A Gest of Robyn Hode



Above is one of the earliest images of Robin Hood. It comes from the first page of the Gest of Robyn Hode (c.1508) by Scotland’s pioneer printers Walter Chepman and Androw Myller. This Chepman & Myllar print of the Gest is in the National Library, Edinburgh. But this woodcut image of Robin Hood had also been used before, by one of the first printers of English books, Richard Pynson (1448-1529) as an illustration of the knight’s yeoman, in his edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1491) shown below.



No comments: