EXCLUSIVE

Robin Hood and his Merry Men are more likely to have stolen from the rich to give to the poor of East Lothian or East Kilbride than the East Midlands - according to a controversial new history.

For author Stephen Knight claims the archetypal English anti-hero was, in fact, a very Scottish creation with striking similarities to our own champion of the oppressed - William Wallace.

In Rabbie Hood: The Development of the English Outlaw Myth in Scotland, he argues that the scourge of aristocratic travellers in Sherwood Forest was more like the chairman of a residents' association than a swashbuckling desperado before he was hijacked by medieval Scottish storytellers. Only then was he returned south having acquired the characteristic traits associated with the modern legend.

The author - Professor of English Literature at the University of Wales, Cardiff - said: ''In Scottish hands the figure of Robin Hood was re-formulated. The English hero was a man of deeds and good instincts who, in play-game and early ballad, represented the local community for collective activity like money gathering or in its resistance to outside intervention.

''In Scotland there were more urgent things for a popular hero to represent as his highest values and they included a sense of national identity and resistance to a usurping king, neither of which had been central nor even of importance to the original Robin Hood.

''The greater nobility and greater political weight of the figure was the mainspring of gentrification. This figure was returned to England where he became highly valuable in renaissance ideology.''

Professor Knight - who will deliver his thesis at a lecture at Edinburgh University today - claims parallels exist between Robin Hood and Scotland's national outlaw - The Wallace.

Both have an over-arching resistance to English imperialism and both share a noble death at the hands of their enemies, leaving an enduring and valued memory.

In literary accounts of the respective heroes there are more specific similarities. Both disguise themselves as potters to enter a town incognito, both save themselves from trouble by dressing as a woman with the help of a sympathetic old woman, both rob and kill travellers and both have a difficult encounter with the king.

Professor Knight said: ''It seems that, in so far as Rabbie Hood exists, he may well be a hybrid of The Wallace and Robin Hood, a nationally conscious gentleman outlaw, royally mistreated by the king of England, noble, resistant and heroic in life and death.''

Professor Knight claims there is a recurrent element of Scottish involvement in the Robin Hood tradition which has received virtually no attention because of his identification as English.

He claims the first three medieval chroniclers who refer to Robin Hood - Andrew Wyntoun in the 1420s, Walter Bower in the 1440s and John Major in 1521 - were all Scots.

He said: ''It has long been known that late medieval Scottish literary references to the English outlaw exist, and that Robin Hood activities took place in Scottish towns in the late middle ages.

''The role of Scots chroniclers in promulgating the English outlaw myth has been referred to by scholars, but these phenomena have not been considered in terms of their wider implications.

''Apart from the intrinsic interest and relative neglect of the topic of Rabbie Hood, another good reason to return to it is that the whole phenomenon of a Scottish version of Robin Hood can now be looked at in the light of recently developed knowledge and theorisation about how colonial cultures operate and interact with native traditions.''