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

Robin Hood is a shady guy. He is a liminal figure, operating on the margins of society and of scholarship, refusing to adhere to simple definitions. Robin Hood is an outlaw who defends his king, a devout Christian who terrorizes ecclesiastics, and a prankster who enforces morality. He is a murderer, a thief, and a hero. In scholarship, he lurks in the disciplinary margins between literature, folklore, and history, as well as between medieval and early modern periods, court and popular cultures, and manuscript and print texts. And yet despite his ambiguous nature, Robin Hood was—and continues to be—an important figure in the English popular imagination. As A.J. Pollard says simply, "Everyone knows the story of Robin Hood" (2). But which story? And which Robin Hood? And from where did these stories come? A small industry has been created in trying to trace the characters, places, and events to historically verifiable antecedents, but the definitive proof of a historical Robin Hood has proven elusive. Nevertheless, in his book Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context, Pollard has taken on the challenge of considering the historicity of the Robin Hood stories. Pollard's idea of history does not involve, however, making further attempts to verify historical data behind the literature but involves a broader inquiry that considers social and cultural history as it is embedded in the tales.

Pollard's study looks at the ways in which the Robin Hood stories of the late medieval period reflect fifteenth-century England. The book is a thorough examination of the social and political context in which the tales circulated and the ways in which Robin Hood stories preserve this context. Pollard considers both the general and specific aspects of the fifteenth-century construction of the legend. One of his most useful chapters is simply on Robin Hood's status as a yeoman, a rather confusing and ill-defined character in late-medieval culture. A member of the "middling classes," the yeoman was part of a social category in medieval culture which itself tends to be confusing and ill-defined. Pollard's careful delineation of what a yeoman was and was not clarifies many aspects of the role, although the truth remains that the term was used in a number of different ways. In Robin Hood's case, Pollard posits that he was a forester-yeoman, a role that allowed him an elevated level of autonomy and yet still designated him as a legitimate and contributing member of society. The fact that such men tended to live in the forest, like many outlaws did, explains in part the weird conflation in the Robin Hood character of outlaw and hero qualities. For Pollard, this class designation of the yeoman establishes much of the ambiguity of the Robin Hood figure: "He is both of intermediary rank and intermediary status," he concludes, "The liminal character of this situation means that Robin Hood is a hero cut for all" (56). Thus, Robin's social position is the entry point for his subversive role, a fact that may reflect late-medieval anxiety about the middling class itself.

Pollard's book goes on to consider other aspects of Robin Hood as a representative of late medieval class politics and ideals, specifically looking at the character's symbolic relationship to the church, the throne, and late medieval civic authorities like fraternities. As the tag "steals from the rich and gives to the poor" indicates, we expect Robin Hood to have a subversive relationship with authority, who are by and large "the rich." But Pollard points out that this aspect of Robin Hood is not really part of the late-medieval stories (nor is the phrase found in them) and that Robin Hood's relationship with authority is much more complex. While he seems to react against the corruption of crown and church, Robin Hood actually reinforces royal and religious authority if it is just and fair. Furthermore, Pollard...