The one true coin of Robin Hood’s England — taken from the corrupt, returned to the people.
During the late 12th and 13th centuries in England — the historical setting of the Robin Hood legends — the silver penny served as the primary and almost exclusive physical coin in circulation. For the vast majority of the population, it was the only currency a person would ever hold in daily life.
While values were reckoned in pounds (£) and shillings (s), these were units of account, not physical coins. A pound sterling was simply a weight of silver equal to exactly 240 silver pennies. No pound or shilling coin jingled in any purse.
A single penny carried real weight: a full day’s wage for a labourer, a couple of chickens, or dozens of eggs. For smaller purchases — a loaf of bread, a pint of ale — folk cut the penny into halves and quarters (farthings) with shears, and the fragments passed as change.
The earliest ballads reflect this reality with precision. Robin Hood and his Merry Men did not seize gold or jewels — they took silver pennies, the lifeblood of the English economy, from corrupt officials, tax collectors, and wealthy oppressors.
One celebrated tale recounts a haul of £100 — an astonishing 24,000 silver pennies — redistributed to the poor beneath the canopy of Sherwood Forest.
Archaeology grounds the legend: surviving silver pennies minted in the Nottingham region — including a notable example held by Nottingham City Council — tie the folklore directly to the economic soil of medieval England. View Nottingham’s unique silver penny →
Eight centuries after the silver penny fell from outlaw hands into the palms of the poor, two Stanford classmates took up the creed. In 2013, Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt founded Robinhood — named for the legend himself — with a single mission: democratize finance for all.
Their conviction was simple and defiant: the markets should not belong only to the wealthy. Where trading once demanded high fees and higher walls, they tore the gates open — commission-free investing, in the hands of anyone with the courage to begin. The same spirit that once redistributed pennies beneath Sherwood’s canopy now redistributes access itself.
And in 2026, the mission was carved into digital stone. Robinhood Chain — a permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 — brought markets that never close to anyone, anywhere. The outlaw’s ethos, once sung in ballads, is now immortalised on-chain: open, transparent, and beyond the reach of any sheriff.
Watch the silver pennies fall — a tribute to the justice and defiance of Robin Hood’s era. As Marian stood beside the outlaw in the old ballads, Lady Marian now stands inscribed on Robinhood Chain — the story written into a ledger no one can burn, seize, or rewrite. Fully transparent, forever verifiable, for all.
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