Fiction · 1883
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
On a spring morning young Robin Hood wagers the King's foresters that he can outshoot any man among them, and when they refuse to pay up, the quarrel ends with one forester dead by Robin's arrow and Robin an outlaw with a price on his head. He retreats into Sherwood Forest and gathers the band that becomes famous in its own right: Little John, won over only after Robin loses their quarterstaff duel on a narrow bridge; the roistering Friar Tuck; his kinsman Will Scarlet.
Pyle wrote and illustrated The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood himself, weaving the old ballads into one continuous, deliberately old-fashioned narrative. It was published in 1883 and has shaped nearly every popular version of the story since.
Bibliomancer restores the 1883 text exactly as Pyle wrote it.
Contents
- Preface — From the Author to the Reader
- Prologue
- How Robin Hood Came to Be an Outlaw
- Part First
- Robin Hood and the Tinker
- The Shooting Match at Nottingham Town
- Will Stutely Rescued by His Companions
- Robin Hood Turns Butcher
- Little John Goes to Nottingham Fair
- How Little John Lived at the Sheriff’s
- Little John and the Tanner of Blyth
- Robin Hood and Will Scarlet
- The Adventure with Midge the Miller’s Son
- Robin Hood and Allan a Dale
- Robin Hood Seeks the Curtal Friar
- The Loving Youth and the Scornful Maid
- Robin Hood Compasses a Marriage
- Robin Hood Aids a Sorrowful Knight
- How Sir Richard of the Lea Paid His Debts
- Little John Turns Barefoot Friar
- Robin Hood Turns Beggar
- Robin Hood Shoots Before Queen Eleanor
- The Chase of Robin Hood
- Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne
- King Richard Comes to Sherwood Forest
- Epilogue
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1853–1911 · Victorian
Howard Pyle (1853–1911) was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and studied art in Philadelphia before Scribner's Magazine accepted his first published piece in 1876. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), his own retelling of the ballad tradition illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings, became the version of the outlaw most American readers grew up on, and he went on to write and illustrate further books on medieval romance and piracy. From 1894 he taught illustration at Drexel Institute, and after 1900 ran his own school in Wilmington and nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; its roughly two hundred students, many of whom became major illustrators in their own right, became known as the Brandywine School. He died in Florence, Italy, in 1911, while studying mural painting.
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