ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the feasting scenes in several late medieval king-in-disguise narratives, wherein a disguised monarch is shown hospitality by a churl or yeoman and the two engage in a complicated game of social negotiation through the mannered “games” of feasting, poaching, and the exchange of blows. Tales such as the Lyttel Geste of Robin Hood, King Edward and the Hermit, John the Reeve, King Edward and the Shepherd, and Rauf Coilʒear add to the ancient tale-type elements such as mutual testing (in addition to mutual reciprocity), transgression, and table-turning. These late medieval tales are part of an intertextual conversation between didactic courtesy manuals and the matter of the greenwood. Both genres’ preoccupation with the rules of courtesy—and especially table manners—and upward mobility is marked, but the parallels between the two late medieval genres go even deeper. Through a close reading of intertextually-related passage we show how the language of the greenwood king-in-disguise texts uncannily echoes that of the courtesy texts like Urbanitas, The Babees Book, and Stans Puer ad Mensam. This reading provides insight into what makes the late Middle English cluster of king-in-disguise tales distinctive and how they may relate to the late medieval popularity of courtesy texts—and have influenced in turn the burgeoning popularity of outlaw material. The feast and game scenes in the Geste, in particular, play with the generic expectations of the well-established king-in-disguise genre and the late medieval courtesy manuals in an exuberant parody of both categories of didactic literature, ultimately resisting the lessons the narrative motifs were intended to teach.
