So who is the real Robin Hood?

Ridley Scott says his new film of Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe, is the most realistic incarnation of the iconic figure.
But who was the real Robin Hood? The first name-checks, dating from the early 13th century, are scattered, mysterious. A bandit calling himself Robin Hood, another, Friar Tuck. In 1377 appears the first allusion in literature, in the poem Piers the Plowman. “I can’t sing the Our Father like the priest, he admits, but I know the rhymes of Robin Hood, and Randolf, Earl of Chester”. An early 15th-century chronicler writes that in the year 1283, in the forests of Barnsdale and Inglewood, Little John and “Robert Hude” were well praised as forest outlaws and all the time they continued “their practices”.
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