young Charles Stewart (the future Charles II), hiding up an oak tree with a price on his head, suddenly stops being a pampered tyrant and becomes a loveable hero: he has escaped into the forest and become an outlaw. The strange wave of popular support that the thuggish Raoul Moat attracted in 2010, despite being a murderer (and blinding policemen), feels to me as though it was related to the fact that he ran off and hid from the law in the woods.
Outlawry is an expression of a fundamental freedom which is to be found in the forest. But it is a conservative and regressive romantic freedom; it is based on some idea of ‘natural rights’, and it ends either with the restitution of the older established order, or in tragic exile and death. The Forest Outlaw is always privileged – and is allowed, even applauded for, activities that in the poor would be regarded as criminal. This too is embedded in language – a ‘villain’ is now a bad guy, a criminal, and particularly one with malevolent intent, but originally the word meant nothing more – or less – than someone at the bottom of the tidy feudal pack – a landless agricultural labourer, a ‘low born rustic’. The poor become the crooks, but the rich become adventurers.
The high-handed and noble option of the Out Law was not easily available to the poor displaced by the development of Forest Law, although it certainly impacted on them bitterly. Their resistance took the form, as it so often does, of a dark humour, even impertinence, expressed in jokes and stories.
Kings do badly in fairy stories.
This probably feels odd, even wrong, at first reading. Everyone knows that fairy stories are about Princes and Princesses. But they aren’t. Jack Zipes has counted. In the Grimms’ collection, there are 29 stories (out of 256) in which one of the principal characters is either a prince or princess, 11 though it is rare for both of the eventual partners to be royal. There is only one story in which a king is the protagonist. And these 30 royals are outnumbered by tailors (11), soldiers (10), servants (8), and 29 other skilled tradesmen or their children. There are 78 stories in which the protagonist is a farmer, a peasant or a ‘poor person’, or the child of one. Moreover, it is easy to forget that that the Grimms’ collection includes about a dozen stories – similar in theme and structure to the more expected fairy stories – which feature saints, most often Mary, not in biblical tales, but as hagiography. If you see Joseph as a skilled tradesman and Mary as the daughter of poor parents (although, like a fairy-tale heroine, eventually becoming the Queen of Heaven itself) – which is how they were perceived for much of the Middle Ages – then this makes another half dozen stories to add to this list.
In a great many of the stories the young and the poor set about outwitting the kings. Young princes and princesses are often complicit in their father’s downfall or in subverting his plans. In story after story the King sends the lower-class hero off on impossible quests, hoping to get rid of him and keep his daughter for more profitable marriage; in story after story young women, both princesses and commoners, outwit the King to marry his son. Kings tend to be snobbish, cruel, incompetent and – in the end – outflanked.
These are stories about ‘just deserts’, not about inherited privilege; cunning as well as industry and courage are to be admired. Proud princesses get their comeuppance and the poor get rich by trickery more often than by virtue. In no stories, however, even in the pietistic editorial hands of Jacob Grimm, does anyone find happiness by becoming reconciled to their poverty – happiness means being rich and powerful as well as beloved. These are radical, not conservative, tales; stories about overcoming distressing poverty and alienation, subverting the normal social order and achieving a new life of comfort and security.
In fact, it is
Outlawry is an expression of a fundamental freedom which is to be found in the forest. But it is a conservative and regressive romantic freedom; it is based on some idea of ‘natural rights’, and it ends either with the restitution of the older established order, or in tragic exile and death. The Forest Outlaw is always privileged – and is allowed, even applauded for, activities that in the poor would be regarded as criminal. This too is embedded in language – a ‘villain’ is now a bad guy, a criminal, and particularly one with malevolent intent, but originally the word meant nothing more – or less – than someone at the bottom of the tidy feudal pack – a landless agricultural labourer, a ‘low born rustic’. The poor become the crooks, but the rich become adventurers.
The high-handed and noble option of the Out Law was not easily available to the poor displaced by the development of Forest Law, although it certainly impacted on them bitterly. Their resistance took the form, as it so often does, of a dark humour, even impertinence, expressed in jokes and stories.
Kings do badly in fairy stories.
This probably feels odd, even wrong, at first reading. Everyone knows that fairy stories are about Princes and Princesses. But they aren’t. Jack Zipes has counted. In the Grimms’ collection, there are 29 stories (out of 256) in which one of the principal characters is either a prince or princess, 11 though it is rare for both of the eventual partners to be royal. There is only one story in which a king is the protagonist. And these 30 royals are outnumbered by tailors (11), soldiers (10), servants (8), and 29 other skilled tradesmen or their children. There are 78 stories in which the protagonist is a farmer, a peasant or a ‘poor person’, or the child of one. Moreover, it is easy to forget that that the Grimms’ collection includes about a dozen stories – similar in theme and structure to the more expected fairy stories – which feature saints, most often Mary, not in biblical tales, but as hagiography. If you see Joseph as a skilled tradesman and Mary as the daughter of poor parents (although, like a fairy-tale heroine, eventually becoming the Queen of Heaven itself) – which is how they were perceived for much of the Middle Ages – then this makes another half dozen stories to add to this list.
In a great many of the stories the young and the poor set about outwitting the kings. Young princes and princesses are often complicit in their father’s downfall or in subverting his plans. In story after story the King sends the lower-class hero off on impossible quests, hoping to get rid of him and keep his daughter for more profitable marriage; in story after story young women, both princesses and commoners, outwit the King to marry his son. Kings tend to be snobbish, cruel, incompetent and – in the end – outflanked.
These are stories about ‘just deserts’, not about inherited privilege; cunning as well as industry and courage are to be admired. Proud princesses get their comeuppance and the poor get rich by trickery more often than by virtue. In no stories, however, even in the pietistic editorial hands of Jacob Grimm, does anyone find happiness by becoming reconciled to their poverty – happiness means being rich and powerful as well as beloved. These are radical, not conservative, tales; stories about overcoming distressing poverty and alienation, subverting the normal social order and achieving a new life of comfort and security.
In fact, it is
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