The deep archetypes of King Arthur and the knights, Robin Hood, and Merlin

What follows is either a deep archetypal insight, or more likely just my headcanon, concerning some subjects I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking-about. 

While I love the Big Picture; I have always had some reservations about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - perhaps because of their deployment by the Plantagenet and Tudor aristocracy in a self-justifying, self-aggrandizing, sort of way. 

I mean, when all is said and done, Arthur is a king, and they're all knights!

And the stories are often (at least superficially) about fighting on horseback, ransoms, castles, hunting, courtly love, points of honour - and other such nasty or ridiculous (and typically Norman) stuff. 

To complement this as any kind of myth for England and the English; it is necessary to give primacy to Robin Hood and his Merry Men. 

These represent to me something like the Yeomanry and Craftsmen of the English and "Welsh" (Saxons and Celts). Certainly there was, for many generations, a kind of obsession - an insatiable hunger - among ordinary English people for songs and tales of Robin Hood. 

This archetype is, however, rather poisoned by the gentrification of making Robin an Earl, and having the story rotate around his supposed loyalty and obedience to his feudal monarch King Richard I ("Lionheart") - who was a a pretty typical absentee Francophile militaristic Norman oppressor. 

I see Robin and Co.'s "outlawry" as - negatively - a protest against the Norman Yoke and especially the vile Forest Laws imposed on the Anglo Saxons; but positively as a kind of restoration of the freedom and animism of a hunter-gatherer life. 

The other great archetypal character is Merlin the wizard - whose greatest resonance is as a kind of shaman-priest, and a link between the pagan and Christian. 

I suppose Merlin to have spent most of his time in the forest, nearby the Merry Men - In my mind replacing Friar Tuck in the role of spiritual teacher, advisor, seer, and magician. 

But, linking the worlds of Arthur and Robin; Merlin might reasonably have been supposed to spend some time in the court; including the crucial task of arranging the birth of Arthur from suitable hereditary stock - on the basis that, since we apparently must have a King and Knights, these might as well be Good ones.