ABSTRACT
The stories of Fulk Fitzwarin and Eustace the Monk were written down some time in the thirteenth century; the earliest surviving ballads of Robin Hood, the arch outlaw of English medieval legend, date from the fifteenth. We know that by then he was already a traditional figure, long famous in popular song, but the older poems about him, on which the ones we know were doubtless based, are lost. Some time between these dates, however, stands the story of another outlaw, the Tale of Gamelyn, written by some forgotten poet and probably about the middle of the fourteenth century. It survives in several of the older manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, where it usually follows the Cook's unfinished story, which was apparently so bawdy that even the usually unblushing Chaucer found it too much for him. It was not Chaucer who wrote the story of Gamelyn, however, for it is in a rhythm that he never used; and how it came to be included among his tales is unexplained. It may be that he intended to remould it, and put a new version of it into the mouth of his Plowman or some other rustic character, and that being found among his papers it was taken for his own. But, however it came about, it is to the accident which associated the story with the name of the greatest English medieval poet that we owe its survival.
