We construct large families of two-dimensional travelling water waves propagating under the influence of gravity in a flow of constant vorticity over a flat bed. A Riemann-Hilbert problem approach is used to recast the governing equations as a one-dimensional elliptic pseudo-differential equation with a scalar constraint. The structural properties of this formulation, which arises as the Euler-Lagrange equation of an energy functional, enable us to develop a theory of analytic global bifurcation.