There Was Probably a Real Robin Hood, But He Was No Hero
One of England’s greatest folkloric legends is that of the medieval outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, fought the Sheriff of Nottingham and the evil King John, and helped the rightful monarch Richard the Lionheart regain his throne. Surprisingly, for a figure whose story revolved around stealing from the rich, Robin Hood first gained widespread popularity as a result of plays originally staged for the upper classes in Elizabethan England. First, however, the playwrights had to gentrify Robin Hood from a commoner bandit, and transform him into a nobleman to whom the well-heeled could better relate. Such gentrification can be traced to the playwright Anthony Mundy, who reinvented the outlaw as an aristocrat, Earl Robert of Huntington, who was wrongfully disinherited by his uncle. So he flees to Sherwood Forrest where he becomes an outlaw, meets and falls in love with Lady Marion, and kicks off the legend.
The Real-Life Robin Hood
In real life, of course, there was no character who performed all the noble deeds of derring-do ascribed to Robin Hood. However, there were plenty of outlaws, nearly all commoners, who gained a measure of popularity with the lower classes for thumbing their noses at the upper-class oppressors. Indeed, in the medieval era, “Robinhood” or “Rabunhod” or “Robehod” were common nicknames for criminals, that appear in numerous 12th century court records. However, those Robin Hoods were the kinds of criminals who did what they did not out of any high-brow motives, but for the mundane reasons that led most people into crime back then, and that still put people on the paths of criminality in the present.
