Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales 9780367224905, 9780367751098, 9780429275180

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper
3. Food, Feasts, and Temperance: The Social Contracts of “Mete and Drink” in The Tale of Gamelyn
4. Bread Without Onions: Winning the Crusades through French Cuisine in Honorat Bovet’s 1398 Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun [Apparition of Master Jean de Meun]
5. Of Courtesy and Community: Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode
6. The Preparation and Consumption of Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender Identity in Selected Premodern Texts and Examples of the Robin Hood Cinematic Canon
7. “So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet”: When the Greenwood Consumes the Outlaw
8. Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context: Poor Knights, Disguised Kings, and Romance Parody in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode
9. The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow: The Question of Courtesy in Late Medieval King and Commoner Narratives
10. Acting Out(Law): Feasts, Outlawry, and Identity Constructions in Two Shakespearean Comedies
11. Early Modern Fishing Practices and Seafood Culture in Robin Hood’s Fishing
12. “Bread With Danger Purchased”: Hunger, Plenty, and the Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage
Index

Citation preview

Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales

In Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales editors Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo gather eleven original studies examining scenes of food and feasting in premodern outlaw texts ranging from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries and forward to their cinematic adaptations. Along with fresh insights into the popular Robin Hood legend, these essays investigate the intersections of outlawry, food studies, and feasting in Old English, Middle English, and French outlaw narratives, Anglo-Scottish border ballads, early modern ballads and dramatic works, and cinematic medievalism. The range of critical and disciplinary approaches employed, including history, literary studies, cultural studies, food studies, gender studies, and film studies, highlights the inherently interdisciplinary nature of outlaw narratives. The overall volume offers an example of the ways in which examining a subject through interdisciplinary, cross-geographic and cross-temporal lenses can yield fresh insights; places canonic and well-known works in conversation with lesser-known texts to showcase the dynamic nature and cultural influence and impact of premodern outlaw tales; and presents an introductory foray into the intersection of literary and food studies in premodern contexts which will be of value and interest to specialists and a general audience, alike. Melissa Ridley Elmes  is Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University. Her research engages the literatures and cultures of the premodern British Isles and North Atlantic world. Kristin Bovaird-Abbo is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado. She teaches and researches medieval language and literature, particularly Middle English and Arthurian studies, with a particular interest in the effects of gender and class on the Arthurian character of Gawain in late Middle English romances.

Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture Edited by Lesley A. Coote (University of Hull) and Alexander L. Kaufman (Ball State University) Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture examines the nature, function, and context of the outlaw and the outlawed — people, spaces, practices — in the pre-modern world, and in its modern representations. By its nature, outlawry reflects not only the outlawed, but the forces of law which seek to define and to contain it. Throughout the centuries, a wide and ever-changing, and yet ever familiar, variety of outlaw characters and narratives has captured the imagination of audiences both particular and general, local and global. This series seeks to reflect the transcultural, transgendered and interdisciplinary manifestations, and the different literary, political, socio-historical, and media contexts in which the outlaw/ed may be encountered from the medieval period to the modern. Series Advisory Board: Sayre N. Greenfield (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg) Kevin J. Harty (La Salle University) Valerie B. Johnson (University of Montevallo) Stephen Knight (University of Melbourne) John Marshall (University of Bristol) Joseph F. Nagy (University of California, Los Angeles) Thomas H. Ohlgren (Emeritus, Purdue University) W. Mark Ormrod (University of York) Helen Phillips (Cardiff University) Graham Seal (Curtin University) Linda Troost (Washington and Jefferson College) Charles van Onselen (University of Pretoria) 5 Capturing the Pícaro in Words Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid Konstantin Mierau 6 Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon Edited by Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman 7 Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales Edited by Alexander L. Kaufman and Penny Vlagopoulos For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Outlaws-in-Literature-History-and-Culture/book-series/OUTLAWS

Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales

Edited by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367224905 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367751098 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429275180 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon LT Std by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

vii xi 1

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES AND KRISTIN BOVAIRD-ABBO

2 Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper

13

ERIC R. CARLSON

3 Food, Feasts, and Temperance: The Social Contracts of “Mete and Drink” in The Tale of Gamelyn

30

RENÉE WARD

4 Bread Without Onions: Winning the Crusades through French Cuisine in Honorat Bovet’s 1398 Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun [Apparition of Master Jean de Meun]

55

SYLVIA GROVE

5 Of Courtesy and Community: Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode

75

SHERRON LUX

6 The Preparation and Consumption of Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender Identity in Selected Premodern Texts and Examples of the Robin Hood Cinematic Canon

93

LORRAINE KOCHANSKE STOCK

7 “So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet”: When the Greenwood Consumes the Outlaw MARYBETH RUETHER-WU

127

vi  Contents 8 Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context: Poor Knights, Disguised Kings, and Romance Parody in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode

146

MARK TRUESDALE

9 The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow: The Question of Courtesy in Late Medieval King and Commoner Narratives

169

S. MELISSA WINDERS AND SARAH HARLAN-HAUGHEY

10 Acting Out(Law): Feasts, Outlawry, and Identity Constructions in Two Shakespearean Comedies

199

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES

11 Early Modern Fishing Practices and Seafood Culture in Robin Hood’s Fishing

222

JASON HOGUE

12 “Bread With Danger Purchased”: Hunger, Plenty, and the Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage

245

MATT WILLIAMSON

Index

263

Contributors

Kristin Bovaird-Abbo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado, where she specializes in medieval British literature with an emphasis on Middle English romance. She has published essays on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Middle English romance. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the impact of gentry readers and authors on the Arthurian figure of Sir Gawain in 14th- and 15th-century Middle English romances. Eric R. Carlson  is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken, where he has been teaching classes in medieval literature, historical linguistics, interdisciplinary methodology, and composition since 2007. Carlson received his Ph.D. in English from Purdue University, and his research normally explores violence as a cultural construct in Old English and Old Norse literature, frequently through the lens of Girardian mimesis. Sylvia Grove  Sylvia Grove studies gender, race, and the nation in French culinary texts. Her previous works have included a study of masculinity in the print magazine BEEF! (2014) and an analysis of culinary democracy in gastronomic bandes dessinées by Guillaume Long.  She received her Ph.D. in French from the University of Pittsburgh.  Sarah Harlan-Haughey  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine. Her scholarship contributes to discussions of the environment and literature in medieval texts. She is the author of The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature: From Fenland to Greenwood (Routledge 2016), and articles on Old Norse, Old English, and Middle English literature. Her current research includes an exploration of the late medieval English outlaw tradition as a seasonal virtual reality, a study of the malignant landscape in Lawman’s Brut, and an examination of the depictions of the insular North-Atlantic land and seascapes in Old Norse literature and later Scandinavian balladry.

viii  Contributors Jason Hogue  recently completed his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Texas at Arlington. His dissertation, Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism and Shakespearean Drama, investigates the intersection of trees and pain in five Shakespeare plays. His research interests include new materialisms, critical animal/plant studies, and outlaw studies. He has contributed entries to The Map of Early Modern London and has done transcription work for the Early Modern Recipes Online Collection (EMROC). Most recently, he published an essay titled “‘The Fare of Sanguinary Devils’: Feast and Storytelling in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,” in Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales (Routledge, 2019), the companion collection to the present volume. Sherron Lux  began studying Maid Marian in the Robin Hood legend for her M.A. thesis at the University of Tennessee in the mid-1990s. A librarian, teacher, and medieval literary scholar with a background in music and an interest in food and tableware history, she has published on Maid Marian and has given papers on Maid Marian and other aspects of the Robin Hood legend as well as on Chaucer, Chrétien de Troyes, and Marie de France at various conferences, including the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA), the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the biennial International Robin Hood conference. Melissa Ridley Elmes is Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University. Her research examines post-Conquest 15th-century English, Celtic, Anglo-Norman and Old Norse literatures and cultures and women’s and gender studies. She is the co-editor of Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth (Brill, 2017) and has articles published and forthcoming on the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, Chaucer, the Mabinogion, Beowulf, medieval literature pedagogy, fairies, women’s friendship in medieval texts, and medievalisms. She is currently working on two monographs on violence and feasting in medieval British and Arthurian texts, alongside projects on teaching Celtic materials, Arthurian ethics, and violence and gender on the premodern stage. Marybeth Ruether-Wu received her PhD from Cornell University, where she completed her dissertation, “Dangerous Humors: Revel, Regulation, and Retribution in Late Medieval Popular Literature,” which explores  the constitution and management of communities in the Anglo-Scottish popular imagination. Her recent work includes “Sores of the Realm,” an essay on the way humoral theory shaped late medieval attitudes toward social and political corruption, in the Hypocrite Reader.  Lorraine Kochanske Stock  is Professor of English at the University of Houston. She has been the recipient of awards including the HFAC

Contributors ix College “Masterteacher” Award, the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, and the Southeastern Medieval Association’s “Scholarly Achievement” award and award for teaching excellence. She has served as President of SEMA, on the MLA Middle English executive committee, and is a member of the advisory board for the TEAMS “Medieval Texts and Studies” series. Stock has published extensively on the Robin Hood tradition, as well as on Chaucer, King Arthur, and the wild man in medieval literature and culture. Mark Truesdale  received his PhD from Cardiff University in 2016, researching the disguised kings and unruly commoners of the medieval and early modern “King and Commoner” tradition. A revised and expanded version of this research was published as a monograph in 2018 by Routledge: The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Along with Dr Stephen Basdeo, he is currently editing the manuscript of Robert Southey’s previously unpublished late eighteenth-century Robin Hood novel, Harold, or The Castle of Morford, for a critical edition under contract with Routledge’s Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture series. Mark has taught at Cardiff University, most recently on the Robin Hood module, and volunteers with the University’s Special Collections and Archives. Renée Ward is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Her research concerns the literature and culture of the high to late medieval period, with particular emphases on monsters/monstrosity in medieval romance and outlaw literature. She explores embodiments of liminality and their connections to violence, and investigates how medieval authors use these representations to challenge or reinstate social hegemonies. Her publications in this area include articles on the Middle English romances Lybeaus Desconus, Octavian, and William of Palerne, as well as on the outlaw ballad Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Similar concerns likewise inform her current monograph project, The Werewolf in Medieval Romance (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan). She has also published widely on the medievalism of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and has ongoing research excavating the works of Victorian children’s writer Eleanora Louisa Hervey, including an article on two proto-feminist retellings of the medieval Griselda story and a forthcoming study on the earliest adaptation for children in English of the Old English poem Beowulf. With Miriam Edlich-Muth (Univeristy of Düsseldorf) and Victoria Coldham-Fussell (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), she recently embarked upon a project for the Routledge Worlds Series, Arthurian Worlds. Matt Williamson is Senior Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Oslo. He specializes in the representation of food. He completed

x  Contributors a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2016, with a thesis entitled “Hunger, Appetite and the Politics of the Renaissance Stage.” His published work includes chapters and articles on topics such as riot, cannibalism, and imperialism in early modern drama. S. Melissa Winders  is Program Manager of Major Gifts at Yale University. She earned her doctorate in English at Cornell University. Her scholarship focuses on Middle English and Anglo-Norman French courtesy literature. She explores the ways in which the didactic literature of courtesy influences literary works like Piers Plowman and The Book of the Duchess. She is the author of “Bad, harsk spech and lewit barbur tong”: Gavin Douglas’s Langlandian Prologue’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 25 (2011), 137–159.

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume of the Routledge Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture series would like to thank Alex Kaufman and Lesley Coote, the series editors, for their enthusiastic support of this volume throughout its preparation. Special thanks as well to our Routledge liaison, Max Novick, for his invaluable assistance, and to the manuscript readers, for many fine comments which helped to shape the book into its final form, and to Rajiv Kumar, our project manager, and his production team at KGL, who managed the typesetting and proofreading of this volume. We also thank our contributors for all of their hard work and their gracious and timely responses to our requests for revisions and additional materials. Acknowledgments on behalf of the contributors are mentioned in the individual chapters.

1

Introduction Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo

Every day, we are inundated by food. Advertisements for restaurants perpetually flash by on the screens that surround us. Friends post images of meals to Instagram and other social media. Enticing aromas surround us as we walk down the streets of large cities. Food does so much more than nurture and sustains our bodies. Food defines us. Sometimes, food even controls us. Food helps us to know our places in the larger world and to connect with others. Not surprisingly, numerous academic societies and journals have emerged specifically to study the modern world’s relationship with food; for example, in 2011, the Food Studies Research Network was founded with the express purpose of “[exploring] new possibilities for sustainable food production and human nutrition, and associated impacts of food systems on culture.”1 But how worthwhile— if at all—is it to examine the relationship between people and food in pre-modern societies? This volume presents a response to that question: such studies are both historically and culturally important, and to date conspicuously small in number, particularly when we venture beyond the merely historical-cultural, or anthropological, into the literary realm, and especially so regarding the relationship specifically between outlaws and food in medieval and early modern texts.

Food and Feasting in Premodern European Literature While the peoples of medieval Europe may not have been besieged with advertisements for food as we are today, food was certainly on the premodern mind. In the second edition of her 2011 monograph The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, Joyce Salisbury briefly discusses a sixteenth-century trial in France in which charges were brought against rats who had destroyed a town’s grain 2; this historical example in turn calls to mind a scene from the story of Manawydan in the Welsh Mabinogion (c. 12/13th c.) wherein Manawydan prepares to hang a mouse for destroying his crops, an early literary example of the relationship between food and criminals in the medieval imaginary.

2  Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo Scenes of feasts and feasting appear throughout the premodern period in a variety of literary forms, from the chronicle to the lai, the epic to the saga, and in dramatic works, although perhaps in no other medieval literary genre are they as central as they are in the romance and fabliau. The preparation and consumption of food is present in an even broader array of texts, including household recipe and cookery books, conduct manuals, and sermons and homilies. Equally diverse are the critical approaches taken by recent scholars, beginning with a 1998 collection of essays edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, which provides a useful interdisciplinary introduction to the subject of medieval food and feasting practices. Food historians, such as Paul Freedman in his 2008 monograph Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, continue such interdisciplinary approaches, with attention to the intersections of geography, food, trade, and economics, all of which are touched on throughout the chapters in this volume. Massimo Montanari and C.M. Woolgar both explore the intersections of social practices, emerging food technologies, and practical considerations regarding food. Montanari’s book offers a broad examination of medieval taste, including “types of production, cooking practices and gastronomic preparation, attitudes towards consumption, table manners, rules and rituals related to food, and cultural and scientific coordinates”3 —all subjects considered in the various chapters in this volume. Woolgar’s study emphasizes the peasantry, moving from an initial discussion of food as it relates to that particular social class to a broader consideration of food “in the life of guilds and urban communities, in church institutions, and in elite households,”4 expanding how scholars have looked at the role of food in medieval culture to a societal level and providing a framework for the various class-based discussions in the current volume. Bridget Ann Henisch’s work on medieval courtesy manuals and household and recipe books has manifested in two important studies: her 1976 Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society, and the more recent 2009 The Medieval Cook. Constance B. Hieatt, likewise, pioneered modern interest in medieval food preparation with her work on medieval recipes, first in her 1976 Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks and then in her 1988 An Ordinance of Pottage. The influence of both Henisch and Hieatt is felt throughout this volume in the discussions of courtesy and conduct and of food preparation. Beyond these strictly historical studies, in cultural terms such as religion and gender, food in the Middle Ages is typically conflated with images of the Eucharist, as explained and explored in Caroline Walker Bynum’s 1987 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Bynum’s central concern is how women use food as an extension of their religious identity, so that controlling their food consumption permits them to align themselves with Christ as suffering for their faith. Highly influenced by this study, critics have tended to examine the subject of food in

Introduction 3 medieval literature for its allegorical significance more so than in its own right; in this volume, the idea of the Eucharist is revisited through a new approach, thinking about anti-Eucharistic feasts in outlaw tales. Even more recently, Aaron Hostetter has engaged with the representation of food in medieval romance as a response to the material and political conditions of the communities that produced these tales, an ongoing preoccupation taken up throughout the following chapters.5 Like the subject of food, feasts and feasting in premodern studies receive most of their attention from historians and anthropologists. Questions of the social, economic, and cultural elements of the feast also engage with the role of performance and spectacle at such events. When feasts are discussed in a medieval or early modern literary context, they suffer a similar fate as their food counterpart, being most often read either as an echo of the Christian metaphor of the Last Supper, or as carnivalesque, rather than for their own merits as narrative events. Mary Frances Zambreno’s unpublished 1988 dissertation, The Image of the Feast in Medieval Literature, was the first major study which makes an effort to provide interpretation and analysis of the feast both as metaphor and an event with important narrative purpose. Recent notable monograph studies of feasts in premodern literature include Sarah Gordon’s 2007 Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature, a Bakhtinian examination, and David Goldstein’s 2013 Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, primarily focusing on ethics and performance. The essays in the current volume continue these conversations, extending them explicitly into the realm of the outlaw.

Food and Feasting in Premodern Outlaw Texts Clearly, food and foodways are essential concerns for human beings, and never more so than when they are compromised. This is the case in outlaw narratives, where sustaining life beyond legal means often requires finding and preparing food beyond the conventional methods available within an established human network. A preoccupation with food is therefore readily located in outlaw narratives from every literary period and is especially prominent in the literature that is created alongside dynamic historical developments involving food, such as during the medieval period, with its emphasis on the acquisition of new foodstuffs via better intercontinental trade routes, and the Early Modern period, during which exploration of “the New World” yielded further new foods and foodways. However, to date little scholarship exists on food in outlaw texts; none of the scholarship mentioned above features an explicit discussion of the relationship between food and feasts and the outlaw, and with the exception of Mark Truesdale’s recent monograph, those studies which do exist are conference papers or stand-alone articles rather than sustained, book-length studies or edited collections of essays.6

4  Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo While it might seem counter-intuitive that the subject of feasting be aligned with the subject matter of an outlaw narrative, given the typical association of feasting with nobility as in the medieval romance, there are a surprising number of feasts found in works belonging to the outlaw genre. The preparation and consumption of food appear as central points of human ingenuity, interaction, community, and fellowship in premodern outlaw narratives, offering opportunities to examine, analyze, and critique trade, economics, and agricultural practices, as well as the social standing of those who produce, purchase, prepare, and consume foodstuffs. For their part, the feast scenes in premodern literary texts also permit the examination and critique of trade, economics, and social standing, and perform a variety of narrative functions—for example, serving as cultural repositories of manners and behaviors, catalysts for adventure, or moments of regrouping and redirecting of characters and plots—and these functions are preserved in popular outlaw tales featuring feasting scenes as much as in their more formal romance and epic counterparts. This volume therefore focuses on the presence and function of food and feast in outlaw tales from the premodern period, its chapters considering whether and how instances of food preparation and eating in medieval and early modern outlaw texts can be read as displaying, developing, or subverting the conventional ideas of community and fellowship most commonly associated with food and feasting.

Medieval and Early Modern Outlaws and Outlawry Modern audiences, especially American audiences, associate the term “outlaw” with a very specific figure, typically an Old West bandit or similar, operating in defiance of the legal system.7 However, medieval audiences would not recognize such a limited view of outlaws and outlawry. There was no single, homogenous legal system in place, but rather laws that were at best intended to serve the needs of a single kingdom or principality and more typically, an even more localized legal system established and maintained by local officials on behalf of the king. In some cases, as in medieval Iceland prior to its union with Norway, the law was an entity kept through oral tradition and thus constantly in flux, determined by precedent and by amassing enough support for one’s claims. Further, the Church also maintained its own legal system, which influenced secular law in areas like marriage and the distribution of property. To speak, then, of “outlaw” and “outlawry” in any sense recognizable to a modern audience would be to flatten the dynamic and complicated reality of their presence in medieval cultures. For the purposes of this volume of essays, we are extending the concept of the outlaw to include those who have been formally outlawed by a decree from a king, justice, or sheriff, as well as those figures who live outside the boundaries of society. In its most generic terms, then, an

Introduction 5 “outlaw” is any individual who finds him- or herself outside the established rules and regulations of an ordered society. In Beowulf, for example, Grendel can be viewed as an outlaw because he does not ascribe to the regulatory and customary behaviors of the human society with which he interacts. A formal charge of outlawry and its attendant punishments depends upon the particular legal system in place. In the English laws, men could be outlawed for failure either on their part or the part of their kin to pay compensation for damage done to another person or that person’s property (Edmund 1§1), for repeated ignoring of the authority of the Hundred, or local government agency (Edgar 3§1), for failure to prove one’s innocence against a charge of thievery (Aethelred 1§9), for stealing cattle (Aethelred 7§1) or killing another individual (Aethelred 7§1; Canute 6); there is even a specific law on the books defrocking and banishing any priest who commits homicide or another major crime (Aethelred 1§26), and one specifically devoted to charges of wizardry (Canute 4a).8 While there are a smattering of laws on the books dealing with the various crimes that could lead to outlawry in the earlier reigns of Edmund, Edgar, and Aethelred, by Canute’s reign (c. 1020) there is a dedicated section of the laws focusing specifically on the legal considerations and implications of a charge of outlawry (Canute 16).9 This is one example of how legal systems in medieval Europe developed as communities and societies developed, rather than in homogenous, onesize-fits-all fashion, demanding a nuanced and considered attention to the specific contexts of outlawry in any given situation. Perhaps the most important of such contexts in terms of the outlaw narratives discussed in this volume is that of medieval Forest Law.

The Medieval Outlaw and Forest Law Many of the British outlaws discussed in this collection of essays find themselves outside of the law as a result of run-ins with Forest Law. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror imposed laws upon game habitats, effectively converting areas formerly used for agriculture or livestock, in addition to forests, into carefully-guarded preserves, entry into which was restricted to only the highest echelons of society. An elaborate system, consisting of game wardens, inspectors, agisters, justices, and woodwards, was put into place to uphold these laws locally. Lesser violations of Forest Law included allowing grazing animals to trespass into restricted areas, cutting down trees or branches, and killing lesser game; more serious offenses included cutting down oak trees or the taking of venison—even if one came upon a carcass of a deer killed by a poacher, he was still prohibited from harvesting the meat. Barbara Hanawalt offers extensive evidence for the punishments of poaching under Forest Law, which could range from heavy fines to blinding and even death.10

6  Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo Several subsequent kings, including Henry II, continued and expanded these laws, often intensifying the punishments for those caught violating them. Pre-Norman Conquest forests and other areas could be used for many food-related activities, such as raising crops, grazing domestic livestock, collecting fuel for fires, and hunting game.11 Those areas were forbidden, and for centuries following the first establishment of Forest Laws, resentment from all levels of social class often became violent protests. For example, in 1288, Philip de Montgomery, the Steward of Forest of Cannock in Staffordshire, England, was beset by a group of nearly 200 men.12 Access to the forests and wild areas of Britain had long been seen as a cultural freedom of all classes and statuses to exploit the natural environment. While there were many factors leading to the Great Rising of 1381, land rights was certainly a prominent one; as William Perry Marvin notes, during the confrontation between King Richard and Wat Tyler, “The rebels petitioned the king … that all preserves of water, parks and woods should be made common to all: so that throughout the kingdom the poor as well as the rich should be free to take game in water, fish ponds, woods and forests, as well as to hunt hares in the fields—and to do these and many other things without impediment.”13 Despite the rumblings of the people, English kings persisted in maintaining Forest Law, and while many poachers were highly successful in eluding the game wardens constantly patrolling forested areas, others were declared outlaws as a result of violating Forest and Game laws and subsequently failing to answer court summons. This seems to be the case for Robin Hood and many of his Merry Men in tales such as A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, where the king is angered by Robin’s continual poaching of the king’s deer at Plumpton Park. It is important to keep in mind that most of Robin Hood’s explicit transgressions–that is, the ones that make him a target for both local and national authorities– are not grounded in Forest Law directly. As Thomas H. Ohlgren notes of the Geste, “The poem is largely silent about the harsh forest laws of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that protected ‘vert’ and ‘venison,’” and Stephen Knight argues that while the theft of the deer at Plumpton Park certainly enraged the king, “stealing the deer was not the reason [the king] was looking for Robin: it was his habitual theft of money, from important people like the sheriff and the monks.”14 Yet Forest law remains an important context for our understandings of these outlaw tales, both in terms of motivations for literary characters and as realities for medieval audiences, and Hanawalt perhaps has this in mind when writing of the Geste that “[t]he irony of the king being invited to a feast of poached venison and pilfered wine must have delighted an audience who hated the forest laws.”15 The protagonist of the later Tale of Gamelyn may also come to mind when he comes into conflict with his eldest brother in part over access to food; in contrast, attention is drawn

Introduction 7 repeatedly to the offers of food and drink when Gamelyn encounters a band of outlaws in the forest. Tales such as these also reveal that charges of outlawry may be reversed; in both Robin’s and Gamelyn’s cases, they receive pardons from the king.

The Outlaw Narrative When the subject of premodern literary outlaws comes up, typically it is the Robin Hood tradition and its analogues, generally preserved in ballad or prose forms, that are best-known and most recognizable as outlaw narratives. While the majority of tales featuring outlaw characters are Greenwood narratives,16 outlaws are found in almost every medieval and early modern literary genre—including but not limited to: law, chronicle, epic, ballad, lai, fabliau, romance, cookbook, travelogue, saga, and drama—so that the “outlaw narrative” cannot be relegated to a particular form, but rather must be construed as something of a hybrid genre or overarching subject heading for a variety of texts. This volume defines the term “outlaw narrative” broadly, to include texts that center on an outlaw protagonist, as with The Tale of Gamelyn and the Robin Hood corpus; texts that include outlaw figures as essential to the narrative, as in Beowulf, the King and Commoner, or King-in-Disguise, traditions, and Honoré Bovet’s L’Apparicion maistre Jean de Meun; texts that refer to outlaws as one of many categories within the social order, as with legal documents and Jean de Bockenheim’s Latin cookery book Registrum Coquine; and plays in which nobles are exiled but not technically outlawed in a legal sense, as in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. This broad definition represents more accurately the presence of outlaws and outlawry in premodern literature and facilitates the interdisciplinary scope of our contributors’ chapters, which range geographically from France to the British Isles and North Atlantic world and temporally from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries.

Organization and Scope of this Volume’s Contents The organization of this volume lends itself to a variety of reading practices, reflective of our sensitivity to the broad range of interests and areas of specialization of its intended interdisciplinary audience. Eric Carlson’s opening chapter points out that in the Old English epic Beowulf, despite the importance of the feast and the Hall in which the feast occurs to human society, it is in fact Grendel, the outcast being, who is afforded actual scenes of feasting, his gruesome cannibalistic meal a perversion of the Eucharist, a Last Supper which condemns, rather than redeems, because of its egocentric and socially destructive nature. Carlson’s study highlights a trend in outlaw narratives: the use of food and feasting to showcase the various ways that lawlessness and

8  Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo the violation of social ethics bring together social, legal, and religious questions in a focused critique. Following Carlson’s chapter, we turn from the feast hall to the family manor in Renée Ward’s study of food and feasting as social contracts in the mid fourteenth-century Tale of Gamelyn. Ward’s emphasis on the importance of these scenes of “mete and drink” as tools of alliance and indicators of appropriate and lawful behavior tied to social norms opens up an important consideration regarding the role of space in social and legal systems, examining the repercussions that arise when the distinctions between domestic and legal spheres are blurred. In the third chapter, Sylvia Grove examines the little-studied Aparicion maistre Jean de Meun, penned by Honorat Bovet in 1348, for its unusual presentation of medieval Franco-Muslim relations. In this text the figure of a traveling Saracen narrating international hearsay demonstrates how an outsider can sometimes have more insight into a culture than its own members. He offers a pointed critique of a French army’s eating practices in comparison to those of their Muslim counterparts, nuancing the interrelationship between food, body, and community in medieval France by arguing that the strongest “call to arms” comes when an outsider calls culture into question. Sherron Lux brings us out of the formally domestic spaces of human community and family into the Greenwood, the particular parvenu of the outlaw, by examining the presentation of food and feast scenes and what they reveal of the character of Robin Hood in the fifteenth-century Gest of Robyn Hode. Lorraine Stock’s chapter brings the discussion of food and feasting in medieval Robin Hood narratives into current discourse on medievalism film studies and the representations of class and gender on screen. Examining scenes of eating from twentieth- and twenty-first century Robin Hood film and television representations— the 1912 film Robin Hood, the 1922 film Robin Hood, the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, the 1955–59 television series The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the 1991 film Robin Hood—Stock shows how the verbal or visual trope of food and eating visually constructs class and gender identities, and contrasts those presentations with their medieval ballad counterparts. This contribution highlights the continued critical significance of studying the premodern outlaw in food contexts by showing the many ways that the relationship between outlaws and food participates in continued and new discourses of identity in various media forms. Marybeth Ruether Wu investigates the Anglo-Scottish border ballads that originated within the active outlaw communities that thrived in the Marches, troubling the “realm of plenty” Greenwood motif by pointing out that in these ballads Greenwood and wasteland are indistinguishable, birds and animals do not willingly offer up their bodies

Introduction 9 for consumption, and outlaws participate in the violent ecologies of the landscape in order to survive. Mark Truesdale probes the literary links between Arthurian romance, specifically the scenes of testing in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Launfal, and Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and politicized feasting and hunting scenes in the Robin Hood and closely related King and Commoner tradition, arguing that the outlaw tales are comic parodies of their romance counterparts. S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey extend this discussion of the Robin Hood and King and Commoner tales as parodic texts by contrasting them with contemporary courtesy books to show how they resist in exuberant and carnivalesque fashion the lessons such tales were intended to impart. Moving from medieval to early modern studies that highlight the performative and political usefulness of the textual outlaw for sixteenthand seventeenth-century authors and audiences, Melissa Ridley Elmes shows how William Shakespeare maximizes the comedy genre’s potential for destabilizing and critiquing the noble class by using juxtaposed images of the figure of the outlaw, the figure of the nobleman, and the feast to make a case for viewing and accepting the reformed outlaw figure as a potentially positive influence on society. Jason Hogue’s study of the relatively unknown seventeenth-century ballad Robin Hood’s Fishing interprets this text as affirmation for the value of local industries and economies in Scarborough, Yorkshire through its comparison to contemporary pamphlets advocating support for national fishing incentives. Matt Williamson rounds out the volume with a study of Jacobean and Caroline dramatic works–John Fletcher’s and Philip Massinger’s c. 1622 Beggar’s Bush and Phillip Massinger’s 1633 The Guardian–which feature outlaw figures and food, showing how, despite their temporal and geographic differences, when examined together these texts provide evidence for a common vocabulary of culinary images through which early modern theatre deploys the specter of the outlaw community as a means of utopian critique. Taken together, the essays in this collection perform four essential functions: they showcase the critical payoff of examining the subject of outlaws, food, and feasting as broadly, rather than narrowly, construed; they offer an example of the ways in which examining a subject through interdisciplinary, cross-geographic and cross-temporal lenses can yield fresh insights; they place canonic and well-known works in conversation with lesser-known texts from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries to showcase the dynamic nature and cultural influence and impact of premodern outlaw tales; and they offer what we hope will prove merely an introductory foray, an amuse-bouche, an appetizer, if you will, into the intersection of literary and food studies in premodern contexts.

10

Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo

Notes 1. “About,” Food Studies Research Network, accessed 11 January, 2021, https://food-studies.com/about. 2. Salisbury notes that the charges were dropped when the judge realized he could not guarantee the safety of the rats should they answer the summons; the defense for the rats claimed that his clients could not appear due to a fear of the town’s cats (111–112). 3. Massimo Montanari, Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table, trans. Beth Archer Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 6. 4. C. M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England, 1200–1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 25. 5. Aaron Hostetter, Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). 6. See: Mark Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2018). The theme for the twenty-third International Medieval Conference in Leeds was “Food, Feast, and Famine,” and indeed, several of the essays in this collection began as papers presented at that conference. Melissa Ridley Elmes has also recently published an article on the importance of the feast event in the Geste of Robyn Hode: “Conduct and Character: The Overlooked Importance of Feast Scenes in The Geste of Robyn Hood,” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016), 25–36 and Stephen Knight offers a taxonomy of forest feasts and their various narrative significations in the Robin Hood legend in his essay, “Feasts in the Forest,” in Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F.D. Hodges, and Dorsey Armstrong (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 161–175. 7. See, for example: Eric J. Hobsbawn’s Bandits, Revised Edition (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 8. A. J. Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925). 9. Ibid., 179–180. 10. Barbara Hanawalt, “Men’s Games, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England,” in Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England, edited by Barbara Hanawalt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 142–157: 144. 11. See, for example: Melvin Jones, “Deer Parks in South Yorkshire: The Documentary and Landscape Evidence,” in The History, Ecology and Archaeology of Medieval Parks and Parklands, ed. Ian D. Rotherham (Sheffield: Wildtrack Publishing, 2007), 65–78. 12. Jean Birrell, “Forest Law and the Peasantry in the Later Thirteenth Century,” in Thirteenth Century England II: Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference 1987, edited by P. R. Coss and Simon D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), 149–163, at 161. 13 William Perry Marvin, “Slaughter and Romance: Hunting Reserves in Late Medieval England,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 224–252, at 230. 14 Thomas H. Ohlgren, “Edwardus redivivus in a Gest of Robyn Hode,” in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99, no. 1 (2000): 14. Stephen Knight, “Robin Hood and the Forest Laws,” The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 2.

Introduction 11 15. Hanawalt, Of Good and Ill Repute, 147. 16. See, for example: Maurice Keen, “The Matter of the Greenwood,” in Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–8.

Bibliography Birrell, Jean. “Forest Law and the Peasantry in the Later Thirteenth Century.” In Thirteenth Century England II: Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference 1987, edited by P. R. Coss and Simon D. Lloyd, 149–163. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988. Carlin, Martha, and Joel T. Rosenthal, editors. Food and Eating in Medieval Europe. London: Hambledon Press, 1998. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Overlooked Importance of Feast Scenes in The Geste of Robyn Hood. Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 25–36. “Food Studies Research Network.” About, Common Ground Research Networks, food-studies.com/about. Accessed January 2021. Freedman, Paul. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Goldstein, David. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gordon, Sarah. Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 37. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007. Hanawalt, Barbara. “Men’s Games, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England.” In Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 142–157. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. ———. The Medieval Cook. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. Hieatt, Constance B. An Ordinance of Pottage: An Edition of the 15th Century Culinary Recipes in Yale University’s MS Beinecke 163. London: Prospect Books, 1988. ———. Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Hostetter, Aaron. Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture 24. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Translated by Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Knight, Stephen. “Feasts in the Forest.” In Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F.D. Hodges, and Dorsey Armstrong. 161–175. Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures 24. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016. ———. “Robin Hood and the Forest Laws.” The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies Vol. 1, no. 1 (2017): 1–14.

12  Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo Marvin, William Perry. “Slaughter and Romance: Hunting Reserves in Late Medieval England.” In Medieval Crime and Social Control, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, 224–252. Medieval Cultures 16. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999. Montanari, Massimo. Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Ohlgren, Thomas H. “Edwardus redivivus in a Gest of Robyn Hode.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 99, no. 1 (2000): 1–28. Robertson, A.J. The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. Salisbury, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2011. Walker Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Woolgar, C.M. The Culture of Food in England, 1200–1500. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Zambreno, Mary F. The Image of the Feast in Medieval Literature. 1988. The University of Chicago, PhD dissertation. ProQuest, https://unco.idm. oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.unco.idm.oclc.org/ docview/303599723?accountid=12832.

2

Grendel’s Eucharist An Outlaw’s Last Supper Eric R. Carlson

Feasting is a social event that serves as a society’s locus to confirm its relationships and shared values, and this is as true for outlaw societies as it is for the mainstream. Within the heroic idiom of the Anglo-Saxons, the feast is an event at which members of a social group confirm shared values within the context of violence, loyalty, and the feud ethos. The value of feasting in general, as a means of establishing social cohesion, sacralizes the event in ways that may reflect the ultimate sacred feast: the Christian Eucharist in which adherents confirm and share their faith. The social cohesion resulting from the ritual feast, both secular and religious, is an attempt to eradicate violence from the community vis-a-vis feasting on an actual victim of violence. This is also how the Christian Eucharist functions—it is a cannibalistic feast rooted in violence against a ritual victim whose death is meant to absolve the community of sin. As Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle note, “communities of blood unite their members sacrificially. The holiest religious holidays do not celebrate literature but blood symbolically framed as birth or death.”1 Both the pagan Scandinavian society depicted in Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon culture that gave rise to the poem are such “communities of blood” that are steeped in the reciprocal violence of the feud ethos. Feasting, in both the pagan and Christian contexts, has the goal of uniting the community both through the acknowledgement of shared values and the reconciliation of mimetic violence within that community. Drawing on René Girard’s theories on reciprocal violence and its resolution, this essay will explore the “last supper” of Grendel, the cannibalistic ogre2 who is Beowulf’s first major adversary in the poem that bears his name. That last supper, the ogre’s eating of the warrior Hondscioh, is a negative representation of the Christian Eucharist, and through this grisly scene the poet subtly warns his audience of the pitfalls of illegitimate violence. Beowulf, an Old English poem appearing in an eleventh-century manuscript, 3 tells through a loosely woven narrative the tale of the titular character’s rise and fall as a great warrior of the Geats in sixth-century Scandinavia. The story revolves around Beowulf’s combat against three major adversaries. In the first fight, Beowulf travels to the hall Heorot

14  Eric R. Carlson in Denmark to take on the murderous ogre Grendel, who has been terrorizing Hrothgar’s Danes for twelve years. Beowulf wins this fight in spectacular fashion, ripping off Grendel’s arm and thereby cleansing the hall of the ogre’s violence. Shortly thereafter, however, Grendel’s mother avenges her son’s death by killing the Danish warrior Æschere, and Beowulf then faces off against her in her sub-aquatic lair; Beowulf kills her specifically in response to her violent act, thus establishing a pattern of reciprocal violence within the poem. The poem then jumps forward fifty years to an elderly Beowulf, now king of the Geats. A dragon, enraged at the theft of a cup from its hoard, terrorizes Beowulf’s people, and the aged king meets the dragon in its barrow. With the help of his nephew Wiglaf, Beowulf kills the dragon but is himself mortally wounded in the process. The poem ends with Wiglaf’s prophecy of renewed conflict between the Geats and the Swedes who will try to avenge past wrongs once Beowulf lies dead. Scholars have explored myriad themes within the poem, but violence, especially reciprocal violence, is the one theme that permeates the text as a whole, in both the major episodes and the various digressions that the poet employs. As a uniting factor in the poem, violence is the poet’s foremost concern; through the depiction of the pitfalls of reciprocal violence, the poet provides a running commentary on the murky boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence for an audience that has a gross preoccupation with it as a cultural institution. The fight between Beowulf and Grendel is one of the first points at which the poet attempts a deep negotiation of the boundaries of (il) legitimate violence. Grendel is presented as an outlaw figure in the text, but normally when we think of outlaws in the English tradition, our thoughts quickly stray to tales of Robin Hood and other such “noble robbers.” However, Eric Hobsbawm notes that the bandit or outlaw also manifests itself in darker, more malignant ways as the “terror-bringing avenger.”4 Hobsbawm further describes bandits and outlaws as those who “resist obedience, are outside the range of power, are potential exercisers of power themselves, and therefore potential rebels.”5 The Beowulf-poet consistently characterizes Grendel in a manner consistent with Hobsbawm’s description: the ogre is the “mæ¯re mearcstapa, sē þe mōras hēold,/fen ond fæsten”6 [the infamous margin-walker, he who held the moors, the fens and the fastness, ll. 103–104], as well as the “deorc dēaþscua …/… sinnihte hēold,/mistig˙ e mōras” [the dark deathshadow, he held the misty moors in constant darkness, ll. 160–162]. Likewise, Grendel is the “fēond mancynnes” [the enemy of humanity, l. 164] who “g˙ efremede/morðbeala māre, ond nō mearn fore,/fæ¯hðe ond fyrene” [performed great murderous killings and did not mourn his feud and sins thereof, ll. 135–137]. Most tellingly in terms of Hobsbawm’s description of outlaws, Grendel exerts rebellious power in his occupation of Heorot: he “Heorot eardode,/sinċfāge sel swertum nihtum”

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 15 [inhabited Heorot, the decorated hall, in the swarthy nights, ll. 166–167] and “Swā rīxode ond wið rihte wan,/āna wið eallum, oð þæt īdel stōd/ hūsa sēlest” [so he ruled and fought against right, one against all, until idle stood the best of halls, ll. 144–146]. According to Hobsbawm, “In traditional societies criminals are almost by definition outsiders, who form their own separate society, if not actually an anti-society of the ‘bent’ which mirrors that of the ‘straight.’”7 Many critics have echoed this sentiment when referring to Grendel who is, in Malcolm Andrew’s words, “a symbolically monstrous version of a perverted man, displaying all the characteristics we would expect in a man perverted by sin, but on the exaggerated scale befitting his monstrous dimensions.”8 As the Beowulf-poet’s overarching concern is with the boundaries of legitimate violence, so Grendel’s outlawry stems from his illegitimate violence. René Girard’s theories on mimetic violence offer sound means of understanding the relationship between feasts and violence within Beowulf. What follows is a highly truncated version of Girard’s theories applicable to this discussion as he developed and expanded them over several decades and several books.9 Girard describes violence as a contagion infecting society from within that will eventually destroy society if it is not somehow averted. This violence stems from mimetic rivalry over an object of desire, and as the rivalry intensifies, the object of desire becomes less important than the perceived need to topple one’s rival— the focus of the rivalry becomes violence itself rather than the erstwhile desire to possess the object. The possessor of the object functions as a “model” or “mediator” for the non-possessing rival—the “agent.” These entities become entwined in the process of acquisitive mimesis, and the intensity of the rivalry transforms the rivals into doubles of each other. Violent reciprocity develops, further intensifying the desire within the mimetic relationship, which then threatens to destroy not only the rivals, but also the very societies using violence to eliminate their rivals and acquire the object of desire, thus reiterating the contagion of violence. In order to avoid such a catastrophe, violence must be channeled through the killing of a ritual victim who functions as a scapegoat figure and is held responsible for the violence of the mimetic rivalry. The perceived monstrosity of the scapegoat, the result of the doubling process, in turn confirms and justifies the ritual killing. The sacrifice of this victim functions as a “founding murder” of society because it diffuses the contagion of violence and is therefore viewed as the source of society’s abundance. Thus, the victim becomes a sacred figure, and ironically, violence also becomes sacralized, insuring its continued presence. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard identifies the basic purpose of the Passion of the Christ, a purpose that should inform all Christian communities: “Christ does not achieve this victory through violence. He obtains it through a renunciation of violence so complete that violence can rage to its heart’s content without realizing that by so doing,

16  Eric R. Carlson it reveals what it must conceal, without suspecting that its fury will turn back against it this time because it will be recorded and represented with exactness in the Passion narratives.”10 Essentially, the only way to eliminate reciprocal violence is to renounce it altogether, yet its sacred nature ensures its continued presence. Likewise, the AngloSaxon world of the Beowulf-poet is one that cannot renounce reciprocal violence entirely despite the clear Christian theology underwriting the poet’s values; violence was an acceptable—and at times preferred— means of conflict resolution in Germanic cultures from time immemorial. As Richard Fletcher points out, “Anglo-Saxon kings did not seek to abolish feuding; that would have been almost inconceivable. Guided by their churchmen they lamented indiscriminate violence, but they accepted the sanctioned, legitimate violence involved in feuding, seeking only to enforce a proper observance of the customs designed to limit its spread.”11 And as William Ian Miller comments on feud in the Icelandic tradition, “No one understood law and feud to be necessarily opposed.”12 The law codes of various Anglo-Saxon monarchs tacitly reflect this. For example, neither the laws of Ine (r. 688–725) nor of Alfred (r. 871–900) actually forbid physical violence and killing, instead of proscribing wergild payments to curb the impetus for reciprocal violence.13 Even then, Alfred’s laws tacitly acknowledge the legitimacy of feud by establishing contexts in which it does not apply; for example, “mon mot feohtan órwige, gif he gemeteð oþerne æt his æwum wife, betynedum durum oððe under anre réon” [A man may fight, without becoming liable to vendetta, if he finds another (man) with his wedded wife, within closed doors or under the same blanket].14 We should note how this law provides a specific context in which feud should not apply, as if feud violence were a perfectly normal way to respond to the violence of others. Clearly reciprocal violence was not preferred, but neither was it prohibited. Violence in Anglo-Saxon society could have a positive value when used appropriately, and one of the primary normative concerns within Beowulf is to delineate what is both acceptable and unacceptable violence within society, the poet constantly negotiating this ongoing crisis regarding the use of violence. This begins immediately in the poem; the opening lines describe the semi-mythic king Scyld Scefing, who rose to power through violence, and how he effectively used violence to preserve the integrity of his people: “Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum,/monegum mæ¯g˙ þum meodosetla oftēah,/eg˙ sode eorl[as]” [Often Scyld Scefing seized the mead-benches from troops of enemies, from many tribes, and terrorized their earls, ll. 4–6], “oð þæt him æ ¯ g˙ hwylċ/þāra ymbsittendra/ ofer hronrāde hy¯ran scolde,/gomban g˙ yldan” [until each of the surrounding nations over the seas should obey him and pay him tribute, ll. 9–11]. The poet concludes his opening with a pithy statement on Scyld Scefing’s efforts: “Þæt wæs gōd cyning” [That was a good king, l. 11],

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 17 clearly identifying Scyld as a good king because he used violence as a means to compel the submission of potential enemies, thereby securing peace for his people. Within the heroic economy that the Beowulf-poet describes in the opening lines, the feast is of paramount importance as a venue in which a leader of a warband and his followers confirm their bonds of loyalty to each other, thus ensuring their society’s integrity through their potential for violence. As such, the feast is a celebration of the ethos of violence, particularly legitimate violence. The common word for “feast” in Old English texts, in both secular and religious contexts, is symbel, appearing both as a simplex and as the determinative element in compounds. Within Beowulf, the poet consistently employs symbel to denote ritual feasting, using it eleven times as a simplex and once in the compound symbel-wynn, “feast-joy.” Beowulf functions in part as a treatise on positive social values, and thus it seems ironic that despite numerous references to the symbel, there is actually little description of feasting, especially given the centrality of the feast within the heroic economy. Despite the numerous references to feasts in the poem, in ten out of the eleven cases, the contexts for the word’s use direct us towards the social cohesion of ritual drinking and gift-giving, both fundamental elements of the feasting event.15 Yet at no point does the poet depict any of these lords and warriors as actually eating anything, a fundamental activity of the feast. Instead, the only character who actually eats in the poem is Grendel, one of the most evil and vicious outlaw figures in medieval English literature. Grendel’s outlawry stems ultimately from his descent from the biblical Cain: wæs se grimma gæ¯st Grendel hāten, mæ¯re mearcstapa, sē þe mōras hēold, fen ond fæsten; fīfelcynnes eard wonsæ¯lī wer weardode hwīle, siþðan him scyppen forscrifen hæfde in Cāines cynne—þone cwealm g˙ ewræc ēċe drihten, þæs þe hē Ābel slog [The grim spirit was called Grendel, the infamous margin-walker, he who held the moors, the fens and the fastness; in the realm of the monster races this wretched man endured for ages, after the Shaper had banished him as among the kin of Cain—the eternal Lord avenged that killing, when Cain slew Abel.] (ll. 102–108) Notably, the poet contextualizes Grendel’s introduction in terms of reciprocal violence—Cain kills Abel out of desire for the Lord’s favor, and the eternal Lord avenged that killing. But if Grendel’s liminality were not enough to evoke his outlaw qualities, the poet early characterizes

18  Eric R. Carlson Grendel’s violence in terms of gluttonous excess. On his first murderous visit to Heorot, … Wiht unhæ¯lo, grim ond græ¯dig˙ , g˙ earo sōna wæs, rēoc ond rēþe, ond on ræste g˙ enam þrītig˙ þeg˙ na; þanon eft g˙ ewāt hūðe hrēmig˙ tō hām faran, mid þæ¯re wælfylle wīca nēosan. [the unholy creature, grim and greedy, savage and raging, was immediately ready and grabbed thirty thanes at rest; then turned towards home, sought out his dwelling, rejoicing in his plunder and his fill of slaughter.] (ll. 120–125) The depiction of Grendel’s violence reaches its gory zenith on his illfated journey to Heorot in which he grapples with the stout and pugnacious Beowulf, consequently losing his life. Thereat Grendel savagely gobbles up a warrior named Hondscioh: Nē þæt se āglæ¯ċa yldan þōhte, ac hē g˙ efēng hraðe forman sīðe slæ¯pendne rinċ, slāt unwearnum, bāt bānlocan, blōd ēdrum dranc, synsæ¯dum swealh; sōna hæfde unlyfig˙ endes eal g˙ efeormod, fēt ond folma. [The monster thought not to delay, but he quickly grabbed at first chance a sleeping warrior, greedily slit him apart, bit into his body, drank the blood from his veins, swallowed up the sinful chunks. Quickly he had eaten up the unliving one entirely, even the hands and feet.] (ll. 739–745) In this gruesome scene the poet links the Old and New Testament traditions: Grendel eats the body and drinks the blood of his victim, just as in the Eucharistic feast, but does so as a monster of the Cain tradition rather than as a penitent Christian. As Andy Orchard notes regarding Grendel’s feast, “aspects of Christian tradition seem to have coloured the poet’s description of Grendel. So the gruesome description of Grendel’s attack concentrates on just those aspects which would cause most offense to a Christian audience … The full horror of this cannibalistic feasting is savoured in detail, and to Christian ears must have sounded an unholy offence: there are numerous biblical prohibitions against the drinking of blood.”16 Yet Grendel’s grim feast is not merely some shadowy reference to biblical prohibitions; as Meyer Schapiro shows, it may actually be informed by the Cain legend itself: an “alternative meaning, that Cain bit Abel to death, is implied in another English legend: in the verse

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 19 Life of Adam and Eve, Eve dreams of the blood of Abel in his brother’s mouth.”17 Grendel, the descendent of Cain, kills his victims in a manner consistent with this legend, which the poet echoes in Beowulf’s recounting of his fight with Grendel once the hero has returned home: … him Grendel wearð, mæ¯rum maguþeg˙ ne tō mūðbonan, lēofes mannes līċ eall forswealg. Nō ðy¯ æ¯r ūt ðā g˙ ēn īdelhende bona blōdig˙ tōð, bealewa g˙ emyndig˙ , of ðām goldsele gongan wolde [Grendel became for him [Hondscioh], that illustrious kin-thane, a mouthkiller, entirely swallowed the body of that beloved man. Not then yet did the bloody-tooth killer, intent on slaughter, wish to go empty-handed from the goldhall.] (ll. 2078–2083) This is not to suggest there is a direct connection between The Life of Adam and Eve and Beowulf, as David Williams cautions,18 but nonetheless “Cain’s unnaturalness and his separation from the natural is the basis for the representation of him—and his descendants—as monster”19 and as the primordial killer Cain “was the first to shed human blood, his descendants advanced his degeneracy in introducing cannibalism.” 20 While commentators such as Williams have long noted Grendel’s associations with Cain, to my knowledge none have discussed the killing of Hondscioh as a perversion of the Eucharist. Both the poet’s overt reference to Grendel’s ancestry at line 107 and Beowulf’s describing the ogre as “blōdig˙ tōð” render the associations with Cain explicit, but the poet links such imagery to the body and blood of Hondscioh; while Grendel is a Cain figure, the poet describes his violence specifically in terms of Grendel’s eating the body and blood of that man, that Grendel “bāt bānlocan, blōd ēdrum dranc” [bit the bone-locker, drank the blood from the veins, l. 742]. This meal—the body and blood of a sacrificial victim—is a twisted, malignant rendering of the Christian Eucharist. Hondscioh’s gruesome death functions beyond mere visceral delight; it allows the poet to tie together Grendel’s social and spiritual outlawry in a succinct and gruesome image of sacrificial violence. One of the Beowulf-poet’s overarching concerns is to negotiate the appropriate contexts for violence, a cultural institution of unparalleled importance within the world of Beowulf, and through this perverse Eucharist, the poet confirms Grendel’s outlawry and also provides subtle and sophisticated commentary on the pitfalls of mimetic violence as both social and spiritual institutions: inappropriate or unrighteous violence leads to destruction that its use is meant to prevent. Grendel clearly functions as the outsider rebel, but the true malignancy of Grendel’s rebellion—and one of the most important factors in

20  Eric R. Carlson his outlaw status—stems from both his refusal to abide by the ethics of feud violence and his delight in excessive, illegitimate violence. As noted above, the reciprocal violence of feud was a means to preserve the integrity of the kin-group; as D. H. Green describes it, the threat of violence could act as a disincentive to violence for as long as the coherence of the kindred was maintained and settlement by compensation acknowledged by both parties. In a tribal society the feud was not regarded as the expression of a personal grudge or an outlet for uncontrolled violence, but rather as an obligation owed to society, as a means of maintaining law and order. The feud is far from being wanton violence. 21 Grendel violates these ethics of feud in two specific ways. First, he kills for its own sake, as if in a grudge, which the poet associates with criminality rather than in response to violence from his rivals: the night after his first visit to Heorot, Grendel “g˙ efremede/morðbeala māre, ond nō mearn fore,/fæ¯hðe ond fyre” [performed great murderous killings and did not mourn his feud and sins thereof, ll. 135–137]. Second, Grendel refuses to pay compensation for these criminal killings, as the law would demand: … Grendel wan hwīle wið Hrōþgār, hetenīðas wæg˙ , fyrene ond fæ¯hðe fela missera, singale sæce; sibbe ne wolde wið manna hwone mæg˙ enes Denig˙ a, feorhbealo feorran, fēa þingian, nē þæ¯r næ¯nig˙ witena wēnan þorfte beorhtre bōte tō banan folmum [Grendel fought for a long while against Hrothgar, bore against him his hatred, sins, and feud for many seasons, a perpetual conflict. He wished for no friendship with any of the tribe of the Danes to stem his hatred, and would not offer compensation. Nor did any of the Danes’ wise men expect bright offerings from the hands of the killer.] (ll. 151–158) As Hobsbawm notes, “revenge and retaliation are inseparable from justice in societies where blood calls for blood,”22 and to refuse to offer compensation for illegitimate killings, a fundamental way to resolve such conflicts, would allow the reciprocal violence of feud to escalate to uncontrollable levels. Grendel’s determination to continue the feud via illegitimate violence is a great social violation, abhorrent to both the characters and audience of the poem. Violence in Anglo-Saxon England was acceptable when it had a specific utilitarian function and its spread could be controlled, but Grendel’s violence is purely signifying and

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 21 uncontrollable. His repeated visits to Heorot, including the killing of Hondscioh, have no purpose other than to re-assert his power over the Danes rather than to achieve any sort of positive practical function—it is killing for its own sake. Since the Beowulf-poet consistently describes the conflict between Grendel and the Danes as fæ¯hðe, “feud,” the dynamic of reciprocal violence is normalized within the text, reflecting common means of conflict resolution in the medieval Germanic world. This takes us back to Girard’s thoughts on the pitfalls of reciprocal violence and their application to Beowulf. As Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred, “Why does the spirit of revenge, wherever it breaks out, constitute such an intolerable menace? Perhaps because the only satisfactory revenge for spilt blood is spilling the blood of the killer; and in the blood feud there is no clear distinction between the act for which the killer is being punished and the punishment itself.”23 The very nature of the feud ethos demands reciprocity, and such reciprocity itself demands further reciprocity—the cycle of violence has the potential to continue infinitely. Such a system of conflict resolution clearly has potential flaws, though. As Girard writes elsewhere, “Violence is always perceived as being a legitimate reprisal or even self-defence. So what must be given up [for resolution] is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in most cases, for legitimate defence. Since the violence is mimetic … only by an unconditional renunciation can we arrive at the desired result.”24 This is the crisis of violence within the Germanic world: total renunciation of violence is untenable. Therefore a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat held responsible for that violence, is propped up and killed to absorb the community’s contagion of violence and hence bring peace and stability to the community once more. 25 As Girard writes of the role of the sacrificial victim, “it is possible to see why the victim is believed to be sacred. The victim is held responsible for the renewed calm in the community and for the disorder that preceded this return.”26 In the Christian framework, Christ functions as this sacrifice, and the Eucharistic feast is a means to recreate this sacrifice symbolically and purge the contagion of violence from the community. In turn, “If sacrifice resembles criminal violence, we may say that there is, inversely, hardly any form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrifice.”27 This, then, is the very function of the Eucharist: Christ, executed as a criminal, is a ritual victim whose death allows followers to escape the bonds of reciprocal violence. Likewise, to take the Eucharist is to accept Christ’s status as a ritual victim and to renounce the need for reciprocal violence. Grendel’s feast serves as the negative example of this—just as he willfully violates the feud ethos, thereby functioning as an outlaw in the text, so he violates the Eucharist: the killing of the sacrificial victim is indulgence in excessive, signifying violence and power rather than an attempt at redemption. For Grendel, the ritual victim is a means to propagate violence, not renounce it. This

22  Eric R. Carlson problem is at the heart of the narrative function of Beowulf, and the poet is preoccupied with the exploring the boundaries between legitimate, socially acceptable contexts of violence and those moments when violence becomes excessive and illegitimate, an issue of great importance given its ubiquity in the Germanic world. Girard’s work shows that the ritual victim takes the form of the monstrous to make the scapegoat mechanism easier to achieve. As he writes, “There comes a point at which physical and moral monstrosity merge”28 and in the “mythological monster the ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ are inseparable. The two are so perfectly combined that any attempt to separate them seems doomed to failure.”29 Grendel is just such a monster, an enemy of society whose monstrosity reflects his immorality; figures such as he are “anti-conformists in practice and by ideology; on the devil’s side rather than God’s.”30 Not only is he an exiled descendent of Cain who eats people, he is a “Wiht unhæ¯lo” [unholy creature, l. 120] and the “fēond mancynnes” [the enemy of mankind, l. 164]. But it doesn’t end there: Grendel is also “Godes andsacan” [the adversary of God, l. 786] and “hē [wæs] fāg wið God” [he was hostile towards God, l. 811]. Grendel is the enemy of both God and humanity and has become “isolated, depraved, and deformed.”31 His rebellion is so profound and detestable that the poet’s claim “hē [wæs] fāg wið God” calls to mind the rebellion of Lucifer against the Almighty. Grendel’s association with Satan thus deepens the impact of the ogre’s social rebellion at all points, the most captivating moment being Grendel’s feast on the ill-fated Hondscioh. As “Godes andsacan,” when Grendel “bāt bānlocan, blōd ēdrum dranc,” his killing becomes a pernicious representation of the Christian Eucharist; even the poet’s reference to the completeness of Grendel’s meal, that he “hæfde/unlyfig˙ endes eal g˙ efeormod,/fēt ond folma” [he had eaten up the unliving one entirely, even the hands and feet, ll. 743–745], may evoke images of Christ’s stigmata. In this we see the most revered and holy event in Christian doctrine completely inverted. Grendel represents “an anti-society, which exists by reversing the values of the ‘straight’ world—it is, in its own phrase, ‘bent’—but is otherwise parasitic on it.”32 The parasitic nature of Grendel’s actions is not just metaphoric; whereas the Christian Eucharist brings salvation, Grendel’s Eucharist serves to nourish the body literally, but otherwise brings damnation. This evokes the poculum mortis, the cup of death, whose symbolism in Old English texts Hugh Magennis analyzes: the “bitter cup of God’s punishment is usually interpreted as being that of eternal damnation, while the desirable cup is the redeeming cup of Christ. This redeeming cup is identified with the Eucharist.”33 Grendel drinks from the bitter cup, as it were, and his damnation via his perverse Eucharist is a direct result of his illegitimate violence and his unwillingness to conclude his rivalry with the Danes.

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 23 As the wretched man [“wonsæ¯lī wer,” l. 105] banished and excommunicated by God from the human community, Grendel’s violence is an attempt to achieve a metaphysical object of desire: inclusion in the community of God, as modeled for him by the Danes. His identity is defined in terms of lack of community and the suffering inherent in that lack; as the poet writes, Đā se ellengæ¯st earfoðlīċe þrāge g˙ eþolode, sē þe in þy¯strum bād, þæt hē dōgora g˙ ehwām dream g˙ ehy¯rde hlūdne in healle [Then the fierce spirit, he who awaited in darkness, tortuously suffered at those times, that every day he heard joy loud in the hall.] (ll. 86–89) Banishment and exclusion torture Grendel; he desires to rid himself of it but can’t, so he takes out his hatred for this exclusion on the Danes, much in the way that Cain took out the Lord’s rejection of him on his brother Abel. As Girard writes, “At the source of the hatred of the Other there is hatred of the self,”34 and more specifically, “Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle.”35 Grendel hates himself because of his exclusion, for which he “g˙ eþolode” [suffered]. In response, Grendel becomes “a living example of the loss of distinctions that arise in collective violence; he is both human and monster, a force of chaos who annihilates order and reduces differences to undifferentiated gore.”36 His only recourse is to destroy the rival Danes, who function for Grendel as the obstacle in his path toward achieving his object of desire. Grendel envies the joy of the Danes, but “[w]hen we borrow the desires of those we admire we must play the deadly serious game of mimetic rivalry with them. Whenever we lose, our models successfully thwart our desires and, because we admire them, we feel rejected and humiliated. But since their victory over us confirms their superiority we admire them more than ever and our desire becomes more intense.”37 Grendel’s failure to achieve this object of desire, the alleviation of the pain of exile (it matters not that the cards are stacked against him), condemns him to victimize his model the Danes repeatedly, and hence the perverse nature of his Eucharistic feast. Instead of freeing him from the contagion of violence, Grendel keeps at the rivalry because his desire for inclusion, or at least his hatred of exclusion, increases and results in more violence against the Hrothgar and his Danes. His sacrificial feast fails in its purpose and incites further violence; thus for “twelf wintra tīd torn g˙ eþolode/ wine Scyldinga, wēana g˙ ehwelcne,/sīdra sorga” [twelve winters’ time the friend of the Scyldings [Hrothgar] suffered misery, every kind of woe

24  Eric R. Carlson and interminable sorrows, ll. 147–149] at the hands of Grendel. Because Grendel’s continued violence exiles him all the further, which then compels him to resort to even more violence, his object of desire becomes an erstwhile motivation and he is now consumed with the destruction of the model, just like Cain and not like Christ. Girard writes, “humans have to discipline their desire, and they cannot accomplish that except by means of sacrifices.”38 Thus we see the mimetic crisis: the “sacrifice” of a figure such as Hondscioh has the reverse effect of its intention; it serves to increase both Grendel’s exclusion from the community rather than alleviate it, as is his expectation of such violence. The killing of Hondscioh also illuminates the poet’s concerns with navigating appropriate and acceptable levels of violence within society. Outlawry frequently results from violence that exceeds society’s established levels of acceptability, and the killing of Hondscioh has a normative social function in the poem in addition to a theological function. The poet presents this killing as an example of pernicious, exaggerated, and improper violence that can threaten the fabric of the community. Violence in and of itself had a level of legitimacy in Anglo-Saxon culture and the greater Germanic world view; the tacit codification of acceptable violence in various Anglo-Saxon legal codes indicates the social legitimacy of violence, as long as its use followed certain socially acceptable parameters designed to limit its spread. Feud was an acceptable recourse for conflict resolution, and even required in certain circumstances, but society could not allow the violence of feud to spin out of control. In this way Grendel functions as the poet’s negative example once again; as Grendel he violates the Eucharist, so he willfully violates the feud ethos and thus creates and/or affirms his outlaw status in the text. The feast of his sacrificial victim Hondscioh is for excessive—and hence illegitimate— revenge and power, rather than redemption. But this gore has a deeper purpose in the poem: it allows the poet to connect outlawry from society with outlawry from God. That is, excessive and unnecessary violence that leads to social outlawry and exile will likewise lead the violent perpetrator to spiritual exile. Girard notes in Battling to the End, “reconciliation is never permanent. There is always the risk of escalation to extremes.”39 Thus a society needs to bring about an end to mimetic rivalry lest it destroy itself through it, and to this end the community’s violence often focuses on the killing of a ritual victim who functions as a scapegoat for society’s sins. Christ is just such a scapegoat, and the Eucharist is an inherently violent act—it is a cannibalistic feast of the ritual victim who functions as a scapegoat to absolve society of its sins, and thus the Eucharistic feast functions as a symbolic conclusion of mimetic rivalry. For Grendel, however, the body and blood of his victim function otherwise; Grendel’s killing, which is “far from alleviating his misery, serves only to increase it, and thus sin itself becomes the punishment of sin.”40 Grendel’s literal

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 25 last supper, the body and blood of Hondscioh, is a negative example of the Holy Feast, just as he is a negative example of violence. But unlike its Christian parallel, Grendel’s Eucharist condemns him because he has no intention of allowing this act to conclude the mimetic rivalry. Rather, it is a grotesque assertion of power through purely signifying violence, and he welcomes the continuation of the rivalry, if only because he will be hungry again at some point. In this the killing of Hondscioh successfully unites both Grendel’s secular and spiritual outlawry: this killing is simultaneously a gross violation of the laws of both human and divine societies, and Grendel is the symbolic depiction of the effects of illegitimate violence. Beowulf is a curiously human poem, one which explores the foibles and failings that make humans such tragic figures. But despite theological concerns underwriting so much of the poem, in the end such concerns are merely a backdrop to the poet’s constant investigation of the Germanic ethos as a means to establish positive social values. This is especially true of the function of violence. Violence has clear positive value in this world—the good kings Scyld Scefing, Hrothgar, and Beowulf all use violence so effectively and fearsomely that they create peace and stability for their peoples. And the poet approves of this; for these characters, each of whom has used violence effectively to ensure peace for his people, the poet employs the pithy epithet “Þæt wæs gōd cyning” [that was a good king, ll. 11, 863, and 2390]. Yet the poet also clearly understands the danger that violence presents. His is a world in which the feud ethos is still a compelling and culturally accepted means of conflict resolution, and an inherent danger of uncontrollable escalation exists within that dynamic. But the violence of feud, when indulged in socially acceptable ways, theoretically can be limited, and seeks only to redress immediate wrongs. Grendel violates this ethic through his ceaseless killings and his refusal to requite those killings in a socially acceptable manner. His Eucharist, the eating of Hondscioh, is a perversion of the ritual killing, an assertion of power rather than an act of contrition. Thus, Grendel is the “fyrena hyrde” [the shepherd of sins, l. 750], whereas God, the ultimate example of right, is the “wuldres hyrde” [the shepherd of glory, l. 931], and Grendel’s violence is simultaneously a social and spiritual outrage. For Grendel the feast is a confirmation of his moral and physical banishment; as Williams writes, “the court of Hrothgar representing kinship, peace, fidelity, and civilization is pitted against the forces of Cain: parricide[,] warmongery, treason, and cannibalism.”41 The Beowulf-poet has no great problem with violence so long as it leads to a stable society, but in no way is this Grendel’s intention. Rather, the ogre uses violence to destabilize society and this violence, as encapsulated in his last supper, reveals the fundamental nature of outlawry from the perspective of the status quo: a perversion not so much in the violent act itself, but in the motivations behind that act.

26  Eric R. Carlson The connections between the social and the religious doctrine are not far apart in this poem. As Girard writes, “In societies that do not have penal systems capable of halting the spread of mimetic rivalry and its escalation into a vicious circle of violence, the religious system performs this very real function.”42 William Chaney likewise claims that “Religion and law cannot be separated”43 in Beowulf and “the Church translated plotting against the monarch into an offense against God. Resisting the dooms of the heavenly and earthly monarchs thus placed one outside the world of law.”44 The Beowulf-poet contextualizes the conflict between Grendel and the Danes in terms of the reciprocal violence of feud and directly equates Grendel’s violence with the perversion of the Eucharist. In so doing the poet links the human community with the heavenly and shows that violations of the feud ethos—de facto violations of the social contract—are in fact violations against God.

Notes 1. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996): 773. 2. I would like to take a moment to clarify why I use the word ogre herein and not troll, which is the common term in Germanic texts for creatures such as Grendel. While there is a level of synonymous meaning to these words, our modern conception of the troll is simply that of a grotesque cave-dweller and these days the term is relatively benign and associated more with folk tales about goats. Ogres, however, are normally associated with more insidious behavior, particularly the habit of feasting on human flesh, and the word ogre today still retains a more sinister edge than troll. The word ogre is derived ultimately from Latin orcus “demon,” which was borrowed into Old English as orc (cf. orcnēas, Beowulf l. 112). Given such etymology, ogre is more semantically appropriate for the modern audience than troll to describe a character such as Grendel. 3. The dating of Beowulf has been an ongoing issue in scholarship for some 200 years, and attempts to date the poem have yielded wildly different assessments, ranging from the seventh century to the eleventh. While the specific date of the poem is of relatively small concern in this paper, I fall into the camp which views an early eleventh century date as most likely. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, revised ed. (New York: New Press, 2000), 23. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. References to the Old English text of Beowulf are based on R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Translations are my own. 7. Hobsbawm, Bandits, 42–43. 8. Malcolm Andrew, “Grendel in Hell,” English Studies 62, no. 5 (1981): 405. 9. Over the course of many years Girard developed—and revised—his theories on mimetic rivalry and its violent manifestations, most notably within the contexts of Russian, ancient Greek, and biblical literatures. In his early work such as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (trans. Yvonne Freccero, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), he explores the general nature of desire

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 27







and mimetic rivalry. Later, notably in Violence and the Sacred (trans. ­Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, Stanford University Press, 1987), Girard shows how mimetic rivalry leads to escalating reciprocal violence and the need to kill a ritual victim to quell that violence. In The Scapegoat (trans. Yvonne Freccero, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and I See Satan Fall like Lightning (trans. James G. Williams, Orbis, 2001), Girard explores the function of the ritual victim, including the potential futility of such scapegoats to bring mimetic rivalry to an end. Late in his career, in Battling to the End (trans. Mary Baker, Michigan State University Press, 2010), Girard explores in depth, using Christian theology as the preeminent example, that only wholesale renunciation of the mimetic rivalry can bring it, and its concomitant violence, to a close. 10. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), 140. 11. Richard Fletcher, Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115. 12. William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 236. 13. See: F. L. Attenborough, ed. and trans., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (New York: Russel and Russel, 1963), 33–93. 14. Ibid., 84–85. Translation is Attenborough’s. 15. The one negative reference to feasting in the poem occurs at line 563–564, when Beowulf tells, with humorous irony, how sea-monsters caught him and “‘hīe me þēgon, / symbel ymbsæ¯ton sæ¯grunde nēah’” [they bit at me, sat at a feast near the sea-bottom]. 16. Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 63–64. 17. Meyer Schapiro, “Cain’s Jaw-Bone that Did the First Murder,” The Art Bulletin 24, no. 3 (1942): 205. 18. David Williams, Cain and Beowulf: A Study in Secular Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 16. 19. Ibid., 24. 20. Ibid., 34. 21. D. H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63. 22. Hobsbawm, Bandits, 63–64. 23. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 14. 24. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 198. 25. This sacrificial victim can at times be an abstraction or a metaphor—wergild within the Germanic feud system is such an example: a person’s value is paid (read: “sacrificed”) in order to bring reciprocal violence to a conclusion rather than allow a potentially endless cycle of killings to continue. Of course, sometimes the victim is real; such is the case with Æschere, who is killed by Grendel’s mother in response to the violence of the Danes—visa-vis the proxy Beowulf—against Grendel. 26. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 27. Italics are Girard’s.

28  Eric R. Carlson 27. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 1. 28. René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 33–34. 29. Ibid., 34. 30. Hobsbawm, Bandits, 43. 31. Andrew, “Grendel in Hell,” 405. 32. Hobsbawm, Bandits, 106. 33. Hugh Magennis, “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature,” Speculum 60, no. 3 (1985): 519–520. 34. René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 57. 35. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 10–11. 36. Eric Wilson, “The Blood-Wrought Peace: A Girardian Reading of Beowulf.” English Language Notes 34, no. 1 (1996): 15. 37. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 77. 38. Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, 93. 39. René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 70. 40. Andrew, Grendel in Hell, 404. 41. Williams, Cain and Beowulf, 43. 42. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 41. 43. William A. Chaney, “Grendel and the Gifstol: A Legal View of Monsters,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 77, no. 5 (1962): 515. 44. Ibid., 516.

Bibliography Andrew, Malcolm. “Grendel in Hell.” English Studies 62, no. 5 (1981): 401–410. Attenborough, F. L., ed. and trans. The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. New York: Russel and Russel, 1963. Chaney, William A. “Grendel and the Gifstol: A Legal View of Monsters.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 77, no. 5 (1962): 513–520. Fletcher, Richard. Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. ———. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. ———. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. New York: Orbis, 2001. ———. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Translated by James G. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. ———. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper 29 ———. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. ———. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Green, D. H. Language and History in the Early Germanic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits, revised edition. New York: New Press, 2000. Magennis, Hugh. “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature.” Speculum 60, no. 3 (1985): 517–536. Marvin, Carolyn, and David J. Ingle. “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996): 767–780. Miller, William Ian. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Orchard, Andy. Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the BeowulfManuscript. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Schapiro, Meyer. “Cain’s Jaw-Bone that Did the First Murder.” The Art Bulletin 24, no. 3 (1942): 205–212. Williams, David. Cain and Beowulf: A Study in Secular Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Wilson, Eric. “The Blood-Wrought Peace: A Girardian Reading of Beowulf.” English Language Notes 34, no. 1 (1996): 7–30.

3

Food, Feasts, and Temperance The Social Contracts of “Mete and Drink” in The Tale of Gamelyn1 Renée Ward

In one of his many studies of medieval recipes, Terence Scully emphasizes the importance of the Latin verb tempare and suggests its use, and the use of cognate verbs describe an act that differs considerably from modern recipe directives such as “mix” or “moisten.”2 Tempare and its associates, he argues, refer more precisely to the creation of balance between humoral elements (hot or cold, moist or dry) in food preparation. He also explains that, in medieval cookery, the tempering of ingredients is crucial to the maintenance of a moderate disposition: “The safest food that a human can consume and not risk losing his or her temper is that which is moderately warm and moist.”3 Wine in particular was believed to be a beneficial and corrective beverage, and “[t]hick red wine” especially was thought to improve and promote the quality of the bodily fluid it most resembled, blood.4 It was frequently included in recipes, often as a tempering ingredient, and it was consumed, diluted or undiluted, during meals.5 Of course, the quantity of wine one imbibed had to be moderate (or tempered) itself, and excessive consumption was considered the source of a range of health problems, “from damage to the brain to trembling and the loss of motor skills.”6 The importance of wine as a cultural artefact increased especially in the fourteenth century with the increasing popularity of a new Eucharistic celebration, the feast of Corpus Christi. As Miri Rubin explains, the feast began on the continent mid-thirteenth century and, over the next two hundred years, spread across Christendom, landing firmly in England by 1318.7 The feast impacted literary traditions as well as religious practice, and, by mid-century, both ritual and text foregrounded the importance of the Eucharist as a way of expressing and maintaining one’s faith, with the wafer and wine representing the flesh and blood of Christ. Food and drink, then, especially wine, were connected to behaviour and to physical and spiritual health as well as to sustenance. Indeed, dietetics, or humoral theory, was an integral part of medieval life, shaping not only what was consumed, but also how what was consumed was understood to act on the body.8 If one’s temperament were imbalanced, one would be described as sanguine (having too much blood), choleric

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 31 (having too much yellow bile), melancholic (having too much black bile), or phlegmatic (having too much phlegm).9 Eventually, the stages of life, the seasons, and even human organs were linked to the humours.10 These associations were so well entrenched by the fifteenth century that John Russell personified them in his Boke of Nurture, an instructional manual that outlines, among other things, the duties and accepted behaviours of household staff, from butlers and chamberlains to marshals.11 Russell introduces four characters in the guise of subtleties, highly politicized and decorative dishes served at the end of a course—Sanguineus, Estas, Harvest, and Wyntur—and links them directly to the four life stages or ages, seasons, and dispositions: childhood, spring, being sanguine; adolescence, summer, being choleric; adulthood, autumn, being phlegmatic; and old age, winter, being melancholic.12 He describes the choleric Estas, for example, as “A roughe, a red, angry syre,/An hasty man standynge in fyre,/As hoot as somer by his attyre” [A rough, a red, angry sire,/A hasty man standing in fire,/As hot as summer by his disposition, ll. 740–42], and notes that Estas’s pastimes include “Fyghtynge, blasfemynge, [and] brallynge” [Fighting, blaspheming, [and] boasting, l. 773].13 This portrait of an impetuous and argumentative youth is highly evocative of the eponymous hero of the outlaw ballad The Tale of Gamelyn, whom critics have repeatedly identified as excessive and gratuitous in his violence. John Scattergood, for instance, points out that Gamelyn has an “aptitude for violence” and that his actions are the tale’s celebration of “lawlessness.”14 Jean E. Jost similarly argues that, as the ballad progresses, Gamelyn’s “anger and aggression become more gratuitous, part of his ordinary behavior. He seems to know no bounds.”15 Such assessments indeed suggest that he can be read as an individual stagnated at the choleric stage of life, a perpetual figure of irascible behaviour. Yet, such a reading belies the text’s subtle depiction of Gamelyn’s progression from fiery youth to level-headed adult. By constructing Gamelyn’s identity as one inextricably linked to food and drink and their associated actions, the poet suggests that his protagonist, in a manner akin to medieval cookery, actually undergoes a process of tempering; that is, through the correct blending of ingredients, Gamelyn reaches moderation in his behaviour. The ingredients of this gastronomical metaphor are the four “units of value” Stephen Knight identifies as necessary to the protagonist’s success: “Strength; Family (including Friends); Status; and Law.”16 The poet thus links food and drink to Gamelyn’s identity, and explicitly to his physical prowess, as he simultaneously identifies food and feasts—specifically the three major feast scenes in which Gamelyn appears—as social contracts that form relationships (good and bad), and as indicators of lawful and appropriate behaviour. In doing so, he foregrounds especially fraternal bonds and behaviours connected to social norms concerning hospitality and generosity. Additionally, he renders Gamelyn’s understanding of space and its uses critical to

32  Renée Ward these actions and social relationships, emphasizing the medieval hall in particular and the problems that arise when the boundaries between its domestic and judicial uses blur when feasting is mixed with violent attempts at justice. The narrative resolves only once the protagonist tempers his behaviour through the establishment of appropriate social bonds or relationships, which provide him with instruction and good counsel, and through his growing awareness that one must maintain the distance within the hall between domestic and judicial activities; that is, he learns that feasting and violence do not mix. Cumulatively, these elements result in a narrative that expresses concerns not only about contemporary inheritance laws, but also about the judiciary system and corrupt local officials. More importantly, while the narrative creates space for a critique of negative behaviours in both arenas, it ultimately reinforces the social hegemony and monarchical power, demonstrating that appropriate justice and resolution are reached only when plaintiffs follow due process. The Tale of Gamelyn is one of the earliest extant outlaw narratives in Middle English. Originally, critics suggested dates for it in the early part of the fourteenth century, although in the mid-twentieth century, this shifted by a few decades. Critics now widely accept a date from the mid-century period instead, although even here precision is impossible.17 The language of the text is more certain; the tale is clearly written in a North East Midlands dialect, and Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren suggest that the frequent appearance of “words of Scandinavian origin” likely place it in a “Danelaw-oriented part of the region, such as Lincolnshire,” or perhaps slightly further southwest in Leicestershire, where evidence exists of historical outlaws that provide contemporary context for Gamelyn’s activities.18 Its author is unknown, but the tale’s survival in twenty-five manuscripts can be attributed to a persistent belief for many years that Chaucer wrote it.19 While Gamelyn falls into the outlaw genre and is anthologized alongside other Greenwood ballads, it is not specifically a story about Robin Hood. Although an outlaw king does appear in the narrative, he is never identified as Robin, and his character quickly receives a pardon and returns home. Even Gamelyn himself is not identified as or declared an outlaw until quite late in the narrative. The ballad is, in many ways, a story about fraternal relations and inheritance laws, albeit one that ultimately favours the practice of primogeniture. 20 Sir John Boundys, the father of three sons, the youngest of which is Gamelyn, gathers a small group of peers to his death bed and verbally dictates to them the terms of his will, which follows the practice of partible inheritance by dividing his property evenly “amonge [his] sones thre” [among [his] three sons, l. 36]. 21 This proposed equity is of paramount importance to John, who fears that his youngest son will be neglected or even abused by his siblings. His comment that “Seelde ye

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 33 seen eny hier helpen his brother” [Seldom do you see any heir help his brother, l. 40] reveals an awareness that fraternal bonds often fail when in contest with the desire for financial power. His counsellors disagree with these terms, and although their preference would be for him to follow the practice of primogeniture and leave all goods to one heir, they suggest instead a compromise, that Sir John divide everything between the two eldest sons, leaving Gamelyn—who is repeatedly identified as young—out of the equation entirely. 22 In response, Sir John dictates a second version of his will, one that leaves an equal but smaller amount of five plough shares to each of his elder sons and then all remaining lands, tenants, and goods to his youngest son. 23 After their father’s demise, Gamelyn’s eldest brother John usurps the younger’s portion of the estate and puts the latter to work in his household as a kitchen boy. Gamelyn’s inheritance falls into ruin: fields lay fallow; forests are pulled down; deer are stolen or poached; buildings dilapidate; and tenants are neglected. 24 As he grows, Gamelyn realizes how poorly his inheritance has been handled and upon reaching an age of physical maturity, a moment marked by his stroking of his beard (81–82), he revolts against his position of servitude. Rather than recognize that his brother has come of age and treat him accordingly, however, John orders his men to beat the youth, an ultimately futile approach. He consequently makes amends with Gamelyn, promising to restore the younger brother’s inheritance, but this promise proves false. Further episodes of violence and a second betrayal ensue, after which Gamelyn flees with a companion into the Greenwood and joins a local outlaw band. At this point, John— now also the Sheriff—has his brother indicted and declared “wolfshede” [an outlaw, l. 696]. Upon hearing this news, Gamelyn confronts his brother, but is thrown in prison until the middle brother, Sir Ote, miraculously materializes and promises to stand surety for the younger brother until the hearing. John agrees, and releases Gamelyn to Sir Ote’s care, but then proceeds to bribe the jury for the hearing, so that when Gamelyn returns, he finds Sir Ote bound and sentenced to hang in his stead. Violence erupts: Gamelyn and his companions deliver to John, the justice, and the corrupt jury the sentence intended for him, hanging. He and Sir Ote then make peace with the king, who appoints the elder brother as the local justice and the younger brother as chief justice of the forest. The king also restores Gamelyn’s inheritance and Sir Ote, now the primary landowner, appoints Gamelyn as his heir, confirming the practice of primogeniture. From the outset, the ballad links both Gamelyn’s status and identity to food and eating. Food first enters the narrative when the protagonist matures and contemplates the misdeeds he suffers at his brother’s hands. When John inquires of Gamelyn “is our mete yare?” [is our meat ready, l. 90], he makes explicit the servile social role the younger brother occupies, that of cook or kitchen-boy, suggesting that he views him as

34  Renée Ward both socially and morally inferior to himself.25 Indeed, cooks were often perceived as being at the lower end of the labouring class because of their trade’s association with the body and its processes. 26 Chaucer, for instance, epitomizes this connection in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by juxtaposing his Cook’s skill at making a blancmanger [a stew of almonds, rice, and fish or poultry in a milk sauce] with a “mormal” [ulcer, l. 386] on his shin. 27 The revolting parallel between the pus-filled sore and the creamy stew gestures to the Cook’s excess bodily fluids and humoral imbalance, a detail which resurfaces in The Manciple’s Prologue when the Host calls upon the napping Cook to tell a tale. The Manciple interjects, saying that he will tell a story to save everyone from the drunkard with the foul breath whose story will infect the entire party. At his words, the Cook—who is roaring drunk—“wax wroth and wraw” [grew wrathful and angry, IX. 46–47], shaking his head so vigorously that his horse throws him to the ground, where he remains, unable to rise without the help of other pilgrims. 28 Gamelyn’s behaviour suggests that, like Chaucer’s Cook, he bears the humoral imbalance associated with his trade. The narrator’s remark “There was noon thereinne neither yonge ne olde,/That wolde wroth Gamelyn were he never so bolde” [There was no-one therein neither young nor old,/That was bold enough to ever anger Gamelyn, ll. 79-80] reveals that the youth’s temper is renowned among and feared by John’s household staff. This fear arises in part from Gamelyn’s immense strength, which the poet likewise connects to the youth’s occupation. When Gamelyn refuses to cook supper, John sets his men upon the youth in response to this perceived insubordination. The men attack him with staves, but Gamelyn seizes what appears to be a weapon of chance—a large pestle—and fends them off. Further, he demonstrates considerable skill with this makeshift weapon, as with the pestle he “made hem al agast” [made them all afraid, l. 128]. Here, the poet presents Gamelyn as a fierce and fearful figure, one whose strength derives explicitly from the physical labour of his household role. 29 Even as the youth rejects the menial social position that previously has been forced upon him, he has no choice but to rely upon the tools of that same position in order to protect himself, demonstrating how difficult it may be for him to extricate his identity from his trade. Further, the poet suggests that while John inhabits the higher social position within the household, this social status does not inherently render him the better person. His repeated betrayals of his younger brother demonstrate that despite his easy aptitude for violence, the elder brother remains the less savoury character. The poet does not, then, like his contemporaries, necessarily render the occupation of cook a negative one, and instead reveals how Gamelyn’s trade gives him a physical advantage. Further, the poet’s social positioning of Gamelyn results in critical insight for the protagonist, providing him with the first-hand experience of oppression under an exploitative

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 35 lord and exposing him to the power dynamics between the estates and what happens when social bonds are abused. In fact, a striking feature of The Tale of Gamelyn is the way in which it interlaces food and the acts of eating and drinking with social bonds. Medieval outlaw tales often foreground the functions of food and feasts, especially the role they play in the creation of social bonds or in the establishment of social status. The lavish feasts Robin sets before Sir Richard and the king in A Lyttel Geste of Robyn Hode, for instance, signify both his generosity as a lord of the Greenwood and his fealty to the king. When the impoverished Sir Richard joins the outlaws, they share a multi-course meal of bread, wine, sweet-breads, swans, pheasants, and river-foul.30 This list gestures to the status of both the guest and Robin himself, for it is a meal fit for a king both to serve and to consume. Wine was generally a beverage of the aristocracy, while swans, pheasants, and river-foul in general were all considered delicacies at the table and were hunted by those in the upper ranks, often with hawks or falcons. 31 Similarly, when Robin and his men meet the king in the forest, they serve him white bread, red wine, a fine brown ale, and venison.32 White bread especially was linked to the upper classes, as was venison, which, like river-foul, was hunted as an aristocratic sport.33 Despite their outlawry, Robin and his men set an elaborate spread.34 They treat their guests to the best repast, honouring them and recognizing their social status. Yet through these displays of abundance and generosity, they simultaneously demonstrate their own status, suggesting that Robin and his band are on equal footing with their guests. Within the larger narrative, this status highlights how the outlaw band and its leader provide a contrast and corrective to the corrupt systems of the local judicial and ecclesiastical authorities.35 The Tale of Gamelyn, however, starkly contrasts such scenes. No swans, pheasants, or sweet-breads fill the tables of this ballad. Instead, a lack of detail characterizes its descriptions of food and feasts, as the ballad refers only occasionally to “mete and drink” [meat and drink], “wyne” [wine], or, in the moment closest to the feasts of Geste, to the “messes two or thre” [courses two or three, l. 463] served during the clerical banquet Gamelyn’s brother John hosts. Yet, this is not to say that food and feasts are less important in Gamelyn than they are in other outlaw tales. For a narrative of relative brevity (it has only 898 lines), references to food and drink—to eating and drinking in some manner, or even to the lack thereof—appear more than three dozen times. Significantly, the repeated use of the combination “mete and drink/ drynk” appears six times within the contexts of both consumption and deprivation.36 Although this may appear initially to be a stock phrase leftover from the ballad’s likely oral circulation, its presence reinforces the poet’s emphasis on food and drink in relation to behaviour and moderation through its evocation of what is perhaps the most prevalent

36  Renée Ward semantic pairing of the period, that of “flesh and blood,” a common reference to the consumption of the wafer and wine of the Eucharist.37 The expression “mete and drink” appears in numerous texts, both secular and sacred, perhaps most notably in the Middle English texts of the long Charter of Christ, variants of which existed contemporaneous to Gamelyn.38 An allegorical text that draws upon the language of medieval legal documents, the Charter outlines how, through the Passion, Christ’s body transforms into a charter highlighting the commandments upon which all others rest, those concerned with love, and detailing how the charter itself is prepared or written.39 Through this allegory, the text represents the agreement between God and humanity: the saving of souls in exchange for the love of God and of neighbours. Christ details how his skin becomes the very “parchemyne” [parchment, l. 51] upon which the charter between humanity and God is written, while his blood is “tempyrd all with vermelyoune” [tempered all with vermilion, l. 145] to colour red the wax upon which the seal that validates the Charter is stamped.40 Here, the body of Christ and the parchment of the Charter explicitly connect to the practice of creating balance so prominent in medieval cookery, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the concept of tempering within medieval culture. The long versions of the Charter expand this connection through their foregrounding of the importance of eating and drinking in the creation of the agreement they outline. Christ explains that during the Last Supper, Myne awen skyn I toke þar-to To get me frendes I gaf gud mede So dose þe pore þat has gret need; On a Thursday a sopere I made Both frende [and] fa to make þam glade With mete [and] drynk to saule fode With haly word my flesch [and] blode. (54–59) [From my own skin I took To protect my friends I gave good mead41 So do you pour that has great need; On a Thursday a supper I made Both friend [and] foe to make them glad With meat [and] drink or soul’s food With holy word my flesh [and] blood.] (ll. 54–59) Here, he explicitly links “mete [and] drynk” with the Eucharist and demonstrates the way in which this sustenance is bound to relationships or community through the reference to friends. Additionally, these lines play upon the double meaning of the word “saule.” The comment that the guests eat and drink “to saule fode” specifically suggests that those present eat and drink substances good for their souls, and thus for their

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 37 salvation, the flesh and blood of Christ.42 Yet while those present eat and drink for their salvation, they also consume an appropriate or moderate amount for fullness, no more, no less; that is, they eat to satiety, tempering their appetites and eating only their fill.43 The reference to the Last Supper, then, while emphasizing the Eucharist, simultaneously reminds the reader that Christ and the disciples were, in fact, feasting. Before Christ shares the bread and wine (flesh and blood) with the disciples, they have already partaken of the paschal lamb as part of Passover celebrations.44 This scene is a pinnacle example in the medieval imagination of how food and feasts contribute to the creation of social bonds, one that emphasizes, moreover, the importance of brotherly love in this process.45 While Gamelyn does not present its protagonist as a Christ-figure, its contemporaneity to the rise of the feast of Corpus Christi and related creative works suggests that the ballad’s use of the expression “mete and drink” and the idea of tempering, both of which had considerable cultural currency by the mid-fourteenth century, would not go unnoticed by a medieval audience. As Rubin remarks, “[i]n the Middle Ages the language of religion provided a language of social relations,” and the Eucharist was central to this paradigm.46 Christ’s body is inextricably linked to the notions of feasting, moderation or tempering, and legal discourse, and these relationships permeate Gamelyn. The protagonist’s identity, as seen, is interlaced with references to food and food preparation. Further, the narrative has a hefty catalogue of references to food, drink, and feasts—two dozen in all—including references to communal meals as frequently as it does “mete and drink”: it mentions three instances of “feest” [feast, ll. 325, 337, 455] and three instances of the analogous “mangerye” (343, 430, 460); one multiple-course event indicative of a feast (463); and one note concerning the removal of the cloth from the board, signalling the end of a feast (489). Five references to meat (392, 624, 629, 661, 670) and wine (314, 332, 424, 592, 604) occur, while eating and drinking as a combined action appears three times (417, 676, 677). Three mentions of meals other than a feast appear (420–421, 631, 640), along with two additional references to fasting or a forced lack of food (394, 670).47 Through such references, the narrator repeatedly draws attention to the role communal meals play in the establishment of social bonds, highlighting especially the distance between the ballad and the religious text. The ballad ultimately demonstrates how far society has strayed from the ideal, and confirms Sir John’s concerns in Fitt 1 that relationships fray when greed takes precedence over brotherly love. The ballad’s three main feast scenes likewise foreground relationships, reinforcing the importance of this cultural practice as both a marker of civilization and as a tool through which to create and maintain social hierarchies and bonds. As J. Allan Mitchell remarks,

38  Renée Ward What happens in kitchens and dining tables, within great households and cottages alike, tends to produce and reproduce dominant cultural forms in the Middle Ages: a table is the place where kinship bonds are forged and maintained; [and] the arrangement of guests recapitulates the social hierarchy.48 Hierarchies indeed informed the space of the hall during mealtimes, from seating arrangements to the types of foods served. Hosts and honoured guests might sit separately from others in more elaborate furnishings, and typically were offered greater amounts and better qualities of food than their lower-ranking companions.49 Although feasts could be celebratory, such as those for betrothals and weddings, coronations, or martial conquests, they operated, more importantly, as demonstrations of wealth and power. The more lavish an individual’s outlay, the more powerful he or she was perceived to be. And generosity was paramount. Feasts, which could last for days or weeks, were highly ritualized events that reinforced political and social networks: by hosting a feast and appearing “open-handed and generous,” the lord “showed his importance and his power, and the guests showed by their presence that they played a part in the hierarchy.”50 Feasts were thus social contracts based upon a degree of reciprocity between the members of the community. Through the first two feast scenes of the ballad, the Gamelyn poet juxtaposes the hosting activities of the protagonist and his abusive older brother, demonstrating that this social practice, like the food preparation connected to it, requires temperance or moderation in order to be successful. When Gamelyn returns from a wrestling match, he breaks down the gate (which John orders locked against him), attacks and kills the porter, and usurps his brother’s position as the head of the household. No longer the cook, he becomes, as he puts it, a “catour” [purveyor or caterer, l. 319], and quickly establishes himself in this new role as the opposite of his brother, whom he describes as a “nigon” [miser, l. 321]. Gamelyn then moves beyond this position and usurps John’s position when he acts as head of the household by hosting a generous feast during which he invites his guests to enjoy “mete and drink” (318), especially the five tonnes of wine sequestered in his brother’s cellar. He welcomes all ranks of society by opening the gates to “all that gone wolde or ride” [to all that went by on foot or horse, l. 310] and tells them, “Ye be welcome without eny greve,/For we wil be maisters here and axe no man leve” [You will be welcome without any trouble,/For we will be masters here and ask no man permission, ll. 311–12].51 This open invitation suggests that while the youth claims the position as head of a household, he also sees social status as unimportant. After all, his own previous status as cook belies the truth of his birth, and while the narrative does not explicitly identify by class the guests who attend the feasts, his recent return from the wrestling competition suggests that it is likely some, if

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 39 not many, of the guests are from the lower ranks.52 Gamelyn’s words, especially his use of the collective pronoun “oure” before “catour” and his use of the first person plural pronoun in his declaration “we wil be maisters,” reveal his intention that the feast be an equalizing affair. In a single semantic gesture, he aligns himself with all of his guests regardless of their status, and erases any of the ritualized expressions of social hierarchy normally associated with feasting. By doing so, he undercuts and attempts to correct the unlawful subservience and hegemony that characterizes his brother’s household. In Gamelyn’s view, the feast is in fact payment for his period of inappropriate servitude and for John’s squandering of the portion of their father’s estate that he has usurped from Gamelyn. The feast therefore is an event greatly informed by the youth’s desire for retribution, and, in his mind, serves as a type of justice, a corrective measure to John’s corruption of the social contract between them: the amount of John’s food and wine which Gamelyn wastes is equal to the wealth or income he has lost in his sixteen years of servitude.53 Yet, while the feast certainly suggests that the younger brother would be a more generous host or lord than his corrupt and miserly elder brother, it simultaneously demonstrates that he is not yet ready for the responsibilities of lordship and, in fact, that he lacks the temperance necessary to be an appropriate host because he is too generous. Although the feast has a celebratory tone—one that highlights Gamelyn’s temporary besting of John—it does not follow the ritualized presentation of courses, and the text omits any reference to an ordered seating arrangement for the guests or any detailed account of the food. Instead, the feast has bacchanalian overtones, what Nancy Mason Bradbury refers to as “carnivalesque images of open-handedness and free access.”54 These overtones ultimately link the revelry to the social disorder frequently associated with wrestling competitions and the lower ranks of society.55 Additionally, the victuals of the celebration themselves gesture towards unruly behaviour. The sheer volume of wine John hoards in the cellar—the wine that Gamelyn and his companions consume— coupled with the elder brother’s characterization as a miser, suggests that the wine has been in the cellar for quite some time. As Hammond notes, “Old (and ‘dark’) wine was bad for people, drying up and burning the body, and exciting bile.”56 Excessive amounts of wine, particularly of old wine, increase choleric tendencies. These associations ring true in the violence Gamelyn displays both prior to and after the feast. Because no specific hierarchical or reciprocal relationships between the host and the guests are at play during the feast, meaningful social or political bonds are not formed during the week-long revelry. After the guests depart, Gamelyn “stood anon alone frend had ne noon” [soon stood alone and friends had he none, l. 346]. Alone and friendless in the hall, he is easy prey for his brother, who returns and orders his men to capture and bind the youth. Gamelyn’s feast, then, fails to temper his

40  Renée Ward behaviour, nor does it give him the social or martial support that feasts were meant to engender among the aristocracy, falling short of the social and political work it should or could do. The feast’s failure also suggests that Gamelyn is also not tempered in his approach to the law. That is, he fails to recognize and follow the correct due process through which to amend his brother’s mistreatment of his inheritance. Once he comes of age, he certainly has the right to complain, or to bring an action to the courts and seek redress for the wrongs done to him.57 He fails to do so, though, opting instead for his bacchanalian feast. While this event may execute a type of retribution in that it significantly depletes John’s stores, it ultimately falls short of enacting justice because it does not remedy John’s treatment of his brother or better Gamelyn’s position. The poet thus implies that the youth is not yet ready for the social role he seizes or for its associated responsibilities. In contrast, the banquet John holds after his capture of Gamelyn initially appears to conform to traditional feast practices. The guests belong to a higher-ranking and specific social group—that of the Church—and they enter the social space of the hall in an orderly manner. The feast follows the ritualized order of presentation, with food spread out over a series of courses, and the removal of the cloth from the board signifies the end of the event.58 Yet, like his younger brother, the elder uses the event to enact revenge rather than to seek justice through appropriate means. John convinces Gamelyn that his people, angered by the youth’s murder of the porter, demand that he bind him as punishment. He requests that Gamelyn acquiesce in order to trick his men, which he does. Once the youth is bound to a post in the hall, though, John’s betrayal becomes evident, as he punishes his captive by depriving him of food and drink for two days and two nights. Moreover, while bound to the post, Gamelyn becomes a spectacle for John’s guests, who “casten her yen” [cast their eyes, l. 458] upon him as they enter the feast hall.59 Gamelyn could be considered the equivalent of trussed game prior to preparation, or to a subtlety, much like the embodied dishes in Russell’s Boke, Sanguineus, Estas, Harvest, and Wyntur.60 Given L. B. Ross’s argument that such dishes frequently conveyed “both a political and a personal message of the host,” John’s placement of Gamelyn is significant.61 The guests consume Gamelyn visually: they witness his containment and subordination by John and indirectly participate in the older brother’s reassertion of power, which renders the youth akin to his usurped inheritance, an object to be used or consumed. John thus sends a three-fold message to the youth and to the clerical guests: Gamelyn’s status is unquestionably subservient; John’s power is paramount; and any attempt to challenge the latter’s authority will fail. Yet, John’s desire to exploit the feast as a form of punishment for Gamelyn backfires when the youth escapes. In this moment, the text reinforces its larger message that justice can be achieved only through appropriate due process.

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 41 Gamelyn likewise envisions the clerical banquet as an opportunity to mete out a type of justice, and the subsequent episode, although similarly unsuccessful, suggests that he is beginning to understand how food and feasts operate as social contracts, knowledge that furthers his maturity and renders him increasingly suitable for social responsibility. Gamelyn wins freedom from his bindings through an agreement with his brother’s spencer, Adam. In exchange for Adam’s help, Gamelyn promises him a portion of his land: “If thou may come to the keys lese me out of bonde,/… I wil part with the of my free londe” [If you may bring the keys to release me from my chains,/… I will give to you of my free land, ll. 397–398]. Knight and Ohlgren suggest that this exchange “represents the processes of ‘bastard feudalism’ at work,” a notion Kaeuper confirms when he remarks, “Adam frees his master Gamelyn, not because of idealized feudal loyalty, but in return for a promise of reward.”62 Adam refrains from offering blind loyalty, but Gamelyn, although his leadership skills have not yet fully evolved, recognizes that effective partnerships have to be beneficial to all involved, an understanding no doubt informed by his own experiences in his brother’s kitchen. This exchange foregrounds once again the role food and eating play in the creation of social bonds. Gamelyn has been bound without food or water for two days and nights. After agreeing to Gamelyn’s terms, Adam frees the captive and takes him immediately to the pantry, where he eats “well and fyne” [well and to his fill, l. 423] and likewise drinks “wel of the rede wyne” [well of the red wine, l. 424]. The descriptors “well/wel” and “fyne” suggest that in this scene, unlike at his bacchanalian feast, Gamelyn consumes a moderate amount of food and drink.63 The repast with which Adam furnishes Gamelyn thus signifies both a tempering of the latter’s consumption and the social contract between the two men, replenishing the youth and formalizing his economic partnership with the spencer.64 The arrangement, then, is a measured one, based on the needs and knowledge of both parties. Gamelyn’s desire, once free, is to initiate immediately an attack on those who wronged him, but Adam suggests instead that they convert the banquet into a mock trial during which the bound youth can test the guests by beseeching them for succour. He tempers his companion’s violent urges, telling him not to kill the guests, since they are “men of holy churche” [men of [the] holy church]; rather, in one of the text’s best moments of dark comedy, he suggests they only “breke both her legges and sithen her armes” [break both their legs and then their arms, ll. 518, 520]. While Adam’s plan initially succeeds—the two defeat John and his guests—they abandon their cause when a large group of the Sheriff’s men approach the hall. Recognizing that they are outnumbered, they share a quick, final drink at John’s expense before fleeing together into the forest. Timing gestures to the inappropriateness of Adam and Gamelyn’s actions, as John holds his “mangerye” [feast, l. 460] on the Sunday, or the sabbath, the

42  Renée Ward Christian day of rest and thanksgiving. The pair’s violence thus contravenes the feast’s role in the formation of social bonds while simultaneously contrasting it to that pinnacle expression of such relations, the Eucharistic feast. Their flight suggests not only that they are aware that they have acted illegitimately, but also that they have little faith in either John or the authorities to deal with them fairly. Gamelyn’s subsequent time in the Greenwood, however, exposes him to a counter-culture that offers a corrective to the corrupt system of expropriation and retribution embodied by his older brother. This sequence provides the youth with a deeper understanding of the social and political functions of food and feasts, especially the importance of separating eating and drinking from violence and judicial acts, as well as of the supremacy of monarchial power in the social hierarchy. Within the forest, Gamelyn and Adam encounter an outlaw band, “Sevene score of yonge men …/Alle satte at the mete compas aboute” [Seven score of young men …/All sitting at the meat in a circle, ll. 623–624]. The outlaws’ feast sharply contrasts those hosted by both Gamelyn and John. The seating arrangement stands out because it downplays the social hierarchies typically associated with seating arrangements in the hall. The outlaws, in a manner reminiscent of Arthur’s round table, feast in a circular setting that places no individual above another. However, while this arrangement does indeed have an equalizing effect and suggests that their community is more democratic and inclusive than the one Gamelyn and Adam flee, hierarchy or social structure is not entirely absent. The outlaws still recognize a leader, whom the poet identifies repeatedly as the “mayster/ maistere outlaw” [master or master outlaw], and, significantly, as the outlaw king, a title which highlights how this community echoes that of the world Gamelyn and Adam flee.65 More importantly, the comportment of the band members reveals their society’s confidence in its leader and that their behaviour, under his governance, is tempered. When a small group from the band greets the pair and requests the surrender of their weapons, Gamelyn boasts that even if they numbered twelve, they would not be enough to challenge his strength (642–647). Despite the youth’s aggressive words, the men respond “myldely and stille” [mildly and calmly, l. 650], instructing him to “Cometh afore our maister and seith to hym your wille” [Come before our master and say to him your will, l. 651]. The description of their speech as mild and calm suggests that even when provoked, these men are capable of maintaining their composure, that, unlike their guest, they are not hot-headed or argumentative. It also suggests that they have confidence in their leader’s abilities to manage this potentially unruly guest. The outlaw king embodies hospitality and generosity, those attributes sorely lacking in John and at which Gamelyn so miserably failed. Taking pity on the hungry outcasts, he entreats them to join the band,

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 43 to sit and “ete and drink and that of the beste” [eat and drink and of the best repast, l. 676]. Although the outlaws are armed, this feast does not devolve into combat and no grudge against Gamelyn surfaces for his earlier harsh words; the affair is a peaceful one, a meal of fellowship and good cheer. In short, the outlaws’ meal realizes the type of equalized society Gamelyn strove for with his own feast, and it teaches the youth one of the most vital functions of communal eating, “learning to live peaceably” with others.66 The outlaw king and his band model appropriate—that is, tempered—behaviour as they integrate their guests into the Greenwood community through the communal feast. Shortly thereafter, the outlaw king elevates Gamelyn to his secondin-command, and within three weeks receives a royal pardon. Gamelyn thus witnesses sovereign power at work: through pardons, the monarch demonstrates his supremacy as head of the judicial system, and that, if necessary, he can and will deliver justice in a manner that circumvents his local representatives. When the master outlaw departs for home, he turns the leadership of the band over to his second, signalling the youth’s preparedness to lead others, including his own people, who seek him out and report that John, newly appointed as Sheriff, has declared him an outlaw. Gamelyn’s response reveals that he is becoming more measured. He travels to the next shire, where his brother presides over a “mote halle” [judicial hall, l. 713], and, notably, as he approaches the lords present in the hall, he “putte adoun his hode” [lowers his hood, l. 714], displaying an appropriate amount of deference to their authority. He then proceeds with what can be termed an action, or the right to pursue a judicial proceeding, when he queries, “Whi hast thou don me that shame and vilenye,/For to lat endite me and wolfeshede do me crye?” [Why have you done to me this shame and wickedness,/To accuse me and declare me an outlaw?, ll. 717–718]. Here, Gamelyn demonstrates that he has learned the importance of due process, and, indeed, he attempts to follow the appropriate channels to resolve his outlawry. This moment also contrasts Gamelyn’s growth to the stagnation and lack of temperance of his oldest brother. When the youth seeks to redress his situation, John denies him action. He refuses to let him speak, fearing that he might secure mercy from those present. Instead, he has Gamelyn bound and thrown into prison (719–722). Only the unexpected intervention and surety of the previously absent middle brother, Sir Ote, secures the youth’s release and the promise of a proper hearing at a future date. Yet, while John releases Gamelyn and agrees to Sir Ote’s terms, he then actively seeks to bribe the jurors and the justice who will preside over the future hearing, demonstrating again his corrupt nature and reinforcing the narrator’s earlier description of him as “the fals knyght” [the false knight, l. 719]. The final confrontation between the brothers confirms that Gamelyn now understands appropriate social behaviour and relationships as well

44  Renée Ward as due process. In fact, the narrator makes it clear that the protagonist does not act rashly and that those accused of corruption have the opportunity to avoid bodily violence as punishment. Gamelyn tells the justice “the most nedes rise;/Thow hast yeven domes  that bene evel dight,/I will sitten in thi sete and dressen hem aright” [you must rise;/You have given verdicts that are unjustly given,/I will sit in your seat and arrange them correctly, ll. 842–44]. That is, Gamelyn gives the justice the chance to vacate his seat and potentially mitigate his punishment. In response, however, “the justice satte stille and roos not anon” [the justice sat still and did not quickly stand, l. 845]. The narrative thus implies that the justice is the one who fails to act appropriately in this moment, not the protagonist. Only when the justice fails to move does Gamelyn resort to violence, breaking the justice’s cheekbone and arm as he forcibly removes him from the seat. Another significant moment occurs when Gamelyn considers the fate of the bribed jurors. Before their identities are confirmed, “hym thought ful longe” [he thought full long, l. 860]. While he takes action once the jurors are found, this line suggests that he does, indeed, contemplate his next step and the type of justice he should deliver. Small though these gestures may be, they do suggest that Gamelyn’s actions are thought through rather than rash—they are, in other words, tempered. This scene is also the first one in which Gamelyn operates with a full community of companions. At the end of the bacchanalian feast, the youth was alone and friendless, while at the end of John’s clerical banquet he had only Adam Spencer as company. Now, however, he has the entire outlaw band at his side, and before he enters the hall, the men declare that he will find them ready to assist if needed.67 The band’s trust in him, which recalls their trust in their former “maister,” suggests that Gamelyn has matured into a capable leader. Moreover, once Gamelyn corrects these injustices against himself and Sir Ote, the two make their way directly to the king, who not only pardons them both, but also grants them new powers as justice and justice of the forest, respectively.68 Sir Ote receives the larger portion of their father’s lands, and Gamelyn reciprocates Sir Ote’s gesture of standing surety for him by deferring to his authority. His recognition of his brother’s lordship, and contentment with his status as heir, suggests that part of his maturity includes a better understanding and acceptance of his appropriate social position and the rule of primogeniture. His new role as chief justice of the forest renders official the authority he developed as master outlaw while it simultaneously confirms the king as the ultimate power in both the domestic and natural realms. Overall, then, the Gamelyn poet uses the cultural currency of medieval ideas about food and feasting, especially those associated with dietetics and the eucharistic feast, to shape a character that evolves from a hot-headed and choleric youth into a tempered adult. He weaves this

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 45 gastronomic metaphor into his protagonist’s identity through associations with cooks, food, and feasts, and, through these associations, links it to various social relationships, including fraternal bonds. As Gamelyn grows, he moves from a socially isolated individual to a member of a secure community, and he develops an understanding of the need to separate feasts and violence, to maintain a distance between the social and judicial functions of the hall. While he revolts against corrupt uses of judicial systems, he simultaneously learns the importance of these systems, particularly of due process, and, ultimately, he recognizes his position with the social hierarchy as second to both the authority of his elder brother and the supremacy of the monarch.

Notes 1. This article grew out of a conference paper delivered at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies during a session organized by the International Association for Robin Hood Studies. I am especially grateful to Melissa Ridley Elmes, Larissa “Kat” Tracy, Hollie Morgan, and Mark Gardiner for their generous feedback on and discussions about this work in its various stages, and to the readers at Routledge for their comments. 2. Terence Scully, “Tempering Medieval Food” in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 5. 3. Scully, “Tempering Medieval Food,” 7. Scully discusses temperance elsewhere, citing the work of English physician and writer Andrew Borde (1490–1549), who provides a recipe for temperate ale. Borde writes, “Poset ale is made with hote mylke and colde ale; it is a temperate drynke” [Poset ale is made with hot milk and cold ale; it is a temperate drink]. See: Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 153; and Borde, A Compendyous Regyment, or A Dyetary of Helth, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS Extra Series 10 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1870), 257. All translations from Middle English to modern English are my own. 4. Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (London and Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 51. 5. A recipe for “noumbles” or “loin meat or organ meat” instructs the cook to create a broth in which to serve the meat, consisting of the water in which the meat is originally parboiled and bread, which one must then “temper … with a gode quantite of vynegar and wyne” [temper … with a good quantity of vinegar and wine]. See: recipe 87 in Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), np. 6. Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 51. 7. “By 1318,” Rubin notes, “the feast had safely arrived in England,” and the increasing popularity of this celebration gave rise not only to the cycle plays of York, Chester, and Towneley, but also to a plethora of creative responses in “the writing of sermons, organisation of processions, formation of fraternities, interpretation of eucharistic themes in the silver and gold of monstrances and in the fine cloth of canopies, in the composition of hymns, and in the orchestration of town-wide ventures.” See: Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 199, 271.

46  Renée Ward 8. Medieval ideas about nutrition grew out of classical medicinal theories primarily, especially those of Galen of Pergamon, who drew upon the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates. Arabic physicians such as the tenth century Haly Abbas likewise adapted Galen’s work and subsequently influenced western thinkers. For a brief summary of the evolution of medieval medicinal thought, see: Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, specifically Chapter 6, “Concepts of Diet and Nutrition,” 205–31. 9. Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 206. 10. Blood represents the heart; yellow bile the liver; black bile the spleen; and phlegm the brain. See: Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 206. 11. As P. Burwell Rogers notes, Russell details the traditional serving roles of the pantry-keeper, butler, carver, server, chamberlain, usher, and marshall. See: “John Russell’s The Boke of Nurture,” The Bucknell Review 5.4 (1955): 39. 12. The personified subtleties appear in the section “A Dinere of Fische” [A Dinner of Fish], which is followed by a brief section that details the four complexions. See: The Boke of Nurture, folowyng Englondis gise, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS Original Series 32 (London: Oxford University Press, 1868), 719–794. All citations refer to line numbers. 13. All translations from Middle English to modern English are my own, unless otherwise noted. 14. John Scattergood, “‘The Tale of Gamelyn’: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), 164, 168. Richard Kaeuper similarly describes the tale’s ending as “an orgy of violence.” See: “An Historian’s Reading of ‘The Tale of Gamelyn,’” Medium Aevum 51.2 (1983): 52. 15. Jean E. Jost, “Why is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence,” in Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 249. 16. Knight argues that these units of value exist in varying degrees (and some not at all in certain parts of the ballad) until they unite at the narrative’s end. See: “‘harkened aright’: Reading Gamelyn for Text not Context,” in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 26. 17. See: Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 185. 18. Knight and Ohlgren, “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction,” 185. Two famous medieval outlaw gangs from this region are the Coterells and the Folvilles. For details on their operations, see: J. G. Bellamy, “The Coterel Gang: An Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth Century Criminals,” English Historical Review 79.313 (1964): 698–717; and Barbara Hanawalt, “Portraits of Outlaws, Felons, and Rebels in Late Medieval England,” in British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty, ed. by Alexander L. Kaufman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 45–64. 19. Knight and Ohlgren, “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction,” 184. Gamelyn is preserved in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, typically inserted after the unfinished Cook’s Tale, and is usually accepted as the potential second tale for this pilgrim. So, while it is now agreed that Chaucer did not write it, we can still thank him, or at least the scribes who worked on manuscript copies of the Canterbury Tales, for its survival.

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 47 20. The idea that Gamelyn is concerned primarily with inheritance practices and larger issues within the provincial fourteenth-century justice system is a well-trodden one. See, for instance, Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., “Mediaeval Law in the Tale of Gamelyn,” Speculum 26.3 (July 1951): 458–464, and Jean E. Jost, “Retribution in Gamelyn: A Case in the Courts,” in Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Mental-Historical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Responses, ed. Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 11 (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 175–188. 21. All quotes are taken from Knight and Ohlgren’s edition of the text in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 194–226. All citations refer to line numbers, and all translations into modern English are my own. 22. See, for example: lines 38, 44, and 46. 23. In doing so, Sir John blends the practice of partible inheritance with ultimogeniture or Borough English, what Rosamond Jane Faith describes as “inheritance by the youngest child, generally the youngest son.” As Faith explains, in the late Middle Ages “scattered examples of both these customs [existed] in the Midlands.” See: “Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England,” The Agricultural History Review 14.2 (1966): 77–97 (82, 84). 24. The narrator describes John’s neglect of his brother’s inheritance briefly, just prior to Gamelyn’s slightly longer consideration of his inheritance, which, he surmises, “went not aright” [did not go well, l. 88]. For the full episode, see: 70–88. 25. Tom Shippey suggests that John’s view of Gamelyn as socially and morally inferior possibly arises from the frequent identification of the youth as “gadelyn,” a term associated with low-birth and/or illegitimacy. See: “The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of Genre,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, eds. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Pearson, 2000), 87. 26. Bridget Ann Henisch notes, “Social disdain was intensified by other considerations. Cooks ministered to bodily needs which by their very nature were inferior to spiritual ones … Any job connected with food had a certain taint for the spiritually fastidious.” See: Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1976), 67. Another negative interpretation of cooks appears in the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, whose similarly disinherited protagonist likewise works in a kitchen before his noble identity is revealed. 27. All references to The Canterbury Tales are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987). All citations indicate fragment and line number; all translations are my own. 28. See: the Manciple’s Prologue in The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale, The Canterbury Tales IX. 25–50 (especially 46–49). 29. Peter W. Hammond remarks, “The mortars were among the most useful equipment in the kitchen, since much of the food was pounded to a pulp before it was cooked.” See: Food and Feast in Medieval England (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1993), 122. Henisch similarly describes the everyday activities of the kitchen as “drudgery with heavy equipment” and the work overall as “physically demanding,” suggesting that “this may be one reason why men and boys were preferred in the kitchen when it was possible to hire them.” See: Fast and Feast, 87.

48  Renée Ward 30. Geste provides considerable detail of the actions in which Robin and his guests engage, as well as of the delicacies they consume. They enact courtly behaviours by washing and drying their hands before sitting down to an elaborate spread that includes venison, swans, and other river fowl. See especially lines 124–129. All references to Geste cite line numbers and are from the Wynkyn de Worde copy included in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, ed. Thomas Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 428 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 93–147. 31. Adamson associates both river fowl and wine with the elite. See: Food in Medieval Times, 38–39, 228. 32. See: Geste, lines 1547–1554. 33. Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 35–36. Chaucer’s Prioress demonstrates the connection between white bread and the aristocracy, feeding her hounds (rather than herself) with a sop of “milk and wastel-breed” [milk and costly white bread, I. 147]. 34. The irony of the venison Robin serves the king, of course, is that it is poached out of the royal reserve. 35. Joseph Falaky Nagy makes a similar claim for Robin Hood narratives, positing that “The liminal world of Robin Hood … provides a context in which social values and realities are mirrored and redefined.” See: “The Paradoxes of Robin Hood,” Folklore 91.2 (1980), 198. Larissa Tracy likewise suggests that the Greenwood community “provides an example of what ‘civilized’ society should be, much the same way that Robin Hood … is a model for emulation, and society often falls short of that ideal.” See: “‘For Our dere Ladyes sake’: Bringing the Outlaw in from the Forest— Robin Hood, Marian, and Normative National Identity,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 38 (Summer & Winter 2012): 56. 36. References to food in relation to consumption appear in lines 318, 360, 627, and 659, while references to food in relation to deprivation appear in lines 383 and 657. 37. A quick search of the Middle English Dictionary (MED) reveals the popularity of this phrase: “mete and drink” has 282 entries, while a search using the alternate spelling “mete and drynke” reveals an additional 685 entries. For information on the likely orality of such stock phrases, see: Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Literacy, Orality, and the Poetics of Middle English Romance,” in Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, ed. Mark C. Amodio (New York: Garland, 1994), 39–69. References to the MED are from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. Accessed 11 January 2021. 38. Mary Caroline Spalding confirms that “The Charter of Christ probably existed in Middle English verse as early as the first quarter of the fourteenth century.” See: The Middle English Charters of Christ, ed. Mary Caroline Spalding, Bryn Mawr College Monographs 15 (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Bryn Mawr College, 1914), xxxix. 39. In the Gospels, Matthew asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest, to which Christ replies, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets.” See: Matthew 22:36–40. All biblical references are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible. http://www.drbo.org. Accessed 11 January 2021.

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 49 40. Fourteen extant copies of the Long Charter exist, in three versions—A (7 manuscripts), B (6 manuscripts), and C (1 manuscript). While all three traditions share content, Spalding explains that the B and C texts are longer than the A texts, including digressions as well as exegetical and transitional passages. The reference to tempered blood appears in six of the seven A-text manuscripts. All quotations are from the Rawlinson Poet 175 version edited by Spalding. Translations are my own. 41. The Middle English states, “To get me frendes I gaf gud mede” (55), but the sense here is not a literal one. Christ does not seek to find friends by offering them wine; rather, his words refer to how his body (the flesh and blood, wafer and wine) offers salvation to those he loves and to humankind, hence my translation of “get” as “protect.” 42. This reference appears in the same location (l. 59) of all versions of the A-text of the Middle English long Charter included in Spalding’s study. The primary definition of “soule(s) fode” is “Spiritual sustenance, comfort, or support.” See: MED, s.v. “fode.” 43. See: MED, s.v. “saule,” which includes definition “(a) Satisfaction, satiety, one’s fill; also fig.; gret ~, overeating; eten (to) gret ~, to eat to repletion; taken a ~, take a satisfactory portion.” 44. Mention of the “pasch” and its aftermath can be found in a variety of biblical passages, but it appears in its fullest form in the Gospel accounts of the New Testament. See: Matthew 26:17–30; Mark 14:12–26; Luke 22:7–39; and John 13:1–17:26. 45. It is, of course, also the pinnacle expression of betrayal, as during the Last Supper Christ reveals that one of his companions (Judas) will betray him. Gamelyn’s underlying evocations of the Charter and the Last Supper are therefore compounded, given John’s repeated betrayal of his brother. 46. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 1. 47. Smaller, related comments also occur, such as John’s concern that Gamelyn “waast his good” [wastes his goods, l. 328] or one monk’s remark after the attack at the clerical feast that he and his companions would have been better off at home with “water and bread” [water and breed, l. 328]. A further amusing individual reference to wine operates as a pun after Gamelyn’s companion Adam knocks down some of the Sheriff’s men. As the fallen men’s companions flee, Adam declares, “I have right good wyne, drynk er ye passe” [I have right good wine, drink before you pass], to which they reply, “Nay, by God! . . ./thi drink is not goode,/It wolde make a mannys brayn to leyn on his hode” [No, by God! . . ./your drink is not good,/It would make a man’s brain spill onto his hood, ll. 592–594]. Here, the brain damage often associated with excessive consumption of wine is equivalent to the damage Adam’s blows will bring. Overall, then, Gamelyn’s catalogue is hefty for a narrative with such minimalistic descriptions of the types of food and drink consumed. 48. J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 124. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo similarly write, “Food and feasting can be understood not simply as the consumption of material goods but also as the figurative and symbolic representations of culture.” See: “Introduction,” in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 18 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), xi. 49. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England, 107.

50  Renée Ward 50. Ibid., 126. Susan E. Farrier similarly observes, “[F]ood serves as proof of largesse, and it has ceremonial value in that feasting marks important events.” See: “Hungry Heroes in Medieval Literature,” in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 145. 51. The Middle English expression “gone wolde” lacks a direct modern English equivalent, but the general sense is that Gamelyn lets in all those that wander by, regardless of their method of transportation. 52. As Gregory M. Colón Semenza notes, “wrestling is relatively unique among medieval sports in that it is practiced by members of the upper as well as the lower orders.” See: “Historicizing ‘Wrastlynge’ in the Miller’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 38.1 (2003): 74. Andrew James Johnston concurs. See: “Wrestling in the Moonlight: The Politics of Masculinity in the Middle English Popular Romance Gamelyn,” in Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Stefan Horlacher, Global Masculinities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 62. 53. Gamelyn says to John, “of al this sixtene year I yeve the the prowe; / For the mete and the drink that we han spended nowe” [of all these sixteen years I have given you the profit; / For the meat and drink that we have now spent, ll. 359–360]. 54. Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Gamelyn,” in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, Studies in Medieval Romance 16 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 137. More broadly, Susan F. Weiss remarks that “The feast or banquet is seen as a locus of pleasure and plentitude, a kind of hedonism, a way of liberating the senses and deriving enjoyment of a rather sensual nature.” See: “Medieval and Renaissance Wedding Banquets and Other Feasts,” in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1998), 159. 55. See: Semenza, “Historicizing ‘Wrastlynge’ in the Miller’s Tale,” 68–71. Chaucer’s Miller, a pilgrim placed firmly in the third estate, is another example of such associations. See: The General Prologue I.548. 56. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England, 88. Although the poet does not identify the type of meat consumed during the feast, it would be safe to assume that the winnings Gamelyn brings home from the wrestling competition—“a ramme and a ringe” [a ram and ring, l. 172]—specifically the ram, would be prepared for the celebrations. While mutton and lamb overall were considered fairly moist and hot, and therefore easy to digest, “the flessh of an oled ramme wyll nat lightely disgest, & that is very euyll” [the flesh of an old ram will not digest easily, and that is very evil]. Russell includes this passage, from Lawrence Andrew’s The Noble Lyfe and Natures of Man (‘Of the Rame’ cap. iii), in notes to his volume. See: The Boke of Nurture, 105. 57. Bracton On the Laws and Customs of England describes an action as “nothing other than / the right of pursuing in a judicial proceeding what is due to one.” See: Henry of Bratton, “Of actions and what an action is,” Bracton Online 2.282, ll.6–7. http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/ bracton/Unframed/English/v2/19.htm. Accessed 11 January 2021. 58. See: Gamelyn, 455–489. 59. According to Kaeuper, this scene renders the youth “something like the centrepiece for a Sunday Banquet.” See: “An Historian’s Reading of ‘The Tale of Gamelyn,’” 51. While I agree with Kaeuper’s comment that Gamelyn is on display, I suspect that his position in the hall is not a central

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 51







one as suggested by his use of the word “centrepiece.” Instead, I would suggest that Gamelyn is bound to one of the posts of an aisle, perhaps one positioned close to the hall entrance. My thanks to Mark Gardiner for his helpful comments on hall layout in relation to this idea. For more on aisled halls and the location of the hall entrance, see: Mark Gardiner, “Vernacular Buildings and the Development of the Later Medieval Domestic Plan in England,” Medieval Archaeology 44.1 (2000): 159–179. 60. Likewise identified by the narrator as Sanguineus, Colericus, Fleumaticus, and Malencolicus. See: Russell, The Boke of Nurture, 787, 789, 791, 794. 61. Ross further remarks that such dishes frequently demonstrated “what endeavors mattered to him [the host] at that time and how he wished to be perceived by his guests.” See: “Beyond Eating: Political and Personal Significance of the Entremets at the Banquets of the Burgundian Court,” in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 18 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 145. Jeff Massey provides an excellent example of how a subtlety can function as a political gesture in his discussion of the embalmed head in the Latin Arthurian romance Arthur and Gorlagon. See: “The Werewolf at the Head Table: Metatheatric ‘subtlety,’” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 183–206. 62. See: Knight and Ohlgren, The Tale of Gamelyn, 223 n. 407, and Kaeuper, “An Historian’s Reading of ‘The Tale of Gamelyn,’” 59. The term “bastard feudalism” has had various interpretations and nuances since it first came into use in the nineteenth century and especially since the late twentieth century, when K. B. McFarlane popularized an understanding of the term as “payment for service.” Subsequent critics have taken a broader approach, including J. G. Bellamy, who examined it specifically within legal contexts, and Michael Hicks, who defines it as “the set of relationships with their social inferiors that provided the English aristocracy with the manpower they required.” The latter definition by Hicks is helpful when considering the relationship here between Gamelyn and Adam Spencer, given that the former offers the latter land in exchange for assistance. See: K. B. McFarlane, “Bastard Feudalism,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays of K. B. McFarlane, Introduction by G. L. Harriss (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 23–43; J. G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (London: Routledge, 1989; London: Routledge, 2013); and Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (New York: Longman Group, 1995; London: Routledge, 2013), 1. 63. “Fine” can imply “Satisfactorily, to one’s satisfaction; fully, completely, entirely, thoroughly; well, quite; wel and fin.” See: MED, s.v. “fin(e).” 64. This scene evokes and inverts hospitality rituals in which the lord or host offers security to the guests via the token of a welcoming gift. In this instance, Adam becomes the host and Gamelyn his guest. The spencer’s release and aid of Gamelyn in the subsequent fight scene becomes an extension of this ritual, as Gamelyn receives Adam’s aid. For more on the importance of this type of social exchange, see: Felicity Heal, “Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, Medieval Cultures 9 (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 179–198.

52  Renée Ward 65. The poet refers to the outlaw as a master, in various forms, four times (632, 634, 679, 684), and refers to him as an outlaw king six times (655, 664, 666, 684, 690, 691). 66. “[T]he banquet provides rules and rituals aimed at taming the passions and circumscribing animalistic behaviours. Learning to eat with others is learning to live peaceably among them.” See: Tomasik and Vitullo, “Introduction,” xv. 67. See: Gamelyn, 826–28. 68. See: Gamelyn, 883–88.

Bibliography Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Food through History 2. London and Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Bellamy, J. G. Bastard Feudalism and the Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2013. ———. “The Coterel Gang: An Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth-Century Criminals.” English Historical Review 79, no. 313 (1964): 698–717. Boorde, Andrew. A Compendyous Regyment, or A Dyetary of Helth, edited by F. J. Furnivall. EETS Extra Series 10. London: N. Trübner & Co., 1870. Bradbury, Nancy Mason. “Literacy, Orality, and the Poetics of Middle English Romance.” In Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, edited by Mark C. Amodio, 39–69. New York: Garland, 1994. ———. “Gamelyn.” In Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, edited by Neil Cartlidge, 129–144. Studies in Medieval Romance 16. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., edited by Larry D. Benson, 3–328. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. Douay-Rheims Bible Online. http://www.drbo.org. Faith, Rosamond Jane. “Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England.” The Agricultural History Review 14, no. 2 (1966): 77–97. Farrier, Susan E. “Hungry Heroes in Medieval Literature.” In Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson, 145–159. New York and London: Garland, 1995. Gardiner, Mark. “Vernacular Buildings and the Development of the Later Medieval Domestic Plan in England.” Medieval Archaeology 44, no. 1 (2000): 159–179. Hammond, Peter W. Food and Feast in Medieval England. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1993. Hanawalt, Barbara. “Portraits of Outlaws, Felons, and Rebels in Late Medieval England.” In British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman, 45–64. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Heal, Felicity. “Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household.” In Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in FifteenthCentury England, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, 179–198. Medieval Cultures 9. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Food, Feasts, and Temperance 53 Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1976. Henry of Bratton. “Of actions and what an action is.” In Bracton On the Laws and Customs of England. Vol. 2. 282. Bracton Online. Harvard Law School Library. http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/Bracton/Unframed/English/v2/ 282.htm. Hicks, Michael. Bastard Feudalism. New York: Longman Group, 1995. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2013. Hieatt, Constance B., Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler. Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Johnston, Andrew James. “Wrestling in the Moonlight: The Politics of Masculinity in the Middle English Popular Romance Gamelyn.” In Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Stefan Horlacher, 51–67. Global Masculinities 2. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jost, Jean E. “Retribution in Gamelyn: A Case in the Courts.” In Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: MentalHistorical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Responses, edited by Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough, 175–188. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 11. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012. ———. “Why is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence.” In Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, edited by Albrecht Classen, 241–267. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Kaeuper Richard. “An Historian’s Reading of ‘The Tale of Gamelyn’.” Medium Aevum 52, no. 1 (1983): 51–62. Knight, Stephen. “‘harkened aright’: Reading Gamelyn for Text not Context.” In Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, edited by Rosalind Field, 15–27. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1999. Knight, Stephen, and Thomas Ohlgren. “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction.” In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 184–193. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Massey, Jeff. “The Werewolf at the Head Table: Metatheatric ‘subtlety’.” In Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, edited by Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey, 183–206. Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 7. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. McFarlane, K. B. “Bastard Feudalism.” In England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays of K. B. McFarlane, Introduction by G. L. Harriss, 23–43. London: Hambledon Press, 1981. Middle English Dictionary. University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 2018. Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “The Paradoxes of Robin Hood.” Folklore 91, no. 2 (1980): 198–210.

54  Renée Ward Pynson, Richard. A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode. Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, edited by Thomas Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, 93–147. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 428. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Rogers, P. Burwell. “John Russell’s The Boke of Nurture.” The Bucknell Review 5, no. 4 (1955): 39–50. Ross, L. B. “Beyond Eating: Political and Personal Significance of the Entremets at the Banquets of the Burgundian Court.” In At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo, 145–166. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 18. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. Russell, John. The Boke of Nurture, folowyng Englondis gise, in The Babees Book: Early English Meals and Manners edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, 1–123. EETS Original Series 32. London: Oxford University Press, 1868. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Scattergood, John. “‘The Tale of Gamelyn’: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero.” In Readings in Medieval English Romance, edited by Carol M. Meale, 159–194. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994. Scully, Terence. “Tempering Medieval Food.” In Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson, 3–23. New York and London: Garland, 1995. Scully, Terence. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. “Historicizing ‘Wrastlynge’ in the Miller’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 66–82. Shannon, Jr., Edgar F. “Mediaeval Law in the Tale of Gamelyn.” Speculum 26, no. 3 (1951): 458–64. Shippey, Tom. “The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of Genre.” In The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, edited by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, 78–96. London: Pearson, 2000. Spalding, Mary Caroline. The Middle English Charters of Christ. Bryn Mawr College Monographs 15. Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Bryn Mawr College, 1914. “The Tale of Gamelyn.” In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 194–226. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Tomasik, Timothy J., and Juliann M. Vitullo. “Introduction.” In At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo, xi–xx. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 18. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. Tracy, Larissa. “‘For Our dere Ladyes sake’: Bringing the Outlaw in from the Forest—Robin Hood, Marian, and Normative National Identity.” Explorations In Renaissance Culture 38 (Summer & Winter 2012): 35–65. Weiss, Susan F. “Medieval and Renaissance Wedding Banquets and Other Feasts.” In Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, 159–174. London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1998.

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Bread Without Onions: Winning the Crusades through French Cuisine in Honorat Bovet’s 1398 Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun [Apparition of Master Jean de Meun] Sylvia Grove Vous estes gens, car apris l’ay, Qui vivés dilicieusement. [You are people, so I have heard, Who live like epicures.] —The Saracen, Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun (II. 420–21, trans. Michael Hanly)

In a controversial October 2012 campaign speech, conservative French politician Jean-François Copé asserted that Ramadan was disrupting snack time. Detailing this alleged affront to the French goûter, Copé claimed that the Muslim month of fasting was making parts of the country unsafe: Il est des quartiers où je peux comprendre l’exaspération de certains de nos compatriotes, pères ou mères de famille, rentrant du travail le soir, apprenant que leur fils s’est fait arracher son pain au chocolat par des voyous qui lui expliquent qu’on ne mange pas pendant le ramadan.1 [There are neighborhoods where I can understand the exasperation of some of our fellow citizens: fathers and mothers who, after coming home from work in the evening, learn that their son had his pain au chocolat ripped from his hands by thugs who tell him not to eat during Ramadan.] While supposedly stated in the defense of non-Muslim French who “vivent en silence leur souffrance” [live and suffer in silence], Copé’s statements problematically frame Islam in opposition to French national security, defined here as the ability to exercise gustatory liberty. 2 Within the context of French republican values, especially the strict separation of church and state, such declarations pit “Islam” against “French citizenship” with a quintessential false dichotomy: If French Muslims reject

56  Sylvia Grove traditional French culinary practices, their religion will remain at odds with the nation. Cultural theorists such as Mary Douglas and Claude Fischler have shown that definitions of edibility/inedibility delineate the boundaries of safety/harm and delight/disgust—in other words, the constructions of friend/foe and self/other.3 Whether through holiday meals or family recipes, human beings perform their membership in social groups through shared food rituals. However, as Fischler notes, the boundaries of that membership can often be constructed by the inverse, “by defining the otherness, the difference of otherness.”4 In contemporary France, refusal and denial mark the food-based commentary—ranging from meat to wine—that captures the tension between Islam and the Christian West.5 While unsurprising in a nation renowned for its gastronomy, such choices lay bare the functioning of food as a symbol of risk and reward in the construction of group identities. Especially in light of recent experiences with terrorism, including the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris and Nice, traditional gastronomic practices have increasingly functioned in France as a means by which to reinforce national unity and promote collective healing—as well as delineate the “dangerous,” often along racial, religious, and even economic lines.6 In late fourteenth-century Europe—a period defined by renewed Crusades, the Great Schism of the Western Church, the Black Plague, and the Hundred Years’ War—food-based stereotypes not only marked religious polarities; they also indicated the health of collective faith, or the lack thereof. For Benedictine monk Honorat Bovet, France’s bleak political and spiritual prospects at the turn of the century were caused, in part, because of the French nobility’s preoccupation with food. Bovet makes this claim in his 1398 text, the Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun [Apparition of Master Jean de Meun], in which he argues that the nobles’ eating habits were impeding upon their ability to defend Christianity against the expanding Ottoman Empire. To prove this allegation, the text centers on the acute observations of a cultural outlaw: a traveling Muslim, or Saracen, who has come to France to prove his expertise on French behavior. In addition to demonstrating the historical origins of contemporary French-Muslim culinary tensions, this little-studied text demonstrates surprising originality in its use of Christianity’s great rival, Islam, to suggest social reform. While the Saracen remains outside of the French social fabric upon the text’s conclusion, his presence within the Apparicion blurs the line between “friend” and “foe,” hinting at possible alternate relations between Europe and the Muslim world, both for the Middle Ages and beyond. A Benedictine monk from Provence, Honorat Bovet is most well-known for his 1387 military treatise, L’arbre des batailles (Tree of Battles), which details standards for international conduct in war. Intended for a popular audience, L’arbre des batailles was widely circulated across Europe

Bread Without Onions 57 and was influential in both literary and military circles. In contrast, the Apparicion, penned nearly a decade later, received little to no attention by its readers or subsequent scholars.7 Despite being individually dedicated and distributed to the four most powerful members of the French court in the summer of 1398—the Duke Louis of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI; the Duke’s wife, Valentina Visconti; Duke Philip of Burgundy, Louis’s uncle and rival; and Jean de Montaigu, Louis’s counselor and political ally—this compact text of 1543 lines of verse and 299 lines of prose was broadly unacknowledged and went “ignored,” to use Michael Hanly’s words, “for more than four hundred years.”8 Michael Hanly’s (2005) translation of the poem with critical commentary brings renewed attention to this “rare example of a medieval Christian pacifist narrative.”9 Interpreting the Apparicion through the social and religious trauma of the Great Schism, Hanly defines Honorat Bovet’s mission as the desire to provoke “an interior examination” on behalf of his readers: “a measuring of their own actions against the just behavior demanded by Christian rulers of God.”10 This chapter builds on Hanly’s work by clarifying the Apparicion’s underlying theme of food, which serves to define the Saracen’s discursive authority, showcase the relationship between body and soul, and underscore the role of personal accountability in Bovet’s restorative social project.

Sociopolitical Contexts of Late Fourteenth-Century France In Europe, the second half of the fourteenth century was defined by growing political and religious unrest. Against the backdrop of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, which began in 1337, and the Great Schism of the Western Church, provoked by a double papal election in 1378, a series of domestic issues threatened individuals’ physical and psychological well-being. The Black Plague swept through Europe in 1348 and again in 1360–1362. In August 1392, the French king Charles VI began experiencing bouts of insanity, destabilizing his leadership. However, the most pressing political issue held the largest implications: the ongoing conflict between Christianity and militant Islam. The expanding Ottoman Empire posed a direct threat to European security: the Serbs were defeated at Kosovo in June 1389; the capital of Bulgaria fell in 1393; and Wallachia was overcome in 1395.11 In desperation, that same year King Sigismund of Hungary sent a dispatch to France to solicit military support. A large Western force— drawing primarily from France, Germany, and the eastern European states—marched east only to be annihilated at Nicopolis (present-day Bulgaria) in September 1396.12 The defeat was a definitive blow to the European sense of security and prowess.13 Nevertheless, writers and diplomats scrambled to respond to

58  Sylvia Grove these events, including Philip of Mézières (1327–1405), who spent the last twenty-five years of his life developing crusade propaganda.14 Many, including Mézières, called for the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War as a “means to an end,” claiming that “peace between Catholic nations had to come before an all-out war against the non-Christian lords of the Holy Land.”15 In contrast, Honorat Bovet’s Apparicion suggests that the Islamic threat—as well as its resolution—were homegrown.16 Specifically, the Apparicion uses food to model the threat of Islam as embodied—that is, executed and resisted through the tension between individuals’ gustatory choices and their responsibility to their community and their faith. While the relationship between overeating and military weakness dates back to Plato, the Apparicion’s originality lies in reminding the readers of their social responsibilities through the figure of a Saracen, who, despite his status as a cultural outlaw, functions as a model of Christianlike moderation and foresight.17 The result is a text in which the Saracen is established as being more aware of Christian ideals than the French themselves—a double-layered insult designed to increase awareness and promote action in Bovet’s readers.

Establishing Discursive Authority The Apparicion is structured around a “panel discussion” between four social outcasts, or outlaws—a Physician, a Jew, the Saracen, and a Dominican Friar known as the Jacobin—all who appear in a dream before the Prior, Bovet’s first-person narrator.18 The discussion between these four outlaws is moderated by a fifth specter: the Frenchman Jean de Meun (1240–1305), author of the second half of the famed Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose), who functions within the Apparicion as an educated authority.19 All unwelcome in France, the first four characters in particular—whom Jean Batany has called the “quatre exclus” [four outcasts]—are evidence of a society in disarray.20 Challenging the social hierarchy, the lower classes had blamed doctors for King Charles VI’s madness. The Jews had been expelled from France in 1394 on charges of usury, an affair that had threatened the financial security of the ruling class. The Dominican Order—evidencing the growing factions within Christianity—had been scandalized in 1387 when Juan de Monzón, one of its members, had claimed that the Immaculate Conception was unnecessary to Christian doctrine. 21 Most significantly, the Saracen signified a physical threat due to his association with the French massacre at Nicopolis; Hanly suggests that he would have literally been considered an “object of terror.”22 The inaccurate rendering of the Saracen’s Ottoman origins—he is described as “aussy noir comme charbon” [black as coal, ll. 116–117], as if he were an African Muslim—furthers the seemingly omnipresent specter of the Islamic faith in the European

Bread Without Onions 59 imaginary. Honorat Bovet’s choice to give voice to these outlaws, especially the Saracen, is a surprising act of humanity that heightens the urgency of his message. The text opens with the prior having fallen asleep in the garden of Jean de Meun’s former residence in Paris. Jean de Meun materializes as an apparition before the Prior and scolds him for having eaten and drunk himself into a stupor, behaviors that have reduced his social utility: Je ne fis oncques cest jardin Pour esbatre vostre grant vin … [Vous] mengiez ceans comme pourcel Sans faire proffit a nully. [I never intended this garden To be the place you can enjoy all that wine … You sit there eating, like a pig, Doing no good for anyone.] (ll. 3–4, 14–15) Symbolizing the Prior’s excess, the comparison between the Prior and a pig hints at the common medieval stereotype that the Saracens themselves not only overate, as explored in more detail below, but that their flesh tasted like pork. 23 The suggestion that the Prior is behaving like Europe’s greatest enemy foreshadows the Saracen’s own critiques of Christian morality, which link excessive consumption with a decline in social responsibility. After the four secondary apparitions—the Physician, the Jew, the Saracen, and the Jacobin—join the conversation in the garden, Jean de Meun puts the Prior to work by asking him to record the dialogue. This injunction to write, placed in opposition to the Prior’s appetite, exchanges consumption for commentary, modeling Honorat Bovet’s image of social reform in miniature. While the Saracen’s controversial status among the poem’s characters could delegitimize his criticism, his keen awareness of French culture—specifically, of French culinary norms—establishes his discursive authority. Indeed, his voice dominates the Apparicion: speaking for approximately a third of the text, or about 600 lines, the Saracen delivers some of the Apparicion’s most inflammatory statements and is the first discussant invited to expound upon his claims. The Saracen introduces himself to the panel as “plus franc trocimant/Qui soit en Sarrazime grant” [the most noble emissary/That there is in all of Islam, ll. 303–304], justifying this designation with an explanation of his noble birth as well as his knowledge of law, religion, and art. On a three-country European tour of Italy, France, and Spain, the Saracen has been tasked by Ottoman Sultan Bajazet I—who had led the victory over the Europeans at Nicopolis— with observing the state of Christianity in preparation for a re-conquest

60  Sylvia Grove of Charlemagne’s territories. Recognizing the potential threat of this Muslim spy, Jean de Meun coyly asks that he recount everything that he has observed. Testing the breadth of the Saracen’s knowledge, this question simultaneously probes the depth of the Saracen’s honesty as well as the danger that his voyage to Europe could represent. In the subsequent monologue, broken only by Jean de Meun’s constant prodding, the Saracen proves his extensive knowledge of the French by touching upon issues ranging from military training to marriage practices. However, his awareness is among its most specific when detailing French food. Explaining culinary rituals performed in public and private spaces, the Saracen not only demonstrates his understanding of the most intimate details of French society; he also showcases the relationship between this information and France’s readiness for war. In particular, the Saracens have begun to suspect a decline in French military prowess because the people are rumored to be more concerned with food than combat. The Saracen’s trip to France has only confirmed these reports, which he explains in detail: Mais a tout ce que guerre avez, Entre nous estes pou doubtés, Et les raisons je vous diray: Vous estes gens, car apris l’ay, Qui vivés dilicieusement; Se vous n’avez pain de froment, Char de mouton, beuf et pourcel, Perdriz, poucins, chappons, chevrel, Canars, faysans et connins gras, Et que demain ne faillist pas Habondance plus qu’aujourd’uy, Vous estes venus a l’ennuy. [But even with all the wars you wage, You are but little feared by us, And the reasons for this, I will tell you: You are people, so I have heard, Who live like epicures; If you do not have wheat bread, Mutton, beef, pork, Partridge, young hen, chicken, hare, Duck, pheasant, and fat rabbits, And if tomorrow there’s not more Abundance than today, You are much troubled.] (II. 417–428) After enumerating French food practices, the Saracen continues by detailing other unflattering aspects of French day-to-day life. Most

Bread Without Onions 61 strikingly, he claims that the French can no longer handle a single day without a “lit mol blanc” [soft, white bed, II. 429] or “chemise blanche” [white garments, II. 431]. In associating the French nobles with a preoccupation for gustatory excess as well as physical comfort, the Saracen implies—just as Jean de Meun did earlier for the Prior— that the French are neither physically or intellectually prepared to participate in battle. But two additional rhetorical moves take place with this detailed list of meats, sauces, clothing, and bedding. First, the Saracen’s extreme awareness of French preferences—literally, at the level of the body—manifests his physical and psychological proximity to French society. Symbolizing the encroaching Ottoman Empire, the Saracen’s words collapse the French perception of the boundary between public/private and safe/unsafe. In doing so, he transforms himself from, in Hanly’s words, “a reified object—whose predictable carpings could be easily dismissed—into a dangerous double-agent in [the characters’] midst.”24 In other words, with his knowledge, the Saracen both establishes his positioning within the text as a cultural authority and confirms readers’ fears of an Ottoman domination, forcing readers to take him seriously. Second, the Saracen’s condemnation of French food behaviors increases the weight of his discursive presence by reversing common medieval stereotypes about Islam. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes that European fantasies about Saracen bodies “have always been inextricable from fantasies of…pleasures”; as such, European associations with the Orient in the late fourteenth century tended to include images of “superabundant wealth, plentiful luxuries, and hedonism.”25 Destabilizing readers’ assumptions about the fixed relationship between enemy and immorality, the Saracen positions the Orient, not Europe, as the example of moderation. Saracen frugality is underscored with the repeated use of the negative, which he contrasts to French excess: Mais nous Sarrazins tout envers, … Vivons autrement, pour certain: L’eaue clere et un pou de pain Est grant disner d’un Sarrazin, Sy n’a cure de noble vin Ne de char qui soit de saison; S’il en trouve, ce soit empron. Et quant ce vendra au gesir, Il n’a cure de desvestir, Ne daignera fuerre querre, Mais qu’il treuve seüre terre. De grant cuisine ne lui chault, Ne de rost, ne pastes chault,

62  Sylvia Grove Ne saulse vert ne cameline, Ne blanc mengier de pouldre fine. [But we Saracens, on the other hand, … We live otherwise, for certain: Clear water and a bit of bread Is a big meal for a Saracen, So there’s no worry over cellared wines, Or what meat is in season; If any is found, that is first-rate. And when it is time to go to bed, He does not worry about disrobing, Or trouble himself with looking for straw, But only with finding some solid ground. Fine cooking matters not to him, Neither roasts nor meat pies Nor sauce verte nor cameline Nor blancmange with poudre fine.] (II. 435, 437–450) Bookended by food-based commentary, this passage not only establishes the Saracens as the social and military foil to the French; it also hints  that the Saracens are comfortable with Christian simplicity in a way that the majority of the French are not. 26 In addition to, as Batany has claimed, transforming the French’s “adversaire fondamental” [primary adversary] into “le témoin principal de [leurs] faiblesses” [the principal witness of [their] weaknesses], the Saracens’ ironic performance of Christian restraint illuminates the hypocrisy that Bovet wishes to address within his own faith.27 The modeling of Christian poverty—the antithesis of French excess—through a Saracen renders Bovet’s rhetorical strategy within the Apparacion even more “risky” and “audacious,” to use Hanly’s words; nevertheless, it “amplifies, rather than diminishes, the force of [the Saracen’s] critiques.”28

Deconstructing the Menu: “A Sin of the Rich and Powerful” In addition to establishing his discursive authority, the Saracen’s list of nearly twenty French foods pinpoints the social class at the heart of his criticism. While implied by a text meant to be read rather than delivered orally, the Apparicion’s focus is the French nobility, especially given that gluttony was considered to be “un péché de riches et de puissants” [a sin of the rich and powerful]. 29 For example, in fourteenth-century France, bread was widely consumed, but wheat bread—the Saracen’s specific focus—was expensive: lower-class bread would have been made from rye, oats, barley, or a blend of grains known as méteil.30 The same

Bread Without Onions 63 class distinction is seen in the Saracen’s commentary on meat. In the Middle Ages, beef and sheep were meats of the nobility, and partridge was hunted for sport.31 In contrast, pork was a less distinguished meat, a fact gestured to in the Apparicion when the Saracen explains that the French refuse “feves et lart/Et l’eaue pure” [pork and beans,/And fresh water, II. 460–461]. The preparation of the meats in the Saracen’s discourse—roasted as opposed to boiled—was also characteristic of highclass banquets; in her study of medieval food comedy, Sarah Gordon defines “courtly feats of abundant roasted meat and game” as “the rich diet of aristocrats and knights.”32 Even Claude Lévi-Strauss’s opposition of the raw, the cooked, and the rotten evokes the superiority of roasted meats in French cultural history, pointing out that they defined the medieval banquet and “marked its culminating point.”33 The sauces and spices critiqued by the Saracen—sauce verte [green sauce], cameline [a spiced sauce made of red wine or vinegar], blancmange [a spiced sauce with international interpretations], and poudre fine [a blend of cinnamon, ginger, and cloves]—underscore the relationship between distinction and excess. While medieval cooking methods, heavily influenced by the Greek theory of the four humors, aspired to balance foods’ inherent properties of cold, hot, moist, and dry, medieval haute cuisine was also executed through an attention to texture, the contrast between sweet and sour, and visual appeal.34 Madeleine Pelner Cosman implies that sauces in particular were seldom used for their nutritional value but rather “to excite attention and to stimulate admiration” and “to pique the appetite and to please the palate.”35 Underscoring their association with excess, these sauces were frequently colored by natural or artificial means; recipes for sauce verte [green sauce] suggest the addition of sage, sorrel, or rosemary to the sauce’s base of basil or parsley to intensify its coloration.36 The use of spices was a further indication of “conspicuous wealth.”37 Cinnamon was especially in vogue in the fourteenth century, a popularity heightened by the Venetian monopoly on the trade; indeed, cinnamon, along with ginger, cloves, and grains of paradise—another “spice of choice” in the late Middle Ages—forms the base of poudre fine.38 One recipe for cameline among many—whose name originates from the French word cannelle [cinnamon]—includes cinnamon, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise, and nutmeg (along with salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, red wine, and a few slices of stale bread).39 The lack of vegetables and dairy products in the Saracen’s monologue correctly indicates that these foods were less symbolically charged. Beans—the only vegetable specifically rejected by the French, according to the Saracen—would have been viewed with skepticism due to their association with flatulence; Melitta Weiss Adamson confirms that they were frequently reserved for the lower classes.40 The choice to focus on symbolically provocative foods, therefore, is a deliberate attempt on the

64  Sylvia Grove part of the Saracen to associate excessive consumption with excessive wealth—the very social class that may be putting the French at risk for an Ottoman invasion.

The Original Sin and the Social Body In addition to highlighting the nobility’s excesses, the theme of food underscores the Apparicion’s central claim: that immoral behavior, both individual and collective, will be the downfall of French society. Just as food served as the entrée to the Saracen’s discourse, so was the sin of gluttony in the Middle Ages believed to introduce a network of social ills. Caroline Walker Bynum explains: Food was not only a fundamental material concern to medieval people; food practices—fasting and feasting—were at the very heart of the Christian tradition. A Christian in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was required by Church law to fast on certain days and to receive communion at least once a year. Thus the behavior that defined a Christian was food-related behavior.41 In addition to being central to one’s personal faith, food traditions were indicative of a community’s spiritual health. According to Bridget Ann Henisch, fasting ranged from expressions of personal discipline to performances of public penance, each case being a “deliberate, conscious offering by the individual or by society.”42 The tension between abstention and nourishment was central to the organization of the medieval calendar as well as to the communal conception of time. Bynum concludes: “When we look at what medieval people themselves wrote, we find that they often spoke of gluttony as the major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way of encountering God.”43 Similarly, overeating was not just an individual transgression; instead, gluttony was “a particular form of spiritual deficiency” that showcased the links between the body and the community.44 Rather than associating the glutton with a lack of self-control—a modern interpretation—gluttony in the Middle Ages was related to sins that impacted others, including drunkenness, impure language, and lust.45 As with Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden, gluttony was believed to be the transgression out of which all others stemmed. St. John Cassian (C.E. 360–435) placed gluttony first on his list of eight deadly sins, which terminated with pride.46 While Pope Gregory I (C.E. 590-604) would later reduce this list to seven sins and organize it in descending order (placing gluttony at the end), gluttony would retain its inverse association with communal health for centuries. According to Susan Hill, a medieval glutton threatened society not in his physical consumption of

Bread Without Onions 65 food but in his symbolic “intervention into a community whose boundaries [were] marked by a desire for spiritual strength and communal well-being.”47 Gluttony was particularly pervasive in the Middle Ages given how broadly the behavior was defined. More than just excessive eating, gluttony—according to Cassian, as cited by Hill—also included the following: The first kind of gluttony is ‘That which urges the anticipation of the canonical hour of eating,’ or eating before the proper time … The second kind of gluttony is ‘that which rejoices only in filling the belly to repletion with any food whatsoever’ … [The] third kind of gluttony is ‘that which is delighted with more refined and delicate foods.’48 Dangerously focusing one’s attention on the self and the body, gluttony originally connoted an overattention to food as pleasure, whether gustatory or visual, a fact that possibly implicated the medieval interest in sauces. More than eight decades later, St. Thomas Aquinas (C.E. 1225– 1274)—described by the Jacobin in the Apparicion as a strong example of the Christian faith—further broadened the definition of gluttony.49 Quoting Gregory I in Question 148 of his opus Summa Theologica, Aquinas explained that gluttony was composed of five transgressions, not just three: ‘Sometimes it forestalls the hour of need; sometimes it seeks costly meats; sometimes it requires the food to be daintily cooked; sometimes it exceeds the measure of refreshment by taking too much; sometimes we sin by the very haste of an immoderate appetite’— which are contained in the following verse: ‘Hastily, sumptuously, too much, greedily, and daintily.’50 Given these specifications, in the context of the Apparicion it is clear that the French are sinning on multiple levels. While the Saracen certainly indicates that the French enjoy “sumptuous” food, he also hints that the French are eating too much when he lauds France’s ancient laws—juxtaposed to their current practices—that had kept warriors from becoming “pansart” [paunchy, II. 459]. Additionally, the French disregard temporal limits by preferring foods that take large amounts of time to cultivate or prepare, including his previous mentions of “noble vin” [cellared wines], seasonal meat, and “connins gras” [fat rabbits, II. 440–441, 425].51 In other words, the nobles’ over-attention to food is not only reducing their preparedness for battle against the Ottomans; it is distancing them from Christian tradition, a choice with social, spiritual, and political repercussions.

66  Sylvia Grove

Gluttony and France The impact of the nobility’s gluttony on the social order can be felt throughout the whole of the Saracen’s discourse. Following his original monologue about food, many of the Saracen’s seemingly unrelated concerns for French society continue to be delivered through culinary metaphors, indicating their interconnected nature and relationship to gustatory immorality. The contempt for temporal limits regarding food bleeds into France’s poor preparation of her sons for battle, as the Saracen explains: “Mais que le partir soit joly,/Vous ne regardés point la fin” [But in assuring that the start is splendid,/You never give a thought to the finish, II. 515–516]. The insult that the nobility is participating in the degradation of their own class emerges in the culinary suggestion that French peasants are better suited than the wealthy to defend their country in battle: “Qui vivroient mieulx de frommage/Que de chappons gent de parage/Ilz nous feroient plus grant guerre/Que tous les gentilz d’Engleterre” [They who would be happier with mere cheese/Than would you aristocrats with capons, …/They would make war against us better/Than all the nobles of England, II. 547–548, 553–554]. Given that the character of Jean de Meun views the nobles’ social responsibility in class-based terms—to “[tenir] en…justice” [administer justice for] their lower-class brethren—he is particularly worried by the observation that the lower classes are increasingly mimicking the excessive behaviors of their lords (II. 37–49). Such a detail indicates that the nobility’s gluttony is threatening both the spiritual well-being of their subjects as well as the nobility’s ability to govern their own country. These varied criticisms serve to illuminate the decline of Christianity, which becomes more explicit as the Saracen’s discourse continues. In particular, the Saracen highlights the nobility’s indifference regarding their countrymen who were enslaved in Turkey after the battle at Nicopolis, forced into hard labor, and fed “pou de pain sans oignons” [a bit of bread with no onions, II. 656]. Seeing no effort made to rescue them, the Saracen claims that the French preoccupation with food has replaced their moral responsibility to other Christians: … charité N’est entre Crestiens ne pité. Vous n’estudiez que en estas, En doulces veandes et plains plas. Crestienté ne vit qu’en bobance, Et par especial gent de France. [… you have no charity Among you Christians, and no pity either. All you care about is your social rank, Your tender meats and your full plates.

Bread Without Onions 67 All Christians do is live like epicures, And especially the French.] (II. 665–670) Defining the French as the epitome of Christian weakness, the Saracen provides a direct reply to a previous comment raised by the Physician, who asserted that “Or s’est venue essayer/Se pourra France envenimer/ La columpne de Crestienté” [Now discord has come to see if/It will be able to poison France,/The pillar of Christianity, II. 187–189]. Such moral decay links gluttony with the Great Schism, a theme that “lurks” throughout the whole of the Apparicion, as pointed out by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. 52 Adding weight to Honorat Bovet’s concern with all of Christianity, the Saracen is indiscriminate in the Christian nations that receive his criticism. Despite the fact that the Romans consider the French to be “moins que neant,/Car ilz les ont pour scysmatiques” [less than nothing,/Because they hold them to be schismatic, II. 360–361], the Saracen reports that Roman Christianity is similarly afflicted with gluttony and excess. Alluding to practices intensified under the papacy of Gregory XI (C.E. 1329–1378)—who had once received permission to consume dairy products and eggs during Lent—the Saracen notes, “Ne vivent de lart ne de poys” [[In Rome,]] they do not live on lard and peas] but feast on “belles veandes” [fine meats], “fort vin,/Gelee franche, blans mengiers” [strong wine,/Clear jelly, blancmanges], and “nobles fruiz, frommage gras” [fine fruits and rich cheeses, II. 854–855, 862–863, 865]. Moreover, just like the French, the Cardinals have become preoccupied with luxurious clothing in addition to extravagant travel, table service, and waitstaff (II. 840–861). These parallels in sin hint that all of Christianity, not just French Christianity, needs to be rethought. Asking “N’estes vous dont tous d’une loy/Entre vous et les dis Rommains?” [Are you not all held under one law,/You and the Romans?, II. 364–365], the Saracen extends the readers’ responsibility not just to their French compatriots but also to their estranged Christian brethren. In other words, a resolution of the Schism could both divert eternal damnation for all of Europe and strengthen Christianity against the Ottoman empire.

Saving Christianity As the Apparicion concludes, its urgency grows, as does the intimation that change—especially regarding food-based behaviors—lies in the readers’ hands. The Physician, for example, speaks of the day “Quant verité sera trouvee/Et faulseté sera foulee” [When truth is finally discovered,/And dishonesty destroyed, II. 219–220]. Speaking to the Prior about individual behaviors, the character of Jean de Meun softens this certainty with the pronoun “if”: “Et se remede n’y mettes/De vivre plus diligemment,/Je vous prise moins que neant” […if you do not take pains/To live more heedfully,/ Then I consider you to be less than nothing, II. 18–20].

68  Sylvia Grove Both of these assertions are consistent with medieval spiritual law, which states that gluttony must be eradicated from a society before other reforms—whether social or political—can take place. According to Pope Gregory I, as quoted by St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica: ‘Unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat … As long as the vice of gluttony has a hold on a man, all that he has done valiantly is forfeited by him: and as long as the belly is unrestrained, all virtue comes to naught.’53 Positioning gluttony at the center of all spiritual conflicts, Gregory I indicates that only through reshaping individual and collective relationships to food can a society begin to heal. Put differently, shifting gastronomic attitudes in France could simultaneously restore the social order between the classes, resolve the Schism, and strengthen Christianity against the Ottoman forces—if the French have the courage to change. The Saracen agrees, detailing a solution for the French through an evocation of their own historic military training. The success of this training—“vrayez et certaines/Pour faire les bons coustumiers/D’estre en armes fors et fiers” [dependable, and sure/To put your men in the habit of/Being strong and fierce in arms, II. 456–458]—is described through the food attitudes of the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.E.). In war: Oncques mauvaiz pain ne blasma, Ne bevrage ne refusa; Ne lui chaloit de perdre fain De mengier paste ou levain; Pour son logis ne queroit salle, Pour ses robes bahu ne malle; Mais qu’il se peust garder du froit, Couleur de drap ne regardoit. [He never turned up his nose at poor bread, Nor refused any drink; Nor was it important for him, in satisfying hunger, To eat meat pies or cakes; For his lodgings he sought no shelter, For his clothes, no trunk nor chest; As long as he was protected from the cold, He didn’t care about the color of the cloth.] (II. 475–482) Representing the acquisition of power through moderation, this description models how the French can strengthen their society from the inside out. The Saracen promises that, by renouncing gluttony, not only will

Bread Without Onions 69 the French regain their physical strength and social unity; they will restore honor to a degraded Christian faith.

Conclusion In contemporary societies, food remains a deeply contested issue, rooted in the present as well as in the past. Tracing the discourse of food through medieval French literature intensifies the scope of contemporary conflicts, as well as their stakes in the individual and collective body. In the Apparicion, gluttony unifies Honorat Bovet’s central concerns for Christianity, a faith that has been weakened, not strengthened, in the wake of a potential Ottoman invasion. While the Saracen’s presence in the text stands in for the actual arrival of this army on French soil, his criticism provides crucial information on how to ensure France’s security. To restore Christian strength, the French must practice discipline and self-restraint especially regarding food, which will reinforce the bonds between Christian brethren. Without undermining the reality of the Ottoman threat, the notion that the French may wish to emulate the gustatory habits of their enemy hints at the possible fluidity of the definition of the “outlaw.” While both the Prior and the Physician indicate that the social climate prevents them from speaking honestly about the challenges facing French society, the Saracen’s status as an outsider permits his transgression of the very cultural codes that he critiques. The agency given to the Saracen outlaw—and his ability to support French society through the sharing of his observations—is perhaps the Apparicion’s most powerful message: despite differing ideologies, social and political rivals should listen to, respect, and dialogue with their “other.” Finally, the framing of food as a question of national security in the Apparicion is inextricable from its relationship to personal responsibility. For Honorat Bovet, even apparently ordinary actions such as eating contribute to the health of a community, a concept that restores agency to individuals wishing to promote cultural understanding despite ideological differences. Given the anxieties regarding the overlapping boundaries of religion, race, nation, and group loyalties in the twenty-first century, Bovet’s text retains its urgency in its call to look inward—in addition to outward—for peace.

Notes 1. Quoted in Jean-Laurent Cassely, “Selon Copé, certains enfants sont privés de pain au chocolat en période de Ramadan,” Slate.fr, last modified October 6, 2012, http://www.slate.fr/lien/62869/cope-pain-chocolat-ramadan. The translation is my own. 2. Ibid.

70  Sylvia Grove 3. See: Mary Douglas, “The Abominations of Leviticus,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2013), 48–58; Claude Fischler, “Food, Self, and Identity,” Social Science Information 27 (1988): 275–293. 4. Fischler, “Food, Self, and Identity,” 280. 5. In his essays “Le vin et le lait” [Wine and Milk] and “Le biftek et les frites” [Steak Frites], Roland Barthes argues that both meat and wine construct an image of French identity defined by ritualistic consumption. In popular culture, examples of the “misuse” of meat and wine, framed as threats to French social and political institutions, include the 2014 claim by members of France’s far-right party, the National Front, that kebab shops were sullying the nation’s cultural heritage. Similarly, in 2015, French President François Hollande chose canceling lunch with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over sharing a meal at which no wine was served. Capucine Truong, Léa Ménard, et al., “À Blois, la guerre du kebab n’aura pas lieu,” LeMonde.fr, last modified June 17, 2016, http://www.lemonde. fr/monde-academie/visuel/2016/06/17/a-blois-la-guerre-du-kebab-naura-pas-lieu_4952411_1752655.html; Adam Gopnik, “France, Iran, and the Affair of the Lunch Wine,” The New Yorker, last modified January 29, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ france-iran-and-the-affair-of-the-lunch-wine. 6. Four days after the 2015 attacks whose targets had included a restaurant, Parisian chefs launched the initiative “Tous au bistrot!” [Everyone to the bistro] with the stated goals of collective mourning, community loyalty, and healing. Interestingly, however, the majority of the restaurants featured in this initiative catered to the predominantly white Parisian elite. Boris Coridian, “Les restaurateurs se mobilisent pour que Paris reste une fête,” LeMonde.fr, last modified November 17, 2015, https://www. lemonde.fr/m-actu/article/2015/11/17/les-restaurateurs-se-mobilisentpour-que-paris-reste-une-fete_4811891_4497186.html. 7. Michael Hanly, ed., Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet. A Critical Edition with English Translation (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 1. 8. Ibid., 1. 9. Ibid., 35. 10. Ibid., 2–3. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Aziz S. Atiya, “The Crusade in the Fourteenth Century,” in A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Harry W. Hazard (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 22. 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Ibid., 21, 25–26. 15. Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue, 33–34. 16. In the dedication that accompanied the text given to Jean de Montaigu, Bovet argues that the greed of the French nobility had weakened Christianity’s ability to combat militant Islam: Je…vous supplie…[de] mettre diligence avec le roy et son grant conseil comment, pour le bien de son ame, de la sainté de son corps et reliefvement de tout son royaume, vueille prendre et mettre a effect les choses qui sont a refformer sur pluiseurs excés qui cueurent au jourduy. Car sans amender nostre vie, j’ay paour que Dieux ne nous aydera, et sy doubte que les Sarrazins durement ne griefvent Crestianté…

Bread Without Onions 71











[I…implore you…[to] entreat the king and his high council, for the good of his soul, the health of his body, and the welfare of all his kingdom, that they accept and implement the measures necessary for reforming the many excesses rampant nowadays. Because without reforming our lives, I fear that God may no longer help us, and thus fear that the Saracens may grievously afflict Christianity…, ll. 22–29] 17. The first two books of Plato’s Laws explore the relationship between the banquet and the education of the citizen, reporting that Sparta believed feasts to be incompatible with military prowess. Some French strategists held similar opinions; Florent Quellier reports that “la gourmandise” [love for good food] was among “des accusés” [the accused] after the French 1356 defeat at Poitiers. See: Michael Jeanneret’s reading of banquet discourse in A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 63; Florent Quellier, La gourmandise: Histoire d’un péché capital (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 17. 18. Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue, 15. 19. See: II. 100–101. 20. Jean Batany, “Un Usbek au XIVe siècle: Le sarrasin juge des Français dans L’Apparicion Jehan de Meun,” Senefiance 11 (1982): 43–58. 21. Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue, 35-36; Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 41. The characters show their awareness of these social issues in II. 97-110, 277–278, 927–928. 22. Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue, 36. 23. Nicola McDonald, “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coeur de Lion,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 128. 24. Michael Hanly, “‘Et prendre nom de Sarrazin’: Islam as the Symptom of Western Iniquity in Honorat Bovet’s L’Apparicion maistre Jehen de Meun,” Multilingua 18, no. 2–3 (January 1999): 227–250. 25. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 113–146. 26. Many medieval monastic orders highlighted physical labor and gustatory restraint as part of their spiritual program. See Stéphane Hénaut and Jeni Mitchell, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment (New York: The New Press, 2018), 43–46. 27. Given that the Saracen remains an enemy throughout the poem—returning home to the court of Sultan Bajazet, as Hanly points out—it is unlikely that this role reversal is promoting the mass conversion of Ottoman Muslims to Christianity. Bovet, however, does address the “schism” between Islam and Christianity in the Apparicion as evidence of the Christian abuse of power (II. 1154–1195). Batany, “Un Usbek au XIVe siècle,” 46; Hanly, “Et prendre nom de Sarrazin,” 231–233. 28. Hanly, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews, 55; Hanly, “Et prendre nom de Sarrazin,” 231. 29. Quellier, La gourmandise, 31. 30. Paulina B. Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 155. 31. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed., trans. Anthea Bell (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 93.

72  Sylvia Grove 32. Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Perdue University Press, 2007), 3. 33. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” trans. Peter Brooks, in Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2013), 42. 34. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York: George Braziller, 1976), 39. 35. Ibid., 64. 36. Recipes consulted include D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully, Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes, and Modern Adaptations (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 120; Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, 148–150. 37. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, 45. 38. Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 55; Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004), 17. 39. Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 116; Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 18. 40. Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 3–4. 41. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2013), 246. 42. Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 28. 43. Bynum, “Fast, Feast, and Flesh,” 245. 44. Susan E. Hill, “‘The Ooze of Gluttony’: Attitudes towards Food, Eating, and Excess in the Middle Ages,” in The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 59. 45. Ibid., 66–68. 46. Quellier, La gourmandise, 17. 47. Hill, “The Ooze of Gluttony,” 70. 48. Quoted in Hill, “The Ooze of Gluttony,” 62–63. 49. See: II. 937–42. 50. Quoted in “Question 148. Gluttony,” Summa Theologica. ed. Kevin Knight, New Advent, last modified 2009. Accessed 11 January 2021, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3148.htm. 51. Reports are contradictory on whether aged wine served as a marker of medieval social class. While Scully and Scully find storing wine to be a common practice among the nobility, Adamson suggests that medieval wines spoiled too rapidly to function as a consistent symbol of wealth. See: Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 35; Adamson, Food in Medieval Times, 50. 52. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 148. 53. Quoted in “Question 148. Gluttony,” Summa Theologica.

Bibliography Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004. Atiya, Aziz S. “The Crusade in the Fourteenth Century.” In The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, edited by Harry W. Hazard, 3–26. A History of the Crusades Volume 3. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

Bread Without Onions 73 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957. Batany, Jean. “Un Usbek au XIVe siècle: Le sarrasin juge des Français dans L’Apparicion Jehan de Meun.” Senefiance Vol. 11 (1982): 43–58. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 245–264. New York: Routledge, 2013. Cassely, Jean-Laurent. “Selon Copé, certains enfants sont privés de pain au chocolat en période de Ramadan.” Slate.fr. Last modified October 6, 2012. http:// www.slate.fr/lien/62869/cope-pain-chocolat-ramadan. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Vol. 31 (2001): 113–146. Coridian, Boris. “Les restaurateurs se mobilisent pour que Paris reste une fête.” LeMonde.fr. Last modified November 17, 2015. https://www.lemonde.fr/ m-actu/article/2015/11/17/les-restaurateurs-se-mobilisent-pour-que-parisreste-une-fete_4811891_4497186.html. Cosman, Madeleine Pelner. Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony. New York: George Braziller, 1976. Fischler, Claude. “Food, Self, and Identity.” Social Science Information Vol. 27 (1988): 275–293. Gordon, Sarah. Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. West Lafayette, IN: Perdue University Press, 2007. Hanly, Michael. “‘Et prendre nom de Sarrazin’: Islam as the Symptom of Western Iniquity in Honorat Bovet’s L’Apparicion maistre Jehen de Meun.” Multilingua Vol. 18 No. 2–3 (January 1999): 227–250. ———, ed. Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet. A Critical Edition with English Translation. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Hénaut, Stéphane and Jeni Mitchell. A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment. New York: The New Press, 2018. Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Hill, Susan E. “‘The Ooze of Gluttony’: Attitudes towards Food, Eating, and Excess in the Middle Ages.” In The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, edited by Richard Newhauser, 57–71. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 123. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Culinary Triangle.” Translated by Peter Brooks. In Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 40–47. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lewicka, Paulina B. Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean. Islamic History and Civilization 88. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

74  Sylvia Grove McDonald, Nicola. “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coeur de Lion.” In Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, edited by Nicola McDonald, 124–150. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. McGuire, Brian Patrick. Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. “Question 148. Gluttony.” Summa Theologica, edited by Kevin Knight. New Advent. Last modified 2009. Accessed 11 January 2021. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3148.htm. Quellier, Florent. La gourmandise: Histoire d’un péché capital. Paris: Armand Colin, 2010. Scully, D. Eleanor and Terence Scully. Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes, and Modern Adaptations. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. 2nd ed. Translated by Anthea Bell. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

5

Of Courtesy and Community Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode Sherron Lux

For many people, the name “Robin Hood” conjures not only the idea of “robbing the rich to give to the poor,” but also the concept of a largely carefree life in the forest, complete with archery contests and frequent feasts, feasts which feature plenty of roast venison and good brown ale. These elements, especially the feasting, which continue to appear in film and television, novels, and plays on the Matter of the Greenwood,1 reach back to some of the earliest written Robin Hood materials we have, including two early ballads: Robin Hood and the Monk, from sometime around 1465, 2 and Robin Hood and the Potter, from around 1468.3 Feasts play roles in several of the ballads, while meals, not all of them feasts, as well as drinking scenes, appear in many other sources. Many of these food-and/or-drink episodes do more than simply get the outlaws fed: They welcome a new member of the merry band or otherwise bolster community, or they exact a toll from an unwary traveler, or they tweak the sheriff or bishop, or they celebrate a marriage or a friendship. Stephen Knight has recently examined the widespread popularity of feasting scenes, and the various forms the feast takes, in the Robin Hood tradition, noting that “the sumptuous forest feast is the most popular of events, both in the sense of being widely enjoyed and in the more interesting sense of being apparently straightforward in meaning, but it is also a narrative formation that can play variant signifying roles […] There is an outlaw menu as well as an outlaw feast.”4 Knight’s essay provides a taxonomy of feast scenes and their function in the Robin Hood legend, emphasizing their variety. As I argue here, regardless of their narrative function, these forest feasts frequently model generosity and courteous, aristocratic behavior, which contributes to community, with Robin Hood in the position of lord or monarch. Thus, in the Robin Hood material, a shared meal is often more than the sum of its parts, but is a gastronomic experience. In this light, this paper considers A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, an episodic narrative poem in eight “Fyttes,” or chapters, possibly printed as early as 1495 by Richard Pynson, of which only a damaged fragment exists;5 Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of c. 1506 is the earliest more or less complete edition,6 and the one used in this chapter.

76  Sherron Lux Food and feasting feature prominently in the Geste, with more detailed feast-scenes in Fyttes One, Three, and Seven, a somewhat elaborated feast scene in Fytte Two, and mentions of eating, drinking, or feasting in Fyttes Three, Four, Five, and Eight. The longer feast scenes form the supporting pillars of the poem’s architecture; all other events lead into or away from them. This near-overemphasis on feeding and feasting makes dramatic sense if, as both Thomas Ohlgren and Dean Hoffman have convincingly argued, A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode originally formed the main entertainment at the annual election dinner of one of the Great Livery Companies, possibly the Drapers’ Guild.7 Hoffman elucidates the way the poem would have been performed by a small troupe of costumed or masked actors, referred to as disguisers, whose improvisations among the guild members in the hall would have created a kind of theatrical running commentary on the evening’s ceremonies, particularly if the episodes of the lengthy poem were staged between the actual courses of the banquet in the manner of a great hall play or interlude. (121–122)8 However, the poem-as-entertainment, like the banquet itself, is about more than eating and drinking. Those festal pillars of the poem, the feast-scenes, are encircled not only with hospitality, but also with courtesy, generosity, and community. Robin himself displays the authority and generosity proper to a nobleman or a guild master, while his lieutenants likewise demonstrate loyalty and generosity, and his young men cheerfully show courteous deference; the outlaws’ community functions smoothly. In addition, running through the poem and around the feastscenes is the hunt: the hunt for deer and other creatures on which the diners feast, and the hunt for men either to attend the feast or to be the metaphorical feast. A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, then, is presented as a literary gastronomic feast in eight courses. Robin and his outlaws habitually serve food to their guests—whether free or forced—which would have graced the tables of the highest levels of society. Their mealtime manners are likewise aristocratic, complete with ritualized hand-washing and polite speech seemingly at odds with the conduct of outlaws living in the forest. One explanation for this seeming incongruity is what Melissa Ridley Elmes, in her examination of the first feast scene in the Geste, calls Robin Hood’s polysemic character: “a freeborn man, a forester, an outlaw, a nobleman, a king, and a tricky swindler” who creates his own life and lives by his own moral code; this includes being “a defender of women and of the morally upright and hard-working, a pious and devout worshiper of Mary and God, a punisher of corrupt authorities.”9 Elmes notes further that not only does Robin Hood appear to know the social rules, but also how to use them “to his advantage, adhering to or breaking them as needed, so that he

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  77 represents no single social order.”10 To Elmes’s list of Robin Hood’s polysemous characteristics thus established in the Geste’s first feast scene, I would add “guide to courteous conduct.” This may initially seem strange for a character who “manipulates customary modes of governance … to serve a particular need.”11 However, if we consider all the scenes of eating, drinking, and feasting in the Geste as well as its possible original context as entertainment at a major guild dinner, Robin Hood himself— and the entire Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode—models courteous behavior and critiques discourteous behavior in the context of community. Before examining the Geste’s feast scenes, we need to address the incongruity of the forest outlaw as aristocratic guide, especially since the Robin Hood of the Lytell Geste is not an aristocrat. From the beginning, the author of the Geste labels Robin a “yeman” [yeoman, l. 3] and an “outlawe” [outlaw, l. 5], albeit with the adjective “good” appended.12 While Elmes’s discussion of the Geste’s Robin Hood as a polysemic character helps to resolve much of this incongruity, the term “yeoman” is itself somewhat polysemous by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as it can refer to “a landholder of intermediary social status or for an intermediary office in an aristocratic household,”13 with a sliding scale upwards and downwards for both meanings. Richard Almond and A.J. Pollard demonstrate that in the Geste, Robin is specifically a “yeoman of the forest,” that is, a forester, an officer who protects the forest and its denizens from common criminals, as an outraged Little John explains to the monk in the Fourth Fytte. When the monk dismisses Robin Hood as a “stronge thefe” [strong thief, l. 867], Little John exclaims, “He is a yeman of the forest” [He is a yeoman of the forest/forester, l. 871]. Almond and Pollard state: “Little John’s retort carries force only if the term ‘yeoman of the forest’ has the specific meaning of ‘a forester,’ rather than the general sense of a yeoman taking refuge in the forest.”14 Of course, these particular foresters are outlawed, why, the narrator never reveals, but their outlawry means that they now illegally walk the forest and take the king’s deer. At the same time, Robin Hood and his men maintain a clear social order, with Robin as “mayster” [master], the master outlaw, the chief forest ranger, the master thief, the exemplary leader.15 Little John is his lieutenant or bow-bearer, then Much and Scathelocke, and the remaining yeoman-outlaws, with all subject to Robin, as they indicate by coming to Robin at the sound of his horn and kneeling before him (ll. 1535–1540; ll. 1768–1778). Almond and Pollard note how “the well-ordered outlaw society reflects the formal structure of forest administration,”16 although one wonders if foresters bowed to their chief as nobles would their lord. Thomas Ohlgren, however, sees the yeomanry of Robin Hood and his followers in a different context, urban rather than rural, with the meaning of “yeoman” expanded to include journeyman tradesmen as well as landowners and household officers. Ohlgren makes a strong case

78  Sherron Lux that the compiler of the Geste participated in the shift of the heroic ideal “from knightly adventurer to merchant adventurer,” including Robin’s giving of liveries (clothing and/or badges) to his followers in addition to his courteous behavior and his wealth, which even lets him loan money.17 Ohlgren notes further that in relation to typical guild organization, Robin’s company of 140 “wyght yemen” [sturdy yeoman] on whom he can call matches the number of liveried guildsmen in one of the Great Livery Companies.18 Because of the emphasis on clothing throughout the poem, Ohlgren suggests that the Geste may have been commissioned by the Merchant Taylors or, more probably, the Drapers Guild for recitation at one of its annual feasts.19 Guildsmen generally lived very well, and the annual feast on their patron’s feast-day was a lavish affair with multiple courses of high-class food and drink along with considerable ceremony, 20 banquets modeled on aristocratic and even royal feasts. Dean Hoffman further observes that the banquet also celebrated newly invested members of the guild, the apprentices who have successfully completed their apprenticeship and who now wear the guild’s livery and feast at the guild’s table, thus enlarging the community. 21 Likewise, the feast scenes in the Geste demonstrate feasting, courtesy, and generosity as important to community and companionship. Is Robin Hood’s yeomanry rural or urban? Why can it not be both? As Thomas Hahn observes, “in all periods and in all times, Robin Hood seems to entail the crossing of boundaries, or the reversal of customary hierarchies.”22 Certainly this polysemous character of legend crosses multiple boundaries simultaneously in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode. Whether as the “master” of a company of outlawed foresters or the “master” of one of the major merchants’ guilds, Robin shows himself “master” or “lord” of the feast multiple times, with the attendant courtesy and ritual expected of someone of aristocratic or even royal estate. In the Introduction to their translation of much of The Babees’ Book, Frederick James Furnivall’s compilation of several late medieval courtesy treatises primarily for boys and young men, Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor note that the English books derive from earlier French sources, “… and it was only with the growth of citizenship and English together, that these matters came to be discussed in this latter tongue [English] for the profit of middle-class children, as well as of the ‘bele babees’ at court.”23 With the rise of the city, then, in the late Middle Ages rose the corresponding demand for a social education which imitated as closely as possible that which the aristocracy, particularly aristocratic males, received. The Geste of Robyn Hode leaves Robin’s origins and upbringing mysterious, with “yeoman” only indicating that he is freeborn. His manners, including removing his hood and kneeling to men of superior social station, indicate familiarity with the then-new courtesy books, or at least with their contents. While these courtesy treatises sometimes go on at length about how certain household officers should perform their

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  79 duties, 24 for the most part they advocate good manners, especially good table manners: no spitting or scratching or snatching or picking teeth, for example; be satisfied with your place at table and your food; share food with your neighbor, and do not take all the choice morsels for yourself. The books also describe correct behavior and address to one’s superiors, and admonish the young folk to speak modestly and sensibly, to not bear tales or speak foully, to wash face and hands, to attend Mass and say prayers: courtly behavior to which almost anyone could aspire. According to the Middle English Dictionary, the term courteis, essentially “courtesy”/”courteous,” defines a person of courtly or refined manners, polite, considerate, kind, gracious, generous, and respectful.25 As the Urbanitatis from the mid-1400s states: “Good manners always make good men”26 – and good, generous, courteous, well-spoken men (and women) can make a good community, whether rural or urban. Certainly, Robin Hood’s outlaw community generally demonstrates courtesy, generosity, and loyalty to each other, as well as to “guests” who return their courtesy, and who may become part of their community. Robin as lord or even as king of his “fayre menye” [fair/good company, l. 123] in both the First and Fourth Fyttes humorously evokes the image of King Arthur in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 27 declining to eat “Tyll I haue some bolde baron/Or some vnketh gest/That may paye for the best/Or some knygot or some squyere” [until I have some bold baron or some uncouth guest that may pay for the best, or some knight or some squire, ll. 23–26], 28 and then sending Little John with a couple of companions to waylay a traveler. Whether threadbare knight or wealthy monk with a train of servants, each “guest” finds himself greeted by Robin with great courtesy as the outlaw doffs his hood, kneels to the man—in each case, his social superior—and bids him welcome. As the Urbanitatis states: When you come before a lord, In hall, in bower, or at board, You must doff or cap or hood, Ere before him you have stood. Twice or thrice beyond a doubt, Before your sovereign must you lout; On the right knee bend you low; For your own sake do ye so. Hold your cap, forbear to don, Till you’re told to put it on. 29 In the First Fytte, the knight returns Robin’s courtesy “With words fayre and fre” [with words fair and free, l. 121], but in the Fourth Fytte, “The m[.]ke was not so curteyse,/His hode then let he be” [The monk was not so courteous;/he did not remove his hood, ll.886–888]. Interestingly,

80  Sherron Lux while technically both men are Robin’s social superiors, Robin and his company, represented by Little John, expect the monk to remove his hood, but do not expect the same of the knight. Perhaps the monk’s not speaking “with words fayre and fre” lowers his status in the eyes of the outlaw community; if he is no longer Robin’s superior, then he should also doff his hood. In the First Fytte, then, the poverty-stricken knight responds to Robin’s courtesy with courtesy himself while in the Fourth Fytte the monk, the High Cellarer of wealthy St. Mary’s Abbey, refuses to reciprocate. When Little John, disgusted, labels the monk a churl, Robin responds that the monk is discourteous because he does not know courteous behavior (ll.885–892), odd, given that the monk is of a higher social class. However, while the monk probably has head-knowledge of courtesy, he may not have life-knowledge; in other words, he may not have practiced courteous behavior consistently until it became part of him. He may also believe that outlaws do not rate courtesy, even when they demonstrate courtly behavior. On the other hand, Robin Hood the outlaw yeoman-master does know and practice courteous behavior consistent with the highest levels of society; his courtesy has become part of who he is. As a free-born yeoman, higher in social status than a peasant, he would have been taught the principles and manners set forth in the courtesy books, whether or not he could actually read them. In the Geste, most of Robin’s guests are his social superiors: the poor knight in the First and Fourth Fyttes, the High Sheriff of Nottingham in the Third, the monk in the Fourth, the knight’s lady in the Sixth, and the king-disguised-as-abbot in the Seventh. In each case, Robin speaks respectfully to the guest and, with the exception of the knight’s lady, invites them to dinner. Since the knight’s lady has come to ask Robin to free her husband from the sheriff, who has captured him, Robin’s courtesy to her is brief, since he and his men must move quickly before the sheriff might kill the knight. For the rest, Robin and the guest trade polite talk, Robin inquiring of the guest’s identity, with Robin and Little John doing courtesy to the guest by serving him themselves (esp. ll. 905– 908, 1547–1548). Stephen Knight reads this representation of Robin as yeoman interacting courteously with noble figures as “a product of the upscaling of the class basis of the yeoman ballad in the Gest,”30 and while this is certainly likely, just as Robin is more than a trickster character, the Gest is more than the aristocratizing of a popular folkloric figure or the romancing of a popular narrative genre. This is not only an elevation, but a transformation, of the material from a straightforwardly class-based narrative into a community experience centered on courtesy at the feast and emphasizing behavior as much as social status. Robin Hood’s mealtime courtesy towards his enforced guests contrasts with the discourtesy of the abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey towards the knight in the Second Fytte, who offers the knight none of his own “ryall chere” [royal fare, l. 481], not even a cup of water. When the

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  81 impoverished knight arrives at St. Mary’s Abbey to repay his loan to the abbot, thanks to Robin Hood’s generosity, he finds the abbot at a celebration dinner with the chief justice, the sheriff, and other lords in anticipation of the knight’s defaulting on the loan and losing his lands to the abbot. Despite the knight’s kneeling courteously to the abbot to plead his case, the abbot bypasses the courtesy of welcome; instead: “The fyrst word the abbot spake/Hast thou brought my pay” [The first word the abbot spoke was/Have you brought my pay?, ll. 407–408]. In handing over the four hundred pounds lent him by Robin, he reverses the abbot’s expectations with the declaration “Haddest thou ben curteys at my comynge,/Rewarde sholdest thou haue be” [Had you been courteous to me today, you would have received a bonus payment, ll. 479–480], at which the dismayed abbot “ete no more” [ate no more, l. 481]. While he has his four hundred pounds again, the abbot does not have the knight’s lands, as he had anticipated, and has also lost the possible extra payment as well as the retainer he had paid to the chief justice (ll. 485–488). Greed, selfishness, and discourtesy on the abbot’s part bring him to such distress he cannot even finish his fine dinner, perhaps an object lesson for listeners and readers of the tale. As the Urbanitatis warns: “Gentle of speech – ye have your will;/But foul of speech – ye fare full ill.”31 The Fourth Fytte again finds Robin Hood sending Little John, Much, and Scathelock to find a “guest” for dinner, preferably one who can repay the four hundred pounds Robin had loaned the knight, who is running late with the repayment. The men return with the High Cellarer of St. Mary’s Abbey, who was present when the knight repaid his debt. This monk fails in both courtesy and truthfulness; when Robin asks the monk how much money is in his coffers, and offers to help him should he need more, the monk claims only twenty marks but is found to be carrying eight hundred pounds, double the amount Robin had loaned the knight (ll. 953–976). Because the knight and Robin had agreed on “our dere lady” [Our Dear Lady, l. 268], the Blessed St. Mary, as surety for the loan, and because the monk is of St. Mary’s Abbey, Robin claims the money as both repayment and gift from Our Lady. Had the High Cellarer been honest, he would have kept part of the money; as it is, he loses it all for both himself and the abbey. Both the abbot at his too-soon celebration dinner in the Second Fytte and the monk at his forest dinner with Robin Hood in the Fourth are not only examples of greedy, discourteous churchmen who get their comeuppance, but of how discourtesy and greed can have negative results. Both should have remembered admonitions from various courtesy books of the period, such as that found in “The Young Children’s Book”: “Look you be true in word and deed, the better shall you prosper; for truth never works a man shame, but rather keeps him out of sin. The ways to Heaven are twain, mercy and truth, say clerks; and he who will come to the life of bliss, must not fail to walk therein.”32

82  Sherron Lux On the other hand, consider the knight’s response to both Robin’s men and Robin himself. Accosted by Little John, who courteously greets him on bended knee, the knight politely agrees to accompany Little John, Much, and Scathelocke to dinner with Robin Hood. He responds to Robin’s courteous greeting with courtesy himself, and enjoys a fine feast with Robin and the outlaws. When asked the contents of his purse, the knight truthfully admits he has but ten shillings to his name. To save his son, who had killed a knight and a squire in a joust, the knight has sold his goods and pledged his lands as surety to the abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey for four hundred pounds, now due, but cannot pay and has lost his friends. With Our Lady as the knight’s guarantor, Robin lends him four hundred pounds. The knight realizes he has acquired new friends, as various outlaws volunteer to additionally give him fine clothing and new boots, a good horse and a fine saddle, a fair palfrey, and even Little John to be his squire. Little John then emphasizes the community element in their assistance of the knight as he says he will give the knight “a payre of gylte spores clere/To praye for all this company/God brynge him out of tene” [a pair of bright gilded spurs/with prayers from all our company./God bring him out of his sorrow, ll. 308–10; see also ll. 265, 284, 294–309, 319–322]. Because the poverty-stricken knight not only responds graciously to the courtesy of Robin Hood and his men, but also tells the truth, Robin and his men assist him. The knight can now ride joyfully to the abbey to pay his debt; he and his wife can keep their lands. Robin’s loan and generous gifts to the knight return to him in the Fifth Fytte when the knight, now named “Syr Rychard at the lee” [Sir Richard at the Lee, l. 122], takes in Robin and his men when they are fleeing from the sheriff, who has used an archery contest in an attempt to arrest Robin Hood. After welcoming Robin and his company and quickly arranging the castle defense, Sir Richard invites the outlaws to a multi-day feast: These twelue dayes thou wonest with me To suppe ete and dyne Bordes were layed and clothes spred Reddely and a none Robyn hode and his mery men To mete gan they gone. [These twelve days you will stay with me/to drink, eat, and dine./Tables were set up and tablecloths spread/readily and at once./Robin Hood and his merry men/have gone in to dinner.] (ll. 1243–1248). Courtesy, truth, and generosity go well together, seasoned with an excellent dinner. In giving refuge to Robin Hood and his company, the knight expresses not only reciprocity and generosity, but also gratitude

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  83 and community. He can shelter and feed the outlaws in their time of need because earlier they fed and, essentially, sheltered him in his need by enabling him to keep his lands. His acceptance of the loan and the gifts he received bring him into the Greenwood community, albeit tangentially; where generosity and courtesy are present, status boundaries disintegrate. As he has been dealt with generously, so the knight deals generously with others in need, proving the courtesy and gratitude he exhibited to Robin in the forest are part of his character. Even before he gives refuge to Robin Hood and his company in the Fifth Fytte, we find him at the end of the Second Fytte assisting a yeoman at a wrestling match; because the young man was not from the area, he was afraid the other wrestlers might injure or kill him if he claimed the prize. The knight and his men claim the prize for the yeoman “for loue of Robyn hode” [for the love of Robin Hood, l. 552]. The knight then pays the yeoman five marks for one of the prizes, “a pype of wyne” [a pipe of wine, l. 542], which he orders broached and shared with all present, not only helping the deserving stranger to his prize, but also helping him become part of the local community, even if temporarily. Since a pipe of wine was 126 gallons,33 the locals no doubt enjoyed themselves and accepted the young wrestler. Sharing the wine enlarged the community, just as Robin’s sharing of food and wealth with the knight enlarged the outlaws’ community, even when the knight and his men were not immediately present. In demonstrating courtesy and enlarging community, feasting and drinking are important in the Geste. What about the meals themselves? Here we see a ritual of courtesy as well as the serving of fine food and drink, most information coming from treatises written either for the nobility or for the ambitiously rising middle class. Before sitting down to dinner, everyone washes and dries his hands, a necessary ritual when food not eaten with a spoon was eaten with the fingers. Throughout the Middle Ages, while peasants at least washed their hands after a meal in whatever water was available, aristocratic and royal diners washed their hands at the table with warm water, frequently scented, before and after a meal. By the late Middle Ages, much ceremony accompanied this handwashing as well as the serving, particularly at dinner and banquets, with courtesy and decorum expected of those at table. 34 While we do not see ceremony, as such, in the two pre-dinner hand washings in the Geste, with the knight in the First Fytte and the monk in the Fourth, we do see the company washing and wiping their hands before eating, which implies at least a basin and a towel (Geste, ll. 125, 905), another unexpected courtesy element in Robin Hood’s Greenwood, in which outlaws behave like aristocrats. After washing and drying their hands, the company moves to eating, drinking, and polite conversation. When mentioned in the Geste, the fare Robin serves his “guests,” regardless of their status, is generally worthy

84  Sherron Lux of an aristocrat or an important guildsman. Even when the food or drink is common, it must be of the highest quality. First, consider beverages. Although common ale appears on the menu for the “abbot” in the Seventh Fytte, it is the best: “fyne ale and browne” (l.1554). C.M. Woolgar notes that in medieval England ale, a heated and fermented infusion of malt, “principally barley malt, but also of malted wheat, oats, and mixed grains, depending on the quality that was required,”35 was a staple drink. It could be home-brewed or made commercially, but unfortunately, it did not keep more than two weeks. We can assume that Robin serves the king-as-abbot fresh, top-quality barley malted ale, some of which had no doubt been taken from distrained travelers through the forest, with some purchased by a few of Robin’s “wyght yemen” (l. 899) in a nearby town. Wine, which Robin serves at all the feasts, was primarily for the wealthy, the aristocracy, and royalty. Although vineyards flourished in England at least until the fourteenth century, 36 it was largely imported in England, with France, Italy, and Germany the main wine countries.37 Wine’s association with the Catholic Mass and with royalty raised both its prestige and its price. Robin Hood, functioning as an aristocratic host, would have kept wine on hand for his “guests.” While the poem does not specify the type of wine Robin serves the knight, he serves the king-as-abbot “the good rede wyne” [good red wine, l. 1553]. Interestingly, the actual food consumed at Robin Hood’s feasting in the Geste is only mentioned for the first and last feasts of the poem, that for the impoverished knight in the First Fytte (ll. 126–131) and for the king-disguised-as-an-abbot in the Seventh (ll. 1552–1554). While there are differences in the food served at those two meals, three items are constant: wine, bread, and venison. Bread with wine for the aristocracy and ale for everyone else were staples across Europe; for Christians, bread with wine echoed the Eucharist, the communion of the faithful with Christ and with each other. Living in the forest meant the outlaws had access to deer and other wildlife for food, with venison frequently in the starring role, possibly because the large company could be fed on fewer deer than on smaller animals, such as rabbits. Of course, the most basic element in all foods of the Middle Ages was grain. Medieval people ate grain of many types in bread, in pottages and porridges, in stews; they drank it in ale and beer.38 Most bread was made from varying grades of wheat, depending on how finely the flour was ground. For the very finest white bread, “paindemaigne” or “manchet,” the wheat flour was sieved two or three times through linen or woolen bolting cloths; this was the bread of royalty, the nobility, and the very wealthy, as well as the bread used for the service of Communion.39 The next best wheat bread, “wastel,” was sieved less carefully, while “cocket” and that simply called “white” were more coarse; “cocket” may have also referred to a very dark rye bread.40 “Maslin” or “meslin”

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  85 was further down the bread scale, wheat mixed with rye41 or barley, and could even just be a mixture of rye and barley.42 Again, in the Gest of Robyn Hode, while the bread served to the knight is not specified, the king-as-abbot enjoys “good whyte brede” (l. 1571); the adjective “good” implies at least a wastel loaf, since Robin as aristocratic outlaw host only serves the best. Bread, like wine, “marked your station in life.”43 So did meat.44 Meat stood at the top of the medieval food-chain, just as the king and/ or queen stood at the top of medieval society. Bridget Ann Henisch notes that medieval people, especially those low enough on the social-economic scale to have little or no meat during the year, wanted meat of any kind whenever they could obtain it.45 Medieval people in general wanted meals to include much meat and poultry, with several varieties appearing simultaneously on the dinner and banquet tables of the wealthy and the aristocracy, sometimes in the same dish. While we would recognize many cuts of beef, pork, and mutton or lamb, along with chicken, partridge, duck, and goose, and would understand that nobles hunted many kinds of game but venison was a royal and aristocratic prerogative, we might find the presence of such birds as herons, swans, and thrushes on the table rather disconcerting, partly because many of these are now legally protected. However, we have just such a combination served on the greensward in the First Fytte of the Gest of Robyn Hode. The threadbare knight whom Robin courteously welcomes sits down to a forest feast: They washed togyder and wiped bothe And set tyll theyr dynere Brede and wyne they had ynough And nombles of the dere Swannes and fesauntes they had full good And foules of the reuere There fayled neuer so lytell a byrde That euer was bred on brere [They washed and dried their hands/and sat down to their dinner./They had enough bread and wine/and venison sweetbreads (or loin cuts)./Swan and pheasant they had in plenty,/and also fowls of the river,/as well as many kinds of little birds/that flit in the trees.] (ll. 124–132) This is a dinner any lord, or the master of an annual guild feast, would be proud to serve.46 In examining surviving bills of fare for guild feasts, Thomas Ohlgren finds they were often “lavish affairs with multiple courses of swan, capons, venison, partridges, bread and wine,”47 similar to the list of comestibles in Robin’s feast for the knight. At the tables of royalty or the nobility, the swan was often presented roasted with the skin replaced so that it was brought full-feathered to the table,48 which

86  Sherron Lux the forest outlaws might find difficult, although they could have roasted both swan and pheasant as well as deer. The small birds would mostly be songbirds such as larks, thrushes, sparrows, and finches;49 various species of ducks would be included in the “foules of the ryvere” [fowls of the river]. The most prestigious meat was venison, with royal and aristocratic associations, undoubtedly one reason why it appears from time to time in the Medieval and Early Modern Robin Hood material. Deer hunting was the legal prerogative of the knightly class and above, as it not only provided meat for the table but also, as Richard Almond observes, “represented status, wealth, power, and privilege; the common people did not eat venison as they were not allowed to take deer.”50 Of course, the outlaws are poachers, illicit hunters, and undoubtedly take rabbits, hares, and various species of birds, but venison is usually the meat mentioned. For example, in the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, after Little John and Much rescue Robin from prison, Whan his men saw hym hol & sounde ffor sothe they were full fayne they filled in wyne & made hem glad vndur þe levys smale And ete pastes of venyson þhat gode was with ale [When his men saw him whole and sound,/truthfully they were very glad./ They filled the wine-cups and made merry/under the small new spring leaves,/and ate venison pasties/that are good with ale] (ll. 320–325). Forest feasts in the Robin Hood tradition frequently celebrate this kind of community and group solidarity or welcome a new member, itself an affirmation of the group’s cohesion as it is enlarged. The most prestigious food would be especially desired as a further way to honor the guest or new group member. Venison even features in the comedy of Fytte Three of the Geste when hungry Little John, temporarily in the service of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the sheriff’s cook fight to a draw. After Little John offers the cook service with Robin Hood, the cook serves Little John “The numbles of a doo/Good brede and full good wyne” [the sweetbreads or tenderloins of a doe/good bread and excellent wine, ll.672–673] before the pair raid the sheriff’s treasure-store of silver dishes and coins.51 Although the meal for the king-as-abbot in Fytte Seven was prepared “full hastly” (l.1547) with what was on hand, along with a number of hurriedly poached deer (ll.1533–1534), it includes “The fatte venyson,/The good whytebrede the good rede wyne,/ And therto the fyne ale and browne” [the fat venison/the good white bread, the good red wyne,/and also the fine brown ale, ll.1552–1554].

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  87 Moreover, Robin’s serving venison and other meats is itself a kind of courtesy to his enforced guests, as he offers them food of royalty and the aristocracy. In this way, he honors his noble “guests” while situating himself as an aristocratic host. If the guest responds to Robin’s courtesy, as do the knight Sir Richard at the Lee and the king-as-abbot, he becomes, however temporarily or tangentially, a member of Robin’s meyné [company]. Venison as well as the deer-hunt itself and the freedom it implies lure Robin Hood back to the forest after obeying the king to follow him to court. Robin finds his wealth gone after a year of generosity, and only Little John and Scathelocke remain with him (ll. 1712–1722). Do they accompany him back to Barnesdale, where Robin tells the king he has built a chapel to Mary Magdelene and thus obtains royal permission to be gone seven days with “Nother ete ne drynke” [neither food nor drink, l. 1746]? Certainly during that year at court, Robin’s lavish spending “Both for knyghtes and for squyres” [both for knights and for squires, l. 1717] included many sumptuous feasts. His funds and most of his friends gone, Robin’s thoughts turn to the life he knows, the life in which he was the courteous, generous, hospitable “mayster” of the forest community. His vow to visit the chapel – possibly a fictitious chapel, since Robin’s devotion is to the Blessed Virgin Mary – barefoot, hungry, and thirsty may be genuine, but may also simply be a ploy to obtain the necessary permission to leave the court. Upon arriving in the forest, Robin goes not to a chapel, but towards a herd of deer; he kills “a full grete harte” [a well-grown male red deer over six years old, l.1767], 52 and blows his horn to re-assemble “all the outlawes of that forest” (l.1769) together again under his acknowledged leadership. The Greenwood community had essentially disbanded during the year at the king’s court, but now it is re-assembled where it belongs, in the forest, with Robin Hood returned to his place as courteous, generous “mayster.” It is safe to assume the reunion commenced with a great feast featuring the slain hart. Hunting runs throughout the Geste, often enabling the community to eat and feast. The venison served in Fyttes One, Three, Seven, and Eight is obviously hunted, as are the various birds served at the greensward feast in Fytte One. In addition, men hunt men: Robin sends men to bring him a dinner guest in Fyttes One and Four, and the “full grete harte” (l. 1767) he slays in Fytte Eight will be a feast for his followers. The sheriff hunts Robin Hood in Fyttes Five and Six and the knight Sir Richard at the Lee in Fytte Six, but to feast on their deaths rather than to welcome them as guests. Likewise, in Fyttes Six and Seven, because the king heeds the sheriff, he initially hunts Robin and the knight to hang Robin and behead the knight; however, his day of feasting and archery with Robin, his men, and Sir Richard convinces the king that these men are actually his friends and supporters. However, twenty-two years later, Robin does

88  Sherron Lux become the victim of the hunt. For reasons unknown, his kinswoman the prioress of Kirklees and her lover Sir Roger of Doncaster plot to kill him and, when he innocently goes to the prioress for what appears to be a standard medieval blood-letting, the plotters succeed: “And there they be trayed good Robyn hode/Through theyr false playe” (ll. 1801–1802). The prioress and her lover may feast on Robin’s death, but although his death allows even wealthy churchmen to move more freely through the forest, the courteous, generous host of the Greenwood now will never return. The feast scenes in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode work in multiple ways. They form the architectural narrative pillars, since all other events in the poem move to or from them. They introduce characters and crises, and they develop Robin himself as a polysemous character, the outlaw as courteous aristocratic host and leader of men, a forester, a trickster, a moral man. As the monk states, “‘He is a stronge thefe’” [He is a strong thief, l. 883], but as the knight believes, “‘He is gode yoman,’ sayde the knyght,/’Of hym I have herde moche gode’” [He is a good yeoman, said the knight./I have heard much good of him, ll. 103–104]. In his courtesy, in the noble fare he sets before his “guests,” Robin acts as an aristocrat or successful merchant, a yeoman-thief rising above himself and the society which keeps him outside the law. In the Geste’s possible context as entertainment for a guild feast, Robin’s great courtesy towards his “guests” would advise these upwardly mobile folk, especially the newly invested members, of their own manners. Furthermore, as C.M. Woolgar observes, “Beyond direct entertainment, gifts of food created bonds and might form an accompaniment to negotiations, in the short or the long term.”53 Thus, as Robin and the knight finish their handsome meal in Fytte One, Robin brings up the subject of payment: “It was neuer the maner by dere worthy god/A yeman pay for a knyght” [It has never been proper, by dear worthy God,/for a yeoman to pay for a knight’s dinner, ll. 146–147]. The poor knight can only respond, “I haue nought in my cofers sayd the knight/That I may profer for shame” [I have nothing in my traveling-chest, said the knight,/that I can offer you, to my shame, ll. 148–149]. Learning of the knight’s plight, Robin negotiates the loan of four hundred pounds and the knight’s re-payment schedule, while Robin’s men generously ensure the knight is properly clothed and horsed for his visit to the abbot. The negotiations turn longterm later when the knight gives Robin and his men refuge from the sheriff (Fifth and Sixth Fyttes), and when Robin and his men later rescue the knight from the sheriff at the behest of the knight’s lady (Sixth Fytte). Likewise, after dinner in the Seventh Fytte, when Robin and Sir Richard realize the abbot is actually the king, Robin asks mercy for himself and his men, which the king grants on condition that they leave the Greenwood and join him at his court (ll. 1627–1646). The king also pardons Sir Richard, restoring him to his home and family (ll. 1706–1708). Finally, as Terrance Scully reminds us, “Sharing was indeed the essence

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  89 of a medieval meal” as diners in groups of two, three, or four shared bowls, platters, and cups.54 This courteous, intimate sharing of food and drink lent itself to the kinds of negotiations we see between Robin and the knight Sir Richard, as well as to welcoming a newcomer or nurturing a community. Robin Hood’s forest feasting traditions emphasize the human need for courtesy and community of which the shared food and drink can become powerful symbols, in legend as in life.

Notes 1. See, for example: the classic 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood. Feasting scenes also appear in the 1952 Walt Disney film The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, and various Robin Hood television series. The 1950s series The Adventures of Robin Hood includes “The Knight Who Came to Dinner,” episode 37, based on the First and Fourth Fyttes of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode. Lorraine Kochanske Stock’s essay in this volume examines the feasting scenes in several of these media adaptations of the Robin Hood legend. For books, Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire is well known. See also: Paul Creswick’s 1917 Robin Hood; J. Walker McSpadden’s 1904 Robin Hood; Roger Lancelyn Green’s 1956 The Adventures of Robin Hood; and Robin McKinley’s 1988 The Outlaws of Sherwood, among others. 2. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, Early Rymes of Robyn Hod: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600 (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval Studies, 2013), 3. 3. Ibid., 23. 4. Stephen Knight, “Feasts in the Forest,” in Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 161. 5. Wynkyn de Worde Edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 45–46. All quotations from the Geste are taken from this edition unless otherwise noted. 6. Ibid., 89–90. 7. Thomas H. Ohlgren, “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology” in A Gest of Robyn Hode, in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 6. Dean A. Hoffman, “I wyll be thy true servaunte/ And trewely serve thee’: Guildhall Minstrelsy in the Gest of Robyn Hode,” TDR: The Drama Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 2005): esp. 119–122. 8. Hoffman, Guildhall Minstrelsy, 121–122. 9. Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” in Medieval Perspectives, 31 (2016): 20, 21, 23. 10. Ibid., 25. 11. Ibid., 27. 12. All line numbers from A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode refer to Wynkyn de Worde’s edition (c. 1506) in Ohlgren and Matheson, Early Rymes of Robyn Hode.

90  Sherron Lux 13. Richard Almond and A.J. Pollard, “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England,” Past & Present, 170 (2001): 55, doi.org/10.1093/past/170.1.52, http://0-www.jstor.org.libcat. sanjac.edu/stable/3600794. 14. Ibid., 58. 15. “Maister.” Middle English Dictionary, last revised 2018, https://quod. lib.umich.edu/m /middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED26558/ track?counter=1&search_id=3808396. 16. Almond and Pollard, “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England,” 62. 17. Ohlgren, ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood, 176. 18. Ibid., 181. 19. Ibid., 188. 20. Ibid., 184. 21. Hoffman, Guildhall Minstrelsy, 125, 131. 22. Thomas Hahn, “Introduction,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 11. 23. Introduction, The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, trans. Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor (Cambridge, Ontario: In Parentheses Publications, 2000), ii. 24. See, for example: “John Russell’s Book of Nurture” in Rickert and Naylor, beginning page 26. 25. “Courteis.” Middle English Dictionary, revised 2018, https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED10059/track? counter=1&search_id=3871724. 26. The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, trans. Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor (Cambridge, Ontario: In Parentheses Publications, 2000). 27. See, for example: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Marie Borroff’s verse translation, Part I, lines 85–106. 28. Translation mine. 29. “Urbanitatis,” in The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, trans. Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor (Cambridge, Ontario: In Parentheses Publications, 2000), 6. 30. Stephen Knight, Feasts in the Forest, 169. 31. Ibid, 7. 32. “The Young Children’s Book,” in The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, trans. Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor (Cambridge, Ontario: In Parentheses Publications, 2000): 24. 33. Peter Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England, rev. ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2005), 13. 34. Hammond, Food and Feast, 107–118. 35. Woolgar, Culture of Food, 45. 36. Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 118. 37. Hammond, Food and Feast, 54; Woolgar, Culture of Food, 53. 38. Debby Banham, Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2004), 13–28. 39. Hammond, Food and Feast, 45; Colin Spencer, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, rev. ed. (London: Grub Street, 2011), 70. 40. Hammond, Food and Feast, 45–46. 41. Ibid., 46. 42. Spencer, British Food, 57.

Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode  91 43. Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 49. 44. Henisch, Medieval Cook, 34. 45. Ibid., 35. 46. Knight, Feasts in the Forest, 169. 47. Ohlgren, Marchaunt, 184. 48. Hammond, Food and Feast, 136. 49. John Cummins, The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk. (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2003), 242. 50. Richard Almond, Medieval Hunting (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011), 19. 51. Raising the question of who is served what and why, which in turn underscores the parallels of Greenwood with aristocratic courtesy and relationships to food; for discussion of the breaking apart and serving of the deer according to social status, see: Ryan R. Judkins, “The Game of the Courtly Hunt: Chasing and Breaking Deer in Late Medieval English Literature,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112, no. 1 (January 2013): 70–92. 52. Almond, Medieval Hunting, 18. 53. Woolgar, Culture of Food, 126. 54. Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1995), 172.

Bibliography Almond, Richard. Medieval Hunting. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011. Almond, Richard, and A.J. Pollard. “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England.” Past & Present 170 (2001): 52–77. Banham, Debby. Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2004. Colquhoun, Kate. Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Cummins, John. The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk. 1988. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2003. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19–30. Furnivall, Frederick James. The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, translated by Edith Rickert and L.J. Naylor, 24–25. Middle English Series. Cambridge, Ontario: In Parentheses Publications, 2000. Hahn, Thomas. Introduction. In Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, edited by Thomas Hahn, 1–11. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Hammond, Peter. Food and Feast in Medieval England. 1993. Rev. ed. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2005. Henisch, Bridget Ann. Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Henisch, Bridget Ann. The Medieval Cook. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2009.

92  Sherron Lux Hoffman, Dean A. “‘I Wyll Be Thy True Servaunte/And Trewely Serve Thee’: Guildhall Minstrelsy in the Gest of Robyn Hode.” TDR: The Drama Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 119–134. doi:10.1162/1054204053971135. Judkins, Ryan R. “The Game of the Courtly Hunt: Chasing and Breaking Deer in Late Medieval English Literature,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112, no. 1 (January 2013): 70–92. Knight, Stephen. “Feasts in the Forest.” In Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F.D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong, 161–175. Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures 24. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016. Middle English Dictionary, revised 2018. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middleenglish-dictionary/dictionary. Ohlgren, Thomas H. “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode.” In Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, edited by Thomas Hahn, 175–190. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Robin Hood and the Monk. In Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, edited by Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, 3–17. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 428. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Scully, Terence. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1995. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. 2002. Revised edition. London: Grub Street, 2011. Woolgar, C.M. The Culture of Food in England 1200−1500. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Wynkyn de Worde Edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode. In Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, edited by Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, 89–147. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 428. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013.

6

The Preparation and Consumption of Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender Identity in Selected Premodern Texts and Examples of the Robin Hood Cinematic Canon Lorraine Kochanske Stock

Contemporary readers approach the medieval Robin Hood ballads with expectations derived from feature films and television series about the British outlaw.1 Hereafter, by “Robin Hood” I indicate a nexus of signifiers contributing to the culturally loaded signified whose explicit and implicit significations were received and commonly understood by premodern audiences. 2 Presumably, some of that original signification of “Robin Hood” migrated to what that term means to contemporary film audiences. These cinematic adaptations contributed the ever-expanding nexus of signifiers and signifieds that identify what a now-global audience understands as “Robin Hood.” Both the premodern literary texts about Robin Hood and the films that reflect them often feature incidents concerning the hunting for, preparation of, and consumption of food for communal feasting. In the cinematic canon, scenes about elegant, costly, and wasteful meals eaten by elite characters are juxtaposed with episodes illustrating the lack of food suffered by members of subaltern socioeconomic levels—victims of social injustice that Robin Hood typically champions. Although the theme of feasting in the Robin Hood literary canon has received some critical treatment, 3 scholarly analysis of this trope in filmic texts that express the Robin Hood legend’s “medievalism” largely has been neglected.4 To fill this lacuna, I examine the topic of food preparation and consumption in select examples of Robin Hood-themed movies and television series, wherein filmmakers employ this culinary trope as visual/aural code conveying issues of gender and class. To provide context for the films’ scenes about feasting, gender, and class discussed presently, first I address the vexed issue of the possibility of literary sources for Robin Hood films. Next, I review likely premodern texts that inform these cinematic adaptations: thirteenth-century pastourelles about Robin and Marion; ballads such as Robin Hood and the Potter, A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, and Robin Hood and Maid Marian; activities performed at the May-games, including folk drama, the Morris Dance,

94  Lorraine Kochanske Stock and communal feasting; and traditional drama exemplified by Anthony Munday’s 1598 The Downfall of Robert Earle of Huntington and other texts. The goals of my subsequent analysis of the cinematic employment of visual/aural semiotics about food are twofold: first, to illuminate gender constructions in both the premodern period and the recent eras of the films’ creation; second, to expose fault lines in the class and power structures of both the historical Middle Ages represented in the premodern texts and the contemporary culture that cinematic medievalism mirrors. Ultimately, I show how these films use the “medieval” Robin Hood legend as a canvas upon which to illustrate present cultural issues and concerns.

What are Sources for Robin Hood Films? Identifying literary sources for any cinematic medievalism is a fraught issue. Contrasting the “Arthurian tradition” with the field of what I call “Robin Hood,” Stephen Knight posits that with the former, “you can always trace the sources” in a hierarchical line of descent. Rather than organizing such a chronological hierarchy of “sources” among what has become a multimedia corpus of texts, films, and other media (ranging temporally from the medieval period through yesterday) for the latter, Knight invokes “the model of the rhizome, a widely spread, invisible root-system which drives plants upwards through the ground from any point.” Knight suggests this paradigm is “strikingly apposite in outlining the effects of the Robin Hood tradition,” wherein “in rhizomatic fashion, the story just commences and then continues.”5 What Knight claims about the “Arthurian tradition” may accurately describe the interrelationship between Arthurian literary texts, but not so regarding Arthurian cinematic medievalism, whereby filmmakers’ explicit claims of adapting a specific literary work are not always trustworthy.6 As in the case of Arthurian films, precise source texts for cinematic adaptations of “Robin Hood” remain elusive. Indeed, adaptation scholar Thomas Leitch claims that Robin Hood films rely not at all on literary sources, but rather visual ones. Such images, he suggests, create for film audiences the instantly recognizable mental picture of the outlaw “in Lincoln green and a peaked hat, a quiver of arrows on his back.”7 Leitch credits this iconic figuring of the Greenwood outlaw to two American artists: the “father of American illustration” Howard Pyle, and Pyle’s student N. C. Wyeth. Much admired by British artist William Morris— who himself created a vast catalogue of nineteenth-century visual and textual medievalism—Pyle’s intricate wood engravings adorn his 1883 often-reprinted collection of stories The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,8 an unchronological mashup of episodes originating in various ballads. Wyeth’s darkly evocative paintings accompanied Paul Creswick’s adaptation of similar ballad episodes within the plot of his 1903 novel

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  95 The Adventures of Robin Hood.9 Although Pyle’s and Wyeth’s book illustrations certainly inform film audiences’ notion of the appearance of “Robin Hood,” Leitch sidesteps the fact that Pyle’s and Wyeth’s pictures are attached to verbal narratives. How would audiences have been exposed to these visual images if they had not read the stories/novel that the engravings and paintings illustrate? Indeed, the plots particularly of early American-produced films about the outlaw—1912’s silent Robin Hood, 1922’s Douglas Fairbanks vehicle, and 1938’s Adventures starring Errol Flynn, all discussed presently—had to derive from some narrative point-of-origin. Pyle’s Robin Hood-themed story collection and Creswick’s novel were ultimately literary adaptations, intended for turn-of-the-century American and British audiences, of the original premodern ballads. The authors’ knowledge of the ballads came through an intermediary source, Joseph Ritson’s oft-reprinted collection of extant Robin Hood texts.10 Pyle’s and Wyeth’s illustrations reflected ballad plot points. Therefore, (pace Leitch) in addition to the pictorial interpretations of “Robin Hood” that illustrate Pyle’s and Creswick’s books, the originary “sources” of these films, even indirectly, are the ballads, with the through-line being Ritson’s published collection, which was adapted by Pyle and other authors of literary versions of “Robin Hood.” Even if the films’ creators were not exposed to early printed iterations of the original premodern ballads such as Potter and Geste, they delivered to audiences certain anticipated and now-recognizable tropes that mirror classic episodes in those ballads: the skilled archer and master-bandit, whom Alexandre Dumas dubbed the “Prince of Thieves” in his 1872 novel Le Prince des Voleurs,11 is a trickster figure who outwits and retaliates against various agents of power: royalty like the king; churchmen like the greedy Abbot of St. Mary’s Monastery in York; and the local political authority, the Sheriff of Nottingham. Perhaps through such intermediaries as Ritson’s collection, Pyle’s stories, Creswick’s novel, and other popular culture media such as Reginald De Koven’s and Harry Bache Smith’s turn-of-the-century American light operas, Robin Hood (1890) and Maid Marian (1901),12 the ballads’ classic episodes, now mainstays of Robin Hood cinema, include archery contests, violent robberies of royal figures and ecclesiastical elites, violations of royal forest law by poaching deer, humiliations of the sheriff, and the romantic pairing of Robin and Maid Marian. If featured in only one premodern ballad (the seventeenth-century broadside Robin Hood and Maid Marian), their romance was central to the American operas. From 1901−1903, Maid Marian (often in repertory with Robin Hood) toured throughout the United States and Canada, giving it wide exposure. It placed Robin Hood at the Third Crusade with Richard I, featured sub-plots about the abduction of Marian, who followed Robin to the Crusade, and a cross-dressing Friar Tuck being snatched into a harem and traded to the sheriff as his bride. With its creation of additional

96  Lorraine Kochanske Stock invented non-ballad female characters and a strong characterization of the eponymous female character, Maid Marian anticipated (perhaps influenced) subsequent cinematic versions of “Robin Hood” that also gave Marian substantial roles.13 Leitch’s contention that it is impossible to establish authoritative source-texts for cinematic “Robin Hood” relies on Stephen Knight’s and Thomas Ohlgren’s observation that stories about Robin Hood are “ephemeral—songs, short plays, proverbs, and place names; in our time, TV serials and films … that have transmitted a tradition which is, like the outlaw himself, both fugitive and flexible, hard to pin down.”14 Leitch’s “heretical conclusion”—that “the most authoritative versions of Robin Hood are not medieval literary texts, but modern American visual or audio-visual adaptations, and that instead of saying these adaptations have a hundred sources, it would be fairer to say that they have none”—is too facile.15 It is my hope that, if not “a hundred sources,” my analysis will identify some of the premodern literary and popular culture models for episodes engaging with the theme of food and feasting, class tensions, and gender construction in select movies and television series about “Robin Hood.” I begin with early premodern ballads.

Feasts, Class, and Gender in Potter and Geste As Melissa Ridley Elmes, Sherron Lux, and Stephen Knight demonstrate, the earliest Robin Hood ballads are replete with episodes about procuring, preparing, presenting, and ingesting food and drink. Significantly, a sustained eating-related sequence in Potter also engages with issues of gender construction, specifically the questionable masculinity performed by the sheriff, as well as social disparity between him and the outlaws. A similar scenario plays out in classic cinematic adaptations of “Robin Hood,” such as Flynn’s 1938 Adventures. In Potter, when Robin, impersonating a pot-maker selling his wares in Nottingham, sends his last five unsold pots to the sheriff’s wife (140−144), she invites the ersatz potter to the sheriff’s residence for dinner, prepared in the very pots supplied by him (155). Her unsuspecting husband extends hospitality to his disguised guest, using the invitational phrase, “let os was, & to to mete” [Let us wash up and eat our meat] (164). Their substantial shared repast features meat, bread, ale, and wine (177−178). The bogus pot merchant bestows a gold ring upon the sheriff’s wife, no trifling hostess gift, to reciprocate her hospitality (237−242). There follows an impromptu, post-prandial archery contest, with the host supplying the equipment. The episode provides Robin an opportunity for one-upmanship concerning the sheriff’s gender construction and social status. Despite the defective arrows the sheriff supplies, Robin handily wins the match, one of several contests calibrating the competing antagonists’ masculinity. This equipment failure allows Robin an innuendo-laced gibe

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender 97 disparaging the sheriff’s “Rygʒt weke gere” [very feeble tackle] (200); the phrase equally suggests the ineffectual arrow and the sheriff’s unimpressive genitalia. Significantly, along with his clothes and horse, the sheriff’s “gere” (279) is listed among items the outlaws stole from their pathetic victim when they captured him in the Greenwood. Moreover, when the potter/Robin “the mastry wan” [won the archery contest] (210), the sheriff complimented him for being “aman” [a man] worthy of bearing a bow anywhere (212−214). The sheriff’s explicit praise of Robin’s manliness implicitly admits his own “weke” [compromised] masculinity. Afterwards, they share a second “scoper” [supper] (232), which concatenates feasting with the sheriff’s gender deconstruction. Besides calibrating the masculinity of Robin and the sheriff, Potter engages with a clash of social class between the yeoman outlaw and the aristocratic sheriff, who is likely a knight.16 Multiple acknowledgments of the “yemen” [yeoman] status of Robin, his followers, and the itinerant potter whose identity he assumes as a disguise emphasize the disparity in social level between the sheriff and his outlaw antagonist. The socioeconomic category “yeoman” is a semantically elastic classification referencing a broad spectrum of economic levels and/or social classes, even denoting specific occupations. Besides generic freeborn landholders below the rank of squire, it included attendants in royal or aristocratic households below the rank of squire; political officers below the rank of sergeant; subordinate military officers; even hired laborers. Its application to a person could register disparagement for an underling, an inferior, with emphasis on the inferiority of the “yeoman” to someone belonging to an elevated socioeconomic stratum or higher political rank.17 After reviewing many previous scholars’ contested definitions of Robin Hood’s “yeoman” status, Richard Almond and A. J. Pollard argue that fifteenth-century audiences of the ballads would recognize Robin Hood as “a particular type of yeoman, a forester,” an occupation whose duties they document at great length.18 For my purposes, the explicit definition of what Robin Hood’s “yeomanry” signified in Potter and Geste matters less than the notion (supported by MED denotations) that, being assigned the category of “yeoman,” Robin and the other figures characterized with this rubric were socially and economically beneath their antagonist, the sheriff. Potter repeatedly reminds its target audience, consisting of “god yemen/ Comley Cortossey & god” [good yeomen/ attractive, courteous, and virtuous] (5−6) that its outlaw-hero (9, 13, 61,) and his alter-ego the potter (61, 87) belong to their shared social group of yeomanry. Not only are Robin’s outlaw cohort “yemen” [yeomen] (77), but one particular “yeman” (34) is trusted to hold the forty-shilling-apiece wager between Robin and John about who will force the potter to pay their road-toll (25−34). During the archery contest, the sheriff’s servant, clearly a lower social category than his master, who is ordered to give

98  Lorraine Kochanske Stock the potter a bow, is also a “yeman” (193, 195). The verbal juxtaposition of the positions of “yeoman” and “master” in Potter and Geste is explored in detail presently. The final line of Potter—a prayer that God have mercy on Robin’s soul and “saffe all god yemenrey!” [save all good yeomen] (323−324)—emphasizes through repetition the social status of yeomanry as an important motif throughout Potter. Modifiers repeatedly attached to each figure elevate the lower class of both yeomen (outlaw and potter) to a nobler status, like that of the sheriff’s wife, who greets the potter “ffoll corteysley” [very courteously] (151). Notwithstanding his yeomanry and outlawry, Robin is “corteys & ffre” [courteous and free] (10), “cowed of corteysey” [understood courtesy] (159) and dines “with a nobell chere” (166), as if an equal, with the aristocratic sheriff and his wife. Moreover, the yeoman potter is consistently described as “prowd” [proud] (15, 17, 31), with good reason; in the “meets his match” fight episode that inaugurates Potter, the potter easily bests Robin, whom he could have slain but for the intervention of the Merry Men (66−76). When impersonating the potter, Robin is also “prowde” (185, 199), as if appropriating his alter-ego yeoman’s pride. In their reconciliation, after swapping their clothing and identity, yeoman Robin declares that the potter speaks “god yeme[n]rey” [good yeomanry]. In contrast, the sheriff belongs to “the shrieval elite,” the acme of a privileged class of local government officials including knights of the shire and justices of the peace.19 His elevated social status and probable knighthood are registered by his horse and gear. Following the archery contest, on the pretext of delivering the outlaw Robin Hood to the sheriff even before “we het bred” [we eat bread] (227), the false potter lures the gullible sheriff into the Greenwood, where the outlaws ambush him and steal both his “gere” and “hors ffoll hey” [very high horse] (272−289). The intensified modifier “ffoll hey” is doubly significant. It indicates a taller horse such as a destrier, courser, or charger—horses used mostly by males, especially knights, for battle and jousting (unlike the palfrey discussed presently). It not only indicates the towering physical height of its noble rider, but also suggests his very elevated social position, appropriate for the sheriff, the most important local political authority of a shire. His capture by the outlaws literally lowers the sheriff from his “hey” massive destrier, the quintessential accessory of knighthood, and figuratively reduces his elite sociopolitical status. In a gesture that further diminishes the sheriff’s masculinity and subjects him to social disgrace, Robin sends him home on foot, with the magnanimous promise that he will send a gift for the sheriff’s wife, a woman he compliments with the same intensifier as “ffoll godde” [extremely good] (283). Robin’s second offering to her, even more valuable than the gold ring, is a white palfrey—a much lighter weight, though very expensive, riding horse that ambled rather than trotted, thus considered suitable for

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  99 female equestrians—to replace the masculine-associated “high horse” stolen from the sheriff. 20 As the bogus yeoman potter, Robin lavishes increasingly valuable gifts upon the sheriff’s highborn wife: five free pots, leading to the dinner invitation; a gold ring; and a white palfrey. Robin’s exercise in one-upmanship further humiliates the nobleman sheriff, who gave the faux-potter only “weak gear” in the archery contest, while a yeoman potter practiced the noblesse oblige expected of a member of the elite class to which the sheriff belongs. Exacerbating the sheriff’s social diminishment, Little John thrice identifies Robin as “master,” underscoring for the socially deflated sheriff how the usual power dynamic in the roles of noble master and yeoman servant now is reversed (257, 259, 261). Just as the denotations of “yeoman” conveyed social, economic, or employment subservience, the signifieds of the signifier “master” consistently registered the dominance of a high civil or military official, political ruler or leader, the highest ranking member of a specific class of individuals, or the official in charge of a place, household, or arm of government. 21 All these signifieds describe the sheriff’s official position in the governing of Nottingham and his membership, as a knight, in his era’s most elite social estate. This opposition between the expected subservience of yeoman Robin Hood and the (usually) predictable dominance of the knightly sheriff creates a climate for ironic class upheaval in Potter and Geste. In Potter, which provides an analogue for a scene in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood discussed presently, social class friction heightens the emotional tension already present between the hyper-masculine outlaw and the feckless, highborn authority figure whom a “proud” yeoman bamboozles, captures, and subjects to professional dishonor and personal disgrace. The ballad concludes by reviving the issues of gender construction that shaped the archery contest. The sheriff escapes from the outlaws’ forest lair to Nottingham on foot, gear-less and minus the high horse that defines knightly masculinity. Indeed, Robin pointedly sends the humiliated husband back to his wife with a sexually suggestive taunt—that, were it not for Robin’s “loffe of yowre weyffe” [love of your wife] (288), the Sheriff would have suffered worse abuse at the hands of the violent outlaw gang. Returning from his ignominious misadventure, the sheriff is greeted by his wife’s loud and disparaging laughter. Her coy implication—that having lost his gear and horse, the sheriff has overcompensated the potter/Robin Hood for the pots he gave her—demolishes the sheriff’s authority as a political administrator, master of servants, and husband (292−307). Further inflaming the scene with provocatively ambiguous innuendo about cuckoldry, Robin suggests that, beyond requisitioning the sheriff’s gear and horse, the false potter also may have absconded with his wife’s affections, or more?22 Robin thus emasculates the sheriff politically, economically, and personally. Significantly, what initiates the sheriff’s social mortification

100  Lorraine Kochanske Stock and emasculation is the meal shared between the sheriff, his wife, and Robin-as-potter. Geste, the longest and most complex of the medieval ballads, incorporates multiple feasts throughout its eight-fytte plot. Though Elmes and Lux analyze other aspects of Robin’s feast with Sir Richard in fytte one, neither covers the themes of gender construction and class conflict I identified in Potter. 23 Space limitations preclude treating more than Geste’s fytte three, which provides both a literary analogue for Potter and another anticipation of the 1938 Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood. Plot elements conjoining food consumption and issues of gender construction and social class permeate fytte three. Posing as “Renold grenelef” (590), Little John inveigles himself into the sheriff’s household, becoming this master’s “worst seruaunt” [worst servant] (609) by thrashing the sheriff’s butler, who denies him food, and raiding the sheriff’s larder. Interestingly, in 1502, a perpetrator of “notorious … exploits,” who “had renued many of Robin Hode’s pageantes” performed at May-games, adopted John’s pseudonym “grenelef” as an alias. 24 In Geste, after an inconclusive sword fight with the sheriff’s cook, wherein John “meets his match” (612−675), John enlists this “good yeman” [good yeoman] (702), a member of their own socioeconomic class, to join Robin’s band, which they celebrate with a feast of good bread, wine, and the “nombles of a Do” [sweetbreads of a doe] (679), consumed while pledging reciprocal troth (670−684). Food consumption thus serves as a vehicle for fellowship (677), therefore social cohesion, between yeomen. Beforehand, John and the cook break into the sheriff’s treasury, stealing £303 and silver serving pieces for delivery to Robin (685−697). Just as Robin tricked the sheriff in Potter, John lures his adopted “dere mayster” the sheriff (721, 733, 739, 750) into the Greenwood lair of his original “dere mayster” (698) Robin by promising to deliver him to a hunter’s jackpot, a sixty-point green “maister harte” and his herd of 140 deer (729–744), an allegorized Robin and his outlaw gang. The passage employs over-the-top wordplay on “deer,” “dear,” and “master.” After eating a meal with the sheriff, the outlaws strip off the sheriff’s luxurious fur-trimmed garments, a perquisite of his aristocratic status and shrieval post, down to “his breche and … sherte” [underwear] (774). They force him to trade his official regalia for the green mantle livery of Robin’s outlaw “order,” and make him sleep rough under the “grene wood tree” (763−780). 25 The sheriff’s gender annihilation may have dominated Potter, but at least he kept his clothes on. Geste’s embellished version of the episode intensifies the sheriff’s social and sexual shaming, where the outlaws’ physical capture and forced denuding achieve his emasculation. Although revenge may be “a dish best served cold,” for underfeeding

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender 101 him in his shrieval household, Grenelef/John takes revenge on his pretend master by serving his alfresco hot meal on the very silver plate he filched from the sheriff’s treasury and turned over to his original master’s hoard of stolen goods (750–756). As John and Robin doubly shame the humiliated sheriff, their communal food consumption now causes not social cohesion, but social rupture. Stripped of his elegant shrieval regalia and forced to sleep rough in underclothes under the Greenwood tree—literally placing him on common ground with outlaw yeomen— and sharing communal food served on his own luxury tableware, the customary dispenser of political justice ironically is subject to the outlaws’ rough justice. 26 Thus the (ordinarily) socially inferior yeoman/ outlaw humbles the “proude” (578, 706, 717, 745, 773, 787) sheriff, appropriating his power as aristocratic “mayster” of two yeomen servants, John and the cook. Significantly, the motif of cooking, serving, and eating meals, interlaced within the outlaws’ elaborate reprisal, exposes the elitist sheriff’s vulnerabilities and rearranges the prevailing class-based hierarchy. Epitomizing this social rupture is the sheriff’s enforced membership in Robin’s anti-establishment, down market, heraldic “order,” a carnivalesque parody of actual chivalric orders like King Edward III’s Garter Order.

Feasting at Premodern Robin Hood Revels As this discussion of the Sheriff’s capture scene in Potter and Geste reveals, literary treatments of food preparation and consumption engaged with issues of gender construction and class tensions. So too actual historical recreations of “Robin Hood” at late-medieval May-games and Whitsunales, which devolved into celebrations of the outlaw, incorporated feasting. Ballads about Robin Hood like Geste supplied plots for the folk plays and other ludic activities performed at these Robin Hood-themed Games, Ales, and Revels staged in fifteenth- through seventeenth-century English parishes, where appointment of the townsman responsible for the festivities reflected divisions by social class. Symbiotically, these festive entertainments incorporated communal celebration and consumption of copious food and drink, reflecting the ballads’ feasts. Pentecost, dubbed “Whit-Sunday” (abbreviated “Whitsun”), inaugurated a week of respite for agricultural laborers to participate in parishsponsored processions, games, and community-performed drama. 27 These Whitsun-ales culminated in communal parochial feasts—groaning boards of food and specially-brewed ale, like those in ballad feast scenes. 28 Sale of these repasts raised money for needy parishioners, a goal reflecting “Robin Hood’s” reputation, as “prince of thieves,” for robbing from the rich to give to the poor, making him the ideal patron of the Ales’ fundraising function. Accompanied by his consort Maid Marian (whose introduction into the literary legend and eventually the

102  Lorraine Kochanske Stock cinematic canon is treated presently) and a court comprising Little John and the Merry Men, Robin Hood fulfilled the role of Mock-King or “Lord of Misrule” presiding over Whitsun-ales and May-games, thus elevating him from his yeoman status in the ballads. Coinciding with the rise of the May-games was the mid-sixteenth-­ century publication of narratives, such as Geste, about the outlaw’s adventures.29 Early printers William Copland and Edward White respectively published c. 1560 and 1594 editions of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hode, each appending to the printed ballad “a new playe for to be played in Maye games, very plesaunte and full of pastyme.”30 Exploiting this combined ballad-cum-play paradigm, professional writers created dramatic material (some of the ephemera Knight and Ohlgren cite, now largely lost) often reflecting ballad episodes, for performance at May-games.31 For W. E. Simeone, Robin Hood’s three centuries of association with the Maygames were “the most important episode in the history of the legend.”32 Moreover, exemplifying the intersection of class issues, communal feasting, and “Robin Hood” I have demonstrated thus far, six decades (1516−1577) of records document the “Robin Hood” games enacted in Yeovil, a town in Somerset.33 A citizen who played the role of the outlaw consistently organized Yeovil’s springtime festivities. Reflecting Robin’s social class in the ballads, each year’s designated Robin Hood belonged to the yeoman or professional craftsmen class, not the local gentry. Over time, just as Robin impersonated a yeoman pot-maker, various representatives of Yeovil’s yeoman constituency—blacksmith, mercer, shoemaker, innkeeper, saddler, tanner, constable, draper—elevated their local status by playing Robin Hood the Mock-King or “Lord of Misrule” for that year. In organizing the town’s annual Ale, Yeovil’s “Robin Hood” was responsible (by casting townspeople in roles and obtaining costumes and props) for planning a Robin Hood-themed play similar to Copland’s play about Robin Hood and the Friar or the plays described by Robinson below. Besides orchestrating a lavish communal dinner that concluded the Ale, Yeovil’s “Robin Hood” administrated the next year’s food-anddrink-related social events. For Ascension Day, he organized another parish dinner accompanied by music and dancing in the church hall. Throughout the premodern period, in England’s other rural and urban parishes, similar Robin Hood Revels, led by yeoman-class citizens, typically culminated in a community feast.34 Along with the early printers’ publication of the ballads, these events constructed “Robin Hood” in the period’s popular culture. In addition to townspeople role-playing Robin, Little John, Much, Scathlock, and the sheriff, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck were represented both in their transgressive roles in the Morris Dance and in “popish” plays about the outlaw. Four centuries later, cinema became the popular culture medium that conveyed what “Robin Hood” signified for newly appreciative twentieth-century audiences. Significantly, some of the same tropes popularized in the ballads and

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  103 Robin Hood Revels—class tensions and gender-related contests, illustrated through food and feasting—became standard scenes in cinematic “Robin Hood.” Before analyzing these films, I consider the incorporation of two important characters that became permanent members of Robin’s cohort in both premodern texts and eventually the film canon.

Maid Marian Becomes Part of “Robin Hood” As stated in the introduction, audiences of films and television series about the Greenwood outlaw anticipate their casts will feature a core group of characters comprising “Robin Hood.” Must-haves include the early ballads’ usual suspects—Little John, Much the miller’s son, Will Scathlock, the sheriff, Sir Richard, the king, the Abbot of St. Mary’s— who are dropped into the ballads’ action without introduction. Medieval audiences of the oral “rymes of Robyn Hood” didn’t need explanation; they recognized these male characters in Robin’s orbit. Authors of eighteenth-century broadside ballads and garlands created the missing backstories, providing exposition about how Robin Hood recruited various members of his band, creating, in cinematic terms, prequels to the Geste. Missing from the early ballads’ cast were Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who became mainstays of cinematic “Robin Hood.” With one exception, a seventeenth-century broadside, the pair entered the legend by a different route than via the early ballads. Thereafter, inclusion of Robin’s female partner became nearly universal in literary and filmic “Robin Hood.”35 This ubiquity reflects the through line of Marian’s presence within what Lesley Coote calls the premodern “story world of Robin Hood.” Across the English Channel, in thirteenth-century France, a character named “Marion” was created. She would be assimilated into the growing outlaw legend through pastourelles like Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion, which featured a shepherdess named Marion, the sweetheart of the shepherd Robin, an early Gallic avatar of the English Robin Hood in the guise of Robin des bois. Just as ballads depicted social tension between yeomen and the sheriff, the pastourelle featured class conflict between woodland peasants and a conventional knight character who traveled into the forest seeking aventure. Like the sheriff on his high horse in Potter, the pastourelle knight on his massive destrier asserts aristocratic privilege (and expresses class contempt) upon the agrarian figures he encounters and nearly always attempts to rape or at least seduce the peasant-class Marion. In a reversal of usual gender norms, Robin is rather feckless in protecting her, while Marion defends herself, not with brawn but with cleverness. The shepherds share al fresco picnics in their pastoral world. Analyzing the figures of Robin and Marion in the Jeu, Lesley Coote posits a line of descent from the French peasant couple to the yeoman English outlaw and his eventual female partner.36

104  Lorraine Kochanske Stock Moreover, the pastourelle “Marion,” whose name evoked the Virgin Mary, Robin’s spiritual patroness in the premodern ballads, evolved into the cross-dressed female character in the Morris Dance, performed by a male dancer in drag.37 This same Morris-“Marian” is reflected in the unnamed female character, the wench-like “trul” who dances with Friar Tuck, appropriated from his role in the Morris Dance, in the play deemed suitable for May-games appended to William Copland’s edition of Geste discussed earlier. This play, preserved mainly because the printer attached it to his edition of Geste, is a lone survivor of a oncevast body of folk-plays or pageants created for the aforementioned Maygames, Whitsun-ales, and Robin Hood Revels. However, like palimpsests, premodern political documents supply tantalizing clues about these ephemeral dramatic texts. For example, a short tract of Protestant propaganda addressed to King Henry VIII offers such a clue. Alongside other advice, Sir Richard Robinson’s A discourse touching the reformation of the lawes of England exhorted the king’s promotion of drama supporting Protestantism and suppression of plays encouraging “popery”: In somer comenly upon the holy daies [like Whitsun] in most places of your realm, ther be playes of Robyn hood, mayde Marian, freer Tuck, wherein besides the lewdenes and rebawdry that ther is opened to the people, disobedience also to your officers, is taught, whilest these good bloodes go about to take from the shiref of Notyngham one that for offending the lawes shulde have suffered execution. Howmuche better is it that those plaies shulde be forbodden and deleted and others dyvysed to set forthe and declare lyvely before the peoples eies the abhomynation and wickednes of the bisshop of Rome, monkes, ffreers, nonnes, and suche like, and to declare and open to them thobedience that your subiectes by goddes and mans lawes owe unto your magestie.38 (emphasis added) Robinson’s diatribe against Robin Hood pageants performed at Whitsun-ales is doubly informative. First, evolving from their roles in the Morris Dance performed at these Revels, both Maid Marian and Friar Tuck joined the cast of expected outlaws in plays reflecting the ballads. Second, episodes (possibly involving feasting) that depicted Robin humiliating the sheriff with impunity, lifted from ballads like Potter and Geste, were incorporated in these plays’ plots. For my present purpose, the evidence about Marian’s noteworthy role in the pageants is most significant, for it attests her continuing connection to “Robin Hood.” In the only ballad that features her, the seventeenth-century broadside Robin Hood and Maid Marian, feasting and gender construction are important themes. Disguised as a page, Marian is the male hero’s equal as a cross-dressed combatant, a motif that cinematic “Robin Hood”

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender 105 adopted frequently, starting with the mid-century series The Adventures of Robin Hood.39 Marian’s gender-bending reversed the male-in-drag cross-dressing of the Marian character in the Morris Dance.40 Skilled at swordplay against her equally disguised opponent, Marian fights Robin for hours before they achieve mutual recognition; Robin so admires her martial talent, he invites her to join his band. Marian upends period gender expectations by performing typically male-gendered combat behavior. However, with the turn of a line, they reconcile, kiss, and live thereafter with Robin’s male followers in the Greenwood. Significantly, a great feast celebrates their reunion and her induction into the band. This typical “Robin meets his match” episode exploits all possible meanings of the verb “match”: Marian is an opponent of, fights, and overcomes Robin; she even “makes a match” by co-habiting with him.41 Although not high literary art, the broadside introduced the cross-dressing and combat motifs that Marian later performed in films and television discussed presently. Notwithstanding her role in the May-games pageants alluded to earlier, “Maid” Marian first appeared in the premodern professional dramatic corpus when Anthony Munday cast her as the Earl of Huntington’s fiancée in his 1598 plays The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington, in which Marian Fitzwater has a major role even after Robin’s death.42 In terms of class, Downfall’s hero is not the ballads’ yeoman, but a dispossessed aristocratic who is outlawed and exiled to Sherwood and renamed “Robin Hood.” In her iconic chastity, Marian substitutes as a more politically correct version of Robin’s spiritual patroness in the ballads. The change allows Munday to transfer Robin Hood’s devotion to the Catholic Virgin Mary to a secular, though no-less-virginal, and more importantly Protestant, namesake of his former “dere ladye” (Geste 34). In Munday’s Death, permanent preservation of Marian’s virginity is accomplished by Robin’s being poisoned and her own preference for martyrdom versus submitting to Prince John’s lechery. As in the 1922 silent film Robin Hood, Huntington and Marian neither accomplish nor consummate their intended marriage. Significantly, substitution of Maid Marian for the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, allows Munday to evoke the good favor his own secular patroness, another “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I, for whom the Huntington plays were performed.43 As discussed presently, early cinematic Marians adhere to the virginal paradigm of the 1922 film. More recently, the binary of virgin/whore or virgin/crossdressed combatant often informs cinematic constructions of the outlaw’s female partner. Moreover, the roles of Marian and Friar Tuck in the Morris Dance were replicated in other premodern literary versions of “Robin Hood,” including dramatizations such as George Peele’s King Edward The First (1593) featuring Tuck and Marian and George a Greene, The Pinner of

106  Lorraine Kochanske Stock Wakefield (1593; printed 1599) featuring Marian. Non-dramatic literary texts include narrative poems like Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622), wherein personified Sherwood Forest catalogues her most famous inhabitants, including Robin, Little John, George a Greene, Much the miller’s son, and Marian, who merits a seven-line paeon of praise, and Ben Jonson’s masque, The Sad Shepherd (unfinished, published posthumously 1641), featuring Marian and Tuck.44 Besides the usual roster of Robin’s yeoman outlaw cohort, Marian and Tuck were anticipated cast members in most examples of Robin Hood cinema. Far from being film adaptations without sources, as Leitch contends, these portrayals of Marian reflect the cross-dressing of the seventeenth-century ballad’s warrior woman or the wench-like, sexually experienced Marian of the Morris Dance or the May-games pageants. I conclude by examining the scenes in select twentieth-century films and television series that exemplify the themes of feasting, food preparation, gender tension, and class conflict that reflect Potter, Geste, and other premodern texts involving Robin, the outlaws, Tuck, and Marian.

Food in the Robin Hood Cinematic Canon: Robin Hood (1912) The consumption of food and drink is a significant visual motif even in the earliest extant American feature film about the British outlaw, the thirty-minute-long, 1912 silent Robin Hood, which includes the expected characters in the outlaw’s cohort, derived from the ballads, the Morris Dance, and the May-games plays: Robin, Marian, and Friar Tuck (the exact cast that Sir Richard Robinson warned promoted popery) as well as the sheriff and Guy of Gisborne.45 While Marian’s father Merwyn and Guy of Gisborne plot her marriage to Guy as a reward for his capturing her sweetheart Robin Hood, the two seal their agreement by quaffing tankards of a beverage. Later, disguised as a merchant, Robin visits the sheriff, seated at a groaning board supporting an elaborate meal. The outlaws waylay the sheriff on his way through the forest and lead him to their lair, where they share another elaborate, al fresco repast and many flagons of ale. Whereupon, the sheriff demands, “Well! Where are your herds?”—alluding to the episode in Geste, discussed earlier, wherein the sheriff is duped by the promise of a green hart and its herd of stags.46 Significantly, after leading the inebriated sheriff through a disorienting wander through the woods in quest of the “herd,” disguised Robin proclaims, “And now you will pay for your lunch,” another nod to Geste’s plot. As the disgruntled sheriff “shows his teeth” while shaking his fist angrily at the outlaw trickster, a primitive cinematic special effect—an image of a bulldog superimposed over the sheriff’s face—inaugurates several such animal/human conjoinings inserted throughout the film.

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender 107 The scene shifts to a tavern near Nottingham, where the sheriff, Guy, and Marian’s father consume more ale while conspiring against Robin. Pretending drunkenness, Friar Tuck eavesdrops. Reflecting an episode in fytte six of Geste when King Edward impersonates a monk to infiltrate Robin’s hideout, a dark-cloaked, mysterious stranger (disguised King Richard I) enters the tavern while they drink. As the group plots to capture the stranger, over more ale, Tuck warns: “Good Sir! Be on your guard, you are to be attacked.” Immediately, the sheriff’s guards surround the stranger, while he and Tuck fight them off. Tuck initiates a “Fire Escape,” leading the stranger out through the fireplace and they flee to the Greenwood, whereupon a title card suggests the class divide that the yeoman outlaw attempts to bridge: “Robin Hood always welcomes the victims of the nobility,” an irony since he aids disguised royalty. According to the film’s official synopsis, next “a great feast is prepared of venison and other game. Robin Hood gives up his own tent to accommodate the stranger when the latter retires for the night.”47 Robin’s noblesse recalls his courteous treatment of Sir Richard, his social superior, in Geste. Robin and his guest subsequently engage in a contest of swordsmanship like Potter’s archery contest and Geste fytte three’s fight between John and the cook. When the stranger wins, Robin proclaims in a title card, “I know of one man capable to disarm me, and he is the king,” an acknowledgment of Richard’s social and physical superiority, which reflects Geste’s fytte seven, where the disguised king overpowers Robin in a contest of strength. When Richard doffs his disguise and reveals his Plantagenet heraldic robe, socially inferior Robin kneels and kisses its hem in homage. The movie’s synopsis narrates that Richard joins the outlaws on a secret mission, attired as monks, to abduct Marian,”48 inverting Geste’s fytte eight, when having donned Robin Hood’s Lincoln green livery, the king and the outlaws ride into Nottingham resembling Robin’s bandits (Geste 1669−1716). Instead of the king garbing himself as an outlaw, Robin impersonates a monk, enters Merwyn’s house, and escorts Marian away while her father, Gisborne, and the sheriff engage in a slapstick altercation with two of Robin’s “monks.” After the king’s blessing and Robin’s social promotion from yeoman to Earl of Huntingdon, Tuck officiates at Robin’s and Marian’s wedding. Although Merwyn, Gisborne, and the sheriff attempt to thwart the marriage, King Richard exiles them. The socially disgraced sheriff metaphorically takes “flight” when a goose, superimposed over the sheriff, literally flies offscreen at the film’s end. Technically simplistic as the 1912 Robin Hood may be, it inaugurated several trends that became mainstays of cinematic “Robin Hood”: it borrowed characters and episodes from the premodern ballads and May-games plays for its plot points; it demarcated character by socioeconomic class; and it featured prominent feast episodes. The impressive proportion of scenes involving the eating of food and drinking of

108  Lorraine Kochanske Stock ale in the film’s mere thirty minutes of screen time inaugurates the sustained theme of feasting occurring in later cinematic iterations of “Robin Hood.”

Feasting, Gender, and Class in Robin Hood (1922) A mere ten years later, once again food preparation and consumption are important signifiers of gender identity and class tensions in the earliest major studio film about the Greenwood outlaw, the 1922 silent blockbuster Robin Hood, directed by Robert Dwan and starring Douglas Fairbanks as the eponymous hero. In most Robin Hood films, royals, whether King Richard I or his brother Prince John, are depicted eating at formal feasts, sitting at a dais, surrounded by other aristocrats such as earls, high ranking church officials like archbishops, and royally appointed political authorities like the Sheriff of Nottingham. In his scenes throughout the 1922 silent Robin Hood, Richard (Wallace Beery) casually consumes a joint of fowl, perhaps to visually signify his gluttony, but also to demonstrate that as king he can eat anything, anytime, anywhere he chooses. In Fairbanks’ film and throughout the “Robin Hood” cinema canon, class distinctions—often to the detriment of the image of the elite characters—are represented through the eating of food at formal occasions.49 For example, at the tournament that opens Robin Hood, a burly, wellfed-looking King Richard sits in his royal viewing stand, helping himself to a tray of food proffered by a servant, from which he selects a large turkey leg. Despite being thoroughly anachronistic, the food item would resonate with an American audience. While munching meat and licking his fingers, he pointedly does not offer food to Prince John, seated beside him—a palpable snub of the sibling who covets his throne. That night, before leaving for the Third Crusade, King Richard hosted a lavish farewell feast lasting “far into the dawn” to honor his knights before going to the Holy Land. Large wooden casks of wine and ale and trestle tables loaded with elegant comestibles visually dominate the foreground of the frame. In the distant background, knights embrace their ladies perhaps for the last time. Concerned about the impending war, nobody, including surprisingly the king, eats much. The camera cuts to the royal dais where the previously jolly Richard sits alone. Stabbing a dagger into a roast peacock, a rare dish worthy of a medieval royal feast, Richard lobs slices of peacock meat to his hounds instead of indulging his usually capacious appetite. Just as Merwyn, Gisborne, and the sheriff schemed in the 1912 film, Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne, distanced from the rest of the festivities and “dizzy with wine and drunk with thoughts of power,” plot together at the feast. Seeing an attendant carrying an oversized jeweled drinking cup, “the King’s goblet,” Prince John staggers over and demands that the intimidated “dog of a servant” give him

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  109 the royal flagon, which, he insists, will be his after Richard’s departure, along with “everything that is the King’s.” Indeed, once Richard departs, John ostentatiously drinks from this royal goblet to demonstrate his appropriated power. Although Gisbourne tries to ameliorate the heightened social tension, the sequence, involving a royal drinking vessel carried by a subaltern human “dog” and the feeding of delicacies to the actual royal dogs, silently speaks volumes about the difference in treatment—between denigrated servants and cherished pets—by the twelfth-century ruling class. Class concerns combine with gender issues in the next scene as another jeweled drinking vessel prominently figures in a contest of masculinity. With Richard observing, this wine-filled goblet becomes a trophy, tugged back and forth in a contest of arm strength between the Earl of Huntingdon (Douglas Fairbanks) and another courtier; increasing the risk, they compete with daggers held to their heads. Displaying “pith in [his] arme” similar to the might King Edward employed in his games of strength with Robin Hood in Geste’s fytte seven, Huntingdon ultimately wins the tug-of-war and drinks from the contested cup. However, the delicate little upward flip of his foot that ends the match undercuts his virile display. Despite the masculine vigor Huntingdon exhibits in this physical test, the competition devolves into a raucous tabletop wrestling-match between male opponents. When Huntingdon straddles the contestant’s torso and both roll together onto the floor for more homosocial (or homoerotic?) horseplay, King Richard disapprovingly observes that “it were more befitting that [Huntingdon] try his love for a maid”— responding to Huntingdon’s earlier statement about being “afeard of women.”50 Richard leaves his dais to deal with Huntingdon, still sprawled on the floor with another male. The camera cuts to the royal fool, who mimics everything his master does, sneaking into Richard’s chair, mischievously filching (and eating) a plump leg of fowl from the king’s plate, and aping Richard’s tossing of delicacies to the royal dogs. Meanwhile, wagging an accusatory finger, Richard halts Huntingdon’s homoerotic slap-and-tickle. Pointing to various knights embracing their sweethearts, he demands of nervous-looking Huntingdon, “Why hast thou not a maid?” When Huntingdon demurs, “when I return, my liege,” Richard urges: “Nay, before you go, good my knight.” Binding Huntingdon to a post, a subjugation that begins his emasculation, Richard beckons all the courtly damsels to compete for Huntingdon’s hand in marriage, promising “a castle and lands to the maid who wins him.” The women surround him, vying for his favor, although Richard’s scheme reverses typical medieval aristocratic marriage arrangements, wherein land-rich females are the prizes negotiated “between men,” their fathers and suitors. Often these wooers, the juventes, were landless younger aristocratic males, disinherited through primogeniture, who sought to better their social status by marrying upward socioeconomically.51

110  Lorraine Kochanske Stock The historic Richard I was betrothed to Princess Alys, the sister of France’s Philip II, Richard’s ally. Instead, he married a more advantageous match, Princess Berengaria, to secure her inheritance, the kingdom of Navarre, which bordered his lands in Aquitaine.52 While the visibly discomfited Huntingdon submits to the touchy-feely overtures of the court ladies—with Maid Marian gazing worriedly— Prince John suggests that Gisbourne may have similar success with Marian. John forcibly drags her into unwanted harassment by violently ardent Gisbourne. When Marian escapes Gisbourne’s clutches by climbing a staircase to the castle’s exterior parapet, the inebriated John pursues her, with a now-escaped Huntingdon following to defend her. The ensuing scene bristles with social one-upmanship and contested masculinity similar to the conflict between Robin and the sheriff in Potter. When John lords his princely position over Huntingdon’s mere earldom, Huntingdon retorts that John is not behaving very princely. Both impulsively reach for their phallic daggers; arriving at a nervous macho impasse, they return them to their sheaths. Upon exiting, with a gesture that is both insulting and effeminate, John haughtily drops his handkerchief. Huntingdon fetches it, extends it to John, but then drops it dismissively. Drawing attention to John’s failure to demonstrate the paradigmatic deportment required both by class and gender for the period, the next title card has Huntingdon apologizing courteously for the prince’s dishonorable behavior: “I regret, Lady Marian, that a brother of our noble King should so degrade his knighthood” (emphasis added). Having displayed at least pro forma the chivalric gallantry expected of manly knights-in-shining-armor rescuing damsels-in-distress, Huntingdon restores his male image and launches the relationship between the future Robin Hood and his traditional female romantic interest, whom the audience first encounters watching the tournament. Seated on an elevated throne, surrounded by her ladies, she evokes the May-queen of the premodern May-games. The sobriquet “Maid” well befits this film’s Marian, whose sexual purity associates her with the Virgin Mary, Robin Hood’s beloved spiritual patroness in the premodern ballads. Hardly interested in pursuing her contested maidenhead himself, Huntingdon courteously defends Marian’s virginity, under attack by Gisbourne and Prince John. At the film’s end, when Huntingdon’s and Marian’s wedding-night is interrupted by King Richard’s insistently summoning Huntingdon at their bedroom door, their marriage remains unconsummated, leaving Marian, as far as the audience is concerned, still a “maid.” This portrayal of an ultrachaste, Virgin Mary-like Marian reflects Anthony Munday’s Marian Fitzwater, invented to be the socially noble and sexually pure fiancée of Huntington’s outlaw earl. This entire sequence of social display and gender testing at the royal feast of 1922’s Robin Hood occurs against the backdrop of the consumption of food and drink.

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  111 Later in the film, Beery’s Richard I visually telegraphs his royal (and masculine) power through his consumption of food. En route to Jerusalem, in his royal pavilion, Richard presides over a table set with exotic fruits, including a coconut, whose shell he easily cracks with his bare hand, a demonstration of the king’s legendary physical strength, before consuming its meat. Moreover, as he observes (with ostentatious nonchalance) his troops parade, he eats another piece of fruit. Culminating the scene, when Richard learns of his brother’s treachery and cruelty in England in his absence, another title card has him proclaim: “Let John get his bellyful!” Once Huntingdon, now renamed Robin Hood, assumes his outlaw identity and loses the royal favor he previously enjoyed, his “Robin Hood” status is indicated by his repeated distribution of food to the starving peasants that Prince John mistreats in Richard’s absence. His demotion from earldom to yeomanry also is registered visually in scenes involving drinking. Rather than sipping wine from a jeweled goblet more appropriate to his noble identity, as at the royal feast, he now informally sits cross-legged, lustily quaffing lower class ale from a large, battered, tankard. The poorer quality of his drinking vessel visually signals his social demotion from earl to yeoman. As in the 1912 Robin Hood, Richard accomplishes revenge upon John by coming into the outlawed Robin Hood’s lair disguised. After the king handily wins a quarterstaff fight with Friar Tuck, proving his masculine mettle by using a yeoman’s primitive weapon, Tuck echoes the moment of recognition of Richard from the earlier film and Geste’s fytte seven, with a title card proclaiming: “With such strength—thou almost makst me think thou art Richard himself.” Overall, both early silent Robin Hood films inaugurate the cinematic employment of food consumption and feasting to illustrate issues of class identity and male and female gender construction.

Two Pivotal Feasts in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) In many ways, the film that contains the most sustained use of the themes of hunger, food, and feasting as signifiers of gender, class, and even race is the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, starring Errol Flynn as the Earl of Locksley/ Robin Hood and Olivia De Havilland as Maid Marian. Curtiz and Keighley frame two defining moments in the film’s plot at significant feasts. The first occurs in “the great cold hall of Nottingham Castle” at the royal feast presided over by Prince John (Claude Rains), accompanied by his female ward, Marian, and impudently interrupted by Robin of Locksley. The second scene occurs in Sherwood when Robin and the outlaws abduct the sheriff, Gisbourne, and Marian and force them to participate in an al fresco feast that feeds the overtaxed

112  Lorraine Kochanske Stock and starving Saxon peasants, oppressed by the Norman aristocrats. This scene reflects previously discussed episodes in Potter and Geste (channeled through later iterations of the plot point in Ritson, Pyle, and De Koven), wherein Robin Hood lures the sheriff to a forest meal and humiliates him. Although both film sequences are feasts, their respective mise en scène could not be more different. The castle’s enormous scale and the lavishness of the royal banquet are over-the-top. Scores of Saxon servants, in stately procession, bear elegant comestibles to their Norman betters. This bit of exposition, which seems merely an acknowledgment of period domestic arrangements, serves to heighten visually the class divide between the ruling Normans and the serving Saxons. In the ballads, this social chasm was expressed as yeoman versus armigerous aristocrat. Inside the hall, a cook roasts a venison carcass in a hearth so massive a man could walk into it. As in the 1922 Robin Hood, the Norman aristocrats’ dogs consume large hunks of meat, enjoying far better food than Saxon peasants eat. The second, forest feast, occurring midway through the film, transforms the earlier, orderly royal celebration into lower class chaos as the Saxon peasants raucously and jubilantly make merry, eating food hitherto unavailable to them in quality or quantity. The ebullient Saxons’ forest feast evokes the feasts that culminated the Robin Hood-themed activities at the premodern parochial May-games. In a now famous scene, Errol Flynn, the Earl of Locksley, swaggers into the aristocrats’ banquet, hefting on his shoulders and dumping onto the royal dais the stag illegally killed earlier in the royal forest by Much the miller’s son. Much explained his crime in life-or-death terms by acknowledging to Sir Guy of Gisbourne the risk of “death for poaching the King’s deer”: “Yes, and death from hunger if I don’t, thanks to you and the rest of you Norman cutthroats at Nottingham Castle....You can beat and starve our Saxons now, but when King Richard escapes, he’ll take you by the scruff of the neck and fling you into the sea.” At the royal feast, calibrations of degrees of masculinity as well as class distinctions are telegraphed visually by body image and costume. Flynn’s masculinity is well displayed by the brute strength required to support the stag’s weight. If Flynn’s garb, a short green doublet barely covering his torso, is unsuitable for forest activity, it highlights his muscular thighs, shown off well in form-fitting green hose. Flynn’s costume contrasts starkly with the robin’s egg blue brocade robe of Rains’ sartorially precious, and vocally high-pitched Prince John. Although twelfth-century aristocratic male attire was often colorful, to a 1938 American audience, Prince John’s pastel clothing and lisping speech pattern would register effeminacy. Alongside John is his ward Marian, elegantly dressed in expensive multicolored brocade and a cloth-of-gold wimple. She signals her feminine submissiveness by acquiescing to Prince John’s plans for her to marry his “Norman” ally Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  113 The adjective “Norman”—an ethnic distinction from native “Saxon” and a class-based, almost racialized term—is repeated countless times in the dialogue. The costumes of the ornately garbed Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin’s usual antagonist in ballads), the purple-clad bishop, and heraldically decorated Gisbourne, plus Prince John’s pastel blue brocade visually telegraph their membership in the elite Norman class. Those seated at the royal dais relentlessly consume food throughout this speech about the Gisbourne/ Marian union and the problem that the Saxon Robin of Locksley poses to Norman authority. De Havilland’s gender performance of Marian as “virgin” type (in medieval terms, the damsel-in-distress or the passive “ward”) is conveyed through her docility toward Prince John and all the other powerful males of various professional categories at the dais and her offering to leave the feast to allow the negotiations “between men.” Robin begins by reprimanding Gisbourne for neglecting the servants distributing their food: “I no sooner enter his door with a piece of meat [the stag] than his starving servants try to snatch it from me.” Robin mocks Marian for her poor “manners” when she betrays feminine timidity by attempting to leave the table while Locksley insults the Normans. The “impudent” demeanor of the” wagging-tongued” “bold rascal,” “saucy fellow,” and “Saxon cockerel” Robin, who “speaks treason fluently,” when critiquing Prince John for overtaxing and hanging his starving Saxon subjects, only worsens. When John invites him to “meat,” a phrase that echoes the sheriff’s offer to his guest in Potter, Robin strides arrogantly over the top of the table and helps himself to a chicken, which he dismembers and eats crudely with his hands. Even the Normans at the dais “goggle” at Prince John when he next declares himself Regent of England. Perhaps deliberately provoking-by-reinforcing the Norman perception that Saxons are sub-human, Flynn spits his “honest meat” out of his mouth in disgust, “spout[ing]” that John is a traitor. He tilts his chair back, propping his feet against the edge of the table, another insult delivered through aggressive body language as he threatens to organize a revolt of Saxons against Normans. In Flynn’s now-famous single-handed swashbuckling fight against a brigade of knights, nearly every table is overturned, spilling elegant foodstuffs to the floor and turning the royal feast’s order into messy chaos. If Robin of Locksley offended Marian’s delicate Norman sensibilities by eating with his hands, the tables will metaphorically turn in the film’s second feast scene. The sheriff escorts Sir Guy (Basil Rathbone), Marian, and the collected taxes to Kenilworth Castle, in hopes of flushing out Robin, who has been killing the Saxon-oppressing sheriff’s men. The Merry Men ambush the entourage, use the Normans’ provisions to make a huge outdoor repast for the oppressed Saxons, and strip off the sheriff’s (official) and Guy’s (heraldic) magnificent livery, which Little John and Tuck don, doubling the humiliation Robin imposed only on

114  Lorraine Kochanske Stock the sheriff in equivalent scenes in Potter and Geste. Just as the outlaws forced the denuded sheriff to wear Robin’s green livery in Geste, in the film they re-garb the stripped sheriff and Sir Guy in Saxon rags, adapting the previously discussed episodes of Robin’s dinner with the sheriff in the ballads. With this exchange of elegant aristocratic wardrobe for shabby yeoman attire, the film visually underscores the class differences between Normans and Saxons through costume choices. A Saxon cook shouts out, “To the tables, everybody, and STUFF yourselves!” As starving Saxon peasants consume a gargantuan outdoor banquet, Marian distastefully proclaims, “It’s revolting.” As he did at the royal feast, several times Robin leaps upon the rough board serving as an impromptu table, nothing like the elegantly appointed dais in Nottingham Castle’s hall, to thank Sir Guy for the food they now devour and assure Marian that the confiscated tax money will fund King Richard’s ransom, not fill outlaw purses. When offered food at this coarse outdoor meal, Marian disdainfully claims, “the company has spoiled my appetite.” Watching Flynn dismantle a whole fowl, grab a leg of mutton, and use his hands to eat both with gusto, Marian succumbs to hunger. As this elegant Norman lady reaches for a chicken leg and her dainty fingers bring it hesitantly to her mouth, Robin laughs in astonishment and satisfied approval at her downgraded table etiquette. Marian’s hands-on partaking of food, paralleling Robin’s crude table manners at the castle celebration, is a turning point. She admits to having been “hasty,” but asks why Robin, “a knight,” should live in the forest “like an animal.” When Robin dares her to learn why he inhabits Sherwood, she protests her courage, “I’m afraid of nothing, least of all you.” Upon witnessing evidence of Normans’ torture, maiming, home-burning, and murder of Saxons, Marian experiences an epiphany about the accountability of Normans, the cultural/racial group with which she identified. Calling Locksley a “strange man,” she prompts his reply: “Strange? Because I can feel for beaten, helpless people?” Yet she asks, “What’s your reward for all of this?” to which he wonders incredulously, “Reward? You just don’t understand, do you?” However, when she admits, “I do understand, a little, now,” he replies, “That’s reward enough.” In gender construction terms, Marian’s fearless investigation of Saxons’ suffering proves she has ascended from the female-gendered obsequiousness of a “royal ward” and damsel-in-distress, as she performs almost masculine courage, the same increased bravado she later displays in her indignant speech to Prince John. Brought before him for committing “treason”—the same discourse that hyper-masculine Flynn-as-Robin boasted of speaking “fluently” at the castle feast—she admits to being “ashamed of being a Norman” because of the “horrors…inflicted on the Saxons” by “a lot of beasts who were drunk on

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender 115 human blood!” and who now plot against King Richard. Whereas earlier Marian considered living rough in Sherwood tantamount to being “an animal,” now the Normans are “beasts.” When John warns she will be sorry, she proclaims: “Sorry, I’d do it again even if you killed me for it!” Norman noblewoman Marian’s disregard for saving her life now registers her affinity with the Saxon peasant Much, who earlier admitted preference for death-by-hanging to death-by-starvation. Marian’s transformation from a complicit Norman-aristocrat to a Saxon-peasant sympathizer is revealed through the juxtaposition of two occasions for consuming food: the royal feast in “cold” Nottingham Castle and the exuberant Technicolor peasant celebration in warm, sunny, Sherwood. This film’s revelation of character through the motif of feasting is the most sustained exemplification of the thematic importance of food in the “Robin Hood” cinematic tradition, wherein occasions for feasting construct class and gender identity. Compared to Enid Bennett’s rather one-dimensional “damsel-in-need-of-rescue” Marian in Fairbanks’ silent Robin Hood, in the 1938 Adventures, Olivia De Havilland’s nuanced portrayal expresses Marian’s capability for character change and personal growth.

Food Preparation and Gender Identity: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955−1959) Food preparation was a thematic device used to explore Marian’s gender identity in classic cinematic “Robin Hood.” The mid-twentieth-century British television series, The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene as Robin Hood, enjoyed unprecedented popularity among British, American, and global audiences. 53 Season One’s fifth episode, titled Maid Marian, constructed the gender identity of the eponymous heroine through food preparation, while also reflecting 1950s social and gender constructions in its engagement with medievalism. After some initial exposition, cross-dressed Marian (Bernadette O’Farrell) impersonating the male page Peter Watts, wanders the forest ostensibly to perform the masculine-gendered activity of hunting game, but actually trying to discover the hideout of the notorious outlaw Robin Hood. Marian’s cross-dressing as a page evokes the plot of the broadside Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Marian/Peter encounters a forester, really her childhood playmate Robin (Richard Greene), whom she thinks has stolen her family’s valuables. During their encounter, Robin conceals his identity and affects not recognizing his former friend. Although eventually both penetrate their disguises, they pretend otherwise. Before bringing her to the outlaws’ camp, Robin shares an impromptu, casual meal with the page, because “eating by yourself is a dull affair.” He provides rather rough fare—meat on bones the disguised Lady

116  Lorraine Kochanske Stock Marian is forced to gnaw crudely, to her obvious displeasure. The scene echoes De Havilland’s repugnance at Flynn’s crude eating habits in the 1938 film. The primitive outdoor meal is a vast change from the elegant edibles a noble lady would customarily have prepared for and served to her in either the great hall or her private solar. When “Peter” requests membership in the outlaw band, Ned, one of the Merry Men, dismisses the “lad” for insufficient masculinity: “he” has a “woman’s ankles”; a “squeaky” voice; “no muscle on his arm”; and “he” can’t “even draw a bow.” In a laughably penetrable disguise, Marian nevertheless surprises Ned by wrestling him to the ground and surpassing Ned’s archery skills, thus qualifying “Peter’s” induction into the outlaw fraternity. Apprehensive about being exposed identity-wise and bodily, Marian balks at the “baptism” the outlaws require as an initiation rite—a naked dousing in the river with male band members. Realizing her discomfiture, but playing along with the joke, Robin proposes another proof of loyalty, that “Peter” prepare a complete dinner for the “hungriest outlaws in all of England.” A shot of Marian gazing in dismay at an array of undressed wild game, deer, rabbit, and fowl, none of which a female of her social class would likely be trained to dress for cooking, cuts to her serving a fully cooked meal to the band. Obviously, Marian rose to the occasion, either out of fear of exposing her female body through “baptism” to a gang of male outlaws or by reflecting the domestic skills expected of most mid-twentieth-century housewives in the audience. Ned proclaims about “Peter’s” culinary expertise, “for a court dandy” Peter “makes a passing fair cook.” Later, Peter/Marian must suffer the indignity of washing the dishes, another household chore to which Lady Marian would be unaccustomed. For the 1950s postwar audience viewing this episode, Lady Marian’s role exemplified the suppression of the wartime autonomy of Rosie the Riveter and her sisters, who were required to relinquish their subjectivity and become post-war domestic goddesses like their TV role model June Cleaver of the popular series Leave it to Beaver. Marian as “Peter” had already demonstrated the masculine skills of wrestling and archery, sufficient qualification for outlaw membership, but Lady Marian, because of her class, initially has no aptitude for performing female-gendered tasks that any scullery maid could execute. Yet the immediate cut to the subsequent scene of the outlaws feasting on the meal she prepared establishes that she is also a quick study of the feminine-gendered culinary arts. Upon escaping from the camp, causing Robin to be captured by the sheriff, Marian reverses gender roles again. Instead of her being rescued by Robin, in the usual damsel-in-distress scenario, she rescues him, releasing him from prison and ordering him to tie her up in his stead. The episode reflects typical mid-century American and British gender

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  117 conflicts as the wartime autonomy, authority, and male-gendered jobs that women successfully assumed while men were away fighting World War II were re-appropriated from them by the returning men, relegating women, perhaps reluctantly, to kitchen duty. Like British and American women who replaced their military-serving husbands, fathers, and brothers in typically male-gendered jobs (even England’s Princess Elizabeth I served as a truck mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II), Marian proved herself capable of “manly” physical skills such as wrestling and archery. Like mid-century women, however, she was required to reassume the domestic chores of dressing meats, cooking them, and cleaning up afterward. In its engagement with medievalism, the episode adroitly uses food preparation as an index of medieval class issues and the delicate navigation of postwar gender tensions.

Food Preparation Constructs Gender Identity: Robin Hood (1991) Three decades after the popular 1950s TV series achieved a broad audience, John Irvin’s 1991 film Robin Hood constructed Marian’s gender identity through a similar initiation into Robin Hood’s band, but with postfeminist differences. 54 The film departs from the traditional casting of the outlaw as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon or Locksley, resisting the usual antagonists, the sheriff, Prince John, and Gisborne. Instead, Saxon Sir Robert Hode—later outlawed and renamed Robin Hood (Patrick Bergin)—is a friend and neighbor of the thoroughly Norman Baron Roger Daguerre (Jeroen Krabbé). Reflecting Eve Sedgwick’s formulaic triangulation of desire “between men,” Daguerre plots with another Norman knight, Sir Miles Folcanet (Jürgen Prochnow), to bestow his niece and ward Marian in marriage to Folcanet, who covets Marian’s inherited lands. Emphasizing the cultural/racial divide between native Saxons and colonizing Normans, the film’s male Norman characters, especially Folcanet, speak with exaggerated French accents. Despite wearing feminine costumes reflecting twelfth-century Norman fashion and initially exhibiting acquiescent demeanor toward her uncle Daguerre, American actress Uma Thurman vividly portrays Marian’s evolution from demure Norman ward into a feisty and tart-tongued uppity woman, who has her own ideas about whom she will marry. 55 Becoming attracted to Hode through an exchange of sexually-charged badinage with him after he humiliates her fiancé Folcanet, Marian resolves not to marry the cowardly, lascivious, Norman boor. To escape the impending union her uncle will enforce, Marian cuts her luxuriant blonde tresses, blackens her hair and face, and cross-dresses as the page Martin Pryde in order to take refuge in and infiltrate Robin’s camp.

118  Lorraine Kochanske Stock Thurman’s disguise is far less penetrable than the mid-century Marian of The Adventures of Robin Hood series, whose flimsy male disguise blatantly betrays her gender. Thurman’s Marian looks barely human, much less female. Once again, food preparation, or lack thereof, is key to Martin’s/ Marian’s attaining membership in Robin’s band. As in the 50s series, Martin/Marian must “earn” not only entry into the group of outlaws, but also his/her “breakfast” by an initiation rite that involves not naked baptism or food preparation, but rather splitting a large pile of logs before the band returns from unspecified outlawry. Robin gruffly orders: “Split logs, you’ll eat.” This is a far less womanly task than the cooking assigned to the mid-century Marian of the television series, who is handicapped from performing the food preparation less by her gender than by her social class. Like the 50s Marian, despite an unpromising start, somehow (again, conveniently off-camera) Thurman’s Martin Pryde chops the whole pile of wood before the outlaws return and “he” is rewarded by a scrap of meat Tuck tosses to “him,” which Pryde eats hungrily, and this time without the obvious fussy distaste of either the 1938 De Havilland disdaining to eat with her hands or the mid-century Marian unhappily gnawing on bones. Patrick Bergin’s Robin then accepts Martin/Marian into the group of outlaws, though once again Robin clearly sees through “Martin’s” disguise. Subsequently, Thurman’s Marian doesn’t merely trade places with Robin as a prisoner, as in the 50s series; rather, she fights the Norman antagonists by his side in traditional (male) swashbuckling fashion, like a female Errol Flynn, which would have been unthinkable in De Havilland’s characterization. At the film’s conclusion, her uncle mandates bestowing her to Robin as a bride who will “weave peace” between Normans and Saxons, another triangulation “between men” who were friends before their Norman-Saxon dispute. Instead, Thurman’s Marian establishes her autonomy and subjectivity by insisting that she take Robin as her husband, not the reverse. She gives herself to Robin, not to promote political expediency, but because he “makes the bee buzz in my heart,” a brazen acknowledgment of female sexuality that also was unthinkable in the previous films and TV. Earlier in the 1991 film, Thurman’s depiction of sexually emancipated Marian’s premarital consummation with Bergin’s Robin cancels her moniker “Maid” Marian well before their marriage, which ends the film. In the 1991 Robin Hood, Marian’s consumption, not preparation, of a well-earned breakfast as sign of her initiation into the exclusively male outlaw band and her superb performance of the male-gendered skill of effective swordplay, which evokes the seventeenth-century broadside’s cross-dressed, combative Marian, complicate gender constructions in this film. The fractious Norman-Saxon antagonism engages with issues of social class divisions.

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Conclusion As the foregoing argument demonstrates, the significant incorporation of scenes of food preparation and feasting in the “Robin Hood” cinematic canon reflect episodes involving similar themes presented in premodern ballads, which informed the plots of folk plays about Robin Hood and his Greenwood cohort performed at May-games and Whitsun-ales. These premodern Robin Hood Revels culminated in a community banquet, which mirrored Robin Hood-hosted feasts in the ballads and inspired similar feasts in the “Robin Hood” cinematic canon. Between the thirteenth-century pastourelles and twentiethcentury cinema, intermediary texts edited by Ritson and adapted by Pyle and others, and earlier films provided more recent reminders of these tropes. The ballads’ episodes involving food preparation and consumption intersected with themes of class difference and both male and female gender construction. Orchestrated by a yeoman community member embodying Robin Hood, the Whitson-ales encouraged fun-raising that produced social cohesion and fund-raising that succored the parish’s poor. As noted earlier, even the literary template for Marian’s cross-dressing involved feasting. After concluding their combat in Robin Hood and Maid Marian, the couple celebrate their reunion by joining Little John and the rest of the outlaws for “a stately banquet … in a shaded bower,/ Where venison sweet they had to eat,/ and were merry” (63−65). Over the next three stanzas, the band’s members toast Marian’s health by imbibing “great flaggons of wine …on the board” and “great boules of sack” (66−69); and “every cup, as they drunk up,/ They filled with speed again” (76−77). This joyous drunken feast is entirely consistent with the celebrations involving food and drink in medieval ballads, community feasts that culminated the Robin Hood Revels, and scenes of food preparation and feasting that are a crucial component of the “Robin Hood” cinematic canon.

Notes 1. Although references to food and feasting occur in most Robin Hood ballads, coverage here is limited to Robin Hood and the Potter and A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, which contain key episodes that are reflected in scenes in Robin Hood films involving intersecting issues of gender and class. References to the medieval ballads are from Early Rymes of Robin Hood: An Edition of the Texts ca. 1425−1600, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013). Hereafter, line numbers are cited parenthetically with the abbreviated titles Potter and Geste. The version of Geste cited is William Copland’s A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, to which is appended The Playe of Robyn Hoode, verye proper to be played in Maye games, pp. 171−237.

120  Lorraine Kochanske Stock 2. See: Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Canonicity and ‘Robin Hood’: the Morris Dance and the Meaning of “lighter than Robin Hood” in the Prologue to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman and Lesley Coote (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 109−131. 3. For a taxonomy of feast episodes in “Robin Hood,” see: Stephen Knight, “Feasts in the Forest,” in Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications 2016), pp. 161−175. On feasts in Geste only, see: Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19−30 and Sherron Lux’s chapter in this volume. 4. For a useful range of working definitions of the discourse of “medievalism” see: Richard Utz, “What is Medievalism?” featured in the review journal Medievally Speaking, accessed at http://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-is-medievalism.html. 5. Stephen Knight, “Rhizomatic Robin Hood” in Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 224−257, at 228, 236−237. 6. An example is the demonstrably false claim in several Arthurian films’ credits that they adapt Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte D’Arthur. See: Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Reinventing an Iconic Arthurian Moment: The Sword in the Stone in Films and Television,” Arthuriana 25.4 (2015): 66−83. 7. Thomas Leitch, “Adaptations Without Sources: The Adventures of Robin Hood,” Literature Film Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 21−30, at 23. 8. See: the description of the copy owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Reknown, in Nottinghamshire, 1883, written and illustrated by Howard Pyle, American,” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/355792. 9. Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883); The Adventures of Robin Hood, an English Legend Retold by Paul Creswick, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903). On Pyle and Wyeth, see: Jill May, “Robin Hood’s Home Away From Home: Howard Pyle’s Art Students,” and Alan T. Gaylord, “‘There was something about him that spoke of other things than rags and tatters’: Howard Pyle and the Language of Robin Hood,” both in Images of Robin Hood Medieval to Modern, ed. Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), respectively 123−37; 153−73. 10. Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. Joseph R itson, (London, 1795; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ­ 2015) 2 vols. 11. Alexandre Dumas, The Prince of Thieves, trans. Alfred Richard Allinson (London: Methuen, 1904). Dumas’ novel inspired the 1948 B-movie of the same title (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040710/) and the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (see http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0102798/?ref_=nv_sr_1). 12. See: Orley Leah Krasner, “To Steal From the Rich and Give to the Poor: Reginald De Koven’s Robin Hood” and Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Recovering Reginald De Koven’s and Harry Bache Smith’s ‘Lost’ Operetta,

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Maid Marian,” both in Images of Robin Hood Medieval to Modern, ed. Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), respectively 242−255; 256−265. 13. See: Stock, “Recovering,” 263−264; Knight, “Rhizomatic,” p. 237. 14. Leitch, “Adaptations,” 23, quoting Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1997, rpt. 2000), p. 1. 15. “Adaptations,” 23. Leitch is a scholar of modern adaptation, not premodern culture in general or Robin Hood in particular. He credits Lois Potter, an esteemed scholar of premodern English literature and a specialist in dramatic Robin Hood texts, for providing him with background information for his essay (28). Potter’s edited volume, cited above, contains essays about many of the texts and analogues that I argue are sources for cinematic “Robin Hood.” 16. Although Potter’s and Geste’s sheriff character is not explicitly identified as a knight (the way Sir Richard is in Geste), sheriffs in fourteenth-century England were at least members of the gentry; the vast majority ranked as knights or future knights. See: Richard Gorski, The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), pp. 86−87, 158, where Gorski summarizes, “Sheriffs were an elite within the office-holding group, numerically, and … socially.” In the appendices listing the actual sheriffs by shire, most have the title “Sir” preceding their names (162−192). My thanks to Professor Phyllis Jestice for advice about the status of sheriffs and their horses. 17. For this broad range of meaning, see: “yeman” in the MED. 18. Richard Almond and A. J. Pollard, “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-century England,” Past & Present 170 (2001): 52−77, at 58. Since they thoroughly review the arguments articulated by scholars—Rodney Hilton, J. C. Holt, Maurice Keen, Peter Coss, Stephen Knight, Thomas H. Ohlgren—over the previous half-century about the meaning of Robin Hood’s yeomanry, I omit citing them here for reasons of space. Conveniently, foundational arguments in the controversy are reprinted in Peasants, Knights, Heretics, Studies in Medieval English Social History, ed. R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 221−272. 19. Gorski, Fourteenth-Century Sheriff, pp. 69−70. 20. R. H. C. Davis, The Medieval Warhorse: Origin, Development and Redevelopment (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), p.137. 21. MED entry for “maister.” 22. Claire Sponsler argues similarly that Robin usurps “the sheriff’s role as head of his household and therefore controller of, and provider for, his wife” in “Counterfeit in Their Array: Cross-dressing in Robin Hood Performance,” in Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 24−49, at 35. 23. In Elmes’s interpretation, the feast in fytte one demonstrates that Robin Hood “should not be associated with any given rank or order but … be read beyond social and class structures” (22, my emphasis) and that he occupies “classless and lawless status” (25). I contend that the Geste’s repeated identification of the outlaw as a yeoman—in contradistinction to the noble status of Sir Richard, a knight, or in a later feast, the royal authority of King Edward—underscores the issue of social class imbricated

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throughout Geste’s multi-episodic plot. Robin’s ability to conduct himself nobly may evince “polysemic” characterization, but that behavior is more unusual considering his yeomanry. In his 1598 The Downfall of Robert Earle of Huntington, discussed presently, Anthony Munday’s gentrified, upmarket Earl Robert unsurprisingly fulfills the expected conduct of a nobleman, whether his chaste cohabitation with his betrothed, Matilda Fitzwater, allowing her to maintain her sobriquet Maid Marian while living rough in Sherwood, or his gallant and loyal consumption of the poisoned beverage intended to assassinate King Richard. Although Lux emphasizes Robin Hood’s unexpected (for a yeoman or an outlaw) “courtesy” demonstrated in his feast-hosting, she does not frame his behavior in terms of class conflict. 24. Often actual outlaws, especially those who led movements of civil disobedience or incited social unrest, assumed the personae of members of Robin’s band, even Robin himself. See: Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, ed. R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), p. 4. Dobson and Taylor quote Fabyan’s Chronycle of 1559 to argue that the insurgent who adopted “Grenelef” as his alias had “read or heard” Geste (4, n. 3). 25. In “Yeomanry,” Almond and Pollard read this episode as not about social fissures but about premodern hunting practices: “In this mockery of aristocratic hunting, in which the codes are confused and the roles reversed, the stupid sheriff cannot resist the prospect of such amazing sport, so he is led to Robin Hood, ‘the mayster herte,’ at his ‘tryst’ ” (72). 26. On medieval underwear equaling nakedness, see: E. Jane Burns, “Ladies Don’t Wear Braies: Underwear and Outerwear in the French Prose Lancelot,” in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, ed. William Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 152−174. 27. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400−1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 52; Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 237. 28. Hutton, Rise and Fall, p. 113; Peter H. Greenfield, “The Carnivalesque in the Robin Hood Games and King Ales of Southern England,” in Carnival and the Carnivalesque: The Fool, the Reformer, the Wildman, and Others in Early Modern Theatre, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 19−28. 29. John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 217−218. 30. Both Copland’s Gest and Edward White’s edition are included in Ohlgren and Matheson, Early Rymes, pp. 228−237; 303−307. 31. J. M. Steadman, “The Dramatization of the Robin Hood Ballads,” Modern Philology 17 (1919): 9−23. On texts of the plays see: George Parfitt, “Early Robin Hood Plays: Two Fragments and a Bibliography,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 22 (1978): 5−12. 32. W. E. Simeone, “The May Games and the Robin Hood Legend,” Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 265−274, at 274. 33. James D. Stokes, “Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 1−25. My discussion summarizes Stokes’s findings. 34. For more expansive treatment of Robin Hood Ales mounted in other English towns, see: John Marshall, “Show or Tell?: Priority and Interplay in the Early Robin Hood Play/Games and Poems,” in Telling Tales and

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Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications 2016), pp. 177−202. 35. For a thorough review of appearances of Maid Marian in “Robin Hood,” see: Stephen Knight, “The Making and Re-making of Maid Marian,” in Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 187−223. 36. Lesley Coote, “Robin Hood and ‘Maid’ Marion,” in Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), pp. 61−86. On the pastourelle origins of the legend, also see: Stephen Knight, “Alterity, Parody, Habitus: The Formation of the Early Literary Tradition of Robin Hood,” in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 1−30, at 5−7. 37. For Marian’s role as the May-queen in the Morris Dance, see: the “Betley Window,” a painted panel (c. 1550−1621) depicting aspects of the Morris Dance, including a May-pole, a Friar Tuck figure, the May-queen Marian, and other dancers. Once a feature of Betley Hall, residence of the Tollett family in Staffordshire, it is presently on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O8054/window-unknown/. 38. For the transcript of the complete document, see: Sydney Anglo, “An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and Other Demonstrations Against the Pope,” Journal of the Warbourg and Cortauld Institute 20.1/2 (1957): 176−179, at 179. The document was created c. 1536, printed in 1542. See Thomas Pettitt, “‘Here Comes I, Jack Straw:’ English Folk Drama and Social Revolt” Folklore 95.1 (1984): 3−20, at 8. 39. For the text, see: Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, pp. 493−498. 40. Claire Sponsler, “Counterfeit in Their Array: Cross-dressing in Robin Hood Performance,” omits Maid Marian’s cross-dressing in male costume. Sponsler’s focus is on Robin’s exchanging clothing with males and females in the ballads as a disguise and others dressing as Robin Hood: King Edward in Geste, Henry VIII impersonating the outlaw, or participants in the folk plays about Robin Hood at the Whitsun-ales, costuming themselves as Robin or the other outlaws (pp. 24−49). 41. See: MED, “macchen.” 42. For the text of the plays, see: Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, pp. 296−440. 43. See: Larissa Tracy, “‘For Our dere Ladyes sake’: Bringing the Outlaw in from the Forest—Robin Hood, Marian, and Normative National Identity,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 38. Summer & Winter (2012): 35–66. On the connections between Miracles of the Virgin and “Robin Hood,” see: Lesley Coote, “Robin Hood and the Virgin Mary,” in Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), pp. 87−103. 44. For a full analysis of many premodern Robin Hood texts, see: Malcolm A. Nelson, The Robin Hood Tradition in the English Renaissance (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1973); for the drama, David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981). For the passage in Poly-Olbion Book II, Song 26, see: http://www.outlawsandhighwaymen.com/drayton.htm. 45. The technically unsophisticated early film Robin Hood was directed by Étienne Arnaud and Herbert Blaché and produced by Éclair American Studio in Fort Lee, NJ. I was privileged to view a restored copy of

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it at the International Association of Robin Hood Studies biennial conference at the University of Rochester in 2009. For a plot summary and details of the production, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0002465/ plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl. The plot summary, by “Moving Picture World synopsis,” includes some details that have not survived in the restored, but incomplete copy of the film. 46. The reference to the “herd” strongly evokes the episode in Geste, whose immediate source could have been the original ballad edited by Ritson or Pyle’s prose adaptation. 47. See: synopsis, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0002465/plotsummary?ref_= tt_stry_pl. 48. Ibid. 49. For the Douglas Fairbanks 1922 Robin Hood, see: http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0013556/. 50. See: the 2003 interview between Allen W. Wright and Stephen Knight, “Gendering Robin Hood,” https://www.boldoutlaw.com/robint/rhgend. html; Thomas Hahn and Stephen Knight, “‘Exempt me, Sire, for I am afeard of women’: Gendering Robin Hood,” in Bandit Territories: British Outlaw Traditions, ed. Helen Phillips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 24−43. On homoeroticism in films featuring a relationship between King Richard and Robin Hood, see: Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “‘He’s not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?’: Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusades,” in Queer Movie Medievalism, ed. Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 61−78. 51. On this trope, see: Eve K. Sedgwick, ed. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1−18. On the marital aspirations of the juventes, see: Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–122. 52. To secure Plantagenet lands in Aquitaine, Richard’s mother Queen Eleanor negotiated a lucrative marriage between him and Princess Berengaria of Navarre. Although Richard legally married Berengaria in Cyprus while traveling to the Third Crusade, they lived separate lives for nearly all of their childless marriage. There is no evidence that the marriage was consummated or that Berengaria ever entered England. See: Ann Trindade, Berengaria: In Search of Richard the Lionheart’s Queen (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999). On a cinematic depiction of this political marriage of convenience, see Stock, “Ardent Suitor,” 64. 53. The series’ 143 episodes, broadcast between 1955−1959, were produced in England by American ex-pat Hannah Weinstein and written by blacklisted American scriptwriters under pseudonyms, see: https://www.imdb. com/title/tt0047706/. 54. On the 1991 Robin Hood, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102797/. In the four decades between the TV series and this film, there had been two waves of feminist ideology that permeated American and British culture. It is beyond the scope of this essay to engage fully with this topic. 55. On Thurman’s subversion of previous cinematic portrayals of Marian, see: Lorraine K. Stock and Candace Gregory-Abbott, “The ‘Other’ Women of Sherwood: The Construction of Difference and Gender in Cinematic Treatments of the Robin Hood Legend,” Filming the Other Middle Ages: Race, Class, and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 199−214 at 211−212.

Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender  125

Bibliography Almond, Richard and A. J. Pollard. “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England.” Past & Present 170 (2001): 52–77. Anglo, Sydney. “An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and Other Demonstrations against the Pope.” Journal of the Warbourg and Cortauld Institute 20, no. 1/2 (1957): 176–179. “Betley Window.” http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O8054/window-unknown/. Burns, E. Jane. “Ladies Don’t Wear Braies: Underwear and Outerwear in the French Prose Lancelot.” In The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, edited by William Kibler, 152−174. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994. Coote, Lesley. Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. Creswick, Paul. The Adventures of Robin Hood, an English Legend Retold by Paul Creswick, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. Davis, R. H. C. The Medieval Warhorse: Origin, Development and Redevelopment. London: Thames & Hudson, 1989. Dobson, R. B. and J. Taylor, eds. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19–30. Forrest, John. The History of Morris Dancing 1458–1750. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Gorski, Richard. The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003. Greenfield, Peter H. “The Carnivalesque in the Robin Hood Games and King Ales of Southern England.” In Carnival and the Carnivalesque: The Fool, the Reformer, the Wildman, and Others in Early Modern Theatre, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken, 19−28. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Hahn, Thomas and Stephen Knight. “‘Exempt Me, Sire, for I am Afeard of Women’: Gendering Robin Hood.” In Bandit Territories: British Outlaw Traditions, edited by Helen Phillips, 24–43. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Hilton, R. H., ed. Peasants, Knights, Heretics, Studies in Medieval English Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Kaufman, Alexander L., Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong, eds. Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren. Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures 24. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016. Knight, Stephen, ed. Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. ———. Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren, eds. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1997. Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptations Without Sources: The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Literature Film Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2008): 21–30.

126  Lorraine Kochanske Stock Nelson, Malcolm A. The Robin Hood Tradition in the English Renaissance. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1973. Ohlgren, Thomas H. and Lister M. Matheson, eds. Early Rymes of Robin Hood: An Edition of the Texts ca.1425-1600. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Pettitt, Thomas. “‘Here Comes I, Jack Straw:’ English Folk Drama and Social Revolt.” Folklore 95, no. 1 (1984): 3–20. Potter, Lois and Joshua Calhoun, eds. Images of Robin Hood Medieval to Modern. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883. Simeone, W. E. “The May Games and the Robin Hood Legend.” Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 265−274. Sponsler, Claire. Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Steadman, J. M. “The Dramatization of the Robin Hood Ballads.” Modern Philology 17 (1919): 9−23. Stock, Lorraine Kochanske. “‘He’s Not an Ardent Suitor, Is He, Brother?’ Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusade.” In Queer Movie Medievalism, edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, 61–78. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. ———. “Reinventing an Iconic Arthurian Moment: The Sword in the Stone in Films and Television.” Arthuriana 25, no. 4 (2015): 66−83. ———. “Canonicity and ‘Robin Hood’: the Morris Dance and the Meaning of “lighter than Robin Hood” in the Prologue to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman and Lesley Coote, 109–131. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 6. New York: Routledge, 2019. Stock, Lorraine K. and Candace Gregory-Abbott. “The ‘Other’ Women of Sherwood: The Construction of Difference and Gender in Cinematic Treatments of the Robin Hood Legend.” In Filming the Other Middle Ages: Race, Class, and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema, edited by Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh, 199–214. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Stokes, James D. “Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 1−25. Tracy, Larissa. “‘For Our dere Ladyes Sake’: Bringing the Outlaw in from the Forest—Robin Hood, Marian, and Normative National Identity.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 38, no. Summer & Winter (2012): 35–66. Utz, Richard. “What is Medievalism?” Medievally Speaking, accessed at ­http:// medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-is-medievalism.html. Wiles, David. The Early Plays of Robin Hood. Cambridge: Brewer, 1981. Wright, Allen W. and Stephen Knight. “Interview: Gendering Robin Hood.” 2003. https://www.boldoutlaw.com/robint/rhgend.html.

7

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” When the Greenwood Consumes the Outlaw Marybeth Ruether-Wu

Introduction: The Greenwood and the Free Feast Like other traditional ballad formulas, invitations to the Greenwood are easy to discard as stock phrases. Robin Hood’s declaration, “To day thou shalt dyne with me, …/Under my trystell tre”1 comes from his eponymous Geste, but it could be from any number of Robin Hood ballads. Descriptions of Greenwood life are just as formulaic. The much-anthologized Greenwood song from Shakespeare’s As You Like It distills its imagined pleasures as a haven for anyone who “loves to live i’ the sun,/Seeking the food he eats,/And pleased with what he gets.”2 Taken together, these descriptions conjure a Greenwood as undisrupted and constant as the formulas themselves, an endlessly iterable heterotopia that exists outside of the economic demands of the real world. The ballad Twa Corbies, a Scottish adaptation of The Three Ravens (1611), sounds much the same: “So shall we take our dinner sweet, Our dinner’s sure, our feasting free, Come and dine ‘neath the Greenwood tree!” 3 Only this last example describes a feast of human flesh. By the time we realize the speakers are carrion crows celebrating a murdered man’s remains, we have already anticipated the free food. The ballad strikingly reveals human forces, not natural ones, feeding the Greenwood, and we are made painfully aware of the price that someone else paid for the corbies’ “free” feast. The surprise of Twa Corbies serves as an important warning to consider what the Greenwood offers carefully before accepting its promises. Across the English outlaw corpus, the Greenwood offers plentiful food and shelter to those who seek its protection. In Twa Corbies, the discordance between the ballad’s grisly subject and its purported setting elevates the Greenwood to a new and sinister place, displacing the positive connotations of “plenty” and leaving only gruesome excesses

128  Marybeth Ruether-Wu behind. This ballad engages with an undercurrent of knowledge that tends to run more implicitly in the Robin Hood ballads; the Greenwood is predicated on deprivation and violence, and it supports itself under the same blood economy that drove the outlaws to the Greenwood in the first place.4 In this, it is typical of border ballads, a significant body of vernacular literature composed in the contested territory between Scotland and England in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Border ballads present the unique opportunity to view the Matter of the Greenwood through the eyes of those who lived in premodern outlaw territory.5 Extant border ballads are contemporaneous with the vast majority of extant Robin Hood material, dateable to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.6 And yet, little work has been done to connect border ballads to the rest of the Anglophone outlaw tradition, though the Greenwood can be found in Scottish literature not long after its first appearances in English.7 The borderers’ adaptation of the Greenwood, found in ballads including The Battle of Otterburn, The Hunting of the Cheviot, Johnie O’Braidiesleys, Gil Brenton, The Broomfield Hill, The Cruel Mother, Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, Bob Norris, The Broom Blooms Bonny, Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret, and Wee Messgrove, rarely imports the features typically associated with the Matter of the Greenwood: safety, plenty, and freedom.8 In the southern tradition, these romantic features persist even alongside what Richard Firth Green has called the “cynical brutality”9 of late medieval outlaw ballads, where, for example, Robin Hood and the Monk begins with a lyrical fourstanza sketch of “somer, when þe shawes be sheyne” [summer, when the woods are shining] and deer take shelter “in þe leves grene/vndur the grene wode tre” [in the green leaves/under the greenwood tree]10 —only for Little John to ruthlessly decapitate a passing monk and his young page. The southern ballads define the Greenwood’s threshold with dramatic tonal shifts: within, freedom and plenty; and without, cruelty and deprivation. These distinctions only hold, however, if we accept the basic premise that hunting is not also bloodshed. After all, generous Greenwood feasts require prolific Greenwood hunting, and Robin cheerfully explains that he and his men “lyue by our kynges dere,/Under the grene wode tre” [live by our king’s deer,/Under the greenwood tree].11 When a guest accepts Robin’s invitation to dinner, “Many a dere there was slayne” and made into “fatte venison.”12 Putting aside for the moment the wholesale slaughter of the hunted, the fact that Robin hunts the “kynges dere” points to the violent maintenance of the Greenwood’s herds. The Greenwood’s ecological plenty is made possible by the exclusionary violence of a law that denies subjects access to meat and natural resources and punishes—even kills—men who encroach on the king’s deer. English ballads associate the Greenwood with royal forests like Sherwood because of, not despite, the fact that it is land that the Crown protects. The very forest laws that

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 129 Robin defies artificially produce the Greenwood’s outsized bounty. In consciously displacing the Greenwood from the English royal forests to the war-torn Anglo-Scottish Borders, the borderers transform a trope technically incompatible with their reality into a means of exploring the unnatural plenty and poverty of outlaw territory. Why, then, go to the Greenwood? The borderers’ Greenwood may not feed or protect them; as we will see, it may even consume them. But in acknowledging the reality of finite resources and blood prices, border ballads also demonstrate a heightened awareness of the value of land and life. If everything can be lost, everything can also be gained, and the border ballads use the Greenwood’s fluid dimensions to describe the radical changes inherent to outlaw territory and the blood feud: massive redistributions of wealth, land, food, and even nationality. In this article, I argue that inverted Greenwood imagery illustrates the unmanageable appetite of the border feud, and that in turn, the hunger that unites people to their land expresses the tension between the dual pleasures and dangers of the Greenwood. We will see the borderers’ literary avatars walk a fine line between consuming and being consumed with Johnie o’Braidiesleys, who pays in kind for his gluttonous feast of deer blood. Comparing two competing descriptions of the same border conflict, The Battle of Otterburn and The Hunting of the Cheviot, also reveals that these ballads use Greenwood outlaw tropes to make sense of the tragedy, triumph, and devastation of life in the Borders. In ironically juxtaposing the feast that the Greenwood promises with the barren land, these ballads conclude that only the feud can sustain life in a place cultivated with blood and bodies.

Where the Borders Meet the Greenwood Life in the Anglo-Scottish Marches was shaped by a complex system of alliances and feuds, most stretching across national borders and several generations.13 Many of these feuds are preserved in colorful songs known as reiving, riding, or border ballads. They offer a view into a functional outlaw community of thieves, poachers, and fugitives who made their home in a war-ravaged wasteland and were never successfully brought under either Scottish or English control.14 When the kings’ men devastated their crops and cattle, the borderers sought “thair meit” [their meat] by “steiling and reif” [stealing and reiving].15 The region was the staging ground for major military incursions between England and Scotland throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. When John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, presented Queen Mary with a Historie of Scotland to prepare her (to no avail) for the complexities of her new kingdom, he observed that the borders “in tymes of weirs thouch inuasioune of ennimies daylie … ar brot til extreime pouertie” [in times of wars through the invasion of enemies daily … are brought to extreme poverty].16

130  Marybeth Ruether-Wu Given the Greenwood trope’s popularity in their ballads, one might reasonably assume that the borders were wooded. And yet by the late Middle Ages, the domestic demand for timber had placed immense strain on Scottish forestland, especially in the lowlands by the border. Overwhelming deforestation was a pervasive rhetorical trope in Scottish political complaint; at the turn of the sixteenth century, Parliament declared that all the wood in Scotland was “uterlie distroyit.”17 Utterly destroyed or not, the late medieval borders were no Greenwood. In his 1888 Comprehensive guide to the county of Northumberland, British historian William Weaver Tomlinson touchingly describes the border region as “a desolate looking tract of treacherous moss-hags and oozy peat flats, traversed by deep dykes and interspersed with black stagnant pools.”18 Though very different from Robin Hood’s Greenwood, this challenging terrain could provide its own form of protection. Robin’s Greenwood is rendered inaccessible by an Otherworldly logic; the outlaws’ camp cannot be found until interlopers take the truth trial and are invited to join Robin in a feast. Before the performance of these rituals, the Greenwood stretches endlessly around an inaccessible center, Robin’s trystell tree.19 By contrast, the discursive practices that structure the borders are oral histories, which pass down detailed knowledge of the land and its dangers. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross marveled that …gif out of thick wodis thay be chaist, to hich mountanis thay præpair; gif out of mountains thay be dung, to the watir bankes of riueris and dubis thay flie. Agane gif thay perceiue that frome that place thay mon flie, schortlie thair followers thay saiflie deceiue throuch certane difficile myres, quhilkes albeit thay be lyke medowis greine abone, and lyke fast 3eard appeir vndirneth, 3it quhen a man entiris, thay sal gaip wyd, and swallie him vp in a maner to the deipth. 20 […if they be chased out of thick woods, they repair to high mountains; if they are dug out of mountains, they flee to the water banks of rivers and stagnant pools. Again, if they perceive that they must flee from that place, soon they safely deceive their followers through certain difficult mires, which although they seem like green meadows above, and appear to have solid ground underneath, yet when a man enters, they shall gape wide, and in some way swallow him up to the deep.] Beneath the grass is an open mouth, endlessly and indiscriminately “swallow[ing]” up anyone who mistakes green meadows for safety. Even for the borderers, this land is a refuge of last resort. Instead of deer for their feasts, this outlaw territory offers a mouth of its own to devour their enemies. The borderers’ protection lies in their ability to recognize its dangers and avoid being digested by their own land.

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 131 Though Leslie meant his description of the borders as a warning against the region’s carnivorous meadows and defiant residents, his references to chasing and digging out fleeing men and women are telling in their similarity to the language of the hunt. The fleeing borderers would have to potentially weigh the cost of lost property and a treacherous journey against the cost of being caught by men who see them as animals. Knowing the price of blood was just as important to their survival as knowing the lay of the land. In Johnie o’Braidiesleys, the eponymous poacher’s mother unsuccessfully warns him against hunting to excess merely to satisfy his appetite for glory. The ballad begins promisingly enough in the Greenwood mode, with Johnie rising on a May morning, shouldering “his gude bend bow,/[And] his arrows, ane by ane” [his good flexing bow,/[And] his arrows, one by one]21 despite his mother’s vehement objection that they already have bread for the table and do not need meat. His mother’s warning that the foresters would pay any price “for a drop of thy heart’s bluid” alerts us to a complicated landscape that Johnie ignores in his fantasy of freedom: a social network so wide, and a forest so transparent, that a housewife could track the movements of the king’s foresters before breakfast. But Johnie is caught up in the fantasy rather than the reality of poaching; in several versions, he dons the “Lincolm green”22 of Robin Hood’s men, symbolically joining their imagined community. Thus liveried, he decides to “gae to the gude green wood,/The dun deer to ding doon” [go to the good greenwood/ To  shoot the dun deer down]. 23 Alliteration jauntily imitates the twanging of his bow, drawing the ballad singer and audience into the Greenwood alongside Johnie as part of a collective soundscape; yet, this inclusion only serves to remind us that others can also hear and follow Johnie in the Greenwood. Each narrative beat in Johnie o’Braidiesleys begins with a Greenwood convention and then disrupts it. Johnie’s conventional actions, from blowing his horn to gutting the deer in the forest, only make him easier for the foresters to track; indeed, the forest is so open, and Johnie so conspicuous, that the first person to spot him is a “silly auld man” out for a walk, who then points the foresters in the right direction. Meanwhile, Johnie sleeps the May morning away in the forest by a stream—a time and place that opens Robin’s adventures in outlaw ballads and acts as the threshold between reality and dream in other ballad traditions. Yet here, it signals the closing of Johnie’s story and the intrusion of reality on Johnie’s dreams of glory. The royal foresters attack Johnie while he is still sleeping. This particular ballad borrows strikingly from the Robin Hood tradition as Johnie, in his final moments, emulates the famous outlaw: “Johnie’s set his back against an aik, His fute against a stane,

132  Marybeth Ruether-Wu And he has slain the Seven Foresters, He has slain them a’ but ane.”24 [Johnie’s set his back against an oak, His foot against a stone, And he has slain the Seven Foresters, He has slain them all but one.] The verse shares stock phrases with Robin and the Bishop of Hereford, an early modern ballad first attested in the 1670s:25 “Then Robin set his back against a tree,/And his foot against a thorn …”26 However, while Robin’s horn summons “threescore and ten of bold Robin’s men,”27 Johnie alone disregarded the rumored patrol of foresters. Johnie’s defiance is brave but stupid, and his story is both an encomium to outlaw ideals and an admonition to poach prudently.

Blood as Water/Drinking Blood The effectiveness of the Greenwood tropes in Johnie o’Braidiesleys lies with the sense of admiration and tragedy the ballad has for its hero, an outnumbered outlaw ambushed by the force of the law. Border ballads deployed the Greenwood tropes with equal enthusiasm, however, in their portrayal of organized border raids and generational feuds. Because English and Scottish administrators upheld two competing systems of law, the matter of the Greenwood could absorb the actions of landed border magnates as though they were latter-day Robin Hoods— and not without some justification. 28 The ballad Kinmont Willie, for example, commemorates the night when a Scottish warden led a band of retainers and outlaws across the border to break an infamous thief out of an English prison. 29 Though the hero and villain of the escape are both wardens, Kinmont Willie stages a familiar conflict between inflexible officials and disenfranchised locals over the enforcement of iniquitous laws. And yet even in its close adherence to and delight in Greenwood tropes, Kinmont Willie must acknowledge that its hero has the same kind of resources as Willie’s captors; he regrets that there is no war between England and Scotland at present, so he cannot burn Carlisle to the ground and “sloken it with English blood” [soak it with English blood].30 The Greenwood, which throughout Robin Hood tales simultaneously rejects and emulates the Crown’s hierarchical structures, makes legible the warden’s simultaneous rejection of the law that condemned Willie for his actions and his conviction that Willie’s captors must be punished for theirs. Such ballads figure a viable, if precarious, community beyond the violence of the king’s law—one which must resort to violence in order to sustain itself, until feuding violence becomes so ritualized and excessive that the Greenwood reproduces the bloodshed it

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 133 seeks to escape: “If ye like na my visit in merry England,” one warden goads the other, “In fair Scotland come visit me!”31 Where border ballads preserve multiple incompatible accounts of a single feud, Greenwood tropes can arbitrate competing perspectives on how land can and should be used to meet a community’s needs.32 To that end, it is also a tool with which borderers interpreted AngloScottish warfare in terms of local interests. Two ballads (each with two or more extant variants), The Battle of Otterburn and The Hunting of the Cheviot, commemorate the bloodshed that took place in August of 1388, when James Douglas, 2nd Earl of Douglas and Mar, led Scottish forces on a raid of the holdings of Henry “Harry Hotspur” Percy, son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland.33 The ballads’ focus on border family feuding and outlaw escapades pares down the international conflict to competing borderer perspectives, Douglas and Percy. From the outset of The Battle of Otterburn, the earlier of the two ballads, 34 the central metaphor of the hunt is complicated by the incompatible landscape and needs of the hunters. The ballad opens as the “dowghtye Dowglasse bowynd hym to ryde,/In Ynglond to take a praye” [the doughty Douglas swore to ride/In England to take prey], except we are not in the summer shaws of the Greenwood but out in the fields in harvest season, “Whan husbondes wynnes ther haye” [when farmers win their hay]. 35 Even more paradoxically, another version of the ballad has “muir-men” harvesting hay on uncultivated land, in the border’s “wild, moorland country”. 36 This impossible harvest follows Douglas down into England, where the ballad shifts its focus from ostensible hunting to land waste; Douglas (along with the Gordons, Graemes, and Lindesays) carves a devastating path to Hotspur’s stronghold in Newcastle, burning fields and villages as he goes. 37 Hotspur, eager to repay the favor, challenges Douglas to wait for him at Otterburn (“Otter’s brook”), but Douglas observes rather wryly that “The Otterbourne’s a bonnie burn, ‘T is pleasant there to be, But there is naught at Otterbourne To feed my men and me.”38 For Douglas, “pleasant” is a damning description. Douglas’s concerns for his men’s provisioning stand even though the Otterburn is said to fulfill the Greenwood’s promises: at Otterburn, “The deer rins wild on hill and dale,/The birds fly wild from tree to tree; But there is neither bread nor kale/To fend my men and me.”39 Douglas’s objection draws a distinction between good hunting land—a Greenwood, filled with the birdsong that heralded Robin Hood’s return to the Greenwood in the Geste—and land that can provide real sustenance.

134  Marybeth Ruether-Wu In Otterburn, wild deer will not adequately provision Douglas’s men for even a day. To a hungry army, there is little difference between the Greenwood and a wasteland—although, inevitably, when the Scots arrive at Otterburn, they find themselves pitching camp not on a pleasant field but “upon the bent (course grass) sae brown.”40 Yet Douglas’s recent efforts to lay England’s pastures to waste, and the uncultivated “muirs” on which the ballad opened, frame his avowed preference for agricultural products. Douglas himself is no farmer: instead, he poses reiving as another way to work the land. If Douglas and his men neither hunt nor farm for their sustenance, then the implication must be that they will pay for their bread with the spoils of war. Stripped of its idealized qualities, the borderers’ Greenwood exposes the uncomfortable fact that trees and deer do not sustain outlaw communities—blood does. While honest about the physical demands and consequences of living in outlaw territory, Otterburn romanticizes the blood feud and reframes the feuding families’ actions in chivalric terms. Hotspur, having failed to protect Newcastle, declares that “For the trespasse thow hast me done,/The tone of vs schall dye”[For the injury you have done to me/The two of us shall die] and Douglas immediately agrees: “Where schall I byde the?” [Where shall I wait for you?]. 41 Despite his concerns for his raiders’ provisioning, Douglas pledges to wait for Hotspur and provide an opportunity for fair retribution. The borderers’ word and their bodies are inextricable, and their word binds their bodies to the land even more powerfully than the need for meat or harvests. “‘Ther schall I byde the,’ sayd the Dowglas, ‘By the fayth of my bodye:’” [“There shall I wait for you,” said the Douglas, “By the faith of my body:”] and he does.42 Hotspur makes clear that their oaths are enacted through their bodies with an act of shared ritual consumption: “A pype of wyne he gaue them over the walles,/For soth as I yow saye;/Ther he mayd the Dowglasse drynke,/And all hys ost that daye” [A cask of wine he gave them over the walls,/In truth as I say to you;/There he made the Douglas drink,/And all his host that day].43 Strikingly, Hotspur supplies a full “pype,” roughly the equivalent of four barrels,44 so that every man present will drink the wine. The oath is never limited to two charismatic figures; it encompasses everybody with them. Even as their shared consumption binds the army together, it reminds us that the army is made of individuals. Douglas’s men each drink their own death. Rather than the celebratory carouse it might be, the wine instead evokes blood, and as it fills their bellies, it seems inevitable that it will burst back out, unnaturally, at the end of a sword. When it does, the land inverts the parasitism of Robin Hood’s Greenwood and conducts the feast that the reivers did not. Like the outlaw poacher, the Otterburn indiscriminately drinks the blood of excess slaughter. Bound by their

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 135 oath and their drink, Hotspur arrives at Otterburn in time to trade blows with Douglas; their duel alone causes blood to run on the brown grass “like raine”45 in a grim parody of fertility. Mortally wounded, Douglas begs his nephew Hugh Montgomery to hide his body so that his “merrie men” do not see it. The land only begins to show signs of growth after it has begun to feast, as Douglas directs Montgomery to “hide me by the braken-bush,/That grows on yonder lilye lee” [hide me by the ferns,/That grow on that fair meadow].46 The shelter that the field could not provide Douglas’s men, it narrowly provides Douglas’s corpse. The concealment allows the battle to continue, soaking both the ground and the combatants in sprays of blood, as thousands of knights and common soldiers “were slayne in the fylde” [were slain in the field].47 As Douglas predicted, the Greenwood could provide his men neither food nor shelter; but it provides just enough cover to incorporate their bodies. Having at last subdued his English rival, Hugh Montgomery tragicomically demands that Hotspur submit his surrender to the fern concealing Douglas: “Thou shalt not yield to lord nor loun,/Nor yet shalt thou yield to me;/But yield thee to the braken-bush,/That grows upon yon lilye lee” [You shall not yield to lord or knave,/Nor shall you yield to me;/But yield you to the ferns,/That grow on that fair meadow].48 Mistaking Montgomery for a churl and outraged by his bizarre demand, Hotspur objects: “I will not yield to a braken-bush, Nor yet will I yield to a brier; But I would yield to Earl Douglas, Or sir Hugh the Montgomery, if he were here.”49 The fight to seize land has rendered Douglas a part of it; and Hotspur’s failure to recognize his foe in the greenery is a culmination of his misreading of the Greenwood. Realizing at last his gaffe, Hotspur “f[alls] low on his knee”50 before Montgomery and the fateful ferns. This moment, gleefully absurd though it is, is still poignant. If the Otterburn cannot feed them, yet they can feed the Otterburn: and it has a hunger that can never be met and a body that never benefits from feasting. The lines between water and blood are just as troubled in The Hunting of the Cheviot: “O Christ! it was great greeue (grief) to see,” the narrator of The Hunting of the Cheviot cries, “… how the blood out of their brests/did gush like water cleare.”51 At the ballad’s opening, Percy (here, the aggressor) declares his intention to kill and carry off the “fattiste hartes in all Cheviat,”52 as if Douglas himself were one of the deer the archers will hunt. The Hunting of the Cheviot reimagines the subsequent bloodshed as a defiant hunt that Hotspur and his archers illegally hold on Douglas’s parkland, a shift that moves the

136  Marybeth Ruether-Wu story even more closely into alignment with Greenwood tropes. 53 The shift in space and genre changes the nature of the power exchanges that ensue. In the romantic mode of Otterburn, for instance, Douglas dies in close combat; and although perforated in four places by spears, he lingers, imparting instructions to his noble nephew, for over eight verses. But the Hunting cannot allow Hotspur to duel Douglas as a knight, having cast Hotspur in the role of outlaw-poacher and Douglas as a land-hoarding tyrant. Instead, the Hunting short-circuits their incipient duel with an impersonal arrow, sent “forthe off a myghttë”54 but anonymous archer. Though it sounds plausible, the anonymous archer is a literary fiction that brings Douglas’s death into line with Greenwood logic. Contemporary chronicles agree that (disastrously) no English bowmen participated in the fight because the battle took place at night. 55 Longbowmen formed the backbone of English military success, but they seldom feature prominently in the literary death of a knight, particularly in romances, including Otterburn’s rejected Greenwood. In the Hunting, Douglas is killed with the same abrupt, pragmatic brutality that Richard Firth Green finds in the Robin Hood ballads, taking a certain grim pleasure from the anonymous nature of death by bowman, a method which puts powerful men down like animals. 56 As the ballad closes, its narrator’s perspective noticeably departs from the kings’, showcasing how the ballads enable the borderers to define and remember themselves. The ballad-singer laments of Douglas and Percy that “Towe bettar captayns wear nat in Cristiant/then that day slan wear ther” [Two better captains were not in Christendom/than were slain there that day]. 57 However, when news of Percy’s death reaches his king, Edward58 is regretful but observes that “I trust I haue within my realme/fiue hundred as good as hee.”59 The king’s cold reckoning of the economics of violence is pragmatic; to a king, a hero—a thinking, bleeding man of principle—will never be worth more than an army. Unlike the borderers, sovereignty does not see or value the individual. In the course of the king’s vengeance at “Humble-down,” among those “of small account,/did many hundreds dye” [of little worth/did many hundreds die].60 By contrast, the Hunting dedicates seven stanzas to remembering the names of men killed at Otterburn; in doing so, the ballad preserves both the memory of these individuals and the feud that led to their deaths.

Dangerous Game The fundamental link between identity and violence can threaten the integrity of the individual and community in even deeper ways, by transforming men into meat. Famously, Old English law codes call the outlaw the wulfes heáfod, the wolf’s head, a metaphor that has since become

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 137 entrenched in the way we imagine the outlaw. Of the outlaw-wolf, Giorgio Agamben argues that “[t]he life of the bandit … [is] a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos …”61 The law sees a wolf, an animal that is always simultaneously a dangerous predator and a life anyone can end with impunity. But strikingly, there are no wolves in outlaw ballads. At the heart of many outlaw ballads are the hunter and the doe. Border ballads imagine the two as a hybrid figure in order to navigate the treacherous slippage between predator and prey, calculated violence and complete vulnerability. And the shift from a predator to a prey animal has other, more disturbing implications: unlike a wolf, a deer nourishes the community after its death. The Hunting of the Cheviot begins by proposing that people can be prey—if you entice them into the Greenwood. The English draw their true quarry into the forest by hunting Douglas’s deer par force. 62 Par force hunting entails an eight-part ritual: 1) the “quest” or “harboring” of the hart, 2) the “assembly,” or “gathering,” 3) the “relays,” 4) the “unharboring,” “finding,” or “moving,” 5) the “chase,” 6) the “death” or “baying,” 7) the “unmaking,” or “breaking,” and 8) the “curée.”63 The Hunting proceeds methodically through each step: Percy identifies “dought Dogles,” located a three-day journey away in “the mowntayns off Chyviat,” as their prey (the quest). Once Percy’s archers have assembled, “dryvars thorowe the woodees went” [drivers through the woods went] to raise the deer (assembly) and the “bomen” [archers] await them (relay) as “greahondes thorowe the grevis glent,/ for to kyll thear dear” [greyhounds through the groves flashed,/for to kill their deer]64 (the unharboring and the chase). Percy “blewe a mort” [the death] to signal the “bryttlynge (carving) off the deare” (the unmaking) only after he and his men have gathered an astonishing and excessive hundred fat harts.65 This leaves only the curée—casting meat to the dogs—to complete the ritual of the hunt par force. Right on cue, Douglas appears with his men, beginning the charnel-house slaughter of over a thousand. By postponing the battle until the curée, the Hunting avoids the implication of cannibalism while also suggesting that Douglas and his men are only fit to be eaten by dogs. The ballad’s subsequent depiction of sparring “under the Greenwood tree”66 is grotesque in the context of the death of nearly fifteen hundred Englishmen under its shade.67 The scale is proportionate to the number of deer killed; one hundred deer would have fed the 1,500 dead men for their entire three-day journey home. The equivalence of men and deer goes both ways; Percy’s archers set out to kill Douglas’s men like animals, but the Greenwood exacts its due proportionately to every deer killed. The archers’ grisly death is foreshadowed before they set out, when the poem describes them as “fifteen hondrith archares bold off blood and bone,”68 a description which

138  Marybeth Ruether-Wu speaks to their strength and worth even as it evokes a carved carcass. Our sense of their interiority as men is quite literally limited to their meat. More conventional Greenwood settings amplify rather than diminish this slippage between men and prey. Back in Johnie o’Braidiesleys, the foresters agree to shoot Johnie while he sleeps off his illegal feast. Like so many outlaw ballads, Johnie exposes the absurd tragedy of a law that bans shooting deer but sanctions shooting men. Johnie, however, resists the law that would strip him of his humanity by asserting the value of his own life; awakened by the blood in his eyes, Johnie kills all but one forester. The injuries he inflicts on the final forester echo the damage done to his bow, an extension of his body; his “gude bent bow is broke” [good tightly-strung bow is broken], the same way Johnie breaks the forester, from his ribs to collar bone, and “laod him twa-fald ower his steed” [laid him sideways over his steed] to “carry the tidings hame.”69 Both are evocative of the “breaking” of deer in the hunt and, suggestively, of the Scots term for outlaws: broken men. Johnie’s body, however, remains behind in the forest, his blood digested by the ground and incorporated into the Greenwood itself, just as he and his dogs earlier drank “sae meikle o the blude” [so much of the blood]70 that they became, figuratively, fat does for the killing. Experience taught the borderers what we must learn from their ballads: no feast is free. The outlaw must not take freely and recklessly, because the price is just as high for the things you do not need—and whatever you take, the debt may be due in blood. Luckily, the same rule applies to those who would enforce the king’s law without knowledge of or respect for border custom. The Greenwood tropes of freedom and plenty gave borderers a robust and flexible means of expressing their triumphs and privations.71 The open reckoning of a Greenwood blood economy does not preclude them from enjoying the pleasures of the hunt and the feast, despite its great cost. A popular jest has it that one sixteenth-century borderer, Mary Scott, pointedly served her outlawed husband Wat his spurs for dinner when the larder was empty.72 In its retelling over the centuries, the joke leaves Auld Wat forever poised on the edge of theft and violence, but—for the moment—sitting down for dinner with his wife and children. The borderers’ ballads are aware of the vulnerability and toil of outlaw life, and they express a very real fear of being consumed by violence—a fear that they will become the doe and not the hunter, better able to nourish someone else’s family after death than they are able to provide for their own. The ballads that they sang to remember one another’s names ensured that border outlaws could not be completely stripped of their humanity or consumed beyond recognition because of the ballads they sang to remember one another’s names. Their bodies absorbed by the trees and the ferns, the Greenwood leads us to Johnie o’Braidiesleys and Douglas and his men to this day.

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Notes 1. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, eds., Wynkyn de Worde edition of A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600 (Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS, 2013), VII.1528, 1530. 2. William Shakespeare, As You like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 2.5:37–39. 3. Alice Furlong, “On Woods,” The Irish Monthly: 42.488 (1914): 76. 4. Border ballads participated in the blood economy they described by preserving and perpetuating blood feuds. See, for example, Edward J. Cowan’s claim that riding ballads “have a propaganda function for they were intended to actually advance and foment the very feuds which they described.” Cowan, “Sex and Violence in the Scottish Ballads,” in The Ballad in Scottish History (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 98. See also: Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud In Scotland, 1573–1625: Violence, Justice, and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1986). 5. As Kaye McAlpine observed, ballads “concerning the Border reivers have some of the strongest links with recorded incidents and people, both in terms of the ballad tales themselves and also the singers of the ballads.” Kaye McAlpine, “Proude Armstrongs and Border Rogues: History in ‘Kinmont Willie’, ‘Jock o the Side’ and ‘Archie o Cawfield’ in The Ballad in Scottish History (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 73. 6. Though many of the ballads were recorded only in later centuries, some, like The Battle of Otterburn, seem to derive from an oral tradition as early as c.1400, contemporary with the Geste of Robyn Hode. Strikingly, many border ballads which were not recorded until the 18th century depict the Borders as they existed prior to the “pacification” of the Borders in the early 17th century. Even in cases where the ballads themselves may have been composed later, these ballad formulas helped ensure the preservation of a uniquely borderer worldview centuries after the destruction of their “Greenwood.” 7. Thomas H. Ohlgren, Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2005), 424. Notably, Robin Hood pageants were popular in Scotland up through the end of the sixteenth century. Several scholars have laid down useful groundwork for connecting border ballads to the Anglophone outlaw tradition. After her contribution to The Ballad in Scottish History, Kaye McAlpine usefully tabulates tropes shared by Kinmont Willie and Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley, though she does not explore these connections herself. See: McAlpine, “Proude Armstrongs and Border Rogues”, 91. Joseph Taylor looks to the Border but not the Border ballads in “‘Me longeth sore to Bernysdale’: Centralization, Resistance, and the Bare Life of the Greenwood in A Gest of Robyn Hode,” Modern Philology 110:3 (2013), 313–339. In his chapter “The Literature of Borders” in Outlawry in Medieval Literature, Timothy S. Jones uses the term “border” much more broadly than I will here. The majority of Jones’s focus on “border” literature falls on the Anglo-Saxon outlaw Hereward the Wake, where the border in question is primarily the imagined temporal divide between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England. Additionally, scholars like Jones and Ohlgren have looked beyond the Borders to John Barbour’s Brus (c. 1375) and Blind Hary’s The Wallace (c. 1480), both long narrative poems which

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draw on outlaw tropes to celebrate Scottish national heroes Robert the Bruce and William Wallace and to promote Scottish sovereignty from the English. 8. Walter Scheps finds that Blind Hary’s familiarity with the Matter of the Greenwood “is indicated by his use of the Greenwood theme, the descriptions of archery, the disguises—especially the potter—and other narrative and verbal echoes.” See: the introduction to “From the Acts and Deeds of William Wallace” in Ohlgren, Medieval Outlaws, 424. 9. Richard Firth Green, “Violence in the Early Robin Hood Poems,” in Oren Falk et al, ed., A Great Effusion of Blood? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 276. 10. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, eds., “Robin Hood and the Monk,” in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600 (Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS, 2013), 1; 7–8. 11. Ohlgren and Matheson, A Lytell Geste, 1489–90. 12. Ibid., 1533, 1552. 13. See: Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1986). Nearly half of the Scottish conflicts Keith Brown identifies as feuds between 1573 and 1625 lasted longer than a year. Of those, 18.6% of all feuds were conducted over the course of one or more decades. 14. For the eventual pacification of the Borders, see: James Reed, The Border Ballads (Stocksfield: Spredden Press, 1991), 10. 15. John Leslie, The Historie of Scotland Wrytten, trans. Father James Dalrymple, ed. Rev. Father E. G. Cody and William Murison (Edinburgh and London: The Society by W. Blackwood and Sons, 1888), 97. 16. Ibid., 97. 17. John M. Gilbert, Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979), 238–239. 18. William Weaver Tomlinson, Tomlinson’s Comprehensive Guide to Northumberland: A Reprint of the 11th Ed. of Comprehensive Guide to the County of Northumberland (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969), 481. 19. Robin Hood’s Greenwood is not, even when tenuously attached to a “real” location like Barnsdale, a “real” place. The multiplicity of potential Barnsdales, and the fact that contemporaries cared far less about determining where Robin was “really” from than modern scholars do—the Geste slips unconcernedly and nonsensically across the region—is a case in point. Robin Hood’s sphere of operation is just as diffuse as the ballads themselves. The Greenwood is in no place: it is a space, a collection of spatial practices repeated and ritualized across any place through which he (and his men) may move. Though the Greenwood is devoid of geographical coherence, the way the outlaws relate to its space, and to each other within its space, is consistent. Anywhere in the Greenwood, Robin Hood can 1) plant his foot, 2) blow his horn, 3) instantly materialize the men dispersed throughout the Greenwood, 4) enact a truth trial, and 5) share a feast under the trystell tree. The trystell tree is a fixed point, reached not by any one past but by repeated gestures (to wit, steps 1–5). Distance and physical obstacles only become an issue when Robin or one of his men leave the forest. 20. John Leslie, Historie of Scotland, 99. Emphasis mine. 21. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. III (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1883), 114F. 41–2.

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 141 22. Ibid., 114A.4 4; also B.24 (“Linkum green”), C.21 (“Lincum green”), and G.24 (“licht Lincoln green”). 23. Ibid., 114G. 53–4. 24. Ibid., 114F.171–4. 25. An early version of this ballad is preserved in the Forresters MS (c. 1670), though Stephen Knight suggests that it was composed even earlier. See: “Robin Hood and the Bishop” in Stephen Knight, ed., Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, British Library Additional MS 71158 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 39. 26. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III. 144A.111–2 . 27. Ibid., 144A.113. 28. Brown, Bloodfeud, 20. In this, they partially reflected the reality of life in the borders, where even in times of peace the majority of Border lords kept a band of outlaws in their employ. 29. Kaye McAlpine, “Proude Armstrongs and Border Rogues”, 75–76. 30. Lyle, “Kinmont Willie,” 142 . 31. “Kinmont Willie,” in Emily Lyle, Scottish Ballads (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1994), 443–4. 32. Perhaps significant to his depiction in The Hunting of the Cheviot as a pseudo-Outlaw King, Harry Hotspur was something of a career rebel whose primary loyalty was to his own best interests. In 1399 he helped Henry Bolingbroke seize the throne from Richard II; in 1403 he rebelled in turn against Henry IV and was killed in battle by Henry’s forces. 33. Like many of the major Border ballads, the events are corroborated in medieval chronicles, significantly by Froissart, Fordun, and Andrew of Wyntoun, which suggests that Otterburn and/or The Hunting existed in some form by the late Middle Ages. The basic facts are these: in one of several coordinated Scottish incursions across the border, Douglas and his troops laid waste to swathes of Durham and Northumberland. Hotspur’s English troops caught up with them at Otterburn Castle late in the evening, and the subsequent battle lasted into the night. Both ballads and chronicles agree that Douglas was killed, unnoticed, at some point in the darkness; nevertheless, the Scottish soundly routed the English, and Hotspur was captured and ransomed. See: Alexander Grant, “The Otterburn War from the Scottish Point of View,” in Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck, ed., War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1992) and Edward J. Cowan, “Introduction: The Hunting of the Ballad,” in The Ballad in Scottish History (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000). 34. The ballad as we have it dates from at least the mid-1500s, when it was quoted in The Complaynte of Scotland. Anthony Goodman argues persuasively, based on internal evidence, that “these later versions metamorphosed from compositions made soon after the battle,” in his introduction to War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. See also: Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol III (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1883), 292–293. For more on the proposed dating of Otterburn and The Hunting, see: Alexander Grant, James Reed, and Anthony Tuck’s contributions to War and Border Societies. See also: David C. Fowler, “‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’ and ‘The Battle of Otterburn,’” Western Folklore Vol. 25: 3 (July, 1966), 165–171. For more on the preservation of Border poetry in medieval chronicles, see: Andrew Galloway, “The Borderlands of Satire: Linked, Opposed, and Exchanged Political Poetry During the Scottish and

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English Wars of the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, ed. Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15–32. 35. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III. 161C.12–4. 36. “Muir-man,” in Dictionar o the Scots Leid. According to the DSL, “muirman” was used specifically of inhabitants of the moors along the English and Scottish border. http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/muir 37. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 161C. 31–2 . 38. Ibid., 161C.111–4. 39. Ibid., 161C.121–4. 40. Ibid., 161C.152 . 41. Ibid. 161A.123–4, 161A.131. 42. Ibid., 161A.161–2 . 43. Ibid., 161A.171–4. 44. “Pype,” DSL, http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/pipe_n_2. 45. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 161C.214. 46. Ibid., 161C.253–4. 47. Ibid., 161A.661. The sowing of fields with the Otterburn dead, unfortunately, has some basis in historical fact. In 1810 and 1877 workers clearing accumulated earth from the walls of the church of St Cuthbert in nearby Elsdon discovered tightly-packed mass graves containing hundreds of “young and middle-aged men” each. The church itself was constructed around 1400, only twelve years after the battle, and thus “the foundations of the north wall were found to be not so deeply laid as other parts of the church, the builders evidently wishing to avoid disturbing the half-decomposed bodies.” William Tomlinson, quoted in Reed, The Border Ballads, 135. 48. Ibid., 161C.321–4. 49. Ibid., 161C.331–2 . 50. Ibid., 161C.154. 51. Ibid., 162B.301,3–4. 52. Ibid., “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” 162A.21. 53. Marsden and Barlow, The Illustrated Border Ballads, 25. Anecdotal evidence from 18th century antiquarians places the supposed “Chevy Chase” near Homildon Hill, the site of a 1402 battle between Henry Percy and the 4th Earl of Douglas, and it is possible that the ballad has conflated the two battles. Geographically, the move to the Cheviots makes little sense; in its new position in the west the battle is nowhere near Douglas land. But then, the garbled sense of geography conforms to Greenwood type. In the Geste, we find Robin Hood moving between Barnesdale, Nottingham, and London in the space of hours depending on his needs. 54. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 162A.362 . 55. Ibid., 294 n. 43, 49. Child’s dry aside: “It will be remembered that the archers had no part in this fight.” See also: Colin Tyson, “The Battle: When and Where it was Fought,” in Goodman and Tuck, War and Border Societies, 82. The absence of their archers likely decided the English army’s defeat. 56. Richard Firth Green, “Violence in the Early Robin Hood Poems,” 268–286. 57. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 162A.433–4. 58. In 1388, during the Battle of Otterburn, Richard II was king of England. Henry IV was king during the Battle of Homildon Hill. One possible explanation for “Edward’s” callousness is that the ballad preserves a tradition of conflict between one of the Percies and the king of England; after

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 143









all, Hotspur rebelled against two separate kings and died not at Otterburn but rebelling against Henry IV (who he earlier had helped to overthrow Richard II). Alexander Grant notes that some versions of the Hunting name “King Harry” (Henry) instead, possibly as an attempt to rehabilitate Hotspur’s reputation after his death at Shrewsbury. See: Grant, “The Otterburn War,” 33. My theory for the otherwise inexplicable substitution of “Edward” is simple: Robin Hood ballads, most prominently the Geste, also operate under the aegis of an ahistorical “King Edward.” 59. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 162B.603–4. 60. Ibid., 162B.631–2 . 61. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 105. 62. Hunting par force was a serious undertaking involving running or scenting hounds, and a large hunting party and supporting staff. It was, as John Gilbert writes, “the classic of medieval hunting.” Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland, 57. 63. John Cummins, The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2003), 32–46. 64. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 162A.51,2 , 62–4. 65. Ibid., 162A.81,4. 66. Ibid., 162B.54 4. 67. Gilbert, Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland, 59−60. Suggestively, there are no extant references to par force hunting in Scotland, despite its popularity and precedence in the rest of Europe. The Normans brought par force hunting to England, where it was extremely popular. It may not be a stretch to say that contemporary audiences would have recognized this depiction of par force hunting as particularly, even aggressively, English. 68. Child, Popular Ballads Vol. III, 162A.33. 69. Ibid., 114F.251, 114F.183–4. 70. Ibid., 114D.92 . 71. These depictions also suggest that scholars ought to take a second look at the seemingly unironic portrayals of Greenwood bounty in the English tradition. Perhaps Robin Hood’s merry men, sometimes puzzlingly clad not in green but all in red, have been wearing the Greenwood’s true livery all along. 72. Robert Borland, Border Raids and Reivers (Dumfries: T. Fraser, 1898), 248.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Brown, Keith M. Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573−1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1986. Bruce, Mark P., and Katherine H. Terrell. The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300−1600. The New Middle Ages 154. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol I-V. Boston and New York: Houghton, 1883. Cummins, John. The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2003.

144  Marybeth Ruether-Wu Galloway, Andrew. “The Borderlands of Satire: Linked, Opposed, and Exchanged Political Poetry During the Scottish and English Wars of the Early Fourteenth Century.” In The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300−1600, edited by Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrel, 15–32. The New Middle Ages 154. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gilbert, John M. Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland. Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1979. Goodman, Anthony, and Anthony Tuck. War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1992. Grant, Alexander. “The Otterburn War from the Scottish Point of View.” In War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, edited by Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck. London: Routledge, 1992. Green, Richard Firth. “Violence in the Early Robin Hood Poems.” In A Great Effusion of Blood?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, edited by Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, 268–286. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Groundwater, Anna. The Scottish Middle March 1573-1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance. Studies in History New Series. London: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2010. Harlan-Haughey, Sarah. The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature: From Fen to Greenwood. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 1. New York: Routledge, 2016. Jones, Timothy S. Outlawry in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages 129. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, British Library Additional MS 71158. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998. Knight, Stephen T, Thomas H. Ohlgren, and Thomas E. Kelly. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Leeson, Peter. “Laws of Lawlessness.” The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (June 2009): 471–503. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/592003 Leslie, John, James Dalrymple, E.G Cody, and William Murison. The Historie of Scotland Wrytten First In Latin by the Most Reuerend and Worthy Jhone Leslie, Bishop of Rosse: And Translated In Scottish by Father James Dalrymple. Edinburgh and London: Printed for the Society by W. Blackwood and sons, 1888. Marsden, John, and Nic Barlow. The Illustrated Border Ballads: The AngloScottish Frontier. 1st University of Texas Press ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. McAlpine, Kaye. “Proude Armstrongs and Border Rogues: History in ‘Kinmont Willie’, ‘Jock o the Side’ and ‘Archie o Cawfield’.” in The Ballad in Scottish History, 73–94. East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000. Motherwell, William. Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, Vol. I. Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827. Neville, Cynthia J. Violence, Custom, and the Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Ohlgren, Thomas H. ed. Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2005.

“So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet” 145 Ohlgren, Thomas H. and Matheson, Lister M. ed. Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 428. Tempe: ACMRS, 2013. Reed, James. The Border Ballads. Stocksfield: Spredden Press, 1991. Tomlinson, William Weaver. Tomlinson’s Comprehensive Guide to Northumberland: A Reprint of the 11th Ed. of Comprehensive Guide to the County of Northumberland. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969. Wheare, Michael. “‘From Castle Hill They Came with Violence’: The Edinburgh Robin Hood Riots of 1561.” In Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern. Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun, ed. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.

8

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context Poor Knights, Disguised Kings, and Romance Parody in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode Mark Truesdale

Robin Hood seated under the forest canopy feasting on deer poached from the king has become one of the defining images of England’s most famous outlaw. The earliest reference to poaching in the Robin Hood tradition can be found in Robin Hood and the Monk (c. 1450). This tale sees Little John order the outlaws to take up their bows and “spare non of this venyson” as part of their insurgent protest against Robin’s capture, and the outlaws later celebrate Robin’s rescue and return with “pastes of venyson” [venison pasties].1 But the most detailed depictions of Robin’s poached outlaw feasting in the early tradition is found in the late fifteenth-century printing of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (c. 1495). This is generally thought to be a reworking of Robin Hood (and non-Robin Hood) tales strung together in a continuous narrative, which both Richard Tardif and Thomas Ohlgren argue was primarily formed and read by an urban yeoman artisan and mercantile class: a class whose post-Black Death rise contributed to the end of feudalism by threatening aristocratic dominance in the late medieval period. 2 The Geste abounds with images of food, including the feast of the corrupt abbot of St. Mary’s (which ends criticizing the abbot’s greed, lack of hospitality and morality), a scene in which a disguised Little John steals food from the sheriff and recruits the sheriff’s cook into the bargain, and a dinner Robin gives to a waylaid, untruthful monk of St. Mary’s, after seizing the abbey’s ill-gotten gold.3 All of these instances are politically aware, with wealthy elites portrayed as corrupt, while the yeoman outlaws seize wealth and food (and the lower classes who prepare the food in the instance of the cook) from those elites, transferring power, money, and moral authority to a yeoman-controlled Greenwood that serves as a locus of justice.4 But this chapter will focus on the Geste’s two extended outlaw feasts, first at the start of the narrative and second towards its close, bookending Robin’s trickster adventures. Both feasts and the events around them abound with moments that define Robin’s position in relation to state authority. They also create sites for generic breaches, through which images from other medieval literary traditions

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 147 directly and indirectly intermingle with the outlaw narrative, often to be (as with the Geste’s figures of authority) turned on their heads. As such, these early outlaw feasts reveal much about the medieval Robin Hood’s ability to invert and playfully disrupt, while providing valuable insights into the literary and social contexts from which the Geste emerged. As has been noted by Stephen Knight, the opening of the Geste sees Robin presented as an elevated Arthurian monarch overseeing a regal feast, before the arrival of the “poor knight” of medieval romance. 5 By contrast, the closing feast occurs during a section that closely draws on the King and Commoner tradition: fifteenth-century politicized comic tales of incognito kings encountering disgruntled, poaching commoners in the forest, that are in turn related to the “menacing testers” of the Gawain romances.6 This chapter will argue that the Geste’s literary borrowings and amalgamations possess a parodic and playfully subversive edge which is closely tied back to Robin’s feasting. Robin’s feasts in the Geste repeatedly present a meeting point between genres and social class, a site around which Robin can playfully engage with and parody conventions. These feasts appropriate both the symbols (such as aristocratic food) and the narratives of power, shifting moral authority from the aristocratic centres to the yeoman-controlled margins, perhaps reflecting the tastes and desires of its ambitious mercantile audience. A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode opens with Robin refusing to dine until “som bolde baron […] vnketh gest” or “knygot” [knight] arrives.7 As has often been noted by previous critics, Robin’s refusal to eat before a guest arrives is a clear allusion to Arthurian romance. King Arthur refusing to eat before the arrival of a guest or wonder is a recurring trope that can be found, for instance, in the romances of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in Chrétien’s Perceval.8 In borrowing this motif, the Geste aims to elevate Robin, presenting him as an Arthurian monarch. This elevation can also be seen in the way that Little John addresses Robin as “Mayster”, asking “whether we shall gone/And what lyfe we shall lede” and responding to commands with a deferential vow that Robin’s “worde shall beholde” (ll. 40–60). This deference is in stark contrast with the earlier medieval text Robin Hood and the Monk (c. 1450), where Robin’s command that Little John carry his bow is met with John’s indignant refusal: “þou shall beyre þin own” (l. 39). But the Geste’s new, unusual presentation of Robin as an outlawed Arthurian monarch prefigures the coming feast: Brede and wyne they had ynoughe, And noumbles of the dere Swannes and fesauntes they had full good, And foules of the ruere; There fayled neuer so lytell a byrde That euer was bred on brere.

148  Mark Truesdale [Bread and wine they had enough, And sweetbreads of the deer. They had fine swans and pheasants, And birds of the river; They lacked not even the smallest bird, That ever was bred on a briar.]9 (ll. 126–131) This banquet of pheasants, birds, and more significantly, swans and venison does indeed seem fit for a king, despite being incongruously provided by an outlaw. As Stephen Knight comments, “This stanza describes an aristocratic feast from high romance: the tiny birds to tempt a palate; the grand swan and pheasant to amaze and delight. Even the language has a courtly romance element.”10 This early appearance of Robin Hood’s feasting seems to be directly tied to the Geste’s parodic romance borrowing; if Robin is playing at being a romance monarch, he requires the banquet to match. Whether this game has been poached is perhaps debatable. The Geste opens in Barnsdale, which unlike Sherwood was not a royal forest (even if it was an area infamous for criminal activity). But the last fyttes of the Geste specifically emphasize that Robin does poach the king’s restricted venison in defiance of the forestry laws and the king’s authority (much to the king’s fury).11 Regardless, this royal feast seems to revel in the discrepancy between the Arthurian romance context and the figure of the outlaw. Stephen Knight has suggested that this Arthurian portrayal could be viewed as a prelude to Robin’s later conservative social elevation in the tradition: an elevation that will see him transformed from a lower class yeoman into a displaced member of the aristocracy.12 Yet in the opening lines of the Geste, Robin is still insistently described as “a good yeman” (l. 3) and “a proude outlawe” (l. 5) despite his regal appearance. It is the blurring of boundaries that appears important. Robin’s outlaw, yeoman status combines with the Arthurian literary markers and feast to create a deliberately unsettling and subversive clash of ideological signifiers to undercut these scenes. Robin resembles both a romance monarch and a thieving yeoman outlaw: at once a symbol of authority and a lawlessness that defies that same authority. Robin’s food represents a form of medieval, aspirational class fantasy that appears quite distinctive when contrasted with other literary examples of late medieval peasant feasting. It is elevated above the realistic depiction of the poor widow in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, whose modest “diete was accordant to hir cote”, consisting of “Milk and broun breed” along with “Seynd bacoun, and somtyme an ey or tweye.”13 Robin’s feasting also far outstrips the food given by the peasants to Hunger in Piers Plowman, in which Piers protests he has no money for salted bacon, eggs, or meat of any kind, instead possessing “but two grene cheses,/A few cruddes and creem and an hauer cake,/And two

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 149 loues of benes and bran.”14 But if Robin’s feast overreaches these depictions of poverty, it also lacks the fantastical escapism found in tales of the mythical Land of Cokaygne, where the commons can feast on chairs made of pies in houses made of fish, served by geese that fly in and roast themselves.15 Robin’s feast does in fact reflect a degree of historical reality, in that it follows a general cultural trend in the late medieval period that saw the commons mimicking the gentry and nobility by gradually moving “from a largely cereal based [diet], with dairy products and some pork, in the thirteenth century,” to “a much larger proportion of meat, especially fresh meat,” by the fifteenth century.16 Yet, Robin’s seemingly everyday feast in the Geste remains elevated far above that which commoners could expect, more closely resembling the food found in aristocratic estates than in the homes of the medieval peasantry.17 This was notably during a time when food was becoming increasingly tied to status amid aristocratic fears over the rising purchasing power of the lower ranks and the subsequent loss of clear, visible social divisions.18 Such appropriation of food was interpreted as a social challenge and disruption of feudalistic norms. In terms of late Middle English comic literature, an even more telling comparison can be found in The Tournament of Tottenham (c. 1450) and its continuation The Feast of Tottenham (c. 1450). In this romance parody, commoners with pots for helmets joust like knights to win the hand of the reeve’s daughter.19 After Perkyn the potter emerges victorious, they settle down to a vast feast with dishes such as “gryndulstones in gravy” [grindstones in gravy], “dongestekis in doralle” [turds in custard], and the “nedur lippe of a larke” [lower beak of a lark] “brought in a muk cart/And set befor the lorde”, while the bride dances and farts.20 This fantastical and grotesque feast parodies romance expectations, dragging high culture into the world of the low to leave it splattered with mud and excrement, but it simultaneously emphasizes the social distance between the commoners and the aristocratic culture that they fall far short of. The Geste’s romance parody could have taken a similar approach, but instead Robin does not feast on that which mockingly emphasizes the hierarchical gap between yeoman and king but on that which crosses the gap. His food is pointedly fit for a lord, or even a king. The feast works in tandem with the other regal and romance elements to depict the yeoman Robin grasping such literary narratives and culinary social markers to elevate himself. Robin is represented as a comic amalgamation of clashing signifiers, unplaceable in any fixed order (befitting his outlaw status), while usurping, undermining, and claiming for his own the romance conventions he draws on. As Melissa Ridley Elmes states in her own exploration of feasting in the Geste, Robin is presented as a polysemic character during his feast, eschewing “any effort to classify his character and, by association, his social position” and so able to make “his own way regardless of rank or situation.”21

150  Mark Truesdale This Arthurian parody and collapse of high and low can also be seen in the Geste’s outlaw oath that precedes this initial feast. In the Geste’s opening, we are told that Robin “Wolde … neuer do no company harme/ That ony woman was ynne” (l. 38–39) and instructs his men to “do no housbonde harme/That tylleth with his plough”, nor to rob any “gode yeman”, nor indeed any “knyght ne no squyer” on the provision that they “wolde be a good felawe” (ll. 50–55). Given the presence of other Arthurian signifiers in the Geste’s opening, this oath cannot help but bear a passing resemblance to the Pentecostal Oath in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur: [T]han the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys, and charged them never to do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy untho hym that askith mercy […] and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes soccour, strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, upon payne of dethe. Also, that no man take no batayles in a wrongefull quarrel for no love ne for no worldis goodis. 22 [Then the king established all the knights and gave them riches and lands and charged them never to do outrage or murder, and always to flee treason, and to give mercy … and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows succor, strengthen them in their rights, and never to rape them on pain of death. Also, that no man will ever take up arms in a wrongful quarrel for neither love nor worldly goods.] Both outlaw and Arthurian oaths emphasize the protection of women and the defenceless, affirming the oath-taker as a maintainer and source of justice. It is an allusion again seemingly designed to establish Robin as a romance king. Yet, despite their similarities, Robin’s oath also details who to rob: These bysshoppes and thyse archebysshoppes Ye shall them bete and bynde The hye sheryfe of notynghame Hym holde in your mynde This worde shall beholde sayd lytell Jhoan. [“These bishops and these archbishops, You shall them beat and bind; The high sheriff of Nottingham, Hold him in your mind.” “Your word shall be held,” said Little John.] (ll. 56–60) After presenting the outlaw Robin and his men as noble and just, the Geste takes aim at those figures of official culture who are meant to

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 151 uphold morality and justice, painting them as villains throughout the tale that follows. The world appears turned upside down, as criminal action against the state rights an already corrupt order. If Robin appears Arthurian in some respects, he is also set against official state authority, and those agents that attempt to control, restrict, or oppress his will and freedoms (those who “wolde [nat] be a good felawe”). Again, Robin is presented as both Arthurian king in some respects and a yeoman outlaw thief in others, creating a collapse and blurring of boundaries amid this regal, outlaw feast. Aristocratic medieval banquets often featured entrements between courses: diverse performances and moments of wonder that sought to surprise and instruct. 23 Christina Normore has compellingly tied these real-life entrements to the fictional intrusion of a wonder into a romance feast, such as the supernatural Green Knight bursting into King Arthur’s feast in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 24 It is telling that amid the Geste’s other borrowings of aristocratic culture, Robin’s feast features its own entrement and instructive moment of wonder in the arrival of Sir Richard at the Lee, an impoverished knight: All drery then was all his semblaunte And lytell was his pryde His one fote in the sterope stode That othere waued besyde His hode hangynge ouer his eyen two He rode in symple a ray A soryer man than he was one Rode neuer in somers day [Melancholy was his appearance, And little was his pride; His one foot in the stirrup set, The other dangled beside. His hood hung over both his eyes, He rode in simple array; A sorrier man than he was Never rode on a summer’s day.] (ll. 84–91) This is a wonderfully imagined portrait of chivalric poverty and shame, from the uncaring foot waving beside the stirrup, to the eyes hiding from the world beneath his hood, all telling of the depths into which this knight has fallen. The contrast between the regal, Arthurian, yeoman outlaw waiting at the head of a lavish banquet amid his obedient men, to this impoverished, isolated, and dejected knight is sharp and again pointedly inverts ordinary expectations. If Robin has risen into a romance world, then this knight appears to have fallen out of it. The wondrous element of this entrement seems designed to instruct

152  Mark Truesdale the watching diners on the fall of the chivalric age and the rise of the yeoman to power. As Stephen Knight notes, medieval audiences would have recognized in this passage the “poor knight” of medieval romance, with this depiction particularly resembling the figure of Sir Launfal. 25 In this romance tale, Sir Launfal falls into poverty and is forced to leave King Arthur’s court. Heading into the countryside or forest, he comes across a beautiful fairy lady reclining in a magnificent tent. Launfal immediately swears his love to her and in return she grants him inexhaustible wealth under oath that he will keep her a secret. Launfal returns to court in splendour but boasts that his lady is more beautiful than the queen, causing the jealous queen to order his execution unless he can prove his boast. Launfal is eventually rescued at the final hour by the arrival of his lady who whisks him away to Fairy Land. The earliest version of this tale is Marie de France’s late twelfth-century Lanval, but for our purposes the best comparison is with Thomas Chestre’s fourteenth-century Middle English version, Sir Launfal. 26 Thomas Chestre adds a significantly greater emphasis on the knight’s poverty and shame, culminating in a description of Launfal desolately riding towards the forest and suffering the added humiliation of his horse falling in the mud amid the mocking laughter of the townspeople: Launfal dyghte hys courser, Wythoute knave other squyer. He rode with lytyll pryde; His hors slod, and fel yn the fen, Wherefore hym scorned many men Abowte hym fer and wyde. 27 [Launfal harnessed his courser Without a knave or squire. He rode with little pride; His horse slid, and fell in the mud, For which many men scorned him Around him, far and wide.] There is an undeniable parallel between the descriptions of Sir Richard at the Lee and Sir Launfal here, with both embodying a desolate romance knight stripped of their wealth, followers, and pride. At his lowest point, Launfal meets a beautiful fairy maiden in the forest, who feeds him, clothes him, gives him the services of “my owen knave” (l. 327), and gifts him a magically refilling purse. In the Geste, Sir Richard similarly meets Robin Hood in the forest, who feeds him, clothes him, lends him the services of “lytell Johan my man” (l. 319), and gifts him an extortionate amount of money to repay his debts. Both knights fall under the obligation of their saviours.

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 153 However, despite these superficial similarities, Sir Launfal and the Geste contain starkly different ideological messages. Ad Putter highlights the role of the mayor and the mayor’s daughter in Sir Launfal to argue that the romance is pro-aristocratic and anti-bourgeois in outlook. During his poverty, Launfal is neglected by the mayor, his former servant, and the knight later rejects the advances of the mayor’s daughter just before meeting the fairy lady. As Putter points out: In the real world, an imprudent and impoverished gentleman like Launfal might well have had to settle for a rich merchant’s daughter, but in Sir Launfal’s world of make-believe the prospect of social compromise is happily banished by the Lady from Fairy Land … Sir Launfal, on this reading, is not so much bourgeois as violently anti-bourgeois. 28 Even if Sir Launfal seems to reflect some of the social upheavals and aristocratic anxieties of the late Middle Ages—which saw the rise of worker pay and freedoms, a break with the strict structures of feudalism, and the rising of an increasingly affluent yeoman and mercantile class all challenging aristocratic economic dominance—it still appears to be a tale that ultimately revels in aristocratic superiority. 29 The fairy element allows for an otherworldly romance escape, with the knight ultimately rising above the period’s shifting economic and social reality to denounce those social upstarts (such as the mayor) who refuse to acknowledge his innate superiority. A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode plays on this “poor knight” motif, borrowing its narrative but twisting it to place the yeoman front and centre. Sir Richard is presented as a victim of social corruption, his downfall symptomatic of the greed of the abbot and the local justice (the symbolic heads of religion and the law). Rather than turning to the chivalric court, or a more fantastical, escapist fairy mistress that allows society to be transcended and left altogether, the poor knight of the Geste must turn to the yeoman outlaw; he must look outside the law, his own class, and the feudal order when official law is corrupted and turn to a newly wealthy yeoman centre of justice and truth. In a call back to the outlaw oath, the yeoman is elevated, presented as a mercantile protector of society, intermingling with and replacing the romance knight, king, or escapist fairy, seizing, comically amalgamating and morphing recognizable romance narratives to reconfigure social expectations. This in turn speaks volumes as to the Geste’s ambitious yeoman/mercantile readership and their social and economic rise at the end of the Middle Ages. In this way, Robin earns his Arthurian portrayal and regal feast. He is being presented as a new social head, a second monarch who restores social order: a true outlaw king for a false world that has already been “tornyn[d] vp so dovne” by the actions of its leaders (to borrow a phrase from medieval complaint literature).30

154  Mark Truesdale The Geste’s second extended feast occurs during its last fyttes. “[W] onder wroth” (l. 1415) at Robin’s poaching and the lack of deer left in Plomton Park, King Edward seeks to capture and (it is strongly implied) execute the outlaw.31 Under advisement, Edward disguises himself as an abbot and heads into Sherwood Forest. He is quickly met by Robin Hood, who drags him to a feast of poached deer, which he knowingly puts on “For the loue of my kynge” (l. 1529). During this outlaw feast, Robin sets up an archery competition, misses the target, and so asks the disguised king to buffet/strike him. Edward does so, and the monarch’s true identity is revealed through the might of his arm. Edward agrees to pardon the outlaws on the condition that Robin returns with him to live in the court. Robin then dresses the king in outlaw livery and on the way back to Nottingham continues their archery contest while repeatedly buffeting the king. The townsfolk flee in terror on seeing their band approach, presuming the king to be dead. At Edward’s court, Robin loses his wealth and is filled with sorrow, complaining he is unable to eat or drink. He eventually flees back to the forest, recommences his poaching and blows his horn to summon his outlaw band. This outlaw feast again occurs during scenes lifted from a separate, if this time deeply interconnected, medieval literary tradition, whose core plot revolves around illicit, lower-class poached feasting. As Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren briefly note, and the essay in this collection by S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey explores, this section of the Geste draws heavily on the fifteenth-century King and Commoner tradition, comprising of King Edward and the Shepherd (c. 1450), John the Reeve (c. 1450), Rauf Coil3ear (Ralph the Collier) (c. 1460), The King and the Barker (c. 1468), and King Edward and the Hermit (c. 1500).32 These comic tales see an incognito king (almost always a King Edward, whether I, III, IV or, like the Geste, unnumbered) become lost in the forest, usually during a hunt, where he encounters a disgruntled commoner.33 The commoner usually complains about the oppressive and unjust court/royal officials before inviting the incognito king back to their home. There, the commoner reveals a feast of deer poached from the king’s forest and often berates or manhandles his guest. The second half sees the king invite the commoner to visit him at court. The commoner accepts and on reaching the court is treated to a second feast, during which the king’s identity is revealed. The commoner fears execution but is instead rewarded with wealth and a position in the court. These final scenes are often haunted by images of death and execution, with the commoner displaying an awareness that this reward absorbs him back into a fixed system, placing him under royal authority and so ending his defiance and illicit feasting.34 As I have argued more extensively elsewhere, the medieval King and Commoner tales set their action around poached feasting that defies traditional hierarchical boundaries and temporarily transfers authority

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 155 from king to commoner.35 The commoner’s feast pointedly rises through the social hierarchy, from initial courses of cheap bread, old salted meat, and penny ale that elicit the king’s horror, to a more aristocratic course of roasted birds, and finally to venison poached from the king. During his feasting, the commoner symbolically climbs the social ranks through the consumption and absorption of class markers to become presented as a carnival king of an upside-down world. In Rauf Coil3ear (c. 1460), Rauf emphasizes that his feast is designed “To mak me lord of my awin”, to establish autonomy and freedom from the oppressions of serfdom and violence of the king’s officials; similarly, for Adam the shepherd in King Edward and the Shepherd (c. 1450) this overreaching consumption is a politicized commoner statement that “Whatso thai have, it may be myne,/Corne and brede, ale and wyne,/And alle that may like me.”36 This feasting is given greater political import by the commoner’s explicit political complaints, which emphasize the court’s corruption and attempts to restrict commoner access to such elite food, enforcing a more class-appropriate oppressive dearth. In John the Reeve (c. 1450), John complains that as a result of the king’s statutes, he is forced to sell his wheat and dine on “Salt bacon of a yeare old,/Ale that is both sower and cold”: For I dare not eate that I gett; Therof I am full wrothe. […] For he that first starveth John de Reeve, I pray to God hee may never well cheeve, Neither on water nor land, Whether it be sheriffe of king That makes such statutinge, I outcept never a one.37 [For I dare not eat what I earn; For which, I am enraged. For he that first starves John the reeve, I pray to God he may never prosper, Neither on water nor land, Whether it is sheriff or king That makes such statutes: I exclude no one.] In King Edward and the Shepherd, the shepherd Adam complains that the king’s men have slaughtered his livestock and violently enforce oppressive forestry laws, robbing him of both food and livelihood. Rauf Coil3ear sees Rauf similarly complain of violent foresters, while the robust (Friar Tuck-esque) hermit in King Edward and the Hermit (c. 1500) complains both of violent foresters and of a court that shows a lack of charity by failing to feed the starving poor.38 All of these figures

156  Mark Truesdale defy such oppression through their poaching, using it to overleap class boundaries, disrupt hierarchical norms, and blur boundaries between commoner and king by seizing that which is forbidden, that food (especially venison) which the tales emphasize marks out an aristocrat or a monarch.39 In the process, these tales appear to echo elements of late medieval complaint literature and some of the more radical demands of the peasant revolts of the period, such as John Ball’s alleged call for “every thing [to] be common” in a land with “no villayns nor gentylmen”: “they have their wines, and spyces, and good breed and we have the drawing out of the chaffe, and drinke water.”40 The last fyttes of the Geste do not contain the overtly political complaints of the fifteenth-century King and Commoner material. However, in choosing to adapt the King and Commoner tradition and the lower-class poached feasting that forms its core, the Geste cannot help but contain traces of this feast as a political battleground between king and commoner. It is a borrowing that allows an outlaw and king to meet and interact around a feast that both claim ownership of: “[Robyn] alway slewe the kynges dere/And welt them at his wyll” (ll. 1445–1446). These characters wrestle over this marker of royal power and authority, with the Geste emphasizing Edward’s murderous anger at Robin’s poaching (“The kynge was wonder wroth with all” (l. 1415)), as well as re-emphasizing Robin’s royal appearance as the royally restricted venison is produced during his final feast (“All they kneled on theyr kne/Ful fayre before Robyn” (ll. 1539–1540)). For Robert Pogue Harrison, the royal forest, placed “outside” (foris) of ordinary society by the king’s authority, is bound up with the monarch’s identity and power: What we sometimes fail to understand, and what critics of the royal hunting privilege refused to accept, is that an essential dimension of the king’s personhood belonged to the forest. The wilderness beyond the walls of his court belonged every bit as much to his nature as the civilized world within those same walls. In that wilderness the king avidly pursues the fugitive deer in a chase that takes on the character of a sacred ritual. The hunt ritualizes and reaffirms the king’s ancient nature as civilizer and conqueror of the land. His forests are sanctuaries where the royal chase may enact, in a purely symbolic way, the historical conquest of the wilderness.41 Robin is robbing an essential, symbolic part of Edward’s kingship and personhood through his poached feasting; Robin is reconquering this unique space (that is both outside civilization and yet owned by the king and an essential part of royal power) through his defiant hunting, before consuming the deer that serves as a marker of the monarch’s authority. At the same time, as an outlaw, Robin is himself being hunted by the

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 157 king; he is (in Little John’s words) “the mayster-herte” (l. 736) whose “coloure is of grene” (l. 722), a fantastical beast to be tracked, slaughtered, and consumed, inseparably linked to the venison and greenery of the king’s forest hunting ground.42 There is slippage in this marginal world around human and animal, hunter and hunted, king and outlaw, as these two figures each wrestle to devour and absorb the other’s essence, their power and authority, by way of the richly symbolic, polysemic venison butchered on the table.43 The Geste also follows the King and Commoner tradition in its presentation of the sorrow and dearth Robin finds at court after his “promotion.” In the court scenes of King Edward and the Shepherd, Adam “clawed his hed, his hare he rent” (l. 1010) in terror, convinced of his approaching execution and furious at Edward’s betrayal of trust in exposing his secrets. In John the Reeve, John also responds to his promotion by desolately stating, “after a coller comes a rope:/I shall be hanged by the throate./Methinkes itt goeth not well” (ll. 819–822). In Rauf Coil3ear, Rauf fears the mocking laughter of the courtiers that aims to brand him a coward and make him a court fool. In each case, the commoner to some extent longs for his former freedom. In the Geste, Robin similarly reflects on his new position in the court not with joy but with sorrow: Yf I dwele lenger with the kynge Sorowe wyll me sloo … I myght neuer in this seuen nyght No tyme to slepe ne wynke Nother all these seuen dayes Nother ete ne drynke. [If I dwell any longer with the king Sorrow will kill me … I could not these seven nights Sleep a single wink, Nor in all these seven days Either eat or drink.] (ll. 1733–1746) Robin’s promotion sees the king triumph, absorbing Robin into the court and into his body politic. Here, Robin is controlled and constricted, powerless, unable to spend and live as liberally as he once did, strangled by the king’s authority and laws, and significantly unable to eat or drink. As with the King and Commoner tales, carnival and Lent are set against each other, with a life-giving forest and illegal feasting contrasted with a royal court that repeatedly restricts, threatens, and brings starvation.44 It is, therefore, significant that Robin eventually flees the court, returning to the Greenwood to summon his men, shoot one of the king’s deer, and resume his forest feast in defiance and fear of the king: “For all

158  Mark Truesdale drede of Edwarde our kynge/A gayne wolde he not goo” (ll. 1781–1782). Food is persistently placed centre table in a struggle for authority and autonomy between king and yeoman outlaw.45 The literary context for Robin’s final feast does not quite end here, but can be tentatively extended one final step further, as the Geste indirectly rubs up against another romance motif amid this second King and Commoner inspired feast. Stephen H. A. Shepherd and Glenn Wright have each pointed to the King and Commoner tradition’s close ties to the “menacing tester” of the Gawain romances.46 These romances see the court’s courtesy and morality challenged by a figure from the wilderness. The most famous example is the late fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the romance that most closely resembles the King and Commoner tradition is Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle (c. 1400). Here, Gawain, Sir Kay, and Bishop Baldwin become lost while on a hunt and take shelter at a castle improbably owned by a lower class “carl” (some versions see this carl later revealed to be a knight under an enchantment), who gives them rude hospitality and an extravagant feast. The carl has supernatural powers and sets several bizarre tasks for his guests to test their obedience, including ordering Gawain to run him through with a spear, with the threat of execution hanging over his guests if they fail to obey.47 While the King and Commoner tradition lacks supernatural elements, several of these tales nonetheless have close resonances with these menacing tester romances. Both Shepherd and Wright emphasize the “menacing tester” elements of Rauf Coil3ear, in which Rauf is depicted as a figure from the wilderness who critiques the court’s behaviour and his royal guest’s courtesy, while employing violence to enforce obedience. During his poached feast, Rauf is repeatedly angered by the incognito king’s perceived failure of courtesy and refusal to obey him, eventually punching him across the room: “Now is twyse,” said the carll, “me think thow hes forget!” He leit gyrd to the King, withoutin ony mair, And hit him under the eir with his richt hand, Quhill he stakkerit thair with all Half the breid of the hall. [“Now is twice,” said the carl, “I think he does forget!” He struck the king without any delay, And hit him under the ear with his right hand, So that the king reeled from it Across half the breadth of the hall.] (ll. 148–152) This moment can be fruitfully compared with a central motif in the menacing tester romances, in which members of the court must receive a blow from the wilderness figure. This can take the form of a potentially

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 159 mortal blow, but in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, a less deadly form can also be seen when Sir Kay and Bishop Baldwin refuse to do as the (seeming) carl commands and are also struck in retaliation for their lack of courtesy: The Carll gaffe hym seche a boffett That smertly onn the grond hym sett; In sonynge gan he lyghe. “Evyll-taught knyghttus,” the Carl gan sey; “I schall teche the or thou wend away Sum of my courttessye.” [The carl gave him such a buffet That it set him smartly on the ground; He lay in a swoon. “Evil-taught knights,” the carl then said, “I shall teach you before you wend your way Some of my courtesy.”] (ll. 325–330) In his comparison of the similarities between the menacing tester romances and Rauf Coil3ear, Wright concludes that Rauf Coil3ear “delivers the more radical and far-reaching critique, since it articulates a version of courtesy that aims … to challenge the customary complicity of courtesy itself with hierarchy and privilege.”48 This is not merely an act of churlish rudeness, or a way to allow the nobles to demonstrate their gentilesse, but establishes Rauf’s authority amid an emphasis on Charlemagne’s lack of courtesy; as Shepherd notes, Charlemagne is described as making “ane strange fair” before Rauf’s blow, indicating that “the narrator tends to ally his view with Rauf’s”.49 In Rauf’s beatings of Charlemagne, the menacing tester of romance is turned towards a wider critique of late medieval class relations and aristocratic privilege. 50 To provide one more example, John the Reeve is another King and Commoner tale with marked similarities to the menacing tester romances. While John does not punch the king for a failure of courtesy during his feast, he does critique the actions of the court, angrily berates his guests for their lack of courtesy when whispering amongst themselves, repeatedly kicks the king in the shins during a chaotic dance, and insists that his aristocratic guests obey his commands. 51 The ending of John the Reeve also bears a striking similarity to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight famously opens with the Green Knight bursting into King Arthur’s feast and demanding that a member of the court exchange deadly blows with him in a beheading game that is presented as a test of the court’s “cortaysye” and ability to hold their word/their trouthe: “I swere þe for soþe, and by my seker traweþ.”52 John the Reeve ends with John bursting into the

160  Mark Truesdale king’s hall on horseback to interrupt a court feast, braining a porter, slaughtering the king’s dogs, and plunging his pitchfork into the high table. Amid threats to “cracke thy crowne” (l. 745), John demands that King Edward hold his word and fulfil “what thou me hight/When thou were with me anight” (ll. 793–794) by not only pardoning but rewarding John’s bloody and distinctly insurgent actions. It is an act that ties up the king in obligations, publicly questioning his and by extension the court’s courtesy and honour if he does not pardon John. As the text says, John has caught Edward “checkmate” (l. 798). In this way, it acts in a similar way to the menacing tester, again testing the court’s honesty and courtesy. But transferring this romance motif into the King and Commoner tradition again changes this narrative’s ideological focus. Arguing that the Green Knight cannot be read as revolutionary, Derek Brewer comments: There is nothing popular, in the sense restricted to low-class people, about the Green Knight. He does not represent the oppressed peasantry any more than he represents nineteenth-century fantasies of vegetation gods and the survival of pagan religions.53 Charging like a knight while armed with a pitchfork (a weapon reminiscent of the period’s peasant revolts), John appears to take on elements of the Green Knight role while adapting this figure precisely for an “oppressed peasantry” in a politicized and insurgent parody of the romance menacing tester. In these King and Commoner tales, such issues of courtesy and violence become deeply politicized sites of social anxiety, reinterpreting elements of the “menacing tester” for a new age and audience. Returning to the Geste, it is possible to see elements of this menacing tester parody surfacing amid Robin Hood’s own King and Commoner feast with the disguised King Edward. Robin, a wilderness figure, seems able to command his royal guest, and what he commands Edward to do is (as in those Gawain romances) to give him a buffet (“Smyte on boldely” (l. 1607)), for which Robin will later give Edward buffets in return: “And many a buffet our kynge wan/Of Robyn hode that day” (ll. 1679–1680). Whether directly or indirectly, it is a moment that seems to contain a distant echo of the menacing tester’s beheading game, with these uncrowning blows pointedly aimed at the receiver’s “hede” (l. 1579), while testing Edward’s courtesy and willingness to obey. This is more striking when it is remembered that the Geste presents Robin as something of a wilderness tester himself; like the Green Knight/Bertilak, Robin is a monarch of a marginal upside-down world who critiques the truthfulness and courtesy of the king’s agents and officials, in the process revealing society’s hidden corruptions. Yet, in the Geste, those corruptions are not based on romance chivalric ideals or the revelation of court

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 161 infidelity but are focussed on untrustworthy agents of authority and a yeoman resistance that persistently questions hierarchical certainties and the centres (and narratives) of official authority. Even if the Geste lacks some of the bite of the King and Commoner tales’ adaptation of the menacing tester (Edward proves his courtesy and passes Robin’s test, after all), this narrative is nonetheless once again being transposed from the aristocratic domain of chivalric romance into the world of the yeoman with disruptive effects that reformulate this romance motif. This chapter has aimed to show that the context surrounding these early depictions of Robin Hood’s feasting is complex. The Geste’s feasts open generic breaches through which the Robin Hood tradition can interact with the “poor knight” of romance, fellow “matter of the Greenwood” in the King and Commoner tales, and perhaps even the “menacing tester” of the Gawain romances. The Geste was formed amid the backdrop of a literate urban print culture that commonly reproduced popular romances and the Geste clearly engages with that culture to reposition the late medieval Robin Hood tradition.54 The result does not simply see Robin Hood becoming “gentrified” amid these feasts, but engages with and claims ownership of the narratives and signifiers of authority, remodelling them to depict the yeoman and merchant as the new symbols of justice and authority. In this way, the Geste’s extravagant feasts speak to the social anxieties and upheavals of the late medieval period, of the breakdown of old certainties. It indicates that such markers of power are no longer under the sole ownership of the aristocratic elite but have been claimed by a new class, one that, like the outlaw, is free from the constraint of feudalism. This appropriation and refashioning of old-world aristocratic markers and narratives of power would have spoken to an ambitious, urban, mercantile yeoman class, who perhaps saw in Robin Hood a hero who breaks with strict hierarchical boundaries to herald in the rise of a new yeoman power. Like Robin at his forest banquet table, this audience sought to consume and absorb everything they desired.

Notes 1. Robin Hood and the Monk, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, edited by Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister Matheson (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 3–17 (ll. 145, 324). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 2. On the Geste’s potential formulation, see: Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 75–76. On the Geste’s mercantile audience, see: Thomas H. Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560, Texts, Contexts, and Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 133–182; Thomas H. Ohlgren, “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression,

162  Mark Truesdale













and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 175–190; Richard Tardif, “The ‘Mistery’ of Robin Hood: A New Social Context for the Texts”, in Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, ed. Stephen Knight and S. N. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1983), 130–145. Also see: Dean A. Hoffman, “‘I wyll be thy true servaunte / And trewely serve thee’: Guildhall Minstrelsy in the Gest of Robyn Hode,” The Drama Review, 49.2 (2005), 119–34 (esp. 131–132). For the rise of commoner and mercantile class socio-economic power in the late Middle Ages, see: Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London; New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), 305–327 and Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 265–297. 3. The references to food are in fact so frequent that Dean Hoffman has built on Thomas Ohlgren’s proposition that the Geste may have been initially commissioned for a Drapers Company of London banquet to claim that the Geste’s steady references to food may have been designed to coincide with the multiple courses served during such a banquet. Hoffman, “‘I wyll be thy true servaunte / And trewley serve thee’, 119–134. 4. See Sherron Lux’s chapter in this volume for more on these feasts and their presentation of the outlaw’s courtesy. 5. Stephen Knight draws brief contrasts between the knight in the Geste and both Sir Launfal and Gamelyn. Stephen Knight, Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 65–67, 69. 6. This tradition is also variously referred to as the “King in Disguise” or “King and Subject” tradition. 7. Wynklyn de Worde Edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 89–147 (ll. 23–6). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 8. “[Arthure] wolde neuer ete / Vpon such a dere day er hym deuised were / Of sum auenturus þyng an vncouþ tale / Of sum mayn meruayle, þat he my3t trawe”. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Revised Edition, ed. and trans. W. R. J. Barron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), ll. 91–94. “‘Kay,’ said the king, ‘leave me be, for I swear by the eyes in my head that I’ll not partake of food on such a great feast, whether I am holding high court of not, until some worthy news comes to my court.’” Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail (Perceval), in Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 381–494 (416). 9. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 10. Stephen Knight, “Feasts in the Forest,” in Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, eds. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong. Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures 24 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 161–175 (168). Sherron Lux’s essay in this volume examines more details on this socially elevated cuisine. 11. A reference to Barnsdale from 1306 records it as being an area especially dangerous for travellers. See: J. C. Holt, Robin Hood: Revised and Enlarged Edition (London Thames and Hudson, 1991), 52.

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 163 12. Stephen Knight argues that romance elements in the tale mean “it is time for the Gest to step into the gentrifying light and be contrasted to the preceding (and often succeeding) fully yeomanesque version of the English outlaw.” Knight, Reading Robin Hood, 56. 13. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 253–261 (ll. 2836–45). 14. William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, 4th Edition, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), Passus VI, ll. 282−287. 15. For the Middle English version, see: The Land of Cokaygne, in Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 121–127. For medieval Dutch versions and a critical discussion of the tale, see: Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 16. C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1999), 133. 17. Ibid., 111–135. 18. “Food had always served as a marker of status, but this trend strengthened during the later middle ages as the aristocracy searched for ways to distinguish themselves from the rising bourgeoisie.” Maryanne Kowaleski, “A Consumer Economy,” in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238–259, at 244. 19. The Tournament of Tottenham, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), 189–195. 20. The Feast of Tottenham, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), 205– 208 (ll. 28−92). 21. Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016), 19–30, at 19–21. 22. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), 97. 23. Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 21–43. 24. Ibid., 131–163. 25. Knight, Reading Robin Hood, 65–66. 26. Marie de France, “Sir Lanval,” in The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Claire M. Waters (Peterborough: Broadview, 2018), 162–195. 27. Thomas Chestre, “Sir Launfal,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 210–239 (ll. 211–216). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 28. Ad Putter, “Arthurian Romance in English Popular Tradition: Sir Percyvell of Gales, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal”, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. Helen Futon (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 235–251, at 246. 29. For a reading that focuses on the influence of the social upheavals of the period in this tale, see: A. J. Bliss, “Introduction”, in Sir Launfal, ed. A. J. Bliss (London; Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1960), 1–46 (42).

164  Mark Truesdale 30. The World Upside Down, in Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Russell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 150–152 (l. 43). 31. King Edward certainly voices his desire to “smyte of the […] hede” of Sir Richard for helping Robin’s most recent escape and so enabling Robin’s continued poaching (l. 1419). 32. Although it should be noted that The King and the Barker is a very different text ideologically to its fellows. For more on these texts, see: Mark Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 14–117; Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 78; Knight, Reading Robin Hood, 68–69; Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 148–149. 33. This is almost certainly why the king in the Geste is named Edward. That the specific Edward is changeable and seemingly frequently irrelevant is a detail conveniently often overlooked by most historians trying to hunt down a “real Robin Hood” while using the Geste’s monarch as a key source. 34. For more on these troubled endings, see: Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 34–40, 74–77, 95–98. 35. See: Chapters 1–3 in Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 14–117. Also see: Mark Truesdale, “Robin Hood and the King and Commoner Tradition: ‘The best archer of ilkon, / I durst mete hym with a stone’”, in Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Canon, ed. Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 69−88. 36. Ralph the Collier, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), 166– 204 (l. 128). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. King Edward and the Shepherd, in Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 145−186 (ll. 441–443). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. On my disagreement over Furrow’s (re) dating of King Edward and the Shepherd, see: Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 16–17. 37. John the Reeve, in Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 190–221 (ll. 139–156). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 38. Indeed, King Edward and the Hermit’s drunken, poaching and politicized hermit would later be combined with the fighting friar of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar to form the foundation for Walter Scott’s hugely influential portrayal of Friar Tuck in Ivanhoe (1820). The King and the Hermit, in Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 224–243 (ll. 409–417). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Penguin, 2012), 180–200, 220–228. 39. Peasant poachers were common in royal forests, killing not for sport but for subsistence and survival under the threat of fines or even death. But venison did not lose its significance amongst even regular poachers. Jean Birrell states: “Venison must always have been a welcome addition to a poor man’s table, but, like their social superiors, peasants had a sense of occasion, and felt that fresh venison added a lustre to their festive meals. Often, a deer was hunted with a specific celebratory meal in mind.” Jean Birrell, “Peasant Deer Poachers in the Medieval Forest,” in Progress and

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 165















Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 68–88, at 84. 40. Jean Froissart, The Chronicle of Jean Froissart 1523–25, Vol. III, trans. Sir John Bourchier and Lord Berners (London: David Nutt, 1901), 224. For more details on these potential connections with medieval complaint and insurgent literature, see: Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 28–31. 41. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 74. 42. This use of a quest to hunt a marvellous stag that usually leads to a further quest or wonder is itself a further romance motif. E.g. King Arthur chasing a hart and coming across the Questing Beast. Malory, Morte Darthur, 34–35. 43. “[Poachers] desacralized the foresta’s ‘transcendental signified’, the ‘venison’ (conceived as a metonymy of the authority uniformly embodied by the royal hunt and the law), with a spectacle of its physical vulnerability to desecrating violence.” William Perry Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 81. For related arguments regarding hunting, violence, and consumption, also see Marybeth Ruether-Wu’s chapter in this volume. 44. Find a detailed discussion of this aspect of the medieval King and Commoner tales in Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 34–40, 74–77, 95–98. 45. For an alternative reading of these texts that instead sees this opposition ultimately develop into a dialogue, bond and fellowship between monarch and subject, amid a dancing interplay of courtesy, see S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey’s excellent chapter in this volume. 46. S. H. A. Shepherd, “‘Of thy glitterand gyde have I na gle’: The Taill of Rauf Coil3ear”, Archiv für das Studium der neuern Sprachen und Literaturen, 228 (1991), 284–298. Glenn Wright, “Churl’s Courtesy: Rauf Coil3ear and its English Analogues,” Neophilologus, 85.4 (2001), 647–662. 47. Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romance and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 85–112. 48. Wright, “Churl’s Courtesy,” 658. 49. Shepherd, ‘“Of thy glitterand gyde have I na gle,’” 288. 50. This aspect is further explored in Rauf Coil3ear when Rauf challenges Sir Roland to a duel following Roland’s failure of courtesy. See: Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition, 91–95. 51. Intriguingly, John’s triumvirate of guests, a king, knight and bishop, also resemble the Carle of Carlisle’s guests, similarly consisting of Gawain, a fellow knight, and a bishop. 52. This beheading game is, of course, older still, dating back to at least the Middle Irish Feast of Bricriu (c. 1100). See: “The Feast of Bricriu”, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, 2nd ed., ed. Elisabeth Brewer (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 18–23. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ll. 263, 403. 53. Derek Brewer, “Feasts”, in A Companion to the Gawain Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 131–142, at 139. 54. As Stephen Knight comments regarding the Geste’s use of both “poor knight” and King and Commoner elements: “It is hardly possible to avoid connecting this thematic mix of nostalgia and modernity statement with the world of print, where, as is well known, the suppliers offer both a

166  Mark Truesdale wealth of now falsely conscious chivalric material and also at least some lower-level popular romance like Adam Bell, Guy of Warwick or Beves of Hamtoun, dealing with upward aspiration and resultant conflicts.” Knight, Reading Robin Hood, 69.

Bibliography Barron, W. R. J., ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Revised Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Birrell, Jean. “Peasant Deer Poachers in the Medieval Forest.” In Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, edited by Richard Britnell and John Hatcher, 68–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Brewer, Derek. “Feasts.” In A Companion to the Gawain Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 131–142. Arthurian Studies, 38 Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999. Brewer, Elisabeth, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, 2nd Edition. Arthurian Studies 27. Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edition, edited by Larry D. Benson, 253–261. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Chestre, Thomas. Sir Launfal, edited by A. J. Bliss. London; Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1960. Chrétien de Troyes. The Story of the Grail (Perceval). In Arthurian Romances, translated by William W. Kibler, 381–494. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Dyer, Christopher. Everyday Life in Medieval England. London; New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. ———. Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.” In Medieval Perspectives, Vol. 31 (2016): 19–30. Froissart, Jean. The Chronicle of Jean Froissart 1523-25, Vol. III, translated by Sir John Bourchier and Lord Berners. London: David Nutt, 1901. Furrow, Melissa, ed. Ten Bourdes. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013. Hahn, Thomas. Sir Gawain: Eleven Romance and Tales. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Hoffman, Dean A. “‘I wyll be thy true servaunte/And trewley serve thee’: Guildhall Minstrelsy in the Gest of Robyn Hode.” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2005): 119–134. Holt, J. C. Robin Hood: Revised and Enlarged Edition. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Knight, Stephen, “Feasts in the Forest.” In Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, eds. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F.  D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong, 161–175. Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures 24. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016.

Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context 167 ———. Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. ———. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Kooper, Erik, ed. Sentimental and Humorous Romances. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006. Langland, William. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, 4th Edition. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886. Laskaya, Ann, and Eve Salisbury, ed. The Middle English Breton Lays. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001. Lupack, Alan, ed. Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. Malory, Thomas. Le Morte Darthur, edited by P. J. C. Field. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. Marie de France. “Sir Lanval.” In The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation, edited and translated by Claire M. Waters, 162–195. Broadview Editions. Peterborough: Broadview, 2018. Marvin, William Perry. Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Maryanne Kowaleski. “A Consumer Economy.” In A Social History of England 1200−1500, edited by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, 238–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Normore, Christina. A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Ohlgren, Thomas H. “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode.” In Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, edited by Thomas Hahn, 175–190. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. ———. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465−1560, Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Ohlgren, Thomas H., and Lister M. Matheson, ed. Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 428. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Pleij, Herman. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. Translated by Diane Webb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Putter, Ad. “Arthurian Romance in English Popular Tradition: Sir Percyvell of Gales, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal.” In A Companion to Arthurian Literature, edited by Helen Fulton, 235–251. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Robins, Russell Hope, ed. Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. London: Penguin, 2012. Shepherd, S. H. A. “‘Of thy glitterand gyde have I na gle’: The Taill of Rauf Coil3ear.” Archiv für das Studium der neuern Sprachen und Literaturen Vol. 228 (1991): 284–298.

168  Mark Truesdale Tardif, Richard. “The ‘Mistery’ of Robin Hood: A New Social Context for the Texts.” In Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, edited by Stephen Knight and S. N. Mukherjee, 130–145. Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 1. Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1983. Truesdale, Mark. The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture. New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. ———. “Robin Hood and the King and Commoner Tradition: ‘The best archer of ilkon,/I durst mete hym with a stone’.” In Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Canon, edited by Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman, 69–88. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture. New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Woolgar, C. M. The Great Household in Late Medieval England. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1999. Wright, Glenn. “Churl’s Courtesy: Rauf Coil3ear and its English Analogues.” Neophilologus Vol. 85, No. 4 (2001): 647–662.

9

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow The Question of Courtesy in Late Medieval King and Commoner Narratives S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey

This study explores the feasting scenes in several late medieval King and Commoner narratives, wherein a disguised monarch is shown hospitality by a churl or yeoman, and the two engage in a complicated game of social negotiation through the mannered “games” of feasting, poaching, and the exchange of blows. Tales such as the Lyttel Geste of Robin Hood, King Edward and the Hermit, and Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlyle add to the ancient tale-type some new elements like mutual testing, transgression, and table-turning.1 The hosts of such tales come from a humbler class, and they display rough, distinctly uncourtly manners so that much of the humor of the tales comes from the paradoxically discourteous hospitality of the hosts as they engage in acts of feasting with their noble guests. The churl is usually a trickster figure with rough manners who puts on a show of serving simple fare and rough entertainment (often a drinking game; in the case of John the Reeve, a kicking game) until he decides to let the king in on his secret bounty and feeds him a remarkably sumptuous dinner, usually involving poached game. Contributing to the comic effect is the motif which Elizabeth Walsh calls the “courtesy lesson,” in which the churl host roughly accuses the guest of some breach of etiquette, often driving the point home with a blow. 2 In the course of the tale, some transgression on the churl’s part will come to light, often in the form of poaching, and the churl may also have unflattering remarks to make about the king, unaware of his guest’s true identity. Nevertheless, the king enjoys his brush with “churl’s courtesy” and promises to return the churl’s hospitality, usually claiming to live at court with various comic equivocations. The disguised king will then offer to return his host’s hospitality and invite him to the court, providing the opportunity for a role reversal. Where before the host occupied the position of authority, teaching the guest lessons of courtesy and requiring him to abide by the rules of the house, the king now gets a chance to put his previous host in a tight spot as the latter realizes just whom he has knocked to the floor (or kicked, or scolded) and to whom

170  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey he has revealed his poached wealth. The king will then graciously let the churl off the hook, lavishly rewarding him, usually with land and a title. While these patterns play out differently in each of these stories, the basic structure of the feast-blow paradigm is very stable. These late medieval tales are part of an intertextual conversation between the three genres of didactic courtesy manuals, King and Commoner narratives, and the Matter of the Greenwood.3 All three genres’ preoccupation with the rules of courtesy (especially table manners) and upward mobility is marked, but the connections between these three late medieval genres go even deeper. Through a close reading of intertextually-related passages, we show how the language of the Greenwood King and Commoner texts uncannily echoes that of conduct manuals like Urbanitatis, The Babees Book, and Stans Puer ad Mensam. Finally, our reading provides insight into what makes the late Middle English cluster of King and Commoner tales distinctive and how they may relate to the late-medieval popularity of courtesy texts—and have influenced in turn the burgeoning popularity of outlaw material.4 We show how the feast and game scenes in the Geste, in particular, play with the generic expectations of the well-established King and Commoner genre and the late medieval conduct manuals in an exuberant parody of both categories of didactic literature, ultimately resisting the lessons the narrative motifs were intended to teach. Instead, they move into profound explorations of what we owe one another, and the ways in which social convention and the transgression thereof can lead to a deeper understanding of others’ perspectives. 5 They also hint at the limits of such empathy. The late Middle English King and Commoner narratives differ from the ancient tale-type in many ways. They are preoccupied with social hierarchies and politics, using “explicit locations, colorful local detail, and topical allusions” to explore issues of kingship, class, and courtliness.6 They often present people from lower classes in a favorable way, stretching the limits of the traditional King and Commoner plot by portraying the “controlled equilibrium” of king-subject interactions which reveal a “tissue of interdependence.”7 They often look kindly on those who are on the upward bound; unlike earlier and continental versions of the tale which emphasize and exalt the king (or god), these late Middle English tales “[give] consideration to the uniqueness and individuality of the common man.”8 They probe the dynamics of court intrigue from many different perspectives; some King and Commoner narratives show “a repellant vista of smug aristocrats … a cabal of petty and bullying idlers inordinately gratified by their cruel diversions,” who deserve to be shaken by an intruder.9 Others indulge in extensive satire of peasant manners, a “sentimentally patronizing portrayal of a churl blundering his way amongst royalty.”10 In his essential study of the King and Commoner tradition, Mark Truesdale reads the king’s surveying of his subjects as proto-panoptical and the court scenes as disturbingly morbid, oppressive

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 171 with a sense of doom.11 This article offers another reading, perhaps the other side of the coin presented so convincingly by Truesdale, underscoring this genre as a complex one in which ambiguous and multivalent narratives allow for many successful readings. The King and Commoner narratives’ focus on a paradoxical social scene that is both reified and in constant flux is likely a result of the many social changes of the fourteenth century, which made courtesy seem like a quality available to non-nobles.12 The plagues that struck all levels of society seem to have hit hardest among the laboring classes; this led to labor shortages, an increase in wages, and overall better conditions for the surviving laborers.13 In general, the manorial holdings became less profitable for landlords, and they increasingly leased out their demesnes. This in turn meant more prosperous, land-owning peasants of the sort we encounter in the late Middle English King and Commoner tales, people who can live a comfortable and prosperous life.14 By the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the commoner was greatly changed from his earlier medieval counterpart—and the King and Commoner story provides an excellent venue for examining the changing relationship of the commoner to king, to society, and to courtliness. The social and economic changes and opportunities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries meant that courtesy and court culture were of more interest than ever to non-nobles with increased social mobility and aspirations. Courtesy manuals proliferated in the fifteenth century, and they seem to have been read not only by the royal and noble children to whom they are frequently addressed but also by humbler citizens with aspirations of upward mobility, people like the rich peasants of the King and Commoner tales.15 The audience of conduct literature was relatively broad, and increasingly so toward the later Middle Ages when they began to be written in English—courtesy books belonged to schools and monasteries, royal tutors, noble households, gentry, merchants, and masons.16 For some among this audience, these texts might have served to supply missing cultural capital.17 Courtesy often seems like a language, or at least a social dialect: one Middle English romance even makes a joke of describing it as such.18 Furthermore, as Chrétien de Troyes’s Percival would attest, the “rules” of courtesy are not to be enacted in a simple or mechanical fashion; they are, again, more like a common vocabulary to be deployed and adapted as the situation requires.19 In diverse late medieval works, characters form relationships, learn, and teach each other not only by following the precepts of courtesy but also by strategically departing from those precepts, creating alternative or subcultural versions of them, and redefining them in new contexts. Our discussion of these genres thus far assumes a distinction between conduct books and literary texts. The literary status of didactic texts (and vice versa) can be a thorny issue, and there is a certain danger in trying to neatly separate the two. It has, nevertheless, been useful to distinguish

172  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey the genre of “conduct manuals”—the “Matter of Courtesy”—as texts that hew to shared conventions and often share whole phrases, lines, or groups of lines. 20 Still, it is important to attend to how these texts converse with other types of writing as well as with each other. Thus, we focus not only on courtesy books but on literary, narrative poems that draw on or respond to the discourse of courtesy. As Rachel Snell comments in her discussion of the case of John the Reeve, “much of the action that takes place in John the Reeve’s house reads like a dramatized courtesy book, as John treats his guests in the punctilious manner detailed in manuals such as The Babees Boke and The Boke of Curtesye.”21 A glance at the contents of Ashmole 61 (c. 1500) corroborates this trend— this book, which closes with King Edward and the Hermit, opens with a series of treatises on courtesy, including Dame Courtesy, How the Good Man Taught his Son, How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter, Stans Puer ad Mensam, and John Lydgate’s Dietary. It is significant that this codex also contains the only known version of King Edward and the Hermit. One can safely observe that the compiler of this manuscript was deeply concerned with matters of courtesy, as well as with King and Commoner stories. With these contexts in mind, we approach the late Middle English King and Commoner tales by focusing on three representative texts: King Edward and the Hermit, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and A Lyttel Geste of Robyn Hode. Through an examination of these tales, we show what makes the late Middle English cluster of King and Commoner tales distinctive and how they may relate to the late medieval popularity of courtesy texts. King Edward and the Hermit features a use of courtesy that transgresses the boundaries typically set by conduct books, but which proves effective at establishing a bond between king and subject, while Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle features an example of courtesy with strong redemptive power and an extremely autonomous churl host. King Edward and the Hermit and Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlyle are not individually representative of the King and Commoner genre, but rather, they demonstrate the extent and flexibility of this taletype’s conventions. While King Edward and the Hermit is fairly typical of the genre, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle expands on the ramifications of the courtesy contest between king and commoner. After a discussion of these two more typical examples of the conventions of the late Middle English King and Commoner tales, we will show how the Geste builds on and subverts these generic conventions by expanding on the game of blows and the length of the test of courtesy, and by generally raising the stakes. It stretches the didactic message of the King and Commoner tradition to its very limit, and critiques the happy resolution offered in many other king-in-disguise stories. 22 Thus, the three samples we have selected provide a representative continuum of one of the most pervasive tale-types in late medieval England.

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 173

King Edward and the Hermit In King Edward and the Hermit, the two main characters use the conventional behavior of courtesy but also strategically transgress it through play in a way that creates intimacy and community. Though the tale begins in an atmosphere of distrust, the king and the hermit come to realize they share a code, or habitus, as they use the playing field afforded by feast and game to reach a new and more productive level of intimacy. Judging by what remains of it, King Edward and the Hermit has a structure essentially like that of the other late Middle English King and Commoner poems, and it shares many of their motifs. We will briefly discuss some of these parallels in the next two paragraphs to show how these texts are in intertextual conversation. For example, having become separated from his hunting party, King Edward seeks lodging for the night at a hermit’s house. This is a typical set-piece, as the kings in Rauf Coil3ear, King Edward and the Shepherd, and John the Reeve are all forced, like Edward, to seek shelter after becoming separated from their hunting parties, and all assume courtier personae: Charlemagne in Rauf Coil3ear is Wymond of the Wardrobe and serves the Queen, Edward in King Edward and the Shepherd pretends to be Jolly Robin, a merchant with court connections whose name also hints at the intertextual ties between the King and Commoner narratives and the Matter of the Greenwood, and John the Reeve’s King Edward claims to be a falconer at the king’s court. King Edward in the Geste pretends to be a monk—an amusing twist on the usual “courtly” personages. In King Edward and the Shepherd, the hermit gives the king very humble hospitality at first, protesting that he lives in poverty, but after deciding that Edward is a fine fellow, he entertains him with a more lavish feast of poached game. The poached dinner figures prominently in King Edward and the Hermit (as in similar tales) and constitutes the major transgression which will cause the hermit embarrassment at the king’s court. King Edward and the Shepherd also turns on the host’s provision of poached game to his guest. Rauf Coil3ear is a skilled poacher, and like the hermit, John the Reeve makes a show of poverty by serving the king simple fare before relenting and bringing out a feast of regal opulence. Other kings, too, tease out their hosts’ poaching secrets the way Edward does—the king of King Edward and the Shepherd, for instance, mounts a sustained attack of hints and flattery to uncover his host’s poaching. 23 After the poaching is discovered, a drinking game often follows. In King Edward and the Hermit, the hermit calls for drink and teaches Edward a drinking game: when one of them says the nonsense word “fustybandyas,” the other must respond, “stryke pantener.” The drinking game occurs in King Edward and the Shepherd, in which the watchwords are “passilodian” and “berafrynde,” but it also harks back to an earlier Latin example of the King and Commoner type. Gerald of Wales

174  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey tells a story in which Henry II seeks shelter at a Cistercian monastery after overzealously hunting until nightfall. The abbot (who hopes that his guest will help him out with some court business) plies the unrecognized king with drink and teaches him to say “Pril” and “Wril” instead of “Wesheil” and “Drincheil.” After returning home to the court, the king summons his former host. The abbot does not realize that the king and his guest are one and the same until the king says, “Abbas pater, dico tibi pril.”24 The pledge serves as a token of recognition, which at first rattles the humiliated abbot but which eventually brings about a convivial scene—as the drink flows, king and abbot, courtiers, and monks make the hall resound with cries of “Pril” and “Wril” so that this story ends with a feeling of carnivalesque community, of disparate groups united under a momentarily shared social code, which is echoed in the tone of King Edward and the Hermit. King Edward finds this game difficult at first and is good-naturedly derided by his host; eventually he catches on and declares that it is the best game he’s ever seen. This is a common reaction among literary kings, who seem to enjoy “slumming it” in these narratives. Quite frequently in this text (and in texts like it), both host and guest behave in such a way as to test the conventions of courtesy, as they awkwardly navigate the expectations of hospitality. These minor transgressions of courtesy—doing things the books (and social convention) say not to do—allow them to work through the tension between the impulse to conceal and the impulse to reveal, to test each other, and ultimately to form what Edward himself calls a “covenant.” What follows is an in-depth examination of the creation of this covenant in King Edward and the Hermit; while the previous paragraphs have shown how this tale has many elements in common with other King and Commoner texts, we will now dwell a bit on plot points in this particular narrative in order to establish the links between the King and Commoner tale-type and the Matter of Courtesy. In this tale, frequent references to promises, troth, and covenants signal that serious negotiations are developing beneath the banter and play.25 The courtesy manual Stans Puer ad Mensam, also found in the courtesy-conscious Ashmole 61, warns against swearing oaths and making pacts: “Ne swere thou to no man a forsuorne othe,/ For that schall be repreve and to thee non honour” (ll. 140–141).26 And this tension between unnecessary oaths, truth-telling, and concealment becomes a prominent theme in this story. King Edward promises rewards or gifts some eight times in the course of the poem, and six of those are in reference to the hermit.27 The hermit, too, has his characteristic habits of speech which betray the stakes of his interactions with Edward; he tends to speak in terms of hiding (hylling) vs. openness, of knowing his guest (as a prerequisite to trusting him), and particularly of troth, as seen in his repeated invocation of the concept of the “trew man” (see lines 252, 442, 474, and 505). Ultimately, as we will see, both actors hold in their own

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 175 way to the courtesy books’ injunction to avoid false oaths and speech and to hold to their troth, as suggested by Dame Courtesy: Make no promys bot it be gode, And kepe thou it with myght and mode, For every promys, it is dette That with no falsed muste be lette. 28 [Make no promise unless it’s good, And keep it with strength and soul For every promise is a debt That cannot be obstructed by falsehood.] (ll. 478–450)29 Though they will both ultimately prove “true,” they will transgress the rules of courtesy throughout their protracted negotiations. The hermit is at his most churlish at the beginning, when he gives hospitality only very grudgingly, all but forcing King Edward to invite himself in lest he break his neck wandering through the forest all night. He is forgetting the rule that he should share, since (as the Good Man taught his son in that eponymous courtesy manual) all is transitory in this life anyway.30 Edward must make three requests before he achieves any sort of success with the hermit.31 The hermit refuses Edward’s initial request, making much of his (fictional) poverty: I won here in wyldernes With rotys and ryndys, among wyld bestys, As it is my Lordys wylle. [I live here in the wilderness With roots and bark among the wild beasts As is my Lord’s will.] (ll. 126–128) The king then asks the way to town twice: the first time he is simply told, “Schorte servys getys thou here” (l. 139), and the second time the hermit informs him that it is five miles to the nearest town, and “a wyld wey,” prompting the king at last to insist on being sheltered (l. 147). In his behavior he is flagrantly violating Dame Courtesy’s rules of conduct toward one’s betters: Be not prowd, bot meke and kynd, And with thi better go thou behynd. When thi better schewys his wylle, To he have seyd thou muste be style. [Don’t be proud but meek and kind, And walk behind your social better. When your better makes his will known, You must be obedient to what he says.] (ll. 61–64)

176  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey The hermit’s reply is not only outright rude but suggestive of the physical violence of Rauf Coil3ear and the suspicious nature of John the Reeve in their stories: “Me thinke,” seyd the hermyte, “thou arte a stout syre. I have ete up all the hyre That ever thou gafe me. Were I oute of myn hermyte wede, Of thi fabyll I wold not dred, Thoff ther were sych thre. [“I think,” said the hermit, “you are a rogue; I have eaten up all the profit you ever gave me. If I weren’t a hermit, I wouldn’t fear your talk, Even if there were three of you!”] (ll. 153–158) He gives hospitality, he implies, only because as a hermit he cannot fight Edward off. Thus, before Edward can even get in the door, he is forced to navigate the hermit’s parries and rebuffs as best he can with fair words, promises, and at last bald insistence. In the first part of this story, the characters’ interaction is distant and evasive. The king must make three requests before the hermit even lets him in, and the latter responds to his inquiries with brusque replies and open suspicion. The volley continues once Edward penetrates the hermitage. Edward soon begins his endeavors to ferret out the hermit’s secret poaching, and the hermit carefully evades his oblique inquiries. In marked contrast to the “schorte servys” of the hermit, King Edward is “never so servysable” as he helps with the chores, and he is in general a good sport even when the hermit’s attitude is confrontational or, later, mocking (l. 177). He doggedly adheres to the enjoinment to “loke thou be servysabull at every mese” (Stans Puer, l. 150), even though he is, of course, a king. Nevertheless, Edward still engages in this text’s characteristic pattern of back-and-forth testing; in his sly attempts to uncover the truth about his host’s activities, he drops a number of unsubtle hints about the food, suggesting that the hermit might provide him with poached venison rather than bread and cheese. The king suggests that if he were a hermit, he would dine on venison; rather than giving the desired response, the hermit turns the conversation to his guest’s secrets, asking where he lives. Edward gives an evasive, if literally true, answer, saying that he lives at the king’s court; he then repeats his request for dinner, adding his second promise of a reward. The hermit seems at first to give the desired response to this promise when he says, “Thou take sych gode as we have; /We schall not hyll it with thee” (ll. 226–227). This statement, however, is just as evasive as the others, for having promised not to “hyll” (“hide”) his supply of provisions, he goes on to do just that, making a show of bringing out humble bread, cheese, and “thyn drynke” (l. 221).32 The king (rather

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 177 predictably by this point) gives another promise of reward and another series of hints that the hermit might serve him poached game instead; the hermit responds that he intends to be “trew” to the king. However useful to his purposes they may be, these sorts of hints do not fall within the bounds of courteous behavior, as Dame Courtesy reminds: With mete and drynke befor thee sette Hold thee plesyd and aske no bette … Bot prayse thi fare whersoever thou be, For be it gode or be it badde, In gud worth it muste be had. [With meat and drink set before you, Hold yourself pleased and don’t ask for more. Only praise your fare Wherever you may be, For whether it is good or bad, It must be appreciated.] (ll. 103–114) The injunction against mockery (particularly at the table) appears frequently in courtesy books. This may seem like a minor point of etiquette given the king’s situation, but it is notable that these small transgressions of courteous behavior are attempts to breach his host’s secrecy. Here we see developing the conflict between truth and a sort of lying by omission, a tension that also appears in the courtesy texts, which on the one hand, suggest one should Luke thou be trew in word and dede: In all thi werkes than schall thou spede. Treuth doyt never his master schame; It kepys hym out of synne and blame. The weys to heven, thei ben this tweyn: Mercy and treuthe, as clerkys seyn. [Make sure to be true in word and deed, And then all your works will be successful. Truth never shames his master; It keeps him out of sin and blame. The ways to heaven are these two: Mercy and Truth, as the clerks say.] (ll. 39–44) while still holding back information, lest it lead to trouble in future: Have few wordys and wysly sette, For so thou may thi worschyppe gete.33 [Use few words, and those wisely chosen, So that you can gain praise/worship.] (ll. 73–74)

178  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey Each character in this narrative is dancing between these two sets of rules for courtly behavior, and much of the poem’s dramatic tension of the work arises from this risky performance. Thus far host and guest have been making vows and swearing oaths on the truth of their asseverations, and both have been evading each other with disguises. Edward’s hinting and prodding does eventually reveal the hermit’s comfortable lifestyle—as he, himself, puts it, “Nere I had spoke of archery,/I myght have ete my bred full dryghe” (ll. 300– 301). Likewise, Edward passes the hermit’s tests, showing a willingness to play by the hermit’s rules and learn his games. In response, the hermit gradually lets the king more and more into his “privyte,” revealing to and sharing with his guest his strong drink, plentiful venison, comfortable bed, and fine bow and arrow collection (l. 454).34 Thus the relationship of hospitality between host and guest becomes more generous and more intimate as each pushes the limits of courtesy, as we will show below. A turning point occurs when the king echoes the hermit’s language of truth and hiding in making a solemn vow: Now as thou arte a trew man, If thou ought of scheting can, Ne hyll it not with thi gest. For be Hym that dyghed on tre, Ther schall no man wyte for me Whyll my lyve wyll lest. [Now, as you are a true man, If you know anything about archery, Don’t hide it from your guest, For by Him who died on a tree, I won’t get anyone in trouble as long as my life shall last.] (ll. 264–269) It would seem at first that this strategy does not lead to the expected success, for the hermit responds with another charade, his most extended description yet of his life as a simple, abstinent hermit—and yet his speech ends on a strikingly intimate, affectionate note, practically a lullaby: Warme thee wele and go to slepe And I schall lape thee with my cope, Softly to lyye.35 [Warm yourself well and go to sleep And I will wrap you in my cloak, So you lie softly.] (ll. 282–284) He then has a change of heart and wakes Edward up again to give him a fine feast of venison. The charade of eremitic poverty having come to a close, its

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 179 sequel, a night of convivial revelry, begins.36 The hermit has moved much closer to Dame Courtesy’s suggested spirit of sharing and fellowship: Sytt upryght and honestly; Ete and drinke and be felewly. Parte with hem that sytes thee by; Thus teches thee Dame Curtasy. [Sit up straight and honestly, Eat and drink and be friendly, Share with him who sits by you— Thus teaches you Dame Courtesy.] (ll. 93–96) After this radical change in their relationship, the evasive dance of the first part of the evening becomes a more playful interaction. 37 Edward laughs and teases the hermit (“The kyng made it full towghe”) as the latter begins to reveal the things that he had hidden earlier, first venison and white bread, and (after more hinting from the King) good, plentiful drink (ll. 302, 308). The hermit continues to test the king to see whether he is a “trewe man,” but the test is now couched in terms of play: The herymyte seyd, “Now schall I se If thou any felow be, Or of pley canst ought.” [The hermit sauid, “Now I will see If you are any “fellow,” Or know anything of play!”] (ll. 333–335) Then follows the drinking game of “fustybandias” and “stryke pantener.” More so than in the analogues (i.e., Gerald of Wales’s story and King Edward and the Shepherd), this game is a learning experience for the king since he does not catch on right away. As in previous exchanges with the hermit, he must make three attempts and experience failure and rebuffs before he successfully proves himself a “fellow” who knows something of play. By engaging in rough play at the table, the king and the hermit are certainly departing from courtesy’s best practices, which demand proper behavior at table. Until he can remember the nonsense words, he not only suffers the hermit’s jeers but is barred from sharing his drink. Moreover, he seems to understand the true import of the game, for he takes up the hermit’s challenge and agrees to his terms as though the two were entering into a covenant: The kyng seyd, “So mote I the, Sey thou what thou wyll wih me; Thy wyll it schall be wrought.” [The king said, “as I might thrive,

180  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey Say whatever you want to me; Your will will be done!”] (ll. 336–368) Rachel Snell speculates that a similar drinking game in the analogue King Edward and the Shepherd “may allude to the fealty pledges undertaken between a king and his subject.”38 The game seems to serve this function, or something close to it, in King Edward and the Hermit. The pledges, nonsensical on the surface, act as watchwords for the king and the hermit, serving as a reminder that the king is able and willing to learn the hermit’s set of social codes (in which it is so important to know something of play) and that the two are in on a secret together. Edward’s eventual success at the game opens the way for deeper access to the hermit’s “pryvite.” The important thing about the drinking game is that it allows courtesy to become play—and for it to create community in troth.39 They create a language in common that brings them closer, and which can be reactivated anytime they share their coded words. At the end of this “play,” the king enthusiastically promises once more to “quite” the hermit, who parries with “God quyte all” (l. 381), slyly suggesting that his guest may forget him after the night is done. This prompts a more solemn vow from the king (ll. 393–338). The hermit seems to scorn the offer of an invitation to court but in the process reveals a bit more of himself (as he boasts of his alms-taking). This prompts another veiled promise from the king. The hermit ventures to trust that his guest is a “trew man” even as he attempts to coax out more information about his identity, asking whom he should ask for at court (l. 442). Ironically, the king’s false name (“Jake Fletcher”) inspires further confidence on the part of the hermit, who is inspired to show off his archery skills now that he “knows” his guest is a fletcher: “Aryse up, Jake, and go with me, And more of my privyte Thou schall se somthyng.”40 [“Get up, Jack, and go with me, And some more of my secrets you will see.”] (ll. 453–455) Again, the two use the language of testing, truth, and covenants: “Jake, and I wyst that thou were trew, Or and I thee better knew, More thou schuldys se.” The kyng to hym grete othys swer: “The covenand we made whyle are, I wyll that it hold be.” [“Jack, if I knew you were true,

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 181 or knew you better, you would see more.” The king did swear great oaths to him: “the covenant we made a while ago, I intend to hold to.”] (ll. 474–479) The invocation of their covenant (by which the king was sworn to secrecy) leads the hermit to show “Jack” the last of his secrets, his great store of venison, and to give him the gift of the arrows. As if to further ratify their covenant, they return to their pledging game until it is time to retire to bed. The manuscript leaves off before King Edward’s mask drops, but what we have of this tale gives a fascinating glimpse of the careful dance of courtesy by which host and guest make a shared meal into a covenant and a space of intimacy, even as they manipulate their respective masks and guises. What is charming about the tale is the way the king proves willing to learn the hermit’s social code with a marvelous flexibility and receptiveness. Each figure is ultimately out of his element yet shows a blossoming openness to learning about how others live. This is touching, and it suggests the tale-teller is exploring the practical application of the dance of courtesy as laid out in the manuals—and is showing how a person who has mastered the rules can afford to break them in order to create new social configurations with transformative potential.

The Tale of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle As the previous analysis has demonstrated, the set-pieces and motifs of the King and Commoner and Greenwood narratives interact with courtesy codes in intriguing ways. The key to success in all three genres lies in remaining socially flexible and capable of adapting to others’ social codes; there is a certain humility in being a learner, in being a schoolboy (the imagined audience of courtesy books). There is even greater humility in allowing oneself to become part of a temporarily lower social order. In these stories the king can take on an almost Christlike humility in his willingness to meet his subject on the most intimate level of domesticity, and in allowing him to guide and even teach him. This occurs in the next text under consideration. If King Edward and the Hermit shows courtesy being pushed and tested to create a bond between host and guest, The Tale of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle offers a vision of the redemptive power of courtesy punctiliously observed, at least on the side of the guest. In the strictest sense, Carlisle is not a King and Commoner story, as it lacks not only the crucial element of the unrecognized monarch (though Sir Gawain serves as Arthur’s proxy in this capacity) but also the churl’s exposure and embarrassment at the king’s court. Nevertheless, the tale is strikingly similar to the late Middle English King and Commoner

182  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey tales in terms of both structure and motifs.41 It has in common with them the motif of separation from the hunting party (which makes necessary the churl’s hospitality) and also features the motif of the “courtesy lesson” administered to the king/knight by the churl. The rude, grotesque Carle with his fine castle and opulent feast fit for a king is reminiscent of John the Reeve and the other wealthy peasants who enjoy luxuries well beyond the restrictions imposed by sumptuary and alimentary laws. The Carle’s guests are, like kings-in-disguise, expected to learn and abide by the social code of the host, however churlish he may be; and like the churls who are rewarded with lands and titles, the Carle is transformed from a churl into a knight through his encounter with the court: he is dubbed by Arthur and becomes a member of the Round Table.42 What follows is a discussion of this text within the context of these two genres (courtesy literature and the King and Commoner tale-type). We will show that this narrative exploits these genres to create a powerful story of radical agency and ultimate redemption. When Gawain and his companions first meet the Carle, the Carle openly declares his churlish nature and declares that his guests will find in him no courtesy, at least not of the sort they are used to: For her no corttessy thou schalt have, But carllus corttessy, so God me save— For serttus I can non. [Here you’ll get no courtesy Except for the courtesy of a churl, so may God save me, For certainly I know no [other kind of courtesy.]] (ll. 277–279) This echoes the porter’s earlier assertion that his lord “can no corttessye” (l. 193). Yet as Thomas Hahn points out in his note to line 314, the Carle is only too willing to criticize his guests for their own lack of courtesy, and to teach “courtesy lessons” through blows.43 This situation allows Gawain to prove himself, both by behaving as a textbook example of courtesy in contrast to his companions, the Bishop and Sir Kay, and by passing the Carle’s special obedience test, showing that he can adapt himself to a foreign social code. In arguing for an expansion of the definition of medieval conduct literature, Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark note that other genres, such as romance, “may have functioned discursively as conduct literature.”44 Carlisle is surely a good candidate for such a work, exemplifying as it does the dos and don’ts of courteous behavior. Throughout, Gawain seems to follow the sage advice offered in Urbain le Courtois: pur dieu ne vous acostumez descharnyr nul qe vous veiez tot seit il poure ou bosoynous.

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 183 ou il ne seit si bel com vous/ si riche ne si auenaunt si corteis ne si sachant pur ce ne ly escharnyes mes mult bel le saluez qar pur escharn ce sachez ne serrez ia bien alosez mes serra al chief de tour escharny ly escharnisour. [For God’s sake don’t be in the habit of mocking anyone you see even if he is poor or needy, or not as beautiful as you, as rich or charming or courteous or well instructed. Don’t mock him because of it but greet him very nicely, for know that you will never be praised for mockery, but in the end the mocker will be mocked.”] (ll. 160–171) Even though Gawain is a paragon of courtesy, he is sorely tried by the uncouth and often ridiculous Carle—nevertheless he holds to the precepts offered in the books of courtesy, never mocking or scorning his host. He becomes a living illustration of courtesy properly used. As Gawain and his companions seek and receive the Carle’s hospitality, Gawain’s courtesy repeatedly follows his companions’ impolite behavior, providing a neat and humorous contrast. This is most obvious in the stable scene, in which the Bishop and Kay selfishly put their host’s little foal out in the rain while Gawain brings him back in. The Carle’s punishment of the first two guests takes the form of a characteristically churlish “courtesy lesson”: before knocking the Bishop to the ground, he says “Yett cannyst thou noght of corttessyghe” (l. 314), and he has similar words for Kay: “I schall teche the or thou wend away/Sum of my corttessye” (ll. 329–330). In contrast, Gawain “full curttesly” (l. 337) asks leave before going out to attend to his horse, and the Carle himself in turn “full curtteslye” (l. 353) thanks Gawain “manny sythis” (l. 354) for his kind treatment of the foal. The pattern has in fact been established even earlier, when Gawain and Kay demonstrate respectively the polite and the impolite way to ask for lodging. While Kay nearly rips the knocking-hammer from its chain, Gawain answers the porter with a courteous request for lodging; he smooths things over as much as possible, as though painfully aware of his fellows’ boorishness (ll. 178–186). When the porter demurs, Kay demands to be shown hospitality, threatening to take it by force if necessary.

184  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey Once they are inside, the tests continue, and Gawain continues to succeed in his mannerly behavior where his companions fail—even when faced with some bizarre scenarios that might throw anyone off his game. Just as, when he met the Carle, only Gawain had shown deference to the host by kneeling (l. 271), likewise, he alone waits to be seated at dinner, as Dame Courtesy would recommend: “Stand and sytte not furst withall,/ Tyll he byde thee that rewlys the hall” (ll. 89–90).45 While the Bishop and Kay presumptuously take the best seats, Gawain is left to stand for three stanzas—the Carle seems to be in no hurry to hold up his end of the contract of courtesy. This interaction can be clarified by the courtesy literature. While self-promotion at the table is discourteous, paying punctilious attention to the correct seating of guests according to rank is important.46 The irony here is that Gawain’s politeness in waiting to be seated lands him in further hot water. His polite forbearance seems to mark him out in the Carle’s eyes as an appropriate candidate for the obedience test, so that after Gawain passes the first stage (by agreeing to hurl a spear at his host’s head), the Carle personally seats him across from his own wife.47 In the second test Gawain is even more explicitly rewarded for obedience and forbearance, obedience in that he promptly fulfills the Carle’s command to kiss his wife and forbearance in that he resists the temptation to take the embrace further. A reward is quickly given in the form of the Carle’s daughter. Furthermore, Gawain’s punctilious courtesy and strict obedience in fact saves the Carle from his wicked ways by breaking the pattern by which the Carle tests and kills disobedient knights.48 Having reformed, the Carle rewards Gawain even more lavishly, giving him not only his daughter’s hand but a horse, gold, and even fine gifts for his discourteous friends. The lavish rewarding of the noble guest is somewhat of a reversal of the usual situation in tales like Rauf Coil3ear, John the Reeve, and King Edward and the Shepherd. To be sure, the rustic hosts of these tales do offer lavish and expensive hospitality to their guests, but only the king is in a position to offer a reward beyond a nice dinner and a strong drink. Here the parties are on more equal standing, and the courtesy test is of weightier consequence to the guest. The change in the dynamic of rewards points to a way in which Carlisle not only follows a trend in the late Middle English King and Commoner tales but takes it further. As previously noted, one of the distinguishing features of this latter group is the importance it gives to the churl host. The Carle certainly holds his own among Rauf, the reeve, the shepherd, and the hermit, and he possesses an advantage that they do not, namely the home-court advantage. While the Carle does, in fact, receive the traditional reward of the “king in disguise” stories, a title and land, when King Arthur makes him lord of Carlisle, the tale deemphasizes the table-turning by which the king takes over the role of host, puts his former host in a tight spot, and proceeds to graciously reward him. The Carle never in fact leaves his own castle; instead he sends Gawain to

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 185 fetch the king and bring him back to dine with the Carle, who plays host for a second time in a scene which parallels the first feast. Once again huge bowls of drink are brought out, and Arthur declares, “By Seynte Myghelle,/This dyner lykythe me as welle/As any that evyr Y fonde,” echoing the Carle’s earlier words: “Be Sent Myghell,/That tythingus lykyth me ryght well./Seyth thei this way wolde” (ll. 625−627, 220– 222). There is even a slyly good-natured reference to the Carle’s former churlish attitude when, having spread a lavish feast before Arthur, he says, “Dothe gladly!/Here get ye no nothir curtesy” (ll. 619–620). These parallels highlight the Carle’s transformation. Like Gawain in the earlier scene, he shows his courtesy by kneeling to his better (Arthur), and in accordance with the advice of conduct manuals (and Gawain’s behavior), he greets his new guest with fair speech, “with wurdis ware and wyse” (ll. 601–603).49 Remarkably, though, he acquires his links to the world of the court (his daughter’s marriage to Gawain and his own initiation into the Round Table) while remaining in the role of host and lord of his own castle. The formerly closed-off realm of courtesy has been advantageous, indeed, for this late medieval churl. And Gawain, too, has grown in stature and wisdom as a result of his willingness to share habitus with his churlish host and to learn his language.

Robin Hood’s Generic Parody The charm of the King and Commoner narrative lies in each character’s ability to navigate the rules of courtesy, even to consciously violate them at times, while remaining conscious of their supremacy in the dangerous game of hospitality. The characters engage in a courteous or churlish, as the case may be, tug-of-war that, if successfully performed, results in the restoration of honor for all parties, in spite of major transgressions of both law and etiquette. The testing happens on both sides—both sides must prove themselves and adapt, because both sides are outside their element. This insecurity and its result, a survival strategy that depends on a willingness to learn and change, is what creates the powerful fellowship between very different men. In the case of the Geste, it also intensifies the poignancy of the fellowship’s ultimate failure. This section will discuss the interwoven narratives of the Geste, all of which contain a courtesy test and the threat of violence, and then offer a reading of fittes seven and eight, the King and Commoner section, while considering the broader literary tradition of King and Commoner narratives and the literature of courtesy. The compiler of the Geste brought together several rymes that had intertextual connections with the broader genre of King and Commoner narratives. Throughout the Geste’s interwoven narrative, breaches of courtesy are explored and censured.50 The significant refrain that certain characters “can no courtesy” that recurs at key points in all these narratives, as it has in the other texts we have

186  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey explored, suggests that the knowledge of the rules of courtesy is a central preoccupation of the work. The Geste’s knight-in-distress storyline offers the most in-depth exploration of the duties and delights of courtesy in the poem. Throughout the knight’s narrative, characters either directly or indirectly reprimand one another for their failure to mind their manners. The story of the bankrupt knight parallels that of the corrupt monk. Both are waylaid by Robin’s band; both are subjected to the outlaws’ enforced hospitality, and both comment on it. The redactor draws comparisons between the different examples of courteous behavior—or lack of it—in the Geste’s intertwined narratives. As in Carlisle, some characters “can courtesy” and others do not, though the moral force of their reproaches are no indication of their knowledge. In the Geste, the most morally suspect characters are often the quickest to accuse others of unmannerliness. The monk, for example, exclaims: By our lady than sayd the monke That were no curteysye To bydde a man to dyner And syth hym bete and bynde. [“By our lady,” the monk then said, “It’s no courtesy To invite a man to dinner And then beat and bind him!”] (ll. 107–110) The monk is technically correct in his condemnation of the outlaws’ rudeness.51 But when one compares the monk’s behavior with that of the knight in a similar circumstance, he seems pathetic and whiney. The knight, in contrast, responds with courteous gratitude to the forced feast with the Greenwood outlaws—even though a silent tear may have coursed down his cheek earlier in his encounter with his hosts. He responds with a gracious thank-you for his captors’ dubious hospitality, and it rings sincere: Gramercy sir sayd he Suche a dynerhad I not Of all these wekys thre [“Thanks sir,” he said, “I haven’t had such a dinner In the past three weeks!”] (ll. 129–131) In graciously accepting whatever food has been offered, the knight is thus following the code set forth by Dame Courtesy: Bot prayse thi fare wheresoever thou be, For be it gode or be it badde, In gud worth it muste be had.

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 187 [Only praise your fare wherever you may be, For whether it is good or bad, It must be appreciated.] (ll. 112–114) This knight is also succeeding where the king in King Edward and the Hermit had failed somewhat. The Geste consistently picks up on this kind of intertextual link and turns it into a joke. Its characters often beat other similar characters at their own game in a spectacular fashion.52 This theme of courtesy at dinner at all costs returns later in the poem when the knight is subjected to another dubious feast—this time at the abbey where a usurious abbot has been lording it over him, forcing him to kneel before him while the abbot and his guests eat a lavish feast.53 The knight’s being ignored at a feast is interlinked with other King and Commoner narratives and with courtesy literature, as noted in the discussion of Carlisle. Unlike Gawain in that poem, who waits politely and never asks to be seated or reproaches his host, the knight eventually makes his feelings clear, ironically echoing the whiney Monk: “To suffre a knyght to knele so longe/Thou canst no curteysye” (ll. 455–456). He also echoes the obsession with sitting, standing, and kneeling in conduct books like Stans Puer: “Ne syte not unbyden weresoever thou stond,/Lesse the pepyll sey thou canne no curtasye” (ll. 74–75). Yet one feels he is justified, unlike the monk, because he has so punctiliously observed the rules of courtesy earlier in the poem—among other mannerly gestures he has demonstrated courteous speech, washed and wiped before dinner, and taken direction from his hosts in terms of where to sit and what to eat. He can violate the code in this moment of extremity, and one does not begrudge him his moment of retribution—he is a gentleman. In spite of certain minor narratological differences, the last two fittes of the Geste offer a classic late-medieval King and Commoner narrative. The Geste may further complicate the uneasy equilibrium of many other King and Commoner stories, but it seems conscious of the way such narratives typically progress. As in the other narratives we have explored, the relationship between the king and Robin Hood pushes the limits of courtesy. The seventh and eighth fittes stand alone, though they are ingeniously linked to the previous storylines through the figure of the knight. The king’s anger at the knight and Robin for their misbehavior significantly links the opening stanzas of fitte seven to major preoccupations of the King and Commoner narratives—the granting and rescinding of land, and the display of loyalty to one’s monarch. In the Geste, the king seeks out Robin Hood and is not separated from his party by accident (in contrast, the sheriff, who is lured there under false pretenses, though he remains with a member of his meynee, finds himself utterly alone). Nevertheless, the result echoes many other King and Commoner tests: an assessment of his subject’s loyalty. The king is not assuming a courtier persona in the Geste but rather that of a monk—here is a difference with parodic power! When interrogated about his lifestyle and how he came to be in the woods, the

188  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey king tells a partial truth: “I have layne at Notyngham/this foutynyght with ours kynge” (ll. 1499–1500). This contains a subtle reproof to the outlaw—a reminder that he, too, has a king, whom he should obey. Instead of displaying ideological disloyalty to the king like his cousins the churlish hosts, Robin Hood is exaggeratedly loyal (ll. 1514–1530), inviting the “monk” to dinner “under my trystell tre” (l. 1530) specifically because the “monk” is a friend of King Edward. Robin Hood is not as cagey about poaching as are the other churlish hosts—he proudly volunteers a feast on an epic scale and acknowledges the food’s origin. Thus Robin is not following the good advice of the courtesy literature: e.g. “… thi tonge thou kepe also,/And tell not all thyngys that thou maye,/For thi tonge may be thy fo.”54 The extravagant meal of poached game happens abruptly but with great fanfare. Here is no reluctance to host, no screening repast of humble bread and cheese, but again, this forthcoming, fearless behavior is an allusion to the more circumspect behavior of other churlish hosts within this broader narrative tradition. Robin is proudly hospitable, and his ability to show up all manner of guests is key to his charm as a legendary figure—and it is especially humorous when viewed in light of these related genres. Robin’s antics consistently twist generic expectations and conventions and make every encounter even more amusing for a clued-in contemporary audience. A similar generic joke occurs after the feast; the games begin abruptly with a scary moment when Robin Hood’s men all jump up and aim their bows and arrows—“Our kynge was neuer so sore agast/he wend to haue be shent” (l. 1565–1566)—and shoot at a garland instead of at the king sitting at the board. Following this shocking transition from feast to game, as in other King and Commoner narratives, where feasting and games are interspersed with blows and other playful violence, the outlaws and the king play an amusingly aggressive game wherein blows are exchanged for missed targets. In this game, Robin’s courtesy is tested—he is accustomed to winning at everything, especially archery, and he clearly delights in handing out blows to lesser athletes in this hypermasculine and formalized contest of barely-suppressed violence. Robin beats everyone until his last shot, when he “fayled of the garlonde” (l. 1593). Here is the moment of truth—will he do the right thing, or deny the shot, or even refuse to take what he dishes out? This is a real moment of suspense for those accustomed to typical late-medieval Robin Hood narratives; in other tales such as Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, our hero has failed in this particular test—when he loses he can refuse to admit defeat or act sulkily.55 Luckily for him, Robin shows his mettle and courteously asks his guest to be the one to subject him to his buffet for his failure. The force of the kingly blow exposes the “monk” as a martial man, leading Robin Hood to peer into his face and recognize their sovereign (presumably he had previously been following the rules outlined in Stans Puer: “Stare not on a strange man to mych—be thou ware—/For that is no curtassy; therto

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 189 thou take gode hede” (ll. 206–207)). The moment of mutual recognition is a moving one, akin to the moments of intimacy and true seeing of the other in King Edward and the Shepherd.56 Luckily for Robin, he has followed the rules of courteous behavior and thus avoids punishment or even death. Instead, he is offered a reward that would seem glorious to many aspirational types—a place in the king’s meynée. True to form, however, the Robin Hood of these lines is both courteous and churlish in turns in an entertaining admixture. His reluctant/eager response to the king’s offer that he should join his court ends with a classically blunt, even churlish, threat: “But me lyke well your seruyse/I come agayne full soone/and shote at the donne dere/As I am want to done” (ll. 1647–1650). With this ultimatum, we begin to sense the limits of Robin’s upward mobility. The king and Robin continue bonding through ever-modulating games of violence and courtesy. They ride away together, playing the game of pluck-buffet along their way—a grand pageant calculated to inspire fear in all onlookers. Neither does Robin spare his sovereign the full power of his blows, nor does the king hold back. Both have successfully demonstrated the high stakes of their courteous-brutal dance, and now they reinforce it with more physical play, even as they perform their royal progress toward town (ll. 1679–1684). Their continuing games show how these two leaders espouse a certain temporary humility by allowing themselves to enter into another’s social code in a way that the proud abbots, monks, and sheriffs cannot. The ultimate culmination of this mutual recognition is the pageant procession into town—the king reveals himself (arguably he cannot help but show himself), and neither is now holding back because they are now speaking the same language. This mutual language of outlaw and king is frightening in its power and cohesion—and, perhaps thankfully, is not ultimately sustainable. After eight months, Robin Hood has had enough of court and wants to leave (ll. 1711–1734). The king is unable to keep Robin happy as a guest— he will die of sorrow should he remain at court any longer. The crowning irony of Robin’s failure is its contrast with the repeated suggestion throughout this long poem that the characters who are the most gracious under duress are the most noble, while those who can’t adapt or take the pressure of inhabiting someone else’s lifestyle, those who complain or unduly call out others’ lack of courtesy, such as the sheriff or the monk, are shown to be weak in character. The one exception to this is Robin Hood himself, whose tragic attempt to succeed at the royal court, to play by the rules of courtesy and largesse, shows in no uncertain terms the limits of the teachings of courtesy for the upwardly mobile and ambitious.57 As in Carlisle, Robin Hood fails at achieving, at least with any permanence, a place in court, a title, or land. Though the king implicitly or explicitly promises all of these, Robin Hood does not have the social wherewithal to gain or keep them. His inability to act in moderation or to nurse the good he has and not live beyond his means in order to seem great (to paraphrase the

190  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey Distichs of Cato) is his downfall—or perhaps his escape from a stultifying social trap.58 The Geste’s critique of the happy conclusion of the other King and Commoner narratives lies in Robin Hood’s failure to thrive as a member of the king’s intimate and charmed circle. He cannot stay successfully at court and is ultimately unable to sustain that shared discourse that he and his sovereign built together in their woodland sojourn.59 Arguably, the Geste tells us that self-ruin is a potential result of immersion in a habitus too far-removed from one’s own. There are inherent limits to translation between different social codes; there are limits to human understanding of one another; and there are limits to the social balm of courtesy. Though Stans Puer may be generally correct when it notes: The child that is curtas, be he pore or ryche, It schall hym avayll — therof have no drede. And ever to hymselve for to be a lech, When he is in quarel or any other nede, [The courteous child, be he rich or poor, Will be helped by Courtesy, there is no doubt; And he will always be a doctor to himself Whenever he is in a quarrel or any other trouble.] (ll. 17–20) In this particular case, Robin’s courtesy can only avail him so much, and there is but one cure for his ailment—a return to his previous (less urbanized and courtly) way of life. It’s hard to say the Geste is parodying or critiquing the King and Commoner narrative, which is already a parodic genre that pokes at the sore spots of late medieval life—the reality of social disparity, the gulf between have and have-nots, and the true difficulty in learning the correct rules for polite society. It might be fairer to say that the Geste exaggerates or mutates these preexisting parodic elements for further comic effect and for the creation of a complicated and poignant intertextual joke. It continues the King and Commoner genre’s theme of mutual recognition, of open-minded learning of someone else’s way of being, but ultimately shows its limits. Thus, the implicit didacticism of many of the other King and Commoner narratives is twisted into a sort of wild exuberance—even a kind of nihilism. To conclude, we have shown that each of these three texts is engaged in intertextual discourse with the literature of courtesy and the Matter of the Greenwood. The result is a rich fabric of writing that explores the important questions of community, power, and the courtesy we owe one another. Each story seems to be searching for a common language—a way of thinking about these issues through play both within the stories themselves, and through their play with the audience’s generic expectations. Recognizing the richness and diversity of late-medieval King and Commoner narratives could make us look more closely at the broad genre of courtesy literature in the late Middle Ages. The manuals may seem prescriptive on their own, but when

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 191 one considers the ways in which many works of literature are preoccupied with their values and even their language, the Matter of Courtesy becomes more than a tool for contextualizing late medieval texts—it becomes positively illuminating. For after all, “Nurtur & good maners makeþ man.”60

Notes 1. Other texts not under detailed examination here include: John the Reeve, King Edward and the Shepherd, and Rauf Coil3ear, among many others. We will occasionally refer to some of these other stories as analogues to the three texts under discussion in this chapter. 2. Elizabeth Walsh, “The King in Disguise,” Folklore 86, no. 1 (1975): 8. 3. As defined by Maurice Keen in The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 2. 4. See Sherron Lux’s chapter in this volume for another approach to the question of courtesy. 5. Mark Truesdale has made the most thorough reading of the ways in which the King and Commoner collapses and reifies identity, and ultimately subverts any didactic or conservative message. See: The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 6. Rachel Snell, “The Undercover King,” in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 134; 137. 7. Glenn Wright, “Churl’s Courtesy: Rauf Coil3ear and its English Analogues,” Neophilologus 85 (2001): 651; 648. 8. Walsh, “The King in Disguise,” 16. 9. Wright, “Churl’s Courtesy,” 653. 10. Stephen H. A. Shepherd, “‘Of thy glitterand gyde haue I na gle’: The Taill of Rauf Coil3ear,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 228 (1991): 297. 11. For Truesdale’s close reading of the pervasive sense of doom in the court scenes and their uneasy containment of carnivalesque energy, see: “Robin Hood and the King and Commoner Tradition: ‘The best archer of ilkon, / I durst mete hym with a stone’”, in Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 69–88. For an exploration of the panoptic king, see: The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), chapters 1–3. 12. For Truesdale’s reading of the King and Commoner texts as emblematic of the death of an old world and the rise of the new, see: The King and Commoner Tradition, especially chapters 1–3. 13. See: Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 5–6, and Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 36–44. These improved conditions were somewhat checked by landlords’ reaction to the situation (more vigorous exploitation of their unfree tenants) and by the Statute of Laborers of 1351, which pinned wages back to pre-plague levels; these reactions, in turn, helped to provoke the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which put a stop to poll taxes if not to serfdom. On this, see: Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 273–278.

192  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey 14. Rachel Snell ties this phenomenon directly to the characteristics of late Middle English King and Commoner tales: “This increased wealth and confidence [of the new, prosperous smallholder] is reflected in the attitudes of the protagonists of these tales, pointing perhaps to socio-economic fact rather than to pastoral nostalgia as the writer’s primary inspiration, especially when we bear in mind that the fourteenth century was a time when royal power and its responsibility to the common man were under scrutiny, and the king was directly challenged by representatives of the people in face-to-face confrontations.” “The Undercover King,” 141. 15. See: Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A. Clark’s introduction to their edited volume Medieval Conduct (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ix–xvii. 16 For an overview of this proliferation, see: Part I of Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985). 17. See: Mark Addison Amos, “For Manners Make Man: Bourdieu, de Certeau, and the Common Appropriation of Noble Manners in the Book of Courtesy,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 23–48. 18. This is the King and Commoner romance King Edward and the Shepherd, in Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 935–937. 19. See: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, especially pages 381–494, in Arthurian Romances, translated by Carleton W. Carroll (New York: Penguin, 1991), as the young and inexperienced hero works to learn the subtle language of chivalry. 20. Nicholls argues for this generic title in The Matter of Courtesy, 7–22. 21. Snell, “The Undercover King,” 152. 22. This slipperiness may in fact be characteristic of the genre itself, as Mark Truesdale has argued in this volume and throughout The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). See also: Truesdale, “Robin Hood and the King and Commoner Tradition.” 23. Additionally, King Edward and the Hermit shares one small but intriguing detail with Rauf Coil3ear in the form of a proverb: Edward, when asking his host for a good dinner, says, “I ne hade never so sory a dey/ That I ne had a mery nyght,” while Rauf says, as he orders dinner, “Efter ane euill day to haue ane mirrie nicht.” Hermit 187–188; The Tale of Ralph the Collier. Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), at 135. 24. Giraldus Cambrensis, Opera, vol. IV, eds. J. S. Brewer et al. (London: Longman & Co., 1873), 215. 25. For an in-depth exploration of the importance of these concepts in ­fourteenth-century England, see: Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), especially Chapters 1 and 3. 26. Stans Puer ad Mensam, in Codex Ashmole: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffleton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008). 27. See: the king’s promise to Saint Julian, lines 93–95; his promise of reward to the hermit in exchange for directions to town, lines 129–134; his promise of a reward as he asks for dinner (lines 222–224) and again when asking the hermit to take the poor fare away, lines 234–236; after learning the pledging game when he promises to “quite” the hermit for the

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 193 e­ntertainment, lines 378–380; his reiteration of his previous vow, lines 396; and finally, after the hermit boasts that a visit to court isn’t enough to dazzle him, Edward repeats his promise of reward one more time, lines 432–435. This striking repetition of the promised requital would, in the complete version of the tale, have been fulfilled in the payoff at the end, when the hermit would receive his rich reward. 28. Dame Courtesy, in Codex Ashmole: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffleton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008). Perhaps significantly, this particular text appears ­ only in Codex Ashmole 61. 29. Translations throughout this essay are the authors’, unless otherwise noted. 30. “Many man here gederes gode All hys lyfe tyme for odour men, That he may not—be the rode— Not have tyme to ete a hene. When he is dolven in his den, Another schall come at the last ende, And have hys wyfe and catell than; That he has sparyd another wyll spende. “For all that ever a man doth here With bysenes and travell bothe, All this is, withouten were, Not bot for mete and drynke and clothe; More getys he not, withouten hothe. Kyng ne prince whether he be, Be he lefe or be he lothe, A pore man schall have als mych as he. “Therfor sone, be my counselle, More than inowghe thou never covete.” From “How the Wise Man Taught his Son” (33–35), in Codex Ashmole, ed. George Shuffleton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), lines 69–86. 31. Incidentally, this is one of several instances of “trebling” (to use Propp’s term) in the tale; this form of repetition is characteristic of the mutually evasive negotiations between Edward and the hermit. See: Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of The Folktale, trans. Svatava Pirkova-Jacobsen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 74–75. 32. The hermit (apparently a wretch who vouchsafes nothing) expressly disobeys the rule given most clearly in The Babee’s Book: And yf stroungers withe yow be sette at mete, And vnto yow goode mete be brouhte or sente, Withe parte of hit goodely yee theym rehete For yt ys nouhte ywys convenyont, Withe yow at mete whanne other ben present Alle forto holde that vnto yow ys brouhte, And as wrecches on other vouchesauf nouhte. The Babees Book. Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Trübner, 1868), lines 167–175.

194  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey 33. See also this wisdom, from “How the Wise Man Taught his Son”: “And, son, thi tonge thou kepe also, And tell not all thyngys that thou maye, For thi tonge may be thy fo. Therfor, my son, thynke what I sey, Wher and when that thou schall praye, And be whom that thou seyst owht; For thou may sey a word todey, That seven yere after may be forthought.” In Codex Ashmole: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffleton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), lines 33–40. 34. See: Stans Puer ad Mensam, line 70; Dame Courtesy, line 59; Urbanitatis, line 65; and The Babees Book, lines 99–100. 35. In helping his guest to bed, the Hermit follows the rules outlined in Stans Puer, which urge the reader to help his better or guest prepare for bed: “Ne go thou not to bede befor bot thi better cause thee, For that is no curtasy — thus seys Doctor Paler. Hose and schone to powle of, loke thou redy be, And other gere that to hym langys, for thou may fare the better” (ll. 218–221). 36. As George Shuffleton points out in his note to this stanza, we have no way of knowing the space of the interval between line 284, when the hermit puts Edward to bed, and line 285, when he decides that his guest is a “felow” suitable for a night of carousing. It may be only a short space of time, the hermit deciding to have a late night rather than an early night, but there is the intriguing possibility that they may be experiencing what Roger Ekirch calls “segmented sleep” in his study of pre-eighteenth century sleep, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: Norton: 2006). In that case, the pledging game and related carousing would take place in the “watch” between “first sleep” and “second sleep,” (which would begin when they go to bed again in line 491). The watch was a time removed from the rhythms of waking daylight hours, often reserved for conversation, marital intimacy, or contemplation (308–310). Such a time would make this segment of Edward’s interaction with the hermit even more intimate and removed from ordinary experience. 37. And one that moves beyond the courteous behavior expected at table, which is not a place for “japes” or “play,” especially in the presence of one’s superiors (See: Stans Puer, 154–167). 38. Snell, “The Undercover King,” 148. 39. Keeping one’s troth does more than make things easier in one’s life—it also helps one to heaven, as Dame Courtesy notes: “Luke thou be trew in word and dede: In all thi werkes than schall thou spede. Treuth doyt never his master schame; It kepys hym out of synne and blame. The weys to heven, thei ben this tweyn: Mercy and treuthe, as clerkys seyn.” (ll. 39–44)

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 195 40. Urbain le Courtois, among others, warn against such boasting: “De nulle rien vous avauntez, Mes tot coy vous tenez, Que tous ceux del pays Parlent bien de vos dys”

[Don’t boast about anything but keep quiet, so that everyone around you speaks well of your words.]

In The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 3, ed. and trans. Susanna Fein, trans. David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowsky (Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), lines 185–188. 41. See Mark Truesdale’s chapter in this volume for a longer discussion of the affinity between the menacing challenger tale type and King and ­Commoner tales. 42. In addition to similarities of structure and motifs, Carlisle shares some striking details with one King and Commoner tale in particular, John the Reeve. Like King Edward in John the Reeve, Gawain is not completely alone when he gets lost—he is accompanied by a courtier/bishop pair. The Carl of Carlisle and John the Reeve make assertions that their guests think more than they say (though in Carlisle this seems to betoken a keen perceptiveness and a suspicious attitude but also mind reading abilities on the part of the host): “Sytt styll,” quod the Carl, “and eete thy mette; Thow thinkost mor then thou darst speke, Serten, I the hyght.” (Carlisle, ll. 376–378) “I know you not & it were day, I troe you thinke more then you say, I am affrayd of treason.” (John the Reeve, ll. 100–102) 43. Hahn, 314. See also Rauf Coil3ear, which features an analogous scene (lines 159–180). 44. Ashley and Clark, “Introduction,” xii. Amy Vines has also explored the idea of medieval romance as conduct manual through a feminist lens in her monograph, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011) and her article, “‘Who-so wylle of nurtur lere’: Domestic Foundations for Social Success in the Middle English Emaré,” in The Chaucer Review 53, no. 1 (January 2018), 82–101. 45. Compare Dame Courtesy’s advice to young readers: “When thi better spekys to thee,/ Do of thi cape and bow thi kne” (ll. 137–138). Though the Carle is not technically Gawain’s “better,” Gawain shows him deference as his host (and presumably his elder). 46. For warnings against “janglyng” at the table, see: Stans Puer, line 161; for instructions on ranked seating, see: Stans Puer, lines 76–77. 47. C.f. Culhwch and Olwen’s analogous contest of violence and courtesy with the giant Ysbaddaden. See: Jeffrey Gantz’s translation of The Mabinogion (New York: Penguin, 1976), 134–176. 48. This point is even clearer in the story The Carle of Carlisle; in a third and final task of obedience, Gawain must cut off the Carle’s head. Though reluctant, he is unwilling to disobey his host’s command, and so he frees the latter from the enchantment under which he has taken a churl’s form. Courtesy thus becomes a powerful force, an antidote to black magic.

196  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey 49. On kneeling to one’s betters, Urbanitatis has this to say: “When þou comeste be-fore a lorde In halle, yn bowre, or at þe borde, Hoode or kappe þou of þo. Ere þou come hym alle vn-to, Twyse or þryse with-outen dowte To þat lorde þou moste lowte, With by Ry3th kne lette hit be do, Thy Worshyp þou mayst saue so” (ll. 3–10). 50. For this essay we use the Wynkyn de Worde edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca.1600, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 89–148. All further citations from this poem are from this edited version and cited parenthetically by line number(s). See also Truesdale’s exploration of the intertextual contexts of the Geste’s feast scenes in this volume. 51. Though he is wrong in calling his dinner companions out for their behavior, according to Dame Courtesy. 52. See, for example: Robin’s famous parody of King Arthur’s behavior in refusing to eat until some wonder or unknown guest has come (ll. 23–24). 53. For a close reading of the feast scenes and their interaction with courtesy, see: Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” in Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19–30. 54. “How the Wise Man Taught his Son,” lines 33–35. 55. Thus, disobeying Dame Courtesy when she says: “Be no gloser, nor no moker” (l. 59), i.e., avoid rash outbursts inspired by pride or anger. 56. See also: Stans Puer on looking one’s monarch in the eye: “Fyrst, when thou spekys luke thou be not rekles; / Behold to thi sovereyn in the face with thi eyen” (ll. 53–54). 57. See Truesdale’s reading of the “sorrow and dearth” experienced by Robin at court in his chapter in this volume. 58. The Distichs of Cato, a famous Medieval Textbook, ed. and trans. Wayland ­Johnson Chase (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1922), Bk. II, 17 (pp. 26–27). 59. See, in this volume, Truesdale’s argument along these lines, wherein he shows Robin Hood’s break with aristocratic conventions as representative of the ethos of an “ambitious, mercantile class.” 60. Urbanitatis, line 34.

Bibliography Amos, Mark Addison. “For Manners Make Man: Bourdieu, de Certeau, and the Common Appropriation of Noble Manners in the Book of Courtesy,” in Medieval Conduct, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, 23–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. The Babees Book, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall. London: N. Trübner, 1868. The Book of the Civilised Man: An English Translation of the Urbanus magnus of Daniel of Beccles, edited and translated by Fiona Whelan, Olivia Spenser, and Francesca Petrizzo. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019.

The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow 197 Breen, Katharine. Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150−1400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bryson, Anna. From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Codex Ashmole: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, edited by George Shuffleton. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008. The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 3, edited and translated by Susanna Fein, with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowsky. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008. The Distichs of Cato, a famous Medieval Textbook, edited and translated by Wayland Johnson Chase. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1922. Dyer, Christopher. Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850−1520. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Early Rymes of Robyn Hood, edited by Thomas Ohlgren and Lister Matheson. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 428. Tempe: ACMRS, 2013. Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Overlooked Importance of Feast Scenes in The Geste of Robyn Hood.” Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 25–36. Evans, W.O. “‘Cortaysye’ in Middle English.” Mediæval Studies 29 (1967): 142–157. Giraldus Cambrensis. Opera. vol. IV, edited by J. S. Brewer et al., 213–215. London: Longman & Co., 1861–1891. Green, Richard Firth. A Crisis of Truth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. ———. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Hill, Ordelle G. The Manor, The Plowman, and the Shepherd. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1993. John the Reeve. In Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: N. Trübner, 1868. Keen, Maurice. English Society in the Later Middle Ages: 1348−1500. London: Penguin Books, 1990. King Edward and the Shepherd. In Middle English Metrical Romances, edited by Walter Hoyt French and Charles Brockway Hale. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1930. The Mabinogion, edited and translated by Jeffrey Gantz. New York: Penguin, 1976. Medieval Conduct, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Nicholls, Jonathan. The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985. Ohlgren, Thomas. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pollard, A. J. Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context. London: Routledge, 2004. Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of The Folktale, translated by Svatava PirkovaJacobsen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.

198  S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey Rubin, Miri. The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages. London: Penguin, 2006. Saul, Nigel. “Chaucer and Gentility.” In Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 41–55. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992. Shepherd, S. H. A. “‘Of thy glitterand gyde haue I na gle’: The Taill of Rauf Coil3ear.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 228 (1991): 284–298. Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. In Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, edited by Thomas Hahn. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. Snell, Rachel. “The Undercover King.” In Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, edited by Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson, 133–154. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Ten Bourdes, edited by Melissa M. Farrow. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013. The Tale of Ralph the Collier. In Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, edited by Alan Lupack. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. Truesdale, Mark. “‘The best archer of ilkon,/I durst mete hym with a stone’.” In Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Canon, edited by Lesley Coote and Alex Kaufman, 69–88. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 6. New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. ———. The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 4. New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Urbanitatis. The Babees Book, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall. London: N. Trübner, 1868. Vines, Amy. “‘Who-so wylle of nurtur lere’: Domestic Foundations for Social Success in the Middle English Emaré.” The Chaucer Review 53, no. 1 (January 2018): 82–101. ———. Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Walsh, Elizabeth. “The King in Disguise.” Folklore 86, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 3–24. Whelan, Fiona. The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England: The Book of the Civilised Man. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Wright, Glenn. “Churl’s Courtesy: Rauf Coil3ear and its English Analogues.” Neophilologus 85 (2001): 647–662. Wright, Thomas. The Political Songs of England: From the Reign of John to that of Edward II. London: John Bowyer Nichols, 1839.

10 Acting Out(Law) Feasts, Outlawry, and Identity Constructions in Two Shakespearean Comedies Melissa Ridley Elmes Introduction Medieval literary outlaw figures draw attention to socio-political issues and instabilities embedded within their stories. Scholars have documented the cyclical, call-and-response development of Anglo-Norman kingship, a rising mercantile class, corruption within the Church, and the English popular outlaw tales criticizing systems of power and their detrimental effect on society.1 Most scholarship on premodern English literary outlaws concentrates on the narratives associated with “historical outlaws”—i.e. Gamelyn and Fouke le Fitz Waryn—or the late-medieval ballads and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsides featuring Robin Hood. 2 This essay considers a very different literary source not so often associated with the outlaw tradition—the comedies of William Shakespeare—bringing the critical lens to bear on early modern drama, a time period and genre combination too rarely discussed within the larger critical conversation of the premodern outlaw tradition. 3 In Shakespeare’s corpus of plays, it is predominantly the comedies that feature Robin Hood in any meaningful way.4 One, Two Noble Kinsmen (written with John Fletcher sometime between 1613–1614) mentions Robin Hood in passing in the prologue, a move playfully denigrating the source material of the play, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, by associating it with the popular (and evidently lowbrow) outlaw’s legend in self-conscious metacommentary on the play’s worth, as Lorraine Stock has shown.5 And two—Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–1592) and As You Like It (c. 1599–1600)—make explicit reference to the Robin Hood legend in conjunction with outlaw figures on the stage during the production, thus calling the audience’s attention to this particular outlaw tradition as a means of characterization and story development, a move made possible because, as Stock notes, the relegation of Robin Hood to short-handed and off-handed references indicates audience familiarity with what that signifier means.6 Further, though, because “Robin Hood” as a passing reference seems to evoke a clear understanding on the part of the audience as to what he represents, in these rarer

200  Melissa Ridley Elmes instances in which he is incorporated into one of Shakespeare’s plays in a more expanded fashion there is clearly more to that presence than simply his use as a signifier, and it is this phenomenon that I examine in this chapter. As a dramatist, Shakespeare’s contrast of the outlaw with the nobleman is performed through dialogue and indirect characterization, primarily achieved through careful and constant juxtaposition of images associated with outlawry, such as the Robin Hood tales, with images associated with nobility, such as feasting scenes. However, Shakespeare does not simply contrast the two; he intermingles them so that we see a clear ambivalence concerning identity construction and acceptance of social change. Shakespeare uses the figure of the outlaw, the figure of the nobleman, and the image of the feast in a call-and-response format similar to that found in the development of the outlaw tales in the medieval tradition to create a space for audiences of these plays to examine social instabilities and to make a case for accepting the reformed outlaw figure as a potentially positive influence on society, a move only made acceptable by these plays’ classification as comedies.

Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Gentlemen of Verona is widely considered to be among Shakespeare’s earliest works; many scholars place it as the first of his plays.7 The basic plot is as follows: Proteus and Valentine, best friends and Veronese citizens, travel separately to Milan, where they fall in love with the same woman, Silvia. Silvia prefers Valentine, but Proteus nonetheless presses his suit despite having a girlfriend, Julia, back in Verona. When Valentine reveals his plan to elope with Silvia to Proteus, Proteus tells her father, who promptly banishes Valentine. Valentine wanders in the wood outside Milan, coming into contact with a band of outlaws who elect him to be their leader. Not believing the rumors of Valentine’s death, Silvia leaves town accompanied by a Sir Eglamour, and they run into several of the outlaws in the wood. Eglamour flees and Silvia is captured by the outlaws; on their way to take her to their leader, they are intercepted by Proteus, traveling in the wood with his page (Julia, disguised as a boy, who has followed him to Milan and, having learned of his interest in Silvia, is trying to decide how to respond). Proteus rescues Silvia from the outlaws but then pursues her for himself, culminating in a climactic moment in which he threatens to take her by force if she will not submit to his desire; at this point, Valentine, who has been secretly watching their exchange, intercedes. Proteus apologizes, and Valentine appears to offer Silvia to him as a peace-offering, at which point Julia-as-Sebastian is overcome with emotion and faints, revealing her true identity. Proteus recalls that he loves Julia deeply and swears his eternal fidelity to her. They return to court, where ultimately the two couples are wedded, and the outlaws pardoned.

Acting Out(Law) 201 Critical discussion of this play typically centers on its many flaws and on the scene in which Valentine appears to offer Silvia to Proteus,8 but his depiction of the Greenwood here is strikingly different from the carnivalesque ways in which Shakespeare uses the Greenwood in his later plays, such as Midsummer Night’s Dream, and because of this difference, is worthy of critical consideration. Understanding this use of the Greenwood is also, perhaps, a key to understanding this particularly fraught scene. While his literary sources for this play are believed to be an English or French translation of the Spanish romance Los Siete Libros de la Diana [The Seven Books of the Diana] 1559) by Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor; English plays focusing on the theme of friendship like Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pithias (1565); John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Endimion (1588) and George Peele’s The Od Wive’s Tale (1590); and Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), with minor additional influences from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney (1590), Shakespeare’s depiction suggests as well indebtedness to the longstanding literary tradition of the Greenwood.9 His representation of the Greenwood and the conduct code of its denizens has much in common with the late-medieval Geste of Robyn Hode, particularly in the ways in which he blurs the line between gentleman and outlaw, subverting the first class and elevating the second through the characters’ behaviors. In this comedy, such characterization ultimately results in a conventional happily-ever-after ending in which the distinctions no longer matter and a wedding feast unites everyone.10 Shakespeare anchors these developments in two passing references to meals; the first in Act 2, and the second in the final lines of the play. In order to demonstrate the excellent character of the outlaws in this play, Shakespeare presents the audience first with an extended observation of the less-admirable behaviors of the nobles. After the opening scenes in which Valentine bids adieu to Proteus and arrives in Milan, Shakespeare rapidly paints the Duke of Milan’s court as one in which secrecy, intrigue, deception, and backstabbing are the de facto atmosphere. Valentine immediately finds himself swept up in this world, keeping his feelings for Silvia secret while she, in turn, plays a game of love with him by having him write a letter to one she loves, only to return the letter to him as soon as he hands it to her, and then leave. Valentine does not immediately perceive this game, and Speed has to explain it to him: SPEED:  O

jest unseen, unscrutable, invisible […] My master sues to her; and she hath taught her suitor, he being her pupil, to become her tutor. O excellent device, was there ever heard a better, that my master being scribe, to himself should write the letter? VALENTINE:  How now, sir? What are you reasoning with yourself?

202  Melissa Ridley Elmes SPEED:  Nay, I was rhyming, ‘tis you that have the reason. VALENTINE:  To do what? SPEED:  To be a spokesman from Madam Silvia. VALENTINE:  To whom? SPEED:  To yourself, why, she woos you by a figure. VALENTINE:  What figure? SPEED:  By a letter, I should say. VALENTINE:  Why, she hath not writ to me? SPEED:  What need she, when she hath made

you write to yourself? Why,

do you not perceive the jest? VALENTINE:  No, believe me.11 At the end of the exchange, Valentine refuses to go to supper, claiming “I have din’d.” (II.ii.171) No reason is given for this decision; but coming on the heels of this scene, it seems evident that either Valentine does not wish to sit at the table having been made a fool of, or does not wish to sit at the table being uncertain of Silvia’s reception, or both. He has been found wanting in his ability to engage in the court intrigues, and rather than eating a communal meal with people among whom he may not be sure of his place, he elects to avoid the supper, seeing it not as an opportunity for community and relationship, but for further testing and potential humiliation. However, Valentine learns the ways of this particular court quickly, and by scene IV is actively engaged in play of wits with Silvia at the expense of Thurio, his rival for her affections: SILVIA:  Servant, you are sad. VALENTINE:  Indeed, madam, I seem so. THURIO:  Seem you that you are not? VALENTINE:  Happ’ly I do. THURIO:  So do counterfeits. VALENTINE:  So do you. THURIO:  What seem I that I am not? VALENTINE:  Wise. THURIO:  What instance of the contrary? VALENTINE:  Your folly. THURIO:  And how quote you my folly? VALENTINE:  I quote it in your jerkin. THURIO:  My jerkin is a doubler. VALENTINE:  Well then I’ll double your folly. THURIO:  How? SILVIA:  What, angry, Sir Thurio? Do you change color? VALENTINE:  Give him leave, madam, he is a kind of chameleon. THURIO:  That hath more mind to feed on your blood than live on your air. VALENTINE:  You have said, sir.

Acting Out(Law) 203 THURIO:  Aye, sir, and done too–for this time. VALENTINE:  I know it well, sir; you always end ere you begin. SILVIA:  A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off. (II.iv.8–34)

Silvia’s response to their exchange of words shows that she views this as a game and is not concerned with Thurio’s feelings, only with how well the men engage in flyting for her amusement. She has egged them on to escalate their argument; yet, when her father approaches she bids them stop [“No more, gentlemen, no more, here comes my father” (II. iv.47–48)] suggesting that she does not wish him to know about these games or to view her as being at their center: further evidence of the degree of secrecy and deception across social levels at this court. Neither visitor, nor servant, nor courtier, nor daughter, nor father seems ever to know quite what is going on, even as all of these engage in their own machinations. That this is a natural state of things here is underscored when, upon learning his friend Proteus is coming, Valentine tells Silvia, “This is the gentleman I told your lady-ship/Had come along with me, but that his mistress/Did hold his eyes lock’d in her crystal looks” (II. iv.87–89) only for her to respond, “Belike that now she hath enfranchis’d them/Upon some other pawn for fealty” (II.iv.90–91), clearly certain that Proteus’s beloved, like herself, engages in fickle love games as a matter of course. She also continues to demonstrate her penchant for secrecy and not revealing what she has been saying and doing to others when Proteus approaches: “Have done, have done; here comes the gentleman” (II.iv.99–100). Silvia is highly practiced in the arts of deception, secrecy, and manipulation, and through her own words, indicates these skills to be central to her character and her success at court. In contrast to Julia, Proteus’s Veronese love, who does play games of love but also second-guesses that gaming in favor of a more sincere response when she wrongs others, apologizing to her maid for her deceptive behavior [“How churlishly I chid Lucetta hence, […] How angrily I taught my brow to frown,/When inward joy enforc’d my heart to smile?/My penance is to call Lucetta back/And ask remission for my folly past” (I.ii.60–65)], Silvia’s words betray no need to question her behavior or apologize for cruelties, suggesting the degree of deception at this court to be higher, an estimation reinforced by Valentine’s own development of greater skills in such behaviors upon his arrival. The corrupting nature of this court is further underscored when Proteus arrives and in short order learns of Valentine’s love for Silvia, falls in love with Silvia himself, and decides he loves her more than Julia and that therefore, he and Valentine are sworn enemies. Having convinced himself of these points, in an extended monologue (II.vii.1–43) he reiterates them, reveals that Valentine intends that night to elope with Silvia, and goes to the Duke of Milan, revealing their plan. The Duke confronts Valentine, seeming to hold a conversation that then becomes

204  Melissa Ridley Elmes a trap into confessing his plot, at which the Duke banishes him from court (III.i.51–187); Proteus then adds insult to injury by repeating this news as though he has just learned it, despite having been perfectly aware of it because of his own involvement (III.i.204–220). Further, the Duke  of Milan  asks Proteus to slander Valentine to Silvia when he is exiled (III.i.11–66)—proving that at this court, the apple does not far fall from the tree concerning manipulation of others and talking about people behind their backs. The various schemes at court continue to develop. Proteus slanders Valentine at the Duke’s behest to try to persuade Silvia to turn her affection to Thurio, even as Proteus seeks to win her love for himself; Silvia plots with Sir Eglamour to run away to find Valentine; and Julia arrives, disguised as a boy for safety on the journey from Verona to Milan, but remaining in disguise once she witnesses Proteus’s wooing of Silvia, in order to give herself time to decide how to respond to this situation. Meanwhile, a very different scene plays out in the wood. The outlaws see Valentine approaching and demand he give them all of his valuables, clearly laying out his options and what he can expect from them [“Stand, sir, and throw us that you have about ye./If not, we’ll make you sit, and rifle you.” (IV.i.3–4)]. Valentine replies that he is destitute, traveling with only the clothes on his back [“My riches are these poor habilements,/Of which if you should here disfurnish me,/You take the sum and substance that I have” (IV.i.13–15)]. The outlaws ask him where he is from, then lead him through a line of questions to which he offers truthful responses—that he is traveling to Verona, has left Milan after sixteen months, being banished—before arriving at why he has been banished, to which he responds with a lie: 1 OUTLAW:  What, were you banish’d thence? VALENTINE:  I was. 2 OUTLAW:  For what offense? VALENTINE:  For that which now it torments

me to rehearse: I kill’d a man, whose death I much repent, But yet I slew him manfully in fight, Without false vantage, or base treachery.” (IV.i.23–29)

He appears to tell this lie in order to impress the outlaws, perhaps with an eye to deterring them from any physical attack upon his person, in keeping with an understanding that outlaws in the wood have been exiled from society because they are dangerous. However, this blend of truth and lie also shows that Valentine has taken what he has learned of manipulation and of deception at the Milanese court and turned it into a skill suitable not merely for games of love, but for survival. It has become a transferable skill which renders him a polysemic figure, able to engage effectively with a variety of audiences for his own purposes—in effect, a Robin Hood figure. That Shakespeare intends for him to be

Acting Out(Law) 205 read as such is evident when the outlaws explicitly reference that legend; impressed with his background, Outlaw 3 suggests: “By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar,/This fellow were a king for our wild faction” (IV.i.36–37) here, indicating that he views Valentine as a polysemic figure—a king and outlaw, a noble and vagrant—in the same way that Robin Hood is presented as such in the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.12 In the spirit of acceptance and mutual respect, the outlaws reveal their own crimes to Valentine, claiming that among them are “gentlemen,/ Such as the fury of ungovern’d youth/Thrust from the company of awful men” (IV.i.42–44)—the first having plotted to steal away the daughter and heir of a Veronese friend of the Duke of Milan’s, the second for stabbing a man dead in a fit of passion in Mantua, and the third for similar crimes [“And I for like such petty crimes as these.” (IV.i.50)] They conclude by stating that they have divulged their crimes both to excuse, or explain, their lawless existence in the wood, and to offer him a true understanding of who they are in preparation to invite him to become their leader [“Are you content to be our general?/To make a virtue out of necessity/And live as we do in this wilderness?” (IV.i.59–61)] They follow that offer with the threat that: “if thou scorn our courtesy, thou diest” (IV.i.66) and Valentine agrees to accept their offer, “Provided that you do no outrages/On silly women and poor passengers” (IV.i.69–70)—an apparent parallel to Robin Hood’s code in the Geste: “Wolde he neuer do company harme/That ony womman was ynne.”13 To this request, the outlaws respond: “No, we detest such vile base practices” (IV.i.71) indicating that they adhere to a specific code of conduct that prohibits such nefarious behavior towards those weaker than themselves. Where at court the only conduct code appears to be do what you can get away with, resulting in much unethical behavior, there is, in fact, a code of honor in action among these outlaws, and the contrast between their forthright honesty and the various deceptive practices at court is stark: these may be outlaws, but they are also portrayed as honorable men. The same cannot be said for the Duke of Milan or Proteus, who have proven thus far to be powerful and in control, yet lacking in ethics and honor. Significantly, while in his later plays Shakespeare uses the Greenwood as a carnivalesque space where anything can happen, in this one the Greenwood is fairly conservative in nature despite the criminal background of its inhabitants. It is employed much as it is in the late-medieval Robin Hood ballads—as a space in which, far from abandoning rational behavior and engaging in all sorts of wildness and debauchery, outlaws live by their own code of conduct, having been exiled from a society that is in many ways far more corrupt. Two Gentlemen of Verona therefore continues the tradition of using the Greenwood as a foil for the court in ways that are clearly critical of the noble characters in the narrative, and Shakespeare can get away with this because the play is a comedy rather than a tragedy—thus, not intended to be taken seriously, although it can

206  Melissa Ridley Elmes be argued that the criticisms he levels at the behavior of the courtiers in comparison to the outlaws are serious, indeed. Keeping their word to do no harm to a woman, when the outlaws come across Silvia and Eglamour in the wood and Eglamour flees, they take Silvia captive but assure her that she is perfectly safe: “Come, I must bring you to our captain’s cave./Fear not, he bears an honorable mind,/and will not use a woman lawlessly” (V.iii.12–14). When Proteus subsequently intercepts them and rescues her from her outlaw captors, Silvia berates him for his falseness toward Valentine: “Had I been seized by a hungry lion,/I would have been a breakfast to the beast/Rather than have false Proteus rescue me” (V.iv.33–35), continues by openly declaring her love for Valentine: “O heaven be judge how I love Valentine,/ Whose life’s as tender to me as my soul!” (V.iv.36–37) and makes clear the extent of her antipathy towards Proteus: “And full as much (for more there cannot be)/I do detest false, perjur’d Proteus./Therefore be gone, solicit me no more” (V.iv.38–40). At this point, Proteus replies: “… if the gentle spirit of moving words Can no way change you to a milder form, I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arm’s end, And love you ‘gainst the nature of love–force ye. … I’ll force ye to yield to my desire.” (V.iv.55–59) It is impossible for audiences of the #metoo era not to read Proteus’s words here as the threat of rape that they clearly are intended to be, and one wonders mightily what an Elizabethan audience would have thought of this moment, in which a nobleman threatens a lady with sexual violence, characterized as “wooing like a soldier,” thereby also implicating an entire category of men who serve the ruling class in systemic violence against women, where the criminals and outlaws of the wood assured her they would never do anything of the sort. It is at this moment that Valentine, who has heretofore been observing their exchange in hiding, comes to Silvia’s aid: “Ruffian! Let go that rude, uncivil touch,/Thou friend of an ill-fashion!” (V.iv.60–61). His words underscore the incivility of Proteus, who should behave according to the codes of courtesy ascribed to nobles, in comparison to Valentine and his followers, who have been outlawed, yet prove to be more civil than those who caused them to be exiled. The moment that Valentine repudiates him, Proteus capitulates, apologizing and acknowledging he has shamed himself: “My shame and guilt confounds me. Forgive me, Valentine, if hearty sorrow Be a sufficient ransom for offense, I tender’t here: I do as truly suffer As e’er I did commit.” (V.iv.73–77)

Acting Out(Law) 207 It is at this point that Valentine responds in a way which critics have found exceptionally problematic, not only accepting Proteus’s apology, but seeming to offer Silvia to him as a peace-offering: “Then I am paid, And once again I do receive thee honest. Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d; By penitence th’Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d: And that my love may appear plain and free, All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.” (V.iv.77–84) However, if he is read according to his presentation as a Robin Hood/ king of the outlaws figure, then this speech makes quite a lot more sense. By the code of honor that was established in his initial encounter with the band of outlaws in Act 4, honesty and forthrightness are essential. While Proteus threatened Silvia with assault, he did not actually carry through with it, and thus has not violated either law or conduct code (though he has behaved with a great lack of ethics.) His true offense at this point—his betrayal of Valentine—has been laid bare, and he has confessed to his guilt and shame and asked for forgiveness. If he is to remain in good standing within the code of conduct by which he has elected to live and which he has agreed to uphold as the leader of the outlaws, if he is not to behave hypocritically by shunning Proteus for his confession as he was shunned for his own by the Duke of Milan, Valentine must accept that honest and forthright apology. His speech further points again to parallels in Robin Hood as he appears in the Geste, a man who upholds the laws of God over the laws of men: if his foes repent their crimes against him, then he must forgive. It is possible, then, that final line—All that was mine in Silvia I give thee—does not mean that Valentine is giving Silvia to Proteus (which of course, he does not have the right to do) but that he is offering Proteus the same unconditional love and trust which he offered to her. Away from court, Valentine has learned to transcend the pettiness of courtly ways in favor of a more humane approach to relationships. As the scene comes to its conclusion, in short order Proteus is reunited with Julia, they swear their love to one another, and the Duke of Milan and Thurio are brought to Valentine by the other outlaws. Valentine welcomes the Duke: “Your Grace is welcome to a man disgrac’d,/ Banished Valentine” (V.iv.123–124), and he and Thurio exchange words for a final time over Silvia. During this exchange Thurio reveals that he no longer wants Silvia because she does not love him, and the Duke of Milan, able to judge Thurio’s behavior against that of Valentine in this space removed from the court, sees clearly Valentine’s worth in

208  Melissa Ridley Elmes comparison to the formerly-preferred Thurio, switching his allegiance accordingly: “Now, by the honor of my ancestry, I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, And think thee worthy of an empress’ love. Know then, I here forget all former griefs, Cancel all grudge, repeal thee home again, Plead a new state in thy unrivall’d merit, To which I thus subscribe: Sir Valentine Thou art a gentleman and well deriv’d, Take thou thy Silvia, for thou has’t deserv’d her.” (V.iv.139–147) Valentine, however, realizes that despite its seeming generosity this pardon is a limited one, and proving again his ability to manipulate a situation not only for his own ends but for the benefit of others as well, pushes for a full pardon for all of the outlaws: I thank your Grace, the gift hath made me happy. I now beseech you (for your daughter’s sake) To grant one boon that I shall ask of you … These banish’d men, that I have kept withal, Are men endu’d with worthy qualities. Forgive them what they have committed here, And let them be recall’d from their exile; They are reformed, civil, full of good, And fit for great employment, worthy lord” (V.iv.149–156) He appeals to the Duke for [his] daughter’s sake because, if Valentine is pardoned but the other outlaws are not, there will always be the possibility of his being grouped in with them as a ne’er-do-well, or seen by others as having been granted special treatment that might or might not have been deserved regardless of the Duke’s own forgiveness and absolution—a state of suspicion that could extend to Silvia through their marriage. A general pardon for all of the outlaws ensures that they are all permitted re-entry into society on equal footing, making it far more difficult for any one of them to be singled out for his formerly exiled state. Where there was a clear line of demarcation between the noble and the outlaw, the lawful and the lawless, based on the location of these men at court or in the Greenwood, their behaviors did not support that physical distinction, and Valentine uses this opportunity to press his advantage on behalf of everyone involved to effect a positive outcome. The Duke agrees to the general pardon and gives Valentine leave to help these men re-enter society [“I pardon them and thee;/Dispose of them as thou know’st their deserts” (V.iv.158–159)] reiterating the esteem in which he now holds

Acting Out(Law) 209 Valentine as a leader. Valentine concludes the play by announcing that he and Silvia, and Proteus and Julia, will be married on the same day, including everyone in the scene in his announcement that they can expect: “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.” (V.iv.173) Where before, Valentine avoided supper because he felt unsure of his reception, here he proposes a feast fully in control of that reception and determined to extend equal welcome to the men who have supported him at his lowest point, thus proving and rewarding their good character and worth. The play brings things full circle from the court, with its social distinctions and intrigues and ethically ambiguous activity thinly veiled under the veneer of nobility, to the Greenwood with its lawless and classless denizens operating on their own code of conduct, and finally, to this moment in which those distinctions are blurred, the outlaw king being received as the noblest of men, his noble rivals viewed as wanting in meaningful ways, all of the outlaws meriting pardon for their good character, and a feast serving as the starting point for a new social order going forward.

As You Like It As You Like It owes its plot to the late-medieval outlaw narrative Tale of Gamelyn, which was adapted by Thomas Lodge in the prose romance Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie (1590), Shakespeare’s main source for this comedy.14 The play centers around the figure of Rosalind, daughter to the exiled Duke Senior, whose brother has usurped the duchy. Initially allowed to remain at court because she is the best friend of the usurper’s daughter, Rosalind finds herself subsequently (and inexplicably) banished, and she enters the wood disguised as a shepherd boy, Ganymede, accompanied by her friend, Celia, disguised as his sister, Aliena. In a parallel story Orlando, a young man who has fallen in love with Rosalind, enters into self-imposed exile in the wood to escape his older brother Oliver’s machinations. Ganymede and Aliena take up residence in an abode in the forest, unknowingly not far from where Rosalind’s father is living with a band of outlaws. Orlando writes love letters to Rosalind while in exile, and Ganymede and Aliena find these letters. Ganymede suggests that Orlando cure himself of his lovesickness by wooing Ganymede as he would Rosalind, and they begin daily lessons together in this endeavor. The usurper, Duke Frederick, learning that Orlando disappeared at the same time as Rosalind, orders Oliver to go into the forest and find him. Orlando rescues Oliver from a lioness and is injured in the process. Oliver meets Aliena and falls in love with her, and, learning of his injury Rosalind realizes the depth of her feelings for Orlando and decides to end the ruse. Returning to town, the couples are all married, and Duke Frederick repents of his actions, restores his brother to the dukedom, and becomes a hermit. Critical discussion of As You Like It typically focuses on the character of Rosalind, Rosalind’s relationship with Celia, and the various gender

210  Melissa Ridley Elmes constructions, or on the forest setting,15 but examining the play through its exiled figures yields important insights into characterization and how Shakespeare has altered and rendered more sophisticated his approach to employing the Matter of the Greenwood for the purposes of social critique and of characterization between these plays. Although Shakespeare does not include outlaws named as such among the characters as he does in Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It’s origin in explicitly outlaw source material places it even more firmly and intentionally within the Greenwood tradition, as does its setting in the Forest of Arden. The characters in exile are living outside of the established legal system of the city and are presented as explicitly parallel to the Robin Hood tradition; as Charles, one of Duke Frederick’s wrestlers, tells Oliver, oldest brother to Orlando: They say he [the exiled Duke Senior] is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.16 As with the earlier Two Gentlemen of Verona, here the Matter of the Greenwood is understood to be lighthearted and popular in tone, with Robin Hood evoked as a pleasant and merry figure living in the great outdoors with his band of merry men, his status as an outlaw viewed as almost incidental to his situation. However, while not preserving any of the more violent material of the earlier outlaw narratives to which it is beholden, again this wood does not descend into a hedonistic free-for-all Bakhtinian carnivalesque. The Forest of Arden is presented as a primordial, Edenic space, a “golden world” beyond that known by contemporary society. As with Two Gentlemen of Verona, the wood in As You Like It functions as a foil to court life, an opportunity for men to cast off the pretense of the court and reveal and live by their true nature; as commentator Anne Burton notes: “People are free here, [in the Forest of Arden] as they are not in the nervous court of Duke Frederick, to realize their own potentialities. Worldly assets and success cease to matter. In the forest, judgments are made only in terms of what people really are.”17 It seems clear from the similarity in how the wood affects the characters in both of his own plays that Shakespeare is not simply adapting Lodge’s romance, but returning to and deepening the idea of court life as corrupting, and life in the wood as liberating, that appears in his earlier work. That his featured outlaws in As You Like It are not expressly named as such, as they are in Two Gentlemen of Verona, should therefore not deter its audience from receiving them in the same vein as those earlier outlaws, especially when they experience the same transformative experience from court to wood and back again, under much the same conditions as Valentine (that is, banishment, or exile.) These similarities noted, there are a few differences worth examining for

Acting Out(Law) 211 how they shine light on Shakespeare’s development as a playwright, in the slight shifts in his approach to the characterization of his exiled figures: particularly, the distinctions made between thieves and the other forest denizens; the emphasis placed on the forest not merely as a place of refuge but of freedom; the explicit displeasure evinced by Duke Senior concerning venery; and how he employs the forest feasting scene. Whereas in Two Gentlemen of Verona the outlaws aside from Valentine are simply generalized characters (Outlaw 1, Outlaw 2, and Outlaw 3) in As You Like It, Shakespeare makes a clear distinction between “thieves” and the other individuals living in the Greenwood because they have been exiled from their homes or are otherwise outcasts from the city. When Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind, Celia declares that he has exiled her as well, and proposes that they flee together into the Forest of Arden to find Duke Senior: CELIA:  …

let my father seek another heir. Therefore, devise with me how we may fly, Whither to go, and what to bear with us, And do not seek to take your change upon you, To bear your griefs yourself, and leave me out; For by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale, Say what thou cans’t, I’ll go along with thee. ROSALIND:  Why, whither shall we go? CELIA:  To seek my uncle in the forest of Arden. (I.iii.100–107) To this suggestion Rosalind replies, in clear consternation: “Alas, what danger will it be to us,/Maids as we are, to travel forth so far!/Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” (I.iii.108–110) While these women wish to seek out Duke Senior and his men for safety, they fear the other outlaws as generalized “thieves.” However, here “thieves” has a ­double-connotation—they can be thieves that are outlawed for stealing, and also thieves of a woman’s virtue. This same concern is, of course, why Silvia asks Sir Eglamour to travel with her and why Julia dresses as a boy in Two Gentlemen of Verona; however, in that play the distinction of “thief” is not made; Silvia simply tells Eglamour: “I would to Valentine,/To Mantua, where I hear he makes abode;/And for the ways are dangerous to pass,/I do desire thy worthy company” (IV.ii.22–25) and Lucetta asks Julia how she intends to follow Proteus to Milan: LUCETTA:  But in what habit will you go along? JULIA:  Not like a woman, for I would prevent

The loose encounters of lascivious men.” (II.vii.39–41) In that earlier play, Shakespeare used the dangers of women’s travels on the road to heighten the dramatic tension of both Silvia’s and Julia’s

212  Melissa Ridley Elmes decision to follow their lovers out into the world and create the comic opportunity to employ cross-dressing as a plot device. In this one, he capitalizes on the wordplay available through the word “thief”—again, heightening that same dramatic tension; again, providing a reason for the comic cross-dressing to occur; and also, deepening the layers of social class and position in this play. The forest of Arden is not simply populated with unspecified dangerous and potentially lascivious outlaws; there are these “thieves,” the exiled Duke Senior’s men are mostly referred to as “foresters” (with one notable exception which I discuss below), and the other country folk met in and around the wood are shepherds. Not only does this render As You Like It more dimensional and believable, but it also showcases Shakespeare’s increasing confidence as a writer in using the materials of the Greenwood not simply in conventional terms as the realm of the outlaws, but for better shaping of the imagined world of his play. Further supporting the contention that Shakespeare has moved away from his earlier, more conventional presentation of the Greenwood to shape and employ it for his own purposes as a playwright interested in exploring the contrasts of city and Greenwood codes of conduct is the continued emphasis throughout As You Like It on life in the forest not as a punishment, but where the constrictions of court life are thrown off—a theme noted, but not so explicitly stated and expressly explored, in Two Gentlemen of Verona. When they have decided that they will indeed flee into the forest to find Duke Senior, Celia tells Rosalind, “Now go [we in] content/To liberty, and not to banishment” (I.iii.137–138), a sentiment immediately echoed by Duke Senior speaking to his servants as they walk through the wood in the scene directly following this one: “Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,/Hath not old custom made this life more sweet/Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods/More free from peril than the envious court?” (I.iii.1–4). The contrast between being in the wood and being in the city is taken up and discussed, over and over again, throughout the play, with Duke Senior, Rosalind, and Celia waxing rhapsodic about the freedoms of the forest, while Touchstone, more a fan of city life, complains about the wood [“Ay, now I am in Arden, the more fool I./When I was at home, I was in a better place” (II.iii.16–17)] and looks down on the shepherds he meets there: TOUCHSTONE:  Was ever in court, shepherd? CORIN:  No, truly. TOUCHSTONE:  Then thou art damn’d. CORIN:  Nay, I hope. TOUCHSTONE:  Truly, thou art damned … CORIN:  For not being at court? Your reason. TOUCHSTONE:  Why, if thou never wast at court,

thou

Acting Out(Law) 213 never saws’t good manners; if thou never saw’st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked, And wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou Art in a parlous state, shepherd. CORIN:  Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are Good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the Country as the behavior of the country is must Mockable at the court.” (III.ii.33–48) Corin seems to provide a voice of reason here, viewing neither city nor country as a more desirable or better place, but simply noting the differences required to successfully engage with society in each place and thus, the different behaviors required of their denizens. The contrast between his balanced response, Touchstone’s bias in favor of court life, and Duke Senior’s and Celia’s raptures over the freedoms of the forest life in comparison to the restrictions of court life emphasizes the sustained thematic focus in this play on the merits of these various habitations, and contributes importantly to audience understanding of the characters’ viewpoints concerning them: the setting and their response to it becomes an important, even essential, element in characterization. Perhaps the most significant way in which Shakespeare reframes the Greenwood in this play lies in his approach to the subject of poaching deer. In the late-medieval and early modern outlaw tradition, and especially notable in the Robin Hood narratives, the poaching of the king’s deer is one of the quintessential activities of the outlaws, expressly signaling their role as individuals deliberately breaking the law because they are living outside of the established legal system as a result of their outlawed status. However, in this play, the exiled Duke is explicit in his distaste for hunting deer: Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gor’d. (II.i.21–25) The Duke finds hunting venison within the forest to be an unsporting affair and, further, suggests that hunting deer within the confines of the forest, their natural habitat, is unethical. This concern for the ethics of venery is not in keeping with outlaw practices, but with the thought-process of a nobleman who abides by a particular world view and moral code which extends not only to human life, but to that of animals. If the Forest of Arden is viewable as an Edenic space, then Duke Senior ascribes to the

214  Melissa Ridley Elmes “protector of” rather than the “dominion over” view of human-animal relations, which is not a luxury that a true outlaw could afford. This moment deepens the characterization of Duke Senior as a wealthy, affable, and humane man, in foil to Duke Frederick, who is presented throughout as capricious, petty, and vindictive. The consistency of Duke Senior’s characterization lends to the unity of the play; it is easy for the audience to understand why Celia would seek him out, and why other lords are so willing to join him in exile rather than remaining at Frederick’s court, beyond simply that Frederick is the antagonist and therefore must automatically be in the wrong. Rather, Duke Senior’s compassion and integrity are presented, developed, and maintained throughout the play as stabilizing forces that draw people to him, even as Frederick’s hot-headedness drives people away.18 In this, he is more a courtier continuing to hold court in the woods than he is a leader of a true band of outlaws; where Robin Hood is best viewed as a polysemic figure, protean in his approach to dealing with others, with “noble lord” merely one of his possible guises, Duke Senior is a more constant figure: the noble exile. This characterization is evident, for example, in the feast scene at the end of Act 2. The scene opens, according to the stage directions: [A table set out.] Enter Duke Senior, [Amiens,] and Lord[s], like outlaws.19 That “like outlaws” is important, because it again both distinguishes them from and also links these characters to their earlier literary Greenwood counterparts, and again associates those figures with a lighter narrative tone; this should be a festive scene of revelry, the Merry Men in the Wood. After worrying about Jacques in his absence, then indulging him in a pessimistic rant upon his arrival, the Duke turns his attention to Orlando, who interrupts the feast, sword drawn, threatening them to “Forbear, and eat no more” (II.vii.88).20 Immediately, the Duke ascertains that this is no true threat, and seeks to establish an understanding of the interruptor’s motives: “Art thou thus bolden’d, man, by thy distress?/Or else a rude despiser of good manners,/That in civility thou seem’st so empty?” (II.vii.91–93) to which Orlando replies: “You touch’d my vein at first. The thorny point Of bare distress hath ta’en from me the show Of smooth civility; yet am I inland bred, And know some nurture. But forbear, I say, He dies that touches any of this fruit Till I and my affairs are answered.” (II.vii.94–99) Picking up on the cues that this intruder to the feast is no threat but rather, a fellow nobleman, Duke Senior counters by insisting on civility: “What would you have? Your gentleness shall force,/More than your force move us to gentleness” (II.vii.102–103) to which Orlando replies “I almost die for food” (II.vii.104). When the Duke then readily invites him to the table,

Acting Out(Law) 215 Orlando responds: “Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you./I thought that all things had been savage here,/And therefore put I on the countenance/ of stern command’ment” (II.viii.106–109), here, mirroring and giving voice to the concerns merely implied in Valentine’s response in pretending to be a criminal when he meets outlaws in the wood in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Orlando reveals that he has a companion who is also starving, to which the Duke responds: “Go find him out,/And we will nothing waste till you return” (II.vii.133–134). Upon their return, Duke Senior welcomes Orlando and Adam to the table, bids them eat and enjoy Amiens’s singing, and then reveals that he has recognized Orlando as the son of his friend Sir Rowland and that they are wholly welcome into his retinue (II.vii.167–200). This feast scene becomes an important reunion between these two exiled figures, made possible by Duke Senior’s inherently hospitable nature. The scene directly following this one reveals Duke Frederick ordering Orlando’s elder brother, Oliver, to find his brother and bring him back dead or alive, or find himself banished with his lands confiscated—a stark contrast, intentionally placed to capitalize on the foiling of Duke Senior and Duke Frederick as characters: the one so humane, the other so cutthroat; the one in the forest, away from court intrigues and thus free to live a life unburdened by conflict, the other in the city, bent on retaining power and control through any means necessary. Duke Senior continues to be the stabilizing and enabling force throughout the play. In Oliver’s Act 4 speech to Celia and Rosalind regarding his reunion with Orlando, he reveals that Orlando was injured when he stopped a lioness from attacking Oliver, and that once that event was over and Oliver demonstrated that he was ashamed of and sorry for his behavior toward his brother, Orlando responded by taking him to Duke Senior: “[In] brief, he led me to the gentle Duke,/Who gave me fresh array and entertainment,/Committing me unto my brother’s love” (IV.iii.142– 144). Oliver, so reunited with his brother under the hospitable auspices of the Duke, finds a welcome in the forest that paves the way for his decision to stay there, living as a shepherd and marrying Aliena, offering to restore Orlando’s properties and position to him. As the four couples of the play enjoy a wedding scene at the end, Oliver’s and Orlando’s other brother, Jacques, comes upon the event and momentarily interrupts the festivities to announce that Duke Frederick has met and been converted by a hermit, and has forsworn his wealth and position, restoring these to Duke Senior—who, despite being exiled and by association, outlawed, has been the true nobleman of the play throughout.

Conclusion Penned approximately a decade apart, and despite their very different source materials, Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It display a continuous preoccupation with the subjects of injustice and misuse of power; the fine line socially between outlaw and noble and critical

216  Melissa Ridley Elmes distinction between noble outlaw and ignoble lord; and the contrast between city life, with its schemes and betrayals, on the one hand, and country life, offering the chance to throw off the mantle of corruption and embrace one’s true nature, on the other. This comparison is rendered possible by these plays’ status as comedies, and thus not works meant to reflect truths of, or to be taken seriously as a mirror of, actual society—the comedy a genre not viewed as a threat to the status quo, but seen as a chance to imagine another reality without necessarily challenging the current world view in which it is produced. That imaginative, yet non-threatening nature is reinforced by the incorporation of the Matter of the Greenwood, by Shakespeare’s time clearly viewed as frivolous, popular literature. The imagery of the outlaw’s Greenwood, and particularly of Robin Hood as the admirably charismatic and polysemic leader of a band of Merry Men living the Good Life in the forest free of society’s corruption, is central to Shakespeare’s shaping of his source materials into these studies of human character and human nature. In both plays, characters in positions of power and authority participate in a variety of schemes and machinations that, while entertaining, also speak to deep ambivalence concerning the integrity of the noble and the criminality of the exiled and outlawed figure. Ultimately, both of these plays culminate in an ending in which, while audiences are distracted by the comedy of the cross-dressing woman and the happy outcome, the social distinction between outlaw, exile, lord, and noble is blurred nearly to a vanishing point, replaced with a greater attention to the inherent quality of a person’s words and deeds in determining his or her ultimate character. Shakespeare critiques bad governance and the injustice of a legal system that relies on the ethical behavior of its upholders through the contrast between his noble and banished characters in much the same way as do the authors of the late-medieval outlaw narratives that serve as the sources for his plays, however many degrees removed through intermediary texts. Through images such as court suppers, forest feasts, and the hunting of deer, the characters and the ways in which their identities are constructed throughout these plays reveal both their indebtedness to their earlier literary counterparts, and the evolution of Shakespeare’s particular use of the Matter of the Greenwood for social commentary.

Notes 1. As early as the 1970s, Jess Bessinger was discussing the anti-ecclesiastical and class-conscious nature of the Gest of Robyn Hode and its 15th-century literary contemporaries; see: “The Gest of Robyn Hode Revisited,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 355–369. In 1988, Richard Kaueper argued for reading the Geste as a sustained commentary on the corruption of local sheriffs in medieval society; see: War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 335–336.

Acting Out(Law) 217 Thomas Ohlgren and Stephen Knight also argue for reading the Geste as a text preoccupied with the wrongs imposed on the people “by authorities of church, town, and state”; see: their “Introduction,” to the “Gest of Robyn Hode” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2000), 86. Maurice Keen in 1961, and again in a revised study in 2000, discussed the outlaw ballads as an expression of peasant discontent; see: The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2001) especially chapter 11. More recently, essays by Antha CottonSprekelmeyer, Alexander Kaufman, Kimberly A. Macuare Thompson, and Mark Leahy examine these concerns in part three of the edited collection of essays British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2011). 2. In addition to the edited collection by Kaufman et al remarked upon in Note 1, recent studies in this vein include Sarah Harlan-Haughey’s monograph The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature (New York: Routledge Press, 2016) which takes an ecocritical approach to examining medieval outlaw tales including those of Gamelyn, Fouk le Fitz Waryn, and Robin Hood, and Mark Truesdale, The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York: Routledge Press, 2018); also, the essays in this volume by Renée Ward, Sherron Lux, Marybeth Ruether-Wu, Mark Truesdale, S. Melissa Winders and Sarah-Harlan-Haughey, and Jason Hogue. 3. Exceptions to this point being the Earle of Huntington tragedies and MayDay theatricals, which of course belong specifically to the outlaw tradition and have been widely studied as such by critics. Three recent exceptions to my claim of a lacuna in critical examinations of outlaws and outlawry in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama include Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Canonicity and ‘Robin Hood’: The Morris Dance and the Meaning of ‘Lighter than Robin Hood’ in the Prologue to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen” and Robert C. Evans, “Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd, the Theme of Compassion, and the Robin Hood Canon” in Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, eds. Alexander L. Kaufman and Lesley Coote (New York: Routledge, 2018) and Matt Williamson’s essay in the current volume, all of which focus on early modern stage outlaws. There is, of course, far more scholarship available on the outlaws of 16th- and 17th-century broadsides and ballads, and on the rogue book and cony-catching tradition of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period; see: Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Life, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.) These rogue books and cony-catching pamphlets influenced early modern English dramatists, including Shakespeare. 4. In the tragedies, Falstaff compares the hostess to Maid Marian in Act 3, scene 2 of Henry IV, part 1 (“There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune, nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox, and for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy’s wife of the ward to thee. Go, you thing, go.” [ll. 111–115]) and a passing reference to “Robin Hood, Scarlett and John” (ln. 103) is made by Silence, one of the country justices, in Act 5, scene 3 of Henry IV part 2. Neither of these references appears to tie into the larger play in any essential thematic fashion; rather, they serve as immediate instances of characterization for their utterers. All citations from Shakespeare’s works are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

218  Melissa Ridley Elmes 5. In that Prologue, the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer is evoked, addressing concerns that his story might be poorly adapted by the playwrights, resulting in “[his] famed works [made] lighter / than Robin Hood!” (ll. 20–21); as Stock argues: “The catchphrase ‘lighter than Robin Hood’ registers the low level to which the renowned, now-canonical poet’s spirit fears his adapters have degraded the gravitas of his Knight’s Tale.” Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Canonicity and ‘Robin Hood’,”109. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. Among these: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109; William Carroll, ed. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Arden Shakespeare (London: Thompson Learning, 2004), 130; and Roger Warren, ed. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26–27. 8. See, for example: Carrol J. Carlisle and Patty S. Derrick, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona on Stage: Protean Problems and Protean Solutions,” in Michael J. Collins, ed., Shakespeare’s Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 126–154, which offers a good overview of the problems critics have noted with this play and the critical conversation surrounding those problems. 9. For discussion of the sources for Two Gentlemen of Verona, see: Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare Volume One: Early Comedies, Poems, Romeo and Juliet (New York, Columbia University Press, 1957), 203-268; Anne Barton, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in the Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 177–180 at 178. 10. For discussion of this blurring of roles in the figure of Robin Hood and its significance to that medieval outlaw narrative tradition, see: Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016), 19–30; also, in this volume, the chapters by Mark Truesdale and S. Melissa Winders and Sarah Harlan-Haughey. 11. II.ii.135–155. All quoted material from the play comes from “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in the Riverside Shakespeare, 181–207, and henceforth appear parenthetically. 12. See: Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character,” esp. 23 and 27–28, for discussion of Robin Hood’s polysemic characterization in that text. 13. Wynkyn de Worde’s “A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” (1506?) in Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, eds., Early Rhymes of Robyn Hood, An Edition of the Texts ca. 1425 to ca. 1600 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 89–148, ll. 38–39. 14. “The Tale of Gamelyn: Introduction,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, eds. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 184–193, at 191. 15. Studies on the character of Rosalind include the classic article by Margaret Boerner Beckman, “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” in S­ hakespeare Quarterly 29.1(1978), 44–51; Lesley Anne Soule, “Subverting Rosalind: Cocky Ros in the Forest of Arden,” in New Theatre Quarterly 7.26 (1991), 126–136; and the popular biography by Angela Thirlwell, Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017). Scholarship examining the relationship between Rosalind and Celia includes J­essica Tvordi, ““Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night” in Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, eds.,

Acting Out(Law) 219





Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 114–130 and Julie Crawford, “The Place of a Cousin in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 69.2 (2018), 101–127. Articles dealing with the forest setting include Martha Ronk, “Locating the Visual in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 52.2 (Summer 2001), 255–276; Ryan Farrar, “As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation,” in Utopian Studies 25.2 (2014), 359–383; and an interesting study on the Forest of Arden as sacred space in Helga L. Duncan, “‘Here at the Fringe of the Forest’: Staging Sacred Space in As You Like It,” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.1(2013), 121–144. 16. I.i.114–120. All quoted material from the play comes from “As You Like It,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 403–436. 17. Anne Burton, introductory notes, “As You Like It,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 399–402, at 400. 18. For a slightly different reading of Duke Senior’s role, approaching it from the subject of “contentment” as it is explored in English Renaissance writings, see: Paul Joseph Zajac, “The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” in Studies in Philology 113.2 (2016), 306–336. 19. “As You Like It,” 414. 20. This scene is also recognizable as analogous to the interrupted meal motif in the Arthurian legend, wherein King Arthur refuses to sit down to dine until he has witnessed a great marvel or some wondrous adventure, most famously exemplified in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and parodied in the Robin Hood tradition when, in the Geste, Robin sends his men out to find someone to dine with (and con). See: Aisling Byrne, “The Intruder at the Feast: Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Insular Romance” in Arthurian Literature 27 (2010), 33–57 and Byrne, “Arthur’s Refusal to Eat: Ritual and Control in the Romance Feast” in Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), 62–74. It is possible to read Duke Senior as a sort of comic, parodic version of the “once and future king” / Arthurian figure, given the trajectory of his character in the play.

Bibliography Barton, Anne. “Introduction: As You Like It.” In The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 390–402. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. “Introduction: The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” In The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 177–180. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Beckman, Margaret Boerner. “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1(1978): 44–51. Bessinger, Jess. “The Gest of Robyn Hode Revisited.” In The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, edited by Larry D. Benson, 355–369. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare Volume One: Early Comedies, Poems, Romeo and Juliet. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

220  Melissa Ridley Elmes Byrne, Aisling. “Arthur’s Refusal to Eat: Ritual and Control in the Romance Feast.” Journal of Medieval History Vol. 37 (2011): 62–74. ———. “The Intruder at the Feast: Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Insular Romance.” Arthurian Literature Vol. 27 (2010): 33–57. Carlisle, Carrol J. and Derrick, Patty S. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona on Stage: Protean Problems and Protean Solutions.” In Shakespeare’s Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies, edited by Michael J. Collins, 126–154. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Crawford, Julie. “The Place of a Cousin in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 69, No.2 (2018): 101–127. Duncan, Helga L. “‘Here at the Fringe of the Forest’: Staging Sacred Space in As You Like It.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Vol. 43, No.1 (2013): 121–144. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode.” Medieval Perspectives Vol. 31 (2016): 19–30. Farrar, Ryan. “As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation.” Utopian Studies Vol. 25, No.2 (2014): 359–383. Harlan-Haughey, Sarah. The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 1. New York: Routledge Press, 2016. Kaueper, Richard. War, Justice, and Public Order. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988. Kaufman, Alexander L, Ed. British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., Inc, 2011. Kaufman, Alexander L. and Coote, Lesley, Eds. Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 6. New York: Routledge, 2018. Keen, Maurice. The Outlaws of Medieval Legend. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge Press, 2001. Kinney, Arthur F. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Life, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Ohlgren, Thomas and Knight, Stephen. “Introduction” to the ‘Gest of Robyn Hode’.” In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Thomas Ohlgren and Stephen Knight, 80–89. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. ———. “Introduction” to the ‘Tale of Gamelyn’.” In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Thomas Ohlgren and Stephen Knight, 184–193. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Ronk, Martha. “Locating the Visual in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 52, No.2 (Summer 2001): 255–276. Shakespeare, William. “As You Like It.” In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 403–436. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. “Henry IV. Part One.” In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 884–927. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Acting Out(Law) 221 ———. “Henry IV. Part Two.”. ” In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 928–973. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by William Carroll. The Arden Shakespeare London: Thompson Learning, 2004. ———. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Roger Warren. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 181–207. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Soule, Lesley Anne. “Subverting Rosalind: Cocky Ros in the Forest of Arden.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 7, No.26 (1991): 126–136. Stock, Lorraine Kochanske. “Canonicity and ‘Robin Hood’: The Morris Dance and the Meaning of ‘Lighter than Robin Hood’ in the prologue to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, edited by Lesley Coote and Alexander L. Kaufman, 109–131. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 6. New York: Routledge, 2019. Thirlwell, Angela. Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine. New York: Pegasus Books, 2017. Truesdale, Mark. The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture 4. New York: Routledge Press, 2018. Tvordi, Jessica. “Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.” In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, 114–130. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Wells, Stanley and Taylor, Gary. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wynkyn de Worde. “A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.” In Early Rhymes of Robyn Hood, An Edition of the Texts ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, edited by Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, 89–148. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 428. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Zajac, Paul Joseph. “The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Studies in Philology, Vol. 113, No. 2 (2016): 306–336.

11 Early Modern Fishing Practices and Seafood Culture in Robin Hood’s Fishing Jason Hogue

“The fisher-man more mony hath Then any marchant two or three; Therefore I will to Scarburough go And there a fisher-man will bee.”1 This statement is made by the legendary Robin Hood at the beginning of Robin Hood’s Fishing, a seventeenth-century ballad which appeared in many popular English broadsides and garlands, usually under the title “The Noble Fisherman, or, Robin Hood’s Preferment.”2 Among the Robin Hood ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this one stands out as being rather idiosyncratic and out of place, taking its principal setting not in the merry Greenwood but at sea, featuring the famous outlaw as either an unlucky or incompetent fisherman. 3 The oddity or incongruity of this scenario in comparison with more orthodox portrayals of the legend, however, affords readers and scholars the unique perspective of seeing the outlaw’s interaction with an early modern fishing community, that of Scarborough in Yorkshire. From this vantage point, the ballad provides insight into economic and political concerns of the day related to the growth of England’s sea-fishing industry and its ability to compete at an international level. In this essay, I assess Robin’s unusual claim that fishermen make more money than merchants do, analyzing Robin Hood’s Fishing in the context of contemporaneous mercantilist pamphlets that advocated for increased national fishing efforts in England, while also attending to the ballad’s representation of marine fishing as a local cultural practice based primarily around the catch of white fish, namely cod. Although Robin Hood’s opening remark in the ballad about the wealth of fishermen seems to echo the mercantilist rhetoric of nationalist pamphlets, I argue that the events that transpire during Robin’s tenure on board the fishing ship suggest that Robin Hood’s Fishing actually critiques this nationalist rhetoric by representing Robin, a spokesman for the pamphlets’ perspective, as a clumsy counterpoint to the competent Yorkshire fishers, ultimately affirming the value of local industries and economies while

Early Modern Fishing Practices 223 still allowing the iconic Robin Hood to win the day and return to his own place in the medieval Greenwood. The ballad Robin Hood’s Fishing warrants closer attention than it has previously received for a number of reasons. For one, some scholars have recently pointed out the importance of the corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ballad texts in the long-running tradition of the popular outlaw. Alexander Kaufman sees “these later, post-medieval texts as worthy of attention, especially to those who seek Robin’s outlaw origins in literature.”4 Stephen Knight, furthermore, has suggested that “what a hundred years ago were seen as the central Robin Hood texts, the broadside ballads, have not been inspected much.”5 As a seemingly odd or outlier text, Robin Hood’s Fishing ranks high in terms of under-inspection, despite its apparent popularity at the time of its initial circulation as indicated by the frequency of its inclusion in garlands and broadsides.6 Dobson and Taylor affirm, “there can be no doubt that it enjoyed great popularity for at least two hundred years after its first emergence in the early seventeenth century,” with a large number of late seventeenth-century broadsides of the ballad still extant, and the ballad nearly always included in the Robin Hood collections known as “garlands.”7 Additionally, although it has been shunned by a few scholars as being too silly or bizarre, this ballad adapts and reinforces many established conventions and characteristics of the Robin Hood tradition, while also contributing its uniquely coastal and maritime flavor to the outlaw’s legacy.8 Finally, because of its savvy engagement with the rhetoric of mercantilism, it is an apt ballad to consider as a commentary on the societal changes that England and other parts of Europe were undergoing during the seventeenth century. As a popular genre of entertainment, the ballad had the potential for reaching a broad audience, with Robin Hood often featured as one of its most enduring popular heroes. At the same time, the adaptation of Robin Hood into the setting of a local fishing community attests to the medieval outlaw’s potency as a “universal folk hero,” nearly infinitely flexible.9 Therefore, the decision by the composer of Robin Hood’s Fishing to use a Robin Hood ballad to comment on issues related to England’s national fishery— while including the well-known coastal fishing town of Scarborough on a local level—suggests a nuanced engagement with English national(ist) politics that innocently lampoons Robin Hood’s ridiculous transposition into the maritime setting while simultaneously using the everyman/ Englishman to expose the limits of mercantilist ideology. Although Robin Hood’s claim in lines 9–12 that fishermen make more money than merchants do sounds suspicious, potentially calling into question the accuracy of the ballad’s representation of early modern fishing, the ballad’s composer by and large convincingly displays a general knowledge of the fishing practices of the time and crafts a narrative that successfully weaves basic elements of the Robin Hood

224  Jason Hogue myth into contemporary Yorkshire fishing culture. Like other town or tradesman ballads, Robin Hood’s Fishing deviates from the setting of Robin’s medieval forest to address late medieval and early modern themes and concerns related to increasing urbanization and the rise of international trade.10 In town tradesman ballads, Robin Hood leaves the forest setting to attempt to take up some form of trade in a town setting, comically failing at it but ultimately able to remain the hero of the story by relying on his traditional strategies of clever deception or excellence in combat. The maritime setting of Robin Hood’s Fishing, however, puts it into a class of its own. While the ballad roughly fits the qualification of town tradesman ballad, Robin’s taking up of fishing in particular problematizes the defining characteristics of the town tradesman ballad, first, because Robin Hood’s Fishing is more focused on Robin’s interaction with the fishermen and mariners at sea than on his interaction with the townspeople of Scarborough, and second, because fishing is itself somewhat ambiguously a single “trade,” such as butchery or pottery, being situated somewhere between the occupations of husbandry and hunting, a “harvest” of food from the ocean that also requires a type of pursuit of animals and technical skill in the dispatching of those animals. As a quasi-town tradesman ballad, then, Robin Hood’s Fishing navigates an oceanic liminal territory, sailing along the border of a mythic past and a mercantile future. As scholars have noted, liminality itself is a characteristic of the outlaw hero, but the oceanic environs ultimately prove to be something of a limit to Robin’s adaptability.11 The plot of Robin Hood’s Fishing begins with Robin Hood gathering his merry men to announce his change of vocation, paying them half a year’s wages, and instructing them that if they should need to reach him to ask for him by his new pseudonym, Simon of the Lee.12 After leaving the Greenwood and arriving in Scarborough, Robin meets a widow who contracts him to use her ship for the purpose of fishing commercially.13 Hoisting up the sails, Robin and his new crew set off to fish.14 They are not at sea for long, though, before Robin realizes he has made a huge mistake in his new occupational choice. The sailors ridicule him for his inability to catch anything, and Robin spends the remainder of the enterprise downcast, sharpening his arrows and wistfully dreaming of his old life in the forest—Plumpton Park in this tale rather than the familiar Sherwood.15 However, when the fishers spy a French pirate ship menacingly heading toward them, Robin manages to save the day by climbing a mast and using his bow and arrow to dispose of the threat, killing all but three of the pirate crew.16 Boarding the French vessel, Robin goes below and locates the pirates’ gold, promising to give half of the spoils to the widow and her children.17 Robin also vows that he will never go to sea again.

Early Modern Fishing Practices 225

Herring and Cod Before getting into the specifics of the ballad and its connection to mercantilist pamphlet literature, some context regarding the history of the European fishing industry and its two main staples, herring and cod, will be useful in demonstrating the importance of these two particular types of fish as invaluable commodities that were being shipped and traded across Europe during the ballad’s composition and dissemination, in addition to constituting a substantial part of the flavor profile of many medieval and early modern diets. Although the bulk of this essay will focus on the catching of these fish, a brief discussion of the processing and preparation of herring versus cod will provide context for the motivations behind the mercantile push for herring fishing in particular. In general, fish and other aquatic animals were key sources of food throughout medieval Europe for the nobility and lower classes alike, but expansion of the marine fishing industry, which specialized in saltwater fishing rather than inland catches, occurred rapidly in the later medieval period, continuing to increase into the early modern period.18 This move toward a more pronounced seafood diet in England during this time was spurred on by a variety of factors including Dutch innovations in salting fish for preservation, an increased demand for the product resulting from the growing populations of towns, and religiously-justified royal proclamations for fish days and fast days.19 Scarborough had long been an important fishing center, and its famous trade fair that originated in the thirteenth century included the prominent sale of cod and herring caught in the North Sea. 20 However, as Yorkshire author Arthur Godfrey makes clear, “In medieval times, fresh fish was a most expensive item, available to few people. Most fish was either saltfish or dried fish, and herring of course was one of the easiest types of fish to preserve and the most convenient to export.”21 The heavily salted herring of the Middle Ages was often part of the rations for both soldiers and seamen—stored herring certainly would have been eaten by members of a fishing crew like the one depicted in Robin Hood’s Fishing. 22 Brian Fagan indicates that such a meal of salt herring was not particularly relished by those who subsisted upon it: “the fish were dry, sticklike, and either tasteless or rancid, like a very poor form of modern-day jerky.”23 Alison Locker, on the other hand, speaks more highly of the preserved fish: “Being high in calories and fatty, herring provides a feeling of satisfaction. It was the fish equivalent of bacon, adding flavour to such staples as bread and potatoes.”24 Bishop Matthias von Rammung apparently did not feel the same way in 1470, however, writing that “herring shall not be considered a fish [for] one can in no way make them acceptable.”25 During Lent, weeks of herring consumption took on such monotony that many tried to drown the salty, preserved food with excessive amounts of alcohol, while cooks

226  Jason Hogue strove to disguise the flavor with a number of different sauces such as mustard. 26 Cooks of wealthy households that could obtain fresh herring would bake, grill, or simmer it. 27 By the fourteenth century, the tastes of Europeans were shifting away from herring to a preference for cod, the type of fish Robin Hood’s Scarborough crew appear to be fishing for (I discuss the textual evidence for this later). 28 Unlike the oily, fatty meat of herring, cod meat is almost devoid of fat (only .3%) and is very high in protein. Mark Kurlanskey notes that “when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein—almost 80 percent protein.”29 The white flesh of cod is known for having a bland, non-fishy taste; when prepared fresh, it has “a clean flavor that takes well to sauces or accompaniments from bacon to tomatoes or wine.”30 Of course, like herring, most of the cod consumed in the early modern era was preserved and stored, either wind-dried as “stockfish” (the preferred process of the Icelanders) or salted (the technique employed by the English). Both stockfish and salted cod required a lengthy preparation process in order to render the fish edible. A recipe from 1682, for example, begins with the following: “Beat it soundly with a Mallet for half an hour or more.”31 Cod also required up to thirty-six hours of soaking in water before it could be cooked, and while today fried cod plays the starring role in one of Britain’s famous dishes, fish and chips, medieval and early modern recipes for cod usually called for boiling. 32 Boiled salt cod was sometimes served in stews, helping with the lengthy desalting process.33 One recipe featured salt cod “simmered with vegetables such as parsnips in half milk and half water and served with a yellow egg sauce.”34 While herring and cod were both decidedly important commodities in Europe’s international economy, the distinction between the fish is not an unimportant one. In the seventeenth century when Robin Hood attempts his short career as a fisherman, commercial fishing in general had become a big business in Europe, an industry that had long been dominated by the innovative Dutch fishers. 35 However, the superior technologies and techniques of the Dutch drew the envy, ire, and admiration of English pamphleteers who advocated a national push toward stronger competition with the Dutch fishery. Going directly against the national preference for cod, mercantilist pamphlets demanded a shift back toward catching, eating, and selling more herring in order to compete with the massive Dutch herring fishery, frequently employing emphatic language about the immense wealth to be had from the sea which should be going to England and Englishmen rather than to foreigners, namely the Dutch fishermen who were getting rich. In exploring Robin Hood’s Fishing as a potentially resistant text to these nationalist sentiments, we need to return to Robin Hood’s use of similar mercantilist rhetoric at the beginning of the ballad—that is, his claim about the

Early Modern Fishing Practices 227 wealth of fishermen and wanting to profit from the situation—as well as the extent to which his poor performance as a “tradesman” comments on his voicing of this mercantilist perspective. Stephen Knight has shown that Robin Hood’s Fishing builds upon the structure of earlier town ballads that feature Robin as an inept tradesman in order to renegotiate “anti-mercantile attitudes,” specifically with respect to Robin’s refusal to accept the master mariner’s meritocratic insistence that Robin should take, for himself, the spoils he wins “with thine owne hands.”36 Seemingly resisting an individualistic paradigm, Robin instead gives the money to charity, reinforcing the characteristic attribute of the popular outlaw we recognize today of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, “a crucial element of the whole tradition.”37 But what exactly does the ballad express about mercantilism? In determining its level of mercantilist critique and/or renegotiation of anti-mercantilist sentiment, we gain significant insight by viewing the ballad in context with the contemporary rhetoric of English pamphleteers who were agitating for parliamentary intervention to boost the productivity of sea fisheries in order to increase national revenues and elevate the nation’s self-image.

Mercantilist Rhetoric and Fishing One representative text of this type is a pamphlet written by Tobias Gentleman, published in 1614, titled Englands way to win Wealth, and to employ Ships and Marriners; Or, A plaine description what great profite, it will bring unto the Common-wealth of England, by the Erecting, Building, and adventuring of Busses, to Sea, a-fishing.38 Gentleman’s ambitious and exaggerated claims echo ones made by other pamphleteers such as Robert Hitchcock and Sir Walter Raleigh, who had already taken note of the impressive Dutch fishing fleet in the late sixteenth century and were agitating for the English government to respond in some way.39 Gentleman greatly admired the large herring busses of the Dutch, who annually came to fish off England’s coast, but he wanted the English to follow their lead so they could be able to compete with them. He argued, Wherefore feeling that we can excell all other Nations, wastfully, to spend money, let Vs in one thing, learne of other Nations, to get thousands out of his Maiestys sea, and to make a generall profite of the benefites that Almighty God doth yearely send vnto vs, in far more greater aboundance then the fruite of our trees … increasing the wealth of the aduenturers.40 Gentleman saw the fish of the North Sea off Britain’s coast, which arguably belonged to the king of England, as an underexploited goldmine

228  Jason Hogue that the Dutch were taking advantage of in order to build up their commercial empire.41 In his pamphlet, Gentleman blends images of natural, God-given abundance with the emerging language of capitalist entrepreneurship in phrases like “to make a general profite” and “increasing the wealth of the aduenturers.”42 These phrasings are comparable to the monetary interests of Robin Hood’s Fishing, preoccupied with wages, gold, and “mony to spend.”43 The ocean’s yield of fish, as Gentleman envisioned it, was a vast resource that simply required proper harvesting, far surpassing agricultural yields such as that of fruit trees. Contrasting the Dutch to the people of England, whom he characterized as lazy, idle, poor, and degenerate, Gentleman’s pamphlet boasts that the Dutch “Ships and Marriners are set on worke, and continually multiplied, and into their countries is plentifull store of money and gold daily brought, onely for the sailes of fish and herrings.”44 Like Bishop Rammung, Gentleman apparently had reservations about the status of herring as qualifying as an actual “fish.” Whereas Rammung denied herring this status because he deemed its flavor unacceptable, Gentleman’s distinction between “fish and herrings” likely reflects his mercantilist view that herring has more of a commodity status than other more flavorful but less valuable fish. Regarding the actual size and extent of the Dutch herring fishery, economic historian A.R. Mitchell questions the reliability of pre-industrial records and estimates, especially biased accounts like Gentleman’s, stating that “quantitative records concerning fishing pre-1750 are few. The most accessible and widely drawn-on sources, the panegyrics of the English pamphleteers praising the Dutch herring fishery, are usually demonstrably false, even when they claim (as do John Keymor and Sir William Monson) to be based on the consultation of original records, very few of the writers having had any first-hand knowledge of fishing.”45 Gentleman is unique, however, in that he was acquainted firsthand with fishing and with life at sea, confessing early in Englands way to win Wealth that My selfe being the most vnworthiest of all, in that I am no Sholler, but borne a Fishermans sonne by the Sea-side, and spending my youthfull time at Sea about Fisher affaires, whereby now I am more skilfull in Nets, Lines, and Hookes, then in Rethoricke, Logicke, or learned bookes …46 Still, Gentleman’s estimates of the number of Dutch fishing ships were very likely inflated to help his argument seem more convincing, and clearly his ploy to elevate his fishing skills over his rhetorical skills is part of his rhetorical strategy. Pamphleteers like Gentleman were wont to assert improbably high numbers, ranging between estimates of 2,000–3,000 Dutch fishing vessels, with as many as 450,000 people

Early Modern Fishing Practices 229 occupied by the fishing trade in the Netherlands, and the Dutch fishery landing as much as 150,000 metric tons annually.47 Environmental historian Bo Poulsen provides more conservative estimates of Dutch herring production in the seventeenth century at annual landings between 30,000–60,000 metric tons.48 On the other hand, Poulsen does specify that in the Dutch Republic, between 1550 and 1650, the herring industry “absorbed more capital, and employed just as many men and ships as did the merchant fleet.”49 Regardless of its size, there is no disputing that the Dutch herring fishery was a huge money-­making industry in the early modern period. If indeed it had been based on the reputation of the Dutch in England, Robin Hood’s declaration that fishermen at the time were wealthy would not have been wholly unfounded. The immediate influence of Gentleman’s ideas in England is evident, his 1614 pamphlet inspiring the publication of two similar tracts the following year: The trades increase by Robert Kayll and Britaines busse by Edward Sharpe. More so even than Gentleman’s, Kayll’s rhetoric gushes over herring and the potential profit to be had from fishing for them, beginning his own tract with a direct nod to Gentleman: Seeing by chance a late Treatise entitled, Englands way to winne wealth, &c. and being easily invited to reade the same, even for the Titles sake; I must confesse my selfe so affected with the project, that I presently resolved to goe a fishing, withall concluding with myselfe, that as there is no fishing to the sea; so there was no fish in the sea like to the Herring … the sea is large enough, and hath rooms enough for us all, and there are Herrings enough to make us all rich … to enrich himselfe, to strengthen his countrey….50 In Britaines busse, Sharpe summarizes what he has learned about the subject of Dutch herring “busses” from Hitchcock, Gentleman, and Kayll, and then proceeds to attempt to “set downe in very plaine particulars the exact charge of Building, Manning, Victualling, and furnishing of such a Busse; and of the gaine or profite, which by Gods blessing in probability may redounde yearely to the particular Owner and Adventurer of such a Shippe.”51 Sharpe hoped that the publication of such a precise technical document “might be some furtherance of the Action” in getting more Englishmen to take up herring fishing. 52 Mercantilist rhetoric permeates both of these subsequent pamphlets, clearly hoping to stir up excitement over the profitable “adventures” that the English might tap into, if only they might emulate the example of the Dutch. Gentleman’s inflated rhetoric in reference to the Dutch fishing industry appears to have influenced writers other than political commentators as well, resounding in Robin’s opening claim that “The fisher-man more

230  Jason Hogue mony hath/Then any marchant two or three.”53 With this statement, the ballad’s composer was participating in the general discourse of the potential wealth of the international fishing trade, seeming to accept the basic premise at face value or perhaps using it as a background “rumor” to set up the story, giving it to Robin Hood as a motivation for leaving the forest and taking up the trade. Unquestioned in the ballad by the merry men, Robin Hood’s statement nonetheless raises questions. First of all, whether or not there was money to be made in the fishing industry in England, were fishermen really able to make as much as merchants could or did, not to speak of two to three times as much? The answer to this depends, largely, on the fisherman and his particular circumstances. During certain times in the medieval period, the Scarborough herring fisheries were quite profitable, with catches of fish sometimes registered to a ship master who was also the owner. 54 Wendy R. Childs and Maryanne Kowalski report: “Fishing boat owners were significant people in the town [of fourteenth-century Scarborough], some owning several vessels … multiple ownership was also evident in the fifteenth century.”55 Childs and Kowalski also specify the following pertinent details: By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Scarborough fishermen were doing very well. Tithe records for four years from 1414 to 1418, and for four further years scattered between 1435 and 1442, indicate that lucrative activity continued both in inshore and offshore fisheries. Between 1414 and 1418, 76 different people paid fish tithes, around 35-46 individuals each year. Some paid only small sums for inshore fishing, perhaps combining this with other employment, whereas two-thirds must be considered professional fishermen, having wide fishing interests, considerable capital invested in boats and gear, and substantial operating costs. The greatest of these were major figures in town government who served as town bailiffs or Members of Parliament, and drew large incomes from fishing. Thomas Peke’s tithe, for instance, represents four years income totalling about £498, derived from a mixture of inshore, herring and Icelandic fishing. Other individuals were active in a similar range of fisheries, and such men’s incomes compared well to all but the greatest of Scarborough’s overseas trade merchants. Indeed, the tithes reveal the overall value of the town’s fish trade, amounting to around £1,447 in 1414–1415, and £1,555 in 1416–1417, the first year of Icelandic fishing. Only wool exports in their peak years were comparable.56 By the mid-fifteenth century, however, the herring industry had declined significantly, and the cod fishery of the North Sea was the only remaining

Early Modern Fishing Practices 231 viable offshore operation.57 As alluded to earlier, this latter fishery is the one portrayed in Robin Hood’s Fishing, and thus it makes sense to assume that the ballad does not depict a medieval Robin Hood overhearing about the successful herring trade but rather a Robin Hood contemporaneous with the seventeenth century in which the ballad was composed and during which the cod fishery of the North Sea and Iceland was thriving, at least until the latter part of the century when the entire northeastern fishery greatly declined. 58 During the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, in fact, at the height of England’s Icelandic fishery, fishing was a profitable venture, with 160 ships able to make the trip to Iceland.59 This boom led one Englishman to declare that Iceland “is the greatest fishing in the Kingdom and exceedeth the Newfownd Land and hering fishings.”60 By most accounts, though, fishermen were decidedly not known for being wealthy, definitely not two or three times more so than merchants. Mitchell notes that, economically, “in all respects the fisherman was particularly vulnerable; the size of his catch was quite unpredictable because of complex natural fluctuations; throughout most of Europe he was a poor man, largely at the mercy of the merchant who could afford to advance money for the fitting out of ships, and pay the high cost of preserving fish.”61 Even among the profitable Icelandic ventures, the reality was that most often the fishermen were poor and did not own the ships on which they labored and risked their lives.62 Evan Jones indicates that the evidence suggests there was an entirely separate ship-owning class “who might be involved in backing and managing a voyage but who would rarely, if ever, have made the trip north themselves.”63 A slightly different financial arrangement, also prevalent at the time, corresponds more closely to the circumstances described in Robin Hood’s Fishing: “the lending of money ‘a venture’ from small tradesmen and other petty lenders, such as prosperous widows.”64 The widow who employs Robin Hood (originally for a three-year commitment) promises to pay him well with “both meat and fee.”65 Sailors in general were granted free room and board and were also paid (typically monthly) wages that were competitive with if not better than those of tradesmen on land.66 Additionally, fishermen in particular were paid partly in shares of the voyage: a long-held custom allowed the fishers “one 5th or 6th part of the fish or every 5th or 6th fish they catch or the value thereof in money.”67 One can understand, then, Robin Hood’s consternation when he fails to catch any fish, as well as the crew’s and ship-master’s pronouncements: “‘Symon’s part will bee but small.’/’By my troth,’ quoth the master man,/’I think he will gett none at all.’”68 The ballad appears to critique the mercantile endeavor to promote fishing on at least two fronts. First, Robin’s outright failure at the trade

232  Jason Hogue casts aspersion on his initial optimism: although he begins as the eager Englishman evidently persuaded by Gentleman’s rhetoric, promising the Scarborough widow he will work for her for three years, in the end he rejects the fisherman’s life to return to his medieval enclave of the Greenwood. One would think that a pro-mercantile ballad would portray the landsman convinced of going to sea to fish as successful in making this transition, heeding the pamphlets’ call and accordingly enjoying the promised reward. Secondly, even as the ballad depicts the failure of a Robin Hood everyman attempting to become a fisherman to reap wealth for himself (and the nation), it also portrays the local Scarborough fishery as vibrant and thriving on its own terms, not the picture that a mercantilist like Gentleman would paint for his audience. In fact, Gentleman complains, And it is much to bee lamented, that wee hauing such a plentifull Countrey, and such store of able and idle people, that not one of his Maiesties Subjects, are there to be seene all the whole Summer, to fish, or to take one Herring: But onely the North-sea boats of the Sea-coast Townes, that goeth to take Cods, they do take so many as they do need to baite their hookes and no more.69 Gentleman singles out fishermen in coastal towns like Scarborough as the only fishers of herring in England, who nonetheless squander this catch by using the herring only as bait for cod. On the other hand, Robin Hood’s Fishing represents, without censure, the practices of Scarborough’s local cod-fishing business, not the ultra-lucrative herring fishing that Gentleman lusts for. By representing cod rather than herring fishing, the ballad implicitly endorses a stance in opposition to that of Gentleman and his contemporary mercantilist pamphleteers. Although the ballad does not use the word “cod,” certain details in the text support this reading. First, like most Robin Hood stories, the ballad is set at the onset of summer time, not during autumn, which was the primary herring season for English North Sea fishers. The ballad begins in the forest with a traditional Greenwood opening reminiscent of medieval ballads such as Robin Hood and the Monk: “In sumer time when leaves grow green,/When they do grow both green and long.”70 Regarding the fishing seasons English fishers followed, Childs verifies, “In early summer came ‘Northlandfare’, which almost certainly meant trips to the Faroes, Norway or Iceland for cod. This was followed … by fishing fare—also called ‘flufare’ and ‘fortylfare’—the main drift net herring fishery in October and November.”71 Robin Hood’s Fishing does not specify a particular month for its fishing activity, but the summer opening coincides most squarely with cod-fishing season. Moreover, the crew of Robin Hood’s ship return home as soon as they have caught

Early Modern Fishing Practices 233 enough fish: “Every man had fish enough,/The shipp was laden to passe home.”72 On the bus-style ships employed by the Dutch, crews had the capacity to process the fish on board and could therefore stay out at sea for much longer. Furthermore, rather than casting nets as they would have if they were fishing for herring, Robin and the other sailors fish using lines, the fishing method used during this period to catch cod, ling, and other white fish. Specifically, they appear to be using handlines in a manner similar to a description by John Collins in Salt and Fishery (1682) of the techniques used by English fishermen who sailed to Iceland: The manner of Catching is thus, A Fisherman hath a Line of 90 fathom or more, with a Lead at the end of it called a deep Sea-Lead of about 6 or 7 pound weight to sink it, above which is a cross-Stick called a chop-Stick, with two Lines and hooks at them with baites.73 In Robin Hood’s Fishing, Every man bayted his line And in the sea they did him throw; Symon lobb’d in his lines twaine But neither gott great nor smaw.74 The specification of “lines twaine” in the ballad corresponds to the two lines and hooks attached to the “chop-Stick” (or spacer-bar) in Collins’ description, a technology that North Sea fishermen continued to use even into the modern age.75

Conclusion While the possibility exists that the ballad represents the crew traveling as far north as Iceland, again textual evidence supports a reading that keeps the sailors relatively close to England, perhaps fishing the Dogger Bank, long a popular spot for cod fishing in the North Sea.76 The ballad hints at such a location with the lines: “they came to th’appoynted place/Where all the fish taken should bee.”77 The summer departure, too, argues against a long haul to Iceland. Although a trip to Iceland around this time might take only a week, the voyage could be delayed by poor winds by as much as a month, and the large ships that left for Iceland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually left England around March and fished for some time before returning in the late summer or early fall.78 Robin and crew sail for the nonspecific amount of time of “More of a day then two or three,”

234  Jason Hogue but this measurement in days also suggests a relatively short voyage.79 Lastly, before Robin Hood saves them, the crew is resigned to a dismal fate when they encounter the French pirates, indicating that the crew is somewhat small and not capable of defending themselves. The large fishing ships that traveled to Iceland were sometimes protected by naval convoys and had substantial crews themselves (as many as forty men) that included gunners and soldiers.80 Assuming that Robin’s crew is small and does not sail to Iceland, we can infer that they are aboard a smaller vessel such as a dogger or a ketch, both used during the period for fishing.81 The small coble design is another possibility, the largest of which were called five-man boats, but these were primarily used for inshore and coastal operations.82 In my estimation, the dogger is the best fit of the three, a working boat that was built for the sole purpose of offshore cod fishing, constructed to withstand the rough waters of the North Sea.83 With a crew of four to five men and two or more boys, doggers had two masts with square sails. Based on this design, the main mast that Robin ascends to fire upon the French would have stood approximately in the center of the ship, with a much smaller mast positioned in the bow, over which Robin would have had a clear shot.84 In addition to the fast-paced action of ballad narrative, then, Robin Hood’s Fishing takes us far afield of the culinary delights of preparing and eating seafood in the early modern era to the actual fishing grounds where the procurement of this commodity took place: the ocean. Success in this trade depended on a knowledge of the sea as well as a good possession of fishing equipment and skills, not to mention a certain amount of luck.85 Robin Hood evinces neither knowledge nor skills in any of these areas, despite the ballad’s emphasis on his having been initially well-equipped by the Scarborough widow for a successful venture: “I have a good shipp,” then she said, “As any goes upon the sea. Ancors and plancks thou shalt want none Nor masts nor ropes to furnish thee. Oars nor sayle thou shalt not want, Nor hooks faile to thy lines so long.” “By my truth, dame,” quoth Symon then, I weat ther’s nothing shall go wrang.”86 Of course, Robin Hood is unsuccessful, catching neither “great nor smaw.” In Child’s version of the ballad, Robin is apparently so foolish that he does not even bait his hooks: “When others cast in their bated hooks,/the bare lines into the sea cast he.”87 Whether unfortunate or incompetent, Robin Hood is featured in this story as the schill—the land lubber who

Early Modern Fishing Practices 235 naively accepts the popular proposition that fishing would lead to fortune. The other sailors tease him, “What dost thou heer thou long luske,/ What the fiend dost thou upon the sea./Thou hast begger’d the widdow of Scarburrough,/I weat [think] for her and her children three.”88 He serves as a counterpoint to these successful Yorkshire fishers who know their craft and have been fishing the ocean for centuries. Robin even admits his defeat in this regard: “‘Fish as you will,’ quoth good Symon,/’I weat for fishes I have none.’”89 It is true that Robin eventually steps in as the story’s hero, somewhat obligatorily, but the heart of the ballad is the situational humor inherent in Robin’s lack of qualifications, in effect a mockery of the pamphleteering literature. Robin’s overconfidence foreshadows his own incompetence as much as it does the fishermen’s inauspicious encounter with the French pirates. Thomas Ohlgren points out that in some town ballads, “what appears to be incompetence is in fact premeditated merchant craftiness, an essential element of merchant adventure.”90 This argument is a rough fit for the story of Robin Hood’s Fishing, however, because the ballad depicts Robin Hood as a truly unqualified fisherman who cannot catch a fish to save his life. What eventually redeems Robin as the story’s hero does not appear to be “premeditated merchant craftiness” but rather Robin’s expertise with the bow and arrow, which he uses instinctively to save his fellow fishermen. He is the heroic Robin Hood who wins the day through his strength and skill with the bow, not with business acumen or an exceptional ability to catch fish. Rather than the praise of merchant class values evident in some aspects of late medieval Robin Hood texts, the significantly later Robin Hood’s Fishing evinces a nostalgia for a “lost” medieval character of Robin Hood, transported to this contemporary coastal-maritime setting away from the medieval Greenwood. Rather than simply reflecting societal changes that were moving England toward a more modern and urban commercial world, the ballad recruits Robin Hood to simultaneously play the role of traditional hero and misplaced mercantile opportunist, out of place in more ways than one. Without a doubt, Robin Hood’s Fishing updates the town tradesman form, but it does so in such a way that it critiques through parody the town tradesman ballad itself, so far-fetched and outlandish does the forest-dwelling Robin appear on the high seas. A subtle critique of mercantilist philosophy, the ballad offers Robin Hood’s “adventure” in Scarborough as a particular case study to parrot the pamphleteers touting mercantilist interventions and to highlight the implausibility of an English everyman, especially a “long luske” like Robin Hood, being able to take up the industrial fishing trade.91 Likewise, his failure at the venture accents the appropriateness of Robin Hood as a medieval hero, clearly out of his native element as a tradesman, as a seaman, and especially as a commercial fisherman.

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Notes 1. Acknowledgments: I want to thank the editors of this volume, Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, for their insightful and enthusiastic feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. Also due thanks to Lesley Coote, who organized the panel at IMC 2015 in Leeds, England, at which I first presented on this topic and received generous feedback from the participants there, including my co-presenters on the panel, Alexander Kaufman and Valerie Johnson. Robin Hood’s Fishing, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, eds. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), pp. 581–591, lines 9–12. All subsequent citations of this poem are from this edition. 2. “The Noble Fisherman, or, Robin Hood’s Preferment” is the title used by Child for his Ballad No. 148 (c.1650). I cite and refer to the more simply titled Robin Hood’s Fishing, the title used in the Forresters manuscript (c.1670; British Library Additional MS 71158), because that text appears to be a more complete version of the ballad compared to the compressed broadside versions, as Knight and Ohlgren explain in their introduction to the poem (p. 581). The earliest record of this ballad is from 1631, when a lost version of it was entered in the Stationers’ Register. See also: Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, British Library Additional MS 71158, ed. Stephen Knight; with a manuscript description by Hilton Kelliher (New York: D.S. Brewer, 1998). Knight and Ohlgren indicate that “preferment” means something like “professional advancement.” 3. There are numerous studies and essays on Robin Hood’s longstanding association with the natural forest setting of the Greenwood. See: Helen Phillips, “Forest, Town and Road: The Significance of Places and Names in Some Robin Hood Texts,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 197–214, as well as Phillips, “‘Merry’ and ‘Greenwood’: A History of Some Meanings,” in Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, eds. Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 83–101. See also: A.J. Pollard, “A Greenwood Far Away,” in his Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2004) and Maurice Keen, “The Matter of the Greenwood,” in his The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (New York: Routledge, 2000). For folkloric considerations of Robin’s relationship to the forest, see: David Wiles, “Robin Hood as Summer Lord,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999), 77–98, as well as Lorraine Stock, “Lords of the Wildwood: The Wild Man, the Green Man, and Robin Hood,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 239–249. Valerie B. Johnson has written about the Greenwood as a constructed space in “Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, eds. Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 31–37. 4. Alexander L. Kaufman, “A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood of the Later Ballads,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, eds. Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 55.

Early Modern Fishing Practices 237 5. Stephen Knight, Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 83. 6. Knight and Ohlgren, Introduction to Robin Hood’s Fishing, 581. 7. D. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the Outlaw (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 179. On the distinction between Robin Hood broadsides and garlands, see: Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 33–43. 8. Ibid., 582. Knight and Ohlgren also note the possible connection of this ballad with the coastal village Robin Hood’s Bay, located not far from Scarborough. 9. See: Douglas Gray, “Everybody’s Robin Hood,” in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. Helen Phillips. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 39–41. 10. Prominent examples of town tradesman ballads in which Robin leaves the Greenwood to attempt a trade are Robin Hood and the Potter and the later Robin Hood and the Butcher. See: Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 56; 69. On the connection of Robin Hood material and mercantilism, see: Richard Tardif, “The ‘Mistery’ of Robin Hood: A New Social Context for the Texts,” in Worlds and Words: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, eds. Stephen Knight and S.N. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1983), 130–145; and Thomas Ohlgren, “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 175–190, as well as Ohlgren, “Merchant Adventure in Robin Hood and the Potter,” in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. Helen Phillips (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 69–78. See also: Kimberly A. Thompson, “The Late Medieval Robin Hood: Good Yeomanry and Bad Performances,” in Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, eds. Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 102–110. Thompson engages with Tardif and Ohlgren, following Judith Butler’s notion of performing gender to suggest that one can perform an economic identity, various aspects of which Robin Hood parodies and challenges by performing them poorly yet ultimately being more successful than the supposedly legitimate owner of that identity. 11. See, for example: Gray, “Everybody’s Robin Hood,” 39. Gray understands Robin Hood’s forest to exist “at the edge of the ordinary world.” See also: Joseph Falaky Nagy, “The Paradoxes of Robin Hood,” in Folklore 91.2 (1980), 198–210. Nagy sees Robin Hood as positioned “between nature and culture.” 12. He is Simon over the Lee in Child (p. 349, stanza 7). 13. As Knight and Ohlgren note, the inheritance of fishing businesses by widows was common at the time (Robin Hood’s Fishing, p. 590, note 33). 14. The exact fishing location is not specified in the ballad. Presumably, however, the typical fishing location in this context would have been somewhere in the North Sea, or perhaps off the coast of Iceland. 15. Inglewood and Barnsdale are also potential Robin Hood forest locations; see: Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 4–6. See also: Robert B. Waltz, The Gest of Robyn Hode: A Critical and Textual Commentary (Self-published, 2013), 270, for a discussion of the location of Plumpton Park.

238  Jason Hogue 16. Robin Hood kills all of the Frenchmen in Child’s ballad. While Robin declares in the Forresters manuscript, as he does in Child, that he will spare none of the Frenchmen, he “Found never a man alive but three” in Forresters, while in Child, the Frenchmen were “lying all dead in their sight” (p. 350, stanza 25). 17. On the widows of sailors and their access to charity, see: Margarette Lincoln, “The Impact of Warfare on Naval Wives and Women,” in The Social History of English Seamen, 1650–1815, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2017), 78–79. 18. See: Callum Roberts, “The Origins of Intensive Fishing,” in The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2007), 17–31. Roberts notes, “By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cod, herring, and other marine fishes constituted 60 to 80 percent of fish bones in archaeological deposits.” For an in-depth look at the archaeological evidence related to this shift from freshwater to saltwater fish consumption, see: D. Sergeantson and C.M. Woolgar, “Fish Consumption in Medieval England,” in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, eds. C.M. Woolgar, D. Sergeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 102–130. 19. See: Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Viking, 2012), 38–39. 20. See: Wendy R. Childs and Maryanne Kowaleski, “Fishing and Fisheries in the Middle Ages,” in England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, eds. David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), 19–28. 21. Arthur Godfrey, Yorkshire Fishing Fleets: The Story of Yorkshire’s Oldest and Most Dangerous Industry (Skipton, North Yorkshire: Dalesman Books, 1974), 10. On the history and development of salt preservation in the European fisheries, see: Brian Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 47–57. 22. See: Alison Locker, “The Decline of the Consumption of Stored Cod and Herring in Post-medieval and Early Industrialised England: A Change in Food Culture,” in Cod and Herring: The Archaeology and History of Medieval Sea Fishing, eds. James H. Barrett and David C. Orton (Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2016), 99–107. Locker explains that, because of its light weight, stored fish (usually cod, “variously described as stockfish, haberdine and North Sea cod”), comprised a seaman’s rations three days out of the week. She notes, “Salted and pickled herring were also used in rations, but these were heavier. Dried or salted fish would have been eaten as a stew with bread or biscuit, the latter being up to 70% of the ration in the Middle Ages” (p. 101). 23. Fagan, Fish on Friday, 49. 24. Locker, “The Decline of the Consumption,” 100. 25. Quoted in Fagan, Fish on Friday, 124. 26. Fagan, Fish on Friday, 149. Fagan notes, “Herring with mustard is a gourmet dish in France today; the medieval ancestor of this dish was but a crude reflection of today’s refined presentation.” 27. Ibid., 149. 28. Ibid., 146. 29. Mark Kurlanskey, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 34. Kurlanskey also mentions that there is very little waste to a cod and that cod-fishing peoples such as the

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Icelanders eat most of the fish, including its head, throat, air bladder (the “sound”), roe, stomach, tripe, liver, and skin. Cod liver oil, which was used by the Norse people for lamps, tanning, and cooking, still valuable today as a vitamin supplement, was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, worth as much as £30 a ton. See: Fagan, Fish on Friday, 65, 185. 30. Fagan, Fish on Friday, 49. 31. Kurlanskey, Cod, 60. 32. On the development of the fried fish industry in England, which began in the late nineteenth century, see: Chris Reid, “From Trawler to Table: The Fish Trades Since the Late Nineteenth Century,” in England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, eds. David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), 161. Though the trade has declined in recent years, it was very popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. 33. Fagan, Fish on Friday, 51. Fagan mentions that medieval Europeans ate many other types of fish such as salmon, conger eels, plaice, and sole, though herring and cod were the most widely consumed. 34. Locker, “The Decline of the Consumption,” 100. Fagan indicates that “the nobility dined off delicately seasoned and sauced fresh and salt Gadus [cod], often flavored with a green sauce made of parsley ground with vinegar, bread, and salt in infinite variations” (p. 66). 35. See, for example: A.R. Mitchell, “The European Fisheries in Early Modern History,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Vol. V), eds. E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 133–184. 36. Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 69; Robin Hood’s Fishing, 171. 37. Ibid., 69. 38. The views expressed in this tract were considered by the Privy Council but were ultimately not adopted. See: R.C.L. Sgroi, “Piscatorial Politics Revisited: The Language of Economic Debate and the Evolution of Fishing Policy in Elizabethan England,” in Albion 35, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–24. A new edition of Gentleman’s book, re-titled The Best Way to make England the richest and wealthiest country in Europe by Advancing the Fishing Trade, was printed in 1660, attesting to England’s ongoing concern over this issue throughout the seventeenth century. The printings of Gentleman’s tract in 1614 and 1660 also represent a contemporaneity with the publication dates of Robin Hood’s Fishing texts. A facsimile of the 1614 printing is available, with an introduction by John B. Hattendorf, published in 1992 in Delmar, New York, for the John Carter Brown Library by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. This edition also includes facsimile reproductions of Robert Kayll’s The trades increase (1615), Dudley Digges’s The defence of trade (1615), and Edward Sharpe’s Britaines busse (1615). Gentleman’s tract is viewable in E-Book format in The Harleian Miscellany: A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, as Well in Manuscript as in Print (Vol. 3), printed for Robert Dutton (London, 1809), 232–250. I cite the page numbers of the original tracts. 39. Other contemporary pamphleteers with similar mercantilist perspectives included Lord Burghley, Edward Misselden, Edward Jennings, Robert Kayll, Edward Sharpe, Thomas Mun, Robert Clavel, William Monson, and John Keymor, the latter of whom Gentleman was in direct contact

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with. See especially: Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 75–104. 40. Tobias Gentleman, Englands way to win Wealth, and to employ Ships and Marriners (London, 1614), 44–45. 41. On issues related to the sovereignty of the seas around Britain, see: John R. Elder, The Royal Fishery Companies of the Seventeenth Century (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1912). 42. Gentleman, Englands way to win Wealth, 45. 43. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 17. Like Gentleman, the ballad is interested in both money and gold, the prize Robin seizes from the French consisting of “Twelve hundred pounds in gold so bright” (line 164). In Reading Robin Hood, Knight notes in Appendix A that garlands from 1663, 1670, 1684–86, and 1689 gave Robin Hood’s Fishing the title of “Robin Hood’s Golden Prize at Sea.” This prize clearly refers to the loot Robin Hood takes from the pirates, but it also resonates with the mercantilist rhetoric that imagines the sea as containing vast wealth and understands fish and herring as translatable into gold and money. 44. Gentleman, Englands way to win Wealth, 6. 45. Mitchell, “The European Fisheries,” 134. 46. Gentleman, Englands way to win Wealth, 2–3. 47. Bo Poulsen, Dutch Herring: An Environmental History, c.1600–1860 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008), 43. 48. Ibid., 45. 49. Ibid., 21. 50. Robert Kayll, The trades increase (London, 1615), 1. 51. Edward Sharpe, Britaines busse (London, 1615), A3. 52. Ibid. 53. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 9–10. 54. See: Childs and Kowaleski, “Fishing and Fisheries,” who note, “In Scarborough’s peak year of 1304–5, 237 foreign landings brought 355 lasts of herrings—810 tonnes or 3,550,000 fish—worth £444” (p. 20). 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Ibid., 20. Emphasis added. 57. Ibid., 21. 58. See: Evan Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery in the Early Modern Period,” in England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, eds. David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), 105–110. 59. Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 107. 60. Quoted in Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 107. 61. Mitchell, “The European Fisheries,” 133. 62. Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 110. 63. Ibid., 110. 64. Ibid., 110. 65. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 34. 66. See: Peter Earle, “The Origins and Careers of English Merchant Seamen in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Social History of English Seamen, 1650–1815, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2017), 129–146. Earle discusses wages of this period for navy men, merchants, and fishers. See also: David J. Starkey, “Britain’s Seafaring Workforce, 1650–1815,” in the same collection, 147–181.

Early Modern Fishing Practices 241 67. Earle, “The Origins and Careers,” 135. It should be noted that fishermen were not necessarily able to keep all of their shares (which were called “doles”) because sometimes they would have to pay their employers back for equipment or provisions. Additionally, fishermen attempting to sell their catch in larger ports like London would have to pay a certain amount to the Crown as well. See: Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 109. 68. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 54–56. 69. Gentleman, Englands way to win Wealth, 43–44. 70. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 1–2. See: Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 13–21, on the continuity of the opening Greenwood stanza in early Robin Hood ballads. 71. Childs and Kowaleski, “Fishing and Fisheries,” 19. To be fair, Scarborough’s herring season did run earlier than more southerly locations like Yarborough, running from late summer to early autumn. 72. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 73–74. 73. John Collins, Salt and Fishery, A Discourse thereof (London: Godbid and Playford, 1682), 87. 74. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 49–52. 75. Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 109. 76. Ibid., 107. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, as England’s east coast fishery’s activity in Iceland decreased, it focused more attention on the Dogger Bank. Childs and Kowaleski write, “There was an active cod fishery in the North Sea by the fourteenth century, probably working coastal and Dogger Bank grounds.” “Fishing and Fisheries,” 22. 77. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 47–48. 78. Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 108. 79. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 78. 80. Jones, “England’s Icelandic Fishery,” 108. 81. See: I.C.B. Dear and Peter Kemp, The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 171 (“dogger”); 302 (“ketch”). For the Dutch, the “dogger” originally was simply a two-masted fishing vessel. The name “ketch” derives from the “catch” of fish, while “dogger,” which for the English was a specific development of the older ketch design, is closely associated with the Dogger Bank fishing grounds. 82. Godfrey, Yorkshire Fishing Fleets, 11. 83. See: Fagan, Fish on Friday, 167–173. 84. Ibid., 171–172. Unfortunately, there are no known depictions of these types of vessels. Fagan draws his descriptions of the dogger from the notes of naval architect, historian, and shipbuilder John Leather. 85. See: David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Kinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), especially Chapter 8 on the occupation of fishing. On the role of luck in fishing, see: 183–185. 86. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 37–44. 87. Cited from The Robin Hood Project: A Robbins Library Digital Project (University of Rochester, updated 2013), lines 43–44. 88. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 57–60. 89. Ibid., 75–76. 90. Ohlgren, “Merchant Adventure,” 70. 91. Robin Hood’s Fishing, 57.

242  Jason Hogue

Bibliography Child, Francis James. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Edited by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904. Childs, Wendy R., and Maryanne Kowaleski. “Fishing and Fisheries in the Middle Ages.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, 19–28. London: Chatham Publishing, 2000. Collins, John. Salt and Fishery, A Discourse thereof. London: Godbid and Playford, 1682. Dear, I. C. B., and Peter Kemp. The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Dobson, D. B., and J. Taylor. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the Outlaw. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976. Earle, Peter. “The Origins and Careers of English Merchant Seamen in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” In The Social History of English Seamen, 1650–1815, edited by Cheryl A. Fury, 129–146. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2017. Elder, John R. The Royal Fishery Companies of the Seventeenth Century. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1912. Fagan, Brian. Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Gentleman, Tobias. Englands way to win wealth, and to employ ships and marriners (1614) together with Robert Kayll, The trades increase (1615), Dudley Digges, The defence of trade (1615), Edward Sharpe, Britaines busse (1615). Facsimile reproductions with an introduction by John B. Hattendorf. Published for the John Carter Brown Library by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. Delmar, New York: 1992. Godfrey, Arthur. Yorkshire Fishing Fleets: The Story of Yorkshire’s Oldest and Most Dangerous Industry. Skipton, North Yorkshire: Dalesman Books, 1974. Gray, Douglas. “Everybody’s Robin Hood.” In Robin Hood: Medieval and PostMedieval, edited by Helen Phillips, 21–41. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Johnson, Valerie B. “Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism.” In Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, edited by Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya, 31–37. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Jones, Evan. “England’s Icelandic Fishery in the Early Modern Period.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, 105–110. London: Chatham Publishing, 2000. Kaufman, Alexander L. “A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood of the Later Ballads.” In Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, edited by Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferre, and Alicia C. Montoya, 51–62. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Keen, Maurice. The Outlaws of Medieval Legend. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kirby, David, and Merja-Liisa Kinkkanen. The Baltic and the North Seas. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Early Modern Fishing Practices 243 Kitch, Aaron. Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. ———. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ———. Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Knight, Stephen, and Thomas Ohlgren. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Kurlanskey, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Lincoln, Margarette. “The Impact of Warfare on Naval Wives and Women.” In The Social History of English Seamen, 1650-1815, edited by Cheryl A. Fury, 71–88. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2017. Locker, Alison. “The Decline of the Consumption of Stored Cod and Herring in Post-medieval and Early Industrialised England: A Change in Food Culture.” In Cod and Herring: The Archaeology and History of Medieval Sea Fishing, edited by James H. Barrett and David C. Orton, 99–107. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2016. Mitchell, A. R. “The European Fisheries in Early Modern History.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Vol. V), edited by E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson, 133–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “The Paradoxes of Robin Hood.” Folklore Vol. 91, No. 2 (1980): 198–210. Phillips, Helen. “Forest, Town and Road: The Significance of Places and Names in Some Robin Hood Texts.” In Robin Hood in Popular Culture, edited by Thomas Hahn, 197–214. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. “‘Merry’ and ‘Greenwood’: A History of Some Meanings.” In Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, edited by Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun, 83–101. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pollard, A. J. Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context. London: Routledge, 2004. Poulsen, Bo. Dutch Herring: An Environmental History, c.1600–1860. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008. Reid, Chris. “From Trawler to Table: The Fish Trades Since the Late Nineteenth Century.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, 157–165. London: Chatham Publishing, 2000. Roberts, Callum. The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Viking, 2012. ———. The Unnatural History of the Sea. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2007. The Robin Hood Project: A Robbins Library Digital Project. University of Rochester, 2013. Accessed 11 January 2021 at https://d.lib.rochester.edu/ robin-hood. Sergeantson, D., and C. M. Woolgar. “Fish Consumption in Medieval England.” In Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, edited by C. M. Woolgar, D. Sergeantson, and T. Waldron, 102–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

244  Jason Hogue Sgroi, R. C. L. “Piscatorial Politics Revisited: The Language of Economic Debate and the Evolution of Fishing Policy in Elizabethan England.” Albion Vol. 35, No. 1 (2003): 1–24. Starkey, David J. “Britain’s Seafaring Workforce, 1650-1815.” In The Social History of English Seamen, 1650–1815, edited by Cheryl A. Fury, 147–181. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2017. Stock, Lorraine. “Lords of the Wildwood: The Wild Man, the Green Man, and Robin Hood.” In Robin Hood in Popular Culture, edited by Thomas Hahn, 239–249. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Waltz, Robert B. The Gest of Robyn Hode: A Critical and Textual Commentary. Self-published E-Book, 2013. Expanded version of 2012 version (Loomis House Press). Accessed 11 January 2021 at https://www.lcboe.net/userfiles/ 153/Classes/28558/userfiles/153/my%20files/gest%20of%20robin%20hood. pdf?id=552015. Wiles, David. “Robin Hood as Summer Lord.” In Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, edited by Stephen Knight, 77–98. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999.

12 “Bread With Danger Purchased” Hunger, Plenty, and the Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage Matt Williamson

Early modern England saw the emergence of a new type of outlaw. JeanChristophe Agnew has argued that the end of the sixteenth century experienced “one of the sharpest rises in vagabondage in England’s history.”1 While Elizabethan estimates vary wildly, “from 10,000 to 200,000,” there can be little doubt that the period saw a marked increase in vagrant numbers. 2 Arrests in London rose “twelvefold from 1560 to 1625, a period in which the metropolitan population only quadrupled.”3 These vagrants constituted what A. L. Beier has described as “a new kind of poverty … masterless men; persons no longer having manorial ties, but who were now subject to the buffetings of the market economy”.4 Modern historians such as Roger Manning have identified these masterless men as products of the huge changes sweeping English society, the result “not only of agrarian change but also of population growth and the development of rural industry.”5 But contemporary authorities invariably presented their plight as simply a product of idleness. In a country which “required that everyone have a parent or master,”6 they were a source of anxiety and fascination. The period saw an explosion of “coney-catching” pamphlets, which purported to describe an entire shadowy underworld, complete with its own language, or “cant,” and its own complex practices and rituals.7 Texts such as John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) and Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors (1566) claimed to reveal the tricks and deception used by these characters in their efforts to acquire money.8 They included colorful depictions of figures such as “Abraham Men,” who feigned mental illness, “Counterfeit Cranks,” who impersonated epilepsy, and “Anglers,” who utilized a long stick with a hook in order to steal laundry.9 Such characters naturally held a rather dubious relation to the material reality of deprivation in early modern England. But at the same time these texts clearly responded to sweeping changes in the nature of poverty in the period. They also proved a fertile source for contemporary drama. The history plays of the 1590s depicted mass rural uprisings of masterless rebels.10 Urban city comedies such as Eastward Ho! (1605) explored the appetites

246  Matt Williamson of apprentices who abandoned their masters.11 Wandering pedlars and rural rogues abound in plays such as Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611).12 In the Jacobean and Caroline theatre, however, the figure of the vagabond also began to appear alongside other, more conventional outlaws. John Fletcher’s and Philip Massinger’s Beggar’s Bush (1622), Massinger’s The Guardian (1633), John Suckling’s The Goblins (1640), Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (1641), and James Shirley’s The Sisters (1642) depict a series of criminal communities, which in various ways fuse the disparate figures of the traditional woodland outlaw and the beggar.13 Like many outlaw plays of the early modern period, they replace the yeoman Robin Hood of medieval tales with an aristocratic outlaw leadership.14 But they also combine these elite figures with incidents, language, and characters derived from the pamphlet tradition of Rogue Literature. The result is both a literal and figurative fusion of aristocratic outlaw and masterless vagabond. Existing critical material has demonstrated a slight reluctance to scrutinize the precise nature of the connections and distinctions which the plays establish between two figures. Julie Sanders, for instance, has argued that the fact that “bandits and outlaws were regularly elided with beggars in both popular understanding and stage representation confirms the notion that beggars were being deployed in a symbolic manner,” and notes that as a consequence these depictions seem unlikely to constitute “precise, or even realistic, interrogations of homelessness or poverty.”15 Yet through close attention to these texts, it is possible to discern a concerted emphasis on the parallels and differences between these two categories of excluded other. This chapter, therefore, takes the intersection of outlaw and beggar seriously. It argues, moreover, that the boundaries between these two types are mediated, and enforced, through the presentation of issues of sustenance. Indeed, these texts are repeatedly concerned with consumption, drawing on both fantasies of excess and the material reality of want. Hunger appears as both a motivation for violent action and the benevolent distribution of charity. Food is figured as a source of community, but also as a potential site of excess, a symptom of appetites which drive the creation of both outlaws and vagabonds. Through attention to Fletcher’s and Massinger’s Beggar’s Bush and Massinger’s The Guardian, it becomes possible to discern the ways in which the depiction of hunger and consumption serves to alternately erode and reinforce the differences between the distinct figures of outlaw and vagabond. In order to acknowledge the significance of the complex range of culinary themes, it is necessary to situate these texts in the context of shifts in the contemporary mode of agrarian production, with a particular emphasis on the rise of the market, the enclosure of the commons, and the spread of vagabondage. But it is also necessary to assert the overtly metatheatrical dimension to the plays, considering the ways in which issues of

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 247 sustenance are deployed to blur the lines between outlaws, beggars, and actors.

Feasts and the Forest One of the earliest texts to place a sustained emphasis on the shifting boundaries between outlaw and vagabond was Fletcher’s and Massinger’s Beggar’s Bush. The play was performed by the King’s Men, and received a court performance at Whitehall Palace in 1622, though the broader circumstances of its initial production are unclear. It bears marked similarities with plays such as As You Like It (1599), but is notable for its blend of aristocratic outlawry with Rogue literature “cant,” instigating a model which would define many of the later outlaw plays.16 The combination of foreign setting and festive mischief notionally serves to detach the events depicted from the material reality of vagabondage in early modern England. But the title of the play also hints at the potential relevance of these foreign vagabonds and outlaws for England itself. As Rosemary Gaby has noted, Beggars’ Bush “was a tree near Huntingdon which was apparently a noted rendezvous for beggars,” and also served as a recurrent literary motif, representing “the final resort of the improvident … a symbol of financial ruin and personal wretchedness.”17 The central action revolves around the Duke of Flanders, who has been deposed by a tyrannous general and adopts the disguise of the vagabond Clause, before rapidly attaining the role of “King of the Beggars.” Although many of the Duke’s nobles have followed him into exile, his crew is also composed of numerous genuine vagabonds, disrupting the orderly distinctions between aristocrats and forest dwellers which define Shakespeare’s earlier play. This fundamental element of tension determines the strategy of the play as a whole. It is embodied with particular clarity in the text’s engagement with issues of plenty and want. The play rapidly establishes food as a key means through which it articulates its political concerns. The commonwealth of vagabonds is depicted as a parodic image of good rule, in which the distribution of sustenance assumes a pivotal significance. When the disguised Duke is made the leader of the community, the audience is told: He will not force away your hens, your bacon, When you have ventur’d hard for’t, nor take from you The fattest of your puddings: under him Each man shall eat his own stolne eggs, and butter… (II.i.111–114) The play’s comic depiction of its utopian commonwealth inverts notions of property and ownership. Theft becomes labor. Stolen goods are property. To a degree, the text figures vagabondage itself as a model of

248  Matt Williamson proto-capitalist enterprise: theft is a “venture” like any other. But this implicit emphasis on acquisition is undermined by a concluding declaration that “he will have no purveyers/For Pigs, and poultry,” (II.i.120–121) implying as it does a critique of both the requisition of foodstuffs by Royal Authority and the practice of speculation. Instead, the text’s appropriation of the language of enterprise implicitly situates vagabondage as a crime which pales in comparison to those of acquisition and engrossment. The language with which this culinary utopia is described makes evident the influence of the “coney-catching” pamphlets on the play. “Dell,” “Doxy,” and “Mort” constitute examples of thieves’ “cant,” the language which these texts claimed was in common use by the vagabond underworld. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that the preoccupation with culinary consumption constitutes a significant alteration of the forms of vagabond identity depicted in the pamphlets. For despite the culinary implications of the term “coney-catching,” in texts such as Harman’s Caveat, food is primarily represented as a means by which vagabonds can appropriate money. The compendium features the Upright Man, who “If he be offered any meat or drink, he utterly refuseth scornfully, and will nought but money”, and Harman later describes how, by contrast with his animal equivalent the “wily fox,” he will steal not “poultry,” but “linen and anything else worth money.”18 Likewise, “Palliards” elicit “bread, cheese, malt, and wool,” only to “sell the same for ready money.”19 And in a similar manner, the “Counterfeit Crank,” if given clothing will “immediately sell the same, for wear it they will not.”20 In The Beggar’s Bush, by contrast, food is a source not of profit but of appetence. The sustenance consumed is resolutely associated with the simple pleasures of the peasantry and lower orders. 21 Their puddings, hens, and bacon are intended not for the purposes of sale, but rather for consumption and enjoyment. While the vagabond utopia depicted is one of culinary and sexual freedom, it is also defined by sufficiency. It is a world in which each man acquires everything that is necessary for his personal survival, with limited recourse to the market. As such, the play is more clearly aligned with the tradition of the woodland feast in Robin Hood ballads such as “Robin Hood and the Potter” (c. 1500), than with the theft and barter of the coney-catching pamphlets. 22 The text repeatedly deploys the “canting” vocabulary which pamphlet writers such as Harman claimed was practiced by contemporary vagabonds. But the play’s implicit opposition of the beggars to practices of speculation and acquisition springs in large part from the play’s fusion of the norms of rogue literature and the gentleman outlaw. This emphasis upon festive consumption assumes a more pronounced political significance through its juxtaposition with other forms of culinary government. Prig, a genuine vagabond and the Duke’s chief rival

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 249 for the role of Beggar King, declares that if appointed King he will be an “arrant tyrant” (II.i.16), and that: … I must have my Capons And Turkeys brought me in, with my green Geese, And Ducklings i’th’ season: fine fat Cheats, Or if you chance where an eye of tame Phesants Or Partridges are kept, see they be mine, Or straight I seize on all your priviledges … (II.i.19–24) On the one hand, the passage serves to mock the crimes of the powerful. Tyranny is reduced to squabbles among beggars. Yet at the same time, these opposed visions of the beggar’s commonwealth embody quite significant differences in contemporary images of governance. William Carroll argues that these contrasts embody an essentially conservative view, since in all cases “the beggars can only imagine some form of sovereignty still over them.”23 Yet this perspective surely risks anachronism, since few in early modern England would have imagined anything else, at least until the onset of the English Revolution. Rather, it is notable that Fletcher and Massinger’s culinary images are deployed in order to reduce the overweening power of the usurping Duke to the same status as a beggar’s greed. Indeed, the play draws a number of parallels between the two characters. Like the vagabond Prig, the Duke himself is “masterless.” In conspiring for the overthrow of the old Duke, he has, in a literal sense, betrayed his lawful master. Yet he has also demonstrated his inability to master his own desires and appetites, becoming “a Prince in nothing but your beastly lusts,/And boundless rapines” (I.ii.89–90). The play’s outlaw community draws legitimacy from its opposition to a tyranny which is both literally and implicitly figured as unrestrained appetite. Furthermore, this vagabond community draws its power and sustenance in large part from its woodland surroundings. As Rosemary Gaby has noted, it is precisely this setting which distinguishes the vagabond or outlaw community from the individualistic urban rogues of plays such as Jonson’s The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. For Gaby, “rural vagabonds are usually presented as leading a life which is free from greed and ambition.”24 They are “happy with their irresponsible lifestyle and are addicted to the freedom of a vagabond existence” (Gaby 402). To a degree, this reflects both contemporary practice and belief. Forests had long been spaces associated with both landless squatters and outlawry. A. L. Beier notes that woodland areas such as the New Forest and the Forest of Dean produced “exceptional numbers of transients.”25 Chris Fitter explains that “it was to wastes and forests that the poor, the evicted and the unemployed drifted, since there, by a law of 1550, they could build cottages and claim grazing rights.”26 Yet in The Beggar’s Bush, this contemporary form of collective living, outside the bounds

250  Matt Williamson of the law, receives a markedly aristocratic inflection. In the third act, the disguised noble Hubert attempts to join the beggars’ community, with the intention of discovering the location of the Duke and aiding his return to power. He presents himself as a Huntsman, declaring: May a poor huntsman, with a merry hart, A voice shall make the forest ring about him, Get leave to live amongst ye? true as steele, boyes? That knows all chases, and can watch all howres, And with my quarter staffe, though the Divell bid stand, Deale such an alms, shall make him roare again? Prick ye the fearfull hare through crosse waves, sheepe walks, And force the crafty Reynard climb the quicksetts; Rouse ye the lofty Stag, and with my bell-horne, Ring him a knell, that all the woods shall mourne him, ‘Till in his funerall teares, he fall before me? (III.iv.78–88) Hubert’s image of woodland life invokes the Robin Hood tales with its references to the quarter staff and deer hunting. The description of the funeral tears of the stag, meanwhile, invites comparison to texts such as As You Like It (II.i.27–44). Hubert’s persona is notionally that of a “poor huntsman,” yet embodies a fundamentally aristocratic image of forest life. At the same time, the description of the forest locates it as a source of sustenance. Once again, theft and self-sufficiency overlap. But the precise model of theft that is advocated is one of upper-class poaching, by contrast with vagabond thefts of chickens and eggs. In asserting his value to the beggars, Hubert performs an image of cross-class collaboration. Rather than embodying a purely aristocratic or vagabond identity, Hubert’s performance of lower-class status occupies a liminal position between the two extremes. The capabilities of the woodland space are unleashed through the fusion of upper-class outlaw with lower-class vagabond. Indeed, the possibilities of a state which unites the interests of disparate classes are complemented in the play’s secondary plot, which depicts the exploits of the Duke’s son Florez, who is disguised as a merchant. Again, however, the merits of mercantile expansion are tempered by a pronounced emphasis on need, in which images of sustenance play a significant role. Early in the play, he attracts the displeasure of his fellow merchants for seeking to intervene in favor of a buccaneer who has been apprehended. He justifies his action, on the basis that the man’s crimes spring not from greed, but from necessity, declaring: … Since want Of what he could not live without, compel’d him To that he did (which yet our State calls death) I pitty his misfortune; and to worke you

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 251 To some compassion of them, I come up To your own price: save him, the goods are mine; If not, seeke else-where, I’le not deale for them. (I.iii.101–109) The passage constitutes one of the play’s most pronounced statements of the connections between hunger and violence. Florez deploys necessity as justification not merely for the act of charity, but for the violent appropriation of goods. Indeed, he is prepared to forfeit his own commercial interests in order to alleviate the difficulties of the imprisoned pirate. Mercantile expansion is figured as a necessary constituent of the commonwealth, but only when tempered by an awareness of need. However, the chief model which the play asserts as a means to restrain these acquisitive impulses is not violence, but reciprocity. Early in the play, Florez distributes charity to his father, oblivious to his true identity. Later, he finds himself at the mercy of creditors and is told “‘Tis foolish to depend on others mercy” (IV.i.12). But he is saved through the intervention of his father, still disguised as the king of the beggars, who places the secret funds of the vagabond kingdom at his son’s disposal. When Florez discovers his father’s true identity, he reflects upon the exchange of gifts that has preceded this revelation, declaring: O my lov’d Father, Before I knew you were so, by instinct, Nature had taught me, to look on your wants, Not as a strangers: and I know not how, What you call’d charity, I thought the payment Of some religious debt, nature stood bound for… (V.ii.31–36) To an extent, Beggar’s Bush deploys the revelation of aristocratic identity precisely in order to undermine its apparent emphasis on charitable reciprocity. As critics such as Daryl Palmer have argued, hospitality was a practice rooted in contemporary power relations, which “occasioned vast opportunities for ideological shaping.”27 It constituted a vital means for relieving the poor, while simultaneously foregrounding the paternalistic role of the elite. Here, however, the charitable giving from merchant to beggar, and vice versa, is refigured as simply the manifestation of filial and paternal duty. Yet this strategy is only ever partially successful. For as the play begins, both Florez and the audience are unaware of Clause’s true identity. Moreover, the implicit presence of paternal authority in the figure of the beggar might also be understood in religious terms, for many contemporary texts emphasized the duty of charity through invocation of Christ’s own suffering. One contemporary text, for instance, implores the Lord “let me remember thy hunger. Oh let me not forget thy thirst, that I may be sober in my diet, and temperate in my drinke, and remember to refresh poore hungry Lazarus, when he lieth crying

252  Matt Williamson and crauing at my gate.”28 Recognizing the presence of the father in the humble beggar has a theological, as well as practical significance. The ambiguity surrounding the motivations of father and son, beggar and merchant, serves to emphasize the significance of reciprocity. Indeed, in the final instance, it is these bonds of reciprocity between beggars, aristocrats and merchants which enable the formation of a crossclass alliance to drive the usurper from his throne. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in the beggars’ woods that this confrontation takes place. The world of woodland plenty constitutes a means to reconcile and integrate competing upper, middle, and lower-class forces into a coherent whole. But that force remains, in the final instance, reliant upon the power of the woodland setting itself. As the tyrant summons his forces in order to assault the Duke in his forest kingdom, the beggars utilize their knowledge of the land in order to mislead and overcome their enemies. They announce that they have “led your Squadrons,/Where they ha’ scratch’d their leggs a little, with brambles,/If not their faces” and “run their heads/ Against trees” (V.ii.147–149; V.ii.149–150). They claim to have “fill’d a pit with your people, some with leggs,/Some with arms broken, and a neck or two I think be loose” (V.ii.151–153), while “The rest too, that escap’d,/Are not yet out o’the briars” (V.ii.153–154). In the play’s conclusion, the forest emerges not as a space of production and sustenance, but rather as a wasteland akin to the forbidding landscape imagined in the coney-catching pamphlets. By contrast with a play such as As You Like It, in which divine intervention operates to halt the invasion of woodland space, in Beggar’s Bush, the forest itself appears to turn against the enemy forces. At the same time, however, this process is figured as reliant upon the actions of the vagabonds themselves. Knowledge of the forest emerges as a form of power. But it is knowledge that the deposed Duke, through the loyalty of his vagabond subjects, is able to utilize in order to restore order. The beggars’ feasting draws its legitimacy from its implicit comparison to both commerce and the court. To an extent, that festive excess serves to marginalize the material factors which drove the contemporary poor into masterlessness. But it should also be acknowledged that the play’s deployment of canting language serves to rework a model of plot derived from the Robin Hood tales in an avowedly contemporary fashion. As such, it is important to note that the specter of hunger can never fully be eliminated from the text. For the original audience, the festive antics of these rather well-fed beggars would inevitably have been understood in the context of the genuine hunger which afflicted many in early modern England. Gerard’s commonwealth of beggars, therefore, constitutes a consciously utopian world, which exists uneasily between vagabondage and outlawry, between the material world of want and a fantasy of plenty. Moreover, there are clear limits to the play’s imaginative resolution of class conflict. When the restored Duke resolves to integrate his vagabond subjects by devising “Some manly, and more profitable course/To fit them, as a part of the

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 253 Republique” (V.ii.204–205), their response is far from promising. Instead, they resolve to “seek Some safer shelter, in some other Climat,/With this his tatter’d Colony,” asking “shall we into England?” (V.ii.218–219; V.ii.220). The resolution serves to blur the boundaries between the play’s ostensibly exotic setting, and England itself, implying that the audience’s country is, in fact, even more capable of sustaining beggars than the European continent itself. The effect, indeed, is accentuated as the three vagabonds deliver the play’s epilogue, in a metatheatrical twist derived from contemporary attitudes toward players, who were legally only distinguished from beggars when in the employ of a patron.29 At the same time, their insistence on remaining vagabonds is significant. On one level, it emphasizes contemporary beliefs regarding the willful nature of the mobile poor. By implication, they beg not because they cannot find work, but because they prefer a life of idleness. Equally, this final declaration might also be interpreted as a repudiation of upward mobility. Despite being offered the promise of a reward for their services, they remain tied to their original position in society: they know their place. Yet in the final instance, their rejection of incorporation within the reformed state reveals an anxiety regarding the capacity of the commonwealth to contain these masterless vagabonds. At this moment, the material reality of the vagabondage threatens to disrupt, or exceed, the literary fusion of outlaw and beggar upon which the play’s fantasy of cross-class collaboration is predicated.

Hunger Has No Law That element of tension gains an additional degree of prominence in Massinger’s The Guardian (1633). The play depicts a group of outlaws whose actions are defined by a pronounced emphasis on socially motivated action. Led by an outlaw nobleman, they form a hierarchical society, in opposition to that of their native city, declaring that they: Will confess no king, Nor laws but what come from your mouth; and those We gladly will subscribe to. (II.iv.64–66) The bandits enact a counterpoint society, similar to those of the masterless communities depicted by the coney-catching pamphlets, and to the beggar’s commonwealths of plays such as Beggars Bush and A Jovial Crew. Here, however, this hierarchical, alternative society is more explicitly figured as embodying forms of popular justice. As such, they embody most closely that form of outlaw activity which Eric Hobsbawm has described as “social banditry,” those “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.”30 At the same time, it is striking that

254  Matt Williamson even when detached from the overt emphasis on vagabondage which defines the earlier play, the depiction of this outlaw community remains fundamentally engaged with the perceived causes of masterlessness. Indeed, for all that these outlaws are ostensibly distinct from the vagabonds of a play such as Beggar’s Bush, it is nevertheless the case that the play consciously elides the boundaries between the two groups. In the final act, the outlaw chieftain Severino declares to a group of his prisoners: Want in myself I know not, But for the pay of these my Squires, who eat Their bread with danger purchas’d, and must be With other fleeces cloth’d, or live expos’d To the summers scorching heat and winters cold; To these before you be compell’d, (a word I speak with much unwillingness) deliver Such coin as you are furnish’d with. (V.iv.75–82) Severino’s speech blurs the boundaries between the bonds of chivalric loyalty, the distribution of charity to the poor, and the exertion of force. The result, as one of the prisoners promptly notes, “is neither begging, borrowing, nor robbery,/Yet it hath a twang of all of them” (V.iv.83–84). In part, the outlaw’s speech reads as a thinly veiled justification for robbery. But in emphasizing the role of hunger as motivation for their acts, the passage also serves to foreground the narrow nature of the boundaries between beggar and outlaw. Much like the vagabonds of Beggar’s Bush, Severino’s followers’ acts of theft and brigandage are figured as motivated by a desire for sustenance, not profit. By contrast with those earlier characters, however, it is not the comparative delicacies of bacon or fowl which are obtained, but rather bread. Andrew Appleby has noted that in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “wheaten bread loaves” constituted “the poor man’s single most important expense.”31 But it was also a central component of charitable gifts, and by implication the food-stuff marks the recipient as one defined by hunger and need, rather than desire and appetite. 32 While Severino functions as a contemporary equivalent of aristocratic incarnations of Robin Hood, his followers are defined by a far more ambiguous social standing, in equal parts chivalric “squires,” and masterless vagabonds. Perhaps more significantly, these outlaws are actively situated in opposition to those forces within early modern society that were believed to cause vagrancy. Their leader instructs them to target only certain figures, including: The cormorant that lives in expectation Of a long wish’d-for dearth, and smiling grinds The faces of the poor, you may make spoil of; Even theft to such is justice. (II.iv.79–82)

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 255 The sequence adopts the logic of earlier Robin Hood ballads such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, but introduces a decidedly contemporary emphasis.33 The cormorant was considered a creature of insatiable appetite, “whose Crawes with eating will be neuer full” (Baxter sig. H2v). It recurred as a term used to describe enclosers of the common land and, as here, engrossers of grain.34 As Kevin de Ornellas has argued, whereas early incarnations of this image are predominantly used to imply simply an uncontrollable appetite, “toward the end of the sixteenth century, the cormorant becomes a familiar emblem not only of greed but also of covetousness,” so that by the end of the century, it is predominantly used to imply “not only their insatiate lust for material excess but also the desire to deprive other men of their possessions.”35 The passage invokes Isaiah 3.15, “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?” The outlaws assume a biblical justification for their actions, yet also situate themselves, more controversially, as the agents of divine justice. At the same time, the biblical trope receives a markedly cannibalistic inflection in this context, with the poor implicitly placed upon the grindstone. The desire to control the supply of corn is elided with a cannibalistic desire to consume the men who need it. The hunger of the poor is figured as a product of elite appetites, depicted as both uncontrollable and sinister. These connections are reinforced by the emphasis which the text places on the city as a space of reckless consumption. In Act Two, Scene Three, a young woman appears at the house of the decadent noble Adorio. His cook announces her arrival in terms which embody the excess of urban living. He declares: I usher Such an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast, As yet I never cook’d: ‘tis not Potargo, Fride Frogs, Potato’s Marrow’d, Cavear, Carps tongues, the Pith of an English Chine of Beef Nor our Italian delicate oyl’d Mushrooms, And yet a drawer on too; and if you shew not An appetite and a strong one, I’ll not say To eat it, but devour it, without grace too, For it will not stay a preface, I am shamed And all my past provocatives will be jeer’d at. (II.iii.22–32) The speech abounds with foods associated with culinary and sexual indulgence. As Joan Fitzpatrick notes, potatoes in this period were “expensive, exotic and considered an aphrodisiac.”36 Potargo, or Bottarga, was the salted roe of tuna or mullet, and was described by contemporary sources as “an Italian meat.”37 While these foods are in part an attempt to capture the particular culinary landscape of the play’s Neapolitan setting, they also evoke an international network of trade

256  Matt Williamson in luxurious and lascivious goods. Indeed, the atmosphere of reckless excess is accentuated by the appearance of the woman to whom these foodstuffs are compared. She is converted into simply another delicacy, a “provocative” to stimulate their appetites. The space of the city is defined by luxurious appetites which threaten to swallow up the poor, and can be restrained only by the violence of Severino’s outlaw band. In contrast with The Beggar’s Bush, however, the expulsion of the outlaw’s aristocratic leader from the city is here a product not of tyranny, but of dueling. Prior to the events of the play, Severino is mistakenly believed to have killed his brother-in-law, and consequently falls foul of the Duke’s strict edicts against such practices. The topic was a popular one, fueled by the increasing restrictions against dueling in early modern England.38 But the decision to depict an alliance between the violence of the elite aristocrat and the implicitly masterless brigands is a striking one. This was a period defined by “progressive dissociation of the nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the medieval social order.”39 The increasing monopolization of force by the state, whether in the context of the duel or military action, constituted a key index of the nobility’s declining power. In this context, the actions of the rogue noble Severino might be read as a counterpart to the “monarcho-populist” discourse which James Holstun has identified as characteristic of much lower-class resistance in the period. Through this mutually beneficial ideology, “monarchists legitimated themselves through paternalistic resistance to capitalist encroachments on small producers, while small producers legitimated themselves by invoking loyalty to a reigning monarch or Protector against some menacing middle man or interloper.”40 In The Guardian what emerges, by contrast, is an avowedly aristo-populist ideology, which asserts the power of an unrestrained nobility to solve the problem of hunger in contemporary England. By situating the Robin Hood model of social banditry in the context of the pressing contemporary phenomenon of vagabondage, the text asserts the necessity of a powerful aristocracy. In the play’s conclusion, the dissolute aristocrats of the city are captured by the outlaws. But following the revelation that Severino’s brotherin-law in fact survived the duel, a general reconciliation is effected. Once again, however, this moment of apparent unity is partially disrupted by the masterless energies of the lower-class component of the outlaw community. The King, aiming to test reports of Severino’s outlaw morality, has adopted the disguise of an elderly poor man, and claims that his sons have been captured by the Turks. Severino promptly resolves to use the band’s accumulated funds to ransom them. But the bandits turn against him, declaring he is “fitter far/To be a Churchman, then to have command/Over good-fellows” (V.iv.184–185). Only the sudden revelation of the King’s true identity prevents the ensuing bloodshed. If the beggar’s epilogue in the conclusion to Beggar’s Bush disrupts the unification of dissident class interests, in The Guardian there is little evidence of any

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 257 process of unification at all. The off-stage beggars, implicitly constructed as both the raw material and motivation for Severino’s outlaws, remain an element which cannot be incorporated within the play’s resolution. Indeed, by contrast with The Beggar’s Bush, there is little indication that the processes and practices producing the masterless victims of enclosure and speculation have been abolished or restrained in any way at all.

Conclusion Both Beggar’s Bush and The Guardian foreground their unreality. Their depictions of joyful beggars and just outlaws are consciously fictional. But their relationship to the brute matter of life is rather more complex than this fantastical emphasis might make it seem. The grim reality of vagabondage and poverty in early modern England appears at unexpected moments in these texts. And the manner in which it does so is intimately related to their treatment of issues of sustenance. In The Beggar’s Bush, the vagabond tricksters of the coney-catching pamphlets are incorporated within a narrative of nobles-in-exile familiar from plays such as William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood sequence. The text deploys the theme of sustenance as a means to elide the boundaries between masterless disorder and festive merriment, but also in order to detach that merriment from the proto-capitalist forces which in practice drove the contemporary increase in vagabondage. In Beggar’s Bush, the world of the forest exists in opposition to the tyranny of the court and, to a lesser extent, the unbridled acquisition of the city. It is established as a space of reciprocity, in which representatives of court, country, and city can forge common bonds. In The Guardian, however, the bond between vagabonds and aristocrats begins to rupture. Severino’s followers are ostensibly incorporated within a chivalric ideal and rob for “bread” not profit. Yet their final, masterless rejection of their outlaw leader disrupts these constraints. In both texts, the imagery and representation of sustenance serves to assert the necessity of a politics rooted in reciprocity. But in the later play, the capacities of this reciprocal model are placed under pronounced strain by the processes of polarization and acquisition dominating both the onstage and offstage worlds of early modern England. Throughout the two plays, the issue of sustenance assumes a position of supreme importance. Food is integral to the manner in which these texts enact relationships between the world of the outlaw, and that of the society from which they are excluded. It functions in this manner primarily because the representation of sustenance entails the depiction or invocation not simply of a particular material object, but rather of an implied set of interpersonal relationships. If the space of the forest is rarely that of complete freedom, it is nevertheless frequently associated

258  Matt Williamson with the restraint of appetites that dominate the theatre’s representation of ordinary society. Yet the variety of political emphases that may be placed upon this basic configuration of appetites is also instructive. Food, in these texts, is capable of expressing utopian fantasy, appealing to the appetites of the audience as a means of conceptualizing a world of abundance. It appears as an image of community and cross-class collaboration, embodying residual ideologies of hierarchy and stability. But the desire for food also emerges as a means of embodying nascent desires of expansion and exchange, an index of the forces that appeared to tear early modern society apart. Food, whether as object or image, provides a means of articulating the ideological tensions and material inequalities of a society in the grip of pronounced socioeconomic change.

Notes 1. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64. 2. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560– 1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), xix. 3. Ibid., 40. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 158. 6. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–60 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 36. 7. The term “coney-catching” derived from the theft of rabbits, though the word “coney” came to be deployed in a more general sense as a synonym for a “dupe” or “gull,” and also carried sexual implications; see: Joan Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare: Elizabeth Culinary Culture and the Plays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), 102. 8. See: Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973). 9. Kinney, Vagabonds, 119; 127–8. 10. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Arden, 1999). 11. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho! ed. Christopher Gordon Petter (London: A. & C. Black, 1994). 12. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Arden, 2010). 13. See: John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, Beggar’s Bush, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96); Philip Massinger, The Guardian in The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); John Suckling, The Goblins: A Comedy, in The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, ed. by L. A. Beaurline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew, ed. by Ann Haaker (London: Arnold, 1968); James Shirley, The Sisters, in Dramatic Works, ed. W. Gifford and A. J. Dyce, 6 vols. (London: Murray, 1833).

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 259 14. The 1590s had been dominated by what Richard Wilson describes as “a cluster of plays … that exalt the rank of Robin Hood to make him a gentleman or even, in Munday’s serial Earl of Huntington (1598), an aristocrat”; see: Richard Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1992): 8. 15. Julie Sanders, “Beggars’ Commonwealths and the Pre-Civil War Stage: Suckling’s The Goblins, Brome’s A Jovial Crew and Shirley’s The Sisters,” The Modern Language Review 97, no. 1 (2002): 1. 16. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Arden, 2006). For discussion of outlaw feasts and the forest in As You Like It, see Melissa Ridley Elmes’s chapter in this volume. 17. Rosemary Gaby, “Of Vagabonds and Commonwealths: Beggars’ Bush, A Jovial Crew, and The Sisters,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34, no. 2 (1994): 407. 18. Kinney, Rogues, Vagabonds, 117, 118. 19. Ibid., 125. 20. Ibid., 129. 21. Bacon, for instance, was believed to be “good for carters and plowmen, the whiche be ever labouringe in the earth or dunge”; see: Andrew Boorde, A Compendious Regiment or a Dietary of Health (London, 1547), sig. F2v–F3r. Likewise, eggs were “plentiful and cheap” in the period; see: Joan Fitzpatrick, Shakespeare and the Language of Food: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2011), 146. 22. Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 45. For discussion of the role of feasting in medieval Robin Hood ballads, see: Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,” in Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19–30, and Sherron Lux’s and Lorraine Kochanske Stock’s chapters in this volume. 23. William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 212. 24. Gaby, “Of Vagabonds,” 402. 25. Beier, Masterless Men, 37. 26. Chris Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 175. 27. Daryl W. Palmer, Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1992), 29. 28. St. Bernard, Saint Bernard his Meditations (London, 1614), 228–229. 29. As Beier has demonstrated, the Statute of 1572 defined as vagabonds any actors who “were not patronized by the peerage or the Queen”; see: Beier, Masterless Men, 96. Furthermore, as Richard Waswo has noted, London’s liberties were home not only to the majority of the city’s theatres, but also to “the marginalised, masterless and mustered out rejects of the new economy”; see: Richard Waswo, “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean theatre” in Plotting Early Modern London, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 58. 30. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, 2nd ed., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 20. 31. Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 5.

260  Matt Williamson 32. The poor received “pottage, beef, mutton, bread, and beer three days a week” from Henry Lord Berkeley in Callowdon, Warwickshire, and William Oglander left bread for the poor every week on his father’s tomb; see: Richard Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 580–581. Gifts distributed to those higher up the social hierarchy, by contrast, rarely involved the distribution of bread. Felicity Heal notes that there is “hardly a mention of grain or its products” in those account books of the period which detail the distribution of food gifts to those of equal or higher social standing; see: Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38. 33. In A Gest of Robyn Hode, for instance, Robin instructs his followers to “do no husbonde harme, / That tilleth with his ploughe” (51–52) and tells them to focus instead on “These bisshoppes and these archebishoppes” and “The hye sherif of Notyingham” (57, 59). See: Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). 34. Thomas Adams, for example, declares that “the churlish Cormorant is a mischicuous Rider: hee sits on a black Iade, Couetousnesse; and rides onely from market to market, to buy vp graine, when hee hath store to sell: and so hatcheth vp dearth in a yere of plenty”; see: The Happines of the Church (London, 1619), 172. 35. Kevin de Ornellas, “‘Fowle Fowles’?: The Sacred Pelican and the Profane Cormorant in Early Modern Culture,” in A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, ed. Bruce Boehrer (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 39. 36. Fitzpatrick, Dictionary, 340. Joseph Hall, in his 1609 Discovery of a New World, describes how stallions are “dieted with Eringo’s, Potatoes, Cullises, and other dishes of lusts deuising”; see: Hall, Discovery of a New World (London, 1609), 109. 37. Giovanne de Rosselli, Epulario: or, The Italian Banquet (London, 1558), sig. H2v. 38. For the relationship between dueling and the theatre see: Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). James I had attempted to make dueling illegal in 1614 but, as Low notes, his edict “failed to lessen the popularity of the custom.” Low, Manhood and the Duel, 1. 39. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 125. 40. James Holstun, “The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: Merrie John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle,” English Literary History 71, no. 1 (2004): 57.

Bibliography Adams, Thomas. The Happiness of the Church. London, 1619. Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books, 1974. Appleby, Andrew. Famine in Tudor and Stuart England. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978.

The Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage 261 Baxter, Nathaniel. (i)Sir Philip Sydneys Our nia, that is, Endimions song and tragedie(/i). London: E. White, 1606. Beier, A. L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Boorde, Andrew. A Compendious Regiment or a Dietary of Health. London: William Powell, 1547. Brome, Richard. A Jovial Crew, edited by Ann Haaker. London: Arnold, 1968. Carroll, William. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Eastward Ho! edited by Christopher Gordon Petter. London: A. & C. Black, 1994. de Ornellas, Kevin. “‘Fowle Fowles’?: The Sacred Pelican and the Profane Cormorant in Early Modern Culture.” In A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, edited by Bruce Boehrer, 27–52. The Cultural Histories Series. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Elmes, Melissa Ridley. “Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode.” In Medieval Perspectives 31 (2016): 19–30. Fitter, Chris. Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career. Routledge Studies in Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Fitzpatrick, Joan. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries (Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays) and the Plays. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007. ———. Shakespeare and the Language of Food: A Dictionary. Continuum Shakespeare Dictionaries. London: Continuum, 2011. Fletcher, John, and Francis Beaumont. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, edited by Fredson Bowers et al., 10 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996. Gaby, Rosemary. “Of Vagabonds and Commonwealths: Beggars’ Bush, A Jovial Crew, and The Sisters.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34, no. 2 (1994): 401–424. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Greaves, Richard. Society and Religion in Elizabethan England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Hall, Joseph. Discovery of a New World. London: Ed. Blount and W. Barrett, 1609. Heal, Felicity. The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. 2nd ed. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. Holstun, James. “The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: Merrie John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle.” English Literary History 71, no. 1 (2004): 53–88.

262  Matt Williamson Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Knight, Stephen, and Thomas Ohlgren. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. TEAMS: Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Low, Jennifer. Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies Series 7. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Manning, Roger. Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Massinger, Philip. The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, edited by Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Palmer, Daryl. Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England. Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1992. Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature, edited by Arthur F. Kinney. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. Rosselli, Giovanne de. Epulario: or, The Italian Banquet. London, 1598. Sanders, Julie. “Beggars’ Commonwealths and the Pre-Civil War Stage: Suckling’s ‘The Goblins,’ Brome’s ‘A Jovial Crew,’ and Shirley’s ‘The Sisters’.” The Modern Language Review 97, no.1 (2002): 1–14. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre. London: Arden, 2006. ———. Henry VI, Part Two, edited by Ronald Knowles. London: Arden, 1999. ———. The Winter’s Tale, edited by John Pitcher. London: Arden, 2010. Shirley, James. Dramatic Works, ed. W. Gifford and A. J. Dyce, 6 vols. London: Murray, 1833. St. Bernard. Saint Bernard his Meditations. London: Thomas Creede, 1614. Suckling, John. The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, edited by L. A. Beaurline. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Waswo, Richard. “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean theatre.” In Plotting Early Modern London, edited by Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, 55–73. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Wilson, Richard. “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1992): 1–19.

Index

abbot 80–88, 95, 103, 146, 153, 154, 174, 187, 189 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1938 film) 8, 89n1, 99, 100, 111–115 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1955–1959 TV series) 8, 89n1, 105, 115–117, 118 ale 35, 45n3, 75, 84, 86–87, 96, 101–102, 104, 106–108, 111, 119, 122n28, 122n34, 123n40, 155 Anglo-Norman 139n7, 199 Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun see Honorat Bovet aristocratic/aristocracy 35, 63, 66, 75–78, 80, 83–88, 91n51, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 122n25, 146–149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 170, 196n59, 246–247, 250–252, 254, 256, 257, 259n14 Arthur (King) 42, 79, 147, 151, 152, 159, 162n8, 165n42, 181–182, 184–185, 196n52, 219n20 Awdeley, John 245: Fraternity of Vagabonds 245 Barn(e)sdale see forests Battle of Otterburn, The 128, 129, 133–136, 139n6, 141n33, 141n34, 142n47, 142n58 beer 84, 260n32 Beggar’s Bush 9, 246–252, 254, 256–57 Beowulf 5, 7, 13–26, 26n3 Boke of Nurture see Russell, John border(s) 110, 129–133, 138, 139n6, 139n7, 141n28, 141n33, 224

border ballad 1, 8, 128–138, 139n4, 139n6, 139n7, 141n33 bread 35, 37, 45n5, 48n33, 49n47, 60, 62, 74, 63, 66, 68, 84–86, 96, 98, 100, 131, 133, 134, 148, 155, 176, 179, 188, 225, 238n22, 239n34, 248, 254, 257, 260n32 Brome, Richard 246: A Jovial Crew 246, 253 Carnivalesque 3, 9, 39, 101, 155, 157, 174, 191n11, 201, 205, 210 Carroll, William 249 Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, A see Harman, Thomas Chapman, George : Eastward Ho! 245–246 Charter of Christ 36, 48n38 Chaucer, Geoffrey 32, 34, 46n19, 48n33, 50n55, 148, 199, 218n5: General Prologue 34; Knight’s Tale, The 199, 218n5; Manciple's Prologue, The 34; Nun's Priest's Tale, The 148 Christ 2, 15, 21, 22, 24, 30, 36–37, 48n39, 49n41, 49n45, 84, 135, 181, 251 cod 222, 225–226, 230–234, 238n18, 238n22, 238n29, 239n33, 239n34, 241n76 comedy/ies 9, 41, 63, 86, 199–201, 205–206, 216, 245–246 community 4, 8, 9, 13, 21, 23–24, 26, 36, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48n35, 58, 64, 65, 69, 70n6, 75–80, 82–83, 86–89, 101, 102, 119, 129, 131–133, 136, 137, 173, 174, 180, 190, 202, 222, 223, 246, 247, 249, 250, 254, 256, 258

264  Index companion 33, 38, 39, 41, 44, 49n45, 49n47, 78, 79, 182, 183, 184, 196n51, 215 “coney-catching” pamphlets 245, 248, 252, 253, 257 Copland, William 102, 104 costume 76, 102, 112–114, 117, 123n40 courtesy 2, 9, 75–83, 85, 87–89, 91n51, 97, 98, 107, 110, 122n23, 158–160, 162n4, 165n50, 169–175, 177–190, 191n4, 194n37, 195n47, 196n53, 205, 206 Creswick, Paul 94–95 Cross-dressing 95, 104–106, 115, 117–119, 123n40, 212, 216 Crusades, The 56, 58 Damsel-in-distress 110, 113–115, 116–117 Danelaw 32 Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington, The (1598) see Munday, Anthony de la Halle, Adam 103: Jeu de Robin et Marion 103 destrier 98, 103 Dogger Bank 233, 241n76, 241n81 Douglas, Sir James 133–138, 141n33 Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, The (1598) see Munday, Anthony deer 5, 6, 33, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 91n51, 95, 100, 112, 116, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 146, 148, 154, 156, 157, 164n39, 213, 216, 250, see also venison drink 7, 8, 17, 18, 22, 30, 31, 35–38, 40, 41–43, 45n3, 48n37, 49n47, 50n53, 68, 75–78, 82–84, 87, 89, 96, 101, 102, 106–111, 119, 132, 134–135, 154, 156, 157, 169, 173, 174, 177–180, 184–185, 248, 251 Earl of Huntington 94, 105, 110, 217n3, 259n14 Eastward Ho! 245–246 Eucharist 2–3, 7, 13, 18–19, 21–26, 30, 36–37, 42, 44, 45n7, 84 exile 7, 22–24, 105, 107, 204–206, 208–216, 247, 257

feast 1–4, 6, 7–9, 10n6, 13, 15, 17– 18, 21–25, 26n2, 27n15, 30–32, 35, 37–45, 49n47, 49n48, 50n50, 50n54, 50n56, 64, 67, 71n17, 75–78, 80, 82–89, 93–94, 96–97, 100–116, 119, 121n23, 127–130, 134–135, 138, 140n19, 146–151, 153–161, 162n8, 165n52, 169–170, 173, 178–179, 182, 185–188, 200, 201, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216, 247–248, 252 Feast of Tottenham, The 149 feud 13–14, 16, 20–21, 24–26, 27n25, 129, 132–134, 136, 139n4, 140n13 Fletcher, John 9, 199, 246–247, 249: Beggar's Bush 9, 246–252, 254, 256–57; Two Noble Kinsmen 199 food 1–4, 6–9, 30–31, 33, 35–42, 44–45, 47n26, 47n29, 48n36, 49n47, 49n48, 56–57, 58, 60–69, 71n17, 75–76, 78–79, 83–89, 91n51, 93–94, 96, 100–103, 106, 107, 108, 110–115, 117–119, 119n1, 127, 129, 135, 146–149, 155–156, 158, 162n3, 162n8, 163n18, 176, 186, 188, 214, 224, 225, 234, 246–248, 254–258, 260n32 Forest Law 5–7, 10n12, 10n14, 95, 128, 148, 155 forests 5–7, 10n6, 27, 33, 35, 41, 42, 44, 75–78, 81–89, 95, 97, 99, 103, 106, 112, 114–115, 128–132, 137–138, 140n19, 146,–148, 152, 154–157, 161, 164n39, 165n43, 175, 209–213, 215–216, 219n15, 224, 230, 232, 235, 236n3, 237n11, 237n15, 247, 249, 250, 252, 257, 259n16: Barn(e)sdale 87, 140n19, 142n53, 148, 162n11, 237n15; Inglewood 237n15; Sherwood 105, 106, 111, 114–115, 122n23, 128, 148, 154, 224 Fouke le Fitz Waryn 199 France 1, 7, 8, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65–69, 70n5, 84, 103, 110, 238n26 Friar Tuck 95, 102–107, 111, 113, 118, 123n37, 155, 164n38

Index 265 Gamelyn 6–7, 31–35, 37–4547n24, 47n25, 49n47, 50n51, 50n53, 50n56, 50n59, 51n62, 51n64, 199, 217n2: Tale of Gamelyn, The 6–7, 8, 30–45, 46n19, 47n20, 49n45, 49n47, 162n5, 209, 217n2 generosity 31, 35, 38, 39, 42, 75, 76, 78–79, 81–83, 87–88, 128, 178, 208 gluttony 18, 62, 64–69, 108, 129 Great Rising of 1381, The 6, 156, 160, 191n13 greed 18, 37, 65, 70n16, 81, 95, 146, 153, 249–250, 255 Greenwood, The 7, 8, 32, 33, 35, 42, 43, 48n35, 75, 83, 87, 88, 91n51, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 119, 127–143, 146, 157, 161, 170, 173, 181, 186, 190, 201, 205, 208–216, 222–223, 224, 232, 235, 236n3, 237n10, 241n70: Greenwood Narratives/ Matter of the Greenwood 7, 32, 75, 128, 140n8, 161, 170, 173, 181, 190, 210, 216 Grendel 5, 7, 13–15, 17–26, 26n2, 27n25 guild 2, 76–78, 84, 85, 88 Guy of Gisbo(u)rne 106–114, 117, 188 Harman, Thomas 245, 248: Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, A 245, 248 Henry II 6, 174 herring 225–230, 232–233, 238n18, 238n22, 238n26, 239n33, 240n43, 240n54, 241n71 Honorat Bovet 7, 8, 55–69, 70n16, 83n27: Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun 7, 8, 56–69 hospitality 31, 42, 51n64, 76, 96, 146, 158, 169, 173–176, 178, 182–184, 185–186, 251 humoral theory 30: humoral ­imbalance 34 humors/humours 30, 63 Hunting of the Cheviot, The 128, 129, 133, 135–136, 137–138, 141n32 Inglewood see forests

Jeu de Robin et Marion see de la Halle, Adam Johnie O'Braidiesleys 128, 129, 131–132, 138 John the Reeve 154, 155, 157, 159–160, 172, 173, 176, 182, 184, 195n42 John Lackland, Prince 105, 108–115, 117 Jonson, Ben 108, 249: Alchemist, The 249; Bartholomew Fair 249; Eastward Ho! 245–246 justice 4, 5, 20, 32–33, 39–41, 43– 44, 47n20, 66, 81, 98, 101, 146, 150–151, 153, 161, 217n4, 253, 254, 255 : injustice 93, 215–216 King and Commoner 7, 9, 147, 154–161, 165n54, 169–196, 170, 173 see also King-in-Disguise King and the Barker, The 154, 164n32 King Edward and the Hermit 154, 155, 164n38, 169, 172–181, 187, 192n23, 193n31 King Edward and the Shepherd 154, 155, 157, 169, 173, 179, 180, 184, 189 King-in-Disguise 7, 172, see also King and Commoner King’s Men 247 Kinmont Willie 132, 139n7 knight 43, 63, 78, 79–89, 97–99, 103, 108–110, 113, 114, 117, 121n16, 121n23, 135–136, 146–154, 158–161, 162n5, 165n51, 165n54, 182, 184, 186–187 Land of Cokaygne, The 149 Langland, William : Piers Plowman 148 Last Supper 3, 7, 13, 25, 36–37, 49n45 legal systems 4–5, 7–8, 24, 36, 210, 213, 216 Lincolnshire 32 Little John 77, 79, 80–82, 86, 87, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 113, 119, 128, 146, 147, 150, 157 lord 17, 35, 38, 39, 43, 44, 51n64, 58, 66, 75, 77–79, 81, 85, 102, 135, 141n28, 149, 155, 182, 184, 185, 196n49, 208, 214, 216, 239n39, 253

266  Index Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode/Gest of Robin Hood 6, 10n6, 35, 48n30, 75–91, 93, 95–124, 127, 133, 139n6, 140n19, 142n53, 143n58, 146–166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 185–187, 190, 196n50, 201 Maid Marian/Marian Fitzwater 95–96, 101–119, 122n23, 123n37, 123n40, 124n55, 217n4: Maid Marian (1902 opera) 95–96 Malory, Thomas 120n6, 150, 165n42: Le Morte Darthur 150 Marston, John : Eastward Ho! 245–246 Martin Pryde (Marian cross-dressed) 117–118 masculinity/emasculation 96–100, 109–111, 112, 114–116, 188 Massinger, Philip 9, 246, 247, 249, 253: Eastward Ho! 245–246; Guardian, The 246, 253–258 master 38, 41–44, 52n65, 56, 76–78, 80, 85, 87, 95, 97–101, 109, 122n25, 147, 157, 177, 194n39, 201, 227, 230, 231, 245–246, 249 Matter of the Greenwood see Greenwood, The May-games 93, 100–102, 104–107, 110, 112, 119, 123n37 meat 5, 33, 35–37, 42, 45n5, 50n53, 50n56, 56, 61–63, 65–68, 70n5, 85–87, 96, 108, 111–113, 115–118, 128, 129, 131, 134, 136–138, 148–149, 155, 177, 226, 231, 248, 255 Mery Geste of Robyn Hode, A (ballad) 93, 102, 119n1 Merry Men 6, 98, 102, 113, 116, 214, 216 Middle Ages 2, 37, 38, 47n23, 56, 63–65, 78, 83, 84, 94, 128, 129, 130, 141n33, 153, 162n2, 171, 190, 225, 238n22 mimetic violence 13, 15, 19, 21, 23–26, 26n9 monk 6, 49n47, 56, 75, 77, 79–81, 83, 86, 88, 104, 107, 128, 146, 147, 173, 174, 186–189, 232 Morris Dance 93, 102, 104–106, 123n37 Morte Darthur, Le see Malory, Thomas

Much the miller’s son 103, 106, 112 Munday, Anthony 94, 105, 110, 122n23, 257, 259n14: Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington, The (1598) 105; Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, The (1598) 94, 105, 122n23 Norman 5, 6, 112–115, 117–118, 143n67 North Sea 225, 227, 230–234, 237n14, 238n22, 241n76 Nottingham 80, 86, 95–96, 99, 107–108, 111–115, 142n53, 150, 154 outlaw/outlaws 1, 3–9, 13, 14–15, 17–18, 19–20, 21, 24–25, 31–33, 35, 42–44, 46n18, 52n65, 56, 58, 59, 69, 75–80, 82–88, 93–108, 110–111, 114–119, 121n23, 122n24, 123n40, 127–134, 136–138, 139n7, 140n19, 141n28, 141n32, 146–151, 153–154, 156–158, 151, 163n12, 170, 186, 188–189, 199–201, 204–216, 217n3, 218n10, 222–224, 227, 245–247, 249–250, 252–257: outlaw king 32, 42–43, 52n65, 141n32, 153, 209 palfrey 82, 98–99 pastourelle 93, 103–104, 119, 123n36 Peasant Revolt of 1381, The see Great Rising of 1381 Percy, Henry “Harry Hotspur” 133, 135, 136, 137, 142n53 Peter Watts (Marian cross-dressed) 115–116 Philip Sidney, Sir 201 Piers Plowman see Langland, William Plumpton Park/Plompton Park 6, 154, 224 poaching 5–6, 33, 48n34, 86, 95, 112, 129, 131–132, 134, 136, 146–148, 154–156, 158, 164n31, 164n38, 164n39, 165n43, 169, 173, 176, 177, 188, 213, 250 polysemy 76–78, 88, 122n23, 149, 157, 204, 205, 214, 216

Index 267 primogeniture 32–33, 44, 109 Pyle, Howard 94, 95, 112, 119, 124n46 Rauf Coil3ear 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 165n50, 173, 176, 184, 192n23 reiving/reivers 129, 134, 139n5 Richard I 95, 107–112, 114, 115, 122n23, 124n52 Richard II 6, 141n32, 142n58 Richard at the Lee, Sir 35, 82, 87–89, 100, 103, 107, 121n16, 121n23, 151–153, 164n31 Ritson, Joseph 95, 112, 119, 124n46 Robert Hode 117 Robin Hood 6–9, 10n6, 14, 32, 35, 48n34, 48n35, 75–89, 93–119, 119n1, 121n15, 121n18, 121n22, 121n23, 122n24, 122n25, 122n34, 123n40, 123n45, 127–134, 136, 139n7, 140n19, 142n53, 143n58, 143n71, 146–154, 156–158, 160–161, 164n31, 164n33, 164n38, 185– 190, 196n52, 196n57, 196n59, 199–200, 204–205, 207, 210, 213, 214, 216, 218n5, 218n10, 219n20, 222–235, 236n3, 237n7, 237n8, 237n10, 237n11, 237n15, 238n16, 240n43, 246, 248, 250, 252, 254–256, 259n14, 260n33: Robin Hood (1890 opera) 95–96; Robin Hood (1912 film) 8, 95, 106–108, 111; Robin Hood (1922 film) 8, 95, 105, 108–111, 112; Robin Hood (1991 film) 8, 117–118, 124n54; Robin Hood Revels 101, 102–103, 104, 119 Robin Hood and Maid Marian (broadside ballad) 93, 95, 104, 115, 119 Robin Hood and the Monk (ballad) 75, 86, 128, 146, 147, 232 Robin Hood and the Potter (ballad) 75, 93, 95–101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 110, 112–114, 121n16, 140n8, 237n10, 248 Robin Hood's Fishing 9, 222–241 Russell, John 31, 40, 46n11, 50n56: Boke of Nurture 31, 40, 46n12, 50n56

Saracen 8, 55–72 Saxon 112–115, 117, 118 Scarborough 9, 222, 223–224, 225–226, 230, 232, 234, 235, 237n8, 240n54, 241n71 sexual emancipation 118 Shakespeare, William 7, 9, 127, 199–216, 217n3, 246, 247, 257: As You Like It 7, 127, 199, 209– 216, 257; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 201; Two Gentlemen of Verona 199, 200–209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216; Two Noble Kinsmen 199 Sheriff of Nottingham 6, 75, 80, 81, 82, 86–88, 95, 96–101, 102, 103, 104, 106–108, 110–114, 116, 117, 121n16, 122n25, 146, 150, 187, 189 sheriffs 4, 6, 33, 75, 80–82, 86–88, 95–104, 106–108, 110–114, 116, 117, 121n16, 121n22, 122n25, 146, 150, 155, 187, 189, 216n1 Sherwood see forests Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle 9, 158, 159, 169, 172, 181–185 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 9, 79, 147, 151, 158, 159–161, 219n20 Sir Launfal 9, 152–153, 162n5 social contract(s) 8, 26, 31, 38, 39, 41 stripping (of costume) 100–101, 113–114 swashbuckler 113, 118 Tobias Gentleman 227 Tournament of Tottenham, The 149 Twa Corbies 127–128 Urbanitatis 79, 81, 196n49 venison 5–6, 35, 48n30, 48n34, 75, 84–87, 107, 112, 119, 128, 146, 148, 155–157, 164n39, 165n43, 176, 178–179, 181, 213, see also deer violent/ violence 6, 9, 13–26, 26n9, 27n25, 31–33, 34, 39, 41–42, 44, 45, 46n14, 95, 99, 110, 128, 132, 136–138, 139n4, 153, 155, 158, 160, 165n43, 176, 185, 188, 189, 195n47, 206, 210, 246, 251, 256

268  Index virginity 105, 110, 113 Virgin Mary 87, 104, 105, 110 Whitsun-ales 101–102, 104, 123n40 William the Conqueror 5 wine 6, 30, 35–39, 41, 45n5, 48n31, 49n41, 49n47, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65, 67, 70n5, 72n51,

83–86, 96, 100, 108, 109, 111, 119, 134, 148, 156, 226 Wyeth, N. C. 94–95 yeoman/yeomanry 77–78, 80, 83, 88, 97–99, 100–101, 102, 103, 105–107, 111–112, 114, 119, 121n23, 122n25, 146–153, 158, 161, 163n12, 169, 237n10, 246