LONDON (AP) -- An academic says he's found evidence that Britain's legendary outlaw Robin Hood wasn't as popular as folklore suggests.
Julian Luxford says a note discovered in the margins of an ancient history book contains rare criticism of the supposedly benevolent bandit.
According to legend, Robin Hood roamed 13th-century Britain from a base in central England's Sherwood Forest, plundering from the rich to give to the poor.
But Luxford, an art history lecturer at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, says a 23-word inscription in the margins of a history book, written in Latin by a medieval monk around 1460, casts the outlaw as a persistent thief.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...HOOD?SITE=PAPOE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Julian Luxford says a note discovered in the margins of an ancient history book contains rare criticism of the supposedly benevolent bandit.
According to legend, Robin Hood roamed 13th-century Britain from a base in central England's Sherwood Forest, plundering from the rich to give to the poor.
But Luxford, an art history lecturer at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, says a 23-word inscription in the margins of a history book, written in Latin by a medieval monk around 1460, casts the outlaw as a persistent thief.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...HOOD?SITE=PAPOE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
later, with growing anti-clerical/anti-feudal sentiment, came the "rob from the rich, give to the poor" layer of the legend. we need to remember that the legendary "robin hood" is an accretion of the deeds and lives of any number of english outlaws: so that if the original robin hood was a particularly daring and effective thief, there may very well have been a later, daring and effective road agent who particularly targeted the greedy (and loaded) 
upper classes 
