Robin Hood and Outlaw Literature

Abstract

Seeming to emerge in the fourteenth century, the mythic figure of Robin Hood became the archetype of the social bandit – an outlaw whose principled and unlawful resistance to corrupt authority eclipsed the literary fame of the many outlaws of medieval British literature. Recorded in ballads, proverbs, short play‐games, marginal scribbling, and elusive records, the story of medieval Robin is both simple and elusive. Unlike the distressed‐gentlemen sagas of Hereward the Wake, Fouke fitz Waryn, or Eustace the Monk, or the national heroes, William Wallace and Owain Glyndŵr, driven to outlawry by the forces of aggressive English colonialism, Robin is never fixed in a precise historical moment, or determined by class or ethnic identities. While he shares much with the large British outlaw tradition, Robin always remained politically indeterminate, ready to be adapted to new situations, forms, and contexts.