ABSTRACT
This is one of the two earliest recorded nonreligious English ballads, the other being Robin Hood and the Monk (Child, No. 119). It obviously belongs to a period in which a wide audience was interested in tales of such heroic outlaws as Robin Hood, about whom a whole cycle of ballads developed, and Gamelyn, who is the subject of a romance, The Tale of Gamelyn (ca. 1350–70). The resemblance of the name Robyn to Robin Hood and of Gandeleyn to Gamelyn is perhaps coincidental, but in its concern for popular justice, the ballad is unmistakably similar to the Robin Hood ballads and the Gamelyn romance. Its terse, impersonal, self-contained, and restrained yet dramatic style is typical of the best ballads that have been recorded in more recent times and presumably also of the innumerable ballads of an earlier age that were never recorded. (According to Piers Plowman in the late fourteenth century, Sloth knew rhymes of Robin Hood better than he knew his paternoster; unfortunately no one at that time bothered to write them down.)
