![]() Yet this vision of Greenwood outlawry may have been alive and well as early as the very early fourteenth century and possibly before then. 2 Robin Hood is, of course, one of the most famous medieval literary figures in our modern imaginary, and his name evokes a particular image of medieval outlaswry, one in which a group of unjustly persecuted men live in the woods and undermine the corrupt political and ecclesiastical powers that be. ![]() ![]() IN WILLIAM LANGLAND'S Piers Plowman, the character Sloth famously exclaims "I kan noght parfitly my Paternoster as þe preest it syngeþ, / But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood." 1 The earliest explicit mention of the Robin Hood legend, these lines suggest that the "rymes" of Robin Hood were well known at that time, though the earliest of the ballads dates to around 1450. ![]()
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