A Gest of Robyn Hode
Gest, which means tale or adventure, is a compilation of various Robin Hood tales, arranged as a sequence of adventures involving the yeoman outlaws Robin Hood and Little John, the poor knight Sir Richard at the Lee, the greedy abbot of St Mary's Abbey, the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, and King Edward of England.
Due to its length, popularity, and influence, A Gest of Robyn Hode is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Robin Hood tradition, and English outlaw literature in general.
He sends his men to find one and reminds them to do no harm to farmers, yeomen or gentlemen, but to rob bishops, archbishops and the Sheriff of Nottingham should they encounter them.
The Abbot, the Prior, the Chief Steward, the Sheriff of Yorkshire, and the county Justice are discussing the Knight whose debt of 400 pounds is due today.
"[2]: lines 1821, 1823-4 The place names mentioned in Gest locate Robin Hood in the West Riding of Yorkshire: Blyth; Doncaster; St Mary Magdalene Church at Campsall; and Kirklees Abbey.
This area is famous for its wide river valleys, and the eastern foothills of the South Pennines, with its numerous limestone caves where outlaws could hide.
The greenwood of Barnsdale Forest is Robin's home; "Robyn stood in Barnesdale/And leaned him to a tree,"[2]: lines 9-10 is how the tale of the Sorrowful Knight opens.
[12] Fowler was one of the first to advocate the study of the English and Scottish ballads relative to their historical time and place, rather than simply within the classification of the Child anthology.
[1] In 1984, Douglas Gray, the first J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, considered the Robin Hood and Scottish Border ballads more as oral poems.
However, Gray admitted that the Robin Hood tales, like most popular literature, are sometimes regarded as "sub-literary material", containing formulaic language and a "thin texture", especially "when they are read on the printed page".
[22] He constructed multiple lines of linguistic evidence that Gest was written in a Northern or East Midlands dialect, most probably during the mid- to late-15th century.
The strategic geographic location of the northern counties was formally recognized in 1249 under a treaty which established the Scottish Marches as a buffer zone between Scotland and England.
[28]: 316–7 This sense of separateness is reflected in the Gest in the way London is portrayed as the power base for the villainous Abbot of St Mary's and Sheriff of Nottingham (see here).
[29]: 57 Based upon clues within the text, Almond and Pollard extended Holt's idea, and proposed that audiences of the 15th century would have recognized Robin Hood as being a forester of Barnsdale or Sherwood because of these clues:[29]: 56-8 Almond and Pollard have traced some of the hunting rituals and terminology found in Gest back to The Master of Game, a hunting book translated in 1413 from French by Edward, Duke of York.
[29]: 64-66 Almond and Pollard compare the 'royal' dinner prepared by Robin for the disguised King in the Seventh Fytte[2]: lines 1545-1576 to that described in The Master of Game.
[30]: 71-2 Almond and Pollard also credited J. C. Holt as the first historian to notice the resemblance between Robin Hood and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Yeoman in The Canterbury Tales.
[32]: xl The green livery of the forester and huntsman is depicted in many of the miniatures of the Livre de chasse, written by Gaston III, Count of Foix, in the late 14th century.
[34]: sense 1 Almond and Pollard's approach coincides neatly with the results of Thomas Ohlgren's study of 'which' King Edward is meant in Gest.
He bases his assertion on internal evidence (references made in the text) concerning feudalism, livery and maintenance, and other details that can be traced back to Edward III's reign.
[2]: lines 353-356 For one thing, Robin, I thee promise; I swear by Saint Quentin, These forty days thou dwellest with me, To soup, eat, and dine.
[1954_Lyon, p 503-4] In the 14th and 15th centuries, purveyance[MED, sense 3, 4] meant recruiting men, clothing them, furnishing the equipment for a campaign, and providing food and transportation for them to the English coast.
[2]: line 426 Note This practice became so prevalent that, in 1346, Edward III issued a statute requiring his justices to swear an oath that they would only accept 'cloth and fee' from the King himself.
[2]: lines 9–12 A musical interpretation of this vocal pattern was recorded in 2002 by Bob Frank in a modern English version entitled A Little Gest of Robin Hood.
Fowler's proposal was both opposed[46][47] and applauded[48][49][50][51][52] for his attempt to construct a history of ballads based upon the earliest dates of surviving texts and not upon comparative structure and form.
Maurice Keen, in his first edition (1961) of The Outlaws of Medieval Legend argued that the ballad form of the Robin Hood stories indicated a primitive popular origin.
In the Introduction to his second edition (1977), Keen stated that criticism forced him to abandon his original arguments[26] He now supported the position that the narrative ballads were minstrel compositions.
Accretion (defined by Hart as the accumulation of independent events)[41]: 355 is the complexity which arises in the narrative as the central character becomes a heroic figure, and represents the community's ideals.
Extending his comparison to the themes and content of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Bessinger concluded that Gest lies somewhere between a ballad, epic, and a romance.
[63] In 2013 Ohlgren and linguist Lister M. Matheson published Early Rymes of Robin Hood, which includes "as-is" transcriptions of all the earliest surviving copies of Gest for use by scholars.
—The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (left)[66]: 159 Gest, Fytte 1 (right)[2]: lines 85-92 Pyle also includes the episode of the wrestling yeoman, but to tie it more clearly into the novel, he made the man David of Doncaster, a Merry Man from Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow, though even this made the episode odd among Pyle's novelistic effects.
