Robin Hood

• 1. Introduction

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  Robin Hood stands at the center of one of the oldest and most restless legends in English history. A complaint recorded in the religious tract Dives and Pauper, written between 1405 and 1410, noted that ordinary people would rather hear tales and songs about a woodland outlaw than go to church. That level of pull, measured in grumbling clergy, tells you something about the grip this figure had on the medieval imagination. Who was he, exactly? A yeoman or an earl? A real man or a useful name? A rebel against the feudal order or a figure who embodied its ideals of courtesy and generosity? The answers have been argued over since the 13th century. From the earliest surviving ballad, copied after 1450 in Cambridge University manuscript Ff.5.48, to the 1938 Hollywood film starring Errol Flynn, to a 1953 proposal to ban Robin Hood from Indiana school books for alleged communist sympathies, the legend has never stopped mutating. This is the story of how one outlaw, real or invented, accumulated a forest full of meaning.

• 2. The Earliest Robin

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  The oldest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad is "Robin Hood and the Monk", preserved in Cambridge University manuscript Ff.5.48, written after 1450. In it, Robin is quick-tempered and violent. He assaults Little John simply for defeating him in an archery contest. In the same ballad, Much the Miller's Son kills a "little page" casually, as part of rescuing Robin from prison. This is not the philanthropist of later legend. The early ballads are clear about his social rank: he is a yeoman, meaning neither a knight nor a peasant but something in between, a rank that in the 14th century included millers and artisans. Little John, Much the Miller's Son, and Will Scarlet appear in these early texts, though Maid Marian and Friar Tuck do not yet figure. The first compilation to attempt a continuous narrative is A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed around 1500. In it, Robin makes a large loan to an impoverished knight that he later does not require to be repaid. He also states his intention to give money to the next poor traveller on the road, though as it happens the next traveller is not poor. The earliest explicit statement that Robin Hood habitually robbed the rich to give to the poor appears about a century later, in John Stow's Annales of England, published in 1592. The Gest names the king in the story as Edward, not Richard, further undermining the now-familiar Crusades setting that would come to dominate the legend much later.

• 3. May Games and Maid Marian

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  By the early 15th century at the latest, Robin Hood had become woven into May Day celebrations. Revellers dressed as Robin and his band, plays were staged at church ales, and Robin was often cast as a kind of May King presiding over games and processions. The first surviving record of a Robin Hood game is from Exeter in 1426, though that record gives no indication of how old or widespread the custom already was. The association spread to the royal court. In January 1510, Henry VIII disguised himself as Robin Hood, with eleven courtiers and a Maid Marian, to surprise Catherine of Aragon in her chamber. In 1492, a complaint brought to the Star Chamber accused men of acting riotously by arriving at a fair dressed as Robin Hood and his men; the accused replied that this was a long-standing custom for raising church funds, and that they had acted peaceably. It is through the May Games that Maid Marian appears to have entered the legend. A French figure named Robin, paired with a Marion, presided over French May festivities as far back as the 13th century. The Jeu de Robin et Marion, dating to around 1280, features a Robin and his companions rescuing Marion from a lustful knight. Scholars Dobson and Taylor considered it highly probable that this French Robin's name and role travelled to the English May Games and fused with the existing Robin Hood tradition. Marian's position in the English legend was not immediately fixed: in the ballad Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage, Robin's sweetheart is named Clorinda the Queen of the Shepherdesses, and Clorinda survives as an alias for Marian in some later stories.

• 4. Fixing the Legend

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  In 1598, Anthony Munday wrote two plays on the Robin Hood legend, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, published in 1601. These were enormously influential in attaching the story firmly to the reign of Richard I and making Robin a nobleman, specifically the Earl of Huntingdon. Munday followed Richard Grafton's earlier Chronicle at Large in elevating Robin from yeoman to gentry. Scholar Stephen Thomas Knight has argued that Munday drew heavily on the story of Fulk Fitz Warin, a real 12th-century outlawed nobleman and enemy of King John, in constructing his Robin Hood. The plays are complex in structure, presenting the Robin Hood story as a play-within-a-play at the court of Henry VIII, written by the poet John Skelton, who also appears as Friar Tuck. The idea of linking the legend to Richard I's absence during the Third Crusade had been first proposed in writing by John Major in his Historia Majoris Britanniæ of 1521. William Shakespeare referenced the legend several times: in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, outlaws in a forest invoke "the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar". In As You Like It, the exiled Duke Senior is said to live "like the old Robin Hood of England". Justice Silence sings "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John" in Act 5, Scene 3 of Henry IV, Part 2. Ben Jonson, in his incomplete masque The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood, used the legend partly as a vehicle for satirising Puritanism. His death in 1637 left it unfinished. The 1642 theatre closure by the Puritans interrupted stage portrayals of Robin Hood, and after the Restoration in 1660 the character returned only in a short play performed in Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II in 1661, adapting the king's pardon episode to refer to the Restoration itself.

• 5. Ritson's Revolution

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  In 1795, Joseph Ritson published what became the most influential collection of Robin Hood ballads ever assembled: Robin Hood: A collection of all the Ancient Poems Songs and Ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated Outlaw. Ritson printed 33 Robin Hood ballads, plus a 34th he had retitled. He also assembled in his preface a full account of Robin Hood's life, concluding that Robin was born around 1160 and giving the date of his death as the 18th of November 1247. Ritson was himself a supporter of the principles of the French Revolution and an admirer of Thomas Paine. He held that Robin Hood was genuinely historical, a figure who had stood up against tyranny for the common people. J. C. Holt later observed that Ritson had "begun as a Jacobite and ended as a Jacobin," and had reconstructed Robin Hood in the image of a radical. Thomas Percy had laid earlier groundwork in 1765 with his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which included from the 17th-century Percy Folio manuscript the ballad Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, generally regarded as a genuine late medieval ballad. Ritson's collection omitted Robin Hood and the Monk, which was not printed until 1806. The most important consequence of Ritson's book was its role as a source book for English poets and novelists. His friend Walter Scott drew on it for his picture of Robin Hood in Ivanhoe, written in 1818, in which Richard the Lionheart calls Robin "King of Outlaws and prince of good fellows!" This cemented the aristocratic, crusades-era Robin Hood in the popular imagination. Francis James Child would later number 38 Robin Hood ballads among the 305 ballads in his landmark scholarly collection, listing them as Child Ballads Nos. 117-154.

• 6. Historical Trails

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  From 1261 onward, names such as "Robinhood", "Robehod", and "Robbehod" appear in the rolls of several English justices as nicknames or descriptions of malefactors. Between 1261 and 1300, at least eight such references appear across England, from Berkshire in the south to York in the north. The earliest known legal records naming a specific person called Robin Hood are from the York Assizes of 1226, recording a man whose goods, worth 32 shillings and 6 pence, were confiscated when he became an outlaw. He owed the money to St. Peter's in York. The following year he was referred to as "Hobbehod". In a petition presented to Parliament in 1439, the name described an itinerant felon: one Piers Venables of Aston, Derbyshire, who had gathered misdoers and went into the woods "like as it hadde be Robyn Hude and his meyne", suggesting the name was already a recognised shorthand for a bandit chieftain. Historian David Baldwin has identified Robin Hood with the real outlaw Roger Godberd, a die-hard supporter of Simon de Montfort, which would place the original Robin Hood in the 1260s. John Maddicott has called Godberd "that prototype Robin Hood". Separately, historian Oscar de Ville has examined the careers of John Deyville and his brother Robert during the Second Barons' War, noting that John's settlement of a mortgage worth £400 parallels the identical sum Robin Hood lends Sir Richard at the Lee in the Gest, and that the family owned a fortified home at Hood Hill, near Kilburn, North Yorkshire. De Ville suggests these parallels indicate the Deyvilles may have served as prototypes for the heroic outlaw ideal. John Maddicott has also proposed that "Robin Hood" was simply a stock alias used by thieves, noting that what appears to be the first example of the name used as a stock alias dates to 1262 in Berkshire.

• 7. The Forest Divided

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  The debate over where Robin Hood lived and operated is older than the debate over who he was. The Lincoln Cathedral Manuscript, the first officially recorded Robin Hood song, dating from approximately 1420, states explicitly that "Robyn hode in scherewode stod", placing him in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire. Yet linguist Lister Matheson has observed that A Gest of Robyn Hode is written in a definite northern dialect, probably that of Yorkshire. J. C. Holt argued that Robin was drawn to Nottinghamshire principally through his conflict with the city's sheriff, not because that was his homeland. The original ballads consistently set events in the medieval forest of Barnsdale, a wooded area no more than 30 square miles in extent, stretching roughly six miles from north to south, with the River Went at Wentbridge near Pontefract forming its northern boundary. Wentbridge is named in Robin Hood and the Potter; A Gest of Robyn Hode appears to reference it through a poor knight who explains that he "went at a bridge" where there was wrestling. The Saylis at Wentbridge, identified by the 19th-century antiquarian Joseph Hunter, provided a view over the Went Valley and the Great North Road; records show the Saylis contributing to aid granted to Edward III in 1346-47. Dobson and Taylor concluded that the surviving evidence makes it "virtually certain" the Saylis is preserved today as Sayles Plantation. A cartulary deed of 1422 from Monkbretton Priory references a landmark named Robin Hood's Stone on the eastern side of the Great North Road, a mile south of Barnsdale Bar. Robin Hood type place-names appear throughout West Yorkshire but the first such name in Sherwood itself does not appear until 1700, a gap that historians regard as significant evidence that the legend originated in Yorkshire.

• 8. Modern Reinventions

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  The 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, transformed Robin from a local yeoman into a national hero leading the oppressed Saxons in revolt against Norman overlords. The film established itself so definitively that, according to the source, many studios chose to make films about Robin's son rather than compete with the image it created. In 1953, a Republican member of the Indiana Textbook Commission called for a ban on Robin Hood from all Indiana school books for its alleged communist connotations. The proposal prompted a protest against McCarthyism and book censorship that began on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and within weeks had grown into a nationwide campus movement, known as the Green Feather Movement. The 1973 Disney animated film cast Robin as an anthropomorphic fox voiced by Brian Bedford; the film's conception grew partly from Disney's earlier consideration of a project on Reynard the Fox, with animator Ken Anderson adapting some Reynard elements into the Robin Hood character. The 1976 film Robin and Marian, starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, was the first in popular culture to portray King Richard as less than perfect. Since the early 1980s, it has become standard to include a Saracen character among the Merry Men, a trend begun by the character Nasir in the 1984 ITV series Robin of Sherwood. Later versions followed: Azeem in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Djaq in the 2006 BBC series Robin Hood, and Little John portrayed as a Muslim named Yahya, played by Jamie Foxx, in the 2018 adaptation. In 1993, a previously unknown manuscript of 21 Robin Hood ballads, written in the 1670s, turned up at an auction house and eventually reached the British Library; published in 1998 as Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, it contains 13 ballads that differ noticeably from the versions previously known, with nine of them significantly longer and more elaborate than the broadside versions, and four representing the earliest known versions of their respective ballads.