Show Notes
Most of us met Robin Hood before we could read — a fox with a sly voice, a picture book at bedtime, a stick bent into a bow. But the oldest trace of Robin Hood on earth is not a story. It is a clerical error: in 1262 a Westminster clerk crossed out a real thief's name and wrote "William Robehod" instead — proof the name was already famous a century before the first story anyone has found. The legend is older than its own oldest story.
Tonight: the old tales themselves, told the way they were meant to be told — the sorrowful knight and the loan guaranteed by the Virgin Mary; the oldest story's missing page (no one alive has ever read how Robin Hood was captured); the potter who beat him; the king he beguiled; the quiet death at Kirklees — and between the tales, the strangest paper trail in English history.
We tell it across four angles, kept carefully apart:
CONFIRMED — the 1226 pipe roll's fugitive Robert Hod and his 32 shillings; the 1225 manhunt that ended in a two-shilling chain; the 1262 clerk's slip; the earliest ballads as real, datable objects.
DEBATED — was there ever a man at all? Two camps read the same parchment and disagree only about what a document can prove.
LEGEND — Marian arrived around 1510, Tuck was a criminal's alias in 1417, King Richard came in 1521, the earldom in 1598, "rob the rich, give to the poor" in 1795, and Loxley the Saxon in 1819. Every familiar piece has a date.
WHY IT SURVIVED — the greenwood is the law working, run by an outlaw — and the legend never stopped finding keepers: the games, the books, the films, the fox. Each one somebody's first Robin. Including ours.
No ads. Ever. A quiet podcast made to be listened to slowly — or to fall asleep to.
A note on how this is made: every episode is researched and written by a human, then narrated with an AI voice. We think that's worth being upfront about.
Sources: primary texts and peer-reviewed scholarship — never Wikipedia. This episode draws on the Pipe Rolls of Henry III, the TEAMS editions of the early ballads, and the scholarship of Holt, Crook, Knight, and Dobson & Taylor.
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