ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 explores King and Commoner texts from the second half of the fifteenth century, primarily focusing on the Scottish, satiric King and Commoner Carolingian romance Rauf Coilȝear (c. 1460) and the King and Commoner sequences in A Gest of Robin Hood (c. 1495). This chapter examines the carnivalesque in these texts (especially carnival violence), arguing that these elements enable and encourage a textual, generic hybridity, as the tradition begins to satirise or intermingle with complementary literary genres. This chapter also includes a brief discussion of the fragmentary King Edward and the Hermit (c. 1500) and The King and the Barker (c. 1468), arguing that both of these later fifteenth-century texts display the beginnings of a break from the previous carnivalesque and structural elements amid a self-conscious restlessness with the tradition’s increasingly predictable narrative.
