The origin of the Robin Hood legend may, I suggest, lie in Yorkshire in the decade following the issue of Magna Carta in 1215, at the end of which the criminal career of a fugitive, Robert of Wetherby, perhaps the original Robin Hood, came to a sudden and brutal end. It took place against the background of major political tensions arising from the antagonism between the energetic King John and leading members of northern society, who were not used to forceful royal interference in their region. John visited the north of England far more than any of his predecessors, and tried to integrate it more fully with the rest of the country than ever before. His sustained attempts to do so eventually gave rise to strong opposition, and the northern counties were particularly unsettled during the later stages of his reign from 1212 onwards, when a series of events took place which eventually resulted in the king's concessions made in Magna Carta. Despite the confirmations of the Charter in 1216 and 1217, the situation in the north remained hostile to the crown in the years following the accession of John's son, Henry III, then nine years old, in the autumn of 1216, and particularly so in Yorkshire, the largest county. The situation there was such, it will be argued, that it provided a suitable background for a successful and notorious criminal career to begin, flourish for a while and then be extinguished.

In the summer of 1212 there was a baronial plot against John's life, and a number of northern barons were suspected of involvement. One, Eustace de Vesci, fled abroad and, after a royal visit to the north, others gave the king hostages for their good behaviour. Yorkshire was thus the earliest focus of resistance to John's rule, and, after a short period during which the king was more conciliatory, their opposition continued to the end of his reign and beyond. Many of the leading rebels were lords with their main interests in Yorkshire, men such as de Vesci, Robert de Ros, William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy and Nicholas de Stuteville. When war began, John's campaign in the north in January 1216 did nothing to reconcile leading Yorkshiremen to Plantagenet rule from Westminster, and probably further inflamed the situation.

When my interest in the legend of Robin Hood and its possible historicity was first aroused over thirty years ago, it seemed obvious that the best place to look for evidence of the temporal and geographical context of an infamous criminal was to study whatever contemporary records of criminal law and administration had survived until the present day. That point seemed, surprisingly, to have escaped the notice of historians until relatively recent decades, and is still largely disregarded by literary scholars, concentrating as they do mainly on the surviving tales of the outlaw and their social and cultural context. This is so despite the fact that those tales are generally acknowledged to be very late in date, somewhere between two hundred and three hundred years later than the period where the most recent historical research on the subject places the original outlaw, the early thirteenth century. The approach seems to veer between the view that it is too difficult to try to identify the original Robin and his temporal and geographical context, so that the attempt is not worth making, and a feeling that it does not matter anyway. If one's interests are focused on the literary merits of the fifteenth-century tales and how they relate to what is known about English society in that period, indeed it does not matter. If one's concern is to try to explain how the legend began, and to identify the period and context of its origin, it matters a great deal. My point is that, although it is certainly extremely difficult to identify the original outlaw from surviving evidence, and no attempt can ever be conclusive or sufficient to satisfy the critical enquirer, it is worthwhile to make the search. That is what this book sets out to do.

The context within which the Robin Hood story rightfully belongs has been a matter of dispute between folk-lore enthusiasts, literary scholars and some historians since the nineteenth century. The early proponents of Robin Hood as myth were rebuked in 1889 by the great editor of the Robin Hood tales, Francis Child, who opined that ‘I cannot admit that even a shadow of a case has been made out by those who would attach a mythical character to … Robin Hood’.

This book is the work of a retired archivist, one of the last generation of assistant keepers of public records, using knowledge of the surviving early records of national government acquired over several decades (1974 to 2007) while working at what is now known as The National Archives (TNA), but was from 1838 until 2003 called the Public Record Office (PRO). It is the first attempt to make as comprehensive an examination as possible of the surviving evidence for the existence of a real original outlaw, active in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, from whom the legend of Robin Hood may ultimately have derived. Some of the administrative, financial and judicial documents relating to the period from the early thirteenth century to the early fourteenth, on which it is based, remained incompletely identified, listed and publicly available until the early twenty-first century. Even now a little work remains to be done, but an overwhelming proportion of the material is now also available in print or online, especially in the form of images on the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website (AALT), created by Professor Robert Palmer and hosted by the O’Quinn Law Library at the University of Houston, Texas. Most of these endeavours were carried out by the staff of the PRO/TNA itself and others working with or alongside them, including in particular the Pipe Roll Society, the Selden Society, the Universities of Cambridge and York, and King's College London.

In 1981 or 1982 I was systematically searching the memoranda rolls of the Exchequer in the PRO, looking for material for a possible article on the clerks who laboured in that department in the reign of King Henry III, when I made the chance discovery of a reference to a ‘William Robehod’, a criminal fugitive in Berkshire in 1262. I noted it in square brackets because, even though it was not of relevance to the subject I was researching, I had an instinctive feeling that it might be of some significance, and that I might never search through that document again.

Since the mid nineteenth century it has often been said that the occurrence of the surname of the legendary outlaw, and even of his Christian name and surname together, is not uncommon in historical sources, and examples were sometimes pointed out. Six were cited by Joseph Hunter in 1852 in his paper seeking to identify the original Robin Hood, and in 1861 his critic Francis Child also remarked on the frequency with which the surname ‘Hood’ and its variants occurred in medieval English documents already in print by that time; he cited three additional examples. Until now, however, no-one has made a more systematic search for, and study of, such names in significant numbers, in spite of, or perhaps even because of, the richness of the available sources. These include the early records of the English state and courts of law, as well as local sources, especially deeds, from the end of the twelfth century onwards. The great increase in the number of documents published and indexed since the time of Hunter and Child has provided easier access to many more examples, in a variety of temporal and geographical contexts. A significant proportion of them are preceded by the Christian name ‘Robert’, whose diminutive form ‘Robin’ seems rarely if ever to have been used in documents written in Latin, although it could occasionally appear in ones using Anglo-Norman French.

The surname ‘Hood’, usually in the form Hod but sometimes Hodd, Hodde, Hoode, Houd, Hudde or Hude, was common in thirteenth and fourteenth century England, and occasionally also occurs in Scotland. It can be explained as deriving originally from someone who made hoods (although the name Hoder or Hodere is a much less common alternative form), or, more frequently, who was noted for or characterised by the wearing of a hood. Occasionally, a name in the form ‘de Hod’ indicates an origin from a place called Hood, there being such locations in Devon and Yorkshire. It is possible that the Robert de Hod found in Richmond in Yorkshire in 1301 was one such individual, from the place of that name, now Hood Grange, in the parish of Kilburn, while the Devon place is in the parish of Rattery.

By the end of the nineteenth century the battle lines of the debate about the origins of the Robin Hood legend had been drawn, and no previously unidentified early tales were found subsequently. Child, as editor of the texts of the tales, assigned them to literary creativity alone, the ‘ballad muse’, and his conclusion became the orthodox view of Robin Hood among literary scholars. Hunter's historical approach, searching for evidence indicating the existence of an original individual bearing the name of the outlaw in the records of medieval government and administration, receded in the wake of Child's criticisms. Perhaps as a result, professional historians paid very little attention to Robin Hood scholarship for many years, as they concentrated on political and constitutional history at a national level, largely ignoring the local and regional sources used by Hunter and his antiquarian predecessors, from William Dugdale (d. 1686) and Robert Thoroton (d. 1678) onwards, in compiling county histories. In the earlier twentieth century, some progress was made in the interpretation and understanding of the tales, but this was entirely within the province of the literary scholars. The most notable contribution was the detailed examination of the Gest published in 1909 by the Canadian scholar W. H. Clawson, which included no historical material. He analysed the Gest to determine how many different stories it contained, and to identify links to analogue tales. It was the only one of the early Robin Hood ballads to have received further detailed literary analysis between the time of Child and the late twentieth century. E. K. Chambers took a literary historical approach to the outlaw in an influential volume of the Oxford History of English Literature published in 1945, in a chapter covering ‘Popular Narrative Poetry and the Ballad’.

He was aware of the discovery of a reference to a ‘Gilbert Robynhod’ in Sussex in 1296, but thought it ‘very likely’ that the story of the outlaw ‘took its start’ from the Robin Hood imprisoned in Rockingham castle in 1354 while awaiting trial for breaking the forest law.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century regarded the medieval period as a time of Gothic uncouthness and barbarity. The chivalry and ritual associated with it, which had survived until the first half of the seventeenth century, hung on only in antiquarian corners of a culture dominated by admiration for classical Greece and Rome, and the Italian Renaissance. However, beginning in the 1760s and 1770s, interest in medieval England underwent a significant revival. This was at least partly derived from an intellectual concern to discover, through the study of historical evidence of various kinds, the true character of past events. Serious attempts were first made, albeit in the context of the much wider search for all old traditional English songs and poems, to collect together the texts of the known Robin Hood stories, and to publish them. The impetus was created not only by a growing interest in medieval and early modern English culture and literature, but by the chance discovery in a country house of an important manuscript, already damaged but fortunately not completely destroyed. The work of publication and interpretation was carried out by several important scholars, not always on the best of terms with each other when their lives and work overlapped. It ultimately culminated in the meticulous edition of the most important poems by Francis Child, initially in America in 1857 and then in 1861 in London, and subsequently, after several more editions in the intervening period, on a more comprehensive basis in 1889. His work became the basis of all subsequent study. Another result of this process was a growing interest in the cultural milieu of the main stories. Did they have a supernatural element and a background in folklore? Did they include any historical truth, or were they, as Child opined in 1889, ‘absolutely the creation of the ballad muse’? Were they a suitable subject for academic study and interpretation, or simply, as described by one critic in 1792, ‘the refuse of a stall’? These developments really began with the activities of an English Anglican clergyman and scholar, who in his youth and maturity gained academic fame, and some notoriety, before in later life becoming the bishop of a northern Irish diocese.

The development of the Robin Hood legend and the increase in its popularity over several centuries sometimes came to influence English local nomenclature, associating places with, in particular, the outlaw himself or Little John. This was mainly limited to minor geographical features, such as wayside crosses or distinctive rocks, not settlements, and these features did not always bear those names consistently or permanently. Such names were very numerous by the nineteenth century, and are found in quite significant numbers from the later sixteenth century onwards, although a large proportion of them are first recorded only on maps drawn in the later eighteenth century. They occur in many counties, not just in those most closely associated with the legend, that is, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The fullest listing of them so far, specifically excluding street, inn and field names, was compiled by Dobson and Taylor and published in the first edition of their book on the outlaw legend in 1976. It was reprinted without any modification or addition in subsequent editions, and made no claims to be comprehensive, providing ‘only a small selection of what seem to us the most important in an enormous field’, with the selection criterion being the appearance of the name in question on the Seventh Series of the One-Inch Ordnance Survey maps. The first appearance of any place-name in a document or on a map is accidental, and it may have existed for some time previously. Only the very earliest can be used to indicate the spread of the legend, and still less can they provide evidence for its origins. Nevertheless, the concentration of the early examples in the areas most associated with Robin Hood is striking. Many more may eventually come to light, especially as more detailed studies of field-names are carried out, although it seems unlikely that they will alter the general pattern of their distribution.

The list includes only four names recorded before 1501, four more before 1601 and 13 more before 1701. Some early place-names were inherently more susceptible to modification by the widespread awareness of the legend than others. In particular, a handful of ‘Robin’ names were altered to ‘Robin Hood’ names subsequently. For example, ‘Robin Hood Cross’ near Bradwell in Derbyshire earlier occurred as the ‘Robin Cross’ in 1319 and still bore that name in 1640.

The early tales of Robin Hood are the essential starting point for any consideration of the evidence for the origins of the legend, and for any attempt to identify the original outlaw. The first step is to study them; the second to identify the elements of the surviving stories that seem most likely to represent the core of the original legend; and the third to differentiate them from others which are most likely to be later accretions to that core. This process can assist in establishing the chronological context and geographical location of the man from whom the legend derived, if such an individual ever existed. It is therefore necessary to consider in detail the small canon of stories that are now generally agreed to have originated before the early sixteenth century, noting their contents and taking account of the views of recent and contemporary literary scholars and historians about their provenance, their likely dates, how to interpret them, and their late-medieval historical context. The chapter will conclude with a brief review of which elements of the modern Robin Hood legend do not appear in the early tales, the origins of which will require explanation. It is convenient to deal with the early stories initially in the chronological order of their recorded appearance, so far as that can be established by the most recent research.

What is known of the medieval legend of Robin Hood as it existed before the early sixteenth century depends mainly on a handful of surviving tales in manuscript and an early printed text in several versions that derives from an original but now lost written source. They comprise five poems or ballads and a fragment of a play, all in the English language, plus a passage in Latin included in a fifteenth-century Scottish monastic chronicle. They represent not the origins of the tales at some earlier indeterminate time, but the stage of development that they had reached by the time the surviving versions were written down. Before then they had taken the form of verses, recited, chanted or sung by professional or amateur entertainers who depended mainly on memory to preserve the details. It cannot be certain that the surviving written tales record all or even the main themes of the oral material that existed earlier, and what we now have is probably only a fragment of what was performed for medieval audiences.

In contemporary popular imagination the legendary outlaw Robin Hood is often associated with opposition to the forest laws of the Anglo- Norman and then Plantagenet monarchs who ruled England from 1066 onwards, and it is sometimes assumed that his outlawry arose from his offences against those laws. There is, however, a growing consensus among both historians and literary scholars that the original Robin Hood, if one existed, had nothing to do with the forest laws or the greenwood, but was a notorious highway robber whose supposed association with forests and woodland came about only after the genesis of his legend. According to Barrie Dobson and John Taylor,

Later, when discussing the significance of the first appearance of the surname ‘Robehod’ in 1262, the pair thought that ‘a forest myth perhaps also engaged with the earliest associations which gathered round the name. There is no evidence that when first used the name Robin Hood had any greenwood associations. By some process that name was placed against a forest background’. According to Stephen Knight, the idea of his opposition to the forest laws as the reason for his outlaw status only became firmly established in novels, with the influential Robin Hood and his Men of the Greenwood, by Henry Gilbert, published in 1912, being of particular significance in that respect. Knight also pointed out that, because the criminality of killing deer contrary to the forest law does not appear in specific incidents in the medieval or later tales, episodes depicting it were only finally added to the legend in new Robin Hood stories devised for twentieth-century cinema, perhaps crucially in the 1938 film starring Errol Flynn, because the setting seemed to require it.

The radical ideas about the origins of the legend of Robin Hood proposed in this book were made possible only by the results of the painstaking work of generations of archivists and record scholars of the earliest surviving records of English government. That work was carried out between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twenty-first, and took place initially under the auspices of the six Record Commissions between 1800 and 1837, before the establishment of the Public Record Office in 1838. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, already a noted antiquary, became one of the first generation of assistant keepers of public records. From 1843 to 1858 he was, in the words of his distinguished colleague Henry Cole, ‘employed on the highly important business of arranging the 4,000 bushels of miscellaneous records of the Queen's Remembrancer's Office of the Exchequer, which had been formally abolished only a decade previously. His fellow assistant keepers, including Cole, carried out similar work on the records of other departments of the Exchequer, and of the Chancery and courts of common law, in other record offices in the capital, until they were finally brought together in the new Public Record Office building on the Rolls Estate in Chancery Lane in 1859. Among the records under his charge and which came to light as he worked, Hunter made what he thought was a very exciting discovery. In an account of the king's Chamber under Edward II he found records of payments to Robert Hod, a lowly porter, which he thought might relate to both a section of the Gest of Robin Hood and to real events which took place in the early 1320s. He wrote a lengthy paper based upon them, published in 1852, suggesting that they might refer to the original legendary outlaw, Robin Hood. His ideas, initially received with interest among fellow antiquaries, were within a decade savagely criticised and ridiculed, and this may have had the long-term effect of discouraging any others who might have been tempted to undertake further research into the subject in documentary sources.

Chroniclers and historians: early attempts to date Robin Hood

The Vision of Piers the Plowman from the late 1370s or early 1380s makes the earliest dated reference to the existence of tales of Robin Hood. Other references or allusions to the outlaw occur in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) onwards. Chaucer's yeoman, who appears in the prologue of the CanterburyTales, closely resembles Robin: both are of yeoman social status, skilled archers and carry bows and horns, and wear hoods. The Lettersnijder edition of the Gest, printed in 1508, even illustrates Robin by reusing the image of Chaucer's yeoman from the beginning of Pynson's printed edition of the Canterbury Tales, of c.1491, something first noticed by Frank Isaac in 1930. Prominent among explicit references to the outlaw are criticisms by clergy. The treatise Dives et Pauper (c.1405-10) attacked those who preferred to visit the tavern to hear ‘a songe of Robynhode’ rather than attend Mass or Matins. Two sermons also referred to the legend with disgust: one the undated context of which is a manuscript of an Oxfordshire parish priest, the other preached before king and parliament by the chancellor John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, in 1433. The first complained that many men preferred fables to the Gospel, and a ‘romaunce of Robyn Hode’ to St. Paul's Epistles; the second thought that the tales threatened social harmony and respect for the clergy, and the people paid more heed to ‘wanton prophets’ like Robin Hood than to the prophets of God’. Other references, however, are not overtly or even implicitly critical. A scribbled note, made in the early fifteenth century on a spare page of a fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript which survives in Lincoln cathedral library, perhaps by someone practising cursive handwriting and translation from English into Latin, merely describes the outlaw, said to be standing in Sherwood, his clothing, and his possession of 24 arrows. In 1429 occurs the first example of the use of the phrase ‘Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood’ in verbal pleading by a serjeant at law in a case heard in one of the central courts of common law at Westminster.

In the five surviving early tales of Robin Hood the outlaw has various enemies, but the only one who appears in all of them is a sheriff, and all the tales refer to one particular sheriff only, the ‘sheriff of Nottingham’. In none of them, however, does the sheriff appear as anything like a character with a personality (with the slight exceptions of Robin Hood andthe Potter, where he briefly becomes a figure of fun, and the third fytte of the Gest, when he complains of the discomfort of spending a night in the forest wearing only his breeches and shirt). He seems simply to be an archetype, an anti-hero representing the enforcement of authority against the heroic outlaw, and no specific information or suggestion about the origins and nature of the enmity between them is given in any of the early tales. According to Dobson and Taylor, he

They also speculatively suggested that stories about him ‘arose independently from and perhaps even preceded those concerning Robin Hood’, and that the legend was ‘an amalgam of two originally distinct story cycles’, one centred on a Yorkshire outlaw from Barnsdale and one on a Nottinghamshire sheriff. It is difficult, however, to imagine a type of popular story in which a sheriff was heroic, and the idea does not fit with the plot of that other tale of yeomen outlaws, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley, the earliest text of which dates from 1536 but which is certainly of medieval origin. The three heroes were ‘outlawed for venyson’ and lurked in Inglewood Forest in Cumberland, near the town of Carlisle, whose justice and sheriff jointly play the role of official villain, although in this tale the justice is the senior figure.