Knight shows how in the late Middle Ages Robin Hood was seen simply as an opponent of centralized law, while the Elizabethans gentrified him to support the aristocracy and to oppose a corrupt Catholic church, and then at the Restoration he came to personify treason against an anointed king. To Walter Scott, Robin was a Saxon freedom fighter, but for Keats he was a vision of an imaginatively freer time. Tennyson and the Georgian poets found in their hero a symbolic escape from oppressive modernity, while Hollywood, at its most vigorous - and elitist - made Robin Hood a doubtful figure of democracy. More recently he has focused forms as disparate as Disney comedy and the historical novel, as well as television versions ranging from the radical-mystical to feminist farce.