ABSTRACT
The thrill of the outlaw legends comes from the fact that they celebrate the deeds of those who were ‘agin’ the law’, but this thrill does not derive from the glamour of theft in a romantic setting. Robin Hood was no Captain Kidd, not even a Dick Turpin; he was the enemy of the existing order, not a parasite on it. Herein lies the historical significance of the outlaw stories. What is striking about them is that they reveal that, in an age when the Rule of Law was respected as the foundation of good government, those who put themselves outside and against the law became nevertheless popular heroes. There can be only one reason for this, that the existing order was generally regarded as tyrannical. Tyranny was to this age the definition of the abuse of law, for under its rule law was founded in the wills of wicked men and not in reason, and acts of tyranny, therefore, though they might be legal, could not be legitimate. Since law itself was ultimately unassailable, protest against abuse must be to some extent specific. What the outlaws can tell the historian, therefore, is what it was that contemporaries regarded as abusive in the existing order of things, and this is a manner more vivid and expressive than that of his usual witnesses, the minor clerks of courts and councils who recorded official acts in a style whose aridity and bombast they thought appropriate thereto.
