Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Preface to Sutton Edition

Frequently Cited References

General Introduction

1 The Outlawry of Earl Godwin

Timothy S. Jones

2 The Deeds of Hereward

Michael Swanton

3 Eustache the Monk

Thomas E. Kelly

4 The Outlaw’s Song of Trailbaston

Carter Revard

5 Fouke fitz Waryn

Thomas E. Kelly

6 Two Tales of Owain Glyndwr

Mica Gould

7 The Tale of Gamelyn

Stephen Knight

8 The Saga of Án Bow-bender

Shaun F. D. Hughes

9 The Hermit and the Outlaw

Alexander L. Kaufman

10 A Gest of Robyn Hode

Thomas H. Ohlgren

11 Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley

Thomas Hahn

12 From The Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace

Walter Scheps

List of Contributors 470

Index 471

Illustrations

Cover Art. The Robin Hood statue outside Nottingham Castle. Courtesy Allen Wright.

Fig. 1. From La Vie du Eduouard, fol. 5v,Cambridge University Library MS Ee.3.59. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Fig. 2. Map of the Fenland in the time of Hereward. Courtesy: Michael Swanton.

Fig. 3. The Cornish princess giving the cup to Hereward, from the 1865 magazine edition of Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake.

Fig. 4. Eustache the Monk receiving a magic book from the Devil, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS FR 1553, f. 325v. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Fig. 5. An equestrian knight, wielding a long lance, defeats another knight, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 85. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 6. A sea battle, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 146. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 7. Map of Wales and the border counties, from Janet Meisel, Barons of the Welsh Frontier: The Corbet, Pantulf, and Fitz Warin Families, 1066–1272, Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Courtesy of the University of Nebraska Press.

Fig. 8. Battle scene, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 37r. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 9. Siege of a castle, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 51v. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 10. Atrocities perpetrated under King John, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 44v. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 11. Knight battles a serpent, from Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, Rome, 1555.

Fig. 12. A wrestling match, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 58. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Fig. 13. Map of the northern countries, from Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, Rome, 1555.

Fig. 14. A northern seascape, from Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, Rome, 1555.

Fig. 15. Archery practice, from Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, Rome, 1555.

Fig. 16. A forest of pine trees, from Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, Rome, 1555.

Fig. 17. Robyn stode in Bernesdale,/ And lenyd hym to a tre, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 145.

Fig. 18. Sir Richard at the Lee repays his loan to the abbot, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 158.

Fig. 19. Little John, disguised as Reynolde Grenelef, meets the Sheriff, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 168.

Fig. 20. Robin Hood and the high cellarer of St. Mary’s Abbey, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 178.

Fig. 21. Robin rescues the wounded Little John, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 190.

Fig. 22. Sir Richard’s wife begs a boon from Robin, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 196.

Fig. 23. Robin recognizes King Edward, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 203.

Fig. 24. Robyn slewe a full grete harte, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 213.

Fig. 25. Robin Hood’s grave at Kirklees Priory, from John Mathew Gutch, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, vol. 1 (London, Longman, 1847), p. 10

Fig. 26. Frontispiece to Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley. Courtesy of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge.

Fig. 27. Portrait of William Wallace from an engraving of unknown date. Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Fig. 28. The execution of William de Marisco, from Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. 155v. By permission of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

The hardback edition of Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English [ISBN 0–7509–1862–4] was originally published by Sutton Publishing in 1998, followed by the paperback edition in 2000. The revised and expanded edition incorporates a number of changes. In addition to updating the notes and bibliographies, the contributors vetted their chapters and silently corrected minor errors. Also, Timothy S. Jones extensively revised his chapter, The Outlawry of Earl Godwin, by adding a new translation from Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, which recounts some trickster exploits of the rebellious Anglo-Saxon earl.

We have also added two new chapters. To document the rebellion and outlawry of the Welsh patriot Owain Glyndwr (c. 1354–1415), Mica Gould translated excerpts from a fifteenth-century continuation of Randulf Higden’s Polychronicon and William Wynne’s seventeenth-century The History of Wales. Alexander L. Kaufman , in addition, translated the late fifteenth-century poem, The Hermit and the Outlaw, which relates how an unnamed outlaw is inspired during a Good Friday Mass to confess his sins and accept what he mistakenly assumes is an easy penance—to forgo the thing he likes least.

Another change involves the placement of the illustrations. Instead of grouping them together in two gatherings, they have been integrated into the texts they illustrate. For permission to publish photographs and other illustrative materials, I thank the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris; Cambridge University Library; Corpus Christi College Cambridge; the Courtauld Institute of Art; Magdalene College Cambridge; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; and the University of Nebraska Press. I also thank Allen Wright for the cover image and Michael Swanton for the illustration and map in his chapter.

I also thank the members of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies for their continuing support and for their helpful exchanges on the Robin Hood Email Discussion List. Frequent correspondents include Alan T. Gaylord, Thomas Hahn, David Hepworth, Dean Hoffman, Stephen Knight, John Marshall, Helen Phillips, Lois Potter, Lorraine K. Stock, and Allen W. Wright. According to the listserv administrator, John Chandler, ROBINHOOD-L is a private listserv maintained at the University of Rochester. It is open to all those with an interest in Robin Hood, the history of the legend, the uses of the myth, its social, economic, political intersections, and the broad cultural meanings of particular texts and performances, from the Middle Ages to contemporary versions.

I also recommend the following websites: Alan Lupack’s The Robin Hood Project (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/rh/rhhome.stm); Gillian Spraggs’ Outlaws and Highwaymen (http://outlawsandhighwaymen.com); Allen Wright’s Robin Hood: Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood (http://www.boldoutlaw.com); and Barbara Green’s The Outlaw Robin Hood: The Yorkshire Legend (http://www.robinhoodyorkshire.co.uk).

At Parlor Press I thank David Blakesley, who expertly guided the book through the editorial and production processes.

For Judy, Molly and Fraser—again.

Preface to Sutton edition

My interest in medieval outlaws grew out of my undergraduate teaching at Purdue University where I have offered a class on Robin Hood since 1992. While surveying the literary and historical accounts of the Prince of Thieves, my students inevitably asked me: Is Robin Hood the original English outlaw? Turning to Maurice Keen’s The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, J. C. Holt’s Robin Hood, and Dobson and Taylor’s The Rymes of Robyn Hood, we discovered that Robin Hood was but one outlaw who left his mark on Western European literary culture. We found some answers, but, alas, no readily-available texts to read for ourselves. While some translations did exist, such as Joseph Stephenson’s 1875 English version of the Anglo-Norman Fouke fitz Waryn or W. D. Sweeting’s 1895 rendering of De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis, they were either long out-of-date or inaccessible for teaching purposes. Another major work, the French Li Romans de Witasse le Moine, existed only in scholarly editions and a modern French translation. Thus began the five-year-long project to create fresh translations of the early outlaw narratives that lay behind the Robin Hood legend. My principal collaborator, Thomas E. Kelly, undertook the arduous task of translating the Anglo-Norman Fouke fitz Waryn and the Continental French Eustace the Monk. Along the way, we discovered that Michael Swanton at Exeter University had translated Hereward the Wake (Vita Haroldi Regis) in his 1984 Garland book Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, and he graciously allowed us to publish a much-revised version in this collection. As time went on, we discovered seven additional stories, bringing the total to ten tales.

Each of the ten selections is accompanied by its own introduction, notes, and select bibliography. The notes provide identifications of the major dramatis personae, place-names, and relevant historical and cultural backgrounds. An exhaustive index has also been created to facilitate the location of the chief characters, places, episodes and themes.

This volume is not intended for academic specialists, who would no doubt insist on reading the texts in their original languages. Instead, it is intended for those who want to walk by themselves in the footsteps of Hereward, Fouke, Eustache, Robin Hood, and William Wallace, among others.

In academia it is often the custom of the castle for scholars to work in isolation and, like porters at the gate, to guard fiercely their domains from unwelcome guests. By contrast, my experience as compiler and editor of this volume belied the stereotype—one could not find a more generous and affable group of contributors! Our frequent exchanges of information, advice, and encouragement were greatly facilitated by the Internet, which, by the way, is the purpose for which it was designed.

I would also like to express my gratitude to those friends and colleagues who offered help and support at every stage of this project: Ann Astell, Shaun Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong.

Frequently Cited References

Child, Francis J., ed. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. 3, New York, The Folklore Press, 1957. 5 vols.

Dobson, R.B. and J. Taylor, eds. Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. Rev. [3rd] ed. Phoenix Mill, Sutton, 1997.

Holt, J.C. Robin Hood: Revised and Enlarged Edition, Thames and Hudson, 1989.

Keen, Maurice. The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, Revised Paperback Edition, Routledge, 1987. Reissued in 2000 as Second Revised Edition [4th ed.]. All page citations are to the 1987 edition.

Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1994.

Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren, eds. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Middle English Texts Series, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Medieval Institute Publications, 1997.

General Introduction

When most people hear the words medieval outlaw, they think immediately of Robin Hood. What they may not realize is that the basic ingredients of the Robin Hood story—an essentially-good nobleman or commoner falsely accused, outlawed without due process, dispossessed of his titles and land, forced into exile in forest or fen, and only later pardoned—are rooted in stories composed hundreds of years earlier. The Anglo-Saxon Earl Godwin and Hereward the Wake, the French Eustache the Monk, and the Anglo-Norman Fouke fitz Waryn are among the many ancestors of Robin Hood, but their stories are little known.

As this anthology of outlaw tales makes clear, outlaws and outlawry figured prominently in medieval literature, but these works have not received the attention they deserve in our own time. Of the research that has been done, Maurice Keen’s The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, is a pioneering study of the origins and development of the outlaw legend from the twelfth-century Gesta Herwardi to the fifteenth-century poems of Robin Hood and William Wallace.¹ Keen’s main contribution was the identification of a coherent group of outlaw legends, which he called the Matter of the Greenwood in order to differentiate them from the other three types of medieval romance: the matter of Britain (King Arthur), the matter of France (Charlemagne), and the matter of Greece and Rome (the Troy story). In the Matter of the Greenwood the forest is no longer that transitional zone through which Arthurian knights ride from adventure to adventure, stopping briefly to encounter a hermit, damsel, or mysterious challenger, but it takes center stage:

within its bounds their whole drama was enacted. If they ventured outside it, it would only be some brief expedition to avenge wrong done, and to return to it, when right had been restored and whatever sheriff or abbot was the villain of the piece had been brought low.²

In applying the Matter of the Greenwood to the outlaw tales, Keen developed three interrelated themes. First, despite their different origins, spirits, and backgrounds, the tales display similarities in theme and incident too close to be accounted for by mere coincidence. They are, in Keen’s words, the same stories, merely associated by different authors with the name of a different hero.³ Second, the tales grew by a process of accretion involving the addition, fusion or inclusion of story elements. Because versions of the stories were transmitted orally in English, it is not necessary to prove that the authors knew about or had access to the surviving manuscript texts in Latin, Old French, and Anglo-Norman. Despite the fact that the unique text of the Gesta Herwardi is in Latin, others forms of evidence indicate that versions in English, now lost, once existed. Keen has observed that at the time of its compilation, the Book of Ely records that peasants were aware of Hereward’s deeds in the songs they sang.⁴ Even the author of the Gesta Herwardi mentions that he translated into Latin a short account in English by Leofric of Bourne. And after describing how Hereward killed a large bear in Northumberland, he adds women and girls sang about him in their dances, to the great annoyance of his enemies. The exploits of the pirate outlaw Eustache the Monk, especially his capture at sea and execution at the Battle of Sandwich in 1217, were widely known and recounted in the chronicles of John of Canterbury and Walter of Guisborough.⁵ As for Fouke fitz Waryn, who led a rebellion against King John in the Welsh March, we know that an English version existed because John Leland, the sixteenth-century Tudor antiquary, printed excerpts from it.⁶ Third, Keen detected a change in the social world of the early romances (Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke fitz Waryn) and the later fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, with the Tale of Gamelyn providing the transition in the mid-fourteenth century. In the early stories historical rebels are trapped out as heroes of romance,while in Gamelyn and the ballads we have left the world of knights, in the romantic sense, for a world of landlords and peasants, the world in which Robin Hood himself moved."⁷ Like Gamelyn, the Robin Hood ballads were intended for a popular, i.e. peasant, audience expressing their discontent against a corrupt social order, the discontent manifesting itself in a series of violent uprisings, most notably the Peasants Revolt of 1381.⁸

While Keen’s claim of a peasant audience for the Robin Hood ballads was challenged by scholars such as J. C. Holt, causing Keen to change his original position, his book still provides us with a highly readable and informative survey of the medieval outlaw legends.⁹ Directly inspired by The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, this volume assembles for the first time Modern English translations of many of the literary texts discussed by Keen. We have also added five works not covered by him—the Earl Godwin episode from the eleventh-century Life of King Edward, the early fourteenth-century protest poem The Outlaw’s Song of Trailbaston, and the fifteenth-century Icelandic outlaw tale, Áns saga bogsveigis. Although the tales differ in historical time (eleventh to the fifteenth century), in language (Latin, Old French, Anglo-Norman, Icelandic, late Middle English and Middle Scots), and in geographical setting (England, Wales, Scotland, France, Flanders and Spain), they exhibit similarities in character types, story lines, and mind-sets too close to be accounted for by coincidence or common tradition. While external evidence for direct descent is lacking, readers of these tales will readily recognize the repetition of the core ingredients of the outlaw narrative.

To orient the reader in the varied worlds of the medieval outlaw, we have included brief summaries of each of the twelve tales. The summaries not only give the essential background information about the date, authorship, and plot of each tale but also point out the major similarities and differences. Following this section is a discussion of the critical issues that readers might want to consider when reading the tales themselves.

1. Earl Godwin: the Earliest English Outlaw

Godwin, Earl of Wessex, was one of the most prominent figures in late Anglo-Saxon England, and many texts preserve stories of his life. In addition to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most important nearly contemporary text is the Vita Ædwardi Regis qui apud Westmonasterum Requiescit. This prosimetric life of Edward the Confessor is represented here by a translation of the third and fourth prose sections and the third, fourth and fifth poetic sections. These excerpts describe Godwin’s conflict with Edward’s French advisor, Robert of Jumièges, leading up to the confrontation of 1051, Godwin’s banishment, and the earl’s return and reconciliation the following spring. This narrative is the earliest extended account of outlawry in English literature. It introduces a number of themes to the outlaw tradition: the conflict between a Saxon nobleman and corrupt Norman royal officials, false accusations by a powerful cleric, outlawry and banishment of the hero, the hero’s return with an armed force, popular support of the people, and reconciliation with the king. Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, on the other hand, was written over a century after Godwin’s death and preserves not so much historical events as folklore. The stories translated here are all stock types about tricksters and common cleverness that the popular imagination attached to the earl in the polarized culture of post-Conquest England.

2. The Deeds of Hereward

Written in Latin in the mid-twelfth century, the Gesta Herwardi celebrates the heroic revolt of Hereward, son of an Anglo-Saxon of very noble descent, against the Norman bastard, William the Conqueror, who successfully invaded England in 1066. Initially exiled to Flanders by his father and King Edward the Confessor for provoking strife, he returned to England after the Conquest to avenge the death of his brother, to reclaim his father’s estates at Bourne, and to lead a rebellion against King William at Ely. Unlike the Vita Ædwardi Regis, the Gesta develops fully the outlaw narrative and establishes the character-types, plot elements, and themes seen in subsequent stories. He lives in the forests and fens of East Anglia; he forms a band of fugitives, the condemned and disinherited; he is supported by the people who celebrate his exploits in song; he wields a deadly sword and bow; he uses disguises and trickery to reconnoitre, harass, and confuse the enemy; he is captured and imprisoned but is rescued by his faithful companions; and, in the end, he receives the king’s pardon and reclaims his lands and possessions.

3. Eustache the Monk

Another historical outlaw is Eustache the Monk (c. 1170–1217), son of Bauduin Busquet, a peer of the Boulonnais in northern France. Surviving in a single manuscript written between 1223 and 1284, the 2307-verse romance in Old French recounts the adventures of the French knight, monk, sorcerer, outlaw, mercenary, and mariner, who is unjustly outlawed by Renaud de Dammartin, the Count of Boulogne. After travels in Spain, where it is said that he studied necromancy in Toledo, Eustache becomes a monk at the Benedictine abbey of Saint Samer near Boulogne. When his father is murdered by Hainfrois de Heresinghen, Eustache abruptly leaves his religious vocation in order to seek justice against his father’s killer. After a series of events in which Eustache’s champion loses a judicial duel, and Eustache himself, now the count’s seneschal, disobeys a direct order, he is accused of financial irregularities by his enemy Hainfrois. Summoned to give an account of himself, Eustache, suspecting treachery, refuses to appear and instead flees to the forests of the Boulonnais where he begins his career as an outlaw. Because he is vastly outnumbered by the count’s knights and men-at-arms, Eustache is forced to rely upon stealth, deception, and daring tricks to elude capture and to wreak his revenge. Donning seventeen different disguises, Eustache terrorizes the count by burning his mills, stealing his horses, and mutilating and killing his men. Several of these exploits closely resemble episodes in later outlaw tales—the capture and release of the Count of Boulogne paralleling Robin’s capture of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Gest and the game of truth or consequences in which those who tell the truth are allowed to keep their money, while those who lie are robbed. Eustache is eventually captured by the count, only to be rescued by William de Fiennes. Escaping to England, he offers his services to King John, who supplies him with thirty ships to rove the Channel Islands and the coast of France. Because the Count of Boulogne became the ally of King John against King Philip Augustus, Eustache again switches sides and joins the cause of Prince Louis who has plans to invade England. As the commander of the French fleet, Eustache is captured and beheaded at the battle of Sandwich in 1217.

4. The Outlaw’s Song of Trailbaston

The Song of Trailbaston was written about 1305 and exists in a single copy produced around 1341 by a scribe who lived and worked in Ludlow in southern Shropshire. It is a passionate protest by a man who claims to have been wrongly indicted before the royal Trailbaston Justices, and to be living now as an outlaw in the Greenwood of Belregard. He boasts to have fought for the king in Flanders, Scotland, and Gascony, presents himself as an expert archer who has practiced that skill in the forest (which may hint at deer-poaching), implies that he has considerable knowledge of legal matters, and claims he has many friends whom he wants to visit. He ends by inviting all men who, like him, have suffered from these new statutes and these unjust judges to join him in the woods where they can live in freedom and not be mistreated by the evil and bullying royal officials. Thus he presents himself exactly as Robin Hood is presented to us: a virile but virtuous man who, in having been wronged, is at the mercy of a powerful and unscrupulous gang of legal crooks who have the king’s power behind them. Again, like Robin Hood, he would like nothing better than to avenge himself on those who have mistreated him. Study of the poem’s scribe and milieu points to a connection with the nobles of Richard’s Castle just south of Ludlow, as well as to a family scandal of 1304–06 in which the lady of the castle poisoned her husband and was indicted before the judges of the Trailbaston courts who are named and execrated in the poem. Blessed with royal connections, she was subsequently pardoned through the intercession of Prince Edward, but her chamberlain—associated with her both in her husband’s death and a subsequent murder—was outlawed for a time before his later pardon. This chamberlain may have composed the poem while outlawed, perhaps hiding out on an Irish manor called Belregard.

5. Fouke fitz Waryn

Surviving in a single manuscript dating from about 1330, Fouke fitz Waryn is written in Anglo-Norman prose, though scholars believe that it is based on a lost thirteenth-century poem on the same subject. Another version in Middle English alliterative verse is also lost save for some excerpts in a sixteenth-century synopsis by John Leland. Like Eustache the Monk, Fouke fitz Waryn is also set in the time of King John, and the outlaw narrative is but a part of the larger tapestry of complex dynastic and political relations stretching back to the Norman Conquest. The first third of the romance traces the history of the Welsh March from the time when William the Conqueror tried to pacify the Welsh borders by settling there three prominent Norman families—the Fitz Aleyns, Waryn de Metz, and the Peverels—to the time of King Henry I when the Fitz Waryn’s ancestral home, Whittington, is given to Roger de Powys. This loss of property sets the stage for the last two-thirds of the romance in which Fouke fitz Waryn III tries to regain his inheritance through vengeance against his family’s enemies. The outlaw narrative consists of the now familiar elements: when King John refuses to return his lands and titles, Fouke renounces his homage and leaves the court; after killing fourteen of the king’s knights, he is outlawed and flees to Brittany, only later returning to England, where he hides in the forests, assembles a gang of followers, dons various disguises, and plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the king’s agents. After a four-year career (1200–1203) of outlawry and rebellion, Fouke eventually wins back his lands and titles. In addition to the outlaw narrative and the largely factual history of the Welsh March, there is a third layer of fairy romance involving battles with giants, serpents, and dragons.

6. Two Tales of Owain Glyndwr

Although Owain Glyndwr (c. 1354–1415) was a historical figure, histories and legends have so grown around him that little is known about Glyndwr himself. In English literature Glyndwr is best known from William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I—a text based on the pro-English Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed. Historically, however, like Fouke Fitz Waryn, Gamelyn, and several other outlaws in this volume, Glyndwr’s outlawry began over a land dispute. In response to unfair treatment, Glyndwr led a rebellion against English rule beginning in 1400. Over the next few years, he gained enormous success in his efforts and eventually joined Lord Percy and Edmund Mortimer in the civil war against Henry IV. When Glyndwr lost the support of his Scottish and French allies and was betrayed by Welsh noblemen, his fight was ultimately unsuccessful. His rebellion, however, became the stuff of legend in the centuries after his death. The two texts included here are a fifteenth-century continuation of Randulf Higden’s Polychronicon and William Wynne’s seventeenth-century The History of Wales. These two texts show the elaboration of Glyndwr’s legend, and in turn imply the development of others, over a period of a century and a half. Although the Polychronicon continuation shows several similarities with other outlaw tales, the tone and subject matter remains historical. By the time of Wynne’s text, Glyndwr’s tale had been amplified—he is said to possess magical abilities and was depicted as the hero of the continuing racial tension between the Welsh and the English. Taken together, the Polychronicon continuation and Wynne’s The History of Wales represent the process of transforming history into legend.

7. The Tale of Gamelyn

The Tale of Gamelyn tells how the youngest of three brothers is deprived by his greedy oldest brother of the inheritance that his dying father wanted to leave to his baby son. When Gamelyn comes to maturity he realizes how he has been wronged and begins to exert himself, deploying both his great physical strength and the loyalty of his father’s steward, Adam. In spite of various successes, however, including winning a wrestling tournament and beating up a group of monks and abbots, Gamelyn and Adam are outlawed through his brother’s manipulation of the legal system. They are welcomed by the mysterious king of the outlaws, who is soon pardoned and leaves the outlaw band under Gamelyn’s control. Gamelyn’s second brother, Sir Ote, has gone surety for him at court, and the evil oldest brother plans to destroy them both. But with his faithful band of outlaws Gamelyn bursts into the court, seizes the judge’s place, and proceeds to hang the judge, brother and the whole jury—after which he is pardoned by the king and spends the rest of his life in honor as a warden of the royal forest. The Tale of Gamelyn has survived only because it found its way into one of the versions of the Canterbury Tales. As a result, it was then recopied many times, and also circulated in print. Many think Chaucer planned to use the story as a basis for an unwritten tale, perhaps for the Yeoman or even as the Cook’s second tale after his first was interrupted for indecency. There is also the intriguing question about whether the king of the outlaws is a reference to Robin Hood—there are some phrases used when Gamelyn stands and scans the forest that seem deliberately reminiscent of the opening of early ballads about the famous outlaw.

8. The Saga of Án Bow-bender

In its surviving form Áns saga is a fifteenth-century example of a genre called the Fornaldar sögur Norðurlanda (Histories of the Early Period of the Northern Lands), and has become associated with a group of sagas including Ketils saga hængs and Örvar-Odds saga set in the northern Norwegian district of Hrafnista. But there exists an earlier Latin version of the story from the early thirteenth century in Book 6, chapter 4 of Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, which suggests that the stories surrounding Án are of some antiquity. Much of Áns saga deals with his running conflict with King Ingjaldur of Naumdælafylki. The king uses the excuse that Án, in helping him achieve victory in a dynastic struggle, has killed his two half brothers. As a result, King Ingjaldur declares Án an outlaw throughout all Norway. Suspicious of the king, Án makes his escape to the forest. After defeating another forest outlaw, Án takes up with a wealthy widow and they are soon married and run four large farmsteads in the forest. All the local people take Án as their leader and, in these surroundings, he enjoys popular support. Grímur, Án’s nephew, comes to the forest and becomes his most trusted companion. Various of the king’s retainers, either on their own or with the encouragement of the king, try to capture Án, but they are either humiliated and returned to the king or executed on the spot when their treachery becomes apparent. On one occasion Án calls an assembly of his followers in the forest to pass judgment on the king’s emissary suggesting some kind of outlaw community. There are numerous comparisons that might be made between Áns saga and the stories of Hereward (feats of strength at an early age, Án’s wife Jórunn and Hereward’s wife Tunfrida), and Gamelyn (feats of strength at an early age, the relationship of Án and his brother Þórir compared to that of Gamelyn and his brother). And, like Robin Hood and William Cloudesley of Adam Bell, Án is a master shot with bow and arrow. Among Án’s other exploits are his prowess at wrestling, first in his match against Björn in the king’s court and then against Garan the forest outlaw. In a final battle with King Ingjaldur, Án is left for dead and his farms destroyed. But he does survive and return to take possession of his forest properties after which time he and the king keep their distance. Án’s son Þórir will eventually kill Ingjaldur and marry the king’s sister, Ása. Four generations later, one of Án’s descendants will be an important original settler in the north of Iceland.

9. The Hermit and the Outlaw

Surviving in two manuscripts both from the second half of the fifteenth century, The Hermit and the Outlaw is a poem that has been virtually ignored for the better part of a century. The narrative of the tale, which can be viewed as both an outlaw narrative and an exemplum, centers on two brothers, one a bold outlaw, the other a devout hermit. On Good Friday the Outlaw sees many going to church, and so he follows them and confesses his sins to the vicar; however he refuses all forms of penance. The vicar asks the Outlaw what he despises, and the outlaw answers, water, and so for his penance the outlaw is to abstain from drinking water for one day. The outlaw soon becomes thirsty, and encounters three women: the first with a water can on her head, the second with a water-dish in her hand, and the third pumping water at a well. The outlaw, realizing he cannot drink water, slits his arm and drinks his own blood so as to quench his thirst. Angels descend from the sky and then take him to heaven. The Outlaw’s brother, seeing this, decides that outlawry is a quick pass to heaven, but an angel persuades him that that is not the case. The vicar and the Hermit inter the body, and the Hermit remains pious until his death, when angels descend and lead him to salvation. While the Outlaw is not named, both he and the story share unique narrative qualities with other outlaw tales.

10. A Gest of Robyn Hode

The best-known medieval outlaw is of course Robin Hood, but, as the Gest depicts him, he bears little resemblance to his modern images in film, television, and fiction. The medieval Robin Hood is a yeoman, not the gentrified Earl of Huntington or Loxley; his base of operations is Barnsdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire, not Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire; his gang, consisting of Little John, Will Scarlok, and Much the miller’s son, operates without Friar Tuck and Maid Marian. And the gang itself, driven by revenge and self-defense, commit real crimes, ranging from deer-poaching, highway robbery and extortion to homicide. Our sympathies, however, are totally on the side of the good outlaws as they punish the avaricious abbot of St Mary’s York and the treacherous and corrupt Sheriff of Nottingham. The narrative, which is arranged in eight parts or fyttes, consists of five main episodes: Robin’s rescue of the impoverished knight, Sir Richard at the Lee, by lending him £400 to save his property; Robin’s punishment of the abbot by stealing £800 from his courier; Little John’s revenge against the sheriff by stealing his money, silver, and his cook; Robin’s meeting, reconciliation, and service with King Edward; and Robin’s untimely death by the hands of his evil kinswoman, the Prioress of Kirkley Abbey. The Gest is not only the longest surviving poem on Robin Hood but also one of the earliest. Although the 1824-verse poem arranged in 456 four-line stanzas survives in seven printed texts of the sixteenth century, the poem was composed earlier in the mid-to-late fifteenth century. To further complicate matters, the surviving printed text is thought to be a compilation of some fourteenth-century works along with material of the poet’s own devising. Among these sources must be counted The Deeds of Hereward, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke fitz Waryn.

11. Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley

Adam Bell and his associates in crime, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley, were legendary outlaws whose recorded exploits extend back almost to the time of the earliest Robin Hood texts. Poetical accounts were circulated as early as the 1530s, and ballads and chapbooks celebrating these outlaws were published regularly through the end of the seventeenth century. The surviving story falls into three parts: William decides to leave the forest in order to visit with his wife and children in Carlisle. There he is betrayed by an old woman of his own household; after a desperate and bloody fight, he is captured and sentenced to death. In the second part, Adam and Clim rescue William from the gallows and, in the course of their spectacular escape, kill several hundred officials and citizens of Carlisle. Safe in the forest once again, William convinces his companions to seek pardon directly from the king. The monarch wishes at first to seize the outlaws, but his queen intervenes and obtains pardon for them, before the king learns the full extent of their recent crimes. William offers to redeem himself and his fellows though a daring escapade, namely shooting an apple from the head of his young son. The skill and mettle of the outlaws convinces the king that they will better serve as his allies than enemies, and the ballad ends with the outlaws happily taking up respectable positions at court. In its narrative style, its level of violence, and its use of stock episodes, Adam Bell distinctly recalls a number of the Robin Hood ballads, as well as other outlaw tales such as William Tell.

12. Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace

Sir William Wallace is perhaps better known as a general or dux bellorum as well as a Scottish patriot and national hero. But his first appearance on the public stage—from the English point of view at least—is as an outlaw, which he remained until his capture and execution in 1305. The primary source of information about Wallace’s life is a poet variously known as Hary, or Blind Harry, or Henry the Minstrel, whose Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace (1482?) chronicles Wallace’s struggle against the English. Much of Hary’s poem deals with Wallace as a military figure who, by his strength of character and by the sheer magnetism of his personality, draws to him thousands of free-lances who form the core of his army. The translated passages, comprising approximately nineteen-hundred lines or more than fifteen percent of the poem, however, ignore Hary’s extensive accounts of pitched battles against the English and focus instead on the more personal causes and consequence of Wallace’s outlawry. The episodes described in these passages often bear a striking resemblance to incidents and motifs found in the other outlaw tales in this volume (e.g., Wallace’s supporters, his skill with bow and sword, his killing of young Selby, his encounter with the potter, his disguise as a woman, his debate over the fish, his betrayal by his mistress, the murder of his beloved, among others), and there is little doubt that Hary fleshed out the historical facts concerning Wallace with material from literary sources, both written and oral.

Models of Outlaw Ideology

To put the twelve tales into a broader critical perspective, we offer the following models of outlaw ideology: the Social Bandit, the Good Outlaw, and the Trickster. While these concepts share certain common features, we will treat them separately.

The Social Bandit

A useful model for studying the outlaw tale is provided by Eric Hobsbawm’s classic study, Bandits. Taking a broad cross-cultural and diachronic approach, Hobsbawm seeks to explain why social banditry is so remarkably uniform a phenomenon throughout the ages and continents.¹⁰ The model that he constructs excludes simple criminals and focuses instead on peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported.¹¹ He demonstrates that social banditry is universally found in agrarian societies, where peasants and landless laborers are ruled, oppressed, and exploited by lords, towns, governments, and lawyers. Often the outlaw’s career is precipitated not by a criminal offense of his own making but by an act of injustice by others, and his main goal is to right the wrongs done to him and his family or people. Sometimes the justice is rough, involving vengeance and retribution. The outlaw is not only invisible due to the frequent use of disguise and trickery but also invulnerable because of his almost mythical prowess with weapons. He is usually not the enemy of the king, who frequently pardons him, but of the local gentry, clergy, or sheriff. If he survives, he returns to his people as an honorable citizen, but if he is killed, it is through treachery, and sometimes a woman is implicated in his capture. Hobsbawn localizes banditry in remote and inaccessible regions such as forests, fens, mountains, waterways, and particularly near highways and trade routes where pre-industrial travel is naturally both slow and cumbrous.¹² While banditry can occur at any moment in history, Hobsbawn identifies those disruptive times that cause tension and crisis, such as war, famine, plague and political chaos. Wars in particular left behind bands of marauders and desperados, making weak or divided civil authorities powerless to control them.¹³ Banditry, however, seldom results in major transformations of society. Instead, it seeks to right wrongs, avenge injustices, and restore the traditional order of things. Some outbreaks, however, may presage genuine revolutionary movements caused by the disruption of an entire society, the rise of new classes and social structures, the resistance of entire communities or peoples against the destruction of its way of life, and the social breakdown that makes the approaching end of a relatively long cycle of history, heralding the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another.¹⁴

While Hobsbawm’s model of the social bandit offers many important insights, it also requires some tailoring to fit the tales in this collection. The most important qualification concerns the social class of the outlaws. None of the twelve outlaw tales in this collection concern peasant heroes. Godwin was Earl of Wessex; Hereward was an Anglo-Saxon of very noble descent; Eustache’s father was senior baron of the Boulonnais; Fouke fitz Waryn descended from Anglo-Norman lords of the Welsh March; Gamelyn’s father was a landed English knight; William Wallace was a Scottish commoner, but certainly not a peasant; and Robin Hood and Adam Bell were yeomen. Furthermore, a distinction should be made between those outlaws who desire genuine revolutionary change (Hereward, William Wallace, and, to a certain extent, Fouke fitz Waryn) and those outlaws who want to right the wrongs done to them, their families, and their friends. The private wrongs in these instances often involve the loss of property, titles and inheritance (Eustache the Monk, Fouke fitz Waryn, and Gamelyn).

The Good Outlaw

Another outlaw model is Ingrid Benecke’s the Good Outlaw.¹⁵ While sharing some of the same features as Hobsbawm’s social bandit, this model draws upon four English medieval literary works—Hereward the Wake, Fouke fitz Waryn, Gamelyn, and A Gest of Robyn Hode. All of the heroes in these stories pose the paradoxical problem of being outlaws, having committed real crimes, but they are admired and supported by the people. Their outlawry does not bring shame upon them, but instead proves them to be superior to their opponents, both in martial prowess and, most important, in moral integrity. As Benecke observes, the moral superiority of the outlaw heroes is highlighted in a number of ways:

either by relating that God honoured them more than others, even working a miracle for them (Hereward, Fulk, Robin Hood), or by describing how the outlaws’ victory over their outnumbering enemies was part of a mission they were destined to fulfill (part of a curse—Gamelyn, or of a prophecy—Fulk), or else by presenting the heroes in such a light that they rightly appear as the judges of their enemies’ crimes (Gamelyn and Robin Hood).¹⁶

In addition to demonstrating the moral superiority of the English outlaw heroes, some of the tales, according to Benecke, defend the knights’ legal rights to reclaim feudal titles, lands, and privileges lost as a result of arbitrary, unjust actions either by the monarch (Hereward, Eustache, Fulk, William Wallace) or the kings’ representatives (Gamelyn, Robin Hood, Adam Bell). As far as the thirteenth-century heroes are concerned, they have a legal right to rebel against a royal tyrant as guaranteed by the provisions contained in Magna Carta. Articles 39 and 52 are especially relevant:

Article 39: No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Article 52: If anyone has been disseised of or kept out of his lands, castles, franchises or his right by us without the legal judgment of his peers, we will immediately restore them to him: and if a dispute arises over this, then let it be decided by the judgment of the twenty-five barons who are mentioned below in the clause for securing the peace.¹⁷

Natural Law

Implicit in Benecke’s treatment of moral and legal superiority is the opposition between natural law and statutory or positive law. According to medieval political theory, man’s law ought to follow the law of nature, which in turn reflected the eternal law of God. By using reason man was able to deduce a body of principles or ethical norms from God’s law that were universal, unchangeable, and morally obligatory.¹⁸ These universal principles—human existence is meaningful, humans possess equal dignity and rights, humans are naturally social and have a moral duty to contribute to society—were a rational ethical ideal forming the foundation for existing legal systems and the standard by which they were judged. Governments exist as the means of fulfilling the social and political nature of man and achieving the common good.

Conformity to the order in nature results in harmony, virtue, and happiness, but violation of natural law results in disorder, evil, and unhappiness.¹⁹ As long as the legal authority is legitimately obtained, man is obligated to obey his superiors or temporal rulers. But, if a civil law violates natural law, man is not obligated to obey it. The justification of civil disobedience is contained in St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia:

Man is bound to obey secular Rulers to the extent that the order of justice requires. For this reason if such rulers have no just title to power, but have usurped it, or if they command things to be done which are unjust, their subjects are not obliged to obey them.²⁰

Although Aquinas elsewhere condemned tyrannicide because it may result in some worse kind of oppression, he recognized that the government of a tyrant cannot be of long duration because those who are kept down by fear will rise against their rulers . . .²¹

The influence of these ideas on the practical politics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was tremendous, as is apparent from sources like petitions to parliament, contemporary poems and songs of complaint, and popular manifestoes at times of rebellion such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s rising in Kent in 1450.²²

The Trickster

The third model of the outlaw to be considered here is the Trickster, which as defined by Paul Radin is one of the world’s oldest expressions of counter-culture:

Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.²³

While Radin’s examples are drawn from Winnebago Indian mythology, it is clear that the concept of The Trickster, like the Good Outlaw, is cross-cultural, examples of which can be located in many different cultures throughout history. For example, Carl G. Jung, in the afterword to Radin’s book, brings us back to the Middle Ages when he notices the same contradictoriness and reversal of the hierarchic order in the medieval jester, the ancestor of the modern-day circus clown. The jester, the clown, and the fool all belong to the world of carnival with its spectacles, celebrations, and rituals, such as the Feast of Fools, Feast of Asses, and the Boy Bishop in the Church itself or the play-games and mock events in agricultural fairs and other civil and social celebrations.²⁴ The fullest account of this carnivalesque spirit of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, in which a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.²⁵ These festive celebrations not only offered temporary liberation from the prevailing truth, but also marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.²⁶ The traditional order was in fact frequently reversed, producing what has been called the topsy-turvy world in which low is high, and high is low, bottom is top, and top is bottom.²⁷

Reversal of position in the moral and social hierarchy also epitomizes the outlaw tale, in which the lowly wolf’s head paradoxically is shown to be superior to the very authorities who should uphold the law. A striking example of reversal occurs in the Tale of Gamelyn when Gamelyn violently ejects the corrupt judge from his bench, breaking his jaw and arm, and assumes his position. He then sentences the judge and the twelve bribed members of the jury to death, and they along with the sheriff and Gamelyn’s evil brother are all hanged. As Keen observes, the only champions of justice are those who are, officially, criminals.²⁸

To right the wrongs done to him and others, the outlaw must first resort to subterfuge or disguise. The tales display four different types of disguise, and they are often used in combination: alteration of physical appearance; voice or language spoken; clothing; and gender. To confuse the enemy, several of the outlaws actually alter their physical appearance. When Hereward is in exile in Cornwall, he rescues a Cornish princess from being forcibly married to a king’s son and returns her unharmed to her betrothed in Ireland. To infiltrate the wedding party in Cornwall he changes his physical appearance by using a lotion which changed his blond hair to black and his youthful beard to a ruddy color. John de Rampaigne, Fouke fitz Waryn’s chief lieutenant, takes the more drastic step of swallowing an herb that causes his face to puff up and discolor so that even his own companions scarcely knew him. Dressed in poor clothes and carrying juggling equipment, he then went to Whittington to spy on Fouke’s enemy, Moris fitz Roger. John later disguises himself as an Ethopian minstrel by staining his hair and body jet black. To make their disguises more believable, several of the outlaws even alter their voices: when he deliberately speaks bad Latin in King John’s court. Similarly, after defeating the pirate Red Reiver on the high sea, William Wallace speaks to him in the Latin tongue.

The chief means of altering one’s appearance is of course by changing costume or clothing. In Eustache the Monk alone, seventeen different disguises, often in conjunction with a trick, are used to deceive the enemy. Interestingly, a number of these disguises are also used in other tales, suggesting either a well-known common tradition or direct influence. In four of the tales, for instance, the outlaw disguises himself as a monk or priest (Hereward, Eustache, Fouke, and Wallace). Three tales use the potter disguise (Hereward, Eustache, and Wallace, as well as Robin Hood in the ballad and play, Robin Hood and the Potter). Finally, in several of the tales, the hero changes gender to fool the enemy. Hereward gains entrance into his ancestral home at Bourne by wearing a maidservant’s cloak under which he hides his mail-coat and helmet. William Wallace twice disguises himself as a woman, once as a spinner after he killed the constable’s son in Dundee and, again, when he dons his lover’s gown and coverchiefs to escape from a trap laid by the English. And the most outrageous example of all however unfolds when Eustache disguises himself as a prostitute and seduces one of the count’s men!

The tales also abound in what we can call strategic tricks involving stealth and deception designed to achieve various ends: to reconnoiter or gain information; to gain entry; to confuse the enemy; to entrap the enemy; to effect a rescue; to effect an escape; and to harass or rob the enemy. In order to seek peace with the count, Eustache, disguised as a monk, audaciously sits down next to him and offers to intercede on his own behalf; upon being identified by a man-at-arms, Eustache escapes with one of the count’s favorite horses. In Adam Bell, in order to gain entry into the town of Carlisle, Adam and Clim trick the porter at the locked city gate by pretending to be messengers from the king. Knowing that the porter cannot read, they show him a false letter and the king’s seal. After the gullible porter lets them in, they rescue William of Cloudsley from the gallows. The trick of reversing the horses’ shoes to confuse the pursuers is used by three outlaws—Hereward, Eustache, and Fouke—so it could not be discovered from their tracks where they were or where they were going (Hereward, chap. 26). Eustache so confuses the count that he follows the horse-tracks back to the smith who reversed the shoes! The trick of using bait to lure the enemy into a vulnerable position occurs in two tales. Disguised as a charcoal-burner, Fouke encounters King John and three knights. When the king asks him if he has seen a stag or doe pass by, Fouke replies that he has just seen a long-antlered stag and offers to lead the king deeper into the forest to find it. Upon arriving at the thicket, Fouke and his men rush out and capture the king. The sheriff in the Gest is captured in a similar manner when Little John, disguised as Reynold Greenleaf, promises him a right fair hart and 140 other sharp-antlered deer; the master-hart turns out to be Robin Hood himself who is accompanied by 140 men armed with sharp arrows—a perfect case of the hunter hunted.

The Appeal of the Outlaw Tale

A variety of explanations can be offered to account for the appeal of the outlaw tale. One psychological theory suggests that the tales provide a safety valve for the channeling and release of aggressive impulses in the reader. We imaginatively identify with the outlaw, letting him perform the antisocial behavior in our place, and in the process we feel relief as if we performed the acts ourselves. To gain our admiration, however, the outlaw must possess the redeeming qualities of loyalty, courage, and cleverness; he must also be the victim of a corrupt legal or political system; and he must not engage in indiscriminate murder and mayhem but right the wrongs done to him, his family and friends, and his country. Another explanation sees the outlaw as a cultural hero who challenges the rigidity of a closed political or economic system. By breaking taboos and violating societal norms, the outlaw not only reveals the bad statutory laws but also reaffirms those values, such as the natural laws of self-preservation, freedom, equality, and justice, which have been subverted. Yet another explanation, and perhaps the most important one, is that the outlaw tales are just good stories with sturdy and honest heroes, vile villains, adventurous chases, daring deeds, bold disguises and tricks, and lots of narrative suspense.

Notes

¹ Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, Revised Paperback Edition, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

² Keen, p. 2.

³ Keen, p. 65.

⁴ Keen, p. 13.

⁵ Keen, p. 61.

⁶ Keen, p. 41.

⁷ Keen, p. 79.

⁸ Keen, pp. 160–61.

⁹ The debate about the social class of the audience of the Robin Hood legend was initially waged in the journal Past and Present from 1958 to 1961. The articles have been conveniently reprinted in R. H. Hilton, Peasants, Knights and Heretics, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 221–72. In brief, R. H. Hilton and Maurice Keen argued that the Robin Hood poems reflected peasant unrest over rents, services, and social status that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. J. C. Holt and T. H. Aston counter-argued that the poems, to use Holt’s words, have nothing at all to do with the rift between landlord and peasant (p. 243), but instead they are the literature of the county landowners, of knights and gentry (p. 244). Holt concluded that the ballads were disseminated in the halls of the gentry’s country households where the entertainment was aimed not only at the master but also at the members and the staff (p. 249). Keen’s views were subsequently published in his first edition of The Outlaws of Medieval Legend in 1961, while Holt’s thesis was elaborated in his 1982 edition of Robin Hood. However, in the revised edition of 1977, Keen recanted his original position, throwing his support to Holt. In spite of Keen’s modification of his original views, the change only affects two of the fourteen chapters and, as a result, much of his analysis of the outlaw tales themselves is still valid. For a discussion of the audience of the Robin Hood ballads, in which I differ with both Keen and Holt, see the introduction to A Gest of Robyn Hode.

¹⁰ Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, New York, Delacorte Press, 1969, p. 11.

¹¹ Hobsbawm, p. 13.

¹² Hobsbawm, p. 16.

¹³ Hobsbawm, p. 18.

¹⁴ Hobsbawm, pp. 18–19.

¹⁵ Ingrid Benecke, Der gute Outlaw: Studien zu einem literarischen Typus im 13. Und 14. Jahrhundert, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1973.

¹⁶ Benecke, p. 157.

¹⁷ Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents 1189–1327 Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 316–24.

18 Paul E. Sigemund, Natural Law in Political Thought, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Winthrop Publishers, 1971, pp. vii-viii.

¹⁹ Sigemund, p. 7.

²⁰ A.P. D’Entreves, ed., Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1948, p. 179.

²¹ Dino Bigongiari, ed., The Political Ideas of St Thomas Aquinas, New York, Hafner, 1966, p. 195.

²² Edward Powell, Law and Justice, p. 32 in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, Rosemary Horrox, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1994; rpt. 1996.

²³ Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956, p. ix. See also Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms, eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1993.

²⁴ Radin, pp. 196–98.

²⁵ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 4.

²⁶ Bakhtin, p. 10.

²⁷ Bakhtin, p. 11.

²⁸ Keen, Outlaws of Medieval Legend, p. 92.

1 The Outlawry of Earl Godwin

Introduced and translated by Timothy S. Jones

Godwin, Earl of Wessex, was man of obscure origins who navigated the convoluted politics of early eleventh-century England to become the most powerful figure in the kingdom. Cnut the Great awarded him the earldom in 1017, and by the time of the Norman Conquest his sons controlled all of southern and western England. Harold, his eldest surviving son, was powerful enough to have himself declared king upon the death of Edward the Confessor. While this rise to prominence may seem an unlikely source for an outlaw legend, the competing interests for the control of England at the time have left us with complex