This is a surprising twist in history: some believe that Robin Hood was based on a gay radical knight.

Last week I wrote about the Lollards — a radical sect of proto-Protestantism that arose in England following the Black Plague. The Lollards criticized the extravagance of the Catholic Church, arguing for vernacular religion and asceticism. The crown and the church tolerated the Lollard heresy until a Lollard-influenced uprising marched on London in 1381. After the rising, the Lollard movement was quashed and the Lollards driven underground. Nonetheless, their legacy influenced more Christian reform movements, including Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation.

However, King Richard II — the same one who suppressed the Lollards — apparently kept a court of "Lollard Knights," who somehow eluded persecution.

Two of these knights were Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe. As knights, they fought in wars and crusades. William and John joined a union called "Wedded Brotherhood," which some historians interpret as a sort of same-sex marriage. In 1391, when the two were on a mission abroad, John died. William died two days later, seemingly of grief. The two men were buried in a joint tomb, bearing an engraving of their helmets facing each other — as if kissing — and their shields overlapping in the style of a husband and wife.

As well as a knight, John was a poet and wrote the original Robin Hood legend. It is believed that John based Robin Hood on William and Little John on himself. Both John and William were close personal friends of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the most important literary work of the era — The Canterbury Tales.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow explore the question "Where did inequality come from?", gradually turning it around to "Where did equality come from?" In their estimation, equality is a strange concept that only appeared in the modern era. They argue that it emerged from dialogues between strongly hierarchical European societies and more egalitarian societies like the Algonquins. Graeber and Wengrow say that until Indigenous North Americans introduced the idea of economic equality to European philosophy, Europeans only understood equality to mean equality before God.

I think it's really interesting to investigate how people understood such ideas of fairness or unfairnes (ideas which dominate all aspects of our modern public discourse) in the past. The period when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, John Clanvowe wrote Robin Hood, and an unknown author wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was also the moment when capitalism was taking form. All of these stories grapple with the anxiety of a changing economic worldview — an anxiety that remains unresolved today. Imagine how John Clanvowe — a gay, radical knight–poet who grew up during the the plague, the deadliest catastrophe in human history — articulated that anxiety in the form of a hero who persists today as the essential rebel. I've always thought it's amazing that we continue to celebrate a man whose slogan is "steal from the rich and give to the poor" — an full-throated call for criminality. What does that say about the world we inhabit?

Edit: After more research, I learned the theory that Sir John Clanvowe wrote "Robin Hood" comes from community historian Tony Scupham-Bilton, though I couldn't find any academic discussion of the theory.