The outlaw, residing in the idyllic ‘wood of Belregard’, is a powerful and evocative image in medieval literature. Embodying a strong sense of social justice and imbued with utopian qualities, both the outlaw figure and the greenwood can be taken to symbolise the aspirations, or perhaps more appropriately the plight, of those who had no apparent prospect of ‘justice’, either through lack of access to the legal system or on account of their treatment within it. The apparent difficulties faced in trying to clear one's name are portrayed as stemming from endemic social prejudice and corruption within the legal system. As such, and in what is a recurring theme during the fourteenth century, the outlaw figure presents a picture of social exclusion amounting to a serious indictment of royal justice in late-medieval England.

This chapter seeks to mitigate the stark ‘outlaw's view’ outlined above (itself a metaphor for the excluded, both literally and psychologically) through an examination of attitudes towards the disadvantaged and by highlighting the structural and administrative factors ameliorating their experience of royal justice in the fourteenth century.