NOTES Introduction 1. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959). 2. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (1961; New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 23. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. Ibid., pp. 22–28. 5. Anton Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1:4 (1972), 494–503. See also Richard W. Slatta, ed., Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987). 6. See the summary by Richard W. Slatta, “Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: A Critique and Revision,” A Contracorriente 1:2 (2004), 22–30. 7. Paul Kooistra, Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power, and Identity (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), p. 29. 8. See Steven Knight’s Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 9. Mary Grace Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: the Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 61. 10. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1841). 11. See, for instance, Kenneth Munden, “A Contribution to the Psychological Understanding of the Cowboy and His Myth,” American Imago Summer (1958), 103–48. 12. William Settle, for instance, makes the argument in the introduction to his Jesse James Was His Name (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). 13. Hobsbawm, Bandits, pp. 40–56. 14. Joseph Ritson, ed., Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, now Extant Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw, 2 vols (London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795; rpt. London: William Pickering, 1832), I p. 28. 164 NOTES 15. Rodney Hilton, “The Origins of Robin Hood,” Past and Present 14 (1958), 30–44. 16. Ibid., p. 204; J. C. Holt, Robin Hood, rev. ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), p. 120. 17. Holt, Robin Hood, pp. 109–58; “The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood,” Past and Present 18 (1960), 89–110. 18. Richard Tardif, “The ‘Mistery’ of Robin Hood: A New Social Context for the Texts,” in Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, ed. S. Knight and S. J. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1983), pp. 130–45. Thomas Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 19. Discussed in Hobsbawm, Bandits, pp. 40–82. 20. W. F. Prideaux, “Who Was Robin Hood?” Notes and Queries, 7th ser., 2 (1886), 421–4. 21. “Outlaws,” American-Scandinavian Review 4 (1916), 350–4; Angevin England and Scandinavia, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921). 22. The Relation and Development of English and Icelandic Outlaw Legends (Harlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1935), pp. 130–1. 23. Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, rev. ed. (New York: Dorset, 1987). 24. He lists “The Origins of Robin Hood” in the appendix of sources and bibliography. 25. Keen, Outlaws, p. xvi. 26. John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 69–88; and Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Barbara Hanawalt, “Ballads and Bandits: Fourteenth-Century Outlaws and the Robin Hood Poems,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 154–75. 27. R. B. Dobson and John Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (1976; Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 1–64. 28. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: TEAMS/Medieval Institute, 2000); Thomas Ohlgren, ed., Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2005), a revised and expanded edition of Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English (Stroud: Sutton, 2000). 29. Ohlgren, Medieval Outlaws, pp. xxvi–xxxiii. 30. Douglas Gray, “The Robin Hood Poems,” Poetica 18 (1984), 1–18. J. B. Bessinger, Jr. did something similar for the Gest of Robyn Hood in “The Gest of Robin Hood Revisited,” in The Lered and the Lewed, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 355–69. Neil Daniel has made a systematic stylistic examination of Gamelyn in “A Metrical and Stylistic Study of The Tale of Gamelyn,” in Studies in NOTES 165 Medieval, Renaissance, (and) American Literature: A Festschrift (Honoring Troy C. Crenshaw, Lorraine Sherley, and Ruth Speer Angell), ed. Betsy F. Colquitt (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1971), pp. 19–32. Ingrid Benecke has analyzed the characterization of “the good outlaw” in sev- eral of the texts discussed here in Der Gute Outlaw (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1973). 31. Claude Levi-Strauss’ analysis of mythic narrative was especially influ- ential. For a lucid summary of the impact of cultural anthropology on narrative theory, see Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 23–6. Chapter 1 1. The Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Middle English versions of Wulfbold’s story are edited by Edward Edwards in Liber Monasterii de Hyda, RBMA 45 (London, 1866). The Anglo-Saxon text can also be found as no. 63 in A. J. Robertson, ed., Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 128. 2. Liber Monasterii de Hyda. 3. On the composition, content, and dating of the Liber Monasterii de Hyda, see G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain: A Short Catalogue (London: Longman’s, Green, and co., 1958). 4. Liber Monasterii de Hyda, p. 252. 5. Ibid., p. 248. 6. Hundredgemot 3, 3.1; All citations of Anglo-Saxon laws are from Felix Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1898-16). In these I have silently expanded abbreviations. Abbreviated references are those used by Patrick Wormald. 7. Henry Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. Samuel E. Thorne as Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, rev. ed., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 352. 8. This process is complicated by the introduction of judicial precedent, which demands that previous interpretations and applications of the legal narrative are taken into consideration, but evidence for this does not appear in England until the thirteenth century. See Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 42–4. 9. My choice of the masculine pronoun is intentional. Women and boys under twelve could not be outlawed for the reason that they were never under the law in the same sense that men were. A woman who commit- ted a crime and fled could be “waived” (Bracton, De Legibus, 2:353). 10. James Boyd White, “Law as Language: Reading Law and Reading Literature,” Texas Law Review 60 (1982), 415–45. For a summary of the debate surrounding White’s thesis and its application to the study of law 166 NOTES as literature, see Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–27. 11. Paul Gewirtz, “Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Paul Gewirtz and Peter Brooks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 5. See Richard Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” 87 Michigan Law Review 2411 (1989). 12. These assumptions are not synonymous with the aporia Jacques Derrida identifies, for instance, in his lecture “Force of Law: Mystical Foundations of Authority,” although some outlaw narratives respond to his question regarding the double-bind of “singularity”: “How are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplace- able groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case?” (trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), 949). 13. Following the structuralist pattern derived from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, I am imagining the legal narrative as langue and others as parole (Course in General Linguistics, Roy Harris, trans. [Chicago: Open Court, 1986], pp. 9–10). However, legal practice is not fixed but responds to its own history and in this respect can behave like parole. On the diversity of parole as a challenge to langue and the relationship of language to ideology, see the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially as described and applied by Tzveten Todorov in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Wlad Godzich, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 41–74. While recent criticism of Bakhtin has historicized his the- ory as a reaction against Stalinism, the dialogical intertextuality that he describes has been usefully applied to a variety of cultural narratives. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ concept of the “cultural script” in Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative,” Narrative 1 (1992), 12–23. 14. See J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Blood-Feud of the Franks,” in The Long- Haired Kings (London, 1962), pp. 121–47; Peter Sawyer, “The Bloodfeud in Fact and Fiction,” Acta Jutlandica 63:2 (1987), pp. 27–38. 15. Heinrich Brunner, Grundzüge der Deutschen Rechtesgeschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923) and Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Leipzig: von Duncker & Humblodt, 1906-28), and from Wilhelm Eduard Wilda’s Das Strafrecht der Germanen (Halle, 1842). For a recent crit- ical discussion of nineteenth-century reconstructions of early Germanic legal customs regarding feud, see Stefan Jurasinski, “The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the ‘Feud’ of Hengest,” Review of English Studies n.s.