seventeenth century, Richard Blome recorded:
William the Conqueror (for the making of the said Forest a harbour for Wild-beasts for his Game) caused 36 Parish Churches, with all the Houses thereto belonging, to be pulled down, and the poor Inhabitants left succourless of house or home. But this wicked act did not long go unpunished, for his Sons felt the smart thereof; Richard being blasted with a pestilent Air; Rufus shot through with an Arrow; and Henry his Grand-child, by Robert his eldest son, as he pursued his Game, was hanged among the boughs, and so dyed.
William Rufus’s death remains mysterious – an unsolved assassination or an unfortunate accident. It is the sort of event that feels as though it belonged more to a fairy story or legend than to history.
Throughout Europe this centralising power of the monarchy cut deep into rural life. The response of the ‘old’ pre-conquest landed class, if they did not join the new order and reap its rewards, was armed resistance. In England, Hereward the Wake is perhaps the most famous rebel. In alliance with some highly dubious Viking invaders, he sacked Peterborough Abbey and then hid out in the Fens, waging a kind of guerrilla warfare until he was defeated on the Isle of Ely in 1071. The North-East proved particularly hard to subdue (as usual), the landed classes there having a long history of independence and of claiming special freedoms, particularly from taxation, for themselves, as ‘the patrimony of St Cuthbert’. The huge, stern cathedral in Durham, one of the great works of Norman architecture and designed to house the shrine of the saint, was founded in 1093 to ‘buy off’ the recalcitrant northern earls.
These were conservative rebellions – they were against ‘new’ laws and the new style of monarchy. They were not ‘revolutions’, or radical struggles for rights and privileges for those who had never had them, they were insurrections against change. They were the resistance of those who had been doing well out of the old system and wished it to continue.
From this perspective, Forest Law did something else, something inverted and strange. As well as preserving wildwood and forest from the onslaught of agriculture, Forest Law created a uniquely useable space where the illegal could become the heroic. Resisting Forest Law was a crime not against one’s neighbours but against an invisible centralised government; not against the common traditions that, however unwelcome, bound communities together, but against a distant authority, and one whose legitimacy could be questioned under the rules of the old dispensation. The forest was thus not only one of the things that these malcontents were contesting, it also became the place into which they could escape in order to contest it at all.
Efficient slave cultures need open land: it has to be difficult to run away. Egypt, for example, is perfect for this purpose – the chances of disappearing off into the desert are slim: escapees can be spotted from miles away, and if the owners do not catch them, the desert will probably kill them. Forests are precisely the opposite – they are very good places to hide. Slip away between the trees, lurk in the greenwood, vanish into the thickets of wild wood: step outside the laws that bind you to the present and you become the Out Law – the free hero of romance and folk tale.
The most famous of these outlaws is Robin Hood, who probably never existed at all – legend, anecdote and fantasy create composite characters who come to represent a whole idea. But such characters, the heroes of folk legend, are usually based on some sort of reality, and there is no reason to think that Robin Hood is an exception. In this sense, these legends are very different from fairy stories and more related to literary romance. The developed story of Robin Hood epitomises all the arguments here. 5 He was a landholder, a minor nobleman, Robin of Locksley Hall, and in some accounts even
William the Conqueror (for the making of the said Forest a harbour for Wild-beasts for his Game) caused 36 Parish Churches, with all the Houses thereto belonging, to be pulled down, and the poor Inhabitants left succourless of house or home. But this wicked act did not long go unpunished, for his Sons felt the smart thereof; Richard being blasted with a pestilent Air; Rufus shot through with an Arrow; and Henry his Grand-child, by Robert his eldest son, as he pursued his Game, was hanged among the boughs, and so dyed.
William Rufus’s death remains mysterious – an unsolved assassination or an unfortunate accident. It is the sort of event that feels as though it belonged more to a fairy story or legend than to history.
Throughout Europe this centralising power of the monarchy cut deep into rural life. The response of the ‘old’ pre-conquest landed class, if they did not join the new order and reap its rewards, was armed resistance. In England, Hereward the Wake is perhaps the most famous rebel. In alliance with some highly dubious Viking invaders, he sacked Peterborough Abbey and then hid out in the Fens, waging a kind of guerrilla warfare until he was defeated on the Isle of Ely in 1071. The North-East proved particularly hard to subdue (as usual), the landed classes there having a long history of independence and of claiming special freedoms, particularly from taxation, for themselves, as ‘the patrimony of St Cuthbert’. The huge, stern cathedral in Durham, one of the great works of Norman architecture and designed to house the shrine of the saint, was founded in 1093 to ‘buy off’ the recalcitrant northern earls.
These were conservative rebellions – they were against ‘new’ laws and the new style of monarchy. They were not ‘revolutions’, or radical struggles for rights and privileges for those who had never had them, they were insurrections against change. They were the resistance of those who had been doing well out of the old system and wished it to continue.
From this perspective, Forest Law did something else, something inverted and strange. As well as preserving wildwood and forest from the onslaught of agriculture, Forest Law created a uniquely useable space where the illegal could become the heroic. Resisting Forest Law was a crime not against one’s neighbours but against an invisible centralised government; not against the common traditions that, however unwelcome, bound communities together, but against a distant authority, and one whose legitimacy could be questioned under the rules of the old dispensation. The forest was thus not only one of the things that these malcontents were contesting, it also became the place into which they could escape in order to contest it at all.
Efficient slave cultures need open land: it has to be difficult to run away. Egypt, for example, is perfect for this purpose – the chances of disappearing off into the desert are slim: escapees can be spotted from miles away, and if the owners do not catch them, the desert will probably kill them. Forests are precisely the opposite – they are very good places to hide. Slip away between the trees, lurk in the greenwood, vanish into the thickets of wild wood: step outside the laws that bind you to the present and you become the Out Law – the free hero of romance and folk tale.
The most famous of these outlaws is Robin Hood, who probably never existed at all – legend, anecdote and fantasy create composite characters who come to represent a whole idea. But such characters, the heroes of folk legend, are usually based on some sort of reality, and there is no reason to think that Robin Hood is an exception. In this sense, these legends are very different from fairy stories and more related to literary romance. The developed story of Robin Hood epitomises all the arguments here. 5 He was a landholder, a minor nobleman, Robin of Locksley Hall, and in some accounts even
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