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 new edition of Looke About You (1600) brings back into view a neglected early modern comic history play filled with disguise, court intrigue, and dynastic conflict. Featuring an unusual portrayal of Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntingdon, the play offers a fascinating alternative to the better-known outlaw tradition. Edited by Stephen Basdeo, this edition makes the text accessible to modern readers while preserving the character of the original quarto.
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 examines how the Robin Hood tradition was reshaped in the seventeenth century to express explicit anti-Catholic sentiment. Focusing on Robin Hood’s Golden Prize (1631) by the prolific broadside writer Laurence Price, earlier medieval critiques of corrupt churchmen were transformed after the Reformation into polemic aimed at Catholic priests.
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.
An exploration of Thomas Robins’s seventeenth-century Robin Hood ballads, tracing how street literature survives through accident, collection, and changing cultural values. Using Robins as a case study, this article examines authorship, adaptation of medieval materials, and the role of antiquaries in preserving popular song within Restoration print culture and memory.
“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.
“JUPITER and JUNO, willing to do honour to the marriage of the two famous rivers, Thamesis and Rhine, employ their messengers severally, Mercury and Iris, for that purpose.”
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.”
“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.”
“Um homem que, em uma era bárbara e sob uma tirania complicada, demonstrou um espírito de liberdade e independência.”
“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.”
“Many among us fancy that they have a good general idea of what is English literature. They think of Tennyson and Dickens as the most popular of our living authors. It is a fond delusion, from which they should be aroused. The works of Mr. Pierce Egan are sold by the half million.”
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.
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.”
The following poem, written by “J.A.” and titled “Robin Hood’s Grave” appeared in the Newcastle Magazine in November 1827. It has been transcribed by Stephen Basdeo.
What have historians said about Robin Hood, who he was, and the social and political context in which the early tales emerged?
Fans of outlaw stories, if they were ever able to time travel, might travel back to the 1820s and 1830s when Victor Hugo’s outlaw drama premiered.