Reading between the lines of revisionist history, Robin Hood is the sequel to Kingdom of Heaven.

Kingdom of Heaven ends with Richard the Lionheart embarking on crusade; Robin Hood begins ten years later, with the consequences.

From blacksmiths to stonemasons, France to England, feudal skirmishes to draft charters.

In Robin Hood, I find it fascinating that Friar Tuck is depicted as a bee keeper. Bernard of Clairvaux is the patron saint of bees, and certain legends suggest that Tuck was once a Benedictine/Cistercian.

From Fiat Lux in Clairvaux Manifesto,

As Holy War developed into a continental corporation, the Germanic Teutonic Knights became an official Order in 1198, operating under the wing of the Hospitallers. Without the aid of Scripture translated for the sake of all people, a frustrated Roman Church leadership launched the Albigensian Crusade in an attempt to quell the Gnostic teachings of the Cathars of France. By 1215, in an age of kings’ ransoms, troubadours’ songs, knightly orders, praying saints, clashing civilizations, and mountains of debt, the Magna Carta was crafted by barons in England and presented to King John at Runnymede. As intellectuals made pilgrimage to the Greco-Arabic philosophies of Spain, a continent covered with Cistercians, Hospitallers (who became more than just keepers of the Hospital of St. John), and Templars (who became more than just keepers of the Temple) got more organized on a number of fronts.

I’d love to see Ridley Scott envision a character around Bernard of Clairvaux: a polymath iconoclast, a seeker of mystical union, a preacher of ideals, a miracle worker, a peace keeper of a continent under siege, a scholar who understood and respected the significance of Jewish, Christian, and Arabic schools, a teacher who saw how ideology could end up idolatry – a leader of leaders who didn’t escape the 12th Century fully unscathed… he was, after all, human.