A Re-Reading of the Gest of Robyn Hode

Abstract

This paper re-examines the Gest of Robyn Hode. It is argued here that this is the oldest and most coherent of the Robin Hood ballads, composed about the second quarter or middle of the fourteenth century but first printed in the early sixteenth. It is a single composition turning on four visits to Robin Hood in his forest. Robin, it suggests, inhabits an alternative world with its own morality but which has elements of parody of an aristocratic household. He and his friends can enter this world: but his enemies cannot find it. It is argued that Robin and his men are not yeomen in the fifteenth-century sense of the word, but merely ‘good men’. Nor are they outlaws in a legal sense: they are out of society. The paper suggests that there is nothing in the Gest that a knightly audience would have found attractive - indeed, it represents a gentleman’s nightmare of falling - but attention is drawn to the merry men’s cult of physical strength and it is suggested that the Gest has elements of a soldier’s tale. The Gest is read here as a work of imagination if not actually an elaborate joke; some elements of the Gest were plainly impossible and were meant to amuse. Finally, a tentative suggestion is made as to when and why it was written.