I
finally got around to watching the film about the legendary outlaw Robin Hood
that was made in 2010 and famously starred Russell Crowe. I say “finally” because my lovely other half hoards
DVDs. There’s no other word for it; she
has shedloads of the buggers and we don’t have a shed. The down side is that there are loads in the
spaces that I think should be for books.
The up side is that she will get stuff that I would hold off from but
that I might be interested in seeing, so there’s something when, if I’m feeling
particularly tired, depressed or ill, to view.
Normally I don’t review films. I
prefer to either blog about more personal subjects (see my other blog Peripatetic Pyneosaurus for this) or
stick to things that might be quite a bit more fact-based than anything coming
out of Hollywood. However, as with most
of my interests, this movie has a little bit of strange stuff going on.
Where
to start? The beginning? That will have to do. The legend that has been accepted in this day
and age (for as with many things, it has changed through time) is that Robin is a Saxon nobleman who has fallen foul of King John and has taken to Sherwood
Forest, waging a guerrilla war against the King’s local representative, the
Sherriff of Nottingham. This ends when
King Richard 1st returns from the Crusades, pardons Robin, who
marries Maid Marian and lives happily ever after. What’s the first change? The film is now centred on the First Baron’s War. I have a shameful admission to make
here. I never did much history at school
and, to my knowledge, never covered this very important event in Great British
history, so full marks to Ridley Scott for drawing to my attention to this
event when no-one else ever did. In this
alternative legend, Richard dies besieging a French castle (which we know he
really did) and Robin Longstride, an archer in the King’s army, takes over the
identity of the King’s friend and confidante
Robert Loxley. He returns to England
and, with Loxley’s father’s consent, replaces Robert. The northern barons are fed up with the way
King John treats them so they back him into a corner to sign the Magna Carta (or at the very least some
sort of predecessor charter). Prince
Louis of France has an agent in England who is conspiring to subjugate England
to the French throne. John is persuaded
to join forces with the Barons, who by now include Robin, to repel an imminent
French invasion. Unbeknownst to Robin,
Marian has disguised herself as a knight and has brought along some of the
children that run wild in Sherwood Forest to fight alongside the English
troops. Robin wins the day; King John is
livid that someone else attracts the approval of the Barons and, therefore,
outlaws him. Marian and Robin go to ground
with the feral boys in Sherwood. It is
at this point that the film ends and the legend begins – according to Ridley
Scott, anyway.
Where
to carry on? I, for one, really could
not stomach the ‘Wild Boys’ in Sherwood Forest.
It smacked hugely of Peter Pan to me; a strange and completely
inappropriate interpolation. It was
neither needed nor enhanced the story.
Possibly it was some kind of attempt to appeal to the kiddies, but it
felt odd to say the least. However,
whilst browsing in search of some kind of sense to this, one theme at least caught
my eye, of which more later.
The
next issue to jump out at me was Robin’s father, who was a stonemason and
espoused individual freedom and democracy.
He also seemed to be the author of the Magna Carta and was supported by
the Barons. It did not require the largest
of mental leaps to link a mason with powerful support to a suggestion by the
film’s makers of Freemasonry. One
American mason even heard Thomas Longstride (Robin’s father) speaking in a
Scottish accent. I replayed our copy and
could not verify this, though. The
relevance of this is that some of the earliest documents relating to
Freemasonry tell of lodges in Scotland, thus making it the probable cradle of
Freemasonic movements all over the world.
Another point of note is that Thomas only practices one bit of
stone-laying in the whole film. The
supposed departure from the stone mason’s guilds to the freemasonry of today (more of this in
yet another blog) is that there were, on the one hand, actual stone carving artisans
and speculative masons on the other, who were gentry and certainly did not get
their hands dirty touching stone and who were the antecedents of the Freemasons as opposed to what was, in effect, a mediæval trade union. Thomas’s
actions, or lack of them, seem to back this up.
Then there
was the historically verifiable closeness of King Richard 1st to the
Knights Templar who, whilst there is no evidence of a direct connection, have
been claimed by some Freemasons as forebears.
There is even the example that Robert of Sablé, who had been a vassal of
the Lionheart, became Grand Master at least partly by the recommendation of the
king; such was his connection to the Order.
So,
we have some quite singular stuff going on.
Robin took to the woods to pursue men’s freedom, which was a cause inherited
from his Masonic father and backed up by the barons, plus back-handed references
to King Richard and the Knights Templar.
So, Robin the Master Mason? Are
Ridley Scott and/or Russell Crowe on the square, then? What also fascinates me is that no mainstream
review that I have been able to find has mentioned any of this at all. I do not claim a conspiracy, although it is interesting. It is probably down to the fact that stuff
like this is below the radar with most people.
To
round things off, I personally rather liked the gritty, muddy “realism” and the
lack of Lincoln Green and those little camp hats with feathers in, although I
am a huge fan of the Errol Flynn film.
The action was riveting and the tale generally twisted, turned and moved
on at a decent pace. Those kids, though. They got my back up. One theory has it, though, that Robin was not
also the second Freemason but that the children represented orphaned boys of
World War 1. In the USA, a Mason called
Frank S Land noticed how many of these boys there were without mentors. The organisation that he started was known as
the Order of de Molay, after the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar,
Jacques de Molay. Thus, in leading the
children, Robin fulfils another rôle of the Mason as a guiding light (such a
strong Masonic theme that there are lodges named after it). Sorry, kids, you were there for a reason all
along!
No comments:
Post a Comment