Why Robin Hood Was Cancelled
15th October 2024
Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s an iconic outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin Hood imagery it’s used since 1980. The press release boasts that the new abstract design celebrates something called “financial diversity”; Nottingham residents, meanwhile, expressed bewilderment at what, precisely, is so “outdated” about the folklore hero.
Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.
Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”.
Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, he did not ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’; he took oppressive taxes and fees back from government officials and gave them to the common people from whom they had been squeezed.
It’s easy to see why a progressive Labor government wants to erase him from public consciousness.