Pierce James Egan (1814–81), usually styled “the Younger,” occupies an important place in the nineteenth-century British Robin Hood tradition. As the author of the long-running penny serial Robin Hood and Little John; or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, published between 1838 and 1840, and reprinted in 1850, and then in the 1880s, it could be said that he shaped the reception of the Robin Hood legend among the British reading public in the nineteenth century. It was certainly a violent tale which led to some controversy in the press. One reviewer placed the novel in the same category as the equally controversial “Newgate novel” Jack Sheppard (1839) by William Harrison Ainsworth.[1]

Egan the Younger’s novel was reprinted five times throughout the nineteenth century and was translated by Alexandre Dumas into French. Egan’s father, named Pierce Egan, often styled “the Elder,” also made a seemingly minor contribution to the Robin Hood legend in his Book of Sports (1832) by writing a poem titled “The Queen of the Bow.” The poem is not unworthy of scholars’ notice given the popularity of Egan’s writing and the fact that editions of the Book of Sports remained in print until the 1860s. The text itself reimagines the seventeenth-century ballad of “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” for Regency-era sports fans, fusing classical and pastoral imagery with medieval tropes. Finally, as the poem reveals, Maid Marian’s now central place in the Robin Hood tradition was, in 1832 when Egan wrote it (and when it is contextualised alongside other contemporary sources) by no means assured in audiences’ minds. Poets and readers alike, when thinking of Robin Hood’s love interest, might have thought of Clorinda as readily as they did of Maid Marian.

Finally, the text of Egan’s “Queen of the Bow” is also presented here anew, complete with a critical commentary on its main themes. Egan’s spelling and contractions have been retained to preserve his deliberately antiquarian-style diction and orthography. Lineation follows the original exactly while editorial interventions are confined to the silent correction of obvious typographical errors.

Pierce Egan (1772–1849), Boxiana, and the Book of Sports

Egan the Elder was born probably in Ireland in 1772 into a poor family.[2] At some point in the late eighteenth century Egan’s day labourer father moved the entire family to London and by 1812 Egan was working for the publisher and printer George Smeeton in St Martin’s Lane.[3] This was in addition to a side job writing sports articles for the Weekly Dispatch. It was while he was working for Smeeton that, in 1812, Egan brought out the first volume of Boxiana; or, Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism. Further volumes followed until 1821 when Egan brought out another literary work titled Life in London, a work of fiction recounting the adventures, in high and low life, of two lower middle-class men, Tom and Jerry, who decide to experience for themselves all of the attractions that the Regency capital had to offer.

At some point before 1824 Egan left Smeeton’s employ and appears to have become the equivalent of what would nowadays be called a boxing promoter. The publication of the Boxiana volumes saw him become the man who arranged matches between the prizefighters. He could further enrich himself by reporting on these events, the narratives of which formed the basis of Boxiana II (1818), Boxiana III (1821), New Series Boxiana I (1828), and New Series Boxiana II (1829), which were published by Sherwood, Jones, and Co. In addition to these hefty volumes, Egan founded two weekly sports journals: Egan’s Life in London, and Sporting Guide, which ran between 1 February 1824 until 28 October 1827, and the less successful Egan’s Weekly Courier, from 4 January until 26 April 1829. The fact that he felt confident enough to attach his name to both newspapers illustrates his fame at the time: Egan and boxing were inseparable. He was the man whose voice was trusted among sports fans for great coverage. His name was a draw. It was such a draw, in fact, that when Egan fell out with Sherwood, Jones, and Co., they felt that Boxiana had to continue and appointed an anonymous writer to publish a new volume titled Boxiana IV (which is why Egan, seeking to distinguish his later writings from the “unofficial” Boxiana IV, titled his later Boxiana volumes as a “New Series.”)[4]

Pierce Egan’s Sports Journalism

Egan is often classified as a pioneer in the then nascent arena of sports journalism. Until well into the twentieth century, he continued to hold a special place among boxing journalists as the father of their trade. “The greatest writer about the ring who ever lived,” was the epithet given to Egan by boxing journalist A.J. Liebling in The Sweet Science—Boxing and Boxiana (1956), the title of that volume being a nod to a phrase popularised by Egan, as well as to Egan’s volumes themselves.[5] Without wishing to take away from Egan’s rightful place as a prominent sports journalist, it could be said that he might just as appropriately be placed among the ranks of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century amateur scholars and antiquaries. Indeed, we might place Egan more in the antiquarian tradition of Joseph Strutt, author of The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), rather than a song and ballad collector like Thomas Percy (1729–1811). For Boxiana, Egan uncovered countless stories of the old pugilist champions of England from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whose feats were recounted in old newspaper reports and oral tradition. To illuminate these boxers’ stories further, Egan drew upon evidence in old ballads as well as early modern historians such as John Leland, whose works Joseph Ritson also mined for information when compiling Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795). To this collection of the tales of old boxers was added a preface titled “Cursory Remarks on the Origin, Rise, and Progress of Pugilism in England” (which was anything but a “cursory” history of the sport but stretched to 46 pages).[6]

The spirit of Boxiana was continued in The Book of Sports; Egan wrote all of the articles which appeared in it, hence it was written in the same journalistic style as Boxiana but also drew upon historical scholarship to provide an entertaining narrative of whatever sport was covered in a particular monthly issue. It was a popular publication with copious footnotes, with footnotes occupying over half the page in some instances. Yet, although it was named a “book,” it was actually serialised first in monthly issues and came out on the first day of each month. This fact seems to have been missed by several of the commentators who have written about The Book of Sports. The most recent historian to write about this publication, David Snowdon, makes no mention of it originally being a serial.

Although the original issues are hard for any collector to come by, I have one single issue in my private collection. It does not contain a date, only a volume and issue number; presumably this was so that any reprints of the serials would not appear out of date to buyers. The single issue which I have is simply titled as “No. XXIV” and, as the masthead reveals, sold for a price of threepence.[7] The 3d price would have probably placed it beyond the reach of the average working-class reader. If Henry Mayhew’s words in London Labour and the London Poor, written a decade or so later, are to be believed, this was an era in which working-class families often had to “club” together to buy a one penny broadside, chapbook, or a periodical.[8] That being said, the Book of Sports was less expensive than a 6d magazine or newspaper (at which price Punch and the Times retailed) or a journal costing a shilling or half a crown (the price of a monthly number of Bentley’s Miscellany). Egan’s Book of Sports, then, was a paper for the lower middle class and labour aristocracy.

When the issues were bound together in a single book, all volume and issue numbers were removed, as well as notices on when future numbers would appear, with the result that each 16 page issue appears just like another chapter of a book rather than a separate number. Each issue focused on one particular sport, detailing its history as well as reporting recent events. Pigeon shooting was the focus of no. XXIV; horse racing occupied the pages of no. XXV. It was in the eighteenth issue of the Book of Sports that the adaptation of “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” appeared, in an issue devoted unsurprisingly to archery. Egan was a patriotic fellow, and the Book of Sports oozed with Egan’s love of country and its national sports. The eighteenth issue’s first page contained a poem which celebrated English bravery and Englishmen’s mastery of the bow and arrow. The first stanza reads thus:

‘Twas one day at a fete giv’n by Jove’s san souci;

The gods drinking nectar, the goddesses tea,

While many a whim did their pleasures beguile,

They at last talk’d of Britain, their favourite isle;

Of its loyalty, whence all its blessings increase;

Of its glory in war, of its splendour in peace;

Cry’d Jove, we’ll revive one accomplishment more,

Through which Britain’s sons gathered laurels of yore—

When fame led her archers wherever they went,

Proudly perch’d on the plume of the Bowmen of Kent.[9]

Written originally by Charles Dibdin,[10] the short poem continues in the same manner, written in heroic couplets of the kind favoured by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Oliver Goldsmith, in order to celebrate aspects of British history. The Olympians, residing in their own equivalent of Frederick the Great’s Sans Souci Palace, live a carefree life but their attention is soon turned to “their favourite isle” of Britain. As immortals, they remember the heroic exploits of the “Bowmen of Kent” at Agincourt. Although Kent bowman specifically, according to modern historiography, are not said to have played a huge role at Agincourt, or indeed in any other major historical event, in eighteenth-century historiography this was not the case. Taking its cue from Michael Drayton, another poem titled “The Bowmen of Kent,” written anonymously but with footnotes to historical sources, lauded these men’s deeds at the battles of Hastings, Agincourt, and during the Wars of the Roses.[11]

It is obvious that Egan has consulted Ritson. Following the “Bowmen of Kent” in this issue is a history of archery in which several of the historians cited by Ritson in 1795 (with further smaller editions published in 1820, 1823, and an enlarged critical edition in 1832) are employed to write a brief history of archery. The connection with Ritson, and not the accuracy of the history of archery, concerns us here. The exact same passages which Ritson cited are referred to, as is the case with Egan’s reference to Richard Niccols’s London’s Artillery (1616):

“How is it that our London hath laid downe

This worthy practise, which was once the crowne

Of all her pastime, when her Robin Hood

Had wont each yeare, when May did clad the wood,

With lustie greene, to lead his yong men out,

Whose brave demeanour, oft when they did shoot,

Invited royall princes from their courts,

Into the wilde woods to behold their sports!

A description of one drawing a bow.

Who thought it then a manly sight and trim,

To see a youth of cleane compacted lim,

Who, with a comely grace, in his left hand

Holding his bow, did take his stedfast stand,

Setting his left leg somewhat foorth before,

His arrow with his right hand nocking sure,

Not stooping, nor yet standing streight upright,

Then, with his left hand little ’bove his sight,

Stretching his arm out, with an easie strength,

To draw an arrow of a yard in length.”[12]

Were Egan a modern historian, presumably he would have had a footnote reading “Niccols, London’s Artillery, 1616 quoted in Ritson, Robin Hood, xcviii.” Yet Egan further mined Ritson’s “Notes and Illustrations” section from Robin Hood by going on to quote the episodes—from Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548)—when King Henry VIII played Robin Hood and his courtiers twice dressed up as Robin Hood.[13]

And so we arrive, after a brief history of archery and the mentions of King Henry VIII playing Robin Hood, to Egan’s poem of the “Queen of the Bow.” We can safely say that Egan was the author of the poem. It does not appear in any other contemporary magazine (as far as I’m aware). Although Egan on occasion employed other writers to write sections of the magazine and mined other texts for poems, the writer’s name or initials were usually appended to the article. Let us briefly review the history of “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage,” however, for we cannot study the adaptation of the ballad by Egan without first knowing the history of the original.

The History of “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage”

“Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” emerged in the decades after 1660 as one of the most elaborate seventeenth-century attempts to supply Robin Hood with a fully developed life story, something not seen since the fifteenth-century Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (1495) and the “Sloane Life of Robin Hood,” both of which seem to have been quietly forgotten about save for a brief influence upon Ben Jonson.[14] Although the earliest surviving copies of “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” date from c.1684–1709, internal evidence places its composition soon after the Restoration, almost certainly in the wake of Charles II’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

The ballad’s explicit prayer for royal heirs signals this terminus post quem,[15] but even more compelling is its portrayal of Robin’s bride, Clorinda, as a shepherdess—an image heavily associated with Catherine’s own carefully crafted court iconography, including Huysmans’s celebrated portrait of the queen in pastoral dress (see my previous post on this ballad).[16] The poem also resonates with the period’s royal enthusiasm for archery:[17] Charles II was famous for championing the sport, and Catherine herself was a skilled archer and patron of the Honourable Fraternity of Bowmen.^[18] These cultural echoes firmly embed the ballad in the ideological, ceremonial, and visual culture of the mid-1660s, situating it as a literary homage to the restored monarchy disguised within the familiar framework of a Robin Hood narrative.

The presence in the legend of a heroine named Clorinda has long puzzled Robin Hood scholars, but the most persuasive explanation links her not to Tasso’s warrior Clorinda but to the pastoral Clorinda of Spenser’s Doleful Lay and to similarly themed songs circulating in mid-seventeenth-century manuscript culture.[19] This reinforces Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren’s observation that the poem is “patently a literary confection”—a text that draws not from medieval outlaw tradition but from contemporary poetic fashions.[20] Nevertheless, despite its literary artifice, the ballad enjoyed considerable circulation. It appeared not only in broadside form but also in prestigious anthologies such as Ambrose Phillips’s Collection of Old Ballads (1723) and Tonson’s Miscellany Poems (1727).[21] Dicey printed both garland and broadside versions in the mid-eighteenth century, evidence that the poem appealed to a broad readership. Strikingly, this popularity contrasts with its later scholarly neglect: neither Dobson–Taylor nor Child accorded it significant attention, partly because its wintertime, courtly, and pastoral elements sat uneasily beside the more familiar woodland outlawry of the traditional corpus. Only with Alexander Kaufman’s recent reassessment has the ballad begun to receive sustained critical treatment.^[22]

The poem itself offers an origin-story for Robin Hood set against a backdrop of Tudor–Stuart Christmas festivities—a deliberate choice that would have resonated strongly in the early 1660s, when Charles II restored the seasonal celebrations abolished by the Commonwealth regime.[23] In this tale, Robin is no outlaw but a gentleman visiting his kin at Gamwell Hall, befriending Little John through Yuletide games, and later venturing into an Arcadian landscape where he and Clorinda hunt, feast, and ultimately marry. The only “outlaws” are threatening forest figures whom Robin must resist, positioning him firmly on the side of order and lawful authority. In its union of the “King of the Forest” with the “Queen of the Shepherdesses,” the ballad allegorises the recent royal marriage while presenting a domesticated, court-friendly Robin Hood suitable for gentry consumption. Its tone, imagery, and narrative trajectory transform the outlaw legend into a Restoration pastoral celebrating loyalty, festivity, and dynastic hope, and anticipating later genteel reimaginings such as Pierce Egan the Younger’s refined retellings.

Pierce Egan’s “Queen of the Bow” (1832)

Prior to embarking upon a discussion of Pierce Egan’s “Queen of the Bow,” the entire poem, in accordance with the editorial principles set forth in the introduction, is presented below.

The Queen of the Bow

Refresh’d like Aurora^[24] when Cancer^[25] prevails,

And the perfumes of Nature make charming the gales:

Clorinda came forth from her forest of oaks,

Like Dian,^[26] the huntress whom Corinth invokes:

More keen than her arrows her heart-piercing eye,

And more certain to wound as her lovers pass’d by.

O’er the daisy-dress’d mead as her nimble foot trips,

Her silver-bound bugle she rais’d to her lips;

At the musical blast busy Echo awakes,

And tells her approach to the rivers and lakes;

Each nymph of the streamlet unmantles her face,

And looks with a smile to the Queen of the chace.^[27]

From the mansion of Peace, on the side of a hill,

Where the fountains of health their pure waters distil;

Bold Robin the Bowman came forth to the plain,

And return’d his Clorinda the melod’ous strain—

Where wanders my charmer?—I go, cries the fair,

To kill a fat buck, then to Nottingham fair.

From a covert, with woodbines and dog-roses drest,

Where the ring-doves were feeding their young in the nest;

A pricket^[28] burst forth, not a finer could be,

Like a sun-beam he flitted the stream and the lea;

But swifter the dart of Clorinda was thrown,

She pierc’d his warm heart, and he sank with a groan.

John Little came running with Clim of the Clough,

Applauding Clorinda, the Queen of the Bow.

While Robin directed his men to repair

With the buck she had slain to the booth in the fair:

Where quickly the maid with her Robin was seen,

To dance the pipe round the pole on the green.

The tread being over, the song and the dance,

And to sleep the dull hours seem’d in haste to advance;

[From]^[29] the mansion of Peace was the signal to go,

And Love with his torch led the Queen of the Bow.

Peace, pleasure, and love, may our archers still share,

Like ROBIN the Bold, and Clorinda the FAIR.

The poem is generally, though not always, written throughout in rhymed iambic pentameter, arranged in couplets, a metre that lends dignity and musical balance to the narrative. Each line generally consists of five iambic feet, producing that familiar rhythm of English high verse found in poetry from Chaucer to Alexander Pope. The regularity of the metre gives the poem a measured, almost graceful pace appropriate to its subject: the stately yet lively movements of Clorinda, the huntress and “Queen of the Bow.” The couplet form allows each pair of lines to present a complete image or idea; the result of this is to echo the harmony of the pastoral world.

Egan is not averse, however, to bending the rules of neoclassical metre when the subject demands it, for occasional variations keep the action lively or emphasise particular events. Hence the beginning of the poem, with its trochee, which draws the reader’s attention to the bright dawn of a summer season. This metrical arrangement situates the poem within the neoclassical tradition of descriptive verse. Further references to natural beauty and moral harmony, combined with the poem’s polished regularity and musical precision, render it similar to the sentiments expressed on a much larger scale in James Thomson’s The Seasons.[30]

The effect of the rhymed iambic pentameter and its almost (though not completely) polished regularity lifts the story out of the world of rough and ready medieval and early modern ballad poetry and into the refined arena of neoclassical poetry. Yet Egan is not totally abandoning the early modern period. He does use archaisms that would be more suited to the time of Shakespeare and Jonson. The words “chace” and “drest” are obviously meant to signal to the reader that we have not yet fully left the medieval era. The poem ultimately depicts the medieval era with a neoclassical overlay.

The poem is replete with classical allusions. As we have seen, the writer of the original “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” situated the events of the tale at Christmas time and in the process invoked the memory of sumptuous Tudor feasts. Egan, however, from the outset, places the tale in summer time with his allusions to Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn. The goddess was invoked by a number of eighteenth-century poets to symbolise an early summertime dawn. Mary Mathilda Betham’s “The Outlaw” (1797), for example, situates an outlawed Saxon’s pensive musings over his fiancée Adelaide’s impending marriage to the Norman Ranulph in that period of the morning just “BEFORE the fair Aurora spread / Her azure mantle o’er the skies.”[31] Tobias Smollett associated Aurora with joy and mirth in the morning.[32] Cancer, the sign of the zodiac that is typically associated with midsummer, or June and July, was invoked by Alexander Pope in Windsor Forest (1713). No longer, therefore, is Clorinda in Egan’s text confined to the woods in the freezing cold winter, for the Queen of the Shepherdesses is almost the personification of the summer.

Conclusion

It may seem strange to Robin Hood scholars that the heroine of Egan’s 1832 poem is Clorinda and not Maid Marian. After all, Marian is conceived of as the heroine who first appeared alongside Robin Hood in village plays and whose status as Robin Hood’s love interest was cemented in Anthony Munday’s Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and the Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1597–98). After this there followed a ballad of dubious literary quality, titled “Robin Hood and Maid Marian,” which Ritson was so disappointed with he thought it scarcely worth republication in his 1795 collection.[33] Ritson only pays scant attention to Marian in his “Life of Robin Hood;” his remarks on her totalled no more than a sentence. Instead, if you were an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century reader, you were often as likely to think of Clorinda as of Marian as Robin Hood’s love interest.

Indeed, although Stephen Knight refers to the alleged “brilliance and influence” of Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822),[34] it only went through one edition.[35] Egan’s poem thus preserves a moment before Marian’s eventual dominance had rendered Robin Hood’s alternative heroines marginal, when Clorinda remained a recognisable and viable consort for the outlaw. His recasting of her as the classical and pastoral “Queen of the Bow” demonstrates how readily the older ballad tradition could be reshaped for the tastes and sporting culture of the early nineteenth century.

References

[1] “‘Modern Perversions,” The Westminster Review vol. 33 (London: Henry Hooper, 1840), 425 and Charles MacKay, “On the Popular Admiration for Great Thieves,” Bentley’s Miscellany July (1841), 411

[2] Dennis Prestidge, introduction to Boxiana; or, Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, by Pierce Egan (Leicester: Vance Harvey, 1971), ix and John C. Reid, Bucks and Bruisers: Pierce Egan and Regency England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 10–11.

[3] David Snowdon, Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 15.

[4] Snowdon, Writing the Prizefight, 17.

[5] A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science—Boxing and Boxiana: A Ringside View (1956. London: Penguin, 2018), xv.

[6] Pierce Egan, Boxiana; or, Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism from the Days of the Renowned Broughton and Slack, vol. 1 (London: Sherwood, Jones and Co., 1823), 1–46.

[7] Pierce Egan, masthead to The Book of Sports no. XXIV (n. d), 369

[8] Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93.

[9] Pierce Egan, The Book of Sports and Mirror of Life (London: William Tegg, n.d.), 241.

[10] Charles Dibdin, “The Bowmen of Kent,” The Sporting Magazine; or, Monthly Calendar of the Transactions of the Turf and the Chace December (1792), 107.

[11] T. Nichols, “The Bowmen of Kent,” The Sporting Magazine; or, Monthly Calendar of the Transactions of the Turf and the Chace December (1792), 176

[12] Egan, Book of Sports, 248; Joseph Ritson, “Notes and Illustrations,” in Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, ed. Joseph Ritson, vol. 1 (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795), xcviii. Original reference: Richard Niccols, Londons Artillery briefly containing the noble practise of that wothie [sic] societie: with the moderne and ancient martiall exercises, natures of armes, vertue of magistrates, antiquitie, glorie and chronography of this honourable cittie (London: Thomas Creede and Bernard Allsopp, 1616), 87.

[13] Egan, Book of Sports, 249; Ritson, “Notes and Illustrations,” xcviii–c. Original reference: Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1548), f.6v, f.56v.

[14] See Stephen Knight, “ ‘Meere English Flocks’: Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd and the Robin Hood Tradition,” in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. Helen Phillips (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 131.

[15] A New Ballad of bold Robin Hood: Shewing His Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage, at Titbury Bull-running: Calculated for the Meridian of Staffordshire, but may serve for Derbyshire or Kent (London: Printed by and for W.O. and are to be sold by the Booksellers, c. 1696-1709?). British Library—Roxburghe C.20.f.7.360-361.

[16] Royal Collection Trust, “Jacob Huysmans’s Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705) c. 1662-64: RCIN 405665,” (2022), https://www.rct.uk/collection/exhibitions/charles-ii-art-power/the-queens-gallery-buckingham-palace/catherine-of-braganza-1638-1705

[17] Victoria and Albert Museum, “Archery Shield (made 1676),” (n.d.), https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78407/archery-shield-cooqus-john-gerard/archery-shield-cooqus-john-g%C3%A9rard/

[18] Ely Hargrove, Anecdotes of Archery (1792. York and London: Hamilton, Adams, 1845), 62.

[19] See Charles G. Osgood, “The ‘Doleful Lay of Clorinda’,” Modern Language Notes 35 no. 2 (1920), 90-96

[20] Knight and Ohlgren, introduction to “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour , and Marriage,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 527

[21] “The Pedigree, Education, and Marriage of Robin Hood with Clorinda, Queen of Titbury Feast,” in A Collection of Old Ballads, edited by Hugh Cunningham, vol. 1 (London: J. Roberts, 1723), 64–74 and “An Old Ballad of Bold Robin Hood, Shewing His Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage, at Titbury Bull-running: Calculated for the Meridian of Staffordshire, but may serve for Derbyshire or Kent. To a Pleasant Tune” in The Sixth Part of Miscellany Poems, Containing a Variety of New Translations of Ancient Poets: Together with Several Original Poems by the Most Eminent Hands. Publish’d by Mr. Dryden, edited by Jacob Tonson (London: J. Tonson, 1727), 276–82.

[22] Alexander L. Kaufman, Christmastime Texts and the Popularity of the Robin Hood Tradition (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2025), 29.

[23] Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, introduction to “Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 527

[24] The Roman goddess of the dawn.

[25] Midsummer.

[26] Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting.

[27] chase.

[28] A young stag.

[29] The original copy begins with “For,” but this does not make any sense in this context and is likely a misprint. The signal is going out from the mansion, so it was probably “from” (or out) of the mansion of peace.

[30] Matthew Parfitt, “The Seasons by James Thomson,” EBSCO Knowledge Advantage (2022), https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/seasons-james-thomson

[31] Mary Mathilda Betham, “The Outlaw,” in Elegies and Other Small Poems (Ipswich: Printed by W. Burrell, 1797), 27.

[32] Tobias Smollett, “Ode to Mirth,” in The Poetical Works of Tobias Smollett, ed. Charles Cooke (London: C. Cooke, 1800), 62.

[33] Joseph Ritson, introduction to “Robin Hood and Maid Marian,” in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, ed. Joseph Ritson, vol. 2 (London: T. Egerton and J. Johnson, 1795), 156.

[34] Knight, Reading Robin Hood, 154

[35] William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 361.