I’ve mentioned it before about 8 months ago but this will save you searching the blog posts, which I admit are a bugger to navigate. It’s a myth I easily debunked in earlier posts but in the interests of rumour and fun I’ll tease you with it again here.
Like King Arthur, Robin Hood is claimed by towns and villages all over Britain, but there are a few pointers to give Liverpool a shout at the true location too. Here goes…
Along with the Calderstones mentioned earlier, there is one more Neolithic stone in the locality, known as Robin Hood’s stone. The name itself is only Victorian, the stone previously having the more generic title ‘Archer’s stone’ based on its markings, but let me sew a few more seeds.
Robin is usually placed in the time of King Richard and King John, and later King Edward, and described as an Anglo Saxon landowner displaced and robbed of his lands by John. Bear with me, there’s more…
Robin is also referred to in medieval times as the Earl of Huntington, with a Huntington listed in the Domesday book in the suburbs of Chester ( it still exists today). King John historically and genuinely had an intense dislike of the Earls of Chester ( it was one of the reasons he created Liverpool, as a port for his invasions of Ireland, and beyond the port taxes of Chester).
The first literary mention of Robin (in the fourteeth century poem Piers Plowman) quotes together stories of Robin Hood and Randulf of Chester in the same line. Like William before him, John ‘relocated’ the lands of his nobles and claimed them himself, including Toxteth, the heavily forested only path to Warrington and the Mersey crossing that the tax collectors would have passed through and Liverpool was the newly created town of King John. Could Robin have been a local, relieving the rich of their money as they headed past MossLake fields? Probably not, but you never know, Liverpool has long had an unfair (and sometimes fair) reputation for crime, so it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that, wherever the ‘original’ Robin lived, some of the detail that ended up in the myth came from Merseyside and Chester?
Only joking, its clearly bollocks, but as I mentioned in earlier posts, it serves as a warning that its very easy to be tempted to fit facts to a hypothesis. It’s also why I’m clearly stating in these posts where I’m speculating wildly. Any other detail you find is at least backed by legitimate research.