OFH Throwback - Episode #50 - Was There a Real Robin Hood? (Part II)

September 2, 2025·57 min·5 clips

Sebastian Major explains why Robin Hood couldn't have been a nobleman loyal to King Richard.

Robin Hood gets bumped up the ladder. The host sits with the point where the gentle thief version of the legend starts to stick, because that version needs a different kind of hero. A gentleman cannot just be a rough commoner in nicer clothes. So Robin Hood gets pushed toward aristocratic territory. Then John Major enters the story. His history gives Robin Hood's outlaw career a new date: 1189, instead of the dates that had already been floating around. That is not a small adjustment. It sends the legend almost 100 years backward and puts Robin Hood in the same year Richard I, the Lionheart, was crowned king. The trouble is that nobody seems to know how Major landed on 1189. The host makes that uncertainty plain, and contemporary voices treated the date like a guess. Richard Graff was skeptical. The appeal may have been neatness: Robin Hood living in the same world as one of England's legendary medieval kings. It makes a good story, even if the footing is shaky. But reputation does work. John Major was respected in the 1500s, so other historians repeated the 1189 claim and leaned on him as their authority. That is how a guess starts to look sturdier than it is. It gets copied, cited, and eventually feels inherited. Then the stage gets hold of it. In the 1590s, this newer Robin Hood starts showing up in London theater during a huge moment for English drama, with Shakespeare in the background and plays like Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar marking the scene. The host is tracing how a loose historical placement turns into a dramatic setting, and then into the version people recognize.

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