The Tale of Gamelyn is the name given to an English ballad that came down to us through the agency of Geoffrey Chaucer and more specifically through his famous 'Canterbury Tales'. The Tale of Gamelyn is agreed to have not actually been written by Chaucer himself based on stylistic differences and the socio-legal system described, (1) but was to be used as the basis for some of the unfinished Canterbury Tales such as the Cook's Tale. (2)
The Tale of Gamelyn - unlike other ballads of its type and era - is inordinately focused on legal procedures (3) and the original author of the work is likely to have been a law clerk or a legal advocate considering the depth of legal knowledge that is exhibited by the author. (4) We can also use the precise nature of this legal knowledge and terminology to date the composition of the Tale of Gamelyn to around 1350. (5)
Unlike the other ballads it is often compared to - such as those of Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk and Robin Hood - the Tale of Gamelyn does not appear to have been based on a historical individual or at least a historical individual we can reasonably speculate was the primary source. Part of the problem of course is because we do not know the real author of the Tale of Gamelyn and we do not even know from which part of England the tale originally derives: so it is rather difficult to locate a starting point in such a search.
It is likely that if the author was a practitioner of the law, then he based the ballad on a particular court case or created it out of a composite of different court cases in which he was involved. In spite of the author's anonymity the Tale of Gamelyn had a major impact on English literature as it was the basis for Shakespeare's play 'As You Like It' as well as Anthony Munday's version of Robin Hood, which served as the basis for a large portion of the modern version of the Robin Hood legend. (6)
The Tale of Gamelyn as a transitional piece of English literature is absolutely key in the evolution of modern legends away from their early to high medieval roots and into the early modern era. (7) One of the aspects of these legends that evolved through the Tale of Gamelyn was the changing character of the opponents of these eponymous heroes in that the original opponents of Robin Hood were almost certainly jews (8) as they would have been for both the historical (9) and mythical (10) Eustace the Monk.
In the Robin Hood ballads in particular there was a substantial shift away from the jews being the avaricious money-lenders and the Catholic religious institutions of the day (particularly monasteries and the sees of Bishops) moving in to the ballads to replace them between the probable origin of the ballads in the mid-late 1200s and the first printed versions of the ballads we have from the early-mid 1400s.
The reason for this shift is rather simple in that the jews - as the butt of complaints from the common people and the elite - had largely ceased to a problem with their expulsion from the kingdom of England in 1290 by Edward I. This meant that another group would inevitably have to step into the moneylender vacuum formerly occupied by the jews: that group were the institutions of the Catholic Church. The Church had by this time acquired substantial amounts of land - often deriving from grants from nobles as socially encouraged 'good works' designed to lessen the amount of time the individual concerned had to send in purgatory - and with land ownership came wealth.
Wealth - in its liquid or in-kind form [i.e., money or goods/services] - could be lent to the less wealthy or those in need of it for profit, but the charging of interest (usury) was forbidden under canon law: the Church instead encouraged the traditional system of encouraging gifts of wealth to the lenders in lieu of interest for having had the generosity to grant a loan.
This meant that with the jews largely gone: they ceased to play an active part in the lives of most of the population of England and thus no longer were credible enemies or figures of fun on which ballad writers could draw. They naturally found their new target in the successors to the jews as money-lenders, which is given expression in the Tale of Gamelyn and the revisions of the older ballads of Robin Hood by the hero's disdain for the clergy in general, while reserving particular venom for the high clergy who to them were the new jews in their lives.
This means that when we read in the ballad that Gamelyn would show no mercy to monks, canons and abbots (11) - as well as the point that the common people did not wish him to - (12) then we should actually read it as Gamelyn and the common people's declaration of war on the moneylenders represented by the Church, but who had formerly been the jews.
We are also told that Gamelyn forcibly took wealth only from these same people (i.e., the lords of the Church) and not from the common people (13) again suggesting that the story of Gamelyn is an attack on the position of the usurious money-lenders who were still plaguing England in place of the jews who had originally created that position and; after their expulsion for being too usurious, the vacuum.
In essence then we should read the Tale of Gamelyn as a transitional piece of English literature linking the early-high medieval world that was under siege from the jews to the supposedly jew free world where the institutions of the Catholic Church had moved in to take over the money-lending businesses of the jews.
This means of course that Gamelyn is actually recommending the expropriation of the Church and if necessary, the murder of its agents as a symbolic struggle against usurious moneylenders. So had the Tale of Gamelyn been written 50 years earlier we would not find Gamelyn attacking the Church and seeking to expropriate wealth her, but rather seeking to expropriate and murder the jews.
Interesting what a difference a few years can make: isn't it?
References
(1) John Bellamy, 1985, 'Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry', 1st Edition, Croom Helm: Sydney, pp. 63-66
(2) James Holt, 1989, 'Robin Hood', 2nd Edition, Thames and Hudson: London, pp. 72-73
(3) Bellamy, Op. Cit., pp. 63-64
(4) Ibid, p. 66
(5) Holt, p. 72
(6) Stephen Knight, 2003, 'Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography', 1st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, p. 62
(7) David Baldwin, 2011, 'Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked', 1st Edition, Amberley: Stroud, p. 177
(8) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/robin-hood-and-the-jews
(9) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/eustace-the-monk-philip-augustus
(10) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-ballad-of-eustace-the-monk-black
(11) Tale of Gamelyn, Fytte 4
(12) Ibid.
(13) Ibid., Fytte 6