History Musings

The one thing that is always disappointing when you actually study history is that all those glorified heroic figures are never as cool as you want them to be.

I absolutely love the Robin Hood myths. I watched the Errol Flynn version at a very impressionable age and the Disney Robin Hood was probably my favorite Disney movie. So while I was reading Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine it was a huge blow to learn about the true character of Richard Coeur de Lion. According to the Robin Hood myths that I've encountered, Richard is supposedly a great and honorable king who champions the cause of the Saxon peasantry and fights courageously in the Holy Land. Once he returns to England, he saves the nation from the clutches of the evil Prince John who has attempted to usurp the throne.

For one thing, it is completely unlikely that Robin Hood would have lived during Richard I's reign; most sources place him in the 13th or 14th century, at least 100 years after Richard was king. But to make things even worse, Richard was a horrible king! He had a reputation of excessive cruelty, to the point that the character of Malik-Ric (evil Richard) was used for centuries by mothers in the Middle East to make their children behave; while on crusade, Richard had nearly 3,000 Turkish men, women and children beheaded because Saladin wouldn't surrender to him. His sexual appetite was so voracious that he abducted and raped the wives and daughters of his vassals and fathered numerous bastards. The man didn't even speak a word of English! (While the monarchs of England were still Normans, they usually had lived in the country long enough to speak some of their subjects' language. They'd be just beginning with Middle English I think.) Raised in Aquitaine with his mother, he understood only the culture and lange d'oc of Southern France. Richard I spent less than a year out of his 10 year reign actually in England; the rest of the time he spent in France or crusading in the Holy Land (the expense of which sucked the country dry). King John's early reign actually proved that he was a better king than Richard and was morally neither better or worse than his brother. (From what I've read, King John became much worse later in his reign - which is why his barons forced him to sign the Magne Carta - but the book ended with Eleanor's death, not with John's).

Robin Hood was probably just a bandit who stole for his own gain too. Phaugh. I'll take Errol Flynn any day.