The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

He singles out this passage in his own personal copy of the book. Notwithstanding Michelet’s highly suspect scholarship, Stevenson must have been convinced that the time of the wars between Lancaster and York was the perfect period in which to set an outlaw novel. He is induced to quit them by the French Wars, so he turns his back on the Sheriff and the King’s deer, seeks the sea and crosses it All Robin Hood’s companions, all who were under ban of the law, were safe whilst Warwick (either personally or through his brother) was judge of the marches of Calais and Scotland. In the long series of ballads of which he is the hero, we find him first inhabiting the green woods of Lincoln. Robin Hood is naturally the enemy of the man of the law, the adversary of the Sheriff. He then goes on to speak about how Robin Hood was one of Warwick’s men: The King of the enemies of property, of the plunderers of the borders, and corsairs of the Strait.

In speaking of Warwick the Kingmaker (a prominent figure in the wars), Michelet writes that he was This history situates Robin and his merry men, not in the time of Richard I, a practice which had been popularised by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe (1819), but, as Stevenson does in his novel, between 14. Stevenson was probably inspired to set his outlaw novel during the Hundred Years’ War as a result of having Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (1844). The novel appears to be a fusion of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834), and the numerous Robin Hood children’s novels that were being published in the late Victorian period. It is a story about medieval outlaws during the War of the Roses (1455-1487). This post, however, is about a now little-known novel that he authored entitled The Black Arrow, which was originally serialised in Young Folks A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature over four months in 1883, and then published as a single volume five years later in 1888. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is perhaps most famous nowadays for his brilliant novel, The Strange Case of Dr.

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson