Gamelyn: An Outlaw’s Ethics

     The master storyteller Chaucer himself seems to have fancied the story of Gamelyn. Literary scholars have also traced its relations to Robin Hood tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the William Tell legend. Variously described in terms of its affinities to balladry and romance, studied for what it reveals about medieval law, the primary appeal of the plot is its action. The righteous hero moves from one crisis to another and, though he is sufficiently vulnerable to keep the audience engaged like a character of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, he is usually capable of vanquishing any number of foes.
     An outlaw’s ethics must be problematic. Someone who has been judged criminal, who has been ousted from civil society for misbehavior, has appearances at any rate against him. Yet Robin Hood’s status as hero is known to everyone, and there were in his day many comparable figures, Adam Bell and Earl Godwin among them. The greenwood may have been dangerous for travelers, but it was also an arena of freedom beyond the reach of unjust feudal authorities. Some outlaws in the English Middle Ages as well as in other times and places have become heroes, “social bandits,” in Hobsbawm’s phrase, seen as allied with the people in opposing an oppressive regime.
     Gamelyn’s perspective is governed by his audience’s socio-economic class. While Robin Hood was regularly identified as a yeoman, neither aristocrat nor peasant, Gamelyn is a member of the land-owning gentry. He is nonetheless as a younger brother vulnerable to exploitation by a coalition including his own brother, the most prominent clerics of the region, and a corrupt legal system. Elements of explicit social protest include criticism of such central pillars of feudalism as the nobility, the church, and the law, but the king’s own judgement is approved, and, in the end, Gamelyn’s reconciliation with the throne sets everything to rights. [1]
     The social order is in question from the very opening when the dying John of Boundes finds that his neighbors, men whom he calls “good men that lawe conne of londe,” (63) mean to controvert his wish to leave property to each of his sons. The sheriff later supports the younger John with concern for neither the law nor ethics. When the younger John binds Gamelyn to a post in his hall, claiming he is insane, he appeals in vain to the clerics feasting there who respond with gratuitous asperity, interested only in currying favor with his wealthy brother. Gamelyn declares “Cursed mote he worth both flesshe and blood,/ That ever doth priour or abbot eny good!" (487-8) Most dramatically, in the scene of the trial of his brother Ote, he realizes the fantasy of the revolutionist and literally brings his elder brother, now become sheriff, the judge, and all twelve jurymen into the role of defendants and summarily executes the lot, declaring by the way “sorwe have that rekke!” [“Sorrow to any who are sorry about it!”] (877)
     Once the outlawed Gamelyn gains access to the King, however, his problems are over. The king not only pardons him and the other outlaws, but awards them “good offices.” (890) The author is not indicting the whole feudal system, only the wicked who must be brought into line by the crown.
     In contrast to the widespread corruption the poet describes in Gamelyn’s neighborhood, the outlaw chief is presented in wholly positive terms. Though his initial words “I am ware of gestes God send us goode” (635) may be taken as either sincerely hospitable or as an ironic welcoming of victims, when Gamelyn tests his host’s courtesy, anticipating “He wil yeve us mete and drink and do us som gode.” (659) the outlaw chief does proceed to treat Adam and Gamelyn most civilly. He “bad hem ete and drink and that of the best.” (676) In this open-hearted generosity in hospitality rituals, the outlaw king recalls Gamelyn’s own extravagant hosting in Fitt 3.
     The sympathetic reader who is not thinking in terms of action movie conventions is likely to be taken aback by the summary killing of the porter at the outset of Fitt III. Gamelyn wreaks angry vengeance, fundamentally opposing his dishonest brother, but incidentally leading him to break the doorkeeper’s neck and toss him in a well. While the action may seem excessive in view of the porter’s trivial and ineffective attempt to keep him out, it is most expressive of his uncontrollable might when roused. Like an old-fashioned swashbuckler or a more recent martial arts adept, he scatters his foes on either side. This is perhaps the earliest form of hero.
     When his elder brother proves impossibly selfish and deceitful, and the local ecclesiastics collude in his wrongdoing, Gamelyn enthusiastically shouts “Save wel the crownes and do hem no harmes,/ But breke both her legges and sithen her armes" (519-20) after which he and Adam pummel the churchmen. Gamelyn proceeds to break his brother’s neck with a single blow, callously telling him "’Sitte ther, brother,’ . . . ‘For to colen thi body as I did myn.’" (535-6)
     His final outburst of violence occurs when at the trial where his brother Ote is being held in his place, when he summarily convicts and executes the judge and jurymen as well as his long-offending brother John. So far is the narrator from considering any of this violence to be excessive or unnecessary, he interjects (passionately if parenthetically) “(sorwe have that rekke!)” (877) (“misery to anyone who cares!}.
     This emphasis on the hero’s strength and fighting abilities is wholly consistent with the king’s eventually not only pardoning him and his outlaw band but awarding them enviable positions. Such muscle is more usefully hired than fought. As a hero of popular culture, Gamelyn excels in scenes of dramatic if almost unbelievable unreflecting action. His ethics are those of the common man: an unthinking acceptance of social norms under most circumstances, a wish to regard oneself as honorable, an honor undamaged, indeed magnified by extravagant violence. The morality is based on the social controls of pride and shame rather than on prescriptive mandates. Gamelyn, one feels certain, would never have turned outlaw had he not been wronged, but his titanic energy must make him seem a somewhat unpredictable associate. The pleasure of those following his story arose perhaps in part from admiration for a strong warrior and in part relief that one need not deal with such a one.
     Gamelyn has a fully happy ending, complete with “a wyf bothe good and feyr” (898), as do most popular works, because this story is meant to be light entertainment, as reassuring as tragedy is unsettling. [2] In fact the heroes of neither action narratives nor tragedies is likely to be concerned with moral choices. A work like Gamelyn simply reaffirms people’s prejudices while one like Oedipus Tyrannos looks beyond right and wrong into the abyss of existence itself. Gamelyn is neither a moral paragon nor an evil-doer as much as he is a regular guy, albeit more daring and capable than his admirers.


1. The reader will recall how the masses who joined in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381allowed themselves to be deceived by King Richard. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the crowds assembled outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg confident that the beneficent Czar would hear their pleas until his troops opened fire.

2. Thus often the Hollywood adaptations of plays and novels tend to rosier denouements as in almost all the generally excellent films made of Tennessee Williams plays during the 1950s.