[p.29]
Laura Blunk
Red Robin: The Radical Politics of Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood

“Robin Hood is tall, short, stocky, slight, dark, fair, bearded, clean-shaven. This one insists he’s a dwarf! A dwarf! And where do we find him? In a cave, down a well, up a tree. Near Wickham, Duxford, Ashley, Calverton. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera! ... Is there no one in this Godforsaken shire who can lead me to him?!”*1*

Modern seekers of the “real Robin Hood” might well identify with the sentiments expressed by King John in “The Betrayal,” an episode in the British television series Robin of Sherwood, for the legend of England’s most famous outlaw has been as diverse in its manifestations as were the characteristics attributed to Robin by the people of Nottinghamshire in this episode. In the seven hundred years in which tales about him have been sung, written, and performed Robin Hood has worn many faces — bold outlaw, stout yeoman, dispossessed nobleman and Saxon freedom fighter among others — but one element has been present in each of his incarnations. Robin is a rebel. Evaluating the mutability of its hero, Stephen Knight concluded that “the Robin Hood tradition may be not so much a set of transformations of an authentic single person, but rather it might be a force-field of variations, of figures and fables which realize in many different and locally functional ways the concept central to the whole myth, which appears to be a resistance to authority.”*2*
Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood, which has been described us “the most innovative and influential version of the myth in recent times,” [p.30] has made resistance to authority one of its central motifs.*3* The creator of the series, Richard Carpenter, has asserted that
This is what makes Robin Hood a figure for all time, in that he really does appeal to ordinary people, and, I think, that the success of Robin of Sherwood is that it struck a chord in people. They felt all the limes that they didn’t have change for the parking meter or they got a silly note from the tax man... and all the sort of petty bureaucracy which is not quite the same as having your hands chopped off because you shot a bow, but, at the same time, there is a little bit of the anarchist in all of us.*4*
There is much more than “a little bit of the anarchist” in Carpenter’s heroes, however. In contrast to the earlier versions of the legend which find Robin and his Merry Men opposing corrupt individuals while supporting legitimate and justly administered authority, Robin of Sherwood presents a tale of revolutionaries opposing a corrupt system. Much more than any other retelling of the legend, the series stresses resistance to the existing social and political order of medieval England. So thorough-going is the resistance to authority in this series that not only does Robin’s band resist the established government, it also frequently challenges and questions his decisions as well. Authority is respected in Carpenter’s Sherwood only when it earns acceptance by being justly wielded for the good of the community — whether that community be the tightly knit band of outlaws or the people of England as a whole. A brief look at several episodes of the program will illustrate the radical spirit in Robin of Sherwood and the genuinely revolutionary behavior of its heroes.
Carpenter’s Robin appears in the familiar setting of Sherwood at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the time of Richard I and John, and the series opens with Robin Hood as a Saxon yeoman fighting against Norman tyranny. The theme of rebellion is stressed from the first moments of the program. A voice-over introduces the initial episode, “Robin Hood and the Sorcerer,” as words scrolling across the screen inform the viewer:
Over a hundred years after the Normans conquered England, rebellion still flared, like embers from a dying fire. One such rebellion was led by Ailric of Loxley. Ailric and many of the English secretly believed in the ancient legend of Herne the Hunter, the horned god of the English forests. A hooded man, a fugitive, would be chosen by Herne to be his son and do his bidding and to lead the English against the Norman tyranny.*5*
[p.31]
In the first scene a Norman troop invades the still sleeping village of Loxley at dawn and efficiently, almost casually, burns it down and slaughters its people. Temporarily fleeing the village in order to hide his son, Robin, from the soldiers, Ailric returns only to be surrounded and shot down by the soldiers of Robert de Rainault (the future Sheriff of Nottingham). Defiant in death, Ailric informs his murderer that “the Hooded Man is coming.”
Robin is raised in Sherwood by a miller and lives there for fifteen years before he and his young foster brother, Much, are arrested by Sir Guy of Gisburne for poaching. Seated upon his large destrier which places him symbolically above his captives, Sir Guy questions them. When Robin rejects Gisburne’s naming of him as a serf, the knight snaps back, “If I say you’re a serf, you’re a serf!” Both the power and the arrogance of England’s rulers are emphasized here and in the next scenes where Gisburne takes his prisoners back to Nottingham and throws them into the dungeons. Much, who is very young and afraid of the dark, cries out that there are devils in the dark hole, “The only devil,” a harsh voice answers him from the shadows, “is the one who put you here — Guy of Gisburne.” The speaker is Will Scarlet. When he and two other residents of the dungeon, Tom and Dickon, tell the newcomers the reasons for their arrests, the viewer is once again reminded of the oppressiveness of the regime. Dickon let his goats graze in the forest, “Can’t do that, can you?” he asks bitterly, “Might take food from the king’s deer.” Tom’s crime, like that of Robin and Much, is poaching. It remains for Scarlet to tell the most harrowing story. Drunken mercenary soldiers had come in the night and violated his wife, “When they’d finished with her, they trampled her with their horses. Then they laughed. Laughed.” Enraged, Will had killed three of them. Unrepentant, he says almost proudly, “I’m gonna swing.” Scarlet’s hatred of the Normans and their government is all-encompassing. More than any other member of Robin’s band, it is he who best fits the definition of an anarchist, defying not only England’s rulers, but, at times, Robin as well.
Both Loxley and Scarlet have “the fire inside them” — a willingness to die fighting rather than meekly surrender to an unjust order. Together they inspire their fellow prisoners into attempting an escape. They form a human pyramid which enables them to reach and overpower the guard, thus making escape possible. The human pyramid is symbolically important as well, for it illustrates a continuing theme in the program: only by working together can the outlaws (and by implication, the people) achieve their freedom. Unlike the nobles, whose power gives [p.32] them the luxury of acting as individuals, the outlaws are dependent upon one another. Solidarity, not individualism, is the means to liberation.
During the escape, however, Robin is separated from his companions and, after fleeing Nottingham Castle by way of Lady Marion of Leaford’s chamber, he arrives in Sherwood alone. There he is met by Herne the Hunter who greets him with a daunting message and an unambiguous call to revolutionary action.
Wolfshead, outlaw. Do you fear me, boy? ... I am your destiny: Herne. Herne the Hunter. Look at me! They are all waiting: the blinded, the maimed, the men locked in the stinking dark. All wait for you. Children with swollen bellies hiding in ditches wait. The poor, the dispossessed; they all wait. You are their hope.
Herne’s words, which call upon Robin to end hunger and poverty as well as injustice, make it clear that he is being asked not simply to oppose corrupt or perverted authority, but to alter the social and political order as well. Frightened and bewildered by the Hunter’s words, Robin shakes his head and runs away, but he cannot escape his destiny. When a second meeting with Herne results in his acceptance of the Hunter’s charge, he returns to his companions, now joined by Little John, and issues to them a call to arms. “You were sleeping. You slept too long. We all have... Villages destroyed so that princes can hunt unhindered, the people bled white to pay for foreign wars. No voice, no justice, no England! Well, it’s time to fight back.” Robin’s litany condemns more than the acts of individual evil-doers; it castigates the very system responsible for such conditions.
Meanwhile, in Nottingham Castle, those persons benefiting from the feudal order, the Sheriff, Robert de Rainault, his brother, Abbot Hugo, and Sir Guy of Gisburne are less than pleased by the prisoners’ escape. Accompanying Marion on her journey to Kirklees Abbey, Gisburne is dismissed by the abbot with the following words, “May God’s peace go with you. Don’t take any prisoners.” As that hypocritical benediction tells us, Sir Guy has been ordered to track down and kill the escapees. Seeking them within Sherwood, Guy is angered by the miller’s defiant refusal to tell where the escapees are and murders him in cold blood.
The murder of his foster-father at the hands of a man acting for the same authorities who murdered his real father sends Robin into action. Laying an ambush for Gisburne and his men, Robin and his friends capture the Norman knight. In an emotionally satisfying reversal of Gisburne’s arrest of Robin and Much, the outlaws strip the knight of his armor (symbolic of his “superior” status) and tie him stomach down across the back of his horse. “Tell the Sheriff of Nottingham,” Robin says to his humiliated prisoner, “that Robin Hood holds Sherwood. Tell him Herne’s Son has claimed his kingdom." No longer accepting the [p.33] sheriff’s authority as legitimate, Robin more than resists it, he rejects it and replaces it, at least within Sherwood, with his own.
By the middle of the first episode of the series, then, the lines have been clearly drawn. While England’s rulers have been portrayed as oppressive, vicious and hypocritical, and Robin and his friends as good men pushed beyond bearing by “the system,” it is the political and social structure of England which is the true villain, for it is that which enable men such as de Rainault to give free rein to their will to exploit and control others.
Wishing to dominate others while seeing them as merely means to achieving one’s own ends is the greatest evil in Carpenter’s Sherwood, and it takes many forms. One of the most distinctive features in the series is its introduction of magical and occult forces. In the second half of “Robin Hood and the Sorcerer,” the Sheriff seeks the help of the Norman Baron de Belleme, whose extraordinary powers arise from his worship of the demon Azael. Using Marion as bait, the Sheriff and Belleme set a trap for Robin; using the magic of Herne’s arrow, Robin overcomes Belleme’s sorcery, rescues Marion, and seems to slay the baron. Nearly half of Robin’s companions die in the fight, however, and only Robin, Marion, Much, Little John, and Scarlet, together with the Sheriff’s chaplain Tuck, who has followed Marion out of Nottingham, reach the safety of the Greenwood.
Even Scarlet, the most martial member of the band, is appalled at the costs of outlawry, and the band’s course of action, even its existence, seems uncertain. “What do you want?” Will demands of Robin, “All of us dead? ... For what?” Robin’s response repeats the series’ ineradicable belief in freedom. “Listen to me. Our friends who were killed, they’ll never starve, or be tortured, or chained in the dark. They never will be because they’re here with us in Sherwood. They’re free. They always will be.” Robin is aware that freedom has a high price, but it is a cost he is willing to pay, for even death is preferable to living the unfree life which had been all of their lot before they came together. Abandoning that life, Robin and his companions consciously choose to become outlaws and, finding strength in their new community, reject the authority of a ruling order which has designated them for the role of victims.
Fighting back, the outlaws of Sherwood, now joined by Nasir (a Saracen and former henchman of Baron Belleme), rob from the rich and give to the poor, prevent injustice when they can, and generally make life hell for de Rainault and Gisburne. Then King Richard returns. Traditionally, the Lionheart’s arrival in England signals not only the restoration of good government and the reinstitution of justice, but also the end of Robin’s career as an outlaw. This is what happens in most retellings, from the early Gest to recent cinematic versions. And such a resolution appears imminent in the most explicitly political of all the Robin of Sherwood episodes, “The King’s Fool.” After the king’s life has been [p.34] saved by Loxley and the band, the disguised Richard accompanies the outlaws back to their camp. When he proposes a toast to King Richard, only Loxley echoes the sentiment. The other outlaws respond with sharp criticisms of the Norman regime, criticisms with which Robin agrees.
Little John: They’ve made it [England] their money box.
Will Scarlet: That’s right, John, and then tax us to the hilt!
Robin: And fight among themselves while we watch the corn fields burn.*6*
When the disguised king suggests that things will be better when Richard returns, Scarlet responds that “pigs will fly.” “The ransom,” John informs the outlaws’ guest, “is just another way to rob the poor.” Unlike Robin’s band in mainstream retellings, Loxley’s followers do not revere the king or believe that his presence will end injustice.
Later, after revealing his identity to his hosts, Richard informs the outlaws that he had been hunting them, but that since they saved his life, “the slate is clean.” As in the traditional tellings of the legend, he pardons them and invites them to dine with him that night in Nottingham. All of the outlaws — save for a skeptical Scarlet — accept the invitation. At this point, Robin, despite his companions’ doubts, wants to believe Richard’s words, for if they are true, the days of injustice are over, and the task of defending England’s people can be lifted from Robin’s shoulders. But they are not. In contrast to the earlier traditions, the Lionheart in this version is not sincere in his words to the outlaws, and his pardon is meaningless. Richard, eager both to humiliate and punish the Sheriff and his brother, Abbot Hugo, for supporting Prince John, is merely using Loxley, and, one by one, his friends recognize that fact. In one of the series’ most powerful scenes, Little John tries to open Robin’s eyes.
Little John: Look, we’re his pets, the wolves clever King Richard trapped and tamed.
Robin: That’s enough, John.
Little John: You’re dazzled by him, aren’t you? He’s but to snap his fingers, and you’re running around his legs like a little dog! Say something funny, Robin. Show us some sword play, let’s see your skill with the longbow. Tell us how to run the country! Do you really think he listens?
Robin: I know he listens.
Little John: He’s laughing at you! They all are! What does he care about England? How long’s he ever spent here? A few [p.35] months and he’s off again, isn’t he? When he’s drained the country of money!
Robin: You... you were a serf! He gave you your freedom.
Little John: Oh yes, to die for him in Normandy!
Robin: Well you could have died in Sherwood.
Little John: Well then, I’ll choose Sherwood!
Robin: John?
Little John: I loved you, Robin. You were the Hooded Man, Herne’s Son, the people’s hope. Now, now you’re the king’s fool.
In this scene it is Little John who best expresses the radical spirit of the program: the established government cannot be trusted or changed. Rejecting the legendary image of the Lionheart as a great and just ruler, John sees him clearly as a selfish warrior who values England and its people only for the money with which they can supply him. Saddened by Robin’s apparent infatuation with the king, John sees him as abandoning his duty to the people. But, although Robin has succumbed to the king’s blandishments, Little John will not. For him, it is better to die free in Sherwood than to be imprisoned once more in the system’s chains.
When Robin learns soon afterwards from Tuck that the king has reinstated the sheriff and is planning a new tax to pay for his campaigns in Normandy, he storms into the royal presence and upbraids the king for his actions. Displeased by Loxley’s challenge to his authority, Richard hides his anger beneath a layer of contemptuous good humor, asking Robin if he should replace the outlaw’s sword with a pig’s bladder, like any trained fool’s, thereby unknowingly and tellingly echoing Little John’s words. At this point Loxley realizes what his friends have known all along, and his realization comes just in time, for the king’s apparent good humor masks his treachery: calling the sheriff to him, he orders de Rainault to see to it that the outlaws are murdered — quietly. “But no one must know. Remember, I pardoned him.” “It’s important,” Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, inserts, “to preserve that memory in the minds of the people.”
The total moral vacuity of England’s rulers, king and primate alike, could not have been expressed more plainly than in this scene. By the end of the episode, Robin, his friends, and viewers of the program have learned the hard lesson that, in medieval English politics, no matter who sits on the throne, England’s rulers will pursue their own aims, aims which include little thought for the welfare of their people. “The King’s Fool” effects a decisive and disturbing reversal in the traditional happy ending of Richard’s return, and thereby makes a very pointed statement about power and the dangers of putting one’s hopes for a better world on the shoulders of a king, a hero, or a leader.
[p.36]
The necessity of casting a new actor (Jason Connery) as the hero in the series’ third season led producers to reinvent Robin Hood: in place of the yeoman I.oxley played by Michael Praed, Robert of Huntingdon is the disinherited son of David, Earl of Huntingdon. Despite this new, noble persona for Robin, Carpenter does not abandon the radical politics which earned the program the name of “Red Robin.”*7* Unlike some earlier versions in which a noble Robin is pardoned and restored to favor, Carpenter’s Huntingdon is a rebel with a cause greater than the righting of his personal misfortunes. Urged by his father to “Give up this life, Robert,” he replies, “No, not until there’s justice for all.”*8*
Very young and tilled with self-doubt when Herne calls him to rescue the dead Loxley’s followers, Robert succeeds in freeing the outlaws, but rejects the role of Hooded Man. Unable to reconcile the conflicting claims upon his loyally, he returns to his father’s castle. The members of Robin’s band, leaderless and bereft of hope, quarrel and go their separate ways. A year goes by between the seeming dissolution of the outlaw troop and the first episode of the third season, “Herne’s Son.” At Huntingdon the old earl is ordered by King John to win the support of Lord Owen of Clun. Although the task galls him, the earl has no option. He must obey the king or risk his displeasure.
Clearly insane, Owen is also barbaric and cruel. At the feast given in his honor, he sexually harasses and humiliates Marion, now pardoned and returned to her father’s care. Trapped by the king’s command, David dares do nothing to protect the daughter of his old friend. As Robert watches his father servilely placate Owen, he realizes that no one, not even “one of the most powerful men in England,” is free, and the hatred of injustice which has always been within him comes to the surface. Unable to follow his father’s example, he challenges Owen and defeats him in a duel. The enraged nobleman later abducts Marion in revenge, and, in order to rescue her, Robert returns to Sherwood and to Herne.
The ensuing encounter with Little John — often the spokesman for the series’ and Carpenter’s politics — strikingly reveals that the motive for Robert’s resort to the forest is not merely the need to rescue Marion, or his sense of responsibility for her abduction, but his desire for freedom. Already accepted by Tuck, Robert approaches John and Much on a bleak moor, seeking their aid in rescuing Marion. With their silhouettes cast sharply against a stormy sky, a bitter and hostile John rejects the young nobleman. But Robert does not give up easily.
[p.37]
Robert: You believed in Robin, didn’t you?
Little John: Yes, I did.
Robert: Why?
Little John: Because the fire burned bright in him and for a while, it warmed us all. Now he’s gone and the fire went with him. It’s over.
Robert: No.
Little John: How could you understand? You ever starved? Ever been whipped because you forgot to lower your eyes when your masters rode by? No, not you. Because you’re one of them!
Robert: Little John. Little Brain, more like.*9*
John’s hatred of the feudal order is so great that he truly cannot imagine that a member of the privileged classes could understand, let alone feel empathy with, the common people.
Enraged at the nobleman’s pretension, he challenges Robert to a duel with quarterstaffs. During the fight, he is impressed not only by Huntingdon’s skill, but by his sense of fair play as well. The match is a draw. Confused and angry, John asks Robert to “leave us in peace.” The nobleman’s response is both a statement of his own beliefs and a plea for understanding.
Robert: Ever since I can remember my father’s told me that one day I’d become the Earl of Huntingdon. That was my destiny. That was my duty. Can you understand? When Robin died, Herne chose me to take his place.
Little John: No one can take his place.
Robert: That’s what I believed, and why I couldn’t do it. Even though I saw injustice everywhere. I lacked the courage...
Little John: You’re not the only one who lacked the courage. I think we all did. I tried to go back to what I was, a shepherd. But you can’t go back, not in your heart... I’m with you.

Raised to serve the established order, Robert of Huntingdon has always, inconveniently, not only seen, but hated injustice. Accused by John of being “one of them,” he asks the outlawed shepherd to accept him as “one of us.” One by one, the followers of Robin Hood do so. Marion is rescued. When Robert reunites her with her father, Sir Richard asks him if he will return to Huntingdon. “No,” replies Herne’s Son, “that life is over.” Having finally resolved the conflict between duty to his father and duty to his conscience, Robert, too, knows that “in your heart you can’t go back.” Accepting Robin Hood’s magic sword, Albion, from Marion, [p.38] who also rejoins the band, he reconfirms that he is now Herne’s Son and, thus, a rebel against England’s established order.
With the community of outlaws restored, Robin and his followers resume their rebellious activities. As before, however, their battles are not simply reactions to isolated acts of tyranny. As the Abbot of Croxden Abbey makes clear in “The Cross of St Ciricus,” they are fighting for something more important. Abbot Martin preaches a form of liberation theology to his people. For that reason, he is hated by the Sheriff, who sends Gisburne to steal from him the Cross of St Ciricus, a holy relic which de Rainault believes to be the source of the abbot’s power over the people. Challenging the existing order of society, Martin tells the poor who have flocked to his church:
in God’s eyes, in the eyes of our Lord God, you, my children, you are the equal of any man alive... You are equal in God’s eyes, why not in the eyes of our lords and masters? The Sheriff, the High Sheriff? Where there is injustice, the just man will be an outlaw. Men like Robin Hood, take them to your bosom. They are your champions. Take them to your bosoms in the name of God... for they know that in the eyes of God, they know, that one day, my children, oh my beloved children, one day, you will inherit the earth.”*10*
Like John Ball, who asked “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Abbot Martin is challenging the basic social and political order of England, and his support for Robin implies his belief that Sherwood’s outlaw leader shares his beliefs and goals.
But achieving a just and equal society is not, as Robert tells the villagers of Wickham in the final episode of the series, “Time of the Wolf,” something that he, or any other leader, can do by himself. Willing to lead them, to give his life for them if necessary, he nevertheless asks them for their aid, their participation in determining their own fate. “You have to fight for your grain. You have to fight for your lives,” he tells them after the sheriff has confiscated all of their grain for the king’s war effort.*11* The meek may inherit the earth, he implies, but only if they abandon their meekness and stand up and fight for themselves.
In asking the villagers to take up the struggle for justice, Robert expresses the distinctively radical political spirit of Robin of Sherwood. The struggle against unjust or illegitimate authorities in almost all earlier versions is exclusively the concern of an outlaw band, and does not embroil the people of England at large. Though these troops sometimes enroll seven score or more men (in contrast to the crew of seven in the [p.39] series), they nonetheless represent a particular segment of society — those who have already been dispossessed and have run to the safety of the Greenwood. They have nothing to lose. Further, they are asked only to fight against illegitimate authority. In “Time of the Wolf,” however, Robert calls upon the people of Wickham, who have not yet been outlawed, to rise up against established authority and shape their own future. He asks them to step outside of the safety of their prescribed places as serfs and to risk everything in the struggle for a more just society. Robert of Huntingdon, the disinherited son of an earl, thus expresses the most democratic sentiments in Robin of Sherwood. It is the responsibility of the people to fight for their rights. No one else can do it for them. In the final episode of the series, the radical politics underlying Robin of Sherwood become explicit. During the very first episode, Loxley had told his friends that they were asleep, they had slept for too long, and that now it was time for them to wake up. Twenty-one episode later, Huntingdon tells the villagers (and the viewers of the program) the same thing. Freedom is never a gift, granted by a benevolent ruling class. It is a right achieved by those willing to dedicate their lives to attaining it, whether in thirteenth-century England or in our own day. As a disgruntled and weary Sheriff of Nottingham says of the struggle to Guy of Gisburne after Loxley’s death, “It’s not over. It will never be over.”*12*

Notes
*1* Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan, Robin of Sherwood: “The Betrayal,” produced by Esta Charkham and directed by James Allen (50 minutes), Goldcrest (1985).
*2* Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994), 15.
*3* Knight, Robin Hood, 239.
*4* Personal interview, Richard Carpenter, Detroit MI (3 July 1995).
*5* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “Robin Hood and the Sorcerer,” produced by Paul Knight and directed by Ian Sharp (115 minutes), Goldcrest (1983). The citations from Robin of Sherwood in the discussion that follows are also from this episode.
*6* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “The King’s Fool,” produced by Paul Knight and directed by Ian Sharp (52 minutes), Goldcrest (1983). The citations that follow in the text are from this episode as well.
*7* Personal interview with Carpenter (3 July 1993).
*8* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “Rutterkin,” produced by Esta Charkham and directed by Gerry Mill (50 minutes), Goldcrest (1985).
*9* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “Herne’s Son,” produced by Esta Charkham and directed by Robert Young (90 minutes), Goldcrest (1985). The citations that follow in the text are from this episode as well.
*10* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “The Cross of St Ciricus,: produced by Esta Charkham and directed by Dennis Abey (50 minutes), Goldcrest (1985).
*11* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “The Time of the Wolf,” produced by Esta Charkham and directed by Sid Robertson (105 minutes), Goldcrest (1985).
*12* Richard Carpenter, Robin of Sherwood: “The Greatest Enemy,” produced by Paul Knight and directed by Robert Young (52 minutes), Goldcrest (1984).