While Robin Hood is the archetype of all English language outlaw hero traditions, there are some who come before his earliest presumed dates and others who may or may not have lived around the same time. The surviving historical and other records on these historical and, like Robin Hood himself, probably mythical characters, are tantalisingly limited, vague and sometimes contradictory. But they are enough to show perhaps the earliest form of the outlaw hero tradition in English-language culture and the existence of certain of its elements in other cultures. Although the Scandinavian term utlah is first recorded in the reign of King Alfred (871–99), the first of such identifiable figures flit through the mists of the Norman conquest of what is now England, exactly the kind of power conflict that forms the basis of the outlaw hero tradition wherever it exists.

Norman Conquest

Earl Godwin

The story of the historical Earl Godwin (990–1053) is contained in a manuscript on the life of Edward the Confessor, thought to have been composed between 1065 and 1067. It is the earliest known detailed outlaw narrative in English and involves some of the essential elements of the tradition, including its setting along a contested border between Anglo-Saxon and Norman England as well as conflict over control of land and resources in the prelude to and the aftermath of the invasion of 1066.