What would Robin Hood do with today’s shower of MPs? One would like to think that he’d hang the pack of them at Westminster, cleave the Speaker’s heart with an arrow, then stroll across St James’s Park to beg forgiveness and offer his services to the Queen. (She would accept.) Unfortunately, it’s likely that if Robin Hood were brought to life tomorrow he would be considered a bad egg. Never mind cleaning up Parliament, he’d more likely be at home, posting YouTube clips calling for the chief constable of Nottinghamshire to be beheaded. No one would sing “hey nonny no” about his slushy socialist adventures under the greenwood tree. They would write angry newspaper columns about what a merciless killer and religious nut he was.

As anyone familiar with the early Hood ballads (ie, the earliest surviving written stories, dating from the mid-15th century) knows, Robin and his men could be extremely violent. Like tales of the original Mr Punch, they shock their audience as much as they delight. In Robin Hood and the Monk (c 1450), Little John stabs a jailer so hard that his blade hits the wall behind the man; John and Much, “the miller’s son”, not only murder the monk of the ballad’s title but also behead his page boy on the off-chance that he might squeal. In Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne (date uncertain, perhaps originally c 1475), Robin, having defeated Guy in combat, beheads him and mutilates his face with a knife.

Like the psychopathic Punch, Robin has softened with the centuries. The Tudors made him romantic, the Stuarts a royal tub-thumper. The Victorians turned him into a sanitised pansy and introduced him to their children. True, the blacklisted exiles of McCarthyite Hollywood gave him socialist cred in the 1950s TV series, but he was hardly Che Guevara. By the time of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves in the 1990s, the story was pantomime: Die Hard in Tights.

But Hood has always reflected his audience, which is why we are seeing a revival of Dark Robin. In two new versions of the story, he is returned to something like his original condition: a cold-hearted gangster with an obsessive moral code. In this he is reminiscent of the judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

That similarity is clearest in Hodd, by Adam Thorpe, a dense retelling of Robin and the Monk. Robin here is a sinister monster, a roadside thief permanently high on magic mushrooms, who harangues his embarrassed outlaws with his lunatic, cod-spiritualist theories. He would not be tormenting his local MP today. He would be buying fertiliser over the internet and planning to blow up buses. The classic narrative feature of a Hood tale — Robin ventures unwisely out of the forest, is captured and must be rescued — is present, but this is no good-natured romp. Thorpe lands Hood in a medieval clink with more than a whiff of Abu Ghraib; the incarceration breaks his spirit and his mind for good.

Thorpe understands not only the physical violence implicit in medieval peacekeeping, but also the spiritual violence of medieval piety. Religion drives his characters to acts of terror and great cruelty. The minstrel-turned-monk narrator’s constant self-flagellation is a painful response to the moral anarchy of his time.

In the proudly populist Outlaw, by Angus Donald, we follow Robin through the eyes of another young minstrel. Almost every feature of the classic Hood tale is present, except, as in Hodd, for Robin’s devotion to the Virgin Mary. Here he is essentially a druid. The darkness of this tale is present chiefly in the graphic descriptions of limbs sliced, tongues diced and eyes put out with gimlets. The only thing treated more gruesomely than bodily appendages is historical accuracy, as set piece after set piece attempts to string out the tension before the gets-girl-kills-sheriff-sets-up-sequel dénouement. This is an old-fashioned romp, which is in a sense true to the Hood tradition.

The appealing paradox in Robin Hood is that he operates outside and contrary to the rule of law, yet in doing so brings justice where the law cannot. Cross though we are with our MPs, we would be crosser still if a demented Swampy type emerged from the woods and started hacking them to bits. For that reason it seems that the Robin of our age must be a bogeyman. How apt to read that Russell Crowe has been cast as the lead in next year’s film.

Hodd by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape, £17.99; Buy this book; 336pp)

Outlaw by Angus Donald (Sphere, £6.99; Buy this book; 384pp)

Dan Jones is the author of Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Harper Press)

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