A paper delivered at the IARHS Biannual Conference, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, 27 June 2025.

Joseph Ritson was born in 1752 in Stockton-on-Tees. His profession was that of a conveyancer. He began his career as an apprentice in the firm of Ralph Bradley before moving to London to take up a position at the firm of Messrs. Masterman and Lloyd. Having served some time with this firm—an advantageous appointment gotten because Ritson had married into the Masterman family—he began his own practice out of his home at 8 Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn.

Ritson’s profession may have been the law but his passion was literature. He made his first grand entrance into the literary world by publicly attacking the flaws in Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774). Afterwards, he sparked some not always amiable academic debates with Shakespeare scholars Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Edmund Malone, as well as the poetry and ballad editor, Thomas Percy. Above all, however, Ritson is known as the man who kick-started the academic study of the Robin Hood legend by producing the two-volume work titled Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, in 1795.

The limelight today, however, belongs to another man: Mr Joseph Frank (1770–1842).[1] Frank was Ritson’s nephew and kept his uncle’s personal copy of Robin Hood (1795) which contained the antiquary’s handwritten notes, corrections, and annotations to the poems and ballads, as well as the “Life of Robin Hood” and “Notes and Illustrations” section. Frank went on to edit three new editions of Robin Hood: a one-volume children’s version in 1820; another profusely-illustrated edition for young persons in 1823; and a scholarly edition of Ritson’s Robin Hood in 1832 (published by every antiquary’s go-to publisher, William Pickering). The final edition incorporated Ritson’s post-publication marginal notes into the text but Frank silently intervened in the text by removing controversial passages, as well as having conducted research on the topic himself. The result was a more scholarly and correct version of Robin Hood, updated with the then latest findings of scholars, but one that was defanged of its anticlericalism and in which Ritson’s insulting remarks about contemporary scholars were removed.

Ritson had been gathering the materials for Robin Hood since at least the late 1780s. He revealed as much with an ‘apology’ in the preface to his Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry (1791):

It might naturally enough excite the surprise of the intelligent reader, that in a professed republication of popular poetry, nothing should occur upon a subject indisputably the most popular of all—the history of our renowned English archer, ROBIN HOOD. Some apology is undoubtedly necessary on this head, as the omission is by no means owing to ignorance or neglect. In fact, the poems, ballads, and historical or miscellaneous matter, in existence, relative to this celebrated outlaw, are sufficient to furnish the contents of even a couple of volumes considerably bulkier than the present; and sufficiently deserve to appear in a separate publication.[2]

Note the present indicative: the materials are sufficient to furnish two volumes. Everyone gathered here knows the result of these efforts which came in 1795 when the publishers Thomas Egerton and Joseph Johnson agreed a joint investment in Robin Hood’s publication. The two small octavo volumes were released, for a price of twelve shillings (or about £50 today), on 14 December 1795. Ill health then prevented Ritson from publishing much more after Robin Hood. It was not until 1802 that he published Bibliographia Poetica, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, and Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees. In September 1803, after several fits, resulting in confusion and loss of speech, he passed away.

Joseph Frank was the son of Ann Ritson and another Stockton native, Robert Frank, and was born in 1770. By 1777, Ann was widowed and, from a distance, Ritson became a father figure to him and regularly sent home to Stockton a number of books as gifts. The hope was that Frank would become every bit a scholar as his uncle. Ritson wanted young Frank to become an accomplished in all of what were then considered the polite arts.[3] His nephew was encouraged to learn another language, to take up music and painting.[4] Having been commanded to remain in school and finish his education, Frank, through arrangements made by his uncle, was in 1785 apprenticed to a London law firm. Taking a boat from Stockton and sailing all the way down the coast to London, Frank would lodge with his uncle at Holborn Court. And what a Spartan existence it would be! Ritson said that, living with him, Frank would need the following skills:

Frying and dressing potatoes, making puff-paste, pickling, preserving and mending stockings, or any other similar kind of knowledge which you may never have an opportunity of coming at, and can have no idea of the vast utility of. In short, to make a pudding, and set a button on your shirt, will be of more use than all your reading and writing. You will think, perhaps, that such a lesson would be more fit for one who was coming into a cook’s shop, than a conveyancers [sic] chambers—but when you have been here a year or two you will probably be of a different opinion.[5]

But Ritson advised Frank to be grateful for this mode of living.[6] The unpleasantness would improve his character, for, as Ritson said, ‘pleasing things are delightful, and hardships glorious’.[7] Frank remained silent as to whether he was indeed grateful for these life lessons.

Frank remained at Holborn Court with Ritson until 1793, which is also the year that Frank’s mother (Ritson’s sister) died, after which he moved into his own lodgings. In emulation of his uncle: when Ritson became a radical and a supporter of the French Revolution, so too did Frank. He became something of a utopianist; as a student he spent a little too much time, so Ritson thought, frequenting coffee houses and radical clubs, discussing revolutionary politics, and not paying enough attention to his studies.[8] So much did Frank take adopt revolutionary ideology that Ritson advised him to hide his bust of Napoleon until the soon-to-be Emperor of the French made his appearance in England.[9]

With his uncle’s passing in 1803, Frank took possession of Ritson’s unpublished papers, his personal library, and took these with him upon his return to Stockton.[10] Although I cannot ascertain the exact date that Frank returned to his home town, he was back in Stockton by 1801, living in the old family home at Silver Street,[11] and acting as attorney in bankruptcy proceedings.[12] The move back to Stockton seems to have been accompanied with a rise in status to a conveyancer with his own practice. Added to this, he was also a property owner for, in the electoral register for the year of the passage of the Great Reform Act, he was listed as a freeholder at nearby Seaton Carew.[13] In 1808, he served as the clerk to the parliamentary commission set up to inquire into the feasibility of making the Tees River more navigable, which project was realised in 1810.[14] Until November 1831, Frank also served as a coroner for Stockton,[15] a position he had held since his return to Stockton thirty years previously.[16] Thus, Frank appears to have settled into the life of a professional man of the law by day and an antiquary and would-be novelist by night.[17] He often assisted northern antiquaries with their scholarly endeavours, in particular Robert Surtees, who corresponded within Frank frequently and who gave Ritson’s nephew much praise, and who described Frank as ‘a man of great ingenuity’.[18]

It was not long until this nephew of great ingenuity began editing his uncle’s unpublished works for publication. Frank’s first project was a one volume republication of the Northern Garlands in 1810, comprising Ritson’s earlier Bishopric Garland, Yorkshire Garland, Northumberland Garland, and North Country Chorister. After this there followed a volume of Ritson’s hitherto unpublished Office of Bailiff of a Liberty, published in 1811, and The Office of Constable. After this followed the Select Collection of English Songs, in 1813. As we have seen, the children’s editions of Robin Hood appeared in 1820 and 1823. In time, most of Ritson’s landmark works would be re-edited throughout the 1810s and into the 1820s. The final scholarly edition of his uncle’s work which Frank undertook was the 1832 two-volume edition of Robin Hood.

Ideally, when the 1832 edition of Robin Hood appears in our twenty-first century reference lists in books and articles, Frank should be listed as co-editor, even if his name does not appear on the title page. At first, Frank promised nothing more than a reprint of 1795 with a few of the additional notes left by Ritson in his personal copy of the book: ‘The former edition of ROBIN HOOD was published by Mr Ritson in 1795 who continued from time to time to make additions to his own copy, from which the present edition has been carefully printed … The tale of “Robin Hood and the Monk” … is now added to the Appendix’. The politically radical sentiments of Ritson’s ‘Life of Robin Hood’ were left intact; that they remained so suggests that Frank had not abandoned the ideology he shared with his uncle. Robin Hood was still a man who ‘in a barbarous age … displayed a spirit of freedom and independence’. The introductions to the individual poems, such as the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode and ‘Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage’ were augmented to include remarks from other historians whom either Frank or Ritson had read. So far, there’s nothing controversial in here.

However, in his new editions of other Ritson books, Frank gave a fleeting glimpse into his editorial policy. In the 1829 edition of Ancient Songs and Ballads, the book was reprinted ‘with fidelity and correctness’ but—and here is a subtle yet important intervention policy—with ‘corrections, as seemed best deserving of republication’.[19] Although he admired his uncle’s scholarly labour, to Frank, not all of his uncle’s original comments were ‘deserving’ of republication. Frank had no time for his uncle’s previous spats with his contemporary scholars, and these were cut out.

If one compares the preface of 1795 with that of 1832, it is obvious that a lengthy paragraph criticising the author of an article in the Critical Review (one of Ritson’s archenemies in the periodical world) has wholly vanished. In fact, when it came to republishing his uncle’s works, Frank never republished those works which were specifically printed with a view to attacking others. Thus, Observations on the First Three Volumes of English Poetry, originally printed in 1783 to criticise Thomas Warton, remained in obscurity. A similar fate befell Ritson’s Shakespeare publications—Remarks, Critical and Illustrative and The Quip Modest—attacking Johnson, Steevens, and Edmund Malone. When Frank republished Ritson’s 1783 Select Collection of English Songs in 1813—of which the lengthy preface of the first edition had as its main point the refutation of Percy’s conclusions on the minstrels—Frank handled the situation in a fairer manner. For the new edition, Frank invited an antiquary named Thomas Park to write a lengthy dissertation on the subject of ‘National Song’ which was highly critical of Ritson’s treatment of Percy.[20]

Frank must have found religion in his later life; at least this is one plausible reason why several of Ritson’s anticlerical statements have vanished as well. At the very least, he thought that his uncle’s statements against religion sullied the fine scholarship that he did. For example, in 1832, there were no longer any sarcastic remarks about the miracles of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed the Prophet. Neither are we told that

‘[Robin Hood’s] songs have been preferred, on the most solemn occasions, not only to the psalms of David, but to the New Testament’.

Another major emendation to Ritson’s text is the disappearance of any reference to ‘clerical drones and pious locusts’—referring to priests—along with a catty remark about the Bishop of Durham in the 1790s who

‘Who has fifteen thousand a year, and odd, / For eating and drinking, / And farting and stinking, / And saying the peace of god.’

When Surtees received a free copy of the 1832 edition of Robin Hood, he remarked to Frank that he was ‘re-perusing [it] with great delight’.[21] Frank may not make headlines in Robin Hood Studies today, but his new edition of Robin Hood was received with great praise. Little comment was said in reviews of the irreligious sentiments of the work—a marked contrast from reviews of the first edition. Ritson’s nastiness towards fellow scholars appears to have been forgotten by the reviewers as well.

Joseph Frank’s trajectory—from orphaned nephew to quiet steward of radical scholarship—illustrates how intellectual inheritance can be both preserved and transformed. Back in Stockton, Frank embodied a striking duality. He was a law professional and cultural custodian. His task for the 1832 edition of Robin Hood was delicate: to honour Ritson’s uncompromising admiration for the outlaw as a beacon of freedom, while satisfying the tastes of a more conservative readership. Frank’s edition of 1832 retains Ritson’s spirit, but tempers its extremes, trading rhetorical anticlericalism and unnecessary combativeness and prioritising scholarly annotation and clarity. As a result, is the 1832 edition of Robin Hood which remains the most frequently cited, and reprinted, version of Ritson’s foundational Robin Hood text; perhaps, in the future, our bibliographies might also credit Frank as well as Ritson.

Notes

[1] ‘Obituary’, Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1842, 219: ‘June 30. At Seaton Carew, aged 72, Joseph Frank, Esq. formerly an eminent solicitor at Stockton-on-Tees, and nephew of the celebrated critic and antiquary, Joseph Ritson.

[2] Ritson, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, xii.

[3] Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 1.

[4] Letters, II, 33; Letters, I, 27; Letters, I, 27–31.

[5] Letters, I, 110.

[6] Letters, I, 103.

[7] Ritson, The Spartan Manual, 30.

[8] Letters, II, 24.

[9] Letters, II, 246.

[10] Taylor, Memoir of Robert Surtees, 35.

[11] Parson and White, History, directory, and gazetteer of the counties of Durham and Northumberland, 317.

[12] Anon. ‘Shaw’s Bankruptcy’, York Herald, 20 June 1801, 2.

[13] Anon. The poll for two knights of the shire, 20.

[14] ‘Notice is hereby given’, York Herald, 31 December 1808, 2.

[15] Richmond, The Local Records of Stockton and the Neighbourhood, 161.

[16] Patent of Appointment of Joseph Frank as Coroner of Stockton Ward and confirmation by Dean and Chapter, 22 November 1800, parchment, Church Commission Deposit of Durham Bishopric Estate Records: Loose Patents, Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, GB-0033-CCB.B172/64 (57230) 

[17] Letter from Robert Surtees to Joseph Frank, 23 January 1807, Durham Cathedral Library Surtees Manuscripts GB-0034 SUR 40/6. By the 1830s, he seems to have been the head coroner for Stockton, owing to the fact that he had deputies under him. See Anon., Accounts and Papers of the House of Commons, 11.

[18] Taylor, Memoir of Robert Surtees, 35.

[19] Frank, Ancient Songs and Ballads, iv.

[20] Park, ‘A Historical Essay on National Song’, lxxvi–vii.

[21] Taylor, Memoir of Robert Surtees, 435.

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——, Remarks, Critical and Illustrative on the Text and Notes of the Last Edition of Shakespeare (London: J. Johnson, 1783)

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York Herald