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Robin Hood: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Robin Hood
The name Robin Hood first appeared in legal records not as a legendary hero, but as a common nickname for a criminal in the year 1261. For centuries, historians have debated whether a real man named Robin Hood ever existed, or if the name was simply a stock alias used by thieves to describe themselves. The earliest references to Robin Hood are found in the rolls of English justices, where the name Robehod or Robin Hood was applied to men who had been outlawed. This suggests that the legend may have originated from a common criminal name rather than a specific historical figure. The name Robin Hood itself was a common diminutive for Robert, and Hood referred to a maker of hoods or someone who wore a hood as a head covering. The name Robin Hood was also used as a stock name for an outlaw, with the first known example dating to 1262 in Berkshire. The name Robin Hood was applied to a man who had been outlawed, suggesting that the legend may have originated from a common criminal name rather than a specific historical figure. The name Robin Hood was also used as a stock name for an outlaw, with the first known example dating to 1262 in Berkshire. The name Robin Hood was applied to a man who had been outlawed, suggesting that the legend may have originated from a common criminal name rather than a specific historical figure.
Ballads of the Greenwood
The first clear reference to rhymes of Robin Hood appears in the alliterative poem Piers Plowman, thought to have been composed in the 1370s. This poem mentions rhymes of Robin Hood, followed shortly afterwards by a quotation of a later common proverb, many men speak of Robin Hood and never shot his bow, in Friar Daw's Reply dated 1402. The earliest surviving copies of the narrative ballads date to the second half of the 15th century or the first decade of the 16th century. In these early accounts, Robin Hood's partisanship of the lower classes, his devotion to the Virgin Mary and associated special regard for women, his outstanding skill as an archer, his anti-clericalism, and his particular animosity towards the Sheriff of Nottingham are already clear. The earliest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad is the 15th-century Robin Hood and the Monk, preserved in Cambridge University manuscript Ff.5.48. Written after 1450, it contains many of the elements still associated with the legend, from the Nottingham setting to the bitter enmity between Robin and the local sheriff. The first printed version is A Gest of Robyn Hode, published in 1500, a collection of separate stories that attempts to unite the episodes into a single continuous narrative. After this comes Robin Hood and the Potter, contained in a manuscript of 1503. The Potter is markedly different in tone from The Monk, whereas the earlier tale is a thriller the latter is more comic, its plot involving trickery and cunning rather than straightforward force. Other early texts are dramatic pieces, the earliest being the fragmentary Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham dated to 1475. These are particularly noteworthy as they show Robin's integration into May Day rituals towards the end of the Middle Ages. Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham, among other points of interest, contains the earliest reference to Friar Tuck. The plots of neither The Monk nor The Potter are included in the Gest, and neither is the plot of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, which is probably at least as old as those two ballads although preserved in a more recent copy. Each of these three ballads survived in a single copy, so it is unclear how much of the medieval legend has survived, and what has survived may not be typical of the medieval legend. It has been argued that the fact that the surviving ballads were preserved in written form in itself makes it unlikely they were typical, in particular, stories with an interest for the gentry were by this view more likely to be preserved. The story of Robin's aid to the poor knight that takes up much of the Gest may be an example. The character of Robin in these first texts is rougher edged than in his later incarnations. In Robin Hood and the Monk, for example, he is shown as quick tempered and violent, assaulting Little John for defeating him in an archery contest. In the same ballad, Much the Miller's Son casually kills a little page in the course of rescuing Robin Hood from prison. No extant early ballad actually shows Robin Hood giving to the poor, although in A Gest of Robyn Hode Robin does make a large loan to an unfortunate knight, which he does not in the end require to be repaid. And later in the same ballad Robin Hood states his intention of giving money to the next traveller to come down the road if he happens to be poor. As it happens the next traveller is not poor, but it seems in context that Robin Hood is stating a general policy. The first explicit statement to the effect that Robin Hood habitually robbed from the rich to give the poor can be found in John Stow's Annales of England, published in 1592, about a century after the publication of Gest. But from the beginning Robin Hood is on the side of the poor. Gest quotes Robin Hood as instructing his men that when they rob: And in its final lines Gest sums up: Within Robin Hood's band, medieval forms of courtesy rather than modern ideals of equality are generally in evidence. In the early ballad, Robin's men usually kneel before him in obedience. In Gest, the king even observes that Their social status, as yeomen, is shown by their weapons: they use swords rather than quarterstaffs. The only character to use a quarterstaff in the early ballads is the Potter, and Robin Hood does not take to a staff until the 17th-century Robin Hood and Little John. The political and social assumptions underlying the early Robin Hood ballads have long been controversial. J. C. Holt influentially argued that the Robin Hood legend was cultivated in the households of the gentry, and that it would be mistaken to see in him a figure of peasant revolt. He is not a peasant but a yeoman, and his tales make no mention of the complaints of the peasants, such as oppressive taxes. He appears not so much as a revolt against societal standards as an embodiment of them, being generous, pious, and courteous, opposed to stingy, worldly, and churlish foes. Other scholars have by contrast stressed the subversive aspects of the legend, and see in the medieval Robin Hood ballads a plebeian literature hostile to the feudal order.
When did the name Robin Hood first appear in legal records?
The name Robin Hood first appeared in legal records in the year 1261. This early reference described a common nickname for a criminal rather than a legendary hero. Subsequent records from 1262 in Berkshire also applied the name to men who had been outlawed.
Who was the first person to publish a collection of Robin Hood ballads in 1795?
Joseph Ritson published an enormously influential edition of the Robin Hood ballads in 1795 titled Robin Hood: A collection of all the Ancient Poems Songs and Ballads now extant. This collection included 33 Robin Hood ballads and provided English poets and novelists with a convenient source book. Ritson's interpretation influenced the modern concept of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
What year was the earliest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad written?
The earliest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad is Robin Hood and the Monk, which was written after 1450. This text is preserved in Cambridge University manuscript Ff.5.48 and contains many elements still associated with the legend. The ballad includes the Nottingham setting and the bitter enmity between Robin and the local sheriff.
When did Robin Hood become associated with May Day celebrations?
By the early 15th century at the latest, Robin Hood had become associated with May Day celebrations. Revellers dressed as Robin or as members of his band for the festivities, and this custom lasted until Elizabethan times in some regions. Henry VIII disguised himself as Robin in January 1510 to surprise Catherine of Aragon.
When was the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood released?
The 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood was released in 1973. The title character is portrayed as an anthropomorphic fox voiced by Brian Bedford. Animator Ken Anderson adapted elements from Reynard the Fox to create the Disney character Robin Hood.
When did the historicity of Robin Hood first become a subject of debate?
The historicity of Robin Hood has been debated for centuries, with the earliest recorded examples of the name appearing in 1261. Between 1261 and 1300, there are at least eight references to Rabunhod in various regions across England. Historians continue to debate whether a real man named Robin Hood ever existed or if the name was simply a stock alias used by thieves.
By the early 15th century at the latest, Robin Hood had become associated with May Day celebrations, with revellers dressing as Robin or as members of his band for the festivities. This was not common throughout England, but in some regions the custom lasted until Elizabethan times, and during the reign of Henry VIII was briefly popular at court. Henry disguised himself as Robin in January 1510, with eleven courtiers and a Maid Marian to surprise Catherine of Aragon in her chamber. Robin was often allocated the role of a May King, presiding over games and processions, but plays were also performed with the characters in the roles, sometimes performed at church ales, a means by which churches raised funds. A complaint of 1492, brought to the Star Chamber, accuses men of acting riotously by coming to a fair as Robin Hood and his men. The accused defended themselves on the grounds that the practice was a long-standing custom to raise money for churches, and they had not acted riotously but peaceably. It is from the association with the May Games that Robin's romantic attachment to Maid Marian apparently stems. A Robin and Marion figured in 13th-century French pastourelles, of which Jeu de Robin et Marion 1280 is a literary version, and preside over the French May festivities. This Robin and Marion tended to preside, in the intervals of the attempted seduction of the latter by a series of knights, over a variety of rustic pastimes. In the Jeu de Robin and Marion, Robin and his companions have to rescue Marion from the clutches of a lustful knight. This play is distinct from the English legends, although Dobson and Taylor regard it as highly probable that this French Robin's name and functions travelled to the English May Games, where they fused with the Robin Hood legend. Both Robin and Marian were certainly associated with May Day festivities in England, as was Friar Tuck, but these may have been originally two distinct types of performance. Alexander Barclay in his Ship of Fools, writing in 1500, refers to but the characters were brought together. Marian did not immediately gain the unquestioned role. In Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage, his sweetheart is Clorinda the Queen of the Shepherdesses. Clorinda survives in some later stories as an alias of Marian. Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham appears to tell the story of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. There is also an early playtext appended to a 1560 printed edition of Gest. This includes a dramatic version of the story of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar and a version of the first part of the story of Robin Hood and the Potter. Neither of these ballads is known to have existed in print at the time, and there is no earlier record known of the Curtal Friar story. The publisher describes the text as a, but does not seem to be aware that the text actually contains two separate plays. An especial point of interest in the Friar play is the appearance of a ribald woman who is unnamed but apparently to be identified with the bawdy Maid Marian of the May Games. She does not appear in extant versions of the ballad. In May 1585, James VI of Scotland was entertained by a Robin Hood play at Dirleton Castle produced by his favourite the Earl of Arran, while there was plague in Edinburgh. In 1598, Anthony Munday wrote a pair of plays on the Robin Hood legend, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, published 1601. These plays drew on a variety of sources, including apparently Gest, and were influential in fixing the story of Robin Hood to the period of Richard I. Stephen Thomas Knight has suggested that Munday drew heavily on Fulk Fitz Warin, a historical 12th century outlawed nobleman and enemy of King John, in creating his Robin Hood. The play identifies Robin Hood as Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, following in Richard Grafton's association of Robin Hood with the gentry, and identifies Maid Marian with one of the semi-mythical Matildas persecuted by King John. The plays are complex in plot and form, the story of Robin Hood appearing as a play-within-a-play presented at the court of Henry VIII and written by the poet, priest and courtier John Skelton, with Skelton playing Friar Tuck. Some scholars have conjectured that Skelton may have indeed written a lost Robin Hood play for Henry VIII's court, and that this play may have been one of Munday's sources. Henry VIII with eleven of his nobles had impersonated Robyn Hodes men as part of his Maying in 1510. Robin Hood is known to have appeared in a number of other lost and extant Elizabethan plays. In 1599, the play George a Green, the Pinner of Wakefield places Robin Hood in the reign of Edward IV. Edward I, a play by George Peele first performed in 1590, 91, incorporates a Robin Hood game played by the characters. Llywelyn the Great, the last independent Prince of Wales, is presented playing Robin Hood. Fixing the Robin Hood story to the 1190s had been first proposed by John Major in his Historia Majoris Britanniæ, published 1521, and he also may have been influenced in so doing by the story of FitzWarin. This was the period in which King Richard was absent from the country, fighting in the Third Crusade. William Shakespeare makes reference to Robin Hood in his late-16th-century play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In it, the character Valentine is banished from Milan and driven out through the forest where he is approached by outlaws who, upon meeting him, desire him as their leader. They comment, By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar, This fellow were a king for our wild faction! Robin Hood is also mentioned in As You Like It. When asked about the exiled Duke Senior, the character of Charles says that he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him, and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. Justice Silence sings a line from an unnamed Robin Hood ballad, the line is Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John in Act 5 scene 3 of Henry IV, part 2. In Henry IV part 1 Act 3 scene 3, Falstaff refers to Maid Marian, implying she is a by-word for unwomanly or unchaste behaviour. Ben Jonson produced the incomplete masque The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood in part as a satire on Puritanism. It is about half finished, and his death in 1637 may have interrupted writing. Jonson's only pastoral drama, it was written in sophisticated verse and included supernatural action and characters. It has had little impact on the Robin Hood tradition but earns mention as the work of a major dramatist. The 1642 London theatre closure by the Puritans interrupted the portrayal of Robin Hood on the stage. The theatres would reopen with the Restoration in 1660. Robin Hood did not appear on the Restoration stage, except for Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers acted in Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II in 1661. This short play adapts the story of the king's pardon of Robin Hood to refer to the Restoration. However, Robin Hood appeared on the 18th-century stage in various farces and comic operas. Alfred, Lord Tennyson would write a four-act Robin Hood play at the end of the 19th century, The Forrestors. It is fundamentally based on Gest but follows the traditions of placing Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntingdon in the time of Richard I and making the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John rivals with Robin Hood for Maid Marian's hand. The return of King Richard brings a happy ending.
Ballads and Garlands
With the advent of printing came the Robin Hood broadside ballads. When they displaced the oral tradition of Robin Hood ballads is unknown but the process seems to have been completed by the end of the 16th century. Near the end of the 16th century an unpublished prose life of Robin Hood was written and included in the Sloane Manuscript. Largely a paraphrase of Gest, it also contains material revealing that the author was familiar with early versions of a number of the Robin Hood broadside ballads. Not all of the medieval legend was preserved in the broadside ballads, there is no broadside version of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne or of Robin Hood and the Monk, which did not appear in print until the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. However, Gest was reprinted from time to time throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. No surviving broadside ballad can be dated with certainty before the 17th century, but during that century, the commercial broadside ballad became the main vehicle for the popular Robin Hood legend. These broadside ballads were in some cases newly fabricated but were mostly adaptations of the older verse narratives. The broadside ballads were fitted to a small repertoire of pre-existing tunes resulting in an increase of stock formulaic phrases making them repetitive and verbose, they commonly feature Robin Hood's contests with artisans: tinkers, tanners, and butchers. Among these ballads is Robin Hood and Little John, telling the famous story of the quarterstaff fight between the two outlaws. More generally the Robin of the broadsides is a much less tragic, less heroic and in the last resort less mature figure than his medieval predecessor. In most of the broadside ballads Robin Hood remains a plebeian figure, a notable exception being Martin Parker's attempt at an overall life of Robin Hood, A True Tale of Robin Hood, which also emphasises the theme of Robin Hood's generosity to the poor more than the broadsheet ballads do in general. The 17th century introduced the minstrel Alan-a-Dale. He first appeared in a 17th-century broadside ballad and, unlike many of the characters thus associated, managed to adhere to the legend. The prose life of Robin Hood in Sloane Manuscript contains the substance of the Alan-a-Dale ballad but tells the story about Will Scarlet. In the 18th century, the stories began to develop a slightly more farcical vein. From this period there are a number of ballads in which Robin is severely drubbed by a succession of tradesmen including a tanner, a tinker, and a ranger. In fact, the only character who does not get the better of Robin Hood is the luckless Sheriff. Yet even in these ballads Robin is more than a mere simpleton: on the contrary, he often acts with great shrewdness. The tinker, setting out to capture Robin, only manages to fight with him after he has been cheated out of his money and the arrest warrant he is carrying. In Robin Hood's Golden Prize, Robin disguises himself as a friar and cheats two priests out of their cash. Even when Robin is defeated, he usually tricks his foe into letting him sound his horn, summoning the Merry Men to his aid. When his enemies do not fall for this ruse, he persuades them to drink with him instead, see Robin Hood's Delight. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Robin Hood ballads were mostly sold in Garlands of 16 to 24 Robin Hood ballads. These were crudely printed chap books aimed at the poor. The garlands added nothing to the substance of the legend but ensured that it continued after the decline of the single broadside ballad. In the 18th century also, Robin Hood frequently appeared in criminal biographies and histories of highwaymen compendia. In 1765, Thomas Percy, bishop of Dromore, published Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, including ballads from the 17th-century Percy Folio manuscript which had not previously been printed, most notably Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne which is generally regarded as in substance a genuine late medieval ballad. In 1795, Joseph Ritson published an enormously influential edition of the Robin Hood ballads Robin Hood: A collection of all the Ancient Poems Songs and Ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated Outlaw. By providing English poets and novelists with a convenient source book, Ritson gave them the opportunity to recreate Robin Hood in their own imagination. Ritson's collection includes Gest and put the Robin Hood and the Potter ballad in print for the first time. The only significant omission was Robin Hood and the Monk which would eventually be printed in 1806. In all, Ritson printed 33 Robin Hood ballads. In his table of contents, he separated the longer ballads from the shorter ballads into two parts, Part 1 containing the longer ballads were numbered I-V while the shorter ballads in Part 2 were numbered I-XXVIII and a 34th, now commonly known as Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon that he included as the second part of Robin Hood Newly Revived which he had retitled Robin Hood and the Stranger. Ritson's interpretation of Robin Hood was also influential, having influenced the modern concept of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as it exists today. J.C. Holt, Robin Hood, 1982, pp. 184, 185 Robin Hood, Volume 1, Joseph Ritson Himself a supporter of the principles of the French Revolution and admirer of Thomas Paine, Ritson held that Robin Hood was a genuinely historical and heroic character who had stood up against tyranny in the interests of the common people. J. C. Holt has been quick to point out, however, that Ritson began as a Jacobite and ended as a Jacobin, and certainly reconstructed him in the image of a radical. In his preface to the collection, Ritson assembled an account of Robin Hood's life from the various sources available to him and concludes that Robin Hood was born in around 1160, and thus had been active in the reign of Richard I. He thought that Robin was of aristocratic extraction, with at least some pretension to the title of Earl of Huntingdon, that he was born in an unlocated Nottinghamshire village of Locksley and that his original name was Robert Fitzooth. Ritson gives the date of Robin Hood's death as the 18th of November 1247, when he would have been around 87 years old. In copious and informative notes Ritson defends every point of his version of Robin Hood's life. Retrieved the 12th of January 2016. In reaching his conclusion Ritson relies or gives weight to a number of unreliable sources, such as the Robin Hood plays of Anthony Munday and the Sloane Manuscript. Nevertheless, Dobson and Taylor credit Ritson with having an incalculable effect in promoting the still continuing quest for the man behind the myth, and note that his work remains an indispensable handbook to the outlaw legend even now. Ritson's friend Walter Scott used Ritson's anthology collection as a source for his picture of Robin Hood in Ivanhoe, written in 1818, which did much to shape the modern legend. In the decades following the publication of Ritson's book, other ballad collections would occasionally publish stray Robin Hood ballads Ritson had missed. In 1806, Robert Jamieson published the earliest known Robin Hood ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk in Volume II of his Popular Ballads and Songs From Tradition. In 1846, the Percy Society included The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood in its collection, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England. In 1850, John Mathew Gutch published his own collection of Robin Hood ballads, Robin Hood Garlands and Ballads, with the tale of the lytell Geste, that in addition to all of Ritson's collection, also included Robin Hood and the Pedlars and Robin Hood and the Scotchman. In 1858, Francis James Child published his English and Scottish Ballads which includes a volume grouping all the Robin Hood ballads in one volume, including all the ballads published by Ritson, the four stray ballads published since then, as well as some ballads that either mentioned Robin Hood by name or featured characters named Robin Hood but were not traditional Robin Hood stories. For his more scholarly work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, in his volume dedicated to the Robin Hood ballads, published in 1888, Child removed the ballads from his earlier work that were not traditional Robin Hood stories, gave the ballad Ritson titled Robin Hood and the Stranger back its original published title Robin Hood Newly Revived, and separated what Ritson had printed as the second part of Robin Hood and the Stranger as its own separate ballad, Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon. He also included alternate versions of ballads that had distinct, alternate versions. He numbered these 38 Robin Hood ballads among the 305 ballads in his collection as Child Ballads Nos. 117, 154, which is how they are often referenced in scholarly works. In 1993, a previously unknown manuscript of 21 Robin Hood ballads, including two versions of The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, turned up in an auction house and eventually wound up in the British Library. Called The Forresters Manuscript, after the first and last ballads which are both titled Robin Hood and the Forresters, it was published in 1998 as Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript. It appears to have been written in the 1670s. While all the ballads in the manuscript had already been known and published during the 17th and 18th centuries, although most of the ballads in the manuscript have different titles than ones they have listed under the Child Ballads, 13 of the ballads in Forresters are noticeably different from how they appear in the broadsides and garlands. Nine of these ballads are significantly longer and more elaborate than the versions of the same ballads found in the broadsides and garlands. For four of these ballads, the Forresters Manuscript versions are the earliest known versions.
Children and Kings
In the 19th century, the Robin Hood legend was first specifically adapted for children. Children's editions of the garlands were produced, and in 1820 a children's edition of Ritson's Robin Hood collection was published. Children's novels began to appear shortly thereafter. It is not that children did not read Robin Hood stories before, but this is the first appearance of a Robin Hood literature specifically aimed at them. A very influential example of these children's novels was Pierce Egan the Younger's Robin Hood and Little John, published 1840. Egan made Robin Hood of noble birth but raised by the forestor Gilbert Hood. Another very popular version for children was Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which influenced accounts of Robin Hood through the 20th century. Pyle's version firmly stamps Robin as a staunch philanthropist, a man who takes from the rich to give to the poor. Nevertheless, the adventures are still more local than national in scope: while King Richard's participation in the Crusades is mentioned in passing, Robin takes no stand against Prince John and plays no part in raising the ransom to free Richard. These developments are part of the 20th-century Robin Hood myth. Pyle's Robin Hood is a yeoman and not an aristocrat. The idea of Robin Hood as a high-minded Saxon fighting Norman lords also originates in the 19th century. The most notable contributions to this idea of Robin are Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry's, published 1825, and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, published 1819. In this last work in particular, the modern Robin Hood, King of Outlaws and prince of good fellows! as Richard the Lionheart calls him, makes his debut. The 20th century grafted still further details on to the original legends. The 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, portrays Robin as a hero on a national scale, leading the oppressed Saxons in revolt against their Norman overlords while Richard the Lionheart fought in the Crusades. This film established itself so definitively that many studios resorted to films about his son, invented for that purpose, rather than compete with the image of this one. In 1953 a Republican member of the Indiana Textbook Commission called for a ban of Robin Hood from all Indiana school books for its alleged communist connotations. This proposal prompted a short-lived college protest against McCarthyism and book censorship in the United States that was launched on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and within a course of weeks had grown into a nationwide campus movement, known as the Green Feather Movement. In the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood, the title character is portrayed as an anthropomorphic fox voiced by Brian Bedford. Years before Robin Hood had even entered production, Disney had considered doing a project on Reynard the Fox. However, due to concerns that Reynard was unsuitable as a hero, animator Ken Anderson adapted some elements from Reynard into the Disney character Robin Hood, making him a fox. The 1976 British-American film Robin and Marian, starring Sean Connery as Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn as Maid Marian, portrays the figures in later years after Robin has returned from service with Richard the Lionheart in a foreign crusade and Marian has gone into seclusion in a nunnery. This is the first in popular culture to portray King Richard as less than perfect. Since the 1980s, it has become commonplace to include a Saracen among the Merry Men, a trend that began with the character Nasir in the 1984 ITV Robin of Sherwood television series. Later versions of the story have followed suit: a version of Nasir appears in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Azeem, and the 2006 BBC TV series Robin Hood, Djaq. Spoofs have also followed this trend, with the 1990s BBC sitcom Maid Marian and her Merry Men parodying the Moorish character with Barrington, a Rastafarian rapper played by Danny John-Jules, and the Mel Brooks comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights featuring Isaac Hayes as Asneeze and Dave Chappelle as his son Ahchoo. The 2018 adaptation Robin Hood portrays the character of Little John as a Muslim named Yahya, played by Jamie Foxx. Between 1963 and 1966, French television broadcast a medievalist series entitled Thierry the Sling. This successful series, which was also shown in Canada, Poland, Australia, and the Netherlands, transposes the English Robin Hood narrative into late medieval France during the Hundred Years War. The original ballads and plays, including the early medieval poems and the latter broadside ballads and garlands, have been edited and translated for the first time in French in 2017 by Jonathan Fruoco. Until then, the texts had been unavailable in France.
Historical Outlaws
The historicity of Robin Hood has been debated for centuries. A difficulty with any such historical research is that Robert was a very common given name in medieval England, and Robin or Robyn was its very common diminutive, especially in the 13th century. It is a French hypocorism, already mentioned in the Roman de Renart in the 12th century. The surname Hood by any spelling was also fairly common because it referred either to a hooder, who was a maker of hoods, or alternatively to somebody who wore a hood as a head covering. It is therefore unsurprising that medieval records mention a number of people called Robert Hood or Robin Hood, some of whom are known criminals. Another view on the origin of the name is expressed in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica which remarks that hood was a common dialectical form of wood, compare Dutch, also meaning wood, and that the outlaw's name has been given as Robin Wood. There are a number of references to Robin Hood as Robin Wood, or Whood, or Whod, from the 16th and 17th centuries. The earliest recorded example, in connection with May games in Somerset, dates from 1518. The oldest references to Robin Hood are not historical records or even ballads recounting his exploits, but hints and allusions found in various works. From 1261 onward, the names Robinhood, Robehod, or Robbehod occur in the rolls of several English justices as nicknames or descriptions of malefactors. The majority of these references date from the late 13th century. Between 1261 and 1300, there are at least eight references to Rabunhod in various regions across England, from Berkshire in the south to York in the north. Leaving aside the reference to the rhymes of Robin Hood in the poem Piers Plowman in the 1370s, and the scattered mentions of his tales and songs in various religious tracts dating to the early 15th century, the first mention of a quasi-historical Robin Hood is given in Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Chronicle, written in about 1420. The following lines occur with little contextualisation under the year 1283: In a petition presented to Parliament in 1439, the name is used to describe an itinerant felon. The petition cites one Piers Venables of Aston, Derbyshire, who having no liflode, ne sufficeante of goodes, gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers, beynge of his clothynge, and, in manere of insurrection, wente into the wodes in that countrie, like as it hadde be Robyn Hude and his meyne. The next historical description of Robin Hood is a statement in the Scotichronicon, composed by John of Fordun between 1377 and 1384 and revised by Walter Bower in about 1440. Among Bower's many interpolations is a passage that directly refers to Robin. It is inserted after Fordun's account of the defeat of Simon de Montfort and the punishment of his adherents, and is entered under the year 1266 in Bower's account. Robin is represented as a fighter for de Montfort's cause. This was in fact true of the historical outlaw of Sherwood Forest Roger Godberd, whose points of similarity to the Robin Hood of the ballads have often been noted. Then arose the famous murderer, Robert Hood, as well as Little John, together with their accomplices from among the disinherited, whom the foolish populace are so inordinately fond of celebrating both in tragedies and comedies, and about whom they are delighted to hear the jesters and minstrels sing above all other ballads. The word translated here as murderer is the Latin sicarius, literally dagger-man but actually meaning, in classical Latin, assassin or murderer, from the Latin sica for dagger, and descends from its use to describe the Sicarii, assassins operating in Roman Judea. Bower goes on to relate an anecdote about Robin Hood in which he refuses to flee from his enemies while hearing Mass in the greenwood, and then gains a surprise victory over them, apparently as a reward for his piety. The mention of tragedies suggests that some form of the tale relating his death, as per A Gest of Robyn Hode, might have been in currency already. Another reference, discovered by Julian Luxford in 2009, appears in the margin of the Polychronicon in the Eton College library. Written around 1460 by a monk in Latin, it says: Around this time, i.e., reign of Edward I, according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies. Following this, John Major mentions Robin Hood within his Historia Majoris Britanniæ, published 1521, casting him in a positive light by mentioning his and his followers' aversion to bloodshed and ethos of only robbing the wealthy. Major also fixed his floruit not to the mid-13th century but the reigns of Richard I and his brother John. Richard Grafton in his Chronicle at Large, published 1569, goes further when discussing Major's description of Robert Hood, identifying him for the first time as a member of the gentry, albeit possibly being of a base stock and linaege, was for his manhood and chivalry advanced to the noble dignity of an Earl and not the yeomanry, foreshadowing Anthony Munday's casting of him as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon. The name nevertheless still had a reputation of sedition and treachery in 1605, when Guy Fawkes and his associates were branded Robin Hoods by Robert Cecil. In 1644, jurist Edward Coke described Robin Hood as a historical figure who had operated in the reign of King Richard I around Yorkshire. He interpreted the contemporary term roberdsmen outlaws as meaning followers of Robin Hood. The earliest known legal records mentioning a person called Robin Hood, Robert Hod, are from 1226, found in the York Assizes, when that person's goods, worth 32 shillings and 6 pence, were confiscated and he became an outlaw. Robert Hod owed the money to St. Peter's in York. The following year, he was called Hobbehod, and also came to known as Robert Hood. Robert Hod of York is the only early Robin Hood known to have been an outlaw. In 1936, L.V.D. Owen floated the idea that Robin Hood might be identified with an outlawed Robert Hood, or Hod, or Hobbehod, all apparently the same man, referred to in nine successive Yorkshire Pipe Rolls between 1226 and 1234. There is no evidence however that this Robert Hood, although an outlaw, was also a bandit. Historian Oscar de Ville discusses the careers of John Deyville and his brother Robert, along with their kinsmen Jocelin and Adam, during the Second Barons' War, specifically their activities after the Battle of Evesham. John Deyville was granted authority by the faction led by Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester over York Castle and the Northern Forests during the war in which they sought refuge after Evesham. John, along with his relatives, led the remaining rebel faction on the Isle of Ely following the Dictum of Kenilworth. De Ville connects their presence there with Bower's mention of Robert Hood during the aftermath of Evesham in his annotations to the Scotichronicon. While John was eventually pardoned and continued his career until 1290, his kinsmen are no longer mentioned by historical records after the events surrounding their resistance at Ely, and de Ville speculates that Robert remained an outlaw. Other exploits forming the inspiration for Robin Hood include their properties in Barnsdale, John's settlement of a mortgage worth £400 paralleling Robin Hood's charity of identical value to Sir Richard at the Lee, relationship with Sir Richard Foliot, a possible inspiration for the former figure, and ownership of a fortified home at Hood Hill, near Kilburn, North Yorkshire. The last of these is suggested to be the inspiration for Robin Hood's second name as opposed to the more common theory of a head covering. Perhaps not coincidentally, a Robertus Hod is mentioned in records among the holdouts at Ely. Although de Ville does not explicitly connect John and Robert Deyville to Robin Hood, he discusses these parallels in detail and suggests that they formed prototypes for this ideal of heroic outlawry during the tumultuous reign of Henry III's grandson and Edward I's son, Edward II of England. David Baldwin identifies Robin Hood with the historical outlaw Roger Godberd, who was a die-hard supporter of Simon de Montfort, which would place Robin Hood around the 1260s. There are certainly parallels between Godberd's career and that of Robin Hood as he appears in Gest. John Maddicott has called Godberd that prototype Robin Hood. Some problems with this theory are that there is no evidence that Godberd was ever known as Robin Hood and no sign in the early Robin Hood ballads of the specific concerns of de Montfort's revolt. The 19th century antiquarian Joseph Hunter believed that Robin Hood had inhabited the forests of Yorkshire during the early decades of the 14th century. Hunter points to two men whom, believing them to be the same person, he identified with the legendary outlaw: Robert Hood who is documented as having lived in Wakefield at the start of the 14th century. Robyn Hode who is recorded as being employed by Edward II during 1323. Hunter developed a fairly detailed theory implying that Robert Hood had been an adherent of the rebel Earl of Lancaster, who was defeated by Edward II at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322. According to this theory, Robert Hood was thereafter pardoned and employed as a bodyguard by King Edward, and in consequence he appears in the 1323 court roll under the name of Robyn Hode. Hunter's theory has long been recognised to have serious problems, one of the most serious being that recent research has shown that Hunter's Robyn Hood had been employed by the king before he appeared in the 1323 court roll, thus casting doubt on this Robyn Hood's supposed earlier career as outlaw and rebel. It has long been suggested, notably by John Maddicott, that Robin Hood was a stock alias used by thieves. What appears to be the first known example of Robin Hood as a stock name for an outlaw dates to 1262 in Berkshire, where the surname Robehod was applied to a man apparently because he had been outlawed. This could suggest two main possibilities: either that an early form of the Robin Hood legend was already well established in the mid-13th century; or that the name Robin Hood preceded the outlaw hero that we know; so that the Robin Hood of legend was so called because that was seen as an appropriate name for an outlaw. There is at present little or no scholarly support for the view that tales of Robin Hood have stemmed from mythology or folklore, from fairies or other mythological origins, any such associations being regarded as later development. It was once a popular view, however. A number of such theories are mentioned at. The mythological theory dates back at least to 1584, when Reginald Scot identified Robin Hood with the Germanic goblin Hudgin or Hodekin and associated him with the fairy Robin Goodfellow. While the outlaw often shows great skill in archery, swordplay and disguise, his feats are no more exaggerated than those of characters in other ballads, such as Kinmont Willie, which were based on historical events. Robin Hood has also been claimed for the pagan witch-cult supposed by Margaret Murray to have existed in medieval Europe, and his anti-clericalism and Marianism interpreted in this light. The existence of the witch cult as proposed by Murray is now generally discredited.
Forests and Graves
The early ballads link Robin Hood to identifiable real places. In popular culture, Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men are portrayed as living in Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire. Notably, the Lincoln Cathedral Manuscript, which is the first officially recorded Robin Hood song, dating from approximately 1420, makes an explicit reference to the outlaw that states that Robyn hode in scherewode stod. In a similar fashion, a monk of Witham Priory, 1460, suggested that the archer had infested shirwode. Specific sites in the county of Nottinghamshire directly linked to the Robin Hood legend include Robin Hood's Well, near Newstead Abbey, within the boundaries of Sherwood Forest, the Church of St. Mary in the village of Edwinstowe and most famously of all, the Major Oak also in the village of Edwinstowe. The Major Oak, which resides in the heart of Sherwood Forest, is popularly believed to have been used by the Merry Men as a hide-out. Dendrologists have contradicted this claim by estimating the tree's true age at around 800 years; it would have been relatively a sapling in Robin's time, at best. Nottinghamshire's claim to Robin Hood's heritage is disputed, with Yorkists staking a claim to the outlaw. In demonstrating Yorkshire's Robin Hood heritage, historian J. C. Holt drew attention to the fact that although Sherwood Forest is mentioned in Robin Hood and the Monk, there is little information about the topography of the region, and thus suggested that Robin Hood was drawn to Nottinghamshire through his interactions with the city's sheriff. Moreover, linguist Lister Matheson has observed that the language of A Gest of Robyn Hode is written in a definite northern dialect, probably that of Yorkshire. In consequence, it seems probable that the Robin Hood legend actually originates from the county of Yorkshire. Robin Hood's Yorkshire origins are generally accepted by historians. The backdrop of St Mary's Abbey, York plays a central role in Gest as the poor knight whom Robin aids owes money to the abbot. A tradition dating back at least to the end of the 16th century gives Robin Hood's birthplace as Loxley, Sheffield, in South Yorkshire. The original ballads set events in the medieval forest of Barnsdale. Barnsdale was a wooded area covering an expanse of no more than 30 square miles, ranging six miles from north to south, with the River Went at Wentbridge near Pontefract forming its northern boundary and the villages of Skelbrooke and Hampole forming the southernmost region. From east to west the forest extended about five miles, from Askern on the east to Badsworth in the west. During the medieval age Wentbridge was sometimes locally referred to by the name of Barnsdale because it was the predominant settlement in the forest. Wentbridge is mentioned in Robin Hood and the Potter, which reads, Y mete hem bot at Went breg, syde Lyttyl John. And, while Wentbridge is not directly named in A Gest of Robyn Hode, the poem does appear to make a cryptic reference to the locality by depicting a poor knight explaining to Robin Hood that he went at a bridge where there was wrestling. A commemorative blue plaque has been placed on the bridge that crosses the River Went by Wakefield City Council. The Gest makes a specific reference to the Saylis at Wentbridge. Credit is due to Joseph Hunter, who correctly identified the site of the Saylis. From this location it was once possible to look out over the Went Valley and the Great North Road. The Saylis is recorded as having contributed towards the aid that was granted to Edward III in 1346, 47 for the knighting of the Black Prince. An acre of landholding is listed within a glebe terrier of 1688 relating to Kirk Smeaton, which later came to be called Sailes Close. Dobson and Taylor indicate that such evidence of continuity makes it virtually certain that the Saylis that was so well known to Robin Hood is preserved today as Sayles Plantation. It is this location that provides a vital clue to Robin Hood's Yorkshire heritage. Historian John Paul Davis wrote of Robin's connection to the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene at Campsall in South Yorkshire. A Gest of Robyn Hode states that the outlaw built a chapel in Barnsdale that he dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Davis indicates that there is only one church dedicated to Mary Magdalene within what one might reasonably consider to have been the medieval forest of Barnsdale, and that is the church at Campsall. The church was built in the early 12th century by Robert de Lacy, the 2nd Baron of Pontefract. Local legend suggests that Robin Hood and Maid Marion were married at the church. At Kirklees Priory in West Yorkshire stands an alleged grave with a spurious inscription, which relates to Robin Hood. The ballads relate that before he died, Robin told Little John where to bury him. He shot an arrow from the priory window, and where the arrow landed was to be the site of his grave. Gest states that the prioress was a relative of Robin's. Robin was ill and staying at the priory where the prioress was supposedly caring for him. However, she betrayed him, his health worsened, and he eventually died there. The inscription on the grave reads, Despite the unconventional spelling, the verse is in Modern English, not the Middle English of the 13th century. The date is also incorrectly formatted , using the Roman calendar, 24 kal Decembris would be the 23rd day before the beginning of December, that is, the 8th of November. The tomb probably dates from the late 18th century. The grave with the inscription is within sight of the ruins of the Kirklees Priory, behind the Three Nuns pub in Mirfield, West Yorkshire. Though local folklore suggests that Robin is buried in the grounds of Kirklees Priory, this theory has now largely been abandoned by historians. Another theory is that Robin Hood died at Kirkby, Pontefract. Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion Song 28, 67, 70, published 1622, speaks of Robin Hood's death and clearly states that the outlaw died.