Hey! This doesn’t sound historically accurate at all!
Let me ask you something, Dex - would you accept a stupid Sherlock Holmes?
The way I see it, there’s a line between reinvention and false advertising. A character isn’t just a name and a job, it’s also a collective of characteristics that define it. You can play around with the details, but you have to preserve the essense of the character, otherwise you’re just using someone else’s name. Sherlock Holmes has to be superintelligent, James Bond has to be a lethal womanizer, and Robin Hood has to be a trickster.
If Ridley Scott (who I’m a huge fan of, BTW) had wanted to make a serious medieval epic about the Magna Carta, he should have made it. Tying the Robin Hood name to it is acting in bad faith.
And Sherlock Holmes stories are about action.
Wait, what?
But the latest Holmes was still Holmes - very smart, very observant, very eccentric; his relationship with Watson was also perfect. Sure, they placed him in a slightly different type of story than we’re used to, but they definitely captured the essence of Sherlock Holmes the character.
No, they were not.
And in this film Robin is a woodsman fighting against the oppression of the nobility.
This film is about as different from the original Robin stories as the Sherlock Holmes film was from the original Holmes stories.
Sounds like this film needs a bearded Alan Rickman as the Sherriff.
Please - Richard I Cœur de Lion barely spoke a word of English. England, at the time, was nothing more than an overseas colony owned by a bunch of French nobleman.
That’s what he does, not what he is.
Whatever you say.
Sure they were. Or we getting hung up on semantics a bit?
Folks included among the ‘rebel barons’ included the likes of Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford. Both had held lands in Normandy that had been lost to Philip Augustus just a few years earlier and like virtually all of the English ruling class at the time, both were French-origined and speaking. Doubtless one of the reasons that inviting the future Louis VIII to take the English crown was attractive to some of the English baronage, was that it floated the possibility that all of those who had lost their cross-channel French estates to the Norman conquest of 1204 might be able to regain them again.
Not only did Richard not speak English, as Alessan noted, but few if any of the Plantagenet kings did. They were French, descended from the Angevins. The founder of the Plantagenet dynasty, Henry II, was also Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Gascony, and Count of Nantes. Richard himself famously hated England and spent most of his life trying not to live there.
John might be a candidate for the transition to a more English rule, more in retrospect than in contemporary history. (His son Henry III makes for a more plausible candidate.)
In particular, the whole Robin Hood legend comes from Robin as a representative of the English yeomanry (not a noble) battling against the French nobility who had usurped the country. That alone negates the notion that Plantagenets were English.
From what I understand, in this movie Robin takes the identity of a knight so the director gets to have it both ways. I can’t think of very many times when trying it have it both ways works, but I doubt if I’ll ever see the movie to find out.
And Count of Touraine! Why does everyone always forget Touraine? Tours was the linchpin of the Angevin continental system!
According to Sir Maurice Powicke, anyway :).
So in this movie does Robin Hood get King John to sign the Magna Carta?
King John is the one who signed it.
With two comedic vulture sidekicks.
And he was pretty successful in that. He spent less than two hundred days in England during the ten years he was king.
That would be awesome. And the story could be just like “Amadeus,” with rickman reminiscing about his battles with RH.
Well, Richard LionHeart was born in England. Indeed, from the days of William the Kings of England were also Duke of Normandy, which is part of modern France. But it wasn’t then, and they didn’t consider themselves “French”. Richard was born in England. (His father was born in Normandy, but Henry I was born in England) Richard indeed spoke French- it was, along with Latin, more or less the International language of the time. He also spoke (or wrote) in Latin, does that make him Italian?
Normany was not part of France. Just because it is now, doesn’t make any of them French.
Well, yes. It’s been done, the movie WITHOUT A CLUE (1988) with Ben Kingsley as Watson (the intelligent one) and Michael Caine as a stupid Sherlock. The premise is that Watson is the detective, but modestly wrote about a fictional “Sherlock Holmes” to be the brilliant one; thus, he published his own cases but under the guise that “Sherlock Holmes” was the genius. When the writings became famous, he had to hire an actor to play “Sherlock Holmes”, so he hires Michael Caine’s character. It’s a very enjoyable movie. Not great, but enjoyable.
I’ve tried, for a long time, not to go to movies with pre-conceived notions of how they “should” be. Nor to approach any other art form with pre-conceived notions, for that matter. I ask for self-consistency, a unified vision behind the work, and technical competence, but otherwise I’m pretty open.
was talking with my son yesterday about better choices to be Robin Hood. Conan O’Brien came to mind. Can you imagine his skinny legs in green tights? It would at least be funny on purpose. Maybe they could get Leno to play King John.
Richard and John were both probably born in England. At least three of their siblings, possibly more, were probably not ( a couple in Normandy, at least one in Anjou, some of them we just don’t know ). Henry II was born in Le Mans, which was in Maine, not Normandy.
Regardless, Normandy was most certainly part of France. The Norman kings of England owed homage to the kings of France long before the Plantagenets came along, hence the constant power-struggle. Now up until John got himself outmaneuvered by Philip II, the held it more or less as an allod rather than via feudal tenure. That goes back to the days of the Viking conquest. The Duchy of Gascony was also an allodial possession up until 1259 when Henry III had to submit to Louis IX.
But owed directly to the French crown or not, the dukes of Normandy were vassals of the French king and thus part of the kingdom of France, starting with with the Viking Rollo, who in 911 who was made a Carolingian count, reportedly took baptism and the name ‘Robert’, and was made responsible for the defense and administration of the area against any other marauders. The last non-Viking count recorded in the area is from 905, so the transition from overrun marchland was pretty quick. The title of duke seems to date a couple of generations later to ~987-1006.
The Norman vikings contributed a grand total of ~300 Scandinavian loan words to Norman French, a third of them involving sailing. In all they seem to have become acculturated pretty rapidly. And if they didn’t consider themselves “French”, neither did most of France - a firm national identity was still many centuries away. The Occitan-speaking folks of most of Aquitaine had even less in common with the Parisians than the Normans did, who at least spoke a much more similar dialect. We speak of the “French” retroactively as subjects of the French crown and speakers of the “French language” as those who spoke one of the interconnected dialects and languages of that kingdom. The Normans qualify on both counts.
Richard and John grew up the children of French-speaking parents - Eleanor needed full interpretation to speak to English subjects even after 40 years of marriage and Henry II’s English was better, but apparently shaky. John spent virtually all of his first 15 years in France ( first Anjou, then Normandy, with one brief visit to England after his birth in between ) and relatively few years in England overall until after 1204.
Richard meanwhile was dismissive towards England and was devoted above all to his mother’s fragmented Duchy of Aquitaine, which he had been granted as an appanage early in life. *The point is that Richard’s closest family associations, whether real or imaginary, were with western France and not with England or Normandy.
Nope, I’m still going with French. Things began to change in the royal court with Henry III and definitively with Edward I and of course change had been accelerating more rapidly among the English nobility and clerical classes. But the royal family was firmly “French” in most every respect from 1066-1216 at the least.
*Quote from John Gillingham’s biography of Richard I.