53 Facts About Robin Hood

Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature and film.

Robin Hood is considered one of the best-known tales of English folklore.

In popular culture, the term "Robin Hood" is often used to describe a heroic outlaw or rebel against tyranny.

At least eight plausible origins to the story have been mooted by historians and folklorists, including suggestions that "Robin Hood" was a stock alias used by or in reference to bandits.

Robin Hood is mentioned in a famous Lollard tract dated to the first half of the fifteenth century alongside several other folk heroes such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Sir Lybeaus.

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In modern popular culture, Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late-12th-century king Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's brother John while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.

The early compilation, A Gest of Robyn Hode, names the king as 'Edward'; and while it does show Robin Hood accepting the King's pardon, he later repudiates it and returns to the greenwood.

Early ballads are quite clear on Robin Hood's social status: he is a yeoman.

The first record of a Robin Hood game was in 1426 in Exeter, but the reference does not indicate how old or widespread this custom was at the time.

The Robin Hood games are known to have flourished in the later 15th and 16th centuries.

The first explicit statement to the effect that Robin Hood habitually robbed from the rich to give the poor can be found in John Stow's Annales of England, about a century after the publication of the Gest.

Robin Hood is not a peasant but a yeoman, and his tales make no mention of the complaints of the peasants, such as oppressive taxes.

Robin Hood appears not so much as a revolt against societal standards as an embodiment of them, being generous, pious, and courteous, opposed to stingy, worldly, and churlish foes.

Complaint of 1492, brought to the Star Chamber, accuses men of acting riotously by coming to a fair as Robin Hood and his men; the accused defended themselves on the grounds that the practice was a long-standing custom to raise money for churches, and they had not acted riotously but peaceably.

The plays are complex in plot and form, the story of Robin Hood appearing as a play-within-a-play presented at the court of Henry VIII and written by the poet, priest and courtier John Skelton.

Robin Hood is known to have appeared in a number of other lost and extant Elizabethan plays.

Robin Hood did not appear on the Restoration stage, except for "Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers" acted in Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II in 1661.

However, Robin Hood appeared on the 18th-century stage in various farces and comic operas.

Exactly when they displaced the oral tradition of Robin Hood ballads is unknown but the process seems to have been completed by the end of the 16th century.

Dobson and Taylor wrote, 'More generally the Robin Hood of the broadsides is a much less tragic, less heroic and in the last resort less mature figure than his medieval predecessor'.

Robin Hood first appeared in a 17th-century broadside ballad, and unlike many of the characters thus associated, managed to adhere to the legend.

From this period there are a number of ballads in which Robin Hood is severely 'drubbed' by a succession of tradesmen including a tanner, a tinker, and a ranger.

Yet even in these ballads Robin Hood is more than a mere simpleton: on the contrary, he often acts with great shrewdness.

The tinker, setting out to capture Robin Hood, only manages to fight with him after he has been cheated out of his money and the arrest warrant he is carrying.

Ritson's interpretation of Robin Hood was influential, having influenced the modern concept of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as it exists today.

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Himself a supporter of the principles of the French Revolution and admirer of Thomas Paine, Ritson held that Robin Hood was a genuinely historical, and genuinely heroic, character who had stood up against tyranny in the interests of the common people.

Robin Hood included alternate versions of ballads that had distinct, alternate versions.

Nevertheless, the adventures are still more local than national in scope: while King Richard's participation in the Crusades is mentioned in passing, Robin Hood takes no stand against Prince John, and plays no part in raising the ransom to free Richard.

Pyle's Robin Hood is a yeoman and not an aristocrat.

In 1993, a previously unknown manuscript of 21 Robin Hood ballads turned up in an auction house and eventually wound up in the British Library.

The 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, portrayed Robin as a hero on a national scale, leading the oppressed Saxons in revolt against their Norman overlords while Richard the Lionheart fought in the Crusades; this movie established itself so definitively that many studios resorted to movies about his son rather than compete with the image of this one.

Years before Robin Hood had even entered production, Disney had considered doing a project on Reynard the Fox; however, due to concerns that Reynard was unsuitable as a hero, animator Ken Anderson adapted some elements from Reynard into Robin Hood, making the title character a fox.

The 2018 adaptation Robin Hood portrays the character of Little John as a Muslim named Yahya, played by Jamie Foxx.

The surname Robin Hood was fairly common because it referred either to a hooder, who was a maker of hoods, or alternatively to somebody who wore a hood as a head-covering.

Oldest references to Robin Hood are not historical records, or even ballads recounting his exploits, but hints and allusions found in various works.

Robin Hood is represented as a fighter for de Montfort's cause.

Richard Grafton, in his Chronicle at Large went further when discussing Major's description of "Robert Robin Hood", identifying him for the first time as a member of the gentry, albeit possibly "being of a base stock and linaege, was for his manhood and chivalry advanced to the noble dignity of an Earl" and not the yeomanry, foreshadowing Anthony Munday's casting of him as the dispossed Earl of Huntingdon.

David Baldwin identifies Robin Hood with the historical outlaw Roger Godberd, who was a die-hard supporter of Simon de Montfort, which would place Robin Hood around the 1260s.

Antiquarian Joseph Hunter believed that Robin Hood had inhabited the forests of Yorkshire during the early decades of the fourteenth century.

Hunter developed a fairly detailed theory implying that Robert Robin Hood had been an adherent of the rebel Earl of Lancaster, who was defeated by Edward II at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322.

Hunter's theory has long been recognised to have serious problems, one of the most serious being that recent research has shown that Hunter's Robyn Robin Hood had been employed by the king before he appeared in the 1323 court roll, thus casting doubt on this Robyn Robin Hood's supposed earlier career as outlaw and rebel.

Robin Hood has been claimed for the pagan witch-cult supposed by Margaret Murray to have existed in medieval Europe, and his anti-clericalism and Marianism interpreted in this light.

Notably, the Lincoln Cathedral Manuscript, which is the first officially recorded Robin Hood song, makes an explicit reference to the outlaw that states that "Robyn hode in scherewode stod".

Specific sites in the county of Nottinghamshire that are directly linked to the Robin Hood legend include Robin Hood's Well, located near Newstead Abbey, the Church of St Mary in the village of Edwinstowe and most famously of all, the Major Oak located at the village of Edwinstowe.

Nottinghamshire's claim to Robin Hood's heritage is disputed, with Yorkists staking a claim to the outlaw.

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Wentbridge is mentioned in an early Robin Hood ballad, entitled, Robin Hood and the Potter, which reads, "Y mete hem bot at Went breg, ' syde Lyttyl John".

Robin Hood shot an arrow from the Priory window, and where the arrow landed was to be the site of his grave.

Robin Hood was ill and staying at the Priory where the Prioress was supposedly caring for him.

The overall picture from the surviving early ballads and other early references indicate that Robin Hood was based in the Barnsdale area of what is South Yorkshire, which borders Nottinghamshire.

Robin Hood Hill is near Outwood, West Yorkshire, not far from Lofthouse.

The plot of Robin Hood's Death, found in the Percy Folio, is summarised in the 15th-century A Gest of Robyn Hode, and it appears in an 18th-century version.

Robin Hood was added to one variant of Rose Red and the White Lily, apparently on no more connection than that one hero of the other variants is named "Brown Robin".

An act utilitarian could argue that many of Robin Hood's actions were acceptable because compared to the gains by the poor "the victim's loss is insignificant".