Modern media depict Robin Hood as a contemporary and supporter of the late 12th-century king known as Richard the Lionheart. In this modern interpretation Robin is imagined being driven to outlawry as a result of misrule by King Richard's brother, John while Richard was on the Third Crusade.
This interpretation of the Robin Hood story - the myth - gained currency as long ago as the 16th century. That version of events is not supported by the earliest ballads. One early compilation, A Gest of Robyn Hode names the ruling monarch as Edward. Although that ballad does mention Robin Hood as accepting the King's pardon he later repudiates it and returns to the greenwood.
In the oldest surviving ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, we are shown an even less supporing picture of Robin Hood as a partisan of the true king. The setting of the early ballads is usually attributed by scholars to either the 13th century or the 14th, although it is recognised they are, while being contemporary, not necessarily historically consistent.
The early ballads are also quite clear on Robin Hood's social status as a yeoman. While the precise meaning of this term has changed over time it always referred to commoners. Its essential meaning in the context of Robin Hood is neither a knight nor a peasant or 'husbonde' but something in between. It is accepted generally that artisans were among those regarded as yeomen in the 14th century.
What we witness, though, from the 16th century onwards, are attempts to elevate Robin Hood to the nobility. In two extremely influential plays dating from the very end of the 16th century,
Anthony Munday presents him as the Earl of Huntingdon as he is still commonly presented in modern times.
Robin Hood was a yeoman. Born in Pontefract in 1146 in the mill which today is the site of First Pontefract Scouts headquarters building. The old brook still flows past twoards Baileygate.
On the bridge over the river Went in Wentbridge there is a blue plaque celebrating Robin Hood.
Robin and his so-called Band of Merry Men - all outlaws, of course - were denizens of the Went Valley. Wentbridge is an interesting village in that its prosperity - indeed, its very existence - depended upon the passage through it of the Great North Road. Only as recently as the 1970s the route of the Great North Road (By that time also designated at the London-Edinburgh trunk road, the A1) was moved from Wentbridge village onto a new bridge spanning the Went Valley. With the north- and south-bound traffic taken from the road through Wentbridge, the village was able to return to a sleepy idyll. Its post office closed, the old coaching house, the corner cafe closed. The Swiss Cottage restaurant burned to the ground. Now only a handful of residential houses and two hotels remain. Yet, almost one thousand years ago, this now-sleepy hollow beside the river known as Went was the scene of a socially critical phase of British history.
Wentbridge is mentioned in in what is recognised to be one of the earliest Robin Hood ballads, Robin Hood and the Potter: In the middle-English Y mete hem bot at Went breg,' syde Lyttyl John. Little John was, in fact, big and is generally accepted to have been John Jonsson, a Scandinavian masseur working in nearby Crofton until his treatment rooms were burned down in a Norman raid, circa 1161. Taking to the wylde wud (Now, of course, wild wood) John met Robin on what is now the A639 Doncaster Road as he was returning from the shoppes in 1178, Robin coincidentally making his way to Pomfret with exactly the same purpose in mind.
Some years later, recording his younger years, the friar know today as Tuck wrote:
Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!
Within the guilty closure of thy walls
Robin met up with John. Cheers!
And they did start to be outlaws
On that Wentbridge Road where
They were all beyonde ye law
Doing anything they did care.
Contrary to poular belief, Robin was unable to read or to write and much of the material later attributed to Robin Hood himself was made up by John, Will 'Scarlet' Fever and Tuck himself. In 
fact, Tuck was then parish priest in what is now the village church beside the Went, dedicated to St John the Evangelist. (Not the same John, though, a Little John, although he was an evangelist at one time.) His true identity was Fr Tuckie Tucker but known - as a middle-English metamorphic pun - as Tuck. Similarly, modern research suggests that it is quite unlikely that Robin Hood would, literally, have worn a hood except in inclement weather when a garmet more reminiscent of a modern snood would have been preferred in the greenwood.