Games of the Greenwood

Archery, Pluck-Buffet, and Violence in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode

Abstract

This essay argues that the unique game of pluck-buffet which features A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode complicates a literary gaming paradigm that usually equates noble birth with quality of character or skill. Though chivalric narratives tend to prioritize noble heroes as worthy winners, a reader of the Geste cannot presuppose the winner when a pluck-buffet challenge between Robin Hood and the disguised King begins. The reader knows that Robin is the more skilled player—and that a win against the King would symbolically undermine the medieval understanding of divine order. Robin does eventually lose the game to the King; however, the outlaw’s violent interactions with the monarch create a space in which yeomen, specifically, can navigate both status and economic reward alongside their social betters, at least while all the players inhabit a fantastical greenwood space. Though the physical violence of the game manages and deflects metaphorically revolutionary violence against the monarchy, pluck-buffet here creates a site of social instability that mirrors shifts in the social hierarchy of late medieval England.