Robin Hood

Why Nottingham?

To this day Nottingham – in particular Sherwood Forest - is Robin Hood’s spiritual home, but there is no real reason for this; while there are references to Nottingham and Sherwood in many of the ballads composed over centuries, there are just as many that talk of Robin coming some fifty miles north in Yorkshire, which is where the Robin of Loxley character became associated with the legend of Robin Hood. However, even this figure has been lost to history.

The problem is there are two Loxleys in England. True enough, there is a small village named Loxley to the north west of the city of Sheffield, which has long been associated with the legends of Robin Hood with the Robin Hood Inn, built in 1799, being an attempt to exploit this fame.

However, there is another Loxley in Warwickshire, near Stratford-upon-Avon and here some historians have traced Robin Hood back to an ancestor of one of the Norman invaders who came over with William the Conqueror and settled there!

Nevertheless, Nottingham will always be Robin Hood country and the county attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world each year, keen to see among other things the famous 1000 year old Major Oak tree, cited as being Robin Hood’s home in Sherwood Forest.

In all it seems that Robin Hood, along with his Merry Men, is a mishmash of all of the above. An amalgamation of various tradition, historical characters and romantic ideals. Robin Hood has been forged by history and has become something that none of the potential historical characters on which he may be based could have ever achieved: immortality.