The Real Robin Hood: From Violent Yeoman Outlaw to Charitable Earl

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In the earliest surviving ballads, Robin Hood punches a friend over an archery contest, and one of his men murders a page boy to leave no witness to a prison escape. This episode traces how that figure became the cheerful nobleman who robs from the rich to give to the poor. The Robin of 15th century texts such as Robin Hood and the Monk is a yeoman, a self-sufficient commoner with no title, who fights with a sword and pursues a personal war against the Sheriff of Nottingham and wealthy abbots. He runs no charity. His appeal lay in humiliating the officials who squeezed ordinary people.

Each later age rewrote him. The May Games and parish church ales made him a festival mascot and added Maid Marian, borrowed from a French pastoral play, and the comic Friar Tuck. In 1521 the historian John Major moved him to the 1190s and the reign of Richard the Lionheart, and the playwright Anthony Munday made him the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon, a rebel safe enough for Tudor elites. The episode also weighs the real outlaws whose lives may lie behind the ballads and names the writer who invented the philanthropist.

• By the middle of the 13th century, court clerks were using the name Robin Hood as a stock alias for unknown bandits, much like John Doe.
• Court records from 1226 show a Robert Hod of York who owed a debt to St. Mary's, had his goods confiscated, and became a fugitive.
• After the Battle of Evesham in 1265, the rebel Roger Godberd retreated into Sherwood Forest with a band of men and fought local authorities for years.
• Joseph Ritson, a supporter of the French Revolution, published a ballad collection in 1795 that recast Robin as a champion of the poor against the rich.
• Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819 made him a Saxon patriot, and Howard Pyle's 1883 children's book removed the remaining violence.