Robin Hood the Bottom Line: Who Was the World’s Most Famous Outlaw?

Putting on my (none-literal) medievalists hat, I return to my teaching specialism to explore what we know about England's most famous outlaw.

When Robin Hood first appears in print, he is so well known as to need no explanation: there is no backstory in the oldest surviving ballad. The Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, (whose earliest surviving manuscript is the Wynkyn de Worde edition c.1492 – 1524) begins by stating that Robin was most prudent and courteous of all outlaws, and that:

Robyn stode in Barnesdale,

And leynd him to a tre;

And bi hym stode Litell John.

A gode yemen was he.

And that is all we are told. Robin appears from nowhere, in his well-known context (Bransadale, not Sherwood) with his cast of sidekicks, who are likewise so well-known as to need no introduction.

The Gest itself is a virtual epic, a non-noble (I hesitate to say working-class) blockbuster, like those great tales of Charlemagne and King Arthur which dominated the cultural landscape of the ruling elites – but addressed to a world of yeomen and minor gentry, the retinues and hangers-on of great lords. And rather like the iconic characters of the story cycles of our own age (for example Star Wars and The Marvel franchise) the Barnsdale outlaws are so famous that their pedigree is irrelevant : Robin, Little John, Will and Much are clearly the Jedi or X-men of their age.

In the Gest, they are pitted first against the evil Abbot of St, Mary’s York, and then their (now traditional) nemesis the sheriff of Nottingham, as they put wrongs to right and generally turn the accepted social order on its head, with outlawed criminals (nowhere stated to be dispossessed noblemen) bettering the corrupt forces which ride roughshod over rich and poor alike. It must also be noted, that Robin never “robs from the rich to feed the poor” but robs and kills evil administrators to return honour and unjustly collected debts to members of the minor gentry. And this perhaps helps to date the story, placing it in a realistic historical context – one much earlier than the era in which the first surviving ballad was printed - as we shall see.

What we undoubtedly have, then, in this unprecedentedly long piece of popular entertainment, is an attempt to fuse the strands of several well-known stories; taking several older tales to build a movie-length epic which defines the saga. I have already noted Robin has two key adversaries in the Gest: the Abbot of St. Mary’s and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and it is fairly obvious that this is the product of a splicing-together of at least two distinct tales - part of the continuous process of adding-to and re-modelling the legend which is still going on today.

Robin, as we have noted, clearly operates in a geographically realistic context of Barnesdale Yorks., in the earlier part of the story, and Sherwood/Nottingham Castle in the latter, and though it can be argued that the two forests and locales were linked in the Middle Ages both by the Great North Road and a continuous canopy of woodland, there is every chance that the Sheriff of Nottingham was a legendary villain in his own right – perhaps from a separate cycle of stories; and, just as in the universe of modern comic-book/cinematic super heroes (where characters from various cycles of stories get ‘assembled’ together and pitted against one another), there is every chance that the composer of the ballad felt the greatest super hero of the day (Robin of Barnsdale) would have to be set against the greatest villain … though in this case, it would be a little like Spiderman being set against Darth Vader.

As for the historical identities of those involved, the possibilities are legion– though it must be noted that it is easier to track down corrupt Nottinghamshire Sheriffs (notably Sir John Ingram, an informant and associate of the notorious Fourteenth Century Coterell gang) than it is a Robin Hood. Yet the realism of the first half of the story certainly hints that there must be some germ of truth behind the legend; and though no-one has been able to track down a realistic suspect conclusively, Dr JC Holt has certainly thrown up a couple of likely Thirteenth Century candidates - and even pushed the possibility back into the Twelfth. But it must be noted we are talking names on court rolls here, not stories with details … but let’s not get bogged down here with a fruitless hunt for the most famous man who never existed.

Clearly by the mid Fourteenth Century, everyone knew Robin Hood’s name. The northern middle-English dialect of the Gest places the story somewhere in the early Fifteenth Century – perhaps even in the Fourteenth, and the majority of the social context (the importance of the term yeoman, for example) and the final recourse to ‘Edward our Comely King’ place the story in the reign of the three Edwards 1297 - 1377. Then there are the sources beyond the ballad itself:

In our first literary reference to the legendary outlaw outside the ballads (of 1377), William Langland in his Piers the Ploughman has his allegorical character Sloth state that he can recite his ‘Rymes of Robyn Hode’ better than the Our Father – giving us a fixed point by which we know the legend was universally popular and very well known.

Place name evidence similarly suggests that by the Fourteenth Century Robin was so popular a figure that people were naming wells, Caves, trees and Bay’s after him across the length-and breadth of Britain. But was there one Robin Hood who gave rise to these legends – or many? Proffessor Holt has suggested that the term ‘Robin Hood’ may also have been used as a slang-term and/or legal formula for outlaws in general from as early as the thirteenth century. Certainly the Statute of Winchester (1265) stipulated punishments for ‘robberdsmen and drawlatches,’ and the term ‘robehod,’ often used in court records to describe highwaymen and robbers was clearly an allusion to the mythical outlaw. There are also more explicit references. Piers Venables of Derbyshire, for example, a criminal complicit in rescuing a prisoner en route to Tutbury castle in 1439 gathered a large band of men, ‘beyng of his clothinge and in manere of insurrection wente into the wodes in that county like it hadde be Robyn Hode and his meynee.’ But was this term 'robehod' the origin or the result of the legend? And how far back must we look for a progenitor?

Returning to the Gest, we do indeed find traces of an earlier origin to the story. In the first half of the tale, Robin’s attempts to help the downtrodden knight Richard Atte Lee firmly puts us into the context of the twelve hundreds - despite the convincing Fourteenth Century world within which the action is set. We are told that Sir Richard has effectively had to stand bail for his son and forfeited his wealth and his estate to the merciless Abbot of St. Mary’s and been made ‘a knight of force’ - a practice impossible by the Fourteenth Century. So if we are looking for the origins of the tale – and the man behind it – then this is the most likely starting point.

So who was Robin and when did he live: Sherwood, Barnsdale – the Fourteenth Century or the Thirteenth? And at this point we must cut to the chase: no scholar has ever been able to find any corroborative evidence that fits an outlaw called Robin to a crime committed in the suggestively realistic context of Barnsadale Bar, Sales, Wentbridge and Wattling Street of the Gest. And what of the surname? Everyone wore a hood in the Middle Ages - it was a staple item of clothing for all classes - so no luck there either.

And as we pick the popular legend apart we find the various strands similarly begin to unravel. This is a tale with a long pedigree and much of it has been bolted on from both real and imaginary origins as the story progressed. Maid Marian, for example (who does not appear in the Gest) was a heroine of French pastoral tradition, while Friar Tuck (Frere or brother tuck) was the Alias of an early Fifteenth century Robber called William de Stafford, whose exploits no-doubt added fuel to the ballads which created the legend.

Perhaps then, the more pertinent question to ask of the legend is: why did the tale became so popular? Why did an obscure South Yorkshire robber gain such a psychological hold on Medieval Britain – and later the world? And that, I fear, is a question for another post!

If you are interested in the legend of Robin Hood, the books you must read are:

R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor Rymes of Robyn Hode, An Introduction to the English Outlaw, (1997 edition)

J.C. Holt, Robin Hood, (1996 revised edition)

M. Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, (2000 edition)

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