Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales

Stephen Thomas Knight was until September 2011 Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University in the School of English, Communications and Philosophy; and is currently a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Honorary Research. Thomas H. Ohlgren is Emeritus Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he has taught since 1969 when he received his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. His scholarship focuses on the earliest surviving written accounts of Robin Hood, ranging from the chronicles of Andrew of Wynton (c. 1420), John Bower (c. 1440), John Major (1521) and Richard Grafton (1569), to the early ballads and plays, which include Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Potter, the Gest of Robyn Hode as well as several short plays. Ohlgren is less interested in finding the original, historical figure, which he believes does not exist, than in tracing the evolution of the medieval outlaw tale, such as Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk, and Fulk fitz Warin, which contain characters, plot elements, and themes too close to be accounted for by coincidence.