The urge to speak of Robin Hood by those who never bent his bow remains undiminished. Why therefore yet another voice? There are two answers: one is that a volume such as this would surely be incomplete without a chapter on the medieval outlaw whom Barrie Dobson has made his own, and the other is that, curiously, in all the recent speakings no one has directly addressed what the tales of Robin Hood said to fifteenth-century audiences who heard them in the form in which they were subsequently set down in their earliest surviving versions. There has been endless speculation about a possible original ‘real-life’ Robin. Much has been written in relation to the context in which the ballads are apparently set, sometime around 1300. Considerable thought has been given to the composition of their audience. The literary qualities, structure and antecedents of the ballads have been exhaustively analysed. Yet not even in the work of Holt, or of Dobson and Taylor, is the content of the tales examined with a view to what they say specifically to a fifteenth-century audience.

This neglect is to some extent surprising, since it is established that the earliest ballads took the form we know in the first half of the century. Dobson and Taylor, in their most recent discussion, judge that the tales began to survive in written form ‘no later than the mid-fifteenth century’. Linguistic analysis of the Gest has suggested a date of composition as early as c. 1400.