More than twenty years ago now, I directed three period plays about Robin Hood with the Society for Creative Anachronism, a sort of medieval reenactment group.

These plays were perhaps fifteenth or sixteenth century. In them, Robin Hood is a guy who hangs out in the woods with his men. He doesn't rob anybody. He just gets into fights. In "Robin Hood and the Knight" he fights a knight who tries to capture him for a reward, then the Sherriff of Nottingham. In "Robin Hood and the Monk" he fights Friar Tuck. In "Robin Hood and the Potter" he fights a potter.

Maid Marion appears at the end of "Robin Hood and the Monk", though no name is given. She is simply introduced as "A lady free, and I her chaplain do thee make, to serve me for my lady's sake." Friar Tuck responds with a ribald little rhyme about the lady's moral character, which we, happily didn't find until the last rehearsal. Because the play was being performed for Boy Scouts.

I encountered Robin first in Howard Pyle's "The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood", written, I think sometime around the turn of the last century. Then there was the old Richard Greene series, which I still have a nostalgic fondness for, since it was on about the time school started, so if I was watching Robin Hood I wasn't going to school.

Rosemary Sutcliffe's book "Heroes and History" includes a chapter on Robin Hood. She seems to think he was a contemporary of Edward II. Though she suggests that the name might have been used by a succession of outlaws.

Which would explain why Bullfinch's Mythology has him as a champion of Katherine of Aragon.

Incidentally, speaking of the S.C.A., on the runestone field at Cooper's Lake, where the annual Pensic War is celebrated, there grows an oak tree that began as a seedling at Runnymede.