Blood on the Table

In medieval outlaw narratives, “feast under duress” set-pieces examine the undercurrent of violent intentions below the veneer of courtliness. This article uses the feast scenes in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode to explore the subversion of fellowship within a potential guild context. If the Geste was produced for a mercantile, guild-oriented, urban audience preoccupied with upward mobility and social order, it would have been enjoyed by people who wished to explore the themes of gentrification, fellowship, and upward mobility that the outlaws perform in feast scenes. But the outlaw tradition from which the Geste draws its power has a problematic relationship with food. Outlaw feasts can be stages for eruptions of taboo violence. The early rimes treat the audience to many absurd dinner parties where the guest is prey, the host a predator, and the courses go on and on. What does this mean for a guildhall audience interested in the performance of gentility through feasting? How does the deep violent inheritance of outlaw narratives overturn and complicate the celebratory, overblown feasts of the Geste? This exploration of the fissures and contradictions in the feasting theme in the Geste shows that, perhaps in spite of themselves, this new audience preserved and amplified the danger and violence that is a hallmark of earlier outlaw feasts. This has ramifications for our readings of the social context of the late medieval outlaw poems.