Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood sends the outlaw to a monastery to die. Hugh Jackman plays him old and ill, Jodie Comer plays the prioress who receives him, Bill Skarsgård plays Little John, and the year on screen is 1247. Audiences raised on archery contests and forest ambushes have read the film as revisionism. It is closer to restoration: the oldest surviving versions of the legend end exactly there, with a bleeding bowl rather than a battle.
The source is a set of ballads, not a book
Robin Hood has no author. What survives is a body of ballads written down from the fifteenth century onward and sung before that. The fullest early text is A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed around 1500, which gathers several stories and closes with the outlaw’s death. A separate ballad, catalogued as number 120 in Francis James Child’s collection of English and Scottish popular ballads, tells the ending in detail across two incomplete versions.
The manuscripts disagree about particulars. They agree about the shape of the ending, and the shape is domestic, not heroic.
What happens in the ballad
Robin is old and unwell. Medieval treatment begins with bloodletting, so he rides to Kirklees Priory, where his kinswoman serves as prioress. She takes him in, opens a vein, and lets the blood run.
In the Gest she is not merely careless: Sir Roger of Doncaster stands beside her in the plot. In the death ballad Robin realises what is happening and drags himself to a window.
He sounds his horn. Little John, waiting outside, breaks in and asks leave to burn the priory with the nuns inside. Robin refuses, and the refusal carries the moral weight of the whole cycle: he has never harmed a woman in his life and will not permit it in his death.
Then he asks for his bow, shoots a single arrow through the window, and tells them to bury him where it falls. No duel with the Sheriff, no returning king, no last stand. The man the Sheriff of Nottingham could not take is killed by a relative under the guise of medicine.
Why the Middle Ages wanted this ending
Three reasons, all practical.
Bloodletting was ordinary, almost domestic. A fifteenth-century listener understood at once that the hero had been killed with the instrument of healing.
Kirklees was a real house in West Yorkshire, and the legend needed geography. A grave can be pointed at; the arrow that chose it can be remembered.
And the ballads keep a strict code about who may be harmed. Robin robs wealthy churchmen and spares women. Killing him by a prioress’s hand puts that code under maximum pressure: he dies precisely because he keeps it.
What the film keeps and what it moves
Sarnoski keeps the location, the prioress, the refusal of revenge and Little John’s role in it. The scene in which Robin forbids the burning of Kirklees survives almost intact, and it works on screen as it works on the page: as a test of whether a man’s rules hold when he no longer needs them.
What moves is intention. In the ballad death ambushes a man who came to be cured. In the film he goes looking for a decent way out, which turns a story about betrayal into a story about consent. Comer’s prioress is given a position of her own, where the ballad gives its killer no explanation at all. That is a gain in psychology and a loss in ballad cruelty.
The year 1247 is itself a nod to the tradition: later versions of Robin’s biography name it as the year of his death. It is not history. The legend dated itself, in retrospect, and the film treats that invention as canon.
Why it failed commercially
Early figures put the film near seven million dollars against a budget of about twenty. The explanation is not mysterious. The public knows one part of this legend: contests, disguises, ambushed tax collectors, a fight on the bridge, a wedding, a just king restored. Death by bloodletting in a priory is material for a slow film about ageing, and an adventure campaign cannot sell that promise.
The mismatch is between film and expectation, not between film and source. The ballad has survived five centuries without a box office.
Where to read it
A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed around 1500: the earliest long compilation, with the death sequence at its close.
Robin Hood’s Death, Child ballad 120: the last day in detail, with the horn, the refused revenge and the final arrow.
Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898): the standard collection, and the reason we cite these songs by number.
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819): the novel that folded the outlaw into historical fiction as Locksley and built the image this film argues with.
One detail rewards a reader who comes to the text after the cinema. In the ballad Robin says nothing about the meaning of his life. He asks for his bow, shoots, and names a burial place. The explanations, the motives, the interior life of the prioress: all of that is the work of later centuries, including ours.
