Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham

This piece, as befits a journal of medieval studies, focuses on the earliest known versions of the stories of Robin Hood. It does not consider the manifestations of Robin Hood after the reformation, let alone his resuscitation in Music Hall, Film and Television in the last century and more. And it does not dwell on the question of whether there was ever a real Robin Hood or on the earliest putative roots of the stories of Robin Hood in the thirteenth century. The focus is on the fictional creation, possibly based on an actual historic figure, that emerged in the fourteenth century and who is the hero of surviving stories that are known to have been in circulation for a century and a half before 1540.