“Upon thy well-made choice of friends, and books; Then do I love thee, and behold thy ends In making thy friends books, and thy books friends.” Ben Jonson, Epigrams, LXXXVI, ‘To the […]
Michael Drayton’s Robin Hood carries arrows pieced from “birch and brazil” and a bow of Spanish yew. These weapons connect England’s imagined medieval past to early modern global trade. Tracing brazilwood from Portuguese America to English workshops reveals the colonial labour and Atlantic commerce concealed behind the outlaw’s familiar arms.
“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.”