The Legend of Robin Hood Is Centuries Old—But the

Way We Tell His Story Has Changed

A group of school boys dressed as Robin Hood hold up their bows, U.K. ca. 1920. Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via
Getty Images

BY SEAN MCGLYNN / HISTORY TODAY APRIL 12, 2019

This post is in partnership with History Today. The article below was originally
published at History Today.

The end of 2018 saw the release of yet another Robin Hood blockbuster film,
this time starring the youthful Taron Egerton in the title role. This follows on
from Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood of 2010, in which the lead is Russell Crowe, who
was more victorious in his battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham than he was in
his battle with a Yorkshire accent. This, in turn, was preceded by Kevin
Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from 1991.

These major films represent just a small proportion of the Robin Hood output
in film and television: since 1950 there has hardly been a year in which no TV
program or film has been made about Robin Hood, Maid Marian or the Merry
Men. Robin has also remained ubiquitous in books, comics, plays — and even
pantomimes — to the present day.

Clearly, Robin is a cultural icon, a character who keeps on giving — and not just
to the poor. Why is he one of the most enduring legends of all?

In one sense, this is easy to answer: whatever the age, we always need a hero,
someone who will stand up for the poor, the weak, the oppressed and those
without a voice. This chivalric aspect was certainly important to the early
development of the legend, in which a yeoman figure takes on knightly
attributes in his quest for justice. But Robin’s enduring longevity is also owed
to his great adaptability, a hero who can be endlessly reinvented for the times
in which his audience live.

The earliest Robin Hood tales survive from late 15th-century England. Our
main source is the lengthy poem The Gest of Robin Hood, compiled sometime
after 1450. This was a period of national crisis for England: the loss of
Normandy and the Hundred Years War exacerbated existing problems,
compounded and even caused by the failing kingship of Henry VI. Not only did
the justice system suffer from a widespread perception of its corruption (a
central theme of the first Robin Hood cultural manifestations in plays, poems
and ballads), but law and order was generally considered to be in a state of
disarray. And from 1455 until 1487 we are in the era of the Wars of the Roses,
adding to the country’s problems and possibly fueling the heroic legend.
But by the time the tales were set down in the Gest the story of Robin was
probably over 200 years old and had already been developed and adapted to
meet the times. This is a pattern that is repeated over the centuries.

By the end of the Tudor period, Robin became forever firmly fixed in the
popular imagination as the Earl of Huntingdon — quite a social climb for our
yeoman hero of the Middle Ages. This elevation stems from two plays by
Anthony Munday in 1598, which reflect the late Elizabethan era’s rediscovered
enthusiasm for chivalry, fixed around the cult of “Gloriana” and service to a
noble lady. Unsurprisingly, Robin was appropriated by and into the upper
classes for their entertainment.

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Britain’s civil wars of the 1640s saw a real-life figure take on the propaganda
guise of Robin Hood in the form of James (sometimes John) Hind, a royalist
soldier and famous highwayman.

A resurgence of antiquarian interest in all things medieval kept the legend very
much alive in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thomas Percy’s folio of ancient
ballads and poems from the mid-1760s contained eight Robin Hood ballads,
prompting comprehensive collections of the Robin Hood literature by Joseph
Ritson in 1795 and by Francis Child a century later. These offered
quasi-“official” source materials for patriotic writers in the age of Empire keen
to demonstrate British justice and fair play.

Between Ritson and Child, the legend was transformed by Sir Walter Scott
though his novel Ivanhoe (1819/20). Although Robin (‘Locksley’) is a secondary
character here, the enormous success of the book brought him to a wide
audience. At one point, five theaters in London were simultaneously
performing the stage version of Ivanhoe. Thomas Love Peacock’s popular Maid
Marian from 1822 added to the momentum and the feeding of the Victorian
appetite for all things medieval, as spectacularly exemplified by the full-scale
Eglinton tournament of 1839, a re-enactment that attracted a crowd of perhaps
100,000.

With the advent of cinema in the 20th century, more people than ever could
follow the adventures of Robin Hood. The swashbuckling Robin, portrayed by
actors Douglas Fairbanks (1922) and Errol Flynn (1938), provided jovial
escapism in the interwar years of economic depression and the rise of fascism.
In the proliferation of films in the Cold War era, Robin became an anti-
communist defender of democracy and an anti-authoritarian freedom fighter
(from America’s British ally in NATO). More subtly, Robin became associated
with justice in the age of McCarthyite “witch-hunts,” as indicated by the
treatment of the Jews in Ivanhoe (1952).

In Britain, the highly influential mid-1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood is

deemed by some to be a response to the free-market economic policies of the
Conservative government, in power since 1979, which, they argue, adversely
affected the poorer and weaker members of society who lost out to big business
and rulers who lacked compassion. This is a grittier and more sombre Robin,
reflecting the perceived harshness of the times. The growing multiculturalism
of Britain was reflected by the inclusion of a Saracen outlaw in Robin’s band —
repeated in Prince of Thieves.

Robin Hood is brought up to date in the post-2008 financial crash world

through both the latest film and, since 2012, the TV series Arrow, a reimagining
of Robin Hood (from a DC Comic character) for the 21st century, in which the
bow-wielding hero fights corporate greed, terrorism and other pressing
concerns of our time. History suggests to us that Robin will have plenty of
opportunities for further reincarnations in the future.

Sean McGlynn is Lecturer in History at the University of Plymouth at Strode

College. His latest book is Robin Hood: A True Legend (2018).

Contact us at editors@time.com.