This essay offers some fresh contexts for reading The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, one of many late medieval narratives that sit uneasily, and therefore intriguingly, within the generic category ‘medieval romance’. Preserved in a printed edition of 1572, the tale is nevertheless ‘medieval’: its composition is generally dated to the later fifteenth century, and scholars regularly extend the boundary of medieval Scots poetry well into the sixteenth. Rauf Coilyear's claims to the designation ‘romance’ include the appearance of the cyclical romance hero Charlemagne among its characters, the adaptation of an alliterative stanza form shared by a subset of English romances, and the extreme elasticity of the romance category itself. The existing scholarship examines The Taill of Rauf Coilyear within a variety of contexts, including Scottish romances, alliterative romances, Charlemagne romances, romances depicting Saracens, and encounters with unrecognised kings. I hope to expand Rauf's frame of reference in two ways: first, by comparing the main character's peasant identity and his use of language to that of the peasant speaker in the Middle English prose Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf (c.1492) and, second, by attending to two subgenres embedded within Rauf Coilyear, the proverb and the popular complaint or ‘poem of social protest’. These contexts for The Taill of Rauf Coilyear help us to see more clearly what is at stake in its representation of a speaking voice only rarely heard in the realm of romance.