ABSTRACT
The fifteenth-century Robin Hood tales were not alone in depicting the poaching, trickster inhabitants of the greenwood. Emerging alongside the fifteenth-century Robin Hood tales was the King and Commoner tradition, including King Edward and the Shepherd (c. 1400–1450), John the Reeve (c. 1450) and Rauf Coilȝear (c. 1460). These tales depict incognito kings and their encounters with disgruntled commoners who hold poached banquets in the forest. The medieval King and Commoner and Robin Hood traditions were closely related and later became amalgamated in the seventh and eighth fyttes of the Gest of Robyn Hode (c. 1500). This chapter will present an overview of these much neglected King and Commoner tales, arguing that they merge politically aware, anti-noble commoner complaint with the feasting and inversion of the medieval carnival. In these tales the forest becomes a liminal space in which static official culture is persistently disrupted as commoners metamorphose into kings, and kings transform into fools. It will also be demonstrated that these tales end in an uneasy containment that imbues the oppressive court with a sense of alterity, permeated by images of death. This paper will argue that this carnivalesque inversion and uneasy containment was carried into and adapted for the Gest’s own King and Commoner encounter between King Edward and Robin Hood.
