THE Robin Hood legend is certainly coming under fire these days. That’s unsurprising, as the last studio big-budget Robin with Russell Crowe had him as a baron who saves England and guarantees it for the other barons.

And, as the Earth’s resources dwindle, we are watching real-life Robin Hoods —  lauded entrepreneurs and their merry band of tech stalwarts, bathed in green —  hiding their ever-increasing gains in tax shelters.

Essentially, they're robbing the state and the poor of the taxes that might help and instead paying rich dividends to corporate board members. Robbin’ hoods indeed — why steal from the rich and give to the poor when you can steal from the poor and give to the rich?

The legend is retold and made more complex in Thieves of the Wood (Jan de Lichte und seine Bande), the Flemish series on Netflix.

It's a reminder that Robin Hood legends appear everywhere there is mass inequality — which is everywhere. They are as prominent in the bandit tales of Italy, which resurface in neorealist films such as Giuseppe De Santis’s No Peace Under the Olive Trees, as in their more modern echoes in films about the James Gang and Bonnie and Clyde, the latter splendidly retold in the African-American variant Queen and Slim.

Thieves of the Wood is an 18th-century tale centred in a small town in northern Belgium near the then major commercial centre of Ghent, where Jan de Lichte is a nobleman conscripted into the Prussian army to fight in the remote regions of Silesia.

He deserts and returns home to find that the town’s mayor has an expert scheme to line his pockets and those of a small band of nobles. The mayor periodically exiles those who cannot pay their bills or who have committed petty crimes, sending them into nearby woods populated by the town’s Roma people. Both groups are now barely allowed through the town gates.

Under cover of a hypocritical morality that applies to the poor but not to the nobles — who hunt young girls for their sexual pleasure — the mayor is gathering together a workforce of exiles who, in order to survive, are to build the road he needs from his town to Ghent. The project will greatly improve trade in the town, with the profits again accruing to the nobles.

De Lichte, all the while pursued by bounty hunters, takes up with a group in the woods and robs a Ghent-bound carriaget filled with gold. But there’s a modern twist. The carriage is also filled with drugs — opium that the nobles are transporting in league with local gangsters, who also traffic in women.

There is a Maid Marion, a printer’s daughter who initially comes to live with de Lichte in the woods but who, appalled at his part in the death of her brother, returns to the city, where she is chastised and beaten with glee by the local prelate.

He is in league with the mayor and exuberantly reinforces the local power structure as he sadistically tortures Jan’s lover for consorting with the devil — those outside the elite who stand in opposition to them.

The series features an incredible resurrection and will need another one if it is to continue for a second season. The most complex character is the sheriff of Nottingham-like bailiff, who at first is appalled by the nobles’ conduct — their slave enterprise and their false conviction and execution of a family blamed for the carriage theft.

Finally, though, he succumbs to the generalised air of corruption that pervades the town and becomes himself an enforcer of the hypocrisy he so clearly sees through.

US critics, some of whom now reduce the act of evaluation to “stream it or skip it,” generally found this series “too complicated” and not worth bothering with. But it’s the complication, the confluence of forces — government, merchants, church and gangsters — that together describe the pattern of power in the town that gives this series its meaning.

There is a pitiful contrast between the small clique of nobles whose sign of power is their ugly and pretentious wigs and the town’s poor, reduced to slave labour, a subsistence existence in the woods and tattered garments.

One could think of contemporary parallels in the US and Europe, with homeless tent cities under the bridges in smog-filled areas and more and more ordinary workers struggling to keep their housing  and not be “consigned to the woods.”

Even housing at the lower end is now being bought up as a sound investment by distantd global hedge-fund managers who quickly jack up the rent, while city elites wall themselves off in mansions and gated areas where the air is clear.

The series meanders somewhat through several episodes before anything like a merry band appears and robs the rich and it ends on a very down note as many of the resisters in the woods are slaughtered.

The contradictions, though, between this version of the Robin Hood myth and earlier, more pristine versions represent the difficulties in the neoliberal era of finding a clear-cut path to opposing accumulated wealth and greed.

Witness the problems of a Jeremy Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders  on the campaign trail in attempting to appropriate even just a bit from the rich to spread the wealth throughout the country. Like de Lichte, they are opposed by a confluence of corporate, political party, government and media forces.

The contradictions aid in presenting an accurate, if occasionally flawed, version of Robin Hood or de Lichte which resound today.