the Earl of Huntingdon. He was treated unjustly by ‘bad’ King John and his wicked place-man the Sherriff of Nottingham while the ‘good’ king, Richard the Lionheart, was off fighting the crusade, so he fled into the forest and became an outlaw, but an outlaw seeking personal restitution, not social change. Meanwhile, he lived free, he ‘robbed from the rich to give to the poor’, he supported the oppressed and was true to the ‘real’ king. It was not the law, but the abuse of the law that he resisted. From early on, accounts of Robin Hood present him as ‘merry’ and courteous – with a particular respect for women – and as an excellent archer, but also as a ‘natural leader’ (officer class) who inspired to-die-for (often literally) loyalty from his men, who were all his social inferiors; these accounts also present a romantic and sunny forest, where Maid Marion can be treated like a princess and where excellent dinner parties can be thrown for friendly visitors.
This sense of the forest as both the place of oppression and the place to avoid or punish oppression goes very deep and still remains strangely resonant. Running away, camping out and living off the land have all kept their romantic heroism, even as children are more ‘cabin’d, cribbed and confined’ 6 than they have ever been before.
The admiration for the noble and somehow free outlaw has left a strange shadow on our consciousness: poaching is treated as different from other forms of theft. At a cultural level, one great and continuing myth is that ‘natural products’ are free and should be freely available to everyone with the energy and wit to go and find them: 7 ‘scrumping’ apples may be ‘naughty’, but it isn’t bad, while stealing fruit from a shop is criminal. This extends to poaching game as well. The contradiction is made explicit in Tom Brown’s School Days , of all unexpected places. Our hero and his friends have spent a day in the woods, climbing trees and collecting birds’ eggs (this shows they are good, healthy, ‘manly’ types). On the way home they fall foul of a farmer who accuses them of stealing his hens – although they are in fact innocent on this occasion. A helpful prefect, Holmes, ‘who was one of the best boys in the school’, arrives by chance on the scene and, in an extremely high-handed manner, liberates them from rustic arrest. However, once away from the menial farmer’s impertinent attempts to protect his own property, Homes goes on to lecture them:
Knocking over other people’s chickens and running off with them is stealing. It’s a nasty word but that’s the plain English of it. If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop you wouldn’t take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith’s basket; but there’s no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree, and the same articles in a shop. I wish our morals were sounder in such matters. 8
But it does no good – Tom and his companions are briefly chastened, but go back to poaching and bird theft, apparently with the amused tolerance of their usually highly moralistic creator. Regardless of the law, in a different, imagined parallel world the outlaw-in-the-forest has imbued the poacher with a romantic freedom, even a sort of virtue. 9 Sneaking off into the forest and living by your wits permeates literature. In John McNab , 10 John Buchan has members of the Cabinet poaching, to the ultimate amusement and admiration of the land owners (and also, therefore, in the twentieth century, the deer and salmon owners) themselves. It is one of the mainstays of children’s adventure stories: from Children of the New Forest to Enid’s Blyton’s Famous Five , poaching is presented as a noble sport and a mark of desirable independence. BB in Brendon Chase and Roald Dahl in Danny, the Champion of the World make poaching an heroic or at least an endearing act, in a way that ‘stealing’ never is. The
This sense of the forest as both the place of oppression and the place to avoid or punish oppression goes very deep and still remains strangely resonant. Running away, camping out and living off the land have all kept their romantic heroism, even as children are more ‘cabin’d, cribbed and confined’ 6 than they have ever been before.
The admiration for the noble and somehow free outlaw has left a strange shadow on our consciousness: poaching is treated as different from other forms of theft. At a cultural level, one great and continuing myth is that ‘natural products’ are free and should be freely available to everyone with the energy and wit to go and find them: 7 ‘scrumping’ apples may be ‘naughty’, but it isn’t bad, while stealing fruit from a shop is criminal. This extends to poaching game as well. The contradiction is made explicit in Tom Brown’s School Days , of all unexpected places. Our hero and his friends have spent a day in the woods, climbing trees and collecting birds’ eggs (this shows they are good, healthy, ‘manly’ types). On the way home they fall foul of a farmer who accuses them of stealing his hens – although they are in fact innocent on this occasion. A helpful prefect, Holmes, ‘who was one of the best boys in the school’, arrives by chance on the scene and, in an extremely high-handed manner, liberates them from rustic arrest. However, once away from the menial farmer’s impertinent attempts to protect his own property, Homes goes on to lecture them:
Knocking over other people’s chickens and running off with them is stealing. It’s a nasty word but that’s the plain English of it. If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop you wouldn’t take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith’s basket; but there’s no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree, and the same articles in a shop. I wish our morals were sounder in such matters. 8
But it does no good – Tom and his companions are briefly chastened, but go back to poaching and bird theft, apparently with the amused tolerance of their usually highly moralistic creator. Regardless of the law, in a different, imagined parallel world the outlaw-in-the-forest has imbued the poacher with a romantic freedom, even a sort of virtue. 9 Sneaking off into the forest and living by your wits permeates literature. In John McNab , 10 John Buchan has members of the Cabinet poaching, to the ultimate amusement and admiration of the land owners (and also, therefore, in the twentieth century, the deer and salmon owners) themselves. It is one of the mainstays of children’s adventure stories: from Children of the New Forest to Enid’s Blyton’s Famous Five , poaching is presented as a noble sport and a mark of desirable independence. BB in Brendon Chase and Roald Dahl in Danny, the Champion of the World make poaching an heroic or at least an endearing act, in a way that ‘stealing’ never is. The
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