I grew up with Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood (and with Alfred Noyes’ A Song of Sherwood). But I was slow to recognise the significance of authors, and that therefore Pyle’s was a particular version of the tale rather than the tale itself in some absolute sense. Later I read other Robin Hoods; in the last several years, as I worked on mine, I have read over two dozen.
From my first paragraph I have found myself falling into the gaping crevasses in my knowledge of English history. Growing up with Pyle there were several things that simply were the truth about Robin Hood. One of them was that he shot a longbow. Another was that he lived in the time of Richard Lionheart. A third was that the sheriff of Nottingham was his chief enemy. Imagine my horror when I discovered that the sheriff of Nottingham did not administer Sherwood Forest; that the English did not commonly use the longbow till about 150 years after Richard Lionheart.
I am no historian, and never flattered myself that I would write a story that was historically accurate. I did, however, wish to write something that was, let us say, historically unembarrassing. A cousin of mine, who is an historian, told me that our sense of history in the 20th century is not what it was 700 years ago; we have what we call the media now, with the result that history tends to be even-handed and instantaneous. This was some comfort; for example, the English were quietly using the longbow as a hunting weapon long before Edward III faced the French at Crécy, which is when the English longbow enters 20th-century textbooks.
I’ve read bits of my Robin Hood aloud several times in the last few years; invariably there were questions, not necessarily about the historical veracity of what I was doing, but about why I had chosen this version of the tale over that version—or where this or that portion of the tale had come from. Many people have strong ideas about who Robin was and what he was like; and a lot of our ideas are as incompatible with each other as they are with history. There is a variant in which Robin is a disinherited earl, for example. My Robin has always been a yeoman (yeoman, by the way, is a term that was not generally used till well after the Lionheart’s day—because the position that would come to be known as yeoman was not yet widespread). There are even tales of a Robin Hood who did not live in Sherwood Forest.
When I could, I have tried to be historically unembarrassing. When I couldn’t.… The book that rescued me from the slough of despond is called, simply, Robin Hood, written by James C. Holt, a professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. It is a lively and fascinating book, and one of Holt’s theses is that the tales of Robin Hood have always reflected what the teller and the audience needed him to be at the time of the telling.
Scholars disagree about when the stories were first told; the earliest hints of an historical Robin Hood date around 1260. The first literary reference to him is from Piers Ploughman in 1377. But the retellings through the centuries have echoed concurrent preoccupations—not those of a possible historical precedent that existed, and may or may not have been a person named Robin Hood. And the slow accretion of the details that most of us would consider inseparable from any man called Robin Hood is sometimes surprising. Maid Marian did not appear till 1500; nor till about the same time was Robin presented as an honourable outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. And it was not until Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in 1819 that Robin was inaugurated as the Saxon champion against the Norman conquerers.
The Outlaws of Sherwood is not the last Robin Hood story any more than it is the first story about an outlaw band living in Sherwood Forest a long time ago. I needed my Robin to carry a longbow—even during the time of Richard Lionheart. I needed him to be a particular kind of hero with a particular set of preoccupations, surrounded by a company of people with preoccupations of their own. My Robin Hood is meant to be neither absolute nor definitive—nor historically satisfying. But I hope my readers may find him and his company persuasive and congenial.