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
From the very start, Robin Hood was subjected to revisionism. "Steals from the rich and gives to the poor" is how he is remembered, and we hold that to be a good and noble venture. But what he really did is take money back from the tax collector and return it to the rightful owners. Think about it.
ReplyDeleteHe's a character... by that point he was whatever the balladeer wanted him to be. In other news, Wild Bill Hickock was a Pinkerton. 'strue. I read it in my penny dreadful..um..I mean, I saw it on TV. ;)
ReplyDelete.... but if the act of loaning money and following a chivalric code are all this guy has to tie him to the Templars, that's weak beer indeed.
The Templar nonsense gets old; I had the (mis) fortune of doing doctoral research at Edinburgh University on medieval Scotland, in particular the region and people that included Roslin chapel (which has all sorts of Templar, Ley Lines and other legends attached), when the Da Vinci Code came out. My supervisor and I had the pleasure of telling people that, "There is NO known evidence and therefore the book is fiction, and yes we can say that because we have been through All of the known evidence."
ReplyDeleteTemplars aside, I wouldn't totally discout his argument that Robin Hood (assuming his existence for the argument since he is definitely in the 'not proven' category of existence) practiced usury. History may be a foreign world, but one of the first rules for the historian is that they were still people doing ordinary, human activity. Charity is not utterly incompatible with an eye to personal advantage. However it is more likely that the composer of the Geste was making a contemporary remark on the increased practice of usury by the putative 'good guys'.
Soooooo. Practicing usery on a knight (not a peasant) is a bad thing?
ReplyDeleteB Woodman
III-per