Gamelyn is a vigorous tale of family rivalry and
corrupt justice composed during the later 14th
century in the northeast Midlands of England. It
is written in MIDDLE ENGLISH at a time when this
was becoming a more popular language for writing
ROMANCES, but Gamelyn has more in common
with a folktale like Cinderella than with stories of
knights errant, COURTLY LOVE, or military exploits.
In its directness the tale is akin to the BALLADS, but
it is written in rhymed couplets in poetic lines with
seven stressed syllables and irregular feet. Moreover
it has at its center issues of property, inheritance,
and justice that were the preoccupation of
the nobility. As a result the poem seems to be a
transitional work, evidence of the diverse forms
that romance could take outside the continentally
influenced tastes of the royal court.
On his death bed, a knight setting his affairs in
order commands his friends to divide his property
among his three sons and not to neglect the
youngest, Gamelyn. But after the knight passes on,
his eldest son, John, takes Gamelyn into his own
house, treats him poorly, and neglects his farms,
forests, and livestock. When Gamelyn comes of
age, he looks at his property and becomes enraged
with his brother. After winning a wrestling match,
Gamelyn invites the crowd of onlookers home for
a party, infuriating his brother. John, in turn, tricks
Gamelyn into allowing himself to be bound while
John throws a party for his own friends.When the
taunting becomes more than Gamelyn can bear, he
breaks loose and beats the guests with a staff before
running to the woods and joining a band of outlaws.
While Gamelyn is in the forest, John is appointed
sheriff of the county and makes it his
objective to try Gamelyn in court. He forces
Gamelyn to appear by threatening to try the third
brother, Sir Ote, in his place, and then bribes the
jury to deliver a guilty verdict.When Gamelyn sees
that the court is corrupt he throws the judge out
of his seat and takes his place.He then pronounces
judgment on his brother John, the judge, and the
12 jurors: All are guilty, all are hanged.
Gamelyn has much in common with ballads
of ROBIN HOOD and other stories of medieval English
outlaws. Like the Romance of Fouke le fitz
Waryn and the Gesta Herewardi, the story is concerned
with property rights, although it takes
place at a lower social level. Gamelyn, too, becomes
an outlaw as the only means of achieving
justice when faced with powerful and unscrupulous
adversaries. In this, he is unlike Robin Hood,
who is a perpetual inhabitant of the forest and the
outlaw status. But like Robin Hood, and unlike
many displaced youthful heroes of romance,
Gamelyn achieves his goal through physical skill
and his innate sense of justice rather than due to
the accident of noble birth. Thus Gamelyn stands
in a middle ground between the tastes and politics
of chivalric romance and those of the popular
ballad.
The tale has connections to two great figures of
English poetry, Geoffrey CHAUCER and William
Shakespeare. Gamelyn was preserved only in manuscripts
of the CANTERBURY TALES, where it is
sometimes identified as “The Cook’s Tale of Gamelyn.”
In fact, the language and style are unlike
Chaucer’s and there are no good grounds for identifying
him as the author. Some scholars, however,
have speculated that he may have known the story
and considered adapting it for one of the Canterbury
pilgrims. If so, it is tempting to think of him
assigning it to the Yeoman, a member of the rural
gentry who would appear to have been the audience
for Gamelyn, rather than to the urban Cook.
Gamelyn was not included in the earliest
printed editions of the Canterbury Tales, but it was
read and adapted by Thomas Lodge as his prose
romance Rosalynde or Euphues Golden Legacie
(1590). This work transferred the action to the
home of a French knight in Bordeaux and exchanged
the exclusively masculine interests of the
Middle English poem for a plot centered on love.
Shakespeare, in turn, subdued the violence further,
removed the outlaws, and further transformed the
forest exile into a pastoral idyll in As You Like It
(1599).
Bibliography
Kaeuper, Richard.“An Historian’s Reading of The Tale
of Gamelyn,”Medium Aevum 52 (1983): 51–62.
Keen,Maurice. The Outlaws ofMedieval Legend. London:
Routledge, 1961.
Knight, Stephen, trans.“The Tale of Gamelyn.” In Medieval
Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, edited
by Thomas H. Ohlgren, 168–186. Stroud: Sutton,
1998.
Scattergood, John. “The Tale of Gamelyn: The Noble
Robber as Provincial Hero,” in Readings in Medieval
English Romance, edited by Carol M.Meale.
Cambridge: Brewer, 1994, 159–194.
Skeat,W.W., ed. The Tale of Gamelyn from the Harliean
Ms. No. 7334, Collated with Six Other Mss.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1884.
Timothy S. Jones