A modern Sheriff of Nottingham

AWW:   Robin sums up Geoffrey, your Sheriff of Nottingham, and how he defies expectations:

Geoffrey is different from the modern portrayal of the sheriff, but not merely because he is not the villain of the novel nor especially cruel. The Robin Hood of the ballads is often a trickster figure, but in films such as Prince of Thieves, the sheriff seems to have taken over that role. Why did you make the sheriff someone who champions duty over adventure?

MC:    I did not consciously calculate my treatment of the sheriff, but it is easy and reasonable to follow what my instincts were.

           I assumed that if I cleared away much of the extra lore that surrounded the Robin Hood story, the way you knock the mud off a boot, you’d get a clearer, more well-defined legend. So I think I took the same cheerful skepticism I used on the legend in general and put it to work on the sheriff.

           I have long enjoyed reading Middle English, and I am a happy student of the Middle Ages in general. I knew that lawmen sometimes tortured suspects, and that criminal punishment was often severe and dramatic. But I knew that a sheriff would usually be a man who was more intelligent than most of his fellow townspeople, and one who had some administrative powers that set him apart from, say, millers and potters.

            Furthermore, I fell in love with the idea of creating a modern character, a man who was a gifted manager, who admired justice, and enjoyed the paperwork and the thought that went into being fair. And I plunked him down into a time period in which cruelty was often admired, and in which courage was defined by the ability to kill. My sheriff is the kind of man you and I would like to work for, if need be--a capable administrator. He is a good-hearted man, with women troubles and a difficult wife. He is one of us.

           And I knew that Robin Hood, if he met such an individual, would come to recognize his virtues. I think Robin Hood is pleasantly surprised to discover that, in the long run, the sheriff has characteristics the outlaw admires, and the same is true for my sheriff. He will ultimately accept the existence of Robin Hood, not because he is weak, but because he is wise.

           This leads me to a point I think we sometimes overlook as readers, and as human beings. We are not the same at the end of a day as we were at the beginning. Characters who are complex and interesting are not the same at the end of a story as they were at the start.

           Robin Hood is changed by his encounters with the sheriff, and while this is hard to quantify, we can sense that that sheriff, too, is altered and made more of a judge of human events by his troubles with the men of the greenwood.

           The sheriff makes a brief but key appearance in the first book of my Crusader trilogy, by the way. In the Book of the Lion we observe Sheriff Geoffrey judging the case of a counterfeiter’s apprentice, and agreeing that the young man should join King Richard’s crusade rather than face more harsh, much bleaker punishment. This is the sheriff as we have come to know him--a man whose careful nature has been burnished by his awareness of Robin Hood.