For hundreds of years, he’s fought tax injustice, tyranny, and the seizure of the commons. Why we still need him today.
by Paul Buhle
and excerpt on YES!
February 15, 2012
“Man
has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a
social order which denies it to him and whatever the world he lives in,
he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of
injustice . . . And in addition he carries within himself the wish to
have what he cannot have—if only in the form of a fairy tale.”
—Eric
Hobsbawm, Bandits (1981)
In the late 1950s, a handful of
peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by
carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of
Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green
was Robin Hood’s color and that Robin could not side with the king’s
soldiers or future soldiers of any empire. Five decades later, the lead
protagonist of a cult favorite American cable show, Leverage, announces
at the beginning of each episode: “The rich and the powerful take what
they want; we steal it back for you.”
A team of Robin Hoods faces off against a motley crew of capitalist clowns and banker jokers.
The game highlighted the possibilities of the Robin Hood tax as way of raising money for climate funds.
It’s
a fitting motto for heroes of the twenty-first century. Admittedly,
resistance to injustice has not as yet returned to the level of the
apprentices and craftsmen in Edinburgh, Scotland, who in 1561 chose to
come together “efter the auld wikid maner of Robene Hude”: they elected a
leader as “Lord of Inobedience” and stormed past the magistrates,
through the city gates, up to Castle Hill where they displayed their
unwillingness to accept current work-and-wage conditions. But as a
global society, we are clearly still thinking about the need for Robin
Hood.
After all, we live in something rapidly approaching a Robin
Hood era. The rich and powerful now command almost every corner of the
planet and, in order to maintain their control, threaten to despoil
every natural resource to the point of exhaustion. Meanwhile, billions
of people are impoverished below levels of decency maintained during
centuries of subsistence living. In this historical moment, the
organized forces of egalitarian resistance and even their ideologies
seem to be reduced to near nonexistence, or turned against themselves in
the name of supreme individualism. Robin’s Greenwood, the global
forest, is disappearing chunks at a time. Yet resistance to authority,
of one kind or another, continues, and, given worsening conditions, is
likely to increase.
Robin Hood lives on as a figure of tomorrow,
rather than just yesterday, in the streets of Cairo, Egypt, and Occupied
sites worldwide. Today’s Occupy Movement, in the U.S. and abroad, lifts
up Robin’s banner intuitively, reclaiming common space; but also
literally, as folks dress in Robin Hood outfits and caps to demonstrate
their sense of continuity for a better life.
A Taiwanese poster
for the latest big-screen (and hardly subversive) adaptation of the
Robin Hood story, directed by Ridley Scott, demonstrates the legend’s
ongoing global—and commercial—appeal.
No other medieval European
saga has had the staying power of Robin Hood; no other is wrapped up
simultaneously in class conflict (or something very much like class
conflict), the rights of citizenship, and defense of ecological systems
against devastation.
No wonder, then, that theater and poetry
seized the subject early on, and that modern communications, from
19th-century penny newspapers and “yellow back” cheap novels, to
modern-day comic books and assorted media have all had their Robin Hood
characters. No wonder that the early Robin films set records for lavish
production and box-office records for audience response. No wonder that
television productions of Robin have pressed issues of civil liberties
and that many of the later films, if distinctly mediocre, nevertheless
seem to refresh the subject, offering a source of summer holiday
distraction that never quite disguises darker themes within.
The Enclosure of the Commons: Circa Norman Conquest of 1066
John
Ball was no mythic figure, but a real leader of a major social
rebellion, assassinated as the rebellion was crushed in 1381. Little is
known about Ball otherwise: Like many an agitator, he was a lay preacher
with working men and women as his street audience.
Ball was once
thought to be the author of the totemic English poem of the time,
“Piers Plowman.” The authorship was otherwise, but the kinship is
striking. Piers Plowman’s complaint and demands, naturally placed in
theological terms during that time, nevertheless spoke to very real
contemporary
developments. These included a failed (but hugely
expensive) Crusade; the creation of the historic 1215 agreement between
king and aristocracy known as the Magna Carta; the rise of religious
dissent and in particular the spiritual rebels known as the Lollards;
not to mention famine and plague, among other cataclysmic events of the
time.
Behind these multiple crises, before the resulting
disruption and attempted revolution of 1381, lay centuries of European
village life, more specifically the creation of a sustainable ecosystem
in which the village had collectively survived invasions, diseases, and
all manner of earlier threats. Peter Linebaugh references Marc Bloch’s
description of “grey, gnarled, lowbrowed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent,
huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunchbacked, misshapen oakmen.” The
ancient oaks, Linebaugh says, were not the growth of “wildwood,” dating
back to the conditions formed by the Ice Age, but the consequence of a
planned and cultivated wooded pasture.
This was a reality, but
also a metaphor. The wooded pasture was nurtured by the villagers within
a common—that is, an area commonly held—with practices like
woodsmanship, so that the same stretches of land remained in use for
their wood value and for the grazing of domestic animals. Ash and elm
trees, capable of growing up from stumps, could be cut and used for
rakes, scythes, and firewood, while trees like apple and cherry, arising
out of root systems as “suckers,” grew rapidly out of reach of the
livestock to provide other resources. Wooded commons were often owned by
the local lord or merchant, but used by all. If the owner commanded the
soil and exacted a percentage of crops, grazing rights nevertheless
usually remained with commoners, and the trees belonged to neither.
Thus, as the cattle grazed, towns were physically organized through the
extensive use of wood in cottages, churches, and for the making of
bowls, tables, stools, and wheels.
The Norman Conquest in 1066, a
couple of centuries before Robin’s supposed time, did much to throw
these old rules of the forest into chaos. Changes brought new laws, new
populations (including French and Jewish), and even new animals for game
including certain kinds of deer not earlier seen in these lands. The
forest, as Linebaugh says, was now as much a legal as a physical
presence.
Other elements of change likewise pressing upon
villagers further complicated the picture. As Marxist scholar Rodney
Hilton explained in his classic, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant
Movements and the English Rising of 1381, serfdom expanded as the
centers of power grew stronger and more successfully exploited the
advancing sources of wealth, even as large numbers of “free tenants”
remained protected to some degree against the seizure of all surplus
through government and lordly dues and payments of one kind and another.
In many cases, farmers closer to markets were growing more prosperous,
but they were also the very farmers with dues-collectors closer at hand.
For
centuries ahead, the collective resistance across Europe, but perhaps
especially in England, coincided with the sense of better days somewhere
in the past, and this real and mythic memory continued to give ballast
to class resentments and radical hopes alike.
In all this, the
forest was a unique status symbol and a domain of kingship, both
symbolic and actual. Royalty needed wood for all the familiar reasons of
building and sustaining a palace life, as well as supporting the lives
of merchants and nobility in league with the king. For holidays, they
demanded sumptuous banquet food, including all manner of forest animal
life, as well as fish that swam in the forest’s rivers, and deer that
were forbidden to be trapped, killed, and eaten by anyone else.
Pickpockets, abundant at public events (including hangings), were more
likely to be shown mercy
than deer poachers, even with the animals in
evident abundance.
Cash was also necessary, in part to meet the
authorities’ demands upon the villages and forests to make possible the
latest forms of military escalation and associated expenses for the
king’s army. Royalty itself sold off forest privileges in order to pay
the cost of mounted knights with or without
armor. Not surprisingly,
then, one main demand in the Magna Carta was to take back the forests,
or at least limit their expropriation by the powerful.
The Magna Carta to the Ballads: 1215-1500
The
Magna Carta was hardly written by common people, and it hardly ended
oppression and exploitation. Like the later arrival of Protestantism, it
often contributed to new conditions for heightened exploitation. But
struggles against royalty and the established church offered symbols of
popular resistance and occasional victory, symbols also used in the
Robin Hood narratives. These helped make it seem possible to fight back,
in small and mainly local ways; they made it seem possible, sometimes,
to win back ancient rights that were in the process of being lost.
Thus
it happened that the main ingredients of the Robin story became
established in ballads, sung and written roughly between 1400 and 1500,
with a handful of basic narratives starring the now familiar characters.
From the beginning, their defense of villagers along with deer hunting,
archery contests, cunning disguises, daring rescues, and
crypto-romances were full of social and ecological implications, and
always rich in symbolism.
Robin Hood, the saga, emerged in
England at a time of bitter social conflict and was reshaped continually
by the modernizing forces of order and production. The medieval barons
who ordered playlets performed by singers and actors would not, of
course, wish Robin to be a social bandit—a romantic bandit certainly,
but not one with a social cause. Nor would most of the playwrights have
wished to pursue such themes.
The Robin Hood ballads could not,
however, have been created without the rebellious legends with their
anti-establishment emphasis casually reinforced in musical
entertainments as carnival-like games, and without the presence of the
very real social unrest sometimes taking place alongside
these
presumably innocent activities.
Robin in Chapbooks: Eighteenth Century Onward
From
the 18th century onward, readers began to encounter Robin in cheap
anthologies. These “chapbooks,” or crudely printed little volumes, could
run as long as eighty pages, but more often were twenty-four pages long
and included illustrations especially profuse in somewhat more pricey
editions.
But who bought them? Because broadsides, and then
chapbooks, sold more briskly in towns and cities than rural zones, their
audience was likely to be the urban lower classes, perhaps recent
migrants from the countryside seeking jobs and, for many, freedom from
the old bonds of rural life.
Sometimes, they would have been men
and women driven from the villages by the ongoing enclosures. These
readers in particular wanted entertainment but they also nurtured the
legacy of rebellion, and probably their own sense of nostalgia for the
beauty and quiet of the rural scene.
Ritson’s Robin Takes On “Titled Ruffian and Sainted Idiots”: 1795-1815
The pure glory of Robin spilled out into the work of Joseph Ritson’s Robin
Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads, now
extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which are Affixed
Historical Anecdotes of His Life, published first in 1795. Ritson
himself was a literary rebel, a wild enthusiast for the French
Revolution (and unlike some of England’s leading poets, never willing
afterward to repudiate its legacies), and a bitter critic of the Roman
Church as well as its English counterpart. Ritson was above all a
collector and an early archivist, and a highly intelligent one at that.
Ritson
established Robin’s qualities through an almost psychological study of
the available folkish documents: “Just, generous, benevolent, faithful
and believed or revered by his followers or adherents for his excellent
and amiable qualities.” Ritson also argued for the historical existence
of a nonfiction Robin Hood, an Earl of Huntingdon who “in a barbarous
age, and under a complicated tyranny, displayed a spirit of freedom and
independence which has endeared him to the common people” against all
the efforts of “titled ruffian and sainted idiots, to suppress” his true
story. This was quite a claim, and not one easily heard in an England
where defeat of the French and anxiety about “revolution” became
predominant sentiments. After 1815, as economic crisis merged with
imperial crisis, Ritson’s Robin Hood emerged as the accepted classic
version, along with folkloric inclusion of Robin stories in the Childe
Ballads collected and published during the last two decades of the 19th
century.
Quaker Robin Hits the United States: 1883
Howard Pyle’s Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (1883)
was a genuine innovation, albeit in form more than content. Robin
material had only begun to appear in the United States at this time, and
Pyle had a growing reputation for his illustrated children’s books. It
has been suggested that the author’s native rural Delaware bore a
resemblance to Sherwood Forest, and his Quakerism contained a dissenting
sensibility (not, however, much of a pacifist limitation).
Williams Morris’s fascination with Pyle’s Merry Adventures
makes good sense because it was close to Morris’s own spirit, and in
line with the heavy praise that Pyle’s book received in the literary
circles of 1880s London. One can almost feel the Morrisian medievalism,
romantic poetry and all, in Pyle’s prose: “Five score or more good stout
yeomen joined themselves to him, and chose him to be their leader and
chief. Then they vowed that even as they themselves had been despoiled
they would despoil their oppressors, whether baron, abbot, knight, or
squire, and that from each they would take that which had been wrung
from the poor by unjust taxes, or land rents, or in wrongful fines . . .
to many a poor family, they came to praise Robin and his merry men, and
to tell many tales of him and of his doings in Sherwood Forest, for
they felt him to be one of themselves.”
Pyle wanted to send his
young readers into a place that only their imagination could carry them.
No small part of this was Pyle’s sense of nature lore: In the “merry
morn” of the forest, where “all the birds were singing blithely among
the leaves,” Robin finds adventure, and the natural setting is never far
from sight. It is also, or can be seen to be, all part of the grand
saga of England, Robin a necessary outlaw but a friend to the Good King
Richard, defender of the proper throne. This was schoolboy stuff, as
Pyle himself might have calculated, but schoolboy stuff of a superior
sort. The book has been in and out of print, mostly in print, for every
generation after its writing.
Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood gives Maid Marian a dagger in Robin Hood.
Big-Screen Robin, the Romantic Lead: 1922
Robin Hood as cinematic hero took the field at least twice in the 1910s, but in full force with Douglas Fairbanks in 1922. The Fairbanks version, true to the tale of the nobleman assisting the oppressed, but also pledging himself to King Richard, was also important in at least one other narrative respect: romance. Filmmakers had already grasped the significance of the female lead, especially for the sake of women in the movie audience. In this version, Marian is determinedly virginal and panic-stricken at her worse-than-death potential loss. Everything about Marian depends upon Robin: no innovation here. But there is more to be said, if only because of the film’s continuing cinematic importance. Robin Hood became and still remains a Hollywood phenomenon as the social rebel beloved of the ticket-buying masses.
Bandido: Robin as Freedom Fighter: 1936
“Joaquin,
the Mountain Robber” (ca. 1848). Artist’s portrayal of Joaquin Murieta.
Original at the California History Room, California State Library,
Sacramento, California.
Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936),
one of the most spectacular anti-racist films of a film era in which
these were rare and mostly limited to sympathetic treatment of
individual Indians. A highly fictionalized biography of Joaquin Murieta,
the famed social bandit who took to the hills to fight the invading
Anglo land-grabbers, finds the “yankees” looting and robbing the poor
Mexicans in mid-19th-century California. His encampment, a center of
merriment, dancing, and singing, as well as military training for a
guerilla army, was the best update of the Sherwood Forest guerillas in
modern cinema to the time. He first aims to rob the rich Mexicans who
have treated his own family so badly, and then learns that they, too,
have been expropriated. A daughter of that class takes up arms with him
as a lover and co-fighter, but as the guerillas plan to escape to Mexico
and safety, they are gunned down to the last member by ruthless,
murdering Anglo creeps.
Robin Under the Fascist Shadow: 1938
The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), costarring a heart-rending Olivia de
Havilland as Maid Marian, amplified a wealth-redistributionist Robin
Hood generally absent from the Fairbanks version. Leading man Errol
Flynn, reputed to be an early 1930s pro-Fascist (but always more
interested in chasing women and boozing), was soon to become the
anti-Fascist screen hero several times over. Before the end of his life
(at 50), Flynn pronounced himself, on prime-time television, to be a
drinking buddy of Fidel Castro’s.
Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Meanwhile,
playing Maid Marian, de Havilland was perfection. The noblewoman, at
first resentful and politically conservative, is won from her
aristocratic beliefs by Robin’s showing her the misery wrought by the
Norman occupiers. She follows her heart and her political growth step by
step into romance and partisanship. Very much her own person, this Maid
Marian is on her way toward a crypto-feminism of self-assertion.
What
else had made this iconic version a huge and lasting hit? Apart from
Robin and Marian, there is the notable camaraderie of the Merry Men, but
also notable is the stark evil of the authorities. The Sheriff of
Nottingham, as played by Basil Rathbone, means to wipe out all
opposition. He is a Fascist, whatever he happens to call himself. As
darkness swept over contemporary Europe, it was easy to identify those
like him in charge of the threat to decency, and their connections with
the powerful ruling groups of various nations.
Blacklisted: Robin at (Cold) War: 1955-1959
The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–59) was created and shot in Britain,
likely the only place that it could have been done. Its producer was
American Hannah Weinstein, a former theatrical lawyer (and organizer of
major events for the doomed Henry Wallace/Progressive Party campaign of
1948) who saw the writing on the wall and, like many of the victims of
the Hollywood blacklist, made up her mind to create a career abroad. In
Britain as in France, the blacklistees were welcomed as heroes,
notwithstanding the British government’s slavish acceptance of U.S.
foreign policies and military and intelligence operations across the
planet.
“The Adventures of Robin Hood” aired on Britain’s ITV
channel, a BBC competitor, and eventually attracted 32 million viewers
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Weinstein easily made contact with
blacklisted screenwriters living in New York, Hollywood, and Paris. The
most important, by a long stretch, was Ring Lardner, Jr., who, until
the witch hunt, had been regarded as one of the film colony’s brightest
young talent (as well as Katharine Hepburn’s personal favorite).
Lardner, Jr., and his longtime film collaborator Ian McLellan Hunter
were set to work with young script editor Albert Ruben in London,
devising a system—prompted by blacklistees’ inability to obtain
passports—by which he traded story ideas and scripts across the
Atlantic. This resulted in some of the best, wittiest, and most
political writing on television in an era of live drama and other
experimentation rarely seen again until film and cable competition drove
networks onward to risks political and sexual alike.
“The
Adventures of Robin Hood” set the small screen afire. It quickly
attracted 32 million viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. It also drew
upon the knowledge and insight of historical scholars—in this case
British scholars—offering examples of the use of existing laws in the
High Medieval Ages to protect commoners against the worst abuses that
aristocrats sought to hand out. With the careful oversight of Ruben, it
made for consistently clever, sometime hilarious viewing: The dialogue
was snappy and socially conscious (especially from Maid Marian) and the
bad guys were bad enough but also capable, now and then, of doing the
right thing, as when a forest fire or a psychopathic baron brought the
foes together in common cause. More often, Robin and his Men, joined by
Marian, typically protected an old woman accused of being a witch (i.e.,
the ongoing witch hunt in the United States); conducted a secret
mission to France and joined hands with the French Underground (shades
of anti-Nazi activities); provided aid to Friar Tuck, who was being a
people’s priest in resisting pope and sheriff; or frustrated the tax-man
or the hangman, for the nth time in the series.
It was also an
unforgettable slap in the face of the repressive 1950s. More, it
represented the struggle to get beyond them. Together, these shows
offered history as a way of learning, and as mass culture created with a
skimpy budget afterwards unimaginable.
Robin Today: Occupy the Meme
The
struggle for common space and decision-making—whether rural,
metropolitan, or global—can be traced back, in one part of the world, to
the changes forced upon royalty in the Magna Carta. They can carry us
forward to our opposition against privatization of formerly public goods
and space toward a society of a different—and more sustainable—kind.
Many millions of farms, urban neighborhoods, and software programs can
be or in many cases are already being operated on some basis of sharing.
The editors of An Architektur dub this process of struggle for
position “commoning.” Thus commoning is the opposite of the imperial
mode, right down to the struggle against dams being constructed on
rivers in or outside forests all around the world.
If the
“primitive accumulation” (Marx’s own phrase) of capitalism was effected
through enclosures—the privatization of previously common lands for the
purpose of successful wool production a couple of centuries after
Robin’s appearance—then he and the Merry Men (not forgetting Maid
Marian) had been seeking to nip the process in the bud. Marx erred,
writing in the middle of the 19th century, not by failing to see the
utter misery introduced to move primitive accumulation forward, but by
not seeing that primitive accumulation as a permanent process.
With so little of the planet not yet completely exploited, the process nevertheless accelerates. We need Robin more than ever.
We
need Robin because rebellion against deteriorating conditions is
inevitable. Without clear-headed Robins, however—without hundreds of
thousands or millions of them seeing clearly—the impulse to rebel will
surely be lost in internecine struggle and crime, organized and
unorganized, the mirror of class society at its destructive extreme. We
need them more now than ever before. No existing political model,
Marxist, Social Democratic, Leninist, anarchist, or other is suitable
for what lies ahead.
Paul Buhle adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from his book Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero (PM Press, 2011). Paul is the founder-editor of the new left journal Radical America and edits radical comic art books in Wisconsin.