Spotlight Post: Robin Hood
Today we present our second edition of Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw; to which are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, published posthumously in two volumes at London by William Pickering in 1832. Pickering added more stories to this edition which Ritson had compiled since the first edition in 1795 by T. Egerton, Whitehall, and J. Johnson in London. The Pickering edition was printed by Charles Whittingham the Elder at his Chiswick Press. The history of texts begin in the oral tradition as ballads and songs. These can be very tricky, because they can vary by region and even from telling to telling. The Robin Hood story came out of the troubadour stories of the Middle Ages, which is why the title describes the book as a collection of poems, songs and ballads. The oldest surviving tale of Robin Hood is an English folk ballad entitled A Gest of Robyn Hode printed around 1500, but it would not necessarily be recognizable as the Robin Hood in our edition or the stories we know today.
Some of the significant additions made by Ritson were the first printing of the ballad of Robin Hood and the Potter, and the omission of Robin Hood and the Monk, which was added by Pickering to the second edition’s appendix. Ritson also wrote a preface that is the first attempt to tie the character of Robin Hood to a historical figure, Robert Fitzooth c.1274 or alternatively Robin Fitz Odoth. Scholars, however, now believe that these were also false names, because there was never a Robert, son of the Earl of Huntingdon.
