Reinventing Robin: the hero of Sherwood down the ages

Robin Hood was a part of my childhood. But when I started to think about all the various films and re-watched them, they were unsatisfying to me because I didn’t really know who this guy was,” Russell Crowe said in a recent interview. At 46, he is about to become one of the oldest actors to portray Robin Hood on screen, with the character re-imagined as a grizzled, heavy-set war veteran. In the poster campaign for the forthcoming release, which reunites Crowe with the Gladiator filmmaker Ridley Scott, the usually immaculate English hero is shown with a blood-splattered face and wielding a giant hammer.

If there’s one thing that the makers of the latest version want you to believe, it is that they are the first to infuse the legendary tale with the back story, realism, historical context and political themes that it truly deserves. But are they?

The Robin Hood scholar Allen W Wright, who runs the website www.boldoutlaw.com, says: "Every new movie or series that comes out, the creators always claim ‘our Robin Hood doesn’t wear tights’. Well, neither did the last one, or the one before that! Each film wants to present itself as more real than the last; they want to give a sense that you are seeing the untold story.”

The 13th-century hero made his screen debut in the 1908 silent film Robin Hood and His Merry Men. Since then he has been at the centre of more than 40 major films and television series around the world.

Although the most enduring image of the outlaw remains the campy tights-and-pointy-hat-wearing swashbuckler portrayed by Errol Flynn in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, Scott and Crowe are not the first who have attempted to break the mould.

And it’s not just costume changes that have set the different incarnations of the character apart. Famed for “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor”, Robin Hood has long been seen as a champion of social justice and a hero of the political left. But over the years, he has also been used by writers to comment on Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts in the US in the 1950s, the Vietnam War and even Thatcherism in the UK.

One reason the legend has lasted so long could be that its flimsy historical foundation allows it to be told in many ways.



Bob White, the chairman of the World Wide Robin Hood Society, thinks so, citing the dearth of definitive evidence about the archer, who may never have existed at all.

“It means every time someone comes along to tell a new tale, they can pretty much tell it from their own perspective,” he says.

The earliest surviving references to Robin Hood exist in 15th-century ballads, written hundreds of years after the hero was said to have lived. Although characters such as Little John and Will Scarlet exist in these sources, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck were added centuries later.

In fact, there is very little in the Robin Hood mythos that is not up for debate. In the earliest tales he is a depicted as a yeoman (a gentleman farmer) but in later centuries he was reinvented as an aristocrat. The earliest stories also place him not in Nottingham or Sherwood Forest, but Barnsdale in South Yorkshire. All agree that he stole from the rich; however, few sources state that he gave anything to the poor.

“He was probably pretty harsh and did some pretty unpleasant things,” says David Baldwin the author of Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked. “But ordinary peasants in England had a pretty hard time of it, so anyone who contravened the king’s laws would have been considered a hero and I think that’s how the legend came into being.”

Although Robin Hood’s most famous adversaries were the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisbourne and King John, some of the earliest tales depict him as a Saxon leading an uprising against the Norman invader William the Conqueror in the 11th century. The idea of Hood as a Saxon fighting Norman nobility may go some way towards explaining the legend’s enduring appeal.

The idea of Hood as a freedom fighter grew in popularity after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe in 1819, which helped make the character a hero to opressed populations around the world.

Although dozens of documented outlaws could have provided some or all of the bases for the character, Baldwin believes the Robin Hood legend began with a man named Roger Godberd.

“They were both said to be yeomen. They both robbed and killed rich churchmen. They both poached the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest. They were both protected by knights called Sir Richard. They were both captured by sheriffs of Nottingham and imprisoned in Nottingham Castle at one time. They were both pardoned by the king and then returned to their former outlaw ways of life,” he says.

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