It tells the story of an adolescent boy who joins an outlaw band and takes part in a great rebellion against the feudal elite.

Set in medieval England, Bows Against the Barons relates the adventures of a peasant boy who becomes an outlaw and joins the Robin Hood's band.

Bows Against the Barons takes place during the final months of Robin Hood's life, beginning in early June, and ending in the following year about February.

Led by a bridle-smith, Dickon and the populace assemble in the market-place to protest about working conditions and to demand the release of imprisoned workers.

His plans almost go awry when he meets his former master, Sir Rolf D'Eyncourt, who has returned from the Crusades and now attempts to reclaim Dickon.

Seeing Dickon's talent for disguises, Robin sends the boy to infiltrate D'Eyncourt Castle and acquire information about its defences.

Taking up positions on its battlements, they pick off D'Eyncourt's defenders with their arrows while Robin launches the main assault on the outer walls.

When his ally, the Archbishop, wonders aloud why the rebels die so willingly on the swords of his soldiers the Earl replies grimly, "Because they know that they are going to win – but not in my time."

Dickon, Robin and Little John survive the battle and flee north with other survivors to Yorkshire, undergoing much hardship on their journey.

It mentions that Sir Rolf has campaigned in the Holy Land and visited the "rotting courts of Eastern Europe", an allusion to the Byzantine Empire in its decline.

In his 1948 foreword and 1966 postscript, Trease compares his novel's events to the English peasants' revolt of 1381, and his version of Robin Hood to medieval rebels such as Wat Tyler, Robert Kett and Jack Cade.

In contrast to earlier depictions of the outlaw as a nobleman and loyal subject of the king, it portrays Robin as a populist figure of the radical left.

[7][8] The novel depicts Robin's outlaws as guerilla rebels who aid workers in a medieval class struggle against their masters,[7] and it employs much revolutionary rhetoric, bearing chapter titles such as "Comrades of the Forest" and "The People Speak".

[9] The Robin Hood scholar Stephen Thomas Knight describes the novel as being "rich with the leftist enthusiasm of the mid 1930s",[9] comparing the Nottingham riot scene to Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.

Bows Against the Barons is also a coming-of-age story that depicts an adolescent protagonist's attempts to overcome difficulties and understand his place in the world.

By the end of my schooldays I was abandoning such values.... [I]n 1933 I was a rather naive Left-wing member of the Labour Party, newly married and struggling to survive as a freelance writer.... [A]fter a rejected novel and other disappointments the desperate idea came to me, though even then it was largely prompted by my political sympathies.

[12]To realise his idea, Trease approached a publisher associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain and made his proposal for a leftist Robin Hood novel.

He found fault with its historical errors and lack of research, both of which he attributed to youthful over-confidence,[2] and made efforts to "remove the worst blemishes" in later editions.

In The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984), Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard criticised Bows Against the Barons for its "political preaching",[17] especially for making "Robin [speak] like a member of the British Communist Party during the 1930s".

[21] Its modern prose style, egalitarian characterisation, and realist attention to the harshness of medieval life all mark significant departures from the aristocratic focus and romantic glamour that had dominated the genre since the 19th century.

[22][23] These changes anticipate the mid-20th-century renewal of children's historical fiction by writers such as Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Cynthia Harnett and Trease himself.

[25] A 2003 ALAN Review article credits Bows Against the Barons with founding the genre of the young adult Robin Hood novel.