ABSTRACT
The news that in addition to “known knowns,” things we know we know, and “known unknowns,” things we know we don’t know, there are “unknown unknowns,” things we do not know we don’t know, came as less of a revelation to Robin Hood scholars than it apparently did to politicians and journalists.1 Finding possible “knowns” in elds of previously “unknowns” and making “unknowns” “known” is what makes the study of Robin Hood and its associated conferences so enthralling. There is, though, another category of disputable “knowns,” unacknowledged in the Rumsfeld taxonomy, that is more worrying for the cultural historian and critic. These are the “knowns” that turn out to be false “knowns” because the evidence for them has either been misinterpreted or underinterpreted, relegating them to the division of “unknowns” on their journey to becoming revised “knowns.” As an outcome of an ongoing research project into the role, reputation, and reception of Robin Hood in sixteenth-century London and its environs, it became clear that some of the “known knowns” in that period and location were not necessarily the “knowns” they were thought to be. The three suspect “knowns” under discussion here are all well-known: the felon, in 1502, likened to Robin Hood in three London chronicles; the royal May festival celebrating Robin Hood at Greenwich and Shooters Hill in 1515; and Henry Machyn’s record of Robin Hood in a May game, in 1559, that paraded through the streets of London. Each event is “known” through the evidence of contemporary chronicles and features frequently, with varying emphases, in works on the history of Robin Hood. In all cases, though, familiarity with these reports has led, if not exactly to contempt, to a somewhat insouciant regard for the original documents in which the occasions are recorded.
