July 14th, 2009

This is an open letter to Brendan O’Neill, who wrote a particularly odious article for the BBC on Robin Hood. His main point, having cut his journalist eye-teeth for the Revolutionary Communist Party, is that Robin Hood is some kind of golden folk-hero who is Marxism incarnate, exactly as Obama is a golden folk hero, lavishing bailouts upon hungry souls (not keeping a penny for the government—of course).

If you want my take on Robin Hood, look here, or just click on the button above which says Robin Hood’s Original Audacity.

Letter:

Brendan O’Neill,

May I suggest that you change a few things in that Robin Hood article? Take this from a dyed-in-green researcher of Robin Hood:

Number One: Robin Hood is mentioned in the earliest sources as having seven score men—not ‘three score’. Look through the Little Gest of Robin Hood. It’s mentioned 5 times.

Number Two: The earliest film of Robin Hood was an American black and white. It was filmed in 1908 and was called Robin Hood and His Merry Men. You were probably thinking of the later, 1922, Douglas Fairbanks film, but in reality there were many in between. Try this website, which has one of the most comprehensive lists.

Number Three: The best kept secret of the Robin Hood ballads is that he is never once mentioned as ‘robbing from the rich and giving to the poor’. Now you can find that idea on the 16th century epitaph set up over the grave of at least three (plague?) victims at Kirklees—the real, old slab-marker of which has now disappeared leaving only the stupid epitaph. The current *ancient* version of which, by the way, is the worst extant imitation of Old English. A truly reliable source set up for the 16th century tourist trade: Robin Hood’s grave. Realio and trulio.

I advise you to *change* the article. A new, really shocking point could be that Robyn Hode was in fact liberating people, not coins.

Your article says:

It’s telling that the legend really sky-rocketed in the 16th and 17th Centuries - an era of the “earliest capitalist enterprises", says Prof Hahn - amongst ordinary people who found new economic systems alien and oppressive.

Really? It did? The Robin Hood legend was in near decay by the 1500’s. Not many could even make real ballads anymore by then. It was much more vigorous 300 years earlier, except that few people could write things down!

And another thing; have you ever truly studied medieval England? Because if so, you would have known that, au contraire, the poor serfs who escaped (in the 1400’s) into the cities invented the ‘capitalism’ and it wasn’t alien, oppressive, or bad—it was freedom! In old English times, ‘poor’ meant the unlucky people still under the lock and key of the country nobility—the, ah, government.

Have lots of fun,

Adele Treskillard