While the previous generation of fifteenth-century English historians was preoccupied with the structure of political and social life, the current generation is increasingly interested in attitudes and ideas. Important recent works such as Philippa Maddern's Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (1992), John Watts's Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996), the collection of essays edited by Rosemary Horrox under the title Fifteenth Century Attitudes (1997), and Michael Hicks's English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (2002) have all demonstrated the great possibilities of this approach for a period that until recently was largely dominated by Namierite political analysis. However, with the exception of some of the essays in Horrox's collection, most of these works have dealt with attitudes concerning aristocracy and government. Anthony Pollard has now produced a work that, taking the late-medieval Robin Hood tales as a point of departure, attempts to understand the attitudes of common Englishmen toward topics ranging from the nature of wilderness and their understanding of their own social geography to law and violence, religion, authority, and social order.

Pollard's purpose is “to relate the words of the late-medieval Robin Hood texts to the experienced world of the people who first knew them” (x–xi), a difficult task (he calls it the “postmodern bind”) familiar to modern literary analysis, but which he achieves with a characteristic English empiricism and without reference to the usual (usually French) suspects of that discipline. An introductory chapter discusses the Robin Hood tales themselves, their evolution and dating, establishing his fundamental premise that the “dominant narrative,” the Gest of Robyn Hood, dates from the later fifteenth century and therefore can be taken to speak to us about the ideas and attitudes of the people of that period.

A second chapter considers the touchy question of audience, and in particular the definition of “yeomen” (which the Gest explicitly identifies as its audience) as a social rank or group. Pollard's argument is that Robin, while he partakes of other senses of the word as meaning a generalized “middling sort” between gentry and commoner or more specifically as a rank of household officer, was meant to be understood as belonging to a third category: forest officials or “yeomen of the forest” (55). The argument is persuasive, but the discussion itself, of social categories, great households, and the administration of forests in the fifteenth century, is very interesting if all too brief.

Having addressed the questions of text and audience, Pollard moves to the heart of the book: four chapters on, respectively, “Crime, Violence and the Law,” “Religion and the Religious,” “Fellowship and Fraternity,” and “Authority and the Social Order.” Pollard's point in the first of these chapters is that Robin Hood's violence reflects a fifteenth-century perception of violence as “cleansing” and “restorative” (108) when it is used to uphold legitimate authority. The kinds of crime most associated with Robin Hood, poaching and highway robbery, were not likely to make him seem genuinely criminal; laws against poaching were more often observed in the breach than strictly enforced at least until the reign of Henry VII, while highway robbery was sufficiently rare that actual highwaymen could be rhetorically associated with Robin Hood himself. If not really criminal Robin Hood and his men are certainly violent, but their violence is righteously directed against the unjust; Pollard suggests that this is a reflection of an older chivalric attitude that allowed and even exalted violence in an honorable cause.

Faith and fellowship are inherently ambiguous concepts. The religious attitudes expressed in the Gest are a combination of conventional piety, especially devotion to the Marian cult, and anticlericalism, particularly directed against monasticism. Pollard's conclusion is that these attitudes reflect “a particular aspect of lay religiosity” (132) on the eve of the Reformation and that their presence in the Robin Hood stories may reflect a much wider anticlericalism than has recently been accepted by pre-Reformation religious historians. In dissecting the meaning of fellowship, Pollard identifies several different senses of fellowship including religious guilds and fraternities; in connection with the chivalric qualities of the story, a very interesting aspect of this chapter is the examples he gives of “fellowship” being used in the sense of a military retinue or mesnie.

In his chapter on “Authority and the Social Order,” Pollard explores the subversive character of the Robin Hood tales, arguing that while elements of the stories could endorse concepts of social order, for the “disaffected” of late-medieval England the outlaw offered an alternative social order set in the “freedom of the greenwood” (177). He notes, however, that this is not evidence of an anachronistic revolutionary ideology: the common population shared an essentially conservative concept of the “common weal” with their masters, as the manifestos of Cade's Revolt and other fifteenth-century popular rebellions demonstrate. Most interestingly, he connects the Robin Hood stories with the tradition of loyal protest, the appeal to the “good old laws” and the king as their guarantor, as opposed to the king's “evil councillors” or others who use authority to wicked ends.

Two concluding chapters, on “history and memory” and on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on pre-Reformation attitudes and perceptions, provide insights equally interesting to those found in the rest of the volume. Considering its brevity, this is a stimulating and often provocative book, which will no doubt appeal to a general readership, but which has much to offer the specialist.