The Real Robin Hood

So let's set the stage for our story.

Let's look at England in the year 1066.

Now, this year is significant because this is the year that an army of Normans invade England and take over, led by a guy who will become known to history as William the Conqueror.

Now the Normans are a fascinating group of people.

They come from the region in France called Normandy, but many of them were originally Norsemen or Vikings who settled there in the 900s, about 150 years prior.

And they intermarried with local women, they now speak French, but they retain an incredibly militaristic attitude.

They are very effective warriors.

And Normans are busy leaving Normandy and building their own kingdoms all over the place, not just in England.

Some of them went down to southern Italy and Sicily and built kingdoms over there.

Some of them headed over to Constantinople to serve in the Varangian Guard.

You can find Normans renowned for their fighting ability all over Europe in the Middle Ages at this time.

But what this means for England is a massive displacement of the existing population, and especially their nobles and leaders, who were predominantly Anglo-Saxon.

So the Normans come in, the Norman king is now running England, and that means his personal retinue of Norman knights and nobles are going to be landowners.

And that means land that used to be owned by Anglo-Saxons is taken and awarded to Norman nobles.

So you're going to have a lot of disenfranchised and angry Anglo-Saxons as a result.

And one of the significant things about Norman rule is that the Norman kings were absolutely mad about hunting.

It was their favorite sport.

And what they do when they take over England is they bring with them this concept of forest law.

The idea here is that there are going to be large chunks of land that are reserved exclusively for the use of the king.

so that only he is allowed to hunt animals in those chunks of land.

And this land was not just land that belonged specifically to the king.

It was also land that was found all over England that the Norman kings basically roped off and said, we'll take this, this, this, this, this.

These pieces of land are all covered by forest law, and therefore only the king can use this land.

So wild animals, specifically things like deer, boar, and even hares or wild rabbits, were protected by forest law.

It was illegal for anybody else to hunt and kill these animals.