“Now Robin who was called Fitzsooth,
Is Dwelling in the wood.
His coat has changed to Lincoln green,
His name is Robin Hood.”
-Alan a-Dale in The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952)

The Western canon of literature is full to the brim of memorable characters, some of which have become so famous that they no longer need any introduction. A silhouette of a lean man with curved pipe and deerstalker, an old man with hair on his palms, a dirty orphan boy, a woman with knitting needles that constantly clack, a pair of boys sailing on the Mississippi no longer need any introductions because they have resided in our heads for so long. In that distinguished company there also resides a man clad in Lincoln green and carrying a longbow.

Robin Hood is one of those characters who has lived for so long—not only on paper and film but in our heads and hearts—that we cannot imagine a time when he didn’t exist. The stories have existed in some form or another since the 15th century and the character has been portrayed on film over fifty times since 1908. Personally, Robin Hood was a major part of my childhood. The animated Disney movie was one of my go-to films, though I also watched Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. An illustrated children’s version of the story was one of my favorites among the forest of books on the shelves, and even the old collection of poems had two “mini” epics of Robin, one which told of how he helped Alan a-Dale win his girl from the clutches of the bishop and his brother, the old and dishonest knight, and the other about how Robin disguised himself as a beggar and slipped into Nottingham. 

Like many people, I thought that I knew the story of Robin Hood: a young Englishman becomes an outlaw and takes residence in Sherwood Forest to rob the rich and give to the poor, winning the love of Maid Marion, making fools of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham (and Guy of Gisborne, when he appears) until King Richard returns, pardons Robin, and makes everything right. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned that while this might be the Robin Hood legend in currency today, it is a recent adaptation of the character.

Robin Hood, as Dr. A.J. Pollard explains in his excellent book, Imagining Robin Hood, was not one character but several in the ancient stories or “rymes” as they were called in England as the Middle Ages were coming to an end. A total of eight rymes exist today from the 15th century, though later ones were created in the 16th century (including “Robin Hood and the Friar” which introduced for the first time the character that would later be known and loved as Friar Tuck). Some of these original rymes included “Robin Hood and the Knight,” “Robin Hood and the Potter,” and “The Death of Robin Hood”. It wasn’t until the middle of the 15th century that five of these stories were taken and stitched into a narrative whole, which was dubbed The Gest of Robyn Hood. But as this narrative had been created from the independent stories, as Pollard says, not only the tone of the narrative can shift from “chapter” to “chapter” (as it were) but Robin himself changes on a dime. In “Robin Hood and the Knight,” Robin is gentler and more chivalrous, while in “Robin Hood and the Potter” he is more of a trickster; in “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne” (which was not part of the Gest) Robin is a cold killer, more on a par with the more serious versions of James Bond.

This chameleon quality in the early stories of Robin Hood might be one reason for why the character has not just survived into the 21st century but has transcended time so that as long as there is a Western Civilization, there will be a Robin Hood. It is often forgotten that Robin Hood, the earl of Huntington and the earl of Locksley, is a later permutation of the legend, originating in the 19th and 20th century in order to make the character more “respectable;” rather than a wild and roguish outlaw, Victorian society made him a displaced nobleman, a patriot of the Middle Ages who not only fought for his Saxon people against the corruption of the Norman conquerors ( a major theme of the 1938 film version with Eroll Flynn) but who, at the same time, also fought on behalf of King Richard the Lion-Heart, away on crusade, and whose throne was in danger from the machinations of his scheming brother, Prince John. In the early rymes, Robin was not an earl or the lord of Locksley; he was nothing but a simple English yeoman.

This same chameleon quality has stayed with the character even to today: Robin Hood has been portrayed in a realistic light (the 2010 movie with Russell Crowe), as a parody (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), a comic figure (Time Bandits), or as an action hero (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). That the character has also been the star of Mexican, Italian, and even Soviet films also demonstrates the versatility that the character possesses. Robin, in a sense, embodies what St. Paul said to the Corinthians in his first letter to that town, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.” Because of his versatility (and the clever manipulations of movie studios and publishing houses) Robin has in one sense become a sort of tabula rasa where people can project what they want and need onto the character, in much the same way Robin acted the courteous gentleman in some of the rymes (for the gentle classes) and more of a trickster and rogue for the common people.

But I think that there is something more to explain why Robin Hood has endured as he has. That the character is versatile is beyond doubt, but versatility is not the whole story. What has made the character last for almost six hundred years is his core.

The core of Robin Hood and his legend has been simplified to the mantra, “I rob from the rich and give to the poor,” an effective way of passing on a major point of the character, especially to children, but it is not the main point of the character. The main point actually resides in what Robin was in the earliest rymes—a yeoman. As A.J. Pollard again explains, the word “yeoman” is one of those words and ideas over which historians and literary scholars have argued with no end in sight. Pollard says that the word “yeoman” comes from the Old English word for “young man,” thus implying a man in the same position as an apprentice but, in the 14th century, the word also began to be used as a translation for the French valet as a rank where it lay between an esquire and a groom in a noble house. At the same time, the word was also used to describe those of free-born blood and tenure, meaning that a yeoman was not a serf.

And then there were noble and royal yeoman, part of the noble houses such as yeoman cellarer, yeoman usher and yeoman of the pot; yeomen were also the personal guards of lords and kings who had a specific military function, as an ordinance of Edward VI, drawing upon a similar ordinance of Edward III states, the yeomen must be “bold men” of “manhood and shooting,” the “strongest archers” in all England. There were, then, several different meanings of the word “yeoman” in usage at the same time, much as there were several different versions of Robin Hood himself. But the yeoman that Robin is depicted as being is a yeoman of the forest. In the Gest, the abbot of St. Mary’s says to Little John that Robin is a “strong thief” of whom he has never heard good. Little John accuses the abbot of lying, for he says Robin is a “yeoman of the forest.” Pollard says that to understand the rebuff we moderns must remember that a yeoman of the forest was the “antithesis of a strong thief”, for it was his duty to catch criminals and tend to the vegetation and deer of the forest on behalf of the king, being as he was part of the king’s extended household, a man who walked both in the circle of commoners and in the circle of the gentry and nobility.

If it was Robin’s duty to tend to the forest on behalf of the king, which included apprehending common criminals, then the core of the Robin Hood legend becomes justice. Robin is a man who sees the injustice of society, whether it be the abbot of St. Mary’s attempting to steal the land of the knight (later identified as Sir Richard of Leigh) or the Sheriff hiring the mercenary, Guy of Gisborne, to kill him a yeoman of the forest, and dedicates his life to fighting the injustice. Robin seems to have understood that a society and a culture cannot exist without Justice which, in its public rather than private understanding (according to Aristotle) is composed of Equality. As Russell Kirk in Roots of American Order observed, it was the English tradition which stated that men were equal before God, being all His creations, and before the laws of England, and that all men were subject to the law, from the lowest serf to the king himself (a principle justified by Magna Carta in 1215 and its subsequent ratifications). It is only the just society that can guarantee order, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness since every citizen knows that he is not ruled arbitrarily by some hidden face, but by the law, a product of reason (as Thomas Aquinas describes it) and that he will be treated the same way by the law as any other man. Justice, in short, is necessary for human flourishing.

It is this understanding, however dim, that has given Robin Hood the longevity he possesses. Behind the additions to the legend—the fight for Richard’s throne and against Norman tyranny, the robbing of the rich to give to the poor—is the understanding that what Robin and his Merrie Men are actually fighting for is justice and its re-establishment in England when she is sorely needed. That Robin does this of his own accord—not for personal reasons as in Prince of Thieves—means that Justice for its own sake is noble and necessary to fight for. That he is a yeoman and not a displaced nobleman illustrates not the usual boilerplate that anyone can be a hero when he sees an injustice—that gives us a false choice. Rather, it illustrates that everyone must be a hero when he sees injustice, even if such actions brand one an outlaw.

Robin Hood has endured because we will always need Robin Hood and we will always need to look for him, not in the forest but in the mirror.