Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Was There A Real Robin Hood?

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Is it true that Robin Hood hung out in Sherwood Forest and stole from the rich to give to the poor? No. No, it’s not. Find out the real story in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Now your analysts get insights in real time to make quick decisions. That's the hybrid cloud solution IBM and a global bank created. What will you create? Learn more at IBM dot com slash hybrid cloud IBM. Let's create. Hey everybody, it's Josh and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode. Was there a real Robin Hood from the heady innocent days of 2018?

It's a super neat history episode where we search for the real Robin Hood and find some really great candidates. Was there a real Robin Hood? I guess you'll just have to listen to find out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there. We're just horsing around saying, who's ah, who's ah?

Actually, I think people might like a little re-create of what just happened. Let's hear it. Jerry said, I need to check levels. We didn't really say anything and she went, all right, you ready? And you said, we didn't say anything for levels. She said, I don't need you to say anything. She's like, in fact, I need you to stop talking. Yeah, and then I had to wait until she said, start talking.

She mouthed, start talking monkey. Goodness me. Is that where we are? Yep. How's it going? It's good. I just want to, before we really get started, Chuck, I want to point something out. I'm not sure if you know this or not.

Oh boy. You have a paper clip holding your glasses together. At first I was like, is he just storing the paper clip? And I thought, no, he's not storing a paper clip. He'd keep that tucked in his cheek if he was just storing it. I would, like everything else. Store, it's on the arm of your glasses where your glasses meet the body. Uh-huh.

You see there? It goes through. It's the, it, acting as the screw because the thing, the screw came out and I need my glasses on in order to put the screw in the glasses. Gotcha. It's quite a conundrum. Were you raised in Oklahoma in the Depression? No, why?

Because you can get other glasses. Dude, that's how busy I am. I can't go by the glasses store. I don't need new ones. I just need someone with tiny fingers and good vision. Someone from Oklahoma could probably help you out. To put in the screw. Ironically.

And this is, this worked so well. I stuck this, the paper clip in there, bent it around and I kind of like it. It is, it's handsome. It's a handsome look. I think you're going to start a trend. I forgot it was there. Well, I like it. Oh boy.

Thanks for playing along. Sure. So we're talking today. The reason I said who's ah, who's ah was because we're talking Robin Hood. Is that from Robin Hood? No. Oh, okay. It's actually from the movie role models, the Paul Rudd movie.

I like that movie. It's good. And I saw it the other day again. Good, dumb, fun. Yeah. I love it. You know, he like wrote that. Rudd?

Yeah. He's great. I like Stifler. Yeah, he's great in that too. His little buddy in that movie or whatever they call him. Ronnie? Yeah. He was so funny.

Stifler's funny, Ronnie. Yeah. He's amazing. I expect great things from that kid. Yep. At least I hope so. Well, anyway, I was watching role models the other day. And one of the LARP guys comes up and goes, who's ah?

And I was like, I always thought it was he's ah. Yeah, me too. That's how Strickland always says it. When he's dressed up like the king of the Renaissance festival. Yeah, those LARP scenes were funny too. Right. But the guy comes up and says who's ah. So I was like, I can't wait to incorporate that somehow, Robin Hood.

Here we go. Prince of Thieves. Yeah. And the reason why that would work is because the LARPers were set in the medieval era. And everyone knows Robin Hood set in the medieval era, but actually that's totally incorrect. Yeah. Most of the time when you see Robin Hood, it's set in the Tudor era in England.

Yeah, that's about right. Almost invariably in Sherwood Forest, which is a wooded area and about right smack dab in the center of England. And the everybody running around is acting like it's the 1400s, maybe the 1500s. And that's all well and good if you're making a Disney version of it. Reality just goes right out the window, right? It's Disney. It's a cartoon for goodness sake.

Everybody lighten up. But I love that version. It's entirely possible and that's a good one. And there are historians who believe that there was a real Robin Hood and they have spent a lot of time and effort trying to track down exactly who it might be, exactly when he might have lived. And my money and a lot of historians place it right around the beginning of the 1200s, the 13th century in England, long before the Tudors were ever even a twinkle in anybody's loins.

Here's my bet is that Robin Hood is an amalgam of a few dudes that the writers of history have filled in some blanks and then the writers of literature just like ran with it. Yeah, that's my take on it as well is that it's a few people served as role models for it. Role models, I didn't even plan that. Paul Rudd is everywhere. But there are some people who still think that there was no such person at all or maybe even persons might have been wholly created. Sure, but then on the opposite side, there are some people, and there are few and far between from what I can tell, who believe there was a single person named Robin Hood who did most of

this stuff and was the basis for these legends. That they're called people who want to sell books. So there's Robin Hood case closed. There's like a whole spectrum that you can just walk right up and say, I believe this and you're as right as anybody on the Robin Hood train. Yeah, so if we go back in time, I think everyone knows that early historians had a lot of blanks and they weren't the most reliable narrators. No, because they would just fill them in with stuff they made up.

Yeah, because I think they didn't. I don't know if they realized that early on. I'm speculating here that they were like a historian. Yeah, they're like recording history. I think it was more like, hey, this is a good story. And I don't know in 500 years, people are going to be taking this as written history. They're spinning yarns. In this case, I don't think that's correct.

I think that they considered themselves actual historians who were getting to the bottom of history, but they had a worldview. And specifically with Robin Hood, it was, I think, 15th century or 16th century Scottish historians who were the ones who really kind of gave us the image of Robin Hood that we have. They were so drunk. The robbing from the rich to give to the poor, the chivalry, a lot of that stuff. Anti-establishment. Yeah, that actually was part of it before.

They had to kind of figure out how to make that one work because it didn't make sense to them at the time. But they basically said, here we've got these ballads that were written in the 1300s, the 14th century. And we think they're historical. So we're going to try to put this in context and the stuff we don't understand. We're just going to make up, but we're going to pass it off as real. So there's this, it's one of those great things like with fairy tales. We know all these fairy tales and you remember we did those episodes on it. Yeah, those are good.

But if you strip away the stuff that's been added over the years and get to the bare bones, it's way darker. It's just child abuse. A lot different, yeah. And a lot different than what we know and love as, in this case, the Robin Hood legend. Right. So if you want to look at literature, like you mentioned these ballads, the actual canon for Robin Hood, the very first mention is one called Piers Plowman, P-I-E-R-S.

Like Piers Morgan. Exactly. For William Langland, about 1377 and then there are a host of other ballads and this is all, was this middle English? I think so. Is that what you would call it? I don't know, maybe even old. With like Y's for vowels and things like that, like canaberry tail stuff.

I really don't know if that's middle or old English. Either way, it's barely legible. It is, a little, and that is spelled L-Y-T-Y-L-L, which is great, a little jester of Robin Hood. That was, was that like Sean Connery on Dope? Just of Robin Hood, that's straight up says Robin Hood. And then a few more Robin Hood in the Monk, Robin Hood in the Potter, Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne and Robin Hood in the Temple of Doom. Yeah. That one was super dark.

It was very dark. Because the author had just broken up with his girlfriend. And I think that's what brought us the PG-13 rating. It was. I'm not mistaken. That and Gremlins. So whether or not you believe this stuff basically has to do with whether or not these early songs you think are just songs or a matter of history, like a historical record.

Yeah, like that's how before people commonly wrote stuff down, like at this time when this stuff was being written, the people who were writing it were monks. Those were the only people educated enough to write. But people still passed stories down. They did it through oral histories. So it's entirely possible that these early ballads were meant to, were created to commemorate a person or people or events or something like that. And then just over time we lost, wait a minute, are these fiction or non-fiction?

But you're right, like that's the divide when it comes to approaching Robin Hood from an historical vantage. Are these just totally fiction? Right. Or are they meant to commemorate something that actually happened? Yeah, and it's easy through today's lens to dismiss these things as songs. But back then, like you were saying, it's like, what better way to remember history than to set it to come on Eileen?

Why that, man? Why did you just do that? That's a great song. It was the first thousand times I heard it. Oh, you don't like it anymore? You know, that's one of the problems is it's like, it's like they just made 10 songs in the 80s and that's all you ever hear. There were so many more songs.

Burning down the house. It was once a great song as well. I'm going to see David Burn tonight. Oh, cool. Tell him I said what. So you won't listen to Come On Eileen, but you'll regurgitate the what's up Budweiser guys? That was from the 90s.

I've heard that less frequently. What connection did I hear recently from the guy who directed those? I think he's directing movies now or something. The guy who directed those commercials. Right. They're like, you've never heard of this movie director, but you were a right member. These guys, that was the gist of it.

I'm surprised those ads never got like a full movie themselves. Definitely that era. Oh, for sure. Remember the cavemen from the Geico ads? They had their own TV show for a couple. Did that ever come out? Yeah, like for like three episodes. See that, yeah, this totally could have been a TV show.

And call it what's up guys. Right. What's happened and was taken. All right. So where were we? We were talking about the talking heads. Let's talk about the forest. Well, the reason we're talking about the forest

is because while a character may or may not have existed, the stuff in the ballads definitely bears a strong resemblance to actual historical events. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The forest is significant here because at the time in the Middle Ages, how much had a percentage of two thirds of the land in England was forest land.

Right. And it was sort of a, it was a place where the king, it was a place where people could go hide out. So that's where it gets this sort of outlaw lore is it was a legit place for outlaws to go do their business. Right. But it was also an outlaw hideout because just by hanging out in the forest, you were by definition an outlaw because of those forest laws

that were super unpopular among people. You know what forest law means. What? I don't know. Well, I'll tell you. What's, what happens in the forest stays in the forest. Yeah. Unless, unless somebody comes out and blabs about what goes on in the forest.

You remember like being a kid though, hanging out in the forest in the woods like playing. I grew up in on two acres in the woods. So, so yeah. I was always in the woods. It's its own place. It is. So you can imagine like your whole country is like that.

And like that's how you're living. You're just an outlaw with your buddies hanging out, having a campfire every night, eating roast pig that you find wandering around. Yeah. But it was weird because the king could like that was his land where he could go have, you know, go hunting and have his, his dudes hunting. But it was also lawless and a place to hide. It was weird.

There was a lot going on in the forest. Right. So the reason why you were just by definition an outlaw if you were hanging out in the forest is because the king had these forest laws that said, all this forest, this is mine. Yeah. This is for my hunting, my friend's hunting. And that's it.

If you're hanging out in the forest, you're breaking the law. And it was like a big law and like there were serious punishments for this. So just being in the forest may do an outlaw. But even more than that, the people who went and lived in the forest weren't like on the run necessarily from the king and the king's officials. They were like at war with the king and the king's officials. This is a time where like just some schmo like you or me could like wage war directly with the king of England.

Yeah. And they came to come fight us basically. And that's kind of what happened. And that's why the forest was a backdrop for all of the Robin Hood legends. From the beginning of the ballads up to the Robin Hood men and tights. They were all set in the forest and because this happened, the forest laws were passed and everyone was really upset about it. So whether it's a metaphor or whether they're saying like the king did this

and we need to commemorate it. Right. Or they were just you know building a foundation for why this action was taking place. The forest like plays a huge role. Yeah. And there's a new Robin Hood movie coming out. Oh yeah. No.

It's crazy. Like it seems like every couple of years this just won't die. They're going to do a new version of it. And there's a new one with the kid from. Kid in play. The king. Yeah. With kid from kid in play.

He's awesome. He does that like jump through his. Remember he'd hold his foot and then jump through the. I used to could do that. No. Yeah. I never could. Yeah.

I would just fall flat on my face. Young Chuck was a little more fleet of foot. It's got the kid from the Kingsman. Uh-huh. You know that guy? Uh-huh. He plays Robin Hood and Jamie Fox is a little John I guess. But it's you know of course this one he's shooting like literally like five arrows at

once and they all manage to go in different directions somehow. Oh is it a comedy? No. No it's real. Oh okay like there's guys coming at him from different directions. Yeah. And so he'll put like three arrows and shoot them at the same time yet they'll all like spread out like a machine gun fire or something.

First shotgun. And for some weird reason he's going. He-ya! He-ya! With every shot. And then I was looking up movies today just while we're on that and I totally forgot there was a Russell Crow version that I didn't even see. I think that was just Robin Hood right?

Robin Hood from like 2010. Supposedly. Ridley Scott. Yeah. No that's not the one. There's one that like historians are like this is about as close to accurate as we've gotten. Well I looked up on the Russell Crow and then I think the deal is that one is a prequel of sorts because it's like the wars before he became you know Robin Hood that you know Robson then

gives to the poor. I would go check that one out. The one that I was thinking of is from 1991. It was directed by John Irvin starring Patrick Bergen. Remember him? Oh yeah. And Uma Thurman. That's the one that historians are like this is the best out of all of them as far as-

It's not Costner. I like that movie when it came out. I'll admit it. I saw JFK on the plane to Australia and I gotta tell you as it came out Costner fan with that one. All over again. I was like this guy is a great actor. You fell in love all over again. Yeah well I specifically avoided draft dates so I could leave the door open to be a fan again.

Yeah yeah that's funny. I don't remember all I remember was that preview for draft day. That's all I saw it too. They built up in that preview it's about the NFL draft something so big like I can't believe that happened it's gonna happen. I was like what did they like kill somebody in the draft room? No they drafted Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick that's so you.

Kaepernick whatever. Let's take a break. I feel like we're off the rails and we're lost in the forest. Yeah a little. And we'll come back right after this. S watch Y Y Y S K S K. Some people can't stand the rain. But at Vessie we can't get enough of it.

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fact. I know that you knew but I just wanted to... Sure, you know. All right, so they're in the forest. The forest makes historical sense like we pointed out because that's where outlaws did their bidding. And now we should talk about the king because it's sort of not all over the map but there's a few people that some historians believe could have been the king of note. Yeah, but what's weird is if you read those original ballads that are spelled all crazy, they mentioned the king once out of all of them. There's just one mention of the king and they refer to him as Edward, our comely king. Yeah, what you think is Edward III, right? That's what some historians say. If you take the ballads at face value and that they were written

contemporaneously to Robin Hood's exploits, right? Yeah. But a lot of people and even in the popular culture, the kings that are most associated with the Robin Hood legend are Richard the Lionheart and his brother, the sniveling villain King John. He's always sniveling and whining in the movies. And so in the Robin Hood legends, Robin Hood frequently helped Richard the Lionheart regain his throne from King John who had schemed to get it away from him. King John's the villain, King really Robin Hood's the hero but King Richard's like the backup hero. Yeah. But they think that it's possible and some of the best candidates for who Robin Hood is based on actually were running around and interacting with the real life King John, if not also King Richard too. Yeah, but

that doesn't make sense time wise, right? Because unless they just took a while to get around to writing these stories because they were around 100 years before the first Robin Hood ballads started appearing. Right, which in my opinion lends credence to the idea that the ballads are folklore based on actual events because that time span is just about enough for things to be kind of changed and compressed and added to and for a folklore to develop. Like think about if you're describing like an outlaw, like if you or I like wrote something about Billy the Kid based on stuff we'd heard, what will we come up with? It'd be close but it wouldn't be like 100 percent accurate, right? Right, that's a good point. Richard though had a pretty interesting story

when he died and this is something that is not lore but is close to recorded fact as we can get. He was walking around the perimeter of a Chateau in France where he that was just there was a battle going on basically didn't have I get the feeling that it was sort of winding down so he may have de-chain mailed and was like just airing out his armpits or something. Oh, so sweaty. And he was shot with a crossbow in the shoulder ordinarily might not have been a big deal but it turned gangrenous and some people say as he was dying he said bring me the man who shot me and they bring the man and he like forgave him and said spare this man I may die but do not do anything to him but that's not how it turned out is it? It's not. The guy's name

Peter Basil and after the king died everybody turned to Peter Basil and was like you know you're dead right? He's like probably figured it. Yeah, he's like I was really hoping that wasn't the case but all right. But didn't didn't you hear him? He just said right. Mother but they flayed him alive which meant peeling the skin off of his head while he was alive. Unbelievable. And then after he endured a lot of agony they hanged him without the skin because I'm sure they peeled it off of his neck as well. Imagine how bad a hanging would be but then without your skin on your neck. Rope burn. It's adding insult to injury is what it is. Yeah, so it was custom at the time that you bury the king in different places which sounds really horrific now but

he was cut up and buried in different places. Hart in Normandy has entrails and Shalos and apparently the rest of his remains in Anjou. Right, so that was a good brother. Yeah, that was Richard the Lionheart. Yeah, so he wasn't like deposed by his brother John. He actually died. He was king for two years after their father. Oh, what was his name? Henry? I believe Henry II? Yeah, Henry II right? Yeah. Okay, so after Henry II died Richard took over for two years then he dies and then John ascends to the throne. Brain of terror. And John was like he's known among historians as the worst king England's ever had. Yeah, he was like you said he was paranoid. He had no scruples. He was humorless.

He was just not a good guy. They point out in this article you sent he was the opposite of Robin Hood and that he took from the rich and the poor and just gave it to himself. I actually wrote that. Did you write that? Very well done. Thank you. Thank you everybody. It sounded like a Josh Clark line. Thanks. And in the movies like John's always just sort of a just that he's sort of a whiny baby. He is but he's also very powerful and very evil and deadly. Yes and vindictive. Right, yeah. So this is in real life that's how he's remembered and described. He was very well known for being a heavy taxer. He would take your estate and he would use these funds to like enrich himself basically like you were saying but he was the the noble or he was

the king that the nobles rebelled against and forced to sign the Magna Carta. That was John. Yeah. That means that he was such a bad king that his own people rose up and took London hostage and forced him to negotiate with them and he signed this document that forms the basis of civil and individual liberties in the Western world. Yeah. You know the Magna Carta signed in 1215. So John was forced to sign that and this rebellion is kind of part of the Robin Hood legend as well. Pretty cool. Yeah. He wasn't cool. No, but just about everything going on around him was cool and I think that the point of John and the reason why I think that he was part of the basis of the Robin Hood legend historically is that prior to John when his father was king

there was a respect for the rule of law and things were just kind of run well like the king didn't act above the law. Well, King John was very much not like that. He was above the law and acted like it and flaunted it. So when his father was around the idea of an outlaw, an outlaw was a villain. By the time John took over or after John took over that had reversed. Yeah. Outlaw was in opposition to the king. The law was what was corrupt and so John's reign kind of gave this fertile ground for a legend like Robin Hood. Sure. An outlaw hero to develop possibly for the first time in Western culture. Yeah. It was prime time for something like this to take hold. Right. So as far as who Robin Hood may have been, historians have tossed a lot of

people into the pot over the years and most of them have some variation of that name. There was a Robin with a Y-Hod, H-O-D. Great. A Robert Hood or Robertus, not bad. There was Gilbert Robin Hood. Sure. Why not? With a Y-N. So all these historians are like, oh, it's got to be these three guys, right? Yeah. Robin Hood with a U. Yeah. But here's what some other folks have finally said is, you know what? I think that name is not a name, right? But it is a term for an outlaw. Yeah. So it was created and there's a little bit to back that up. Yeah, there really is. They actually, this is like as clever as an historian can get. Pretty good stuff here. Clever and lucky. Some historians, I didn't find out who it was or when, but they came upon a,

I guess like a civic proclamation about a prior, which is a church official, being pardoned for seizing somebody's assets. Yes. And the person, and he seized them without a warrant, which is what he was being pardoned for. Yeah. But the person whose assets he seized was an outlaw named William Robahood, okay, Robin Hood, right? ROBEHOD. So they were like, okay, this is a Robin Hood right here. They managed to find the year's court record before for the same area. There was only one prior in the area and that noted that the prior had seized the assets of a guy named Robert, son, or no, William, son of Robert Lafever. So what they figured out was that the clerk in the pardoning proclamation wrote down that the guy was a Robahood, which

meant a fugitive and outlaw. And they say, okay, this is proof positive that as late as 1262, no later than 1262, the idea of using the term Robin Hood or some variation of that as a term for an outlaw, generic term for an outlaw, was so widespread that a clerk could write that down, denote somebody as a Robahood, and people would know what they were talking about, which means that that legend of Robin Hood had to have been around prior to this and in circulation for long enough that it had spread. Yeah. So in effect, William, son of Robert Lafever, is the same person as William Robahood. Right. And this dude in 1262, this clerk just took it upon himself to give him that name and no one thought he was crazy. Right. It almost like he had written

down William the bank robber or William the bandit rather than writing his last name, which frankly, he didn't have a last name. He was son of Robert Lafever because they didn't have last names very much back then. So it was very much like the clerk wrote William the outlaw bandit. Yes. But what he used Robahood or Robin Hood instead of outlaw bandit is just somewhere over the ages, we lost that knowledge that Robahood or Robin Hood meant that and wasn't an actual person. Right. So there's this other guy, Folk Fitz Warren. I love this guy. He is a bad dude. He was a bad dude and he was a real guy. And it turns out there was actually a personal link to King John. They were pals, little Folk Fitz Warren and young John who I bet young John was

a not fun to be around. No, he's probably not a fun playmate. Yeah. Mine. And here's one story. They were playing chess one day. John got mad, broke his chessboard over Folk's head. Folk kicked him in the stomach and John almost said little John, but that would be a mistake. Different John. Little John was a character, which by the way, I don't think we mentioned little John was referenced in all those old ballads. Yeah. He's been around kind of since the beginning. And they think they found his grave. That's right. So this John as he was younger went crying to daddy and said he kicked me in the stomach expecting to get some sort of backup. And apparently that would have been Henry II. I don't know if he beat him, but he was beaten for complaining about being kicked

in the stomach. Spanked him good. Yeah. So no wonder John grew up to be a jerk. Right. His dad didn't ever have his back. It sounds like. Yeah, that's part of it. I'm sure. So flash forward a bit. Folk's father passes away in 1197. He inherits his ancestral holding at Whittington. John comes to power and says, I remember when you kicked me in the stomach. What a little bastard. I am going to take your holdings, take your family estate basically and give it to your enemy, old Maury Fitzroger. Yeah. Sorry, Maury's. There's an S at the end. These names are great. So Folk ends up murdering Maury's. It might even be Morris. Morris. Maybe. Yeah, probably today it would be. Morris Fitzroger. That's my new hotel name. That's a new pseudonym.

Folk kills Morris, flees and basically wages a Robin Hood-like war against John and his men for about three years. Yeah. So this could be him. Yeah, it could be because not just the fact that he was battling King John and fled to the forest where he used as his base of operations. Yeah. But there are a few other things that came up. Like one thing that's part of the legends, but actually isn't part of the earliest ballads, is that Robin Hood was a fallen nobleman, somebody of noble birth who either lost or renounced their title and became an outlaw and then regained it. That's the story of Folk Fitzwarren. Yeah. Like he lost his land, he lost his title to this other guy and then finally got it back when he was pardoned in 1203,

right? Pretty good candidate. That was one. There's another one where Folk was known to, while he was a forest bandit, he would hijack like the king's people who were carrying the king's money or rob him and he would say, what do you have on you? And the ones who told the truth about what they actually had, the amount of currency they had on them, he would let live. Very Robin Hood-y. Very. Like straight out of the legend, but the ones who lied, he would punish with their lives or whatever. That was super Robin Hood-y. There was also another character trade of Robin Hood was disguises, using disguises. Folk Fitzwarren was not above disguising himself. Yeah, there was another guy, historical outlaw name, Eustace the Monk, who also had the disguise

thing down, very much like Robin. In fact, exactly, he would disguise himself as a potter and that even goes to the Disney cartoon, these disguises, very much a Robin Hood thing. I haven't, I don't know, Eustace the Monk doesn't seem as enticing to me as old Fitzwarren. No, Fitz or Folk is, he's my guy too. Speaking of Fitz though, we should tell everyone that that little tag at the beginning of the name means that you're a bastard child, right? An illegitimate son. I looked that up because it sounded too good to be true, but there was definitely a kid named Fitzroy, which meant illegitimate son of Roy, of the king, and I can't remember what king or what the guy's first name was, and since then it's kind of become

code, but I don't know that that was widespread at the time, that necessarily Folk Fitzwarren was an illegitimate son or that any of the other Fitzs were. Yeah, I wonder today if like Fitzpatrick and Fitzgibbons and like Fitzgerald, is that all mean, illegitimate son of Gerald or Patrick? I don't know, I don't know, it's the truth anymore. Very interesting. Fitz. Should we take another break? Yeah, we'll let everybody stew on that one for a little while. We'll be back right after this. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it.

That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but. Imagine your favorite sneaker styles, supercharged with waterproof tech. So whenever Lin-Al's just staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com, that's V-E-S-S-I dot com, and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. If you do not rise to the head, not only of your profession, but of your country, you will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.

So we're tracing John Quincy Adams' journey from the White House to the halls of Congress. I'm Bob Crawford, basist for the Ava Brothers. Join me, Patrick Warburton, and Nick Offerman, as we bring the sixth president to life. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before? Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. He held the union together across two pivotal errors and two visions for America. Adams stretches his hand forward to Lincoln, and in so many ways makes Lincoln possible. Listen to Founding Son, a curiosity podcast every Thursday on the iHeart radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, so we've covered Folk, and we covered Eustis. Folk, by the way, we got to tell that one story real quick about him. Oh, the beginning? Yeah, he found out that another bandit was using his name. Pierce Morgan. What was his name? Pierce what? Pierce De Bruville. Okay, that sounds like, these sound like romance novel names. But he found out Pierce was using his name, robbing somewhere else, and he captured Pierce and his men, and he made Pierce tie his men up, and then go around and behead every single one of them with his own hands. With, I guess, with the assumption that he would be let go.

I guess, but he didn't. Then he cut off Pierce's hands when he was dead. If this happened, Chuck, can you imagine being in that house, that room, where there's like five, six, ten guys, I have no idea how many men there were, who were systematically beheaded. And so, like, as you're waiting in line, as the guy next to you is getting his head cut off, and your turn's next. There's heads everywhere. Yeah, how much blood and gore was everywhere. Like, can you imagine, like, really put yourself into that situation? Like, that may have actually happened. Yeah. It's so disturbing. So disturbing. Yeah, like losing your head, that's, that's, I think that's probably, like, the first mortal fear any human's ever experienced. Yeah.

Like, words, we just know on, like, a primal level, the head is supposed to be attached to the body. And when it's not, there's something bad wrong that's going on. Yeah, like, your, your death. Yeah. Didn't we determine, though, in a podcast nine and a half years ago that you stay alive for, like, what, six or seven seconds? Four, I think. Four seconds. That's what they found in rats. After you were beheaded. Yeah, and remember that one guy who was guillotine, like, he kept, like, looking over and, like, trying to die, but then they'd say his name, and his eyes would open back up and he'd be like, what? Oh, could you imagine the horror of potentially looking up for four seconds and seeing your headless body? No. No, my mind

just rails against going there. Yeah, it should. It's, it's replacing it with, with a bed. All right. So there was a guy who wrote a book. A lot of people are still trying to piece this together. This is not something that historians put to bed years and years ago. Definitely not. Yeah. Only 14 years ago in 2004 and probably since then. But there was a dude named Brian Benison who wrote a book called Robin Hood colon. Case closed. Always a cult. The real story. That's pretty close to case closed. Yeah, pretty much. And he says, he's a lot, he's in the camp that Robin Hood is a name, like a title, similar he says to Billy the Kid. Right. I thought Billy Kid was a real dude though. Right. Yeah. I think his name is William Bonnie. Yeah. But I mean,

he knew at the time that he was called Billy the Kid. Right. Yeah. That's a, it's a terrible analogy. I think so too. Because it'd be like Robin, son of Lafever. Right. But you call him Robin Hood, not even close. No. But at any rate, he, he claims it's a nickname and that of a man named Roger Godbird or Gobert. And he said, he's the real guy. He said, he lived in the 13th century. He was a friend originally of the Sheriff of Nottingham, Reginald de Grey. That's pretty significant. And we should point out too that the one reason we can't pinpoint a lot of this is that they never name of the Sheriff of Nottingham they're talking about in any of these stories. Right. And that's not a person's name. That's a, that's a title. No, but there is such a thing as

the Sheriff of Nottingham. That's what I'm saying. And there was back then. But there were many of them. Right. Exactly. Just one after the other. So that doesn't help that much. But it does zero in on the area. But yeah, it doesn't help get a time period down. No, but he claims that it was specifically Reginald de Grey, that Sheriff of Nottingham. And after what, four years as an outlaw, the dude was captured, went to jail, pardoned, and then farmed peacefully for the rest of his life. Yeah. And I mean, that guy is a pretty good candidate. Is he? He is. Because one of the things about the Robin Hood themes, despite in some, in some of the, I think the ballads, no, not in the ballads, it would have been in the ones that came later. So I guess

the ones that the Scottish historians added, he was battling the king. Right. In the original ballads, all of the people he was rebelling against and fighting were like local authorities. Like the Sheriff of Nottingham. Yeah. So he was kind of a working class hero in among like the first working class the West has ever seen, the Yeoman farmers of the era, or of the area. They were like the first like middle class that ever developed because either you were a peasant, meaning you were a feudal slave to the feudal Lord and you worked the land, whether you liked it or not, or you were landed gentry, like you were a feudal Lord and you had a peasantry and you had, you know, a bunch of land, you were friends of the king.

Yeah. But in between, there were Yeomans. I think that's how you say it, Y-E-O-M-A-N. Yeoman. Yeoman. There were Yeoman farmers who were, they weren't slaves, but they didn't have a title. They just kind of made their own way. And supposedly that's what Robin Hood was. So it sounds like that this was what this Roger Gobert is. Right. He was the same thing. And the idea that he was battling the Sheriff of Nottingham, that would place him more in the historical lens than say, if he were like battling King John, that's actually a mark against folk if it's Warren, because that doesn't appear in the original ballads. It was, he was battling the Sheriff of Nottingham or he's battling local church officials. He hated

the church officials. But he loved God. He did so much so that he would get arrested to come out to go to church. Right. He just hated the clergy. Right. Which at the time, those were the people who were taking your land or throwing you in jail or taking your stuff without a warrant. Yeah. And also when you look back on a lot of these early ballads and stories, they're very, very different from what the legend of Robin Hood became to us in like contemporary fiction. Apparently that the jest ballad only had a couple of things that he did that were even close to like these big altruistic acts that he's really, really most known for now. I think one of them was he agreed to lend money to a knight. That was one of the two. Really? Yeah. Here's five bucks.

Just pay it back with a 2% Vig. Right. But that whole steal from the rich and give to the poor thing, that came thanks to the Scottish historian. Yeah. All these authors sort of littered it with that stuff because they had found a champion of the underling basically in the common man and ran with it. Just from standing up to the king or to the authority who were acting unjustly and above the law themselves. Yeah. There's also no mention in those early tales of a maid Marion who seems to have come along later and is actually one of a great example of one of the first examples in literature of female empowerment of a character because maid Marion was no one's chump in any of these stories. And he was, she was like a sort of an equal to Robin partially

because of her spunk and partially because Robin in the stories at least was kind of down with equality. Right. Yeah. That was one thing that and basically being in Nottingham area or Yorkshire area but somewhere in the woods. Those two things are basically the two constants throughout all the Robin Hood legends that he was very much down with. He was a feminist. Yeah. He was down with the cause. Yeah. And maid Marion from what I saw, she had her own series of ballads before she appeared in the Robin Hood ballads. She was her own character. And so when they were brought together, it was kind of analogous to like putting Superman and Wonder Woman in the same comic book basically, which is a pretty cool move. That is a cool move. And to keep her equal to him.

That's huge. Yeah. It is huge. Whether or not any of that happened, it's kind of irrelevant as far as literature is concerned. There was one historian in 1521 that wrote, Robin permitted no harm to women nor seize the goods of the poor but help them generously with what he took from Abbots, like we were saying earlier with the clergy. But then in some of the earlier stories, there's not a whole lot of mention of that kind of stuff except for one that just had one comment that Robin did poor men much good. Which okay. Sure. I guess it's better than like he was the scourge of the poor. Yeah, but it wasn't like they built the legend upon that one kind of throwaway line. But I think they did. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But they didn't make a lot of hay out of it.

Right. Or at least that one author didn't. Yeah, not at the very beginning in the ballads. Yeah. There it was also like way more violent. Like there was one of the characters, Much the Miller's son. Much was his name. I just love that guy's name. Much was, I think in the ballads, he lops off the head of a page boy, a child to keep him from like blabbing from what he saw, you know, the location of where the merry men were. Right. It was way more violent than the later ones depicted Robin Hood. Yeah, they were though all Robin and his merry men. Archery was always a big deal. Yeah. They're all very skilled archers and one of the enswordsmen, but they were all super skilled horsemen. And that's not something that you see as much. Right. Although I think in this

new movie, there is pretty good horsemen. Yeah. I mean, imagine like it's hard enough to be good on a horse, but a horse in a forest, that's like a whole different level. Shooting arrows. Yeah. Like a Mongol. Exactly. And that was who was so good? Yep. The Mongols. The Mongol hordes who made their thigh steaks. Remember they sat on raw meat on their saddles to cure it? Thigh steaks. Tartar, steak tartar. What else? You got anything? Oh, he was killed by a treacherous prioris, a female church official, kind of like a middle manager nun. A middle manager nun? Yeah, he went to go see a nun for... Oh, right. Was he hurt? Health care. I'm not sure what it was, but he went to go get bled and she purposefully over bled him. And then when he asked to be

buried somewhere and she's like, no, I'm going to bury you on the side of the road. And she supposedly erected a... This is in Kirkleys. She erected a stone that said, here lies Robin Hood or something. I don't remember exactly what variation of Robin Hood it was. A Robert Hood H-U-D-E. Yeah. And supposedly she erected it, and this was written hundreds of years later, to basically let travelers through the woods know that they didn't have to fear being held up any longer. Apparently, if your name had the initials R-H, it was fair game. Yeah. They really have a lot of leeway here with things like Hood, Hood, Hod. Yeah. Everybody was illiterate, so it didn't matter. Robin, Robert, Robertus. Come on. Maybe I'm... Come on.

You middle English dumb dumb. And supposedly after, as he was dying, he used his last bit of energy to fire an arrow and say, that's where I want to be buried. And that's when she was like, that was nice for the movies, but it's not happening. She's like, yeah, sure, sure. You can die knowing that I'll bury you just there. Over bled, man. Can you imagine? Because I guess you just get so weak. That I can imagine. You're probably like, I think I'm good, but I'm not feeling so hot. She's like, just a little more should do it. I'm not dead yet. Yeah. You got anything else? Nothing. So that was Robin Hood. I love history, and if you love history too, we'll go look up some Robin Hood stuff on the internet.

Since I said that, it's time for this one. I'm going to call this one of the many, many, many roundabouts emails that we got. We got a lot. Everyone loves their roundabouts. I know. It was really surprising. Like everyone wanted to talk about their hometown roundabout. Everybody's very proud of their roundabout. Apologies to the people of Carmel. Carmel. No, didn't they say it was Carmel? I don't remember anymore. I think it's supposed to be Carmel. Let's go with Carmel. Hey guys, just finished roundabouts. I thought I'd pitch a little info on our local one in Alexandria, Louisiana. In the 1940s,

they built two circles, part of a road project, speed up travel between two local military bases that had popped up during World War II. The larger of the two is still in use, though it's notorious in the area for traffic accidents, especially during heavy traffic and bad weather. It's a two-lane circle with a large forested area in the very center that is probably the size of a city block. Wow. Like other roundabouts, you must yield to traffic already on the circle, but there are two lanes that funnel traffic onto the circle and only one lane for getting off. This means that if you enter in the left lane, you have to merge to the right lane before you can exit. Because the circle is so big, though, the speed limit is 45 miles an hour within the

circle. People inevitably go too fast, or sometimes lanes change as slower cars are entering the circle, resulting in rear-end crashes. The problem is frequent enough that the city is seriously looking into eliminating the circle. No definitive plan on its replacement has been settled on, and some locals are concerned about disrupting wildlife in the forest as well, which has delayed any definitive action on whether the circle will continue to exist. May the circle be unbroken. Warmest regards. I love that. Marshall Wells from Colfax, Louisiana. Thanks a lot, Marshall. Appreciate that. Great story.

Let us know how it pans out because we worry about the wildlife too. Yeah, and thanks for everyone who wrote in about the roundabouts. I love the enthusiasm. Yeah. It's nice. Especially from Carmel. Carmel. If you want to get in touch with us, do that. You can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com, find our social media links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcastandhowstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it.

That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but. Imagine your favorite sneaker styles, supercharged with waterproof tech. So whenever Lin-Al's is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon.