Robin Hood - The Real Story is Far, Far, Far Darker Than You Think - Oh and it isn't Based in Sherwood Forest!

By Chris Livemore

A few nights ago my daughter declared loudly that she is obsessed with Robin Hood because he helps people, can shoot arrows and has lots of friends. She also mentioned that he was a fox, all very accurate points if we are basing all of our Robin Hood knowledge entirely on the 1970s Disney film, but Robin Hood wasn't really like that.

This one might just surprise you! Spoiler Alert - if my daughter knew that I wrote a medieval history blog, could navigate the internet to find it and then sit down and read this...she would instantly dislike her current hero.

Now I am not talking about the Robin Hood in green tights, the one who robs the rich to give to the poor with a warm smile and a perfectly aimed arrow. Not the one who has been played by Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe and, in one particularly committed interpretation, Cary Elwes in a film that was definitely a comedy.

We need to travel back well over 500 years to find the one from the earliest surviving tales, preserved in a manuscript copied around 1450. This Robin is considerably less charming, a lot more violent and a very, very grim ending. There is a reason why no Hollywood studio would ever show the Robin you are about to learn about in a film, let alone have Bryan Adams singing one of the greatest songs of all time about him.

But this makes it is a much better story. At least, I think it does.

Who Robin Hood actually was in the earliest tales

The earliest surviving written reference to Robin Hood as an established figure of folklore appears in the 1370s, which means the legend was already old enough by then to be cited as common knowledge. The poet William Langland mentions "rymes of Robyn hood" in Piers Plowman around 1377 as the kind of thing that idle people knew rather than their prayers. This tells us that the stories about Robin Hood existed and that respectable medieval society had opinions about who was listening to them.

The earliest surviving text of a Robin Hood ballad is Robin Hood and the Monk, preserved in a Cambridge University manuscript written shortly after 1450.

The character of Robin in these first texts is rougher edged than in his later accounts. In Robin Hood and the Monk, he is shown as quick-tempered and violent, assaulting Little John for defeating him in an archery contest. In the same ballad, Much the Miller's Son casually kills a little page in the course of rescuing Robin Hood from prison. Much kills a child. That's Much the Miller's Son who kills a child. I am still in shock about that.

And the ballad barely pauses to acknowledge it! This is not a story about a noble outlaw with a conscience. This is a story told to medieval audiences who had a rather different understanding of what an outlaw's life actually involved.

What the early Robin Hood actually did

The popular image of Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor, is largely a later invention. It is a warm, satisfying moral framework and it has sold an enormous number of films and television series.

No ballad actually shows Robin Hood giving to the poor, although in A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin does make a large loan to an unfortunate knight - although he frequently helps those he believes have been treated unjustly. The giving-to-the-poor element appears to have developed gradually over centuries of retelling, each generation softening and moralising the story until it arrived at the version we now know.

One of the longest surviving Robin Hood poems, A Gest of Robyn Hode, presents Robin as a yeoman rather than a nobleman. A yeoman was a term used for an archer in the 100 Years' War (it is also someone who owned and farmed his own land, but given that this is Robin Hood I am going with the archer term!). The Robin Hood tales described a series of adventures involving the yeoman outlaws Robin Hood and Little John, the poor knight Sir Richard at the Lee, the greedy abbot of St Mary's Abbey, the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, and King Edward of England.

Robin Hood was a skilled outdoorsman of the middling sort who has ended up outside the law and is making the best of it with a group of similarly positioned men. He robs travellers. He ambushes the Sheriff's men. He is loyal to his own group and deeply hostile to corrupt clergy and officials, but the moral framework is considerably more pragmatic than later versions suggest.

He also, and this is frequently overlooked, is operating in the reign of a King named Edward, not Richard the Lionheart. The early compilation A Gest of Robyn Hode names the king as Edward, and while it does show Robin Hood as accepting the King's pardon, he later repudiates it and returns to the greenwood.

The association with Richard I and Prince John is a much later addition, first gaining currency in the 16th century and having very little scholarly support. It was a narrative choice that gave the story a clearer political shape. A legitimate king absent, corrupt regent in charge, noble outlaw resisting injustice etc, but it is not what the medieval ballads say.

The death of Robin Hood

In the earliest tradition, Robin Hood does not go out in a blaze of glory. He does not die in battle against the Sheriff's men. He does not sacrifice himself nobly for the common people he has spent his career supposedly protecting. He is bled to death by a woman.

Specifically, by the Prioress of Kirklees, his own cousin, in what appears to be a deliberate act of betrayal.

The ballad Robin Hood's Death describes Robin, ill and weakening, travelling to Kirklees Priory to be bled, a common medieval medical practice, considered therapeutic for various conditions. The Prioress opens a vein in his arm and then doesn't close it.

She leaves him bleeding, apparently in collaboration with a knight named Roger of Doncaster who has his own grievances against Robin. By the time Robin realises what is happening, he is too weak to summon help. He manages to blow his horn, a last signal to Little John, and when Little John arrives and asks permission to burn the priory to the ground in revenge, Robin refuses.

Even at the end, the code holds. No revenge on the innocent.

He asks to be buried where his last arrow falls, shoots it from the window, weakened almost beyond the ability to draw the bow, and dies shortly after. It is a verypowerful ending, betrayal by a trusted relative. Weakness that comes from trusting the wrong person. A final act of restraint when destruction would have been easy and arguably justified.

And it is nothing like the ending you have been shown in any film, television series or animated feature produced in the last century.

Was Robin Hood a real person

This is the question everyone asks and the honest answer is: possibly, but the evidence is inconclusive and historians are cautious.

Historians have identified numerous men called Robert Hood, Robert Hod or Robin Hood in medieval legal records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some of them outlaws, some of them criminals, some of them simply people with a common name. One candidate is a Robert who was fined for ignoring a summons to Edward II's forces and is thought to have been outlawed in 1322 for taking part in Earl Thomas of Lancaster's rebellion, fleeing into Barnsdale Forest after the recorded confiscation of his property

Barnsdale Forest in Yorkshire, it should be noted, features in the earliest ballads far, far more than Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, which is interesting given that the Sherwood connection is the one that everyone remembers today.

The honest position is that Robin Hood was probably a composite figure, a name and a set of characteristics that gathered stories around themselves over time, drawing on real outlaw traditions and real social tensions but not reducible to a single historical individual.

Folk heroes have a habit of collecting stories as they travel through history. Robin Hood wasn't just someone people read about. By the late Middle Ages he had become part of village life. Across England, May Day celebrations often included Robin Hood plays and games, with local people dressing as Robin, Little John and Maid Marian. Long before Hollywood discovered him, ordinary villagers were already keeping his story alive.

Why the story was sanitised

Each generation that retold Robin Hood's story made adjustments that reflected their own values and their own audience.

The Tudor period gave him noble birth, a dispossessed earl rather than a yeoman, because Tudor audiences found a nobleman in adversity more sympathetic than a common criminal. The Victorian period gave him the full moral framework of robbing the rich to give to the poor, because Victorian social reformers found him useful as a symbol of redistribution and justice. Hollywood gave him the green tights and the romance and the warm conclusion, because audiences in the twentieth century enjoyed happy endings.

But the original is darker, stranger and in some ways more interesting. A violent man in a violent world, loyal to his own, distrustful of institutions, brought down in the end not by the Sheriff's army but by someone he should have been able to trust.

That version of events feels a lot more medieval.

Inspired by the real history and folklore behind The Good Knight? Join the Shield Wall at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall, for medieval history, mythical creatures, dark origins of familiar stories and the occasional arrow shot from a priory window.