the persons who suffered in the revolt of that year were for the most part either churchmen ( and the ballads , as the peasants , do reveal an animus against the richer cleric ) , or individuals personally associated with misgovernment or the abuse of office ( the sheriff of Nottingham &apos;s chief crime was clearly abuse of his official position ) . the men who were attacked in 1381 were persons such as Sudbury and Hales and Legge , whose names were linked with the imposition of the poll tax ; John of Gaunt , who was suspected of designs on the throne , and his affinity : and the lawyers , from justices like Bealknap and Cavendish down to the apprentices of the Temple - the men , that is , who would have been individually responsible for resisting the peasants &apos; claims at law , when they attempted to establish their free status by exemplifications out of Domesday , or were charged with breaking the statute of labourers . in other words the brunt of the attack in 1381 fell on those who were , either professionally or personally , directly associated with political mismanagement or legal oppression . it was the same at the time of Cade &apos;s revolt , when lesser gentry fought side by side with the peasant : their attack was on the politicians and the corrupt Lancastrian officials , James Fiennes and his affinity , and the sheriffs and under-sheriffs of counties . rumours of plans for the wholesale slaughter of the aristocracy in 1381 , and of the clergy in 1450 , were clearly exaggerated . men of the period , both humble and gentle , accepted a stratified society : what they resented was the abuse of official or social position , and this is precisely the attitude which the ballads echo , with their detailed catalogue of the crimes of men like the sheriff of Nottingham and the Abbot of St Mary &apos;s . one should not expect popular literature to concentrate its attack on the manorial system or the inconvenience of villein status , because the peasants themselves did not see their grievances in economic or systematic terms : they saw them rather in terms of the personal viciousness of individual lords . the men they were after were Hobbe the robber and the lawyers who had set Trewthe under a lokke and would not unfasten it for any but he sing dedero . there are however other reasons , Mr Holt declares , why the ballads should not appeal to a peasant audience . for instance , the crucial events centre round the county courts , where the sheriff and the knights were the dominant figures ; and there is no mention in them of the justices of the peace , with whom the humble criminal would surely have had more to do . the reason for this seems , however , to be elementary : the justices of the peace could not declare outlawry , which had to be proclaimed by the sheriff in the county court . that peasants would be unconcerned about this would hardly seem a tenable view in the light of Wat Tyler &apos;s demand at Smithfield in 1381 that sentence of outlawry be not pronounced henceforth in any process at law . again , Mr Holt asserts that the methods and manner of poaching in the ballads are aristocratic , and its object sport , not food . what then of the outlaws &apos; claim in the Gest of Robyn Hode : we lyve by our kynge &apos;s dere , other shyft have not wee . here surely food is the implied object of poaching . that the ballads make no mention of the trapping of rabbits and other lesser game is hardly germane , for the ballads are certainly intended to be heroic and this is not a heroic topic . peasant poaching was by no means confined to humble quarry : another of Wat Tyler &apos;s demands in 1381 was that all warrens , parks and chases should be free , so that throughout the realm , in &amp;hellip; the woods and forests , poor as well as rich might take wild beasts and hunt the hare in the field . moreover the manner of poaching in the ballads surely stamps it as humble . the rich man hunted with dogs , as the example of Abbot Clowne of Leicester , whose success in breeding hounds earned him the respect of the highest in the realm , reminds us . the outlaws shot their deer with the bow , which was not the weapon of the aristocrat . the great schools of English archery were the village butts , and it was from among the men who had learned their skill there that Edward 3 recruited his longbowmen . the military importance of the archer led Edward to make archery contests compulsory on feast days , but it never earned the archer social status . the poachers of Sherwood , whose skill proved so useful at Halidon Hill in 1333 , were not sporting gentry , but men arrayed from among those humble people whom the statute of Winchester had commanded to keep bows and arrows out of the forest , and in the forest bows and bolts . Edward 1 had clearly realised to what use men who had less than twenty marks in goods and who lived in the forest would put their arrows , and protected his venison accordingly . the arguments which are said to preclude the ballads from appealing primarily to a peasant audience seem therefore to be weak ones . what then of the positive arguments for their being composed for gentle ears ? Mr Holt says that the knightly class is consistently treated with favour in them . it is true that in the Gest Sir Richard atte Lee is on the side of light and that Gamelyn was a knight &apos;s son . what , however , are we to make of the county knights in the tale of Gamelyn , who were ready to a man to conspire with Gamelyn &apos;s villainous elder brother to cheat the boy of his inheritance ? what are we to say of Alan a&apos;Dale , who but for Robin Hood would have died broken-hearted because his love was chosen to be an old knight &apos;s delight ? and from what class were the sheriffs and justices of the ballads chosen , if not from among the knights ? the fact is that the knights as a class are not treated consistently in the ballads , which in my submission is what we should expect . the commons had no animus against social rank as such : what they resented was the lordship of unjust men and their corrupt practices . their political horizons were limited and local : their grievances were specific . their appeal in 1381 was to specified rights of ancient standing , to charters of Cnut and Offa and to Domesday book : in 1450 they drew up their complaints in a list , setting them out one by one . and on both occasions they limited their governmental demands to the removal of evil councillors and officials . so in the outlaw stories the final resolution is the substitution of just men for corrupt officials : the way to set the world to rights is not to reform the system , but to kill the Sheriff of Nottingham and to make Gamelyn Chief Justice of the Forest . hero and villain are differentiated in the manner which a medieval audience would have understood , by distinction of personal character rather than social class . the knights are not all good or all bad : Gamelyn , the outlaw King , is the hero , and his brother , the sheriff , is the villain , but both are born of the same father and are of the same social standing . neither the attitude expressed in the ballads towards persons of high social status nor their attitude towards social problems seem necessarily to associate them with the views of the knightly class . Mr Holt claims that their appeal to this section of the community is also revealed by the background of the stories , which he describes as that of maintenance and misgovernment at their worst , of baronial and border warfare , subjects of primary interest to the gentry and to the northern gentry at that . I have failed to find a single reference to border warfare in any of the genuinely early Robin Hood ballads . this is the more surprising , since certain incidents recounted of Robin Hood in the ballads are also told of border heroes . the outlaw Murray of Ettrick Forest warred on the southrons at the head of a band clad in Lincoln green , and William Wallace , according to Blind Harry , adopted the classical outlaw &apos;s disguise of a potter to spy on his enemies . this disguise was used by Eustace the Monk , the central figure of a thirteenth-century romance , and by Robin Hood . incidents in another French romance of the same period , that of Fulk Fitzwarin , also resemble stories told of Robin Hood , as do some of the incidents in the story of Hereward the Wake . since a great deal of the matter common to these stories ( for instance the chivalrous episodes , the fights with giants and dragons , and the scenes of courtly love ) are clearly intended for an aristocratic audience , Mr Holt argues that the Robin Hood ballads were meant for the same ears . what seems to me significant , however , is that while the romances share these common themes with the story of William Wallace , which concerns knightly struggles in Scotland and on the border , courtly and chivalrous material are entirely lacking from the story of Robin Hood . in other words , it looks as if the matter common to these knightly tales and to the outlaw ballads is not in the latter case derivative , but is the result of borrowing from the same source . moreover , the omission from the ballads of chivalrous material and of references , for instance , to the border wars , surely suggests that they were aimed not at the same audience as the longer romances , but at a different one which was less interested in these subjects . that this was the case is confirmed both by the testimony of the earliest references to Robin Hood in the chronicles , and by the consistently favourable attitude of the outlaws of story towards the poorer classes . the outlaws were not always poor men , but the poor man did not demand that . he demanded kindness , good lordship to engage his fidelity , and this is what the outlaw gave . it is the theme of Robin Hood &apos;s famous advice : but loke ye do no husbonde harm , that tilleth with his ploughe . it is the theme , too , of his final epitaph in the Gest : for he was a good outlawe , and dyde pore men moch god . how the outlaw was rewarded is told in the tale of Gamelyn : the knights of the county might conspire to cheat him , but his villeins were faithful even in the hour of extreme misfortune : tho were his bonde-men sory and nothing glad when Gamelyn her lord wolves heed was cryed and maad . it was to protect them against the oppressions of their new master that Gamelyn came to the Moot Hall , where he was arrested and bound by the sheriff . whether he is like Gamelyn a knight or like Robin Hood a yeoman , the outlaw hero of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century stories is the friend of the poor : he is not consistently the friend of the knight . the word poor , as I have used it here , does require a gloss . the poor men of the outlaw ballads are not , certainly , thirteenth-century villeins , bound down by ancestral thraldom and working three days a week on their lord &apos;s land . they are mostly yeomen , bound to one another by the ties of good yeomanry , proud , independent and free . because this independence of spirit is a striking feature of the outlaw ballads , Mr Holt has drawn a sharp distinction between the yeoman and the peasant . he defines the word yeoman as meaning a special kind of household servant , in rank only a little inferior to the squire and quite possibly of gentle breeding . I doubt very much whether the word can be limited to this meaning in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century usage , and this is after all the period in which the ballads as we know them were composed . I do not see how such a meaning can be squared with the reference to genz de mestre et d&apos;artifice appellez yomen in the parliament roll of 1363 , or with Barbour &apos;s description of yeomen who fight apon fut - a most unknightly situation . 