Volk Hero: Robin Hood

It is from this hero I take the last name “Hood”. We are all of us outlaws in waiting…

Once upon a time the great mass of English people were unfree. They could not live where they chose, nor work for whom they pleased. Society in those feudal days was mainly divided into lords and peasants. The lords held the land from the king, and the peasants or villeins were looked upon as part of the soil, and had to cultivate it to support themselves and their masters. If John or Dick, thrall of a manor, did not like the way in which the lord of his steward treated him, he could not go to some other part of the country and get work under a kinder owner. If he tried to do this he was looked upon as a criminal, to be brought back and punished with a whip or the branding iron, or cast into prison.

When the harvest was plenteous and his master was kind or careless, I do not think the peasant felt his serfdom to be so unbearable as at other times. When, however, hunger stalked the land, and the villain and his family starved; or when the lord was of a stern or exacting nature and the serf was called upon to do excessive labor, or was harshly treated, then, I think the old Teutonic or Welsh blood in the English peasant grew hot, and he longed for freedom…

A poor man, yeoman or peasant, found slaying one of the royal beast of the forest was cruelly maimed as a punishment. Or if he was not caught, he ran and hid deep in the forest and became an outlaw, a ‘wolf’s head’ as the term was, and then anyone might slay him that could.

It was in such conditions that Robin hood lived and did deeds of daring such as we read of in the ballads and traditions which have come down to us. Because his name is not to be found in the crabbed records of lawyers and such men, some have doubted whether Robin Hood ever really existed. But I am sure the Robin was once very much alive. It may be that the unknown poets who made the ballads idealized him a little, that is, they described him being more daring, more successful, more of a hero, perhaps, than he really was; but that is what poets and writers are always expected to do.

Just as King Arthur was the hero of the knightly classes of England in feudal times, so Robin hood was the hero or popular figure among men of the poorer sort…It was sweet therefore, in hours of leisure, to hear songs about the bold outlaw Robin Hood, who once had been bound in set laws as they, but who had fled to the freedom of the forest, where, with cool daring and thrilling effrontery, he laughed to scorn the harsh forest laws of the king, and waged war upon all those rich lords and proud prelates who were the enemies of the humble FOLK!

-Henry Gilbert from the book for children, “Robin Hood”