This comprehensive collection testifies to the enduring popularity of outlaw tales in medieval and early modern England, the legend of Robin Hood foremost among them. As figures of mischief, guile, anticlerical sentiment, and resistance to unjust authority, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and "merry men" such as Little John, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet featured in numerous popular medieval and early modern ballads, plays, and carnivals, even garnering mentions in chronicles and legal records. This collection charts the evolution of this endlessly generative figure and his legend as both were adapted to various historical contexts and narrative mediums from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. For greater literary context, it also provides historical parallels of the character in medieval English outlaw traditions, such as the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman Hereward the Wake, the twelfth-century French nobleman Eustache the Monk, and the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman ancestral romance hero Fouke le Fitz Waryn.



Stephen Thomas Knight was until September 2011 Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University in the School of English, Communications and Philosophy; and is currently a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Honorary Research. Thomas H. Ohlgren is Emeritus Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he has taught since 1969 when he received his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. His scholarship focuses on the earliest surviving written accounts of Robin Hood, ranging from the chronicles of Andrew of Wynton (c. 1420), John Bower (c. 1440), John Major (1521) and Richard Grafton (1569), to the early ballads and plays, which include Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Potter, the Gest of Robyn Hode as well as several short plays. Ohlgren is less interested in finding the original, historical figure, which he believes does not exist, than in tracing the evolution of the medieval outlaw tale, such as Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk, and Fulk fitz Warin, which contain characters, plot elements, and themes too close to be accounted for by coincidence.



Illustrations



General Introduction



The Chronicler's Robin Hood



Introduction



From Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Chronicle (c. 1420)



From Walter Bower's Continuation of John of Fordun's Scotichronicon (c. 1440)



From John Major's Historia Majoris Britanniae (1521)



From Richard Grafton's Chronicle at Large (1569)



Early Ballads and Tales



Robin Hood and the Monk



Robin Hood and the Potter



A Gest of Robin Hood



Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne



The Tale of Gamelyn



Robyn and Gandelyn



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



Robin Hood Plays



Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham



Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter



Introduction to the Munday Plays



The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, by Anthony Munday



From The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington, by Anthony Munday



Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers



Later Ballads



Introduction



Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar



The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield



Robin Hood and Little John



Robin Hood and Allin a Dale



Robin Hood and Maid Marian



Robin Hood and Will Scarlet



Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham



Robin Hood Rescues Three Young Men



Little John a Begging



Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage



Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow



Robin Hood and the Bishop



Robin Hood's Golden Prize



Robin Hood and Queen Catherin



Robin Hood's Fishing



The Death of Robin Hood



A True Tale of Robin Hood



Robin Hood and the Pedlars



Other Outlaw Tales in Prose Translations



Hereward the Wake, translated by Michael Swanton



From Eustache the Monk, translated by Thomas E. Kelly



From Fouke le Fitz Waryn, translated by Thomas E. Kelly