GAMELYN, THE TALE OF

anonymous English metrical romance of about 1350, some 900 lines long, written in the East Midland dialect of Middle English, in rhymed couplets. Based on English folklore, it tells of Gamelyn, son of Sir John de Boundys, who is deprived of his inheritance by his brother and becomes an outlaw in the forest. Eventually he is able to regain his estates, and the sheriff who had helped his brother is hanged. The Tale of Gamelyn is of special interest for its connections with the English ballads of the outlaw Robin Hood. It was a source of Thomas Lodge's prose romance Rosalynde (1590), on which William Shakespeare based his As You Like It. It was almost certainly intended by Geoffrey Chaucer to form the basis of his (unfinished) Cook's Tale in The Canterbury Tales.