A document of court records was found in the London public records office dating from 1226. The court records reflect that a man named Robert Hod fled the jurisdiction of the king's justices, and his possessions were seized by the Sheriff of York. (In the Middle Ages, the name Robert was synonymous with Robin.) The document reads that this sheriff "owes 32 shilling 6 pence of chattels of Rob Hod, fugitive." The Sheriff of York later became the Sheriff of Nottingham. In 1227, the sheriff still owed the court the money for Robert Hod's belongings, and the record states that the same sheriff owed the money. The sheriff told his men to search for and find this Robert of Weatherby and behead him, calling Robert an "outlaw and evildoer of our land." Robert Hod was caught and hanged by chain. 

Forty years later, another fugitive was nicknamed Robyn Hod in court records. Rolls of Parliament in 1437 show a petition for the arrest of Piers Venables of Derbyshire who had resorted to violence and robbery and taken to the woods "like as it had been Robyn Hood and his meynie." So the outlaw Robin Hood was used as a title for a woodland thief and outlaw, even within a generation of Robert Hod in 1226. 

Here are some other facts: First, there was a Robert Hood and his wife Mathilda (who was not from the Fitzwater family) recorded in the court rolls of Wakefield, England in 1316 and 1317. Second, the poem A Gest of Robyn Hode was from a press around 1510 and mentions King Edward II as the reigning monarch at the time of Robin Hood's escapades. There are records from the court of Edward II dated 1324 reflecting that the king had a valet of chamber named Robyn Hood, but this man left his service within a year. So, what are some possibilities? 

In tracing the travels of Edward II during his reign, court records show that he did travel through the area from April to November 1323, reaching Nottingham in November. At that time, the king and many barons were fighting over taxes and land, and the Earl of Lancaster had fought King Edward II in the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322. The Earl was defeated, and his supporters fled the area to live as outlaws. It is possible that Robyn Hod was one such supporter. 

From March 24 to November 22 1324, a man named Robyn Hood was a porter of the Chamber of the royal service. So the possible history is this: Robert Hood of Wakefield was a supporter of the Earl of Lancaster, who was executed after his defeat in battle. Robert Hood escaped the rebellion, which made him an outlaw, but by the time Edward II came to Nottingham in 1323, Robert had resolved these feelings. He became part of the royal service and was called Robyn Hood. He tired of this work within a year and returned to Barnsdale in 1324, just outside Wakefield, when his name no longer appears in the records. 

J.C. Holt (1989) pointed to one record that makes this theory difficult to hang on to: There is a record of the court paying a porter of the chamber named Robyn Hode on June 27 1323. This would place his service before Edward II reached Nottingham. It could be that the Gest is wrong with the dates, Holt contended, but this record stirs up some question. It seems that these two Robin Hoods, the Wakefield Robin and the court Robyn, could be separate men. This is the theory that I believe to be true as well. 

Other possibilities of the origins of Robin Hood have been postulated: The name Robin Hood could have come from the title to Grandmasters in the witchcult, who wore hoods. The name Robin was one of the names given to the gods they worshiped, and so the name "Robin with a Hood" could have come about. Fairies and forest elves wore hoods, and one fairy name was Robin Goodfellow, and so the name Robin could have been combined with Hood in mythology.  Other writers think that forest bandits adopted the name, with Robin being a generic name of thiefs and Hood coming from "O' th' wood." One professor even thinks that Robin was a real man named Robin Fitzooth and was known by the name Robin Hood. 

Men who played parts in Robin Hood plays often were called the character names that they played, and so some confusion could come from this. Little John's grave is supposedly at a church cemetery at Hathersage in Derbyshire, as quoted from a 17th-century text about a Robert Lockesley who met up with a Little John. The Little John grave is 13 ft. 4 in. long, and in 1795 it was written that the grave was exhumed and the bones were of an extremely large man. The text also reported that trouble found the men who had removed the bones until the bones were placed back in the grave. It could be that this man was chosen as an actor for Little John because of his size. 

There is mention of Robin Hood (Robyne Hude) and Little John (litill Iohne) in Andrew de Wyntoun's 1420 chronicle of Scotland through 1408. He mentioned them under the years 1283-85. In the 1440s, Walter Bower continued work on a 1300s piece and cited Robin Hood (Robert Hood, a famous murderer) and LJ under the year 1266. A third man, John Major, published a book in 1521 called History of Greater Britain and cited Robin Hood and Little John from 1193-1194. 

There is a grave for Robin Hood in the area of Kirklees Priory at Yorkshire, England. The story of the epitaph is interesting: In 1665 a drawing of the grave was made and was published in 1786 when the word on the grave marker were no longer ledgible. The grave read "Here lie Roberd Hude, William Goldburgh, Thomas." It is unclear who William Goldburgh and Thomas are. 

A man named Thomas Gale was dean of York from 1697-1702, and he left in his papers the words that were supposedly on Robin Hood's grave. The date of death was recorded as 12-24-1247. A similar epitaph was published at the end of The True Tale of Robin Hood by Martin Parker, which gives the death date as 12-4-1198..  The Parker epitaph reads: 

Robert Earle of Huntington/Lies under this little stone./No archer was like him so good;/His wildnesse named him Robbin Hood./Full thirteene yeares, and something more,/These northerne parts he vexed sore./Such out-lawes as he and his men/May England never know agen  

Here is the Thomas Gale version, written in what more than one researcher has deemed the old English "muddied" by Gale: 

Hear undernead this (dis) laitl stean/Lais Robert Earl of Huntington (Huntingtun)/Nea arcir ver as hie sae geud/An pipl kauld im Robin Heud/Sick utlaws as hi an is men/vil England nivr si agen./Obiit 24 Kal. Dekembris 1247.  

or in modern English... 

Here underneath this little stone/Lies Robert Earl of Huntington/No archer was as he so good/And people called him Robin Hood/Such outlaws as he and his men/Will England never see again.  

The veracity of these epitaphs has been questioned, but for now, the stone at the site reflects these words. 

All in all, most researchers have agreed on the likelihood that the man who became Robin Hood was alive under the reign of Richard I around 1193. I believe that there was a man who was deemed an outlaw around the end of the 12th century, whose name became Robin Hood and was used to refer to other outlaws. And so the legend grew... 
 
 

Believe It or Not! 

In Robin Hood: His Life and Legend, Lord Bernard Miles wrote of this story, which may or may not be true ... you decide! 

Two men were sinking a shaft for a coalmine in the 1820s near Bolsover, England. They uncovered a cave, and searching it, they found that it was Robin Hood's. Bows, swords, and iron pots were scattered about, and the skeleton of a man with a crucifix lay up against a wall. These words were written above the skeleton: "These died that we might live. Requiescant in pace" with a long list of names below. At the bottom was "I was the last, Michael Tuck." The cave collapsed after they left, and they were not believed when they related their story to the townspeople. The cave has not been uncovered since.