Sanctuary magazine

Editor's Column

Robin Hood in America by John Hanson Mitchell

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Robin Hood and his companions ©NC Wyeth

It was springtime in Nottingham and all through Sherwood Forest the bluebells were in bloom and the woods were alive with the song of the cuckoo, thrush, and wood pigeon. On this particular day, there came riding through the overarching oaks and beeches a certain knight in black armor, his lance lowered and his visor cocked up on his forehead. As he rounded a bend, the knight saw, pulled across the track, a cart loaded with a barrel of wine and two rough-looking chaps accompanied by a portly monk in nut brown robes. The knight reigned in his Friesian stallion and snapped up his lance.

“Clear the way, hedge pigs,” he shouted. “By what right are you here in the King’s forest? Account yourselves.”

The goodly friar took it upon himself to engage the knight in a debate on the matter of access.

 “But my liege, we are in fact the legal residents of Sherwood Forest,” he said, “and we reserve the right to question any man who passeth this way.”

“And from whom dost thou hold this right, if I might be so bold as to inquire?” asked the knight. He was clearly unimpressed by his adversaries. 

“Of one Robin Hood, a gentleman of whom ye may have heard,” said the friar.

“I have indeed heard of the man, who has not? But never have I heard the term ‘gentleman’ applied to said knave. Moreover, I believe that this forest belongs to King John—the trees, the underwood, and also the streams and the boar and the deer to boot.”

The goodly friar stepped forward and held up his hand, index and middle finger raised as if in benediction.

“True,” he said, “this wood is the realm of the king, but Deo volente, the forest is also the domain of Robin Hood.”

The knight adjusted his visor and chuckled cynically. “And how came this to pass?” he asked with mock formality.

“Explained plainly, Sir Knight, my argument runneth thus. God may have bestowed this forest to King John, but de facto God did also grant these lands to Robin Hood. Likewise to all people hereabout. That is to say, we hold this land by divine right. The King, being human—and hardly divine—is beholden also to the Almighty; and being human and therefore profane hath no more rights than any man who walks the earth as far as the use of Sherwood Forest is concerned.”

This little exchange—a scene pieced together from various ballads, minstrel songs, plays, and novels—represents the heart of the argument of the whole body of the Robin Hood story cycle: the question of the use of land. It is a dispute that began long before Robin Hood and one that has carried on ever since his time. It involves, along with the unequal distribution of wealth, one of the most basic conflicts of the human experience, the control of land, which until fairly recently in history was one and the same with the control of capital.

In Robin Hood’s time, the late twelfth century, there was indeed a great deal of strife among the king and the commoners and barons over the use of formerly common land. The issue was rooted in land controls known as the Forest Laws, a new system established by William the Conqueror in the late eleventh century. The crown in those days (and still today, in theory) owned all of England, including the deer and the boar and the salmon in the streams. But until William’s Forest Laws were instituted, the peasantry was able to utilize what was known as the vert and venison, that is, the plants and animals of the forest. In fact, the deer and the boar, the berries, nuts, and mushrooms, were a major resource for the cottagers and villeins of feudal England. For 500 years after the arrival of William the Conqueror, the populace resented and, as with Robin Hood sometimes resisted, the king’s edicts.

Robin was not the last of the forest rebels. Over the centuries, as laws of the land evolved, other Robin Hood like figures have arisen to preserve the public access to common land, and more recently to protect, by whatever means possible, the local ecosystems.

Here in the Americas, a 200-year-long running battle with the native people, known as the Indian Wars, was fought over more or less the same issue that Robin Hood dealt with—eviction from commonly held lands. And in the United States, where the doctrine of private property was definitively established in the Fifth Amendment of the American Constitution, the resistance continued.

In the eighteenth century in Maine, a group of homesteaders were threatened with eviction by distant landholders; and in reaction, calling themselves The White Indians, rose up to defend their use of the land. The same thing happened along the Hudson River in the nineteenth century, when a band of local farmers known as the Calico Boys countered the feudal dictates of the vast holdings of the Van Rennselaer family.

But it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that some of the most radical Robin Hood like environmental activists rose up in defense of natural resources. Inspired in part by Edward Abbey’s popular 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, David Foreman and a group called Earth First! used industrial sabotage as a means of protecting land. Other back-to-the-land environmentalists such as Doug Peacock, who was the model for one of Edward Abbey’s characters, took to the woods and lived side by side (more or less) with grizzly bears. Julia Butterfly Hill, in one of the more extreme and imaginative acts of environmental resistance, lived in a redwood tree for more than two years in order to save it from foresters.

But it was the father of them all, Edward Abbey, who was the most Robin Hood like of them in spirit. In his arguments for the preservation of the southern Utah wilderness, he argued, as did Robin Hood, that uncultivated land should be the property of all people. “Keep it wild,” he said.

Robin Hood, were he with us now, would surely understand.