The medieval proverb, ‘many men speak of Robin Hood that never bent his bow’, has had limited effect in discouraging uninformed opinion. Nor, if it was the intention, has it curbed the enthusiasm to speak of Robin Hood since the late fourteenth century when the priest Sloth confessed, in Piers Plowman, that:

Resisting all constraints, Robin Hood has remained firmly in the popular imagination and on the lips of successive generations for eight centuries, an achievement that earned him the only properly fictional character entry in the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Although the outlaw myth acts, centrally, as a reference point for contesting the concepts of freedom and justice, it fluctuates in emphasis according to the tastes and anxieties of each age. In addition to transformations fashioned by audience sensibilities and social and political conditions, the myth is moulded by the practical demands of the different media through which it is transmitted. This has seen Robin shift in shape over the years from the sometimes violent, anti–authoritarian yeoman of the late medieval ballads and games through the genteel, dispossessed nobleman of Renaissance plays and Victorian novels to the Green Lord of the Wildwood, the incarnation of spring, of new age literature. He is, undeniably, one of the best–known and most enduring secular figures in the western world.

But Robin has another string to his bow. Since the early nineteenth century he and his adventures have epitomized the middle ages. For film and television generations in particular, the visualizations of character, costume and scenery have created an image and evocation of the period uninhibited by historical correctness. This cinematic medievalism is the culmination of years of conflating fact and fiction in an attempt to make the Robin Hood myth seem ‘real’. Many narrative developments and historical details now so familiar would have been unrecognizable to the ballad and game audiences of the fifteenth century. The setting in the reign of Richard I, the noble status of the dispossessed outlaw (Earl of Huntingdon or Loxley), the principle of robbing the rich to give to the poor and the love of Maid Marian are all late sixteenth–century elaborations of the myth.