Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook Mark-Allan Donaldson David Crook, Robin Hood: Legend and Reality ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), 298 pp., 14 ills. Medieval studies is often a difficult place to inhabit. Whether it be a stray lacunae, singed page, or unfinished manuscript, there is an almost constant sense that the information being dealt with and studied comes secondhand or clouded in an esotericism that previous generations of scholars found romantic. This is accompanied by the general fictionalization of the Middle Ages by the periods that follow, with researchers having to simultaneously grapple with the task of getting at the truth of the matter while also figuring out what exactly truth may have meant to the people, objects, and literatures they are studying. It is into this quagmire that David Crook steps with his interrogation into the pseudo-historical/semi-mythical figure of Robin Hood. Crook, an archivist who has been building interest in his subject since incidentally encountering a reference to the thirteenth-century criminal William Robehod, sets out in this work to formulate a distinct approach to discussing the category of medieval personage into which Robin Hood fits. There is a tension throughout the book between previous literary and historical approaches. The former, in Crook's opinion, while giving the canon of Robin Hood texts apt attention, focuses too much on the text as an object removed from its historical contexts in the same way a physicist may ignore friction to make an equation work; while the latter, despite approaching the interrogation of Robin Hood's reality in a more familiar manner to an archivist, tends to write off the interrogation itself as illogical given the minimal hard evidence for the figure's historicity based on the surviving medieval material. This tension is somewhat resolved by the method Crook utilizes, which, while not explicitly labeled, is a type of synergistic approach to literary and historical criticism that utilizes the meticulous nature of archival work to build a supposition based on textual evidence and effect. The text is separated into two main parts, each with its own chapters. The first part, "The Legend and Its Interpreters," is split into chapters that first move chronologically through the significant texts that make up the canon of Robin Hood literature. In this part, Crook manages to create a wonderful and referenceable survey of major works that details when they are thought to have been produced, their significance in terms of what is contributed to the legend textually (characters, locations, plot points, etc.), and how each text aids the development of the literature metatextually. This literary survey is injected with moments of historical analysis wherein Crook discusses elements of various texts that could hint at an accurate dating for a story's composition, or for a possible historical Robin Hood. The only drawback to this part is that Crook does not spend much [End Page 243] time analyzing the nuance of the medieval perspective. For instance, when drawing attention to A Lyttel Gest of Robin Hood's assumption that Robin was a real figure, Crook does not aptly consider the tradition of false truth claims or fictions that begin medieval texts. He does not allow for the medieval text and reader to participate in creating/absorbing fiction; nor is there an acknowledgement of the medieval phenomena of truth as something separate from fact, nor of a text's ability to create and disseminate a truth that is outside of modernity's notion of "objective truth." Following the survey of primary medieval sources, Crook then moves into a similarly chronological overview of the academic interest surrounding Robin Hood and the relative increase or lack of interest in his historicity depending on the time and academic discipline. The final chapter of this part moves away from the predominantly textual foundation of Crook's discussion and into an analysis of place names connected to the Robin Hood legend. Functionally, this chapter explores the possible dissemination of information about Robin Hood and charts the rise of the popularity of his person and legend. More importantly to Crook's methodology, this discussion of places serves as a means of connecting Robin Hood to reality...