THE OUTLAW'S TALE

Author's Note

Given the strict cloistering to which nuns were supposed to submit, Frevisse and Dame Emma's venturing out to a family christening may seem surprising. Indeed, nuns in medieval England were officially cloistered, supposed to stay shut from the world behind nunnery walls, but in fact leave could be granted for them to visit outside the cloister for any 'manifest necessity' -- and as Eileen Power observes in Medieval English Nunneries, "they could with a little skill, stretch the 'manifest necessity' clause to cover almost all their wanderings," whether on pilgrimage, for pleasure, or on family matters. To judge by the centuries-long efforts of bishops and other churchmen to regulate and curb these jaunts, nuns seem rarely to have faltered in treating cloistering as far more open to choice than their bishops liked.

For those accustomed to view medieval society as a straightforward matter of Nobles vs. Peasants, Master Payne's household may seen fanciful, but in truth there was a rapidly growing free middle class in England through all the later Middle Ages -- prospering merchants in cities and towns; the gentry in the countryside -- who owned their own property, ran their own lives, and served lords only insofar as they chose, even, as in Master Payne's case, making a business of doing so.

As may be readily expected, Robin Hood was a popular figure in medieval England, though not always in the guise more modern tellings give him. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, provides both a study and a number of stories of Robin Hood and other medieval outlaws that Nicholas and his men could readily have known.