Historical Robin
Was Robin Hood a real person? Or was he, as the historian JC Holt claims, ‘a legend rather than a man’? If he was a real individual, is there any trace of him in the historical record? In a sense, the questions are superfluous. It is Robin Hood the living mythic figure who holds our attention not some long-dead medieval outlaw who may have been known by that name or a similar one. And yet the question of whether or not Robin Hood really existed is one that will not go away. Historians and pseudo-historians have been striving to answer it for centuries. One of the most distinguished scholars who ever studied the Robin Hood ballads, the American Francis J. Child, was of the opinion that anyone who made a connection between any ballad and a specific historical record must be possessed of ‘an uncommon insensibility to the ludicrous’ but there have been plenty of people over the years prepared to risk looking silly in the pursuit of a real Robin.
Certainly there were plenty of real-life gangs of outlaws in the Middle Ages. Eustace Folville and his younger brothers, for example, delinquent members of a gentry family, led a band of thieves and thugs who committed a series of often violent crimes in Leicestershire and Derbyshire in the 1320s and 1330s. Summoned for trial in 1326 for the murder of a local knight, the Folvilles simply headed for the hills and were declared outlaws. Over the next decade, they were responsible for most of the worst law-breaking in the Midlands. Eustace himself is mentioned in the records in connection with three robberies and four murders in the space of a few years. Despite this, there was clearly a good deal of sympathy for the Folvilles amongst ordinary people and a sense that these outlaws were more honest men than the officers of the law who pursued them. Rendered into modern English, the complaint of one official was that the Folvilles ‘are aided and abetted by local people, who incite them to their evil deeds and shield them after they are done’. He could have been talking about Robin and his merry men. Thirty years after his death, Eustace Folville was still remembered as a fundamentally just man. In 1377, William Langland wrote approvingly in Piers Plowman, the poem in which the first mention of Robin Hood literature is made, of ‘Folvyles lawes’, the rough and ready justice that the brothers had embodied.
The Folvilles made no mark on literature beyond this passing reference in Piers Plowman but there were also real outlaws from earlier times whose lives were recorded in verse and prose. Hereward the Wake was a hero of the Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest who defied the Conqueror’s men from his stronghold on the isle of Ely. Tales of his exploits survive in a number of medieval works, most notably Gesta Herewardi (‘The Deeds of Hereward’), the earliest copy of which dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. Fulk FitzWarin was a nobleman turned outlaw, a landowner from the Welsh Marches who rebelled against King John in the first decade of the twelfth century. His adventures are recorded in a prose romance in Old French entitled Fouk le Fitz Waryn which survives in a compilation of works written by a scribe in Hereford sometime between 1325 and 1340. Eustace the Monk was a Benedictine who left his monastery in about 1190 and went on to become an outlaw and pirate. He was killed in the naval Battle of Dover in 1217. Some time in the decades immediately following his death, he became the subject of Wistasse li Moine, a French poem which focuses particularly on his early career as a forest outlaw, fighting and feuding with his former lord, the count of Boulogne. All of these outlaws were undoubtedly real, historical figures and the works of literature which were written about them carry unmistakeable echoes of the earliest stories of the most famous outlaw leader of them all. Clearly elements of the stories of Hereward, Fulk and Eustace found their way into the Robin Hood tradition. This does not necessarily prove that Robin, like them, was a real individual.
To some writers, beginning in the nineteenth century, Robin was most definitely not a real man but a figure from ancient mythology, one ‘whose name but faintly disguises either Woden in the aspect of a vegetation deity, or a minor wood spirit Hode’. In the twentieth century, folklorists such as Margaret Murray saw him as a high priest of the ancient pagan religion, representative of the horned god of nature. Such theories, although they have been regularly revealed as based more on wishful thinking than any real evidence, refuse to go away. In the 1990s, John Matthews, a prolific explorer of the territory where mythology and new age spirituality meet, published Robin Hood: The Green Lord of the Wildwood in which he reaffirmed links between the outlaw leader and the ancient symbol of the Green Man which had been largely discredited decades earlier. Discarding such outré ideas may be essential in any pursuit of the real Robin Hood but it still does not necessarily involve the belief that the hero of the greenwood can be traced back to a specific individual from the Middle Ages.
So where should we look if we are in pursuit of a real Robin? It would seem as if place names that indicate a connection with the outlaw (Robin Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast, Robin Hood’s Close in Nottingham, Robin Hood’s Cave in the Creswell Crags between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) might provide some clues. However, the dates when these place names are first recorded reveal that they almost certainly reflect the widespread popularity of the stories in song and folklore rather than any link to a real person named Robin Hood.
What about the names of individuals most commonly associated with him in the popular imagination? Most of these can also be swiftly dismissed in the search. Despite what some twentieth-century filmmakers and TV scriptwriters would have us believe, he was not Robert, Earl of Huntington. Robin makes his earliest appearances in the ballads as a yeoman not a noble and it seems that the first person to identify him as the Earl of Huntington was the Elizabethan dramatist Anthony Munday in two plays from the 1590s.
Nor was the outlaw’s real name Robert of Locksley, Robin of Loxley or any of the other similar variants that have been used in dozens of books and films in the years since Walter Scott introduced his Robin Hood character as ‘Locksley’ in his 1819 novel Ivanhoe. It is true that a manuscript which forms part of the Sloane Collection in the British Museum, probably written in the late sixteenth century, is the first surviving attempt to provide a historical biography of Robin Hood and that this places him in the time of Richard I and records his birthplace as Locksley. However, there is no evidence that the writer of the ‘Sloane Life’ had access to records that have now been lost. Most of the rest of his biography is quite clearly constructed from material in the ballads. The Locksley birthplace is surely more likely to have come from a lost ballad than from lost historical evidence. There are other early references to Locksley as Robin’s name. Roger Dodsworth, for instance, a seventeenth-century antiquarian, wrote: ‘Robert Locksley, born in Bradfield parish, in Hallamshire, wounded his stepfather to death at plough: fled into the woods, and was relieved by his mother till he was discovered. Then he came to Clifton upon Calder, and came acquainted with Little John, that kept the kine which said John is buried at Hathershead (Hathersage) in Derbyshire, where he hath a fair tomb-stone with an inscription.’ Yet, since Dodsworth also goes on to refer to the possibility that it was Little John who was the Earl of Huntington, it doesn’t seem as if a great deal of credence can be placed on his theories.
In looking for a real Robin, the first references to him as an historical figure rather than a literary one are significant. They come, perhaps surprisingly, from Scotland. Two fifteenth-century Scottish chroniclers, both of them churchmen, record the outlaw’s activities in their works. Andrew of Wyntoun, writing about 1420, places Robin in the year 1283. In an entry for that year in his Orygynale Chronicle, Andrew writes: ‘Litil Iohun and Robert Hude/Waythmen war commendit gud/In Ingilwode and Bernnysdaile/Thai oyssit al this tyme thar trawale’. (‘Little John and Robert Hood were forest outlaws who were highly praised. In Inglewood and Barnsdale, they undertook their labour all this time.’) Some twenty years later Walter Bower, writing in Latin, placed Robin in the 1260s, casting him as one of the followers of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, forced into banditry after the defeat and deat
h of the Earl at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 – ‘Then arose the famous murderer (siccarius, literally ‘cut-throat’) Robert Hood, as well as Little John, together with their accomplices from among the disinherited, whom the foolish populace are so inordinately fond of celebrating both in tragedies and comedies, and about whom they are delighted to hear the jesters and minstrels sing above all other ballads.’ It is worth noting that neither Andrew of Wyntoun nor Walter Bower mentions Nottinghamshire. Andrew places him in Barnsdale in Yorkshire and further north in Inglewood, probably an area near Carlisle. And neither of them puts Robin in the period with which later generations have come to associate him – the reign of Richard I – but nearly a hundred years later.
The first historian to associate the outlaw with Richard the Lionheart was another Scotsman named John Major, author of a History of Great Britain, originally written in Latin, and published in 1521. Major also played a significant role in the process of transforming Robin from yeoman outlaw to a man of gentility and humanity. ‘Robert Hood, an Englishman, and Little John,’ he wrote, not only ‘lay in wait in the woods’ but they also ‘spoiled of their goods those only that were wealthy’. These were not just bloody cutthroats. ‘They took the life of no man, unless he either attacked them or offered resistance in defence of his property.’ Robin was basically, in Major’s eyes, a decent chap. ‘He would allow no woman to suffer injustice, nor would he spoil the poor, but rather enriched them from the plunder taken from the abbots.’ In short, Robin Hood was – there was no getting away from it – a robber but ‘of all robbers he was the humanest and the chief’.
As the sixteenth century progressed, other antiquarians, including famous names like John Leland, sometimes called ‘the father of English local history’, and John Stow, the author of A Survey of London, tended to repeat what Major had said and the association of Robin with the reigns of Richard I and John began to gather strength. For close to two hundred years there were few significant developments in the story of the search for an historical Robin. As we have seen, a prose life of the outlaw, dating from about 1600, was preserved in the Sloane Manuscripts but it is merely constructed from ballads, folk plays and tradition. Even four centuries ago, it seems that there was little hard historical evidence to hand. One of the traditions that existed was that Robin Hood’s Grave could be seen in Kirklees in Yorkshire where there was certainly a stone that was linked to the outlaw. It was described by the antiquarian William Camden in 1607 and drawn by a local doctor named Nathaniel Johnston sixty years later. Forty years after Johnston, the Dean of York, Thomas Gale, not only recorded a date for Robin’s death which he claimed was on the grave (the improbable 24 Kalends of December 1247) but also some lines from a verse epitaph. ‘Hear underneath this laitl stean/Laid Robert earl of Huntington/Nea arcir vir as hei sae geud/An pipl kauld im robin heud.’ Presumably this was some kind of clerical joke since this gibberish bears no relation to any form of Middle English and the scholarly Gale must have known this. He seems to have taken the verse from Martin Parker’s A True Tale of Robin Hood from 1632 and turned it into cod medieval English for fun. The joke took on a life of its own when, sometime in the eighteenth century, the words were carved onto another stone slab near Kirklees which is still there.
Probably not intended as a joke but no less ludicrous than Gale’s epitaph was the family tree constructed for Robin Hood by the eccentric antiquarian William Stukeley. In 1746, Stukeley took the genuine pedigree of a series of medieval earls of Huntington and inserted into it some names which, as far as one can tell, he had simply made up. He invented a family of Fitzooths and proudly stated at the bottom of this false pedigree that one of them, Robert Fitzooth, was ‘commonly called Robin Hood’ and was the ‘pretended earl of Huntington’. Quite what Stukeley’s motives were in creating Robin’s family tree are unclear but he had a track record in holding barmy ideas about the past. He was genuinely a major figure in the history of the development of British archaeology and one of the first people to investigate Stonehenge in anything approaching a scientific fashion but he was also the proponent of some markedly offbeat theories. His local patriotism was such that he decided that Stamford in Lincolnshire, the county of his birth, was a seat of learning far older than Oxford and Cambridge. In fact, he argued there had been a university there in the ninth century BC, founded by Bladud, the legendary king of Britain who also established the city of Bath. One of his contemporaries described Stukeley as a mixture of ‘simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition and antiquarianism’ and the kindest assumption about his ideas on Robin Hood’s ancestry is that, in constructing the family tree, he demonstrated his simplicity and superstition rather more than he did his ingenuity and antiquarianism.
Not much reliance should have been placed on Stukeley’s ‘researches’ at all but, alas, people continued to do so for decades after his death. (Some people even do so today.) In 1864, an antiquarian and prolific dramatist named JR Planché published a paper entitled ‘A Ramble with Robin Hood’ in which he argued that Stukeley had got the name ‘Fitzooth’ wrong and that it should have been ‘Fitzodo’. There was a Fitzodo family in records from the late twelfth century which traced its descent from Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother and a man who had paid little attention to any notions of priestly chastity. Planché speculated that the ‘Fitz’, which implied illegitimacy, had been dropped from the name and that some members of the family had called themselves simply ‘Odo’ or ‘Ode’. He even found a Robert Fitzodo in the 1190s who could have been ‘Robert Ode’ or Robin Hood. In truth, of course, Planché was barking up the wrong tree by paying any attention whatsoever to Stukeley’s absurd pedigree but he must have been further excited because the Fitzodos at the time were lords of the manor of Loxley, a village in Warwickshire.
So far we have only considered the slow development of past ideas about Robin’s historical reality and the names of those proposed can be readily dismissed. What about candidates for the ‘real’ Robin Hood whose case can still be argued? One of the strongest of these was first put forward in 1852, twelve years before Planché went off on his rambles with ‘Robert Ode’. Joseph Hunter was a Yorkshireman who became an assistant keeper at the Public Record Office. Fascinated by the old ballads of Robin Hood, he decided to see whether or not there was anything in the medieval records which supported the story told in the Gest. He noted that the king in the Gest is named as ‘Edwarde, our comly kynge’ and that this king is on a progress through the north during events described in the poem. Hunter decided that the only king this could be was Edward II who was indeed journeying through the north of England between April and November of 1323. Furthermore, the following year, a Robert or Robyn Hood appears in the service of Edward II. Perhaps, Hunter thought, this man could be the same Robert Hode who appears in the Court Rolls of Wakefield, close to Barnsdale, in 1316 and 1317. He constructed a plausible enough story to fit his man with some of the narrative supplied in the Gest. So far Hunter was on relatively firm evidential ground but he went on, rather more shakily, to argue that the man must have been a supporter of the uprising by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster against Edward II and that he had become an outlaw after Lancaster’s rebels had been defeated at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322. The records are those of a man who has returned to the king’s favour after a period of exile. Although there are huge gaps in the evidence Hunter used, his theory does have points in its favour and it has been revisited several times since he first proposed it. It has, for instance, been repeated, as if it was an astonishing revelation, in the 1995 book Robin Hood: The Man Behind the Myth by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman.
Since Hunter first ventured into the medieval records in search of a man called Hood, many others have followed in his wake and many other potential Robins have emerged. Some date back much further than Robert Hood of Wakefield and there is a good argument that the earlier the Hood the more likely he is to be the right man. The first mention of Robin Hood rhymes da
tes from the 1370s, only half a century after Hunter’s Hood was alive. Go back a bit further and there is more time for the legend to have developed. One of the most promising of all candidates for the real ‘Robin’ dates back a century before Robert Hood of Wakefield. He was first put forward by a local historian named LVD Owen in 1936 who found him in the records of York Assizes for 1225–26. They refer to a ‘Robert Hod’ who is described as a ‘fugitivus’ and state that the chattels left behind by this man were worth 32s 6d. The same name (or variants of it such as ‘Robert Hood’ and ‘Hobbehod’) appears in later entries in the same records and can be safely assumed to refer to the same man. He is the only man found in the records with the right name who was almost certainly an outlaw. It is difficult to see what else the word ‘fugitivus’ could mean other than that he was on the run from the law.
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