Robin Hood

The road through Barnsdale ran quiet under the oaks, and the quiet was the trap. A rich traveller riding north from Doncaster would hear nothing to alarm him, only wind in the high branches and the suck of his horse’s hooves in the mud, until a man in a hood of green stepped out and laid a hand on the bridle. He was courteous. He was always courteous first. He would bid the stranger come and dine under the trees, and only when the meal was eaten would he ask, in the gentlest voice, exactly how much money the guest was carrying. A truthful answer was wise, because Robin counted it himself, and he could tell a liar by the weight of a purse.

This is the outlaw as the earliest stories tell him, and he is stranger and harder than the twinkling gentleman-thief of later centuries. His world is not Sherwood but Barnsdale, a stretch of forest and heath in south Yorkshire, and the ballads know its tracks and crossings with a local precision they never show for Nottingham. He is no dispossessed earl brooding over stolen lands. He is a yeoman, a free commoner of middling rank, at home in a green wood and useless at court, and he answers to no lord but the king and no saint but Mary.

The name surfaces first as a byword. In 1377 the poet who wrote Piers Plowman put into the mouth of a slothful, half-literate priest the confession that he could not say his prayers properly but knew “rymes of Robyn Hood” by heart, which tells us the songs were already old, already everywhere, and already regarded by the respectable as a waste of a man’s attention. The oldest surviving tale, Robin Hood and the Monk, was copied down around 1450. A little later came the long stitched-together epic called A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed in the early sixteenth century but composed generations before, and it remains the fullest early portrait of who this man was supposed to be.

The Gest turns on money and on a kept promise. A knight, Sir Richard at the Lee, rides through the forest with his head down, ruined by debt to the abbey of St Mary’s. Robin feeds him, hears his story, and lends him four hundred pounds against no security but the word of Our Lady. Later, when a fat monk of that same abbey blunders into the greenwood, Robin robs him of a sum that comes to almost exactly the loan, and declares that the Virgin has settled her debt through her servant’s hand. It is thievery dressed as devotion, and the ballad delights in the joke without a flicker of shame.

He robbed from those who had grown rich by cheating, and the idea that he handed it all to the poor came slowly and unevenly. The early Robin is generous, but selectively, and mostly to those who keep faith with him. The clean modern formula of stealing from the rich to give to the poor is a tidying-up of something more like feud and reciprocity. What stays constant is the target. Robin’s enemies are the men who twist office and religion into extortion: the Sheriff of Nottingham, the corrupt higher clergy, the abbots who foreclose on widows and knights alike.

Around this core the legend grew a crowd. Little John, huge and quick-witted, bests Robin with a quarterstaff on a narrow bridge before joining him. Will Scarlet and Much the Miller’s son fill out the band. Maid Marian and the jolly Friar Tuck arrived centuries afterward, wandering in from the May Games and folk plays where villagers dressed as the outlaws each spring, and Marian herself may trace back to a French pastoral romance with no outlaw in it at all. The Tudor age promoted Robin to the nobility, inventing the wronged Earl of Huntingdon, and in 1819 Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe recast him as a Saxon patriot resisting Norman tyranny under the name of Locksley. Each age remade him in the shape it needed.

His gifts are the gifts of a man, sharpened to the edge of the miraculous but never crossing it. He splits a peeled wand at a distance no other archer can reach, walks into Nottingham disguised as a potter or a butcher to rob the sheriff at his own table, and reads the forest the way other men read a page. His weakness is exactly this: he is only a man. No charm guards him, and the same trust that makes him lend to a stranger on the Virgin’s word is what finally kills him.

The end comes at Kirklees Priory. Sick and losing strength, Robin goes to the prioress, a kinswoman, to be bled, an ordinary medieval treatment. She opens a vein and leaves him to empty out slowly, in league with her lover Sir Roger of Doncaster, who finishes what the blade began. In the best-loved version Robin, too weak to stand, asks for his bow, sets one last arrow to the string, and looses it through the window, telling Little John to bury him where it falls. Nobody knows if he was real. The arrow, and the man, have been coming to rest ever since in whatever ground each new century chooses to give him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Robin Hood?

Robin Hood is a legendary English outlaw and master archer from medieval folklore who robbed corrupt officials and clergy and defied the Sheriff of Nottingham. In the earliest ballads he is a yeoman, a free commoner rather than a nobleman, living outside the law in the greenwood with his band of followers.

Was Robin Hood a real person?

No one knows. The name appears as early as 1377, in a reference to popular “rymes of Robyn Hood,” and many scholars think a real outlaw or several stand somewhere behind the legend, but no single historical figure has ever been proven to be him. The Robin Hood we know is a creation of ballads, plays, and festival performances built up over centuries.

Where did Robin Hood actually live in the oldest stories?

In the earliest ballads Robin Hood haunts Barnsdale, a forest region in south Yorkshire, not Sherwood Forest as later tradition claims. The early tales show detailed knowledge of Barnsdale’s roads and landmarks, while the strong association with Sherwood and Nottingham grew stronger only in later versions.

How did Robin Hood die?

Robin Hood was murdered at Kirklees Priory by its prioress, a relative who was supposed to treat his illness by bleeding him but instead opened a vein and let him bleed to death, with help from her lover Sir Roger of Doncaster. According to the traditional account, the dying Robin fired one last arrow from a window and asked to be buried where it landed.

Did Robin Hood really steal from the rich to give to the poor?

The famous formula of robbing the rich to give to the poor developed gradually and is not the whole picture in the earliest ballads. The original Robin targets those who grew wealthy through corruption, especially greedy clergy and dishonest officials, and is generous chiefly to those who keep faith with him, such as the debt-ruined knight Sir Richard at the Lee.

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