#saxons

I was promised Sean Bean and it is a great time to be making a new anti-colonialist/anti-authoritarian show, so I gave it a try, but they are doing something so persistently annoying and ahistorical that it yanks me right out constantly and is plot critical that I had to give up. It's possibly even worse than Pillars of the Earth with is really saying something.

Look, I'm of the school of thought that Robin Hood is an amalgamation, and accretion of stories about a whole lot of different outlaws. There were at least three outlaws named some variation of Robert in the mediate post Norman invasion period. There were tons outlaw stories circulating in Medieval England, including an entire cycle under another guy's name. Most treatments put Robin Hood in the era of King Richard and King John, but there is reason to think most of the stories are from the period in the first half of the 14th century when Outlawry was rampant because of all the younger sons who basically were set loose with horse, armour, and weapons and not much in the way of prospects.

Robin Hood Stories are all basically FanFiction.

If you are a professional entertainer making your living wandering around singing songs for people, and you have a bunch of good songs about outlaws, and there is a legendary outlaw people like to hear stories about, it is in your economic interest to change the name of your outlaw to match the one people like best and they will pay better for songs about the famous guy. So you switch your main guy to Rob or Robbin, whichever fits the meter best. You make his villains a Robin Hood villain. If he has a love interest or interests, that becomes Maid Marian. If you have some cool side characters that match ones people like and already know, you map them on what's closest. If you don't? Well here's another Merry Man you just hadn't heard about yet. Add some OCs. Go to town with itMaybe add details and exaggerate or come up with a new story if you think people will like it better. If you want to make a political point but don't want to get in trouble, you can just slide that in sly like, because this stuff happened like a while ago, so you aren't directly attacking the king or the local lord or the modern clergy or the current sociopolitical situation. Same with the people who started writing the stories down. They had agendas and audiences and things they wanted to say using the blorboes from their stories.

Modern Authors aren't doing anything different when the retell Robin Hood whichever way, because it's basically fan fiction all the way down, you follow? Reinterpret away. People have been at it for more than a thousand years, maybe longer.

I'm not complaining about fucking with cannon, because there is no fixed cannon and that's kind of the beauty of Robin Hood.

What I'm complaining about is fucking with history in a major way. Again, I'm not complaining about little things nearly everybody in movie and TV get wrong about the middle ages, though those things are there to.

I'm talking about them deciding that Saxons were all Pagans in Queen Eleanor's time and that's why the Normans were stealing their lands, titles, and rights away and if they'd just convert to Christianity they'd get their stuff back.

No the fuck they would not. I know that because that's not what happened.

The Saxons were Roman Catholic like the Normans and had been for some two and a half centuries plus. Like yeah, the King Offa story is disputed as to whether it actually happened that way and not everyone would have converted all at once, but by the time of the Conquest by William the Bastard the Saxons were very much Catholic and that literally plays a part in the pretext for Invasion so seriously, WTF Robin Hood 2025!

We also know they wouldn't have gotten their land back because even what few Saxon Nobles who were allowed to keep their stuff immediately after the Invasion by swearing oaths and supporting William the Bastard lost it all within a generation. There were virtually none left. Like maybe some of the daughters married Normans but there weren't any titled Saxon Families anymore, because the point of colonizing a place is taking the locals' stuff and their power away and giving it to your friends.

Which William the bastard did and was pretty much the basis of the power structure going forward and you can actually see it in the way English changes post invasion.

Taking this particular time period and making it about good, pure pagans vs. evil corrupt Christians instead of making it about power and colonialism and what it means to have a Conqueror ignore their own laws whenever it suits them and taking all the rights of one's forefathers away.

And they clearly don't understand the Catholicism and customs and traditions of this period at all. I know this may shock you, but Medieval Catholics were not Early Modern Puritans. There were ascetic monastic orders, hermits, anchorites, etc., but the practice of every day religion was a whole other thing. See also both Saxons and Normans were literally Roman Catholic in this period.

Cause the people of Brittania prior to the Roman conquest were Britons, who spoke something like Welsh - so English had a base root in the Brythonic language family. And then the Germanic Angles and Saxons took over - so the Germanic language family got added to the mix. And then the Romance language family, melded with the Scandinavian one when the Norman French - Frenchmen descended from Norse Vikings - conquered it.