This is part two of my short series looking at the research I’ve done into the identity of the real Robin Hood. My previous post suggested a different location. Today I’m looking at names.
Did Robin Hood ever really exist?
Researching the subject is largely a game of deciding which aspect of the story you can’t let go of. Which element is most important to you? Is it the name? Is it the location? Is it the time period? Is it the events? Each one of these becomes a hill for someone to die on. We will never find all of them together in one person, because there have been too many evolutions and alterations to the myth. So which one do you want to focus your research on?
You might find someone with the right name, but they’re a century too early or late. You might find records of criminals activities in the right area, but none of them are linked to the name Robin Hood. You might find all of the right events happening, and even in the right place, but other details will be off.
One of the clearest divides is between two very different versions of the character. One, the Robin Hood of the two earliest poems and the ballad, is of a violent criminal, a yeoman outlaw. The other is a more gentrified version, of a noble who has his lands taken away by a king, prince, or sheriff. The latter version has come to dominate, and most of the screen adaptations give us some variation of Robin of Loxley, or Robert Earl of Huntingdon, returning crusader who loses his lands and takes to the greenwood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
The outlawed yeoman didn’t seem to have such a problem keeping the money he stole. These stories show he could be capable of great kindness, and was religious, but seemed to hate systemic corruption and thought nothing of killing (and beheading or skinning) anyone who got in his way.
The Earl of Huntingdon/Huntinton version seems to date back no further than the 1500’s, as does the setting of the story in the 1190’s. Scottish writer John Major placed Robin Hood during the reign of King Richard, in his 1521 work Majoris Brittannie, and playwright Anthony Munday introduced the Huntingdon aspect into the official cannon with with plays in the 1590’s. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe later ran with these ideas, and from there the story was set. But before Major, the only King named in any (surviving) tale was Edward, with no number to tell us which one.
In truth, I think it helps to see Robin Hood as crime fiction. In any era, we seem to love to root for the rogues and criminals. Sometimes they deserve it, sometimes they don’t. How often does the media choose to present us with documentaries, films, and news reports that humanise serial killers and abusers, but ignore victims? In more recent times, especially in the UK, the crime fiction market has been dominated more by establishment heroes. Rogue cops with hearts of gold, investigative journalists, gentleman sleuths. People who safely put the status quo back together again at the end. And even the modern version of Robin Hood presents us with a story where the good king returns at the end and everything goes back to normal. But beneath the surface of our popular imagination has always been the desire to excite and entertain ourselves by letting the darkness loose in our minds. So I have no issue accepting that the Robin Hood of early stories wasn’t a safe and noble outlaw, and in turn, the person who inspired the tale, if he exists, shouldn’t be expected to be a saint. The most accurate novel I could write would probably feature Robin as, at best, an amoral criminal, and at most realistic, a bloodthirsty killer. And this reality is an issue I’ll return to in a later post when I name my candidate.
For people who see the name as the most important qualifier, researching Robin Hood has become a game of looking through old scrolls, court documents and parish records, and seeking out any and every variation on Robin, Robyn, Robert, Hob, Hod, Hood, and Hode. And there is no shortage of them. Robert is one of the most common names of medieval England, and Hod/Hode wasn’t uncommon. But once you’ve found a name, you’re still filling in the blanks with guesswork.
This approach gives us a Robertus Hod/HobeHood in Yorkshire in the 1220’s, who some people believe to also be Robert of Wetherby, a criminal who was hunted down an executed. It gives us Robert Hode of Wakefield, from a century later in the 1320’s, who was married to a woman named Mathilda, and was outlawed for a time. A short while later there is also record of a Robyn Hod working for the king, and there’s an easy temptation to combine these two people into one, and see it compares to the narrative presented in the ballad. There was a Robin Hood imprisoned in Rockingham Castle in the 1350’s.
The name ‘Robin Hood’ was used a few times over the following centuries, linked to any time a group of peasants rose up or formed criminal gangs. I think the enduring nature of the myth also speaks to certain national characteristics that have endured through the centuries. From the yeoman outlaw who hated corruption, right up to a populace that voted Brexit over the idea that the system was broken and ‘normal people’ were being lied to. There is something ingrained almost in a sense of Englishness -regardless of where you came from, originally, and where you sit on the political spectrum- to think someone in authority is screwing you over, but to not really know who to blame or how to define it, and yet to still also want to see the good King come back at the end and put everything right again. Twas ever thus, we love authority and we hate hate authority, and Robin Hood is the ultimate avatar of this contradiction. And in this we see the great problem of trying to find any truth behind the myth. Robin Hood became what people needed him to be. Regardless of what the original man intended, he was turned into a symbol, a hero for anyone who felt dispossessed, or wanted to take up arms. The patron saint of outlaws, and those who wanted to see themselves as outlaws. The Robin Hood we know today never existed, he’s a fiction 700 years in the making. But was there a story behind it all?
If we spin the clock further back than the Yorkshire fugitive, we also find a Robert Fitz Ode, a knight of Loxley in the 1190’s. This was a different Loxley to either of the ones I mentioned in my previous post, this time we’re looking in Warwickshire, just down the road from Stratford. This Fitz Ode seems to stop being a knight around 1198, but that is all we know, and the researchers who turn this into a claim he was disinherited are simply seeing what they want to see.
Or you can ignore the name, and say it’s the actions that matter, and point to Wilikin of the Weald, a soldier who led a guerrilla war against French invaders in the Forest of the Weald, during the final years of John’s reign. You can find Roger Godberd, an outlaw of the 1260’s and 70’s, who was pardoned before returning to a life of crime, escaped at least once from Nottingham Castle, and was known to have operated out of Sherwood and Charnwood.
You can try and narrow it down by finding a Robert/Robin who is known to have worked with a John, since Little John is also present in the early poems. But all you’re doing there is adding another of the country’s most common names into the mix. A lot of people who fell foul of the law in the thirteenth and fourteenth century were named Robert and John. Roger Godberd is known to have worked with at least two different Johns. Trying to prove that either of them are the John just adds to the challenges, rather than making the task simpler.
The trouble ultimately is that we’ll never know. Unless eventually we find a court scroll that says “Hey guys, this was Robin Hood, trust me on this, here’s a picture to back it up.” At some point we either need to pick our favoured candidate and stop looking, or simply give up wondering at all. There’s a large dollop of faith involved. (There are a couple of potential ‘smoking gun’ pieces of evidence that I’m skipping over here, in showman style, to return to in a future entry.)
For my part, I have picked my candidate. And it’s a combination of a few different approaches above. I’ll return to that in a later post. For today I wanted, much like my thoughts of Rutland, to speculate out loud about a couple of historical Roberts. At this point I don’t back either of them as the Robert, but still think they’re worth investigation.
Son of Robin Hood.
In a 1264 memoranda roll there is a reference to a criminal named William, son of Robert Le Fevre (meaning Smith, basically. William, son of Robert Smith.) By the following year, the same person is entered in the scroll as William Robehood. Most discussion about this entry -led by JC Holt who should always be taken as one of the main authorities on Hood- see this as proof that the name Robin Hood was already established as a criminal alias by 1265, and that a court cleric was amending William’s name to say he was a figurative son of Robin Hood, in effect changing the entry to “William, criminal.” But I can’t help wonder if there’s something a little more literal at play here. We know William’s father was name Robert, and we know a cleric amended the entry to say William’s family name was Robehood. And I think it’s worth trying to find out more about this Robert Le Fevre, because what if this scroll is telling us, and has been telling us all along, that William was the son of Robin Hood. A smith would qualify as a yeoman in many definitions of the term, and to be the father of an adult son in the 1260’s we’d be looking at someone who could have been active himself as outlaw anywhere from the 1230’s up. Was Robert Le Fevre Robin Hood?
Breaking the (Forest) Law.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the term ‘royal forest’ was a legal definition, not a reference to dense woodland. A royal forest was an area covered by forest law, which was a distinct set of rules to everywhere else. The law was enforced by foresters. In Sherwood, the title of forester was hereditary, and passed down through birth and marriage to a man named Robert de Everingham who, at some point early in Edward the First’s reign, fell afoul of the law himself and had his title stripped away. There is a record of a later pardon for both Robert and his brother, John. It’s just another in a long line of historical coincidences and guessing games, but we have two people of the right name, outlawed for offences in Sherwood, under the reign of an Edward, and then later pardoned. Maybe, just maybe…