In her book Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman argues that while “memes are seemingly trivial and mundane artifacts, they actually reflect deep social and cultural structures.” The participatory culture ingrained within internet communities and the creation and dissemination of memes allows for an individual to seamlessly enter into the online political discourse, ingest the message and meaning within the meme, and then transform that signifying matrix into political action. Audiences can transfer that meme to another person, comment on one in a Twitter feed or online forum, replicate it or its message at a political rally, or embrace the ideology of the meme and put it into action at the voting booth. In the present world of new media, Shifman sees memes working in three interconnected ways: they can function as forms of persuasion or political advocacy; as grassroots action, where participants are empowered through the message of the meme to coordinate and organize online and also on the ground; and as modes of expression and public discussion. This essay is a focused venture into the intersected world of medievalismist Robin Hood and political meme culture of the nasty, malevolent, lulz variety from the 2000s and 2010s. I am especially interested with the ways in which authors and artists have corrupted the good outlaw Robin Hood and his ideology into something nefarious and degenerate. The Robin Hood memes that form the basis of this essay are those that reimagine Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama as versions of the outlaw, and these memes share several characteristics. Both Clinton and Obama are linked with communist iconography, and the two are portrayed as questionable capitalists. The adage “It's the economy, stupid” is not lost on these memeists, for they stoke the fear of an economy going under at the hands of Clinton and Obama, the former rendered as one whose corrupt family and foundation will use their political connections to bankroll their own interests, and the latter as a socialist in disguise who will expand the welfare state to the detriment of the free market and the benefit of “urban” (black, multicultural, multiethnic) communities.

PORTENTS are omens, signs of the future. They warn oftentimes of dangers that will come – sometimes momentous in scale – and the devastation that will be wrought. Portents can also exist as marvels, miracles and wonders of an unusual nature that could signify a future event. Portents are found in different types of medieval historical writings: versions of the Middle English Prose Brut, several fifteenth-century chronicles of London, genealogical texts and other medieval histories. For example, Thomas Walsingham, in his Chronica Majora, describes how in 1385 the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was followed ‘by the greatest of upheavals in the kingdom’, and that the appearance of a dolphin on Christmas Day in the Thames in London was an omen for trouble between Londoners and Richard II. In this essay I will examine a number of such portents and wonders found in ‘Warkworth's’ Chronicle, which spans the years 1461 to 1474, and discuss how these phenomena can serve as a means by which its author came to terms with the unthinkable yet real: murder, treason, war and other-worldly phenomena. The unnamed author uses the term ‘tokens’ twice to denote events in the chronicle that are of a portentous nature: extreme floods and ‘wo-water’, and the sighting of a headless revenant. Moreover, he describes several events that are not necessarily portents, for they do not attempt to predict a future event. Nevertheless, they invite readers to interpret them as political commentary, especially when read in context with the naturally occurring portents and the author's direct, at times politicized, interpretation of them. Some of these unexplained wonders are associated with Henry VI, while another relates the sighting of the headless being noted above. The author of ‘Warkworth's’ Chronicle reserves comment on the outcome and explicit meaning of the more ambiguous wonders such as these, for his vagueness and oblique strategies of narrative suggest a political climate too caustic and dangerous to report and explain them in a direct and critical manner. Yet, this text is a chronicle, and as is the case with some chroniclers, commentary, brief though it is, is occasionally given on these matters.

Robin Hood is certainly one of the main figures whom we associate with medieval culture, medievalism, and neomedievalism. With each new age, it seems, there is a new Robin Hood who is quick to adapt to his contemporary surroundings (or, rather, his creators are purposeful in placing the outlaw into a contemporary political and social context, a space in which the outlaw can navigate the uncertain terrain). While Robin and his greenwood world are grounded signifiers of the Middle Ages, Robin Hood, and Robin Hood studies, have been on the periphery, on the margins, of medieval scholarship for a number of years. Perhaps we should, once and for all, blame William Langland for this unfortunate occurrence: the outlaw's first literary appearance is in one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages, the B-Text of Piers Plowman, passus V, and the representation of the outlaw is none too flattering. Here, Will, the dreamer, encounters Sloth, who is represented as a priest. Sloth does not know his pater noster but he can, astonishingly, recite from memory the “rymes of Robyn hood and Randolf Erl of Chestrre.” We still do not know what Langland meant by “rymes” nevertheless, that a slothful priest knows these works from memory points to their outsider, transgressive status.

While Robin Hood and his literature have always been associated with the Middle Ages, there remain precious few textual remnants of Robin Hood literature that fit into the general timeframe of medieval Europe: Robin Hood and the Monk exists in one manuscript, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.5.48, which dates to ca. 1465, and there is one manuscript fragment of that poem from the fifteenth century, London, British Library, Bagford Ballads, volume 1, article 6 (C.40); Robin Hood and the Potter (ca. 1468) is found in only one medieval manuscript, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.4.35; the play Robynhode and the Shryff off Notyngham (ca. 1475) is only found in Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS R.2.64; no extant manuscript exists for the magisterial poem the Gest of Robyn Hode, yet eight whole and fragmentary versions in early printed books are extant, and the publication of these roughly span the years 1495–1590.