If you bought a cheap printed Robin Hood book in Tudor London, chances are it came from the press of a Dutch émigré with the improbable name Wynken de Worde. Famous today mainly because his 1506 edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode became the standard version of one of the longest medieval Robin Hood poems, de Worde was far more than a footnote in outlaw lore. A savvy businessman, brand-builder, and generous patron of provincial printers, he helped turn Robin Hood from an oral tale into a printed bestseller.

Introduction

When, in the 1790s, the lawyer and antiquary Joseph Ritson was compiling his Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795), he made frequent use of the libraries in the British Museum and Cambridge University. One of these, Cambridge, had, since 1715, held the most complete copy of a text which would come to be regarded as the most important text in the Robin Hood legend.[1] The text is titled Here begynneth a lytell geste of Robyn Hode, and the edition which Ritson transcribed was originally printed c.1506 by a man named Wynken de Worde.

The ‘Crowning Jewel of Early Robin Hood Texts’

The lytell geste of Robyn Hode is the longest late medieval Robin Hood poem in existence. Told in eight episodes, or ‘fyttes’, the story revolves around the assistance which Robin, an outlawed yeoman, renders to a poor knight named Sir Richard of the Lee. At the beginning of the poem, the outlaws see Sir Richard travelling forlornly through the forest where he is due to appear before the Archbishop of York, to whom he owes £400. Realising that Sir Richard has to his name but a few shillings, Robin lends the knight the money to free himself of the debt. This sets off a chain of events which culminate in the king travelling into Barnsdale Forest in disguise to capture Robin. At the end, the king, so impressed with Robin’s courtesy and loyalty, pardons the troublesome outlaw and invites him to live at court. The life of a courtier ends up not being suited to Robin’s wild and untameable spirit, and, having lived over a year with the king, he flees back to Barnsdale Forest to join his men once more.

Who the author of this ‘crowning jewel of the early Robin Hood texts’—as Alexander Kaufman terms the lytell geste—nobody is quite sure.[2] The likelihood is that there was no single author; the text is essentially an ‘encyclopaedia of the medieval Robin Hood’, in the words of Stephen Knight.[3] By this Knight means that the poem is a collection of existing Robin Hood tales to which some anonymous compiler, with a few tweaks in the storyline, unified at some point before it was sent for printing.[4]

The Readers of the lytell geste

Even the people for whom it was written have been a subject of debate since ‘Robin Hood Studies’ began to be taken seriously in the field of medieval studies, when Rodney Hilton and James C. Holt debated the matter through the pages of Past and Present. The great historian of the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), Hilton, surmised that the audience for the lytell geste, and of other early Robin Hood tales (‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’) was plebeian and that the tales were representative of peasant discontent in the lead up to and aftermath of the rebellion.[5]

James C. Holt disagreed, and in his analysis, he stated that ‘I can find no evidence that the ballads were concerned to any significant or important degree with the agrarian discontents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’. In fact, Robin Hood, and especially the Robin Hood of the lytell geste, so stated Holt, was not a plebeian hero but a hero of the gentry. After all, there was very little in the early poems which could be said to have any correlation with agrarian discontent of the 1380s.[6] Maurice Keen then responded to Holt by stating that the origins and audience of the early Robin Hood texts could be found within ‘the communal storytelling of the of country people—the accompaniment of their song and dance at rustic festivals’.[7] Hilton’s argument was reheated, with some modifications, for Keen further argued that, although the early poems do not explicitly represent the concerns of the commons in the fourteenth century, the tales of Robin outwitting the sheriff and the archbishop would likewise have been received very favourably by the peasants in that era.[8]

The Dating of the lytell geste

By the time that the third edition of Keen’s Outlaws of Medieval Legend (1987) was released, the new introduction contained some ‘recantations’ of his original thesis. Instead of the Romantic vision of the early Robin Hood ballads emerging out of the ‘rustic’ entertainments of the common people after a hard day in the field, Keen acknowledged that it was more likely that the poems were ‘composed for recitation by professional minstrels’.[9]

The Robin Hood historians of the mid-twentieth century were labouring under a false understanding of the texts because they were relying largely on the idea that the poems were composed during the fourteenth century. Thomas Ohlgren, in the early 2000s, finally provided scholars with an accurate dating of all of the early poems. ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, previously dated by Victorian historians to the late 1300s, was found to have been written (that is, physically, on a manuscript) in 1465. ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ was found to have been written in 1468. The lytell geste was found to have been printed in 1495 and for a very specific purpose: entertainment for members of the clothworkers or linen drapers’ guilds.

The Guilds and the Geste

Owing to the emphasis in the poem upon cloth measuring, the buying and selling of liveries, and money lending, and the fact that most of the episodes end with feasting of some sort, the tale was probably composed to be recited at a feast of one of London’s many clothworker guilds.[10] Certain skilled trades in the medieval era had guilds, which were a kind of mutual assistance association into which all members paid dues, and were also responsible for the training up of apprentices and quality assurance. Royal charters also granted guilds the sole right to the production, distribution, and sale of a given commodity—a right which the guilds jealously guarded.[11] Alternatively, another theory posited by Thomas Ohlgren is that the writing and printing of the lytell geste was commissioned for a mayoral inauguration.[12]

Getting the dates right is more than a pedantic detail: knowing when these ballads were first written or printed changes our sense of who they were for and why they were told. If the poems belong to the later fifteenth century rather than the age of the Peasants’ Revolt, then Hilton’s picture of a fourteenth-century plebeian protest literature collapses—and the guild-hall feasts, cloth-merchants, and civic pageantry of late-medieval London suddenly come into focus as the world that shaped the lytell geste. What is more, it makes more sense that a wealthy guild would commission the printing of a poem which they wanted to hear recited at one of their feasts.

To whom, then, would the guild members turn to have their poem printed?

Richard Pynson: The First Printer of the Geste

Now, when de Worde’s apprentices began to set the type for the printing of the lytell geste, this was by no means the first time that the poem had been printed. In fact, the first ever printing of the text was undertaken, around the year 1495, by a man named Richard Pynson.[13] Pynson, who hailed from Normandy, studied at the University of Paris in 1464 before moving to London. He had established himself as a printer in the capital in 1494.[14] In 1506, he became the official printer to King Henry VII and served in the same office under Henry VIII.[15] Pynson, however, will figure in our story a little later.

The Life of Wynken de Worde

As with most late medieval and early modern public figures, little is known of either Pynson’s or de Worde’s birth or early life. We do not have a date of birth to assign to him. Even the origin of de Worde’s surname is a subject of speculation; ‘de Worde’ has been counted as a little too convenient for his chosen profession as a printer and historians have pointed to the fact that in records he has been named as Wynand van Worden, Wynkyn Vort, and Jan Wynken.[16] The other forms of his name, as written in the available records, suggest that he was a Dutchman, hailing perhaps from Woerden in Holland. Or perhaps he was not Dutch; maybe he was from Woerth-sur-Sauer in Alsace or Wörth am Rhein. So, this man, who was one of the most important figures in the history of printing in England, can be given neither a date nor a place of birth.

De Worde was probably (this word appears a lot in de Worde scholarship) brought to England with the famous English printer William Caxton, who returned to London after a sojourn on the continent, around the year 1481. Caxton, having learned the printing trade in Cologne, is famous for having printed the first book in the English language: Raoul Lefevre’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473).[17]

On his return to England, Caxton set up a printing shop in Westminster and won some patrons in high places including that ‘sun of York’, Edward IV.[18] By 1492, Caxton had died and following a three-year period of litigation de Worde took over Caxton’s business, inheriting his presses and typeface, and many of his high end patrons (while at the same time cultivating new patrons such as Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII).

A Shrewd Businessman

De Worde was a shrewd businessman. Caxton’s name was already popular and what we could call a ‘brand’ in itself. Now, at this time, it was rare for a printer’s name to appear on the title page (and, for those enthusiastic about book history, the development of the title page is an interesting story in itself). Every printer, however, would have had a colophon: this was an emblem usually containing the printer’s initials along with a simple picture and was placed on the final page of a printed book. De Worde decided to continue using Caxton’s colophon and it appeared, to the outside observer at least, that his business was not a ‘new’ business but more of a continuation of his former master’s brand.

Caxton, an Englishman, mainly published translations of French chivalric romances for members of the nobility. The foreigner de Worde opted for a different approach: His focus was to be the production of books in English. He would publish translations into English of French chivalric romances, as his predecessor Caxton had done. He would also print translations of Ancient Roman texts, such as Cicero’s De Officiis, as he did in 1534, which helped scholars a great deal because it had the Latin and English texts facing each other. Veterinary books as well as devotional books formed a part of his output, as did travel writing.[19]

‘At the Sign of the Sun’

Eventually, the cramped premises in Westminster were no longer sufficient to contain his growing business and, by 1500, he decided to set up shop in a former inn in Fleet Street (on the site today occupied by numbers 130–31). This shop he named ‘The Sign of the Sun’ (for house numbers were not in use at this point) and thenceforth all his publications, like the lytell geste of Robyn Hode, ended with the following words:

‘Enprented at London in Fletestrete at the synge of sone by Wynken de Worde’[20]

…while the emblem attached to this statement was that of his old master, William Caxton. He also decided to separate his business into two premises. From now on the printing would be carried out at the Sign of the Sun while the retailing of books would be conducted from a shop in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral.

However, with the move to Fleet Street, de Worde decided to have a bit of a clear out and invest in some new printing materials, especially some of his woodblocks and type which ended up in the hands of another printer named Julian Notary.[21] (who also published an edition of lytell geste in 1515).[22]

Wynken de Worde versus Richard Pynson

The orders came in thick and fast and de Worde’s apprentices would hastily set to work on the printing of the customer’s desired item. However, on the same street that de Worde worked was the premises of a rival printer named Richard Pynson, who traded ‘At the Sign of the George’.[23] De Worde was always trying to get the edge over Pynson, whose books were generally less popular, more expensive, and suited more to a scholarly and aristocratic audience than de Worde’s books.

Only occasionally did Pynson print secular works of popular English poetry and he is the man who is credited with having printed the first known edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode in 1495.[24]

Piracy in early modern printing was rife, and lesser-known contemporary printers had few qualms about ripping off Pynson’s work. Many times, the pirates, though Pynson had nothing to do with the printing of a book, simply attached his name to shoddily-printed text.[25] In the absence of copyright laws, perhaps de Worde, seeing the international popularity of Pynson’s edition of the lytell geste, for an edition was also printed in Antwerp between 1500 and 1510[26]—decided that he too, would print an edition. After all, de Worde knew that English poetry was popular—he had already printed the English romances of Sir Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis of Hampton.[27] He might as well print the story of England’s most famous outlaw as well.

It would be a mistake, surely, to attribute de Worde’s willingness to print material from other printers to a solely capitalistic worldview. He seems instead to have been genuinely committed to promoting English literature. While Pynson focused on French chivalric romances, de Worde printed, and promoted, English literary culture. Alongside the popular romances of Sir Bevis, de Worde also printed Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in 1498, from his old master Caxton’s first edition, and in the process created a truly lavish book.[28] Nor was de Worde only focused upon then historical works of English literature; he also had an eye on the literature produced by poets who were his contemporaries, as he printed works of the early Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and John Skelton.[29] And to think that some early academic historians once wrote de Worde off as a charlatan, inferior to Pynson, and a man who was ‘devoid of all artistic feeling [with] no literary tastes’![30]

Collaboration between Pynson and de Worde

The rivalry between de Worde and Pynson was friendly, however, and Pynson appears not to have been too hurt by de Worde’s piracy. The two men had different kinds of connections in the printing world and their own set markets. Although de Worde printed texts originally published by Pynson, Pynson also acted as retail agent for de Worde.[31] The two even collaborated, along with a third printer named John Rastell, to print a lavish three-volume edition of Anthony Fitzherbert’s La Graunde Abridgement de le ley (1507).[32] Piracy, it seems, could also lead to fruitful partnerships in the early modern printing world.

Only a fragment of Pynson’s and the Antwerp edition of the lytell geste survives. So the de Worde edition, despite likely being printed to piggyback off the success of what his rival had put out became, by virtue of its reprinting by Ritson, the version most known to scholars and enthusiasts today.

De Worde: The man who made Robin Hood a bestseller

However, we may credit de Worde with spreading the lytell geste beyond the confines of London and into the provinces. Pynson was a London man. His commercial network was largely confined to London and the continent, especially Amsterdam, which in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was the centre of the publishing trade. De Worde was the opposite; he did not have much of a European network to rely upon but he did forge good relations with provincial printers and even acted as patron to them.

Hugo Goes of York

One of the men whom de Worde took under his wing was Hugo Goes of York, the first York-based printer. De Worde, a generous man, gave (by all accounts gratis) a set of his type to Goes who had set up his printing house near York Minster in 1509. It was with de Worde’s type that Goes printed an edition of the lytell geste in York shortly after his removal to York. The geste was sure to find a ready audience in York; the poem is set in Yorkshire and features the Archbishop of York as one of Robin’s nemeses (York Abbey is literally a stone’s throw from the Cathedral where Goes established his business).

It was obviously de Worde’s edition of the lytell geste that Goes worked from when producing his own edition. Although only a fragment remains of the Goes edition, the still extant fragment contains wording that is exactly the same as that found in de Worde’s edition, and printed, of course, in the same type, whereas there are occasionally significant variations in spelling between Pynson’s edition and the later ones. The fact that Goes’s lytell geste was printed in the same 95mm Textura font meant that, when a fragment of Goes’s edition was found by Dr Richard Farmer, who then gave it to Joseph Ritson, both antiquaries assumed that it was a de Worde edition.[33] Thus, the two printers to whom de Worde gave type (Julian Notary and Hugo Goes) also printed editions of the lytell geste closely based upon de Worde’s and using de Worde’s type.

The death of Wynken de Worde

Wynken de Worde died in 1535. His wife had passed away some years before, and, as far as we can gather from his will, he had no children to whom he might leave his successful business. Of course, in the absence of a biological family, he had gathered around himself a professional family; he made sure to provide for them in his will. To the eight servants in his household, as well as the nine apprentices who lived with him, money was left.[34] De Worde must also have had a good relationship with his neighbours, who were also members of the printing profession, for he left them money as well. Even to people who had left his employ and struck out on their own, did he leave gifts, and, of the several names listed, one of them stands out in this regard. The man was Robert Copland (fl. 1508–47). To quote from de Worde’s will:

And I bequethe to the said Robert Copland for his labour asmanny printed books as shall amounte to the value of tenne marks sterling.[35]

The William Copland Edition of the Geste

Ten marks’ worth of books, or £6 13s 4d, was a sizeable gift to leave to a former apprentice. Perhaps the lytell geste was one of those books bequeathed to Copland, for the former apprentice established a publishing business with his brother William, and the pair of them very enthusiastically took to printing the Middle English poems and romances that had formed a part of Robert’s former master’s output.[36] Although Robert died around 1547, his brother continued the business in Thames Street ‘in the Vyntre upon the Three Craned Warfe’. It was the younger Copland who went on to print, around the year 1560, a new edition of the lytell geste, this time with the title of A mery geste of Robyn Hoode and of hys lyfe, with a newe playe for to be played in Maye games very pleasaunt and full of pastyme.[37]

Edward White’s edition of the Geste

The new Mery geste was based entirely on the de Worde edition. Copland updated some of the antiquated words found in de Worde’s 1506 version (using, for example, the more recognisable ‘laugh’ instead of ‘lough’). As the English language in the printed word was becoming more standardised, Copland also added punctuation to the poem. Those who study the legend of Robin Hood are also eternally grateful to Copland for including the texts of two plays of Robin Hood.[38] When Edward White published his version of A Merry Iest of Robin Hood and of his life in 1594, he took Copland’s version as a model, modernised the spelling, and retained Copland’s punctuation.

Conclusion

Today, little survives of Wynken de Worde beyond his books and, in the case of Robin Hood, the words that still echo through the text that he helped to preserve. Yet his presses in Fleet Street and his generosity to fellow printers (Goes and Copland) shaped the version of Robin Hood that eighteenth-century antiquaries like Ritson rediscovered—and that we still recognise today. Every time the lytell geste is quoted or staged, we are hearing not just the voice of a now unnamed medieval poet but also the imprint of the enterprising immigrant printer who turned a forest legend into a bestseller in both his own and our time.

References

[1] ‘A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. by Joseph Ritson, 2 vols (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795), I, pp. 1–80 (pp. 1–2)

[2] Alexander L. Kaufman, ‘Histories of Contexts: Forms, Argument, and Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode’, in British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty, ed. by Alexander Kaufman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), pp. 146–64 (p. 148).

[3] Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 22.

[4] Lesley Coote, Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw (London: Reaktion, 2020), p. 44.

[5] Rodney H. Hilton, ‘The Origins of Robin Hood’, Past and Present 14 (1958), pp. 30–44 (p. 35).

[6] James C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood’, Past and Present, 18 (1960), pp. 80–110 (p. 80).

[7] Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (New York: Dorset Press, 1987), p. xii.

[8] Maurice Keen, ‘Robin Hood—Peasant or Gentleman?’ Past and Present, 19 (1961), pp. 7–15.

[9] Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, p. xii.

[10] Thomas Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560. Texts, Contexts, and Ideology (Newark, DEL: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 154–59.

[11] Mark Cartwright, ‘Medieval Guilds’, World History Encyclopedia, 14 November 2018, https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Guilds/ (accessed 28 September 2025)

[12] Ohlgren, Robin Hood, p. 25.

[13] Ohlgren, Robin Hood, p. 110.

[14] Tim O’Mara, ‘Richard Pynson – King’s Printer to Henry VII and Henry VIII’, Worcester Cathedral Library and Archive Blog, 9 April 2022, https://worcestercathedrallibrary.wordpress.com/2022/04/09/richard-pynson-kings-printer-to-henry-vii-and-henry-viii/ (accessed 28 September 2025)

[15] Adam Smyth, The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (London: Vintage, 2025), p. 13.

[16] Smyth, p. 9.

[17] Matthew Wills, ‘The First English Books’, JSTOR Daily, 20 November 2014, https://daily.jstor.org/first-english-books/ (Accessed 29 September 2025).

[18] Margaret Willes, In the Shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral: The Churchyard that Shaped London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), p. 37.

[19] Smyth, p. 11.

[20] ‘Wynken de Worde edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hode: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, ed. by Thomas Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2013), pp. 89–148 (p. 148).

[21] William Frederick Hutmacher, ‘A Transcription and collation of Wynken de Worde’s 1498 edition of the Canterbury Tales with Cx2, the General Prologue through the Franklin’s Tale’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Texas Tech University, 1976), p. 11.

[22] Ohlgren and Matheson, ‘Julian Notary edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hode, p. 157.

[23] Willes, p. 39.

[24] Ohlgren and Matheson, ‘Richard Pynson edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hode, pp. 45–46.

[25] William Roberts, The Earlier History of English Bookselling (London: Sampson Row, 1892), p. 43.

[26] Ohlgren and Matheson, ‘Antwerp edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hode, p. 57.

[27] Hutmacher, p. 10.

[28] Thomas J. Garbaty, ‘Wynkyn de Worde’s “Sir Thopas” and Other Tales’, Studies in Bibliography, 31 (1978), pp. 57-67 (p. 58).

[29] Seth Lerer, ‘The Wiles of a Woodcut: Wynkyn de Worde and the Early Tudor Reader’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59: 4 (1996), pp. 381–403 (p. 381)

[30] Henry L. Plomer, Wynkyn de Worde and his contemporaries from the death of Caxton to 1535 (London: Grafton, 1925), p. 44, 61, 104.

[31] Henry L. Plomer, ‘The Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson’, The Library, ns 10: 38 (1909), pp. 116–33 (p. 122).

[32] Smyth, p. 36.

[33] Ohlgren, ‘Hugo Goes edition of A lytell geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hode, p. 149.

[34] Mary C. Erler, ‘Wynkyn de Worde’s Will: Legatees and Bequests’, The Library, s6: 10 (1988), pp. 107–21 (p. 109).

[35] Erler, p. 121.

[36] Edward Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and resistance: narratives of chivalry in mid-Tudor England’, Renaissance Studies, 24: 4 (2010), pp. 482–95 (p. 483).

[37] ‘William Copland edition of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hode’, in Early Rymes of Robyn Hood, pp. 169–70

[38] Ohlgren, Robin Hood, pp. 130–31.