This article examines Punch’s 1894 poem ‘Bold Robin Hood’, which recast Sir William Harcourt’s Budget as fiscal outlawry. Rather than celebrating Robin Hood’s moral economy, Edwin James Milliken’s satire made redistributive taxation appear as cant, coercion, and highway robbery in defence of property and middle-class respectability.
This article explores how Chartist newspapers, poems, and historical essays transformed Wat Tyler from a vilified medieval rebel into a hero of working-class memory. It argues that the Chartists played a crucial role in making Tyler a lasting symbol of protest, political resistance, and radical historical consciousness.
An open access version of the Robin Hood pageant Metropolis Coronata (1615), linking the outlaw myth to London’s Lord Mayor’s triumph.
Zé Maria da Fortaleza’s Adventures of Robin Hood (2007) retells the outlaw legend in Brazilian cordel verse. Robin becomes leader of a woodland brotherhood resisting injustice, defeats the Sheriff through disguise and skill, wins Marian’s love, and is ultimately vindicated by King Richard, blending English folklore with Brazilian popular tradition.
This article recovers Samuel Smithson, a prolific seventeenth-century broadside ballad writer, as the author of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Moving beyond debates of literary merit, it shows how professional balladists helped sustain and reshape the Robin Hood tradition through early modern print culture in England.
Álvares de Azevedo’s Macário (1850) transforms the traditional tempter of Christian drama into a philosophical moral arbiter who performs God’s work in sifting the irredeemable from the earth. In Macário, then, the Devil emerges not as corrupter or tempter but as the play’s moral centre: urbane, eloquent, and disgusted by human hypocrisy and irreligiosity. His irony exposes the spiritual decay of a society already more corrupt than Hell itself.
“Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage” was published in 1662 and celebrated England’s new queen from Portugal, Catherine of Braganza.
While editing Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795), I stumbled upon an unexpected reference to “the sweet science” of boxing. This small detail opens a window into Georgian England, where Ritson’s antiquarian scholarship met the vibrant popular culture of his age. His nod to “the boasted worthies of the knuckle” reminds us that Robin Hood was never just a medieval study—it was also a reflection of eighteenth-century London life, where learning, liberty, and pugilism could coexist.
Today, little survives of Wynken de Worde beyond his books and, in the case of Robin Hood, the words that still echo through the text that he helped to preserve. Yet his presses in Fleet Street and his generosity to fellow printers (Goes and Copland) shaped the version of Robin Hood that eighteenth-century antiquaries like Ritson rediscovered—and that we still recognise today. Every time the lytell geste is quoted or staged, we are hearing not just the voice of a now unnamed medieval poet but also the imprint of the enterprising immigrant printer who turned a forest legend into a bestseller in both his own and our time.
In Harleian MS 367, which dates from the time of Henry VIII’s Reformation, in which the name of Robin Hood is used to satirise the Catholic Church and the Reformers.
Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), a conveyancer and passionate literary critic, significantly impacted the study of the Robin Hood legend with his 1795 work, “Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems.” His nephew, Joseph Frank, later edited Ritson’s works, updating and adapting them for contemporary audiences while preserving their scholarly essence.
The name of the Pinder to Wakefield locals is, as Shakespeare might say, ‘familiar in [their] mouths as household words’. The Pinders Fields, however, reveal an exciting history of rebellion, outlawry, and patriotism; so expressed in Robert Greene’s play in 1599 titled “The Pinner of Wakefield.”
One of the book’s central premises is therefore incorrect … Upon weak foundations and generalisations does Danahay and Howey’s Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism: Re-Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (2024) begin.
“Now I would hesitate to give this such a glowing and positive review. The reason for this is hinted at in the review above but never expanded upon; there is no discussion or G.R.R. Martin’s place in the long line of medievalism and fantasy authors which preceded him.”
“Though a heavy tax, or a requisition order … might not in itself precipitate a rising, it might do so in the context of strained social relationships … This strain is seen by the peasants from an apparently conservative standpoint. They cannot accept the abandonment of traditional roles by any one of the orders of society—whose basic structure they do not, to begin with, challenge.”
“The blind man ran. The lame man ran. The man with no legs ran. And then, as he penetrated further down the street, the legless, the blind and the halt came swarming around him, together with the one-armed, the one-eyed, and the lepers with their sores….”
“Um homem que, em uma era bárbara e sob uma tirania complicada, demonstrou um espírito de liberdade e independência.”
“Society was held together by brute force, intrigue, cord and axe, and woman’s flattery. But a push seemed needed to overthrow it. Yet it was quite secure, nevertheless, as there was none to give that push.”
“Talk of Robin Hood and Little John, and their dingy imitators in this metropolis described by Dickens and Ainsworth … The same man passes from one form into another – developing, according to the changes in society, from a forester to a mountaineer, thence to a highwayman, thence to an instructor of pickpockets and the receiver of their day’s work in St. Giles.”
1848. The Chartists were down and despondent. Their third petition had been rejected by the government outright. What they needed was a new sense of purpose and, perhaps, a “Tyler” to speak to them.
This article examines the teaching and reception of British medieval history in Guyana. It takes an interdisciplinary approach by conducting textual analysis of Guyanese school textbooks to determine precisely what aspects of British medieval history were taught, which included events such as the Norman Conquest (1066), King Stephen’s reign, as well as medieval folk talks such as Dick Whittington, Robin Hood, and Old King Cole.
An associate of mine, Dr Howard Williams, gives his account of the lies and defamation spread about him at the hands of certain medievalists in the journal Postmedieval.
All of the newspapers which covered the event paid significant attention to the panel on Robin Hood, which, if it happened to a Robin Hood conference today, would be a significant publicity coup.
“He unites the exactness of the [medieval] chronicles, the majestic grandeur of history, and the all-compelling interest of romance.”