page_title: Maid Marian
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Maid Marian / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Robin Hood and Maid Marion in the Bower, from Robin Hood, Louis Rhead, 1912
context_page_description: Maid Marian or Marion is the love interest of the legendary outlaw Robin Hood in English folklore.
  Maid Marian was in origin a "shepherdess" figure associated with May Day. Her role as the love interest of Robin Hood dates to at least the 16th century. She is typically portrayed as beautiful, confident, and sincere in her love of Robin Hood. Often, she is a noblewoman in the stories, though sometimes she is a commoner.
  Most modern Robin Hood stories feature her prominently and present her as an admirable woman. Of particular note are Marian's independence and relative equality to her lover, marking her as one of the earliest strong female characters in English literature.
context_section_description: Maid Marian is never mentioned in any of the earliest extant ballads of Robin Hood. She appears to have originally been a character in May Games festivities (held during May and early June, most commonly around Whitsun) and is sometimes associated with the Queen or Lady of May or May Day. Jim Lees in The Quest for Robin Hood (p. 81) suggests that Maid Marian was originally a personification of the Virgin Mary.
  Francis J. Childe argues that she was originally portrayed as a trull associated with a lascivious Friar Tuck: "She is a trul of trust, to serue a frier at his lust/a prycker a prauncer a terer of shetes/a wagger of ballockes when other men slepes." 
  Both a "Robin" and a "Marian" character were associated with May Day by the 15th century, but these figures were apparently part of separate traditions; the Marian of the May Games is likely derived from the French tradition of a shepherdess named Marion and her shepherd lover Robin, recorded in Adam de la Halle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, circa 1283.
  It isn't clear if there was an association of the early "outlaw" character of Robin Hood and the early "May Day" character Robin, but they did become identified, and associated with the "Marian" character, by the 16th century.
  Alexander Barclay, writing in c. 1500, refers to "some merry fytte of Maid Marian or else of Robin Hood".
  Marian remained associated with May Day celebrations even after the association of Robin Hood with May Day had again faded.
  The early Robin Hood is also given a "shepherdess" love interest, in Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage (Child Ballad 149), his sweetheart is "Clorinda the Queen of the Shepherdesses". Clorinda survives in some later stories as an alias of Marian.
  The "gentrified" Robin Hood character, portrayed as a historical outlawed nobleman, emerges in the late 16th century.
  From this time, Maid Marian is also cast in terms of a noblewoman, even though her role was never entirely virginal and she retained aspects of her "shepherdess" or "May Day" characteristics; in 1592, Thomas Nashe described the Marian of the later May Games as being played by a male actor named Martin, and there are hints in the play of Robin Hood and the Friar that the female character in these plays had become a lewd parody. Robin was originally called Ryder.
  In the play, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon by Anthony Munday, which was written in 1598, Marian appears as Robin's lawfully-wedded wife, who changes her name from Matilda when she joins him in the greenwood. She also has a cousin called Elizabeth de Staynton who is described as being the Prioress of Kirklees Priory near Brighouse in West Yorkshire. The 19th century antiquarian, Joseph Hunter, identified a Robert Hood, yeoman from Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the archives preserved in the Exchequer, whose personal story matched very closely the story of Robin in Anthony Munday's play, and this Robert Hood also married a woman named Matilda, who changed her name to Marian when she joined him in exile in Barnsdale Forest (following the Battle of Boroughbridge) in 1322, and who also had a cousin named Elizabeth de Staynton who was Prioress of Kirklees Priory. If these parallels are not coincidental, then the Marian of Robin Hood fame, whose origins may be distinct from the Marian of the May games or of Monday's play, may derive all her roots from her association with the historical Robert Hood of Wakefield.
  In an Elizabethan play, Anthony Munday identified Maid Marian with the historical Matilda, daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, who had to flee England because of an attempt to assassinate King John (legendarily attributed to King John's attempts to seduce Matilda).  The "Matilda" theory of Maid Marian is further discussed in In later versions of Robin Hood, Maid Marian is commonly named as "Marian Fitzwalter", only child of the Earl of Huntingdon, is the Maid Marian in McSpadden, J. Walker (1926). "Chapter I: How Robin Hood Became An Outlaw". Robin Hood. London, UK: George Harrap – via Project Gutenberg.</ref>
  
  In Robin Hood and Maid Maria
caption: Robin Hood and Marian in their Bower (1912). Maid Marion wears a Tyrolean hat and carries a hunting horn.
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