Robin Hood, the hero of a group of old English ballads, represented as an outlaw and a robber, but of a gallant and generous nature, whose familiar haunts are the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, where he fleets the time carelessly in the merry greenwood. He is ever genial and good-natured, religious, respectful to the Virgin and to all women for her sake, with a kind of gracious and noble dignity in his bearing. He lives by the king's deer, although personally most loyal, and wages ceaseless warfare on all proud bishops, abbots, and knights, taking of their superfluity, and giving liberally to the poor and to all honest men in distress, of whatever degree. He is unrivalled with the bow and quarter-staff; but in as many as eight of the extant ballads comes off the worse in the combat with some stout fellow, whom he thereupon induces to join his company. His chief comrades are Little John, Scathlok (Scarlet), and
Much; to these the Gest adds Gilbert of the White Hand and Reynold. A stalwart curtal friar, called Friar Tuck in the title though not in the ballad, fights with Robin Hood, and apparently accepts the invitation to join his company, as he appears later in two broadsides, which also mention Maid Marian. Such is the romantic figure of the greatest of English popular heroes—a kind of yeoman-counterpart to the knightly Arthur.
The earliest notice of Robin Hood yet found is that pointed out by Percy in Piers Plowman, which, according to Skeat, cannot be older than about 1377. Here Sloth says in his shrift that, though but little acquainted with his paternoster, he knows 'rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf, erle of Chestre.' In the next century we find him mentioned in Wyntoun's Chronicle of Scotland (c. 1420); a petition to parliament in the year 1439 represents a broken man in Derbyshire taking to the woods 'like as it hadde be Robyn-hode and his meyné;' Bower, in his Scotichronicon (1441-47), describes the lower orders of his time as entertaining themselves with ballads both merry and serious about Robin Hood, Little John, and their mates, and preferring them to all others; and Major or Mair (c. 1470-1550) says in his Historia Maioris Britanniae that Robin Hood ballads were sung all over Britain. The last passage gives apparently the earliest mention of those more romantic and redeeming features of Robin Hood which earned him a place in Fuller's Worthies of England, under his proper county, sweet Nottinghamshire, 'not for his thievery but for his gentleness.' Yet another 15th-century mention occurs in the Paston Letters, where Sir John Paston writes in 1473 of a servant whom he had kept to play Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Fragments of two Robin Hood plays exist, one dating from 1475, the other printed by Copland with the Gest about 1550. The latter is described in the title as 'very proper to be played in May-games.' Robin Hood was a popular figure in these during the 16th century, as we find from Stow, Hall, and other writers, and there is evidence that in this connection he was known as far north as Aberdeen. In place-names again we find traces of him in cairns, mounds, hills, rocks, crosses, fountains, caves, and oaks from Somerset to Whitby. In the Gest the localities around Barnsdale are topographically correct, down to the place of his death at the priory of Kirkless between Wakefield and Halifax. Here the valiant outlaw is treacherously bled to death by his kinswoman the prioress, to whom he had gone for relief in his sickness. His last charge to Little John is completely true to his character, and is expressed in lines of touching simplicity:
Lay me a green sod under my head,
And another at my feet;
And lay my bent bow by my side,
Which was my music sweet;
And make my grave of gravel and green,
Which is most right and meet.
There is no evidence worth anything that Robin Hood was ever more than a mere creation of the popular imagination, but in due time the yeoman became a political personage, and was transformed into an Earl of Huntingdon for whom a suitable pedigree was constructed. Both Sir Walter Scott, in Ivanhoe, and Thierry, in his Conquête de l'Angleterre, make him a Saxon chief holding out like Hereward against the Normans; Bower, the continuator of Fordnn, distinctly calls him one of the proscribed followers of Simon de Montfort; Joseph Hunter (1852) makes him an adherent of the Earl of Lancaster in the insurrection of 1322. The last scholar discovered a still further and exceptionally amusing mare's nest in the name of one Robyn
Hode, who entered the service of King Edward II. about Christmas 1323 as one of the 'vadlets, porteurs de la chambre,' and was eleven months later found unfit for his duties, and paid off with a gift of five shillings. 'To detect "a remarkable coincidence between the ballad and the record" requires,' says Professor Child, 'not only a theoretical prepossession, but an uncommon insensibility to the ludicrous.' Kuhn again identifies our outlaw with Woden; others with a sun-god, a woodland deity, and the like—all which subtleties of speculation are unnecessary if we readily admit that the hero of popular creative imagination may well have formed a peg round which to hang much old-world wood-lore even then fast fading into forgetfulness.
Of Robin Hood ballads there have come down to us in more or less ancient form as many as forty, of which eight may be said to be of the first importance, and of almost the finest quality of ballad poetry. Of the remaining thirty-two, as Professor Child points out, about half a dozen have in them something of the old popular quality; as many more not the least snatch of it. Fully a dozen are variations, sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening, upon the theme 'Robin Hood met with his Match.' The best of all the cycle are perhaps 'Robin Hood and the Monk,' and 'Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,' and both open with a delightful glimpse of the green wood a century and more before its time in English poetry—
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song:
To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the levës grene,
Under the grene-wode tre.
The second begins no less beautifully—
When shawes beene sheene, and shrads full fayre,
And leeves both large and longe,
Itt is merry, walking in the fayre fforest,
To hear the small birds songe.
The Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode was printed by Wynken de Worde, most probably before 1500, a long poem of over 1800 lines, arranged in eight fyttes, being a not unskilful redaction of at least four earlier distinct ballads.
See Ritson's collection of Robin Hood ballads (2 vols. 1795); J. M. Gutch's Lytell Geste of Robin Hode (2 vols. 1847); the Percy Folio Manuscript, vol. i. (1867), and the Introduction to the Robin Hood ballads there by Professor Hales; and especially part v. (Boston, 1888) of Professor Child's magistral English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The first known 'Garland' was printed in 1670, and in 1678 there appeared a prose version of it, reprinted by W. J. Thoms in his Early English Prose Romances (vol. ii. 2d ed. 1858).