49 pages • 1 hour read
Roger Lancelyn GreenThe Adventures of Robin Hood
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Creation of Outlaw Society
A prevailing theme within The Adventures of Robin Hood is the creation of an alternative society to offset Prince John’s reign of corruption. As the socio-historical context of this guide indicates, outlawry is a social consequence that voids the outlaw of any social connection or community and leaves the person in complete social ostracism. Green’s Robin Hood, however, manages to dismantle the social void that comes with outlawry and instead creates a counter-society to balance the oppressive regime ushered in by Prince John and his followers through sheer fame and social mimicry. The fact that Robin uses Sherwood Forest as his base of operations is not without meaning. As a setting, the forest is always on the outskirts of human society and is a lawless space despite being owned by the King and ruled by Forest Laws that would criminalize people who hunt the King’s deer. As these laws are irregularly applied, however, the story intimates that the forest is so separated from society that even royal authority has little sway. With no pre-existing society to set the rules and hierarchy, therefore, Sherwood Forest becomes the perfect domain for Robin and his men to settle and is made accessible only to people of whom Robin approves. As a rite of membership, Robin’s men must learn how to read the forest like him to know how to navigate its space, as Green intimates in the following passage: “For the last mile Robin led by narrow, winding paths, pointing out to his companions the secret, hidden signs by which they could find their way” (45). The author suggests that the society of merry men that Robin builds is an exclusive one, tied together by a firm trust that no one will divulge their secret location and thereby never compromise their safety. This trust is solidified, namely by the fact that being one of Robin’s men and living in Sherwood Forest allows the men (and Robin himself) to adopt a new identity, signaled by the fact that all of them are bestowed “a greenwood name” (70) usually given by Robin himself. Robert Fitzooth, therefore, becomes Robin Hood, John Little becomes Little John, Brother Michael becomes Friar Tuck, Lady Marian Fitzwalter becomes Maid Marian, and so on. Thus reborn, Robin and his band of men reclaim a sense of self and community, completely divorced from Prince John and his society.
Such social unity is also visually represented in their clothing. Though Robin claims that the whole of the merry men are comrades and brothers, they nevertheless wear a uniform, or livery, by which they can be identified as one of Robin’s men: “doublets and hose of Lincoln green, in hoods of green or russet and in knee-boots of soft brown leather” (45). Liveries also hint at a relationship of service, wherein the men who wear the livery are in service to a ruler, and indeed, Robin is named the chosen king of the men of Sherwood by his followers “not because I [Robin] am by right an Earl, […] but because one must rule and I come of a race of rulers” (43), and because he is an honorable man whose reputation and fame speak volumes of his good character. Compared to Prince John’s imposed extortionist reign, in other words, Robin is more or less democratically elected to his position as king of the outlaws, and with his mandate to “declare war upon all of those thieves, robbers, extortioners and men of evil whom we find among the nobles, the clergy, and burgesses of town” (46), he positions himself as a just king, one who believes in a fairer distribution of wealth to honest people and who creates and promotes a society wherein justice and decency are not so easily swayed by personal greed.
The Ambiguity of Robin’s Social Justice
When Robin relinquishes his identity as Robert of Locksley and fully adopts the identity of Robin Hood, the outlaw king of Sherwood Forest, he also takes on an ideology that drives him and his merry men to action in most of their adventures. As he unknowingly explains to King Richard in Chapter 21:
We dwell here [in Sherwood Forest] to set right the wrong: never yet did we hurt any man knowingly who was honest and true, but only those who—with or without the law on their side—robbed innocent men or oppressed them, or did ought against the honour of a woman (243).
Being unencumbering and helpful to the general downtrodden community and only pestering and harming those who would abuse their stations and authority are what, in other words, allow Robin and his followers to consider themselves “thieves” of honor. Yet while the author seems to imply that their actions are done out of a sense of justice—to “set right the wrong” as it were—the reality is much more ambiguous, and Robin and his men’s code of conduct becomes muddied in his other tales. In Chapter 12, for instance, Robin’s wager with Little John has them looking to disguise themselves as beggars and return by the end of the day with spoils. Though the plot makes Robin out to be a hero by saving three lives, the juxtaposition with Little John’s actions makes his behavior comparatively questionable as he robs not men of power or of the cloth who abuse their station, nor such people who can say to have robbed innocent men. Instead, Little John beats and takes from four beggars, one of whom did indeed steal from him and Robin, but the other three of whom are depicted as individuals with disabilities. The narrative substantiates Little John’s actions by showing that, for instance, the man with one leg could, in fact, “run away on two completely unmaimed limbs” (145), but Little John still moved to thrash them and rob them before knowing the deceit.
An argument could certainly be made that the so-called beggars acquired their 300 pounds of gold through lying and deceit, but by no means do they fit neatly as the men whom Robin and his men act on to “right the wrong” of society, as Robin outlines to King Richard. Moreover, though Robin and his men do not directly injure people who are true and honest, they nevertheless indirectly become the source of their harm, as seen with Sir Richard of Legh when he is captured for harboring Robin in Chapter 10, with Much the Miller in Chapter 1 when Prince John wants to use him to draw out Robin, and so on. Honor, in medieval parlance, has the notion of “troth,” a term typically associated with “truth” but more broadly to the credibility of one’s word, and though Robin and his men do, for the most part, keep and enforce their ideology as “thieves” of honor, Green demonstrates that even so well-intended characters as Robin and his men can operate within a moral grayness.
The Erasure of Conquered Heritage
From the very outset of the narrative, the discord surrounding identity politics in Robin’s England portrays the eclipsing of Saxon heritage by the newly enshrined Norman nobility and sets the antagonistic and oppressive dynamics between the nobility and the peasantry. In the Prologue of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Green underscores the animosity and divided landscape that leads to Robin’s birth and his parents’ secret marriage as the narrative explains that “England was still an ‘occupied’ country in the twelfth century, and […] there was little friendship between Saxon and Norman” (13). Though his parents marry out of love, Robin’s parentage signals the decline of Saxon lineage, as, though his mother is a full Saxon, his father is part Saxon, part Norman, and thinks himself mostly as a British person more than any other given ethnicity. By the time Robin is of age, his nobility is yet further questioned as he sports three names—Robert Fitzooth, Robert of Locksley, and the Earl of Huntingdon—only to lose them all and the attached cultural history embedded within his names when he becomes Robin Hood, the outlaw. Green specifically uses names—be they for people or places—to indicate how Saxon culture and history are being erased and replaced by Norman conquerors. As Prince John and Worman point out, for example, Robin’s title of Earl is not in good legal standing, and the name only persists because of the devotion of his community and serfs:
‘I have heard of this nonsense before—David Lord Carrick is the Earl—Northumberland’s son. What pretence is this?’ ‘Pardon me, my lord,’ protested Worman, cringing before Prince John. ‘Hereabouts men call Fitzooth Earl of Huntingdon, by right of his mother and the Saxon line of the old Earls (22).
The author intimates, in other words, that the Saxon line of old Earls is void of legal, social, and cultural significance in this “occupied England,” and it is only a matter of time before the markers of this conquered inheritance get lost over time.
The change can also be seen in how important historical events are remembered. In Chapter 20, for instance, the archer Hubert refers to his grandfather’s participation in the battle of Hastings of 1066, whereas Robin refers to it by its Saxon name, Senlac Field. Though Hubert infers that his grandfather’s prowess with a bow was an honorable memory and upholds the Norman efforts in the battle, Robin infers that the Normans have overridden the history of the battle and misremember it. In this passage, Robin implies that there was no such prowess and that the Normans won against the Anglo-Saxon King Harold out of sheer luck and not skill: “Only one side shot their arrows at random into the air: and it was such an arrow that struck King Harold in the eye” (228). Green crafts his narrative, in other words, to portray how conquerors often rewrite historical narratives to better portray their right to rule and oppress those they now have under their regime. By negating the previous culture—in this case, the Saxons’—the conquering Normans legitimize their presence and authority in the country.
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