Was Robin Hood a loan shark?

According to an article in the Telegraph, perhaps he was . . . but only if one permits revisionist historians to get away with their nonsense.

By stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, Robin Hood gained legendary status as a selfless re-distributor of wealth.

But a new book claims that the outlaw of Sherwood Forest was in fact something of a loan shark, who operated a sophisticated lending scheme for those short of cash.

The claim threatens to tarnish the image of a hero of English folklore who has been played on screen by actors including Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner, and who even has even has an airport, in Doncaster, named after him.

John Paul Davis, the author of the new book, cites scenes from A Gest of Robyn Hode, one of the earliest references to Robin Hood which dates from the 1500s, to support his theory.

In the ballad, Robin is approached by a knight who is indebted to an abbot and asked for a loan. Robin asks the knight if he has a guarantor, then agrees to give him the money, to be repaid over a year.

He asks Little John to count out £400 from his treasury.

Later in the ballad, which is written in Middle English, the knight returns to see Robin, and with his debts to the abbot cleared, offers to repay the loan together with an extra deposit charge.

Robin, however, declines the repayment, saying he has already received the money after stealing it from the abbot himself as a punishment for his greed, and tells the knight that it would be wrong to take the money twice.

Mr Davis also claims in the book that Robin was a member of the Knights Templar, a powerful Christian military organisations of the Middle Ages.

He argues that during the period, the sort of banking transaction described in the ballad was the preserve of the Templars alone, who were known to charge deposit fees as usury was officially forbidden by the Church.

Mr Davis, said: "The Templars were the most famous moneylenders in the world and £400 was a vast sum of money, which hints at an organisation behind the loan rather than the act of a lone outlaw.

"Although the information we have for Robin Hood is pretty scant, he is always described as an astute swordsman and soldier, with a notable devotion to Christianity who took a vow, along with his merry men, of honouring and protecting women, all of which were Templar codes.

"The idea that he was a money lender may not fit with the traditional image of Robin Hood, but he is still shown to be a good outlaw giving his money around."

While Robin Hood has been the subject of countless interpretations in books, plays and films over the centuries, there is no actual evidence that he ever existed.

There's more at the link.

Quite frankly, this sort of article irritates me. Anything and everything that revisionist historians can think of is being tied to the Knights Templar, despite an almost complete lack of any objective, quantifiable, verifiable evidence to support their claims. (I suspect Dan Brown bears a good deal of responsibility for this through his [rather silly] novels.) As for taking one or two sentences out of a post-medieval manuscript, written centuries after the events to which it refers, and inferring from them all that Mr. Davis does . . . that's just ridiculous!

Peter