Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature and film. According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. In some versions of the legend, he is depicted as being of noble birth, and having fought in the Crusades before returning to England to find his lands taken by the Sheriff. In other versions this is not the case and he is instead born into the yeoman class. Traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln green, he is said to have robbed from the rich and given to the
Robin Hood and the Butcher people on topical matters: for the peasantry, Robin Hood may have been a redemptive figure. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds two seventeenth-century broadside ballad versions of this tale: a copy in the Pepys collection at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge (2.102) and another in the Roxburghe ballad collection at the British Library (3.529). This tale has reappeared in many books about the Robin Hood legend, including Howard Pyle's "Merry Adventures of Robin Hood", although the threat to kill the sheriff at the end was often omitted. The so-called "Butcher ballads"