`The first comic strip hero with tales of derring-do'.

Byline: Tony Pogson ,

He has been described as the first comic strip hero - not easy when your place in history pre-dates printing itself in this country - and important enough to provoke a book by a distinguished and prolific medievalist professor at Teeside University.

A J Pollard has been taking a serious and scholarly look at the Robin Hood legend in his work Imagining Robin Hood.

The first big question is - did he really exist? There are three possibilities says Prof Pollard: Robin may have never existed, he may have been an amalgam of several historical characters or he could have been simply created as an archetype. But he concludes that he is essentially a fictional creation.

Early stories did make him the first comic strip hero with tales of derring-do and comic japes woven around a cast of stock characters.

Eight surviving "rymes" or stories of Robin Hood were set down in writing by about 1500. In essence this is the Robin Hood story that we know today - except that he was as much at home in South Yorkshire's Barnsdale Forest as in Sherwood, there was no mention of Maid Marian and scarcely any of Friar Tuck, and his robbing was to redistribute wealth from the undeserving to the deserving rather than from rich to poor, a vital difference.

But the Huddersfield area retains its dubious claim to fame, with Robin's death at Kirklees thanks to the treachery of the Prioress there.

There may or may not have been a Robin Hood two centuries before, says the professor. There are references to Robin Hoods in Yorkshire and Durham and another suggestion that the outlaw band were linked to defeated followers of Simon de Montfort.

Be that as it may, by 1500 the population of England had been rocked by a succession of shattering events, the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation switch from Catholic to Protestant.

Small wonder there was discontent, small wonder there was a longing in the Robin Hood stories to get back to the peace and order of Edward III's reign.

Prof Pollard sees reflected in the stories a deep-rooted cynicism about people in power and a long-standing popular distrust of the commitment of any government to making the world a better place - which sounds almost like today, in fact.

When the stories were first written down, he says, Robin was a hero for all seasons, all things to all men.

He thinks it is important that Robin was then a yeoman and not the earl he became in some later versions.

As a yeoman he was not just an in-between man straddling the worlds of gentry and non-gentry alike, but was a forest man, known to produce England's best archers but closely linked to the men who carried the local government at its lowest level, independent-minded and not afraid to remonstrate against royal authority - as happened in Cade's rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace.

The stories appealed to the gentry because Robin was courteous and respectful to those who lived up to their rank. They equally appealed to the non-gentry because Robin, and especially his lieutenant Little John, could be a prankster who mocked aristocratic values and flouted the sheriff's authority.

Here are paradoxes that the true fellowship in the forest is contrasted with the false fellowship in the monasteries; the band of outlaws preying on travellers, mainly monks, a fellowship living beyond the law does more to uphold justice than the law officers themselves.

The greenwood was no Utopian world but one where people are aware that dreams turn sour, they hope that things can be better while also being aware that life does not work out that way.

In short, here's a world of putting wrongs right, a world of sturdy independence, of legitimate rebellion where even a king can be wrong.

Imagining Robin Hood. AJ Pollard/Routledge. pounds 15.99