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A.
J. Pollard.
Imagining Robin Hood:
The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context.
London: Routledge, October 2004.
288pp.
Hardback.
ISBN 0415223083.
Publisher's
recommended price £15.99
Everyone
knows the story of Robin Hood. But do they?
Robin Hood was the first comic strip hero. The earliest stories
about him wove ripping yarns, tales of derring do and comic japes
around a cast of familiar stock characters: Robin, Little John, the
sheriff of Nottingham, the King.
A. J. Pollard takes us back to the fifteenth-century 'rymes' that
formed this popular literature. He examines their deeper
meaning. What is the significance of a set of tales which makes
heroes of a band of vicious criminals preying on travellers (mainly
monks) and poaching deer (the king's), led by an outlawed forester, and
being endlessly hunted by an inept law enforcer?
The outlaw as imagined in the late-medieval stories was a people's
hero. By the fifteenth century Robin Hood was all things to all men,
with an appeal across all social classes. By setting the stories in
their social context, A. J. Pollard both illuminates the ways in which
late-medieval society shaped the stories and throws new light on what
Robin Hood meant to contemporaries. He shows how the original
Robin Hood represented a deep-rooted English cynicism about people in
power and a long-standing popular distrust of the commitment of any
government to making the world a better place.
Contents: Preface and acknowledgements. Illustrations.
Abbreviations. 1. Texts and context 2. Yeomanry 3. A
greenwood far away 4. Crime, violence and the law 5.
Religion and the religious 6. Fellowship and Fraternity 7.
Authority and the social order 8. History and memory 9. Farewell
to merry England.
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