"Robin Hood" Topic

"Robin Hood was the most popular English folk hero of the 14th and 15th centuries. His legends were restricted to England, and, although they may have been sung in courts, they belonged to the common people in a way King Arthur did not. Like the Arthurian cycle, stories of Robin Hood were invented by different people in different times and were only united into a single strand during the 15th century. The Gest of Robyn Hode connected five existing stories, patching them together as a complete story that ended with the hero's death. There are at least three other contemporary 15thcentury stories, as well as later stories composed in the 16th century. But Robin Hood seems well established as a folk hero of ballads long before. The 14th-century poem "Piers Plowman" criticized priests who knew the stories of Robin Hood better than their prayers, and there are scattered references to May plays about Robin.
Historians have tried to identify an original Robin Hood, but it is most likely that his name was something like the modern generic name John Doe and that his literary character has a reality similar to Batman's. Earliest references to Robin place him in the 13th century, a time when hoods were a universal hat fashion. There were other outlaws in stories, chiefly Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, William of Cloudesly, and Gamelyn. Their stories are very similar to Robin's. All take refuge in the forest, all are guilty of poaching deer, all get drawn out of hiding by treachery and must use their wits and their weapons to regain safety, and all find ultimate justice with the king, not with his officers. That Robin Hood's stories gained dominance may be an accident of his name working best in rhyme and song.
The context for Robin and the other outlaws is the restrictive forest laws laid down by King William I and his descendants. These laws were at the peak during the reign of Henry II in the 12th century. Henry II's sons appropriated more forest lands. King John, the villain of the modern Robin Hood legends, was only following the precedents of his father and older brother Richard I in adding to his forest preserves. His son, Henry III, was required to promise to uphold the Magna Carta provisions that King John had signed unwillingly; from then on, the royal forests began to shrink, and poaching was a less serious offense. Other aristocrats began to keep forests and parks, though, and they hired foresters and parkers to police them…"

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