Most of the political aspirations and real or imagined machinations of outlaw heroes are related to fundamental notions of equity. The right – assumed where it does not exist – of all members of a society to a reasonable share of its riches and access to its resources, is integral to the rationale of outlaw heroism. Robin Hood's levelling of the wealth disparities of medieval England echoes again and again through the lives, deaths, legends and literature of bandit after bandit. Underlying this are the folkloric conceptions of the commons and of limited good – the common good.

The common good is sometimes found enshrined in legislation (whether observed or not) and sometimes in custom and precedent. It usually consists of a series of obligations and expectations between those who have most and those who have least in a particular society. We see the physical manifestation of these important assumptions in the long and bitter struggles over the enclosure of common lands that were a feature of European societies from the early modern era. Sometimes these tensions are articulated in episodes of social banditry. During the early nineteenth century, the Apulian outlaw hero Vardarelli wrote to the mayors of Atella and Foggia demanding that the traditional peoples' perquisite of gleaning the fields be restored, and that this means of subsistence not be fed to the cattle.