![]() ![]() And, perhaps, Maid Marian, described as a “ beard” by Meek, but even if not, seems to exist mostly as a plot device.įor Meek, the core story in the Robin Hood narrative is the moment when he ambushes the Sheriff’s coach in Sherwood:Ī column on horseback rides in wary silence between the trees. Fourth, the absent King Richard, who would (surely) sort everything out if only he were here. Third, Robin Hood, the dispossessed Earl of Locksley, now living as a bandit with the band of Merry Men in Sherwood Forest. Second, the people, oppressed, scraping by, with not enough money to pay the extra taxes. First, the Sheriff of Nottingham, the agent of the wicked King John, who has to collect taxes from the people to pay for John’s catastrophic wars. A feathered arrowĪt the heart of the Robin Hood story, there are four actors, or perhaps five. Indeed, the archetype of the bandit is so common that the historian Eric Hobsbawm was able to write, and re-write, a whole book exploring its meaning.īut at their heart, these bandit stories tell the same story: the bandit who is outside of the law because he fights oppressive authority and sides with the poor. A Woody Guthrie song celebrates the Depression-era outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd, known as the “Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills”. The idea of the noble robber also runs deep across many cultures, from Pancho Vila (not mentioned by Meek) to his recent counterpart, El Chapo, who turned himself in rather than have to spend more time talking to Sean Penn, to Jesse James in the US. ![]() #Taxation and the sherriff of nottingham series#He didn’t mention this, but by my count there have been something like 25 films and television series worldwide about Robin Hood in the past 25 years, each using the story malleably to their own ends. Robin Hood clearly passes this test it’s a story most people can tell, partly because it gets retold constantly. In this post I’ve improvised a little around his argument before adding some reflections of my own.Īs Meek observed, stories have a climb a high bar to make it as national myths: “any individual must be able to interrogate their own memory to assemble their own version of the myth.” Meek’s text has now been published by the paper, along with a recording of the lecture. Essentially, he argued that the underlying idea of Robin Hood, the apparently progressive notion that “he takes from the rich to give to the poor,” had been captured by pro-austerity politicians and rewritten as a story about the evils of tax. James Meek offered a different account of the Robin Hood story in his recent London Review of Books lecture at the British Museum. Published under a Creative Commons licence, CC BY 2.0 ![]()
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