Early Robin Hood was a yeoman, not a displaced noble
Modern films cast him as a Crusade veteran robbed by Prince John. The oldest ballads make him a commoner archer devoted to the Virgin Mary, hostile to the Sheriff of Nottingham, with no Richard-the-Lionheart loyalty plot in sight.
Robin Hood is England's legendary outlaw archer and swordsman, later surrounded by Maid Marian, the Merry Men, and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Popular culture uses his name for any generous rebel against tyranny. Clear talk of "rhymes of Robin Hood" appears in Piers Plowman in the 1370s; proverbs and sermons around 1402–1410 grumble that people prefer his tales to parish teaching. Surviving narrative ballads date from the later fifteenth or early sixteenth century. In those texts he champions lower ranks, honors women, shoots peerlessly, mocks clerics, and especially hates the Nottingham sheriff—already many of the traits that stuck.
Linking him to Richard I and John's misrule while Richard fought the Third Crusade is a sixteenth-century fashion, not an early-ballad fact. A Gest of Robyn Hode names a King Edward instead. Social rank is plain: he is a yeoman—neither knight nor peasant husbandman but something between, among common free men and artisans. May games and plays spread the legend; Exeter records a Robin Hood game in 1426, with the custom thriving later in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earliest surviving ballad text, "Robin Hood and the Monk" (Cambridge manuscript Ff.5.48, after 1450), already sets bitter sheriff enmity in Nottinghamshire.
Historians have floated at least eight origin theories, including late-thirteenth-century namesakes, without consensus. Continuously rewritten from yeoman forest rogue to aristocratic avenger, Robin remains England's most exported folklore brand—an arrow that keeps changing its target.
Source: Robin Hood
