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”. 

Medieval social hierarchy divided England roughly into three “estates”, according to historian Ian Mortimer: the lords who governed, the clergy who prayed, and everyone else who worked. But as Mortimer also shows, there was huge variation among workers. Pop-history sometimes caricatures feudal life as starkly divided between lords and grubby, miserable peons after the fashion of Monty Python, or perhaps Baldrick in Blackadder. But in reality, the workers’ estate varied immensely — notably in how free they were. 

“Villeins” were tied to a great estate, and entitled to work a portion of its land in exchange labour. They were, in a sense, part of the estate’s “property” and estates that changed hands were sold complete with tied villeins. But over time, and at accelerating pace after the Black Death in the 14th century, much freer working-class groups emerged: the yeomen. Some of these, Mortimer explains, were small farmers with a freehold on their land — a class that gained in prominence with the sharp population fall after the plague. Others might be tradesmen who, again, could command much higher wages due to the labour shortage. 

Meanwhile, over the Hundred Years’ War, yeomen had also become strongly associated with the development of semi-professional soldiery — and particularly with England’s increasingly lethal longbowmen. As one military historian describes, these highly skilled archers came increasingly to typify the rising importance accorded to merit, over inherited rank.

By the time Robin Hood was first mentioned in Piers Plowman, the yeomen’s real-world independence created a class far less compliant than indentured villeins. It was yeomen who led the so-called “Peasants’ Revolt” which erupted in 1381 against John of Gaunt’s excessive taxation. 

Robin Hood emerges, then, as a folkloric representation of this emerging middle class. But in a twist that perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the risks of lawlessness attached to yeomen’s relative freedom, he was also depicted as an outlaw. In medieval justice, this category was reserved for criminals deemed so dangerous they were denied all protection of the law. But in an England whose total population was about half that of modern London, such fugitives would simply flee to forests or other under-populated areas, where they would survive on a mixture of foraging, poaching, and banditry. 

There were many such gangs in the medieval English wilderness, meaning travellers were wise to travel with armed retainers, or as we might call them today “thugs”. But unlike Robin, most historic leaders of outlaw gangs were minor aristocrats, and these gangs would rob, rape, and kill anyone. By contrast, the Robin Hood of early folklore is a yeoman and skilled archer, like the soldiers of the Hundred Years’ War — and while he’s often violent, early stories often emphasise that he directs his attacks only at priests and lords. 

The medieval Robin combines Christian piety with violent contempt for actual priests, and displays a kind of class solidarity even across formal differences in social rank: he often shows sympathy to impoverished knights, while scorning, scamming, or even murdering great lords. In one 15th-century work, The Gest of Robin Hood, for example, Robin lends money to a poor knight so he can reclaim his lands from a villainous abbot. Later, Little John has a huge punch-up with another lord’s personal chef only for both men to shake hands, get drunk together, rob the lord and return to Robin in the greenwood.

The sense that emerges is of a germinal middle class, finding an imaginative language for self-representation. Overall, the sensibility that emanates is volatile, competitive, bloodthirsty, and full of lust for life: a hardy group, independent-minded to the point of recklessness, and shaped against the impersonal forces of church and governance by luck, courage, and in-group loyalty. They are recognisably the class of loyal, warlike Englishmen whom Samuel Johnson would describe in 1760 as possessing “a kind of epidemick bravery”. 

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This pious, violent, sentimental but always fiercely vital character couldn’t be further from the purse-lipped, curtain-twitching sensibility commonly associated with England’s modern middle class. This transformation began in the 19th century; it too can be traced via that era’s reimagining of Robin Hood, from the merry and violent medieval hero into the version whose disappearance from Nottingham Building Society has caused such a kerfuffle.

Johnson’s description of “epidemick bravery” among the English soldiery was written amid yet another round of war with France, now intensified and globalised by these rival nations’ competition for colonial territories. Just four years after that conflict concluded with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Sir Walter Scott defined Robin Hood for Britain’s era of peak nationalism, in his epic three-novel reimagining of 12th-century England, Ivanhoe: a text that arguably made an equivalent contribution to Victorian Britain’s self-image as the cowboy myth did in 20th-century America. 

The story centres on an Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family, struggling to survive amid dastardly Norman occupiers that Victorian readers no doubt gleefully identified with their recently defeated French antagonists. It’s all set against the backdrop of the Crusades, and the forest-dwelling “Robin of Locksley” makes numerous appearances and does heroic things before pledging fealty to the returning Richard the Lionheart. More or less every Robin Hood since has the heroic, patriotic outlaw-underdog traits first depicted by Scott, and many repeat his motifs: for example Ivanhoe is the origin of the famous moment, immortalised by Arrow Cam in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin splits his opponent’s arrow in an archery contest. 

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It’s thanks to Scott, then, that Robin Hood became indelibly linked to patriotism, Englishness, royalism, and (more obliquely) national triumph against those damnable French (ahem, sorry, Norman) fops. But does this Robin make sense today? After all, the global empire that gave rise to and was legitimised by it was dismantled half a century ago. So there’s little point in writing angry articles about the evaporation of its last symbolic memories, save to spare Telegraph readers the pain of thinking too directly about the political and territorial realities driving that evaporation.

And also follows that in the context of modern post-imperial Britain it probably makes sense to bin the Victorian Robin Hood. Aside from anything else, his high imperial Ivanhoe connotations are surely out of keeping with a Nottingham that, since 2001, has gone from 81% white British to almost half ethnic minority according to the 2021 census. Under those circumstances, we can hardly blame the Nottingham Building Society for pivoting away from British Empire-coded symbology toward the more nebulous and ductile “financial diversity”. 

Meanwhile where are England’s yeomen now? For some time now, the picture for what’s left of this class has been bleak. Commentators have long remarked on the hollowing-out of middle class life in the British Isles, and the way both Tories and, now, Labour, seem always to favour policies that fall hardest on their shoulders. 

But perhaps it’s less that they’ve been obliterated, than — like Robin of old — they’re fleeing the priests and sheriffs who would bind them. In Samuel Johnson’s time, or indeed that of Sir Walter Scott, those with the vitality, courage, and lawlessness of the medieval Robin Hood might have found an outlet Great Britain’s imperial sprawl. But where would such a character flourish today? And the grim answer is: probably not in England. Instead, today’s Robin Hood might be flouting employment law to make a fortune job-stacking from a beach in Indonesia, or outraging polite society as a danger tourist in Afghanistan. Perhaps he’d be a mercenary, in one of the modern world’s less-than-completely-official warzones. Perhaps he’d be across the Atlantic, dreaming of conquering the stars.

For there’s still plenty of wilderness in the world, for those yeomen with a taste for danger and a casual attitude to the rules. But there’s none in Sherwood now: just shabby Victorian terraces. The men of the greenwood are all gone, roaming further afield.

Connoisseurs of werewolf lore will doubtless remember that Stumpf, also known as Peter Stubbe, was tortured on the rack until he confessed to murder, cannibalism, rape, incest, bestiality, and pretty much every other crime the local inquisitors could think of. He was then broken on the wheel, beheaded, and burnt at the stake in Cologne on 31 October 1589. His daughter and a woman named Katharina Trump, both of whom were accused of having affairs with him, were also burnt at the same time. The latter, Pittle and Hopkins note, may well have been the same Katharina Trump who features in the family tree of Donald Trump. If this is true — and again, this is a speculative hypothesis — Donald Trump is descended from a werewolf’s love child.

By now, those readers who don’t happen to be connoisseurs of werewolf lore may be scratching their heads, so let me explain. Yes, there were werewolf trials in 16th-century Europe — quite a few of them, in fact, and more in the centuries immediately before and after. They were conducted in the same dubious fashion as the witch trials of those same years: that is to say, once an accusation was made, the accused was presumed to be guilty, tortured savagely in order to extract a confession, and then put to death, preferably after he’d implicated several other people who could then be subjected to the same treatment. It was an ugly chapter of history, though there are plenty of equivalents before and since.

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Follow the track of the werewolf back into the mists of Eurasian antiquity and it’s possible to trace the outlines of an archaic set of traditions of the Indo-European peoples back when they were cattle-herding tribes on the plains of what are now Ukraine and southern Russia. In those days, boys who reached puberty left their home villages to dwell in the forest under the tutelage of elder shamans. For a period of several years, they spent the summers living like wild things, eating raw meat, sleeping in the open, and raiding neighbouring tribes to steal cattle. The winters, in turn, were devoted to harsh austerities and rituals of initiation.

The most important of those rituals centred on the mythic theme of casting off the participants’ identity as boys and becoming wolves: fierce, predatory, loyal, tough, attuned to the wilderness. Then, once their period in the forest was finished, they cast off their wolf-identity through another ritual process, became men, and returned to their villages to take up their social roles as husbands, fathers, providers, and warriors. For thousands of years, that was how the Indo-European tribes handled the turbulent transition from boyhood to manhood, and mythic echoes of these same customs remained in Indo-European societies from India to Ireland long after the original tradition had faded out.

Did these boys in the wilderness actually turn into wolves? Not in any biological sense, surely. That said, human consciousness is capable of strange things. Certain bands of Norse warriors in historic times were called Úlfhednar, “wolf coat wearers”; like their close equivalents the Berserkir, “bear shirt wearers”, they could enter into a battle-frenzy in which they behaved like wild beasts, possessing superhuman strength, insensibility to pain, and the ability to walk over burning coals unscathed. (A priestly clan among the Faliscans, an Italian people absorbed by the Romans, had the same firewalking reputation; they were called hirpi Sorani, “wolves of the god Soranus”.) Certain kinds of out-of-body experience, in which the participants experience themselves as taking on animal form, also seem to be caught up in the same tradition. It’s a heady mix of practices, more than enough to make its initiates fierce and effective warriors in an age of hand-to-hand combat.

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The initiation rituals referenced above aren’t simply a matter of speculation. Archaeologists have dug up at least one site where they were performed: an isolated structure at Krasnosamarskoe in Russia, dating from around 1800BC, where dogs were ceremonially sacrificed and eaten in the midst of other ritual activities. Dogs are considered good eating in many cultures, but in societies descended from the Indo-European tribes, the thought of eating dog meat gets an immediate reaction of repulsion. That’s the last dim echo of an archaic taboo that once restricted eating the flesh of canids to the wolf-boys in the forests. The dog sacrifices took place during the winter ritual season — you can tell such things these days from skeletal remains. Combine that evidence with input from myth, legend, and folk tradition and you can glimpse a little of the ancient wolf-magic as it once existed.

That, to sum up decades of scholarly research, is what lies behind the legendary image of the werewolf in European folklore. After the great Indo-European migrations and conquests, the bands of boys-become-wolves in the forests gradually changed into permanent warbands under the command of local chieftains, and then morphed further into the feudal system of medieval Europe, with each young generation of warriors absorbed into the retinues of barons and kings, and so no longer a threat to the status quo. The old traditions clung to shadowy life here and there, mostly in isolated areas, and gave rise to bands of outlaws: in several old Indo-European languages, as a result, the word for “wolf” is also the word for “outlaw”. (In Old Norse, that word is vargr, which is where Tolkien got the word “warg”.)

As medieval European society settled down after the era of mass migrations, and Christianity became more centralised and dogmatic, surviving traces of the old shamanistic traditions got squeezed out a little at a time. Whether or not Peter Stumpf was involved in one of the last flickering traces of the old wolf-cult will probably never be known, but it is at least possible. It’s also possible that a few scraps of the old tradition still survive, either in Europe or in some corners of the European diaspora.

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Whether any remnant of the archaic wolf-cult endured, however, it’s safe to say that its archetype certainly did, and it remains a living and potent force today. Imagine for a moment how the reputation of the ancient wolf-initiates changed as the tribal cultures of Indo-European antiquity gave way to the settled societies of medieval Europe, as warriors were expected to become the loyal servants of feudal magnates and the new ideology of Christianity put its own spin on the legacies of the distant past. Here and there, as in the legends of Robin Hood, outlaws seized the popular imagination as an emblem of resistance to the status quo, but far more often the fierce, lonely men who had been driven out of polite society and dwelt in deep forests and mountainous regions were feared and despised by the respectable people of their time. It was proverbial in medieval England that outlaws “had a wolf’s head” — that is to say, like the wolf that was their ancient emblem, they could be killed out of hand by anyone tough enough for the job, and their deaths would be met with general rejoicing.

This, of course, is where we circle back to Donald Trump. Well before a jury found him liable for sexual abuse this week, the man had made an enduring mark on American culture by violating all the rules that polite society had erected to maintain the grip of today’s privileged classes on the levers of political and social power. It’s a piece of synchronicity that Carl Jung would have appreciated that Trump may be descended from a famous werewolf, because he’s the outlaw of today’s American politics, sporting a wolf’s head in the best medieval style, refusing to play by the rules that keep power in the hands of a failed managerial aristocracy that can’t lead but won’t get out of the way. That’s why he fields the same kind of blind hatred that Peter Stumpf got from the German authorities of his time. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are plenty of people who would gladly see Donald Trump broken on the wheel, beheaded, and burnt at the stake if they thought they could get away with it.

There’s more to the archetypal pattern than this, however. Of all the many people who rallied around Trump’s banner in 2015 and haven’t abandoned it yet, what’s the group that’s made the biggest mark? It’s primarily young men, the same group that would be out there in the forests learning how to be wolves if we still followed the folkways of Indo-European antiquity.

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This is a bleak and bitter time to be a young man in America. Outside the narrowing circles of the well-to-do, boys and girls alike face a world in which every option pushed on them by their society — employment, college education, you name it — is a mug’s game rigged to make others rich at their expense. Boys, however, face the additional burden that maleness has been pathologised in our schools, so that boys are systematically punished and penalised for the crime of not acting more like girls. Those boys who can’t handle the demands for passivity and obedience can count on being drugged into submission — if they aren’t simply arrested and put into what has been usefully labelled the school-to-prison pipeline.

The military used to be the great escape hatch for young men who couldn’t find a place in civil society, but that door’s been slammed shut in recent years as Pentagon bureaucrats push an increasingly strident woke ideology on the rank and file, and the benefits of military service have become increasingly limited when they’re not wholly imaginary. The salary you get as an enlisted man these days won’t keep your family fed and housed, and the Veterans Administration medical system has turned into a sick joke. These days a rapidly growing fraction of the young men from working-class backgrounds who used to keep the US military well-supplied with recruits are walking away from military service, and they’re doing it with the encouragement of their elders; many of these latter, after all, are military vets who know exactly what the score is.

Rejected by the cultural mainstream, and as often as not condemned by woke ideologues as personally guilty of every wrong ever inflicted by their ancestors, a great many young men have been driven to the fringes of our society. The folk knowledge, the traditional customs and the largely intact ecosystems that would enable them to live in the forest, gnawing on raw meat and carrying out cattle raids on neighbouring tribes? Those no longer exist, so the young men in question are finding refuges in the wilderness of the internet and cobbling together traditions of their own. That the raw material for those traditions comes from the things our mainstream society rejects is hardly a surprise.

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Yes, I know that there have been various attempts to create models of male initiation in our time. All of the ones I’m familiar with — well, let’s just say that you can tell easily that they were invented by middle-class suburbanites. They provide a weak simulacrum of the tribal initiations of the past, lacking the terrifying intensity of those initiations’ head-on confrontation with the realities of death, violence, fear, and pain. It was because the military provided that intensity through combat that it so often served as an initiatory experience. Lacking that, it’s no surprise that so many young men make a beeline for gangs, or find some other socially unacceptable way to define themselves in opposition to a society that so obviously hates and fears them.

Exactly how all this will play out is impossible to say. One of the core insights of depth psychology, though, is that you can’t get rid of something you don’t like by repressing it. All you’ll get by piling on the punishment is a more serious blowback. That’s a lesson both sides in today’s culture wars could stand to learn. Another such lesson is the reminder that the thing you hate most in other people is by and large the thing you refuse to see in yourself.

The first round of blowback from this repression of American masculinity helped to put Donald Trump in the White House. The second round could quite possibly repeat that, or it may lead in directions even more unpalatable to today’s status quo. Nor will a silver bullet solve the problem. (Why silver? The Moon’s metal, emblematic of feminine energy, represents the longing for marriage, family, and a settled life that once transformed the wolf into a man.) Look instead into the silvered mirror. The wolf’s face that stares back at you may be your own.

This obviously wasn’t really about attitudes in 12^th century England and no one seriously believed it was; it was about Englishmen, or Britons, today, and it’s safe to say that on the eve of a Second World War the idea of a 20^th century “free-born Englishman” was a potent one.

It was believed to be as much a part of the national character as the repression of Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, or the stoicism in all those roles played by Kenneth Moore. An Englishman was freedom-loving and would never submit to tyrants big or small, whether French-speaking sheriffs or Hitler, or indeed petty busybodies closer to home.

But that was 80 years ago, and if it was ever true, the idea of the freeborn Englishman has been quietly put to bed by the pandemic, exposed as nothing more than an empty myth.

Last February, with events in China giving us a grizzly image of our future and the full horror starting to dawn, that myth was often trotted out. We were repeatedly told that the British were too much of a freedom-loving race to tolerate similarly authoritarian measures. The ghosts of John Bull, John Wilkes and Robin Hood would rise up within us to resist this tyranny.

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Boris Johnson said as much, telling the House in Commons in September that “There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world: our country is a freedom-loving country…. It is very difficult to ask the British population uniformly to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary.”

The experts had even hesitated to act last February because they feared that British people would not be able to tolerate lockdown for long. There would be riots, some thought.

Yet like the military experts of the 1930s who predicted that aerial bombing would shatter morale, they were completely wrong. While Italy and the Netherlands have had serious anti-lockdown disturbances, the British public have accepted it with remarkably little in the way of complaint. They may not have liked it, and some rules may have been bent a little, but compliance has generally been strong — with an inevitable decline during the summer.

Not only that but lockdown is popular as a policy. Wildly popular, you might say. The Prime Minister has been miles behind British public opinion in every restriction he has reluctantly imposed, out of touch with a population who, as a whole, don’t seem to especially love freedom.

Although Right-wingers were the early doomongers about Covid, the issue soon realigned along culture war lines, with progressives far keener to lock down. Yet there was a big difference. While Nigel Farage flirted with the idea of lockdown scepticism, it didn’t last long because, Farage, whatever else people say about him, has a very good sense of what the British public think.

The UKIP position on immigration was hugely popular during the Blair, Brown and Cameron eras; likewise crime, another area where Right-wing populist positions regularly poll 60 or even 70%. But lockdown scepticism? It barely made it into double figures.

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On almost every question relating to lockdown and Covid, the British public are far less liberty-loving than the Government.

They’re happy with closing borders, and they’re keen on putting people in quarantine. Some 70% support GPS trackers for people entering the country.

Are vaccine passports a hugely controversial infringement on our liberties? Not really — most people want them used for hospitality, offices, and even social gatherings. And the public favours compulsory jabs for nurses, regardless of how nurses themselves feel about this. 

Over three quarters of the population can cheerfully contemplate social distancing measures remaining in place until autumn. There is widespread, even overwhelming support for police enforcing lockdown measures. 

A majority of Britons even think a 10-year jail sentence for lying about your country of departure is fair, while 13% think it’s not harsh enough! I wonder what proportion of that 13% would support actually hanging them.

All the predictions that the British public would not tolerate harsh lockdown measures are completely contradicted by the polls, which show the Chinese government to be more in tune with the great British public than Boris Johnson is.

Contrary to all the predictions that we would never tolerate surveillance in return for the end of Covid, I reckon the average Englishman would happily have a microchip in his arm if it meant he could go down the pub.

Sure, this is the home of Magna Carta and we can make a reasonable claim to being the birthplace of liberalism, but John Locke’s ideas were much more influential in the United States than in his home country.

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Like much of our politics, our political-psychological idea of ourselves comes from the Civil War era. It was around that time that the phrase “free-born Englishman” was coined by Leveller John Lilburne, and they put him in prison.

Had YouGov been around in the 17^th century, a significant majority would probably have supported this, with another 13% wanting him burned to death, and the liberty-loving sect to which Lilburne belonged, the Quakers, were deeply unpopular for a long time. 

The Levellers believed that Englishmen had once been free, a natural liberty that had been crushed by the Norman Yoke; before that foreign occupation brought about the class system and privilege, free Saxons sat around in the forests of Olde England, presumably talking about cricket and the weather. It’s an appealing national myth and, of course, completely untrue; slavery was widespread in Anglo-Saxon England, before being abolished by the Normans.

Likewise, Lilburne thought that free-born Englishmen had their rights laid down by Magna Carta: “the ground of my freedom,” as he said, “I build upon the Grand charter of England”.

Magna Carta, although it had nothing to say about the ordinary peasant, did evolve to restrain royal authority — but even here it has been more influential in the United States, where its legacy can be read in the constitution (Clauses 39 and 40, for instance, influencing the 5^th Amendment).

Although three clauses are still on the statute books in England, attempts to make Magna Carta a sort of sacred English text of freedom have always been quite a fringe affair.

Among the wilder shores of the lockdown sceptic movement, there are modern-day sects of sort who cite Magna Carta Clause 61 to oppose Covid measures, claiming it allows “for lawful dissent and rebellion” and that businesses don’t have to close under Covid-19 regulations.

That Clause 61, which gave the leading barons the right to overthrow the king, did not appear in the approved 1225 version of Magna Carta makes no difference to their enthusiasm for this idea. It’s a myth, based on an idea of the English as being inherently free. Yet these groups are minuscule, and for most people our supposedly sacred freedom is not thought about much; Oliver Cromwell was probably onto something, public opinion-wise, when he referred to the document as Magna Farta.

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And whereas America has the First Amendment, the British have come to accept a huge number of hate speech laws down the years, with Blair’s government being particularly illiberal on this issue, to the extent that police are now investigating 120,000 “non-crime” hate incidents.

Indeed, so well-known are the Britons for being downtrodden by overzealous, interfering government authorities that there is a meme in other English-speaking countries called “have you got a licence for that, mate?” making fun of us.

We are now the most spied upon country outside of the People’s Republic of China, London being the only non-Chinese city in the top 10 of CCTV global hotspots. And despite this, CCTV is very popular among the British public.

Perhaps it’s because the British love spying on people, which certainly is a national characteristic dating back to Francis Walsingham. Or perhaps we like being spied on. We think the reduction in crime justifies the loss of liberty, just as the reduction in coronavirus deaths does.

In which case, which people are being referred to when we are told that “British people will never accept these sorts of restrictions”?

There is, it’s true, a strong liberal and Whig tradition in Britain, of which Boris Johnson is an inheritor, but they are certainly not the majority. On the political axis the median British voter sits somewhere in the top left quadrant, neither economically nor socially liberal, with culturally conservative and redistributive views.

The largest block after that are the progressives, who care most about equality and have barely-concealed authoritarian leanings. Then there are the genuine liberals, of which there are about 17 in Britain.

We tend to group like this because the major driving force in the British psyche is not liberty but fairness, and its step-brother spite. This is a country which hates benefit scroungers yet gets hugely sentimental about the issue of free school meals, because its people hate the idea of someone cheating the system. The one SW1 story that broke through with the public in recent years was the Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle saga — because it upset people’s sense of fairness.

The British are, in fact, quite conformist and placid. The French riot about literally anything, while after epic levels of political incompetence and 120,000 deaths, the worst that’s happened here is someone projecting “Boris is a wet wipe” on Parliament.

There’s a reason why an Englishman in the late 1930s might have seen himself as uniquely free-born and liberty-loving. Our political history and lucky geography has graced us with centuries of moderate politics, avoiding the ideological nightmares of our neighbours. But that doesn’t make us particularly freedom-living; indeed if it anything it makes us complacent about our good fortune.

Most of the British public still support Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, but not because they care about freedom. It’s because they care about fairness. They don’t want a free England, they want a fair England.