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THE RADICAL WHO INVENTED ROBIN HOOD  
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Mat Coward
December 7, 2025
Morning Star
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_ An 18th-century scholar and revolutionary democrat Joseph Ritson
turned a medieval outlaw into England’s people’s hero — and
blacklisted writers popularized his story for a new generation in the
1950s TV show. _

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[Nottingham]
 
Around about now, at theatres all over Britain, a pantomine called
Robin Hood is either rehearsing or opening. Everyone in the
English-speaking world knows who Robin was — a valiant medieval
outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. And the reason
we’ve all heard of him is a man named Joseph Ritson: 18th-century
lawyer, antiquary, revolutionary democrat and all-round eccentric.

He’s the one who dyed the Robin Hood legend red, so thoroughly that
even the worst modern TV version can’t rinse it away.

Ritson was born of humble peasant stock in 1752 at Stockton-on-Tees.
As a teenager he was apprenticed to a lawyer, and spent most of his
adult life living in London and working at conveyancing.

He was successful at the law, but his greater passion was for historic
British literature. He became a recognised Shakespeare scholar, always
determined to go back to original sources and ruthlessly attack
misattributions, rewrites and later edits. His outspoken, and
sometimes intemperate criticisms of other scholars made him a
controversial figure.

His many enemies — and some of his allies — often mocked Ritson
for the vegetarian diet which he had adopted as a youth. In a
surviving letter to his sister, he warns that “you will certainly
find yourself healthier, and if you have either conscience or
humanity, happier, in abstaining from animal food than you could
possibly be in depriving, by the indulgence of an unnatural appetite
and the adherence to a barbarous custom, hundreds, if not thousands,
of innocent creatures of their lives, to the enjoyment of which they
have as good a right as yourself.”

He was also an atheist and indeed, at the time of his death, claimed
to be “writing a pamphlet proving Jesus Christ an impostor.”

Ritson’s rebel political views came on him gradually as he got
older; one of the key moments was his decision to take a long holiday
in Paris — during the French Revolution. What he experienced there
convinced him that republicanism, egalitarianism and democracy were
the way forward for the human race.

It was, he thought, inevitable and entirely desirable that France’s
revolution would spread to Britain. Unlike many other British
radicals, who abandoned their support for France during the Terror,
Ritson never lost his faith in the French example.

This revolutionary outlook came together in 1795 with his love of
medieval British poetry, songs and ballads, and a mission to track
down and preserve their purest, uncorrupted texts, when he published
the work for which he is remembered.

His book on Robin Hood aimed to collect every authentic tale, every
scrap of information, about Robin to put him in a historical as well
as literary context.

It is from this book that we get the concept of Robin as a people’s
hero — “for all opposition to tyranny is the cause of the
people” — and a freedom fighter. The idea of the noble outlaw, who
only kills when forced to, who never steals except from the rich and
corrupt, and who supports and is supported by the common folk of the
forest, stems almost entirely from Ritson’s influential writings.

It’s reasonable to say that Joseph Ritson was “the man who
invented Robin Hood,” at least the Robin known from the start of the
19th century up until today.

The last years of his life saw increasingly erratic and troubling
behaviour and various forms of ill-health, until he died in a Hoxton
asylum in 1803. Ritson’s Robin continued to be an important figure
to democrats and socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries, each
generation retelling his stories in ways that chimed with current
events and ideologies.

During the second half of the 20th century the legend was kept alive,
and indeed amplified, by Hannah Weinstein’s 1955-59 TV series, The
Adventures of Robin Hood, which stuck faithfully to the Ritsonian view
of Robin. Starring Richard Greene as Robin, it was a superior piece of
television drama, still critically admired and fondly remembered
today. What most people didn’t know about it at the time was that
the whole thing was a communist conspiracy.

Weinstein was a US dissident living in exile in London. She worked
with the Communist Party of the USA to create a production company to
develop and sell television programmes which would provide employment
to some of the many US writers who had been banned from working in
their own country due to their political beliefs.

She employed around two dozen blacklisted screenwriters on The
Adventures. Working under pseudonyms, they included Ring Lardner Jnr,
who had been one of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers but was put in
prison for refusing to tell a Senate hearing whether or not he was a
member of the Communist Party.

He later described Weinstein’s series — which she sold to US
networks as well — as “perhaps, in some small way, setting the
stage for the 1960s by subverting a whole new generation of young
Americans” through its anti-Establishment plots and dialogue.

In Britain the series was an immediate smash-hit, establishing the
newly launched ITV as a financial success and a serious producer of
original dramatic material.

But the best-remembered element of the show is surely the theme song,
with its immortal first verse (and laughably bad second verse — look
it up), which includes a line that perfectly sums up Ritson’s Robin,
and explains why he will always be England’s greatest hero:

“Feared by the bad, Loved by the good — Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Robin Hood.”

_You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at
__www.rebelbrit.substack.com_ [[link removed]]_
for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual
uprisings and different demos._

 

* Robin Hood
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* Radical Democracy
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* English working class
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* French Revolution
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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* vegetarianism
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