Outside the Law: King and Outlaw in Late Middle English Literature

This dissertation explores the relationship between kingship and outlawry in late Middle English literature, demonstrating that many genres of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts used the concept of extralegal existence and action to consider models of ideal law and governance. Ultimately, this project argues that the depiction of outlaws in late medieval literature reveals support for autocracy much earlier than has been recognized in English literary and political history. Chapter One analyses the representation of kingship in late medieval outlaw romances (The Tale of Gamelyn; Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley; Robin Hood and the Monk; and A Gest of Robyn Hode), arguing that these romances depict outlaws as both ideal advisors to kings and as figures with a claim to sovereign authority themselves. Chapter Two turns to William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which draws on outlaw romance tropes and binds outlaw figures to kings even as the text struggles to contain literary outlaws to the role of a useful threat. Chapter Three examines the depiction of outlawry in the Piers Plowman tradition of political poetry, including Mum and the Sothsegger, Richard the Redeless, The Crowned King, and The Parlement of the Thre Ages: these texts brazenly conflate the roles of king and outlaw, suggesting that in order to govern effectively, kings must rule autocratically. Finally, an Epilogue briefly explores outlaw literature’s shift from supporting autocratic governance to opposing it, analyzing the episode of the zealot in Thomas More’s Utopia and the skeptical treatment of royalty in Anthony Munday’s Downfall and Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington. Ultimately, the relationship between outlaw and king in late medieval law and literature not only reveals the historical development of autocracy as a concept but informs how we might assess the traits of autocrats in the present.