Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
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Of course, this snippet of poetry doesn't mean Langland invented Robin Hood, but rather that his legends had been around long enough to show up as a matter of common knowledge in someone's poem at the time.
And there's more evidence to consider.
Fairly soon after, in the early 1400s, another mention showed up in a work called Friar Dawes' Reply.
Rephrased from the Middle English text, the words basically say, many men speak of Robin Hood and never shot his bow.
It is a sentiment even modern people can easily grasp.
Around the same time, a publication called Dives and Pauper complained that parishioners would rather hear a song of Robin Hood than mass or matins.
And he was also mentioned alongside other folk heroes in a religious tract of a similar era.
we can conclude from all these clues that, by the late 14th century and early 15th centuries, the stories of Robin Hood had been around at least for a little while.
So, this raises the question, who inspired these already famous stories?
All that these early references tell us is that Robin Hood was some sort of hero of the people, that he was an archer, and that folks had some pretty great stories about him already circulating.
But it doesn't reveal the time period in which he was thought to have lived or any other identifying details.
To find some of that information,
Scholars travel forward in time to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, which was when the earliest ballads were written about this mysterious outlaw, giving us stories entirely focused on Robin Hood himself.
There are a few narrative ballads that form this picture.
Perhaps the oldest is Robin Hoad and the Monk
It survives in manuscript form and was also reprinted in the 19th century.
This ballad establishes many aspects of the Robin Hood legend that are consistent for this early period.
First, Robin is a yeoman.
The meaning of the term has morphed over time, but the best way to think of a yeoman for our purposes is someone who is neither a nobleman nor a peasant.
In modern terms, it's pretty safe to say that Robin Hood was sort of middle class.
Showing 1541–1560 of 2,981 · page 78 of 150
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