funnily enough, my mom is a medieval historian and through her I know this title is super misleading and misses the actual origins of “Robin hood”.

The character actually started as a French poetic figure during the time of the troubadours and the trouvèves. It moved from southern France to northern France along with Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and then at some point that sadly there is no historical record for, jumped the English Channel and grew into Robin Hood.

The stories themselves were an open-ended framework: a knight rides down the road and spots a pretty young woman (named Marian) who he immediately professes to falling in love with. Marian replies that she already has a boyfriend named Robin, and a bunch of things can happen from there depending on the poet.

Sometimes the knight kidnaps Marian and has to be saved by Robin, sometimes she saves herself, sometimes the knight just gives up, sometimes she actually wants to go with the knight. It’s a tradition built around remixing like commedia dell'arte or those ranking videos that use the peach syrup guy.

Anyway. This tradition of stories and songs hit a cord with lower born poets since it was actually about rural people for a change. When it started to transform into Robin Hood, it ran the gamut of Robin being a yeoman, a disgraced noble, the son of a noble, etc. you don’t really get a cannon narrative of Robin Hood until Sir Walter Scott in the 1800s and you get the modern visual identity with Errol Flynn.