Original subtitles

Think of an outlaw.

The first outlaw.

The most famous outlaw of all time.

One name stands alone.

Robin Hood.

I think the central thing that people respond to with Robin Hood is the idea

that there's somebody out there that wants to or is willing to redress the

balance. Over 700 years ago,

People are telling stories about Robin Hood around the campfires and taverns of

medieval England.

In those times, a massive number of have -nots against a teeny minority of

haves.

So Robin Hood would clearly be always against oppression.

He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. And he's a champion of the people.

Was there an action?

Medieval outlaw called Robin Hood.

Who is the real Robin Hood?

I declare him to be an outlaw!

Liberty by law!

Finding Robin Hood is a detective story.

No one actually says that he knew Robin Hood. No one claims to have met him. We

have to be detectives.

By royal decree, Robin Longstride, also known as Robin of the Hood, and all who

shelter him or aid him are declared outlaws of the realm.

A nail, please.

And a hammer.

A nail!

Our search for the real Robin Hood begins with a closer look at the

details of the Robin Hood legend that have survived throughout the ages.

According to the legend, Robin Hood lives in Nottinghamshire during the

King Richard the Lionheart at the turn of the 13th century.

If there was a Robin Hood, he probably lived somewhere between 1180 and 1280.

Certainly that's when the legend will have been born.

One of the big questions about the Robin Hood tales is was he a Yorkshireman or

from Nottinghamshire?

Yorkshiremen and Nottinghamshire people are very, very passionate about it.

He is born into the yeoman class, neither rich nor poor, but becomes an

You have to understand the word outlaw.

Outlaw means you have been placed outside the law.

Anyone has the right to chase after you and to kill you.

One way of escaping punishment was indeed simply to run away, away from the

to become an outlaw, go and live in areas that were less visited, that were

some way dangerous or off -putting and were not likely to be looked for.

Medieval England was a densely wooded area and hazardous to travel. Going from

town to city was very, very dangerous.

First of all, there were outlaws.

Thousands of outlaws living in the forests of England.

Real hungry, desperate men.

And there were wolves.

Wolves carried a bounty on their head, a price.

And so it was that outlaws, like Robin Hood, were known as Wolfheads. They were

people with a price on their head.

Robin Hood's band of outlaws and outcasts were known as the Merry Men.

You just said we were in danger, Robin.

Know your truth and step back into harm's way.

I'll pack up your share.

We eat and sleep.

We'll go home first, what?

The context of the tales is a band of young men, landless men, they have no

of their own, living the life of freedom in the greenwood, living off the king's

deer, which they enjoy poaching, taking part in youthful activities of archery

and sword fighting.

His storied love interest is Maeve Marion.

We tried to just set our Marion in a place where...

Her life has made her strong. Her life has made her resilient.

Girl.

Girl?

The myth has been around since time began that it's dealing with really

rich archetypes. They're not slight characters.

Well, are you coming or not?

I've noticed it.

He lives a kind of utopian, free -spirited life in the refuge of the

Forest.

Sherwood, the greenwood, it's a site of idealised freedom.

The term forest does not mean a huge area full of trees.

Forest was a term brought over to England when William the Conqueror from

Normandy captured England in 1066. It was a law that gave him control of large

stretches of the countryside.

Sherwood Forest was what was called a royal forest.

It wasn't a forest as we know it. Instead, it referred to a legal

Within the royal forest, the residents were not allowed to cut wood or take

game. So there was laws which, when you look at them today, were ridiculous,

where a man was not allowed to hunt the royal deer. Out of the question, you

could go to the wall for that one.

But you cannot, even as an individual.

Look after yourself by hunting in the forest, by, you know, going and finding

what grows wild to sustain yourself and sustain your family.

And that puts every individual in a situation where they are beholden to

a lord or some form of master.

Every deer in the land belongs to his majesty.

These things are God's gifts first before the king's possessions.

But it's illegal for a man to tend to himself.

How then can he be a man in his own right?

This is perhaps why the forest works so well in the Robin Hood legend. It is

both a symbol of freedom from restraint and the restraint of freedom.

In Sherwood today, there still lives a thousand -year -old tree, a mighty oak,

a living relic from the time of Robin Hood.

Major oak was one of the few large trees to end up being preserved out of

Sherwood Forest.

And it's probably been preserved because of the association with Robin Hood. The

Tertzing tree is a kind of mythologized tree that was large enough to stand out

from the general forest setting, probably the closest equivalent to the

oak. And tryst means meeting. So the trysting tree is the tree where the men

meet.

Marion, sheriff.

Robin Hood's well -known nemesis is the notorious Sheriff of Nottingham.

Marion, why, why do you make an enemy of me when you have the means to make me

your protector?

What means?

It's hard to think of the way England was governed without thinking of this

-important figure of the Seraph. The Seraph was really the ultimate

representative of the interest of the king at all levels, financial, judicial,

military, everything and anything, and indeed intelligence, just knowing what's

happening out there.

I see trouble coming from Loxley of Pepper Harrow. A blind old man gives you

trouble. Aye, honey, none will give more.

The crusader Robert Loxley has returned.

We're in the Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham, which is the site of the

old county jail that dates back to the mid -1400s, and the King's Hall, which

now called the Shire Hall, which dates back to 1375.

This is also where the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire would have been based.

We do know that a jail had been ordered to be built by King John in the early

1200s. We also have caves that suggest that it goes back a lot further than

site. In the legend, I guess, the show is actually portrayed as the most hated

of royal officials.

Well, there's actually two accounts of two particular shows.

One called Show Our Dear Atiyah and the other one called Mop.

Both were actually notorious for a false arrest.

and for abuse and violence.

Deeper dungeons would have actually been a place of imprisonment to the likes of

Robin Hood. It's underground, it's dark, it's damp, so fairly grim and miserable

conditions.

We've gone down into the dungeons and then down further into the bottom of the

cave. It is widely believed that this might be an oubliette.

It's actually shaped like a wine bottle.

An oubliette is French for to forget.

It's basically a wine bottle -shaped cave that prisoners were thrown into and

left to die through starvation or go mad. And the only way out was by a rope

pulling them out.

It can be linked to one of the earliest ballads ever written called Robin Hood

and the Monk, which basically talks about Robin Hood being cast down into a

dungeon and eventually rescued by...

Little John and his merry men buy a rope.

Above all, Robin Hood is associated with his lethal weapon, the longbow.

You don't think of Robin Hood without thinking of the longbow. You don't

think of the longbow without thinking of Robin Hood. It's a really powerful

link.

His skill with the bow.

It represents the common weapon of the common man.

It represents the fact that a skilled archer can pick a mighty man of arms off

at a distance.

Robin Hood is best known for the vigilante style of justice that he

the corrupt world around him.

None shall pass.

Your next move.

will be your last.

I think the core value of Robin Hood, the robbing from the rich to give to the

poor, is the thing that's going to survive.

Robin Hood is a paradigm, and there is no other paradigm for that sort of

behavior. Somebody who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, who stands

all sorts of honorable codes, and yet is an outlaw in the forest. I mean, he

does kill people. He does rob from people.

We have here a hero who, against the odds, defeats authority, yet is

often seen as serving some higher good.

Over the centuries, Robin Hood's tale has been told and retold, but the story

always shares these common threads.

Can we reach back through time and uncover the sources of the Robin Hood

Can any of these sources tell us the identity of the real Robin Hood?

Rise.

You.

I don't know you.

Robert Loxley, sir.

I'm not young.

Our search for the real Robin Hood takes us back.

650 years to the original sources of the legend, where do we first find the name

and stories of Robin Hood in medieval ballads written down in the 14th and

centuries? Our earliest allusion to Robin Hood is just one line

in the poem Piers Plowman by William Langland, which Langland wrote in the

1370s.

Piers Plyman does not talk about the Robin Hood stories. It is a character

called Sloth or Laziness.

Sloth basically is asked, well, so can you say your Lord's Prayer? Can you say

your Paternoster?

And Sloth replies, well, no, I can't say my Paternoster, but I know every single

one of the rhymes of Robin Hood. And that's the first literary reference for

Robin Hood that we have.

Frustratingly, we don't have any rhymes of Robin Hood, whatever they were from

this period.

We can infer that Robin Hood was very popular at the time. You know, the

medieval equivalent of viral.

He's everywhere.

Even lazy people who, like Sloth, who can't get out of bed to hear Confession

and spend most of their time in the taverns have bothered to memorize all of

Robin Hood.

So we know that by 1377...

that Robin Hood is already a literary figure.

So that's a crucial date. You have to start from that and work back.

The first substantial literary text we have is Robin Hood and the monk.

In it, Robin comes to St Mary's Church in Nottingham for Mass.

And he is recognised by a monk whom he had previously robbed on the highway.

And the monk goes and tells the sheriff, shut the town gates.

One reason why William the Conqueror built the first Nottingham Castle was to

dominate the town of Nottingham. And if you look to my right here, we're looking

over the original town. And at its heart, St Mary's Church.

And it was in St Mary's Church that Robin, in the story of Robin Hood and

Monk, slaughtered 12 of the sheriff's soldiers before his sword was broken and

he was captured.

Robin Hood and the Monk, we think, is from about 1460.

but the first time we have a big story of robin hood is the jet of robin hood

now dated to around 1500 it is close to a complete life of robin hood just

means the history it doesn't mean a joke it means the story of robin hood it was

an absolute bestseller and it's possible that there was already in existence a

ballad form of this story for many years now People thought that ballads are

part of an oral tradition being passed down.

In a world where there are no newspapers, in a world where so few

read, can write, the only way that key people can pass on their stories, their

history, is by word of mouth.

Most of those stories in the early days are in four -line verses and they're in

rhyming couplets to help people remember what's going on. And the death of Robin

Hood starts with Lizzie and listen, gentlemen, who be of free -born blood. I

will you tell of a good you, man.

His name is Robin Hood. And Lizzie means be quiet and listen. And you can almost

imagine the minstrel saying that and then shouting out the words Robin Hood

the end of it and suddenly the whole audience brought together to listen to

story.

The chances are the stories of Robin Hood are around between 100 and 200

before they are ever written down.

Though the ballads can give us a plausible time frame for Robin Hood,

cannot tell us definitively if he actually existed.

Was there a real figure on which the ballads were based?

The evidence is scattered and buried in medieval court documents and historical

records.

So we know nothing about this idea of an original character.

We have to be detectives.

And the most important detective work is done by a man called James Holt. And he

looked for earliest examples of someone called Robin Hood who could be an

outlaw.

The closest name Holt found was a man named Robert Hode, listed as

an outlaw in the Yorkshire judicial rolls for the years 1225 and 1226.

Robert Hode, Robin Hood, escapes into the Greenwood as an outlaw in 1226 -30.

and he's called Robert Hood, he's called Hobby Hod, and here we have a real

Robin Hood, a real person who is an outlaw in the 1220s.

In addition to sharing a similar name, location, and time frame, Robert Hood's

crime was that he owed a large sum of money to an abbot of a monastery in

a crime consistent with Robin Hood's legendary disdain for the clergy.

That's the earliest possible example that we know of, but there's no way you

say whether he's the real Robin Hood or not.

Tantalizing, though, isn't it? Sir Robert, nice to see you again.

I only know about your wealth of money.

My bees give life.

They are my life, Sir Robert.

Should not the bishop be told to the clergy can spread Nottingham honey on

Nottingham bread?

Though Robert Hode might be the most appealing candidate for the real Robin

Hood, By the later part of the 13th century, other Robin Hoods began to

James Holt explored the name Robin Hood, not as two separate names, but as one

Robin Hood. And a key thing that James Holt referred to was a court case in

Berkshire in Southerning in 1261, when a man called Robert, son of William

Lefebvre, was an outlaw, was brought before the court, and the clerk of the

court changed his name, and instead of saying Robert, son of William Lefebvre,

said Robert Robin Hood.

So he gave him a nickname of Robin Hood.

The first example of a Robin Hood figure appearing in an historical document is

in the Scottish Chronicon, a history of Scotland written between 1377 and 1450.

It reads, Then arose the celebrated bandit Robert Hood, with little John and

their accomplices.

By the end of the 14th century. You have eight examples of people being given

the nickname Robin Hood as one word.

What is the significance of multiple outlaws being called Robin Hood a

years prior to the appearance of the first written ballot?

For one thing, it could mean that Robin Hood was simply a generic nickname for

an outlaw, not a reference to a specific individual.

If someone's being given the nickname Robin Hood, they're associating that

an outlaw. So you're able to say that nickname was already being used and

associated with outlaws.

But if there is... No historical figure at the heart of the Robin Hood legend.

Why does the name Robin Hood suddenly appear in the 13th century associated

outlaw behavior?

Is it possible the 13th and 14th century outlaws who called themselves Robin

Hood were copycats, stealing the moniker of an actual infamous outlaw?

It is certainly possible, even likely, but difficult to prove.

As much as many historians have tried to pin Robin Hood on a particular person,

and I'd like to believe that there was actually a particular person called

Hood, it seems to be, given that that story has lasted so long, that perhaps

was a series of people.

The end result is that we have this terrible, terrible question, you know,

wanting to find out more.

If a man could be judged by the company he keeps...

Perhaps we must look to the merry men to know the real Robin Hood.

My men at arms.

This is about as courtly as they get.

Eleanor Dale, Will Scarlet, and little John, Lady Marion.

I trust you had an historic evening.

Oh, for sure.

The Merry Men are basically the followers of Robin Hood.

In one of the early ballads, I believe it is Robin Hood and the Potter, named

themselves as Merry Men.

I demand to know who you are!

We are men of the Hood.

Merry now at your expense.

The ballad quickly goes from a description of the green leaves and the

the woods.

and how merry it is to hear the birds singing, to Little John basically

and this is a merry morning, and I am a merry man. You will not find a more

merry man throughout the length of England than me on this merry morning.

From the earliest texts, we have Little John, and Little John began as being

even more important than he is today.

We're not even sure at the very beginning that Robin Hood is the de

leader. of the band little john's primary function is very much as robin

number two he is by far the strongest character in the tales after robin hood

himself in the legend he and robin meet trying to cross a bridge and they fight

with staff

Little John kind of defines the edges of Robin's authority on a continual basis

and is always testing the boundaries.

He's not an unconquerable hero.

He's a very fallible hero. And Little John frequently functions to sort of

him back to the right path.

This is not a game of luck. It's about the science of memory.

And a quick hand. I've got a quick eye.

I'll be watching you.

In Robin Hood and the Monk?

When Little John, in the end, rescues him from the prison, Robin says, OK, you

were right, you know, you can take over the band, I'll give your leadership to

you, you deserve it. And Little John refuses.

He remains Robin Hood's right -hand man.

I suppose that's one of the nice things about it. He's a remarkable character in

his own right, a very strong character, a very fierce one, but he is incredibly

loyal to his leader, to Robin.

Well, Scarlet is also there from the beginning with Little John.

She develops more of the...

Swordsman, not as a particularly violent member of the band, but instead he's

the sort of fop of the merry men. Robin!

Ah!

Will Scathlock, who's probably the origin of Scarlet, will Scarlet later.

Scathlock, scath means harm or hurt. He hurts locks and breaks into places.

That's probably where his name developed.

Right. is one of the great mysteries.

It's interesting with Freytag. He is not a priest.

He is not a normal member of the church.

He is a friar. They take a vow of poverty.

Friar Tuck probably enters into the tradition quite late in the 16th century

probably as part of the May Gang during and after the Reformation in England

when there was a lot of anti -Catholicism. And so Friar Tuck, as a

fraternal order, is part of an old Catholic regime that's now seen as both

mischievous and...

kind of insidious and dangerous.

And so he's an interesting figure of mischief and disorder.

If I wasn't the village priest, I'd try it with a village drunken.

You really do have an outlaw robber in the early 15th century with the nickname

Fry Tuck, his real name's Robert Stafford.

We don't find Fry Tuck in the early ballads.

But we do find him in a small play that's recorded around 1475, and it's

The Curtled Friar. You're the town beekeeper?

Let you know, I'm the friar. Tuck's the name.

And when we first discover him, he and Robin fight a particularly savage

encounter. And it suggests the friars act with a very active, physically

addition to the Robin Hood band.

Alan O'Dale comes much later into the tradition from a 17th century ballad.

Robin intervenes when his betrothed is to be married to an aged knight.

He's a minstrel, and I think he was folded into the tradition just as a kind

acknowledgement and way of looking at the very means by which the Robin Hood

ballads became most popular.

That's why I think Alan Adale is a character who's mostly sympathetic and

appealing.

The Merry Men play many different roles. Sometimes they're individualized.

Sometimes they question Robin's authority.

Sometimes they come out as better looking than he does.

What we see among Robin's men is specialist.

Just like you do in most...

folk hero outlaw bands.

Doesn't matter whether it's the Magnificent Seven or the Deadly Dozen.

Everyone's a specialist.

So we have Little John and the Friar, good with their staff.

Will Scarlet, good with the sword. Other men, good with the dagger.

Robin, of course, the quintessential archer, but also skilled with all

He could fight with a sword. He could fight with a staff.

So I can just imagine Robin imposing a discipline on his band of brothers that

meant that they had martial practice every morning.

As Robin Hood and the Merry Men fight to make their way

in these harsh times, the crown began to wage a war that would change the world

they knew forever.

Are you honest enough to tell the king something that he does not want to hear?

What is your opinion on my crusade?

Will God be pleased with my sacrifice?

No, he won't.

What Ridley and I thought to do is recalibrate the whole story.

take it back to its origins.

What I thought was a spectacular time to begin with when Richard Curdleon,

Richard the Lionheart, is coming back from the Crusades. Thank you, Robin.

And then you insert this man called Robin in the returning army as one of

thousand yeomen that have returned from the Holy Land.

If Robin Hood returned from the Crusades, the world he witnessed would

one of disarray and turmoil.

Did these hard times birth a new hero, the legendary outlaw Robin Hood?

Europe was a very fragmented society, very localized. If you think of the

of France, their remit goes maybe 20, 30 miles outside of Paris. Not the sort of

grand expanse of power that you'd expect.

It's also a very violent society.

This lack of central authority means that people, peasants, are very much

oppressed by castellans, nobles, people charging around, taking money and

animals from them.

A map of Europe

in the late 11th, early 12th century would look very different from today's

boundaries. We used to set a large date, but in the 11th, 12th century, it's

very fragmented, very localized.

You've got the Dukes of Normandy, the Dukes of Aquitaine, the Counts of Anjou,

the Counts of Flanders.

The German Empire is all fragmented into powerful duchies.

Spain is largely ruled by the Muslims.

It's politically very, very broken up. It's also a very religious society.

Religion saturates society.

Fear of what will happen to you when you die.

Saints, pilgrimages, these are all intrinsic parts of medieval life.

They link together in the form of the Crusade, which is a holy war.

an expedition to recover Jerusalem for Christianity.

In the 11th century, the known world is divided by the great religions,

Christianity and Islam.

But while the collapse of the Roman Empire and Roman order has left Europe

chaos, the East has become the center of global wealth and trade.

The great cities of the world are in the East.

Baghdad boasts half a million people, Constantinople 600 ,000. In contrast,

Rome, Paris, and London can hardly muster...

30 ,000 in good times.

Some speculate that it is primarily an attempt to unify the Christian West that

drives Pope Urban II to call for the First Crusade on November 27, 1095.

Pope Urban II called the knighthood of Europe to free the Holy Land from the

infidel. What he offered them was something that they needed, the

all their sins.

These men are violent, they kill people for a living.

And they are going to be condemned to the fires of hell for eternity unless

make good. And Urban's very clever. He says, OK, you can carry on killing

people, but these will be Muslims.

You'll be freeing Jerusalem, Christ's city, for the Christian faith.

And that is an act of spiritual merit. This is a promise that absolutely

entrances the knighthood of Western Europe. They sign up for it in their

thousands, and through 1096, 97, 98, they head towards the Eastern

Mediterranean.

So you have to imagine that this man, who in a time period where most

would move no further than 14 miles from their place of birth, with Robin Hood,

this man's experienced the grandness of France, experienced the control of the

church in Italy.

He's experienced democracy at work in Greece. He knows how many, many

systems of government work. They're dealing with...

a man who is probably ahead of his times in terms of his cultural experience,

particularly where he comes from economically or in the class structure.

If Robin Hood had experienced the Crusades, he would have witnessed the

injustice that wealth and social class played on the medieval battlefield.

Towards the end of the 11th century, the Normans invented a completely new form

of warfare.

Prior to that, in Western Europe, people had fought on foot, in shield walls,

standing shoulder to shoulder. The Normans at the Battle of Hastings in

changed all that.

They came galloping onto the field with horses, carrying shields in their left

hand and spears in their right. Mostly, they were throwing their spears or

leaning out to pick people off like that.

Just a few years later, a couple of decades later, in the Crusades, that new

cavalry tactic had changed yet again.

The lance, the spear, was now couched, embedded under the arm. And this made

lance, man, and horse one single projectile unit. It was the

dawning of the age of impact.

These men would...

go knee to knee riding in what they called conroy conroy with the king

masses of male clad knights knee to knee charging into the

enemy the armor they wore was male it's simply called male

not chain mail a chain is single linked This is an interlinked web of rings,

each one closed with a tiny rivet. Very painstaking work.

And a skilled mailmaker would tailor it to the shape of the body so it's tight

under the arm, so the man could swing his sword without any impediment.

And this, of course, made it very expensive armor.

Coats of mail were handed down from father to son.

But it didn't work on its own. If you put...

metal on your hand and get a friend to hit you with a metal stick, you'll find

it still hurts a lot.

What you need to do is put it over some padding, thick padding.

The idea of the mail is that it will take some of the sting.

It may even deflect and turn the blade.

But what you're really protecting against is the impact.

You can still get broken bones and severe bruising that would disable the

the battlefield.

For 600 years, the sword apparently doesn't change. They look very similar.

is a Viking -era sword, and this is a sword around the time of the First

Crusade, around the time of Robin Hood. But they're different in a number of

important ways.

On these swords...

The principle is leverage.

This pommel, this back part of the sword, levers against your hand. That's

you get over the inertia to fight it. It's quite a heavy blade.

Now with having a longer hand grip and a weightier pommel, now you've got

something that is counterbalanced and much more fluid. This begins much more

sophisticated systems of sword fighting.

And there were other ways to defeat that. Sometimes people would go for

-crushing things like a mace.

So the idea of the mace is you don't expect to get through the armor, but you

simply need to deliver the energy of the blow through the armor to break the

bones of the man within, disabling him from fighting. That's all you need to do

on the battlefield.

Another weapon that was used for that is the axe. Again, the blade of the axe.

can bite into the mail it probably won't go through it but it delivers that

shock to the man within all of these weapons were trying to defeat this armor

and this armor was trying to stand up to the weapons of the day it was an arms

race the armor and weaponry are not cheap The

price of armor and a horse in Robin Hood's day is the equivalent of a five

-bedroom house on a half -acre lot in a leafy suburb today.

The fact that medieval art for the most part only shows kings and nobles in full

-body armor reveals an important fact about warfare in the Middle Ages.

It's a rich man's game.

And during the lifetime of Robin Hood, no one embodied this lethal alliance

between wealth, power, and violence.

More than one man.

Our search for the real Robin Hood leads us to the one figure who is commonly

more exalted than Robin Hood himself, King Richard the Lionheart.

But is Richard's glorified place in the tales warranted?

Speak up!

When you had us herd two and a half thousand Muslim men, women, and children

together, the young woman at my feet,

With her hands bound, she looked up at me.

There wasn't fear in her eyes.

There wasn't anger.

There was only pity.

For she knew that when you gave the order, and our blades would descend upon

their heads, that in that moment we would be godless.

Richard the Lionheart was born in England and he was one of five sons of

II, John being the other well -known one.

His elder brothers died before him, which is why he came to the throne in

And he reigned in England for ten years, 1189 to 99.

As well as being king of England, Richard also ruled large areas of

If you think of Richard the Lionheart, he hardly spoke English at all, he spoke

French. You know, French was the language of court.

Aristocrats across Britain would have spoken French most of the time.

Richard didn't like England, hated the food and thought the weather was

and couldn't learn the language.

He had a very negative attitude about England and the English.

In fact, he did try to sell the city of London at one point but couldn't get a

buyer. And basically, you know, he was an assassin for the Pope and spent the

vast majority of his time as king on crusades.

He was a powerful, energetic king.

He's famous for his bravery in battle.

Known for being at the front of his troop.

His strategic brilliance.

Look what they do to the Lionheart!

He's also a very calculating, clever man. And he's also a man of conventional

religion. You wouldn't say he's the most pious king of England by a long, long

way. But he's motivated enough to go on crusade.

In 1187, the Muslims recaptured Jerusalem.

This was a terrible shock to Christianity.

The Pope was said to have died when he heard the news.

There was a real onus on everybody, all the powerful figures in the West, to

take the cross and recover the holy city.

And Richard was one of the first people to do so.

His progress to the Holy Land was pretty slow, always trying to make sure that

he got maximum money to finance his troops.

But when he got there, his impact was considerable.

the Muslims suddenly realized that they had a new and very dangerous opponent.

Richard began to march his troops down the coastline, defeated Saladin in a

couple of battles, again, a blow to the pride of the Muslim leader.

His opponent, Saladin, the two great figures, iconic figures of the age, have

been fighting each other for a couple of years. They're both physically

exhausted, both of them are ill a lot of the time, and they're running short of

money, and they've stretched the loyalty of their troops to the absolute limit.

In late 1192, the two of them make a truce.

Basically, Christians can enter the holy city as pilgrims, but the Muslims

maintain Jerusalem in their hands.

And after that, Richard goes home.

On his return, Richard got caught by the Germans, Gauls, and was ransomed for

three times the national budget for the royal crown.

While Richard is lingering in prison in Germany... A real source of worry to him

were the actions of his young brother, Prince John. You, who honored your

husband with eight children, so that even now, when death has taken the rest,

you have a king and the runt of the litter to call you mother.

John was a very unscrupulous man, desperate to increase his power, and he

Richard's imprisonment as a chance to take over.

A king!

does not bargain for the loyalty that every subject owes him. Without loyalty,

there is no kingdom. There is nothing.

I'm here to speak for Sir Walter Loxley.

Speak if you must.

I have marched from France to Palestine and back.

And I know in tyranny lies only failure.

john had even tried to bribe the people who were holding richard so that they

wouldn't let him back but when richard is ransomed by his mother and comes back

to england john has to make his peace with him and richard accepts that but

of john's supporters continue to hang out in castles around the country in

support of john and most famously at nottingham castle and richard actually

comes here with an army in 1194.

Richard the Lionheart has become associated with the tales of Robin Hood.

you look at the original tales, what you have to appreciate is that the king, he

is always seen as being good.

It is evil men who are causing bad things to happen. And if only the king

discover this, he would set everything to right.

So the way the legend has developed is that in the end, the king returns from

the Crusades and meets up with Robin, puts down the evil sheriff and

becomes right with the world again.

But Richard only stays in England for a very short while. He must go straight

back to France.

One of the first things on his agenda is to try to recover the territories in

southern France that were seized by Philip Augustus. He spends years going

around recovering castles, towns, territories.

And it's there in 1199 that the little castle of Chalut -Charol that a

crossbowman sees the king of England being a bit careless. He fires a

speculative shot at him, hits him in the shoulder.

and Richard dies.

How would the death of England's beloved ruler and war hero affect the world of

Robin Hood?

How would the Crusades permanently alter the course of English history?

For starters, it nearly broke the English crown, both financially and

politically. When Richard died in 1199, John really is the logical man to take

over. He is the younger brother of Richard.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, their mother, terribly influential figure, very

dominant woman, decides that John should be the man to take over.

Long live the king!

Long live the king!

John, by the time he got the crown and the seat, was fully bankrupt.

So John was angry, frustrated, and was really...

Head up of living in the shadow of his brother and his glorious father.

Richard's army is coming home.

Cost money to keep it together.

Marshall, you speak for the money. I do, sir.

But to disband the army could cost more than to keep it. King Richard's

campaigns were costly.

What is that to me, Marshall?

William Marshall was one of the most influential men of the day. He was a man

who came from very humble origin, yet through his deal on the tournament field

and the battlefield, he came to the attention of the royal family.

He was a trusted adherent of King Richard and very much helped the country

of stay stable when Richard was away on crusade and in prison.

When John became king, first of all, he was quite supportive of John and very

helpful.

Taxation. These are difficult times.

We can buy time.

I can send envoys to secure loans.

The crown is owed money at home. The northern barons plead poverty, but

always been the song of rich men.

Eventually they fell out.

and the Marshal disappeared into sort of semi -exile. But he's there as an

important figure in the background.

Sir John was left the horrible task of increasing the taxation hundredfold. So

he was really, really unpopular.

We'll honour King John! The bailiffs and the sheriff's men shall collect all

tax! As a ruler, John was frankly abysmal. He was a liar, a man who abused

his nobles.

He took endless amounts of money from them again and again and again.

He often took their wives, which obviously angered them immensely.

He gets involved in struggles with the church.

He is a man who oppresses the people ceaselessly.

He's also a pretty hopeless general.

Part of the problem, part of the reason he needs so much money is because he

keeps losing battles in France.

There's a loss of territory. The power and the strength of the English crown

diminishes with John.

All we need is about us.

Armor, helmets, swords.

And we make England wealthy men.

With horses and gold.

Sheep, they smiled upon us at last.

And I, for one, shall not turn my back on her.

Could the real Robin Hood survive a treacherous life in the forest without

best tools at his disposal?

And was the horse the tool that would level the battlefield for the working

class hero, Robin Hood?

This is a war horse, a fierce fighting horse.

Fiery stallions like this are what knights rode into battle.

in the impact charge, riding knee to knee.

This was an impenetrable wall of muscle.

And in the melee, they're very maneuverable, and you can cut and stab

the enemy all about.

But these were very expensive horses.

Expensive to buy, expensive to train, and very expensive to feed. They needed

sophisticated agricultural system to support them. They needed high -quality

grain. This was not an ordinary person's horse.

the Rolls -Royce of horses and was only used for war. You wouldn't travel on a

horse like this. These precious horses were led along the forest tracks if they

were going from town to town. If you were traveling, you would need a

different type of horse. What you need for traveling is a horse like this, an

ambler or a palfrey.

Horses like this, if you look at medieval manuscripts, all the travelers

horses like this, short, stocky, Good weight -bearing horses.

Tremendous for endurance.

This, in fact, is an Icelandic horse.

And what makes them so ideal for traveling is they have a fifth gait.

only walk and trot and canter and gallop, they amble. They

do this.

They have this very peculiar walk, and they can keep it up.

for hour after hour after hour and it's very comfortable and it's very untiring

for the rider so whereas the big glamorous war horses were the the

cars of the middle ages this is what everybody rode for comfort and from

from a to b and i think it's also probably the sort of horse that robin

would have ridden But now, with the rise of the middle class, with the yeoman,

you've got ordinary people owning horses, and ordinary people with a need

travel. They need to travel to sell their goods, to sell their merchandise,

prosper. But by traveling, they also spread ideas.

These forest roads were the first information superhighway, and the word

freedom spread throughout the land.

Was it Robin Hood's experiences in the Crusades that gave him the power to

change the lives of the oppressed people of England?

There is no difference between a knight and any other man, aside from what he

wears.

One of the core problems you've got when you approach Robin Hood is that the

last 100 years of cinema have oversimplified this tale.

Robin Hood and taking Robin from...

what was obviously a working -class background originally, and put him in a

situation where he is either a maligned or forgotten royal.

Whether Robin was a serf or a yeoman, I don't know. We make him in this, we

decide to make him a yeoman, a yeoman bowman.

So we thought that was a nice way of giving Robin an absolute in terms

of, yes, he is a working -class boy. Is he handsome?

Yes.

In the way that yeomen sometimes are, when they're sober.

The great upheaval caused by the Crusades led to the birth of the class

who would later make Robin Hood a legend.

To understand who they were, we have to first understand the structure of

English society at the time.

We have huge social change in a century between sort of 1180 and 1280, which is

the century during which...

A Robin Hood figure would have existed, did exist, if he existed. It's going to

be in that period of tremendous turbulent social change and the birth of

yeoman classes.

The entrenched class system of medieval Europe, feudalism, grows out of the

turmoil left after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

Without Roman order to keep the peace, tribes and warlords acquire wealth and

power through one means alone.

Power basically rests with the might of the sword.

You've got people who are based in their castles, and through growing in

strength, they've acquired control over a certain district.

We have to imagine this period being a time where wealth is in the land above

all. You have fast farms, and these farms produce agricultural produce, and

can then, of course, be turned into liquid wealth, into money. Then you are

wealthy man.

The more land a man conquers, the more powerful and wealthy he becomes. If he

gains enough power, conquers enough land, then, simply put, he becomes king.

What the feudal system is about, it's a king at the top distributing the

land which he rules amongst his followers, keeping part of it for

distributing vast... tracts of land amongst great men, and the return was

given by these men turning up with armed men to create the army of the King of

England.

Gentlemen, we go to war.

Forward! With fighting as their primary obligation to the crown, the barons and

noblemen of England are also its warrior clans.

A knight is not only a fighting man, he is a wealthy, powerful landowner as

well. Class and power are synonymous. Common man, the peasant, has only one

purpose in feudal society, labor.

Kings set in place a number of rules which essentially made it very difficult

for an individual person to fend for themselves.

Sir Robert. Good morning, Joseph.

Emma. You had a God -given place in society. The priests... prayed for your

soul, the knights protected you. Your job as a peasant was to produce the food

and pay your taxes so that the others could live.

But if you tried to change your position in society, this was like an

earthquake. You know, you destroy humanity by seeking to do that.

But with the economic and social changes brought on by the Crusades, an entirely

new class of men began to emerge in England.

a class of men who not only fell outside the economic and political barriers of

the feudal system, they would eventually rise up and destroy it.

Robin Hood, in many of the legends, was from the yeoman classes, and that is a

status of society which is sort of the proto -middle class.

Middle class hasn't really arrived yet, but the yeoman are beginning to own land

or free trade.

Nowadays we think of a yeoman as a free farmer.

But at the time, yeomen, one of the key meanings of the word, was an attendant

for a great lord.

Of course, violence is a natural part of that lifestyle.

It goes without saying the Robin Hood stories appeal to the class of men.

The yeomans were often a force that demographically shifted the way that

medieval warfare was conducted.

The yeomans were not associated with the big sort of cavalry charges that were

more kind of allocated to knights who could afford expensive armor and weapons

and horses.

Hardened by life in the forest, fighting would have been a way of life for the

yeoman that associated with Robin Hood in these desperate times would hope.

sprang from Robin Hood and his men's legendary fighting skills.

Many men, humble men, poorer men, would flock to the medieval battlefield armed

with just a simple old sling, throwing stones at the enemy, or men with staff.

Simple staff.

This is as good a weapon as you can get. It can be used long form to fight at

reach and at a distance.

It can be used short form, in close, to lever and wrestle your opponent to the

ground. It can be used to bludgeon, to crack heads, to break bones. It's an

extremely strong and powerful weapon.

Other men were armed with just a dagger.

They would get in close.

They could get under the bellies of the horses and get their daggers in. They

could pull these expensive knights from their saddles and cut their throats.

And like all martial art, that requires training. And there was a huge culture

of martial training in the Middle Ages. For sword and shield, we have manuscript

evidence showing us that they trained at the Pell.

That's a big wooden post.

And they trained with heavy wooden swords, it says.

Double the weight of a real sword, so it builds your muscles up.

With a heavy sword and an extra heavy shield, men would practice their

working around the Pell, slamming it with their shield. So the shield's also

weapon. You can use the edges of the shield, smash that against the Pell,

the pommel against the Pell, work round, backstrokes, working around this post,

improving your footwork as you go. That was a daily exercise.

There was another type of shield, the buckler.

which was especially favored as an archer's weapon.

If you're an archer, you're mostly carrying your bow.

But there's a threat in the close of battle that you may need to engage with

hand to hand.

You don't want a great clumsy shield to carry along because you need to ply your

bow. But a buckler just hangs over your sword hilt. In fact, it

clatters. It swashes.

Hence the expression swashbuckler, as you swagger along.

So these swashbuckling archers had these. They worked like steel fists.

So you can punch the enemy with them. You deflect his blows to the side rather

than blocking them. You can use the pommel of your sword to smash in the

You're using the whole sword.

It's a very fluid, universal system.

And what's interesting, there's a manuscript where you see men being

by a monk.

We have images of Shaolin monks and that whole tradition of monks being martial

art experts. Well, here it is in Europe, round about the time of Robin Hood and

Friar Tuck.

Perhaps he was a holy man who had come back from the Crusades and was therefore

so skilled with his fighting arts.

But either way, this is very much the type of weapon that Robin and the Merry

Men would have used. The sword and the buckler.

But one weapon forever came to symbolize both the newfound power of the yeoman

class and the might of Robin Hood.

Jimmy!

Calm and careful. Make it count. Go!

The bow and arrow frees you up. You don't have to be right next to your

banquet that person.

Although

the

longbow is the iconic weapon of Robin Hood, the iconic weapon of the European

Middle Ages, it wasn't invented in the Middle Ages.

Longbows have been found as old as the Stone Age. They're Neolithic.

Now, bows and arrows were used widely on the ancient battlefield. The Egyptians

used them, the Romans used them, the Greeks used them. Everybody used archery

the battlefield.

Except during the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th century, battlefield archery sort of

out of fashion. It came back in 1066 with the Norman invasion of Britain.

William the Conqueror came with infantry, cavalry and archers.

And it was that combined forces that won the day.

Where the longbow prevailed was in guerrilla warfare.

Small band working through the woods, picking people off, sniping. That's what

the bow was perfect for.

The bow was the outlaw's weapon, the forester's weapon.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, bowmen were to be found in the forests.

They were either the foresters themselves or they were the outlaws they

trying to hunt down.

The longbow particularly was an extremely powerful weapon. There is a

It's a practical thing. This is what you hunt with.

It's also what you fight with.

From the late 1200s into the early 1300s, a new class of bowmen arrived.

the yeoman bowman, the professional soldier.

Now, in the Hundred Years' War, which happened in the 14th to early 15th

century, these yeoman found great employment in England's armies.

Archers were needed in their thousands upon thousands.

England was a relatively poor country compared to, say, france or other foes

a knight in armor by then was a very expensive piece of war machinery to put

the field but you could pay your yeoman bowman a reasonable wage for them they

thought they were getting a pretty good wage so they were professional soldiers

with a good wage bringing down these very expensive french knights and they

also the first audience for the robin hood tales

They identified with a hero bowman.

So this is a replica of an English longbow.

Exactly the sort of weapon that Robin Hood would have used. As you can see,

a longbow, a long wooden bow.

In fact, there's no such thing as a short wooden bow.

It's a misconception.

If you want to draw something this sort of length, you have to have this much

wood. If I don't have this much wood and I try and draw it to my full draw, then

probably what will happen is it will break. So it's a long bow. But to give

its power, it's shaped. And the classic shape of the longbow is this V -shaped

cross -section. This arched part here is called the belly of the bow. And that's

what stacks up to...

restore the kinetic image of the bow. That's the muscles of the bow. And then

this is the back of the bow, and it resists tension, stops it exploding and

pulling apart.

So the shaping, the crafting of a bow is a highly skilled operation.

During the Middle Ages, they made bows from oak and ash, and elm was especially

popular, but the wood that was most sought after was yew.

Robin Hood would have used a yew bow given a choice because it is the king of

bowwood. It performs the best of all the woods that we have here.

Right, what we've got here is a bow made of yew, and as you can see, there's two

colours, the sapwood and the heartwood. This is taken from the outer part of the

yew tree.

It's a very elastic material.

The yew tree gives you a cross -section in nature that is a lamination. It's a

composite wood that occurs in nature.

This dark heartwood, that's what's the belly of the bow. That's the muscle

storage. It really resists compression, really storing up tremendous energy when

you draw the bow.

A lot of strain there. So this sapwood, this light wood on the outside is like

the skeleton, stopping it breaking apart. So you've got muscle and skeleton

giving you an extremely powerful and accurate weapon.

What we've got is a large chunk of yew taken from a fairly large yew tree.

And again, you can see this has been sawn into what we call a bow stave. So

it's taken from the tree and processed like this, we call it a stave.

And if we're working in the woods, this is the kind of tool that everybody had

in the Middle Ages. Everybody had axes and knives.

That's the kind of tool that we'd have used to prepare the bow stave.

Once the bow is shaped, it is fitted with a string, spun from either flax

or hemp, then bonded together with beeswax.

The first guy that trained me with the bow and arrow, he asked me, are you

enjoying this?

I said, yeah, I really am enjoying this.

There's something about it that I really like. He goes, well, what is that

something? I said to him that for me, it was the flight of the arrow.

It was the excitement of the moment that the arrow left the string.

More specifically, how it arced through the air.

It's not a torpedo. It's not a missile.

It's a living thing.

The energy has been balled up behind it and is trying to find its way through

the shaft.

An arrow swims.

And on the battlefields of the Hundred Years' War with the English kings

the French at Crecy and Agincourt and Poitiers, then they were using arrows

like this.

Arrows to pierce armour.

The idea would be that you would wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

They're all shooting level when they're shooting in battle.

And that's because arrows are very expensive.

There are a lot of things in an arrow. An expensive head that has to be forged.

A shaft that has to be planed out of a square piece of timber.

Flights that have to be cut and put on and then bound on with thread. A horn

piece of insert into the nock so that it doesn't split. This is expensive

ammunition and it needs to count.

So you have to wait until they are close.

In the forest, it's a different question altogether.

In the forest, it's not mass volumes of arrows, it's one arrow carefully

selected to bring down that deer or to halt that traveller with his rich booty.

The huge dependency on yeoman archers during the 13th,

14th and even 15th century meant that laws were introduced.

requiring yeomen to practice at the butt. Men between 16 and 65,

every Sunday morning, had to practice at the butt, an earth mound as a target.

But in the forest, there were also laws that prohibited the carrying of sharp

arrows. That might get the king's venison.

So what we see in manuscripts in the forest is they're carrying blunts.

That's also a perfectly good hunting arrow.

If you're hunting birds or you're hunting rabbits or hares, a blunt will

and, in fact, not spoil the meat for the table.

And it will also stick into an earth spot.

So if you're caught with a bow and arrow in the forest, it had better be with a

hunting blunt.

If you wanted to kill a deer, however, you would need something like that.

So if Robin Hood was made an outlaw, because he was caught poaching the

venison, then he was out in the forest with something like this.

And there could be no mistake of what he intended it for.

Despite the fact that a single arrow could bring down a fully armored knight,

there was only one thing that would bring the outlaw Robin Hood to his

I sleep with a dagger.

If you so much as move to touch me, I will sever your manhood. You understand?

Thanks for the warning.

No figure in the Robin Hood stories more dramatically reflects changing societal

values over the centuries than does Maid Marian.

When Marian meets Robin, she's not swept off her feet. She's suspicious more

than anything. And she keeps throwing these tests at Robin to see how he

actually... comes up, you know.

Heidi, you're going blind. Are you looking for charity?

Are you the keeper of this house?

A manner of speaking, yes.

Maid Marian, I'm afraid, is a late addition and is a real character in her

right before joining Robin.

Prior talk in Maid Marian enter maybe, you know, 200, 300 years after the Robin

Hood ballads really get started as a kind of influx from another popular

tradition. probably as part of the May Day traditions, the May Games.

I think it's important for us when we look back at the Middle Ages and the

of Robin Hood to realise that everything you did is based on the seasons.

And winter, of course, was the time when you prepared for winter by killing the

bulk of your animals because you could not keep them through the winter.

You were scared stiff of a bad autumn crop.

where you did not bring in enough to keep you going through the winter.

So the May Games were part of the seasonal way of celebrating the return

weather.

The May Games were a rustic, very noisy, very drunken, no doubt, part of the May

celebrations. Oh, a man could get very affectionate here. I haven't seen so

women for so few men outside of Nunnery.

It's the power of the forest. It's the world, the pagan world that's really

enticing and the kind of the rule of nature.

And I think that that's sort of what the green man represents.

The only earlier example of Maid Marian will perhaps surprise modern enthusiasts

for the legend because she is a bawdy, fat, dancing

pantomime dame figure.

Played, of course, by a man and played comically.

She is a symbol of fecundity in the May celebrations.

And I don't know if I can say it, a prick or a prancer, a terror of feats, a

waggler of bollocks while other men sleep.

You can cut that, can't you?

So she's not at all a dignified figure.

And the only man she's in a sexual relationship with is the bawdy, Raya,

Robin.

Marion's sexually promiscuous representation in the May Games is a

reflection of one of the commonly held beliefs about women at the time.

A man's attitude to women in the 16th, 17th century is quite appalling.

I think she's probably quite, probably rightly in that particular age, quite

suspicious of men, always thinking that they want something.

Representations of women often ran to extremes, two of the extreme types.

of women were eve on the one hand and the virgin mary on the other

from the beginning of the tale

robin is a devotee of the virgin mary you will do no woman any harm no company

any harm that a woman is in in contrast to eve mary was seen as the

virgin as

not sexual, as completely spiritual, as pure.

Maid Mary and Dodge have two roles, and this is very, very important to the

tales and to the survival of the tales, because in the late 16th century, she

has this role as an aristocrat, and here you're talking about courtly love and

the ideal woman, and there's nothing naughty ever happens in the forest.

Maid Marian as Robin Hood's girlfriend doesn't appear until the 1590s, when

an Elizabethan playwright, Anthony Munday, created one of several

stage plays.

And in them, Robin swears an oath that he will remain faithful to her forever

until they can eventually get married.

And so that's very much a reflection of the courtly tradition.

The courtly love tradition is normally associated as beginning with the

troubadours in 11th century France.

There is usually an image of the beloved or perhaps some type of secret lover

within the song.

Often in these songs, the joy that goes along with fantasizing about the lover,

fantasizing about the sex.

is also connected to the joy of composing the song.

Courtly love does not mean that you end up with the woman. Courtly love means

you do things for that woman symbolically. You go out and perform

show your love for that woman.

Courtly love sees woman as someone who needs to be put on a pedestal and

worshiped from afar.

And of course, here you also have symbols and representations of women.

You have woman on the one hand set up on a pedestal, and on the other hand,

woman is who tempted Adam into sin.

Out of these two extreme stereotypes, a single version of Maid Marian eventually

emerges over 200 years after her first appearance in the legend.

The great time for Robin and Marion as a love story is the Victorians. It's the

19th century.

And there you see again Marion reappearing as the great love interest

life. Once before I said goodbye to a man going to war.

He never came back.

That's been nice.

Again, at taste, nothing happens in the Greenwood that shouldn't. They will wait

until they are married. And, of course, in the end, with the Victorians, in

their story, they're married by Richard the Lionheart when he comes back from

the Crusades. And this is one of the great moments of the story.

Robin would have been married in this building.

Well, not exactly in this building. He would have been married at the door,

because in those days you got married at the church door rather than inside.

But since that time, in the 14th century, the church was extended. So he

have got married at that spot there, which is where the church would have

in the 12th century.

The church would have been built about five years before King Richard the

Lionheart came to the throne. He was the son of Henry II.

King Henry II had had his Archbishop Thomas Becket murdered, and as a result

to do penance by building a number of stone churches around the country, this

being one of them. And we remember that story with his stone head, which is just

up there.

And opposite it, on the other side, we have Thomas Becket, who was his

Archbishop, and they continue their feud to this day, peering at each other

across the aisle.

Though the Victorians view the marriage of Robin Hood and Maid Marian as the

perfect ending to their perfect Victorian love story, the 20th century

Marian finally becomes a fuller character in her own right, enjoying

equality with Robin Hood.

Her sense of playing the traditional female role has been non -existent

as the story in this particular film happens, her husband, they had one night

together and then he left to go on the crusade.

So she's presiding over a village that has no men.

In her own small way, fighting for the rights of the villagers who she, for

of a better word, presides over.

During the 20th century, if you look at Robin Hood for children, the way in

which... Marion is presented is almost like a survey history of changing 20th

century attitudes towards girls and women and their fears

And by the time we get to Robin McKinley's Robin Hood book for children,

in the 1970s, there are a large number of strong women or girl characters here.

And Marion herself really becomes virtually the leader of the gang. For

she's a better archer, even than Robin Hood.

And towards the end, it is proposed...

that after the evil Sheriff of Nottingham has been defeated, that

should become the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The story of Robin Hood, Maid Marian and the Merry Men, is not merely about the

adventures of a single outlaw and his band of followers.

Our search for the real Robin Hood ultimately leads us to a point in

When man's struggle for justice, equality, and rule of law would take a

step forward.

The laws of this land enslave people to its king.

A king who demands loyalty but offers nothing in return.

I think the core value of Robin Hood, the robbing from the rich to give to the

poor, is the thing that's going to survive.

We haven't approached that core.

from a literal money sense.

We've jumped off from there into a metaphor, and that's why we've shifted

timeline and put it into the era of the Magna Carta and our redress of the

balance. Our robbing from the rich is their rights and privileges.

Between about 1180 and 1280, there was tremendous social...

And it's a very important century for changes in social structure, in law, in

the rights of man.

And then, of course, famously in 1215, the Magna Carta.

This Charter of Rights was written by your father.

There are the names of all the barons that signed the Charter.

Fitzrobert, Baldwin, Marshall, and myself.

What he wanted was a charter. The Magna Carta, at the time, was an attempt by

the barons of England.

Take control of John and control him.

You build a country like you build a cathedral. From the ground up.

Empower every man.

And you will gain strength.

He was a brutal, unpleasant monarch who took so much money from people that they

had to start fighting back.

We have paid in money and men for King Richard's wars.

And we have no more to give.

John needs more money to fight his battles in France, as Richard had done

him, but John does not have the strength of personality or sheer psychopathic

nature, I reckon, that Richard had, and has great difficulty in getting that

money off the barons, who eventually come close to rising up against him.

John at this point meets with the barons in London and they sit down at

Runnymede on the Thames just outside London and John signs the Magna Carta,

Great Carta.

He promises that the king should not be above the law. He promises he should not

impose any unjust taxes.

By the insistence of his knights and his barons and the dukes that he must pay

attention to them, he must listen to them. It's the beginning of a kind of

sense of parliament.

Of course, most important for the rest of it is the start of the writ of habeas

corpus. If someone is imprisoned innocently, you can demand their

This is a definite sea change in the relationship between a king and his

But John, as soon as the barons have left London again, gets the support of

Pope and dumps Magna Carta.

We look to you!

Look to your estate!

Civil war breaks out between John and his barons in the fall of 1215.

Not surprisingly, John conducts the war ruthlessly, ordering devastating raids

on the countryside.

John heads up to the north of England again to try and rally his supporters.

Nottingham Castle was held for John by Philip March, his sheriff in the area at

the time. But John falls ill and dies at Newark Castle in 1216.

To general relief, King John dies a fittingly inglorious death from

October. His nine -year -old son, Henry III, is placed on the throne and the

Magna Carta is reissued in his name.

The reality is that the Magna Carta is a deal between barons and kings.

So as much as it may be associated historically with the Declaration of

Independence, in truth, the Magna Carta doesn't reset the table.

for all men.

It only resets the title for some men.

It has come to represent far, far more than that. It's representation of the

idea that no one is above the law.

It's representation of the idea that no one should be falsely imprisoned.

These are important things worldwide.

Given that Robin Hood allegedly lived during the first part of the 12th

can a link be made between the Magna Carta and the real Robin Hood?

There is nothing in the tales that link Robin Hood to Magna Carta. But what

there is, is clear understanding that people knew about corrupt lords.

Choose carefully the spot where you would place your dagger.

But I will choose carefully as well.

They knew about a wealthy church that had ceased caring about the people and

only interested in itself.

And these things told in popular tales suggest, you know, popular support for

those concepts.

I think that's probably as close as you'll get for a direct relationship

the two.

The most telling link between the Magna Carta and the people who embrace and

spread the tales of Robin Hood is found in Article 39, which reads,

No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or deprived of his property

or outlawed or exiled unless by legal judgment of his peers.

This article, in essence, creates for the yeoman class, the rising middle

the conditions it needs to thrive under the protection of common law.

Before that, people were owned.

After that, they were still owned a little bit. Nothing was put right

But it was a time of awareness.

The yeoman class eventually succeeds in bringing the ideals of liberty,

equality, and justice to the modern world.

And no hero embodies their values and hopes more than Robin Hood.

A hero who represented that spirit in man was vital. And that is

where Robin Hood came from.

In the end, this may be the real Robin Hood.

The real reason.

His story lives on.

We can't prove he lived. We can't prove he didn't live. But I do think that's

irrelevant. It's far more interesting to me that there are tales about him that

still live. And it's far more interesting to me that this man, if he

existed, ceased to be a person and became a hero.

He is a true hero. He is just an adventurer who gets out there and does.

You must take the sword to my father.

It will bring me peace.

It's courtesy, it's willingness to help people, it's kindness with prisoners,

it's willingness to treat women properly.

Alongside that, who doesn't want to fight against corrupt officials?

Who across the world does not recognise the idea of corruption amongst those in

power?

Even in our own century, we are still telling tales about Robin Hood,

reinventing and retelling the story, because every generation needs to

understand the spirit of Robin Hood.

It's always going to be the same thing, robbing from the roots and give to the

poor, redressing the balance. That's the core of Robin Hood. That's why it

lasted so long, and that's why it'll continue to last, because there's still

balance that needs to be redressed.

And that hasn't changed.

So that's why I don't think that Robin Hood will fade away.