Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood

Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795) was the first attempt to assemble the legendary outlaw’s surviving medieval and early modern texts into a single, authoritative corpus. Produced at the height of Britain’s rivalry with revolutionary France, it was a profoundly political work, shaped by Ritson’s radical republicanism, legal training, and uncompromising scholarly principles. This critical edition presents Ritson’s Robin Hood, together with the prefatory materials, annotations, and later editorial interventions by his nephew, Joseph Frank, alongside a substantial new introduction that situates the book within eighteenth-century literary culture, antiquarian scholarship, and radical politics. Drawing on manuscript letters, legal records, contemporary reviews, and a wide range of printed sources, Stephen Basdeo reconstructs Ritson’s life as an editor, lawyer, and revolutionary, showing how his combative temperament and insistence on textual accuracy shaped the modern Robin Hood canon. With extensive appendices and notes—including additional ballads, dramatic texts, later forgeries, and contemporary criticism—this volume offers the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of Ritson’s Robin Hood to date. It will be essential reading for scholars of medieval and early modern literature, eighteenth-century culture, book history, and, most importantly, anyone who wishes to learn more about one of England’s most famous figures: The good outlaw Robin Hood.