Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow

If you walk deep enough into the heart of Nottinghamshire, where the ancient oaks of Sherwood Forest stretch their gnarled, mossy arms toward the sky, you can almost hear the whisper of a bowstring. It is a quiet rushing sound, like a sudden intake of breath among the leaves, followed by the deep, satisfying thrum of seasoned wood returning to its shape. This is a story from England, born more than 600 years ago in the songs and ballads that people used to sing by winter fires. In those days, books were rare and precious things, written by hand on sheepskin. But stories belonged to anyone who had a voice to sing them and an ear to listen. Over those six centuries, this tale has been told in many different ways. Some say the hero was a fallen nobleman. Others say he was a simple yeoman of the woods. But in every telling, he is the same. A man in a coat of Lincoln green, with a laugh that could shake the acorns from the twigs, and a bow that never missed its mark. His name, of course, was Robin Hood. To understand Robin, you must first understand the forest of Sherwood and the strange hard laws that governed it. In the medieval England of this story, the forest did not belong to the people who lived near it. It belonged to the king. Under the strict forest laws of the Norman rulers, the greenwood was a private larder for the royal court. The red deer that moved like ghosts through the ferns were more heavily protected than the peasants who farmed the rocky soil of the forest edges. If a starving man, desperate to feed his pale and hollow-eyed children through a bitter winter, was caught taking so much as a single hair from the brush, the punishment was swift and terrible. He might lose his hand, his eyes, or his life on the gallows. At the same time, the king's tax collectors, led by the powerful sheriff of Nottingham, rode from village to village, taking the last silver pennies from the peasants' pockets to pay for distant wars and grand stone castles. Robin Hood had not started his life planning to be an outlaw. He had once been a man of the villages, a freeholder who loved the open air and the skill of the longbow. But there came a day when he saw a neighbor dragged from his cottage by the sheriff's men for the crime of gathering fallen firewood in the king's preserve. When Robin spoke out against the cruelty, the soldiers turned on him. To save his own skin, he had to run. He fled into the deep trackless paths of Sherwood, where the law of the castle could not easily follow. In the eyes of the law, the moment Robin stepped into the forest as a fugitive, he became an outlaw. This was a heavy, frightening word. It literally meant he was outside the law. He had no rights, no protection, and no recourse. Anyone could kill him on sight and receive a reward from the sheriff. Yet, instead of hiding in fear, Robin found a strange kind of freedom under the greenwood canopy. He began to gather others who had been broken or cast out by the harsh laws of the land. There was Will Scarlet, whose back still bore the scars of the sheriff's whips. Friar Tuck, a jolly but fierce monk who believed that God cared more for the hungry than for the rich abbots in their gilded monasteries. And Maid Marion, a woman of sharp wit and noble birth, who had traded the stifling court for the liberty of the leaves. And of course, there was Little John. He was called little because he stood nearly seven feet tall, with shoulders as broad as an oak door and a heart to match. He had fought Robin on a narrow footbridge when they first met, tumbling the outlaw leader into the stream with a stout staff, and they had been inseparable brothers ever since. Together, this band of outlaws created their own kingdom beneath the branches, a kingdom where the rules…

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