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"Although we accept the evidence that the lads of Sherwood were outrageously gay, they were not, communists. Of that we are quite certain"

Although I deplore the removal of books or references to books, you need to admit, that Robin Hood's ideals were a bit communistic!

you dont think they were over the top?

No, I don't. The stories of Robin Hood are no more communistic than say, the Beatitudes of jesus or the ideals of Sparticus which is to say that's why they where crucificed (not a moment too soon for republicans). Hope for the enslaved, the down-trodden, the oppressed; tyrannized populice from Athens to America has always been a goal of civilization.

Are you asking me about my thoughts about Mrs. White, and the people who backed her? Yeah I think that she was "over the top". But, on the other hand, one must acknowledge the times. Communism was very much feared in those years, and people had reactions to the threat of Communism that was probably way out of proportion, looking at the situation from the vantage point of history.

The American way is to rob from the poor and give to the rich.

Anything else is un-American (let alone Communistic).

I think Miss White was a nut case, no doubt about it.

Robin Hood, as described by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe was completely a character of fiction, without any foundation in fact. In fact, the historical record contradicts almost every aspect of the Robin Hood tale.

However, the Robin Hood tales (there have been many various versions) have been popular for nearly 700 years precisely because they appeal to ideals that we might describe as "communistic."

In the 14th Century, Europe was ravaged by "the Black Death." Labor became a seller's market, and there was a dramatic rise in "masterless men," who often fled to the woods to avoid labor compulsion. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, entire villages were wiped out. In other cases, a handful of survivors were expected to continue to labor on the land of the lord of the manor (temporal or spiritual), despite the drastic reduction in the available labor force. Many of them fled, and hid in the woods, and hence, the image of "the merry band of men" living off brigandage in the forests.

The Robin Hood ledgend was dusted off and re-written, and re-circulated in the 15th Century, at the time of the Wars of the Roses. During the "Black Death," many men became masterless men because the lord of the manor was killed by the plaugue--in the Wars of the Roses, more than half of the families of the peerage were extinguished in the direct male line, and the power of the labor market increased dramatically, as the Reeves (agents, hence the King's Reever of a county, a shire, was the Shire Reeve, or Sheriff) of the various manors in England competed for the labor to keep the manor running. The printing press had come to England, and crude pamphlets were circulated with the newest version of the Robin Hood legend, designed to appeal to the peasantry with the "rob the rich to give to poor" message.

As i've already pointed out, Walter Scott created the modern image of Robin Hood in his novel Ivanhoe, and he tailored it almost entirely from whole cloth. But the ideas which motivated the peasants were nothing new. King Edward III, the king who had begun the Hundred Years War with France, died in 1377. Thanks to the war, England was frequently overrun with men at arms who were, temporarily at least, unemployed, and preyed on the peasantry (the aristocracy employed other men at arms to protect them from the brigands). When Edward died, his son, Edward Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, was already dead, so the grandson, Richard II, became king while still a minor. In 1381, there was a general peasant uprising, known as Wat Tyler's rebellion. Wat Tyler was "the man on horseback" who lead thousands of peasants to London, but he was no real leader, philosophically or militarily. Trusting naively in the 14 year old King, who promised amnesty, the peasants agreed to lay down their arms and negotiate. Tyler and other "ringleaders" were rounded up an executed. The true philosophical leader of the rebellion had been John Ball, and cleric who provided the slogan When Adam dolve and Even span, who was then the gentleman? (When Adam dug up the earth, and Eve spun wool to weave, who ware the aristocracy then?). Ball was a "hedge priest," and the propaganda against him was that he had never truly been ordained. He was a Lollard, a follower of John Wyclif--the Lollards agitated for the reform of the Catholic Church two centuries before Martin Luther. Wyclif had translated the Bible into English, which was considered a revolutionary act, and he and his bible were condemned. The Council of Constance, which executed the "heretic" Jan Hus (the Hussites were another "Protestant" precursor to Luther) ordered that the bibles Wyclif and his followers had produced be burned, and Wyclif's remains be dug up and hanged.

John Ball himself was eventually seized, and was tried, condemned, hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the young King Richard II. His most famous sermon, in which his rallying cry for the peasant rebellion appeared, contained the following appeal to equality:

When Adam dolve and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may ( if ye will ) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

The peasant uprising was doomed, but so was the English war with France. When Richard was a minor, his uncle, John of Gaunt, had ruled the Kingdom as regent. He was cordially hated by many powerful lords, and Richard, to his misfortune, continued to favor the men who surrounded John of Gaunt when he, Richard, to over the government of his own right. Eventually, Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard, and became King Henry IV. His son, Henry V, "won" the Hundred Years War in France--but it was a chimerical victory. He won the battle of Agincourt in 1415, concluded a treaty with mad King Charles of France, acknowledging him as King of France, and he married the daughter of King Charles, Catherine, in 1420. Less than two years later, he was dead, and his nine-month-old son became King of England, and, putatively, King of France. This was the era in which the English began to lose their grip on France, and the era of John of Arc, Dunois the Bastard, and the regin of Charles VII, who saw the French victory.

That is another story, however. The Wars of the Roses began a few years after the English lost France, although that is only coincidence. From 1452 to 1485, war on a small scale raged off and on in England, as the Houses of Lancaster and York vied for control of the throne. Eventually, the grandson of John of Gaunt's bastard daughter defeated Richard III at Bosworth, and made himself King Henry VII. He was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and he married Elizabeth of York, to end the strife, a task at which he succeeded in 1487, when the last competing claimant to the throne (a "false pretender") was taken after the defeat of 2000 German mercenaries who had landed near York.

In the upheavals of the Wars of the Roses, many more peasants ran away to become masterless men, or were left "masterless" when the aristocratic line which owned the lands to which they were bound was snuffed out in the wars. Typically, these men and women survived by grazing a cow and growing some crops on the common land. By tradition in England, the commons were open to all peasants to graze a cow, or plant a "kitchen garden." The masterless men and women took this a step further, and disavowed any bondage to land, and subsisted on a primitive agriculture on the common land.

Parliament, created by Edward III's grandfather, Edward I, was, or course, filled with man wealthy commoners, and was of course, not at all a representative body. When Henry VIII created the Church of England, and seized church property, to be distributed to his supporters, a movement also began in Parliament, based on the precedent of occasional seizures of common land in the past. This was the movement of "enclosure." Someone with wealth, and influence in Parliament, would instigate bill which would declare a tract of commons to be "enclosed." The theory was sound--one wealthy man could graze twenty cows on the common land, now enclosed, and make a considerable profit which was lacking when twenty families grazed twenty cows for their own subsitence. Instances of enclosure increased (they would not end until the 19th century), and more and more of the poor peasantry were driven away from their subsistance livelihoods.

The sister of Henry VIII had been married off to the King of Scotland. When Henry's daughter Elizabeth died, she was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. He was a survivor (anyone who would be King of Scotland needed to be very competent indeed, just to succeed--as his greatgrandmother Mary Queen of Scots had learned to her cost), but his son, Charles I, was a stiff-necked relgious bigot, who was not to survive. Many of the Puritans who opposed him made alliance with the peasants--Oliver Cromwell, who was to conspire in the execution of Charles I, and who would succeed him as Lord Protector, first made a political name for himself when he supported the men of the fens (fresh and salt water swamps in East Anglia) in their opposition to the enclosure and drainage of the fens. When civil war broke out, these fen men, and many other religious "dissenters" rush to the ranks of Parliament's army and made the Parliamentary victory possible.

In the turmoil and upheaval of the civil wars, many peasants moved onto common ground, or tore down the fences of enclosures and claimed them as common ground, and began to dig them up to plant crops. They became known as "Diggers." Their philosophical cousins adopted the line taken by John Ball, and declared that there was no religious authority for aristocracy, and became known as the "Levellers"--because they declared that society must be "levelled," and aristocracy abolished. King Charles I is said to have contemptuously referred to them as " . . . that endeavor to cast down and level the enclosures of nobility, gentry, and property, to make us all even . . . " That was, of course, a thought abhorent to monarchy and aristocracy. The Levellers organized for political action, with a nominal membership fee, and formed local chapters, which function much as Lenin's Bolshevik "cells" would one day do.

The earliest important leader of the Levellers was John Lilburne. Although initially a Puritan friend and casual counsellor to Oliver Cromwell, he was also one of the Agitators (as they were called, and as they called themselves) who created turmoil in the New Model Army which fought for Parliament against the King, and he was eventually tried by Parliament and imprisoned. Although released, Cromwell had imprisoned again, and when his health failed, Cromwell ordered his release, but Lilburne had died by then.

A more radical reformed was Gerrard Winstanley, seen as a leader of the Diggers, who referred to them as the "True Levellers." Winstanley and those of like mind took Lilburne's levelling philosophy a step further and advocated the abolition of private property. Winstanley's efforts to establish Digger colonies failed, however, when local landowners sent hired thugs to beat up the Diggers, and to drive them off the land. After 1651, Cromwell increasingly took power in the government, and eventually was named Lord Protector. His rule was rather benign (although dictatorial) and both Lilburne and Winstanley became Quakers, and abandoned their earlier firey advocacy of revolutionary change. But Lilburne could not keep a civil tongue in his head, and spent the last years of his life in prison. Winstanley actually became a minor pillar in his community. Both men articulated principles first spoken by others, and both men failed of their ultimate objectives. The movements they organized died out, but not the ideas. The Luddites and Chartists of later generations were the philophical heritors of the Diggers and the Levellers.

When Karl Marx lived and studied in England, he spent his days at the British Museum, and it was there that he first learned of the Diggers and the Levellers. In his correspondence, he told of the great influence the ideas of John Ball, John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley had on his political philosophy.

The Robin Hood stories are no more than that--they are just stories. But the evolution of ideas which would eventually influence Marx in his formulation of a Communist Manifesto can certainly be said to have taken place among the peasants and the "masterless men" of England, upon whom the "merry men" of the Robin Hood legend were based.

Then move to Mexico --- PLEASE.

I was just thinking more about the story.

Robin Hood was a militant with an armed group hiding in the Forest with supporters who blended in with villagers. When he had opportunity he made quick attacks after which he retreated into hiding.

Robin Hood was a terrorist.

Was Robin Hood killing innocent civilians as part of his dealings?

Sparticus and jesus were equally guilty of rallying the downtrodden and needed cruicification, which they got, not a moment too soon. I was talking to my cousin Hector yesterday (he's mexican from east L.A.) and being a resourceful guy has broached Lowes with a plan to sell extra tall latters and his opening his own tunnel construction company.

Jesus was waay gay too. SO was Randolph Scott .