Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales

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.