This is a “What If?” story.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., article on “Women,” records that in one case in the 1600s, a woman—a countess—personally exercised the office of Sheriff of Westmorland, hereditary in her family.
As soon as I read that, I started wondering: What if such a situation had applied in Nottingham in the days of Robin Hood ... which were not necessarily those of Richard the Lionheart—that specious idée fixe is perhaps our longest-lingering and most pervasive legacy from the 19th-century craze for Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.