Robin Hood
ALTERNATIVE NAME: (Robin of Locksley in some stories)
LANGUAGE: English
TIME: 12th century (to present day)
LOCATION: England (Nottingham and Sherwood Forest)
CATEGORY: Mythical folk hero
DISCIPLINE: Literature
ASSOCIATION: Literature/drama (Rights of the common man/rebellion against unjust authority/pastoral idyll)
SHORT DESCRIPTION:
A legendary English folk hero who lived as an outlaw in the forest with a band of supporters and fought for the oppressed and the victims of injustice.
DESCRIPTION:
The earliest references to Robin Hood are in English ballads of the high Middle Ages. In France there was a woodland character called "Robin du Bois" and at the end of the thirteenth century the French poet and musician de la Halle* wrote a musical play entitled "Jeu de Robin and de Marion" ("The Play of Robin and Marion").
Some historians have suggested that the original character on which the English legend is founded was a similar pastoral figure from pagan mythology, a spirit of the woods, but there is no reference to anything magical or supernatural in these early English ballads.
The portrait given of Robin Hood matches that of a yeoman - a small landholder who had risen above the common peasantry but was certainly not an aristocrat. He fought not with a sword but with a bow and arrow or a stave, and expressed a Christian devotion to the Virgin Mary. His role was to mock, trick and fight feudal lords who oppressed their poor tenants.
Some have suggested he led a peasants' revolt but there is no hard evidence for this theory. By the fifteenth century, references to Robin Hood were common in England and Scotland: he was mentioned in ballads and chronicles, portrayed as a character in folk drama and there were texts describing his exploits as a rebel and an outlaw, and there were more theories about the real Robin Hood: that he was fighting for dispossessed Saxons suffering under harsh Norman officials who had usurped the authority of King Richard I of England, or that he was a nobleman who had been unjustly dispossessed during the struggled for the English crown between the Yorkists and Lancastrians (the Wars of the Roses) in the fourteenth century.
Until the seventeenth century, people believed that Robin Hood really existed. The change came with a play written at the end of the sixteenth century in which Robin is portrayed as Robert, Earl of Huntingdon who fought for the Lancastrian cause. When no trace of the earl could be found, scholars began to see Robin Hood as a legendary, not a historical, figure.
The story told today of Robin Hood and his band of men is virtually the same as that related in fifteenth century chronicles. Robin leads a band of outlaws who hide in the forests of medieval England - mostly in the royal hunting forest of Sherwood near the town of Nottingham, although he is found elsewhere: one location associated with him is the site of the modern Jodrell Bank* radio telescope.
The main characters in his band are Friar Tuck (a mighty eater and wrester) Little John (a very tall character) Will Scarlet and Much the Miller's Son. Maid Marion joins Robin later. They live well and merrily, eating fish, venison and other game, and drinking large amounts of honeyed ale (mead). The arch villain is the Sheriff of Nottingham, a wicked man whom Robin torments by evading capture.
Robin is loyal to the King. His fight is against the misuse of authority and the abuses carried out by evil feudal barons. He carries out a series of daring exploits in which he and his men outwit the villains, restored natural justice, and gave help to the poor.
Robin is eventually betrayed by the Prioress of a local abbey. When he knows he is dying he uses the last of his strength to fire an arrow from the window of the abbey gatehouse, requesting that he be buried where the arrow falls.
Robin Hood has remained a potent myth, still popular in children's literature; there is a thriving Robin Hood industry in Nottingham; several Hollywood films have been made, and academics are still writing books examining the evidence for an historical Robin Hood.
ASSESSMENT: A mythical character whose exploits have excited many over the centuries.
OTHER CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Robin Hood, mythical medieval hero
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Knight, Stephen, Robin Hood, A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, Blackwell, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA, 1994
Phillips, Graham, and Keatman, Martin, Robin Hood, The Man Behind the Myth,Michael O'Mara Books Ltd., London 1995
Singham, Jeffrey L, Robin Hood, The Shaping of the Legend, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, and London, 1998.