Robin Hood: Politics and myth

Robin Hood is first heard of at the end of the English middle ages, as a figure firmly against authority. In 1354, a man arrested in the east midland Rockingham Forest gave his name as Robin Hood. In about 1420 the Scots chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun spoke of him and Little John as ‘waythemen’ – ‘forest outlaws’ – and some twenty years later another Scot, Walter Bower, writing in Latin, told how Robin fought off the sheriff’s men at his forest refuge; in 1439 one Piers Venables rescued a prisoner and then, with a company of men, went into the forest ‘like as it had been Robin Hood with his meyny (band)’. In 1441 in Norfolk, when a mob of workers blocked the road threatening to kill the local landlord Sir Geoffrey Harsyk, they were singing ‘We are Robinhoodsmen, war war war’.