The Broadside Ballads and Garlands
With the advent of printing came the Robin Hood broadside ballads. Exactly when they displaced the oral tradition of Robin Hood ballads is unknown but the process seems to have been completed by the end of the 16th century. Near the end of the 16th century an unpublished prose life of Robin Hood was written, and included in the Sloane Manuscript. Largely a paraphrase of the Gest, it also contains material revealing that the author was familiar with early versions of a number of the Robin Hood broadside ballads.[51] We do know that not all of the medieval legend was preserved in the broadside ballads, there is no broadside version of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne or of Robin Hood and the Monk; which would not appear in print until the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. However the Gest was reprinted from time to time throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
No surviving broadside ballad can be dated with certainty before the 17th century, but during that century the commercial broadside ballad became the main vehicle for the popular Robin Hood legend.[52] These broadside ballads were in some cases newly fabricated but were mostly adaptions of the older verse narratives. The broadside ballads were fitted to a small repertoire of pre-existing tunes resulting in an increase of "stock formulaic phrases' making them "repetitive and verbose",[53] they commonly feature Robin Hood's contests with artisans; tinkers tanners and butchers. Among these ballads is Robin Hood and Little John telling the famous story of the quarter-staff fight between the two outlaws.
