11th Century… The Virgin and the Outlaw 5 Jun 2018 By Stephen Basdeo In modern popular culture, heroes often possess some supernatural powers, or at other times they are so skilled at what they do that their superiority often appears…
17th century… “Robin Hood’s Rescue of the Three Squires” and the Political Economy of Banditry 30 Mar 2018 Many Robin Hood ballads were printed as broadsides during the seventeenth century. The majority of them depict Robin Hood as a rather inept outlaw who, every time he stops somebody,…
20th Century… Reading Robin Hood in World War Two (1939–45): Data from Mass Observation 27 Jan 2018 Before the twentieth century, Robin Hood was a literary figure: he is the main protagonist in a number of important literary works such as A Gest of Robyn Hode (c.…
19th Century… Pierce Egan’s “Robin Hood Ballads” (1840) 6 Jan 2018 This post is not one of my usual essay style posts, with an introduction and conclusion, etc., but more of a research note after having got hold of a first…
18th century… The First Robin Hood Novel: Robert Southey’s “Harold, or, The Castle of Morford” (1791) 13 Jun 2017 (This is an updated version of an earlier post I made) Scholars generally point to 1819 as the year that the first Robin Hood novels appeared, these being the anonymous…
15th Century… Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Black Arrow” (1888) 3 Feb 20173 Feb 2017 Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is perhaps most famous nowadays for his brilliant novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). This post, however, is about a now…
