Robin

Robin Hood – English folk hero

Robin Hood is a major figure in English myth and folklore, and is widely regarded as an English hero. However, we do not know if such a person ever existed in reality. If he did, then he was a very unusual hero!

Robin Hood was an outlaw, a highly skilled archer and swordsman, best known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". The origin of the legend is thought to have come from actual outlaws, but so many competing and often contradictory ballads and tales of outlaws generally, as well as specific Robin hood ones, exist, that is impossible to tell exactly where and how his tale began.

Robin Hood became a popular folk figure starting in the medieval period continuing through modern literature, films, and television – in the USA and Britain alone, over 40 films and 5 TV series have been made about him and his merry men.

In the earliest sources Robin Hood is a gentleman farmer, but he was often later portrayed as an aristocrat wrongfully dispossessed of his lands and made into an outlaw by an unscrupulous sheriff. In some versions he was a Norman aristocrat; in others, a Saxon lord.

In these tales, Robin and his Merry Men are portrayed as living in Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, but competing stories say that he came from various places in Yorkshire, some distance to the north of Sherwood Forest.

Historical background

If he lived at all he lived over 800 years ago, in an England which was very different from today. It was only about 100 years after one of the greatest events in English History – the Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings. England until 1066 was ruled by Saxons – people who had originally sailed to England from northern Germany about 500 years earlier and had settled in the country. In the royal family which ruled England there were many relatives who had married into the ruling families of other countries, and...