like, no, I don't
have any money, don't do this.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
It also leads back to Redwall, because anybody who's read
Redwall dose of how well the author described all of
the food that they're eating.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Those books have made me hungry. I read those books
in middle school, and I honestly I disassociated most of
middle school, so I mostly just remember that there was
a mouse on the cover.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
It's probably for the best.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So they would rob them by basically saying, now you
got to pay for dinner, but it's a still pretty
polite they like, wouldn't beat them up or anything, right,
I mean, unless they didn't pay. And they do this
to a knight who has no money and he's in
debt to the Abbot, he's like broke, right, And he's like, oh,
I'm losing my land. I'm a broke night. I kind
of fallen out of my horse, tired, my hoods hanging
down over my eyes. And so they're like, oh, no,
(14:02):
you don't how any money, and you owe the Abbot money,
and the Abbot sucks. Here's three hundred pounds or whatever
the money is. I can't remember, even though I literally
just read this yesterday. They also give him a yeoman
of his own, a servant. They give him little John
to be his servant for a while. And the knight
then repays Robin Hood and the merry men and gives
them a bunch of guns and ammo, I'm sorry, bows
(14:24):
and arrows, and also one hundred hired mercenaries. Do I
guess the bandits sick?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
This is a good exchange, you're funny? No, yeah, worked
out really well for him who says bartering doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
I know you. It's like a charity right. You're like,
oh shit, we didn't know you were broke. Here will
lend you money, but not in an evil way, but
you're still going to repay us really well. And then
little John stops yeomaning for the night and starts yeomaning
for the sheriff, the evil sheriff of nodding him, and
then he and the sheriff's cook rob the sheriff and
take off and rejoin the bandits. There's more to it,
(14:57):
There's more ins and outs. There's more adventure happening here.
They rob the sheriff again when he comes after them,
but first they offer him dinner served on his own
silverware because they stole all his silverware, and like, ah, yeah,
come and eat.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
But what a shitty sheriff falls for this twice I know, Oh,
you guys are gonna rob me again.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah, well, I guess the first time they stole, right,
because they steal everything and run, so the seconde's a robbery.
And then they make the sheriff and his men sleep
outside without their outer clothes, just like shirt and pants
or whatever, which is actually always cold. Every time I
have slept outside without a sleeping bag, I have been cold, same,
no matter what summer it is. And then the sheriff
(15:38):
tries to arrest Robinhood. He shows up an archery contest wins,
and then the sheriff tries to arrest him. So they
all run away and they hole up in their night
friend's castle. So the sheriff is a little snitch. He
runs to the king and is like, Sir Richard, that's
the NIC's name. It's like he's trying to make himself
a lord using the outlaws. And so the sheriff captures
(15:59):
Sir Richard. So Robin Hood shows up, and I'm just
gonna read the lines. Robin bent a full good bow
an arrow he drove at Will, I drew at Will.
I didn't bother changing this to modern English. So I'm
going to fuck this up.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
He hits.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So the proud Sheriff upon the ground, he lay full still,
and ere he might up arise on his feet to stand.
He smote off the Sheriff's head with his bright brand.
Lie thou there, thou, proud sheriff. Evil mote thou chev badly?
May you end? That's the way it gets translated. There
(16:35):
might no man to the trust thou while thou still
were alive. He shoots the sheriff down he cuts off
his head and says, you died badly and no one
was ever able to trust you.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Fuck you. It's like the Robin Hood version of Dracula Flow,
and I'm here for it.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Why was Dracula Flow?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Oh, I don't even know if we have the time
to go into that. It is this very strange rapper.
I suppose it's an old man dressed up like Dracula
very badly, to the point that he has the Dracula
hair sharp eat on. Yeah, uh huh, and he has
fed incredibly nonsensical rap lyrics by filthy Frank And it's
(17:17):
just something you have to experience.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I want to see him do the jest of Robin Hood.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Then he could do it. I fully believe he could
do it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yeah, so kill the Sheriff of Nottingham. There's no like
long back and forth of who's the villain. They're like,
I fucking killed this guy, cut off his head, and
then I laughed at him while he was dead. The
king shows up and is like, wait, what the fuck happened? Like,
what the fuck just happened? So he goes into disguise
in the forest. The king is like, I'm going to
go as a commoner or whatever meets robin Hood, and
(17:47):
robin Hood is like, oh, you work for the king.
I love the king. You're not the king, but I
do love the king, but you serve him, so I
like you. And then they have an archery contest back
at the in the woods, right at the bandit camp,
and the king is so impressed because Robinhood has humility.
When he loses that when he reveals himself and he's like,
(18:08):
you're all pardoned, You're so great. I love all of you.
You can come live with me at court, which is
the most folklore ass shit in the world. If you
ever read like Russian folklore, it's like and then the
king is like, now you want you get to live
with me at court, but robin Hood is like, look,
I only go if I can bring all my men,
And the King's like, yeah, all right, and then he
(18:28):
goes and he's like he lives there for a year,
and he's like now, fuck this, and he goes back
to the forest and then he lives for another twenty
two years in the forest.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
That's the gist of robin Hood, all right. I appreciate
that he brought all his friends with him.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
I know much like, you can bring your friends, invite
them not to listen to this podcast. The podcast is fine,
invite your friends to listen to the ads of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
And obviously the most important takeaway in this is what's
the deal with class medieval England and archery. That's obviously
where everyone's mind has gone.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I know mine did.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, so I'm going to answer that. You ever, like,
watch the people who are like really big fans of
the English longbow, the war bow I have.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And I know they tend to split hardly into two camps.
One is like, you know, actual enthusiasts who are really
deep in the weeds and the stuff, kind of like
you know, we have become, or people who insist that
it is like some kind of symbol of supremacy.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Oh interesting, yeah, oh wow, Oh that doesn't surprise me.
I wish that didn't surprise me. Everything to do with
history has that camp. Unfortunately, rather than you know, the
longbow generally being the tool of the peasants, that's what
we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Whenever I was watching the nineteen fifty one conservative Robin
Hood for about ten minutes last night, and then I
was like why am I doing this to myself? And
I stopped it? And the like when baby Robin has
like his good and honest, hard working Anglo Saxon Dad
is killed by the Norman usurper, but Anglo Saxon Dad
is still a king or a noble or whatever the
fuck you know. They grabbed Dad's bow that's inscribed off
(20:28):
the wall. It would have been a fucking crossbow, that's what. Yeah,
that was the upper class weapon.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah. Using a long bow effectively required a lifetime of training,
which was mandated because it is insanely strong draw pole.
It is hard to do to the point of deformed
people's bones.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah, and it's also why like England had Well, okay,
we'll get to it all right. So Robinhood starts off
a yeoman in this story, right, the third line is like,
he's a yeoman, don't worry, we got this. He's one
of us. But later stories around the sixteen hundreds, I
think maybe sixteenth century. I always get those two mixed
up in my head when I read them, and don't
put them in my script. Later he becomes a noble.
(21:10):
But it's not a coincidence that he's the most famous
archer in English history and a yeoman. The knights were
nobles and they fought up close and personal or with crossbows.
But it was the yeoman archer who made England the
medieval force that it was. The English longbowmen is one
of the most famous and deadly forces of military history. Ah. Yeah, No,
whenever there's the like these are the best people in
(21:31):
military history, there's like people who are like the Katana's
the best and also I'm a fascist, and you're like,
you could just like Katanas. You don't have to throw
in the fascist part.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, you don't have to uchiomechium of the shit up.
You could just enjoy swords.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You know, Like, no, the mounted horseback rider is the
best possible soldier. And that's why I'm a fascist. You're like, God,
damn it.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I think it always has something to do with And
this is something I run into all the time as
a military historian, is whenever something is revolutionary in a
way and asserts a kind of military supremacy on the
battlefield and then intern in politics, it always has to
be coming from a position of power supremacy. Of course,
(22:14):
that always gets chained to a modern nation state which
didn't exist a race, which is a concept that didn't exist.
Yet this always happens rather than obviously in the case
of the katana, that legitimately is the case. It was
a symbol of the upper class, right, whereas the long
bow is the most peasant thing, the most peasant symbol
(22:34):
that could exist on the battlefield other than just being unarmed.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah. Well, and it's like, because there's still they're like
the peasant middle class of the military, right, and so
it's like it's going to be hundreds of years, but
eventually the Omen are going to come up, right, you know. Yeah,
But the military use of the long bow. You have
the famous battle of I don't know how to pronounce
French agin Court, where there was a muddy field and
(22:58):
the English long woman just killed the shit out of
all the French knights. The French nights were like, we
got this, and then they were just like, now we're
just gonna keep shooting you kind of the original go
charge that machine gun nest.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, uphill in a muddy field while wearing plate armor.
It was one of the dumbest battle plans I think
I've ever talked about on my Well, actually, that's a
high title to give anything at this point.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
But yeah, that is the title of your podcast, basically,
Legend Daily Stupid. Yeah, and the Yeomen were commoners. They're
middle class commoners, but they're commoners. Nonetheless. In thirteen sixty seven,
as you mentioned, England decreed that every Englishman should be
good with either a crossbow or a long bow. And
it's kind of bonkers to imagine that today. The equivalent,
(23:42):
obviously would be everyone should know how to use an
air fifteen. Yeah, and I don't see even the United
States saying, hey, everyone, you'll have to learn how to
use air fifteens. Only the wealthier folks could afford a crossbow,
which is way easier to use with less training and
less like deforming your to pull back one hundred town bow.
And you know, and I wanted to say when I
(24:06):
was first thinking this through, I was like, obviously the
English trusted their people more back then, But it doesn't
really work out for them that they trust their people, right, Like,
I guess it makes good for conscripting everyone and going
to war. I guess because there's not as much like
standing army stuff. I actually know less about the history
of when England picked up standing army stuff, but there's
(24:27):
so many uprisings all throughout English history. Mmmm that maybe
teaching everyone how to use an air fifteen. I don't
know whatever. I like most of the uprisings. I wish
they had won most of them. Got mixed feelings about
the English Civil War.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
So I'm better than others. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, not a big fan of the Puritans. But this
rising middle class. They didn't have jousting tournaments as for
the rich. They had archery competitions, not just in England
but also in the Netherlands and presumably in France. The
wealth if your people did crossbow at these things. The
poorer people used bows, but there's an odd amount of
(25:06):
social mobility that relates to specifically being good with a bow.
It was like a very important class symbol, but like
a complicated one. People formed militias called confraternities and trained
John Block Friedman in his piece Because I Love My Job.
In his academic piece Robin Hood in the social context
(25:28):
of late medieval archery, described archery competitions with a wooden bird.
You may get a wooden bird called a popinjay, and
you put it on top of a pole and quote
whoever knocked the bird off the pole was acclaimed king
for a year, obeyed by other members of the confraternity,
granted a suit of clothes, wine, and other signs of
civic status. If he succeeded three years running, he was
(25:51):
crowned emperor and given hereditary nobility, and you get a
fancy guilt collar that looked like what nobility wore, but
like obbe see the cheap knockoff version. But it's like
a wrestling belt. You have to give it up to
the next person after you.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Okay, oh well, it's kind of like wrestling would be preordained,
so more like mma in a way, right, Like I
assume some things were also rigged, you know, perhaps there
was a hull cogan of archery. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, someone's like over there just kind of kicks the
pole and the popinjay falls off.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. I think this is interesting too, because I don't
even remember which episodes to see large chunks of, especially
when I talked about Irish history. But this idea of
like having like false kings and like being like, ah,
your nobility but kind of in a fun way is
so common all throughout the medieval world and the ancient
world of just this like way of being like, I've
(26:46):
kind of like fucking with actual kings by being like, no,
this guy's kN like turn the world upside down for
a day. It's a very common holiday thing to do.
This isn't quite this is much later than most of that.
But I just think it's interesting that it's like you're
king now because you won. And obviously these competitions are
(27:10):
important in the jest of Robinhood. There are three different
I didn't mention one of them, Little John wins one.
There's three different archery competitions just in the jest of
robin Hood. And I think this is my own conjecture
here that kind of implies that the written versions of
robin Hood were for a yeoman rather than surf audience. Right,
(27:34):
and he is a yeoman, so that's obviously also implied.
But this might be now that these are like written
and printed, this actually might be the first kind of
literal gentrification of Robinhood. It might be the first taking
him up a social class. Right. Yeah, but this is
entirely my own conjecture. Robinhood used the bow, not the crossbow.
(27:56):
But there's a lot of class fantasy, at least in
the jest. I am fascinated by how Robin Hood hates
the middle nobility but loves the good and noble king.
This is so common throughout all monarchies. You live in
a monarchy, I do. Yeah. I remember once walking around
the Netherlands and there was a this is when Beatrix
(28:17):
was queen. I think, hmm, and I just like walking
by and there's just like this giant portrait of the queen,
and I like turn to my friends and I'm like,
I keep forgetting y'all live in a monarchy.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That's kind of like the weird way about it here
is that unlike the UK, where people, you know, have
actual feelings towards the monarchy. Yeah, Like Dutch people don't
give a shit, you know, it's just not a part
of life.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I think they forget too, And that seems
fine until you see like the crown on the paperwork,
Like oh yeah. I remember reading a piece by Jjack
that annoyed me, But then now that I read more history,
I like hate that. I have to hand it to Gjack.
I was talking about how like populist, including lefty populism
(29:05):
in England likes the monarchy like they're kind of the
people's mascots, you know, And so like, there's this idea
that I've read about all throughout history, going back to
fucking three thousand years ago, that the king is the
good protector of the people, while the rich and the
(29:26):
lesser nobility they are the ones who oppress us. They
are the ones because they're the ones you actually see
oppressing people right right, Like the sheriff is coming around
collecting taxes. It's for the king. But everyone's like, ah,
but if the king knew I was starving, he never
would have asked me for my shilling. Like, no, he
he specifically doesn't give a shit and asked for your shilling. John, Yeah,
(29:46):
good or whatever your fucking name is. If you're English,
you know, people would say like, oh, the czar doesn't
know what's happening. If only if the father or good
father knew. Last week I wrote about the first ever
labor strike in recorded history, which was three thousand years ago,
and Egypt and the tomb builders when they went on strike,
they were like, we just got to get a message
to the pharaoh. As soon as the pharaoh learns about
(30:07):
our plate, everything's going to be fine. But in robinhood,
So when Robin Hood's like, oh, I like the real king, right,
And there's also some Pierce Plowman in this story about
how the peasants are the true nobles. And there's also
a cross class idea that I find oddly American. The
ultimate American man, I would argue, is someone who is
(30:30):
both somehow working class and upper class. Yeah, this is
why eighty thousand dollars pickup trucks exist, Yes.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And why like this you know, mid level guy who
works something to do with his hands, but also makes
him upper middle class. Like nobody is like, look at
the manly I don't know, middle manager, investment banker. Yeah, like, no,
(31:00):
nobody's looking at that guy. It's always gonna be semi
indecipherably rustic in a fake way. Like yeah, they have
the duly, that's eighty thousand dollars. They live on a
large piece of land, but they do not use that
truck for any manual labor.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah. Yeah, I think about this so much, partly because
I'm a podcast who owns a truck. But I bought
it while living off grid, and like it's like all
fucked up, you know, because I like, yeah, live in
the fucking woods. But yeah, this this idea. The eighty
thousand dollars truck is just the ultimate fucking example of
this idea of masculinity, because being rich is cool, but
(31:42):
also you have to somehow be working class, and so
you have to be both at once, and it drives
men insane, Like I kind of feel bad for like
some American men who hold themselves to these standards, even
Red Tarzan.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Probably, but I definitely remember the movie better.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I recently, and by recently I mean about fifteen years ago,
but as an adult, so therefore it all conflates down
to itself. I recently read the first Tarzan book, and
I'd always been familiar with the idea of it. Right,
you have a guy who's raised in the jungle, but
don't worry, he's white. And also in the original Tarzan
book he literally hangs the first black man he ever meets.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Oh, if I.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Remember correctly, he is rough and tumble, and he swings
from the vines. But also in these books he cleans
up nice, he learns languages with ease, he can make
himself comfortable and accepted in high society. So he's when
he chooses the woods, he's choosing the woods. This is
what matters. This is what elevates him above the like savages. Again,
(32:43):
these are racist books. That's the America man like. I'm
kind of obsessed with that archetype and how much it
fucks everyone up. And I think robin Hood is playing
with this a little bit. Robinhood is both a man
of the people but also someone who could make it
in high society. He just doesn't want to. He'd rather
be in the woods.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
That does track.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, and I don't like that read because I like
robin Hood. But stories are what they are. I can't
force it into well. Later we'll talk about someone who
forced it into just like straight up a communist narrative.
But before we talk about anyone who wrote Bows against
the Barons, we should talk about the products and services
that support this show. I often rely on both products
(33:29):
and services as part of my life. I don't know
about you will, and we're back. So that's the earliest
robin Hood, the jest of robin Hood. But the idea
of robin Hood has never gone away, and there have
(33:50):
been new robin Hood stories over and over again. I'm
a little sad that there was no real I expect
it to be, like, I'm just writing about outlaws instead
of doing like literary history this particular episode, but it
is what it is. I still find all this shit fascinating.
By the late sixteenth century, he became a dispossessed nobleman.
Right around the start of the nineteenth century, robin Hood
(34:11):
just got fuck off popular in England, which is funny
because like the nineteenth century is when like everything got popular.
I don't know, I'm always like And then the Victorians
discovered this thing and started doing it badly. That's like
they do that with everything. Book after book were written
about robin Hood, plus theater, plus music, operas, and he
becomes Robin of Locksley. He was not Robin of Locksley
(34:34):
until the nineteenth century. His full name is Robin of Locksley,
alias Robin Hood, and that comes from a novel called
Ivanhoe from eighteen nineteen, which was written by this conservative
Scottish guy named Walter Scott. And this is also where
Robin Hood is returning from the Crusades to find everything
fucked up comes from two So Ivanhoe is where we
(34:56):
get a lot of our modern robin Hood, especially the
more annoying part of it. I'm a little out of
my depth here about this Walter Scott guy. You wever
find that there's like the people who are so famous
that you just everyone pretends like they already know about them,
but then you realize no one actually knows about them.
Oh yeah, that's Walter Scott. Yeah. I think if someone
has said, do you know who Walter Scott is? I
(35:16):
would have been like no. But if someone said Ivano,
I would have been like, that's a book. Walter Scott
was one of the most popular writers of his era,
although later people were like, his books are silly and
his politics are bad, which is good because his politics
were bad. The twentieth century Scottish poet Hugh macdarmid basically
(35:40):
said that it was Walter Scott who convinced the Scottish
people that there was no point in trying to revolt
in that they like, literally like, it's it's Walter Scott's
fault that Scotland isn't free.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I'm willing to blame him for that. He doesn't seem
like a nice guy. His last name is Scott, he
should be pro Scottish.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, so he's a Scottish nationalist, but he's one who
insisted that Scotland should stay part of the UK because
he loves our traditions, not our watchly im as Scottish
as I'm Irish, but whatever. He loves the Scottish traditions,
but they're backwards and needed to be advanced by the English,
so they had to join with the English in order
(36:20):
to like move away to a higher stage of human
societal evolution. He believed strongly in stages of history that
every society has to go through. And what's funny is
I read this piece I think was written by conservative
about why Walter Scott's like cool and it specifically had
to spend a lot of time because I read that,
and I was like, that's just Karl Marx, which is
(36:42):
one of the big things that Karl Marx is wrong about, right,
was this like stages of history that everyone has to
go through. But I was like, he's just saying what
Carl Marx said. And so then the whole article is like,
I swear he does it different. I swear it's not
the Carl Marx version, even though he also believed, and
this is a Karl Marx belief too, that people are
generally the same everywhere and it's their material conditions in
(37:04):
society that shape them into who they are. But Ivanhoe
basically puts robin Hood into the Saxon versus Norman conflict
of medieval England and is like, well, the Normans are
invading and like kind of taken away or like cool
Saxon stuff, but honestly they're the more advanced society, so
(37:24):
we should probably let them, right. That is like the
lesson learned. I think I haven't read Ivanhoe, but by
many of the characters in Ivanhoe is that they're like, ah,
I even though we're Saxon, we don't like the Normans.
They are better, so I guess they should win.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It's a very confusing kind of nationalism.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
But okay, I know, well you don't understand the Turkish
are just more advanced than the Armenians. You know, you
all were still living in a more tribal societies. Obviously
kind of just makes sense and nothing ever happened, and
if it did, we deserved it, and it was good
at the end of the day. As long as he
stok it to call yourself Armenian, you can have no
(38:03):
control and you have to accept the society of Turkey.
But you know, yeah, that's a yeah, and it's so
funny because this is how Robin Hood becomes a more
conservative character to people. But it's hard to make stick, right,
Like whenever people are like trying to make Robin Hood
a write wing character, it happens all the time, and
there's like that Robin Hood. I couldn't make it through
(38:26):
where he's just like basically like a modern war on
terror army bro Oh have you seen this one?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I have it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
He's got short hair and he's like basically wearing a
plate carrier, but he has a bow instead of an
AR fifteen or a four or sixteen whatever. I don't
know the military guns. Yeah, anyway, I assume that was
the conservative Robin Hood. I couldn't make it through it.
I was like, I'm not watching this shit. He's wearing
a plate carrier. I can't take this series.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Robin Hood in a fast helmet writing his Navy seal biography, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Exactly, that's the like. And then I came home and
saved the people. Right.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
I can't believe they gave Robin Hood a punisher tattoo.
This sucks.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
The punisher's skull, but with the Robin Hood jaunty cap
with the feather.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Coming no that's that absolutely exists. It has to the
punisher skull is like rule thirty four of being a conservative.
It exists somewhere all forms of the Punishers.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Totaling, which is yet another example of like Punisher didn't
like cops. I'm not coming out in bat in favor
of the Punisher. He killed cops all the time, that
was like his thing. Yeah, and the guy who wrote
The Punisher said, cops fucking suck. Frank Castle would hate you. Yeah. So,
(39:46):
actually robin Hood and the Punisher are a perfect matchup,
kind of in this particular context. Fortunately, most understandings of
robin Hood. At the end of the day, they constantly
give us the like, oh he wants the good king,
blah blah blah, blah blah. The main single thing that
people remember about robin Hood is robed from the rich
and give to the poor.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
That's the most basic thing about robin Hood. Everybody does.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah. Yeah. On the other hand, that's more or less
also what Christianity says, and they keep turning that into
the opposite of that too, So I guess they are
really good at turning things into their opposite. But many
such cases, yeah exactly, I tried watching ten minutes of
nineteen fifty one's Tale of robin Hood, and it is
amazing how much people can make Robin Hood into a
(40:30):
right wing figure. But in the other direction, there's a
book I want to read. I don't know if it's
good or not, but I want to read it. Nineteen
thirty four's published by British communists, Bows against the Barons,
and it was written by Jeffrey Trees, who later felt
bad about He was like, look that was my Like,
I was youthful and naive. And so he later went
(40:51):
through it did a version of it that takes out
most of the uses of the words worker and comrade
from the.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well, how fitting is it a guy with the surname
Trees to write a book about Robin Hood.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Oh that's a good point. It's spelled tra Se And
so I hadn't said it aloud in my head until
just now.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, then we just have to accept it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Yeah. As Robinhood became more popular, his sharp edges were
shaved off. He became unambiguously good, His enemies became unambiguously bad.
The bad Usurper is like, you know, we got to
get rid of the bad usurper. The good King has
to come back.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Have you seen the Death of Robin Hood, the new
robin Hood?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
I have not.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Nope, it reverses the usual Robin Hood. I'm not going
to spoil it, but this is the premise of the movie.
Robinhood is just kind of a brutal outlaw who kills people.
He like kills a kid in like the first scene,
and he's old and he's like, actually, damn, my life
kind of sucks, and it's weird that people tell stories
about me being good. I actually just kill people. I'm
kind of shitty. That's the rough idea of the book,
(41:58):
and it gets into some at a Christian shit. The
movie presents the idea that Robin Hood was only worth
loving in legend, and I liked the movie, but I
also think it misunderstood robin Hood in a different direction,
because it's like, I'm going to get rid of the
shaved off edges of robin Hood. But at the same time,
(42:18):
the real outlaws of Sherwood Forest were killers and thieves
for sure, but they were part of the lower class
community of the area, and they kept getting pardoned byers
sheltered from the law. I think they have more in
common with like modern gang culture, right, Like there are
outlaw cultures where they're also seen as good by the
(42:40):
communities that they're in, or necessary evils, or like better
than the state services that don't exist. You know. Yeah,
I like to believe that the working class hero of
robin Hood was a fucking scoundrel, but he was their scoundrel.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, I'm willing to bet it's a mesh of the two,
you know, Like, I'm sure him and his band of
merry min stacked bodies fucking waist high and did a
lot of horrible shit, but they were still better than
the alternative. Or you know, maybe they were so awful
that their own threat of violence if people did not
(43:16):
shelter them. You know, these things could both be true totally.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah. I think that we do ourselves a disservice when
we file off the edges off over romantic outlaws. But
I think as a folk hero, as a folk story,
I want something built from the synthesis of the class
warrior and the bandit. But I haven't seen that particular
thing represented too well. Maybe one day I will. And
(43:42):
my final note is on robin Hood and mythology and paganism.
By and large, modern scholarship dismisses the idea that Robinhood
has derived from mythology. I don't know if you knew that. Like,
there's like, especially the Victorians, but also modern folks. Whenever
there's an old timey thing in Europe, people are like, ah,
it's from pre Christian it's pagan, it's pagan. It's oh,
it's like this cool thing, right, Oh yeah, And usually
(44:03):
it's not true. You feel really smart when you learn that,
but then it's not true. It's often from syncretic shit anyway,
so people will be like, oh, Robinhood has to be
a representation of the gods or has to be something else.
And it is almost certain that robin Hood was either
a character that someone made up or there was a
bandit named robin Hood that someone wrote a song about,
(44:27):
and it was an idea whose time it had come
and it spread. So it's probably only an old idea
like one thousand, you know, six hundred and fifty to
one thousand years old, not three thousand years old or whatever.
But there are people who feel that it or felt
that it might come from older sources. F. H. Bradley,
who was writing in the Victorian era. Just to present
(44:47):
this argument, he wrote, quote, the whole story is ultimately
derived from the great Aryan Sun myth. Robin Hood is
hod the god of the Wind, a form of Woden,
Made Marian as Morgan dawn Maiden. Friar Tuck is Tokey
the spirit of frost and the snow. I suspect this
isn't true, partly because Made Marion and Friar Talk were
(45:09):
actually later additions to Robin Hood's stories.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
It seems like a bit of a reach.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, and Robin Hood was a Marianist. That was like
such an important part of his character. He holds Mary
in very high esteem within Catholicism, which does have syncretic roots, right,
like I worship the Mother Goddess. Like that's it. Yeah,
that gets old. I'll give it that.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
You know. Some could even go further. The Holy Trinity
is itself evolution of those things?
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, totally, But there was Okay, so I tend not
to buy the like robin Hood is the gods thing.
But there is one mythological element of robin Hood that
stands out to me, and I hadn't seen anyone else
discuss it. So again, this is purely conjecture from my
non historian self, Robinhood and his mary Men remind me
(46:00):
of the fairies. They live in the woods, they invite
you to dinner. The dinner is an astounding and fine banquet,
full of manners and refined beauty, despite the facture in
the woods, and then there's a secret cost at the
end of it that sounds like the fairies to me.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yet it would be a kind of myth making and
storytelling that these people be very familiar with.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah, exactly. It's like I doubt it was like the
fairies turned into Robin Hood. It's just like people were like, No,
we're just like used to having stories about like, oh,
you go hang out in the woods and someone's going
to invite you to dinner and it's going to be
real costly, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
And that's what I got inbou Robin Hood. Very little
of the details about the Robbin and the Rissians giving
to the poor, but it's a cool idea and it
lives on forever.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
I gotta admit, going into this, I assumed Robin Hood
was a real dude at one point, me too, obviously.
With a ballooning of myth over time and all of that.
But like, you know, because the British history is not
my forte I have. My background is military history and
the very uplifting genocidal history, but not British myths, English myths. Yeah,
(47:03):
I assumed he was a real guy.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
No, I know, there's there's about eight people who people
point to and are like, maybe this guy. General scholarly
consensus is probably not of any of those eight specific people.
It's a bunch of people named Robin Hood, you know.
And there's like one guy who was named Robin Hood
who was like worked for a similar place as someone
(47:26):
named Little John or John the Little but there's no
particular outlawry to them, you know. And then there's a
couple like tombstones of Robin Hood, but they've been later
been found to be like I'm gonna make this number
up because I don't remember like eighteenth century forgeries, so
like they're written in like fake Middle English.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
You know. Hell, yeah, the tourist traps almost like people
are gonna go to see that. I'm gonna get through
shit like that rules.
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Yeah, totally. Robin Hood would have probably approved of that, honestly.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Definitely, at least spiritually. I do like the idea that
this might be the first English cryptid.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Oh shit, yeah, don't got w that's where Robinhood is,
which case is fine.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, he only walks very quickly looking over his shoulder
and appears very blurry and photographs.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah totally. I mean that's what it is. The history. Yeah,
there's very blurry ideas about who he might have been. Yeah. No.
I went into this being like, all right, cool, I'm
gonna like, I'm sure there's a guy. There's no the guy,
but that's okay. Well what do you do? Who are you?
You write books? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Podcasts? I write books, I write and record podcasts. If
you like fantasy, which I assume you do because you
just listen to two hours of Robin Hood, I have
a fantasy novel out called The Highlands Burn. It also
involves robbing from the rich and stealing from the poor,
kind of you should check it out. If you like
wizards getting shot with magical revolvers, it might be the
(48:59):
book for you. I also say military street podcast called
The Lines Up by Donkey's podcasts. You can listen to
wherever pods are casts and if you listen to it
and you like it. We're having a live show in Cork,
Ireland on September twenty sixth. Tickets are available now. If
you can't make it, we're also live streaming it with
video on demand and you can find all those links
(49:22):
somewhere below.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Perhaps hell yeah, and if you listener want to be
your very own Robinhood then you can. I think that's
a good idea and probably it's probably a crime. Anyway,
I'll see you all next week. Cool People Who Did
(49:46):
Cool Stuff is a production of pool Zone Media. For
more podcasts and pool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Visit our website gooalzonemedia dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Check us out on the I.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
Heard Radio app, pp A Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Here you
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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