I'm an expert historian and here's how accurate Robin Hood on MGM+ is to real events

The new Robin Hood series from MGM+, starring Sean Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham and newcomer Jack Patten as Robin "Rob" Hood, offers a gritty version of the medieval legend for a 21st-century audience. How much of it is inspired by real events, and how much is fabrication?

Amid the facts, it is riddled with historical inaccuracies and invention. But does this matter? Surprisingly, no. Indeed, in this regard, it is true to the spirit of the Robin Hood legend and its evolution.

It will surprise no one that the TV series is set in Sherwood Forest and Nottingham. Where else would it be? While these places cannot be proven definitively as the settings for the origins of Robin Hood, they are named in the earliest surviving texts of the story from the mid-fifteenth century and have stuck ever since.

More original for this series is the timing. Here, the story begins with Robin in 1186 during the reign of King Henry II.

Historians tend to place Robin Hood (or at least his legend) between the early 1200s and early 1300s, with more consensus for the earlier period. Film and TV settings have long settled on the reign of King Richard the Lionheart (1189–1199): Robin of Sherwood, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and the Robin Hood films of 2010 and 2018. The 2025 version moves to 1189, the last year of Henry’s reign. The youngsters from 1186 must have been on some form of medieval growth hormones, as they now all appear 10 years older, not three.

What of the characters? In 1189, it is indeed the case that Henry is king, Eleanor of Aquitaine is queen, and John and Richard are the royal princes vying to inherit the crown.

The matter of Robin Hood is more problematic, and here we start finding historical errors.

If Robin actually existed, it is highly unlikely that he was surnamed Loxley, as in the programme – a speculative association that came centuries later. Nor was he the rightful Earl of Huntingdon, a title bestowed only in 1598, when the Tudor nobility tried to recast the popular Robin as a hero of their own class.

A historical Robin Hood is impossible to pin down. There are plenty of Robin Hood names, and variations of it, for criminals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it was a common nickname, and in many cases its usage was likely a matter of life imitating the legend. Sources also name a criminal Little John, and, in the early fifteenth century, Friar Tuck.

As for Maid Marian, the earliest existing references to her in the Robin Hood legend come from the first decade of the sixteenth century.

The Sheriff of Nottingham is a greyer area. That title was not introduced until the mid-fifteenth century, a time when the once-powerful role of sheriff had become greatly reduced in importance. However, there was a High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the 1180s. It is a small step to truncate that to simply "Sheriff of Nottingham".

Other changes are more obvious. Queen Eleanor appears to be acting as regent, ruling England in Henry’s absence. In fact, following her involvement in a rebellion against Henry in 1173–74, she had been imprisoned for at least 10 years. Thereafter, she was kept under close scrutiny, and her powers and lands were taken from her until Henry’s death.

Friar Tuck does not add up in any form. The friars of the Franciscan and Dominican religious orders did not arrive in England until the 1220s. Here, he is somehow associated with a Trappist monastery, a monastic order founded four and a half centuries later! Nor is he tonsured.

Two factual errors stand out above the others. The French rulers of England are called Normans. Henry and his sons were from Anjou and thus were Angevins, quite separate from the Normans who came over with William the Conqueror. When Henry became king in 1154, he established the new Plantagenet dynasty. The series’ repeated emphasis on unjust Norman rule over “Saxons” (i.e., the English) seems to echo Sir Walter Scott’s hugely successful Ivanhoe novel from 1819.

The other is that the “Saxon” population is pagan, resisting the imposition of the Normans’ Christianity. But England had been Christian for centuries. Indeed, the earliest tales of Robin Hood are keen to express Robin’s devotion to the Virgin Mary.

So why do these inaccuracies not matter? Because the Robin Hood stories were, from the very start, designed as entertainment. Popular stories from the thirteenth century of real-life heroes such as Hereward the Wake, Fulk FitzWarin, and Richard the Lionheart wove genuine historical events into fantastical tales that would be more at home in the genre of sword and sorcery.

As the Robin Hood stories grew, they diversified into various, sometimes contrasting, tales. But all the while — whether as plays, songs, texts, or as part of May Day festivities — they were designed to delight audiences. After all, if the singers, writers, and actors behind them failed to please their listeners and viewers, there would be no money in it for them.

The same goes for this Robin Hood. And all the future ones that will surely follow, maintaining a tradition of entertainment for over eight centuries.

Robin Hood arrives on MGM+ on Sunday 2nd November 2025.

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