The Early Robin Hood and “The Myght of Mylde Marye”

Abstract

A number of reformist commentators in late medieval England suggested that stories about Robin Hood were especially popular with people who were not especially devout. On the other hand, notwithstanding these reformist comments, we also have evidence that Robin Hood stories were sometimes used as sermon exempla, which suggests that they were seen (at least by some preachers) as promoting acceptable forms of Catholic devotion. At one level, the use of these stories as sermon exempla derived from the fact that in these early stories (quite unlike later stories) Robin was depicted as committed to the Mass and devoted to the Virgin Mary. The real value of these early stories about Robin Hood, however, is that they allow us to problematize two historiographical assumptions that continue to guide the thinking of English historians studying late medieval Catholicism. Thus, English historians (including the revisionist historians who have otherwise done so much to document the vitality of English Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation) continue to mimic official Catholic doctrine in suggesting that for English Catholics, Christ was the supernatural being who stood atop the Catholic pantheon, and that Mary and the saints were viewed only as intercessors with no independent power of their own. By contrast, the evidence from the Robin Hood stories (and from other stories used as sermon exempla) very explicitly depicts a rank ordering in which Mary not only had independent power, but independent power which eclipsed that of her Son.