Thomas Miller’s Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John (1838) is one of the more obscure nineteenth-century retellings of the Robin Hood legend. Miller himself is hardly a household name today, although during the Victorian period he enjoyed a successful career as a poet, novelist, and writer of books for children. Born into a poor family at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire in 1807, he worked first as a ploughboy and later as a shoemaker’s apprentice before establishing himself as a professional author.

Like many nineteenth-century writers, Miller was greatly influenced by Sir Walter Scott. In particular, Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) transformed the Robin Hood legend by presenting the outlaw as an Anglo-Saxon resisting Norman oppression. There is little basis for this idea in the medieval Robin Hood tradition, but Scott’s novel was so successful that the conflict between Saxons and Normans became one of the most persistent features of later versions of the legend.

Miller borrowed this framework for Royston Gower, but put it to a very different political use. Scott was politically conservative and ultimately portrayed Robin Hood—or Locksley—as a supporter of the legitimate political order represented by Richard I. Miller, by contrast, published his novel in December 1838, just as the Chartist movement was emerging as a major force in British politics.

The result was what I termed in this article a “Chartist Robin Hood.”

Miller’s Saxons resemble the politically excluded working classes of his own day. They suffer under oppressive laws imposed by a wealthy Norman elite, while Robin Hood and his companions repeatedly speak of liberty, popular rights, resistance to tyranny, and the need for a “charter.” The resemblance to the People’s Charter—the document from which Chartism took its name—is difficult to miss. Miller even makes explicit comparisons between his medieval Norman aristocrats and nineteenth-century politicians.

The politics of the novel are particularly interesting because Miller does not present the outlaws simply as revolutionaries who wish to destroy society. Instead, they are reformers. Their alternative society in the greenwood is governed according to principles of fellowship and comparative equality, while their opposition to King John rests upon the belief that true patriotism consists in defending the rights and liberties of the people.

I originally published the following article in Studies in Scottish Literature in 2018. Looking back at it several years later, it forms part of a much larger strand of my research into the political afterlives of Robin Hood: the ways in which writers from Joseph Ritson and Walter Scott onwards repeatedly reinvented the medieval outlaw according to the political concerns of their own age.

The original published paper, which emerged from a talk I gave at the ‘Reworking Walter Scott’ conference at the University of Dundee, and which I am permitted to make available on my personal website, can be read or downloaded below.

Thomas Miller’s Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John (1838)

Citation for the original article:

Basdeo, Stephen (2018) “The Chartist Robin Hood: Thomas Miller’s Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John (1838),” Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 44: Iss. 2, 72–81.

(The images below were not originally included in the published article. For online readability I have also added subheadings although readers can access the article PDF above)

Introduction

Thomas Miller (1807-74) was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, to a poor family and in his early youth worked as a ploughboy, before becoming a shoemaker’s apprentice. He had a limited education, but his mother encouraged him to read on a daily basis.^[1] In his adult life, he became a professional author. He greatly admired Walter Scott (1771-1832), whom he referred to as ‘the immortal author of Waverley’.^[2] And it is in emulation of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) that Miller authored his own Robin Hood novel entitled Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John, which was published in December 1838.[3]

This article highlights the ways that Miller’s Royston Gower reworks Walter Scott’s idea of racial conflict between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.[4] Miller does this to serve the Chartist cause: he superimposes ideas of class on to Scott’s Saxon/Norman racialism; the Saxons represent the downtrodden working classes, while the Normans represent the nineteenth-century upper classes who are resistant to any demands for political reform. Furthermore, Miller places great emphasis upon ideas of liberty and of the rights and sovereignty of the people, and Robin Hood fights for freedom against tyranny and the establishment of a ‘charter of rights’. The Robin Hood who appears in this novel can therefore justifiably be termed ‘the Chartist Robin Hood’.

Chartism and Chartist Literature

Miller’s life and works have received very little critical attention beyond a chapter in Owen Ashton’s and Stephen Roberts’s The Victorian Working-Class Writer (1999), and a short entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.[5] Even Stephen Knight, whose research made the post-medieval Robin Hood tradition an important area of scholarly inquiry, dwells upon the novel only briefly.[6] This essay, therefore, aims to develop scholarship upon Miller’s life and works even further, as well as contributing to wider debates in the field of medievalism: while Miller was rarely political in his later works, his sympathy towards the Chartist movement in the late 1830s challenges Clare A. Simmons’s assertion that, after c. 1830, medievalism became conservative.[7]

When discussing Chartism, Dorothy Thompson says that ‘true Chartism’ must be separated from its influences.^[8] A modified form of Thompson’s words can be applied to Chartist literature: we must separate ‘true’ Chartist literature, such as The Northern Star and the writings men such as Thomas Cooper (1805-1892), from that of literature which sympathises with the movement, such as Pierce Egan the Younger’s Wat Tyler; or, the Rebellion of 1381 (1840-41).^[9]

Belonging to the latter category is Miller’s novel. Chartism needs little introduction. It first emerged between 1836 and 1838, and took its name from the movement’s formal petition, or ‘People’s Charter’ which in its final form contained six demands: a vote for all men over twenty-one, a secret ballot, the abolition of property qualification for MPs, payment for MPs, electoral districts of equal size, and annual elections for Parliament.

An entire body of prose and poetry complemented the movement, a corpus of works which have recently been focused upon in depth by Michael Sanders and Ian Haywood.^[10] Leading Chartists often drew inspiration from the medieval past: Magna Carta, or ‘the Great Charter’, was a symbol co-opted by many Chartist writers to provide continuity with the struggle for rights in the past and connect it to their fight for political representation in the present.^[11]

Nineteenth-Century Popularity of Robin Hood

The early nineteenth century also witnessed Robin Hood’s first appearance in the novel. In addition to the poems of John Keats and John Hamilton Reynolds, three Robin Hood novels appeared in this period: the anonymous Robin Hood: A Tale of the Olden Time was published in the early part of 1819, while Scott’s Ivanhoe appeared in December of that year. Interestingly, although Scott scholars have not taken note of the first Robin Hood novel, it may have had some influence upon Scott’s novel.^[12]

Published a few months before Scott began writing Ivanhoe, the anonymous Robin Hood is the first novel to associate Robin Hood with the Saxons. And the name of one of the principal characters in the novel, Athelstane, would, of course, reappear in Ivanhoe.^[13] Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian subsequently appeared in 1822.[14] Robin Hood and Maid Marian went quickly out of print.

It is only Scott’s novel that had a lasting effect upon Robin Hood literature during the nineteenth century, particularly with regard to Scott’s completely invented idea of enmity between the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ and the Normans alluded to above. The racialism in Ivanhoe links the outlaw to a conservative agenda, and is used as a means of showing how all sections of a divided society could unite in a common cause and become one nation under a just and benevolent king, Richard I. But this had certain caveats, of course, for in the words of Alice Chandler, ‘the serf should be willing to die for his master, the master willing to die for the man he considered his sovereign’.^[15]

Thus to Scott, medieval social structures, or feudalism, could be adapted for the nineteenth century. Locksley in Ivanhoe does not have any clear political goals, such as political enfranchisement. Once Richard I regains his throne, it is clear that the people who should lead the nation are the middle classes, symbolised by Ivanhoe and Rowena, and the upper classes, symbolised in the person of Richard.

Medieval Robin Hood stories such as A Gest of Robyn Hode (c. 1495) depict Robin Hood and his men as not only as highway robbers, but also as poachers who regularly kill the king’s deer.[16] After the Norman Conquest of 1066, lawmakers designated certain forests as the personal property of the king for hunting. Punishments for poachers could be severe, with offenders being sentenced to either mutilation or death. The laws were a major source of grievance throughout the medieval period, and shortly after the passage of Magna Carta in 1215, a separate Charter of the Forest was enacted in 1217 which limited some of the more draconian features of the existing forest laws.[17]

The authors of post-medieval Robin Hood texts often used the harsh forest laws as a backdrop for their own stories. For instance, in Ivanhoe, it is ‘the severity of the forest laws [which] had reduced [the outlaws] to this roving and desperate mode of life.’[18] Scott returned to the subject of these laws in his section upon French history for Tales of a Grandfather (1831).[19] In Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822), one of the reasons, among many, that Robin is outlawed is because he has regularly been caught hunting the king’s deer.[20]

The same is true in Pierce Egan the Younger’s phenomenally successful penny blood entitled Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (1838-40).[21] In emulation of Scott, in Miller’s novel, his aim is to highlight ‘the tyranny of the Norman Forest laws’.^[22] Miller shows how, while the good Saxons starve, they are not permitted to feed themselves upon the abundance of food that the natural world provides:

During the reigns of the Saxon princes, forest laws were first established in Britain; for while the Romans held possession of the island, it was free to the poorest hunter. The Saxon laws were, nevertheless, mild, and only useless wastes and untenanted wilds were set apart for the chase […] William the Norman was the first to destroy villages and churches, make slaves of the inhabitants, and turning their possessions into forests, guard his regal hunting grounds by cruel and vexatious laws.^[23]

Thomas Miller’s Appropriation of the Saxon v. Norman Conflict

The Norman Conquest, Miller notes, saw the establishment of a tyrannical and self-serving elite composed of the Church and the aristocracy who advance their own interests through the forest laws. These oppressive laws result in near starvation for the Saxons:

They [the Normans] are rich and powerful, yet dissatisfied, while the Saxons are poor, and oppressed with heavy talliage […] they [the Normans] revel in idleness and luxury, are all knights or nobles; while [the Saxons] eat of the bitter bread, nor look aught beyond the appeasing of hunger.^[24]

That Miller intended his twelfth-century Normans to be equated with the early Victorian political elite is evinced due to the comparisons that he makes between the Norman nobility and nineteenth-century politicians.^[25] Yet the problem in medieval England, according to Miller, is one of class inequality, perpetuated by treacherous monks and cunning aristocrats, rather than a problem of race. He points out that there are poor Normans, and there are also rich Normans who are good characters.^[26] This anticipates Errol Flynn’s Americanised, populist Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), in which the influence of Scott can also be felt, for in that film Robin exclaims that ‘it’s injustice I hate, not the Normans.’^[27]

It is because of their political oppression that the Saxons in Royston Gower seek the establishment of a code of laws, or a ‘Charter’. From the preface, it is clear that Miller intended to adapt Chartist discourse and superimpose it on to his twelfth-century tale. One of the men with whom Robin becomes associated, a Saxon named Hereward, is one of the primary campaigners in this medieval ‘chartist’ cause.^[28] Obviously, allusions are made to Magna Carta, but Miller’s choice of spelling is noteworthy here: whenever the Victorians wrote about Magna Carta, they usually spelt it as ‘Magna Charta’.^[29] Miller’s ‘Charta’, however, is a ‘charter’.

Indeed, the actual demands contained in the Anglo-Saxons’ people’s charter are left undefined, in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to encourage readers to associate the charter of the novel with the nineteenth-century People’s Charter. It is a charter which enjoys the support of all the Saxons, or the medieval working classes. It is initially presented in good faith to King John and the barons, but it is rejected immediately by Norman political elite. Such scenes anticipate the dismissal of the first Chartist petition by the government in 1839. This is why the Robin Hood of Miller’s novel can justifiably be called ‘the Chartist Robin Hood’.

Interestingly, among Miller’s boyhood friends was Thomas Cooper, a prominent Chartist activist, with whom he remained good friends with throughout his life.^[30] Although Miller never appears to have publicly come out in support of Chartism, his lifelong friendship with Cooper makes it unlikely that he was not to some degree influenced by the movement. Indeed, it might be said that Miller, at this early stage in his literary career, was an independent radical, of the type written about by Michael J. Turner in Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (2004). These men were not always allied to a particular cause, and they often did not hold to a clear and coherent ideology, but they did place great emphasis in their writings upon the rights and sovereignty of the people.^[31] In a similar manner, Miller’s outlaws’ make repeated references to rights of the people that are specifically connected to the medieval ‘chartist’ cause.[32]

Re-Radicalising the Robin Hood Tradition

Miller’s setting is also significant: he could have emulated Scott to the letter by setting his novel the days of King Richard. When a Robin Hood story is set during the time of Richard I, Robin’s opposition to Prince John, who plots to steal the throne of England from his brother, usually extracts any subversive traits from the story. Robin Hood becomes, according to Stephen Knight, nothing less than an upholder of the true political order.^[33] However, Miller opts for the reign of King John, setting his story slightly later, between 1199 and 1216. This may appear to be worthy of little note, but it is not. King Richard was widely perceived as a good king during the nineteenth century, a perception which emerged partly as a result of the popularity of Scott’s novel. Yet the fact that Robin Hood and his men fight against King John, and never declare any allegiance to a tyrannical monarch, allows Miller’s Robin Hood to be truly anti-establishment.

It was not enough that independent radicals such as Miller simply complain about socio-economic conditions of the present, but they also had to present solutions to them as well.[34] Thus, in his novel, Miller presents an alternative model of society to the government of King John and the barons. The outlaws’ forest society is governed by principles similar to the ones presented on the charter to King John. As a result, the forest functions as an alternative model of good government. This is the effect for which the forest is used in several reinterpretations of the Robin Hood story. For example, in Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795), which has some claim to being one of the most important literary works in the entire Robin Hood tradition, it is said that, ‘in these forests, and with this company, he for many years reigned like an independent sovereign’.[35]

In Ivanhoe, when mainstream society is governed in a tyrannical way by Prince John and the traitorous Norman barons, it is Locksley’s forest society which represents the fellowship of free men, although King Richard, in disguise as the Black Knight, also has a place in Scott’s outlaw fraternity.[36] The forest is used to the same effect in Peacock’s Maid Marian, as the outlaws operate according to the principles of ‘legitimacy, equity, hospitality, chivalry, chastity, and courtesy’.[37] And it is a theme that was carried on in Pierce Egan’s Robin Hood and Little John, which began its serialisation in 1838, the same year that Royston Gower was published.[38]

In Miller’s novel, life in Sherwood is arranged along egalitarian principles: every outlaw including Robin Hood must prove himself willing to do any kind of task, however menial – from keeping the watch to serving meals – so that ‘it left no grounds for murmuring and made servitude equal’.^[39] Furthermore, when society is run according to the principles of freedom and liberty, people do not go hungry. This is best illustrated by a scene of feasting in the forest, in which Little John sings ‘the Song of the Outlaws’ which combines radical political sentiments, ideas of liberty and freedom with an abundance of food:

As free as the wind is the life that we lead,

That sweeps without let over mountain and mead;

We own not a tyrant, no foeman we fear,

Our home is the Greenwood well-stocked with deer […]

We lack not a stoup of good berry-brown beer,

We lack not a pasty, well-lined with fat deer,

We lack not an arm when the tyrant does wrong,

To succour the weak, and strike down the strong.^[40]

In spite of their aversion to tyranny, Miller seeks to portray Robin Hood and his outlaws’ actions as those of reformers, rather than revolutionaries. This is of course how many Chartists saw themselves: they did not wish to overturn the political order but desired to share in it. In the preface, for instance, he describes Robin as ‘this early reformer’.^[41] Because of their commitment to reform, Robin and the outlaws are ‘patriots, whose blood was spilt in struggling to overthrow the strongholds of oppression.’^[42] It is only by working to better the nation and the condition of everyone in it that one can count themselves as truly loyal to it.

Chartist writers often appropriated patriotic language, but it was a patriotism centred upon the people of the nation and the English constitution.[43] The patriotism of the Anglo-Saxons in Miller’s novel, then, is what Eric Hobsbawm would say is the social-democratic kind, that looks back to the language of earlier forms of American and French nationalism during the late eighteenth century.[44] Thus, the patriotism of the Anglo-Saxons in Miller’s novel, while adapted from Scott’s novel, is wholly unlike the nationalism found in Ivanhoe, which is centred upon loyalty to King Richard I. Miller’s message to readers of his novel, then, is that true patriotism lies in lending their support to political reform.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Walter Scott’s reinvention of Robin Hood as an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter in 1819 has had a lasting impact upon later portrayals of the outlaw’s story, all the way into the twentieth century. The life and works of Thomas Miller have thus far received very little critical attention by scholars thus far, but it is clear that Scott’s novel influenced his portrayal of the Robin Hood story. Miller takes Scott’s idea of enmity between the Saxons and the Normans and superimposes onto it ideas of class conflict. His equation of the Normans with modern politicians makes it clear that he intended his novel to be applicable to the nineteenth century. The only way for the Anglo-Saxons in the novel to achieve true equality is, with the help of the outlaws, to seek the establishment of a charter, and it is clear that Miller’s novel offers an alternative reading to Simmons’s idea that nineteenth-century medievalism became ‘conservative’ after c. 1830.

In spite of their commitment to the medieval ‘chartist’ cause, the outlaws in Royston Gower are not traitors to their country, for they have at heart the best interests of the people of the nation. This is another way in which Miller reworks the ideas found in Scott’s Ivanhoe, where Locksley is loyal to the true king, Richard I. Thus, the conservative themes in Ivanhoe, originally written by the Tory Walter Scott, are in Miller’s novel adapted to serve the cause of the early Chartist movement, and it is for this reason that the Robin Hood of Miller’s novel can justifiably be called ‘the Chartist Robin Hood’.

References

[1] See Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts, The Victorian Working Class Writer (London: Mansell, 1999), 32-45.

[2] Thomas Miller, Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John (London: W. Nicholson [n.d.]), 4.

[3] Thomas Miller, Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John 3 Vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1838), 1: xxiv.

[4] Stephen Basdeo, “Ivanhoe’s Afterlives: Walter Scott’s Legacy upon 19th-Century Robin Hood scholarship in England and France,” ed. Odile Boucher, Stephane Guy, Francois Ropert, Francoise Baillet, in Tradition(s) – Innovation(s) en Angleterre au XIX Siecle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 19-33; Walter Scott had a profound influence upon the legend of Robin Hood with the publication of his novel Ivanhoe (1819). His portrayal of the outlaw as an Anglo-Saxon freedom fighter, a concept that is absent in earlier Robin Hood literature, is one that has persisted in modern retellings of the Robin Hood story. By the time that Miller was writing, the idea that Robin Hood was of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and that he fought Norman tyrants, had virtually become a fact in historical writing.

[5] Louis James. “Miller, Thomas (1807–1874).” In The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed July 31, 2017. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18738.

[6] See the following works by Stephen Knight: Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 154-8; Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 142-3.

[7] Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 191-94.

[8] Dorothy Thompson, The Dignity of Chartism (London: Verso, 2015), 7.

[9][9] See the following works on Pierce Egan the Younger’s Wat Tyler (1840-41): Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency and the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), 37-49; Stephen Basdeo, “Radical Medievalism: Pierce Egan the Younger’s Robin Hood, Wat Tyler, and Adam Bell,” in Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, Volume 15: Imagining the Victorians ed. Stephen Basdeo and Lauren Padgett (Leeds: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 2016), 48-64.

[10] See the following works: Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ian Haywood, ed., The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

[11] Simon Rennie, The Poetry of Ernest Jones Myth, Song, and the ‘Mighty Mind’ (Cambridge & Abingdon: Legenda, 2016), 60-1. See also Clare A. Simmons, ‘Introduction’, in Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages ed. Clare A. Simmons (London: F. Cass, 2005), 8.

[12] Technically, the first Robin Hood novel is an unpublished novel by Robert Southey entitled Harold, or, the Castle of Morford (1791). Richard I is a reformist king who, as in Scott’s Ivanhoe, travels into the forest incognito and associates with Robin’s band of outlaws. Interestingly, Southey also uses Saxon names such as Athelwold and Ulfrida, which are similar to some of those found in Scott’s novel. Southey’s MS. is currently held in the Weston Library, Oxford. See Bodleian MS. Eng. Misc. e. 114.

[13] Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 116-18.

[14] For a commentary upon Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822), see the following works: Marilyn Butler, “The Good Old Times: Maid Marian,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999), 141-54; Rob Gossedge, “Thomas Love Peacock, Robin Hood, and the Enclosure of Windsor Forest,” in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition ed. Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 135-64.

[15] Alice Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19: 4 (1965), 324.

[16] “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales eds. Stephen Knight & Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 135.

[17] On the Norman Forest Laws see the following works: A. J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood: The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 82-110; John Hudson, Forest Laws from Anglo-Saxon England to the Early Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979).

[18] Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Edinburgh: Black, 1871), 188.

[19] Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from the History of France, vol. 1 (Paris: Galignani, 1831), 138-55.

[20] Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle, ed. George Saintsbury (London: MacMillan, 1895), 13.

[21] Pierce Egan, Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London: W. S. Johnson, 1850), 212.

[22] Miller, Royston Gower, 7.

[23] Miller, Royston Gower, 25.

[24] Miller, Royston Gower, 269.

[25] Miller, Royston Gower, 107.

[26] Miller, Royston Gower, 26 & 117.

[27] The Adventures of Robin Hood, dir. Michael Curtis & William Keighley. Warner Bros. 1938 [DVD].

[28] Miller, Royston Gower, 117.

[29] For example,: An Historical Essay on the Magna Charta of King John (London: John Major, 1829); Magna Charta (London: S. Rousseau, 1810); John Cleland Wells, Magna Charta: or, The Rise and Progress of Constitutional Civil Liberty in England and America (London: Mills, 1880).

[30] Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper Written by Himself (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1872), 60.

[31] Michael J. Turner, Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (Westport, CT: Praegar, 2004), 4.

[32] Miller, Royston Gower, 20, 32, 117, 272.

[33] Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 53.

[34] Turner, Independent Radicalism, 4.

[35] Joseph Ritson (ed.), Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw 2 Vols. (London: T. Egerton, 1795), 1: v.

[36] Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 114-16.

[37] Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian and Crochet Castle ed. George Saintsbury (London: MacMillan, 1895), 88.

[38] Pierce Egan, Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (London, 1840; repr. London: W. S. Johnson, 1851), 101 & 190; for example, there is equality in Sherwood forest society as when the aristocratic Matilda goes to live with Robin Hood and the outlaws in the forest, she takes the name of Maid Marian so that people will not think her higher or lower than other forest dwellers; also, Robin Hood says that he had no choice but to build an egalitarian forest society, because mainstream society, with its laws that favour the rich, do not protect people.

[39] Miller, Royston Gower, 36.

[40] Miller, Royston Gower, 171.

[41] Miller, Royston Gower, 7.

[42] Miller, Royston Gower, 333.

[43] See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism’, in Routledge Revivals: Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity ed. Raphael Samuel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 57-89.

[44] On the various definitions of ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’, see Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14-45.