Robin Hood in popular culture the anonymous "Robin Hood: A Tale of the Olden Time" (1819), and a few months later "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott, 1819. "Ivanhoe" was Scott's first novel where history and romance is combined. Robin Hood in this book is the saviour of the nation. The Upper classes need the working classes as much as the working classes rely on their 'betters'. Scott's tale is significant because it is the first time that Robin is presented as an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter, a theme which many later Victorian Robin Hood novels would utilise. The next novel following Scott was Thomas Love Peacock's novella
Robin Hood "Historia Majoris Britanniæ" (1521), (and he also may have been influenced in so doing by the story of Fulk Fitz Warin) This was the period in which King Richard was absent from the country, fighting in the Third Crusade. William Shakespeare makes reference to Robin Hood in his late-16th-century play "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". In it, the character Valentine is banished from Milan and driven out through the forest where he is approached by outlaws who, upon meeting him, desire him as their leader. They comment, 'By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar, This fellow were a