Studies in Medievalism XII: Film and Fiction. Reviewing the Middle Ages [12] 085991772X, 9780859917728

Table of contents :
Editorial Note / Tom Shippey 1
Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in 'First Knight' and 'A Knight’s Tale' / Nickolas Haydock 5
Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints / Gwendolyn Morgan 39
Seeking the Human Image in 'The Advocate' / William F. Woods 55
Harold in Normandy: History and Romance / Carl Hammer 79
The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great / Joanne Parker 113
'Eric Brighteyes': Rider Haggard rewrites the Sagas / Jóna Hammer 137
“Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk”: Appropriation of 'Piers Plowman' in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries / Paul Hardwick 171
What 'Tales of a Wayside Inn' tells us about Longfellow and about Chaucer / William Calin 197
Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism / Clare A. Simmons 215
“The Bony Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law / Bruce Brasington 237
Notes on Contributors 255

Citation preview

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STUDIES IN MEDIEVALISM XII 2002 Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages

Studies in Medievalism Volume XII

2002

Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages

D.S.BREWER

6.14 x 9.21

.688

6.14 x 9.21

Film and Fiction Reviewing the Middle Ages

Studies in Medievalism XII 2002

Studies in Medievalism Edited and founded by Leslie J. Workman Volume I 1 Medievalism in England. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1979. 2. Medievalism in America. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1982. Volume II 1. Twentieth-Century Medievalism. Edited by Jane Chance. Fall 1982. 2. Medievalism in France. Edited by Heather Arden. Spring 1983. 3. Dante in the Modern World. Edited by Kathleen Verduin. Summer 1983. 4. Modern Arthurian Literature. Edited by Veronica M.S. Kennedy and Kathleen Verduin. Fall 1983. Volume III 1. Medievalism in France 1500-1750. Edited by Heather Arden. Fall 1987. 2. Architecture and Design. Edited by John R. Zukowsky. Fall 1990. 3. Inklings and Others. Edited by Jane Chance. Winter 1991. 4. German Medievalism. Edited by Francis G. Gentry. Spring 1991. Note: Volume III, Numbers 3 and 4, are bound together. IV. V. VI. VII.

Medievalism in England. Edited by Leslie Workman. 1992. Medievalism in Europe. Edited by Leslie Workman. 1993. Medievalism in North America. Edited by Kathleen Verduin. 1994. Medievalism in England II. Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1995. VIII. Medievalism in Europe II. Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1996. IX. Medievalism and the Academy I. Edited by Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger. 1997. X. Medievalism and the Academy II. Edited by David Metzger. 1998. XI. Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud. Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2001.

Film and Fiction Reviewing the Middle Ages Edited by

Tom Shippey with

Martin Arnold (Associate Editor)

Studies in Medievalism XII 2002 Cambridge D. S. Brewer

 Studies in Medievalism 2003 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2003 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk ISBN 0 85991 772 X ISSN 0738–7614

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Studies in Medievalism Founding Editor Editor Associate Editor Advisory Board

Leslie J. Workman Tom Shippey (Saint Louis) Martin Arnold (Hull) Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) William Calin (Florida) Philip Cardew (King Alfred’s College, Winchester) David Matthews (Newcastle, Australia) Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State) Ulrich Müller (Salzburg) Richard Osberg (Santa Clara) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen) Clare A. Simmons (Ohio State) John Simons (Edgehill College, Ormskirk) Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan) Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan) Andrew Wawn (Leeds)

Studies in Medievalism provides an interdisciplinary medium of exchange for scholars in all fields, including the visual and other arts, concerned with any aspect of the postmedieval idea and study of the Middle Ages and the influence, both scholarly and popular, of this study on Western society after 1500. Studies in Medievalism is published by Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., P.O. Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at the appropriate office. Submissions and inquiries regarding future volumes should be addressed to the Editor, Studies in Medievalism, English Dept., Saint Louis University, 221 N. Grand Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63103, USA, tel. 314–977–7196, fax 314–977–1514, e-mail .

Contributors should submit the original manuscript and one copy with an abstract: unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. When a manuscript is accepted for publication, copy on an IBM-compatible disk will be required. Acknowledgments The Editors make grateful acknowledgment for technical and other assistance to Saint Louis University and Hull University. The device on the title page comes from the title page of Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, edited by L. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Heidelberg and Frankfurt, 1806). The epigraph is from an unpublished paper by Lord Acton written about 1859, printed in Herbert Butterfield, Man On His Past (Cambridge University Press, 1955), 212.

Studies in Medievalism Editorial Note

Tom Shippey

1

Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Nickolas Haydock Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight’s Tale

5

Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints

Gwendolyn Morgan

39

William F. Woods

55

Harold in Normandy: History and Romance

Carl Hammer

79

The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great

Joanne Parker 113

Eric Brighteyes: Rider Haggard rewrites the Sagas

Jóna Hammer 137

“Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk”: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Paul Hardwick 171

What Tales of a Wayside Inn tells us about Longfellow and about Chaucer

William Calin 197

Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate

Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism “The Bony Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law Notes on Contributors

Clare A. Simmons 215 Bruce Brasington 237

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Volume XII 2002

Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. Lord Acton

Editorial Note The “Editorial Note” to the previous volume of Studies in Medievalism remarked that it contained no contribution directed towards popular, commercial, and contemporary forms of medievalism, but that these would be as welcome in future as studies directed towards the academy or towards medievalisms of the past. It is a pleasure accordingly to note that the balance has been to some extent redressed in the present volume, which contains three essays discussing modern film representations of the Middle Ages. Nickolas Haydock’s analysis of the movies First Knight and A Knight’s Tale indeed challenges common academic views of these mass-market productions, including it must be confessed this editor’s. A standard professional reaction to them, made overt in several reviews, has been to dismiss them as simply erroneous, ignorant, even catchpenny. First Knight delivers a version of the Arthurian story which makes drastic changes to the canonical versions of Malory, or Tennyson, or even John Boorman, and has accordingly been condemned for its lack of fidelity. A Knight’s Tale meanwhile presents the chivalric tournament with all the accoutrements of modern professional sport, including fans, stars, and even hooligans, while Chaucer, “the father of English poetry,” becomes a public relations expert. Deliberate anachronism, or just insolence? Haydock carefully and engagingly presents a perspective from outside traditional scholarship, while exposing and demolishing many of the standard assumptions about how such “historiographic metafictions” should be “read,” or viewed. Gwendolyn Morgan takes a more aggressive view of the two recent film versions of the story of Joan of Arc, showing how they reject many aspects of what is a well-documented life, arguably out of the triumphalism which is so marked a strain in modern views of “the Middle Ages,” and expressed of course in the very phrase “Middle Ages.” Not dissimilarly from Haydock, though, Morgan concludes that “the more we compare the products of popular culture to current scholarly trends, the more we see that they take different, but equally serious, departures from record.” The 1994 film of The Advocate, discussed in detail by William Woods, was the least commercially successful of the medievalising films grouped together here, as also the most artistically ambitious and

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deliberately provocative. It opens by reproducing familiar concepts of medieval barbarism and superstition – would you believe it, in the old days they even tried animals for murder! – but goes on to draw far less comforting and self-flattering parallels, the Middle Ages becoming steadily less alien and distanced than one would wish. The law which “the advocate” practises is not ours, but nor is it the vicious and ludicrous stereotype of anti-clerical fears (for which see Brasington below). The present volume also contains more methodologically familiar but no less welcome analyses of historical fictions, which further confirm a remark made in the last volume’s “Editorial Note.” There it was claimed that “there is no completely non-scholarly medievalism left in the world,” a claim surprisingly supported by Haydock’s demonstration of the unacknowledged influence of Sir Maurice Keen on A Knight’s Tale (see p. 27). Carl Hammer’s simultaneous analysis of the changes in scholarly historical views of the Norman Conquest, and their re-creation in a whole string of historical novels, however, documents in detail the constraints which history imposes on fiction and the opportunities which it creates even if the latter, in Hammer’s historian’s view, have not yet been taken. It may be that no-one any longer has the old confidence in writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen, the way it actually happened. But should this not be balanced by a corresponding creative freedom of the imagination? Apparently this has not always been the case. . . One reason for this may appear by noting an occasion when two contributors to the volume seem to contradict each other flatly. The “Norman Yoke” theory of early English history remains powerful still, declares Hammer (see his note 34), with oppressed Saxons regularly appearing in film and fiction under the heel of jackbooted Norman invaders, just as in Scott’s Ivanhoe almost two centuries ago. Not so, argues Joanne Parker (see her note 135). The “Norman Yoke” theory has been vitiated and discredited not by any new sympathy for Normans, but by a widespread rejection of Saxonism, and Anglo-Saxonism, as tainted by nineteenth-century theories of racial supremacy. Parker also points to the destructive effects of expert knowledge. While King Alfred was known to every school-child as “the king who burned the cakes,” he was a national icon and a focus for intense and continuous re-creation. Once the scholars had dissected the cakes away as apocryphal, a once overpowering interest faded, and myth or metafiction dwindled to mere history. Though King Alfred, it should be said, remains a centre for impassioned and even bitter debate within academia, outside academia (Parker reports, p. 129) the common and equally impassioned response may be that of her student respondent: “I know nothing about this man, NOTHING!” The

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gloomy conclusion would appear to be (from Parker) that “research by experts” can kill off fiction, but (from Hammer) that it has not had a good record of inspiring it. It is to be hoped that this question can be pursued further, and answered differently. Jóna Hammer offers an example of a much more creative tension between scholarship and creativity in her study of Rider Haggard’s “Viking novel,” Eric Brighteyes. This could never have come into existence, Hammer shows, without the intense Victorian interest in the rediscovered Icelandic sagas, which led Haggard to produce perhaps the most detailed of all the many Victorian “neo-sagas” – Njáls saga meets Gunnlaug Wormtongue, one might say, irreverently. Yet the interest and the emulation (Viking sea-kings as literal and spiritual ancestors of the Royal Navy) met also a shocked awareness of paganism, cruelty, superstition – this too, as Conrad wrote of the River Thames, has been “one of the dark places of the earth” – so that Haggard’s neo-saga is met and combined with a simultaneous anti-saga. Nineteenth-century views of medieval poets and poetry are also contrasted in the essays by Paul Hardwick and William Calin. Chaucer was never too much of a problem for later venerators: the image of him presented in Florence Converse’s historical novel Long Will, and discussed by Hardwick, is not completely incompatible with the one in A Knight’s Tale (see above). William Langland was a different matter, as Hardwick shows, intensely interesting to scholars (the disputes over his text set off by Walter Skeat have still not faded), but liable to be written off as only historically interesting, too surly, passionate and metrically rough to fit into what Hardwick calls the “Merrie England” and “Return to Camelot” views of the medieval past. Nevertheless these perceived faults were perceived virtues to some, notably to William Morris, and after him to a contrarian, socialist, and anti-feudal medievalising tradition, still, as Hardwick notes, not entirely welcome in scholarly circles. By contrast Longfellow’s Chaucer, a little amiable and easily-removed raffishness aside, entirely suited the spirit of the age. That age is not ours, though, and Calin remarks on the thoroughness with which Longfellow has been removed from academia’s unofficial, indeed officially non-existent canon. His image of Chaucer is now greeted only with indifference. Yet Longfellow’s eclipse can be seen as a result of the translatio studii which he himself laboured to bring about. And it may yet be reversed as medievalism comes to be seen as “almost as central” to modernism as it was to Romanticism. Two final comparisons close the volume. Baronets, Clare Simmons shows, are almost invariably bad in Victorian prose and melodrama,

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labouring under curses and prone to reinvent the greatest horror of medieval times (for Mark Twain and others), the droit de seigneur. However, it was well-known that they were not medieval, being mostly discreditable and commercial early modern creations. The dislike of spurious medievalism shown in the hostile portrayals of baronets could accordingly be combined with admiration for what was seen as real medievalism, authentic, hereditary, noble, and even wie es eigentlich gewesen. Meanwhile, passionate Anglo-American dislike of what was seen (by Mark Twain again) as real medievalism, i.e. the Catholic Church and its whole dimly-understood apparatus of canon law, is compared by Bruce Brasington to a strikingly modern phenomenon, the “urban legend,” like Protestant horror-stories about canon lawyers seemingly in continuous oral circulation and always without a definitive text. Brasington uses the modern technology of the Internet and its search engines to trace and compare both these fluid, ubiquitous, and irritatingly sourceless streams of story in a way perhaps not possible before. Cross-references and cross-comparisons are easy to find in the ten essays printed here. Any common theme, other than medievalism itself, is much harder to locate, while it is obviously true that there have been many varieties of medievalism. A majority of the topics dealt with lie in the field of literature, if one includes film within that field, though only half of the contributors work within departments of English. The historical topics covered are however characteristically diverse, ranging from straightforward and traditional medieval history to the history of law, and including the impact of medieval history on national culture. Meanwhile the literary topics addressed are even more diverse, and even harder to classify or categorise, reactions to poetry mingling with national politics, popular stereotype cohabiting with the severest of scholarship. This unclassifiability poses problems for editors, and for reviewers, but remains a continuing strength of medievalist studies. Interdisciplinarity is so to speak built in, and the field encourages perspectives not from the standpoint of the professional university department, for which there are many opportunities already, but from that of national and international culture. Studies in Medievalism will remain the major forum for research of this kind, which is as important outside universities as within them. Tom Shippey Saint Louis University April 2002

Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight’s Tale Nickolas A. Haydock If they met aboard some unidentified flying object near Montaillou, would Darth Vader, Jacques Fornier, and Parsifal speak the same language? If so, would it be a galactic pidgin or the Latin of the Gospel according to St. Luke Skywalker? (Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”)1 An art not systematic but additive and compositive, ours and that of the Middle Ages. (Umberto Eco, “Living in the New Middle Ages”)2 “That medieval style offends me, it is all artifice. What is it that you painters say? Pasticcio. It is all pasticcio. . . “It must be real,” she went on. “What is the reason for the imitation of an imitation?” (Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton)3 This essay explores certain broad analogies in the medievalism of American popular cinema during the past six years, focusing primarily on First Knight (1995) and A Knight’s Tale (2001). Both movies flaunt anachronism, designed not to render faithfully their respective sources in Malory or Chaucer, but rather to appeal to a cinematic imaginary4 about the Middle Ages, composed of bits and pieces drawn from film history and popular culture. The postmodern call to revisit the past with a mixture of nostalgia and irony is answered in such films by deploying the “prior textualization”5 of the cinematic history of the “Middle Ages” as pastiche. Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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First Knight reimagines Arthurian courtly romance as an amalgam of feudal horse opera and Hollywood melodrama. A Knight’s Tale recreates fourteenth century England as a Debordian society of the spectacle where jousting is an X-treme sport.6 What is by turns engaging and infuriating about both films is their postmodern ontology: Exactly what worlds are these?7 The two quotes by Umberto Eco above reflect our mixed emotions about the medievalismby-collage of such movies. We distrust the depthlessness of pastiche and yet recognize that the anachronistic, agglutinative representation of the past in Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale may be closer to the poetics of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale than we would comfortably admit.8 Likewise, the nostalgic eclecticism of First Knight is, mutatis mutandis, a salient feature of many medieval romances. Yet if both films flaunt the wild conglomerations of postmodernism, they do not share its suspicion of meta-narratives. First Knight rewrites the Day of Doom as a Hollywood happy ending, a smooth translatio imperii where Camelot never falls and Excalibur passes from the notably British Connery to the notably American Gere. Likewise, A Knight’s Tale traces democratic pluralism and Horatio Alger stories back to Chaucer’s England. However, the persistent methodology in the study of such films which proceeds by comparing them to their supposed medieval sources needs to be supplemented by a more consistent use of the tools of film theory and formal film analysis. The following discussion focuses primarily on topics conventionally employed in the critical analysis of cinema, such as: auteurism, film genres, celebrity, violence, the gaze, spectatorship, parody and pastiche. These films do offer provocative images of the Middle Ages, but the pictures are projected through the lens of the popular film industry. First Knight First Knight has met with a cool and (I think) hasty critical reception.9 Both film reviewers and medievalists have panned the film as a seemingly chaotic hodgepodge that distorts the Arthurian material nearly beyond recognition. Kevin Harty’s authoritative guide, The Reel Middle Ages, represents the mainstream opinion: Given that there is no one version of the tale of Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere, filmmakers can be granted some license in their interpretation of that legend. But nothing here quite works. Clearly, Zucker intends his film to be an Arthuriad for the 1990s, but it fails to capture the spirit of the original

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legend or to make a case for its contemporary translation of an oft-told story.10 It is surely unfair to place too much weight upon a single entry in what is certainly an invaluable reference work, yet Harty does repeat the same judgment almost verbatim in a more extensive discussion of Arthurian films as well.11 It should also be emphasized that his use of these terms is relatively benign, yet the passage enlists a number of cross-media metaphors that might repay a closer look. Despite a nod toward the variety of the medieval Arthurian materials, the verdict still derives from assumptions about fidelity to written sources. This vocabulary hints at a comparative methodology widespread in the analysis of films about the Middle Ages. Film-making is seen as being analogous to a scholar’s “interpretation” of written sources. The director is like an author who “intends” his version as a response to a literary tradition, and expects it to be understood and evaluated in terms of that tradition. Alternately, he is like a translator who ideally should strive to be faithful to the “spirit” of his “original” and to make his new translation timely. These metaphors of scholarship, authorship and translation are a convenient but misleading short-hand, common to a good deal of academic criticism of films about the Middle Ages. That the roles of medieval scholars and Hollywood directors are in any but the most frivolous ways similar is almost too ridiculous to merit serious consideration were the assumption not so persistent.12 Its tenacity is perhaps best explained by the sense of superiority such a comparison gives scholars over their vastly better paid and better known counterparts. It is difficult to imagine, however, that simply employing medieval historians to edit screenplays or design sets would significantly improve these movies. In any event, the analogy between filmmaking and scholarly interpretation is misleading. It automatically privileges what need not be the most essential component in a film: the validity or creativity of its “interpretation” of a medieval text, legend, figure or historical period. While such an approach has its place, contemporary films about the Middle Ages made within the Hollywood system are best approached as products of that system rather than as attempts to approximate the interpretations of professional medievalists. The metaphor of authorship is vastly more problematical. To analyse a movie chiefly as the product of a director’s intentions, based on the analogy of authorship as the controlling intelligence of a work, ignores the realities of the movie industry where the cinematographer, screenwriters, producers, actors, etc., all have an influential role to play.13

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Auteurist approaches, however, have an esteemed history in the analysis of film. The director/author analogy underwrote the professionalization of film theory and the incorporation of film study within the academy.14 Despite the numerous theoretical challenges leveled at auteur theories, a large number of book-length studies of particular directors like Eisenstein, Ford, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Kubrick continue to be published each year. Yet herein lies an especial crux for medievalism. While many studies of medieval films are conducted according to the director/author analogy, little of this work addresses the auteur’s complete oeuvre, but rather it tends to focus almost exclusively on a single movie, or on a collection of movies about the Middle Ages, directed by different people. In the case of Jerry Zucker’s First Knight, the film’s sentimental romanticism, its melodramatic reconstruction of the love triangle and the self-conscious fetishizing of the kiss surely call for more comparison with Zucker’s most commercially successful film, Ghost (1990). Likewise, many of the wild anachronisms and the introduction of themes from genres like the western and science fiction may begin to appear to be less a product of unthinking popular cinema and more the result of a deliberate authorial tendency toward parody when we compare First Knight with more obvious film parodies produced by the Zucker/Abrhams/Zucker team, such as: Airplane (1980), The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988), and The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991).15 The final term in this triad of metaphors by which medieval films are conventionally judged, “translation,” is the most prevalent and the most difficult to dislodge. It proceeds from the assumption that Hollywood’s forays into the past should be governed by fidelity to an original text or group of texts according to the far from complementary aims of translation to “get it right” and “make it new.” Even if one relaxes these imperatives from literal fidelity to a prior text to a requirement that filmmakers be faithful to its “spirit,” one still runs the risk of introducing misleading comparisons. In the case of First Knight, the often implied source which the film is supposed to mistranslate is Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Rebecca and Samuel Umland have cautioned against “template matching, in other words, discerning the degree of one-to-one correspondence between a film and its (apparent) narrative source; determinations of the film’s merit follow as a consequence.”16 First Knight also suffers from implicit comparisons to John Boorman’s modernist Excalibur, a respectful but revisionist film that follows Malory’s story ab ovo ad mortem. While Zucker’s film has no definitive medieval source, it is in fact a much more elegant “translation” of Malory’s work than many critics

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have surmised. The screenplay adapts the story of Mellyagaunce’s kidnapping of Guenevere and her rescue by Lancelot, narrated in Malory’s “The Knight of the Cart” episode of the “Book of Lancelot and Guenevere.” The film fashions out of this Malorian subplot a sort of microcosm of the Mordred plot of kidnapping and invasion which it replaces.17 However, in doing so First Knight is faithful neither to the truth of a medieval source nor to the spirit of any medieval legend. It draws instead on a cinematic imaginary about the story of Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere, a swirl of patriotic and heroic images of what we might call a cinematic unconscious and its dreams of the Middle Ages. The “spirit” at the center of the film is derived not from Malory per se but from the transhistorical, transnational ideal of Camelot (quondam civitas et civitas futura) that is an essential part of the cinematic inheritance. In the words of Connery’s Arthur: “That is the very heart of Camelot. Not these stones, timbers, towers, palaces – burn them all and Camelot lives on because it lives in us, it’s a belief we hold in our hearts.” Or in the more melodious version of Lerner and Lowe’s lyrics: “In short there’s simply not/ A more congenial spot/ For happily ever-afterings/ Than here in Camelot.” The question of the film’s sources will be examined in more detail below, but first I want to discuss how two central themes, violence and the gaze, link First Knight with the postmodern anxieties of a number of historical films produced recently. Violence and the Gaze The last six years have seen a surge of big-budget, historical epics garner a large share of American and international audiences. I am thinking in particular of films like The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), Braveheart (1995), Patriot (2001), and Gladiator (2000). These films all share an abiding concern with the construction of national identity in the face of colonialism or imperialism. Historical accuracy is seldom a consistent feature. They are probably best categorized by Linda Hutcheon’s term “historiographic metafiction” where the past is revisited through cunning appropriations and additions which provide for us what we need from it. Such works investigate the constructedness of received history and project contemporary desires into the past.18 Whether we choose to view the historiography of recent popular cinema as revisionist or opportunistic, it is difficult to ignore the similarity of their appeals to patriotism and national identity. One could argue, for instance, that Braveheart and The Patriot are in almost every important way the same movie, and that

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the resemblance is far from nugatory. American patriotism has gone back in time to colonize the patriotic struggles of the past. Contemporary American audiences are interpellated into wars for liberation, national identity, and democracy with which they happily identify.19 Remote, complicated historical processes become distant but clear approximations of American democratic freedoms. And the English, identically sadistic, tyrannical oppressors in thirteenth-century Scotland, fifteenth-century France and eighteenth-century North America, are made to bear the whole historical burden of colonialism. Americans in the past (The Patriot) and in the future (Independence Day, 1996) are heroic resisters of colonial domination whose current privilege as the sole remaining superpower exists only to promote freedom (and free trade) throughout the world. Such films thrive on ecstatic carnage and the supernatural invincibility of pious rage, a rage that remains sympathetic because of the particularly grisly way it is born. Both Braveheart and The Messenger provide a back story of disgusting savagery to explain their heroes’ zealousness in battle as adults. In Braveheart, Blind Hary’s fictional Barns of Ayr story is transposed to an episode which Wallace experiences as a boy, where he rushes into the barn only to be trapped and traumatized by a harvest of swinging corpses that glower down on the frantic child.20 Luc Besson’s The Messenger has the young girl Joan witness her sister’s rape and murder from inside a cupboard. The intimacy of the mise en scène is especially appalling because of the way it employs shot-counter-shot, point-of-view and double-framed close-ups. The camera cuts back and forth between two positions of observation and the rape that takes place in the center. From their vantage point at a table two English soldiers enjoy a meal (waiting their turn) while they casually observe their countryman’s struggle with Joan’s sister. Joan remains inside the cupboard watching the rape through the cracks in the door – the space and lighting is eerily similar to scenes before and after with Joan in the confessional. The soldier, frustrated with his victim’s “squirming about,” impales the young woman on a sword which lifts her off her feet and plunges, bloodstreaked, through the door, inches from Joan’s face. The ugly, blacktoothed soldier then completes his rape and calls to his comrades, “your turn.” The violence in such scenes strikes an audience with particular immediacy because their gaze is sutured to that of a child.21 It also justifies our sympathy with his or her pious carnage later in the movie. Like Joan of Arc and William Wallace, First Knight’s Lancelot is a child victim,22 and like them this status seems to confer on him supernatural abilities as a warrior. As Guenevere herself concludes, “it made you

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what you are.” However, the back story of the murder of Lancelot’s family has none of the visceral or visual immediacy of the examples discussed above. It consists of two brief flashbacks of a burning church where the camera, in relatively objective mid-shot, shows only the anguish of the boy watching outside, not the suffering of those inside. While being burned alive is surely a gruesome way to die, we do not watch it happen – and neither does Lancelot, who sees only smoke and stained glass. The distinct lack of carnage in the scene is not an isolated reticence. Despite a screenplay thickly crowded with violence of all sorts (pitched battles, sneak attacks and hundreds of deaths) only the scarcest hint of blood is ever seen on screen. Arthur receives three bolts directly in the chest and Malagant is sliced wide open by an Excalibur-wielding Lancelot, but neither shed a drop. Death is stylized, in the manner of the classic style of the Hollywood western and melodrama – genres to which the film’s mise en scène and worldview are deeply indebted. And just as First Knight is remarkably bloodless, it is also remarkably sexless. Not only is there no depiction of sexual intercourse, there is never any implication that any sexual exchange other than a kiss ever occurs! But if the film does seem to frustrate the voyeuristic appetites of its audience, it remains deeply invested in celebrity, the gaze and spectatorship. It would be difficult to imagine a film more focused on the visual, although this focus is embedded within a style which refuses to call attention to itself in the manner of more self-consciously scopophilic films like Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and its legion of imitations. The dialogue is packed with references to looking, eyes, and seeing. Indeed, in the movie’s reimagining of the adultery-plot, Guenevere’s sole crime is having gazed passionately at Lancelot. Connery’s Arthur jealously rages at her: “Then look at me as you looked on him!” Gere’s celebrity is constantly evoked in a screenplay that seems structured around recurrent public spectacles. The defining characteristic of Gere’s Lancelot is performance: in carnival displays of swordsmanship and agility, in repeated scenes where he receives enthusiastic applause for his exploits (including a round of applause from Arthur and the knights of the Round Table), and finally when he stands on trial in the public square watched by the assembled population of Camelot. In a nighttime battle with Malagant’s army, Gere takes off his helmet and shakes his long hair loose like a shampoo model before flying into battle bare-headed.23 At the end of this battle he is greeted by admiring stares from the other knights. Gere’s performance gives us Lancelot as movie star and sex symbol. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary treatment of the Arthurian material with a Guenevere more high-principled and chaste than Julia Ormond’s.

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Perhaps the most controversial and influential essay in film studies in the last 25 years is Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”24 Mulvey showed how popular cinema genders the viewer’s gaze as male and thereby reproduces and confirms in cinematic discourse the patriarchal objectification of women. Mulvey eventually had occasion to modify the determinism of this thesis somewhat in order to leave more room for oppositional readings of the dominant visual strategies by women themselves.25 Still, the mise en scène of First Knight seems determined to invert the very strategies Mulvey describes. Gere is continually the object of shots designed to maximize not only his sex appeal and virility but also his vulnerability. This curious reversal of roles is also a fundamental feature of the film’s dialogue. Arthur’s demand that Guenevere look at him as she had at Lancelot follows an earlier scene in the forest where Lancelot’s confident come-on (“I can tell when a woman wants me, I can see it in her eyes”) is unconvincingly rebuffed by Guenevere’s embarrassed: “Not in my eyes.” In this film men solicit the passionate female gaze and a woman is embarrassed when caught in the act of sexually objectifying a man. This reversal may simply be a concession to political correctness or a way of capitalizing on Gere’s sex appeal, but it also suits well with Zucker’s reimagining of medieval romance as a modern romance or sentimental melodrama. The interpellated gaze which the film invariably solicits is a feminine not a masculine gaze and the melodramatic plot makes its appeal directly to a feminine audience. This strategy entails not only a solicitation of the feminine gaze but also a chastening of the male gaze. I want to explore briefly three examples of the chastened gaze, first in the movie’s advertising poster and then in two scenes where sex and jealousy, respectively, rear their ugly heads. The movie poster, reproduced for the cover of videotape and DVD releases, is an iconographically complex piece of cover art. Reading down from the upper left hand corner to the bottom right, it includes a half shot of Connery in the background staring straight out at the viewer and dressed in armour, with a reflection of Camelot emblazoned across his chest. The middle of the poster is transected by the sword, Excalibur, which contains a full shot image of Ormond’s Guenevere with the top half of her body in focus, while her lower half blurs into the grain of the sword. She stares intently down at Lancelot, pictured in the foreground bottom right, whose shoulder and biceps cover Guenevere’s torso. Lancelot, like Arthur, directs his gaze out of the frame toward the viewer. The poster archly quotes a famous scene from Excalibur where Arthur finds the two lovers asleep in a forest, embracing naked under a tree. He plunges Excalibur into the ground between their bodies and ultimately

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into the back of the world serpent, waking the day of doom. In a tour de force of modernist syncretism Boorman’s film substitutes the apocalyptic serpent of Norse myth for Malory’s dragon. Excalibur’s exploration of Malory’s love triangle is also deeply indebted to classical tragedy and Freudianism, showing sexual desire as a force which ultimately obliterates all it touches. First Knight, though, draws rather on sentimental, distinctly contemporary notions of romance. The film poster’s quotation of the Excalibur image is thoroughly sanitized of any eroticism. Guenevere alone retains the power of the gaze as she looks over and down on Lancelot. One could argue that the image of her contained within the sword represents a woman trapped within the constraints of a feudal system designed to control feminine desires. Yet, the movie repeatedly emphasizes her agency and strong will. The purpose of this homage to Excalibur is to address sensibilities shaped by melodrama and the soap-opera, those appealed to in the poster’s riding caption: “Their greatest battle would be for her love.” The story of Arthur is thus reimagined as a melodrama where no one is at fault and no one sins: it is simply the tragic way of the world that bad things happen to good people. My second example occurs early in the film, during Lancelot’s first rescue of Guenevere. The scene is worth recalling in detail. It begins with Guenevere fleeing through the forest from Malagant’s men when she is pounced upon by Lancelot in a thick scrub of brush. He pulls her underneath his body, covering her mouth – a posture that out of context would suggest assault rather than protection. Fear of this is certainly present in Guenevere’s eyes at this point. Two villains arrive and Lancelot makes short and showy work of killing them, watched from the bush by Guenevere in wide-eyed fascination. When she stands up, a third assailant grabs her from behind in a chokehold and with his other arm trains a crossbow on Lancelot. Guenevere is held with her back to her attacker, both face Lancelot. The following exchange ensues. Bad Guy: You, drop the sword. Lancelot: All right, but can I have her when you’re done with her? Bad Guy: You were after the woman? Lancelot: Of course, of course. You ever see anything so beautiful in your whole life? Bad Guy: I don’t know about that. Lancelot: Ah, don’t tell me you don’t want her. Soft skin, sweet lips, young, firm body. Bad Guy: I have my orders.

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Studies in Medievalism Lancelot: So? Who’s to know? Bad Guy: I should take her back. Lancelot: How ’bout I hold her for you, you hold her for me? It won’t take long. Bad Guy: I don’t want any trouble. Lancelot: This one’s no trouble. No, look at her, she wants it alright. Bad Guy: What’s she doing? (All this while Guenevere has been fumbling with her hands held below her waist out of the shot. Now we cut to a very tight shot which shows her fingering the trigger of a very phallic crossbow.) Lancelot: See for yourself, turn her around, look in her eyes, see what she’s got for you. (The bad guy turns her around, pressing her against his body.) Bad Guy: Oh, pretty, pretty! Now what have you got for me then? (We hear the clink of the crossbow trigger and Guenevere’s attacker drops to his knees, staring bug-eyed up at her. He then falls flat on his back with the black bolt jutting perversely from his groin. Guenevere looks over to Lancelot and receives a grim nod of approval.)

Lancelot’s trick cleverly solicits the objectifying male gaze of her attacker as well as the masculine gaze of the audience who watch her held squirming against his chest and fumbling with her hands beneath her waist. This object lesson in the perversity and impotence of the voyeuristic gaze climaxes with a soft groan from Guenevere as the bolt strikes its target in his lower abdomen. The broad phallic joke as he lies prostrate on the ground with a fatal erection punishes with death and ridicule his attempt to look at Guenevere as a sexual object.26 Perversion has itself been perverted in a very literal sense. The scene presents in physical form the etymology of the word: the Latin perversus (lit., facing the wrong way round, reversed) from the verb pervertere (1. To overturn, knock down; 2. To cause the downfall of a person, subvert; 3. To cause to face the opposite way; 4. To distort, misrepresent, divert to an improper use).27 What she “has for him” is a hidden phallus: he’s been had. Such visual strategies in the film gradually replace the lustful male gaze with a mixture of sentimentalism and Augustinian caritas, as I hope to show in my final example of the chastened gaze. The classic Hollywood style produces a movie to be looked through,

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not at. Film editing, shot protocols, music, lighting and dialogue propel viewers through the story without calling attention to its construction, thereby rendering the simple joys of escapist fantasy through a coherent and uninterrupted diegesis.28 Zucker’s film seldom deviates from this style. One notable exception occurs at the point of crisis in the melodramatic plot when Arthur discovers Lancelot and Guenevere kissing in her room. Radical montage – which Sergei Eisenstein saw as the art of cinema and the chief feature of auteurism – occurs in Zucker’s film only this once. The camera zooms in for an extreme close up of Arthur’s jealous eye, glaring at a penitent Lancelot. Then a form dissolve montage links his eye with the next shot of a burning cauldron. The camera tracks outward from the central image of the burning eye/cauldron to take in the Round Table itself and Arthur’s knights being told of the scandal. In a following scene, Arthur widens the circle of the spectacle even further by throwing open the city gates and allowing everyone to watch Lancelot and Guenevere’s trial for treason. The cinematography in its widening scope thus mirrors the ripple effect of Arthur’s jealousy. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, those watching the scandalous trial are themselves under surveillance. Malagant’s army spring their surprise attack immediately upon Arthur’s tragic recognition that the trial and his jealousy are proud folly. (Of course the idea that a spectacular sex scandal and show-trial could destroy a popular leader and plunge a society from its peak of prosperity is a far-fetched idea.) However, the film’s continued insistence on the pleasures and moral probity of democratic spectacles is subsequently reaffirmed when all the inhabitants of Camelot (king and commoner, knights, women and children) unite to repel the invasion. The democratic implications of the scene bear a strong similarity to the conventional platitudes of western democracies about terrorism: a free and open democratic society exposes its leaders to both scandal and assassination and places its citizens at greater risk – but it is the only kind of society worth defending.29 I explore in more detail the significance of public spectacles in medievalized projections of American society in my discussion of A Knight’s Tale (2001), below. First Knight’s political allegories receive a fuller consideration later as well, under the rubric “Malagant and the Pax Americana.” But let us return briefly to the final sequences of the film which stage the chastening and final sublimation of Arthur’s jealous eye. From the instant Arthur sees Lancelot and Guenevere passionately kissing the plot progresses with Aristotelian precision. Jealousy overcomes Arthur’s compassion and he pridefully insists on a public trial where he threatens with the self-righteous indignation of a classical tyrant: “the law

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will judge you.” In the next scene, gazing down from the dais at a kneeling Lancelot who offers to give up his life for the good of Camelot, Arthur finally recognizes his folly, averts his eyes, and mutters “may God forgive me.” When Malagant and his army take control of the city, Arthur is commanded to kneel in submission before Malagant or die. He appears to obey, bowing down, but then in his last act as king raises Excalibur and commands his people to “fight, fight!” At this moment he turns from tragic tyrant to Christian martyr, his willingness to sacrifice his own life (mirroring Lancelot’s own willingness to die in the service of Camelot) saves the city. Later, on his death bed, Arthur lovingly strokes Lancelot’s hand as he gives him Excalibur, and then gazes adoringly at Guenevere. All passion spent, his final words are: “I can see it now my love – the sunlight in your eyes.” As he dies his eyes remain open, averted slightly from Guenevere to the heavens. The melodrama here is deeply invested with an Augustinian caritas toward which the film’s chastening of the gaze has been moving all along. The ship-burial at sea with which it ends is cliched and anti-climatic in the extreme, but it does allow Zucker a chance to close the circle of the theme of the gaze. The last shot in the film shows Arthur’s burning boat encircled by the dark sea. Clearly, this is designed as a visual echo of the earlier shot of the burning cauldron in the middle of the Round Table in the dark hall that began the sequence. This symbol of an eternal flame is an unabashed evocation of sublimity, the sign of an eternal Camelot and the transcendent love it represents. As Arthur says of the physical city earlier, “burn it all, and Camelot lives, because it lives in us, it’s a belief we hold in our hearts.” Sublime and sentimental surely, but, I would argue, deliberately and adroitly so. Still, it would be difficult to find any romance from the historical Middle Ages more faithful to the spirit of Augustine’s theological distinctions between cupidinous and charitable love, on the one hand, and between the city of man and the city of God on the other.30 In this sense perhaps Zucker is more “medieval” than Malory himself. The combination of nostalgia and pastiche that results from Zucker’s melodramatic Augustinianism is explored next. Going to Pieces It may be that a director’s tendency to think visually, in terms of the shot, is perpetually at odds with the narrative constraints of popular cinema. The transparency of the classic Hollywood style is certainly at odds with heavy-handed auteurism that calls attention away from the story and towards the artifice of its construction. Radical montage and distinctive

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mise en scène play an important role in foregrounding the director as the creator of a film. Other signs of authorship, like a director’s appearance in his own movie (e.g., Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese) or the ironic quotation of other films, also play a role. The transparent style of Zucker’s First Knight leaves few obvious traces of authorship. Its hodgepodge of neutral quotations from the archive of popular film would seem to leave it open to the charge of “blank or blind parody” leveled by Jameson at postmodern pastiche. Even more relevant is Jean Baudrillard’s critique of postmodern images which he sees as controlled by the logic of late capitalism: simulation.31 For Baudrillard the final, postmodern, phase of the image comes when copies no longer bear any meaningful relationship to their originals or to any reality whatsoever. When the image becomes its own pure simulacrum, it erases any connection to history or to the real, becoming “hyperreal.” It could be argued that Zucker’s film makes of the legend of Camelot just such an image: a sourceless story in a timeless world which reflects only the Plato’s cave of popular culture – a kingdom of shreds and patches. A hyperreal Camelot set somewhere between medieval England, the American frontier and Deep Space Nine, where no one commits adultery, where Camelot never falls, and where room is left at the end for a sequel! However, some of the film’s parodies are more than empty shadows playing on a wall. There are distinct signs of authorial irony and deft political burlesque beneath its postmodern superficiality. Still, the profusion of pastiched quotation deserves to be surveyed before we try to pick up the pieces in search of patterns of irony or allegory. Like Zucker’s early credits in more obvious parodies like Airplane, Top Secret or The Naked Gun, First Knight is at least in part a send-up of the genre picture. The title seems roughly “medieval” but it clearly mocks big-budget, patriotic action films like First Blood (1982) and Top Gun (1986). Indeed as Arthur’s top gun, Lancelot goes through a process of maturation similar to Tom Cruise’s Maverick in Top Gun. He begins the film as a fatherless, self-obsessed individual whose fearlessness grows out of alienation and spiritual emptiness. Through an older man’s guidance and the love of a powerful woman who tempers his selfishness, Lancelot, like Maverick, finds a new family in the army and takes his rightful place as their leader at the end.32 Lancelot’s character (like Maverick’s) is drawn almost whole-cloth from the gun-for-hire exile of American westerns (see, for instance, Shane, 1953 or Angel and the Badman, 1947). He rides a small, sleek pony, saddled with a bedroll, that comes trotting to his master whenever he whistles. He foils stagecoach robberies, tracks villains to their hideout, and magically disarms antagonists without hurting them. At the

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end of the pre-credits sequence where he demonstrates how well he can handle a sword, the hero rides off into the sunset. As academy award-winning recent movies like Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) and Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) excoriate the stereotypes of conventional Westerns, these stereotypes re-emerge with a vengeance in medievalized Westerns like First Knight or Costner’s own Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). And just as Baz Luhrmann’s street gangs in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) tote silver-plated automatic pistols engraved with the words “sword” or even “Excalibur,” so Lancelot uses his sword like a gun. To emphasize further the blurred boundary between the Western and medieval romance Zucker arms his villains with miniature cross-bows which they fire like Colt .45s. Richard Gere’s Lancelot also follows a number of action-hero stereotypes. The film employs countless quotations of famous action sequences, specifically recalling shots from Die Hard (1988), Lethal Weapon (1987), Romancing the Stone (1984) and the early James Bond. In the second chase sequence, Gere begins by diving like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood from the castle ramparts into a moat. Then in a shot which quotes Connery’s own stint as James Bond (Goldfinger, 1964), he latches onto a rope behind a boat towed with such speed that it leaves the distinctive wake of an outboard motor. Later, he and Guenevere make their escape from Malagant’s castle by plunging headlong through a subterraneous stream and over a waterfall – shots that specifically echo Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981) and Romancing the Stone, respectively. The same sequence of shots is employed to exit Beowulf and his company from the Thunder Caves in the recent Thirteenth Warrior (1999) – the game continues. Examples could easily be multiplied, but the exercise would serve no particular end. Recognizing these echoes does not tell us anything of importance about First Knight, it merely confirms our worst suspicions about the promiscuity of popular cinema. It is blank parody, a simulation in movieland: a style born of film schools and videotape, clever perhaps, but as cluttered as a backlot warehouse. The suspicion of a derivative, facile imitation is doubly encouraged by the fact that all three of the major stars are cast so rigidly to type. Connery, as the reigning king of the Hollywood Middle Ages, reprises earlier roles like those in The Name of the Rose or Robin Hood where he serves as the emblem of a benign paternalism which oversees a younger man’s transition into full adulthood. Gere reprises the role of the cold-hearted individualist – narcissistic but technically brilliant – that he has made a career of playing. Just as in the 1990 Pretty Woman he is transformed from ruthless selfishness by a woman’s love and the respect of a

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surrogate father. Ormond’s Guenevere is also the result of typecasting. In Legends of the Fall (released the year before First Knight), she again plays the melodramatic role of a strong woman torn between the love of two good men, one whom she deeply respects and a wandering individualist whom she deeply desires. As the head of the production company Indican Pictures, associated with Fox Searchlight Pictures, she seems perfectly cast as a career woman who rules a small empire in her own right. The screen-personas of major stars have an enormous influence on the kinds of films they make. Screenwriters or directors – or even actors themselves – can construct roles contrary to audience expectations, but there has been no attempt to do this in First Knight. Indeed, the film could be adequately described in terms of the Hollywood jargon mocked in movies like The Player: “Legends of the Fall meets Pretty Woman!” First Knight is certainly a star vehicle, but it is also, albeit mutedly, a director’s picture. The first hint of this occurs at the end of the film’s title sequence. An establishing shot of the pastoral Lyonesse concludes with the final credit, “Directed by Jerry Zucker.” In the background on a hillside, behind Zucker’s name, a windmill revolves in the breeze and sheep graze beneath it. The image suggests the quixotic anachronism of any director engaging in medievalism – tilting (one’s camera) at windmills imitates the madness of Don Quixote’s quest to recreate the Middle Ages in the modern world. Medievalism is not only quixotic but possibly idiotic as well: in the last instant the music of the sound track ceases to be replaced by the noisy “bah” of the sheep. The effect is relatively subtle but it is all of a piece with the humour of Zucker’s earlier film parodies. His shot parodies are also not always as neutral as those outlined above. In a film that seems to be responsive to contemporary anxieties about violence in popular Hollywood movies, Zucker quotes a scene emblematic of indomitable masculinity, but he quotes it backwards and with irony. The first invasion of Lyonesse culminates with a shot of the villain Malagant on a rearing horse, internally framed by the burning threshold of a barn door. Inside the barn from the perspective of the frightened inhabitants of Lyonesse, the audience sees this icon of power and domination from the point of view of those oppressed. The double-framed shot quotes Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989). In Branagh’s film, though, the young king is framed by the fiery arch of the gate of Harfleur behind him. The audience views the indomitable power of Henry from the point of view of his beleaguered soldiers. Henry’s two subsequent speeches are perhaps the most stirring calls to patriotic bloodlust in the English language, exhorting “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ or close the wall up with our English dead” and next threatening the inhabitants

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of Harfleur with the murder of old men, the rape of their daughters, and “your naked infants spitted upon pikes.”33 Zucker’s quotation of this shot criticizes the might makes right mentality of Malagant and the idea of war fought for personal glory. In contrast to Malagant’s pursuit of personal heroism, Arthur wishes only for peace and Lancelot chiefly excels in the rescue and defense of the oppressed. Perhaps the most distinctive sign of authorship in the movie, as I have been maintaining throughout, is its complete sentimentalization of sexual love. Here that most enduring of Hollywood images, the kiss, plays the central role. Guenevere kisses Lancelot and Arthur each three times, and, in the fairytale rhythm we expect in romance, the third in each series makes a significant change. Lancelot’s first two kisses Guenevere treats as unwelcome advances, after the second she makes him promise never to do it again. Their final kiss in her chamber is one she asks for, the most passionate kiss in the film. It is interrupted by the arrival of Arthur. The lovers’ reaction to being caught in the act is shot through heavy filters and in slow motion – the close ups savour of Adam and Eve caught between shame and despair. The final kiss between Arthur and Guenevere occurs on his deathbed. The result of this kiss, as discussed above, is the opposite of eyes downcast in shame, an image of love without jealousy, where Arthur finds at last “the sunlight in your eyes.” The organization of a plot around the kiss is a staple of classic Hollywood filmmaking, just as one could say that many films today are organized around graphic depictions of people having sex. The final scene in Zucker’s Ghost, of course, includes the ultimate transcendental kiss. Patrick Swayze’s ghost becomes visible to his wife and she kisses an angelic vision of him bated in heavenly light. His parting words are: “You take it with you Moll, the love you feel inside.” Just as in Ghost, the kiss in First Knight becomes a sign of love transcending death and is offered as an alternative to the selfishness and jealousy of cupidity. One could argue that this sentimentalized vision of love, composed of equal parts of Hollywood nostalgia and the Christian doctrine of charity, is a distinct sign of Zucker’s authorship.34 Colonizing Myth: Malagant and the Pax Americana Zucker’s film is not only sentimental, it is also a highly nationalistic political allegory, albeit one tinged with provocative satire. Althusser famously claimed that ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence.”35 The peculiarity of the American imaginary relationship to imperialism and colonialism has been outlined by Edward Said:

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Even if we were to allow, as many have, that the United States foreign policy is principally altruistic and dedicated to such unimpeachable goals as freedom and democracy, there is considerable room for skepticism. . . . Are we not as a nation repeating what France and Britain, Spain and Portugal, Holland and Germany, did before us? And yet do we not tend to regard ourselves as somehow exempt from the more sordid imperial adventures that preceded ours? Besides, is there not an unquestioned assumption on our part that our destiny is to rule and lead the world, a destiny that we assigned ourselves as part of our errand into the wilderness?36 Such assumptions about the purity of American motives and the certainty of its destiny underwrite much of America’s foreign policy, as well as popular cinema’s colonization of the Middle Ages touched on earlier. In our cinematic imaginary, distant historical struggles are dim approximations of America’s globalization of democracy and freedom.37 Zucker’s deployment of this cinematic imaginary plays to American patriotism but also seems to chide it as well. He has a great deal of fun with the official ideology of George Bush, Sr.’s years (1988–1992) in the White House. At first sight in the film Camelot appears only as a “thousand points of light.” Elizabeth Chadwick’s novelization of the screenplay makes the connection clearly: On the far bank, Guinevere could see many moving points of light like giant fireflies. . . Rising out of the water on the far side the towers of the city of Camelot glimmered with the light of a thousand torches. Reflected in the lake, the city seemed to float in mid-air, as if transported from the mythical land of Faery.38 In the film as the camera pans downwards, the city becomes more easily identifiable as the island of Manhattan. First Knight is also distinctly coloured with the black and white patriotism of the Gulf War. In this view a peace-loving Camelot/America is drawn into conflicts because of its need to protect weaker nations against old allies who have become rogue nations. Such leaders are less heads of state than warlords, never pictured out of their uniforms. David Zucker’s Naked Gun 33ƒ, released the year before First Knight, begins with a long running gag about an incredibly “smart bomb” which after many twists and turns finally reaches its target: Saddam Hussein sitting on a commode. The example is useful because it shows how such satire can be double-edged, mocking not only foreign despots but also the absurd

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hyperboles of wartime propaganda. The character of Malagant is a particularly interesting creation in this regard. Substituting Malagant for Mordred produces a version of the Arthur legend sanitized of incest and adultery but tightly packed with political implications. It is worth noting that Mellyagaunce’s motive for kidnapping Gwenyver in Malory’s “Knight of the Cart” episode is strictly personal: “And thys knyght sir Mellyagaunce loved passyngly well quene Gwenyver, and so he had done longe and many yerys. And the boke seyth he had layn in awayte for to stele away the quene.”39 First Knight’s Malagant demonstrates no sexual interest in Guenevere at all. She is merely a hostage taken as a bargaining chip which Malagant hopes will make Arthur “more reasonable” about Lyonesse. If Gere gives us Lancelot as movie star, Ben Cross plays Malagant as Middle-Eastern despot – his complexion noticeably darkened to encourage the inference. His home base looks like a bombed out castle, a rubble of shining black slate, caves and tunnels. His crimes include terrorist attacks on non-combatants, hijacking, political kidnapping and ransom demands, border raids, intimidation, etc. He is as cruel to his own troops as to his enemies and is willing to sacrifice as many of his men as necessary in order to win. He raids border cities on the false pretext that he is countering aggression and bringing law and order to a chaotic border: “Last night, men from this village crossed the border and murdered three of my people. In reprisal, I have destroyed your village. The borderlands have been lawless long enough. Know now that I am the law.” However, Malagant’s real motive, like all Middle Eastern tyrants, is not simply the annexation of small kingdoms, but rather to bring the superpower Camelot to its knees. In the allegory Lyonesse seems to be both Kuwait and Jerusalem – a kind of proto-Israel (Zionesse?), ruled by Guenevere with her spiritual advisor Jacob by her side. The special relationship between Camelot and Lyonesse is not susceptible to change by any temporal condition nor is it dependent upon what Guenevere does: it is absolute. Beneath the fable is an allegory, part patriotism and part parody, of the United States’ special relationship with Israel and the ideology that underpins American interventions in the Middle East. At the United Nations Round Table in Camelot the chair of the rogue Malagant remains empty. When he returns to negotiate with Arthur, Malagant offers to trade peace for land. His political solution is the partitioning of Lyonesse, but Camelot does not negotiate with terrorists. Malagant’s criticisms of Arthur’s Camelot are based on a suspicion of globalization in medieval form, Arthur’s reply is an appeal to universal democratic principles.

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Malagant: Come on Arthur. I’m here to settle this business. We both know Lyonesse is too weak to stand alone. Let’s say half each. The lesser gives way to the greater, and what could be greater than Camelot: the land of justice and the hope of mankind. . . . Arthur: You know the law we live by. And where is it written that beyond Camelot live lesser people – too weak to defend themselves – let them die? Malagant: Other people live by other laws, Arthur. Or is the law of Camelot to rule the entire world? Arthur: There are laws that enslave men and laws that set them free. Either what we hold to be right and good and true, is right and good and true for all mankind, under God, or we’re just another robber tribe. Their exchange seems a medievalized rendition of the Gulf War propaganda issuing from Iraq and the U.S.40 Surely Malagant’s suspicions about the motives behind Camelot’s interventionist foreign policy are an unfounded pretense, yet the law to which Arthur refers sounds suspiciously like the American Pledge of Allegiance: “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” This is not quite Jameson’s “blind parody” nor is it simply blind patriotism: Zucker is clearly winking at his audience here. That the Malagants of the world must be resisted at all costs is never questioned in First Knight, but exactly how much less tyrannical Arthur’s one law for all is than Malagant’s “I am the law,” remains an open question. Military interventions in foreign conflicts may be justifiable in terms of international law, but they also have a way of keeping oil prices down. Perhaps First Knight’s most startling change to the Arthurian legend is its happy ending. Hollywood’s against-all-odds recourse to happy endings has been a recurrent figure of ridicule in the many mise en abyme parodies of the industry (e.g., The Player, d. Robert Altman, 1992, and State and Main, d. David Mamet, 2001). Throughout my discussion of First Knight’s politics, I have been moving toward the notion of a carefully negotiated balance between patriotism and parody. This is nowhere more evident than in the film’s handling of King Arthur’s happy death. A staple theme in medieval romance itself is the notion of translatio imperii. Zucker makes of the ending of the Arthur story not a cyclical prophecy of rebirth, but a tale of continuity, of a peaceful, loving transition as from father to son. Excalibur passes from the British Connery to the American Gere, but the idea of Camelot, transhistorical and transnational, lives on. “Arthur’s dream,” as Malagant had contemptuously called it, becomes the

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American Dream of a benign superpower that will spread its “one law” across the face of the earth. Umberto Eco claims we are all “dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Zucker suggests they may be dreaming of us as well. King Arthur dreams not of dragons but of America. A Knight’s Tale: Democratizing Spectacles and the Thatcherite Knight If First Knight marks a sentimental, nostalgic return to the classic Hollywood style, Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale heralds the onset of an M.T.V. Middle Ages. And if First Knight is in some sense a strange mixture of melodramas like Ghost and parodies like Naked Gun, A Knight’s Tale is certainly, in the Hollywood jargon of our time, Gladiator meets Shakespeare in Love. Such amalgams are increasingly a feature of postmodern films crafted to appeal not only to established cinema appetites but also to the growing film literacy of audiences who can appreciate cinematic pastiche. I want to focus in turn on two particular discourses engaged in the film: the therapeutics of democratic spectacle and Helgeland’s self-conscious addition to the Chaucerian apocrypha. In their celebration of spectacle Gladiator and A Knight’s Tale participate in popular cinema’s on-going rehabilitation of the gaze.41 Through analogies with modern sporting events and other examples of spectator culture, ancient and medieval arenas become sites of democratic freedom where Debord’s society of the spectacle is ultimately defeated by a more Bahktinian view of public space as a carnivalized, dialogized forum of social justice. Spectacle in Gladiator appears at first to be doctrinaire Debord. The Roman Colosseum is a monument to empire, a confined and policed space where slaves die only after professing undying allegiance to their emperor. The games also attempt to portray an official version of Roman history in obscene masquerades. Worst of all, the spectacle is instituted by a Machiavellian dictator as a replacement for real democracy: open the Colosseum and you can close the Senate. Yet the plot ultimately fails because Commodus the tyrant who had sought to manipulate the spectacle is finally drawn into it himself. At the mercy of the celebrity spectacle manufactures, he finds that he has opened a forum for defiance. Commodus is first forced to bow to popular opinion, then despairs as the games make a slave more powerful than the emperor, and finally dies in the arena as the villain in a public drama into which he has been ineluctably drawn. In contemporary movies like Gladiator and A Knight’s Tale spectacle restores democracy, despite cynical attempts by those in power to manipulate it or use it as a narcotic. It is implosive, drawing into its center and

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under its scrutiny people and ideas that the spectacle itself was supposed to fix in power. The democratized gaze offers a cinematic experience that answers Debord and other critics of postmodernism with Bakhtin. Popular media can be a therapeutic carnival that works to dethrone the powerful and to question accepted ideologies – that it may be designed to do the opposite makes little difference. Such a reply to the critics of popular cinema and mass media has the benefit of offering a way out of the “no exit” approach to postmodernity, but it meets their doctrinaire dismissal with an equally doctrinaire acceptance. That popular cinema can be subversive does not mean that it often is. The implicit exaltation of modern spectatorial athletics and celebrity as the site of democratic leveling panders to the contemporary obsession with sports stars as symbols of western society’s pursuit of excellence and progress toward social justice. A shared devotion to public spectacles is the only abiding similarity between Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” and Helgeland’s version. Both exalt spectacles as the supreme expression of civilization. In Chaucer the ideals of feudalism are undermined by fate (and perhaps by irony as well), in Helgeland’s film they are toppled by an emergent democracy. The film gives us a view of chivalric hierarchy as it might be represented by the Wife of Bath, where real nobility (“gentilesse”) is based on worth not birth.42 Susan Aronstein and Nancy Coiner, in their analysis of Disney and Las Vegas versions of the Middle Ages, make an important addition to Eco’s famous list of the ten kinds of medievalism, which they dub “a peculiarly American Middle Ages, the Middle Ages of Democratic Possibility.”43 Helgeland’s story of William’s rise from thatcher’s son to international jousting star certainly qualifies. After successfully pretending to be a knight, he is ultimately dubbed a knight in reality by Edward, Black Prince of Wales, because he so completely embodies the chivalric ideal (one thinks of British actors like Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Sean Connery himself, as well as the many sports stars so honoured). The film’s remarkable recasting of the medieval tournament is propelled by the analogies it draws between knights and sports stars, producing something akin to a medieval aristocracy of sports celebrity. If First Knight embeds anachronism and satire within the seamless diegesis of the classic Hollywood style, Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale brings the medieval and postmodern worlds into violent collision – like two riders in the lists intent on unhorsing one another. A key characteristic of postmodernist fiction, according to Brian McHale, is its troubled ontology. The villain Adhemar taunts William by asking, “in what world could you have beaten me?” After defeating him William wryly observes:

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“Welcome to the new world.” Our sense of an upstart from a “new world” displacing the old world of privilege is also conveyed in the film by setting Adhemar’s (Rufus Sewell) British accent against the distinctly Australian speech of the peasant William (Heath Ledger). This new world is a decidedly capitalistic one where athletic prowess confers nobility, but the film makes no attempt to hide the preposterousness of such an assertion. The sound track is almost never undiegetic: Queen’s “We Will Rock You” – the anthem of contemporary sports spectatorship – is heard within the diegesis by fourteenth-century spectators at the joust, who respond, like their modern counterparts, by singing along and stamping their feet to the beat.44 They also take off their shirts to flaunt their pot bellies, do the wave, jostle to catch flying helmets as modern fans do baseballs, and they clamour for autographs. The tournaments in the film are arranged on a schedule that forms a “season,” ending in London with “The World Championships.” The jousts are filmed like modern football (English or American) where decisive moments within a panopticon are dissected from different angles, close ups, and multiple replays. The hero, William, is a boy whose athletic prowess has raised him, like the prototypical American basketball superstar or English soccer player, from poverty in Cheapside to the world stage. In a shot that recalls a number of advertisements featuring athletes, William momentarily sees himself as a boy in the adoring face of a young fan. Even though trophies are presented to him on an Olympic-like dais, he materialistically pawns them for ready cash. His final triumph is attended by his poor, adoring father. Like most contemporary sports stars William is a privately held corporation. His squires, Roland and Wat, have a share in the proceeds of his victories equal to the percentage of their earlier investments. William also signs a sweet endorsement deal with Ur-Nike – a female blacksmith whose ingenious armour gives him a competitive advantage. Umberto Eco’s list of the “ten little Middle Ages” could, of course, be extended ad absurdum but William’s lighter, tighter-fitting armour made of tempered steel and marked with a double Nike swoosh suggests a Middle Ages of Trademark Capitalism.45 Such techniques are calculated to reinstate disbelief in audiences and to foreground the constructedness of this image of medieval chivalry. The resulting pastiche of sports star bio-pic and medieval romance makes no attempt to hide its seams, rather the striking apposition of genres invites consideration of the unsuspected affinities between medieval knighthood and modern sports. The film’s analogies – between Chaucer’s pluralism and ours, between medieval and modern notions of “gentilesse,” and between athletic spectacles then and now – are designed for audiences who enjoy the play of continuity and

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anachronism. This sense of continuity within vast differences is also a distinct part of the love story. In one exchange Jocelyn compares William’s wooing to a hunter tracking a fox – a characterization he endorses by replying: “You are a fox.” The pun, perhaps suggested by Chaucer’s own pun in the Book of the Duchess on “hert-huntyng,” plunges the audience from medieval love allegory to modern singles’ bar slang in an instant.46 Later, with the crispness of a D.J. changing records, the ordered symmetry of “medieval” music and dance give way in mid-beat to the dance club strains of “Golden Years,” and everyone in contemporary fashion begins finding their own groove. What world is this? Well, it is certainly one composed by pastiche and deeply indebted to the virtual reality of fantasy sports. The jousting pitch becomes a field of dreams or a hall of fame where the shades of tournament champions like Edward, the Black Prince of Wales (1330– 1372), William Marshal (ca. 1146–1219), and the flamboyant Ulrich von Lichtenstein (fl. mid-thirteenth century) can break a lance or two. While there certainly is no medieval source for Helgeland’s screenplay, there is a modern one that he follows religiously and from which almost every major plot element derives: Maurice Keen’s Chivalry.47 Helgeland’s use of the book as a source is confined mainly to three chapters: “The Rise of the Tournament” (83–101), “Heraldry and Heralds” (125–42), and “Arms, Nobility and Honour” (162–79). In fact, most major plot twists in the film derive directly from two brief passages in Keen’s book (89–92 and 135–39). On page 89 Keen discusses William Marshal’s use of the tournament as a road to riches and international celebrity. Then Keen goes on to recall the passage from Historie de Guillaume le Maréchal where William and the Countess of Joigni pass the time at a tournament dancing to one of William’s songs (91). Which leads to a mention of the episode’s source in Chrétien’s Lancelot where Lancelot is commanded to demonstrate his love by intentionally losing a tournament (91). This is followed by an extended discussion of Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s prodigious career as a jouster and his love of disguise and masquerade (92–93). Likewise, Keen’s discussion of Heralds and Heraldry (135–39) provides most of the core plot elements of Chaucer’s role as William’s herald in the movie, including Keen’s mention of William Marshal’s herald grossly inflating his knight’s accomplishments (135), the integral role played by heralds in confirming nobility (134), their mastery of the blazon (139), the association of heralds with poetry (139), and their use of “letters patent” to grant or confirm nobility (164), etc. Indeed, it is perhaps not too great an exaggeration to say that Keen’s masterful introduction to chivalry is more the source of Helgeland’s screenplay than anything

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Chaucer wrote. We might also note that Helgeland’s reliance on expert modern scholarship does not serve to curb but rather to thicken and diversify the film’s wonderfully eclectic chronological hodgepodge. Keen’s work on medieval chivalry clearly fired Helgeland’s imagination – to such an extent that one wonders whether he is not owed a screenwriting-credit and a cheque – but the result of this collaboration between medieval scholarship and screenwriting is pastiche not historical accuracy. Helgeland’s stadium abolishes both time and class. It is the site of public masquerade where Edward the Black Prince and William Thatcher – from opposite ends of the social spectrum – can pretend for a while to be someone they are not and compete on equal terms. In the film tournaments are spectacles of the new world of free market capitalism at work, displacing the old order of aristocratic privilege. This is the world which Margaret Thatcher, herself the daughter of shop-keeper, supposedly played so great a role in creating: where individual initiative and speculation are rewarded. Adhemar represents the old world hierarchies, he forfeits a match once he learns a disguised Edward is in the lists but cheats to maintain his sense of inherent superiority over William. After an early victory, he taunts William with the Biblical judgement: “You have been weighed, you have been measured, you have been found wanting.” But for the feudal society Adhemar represents the writing is already on the wall: the trio of Roland, Wat, and Chaucer look down on his ruin at the end and repeat the same taunt. We have entered the age of Thatcher. “The Naked Text in English to Declare” The current rejuvenation of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and Chaucer is itself worthy of a major study. All three have had a significant image overhaul recently. Their famous, oft-reproduced portraits become, in modern visual culture, an equivalent of the increasingly archaic language in which students encounter them. These monuments to English Culture offer the contemporary world quaint mixtures of the authoritative and absurd: the bald and bug-eyed Shakespeare, the peacock Elizabeth, and the pudgy, sententious Chaucer. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) excavates the famous icon by offering a prequel to it, showing us the passions and uncertainties of a young woman who, in a sublime act of renunciation and self-fashioning, transforms herself into the distant, powerful goddess of the portrait. In Shakespeare in Love, the bald pate and the big tome it usually adorns are nowhere in sight, instead a spendthrift young lover with writer’s block takes center stage. These are heroes for a Gen-X

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culture: successful only after inglorious youths, unsure of themselves and their vocation in life, given to self-parody and self-pity, beautiful and quick-witted, but without direction. The screenplays of these movies, although clever and nuanced, nevertheless are made to appeal to a generation in which games of trivia are a defining obsession. These trivial obsessions account for the chief pleasure of watching movies in which etiological fables explain the homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Chaucer’s grudge against pardoners. High culture is repackaged as a game show full of transparent inside jokes – a form of knowledge designed especially to appeal to Gen-X audiences. These audiences can relax: Chaucer and Shakespeare were late bloomers too! And their elders teaching in universities can also take heart: enrollment in Early English literature courses are likely to soar. A Knight’s Tale, unlike Shakespeare in Love or Elizabeth, is a film of very few words. Its primary inspiration is not Chaucer’s language – the influence of his “The Knight’s Tale” is minimal, confined primarily to the tournament spectacles. Rather, it attempts to “translate” directly from the visual culture of the Middle Ages. The illumination of medieval texts becomes the model for the film’s cinematography and mise en scène. While the use of manuscript illuminations in movies about the Middle Ages is nothing new (cf., Zeffirelli’s use of images from The Book of Kells in Hamlet, 1990), Helgeland’s film uses illuminations not as decoration but rather as sources for the depiction of tournament combats. It also, like Elizabeth, offers a rejuvenating prequel to authoritative images of historical figures through which contemporary culture visualizes the past. A Knight’s Tale takes its cues from the Chaucerian tradition of portraiture and apocryphal continuation, even though it mounts a concerted assault on that tradition. Chaucer is here seen as one of the overgrown kids, a Gen-X rogue, who mocks himself as well as the establishment, directionless, without belief, but fascinated by spectacles; overeducated, talented, poor, and struggling to find a place for himself in the new economy; an amoral wanderer in a shaken world: ambivalent, addicted to gambling, but clubbable – a Chaucer willing to do nude scenes! With some squinting this picture can be viewed as a thoroughgoing reaction against the moral Chaucer of the Victorian Age that witnessed the birth of the modern Chaucer scholarship.48 It is instructive to compare, for example, Robert Bell’s reaction to the Hoccleve portrait in The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1878) in its mixture of gravitas and suavitas with the view of Chaucer implied by Helgeland’s image. For Bell:

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Studies in Medievalism The mixture of gravity and sweetness in Occleve’s portrait conveys the perfect image of a character not the less remarkable for its rare combination of power and sympathy, than for the variety of accomplishments by which it was graced.49

Bell’s description of the Hoccleve’s portrait could easily be rewritten to yield Helgeland’s Chaucer: The mixture of flippancy and acerbity in Helgeland’s portrait conveys the unreliable, self-fashioned image of “a real character” not less unremarkable for its combination of ennui and exuberance, than for the paucity of accomplishments with which it is burdened. Helgeland’s portrait is also a rejoinder to the currently fashionable understanding of Chaucer as a man of the world, confident civil servant, diplomat, and confidant of the rich and powerful. In fact, when the young poet, naked and covered in mud, appears on the road early in the film it is not as a court poet or portly pilgrim, but as Chesterton saw him – a force of nature. When I think of Chaucer in this primary and general fashion, I do not think of a court poet receiving a laurel from the king or a flagon from the king’s butler, not even of a stout and genial gentleman with a forked beard setting forth from the Tabard upon the Canterbury road; but of some. . . elemental and emblematic giant, alive at our beginnings and made out of the very elements of the land.50 In the film the poet’s portrait develops gradually from an “elemental” to a “social Chaucer,”51 a Chaucer schooled in the social graces but never completely within the social world he inhabits.52 Helgeland’s Chaucer mixes uneasily with nobility and with irascible commoners like “Wat” alike; he is a self-conscious performer who while dressed in a weathered cloak can still hold an audience; a coarse but genial observer of all classes who seldom pays his debts but who always settles his grudges, a servant of love’s servants – not above a little good-natured pandering.53 I want to focus on two instances where the film seems to respond directly to traditional images of Chaucer. Three manuscript illuminations have had an enormous influence on the modern reception of Chaucer: the Hoccleve portrait (in e.g., British Library MS Harley 4866, f. 88r), the pilgrim portrait in Ellesmere (Huntington Library MS EL 26. C. 9

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f. 153v), and the frontispiece to Troilus and Criseyde in the Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 61, f. 1v.54 We first see Helgeland’s Chaucer on the road (a pilgrim of sorts), but gone are the rich mount and dwarfish legs of the Ellesmere portrait and gone too are the moral gravity, quiet mien and clerkish garb of the Hoccleve portrait. Helgeland’s Chaucer still can give directions to the lost – the Hoccleve portrait is often lifted from its context in modern reproductions so that Chaucer seems to be pointing the way to the corner store – but here he is unexpectedly young, tall and thin, and as naked as the day he was born. As I discussed above, the image is more than sheer impertinence: it thoughtfully demystifies traditional constructions of Chaucer as moral exemplar or affluent bureaucrat. It also suggests that a very different image of Chaucer could be gleaned from his works. Debunking the “moral Chaucer,” it offers a biographical etiology for Chaucer’s “Proverbs”: What shul thise clothes thus manyfold, Lo! This hote someres day? After greet hete cometh cold; No man caste his pilche away. Of al this world the large compas Hit wol not in myn armes tweyne, Whoso mochel wol embrace, Litle therof he shal distreyne.55 Helgeland’s portrait shows Chaucer naked in both the senses hinted at in these moral epigrams: undressed and destitute. The image may stem as well from the apocryphal Canterbury tale, “The Tale of Beryn,” where Geffrey and Beryn both suffer like indignities at the hands of Falsetown loan sharks. However, the film’s Chaucer is also naked in distinctly modern senses. The popular media continually portrays celebrity character for a scandal-obsessed culture in terms of embarrassing nude photos that undermine famous stars’ carefully constructed public personae. Candid shots, often taken in sordid circumstances, carnivalize celebrity status, by turns de-sanctifying and humanizing the public image of famous people. In Helgeland’s film, Chaucer is no distanced observer of the carnival world he represents but is instead both its hapless victim and the recipient of its leveling graces. Chaucer’s nakedness is also the naked truth behind his most celebrated fictions. His devastating depictions of the Summoner and Pardoner stem from his real-life crisis as an inveterate gambler repeatedly at the mercy of this merciless pair. The second time they strip him naked, the loan sharks threaten in perverse accordance

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with Biblical law to take in partial payment an especially precious pound of his flesh. Freed by William from the debt, Chaucer threatens the unholy pair with a decidedly Dantesque form of revenge: “I will eviscerate you in fiction: I was naked for a day, you will be naked for all eternity.”56 Later, the stadium where “all are equal” becomes the genesis of the idea of the pluralistic Canterbury Tales itself, a fictional world which can match the diversity of Chaucer’s London. Only Chaucer’s tongue-tied, bullying nemesis, Wat (Tyler?), need be excluded from this collection of God’s plenty: “All human activity lies within the artist’s scope – maybe not yours. . .” The implication is clear: like the Shakespeare of the recent film, Chaucer requires no mountain of scholarly commentary to explicate his works. At their core such masterpieces are not simply translations from the Italian but rather mediated reflections of the author’s life. Helgeland’s excavation of the famous Troilus frontispiece of Chaucer reading his poem outdoors to an assembled crowd is wonderfully imaginative and completely over the top. Here Chaucer is a youthful herald, quickly learning how to win the crowd and inventing a distinctive new style, soon to have its imitators.57 For modern audiences the style clearly parodies the vowel belabouring public address announcers of contemporary sports arenas. Chaucer’s introductions of William, spoofing the Knight’s own hyperbolic press guide in the “General Prologue,” whip the crowds into a frenzy. This is no bookish Chaucer standing before a podium but an improvising, oral entertainer who appeals from his perch standing on the lists both to the nobility and to those in the cheap seats, “those not sitting on a cushion.” This Chaucer relishes his place at the centre of a pluralistic spectacle. He is in love with the sound of his own voice and begins to conceive of public poetry while coining patently absurd idealizations of Christian knighthood, like: “I give you that seeker after serenity, that protector of Italian virginity, Ulrich von Lichtenstein.” In the film, the “historical Chaucer” is not unknowable because of a paucity of historical evidence but because his own identity is a rhetorically constructed fiction. The second most celebrated tidbit from the historical record is Chaucer’s testimony to establish the authenticity of Sir Richard Scrope’s claim to bear the coat of arms “azure a bend or” over that of Sir Robert Grosvenor in the High Court of Chivalry at Westminster, October 15, 1386. The episode is archly evoked in A Knight’s Tale. Helgeland’s Chaucer is a skilled coiner of false identities, willing, for a price, to draw up forged “patents of nobility” complete with spurious coats of arms. His price is a cloak to cover his nakedness. The search for an historical Chaucer, the film seems to suggest, can only uncover a rhetorical Chaucer, a self fashioned out of economic necessities: “Let no

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man caste his pilche away.” The word pastiche in English means not only “assemblage” but also “forgery.”58 Any reconstruction of the past is to some extent pastiched in both senses of the word. Helgeland’s images of Chaucer and of the medieval joust do not invite us to measure his version of the Middle Ages against our own. Instead they encourage us to understand medievalism as the practice and study of pastiche, or rather of generations of pastiche stretching back not to an original but to earlier acts of compositive forgery. That we all of us “justen at a fane” represents what is best in the discipline of medievalism: its arcane proficiencies, its quixotic nostalgia, and its curiously central place in the postmodern world.

NOTES 1. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1998), 61. 2. Eco, Faith in Fakes, 83. 3. Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 160. 4. This concept is based upon Lacan’s notion of the “imaginary” where a patient’s real history is replaced by an imagined narrative. The target audiences for such films will know the Middle Ages chiefly through its representation in earlier films and popular culture. See Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 92: “The Imaginary is the order of mirror images, identifications and reciprocities. It is the dimension of experience in which the individual seeks not simply to placate the Other but to dissolve his otherness by becoming his counterpart.” 5. The term is Frederick Jameson’s and refers the idea that no history exists independently of its expression in textual form. In cinema the term may be used to suggest that no representation of an historical Middle Ages can be independent of earlier film representations. Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 6. “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 7. McHale maintains that postmodernism is philosophically centered on questions of ontology, as opposed to the epistemological concerns of modernism. See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987). 8. In fact John Gardner’s approach to the historical Chaucer (that is both the medieval individual and his fictions about the past) could well serve as an epigraph to Helgeland’s movie. “We have no choice but to make up Chaucer’s life

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as if his story were a novel, by the play of fancy on the lost world’s dust and scrapings. So Chaucer himself made up the classical age, dressed up young Troilus in crusader’s armour and decorated legendary Theseus’ Athens with battlemented towers, wide jousting grounds, and sunny English gardens.” John Gardner, The Life and Times of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 3. 9. Rebecca A. Umland and Samuel J. Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 94–100 survey reaction to the film and provide a lukewarm defense. 10. Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (London: McFarland, 1999), 97. 11. Kevin J. Harty, “Lights! Camelot! Action!: King Arthur on Film,” in Harty, ed., King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema (London: McFarland, 1999), 5–38 (31). 12. See, for instance, William Paden’s praise of Bergman’s Seventh Seal: “Bergman’s film presents. . . a case in which Bergman has reconstituted the past more faithfully than available traces gave him any apparent means to do. . . Bergman produced an image of the Middle Ages more faithful than he can have known.” William D. Paden, “Reconstructing the Middle Ages: The Monk’s Sermon in the Seventh Seal,” in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 287–305 (288). 13. For a general introduction to some of the issues involved see Patrick Phillips, “Genre, Star and Auteur – Critical Approaches to Hollywood Cinema,” in Jill Nelmes, ed., An Introduction to Film Studies, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 161–208. 14. The classic discussion of auteurism is Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and Film Sense (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957). A cogent overview of the challenges to and adaptations of the approach is available in Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 83–88 and 123–85. 15. Jerry Zucker’s credits in film parodies include: The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977, co-director and co-writer), Top Secret (1984, co-writer and co-director), Ruthless People (1986, co-director), Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988, co-writer), and Naked Gun: The Smell of Fear (1991, co-writer). For a systematic analysis of the importance of parody in cinema and in theoretical discussions of film, see: Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2001). 16. Umland and Umland, The Use of Arthurian Legend, xiii. 17. I owe this suggestion to Tom Shippey whose encouraging persistence shepherded this article through protracted revisions. 18. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). 19. The term “interpellation” is Althusser’s and is commonly used in film

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studies to signal the ways in which cultural practices implicate audiences and construct the subject positions from which audiences will view a film. See Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 134: “Ideology operates through what Althusser calls ‘interpellation.’ Originally derived from French legislative procedure, the term ‘interpellation’ evokes the social structures and practices which ‘hail’ individuals, endowing them with a social identity and constructing them as subjects who unthinkingly accept their role within the system of production relations.” 20. Blind Hary in Book VII of the Wallace has the episode occur in 1297 when Wallace was approximately 20 years old. See Matthew P. McDiarmid, ed., Hary’s Wallace (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1969), 78–123. The changes in the legend were first introduced by Randall Wallace, Braveheart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). His childhood fathers Wallace’s rage as an adult. 21. The term “suture” is used more less interchangeably with interpellation in contemporary film studies. In this essay, though, it refers specifically to shots where the audience, through point-of-view camera, shares the vantage point of spectators within the scene. Such sutures, particularly in moments of extreme tension, hail or interpellate the viewer’s sympathies. For a cogent discussion of these terms and related issues of spectatorship, see Patrick Phillips, “The Film Spectator” in Nelmes, Introduction to Film Studies, 129–59 and the bibliography on page 160. 22. It is interesting to note that the “novelization” of the film (which perhaps reflects the original screenplay) has Lancelot 19 years old at the time of the attack of the warlords when his pregnant wife and parents are killed. The film, however, clearly shows him witnessing their immolation as a young boy of 12 or 13. 23. See the engaging discussion of this scene in Jacqueline Jenkins, “First Knights and Common Men: Masculinity in American Arthurian Film,” in Harty, King Arthur on Film, 81–95 (84–85), where Lancelot’s hair shaking signifies a “new, specifically American, triumphant freedom.” 24. Reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 14–28. 25. Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun,” in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 29–38. 26. Phallic jokes could almost be called a visual signature of the Zucker brothers’ film parodies. In Naked Gun 2½ the lovemaking scene between Lt. Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) and Jane (Priscilla Presley) climaxes with a comic montage of fifteen phallic jokes, including a missile launch, a foot-long hot dog, and the obligatory reference to Hitchcock of a train entering a tunnel. 27. I have represented the entries as they are in the O.L.D. but not in their entirety. P.G.W. Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1363–4. 28. The issues raised by such a style are treated in detail by David

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Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York; Columbia University Press, 1985). 29. This essay was written before the events of September 11, 2001. Here and below in the section “Malagant and the Pax Americana,” I put things rather more polemically than I would under current conditions. In light of recent events, though, I am even more convinced that the film has a great deal to tell us about the ideological implications of popular cinema and medievalism. 30. See Bernardus Dombat and Alphonsus Kalb, eds., Augustine, De civitate dei, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47, 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955); Augustine, City of God, 3 vols., trans. Gerald G. Walsh et al., vols. 8, 14, 24 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950, 1952, 1954), and On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1958). 31. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 32. On Lancelot’s maturation, see Jacqueline Jenkins, “First Knights and Common Men,” in King Arthur on Film, 81–95. 33. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the speeches occur in Act III, scenes one and three, respectively. Branagh’s film emphasizes the bloodlust of the weary hero by cutting or relocating much of the dialogue between these two speeches. 34. The lesson of a charitable love triumphing over selfishness is also the main theme of Zucker’s next film, My Best Friend’s Wedding (producer, 1997). However we should also note that Malory’s Mellyagaunce episode on which the screenplay is loosely based does celebrate a form of patient love: “But nowadayes men can nat love sevennyght but they muste have all their desyres. That love may nat endure by reson, for where they bethe sone accorded and hasty, heete sone keelyth. And ryght so fareth love nowadayes, sone hote and sone colde. Thys ys no stabylyté. But the olde love was nat so. For men and women coude love togydirs seven yerys, and no lycoures lustis was betweyxte them, and than was love trouthe and faythefulnes. And so in lyke wyse was used such love in kynge Arthurs dayes.” Eugene Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 3: 1120–21. 35. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 232. 36. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 55. 37. Compare Aronstein and Coiner’s discussion of the Disunification of the Middle Ages: “Twice Knightly: Democratizing the Middle Ages for Middle-Class America,” in Kathleen Verduin, ed., Medievalism in North America, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994), 212–31. 38. Elizabeth Chadwick, First Knight (London: BoxTree, 1995), 75–76. 39. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3: 1122. 40. For a range of critical analyses of the ideologies of the war, see: Stanley

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A. Renson, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders, Publics, and the Process of the Conflict (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). 41. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993) surveys this growing field in film studies. 42. For a recent discussion of Chaucer’s use of the term and its relationship to literary and social conventions, see: Nigel Saul, “Chaucer and Gentility,” in Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992), 41–58. 43. Aronstein and Coiner, “Twice Knightly,” 213. 44. One particularly salutary effect of postmodern metafiction is to defamiliarize the prior textualization of historical representations. It is difficult to listen to Helgeland’s soundtrack without being goaded into pondering why the “classical” music of nineteenth-century Germany now seems so natural an accompaniment to representations of the Middle Ages. 45. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (London: Vintage, 1998), 61–72. 46. If such a cultural translation from Chaucer’s pun to an analogous, modern one is indeed what the screenplay intends, this updating of medieval allegory is cleverly embedded within the film’s framework. The young Chaucer of the film has only written The Book of the Duchess. Indeed the whole interview between Jocelyn and William could profitably be compared to Chaucer’s earliest dream vision. 47. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 48. See, for instance, Steve Ellis, “Popular Chaucer,” in Leslie Workman, et al., eds., Medievalism and the Academy I, Studies in Medievalism 9 (1997): 26–43 and David O. Matthews “Speaking to Chaucer: The Poet and the Nineteenth Century Academy,” in the same volume, 5–25. 49. Quoted in Matthews, “Speaking to Chaucer,” 15. 50. Quoted in Ellis, “Popular Chaucer,” 37. 51. The reference is, of course, to Paul Strohm’s influential Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 52. See Matthews, “Speaking to Chaucer,” 7. 53. See Derek Pearsall’s reflections on Chaucer biographies in The Life of Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 1–8. Pearsall emphasizes how bias determines the kind of Chaucer biographers create, from the English “snobbery” which presses “the Lancastrian connection” to the American Horatio Alger Chaucer to the general consensus that Chaucer was “a decent sort of fellow.” Choosing a “differently prejudiced view,” Pearsall dares to imagine Chaucer’s life “as that of a time-serving opportunist and placeman, who pictured his own pliability in all that he saw. He might be seen as one who had outlived the idealisms of chivalry and faith but found nothing to fill the vacuum that they left; who exposed the meretriciousness of institutional religion, but retreated into its most inflexible dogma when his humanity was exhausted; who recognized no central social value in law and other forms of contract, but saw only what was

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hollow and saleable; who made many generous gestures towards women, but returned generally to a conventional misogyny; who viewed life in a spirit of pessimism interspersed with irrepressible hilarity” (8). The Pearsall prejudice has certainly taken hold in contemporary scholarship, and while it is considerably darker than Helgeland’s portrait, it is easy to see the same Chaucer in both. In Helgeland’s twenty-something Chaucer are the seeds of Pearsall’s fifty-something Chaucer. 54. These portraits have been widely imitated, reproduced and discussed. For a concise introduction see Pearsall, The Life of Chaucer, 285–305. 55. Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 56. The notion of fiction as personal revenge is central to the poetics of the Canterbury Tales themselves (e.g., “The Reeve’s Tale”) and to fifteenth-century Chaucerianism. Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid revisits Chaucer’s Troilus to punish the wayward Cresseid with a venereal disease, and the anonymous Canterbury Interlude makes Chaucer’s Pardoner the butt of fabliau justice upon his arrival in Canterbury. In this way Helgeland’s Chaucer “quits” the Pardoner with a literary castration. See Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), and John M. Bowers, ed., The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth Century Continuations and Additions (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992). On fifteenth-century readers revenging themselves on Chaucer’s fictions, see Nickolas A. Haydock, “Remaking Chaucer: Influence and Interpretation in Late Medieval Poetry” (University of Iowa Dissertation, 1994). 57. As mentioned above this probably derives from Helgeland’s use of Maurice Keen’s Chivalry. 58. See Margaret Rose, “Post-Modern Pastiche,” British Journal of Aesthetics 31:1 (1991): 26–38.

Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints Gwendolyn Morgan Popularly acclaimed as a saint in her homeland and celebrated by such authors as Christine de Pisan some 500 years before receiving official Church sanction,1 Joan of Arc nonetheless remained vilified or ignored in the English-speaking world until the Romantics adopted her as a heroine of democracy and the oppressed masses. Since then, Joan has become an increasingly fashionable focus for both intellectual and popular ideologies, first in literature and in various professional and academic journals, and later in film.2 By 1996, she could claim sufficient cinematic versions of her story to merit an entire book devoted to the study of them. Part of our enduring re-creation of the Middle Ages, such films employ what Deren3 calls the “innocent arrogance of objective fact,” which is simultaneously film’s authority and its illusion, to propose a medieval mystic who never existed. We have created Joans to embody Marxist, democratic, populist, and patriotic political agendas; female heroes for feminists and gays;4 new-age shamans with mystical journeys and guardian angels. More recently, we discover Joan as psychotic, schizophrenic, delusional, manic-depressive, or any combination of these, apparently the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of her as the frustrated victim of overactive, pubescent hormones. Whatever the sauce in which we serve her up, all these re-creations ignore the fundamental medieval reality of Joan as a woman of unshakable faith in her personal and profound experience of Christianity. In our efforts to explain away the religious experiences so believable to her contemporaries and so unbelievable to the scientific rationalist impulse of the twentieth century, we have left the real Joan far behind and rendered her an icon defining our own concept of human identity. To borrow from Gledhill,5 she has become: Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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In 1999, Hollywood and its Canadian equivalent produced two films – Columbia’s blockbuster The Messenger and Joan of Arc, released for home video by Artisan – which provide excellent case studies of this process. Both productions claim veracity for their interpretations in introductory screen overlays. Joan of Arc refers to the ancient prophecy of Merlin foretelling the Maid of Lorraine (conveniently forgetting that Bede had also done so, and hence eliminating one historical Church authority) but asserts, “It did not say how,” thereby implying that the truth is to be found in the film. The Messenger simply declares itself to be “The Story of Joan of Arc.” Before proceeding, we should remind ourselves of the known basics of Joan’s career. She perceived divine messengers, specifically Saints Catherine and Margaret and the Archangel Michael, directing her to drive the English from France and see Charles crowned at Reims. They further provided her with foreknowledge of a variety of events, both during her military career and her imprisonment. Miracles, at least to the satisfaction of her contemporaries, surrounded her, from de Baudricourt’s hens refusing to lay, to fulfilled predictions, to the miraculous changing of the wind at Orleans, to her own superhuman physical stamina in battle after receiving serious wounds. Her heart would not burn, said the executioner, even in a posthumous attempt,6 and had to be disposed of secretly. She predicted her own betrayal and downfall, asserting upon her first arrival at Chinon that “I shall last a year, hardly longer.”7 She displayed exceptional intelligence and humour, along with a particularly acute and extensive memory for details, outwitting and frustrating her judges.8 Above all, Joan evinced an unshakable faith, never displaying the least doubt in her divine mission until the final days of her trial. Even then, she indicated that her abjuration was not to be taken seriously by signing it simply with an X, a ploy she used during her military campaigns when sending false information intended for interception, in contrast to true instructions which she signed “Jehanne.”9 Moreover, she withdrew her recantation only three days later, to face the stake knowingly rather than deny the validity of her religious experiences even to that dubious extent. At her death, Joan refused to scream, merely calling the name of Jesus seven times before perishing.10

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Of the two 1999 films, The Messenger11 overtly seeks to debunk Joan as Christian saint, operating simultaneously on so many theoretical levels as to make a red-blooded postmodernist proud. Here, it is possible to touch on only a few. The feminist aspect, for example, is strong but predictable. Joan is “just a girl” whose faith is ridiculed and advice scorned by the French military command. Angry at her exclusion from strategic sessions, she hacks off her hair and demands voice in their decisions. Although the film omits all Joan’s victories except that at Orleans, and meticulously avoids depicting her in battle in almost any capacity but waving her banner, her ingenuity in reversing a siege tower and using it as a bridge over the English defenses and her courage in leaping a field of stakes to lower the drawbridge prove her capacity as a soldier. Beyond this brief scene, however, Joan is denied military acumen, her success instead credited to obsession. Yet the historical Joan, according to the Duke of Alençon, “in the matter of war. . . was very expert, in the management of the lance as in the drawing up of the army in battle order and in preparing the artillery.”12 The film’s Joan is also pampered by her male companions, protected from profanity (the English response to her letter, “Go fuck yourself,” is softened by them to, “They said they’d think about it”) and left to sleep while the men attack. This masculine scorn of strong women is foreshadowed earlier in the film by the rape-murder of Joan’s sister, Catherine, whose English assailant mocks her attempt at selfdefense with, “Ooh! A woman with a sword!” The Messenger’s most important feminist issue – the objectification of women – in fact centers on this scene. The incident (entirely an invention of the film, by the way, since her sister survived to testify at her rehabilitation trial a quarter of a century later) is particularly brutal and graphic: because she will not “stay still” during the rape, a soldier pinions Catherine to a door (which hides Joan as she witnesses the entire atrocity) and rapes her during her death throes. The horror is further emphasised by the fact that it resulted from Catherine’s heroic gesture of giving up her own hiding place to her baby sister. The event has a lasting impact on Joan, who relives it during a fever-induced delirium at Orleans, and again when English soldiers tear off her female attire after her recantation and leave her only with men’s clothes to cover herself – an act which, of course, leads to her death. . . at least in the film. Indeed, that the film credits the threatened rape of Joan with her ultimate condemnation, despite tenuous historical evidence and Joan’s own words contradicting the possibility,13 is further evidence of its feminist undercurrents, for the centrality of the incident transforms, on one level, Joan’s crusade into a fight against male domination and abuse of women.

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Other late twentieth-century obsessions, including Joan’s possible lesbianism (in the cross-dressing, and in the almost complete masculinisation of a notably feminine actress), conspiracy theory (e.g., Charles and Yolande’s unscrupulous use and betrayal of Joan and the English forcing her into male dress), and liberal-populist political agenda (the “simple people” are constantly used, abused, and pitted against crafty and self-interested aristocrats), also receive perfunctory nods in The Messenger. The film’s predominant ideological foci, however, are the closely related themes of Joan as delusional psychotic and the gnostic cum atheistic cum post-modernist denial of the possibility of pure good and evil, and consequently of God. The explanation of Joan’s inspiration as mental instability dates back to the late nineteenth century.14 The Messenger capitalises on the idea and invents or exploits all manner of events to eliminate any possibility of divine guidance, asserting instead psychosis and obsession. The opening 45 minutes offer an entirely invented childhood, which depicts her skipping fancifully through streams and chasing butterflies, seeing angels in the patterns of the clouds. She has visions, not of saints or angels, but of a child-Christ on a Celtic stone throne, a figure who grows up with her and whose words come simultaneously from his own and the young, and later the adult, Joan’s mouths, thereby effectively blending the two. At Orleans, she goes so far as to state, “I don’t think; I leave that to God” and to comment, “It’s not me who’s angry, it’s God.” The conclusion is obvious: her heavenly visions result from schizophrenic projection of herself and her needs. Catherine’s equally fictional rape-murder provides a focus for this already unstable child when a priest, in an effort to console Joan, suggests, “Perhaps he chose [to save] you because he needs you for some higher calling.” This, combined with Joan’s accidental discovery of her sword immediately prior to the rape, directs Joan in a sublimated quest for revenge against English male aggressors. Always over-pious, the movie’s Joan now seeks consolation in religious obsession and creeps into a dark church to steal the sacramental wine, insisting to God, “I want to be at one with you NOW!!” Here, her latent delusional impulses congeal with subconscious suggestion (by the rape and her priest’s interpretation of her own escape from it), and Joan visualises a stained glass window of Christ-as-Warrior shattering and reforming, life-size, in front of her. That it reforms as stained glass confirms the vision as delusion. From this point on, Joan’s facial expressions and body language mirror that of her projected Jesus: the camera, angled above, watches as their eyes turn up and roll under lowering brows; mouths are hard,

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down-turned, pained and angry. Fingers point accusingly. Righteous fury blends with insanity, even with evil. The camera flashes (with sinister musical score) between Joan and her vision of Christ on the pagan throne, changing angles wildly and creating a montage in which Joan and Christ become the same figure seen from different perspectives; Joan’s projection of her own mental and emotional turmoil as an externalised God is now complete, and the recurring nightmare of Catherine’s murder only emphasises the pathology of her obsession. There is nothing in the film of the clever, quick-thinking, and jocular realist of historical record. Joan’s sanity is at issue throughout the film, from the priest in her childhood who, in uncharacteristically modern manner, questions whether she and her mother are happy at home; to her companions’ continual efforts to calm her down; and, finally, to her exchanges with the unnamed figure played by Dustin Hoffman in the final scenes. Under duress, such as in the slaughter at La Tourelles, she falls into panic attacks and finally into surreal hallucination. Moreover, toward the end of her career, she finally glimpses that her divine inspiration comes from herself: Jean: “. . . How do you know these voices aren’t really you?” Joan: “They are me. That’s how God speaks to me. . .” This exchange is in the precise language of Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,15 asserting that visions of the divine are merely the manifestation of subconscious individual desire. It is the shadowy companion of Joan’s confinement, however, who strips away her illusion and thereby most effectively exposes to the audience her severe mental illness. To identify himself, the figure tries on the faces first of the child and then of the adult Jesuses of her visions, but finally settles on Hoffman’s visage and the garb of the grim reaper. Once again, the camera zooms in rapidly, backs off, and zooms in again on the changing faces, even closing on specific features (the eyes and mouth) as it does so, blending one image into the other and confirming that the Jesuses, Death, and Joan herself are indeed the same being. As Joan frantically attempts to justify her career as divinely inspired, insisting that she was non-violent, humble, only following (divine) instructions, Hoffman’s character calls up (out of context) earlier scenes from the film which seemingly disprove her claims. Patiently, he debunks each of her “signs,” explaining them as misinterpretations and accidents. Consider her sword, found in a field during childhood: after demonstrating a myriad of ways in which it might have come there, Death concludes, “out of an infinite number of possibilities, you

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had to pick [a heavenly source.] You didn’t see what was, Joan, you saw what you wanted to see.” Of course, historically Joan’s sword was unearthed at divine direction in Saint Catherine’s church in Fierbois on her initial journey to Chinon,16 but the film’s invention here – as with its assertion of the onset of Joan’s voices in childhood rather than, as she herself claimed,17 at thirteen, and its creation of a sympathetic Pierre Cauchon from the violently antagonistic judge of historical record, along with the traumas of her and her sister’s rapes – serves to reinforce the interpretation of Joan as psychotic. Entangled with the film’s discovery of Joan as mentally ill is the postmodern impulse to blur the line between good and evil and to relativise morality, which here ultimately leads to a denial of God’s existence and a retreat into rational atheism or, at best, a manic gnosticism. Hoffman’s character, not identified in the film proper but listed in the credits as “The Conscience,” indeed fulfills this function as Joan’s externalised superego as she relives her failings. She at first identifies him as Satan with a “get thee behind me,” and he certainly lives up to the accusation in his sustained attack on her faith, as he reduces everything to “what [she] wanted to see.” Yet, he also wears the face of Jesus and grants her final absolution in conventional Church ritual. Prominent, too, in her exchanges with this figure is his eliciting from Joan accusations against God of betrayal, which he then shows her to be merely accusations against herself. Such recall her hallucination of Christ at Orleans. In this telling scene, Joan begins frantically to spin in circles, overcome with the horror of the carnage around her, a grotesque parody of her playful childhood spinning and rolling in the fields. She suddenly retreats into delusion. Her eyes focus on the vision of Jesus on his stone throne, asking, “Jeanne, what are you doing?” “I’m playing,” she responds, at which He begins to bleed and repeats, “What are you doing to me?” In this way, Joan receives the blame for the carnage around her, and the audience receives an indication that at least some aspect of her self-created divine does not approve. She is her visions. Good and evil, God and Satan, become indistinguishable for, as The Conscience says – to the audience as much as to Joan – “Who are you to even think you can begin to know the difference between good and evil?” And, as she finally confesses her military career was actually a result and mirror of her own desires, ambition, and pride, The Conscience begins to repeat her words after her. “Pride,” he whispers in unison as she concludes her confession. Joan’s entire mission and position as “God’s Messenger” is thus completely discredited. That Hoffman’s character is “The Conscience,” not even “Joan’s Conscience,” possesses further significance. First, in some quasi-formalist

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or postmodernist fashion, it implies the nonexistence of the individual identity or truth, and by corollary, suggests that such is illusion. If Joan’s illusion of herself manifests as her God, her Satan, and her mission, then her entire history, her sainthood, is our illusion. The Conscience could be anyone’s, be perceived by anyone. Second, if Joan herself simultaneously defines both the good and evil of her acts, this relativises the very concept of morality. The elimination of the distinction between good and evil (which The Conscience explicitly posits), and with it the responsibility of humanity to attempt to perceive and hence to live by it, permit an easy movement to the gnostic position, to interpret Joan’s recognition of her divine voices as herself as a gnostic impulse – as simply another manifestation of her Conscience. And, it is important to recall that The Conscience grants her ultimate absolution. Joan thus creates her own mission, justifies it, condemns it, and forgives it. She becomes her own God. Now, we can understand anew the overlaying of her visions of Jesus with herself as the absence of God and as merely a projection of the will. Or, if we choose to remain with psychosis as an explanation, that there was simply nothing of the divine in Joan’s life. Yet it is in the treatment of miracles that The Messenger most obviously takes its stand against the possibility of efficacious religious experience and absolute morality. The miracles of historical record – and there are many – are absent from the film, except for a perversion of that at St.-Pierre-Les-Moutiers. According to witness Jean d’Aulon, a constant companion of Joan, Joan claimed that she had with her fifty thousand of her men when, in fact, she had fewer than two hundred. When begged to retreat, she cried, “ ‘Faggots and hurdles, everyone, to build a bridge!’ which immediately was done, and the town was taken by storm.”18 Thus, with only a tiny force, the historical Joan performed the seemingly impossible in capturing St. Pierre. The Messenger, however, transfers this situation to Paris, Joan’s most dismal failure. Here, the faith of Joan degenerates into obsessive delusion, for her puny force, one by one, die or desert. The miracle described by eye witnesses in her posthumous retrial is thereby not only debunked but transformed into a self-inflicted disaster. Even more significant in The Messenger’s rejection of absolute good and evil is the film’s deliberate creation of false miracles and the consequential reduction of the term to absurdity. At Charles’s coronation, for example, the churchmen are distraught to find the sacred oil of Clovis completely evaporated and insist the ceremony cannot go on. Enter Yolande, to fill the vial with fresh oil. When a horrified prelate exclaims, “Madam, what are you doing?” she replies, “performing a miracle.” However, as Sackville-West notes, everyone knew the oil had dried, and

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“the necessary morsel. . . had been dug out of the Sainte Ampoule with the point of a golden needle” and added to the ceremonial ointment.19 The film glosses over this suggestion of a medieval capability for rational thought and suggests, instead, the gullibility and superstition of the medieval mind. Elsewhere in The Messenger, we find Dubois at Orleans replying with sarcasm to news of the Maid’s arrival with, “Yeah, it’s a miracle,” and, following the fall of La Tourelles, while Joan pleaded with the English troops to leave, instructing his men, “Never wait for miracles; stand by to attack.” As a final act in the personal defamation of Joan, the film depicts her screaming in terror and pain at the stake, when, historically, even English eye-witnesses marvelled at her calm and her faith throughout the ordeal. The saint has been effectively eliminated and replaced with an abused and manipulated girl who was also, unfortunately, mentally ill. In contrast to The Messenger, the 1999 made-for-television film Joan of Arc20 is, at least on the surface, a more traditional interpretation of the Maid, in no way suggesting severe mental or emotional aberration and making somewhat greater use of what historical records we do have. Here, then, is the quick-witted, humorous pragmatist of the trial records, the forceful woman of single-minded purpose. Nonetheless, this production is also untrue to the medieval saint, but its departure from history and legend comes primarily in the form of omission. For example, although divine voices (and the right voices in this case) do direct Joan’s career, they take a definite back seat to Joan’s natural talents. Moreover, we see her experiencing them only at times of extreme emotional turmoil: during a raid on Domremy, in which her friend is killed (a scene completely invented by the filmmaker); in the aftermath of fire at Fierbois; at Orleans, while delirious from the arrow wound; and in the flames at the stake. Thus, the film suggests that they may be merely her response to crisis, and their divinity is thereby effectively deflated. Joan herself, in this film, repeatedly denies that she is the prophesied Maid until the aftermath of her delirium stemming from her wound at Orleans. Too, as in The Messenger, miracles are all but completely eliminated or, as with the Maid’s entry into Orleans, the development of Valcouleurs’ defenses, and the finding of her sword, given absolutely logical and pragmatic explanations – in the movie Joan’s words, “nothing that couldn’t have been done before.” Her prodigious military capabilities are likewise explained away. For example, in contrast to Joan’s own testimony of record that, until she reached the Dauphin, “I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war,”21 the film shows her astride a vigorous and impressive mount (something her father could never have owned) even before she leaves

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Domremy, and later training at swordplay. Capable and a quick learner, yes, but touched by God, no. Similarly, as a child she receives lessons from the village priest on the English invasion of France – necessary preparation for her mission in the modern view, but again without historical substantiation, and from all we know of the medieval Church’s view of women, extremely unlikely. Reinforcing this rationalist impulse are the complete disbelief of the French court (Charles remarks, “We’ve tried the Maid of Lorraine ploy before. . . but maybe this time it will work”) and her adversaries’ dismissal of her even as a witch (“Never underestimate the power of a myth, my friend,” says Burgundy to the English commander. “We must find the girl and kill her”). Even Joan’s father does not believe in her and, in a very twentieth-century family drama, denies her divine inspiration in an effort to control his willful child. Indeed, in analyzing the film’s rational atheism, Jacques D’Arc’s character is a case in point. Joan of Arc depicts Joan’s father as a rough peasant pragmatist, hard-working and without illusions, ruling his family with an iron hand. His problems with Joan arise precisely because he does not believe in divine intervention in the affairs of humanity. For example, a messenger to Domremy bringing news of the appearance of “the Maid” after Joan has disappeared from home is met with Jacques’ brusque dismissal of the Maid as “a fairy tale,” and later he accuses Joan of simply following her own selfish dream and sacrificing her brother, who died at Paris, to it. His extreme practicality and no-nonsense approach to the political situation and to Joan’s image, however, directly contradicts the evidence of record. The historical Jacques D’Arc purportedly had premonitory dreams that his daughter would run off with soldiers about two years after Joan began to hear her voices – evidence, according to Sackville-West, that “some curious sympathetic bond existed between Jeanne and her father. . . which can only be explained by assuming some telepathic communication between them.”22 Thinking, naturally, that such was likely to occur only if Joan were to become a camp follower, he instructed his sons to kill her if they found her about to depart in such company, for his dreams indicated total ruin for Joan should she so leave. Moreover, both her parents were exceedingly proud of their daughter after she became recognised as the Maid. The 1999 Joan of Arc, however, has eliminated any such supernatural possibilities in its depiction of Jacques and his relationship with his daughter, and has even gone so far as to eliminate her parents’ own faith in God or in His miracles. In place of the saint and visionary, then, Joan of Arc presents us with a female hero of the people, the focus of its solid feminist sensibility, rational atheism, and Marxist-populist strain. Repression and abuse of the

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common people appear from the outset: Robert de Baudricourt, from all historical accounts a loyal and able military commander, is reduced to a coward and effeminate glutton, starving his people for the sake of his own “pampered stomach.” Similarly, Burgundian soldiers searching for Joan en route to Chinon attack a farm cart, threatening the “peasant pig” of a father and jeeringly asking if his “peasant daughter is still a maid.” Even La Hire, later to become Joan’s most loyal comrade, refuses to take supplies to Orleans, arguing that “our objective is to raise the siege, not feed the masses.” In contrast, Joan appears as their advocate: “And I am here by the will of God. . . and I say that the people of Orleans must be fed.” Of course they are, although again, the miraculous changing of the wind permitting Joan’s entrance into Orleans has been eliminated from the scene. In like manner, throughout the film the self-interested aristocrats abuse the earnest and down-trodden peasants; even a belated rescue attempt led by La Hire is manned by common and unpaid soldiers who are simply fighting for “what they believe.” In this alternative but nonetheless late twentieth-century reading of the legend of St. Joan, then, the filmmakers offer us a charismatic female hero, of unusual intelligence and wit, one of those rare individuals with a gift to make others believe in her cause and follow her in the fight to realise it; a hero, but once again no saint. That her power is charismatic and not divine is reinforced by repeated use of a camera angle which has Joan, during her rare communications with her voices, looking up directly into the viewer’s face and speaking, as it were, to the viewer. We never hear her voices, perhaps indicating they are only in Joan’s mind; her facial expressions are ecstatic, but simplistic and child-like, indicating an honesty – and a naiveté – about Joan that endears her to us, despite the possibility of self-delusion. Her words in the final such incident, that in which she sees her saints welcoming her into their company: “Thank you!,” as if suggesting that we, not God, have made her a saint. Because this fictional Joan is a pragmatic hero, despite her belief in her voices, she is utterly aware of Charles’s intent to sacrifice her to the Burgundians, and therefore her capture at Compiègne comes as no surprise. Indeed, she warns her squire Jean that, should anyone attempt to take or kill her, he must not allow her army to interfere, as such is necessary for Charles to mature into a capable king. She actually runs, unarmed, towards her enemy, sacrificing herself for her people. In almost identical fashion, she deliberately changes back in male dress and thus invites the stake rather than allow La Hire and his men to rescue her and thereby undo her work of teaching Charles to be a king. She is, in the film, definitely a martyr, but to a nationalist cause, not to religious belief,

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and in this manner the film appears to owe much to Bernard Shaw’s interpretation. What, then, are we to make of current popular conceptions of Joan the Maid? Certainly, we’ve struggled with the problem for a long time, as a number of works on Joan’s enduring presence but wildly fluctuating image attest.23 And certainly, it is a truism that icons are recast to reflect the ideals of the age that employs them. Yet both 1999 cinematic versions aim at the audience of popular entertainment, not at selling war bonds or advocating patriotism. Rather, they appeal to our own wishes and dilemmas through our popularised vision of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the films are doubtless part of the craze for subjects and stories medieval which has dominated American cinema for the last two decades and has been repeatedly explained by scholars building upon Umberto Eco’s theory that we relive and recreate the Middle Ages as a means of paying our psychic debts: all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages: modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy . . . the national state . . . the struggle between the poor and the rich, the concept of heresy or ideological deviation . . . the conflict between church and state, trade unions . . . the technological transformation of labor. . . Thus, looking at the Middle Ages means looking at our infancy.24 The concept is also what underlies Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, as the reason academics join the general public in continuing to do so: The one conclusion that everyone can agree to is the great complexity of high medieval culture, society, government, law, economy, and religion. Each facet of life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was intertwined with many other facets. Each movement forward generated new issues and countervailing tendencies. Every great personality that we can discern turns out to be a very complex and frequently mysterious man or woman indeed.25 In this complexity, Cantor goes beyond the cultural and suggests that we see reflected in medieval personalities the pervasive problem of the “divided self,” for medievals the self torn between this world and the next, between understanding and dealing with the need to accept the grace and importance of this life and yet shun it in aspiring to the rewards of the afterlife. This mirrors our own dilemmas in everything from the

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simultaneous adulation and condemnation of the industry and policy which at once creates our affluence and pollutes our world, to the perceived destruction of stability brought about by the great wars, and the subsequent yearning for the stability of an imagined past continuum stretching from the Classical era to the late nineteenth century. The daily struggle in reconciling the two sides, which Cantor asserts we have come to perceive in the perpetual medieval struggle with the human condition, epitomised by Joan-the-Chosen coexisting with Joan-the-pragmaticwarrior, exemplifies on a grander scale the same struggle with divided selves we experience today. As if this weren’t enough, Joan holds a special magic for us for a variety of other reasons, ranging from the activism of three decades of feminism to our own desperate reaching for a substitute for the dead and dying faith in the major religions which plagues the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.26 Here, we are firmly in the territory of popular culture and the mass reception of Joan and her image as presented in popular film. Both 1999 versions partake of sufficient historical record and popular understanding to offer credibility (at least to a general audience) to their claims of each being the “true story” of Joan. Indeed, they also draw upon scholarly record to a minor extent. Yet neither considers her within the tradition of medieval female martyrs or saints, as much recent academic work27 has been wont to do. That Joan herself denied such a connection28 is grist for another mill. Neither do they consider contemporary psychological studies of the martyr impulse, such as that of Gossman,29 who addresses Joan’s case, though once again considerable evidence indicates that Joan had no such temperament. And the more we compare the products of popular culture to current scholarly trends, the more we see that they take different, but equally serious, departures from record. This is a difference in intellectual training and focus, not in impulse. Regardless of our biases, explanations, or emphases, we clearly remain in awe of Joan of Arc and still seek to understand her drive and her surety, the mystery of her faith. Yet what we cannot accept – a personal, involved deity who functions within the boundaries of the everyday world, the laws of physical reality, and the limitations of human identity – is exactly what Joan and her medieval contemporaries found believable. That is what makes her a true saint. And ultimately, that we cannot simply let it go at that – that we try to find rational, psychological, even scientific explanations for her – is surely a sign of our credulity, not hers.

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NOTES 1. Christine’s “Poem of the Maid” appears in at least three contemporary manuscripts and is dated as having been composed in July, 1430, shortly after Charles’s coronation at Reims, see Angus L. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty, eds., Ditie de Jehanne d’Arc, Medium Ævum Monographs 9 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977). Although it is in some ways a political work calling Frenchmen to accept and support their rightful king, it is also a hymn of sorts, since it repeatedly asserts Joan’s divine mission and uses such diction to describe her as “elect,” “ordained,” “divine,” etc., claiming her to be the saviour not only of France but of the Christian faith itself. Beginning therewith and continuing though the present with only a very few notable exceptions (Voltaire’s politically motivated La Pucelle, for example), Joan has been used as an icon for French nationalism. Particularly good studies of this are Susan Dunn, “Michelet and Lamartine: Making and Unmaking the Nationalist Myth,” Romanic Review 80 (1989): 404–18; Martha Hanna, “Iconography and Ideology: Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of the Action Française, 1908–1931,” French Historical Studies 14 (1985): 215–39; Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of French Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981); Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985); and of course Jules Michelet, Joan of Arc, trans. Albert Guérard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957). 2. Consider, for example, Shakespeare’s depiction of her as a witch and harlot, a consort of demons and of a variety of mortal men, including the Dauphin himself, in Henry VI Part I. Even earlier, Caxton threw doubt on her virtue by insisting she claimed pregnancy to avoid the stake (Chronicles of England with the Fruit of the Times, quoted in Vita Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc (1936; repr. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984), at p. 299). William Waugh’s “Joan of Arc in English Sources of the Fifteenth Century,” in J.G. Edwards, V.H. Galbraith, and E.F. Jacob, eds., Historical Essays in Honor of James Tait (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1933) has reviewed a number of other fifteenth-century sources that do their best to discredit her otherwise, usually through the accusation of witchcraft. Robert Southey first rehabilitated Joan’s English reputation in his poetry (see James Darmesteter, “Joan of Arc in England” in English Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), for a summation of Joan’s subsequent reputation in English literature), and shortly thereafter she became a popular focus in America, as examined by Anne Powers in “The Joan of Arc Vogue in America, 1894–1929,” American Society of Legion of Honor Magazine 49 (1978): 177–92. Since Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in 1924, she has been a continual subject of study and fiction. 3. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” in Leo

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Braundy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 5th edn. (New York: Oxford UP, 1999): 216–27 (220). 4. Regarding Joan as a feminist icon, studies range from Anne Barstow’s fine, if disputable, treatment of her as part of the tradition of female mystics from a largely feminist standpoint, in Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1986); to Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); to Leslie Feinberg’s rather forced examination of her in Transgender Warriors (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), a study of what Feinberg claims is a “history” of maligned lesbian transvestites. She goes on to claim that Joan’s cross-gendering was both what endeared her to the peasants and what engendered the Church’s hostility. While it was indeed one of the few points on which the Church finally condemned her, Feinberg’s claim seems pretty much contradicted by Joan’s own comment that her dress was “the least of matters,” the fact that, prior to her capture, the Church saw nothing wrong with it (e.g., in the Paris examination), and the comparatively small role such played in her trial. Indeed, the whole issue of Joan’s dress has been much over-emphasised. 5. Christine Gledhill, “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” in Braundy and Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 251–71 (257). 6. Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. Jeremy Duquesnay Adams (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) at p. 137; Sackville-West, Saint Joan, 324–25, and Don Nardo, The Trial of Joan of Arc (San Diego: Lucent, 1998). Pernoud’s two accounts of Joan (see also note 12), which include significant portions of the actual trial records, are the most detailed and readable of the biographies. Several others, however, have significantly influenced academic and popular perceptions of Joan, the most important of them being Anatole France, The Life of Joan of Arc, trans. Winifred Stephens (New York: John Lane, 1908); Leon Denis, The Mystery of Joan of Arc, trans. Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925); Frances Gies, Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresney, Memoirs of Jeanne D’Arc, commonly called the Maid of Orleans . . ., trans. George-Anne Grave (London: Longman, 1812); and Willard Trask, trans., Joan of Arc: In Her Own Words (Chappaqua, NY: Turtle Point Press, 1996). 7. Barstow, Heretic, 141. 8. Nardo, Trial, 49–52 summarises the evidence of Cauchon and his assistants’ extreme frustration, but the on-going drama of her trial during which she cajoles, outwits, teases, and circumvents her examiners cannot be fully understood except from the trial records themselves. 9. Pernoud and Clin, Her Story, 131. 10. Pernoud and Clin, Her Story, 136. 11. The Messenger, Columbia Pictures (1999), produced by Patrice LeDoux, directed by Luc Besson. Starring Mila Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway, and Dustin Hoffman. Screenplay by Andrew Birkin and Luc Besson. The Messenger was a big budget (390 million French francs) film, but it received mixed, primarily lukewarm critical reviews and, while it was a major box office

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success in France, was less popular, although it still made significant money, in the U.S.A, Canada, and Britain. In France, it was nominated for a number of César awards, but won only in the costume and sound categories. It was not nominated for any major awards elsewhere. Thus, critically, it was a disappointment, but certainly might be considered a blockbuster for its gate. 12. Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, trans. Edward Hyams (1962, repr. Lanham, MO: Scarborough House, 1982), 63. 13. The whole issue of a possible prison rape of Joan stems originally from Caxton’s claim that she was pregnant (apparently his own invention) and Shakespeare’s sensationalisation of the same in his play. The surviving records, however, entirely contradict the possibility. While Joan does on one occasion intimate that advances had been made to her, she also claimed to have successfully repulsed them, and on the day of her death she bemoaned the fact that her “body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted” would be consigned to the flames (Pernoud, Her Story, 217). Such a claim could not have been made had a rape taken place. 14. Andrew Lang’s article, “The Voices of Joan of Arc,” in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research 5 (1889): 198–212, is the earliest suggestion of her voices resulting from pubescent hormonal imbalance, a concept taken up by a variety of her detractors and certainly implied in The Messenger. In the same volume, Frederic Myers’s “The Daemon of Socrates,” 552–63, attributes her experiences to the subconscious powers of the mind “drawn into conscious life” and so compares her to Herschel and other various prodigies. This latter is also heavily utilised in the Columbia film. It is unlikely, however, that the producers went back to this old journal; more likely, more recent discussions, such as Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976), which briefly mentions Joan and other visionaries and mystics as transitional examples and was wildly popular in the 1970s and ’80s, can take the credit for such post-Freudian denigrations of Joan. 15. Jaynes, Bicameral Mind, throughout. 16. Barstow, Heretic, 59. 17. Pernoud, By Herself, 30. 18. Pernoud, By Herself, 144. 19. Sackville-West, Saint Joan, 203. 20. Joan of Arc, Artisan Entertainment (1999), produced by Peter Bray, directed by Christian Duguay, starring Leelee Sobiesti, Jacqueline Bisset, Powers Boothe, Neil Patrick Harris, and Peter O’Toole. Screenplay by Michael Alexander Miller and Ronald Parker. The film was a made-for-TV production but was released briefly in theatres prior to its showing on network television. A small budget film ($20 million), it achieved surprising critical acclaim, receiving, among others, the awards for Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries, and Specials by the Television Critics Association (U.S.A, 1999) and the Best Young Actress in a Made for Television Film (U.S.A., 1999); the Best Cinematography in a Television Drama, from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers

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(Canada 2000); and the Emmy for the Best Supporting Actor, Peter O’Toole (U.S.A. 2000). It was nominated for many more awards, including the American Association of Cinematographers’ Outstanding Achievement Award (2000) and Leelee Sobiesti’s nomination for the Emmy for Best Actress (1999). It also introduced to the commercial world the 12-year-old singing sensation from Wales, Charlotte Church, who provided the soundtrack vocals and has since achieved international stardom for her (primarily classical, religious, and traditional Welsh folk song) performances and recordings. 21. Pernoud, By Herself, 30. 22. Sackville-West, Saint Joan, 58–59. 23. Consider, for example, the survey provided by Deborah Fraioli, “The Literary Image of Joan of Arc: Prior Influences,” in Speculum 56 (1981): 811–30. 24. Umberto Eco, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 319. 25. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 27. 26. I have explored this concept at length in “Gnosticism, The Middle Ages, and the Search for Responsibility: Immortals in Popular Fiction,” in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), although in that essay the focus is on our invention of various types of immortals in popular fiction who take responsibility for our own moral/religious bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the invention of a mystic or a psychotic who never existed to explain a moral sensibility we cannot accept is very much of the same ilk. 27. For instance, Barstow, Heretic, throughout. 28. Consider that Joan was not, like other female mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an introspective visionary seeking ecstasy in oneness with God, but a pragmatic activist, as is shown by: her rejection of Catherine de la Rochelle’s offer to raise funds for her army with instructions that Catherine go home to her husband and children; the fact that her vow of virginity to her voices was, by her own admission, to last only as long as her military career required; and the fact that she denied her own voices’ overt prediction of her martyrdom, insisting that such must refer to her imprisonment, because she so vehemently feared the flames. Such details are, of course, in direct opposition to the martyr temperament attributed to Joan by Norbert J. Gossman in his The Martyrs: Joan of Arc to Yitzhak Rabin (Lanham, MO: University Press of America, 1997) and to Barstow’s argument for her as a mystic in an established tradition. Joan was not a holy virgin, nor a martyr waiting to happen; she was a devoutly pious woman obeying the call of her God but wanting nothing more than to get back to her own life. 29. Gossman, The Martyrs, et al.

Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate William F. Woods A useful taxonomy for medievalism, and one often quoted, is Umberto Eco’s “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” which appeared in 1986 as a chapter in Travels in Hyperreality.1 Here, Eco offers “Ten Little Middle Ages” – ten kinds of medievalism, as he sees it – including “The Middle Ages as the site of an ironical visitation” (like Monty Python and the Holy Grail), “The Middle Ages as a barbaric age” (early Bergman, “shaggy medievalism”), “The Middle Ages of Romanticism” (“stormy castles and their ghosts”), and so on. This handlist is both a description of common pre-conceived visions of the past, and a suggestion of where these attitudes are rooted, some springing from popular culture, some from academia, others from political or artistic nostalgia, or from an interest in the occult. For my present purpose, trying to assess the significance of an historical film, Eco’s first category, “The Middle Ages as a pretext,” appears to be central. In works that serve this vision, [t]here is no real interest in the historical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters. . . Thus in historical novels fictional characters help one to understand the past (and the past is not taken as pretext), while in cloak-and-dagger novels the past (taken as a pretext) helps one to enjoy the fictional characters. (68–69) In essence, Eco is here distinguishing between novels – or films – in which the Middle Ages are the substance of the work, and those where the Middle Ages are accidental – mere decoration, a setting that has nothing to do with the action. This classic distinction works nicely for Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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what I consider bad, or obvious films. It works less well for the good ones, I think, yet it does lead us to the crucial question of what a film is really about. For example, one of the best films ever made about fifteenth century France, in regard to casting, quality of dialogue, accuracy of setting, the substantial treatment of themes and problems typical of the fifteenth century, and the hard-to-define quality of “ambiance,” is the relatively unknown British/French production originally released in Europe as The Hour of the Pig, and retitled The Advocate for distribution in the U.S.A.2 But is this a good historical film about the Middle Ages, in Eco’s sense, or is it a carefully prepared, “historically accurate” medieval package for modern themes? I am going to end up arguing that it is, and very likely must be both things, and that Eco’s question has the practical benefit of forcing us to redefine our notion of a good historical film. And since definitions are more enjoyable, more “sweet to bear away” (as the prologue to Everyman tells us) when they follow the agon of discussion, I will first try to show how the film works – how it develops its ideas – and then return to what and who and when it is about, and how that is related to the way all of us – movie makers and all – turn our historical cameras backward, focussed variously on the Middle Ages. I The Advocate appeared in 1994. It concerns a young lawyer of Paris in the middle of the fifteenth century (1452) who, seeking the pastoral ideal of simplicity and innocence, moves to the country town of Abbeville to practice and, as Henry Thoreau might have said, live deliberately. Needless to say, his brief encounter with country life offers one comic disillusionment after another. For the people of Abbeville are anything but simple, and as the tragi-comic murder mystery sub-plot unfolds, innocence begins to seem a necessary but essentially unreachable ideal. The murder plot involves the lawyer’s defense of a pig, accused of murdering a small boy, and this incongruous image, drawn from actual cases tried in fifteenth-century France, is where the various themes of the film converge. On one hand, the local lord, covertly supported by the civil court, would like to execute the pig and thereby close the case. Something is being covered up, but whatever it is, no one is telling: the parish priest silently guards the secrets of the confessional, the peasants are superstitious and fearful, and the local prosecutor coaches the witnesses. On the other hand, the pig belongs to a family of gypsies, recently come to town, and is their meat for the winter. None of this would ordinarily interest the Paris lawyer very much, except that the gypsy girl Samira (“summer

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wind”) is beautiful, stubborn, and able to rouse in him feelings both of love and ethical conscience. Courtois’s uncertain pursuit of love, truth, justice and a sense of purpose (he is young, remember) takes him from his berth at the Abbeville Inn to the drama of court appearances, like his defense of Abbeville’s prophetic madwoman (“look to the boy, Maitre. . .”); meetings with the tight-lipped lord, in his imposing, gloomy castle; reflective, often sardonic conversations with the parish priest; liaisons with two women, one noble, one not, both comic, and both reflecting the realities of Abbeville; and, in time, infatuation with the dark and mysterious Samira. But little progress is made in solving the murder until Courtois finds himself running through the night streets, trying desperately, as if in yet another dream sequence, to save a stable boy from an anonymous hooded horseman. The presumed murderer escapes on his fine black horse, but Courtois, armed with the evidence, confronts the priest (“look to the boy”), then indicts the lord’s degenerate son. By now, however, that boy is safely out of town. Empty-handed and by now thoroughly disillusioned, Courtois contrives to free the pig so it can become the gypsies’ winter bacon (he procures another one with similar markings and a bad disposition), but Samira – more aware of their differences than he – will not come away with him to live in Paris. And so he boards the coach for town, while behind him in Abbeville, another sort of “liberator” arrives in the form of a knight errant whose gleaming armour hides a mass of plague sores. The contrived neatness of Abbeville’s pestilential “deliverance” from “medieval” ignorance and moral twilight suggests a modern audience’s Rage for Order, but it has little to do with the significance of the film, which depends instead upon the likelihood, reinforced by the director’s proto-Shavian epilogue, that life in Abbeville and towns like it will continue much as before, for pigs and men as well. Certainly, it does not prevent our concluding that the inconsequential pig trial is merely a vehicle for showing Courtois’s descent into a grimly matter-of-fact ambivalence toward civil law and social governance. Here, centrally, the film leaves us with questions unanswered, to the probable discomfort of viewers for whom the ironic plague-finale seems to have been invented. If it is puzzling how such a movie ever came to be made, or more to the point, what mass audience would want to see it,3 we can sympathise with the marketing subdivision at Miramax, which had acquired a beautifully photographed, well-cast film, shot on location and full of strong acting, but not really a comedy, and with no discernable selling point. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wondered if, after Monty Python, we

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can really take this medieval stuff seriously?4 A reviewer for the New York Post was more sympathetic, calling it one of the wisest films of the season, but like other reviewers, she thought that the murder mystery plot didn’t really carry the film, and that its “unravelling. . . becomes increasingly messy.”5 But Miramax saw the murder plot as a recognisable feature, and their posters begged those who had seen the film not to reveal what was, in actuality, a fairly predictable ending. The poster graphics featured women and men in erotic poses, but these figures did not appear in the movie, and had no connection with it. The major concern at Miramax was that initially, because of a graphic bedroom sequence at the Abbeville Inn, The Advocate was given an NC–17 rating, and that was too much of a good thing; when selective editing qualified the film for an R rating, medieval nudity would constitute at least one sort of broad spectrum appeal. As it happened, The Advocate grossed only a little over a half million dollars ($581,762 as of Oct. 30, 1994)6 during its first year of distribution in the U.S., a disappointing figure for those who had hoped barnyard sex and pig-wickedness would sell better to an American audience. Was this relative box office failure a good film from any other point of view? In the opinion of one fairly typical European reviewer, “[m]ore in tune with the strangeness of a medieval belief system than the similar but solemnly arty Anchoress, this is full of intriguing historical detail.”7 Another reviewer for Variety said that “[t]he interracial romance between Firth and Annabi smacks a little too much of twentieth-century posturing, but this (and a slightly overlong conclusion) is the only false note in the comic, intellectually stimulating proceedings.”8 The London-based Film Review called the film “a Renaissance drama” – apparently without grasping some of the “historical detail” that had intrigued others – but gave it three stars and praised its specifically cinematic qualities: “As a film it looks ravishing and it sets off to tell its unusual, dark tale in great style with humour and credibility.”9 In sum, most of the professional reviewers would probably have agreed with the reviewer from Variety, who suspected The Hour of the Pig might do well at “international art houses.”10 This being the case, why would an academic reviewer for the American Historical Review, having analyzed the film’s historical setting, themes and content, be moved to label its view of the medieval world “mean-spirited” and “shallow”?11 In regard to this, more later. But enough has been said to justify an inquiry into the quality of medievalism presented by a “mean-spirited” movie which Film Review called “immensely watchable.” Indeed, the quest for an R rating may seem a shallow kind of medievalism, and a far cry from “seeking the human image in The Advocate,”

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but per accidens, it is not. For in a movie which relentlessly pursues the question – What Is Man? – there is thematic relevance and relevant visual interest in human bodies nude, partially nude, old, young, male, female, European and Oriental, dressed in every variety of medieval costume, up and down the social hierarchy and across the three estates. This makes the film sound like a National Geographic article, but that is not a totally inaccurate impression. Like the pictures in the magazine, the bodies, costumes and faces in the film blend together, reinforce each other, and seem to imply a larger, less-tangible reality – medieval culture, certainly, but perhaps better, medieval sensibility, or even medieval consciousness. For there is something seriously wrong with the town of Abbeville, a kind of social malaise. The lawyer from Paris senses this, and so we too are aware of it, and discover with him that the attitudes of the people in this country town, and even the murder of a child, have their roots in something as fundamental and hard to define as the quality of human nature itself. And so it isn’t the murder that carries the movie, and it isn’t the costumes or even the nudity. Instead, as in a few other good medieval films, where costumes and settings, though splendid, are not themselves the point, we are held by the possibility that this medieval mirror will tell us a little more deeply and truly who we are. But we must look carefully. In perhaps no other medieval film are audiences so insistently invited to scrutinise, evaluate, and go beyond the information given. We are given this visual mandate with the opening credits. Colin Firth plays Richard Courtois, the Advocate at Law from Paris, but when his name appears, the image that dominates the screen is a close-up shot of a raven, with piercing eyes and long sharp beak, darting his head here, there, behind, with a bird’s impossible quickness, while the sound track plays a somber, brooding theme that we soon come to know as the “lawyer’s music.” Then we are in the coach carrying him and his clerk to Abbeville, but almost immediately he “wakes” into a dream sequence – for it is a long, sleepy ride through the French countryside – and now, suddenly, as Firth’s enormous brown eyes peer out into the dark, drizzling night of his dream, we know what his role will be in the film. The Advocate is there to see everything. Nothing will escape the gaze of this enlightened, intelligent, idealistic young man who has come to the country because he loves justice and wants to live and work with “real” people. We will not lose this impression of him because these long, open, pondering looks become a recurrent, identifying feature of the Advocate’s character; ultimately they help to create the rhythm of the scenes, and they continue to affect the way we participate in the film, pondering along with him.

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It is probably obvious by now that this legal idealist is not well suited to life in a country town. True enough, his reforming vision will not create any changes here. From the opening scene, he stands out as different from the peasants, the gentry, the parish priest. All of these people, including the law clerk, accommodate themselves in some way to the local necessities of life, but Courtois is at the same time above their compromises and comically below their level of small-town cleverness. Practically every major character calls attention to this friction in some way, but the local lord (played by Nicol Williamson), having failed to bribe him, says it best: “I feel that somehow, Courtois, you’re not at ease with us yet.” Courtois is scarcely at ease with the local law – not Roman Law, as it is practiced in Paris, but a strange mingling of Roman Law with the regional law (actually, “custom”) of Ponthieu, which “can be rather confounding,” as the local prosecutor says, because for one thing, it makes less-than-clear distinctions between the jurisdictions of church and state.12 He is amused, and a bit uneasy with the parish priest, Father Albertus, a learned Franciscan (played by Ian Holm) who nevertheless likes the country because the country wives are amenable to his kind of absolution. And certainly he is ill at ease with the Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre. One of the “new” lords, d’Auferre is a wealthy merchant who bought his title along with his lands, and uses his power to fix prices throughout the region – in addition, naturally, to making his influence felt, when necessary, in the civil court of Abbeville. Yet there is also a kind of uneasiness in Abbeville itself, an undercurrent of dread. Surely it has something to do with the murder of a child, a few days after the Advocate arrives in town, yet it appears also to be connected with the highhandedness of the Seigneur d’Auferre, or with the Church’s cruel treatment of those accused of witchery (Maleficium), or the ravages of the Black Death in the south of France, or the spies for the Inquisition, which like the plague itself, threatens everyone indiscriminately. People go about their business in Abbeville, to be sure, and life goes on, in its countrified way, for the fields must be plowed, and the animals fed; the builders are behind schedule with the Advocate’s new house, as is normal, and everyone, it seems, makes use of the public baths. But still, the people are afraid, and there is something very like what Johan Huizinga, writing about fifteenth-century France in The Waning of the Middle Ages, called a “feeling of general insecurity.”13 Indeed, given the emotional tone of the film, its music, and the darkness of several of its scenes, it would not be misleading to quote Huizinga a little further:

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The feeling of general insecurity which was caused by the chronic form wars were apt to take, by the constant menace of the dangerous classes, by the mistrust of justice, was further aggravated by the obsession of the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils. The background of all life in the world seems black. Everywhere the flames of hatred arise and injustice reigns. Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings.14 In this town, with its country wisdom and vague despair, the Advocate would like to be a bringer of light – the knight in shining armour that the people talk about – but for the most part, he simply tries to penetrate the darkness. He defends his humble clients, learns from his mistakes, listens to the priest, the lord, and the more experienced (if somewhat compromised) prosecutor and judge, and he watches. . . endlessly. . . trying to put it all together. Why do people fear the dark streets, the evil eye, gypsies, Satan in his many forms? Courtois is ever the camera’s eye in this, for whenever he pauses to look, we follow his gaze, and his concerned watchfulness becomes a shared point of view – an implied commentary, even, with its undertone of apprehension and a kind of melancholy. One scene in particular demonstrates how this narrative filtration is created.15 Courtois is standing on his balcony at night, looking down at the street, as faint noise from the ale-house drifts up to him. There follows a sequence of brief shots that replicate, and thus reinforce his gaze: an owl peers searchingly down from a nearby railing – CUT to a barrelhead below the balcony, where some mice (his prey?) are scratching for grain – CUT to the street, and the mysterious, darkly-clad stranger who so intrigues Courtois (he will turn out to be a spy for the Inquisition). . . listening, he pauses in a doorway, his eyes directed far down the street – CUT to Courtois, who takes one more look around as he turns to go back into his room, and realises – CUT to Samira the gypsy girl who has come up the stairs to the balcony, and all this time, perhaps, has been watching him. And so it is, in this tense little town where private life is obviously hard to come by, that the priest watches the townswomen, the lord gazes coldly upon the peasants, the peasants keep their nervous and suspicious eyes on the gypsies, and the gypsies watch. . . the Advocate. For as you remember, he is defense lawyer for a murderous pig, and the pig belongs to the gypsies. Of course it is unnatural, worse, it is unjust to try a pig for murder. The Advocate protests, but this would not be the first medieval French animal to be executed for harbouring Satan,16 and furthermore, a

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surprising number of people would feel relieved if the pig were simply hanged for the child’s death, and an end put to the matter. Here, in fact, is the crux: the town wants the pig dead, and Courtois wants justice. Not only because he did not study law to become a defender of pigs, nor even because he is falling in love with the gypsy girl whose pig it is, but because, as he sees it, hanging a pig for murder makes a mockery of the law, and Courtois loves the law. In Abbeville, he imagined, law could be practiced without cynicism or self-interest, in the service of people whose essential goodness it would guard and preserve. But if reasonable intent is assumed in pigs – even those influenced by Satan – then the law is not a mirror of reason,17 and the image it reflects is no longer human. Or is it? An historical film can stage great events “accurately” and still remain lifeless, a mere construction. Yet when great questions of history are implied indirectly by the dramatic situation, when they are quietly yet unmistakeably implicit in what we recognise as normal, “realistic” human behaviour, then we may find the action gripping, for its significance presses in upon us. To give Eco his due, his phrase, “fictional characters [who] help one to understand the past” may entail this kind of historical realism. In any case, the question implicit in this film is a legal and a theological one. Ever since Cicero and the stoics, the basis for justice (iustitia), both in canon and civil law, had been God’s reason as it is manifested in Nature (ius naturale).18 The same natural law, the same complex idea of divine reason, had applied to Adam and Eve in their primitive state, and to all of the animals in God’s harmonious creation as well. But with the fall of man, man’s nature was changed and darkened, and the ius naturale became for man the ius gentium, the law of peoples. In its actual codification and administration by men, the ius gentium, the idea of God’s reason as manifested in human nature, was called the ius positiva, or the ius civile, the Law of the State. Thus the law practiced by Richard Courtois, the law based on Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis and its glossators (especially the Glossa Ordinaria of Accursius) is an example of ius positiva. Under some circumstances, the ius positiva may appear to contradict the ius naturale, even though the one was derived from the other. To avoid such contradictions, and to preserve access to the authority of first principles, was the object of interpretation. Yet it follows that since animals are necessarily governed by the ius naturale, and men are indirectly governed by its first principles, it might be difficult to draw absolute distinctions between the prosecution of men vs. the prosecution of animals under the ius positiva, derived as it is from the ius naturale. Not many viewers, one may assume, can bring to bear a knowledge of the Corpus Iuris (here, at least, Courtois has the advantage of us), and it

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would be misleading to suggest that an appreciation of the pig trial presupposes an awareness of the problematic relationship between ius naturale and ius gentium. Nevertheless, the very incongruity of trying a pig for murder forces us to consider the borderland between human and animal behaviour, between the reign of kings and the animal kingdom. However the law may read, we feel it is somehow deeply wrong to prosecute a pig, and this doubt casts its shadow over the apparent but murkier human wrong inherent in keeping silent about the hunting of male children as if they were wild game. It is a consequence of such feelings that the stern, if somewhat ambivalent question of what is Natural lends resonance to all of the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic courtroom scenes in this film. Indeed, one of the major goals of the film is to create a setting so dominated by images of animals, animal behaviour, humans who look like animals, humans who behave like animals, and especially, humans who treat other humans as animals, that finally the peculiar custom of prosecuting pigs, dogs, cats, rats, or even flies for harbouring in them the evil of Satan seems not so much bizarre idiocy, but rather a kind of protocol, which may or may not be convenient under the circumstances. We have our first sight of Abbeville, for instance, when the camera pans across a field outside the town, picking up a horse, some mules, scattered people, then the edge of a crowd which turns out to be watching a scaffold. On the scaffold is a donkey, and someone is slipping a noose around its head, for the donkey (her name is Virginie) has been convicted, along with her owner, of the capital offense of sodomy, and they are about to be hanged side by side, two partners in crime. At the last moment, however, a friar arrives breathlessly with a reprieve – not for the owner, but for Virginie: their neighbours have signed a petition attesting to her good character. Her complicity in the evil act could not, therefore, have been by her consent, so the donkey goes free, the crowd cheers, the man is hanged, and the neighbours profit. I should add that Rogier Landrier, the owner, is hanged wearing only a breechclout. He is a small man with gross features but well-defined muscles. He says nothing throughout the scene, and his expression suggests nothing beyond a dully concerned awareness of what is going on. We see him mainly as a physical specimen, defined by an animal act, and the crowd accepts his death in silence. There are other protocols, other accommodations. The local herbalist, wet-nurse and madwoman is accused of Maleficium – to wit, inciting the rats in her dwelling to bite her neighbour, who then fell sick and died. The Advocate clears her of the rat charge – really he is quite brilliant – but she is then hanged for a prior confession to the holy fathers

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of the inquisition that she made a pact with Satan.19 Her lands, naturally, are confiscated by the civil court. Or consider the case of the Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre, who enjoys hunting. Once he organised a chase after human quarry – not to the death, mind you, and after all, they were well paid for their scrapes and bruises. He is trying to marry off his daughter Roseline, nicknamed Filette, who is tall and shapely, but has an unfortunate laugh – “She brays like a she-ass,” says the lord, “and she comes with 500 hectares of land.” Nicol Williamson’s d’Auferre is dispassionate, controlling, but not entirely humorless. He comes from a old Cathar family – his grandfather had his legs burned off for heresy – and he secretly maintains a Cathar brotherhood, not for religious reasons, but as a means of fixing tithes and tariffs for the entire province.20 This engagingly icy lord doesn’t hate peasants, or gypsies, or pigs, or lawyers, but as he tells Courtois, sometimes it is necessary that gypsies be driven out, pigs hanged, lawyers bribed and peasants oppressed for the sake of Order and Rule. He does not mean divine order or the rule of law. Nevertheless, the church and the law are also dedicated to maintaining human order in this small town,21 and for better or worse, they work together. On the one hand, the Inquisition is all eyes and ears, which means that anything disturbing, irritating, or simply different can be denounced as the work of Satan. Father Albertus privately thinks witch trials are preposterous. Would he testify to that in court? “Richard,” he replies, rather testily, “I like it here. It’s a good life, and having my balls burned off in public might take some of the pleasure from it.” In fact he does testify in the pig trial, but as a witness for the prosecution. Asked if he thinks it is futile to put an animal to death for a crime, he hesitates – for this is dangerous ground – then makes what he surely knows is a self-serving distinction: “We execute, not the animal itself, but Satan in it.” As for the law itself, it helps to know that Pincheon, the prosecutor, earns more than his salary in payoffs from the local Seigneur. Whatever may be the truth about this pig trial, he knows more than he is willing to say, and he too is anxious to have done with it. Nonetheless, this rheumy, aging man of law, played by Donald Pleasance, compels our attention and our sympathy. His summation in the pig trial is probably the most powerful speech in the film. Its appeal goes beyond the needs of those who wish to bury the issue, and addresses the terrible need for justice, for laws that acknowledge human weakness, and levy punishment, close the book, and make us whole. He himself was a successful Paris lawyer once, but now, after twenty years of country law practice, and so many compromises. . . “Look at me, Maître,” he says to Courtois, “I am what you will become in twenty – well, thirty years.”

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That leaves the Advocate himself, the vigilant idealist and reformer, building a house, a new life in the country, but also, of course, the romantic under full sail, and headed for the pragmatic rocks. Courtois imagines himself a realist, not a dreamer, yet he dreams constantly, and in his dream visions, he confronts – as we might expect – the spectres of violence and brutality, and the ecstasies of love. He bitterly resents having to represent a pig; he dislikes losing debates with Pincheon, who plays to the judge by invoking lex talionis – “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a stripe for a stripe: there’s a case to answer!” But most of all, he hates the idea of losing this case, for by now it represents everything that opposes him, and that he can’t understand in this unenlightened, superstitious town. That, and the fact that the pig’s gypsy owner – Samira – has great dark luminous eyes – observant eyes, just like the Advocate himself. Also like him, she is not one to accept a compromise. The gypsies need the meat, and besides, it is obvious that Courtois will help her. But we must be fair. The Advocate is young, yet the film takes him seriously, for the most part, and the film is more satire than comedy. Courtois dreams, it is true, but his final vision is a surreal gallery of verbal and visual clues that torment his sleeping mind as he dreams of justice. He never brings the killer to trial – indeed, the killer is another avid hunter, d’Auferre’s monstrous son, whose bad habits include nailing dogs to trees – but the boy flees to England, and the people’s fear is reduced thereby.22 As for the pig, it is acquitted, finally, when Courtois, disgusted with the whole business, locates another, similar pig and rigs its “confession.” What Courtois can not, and could never do, is to change the way these people see themselves and others. The peasants, the lord, the priest, the civil court, the gypsies – all of them fear the Black Death and the Inquisition, but they also fear each other. They are continually on watch, not just for small town gossip, but for any small thing that will give them an advantage. This could be the stuff of comedy, as in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, but it is not: they fear each other because they prey upon each other, so that each one is at the same time hunter and victim. The lord abuses the gypsies, for example, and uses their pig as a scapegoat, but the pheasants and other illegal game in the gypsies’ wagon end up at d’Auferre’s castle, and when the gypsy girl dances at his festival banquet, it is implied that other commercial relationships might be possible – if not with this woman, then with another. The constant emphasis on animals, in this film, is ultimately a way of focussing on man the hunter, and his human quarry. The Seigneur d’Auferre is matter of fact about it, the church would deny it (but what, after all, is the Inquisition), and the men of law,

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in trying to prevent it, become the most sophisticated and self-serving of all the hunters. And so, at the end, Courtois goes back to Paris. He belongs there. Everybody knows it, and finally, he accepts it too. He doesn’t say good-bye to the maid at the local Inn – that was over long ago, and it turns out that he was paying for it anyway, since the Abbeville Inn is covertly the Abbeville whorehouse, and her fee was the room tax. More hunters, more victims. But Samira is another matter. He loves her, and in many ways they are similar, outcasts both, and given to those long, profoundly watchful brown-eyed gazes. But she will not go with him, at last, not that she could not love him, but because she thinks she is not quite human in his eyes. Not an animal, a beast, as the townspeople think of her, but a strange fine creature to have in his house, and in his bed. For them, as for all the characters in Abbeville, making a life depends upon knowing who you are and recognising that identity in others. Augustine found this correspondence reflected in the Holy Trinity. The people of Abbeville, it seems, find it by living a kind of human beast fable. And as for Courtois – the Advocate goes back to Paris, where he will become the most distinguished lawyer of his time, the credits tell us, by defending two-legged clients – like himself. II Stepping away from the film a bit, we can see that there are in Abbeville two main attitudes – call them theories – regarding human behaviour, and Courtois’s idealism shuns both of them. First, it is generally assumed (and the film amplifies this assumption) that animals are in effect a revealing mirror of human life, and that anyone who doubts this correspondence is naive or quite unrealistic. People’s appetites, aggressions, fears and even cleverness are constantly shadowed by animal parallels, and thus appear to have a kind of innocence – as if doing what comes naturally (usually, some kind of hunting behaviour) is inevitable and not really blameworthy. Yet on the other hand, since there have to be customs, laws, prohibitions for society to exist at all (and the film’s emphasis on legal affairs underscores this theme), there is a general need for control, and virtually every character in the film demonstrates some small ability to control his or her immediate social environment. The nobility, the church and the civil courts are obviously engaged in imposing order, but the same manipulative tendencies are plainly to be seen at a lower level in the pigherd (who pricks his pig to make it “speak” its confession), the jailer/torturer (who pricks a female prisoner, producing skin lesions that

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are taken as evidence of Satan’s influence), the maid at the Inn, the mother of Filette, Samira (who lacerates Courtois’s idealistic conscience) – each has found a way. But if control is an absolute necessity, and the law imposes control through punishment (an eye for an eye, etc.), then any behaviour that violates the law must be punished, whether the guilty one is human or not. Hence the animal trials. These two assumptions are complementary opposites. Together, they imply that life in Abbeville is to control or be controlled, and very often both at the same time. But Courtois, who has come to Abbeville to bring the spirit of the law to “real” people, would like to think that humans are defined neither by animal urges nor by rigid and arbitrary codes of law. He loves the law because it seems to him impartial but also reasonable, a protection and a guide enabling people to live as they are meant to live, by choosing their way freely according to their needs and their ideals. Surely, although he does not say so in the film, he thinks that they are meant to live by ius gentium, not as slaves to their appetites, yet not under tyranny either, nor by the law of fang and claw. At this point, moviegoers may wonder whether people like Courtois actually lived in the fifteenth century – but of course idealists and reformers spring up in every time and place. A better question is whether human and animal behaviour was indeed conflated during that period, as the movie in its schematic way suggests. Were there really animal trials, and if so, does the movie treat them accurately? The trials did occur, lawyers like Courtois became known for participating in them,23 and there was even a kind of precedent for these odd events, if one considers that their key assumptions have an imaginative quality that recalls the Roman de Renart, and mimics the kind of reasoning that guided the trials of the Inquisition. These sobering parallels are implicit in the movie, and seem the more powerful for being understated. The filmscript is also rich in legalistic anecdotes, phrases, ironies, problems, all of which has the effect of keeping our attention on “order and rule” – what Chaucer might have called questions of “governaunce” – which seem genuinely compelling, given the frightening instability and disorder that characterise not only the film but the historical time and place that it reflects. Indeed, the most impressive historical aspect of the film is not the animal trial, which provides plot structure and directs us recurrently to the main question (What is Man?), but the accuracy, immediacy and variety of features which reflect the unsettled fifteenth century in France. This turbulence is central to the movie; it is, I believe, what the movie is really about, just as Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror was really about her subtitle, The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, which seemed to her fully as

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afflicted as the calamitous twentieth.24 I mentioned above that there was a kind of social malaise in Abbeville, and yet it seems a normal, recognisable country town. Courtois wants to know who murdered a Jewish boy, but our sense of there being something deeply, intangibly wrong derives more from realising that the many disorders referenced in the film are linked and cumulative, and that if we breathed that country air, we too would be quick-witted, hyper-vigilant, apprehensive, suspicious. The church, for example, is obviously in need of reform (Father Albertus is evidence for this), and the counter-reformation (as some would call the Inquisition) is an organised, vigorous answer to that threat. There are no peasants’ revolts in this film, but there is evidence of growth in the little Norman town of Abbeville (Paris lawyers are moving in) and the middle class builders, at least, are amassing capital. The Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre is himself a capitalist noble, and his heretical Catharist grandfather probably came from the South – where the plague comes from, and the gypsies, “spreading like rats,” as the law clerk says. The Hundred Years War is not overtly mentioned, but its last great battle took place at Agincourt, which is not far from Abbeville, and the war will end the very next year, in 1453. Furthermore, it is a “wandering knightat-arms” who brings Abbeville “deliverance” from its worries at the end of the film, because he carries the plague. Less explicit (but typical of the film’s texture, and its rewardingly broad, if barely visible historical horizons), is that Courtois himself, the university-trained civil jurist, represents the spread of the (written) Roman law into northern France, where it will displace the many unwritten and partially written customs (coutûmes) that were inherited from feudal practices and a tradition of Germanic law.25 With French law will come French rule. By 1470, Abbeville and Ponthieu (the valley of the Somme) which are at this point still subject to the Duke of Burgundy, will have become part of the Couronne de France, and the relative absolutism of the French crown will endure for nearly 300 years.26 War and its effects, then, plague, capitalist monopoly, witch trials, animal trials, political absolutism – these are severe constraints, offering a very dark glass indeed in which to seek the human image. III The Advocate is far better at stating the human problems of fifteenth-century Abbeville than it is at finding solutions, or even at tracing historical consequences, and that, surely, is its strength as an historical film. Richard Courtois is not presented as a “Renaissance Man”

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to save this or any other world. He ultimately returns to an urban version of the same problems, concerned, like any other man, with “making a living.” And yet there is something in Courtois that we respond to. We probably like the animal exhuberance of life in Abbeville, and we pretty certainly understand the often invisible but binding network of controls that accompany it, but this airless dialectic is not enough for us. Like Courtois, we want more, more choices – freedom, dignity, identity. And this is how the film can be about the fifteenth century, and about us at the same time. Trapped (for 101 minutes) in Abbeville, involved in the animal trials, and with animal behaviour a constant parallel, we are forced to question what is human, but this is a question to which we are already accustomed, and have been for some time. We are like Courtois because in our own way, we too are suburbanites, fleeing urban sprawl. In this, Henry Thoreau is still our strongest voice: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.27 For Thoreau, Walden Pond is a mirror, not only of heaven, but of man. Nature for him is an entity, a guide, a pattern for human living, just as it was – although in a more abstract, systematic, “realist” sense – for Courtois; it offers “higher laws” for those who are equipped to understand them. And so he goes to Walden, where the angelic pickerel, with their “cool and even temperament” swim on through “perennial waveless serenity,” under the ice of the pond in winter (189). So far we have heard the transcendalist Thoreau, but he has other voices, and in them we may begin to recognise the conflicted, animal-haunted vision of man that we saw in Abbeville. Thoreau had few visitors in the woods, but one of these, a French-Canadian wood chopper and post-maker, becomes for him an example of “natural” man: “Such an exhuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him” (102). And more directly, “In him the animal man chiefly was developed” (102). Thoreau both respects and patronises this man, in somewhat the same way that Courtois treats his unfortunate clients in Abbeville. This lumberman is strengthened by his life in nature, but also, Thoreau feels, limited by it: “When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him on

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every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child” (102). In a later chapter (“Higher Laws”), we see Thoreau’s fully developed attitude toward man’s two natures: We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure (149). We come away from Thoreau having witnessed the same struggle between natural and reasonable man that is dramatised in the movie by the character of Courtois. Nature, for Thoreau, is a great teacher, and a high example (remember the pickerel), but nature within man is ambivalent, problematic. He feels that boys should be allowed to fish, but considers them stunted if they don’t eventually leave the fishpole behind, and become, as it were, fishers of men (144). It would be tidy to conclude that Thoreau, the nineteenth-century dualist Romantic, is carrying on the same struggle between ape and angel that Courtois suffers in his legalistic idealism, and that we Post-Moderns can relate to both. But even though we remain post-Romantics to some degree – and Thoreau is still read – I’m not sure that is exactly what The Advocate is about, for us. We can contemplate the fifteenth-century’s social problems with a certain grim knowingness, and we know enough about the animal in man to appreciate both the truth and the irony of beast fables; about tyranny we are too well informed. But our idealism? Do we retain the high-mindedness (both the ethical committment, and the analytic detachment which keeps it from becoming mere emotionalism) necessary to care about yet another (fifteenth-century French) urban dreamer out of his depth in country matters? The peculiar sensible power of the medieval world in this film helps us to care. For as we surrender to the tangible immediacy of fifteenthcentury problems and worries, we can suspend for just a little while our own skepticism regarding political ideals, and our cynicism about the blurring of the distinction between human and animal nature. We may pass over the skepticism lightly, since the on-going nostalgia for Camelot demonstrates our hidden hunger for political fables, especially the remote, simplistic and (for us at least) painless ones like the Round Table. But if

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the human image also embodies an ideal, there seems to be little hunger for it. The blurring of distinctions between human and animal is commonplace. It seems almost a necessary assumption in popular culture, where dogs are assigned to dog psychotherapists, chimpanzees are taught to communicate in sign language, and killer whales are sentimentalised as playmates for small children (while on the non-fiction Discovery channel it is possible to watch them beating Arctic seals to bloody pulp). Arguably, these examples belong to the beast fable tradition, like Disney cartoons, while stories of humans acting like animals are probably a variety of romance – gothic, for instance, or detective thrillers, or science fiction. I am not giving them much importance. I would argue merely that in popular art, it is common for animals (even great white sharks) to be assigned human motives. Conversely, given titles like The Killer Ape, or (the movie) Birdie, or The Silence of the Lambs, we are not surprised when humans carry out animal behaviours. Conceivably, the impact of these mingled images may contribute to an increased anxiety over questions of human identity (for example, the moral backlash in rural Kansas against the teaching of evolution), and to our increased interest in scientific advances like the description of the human genome, or the theory of socio-biology, both of which are popularly assumed to have identified a “script” for human form or function. IV As moderns, nonetheless, we react to the pig trial with a condescending shrug: we find it childish, contemptible even that humans and animals were judged as equals under the law. But it is probably more significant that we can still find it touching, and even a little stirring that Richard Courtois, the Advocate of Abbeville, should care so much about it. . . that he has reason to be concerned. Sharing his darkly thoughtful gaze as we do, however – for the director’s eye for coded detail quickly has us searching for social, legal and historical implications – the medieval ideals and conflicts implicit in this serio-comic beast litigation become vivid and emergent for us, and we find ourselves pondering over the law as a mirror of human reason. It is mildly amusing, for example, that the Advocate Courtois summons the rats to bear witness in defence of a woman accused of Maleficium – of inciting them to bite a neighbour. But when the rats do not obey the summons (issued on posters written clearly in the French language), he quotes Roman law (the Corpus Iuris Civilis) to justify their absence: given that their mortal enemies, the dogs and cats of the village, might cause harm to their persons, the rats may rightfully

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absent themselves – even though summoned by law – because they have the natural right to act in defense of their own safety.28 Amusing it is, and yet this is precisely the point of law that was invoked to excuse a king’s resort to warfare in defense of the public good, even though such an act would otherwise contradict the ius naturale, the natural law. Within the context of European history, it was a serious matter, this reasoning about the differences between ius gentium, the law of men, and the ius naturale, God’s reason in Nature, and the putative source of the ius gentium. Within the events of the film, it manifests itself as the necessity of human imperfection, and the social and legal attempts that are made to compensate for it. For us, however, it is ultimately a question of human identity. And so we, too, meditate upon the governance of a lord whose bookkeeping is so exact, but whose pleasure is riding to the hunt for human quarry; and we wonder, endlessly, whether there is room for human intentions and choices between the crushing millstones of animal behaviour and tyrannical control. Through Courtois’s perplexity, and through the villagers’ anxiety, the priest’s irony, the frigid humour of the lord, we enter fifteenth-century France, then, and we ponder its questions – for a time. But we remain aware that we are in it, not of it. That is the condition of medievalism, but in any case, the movie will not allow us to forget ourselves. For its fundamental style is to present medieval life as paradoxical: life-like, yes, and true to its own assumptions, but essentially opposed to our empirical, eclectic frame of mind. And here is where we feel most keenly the film’s narrative “slant.” The animal trials are such a paradox for us, as is the inquisition and the matter-of-fact absolutism of the Seigneur d’Auferre. Centrally, and somewhat surprisingly, however, the chief paradox is Courtois himself, and the nature of his reasoning. To be sure, he too finds it absurd to have to defend “witches,” and even pigs, in a court of law. Yet the law he practices itself rests upon abstract ideals (e.g. the “natural right” to self-defense) which are treated as though they were real entities, and provide the basis for real-world decisions, including wars and executions. This law is certainly a disciplined practice of reason, yet reason reduced to formulae and based on premises which often go unexamined. In this connection, Huizinga is again helpful: The spirit of casuistry, which was greatly developed in the Middle Ages. . . is another effect of the dominant realism. Every question which presents itself must have its ideal solution, which will become apparent as soon as we have ascertained, by the aid of formal rules, the relation of the case in question to

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the eternal verities. Casuistry reigns in all departments of the mind: alike in morals and in law, and in matters of ceremony, of etiquette, of tournaments and the chase, and, above all, in love.29 One might reasonably object that like medieval people, we have our own abstract ideals, and our own casuistry, including the legal kind. Without question. Yet even though we can warm to their courtroom drama, try on their attitudes, savour their legal wit, their habits of mind are not, can not be ours. Even Courtois, whose youthful idealism is steadied by solid legal principles, finds his purpose and identity in practicing law whose deepest logic is theologic: God’s reason applied to men. And so, while the movie’s affect – its elemental images of medieval pride, dirt, loveliness and pain – reaches us directly, just as practically anyone is quickened by Alysoun’s friskiness or Nicholas’s scorched behind, its instruction, its medieval “sentence” must come to us by analogy, and no doubt it is clearer and more helpful for that very reason. Charmed, then, by The Advocate’s historical detail, its colour and wry comedy – all of it quite faithful to the period – we are lured into sifting, and at a certain distance, caring about questions of legal, political and moral philosophy that give us back a troubling, ambivalent reflection of our human image. Thus are we drawn to question a little more deeply and truly who we are. That is how a movie can be about the Middle Ages as well as about us, and why, if it is going to be good, it probably needs to be both.

NOTES 1. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (1986; London: Picador, 1987), 61–72. 2. The Advocate (1994), a Miramax Films release of a BBC/CiBy 2000 production. Producer: David M. Thompson. Director: Leslie Megahey. Screenplay: Leslie Megahey. Director of Photography: John Hooper. Editor: Isabelle Dedieu. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 3. In his review for Sight and Sound NS 4 (Feb. 1994), 53, Phillip Strick said: “Part whodunnit, part rustic comedy and part historical pageant, The Hour of the Pig embraces its opportunities with an enthusiastic but precarious grasp, seemingly reluctant to decide on a main argument.” The unusually close attention paid to production design – which provided the authenticating detail that creates the film’s solidly medieval look and feel – must derive substantially from Leslie Megahey’s having both written and directed this, his first movie. But it may also have something to do with the production company, BBC/CiBy 2000,

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given the enduring cultural thrust of the BBC, and with the picture’s being shot on location in northern France. 4. Peter Rainer, Los Angeles Times (3/31/94): 11. 5. Thelma Adams, New York Post (8/24/94): 35. 6. Magill’s Cinema Annual 1995 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1996), 10. 7. Kim Newman, Empire 56 (Feb. 1994): 30. 8. Lisa Nesselson, Variety 25 (Oct. 1993): 82. 9. Marianne Gray, Film Review (Feb. 1994): 19. 10. Nesselson, Variety: 82. 11. Linda E. Mitchell, American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1221–2. 12. Legal issues, legal language and legal procedures supply much of the film’s content, verbal wit and plot structure, and so it is intriguing to find a reviewer (Linda E. Mitchell, see note 11) who says “the filmmaker. . . has failed to utilise the true richness of the legal issues that form the basis of the story” (1222). This reviewer was disappointed that the film did not present viewers with a debate between certain premises of Roman law, and the law (the “Custom”) of Ponthieu. In her view: Roman law creates a chasm between male and female on the same rational basis by which it differentiates between human and animal. Thus women, according to Roman law, are closer to animals than they are to men: they, too, are incapable of rational decision-making and can be exploited and abused like chattels. Just as customary law makes few distinctions between human and animal, it makes few distinctions between male and female. Unfortunately, the debate between these concepts is not an element of The Advocate (1222). 13. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (1924; New York: Doubleday, 1954), 30. 14. Here, I am arguing merely that the director, Leslie Megahey, presents the Middle Ages in ways reminiscent of Huizinga’s account. But anyone familiar with The Waning of the Middle Ages would discover even stronger resemblances. For example, when Courtois, the naive urbanite, orders his first supper at the Abbeville Inn, he rather absurdly quotes Philippe de Vitri’s Le Dit de Franc Gontier, a fourteenth-century poem on the simple joys of country life: Under green leaves. . . near a noisy brook. . . Gontier took his meal with dame Helayne on fresh cheese. . . garlic and onions [and] chopped shallots on a brown crust with coarse salt, to drink the better. These very lines appear in Huizinga’s chapter on “The Idyllic Vision of Life” (130n), where he provides the original French, accompanied by this translation, in support of his commentary on the late-medieval pastoral ideal. Thus it is likely that Megahey studied Huizinga’s early chapters, but the composition of certain “tableau” scenes in the film may imply a familiarity with the later chapters on the Van Eycks as well.

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15. In Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch. 8–9, Seymour Chatman distinguishes between the implied author in a film, the film’s narration, and its “filtration.” The implied author is the entity to whom we attribute the film’s intentions – aesthetic, ideological, and so forth. The narration is the sum of the ways in which the film is presented (hence the narrator is an agency, not a person); narration produces “slant,” the ideological or other commentary implicit in the film’s presentation. Filtration, however, is commentary proceeding from (or “filtered through”) a particular character’s sensibilities and point of view. These are useful distinctions for studying The Advocate, because even though we often share Courtois’s earnest, reasonable point of view (his filtration), the film retains its own narrative slant, or implied commentary. In large part, it is this implicit “voice” that constitutes the film’s interface between medieval times and our own. It reminds us that Courtois is intelligent but rather inexperienced in this country setting, that his thinking is reasonable yet legalistic (he is a medieval lawyer, after all), and that while we may sympathise with his brand of enlightened discontent, we cannot really share it. 16. See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977): “Trials of barnyard animals were not uncommon. Under the assumption that the responsibility of domestic animals is identical to that of humans, the Registre Criminel de Saint-Martin reports the case of a sow which, having killed a young child, was executed at Noisi according to the procedure reserved for murderers” (33). See also Y. Bongert, Cours d’histoire de droit pénal français de la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle à 1493 (Paris, 1970), 350. 17. This metaphor was in fact known to medieval legal discourse. Cf. Walter Ullmann, The Medieval Idea of Law as Represented by Lucas de Penna: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Legal Scholarship (1946; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), 45, who quotes Lucas de Penna, a fourteenth-century Neapolitan jurist, on law as “the reflection of the divine will”: “Lex est divinae voluntatis imago” (Commentarium XI, 18, 1, no. 12). 18. The following discussion is derived from Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 508–12, 539ff., 548ff., 552f. 19. On the continental witch trials, see Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), who argues that: the drastic increase [during the 14th and fifteenth centuries] in trials for sorcery came about because of anxieties felt throughout society, but . . . the more fantastic charge of diabolism. . . built on a foundation that was already laid. The jurists and theologians who suggested this charge supplied a new dimension to the craze that was already underway, adding fuel to an already blazing fire. The masses and the intellectual elite combined their energies in a task of common concern

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– and demonstrated that the fruits of such co-operation are by no means necessarily salutary” (105). 20. Latin aufero (infinitive auferre) means “remove,” “take,” and in some cases, “seduce” or even “steal.” It suits this grasping lord well. 21. Marjorie K. McIntosh, “Finding Language for Misconduct” in Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), provides a suggestive account of what was probably a parallel situation in mid-fifteenth-century France: For local jurors, the need to maintain control in the face of [the social and economic changes following the hundred years’ war] was paramount: they sought both to regulate the life of their communities and to retain their own power. They were faced with the presence of new kinds of people and styles of behaviour that undermined traditional patterns of good order, yet they lacked specific legal authority with which to address many of the issues that seemed most threatening. . . their sense of urgency in responding to the problems can only have been intensified by the political uncertainties of the higher levies of government (112–13). 22. The predations of d’Auferre’s son have their medieval precedent in the notorious acts of Gilles de Rais, a young nobleman of Anjou (1404–40), whose early military career included commanding a part of the troops that Joan of Arc led against the English at Orleans (1429). Shortly after, at the coronation of Charles VII, he was named Marshal of France. In the decade that followed, certain rumors circulated, but no one pursued them because Gilles’ cousin Georges de La Tremoille was then the king’s favourite. But in 1440, constrained by indebtedness caused by his profligate spending, Gilles committed the sacrilege of disrupting a mass in Brittany and kidnapping a priest, with the hope of repossessing a castle he had previously sold to the priest’s brother. The Duke of Brittany, who was his suzerain, then had him brought to trial. Faced with torture, Gilles de Rais “spontaneously” confessed to sodomising and murdering, during the preceding eight years, at least 128 children – all, or mostly boys – who were kidnapped for him by accomplices from the streets and fields, from the ranks of his pages and choirboys, and especially from the numbers of beggar children who came to his residences hoping to receive alms. Gilles de Rais was sentenced to death for his crimes on Oct. 25, 1440, after several lengthy and impassioned confessional speeches. The next day he was hanged and burned, but asked to be executed first, before his accomplices, to provide them with an example of how to die well. See Reginald Hyatte, intro. and trans., Laughter for the Devil: The Trials of Gilles de Rais, Companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc (1440) (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984). 23. According to the credits, Courtois’s character is based on the life of Barthélemy de Chasseneuz (sometimes spelled Chassanée) (1480–1541). See M. Michaud, ed., Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Moderne, Nouvelle Édition

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(Paris: Madame C. Desplaces, 1854), VII: 699–700. Chasseneuz, a prominent jurist, did defend animals and became president of the Parlement d’Aix in 1540, where he presided during the notorious judgment of the villagers of Mérindol, who were suspected of heresy. Some had been condemned to death for their failure to present themselves at court (contumace), others to be banished and their houses destroyed. Chasseneuz prevented this judgment from being carried out by arguing that since one could not excommunicate rats before they were arraigned and their testimony heard, then even the heretics of Mérindol should not be treated more harshly (rigoureusement) than these animals. Some historians believe this to be a mere story drawn from a Protestant martyrology. Yet it is true that Chasseneuz had previously reported a case in Beaune (see his Consilia, Lyon, 1531), in which beetles had attacked the vines, but then as well he had refused to uphold a judgment that the beetles leave the territory under threat of excommunication: the beetles would not come to court, yet neither had they refused counsel. In his judgment at Mérindol, Chasseneuz cited several other similar cases against harmful animals (animaux nuisibles) such as rats and snails in Autun, Lyon and Maçon. On these grounds, he obtained an order from the king that the Mérindol defendants should remain free from judgment until arraigned. This order remained in force until the following year (1541) when Chasseneuz died suddenly, some say by poison in a bouquet of flowers, and the unfortunate villagers suffered their cruel judgment. In retrospect, it seems that the underlying strategy of Chasseneuz may have been to establish precedents which, since they concerned animals, were clearly an illustration of natural law (i.e. first principles), and would retain their authority in judgments concerning humans. 24. Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Knopf, 1978). 25. On the differences between the laws in the North and South of France in the Middle Ages, see Joseph R. Strayer, ed., Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1986), VII: 457–68. 26. Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 378–80, makes the point that whereas the English crown’s active attempts to adjudicate legal issues during the Hundred Years War helped to create regional (parlementary) resistance to central rule, the French crown during that time tended to allow legal issues to be dealt with by the powerful nobles, through long-established feudal practices. Consequently, when the French king consolidated his rule in the late fifteenth century, no effective parlementary system existed, and the French monarchy enjoyed an uninterrupted absolutist rule until the eighteenth century. 27. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; New York: New American Library, 1960), 66. 28. Corpus Iuris Civilis D. 9, 2, 4. More broadly, “All laws (natural and human) sanction the use of force to repel force”: “Vel enim vi defendere, omnes

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leges, omniaque iura permittunt” (D. 9, 2, 45, 4). Both passages are quoted in Post, Studies in Medieval Legal thought, 509. 29. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 232.

Harold in Normandy: History and Romance Carl I. Hammer The year 1066 is certainly the most famous date in English history. And with good reason. Duke William of Normandy’s victory over King Harold at Hastings on October 14th led to fundamental changes which shifted England’s geo-political orientation and lay culture from Scandinavia to the Continent, revolutionised its social structure by entirely supplanting the ruling class, and sharply altered the development of its language. These traumatic consequences of the Norman Conquest led to profound and prolonged national reflection; the progressive reshaping of its memory supplied England with its most durable national political myth, the “Norman Yoke,” according to which William’s victory had subjected a nation of free Englishmen, “to the combined forces of Popery and Absolutism!”1 Few military actions have such immediate, deep and such long-lasting consequences as the Battle of Hastings, and the impact of its memory has been further shaped and intensified by the astounding survival of a unique artefact, the Bayeux Tapestry. There is no comparable medieval event for which we possess an almost cinematic, contemporary record which is capable of transforming us into time-travelers, direct witnesses to dramatic scenes of life and death almost 1000 years ago.2 Indeed, in the age of such older film epics as “El Cid” and now “Gladiator” it is something of a puzzle why no modern filmmaker has taken up the challenge to retell the Tapestry’s deceptively simple story. However, by way of compensation, we have (at least) six historical novels which narrate the fatal tale of William and Harold:3 (1) The earliest novel is, itself, now a kind of historical artefact, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, first published in Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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1848 to enormous success and subsequently re-issued in numerous editions (both authorised and “un-”). Bulwer (1803–1873) was already an experienced writer of historical fiction having published The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835) and The Last of the Barons (1843). However, as we shall see, with Harold the highly-didactic “New Seriousness” practiced by Bulwer in his historical novels was aimed in a particularly urgent way at immediate political relevance.4 (2) Bulwer’s impact is probably also measured by the fact that the next novel (Isabelle) Hope Muntz’s The Golden Warrior, did not appear until precisely one hundred years later in 1948 (London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949). It too enjoyed great popular success with many editions and book-club selections in both England and the United States. Unlike Bulwer, Muntz (1907–1981) was a very unlikely author.5 She was born in Toronto and never studied at a university; her earliest work was as a commercial artist. The Golden Warrior was her first and only novel. She evidently continued to work on the theme in various media for the rest of her life, but no revision of the novel was ever published. (3) Alfred Duggan’s (1903–1964) novel of King Edward the Confessor, The Cunning of the Dove, published in both England and America in 1960 (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Pantheon), contains much material relevant to our topic and must be considered with the novels more narrowly concerned with Harold Godwinson. Duggan, a prolific author who attended Eton and Balliol, specialised in historical novels set in the ancient and medieval periods and in religious subjects. (4) Morgan Llywelyn (1937– ) had a background not dissimilar to Muntz. She was born in New York, likewise, never studied at university, and pursued a variety of early occupations with no literary connections. The Wind from Hastings, published first in America in 1978 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; London: Robert Hale, 1980), was also her first novel. Her subsequent writings, fiction and non-fiction, have been exclusively on Celtic topics which already are reflected in the prominence given to the English narrator, Aldith’s, Welsh marriage to King Gruffydd ap Llewelyn. (5) Valerie Anand (1937– ) is English, but her novel, The Norman Pretender, was first published in America in the year following Llywelyn’s, 1979 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Chatto & Windus, 1980); its Welsh excursus may have been suggested by Llywelyn’s novel. The Norman Pretender was her second novel but is part of her “Wessex Trilogy” which begins with her first novel on the earlier history of the Godwin family, Gildenford (1977), and concludes with a post-Conquest

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novel on the revolt of Hereward the Wake, The Disputed Crown (1982). Since then she has published several other historical novels and a series of mysteries set at Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Anand too never studied at university and continued to work in business communications while writing her novels. (6) The most recent novel, Julian Rathbone’s (1935– ) The Last English King, was first published in England only in 1997 (London: Little Brown & Co.; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). It is a surprising choice of topics. Since 1967 he has published many books, most of them crime novels, the earliest of which were set in Turkey where he taught school after graduating from Cambridge in 1958. Although all of the later writers were already well established or soon became successful authors, none of their novels on the Battle of Hastings received the same degree of popular success as did those of Muntz and, especially, Bulwer. But the contrast between the earlier and the later novels lies not only in their popular reception. Their authors follow very different literary programs. Bulwer and Muntz aimed to recreate history in a dramatic, fictional idiom rather than the expository prose of conventional historians.6 Similarly, Duggan writes a modern saint’s “Life” of King Edward in a novel narrated, rather cleverly, by the king’s fictional chamberlain, Edgar, which permits knowledge of private as well as public events.7 Llywelyn and Rathbone, on the other hand, have used historical settings and events to present a variety of romantic and picaresque plots and themes which, apparently, recur in their other novels. A similar distinction was, in fact, explored at length by Bulwer in the original “Dedicatory Epistle” and, subsequently, in the “Preface” to the third edition of his novel. In the “Dedicatory Epistle” Bulwer describes his preparatory research in the library of Charles Tennyson D’Eyencourt’s estate, Bayon’s Manor in Lincolnshire. There, he recalls his host, “entering that Gothic chamber in which I had been permitted to establish my unsocial study, heralding the advent of majestic folios, and heaping libraries round the unworthy work.” Ensconced thus as an historical scholar amongst his sources, he contrasts those who, “throw aside pretensions to accuracy altogether, and so rest contented to turn history into flagrant romance,” with his “own conception of extracting its natural romance from the actual history.” To this end, he has, “been faithful to the leading historical incidents. . . and as careful as contradictory evidences will permit, both as to accuracy in the delineation of character, and correctness in that chronological chain of dates without which there can be no

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historical philosophy. . .” In contrast, “the fictitious part of my narrative is. . . confined chiefly to the private life with its domain of incident and passion, which is the legitimate appanage of the novelist or poet.” In the later “Preface” to Harold Bulwer refines and subtly shifts this contrast (now explicit) with Sir Walter Scott: There are two ways of employing the materials of History in the service of Romance: the one consists in lending to ideal personages and to an imaginary fable the additional interest to be derived from historical groupings; the other, in extracting the main interest of romantic narrative from History itself. Those who adopt the former mode are at liberty to exclude all that does not contribute to theatrical effect or picturesque composition; their fidelity to the period they select is towards the manners and costume, not towards the precise order of events, the moral causes from which the events proceeded, and the physical agencies by which they were influenced and controlled. [Although] there is presumptive reason for supposing [that the first, Scott’s approach] is the more agreeable to the art of fiction. . . I [have] contented myself with the humbler task to employ Romance in the aid of History. . . [to] enliven the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is confined [and to] construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the struggles and delineating the characters of those who had been the living actors in the real drama. A century later, in the “Foreword” to Hope Muntz’s novel, the distinguished English historian, G.M. Trevelyan, echoed Bulwer directly when he wrote that The Golden Warrior “is not an ordinary historical novel, for the historical novel usually avoids the great personages and the famous scenes, and fills its canvas with imaginary characters. But this book is a Saga of Harold and William. The other personages, English and [sic] European are historical portraits. . . The atmosphere is that of heroic drama sustained throughout.” Muntz was not, herself, a trained historian, but she took her history seriously and was regarded accordingly by distinguished professional historians such as Professors Frank Barlow and Dorothy Whitelock. Together with her companion, Catherine Morton, she published a scholarly edition of one of the primary sources, the “Ballad of the Battle of Hastings,” and in the same year, 1972, both were elected Fellows of the Royal Historical Society.8 In the “Author’s Note” to the novel, she does

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not present any theory of the historical novel; rather, as a good historian, she emphasises (as did Bulwer) her fidelity to the historical sources: “For the facts and characters of this story I have gone to the contemporary sources. . . In disputed matters. . . I have followed the version that seemed to me most probable. Where legend and tradition enrich the story and do not conflict with the known facts, I have made use of them. . . but at no time has history been intentionally falsified.” These statements admittedly reflect a view of history that is not held today by all historians who, to varying degrees, have jettisoned claims to Rankean objectivity (wie es eigentlich gewesen) and devoted themselves increasingly to the obscurities of the “private lives” of private, rather than public, persons. Nor do the novels by Llywelyn and Rathbone conform exactly to the type of historical romance dismissed by both Bulwer and Trevelyan. The two more recent novels are cast from the entourage of Harold Godwinson and set against the events of his life; they, thus, have a distinctly “public” aspect and must maneuver within the same historical context as their predecessors. Yet, while Bulwer and Muntz present fictionalised, heroic biographies of Harold, Llywelyn and Rathbone build their stories around the lives of “ideal personages” and “imaginary characters.” It is true that Llywelyn’s protagonist and narrator, the Mercian Lady Aldith, was a real person: the sister of Earls Edwin and Morkere, the wife of the Welsh King Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, and then (briefly) of his slayer, Harold. Nevertheless, Aldith is so poorly documented that she exists barely as a name and almost anything can be imputed to her and her (assumed) life in Wales. Rathbone’s main character, the housecarl, Walt, is pure invention as is his companion, Quint, a stock character evidently adapted (like another, albeit possibly historical, character, Taillefer) from his modern political thrillers. And both novels are set extensively in exotic and remote settings frequented by the authors in their other works: Wales and Asia Minor. Llywelyn and (even more clearly) Rathbone are concerned primarily with the private lives, the thoughts, and the emotions of their imaginary characters and (particularly in Rathbone’s case) with telling an inventive and exciting yarn of personal adventure, rather than with the public events of “1066 and all that.” Fair enough. Rathbone, a very practical novelist and Booker Prize nominee, also provides a prefatory “Author’s Note” to explain his own “take” on historical novel-writing. He does not eschew conscious anachronism or modernisms, both in language and in reference, for stylistic effect. Regarding more conventional historical issues, he has, “tried to be accurate with historical personages, events and dates in so far as these are known through the few and often contradictory sources available, though, of course, I have put my own interpretation on

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them in a way that is disallowed to historians. This is, after all, a novel. . . I’ve left things out where they got in the way of my main story-line, and, where no source I could find covered a particular theme or span of time, I have felt free to invent.” Not totally different but, nevertheless, a significantly broader brief, it seems to me, than that espoused by Muntz. What interests me as an historian is the explicit appeal by Bulwer, Muntz and Rathbone to the “sources” as a control on their artistic freedom.9 These are, of course, also the ultimate authorities to which historians must answer. But that discipline can be applied in quite different ways. For an historical novelist like Rathbone, the sources are, in the first instance, an interesting pretext on which to hang a tale; beyond that his enabling principle seems to be: “Whatever is not forbidden (by the sources), is allowed.” The historian, on the other hand, must in some way be content with the restriction: “Whatever is not allowed (by the sources), is forbidden.” Nevertheless, every historian knows that any source may say several things; and even the question of which sources to admit is highly contentious. As a first step to explore the relationship between historical sources and historical novels, I have assembled two Matrices which present in synoptic form comparable information on Harold’s eventful trip to Normandy immediately before 1066, a journey characterised by Professor David Douglas in his important study of William the Conqueror as, “one of the most picturesque and controverted episodes of history.”10 As we shall see, every aspect of this trip presents difficult issues of source-criticism and historical interpretation. Their resolution is critical to our understanding of the conflict between Harold and William. How have our six novelists used these sources to inform their accounts and, with their greater freedom, can they provide historians with significant new insights? When we consider the early sources available for reconstructing Harold’s fateful trip to Normandy (Matrix 1), then a curious fact emerges. No version of the most important contemporary English source for this period, the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” is amongst them, nor is John (the chronicler formerly known as “Florence”) of Worcester who evidently used another, no-longer-extant version of the “Chronicle.”11 These sources are completely silent on any Norman sojourn and even lack any entry whatsoever for one of the possible years, 1064. In fact, all of the earliest literary sources are Norman or, at least, Continental in origin. They are in (apparent) chronological order:12 (1) The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, which Muntz and Morton edited in 1972, seems to be the earliest source and probably was written by a

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well-informed authority, Bishop Guy of Amiens (uncle of Count Guy of Ponthieu), in the late 1060s.13 Although the comital house of Ponthieu bordered on Normandy and participated at Hastings, it was also close to Eustace of Boulogne which may be reflected in the narrative of the Bayeux Tapestry (see below). The Carmen is very favourable to William’s cause and is close in substance to the two following Norman accounts, but it is not a panegyric. It had very limited circulation in the Middle Ages, and the only complete manuscript was not rediscovered until the early nineteenth century (see below). (2) William, a monk from the important Norman monastery of Jumièges, wrote a continuation of Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s “Deeds of the Norman Dukes” in about 1070.14 This prose account is the only early source to have had a wide medieval distribution; numerous manuscripts survive including later redactions with significant additions made by the important Anglo-Norman historian, Orderic Vitalis (c. 1095–1113), and by Robert of Torigni (late 1130s). (3) Jumièges’s work was used shortly after its completion by another William “of Poitiers” in his openly panegyrical “Deeds of William [the Conqueror].”15 Despite his name, this William was a former Norman knight, an Archdeacon of Lisieux, and probably for some time chaplain to Duke William so that he was well positioned to gather and evaluate information. This is by far the most extensive and circumstantial written account of Harold’s journey, and Poitiers (like Jumièges) clearly had access to official sources which documented the disputed claims between William and Harold. In strong contrast to Jumièges’ highly popular work, its medieval circulation was quite limited. At least two manuscripts apparently survived into the early seventeenth century but none is extant (or, at least, known) today, and our text depends on the early printed editions (see below). (4) Finally, in the early twelfth century a monk from William the Conqueror’s foundation of Battle Abbey wrote a Brevis Relatio or “Short Account” which incorporates some original information derived from that monastery’s local traditions.16 It, too, had very limited manuscript circulation, but it was consulted by Robert of Torigni for his redaction of William of Jumièges and by Wace (see below). Although these contemporary Norman sources never were wholly rejected, their clearly tendentious origins made them suspect, particularly to English historians, who, at times, displayed a certain nationalist bias. It

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was only in 1953 that Professor Douglas’ highly-influential article in the English Historical Review rehabilitated and established them as the primary written sources for Harold’s journey.17 In contrast, ten years earlier Douglas had utterly rejected the testimony of a later twelfth century Norman writer who had been used extensively by many earlier historians.18 Wace, a Caen schoolmaster, became a canon of Bayeux and through the early 1170s, worked on a poetic account of the dukes of Normandy, the Roman de Rou (Rollo), for King Henry II.19 This was Edward Augustus Freeman’s “honest Wace” whose reputation already had sustained serious damage in J. H. Round’s critical, even vitriolic attacks on Freeman’s voluminous (and still, in many ways, definitive) account of the Conquest which was published in five thick volumes between 1867 and 1879.20 But recently historians have begun a rehabilitation of Wace as an “oral historian” who preserved important local traditions, particularly from the Cotentin region of lower, western Normandy. Because of his late date I have not included him in my Matrix, but he is worth consulting on particular points, and we shall make further reference to him. On the English side we, apparently, have nothing earlier than the first Book of Eadmer’s “History of Recent Events in England” which he began as a part of his famous biography of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury.21 This work, too, had limited medieval circulation and survives in only two manuscripts, one of which (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 452), however, seems to be an autograph. Even though his account was written about half-a-century after the event, it must be taken seriously. Eadmer had entered Christ Church Canterbury as a child oblate, evidently just before the Conquest, since he remembered the old cathedral church which burned in 1067. The late Sir Richard Southern has shown that Eadmer was a conscientious historian with a clear concern to preserve English traditions endangered by the new regime.22 Writing in Canterbury, he certainly was in an excellent position to gain both oral and documentary information on the events leading up to the Conquest, and he was in close contact with the most important center of contemporary English historical writing at Worcester. It is even possible that Eadmer (like Wace) had some personal knowledge of the potentially most significant, in many ways the most explicit, and, yet, certainly the most enigmatic source for “Harold in Normandy”: the Bayeux Tapestry.23 The currently-accepted hypothesis for the Tapestry has it fashioned in England under the patronage of Duke William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, possibly for the dedication of his new cathedral church in 1077.24 All of this is plausible, but none of

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it is documented. If this account of the Tapestry’s origins is true, however, then its consistently-sympathetic treatment of Harold is very puzzling, indeed.25 We certainly are not looking at a simple piece of Norman triumphalism, much less blatant retrospective propaganda. Rather, this is a highly-nuanced source with three distinct levels of information, both textual and pictorial, which makes it an exceptionally difficult document to “read.” The Tapestry is impossible to classify as either English or Continental (although I would incline more to the former), and, for that reason, I have given it a segregated and somewhat privileged position in Matrix 1 where I have used it to determine the flow of information, both because of its detailed coverage and its apparent temporal linearity. But I also have some historical license for this. Sir Frank Stenton’s account in his authoritative first volume of The Oxford History of England also relied on the Tapestry (for which he later produced the still-normative edition) as “the simplest, and on the whole the most probable version of the story” to structure his narrative.26 Sir Frank’s account, which appeared first in 1943 during the Second World War and was reissued essentially unrevised only four years later in 1947, would have been available to Hope Muntz when she wrote The Golden Warrior as would, of course, Freeman’s voluminous and, in its detail, still-not-superseded account. A full century earlier, Bulwer, likewise, was not without up-to-date historical guides. The established account by an Englishman was still Sharon Turner’s multi-volume History of the Anglo-Saxons which first appeared in 1799 but which went through a sixth (and final) edition in 1836. In 1845 Benjamin Thorpe published a revised, two-volume translation of the German historian, J.M. Lappenberg’s History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, first issued in Hamburg in 1834. Perhaps, most pertinently, in 1847 William Hazlitt published a complete English translation of Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans from the seventh Paris edition of 1846. And only one year after the publication of Bulwer’s novel, in 1849, John Kemble’s magisterial and still-valuable The Saxons in England appeared in two thick volumes. This sober (but still tendentious!) work of what we would now call “structural” history lacked any political narrative, but it immediately made earlier antiquarian speculations on Anglo-Saxon institutions (including Bulwer’s) appear amateurish. Moreover, all of the principal sources reviewed above were readily available in serviceable editions by the time Bulwer set to work in the “Gothic chamber” at Bayon’s Manor in April 1848.27 The manuscript of Bishop Guy’s poem had only been discovered in Brussels as late as 1826 by the great editor of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Georg Heinrich

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Pertz, but it was available in several editions by 1848. The other written sources had venerable publication histories reaching back to the historical revolution of the seventeenth century and to the circle of antiquaries working around Sir Robert Cotton and his magnificent manuscript collection.28 William of Jumièges was first published by the pioneering English antiquary, William Camden, in 1602. William of Poitiers was first edited by the important early French textual scholars, Nicholas Fabri de Peiresc and André Duchesne, using a borrowed (and now-lost) Cottonian manuscript and published along with Jumièges in 1619. The great legal scholar, John Selden, produced the first edition of Eadmer while in prison from 1621 for his association with the Virginia Company and published it in 1623. The Brevis Relatio was printed by Silas Taylor as an appendix to his History of Gavelkind in 1663. The “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” first printed at Cambridge in 1643–44, was published in three new editions (all using conflated texts) with modern translations between 1823 and 1848.29 The relevant sections of Wace, too, were available in English translation in 1837. Engravings of the complete Bayeux Tapestry, based upon meticulous drawings by Charles Stothard, were issued by the London Society of Antiquaries in seventeen colour plates between 1819 and 1823. Finally, three of the principal early texts, the Carmen, William of Poitiers, and the Brevis Relatio, were available in a convenient compendium volume published in 1845 by the Caxton Society as Scriptores Rerum Gestarum Willelmi Conquestoris and edited by the prolific “borrower,” John Giles.30 Of the potentially relevant sources, only the anonymous but contemporary “Life” of King Edward was not in print by 1848.31 And the critical sifting of this evidence was already well underway, a process which already had eliminated spurious sources such as the forged Crowland Chronicle of “Ingulf,” still cited as “a contemporary writer” by Sharon Turner.32 Bulwer as an historical novelist was heir to more than two and a half centuries of tireless and acute historical and textual scholarship. We should keep this surprising bibliography in mind. It is important to remember that Bulwer was an innovator of the historical novel, not a pioneer historian. And, although his “Dedicatory Epistle” emphasises his solitary labours and laments, “the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters, events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante Agamemnona,” these publications indicate that Anglo-Saxon “antiquities,” far from being an obscure and neglected subject, were, in reality, something quite in vogue. Bulwer’s novel, with its strong “Norman Yoke” (or “Germanist”) bias is, thus, at one piece with contemporary historical interests, which, as Kemble pointed out, were considered highly

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relevant to contemporary politics. The roots of English freedom and political stability in an age of European revolutions were thought to be planted firmly in the Old English past.33 By the same token, Muntz’s novel echoes Stenton’s and Trevelyan’s fervent patriotism and nostalgic sense of an indomitable English spirit which had just faced (now successfully, not tragically) the threat of a “European” invader. As Michael Wood has recently pointed out, the nationalism of the “Norman Yoke” is surprisingly long-lived, and even a novelist as seemingly up-to-date as Julian Rathbone is not immune!34 These strong contemporary resonances, despite their differences and the divide of a full century, may go a long way to explain the markedly more successful reception of the two earlier novels. Both Matrices present information on eleven (more-or-less) discrete but interrelated episodes or issues. In a short paper, it is impossible to discuss them all. Rather, I would like to concentrate on the first two items, the background and the immediate initiative for Harold’s journey to Normandy, which undoubtedly are the most contentious historical issues and also illustrate quite well the different problems confronting both the historian and the novelist. Freeman laid out very clearly three alternative hypotheses which can be derived from the principal sources.35 In the first alternative, King Edward the Confessor sends Harold to Normandy to confirm William as his, that is, Edward’s heir. In the second alternative, Harold, himself, undertakes the journey in order to gain the release of his brother and his nephew who have been held there as hostages since Earl Godwin’s exile and restoration in 1051/52. In the third alternative, Harold’s arrival in Normandy was unintentional and even accidental. If we look at Matrix 1, we will see (I think) that Bishop Guy, William of Jumièges, and the anonymous monk of Battle Abbey all provide direct evidence for the first alternative: Harold as Edward’s emissary to William. Eadmer mentions only the second alternative: the liberation of the hostages. William of Poitiers conflates the first two alternatives; the Bayeux Tapestry can be read in conformance with any of the three alternatives although it is probably weakest on the alternative involving the hostages. Wace, now read as an historian rather than as a primary source, likewise presents both of the first two alternatives, apparently giving precedence to the hostage version without deciding finally between them (lines 5581–5604). Sharon Turner and Lappenberg’s accounts display a similar tendency to that characteristic historian’s vice, evasiveness and muddle. Thierry (rather surprisingly) follows Eadmer and opts for the hostages. Freeman, himself, doubted the hostage story completely (and, I believe, rightly).36 Nor, as a fervent nationalist, could he conceive of any serious

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attempt by an English king to put William on the throne; he, accordingly, rejected the Norman sources as tainted. He finally opted for a story reported by another early twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, that Harold had been pleasure boating and was blown off course!37 Freeman, needless to say, has not been followed by modern historians who generally (but with some significant differences) prefer some variant of alternative one: Edward’s dispatch of Harold. What do our novelists make of this historical puzzle (Matrix 2)? The novels by Bulwer, Muntz, Duggan, Anand and Rathbone provide detailed accounts.38 Both Bulwer and Muntz share Freeman’s reluctance to make King Edward the immediate instigator although they refer to earlier events in Normandy before 1042 and in England in 1051 when he was inclined to favour William as his heir. Bulwer, like Thierry, relies on Eadmer’s account to supply the primary motive, freeing the hostages. But Bulwer also invents additional motives, listed in Matrix 2 (coincidentally) in (rapidly) declining order of plausibility. In Muntz’s account Bulwer’s subsidiary theme, Harold’s plan to secure William’s support for his, that is, Harold’s succession to the throne, becomes the primary motivation. This is not supported explicitly by any early source, but it may be implicit in what another contemporary source tells us about him. Harold evidently had a reputation not unlike Bill Clinton’s in our own day. Womanising aside, Professor Barlow has shown from the contemporary “Life of King Edward,” commissioned by Harold’s own sister, Queen Edith, that he was a skilled dissembler and, “rather too free with oaths, alas”; he may well have planned some judicious Continental diplomacy in support of his ambitions.39 Perhaps, he even thought he could “sweet talk” William, a delusion against which Edward warns him in Eadmer’s account, here followed by both Bulwer and Muntz. However, Muntz evidently has been influenced by Freeman (or possibly by Stenton?) in one key area; there are no hostages in Normandy. Accordingly, they play no part in Harold’s considerations although she has worked them cleverly into the plot in a way that makes good sense to me. Likewise, she has included a “take” on William of Malmesbury’s “pleasure sail” which, if still unlikely, nevertheless avoids the obvious absurdity of Freeman. In short, Muntz has devised a modestly innovative fictional narrative which also is historically credible. Duggan’s novel, which is narrated from the perspective of Edward the Confessor by his chamberlain, Edgar, marks a clear shift in historical interpretation. In Duggan’s novel, Edward turns to William after his sister’s son, Earl Ralph “the Timid” has shown himself to lack the essential qualities of a king. Duggan does makes two significant changes to the Norman sources.

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Edward’s designation follows Archbishop Robert of Canterbury’s return from Rome and Normandy in 1051. We are left to speculate whether the topic was raised by Robert in Rouen, but he clearly could not have been an official agent of confirmation as reported by the two Norman Williams. Nor does Duggan mention any English hostages held in Normandy. Like Muntz, Duggan deposits Wulfnoth (undoubtedly a lifelong hostage at a later date) in Normandy as a guarantor for Harold’s oath, but unlike Muntz this had been agreed before Harold’s departure. Duggan’s version clearly reflects the rehabilitation of the Norman sources effected by Professor Douglas in 1953.40 Duggan obviously was familiar in some form with William of Poitiers’ account and gives it an interesting novelistic spin.41 Poitiers (like Bishop Guy) reports first that Edward’s designation had the consent of the English magnates (Bk 1, c. 15: optimatum igitur suorum assensu). Later, in the negotiations before the Battle of Hastings, Duke William makes reference not only to the magnates’ consent (suorum optimatum consensu) but to their oaths (iureiurando suis manibus) and specifies them by name: Archbishop Stigand and the earls Godwin, Leofric and Siward (Bk 2, c. 12). The juxtaposition of these two passages indicates that Poitiers was hastily stitching together disparate sources which he could not reconcile fully. Duggan, likewise, refers twice to this critical and very problematic event. First, after William’s visit to England at Christmas 1051, the King tells Edgar that, “the Earls and Archbishop Robert” had sworn, but in private so that there was no clear record. This justification for Harold’s own oath then resurfaces in early 1064 before his departure for Normandy, when Edward informs Queen Edith, much to her displeasure, of those previous undertakings. To aid his royal master, who (for whatever reason) is vague on the details, the Chamberlain-narrator, Edgar, invents the names, being careful to include Edith’s own father, Earl Godwin, who, in fact, was in exile during William’s visit in 1051, and Stigand, now an archbishop, who is depicted in the novel as a Godwin ally! Duggan’s subtle reworking of Poitiers’ awkward account is easily the single most sophisticated fictional manipulation of historical sources in the six novels. That does not, however, mean that it is true. Rathbone’s much cruder account contains elements of all three alternatives, but there is no doubt about the force of Edward’s intent to install William as his successor.42 The real initiative comes from the king as it does in Duggan’s novel, but with a significant twist. Edward schemes to send Harold to William so that the Norman duke can secure the English earl’s acquiescence to William’s succession. However, since Harold would not be a willing participant, Edward dissembles his true objective and

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seeks to motivate him, rather, by the prospect of liberating his kinsmen long held hostages in Normandy. Finally, Harold’s unexpected landing in a hired merchant ship at Ponthieu is part of the same plot by Edward to put Harold under William’s control. Rathbone, likewise, makes a particular point in his “Author’s Note” of “one conscious alteration to actual [sic] events”; while “historians ‘surmise’ (their word [whose?]) that Harold was in Normandy in 1064. I’ve moved the trip to 1065.” However, Rathbone’s own “surmise” (clearly implied by the Tapestry) would hardly surprise historians, since Eric John argued in an another influential article in 1979 that Harold’s trip to Normandy should be dated to November and early December 1065.43 And the last item in Matrix 2 (p. 4) shows that Rathbone’s supposed “innovation” was anticipated by Bulwer (and by Llywelyn). At the risk of sounding like the “swots, letter-writers, anoraks and so on” whose pedantry Rathbone derides, I should point out that his own chronology is strained and confused,44 and his mode of transport absurd. No earl, much less Earl Harold, would hire a merchant ship to go anywhere.45 Just as he is portrayed in the Tapestry, he would travel in state on his own longships. Rathbone may be headed very roughly in the right direction, but his realisation is an historical bungle. For myself, I would like to see a more sensible variant than that proposed by Rathbone of Freeman’s third alternative: the unintended trip, for which there is historical warrant and for which John’s chronology has opened some interesting possibilities. A really imaginative historical novelist (or even an imaginative historian) might have asked where Harold really thought he was going in early November 1065 and considered more carefully Harold’s relationship with Count Guy of Ponthieu whom he had met at the court of Flanders in 1056.46 A missed opportunity, but certainly not the only one. The greatest unsolved puzzle of the Tapestry is the scene placed between Harold’s meeting with William in the palace at Rouen and the start of the Breton campaign. In the palace Harold seems to be gesturing towards the next scene where a tonsured cleric is grasping the face of a woman standing between two elaborate columns (Stenton edn. Plate 19; Wilson edn. Plate 17). The surtext reads, “Where a [certain] clerk and Ælfgyva (Ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva),” and the subtext shows a naked man with a prominent member groping upwards with his left hand towards the hem of the lady’s dress. The placement indicates that this is a crucial scene, and it is difficult to see how we can claim to grasp the “mystery” of the Tapestry or of “Harold in Normandy” unless we can explain it.47 None of the six novelists touches it although Muntz and Anand seem to imply obliquely that this might be a reference to Harold’s sister, who, as Freeman first pointed out, was also

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named Ælfgyva.48 But a marriage alliance involving her, while historically plausible, is difficult to reconcile with the sexually- charged iconography of the Tapestry’s scene. I am especially surprised that its obvious salacity elicited no response from Rathbone. In fairness, I should admit that respectable historians have set them a bad example. While Freeman speculated at length about Ælfgyva, both Stenton and his immediate predecessor, Thomas Hodgkin in the first volume of Longmans’ influential “The Political History of England,” passed silently over this discomforting scene in their otherwise detailed accounts of the Tapestry.49 At this point I have no historical solution to offer, but if ever there were an opportunity for historical novelists to engage their artistic imaginations in some informed and creative speculation, the tale of Ælfgyva and the clerk could hardly be bettered. In short, as an historian, I must register some disappointment with my novelists. When they are not absurd, they are rather timid and conventional for my tastes. Duggan, the most experienced and accomplished historical novelist of the group, has a good command of events and can use his sources deftly, but his historical line is prosaic, lacking in vivid contours, as may well be appropriate to his intentions for a saint’s life. Only Muntz is at all plausible when she strikes out on an original interpretive line. Her history is somewhat old fashioned but still intelligent. It is not as embarrassingly outdated as Bulwer’s nor as naive as Llywelyn’s, Anand’s and Rathbone’s. One would like to know how she intended to revise her novel after her later historical research. As a novelist Muntz is not as inventive a story-teller as Rathbone nor as fluid or lively a narrator as Duggan or Llywelyn, but she still is quite good. Her language, particularly her dialogue, contains some mild archaisms, without the excesses of Bulwer which make him practically unreadable today and were even criticised by his contemporaries. For a novel set in such a distant period, I, myself, prefer language which establishes some distance between the reader and the subject. These are, after all, people whose mental world was quite different from if not completely alien to our own. Having said that, Rathbone does score some points when he states the obvious fact, “that Anglo-Saxon lords were as quick with the odd expletive as their modern counterparts.” Indeed, they were probably quicker, and an exaggerated, Victorian prudery can only be seen as an historical anachronism. In sum, there is still considerable scope for a new novel about Harold and William, and the historical tools available to that novelist are now superb. But until that novel is written, Hope Muntz’s The Golden Warrior deserves to be read widely both for historical instruction and for pure pleasure.

Edward’s Previous Commitment to William

Edward had designated William as his heir with consent of magnates

Edward designates William as his heir and sends Archbishop Robert of Canterbury to confirm (1051)

Edward with consent of magnates designates William heir, to confirm sends delegation to Wm by Abp Robert of Canterbury with Godwin’s son and grandson as hostages (1051); [2/12: done on advice and by oath of Abp Stigand, Earls Godwin, Leofric and Siward]

William of Bishop Guy of William of Jumièges Amiens Poitiers Gesta Carmen de Hastingae Proelio Normannorum Gesta Guillelmi Ducum (ca 1070) (early 1070s) (late 1060s) Edward previously had made William his heir and (on his deathbed?) refused Harold’s request to change succession in his favour

Monk of Battle Abbey Brevis Relatio (1114–1120)

“Harold in Normandy” Matrix 1: Comparison of Selected Early Sources

Nil

Bayeux Tapestry (1070s)

Edward promised succession to William while still an exile in Normandy before returning to England in 1041

Eadmer Historia Novorum in Anglia (1109–1115)

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Circumstances of Landing and Captivity at Ponthieu

Nil

Harold brought Initiative and sword and ring to Reason for Harold’s Journey William to confirm Edward’s designation of him as successor

Nil re weather; Harold and men imprisoned by Count Guy

Edward sends Harold to confirm earlier commitment of 1051

Harold asks Edward’s permission to go to Normandy to free his brother, Wulfnoth, and nephew, Hakon, who had been transferred there for safekeeping as hostages after Godwin’s restoration [1052]; Edward warns Harold against William but does not stop him Driven by storm; Harold adjudged a captive and placed under strict arrest; despoiled by Guy before release

Harold has an audience with Edward at a royal residence before his departure from Bosham in a longship

Contrary wind (velis vento plenis)? One longship lands safely; captions: “Here Guy arrests Harold and led him to Beaurain and kept him there”; “Where Harold and Guy parley”; “Here Guy brought Harold to William, Duke of the Normans”

Harold “was intending (vellet) to sail to Normandy”; the oath was the “matter (negotium) about which he had come to Normandy”

Driven by contrary winds; Harold kept in custody by Count Guy

Edward, anticipating his imminent death, sends Harold to confirm earlier commitment of 1051

Unfavourable weather? Harold and his men seized and taken into custody by Count Guy; after agreement with William, Count Guy “behaved well” and brought Harold to William at the castle of Eu

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Nil

Nil [Orderic adds that it occurred before the “many oaths”]

Nil

Nil

Ælfgiva Scene

Placement and Itinerary of Breton Campaign

A cleric touches the face of a woman standing between two elaborate columns. Caption: “Where a clerk and Ælfgyva”. Scene placed between Harold’s meeting with William in the palace at Rouen and the start of the Breton campaign Route of Norman army: by Mont Saint-Michel; cross river Cousenon where Harold rescues Normans; relieve (?) Dol; bypass (?) Rennes; besiege Dinan

Nil

Follows oath (below); campaign seems to take place during late Spring or early Summer (below). William has Harold as his tent-mate (contubernalis); siege of Dol relieved

Bayeux Tapestry (1070s)

Nil

Monk of Battle Abbey Brevis Relatio (1114–1120)

Nil

William of Bishop Guy of William of Jumièges Amiens Poitiers Gesta Carmen de Hastingae Proelio Normannorum Gesta Guillelmi Ducum (ca 1070) (early 1070s) (late 1060s)

Nil

Nil

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Nil

Bonneville-surToques

Nil [Orderic in his Ecclesiastical History, Bk 3, gives Rouen]

Place of Oath

Nil

Harold “did H. swore fealty homage and before Breton campaign (above) fealty” to William “by holy rite of Christians” as first part of oath (below); Wm confirmed H’s lands and authority. Wm provided H. and companions “knightly arms and the finest horses” [2/12: H. gave himself “by his own hands”]

Harold’s Fealty/ William promises Swore fealty Vassalage Harold his father’s lands, and asserts that Harold “was mine” (meus ipse fuit)

Bayeux

At conclusion of Breton campaign: “Here William granted arms to Harold”

Nil

Nil

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William calls Harold “false, infamous and perjured king and adulterer”; Harold warned to “keep faith and observe oaths; right hand bound by sacred bonds”. [Harold’s oaths to William made in secret (furtiva mihi periuria fecit)?]

Nil

Nature of Harold’s Oath to William

Disposition of Hostages

Included with fealty oath (above). Terms: (1) act as William’s vicar in England; (2) ensure William’s succession; (3) secure Dover and other castles for William [2/12: relics worn by Wm around his neck at Hastings, 2/32: Wm’s daughter promised to H.]

Harold’s nephew [Orderic adds: Wulfnoth kept in released (see above) Normandy by William]

Swore many oaths [Orderic adds: Harold betrothed to William’s daughter, Adeliza, and promised half of England]

William of Bishop Guy of William of Jumièges Amiens Poitiers Gesta Carmen de Hastingae Proelio Normannorum Gesta Guillelmi Ducum (ca 1070) (early 1070s) (late 1060s) Occurs following Breton campaign; Harold, in the presence of William and court, holds each hand on a reliquary: “Where Harold swore an oath to Duke William”

Nil

Nil

Bayeux Tapestry (1070s)

“As many say”, Harold swore “3 oaths upon a reliquary called the ‘bull’s eye’ to keep the faith and promise he had made”

Monk of Battle Abbey Brevis Relatio (1114–1120)

H. returns with nephew; brother kept by Wm until he comes as king

Hostage release conditions: (1) support for Wm’s succession; (2) secure Dover; (3) H’s sister to marry Norman; (4) H. marry Wm’s dau. H., “perceived himself in danger on all sides; did not know how else to escape” agrees; swears on relics

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With many gifts

Harold’s journey reported directly before Edward’s death

Nil

Nil

Circumstances of Harold’s Return

Precise Dating of Harold’s Journey

William kept Harold “for only a few days”; Edward dies “shortly” (in breve) after meeting with Harold

Harold’s return “somewhat” (aliquantum) before onset of Edward’s illness at Christmas 1065

Edward’s final illness and death during Christmas 1065/66 follow directly on his audience with Harold

Breton campaign takes place as “crops were standing green (immaturae) in the fields”

Directly after oath ceremony; Edward rebukes Harold

Departs directly Loaded with gifts As quickly as possible after the from the oath scene; has oaths audience with Edward immediately upon return, rebuked?

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Edward’s Previous Edward, while an Commitment to exile in Normandy before his return in William 1041, made “rash hints” but not promises about the succession to William; William not able to raise the issue during his visit to England in 1051/52.

Edward, while an exile in Normandy before his return in 1041, promised succession to William; Wm’s case urged by Abp Robert of Canterbury during Wm’s visit to England in 1051; Edward wants to confirm by Witan but Wm and Robt advise against.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hope Muntz Harold the Last of the The Golden Warrior Saxon Kings (1948) (1848)

Julian Rathbone The Last English King (1997) Edward invites William to England in 1051 and promises to name him as his successor.

Valerie Arnand The Norman Pretender (1979) Edward designates William as his heir in 1051 and Witan confirms; Godwin’s son, Wulfnoth, and grandson, Hakon, given to Edward as hostages in his dispute with Godwin, transferred to William as pledges.

Alfred Duggan The Cunning of the Dove (1960) After Godwin’s exile, in late 1051 Edward reveals plan to designate William his heir; Wm visits at Christmas, and “the Earls” and Abp Robert swear privately to make Wm king; in 1064 Edgar (narrator) names Godwin, Leofgar, Siward and Stigand to Edith.

“Harold in Normandy” Matrix 2: Comparison of Five Novels

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Ship’s master bribed by Bp William to take Harold to Ponthieu where he is held for 3 weeks by Count Guy in indifferent circumstances until ransomed by Duke William. Shipwrecked by a storm; Guy has Harold shackled in a dungeon at his castle of Beauvais [sic].

Harold driven off course by storm; later suspects that his imprisonment and rescue was “a put-up job from the beginning”, since “the little French Count [of Ponthieu] is one of William’s vassals”.

Ship wrecked by violent storm and false shore-lights put out by inhabitants; Guy chains Harold and party in dungeon and then removes them to Beaurain further away from Wm; Guy’s treatment improves after agreement with Wm and all goods restored at Eu.

“storm and wind”; Harold “cast into a prison in the castle of Belrem. . . a dungeon fit for malefactors”.

Circumstances of Landing and Captivity at Ponthieu

Edward dying in 1065 plots with Bp William to get Harold to Normandy where Duke Wm can gain his support for succession. H. wants release of his 2 kinsmen [Edw: nephew Wulfnoth/cousin Hakon] held as hostages with Wm. H. sails from Bosham in merchant ship.

Edward no longer favours William; Edith suggests that the hostages be brought back to give Edward a free hand; Harold volunteers to go in place of Tostig so he can again meet with an old rival who has been hostages’ guardian.

Edward “on his throne” commands Harold “with uncovered head” to go to Normandy to swear to be William’s man and help him to the throne; done publicly at Harold’s request to demonstrate his unwillingness.

Harold wants Wm’s support for his succession as agreed by Witan in 1063; meets with Edward but disguises his purpose as sailing and fishing; Edward suspects and warns H. Against Wm; Wulfnoth and Hakon sail from Bosham with H. who wears royal arm-ring.

Harold hopes: (1) at Initiative and Gytha’s urging to free Reason for Harold’s Journey 2 hostages committed to Wm in 1052; (2) secure Wm’s acquiescence to H.’s succession; (3) learn from Wm how to reform England; (4) gain support for papal dispensation to wed Edith; Edward warns against Wm.

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Nil

Harold saves Placement and Normans at the river Itinerary of Breton Campaign Cousenon; Normans besiege “a place”; Harold and William share a tent on the campaign.

Ælfgiva Scene

Nil

Fortnight after arrival at Rouen, Harold sets out with Normans from Caen; battle with Conan by river Cousenon near Mont Saint-Michel where some Normans are caught in bog; Conan retreats to Dinan where besieged for 3 weeks but escapes as castle falls.

Nil; [see below under oath agreement]

In Rouen William makes Harold’s participation in Breton campaign a precondition for discussing Hakon’s freedom, army crosses quicksands at mouth of Cousenon where Harold saves Normans; Conan retreats from Dol to Rennes and surrenders at Dinan

Nil

After arrival at Rouen William gives Harold “long mailshirt” and takes him on campaign in Brittany to show him French military tactics; “no real fighting”; Harold saves Normans “when the tide caught us fording a river”.

Nil; [Harold’s youngest sister, Elfgiva, at Bosham, wants to sail to sail to Normandy with H; by oath agreement (below) she is to marry a Norman] After Harold has spent the winter of 1064/65 in Normandy, campaign May–June 1065. Route: ford Cousenon by Mont Saint-Michel where H. saves Normans; Dol yields; Rennes taken; Conan surrenders at Dinan; Harold and William share a tent on campaign.

Julian Rathbone The Last English King (1997)

Valerie Arnand The Norman Pretender (1979)

Alfred Duggan The Cunning of the Dove (1960)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hope Muntz Harold the Last of the The Golden Warrior Saxon Kings (1948) (1848)

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Bayeux

Place of Oath

To gain release H. Nature of Harold’s Oath to decides to deceive Wm. Terms: (1) William secure Dover; (2) aid Wm to succeed; (3) marry Wm’s dau. Adeliza; (4) H’s sister, Thyra, to wed Norman. H. swears on small reliquary but cloth cover then removed to reveal chest full of relics.

Before the Breton campaign, Harold admitted to “that peculiar band of warlike brothers” established by William as “knights”.

Harold’s Fealty/Vassalage

Bayeux

Wm seeks H’s support in Witan. H. requires to rule England in Wm’s stead. Wm declines. At feast Taillefer creates illusion of 2 hostages in danger (cousin Wulfnoth/ nephew Hakon). H., drunk, swears oath in support of Wm’s claim on 2 concealed reliquaries.

“In Normandy” [Rouen?] after Breton campaign, Bishop Odo receives oath. Wm tells Harold he must remain in Normandy until he swears to support his claim to throne as confirmed by the Witan; Harold’s infirm sister, Elfgiva, to marry a Norman and Harold to wed Wm’s daughter, Agatha; oath made on covered table concealing relics.

H. intends “polite promise of friendship” but tricked to swear binding oath over concealed relics (Bull’s Eye); Edw. dictates Wm’s promises to H: (1) Wm’s agent in England; (2) build and hold Dover castle; (3) rule in England as deputy; (4) marry Wm’s sister.

Agreed in Brittany. H. to: (1) ensure Wm’s election; (2) secure Dover, other castles; (3) wed Wm’s dau. Agatha; (4) marry sister Elfgiva to Norman; (5) receive half England as Secondarius. Swears falsely under duress on sacred jewel; cloth covers relic chest.

After Harold arrives at Rouen (above), Wm asserts his vassalage as result of ransom paid to save his life. H. agrees to serve Wm wherever he “may rule by law”. Wm knights H. after Breton campaign (above), and H. repeats unsatisfactory oath.

At conclusion of Breton campaign Harold made a knight by William and swears fealty to him along with Conan.

Nil; “When we got back from Brittany” [to Rouen?]

After Breton expedition William gives Harold “armour and weapons to take home” for rescue (above); Edward explains that “when he gave you weapons . . . he adopted you as his chosen warcompanion”; H. admits to being Wm’s “sworn vassal” after oath.

Bayeux

William knights Harold on the field after Conan surrenders at Dinan; Harold kneels to William in ceremony.

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Precise Dating of During 1065; return From Autumn 1064 to early Summer Harold’s Journey at time of Northumbrian revolt 1065. against Tostig in early Autumn.

From late Summer 1065 for 9+ weeks.

Nil

“King Edward was pleased to see Harold safely home . . . sympathetic about Harold’s predicament over the oath-taking . . .”.

On return Harold “delivered a formal speech in hall, saying he had done all that had been commanded and that Duke William held his oath”; but “Harold was very angry” and at private interview complains to Edward of Wm’s “trickery”.

H. betrothed to Agatha and departs next day; rides directly to Edward at Winchester; tells him, Edith and Tosti about oath and Wulfnoth; Edward reminds H. of his warning; H. fights with Tosti and Edith rebukes him; Bp Wulfstan absolves H. with penance.

Circumstances of Edward has suffered Harold’s Return severe illness during Harold’s absence in Normandy; Archbishop Alred of York absolves Harold of the oath as coerced.

Leaves after Pentecost Spring 1064 until end of July. (30 May) 1064; returns before Michaelmas (29 September).

Nil

Wulfnoth wishes to remain in Norman monastery, and William confirms his safety there; Hakon returns with Harold

Harold leaves Wulfnoth as hostage with William as previously agreed with Edward.

Disposition of Hostages

Harold expected that both Wulfnoth and Hakon would be required by William as hostages for the oath, but William only demands one, Wulfoth volunteers.

Julian Rathbone The Last English King (1997)

Valerie Arnand The Norman Pretender (1979)

Alfred Duggan The Cunning of the Dove (1960)

Harold’s nephew, Haco, returns to England with him; Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, remains as hostage in Normandy.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Hope Muntz Harold the Last of the The Golden Warrior Saxon Kings (1948) (1848)

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NOTES 1. Quoted from David C. Douglas’s 1946 David Murray Foundation lecture at the University of Glasgow, “The Norman Conquest and British Historians,” reprinted in his Time and Hour; Some Collected Papers of David C. Douglas (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 57–76 (62). See also the recent essay by Michael Wood, “The Norman Yoke,” in his In Search of England; Journeys into the English Past (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 3–22. The earliest historical memories are surveyed in Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press and Macmillan, 1999), 123–42 (Chapter 6: “The Memory of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066”). 2. Michel Parisse, La tapisserie de Bayeux: Un documentaire du XIe siècle (Paris: Denoël, 1983), 53–80 (“Une conception filmique”). 3. In the following selection I have not taken account of children’s stories such as Henry Treece’s Hounds of the King (1955), nor of adult novels which only treat the Battle of Hastings and associated events in a peripheral manner such as Cecilia Holland’s The Firedrake (1966). Finally, I have not searched for historical novels in languages other than English. A more debatable omission is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s verse drama, “Harold” (1876), the second act of which deals with Harold’s journey (The Works of Tennyson vol. 8, ann. Alfred Lord Tennyson; ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson [London: Macmillan and Co., 1908], 207–327, 353–81). Paull F. Baum’s Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948) makes the interesting critical point that in “Harold,” “Tennyson sacrificed the logic of tragedy to the facts of history” (223). Tennyson certainly used Freeman’s new history of the Conquest (see below) but how scrupulously is a question; he is willing to make Harold’s arrival in Normandy unintentional but unwilling to give up on an English hostage, Wulfnoth, there, presumably, because of its dramatic value. 4. The phrase is from Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), 47–67 (Chapter 3: “The New Seriousness: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold”). There is a good general survey of Bulwer’s life and work in James L. Campbell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Twayne’s English Authors Series 420 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), see esp. 85–88. 5. Unless otherwise noted, information on Muntz and the following contemporary authors is taken from the biographies provided by the Gale Group’s on-line “Literature Resource Center”. 6. This seems also to be Anand’s intention although her work lacks the sharp biographical focus of Bulwer and Muntz. She provides an explicit and continuous chronological framework for each “Part” of her three novels which can be read, to some extent, as narrative pageants of the period. Continuity

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between the novels is established by a common fictional character, Brand the Woodcutter, a Godwin retainer, who, nevertheless, plays a subordinate role. 7. Presumably, the narrator, Edgar’s, declaration of his own (unactualised) homosexuality is a device to validate his exoneration of the king’s ambiguous sexual orientation. On the latter see the oblique remarks on contemporary royal homosexuality by Frank Barlow, William I and the Norman Conquest, Teach Yourself History (London: The English Universities Press Ltd, 1965), 11–12. 8. The ‘Carmen de Hastingae Proelio’ of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz, eds. and trans., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). I must thank Joy McCarthy, Executive Secretary of the Royal Historical Society, for confirming information on their election. 9. Of the six novelists, only Anand provides a bibliography of the secondary historical accounts that she consulted. Except in a very few cases (see below for Bulwer and Duggan) it is difficult to determine whether these novelists have derived their specific “facts” from primary sources, modern histories, or even from previous novelists (see above for Anand). 10. David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 175. There is a composite map of Harold’s journey in N.J. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 153. 11. M.J. Swanton, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London: J.M. Dent, 1996; New York: Routledge, 1998); R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk, eds., J. Bray and P. McGurk, trans., The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). The mid-eleventh century dates of two separate versions of the “Chronicle,” C (Abingdon) and D (Worcester), seem to preclude the possibility of later, deliberate editorial omissions. 12. In addition to the critical editions cited below, see Marjorie Chibnall’s appended survey, “Appendix 3: Early Narrative Sources for the Norman Conquest,” to her edition and translation of The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, vol. 2 (Books 3 and 4), Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 368–70. 13. Now superseded by Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The ‘Carmen de Hastingae Proelio’ of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), lines 203–303 (14–19); for the following discussion of the sources see Barlow’s introductory remarks, here: lii–lx. For the (to me, surprising) deletion of Morton and Muntz’s names from the new edition see Barlow’s prefatory remarks (v). 14. Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, ed. and trans., The ‘Gesta Normannorum Ducum’ of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, 2 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 and 1995), Bk 7, c. 31 (2, 158–61). 15. R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall, eds. and trans., The ‘Gesta Guillelmi’ of William of Poitiers, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon

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Press, 1998), Bk 1, cc. 14, 41–46 (18–21, 68–79) and Bk 2, cc. 11–14 (116–25). 16. “The Brevis Relatio de Guillelmo Nobilissimo Comite Normannorum, Written by a Monk of Battle Abbey,” in Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, ed., Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Medieval England, Camden Miscellany 34, Camden 5th Series, 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1997), 1–48, here c. 4 (27–29); reprinted in her History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000–1200, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS663 (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1999), VII (with original pagination). An English translation of cc. 1–10 is included in her anthology, The Normans in Europe, in the Manchester Medieval Sources in Translation series (2000) which I have not been able to consult. 17. “Edward the Confessor, Duke William of Normandy and the English Succession,” reprinted in his Time and the Hour, 141–59. 18. David C. Douglas, “Companions of the Conqueror,” History 27 (1943), 129–47. See the remarks for this and the following by Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, “Wace as Historian,” in K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, ed., Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the tenth to the twelfth century (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1997), 103–32 (109); reprinted in her History and Family Traditions, X (with original pagination). 19. A.J. Holden, ed., Le Roman de Rou de Wace 2 and 3, Sociéte des Anciens Textes Français (Paris: Éditions A. & J. Picard, 1971 and 1973), Part 3, lines 5397–5840; English translation of relevant sections in Edgar Taylor, ed. and trans., Master Wace, His Chronicle of the Norman Conquest from the ‘Roman de Rou’ (London: William Pickering, 1837), 66–94. Wace (lines 5681–5716) is the source of the apocryphal story that Norman relics were purposely concealed beneath the table on which Harold swore his oath and only revealed afterwards to his horror, a tale still found, with novel dramatic flourishes, in Rathbone. 20. The sections relevant to this study are in Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results, vols. 2 and 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1868 and 1869), here: 3, Note R, 667–96. For Round’s attacks on Freeman, see his Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1895; repr. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), passim. Wace is discussed and dismissed, along with Freeman, 306–20. 21. Martin Rule, ed., Eadmeri Historia Novorum in Anglia. . ., Rolls Series (London: Longman & Co. et al., 1884), 5–9; English translation in Eadmer’s History of Recent Events in England, trans. Geoffrey Bosanquet (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1965), 5–9. There is a clear need for a new critical edition and parallel translation of this important work. 22. R.W. Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer; A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 298–313; also his “Foreword” to Bosanquet, Eadmer’s History, vii–xii. 23. Complete editions with commentary: [in black and white], Sir Frank Stenton, ed., The Bayeux Tapestry; A Comprehensive Survey, 2nd edn (London:

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Phaidon Press, 1965), here plates 1–31; and [in colour], David M. Wilson, ed., The Bayeux Tapestry; The Complete Tapestry in Color (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), here plates 1–28. Harold’s journey to Normandy occupies all of Panel 1 and Panel 2 which ends with Edward’s funeral at Westminster in odd reverse order to the double-decker death scene at the beginning of Panel 3. Besides their unusual length (13.65m and 13.75m, respectively, against 5.2m–8.35m for the other six), these first two panels have some common epigraphic, orthographic, and linguistic peculiarities (most notably, the only uses of “Ubi” as a rhetorical contrast to “Hic”); see the interesting conjectures by Ian Short, “The Languages of the Bayeux Tapestry Inscription,” Anglo-Norman Studies 23 (2000), 267–80, with a very precise transcription and translation of the texts (278–80). Panel 1 also contains, in analogy to Edward’s funeral on Panel 2, the other principal non-sequential “flashback,” the events around Harold’s transfer from Count Guy to Duke William (Parisse, La tapisserie, 74–77). And these panels contain a striking concentration of the identified Aesopic iconography in the bottom border (Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion [Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2001], 91–105). One explanation might be that the first two panels, which deal primarily and quite sympathetically with Harold, were conceived and executed according to a distinct agenda or even as an afterthought to the rest. A possible objection to this hypothesis is that the join between Panels 2 and 3 runs between “et” and “hic” of Edward’s death scene and apparently through the figure below which implies some continuity of overall design concept. 24. There is an excellent recent survey of Tapestry scholarship by Richard Gameson, “The Origin, Art, and Message of the Bayeux Tapestry,” in his anthology, The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1997), 157–211. A different account of the Tapestry’s origins is in preparation by Andrew Bridgeford; see provisionally his “Was Count Eustace II of Boulogne the patron of the Bayeux Tapestry?”, Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999), 155–85; he has kindly discussed additional aspects of his forthcoming book with me in private correspondence. 25. The best political interpretation of Harold’s journey is in David J. Bernstein, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 114–23 (Chapter 7: “The Politics of Art”). 26. Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 569. 27. The entire novel was completed in “less than a month” (Campbell, Bulwer-Lytton, 85)! Full information on the publication histories of these sources is available in the modern, critical editions cited above. Since only Jumièges’ work has a complex textual history, the establishment of the text itself has not been a major critical issue for the other sources, and early antiquaries were generally very competent transcribers; major advances in scholarship have come, rather, in clarifying the context. Bulwer, a good Latinist, clearly did consult the relevant written sources (which, after all, are not voluminous) and the Bayeux

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Tapestry; see, for example, his reference to William of Poitiers in a footnote to Bk 9, c. 2. 28. For the following see Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, “Camden, Cotton and the Chronicles of the Norman Conquest in England,” British Library Journal 18 (1992), 148–62; and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time; English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79–80, 124–25. 29. The early history of the editions is recounted in Charles Plummer’s Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel with Supplementary Extracts from the Others, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), cxxvii–cxxxvii. 30. Plummer notes dryly of Giles’s 1847 translation of the “Chronicle” that (cxxxiii) “Like others of Dr. Giles’ literary productions it was largely based upon the labours of others. . .”; in this case, the “vigorous and idiomatic” translation of a crippled spinster, Miss Anna Gurney (cxxxi–cxxxii). 31. It first appeared in the Rolls Series in 1858. See now Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster, 2nd edn, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 32. See the account in Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c.550–c.1307, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1974; reprint: 1996), 2, 490–91. See Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, Bk 6, c. 15, for an example of the spurious “Ingulf ” misleading Turner on the “pre-history” of William’s claims to the succession. 33. Kemble’s The Saxons in England has the revealing subtitle: A History of the English Commonwealth [sic] till the Period of the Norman Conquest. In the “Preface” he expands on the “Saxon” origins of English political institutions: “The subject is a grave and solemn one: it is the history of the childhood of our own age – the explanation of its manhood. On every side of us thrones totter, and the deep foundations of society are convulsed. . . Yet the exalted Lady [Queen Victoria] who wields the sceptre of these realms, sits safe upon her throne, and fearless in the holy circle of her domestic happiness, secure in the affections of a people whose institutions have given to them all the blessings of an equal law. . . It cannot be without advantage for us to learn how a State so favoured as our own has set about the great work of constitution, and solved the problem, of uniting the completest obedience to the law with the greatest amount of individual freedom” (v). 34. Wood remarks on Stenton (“Norman Yoke,” p. 5): “Unlike many academic books, [Anglo-Saxon England] was written with the heart and the spirit as well as the intellect. Its patriotism is unmistakable, its view of the origins of England undeniably teleological. Stenton believed in the continuity of English history.” And even if this approach is no longer fashionable (or even acceptable) amongst academic historians, “In popular culture, the tale has lasted much longer. Comics, novels and stories still evoke the Norman Yoke, with plucky free Saxons pitted against regimented Continental despots: William’s troops with

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‘polished leather boots with pointed toes’, as Julian Rathbone’s latest novel, The Last Saxon King, has it” (13). 35. History of the Norman Conquest, vol. 3, c. 12:4, 215–54, and Note R, 667–96. 36. The C and D manuscripts of the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” carefully review by name the fortunes of Godwin’s five older sons in the events of 1051/52 and it is inconceivable to me that they would neglect to name any son given as a royal hostage at that date, much less one subsequently transferred to Normandy. However, the evidence for the hostages is reviewed more sympathetically by Frank Barlow in his Edward the Confessor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), Appendix B, “Hostages Taken from Earl Godwin’s Family,” 301–306, now reprised in his The Godwins (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2002), 48, 52, which otherwise follows closely the Life of King Edward. There is no doubt that Earl Godwin’s (youngest?) son Wulfnoth died as a Norman hostage at Winchester in 1094, and the whole story may have been concocted after the fact to account for his presence. There is no reason to think that his captivity predates Harold’s journey to Normandy or even the Conquest. In fact, the earliest Norman source, Jumièges, knows nothing about any English hostages, and Orderic Vitalis, in his redaction, specifically states (Bk 7, c. 31) that William sent Harold back to Edward with many gifts, et pulchrum adolescentem Vulnothum fratrem eius obsidem retinuit [“and kept back the fair youth Wulfnoth his brother as a hostage”], thus implying that his captivity began only then. For Wulfnoth’s subsequent captivity see in addition to Barlow, The Godwins, 117–18, his William Rufus, Pb edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 65–66, and Ian W. Walker, Harold, the Last Anglo-Saxon King (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1997), 196–97, both of which posit his captivity commencing in 1051. 37. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, eds. and trans., William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum; The History of the English Kings 1, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1, Bk 2, c. 228 (416/17). Freeman, however, did not follow Malmesbury in dating the journey itself to very late 1065 (418/19), preferring, rather, 1064 with a “?”. 38. Morgan Llywelyn’s novel provides only very limited information on these points. Because it is told consistently from the viewpoint of Aldith, who is not yet married to Harold when he departs, it does not provide an immediate narrative of events at this point and refers only to a royal “mission to the Continent.” I have, therefore, omitted it from the Matrix. 39. Edward the Confessor, 226–28; Life of King Edward, Bk 1, c. 7: sed ille citius ad sacramenta nimis, proh dolor, prodigus. 40. Without the benefit of Douglas’s and Barlow’s magisterial histories of William (1964) and Edward (1970). 41. Probably in the (then) recent French edition, Raymonde Foreville, ed. and trans., Guillaume de Poitiers, Histoire de Guillaume le Conquérant (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1952).

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42. In line (very roughly) with Eric John’s 1979 argument that “Edward was always committed to the Norman succession” (“Edward the Confessor and the Norman succession,” English Historical Review 94 [1979], 241–67, here 242); this is applied in John’s more popular contribution, “The End of Anglo-Saxon England,” to James Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons (Oxford: Phaidon; New York: Cornell University Press, 1982), 214–39, here 221–33, which certainly could have been available to Rathbone. 43. Eric John, “Edward the Confessor,” 260; “The End of Anglo-Saxon England,” 232. 44. Rathbone has Harold leave for Normandy in “late summer” (135), spend three weeks in Ponthieu (144), two weeks in Rouen before arriving in Brittany (146), three weeks besieging Dinan (155), and one week returning to Bayeux (157), a total of over nine weeks although at the end Harold only claims to have been absent from England for six weeks altogether (158). We know from the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (C, D and E [Peterborough]) that Harold was in Northampton dealing with the Northumbrian revolt against his brother Tostig on Thursday, 27 October 1065 (the Eve of Saints Simon and Jude) which, with a modest allowance for travel, would put Rathbone’s putative departure date from England easily back to early August. Edward’s prolonged death in the novel from diabetes also seems to be at odds with the “Chronicle” and other accounts where the onset of his fatal illness at Christmas is apparently quite sudden and unexpected (Barlow, The Godwins, 88, which also provides some prefatory remarks on Rathbone, Bulwer, Tennyson, and Muntz, 10–11). 45. On the voyage Harold is accompanied by “the inner core, the comitati, of Harold’s bodyguard” (136). This apparent plural form (from fourth declension comitatus?) is otherwise unknown to Latin lexicography. 46. Philip Grierson, “A Visit of Earl Harold to Flanders in 1056,” English Historical Review 51 (1936), 90–97. 47. Typical of the scholarly evasion on this point are Bernstein’s (unintentionally humorous) remarks in his fine study, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, 116: “Then, if we skip over such enigmatic scenes as the one with the mysterious Lady Ælfgyva. . .” Unfortunately, it must be admitted that the two most recent attempts at a solution are not convincing historically: J. Bard McNulty, “The Lady Aelfgyva in the Bayeux Tapestry,” Speculum 55 (1980), 659–68, which is essentially reproduced in his The Narrative Art of the Bayeux Tapestry Master, AMS Studies in the Middle Ages 13 (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 52–58; and John Gosling, “The Identity of the Lady Ælfgyva in the Bayeux Tapestry and some Speculation Regarding the Hagiographer Goscelin,” Analecta Bollandiana 108 (1990), 71–79. See now Barlow, The Godwins, 72. 48. History of the Norman Conquest vol. 3, Note S, 696–9. On Harold’s sister see now the short, prosopographical discussion in Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh Century England (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 307, which also has the most complete discussion of another historical candidate, King Canute’s

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first wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton, both of whose sons, King Swein of Norway and King Harold “Harefoot” of England, were later alleged to be of irregular origins (233–44). 49. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 569; Hodgkin, The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), 469.

The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great Joanne M. Parker At 12.17 p.m. on 20th September 1901, the guns of the Royal Field Artillery fired, cathedral and church bells pealed, and applause erupted from thousands of spectators who were densely crowded in the streets, crammed onto roof-tops and balconies, and hanging out of windows. Later that afternoon, acrobatic clowns, performing dogs and “Old English sports” entertained the masses, a whole ox was roasted and distributed to the poor, and 2,000 schoolchildren were treated to a moralistic lecture and cakes. At 4.00 p.m., a commemorative service was held in the Cathedral, which proved to be so popular that hundreds of people were left standing outside.1 The scene was Winchester, and the occasion was the unveiling of a larger-than-life bronze statue of King Alfred the Great, erected to commemorate what was believed to be the thousandth anniversary of his death.2 It is perhaps not surprising to discover that the demise of a ninth-century king was remembered in 1901. Throughout the Victorian age, the speed of contemporary industrial and social change caused the future to be contemplated with apprehension and history, conversely, to seem increasingly appealing. This new attraction included something of a mania for commemorating historical dates.3 Throughout 1897, for instance, every edition of the Cornhill Magazine carried an “anniversary study” of a significant historical event.4 As the work of many modern scholars has shown, it is also far from startling that a king from the medieval period, in particular, should have been venerated. After the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, the Middle Ages – which undeniably represented several centuries of Catholicism in Britain’s past – took Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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on a new interest for writers, historians and the general public.5 This was then fostered by Victorian Britain’s industrial and colonial success, which tended to increase national pride and thus encourage the early British past to be hailed as equal in interest and import to the classical period.6 That the residents of Winchester should have been eager to erect a statue of a king who had died in their town and, more importantly, made it the capital of his kingdom, is also hardly remarkable. By the late nineteenth century, in response to the growing centralisation of political and economic life in London, a great many provincial areas of Britain were asserting the richness of their local history and were consequently restoring monuments, unearthing remains or erecting memorials.7 Though this was done primarily as a means of accruing cultural prestige, there were often more pragmatic grounds for such activity. Alfred Bowker, Lord Mayor of Winchester from 1897 to 1898, asserted that one important reason for erecting an effigy of King Alfred was its potential to become “the means of immediately and directly benefiting the city of Winchester’s . . . prosperity.”8 By this he was almost certainly alluding to the significant revenues that many towns were gaining at the time from attracting the growing numbers of British tourists, hungry for heritage, whose exploration of their home country had been recently encouraged by European wars and facilitated by the expansion of the railways.9 The Winchester Alfred millennium celebrations are truly astonishing in a number of ways, however. To begin with, there is their sheer scale. The unveiling of the Alfred statue represented the climax of a full seventy-two hours of celebrations that included luncheons, dramatic and orchestral performances, and fireworks.10 Moreover, the notion of commemorating Alfred’s death was proposed as early as 1888; planning for the event began in 1898; and those who voiced support for it included such eminent figures as Cardinal Vaughan, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Edward Burne Jones, Henry Irving, John Ruskin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.11 Nor were the festivities simply a local affair. Winchester had to fend off rival claims by both London and Wantage to secure the honour of accommodating the Alfred statue, and its unveiling was attended by lord mayors from all parts of the British Isles; by ambassadors from Australia, Canada and India; and by journalists from America, France and Germany.12 While the Winchester celebrations were underway, not just the inhabitants of the city, but the whole of Britain enjoyed a national holiday.13 The 1901 Winchester commemoration is also significant because it was not just an isolated tribute but rather the pièce de résistance of a pervasive nineteenth-century cult of King Alfred which included the

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erection of at least three other statues, the completion of more than twenty-five paintings and, most strikingly, the publication of over a hundred works of literature.14 Between 1800 and 1901, there was not a decade in which significant texts about Alfred were not published. These included poems, plays, novels, children’s books, and both popular and scholarly histories. Admittedly, the only authors of these texts whose names are widely remembered today are William Wordsworth, who wrote two unremarkable short poems on the king; and Thomas Hughes (better known for his Tom Brown books), who produced a popular history of Alfred.15 It is also undeniably the case that several nineteenth-century Alfredianists are more familiar to posterity for the jibes they attracted from their more accomplished literary peers than for their own work. Joseph Cottle, for instance, is today remembered less for his 1801 Alfred: An Epic Poem than for the scorn poured on that text by Southey and Lamb.16 Nonetheless, the sheer range of authors who celebrated Alfred is remarkable. This included two poet laureates, Henry James Pye and Alfred Austin;17 commercially successful popular novelists like Gordon Stables and G.A. Henty;18 and amateur writers like Richard Kelsey, who describes himself in his Alfred of Wessex: A Poem (the only text he seems ever to have written) as “not. . . professedly an author. . . having, during the whole of the active portion of life, been an obscure, plodding man-of-business.”19 Rewriting Alfred’s life was by no means a solely male preserve. A number of Victorian female authors celebrated the Saxon king,20 most commonly through the medium of “improving” texts for juvenile audiences.21 Nor were nineteenth-century Alfredianists invariably of English nationality. Just as visitors from around the world attended the Winchester celebrations, so too throughout the nineteenth century Alfredian texts were published by writers from America, Ireland, Germany, Scotland, Canada and even Australia.22 Two very different men – the professional poet Martin Farquhar Tupper, and the attorney John Fitchett – merit particular mention among this large body of nineteenth-century Alfredianists. Tupper wrote five poems and a play about King Alfred, as well as producing English translations of several of the Saxon king’s writings and (unsuccessfully) campaigning single-handedly for a statue of Alfred to be erected in Wantage in 1849 to mark the anniversary of the king’s birth.23 Fitchett, on the other hand, wrote only one text about the Saxon king. However, at 1,500 pages, his 1841 King Alfred: A Poem, which allegedly “occupied his leisure hours for forty years,”24 is almost certainly the longest work ever composed on Alfred and has also been cited as the lengthiest poem in the

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English language.25 The writings of both men therefore vividly exemplify, as much as the 1901 commemoration, the depth of enthusiasm that was generated for Alfred during the nineteenth century. On the most basic level, the reason for this was the fact that Alfred was a Saxon. The antipathy felt by a large proportion of the British public towards the French during the nineteenth century meant that many Britons were loath to imagine that any measure of their national identity could be attributed to the Norman element of their ancestry, instead choosing to identify themselves and all that was great about Britain as essentially Saxon.26 Tupper, for instance, begins one of his poems, “Alfred, born at Wantage”, by addressing his contemporary Britons as “AngloSaxons all!”27 This attitude was supported by the insights of nineteenthcentury philology, which had been taken to demonstrate that the English language was essentially “Teutonic, and . . . Aryan,”28 and was encouraged by the propaganda of royalists, keen to gain public acceptance of the Germanic Victoria and Albert.29 More important than his Saxon blood, however, was the fact that Alfred lived, loved and died exactly one thousand years before the Victorians, thus furnishing a set of particularly resonant anniversaries for artists, writers and events organisers to observe, and a neat starting point for cultural historians. George Eayrs, for instance, called his study of the English monarchy Alfred to Victoria: Hands Across a Thousand Years.30 The thousand-year gap also made Alfred an evocative figure to be compared with or contrasted to contemporary figures. At the Winchester memorial celebrations, the first toast was to Edward VII and Alfred, and throughout the nineteenth century, writers with political interests likened the Saxon king to William IV, Victoria and William Pitt, and contrasted him with George IV.31 Egbert, Æthelwulf and Æthelberht, however, were also entirely admirable Saxon kings who all ruled Wessex exactly a thousand years before the nineteenth century, yet none of them attracted anything like the adulation accorded to their descendant Alfred. What set King Alfred apart in the first place was probably availability of source material. Whereas most of his Saxon predecessors and successors were known to Victorian history enthusiasts only through brief references to them in broad monastic histories such as the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred also had a text written exclusively about him: Asser’s Life of King Alfred, which was allegedly composed during the king’s lifetime.32 This was readily available in modern English translations throughout the nineteenth century.33 Alfred was not only different from other Anglo-Saxon kings in terms of the quantity of source material

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available about him, however. In his 1901 speech at the unveiling of the Alfred statue, Lord Roseberry announced to the gathered masses: What, indeed, is the secret of [Alfred’s] fame, of his hold on the imagination of mankind? It is, in the first place, a question of personality. He has stamped his character on the cold annals of humanity.34 What the retired Prime Minister was alluding to was a significant difference in quality between Asser’s Life and the Old English sources that relate the lives of other monarchs. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shows most interest in political subjects, such as the outcome of battles and the distribution of lands, Asser’s text is concerned to depict Alfred’s human fears and weaknesses; his loves and virtues; the development of his character from childhood to maturity. In short, the Life of King Alfred is a biography: a genre that gained considerable popularity during the nineteenth century.35 It was not entirely due to Asser, however, that so many Victorians were drawn so devotedly to the figure of King Alfred. At the September 1901 Alfred millennium luncheon, attended by over four hundred guests, the Bishop of Winchester proclaimed that if anyone in the room were “so adventurously rash as to discredit on such a day the dear old story of the burnt cakes, he ought not to expect to escape from the doors with a whole skin.”36 The “dear old story” to which the bishop was alluding so effusively played a seminal role in winning Alfred popular affection during the nineteenth century. Writing in 1852, J.A. Froude described it as “the favourite story in English nurseries”;37 from 1820 until 1901, it was rehearsed in all but one of over ninety texts about Alfred’s life;38 and at the 1901 unveiling ceremony, Lord Roseberry described it as possessing “those romantic elements which fascinate successive generations.”39 The story of Alfred and the burnt bread (or “cakes” as most Victorians would have it) finds its first expression in the mid-eleventh-century Life of St Neot. According to this text, in the early spring of 878, while King Alfred was in hiding from invading Danes, he stayed in the cottage of a swineherd, spending his hours contemplating Job’s “astonishing constancy” and the message of Hebrews xii, 6 – “whom the Lord loves, He chastises.” One day during this period, Alfred: remained alone at home with the swineherd’s wife. The wife, concerned for her husband’s return, had entrusted some kneaded flour to . . . the oven. As is the custom among

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It is improbable that any Victorian authors would have seen this original account. However, in the twelfth century it was incorporated (with the rest of the Life of St Neot) into the Annals of St Neots, which became known as the Annals of Asser,41 and from there it was interpolated by the sixteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist, Matthew Parker (who seems to have believed the Annals to be Asser’s work), into his 1574 edition of Asser’s Life.42 The vast majority of nineteenth-century editors and translators of Asser then followed Parker’s erroneous example, printing the passage above as an integral part of the Life of King Alfred, and it was from their texts that most literary Alfredianists took their lead.43 There were probably a variety of reasons why the story was especially appealing to Victorian authors. For a start, the work of Sir Walter Scott engendered a keen taste for all “apocryphal history” among nineteenthcentury readers. More specifically, the entire genre of “King and Subject” romances enjoyed a rebirth of popular appeal, maybe initially as a consequence of George III’s high visibility as monarch.44 George’s madness, blindness and frugal lifestyle also engendered, in the early nineteenth century, a popular new view of monarchs as essentially ordinary, fallible men, with which the story of Alfred’s disastrous baking efforts seems to have sat well.45 Above all, though, the story seems to have enjoyed wide circulation because, in an age when the future role of Britain’s monarchy was in serious doubt,46 a legend about a king experiencing poverty provided a perfect vehicle for the expression of topical views about the privileges and responsibilities of sovereigns. Writers of widely varying political persuasions used King Alfred as a mouthpiece for their own beliefs, by imagining that the Saxon king burned the cakes because he was meditating not on Holy Scripture, but on his own role as king. James Sheridan Knowles, for instance, was a frequent contributor to the Free Press, a radical Glasgow journal that

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promoted social reform.47 His play, Alfred the Great: Or, the Patriot King, was published in 1831, the year before the Great Reform Act was passed, and a period characterised by considerable social unrest.48 Unsurprisingly, then, when Knowles’s Alfred burns the cakes, he muses aloud on the difficult lives of the poor and the need for leaders to be socially responsible: What thought hath he How hunger warpeth honesty, whose meal Still waiteth on the hour? . . . if I assume again The sceptre, I may be more a king By being more a man!49 At the opposite end of the political spectrum from Knowles, G.L. Newnham Collingwood, son-in-law to Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, was a staunch supporter of the aristocracy.50 His 1836 poem, Alfred the Great, was published at a time when fears abounded that Britain might be headed towards republicanism.51 Collingwood’s Saxon king therefore voices the doctrine of “noblesse oblige” – the idea that wealth and high status are in reality an onerous burden – as he burns the cakes and enviously contemplates the simple happiness of the poor.52 The eleventh-century story of the burnt cakes was not the only legend that became attached to the memory of King Alfred during the late medieval period. Others included William of Malmesbury’s twelfth-century account of how Alfred stole, in disguise, into his enemies’ camp to discover their plans for battle;53 Simeon of Durham’s eleventhcentury tale of how during Alfred’s time in hiding, St Cuthbert promised him victory in a dream;54 and Ralph Higden’s fourteenth-century claim that St Cuthbert appeared to the fugitive Alfred in disguise as a beggar, to test the king’s virtue.55 After Victorian translators and editors like J.A. Giles and Joseph Stevenson had rendered such tales accessible to non-scholarly readers,56 they too, like the story of the burnt cakes, were elaborated by authors to suit contemporary tastes and to serve contemporary agendas. Higden’s story, for instance, relates that as a reward for Alfred’s generosity to the disguised Cuthbert, the king’s fishermen brought in “a great quantity of fish.”57 In 1899, this was rewritten by the popular novelist Charles Whistler as a tale in which three itinerant Norwegians teach Alfred’s thegns (who have never known such a severe winter) how to ice-fish. Using this new method the thegns unexpectedly catch a huge

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basketful of fish: an event which Alfred takes as a portent that “out of hopelessness should come help and victory.”58 As it turns out, in Whistler’s novel, it is only with the help of his new Norwegian allies that Alfred does manage to later defeat the Danes.59 Essentially, therefore, Whistler transformed a medieval saint’s tale into a modern myth about the need for co-operation between nations. His tactic is typical of the way in which, throughout the nineteenth century, Alfred’s life was made relevant to contemporary concerns and the Saxon king himself was conceived of as a strangely modern figure. Lord Roseberry, for instance, described Alfred to the crowds amassed in Winchester as his people’s “captain of enterprise, their industrial foreman. . . their legislator.”60 Roseberry’s description of Alfred highlights one other major reason why the Saxon king was so enthusiastically fêted in 1901. Throughout the Victorian age, he was credited with having inaugurated momentous legal, social, commercial and political developments. Such rapid progress was not only asserted to have paralleled and anticipated that of the nineteenth century; more significantly, it was also claimed that many of Alfred’s institutions had survived intact for a thousand years to grow into the venerable machinery of the modern British state. In 1849, for instance, the poet Martin Farquhar Tupper celebrated the Saxon king as “the root and spring of everything we love in Church and State” and asserted that he was the cause of “half the best we boast in British liberties and laws,”61 while at a planning meeting for the 1901 Winchester celebrations, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle asserted: What we are commemorating is not merely the anniversary of the death of King Alfred, but the greatness of those institutions which he founded. The anniversary may be said to indicate the thousandth milestone in this majestic journey of our race.62 In many cases, Victorian beliefs about Alfred’s achievements seem to have derived from overreaching interpretations of Saxon sources. For instance, versions D, E and F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relate briefly that in 883, Alfred sent two men with alms to a Christian shrine in India.63 This reference to India is actually merely the result of a scribal misreading of the word “Judea” (which occurs in versions B and C of the text).64 However, in the nineteenth century, India was such an important hub of Britain’s overseas trade and colonialism65 that Alfredianists naturally seized upon the account as prophetic, interpreting it as a record of the first instance of British imperialism and presenting Alfred as the father of the British Empire.66 Thus, in Stratford Canning’s 1876 play, the

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Saxon king is made to announce that he intends his race to “heal the world” (and also, incidentally, “line [England’s coasts] with the gold of wealthier lands”);67 while in Edmund Hill’s play, Alfred the Great, he plans: an Empire stretching o’er the seas, Of many lands, of many races knit, And held together in the bonds of love.68 By the time of the Winchester celebrations, Alfred’s reputation as the founder of Britain’s Empire was so well-established that for the historian Walter Besant the Alfred statue erected in Winchester was as much a reminder of the start of imperialism as it was a memorial to a Saxon king, and the festivities were simply a continuation of the earlier celebrations of empire, held in 1897.69 The organisers of the Winchester “millenary” seem to have shared Besant’s view to some extent. Alfred Bowker believed that because of Alfred’s colonial connections, a celebration of his death would be the ideal opportunity to “strengthen and consolidate” the Empire;70 while it was decided at an early stage of planning for the event that representatives of universities from “all lands where the Englishspeaking race predominates” should take part in a commemorative procession through Winchester.71 In fact, it was probably hoped that the procession of academics that took place on 20th September would bear a number of different satisfactory connotations for the diverse crowd who watched it. To some it might simply symbolise Alfred’s role as the father of the Empire. For a few observers, however, it could also act as a pleasing reminder of the Saxon king’s reputation as the alleged founder of the University of Oxford. This entirely erroneous notion – which originates in the fourteenth-century Polychronicon72 – actually reached the height of its influence in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.73 However, although it had been soundly discredited by the late Victorian era,74 evidence suggests that some people (especially Oxonians) continued to remember the myth fondly.75 In 1901, the popular historian Warwick Draper asserted that the claim would “always possess a certain historical value as belonging to that sacred praise of legendary fame which Alfred’s personality has continuously won,”76 while in 1902 the Oxford-educated historian, Charles Plummer announced: We may not, here in Oxford, claim Alfred as our founder; but surely our hearts may be uplifted at the thought that in all that

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Plummer’s allusion to Alfred’s interest in education highlights a third reason why the processing scholars might have been viewed as significant by the many spectators who gathered in Winchester. By the late nineteenth century, thanks to the claims of numerous Alfredian novels, articles and histories, Alfred was widely accepted as “the founder of education in England.”78 Indeed, in June 1901, the National Home Reading Union deliberately chose to hold their summer assembly in Winchester in order to associate their work with the anniversary of the Saxon King.79 The notion that Alfred was a keen educationalist derives ultimately from one of the king’s own writings – the introduction to his Anglo-Saxon version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Here, Alfred states his desire that: all free-born young men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it, may be set to learning (as long as they are not useful for some other employment) until the time that they can read English writings properly. Thereafter one may instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and wishes to advance to holy orders.80 This passage, however, was probably not anywhere near as widely read in the nineteenth century as was Sir John Spelman’s paraphrase of it in his Life of Alfred the Great. Spelman’s seventeenth-century history was the only well-known biography of Alfred until well into the nineteenth century, and the 1709 English translation of it remained influential until the close of the Victorian age.81 Its account of Alfred’s educational intentions, though, rather over-represents the king’s desire to educate his populace, asserting: In sundry Parts of the Kingdom, (as it seemeth) he [Alfred] erected Schools for Youth, ordaining . . . that every Freeman of Ability sufficient should bring up their Children to Learning.82 In stating that Alfred educated the children of every “Freeman of Ability,” Spelman ignored the Saxon king’s provisos that only those youths with “the means,” and furthermore only those “not useful for some other employment,” should be educated. In practice such youths would have constituted only the sons of nobles: not, as Spelman led many Victorians to believe, children of all classes. It is perhaps understandable that Victorian Alfredianists should have

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so readily accepted Spelman’s claim since educational reform was an important preoccupation for most of the nineteenth century in Britain. It was not until 1902 that a free primary and secondary education was provided for all English children, but as early as 1816 voices were raised in condemnation of the country’s lack of schools.83 Those who were influenced by Spelman included such varied writers as Maria Graham, who claimed in her 1835 children’s book, Little Arthur’s History of England, that Alfred “determined to encourage all the young people of England to love learning”;84 the Anglo-Saxonist, John Earle, who stated in his 1899 essay “Alfred as a Writer” that the Saxon king determined that “the children of all free men should learn to read English”;85 and Charles Dickens – a keen believer in the education of the working classes – who asserted in his Child’s History of England: Let you and I pray that [Alfred’s spirit] may animate our English hearts, at least to this to resolve, when we see any of our fellow creatures left in ignorance, that we will do our best, while life is in us, to have them taught; and to tell those rulers whose duty it is to teach them, and who neglect their duty, that . . . they are far behind the bright example of King Alfred the Great.86 Sir John Spelman’s relationship to events in the autumn of 1901 does not seem to have been limited only to his dubious role in having popularised the belief that Alfred was an educator. In writing his history of the Saxon king, Spelman also expanded upon the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account of how, in the year 896: King Alfred had long ships built to oppose the Danish warships. They were almost twice as long as the others . . . They were both swifter and steadier and also higher than the others. They were built neither on the Frisian nor the Danish pattern, but as it seemed to him himself that they could be most useful.87 According to Spelman, this feat meant that Alfred “was the first that put to sea such a Navy as was awful unto Strangers, begun the first Mastery of the Seas.”88 Because nineteenth-century Britons were immensely proud of their navy, they were particularly receptive to this suggestion that the institution had ancient and venerable origins.89 Spelman’s claim that Alfred was essentially the founder of the British navy therefore became one of the most frequently reiterated and most popular beliefs about the

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Saxon king in the Victorian age.90 This was especially the case amongst those with any naval connections. In 1836, the poet G.L. Newnham Collingwood (perhaps hoping to impress his father-in-law, an admiral who served with Nelson) asserted: Not for other cause Does England dearer hold her Alfred’s name, Than that he first gave to the island-queen Dominion o’er the waters,91 while in 1898 the novelist and one-time ship’s doctor, Gordon Stables, asserted that he primarily loved Alfred because he was “the first English admiral.”92 Though some scholarly scepticism about Alfred’s significance in English naval history was voiced towards the end of the nineteenth century,93 the concept of Alfred as “first admiral” retained its influence on popular perceptions until the turn of the twentieth century.94 On September 20th 1901, therefore, it was the Portsmouth naval brigade that was chosen to head the Alfred millennium procession through the city of Winchester and to form a guard of honour around the unveiled statue.95 Moreover, just over a month after the Winchester celebrations, on 28th October 1901, thousands of spectators gathered to watch another commemoration of the Saxon Alfred – this time in Portsmouth. The event was the launching of the Royal Navy’s new armoured cruiser, built at the considerable cost of £1,011,755. It was named “HMS King Alfred.”96 Those who decided on the appellation “King Alfred” might not have been acting only under the influence of Spelman and his Victorian followers. They could well have also been encouraged to commemorate Alfred as the founder of the navy by David Mallet and James Thomson’s 1740 Alfred: A Masque. This short play about Alfred’s three months in hiding ends with the Saxon king launching a naval attack upon the Danes. The text was revised, republished and performed many times throughout the eighteenth century.97 However, what made it particularly instrumental during the Victorian period was not the play itself, but rather a song that was written for it: “Rule Britannia.” This now famous ditty is sung to Alfred, near the play’s conclusion, while a shadow-play of the king’s new ships conquering those of the Danes is seen in the background.98 Lines from “Rule Britannia” – perhaps the most famous expression of British naval pride ever – are quoted in a number of nineteenthcentury plays and poems about Alfred. M. Lonsdale’s 1865 play, A Sketch

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of Alfred the Great, for instance, ends with the celebratory proclamation, “Britannia rules the waves!”99 It might well be imagined that similar phrases would have been uppermost in many minds as the “King Alfred” set off on her maiden voyage. Behind the naval officers and academics in the procession through Winchester on 20th September 1901 were lord mayors from every part of Great Britain. Their presence, too, was perhaps intended to be significant, since during the nineteenth century it was often claimed that King Alfred had been Britain’s first limited monarch.100 This belief may also have prompted the Alfred millennium committee’s choice of the former Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry, to unveil the Alfred statue. Certainly, Roseberry did not let any sense of connection between himself and Alfred pass by the crowds assembled for the unveiling ceremony. The “striking” speech which he delivered drew an explicit parallel between Alfred’s councillors or witan and the modern British parliament, calling upon his audience to imagine that the Saxon king could be shown a palace where “the descendants of his Witan conduct a system of government which . . . is the parent of most constitutions in the civilised world.”101 Roseberry was by no means the first to explicitly present Alfred as the forefather of Westminster.102 Henry James Pye’s 1801 Alfred: An Epic Poem depicts the Saxon king dramatically denouncing unlimited monarchy as “a charge too vast for mortal man to wield”;103 while Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s 1888 poem on Alfred is prefaced with a quotation avowing that the king did “no less than to new model the Constitution, to rebuild it on a plan that should endure for ages.”104 The most adamant promoter of the belief, however, was easily Martin Farquhar Tupper, who entitled one of his poems “King Alfred’s Parliament at Shifford”; likened Alfred to George Washington in another poem; and alluded to the Saxon king’s constitutional reign in several of his other works.105 The nineteenth-century idea that Alfred created a parliament seems to have been ultimately based on a reference to “the councillors of the West Saxons” and two references to “assemblies” being held, in the Saxon king’s will.106 There is nothing in the will, however, or indeed in any other ninth-century manuscript, to suggest that Alfred’s assemblies were the equivalent of a modern parliament, or that his councillors wielded any real independent political power. Once again, the source of the nineteenth-century conceptions about Alfred’s “parliament” is probably Spelman’s Life of Alfred the Great, which asserts that the Saxon king “often heard the Opinion of his Council, whom, though they were not yet known by that Name, yet may we properly call his Council of State.”107

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In fairness, it must be acknowledged that Spelman does qualify this statement, explaining that Alfred’s assembly was not “of one and the same Form and Solemnity with our later Parliaments.”108 However, he later goes on to relate that, twice a year in London, Alfred held “an assembling of the Representative [sic] Body of the State”:109 an ill-phrased description that could easily have encouraged nineteenth-century writers to view Alfred’s witan as like their own government. Indeed, some nineteenth-century Alfredianists did rather more than that, taking at face value Spelman’s specific description of Alfred’s council as “representative.” Maria Graham, for instance, asserts in her influential children’s book, Little Arthur’s History of England: When [Alfred] wanted to make a new law, he sent word to all the towns in his kingdom, and as many of the men as could, used to go to the king to hear what the new law was to be . . . But it would have been troublesome for all the men to go to the king . . . so the men in one town said, it will be better to send two or three of the cleverest of our neighbours . . . we call this a parliament in English.110 The issue of whether Alfred’s supposed parliament really was democratically elected was, perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century debate about the Saxon king, intimately related to contemporary concerns. At the start of the nineteenth century, Britain, like many other European nations, did not yet have universal male suffrage. Indignation at this fact was encouraged by the 1830 revolutions in France and Belgium; was expressed in insurrections up and down the country; and was only partly placated in 1832 when the Whigs passed the first Reform Act, giving the vote to twenty percent of Britain’s adult males.111 It was not until the much later Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 that the issue was resolved for men, at least.112 Until then, many of those who campaigned for increased suffrage supported their case by claiming that prior to the Norman Conquest, all classes of men in Britain had been entitled to vote.113 Since Alfred was the best-known Saxon monarch, he was naturally often cited as the instigator of this supposed right.114 While Alfred helped to usher representative politics into nineteenthcentury Britain, the growth of that spirit of democracy, in its turn, helped to transform the Saxon king into a people’s hero. During the Victorian age, Alfred began to be represented as a paradigm for all orders of society. Most often, the writers who depicted him in this popular light were those who, like Joseph Cottle and Robert Kelsey (respectively a bookseller and a

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sewerage inspector), had begun to emerge from the middle and even lower classes as a result of recently improved literacy rates.115 Typically cherishing egalitarian and democratic sentiments,116 such authors depicted the Saxon king not as a role model for monarchs alone, but as the exemplary deferential husband and wise father;117 as the perfect child, eager to learn;118 and as the ideal self-improved man.119 Their texts hailed him as the “type eternal of true English worth,” and “the typical man of our race at his best and noblest.”120 This new conception of Alfred was also facilitated by the invention of cheaper printing methods,121 which allowed texts to be published not just in limited editions for private distribution to a wealthy élite, as in the eighteenth century, but by major publishers, for mass consumption.122 As a result of this development, writers could produce Alfredian texts specifically aimed at the new reading classes. Walter Besant, for instance, states in the preface to his 1901 Story of King Alfred that he wished the book to “fall into the hands of the Board Schools, of the Continuation Classes, of those who spend their evenings over books from the free libraries . . . To such as these I dedicate this Life of Alfred.”123 It was largely because of Alfred’s specifically Victorian role as the people’s hero that the 1901 Winchester millennium celebration was so remarkably successful. The Times described the unveiling ceremony as the manifestation of “a movement of popular feeling” and noted with satisfaction that the event had been attended by “all ranks and classes,”124 while Alfred Bowker observed in his record of the proceedings that “all religions and sects . . . all shades of opinion” had found a “common ground” in gathering to remember Alfred.125 Truly to appreciate how Victorian enthusiasm for Alfred reached a climax with the 1901 millenary, it is perhaps informative to compare the event to an earlier public commemoration of the Saxon monarch. In 1849, a similar gathering took place to mark Alfred’s birth, in Wantage, the town where he was born. This celebration, however, was an event on a very different scale to the Winchester millennium. It was planned and organised (allegedly at the last minute)126 by just one devotee of the Saxon king – Martin Farquhar Tupper – and consisted only of speeches in the Town Hall, a luncheon, and various “out-of-door amusements,” since Tupper’s campaign to have a statue erected generated insufficient financial support from the great and good of the land.127 The two events thus exemplify the way in which enthusiasm for Alfred developed significant momentum during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Comparison of the two events can also highlight how Alfredianism in general developed during the late nineteenth century, as well as provide

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a clue as to why the Winchester celebration represented not just the pièce de résistance of public enthusiasm for Alfred, but also its swan-song. In both 1849 and 1901, a commemorative “Alfred medal” was minted,128 featuring a portrait of the revered monarch. However, whereas the 1849 medal (designed by Tupper) was based on a late-medieval painting of the king, that which appeared on the 1901 coin was taken from a coin dating from Alfred’s reign.129 Furthermore, in an article about his work, the designer of the 1901 medal stressed that, unlike Tupper, in preparation for designing the Alfred medal he had “read almost every genuine antiquarian work that could be called such, with many manuscripts in public collections.”130 The greater historical accuracy of the 1901 medal is symptomatic of the way in which Alfredianism gradually became more scrupulously researched and historically informed during the nineteenth century. Whereas Alfredianists like Stephen Payne Knight, writing in 1823, made liberal use of anachronisms (for instance depicting Alfred as a latemedieval courtly lover) writers like Anne Manning (whose Chronicle of Ethelfled was published in 1861) were anxious to maintain reasonable accuracy in their depiction of the Saxon king and his world.131 This development can partly be seen as a legacy of the British education reforms of the 1830s, which gradually led to greater enthusiasm for instructive and informative writing and to suspicion of fiction, especially historical novels, which blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction.132 Certainly, the 1901 Alfred millennium gave new impetus to an already effective crusade to divest Alfred of his mythic garments. According to Alfred Bowker, the commemoration stimulated: Considerable research by experts . . . In times past King Alfred to the great body of the people was a dim and unrealised figure, occupying a position in the popular mind much as King Arthur does at the present moment . . . In the future . . . all teachers will make the study of Alfred more real.133 Ironically, it seems that this drive to make Alfred more “real” contributed significantly to the Saxon king’s demise, or at least decline, as a popular hero. In 1898, the novelist Gordon Stables asserted (defending his own use of Alfredian myth) “Who would read your dry-as-dust history, think you, if there was no ray of romance illuminating its pages here and there?”134 His assessment turned out to be prophetic. As Alfred lost his romantic status in the wake of the Winchester millenary and became the object of “research by experts,” so authorial and popular interest in the

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“dry as dust” Saxon king began to wane.135 Between 1902 and 2000, less than forty texts about Alfred were published, and in 1999, when the eleven-hundredth anniversary of his birth arrived, there was no parade, no boat launch, no public holiday, and no free cakes. The event was marked only by an academic conference and the commencement of a small archaeological dig for the king’s remains. As the twenty-first century commences, Alfred’s future appears uncertain. It can only be hoped that the level of future public interest in Alfred the Great of Wessex cannot be estimated by a comment, scrawled on a questionnaire about the Saxon king by an anonymous sixteen-year-old history student: I know nothing about this man – NOTHING!136 NOTES 1. See Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary: A Record of the National Commemoration (London: Macmillan, 1902), 106–33. 2. Alfred actually died in the year 899. The year chosen for the millennial celebrations was thus wrong by two years, while the precise day selected, 20th September, was probably a matter of guesswork and the noontime scheduling may well have been due to mere civic convenience. On the date of Alfred’s death see Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds., Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 44. 3. See Michael Sanderson, Education, Economic Change and Society in England: 1780–1870 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 43. 4. See, for instance, The Cornhill Magazine, 75: 3202–3204, 3280–3281, 3228–3229; and 76: 3317–3318. 5. See Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 134–57. 6. See Sanderson, Education, Economic Change and Society in England, 43. 7. See Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 58–65. 8. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 187. 9. Dellheim, The Face of the Past, 37. 10. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 100, 113, 133 11. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 12, 20. 12. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 107. 13. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 103. 14. On Alfredian statues and paintings see Simon Keynes, “The Cult of King Alfred the Great,” Anglo-Saxon England 28 (2000): 225–356 (335–47). 15. William Wordsworth, “Alfred,” in The Poetical Works, 7 vols. (London:

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Edward Moxon, 1850), 4, 70; and “A Fact, and an Imagination; or, Canute and Alfred, on the Sea Shore,” in The Poetical Works 4, 217–18; Thomas Hughes, Alfred the Great: A Biography (London: Sunday Library for household reading, 1869). The lack of “great” nineteenth-century Alfredianist has been bewailed by many previous critics: see, for instance, Eric Gerald Stanley, “The Glorification of Alfred King of Wessex (From the Publication of Sir John Spelman’s Life, 1678 and 1709, to the Publication of Reinhold Pauli’s, 1851),” Poetica 12 (1981): 103–33 (115); Louis Wardlaw Miles, King Alfred in Literature (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1902), 125. 16. See Donald H. Reiman, ed., Alfred: An Epic Poem (London: Garland, 1979), i–xi (x). Similarly, Henry James Pye’s Alfred: An Epic Poem (London: Suttaby, Evance & Fox, 1801) was disparaged by Byron (see Sidney Lee, D.N.B. [vol. 47], 69). 17. Pye held the post from 1790 until 1813; Austin from 1896 until 1913. 18. On the commercial success of Henty and Stables, see Gabriel S. Woods, D.N.B. [supplement. 2, vol. 2], 250; [supplement 2, vol. 3], 375. 19. Richard Kelsey, Alfred of Wessex: A Poem, 3 vols. (Battle: Dobell’s Private Press, 1852), 1, i. 20. For instance Anne Manning, Eliza Pollard, Florence G. Attenborough, Mrs C.G. Boger, Sarah Hamilton, Eliza Kerr, Katie Magnus, Mary Maxwell, Jesse Page, Agnes M. Stewart and Eva March Tappan. The first woman to write on Alfred seems to have been Anne Fuller, whose novel The Son of Ethelwolf was published in 1789. 21. Agnes M. Stewart’s Alfredian text, for instance, is entitled Stories about Alfred the Great, for the Amusement and Instruction of Children. Eliza Kerr’s 1885 Two Saxon Maidens was published by the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School. 22. Arthur McIlroy was an American writer; Agnes M. Stewart and James Sheridan Knowles were Irish; Reinhold Pauli was German; Gordon Stables was Scottish; Imrie was a Canadian; and Clement C. Elrington was from Australia. 23. See Martin Farquhar Tupper, “The Late Commemorations,” The Anglo-Saxon 1 (1849): 16–21 (20). 24. Robert Roscoe, “Introduction,” in John Fitchett, King Alfred: A Poem, Robert Roscoe, ed., 6 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1841), 1, viii. 25. Charles William Sutton, D.N.B. [vol. 19], 79. 26. See, for instance, Walter Besant, The Story of King Alfred (London: George Newnes, 1901), 120, and the articles in the periodical The Anglo Saxon, especially the editor’s letter, 1, 471. For examples of nineteenth-century British Francophobia, see Charles Gibson, “Some Characteristics of the Normans,” Catholic World 65 (1897): 506–13; and Frederick Hardman, “French Conquerors and Colonists,” Blackwood’s Magazine 65 (1849): 20–32 27. Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Alfred,” in Ballads for the Times (London: Arthur Hall Virtue, 1851), 249. 28. Max Müller, quoted in Clare A. Simmons, “Iron-worded Proof:

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Victorian Identity and the Old English Language,” in Leslie J. Workman, ed., Medievalism in England, Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 202–14 (209). 29. Victoria is defended in these terms in W.S. Lilly, “British Monarchy and Modern Democracy,” Nineteenth Century, 41 (1897): 853–64 (859); and Henry W. Wolff, “The Early Ancestors of our Queen,” The National Review 18 (1892): 740–57. Stratford Canning, Alfred the Great in Athelnay: An Historical Play (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1876), I, identifies Albert with Saxon culture. See also Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Berkshire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 283–84. 30. George Eayrs, Alfred to Victoria: Hands Across a Thousand Years (London: Swan Sonnensche, 1902). See also Arthur McIlroy, “A Thousand Years of English,” National Magazine [Boston] 15 (1896): 99–103. 31. See, for instance, Charles Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great: Being the Ford lectures for 1901 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 210; Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Alfred: Born at Wantage, in Berkshire, Oct. 25, 849,” in Ballads for the Times (London: Arthur Hall Virtue, 1851), 249–51 (249); James Sheridan Knowles, Alfred the Great: Or, the Patriot King (London: James Ridgeway, 1831), i. 32. On the date of Asser’s Life and the Chronicle, see Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 41. 33. See Dorothy Whitelock, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), xxv–xxix. 34. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 110. 35. See Steven Serafin, Nineteenth-Century British Literary Biographers (Detroit: Gale Research 1994), 1–10. 36. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 118. 37. J.A. Froude, “King Alfred,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 45 (1852): 7487 (82). 38. The exception is William James Linton, “King Alfred,” in Poems (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1865), 53–60 (56). The tale was less popular in the eighteenth century: perhaps because writers of the period were reluctant to portray a monarch as humbled by a commoner. This tendency seems to have carried over, to some extent, to the first two decades of the nineteenth century. 39. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 110. 40. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 197–98. 41. See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 201. 42. See Matthew Parker, ed., Aelfredi regis res gestae (London: John Day, 1574), 15. On Parker’s interpolation see Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 201. 43. The interpolated passage appears, for instance, in J.A. Giles, ed., Six Old English Chronicles (London: George Bell, 1878), 60; and Joseph Stevenson, ed., The Church Historians of England (London: Seeleys, 1854), 2: ii, 457. Both editors included a disclaimer about the passage’s authenticity. However, authors of fiction looking to these texts as source material may have overlooked such

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disclaimers. This is suggested by the complaints in Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, 22, that, “Even the editors of the Monumenta Historica Britannica were content to place [Parker’s interpolations] in brackets, instead of removing [them] altogether. Consequently they are often quoted by modern writers as if they were part of the original Asser.” 44. In Anon, Three Excellent Old Songs (Falkirk: T. Johnson, 1816), for instance, two out of three poems are “King and Subject” texts. On this subject, see also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 233. 45. On George see William Hunt, D.N.B. [vol. 21], 175, 179, 187, 190. More generally, see Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 232. 46. For examples of this sentiment see Hughes, Alfred the Great, 13; Frederic Harrison, “The Monarchy,” The Fortnightly Review, 66 (1872): 613–641; Frank H. Hill, “The Future of the English Monarchy,” The Contemporary Review 57 (1890): 187–205. 47. Thomas Bailey Saunders, D.N.B. [vol. 31], 298. 48. See Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 264; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 898. 49. James Sheridan Knowles, Alfred the Great: Or, the Patriot King (London: James Ridgeway, 1831), 26. 50. Collingwood adopted his father-in-law’s surname, apparently in the hopes of attracting social prestige and a handsome inheritance (Lord Collingwood had no sons). See D.N.B. [vol. 4], 813–18. 51. On the revolts of 1830 see Stafford, The Last of the Race, 264; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 898. Fear of a British revolution is expressed throughout Archibald Alison, “On Parliamentary Reform and the French Revolution,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 29 (1831): 745–62; and Robinson, “The Preservation of the Monarchy and Empire,” Fraser’s Magazine 12 (1835): 301–12. 52. George Lewes Newnham Collingwood, Alfred the Great: A Poem (London: J. Ridgeway, 1836), 108. 53. See Joseph Stevenson, ed., The Church Historians of England (London: Seeleys, 1854), 3: i, 101. 54. See Joseph Stevenson, ed., The Church Historians of England (London: Seeleys, 1855), 3: ii, 493. 55. See J.R. Lumby, ed., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translation of John Trevisa (London: Longman, 1876), 373. 56. See, for instance, Joseph Stevenson, ed., The Church Historians of England (London: Seeleys, 1853), 2: i; Stevenson The Church Historians of England, 3: i; J.A. Giles, ed., Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History (London: Henry Bohn, 1849); Giles, ed., Six Old English Chronicles. 57. See Lumby, Polychronicon, 373.

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58. Charles W. Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking (London: T. Nelson, 1899), 192. 59. Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking, 227–48. 60. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 111. 61. Tupper, “Alfred: Born at Wantage,” 249. 62. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 20. 63. See Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London: Longman, 1998), 190. 64. Abels, Alfred the Great, 190. 65. See C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (London: Macmillan, 1973), 209. 66. See, for instance, Froude, “King Alfred,” 84; John Tulloch, “Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Christianity,” The North British Review 37 (1862): 35–68 (52); Hughes, Alfred the Great, 210; John Stuart Blackie, “Alfred,” in A Song of Heroes (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1890), 89–102 (98). 67. Canning, Alfred the Great in Athelnay, 171–72. 68. Edmund L. Hill, Alfred the Great: A Drama (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), 86. 69. See Besant, The Story of King Alfred, 205. 70. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 189. 71. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 47, 189 72. Higden’s text was translated into English by John de Trevisa in 1398 and printed by William Caxton in 1480. 73. See Keynes, “The Cult of King Alfred the Great,” 245–63. 74. See, for instance, Agnes M. Stewart, Stories about Alfred the Great, for the Amusement and Instruction of Children (Dublin: J. Browne, 1840), 53; J.A. Giles, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (London: George Bell, 1848), 298; Frederick Pollock, “Alfred the Great,” The National Review 33 (1899): 266–284 (280). 75. See, for instance, Pollock, “Alfred the Great,” 280; Eayrs, Alfred to Victoria, 11. 76. Warwick H. Draper, “Alfred the Great: A Sketch and Seven Studies” (London: Elliot Stock, 1901), 91. 77. Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, 193. 78. See, for instance, J. Bryce, “Alfred the Great,” Independent 53 (1901): 1534. 79. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 32. 80. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 126. 81. See Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 40. 82. John Spelman, The Life of Alfred the Great from the Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: With Considerable Additions, and Several Historical Remarks by the Publisher, Thomas Hearne (Oxford: Maurice Atkins, 1709), 143.

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83. For a more detailed account of the lack of schools in the nineteenth century, see E.C. Midwinter, Nineteenth-Century Education (London: Longman, 1970), 77–78. 84. Maria Graham, Little Arthur’s History of England (London: Murray, 1835), 51. 85. John Earle, “Alfred as a Writer,” in Alfred Bowker, Alfred the Great: Containing Chapters on his Life and Times (London: A. & C. Black, 1899), 171–205 (188). 86. Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852), I, 24. 87. Whitelock, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 57. 88. Spelman, The Life of Alfred the Great, 150. 89. See Azar Gat, The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 205. 90. See, for instance, Ernest James Myers, “Alfred the Great,” Cornhill Magazine 84 (1901): 1–2 (2). 91. Collingwood, Alfred the Great, 138. 92. Gordon Stables, ’Twixt Daydawn and Light: A Tale of the Times of Alfred the Great (London: J.F. Shaw, 1898), 368, xi. See also Myers, “Alfred the Great,” 2. 93. See Pollock, “Alfred the Great,” 280; Besant, The Story of King Alfred, 93; Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, 120. 94. See, for instance, Besant, The Story of King Alfred, 93; Pollock, “Alfred the Great,” 280. 95. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 103. 96. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 103, 146, 147. 97. See George Gregory Smith, D.N.B. [vol. 35], 426–28. 98. David Mallet and James Thomson, Alfred: A Masque (London: A. Millar, 1740), 42. 99. M. Lonsdale, Sketch of Alfred the Great: Or, The Danish Invasion: A Grand Historical Ballet (London: [n.pub.], 1865), 7. 100. See Tupper “Alfred: Born at Wantage,” 250; Tupper, “Alfred,” 297; Pye, Alfred: An Epic Poem, 158, 159; Albert R. Savage, “The Anglo-Saxon Constitution and Laws in the Time of Alfred the Great,” in Anon., In Commemoration of the Millenary Anniversary of the Death of King Alfred the Great, November 12, 1901 (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1901), 46. 101. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 111. The speech is described in Herbert Thurston, “Alfred the Great the Idolator,” The Month 98 [n.d.]: 425–31 (425). 102. See, for instance, Walter Besant, “Introduction,” in Bowker, Alfred the Great: Containing Chapters on his Life and Times, 3–41 (31). 103. Pye, Alfred: An Epic Poem, 158, 159. 104. Winthrop Mackworth Praed, “King Alfred’s Book,” in Political and Occasional Poems (London: Ward, Lock, 1888), 140.

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105. Martin Farquhar Tupper, “King Alfred’s Poems,” in J.A. Giles, ed., The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great: With Preliminary Essays Illustrative of the History, Arts, Manners, of the Ninth Century (Oxford: J.F. Smith, 1852), 158–254 (232); Tupper “Alfred: Born at Wantage,” 250; Tupper “Alfred,” 297. 106. See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 174, 175. 107. Spelman, The Life of Alfred the Great, 156. 108. Spelman, The Life of Alfred the Great, 157. 109. Spelman, The Life of Alfred the Great, 157. 110. Graham, Little Arthur’s History of England, 42–43. See also Macfayden, Alfred the West Saxon: King of the English (London: [n.pub.], 1901) a text I have been unable to access, but which is quoted in Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, 6. 111. See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 898; Stafford, The Last of the Race, 264. 112. See Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 345–49. 113. See, for instance, John Cartwright, The English Constitution Produced and Illustrated (London: T. Cleary, 1823), 146; Anon., “The Anglo-Normans,” The North British Review 6 (1847): 431–72 (441). On this subject, see also Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 34–37, 76–91. 114. See, for instance, George Troup, “Our Anglo-Saxon Empire,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 20 (1849): 687–95 (688). 115. On this subject see Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2; Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 83–113. 116. See Reiman, ed., Alfred: An Epic Poem, x; Kelsey, Alfred of Wessex, I, i. 117. See, for instance, Martin Farquhar Tupper, Alfred: A Patriotic Play (Westminster: printed for the author, 1850), 17; Reinhold Pauli, The Life of Alfred the Great, trans. by B. Thorpe (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 221; Eliza F. Pollard, A Hero King (London: S.W. Partridge, 1898), 409–13; Hill, Alfred the Great: A Drama, 27. 118. See, for instance, Blackie, “Alfred,” 90; Francis Turner Palgrave, “Alfred the Great,” in The Visions of England (London: Cassell, 1891), 24–25 (24); Eva March Tappan, In the Days of Alfred the Great (London: Gay & Bird, 1900), 32. 119. See, for instance, Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking, 286; Tappan, In the Days of Alfred the Great, 289; Blackie, “Alfred,” 98–99. 120. Alfred Austin, England’s Darling [5th edn] (London: Macmillan, 1896), vii; Myers, “Alfred the Great,” 1; Besant, The Story of King Alfred, 206. 121. See Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 33. 122. Alexander Bicknell’s, The Patriot King: Or Alfred and Elvida. An Historical Tragedy (London: [n.pub], 1788) was privately printed and sold from his house to 163 subscribers. Austin’s England’s Darling was published by the

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major commercial publisher Macmillan. J. Abbot’s, Alfred the Great (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1898) ran to 3,000 copies in its first edition alone. 123. Besant, The Story of King Alfred, 9, 10. See also Bowker, Alfred the Great: Containing Chapters on his Life and Times, ix. 124. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 141. 125. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 188. 126. According to Barbara Yorke, “The Most Perfect Man in History?” History Today, 49:10 (1999): 8–13 (12). 127. See Tupper, “The Late Commemorations,” 17–20. 128. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 128. 129. R.C. Jackson, “The Alfred Medal of 1901,” The Westminster Review 156 (1901): 673–76 (676). 130. Jackson, “The Alfred Medal of 1901,” 676. 131. See Richard Payne Knight, Alfred: A Romance in Rhyme (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1823), 230; Anne Manning, The Chronicle of Ethelfled (London: Arthur Hall, 1861), iii. 132. Stafford, The Last of the Race, 252, 263. 133. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, 186. 134. Stables, “Twixt Daydawn and Light,” 207. 135. This process was compounded by a general decline in the popularity of all things Anglo-Saxon which is attributable to a loss of faith in the Norman yoke theory, and to a perceived connection between the nineteenth century’s theories of Saxon superiority and the twentieth century’s active fascism. 136. Questionnaire composed and distributed, 05/2000, by the present author.

Eric Brighteyes: Rider Haggard Rewrites the Sagas Jóna E. Hammer Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s fourteenth novel, Eric Brighteyes (1891), is not among his best-known works. Few modern readers are familiar with any of Haggard’s fiction – more than fifty novels – except for three popular tales of African adventure: King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887); these novels, especially She, are the usual points of reference in Haggard studies. However, in addition to these and other African novels, Haggard wrote several set in Victorian England as well as historical novels set in different countries and times. Among the latter, Eric Brighteyes, a historical novel – or “romance” as Haggard called it – of the Middle Ages, is set in tenth-century Iceland and manifests a special relationship to the Icelandic sagas. Although Eric Brighteyes is written for popular entertainment and never pretends otherwise, the novel is noteworthy both for its relationship to Haggard’s other work, especially his English novels, and as a very special contribution to the field of Victorian medievalism in historical fiction. In The Vikings and the Victorians Andrew Wawn calls it “arguably the finest Victorian Viking-age novel” and “a remarkable illustration of just how inward a knowledge of Icelandic sagas could be developed in 1890 by a dedicated enthusiast of the old north, even one who was in no real sense a professional philologist.”1 To expand this statement, what results from Haggard’s use of saga-models is also a demonstration, through the opportune medium of “old north” literature, of his own recurring authorial concerns. Eric Brighteyes appears at the intersection of two significant trends in Victorian readership: a renewed popular taste for historical fiction and a growing interest in Icelandic sagas in the second half of the nineteenth century. In The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini, Harold Orel Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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outlines a general distinction in historical fiction-writing, emerging by 1880, between a “ ‘recovered past’ – in historical novels based on a careful study of books, documents, archives, and visits to sites that had figured prominently in actual events – and the ‘felt’ past – in a historical novel that imagined the emotional responses of fictional characters who lived at some moment prior to the novelist’s lifetime.”2 Eric Brighteyes combines elements from both these categories; the sagas on which it drew were themselves regarded at the time as versions of “history,” and Haggard read sagas and visited saga-sites for “atmosphere” before re-creating the “felt” past of his characters. Literary historians, most recently and extensively Andrew Wawn, in The Vikings and the Victorians, have traced an influence of medieval Icelandic literature on British writers through several centuries and thoroughly charted the segment of late-Victorian literature where Haggard’s inspiration to write an “Icelandic” work was part of a larger whole. Haggard’s journey to saga-sites in Iceland was part of a pattern of such visits by nineteenth-century British philologists, writers and scientists – notably the prolific saga-translator William Morris, whose advice Haggard sought before his own voyage.3 The writings of these visitors range from travelogues to poetry and sometimes reflect a contrast between saga-reading visitors’ romantic expectations and the gloomy realities of impoverished nineteenth-century Iceland. Haggard’s contemporary, Thomas Hall Caine, for example, uses this contrast explicity for strong dramatic effect in his novel The Bondman (1890); Haggard’s own encounter with this decline may have contributed to the pessimistic mood of Eric Brighteyes. The creation of Haggard’s “Icelandic” novel thus takes place within an emerging sub-genre of historical fiction looking toward the Middle Ages: saga-related novels. Within the novel, Haggard’s enthusiasm for the sagas, his Victorian social perspective, and his own authorial preoccupation with human relationships and afflictions come together in a remarkable portrait of an author and his times. Unlike comparable novels of its time, Eric Brighteyes distinctly identifies itself at the outset – by an outer framework and pronounced aspects of style – as a “neo-saga” pointing back to the “recovered” past of the historical and literary saga-world. It then evolves – inside a different inner framework, through stylistic reversals and a shift in focus, all typical of Haggard’s fiction – into a “counter-” or “anti-saga” depicting a “felt” past of a kind unsung by other saga-enthusiasts of the nineteenth century. While Haggard’s neo-saga presents features familiar to saga-readers, his anti-saga turns these features over to expose hidden sides or reshapes them altogether. Both this unique kind of identification with the saga-genre, on the one hand, and the

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subsequent departure from that identification and from popular Victorian saga-associations, on the other, distinguish the novel among saga-derived Victorian fiction. Nineteenth-century English saga translations and saga-based novels illustrate the process by which literary translation, subject to political, cultural and literary influences outside the text itself, becomes the “rewriting” of the translated text, contributes significantly to the literature of the new language, and, in turn, inspires “rewriting” in the form of new literary works. Theories in literary translation, as set forth, for example, in André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame,4 trace such evolution, and The Rewriting of Njáls saga5 by Jón Karl Helgason shows how versions of that popular saga – Haggard’s favourite – developed in such “rewriting” within various cultural and linguistic contexts. Eric Brighteyes clearly owes a strong inspiration to George Webbe Dasent’s translations of the prose Edda (1842) and Njáls saga (1861). Other translated sagas available to Haggard – especially Walter Scott’s retelling of Eyrbyggja saga (1814) as well as William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon‘s translations of Grettis saga (1869), Gunnlaugs saga (1869), and Frithjofs saga (1871) – are also likely models for various features in Eric Brighteyes. Another influential work, Samuel Laing’s translation of Heimskringla (1844) with Laing’s “Preliminary Dissertation” on the saga-culture, is cited as inspiration by several of Haggard’s predecessors; for example, R.M. Ballantyne – whose popular novel Erling the Bold (1869) is probably the closest forerunner and parallel to Eric Brighteyes as an entertaining Victorian tale of a Viking-age champion – uses Laing’s work as a point of departure for a celebration of spirited “sea-kings”; his valiant protagonist, Erling, shows his mettle in historic battles described in Heimskringla. Although the saga translators differed in their treatment of saga-language, they had conveyed to late-nineteenth-century English readers a sense of distinct features of saga-diction and plot, along with their own commentaries expressing veneration for the heroic spirit of “our ancestors.” The translators’ enthusiasm and the suggestion that the British were heirs to a glorious Nordic past were adopted by novelists drawing on the translators’ work. Haggard’s own vivid depiction of the English aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis, “his long yellow hair stream[ing] out in the breeze behind him,” fighting the formidable armies of King Twala in King Solomon’s Mines is framed, admiringly, in terms of the peer’s “gallant” Nordic heritage: “There he stood, the great Northman, for he was nothing else, his hands, his axe, and his armour all red with blood, and none could live before his stroke.” However, in addition to the spirit and battle-prowess of a Viking,

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this “great Northman” also displays the murderous frenzy attributed to a particularly savage breed of saga-warriors: “as he struck he shouted ‘O-hoy! O-hoy!’ like his Berserker forefathers, and the blow went crashing through shield and spear, through head-dress, hair and skull . . .”6 Although this portrait of Sir Henry admires his northern “heritage,” Haggard’s reference to the “Berserker”7 hints at its darker side, of which a Victorian audience might have been uneasily conscious: the murderous savagery and excesses leading to the decline and dissolution of Viking culture. Andrew Wawn suggests the presence of this darker view in, for example, G.W. Dasent’s saga-derived novel The Vikings of the Baltic (1875). Here, Dasent’s young protagonist, Vagn, questions (as would Haggard’s Eric later) the tenets holding together a Viking community; that community eventually disintegrates, and Vagn becomes a prominent member of the “establishment.” As Wawn states, the “uncertainties, fears and tensions” encountered in Dasent’s novel may not have been “resolved comfortably”8 at the end of the novel; however, they are settled, at least for the time being, with Vagn’s future prosperity in sight. The dark aspects of Norse culture presented in The Vikings of the Baltic do not dominate the novel’s end, nor are they emphasised by other contemporary writers of saga-derived fiction. In Haggard’s rewriting of the sagas, on the other hand, the Viking savagery and excesses which the Victorians would have found disturbing – the “uncertainties, fears and tensions” embedded in the popularly celebrated Norse heritage – eventually take control of Eric Brighteyes and dominate the disastrous outcome of the novel’s conflicts. In the context of Haggard’s previous fiction, the pull toward this darker side comes naturally to the novel. Eric Brighteyes continues to dramatise issues, simultaneously Victorian and universal, which Haggard had earlier raised in several novels. His preoccupation with the concepts of immortality, reincarnation, predestination, and a supernatural cosmic order was already manifest in his fiction, as was his fascination with history, femininity, and the occult. A writer of ambiguities, Haggard has been variously interpreted over the years as both an advocate for and protester against Victorian imperialism, anti-feminism, and homophobia; as an advocate for both conventional Christian ideologies and Eastern mysticism.9 His examination of these issues is dramatised in plots and settings where his typical hybridisation of realism and fantasy opens venues of exploration closed to the serious social or historical novelist. As a literary experimenter and “romancer,” Haggard generally explores boundaries where a tangible environment governed by human endeavour borders on a cosmic universe governed by an unknown supernatural order

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or, perhaps, not governed at all. Whatever religious tenets might reveal a “true” universal order, Haggard’s fiction consistently manifests a hope – never fulfilled – that such order will relieve mortal afflictions. The body of his work suggests a persistent endeavour to fuse physical, spiritual, and supernatural dimensions of human existence; this endeavour is often accompanied by frustrated musings on its futility. The world-view attributed to Thomas Hardy that “the mass of humanity is passive and incapable of controlling its destinies, despite assertive religious and philosophical claims to the contrary”10 is equally attributable to Haggard; in the words of Norman Etherington, the “importance [of Haggard’s work] derives from the important ideas that Haggard tackled, rather than from any innovations he made in the style or form of the novel.”11 Andrew Wawn has commented that the “shape and substance” of Eric Brighteyes appear “to mimic the unease and insecurity of the [Victorian] age”;12 other critics have suggested specific links between social, political, and spiritual matters of Victorian debate and aspects of Haggard’s fiction in general. The “woman question” and the emergence of the “New Woman” in Victorian literature, social ambivalence about homosexuality, and the challenge from Eastern religions and spiritualism to traditional Christian beliefs are strong features of Haggard’s work.13 Issues raised in Eric Brighteyes are, indeed, Victorian, but they are also medieval and timeless. The sagas offered to Haggard a new setting especially suited for dramatisation of his perpetual concerns, both because of the saga-society’s own inherent social and ideological structures and because of Victorian claims, promoted by English translators and other writers, to a special hereditary relationship to Viking culture. In Haggard’s treatment, the faraway, yet “familiar,” medieval society of Eric Brighteyes becomes a stage where fragile and ill-fated human relationships commonly seen in Haggard’s previous English novels play out their destiny to the inevitable tragic end, at the same time as Haggard’s pessimistic view of the human condition constitutes in Eric Brighteyes a departure from the nostalgia with which many Victorian readers regarded the “old north.” Haggard and the neo-saga Eric Brighteyes is anchored in English translations of the Icelandic sagas and shows its kinship not only to Haggard’s favourite – Njáls saga – but to several other saga translations which existed before 1891 and conveyed prominent patterns of plot and language from the originals. While the saga writers refrain from emotionalism, they typically show firm adherence to a code of individual and family honour in a favourable light while

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celebrating brave and usually noble-spirited battle-champions; they also acknowledge the significance of dreams and omens, the gift of second sight, and the practice of sorcery. In particular, the sagas express a strong belief that human destiny is an inescapable and uncontrollable force, sometimes set in motion by a feminine agency. The articulation of these philosophies follows particular linguistic and idiomatic patterns of concise understatement and realistic depiction of observable behavior only, which the English translators had endeavoured to transmit. In Eric Brighteyes, however, the diction often displays Haggard’s own fondness for stylistic embellishment, to the point of becoming the very opposite of austere saga-narration, and, although the novel describes the obligatory heroic deeds and noble spirit of champions as celebrated by other English saga-reading writers, Haggard looks past the heroics of the saga-plot to question social and religious tenets dictating these heroics and to comment on the afflictions of those bound by such tenets. His dramatic breaks from the terse style of the sagas may be a concession to contemporary popular tastes, but, although his treatment of the darker aspects of northern culture reflects on the surface a Victorian uneasiness with pagan behavior, the underlying questioning of Viking-age philosophies applies not only to the writer’s own times but to human history in general. Unlike his predecessors, Haggard set his novel in Iceland and used prominent Icelandic landmarks for verisimilitude. In Eric Brighteyes, as often in the sagas, the general plot is anchored in the household of a prosperous farmer-chieftain; this plot traces the destruction of the entire house of Asmund the Priest, whose fatal mistake is a reckless liaison with a seductive and malevolent concubine: Groa the Witch. At the core of this extended plot, a rapidly moving narrative charts the rise of a heroic champion, Eric Brighteyes, whose respective romantic attachments to Asmund’s daughters, Gudruda the Fair – Eric’s betrothed – and her half-sister and competitor for the affections of Eric, Swanhild the Fatherless – malevolent daughter of Groa – lead to the central tragedy of the novel. Eric’s loyal retainer, Skallagrim, and his arch-enemy and rival, Ospakar Blacktooth, exert influence on the immediate course of events, but, as sometimes happens in the sagas – particularly Njáls saga, which Haggard frequently invoked – the three women shape the larger plot. In the sagas, influential women perpetuate cycles of revenge to uphold family honour; in Haggard’s novel, female sexual passion fortified with witchcraft is the origin of mayhem. Haggard had already written extensively about feminine passion and mysticism, as well as the social status of women and other issues of gender, most famously in She, where his powerful, notoriously sensual, and near-immortal Ayesha threatened to

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invade England and destroy Victorian patriarchy. In his several novels set in England he had often placed his characters into complex love-triangles where women, possessing or striving towards greater mystical knowledge and power, exert significant influence on a male protagonist’s fate. In Eric Brighteyes Haggard enthusiastically adopts the myth of Norns from the prose Edda to suggest that the three major female characters in Eric Brighteyes are either themselves Norns or instruments of fates decreed by Norns.14 In a series of events initiated and influenced by these three women, his male protagonists are compelled – as their saga counterparts frequently are – to pursue a fatal course of action, ample counsel to the contrary notwithstanding. Eric Brighteyes identifies itself as a “neo-saga” through a combination of setting, plot, and stylistic features. The opening paragraph of Njáls saga demonstrates typical features of the sagas’ narrative approach, here in G.W. Dasent’s English translation: There was a man named Mord whose surname was Fiddle; he was the son of Sigvat the Red, and he dwelt at the “Vale” in the Rangrivervales. He was a mighty chief, and a great taker up of suits, and so great a lawyer that no judgments were thought lawful unless he had a hand in them. He had an only daughter, named Unna. She was a fair, courteous and gifted woman, and that was thought the best match in all of the Rangrivervales.15 The introductions are concise, stating the characters’ main attributes and their genealogy (much of which Dasent omits). Place names situate the characters geographically and historically, a point of great importance to saga-writers. Haggard’s salute to Njáls saga is clear in the opening paragraphs of Eric Brighteyes: There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Willibald’s son, preached the White Christ in Iceland. He was named Eric Brighteyes, Thorgrimur’s son, and in those days there was no man like him for strength, beauty, and daring, for in all these things he was the first. But he was not first in good luck. . . [Asmund the Priest] was the wisest and the wealthiest of all men who lived in the south of Iceland in those days, owning many farms, and, also, two ships of merchandise and one long ship of war, and having much money out at interest. . . Asmund was a handsome man, with blue eyes and a large beard, and, moreover, was very skilled in matters of law. He loved money much

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At the end, when the plot has run its blood-soaked course, the final paragraph reiterates the historical markers of the beginning: Now, this is the tale of Eric Brighteyes, Thorgrimur’s son; of Gudruda the Fair, Asmund’s daughter; of Swanhild the Fatherless, Atli’s wife, and of Ounound, named Skallagrim Lambstail, the Baresark, Eric’s thrall, all of whom lived and died before Thangbrand, Willibald’s son, preached the White Christ in Iceland (321). The plot of Eric Brighteyes unfolds within this frame of saga-convention. Its historicity is anchored by Thangbrand, a militant German priest and missionary sent to Iceland in 997 by king Olaf Tryggvason, three years before Christianity was accepted as the official religion of Iceland. Thangbrand and the vigour of his mission are portrayed in Njáls saga; the phrase “before Thangbrand” places the plot of Eric Brighteyes before 997 and emphasises the pagan setting fostering the fatalism soon to unfold from the narrator’s ominous opening statement that Eric “was not first in good luck.” Further chronology and historical support is provided in the middle of the narrative when Eric sails up the Thames to London and visits the court of Edmund, son of Edward the Elder and king of Wessex 939–946. Eric is then approximately twenty-seven years old, and the plot has another two years left to run; the main events are thus set in the fourth and fifth decades of the tenth century. Eric’s visit to King Edmund’s court follows a tradition for young Icelandic men of good families to visit the courts of foreign kings; such visits often date events in a saga.17 The setting for the novel is authenticated by the use of real Icelandic place names in a landscape rich in geographical and geological landmarks. Haggard’s facility for describing both natural landscape and man-made structures incorporated into it, especially in his African romances, is again manifest in his descriptions of steep Icelandic cliffs, caves, mountain slopes, and waterfalls.18 The relationship of Haggard’s chosen place names to the landscape they designate in the novel, on the one hand, and to the real Icelandic geographical features bearing the same names, on the other, is a blend of fact and fiction, illustrating both Haggard’s experience at the saga-sites and his sense for dramatic detail. In a prominent example, a well-known waterfall in Iceland, Gullfoss, is first described in Haggard’s

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journals, then appears in Eric Brighteyes as “Golden Falls,” than which “there are no greater water-falls in Iceland” (26); relocated and re-landscaped to serve the plot, the waterfall then becomes the site of some of the novel’s most dramatic events. Haggard’s part-historical, part-anachronistic use of another landmark, Öxará or “Axe-River” at Thingvellir, illustrates especially his enthusiasm for history and historic landscape and the literary licence with which he treats both. In Days of My Life he quotes from a “home letter, written in pencil, from Thingvellir”: At last, about ten o’clock at night, we came to Thingvellir Lake, and then passed down All Man’s Drift to this most historic spot. I only wish you were familiar with the Njal Saga, for then you would understand the interest, the more than interest, with which I look upon it. Every sod, every rock, every square foot of Axe River, is eloquent of the deeds and deaths of great men.19 In his journal on June 22nd, 1889, Haggard then makes special mention of two landmarks in the Axe River: “there is the Holmgang Island in the middle of Oxara’s stream, on which champions without number have lost their lives in duel, there the pool where faithless women met their doom.”20 In Eric Brighteyes he uses these two well known parts of “Oxará”: the island Öxarárhólmi and the “drowning pool,” Drekkingarhylur. Eric fights a duel (hólmganga) on the island, where Haggard’s fictional fifteenth-century narrator in Eric Brighteyes says, “holmgangs are fought to this day” (115). Although the narrator’s statement here is not entirely accurate – duelling was outlawed in Iceland with the acceptance of Christianity in 100021 – Eric’s duel is staged within the appropriate pagan period. The other spot in the river, the “drowning pool,” is used anachronistically in Eric Brighteyes when Swanhild refers to the pool “where faithless woman (sic) lie” (102), wondering whether she will be drowned there. Women condemned for adultery, fornication and other offenses were, indeed, drowned in this pool during the annual Althing-assembly for a period of two centuries, but such drownings did not take place before the passing of special legislation in 156422 and are consequently not described in the sagas. In fact, saga-women are generally not punished for Swanhild’s crime here: attempted murder; even the great carnage initiated by the notorious Hallgerd of Njáls saga, whom Haggard often refers to outside of Eric Brighteyes, does not have any dire consequences for Hallgerd, blackened though her name may be. However, the prospect of such a brutal and public execution adds dramatic weight and,

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within the plot, provides a force strong enough to frighten Swanhild into leaving Iceland. Haggard’s use of these features of the Öxará landscape brings together his knowledge of the history of the site, his own experience in Iceland, and his sense of the tastes of his audience. In the neo-saga, the cast of male characters follows tradition. Well-to-do combat-skilled farmers or chieftains and their “housecarles” engage in gory sword-fights, slander, and much litigation at the Althing; lengthy and detailed descriptions of legal presentations in Njáls saga echo faintly in the narrator’s comment that “The pleadings were long and cunning on either side” (113) before Eric is sentenced to three years of exile for killing an enemy. Masculine pursuits – the business of protecting by sword or litigation one’s property and good name – are generally described in the straightforward manner of the sagas. Furthermore, Eric himself is a composite of several saga-champions,23 notably Gunnar of Hlidarend from Njáls saga, Gisli son of Soursop from Gísla saga (The Story of Gisli the Outlaw in Dasent’s translation) and Grettir from Grettis saga. Like them, he is endowed with great physical strength and agility and fond of showing off these attributes in daring feats, and, like them, he is known to be doomed from the beginning of his story in spite of his excellence. His handsome appearance, as well as his courage and innate nobility of spirit, are presented in explicit contrast to the darkness of his destiny. This presentation calls to mind the appearance and personality of Gunnar, to whom Eric may owe many of his attributes and his sobriquet “Brighteyes,”24 and of the tall and handsome Gisli, “who could turn his hand to anything” and is “mild of temper too”25 but fated to become a murderer and outlaw. Similarly, Eric is “first” in brave deeds but not “first in good luck,” a familiar circumstance of birth observed with regret by saga-narrators. His final combat, as he supports himself, mortally wounded, with his back against a cliff-wall, recalls Grettir’s last fight in the hut on Drangey26 as well as the last defense of Gisli and Gunnar, respectively, and Eric’s preordained fate is the same as that of the saga-outlaws although his course is different. Like Gunnar, he is sentenced to exile abroad (Gisli and Grettir are sentenced to outlawry); unlike all these champions, Eric not only spends the years of his exile abroad but becomes a Viking of renown, much as does Frithiof the Bold in the saga-romance bearing his name, popular in England at the time.27 Gisli and Grettir are trapped in Iceland, and Gunnar makes the “wrong” decision to stay home rather than go abroad; all three are killed. Eric, on the other hand, makes the “right” decision to go abroad, but, after an illustrious career in Viking warfare – of a kind that resulted in a triumphant return to Norway and reunion with his beloved Ingibiorg for

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Frithiof the Bold – Eric is still destined by the Norns to perish like the tragic saga-champions. Recalling Gunnar especially, in this respect, Eric cannot escape his fate both because strong female characters work to carry out the Norns’ purpose and because some of his own attributes work against him. Another significant feature of the “neo-saga” is Haggard’s adaptation of diction and narrative devices. Harold Orel has commented that “it is inadvisable to speak of the style of Eric Brighteyes as if Haggard had deliberated and chosen from a variety of choices; as if the narrative, with its emphasis on swift action, clear motivations, and uncomplicated characterisations, could possibly require the gloss of a decorative style.”28 However, once Haggard had begun to write with the sagas in mind, thus linking his work to a genre characterised by a literary style which English translators had demonstrated in essence, the diction of Eric Brighteyes was no longer a matter merely of “the gloss of a decorative style.” If Haggard believed, as Orel suggests, that style “inhered in the subject matter,” he certainly realised that the subject matter of a saga is inseparable from its diction, that heroic stoicism and fatalism take form not just in action but in the verbal expression of that action, and, in accordance with that insight, he makes a more consistent effort than any of his predecessors to create the stylistic contours of a saga. Characters in Eric Brighteyes are much less prone to the long-winded oratories often seen in Haggard’s previous novels than they are to speaking in concise and metaphorically packed saga-language. For example, a type of short, proverbial, and often alliterative remark, used in the sagas to sum up a situation or as a maxim, is uttered on several occasions in Eric Brighteyes. When Asmund is poisoned by Groa in the middle of his wedding to another woman, he says “heavily,” “New wed, new dead !” (172), a remark which not only applies to his own imminent death but also prophesies the death of his daughter Gudruda on her wedding night some time later. Sagaunderstatement and variations on metaphorical usage abound, particularly in dialogues between Eric and his loyal retainer and comrade, Skallagrim. When Eric angrily dismisses Skallagrim from his service for drunkenness, Skallagrim responds with an understatement: “I have not befriended thee so ill that thou shouldst fear for blows to come” (82). In the middle of one combat-episode, as Skallagrim smashes the skull of an opponent, Eric compliments him on the blow, “That was well done,” to which Skallagrim “growls” in response, “Not so ill but it might be worse” (81). On another occasion, Skallagrim comments that Gudruda is “very fair,” to which the love-stricken Eric responds with appropriate Norse reserve, “There are women less favoured, Skallagrim” (88). Prophetic and

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often metaphorical remarks frequently include warnings; in the conversation about Gudruda’s beauty cited above, Skallagrim is leading up to such a warning: “strive as thou mayest against thy fate, that maid will be thy bane and mine also” (88). The warning is here expressed directly but is also typically found expressed indirectly with the implication that precautions may avert disaster.29 When the drunken Skallagrim comments proverbially, early in the story, that “ale is many a man’s doom,” Eric replies, “Have a care that it is not thine and mine then!” (101). Ale will indeed be the “doom” of both men because of Skallagrim’s weakness for strong drink, just as “that maid” (Gudruda) in the direct warning statement will be their “bane.” Haggard and the anti-saga The features described above suggest the development of a “neo-saga” where characters in an authentic saga setting speak in the manner of saga counterparts and carry out saga-like actions; however, the development of the “anti-saga” is occurring simultaneously as each of these features is turned around. The neo-saga framework – the links to sagas and history at the beginning and end of the novel, within which the male characters carry out their saga-like pursuits – contains an inner frame within which the “anti-saga” evolves. Like the frame for the neo-saga, this inner frame is anchored at the beginning and end of the novel. It is marked by the arrival of a sensual and powerful sorceress, Groa, at Asmund’s prosperous homestead and the departure, some twenty years later, of Groa’s sensual and powerful sorceress-daughter, Swanhild, who leaves that prosperous community behind her in ruins. The plot of the anti-saga is dominated by female characters, larger-than-life reincarnations of Victorian heroines from previous Haggard novels where Haggard’s preoccupation with the feminine is evident. Norman Etherington has observed that “Haggard’s writing about women is significant as a pointer to late Victorian shifts in attitude toward femininity and femininism,”30 a shift occurring within a patriarchy which, in the words of a social historian, was “under attack not only by women, but also by an avant-garde of male artists, sexual radicals, and intellectuals, who challenged its. . . compulsory hetero-sexuality and marriage, and its cultural authority.”31 Groa and Swanhild, the sorceresses, had been preceded by a Haggardian line of several “New Women”32 whose extreme desire for or possession of “higher” knowledge, combined with great sensuality and sexual autonomy, had posed a threat to the rule of patriarchy, the most famous example being his Ayesha in She. In a well known passage in that novel, Ayesha speaks of invading Victorian

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England, and Horace Holly expresses his dismay at this dangerous prospect, “It might be possible to contain her for a while, but her proud, ambitious spirit would be certain to break loose and avenge itself for the long centuries of its solitude.”33 Soon afterwards, Ayesha herself is destroyed. Victorian patriarchy in Haggard’s earlier novels had resisted the “invasion” of other extraordinary women; when such women invade his saga-patriarchy, the effort to suppress them serves only to intensify the great destructive powers they exercise in revenge. With a view to Haggard’s other fiction – to which Freudian theories have been copiously applied over the years – and a view to the sexual debates of his times, it is no surprise that issues of gender, feminine and masculine, should be raised in Eric Brighteyes. The first sign of the novel’s shift from one framework into the other is a stylistic turnaround where saga diction and narrative devices turn into their opposites – ornamentation and sometimes melodrama, familiar from Haggard’s earlier novels. Although Haggard clearly appreciates the characteristic terseness and understatement of the saga style, he provides his own audience with an omniscient narrator and often substitutes dramatic elaboration for saga subtlety. A good general illustration of such change is Haggard’s use of a minor character, Saevuna – Eric’s mother – apparently inspired by a similarly named character in Njáls saga. In that saga, Saevuna is an old “carline” living in Njal’s household, “wise in many things, and foresighted”; in Eric Brighteyes, Saevuna is also an old sybil. The Saevuna of Njáls saga foretells the killing of Njal’s family when she insists that a “stack of vetches” outside the farmhouse “will be taken and lighted with fire when Njal my master is burnt, house and all, and Bergthora my foster-child.” Her repeated pleas for the vetch to be removed are scorned by Njal’s son Skarphedinn, who responds, laughingly and with typical saga-fatalism, that “something else will be got to light a fire with, if that were foredoomed, though this stack were not here.”34 The prophecy is fulfilled when the vetch is used as kindling for the fire where Njal and his household perish. The Saevuna of Eric Brighteyes similarly utters a death-prophecy before an intended marriage-celebration for Gudruda and Ospakar Blacktooth, Eric’s arch-enemy: My blind eyes are opened and I see this hall of Middalhof, and lo! it is but a gore of blood! Blood flows upon the board – blood streams along the floor. . . Eric comes and Whitefire is aloft. . . Red was that marriage-feast at which sat Unna, my kinswoman,

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In addition to the parallel with the Njáls saga Saevuna and her warning, this part of the Haggardian prophecy echoes, verbatim, Njal’s own vision at supper with his family on the night before the burning: “Wondrously now it seems to me. Methinks I see all round the room, and it seems as though the gable wall were thrown down, but the whole board and the meat on it is one gore of blood” (234). However, Njal’s statement is uttered matter-of-factly and greeted by his audience with typical saga-restraint as is the foresightedness of the old crone in his household. The Njáls saga Saevuna is dismissed in a sentence: she “babbled the whole summer about the vetchstack that it should be got indoors, but something always hindered it” (231) whereas her counterpart, Haggard’s Saevuna, rants on at high dramatic pitch before her prophetic oratory is cut short by her sudden collapse and death. Similar stylistic cross-overs occur repeatedly in the narrative voice. A nod to the sagas in “Now the story goes back to Iceland” is counterbalanced in one instance by an unannounced narrative leap from a very saga-like chapter-ending in Iceland – “That summer also Ospakar Blacktooth met Björn, Asmund’s son, at the Thing, and they talked much together in secret” – to the sudden opening of the next chapter – in the Orkneys – in the manner of an altogether different genre where “Swanhild, robed in white, as though new risen from sleep, stood, candle in hand, by the bed of Atli the Earl, her lord, crying ‘Awake!’ ” (173–4). In other instances Haggard’s narrator changes verb-tenses back and forth between past and present during rapid action. Changes back and forth between past and present tense do occur in the sagas, for example in this passage from Njáls saga: Skarphedinn takes a spring into the air, and leaps over the stream between the icebanks, and does not check his course, but rushes onward with a slide. The sheet of ice was very slippery, and so he went as fast as a bird flies. Thrain was just about to put his helm on his head; and now Skarphedinn bore down on them, and hews at Thrain with his axe, “the ogress of war,” and smote him on the head, and clove him down to the teeth, so that his jaw-teeth fell out on the ice (173). In the sagas, however, these shifts in tense occur within individual sentences; as in the example above, narration in the present tense is not

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sustained. Haggard breaks from this pattern on more than one occasion in the interest of drama. As tension increases in the novel’s description of Eric and Skallagrim’s last defense, the narrator speaks of the battle in the past tense until Eric and Skallagrim appear to have defeated their attackers: “Now it was won, and now all the company that came with the thrall from over the mountain brow were dead or sorely wounded at the hands of black Skallagrim.” Then a startling and fatal shift occurs in the combat, and the narrator changes to a somewhat breathless present tense: “Lo! one springs on Eric, and Gizur creeps behind him. Whitefire leaps to meet the man and does not leap in vain; but Gizur smites a coward blow at Eric’s uncovered head, and wounds him sorely, so that he falls to his knee” (316). The present-tense narration is then sustained for several paragraphs until the battle is ended, creating an effect quite different from saga-usage. In yet another departure from the sagas, Haggard’s narrator abandons plain language and the sagas’ realistic pattern of reporting only observable behavior. Part of the introduction of Swanhild demonstrates both these features: For Swanhild, too, loved a man, and that was the joint in her harness by which he shaft of Fate entered her heart. . . without him all the world was dark to her and her soul but as a ship driven rudderless upon a winter night (11–12). Apart from the ornamentation of metaphor and simile, the narrator enters Swanhild’s mind to explain her motivation. Although, in the opening paragraphs of Eric Brighteyes, the narrator first restricts himself to implied characterisation – for which the classic saga writer’s limit for elaboration was to report that “it was said of him that. . .” – Haggard’s narrator almost immediately sheds this restraint in order to guide the reader with narratorial omniscience. The narrator also goes beyond the sagas’ traditional foreshadowing seen in the statement that Eric is “not first in good luck” in order to foretell crucial elements of plot: “But women loved him much, and that was his bane – for of all women he loved but one, Gudruda the Fair, Asmund’s daughter. He loved her from a child, and her alone till his day of death, and she, too, loved him and him only” (11). Such general summing up ahead of the story shifts the suspense from the final outcome – now known or taken for granted by the listener – to the plot, still unknown, which leads to that outcome. Haggard’s use of this narrative pre-summary is in accord with the fatalism of Eric Brighteyes and with a desire to engage the audience; in the sagas,

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foreshadowing occurs only in symbolic dreams or subtle remarks during the course of the plot, not by the “sagaman’s” explicit preview. Haggard’s stylistic shifts are the most immediately obvious features of the “anti-saga” but not the most significant ones; those features are embedded in his treatment of plot and characters, with Eric at the center. Great deeds are a saga champion’s contribution to legend; in the tradition of Heimskringla-kings who made sure their skalds witnessed their battle-deeds to record them in verse, Eric articulates an awareness of himself as such a champion, telling his friend Skallagrim, as they prepare for their last and fatal combat, “Now let us make ready to die as becomes men who have never turned back to blow, for the end of the story should fit the beginning, and of us there is a tale to tell” (309). As a champion, Eric follows general patterns of tragic saga-heroes who fare ill in spite of their excellence. After he has performed his first obligatory feats, his suit for Gudruda’s hand meets with the approval of her father; their proposed union will serve to perpetuate patriarchal order and the house of Asmund. The obstacles diverting Eric’s life from a prosperous future with Gudruda at Coldback farm toward an untimely death arise, like saga-tragedies, from an interplay of predestination and innate attributes. However, Haggard’s characterisation of Eric is developed beyond imitation or stereotype; his attributes and attitudes suggest Haggard’s preoccupation with social and religious issues. Eric displays, on various occasions, greater sensitivity and introspection than expected from a mere swashbuckling hero. Although his feats, his fearlessness, and his excellence in combat prove his distinction as a Viking-age champion, he steps out of that role to comment on the destructive philosophies behind it; although his masculinity is unquestioned, a masculine-feminine duality in his nature is glimpsed in his relationships with Gudruda, his sweetheart, and Skallagrim, his closest friend. On several occasions Eric’s physical appearance is seen to have an aspect of femininity. Although the sagas’ “[d]escriptions of physical beauty are more frequent, longer, and more detailed for men than for women” and “[h]air plays an important role for both genders,”35 the description of Eric’s hair goes further. Eric’s mane of blond hair is so long that on more than one occasion he is explicitly mistaken for a woman, a feminine association shunned by saga-champions except in cases of deliberate disguise for urgent purposes.36 Early in the novel when Asmund dreams of the future of the three children, Eric, Gudruda, and Swanhild, Eric is symbolically represented as a swan and Gudruda as a dove; in a very similar dream in Gunnlaugs saga, which Haggard almost certainly was familiar with, it is a heroine especially renowned for beauty, Helga the

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Fair, who is represented by a swan while her suitors are represented by eagles. In that dream, the swan’s beauty, clearly its most prominent feature, distinguishes it as “feminine” from the “masculine” eagles, birds of prey, who fight over it. Although Haggard arms his Eric-swan with a sword for tongue, the association with beauty is still the most immediate one, particularly since Skallagrim appears in the dream represented by a raven and Swanhild – sensual temptress – as a snake. Additional feminine associations are interspersed through descriptions of Eric’s fellowship with Skallagrim, whose characterisation also extends beyond the familiar one of a misogynistic buffoon comrade-atarms. Predictably, Skallagrim is dark-complexioned, ungainly, and quicktempered to a fault – recalling, perhaps, his only namesake, the Skallagrim of Egils saga – in strong contrast to the handsome blond and more phlegmatic Eric; however, Skallagrim’s second nature is another example of Haggard’s putting a familiar phenomenon to unfamiliar use. In earlier novels, Haggard had often created male crossbreeds, heirs to conflict – Boer-English or Spanish-English, for example – whose true nature and loyalties are in doubt. Skallagrim is a character of such “otherness”; he is a berserkr, who needs little provocation, at the beginning of his association with Eric, to begin gnawing the rim of his shield in superhuman fury.37 Although the presence of berserks in the sagas is familiar in the context of battles and other mayhem abroad, they are unlikely to inhabit the Icelandic countryside; they arrive in Iceland as rambunctious foreigners, soon to be disposed of, as happens in both Njáls saga and Eyrbyggja saga. In Skallagrim’s own story of his transformation into a berserk, he is originally a “yeoman of small wealth in the north” whose wife leaves him for another man. The grief over this betrayal is powerful enough to turn Skallagrim into a berserk: “of a sudden something leaped up in my heart, fire raged before my eyes and voices in my ears called on to war and vengeance. I was Baresark – and like haybands I burst my cords” (75). Under Eric’s command, Skallagrim learns to curb his berserk-side and shows himself capable of loyalty and self-sacrifice, contrary to the general nature of saga berserks, who are viewed with “fear and execration” and appear in the sagas as incorrigible “representatives of mere brute force.”38 Skallagrim’s transformation has a semi-parallel and possible model in Eyrbyggja saga: a berserk who undergoes similar change, described in Scott’s retelling in “Abstract of the Eyrbiggia-Saga”: Thrandar, who, before assuming the Christian faith, had been a Berserkar, and although he had lost the supernatural strength exercised by such persons, which the author states to have been

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Thrandar, however, sheds his berserk nature only at the powerful touch of Christian baptism; he also abandons certain natural intoxicators popularly imagined to bring on berserk-fits, as Scott implies in his explanation. Skallagrim, on the other hand, has no recourse to baptism, nor is he seen to use any intoxicators except ale. His transformation into a berserk comes about through his own jealous rage and grief over the loss of a woman. The change from berserk into a loyal and relatively tractable companion to Eric is brought about by Skallagrim’s ardent wish to serve Eric. From the perspective of the sagas, Skallagrim’s “conversion” is a testimonial to the powerful relationship between “master and man” in the heroic tradition; from the perspective of trends in Haggard’s fiction, the same conversion suggests an additional component. If grief over a lost love has the power to turn “yeoman” into “baresark” (and Skallagrim is unique among berserks in this respect), the berserk’s own deliberate curbing of this second nature appears to require the motivation of an equally strong emotion – love. The oath of loyalty that Skallagrim swears to Eric when the two warriors become “master and man” ends with the ring of a wedding-pledge, “thy hearthstone shall be my temple, thy honour my honour. Thrall I am of thine, and thrall I will be, and whiles thou wilt we will live one life, and, in the end, we will die one death” (73). At various points in the warriors’ adventures this strand of their relationship is reinforced. After their ship, the “Gudruda,” is wrecked by Swanhild’s witchcraft, the two comrades are found unconscious and “locked like lovers in each other’s arms” on the shore of Stroma by Atli and his men: “He who was undermost lay upon his back, but his face was hid by the thick golden hair that flowed across it.” The length of Eric’s hair prompts Atli’s comment: “Man’s body indeed, but woman’s locks” (176–7). The phrase “locked in each other’s arms” is later applied to Eric and Gudruda sleeping together on their wedding night while Skallagrim settles down in a nearby store room “very sad at heart” because “he was jealous. Skallagrim loved but one thing in the world truly, and that was Eric Brighteyes, his lord. Now he knew that henceforth he must take a second place, and that for one thought which Eric gave to him, he would give ten to Gudruda” (274). The friendship of the two men recalls similar male friendships in Haggard’s previous novels, in particular that of Horace Holly and Leo

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Vincey in She.40 In the context of Haggardian constructs, Skallagrim’s berserkerhood manifests a conflicted “otherness” recalling Haggard’s earlier crossbreeds but with sexual undertones. Eric rejects this “otherness” in Skallagrim and persists in his attachment to Gudruda. When that attachment ends in Eric’s death, Skallagrim not only pulls the spear from Eric’s mortal wound but – in a manner unprecedented by saga-warriors – also kisses Eric on the forehead. Momentarily reverting to saga-manner, Skallagrim then utters an epitaph: “Iceland shall never see such another man, and few have died so great a death” (318), recalling the remark made by Gunnar’s killer in Njáls saga that “the fame of [Gunnar’s defense] shall last as long as men live in this land” (139). Turning back to the battle, Skallagrim resumes his berserk-nature and kills several more of their opponents before succumbing to mortal wounds in dramatic and un-saga-like fashion: “A moment he stood swaying to and fro, then he let his axe drop, threw his arms high above him, and with one mighty cry of “Eric!” fell as a rock falls – fell dead upon the dead” (318). While the drama of Skallagrim’s death echoes Haggard’s description of the heroic death of the “brave old Zulu” Umslopogaas in Allan Quatermain, Skallagrim’s kiss and the emotionalism which has him crying Eric’s name with his dying breath, point back to an emotionally charged and complex partnership. In a recent dissertation, Shannon Young has suggested that Haggard’s early African writing reflects a problematic passage of social transition from youthful homosexuality, tacitly accepted in Victorian society, to the adult heterosexual norm; Elaine Showalter had earlier outlined a social theory of such transition.41 Eric’s love for Gudruda is repeatedly described in the novel as his doom or “bane”; in the light of the theories cited above and Haggard’s earlier treatment of gender issues in fiction, one view of this relationship of “master and man” may suggest the interpretation that it is Eric’s unsuccessful attempt to transfer his closest attachment from Skallagrim to Gudruda that leads to disaster. In Eric’s courtship of Gudruda, over Skallagrim’s protests, and in the contest between the half-sisters for Eric’s affections, Eric’s hair – the feature that sometimes causes him to be mistaken for a woman – then becomes a symbol of sexual transition. As Eric takes his leave of Gudruda before sailing abroad, she comments that his hair “grows long as a woman’s, and that is ill, for at sea the salt will hang to it. Say, shall I cut it for thee?” After cutting Eric’s hair and saving a lock for herself, Gudruda insists to him that “no other man or woman shall cut thy hair till thou comest back to me and I clip it again” (123). Eric’s sworn promise that he will not allow his hair to be cut before he returns to Gudruda reaches the ear of Swanhild, who, having seduced Eric, makes a point of cutting a

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lock from his hair as he sleeps in her bed. Swanhild later uses this lock of hair as a token of her sexual triumph and Eric’s infidelity to Gudruda; the lock of hair thus takes on great importance in the sexual rivalry between the half-sisters. Much later, while Gudruda is weighing her love for Eric against her obligation to avenge her brother and kill Eric rather than marry him, Eric lies in his outlaw’s cave with an infected wound in his shoulder. His hair is caked with blood “so fast about his neck that it could only be freed by shearing it,” which he refuses to allow anyone, even Skallagrim, to do. Eric’s death from the infection appears imminent, but Skallagrim, reluctantly, fetches Gudruda to Eric’s bedside to cut his hair and clean the wound. In the context of Showalter’s theories earlier cited, the cutting of Eric’s hair and the events leading up to it suggest the possibility that Skallagrim is yielding to Gudruda his own place at Eric’s side and acknowledging the inevitable replacement – by marriage – of Eric’s close partnership with himself, as his jealous thoughts on Eric’s wedding night also suggest. Gudruda herself, although not an “angel in the house,” is endowed with the intelligence and nobility of Haggard’s earlier Victorian heroines and also with some of their impetuousity; she draws on saga-women for general stoicism and a strong sense of family honour. While Groa and Swanhild, the invaders, threaten patriarchal order with their unrestrained sexual passion and their supernatural learning, Gudruda represents a perpetuation of that order: a prosperous marriage with good family connections for Eric. However, as Skallagrim has foreseen – and as Haggard reflects in his English novels – even a relationship with the “right” woman is problematic; Eric’s persistence in his relationship with Gudruda leads to his own early death. The cutting of tresses from a loved one’s hair with accompanying oaths of fidelity is a familiar motif from folktales and romances; Haggard uses this motif to suggest links among these four characters, unusual in the sagas. Eric’s willingness to reflect on matters beyond his heroic escapades, separates him from saga-champions, in general, and from heroes of late-Victorian adventure fiction for boys.42 Before launching Eric on his heroic exploits, Haggard’s narrator makes a point of showing this side of his character, slowing down the rapid narrative pace for that purpose. Newly introduced to the story as a budding champion, Eric arrives on horseback on a familiar hillside where Gudruda huddles, having lost her way in a snowstorm, resignedly awaiting her death from exposure. Instead of instantly carrying his beloved to safety, Eric settles down with her – in a rather non-heroic manner – to wait passively for their common demise. This leisurely anticipation of imminent death provides an appropriate setting for the lovers to declare their mutual affection, and, in the course

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of these declarations, a philosophical question arises: will the lovers be united in an uncertain afterlife? The boundaries of paganism are explored; Gudruda, concerned because “in Odin’s house there is no place for maids,” is assured by Eric that “Valhalla shuts its gates to me, a deedless man. . . for I do not die with byrnie on breast and sword aloft. To Hela shall we go, and hand in hand.” In words prophetic of the great religious change to come – the conversion of Iceland to Christianity – Gudruda, like her predecessor Hilda in R.M. Ballantyne’s Erling the Bold, confesses her doubt as to the existence of both Valhalla and Hela; Eric shares her doubts but assures her that “where thou goest there I shall be,” until she contentedly remarks that “Then things are well, and well work the Norns” (17). The question raised is shelved for the time being; the episode having served its purpose, the lovers eventually find their way home by the blazing northern lights. Three years later, on Eric and Gudruda’s fateful wedding night, the issue is raised again after the newlyweds have unsettling dreams. In Gudruda’s dream she again foresees her own death as she saw it earlier in the snowbank; in Eric’s dream, the spectral Asmund tells him, “ye shall die, yet is death but the gate of life and love and rest.” In response to Eric’s account of his dream, Gudruda asks again, as she did in the snowbank, whether Eric will have to go to Valhalla and she to “Hela’s halls”; this time Eric has a new answer: “Odin does not reign over all the world, for when I sat out yonder in England, a certain holy man taught me of another God. . . who died that men might live forever. . . they name him the White Christ” (276–7). Gudruda declares her eagerness to learn about “this Christ,” and, clearly yearning toward the new religion, the lovers express their desire for carnage to cease and their readiness to die into the promise of Asmund’s ghost. Eric vows that he will not perpetuate the cycle of obligatory blood-revenge but will henceforth only kill in self-defense; he has become a critic of old religious and social order and harbinger of a new one. His condemnation of the heroic code of honour and the cycle of violence that it perpetuates echoes the implicit philosophies of Gunnar of Hlidarend and Njal in Njáls saga but is much more explicitly expressed. The issue of religious uncertainty, prominent in the novel, is closely woven into Haggard’s linking of femininity and the supernatural. Haggard had created a succession of powerful and mystical female characters in previous novels and persistently linked the powers of these characters to a supernatural world of unknown dimensions. In the prose Edda the three named Norns epitomise such linking, and the major female characters in Eric Brighteyes – Groa, Gudruda and Swanhild – suggest a parallel both to the named Norns and to the “lesser” Norns who carry out

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the designs of the greater ones. The Edda does not explicitly state the domains in time – past, present, and future – commonly attributed to the greater Norns, but these domains, known from other medieval Icelandic texts, are indicated in the Norns’ names: Urður, what has been; Verðandi, what is; Skuld, what is to be.43 Haggard may or may not have been aware of that meaning; however, in the context of the sagas, the configuration of Groa, Swanhild and Gudruda reflects the Norns’ respective domains. Like Urður, Groa represents the past. The sinister background, knowledge and talent she brings to the tale evolve into a troubled present dominated by Swanhild, and the vague hopes for a future belong to Gudruda. Additionally, in the context of Haggard’s own work, Swanhild and Gudruda recall the several love-triangles where contrasting sister-pairs are rivals for the affections of male protagonists in previous novels; Groa recalls a third type of female Haggardian character who exerts mystical and sexual influence from outside the triangle. The lengths to which Haggard goes in his presentation of the Eddic Norns and his creation of this powerful female triad far surpass in intensity the sagas’ treatment of the Norns and of the influential female saga-characters Haggard often invokes in his writing. Eric’s models, tragic saga-champions, accept their fate as decreed by an unnamed force of destiny; the saga-writers themselves are separated by time and Christianity from the events they describe and from the mythology of the Edda. Although saga-champions’ travails are often attributable to the words and actions of women to a significant extent, female characters do not stay in the foreground of the classic family-sagas and Norns are rarely mentioned; narrators refer to events happening “as they are intended.” The highly mythological Völsunga saga alone pays close and steady attention to the dire supernatural powers of its heroines, Brynhild and Gudrun, and seems Haggard’s likeliest saga-inspiration here. The generators of Eric’s tragedy, the Eddic Norns are a strong presence constantly invoked in such phrases as “as the Norns have ordered so shall it be” or “as the Norns decree.” Nor are Groa, Gudruda, and Swanhild ever absent from the narrative for long; if not part of the immediate action, they are on the minds of male characters, desired, feared, cursed or mourned, and most supernatural elements of the plot are directly linked to them. The three women all demonstrate degrees of the mystical – and sexual – powers which Haggard had previously attributed, in more subtle forms, to well-bred Victorian ladies of good society. Gudruda possesses merely the traditional gift of second sight, frequent in the sagas, but Groa and Swanhild, women of great sexual passion and autonomy, are accomplished sorceresses whose powers far surpass the

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sagas’ restrained treatment of supernatural phenomena and take the novel into a dimension more reminiscent of medieval Christian superstitions and devil-worship. Just before the novel ends, the three Eddic Norns manifest themselves dramatically to the “fey” Eric and Skallagrim, preceded by figures from pagan mythology: dwarves and trolls, as well as “the God-kind gather[ed] to see Eric die” as Skallagrim comments. The Norns appear to the doomed men as a flaming vision against the “snowy dome of Hecla”: there sat three giant forms of fire, and their shapes were the shapes of women. Before them was a loom of blackness that stretched from earth to sky, and they wove at it with threads of flame. . . Their hair streamed behind them like meteor flames, their eyes shone like lightning. . . They wove fiercely at the loom of blackness, and as they wove, they sang. . . but what they sang might not be known. . . a picture came upon the loom. . . a giant ship fled before the gale. . . in the ship were piled the corses of men. . . the face of the corse was the face of Eric, and his head rested upon the dead heart of Skallagrim. (303–4) Haggard’s likely model for this episode is a poem, “The Woof of War” or Darraðarljóð in Njáls saga, where a warrior, Darrand, looks through the window of a bower and sees Valkyries singing this poem while weaving on a loom: “Men’s heads were the weights, but men’s entrails were the warp and weft, a sword was the shuttle, and the reels were arrows.” The poem picks up imagery from the Valkyries’ gory web and describes at considerable length their delight at the prospect of joining the battle. When the song is ended, “they plucked down the woof and tore it asunder, and each kept what she had hold of ” (327–9). Andrew Wawn suggests that Haggard’s manifestation of the Norns is “straight from” this poem;44 however, Haggard rewrites and adapts for dramatic effect. The poem is about Valkyries, and Haggard adopts their loom and web for his Norns; Eddic Norns, unlike Valkyries, do not weave.45 Although Haggard’s Norns rise up and “ren[d] the web asunder” as do the Valkyries in Darrand’s vision, other details are changed to emphasise the fatalism of Eric Brighteyes. Darrand’s vision is framed by a window; Eric and Skallagrim’s vision covers the horizon, “from earth to sky.” For the debris of battle – human heads and entrails – Haggard substitutes the blackness of the firmament and “threads of flame,” thus making the imagery cosmic rather than limited to physical human

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combat, in keeping with the universal role of the Norns. As in earlier visionary experiences in the novel, the secondary image is a direct, non-symbolic depiction of events to come. The phantom ship in which are “piled the corses of men” is that on which Swanhild later takes Eric and Skallagrim’s corpses and those of other battle-dead out to sea. Eric and Skallagrim’s respective response to the vision illustrates the overlap between receding paganism and dawning Christianity. Skallagrim mistakes the Norns for Valkyries and takes a pagan warrior’s comfort in the thought that “we had a goodly bed on yonder goblin ship, and all of our own slaying methinks. It is not so ill to die thus, lord!” Eric recognises the Norns and their message but is no longer concerned with great battle-deeds or fame and expresses anti-heroic sentiments: “I am weary of blood and war, of glory and of my strength” (305). The entire vision reinforces not only the fatalism but also the religious instability and sense of decline imbuing the narrative from the beginning and voiced here again by Eric. This instability and doubt, familiar from Haggard’s earlier novels where characters are given to spiritual reflection and questioning, appear in various forms throughout Eric Brighteyes. Because of inconsistencies in its depiction, the paganism anchoring the Norns and their work often appears as a crumbling rather than a strong foundation, and, although pagan gods are frequently invoked and their images seen enshrined in Asmund’s “hof,” the prospect of an afterlife is viewed from various perspectives, for example in the burial of Gudruda. Eric buries Gudruda’s body under the floor of the great hall at Middalhof. After she has been “washed and clad in a clean white robe. . . Eric. . . bound the Hell-shoes on her feet and closed her eyes” (289). The “Hell-shoes” are traditional footwear of pagan dead although the addition here of the second “l” – Hell rather than Hel – confuses their religious significance.46 The white robe and the burial in the floor run counter to historical records of pagan burial practices; according to that tradition, Eric might have buried Gudruda in a barrow, colourfully dressed and surrounded by precious objects. Her horse, later killed by Eric because “Gudruda may need thee where she is” (91), is then left lying in the yard where it was killed instead of being interred with Gudruda in accordance with her need for it (however, Gudruda’s ghost later appears riding the horse). The account of Gudruda’s burial may be inspired by accounts of the later Christian practice of burying the dead under the floors of churches; one of the likely models for Gudruda, Helga the Fair in Gunnlaugs saga, is buried “in the church” at her home.47 This choice of a burial site for Gudruda is then counter-balanced as Eric proclaims that, like pagan royalty, Gudruda is to

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have not only a pagan burial mound but an extraordinary one: the walls of the great hall of Middalhof, henceforth to be shunned by the living, will collapse to become her barrow. Further Christian overtones appear as Eric, hearing that Gudruda’s ship has been burned, replies: “We need the ship no more; now hath she whom it should bear wings with which to fly” (289). Only fatalism remains a constant, as evident in Eric’s remark just after his introduction of “White Christ” to Gudruda, that “things will befall as they are fated. We may do nothing of our own will, I am sure of this, and it is no good to struggle with the Norns” (277). Eric and Gudruda have earlier planned to escape to England – and Christianity – leaving behind the Norns and unending heroic bloodshed, and, as Haggard’s reader knows, the new religion will soon wipe out the Norns themselves with their pagan universe. While Gudruda and Eric question the old order and reach toward the Christian promise of immortal life, Swanhild and Groa override and disregard old and new religious doctrines, reaching instead into a void of malignant a-religious chaos. A dark afterlife awaits Swanhild with the demon to whom she has sold her immortal soul for the deliverance of Eric to her bed: Thou shalt give thyself to me when thy day is done, and merrily will we sisters dwell in Hela’s halls, and merrily for ever will we fare about the earth o’nights, doing such tasks as this task of thine, Swanhild, and working wicked woe till the last woe is worked on us. (160) Although the pagan goddess of death, Hel, is invoked here, the bargain appears to assign Swanhild to eternal damnation in some kind of vampiric existence, rather than to the bleak world of Hela, the pagan alternative to Valhalla. Swanhild’s threat to Eric as he scornfully rejects her after her seduction of him has the same overtones of the Christian type of damnation: “not for this came I to witchcraft and sin” (194) (my emphasis) although her belief that “There were no Gods save the Gods of Evil – the Gods she knew and communed with” (90) has been stated earlier in the novel. The prospect of eternal punishment for Swanhild in this afterlife is confirmed in the last words Eric speaks to her, “haunted and accursed shalt thou be for ever” (317) and as she “passe[s] to doom” sailing to her death at the end of the story. Swanhild’s Faustian bargain with the demon is paralleled by Gudruda’s bargain with Odin. Gudruda dreams that she is face-to-face with Odin, offering to pay with her life if he will first “give Eric to her for

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a little space”; the bargain is struck as Odin tells her, “for a night Eric shall be thine” (86–7). In this non-symbolic dream, the prophecy is literally expressed, later to be literally fulfilled. Although the granter of Gudruda’s wish is Odin himself and not a troll or goblin, such negotiations with supernaturals are familiar not from the sagas but from folkand fairy-tales, where mortals often strike potentially lethal bargains with supernatural beings.48 In such tales, however, the impossible-seeming conditions of the bargain are usually met by the human bargainer at the eleventh hour for a happy ending49 whereas Gudruda’s bargain with Odin includes no escape clause. The women’s respective contracts with supernaturals encapsulate the essence of their differences in character; the contrast between these deadly bargains also illustrates the instability occurring as one system of religious beliefs is giving way to another. Although Gudruda’s bargain with Odin is not a typical saga-event, it falls within the frame of paganism. As befits Gudruda’s aristocratic dignity, she bargains directly with a god; as befits the dignity of the champion she is bargaining for, the god is Odin himself, ruler of Valhalla, who favours warriors. Although not renowned for generosity or kindness, Odin is true to his word; as he promises, Gudruda is Eric’s wife for one night before she dies. Befitting a sorceress, Swanhild’s bargain, on the other hand, is with a denizen of chaos, far removed from Valhalla or Hel. This demon manifests itself in increasingly repulsive form, and Swanhild exchanges external shape with it on occasion, in episodes which show no relationship of style or content to the sagas. Völsunga saga mentions shapeshifting briefly and matter-of-factly as part of its mythological plot; Haggard, on the other hand, uses the phenomenon extensively in graphic and repulsive detail, both as a revelation of Swanhild’s nature and as a window on a chaotic and horrific universe cut loose from both pagan and Christian order. Unlike Odin’s promise to Gudruda, Swanhild’s bargain with the demon is based on deceit, the spirit of its promise broken. In return for her soul, the fiend promises Swanhild that “Ere morn Brighteyes shall stand in Atli’s hall, ere spring he will be thy love, and ere autumn Gudruda shall sit on the high seat in the hall of Middalhof, the bride of Ospakar” (161). Swanhild has power to summon her demon-familiar, but she is no match for the force she herself has invoked; all the promised events come to pass but are followed immediately by their negation. Although Swanhild seduces Eric, he rejects her contemptuously as soon as the magic potion wears off; Gudruda, although briefly seated at Ospakar’s side as his bride, never becomes his wife. As pointed out earlier, the symmetrical saga-framework, the anchoring of the “neo-saga” in historicity at the beginning and end of the

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novel, contains an inner frame of the “anti-saga” marked by Groa’s arrival at the beginning of the novel and Swanhild’s departure at the end. Although the very last paragraph returns the reader to the saga-frame, a final closer look at this inner frame shows how far Haggard has departed from the saga-model in the course of the novel. When the novel begins, Asmund and his men find “a beautiful woman, who wore a purple cloak and a great girdle of gold, seated on a rock, combing her black hair and singing the while.”50 She declares herself, in a sybilline song, an instrument of the Norns to carry out the fate determined for Asmund: Asmund, keep the kirtle wearer, For last night the Norns were crying, And Groa thought they told of thee: Yea, told of thee and babes unborn. (3) Groa’s arrival sets in motion the destruction of Asmund and his kin; with her sexual allure and witchcraft she is the most successful of Haggard’s line of female invaders and potential destroyers of patriarchy: women who seize knowledge and sexual autonomy for themselves and cannot be contained within boundaries of social tradition. In Haggard’s English novels the threat of such women is often removed by their early deaths; Groa, however, is given a full life-span to carry out her revenge on the patriarchy which has scorned her. Her progress is enhanced by Asmund’s own weaknesses, mainly his sexual susceptibility, in a relationship foreshadowing the later one between Eric and Swanhild. The declining society represented by the house of Asmund is too weakened from internal pagan struggles to withstand the forces unleashed by Groa’s invasion. When the novel ends, Swanhild’s departure is the last scene described before the final paragraph returns to the frame of the neo-saga. Asmund’s family, his prosperous household and homestead are wiped out, the ruins of his great hall destined to cover his daughter’s grave. He himself, Eric, Gudruda, Skallagrim and countless others lie dead; Eric and Skallagrim last appear to the reader as battered corpses among many others heaped on the ship carrying Swanhild, the last survivor, away to her own special doom. As Groa once appeared from the sea, Swanhild disappears into it, looking much as her mother did when first found on the shore. She stands on the deck surrounded by the heaps of corpses and “clad in her purple cloak, and with rings of gold about her throat and arms. . . singing so sweet and wild a song that men grew weak who heard

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it.” The ship is “lost in the wind and the night. But far out on the sea a great flame of fire leapt up toward the sky” (320–21).51 The focus of this final vision is on death, the end of a society guided by violent and self-destructive heroic tenets, held together by flawed paganism and patriarchy, invaded by corruption. The Norns’ rule is misrule and the revered heroic code built on quicksand; the champion who displays “feminine” sensitivities and lays down his weapons to end the vicious cycle of revenge-killing offends against social tradition,and the powerful “New Women” destroy it. The flickering suggestion of some kind of re-birth to be anticipated with the advent of Christianity is never supported enough by the narrative voice to throw any light into the final darkness where Swanhild disappears with Eric and Skallagrim’s corpses; the characters’ respective afflictions are ended by death, not by any benevolent supernatural intervention. As he consistently does elsewhere, Haggard expresses his pessimistic view of the human condition through the individual human destinies in Eric Brighteyes. Viewed in its cultural context, the novel takes up the issue of British heritage and identity, looking to the saga-society for a kind of pre-enactment of British present which Haggard had earlier depicted in contemporary settings; it becomes an “anti-saga” where Haggard rejects the idealisation of the Nordic past for a recognition of its dark side. The “heroic spirit” of “our” ancestors notwithstanding, Eric Brighteyes suggests a conclusion along the lines of Raymond Chapman’s summary of one type of Victorian world-view – “life goes on and things do not greatly change although the outward manifestations are different. . . We deceive ourselves if we think that we can reach into the past and draw from it any understanding of our present condition.”52 This view and Haggard’s way of using the sagas as models for its expression make his novel stand out from its genre. NOTES 1. Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 331–33. 2. Harold Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 1. 3. Wawn also maps out the various political and social causes contributing to Victorian interest in Nordic culture and literature in The Vikings and the Victorians. Regarding the “vogue” for nineteenth-century British writers and scientists to visit Iceland and write about it, see Gary Aho’s “Með Ísland á heilanum [Iceland on the Brain],” in Skírnir 167 (Spring 1993): 205–58.

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4. André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992). 5. Jón Karl Helgason, The Rewriting of Njáls saga: Translation, Ideology and Icelandic Sagas (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999). 6. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885; London: Arrow Books, 1986), 191. 7. For a definition of the berserkr concept, see note 37. 8. See The Vikings and the Victorians, 181–82. 9. For example, Norman Etherington’s Rider Haggard (Boston: Twayne, 1984) views Haggard as being generally ahead of his time in tackling socially sensitive issues. The myriad studies of Haggard’s African novels, especially She, illustrate the diversity of critical opinion. 10. Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 237. 11. Etherington, Rider Haggard, 107. 12. Andrew Wawn, “The Spirit of 1892: Sagas, Saga-Steads and Victorian Philology,” in Saga-Book of the Viking Society 23/4 (1992): 213–52 (242). 13. For a detailed treatment of these issues and of patterns in Haggard’s English novels and in contemporary saga translations and saga-derived novels, see my dissertation “Haggard’s Saga: The Achievement of Eric Brighteyes in the Context of Late-Victorian Historical Fiction” (Duquesne University, 2001). 14. G.W. Dasent’s translation The Prose or Younger Edda: Commonly Ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (Stockholm, 1842) includes this account of the role of Norns: . . . out of that hall come three maidens hight thus, Urþur, Verþandi, Skulld, these maids shape the lives of men, them call we Nornir; yet are there beside Nornir who come to every man that is born to shape his life. . . Then said Gangleri; If the Nornir rule the weirds of men, then they deal them very unevenly, for some have a good life and a rich, but some little gifts or praise, some long life, othersome short. Hár answers: Good Nornir and well akin shape good lives, but those men who are weighed down with mishap, against them bad Nornir wield their might. (19) This passage is central to the consideration of fatalism in Eric Brighteyes. Although the sagas, written after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity, do not often mention Norns, they emphasise the power of an unnamed (and not Christian) source of inescapable predestination. In Haggard’s novel, set some decades before the official conversion, the Norns are an explicit and omnipresent source of this power. 15. G.W. Dasent, The Story of Burnt Njal (1861; New York: Baker & Taylor, n.d.), 1. 16. Haggard, Eric Brighteyes (Chicago, 1891), 1–2, cited in text by page. 17. Haggard may here have had in mind a particularly close parallel in William Morris’s translation “The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and

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Raven the Skald,” in Three Northern Love Stories and Other Tales (London, 1875. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 7–47, where eighteen-year old Gunnlaug, betrothed to Helga the Fair and eager to make a name for himself, sails to England and visits the court of Ethelred the Unready (978–1016), grandson of Edmund. Also within this tradition, Eric’s involvement with a beautiful woman of noble lineage residing at the court has several parallels, notably an account in Njáls saga of Hrut’s disastrous relationship with Queen Gunnhild of Norway. 18. The use of real place names for verisimilitude in adventure fiction was common; for example, Andrea White comments in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge UP, 1993) that nineteenth-century adventure fiction “generally announced itself as fact. Part of the particular pleasure afforded by the genre was that it concerned real places with geographically verifiable names, not airy habitations without names” (45), as Haggard’s use of place names in the African novels exemplifies. With the use and relocation of verifiable Icelandic place names, however, Haggard was venturing not only into real geographical territory but also into a literary realm already populated by saga-characters whose actions were linked to such place names, a more complex undertaking than naming fictional countries hidden inside real African topography. 19. Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1926), 285. 20. Lilias Rider Haggard, The Cloak That I Left: A Biography of Rider Haggard (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), 141. 21. Þorsteinn Jósepsson and Steindór Steindórsson, Landið þitt: Ísland, 6 vols. (Reykjavík: Örn og Örlygur, 1984), 5, 199. 22. This legislation was Stóridómur, which introduced greatly increased penalties for fornication, adultery and incest (Jósepsson, Landið þitt: Ísland 5, 166). 23. The word “champion” is used here as an approximation of the Icelandic word for “hero” (hetja). For the meaning of hetja in the sagas, Bjarni Guðnason suggests in “Hetjur í Íslendingasögum” in Yrkja: Afmælisrit til Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur 15. apríl 1990 (Reykjavík: Iðunn, 1990, 37–46) the following definition: “[A hero is the man who does not yield his honour, even in the face of impossible odds, and puts his life at stake] Hetja er sá sem lætur ekki hafa sæmd af sér, þótt við ofurefli sé að etja og leggur þar líf sitt við” (40). Eric is a champion under this definition, but the meaning of “honour” is seen to be shifting with the heroic code as evident in Eric’s changing views on bloodshed and revenge toward the end of the novel. 24. The author of Njáls saga describes Gunnar enthusiastically and at length when Gunnar “comes into the story.” Gunnar’s athleticism and combat skills are enumerated to the conclusion that “it has been said that no man was his match.” Gunnar is also “handsome of feature and fair-skinned. His nose was straight and a little turned up at the end. He was blue-eyed and bright-eyed, and ruddy cheeked. His hair thick (sic), and of good hue, and hanging down in

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comely curls. The most courteous of men was he, of sturdy frame and strong will, bountiful and gentle. . . ” (Dasent, Story of Burnt Njál, 30). 25. Dasent, The Story of Gisli the Outlaw (Edinburgh: Lippincott, 1866), 8. 26. Eric also develops a fear of the dark, as does Grettir after his struggle with the “undead” monster Glam. Ralph Allen Berger states in “Old Icelandic Sources in the English Novel” (Diss. Pennsylvania, 1933) that “the fear of the dark, and [Eric’s] last stand with Skallagrim at Mosfell bears a great likeness to Grettir, upon whom he is somewhat modeled” (80); overall, however, Eric has less in common with Grettir than with the other two protagonists discussed above. 27. Wawn, “The Cult of ‘Stalwarth Frith-thjof ’ in Victorian Britain,” in A.N. Wawn, ed., Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Middlesex: Hisarlik Press, 1994), 211–54. 28. Orel, The Historical Novel, 143. 29. This kind of prophetic warning appears in the sagas at one end of a scale of advice on the possibility of changing one’s destiny; the warning is never heeded, so the possibility is unreal. At the other end of the scale the advice offered presents a real possibility, reflected on but rejected. 30. Etherington, Rider Haggard, 77. 31. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1991), 11. 32. In Women and Fiction; Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920 (Brighton: Harvester; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), Patricia Stubbs discusses the “New Woman” and the development of female characterisation in literature during the period while Haggard was writing most of his work. 33. Haggard, She (1887; Oxford University Press, 1992), 256. 34. Dasent, The Story of Burnt Njal, 231. Dasent’s translation is cited in text from here on by page. 35. Jenny Jochens, “The Illicit Love Visit: An Archaeology of Old Norse Sexuality,” in Journal of the History of Sexuality (1.3 (1991): 357–92 (381). 36. In Njáls saga Helgi son of Njal is persuaded to put on a woman’s cloak in an attempt to escape from the burning farmhouse. He is immediately pointed out by Flosi as “a tall woman and broad across the shoulders,” whereupon Helgi “cast[s] away the cloak” and hews off a man’s leg before he himself is decapitated by Flosi’s sword (Dasent 238–39). 37. Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, in An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1874, cited here from the second edition revised by William A. Craigie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), list two possible meanings of berserkr: someone fighting “in the skin of a bear” (with the ferocity of a wild animal) or “without armour” (61). Haggard spells the word “baresark” (as does Dasent) indicating a preference for the meaning “without armor,” and when Skallagrim first appears, he is “clothed in nothing but a shirt” (Eric Brighteyes, 70). In “Abstract of the Eyrbiggia-Saga,” in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (Edinburgh, 1814. repr. in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott,

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Bart.: Paul’s Letters. Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, n.d.), 355–413, Scott gives this definition only, “Bare but for the Sark, or shirt” (373). Cleasby and Vigfusson go on to explain that “A somewhat different sort of berserker is also recorded in Norway as existing in gangs of professional bullies, roaming about from house to house, challenging husbandmen to ‘holmgang’ (duel) . . . It is worth noting that no berserker is described as a native of Icel.; the historians are anxious to state that those who appeared in Icel.. . . were born Norse (or Swedes)” (61). Grettir subdues such a gang in Norway. Eric’s father, Thorgrimur Iron-toe (possibly named in honour of Haggard and Morris’s Icelandic guide, Thorgrimur Gudmundsen) is suddenly attacked by a “baresark” while peacefully sowing his wheat (2); apparently this happens in Iceland (rather than Norway) and possibly indicates Haggard’s mixing the berserk-phenomenon with violent and aggressive outlaws described in Icelandic folktales of much later date. 38. Cleasby and Vigfusson, An Icelandic English Dictionary, 61. Njáls saga includes an account of a “Baresark,” sent for to support a heathen household against Thangbrand’s militant Christian mission; this Baresark, unable to pass the test of Thangbrand’s consecrated fire, is subsequently killed by Thangbrand and others, whereupon the heathen household is baptised. This berserk’s aversion to the Christian consecration indicates the closeness of the berserk-image to that of evil spirits, and, in Eric Brighteyes, Eric makes clear his disapproval of berserk-ways. Haggard’s Skallagrim appears related to the genuine berserk variety, akin to the one who fights Odysseus in Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire (1890), but not true to either type. He distinguishes between himself and his early companion in the Mosfell cave where Eric originally confronts them: “he was an evil man, for though it is good to be Baresark from time to time, yet to dwell with one who is always Baresark is not good” (77). Haggard’s adaptation of this partial berserk-concept might have been influenced by Eyrbyggja saga’s account of two berserks, brought to Iceland from the court of King Hákon (“Count Haco”) of Norway. In Scott’s retelling, the man who brings the berserks to Iceland has “contracted a sort of friendship with these champions, who, unless when seized with their fits of fury, were not altogether discourteous or evil-disposed” (“Abstract of the Eyrbiggia-Saga,” 373–74). This duality in the berserk character points forward to Skallagrim, as does the warning by “Count Haco” that they are used to only “submit to men of great power and high rank, and will be reluctant and disobedient stipendiaries to a person of a meaner station” (374). Skallagrim subjugates himself to Eric because “of all men who ever were, thou art the mightiest. . . there is but one who has mastered me, and thou art he” (Eric Brighteyes, 72–73). The berserks of Eyrbyggja saga are somewhat humanised by their attempts to conduct verbal negotiations, of sorts, with their master; however, they eventually become such an unruly presence that means are devised for killing them, whereas Skallagrim is able to subdue his berserk-side at Eric’s mere behest. 39. Scott, “Abstract,” 404. 40. For similarities, see Shannon Young’s discussion in “The Narcissism of

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the Imperial Encounter in the Works of H. Rider Haggard” (Diss. Claremont Graduate School, 1997) of Holly and Vincey’s relationship: “A clue to the homoeroticism of Holly’s tie to Leo arises from the nickname the Cambridge community coins in relation to the pair. Holly’s (sic) is called the Beast, and Leo, Beauty. The earlier designation of Holly as the Beast to the woman’s Beauty aligns Leo with the woman involved in the one amorous episode from Holly’s past” (125). 41. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. 42. Lisa Honaker describes, in “Reviving Romance: Gender, Genre and the Late-Victorian Anti-Realists” (Diss. Rutgers, 1993), a late-Victorian shift in characterisation of heroes of juvenile fiction, away from a mid-century hero who would entertain ethical concerns, toward a “hero whose duty requires that he not look past the action in which he is involved to consider its ethical implication” (89). Honaker cites Claudia Nelson’s Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917 (1991) to argue that “this late-century shift in the definition of a manliness, from one that encompasses the traditionallyfeminine virtues to one that rejects them, reflects a late-century fear of male homosexuality” (108). Haggard reflects such shifting ideology in the portrait of Eric as in portrayals of female characters. 43. Rudolf Simek, Hugtök og heiti í norrænni goðafræði [Concepts and Names in Norse Mythology] (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1993), 185. Russell Poole’s study “Constructions of Fate in Victorian Philology and Literature,” in Geraldine Barnes et al., eds., Old Norse Studies in the New World (Sydney: Dept. of English, University of Sydney, 1994), offers a helpful perspective on Victorian concepts of “Fate” as well as some Victorian interpretations of saga-fatalism in the background for Eric Brighteyes. The most important consideration for my study, however, is Haggard’s use of the Eddic Norns and their mortal handmaidens to expand the supernaturally powerful and sometimes menacing feminine image he had repeatedly introduced in his previous novels. 44. Wawn, “The Spirit of 1892,” 241. 45. While stating that in Norse mythology only Valkyries are described as “weaving,” Rudolf Simek contrasts the Eddic Norns with their Roman counterparts who weave human fate (Hugtök og heiti, 185) – possibly an influence on Haggard from a different direction. 46. Gísla saga contains an episode where the “hel-shoon” are put on the corpse by its murderer; in Eric Brighteyes, Groa wishes aloud that she were binding “Hell-shoon” on the feet of Eric’s corpse (57), and Swanhild tells Gudruda, “I will live to fasten the Hell-shoes on the feet of Eric, and on thy feet, Gudruda!” (240). 47. Morris, “The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue,” 47. 48. This bargain is incongruous in a saga-context also because a woman’s life would have been of little interest to Odin, who had no place for women in Valhalla. Gudruda’s bargain simultaneously displays a “feminine” instinct for

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self-sacrifice (seen in earlier Haggard heroines), an aristocratic disposition (seen in the saga-women), and the resourcefulness of a Victorian “New Woman.” 49. Perhaps the best known such tale is the Grimm-brothers’ “Rumpelstiltskin,” but Icelandic folktales also include numerous such bargains. 50. Groa’s appearance out of the sea recalls that of Gudrun’s arrival at King Jonakr’s court in Völsunga saga. Gudrun, despondent over the death of Sigurd and her brothers, tries to drown herself in the sea, “But mighty billows drave her forth. . . till she came at the last to the burg of King Jonakr” (Halliday Sparling, ed., Völsunga saga: The Story of the Völsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, trans. Eirikr Magnússon and William Morris 1870 [London: W. Scott, n.d.], 151). In both cases, the women appearing from the sea bring misfortune and carnage into the households of the men who rescue them. 51. Swanhild’s “death-song,” still heard long after the ship has left the shore, not only recalls her mother’s song at the beginning of the narrative but also points forward to Haggard’s Stella Fregelius (1904), where he creates a “death-song” for Norse women, harking back to a fictional Viking tradition. An inspiration for this death-song may have come from an episode during his stay at a farm in Iceland when he heard a funeral hymn being sung over the corpse of an old man, subsequently carried away from the farm by boat. In The Cloak that I Left, Lilias Haggard states explicitly that the inspiration for the Norse women’s death-song came from this event and quotes her father’s journals for a description of “one of the simplest but most beautiful and impressive things I [Haggard] have heard” which ends as “the bearers took their burden down across the marshland to the border of the lake, the boat hoists sail, and it is gone” (144). 52. Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 194–95.

“Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk”: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Paul Hardwick In his 1821 novel, The Pirate, Sir Walter Scott gives us a scholarly in-joke at the expense of what we may think of as an “unusual” reader of Piers Plowman. Triptolemus Yellowley, Scott’s obsessively theoretical, yet hopelessly impractical, agriculturalist has little time for vernacular poetry, preferring instead classical authors with some connection, however tenuous, with farming. One of the few vernacular titles to slip through is “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,”1 which, charmed with the title, he bought from a packman, but after reading the first two pages, flung it into the fire as an impudent and misnamed political libel.2 I refer to Yellowley as an “unusual” reader of Piers Plowman because he is one of the seeming few who have failed, by some means, to find what they want within the work. Helen Barr puts it quite succinctly when she observes that “there must be few works which have been used to authorise both civil and religious dissent and which have also spawned a literary tradition”:3 the complexity and open-endedness of Piers Plowman rendered it infinitely adaptable and malleable in the service of quite differing agendas. In the present paper, I would like to address the issue of how Piers Plowman continued to be read and appropriated after Yellowley’s dismissal, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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History and Literary History In 1778, Thomas Warton published his History of English Poetry from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century, the stated aim of which was “to pursue the progress of our national poetry, from a rude origin and obscure beginnings to its perfection in a polished age.”4 His introduction to Piers Plowman hardly fills the reader with expectation of literary joys to follow: . . . instead of availing himself of the rising and rapid improvements of the English language, Longland prefers and adopts the style of the Anglo-Saxon poets. Nor did he make these writers the models of his language only: he likewise imitates their alliterative versification, which consisted in using an aggregate of words beginning with the same letter. He has therefore rejected rhyme, in the place of which he thinks it sufficient to substitute a perpetual alliteration. But this imposed constraint of seeking identical initials, and the affectation of obsolete English, by demanding a constant and necessary departure from the natural and obvious forms of expression, while it circumscribed the powers of our author’s genius, contributed also to render his manner extremely perplexed, and to disgust the reader with obscurities.5 In spite of Langland’s troublesome insistence upon “obsolete English,” however, Warton does concede that the extracts which he reproduces at length may possess some literary value, stating that they are: not only striking specimens of our author’s allegorical satire, but contain much sense and observation of life, with some strokes of poetry.6 Rarely can we find a work so delicately damned with the faintest of praise. Whilst elsewhere he endorses Johnson’s view of Chaucer by noting that he “has been pronounced, by a critic of unquestionable taste and discernment, to be the first English versifier who wrote poetically,”7 Langland can only manage “some strokes of poetry.” Piers Plowman is hardly unique in its perceived unworthiness compared with Chaucer. As David Matthews has noted, antiquarians tended to be attracted to non-Chaucerian poetry because of its difference from modern poetry. This difference may be addressed either negatively or positively: either the work is of interest “despite its barbarism” or it is recommended because of its philological value.8 For Warton, Langland,

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in spite of his barbarism, is possessed of a type of “genius” – not for poetry, but for social commentary. Whilst he may be lacking Chaucer’s “spirit, imagination, and elegance,”9 Langland offers us “much sense and observation of life” of the fourteenth century. What Piers Plowman offers, in short, is “History.” This is not to suggest, of course, that Chaucer’s works are never read as history; rather that his work is given a status as “literature” denied to Langland.10 Of course, Piers Plowman had always stood a much better chance of being read as history than literature. For whilst Chaucer’s “fayre makyng” was praised from the fourteenth century,11 Langland’s name is forgotten as his creation takes on what we might think of as a political life of its own. In terms of civil dissent, of course, we have the superficially simple, yet frustratingly opaque, letters of the 1381 rebels, with their exhortations to “bid. . . Peres Ploughman go to his werk” and enigmatic coded references to doing “wel and bettre.”12 This adoption of Piers as a figurehead for civil disobedience seems, from surviving evidence, to have been nipped in the bud with the Revolt itself. In terms of religious dissent, the ground is more fertile, not only in terms of influence upon works such as Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and, somewhat less directly, The Plowman’s Tale, but also in terms of the publication history of Piers Plowman itself. With Crowley’s three editions of the mid-sixteenth century, Langland was retrospectively accorded the status of proto-Protestant, with preface, annotation and judicious re-writing re-shaping the text for the ends of Reformation propaganda.13 This reformist bias is perhaps tacitly upheld by appending Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede to the work in subsequent editions,14 thereby adding what is effectively an interpretative gloss upon Piers Plowman itself. As for the Piers Plowman literary tradition, there are a number of works which owe obvious literary debts to Langland: Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Mum and the Sothsegger, Richard the Redeless and The Crowned King. On the fringe (although I personally would argue for its inclusion) we have the aforementioned Plowman’s Tale: a work which, in its final form, refers directly to Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and which, for a brief period in the sixteenth century, edged its way into the works of Langland’s contemporary, Chaucer.15 By the nineteenth century, then, Piers Plowman had become a historical document of its time. Furthermore, it was a document of a medieval history which was at odds with what nineteenth-century society generally wanted of its Middle Ages. A quotation from J.R. Green’s Short History of the English People (1876) will highlight the point: All the darker and sterner aspects of [the late fourteenth century], its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the

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Whilst a writer like Langland who, in the words of S.R. Gardiner (a contemporary of Green), “cried aloud for the return of justice and true religion,” and stood apart from others of his time in “looking for help to the despised peasant,”17 could be admired, he was impossible to assimilate into the ordered scheme of the idealised Victorian medieval past. However, it was this very problem of assimilation that appears to have attracted certain writers to Langland, whose indistinct persona contrasted so markedly with the jolly, boisterous public image of Chaucer. Morris and Langland Probably the most prominent writer attracted to Langland was the famous Scott enthusiast, William Morris. Morris famously claimed to have read all Scott’s novels by the time he was seven years of age:18 Scott understandably appealed to the imagination of the small boy who would ride his pony through Epping Forest dressed in a miniature suit of armour,19 but it was an enthusiasm which would never leave him. As late as 1885, in a letter to The Pall Mall Gazette listing his “Best Hundred Books” (actually numbering fifty-four),20 he went out of his way to declare: I should like to say here that I yield to no-one, not even Ruskin, in my love and admiration for Scott. From this foundation grew two related strands in Morris’s life and art: a love of the Middle Ages, evinced by a thorough absorption in the art and literature of the past, and a strain of medievalism in his own fiction, from his earliest writings such as The Story of an Unknown Church (Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856) through to the romances of his later years. These two strands were nowhere more closely and effectively entwined than in what is perhaps Morris’s most celebrated project, the Kelmscott

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Press Chaucer of 1896.21 The full scope of Morris’s medievalism is too broad for consideration here, but we may trace a development from the purely picturesque – fantastic, even – uses of the medieval in the early poetry and prose works to the paradoxically forward-looking medievalism of his later decorative works and the “utopian romance” of News from Nowhere.22 This development may be directly linked to his conversion to Socialism in the late 1870s.23 In a letter to Crom Price in July 1856, Morris could write: I can’t enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole, I see things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little degree. My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another. . .24 By the later years of his life, however, the dreams that informed his work – A Dream of John Ball (1886) and, especially, News from Nowhere (1890) – had become very much informed by “politico-social subjects.” Throughout his career, Morris’s poetry had frequently been compared with that of Chaucer, whom he had referred to as his “Master” in both The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).25 Indeed, the persona Morris creates for himself in A Dream of John Ball as a wandering tale-teller, “tall across [his] belly and not otherwise” is strongly reminiscent of Chaucer’s self-representation, whilst Will Green’s admonishment to “[l]ook no more on the ground, as though thou sawest a hare” echoes the words spoken to Chaucer by the Host before the tale of Sir Thopas.26 By 1886, then, we may see Morris trying on his “Master’s” clothes. However, I would like to suggest that Morris’s most subsequently influential written work – News from Nowhere (serialised in The Commonweal in 1890 and appearing in book form in 1891) – owes a much stronger debt to Chaucer’s contemporary, whom he probably encountered for the first time in Scott’s The Pirate: William Langland. May Morris recalled that her father once commented to a friend: “you know, I wrote an alliterative poem myself once on a time,”27 referring to his 1872 “morality” Love is Enough. Peter Faulkner has suggested that the adoption of an unrhymed alliterative metre in sections of this work evinces a knowledge of Piers Plowman at this date.28 Whilst there are no direct parallels to offer further support for this idea, it is surely not difficult to be convinced that someone as steeped in medieval literature (and so self-consciously imitative in his own writing) as Morris would be inspired by this remarkable work which was, at that time, the subject of serious scholarly attention.29 Wright’s standard B-text (1842 and 1856)

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and Whitaker’s lavish subscription edition of the C-text (1813) were being superseded by Skeat’s landmark series of publications for the Early English Text Society. Parallel Extracts from Twenty-Nine Manuscripts of Piers Plowman (later expanded to address forty-five manuscripts),30 published in 1866, had identified the three versions of the poem and laid the foundation for subsequent volumes of which, at the time of Love is Enough, both A and B-texts had appeared, in 1867 and 1869 respectively.31 It is not, however, until 1884 that we find Morris referring directly to Langland, in his lecture on “The Gothic Revival,” delivered to The Birmingham and Midland Institute in Birmingham on the 3rd March of that year.32 The mention is fleeting but significant. This lecture charts the triumph of what Morris terms the “academical pedantry” following the Italian Renaissance which led in an inexorable downward spiral to that prim and dull country of the 18th century where we no longer dare to call our souls our own: where history is studied only for the purpose of insulting the religion and aspirations of those who went before us and of magnifying our own mean and hypocritical sham virtues: where poetry is come to mean copies of smooth verses with as little meaning as can be got into them and without any glimmer of passion or imagination, where art finally is on the one hand a pastime of dilettanti, and on the other foolish upholstery provided by despised drudges for vulgar luxury.33 William Langland is listed, alongside Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and anonymous early medieval poets, in the select band with whom the Romantic poets, offering a glimmer of hope at the end of the despised eighteenth century, may claim brotherhood.34 He is not held up as a model for antiquarian imitation of the kind Morris possibly attempted himself some twelve years earlier with Love is Enough, but as an exemplary producer of an “intelligent, reasonable and free art,”35 which was “common to the whole people; it was free, progressive, hopeful, full of the human sentiment and humour.”36 As we may expect from Morris during the last quarter of his life, this artistic exemplar is, by its very nature, political: Langland and his “brother” poets represent an art “of the people,” free from the degradations and inequalities of capitalism. At the end of the following year, which also saw the final installment of Skeat’s editions for the Early English Text Society, Piers Plowman would find itself on Morris’s “Best Hundred Books” list in The Pall Mall Gazette.37

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Morris’s last recorded mention of Piers Plowman is in the chapter on “Feudal England” from Signs of Change (1888), which touches very briefly upon the poetry of the period. Naturally, the discussion commences with Chaucer, who is first praised for poetic achievements, before being considered as a recorder of the ideal medieval past. Upon his poetic art, says Morris: he builds a superstructure of the quaintest and most unadulterated mediævalism, as gay and bright as the architecture which his eyes beheld and his pen pictured for us, so clear, defined, and elegant it is; a sunny world even amidst its violence and passing troubles. Popular ballads are then praised (“Half a dozen stanzas of it are worth a cartload of the whining introspective lyrics of to-day”), before the discussion closes with reference to Piers Plowman: It is no bad corrective to Chaucer, and in form at least belongs wholly to the popular side; but it seems to me to show symptoms of the rising middle class, and casts before it the shadow of the new master that was coming forward for the workman’s oppression.38 For all of his suspicions of the work’s bourgeois agenda upon which, unfortunately, he does not elaborate, I believe that, in common with the anonymous religious and political dissenters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Morris was attracted by its “form,” which he pressed into service for his own “popular” requirements. “News from Nowhere” As we have seen, Morris had long seen himself as a disciple of Chaucer, even going so far as to construct his narrative persona in A Dream of John Ball in the image of his acknowledged “Master.” However, for all his professed Chaucerian aspirations, one of the two original verses inserted into the narrative of A Dream of John Ball includes a fine example of the “popular” alliterative form. Whilst it would be difficult to prove a specific Langlandian influence in this instance, between January and October 1890 Morris undoubtedly staked a firm claim to “brotherhood” with Langland with the serial publication in The Commonweal of News from Nowhere.39 Written as a response to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which Morris dismissed as a “Cockney paradise,”40 News from Nowhere takes the form

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of a dream in which the narrator, referred to simply as “Guest,” finds himself in an idyllic future, wherein a number of guides enlighten him as to the nature of their future society and the process by which it came about. This future world in many ways resembles the popular, picturesque medieval past, in details such as dress and architecture. Yet Morris takes pains to emphasise that this is more than “sham old.”41 As the future antiquarian, old Hammond, informs Guest: You must not suppose that the new form of art was founded chiefly on the memory of art of the past. . . The art or work-pleasure, as one ought to call it, of which I am now speaking, sprung up almost spontaneously, it seems, from a kind of instinct amongst people, no longer desperately tied to painful and terrible overwork, to do the best they could with the work in hand – to make it excellent of its own kind.42 The final third of the book describes a journey up the Thames to attend the annual harvest, culminating in the preparation for a great communal feast at the final destination. However, in a reversal reminiscent of Piers Plowman B XVIII (C XXI), the ideal conclusion is undermined, for just as Guest is about to cross the threshold of the hall, the scene fades.43 In his confusion, he stumbles across a ragged, prematurely-aged workman. This confusion escalates rapidly until he awakes to find that it has all been a dream – “Or,” as he asks, “was it a dream?”44 As he realises the possibility of bringing about this idyllic state in the real world, he closes the book with the assertion that “if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”45 I would like now to address some points in which News from Nowhere suggests a Langlandian influence before venturing a suggestion as to why Morris was drawn to Piers Plowman. In the narrative frame, the dreamer relates that he has undergone such “surprising adventures” that he feels they must be told.46 Morris had used this device in his earlier A Dream of John Ball (1886) (in which the narrator refers to the “things strange and new that befell me after I had fallen asleep”):47 a technique suggestive of medieval dream-poetry, especially when coupled with the summer setting. Whilst this is not specifically Langlandian in itself, the lack of prologue elaboration – the narrator, after a brief pause by a river on his way home, tumbles into bed and falls asleep “after his wont, in two minutes time”48 – is strongly reminiscent of the rather perfunctory manner in which Langland swiftly disposes of the demands of convention before settling down to the serious substance of his dream.49

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The journey of discovery, too, with its sequence of guides leading to some sort of “truth,” is a further recognisable element. As Adriana Corrado has observed, In outlining his utopia Morris cannot forget his youthful religious life, mingled with and tempered by his intellectual interest in the Middle Ages, and the literary convention of the allegorical dream vision, in keeping with the penitential quest of those times. But the penitent’s journey to the contemplation of truth was generally led by a celestial creature, or at least by somebody who had seen the truth, had experienced knowledge. Beatrice was the last guide of Dante, while others had paved his way to the threshold of paradise; Ellen [Guest’s final guide], if only a secular guide, is not at all less aware than Beatrice of the value of beauty in rescuing man from sin and damnation.50 Whilst I do not wish to argue against Corrado’s convincing association of Morris’s Ellen with Dante’s Beatrice – Dante, too, makes an appearance on Morris’s “Best Books” list – the character of Ellen also possesses Langlandian facets. The instant attraction – even tending at times towards eroticism51 – felt by Guest towards Ellen has received much comment, yet there is a further element to their relationship. Fearing that he will be disbelieved or thought mad if he reveals that he is a visitor from what is, in effect, the distant past, Guest constantly strives to conceal his true nature. He suspects, however, that Ellen can see through him, eliciting at one point in their journey the admission to the reader that “[he] felt somewhat uncomfortable under Ellen’s serious attentive look.”52 In Morris’s final guide, therefore, we are reminded of Langland’s first, Lady Holi Chirche, who, for reasons not made explicit, instils fear in the dreamer, for all her fairness: “I was aferd of her face thei
she faire were.”53 Furthermore, Ellen’s literary heritage is perhaps acknowledged in her final conversation with Guest, in which she reveals that “[her] father when he was working was a tiller of the soil.”54 One final possible borrowing to which I would like to draw attention is the poor labourer encountered as the dream dissolves. Guest, “lonely and sick at heart past the power of words to describe,” tells of the meeting thus: Once more without any conscious effort of will I set my face toward the old house by the ford, but as I turned round the corner which led to the remains of the village cross, I came

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Studies in Medievalism upon a figure strangely contrasting with the joyous, beautiful people I had left behind in the church. It was a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half-forgotten, was really not much more than fifty. His face was rugged, and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping. His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags. . .55

This is instantly recognisable from Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede – appended to the B-text of Piers Plowman in editions prior to Skeat – in which the desolate narrator, wandering aimlessly and “wepynge for sorowe,” comes across the very type of material poverty: His cote was of a cloute That cary was y-called; His hod was full of holes, And his heare oute; With his knoppede shon Clouted ful thykke; His ton toteden out, As he the lond tredede; His hosen over-hongen his hokshynes On everiche a syde, Al beslomred in fen, As he the plow folwede. Tweye myteynes as meter, Maad all of cloutes, The fyngres weren for-werd, And ful of fen honged.56 Whilst Langland’s allegorical ploughman is never described physically, the Crede-poet makes Piers intensely physical. He may be understood, as Skeat commented, as “an individual, a ploughman and no more, described as in an abject state of poverty.”57 Whereas the Crede-poet employs this as an authoritative exemplar to speak religious truth, Morris’s labourer’s physical presence alone speaks an eloquent political truth. In both works, the figure appears when the narrator is at his lowest ebb and initiates a profound and transforming understanding. These points of similarity, whilst perhaps tenuous when taken singly, do, I believe, add up to suggest that a reading of Piers Plowman – in conjunction with Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede – lies behind and informs

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News from Nowhere. We should remember that, by this time, not only had Skeat completed his series of editions for the Early English Text Society, but in 1886 – the year in which Morris began his first dream-narrative, A Dream of John Ball – he had published his monumental parallel-text edition, which Morris certainly owned.58 Turning once more to the ending of News from Nowhere, the dissolution of the dream on the verge of Guest’s full integration into the community has been seen as a failure of Morris’s utopian vision, with the final waking utterance, “if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream,”59 ringing rather hollow.60 Morris’s earlier self-characterisation in the “Apology” to The Earthly Paradise (1868), as an “idle singer of an empty day” and “[d]reamer of dreams, born out of my due time,”61 is invoked in order to diminish the value of the dream in News from Nowhere. Yet between The Earthly Paradise and News from Nowhere there is a lapse of more than twenty years; a period during which Morris’s understanding of the meaning, significance and potential of the dream as a literary device in the Middle Ages must surely have become more sophisticated,62 and during which scholarship on the most enigmatic and influential of Middle English dream-visions had advanced dramatically. In refuting the suggestion that Piers Plowman was an incomplete work, lacking a “satisfactory” ending, Skeat argued: I am convinced that this opinion is erroneous; not so much because all the MSS. have here the word Explicit, but from the very nature of the case. What other ending can there be? or rather, the end is not yet.63 No conclusion is possible within the written text. It is up to the poem’s readers to respond to the text and work towards the deferred conclusion within their own active lives. This is precisely the strategy behind Morris’s inconclusive ending. Corrado has noted that: Morris in his early years was deeply religious. Later, his belief in a better life, where men are at last all really equal and are rewarded only on the basis of their personal choices and actions, gave him hope on a personal and social level.64 Perhaps Skeat’s final severance of Piers Plowman from Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, instead coupling it with Richard the Redeless – a work of political analysis largely untouched by Christian moralising65 – suggested

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the ready adaptability of elements of Piers Plowman for Morris’s tale of society after his own projected “Peasants’ Revolt,” as described by Old Hammond in News from Nowhere itself. Certainly, Morris’s reading of the poem would appear to have had more in common with that of John Ball than with readers of the intervening years and, in taking this approach, he may be seen as expressing a medievalism strikingly at odds with the ideologically conservative, “Return to Camelot” medievalism which permeated late-Victorian society.66 In his essay, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” J.A.W. Bennett imagines the enthusiasm with which Chaucer must have discovered Piers Plowman.67 Langland’s unacknowledged influence upon Chaucer has been much discussed and will surely continue to be so.68 I would suggest that, some five hundred years later, Morris – another “real contemporary of Chaucer” – discovered and made use of Langland with the same enthusiasm.69 As an enthusiastic antiquarian, Morris found no problem with what Warton classed as Langland’s “affectation of obsolete English.” Furthermore, however, in “the social chasm that severed the rich from the poor,” Morris saw a mirror of his own time, which fed into his own “free, progressive, hopeful” dream-visions of the 1880s and 1890s. Where Morris differs significantly from Ball, however, is that he doesn’t mention Piers by name. Unlike Ball – or, for that matter, the writer of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede – Morris cannot rely upon his audience’s familiarity with the figure. Whilst the subject of much scholarly scrutiny throughout the preceding quarter-century, Piers Plowman, as already noted, was at odds with what nineteenth-century society wanted from its Middle Ages. Piers, then, would carry little weight, so the informed reader is left – rather like the Host in the prologue to the Ploughman’s Tale – to make the connection him- or herself, and to consider the implications thereof. Florence Converse’s “Long Will” I would like now to turn to what is perhaps the most consistent attempt to rectify this popular lack of familiarity with Langland and his work; Florence Converse’s 1903 novel, Long Will.70 It is a work that was, in its time, very popular, running to several editions, including an Everyman edition of 1908 which ran to at least eight reprints over the subsequent thirty or so years. That being said, it is practically unknown now, so perhaps a few words by way of an introduction are called for. Long Will is a historical romance, aimed at older children. On more than one occasion, Converse had made use of her extensive knowledge of

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medieval literature in her fiction – perhaps most notably in her Sunday School Book The House of Prayer (1908), which quotes freely and extensively from Malory – but on the surface, the minor cleric Langland would appear rather less promising a source for adventure. As it turns out, however, the result is probably the most rewarding of Converse’s books for those in search of simple adventure. Offering a cast that includes Langland himself, John Ball, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, Richard II, Chaucer, Gower and the Gawain-Poet (here revealed to be Brother Owyn of Malvern Priory), Converse presents a “who’s who” of the later fourteenth century, caught in the upheavals surrounding the rising of 1381. Perhaps the main figure, however, is Langland’s daughter Calote, who spends a substantial amount of the novel travelling the country in an attempt to rouse the downtrodden poor from Devon to Newcastle by reciting extracts from her father’s Vision (after first softening up her audience with the more immediately attractive “Robin Hood, or Earl Randle of Chester”),71 on a mission half-heartedly supported by the petulant boy-king Richard. The reader is kept in page-turning suspense, wondering if the rather suspect Jack Straw will have his wicked way with Calote, and pondering the identity of the mysterious, chubby, bearded figure who saves Langland from Straw and Tyler’s crazed throng of bloodthirsty weavers. The one question perhaps paramount in the mind of the modern reader, however, is: why would Converse choose to write about Langland, and what is she doing with this rather shadowy historical figure? The appropriation of Arthurian knights – especially the spotless Sir Galahad – for the moral edification of the young was hardly original.72 Yet with Long Will’s emphasis upon the materially poor lower orders of society Converse silently acknowledges that exemplary nobility is not enough. It is a point made by her life-long companion, Vida Scudder, in Socialism and Character (1912), a work dedicated to Converse:73 The mediæval code of chivalry based on the responsibility of superiors did more or less effectively sustain justice in its day, and really at times succored the oppressed. But its essentially undemocratic character is evident from the absence of the common people and their wrongs from the ordinary run of its records. Our modern code is in a like predicament.74 The “undemocratic character” of fourteenth-century England is hard to deny. What we may, perhaps, see in Long Will, then, is an attempt to rectify this “absence of the common people and their wrongs” and, in so

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doing, posit an early stirring of the democratic principle. By far the most significant element of this statement is the assertion that “Our modern code is in like predicament.” Elsewhere, Scudder makes the point more forcefully: The primary fact about our civilization is that it is founded, like all others from time immemorial, on social and industrial inequality. This broad point of agreement between capitalism and former society, notably in the Middle Ages, is our reason for not rejecting at once that Apologia of Religion which points us to the spiritual victories of the past as a reason for refusing to change the basis of the social structure in the future. It is of course the socialist aim to diminish such inequalities, and what we have to do is to inquire whether such a change would help or hinder spiritual life: we must compare the ethics actually attendant on social inequality with those which equality is likely to engender.75 Long Will’s prologue opens with the young Langland, golden-haired and russet-clad, composing an early draft of Piers Plowman to a suitable avian accompaniment in the idyllic Malvern Hills. As the primed reader may expect, he soon falls asleep. Before he has the opportunity to dream a wondrous dream, however, he is awoken by “a gay lad in scarlet hosen and a green short coat, and shoes of fine leather” who, distracted by the composition of a roundel to his lady, has become separated from the hunting party of Prince Lionel, who is currently a guest at the priory.76 This highly perceptive child almost immediately discerns that the “long brown man” must be a poet, and there follows a discussion, continued throughout the three short chapters of the prologue, concerning what it means to be a poet. The revelation that the child is the son of a London vintner further confirms suspicions as to his identity that may already have arisen in the reader, and which will be confirmed much later in the novel. Naturally, he defines poetry as a courtly, noble pastime, and is somewhat perplexed by Langland’s alliterative metre, interrupting his recitation of Piers Plowman after a mere half-dozen lines, with “No, no! not thus, not thus!”. . . “never thus! An thou come to court they’ll not hearken thy long slow measures. Thou shalt make thy verses the French way, with rhyme. Needs must thou learn this manner of the French ere thou come to court.”77

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The difference between the poetry of the boy Chaucer and the young Langland – here characterised as the difference between the lark and the cuckoo – is plainly one of fashion and acceptability; a case of the “Southren man” being uncomfortable with the “rum, ram, ruf ” of the West Midlands. Beyond the text itself, however, we may also find a keen address to the school of opinion, dating back to Warton, which views Langland as wilfully excluding himself from “the progress of our national poetry.” Converse is invoking the contrast between Chaucer and Langland noted earlier by Green. However, instead of privileging the “world of wealth and ease and laughter” which informed much nineteenth-century medievalism, she privileges the other side of the “social chasm,” its “darker and sterner aspects.” Furthermore, whilst constructing the narrative as “history,” Converse also elevates Langland’s poetry. Quotation from the Vision permeates the book, with phrases repeatedly occurring in characters’ conversation, whether or not they are explicitly referring to the work. At one point, we even find Langland summoned to the king’s chamber in order to recite from his poem. However, what he hopes will be an opportunity to express his views to the sympathetic king is revealed to be little more than a kind of “battle of the bards.”78 Yet it is a contest in which Langland acquits himself well until political concerns sour proceedings. In the final analysis, Chaucer’s theatrical performance of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale appears more to the King’s taste than Langland’s possibly ill-advised “Fable of the Rats,” whilst the decidedly moral Gower is never really in contention. For Converse, then, Langland embodies not merely an alternative to the “Merrie England” view of the medieval period symbolised by Chaucer, but an alternative that can hold its own. The reader is thereby presented with a competitive medievalism that may challenge dominant medievalist ideology. This challenge is, once more, made explicit by Scudder, when she notes that: The mediæval revival in literature, religion, and art, which has persisted against such heavy odds for the past hundred years, has had a real significance; and we need to learn that the ages of romance have as much to teach the sociologist as to the artist or the priest. We shall never get at their worth to us through prim or sentimental imitations; we cannot profit by the past through copying it, whether in Pre-Raphaelite pastiches, picturesque rituals, or artificially fostered handicrafts . . . We want no dilettante Pre-Raphaelitism in ethics; yet the curiously common

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Scudder here refers to what we may term Morris’s “progressive medievalism”; that is, a medievalism which is not the “sham old” of superficial decoration, but a model for an ideal future state – a state which for Morris, as for Scudder and Converse, is necessarily socialist in character. How, then, does Long Will make use of its “union of mediæval enthusiasm with social radicalism”? William Morris had, of course, in what Scudder described as “the most lovely of all [his] lovely writings, the noble and imaginative ‘Dream of John Ball’,”80 traced the roots of socialist struggle to the 1381 rebels. However, perhaps the association is made too explicit as, for the reader, it is a melancholy brotherhood of ideals, as the fate awaiting Ball is considered.81 For, whilst the rebellion of 1381 may provide an ideal historical model for Morris’s prospective rising, it also carries with it the inevitable historical baggage of failure. Converse, of course, has the same basic problem. However, this she manages to side-step by the neat manoeuvre of shifting the focus from the historically doomed rebel leaders on to Langland who, by virtue of the scant biography available, may be freely manipulated into the role of her choosing. It is interesting to note here that Morris, too, apparently wished to separate Langland from the events of 1381. Whilst directly quoting John Ball’s letter in the opening chapter of A Dream of John Ball, he notably avoids the reference to “Peres Ploughman,” thereby removing the poet he would later emulate from the failed rebellion. In Long Will, Langland is right at the centre of the Revolt, with Jack Straw and Wat Tyler being regular visitors to Cornhill. However, whilst his work inspires the rising, it is acknowledged that there is doubt about the interpretation of this work, as the narrator speculates: Mayhap ’t was by John Ball and his ilk that Langland’s Vision came into the countryside and spread among cottagers; and Wat Tyler heard it, and Jack Straw, – and came out of Kent to learn more of this doctrine. So they found Will Langland and loved him; but for understanding of him, that was another matter. There were few men at that time could rede this chantry priest.82

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The suspicion is given further voice by Langland himself, as he tries to persuade his daughter to abandon plans for her rabble-rousing mission. “But now tell me,” he asks, “dost believe Jack Straw and Wat seek Truth, – or their own glory?”83 Indeed, as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Straw and Tyler are largely serving their own ends. Furthermore, as Calote notes upon her return, allowing for some notably worthy exceptions, many of the would-be rebels are not spurred on by the best of motives. “They are not ready,” she warns: “To rise for vengeance’ sake, and hate, and to pay a grudge, – ah, what a foul wrong is this!”84 And, later, “ ’T will fail, because the spring and soul of it is hate, not love.”85 For Converse, then, the historical failure of the Revolt is transformed from a tragic defeat under the might of the ruling classes into a self-defeat, brought about through the inappropriate motives of the rebels. The ideal of the Revolt, however, remains embodied in an uncorrupted form in the person of Langland, and of his daughter, whose doubts concerning the rebels echo Vida Scudder’s warning concerning political change in the early twentieth century: For should socialism arrive otherwise than as the result of an inward transformation, affecting the deep springs of will and love, it would prove the worst disaster of any experiment in collective living that the world has seen.86 Social change, in both the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, requires personal transformation. It requires disinterestedness in the service of the greater long-term good. As Scudder notes elsewhere: No sensible socialist expects a personal gain from his creed, since he cannot look for a triumph of his cause during his own lifetime, complete enough to affect his private destiny.87 And this is the quality embodied by Converse’s Langland, waiting patiently for the change to occur, trusting implicitly in the Will of God.88 For details of the events at Smithfield, Converse, as in other places in the novel, suggests turning to the chronicles. She does, however, add her own comment to her brief synopsis, musing that: It may well be that those deeds which befel at Smithfield had not befallen thus and so if Will Langland and his daughter Calote had been in that company; but as concerning these things, who shall prophesy?89

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In an appropriately Langlandian manner, the narrator’s refusal to speculate itself prompts speculation. Throughout the work Langland has acted as a calming influence, and the reader is acutely aware that his absence does indeed make all the difference. The effect is two-fold. First, it dramatically emphasises the point already made, that the rebellion, without the Christian, proto-socialist ideals embodied in Langland, is doomed to failure. At the same time, however, this serves to separate these ideals from this failure. Elsewhere, Scudder suggests that “it is quite possible that [Langland] would have shrunk from the part his poem was destined to play in the Peasants’ Uprising.”90 In Long Will, Converse adopts this interpretation, thereby wresting Langland’s Vision from the specific historical moment and allowing it to live beyond the crushing of the Revolt.91 Whilst Scudder observes that Langland’s “startling originality” in presenting the “Voice of the Laborer” was “so far in advance of its day that we cannot wonder if it was soon completely forgotten, as the Middle Ages drew to their close,”92 Converse re-writes history to perpetuate this voice. In the novel’s Epilogue, the aged Langland’s dying words are, fittingly, the closing lines of Piers Plowman, the exhortation to readers to go beyond the text and transform their own lives – “free, progressive, hopeful,” as Morris put it.93 Set at the end of such a work, the transformation intended is clearly towards the optimistic, forward-looking Christian socialism espoused by Converse and Scudder. Once again, as in 1381, Piers the ploughman finds himself bidden to “go to his werk” in support of a political cause – this time along with his creator. Conclusion Before leaving Long Will striding once more across the Malvern Hills in the early twentieth century, I would like turn briefly to the “Editor’s Note” which prefaced editions from 1908: This story forms a very tempting by-way into the old English life and the contemporary literature which gave us Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman. It deals with those poets and with many figures of the fourteenth century whose names still ring like proverbs in the twentieth – Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, John Wyclif, John of Gaunt, and Richard II – and it summons them to real life in that antique looking-glass of history which is romance . . . To read the story without wishing to read Chaucer and Piers Plowman is impossible, and if a book may

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be judged by its art in provoking a new interest in other and older books, then this one is of an uncommon quality.94 In this introductory note, there is a very strong sense of Long Will encouraging the reader, in a literary sense, to go in search of Piers Plowman itself – an exhortation also made around this time by H.E. Marshall in his English Literature for Boys and Girls (1909).95 However, the nature of this encouragement is telling, if unsurprising. Long Will is described as offering a “very tempting by-way into. . . old English life and. . . literature.” Indeed, a subsequent schools edition prefaces its “Questions and Exercises” section by informing the reader that: You will find this book much more interesting if at the commencement you find out all you can about the reign of Richard II.96 The connection between past and present – and, indeed, future – explicit in the work of Morris and Scudder, and implicit in Converse’s Long Will, is broken. The highest praise reserved for Converse in Sir John Marriott’s English History in English Fiction (1940) is that “The novelist adhered closely to history.”97 And, as Marshall states, “the chief interest and value of Piers Ploughman is that it is history.”98 Whilst, like Morris, Converse recognised in Piers Plowman the potential for an alternative, socialist medievalism, a culture in which Sir Galahad could still be held aloft as a model for young gentlemen was rather more comfortable if Langland was held to reveal not only, as Green wrote, “the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed the rich from the poor,”99 but also the chasm which severs the fourteenth century from the present.

NOTES 1. In employing this title, Yellowley joins the ranks of those who Skeat would later condemn as “such as have no regard for accuracy, and who would not stick at using the term ‘Christian’s Vision’ as an equivalent one to Bunyan’s vision of one Christian”: introduction to Walter W. Skeat, ed., Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, EETS o.s. 30 (London: N. Trubner, 1867), xiii. For those early “men of eminence” who fell into this “curious error,” see introduction to Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 2, xxiv–xxv. 2. Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (1821; repr. Lerwick: The Shetland Times, 1996), 32–3.

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3. Helen Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 5. 4. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century (1778, repr. London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1870), v. 5. Warton, History of English Poetry, 176–7. 6. Warton, History of English Poetry, 177. 7. Warton, History of English Poetry, 224–5. 8. David O. Matthews, “Speaking to Chaucer: The Poet and the Nineteenth-Century Academy,” in Leslie J. Workman et al., eds., Medievalism and the Academy I, Studies in Medievalism 9 (1997): 5–25, (8). The development of attitudes towards English medieval literature between the eighteenth and early twentieth century is explored at length in David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999). 9. Warton, History of English Poetry, 311. 10. See Steve Ellis, “Popular Chaucer and the Academy,” in Workman, ed., Studies in Medievalism 9 (1997): 26–43, esp. 36–9. 11. The quotation is from Lydgate’s “Flower of Courtesy” (c.1400). For contemporary and near-contemporary praise of Chaucer, see Derek Brewer, ed., Chaucer: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1, 39–67. 12. “John Ball’s Letter to the Essex Commons,” in R.B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1983), 381. The surviving letters of the Revolt are gathered on 379–83. 13. See John N. King, “Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman: a Tudor Apocalypse,” Modern Philology 73 (1975–76): 342–52; Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–19. 14. Owen Rogers, 1561, and Thomas Wright, 1842 and 1856. 15. See Andrew N. Wawn, “The Genesis of The Plowman’s Tale,” Yearbook of English Studies 2 (1972): 21–40. 16. John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1876), 248. 17. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Student’s History of England from the Earliest Times to 1885, 2nd edn., 3 vols. (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1891), 1, 259. 18. Douglas Cockerell’s “Notes of a biographical talk by William Morris at Kelmscott House, Nov. 28, 1892,” quoted in May Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols. (repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 22, xxxi. 19. J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, new edn., 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1901), 1, 10. 20. This letter, dated 2nd February 1886, is reprinted in Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2, 514–18.

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21. For a discussion of the production of the Kelmscott Chaucer, see William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 228–57. It is perhaps significant for the present discussion that Morris, after consultation with the editor and long negotiations with the Oxford University Press, used Skeat’s text for his Kelmscott edition, thereby displaying a knowledge of – and respect for – Skeat’s work on medieval texts. The matter is discussed in William S. Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 108–9. Morris was one of the original subscribers to Skeat’s edition of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894): see 6, 434. 22. This development is discussed in my article “ ‘A Vision rather than a Dream’: the Progressive Medievalism of William Morris,” The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 2.2 (Summer 1994): 1–11 and 2.3 (Autumn 1994): 18–26. 23. On Morris’s transition to practical Socialism between 1878 and 1883, see E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, revised edn. (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 243–75. 24. Morris, Collected Letters, 1, 28. 25. Collected Works, 2, 259 and 6, 331. 26. Collected Works, 16, 227. 27. Collected Works, 9, xxxi. 28. Peter Faulkner, Against the Age: an Introduction to William Morris (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), 67. 29. It is not known which editions of Piers Plowman Morris may have owned or read at this date. A valuation of the principal items in Morris’s library compiled by Frederick Startridge Ellis in 1896 shows that, at the time of his death, Morris certainly owned a copy of Crowley’s edition. Unfortunately, there is no record of the date of its purchase, although Morris’s increased enthusiasm for book collecting from 1890 makes it statistically more likely that this purchase post-dates News from Nowhere. Ellis’s list is printed as an appendix to Kelvin, Collected Letters, 4, 401–33. 30. EETS o.s. 17. 31. EETS o.s. 28 and 38. 32. William Morris, “The Gothic Revival [I],” in Eugene D. LeMire, ed., The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), 54–73. 33. Morris, “Gothic Revival,” 69. 34. Morris, “Gothic Revival,” 72. We may contrast this with the attitude expressed by Warton, above. 35. Morris, “Gothic Revival,” 64. 36. Morris, “Gothic Revival,” 65. 37. Following Morris’s death, Kelmscott Press secretary Sydney Cockerell referred to a proposed Kelmscott edition of Piers Plowman: Peterson, Bibliography,

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153. Whilst the book was not produced and no further documentation exists, the fact that the project was at least discussed evinces the status accorded to the work by Morris. 38. Collected Works, 23, 51–2. 39. Whilst the alliterative poem that closes chapter 8 of A Dream of John Ball (Collected Works, 16, 261) is not thematically based on Piers Plowman, it may be significant that it is printed in short lines, in the manner of Wright’s edition. 40. Collected Works, 16, xxviii. 41. This derogatory term is used of the proposed restoration of Tewkesbury Minster in a letter to The Athenaeum (April 1877): Kelvin, Collected Letters, 1, 361. 42. Collected Works, 16, 134. 43. The passus closes with Will calling his family to church. The opening statement of the following passus – “Thus I awaked and wrote what I had dremed” – implies a conclusion, in the manner of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, for example. However, this apparent resolution is immediately overturned in the attack on the Barn of Unity, itself perhaps a model for the church in which Morris’s feast is to take place. 44. Collected Works, 16, 210. 45. Collected Works, 16, 211. 46. Collected Works, 16, 5. 47. Collected Works, 16, 216. 48. Collected Works, 16, 4. 49. Piers the Plowman, A Prol. 1–10; B Prol. 1–10; C Prol. 1–8. This reduction of preliminary detail to “a mere sketch” is noted in A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 138–9. 50. Adriana Corrado, “Beatrice and Ellen: Ideal Guides from Hell to Paradise,” in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston, eds., William Morris: Centenary Essays (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), 81. 51. See Jan Marsh, “News from Nowhere as Erotic Dream,” The Journal of the William Morris Society 8.4 (1990): 19–23. 52. Collected Works, 16, 185. 53. Piers Plowman, B I 10. Substantially the same line appears at A I 10 and C I 10. 54. Collected Works, 16, 204. 55. Collected Works, 16, 209–10. 56. The Creed of Piers Ploughman, in Thomas Wright, ed., The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, 2nd edn. (London: John Russell Smith, 1856), lines 838–54. 57. Introduction to Skeat, ed., Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, xii. 58. Morris’s copy of Skeat’s two-volume edition is item 617 in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue of the contents of his library (5th–10th December

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1898). I would like to thank Norah C. Gillow, Keeper of the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, for drawing my attention to this item. 59. Collected Works, 16, 211. 60. See, for example, John Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution,” in John Lucas, ed., Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1971), esp. 276–7. 61. Collected Works, 3, 1. 62. This point is touched upon by Krishan Kumar in his introduction to William Morris, News from Nowhere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xvii. 63. Skeat, ed., Piers Plowman, II, lvi. 64. Corrado, “Beatrice and Ellen,” 80. 65. As characterised in Barr, Piers Plowman Tradition, 19. Wright, in his introduction to the 1838 Camden Society edition of Richard the Redeless, which he titled Alliterative Poem on the Deposition of Richard II, had suggested that “it seems to have been intended as a continuation” of Piers Plowman (vi). However, the two works were not printed together prior to Skeat’s edition. 66. An excellent study of this dominant strain of medievalism is Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 67. J.A.W. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” in S.S. Hussey, ed., Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), 322–4. 68. See Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” 310–24; Helen Cooper, “Langland’s and Chaucer’s Prologues,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987): 71–82; Frank Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 3–23; Paul Hardwick, “Chaucer: the Poet as Ploughman,” The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 146–56; Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), esp. 208–12. 69. The description of Morris as affecting the language of “a real contemporary of Chaucer” is from Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895), 99. 70. As Kate McCullough notes in Regions of Identity: the Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), Converse has received scant critical attention. McCullough’s welcome and illuminating study of Converse (58–92) centres upon issues of sexuality and identity in her 1897 novel, Diana Victrix. As long ago as 1968, an unsigned Times Literary Supplement article commented upon the absence of Converse’s (and others’) “Sunday books” from “best books” lists, in spite of their quality and longevity: “Ancient and Modern,” Times Literary Supplement (11th April 1968), 1–2, reprinted in Virginia Haviland, ed., Children and Literature: Views and Reviews (Glenview, ILL and Brighton: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1973), 44–9.

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71. Florence Converse, Long Will (Boston and New York: E.P. Dutton, 1903), 165. 72. On the promotion of chivalry in English public schools, see Girouard, Return to Camelot, 163–72. On the development of this ideal in America, see Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999), 59–92. One notable devotee of Sir Galahad was, of course, William Morris, whose psychologically resonant “Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery” was included in his first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858): Collected Works, 1, 24–30. On the lasting influence of Galahad upon Morris and his circle, see Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 74–109. 73. An indication of Converse and Scudder’s closeness is offered by Theresa Corcoran, who notes that Scudder inscribed the flyleaf of Converse’s copy of Socialism and Character with Converse’s poem “Lo, here is fellowschipe”: Theresa Corcoran, Vida Dutton Scudder (Boston: Twayne, 1982), pp. 109–10. Corcoran suggests that the poem “may have been written jointly by the two friends,” adding that it “may have been published anonymously earlier, but the first published version located is in the Collected Poems of Florence Converse (London: J.M. Dent, 1937), under the dedication ‘To Vida Dutton Scudder’ ” (125, n. 25). Whilst, in view of the close relationship between the two writers, joint authorship is possible, no evidence is cited in support. It should be noted that, far from being published anonymously, the poem was initially published as an introductory verse in Long Will. 74. Vida D. Scudder, Socialism and Character (London: J.M. Dent, 1912), 214–15. On Scudder, see Corcoran, Vida Dutton Scudder, in particular 43–54 for her commitment to Christian Socialism. That Corcoran makes so little mention of Converse is perhaps surprising, although, as she notes, “Even less is known about the early life of Converse than of Scudder” (108–9), so this is perhaps due more to lack of available information than authorial choice. 75. Scudder, Socialism and Character, 207–8. 76. Converse, Long Will, 4. 77. Converse, Long Will, 8. 78. Converse, Long Will, 242–61. 79. Scudder, Socialism and Character, 285–6. 80. Vida D. Scudder, Social Ideals in English Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899), 290–1. 81. Indeed, in his final speech to the narrator, Ball draws attention to these mixed feelings, acknowledging that “thou hast been a dream to me as I to thee, and sorry and glad have we made each other, as tales of old time and the longing of times to come shall ever make men to be”: Collected Works, 16, 286. On the problems faced by Morris in drawing upon the events of 1381 in support of nineteenth-century socialism, see Nicholas Salmon, “A Reassessment of A Dream of John Ball,” The Journal of the William Morris Society 14.2 (2001): 29–38.

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82. Converse, Long Will, 97. 83. Converse, Long Will, 123. 84. Converse, Long Will, 219. 85. Converse, Long Will, 222. 86. Scudder, Socialism and Character, 187. 87. Scudder, Socialism and Character, 162. 88. To Calote’s exasperated insistence that “ ’T is well enough to say, ‘Not to-day!’ But a man might do so forever, and all the world go to wreck,” he replies, “Not if I believe in God, – and Christ the King’s Son of Heaven”: Converse, Long Will, 124. 89. Converse, Long Will, 329. 90. Scudder, Social Ideals, 44. 91. On earlier American interpretations of the 1381 rebellion, see Roger Wood, “ ‘The History is Concisely This’: Thomas Paine’s Account of the Peasants’ Revolt,” in Kathleen Verduin, ed., Medievalism in North America, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994): 5–20. Commenting upon discussions of the Revolt by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, Wood concludes that “For both writers, narrativity becomes a tool of ideology. What each says about the Peasants’ Revolt reflects more on his values and goals for the present and future than on his ability to document some objective ‘reality’ about the medieval past” (45–6). The same may be said of Converse. 92. Scudder, Socialism and Character, 227–8. Scudder had addressed Langland in her earlier Social Ideals in English Letters (Boston, 1898), aligning him with the 1381 rebels, and seeing him as a unique, subversive forerunner of modern Christian Socialism. 93. “The Gothic Revival,” 114. 94. “Editor’s Note” to Florence Converse, Long Will (1908). Some editions date this note to 1910. 95. “I hope that. . . although the ‘sense be somewhat dark’ you will some day read the book for yourselves”: H.E. Marshall, English Literature for Boys and Girls (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1909), 114. Marshall devotes two chapters to Langland. 96. Florence Converse, Long Will (London: J.M. Dent, 1939), 379. 97. Sir John Marriott, English History in English Fiction (London: Blackie, 1940), 75. 98. Marshall, English Literature, 121. 99. Green, Short History of the English People, 248.

What Tales of a Wayside Inn Tells Us about Longfellow and about Chaucer William Calin Kim Moreland’s The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature is a first-rate book which represents a great leap forward in the study of medievalism in the New World. It also makes no mention of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow except as co-founder of the Dante Society in 1881.1 One ought not to reproach Moreland for this; she cannot discuss everyone. Longfellow’s absence from The Medievalist Impulse can be attributed primarily to his non-presence in today’s canon of American literature. In his case, absence is a trace of low status in the institution of literature, an institution which creates presence and absence. Also, Tales of a Wayside Inn2 differs from what we can call primary medievalism, as manifest in such works as Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s Froissart (1879) and The Boy’s King Arthur (1880). Although Longfellow did contribute to primary medievalism in other works, the most notable of which is The Golden Legend (1851), Part Two of Christus: A Mystery, with Tales of a Wayside Inn he writes a text of “secondary medievalism” by taking the Chaucerian structure – the idea of the Canterbury Tales3 – and recasting it, intertextually, in his own nineteenth-century Massachusetts. He does this by having six friends – the Poet, the Musician, the Sicilian, the Spanish Jew, the Student, and the Theologian – plus the Landlord, while away their time at the Red Horse Tavern in Sudbury by telling stories. Moreland provides a valuable insight into Longfellow as into so much of nineteenth-century medievalism. Her thesis – that medievalism functioned as a response to and reaction against modernity, capitalism, the cult of progress, optimism, and the growing materialism of life in America after the Civil War – can be applied, at least in part, to Longfellow.4 Scholars have commented on how the father of American Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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poetry ignored all contemporary American issues except for slavery; how, in large measure, he rejected contemporary American reality for the past, a past which existed in his mind as a timeless never-never land, an icon of veiled beauty, the subject of melancholy and reverie.5 Like so many others in the century of progress, Longfellow lived and grounded much of his work in nostalgia for a doomed, unrecoverable past. It is surely not a coincidence that the Tales are told in an inn which goes back to 1686, a locus of repose unsullied by railroad smoke and noise: As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality. . . A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railroad speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds. . . (15–16) Longfellow corrects Chaucer, or, more accurately, adapts him to the horizon of expectations of a nineteenth-century English-speaking public. Two such corrections/adaptations appear to me significant – those in the domains of sex and of structure. 1. Medievalists forget sometimes the extent to which works such as Le Roman de Renart, Le Roman de la Rose, and the Canterbury Tales brought rich, complex, and problematic manifestations of sexuality into the realm of modern Western high art, with in consequence a juxtaposition or mixture of styles – genus grande, genus medium, and genus humile – sharing the writer’s and audience’s attention.6 Such has not always been the case. We can observe, over the centuries, a fluctuation between, say, Chaucerian conventions and Victorian conventions. These are conventions. The reality of Victorian sexuality differed enormously from what one could read in Dickens and Tennyson,7 and a number of writers, such as Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), were aware of the conventions and demystified them. The Victorian triumphs in Tales of a Wayside Inn, where sex is not to be found, and no more in stories taken from Boccaccio than in those taken from the history of the Reformation. With one small semi-exception,8 Longfellow’s is a world of eunuchs and eunuchettes, where people love, cherish, revere, and adore, yet stand seemingly oblivious to the probable tangible goal of their

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reverence and adoration, and where people seldom go to bed and, when they do, it is to sleep. Chasteness of diction mirrors chasteness of thought and action.9 As a result, for all of his stupendous metrical variety, Longfellow’s tales are told in a relatively narrow middle range of style, a literary diction far from the sublime and the grotesque. The chasteness – of mythos, ethos, and dianoia – is Longfellow’s own, not a concession to the public. He is quoted as having said that Goethe is great but too sensual. He thought that France is quaint but that modern French writers are obscene.10 He is quoted asserting: A wife should know nothing of such physical concerns. I would rather live on bread and water than eat the nicest dinner in the world if my wife had been obligated to cook it for me. . . I do not like to have woman discussed in public. Something within me rebels at the profanation.11 It ought not then to surprise anyone that, in his own way, Longfellow resembles those writers, cited by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, who develop the peculiar American narrative structure of a hero who quits females, family, and responsibility in society – often urban society – to escape to the wilderness for a life of adventure, often associated with a figure of nature who is another man.12 In the Tales, the six residents, all intellectuals of a sort, have temporarily left work and family in Boston for a sojourn in this ancient, isolated hostelry, where they enjoy good fellowship together by telling stories and discussing literature. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury, they all are men. Theirs is a poetic vita contemplativa, an alternative to the vita activa of the Deerslayer and Huck Finn. Also, in their own way, Longfellow’s tellers recreate the family as, forming a group, they exude contentment at the hearth before a crackling fire, a clerkly version of the domestic, a Romantic-Biedermeier icon, what Hans Robert Jauss terms la douceur du foyer, here happily sans cumbersome women and their children.13 2. Realism of mimesis, in the modern sense of the term – a believable narrative concerning believable characters in a believable setting – is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon. It marks much of the fiction that extends from Balzac to Camus. It also functioned in the Middle Ages, in works such as Raoul de Cambrai, Flamenca, and La Mort le roi Artu, for that matter in the Decameron. However, we have no evidence that Chaucer was concerned about the technical requirements for and implications in having his pilgrims tell stories on the road to Canterbury, what we can call horseback narratology. It is more likely that

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he was concerned over the fact that, having originally announced a program of twenty-five and more pilgrims, each one responsible for four tales, and having rightly chosen to produce tales of powerful, varied, and often extended dimensions, bringing the desired result – a Chaucerian comédie humaine – to fruition could occupy a full modern lifetime, not to speak of a medieval one. As we all know, he didn’t. The text survives as a collection of fragments. Longfellow, in his “low mimetic” century, was aware that you cannot talk on horseback and be heard by twenty-plus other cavaliers. For that matter, you might not be heard by all twenty-plus chugging ale in a noisy Kentish tavern. And he was aware that unified, completed books sell better and are more highly regarded than incomplete, fragmented ones. In his century the aesthetic of the fragment did exist, sometimes as an exploration of liminality or a statement of protest.14 Liminality and protest were not Longfellow’s forte. He solved the problem by reducing the number of travellers to six and by situating the frame narrative in the parlour of the inn. Each person would tell one story, and since, in tribute to Harry Bailly, the Landlord is included, not as judge but, democratically, as a fullyaccredited teller, the implied reader can credibly imagine seven tales told by old friends, in front of a fire, over the course of a cozy evening or a rainy forenoon. Most aesthetic choices bring about gain and loss. Longfellow’s low mimetic realism and, also, the New England-Unitarian ideology of his class made it impossible for him to replicate many of Chaucer’s strengths. Chaucer’s pilgrims function as a microcosm of society, in all the richness of its hierarchical order and the undermining of that order. Horseback narratology underscores the symbolism of the road, voyage, quest, and pilgrimage. One does not have to embrace Robertsonian orthodoxy to recognise the problematic complexity of a secular narrative grounded in powerfully archetypal Christian symbolism.15 The pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury and from Babylon to Jerusalem grants the Canterbury Tales a symbolic and archetypal structure which the “Sudbury Tales” lack.16 In its first edition, Longfellow’s Tales attain closure only by the lateness of the hour, and everyone goes to bed but for the Landlord: Alone remained the drowsy Squire To rake the embers of the fire, And quench the waning parlor light; While from the windows, here and there, The scattered lamps a moment gleamed,

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And the illumined hostel seemed The constellation of the Bear, Downward, athwart the misty air, Sinking and setting toward the sun. Far off the village clock struck one. (129–30) At the end of Part Third, published in 1872, Longfellow now offers a quietly effective Biedermeier closure: The following day the travellers leave the inn. It will be forever, and they will never meet again. For, states the implied author in the present, two are abroad and three are dead: . . . that nevermore Their feet would pass that threshold o’er; That nevermore together there Would they assemble, free from care, To hear the oaks’ mysterious roar, And breathe the wholesome country air. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. (260) The living can now only capture the golden lost moments of the past reflected in the implied author’s book, the Tales recounting the telling of the tales, much as, then, the tellers saw themselves and their landscape reflected in the water of a stream as if in a dream. One purpose (among many) of the Canterbury Tales, as of Chaucer’s entire corpus, was to transmit French and Italian culture to England or, rather, to English; to compose in English contemporary texts comparable to and mirroring the best of recent and contemporary literary production from the most esteemed writers: Jean de Meun, Machaut, Froissart, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to cite the most eminent.17 Chaucer also had a sense of history and, in typical medieval fashion, valorised the past. Interestingly, the Knight’s Tale, like Troilus and Criseyde, a text recounting the most distant Hellenic past, is inscribed in something akin to genus grande; stories from what we would today call late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – the Man of Law’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Franklin’s Tale, and the Prioress’s Tale – are in genus medium; whereas genus humile is reserved for the fabliaux, situated, for the most part, in the present. Also,

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as level of style descends and as time approaches the present, space approaches England. This one strand in Chaucer becomes the driving force behind Longfellow. He wished to be the Father of American Poetry just as Chaucer had been the Father of English Poetry. We can see this from the sonnet Longfellow published in 1875 entitled “Chaucer”: An old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.18 The old man Longfellow depicts Chaucer as “an old man in a lodge within a park” and as one who “his old age made beautiful with song,” who was “the poet of the dawn,” metaphorically the dawn of his language, literature, and culture. Longfellow felt that he also could be a poet of the dawn, that he could do for America what Chaucer had done for England by bringing in European culture – a literature and a past which were lacking in the New World. He would be translator (he authored and edited innumerable tomes of foreign-language translation) and transmitter of the European tradition.19 He would make literature respectable in a materialist, uncultured land. Furthermore, like Chaucer, Longfellow turned to the Continent, not to the Anglo-Saxon mother land. Of the six outside tellers, three are foreigners: the Musician (from Norway), the Sicilian, and the Spanish Jew. The Student – an American – loves “Ancient French Romances.” Of the twenty-two stories, fourteen are situated in Europe and three in the East, while only five are American stories and none is English. Also, whereas Chaucer had, of course, not yet heard of the Middle Ages, Longfellow has and knows it is Chaucer’s time. For this and other reasons, he privileges the medieval as the age of a cultured past and

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of story-telling. Sixteen tales are located in the Middle Ages and early Reformation, two in the seventeenth century, and four in the eighteenth. Significantly, these four “modern” tales are American; yet even they prove to be a full century old. The poet’s choice of sources indicates how well-read and up-to-date he was in foreign literature.20 One example would be his adaptation (“Emma and Eginhard”) of “La Neige” by Alfred de Vigny, one of the leading poets of French romanticism, Longfellow’s contemporary, born only ten years before him. A second example would be “The Saga of King Olaf,” taken from English and Swedish translations of the Old Norse Heimskringla, Laing’s version having been published as recently as 1844. No less significant is Longfellow’s capacity to adhere to medieval literary genres in his redaction of stories located chronologically in the Middle Ages. “The Saga of King Olaf ” and “Charlemagne” can be classified as epic or chanson de geste, “The Falcon of Ser Federigo” and “King Robert of Sicily” as romance (the latter as homiletic or exemplary romance), “The Legend Beautiful” as vita or miracle, “The Bell of Atri” and “Kambalu” as exemplum, and “The Monk of Casal-Maggiore” as fabliau. In a few cases Longfellow “medievalises” his sources, much as C.S. Lewis claimed that Chaucer had medievalised Boccaccio.21 His tale of Ser Federigo, from Boccaccio, is closer in spirit to Old French courtly romance than it is to the more urbane and cynical Decameron. Similarly, “Charlemagne,” taken from an old chronicle in Latin quoted by an Italian historian, recaptures the spirit of the epic Chevalerie Ogier, the ultimate source of the chronicle and history. Critical fashion changes and changes quickly, especially in Chaucer studies. Over the last forty years, a psychologically and thematically oriented modern criticism gave way to the exegetical school which gave way to post-structuralist concerns with textuality and gender.22 Without arriving at anything which approaches consensus, the exegetes and many of the textualists deny roundness of character to the Chaucerian tellers. Contemptuous of horse-back psychology and road-side drama, and contemptuous of those who speculate on how the Wife of Bath’s fourth and fifth husbands died or whether or not the Merchant was a good husband, they insist that the tellers should be considered not people but subjects.23 Chaucerians should, in consequence, concentrate on the fascinating textuality of the tales, the groups, and the work as a whole, on the functioning and disjunction of language, exemplifying and contributing to the problematic of discourse, and not invent relationships and histories for vectors of forces who are not the mimesis of living beings. The post-structuralist vision (obviously not the Robertsonian) can

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be applied with perfect congruity to Longfellow. Longfellow concentrates on the stories, for he is a superb story-teller. A number of tales – “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Falcon of Ser Federigo,” “The Saga of King Olaf,” “The Baron of St. Castine,” “Emma and Eginhard,” and “Elizabeth” – survive on their own; one or two have generated myths. Generations of American schoolchildren, and generations of politicians, could cite by heart: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. . . One, if by land, and two, if by sea. . . So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went on his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm, A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo forevermore! (25, 29) Revere became an honoured, romantic figure in the pantheon of the American Revolution, comparable to Nathan Hale and Betsy Ross. With them, as a cultural icon, he contributed to the elaboration and the maintaining of American patriotism and the sense of an American history. Quite the contrary, Longfellow’s “Interludes” are perfunctory, a homage to Chaucer and Boccaccio, otherwise devoid of interest. The tellers are light-as-gossamer “types”: the Student dreams, the Spanish Jew broods, and the Musician plays his violin.24 The intellectual heavyweight of the group proclaims that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are a nice person (109–11). Longfellow calls this worthy “The Theologian.” The only comedy generated by the interludes is a touch of humor directed at the Landlord over his snobbery and because he snores during the first night’s activities: All laughed; the Landlord’s face grew red As his escutcheon on the wall; He could not comprehend at all The drift of what the Poet said, For those who had been longest dead Were always greatest in his eyes; And he was speechless with surprise To see Sir William’s plumed head

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Brought to a level with the rest, And made the subject of a jest. (30–31) The Landlord’s eyes were closed in sleep, And near the story’s end a deep Sonorous sound at times was heard, As when the distant bagpipes blow. At this all laughed. . . (129) In contrast to Longfellow, Chaucer’s frame diegesis is powerful and problematic. Some of his “vectors of forces” remain among the most remembered characters in English literature. Conflict between the tellers – the Miller vs. the Reeve or the Friar vs. the Summoner – provides insight into the tellers’ “condition,” including social class and religion; it also provides insight into the tales and how we should interpret them. The “Marriage Group” and the “Art Group” do the same on a larger scale. They also contribute to the discussion of serious issues, a level of intellectuality, comparable to what we find in Jean de Meun and Dante and over the head of Longfellow. With the Pardoner and the Canon, Chaucer reaches out to the borders of society, to social and cultural liminality – the domain of interdiction and its transgression. In sum, the frame, trivial and ephemeral in Longfellow, in Chaucer is so weighty, so rich and problematic, and so meaningful in terms of psychology and human relations (including gender), that we have to acknowledge its importance and accord it the same attention that we grant to the tales themselves. Longfellow’s thinness recalls to us the danger of ascribing a comparable thinness to Chaucer. After all, the opposite of riches is poverty. Poverty in the “Sudbury Tales” can be ascribed to Longfellow. If we find it in the Canterbury Tales, it has to be our fault, ours and ours alone. Similarly, scholars of today readily apply to Chaucer today’s insights concerning metatextuality and metanarrativity. Chaucerians proclaim that the central thematics and the central functioning of the Canterbury Tales concern tale-telling, therefore that the tales themselves and the competition and social tension between the tellers exist primarily as textual hermeneutics. They serve as contributions to an ongoing debate on tales, their telling, and their interpretation; therefore the tales of Canterbury, in the spirit of metanarrativity, reflect, most of all, how the Canterbury Tales came into being. This thematic is indeed important in Chaucer, as it is in other great medieval writers: Jean de Meun, Machaut, and Froissart, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. It is one among a number of central issues raised on the

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road to Canterbury. However, again that which is one among many in Chaucer proves to be absolutely central – one among two or three – in Longfellow. What little moderate difference of opinion (nothing comparable to the heated personal and/or ideological divergences in Chaucer) we can find in Tales of a Wayside Inn concerns uniquely the difference between good and bad stories and, consequently, which ones should be told and which not. The interludes relate this moderate, genteel divergence in aesthetics. The Theologian condemns “old Italian tales,” including the Decameron, for being “trifling, dull, or lewd” (41); the Student defends them, observing that they were sources for “imperial Shakespeare” (42). After the Theologian’s sombre “Torquemada,” the Student observes that the Italian stories “Would cheer us and delight us more,/Give greater pleasure and less pain” (120) than these Spanish tragedies. At one point the Poet, reacting against a plethora of old-world tales, will tell “Something of our New England earth” (164), a story young and fresh. The Student replies here (165), and the Theologian later (172), that old legends of Europe are just as good. In Part Third the Sicilian avers he wants happy, sunny tales (195–96). Not until I tell mine! replies the Poet. When the Student praises the Theologian’s “Elizabeth” as worthy of a German bard, the Theologian insists, “with some warmth” (226) that his story is true and no invention of his own. “ ‘It matters little,’ quoth the Jew; ‘The cloak of truth is lined with lies’ ” (227). Upon which, the Sicilian announces his own story to be “A naked falsehood and absurd/As mortal ever told or heard.” The issue of “true” or invented also comes up after the Spanish Jew’s Second Tale, “Scanderbeg” (246). Later, it is the Theologian who backs simple, old, native, homespun tales while the Student – now surely echoing Longfellow – argues that “Poets – the best of them – are birds/Of passage” (252), who range all over to bring home seeds that will germinate, consequently that one ought never to restrict them to their back yard. Theory of subjectivity and theory of metatextuality are insightful twentieth-century approaches that can be applied to literature anywhere. Yet it ought to be clear that such approaches are part of a twentiethcentury mind-set and, consequently, will be more obviously employed with modern writers who themselves share consciously some of our twentieth-century concerns. What is central to a Proust or a Gide will also be central (in diluted form) to a Longfellow and will be found – but only combined with many other elements – in a Chaucer. Also, what today’s critic deems to be important in a work of art does not, in and of itself, determine value. A less-than-great poet such as Longfellow can be more

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preoccupied with story-telling and with narrativity than a supremely great poet like Chaucer, who will be aware of them and also of allegory, Christian typology, and the three registers of style in rhetoric. Criticism has always to be tempered by and enriched with history, and both of them by and with common sense. It is patent that Longfellow is no Chaucer nor, to his credit, did he ever claim to be. On its own terms and in its own time frame, Tales of a Wayside Inn is a successful long poem in what we can call the New England Biedermeier vein, successful as poetry and in its capacity to please the contemporary Regents of Parnassus and the relatively vast literary public on both sides of the ocean.25 Longfellow and Victor Hugo may have been the last to achieve that feat. The “Sudbury Tales” also makes a significant contribution to medievalism. By choosing to cultivate a medieval structure and to remake a medieval work of art, by turning to the Middle Ages for subject-matter – the stories – and by emphasising the medievalness, Longfellow valorises the Middle Ages. For him, the Middle Ages was a golden age in the past, a treasure house of myths, legends, and story-telling, and also a time when people led lives of chivalry and piety. This age he contrasts to his own time of grasping materialism and unseemly physicality.26 In addition, the Middle Ages was a period of supremely rich cultural production on the European continent. Longfellow chose medieval high culture – and not classical antiquity – to be his source for the translatio studii, actually a translatio litterarum, that he devoted a lifetime to bring about: European tradition and the European past as a launching-point for the new American literary culture. If this analysis is accurate, in the great divide which characterises our literature, Longfellow stands on the side of Eliot and Pound, not Whitman and Sandburg. Indeed, Norman Holmes Pearson, one of the most intelligent critics to have written on Longfellow, identifies him as a precursor of Eliot.27 So also does Dana Gioia in the Columbia History of American Poetry.28 This allegiance helps to explain the decline in Longfellow’s stature in the American literature canon, for the man who had been the most famous, successful, and beloved poet of the English-speaking world underwent, as one critic puts it, “the long slow slide from canonical shrine to antiquary shop.”29 Of the three forces or elements that Lawrence Buell (viii) cites as instrumental in Longfellow’s decline – the scholarly, the modernist, and the American-centered – the third is surely not the least important. An American-centered or nativist ideology has been largely dominant in American-studies circles since the founding of the discipline.30 This current can be situated on the Left. Literature as institution

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is indeed shaped by socio-political forces, which, however, come from the Left as easily as from the Right. Consequently, aside from the aesthetic, some Americanists will always raise a Whitman or a Dickinson above a Longfellow on the basis of ideology, and, for the same reasons of ideology, find excuses to bring down Eliot and Pound.31 At some time in the future, perhaps after the demise of race, gender, and ethnicity as the chief concerns of literary study, will Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, and the others be restored to a central place in American cultural history and the history and criticism of our poetry? Medievalism may contribute to the revaluation. Given that inherent in modernism is the reaction against modernity, medievalism becomes almost as central to the modernist experience as it was to romanticism.32 Longfellow’s medievalism is romantic and also modern; and his reaction to modernity makes him, in some respects, more genuinely modern than, say, Emerson. Medievalism also reminds us of the truth, C.S. Lewis’s truth, that our contemporary modernity (now, a postmodernity or postmodernism) is simply one period like so many in the past and that it and its dominant ideology will give way to others in the future.33 Medievalism then can not only explain works of art, in the past and the present; it can also contribute to revising the canon, in the present and the future, and to serving as a counterweight to the extremes of ideology – the aesthetics of denunciation34 – which condemn all the past and all our high culture – classical, medieval, modern, and everything in between. NOTES 1. Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 4. 2. Published in three parts: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 1–225; Three Books of Song (Boston: Osgood and Company, 1872), 1–204; Aftermath (Boston: Osgood and Company, 1873), 1–144. I shall quote from Volume 4 of The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Riverside Edition,” 6 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886). Selections from Tales of a Wayside Inn are to be found in the Penguin Classics, Lawrence Buell, ed., Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 148–66, and the Library of America, J.D. McClatchy, ed., Poems and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 2000), 354–471. 3. This phrase alludes to the distinguished literary study by Donald R.

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Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 4. See Moreland’s strong formulation in The Medievalist Impulse, 12: “The medievalist impulse clearly runs counter to the major American cultural tradition at every point. Medievalism is feudal and aristocratic rather than capitalistic and democratic, Roman Catholic rather than Puritan, European rather than nationalist American, and regressive rather than progressive. This impulse emerged only as American culture underwent a transformation during which the traditional order broke down, a transformation whose effects we are still feeling. The medievalist impulse expresses the desire for a golden past – an age of order, stability, beauty, and faith – at a time of radical change in what seemed to many an all too gilded present.” 5. For example, Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 2, 152–79; Edward L. Hirsh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Pamphlets on American Writers 35 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964); Phyllis Franklin, “The Importance of Time in Longfellow’s Works,” in J. Chesley Mathews, ed., Henry W. Longfellow Reconsidered: A Symposium (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1970), 14–22. 6. I discuss these matters in In Defense of French Poetry: An Essay in Revaluation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 56–70, and “Contre la fin’ amor? Contre la femme? Une relecture de textes du Moyen Age,” in Keith Busby and Erik Kooper, eds., Courtly Literature: Culture and Context (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 61–82. 7. See Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–98), esp. vols. 1 and 2. 8. The semi-exception is “Emma and Eginhard” (201–8), where the clerk is preferred by Charlemagne’s daughter over nobles and warriors and where, after having spent part of the night, he leaves her chamber in the morning. What they do in her chamber is left unsaid. Perhaps only mutual avowals of love and the recitation of poetry? 9. Longfellow published in Putnam’s Monthly (May 1853) his translation of a tale from Il Pecorone by Giovanni Fiorentino, entitled “Galgano.” This text, which recounts how the protagonist, though sorely tempted, resists the advances of a married lady, was to have been included in Tales of a Wayside Inn. However, Longfellow set in its place the chaste “Ser Federigo,” and “Galgano,” relegated to oblivion, never appeared in any collection of the master’s works. See Steven Allaback, “Longfellow’s ‘Galgano’,” American Literature 45 (1974–75): 210–19. 10. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 123. 11. Cited by James Taft Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow, with Special Reference to His Relations to Germany (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 152. 12. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960); see also An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and

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Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), and The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). 13. Hans Robert Jauss, “La douceur du foyer: Lyrik des Jahres 1857 als Muster der Vermittlung sozialer Normen,” in his Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik I (Munich: Fink, 1977), 343–76. I have discussed this question in A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), chap. 13; “Aubanel’s Mióugrano and the Romantic Persona: A Modern Reading,” Tenso 3 (1987–88): 43–57; and “Dante on the Edwardian Stage: Stephen Phillips’s Paolo and Francesca,” in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 255–61. See, from a quite different perspective, the insightful article by Eric L. Haralson, “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (1996–97): 327–55 (329), where he alludes to Longfellow’s “advocacy of a cross-gendered sensibility – and, crucially, of a ‘sentimental’ masculinity – that answered to the experiential trials and affective needs of his audience.” 14. On the fragment in modern literature and art, Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik: Von Baudelaire bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956); David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Deborah A. Harter, Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 15. The seminal volumes from the Robertsonian or exegetical approach are D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); Bernard F. Huppé and Robertson, Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1964); John V. Fleming, The “Roman de la Rose”: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Although the change of fashion in English studies has proved to be so rapid that, nowadays, Robertson is neglected, his impact was enormous and, in the long run, beneficial. I profited from this approach as a way into Renaissance and baroque French epic and into Catholic writers of the twentieth century, in A Muse for Heroes, chaps. 7–10, 18. 16. However, for such a structure – the inn as “a stage on the road of eternal ideal history,” and specifically of American history – see Robert Stafford

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Ward, “The Influence of Vico upon Longfellow,” in Henry W. Longfellow Reconsidered, 57–62 (59). 17. A number of recent books treat the French and Italian presence in Chaucer as more than source study and more than how he purportedly always improves upon his sources: Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Richard Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in “The Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman antique” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); N.S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Lee Patterson demystifies “Whig literary history” in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 18. The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 3, 200. First edition, “The Masque of Pandora” and Other Poems (Boston: Osgood and Company, 1875), 134. See Nancy L. Tenfelde, “Longfellow’s ‘Chaucer,’ ” Explicator 22:7 (March 1964), No. 55. 19. As Buell observes, in his introduction to the Selected Poems, xiv, Longfellow’s first six published books were foreign language texts (for French, Italian, and Spanish); and his first published book of verse was the 1833 translation of the Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique. Longfellow also edited the 800-page Poets and Poetry of Europe (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845) and Poems of Places, in thirty-one volumes (Boston: Osgood and Company, 1876–79). Consult, among other studies, Gary Scharnhorst, “Longfellow as a Translator,” Translation Review 12 (1983): 23–27. 20. The work on Longfellow and his sources is both immense and of uneven quality. The groundwork was laid by Hermann Varnhagen, Longfellows “Tales of a Wayside Inn” und ihre Quellen (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1884) and Paul Morin, Les Sources de l’œuvre de Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Paris: Larose, 1893). Among the more recent general studies, Iris Lilian Whitman, Longfellow and Spain (New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1927); James Taft Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow (as in note 11); Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia: A Study of the Poet’s Relationship with the Northern Languages and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947); Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); and Kenneth

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Walter Cameron, Longfellow’s Reading in Libraries: The Charging Records of a Learned Poet Interpreted (Hartford: American Transcendental Books, 1973). 21. C.S. Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” in his Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 27–44. Originally published in 1932. 22. Since 1985, notable examples are: Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the “Canterbury Tales” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Lisa J. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991); Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Robert S. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). 23. Or, in the singular, a focus or vector of forces, a literary construct, and a textual artifact. 24. Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 205–36 (208), notes some correlation between the tellers and their tales: the Spanish Jew recounts dark legends from the East; the Musician, Norse material; the Theologian, tales that have to do with religion; and the Landlord, tales of New England. Here one can add that the Sicilian’s tales all come from Italy. 25. Arvin, for one, believes that Tales of a Wayside Inn is “Longfellow’s major achievement as a poet” (Longfellow, 236). 26. In a very perceptive study Kenneth Hovey, “ ‘A Psalm of Life’ Reconsidered: The Dialogue of Western Literature and Monologue of Young America,” American Transcendental Quarterly N.S. 1 (1987): 3–19, observes two voices in Longfellow and in his vision of the history of poetry: the aspirer and the skeptic. Aspiration includes much of the Middle Ages, whereas cynicism is ascribed to modern writers such as Voltaire, Byron, Musset, Heine, and Poe. 27. Norman Holmes Pearson, “Both Longfellows,” in his American Literary Fathers, Shinji Takuwa, ed. (Kyoto: Apollon-sha, nd), 65–92. 28. Dana Gioia, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” in Jay Parini, ed., The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 64–96. 29. Haralson, “Mars in Petticoats,” 328. Arvin, Longfellow, 320, quotes Van Wyck Brooks who, in 1915, wrote: “Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.” Richard Ruland, “Longfellow and the Modern Reader,” English Journal 55 (1966): 661–68 (662), quotes Ludwig Lewishon

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who, in 1932, wrote: “Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?” Clarence Wolfshohl, “Blown Out of the Canon: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Reputation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Philological Papers (West Virginia University) 42–43 (1997): 115–20 (116), notes that the MLA CD-Rom Index, from 1981 to 1995, registered seventy-four articles on Longfellow, 894 on Whitman and 1542 on Eliot. To cite one example, Michael J. Colacurcio, Doctrine and Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England (New York: Routledge, 1997), discusses or alludes to approximately seventy-five writers from the colonial period to the early twentieth century. None of the Fireside Poets (Bryant, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier) is mentioned. 30. For revisionist scrutiny of American Studies, as discipline and ideology and as it relates to the poetic canon, see, among others, Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1900–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); William C. Spengemann, A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989); Peter Carafiol, The American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly Activity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 31. The excuses are accusations of fascism and anti-Semitism. See Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Eugene Goodheart, Does Literary Studies Have a Future? (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 112, observes pertinently: “Unfortunately, the preoccupation with anti-Semitism consumes Julius’s view of Eliot. The persuaded reader should come away from the book believing not simply that anti-Semitism infects Eliot’s work, but that it is his muse. Critical balance is lost in an effort to indict the poet.” I recommend, as a much more subtle and nuanced view of the topic, the earlier study by William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973). 32. On medievalism as a constituent trait of romanticism, see Leslie J. Workman, “Medievalism and Romanticism,” Poetica 39–40 (1994): 1–44. 33. John Lawlor observes that Lewis “was fond of maintaining that the present was itself ‘only a period’ (a bad one, in his view); but he was not prepared to see the past as only a period.” Lawlor, “The Tutor and the Scholar,” in Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 67–85 (74). 34. Or a “reading for evil,” so termed by Jeffrey Wallen in Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3, 135, 137, 140.

Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism Clare A. Simmons “All baronets are bad,” observes Ruth, a professional bridesmaid, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 operetta Ruddigore. Yet the baronets of Ruddigore are not merely bad, but cursed to be so. According to Dame Hannah, in the reign of James I, the first baronet of Ruddigore, Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, spent “his leisure and his riches” in “persecuting witches.” Finally, a witch whom he was roasting on the village green uttered the following curse: Each lord of Ruddigore, Despite his best endeavour, Shall do one crime, or more, Once every day, for ever! This doom he can’t defy, However he may try, For should he stay His hand, that day In torture he shall die!1 As a result, whoever holds the title has to commit crimes, or die. In making the baronets of Ruddigore cursed by the need to do evil deeds, the librettist W.S. Gilbert was playfully drawing attention to the nineteenthcentury tendency in both the novel and stage-melodrama to present baronets as bad. I hope here briefly to sketch the history of bad baronets in nineteenth-century British literature, and tentatively to suggest why they might be bad. The question has some social relevance at a time when through the reform of the House of Lords, many other British titles are becoming like baronetcies: that is, the title will in most cases indicate a Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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family of longstanding recognition, but will have no other privileges. My main purpose here, however, is to consider how the presentation of baronets sheds light on the pervasiveness of medieval themes and motifs in British culture, so that even an institution like the baronetage, which simply did not exist in medieval times, becomes steeped in a medieval mystique, notably through the function of a curse. At first consideration, the representation of baronets as bad in melodrama and the novel, genres drawing largely upon a middle-class readership, might appear antimedievalist, a rejection of traditional, rather than earned, status, and a way in which middle-class authors and readers can feel a superiority over the lowest-ranking of the titled classes. But as I shall argue, surprisingly often, implied critiques of baronets are themselves medievalist. The history of baronets was readily available to nineteenth-century readers. The word “baronet” occurs in medieval English writings, yet its precise meaning is unclear until James I of England and VI of Scotland established the rank in 1611. Dame Hannah’s song in Ruddigore hence appropriately links the quasi-medieval institution of the baronetage with another quasi-medieval practice of the reign of James I, the legal pursuit of witches. James’s purpose in establishing the order of baronets was very clear: he wanted to raise money for his Irish campaign, and especially the subjugation of Ulster. Even William Betham, whose 1801 history of the baronetage, marketed by subscription directly to baronets, is as sympathetic as possible, can only concede the king’s financial motivations: . . . in order to preserve [Ulster’s] subjection, and encourage a plantation therein by the English, [the king] instituted the hereditary dignity of Baronet, May 11, 1611. They engaged singly to maintain 30 foot soldiers in Ireland, for three years, at the rate of 8d. English by the day; and to pay the first year’s wages into the Exchequer, at one payment, upon passing their patents, which with fees and honours, amounted to near £1200.2 In a further hint that this was a quasi-feudal title where the king did all the taking and none of the giving, baronets were also required to demonstrate an annual income from property of £1000, a far from insignificant sum. To preserve the exclusive nature of the rank, James promised to limit number of baronets to 200, but the promise was continuously broken: Betham lists over 500 baronetcies by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and states that the number rose by 262 between 1741 (when Thomas Wotton had published a baronetage) and 1800.

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For their capital investment, the baronets did not receive any hereditary privileges, such as a seat in the House of Lords. They did gain the hereditary of “Sir” attached to their given name, like that of a knight. They also had the right to a coat of arms, incorporating the badge of Ulster, or “Argent, a Hand, sinister, couped at the wrist, extended in Pale, Gules” – that is, a raised open hand on a silver background. In theory, they could claim knighthood for their eldest sons on request, and fight near the Royal Standard in battle, but these medievalist links to the age of chivalry were rapidly neglected, especially since most baronets, both fictional and living, seem to have been averse to any kind of fighting that might place their lives in danger. Later monarchs seemed to have little trouble finding people willing to pay for these privileges. Charles I created more, with the specific goal of raising revenue for his Canadian campaign, while the Georges tended to use the title more as a reward for political services rendered than as a means of gaining hard currency. The British government bestowed baronetages at least until 1960, after which non-hereditary honours such as life-peerages, knighthoods, and British Empire medals became the standard for rewarding citizens who had won the Government’s approval. These privileges may not at first consideration seem a good return on an investment of money or loyalty, but implied in the title is ancient nobility. Even though Betham had revealed the strictly financial motives behind the title, he had chosen to do so in a footnote to his main text, which insists that baronets: . . . were, at their original institution, carefully selected from the distinguished families of the gentry; with the indispensable requisite of honourable descent: holding the next degree to Peerage, and secured by royal covenant of his majesty, James I, that neither he, nor his successors, should ever create any hereditary honour, between them and the peers of the realm.3 Betham’s observations confirm that from the outset, baronets made some effort to claim a medieval descent and to point out the connections between their title and medieval knighthood. In reality, as he would have been fully aware, some of the baronets may have been members of “distinguished families,” but others devised ancient descent through personal ingenuity, or failing that, by mail order from a professional genealogist with access to the Herald’s College, the archive devoted to family pedigrees. The title of baronet was a convenient means of giving wealthy families a historic legitimacy to their social status. James I had made this

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easier for them from the outset since the word “baronet” resembles the term “knight banneret,” a medieval order of knighthood that carried obligations to provide the king with armed men. Thomas Wotton’s 1741 baronetage, the earliest book listing all baronets and pedigrees that I have found, claims that baronets were the same as knights banneret: Baronets, then, (as appears before by the name) are an inferior sort of Barons, and seem constituted in the room of the ancient Vavasours, or Vavasors, between the Barones of England, and the order of knighthood, taking place next to the Barons, which was a dignity that seems to have come to us from the French.4 Whereas the order of barons, in Wotton’s opinion, entered England at the time of the Norman Conquest, the order of baronets is a British institution with medieval roots. Sir Walter Scott was too honest a baronet, and too good a medieval scholar, to allow this to pass. In his 1818 “Essay on Chivalry,” Scott explains the duties of a knight banneret, including some that James I may have deliberately replicated in establishing the order of baronet, such as the obligation to supply at least thirty armed men. But he then notes that “the degree of Baronet, or of hereditary knighthood, might have been, with greater propriety, termed an inferior rank of noblesse, rather than an Order of Chivalry.” He then goes on to remark: “The creation of this dignity, as is well known, was a device of James I to fill those coffers which his folly and pretension had emptied.”5 Scott’s own life nevertheless demonstrates a yearning for the age of chivalry, and even though Scott perfectly understood the modernity of his title, in Abbotsford he created his own medieval world.6 Scott moreover fulfilled the duties of a “banneret” even before he became a “baronet,” since during the wars against France in the 1790s, he helped form a volunteer cavalry regiment, a line of civil defense that fortunately never had to be tested.7 Even if some baronets such as Scott were only partly convinced by their own medievalist fantasies, being a baronet and claiming ancient descent went hand in hand. The lines of descent in books such as Betham’s Baronetage are astonishing works of medievalist imagination. Just about every family awarded a baronetcy by the Stuarts manages to claim descent from someone who came over with William the Conqueror, although one or two prove more original. The Temples of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, for example, were, “according to many genealogists,” descended from Leofric and Godiva; while the Wakes of Somerset, evidently very proud of their name, claimed ancestry both from

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Hugh de Wac, who came over with William the Conqueror, on the male side; and from Hereward the Wake, the Saxon who opposed William, on the female side. Later, the Blake family claimed descent from a certain Ap Lake, who was one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.8 Presumably, most baronets managed to believe their own myths of origin. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a book that, like the baronetage, creates an intricate record of precisely who is who, Sir Leicester Dedlock’s identity rests on the firm conviction that his family was “as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable.”9 While these claims to ancient knightly honour did not necessarily convince the public of baronets’ chivalry, critique of the class-structure in fictional representations of baronets remains strangely muted. As propertyowners, baronets are in a position to improve society, yet in fiction they earn curses not because of an inherent sense that an aristocracy is an evil institution and that baronets, as the titled classes closest to commoners, are the easiest targets; but rather because they do not carry through their feudal obligations when they abuse their social position and exploit women and the poor. For all their medievalist self-representation, baronets can still be seen as upstart aristocrats whose families used wealth and political influence to gain their titles, in contrast with lords who can trace their titles back to ancient times. The apparent anti-medievalism of the Victorian writer’s attack on baronets, then, proves to be simply medievalism of a different kind. Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil, Or, The Two Nations illustrates this selective medievalism. By early Victorian times, baronets had a reputation for being querulous, particularly since many seemed to have forgotten the origin of their titles. Disraeli humorously depicts complaining baronets through Sir Vavasour Firebrace, whose name recalls the medieval rank from which Thomas Wotton had claimed that the idea of the baronetcy was derived. Sir Vavasour tries to interest Earl de Mowbray in a petition for reviving the dignity of the baronetcy, since Mowbray is both an earl and a baronet.10 In fact, Earl de Mowbray, described as “the most aristocratic of breathing beings” who emblazons his coat of arms on every available surface, would probably prefer not to be reminded that about fifty years before, his father John Warren took George III’s side in a political matter: “Burke denounced him; the king made him a baronet” (Sybil, 109), the start of the family’s rapid rise to an earldom. The Earl’s daughter Lady Joan tells Sir Vavasour “a baronetcy has become the distinction of the middle class; a physician, our physician for example, is a baronet; and I dare say some of our tradesmen; brewers, or people of that class. An attempt to elevate them into an order of the

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nobility, however inferior, would partake in some degree of the ridiculous” (Sybil, 139). What is really ridiculous, of course, is Lady Joan’s lack of historical awareness, which Disraeli mocks as much as he does Sir Vavasour’s aristocratic ambitions. Her father rapidly changes the subject, and Sir Vavasour’s only recourse is to change himself: a professional genealogist at the Herald’s College finds him a baronial title of his own, and once he is a lord he does not seem to care about baronets any more. Although the character of Sir Vavasour Firebrace seems exaggerated for comic effect, it may be influenced by a real baronet, although one of new creation, Sir Egerton Brydges. Brydges was so obsessed with pedigrees that he devoted all his family’s resources to trying to claim the barony of Chandos, very likely forging the supporting evidence that was repeatedly rejected by the courts.11 Mark Girouard notes that Brydges’s medievalist dreams were an influence on a young son of a baronet, Charles Lamb. Lamb’s father’s title was of recent creation, yet he had aristocratic connections: his half-brother the Earl of Eglinton sponsored the infamous Eglinton Tournament of 1839 where young gentlemen tried to become medieval knights and exposed themselves both to mud and rain and to major public ridicule. Charles Lamb became so consumed with pedigrees that he spent the last years of his short life constructing escutcheons for his hundreds of pet guinea-pigs.12 Brydges and Lamb illustrate a solipsistic tendency even among real baronets to spend their time thinking about being baronets, famously represented in fiction both in Bleak House and in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, where we are told that Sir Walter Eliot “for his own amusement, took up no book but the Baronetage.”13 Even this leaves Sir Walter with a range of reading: by the early years of the nineteenth century, at least four baronetages (those of Wotton, 1741; Betham, 1801; Debrett, 1802; and Miller, 1804) were available for careful study. John Burke of Burke’s Peerage fame had entered the genealogy business by the 1830s, and by 1855, baronets of limited means could study Hardwicke’s Shilling Baronetage. Baronets’ reputation as complainers solipsistically trying to preserve their niche in society may partly explain why they fare badly in nineteenthcentury literature, but what seems to cause the most resentment among the middle classes is their claim of feudal privilege. Although they are not lords, literary baronets, as the chief local landowners, frequently claim the unofficial title of “lord of the manor,” as in Ruddigore. Their position dependant on both birth and gender – primogeniture dictates that baronets have to be male, and they are known by their male given name – they claim an inherited right to treat those living on or near their property as feudal inferiors. Yet works such as Sybil that make a clear

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distinction between recent titles and ancient nobility are far from anti-medievalist. The positive portrayal of the saintly Anglican clergyman Aubrey St. Lys, “a younger son of the most ancient Norman family in England” (Sybil 110), demonstrates that Disraeli accepts that Norman blood is a sign of aristocracy.14 In contrast, the baronet is bad because he is claiming feudal privilege that he did not have in medieval times, rather than the literature implying that all pretensions to nobility should be abandoned in an age of progress. Foolish or wicked aristocrats of higher ranks certainly occur in English writing, but with nothing like the regularity of bad baronets.15 Self-evidently, not all baronets are bad, even in fiction. In the eighteenth century, the presentation seems to be fairly evenly balanced. In Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754), for example, the character is a model baronet in every respect. Yet Sir Charles Grandison is in this as in many ways the exception that proves the rule. He enters the novel in direct contrast to Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, repeatedly described as a “devilish” man who not only kidnaps young ladies but refuses to believe in the value of higher education.16 Even in the nineteenth century, some baronets, such as Sir James Chettam in Middlemarch (1871–72) and Sir Michael Audley and Sir Harry Towers in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) are simply not as intelligent as the women with whom they interact. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, in Anthony Trollope’s relentlessly gloomy short novel of that title, is not a bad baronet, but at his death the title will go to his nephew George, described as “a brute, unredeemed by any one manly gift; idle, self-indulgent, false, and without a principle.”17 The best baronets of all tend to be those who can prove a true medieval ancestry by bearing the traits of their ancient forebears: for example, Sir Henry Curtis of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is described as like an “ancient Dane” of the Viking era.18 Even then, the reason why he is looking for the mines is a family quarrel over a subject always close to baronets’ hearts, namely, inheritances. These, though, are the best of a thoroughly bad lot. Even at the beginning of the century, baronets are a species on the wane, the biological image building as the century progresses. To start at the beginning, the Rackrents, the baronets of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), are in a constant state of disarray. Efforts like imprisoning their wives for years in order to persuade them to give up their diamonds prove to no avail, and the Rackrents are said by the “editor” of the narrative to be now extinct. In Thomas Love Peacock’s 1817 novel Melincourt, Sir Oran Haut-Ton, Baronet, is not really bad, but an affable individual who is elected to Parliament. He also happens to

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be an orangutan, but this does not seem a problem to anyone, except those who choose to extrapolate from his social success that humans (or at least baronets) are in a constant state of decline. As we move into the nineteenth century, baronets are increasingly unpleasant men, and are frequently used in an almost surreal way to suggest both degeneracy and a regret for the loss of the past. Rather than of ancient descent, the fictional baronet is often questionably British; in many cases, baronets demonstrate foreign or exotic tastes even to the extent of trying to revive the supposed continental medieval practice of the droit du seigneur. Lords of the manor might seem familiarly English: baronets, though, often embody what for the nineteenth-century reader were disturbingly un-English qualities. Baronets, then, can be bad either because they are not medievalist enough, or because they embody the wrong kind of medievalism. In the first category is Sir Jasper Denison of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1865 novel Sir Jasper’s Tenant. As her letters reveal, Braddon consciously set out to write a best-selling sensation novel, and the only variation on the standard “evil twin” plot device is that in this case, one twin is simply more evil than the other.19 The presentation of Sir Jasper Denison, though, reveals some interesting middle-class ideas about how the landed gentry should conduct themselves. Sir Jasper pointedly avoids everything medieval: he rents out his haunted “Hermitage” with its “picturesque medievalism” rather than live in it himself; tells his tenant George Pauncefort that “I don’t believe in the common talk about a rich man’s duty towards society”; and upon inviting him to visit at Christmas, promises him: No would-be medievalism, – boars’ heads with lemons in their mouths, rejoicing retainers, fiddlers in the music-gallery, and so on; none of your Christmas-in-the-olden-time absurdities . . .20 His personal taste is instead classical and Orientalist. Repeatedly called a “Sybarite,” Sir Jasper is an atheist devotee of Voltaire who dresses like an Eastern potentate and enjoys intellectual discussions and collecting art. His particular favourite is the English artist William Etty (1787–1849), who was best known for the fleshly emphasis of his studies of nudes. Sir Jasper remarks: My Etty used to invest his commonest models with the divinity of grace. He never painted what he saw – he painted what he felt; and the students in the life Academy wondered as they looked over his shoulder and compared the creature on his

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canvas with the faded model. You cannot get goddesses for a shilling an hour. (2, 147–48) Although the baronet is talking about female models here, Etty was so preoccupied by the male nude that even after he was a successful Royal Academician he continued to attend the male life-drawing class, and to the Victorian reader, an obsession with Etty might have suggested that Sir Jasper’s tastes were “Greek” in the homoerotic sense.21 When Sir Jasper becomes entangled with Blanche Harding, an evil twin masquerading as a widow who makes the most of her fleshly appearance, he privately describes his feelings towards her not in terms of heterosexual desire, but through parallels with friendships between males: “There might be times when I should find her a nuisance,” thought the Baronet. “Even one’s dearest friend is apt to degenerate into a nuisance. I daresay Orestes was often bored by Pylades, and Damon occasionally weary of Pythias, and Socrates tired of Plato, and Pope disgusted with Bolingbroke, and Lamb heartily sick of Coleridge. But I could send her off on a round of visits, or get rid of her in some equally civil manner. She would be mine – my goods, my chattels, my house, my household stuff, my field, my barn . . .” (2, 145) Sir Jasper wishes to possess Blanche Harding like a work of art, and it is probably a deliberate allusion that like the Duke in Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” who keeps a portrait of his deceased wife behind a curtain, Sir Jasper owns a bronze statue of Neptune. The narrative emphasises that Sir Jasper is not actively wicked: Murder, however neatly it may be executed, is a crime attended with unutterable inconvenience. A combination of circumstances might have arisen under which it would have been possible for Sir Jasper to look on and see a murder committed; but under no possible phase of events could the Baronet have done the deed. He had been a disciple of Voltaire ever since his boyhood; he had looked up at the stars, and admired them with the sensuous admiration of a Sardanapalus, and had rarely lost an opportunity of insulting their mighty Creator with a covert sneer; but he had never in his life done any thing particularly wicked, chiefly because he knew very well that every kind of sin is so apt to entail trouble and vexation upon the sinner. (1, 155)

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Sir Jasper’s passivity allows Blanche Harding to work upon him, and also causes him to ignore the needs of his daughter Marcia, who is described as “almost like the image of a mediaeval saint keeping guard over a tomb” (1, 45) and who stands in stark contrast to her father’s contempt for the medieval tradition. Fortunately, Blanche Harding’s true identity as an evil twin is exposed, and Marcia is able to marry George Pauncefort, who is really the true aristocrat Godfrey Pierrepoint of ancient Norman descent; they go to live in his castle and fulfil their feudal obligations to the poor. Hence although Sir Jasper’s Tenant might appear to be attacking the degeneracy of baronets, the heroine, although the daughter of a baronet and a former Miss Jones whose father was “something in the City,” is rewarded for her medievalism when she becomes a true feudal aristocrat. Sir Jasper Denison is pointedly anti-medievalist; more often, however, fictional baronets are bad because they embody a foreign kind of medievalism. In particular, they attempt to assert a supposed medieval practice that had never been recognised in Britain, the droit du seigneur. Although Alain Boureau has recently argued that the droit du seigneur did not exist as a right in medieval Europe,22 nineteenth-century Britons were familiar with the idea from a variety of sources, notably versions of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro. For example, in Thomas Holcroft’s 1785 English adaptation of the drama, The Follies of a Day, “Susan” reminds her fiancé Figaro that Count Almaviva “during the first transports of love” for his wife Rosina “abolished a certain gothic right” (the droit du seigneur), then informs him that the Count is hoping to obtain from Susan on her wedding night “a right which he now most sincerely regrets he ever parted with.”23 Novels such as A Tale of Two Cities (1859) demonstrate British belief that in at least some countries in continental Europe, aristocrats could claim the ancient right of compelling lower-class women to give their virginity to their feudal superiors.24 Thus in asserting his rank and power over the bodies of lower-class women, the baronet might appear to be drawing on his medieval forebears. Yet he is simultaneously acting in a way that is not entirely English and breaking the rules of chivalry, and no Victorian novel that I am aware of leaves the sexuallypredatory baronet free from present or future punishment. These punishments, however, are strangely ritual. The heraldic badge for baronets is also known as the bloody hand, and later in the century, baronets who attempt to claim a droit du seigneur become associated with something that seems out of place in the realist world of the nineteenth-century storytelling: namely, the curse. In Victorian stage melodrama, “Curses!” is the swearword of preference of baronets who attempt to wrong their social inferiors (who in turn often display moral

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superiority). For example in Sole Survivor: A Tale of the Goodwin Sands, a play by George Conquest and Henry Petitt first published in 1876, “Sir Jasper Raymond, Bart., the Lord of the Manor,” as he is described in the cast list,25 enters the play by proposing a liaison with Lucy, the virtuous daughter of an evil lighthouse-keeper and the kindly lady who owns the local pub. Lucy points out not only that she prefers Frank the boatman, but also that Sir Jasper has a wife already. Sir Jasper attempts to murder his wife Lady Mary by arranging for a bridge to collapse under her carriage, and then tries to frame Frank for the murder of a stranger who turns out to be Frank’s father and the wealthy Lady Mary’s first husband (bigamy stories were very fashionable at this time and Lady Mary is an unintentional bigamist). The melodrama ends with a boat-chase where Sir Jasper tells his putative wife, “Then, curse you, die!” But in a struggle with Lady Mary’s first husband, who through a case of mistaken identity survived an attack by Sir Jasper’s henchman the evil lighthouse-keeper, Sir Jasper is shot dead himself. The melodrama may only be unpredictable through its extravagant use of predictable elements, but the plot’s class implications are complex. The heroic Frank may seem to announce the triumph of the virtuous lower classes, but he is not a simple boatman but a Lady’s son (the title Lady Mary would imply that she is the daughter of a Duke or an Earl). He is about to marry Lucy, whose father is going to be hanged for murder, but who has a comfortable inheritance through her mother the pub-keeper. The curse of the patriarchy of baronets has been destroyed in favour of inheritance through the female line. In the novel, the curse takes on an even more definite form. In Mrs Henry Wood’s phenomenally popular East Lynne, the young Captain Levison ominously breaks Lady Isabel Vane’s gold cross when he accidentally steps on it.26 She later leaves her husband and children to elope with him to continental Europe, but he in turn abandons her when he becomes a baronet. Sir Francis Levison is also a murderer, and at the end of the story, when all secrets are revealed, he is condemned to hang. Perhaps the most familiar bad baronet of the mid-Victorian novel is Sir Percival Glyde of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Walter Hartright is already entering a strange world when he meets a mysterious woman in white who immediately asks him whether he knows “many men of the rank of Baronet?”27 Hartright deduces that a baronet has wronged her, and even though she is identified as an escaped lunatic, at the first mention of Sir Percival Glyde, he makes a connection between her words and the fiancé of Laura Fairlie, the woman he loves. And he is not wrong. Soon after, Laura receives an anonymous note that tells her:

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Sir Percival can be identified by a scar on his hand – thus he wears the badge of the baronet, the “bloody hand,” on his person. He also uses foreign means to achieve his goals when he is aided in his schemes to obtain his wife’s fortune by the self-proclaimed Italian nobleman Count Fosco. Glyde himself refers to a curse when he describes a half-drained lake as “a blot on a gentleman’s property,” then goes on to remark, “My bailiff (a superstitious idiot) says he is quite sure the lake has a curse on it, like the Dead Sea. What do you think, Fosco? It looks just the place for a murder, doesn’t it?” (230–31). Fosco disagrees, since in his opinion, the perfect crime should be undetectable. Nevertheless, their scheme for disposing of Laura Fairlie by faking her death and imprisoning her in a madhouse is foiled by the tenacity of her unaristocratic admirer Walter Hartright. Hartright’s success in defeating Glyde and Fosco and obtaining both Laura and her inheritance is often read as a triumph of the middle classes over a corrupt aristocracy. Yet even though as I have suggested, baronets are the least legitimate of the titled classes, Sir Percival Glyde is even less legitimate: he has forged his claim to the baronetcy, and is burned to death in his final attempt to conceal his bastardy.28 That Glyde is not a real baronet undermines the apparent message that the virtuous middle classes must prevail over inherited status, since Glyde’s status is the product of fraud. The theme of insanity in The Woman in White allows for the curse to be rationalised, but in other novels, curses against baronets seem fully functional. By drawing attention to ancient inheritance, baronets may have drawn upon themselves another kind of curse, namely, the curse of nature. Although Charles Darwin himself was reluctant to apply his theories of natural selection to human society, others were eager to do so in order to explain perceived social, national, and racial differences. Ironically, one of the earliest reports on the evolution debate used the language of aristocratic pedigree. The Athenaeum noted that the pro-Darwinian Thomas H. Huxley and his associates “have expressed their willingness to accept, for themselves, as well as for their friends and enemies, all actual truths, even the last humiliating truth of a pedigree not registered at Herald’s College.”29 Herbert Spencer, who, rather than Darwin, popularised the phrase “survival of the fittest,” used evolutionary

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theory to analyze society, including the origins of nobility. He argued that titles were originally ways of marking military renown, something that, as we have seen, baronets could not claim as the source of their titles.30 Spencer believed that power through inheritance was primitive, and that a progressive society needed to grant power to those with personal merits: Contrasting the two, we thus see that while the acquirement of function by inheritance conduces to rigidity of structure, the acquirement of function by efficiency conduces to plasticity of structure. Succession by descent favours the maintenance of that which exists. Succession by fitness favours transformation, and makes possible something better.31 Spencer and his followers, though, certainly did not reject the force of heredity in creating a natural leader, and Social Darwinism of the later nineteenth century generally replicates the ideas of writers such as Disraeli who argue that ancient descent determines character.32 Yet because baronets were recognised as claiming a rank that was only questionably acquired through meritorious descent, it becomes convenient to present them as a biologically doomed race, in keeping with late nineteenthcentury ideas of “degeneration.”33 If baronets are degenerate, different explanations can be found for their degeneracy than would be needed for other members of the aristocracy.34 Spencer had questioned the notion that hereditary status and moral superiority are linked: in the novel, baronets often have descents tainted by moral flaws that have become curses on their families. An early example is William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, published in 1834. The Rookwood family is genuinely old, and apparently moved seamlessly from medieval knights to Georgian baronets. The family’s genuine antiquity, however, does not protect it from multiple curses. The first of these relates how Sir Ranulph de Rokewode, who lived during the Wars of Roses, hunted down a “wretched hag” on his property with his hounds, them impaled her with a lime-tree branch. From this sprang a tree, and when a branch falls from it, a Rookwood dies.35 A second curse is that “when a Rookwood shall marry a Rookwood the end of the house draweth nigh” (Rookwood, 96). This has already come to pass: Luke Bradley, who believes himself Sir Piers’s illegitimate son, is shown his mother’s body by his grandfather (also a Rookwood in disguise). When Luke sees her wedding ring, he removes her hand and sets about claiming the baronetcy. To do this, he renounces his gipsy love

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Sybil (thus invoking a gipsy curse) and plans to marry his cousin. The gipsies do not leave their curse to destiny, but poison Sir Luke, and his plotting relatives are buried alive in their ancestral tomb. James Payn’s highly successful mystery novel Lost Sir Massingberd (1864) seems to owe a debt to Rookwood, but incorporates the later nineteenth-century idea of a hereditary taint. The baronet of the title is full-bloodedly and unequivocally wicked. His heir Marmaduke Heath says, “we are a doomed race . . . [and] our family residence is consecrated to the devil.”36 Sir Massingberd himself, a man of “Herculean proportions,” bears the family trait of what appears to be the imprint of a horseshoe on his forehead,37 and this in combination with his contemptuously curving lips give him, in the words of the story’s narrator Peter Meredith, “a demoniacal look,” or the features of “the Giant Despair” (Lost Sir Massingberd, 12). The baronet is suspected of murdering his own father, and attempts to kill his nephew in order to break the entail on his estate. He is cursed by a gipsy whose sons he has transported and jailed, and whose younger sister he attempted to seduce, but accidentally married and left a maniac through his cruelties. The gipsy queen pronounces, “May the lightning strike him in his wickedest hour! Nay, let him perish, inch by inch, within the reach of aid that shall never come, ere the God of the Poor takes him into his hand!” (62). Because everybody has a reason to detest Sir Massingberd, when he disappears, in the true detective tradition, everybody has a motive. Many years later, the curse is found to have come true: sheltering from a storm, the huge Sir Massingberd became trapped inside a hollow oak-tree, and literally perished by inches as he starved to death. Although the story of the fictional Sir Massingberd might seem bizarre, the Victorians were apparently prepared to accept that stories of real-life baronets might be just as strange. Soon after the British public had seized on the fictional account of a huge baronet who was lost, they were captivated by newspaper accounts of a huge baronet who was apparently found. The Tichborne family was so old that it was nearly as ancient as its pedigree claimed; granted a baronetcy by James I in 1620, the Tichbornes were “presumed of Saxon origin,”38 and may in fact have been able to trace their ancestry back to the twelfth century. According to Bram Stoker, the Tichbornes had, moreover, a family curse: if they neglected the poor, all their children would be daughters (that such a fate would be considered a curse is symptomatic of the baronetcy’s troubled obsession with masculinity).39 The line suffered another setback when the heir to the baronetcy, Roger Tichborne, was lost at sea in 1854. His mother refused to believe in his death, and when a 300-pound butcher

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living at Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the missing Sir Roger, she took the matter seriously. He arrived in England in late 1866, and although the butcher did not resemble the lost man in any respect, it took another eight years for a court to declare that he was not the real missing baronet, but Arthur Orton, originally from Wapping. The amount of attention this case received suggests that the British public was quite prepared to believe anything of baronets.40 Returning to fiction, the most famous instance of a cursed line of baronets appeared just after the death of Queen Victoria, namely, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who was a knight, not a baronet). The second chapter, half of the first episode published in 1901, is titled “The Curse of the Baskervilles.” Here a curse is not actually spelled out in words, but falls on the Baskerville family as the result of the seventeenth-century Sir Hugo Baskerville’s abduction of a yeoman’s daughter, as recorded in an eighteenth-century document shown to Sherlock Holmes. When the girl attempts to escape Sir Hugo, he pursues her, and his three fellow-revelers catch up with them in: a broad space in which stood two of those great stones, still to be seen there, which were set by certain forgotten peoples in days of old. The moon was shining bright upon the clearing, and there in the center lay the unhappy maid where she had fallen, dead of fear and of fatigue. But it was not the sight of her body, nor yet was it that of the body of Hugo Baskerville lying near her, which raised the hair upon the heads of these three daredevil roisterers, but it was that, standing over Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye rested upon.41 The hell-hound is associated with the entire cursed history of the Baskervilles, so that “many of the family have been unhappy in their deaths, which have been sudden, bloody, and mysterious” (Hound of the Baskervilles, 14). After the Hound has apparently finished off Sir Charles Baskerville, the last of the line is Sir Henry, a Canadian who tends to respond to Sherlock Holmes’s deductions with phrases like, “By thunder, you’re right! Well, if that isn’t smart!” (32). Sherlock Holmes discovers that the supernatural hound apparently pursuing the Baskervilles has a rational explanation, and that an apparently harmless neighbor is trying to kill off Sir Henry in order to become the next baronet. But does this mean that curses on baronets do not exist? In the case of Sir Charles, the

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curse proves effective, even if its power is psychological rather than supernatural. Moreover, the Baskerville line would either not survive or would pass into the hands of the “desperate and dangerous” Stapleton if it were not for the superior intelligence of commoners such as Sherlock Holmes. In the modern world, baronets are almost as anomalous as gigantic hell-hounds, and as in many of the other Sherlock Holmes stories, the aristocracy and gentry are dependent on Holmes’s abilities to retain their status. Finally, an even more bizarre marriage of the supernatural and the psychological curse occurs in another novel of 1901, Sir Richard Calmady, by Lucas Malet (the pen-name of Mary St. Leger Harrison, daughter of Charles Kingsley). The story opens with the standard medievalist topos of the description of the Calmady country house42 – yet forgotten by the Calmady family, and only known to the friend the self-tormenting clergyman Julius March, the baronets of Calmady are cursed. In Restoration times, Sir Thomas Calmady seduced the forester’s daughter. She attempted to bring her child to its father, but the boy was killed when his legs were run over by Sir Thomas’s wife’s carriage. The forester’s daughter cursed the baronets, so that none of them would live out a natural lifetime until: A fatherless babe to the birth shall have come, Of brother and sister shall he have none, But red-gold hair and eyes of blue, And a foot that will never know stocking or shoe, If he opens his purse to the lamenter’s cry, Then the woe shall lift and be laid for aye.43 Not long after the extraordinarily wealthy young Sir Richard Calmady’s marriage to Katherine Ormiston in 1842, he is crushed in a steeplechasing accident. Although his legs are amputated above the knees, he dies of infection. Katherine’s shock at her husband’s death is such that when her son is born some months later, he is found to be affected by “spontaneous amputation” – he has feet, but no knees or lower legs (Sir Richard Calmady, 70). Despite this start in life, the new Sir Richard actually makes an effort to be a good baronet, until he attempts to use his wealth to buy himself a wife. His mother’s companion Honoria St. Quentin, a “New Woman” and a feminist, is shocked that a young girl should have to marry without love and contrives to have the match broken off. In response, Sir Richard makes a career choice fairly common among

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baronets, goes abroad, and becomes a rake. The novel does not give details of his rakishness, but they culminate when his wicked cousin Helen, who has always had a bizarre fascination with his small stature, seduces him in the dwarf-proportioned library on his yacht, then has another boyfriend beat him senseless. Richard returns to his mother, and is comforted when Julius March finally tells him about the curse. Living up to his role as the Child of Promise, Sir Richard finds his salvation through medievalist feudalism, even though, as the first chapter has made clear, the Calmadys were not the medieval owners of the property. Honoria tells him, “You know this Brockhurst property alone would carry eight or ten more families. There’s plenty of work. It needn’t be made. It is there ready to hand. Give them good gardens, allotments if you can, and leave to keep a pig. That’s infinitely better than extravagant wages. Root them down in the soil. Let them love the place – tie them up to it.” Sir Richard apparently recognises the debt to the medievalist ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, since he responds, “Your socialism is rather quaintly crossed with feudalism, isn’t it?” (624). He becomes a good landlord caring for the poor, accepts Honoria’s marriage proposal despite the fact that earlier in the book she has pronounced herself to be “not a marrying man,” and Richard, his mother, and Honoria live together as a threesome, adopting Richard’s nephew to continue the family line. Although the story does hold out hopes of happiness to baronets who carry out the feudal obligations that their title never had, we also see a plot that contains a pun: the diminution of the titled classes. The Freudian idyll at the conclusion of the book has ended the curse, but brought no new blood into the family: by effectively marrying his mother, Richard keeps the family small. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Thomas Love Peacock had depicted an orangutan who passed muster as a baronet, yet in the post-Freudian, post-Darwinian world of Sir Richard Calmady, this baronet, who with his long, powerful arms and tiny legs, is somewhat like an orangutan; his arms are, Sir Richard says grimly, “as strong as a young bull-ape’s.”44 Baronets, who live in an imaginary medieval past, are not well adapted to survive into the twentieth century, and another way of thinking of the curse is as natural selection: the line of baronets simply will not survive, and they are doomed to degeneration. Sir Richard Calmady is set in a world where a combination of psychology and biology can be a curse; yet the means of escape from the curse is not the false medievalism of the bad baronet, but the socially-responsible medievalism of the property-owner as the heir of feudalism. The acceptable baronet must be a truly English lord of manor, whose rights are fully reciprocated

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by obligations, and who by his own choice makes an idealised medieval past a reality. Appropriately, Malet subtitled her novel A Romance.

NOTES 1. W.S. Gilbert, Ruddigore, Or, The Witch’s Curse, 1887. The Savoy Operas (Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Reference, 1994), 88. 2. William Betham, The Baronetage of England, or the History of the English Baronets, 6 vols. (Ipswich: Miller, 1801) 1, xiii. 3. Betham’s Baronetage, 1, xiii. 4. See Thomas Wotton, ed., The English Baronetage; Containing a Genealogical and Historical Account of all the English Baronets, Now Existing, 5 vols. (London: Wotton, 1741) 4, 297. 5. Sir Walter Scott, “Essay on Chivalry” (1818), The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1848), 547–48. 6. On the development of Abbotsford, see Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 147–207. 7. On Scott’s cavalry regiment see John Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 66–68. 8. See Betham’s Baronetage 1, 186; 1, 238; 3, 310. 9. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1851–52; London: Penguin, 1985), 57. 10. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, Or, The Two Nations (1845; London: Penguin, 1985), 139; subsequent references cited in the text. Baronetages list a real family of baronets whose last name was Vavasour. 11. The Autobiography of Sir Edgerton Brydges, Bart., 2 vols. (London: Conchrane and M’Crone, 1834). Brydges received the title for government service. 12. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 89–95. 13. Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818), in The Novels of Jane Austen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923, repr. 1988) 5:3. 14. See Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 103–4. 15. A literary awareness of bad baronets, and especially of Ruddigore, proves the key to the mystery in Michael Innes’s What Happened at Hazelwood (1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 16. See Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (1754). I am not discussing Tobias Smollett’s Sir Lancelot Greaves (1762) since the title character is identified as a knight, not a baronet, even though the “Sir” seems to be passed from father to son. 17. Anthony Trollope, Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1870; Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 1928), 224. Sir Harry’s name recalls medieval knighthood and fiery action, qualities that he is never able to demonstrate. 18. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885; London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994), 5. A footnote, however, reads, “Mr. Quartermain’s ideas about ancient Danes seem to be rather confused; we have always understood that they were dark-haired people. Probably he was thinking of Saxons. EDITOR.” The note hence reinforces Curtis’s Englishness. 19. See Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland, 1979), 137–38. 20. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sir Jasper’s Tenant (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1866) 1, 57; 1, 87–88. The word “medievalism,” only coined by Ruskin in the 1850s, occurs a number of times in the novel, although in the Tauchnitz edition the spelling varies. 21. On the significance of “Greek Love,” see Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley: U. California Press, 1985) and Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 22. Alain Boureau, The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 23. Thomas Holcroft, The Follies of a Day [Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro] (London, 1785), Act 1. 24. The droit du seigneur (otherwise droit de seigneur, or droit de cuissage) is not specifically mentioned in Dickens’s main sources, but features in A Tale of Two Cities as an instance of the abuses of pre-Revolutionary France. As Alain Boureau notes, eighteenth-century France did much to establish the myth as a medieval abuse. 25. George Conquest and Henry Pettit, Sole Survivor; or A Tale of the Goodwin Sands (London: Samuel French, 1876). Sir Jasper is a name especially common among baronets. In addition to Sir Jasper’s Inheritance, W.S. Gilbert used the name; and as late as 1930, P.G. Wodehouse created a Sir Jasper Addleton in “The Smile That Wins,” which also features a baronet called Sir Sutton Hartley-Wesping. See Mulliner Nights (1930–35; New York: Random House, 1965), 7–25. 26. Mrs. Henry Wood [Ellen Price], East Lynne (1861; London: Everyman, 1985), 13. 27. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860; London: Penguin, 1999), 27. Subsequent references are given in the text. 28. That “bad baronet” novels often also contain errors of identity shows the connectedness of the idea of the “bad baronet” with the “sensation novel,” produced for a largely bourgeois market, and featuring bourgeois heroes and heroines. The term “sensation novel” was in use by the early 1860s: see, for example, the article on “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (1862): 481–514; see also Patrick Brantlinger, “What is Sensational about the Sensation Novel?,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1–28. I would emphasise,

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though, that subversions of the class structure in the sensation novel are almost invariably temporary or restricted. 29. “Science: British Association,” Athenaeum 1860:2 (July 7), 19. See Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 39–40. 30. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (c. 1879; repr. Osnabruck: Otto Zeller, 1966), 2, 172. 31. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 2, 260. 32. On Disraeli’s ideas of racial inheritance, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: The “Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 33. As we have seen, baronets are frequently obsessed by being baronets, and would seem to conform to Max Nordau’s definition of “ego-maniacs” (Ichsuchtigen). Nordau notes that if an ego-maniac “is cultivated and well-to-do, or in a commanding position, he commits misdemeanours peculiar to the upper classes which have as their object not the gratification of material needs, but of other kinds of craving. He becomes a Don Juan of the drawing-room, and carries shame and dishonour without hesitation into the family of his best friend. He is a legacy-hunter, a traitor to those who trust in him, a sower of discord, and a liar.” Max Nordau, Degeneration, 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1895), 260. 34. An exception would appear to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), where Mr Hyde’s most explicitly-described crime is beating a seemingly blameless baronet to death. In this story, Hyde would seem to represent degeneracy and the baronet decent society – yet if Hyde’s crimes can be seen as a kind of liberating wish-fulfillment, perhaps they embody a secret wish in middle-class society to stamp on baronets. 35. W. Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood (1834; Philadelphia: Rittenhouse, n.d.), 8–9. In addition to bearing a striking resemblance to the “bad baronet” stories in Ruddigore and The Hound of the Baskervilles, Rookwood bears features in common with Lady Audley’s Secret, especially in the description of the property and the ominous “Lime-Tree Walk” of the later novel. 36. James Payn, Lost Sir Massingberd, A Romance of Real Life (1864; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1976), 18. Subsequent references are to this edition. Like Sir Richard Calmady, the subtitle emphasises the modern “romance.” 37. The horseshoe imprint recalls that of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, who “had a way of bending his brows, that men saw the visible mark of a horse-shoe in his forehead, deep-dinted, as if it had been stamped there” in “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Sir Robert, who observers believe has made a pact with the devil, is identified as an “auld knight” in the story, but his title appears to be inherited by his son John, so he is presumably a baronet. 38. Betham’s Baronetcy 1, 218. 39. Bram Stoker, Famous Imposters (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910), 204–5.

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40. On the Tichborne affair, see also Sebastian D.G. Knowles, The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s Ulysses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 115–27. 41. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13–14; subsequent references cited in the text. 42. The description of an aged country house that embodies the destiny of the family that lives there is also found in Rookwood and Lady Audley’s Secret. 43. Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady, A Romance (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1901), 31. Subsequent references cited in the text. 44. The idea that Richard could inherit an acquired characteristic is not, of course, Darwinian, but closer to the evolutionary theory of Lamarck.

“The Bony, Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law1 Bruce Brasington Like their ancestors at Massachusetts Bay, nineteenth-century American Protestants distrusted, even loathed, the Church of Rome. Time had not diminished the perceived threat of Rome and her Jesuit agents to the “city on the hill.”2 Rome represented everything repugnant to those who viewed themselves as the standard-bearers of Gospel salvation and enlightened modernity.3 Popular4 and academic5 cultures shared this prejudice. As Richard Hofstadter noted years ago, such hostility fanned the flames of anti-intellectualism.6 I wish to focus on one manifestation of this hostility: views on medieval canon law, especially the early canon law down to the appearance of Gratian’s Decretum in the middle of the twelfth century. Through the Internet, many of these texts, from textbooks to popular tracts, are available for study. They enable a survey of both scholarly and lay audiences. What we encounter is a decidedly mixed message, often hostile, occasionally fanciful or trivial.7 Taken together, they function as a body of folklore like modern “urban legends,” cautionary tales conveying a message about the threat of the exotic, the “other” threatening the social and religious status quo. The Matter of Early Medieval Canon Law Early canon law evolved through three distinct phases.8 From late antiquity down to the middle of the eleventh century, the tradition of the Church – from the Bible, to the canons of church councils, to papal Studies in Medievalism XII, 2002

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letters – was transmitted through a variety of collections. None had normative value; each compiler drew on older collections while adding new texts. In the early eleventh century, Bishop Burchard of Worms produced his Decretum, a harvest of this diverse tradition, which exercised immense influence during the next century.9 During the eleventh century, the ecclesiastical reform movement sparked new interest in canonical tradition. This resulted in the production of new collections both at Rome – where they promoted claims of primacy and power – and in the provinces.10 Among these many collections, those of Bishop Ivo of Chartres, especially his Panormia,11 served much the same function as had Burchard’s Decretum a century earlier. With the appearance of Gratian’s Decretum (Concordia discordantium canonum) around 1140, the Church finally gained something like Justinian’s Digest, an organised textbook of ecclesiastical law.12 Drawing upon Ivo and Burchard, along with other collections, Gratian fixed tradition in a form that would become the schoolbook for the Church’s law.13 Gratian also used a primitive dialectical hermeneutic to attempt to organise the canons and harmonise them when they appeared to be in conflict. With Gratian, canon law secured its place in the scholastic curriculum of the medieval university.

Milton, Blackstone, Assorted Colonists Dante placed Gratian among the lights of Paradise;14 the Reformation relegated him and his associates to the nether regions. In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther thundered: “The evil spirit unleashed by canon law has brought such a terrible plague and misery into the heavenly kingdom of holy Christendom, having done nothing but destroy and hinder souls by canon law. . .”15 He concluded: “Since then the pope and his followers have suspended the whole canon law as far as they themselves are concerned, and since they pay it no heed, but give thought only to their own wanton will, we should do as they do and discard these volumes. Why should we waste our time studying them!”16 Subsequent critics more or less echoed this theme.17 English Reformers were equally enthusiastic in their rejection of the medieval canons, and added as well their island’s peculiar sense of uniqueness among Christian nations. To be sure, Shakespeare did not like lawyers of either stripe, secular or ecclesiastic.18 But a particular dislike for Rome’s jurisprudents was apparent from early on. For England, and later her American colonies, the Whig hostility towards anything tainted by

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“popery” made the medieval church automatically suspect. Born under the Tudors, nurtured by Civil War and Restoration, it found its Muse – an Anti-Dante if you will – in Milton. While noting that Gratian, following St. Jerome, had collected canons affirming “the Churches were rul’d in common by the Presbyters,” he condemned St. Anselm of Canterbury: “who to uphold the points of his Prelatisme made himself a traytor to his country. . .”19 That sense of country and condemnation of the medieval Church and her law would only grow as the Protestant gentry asserted its political and cultural influence during the Restoration and Glorious Revolution.20 By the eighteenth century, Whiggish contempt for canon law was at its height.21 It took England’s particularity within the medieval church as fact. Treatises declared Rome’s failure to introduce her canons fully into medieval England.22 Most influential for American audiences was Blackstone’s Commentaries, which remained part of the legal curriculum down to the twentieth century.23 Blackstone summarised this for future generations of law students: it is most plain, that it is not on account of their being written laws, that either the canon law, or the civil law, have any obligation within this kingdom; neither do their force and efficacy depend upon their own intrinsic authority; which is the case of our written laws, or acts of parliament. They bind not the subjects of England because their materials were collected from popes or emperors; were digested by Justinian, or declared to be authentic by Gregory. These considerations give them no authority here: for the legislature of England doth not, nor ever did, recognize any foreign power. . .24 This judgment was accepted even by foreign authors like Güterbock, who noted how the English “felt a strong instinctive repugnance” to the judgments of Rome.25 Not until the late nineteenth century, thanks to the work of Maitland, would this assumption of English separateness begin to dissolve under the solvent of historical research informed by both knowledge of the continental “historical school” and critical reading of the common law.26 This tradition informed America’s earliest critics of medieval canon law. Particularly eloquent was John Adams’s Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law.27 Serialised in the Boston Gazette in 1765, it leaves no doubt where the author stands:

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To Adams, both systems embody the evil traditions against which America now stood as a bulwark of freedom and religion.29 That tyranny had been born in the Middle Ages and perpetuated under the Tudors and Stuarts, who had refused to carry the Reformation to its conclusion. On this, both philosophes and Protestant patriots could agree.30 America’s mission was, and remained, the maintenance of liberty against this “infernal confederacy.”31 The State of Antebellum Scholarship It is not surprising that few American Protestant scholars in the nineteenth century had more than a superficial, often inaccurate, knowledge of medieval canon law. While early-modern Catholic academics like the Ballerini brothers and Antonio Augustin had done much to survey the outlines of how the law had developed, this was not widely known by anglophone Protestant scholars.32 By the early nineteenth century, the German “historical school,” above all the monumental work of Savigny, was beginning to write about the origins, content, and influence of the medieval civil law – and its influence on medieval canon law as well.33 While Savigny’s achievements were known among American legal circles, American jurisprudents appear to have been more concerned with the legacy of ancient, not medieval, Rome.34 His research into the development of the ius commune, in which canon law played a key role, does not appear to have attracted any attention.35 The same appears to have been the case for canonists like Theiner, who were discovering not only new collections of law but paying closer attention to the content of these compilations.36 What reached American scholars was conveyed by general histories of the church. Some German scholars writing histories of Christianity were available in translation, and these did mention contemporary research into medieval canon law, if not in depth.37 Likewise, the English scholar Milman provided a historical outline, though not fully up-to-date.38 As far as I know, no American author attempted to write a history of early canon law.

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What passed for commentary on the medieval canons was often both inaccurate and tangled in a web of romantic legend. In on-line digital collections like the “Making of America”, one finds scattered references to Burchard of Worms by translated German authors like Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1694–1755).39 Blackstone himself comments: The canon law is a body of Roman ecclesiastical law, relative to such matters as that church either has, or has pretended to have, the proper jurisdiction over. This is compiled from the opinions of the ancient Latin Fathers, the decrees of general councils, the decretal epistles, and bulles of the holy see. All which lay in the same disorder and confusion as the Roman civil law, till about the year 1151, one Gratian an Italian monk, animated by the discovery of Justinian’s pandects at Amalfi, reduced them into some method in three books, which he entitled concordia discordia canonum, but which are generally known by the name Decretum Gratiani. These reached as low as the pontificate of Pope Alexander III.40 Prior to Gratian, apparently all was confusion. Later reference works like Chambers’s Information for the People (1857) furnished information, if wildly incorrect, about Bishop Ivo of Chartres, the most important compiler in the early twelfth century and a direct source for Gratian: “About the year 1114, a collection of the decrees of popes and cardinals was commenced by Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, and was revised and completed in 1149 by Gratian, a Benedictine monk.”41 Errors in dates (neither is correct) and factual information (there is no evidence Gratian was a Benedictine) are excusable in an age where the formal, historical study of medieval canon law had just begun. Errors in fact and interpretation can be corrected. More difficult to clear away were the clouds of romantic medievalism42 that trivialised the medieval Church and her law and obscured the very real achievements of canonists like Ivo, who had contributed so much to Gratian’s Decretum.43 Ante-Bellum Prejudices Anti-Catholic sentiment flourished in the antebellum period. If the Gothic Revival rehabilitated aspects of the Middle Ages along romantic, racist, and nationalist lines,44 the papacy and her law remained as dark as ever. Protestant children played the “Game of Pope and Pagan” and learned about Rome’s evil agents, above all the Jesuits.45 Their parents

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diverted themselves with lurid tales of Catholic atrocities. Readers were shocked and titillated, by The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu (1836),46 which purported to tell the story of a woman’s ordeal at the hands of violent, sex-crazed monks, and Quaker City, where rich men formed a secret society dedicated to enslaving poor men and women, the latter subjected to sexual predations in a “Monk’s Hall.”47 More sophisticated readers turned to authors like Thomas Richard Whitney, whose A Defence of American Policy (1856) declaimed against the “Romish theory of government” based on canon law, above all the Donation of Constantine. Whitney was no less convinced than Adams, that Protestant America and her law “indicates the opposite notion. It is opposed to the one-man power.”48 From children’s games to parlor reading, the Protestant home was a solid bastion of prejudice. Periodical literature provides an equally rich source for anti-Roman, anti-canon law sentiment. Writers and editors quickly learned to favour the sensational in order to capture an audience.49 To an author in the Princeton Review (1864), the Donation of Constantine was a striking manifestation of how “Measures of aggrandisement were taken on the most questionable principles of canon law.”50 The Apostle’s Creed convinced another that canon law served the magisterial ambition of Rome: “This theory, therefore, simply puts the Creed in the place of the Bible.”51 Gospel had been replaced by a corrupt law Rome chose to ignore when it suited her nefarious purposes.52 Canon Lawyer Jokes: St. Evona’s Choice A particularly unusual story reflecting both anti-Catholic prejudice and an ingrained distrust of lawyers in general is “St. Evona’s Choice.” A condensed version appears in Frederick Saunders’ Salad for the Social (New York, 1865): Evonn, a lawyer of Brittany, went to Rome to entreat the Pope to give the lawyers a patron saint. The Pope replied that he knew of no saint not already disposed of to some other profession. His Holiness, however, proposed that he should go round the church of Giovanni di Leiterano blindfolded, and, after saying a number of Ave Marias, the first saint he laid hold of should be his patron. This the good old lawyer undertook; and at the end of his Ave Marias, stopped at the altar of St. Michael, where he laid hold of, not the saint, but, unfortunately, the

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devil under the saint’s feet, crying out, “This is our saint, let him be our patron.”53 In the longer versions, Evona eventually dies, arrives at Heaven’s Gate, and, after initially being refused by St. Peter (“there is no room for you lawyers”) is admitted because of his reputation for honesty and probity. The news reaches Rome, and prompts a poet to scratch these lines on Evona’s tomb: “St. Evona un Briton, Advocat non Larron. Haleluiah!”54 The epitaph provides the punchline: A lawyer who wasn’t dishonest! The saint in question is Yves of Brittany, the thirteenth-century patron saint of lawyers, who practiesd in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. While at least one American, Catholic writer knew some details about his life,55 Protestant writers retelling the tale were understandably confused. Evona’s home moved: Brittany, not unexpectedly, became Britain. Writers were uncertain as to the type of law he practiesd. The tale was also abroad in England, where a correspondent to Notes and Queries attempted to set the record straight: In strict law, Sir, the profession may in courts of Momus be held bound by the act of the respectful but unlucky St. Evona; but in equity, let me respectfully claim release, for Evona was a churchman. A Templar. He failed, however, to convince the journal’s editor, who commented: We gladly insert our correspondent’s “claim to release,” but doubt whether he can establish it; inasmuch as St. Ivo or Evona, canonized on account of his rectitude and profound knowledge both of civil and canon law, was both lawyer and churchman, like the Clericus so recently discussed in our columns; and clearly sought for and obtained his patron saint in his legal character.56 The sarcastic reference to Momus, the Roman god of mockery, leaves no doubt as to where the correspondent’s sympathies lay. A medieval lawyer and churchman made a particularly repellent combination.57 Perhaps the confident assertion that he was also a Templar – which was completely untrue – further emphasised the derogatory tone. What could be more illustrative of the benighted Middle Ages than a canon lawyer (blinded – a mixed message about his ability to judge!) who groped for the Devil in the hopes of finding a saint.

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Peter, Peter, Gratian and Mom The tale of St. Evona’s choice has, at least, a burlesque quality. The lawyer may have reached first for the Devil but eventually entered heaven. Less merry, however, was the circulation in the nineteenth century of an old story that Gratian was not only brother to Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor but that their mother was a prostitute. Peter Lombard’s Sentences had compiled and organised patristic texts in much the same way as the Decretum had digested canonical tradition, while Peter Comestor was one of the leading Biblical exegetes of the Parisian schools of the late twelfth century. Medieval chronicles frequently listed them in sequence.58 Their closeness in age and similar careers made them complementary figures worthy of citation.59 This soon led to claims that they were brothers.60 This legend landed in the hands of Protestant writers. Milton certainly believed the tale. In his treatise on Doctrine and Discipline, “why divorce is not to be restrain’d by Law, it being against the Law of nature and of Nations,” he comments: That all this is true, who so desires to know at large with least pains. . . let him hast’n to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, Of the law of nature & of Nations, a work more useful and more worthy to be perus’d, whosoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, then all those decretals and sumles sums, which the Pontificall Clerks have doted on, ever since that unfortunat mother famously sinn’d thrice, and dy’d impenitent of her bringing into the world.61 English divines like William Cave added their voice to Milton’s, thus ensuring the spread of the legend into scholarly accounts of the medieval Church.62 The legend persisted well into the nineteenth century, even if some writers eventually came to recognise its implausibility. A on-line search of the British journal Notes and Queries reveals it cropping up on various occasions in the 1850s and 60s, generally in reference to earlier authors who had either challenged the story (like the fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, Antonius) or the Anglican Bishop Jeremy Taylor, who apparently had no problem with it.63 The point was the grotesque image it evoked: the sordid origins of the father of medieval canon law.

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Conclusion By the late nineteenth century, the academic interest in the Middle Ages begun with continental institutes like the Monumenta Germaniae Historica had reached American shores. The American academy cautiously began its adoption, if not “invention”, of the Middle Ages.64 Such inclusion of medieval studies in college curricula did not, however, appreciably diminish contempt and confusion surrounding medieval canon law. The History of the Middle Ages written in 1921 by the pioneering American medievalist, Dana Munro, is 401 pages long. Canon law rated three paragraphs, on pages 143, 356, and 370 respectively. The longest concerned the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries which, among authentic papal letters and conciliar canons, transmitted spurious texts advocating the power and primacy of Rome.65 Canon law remained among the features of the medieval church most repugnant to American Protestant readers. Others had more to say, but nothing flattering. The influential Protestant historian Phillip Schaff echoed earlier invective in his History of the Christian Church: This body of law was an improvement upon the arbitrary and barbaric severity of princes. It, at least, started out from the principles of justice and humanity. But it degenerated into an attempt to do for the individual action of the Christian world what the Pharisees attempted to do for Jewish life. It made the huge mistake of substituting an endless number of enactments, often the inventions of casuistry, for inclusive, comprehensive moral principles. It put a crushing restraint upon the progress of thought and bound weights, heavy to be borne, upon the necks of men. It had the virtues and all the vices of the papal system.66 Little had changed since the eighteenth century. The medieval Church remained the exotic “other.” To Romantics, the gothic cathedral looming in the gloomy forest may very well have represented a sanctuary for those fleeing a modern world. Progressives, whether secular or religious like Schaff, clearly saw it as a dungeon. Both audiences, however, had little interest in the law that provided the institutional foundation for that church. As long as religious intolerance remained the norm for both scholars and masses, medieval canon law provided a common point of agreement: all disliked Rome and her lawyers.

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We can learn from this disgust, because it marks the intersection of learned and popular culture. Scholars and the masses may differ on what they like, what they find aesthetically and intellectually pleasing; they can, however, often find agreement in disgust.67 Telling tales that reinforce that disgust, whether grounded or not in fact, is the function of the contemporary urban legend, “cautionary tales” designed to remind the listener how unexpectedly threatening the world can be.68 They serve to confirm prejudices and anxieties by providing texts – both oral and written – that construct and perpetuate a historical record of the unexpected, generally some sort of calamity.69 They evoke emotion, reveal suspicion towards institutions, separate good and evil.70 Above all, they are didactic. There is a story to be told. Folklorists have noted the wide variety of urban legends in circulation at any given time. While the most well-known are often the most bizarre – for example the infamous “Kentucky Fried Rat” – no corner of society appears to lack an urban legend.71 Lawyers are not immune. Indeed, the legal profession has more than its share of tales.72 Americans have long held suspicious, frequently hostile, views towards lawyers. This “jaundiced view,” to quote one author, has led to a variety of modern urban legends.73 Our Victorian tales functioned in much the same way. The scattered, overwhelmingly negative and dismissive, treatments of medieval canonists kept up a volume of disparagement. Like static on a radio, it did not have to be loud to disturb, only persistent. To an age worshipping progress, canon law represented a past best left behind, useful only when compared with the present. G.K. Chesterton once remarked, “For whatever the medieval faults, they went with one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; and modern people do worry horribly about being modern.”74 Medieval canon law, both real and imagined, generated its share of worry in the nineteenth century. It is to be hoped that we moderns are less certain of our superiority than those who read Schaff, Blackstone, John Adams. An optimist would like to believe that medievalists now try to understand the past, not employ it as a foil to demonstrate an enlightened present.75 Given enduring prejudice against Rome, the Middle Ages, and lawyers, it seems just as likely that we have not heard the last tale about the “bony, grasping hand” of the medieval canon lawyers.

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NOTES 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1996 annual meeting of the Texas Medieval Association and the 35th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (2001) at Kalamazoo. 2. Among many studies see, Ernest Lee Turveson, Redeemer Nation: The Ideal of America’s Millenial Role (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968). See also Marc L. Harris, “Revelation and the American Republic: Timothy Dwight’s Civic Participation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54.3 (1993): 449–68. 3. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). The prejudice spanned the Mason-Dixon Line. Among many studies, see Richard B. Latner and Peter Levine, “Perspectives on Antebellum Pietistic Politics,” Reviews in American History 4.1 (1976): 15–24, Dennis C. Rousey, “Aliens in the WASP Nest: Ethnocultural Diversity in the Antebellum Urban South,” The Journal of American History 79.1 (1992): 152–64, and Elliott J. Gorn, “Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American: Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City,” The Journal of American History 74.2 (1987): 388–410. 4. The persistence of this anti-Roman prejudice late into the century is seen in a song from the African-American songwriter Chauncey Clifford: “There’s a Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, of Romish Legions.” Written in 1894, it calls for the “noble patriot band” to rise against Rome’s “bony fingers grasping after rule and hateful empire in our land.” It is available at Duke University’s Historic American Sheet Music collection: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/ b/b02/b0246. For a historical comparison of Canada and the United States in this regard, see William H. Katerberg, “The Irony of Identity: An Essay on Nativism, Liberal Democracy, and Parochial Identities in Canada and the United States,” American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 493–524. 5. For example, his Studies in Church History (Philadelphia: Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1869), 53, available at Making of America (hereafter MOA): http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/tex...001.001&view+image&size=s&frm=main, accessed on 12 February 2001. 6. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). Part three is especially pertinent. 7. Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 52–74: “Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism.” 8. See Lotte Kéry, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140) A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2000), and Robert Somerville and Bruce C.

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Brasington, Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity: Selected Translations, 500–1245 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 9. Most recently Jörg Müller, “Die Kirchenrechtssammlung des Bischofs Burchard I. von Worms,” in Thomas T Müller et al., eds., Beiträge aus den Archiven im Landkreis Eichsfeld: Bischof Burchard I in seiner Zeit (Heiligenstadt: F.W. Cordier, 2001), 162–81, with extensive references to earlier scholarship. 10. A good introduction is provided by Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), especially chapter 3. See also her essay “History and Tradition in Eleventh-Century Rome,” The Catholic Historical Review 79 (1993): 185–96, reprinted in Papal Reform and Canon Law in the 11th and 12th Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies (London: Ashgate, 1998) with same pagination. 11. For a provisional, on-line edition of the Panormia and a survey of scholarship on the collection, see http://wtfaculty.wtamu.edu/~bbrasington/ panormia.html. This ongoing editorial project is conducted by myself and Dr Martin Brett. 12. The best and most current source for information on Gratian is the website administered by Dr Anders Winroth, Domus Gratiani: http:// pantheon.yale.edu/~haw6/gratian.html. See also his monograph, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13. For a translation of the first twenty distinctions and the medieval ordinary gloss, see Gratian, The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1–20) with the Ordinary Gloss, trans. Augustine Thompson and James Gordley, with an introduction by Katherine Christensen, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law 1 (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1993). 14. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 10.103–5: “The next flaming comes from the smile of Gratian who served the one and the other court so well that it pleases in Paradise.” 15. Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, trans. Charles M. Jacobs, rev. James Atkinson, Luther’s Works 44 (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1966), 182. 16. Luther, Address, 203. 17. Compare, for example, Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres diverses 4 vols. (Den Haag 1727, repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1964–68) 1, 88. 18. “Religious canons, civil laws are cruel. . .”: Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, IV.3.60. 19. John Milton, Reason of Church Government, in Don M. Wolfe et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–82) 1, 736–861 (777). 20. A good survey is provided by Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 21. On English legal scholarship in this period and its development of

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historical method, see Harold J. Berman, “The Origins of Historical Jurisprudence: Coke, Selden, Hale,” Yale Law Journal 103 (1994): 1–68, accessed on 11 April 2001 via Lexis-Nexis. 22. See, in particular, Richard Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 23. Berman, “Origins of Historical Jurisprudence” n. 226, referring to Blackstone’s influence on American legal education. 24. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1766), accessed on 18 April 2001 at the Avalon Project: www.yale.edu/lawweb/ avalon/blackstone/introa.htm. 25. Karl E. Güterbock, Bracton and his Relation to the Roman Law: A Contribution to the History of the Roman Law in the Middle Ages, trans. Brinton Coxe (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1866), 63–66, accessed at MOA on 12 February 2001. 26. Building on earlier work by F.W. Maitland, Z.N. Brooke dismantled this assumption of English “separateness.” See his The English Church and the Papacy (London 1932, repr. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). On the current state of scholarship, see Charles J. Reid and John Witte, “Review Essay: In the Steps of Gratian: Writing the History of Canon Law in the 1990s,” Emory Law Journal 48 (1999): 647–88, accessed via Lexis-Nexis on 20 May 2001, and Kenneth Pennington, “Learned Law, Droit Savant, Gelehrtes Recht: The Tyranny of a Construct,” Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 20 (1994): 205–15, accessed via Lexis-Nexis on 15 June 2001. 27. John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1851) 3, 447–64. 28. Adams, A Dissertation, 449. 29. Adams, A Dissertation, 451. 30. An insightful essay is provided by G.K. Chesterton, “Anti-Religious Thought in the Eighteenth Century,” in An Outline of Christianity, vol. 4: Christianity and Modern Thought (London: The Waverley Book Company, 1926), available online at the American Chesterton Society (henceforth “Chesterton”), http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/historian/antireligious.html., accessed on 10 January 2002. 31. Adams, A Dissertation, 451. 32. Ballerini, Disquisitiones de antiquis collectionibus et collectoribus canonum in Opera Leonis magni, 3 vols. (Venice 1753, repr. PL 56. 11–254). Antonio Augustinus, De quibusdam veteribus canonum ecclesiasticorum collectoribus iudicum ac censura (Rome 1611). On Augustinus, see Stephan Kuttner, “Antonio Augustin’s Edition of the Compilationes antiquae,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, NS 7 (1977): 1–14. 33. Carl Friedrich von Savigny, Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, 6 vols. (Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer, 1815–1831, repr. Goldbach: Keip, 1997). A recent survey is provided by Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal

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Past of Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law 4 (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1995). 34. See especially Michael H. Hoeflich, Roman and Civil Law and the Development of Ango-American Jurisprudence in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), in particular chapter 3. 35. Hoeflich, Roman and Civil Law, 75–77. Searches through MOA (accessed on 12 January 2002) uncovered various references to Savigny. All are laudatory and several indicate more than passing familiarity with his history of medieval Roman law. But none considers the ius commune and canon law. For examples, see George Frederick Holmes, “Roman History: A Review,” Southern Literary Messenger (Aug. 1846): 507–12 (508) and, from the same journal, “Origin and History of the High Court of Chancery” (May 1850): 303–15. The latter is particularly interesting, for the author not only discusses the main features of the German “historical school” of jurisprudence but also comments favourably on Savigny’s arguments for Roman law’s influence on medieval English common law. See also Sir Robert Phillimore, Commentaries Upon International Law, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1854–57), 1, 202 and n. (H), noting the presence of civil law in early canons. 36. August Theiner, Disquisitiones criticae in praecipuas canonum et decretalium collectiones (Rome: Collegio Urbano, 1836). 37. Knowledge of Theiner’s efforts were transmitted, if incompletely, by translated German works such as Johann Karl Ludwig Giesler’s A Text Book of Church History, 5 vols. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1857–80), accessed at MOA on 12 January 2002. Giesler also presents a survey of the development of early canon law and notes as well the achievements of scholars such as the Ballerini. 38. Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity; Including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V, 8 vols. (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1860–62), available at MOA, accessed on 12 January 2002. A good overview of Milman’s works, whose historical approach to church history, which took a more secular view, was controversial in its day, is found in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 18 vols. (1907–21), vol. 12, accessed at wysiwyg://209/http://www.bartelby.com/222/1410.html. on 12 January 2002. A particularly severe judgment came from Newman in his essay “Milman’s View of Christianity,” available at http://www.newmanreader.org/works/essays/volume2/ milman 1.html, accessed on 12 January 2002. 39. Johann Lorenz Mosheim, An Ecclesiastical History, trans. Archibald Maclain, continued to the year 1826 by Charles Coote and furnished with a dissertation on the state of the primitive church by George Gleig, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas N. Stanford, 1871) 1: 247, accessed at MOA on 20 April 2001. On Mosheim, see most recently Peter Landau, “Johann Lorenz von Mosheim über den Rechtszustand der frühen Kirche,” in Johann Lorenz Mosheim: Theologie im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie und Geschichte 1693–1755, Wolfenbüttler Forschungen 77 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 329–46. I thank Professor Landau for bringing this article to my attention.

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40. Blackstone, Commentaries, accessed on 18 April 2001 at the Avalon Project. 41. Chambers’s Information for the People, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James R. Smith and Company, 1857), 53, accessed on 20 April 2001 at MOA. 42. For example, the utterly fanciful tale of Ivo’s encounter with a “phantastic” woman recounted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia litteraria, in William Shedd, ed., The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 7 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853–54), 3, 213–14, accessed on 20 April 2001 at MOA. 43. Brasington and Somerville, Prefaces to Canon Law Books, 105–17. 44. Robin Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 100.4 (1995): 1061–95. For a recent study of British attitudes towards the Middle Ages, see Julie Pridmore, “Reconstructing the Middle Ages: Some Victorian ‘Medievalisms’,” Kleio 32 (2000), accessed without pagination at Unisa Press Online Journals on 10 January 2002. 45. Fleming, “Picturesque History,” 1076. See also Hofstadter, AntiIntellectualism, 136–41. 46. Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (New York, 1836, repr. New York: Random House, 1995) 47. George Lippard, The Quaker City or the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Philadelphia: Published by the author, 1846). It has been reprinted several times. On how this popular work reflected “plebeian culture” in the antebellum period, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 385–86. I thank Dr Wade Shaffer for pointing out these sources. 48. Thomas Richard Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, as opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence, and Especially to the Interference of the Papacy in the Political Interests and Affairs of the United States (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1856), 74ff, accessed on 12 February 2001 at MOA: http:// moa.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/sgml...&coll=monograph.raw&q1=Constantine. 49. A good survey is provided by Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). I thank Dr Wade Shaffer for this reference. 50. “Latin Christianity,” The Princeton Review 36.2 (1864): 249–76 (263), accessed at MOA, 12 February 2001. 51. “The Apostle’s Creed,” The Princeton Review 24.4 (1852): 602–77 (618), accessed at MOA 12 February 2001. 52. C.F.W. Walther, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, trans. W.H.T. Dau (St. Louis 1897, repr. St. Louis: Concordia, 1928), 386. 53. Frederick Saunders, Salad for the Social, by the Author of “Salad for the Solitary” (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1856), 252, accessed at MOA on 20 April 2001. Other authors retelling the tale are: John Cordy Jeaffreson, A

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Book about Lawyers (New York: Carleton, 1875), 395–96, and Horace A. Cleveland, Golden Sheaves Gathered from the Fields of Ancient and Modern Literature (Cincinatti: Zeigler McCurdy, 1869), 374–75. 54. In the Latin original, “advocatus et non latro, res miranda populo.” See the summary of Ivo’s life at http://landru.i-link-2.net/shnyves/ St._Ivo_of_Kermartinlhtml., accessed on 26 January 2002, with bibliographical references. 55. One American Catholic, John Francis Maguire, praised Yves. In his Rome, Its Ruler and its Institutions (New York: D. and J. Sadlier and Company, 1860), 242, he remembers the saint’s legacy, without any hint of his “visit to Rome”. He notes that the “Congregation of St. Ivo” at Rome was “established in the beginning of the 16th century, was thus called after its founder, a saint of that name, who, a lawyer by profession, had consecrated his life to the gratuitous advocacy of the poor, especially orphans and widows.” 56. The exchange concerning “St. Evona’s Choice” appears in Notes and Queries 5 Jan. 1850, 151–52 and 16 Feb. 1850, 253 – the latter being the text quoted here – all accessed at the Internet Library of Early Journals (hereafter Internet Library): http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin on 24 January 2001. 57. For more on literary treatments – sarcastic and otherwise – of lawyers and the legal profession, see the “Law and Popular Culture” online collection of the Tarleton Law Library at the University of Texas, available at http:// tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/lpop.htm. Among its many texts, see Randall Coyne, “Images of Lawyers and the Three Stooges,” Oklahoma City University Law Review 22.1 (1997): 247–56, accessed at the Tarleton site on 17 January 2002. The article describes a twentieth-century view of the legal profession that brought the “courts of Momus” to life on the silver screen. 58. On the “myth of the three brothers”, see Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994) 16 and n. 5. 59. Joseph de Ghellinck, Le mouvement théologique du xiieme siècle, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Éditions de Tempel, 1948) 285. I am grateful to Dr Anders Winroth for providing me with a photocopy of this text. 60. de Ghellinck, Le mouvement, 285. See also Colish in note 58 above. 61. Milton, Doctrine and Discipline, 350–51. 62. William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria, 2 vols. (London: Richard Chriswell, 1688–89) 2, 216, cited by Ghellinck, Le mouvement, 40. On Cave and his works, see the online Dictionary of National Biography, accessed on 26 April 2001 at www.cavescove.com/archives/ BioArchives/DiNaBiwc63.html. 63. For example J. Sansom to W.S.W., 11 October 1851, p. 283, accessed on 31 January 2001 at the Internet Library. 64. On Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, see, among many reviews, Richard W. Pfaff ’s in Speculum 68 (1993): 122–25. 65. The fundamental study remains Horst Fuhrmann, Einfluss und Verbreitung der pseudisidorischen Fälschungen von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neure

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Zeit, 3 vols., Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica 24.1–3 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1972–74). 66. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (1867; vols. 5 and 6 repr. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1907) 5, 769. 67. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997). Miller argues for the visceral, primal essence of disgust and would, I believe, consign the negative views of our authors to the realm of “indignation” or “anger.” Nevertheless, I believe there is something more palpable than mere intellectual rejection in how writers felt about medieval canon law, something like being repelled by and attracted to a train wreck. 68. See Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore, 3rd ed. (Norton: New York, 1986), 158–59 and, among his many studies specifically on urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (New York: Norton, 1981) and The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends (New York: Norton, 1993). I thank Dr Trudy Hanson for an introduction to this and other works on urban legends. 69. Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends,” Social Problems 32.5 (1985): 488–99, especially at 495 on the psychological dimensions of urban legends and their transmission. For a related study, see Jean-Noel Kapferer, “How Rumors are Born,” Society 29.5 (1992): 53–60. 70. John Todd Llewellyn, “Understanding Urban Legends: A Peculiar Public Relations Challenge,” Public Relations Quarterly (12–1–96), accessed at the Electric Library (http://www.elibrary.com/s/edumark) on 7 January 2002. 71. Gary Alan Fine, “The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modern Society,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 17.2–3 (1980): 222–43. 72. For a case study of the tale of the “mouse in the coke bottle”, which periodically generates actual court cases, see Gary Alan Fine, “Cokelore and Coke Law: Urban Belief Tales and the Problem of Multiple Origins,” Journal of American Folklore 92 (1979): 477–81. 73. Marc Galanter, “An Oil Strike in Hell: Contemporary Legends about the Civil Justice System,” Arizona Law Review 40 (1998), accessed without pagination via Lexis-Nexis on 7 January 2002. See also Ray B. Browne, “Why Should Lawyers Study Popular Culture?” in David L. Gunn, ed., The Lawyer and Popular Culture: Proceedings of a Conference (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman and Co., 1993), accessed at http://tarleton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/conf/browne.htm on 9 January 2002. 74. G.K. Chesterton, “On Turnpikes and Medievalism,” accessed at Chesterton on 10 January 2002. 75. Milton McC. Gatch, “The Medievalist and Cultural Literacy,” Speculum 66 (1991): 591–604.

Notes on Contributors BRUCE BRASINGTON is Professor of History at West Texas A&M University, where he has been on the faculty since receiving his PhD from UCLA in 1990. His main area of research is medieval canon law, and he is currently working, with Dr Martin Brett of Cambridge, on the first modern edition of Ivo of Chartres’ Panormia, the most important canon law collection of the earlier twelfth century. Ongoing work on this edition is made available by website. Dr Brasington was most recently a visiting professor at the University of Dresden, and has published on a very wide range of subjects, from medieval Latin codicology to American juvenile fiction round 1900. WILLIAM CALIN is Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida. Among many distinctions, he is currently International Vice President of the Association Internationale d’Etudes Occitanes. Among the ten books he has written are A Muse for Heroes (1981) and The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (1994), both of which were named by the American Literary Association as Outstanding Academic Books of their respective years. His most recent volume is Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton and Occitan, 1920–1990. Current projects include “The Humanist critics, from Spitzer to Frye,” and “The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland.” CARL HAMMER took his PhD from the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, but after a brief university teaching career went into corporate planning, first for Westinghouse, and then for DaimlerChrysler, where he was a Director of Corporate Development. He has now returned to medieval history, has published numerous articles, and completed a book on early medieval slavery, published by Ashgate in 2002. He is also completing a major study of Bavaria in Merovingian and early Carolingian times for the Commission on Bavarian History at the Academy of Sciences in Munich. He is married to Jóna Hammer. JÓNA HAMMER went to school at the Academic Gymnasium in Akureyri, northern Iceland, and studied later at Smith College, University College, London, and the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her

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PhD at Duquesne University in 2001 with a dissertation on Rider Haggard’s use of Icelandic sagas in Eric Brighteyes, and has translated several literary texts from Icelandic to English, and vice versa. She is currently Associate Director of the English as a Second Language Program at Duquesne, and is married to Carl Hammer. PAUL HARDWICK is a Lecturer in English at Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds, where he teaches a range of courses in medieval literature. He has published articles on medievalism in the works of William Morris and in children’s literature, and on other topics in medieval literature and art history. He is a former editor of The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and continues to contribute to this publication. NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, currently completing a sabbatical year in Edinburgh, is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, where he teaches courses on Old and Middle English, Shakespeare, film, medievalism, and literary theory. He has published articles on Henryson, Dunbar, and other medieval topics, and is working on two books, “The Place of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” and “The Poetry of William Dunbar, Texts and Translations,” as well as a novel to be titled “The Deaths of the Poets.” GWENDOLYN MORGAN, Professor of Medieval and British Literatures and Languages at Montana State University, is the author of three books on medieval balladry and Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as a number of articles in these areas and in modern popular culture. She is Director of Conference Activities for the Studies in Medievalism organization, maintaining a solid presence for medievalism at the Kalamazoo and Leeds conferences, as well as co-ordinating the annual Conference on medievalism. She is presently at work on the recurring Romantic movement from the Middle Ages to the present. JOANNE MARY PARKER took her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2001, with a thesis on “Representations of King Alfred in NineteenthCentury Literature.” She is now developing her thesis into a broader study of Alfred’s post-medieval legacy, while working as a radio arts reporter in Ottawa. Her previous paper on the Saxon king, “The Apocryphal Alfred,” appeared in Michael Brown, ed., The Medieval World and the Modern Mind (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).

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CLARE A. SIMMONS is Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Eyes Across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History, and British Writing 1830–1882, and papers and articles on nineteenth-century British literature and medievalism. The co-editor of Prose Studies, she recently edited the essay collection Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family. Her current project is titled Romantic Medievalism and the Common-Law Tradition. WILLIAM WOODS is Professor of English at Wichita State University, where he teaches medieval and classical literature. His articles, focussing mainly on the Canterbury Tales, have appeared in Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Chaucer Review, and other journals. His most recent contribution to medievalism is a ballet libretto, Merlin’s Song, written for the Metropolitan ballet of Wichita, and performed by their company in spring 2001. The article printed here is his first on medievalism in film.