Introduction

King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across England and Scotland in the late-medieval and early modern periods, their influence echoing across an array of literature from outlaw ballads of Robin Hood to Shakespearean national histories. This book aims to examine much of this literature for the first time, providing an introduction to a rich and deeply politicised comic tradition that mulls on the nature of power, kingship, surveillance, revolt, and the commoner’s place in an often oppressive world. The early King and Commoner bourdes persistently intermingle feasting and dearth with laughter and politics, in tales that grant a relatively rare literary voice to the medieval commoner and his perspective amid the social and political turmoil of the later Middle Ages. The political and narrative focus of these early tales falls on the presentation of two opposing feasts: an unofficial feast in the forest and an official feast in the court.