Tea at Trianon: Robin Hood – The Man, The Myth, and The History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Robin Hood – The Man, The Myth, and The History

From Medievalists:

Perhaps the most readily identifiable trait of the literary Robin Hood is his status as an outlaw – spending his life in and out of the Royal Forest of Nottingham with his band of merry comrades as they preyed upon the wealthy and evaded their evil nemesis, the Sheriff. However, the image of medieval outlawry we get in the Robin Hood corpus is a decidedly saccharine one – the criminal exploits of Robin and his band are often colored with a sort of chivalry and a playful cheekiness, as if being an outlaw in late medieval England was something equivalent to a clever prankster who just so happened to “borrow from those who can afford it” from time to time.

The reality, as we will discuss, was far less rosy and the experience of the historical 14th century English outlaw was vastly more violent and cruel than the myths would have us believe. Also, this piece will look at how the depiction of Robin Hood both bears similarities and critical differences to the lives of the real outlaws from that period.

First, in order to better understand the outlaw, one must understand the legal system of which he had run afoul. The exercise of legal authority in medieval England was a decidedly interpersonal affair – far more so than the impersonal, bureaucratic systems we in the modern era are accustomed to. In post-Magna Carta England, all municipal judicial and law enforcement roles were almost entirely filled by members of the local minor gentry or the landed yeomanry, giving each shire and county their own unique flavor when it came to law and order. From the 12th to the 16th Centuries, the primary law enforcement official of medieval England was the Sheriff, appointed in the King’s name to exercise a wide variety of both judicial and law enforcement responsibilities for his local shire – all collectively classified as “keeping the King’s Peace.” Assisting him through most of the 14th and 15th centuries was a body of men known as the “trailbastons” – essentially a posse of officials that served as both a law enforcement body and a roving trial court that could hear both civil and criminal cases wherever they went. (Read more.)