The origins of Robin Hood are unclear. Historians committed to empirical identity as reality like to speculate about a “real” medieval Robin or Robert Hood who was in trouble with the law and became a mythic hero, like a medieval Jesse James. Contenders are William Lefevre from Reading, alias “Robehod,” in 1261-62 and a Robyn Hode of 1324, perhaps from Wakefield in Yorkshire, who served and then left the king as Robin does in The Gest of Robin Hood. Both of them have been held to be the originals behind the first reference to “rymes of Robin Hood” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (ca. 1375) and the tough yeoman of the ballads that survive from the later fifteenth century on.
This view ignores other early Robin Hood types. One, whose priority might seem attractive to historians, was in trouble for allegedly murdering a servant of the abbot of Cirencester around 1214—presumably both the unappealing crime and the westerly location repressed this unsettling figure. A fact more structurally opposed to the idea that the original Robin Hood was a criminal is that as records emerge in the early fifteenth century, both small towns in the southwest of Britain and also places in lowland Scotland attest to the deployment of Robin Hood, usually in early summer, as the central figure in the nature-linked celebration of a procession, communal sports, and a feast. Operating mostly in those restricted regions until about 1600, “play-game” Robin was a peaceful and communally central figure, not an outlaw—though such carnivals could sometimes turn into riots, as in Edinburgh in 1561.
The distribution of the play-games suggests this Robin is the same as the Robin of the thirteenth-century French pastourelle, a youthful peasant who plays with his rustic friends and occasionally defends his Marian from gentry seducers. The southwest of England knew France well through the wine trade (southeastern England traded principally with the low countries, Germany, and the Baltic), and lowland Scotland was already involved in the “auld alliance” with France: a ship called “Le Robin Hood” anchored in Aberdeen in 1438.
If France provided play-game Robin, one question is how did he gain the English surname Hood, as he is always named in the play-game records? Hardly through a historical English criminal with that name: play-game Robin is never a lawbreaker, and the one appearance of the sheriff has him wearing green and celebrating seasonally along with Robin. A more probable source of the surname is that Hood—designating either a wearer or a maker of hoods—implies both relative poverty (hats were expensive), and also a form of disguise, the partial concealment still realized in the modern “hoodie.” A second question is how amiable, communal Robin of the play-games became the tough outlaw popular in ballads. A real outlaw might indeed be a source for this robbing Robin, but the play on the two words was common in the fourteenth century, and it may simply be that the representative of small-town communality became criminalized in response to the financial and social upheavals of that stark period. It began with bad weather and blighted harvest after 1305 and grew worse when mid-century and recurrent plagues brought wholesale death and impoverishment, as well as repressive laws to restrain wages as labor became scarce; then general socioeconomic distress hit a population both falling in numbers and urbanizing in a rapid and disorderly manner. An English outlaw myth that realizes both contemporary conflict and a utopian response to it seems highly credible as the creation of a century not matched for disaster until the twentieth.
World History
