Robin Hood's Delight
Robin Hood's Delight is
Synopsis
One midsummer day,
Historical and cultural significance
This ballad is part of a group of ballads about
Writing of the Robin Hood ballads after A Gest of Robyn Hode, their Victorian collector Francis Child claimed that variations on the "'Robin met with his match'" theme, such as this ballad, are "sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening," and that "a considerable part of the Robin Hood poetry looks like char-work done for the petty press, and should be judged as such."[4] Child had also called the Roxburghe and Pepys collections (in which some of these ballads are included) "'veritable dung-hills [...], in which only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel.'"[5]
However, as
On the other hand, the broadsides are significant in themselves as showing, as English jurist and legal scholar John Selden (1584–1654) puts it, "'how the wind sits. As take a straw and throw it up in the air; you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.'"[7] Even though the broadsides are cultural ephemera, unlike weightier tomes, they are important because they are markers of contemporary "current events and popular trends."[7]
It has been speculated that in his time Robin Hood represented a figure of
Archival holdings
The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds two seventeenth-century broadside ballad versions of this tale: one in the Pepys collection at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge (2.112), and another in the Crawford collection at the National Library of Scotland (1162).[11]
References
- Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Retrieved 12 August 2012.
- ^ Watt (1993), pp. 39–40
- ^ Watt (1993), pp. 39–40, quoting Edward Dering, A brief and necessary instruction (1572), sig.A2v.
- ^ Child (2003), p. 42
- ^ Brown (2010), p. 67; Brown's italics
- ^ a b Brown (2010), p. 69
- ^ a b Fumerton & Guerrini (2010), p. 1
- ^ Holt (1989), pp. 37–38
- ^ Holt (1989), p. 10
- ^ Singman (1998), p. 46, and first chapter as a whole
- ^ "Ballad Archive Search - UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive". Ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Retrieved 2015-06-02.
Bibliography
- Brown, Mary Ellen (2010). "Child's ballads and the broadside conundrum". In Patricia Fumerton; Anita Guerrini; Kris McAbee (eds.). Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 57–72. ISBN 978-0-7546-6248-8.
- Child, Francis James, ed. (2003) [1888–1889]. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. 3. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
- Fumerton, Patricia; Guerrini, Anita (2010). "Introduction: straws in the wind". In Patricia Fumerton; Anita Guerrini; Kris McAbee (eds.). Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 1–9. ISBN 978-0-7546-6248-8.
- ISBN 0-500-27541-6.
- Singman, Jeffrey L. (1998). Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-30101-8.
- Watt, Tessa (1993). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. ISBN 9780521458276.
External links
- Link to a facsimile sheet of an early modern version of this ballad at the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara: [1]
- Link to an audio recording of this ballad
- "Robin Hood's Delight". Rochester, New York, USA: University of Rochester. Retrieved 12 August 2012.
- Link to the website of The Robin Hood Project, a collection of webpages chronicling the development of Robin Hood from his medieval origins to modern depictions, at the Robbins Library at the University of Rochester: [2]
- Link to a fairly comprehensive website on all things Robin Hood, including historical background on the real Robin Hood and other characters of the legend, texts and recordings of Robin Hood stories, resources for teachers and students, information about adaptations, and more: [3]