Is Robin Hood based on a real person?
Modern scholarship generally agrees that the origin of the Robin Hood legend lies somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth century probably in Yorkshire. The first literary reference to Robin Hood was apparently 1377. In all of the earliest stories Robin is depicted as a yeoman, he doesn’t achieve a noble birth until centuries later, perhaps as late as the sixteenth century stories when he also acquires a love interest in the form of Marian. The links between the legend and historical figures are difficult to trace, there was a Robert Hod, recorded in the Yorkshire assize for 1225 as a fugitive, a Robyn Hood who served as a porter to the king’s court in 1324, a Robert Hood, who was a tenant of Wakefield, Yorkshire found in a 1316 record, or even David, Earl of Huntingdon among countless other candidates. Over the centuries, Robin evolved from a bandit king tyrant to a quasi-democratic leader of an egalitarian substrata of society. You can’t keep a good story down.
