ABSTRACT
Anglo-Scottish Border ballads offer the unique opportunity to view the Matter of the Greenwood through the eyes of those who lived in premodern outlaw territory. In English outlaw ballads, the Greenwood offers plentiful food and shelter outside the economic demands of the real world. However, the Border region was devastated by centuries of Anglo-Scottish warfare and shaped by customary blood feuds, described in their “reiving” or “riding” ballads like Johnie O’Braidiesleys and The Hunting of the Cheviot. In these ballads, the Greenwood is predicated on deprivation and violence, and it supports itself under the same blood economy that drove the outlaws to the Greenwood in the first place. This article argues that inverted Greenwood imagery illustrates the unmanageable appetite of the border feud by framing human violence as hunting and feasting. The border ballads use the Greenwood's fluid dimensions to describe the radical changes inherent to outlaw territory and the blood feud: massive redistributions of wealth, land, food, and even nationality. In ironically juxtaposing the feast that the Greenwood promises with bloodshed and waste, these ballads conclude that only the feud can sustain life in a land cultivated with blood.
