ROBIN HOOD:

The popular nature of the tale of Robin Hood is evident from the number of plays, stories, books, movies, and locations that bear his name and attempt to tell of his deeds. These stories in all their forms take on different aspects of the local hero. This is demonstrated especially in movies, from Disney’s 1973 animated children’s story Robin Hood with its victory cry of “oo-de-lally,” to the 1993 irreverent and comedic adventure Robin Hood: Men in Tights directed by Mel Brooks, to the gritty and “realistic” Robin Hood of 2010 starring Russell Crowe and his lack of “Robin-esque” charisma. All of these interpretations of Robin Hood have a valid place in the story that has grown over the centuries. But few of these go back to the original tales before later scholars added modern details, made assumptions to prove Robin’s place in history, and eventually despaired. Who Robin Hood really was may be lost to time; he may have never existed, and may be a creation of myths borrowed from other cultures. In between these two camps are those who would say that even though Robin may not be real, he is not completely derived from myth. Perhaps there are several outlaws whose stories inspired the ones about Robin Hood and made him neither a historical figure, nor myth, but a legend. The topic of Robin Hood, both in the recorded stories and in the long history of scholarship, is a complicated one that possibly cannot be untangled. This article examines the quest to find the historical Robin, acknowledge the possibility of a mythical Robin, and consider the combination of past outlaws who may have contributed to the story of the legendary Robin. It also aims to suggest where the scholarship might be taken next when faced with the serious roadblocks historians face, and to examine a possible new chapter to the story.

Untangling the history of Robin Hood is long and complicated; not all of the scholars who have contributed can be included in this telling. Weaving together all the research and all the thoughts in all the writings of historians about this topic would take an entire book. Here, the focus will be on when the first tales were written, and on the different attempts made to find the “historical” Robin Hood, and the stumbling blocks which have prevented historians from agreeing with each other. Many attempts have been made to give Robin Hood a place in history, and in order to do so the logical direction to turn to is the oldest references to Robin. These references are scarce at best, and because precise dating is very difficult, scholars continue to disagree intensely. However, it’s fairly evident that mentions of Robin Hood pre-date his actual tales recorded as literature. In 1283, an Augustinian canon named Andrew of Wyntoun from St. Andrews in Scotland wrote “The Orygynale Chronicle,” which is considered to be “the first reliable Scottish record,” and is “singularly accurate as to dates."1 In this chronicle, he writes: “Litil Iohun and Robert Hude Waythmen war commendit gud,” which translates to “Little John and Robert Hude Were well praised as forest outlaws.”2 The context of this was a discussion about English law-breakers during the reign of King Edward I. Later writings show that “there was an advanced cult of the outlaw in the towns and cities throughout Scotland,” so it makes sense that early stories of Robin Hood the Outlaw would have an eager audience despite its distance from Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, and Barnsdale, the sites of action in the tale.3 About a century later, in 1377, a character in William Langland’s Piers Plowman declares, “I kan nought parfitly my Paternoster as the preest it syngeth, But I kan rymes of Robyn hood and Randolf Erl of Chestre.” Translated, this says, “I do not know my Paternoster perfectly as the priest sings it, But I know rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester.”4 Besides these brief references, all that survives of medieval Robin Hood are five ballads and a small fragment of a play. The earliest of these is from a collection of manuscripts from around 1450 entitled Robin Hood and the Monk, and the second formed part of a manuscript collection from around 1503 entitled Robin Hood and the Potter.5 In the early 1500s two different printers produced a text that seems to have come from a single written source, but the exact source and the author are unknown. The best guess is that it was probably composed in the early 1400s. This text was called A Gest of Robyn Hode by one and A Lyttell Gest of Robyn Hode by the other.6 Two more tales were discovered in a seventeenth century manuscript called the Percy Folio, but they are clearly much older than the folio itself. Robin Hoode His Death recounts the story of his death at the hands of the Prioress of Kirklees and is so closely related to the end of the Gest that it is quite likely dependent on it, and Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne shares a lot of material with the play fragment from around 1475.7 These five stories and the play fragment embody the oldest literature of Robin Hood. These stories lack a lot of the elements we are familiar with from the Robin Hood story. Robin Hood and his men fight with swords and not staves, there is no Maid Marian, the only king mentioned is Edward and not Richard the Lionheart. Robin did not fight with the English against the Normans, he is specifically a yeoman and not a knight or nobleman, he was not a great social rebel, and he does not seem to “rob the rich and give to the poor.”8 All of these elements came later. Some elements such as his lineage were created by quasi-historians and the addition of characters such as Maid Marian and Friar Tuck came in the fifteenth century when Robin became a central figure in the May Games festivals.9 The ballads were easy to dramatize, there was a lot of action and the dialogue wasn’t difficult – perfect inspiration for play to capture people’s attention.10 The character of Robin Hood was then so popular that other characters who were involved in other aspects of the May Games ended up being drawn into his stories, such as Friar Tuck and Maid Marian who were originally characters in an ancient fertility rite called the Morris Dance.11 So much material was added to the legend of Robin Hood as a result of the May Games that sorting through it all is challenging for historians.

While folk scholarship can produce a myriad of stories about Robin Hood and people who were Robin Hood and places where Robin Hood really lived, professional historians and academics turned to public records that provide limited amounts of information.12 John Bellamy in his highly detailed 1985 book Robin Hood: an Historical Enquiry, describes one of the hardships that historians face when he says, “Historians who have written on Robin Hood in the last quarter-century have tended to become alarmed when they have found themselves treading the same path as previous investigators, the more so in that several of these were men of no great skill or judgment as writers of history.”13 He was not a man to hold back on his criticism, and the history of searching for Robin is equal parts excellent detective work and outright fabrication. Two of the first men to really try and dig into the identity of Robin Hood were Joseph Ritson and William Stukeley. Bellamy describes Ritson as “an exacting literary scholar of quarrelsome disposition and acrid manner,” for Stukeley he quotes a contemporary who described him as “a mixture of ‘simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition and antiquarianism.’”14 All in all, not a pair that inspires great confidence. However, Ritson did accomplish something extremely important. In 1795, he was able to collect the medieval texts of Robin Hood, such as the Gest and the other four stories in the canon, and put it into one book.15 However, he mostly used sixteenth and seventeenth century sources to create a background for Robin and came to the conclusion that he “had been born c. 1160 and was of noble blood, perhaps being the Earl of Huntingdon,” using a fabricated genealogy created by Stukeley.16 The idea of Robin as the earl of Huntingdon first appeared in 1598 by a playwright named Anthony Munday, and Stukeley gave this make-believe earl a family tree that was based on errors from the beginning.17 Then, “into an erroneous genealogy of the Ghent or Gant family of Lincolnshire inserted a Ralph Fitzooth, a Norman lord of Kyme and ancestor of Robert Fitzooth, ‘commonly called Robin Hood, pretended earl of Huntingdon.’”18 The flaws are glaringly clear when it is remembered that the Earl of Huntingdon was known to be King William of Scotland’s brother, David.19 With all of this fabrication, it is no wonder that historians get frustrated when they learn how little of the popular knowledge and academic scholarship is true.

A true breakthrough came when Joseph Hunter, a scholar and an official in the Public Records Office in the mid-nineteenth century, began to search through the records for a man named Robin Hood, or one of his many variations.20 Looking at the Gest, Hunter determined that the King Edward that was mentioned was King Edward II, based on the fact that he was the only Edward who made a circuit of the royal forests around Nottingham.21 The Gest specifically says that Robin was taken into the service of Edward, went to court, and disliked it so much he returned to the woods again… and Hunter found “an actual Robyn Hode who was paid as a valet de chambre for Edward II in 1324 and left his service then ‘because he could no longer work.’”22 However, there was nothing to tie this man to an outlaw past or any other sort of violent activity, and Hunter then undermined himself by finding another Robin Hood in Wakefield and tried to make the argument that the two men were the same although nothing linked them.23 The lists of men uncovered by various historians with names that are variants of Robin Hood, Robert Hode, and even Robynhod as a surname are dizzying. The situation becomes even more difficult when one considers that outlaws could have claimed the name of “Robin Hood '' due to the popularity of the ballads. Perhaps the real Robin Hood can be traced through the record, but that would be an extraordinary process. Nevertheless, the work done by Hunter was useful in the search for Robin Hood.

The next scholar who took up the search was Francis Child in the late 1800s. Child, an American editor of European literature with a focus on England and Scotland, completely dismissed Hunter’s work for several reasons, but a main one was lack of citations.24 Despite his belief that Robin was not at all historical and was completely mythical, he did help with eliminating confusion over the dating of a Latin poem that mentioned Robin. The poem had been dated as 1304, but Child “pointed out that the date in question was not in the text but in the margin and it referred to matters in the poem.”25 Others searching for the historical Robin also provided excellent insights to help future seekers. M. H. Keen and J. C. Holt debated hotly whether or not Robin was an amalgamation of other outlaw tales or truly historical in the 1960s; R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor searched for the historic Sheriff of Nottingham in an attempt to determine the time period Robin lived in; and J. R. Maddicott suggested that the name “Robin Hood” was an alias, since (as he said), “it was unlikely ‘a notorious outlaw called by that name could have escaped all notice in the records’.”26

This study is heavily indebted to two scholars: J. C. Holt and John Bellamy. Holt wrote his book in 1982 and Bellamy his in 1985. Holt’s clear writing style and his thorough description of the five original ballads made his work particularly valuable. He focused on the legend itself, the history of scholarship done on Robin, the physical setting in which the story could have taken place in, and its intended audience. While it is difficult to say whether or not he had a historiographical style or orientation, it’s clear that he was determined to not allow more recent attitudes on Robin, such as his position as a nationalist hero or a social rebel against the corrupt systems of the time, cloud the interpretation of an original, historical Robin.27 As he builds off of Hunter’s previous work searching records for specific mentions of “Robin Hood”, Holt’s own contributions include discounting some records, favoring others, and making arguments for the time period that he believes Robin would have lived in.

But his writing goes beyond simple arguments over Robin’s historicity; Bellamy (who doesn’t seem to approve of anyone yet had no criticisms to make of Holt) sums up Holt’s position on the five original documents nicely when he says, “The Robin Hood tales… ‘spring not from the point of origin of the legend by from different stages in its growth’; they reflect different geographic backgrounds and may have been intended for different types of audiences.”28 Holt broadens his view in a way that greatly benefits study of Robin, because he doesn’t just focus on records like Hunter, and considers the reasonable later additions to the Robin Hood legend as just as valuable as the Gest. This broader look means that he gives careful consideration to the historical times of Robin and to the famous other outlaws who preceded him and whose exploits may have contributed to the Robin Hood story. It also means that Holt balances examining literature, the history of the literature, the close study of records, and the broad view of medieval England in a very clear and well-informed way. The infamous John Bellamy wrote his book about Robin about five years after Holt, and while his book is small, it is dense and mighty. The route he takes in discussing Robin is far more tangled than Holt’s, and “held its magnifying glass over the records of fourteenth century crime and disorder in quest of a single identifiable man.”29 Again, as they have since Hunter, the historian searching for Robin Hood takes an almost micro-history level approach and focuses heavily on the records of the time. This has been the common tactic in the historiography of Robin Hood study: a close reading of the Gest, identifying elements to place it in a specific time period and debating the issue intensely with other scholars, examining records and the many dozen individuals who have a version of the name “Robin Hood”, and trying to find some minor element that makes that meager name match the Robin Hood of the English people. The search for that small, tiny clue is one that some scholars have given up on and have chosen to examine Robin Hood from different aspects. The instances of Robin Hood examined through a socialist lens are numerous; the story of a power-struggle involving the noble lower classes rising against the oppressive and corrupt church, law, and government was deeply associated with Robin ever since Sir Walter Scott gave him that role in Ivanhoe in 1820.30 His role as a hero of the lower class is closely tied to his role as a nationalist hero of the English. In 2000, Stephanie L. Barczewski wrote Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, in which she compares Arthur, king and hero of the nobility and the upper class, to Robin, “a hero outside of and in many ways subversive to conventional structures of authority.”31 The whole purpose of Barczewski’s work is to study “the way in which the traditional conflict between the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood paralleled conflicts in nineteenth-century Britain over inclusion and exclusion in the nation.”32 The study of Robin Hood has shifted from close readings of the original canon and mining through records to his role as a nationalist and a socialist hero, much as the attention of history itself has shifted over the past decades.

As is evident, learning more about the man known as “Robin Hood” is extremely difficult with the sources that are currently available, and what we “know” are really only reasonably educated guesses. While most historians, such as Hunter, Holt, and Bellamy, claim that Robin Hood was a real man, there are some, like Childs, who take an opposite view, and are determined that Robin Hood was a myth. This is a long standing and perhaps inevitable division. The theories for mythological sources are wide and varied, and “relate the outlaw to geographical names and features, suggesting that he was a forest deity, a wood or water sprite, a pagan lord of springtime, the Aryan sun god, the blind archer Hödr who slew Balder, or even a degraded form of Odin.”33 In tracing the movements of myths across culture, time, and place, one gains insight into possible movements across Europe, and this should not be ignored or belittled. That being said, many of the myths seem improbable, or they only make sense if the Gest is ignored. The theories fascinate scholars such as W. E. Simeone, who says that the scholars who focus on the myth “have done a service in exposing the weakness of the ideas of a historic Robin Hood,” even though he insists that “A deity of any kind the outlaw is just not. In effect, this insistence upon a god Robin Hood is a monistic explanation for what seems to me complex legendary.”34 The idea that Robin was a god had a period of great popularity; several German scholars were very sure that the myth of Robin Hood had come from their own culture, and they believed that he was a deity that came from seasonal festivals.35 They also suggested that Robin was actually derived from a god, specifically the god Woden, and argued that “certain phonological changes produced the name Hood from Wodan and the name Robin from the familiar German Ruprecht, Wodan’s popular name.”36 While the argument for name changes can make some sense, and while the original Anglo-Saxon settlers of England did come from Germany and could have brought their old gods with them, there are major problems with this theory. First of all, “Ruprecht” seems to most frequently link with Christmas celebrations, and Robin took an almost deity-like place in the May Games.37 This seasonal problem has been explained by saying that “Wodan, the principal figure in the feast of bringing in the summer, was himself the approaching summer, the glorious conqueror of winter.”38

A second theory regarding Robin as deity is that he is a version of a sun god archetype. This theory was produced by Isaac Taylor, who, “insisting upon the failure of the historical identification of Robin Hood, declared anew that the story was a solar myth and that Maid Marian was the dawn maiden” No historian today agrees with this theory.39 A third theory looks to the fact that Robin’s main enemy in the Gest, and the earliest stories aside from the Sheriff of Nottingham, is the Roman Catholic Church and its corrupt abbots and monks. Robin’s own death was brought about by the Prioress of Kirklees. Dr. Margaret Murray has suggested that this animosity is because “Robin Hood is a god of an antique, un-Christian religion adored by a cult widespread in Britain long before the country had become officially Christian.”40 Her reasoning for this is that they wore the color green which is associated with fairies, they had ties with the month of May which is “the fertility period,” the name “Robin” is “so common a term for the “Devil” as to be almost a generic name for him,” and they were frequently against the church.41 While Robin and the church were certainly at odds in the Gest, and while there were complaints about him and his role in the May Games, the fact that some church records show that church officials paid for the festivities where troupes depicting Robin Hood performed indicates that not all churches were against it.42 The biggest problem for the church was that people would rather see plays about Robin Hood than listen to preaching. A highly distressed Bishop Hugh Latimer, a hero of the English reformation, complained in 1549 that “It is no laughynge matter my friends, it is a weepyng matter, a heavy matter, under the pretence for gatherynge for Robyn hoode, a traytoure, and a thefe, to put out a preacher, to have his office lesse esteemed, to prefer Robyn hod before the ministracion of Gods words.”43 Instances of Robin Hood being banned stemmed from the occasional riots led by men playing “Robin Hood”, and the Scottish Parliament made impersonating the outlaw illegal in 1555.44 But these instances had nothing to do with witchcraft on the level that Dr. Murray suggests, and there is nothing indicating that these Robin figures were Grandmasters of covens, or that sacrificial rituals were a part of the original Robin Hood story.45 In fact, a common thread in the oldest Robin Hood stories is his devotion to the Virgin Mary, a strange element to add so early into the tale if Robin was a mythical figurehead for pre-Christian witchcraft. While there are many interesting explanations for Robin as a myth belonging to either other cultures or to ancient Britain, they need to be examined more closely or perhaps from new angles. As far-fetched as Robin’s historicity seems, his mythology is even less convincing.

Some scholars have chosen to examine the middle of these two opposite camps. They believe that there may not be a historical Robin Hood, nor that he’s not a god from another culture, but that he was simply a legend. Either there was a man who others decided to call Robin Hood, or there were several outlaws whose doings inspired stories about an outlaw who was better, more chivalrous, cleverer, and embodied everything people want in a local hero. J. C. Holt provides a great amount of detail concerning the three main outlaws who come up frequently in the scholarship: Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk ,and Fulk fitz Warin. These three men were very popular romance heroes and the story of Robin Hood was printed along with them because the tales fit very well together.46 If we assume that the mention of a King Edward in the Gest is original, these outlaws would all be about a century or two older than Robin. Very little is known of Hereward the Wake, but he “became a national hero as leader of English resistance to the Norman conquerors.”47 It was in the 1080s that his criminal career seems to really take off – the Domesday survey of 1086 reports that he “fled the land” during the time of King Edward the Confessor. Between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the Domesday survey, he appears to have attracted people who were unhappy with the Normans to his hideout on the Isle of Ely, then burned and looted Peterborough Abbey before he was ousted by William the Conqueror in the early 1070s.48 Another twist to his story is that he may have eventually made amends to the king and been pardoned, because a Hereward was recorded in the Domesday book as “a landholder in Lincolnshire and the Fenland” in 1086, but it is unclear if this is the same Hereward.49 It is interesting to note that the Isle of Ely (which was not a true island, but a dense swampland) is not far south of Nottingham – only about 80 miles or so; additionally, Lincolnshire is between Ely and Nottingham and the swampy ground of Ely could be “the Fenlands.” It is very difficult to know more accurate information about Hereward, but his legendary adventures of resistance against the Normans were written down in the middle of the 1200s by Robert of Swaffham, a monk of Peterborough, and entitled De Gestis Herewardi Saxonis (The Deeds of Hereward the Saxon).50

Eustace the Monk was not nearly the symbol of English resistance that Hereward was. In 1190, Eustace left his monastery to take revenge for his father’s murder, and in 1203 he fell out of favor with his current employer and became an outlaw, gaining “a reputation as a soldier of fortune and a naval commander.”51 He fought both for King John of England and for King Philip of France, and was a pirate in the English Channel from 1205-1215 using the island of Sark which lies between modern-day Guernsey and Jersey off the French coast as a stronghold.52 He then began to work for the French once more, and while commanding a French fleet he was defeated off the coast of Kent by Henry III and beheaded.53 This battle is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, complete with Eustace’s beheading.54

A third outlaw who could have influenced some of Robin Hood’s tales is Fulk fitz Warin. Like Eustace, he is relatively far from Robin geographically. Fulk was born in the 1170s in the Welsh marches, and was outlawed when his claim to his family’s barony and castle in Shropshire went against him in 1200.55 He remained in the marches and fought against King John, but was pardoned in 1203 and reclaimed his lands in Shropshire, though this did not last because he supported the Magna Carta with the other barons and lost his castle again.56 He gained it back again in 1223, and eventually died in 1256-7, probably of old age.57 A romance was written about him (Fouke le Fitz Waryn) between 1325 and 1340 by a scribe in Hereford, and this was based on an older romance from the late 1200s which is no longer extant. The tale “is chiefly devoted to the three years between 1200 and 1203 when Fulk was an outlaw, engaged in a battle of wits with an enraged and vengeful King John.58 Other outlaw tales which may have contributed to that of Robin Hood but do not have known historical bases are Gamelyn (of The Canterbury Tales fame) and a trio of men from Cumbria named Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley; all four of these outlaws are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which is around the same time or just before the stories of Robin Hood were recorded.59

All three of these tales have affected, Holt would say “contaminated,” the story of Robin.60 Very similar threads go through several of them: life as an outlaw living in the woods, making peace with the king or other authority figure, getting captured but escaping because they were cleverer than those who caught them, using disguises, capturing their enemy but releasing him because the outlaw is the more noble of the two, their loyal men infiltrating the enemy’s ranks and at times needing to be rescued, stealing from corrupt clergymen, and the outlaw heroes succumbing to defeat only because of betrayal.61 These can be taken as common themes, but the stories they come from are so identical that there must be some relation, such as how the one of the fyttes in the Gest has very close parallels to the tales of Fulk and Hereward.62 This does not mean that Robin’s stories are just copied from those that came previously. They have changed and mutated, and elements that were key to the tales of Hereward, Eustace, and Fulk would not make sense in the story of Robin so they are not to be found.63 Yet, Robin remains very different from them in two ways. First, he has no background or genealogy, and no story is told about his birth or about where he might have come from; to quote M. H. Keen, he is simply “an ideal figure who embodies the wishful thinking of the common man.”64 A major difference that separates the stories of Robin from those of his historical predecessors is that they all have a reason to be outlawed. They all have a major grievance, such as being rejected as a rightful heir in the case of Hereward and Fulk, or of avenging wrong done to their families like Eustace, but Robin just exists as an outlaw with no reason. He is reconciled with the king, but that doesn’t seem to right any wrong that has been done to him, and he “moves in a different world than that of the feudal dispossessed landowner.”65

While finding the historical Robin has been challenged by the brevity of records and labeling him as pure myth seems deeply inaccurate, it appears likely that his legend could be the elevation of other outlaws whose stories became tall tales. The myths have touched mostly on German origins and the legends have had English origins, but just to the west of Great Britain is Ireland, and there has been close contact between those two countries since the Celts first settled Ireland in 500 BC.66 In the centuries before Robin Hood, stories of other heroes were circulating in Ireland, especially tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill. The stories of Fionn mac Cumhaill are long and complicated, full of magic and drama and mighty deeds of great warriors, and they have a very different tone than the relatively light-hearted ballads of Robin Hood. Whether Fionn mac Cumhaill was a historical person is seriously in doubt, but it is possible that he holds a status very similar to King Arthur.67 At first glance, the differences between Fionn and Robin outweigh the similarities. Fionn and his band of fianna are not outlaws, there is a heavy magical influence, Irish gods can be involved in his stories, and the tales are often much darker in tone than those of Robin. Some of the only similarities are that they both live outside of normal systems of community, both have bands of loyal men, and both have been used by their various countries for nationalist ends. This is scant evidence for any form of relationship. However, direct comparisons have never been made before, or at least apparently have never been made before. Stories and tales of Fionn might not have spread readily through England since there have been tense relations between the Irish and the peoples of England ever since the Normans conquered Ireland and treated the local people as inferior.68 Despite the bad blood between the Irish and the Normans, relations with Scotland were very different and groups of people went back and forth between those two countries with relative frequency. Considering the “cult of the outlaw” that was common in Scotland when Andrew Wyntoun made the first mention of Robin Hood, it seems very possible that tales of the hero Fionn and his group of warriors could have had at least a bit of influence on an outlaw and his men. There are true parallels that have been made between Fionn and Robin, even though those parallels exist more in their development as popular heroes, and the fact that they have both been tested against Lord Raglan’s “Hero Formula,” which was developed by Raglan in 1936 and compared heroes in traditional literature from around the world.69 Despite the great differences between their stories, it is worthwhile to carefully look at Fionn and how his stories spread throughout Scotland and see if some connection can be made to Robin Hood.

Historians have been constantly struggling to get to the center of Robin’s story and to learn more about him, but the difficulties of finding one man in records of the time mean that we have much speculation and many theories, but no truth. While some have focused on the development and importance of his story to modern people, others have looked for other ways to understand him, and they’ve turned to mythology or to the stories of other people who were similar to him and could have been an influence to his story. All of these have at least advanced how we think about him, even if they haven’t provided more insight into his actual story. Perhaps by looking at influences and the movement of stories from Ireland, we can add another dimension to that question of how Robin Hood fits into the myth and legend of the British Isles. In the meantime, the information we have is more than enough to generate respect and admiration for the journey of the outlaw who has become one of the two great national heroes of England.

Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 32.
Ibid.
Ibid, 33.
J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 16.
Ibid, 15.
Ibid.
Ibid, 16.
Ibid, 36-38.
William E. Simeone, “The May Games and the Robin Hood Legend,” The Journal of American Folklore 64, no.
Simeone, “The May Games,” 226.
Ibid, 268.
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 11.
John G. Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1.
Ibid, 2-3.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid.
Holt, Robin Hood, 42.
Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry, 3.
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study…22-23.
Ibid, 23.
Holt, Robin Hood, 45.
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 23.
Ibid, 24.
Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry, 11.
Ibid, 12.
Ibid, 29.
Holt, Robin Hood, 8
Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry, 30.
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 12.
Holt, Robin Hood, 183.
Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), v.
Ibid, vii.
Robert E. Morsberger, “In Quest of Robin Hood,” The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Language Association 25, no. 3 (September 1971): 75.
William E. Simeone, “The Mythical Robin Hood,” Western Folklore 17, no. 1 (Jan., 1958): 27-28.
Ibid, 22.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Simeone, “The Mythical Robin Hood,” 23.
Ibid, 24.
Ibid, 26.
Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 14.
Simeone, “The Mythical Robin Hood,” 27.
Barczewski, Myth and National Identity, 21
Ibid.
Simeone, “The Mythical Robin Hood,” 27.
Holt, Robin Hood, 55.
Ibid, 62.
Ibid.
Ibid, 62-63.
Ibid, 63.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, 80.
Ibid, 63.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, 64.
Jeffrey L. Singman, Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1998), 33
Holt, Robin Hood, 64.
Ibid.
Singman, Robin Hood: The Shaping of a Legend, 16.
Holt, Robin Hood, 65.
Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry 24.
Ibid.
Daniel Webster Hollis III, The History of Ireland (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2001), 15.
James MacKillop, Fionn Mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 5.
Hollis, The History of Ireland, 27.
MacKillop, Fionn Mac Cumhaill, 56.

Memory of the Great Irish Famine