Robin Hood is a genre, not an original

Matter of the Greenwood Topic

Summary: Hereward the Wake (c. 1070s, written up c. 1109-31), Eustace the Monk (d. 1217), Fouke le Fitz Waryn (d. 1258) and the Tale of Gamelyn (c. 1350-70) all predate or parallel the earliest Robin Hood texts and share the same grammar: unjust dispossession, flight to the forest, disguise and trickery, an ambush with a truth-telling test, humiliation of a corrupt official, and eventual royal pardon. Robin Hood is the version of this story that survived, not the source of it.