Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for people who swerve their car into incoming interesting ideas. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

We all know the story of Robin Hood.

Plucky Archer who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor,

his band of merry men, a jovial drunk friar, burgloring, exploitative aristocrats, redistributing their plunder to the peasants,

and then hiding out in Sherwood Forest.

Now the whole thing has been pretty much Disney-fied,

but it's usually expressed as a sort of socialist morality tale

the rich have too much ill-gotten money leaving an insufficient amount of money for the poor.

So our hero redistributes their wealth.

Which is actually a very modern way of thinking about Robin Hood. We basically think of him as Zorro,

cosplaying at a Renfair, the rich versus the poor. But that's not how people in the 14th century would have

understood Robin Hood or Sherwood Forest. Actually let's talk about Sherwood

Forest for a moment. I love forests and I spend a good deal of time poking around them with my

trusty dog Wallace. To us modern people forest means a concentration of trees right it's a bunch of trees, right?

It's a bunch of trees we can walk around,

slang hammocks in, peon, all that good stuff,

means trees.

The word forest and forbidden share the same root.

They're both derived from the Latin word forus meaning outside.

And were we to go back to the 14th century.

Forest was a much more expansive term than it is now,

much closer to that original understanding of forest as the outside.

...