Of all the figures of medieval English legend, only King Arthur rivals Robin Hood in popular fame. The yeoman outlaw of Sherwood Forest, the silver-arrowed archer who robbed the rich to give to the poor, has been told and retold for more than six hundred years, in ballads, in plays, in the Ealing comedies, in the novels of Walter Scott and Howard Pyle, in the BBC television series, in the Hollywood blockbusters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in the very different world of the political allegory. The story of Robin Hood is the story of an idea: the idea that the king’s law is not the only law, that a man of courage and skill may take from the powerful and give to the helpless, and that the greenwood of England is the natural home of the free.
What is striking about the legend is its longevity. The earliest surviving text, the mid-fifteenth-century ballad “Robin Hood and the Monk,” is already a developed story with a band of outlaws, an enemy abbot, a fight in the greenwood. The next hundred years saw the great flowering of the Robin Hood ballads in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from there the legend was carried by the broadside ballads, by the plays of the sixteenth century, by the great prose compilations of the seventeenth and eighteenth, and by the novels, plays, and films of the modern period. The figure of Robin Hood has, at different times, been an English nationalist hero, a labor hero, a Christian hero, a forester, a yeoman, a nobleman dispossessed by an evil king, a Saxon rebel against the Norman oppressor, and a defender of the poor against the abuses of unjust officials. Each generation has seen in him what it wished to see.
The Earliest Texts
The earliest known reference to Robin Hood is a passing mention in the late thirteenth-century text Piers Plowman by William Langland, where “Sloth” knows the rhymes of Robin Hood and Ranulf of Chester. Slightly later, the Scottish chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun in his Original Chronicle (c. 1420) refers to Robin Hood and Little John as famous English outlaws of the time of Edward I. The earliest substantial narrative is the mid-fifteenth-century ballad “Robin Hood and the Monk” (preserved in the Fowler Manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.48, c. 1450), in which Robin, having slain the monk of a prior, is betrayed by a treacherous monk to the Sheriff of Nottingham, imprisoned, and rescued by Little John and Much the Miller’s Son. The poem is missing many of the famous features of the later legend — no Maid Marian, no Friar Tuck, no King Richard — but it has the essential core: an outlaw in the greenwood, an enemy sheriff, a band of faithful men, a heroic archer.
The “Robin Hood and the Potter” (c. 1500) and “Robin Hood and the Tinker” also belong to the fifteenth century. By the later fifteenth century, in the “A Gest of Robyn Hode” (c. 1500), the legend has crystallized: the outlaws live in Barnsdale Forest (or, in some versions, Sherwood), the enemy is the abbot of St Mary’s York or the Sheriff of Nottingham, the hero is a yeoman archer of consummate skill, and the final episode is the death of Robin, in the hands of the Prioress of Kirklees. The Gest is the foundation of the later tradition; almost every subsequent retelling borrows from it.
The Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood
In the earliest ballads Robin Hood’s base is Barnsdale Forest (or Barnsdale), on the road between Doncaster and Pontefract in what is now South Yorkshire. By the sixteenth century the legend has migrated to Sherwood Forest, the great royal forest that covered much of Nottinghamshire in the middle ages and that was one of the best-known forests in medieval England. The two forests are sometimes mentioned in the same ballad; the shift in geography was a slow process and was never complete.
The greenwood in the Robin Hood ballads is a place of safety and a place of trial. It is the place where the king’s law does not run, where the outlaw can take refuge from the sheriffs, and where the deer of the forest — the king’s deer, in a technical sense — are a free food. It is also a place of moral inversion: in the greenwood the virtues of the world (the king’s court, the sheriff’s town) are reversed, and the outlaw’s generosity, his skill at the long bow, his willingness to take a blow on the chest rather than dishonor his word, become the highest virtues. The image of the greenwood outlaw is one of the great creations of medieval English literature and is closely related to the image of the wild man of the woods, the forest hermit, and the wandering scholar in the Arthurian tradition.
The Merry Men
The Merry Men — Robin’s band — are named variously in the different ballads. The earliest texts mention Little John (whose name is a joke: he is seven feet tall, and his original name is John Little, which Robin reverses in a mock-feudal ceremony), Much the Miller’s Son (Much, in some versions, the son of the miller of Wakefield), Will Scarlet (or Scathelock, or Scarlok, originally a name suggesting “the scathelocke” — a brightly-dressed soldier), Maid Marian (added in the later tradition, possibly under the influence of the French pastoral romances), Friar Tuck (a churchman turned outlaw, possibly the most famous of the Merry Men, although he appears late in the tradition), Alan-a-Dale (the minstrel who wins his love at a tournament), and George-a-Green (the pinder, or pound-keeper, of Wakefield). The number of the Merry Men is sometimes given as forty, sometimes as a hundred, sometimes as a vague “many” that increases and decreases according to the needs of the story.
Each of the Merry Men has his own story. Little John is Robin’s right-hand man, his lieutenant in the greenwood, the one who fights with Robin on the bridge and breaks him in half by hitting him too hard. Friar Tuck is the religious humorist, the man who wrestles with the villain at the table and is found out only by the candles burning out under his cowl. Will Scarlet is the noble cousin who has fled to the greenwood from the court. Maid Marian is the lady of the May-games, the queen of the May, who is sometimes the same as the historical “Marian” of the May-games of the fifteenth century. Alan-a-Dale is the musician, the trickster with a lute, the lover who wins his love at the tournament. The image of the Merry Men is a kind of ideal community, the brotherhood of the greenwood, a free society of skilled men and one skilled woman, and it has had a long afterlife in English political thought.
The Enemy: The Sheriff of Nottingham and the King
The enemies of Robin Hood are also stereotyped. The Sheriff of Nottingham is the chief of these, the representative of the king’s law in the northern counties, the villain of the most famous ballads. The Abbot of St Mary’s York (in the Gest) and the Bishop of Hereford (in some versions) are also targets. The King is a more ambiguous figure: in the earliest ballads the king is Edward I or Edward II, an absentee ruler whose local representatives are evil. In the later tradition, the king is Richard the Lionheart (Richard I, 1189–1199), the crusader king, who comes to Sherwood in disguise, fights with Robin, is entertained by him, and grants him a royal pardon. The image of the king and the outlaw meeting in the greenwood, of the king in disguise, of the king’s coming to know the truth about his kingdom from a man who has been outlawed for telling it, is one of the great images of medieval English political thought.
The Robin Hood ballads’ politics are not simple. In some ballads the outlaw is a kind of proto-republican, opposing the king’s officials because they are corrupt. In others he is a true subject of the king, opposed to the abuse of authority by the king’s local representatives. In the modern period, the legend has been read in many keys: as a defense of medieval forest rights, as a defense of the yeoman, as a defense of the common man against the abuses of the court, as a defense of the Saxon English against the Norman oppressors, and as a celebration of the Englishman’s love of the greenwood.
The Death of Robin Hood
The death of Robin Hood is told in a number of ballads, of which the most important is the late-fifteenth-century “Robin Hood’s Death” (or “The Death of Robin Hood”). In the most familiar version Robin is bled to death by the Prioress of Kirklees, a nun who has been bribed by the king’s men to kill him. Before he dies, he shoots an arrow from his deathbed through the window of his chamber and asks Little John to bury him where it lands — at the wayside, with the green sod over him, so that passers-by may say “Here lies a bold fellow.” The image of the dying outlaw asking to be buried where his arrow falls is one of the great scenes in English legend and has been the model for the deaths of many later outlaws in fiction.
In a different version, preserved in Anthony Munday’s play “The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington” (1598), Robin is the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon, whose lands have been taken by the king. In this version he is mortally wounded by the Prioress, repents of his sins, and is reconciled to the Church. The legend is here turned into a moral tale, and Robin becomes an exemplum of the wronged nobleman. The story of the death of Robin is one of the most often retold of all English legends and has been the subject of dozens of ballad versions, novels, plays, and films.
The Historical Possibilities
The question of whether Robin Hood really existed has been a matter of scholarly debate since the sixteenth century. The early antiquary John Major (Johannes Major) wrote in his Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521) that Robin Hood was a real outlaw of the time of Richard I, and the antiquary William Camden in his Britannia (1586) included a similar statement. The earliest named candidates are the “Robyn Hode” of the 1225 Wakefield court roll and the “Hobbehod” of the 1226 inquest of the York Assizes, but these may be common names of the period.
The earliest references to a definite Robin Hood come from the late thirteenth century. The court rolls of Edward I contain a number of references to outlaws called “Robbehod” or “Hobbehod” who were in trouble for poaching or robbery. The criminal records of the reign of Edward I and Edward II also mention a number of outlaws who were pardoned for good service to the king. In the late medieval period, the name of Robin Hood was so common that it was used as a pseudonym for real outlaws. The question is treated in detail in the long-tail page on whether Robin Hood really existed, but the consensus of modern scholarship is that Robin Hood is a legend built on a real base of medieval outlaw traditions, not a single historical person.
The Romance of Robin Hood
The Robin Hood ballads continued to be told and printed well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The great prose collection “The Noble Birth and Gallant Atchievements of that Renowned Hero, Robin Hood” was published by Wentworth Smith in 1670 and formed the basis of many later prose retellings. The verse romance “Robin Hood: A Lyrical Romance” (1819) by the forgotten Robert Thorn was followed in 1838 by Ritson’s ballad compilation. In the nineteenth century, the legend was carried by the novels of Walter Scott (in Ivanhoe, 1819), the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, the plays of Thomas Love Peacock and John Keats, the children’s books of Howard Pyle (especially The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of 1883), and a wide range of popular literature.
The legend has been a subject of motion-picture treatment since the earliest years of the cinema. The most famous films include the silent Robin Hood (1922) with Douglas Fairbanks; the Ealing comedy The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and Olivia de Havilland; the British Robin Hood (1952) with Richard Todd; the Disney animated Robin Hood (1973); and the more recent films of Mel Brooks, Kevin Costner, and Russell Crowe, among many others. The BBC television series Robin of Sherwood (1984–1986) introduced the legendary hero to a generation of children. The image of Robin Hood in modern media is a long and varied one: a forest fighter, a freedom fighter, a comic hero, a tragic hero, and a romantic hero.
The Cultural Legacy
Robin Hood has been used as a symbol of English national identity, of medieval forest rights, of the yeoman tradition, of the labor movement, of the Christian social gospel, of the greenwood ideal, and of the resistance to unjust authority. He is the only medieval English hero whose name is known in every corner of the world. The greenwood ideal of the legend — the free society in the forest, the brotherhood of skilled men and women, the opposition to the abuses of the official law — has been one of the most influential political images in the English-speaking world.
The legend has had a long afterlife in literature. The image of Robin Hood has been taken up in novels by Walter Scott, Thomas Love Peacock, Howard Pyle, and the contemporary novelists of the modern period; in poems by John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and W. B. Yeats; in plays by Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, and the modern dramatists. The image of the greenwood outlaw has been a model for the Westerns of the American frontier, the swashbucklers of Hollywood, and a wide range of political allegories. The medieval greenwood of Robin Hood is the ancestor of the forests of the modern fantasy, including the forests of the Norse and Arthurian traditions.
Last reviewed: June 2026.