Robin Hood of Sherwood

The rhymes were medieval; almost nothing else about them is. Robin Hood is first mentioned around 1377, in Piers Plowman, by a slothful priest who knows his rhymes better than his paternoster - and not one of those rhymes survives. When the ballads finally appear in writing, they do not agree with the story we tell. A Gest of Robyn Hode names Barnsdale, in Yorkshire, nine times and Sherwood not once; in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne the hero calls himself "Robin Hood of Barnesdale". The Gest's one mention of Lincoln green dresses the king, not the outlaws. Robin does not split a rival's arrow: he splits a peeled wand set up as a mark, and the split arrow belongs to chapter XIII of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, in 1819. Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and Alan-a-Dale each arrive later, on datable pages, and "robbing the rich to give to the poor" is first put in those words by a Scottish historian writing in Latin in 1521. Here is the legend with its dates restored.

Begin with the sentence that stopped anyone from checking. The old entry said that medieval ballads tell of Robin Hood, and that "the earliest surviving rhymes date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries". Both statements are true. Together they quietly licence everything around them: if the rhymes are medieval, then so, apparently, are Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Alan-a-Dale, Lincoln green, the split arrow and Sherwood itself. They are not. Every one of those pieces has a first datable appearance, the dates are spread over four and a half centuries, and on two of them the oldest texts say the opposite of what we said. The earliest known mention is a boast by a character who cannot say his prayers. In the B-text of Piers Plowman, written around 1377, Sloth confesses to Repentance: "I kan noght parfitly my pater-noster, / As the preest it syngeth; / But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood, / And Randolf erl of Chestre." Thomas Wright, printing the passage in 1842, noted that "This seems to be the earliest mention of the ballads of Robin Hood which can now be found", and threw out the two older candidates then in circulation. Notice what the line proves and what it does not: by 1377 the rhymes were current enough to stand for everything an idle priest knows instead of scripture. Not one of those rhymes survives. Where was he? The oldest datable answers do not say Sherwood. Andrew of Wyntoun, writing his Scottish chronicle about 1420, enters Little John and Robin Hood under the year 1283 as outlaws well spoken of, and gives their ground in two lines: "In Vngilwode and Barnysdale / Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale" — Barnsdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire and, on the usual reading of the first name as printed, Inglewood in Cumberland. The first surviving line that does put him in Sherwood is a scribble, four lines of doggerel on a blank leaf of Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 132, f. 100v, catalogued by the Digital Index of Middle English Verse as no. 4509 and transcribed there as "Robyn hod in schere wod stod / hodud & hathud hosut & schod / four & thuynti arowne / he bar in hitz honde", with a Latin version copied after it. DIMEV gives it no date; published estimates for the leaf run from about 1400 to about 1425. Then the ballads themselves, and here the entry can be measured rather than argued with. In A Gest of Robyn Hode, the compilation of 456 stanzas printed around 1500, Barnsdale is named nine times (spelled Bernysdale seven times and Bernesdale twice) and Sherwood not once; Nottingham appears twenty-one times in four spellings and the sheriff forty-seven times in nine, so the text is not short of Nottinghamshire, it simply does not put Robin in the forest. Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne is blunter still: the hero introduces himself as "Robin Hood of Barnesdale". Only Robin Hood and the Monk, the ballad copied about 1450, has "mery Scherwode", and it has it twice. The Robbins Library at Rochester states the pattern plainly: before 1500 Barnsdale is far more commonly named, and Sherwood gains its prominence in the seventeenth century. The Gest also states Robin's programme, and it is narrower than "rob the rich to give to the poor". Little John asks where they shall rob and beat and bind; Robin answers: "But loke ye do no husbonde harme, / That tilleth with his ploughe", nor any good yeoman, knight or squire that will be a good fellow; "These bisshoppes and these archebishoppes, / Ye shall them bete and bynde; / The hye sherif of Notyingham, / Hym holde ye in your mynde." The poem's last line grants him the credit — "For he was a good outlawe, / And dyde pore men moch god" — but the money he is actually shown handing over in the poem goes to a knight, Sir Richard at the Lee, four hundred pounds of it. The familiar formula is not medieval English at all. It is Latin, Scottish and dated: John Major's Historia Majoris Britanniae, printed at Paris in 1521, reports that Robin "would allow no woman to suffer injustice, nor would he spoil the poor, but rather enriched them from the plunder taken from the abbots", and adds the sentence that ought to travel with the rest — "The feats of this Robert are told in song all over Britain." Major is also the man who moved Robin to the reign of Richard I and King John. Before him, nobody had. Lincoln green is the same kind of surprise. The phrase occurs once in the whole Gest, in the eighth fytte, and it is not Robin who wears it: the king, having decided to go among the outlaws, "kest of his coll then, / A grene garment he dyde on", and "Whan they were clothed in Lyncolne grene, / They keste away theyr graye". The archery contest survives the check; the split arrow does not. In the Gest the sheriff proclaims a shoot for an arrow whose "shaft of syluer whyte" carries a head and feathers "of ryche red golde"; Robin goes to it openly, with seven score men at his back and six shooting beside him, and "Thrys Robyn shot about, / And alway he slist the wand". Little John does the same earlier in the poem, and in Guy of Gisborne "he cloue the good pricke-wande". A wand is a peeled rod set up as the mark. Splitting a rival's arrow enters the story in a book, in a chapter that can be named: Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, 1819, chapter XIII, where Locksley says "I will notch his shaft for him, however", and his arrow lights "right upon that of his competitor, which it split to shivers" — and then, a page later, he splits the willow rod as well. Scott kept the medieval wand and added the arrow on top of it. The companions arrived one at a time and late. Little John is there from the beginning, in Wyntoun and in every early ballad, but the quarterstaff duel on the narrow bridge — in which Robin is knocked into the brook and loses — is a broadside: its title is entered in the Stationers' Register in 1624 and the earliest surviving copy was printed by W. Onley before 1685. Friar Tuck's name appears in English royal writs of 1417 and 1429, where it is the alias of Robert Stafford, chaplain of Lindfield in Sussex, an outlaw with no traceable connection to Robin Hood; within the Robin Hood tradition the friar belongs to the play texts, and is labelled Tuck in the marginal notes of William Copland's printing in the 1560s. Maid Marian comes from the French Whitsun games, where Robin and Marion were already a pair, and the earliest English text that names her beside Robin keeps them apart: Alexander Barclay's eclogue, appended to his Ship of Fools, offers "some mery fit of Maide Marian or els of Robin Hood" — or else. She becomes his beloved, and Matilda Fitzwalter into the bargain, in Anthony Munday's plays about the Earl of Huntington, printed in 1601. Alan-a-Dale is later than any of them: the Traditional Ballad Index dates his ballad to a garland of 1663. As for the man, the archives hold names rather than a life. A Robert Hod appears as a fugitive in the Yorkshire records of the 1220s and as Hobbehod in the Exchequer between 1228 and 1232; a Gilbert Robynhod turns up in Sussex in 1296; Joseph Hunter found in 1852 that a "Robyn Hode" was paid as a porter of the chamber in Edward II's household between 24 March and 22 November 1324, and that on the last of those days "Robyn Hode, jadys un des porteurs, pour cas qil ne poait pluis travailler" was given five shillings and let go. The record that tells us most, though, is the one that disqualifies its own man. In 1262 a Berkshire clerk copying an entry about William, son of Robert le Fevere of Enborne, wrote him down instead as William Robehod. The find is credited to the archivist David Crook and dated to 1984; this review has it at second hand, from the Robbins Library's account, not from Crook's own pages. Nobody had renamed that man after an outlaw who did not yet exist. By 1262 "Robehod" was already what you called a robber.

Go now if you are going, because the thing everybody comes to see died this year. On 18 June 2026 the RSPB announced that "this spring, the Major Oak failed to come into leaf and is now believed to have died". The causes it lists are not the weather alone: past preservation work — metal bracing, props, concrete and coverings — "prevented it from ageing naturally"; soil compacted by visitors made it hard for water, nutrients and oxygen to reach the roots, which surveys since 2021 found "far smaller and weaker" than expected; heat waves and drought did the rest. Natural England's East Midlands team confirmed the news in July. The tree will stay standing for years yet, as habitat for beetles and flies that need decaying wood, and saplings raised from its acorns are growing elsewhere. Nothing ever connected it to the ballads: it takes its name from Major Hayman Rooke, who described it in 1790 and thought it could not be much less than a thousand years old. The Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree Inventory, which lists it as tree number 1, records a girth of 10.66 m at 0.90 m from the ground, against the 27 feet 4 inches Rooke measured in 1790, and gives its position as grid reference SK 62053 67902 — 53.2046 N, 1.0724 W. The forest around it is a National Nature Reserve at Forest Corner, Edwinstowe, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire NG21 9QB, managed by a team led by the RSPB, whose visitor centre opened in 2018. Entry is free and parking is free on ordinary days; on event days the car park costs ten to fifteen pounds a vehicle, less for RSPB members. There are accessible toilets and a Changing Places facility, and a mobility scooter can be hired for three pounds an hour if booked ahead. Two warnings. First, a reader following the oldest texts should be on the A1 in South Yorkshire, not here: the Gest's country is Barnsdale, the wooded ground between Doncaster and Pontefract. Second, do not go looking for the grave. The monument called Robin Hood's Grave stands in private woodland on the Kirklees Park estate at Clifton, near Brighouse in West Yorkshire, a few hundred metres from the gatehouse of a vanished priory. The priory itself — a nunnery founded in the reign of Henry II, holding eight nuns when it was dissolved in 1539, excavated in 1905 and surveyed by geophysics in 2007 — is a scheduled ancient monument. There is no public access to either.