5 thoughts on “Thieves of the Wood (2018) Is Shockingly Entertaining: Part 1

  1. The amount of layering in this show surprises me,which really makes the costumes look authentic and reasonable if not entirely accurate in construction.The crossover shawls and sashes really do liven up the look.
    The brothel manager(is pimp too harsh a word?)should probably be dressed better.After all it would be him gobbling the money of the women.Side note-Hollywood and European productions have the propensity to dial up the grittiness of the prostitutes(who did dress up on public occasions to maintain that facade of decadence),while Southeast Asian productions put courtesans and their likes in essentially too-good-to-be-true modern bridal couture.All.The.Time.Everyone forgets that people dressed differently for different occasions.Both sepia washout and rose tint are inappropriate while looking at history.

  2. Looks interesting. Too bad it’s on Netflix bc of Cuties I am not streaming the network.

  3. “Blackamoors,” as they were often called, has been in England, at least, since Great Elizabeth;s time. Then , there were about 3000 in the country, and there had been an outcry to have them removed. If you can find, iot, there’s a very interesting article on the Net. Some may have come from Moorish Spain, some earlier from the Crusades (If we’re to believe either Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves,” or “Robin of Sherwood.” Some doubtless came from slavery. In a good part of this period, there was also quite a large trade in white slaves, and Venice was one of the centres of it. So Shakespeare came by his inspiration honestly. Search on “blackamoors’ and “slavery” for more background. And I will certainly give the series a look.

    1. ‘If we’re to believe either Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves,” or “Robin of Sherwood.”’

      Surely you jest!

      “Robin of Sherwood” was a post-hippie-era, part-fantasy serial for children and teenagers, and the makers threw everything into the mix they could think of what would be colourful, such as ‘pagan Welsh sorcerer’ (never mind that Wales had been solidly Christian for centuries before England), magic swords, nature spirits, what-have-you. They introduced a Saracen character not so much for inclusivity (not yet really a thing in 1980s Britain) but for a bit of exoticism. This was a complete innovation: there is no basis in any of the earlier Robin Hood stories for a non-English Merry Man.

      “Prince of Thieves” is notorious for the some of the most egregious howlers about English history and geography in film history. Most famously, the one where Robin and Azeem arrive at Dover at dawn and Robin says brightly that they can walk to his father’s home at Loxley. Which would be a stroll of over 230 miles – except that we see them at Hadrian’s Wall on the way, which diversion brings the day’s stroll to over 500 miles. And to show how scientifically advanced ‘Muslim’ Azeem is, they provided him with a telescope – a product of the late European Renaissance at the very end of the 16th century. The Sheriff of Nottingham imports woad-wearing, savage ‘Scottish Celts’ who would have looked primitive a millennium earlier.

      Believing that either production has anything to tell us about 12th-century Britain is equivalent to taking Tennyson’s Arthurian poems as a guide to the Migration Period.

      Just for the record: while of course it’s not impossible that some English crusaders returned home with a Middle Eastern person or two in their entourage, Middle Eastern people are of course not black, but light- to mid-brown. Also, they would have been Christians – either born Christians (everyone forgets that the majority of the native population of the Holy Land was still Eastern Christian in the 12th century, and even now many of them are) or converted. Nobody would have been daft enough to bring a Muslim back to live in England, and if anyone did, the man wouldn’t have been tolerated for an instant if he had attempted to practise his religion.

  4. The first Episode was crazy, but I had to stop after 4 or 5 more episodes as I thought that my head would explode after so much nonsense. More to find about the “So what?”s in storyline and the problems with the history of Flanders (and all over europe) on our Blog: https://wackershofenannodomini.blogspot.com/2020/02/de-bande-van-jan-de-lichte-thieves-of.html

    I think that you can enjoy the series if:
    you like a crossover from historical Larp to “Fantasy-like adventures”
    don’t compare anything with real history
    you like dirty brutal figures.

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