The name of Joseph Ritson, born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1752, will be familiar to very few people. The name of Robin Hood is known the world over. Yet it was Ritson whose research in the late eighteenth century ensured the survival of the Robin Hood legend. He traveled all over the country looking for ancient manuscripts which told of the life and deeds of England’s most famous outlaw. Without his efforts, the legend of Robin Hood might have gone the way of other medieval outlaws such as Adam Bell — famous in their day but not so much now. Yet this is not only a story about the formation of the Robin Hood legend. Ritson’s story is one of rags to riches. Born in humble circumstances, his aptitude for learning meant that he rose through society’s ranks and became a successful lawyer, local official, and a gentleman. However, underneath the genteel and bourgeois façade of Joseph Ritson, Esq. was a revolutionary: having traveled to Paris at the height of the French Revolution, he was captivated by the revolutionaries’ ideology of liberté, egalité, fraternité. He returned to England as a true democrat who sought the abolition of the British monarchy and the ‘rotten’ parliamentary system and wished for French Revolution and its reign of terror to spread over to England. This the history of the life and times of Joseph Ritson: gentleman, scholar, and revolutionary.

This cutting-edge volume demonstrates both the literary quality and the socio-economic importance of works on "the matter of the greenwood" over a long chronological period. These include drama texts, prose literature and novels (among them, children's literature), and poetry. Whilst some of these are anonymous, others are by acknowledged canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Keats. The editors and the contributors argue that it is vitally important to include Robin Hood texts in the canon of English literary works, because of the high quality of many of these texts, and because of their significance in the development of English literature.

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Horgan analyses the importance of songs in British eighteenth-century culture with specific reference to their political meaning. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining the perspectives of literary studies and cultural history, the utilitarian power of songs emerges across four major case studies.

A record of literary properties sold at auction in the United States.

Robin Hood is one of the most enduring and well-known figures of English folklore. Yet who was he really? In this intriguing book, Lesley Coote reexamines the early tales about Robin in light of the stories, both English and French, that have grown up around them—stories with which they shared many elements of form and meaning. In the process, she returns to questions such as where did Robin come from, and what did these stories mean? The Robin who reveals himself is as spiritual as he is secular, and as much an insider as he is an outlaw. And in the context of current debates about national identity and Britain’s relationship with the wider world, Robin emerges to be as European as he is English—or perhaps, as Coote suggests, that is precisely the quality which made him fundamentally English all along.