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Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context (review)

2006; Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pgn.2006.0101

1832-8334

Graham Tulloch,

Medieval Literature and History

Reviewed by: Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context Graham Tulloch Pollard, A. J. , Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context, London/New York, Routledge, 2004; cloth; pp. xvi, 272; 14 colour plates; RRP £15.99; ISBN 0415223083. In spite of, and perhaps because of, all the outstanding work that has been done on Robin Hood over the last 30 years, it is impossible to approach a new book on him without asking the question, do we need another book on this topic? Fortunately, A. J. Pollard's decision to write a new book on the great English outlaw is amply justified. This is because he takes an entirely new approach. He appears, at least in this book, to have no interest in the perennial questions – did Robin Hood really exist? If so, when and where? And, if he did exist, is there [End Page 190] any chance that he lived in the reign of Richard the Lionheart, as the popular imagination will have it? Instead, as suggested by his subtitle, Pollard starts from one of the few things we know with reasonable certainly, namely that the earliest versions of the Robin Hood stories that have come down to us belong to the late Middle Ages (more precisely the fifteenth century), that is some time after he lived (if he lived) and some time after he began to be a figure of folklore. Starting with this fact, Pollard asks the question: what do these earliest versions mean to the audience for which they were created? As he notes, 'this book is not about a possible real-life Robin; it is about his persona as a fictional creation as it existed when we first encounter it in the fifteenth century. It is about how Robin Hood was imagined then' (p. x). To show how different that imagination was, he points out that many of the stories we all attach to Robin now were unknown to the fifteenth century – here is no Maid Marian, no Friar Tuck, no King Richard. A rather different figure from the one we all know emerges from these earliest texts. Pollard clearly brings a deep knowledge of the Robin Hood secondary literature to this study but he wears his learning lightly and this is an extremely readable account. It is also a very attractive physical object with an elegant typeface and layout and a number of well-reproduced colour illustrations. After an introductory chapter on 'Texts and Contexts', Pollard proceeds to examine aspects of the fifteenth century imagining of Robin Hood. A chapter on 'Yeomanry' examines the persistent presentation of Robin as 'yeoman' and asks what exactly this term might have meant to those early audiences before concluding that, although his 'yeomanry' is 'a complex, if not to say confusing, matter', yet 'the particular and unambiguous identification of Robin Hood as a very specific kind of yeoman, a yeoman of the forest, or forester, provides a fixed point of reference in this fluidity' (p. 55). Further chapters deal with the notion of the greenwood, attitudes to crime and violence, religion and the religious (the latter often the focus of Robin's attacks), the key concept of 'fellowship' and what it might have meant in pre-Reformation England, and authority and the social order. Because Pollard brings a depth of historical knowledge to his study he is able to show us how much the picture of Robin in these versions is determined by the social conditions of the fifteenth century but he also constantly reminds us that these works are also a product of the literary imagination. For instance, with regard to the persistent location of Robin Hood in northern parts of England, he points out that 'It is not the north as it was known and experienced by well-travelled and well-informed southerners that infuses the stories; it is the stereotypical north of literary convention' (p. 71). Similarly he demonstrates [End Page 191] that 'In many ways the stories in their first written form do not reflect the contemporary pattern of violent crime, homicide and poaching as revealed in legal records' (p. 101) but rather that 'The violence perpetrated by...