Robin Hood Origins and Development

The first recorded mention of a Robin Hood is a brief allusion in the great Middle English allegorical poem Piers Plowman, composed by William Langland around the year 1377. The verse is unremarkable in itself, but the name is unmistakable: “I do not know my paternoster as the priest sings it, but I know rhymes of Robin Hood and of Randolph Earl of Chester.” Within a few years the name had spread through the English chronicle tradition, the popular ballad, the May Games, the broadside, the novel, the play, the film, and the cartoon. The outlaw of Sherwood has become one of the most famous folk heroes in the world.

This article is part of the wider survey of Medieval European Heroes and of the larger survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It follows the legend from its obscure beginnings in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to its long afterlife in the modern world, and it connects to the wider currents of European Folklore, the Celtic trickster tradition, the Norse skaldic tradition of hero song, and the Celtic saint lore of the British Isles.

The Origins

The earliest solid reference to Robin Hood is in the Vision of Piers Plowman of c. 1377. The poet Langland includes the rhymes of Robin Hood alongside the rhymes of the historical Earl of Chester, Ranulf de Blondeville, who had died in 1232. The natural reading is that, by 1377, the figure was so famous that he could be mentioned casually as a model of popular song. Two years later, in 1379, the Scottish chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun placed the legend in Barnsdale, on the border of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The earliest surviving ballad is Robin Hood and the Monk, a late fourteenth-century text now in the University Library of Cambridge, in which Robin kills a monk, is betrayed to the sheriff, and is rescued at the last moment by Little John and Much the Miller’s Son.

Who the historical Robin Hood may have been is a question that has been asked for centuries. The earliest candidates are figures named Robert of Loxley and Robert Hod, named in the legal and household records of the late thirteenth century. A Robert Hod, also called Robert of Strelley, was listed in 1227-8 as a follower of the Earl of Lancaster, and was outlawed. The twentieth-century scholar J.C. Holt concluded in his Robin Hood of 1981 that the figure is most likely a composite of several historical figures and several older folkloric patterns, and that the search for a single historical original is probably mistaken.

The A Gest of Robyn Hode

The great medieval compilation of the Robin Hood legend is the A Gest of Robyn Hode, a long composite ballad of about 450 stanzas, preserved in a printed copy of c. 1510 and probably composed in the late fifteenth century from older material. The Gest gathers together many of the stories that would later become central: Robin’s encounter with the disguised king, his rescue of the knight whose lands are forfeit, his battles with the sheriff of Nottingham, his death at the hands of the prioress of Kirklees.

The hero of the Gest is a yeoman, a man of the common people, generous to the poor and a deadly shot with the longbow. He lives in the greenwood with Little John, Much the Miller’s Son, Will Scarlet, and the rest of the merry men. He robs the rich, gives to the poor, and refuses to harm any honest yeoman. The political implication is that the king is good but his officers are not, and that the outlaws of the greenwood are a kind of conscience that the king himself has been forced to do without — a model that English popular culture would return to again and again.

The May Games and Maid Marian

The May Games, the great popular celebrations of the early summer, were a central setting for the legend. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Robin Hood plays and pageants were a standard part of the summer festival, and the earliest surviving record of such a play is from Exeter in 1427. The May Games are important because they show Robin as a folk figure in the full sense: the audience did not merely watch the play, they enacted it. A young man was chosen to play Robin, another to play Little John, another to play Friar Tuck, another to play Maid Marian. The May Games were a time of licensed disorder, in which the social order was briefly turned upside down. The May Games also gave Robin his first female companion, Maid Marian, who by the Elizabethan period was firmly established as the outlaw’s lady.

The Transformations

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the development of the legend in many directions. Anthony Munday’s plays of 1598 and 1601 introduced the identification of Robin with the historical Earl of Huntington and the central role of Maid Marian. The seventeenth-century broadsides and ballads, collected later in Francis James Child’s great English and Scottish Popular Ballads of 1882-1898, fixed the popular story in its most familiar forms. The nineteenth century saw the most thorough transformation since the legend’s origin: the American writer Howard Pyle, in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of 1883, presented the outlaw as a Saxon nobleman, the dispossessed heir of an ancient lineage, who fought for justice against the Norman oppressor. Walter Scott, in Ivanhoe of 1819, and Tennyson, in The Foresters of 1892, helped to plant the legend in the popular imagination of the British Empire.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an enormous expansion of the legend. The Errol Flynn film of 1938, The Adventures of Robin Hood, set the template for the cinematic Robin: a dashing, smiling, brightly dressed hero in a greenwood of immense beauty. The 1952 Disney animated feature presented Robin as a fox, a child-friendly version that has been a fixture of children’s television ever since. The BBC produced the series Robin Hood of 2006-2009, and Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood, with Russell Crowe, returned the legend to its darker medieval origins. The Robin Hood of the twenty-first century is a global figure, known in every country where English-language popular culture has reached.

The Folkloric Connections

The Robin Hood legend is, in its deeper structure, part of a much wider European pattern. The outlaw of the greenwood has structural cousins in the hajduk of the Balkans, the bandolero of Latin America, the gaucho of the Argentine pampas, and the Japanese Ishikawa Goemon. The Robin Hood legend is also deeply connected to the Celtic tradition of the trickster figure and to the Norse skaldic tradition of the hero song. The folkloric Robin Hood belongs to a much wider world, and the comparison of his legend with the legends of the Celtic Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Norse Sigurd is one of the most revealing in the whole study of European folk heroism.

Sources and Further Reading

Holt, J. C. Robin Hood. Thames & Hudson, 1981. (The 1981 reissue, with corrections, of the foundational 1931 study.)
Dobson, R. B., and Taylor, J. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.
Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Blackwell, 1994.
Hilton, R. H. The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages. Clarendon, 1975.