Part One: Robin Hood and the Legacy of Outlaws in Medieval England

Cool Zone Media.

Hello, and welcome to kopy Boodhed Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that there have always been people fighting for what's right. Usually I have a less cliche introduction than that, but I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I have two very important things to say right here up top. First, we have a guest this week, Joe Kasabien.

Hi. How are you hey? Thanks for having me. I'm good. How about you?

I am doing well. I'll get to the other thing.

Okay.

So you run a military podcast, The Lions Led by Donkeys. Yeah, I guess military is the only adjective. Doesn't really like a military history podcast.

I like it.

I've listened to it a couple of times. You're also a military specfic writer and now a regular fantasy writer. Is that also true?

That is true?

What is your new fantasy book?

So? I wrote a gunpowder fantasy book called The Highlands Burn. It came out in the end of May. It focuses mostly on kind of like a libertary story based out of an area roughly based on the Caucuses. Because I kind of got sick of I'm a huge fantasy fan, but I kind of got sick of just reading about Western European stuff all the time.

Yeah, that makes sense. I have bad news for you about the subject of this episode, but we'll get to that because I also have sick of it. This is actually why I had to like do the research on the thing I'm going to talk about today. Yeah. But the other thing that I wanted to say before we even get to anything else. You're a military person, so you should advise me whether or not should we invade Canada to get them to stop burning down all their trees.

Because I am way south of Canada, and the sun is an angry red eye in the sky, and so I figure instead of blaming climate change, we could blame other people. And I had to turn off my air conditioner in my air filter in order to record this and this West Coast people are supposed to have to deal with wildfire smoke. That's the natural way of the world.

But I shouldn't.

As someone who's originally from Michigan, I find myself being a big fan of Big Michigan. Like I don't want the United States to take over Canada. I want Canada to become part of Michigan.

First of all, I fucking love Michigan. I think that's a great idea to.

Really finally put those people in Ohio in their place.

Yeah, we just make Canada just like an extension of like the best city in Michigan and Arbor.

Well, I am a Detroiter, so my opinions on that are known. Well, I've spent the longest in Lansing, but that's where I went to university. Lansing is a terrible place. It sucks.

My dad's from Detroit, my mom is from Plymouth, so I got the Michigander and me.

All right, all right, Still, both of those are better than Lansing. I will say I.

Spent a lot of time literally sleeping in bushes and Lansing because one of my friends had been arrested there and we were waiting for him to get out of jail. So I'm not a big fan of Lansing. I have also been arrested at Michigan State Police.

Hello.

It was the police in Lancing that convinced me that horse cops have a trigger by which they can make their horse poop. I'm convinced of this because I was busking and Lancing and the cops went by and they couldn't stop us. It was legal for us to be busking, but they didn't like us, and they left a line of horseshit directly in front of us, about five feet long.

I believe you it was perfect. We had to move, we were done busking.

The cops would be the people to teach their horses how to weaponize shit. Yeah, that's a very MSP thing to do. I mean Lancing PD as well and Michigan State University's police. They're all assholes.

Yeah, So what you're saying is that actually Lancing being drowned in the fiery smoke was actually Canada doing us a favor, and the rest of us are just collateral damage.

Possibly. I mean Gretchen Whitmer, the governor's on her way out, but she's currently trying to sell everything to data centers, So I mean all of these things are possible.

Okay. Well, unrelated to any of that, I'm actually completely with you that I want to read mostly fantasy books that have the furthest from Western Europe and especially the furthest from England that I can get. That's usually what I want, especially anything that has to do with like kings and nobility and stuff. But I really wanted to talk this week about the most famous outlaw in the English world, the man whose name is synonymous with outlaw but good, the person that I'm surprised it took me into about four or five years of this podcast to cover Robinhood. Oh hell yeah, what are you coming into it knowing about Robinhood?

Only the stuff in like popular media. Certainly, Oh perfect, And of course I believe there is some kind of financial ada named after him.

Oh that's true. I'm sure he'd be really happy about that. Well, what's funny is that actually what we're going to talk about today and Wednesday is about how Robin Hood, who probably didn't exist but might have existed, About how Robinhood his name has like it becoming the weird capitalism for the people app is not fitting to probably what the original Robinhood would have wanted, but perfectly fitting with the direction that Robin Hood's name has been taken over the last six hundred and fifty years at least.

Yeah, that happens to everyone that is like cool from back in the day. At one point, after several generations, someone is stealing your shit to sell an app.

Yeah yeah, and just be like this is now something completely unrelated to anything you had any interest in. Yeah, we are robbing the rich and giving to the poor by all investing.

I mean the only character from history that isn't the case is like Hitler, because he would love Twitter.

I give it another hundred years. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it. But Leopold, King Leopold, not a lot of people trying to turn his name around because everyone who like vaguely supports him and just tries to make everyone forget that he ever existed, you know, like.

Or they're just Belgian. Yeah.

Yeah, there's like some mass murderers who are just like trying to quietly get forgotten out of history. And like Leopold though what second I think is the main one I think of when I think of those folks.

Oh yeah, he is the crown of being a piece of shit. Yeah, at least from the low countries, he comfortably has that title.

Yeah. If people want to hear more about King Leopold, they can go back and check out our story on Sir Roger Casement, the gay Irish knight who brought down the greatest mass murder in his And this person's not a night. We're not going to talk about a night, but we are going to talk about a weird thing that sort of relates to anti colonialism despite happening in England.

We call Robinhood the one and only Robinhood. No one calls him that, but I did earlier in my script. But it's entirely possible that Robin Hood was a name that outlaw after outlaw took aus their own name. Or it's maybe not the one and only. After all, it's even more likely that there never was anyone named Robin Hood. Well, we have records of people named Robinhood, but they're not the Robin Hood. Probably so he might be the nun and neither not the one and only. Obviously there's a certain amount that everyone knows about Robin Hood. There used to be a plucky fellow who was either a human or a fox, depending on your source, who lived in a quirky forest. I went and watched some of these you know it lives in a quirky forest called Sherwood

in ye oldie sorty times in England. He was an outlaw with a heart of gold who robbed from the rich, and I wrote stole from the poor of my script. But that's not what he's known for. And gave to the poor alongside his crew of merry men, and his particular foe was that mean old nasty Sheriff of Nottingham, who is either a human or a wolf, again, depending on your source. There is not any confirmed historicity to any specific tale of Robin Hood, but what we know for certain is that Robin Hood has been a folk hero in England for at least six hundred and fifty years and probably several hundred years longer than that. As a folk hero, all sorts of people have mapped their own values onto this poor guy. But what's important to

me and to this week's story is that he started off firmly a working class hero. We actually don't know the earliest ballads. We just like straight up don't know them, but the ones that were written down, the first ones that were written down. He was not a noble. He was a yeoman. Are you familiar with yeomen?

Yeah? Guy, it was kind of just a rank and file, working class guy working for his shitty feudal lord.

Yeah. It means slightly different things at slightly different times. Overall, it usually means someone who's like a free commoner instead of a like in serfed I don't know the word here. Instead of a serf, you know who is like theoretically tied to the land, right, A yeoman is like the upper crust of being a fucking peasant. And you could even sort of call them the pro to middle class, but not really. But also they're not the rich. It's also a word that means servant, which is the other usage of it, right, the guy who works for the nobles and things. But as I learned while trying to research all of this shit, if you want clear cut definitions of how the medieval world worked, then don't look to actual history because there's a lot of it, and

most of it isn't written down, and it's written down in different places at different times, but different people and everything means different things.

The word usage evolves heavily over time, to the point it kind of makes you go mad when you go far enough back for historical research.

Yeah, there's going to be way more etymology drops in this episode than usual.

Hell yeah, we love a good etymology drop.

I'm really excited about it. We're going to talk about the Jest. The jest is my favorite one of them anyway, and tithings.

Okay, so.

What I care about is that Robinhood was not a noble, not at first that idea, like most modern Robinhood films and things like that. Most modern adaptations have him as a noble who has been displaced because the wrong guy is king or whatever right, and he's off to try and find the right king, and all the robbing from the rich and giving to the poor is like kind of almost like a secondary it's like a thing to pass his time while he's going to do the true and noble monarchist revolution against the existing monarchy that's later, although still hundreds of years ago. That's not just a like modern twentieth century invention. But what Robinhood is more than anything else is the arc type of the noble outlaw,

which is something that's more common in populist stories because it gives the working class a hero of their own. So like the great stories of the Only Sorty Times England are King Arthur for the nobles and Robinhood for the peasants, and specifically populist stories for the working class, like kind of having someone who upends the social order and someone who acts noble without being a noble. But later versions, of course they're like, oh, we actually have to make him a noble because peasants can't be noble.

They can't act this way. It's too high above their station. You can't have them thinking that they can't be shoveling literal shit all day and be named like Billy shit shoveler.

Yeah, totally, huh. Yeah, No, he's like, you have to be groveling around in the dirt. You don't have time for high minded things like being nice to people or whatever. Only the rich or nice to people, which is counter to everyone's experience of the world.

Yeah, But to.

Lay the scene before we get to robin Hood, we have to do context. My favorite thing in the world. We're gonna talk about Sherwood Forest, and I'm gonna tie this whole thing into the enclosure of the commons, because why not I have to tie everything to the enclosure of the commons. Sherwood Forest. I've never been to Sherwood Forest.

Have either of you all been to Sherwood Forest.

Nope.

I've been to a place called Sherwood Forest, but definitely not the one in England.

Oh okay, let's say it was in England. It's the Sherwood Although we're gonna talk about what a generic name Sherwood Forest is in a second. Sherwood Forest is obviously a place of legends because of Robinhood. It was fantastically important as a forest in its day. I don't know that I can point to anything comparable in the modern world.

The Central Royal Forest of medieval England was like an entire legislative area that mattered. I'd always assume Sherwood Forest is like a forest, like, ah, there's a forest over there, and that's where the outlaw is, you know.

Yeah, I assumed it was the woods. Yeah.

Well, its name Sherwood basically means county forest forest.

Ah. Okay, really rolls off the tongue.

Yeah, really totally, because Sherwood basically means the woodland that's part of the shire. With shire being an old timing place administration name, it's not just where hobbits are from, and shires were administered by representatives of the king called shire reeves aka sheriffs. So this woodland it was named I pronounce this skier Uda in nineteen fifty, not nineteen fifty eight. That was absolutely not fifty eight. It was literally regular nine fifty eight without the on regardless of what I wrote in my script in the year nine fifty eight. It was named scare Udah or something like that, maybe Sheer Yuda the woods of the shire, the shire in questions, of course, nottingham Shire. Then in ten sixty

six you have the part that I almost wish I'd have to talk about, because every single political persuasion wants to talk about this in really complicated ways. You have the Norman invasion. Ah, when William the Conqueror from Normandy. I feel so bad. You were like, oh, man, I love fantasy that has nothing to do with England, and I'm like, let me tell you about the fucking Normans.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love myself some good history. I just don't want to sit down after a long day and crack open the next tale about nights or whatever in fantasy world fighting dragons. When it comes like we did a series on the English peasant Revolt, wonderful time. Oh amazing?

Yeah, No, I like I always kind of hated English history just out of a bo shit, Like my family calls itself Irish, so we're like, ah, we hate England, you know. And then also like this is of course every single fantasy story and I'm sick of it or whatever. I grew Upretty in a ton of fantasy, but so I always like kind of had a resistance to learn about English history, and then slowly I'm like, oh, ancient English history is interesting as shit, and so are all the peasant revolts, and so is the history of like labor struggle, fighting, the enclosure of the commons. Like the thing that I've learned by doing the show is that wherever bad stuff starts, people start fighting it right away.

So in the worst places, you have some of the coolest people, right you have like well, unfortunately a lot of the resistance to fascism in Germany got kind of crushed by the early thirties, but like, you still have all these people to do an amazing shit, and so you can't just be like, oh, Germany in nineteen thirties, I hate everyone who's ever from there. You know.

Yeah, everywhere you know has layers like an ogre.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, But you can grow underground and then the green sprouts come up out of the ogre.

Yeah, that's how they're grown. I mean, going back to the Shire and Orcs for that matter.

It's the difference between ogres and orcs. Orcs are mined and then yeah, exactly, ogres are grown, orcs are cultivated. Yeah, and ogres grow wild, yeah exactly. Yeah, difference between wild onion.

And whenever somebody says merry men, I think it's just like a bunch of little Mary the Hobbits. Yeah. Yeah, so it's just like a guy and then his band of merry men.

Well we're going to talk about the merry men in a little bit. Great because the merry men actually just means the pleasant men, not the funny men. I just it's hobbit.

Yeah.

They didn't have a tight five. They're just nuice.

Yeah, yeah, just admit this was an excuse for you to make as many Lord of the Rings references as possible.

I didn't write any into the script.

Yeah, I know you didn't. You don't need to write it into script. It comes it's like breathing.

Yeah, no, totally, am which is funny because I've never written. But don't put that in all right, anyway, it's fine, you're not missing anything in my opinion. Well, it's the same reason that like I didn't care about history until I started actually caring about like politics, and like how power works and stuff like that. You know, It's like I really struggled with, like, here's a bunch of names and dates, so why would I read the fantasy version of that when instead I can read the names and dates tied into story, like Lord of the Rings, or like the Norman Invasion when William the Conqueror in ten sixty six from Normandy invaded Normandy. For those who have a normal understanding of history where you don't care about

small parts of France, Normandy is this place in northwestern France that has been settled by Vikings from Denmark and from elsewhere, but you know, most famously from Denmark, and it became like mostly French. William was the descendant of Rollo, the Viking leader who founded the place, who I learned about through TV, and he conquered England. Which is you name your kid, as nominative determinism, if I've ever heard it, you name your kid William the Conqueror. And that's a lot of pressure to put on a kid.

It's a big surname to hold.

Yeah, yeah, like your dad is like John the Conqueror. He didn't do shit, you know, and the English called him William the bastard because they didn't like being conquered. The Norman invasion fucked England up, and it also fucked up everything because everyone ever since has like both good and bad people talk about the Norman invasion. There's a lot of Anglo Saxon purity people who are not good people, even though theoretically they are the anti colonial side of this particular equation. Although the Saxons had also just conquered it.

These islands got conquered a lot.

I couldn't know anything about that in my surname personally.

Oh, I don't know what the reference is.

I am Armenian. We are the crossroads of constantly being conquered.

Oh, not Kassabian specifically, but being Armenian.

Yeah.

If people want to know more about Armenian history and our podcast, they can check out our four parter or maybe six part are on Operation Nemesis. When the people who survived the Armenian Genocide went and hunted down all of the people who did the Armenian genocide.

Some of my favorite dudes to ever exist.

Yeah, they were fucking cool. I love a like when your defense in court is fuck that guy. The fuck that guy defense is the strongest defense, and we've only had a couple of them on the show. I think there's been three. Fuck that guy defense. One Russian revolutionary in the nineteenth century, woman won someone from Ukraine, Ukrainian Jewish anarchists who went and killed the Ukrainian nationalists who genocided or led all the programs that killed the man's family, and then Operation Nemesis. I can't remember the name of the guy, but one of the Armenians who went to Germany, Sogamon tet Lerian. Yeah, there is an absolutely sick statue of him in Armenia for anybody that wants an excuse to go there, of him standing there holding his pistol,

standing on tallat Pasha's head. I have multiple pictures in front of it. It is a good time. Yeah, amazing. See, this is why history is interesting. It's actually full of all of the best stories in the world because it's full of all of the stories in the world. Yep, So the Normans. When the Normans invaded England, it started England down the track towards becoming the reoccurring villain of the Pod. The enclosure of the Commons. Basically centuries before England could go around fucking up the rest of the world.

They had to fuck up their own people first, which they did by taking all of the lands that were held in common the commons and saying, never mind someone owns this. You can't hunt in these woods, you can't graze your sheep in these fields, or all the ways of life you've been doing for millennia. And I remember, I actually don't remember the name of this woman off the top of my head. Unfortunately, someone won the Nobel Prize in Science for proving that the tragedy of the Commons was a bullshit idea, this idea that if you hold things in common, they just get destroyed. Science says very clearly otherwise. And it's always been really funny to me too, Right with like the enclosure of the original comments,

you're like, ah, well, if the peasants had it, they would destroy it all. And you're like, but that's the way it's been for thousands of years and everything's still here.

Yeah, exactly, pretty sure if they were going to destroy it, they would have done it by now. Yeah.

Yeah, they've been there for a while. And also, you know, certainly what destroyed Ireland's trees was not the enclosure of the Commons.

But the English, Yeah, they have a tendency of doing that where they go.

It seems to be their thing. Yeah, I would argue it's possible that the enclosure of the English Commons was the worst single thing that happened in the history of the world, because it is the idea that the British eventually exported everywhere else. Was this idea of you take all the common stuff and now it is owned by one rich guy the poor. Before they could steal all Robin Hood's style steal from the rich, the rich had to have stolen from the poor by enclosing all of the land. And Sherwood is one of the first places that that enclosure happened. I don't know if it was specifically framed as the enclosure of the Commons, but that's what happened. The Norman Kings wanted Sherwood Forest like it

was about one hundred thousand acres. They needed one hundred thousand acres to be their own private hunting lands. But if you want private hunting lands, do we still have a sponsor for private hunting of things that would be illegal to hunt otherwise, Sophie, I'm not sure. Let's say yes, yeah, probably you should listen carefully to all of these goods and services because one of them might be your own private royal forest. And we're back. So the Norman Kings, they were like, we want one hundred thousand acres private hunting lands, just like more than I could imagine whenever I'm reading about shit way back in the past when people were like, ah and then the poor person got forty acres, and I'm like, all right.

Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me right now. But they're like, yeah, I get one hundred thousand for me personally, Like well, fuck.

Yeah, totally. That's why no one else can have their five or whatever you know, or quarter whatever. Anyway, I live early most of the time, so I would settle for a yard at this point totally. Oh yeah, you're a you're in Europe. Yeah, not a lot of wild land in western Europe.

I don't even have a balcony.

So I was calling it county forest forest because I think that's funny, but they're there. Actually was a legal distinction between a woodland and a forest, so sherwood forest does mean something different than sherwood wood. A woodland wasn't just untouched wilderness. It was tended and managed by generations of people to be productive. A forest was basically an enclosed woodland plus the fields, villages, towns, abbeys. And there's even a palace in Sherwood forest because that's where the king goes to go hunt, and they have strict rules about what you can do there. You can do even less there than you can do in the rest of the country. Only the king or those he grants permission to are allowed to hunt beasts of the chase, which

means deer and bore. I think in eleven hundred the laws included prohibitions on clearing land, cutting firewood, burning fields, hunting, carrying bows or spears, or grazing livestock, and these laws and the forest were overseen by a keeper appointed by the king. The position of Sherwood Keeper was an hereditary title, and the keeper hired foresters and adjusters. Foresters police the forest, riding around on horses, making sure no one was killing any boors that they didn't want them to kill. Can't eat that wild food.

Got to make sure nobody's hunting the King's most dangerous game.

Yeah, it's so such a fantasy trope. I wonder how many actual kings I know more about fantasy than I do about actual history of nobility. I wonder how many kings met their end to a boar. Yep, it's a lot.

It's got to be more than zero.

Yeah, adjusters a word I had never heard before. Collected tax and made people pay rent. Hundreds of people lived in the forest. There's like whole villages and stuff there. Right before they were like, and we just now, this is the forest. It's its own thing. You can keep living here. You just can't do any of the stuff that you need to live here. And they made sure that people weren't grazing their animals too much. And if you are caught poaching a deer or a boar for the first hundred years or so, they blind you and castrate you.

Oh that's a bit steep. I know.

What's funny is the thing I read was like, they would blind you and castrate you. And then the next sentence was like, and then they stop the hangings. And I'm like, so they would blind you, castraight you, and sometimes hang you. Is that what I'm hearing? But then peasants got those rights, those pesky rights with the magna Carta in twelve fifteen, and so after that they were like, all right, fine, we're just gonna find you which raises money for the crown, and you'd barely have any money.

So it's still not so great in the Magna Karta and the Forest Charter that came two years later actually a big demand for the people. I love how much old timy politics don't map to modern left to right politics, right because you're like, stop making all the land public and let us graze our animals there. That's a modern right wing talking point in North America, right.

Right, especially like the sage brush Wars and all that other stuff.

Yeah, but when we're talking about the enclosure of the commons, the forest is the enclosure. So they're like, please stop making this be legally forest land. And they managed to get the size of the forest taken down in size. It doesn't get rid of the trees, it just gets rid of the legal distinction around the forest. Some of the oldest trees on the island are there in that forest.

But just last month, in June twenty twenty six, the oldest tree in the forest died. Its name was major Oak. It was about one thousand years old. It was between eight hundred and twelve hundred years old, and it was legendary as the place that Robin Hood slept was under this oak. And you want to guess what killed it?

Men, It's got to be people in some way, right.

It's the same reason that we have to destroy Canada. It's not actually Canada's not particularly to blame for climate change. Climate change. Oh yeah, climate change. Well we don't know, Oh that Canada doesn't have shooters in those woods. England has been cut through by heat wave after heat wave these past few years. You all just had some gnarly ones.

Oh it was terrible and we did our last live show in London smack dab in the middle of a heat wave and it was not.

Fun with or without air conditioning.

Oh without, of course, yeah, y.

Horrific. I understand. I've been to England a couple of times. I understand why they don't think they need air conditioning. Like in any logical world, what they need is an artificial sun so that they have a sun.

Yeah, it's similar to living in the Netherlands, like we need a big fake like glow lamp, like an iguana. But now we have it and our houses are not built for that, so it's like everything is an oven all time.

Yeah, God, Yeah. When I was in Netherlands, it was not hot. That is one of my primary memories of the Netherlands. When people complained about it being hot. It was not hot. A lot of really nice evenings biking around in the snow. And major Oak was destroyed by climate change and tourism, the one two punch. Basically, the heat waves destroyed it, but the fame didn't help. In order to keep it looking majestic, they all put supports up under it to hold the branches up. So there's like all these like metal supports holding up the branches, which meant that the oak kept those branches alive instead of doing what it naturally does, which is let the branches that can't support fall off. And so it wasn't

able to shrink down to take care of itself like old trees do, and trees in crisis will do, is they'll like retreat back to the oak where I live. We had this horrible drought a couple years ago last year Jesus Christ don't even remember, and most of the oaks on the property died, but a lot of them kind of came back the next year by like sprouting little tiny branches just like right out of the trunk.

You know, Yeah, it makes sense. I wasn't able to do that, so it died. That's Robin Hood's tent died because of our arrogance. But in ye OLDI sorty times, the big Highway comparatively big that led from London to York ran right through Sherwood Forest, which meant it was a particularly good place to rob people, so outlaws went there.

Respect Yeah, I've always wondered like as soon as GPS has started routing people their neighborhoods that like weren't used to having people come through it. I was like, I like, wouldn't even be mad if someone set up a roadblockade at this point to started asking people to pay a toll.

I lived in a neighborhood that you know, wasn't the worst around where I lived, but it was not a place you wanted to get lost in at night. Is where I kind of grew up. Yeah, and as technology kind of seeped in everybody's life, you definitely got a lot of really strange people ending up there that you know, did not mean to end up there. Yeah, and I didn't rob anybody, but I did ask like, are you lost?

Yeah. Well, later we're going to talk about some of the very polite ways that Robin Hood robed people. But Norman England was a shockingly social controlled space. We've covered before on the show if you go back and listen to it. I don't remember what we called. It might have been called Anglo Saxon democracy, but I probably tried avoiding putting Anglo Saxon the title because that's a contentious series of words. Before on this show that there was an odd democracy that was common in post Roman pre Norman England, not because there wasn't a monarchy, but because the monarchy wasn't particularly capable of expressing power outside of the core areas, and so people practice traditional democratic structures

and that started to wither by the end of the millennia as the crown got better at controlling people. Well before the Norman conquest, but once the Normans were there. Do you ever heard of the Frank Pledge.

I haven't.

Yeah, I had neither, and I have read a lot of Eyeoldie sword Time books that are basically based in England. On the other hand, famously, Eeoldie short time books like to just try and pretend like capitalism has always existed and everyone's like paying their taxes and coins instead of like eels or whatever.

You know.

Yeah, yeah, but the Frank Pledge sure wasn't in any of these books, because I don't think authors wanted their books to sound like nineteen eighty four. But if you ever do write a fantasy book at a eeoldie short times England, here you go. The frank pledge was a system of collective punishment. Every single man or boy over the age of twelve in Norman England was part of a tithing, a group of ten people, and if any member of that tithing was supposed to appear before court and didn't, the rest of the group was fined. This is particularly important for commoners because the wealthy would like basically put up their lands as bond to say like, yeah, up here in court, you can stay my land if I don't, the commoners don't have any land, so instead

it's yeah, I'll show up in court or otherwise you're gonna like basically rob everyone.

I know. Yeah, that sounds about right for a lot of older civilizations where there's a kind of in this case, the court is employing it, but a kind of social shaming to keep everybody in line to some extent totally.

And there was a little bit of this happening prior to the Norman conquest, but it wasn't nearly as compulsory, and like I was a little bit more of just like yeah, non legislative social shaming. But they also put in the tithing. They put it in place to stop mergerum, which is my new favorite crime. Mergerm is the crime of ambushing colonizers in the woods and then killing them and leaving their body. We don't call that merger We call that a loot drop. Yeah, exactly, I care and all that stuff. What do you expect, there's some nice sandals, motherfucker.

I reread a Heinland book recently. I read a lot of Heinland when I was a kid, and there's a loot drop in this book from the fifties where they like go through a portal to go survive on an alien planet and one person is all the fanciest gear and as soon as they walk through, someone just kills them. It takes their fuckings stuff.

Oh that's good.

So Mrdram eventually became the word for killing someone in secret versus in public, because it was like you have to kind of solve a crime, like I guess at the time, most murderer was like two people are angry and one of them kills the other one, and lots of people are around. You know.

Yeah, plotting hadn't been invented yet. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, plotting and scheving.

Yeah, so many Normans were getting got in the forest that they had to create a special law and once again an even larger collective punishment, either every ten households or every ten tithings. I have read things that implied both, I am not certain. Was called a hundred and this is like the social unit that everyone was put into. Right, if a Norman was found dead in your one hundred, then the whole hundred owed a whole bunch of money, and you know, if you don't have any money, it's a bad thing.

Pretty sure.

There's debtors prison at this point.

Oh, for sure. The only thing that you're inventing through this is the science of how to dump a body somewhere else.

Yes, yeah, they're like, ah, that guy over in that other hundred was pissing me off, so I'm gonna go kill a Norman and leave him over there.

Yeah, I've come up with a new crime called accessory to mudroom.

Incidentally, tithing is not the root of the modern word tithing when you give money to a church. They just both come from the same route themselves one tenth. You're supposed to tithe one tenth of your income, and you are yourself one tenth of a tithing. Twice a year there was a torn, a mandatory inspection of all the tithings by the sheriff, and anyone who didn't show up owed the sheriff a penny for not showing up. So the sheriff started doing them more and more to trip people up and get money out of them. Of course, and torn doesn't come from torny or tournament, even though those were picking up it around the same time. Instead, tour comes from like doing one shift of your job, like one tour, one military tour. That's like the main

place we still use that word, right, Ah, okay, So it was easy to end up an outlaw, right. The sheriff is like, ah, there's a torn today, and you're like, fuck, I'm in the field. I didn't even know about it. And you're like I don't have a penny, and you're like, oh, I don't want to go to prison. I'm just gonna start living in the woods and shooting these deer, Like that seems nicer.

I would have shown up for your tour, but I was way too busy.

Steal of that guy's coat, Yeah, I didn't know you were coming, which was probably not a crime. He probably allowed to steal, right, I it's not merger them.

Yeah, I didn't kill him for his coat. I simply threatened with killing him to get.

His kills A totally different thing.

Loophole Bab's right.

So it's easy to end up an outlaw, and Sherwood Forest outlaws went hard. In twelve sixty seven, two men were caught with bows and arrows and were arrested. So again, like, I think most of the work of being an outlaw wasn't robbing people. I think most of the work of being an outlaw was like poaching and just trying to fucking survive in the woods, you know. So they were arrested.

Two men were arrested for traveling around armed. That night, twenty of their friends showed up armed to the teeth with bows and swords, they like stormed the jail, set the men free beat the guards. The guards were literally just the local lord's servants, and so they didn't kill them. They just beat the shit out of them. And then they went to the steward, the local guy, the guy who'd arrested their friend, and they broke out all the windows in his house and then taunted him from the woods.

Oh these dudes rock, I know, I.

Know, And there was a big investigation, but most of them got away. The number of outlaws from this period who simply evaded capture their entire lives is like shockingly high. I keep reading about stuff now. Whenever I read about like a jail break, it's like almost every single person who breaks out of jail in the modern world is caught.

It's depressingly high. But do you know what's not depressingly high? Do you know what's amazing and low? The prices on the goods and services that are actually probably not discounted at all. They're probably actually a regular price. But they're the ones who support the show and we're back. History knows the name of at least one of these Sherwood Forest outlaws, a guy named Roger god Burg, He's probably not Robin Hood, but like, I don't know, he could be. Yeah, of the people we know about, I have some other ones that I'm like, I feel a little more likely, but he certainly could be. England was just like full of civil wars. They just like kept having various revolts.

I kind of understood why peasants were, like, there's like peasants wars when they would uprise, But usually it's just like barons being like, I don't actually really want you to have all the power. I want to have all the power, you know. Yeah, And so Roger had sided with the barons in the Second Baron's War, which is a war in the thirteenth century when a bunch of barons were like, why doesn't the king have us on his council? We should make that happen, And they had a war about it and the barons lost. Roger Godberg fought on the losing side, so we wound up an outlaw because he was like, I don't really want to get arrested for that, And he and his men likely went around robbing and killing people before they were tracked

down and he was either pardoned or died in jail, depending on your ancient and untrustworthy sources, and there's a bunch of outlaw gangs the people that I feel like a little bit more likely there's a bunch of outlaw gangs flourishing in the early fourteenth century, like the thirteen twenties or so in the English country side. You know how the golden age of piracy was like fifteen years long or whatever. It was like just like this one little brief moment where it made a lot of sense to become a pirate in the Caribbean.

Yeah, and there's a big enough gap in power where you could hypothetically get away.

Yeah, Like it didn't just seem like a death sentence. It was a kind of a death sence, but like a little bit more fond of a death sentence than other things. You know. I feel like there was kind of that moment in early fourteenth century English countryside where all of these gangs are roving around, these outlaw gangs and kind of similarly just sort of living outside the law but actually being like pretty well respected by the people around them. There's all this constant war going on between the monarchs and their barons, and so you have this fairly non power structure place right, and so these bandits they ended up dispensing justice that was otherwise wanting, like kidnapping and ransoming corrupt nights.

Hell yeah, yeah, So they were just.

Like kind of being like, oh, those powerful people are fucking with you. We're gonna fuck them up. They often themselves were pardoned when they were caught, like that's how much the people around them liked them.

It's because the sheriff to learned last upblic Well, if we just arrest them, they're gonna come over, they're gonna beat the shit out of me. They're gonna break out my window, and then they're gonna make fun of me from the woods about how much they beat the shit in me and broke my windows.

Exactly, guys, don't rub it in. Do you know how expensive glass is. It's the thirteenth century. I didn't even think about that when I realized they broke those windows. I don't even know when they started moving to glass.

That's a much bigger like fuck you than anything else they could have done. I don't even know what the modern equivalent of that would be, because if you just like burn someone's Bentley or whatever, they could just go buy a new one.

Yeah, windows hard to come by, I don't remember. I know, you go back far enough and poor enough people have like scraped hide as their windows, you know, just a's like thin and let's in a little bit of light. But so two of these gangs, the Coderal Gang and the Fullville Gang, named after families that were doing it.

Families that rob together stay together, And the Fullville Gang is the main one that I read about. They regularly cooperated with each other, these various gangs. They formed a sort of interesting counterpower. Low level administrators of the church and state seem to support them, the people absolutely supported them and hid them all the time, and the upper levels fucking despised them. And the Fullville Gang was often at war with the Sheriff of Nottingham. So they're my pick, Margaret's most likely to be Robin Hood pick. It's the Fullville Gang, except for the fact that none of them were named Robinhood. But I honestly don't care about that.

I have a feeling that you're incentivized to not use your legal name when you rob people for a living.

It's probably a good idea, especially in an era where you just were who you said you.

Were yeah, totally checked my ID.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my name is Steve. Proved me wrong.

I have like some like he gets sent from the future with IDs. The Kings would have loved that. They yeah, they know exactly what tithing you're in. That's the future shit. The current British government would love that. They've been trying to get IDs out there for fucking years. They're gonna be fucking They're bringing back tithings. That's my nightmarish prediction.

Most of the names I found for these outlaws were men, but not all of them. Alice Fulville, Like, I read about eight names of specific outlaws at this time, and one of them was Alice. So working on that set of information, I can tell you for certain that one in eight of them were women. I can't tell you that for certain, but I can tell you that all throughout history, especially when you leave like the like civilized world, I get to air quotes whenever there's a role that is supposed to be men, women do it too, just not as much, you know.

Yeah, of course, and then they, you know, slowly over time get written out of history unless it's advantageous for someone to be like hey.

Look, yeah, no, like I'm like, hey, I found a woman outlaw from this golden age of outlaws that no no one can There might be papers about it. I didn't find them. I read enough papers this week. Most of the research I read is academic papers and like things in Middle English. But anyway could have been more.

It's not a not an all men thing. Most everything written about these outlaws was written by people who could write, so it was critical of them to say the least these outlaws do foul deeds. They are evil according to the writing. But the peasants weren't doing the writing, and so basically everyone is saying, oh, these evil bandits are doing evil? Why do people keep being nice to them?

I don't understand, you know. The historian ELG. Stones, writing in the nineteen fifties, describe the way that authorities at the time describe the Fulville Gang and the whole moral panic that the rich were trying to drum up around these people. Quote, disturbers of the peace are said to gather daily to do evil. They ride in force by day and night, taking and robbing people at their will, imprisoning some of them until they have made grievous ransoms.

They form congregations and wander in the woods and other public and private places, ambushing wayfarers, whom they rob and sometimes slay. In all these things, they are aided and embedded by local people who incite them to their evil deeds and shield them after they are done. So that's not the history and saying that's what they did. That's a historian saying that's what the contemporary authorities said about them at the time. And I think it's telling that.

It's like, it's like they rob people and they took them ransom. You're not taking commoner's ransom.

No, what are you going to get like a handful of dirt in exchange? And why do you think normal ass people are hiding them knowing the punishment that they're going to get.

Right, So I think there's some class stuff that's not This is why I'm like, this is fucking robinhood. Like they also probably did evil shit, for sure, I'm not sure to be like, there's no moral army that hasn't committed war crimes. There's no group of bandit outlaws writ large that isn't also like doing horrible shit, you.

Know, Yeah, I mean their outlaws for every cool thing they do like helping their community with whatever ransom they get for a night. They're definitely killing someone over the Sherwood Forest version of like Jordan's like they're doing petty murderers shit on top of the cool stuff.

Yeah, Like there's probably not a really high value of life when you're a fucking yeoman living as an outlaw in Sherwood Forest in thirteen twenty four.

Yeah, knowing if you get caught, you're gonna die really really bad life.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I didn't even include this in this episode. Whenever I end up doing like ee all these short times in England, I'm like, and then here's another horrible way they invented to murder the people that they caught, which is the other thing is like outlaws like cut people's heads off. The state draws and quarters people.

Yeah, they burn your entrails in front of your eyes. Like in comparison, they're merciful, like exactly.

Like it's like funny because I I which I assumed came out of like, well, we tried killing them to make it stop, but they're not afraid of death. What's worse than death? All Right, we gotta come up with new bad shit, like what if that's just not a good system, Like what that's not a way to compel people to behave properly. By the time you're fucking literally ripping them apart with horses, Like I don't think you're on the good side anymore.

Perhaps state violence has never been a good way to exact justice.

Who can say, interesting argument that would collapse everything we understand about society. It is in this general atmosphere that the first stories of robin Hood arise. We actually don't know for certain what these stories were, because they're an oral tradition, and historians and pop historians like me regularly lament that we only tend to know about the upper classes because the poor people weren't writing. We do know, though, that eventually the tales of Robinhood become so ubiquitous that they do show up in writing. So robin Hood there's no historical figure that we can point to and say that is robin Hood, not that we know of. Robinhood is and likely has always been a legend, a folk here,

a character like honestly, I was talking to my friend about this. Miriam is often a guess on the show I Love You, Miriam Miriam is great. Miriam was like, oh, a superhero, like it's a Marvel character, you know. Yeah, yeah, because this is just a character that everyone includes in everything. But there's one important distinction. For now, at least, people understand that superheroes aren't real. If you're listening one hundred years from now, you'll be like whoa. People. Anyway, Importantly, people believed Robin Hood was real, that he was a character, but he was a real person that they were telling like fictional stories about. That's kind of what most ballads were.

And it's possible that one of these old timey bandits was named Robinhood. We don't know. Most guests actually put him about one hundred years before the like thirteen twenties people, and because of basically because of how much the legends had grown, right, they were like, oh, it couldn't have grown that fast, so it must be even before then, which I think is neat because it means is a decent chance that the romantic outlaws of the thirteen twenties were themselves inspired by Robinhood's stories. And it's also possible that they went by the name Robin Hood in order to evoke those stories.

Yeah, it makes sense. When you form a kind of community, legend, mythos or whatever, it inspires a sense of justice and good can be done in one community and inspires fear and other We still do this in the modern era, oh totally for I mean nowadays you know, propaganda purposes or whatever. But we've seen that happen during the opening stages of the war in Ukraine. We've seen this happen during the troubles in Northern Ireland during the Iraq War, where these folk characters get built and most of the time either a they didn't exist at all, or it's a group of people that have taken up the mantle to scare people and inspire others.

Yeah, what was the Ukraine one?

It was that lone fighter jets. Oh that's right, Yeah, that shot down an infinity number of jets or whatever. Yeah, inspired confidence and in a really dark time. You know. The Belfast Sniper is another good example during the troubles where like you know, they put signs up and you know there was a sniper in Belfast, but it was certainly a cell of people operating, and in Iraq there was Juba the sniper Hut videos. There's definitely a group of dudes.

Snipers are usually this person, right, because you have Lady Death in World War Two, like.

Yeah, Ludmiya Pavlachenko. Because snipers are this like adventurous loan character stalking their target, like there's a purpose behind them that there isn't with like a normal soldier.

Oh, which is interesting because Robinhood is a tale of archery, right.

Yeah, it's pretty much sniper right.

Yeah.

No, like guns hadn't been invented yet, dudes still gotta get shot in ahead with something.

No, totally, huh. We're actual gonna a whole thing on Wednesday about archery and robin Hood because I spend way too much of my time learning the class and social implications of various medieval weapons. Because I have a normal set of interests.

I empathize.

Yeah, I thought you might. I was like, oh, what am I going to do with Jocosavian on the Guest And I was like, Oh, this is what I'm finally going to do this one. And the oldest writing we have about Robin Hood isn't about him as a person, but about the popularity of his myth, which is to say, he is always from the very start represented a sort of populist counterpower to the state and church. So he's like always been this myth. The oldest writing we have about him is from the classic of Middle English long non rhyming poem aka story We'll actually it supposed to be called him, a literative poem called Pier's Plowman, which was published in thirteen seventy seven, probably by a guy named William Langland. Pier's Plowman is the story of a plowman,

a commoner. I haven't read this thing yet, I read a lot of excerpts of it. In the story, this commoner Pierce Plowman is teaching lessons to a night on the finer points of how to live a virtuous life, like because the night hasn't gotten it, but the peasant does right. How to be a good Christian, how to be brave in the face of temptation, and be responsible to both yourself and to others, and be humble no matter who you encounter, but also how to avoid those dastardly sins like covetousness, sloth and hunger. Hunger. I bet I meant to write anger, that seems I don't know what I meant to write there. I think you had hunger.

I don't know if hunger is a sin. I'm sitting right.

Yeah, No, I got no idea what was supposed to be there in my script? Sorry everyone, And I have a feeling I'll come back to this poem and partly to figure out what the fuck I got wrong. But I want to do and actually maybe I'll just listen to your episodes first. I want to do it a series, an epic, long series about all the peasant uprisings all across Europe, because they are fascinating and this story, one of the oldest pieces of English literature, led to one of the largest class rebellions in English history only four years later, the Peasant Revolt of thirteen eighty one, which hell, which customer volts y'all go for?

That was the one.

Yeah, all right, you know way more about it than me. Here's what I got, but you can correct me on things. So the actual inciting incident was a poll tax. England keeps trying this shit. The last poll tax riot i've read about England was a nineteen ninety A lot of like punks were at it, and I think I covered it in the harm Reduction in Canada episode, because everything is connected in this strange world we live in. The king was like, everybody not in nineteen ninety, but eeoldie times.

Nineteen ninety is ee oldie times for some of you. But the King was like, everybody give me a shilling. I don't care how poor you are, rich or poor. Everyone give me a shilling, which is funny because modern right wing interpretations of Robinhood are like, and he was taxing everyone horribly, even the rich people, you know, Oh no, yeah, because it's like Robinhood's mad about taxes, and in the modern world being mad about taxes is like kind of a right wing rich person coded thing, but it's actually just different in different times, and so the way people interpret Robinhood will tell you a lot about their politics.

But the king actual king was like, everybody has to give me a shilling. I don't care how rich poor you are. Obviously this impacts poor people more than impacts rich people, and peasants were like, what if instead of giving you a shilling, we stormed London and demanded that you end serfdom. To quote Catherine Walton writing for Medievalist dot net quote, the revolters wanted an end to the poll tax, an end to serfdom, and the end to various other governmental injustices that made the lives of those in the lower classes difficult. They also wanted lordship to be divided amongst all men, there to be only one bishop, and the wealth of the church be spread to the populace.

And the king honestly pulled off some masterful politick. And he is fourteen years old. Richard the second he rides out and he's like, oh, yeah, I'm totally gonna listen to you. I'm the king. Everyone knows kings are like populous and other people's people in mind, you know. And people are like, great, we want all this stuff. And Richard the second he's like, all right, don't worry, I got you. None of you are going to be punished for this. We're totally going to meet all your demands.

Just head on home. We got it from here. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. We're all in it together. I am putting words in his mouth. People probably realize that, but that was the idea of it. And you will be shocked to know. Not you, because you know the story. Everyone else will be shocked to know the king kept none of those promises.

He sure didn't.

Yeah, sure executed a lot of them. He never tried to pull tax again though. That's the one thing you can say scared him out of that one particular thing.

Yeah. It was a very interesting story where like the taxes back then were pretty much at random, They had no set schedule. There was wars and stuff going on, so it's like, oh, well we need another tax for the army. Well we need another tax for the army. Yeah, well we need another tax for the army. So people are like, you know what, we're fucking dune. Yeah.

Yeah. Every time, like Trump wants a new fighter jet, he just is like, everyone gave me ten bucks.

Fuck you? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Yeah. The rebellion almost worked. It was spurred by populism, and it failed by populism because it failed by trusting the king and king so for whatever odd reason, usually trusted unlike the nobility and the wealthy, and a huge part of what spurred it. One of the leaders, John Ball, wrote a letter about how this book Pierce Plowman, was, how he justified his positions, how he used to explain them.

Because Pierce Powman was used as an allegory to mock the wealth of the and say peasants are fucking great. The poor are the only people who really know how to be good Christians, which, again we're gonna get into our weird right left thing that I kind of appreciate about the past. Work hard, don't ask for too much.

That's how you be a good Christian. After the revolt, the guy who wrote Plowman rot another version that toned it all down, basically to be like, oh, that wasn't me. I didn't do that. Don't execute me.

Please, please don't stab me in the face.

Yeah. I feel like that's the part that makes me saddest. I would like to think that if my book spurred on a popular revolt, I would just be like, man, even if it kills me, that kind of goes hard. That's cool.

Yeah, my sales are gonna do so well once the state kills me.

I used to think about if I got stuck doing grand jury resistance, where you refuse to testify about the social movements that you're part of. It's not a crime to refuse to testify in front of a grand jury, but they can still put you in jail for it. To try and compel You can't be punitive, but they can compel you, right, they can try to force you, they just can't punish you. And I like have always kind of had in the back of my mind being like, you can do it, but it's gonna help my book sales.

Yeah, yeah, you're not wrong.

Not because I would want to go to jail. I'd rather have fewer book sales in less jail time, but just as a way to you know, but if you are gonna.

Put me in jail anyway, like right, why okay, Like this is fine. I mean, eventually you have to let me go and I'll be able to benefit from this.

But I'd also rather not be right, the clips of this show are what we're going to use for our jail support. After your books and my books cause people to revolt, well maybe they'll just succeed.

Yeah, then we'll be fine. Yeah.

Actually, yeah, you just got to make sure you write really good strategy into your books. That's the thing about writing military sci fi.

I may have done that all right, including in depth hit and run tactics in my newest fantasy book, Excellent. So you know, Dutch government, if you're listening, it is it is about. It is not the Netherlands. It has wizards and shit.

They all live on the Olmstall. I was trying to come up with some canal. That's the only one I can remember.

Don't worry, dear immigration services. This is all put in the fantasy caucuses, and we know that's a part of the world you do not care about.

Certainly true. So anyway, I found that that story, Pierre's plowmen and peasant role. It's a complete aside. We haven't even talked about what he has to do with robin Hood. But I found it fascinating because fiction has always been powerful, and storytelling shapes our world, which means myths like Robin Hood also shape our world. And the other lesson from that revolt is, don't listen to your leaders when they tell you they're totally going to meet all your demands.

If you just disarm and go.

Home, everybody, if you just stop burning down the city. I happen to be hiding out in in the Tower of London, and let me live. I'll totally not seek revenge. Yes, now I'll appreciate your mercy. It'll be great. Everything's gonna be great. But that is the story. Well, the thirteen seventy seven story is the first one to talk about robin Hood. How it talks about robin Hood. We're gonna talk about it on Wednesday, But first, what is the name of your hit and Run guide, I mean, your fantasy novel.

It is called The Highlands Burn. It's available wherever place you get a book. It's also available from our website in case you want to buy it from us directly. It includes ebooks, audiobooks if you're not sick of my voice because I read it, and paperbacks. I also host a military history podcast called The Lines Led by Donkeys.

Check it out. If you do, check it out and enjoy it. We happen to be doing a live show on September twenty sixth in Cork, Ireland, and tickets are on sale now.

Ah awesome. Okay, I've been thinking about the name of your podcast, Lions led by Donkeys. But what do you think though, now that America is now lyon led by lions. It's led by a real war fighter who's so god fucking pete Hegseth, who's going to start mandatory testosterone testing. Yeah, the dude's absolutely hilarious and the darkest way possible because I was in the military for a while.

Fucking horrible decision. Nobody should do that. And I've met a thousand pete heg seths.

Yeah, they're just not in charge of countries.

Yeah. You know, he wasn't supposed to be either, he was just supposed to be some Fox News dipshit. But that gets you a cabinet position. Now, Yeah, it's great. Everything's great anyway, everything's going great. The last cabinet of the Netherlands certainly didn't have a former storm Front poster in it.

Oh my god. I was like when remember, Like I like, ah, Europe, that's where everyone's lefty, and I'm like, no, that's where there's a left It's different, Like Europe is going right wing just as fast as the US. Just yeah, the opposition has like slightly nicer points. That's the only thing it has going.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean things are dark.

Yeah, but there's always in a fantasy land Robbin from the rich to give to the poor, which we'll talk about on Wednesday with Robinhood. Cool People Who.

Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website. Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out on IR radio, appp A podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Part One: Robin Hood and the Legacy of Outlaws in Medieval England

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