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 Ad...

Blends humor with factual storytelling, turning kings, queens, and historic events into witty, irreverent narratives.“Nothing now succeeds unless it’s in the comic line. We have comic Latin grammars, and comic Greek grammars; indeed, I don't know but what English grammar, too, is a comedy altogether. All our tragedies are made into comedies by the way they are performed; and no work sells without comic illustrations to it. I have brought out several new comic works...

Traces how apocalyptic fears and visions have shaped popular culture from medieval times to today.People have always imagined that human history has an end point. The way this has been imagined has varied according to time, place, and culture. In medieval England people lived in expectation of the Biblical Day of Judgment, when the world would end and people would be judged by God according to their sins. In art and literature from the early modern period onwards, ...

An analysis of the builders of the British Empire, how they were represented in popular culture of the day, and how that vision has changed over time.From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world's surface. The common saying was that "the sun never sets on the British Empire." What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock...

"Pestilence entered… The ordinary pursuits of society were paralysed; all previously-formed plans of happiness, business, trade, occupation, and domestic arrangement, were checked as cruelly and abruptly as if every principle of the human mind were in a moment subverted… The physicians saw that human aid was vain, and that destruction inevitably awaited all who approached the infected. Terrific mortality! Appalling scourge of the human race!" — George W.M. Reynolds Throughout history human...

Throughout history brave Englishmen and women have never been afraid to rise up against their unjust rulers and demand their rights. Barely a century has gone by without England being witness to a major uprising against the government of the day, often resulting in a fundamental change to the constitution. This book is a collection of biographies, written by experts in their field, of the lives and deeds of famous English freedom fighters, rebels, and democrats who have had a major impact ...

George W.M. Reynolds (1814–79) was one of the biggest-selling novelists of the Victorian era. He was the author of over 58 novels and short stories and his "penny blood" The Mysteries of London, serialised in weekly numbers between 1844 and 1848, sold over a million copies. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Reynolds's Mysteries, and its follow-up The Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), contained tales of crime, vice, and highly sexualised scenes. For this reason Charles Dicke...

The Georgian era, we are told, was a "polite and commercial" era. The supposedly refined aristocracy governed the nation while the bourgeoisie, at the center of the largest empire the world had ever known, expanded the nation's overseas trading interests while currying royal favors. It was an era which witnessed the flowering of art, literature, and music. But at the heart of the British Empire was something rotten: Vice, corruption, and crime reigned supreme. Someone had had enough and de...

"Impressively researched . . . an extraordinary combination of biography and cultural history" from the author of Heroes and Villains of the British Empire ( Midwest Book Review).Robin Hood is a national English icon. He is portrayed as a noble robber, who, along with his band of merry men, is said to have stolen from the rich and given to the poor. His story has been re-imagined many times throughout the centuries.Reader...

A fascinating historical survey of the world's most infamous outlaws.For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them.This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery...

In 1381, England was on the brink - the poor suffered the effects of war, the Black Death, and Poll Tax. At this time the brave Wat Tyler arose to lead the commoners, forming an army who set off to London to meet with King Richard II and present him with a list of grievances and demands for redress. Tyler was treacherously struck down by the Lord Mayor. His head hacked from his shoulders, pierced on a spike, and made a spectacle on London Bridge. Yet he lived on through the succeeding cent...

This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere ...