Back on topic, I watched the Costner rendition (again), Prince of Thieves yesterday...I must say, that one is my favorite Robin Hood movie of all the ones I've seen.
I find it funny that people look for the historicity in Robin Hood when it can't even be proven whether or not he actually existed. LOL
Right, just like the Arthurian stories, the Robin Hood legends are mostly stories as well. What has been passed down over the centuries are ballads and poems. And even if there's some truth to it, there's no real way to know if the stories are truly about the same person. Robin Hood was a common name at the time, and in fact was often used the way we'd refer to a "John Doe" or something like that when someone's real identity isn't known. Records show marriages, convictions, and the like of Robin Hoods in almost every region from back then. Even the supporting characters (Little John, etc) usually only appear in one story, or a small handful of them, which probably indicates that a lot of the stories originated separately. And like the Arthurian stories, later writers attempted to weave them together and make it coherent.
We finally had a chance to watch the movie this weekend. We liked it! Yes, lots of inaccuracies, big and small (out of period helmets, Richard the Lionheart was speaking English instead of French, etc). But overall we though it was a clever alternate origin story for Robin Hood and his men, one that was woven in with one of the existing legends (Robert of Locksley). I have to agree on some of the nit-picks of course, like firing that wet shot, the confusing uselessness of the boats crashing together in the climactic battle, calling the armor "chainmail", and so on. But there were nice little details too that they might easily have overlooked, such as cutting the wine with water at dinner. The year was correct for the death of Richard the Lionheart, and even the circumstances of his death, though historically it took a long time for him to die of his wounds.
It did seem odd, the whole "stone cutter" reference and the inscription hidden under the stone. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for something that was a minor plot point.
