As in so many other areas, Romantic writers injected new vigor into the phenomenon of Robin Hood. The ballad material itself became widely available in Joseph Ritson’s anthology of 1795. Juxtaposing the yeoman and the lord, he reprinted almost all the early ballads, missing only “Robin Hood and the Monk,” but prefaced them with a full “Life” in which he espoused Lord Robin as the real man, though the earl hardly appeared in the edition itself.
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), his first England-based novel, has a similar double use for the tradition. Known mostly as Locksley (named for a village first given as his origin in the Sloane Life), Robin is tough, illiterate, a formidable bowman, and leader of forest outlaws. He helps King Richard, reveals his own rustic authority, then fades from the story. Scott gives him two indelible elements: Robin is for the first time a Saxon, a serious enemy to the French lords—a potent motif just four years after the battle of Waterloo and the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. Then, when he performs the impossible feat of splitting a Frenchman’s arrow into slivers, English chauvinism and phallic triumphalism are condensed. Both features have become central to the modern icon. Scott also knew the gentrified story. His conservatism presumably prevented him from making the outlaw a lord, but he still acknowledges that part of the tradition: the lands of the noble Saxon crusader Ivanhoe have been stolen by bad Prince John and his Norman friends, and King Richard will restore him.
If Scott in this inventive way juxtaposed the two major Robin Hood strands that Ritson had transmitted, Thomas Love Peacock had the technical brilliance to interweave them, working in parallel to Scott. He wrote most of Maid Marian before Ivanhoe was published, and he provided the final chapters for publication in 1822. Here emerges the modern Robin Hood: an earl who resists John and loves Marian, he is also the hero of many a fight, jape, and song, and he consciously flouts the punitive forest laws, which in the recent period of enclosures had become a major issue in British consciousness. Peacock himself lived near Windsor Forest, which was being forcefully enclosed by the royal family. In 1814, there was strong resistance by local landowners and peasants acting together, and in “The Last Days of Windsor Forest,” Peacock later reminisced about meeting a man calling himself “Little John” who was looking for the leader of the anti-royal forces, a farmer known as “Robin Hood.”
The strongly independent, nature-linked voice of the common people appealed to the more liberal Romantics. John Keats produced his casually brilliant “Robin Hood: To a Friend” (1818) in response to sonnets on the same theme by John Hamilton Reynolds. Between them they generate a nature-related, anti-urban, morally authentic hero; the radical Leigh Hunt, who had just spent two years in prison for mocking the prince regent, developed this theme in a more overtly political way in a series of ballads.
These stimuli gave rise to a number of novels, much longer and far less elegant than Peacock’s. Some authors, like G. P.R. James and Thomas Miller, linked Robin with the liberal fantasy that Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, had in the mid-thirteenth century founded an early version of parliament. Others developed ludicrous plots involving exotic villains (Pierce Egan has one called Casper Steinkopft), orientalism (Joachim Stocqueler has Robin return from Crusade with a bellydancer), and sheer fantasy (George Emmett involves Robin with a wood demon).1 This last is called the “Young Englishman’s Edition,” and Robin Hood begins to play a part in the development of children’s literature.2
World History
