Digital Robin HoodEverything you need to know about Robin Hood.
Medieval court rolls, wax seals, and a quill on a candlelit archive table, storybook manuscript-illumination style
The chronicles and rolls where the legend first leaves footprints. AI-generated illustration (2026-09-26). AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.

The Early Chronicles

Before the ballads were printed, Robin Hood left footprints in chronicles and poems. These are the earliest references — each quoted, dated, and labeled for what it is.

The rule for this page

Each entry below gives the documented text (translated where the original is Latin), its date of writing, and — separately — the date it claims to describe. A chronicler writing in 1420 about the year 1283 is evidence for 1420, not for 1283.

c. 1377 — Piers Plowman

The earliest certain mention of Robin Hood anywhere. In the B-text of William Langland's Piers Plowman (Passus V), the figure of Sloth — a lazy, drunken priest — confesses:

"I can nouzte perfitly my pater-noster, as the prest it syngeth: But I can rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Erle of Chestre."

("I cannot perfectly recite my Paternoster as the priest sings it, but I know rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph Earl of Chester.")

The rhymes themselves are lost — only the title-character's name survives, and it survives as something a priest is ashamed to know instead of his prayers. That tells us two things: the rhymes existed by the late 1370s, and they were already popular entertainment, the medieval equivalent of knowing song lyrics instead of scripture.

Date of writing: the B-text is dated to about 1377. Date described: none — it is a contemporary reference.

c. 1420 — Andrew of Wyntoun, Orygynale Chronicle

The Scottish chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun, writing around 1420, places Robin and Little John in a specific year:

"Lytel Jhon and Robyne Hude / Waythmen were commendyd gude; / In Yngilwode and Barnysdale / Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale."

("Little John and Robin Hood, outlaws, were commended good; in Inglewood and Barnsdale they practiced all this time their trade.") The passage is set under the year 1283 — the time of the Scottish wars of independence. Wyntoun is writing 140 years after the fact; his dating is his own choice, not evidence for a 1283 Robin.

Note the geography: Inglewood (Cumbria) and Barnsdale (South Yorkshire) — not Sherwood. The early tradition points north, to Yorkshire, more strongly than to Nottingham.

Date of writing: c. 1420. Date described: c. 1283 (Wyntoun's claim, not corroborated).

c. 1440s — Walter Bower, Scotichronicon

Walter Bower, continuing Fordun's Scotichronicon in the 1440s, gives the legend's first extended prose notice — and he does not like it:

"Hoc in tempore [1266] de exheredatis et bannitis surrexit et caput erexit ille famosissimus sicarius Robertus Hode et Littill Johanne cum eorum complicibus, de quibus stolidum vulgus hianter in comoediis et tragoediis prurienter festum faciunt et super ceteras romancias, mimos, et bardanos cantitare delectantur."

("About this time [1266], from among the disinherited and outlawed, there rose up and lifted his head that most famous murderer Robert Hood, with Little John and their accomplices, about whom the foolish crowd eagerly make a holiday in comedies and tragedies, and delight to sing above all other romances, mimes, and ballads.")

Bower calls Robin a sicarius — a murderer, an assassin. He dates the rising to 1266, in the aftermath of the Barons' Wars, and he is irritated that the common people prefer Robin's songs to every other romance. That irritation is itself evidence: by the 1440s, Robin Hood was mass entertainment.

Date of writing: c. 1440s. Date described: 1266 (Bower's claim, not corroborated).

1521 — John Major, Historia Majoris Britanniae

The Scottish historian John Major (Mair) is the first to do two enormously consequential things: he sets Robin in the reign of Richard I (the 1190s), and he describes the outlaw code in terms that anticipate "rob from the rich, give to the poor":

"Circa haec tempora [Ricardi Primi], ut auguror, Robertus Hudus Anglus et Parvus Joannes latrones famatissimi in nemoribus latuerunt, solum opulentorum virorum bona deripientes. Nullum nisi eos invadentem vel resistentem pro suarum rerum tuitione occiderunt... Faeminam nullam opprimi permisit nec pauperum bona surripuit, verum eos ex abbatum bonis sublatis opipare pavit."

("About this time [of Richard I], as I conjecture, the most famous robbers Robert Hood, an Englishman, and Little John lurked in the woods, stealing only the goods of wealthy men. They killed no one except those who attacked or resisted them... He permitted no woman to be oppressed, nor did he steal the goods of the poor, but rather feasted them sumptuously on goods taken from the abbots.")

Note Major's honesty: ut auguror — "as I conjecture." He is guessing at the date. But his guess became the legend's official setting for the next 500 years, and his description — robbing only the wealthy, feeding the poor from the abbots' plunder — is the earliest clear statement of the Robin Hood economic idea (see The Outlaw Code).

Date of writing: 1521. Date described: the reign of Richard I (Major's conjecture).

1569 — Richard Grafton, Chronicle at Large

Grafton, following an "old and ancient pamphlet" he claimed to have found, made Robin a nobleman: advanced, he said, "to the dignity of an earl" for his "manhood and chivalry." This is the first appearance of the Earl of Huntingdon — the dispossessed nobleman of the later legend. The medieval ballads know nothing of it; their Robin is always a yeoman.

Date of writing: 1569. Status: Grafton's pamphlet has never been independently verified.

c. 1600 — The Sloane Life

An anonymous manuscript life of Robin Hood, now in the Sloane collection (British Library), gives a compact prose biography: Robin of Locksley, outlawed, pardoned, and finally bled to death by treachery at Kirklees. It is a useful witness to what the legend looked like around 1600 — after the plays, before the broadsides' full flowering.

Date of writing: c. 1600 (manuscript). Status: a literary compilation, not a record.

What the chronicles prove — and don't

They prove that by the late fourteenth century a body of "rymes of Robyn Hood" was popular enough for a poet to use as shorthand for idle entertainment; that by the fifteenth century chroniclers treated him as a figure of the 1260s–1280s; and that by 1521 a historian could place him in Richard I's reign and credit him with robbing only the rich. They do not prove that any of those dates describe a real man. Every date above before 1377 is a chronicler's choice, and the chroniclers disagree with each other by decades.

Source notes

Limitations