Robin Hood never robbed alone. From the earliest ballads, the outlaw of Sherwood is surrounded by a band of companions — the Merry Men, who live with him in the greenwood, share his adventures, fight beside him, and feast on the king’s venison. Some of them, like Little John, are as old as the legend itself. Others, like Friar Tuck and Maid Marian, joined the story later, from the May games and plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
This page follows the main members of the band, where they came from, and how they changed over the centuries. For the legend as a whole and the question of whether Robin existed, see Robin Hood: The Outlaw of Sherwood Forest and Did Robin Hood Really Exist?.
”Merry” in the Greenwood
The phrase “merry men” appears in the earliest Robin Hood ballads, but the word merry meant something different in medieval English. It did not mean simply “cheerful.” It meant pleasant, delightful, or blessed — the “merry” of “Merry England” — and was often applied to the greenwood itself, the forest in summer. “Merry men” were companions in a good fellowship. The word men could also mean retainers or followers, like the household of a lord.
The band lives in the forest — Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, or Barnsdale in Yorkshire in the earliest ballads — hunting deer, waylaying rich travellers, and holding feasts. The ballads suggest a band of anywhere from a handful to seven score (140) men, dressed in Lincoln green, the colour of the forest, and armed with longbows.
Little John
Little John is Robin’s right-hand man, the most important of the Merry Men, and nearly as old as Robin himself in the tradition. The Scottish chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun, writing around 1420, already paired them: “Lytil Johun and Robyne Hude / Wayth-men ware commendit gud.”
The joke of his name is that he is enormous — seven feet tall in some versions. His real name was John Little, and the Merry Men “christened” him Little John by reversing it.
The most famous story of their meeting comes from a seventeenth-century ballad, Robin Hood and Little John. Robin, walking in the forest, meets a very tall stranger on a narrow footbridge over a stream. Neither will give way. They fight with quarterstaffs, and the stranger knocks Robin into the water. Robin, laughing, blows his horn to summon his men, and invites the stranger to join the band.
In the early ballads, Little John is a strong, practical, sometimes quarrelsome figure. In Robin Hood and the Monk (c. 1450), one of the oldest surviving ballads, he quarrels with Robin, who strikes him, and they part in anger — but when Robin is captured in Nottingham, it is Little John who rescues him, killing the monk who betrayed him. In the Gest of Robyn Hode, Little John goes into service in disguise with the Sheriff of Nottingham and robs him.
Tradition places Little John’s grave at Hathersage in Derbyshire, where a long grave in the churchyard has been shown to visitors for centuries. Diggings in the eighteenth century reportedly found an unusually large thigh bone there.
Will Scarlet
Will Scarlet (also Scarlock, Scathelock, or Scadlock) appears in the early ballads, including the Gest. His name may originally have been Scathelock, “breaker of locks” — a thief. Later, perhaps by association with fine clothes, it became Scarlet, and in the later tradition he is a dandy, a skilled swordsman, dressed in red silk.
In the ballad Robin Hood Newly Revived, he is Robin’s long-lost cousin, Young Gamwell, who has fled after killing his father’s steward.
Much the Miller’s Son
Much is the third of the original companions, appearing in Robin Hood and the Monk and the Gest. He is the son of a miller — a working man, like Robin in many of the early ballads. He is loyal and tough. In Robin Hood and the Monk, it is Much who, with Little John, kills the monk’s little page so that there will be no witness. The ballads do not shy away from the band’s violence.
Friar Tuck
The jovial, fighting friar is one of the best-loved figures in the legend, but he was a later addition. A real outlaw chaplain nicknamed “Frere Tuk” is recorded in legal documents from Sussex in 1417, when a writ was issued against a chaplain called Robert Stafford who had taken the name and gathered a band of outlaws. His name may then have attached itself to the Robin Hood stories.
The friar first appears with Robin in a play of around 1475, and becomes prominent in the May games of the sixteenth century, where Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the friar were stock characters.
The classic story is the ballad Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar (seventeenth century). Robin meets the friar at a river and orders him to carry him across on his back. The friar does so — then, in the middle of the stream, he orders Robin to carry him back, and throws him in the water. They fight all afternoon; Robin whistles for his men, and the friar whistles for his fifty fierce dogs. At last they make peace, and the friar joins the band.
Friar Tuck is fat, merry, fond of food and ale, and handy with a quarterstaff — a comic portrait of the worldly clergy that was already common in medieval satire.
Maid Marian
Maid Marian is not in the earliest ballads at all. Robin in the fifteenth-century texts is devoted to the Virgin Mary, not to a sweetheart. Marian came from a different tradition entirely: the French pastoral play Le Jeu de Robin et Marion by Adam de la Halle (c. 1283), about a shepherdess and her shepherd lover.
In England, a “Maid Marian” became a regular character in the May games and morris dances by the early sixteenth century, and she was naturally paired with Robin Hood, the king of the May. By the time of the Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (1598), she had become a noblewoman, Matilda Fitzwater, who takes the name Marian when she goes into the forest with Robin.
In later tradition, Marian is often a skilled archer and swordswoman in her own right. In one ballad, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, she disguises herself as a page and fights Robin without recognizing him.
Alan-a-Dale
Alan-a-Dale is the minstrel of the band. His story, told in the seventeenth-century ballad Robin Hood and Allin a Dale, is one of the most romantic in the cycle. Robin meets a young man singing happily one day, and the next day finds him sighing and miserable. Alan explains that his true love is to be married against her will to a rich old knight. Robin disguises himself as a harper, goes to the church, stops the wedding with a blast of his horn, and has his men bring the bride to Alan. When the bishop refuses to marry them without the banns being read, Little John puts on the bishop’s robes and reads the banns seven times.
Other Members
Other members of the band appear in individual ballads or in later traditions:
- Arthur a Bland, a tanner who beats Robin in a fight and joins the band.
- David of Doncaster, a young archer.
- Gilbert of the White Hand, a fine archer in the Gest.
- The Pinder of Wakefield, a pound-keeper who fights Robin, Will Scarlet, and Little John at once.
- Nasir, a Saracen warrior, was invented for the 1980s British television series Robin of Sherwood and has appeared in several later adaptations — reflecting the tradition of Robin as a returned Crusader.
The Band as a Social Ideal
The Merry Men are central to the appeal of the legend. They represent a community of equals living in the freedom of the forest, outside the corrupt order of sheriffs, abbots, and greedy lords. In the early ballads they are yeomen — free men of middling rank — and their fellowship is based on loyalty, skill with the bow, and generosity.
The band’s life in the greenwood was a fantasy of freedom that appealed to generations of audiences, from medieval peasants burdened by forest laws to modern readers seeking escape. The images of Little John on the bridge, Friar Tuck in the river, and the feast under the great oak have become the essence of the Robin Hood story.
Last reviewed: September 2026.