Robin hood the legend of sherwood box art

In these plays, Munday backdated Robin Hood to the twelfth century: Sir Robert is outlawed by Prince John, ruling while the rightful king, Richard I, fights in the Crusades. Thus, Robin changed from thuggish thief to dispossessed earl when Anthony Munday published The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon in 1598. Robin Hood received a makeover in the late sixteenth century, as a character who preferred forest life to a kingвЂ™s beneficence made those in power uneasy. In these tales, Robin is a simple yeoman who always returns to the greenwood richer and triumphant, preferring the dark and mysterious wood to the society of the King and court. The Gest packs RobinвЂ™s adventures with plenty of thieving, double-crossing, and murdering-committed by both stock bad guys like the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Merry Men. The first written account to appear was in the late fifteenth century as a Middle English ballad-poem: A Little Gest of Robin Hood. It might come as a surprise then that Robin Hood started life happily robbing the richвЂ¦and keeping the spoils for himself. The character possesses a protean quality that has allowed his legend to survive over five centuries of vigorous rebranding, finally producing the Robin Hood we know and love today-an outlaw, but a charming one, whose band of Merry Men rob from the rich to give to the poor, nobly defending the common man from injustices with a wit as quick as his arrow. The pages devoted to his adventures might equal a Sherwood ForestвЂ™s worth of trees, and he has appeared in all manner of guises, from a Saxon freedom fighter to a singing gangster and even a cartoon fox.

Unlike other outlaws from the Middle Ages, Robin Hood has proved extraordinarily difficult to kill.

Robin hood the legend of sherwood box art