Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies ...

Author: Clare A. Simmons

67 downloads 1018 Views 8MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures, and history of science.

PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, edited by Larry H. Peer Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi Romanticism and Pleasure, edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

10.1057/9780230117068 - Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, Clare A. Simmons

9780230103740_01_prexii.indd i

12/10/2010 3:01:00 PM

Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger Samuelian Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J. The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David Dowling Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton Nichols The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson Romanticism and the City, by Larry H. Peer Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab


FORTHCOMING TITLES:


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd ii

12/10/2010 3:01:02 PM

Clare A. Simmons


Popu l a r M e di e va l ism i n Rom a n t ic-E r a Br i ta i n


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd iii

12/10/2010 3:01:02 PM

POPULAR MEDIEVALISM IN ROMANTIC-ERA BRITAIN

Copyright © Clare A. Simmons, 2011. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10374–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Simmons, Clare A., 1958– Popular medievalism in romantic-era Britain / Clare A. Simmons. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) ISBN 978–0–230–10374–0 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Authors, English—19th century—Political and social views. 3. Medievalism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Politics and literature—Great Britain— History—19th century. 5. Medievalism in literature. 6. Middle Ages in literature. I. Title. PR457.S56 2011 820.9⬘358401—dc22

2010023215

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved.


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd iv

12/10/2010 3:01:03 PM


To Henry, Justin, and David Stern


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd v

12/10/2010 3:01:03 PM

Previous Publications Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

The Clever Woman of the Family, by Charlotte M. Yonge (Editor) Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (Editor)


Eyes across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History and British Writing 1830–1882


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd vi

12/10/2010 3:01:03 PM

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Popular Medievalism and the Romantic Ethos 1 Rites and Rights: The Topography of Ancient British Law 2 Taking Medievalism Home: The National Melody 3 Medievalism Onstage in the French Revolutionary Era 4 The Radical Bestiary 5 Buried Alive: Gothic Reading and Medievalist Subjectivity 6 Scottish Lawyers, Feudal Law Epilogue: Medievalism Becomes Expensive

1 17 57 81 105 141 167 191

Notes

195

Works Cited

213

Index

225


C on t e n t s


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd vii

12/10/2010 3:01:03 PM

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 10.1057/9780230117068 - Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, Clare A. Simmons

9780230103740_01_prexii.indd viii

12/10/2010 3:01:04 PM

1.1

William Blake, Milton, Plate 6. A massive trilith stands under the words “the mighty limbs of Albion.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission 39 1.2 William Blake, Title page of Europe, A Prophecy (Plate 2). The coils of the serpent replicate William Stukeley’s ideas about the form of druidic temples. In all versions of this print the word “Lambeth” is prominent. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission 41 1.3 Blake, Milton, Plate 4. Stonehenge-like structures overshadow the sacrificial altar (“London Stone”) in druidical London. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission 44 4.1 Contradicting Burke’s claim that the Swinish Multitude would be the death of learning, Toby the Sapient Pig writes his autobiography. Frontispiece to The Life and Adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig. © The British Library Board. British Library 992.i.6 f.p 125 4.2 George Cruikshank. The Massacre of Peterloo, 1819. The yeoman cavalry attacking the crowd carry butcher’s cleavers and wear sharpening tools on their belts 129


I l lust r at ions


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd ix

12/10/2010 3:01:04 PM


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd x

12/10/2010 3:01:04 PM

M

any individuals and organizations helped make this book possible. The Department of English at The Ohio State University gave me time away from the classroom at crucial junctures. At The Ohio State University I am supremely fortunate to have the resource of a wonderful library and helpful librarians, including Jim Bracken and Anne Fields. I am deeply and happily indebted to all of my Department students and colleagues past and present, especially those working in or with nineteenth-century British literature, including David Riede, Leslie Tannenbaum, Marlene Longenecker, Amanpal Garcha, David Ruderman, Jill Galvan, Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Robyn Warhol, and Noah Comet. Yet I also received advice and support from my friends in Medieval Studies, especially Richard Firth Green and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Lisa Kiser, Drew Jones, Leslie Lockett, and Karen Winstead. I presented early versions of a number of ideas at the conference for Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, and others at the International Conference in Medievalism. I am appreciative of all the suggestions and encouragement I received at these and other venues, including from, but by no means limited to, Christine Krueger, Teresa Mangum, Mary Jean Corbett, Greg Kucich, Keith Hanley, Ian Duncan, Ken McNeil, Katarina Gephardt, Jennifer Phegley, David Wayne Thomas, Tom Shippey, Richard Utz, Karl Fugelso, Jane Toswell, and of course Kathleen Verduin and the late Leslie J. Workman, who did so much to make medievalism a field of study. Joseph Viscomi, Ashley Reed, and the William Blake Archive assisted with pictures, as did the British Library. Frances Simmons and other family members shared their knowledge of London. As always, Mark Schoenfield and Kristin Flieger Samuelian have provided empathy and wisdom; Kristin went beyond the call of friendship in reading the whole manuscript, which is much the better for it. Marilyn Gaull has been both a friend and a mentor to this project and to me. I always think of my friends and advisors Peter J. Manning and the late Eric Mackerness when I write. Finally, I thank my family,


Ac k now l e dgm e n t s


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd xi

12/10/2010 3:01:04 PM

A c k now l e d g m e n t s

Henry, Justin, and David Stern, who sometimes wisely left me to my own devices but who were always there when I needed them. An early version of the introduction appeared in Studies in Medievalism 17, edited by Karl Fugelso; material related to the discussion of Ivanhoe in Chapter Six appeared in Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels (2009), edited by Evan Gottlieb and Ian Duncan.


xii


9780230103740_01_prexii.indd xii

12/10/2010 3:01:04 PM

[T]hese turbulent times were little calculated for the cultivation of literary talents, and after the Goths and Vandals had overrun the empire, a night of mental darkness followed, from the tenth to the middle of the fifteenth century. —Richmal Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People (86–87)

I

n Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1865 sensation novel Sir Jasper’s Tenant, the Sir Jasper of the title is a widowed baronet with an especial fondness for the art of the early Victorian artist William Etty. Etty, a Royal Academician, who attended the Academy’s life classes his entire career, is best remembered for his sensuous classically inspired studies of nudes, both women and men. True to his idol’s tastes, Sir Jasper has an eye for the voluptuous charms of a lady visitor who happens to be an evil twin in disguise, but he also likes the brooding manliness of his equally disguised tenant, George Pauncefort. Attempting to persuade George to spend Christmas with him, Sir Jasper promises: “No country families, 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” (1:69). What Sir Jasper means is that Christmas will not be in the “Old English style” as famously witnessed (or at the very least compiled from his own medievalist reading) by Washington Irving’s alter-ego Geoffrey Crayon. In his visit to “Bracebridge Hall” in about 1818, Crayon had represented the old-fashioned Christmas as in decline. According to Crayon, such practices “flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously: times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and the drama with its greatest variety of


I n t roduc t ion: Popu l a r M e di e va l ism a n d t h e Rom a n t ic Et hos


9780230103740_02_int.indd 1

12/5/2010 12:08:43 PM

Pop u l a r M e di e va l i s m i n Rom a n t ic -E r a Br i t a i n

characters and manners” (348). As a result, the “traditionary customs of golden hearted antiquity, its feudal hospitalities, and lordly wassailings, have passed away with the baronial castles and stately manor houses in which they were celebrated” (349). By the 1860s, however, feudal memories were not dead, many of the practices that Crayon describes having been revived by Victorians longing for the supposed old days of medieval jollity. Sir Jasper employs the word “medievalism” in accordance with its modern usage as implying a respect for or revival of the styles, practices, and values of the Middle Ages1 with the assumption that George, and by extension the novel’s readership, will automatically understand the connotations of the term. Sir Jasper’s confidence is remarkable since the very word “medieval” had only entered the English vocabulary a generation before. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word “mediaeval” was in November 1827, when the Gentleman’s Magazine published a communication from “S. Tymms” with the title “Antient Peg-Tankards,” where he referred to “the sculptural representations of the mediaeval aera” (490). The word “mediaeval” or “medieval” hence first entered English usage during the Romantic period—a time that did not, of course, call itself the Romantic period—2 and the earliest usages are in the context of describing the age, rather than things characteristically of the age.3 “Mediaeval” is an adjective derived from medium aevum (middle age), so it might at first consideration seem simply a variation on the Middle Ages, a term that had been used at least since the seventeenth century to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and revival of classical learning at the Renaissance. In addition, however, to providing an adjective that by the later 1840s was used to describe any aspect of the Middle Ages, the Latinate form gives a new dignity. No longer simply “a night of mental darkness,” as schoolchildren had been taught to describe it in textbooks such as Mangnall’s Historical Questions,4 the medieval period had come to deserve consideration not as a gap in civilization but as a time with a character of its own. The word “medievalism,” however, is a Victorian coinage, and medievalism has most often been discussed in a Victorian context. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from the Southern Literary Messenger in September 1849, when “B.” warned the people of Richmond, Virginia against the “influx of European literature” that was promoting “an incessant, and probably increasing toryism, feudalism, medievalism, all manners of retrogradism and rottenness in opinion” (626). In contrast, in 1853, John Ruskin used the word in a positive sense to describe his own generation’s enthusiasm for the


2


9780230103740_02_int.indd 2

12/5/2010 12:08:43 PM

Introduction

3

Trinity of ages—the Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but united in the spirit of their age,—the Classical Age having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,—the Middle Age having its Goths and Franks, Lombards and Italians,—the Modern Ages having their French and English, Spanish and Germans; but all these distinctions being in each case subordinate to the mightier and broader distinction, between Classicalism, Mediaevalism, and Modernism. (153)

For Ruskin, these were not merely styles of art; they were inextricably linked to ways of life, as his definitions of their time periods as pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian suggests. Thus although medievalism might be generally described as the later interpretation of the Middle Ages, from its original usage, the term implied some comparative valuation between epochs and a sense that ages have distinctive spirits based on common culture and beliefs. Ruskin was drawing on the Romantic-era concept of Zeitgeist in declaring that epochs have distinctive spirits, but he himself deserves credit for identifying an ideological debt to the Middle Ages as a cultural phenomenon. His model for cooperative society, expounded in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851), was the Gothic cathedral, representing craftsmen working collectively, yet with scope for individual expression, toward a common goal, each recognizing and valuing his own role in artistic creation. Medievalism is hence often seen as only emerging in the nineteenth century as a reaction against increasing technology, mass production, and the reconsideration of traditional values prompted by scientific discoveries that seemed to call into question the historical status of the Bible.5 Alice Chandler’s seminal book on nineteenth-century Anglophone ideas of the medieval calls this a “Dream of Order.”6 Her title consciously politicizes Ruskin’s model: the Gothic cathedral brings together in art in an ordered representation of the laws of humanity, nature, and God. And although Ruskin was positing a medieval past in which everyone had a creative function, in Ruskin’s work, the idea of the Middle Ages becomes a model for social selfregulation as each individual contributes to the greater good. While such a social model is in theory democratic, the ideal of self-regulation could easily give way to a vision of society in which the less-powerful or less-capable members of the society ceded authority


medieval. In a lecture justifying Pre-Raphaelite art, Ruskin referred to what he called a


9780230103740_02_int.indd 3

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

4


Gurth’s brass collar did not gall him: Cedric deserved to be his Master. The pigs were Cedric’s, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth has the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow-mortals in this Earth. (235)7

Past and Present suggests that the master-servant relationship between Cedric and Gurth is both natural (implicitly Cedric has the innate abilities to command Gurth) and the product of an idealized social structure (Anglo-Norman society works because everyone recognizes their inherent role in society). The medieval past reminds Britons of their duties: to the model of chivalry, toward the poor, and to an unselfish code of conduct. For this reason, chivalric codes are open to criticism as providing a justification for structures of oppression. This is certainly the case in some Romantic-era works, such as William Godwin’s 1794 novel Caleb Williams. As Caleb reconstructs the story of Mr. Falkland’s past, he learns from Mr. Collins and other sources of information that [a]mong the favourite authors of [Falkland’s] early years were the heroic poets of Italy. From them he imbibed the love of chivalry and romance. He had too much good sense to regret the time of Charlemagne and Arthur. But, while his imagination was purged by a certain infusion of philosophy, he conceived that there was in the manners depicted by these celebrated poets something to imitate, as well as something to avoid. He believed that nothing was so well calculated to make men delicate, gallant, and humane, as a temper perpetually alive to the sentiments of birth and honour. The opinions he entertained upon these topics were illustrated in his conduct, which was assiduously conformed to the model of heroism that his fancy suggested. (12)


to those with greater ability, and regulated social structure played a significant role in Victorian conceptions of medievalism. For example, Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present contains a chapter cautioning against the social dangers of democracy. The narrator remarks of Gurth the Thrall from Scott’s Ivanhoe:

Falkland’s medievalist sense of the importance of reputation is both a motivation for his crimes and his means of deflecting their consequences. After Barnabas Tyrrell has caused the death of the young woman whom Falkland loves and has publicly humiliated him by


9780230103740_02_int.indd 4

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

Introduction

5

He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry, ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable according to his ideas, in which he had been placed upon this occasion. There is a mysterious sort of divinity annexed to the person of a true knight that makes any species of brute violence committed upon it indelible and immortal. To be knocked down, cuffed, kicked, dragged along the floor! Sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not to be endured! No future lustration could ever remove the stain: and, what was perhaps still worse in the present case, the offender having ceased to exist, the lustration which the laws of knight-errantry prescribe was rendered impossible. (101)

Falkland seems to confirm Collins’s reading of his motivation when he defends himself from the charge of the murder of his rival Barnabas Tyrrel by reminding the investigating magistrates that his “life has been spent in the keenest and most unintermitted sensibility to reputation” (105), and that Tyrrel’s death has deprived him of the opportunity to defend his honor. Falkland is, however, lying, and to defend his reputation, he is prepared to destroy those who threaten his chivalric identity. Rather than promoting selflessness, chivalry hence becomes a justification for murderous egotism. Even more significantly for this study, stories of chivalry may present figures with which Falkland can identify, but they provide few role-models for Caleb, who describes his parents’ occupations as “such as usually fall to the lot of peasants” (5), and who uses the skills learned in a basic education to improve himself. Ordinary people of the middle and working classes are conspicuously absent in medieval romance. For example, Edmund Spenser prefaced his Faerie Queene, which although a medievalist work functioned as the romance most accessible to English readers in the Romantic era,8 with the announcement that after having written of shepherds, he now intends to “sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds” (3). The Faerie Queene pays very little attention to who does the farming and manufacturing of goods, most of which occurs by magic rather than by hard work, and even servant figures are more likely to be spirits or dwarves than characters with whom a working reader might identify. Caleb’s attempt to experience chivalry vicariously through learning Falkland’s history proves disastrous; he finds himself not on his own chivalric quest, but rather pursued and persecuted by Falkland. Caleb Williams thus suggests


knocking him down, Mr. Collins imagines Falkland’s thoughts from the perspective of chivalry:


9780230103740_02_int.indd 5

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


that people of humbler social origins have no part in the world of chivalry, and the popular medievalism that is the subject of this study tends to look beyond the chivalric to other forms of inspiration from the Middle Ages. Parallel with the ideal of chivalric honor runs another form of reimagining the medieval past of more appeal to those whose social status did not allow them to identify with knights and ladies. The claim to historic rights of individuals9 is openly (although not uniquely) a British phenomenon, rooted in a sense of the national past. For such interpreters of the Middle Ages, medievalism is not an ideology but an ideal, a paradise lost that historical consciousness must attempt to regain. The subject of this study is popular medievalism, or the imaginative use of the past in creating a vision of what Britain should be in the future by looking back to the origins—as always, real or imagined—of British rights as conceived by those who did not have full political rights at a time when the right to participate actively in the political process depended on property and gender. In the Romantic era, popular medievalism uses the Middle Ages as a way to challenge class structures rather than to justify them. Until the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, the voting qualification varied from borough to borough, but in effect most people with modest incomes were excluded from the voting process. After 1832, a higher proportion of middle-class men were able to vote.10 The Romantic era is thus distinctive as the moment when as literacy grew, those in skilled occupations—including clerks, tradespeople, teachers, and many writers—and those who performed manual labor—including factory and farm workers and servants—became increasingly conscious of their exclusion from politics. Popular medievalism may be defined as either identifying with the less-privileged classes of British society, or as adopting forms of expression drawn from, or accessible to, those classes; in most cases, the works under analysis do both. The focus is pointedly on the period of the first French Revolution because at this time, the “natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man” begin to be discussed in both ahistorical and comparativist terms.11 In other words, Thomas Jefferson, JeanJacques Rousseau, and their followers and admirers claim the “rights of man” as natural and inherent to the species, rather than acquired in history. Britons also look to declarations of right in the United States and France as patterns for their own rights. As I shall argue, though, British writers continued to appeal to a sense of English right distinct from this construction of natural right, deriving from both the history and traditions of their own nation.


6


9780230103740_02_int.indd 6

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

7

This popular version of medievalism is markedly different from that of the later nineteenth century. Victorian-era medievalism’s emphasis on duty has helped obscure the wide range of variations in earlier envisioning of the Middle Ages.12 Although this study primarily analyzes the written word, medievalism is the recreation in any medium (such as words, visual and decorative arts, and music) of some aspect, real or imagined, of the Middle Ages, prompting conscious comparison and contrast between past and present. Yet the process of comparison of those seeking to define themselves through or against the time from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance began far earlier: only if the Renaissance is seen a “rebirth” of classical learning can this time period be seen as “middle.” Medievalist works can be found almost as soon as writers and readers are able to identify themselves as not part of the Middle Ages. Medievalism comes into play even when artists distance themselves from part of the Middle Ages, such as fifteenth-century writers recreating the Saxon period or the Arthurian era. For example, William Caxton’s 1485 printed edition of Thomas Malory’s tales of King Arthur had for Victorian readers the status of an authentic source of information about the medieval period; yet both Caxton and Malory were representing a past England that functioned differently from the England known to their fifteenth-century audience. Caxton’s Preface proclaims his intent to be “that noble men may see and learne the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jentyl and vertuous deds that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes” (xv). The phrase “in tho[se] dayes” is a marker of difference between “then” and “now” that is central to the comparativist nature of medievalism. Likewise, exerting the power to read what he wants to read in his source, another recurrent feature in medievalism, Malory himself famously writes of Lancelot and Guenevere in the queen’s bedroom, “And whether they were abed other at other maner of disportis, me lyste nat thereof make no mencion, for love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadays” (676). These two examples show a sense of difference between “those days” and “nowadays,” yet like most manifestations of medievalism, they also hint at a sense of loss: the present has lost something, generally something value-related that the past once had. This study, however, will focus less on lost values constructed as moral absolutes, such as that a person should be virtuous, chivalrous, and chaste, than on those connected with a sense of national identity, and particularly rights claimed as part of that identity. Before exploring the British Romantic era, I shall thus briefly discuss some examples of the claiming of right before the end of the eighteenth


Introduction


9780230103740_02_int.indd 7

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


century. Some rights belong only to rulers, others to some men, some to all men, and some to all people. Yet in each case, even when a historicized right is seen to coincide with a universal human right, I am interested in the claiming of these rights as traditionally “English.” I shall focus here on the English legal inheritance, but in many parts of this study, the justification of “English” claims is made through the idea of “Britain.” For example, the Tudor claim to the English throne draws on an idea of an ancient kingdom of Britain. From the Tudor period onward, English attention to the Middle Ages is almost invariably not just because the past is interesting, but because a reading of the past justifies the state of the present or a posited future. The Tudor monarchs cited in support of their right to rule their descent from King Arthur, prompting a new interest in recovering an authentic Arthur—provided, of course, that the authentic Arthur recovered served their political purpose. The Tudors were an intelligent family, and they realized that for their own longevity, they needed to establish a right to the throne on some basis other than military force. Military might can always succumb to greater military might. Yet so successful were the Tudors in establishing themselves as rightful rulers that all three of Henry VIII’s surviving legitimate children were able to succeed to the crown. Moreover, the monarchy has remained a hereditary institution, so that the British monarch has no need to claim personal merits to rule: the right is derived from tradition supposedly reaching back to King Arthur, and Arthur is one of the given names of the current heir to the throne.13 Another form of right claimed from the medieval past almost as soon as the concept of the Middle Ages came into being was the rights of the English church. Many of the earliest recoveries of the Middle Ages involve the rescuing of materials, and particularly documents. While in some cases (Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscript collection being one such example), the main political import of the collection is to bestow on English writing an equal or superior value to that of the classical past, in most instances, a more directly political motivation is apparent. A significant number of the earliest collectors of documents hoped to construct a reading of the past in which the English church was independent of the Church of Rome. The first Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, and his associates paid particular attention to historical evidence from pre-Norman times to argue that rather than being an innovation, an independent Church of England was a return to the piety of the church in England before the coming of William the Conqueror.14 For countries such as England where the state endorsed the Reformation, the idea of the Middle


8


9780230103740_02_int.indd 8

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

9

Ages was so closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church that to argue for “medieval” values was frequently to incur the danger of being suspected of Catholic sympathies. Even this, however, was not an insuperable barrier to a selective reading of the Middle Ages. For example, Edmund Spenser’s allegorical treatment of the romance quest in the Faerie Queene found a way to use medieval motifs in defense of Protestantism. Similarly, Protestants were not likely to endorse monasticism, yet some, such as John Foxe, argued that the English church of Saxon times was closer to the ideals of primitive Christianity than the papally dominated church structure imposed by the Normans.15 The rights of the church continued throughout the Romantic era to be a significant impetus to medievalist investigation. Medievalism also served as a means of historicizing the rights of kings and the church in a way that made their roles more acceptable not just because they were long-established, but because these rights seemed decreed by the Deity. Problematic as this may seem to many people today, even more questionable is the concept that property is a right. Yet while in theory, modern-day democratic states do not link civil rights such as voting with possession of property in the way that Romantic-era Britain did, in effect, property still plays a role. In the United States, for example, people without addresses cannot register to vote, while those convicted of a felony (many felonies being offenses against others’ rights of property) are excluded from voting at least temporarily, and in some states permanently. A fundamental assumption of common law is that for a private citizen or group of private citizens (governments have always been a different matter) to take the property that by possession or deed belongs to others is stealing, and that stealing is a violation of the laws of God. This last interpretation raises the difficult philosophical question of whether the laws of God give humans rights. For example, the Ten Commandments include “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal.” The usual interpretation is that killing (a problematic term) and stealing (a surprisingly unproblematic term in contemporary Western culture) break the law of God, but it is also possible to read them as establishing human rights, a right to life and a right to property, and this seems to have been both the eighteenth-century interpretation of the commandments and the one still accepted by common law. Although property is not a declared right in the present-day United States, it is certainly a functional right, since ownership is the right most directly funded from, and defended by, taxpayers’ money. The police system seems better designed to protect property than to protect personal safety or civil rights.


Introduction


9780230103740_02_int.indd 9

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


My intent here is not to question whether property should be a right, but to suggest that in common law, it functions as one. Within a feudal system, the right of property is related to the right of rule, and from earliest times, the study of medieval records such as Domesday Book has served to establish that right. Romantic-era literature frequently depicts English society as struggling with the significance of feudal inheritance and its implications as an especially classed, gendered right. Most importantly for this study of popular medievalism, however, the medieval inheritance was seen to confirm the rights of individuals. Romantic-era Britons were aware that their country did not have a written constitution like that of the United States or the codes that Napoleon was to create for the kingdoms in his empire; as Tom Paine pointed out in 1791, in “England it is not difficult to perceive that everything has a constitution, except the nation” (Rights of Man Ch. 4.1). They were, however, able to appeal both to tradition, the legal practices handed down since “time immemorial”; and to a small body of documents, among which the Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215, was the most frequently quoted. Magna Carta’s thirty-ninth clause reads, “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”16 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the government more than once suspended Habeas Corpus, including in 1794 and 1817. The Habeas Corpus Act became law not in the medieval period but in 1679, but Romantic-era commentators saw the act, like Magna Carta, as the inscription of previously understood common-law rights. These rare documented statements of right not only become touchstones that are often mentioned explicitly, but also provide an implicit undercurrent to many works involving national liberties. When in 1810, officers broke into Sir Francis Burdett’s house to arrest him for libeling the House of Commons, for example, he made sure that the story circulated that they found him teaching his fourteen-year-old son to translate Magna Carta.17 Although the Magna Carta exists as a physical document, in such readings it assumes a far more powerful conceptual experience as a repository of English common-law rights. For this reason, I would suggest that the word “medievalism” is more appropriate than the word “antiquarianism,” although admittedly in the Romantic era, medievalism and antiquarianism are often found together. Antiquarianism


10


9780230103740_02_int.indd 10

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

11

tends to focus on the physical remains of the past, to the extent that the antiquarian’s fetishization of what is old becomes a commonplace. In contrast, medievalism insists first, that the past is just as important for its ideas and values as for its physical remains; and second, that the past must always be considered with a conscious awareness of the present. For this reason, even though I recognize the psychological aspects of the Gothic genre, chapter 5 aligns the Gothic more closely with antiquarianism than medievalism. I am stopping short of the claim, made provocatively by Leslie Workman in the 1970s, that “Romanticism is Medievalism and Medievalism is Romanticism” (Utz and Shippey 451). Such a definition is dependent on the Ruskinian model seeing medievalism as opposed in style and spirit to classicism: to cite the 1859 note by Lord Acton that was to become the epigraph of the journal Studies in Medievalism, Two great principles divide the world, and contend for 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 to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. (Utz and Shippey 5–6)

Although seeing medievalism in opposition to classicism continued to be central to Workman’s definition, in Medievalism and Romanticism, published in 1994, Workman characterizes Romanticism as a “definable movement,” whereas medievalism is a “theme” emergent at the end of the Middle Ages and continuing to the present (26). The word “Romantic” implies the kind of extravagance of emotion and action found in medieval romance. Jerome McGann has suggested that for much of the twentieth century the field of Romantic studies was dominated “by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representation” (1), accepting the “Romantic ideology” of artistic universality that can be traced back to claims made during the period. For example, Friedrich Schlegel defines Romantic poetry as a “progressive universal poetry” in contrast with the “ancient” poetry of the Greeks. Schlegel finds “the Romantic among the older Moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived” (Furst 4–5, 9–10). Schlegel thus simultaneously defines Romanticism as a transhistorical phenomenon and as drawing its inspiration from romance, a tradition rooted in history. Although Schlegel’s description might seem to describe medievalism,


Introduction


9780230103740_02_int.indd 11

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


the distinct difference is that medievalism may find timeless qualities in the past, but always with an awareness of the present. If medievalism is a theme rather than a movement, a working definition seems needed. First, medievalism is not simply the recreation of the Middle Ages, but requires emotional and intellectual commitment. Yet although Elizabeth Fay’s Romantic Medievalism makes an excellent case for connecting Romantic subjectivity with a medievalist imagination, the self-conscious awareness of one’s position in history that I am arguing is central to nineteenth-century medievalism is a departure from the representation of character through action seen in romances written in the Middle Ages. Indeed, a fundamental characteristic of the medievalist temperament is an acute awareness of one’s subject-position as identified by nationality, history, social status, religion, and gender. Medievalism is never disinterested; even though unselfishness is one of the supposed virtues of the Middle Ages that the medievalists admired, when they were not speaking for their own interests, they were claiming to speak for the interests of others. Second, medievalism is persistently comparative, compelling some level of conscious contrast between the reader’s (or observer’s) present and the recreated medieval past. Although it may generalize the Middle Ages, it particularizes the present, making the reader aware of the specific conditions of his or her historical moment. Even though medievalism is often bad history, it is inherently historical in that it forces the reader to analyze the present as a historical phenomenon. Representation of the past thus becomes a potent form of self-representation, although not without emotional cost. Kathleen Biddick has suggested that medievalism invokes a consciousness of, or even a repetition of, loss: that something worthwhile has been sacrificed with the passing of time and the shifting of values, and that even the recreation of what is lost must reenact the process of mourning (12–15). The following chapters explore this process of passionate selfrepresentation by considering some of the varied ways that Britons imagined their medieval heritage and its lasting effect on the nation’s literature, landscape, laws, and spirit. Chapter 1 examines ideas about the origins of English law as imaginatively recreated through landscape and a supposed inheritance from the ancient Druids. Although I am using the term “medievalism” strictly to apply to visions of the Middle Ages, this first chapter is wider in historical scope because the very act of connecting the Druids not with the classical past but with a national medieval inheritance becomes a means of recuperating the Middle Ages while constructing a national myth of origin. Even


12


9780230103740_02_int.indd 12

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

13

though English popular medievalism is strongly indebted to the belief that English rights are part of a Saxon heritage, the imagined survival of the wisdom of druidry into medieval times becomes an alternative means of envisioning a national tradition of justice, and of suggesting that the poet-artist, inheritor of the Druid-bard tradition, is a visionary legislator for the nation. The Ancient British queen Boadicea emerges as a champion of national rights, creating a continuity with the reader’s present. William Blake’s use of Boadicea in his visions of the origins of England unites a sense of natural and historical rights by identifying Boadicea both with law and with topography. Chapter 2 provides some examples of ways in which antiquarian modes of preserving the past, largely the province of wealthy males, were adapted for middle-class audiences. Even though antiquarians relied on the memories of poorer and frequently illiterate people to help them recover old ballads, most ballad-collectors believed that the oral record preserved debased forms of medieval song. In contrast, the National Melody serves as a means of popularizing the antiquarian ballad, Robert Burns’s work providing an important bridge between antiquarian ballad-collection and popular song. In the hands of practitioners such as Thomas Moore, the use of fragments of medieval history in song proves a means of allegorizing nationalist critique. A similar appeal to middle-class audiences can be found in popular medievalist drama, the subject of chapter 3. Theater was an important means of spreading a knowledge of medieval characters to a wider audience, and this chapter focuses on plays that build upon, or even help create, a sense of Britain’s early medieval period. Some of these plays imagine Druids surviving well into the medieval period; Druids therefore become the embodiment of bardic inheritance and cultural memory, including a concept of national justice. Other plays, such as Ann Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin, draw on the myth of the Norman Yoke in claiming historical freedoms for the English people. Whereas chapters 2 and 3 show the adaptation of fragments of medieval history to make potentially subversive social points, chapter 4 turns to the use of the medieval form of the bestiary, in which characteristics of animals are used to make moral points. Even though Edmund Burke was using the moral register of the bestiary when he referred to the “swinish multitude,” not unreasonably, English radicals seized on the idea that he had called the English populace pigs. In the radical press, animal imagery thus becomes a means of exploring the idea of human rights. I suggest that Percy Shelley was making use of this radical vernacular in Swell-Foot the Tyrant, which combines classicism, medievalism, and the bestiary tradition.


Introduction


9780230103740_02_int.indd 13

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


Chapter 5 distinguishes between medievalism, antiquarianism, and the Gothic as it confronts a central problem of English popular medievalism, namely, how to negotiate the nation’s Roman Catholic past. One option, obviously, was to embrace it, as William Cobbett did in arguing that national history was biased against Roman Catholicism, and that medieval society had better solutions to the problem of poverty and social injustice than did the supposedly Protestant Christian present. A more common solution to the problem, however, was to imagine medievalism as a tool of oppression, a common feature in the Gothic novel. Some of these novels represent the real and entirely voluntary medieval ritual of immuring as the literal bricking up of those who violated sexual rules. These narratives show medievalism’s problematic relationship with the Gothic. Whereas Gothic conventions tend to distinguish between the reader’s present and the narrative’s account of events distanced by time and space, medievalism requires an interested, committed reader. Even a negative account of the survival of supposedly medieval practices as found in the Gothic novels’ accounts of being buried alive may serve the medievalist purpose of juxtaposing past and present. Chapter 6 turns to the representation of legal rights by Scottish authors. Characters in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which becomes the textbook of nineteenth-century British medievalism, constantly refer to different codes of law and ways to interpret them, which moves the discussion from the unwritten to the written, from common law to statute law. The narrator prompts the reader to consider Rebecca’s trial in the light of English law, even though the trial and ordeal that follows raise questions about natural law and about divine justice. Ivanhoe’s implied claim about English rights, namely, that they apply to outsiders as well as to the English, is also a feature of a less-remembered novel by a lowland Scot, John Galt’s Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk. Published two years after Ivanhoe, Sir Andrew Wylie moves questions of feudalism into the Scottish and English present as it tracks the progress of a Scottish orphan of modest means from a playful schoolboy to a lawyer and feudal landowner. Central to Andrew’s progression from trickster to hero is his championing of gypsies who have been charged with murder. Just in Ivanhoe, Sir Andrew Wylie reminds its readers that in theory English law protects the innocent, yet sometimes innocence has to be proved. Ultimately, however, although Andrew’s aristocracy is the product of his abilities and early experiences rather than his birth, he embraces feudal obligation. Even though it represents a hero of the people Sir Andrew Wylie thus anticipates the emphasis on structured


14


9780230103740_02_int.indd 14

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM

15

class relationships that is one of the features of Victorian medievalism. The conclusion, “Medievalism Becomes Expensive,” briefly surveys the emphasis on the material object that can sometimes embody the ideas of Romantic-era popular medievalism, as in the creation of a medieval-styled Palace of Westminster as the seat of British government, but that may also distance medievalism from popular tastes— and most people’s incomes. Since the trajectory of Romantic-era medievalism is from a conception of individual right to sense of personal entitlement, the startingpoint for this study must be the perceived origins of these rights. Romantic-era commentators found these origins not in written laws such as Magna Carta, which they insisted was not the creation but the reaffirmation of preexisting British rights, but inscribed on the British landscape.


Introduction


9780230103740_02_int.indd 15

12/5/2010 12:08:44 PM


9780230103740_02_int.indd 16

12/5/2010 12:08:45 PM

R i t e s a n d R igh t s: Th e Top o gr a ph y of A nc i e n t Br i t ish L aw

This for the past, and things that may be viewed Or fancied in the obscurity of years From monumental hints. (Wordsworth, The Prelude [1850] 13:350–52)

Where did rights of the British

1

people begin? For British writers, this question was inevitably linked to speculation as to how law began. By the Romantic era, many Britons believed that the origins of law were written on the landscape itself. To such observers, topography indicated not the strangeness of the past, but rather a continuity that helped explain the present. Although written history recorded successive invasions—by the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, and the Normans—the landscape of Romantic-era England also showed multiple signs of society before the Middle Ages. Although many Roman sites known today had not yet been excavated, Roman roads, such as Ermine Street and Fosse Way were still in use; Hadrian’s Wall, built to keep out the northern tribes, remained a massive monument to Roman occupation; and towns such as Colchester and Dorchester yielded a variety of Roman remains. Yet antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries puzzled over even more enigmatic relics, such as mounds of earth, known as barrows; huge ditches and embankments; and standing stones, the most famous in England being the circle at Avebury and


Chapter 1


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 17

12/5/2010 12:08:54 PM


the huge structure at nearby Stonehenge. While some antiquaries were inclined to attribute everything to the Romans, more believed that at least some of these remains predated the Roman invasion and were indicative of the culture of the early Britons. The notes to Charlotte Smith’s poem Beachy Head, published posthumously in 1807, show an intelligent observer attempting to read the landscape and make sense of the ancient remains of her native Sussex.2 The poem begins with Smith returning in fancy to the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion, when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arms, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. (1–2)

Yet Smith herself is doubtful of the historicity of the creation of England’s island form. She concedes that “the cliffs about Dieppe, resemble the chalk cliffs on the southern coast,” but asserts that she “never could trace the resemblance between the two countries,” since “Normandy has no resemblance to the part of England opposite it” (1–2; notes on 143–44). Personal observation not only challenges antiquarian theory, but also confirms a standard national prejudice: namely, that geographically, Britain always had a separate identity. Still, the landscape bears signs of those who placed a stamp on that identity. Half-destroyed mounds on the Sussex Downs, the chalk ridge that ends in cliffs such as Beachy Head, have been demonstrated to contain the remains of men, of whom is left No traces in the records of mankind, Save what these half obliterated mounds And half fill’d trenches doubtfully impart To some lone antiquary, who on times remote, Since when two thousand years have roll’d away Loves to contemplate. (27–28)


18

The date of “two thousand years” ago assigned to the tumuli suggests that Smith believes that the Ancient Britons built them. Smith’s note brings together remains from different ages when she remarks: “These Downs are not only marked with traces of encampments, which from their forms are called Roman or Danish, but there are numerous tumuli among them” (160). Smith also mentions the


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 18

12/5/2010 12:08:54 PM

R ites a nd R ights

19

The pirate Dane, who from his circular camp Bore in destructive robbery, fire and sword Down thro’ the vale, sleeps unremembered here, And here, beneath the green sward, rests alike The savage native, who his acorn meal Shar’d with the herds, that ranged the pathless woods;3 And the centurion, who on these wild hills Encamping, planted the Imperial Eagle. All, with the lapses of Time, have passed away. (29)

Yet, the poem also discusses times in written history, as the speaker muses over the Norman invasion at Pevensey, and Pevensey Castle.4 The poem next moves to an important part of the age of documented history, Battle Abbey, built on the site of the defeat of the “Saxon heptarchy.” Although the landscape shows signs of national changes of rule, it also shows evidence of the responses of individuals to law. The cottages built in the traditional manner from seaflint, Smith explains, are simultaneously the residences of shepherds and smugglers. The houses are positioned to look out over the cliffs toward France, the land from which invasion comes, but also the source of contraband. And the land is comprised of a mixture of communal resources—fish, birds, plants, waterways—and private property. Some ancient buildings, for example, have become part of private dwellings: Smith’s note states that some of the fortresses from the time of the wars between Stephen and Matilda “are now converted into farmhouses.” The poem ends with the account of a hermit who chose to live outside history by dwelling in a cave at the foot of Beachy Head: yet even he leaves his mark on the landscape because the rock itself bears “Memorials of his sufferings,” and his private residence is a place of public visitation. Moreover, although Smith states in her note that she fears that the hermit’s story may have been forgotten, her reading of the landscape where he lived preserves the link between landscape and written records of humanity. Modern-day archaeologists might wish to amend Smith’s history. England and France were certainly joined at one time, while most ancient bones of gigantic creatures are not of Roman origin but many thousand years old, probably predating the Ice Age that


ramparts and ditches (“The rampire, or excavated fosse”) dug by the Romans, and the remains of elephants, believed by some to be left there since Noah’s flood, but that also might be Roman, found in Sussex (28). Smith’s version of the transience of human life is explicitly archaeological:


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 19

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM


formed the South Downs. Pevensey Castle is at least in its foundations Roman, while the earthworks probably are not; the heptarchy was many years past by the time of the Norman invasion. Yet, we see in Smith’s poem an imaginative recreation of past landscapes, while her history is as scholarly as the data then allowed. Smith was right in pointing to the different ages who had occupied Sussex: ironically, less than a decade after her death, a Roman villa was discovered by Smith’s family home at Bignor. Bignor is now an important Roman archaeological site, where Roman pavements are protected in sea-flint buildings, and a private residence is now open to the public. Smith’s poem thus presents the problem of how to read the English past in a way that continues to have meaning when even ancient remains, apparently concrete facts about past ways of life, are open to multiple possibilities of interpretation. Smith’s topographical approach to the ancient English past was far from unique. I shall therefore begin by exploring British ideas about their nation’s origin, the role given to the Druids as Britain’s lawmakers and the implications for ideas of social equality. The ancient Britons were the earliest known people in Britain, and the little that is recorded of their interactions with the Romans suggested to later generations that they resisted the imposition of Roman law. Tacitus had noted the story of the Druid rebellion on Mona (Anglesey) and of the British queen Boudicca’s (Boadicea’s) rising against Roman rule, and both could be interpreted to suggest that Britons felt that Roman conquest had restricted their rights. In eighteenth-century analyses of the origins of England, the role of the Druids in creating an ancient British identity assumes a remarkable centrality, many commentators imagining the survival of druidry into the Middle Ages. Druidry thus becomes not just an antiquarian concern, but more specifically an aspect of popular medievalism. Discussions of the Druids provide a number of clues as to how English writers of the later eighteenth century thought about Godgiven, natural, and historical law. Neo-Druids of the present day often practice civil disobedience, claiming that their freedom of worship and access to traditionally common land (notably at sites such as Stonehenge) is restricted; they also participate in environmental issues. They are thus claiming to respond to a different law, namely that of the Nature-Goddess, and as Ronald Hutton has pointed out, at least one of these groups, led by Arthur Uther Pendragon, sees medievalism and druidry as one and the same, a recreation (or rebirth) of earlier British experience. Hutton tells how Arthur changed his


20


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 20

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM

R ites a nd R ights

21

He then asked The Goddess to help him recover Excalibur by the next full moon, accepting that if he did he would commit himself to the defense of the land. On the day before the moon reached its fullness, he saw a sword offered for sale in a shop window, which had been made to represent Excalibur in a film. He bought it, and vowed from that moment to fight for civil liberties and environmental issues. (“The New Druids” 16–18)

Arthur is associated with both the Secular Order of Druids (or SOD) and the Glastonbury Order of Druids (or GOD), but the group he founded calls itself the Loyal Arthurian Warband, or LAW.5 Very clearly, Arthur and his associates do not regard themselves as breaking the law, but answering to a higher law. The question remains whether the same was true of Romantic-era attitudes toward Druids and legal authority. Reading traces of the Druids in the landscape, as the modern-day Arthur’s story suggests, requires not archaeological skill, but visionary imagination. Evidence about the Druids was even more problematic than Smith’s archaeological-topographical view of Sussex, since their “traces in the records of mankind” are very few: indeed, most modern archaeologists believe that there is no physical record of British Druids, while textual evidence is very scant. As A.L. Owen remarks in his comprehensive study of literary interpretations of the Druids, The Famous Druids, English antiquaries had only two classical sources specifically discussing Druids in Britain, the accounts of Julius Caesar and Tacitus (15).6 Yet because Caesar suggests that the British Druids may have taught their fellow-Druids in Gaul, most British antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assumed that what the small number of other sources have to say about druidic practice on the other side of the channel was equally true in Britain. Smith’s insistence that she sees no physical similarities between England and France may be indicative that such ideas that had become increasingly uncomfortable by Smith’s time, when during the Napoleonic era patriotic Britons felt the need to express not their common origins with France, but their differences. I do not propose here to examine the complete range of responses to the Druids, but I hope to position them in the debate over the origins of English law and their relevance to medievalism. Before the Gothic revival of the eighteenth century, even those discussions of the Druids that were not completely entangled in the


name when an experience at Stonehenge convinced him that he was the King’s reincarnation:


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 21

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM


writer’s conceptions of what the relationship between church and state should be were rarely able to escape a classicist bias. The most frequently mentioned “facts” about the Druids are all drawn from Caesar’s Gallic War: that they were the priests and lawgivers of their people; that they practiced human sacrifice; and that they believed in the transmigration of souls (13–16). Almost without exception, British writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century assumed that if the Druids believed that at death, souls passed into another being, they must have derived this idea from the Greeks, rather than arriving at it independently. The Bible stated that all humanity had descended from the three sons of Noah, so people must have spread from the east to the rest of the world. If the fragment of religion that the Druids had retained from their connections with Greece was so clearly wrong, then the question remained as to whether their legal teaching retained anything from the laws of the true God, and whether it was entirely corrupt. John Milton’s summary dismissal of the Druids in his History of Britain, first printed in 1670, is typical of such discussions: by thir abstaining from a Hen, a Hare, and a Goose, from Fish also, saith Dion, and thir opinion of the Soules passing after Death into other Bodies, they may be thought to have studied Pythagoras; yet Philosophers I cannot call them, reported men factious and ambitious, contending somtimes about the archpriesthood not without civil Warr and slaughter; nor restrein’d they the people under them from a lew’d adulterous and incestuous life, though of neerest kin, Mother, Daughter, or Sister; Progenitors not to be glori’d in. (51)

Milton’s use of the word “progenitors” raises the question of ancestry, yet it is clearly one that he does not wish to pursue. If writers of the early neoclassical era wished to dismiss the Druids as part of a barbarous past, Enlightenment commentators could hardly be expected to respect druidic mysteries either. In the most-read history of the eighteenth century, Hume’s History of England, David Hume does not have much to say about the Druids, except to show how much he dislikes them. Hume has just mentioned that the ancient Britons, like other Celtic nations, had governments that “though monarchical, were free,” so that “the common people seem even to have enjoyed more liberty among them, than among the nations of Gaul, from whom they were descended” (1:3). Yet the Druids “possessed great authority” with the Britons: “Besides ministering at the altar, and directing all religious duties, they presided over the education of


22


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 22

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM

23

youth; they enjoyed an immunity from wars and taxes: they possessed both the civil and criminal jurisdiction: they decided all controversies among states, as well as among private persons” (1:3). Hume imagines a people entirely bound by mysterious laws: “They practised their rites in dark groves, or other secret recesses; and, in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion, they communicated their doctrines only to the initiated, and strictly forbad the committing of them to writing, lest they should at any time be exposed to the examination of the profane vulgar.” The Druids thus control law by keeping it as mystery. Their determination to be “pre-historic” by not writing down their secrets had also infuriated Milton, who believed that the Druids knew Greek and therefore could see no reason why they did not write things down. Finally, Druids practiced human sacrifice. Hume is paraphrasing Caesar throughout this passage; he cannot, however, refrain from adding a sentence not in his source. “Thus,” Hume sarcastically concludes, “the bands of government, which were naturally loose among that rude and turbulent people, were happily corroborated by the terrors of their superstition” (5). For Hume, the Druids demonstrate combined spiritual and legal authority at its worst, using superstition to control impulses toward liberty. About the same time, Edmund Burke began an “Abridgement of English History,” which is even more hostile in its reading of the Druids. One of the few records of British Druids is Tacitus’s account of Paulinus’s slaughter of the Druids on the island of Mona. Stabat pro litore diversa acies, densa armis virisque, intercursantibus feminis; in modum Furiarum veste ferali, crinis deiectis faces praeferebant; Druidaeque circum, preces diras sublatis ad caelum manibus fundentes, novitate aspectus perculere militum, ut quaesi haerentibus membris immobile corpus vulneribus praeberent. A diverse battleline stood on the shore, a thick mass of weapons and men, with women running in and out; in the manner of Furies with their savage costumes and dishevelled hair they brandished torches; and the Druids standing round them,7 pouring out dire prayers with their hands raised to heaven, presented such a strange sight to the soldiers, that as though their limbs were paralyzed, motionless, they exposed their bodies to wounds. (Annals 14:30)8


R ites a nd R ights

In Burke’s rendering, this becomes: On every side of the British army were seen bands of Druids in their most sacred habits surrounding the troops, lifting their hands to heaven,


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 23

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM

Pop u l a r M e di e va l i s m i n Rom a n t ic -E r a Br i t a i n devoting to death their enemies, and animating their disciples to religious frenzy by the uncouth ceremonies of a savage ritual, and the horrid mysteries of a superstition familiar with blood. The female Druids also moved about, in a troubled order, their hair dishevelled, their garments torn, torches in their hands, and, with an horror increased by the perverted softness of their sex, howled out the same curses and imprecations with greater clamour. Astonished at the sight, the Romans for some time neither advanced nor returned the darts of the enemy.9

Burke was possibly misled by “Druidae,” since first declension words are usually feminine, but the mistranslation is typical of Burke’s ideas about gender roles. As in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke presents a failure to differentiate between the roles of the sexes as evidence of a lack of civilization—even though this involves describing female Druids whose presence is distinctly questionable in his source and stressing that the Romans’ terror was increased by this female deviance. Burke’s horror at the Druids may also be due to a personal need to root out “Celtic” influences in his model of Britishness: his Druids are pointedly nothing like Britons of his day. Yet even before Burke composed his historical fragment, a more sympathetic view of the Druids had emerged, which, like the NeoDruids of today, claimed ancient erections in Britain as Druid sites. The most spectacular of these was, of course, Stonehenge. Even today, much of our knowledge of ancient Britain is speculative.10 Early antiquaries had little to say about Stonehenge, merely repeating (usually skeptically, as in the case of Milton and William Camden) that it was said to be built as a monument to the massacre of the Britons by the Saxons. In some versions, Merlin built it either by magic or by superior knowledge. Walter Charleton thought it was the work of the Danes. The ardent classicist Inigo Jones, however, tried to wrest Stonehenge from the Middle Ages by claiming that it could not have been the work of the indigenous people and their Druid leaders, but would have taken Roman architectural and engineering skills.11 Hence Walter Pope wrote in a 1676 broadside ballad describing the history of Salisbury: I will not forget those Stones that are set In a round, upon Salsbury Plains, Though who brought ’em there, ’tis hard to declare, The Romans, Merlin, or Danes.


24

A footnote reads, “Stonehenge the noblest monument of antiquity.” John Aubrey, however, took up Inigo Jones’s rejected idea of the


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 24

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM

25

Druids. He did some digging at the site and began to circulate the idea that Stonehenge and similar monuments were “Templa Druidum”— temples of the Druids. Aubrey did not publish his complete findings, although Edmund Gibson referred on a number of occasions to his Monumenta Britannica in his edition of Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1695. Aubrey’s idea is among the seven theories listed as to the origin of Stonehenge (which included the idea that it was the burial-place of Arthur, Uther Pendragon, Boadicea, or some other ancient Briton). The systematic description of Stonehenge and the nearby stone circle at Abury (now written Avebury) as Druid temples was left to William Stukeley. Stuart Piggott has argued that Stukeley’s earlier work shows him making a sincere attempt to interpret archaeological evidence and recognizing that Britain had a long history before the Roman invasion. Some of Stukeley’s observations, such as the existence of an approach that he called the Avenue, have been confirmed by aerial survey. As Piggott and Hutton demonstrate, Stukeley was aware of the work of Aubrey, and probably also the druidic ideas of a number of other writers. These include the freethinking John Toland; Johann Georg Keysler, who drew parallels between British structures and those found elsewhere in Europe, including Scandinavia; and Martin Martin, who had theories on Irish Druids (Hutton [2007] 52–54). In Mary Matthews’s 1722 reprint of Gibson’s 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia, the editor seems sympathetic to the idea that stone circles are Druid remains and quotes extensively from Welsh antiquarians, such as John Davies, who support their contentions by citing Aubrey (123). Stukeley, however, used these hints to imagine an entire Druid culture that was solidly British. In middle life, Stukeley abandoned his earlier occupation of medical doctor and took orders in the Church of England. He published his extensively illustrated Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids in 1740 and Abury, A Temple of the British Druids, with Some Others Describ’d in 1743, representing both his archaeological researches and his ideas about British druidic authority that were to influence all later ideas of British druidic practice. Like most of his contemporaries, Stukeley believed that all humanity had come from the original Man. Yet he also wanted to believe in the ancient origins of the English and of Anglican Christianity. He therefore argued that in the time of the patriarchs, when people talked directly to God, Abraham and his contemporaries were Christians, seemingly of the Anglican persuasion. Indeed, he planned a treatise on Melchisedec to show “that the first religion was no other than Christianity, the Mosaic dispensation, as


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 25

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM


a veil, intervening; that all mankind from the creation had a knowledge of the plurality of persons in the Deity” (Stonehenge, Preface). In these patriarchal times, through Phoenician traders, the Druids first came to Britain and practiced patriarchal Christianity; their leader was probably Hercules (Abury 80). According to Stukeley, although they worshipped both in temples and in oak groves (Stukeley can hardly reject the idea that the Druids worshipped in groves since it is in all his sources, but concentrates on their use of temples), the patriarchal Druids were not nature-worshippers. Neither were they idolaters, nor sun-worshippers, even though Stukeley seems to have been the first to observe that Stonehenge has a solar alignment at the summer solstice, a point crucial to the beliefs of present-day Druids. Instead, Stukeley’s original Druids worshipped the Triune God and lived by God’s laws. Hence, rather than being distinct from modern-day Britons, they shared the same notion of the divine. Stukeley concluded that Stonehenge was an example of a circular temple, built about 460 years before the Common Era; while Avebury was part of an earlier serpent-shaped temple, built about the time of the death of Abraham’s wife Sarah: that is, 1859 B.C.E. Stuart Piggott has observed that to support this theory, Stukeley’s later diagrams of Avebury display oval arrangements of stones, rather than true circles as he himself had earlier measured them: to find the inner truths of druidism, he was prepared to doctor his data (Piggott 107). Stukeley may have been inspired to link Druids and serpents through discussions in works such as the 1695 Britannia of “snakestones,” or Druid amulets mentioned by Pliny in relation to continental Druids, but the idea of serpent-temples seems to have been his own. For such structures, Stukeley coined the term Dracontia, or dragon temples: Stukeley’s analysis suggests that he liked snakes and felt that they had received a bad press from Christian interpreters.12 There was a third order of temple, shaped like wings. In combination, these shapes made up the sacred hierogram of the Egyptians, and other ancient nations, the circle and the snake. The whole figure is the circle, snake, and wings. By this they meant to picture out, as well as they could, the nature of the divinity. The circle meant the supreme fountain of all being, the father; the serpent, that divine emanation from him which was called the son; the wings imparted that other divine emanation from them which was called the spirit, the anima mundi. This is that figure which Kircher names ophio-cyclo-pterygomorphous, and discourses largely of. (Abury 55)


26


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 26

12/5/2010 12:08:55 PM

27

Contrary to the ideas of eighteenth-century rationalists, Stukeley argued that the “one, only, self-originated first being” would not remain “torpid, inactive, solitary, useless” after the act of creation, but that God himself communicated his existence to humanity and taught them the “most glorious” aspect of divinity, namely, “goodness.” As far as Stukeley is concerned, the word “druid” is synonymous with that of “priest,” so that, he remarks in Stonehenge, Rev. Hayward, the holder of the living of Ambresbury, “at present may be call’d the Archdruid of the island.” Stukeley’s patriarchal Druids are repositories of goodness, presumably conducting their society under the direct law of God: God’s law, natural law, and English law would thus, in Stukeley’s theology, originally have been one, and the topography of Britain tells the story of divine revelation. Only under later influences from outsiders did the early followers of the true religion become idolators: hence, in Abury, Stukeley explains that God gave the Mosaic law because the relationship between God and humans had become corrupted: “We find, on the continent, idolatry crept on by degrees universally, which was the occasion of providence exerting itself in the Mosaick dispensation; and thereby changing the manner of these temples, altogether polluted” (iii). This was not, though, the case in Britain: “We have no reason to think but that the Druids, in this island of ours, generally kept up to the purity of their first and patriarchal institution.” Stukeley’s Druids apparently do not believe in the transmigration of souls: disingenuously, he notes: “our Druids taught the expectation of a future life, both soul and body with greatest care” (Abury 41). Having insisted on the goodness of the Druids’ beliefs, Stukeley becomes defensive on the subject of human sacrifice, also mentioned by textual sources as a druidic practice. First, he observes that although remains that appear to be animal sacrifices have been found near Stonehenge, the only human remains are in barrows (he calls round barrows Druid barrows and long barrows Archdruid barrows). Second, he concedes that in Roman times, Druids may have been corrupted by outside influences and practiced human sacrifice; even then, however, he maintains that because of their isolation, the British Druids remained truer to the patriarchal faith than their counterparts on the continent. Finally, human sacrifice might indicate some sense of Christian redemption:


R ites a nd R ights

They crucified a man and burnt him on the altar; which seems to be an extravagant act of superstition, deriv’d from some extraordinary notice, they had of mankind’s redemption; and perhaps from Abraham’s example misunderstood.13 But as to human sacrifices,


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 27

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

28


The phrase “the Romans themselves” suggests that Stukeley assumes that his reader believes the Romans to be the measure of whether a people is civilized or not: if the Romans practiced human sacrifice, then less civilized people can only be expected to do the same.

Stonehenge and the Romantic Aesthetic Stukeley was writing at a time when the preeminence of the Romans was coming into question with the beginning of a revival of interest in Gothic architecture: Stukeley himself was to design neo-Gothic structures in later life. His description of Stonehenge suggests religious awe, yet may also hint at aesthetic appreciation, while the illustrations to Stonehenge reveal that it was already becoming a tourist destination: When you enter the building, whether on foot or horseback and cast your eyes around, upon the yawning ruins, you are struck into an exstatic reverie, which none can describe, and they only can be sensible of, that feel it. Other buildings fall by piece meal, but here a single stone is a ruin, and lieth like the haughty carcase of Goliath . . . We may well cry out in the poet’s words, “Tantum Relligio potuit!” (Stonehenge 12)

As the eighteenth century progressed and ideas of the picturesque developed, Stonehenge became an obvious destination-point and continued to be associated with an idea of a similarly picturesque Druid. Soon, virtually every scholar accepted the druidic origins of Stonehenge. In Richard Gough’s 1806 edition of Camden’s Britannia, for example, Gough critiques Camden for dismissing Stonehenge: “Mr. Camden could see nothing but confusion and rudeness in this stately pile” (Camden, ed. Gough 1:55).14 He evidently accepts the temple’s Druid origins, yet he seems less certain than Stukeley that Druids were patriarchal Christians. He hence includes some of the numerological-astrological observations of John Smith’s 1770 treatise Choir Gawr, The Grand Orrery of the Druids. According to Gough’s summary of Smith’s observations, Smith


simply consider’d, the Romans themselves and all other nations upon earth, at times, practise’d them. (Stonehenge 57)

shows that the outer circle of 30 stones, multiplied by 12 within for the twelve signs of the Zodiac, represents the antient solar year of 360 days; its inner circle is the lunar month of 29 days 12 hours represented


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 28

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

29

by 30 more stones, of which six at the upper end of this circle exhibit the hunter’s and harvest moon rising six nights together with little variation. Next to this circle is a great ellipse composed of seven pair of pillars with an impost in each pair for the seven planets whose influence may be alluded to by these compages of threes. Within these forming a concentric ellipse are 12 smaller single stones for the 12 signs of the Zodiac, with a 13th at the upper end for the archdruid’s seat before the altar. the center of this temple Dr. Smith finds to be 5111”, and that it could not be erected in this form at any other parallel of latitude. (1:155)

Gough waxes lyrical when recalling how on January 3, 1797, one of the triliths of Stonehenge fell, presumably because of burrowing rabbits: “Alas! Stonehenge, where were the Genii of this Druidical temple, while a few coneys were undermining the stones that had continued upright for no one can tell how many centuries?” (1:157). By the late eighteenth century, even antiquarians, it would seem, had an appreciation for a picturesque ruin. An interesting bridge between Enlightenment ideas and a new aesthetic appreciation for non-Classical style is shown in Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain on a New Plan, first published in 1771–1785. By the sixth edition, printed in 1823, the work included some one hundred and fifty pages discussing the British Druids—ten times longer than the written source materials. Most of the discussion of druidic practices is speculative, relying on parallels from classical writings on European Druids, Welsh bardic remains, and what was known of the Celts, again implying a continuity rather than a disjunction between the ancient and medieval periods of the nation.15 Henry shares Burke’s interpretation of Tacitus’s account of the Mona rebellion as proving the existence of female Druids in Britain. Henry, though, has more to say about druidic law than anyone else. Like Stukeley, Henry believed that Britain contained many physical remains of the Druids, and that druidic practice had patriarchal origins: The first and purest principles of it [their religion] at least descended to them, together with their language and many other things, from Gomer the eldest son of Japhet, from whom the Gauls, Britons, and all the other Celtic nations derived their origin. For it is not to be imagined that this renowned parent of so many nations, who was only the grandson of Noah, could be unacquainted with the knowledge of the true God, and of the most essential principles of religion; or that he neglected to communicate this knowledge to his immediate descendants, and they to their posterity from age to age. But


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 29

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

Pop u l a r M e di e va l i s m i n Rom a n t ic -E r a Br i t a i n unhappily the method by which this religious knowledge was handed down from Gomer to his numerous posterity in succeeding ages, was not well calculated to preserve it pure and uncorrupted. This was by tradition, which, however limpid it may be near its fountainhead, is like other streams, very apt to swell and become turbid in its progress. Accordingly we find, that at the period where this history begins [the invasion of Julius Caesar], the religion of the ancient Britons had degenerated into an absurd, wicked, and cruel superstition. (1:136)

But while their religion had become corrupt, Henry assumes that the Druids performed their legal functions to the best of their ability. Henry believes that the landscape bears signs of the dispensation of druidic law: the “eminences” around places such as Stonehenge—he appears to refer to the earthworks and barrows in the region—were used for preaching and dispensing justice to the people. He goes on to speculate as to the range of druidic laws and concludes that their justice must have protected their religious beliefs and the lives and property of the people. In a passage whose marginal summary reads “British common law,” Henry explicitly traces common law back to the Druids. In “civilized nations,” Henry remarks, laws are written as statutes or as practices known as immemorial custom. In contrast, in primitive societies, only certain general maxims of justice and equity are established, and the application of these maxims to particular cases, is left to the wisdom and integrity of the judges. This was certainly the state of what may be called the common law, among the ancient Britons. Those principles of truth, fidelity, justice and equity, in which the Druids instructed the people in their discourses, they made the rules of their decisions when they acted as judges. (1:328)

Henry suggests that while the idea that common law has remained intact since ancient British times is “incredible,” the Romans did not entirely replace British law with their own, so that there might be a considerable resemblance between the judicial decisions of the British Druids, and the regulations of the common law of England. For as right reason, equity, and justice, are eternally and universally the same; if the decisions of the Druids were regulated by these, they would in similar cases, materially, though perhaps not formally, coincide with those of the common law, which is regulated by reason, equity, and justice. (1:329)


30

The debt to Enlightenment ideas of the ahistorical consistency of human nature is clear here: even though Henry knows from his


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 30

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

31

sources that the Druids practiced human sacrifice, he can only imagine them making legal decisions based on “reason.” Henry’s view of natural law is built on a model of natural human reason. Even then, however, the claim of universality is somewhat undermined by Henry’s insistence of a British tradition of natural liberty tempered by a respect for religion, personal safety, and property that was able to survive Roman incursions. The thought that private ownership of property might not be “natural” never seems to occur to him, even though he is aware that some early peoples raided neighboring tribes. Henry is thus able to trace a slender thread of English common law back to the Druids. The rehabilitation of the Druids was such that by the late eighteenth century, some enthusiasts formed Neo-Druid groups. Foremost among these was a craftsman named Edward Williams, better known by the bardic name he chose for himself, Iolo Morganwg. Ronald Hutton has noted the centrality of Iolo’s role in Neo-Druidism, which he seems largely to have invented ([2007] 22–23, 160–64). Whereas Stukeley saw the Druids as a priestly class who were true forerunners of the Church of England, Iolo saw druidism as a popular form of democratic resistance to hierarchy and central to his own Welsh heritage. Iolo produced translations of the supposedly ancient writings of Taliesin, which in the Ossianic tradition seem to have been inspired by some genuine medieval sources but were probably largely his own composition. In the 1790s, Iolo helped form a group of Druids who “worshipped the sun” and recited druidic poetry on Primrose Hill, the highest geographic point in London (Taylor 104–5). At the first Gorsedd or meeting of the bards in 1792, Iolo recited an “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards” that contained the stanza: Now glancing o’er the rolls of HEAV’N I see, with transport see, the day, When, from this world., OPPRESSION driv’n With gnashing fangs flies far away, Long-banish’d VIRTUE now returns, BENEVOLENCE, thy fervor burns; PEACE, dove-eye’d PEACE, with sunny smile, High lifts her wand in BRITAIN’s Isle; HELL’s horrid gorge receives the Despot PRIDE; The Bardic Song shall now resound, Trill through these templed hills around, Come! Sons of TRUTH! Your paths are clear, In robes of light, in heav’nly forms appear, For JUSTICE wears her crown, reigns now th’eternal guide.16


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 31

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

32


Wordsworth, Blake, and the Druidic Landscape This overview of the eighteenth-century writings on British Druids suggests that the Druids of Romantic poetry can be traced back to historical sources that rival them in imagination. Iolo connected Druids with the traditions of the Welsh bards, even though most of his source-poems were of comparatively late date. As Thomas Gray did in “The Bard,” Iolo assumes the prophetic function continuing into the thirteenth century; he endeavored to continue this tradition by naming his son after in his opinion the greatest of the bards, Taliesin. The sources mention druids, bards, and seers or augurers (vates), but do not distinguish clearly among them, so that, for example, Robert Henry notes that the bards and seers were probably also Druids.17 The standard breakdown is that the Druids performed the priestly and legislative functions; the bards preserved history and genealogy; and the seers predicted the future through interpreting natural signs such as the behavior of birds or their sacrificial victims. A blurring of the categories is seen in poems such as Gray’s “The Bard,” where the last of the Welsh bards claims a prophetic function. Iolo thus created three orders of Druids (priests), Bards (artists), and Ovates (the learned), but in literature the distinction is less clear. Since Romantic-era poets often claimed for poetry visionary insight, occasionally (as in the case of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry) a legislative function as the priesthood of a new era, some poets may have thought of themselves as the new Druids. William Wordsworth probably would have dissociated himself from the notion of poet as Druid, but seems to have struggled with his ideas about the Druid past. As Alan Liu notes, Wordsworth was sufficiently interested in Druids to have made a notebook entry on the major sources about them (192–93), and Wordsworth’s reading of the Druids parallels his personal development from the bloody years of the early 1790s to the post-Reform Act Britain of the 1840s. Wordsworth visited Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge in summer 1793 and seems to have started working on the poem “Salisbury Plain” during the trip: the poem’s genesis and composition thus coincide with Robespierre’s rise to supreme power and the so-called Reign of Terror in France.18 The image of druidic holocaust, superimposed


According to Dena Taylor, the group survives to this day and claims William Blake as its “chosen chief” (105). Yet although Blake refers on more than one occasion to Primrose Hill, Archdruid was a role that Blake might not have chosen for himself.


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 32

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

R ites a nd R ights

33

And oft a night-fire mounting to the clouds Reveals the desert and with dismal red Clothes the black bodies of encircling crowds. It is the sacrificial altar fed With living men. (Salisbury Plain Poems 27)

Druidic law may thus be as cruel as the present—and, as the poem goes on to reveal in the story of the female wanderer whose story Wordsworth was to develop over the rest of his life, these cruelties are not confined to France. A widow tells a traveler of times of great hardship and injustice. Salisbury Plain is an appropriate place for this not merely because of the Druids, but also because the city of Old Sarum had moved in the Middle Ages, but the unpopulated area still returned two members to parliament, nominated by the local landowner. Yet the poem does not specifically name Druids as the agents of the destruction of human life, and moreover immediately follows this passage with a more benevolent image of Druids, where the cries of suffering and terror are replaced by the “charm” of “sweet sounds”: Not thus where clear moons spread their pleasing light. —Long bearded forms with wands uplifted shew To vast assemblies, while each breath of night Is hushed, the living fires that bright and slow Rounding th’aetherial field in order go. The as they trace with awe their various files All figured on the mystic plan below, Still prelude of sweet sounds the moon beguiles And charmed for many a league the hoary desart smiles. (27)

These two contrasting images of the ancient British past remained with Wordsworth for his entire poetic career, appearing, still together, in the very last versions of The Prelude. In Book 13 of the 1850 Prelude, Wordsworth is claiming for the poet a visionary function where his imagination recreates past, present, and future. The poet has “stood / By Nature’s side among the men of old, / And so shall stand for ever” (13: 297–99). In the 1850 version, the poet addresses the deceased Coleridge:


on the ruins of Stonehenge, may plausibly be linked with the Paris Guillotine:

Dearest Friend! If thou partake the animating faith


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 33

12/5/2010 12:08:56 PM

Pop u l a r M e di e va l i s m i n Rom a n t ic -E r a Br i t a i n That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, Have each his own peculiar faculty, Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits him to perceive Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame The humblest of this band who dares to hope That unto him hath also been vouchsafed An insight that in some sort he possesses, A privilege whereby a work of his, Proceeding from a source of untaught things, Creative and enduring, may become A power like one of Nature’s. (13 [1850]: 299–312)

The rephrasing of this passage as an appeal to Coleridge seems to imply that Wordsworth hopes to connect his idea of the poet’s special gift of insight with Coleridge’s idea of the primary imagination. What immediately follows this apparently modest claim of poetic insight is what may be called the “Salisbury Plain” experience. Again, Wordsworth records two different imaginative visions of Stonehenge in ancient times: first, The sacrificial altar, fed With living men—how deep the groans! the voice Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills The monumental hillocks, and the pomp Is for both worlds, the living and the dead. (13: 331–35)

The second shows him wandering Where’er the Plain Was figured o’er with circles, lines, or mounds, That yet survive, a work, as some divine, Shaped by the Druids, so to represent Their knowledge of the heavens, and image forth The constellations. (13: 337–42)

This prompts the benevolent image of the Druids as “long-bearded teachers,” as in the Salisbury Plain poems and the version of it that Wordsworth eventually published in 1842, “Guilt and Sorrow.” Although over Wordsworth’s long poetical career, this poem went through a number of transformations, two points remain largely consistent. First Stonehenge, with its “sacrificial altar,” serves as a permanent reminder of human destruction of other human life. In the earliest version of the poem, drafted in 1793–94, the Wicker man


34


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 34

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM

35

reminds the speaker of the oppression of the poor: although the cries of the victims of the wicker man can no longer be heard, “reason’s ray” nevertheless reveals “with still-born glimpse the terrors of our way.” The Spenserian stanza, which remains the form of all versions of the poem, replicates the physical monuments of the past by being a monument to England’s literary heritage, and especially the moralized England of The Faerie Queene.19 At the same time, the poem in its first form was highly topical. “Terror” was a resonant word at the time of the most violent period of the French Revolution, but here the “terror” revealed is that of starvation: “For want how many men and children die?” (35). The second version of the poem, “Adventures on Salisbury Plain,” which was drafted in the last five years of the eighteenth century, makes an even more explicit connection between the wicker man and legal punishment as it tells how a sailor, impressed into the Navy, on his final return home has robbed and murdered a stranger. On Salisbury Plain he first encounters a gibbet where he sees “a human body that in irons swang,” and falls into a trance in which he seems to be pursued by rolling stones. Then he encounters the greatest stones of judgment, Stonehenge: “Hoary and naked are its walls and raise/ Their brow sublime.” (127). The stones are themselves like a circle of elders. The narrator addresses Stonehenge directly: Even since thou sawest the giant Wicker rear Its dismal chambers hung with living men, Before thy face did ever wretch appear, Who in his heart had groan’d with deadlier pain Than he who travels now along thy bleak domain? (127)

The Wicker man, a giant wicker figure that, according to the Romans, Ancient Britons used to pack full of people and then burn them to death as a human sacrifice, might appear to be locked firmly in the past. Yet the Sailor too is a victim of a social structure that treats people as disposable. When the Sailor realizes that his own act of violence has continued the cycle by causing suffering to others, he confesses to the murder, and although the citizens say, “Though we deplore it much as any can,” still those “who of Justice bear [. . .] the violated name” ensure that he hangs “in iron case.” The place of his execution becomes a place of primitive ceremony as “dissolute men, unthinking and untaught, / Planted their festive booths beneath his face” (154). As the Sailor has earlier remarked, “ ’Tis a bad world, and hard is the world’s law” (149).


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 35

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM


By the time that Wordsworth published a revised version of the poem as “Guilt and Sorrow” in 1842, both English society and his attitude toward it had undergone some changes. The strong social critique of the first version, which accuses English society of replicating the oppressions of their forebears; and of the second version, which most closely connects ancient Stonehenge and modern actions of retribution, is muted, as Wordsworth apparently no longer saw himself as at odds with legal authority. Whereas at the beginning of the century, British courts still widely used the death penalty, by 1842, few people received a capital sentence, and even fewer were executed. The Sailor not only confesses his crime, and again invites “the murderer’s fate,” but also shows that he has undergone not merely social but also Christian repentance when he concludes his speech, “My trust, Saviour! is in thy name” (281). The final stanza reads: His fate was pitied. Him in iron case (Reader, forgive the intolerable thought) They hung not:—no one on his form or face Could gaze, as on a show by idlers sought; No kindred sufferers, to his death-place brought By lawless curiosity or chance, When into storm the evening sky is wrought, Upon his swinging corse an eye can glance, And drop, as he once dropped, in miserable trance. (282–83)

Yet although in the narrative the Sailor is not hanged, the fate that a more-clement legal authority has commuted is still there in the Sailor’s own trance and the imagination of the reader. In an age where the law no longer needs to express itself in public cruelty, the imagined past is similarly less cruel. Whereas in earlier versions, Stonehenge was the site of the Wicker man holocausts, by 1842, Wordsworth seems less sure even of ancient human sacrifice: the line addressed to Stonehenge, “Even since thou sawest giant Wicker rear” has become “Even if thou saw’st the giant wicker rear” (235; my italics). As Wordsworth notes in The Prelude, the most extreme acts of human cruelty may be in the imagination, and by 1842, when English society had become far more cautious about imposing the sentence of death, the imagination is where they belong, to the extent that Wordsworth has to apologize to his reader for creating the “intolerable thought.” If past and present human cruelty is a common theme in Wordsworth’s imaginative creation of Stonehenge, the other common theme is Wordsworth’s attitude toward the Druids. He does not specifically state that the Druids were the ones who carried out


36


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 36

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM

37

human sacrifice, hence implying that the guilt of injustice falls on the whole society, rather than its priesthood and legislators.20 By the 1820s, when he wrote the Ecclesiastical Sonnets depicting the earliest part of England’s religious history, Wordsworth ascribed to the “patriarchal Druid” theory, very possibly derived from his reading of Robert Henry: describing the mystic ring Where Augers stand, the Future questioning, Slowly the cormorant aims her heavy flight, Portending ruin to each baleful rite That, in the lapse of ages, hath crept o’er Diluvian truths, and patriarchal lore. (419)21

The following sonnet describes a druidic excommunication, of the kind described in the classical sources, yet Wordsworth suggests that Yet shall it claim our reverence that to God, Ancient of days! that to the eternal Sire, These jealous Ministers of law aspire, As to the one sole fount whence wisdom flowed, Justice, and order. (419)

At this point in Wordsworth’s thinking, that the priestly and legal functions might always have been combined is a reason for “reverence,” not moral outrage as in the first version of “Salisbury Plain.” In such a context, the Druids of Blake’s visionary imagination do not seem quite as idiosyncratic as some scholars have suggested. Blake knew Gray’s work intimately, but although some commentators, including Peter F. Fisher, have suggested that Blake’s ideas about Druids were influenced by Gray, Blake makes a clear distinction between bards and Druids in their post-patriarchal form in a way that Iolo Morganwg seems to have intended but did not quite achieve. Bards are prophetpoets: for example, Songs of Experience opens with the voice of the bard, Who present, past, and future sees— Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees. (Plate 30, 209)


R ites a nd R ights

Although when the Word walked on the earth, there may have been no division between Druids and bards, in Blake’s depiction of the fallen world, they have different functions.


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 37

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM


Britain’s druidic past has an important role in Blake’s last largescale prophetic books, Milton and Jerusalem. Blake’s reading of ancient British history is uniquely personal, yet claims a spiritual universality. Even while I would agree with A.L. Owen that in his representation of the Druids “Blake aimed at the statement of universal truths” (226), I shall here focus on Blake’s interpretation of the origins of British law and especially the ways in which he links a reading of legal authority (usually for Blake, false legal authority) with national topography. Blake linked all three of his homes during his creative life with a historicized sense of human and divine law. From 1791, Blake lived at Lambeth, which is mentioned prominently in the “bard’s prophetic song” that first moves Milton: The Surrey hills glow like the clinkers of the furnace. Lambeth’s vale— Where Jerusalem’s foundations began; where they were laid in ruins, Where they were laid in ruins from every nation, & oak groves rooted— Dark gleams before the furnace-mouth, a heap of burning ashes. (When shall Jerusalem return & overspread all the nations? Return, return to Lambeth’s vale, O building of human souls!) Thence stony Druid temples overspread the island white, And thence from Jerusalem’s ruins—from her walls of salvation And praise—through the whole earth were reared; from Ireland To Mexico & Peru west, & east to China and Japan; till Babel, The spectre of Albion, frowned over the nations in glory & war. (All things begin & end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore, But now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion. (Plate 6; 419)22

Immediately below these lines is the design of a huge trilithon like those at Stonehenge, surrounded by a starry sky; the scale of the structure is indicated by a tiny figure on horseback (fig. 1.1). Why should Blake link Lambeth and Stonehenge? By Blake’s time, almost everyone believed Stonehenge was a relic of the Druids. As several commentators, including Owen and Fisher, have noted, Blake must have been familiar with William Stukeley’s reading of druidic remains as “stony Druid temples” spread not only throughout Britain, but also the rest of the world. Blake also frequently alludes to “dragon” or “serpent” temples, an idea that Stukeley seems to have originated. As early as Europe (1794), he refers to Albion’s angel as


38

The fiery king, who sought his ancient temple serpent-formed That stretches out its shady length along the island white. (Pl. 10; 233)


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 38

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM


Figure 1.1 William Blake, Milton, Plate 6. A massive trilith stands under the words “the mighty limbs of Albion.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission.


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 39

12/5/2010 12:08:57 PM


The creation of the serpent-temple is explicitly linked to making “God a tyrant crowned” (Pl. 10; 234). Giving centrality to this image, the plate (Plate 10) is bordered by an elaborate fire-breathing serpent with seven coils that “stretches out its shady length” on the entire left side of the page. A serpent also appears on the title-page of Europe, and this serpent’s body is coiled to create a circle in the way that Stukeley had described serpent-temples. Below the serpent is the word “LAMBETH.” This is part of Blake’s imprimatur: below in smaller letters are the words “Printed by Will: Blake: 1794” (fig. 1.2). Lambeth and the temple-serpent, though, seem emblematically linked. David V. Erdman’s Illuminated Blake includes four additional prints of the titlepage to Europe that he dates no earlier than 1809 (395–98). Although Blake was no longer living at Lambeth, in each of the four, the word “Lambeth” remains prominent under the print of the serpent. One of these prints, Europe ii.c in the Kerrison Preston collection, City of Westminster, has been trimmed and drawn over so that the only surviving word of text is “Lambeth”; it cannot be established that Blake did the trimming, but he certainly created the palimpsestic effect where the word “Europe” has been replaced by a sketch of human figures about to be devoured by the head of another serpent. I would suggest that for Blake, Lambeth represents druidism gone awry. As Peter F. Fisher has shown, Blake subscribed to the fairly common Gothic Revival belief (also used by Wordsworth in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets) that the druidism witnessed by the Romans was a late corruption of a pure, God-centered religion. Blake describes the biblical patriarchs, and Albion, the manifestation of England, as Druids when he asks, in the Preface to Book Two of Jerusalem, addressed “To the Jews,” “Was Britain the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion?” Your ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem, and Noah, who were druids, as the druid temples (which are the patriarchal pillars & oak groves) over the whole earth witness to this day. You have a tradition, that man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in heaven & earth: this you recieved from the druids. “But now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion.”


40

Albion was the parent of the druids; & in his chaotic state of sleep Satan & Adam & the whole world was created by the Elohim. (Pl. 27; 676–77)

But whereas Stukeley, Henry, and others imagine the patriarchal Druids as having spread knowledge of God from the Holy Land to


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 40

12/5/2010 12:08:58 PM


Figure 1.2 William Blake, Title page of Europe, A Prophecy (Plate 2). The coils of the serpent replicate William Stukeley’s ideas about the form of druidic temples. In all versions of this print the word “Lambeth” is prominent. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission.


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 41

12/5/2010 12:08:58 PM


Britain, the edge of the ancient world, in Blake’s vision, the druidic tradition had its center in Britain and spread to the rest of the earth. In this primeval state, man “contained in his mighty limbs all things in heaven & earth”: there was no separation of knowledge between the creator and the elements of creation, and hence, as in Stukeley’s version, no need for law. The Druids, however (and this Blake would have found in Milton’s Britain), kept knowledge secret by refusing to write, so that “the starry heavens” become part of a process of mystery, rather than revelation.23 In Milton, the names of pagan gods are given to “the twelve spectre sons of the Druid Albion” (Pl. 37; 554): hence the druidic tradition itself helped create false representations of the divine. For Blake, although Druids and bards may once have been one, they divide when bards continue to broadcast prophetic truths, and Druids to retain control over these truths. The creation of a separate order of priesthood marks the beginning of human enslavement to rules. Lambeth hence has a role in Blake’s antiquarian topography as the modern manifestation of the corrupt priesthood. The residence of the archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the established church, Lambeth represents a false link between spiritual and temporal authority in an exclusive priesthood that Blake traces back to the Druids. Blake probably also knew that Lambeth Palace was by the site of more ancient remains, so that the archbishops may in fact have built the palace out of the remnants of earlier forms of worship. The corrupt line of the Druids lives on at Lambeth: hence when the daughters of Albion pronounce “From Lambeth / We began our foundations, lovely Lambeth!” (Pl. 84; 812), the daughters’ definition of loveliness should be questioned.24 The second home of Blake’s working life has healthier primeval associations. In 1800, Blake moved to Felpham, in Sussex. Milton begins in an anticlassicist vein: describing Greek and Latin literature as “set up by artifice against the sublime of the Bible,” Blake asserts that “We do not want either Greek or Roman models, if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever—in Jesus our Lord.” The verses that follow, “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green” (Pl. 1; 488–89) are often linked with an English folk-myth that in his childhood, Jesus visited England with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea.25 But Blake may have been looking back to more ancient times than the first century: if Britain is the place where all originated, in the beginning, God and humans could walk the same ground. The song concludes with the line, “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” In creating divisions between


42


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 42

12/5/2010 12:08:59 PM

43

priests and other people, the Druids have destroyed the primeval world where God walked and all people could communicate with God, not leaving the task to priests and visionaries. In Felpham, Blake refused to leave revelation to Druids. Looking back on his time at Felpham as he worked on Milton and Jerusalem, Blake seems to have remembered it almost as Edenic: for example, he records in Book II of Milton that For when Los joined with me he took me in his fiery whirlwind. My vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeth’s shades; He set me down in Felpham’s vale & prepared a beautiful Cottage for me that in three years I might write all these visions To display nature’s cruel holiness, the deceits of natural religion. (Pl. 40; 551–52)

Felpham is for Blake the place of the visions that will become Milton and Jerusalem; he is there three years, the length of time of Christ’s earthly mission. When he recalls that “Walking in my cottage garden sudden I beheld / The virgin Ololon,” the connection with the biblical story of Adam is clear: walking in the garden, Adam is able to meet with God. Yet human law came to meet Blake at Felpham: he seems to have felt William Hayley, through whose help he had obtained the cottage, too controlling; while an argument with a soldier named Schofield or (according to Blake) Scholfield, who entered Blake’s garden, led to Schofield charging Blake with seditious speech.26 Although he was acquitted by the Sussex courts when the case came to trial in 1804, Blake had already left Felpham 1803 for London. Here he took up residence in South Molton Street. In Plate 4 of Milton, not found in all copies, Blake writes, Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place, Calvary’s foot, Where the victims were preparing for sacrifice, their cherubim Around their loins poured forth their arrows, & their bosoms beam With all colours of precious stones, & their inmost palaces Resounded with preparation of animals wild and tame (Mark well my words! Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies). Mocking druidical, mathematical proportion of length, breadth, height, Displaying naked beauty, with flute & harp and song. (Pl. 4)


R ites a nd R ights

The accompanying design shows trilith-type stone structures, with figures weeping and dancing; above, a small image of Stonehenge is set into the text, suggesting that the historic landscape and words need to be read together (fig. 1.3). Blake’s new home was near Tyburn,


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 43

12/5/2010 12:08:59 PM


Figure 1.3 Blake, Milton, Plate 4. Stonehenge-like structures overshadow the sacrificial altar (“London Stone”) in druidical London. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2010 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission.


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 44

12/5/2010 12:08:59 PM

45

which until 1783 had been the place of public execution in London. Across time periods, Blake connects moments of “sacrifice”: the human sacrifices of the Druids, the crucifixion of Christ at Calvary, and modern judicial killing, which, although no longer practiced at Tyburn largely because the authorities felt that Tyburn executions had been accompanied by too much “flute and harp and song,” was a very recent memory. Stukeley had glossed over the question of human sacrifice, noting that if the Druids practiced it, it was either a late practice copied from other nations, or some incorrect memory of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Yet although Blake is clearly indebted to Stukeley for ideas about ancient temples, Blake has much more to say about human sacrifice, which he imagines as taking place on the altar at Stonehenge and on “London Stone.” Believed to be the Roman marker of the center of London, “London Stone” is a symbol that unites the druidic past, the medieval popular feeling, and the present. During the Peasants’ Revolt, Jack Cade is said to have struck London Stone as a symbol of the end of oppression against the peasant classes. Blake envisages it as, like Stonehenge, used for druidic human sacrifice.27 In the song that follows the opening address of Book 2 of Jerusalem, Blake interprets druidic sacrifice in London: What are those golden builders doing Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington, Standing above that mighty ruin Where Satan the first victory won, Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree And the druid’s golden knife Rioted in human gore, In offerings of human life? They groaned aloud on London Stone, They groaned aloud on Tyburn’s brook; Albion gave his deadly groan, And all the Atlantic mountains shook. Albion’s spectre from his loins Tore forth in all the pomp of war, Satan his name; in flames of fire He stretched his druid pillars far.


R ites a nd R ights

Jerusalem fell from Lambeth’s Vale, Down through Poplar & Old Bow, Through Maldon & across the sea, In war & howling, death & woe. (Pl. 27; 678–79)


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 45

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM


Blake’s attitude toward sacrifice reveals much about his attitude to law. Sacrifice is the creation of a scapegoat, one who will bear the wrongs of others. Instead, as Milton discovers in his epic journey, “self-annihilation,” the blotting out of self, is true inspiration, and thus human sacrifice reverses “the laws of Eternity.” Milton tells his specter Satan: Know thou, I come to self-annihilation. Such are the laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for other’s good, as I for thee. Thy purpose & the purpose of thy priests & of thy churches Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach Trembling & fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness. Mine is to teach men to despise death, laughing to scorn Thy laws & terrors, shaking down Synagogues as webs. (Pl. 38; 558)

Where Wordsworth had blurred the boundaries between sacrifice and execution, Blake pointedly makes no distinction between the two. In Book 2 of Jerusalem, as Albion sits “by Tyburn’s brook,” a “deadly tree” shoots up: he named it Moral Virtue, and the Law Of God who dwells in chaos hid from human sight. From willing sacrifice of self, to sacrifice of (miscalled) enemies For atonement Albion began to erect twelve altars, Of rough unhewn rocks, before the potter’s furnace. He named them Justice, & Truth. And Albion’s sons Must have become the first victims, being the first transgressors. (Pl. 29; 682)

Blake conflates the sacred oak of the Druids, the cross of Christ, and the gallows of Tyburn into a place where one’s own wrongs are transferred onto others; Tyburn only represents druidic justice, not true justice for all people. In additional to referring to both sacrificial trees and sacrificial stones, Blake’s vision includes what he calls “the wicker man of Scandinavia.” Since Roman sources state that the sacrificial rite of the Wicker man was a British custom, Blake’s attribution of the practice to Scandinavia is puzzling, especially when contemporaries such as Wordsworth associated the practice with Stonehenge.28 Given Blake’s critique of the fallen state of Albion, it does not seem likely that Blake simply wished to present this kind of mass-slaughter as un-British. He might simply have associated this kind of sacrifice with the cruel


46


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 46

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

47

rites of the Norse gods. A. L. Owen says that he may also have been familiar with theories that druidism originated in Scandinavia. For Blake this would have to be a false theory since it moves “beginnings” from Britain, and hence he might link it with corrupt druidism. But another possibility is that through Swedenborg, a Scandinavian, Blake connects the Wicker man with the rationalism of natural religion. The title page to Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan, a work that as a trained engraver, Blake is likely to have seen, depicts the state as a king made up of tiny people. The French had used similar kinds of iconography in the still-recent time of the revolutionary Republic in depicting the state as a giant Man. For Blake, though, Swedenborg represents false oppositions of good and evil that might lead people to attempt to negate the evil by sacrificing the good. The Wicker man is a “natural image,” produced from living matter, although that living matter would appear to have its origins in London: From Camberwell to Highgate, where the mighty Thames shudders along, Where Los’s furnaces stand, where Jerusalem and Vala howl, Luvah tore forth from Albion’s loins, in fibrous veins, in rivers Of blood over Europe—a vegetating root in grinding pain, Animating the dragon temples, soon to become that holy fiend The wicker man of Scandinavia, in which cruelly consumed The captives reared to heaven howl in flames among the stars. Loud the cries of war on the Rhine & Danube with Albion’s sons. (Pl. 47; 722)

This primeval image, though, has very topical connotations; if “Luvah” is France, Blake would seem to be referring to the wars against Napoleon in Prussia. War itself can be a repetition of the “wicker man,” because individuals are expected to lay down their lives for their countries. Yet the wicker man represents the druidic creation of laws to oppress the common people that can only be kept by sacrifice and hypocritical self-denial. When in Book 3 of Jerusalem the Druids demand “chastity from woman & all was lost,” Blake’s representative Los protests, “How can the female be chaste, O thou stupid druid?” (Pl. 63; 760). Los believes that druidic laws to keep women chaste will only be maintained by sacrifices for atonement. Led by Gwendolen, the cruelest of the Twelve, the daughters combine into Vala, the wife of Albion. Los, however, recognizes her and her motives:


R ites a nd R ights

All quarrels arise from reasoning: the secret murder, and The violent man-slaughter—these are the spectre’s double cave;


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 47

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

48


Blake’s central objection to druidism is disclosed when Vala pronounces that she was ordered to kill Albion, but that she keeps Albion’s body “enbalmed with moral laws”: The children of Jerusalem, the souls of those who sleep, Were caught into the flax of her distaff, & in her cloud, To weave Jerusalem a body according to her will, A dragon form on Zion hill’s most ancient promontory. (Pl. 80; 801)

The creation of the woven body of the wicker man is here combined with the idea of the dragon temple—and this occurs on the “most ancient promontory.” If Zion’s current form is London, then the promontory would be Primrose Hill, where Neo-Druids practiced their rites in Blake’s time, possible even with Blake’s participation. The difficulty is that Neo-Druids can only replicate the practices of the post-patriarchal Druids, and thus we have to look to the end of Jerusalem to find a resolution that brings the end back to the beginning.

Boadicea and the Destruction of Albion The story of Boadicea in many ways marks an ending for Albion, and scholars of the late eighteenth century also believed that with the fall of the Ancient Britons precipitated by Boadicea’s war came the end of the Druids as an official power. Boadicea is one of the few names we know from ancient British history, although even this name only became the established form in the late eighteenth century; Tacitus calls her Boudicca, and she is also called Bonduca.29 Boadicea’s story, even as told by her enemies the Romans, involves the claiming of British liberty,30 and thus she provides an interesting test-case for whether by the later eighteenth century, Britons could trace a history of English low back to the ancient Britons. According to Tacitus, Boadicea was the widow of the Icenian king Prasutagus, and following British custom, which did not distinguish between the sexes in monarchs, she succeeded him as ruler. The Romans flogged the queen, raped her daughters, took the Icenian ancestral property (“avitis bonis”), and reduced members of the royal family to servitude. Boadicea urged the tribe of the Trinobantes to join the Iceni


The sexual death, living on accusation of sin & judgement, To freeze love and innocence into the gold & silver of the merchant. Without forgiveness of sin, love is itself eternal death! (Pl. 64; 762)


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 48

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

49

in rebellion against the Romans; they destroyed the Roman city of Camelodunum and massacred the inhabitants; they then turned to London and Verulamium. Tacitus describes Boadicea as mounted in her chariot, proclaiming wrongs to her person, her family, and her nation, and urging them to reclaim their lost liberties: the Britons “must conquer or fall in battle. Such was the destiny of a woman: the men could live and be slaves” (Tacitus, Annales 14:35). The Romans defeated the Britons in battle, and Boadicea died by poison, presumably a suicide. In his Epitome of Roman History, Dio Cassius expands on the story, listing the atrocities (notably against women) committed by the Britons, and describing Boadicea as a tall, masculine woman with waist-length yellow hair and a harsh voice: he gives her a far longer speech than does Tacitus, where she again cites personal wrongs and the need to reclaim liberty for the people: she tells them, “You have learned by actual experience how different freedom is from slavery,” and complains at oppressive Roman taxation (Epitome of Book 62; Loeb 8:85). She also performs some kind of rite when she draws a hare from within her clothing. This and Dio’s description of omens in London may have caused later interpreters of the story to connect Boadicea with the Druids. In Tacitus’s Annals, the story of Boadicea directly follows the rising of the Druids on Mona, but no Druids appear in the narrative. Is Boadicea concerned with individual rights (notably the security of individuals and of property), or is she motivated by barbaric superstition? At least partly because they seem uncomfortable at the idea of a woman in this role, British writers prove reluctant to claim Boadicea as a hero of popular liberty. Boadicea does not fare well in earlier English interpretations. In John Fletcher’s Bonduca (c. 1614), the cast-list describes her as “Queen of the Iceni, a brave virago,” and although she talks about “liberty and honour,” her resistance the Romans is portrayed as self-destructive. The drama includes some druidic rites, but no Druids are developed as characters. Milton portrays her as superstitious, and, like Hume a century later, he questions her military capability. William Stukeley, hardly surprisingly, seems to have liked her, since of the two women who joined his antiquarian group the “Society of Roman Knights,” one took the name of Bonduca, and the other that of Cartismandua, queen of the Brigantes, which, since Boadicea’s daughters have no names, is the only other woman’s name we know from pre-Roman British history; Stukeley himself took the name “Chyndonax,” whom he believed on very flimsy grounds to have been an Archdruid (Piggot, Stukeley 53). Robert Henry believed that the Roman slaughter of the


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 49

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM


Britons following Boadicea’s defeat had led to the final overthrow of the Druids. Henry hence dismisses another theory about Stonehenge, namely, that it was built as Boadicea’s tomb: this would not at all match his theory of British decline. All of these writers appear to blame Boadicea, to a lesser or greater extent, for the suppression of “British-ness” by the Romans. In contrast, Boadicea is explicitly connected with British identity in William Cowper’s poem of about 1781, “Boadicea, An Ode.” In this short poem, the “British warrior queen” responds to her mistreatment by the Romans not by inspiring her people with indignation but by seeking “Counsel of her country’s gods” (1:431–32). She is consoled by a Druid sitting “beneath a spreading oak,” who foretells the fall of Rome, and the rise of British power: Then the progeny that springs From the forests of our land, Arm’d with thunder, clad with wings, Shall a wider world command. Regions Caesar never knew, Thy posterity shall sway, Where his eagles never flew, None invincible as they.

Cowper’s Druid, who seems to owe something to Gray’s Bard, is simultaneously Druid-priest (the interpreter of the gods), a “bard” singing in the accompaniment of a lyre, and “prophetic.” At the end, Cowper claims his own druidic voice when he pronounces, Ruffians, pittiless as proud, Heav’n awards the vengeance due, Empire is on us bestow’d, Shame and ruin wait for you.

The Druid, whose interpretation of the Gods is ratified by “heaven,” fares better in the poem than does Boadicea. Boadicea responds to the Druid’s words “with all a monarch’s pride,” and consequently “Rush’d to battle, fought and died.” This would seem to imply that she dies in the battle, while no mention is made of the massacres of the Romans. Boadicea is here not the inspirer of liberty, but inspired—she can only hurl the Druid’s “prophetic words” at the foe, rather than her own—and even then, the inspiration is not her potential freedom, but the future world domination of her people. In the 1860s, at the


50


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 50

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

51

height of Victorian empire, the final stanza of Cowper’s poem was chosen for Thomas Thorneycroft’s gigantic statue of Boadicea, which now stands on the Thames Embankment. For Cowper, the physical reminder of the ancient Britons is the forest; this brief poem shows no interest in archaeological remains. In contrast, William Blake’s depiction of Boadicea is, I shall argue, heavily topographical, yet, like all the previous imaginings of the queen, still imagines her as a woman who contributes to the long term yet not permanent overthrow of Britishness. Blake names Boadicea as one of the “Daughters of Albion” in Vala; Or The Four Zoas, a poem that Blake seems to have regarded as a work in progress. With the exception of Mehetabel and Cambel, the Daughters are all associated with the early history of Britain, or preRoman druidic times, and also with topography. Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella are from the story of King Lear (Leir), which involves geographical partition; Conwenna and Ingoge are early queens associated with territorial alliances; Guinefred was a Welsh virgin martyr of the seventh century whose death caused a miraculous spring; and Gwendolen, Estrild, and Sabrina are in the story of the origin of the name of the River Severn. Of the two remaining Daughters, Mehetabel is a queen of Edom in Genesis 31,31 and the name Cambel has no known source. With these two exceptions, the Daughters are all women involved in shaping Britain; they are, says Jerusalem, “Names anciently remembered but now contemned as fictions, / Although in every bosom they control our vegetative powers” (Pl. 5, 633). Boadicea’s name disappears from the list of the Daughters in Book One of Jerusalem, where it is replaced by Gwineverra. Since Arthur is one of the emanations of Albion in Jerusalem, Blake probably wanted to include his queen. (Although Guinevere is generally depicted as a post-Roman queen, Blake’s Arthur fights not against the Saxons, but against the Romans, so Guinevere too belongs to the pre-Roman history of Britain.) Cambel and Boadicea are two different Daughters in The Four Zoas, but Blake states in two different places in Jerusalem that they are one and the same. Possibly, just as the other names have topographical associations (for instance, Sabrina’s father’s wife Gwendolen threw her into the river, hence the River Severn), Boadicea’s name in Blake’s visions is similarly topographical, suggesting the river Cam (in the Iceni region); Cambridge (for Blake, a place of druidic learning also associated with Milton); and Camelodunum, the first city destroyed by Boadicea. Possibly it also suggested a Romantic-era term for the Ancient Britons and their Welsh descendants, the Cambro-Britons.


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 51

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM


According to the sources, Boadicea destroyed three centers of Roman control in England, Camelodunum, Verulamium, and Londinium. Modern archaeologists identify Camelodunum with Colchester,32 but in Blake’s time, it was believed to have been Maldon, which Blake mentions frequently. As we have seen earlier, in the song that follows the introduction to the second book of Jerusalem, directly after Albion’s specter Satan stretches “his druid pillars far” come the lines, Jerusalem fell from Lambeth’s Vale, Down through Poplar and Old Bow, Through Maldon & across the sea, In war & howling, death & woe.

Here the extension of druidic power moves east bringing war, in a reversal of the route of destruction believed at this time to have been taken by Boadicea. Toward the end of Jerusalem, the “giants of Albion,” shamed by Los, began to build trembling rocking-stones . . . Terrified, rocking to & from upon the earth, & sometimes Resting in a circle in Maldon or in Strathness or Jura: Plotting to devour Albion, & Los the friend of Albion; Denying in private, mocking God & eternal life; & in public Collusion, calling themselves Deists, worshipping the maternal Humanity; calling it Nature, and Natural Religion. (Pl. 90; 826–27)

There are no stone circles at Maldon, yet Blake names it as a site where druidic rituals merge into natural religion. The second city where Boadicea massacred the inhabitants, Verulamium, also has important historical associations for Blake. The Roman remains of Verulamium lie outside the town of St. Alban’s, named after the first English Christian martyr whose death is another example of human injustice and taking of life. When the fourthcentury Briton Alban, refusing to deny Christ, was dragged from Verulamium to be martyred at the top of the hill that in Saxon times became the shrine of St. Alban’s, a miraculous spring came into being. Hence like Guinefred, Sabrina, and possibly Cambel-Boadicea herself, Verulamium or Verulam, mentioned several times in Jerusalem, and at first sight a strange choice for one of the “English names” of the four Zoas (besides Verulam, the others are London, York, and Edinburgh [Pl. 59; 749]) is also associated with water. But unquestionably, just as Maldon is a site of natural religion, Verulamium also


52


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 52

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

53

suggested one of Blake’s icons of wrong thinking, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, and Viscount St. Albans. Druidism leads to the belief that wrong can be corrected by wrong (as displayed by Boadicea and the killers of St. Alban) and ultimately to natural religion and the rational thought of figures such as Francis Bacon, who, compounding the idea of “the goddess Nature” with the “druid dragon,” “deny a conscience in man” (Pl. 93; 832). The twelve Daughters of Albion from early British history have their counterparts in the twelve Sons of Albion, whose names, as Erdman and Stevenson remark, derive from men personally known to Blake, and especially those involved in the legal wrangles that resulted from his stay in Sussex—unless “Coban,” whose identity is uncertain, represents Francis Bacon himself. Where the Sons represent the practicing of oppressive law, the Daughters have a part in its creation. The third city destroyed by Boadicea is, of course, London. Cambel-Boadicea’s male counterpart is Hand, whom Blake associates with southeastern England, the area of all three of Blake’s own homes. Hand is described as having three heads, and hence three brains in constant strife with each other, “therefore rejecting ideas as nothing, & holding all wisdom / To consist in the agreements & disagreements of ideas” (Pl. 70; 778). At some points seemingly enfiguring all the brothers at once, Hand is also associated with the giants Gog and Magog, whose statues stood at the entrance to the Guild Hall, the administrative center of the Lord Mayor of London. Boadicea burns down London, but Hand destroys its spirit. In their edition of Blake’s poems, David V.Erdman and W.H.Stevenson have suggested that Hand is influenced by the Hunt brothers, publishers of The Examiner (778); yet if so, Blake must have interpreted their paper as imperialist, attempting to extend Albion’s influence over the rest of the world. Boadicea and Hand function separately and together in causing confusions of identity that distract from true religion. Toward the end of Jerusalem, Cambel-Boadicea plays a role in the struggle of the sexes. As Los (the poetic force closely identified with Blake himself) attempts to forge truth, the Daughters of Albion use the traditionally female skills of spinning and weaving to destroy it. Cambel uses her male counterpart Hand “to weave Jerusalem a body repugnant to the Lamb” (Pl. 80; 802). Gwendolen next identifies herself as Nimue of Arthurian legend, who fills Merlin with desire, imprisons him, then falsely announces to her sisters that Enitharmon plans to scatter them; Hyle, her male counterpart, becomes her monstrous offspring: when she draws aside her veil, “Hyle was a winding


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 53

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM


worm and herself perfect in beauty.” Yet even this makes CambelBoadicea jealous: she forges Hand into a monstrous infant of her own in Los’s furnace (Pl. 82; 806–7). Gwendolen and Cambel, who in mythical history were killers, now infantilize and deform masculinity. The escape from Boadicea and her sisters, representatives of past cruelties, and Hand and his brothers, representatives of present ones, comes when Time finishes and “England, who is Britannia” awakes (Pl. 94; 833). England-Britannia seems to have been Boadicea in her sleep, as she mourns: Oh, piteous sleep! Oh, piteous dream! O God, O God, awake: I have slain! In dreams of chastity and moral law I have murdered Albion! Ah! In Stonehenge & on London Stone & in the oak groves of Maldon I have slain him in my sleep with the knife of the druid! (Pl. 94; 834)

When Britannia enters Albion’s bosom, he is able to be in the presence of Jesus (the primordial state alluded to at the beginning of Milton) and learns that the “offering of self for another,” the reversal of the druidic offering of another for oneself, is the way of Jesus. The sons and daughters of Albion are reconciled with him, and “the druid spectre was annihilate” (Pl. 98; 838). In Blake’s vision, Cowper may thus have been a true bard when his Boadicea’s solution to the suppression of liberty was self-immolation. Yet the final designs of Jerusalem suggest that although distracting false beliefs and rituals have been swept away, the temple lives on. The living creatures cry, Where is the covenant of Priam, the moral virtues of the heathens? Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel Of Albion’s spectre, the patriarch druid? Where are all his human sacrifices For sin in war, & in the druid temples of the Accuser of Sin, beneath The oak groves of Albion that covered the whole earth beneath his spectre? Where are the kingdoms of the world & all their glory that grew on desolation, The fruit of Albion’s poverty-tree, when the triple-headed GogMagog giant Of Albion taxed the nations into desolation, & then gave the spectrous oath? (Pl. 98; 840)


54


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 54

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM

55

Through Gog and Magog, three-headed Hand now embodies the oppressive qualities of all the Sons and Daughters of Albion that have now passed into oblivion. The passage is followed by a design of some sinister little creatures, a spider, a toad, a worm, and a snail—but the once-mighty serpent, symbol of druidic power, has joined their number. Albion’s immolation brings about Jerusalem, depicted as a woman embraced by a father-like figure in the penultimate plate. The final design, number 100, does not do what Boadicea had done and destroy the temple. The serpent-temple is present, but seemingly transformed into part of the landscape as the sun and moon shine above it. Most important, the human figures are not, as they had been in some earlier plates, dwarfed by the temple, but stand powerfully in front of it. Rather than destroying humans, the temple can complement their endeavors, as the human figures offer not others but themselves to the world. Justice is located not just in action, but also in self-sacrifice. Although not all the critics of social hierarchy in early nineteenthcentury Britain would have agreed with this conclusion, the belief that British rights are written less in law-codes than in the various emanations of history—topographical, written, oral—was common during the British Romantic period. The chapters that follow analyze some of the ways in which Britons used their vision of the indigenous past, and particularly the medieval past, to claim a continuity of historic rights.


R ites a nd R ights


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 55

12/5/2010 12:09:00 PM


9780230103740_03_ch01.indd 56

12/5/2010 12:09:01 PM

Ta k i ng M e di e va l ism Hom e: Th e Nat iona l M e l ody

The Minstrel Boy has become a traditional Irish song, but Thomas

Moore wrote the lyrics in the early years of the nineteenth century. The first stanza is as follows: The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you’ll find him; His father’s sword he has girded on, And his wild harp hung behind him.— “Land of song!” said the warrior-bard, “Tho’ all the world betrays thee, One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee!” (99)

The land of song is, of course, Ireland, and the harp stands as a synecdoche for Irish tradition preserved in song. In the second stanza, the Minstrel falls in battle, and tears the harp’s “chords asunder” (the use of the word “chords” to mean the strings of a musical instrument seems to be an archaism). Addressing the harp, the speaker concludes, “Thy songs were made for the pure and free. They shall never sound in slavery.” The two possibilities would seem to be that either the Minstrel expects to survive as a captive, but that he will refuse to perform Irish music; or that the Minstrel expects to die, but he does not want his harp, symbol of his nation, to be captured and used by the enemy. Yet the word of particular interest here is “rights,” since the Minstrel boy associates both the one sword (armed resistance) and the harp’s song with his land’s rights.


Chapter 2


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 57

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM


The language of rights and personal freedom is a central part of Romantic-era popular medievalism. Such language is inherent in the National Melody, which was part of the Romantic phenomenon that Katie Trumpener has called “Bardic Nationalism.”1 According to this tradition, since the early peoples of Britain had no written records, their bards became the repositories of historical memory, and hence song became a means of preserving what a culture valued. Thomas Moore had his own bardic identity, “Thomas Little,” and during the early 1800s he became known as the collector, creator, and performer of “Irish Melodies” in London. “The Minstrel-Boy” was included in the fifth collection of twelve songs, published in 1813. The National Melody was a Romantic-era poetic concept that matched poems on national themes either to traditional tunes or “airs,” or to tunes written for the purpose in a national style. Celeste Langan has traced the connotations of the “air” in her essay “Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air.” The form was an outcrop of the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century’s interest in reclaiming local and national traditions, frequently from Britain’s “Celtic fringe,” although as Langan notes, very often the only “Gaelic” association was in the titles of the airs. The circuitous path by which the tradition of oral song was wrested away from the less-educated classes to become the study of antiquarians, finally to be reinscribed in the more popular form of the National Melody, however, has its own narrative.

Antiquarians and Social Class The Anglican clergyman Thomas Percy deserves credit for making the recovery and study of old ballads a respectable antiquarian pursuit and also for laying the foundation for the class assumptions that influenced later scholars of the form. When Percy dedicated his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry to the Countess of Northumberland, he promised his patroness select remains of our ancient English Bards and Minstrels, an order of men who were once greatly respected by our ancestors, and contributed to soften the roughness of a martial and unlettered people by their songs and by their music. (1:xi)


58

Although he describes the ballads and other old poems in his collection as “barbarous productions of unpolished ages” (1:viii), Percy simultaneously claims their civilizing power. The ancestors of the


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 58

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM

59

present-day English were barbarous, but their artistic productions were less so, even though they might now seem unsophisticated. Percy’s original inspiration for the antiquarian study of ballads was a collection that according to his own account he came upon by accident while living in Shropshire. In reconstructing the story of the manuscript, he tells how he almost destroyed the collection as of no value, until persuaded otherwise by “learned and ingenious friends, who thought the contents too curious to be consigned to oblivion” (1:xi). These friends included Samuel Johnson, William Shenstone, and others who encouraged Percy to include further examples of old poetry in his edition. In the 1967 reissue of John W. Hales and Frederick Furnivall’s edition of the manuscript, Leslie Shephard points to evidence that “the MS. may have been found and appreciated before Percy found it” (Preface). Percy’s own prefatory material, however, suggests that the manuscript was close to destruction when he shared it with his friends, thereby claiming for himself and his associates the credit for realizing the significance of its contents. Why should educated and cultured readers of the 1760s care about these ballads? The answer, according to Percy, is that the poems have a historical and, to some extent, an aesthetic value; and that their mode of transmission through the person of the minstrel is also important. Percy characterizes the poems both as art and as historical records, since they show both “the first efforts of ancient genius” and “the customs and opinions of remote ages” (1:viii). In his “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels,” revised in later editions in response to critiques and suggestions from his antiquarian friends, Percy states that minstrels “seem to have been the genuine successors of the ancient Bards” that the ancient Teutonic tribes “admired and revered,” so that “poets and their art were held among them in that rude admiration, which is ever shown by an ignorant people to such as excel them in intellectual accomplishments” (1:xx). With the coming of Christianity, poetry became the written skill of the monastery, while minstrels continued to be honored as they sang “verses to the harp, at the houses of the great.” In Percy’s opinion, bards had a privileged position in pre-Christian culture, but minstrels had a lower position in the class order, being dependent on the patronage of the powerful.2 Percy locates the true minstrels in the Middle Ages since by Elizabethan times “this class of men had lost all credit, and were sunk so low in the public opinion” that they were mentioned in the statute that outlawed “sturdy beggars” (1:xxxvii). While minstrels composed orally, later ballads, Percy says, were composed specifically to


Ta k i ng M e di e va l i s m Ho m e


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 59

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM


be printed as broadsides. Percy’s belief that medieval minstrels were dependent on patronage may be nostalgia for feudal times before a capitalist economy; rather than simply selling their labor in song or in text, they were dependent on a relationship with their feudal overlords. At the same time, Percy is presenting this work in the personal hope of patronage. Because Thomas Percy was the name of the great Earl of Northumberland, who was the subject of some of the ballads, he is seeking support from the Countess of Northumberland, Elizabeth Percy. In fact, neither had started life as a Percy; Thomas Percy had previously called himself Pearcy or Piercy, while Elizabeth Percy had been born Elizabeth Seymour and married Hugh Smithson. The couple assumed the Percy name when Elizabeth succeeded to the Percy property and baronial title and Hugh to the Northumberland title; he was later to become Duke of Northumberland. Simply being a Percy is an act of medievalist identification. In her compelling outline “Towards a Minstrelsy Complex,” Maureen M. McLane suggests that to “write about minstrelsy is to participate in minstrelsy” (152). Thomas Percy was acutely aware of this, personally identifying with the decline of the poet from priest to feudal dependent to the printer of what at one time had been performance pieces. He apparently did receive some reward from his patrons, since he worked for them as a secretary. The priestly endowment that he hoped for came in the form of the Church of Ireland bishopric of Dromore, somewhat less prestigious than his expectations, but like a bard in the druidic tradition, Percy carried out his charge faithfully. Percy’s first contribution to the medievalist myth of the minstrel was to grant minstrels a kind of gentility that removed them from the populace yet placed them in a fixed relationship with the ruling classes, whose exploits in warfare their songs celebrated. Hardly coincidentally, about this time a long-forgotten minstrel story became popular. In the expanded “Essay on Ancient Minstrels” that prefaces the third edition of the Reliques, Percy credits Anna Williams with having “rescued from oblivion” the story of Richard I’s minstrel Blondel (1:xxviii). Williams had access to Claude Fauchet’s sixteenthcentury Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie Francoise, ryme et romans, where Fauchet mentions an old chronicle in his possession that tells the story of “Blondiaux.” When on his return from the Crusades Richard was imprisoned by the Duke of Austria, his faithful minstrel Blondel located him by singing a song that he and Richard had composed, so that “when king Richard heard the song, he knew it was Blondel that sung it; and when Blondel paused at half the song, the king ‘BEGAN THE OTHER HALF AND COMPLETED IT’ ”


60


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 60

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM

61

(xxx).3 Fauchet’s source would appear to have been the thirteenthcentury Récits d’un menestrel de Reims, although Fauchet, in his account of the exploits of “ancient French poets,” changes the story. In Récits d’un menestrel, Richard spies Blondel from his tower and sings to attract his attention. In Fauchet’s version, “Blondiaux” himself takes the initiative of singing the song, moving the agency from king to minstrel. Percy characterizes King Richard as “the great restorer and hero of Chivalry” and also “the distinguished patron of Poets and Minstrels” (xxviii), so that the crusader-king and his faithful collaborator and servant Blondel become the archetypes of the patron-minstrel relationship in the years before the French Revolution. Mentioned in works such as Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, the legend soon expanded to tell how Blondel went singing from castle to castle to find Richard. (This tale of feudal loyalty was probably a more palatable version of history than that the English knew where Richard was, but were in no particular hurry to ransom him.) In 1784, Andre E.M. Grétry produced the French opera Richard Coeur-de-Lion with a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine. It was performed in London in a version by John Burgoyne, although on the English stage Blondel shares the credit for finding Richard with Richard’s lady-love Matilda. By October 1789, Grétry’s aria “O Richard, O mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne” (Oh, Richard, Oh my king, the universe forsakes thee) had become an anthem for the supporters of the beleaguered Louis XVI.4 About this time, Joseph Ritson, whose antiquarianism was far more closely tied to a concern with historical authenticity than was Percy’s, questioned whether there were in fact English minstrels who, to quote Percy, “united the arts of poetry and music, and sung verses to the harp of their own composing” (qtd. Ritson vii). Whereas Percy imagined each of the minstrels performing their own artistic compositions, Ritson’s view was that more of them simply sang songs, although admittedly someone must have invented them. That there were individuals formerly, who made it their business to wander up and down the country chaunting romances, and singing songs and ballads to the harp, fiddle, or other more humble and less artificial instrument, cannot be doubted. . . . It may be easily imagined, that many of these people, though entirely destitute of education, and probably unable either to write or read, possessed the talent of inventing historical or legendary songs, which would sometimes have merit . . . Men equally ignorant, have in all ages and all countries, been possessed of the same talent. (xvi)




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 61

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM


Whereas Percy imagines the minstrels as feudal retainers, Ritson, writing in the era of the French Revolution, a movement that he strongly endorsed, envisages them as self-employed wanderers preserving popular tradition. Yet although Ritson challenged the notion that minstrels were part of a feudal hierarchy, ironically, his insistence upon the scholarly study of old ballads had the effect of removing ballads from popular oral tradition and making them historical documents only accessible through antiquarian editions; like Percy and the later ballad-mongers, he played a role in fixing the ballads in a specific form through publishing them in print. Ritson’s view of minstrelsy accorded better with Percy’s second contribution to medievalism, which was to suggest a regional primitivism. In the first edition of his Preface, Percy had suggested that the oral tradition survived longer in the north of England, “the reason of which seems to be this; the civilizing of nations has begun from the South: the North would therefore be the last civilized, and the old manners would longest subsist there” (xviii). This suggestion apparently did not sit well with some of his readers, very likely including his patrons the Northumberlands, since by the third edition, this became: “as our Southern Metropolis must have been ever the scene of novelty and refinement, the northern counties, as being most distant, would preserve their ancient manners longest, and of course the old poetry, in which those manners are peculiarly described” (xxxviii). Therefore, The old Minstrel-ballads are in the northern dialect, abound with antique words and phrases, are extremely incorrect, and run into the utmost licence of metre; they have also a romantic wildness, and are in the true spirit of chivalry. (xix)

Percy’s language-choices reveal his aesthetics as a contradictory mixture of Enlightenment rationalist progressivism and pre-Romanticism. The phrase “extremely incorrect” suggests an absolute standard of grammar and poetry, while references to “romantic wildness” and “chivalry” seem appreciative of the emotional and moral values of the Middle Ages. The classic example of Percy’s medievalist ambivalence is the romance of “Sir Cawline.” As Hales and Furnivall indignantly demonstrated in their 1868 transcription of Percy’s original manuscript, Percy made major alterations to the ballad as it appeared in his source. In particular, in the second part,


62

All its other incidents—the stolen interviews of the lovers, their interruption by the King, Sir Cauline’s5 banishment, his reappearance


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 62

12/5/2010 12:09:09 PM

63

in disguise, his death, her death—are the Bishop’s own production. Altogether, the MS. copy contains 201 lines; that in the Reliques 392. . . . For our part we prefer the Folio copy, with all its roughness and imperfections, to the Bishop’s revision, with all its cleverness. Ever so few gold-grains are more precious than heaps of tinsel. If one touch of nature makes the whole world kin, one touch of affectation mars and dissolves that universal kinsmanship. (3:1–2)

Aesthetically, these Victorian editors claim to prefer the manuscript version, which tells how Sir Cawline became sick (or feigned sickness) for the love of the king’s daughter. When the daughter, who is “a Leeche full ffine,” comes to heal him, Sir Cawline asks for a kiss to cure him. She demurs, and he offers to do “some deeds of armes” on her behalf. At her suggestion, he defeats an “Eldrige King” in combat. He later battles a five-headed “Gyant,” also described as a “soldan,” that is, a Sultan; and finally kills a lion by brute force. The poem concludes, Then he did marry this Kings daughter with gold and silver bright, & 15 sonnes this Ladye beere To Sir Cawline the Knight. (3:15)

To the first part of the poem Percy adds some lines that identify the demanding doctor as “Fair Christabelle.” He also emphasizes the class difference between the knight and the king’s daughter: Syr knighte, my father is a kinge, I am his onlye heire; Alas! And well you knowe, syr knight, I never can be youre fere. O ladye, thou art a kinges daughter, And I am not thy peere, But let me doe some deeds of armes To be your bacheleere. Some deedes of armes if thou wilt doe, My bacheleere to bee, (But ever and aye my heart wold rue, Giff harm should happe to thee,) . . . .



Whereas in the manuscript version, the daughter immediately issues Sir Cawline with the challenge of the Eldridge King, in Percy’s version, while acutely aware of the difference in status, Christabelle shows that she feels an emotional attachment to the knight by revealing to the


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 63

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM


reader the feelings of her “heart” and her concern for Sir Cauline’s personal safety. These two elements, romantic love and class distinction, dominate the ending of Percy’s version. The manuscript version evidently considers that by the time he has asphyxiated a lion, Sir Cawline has earned the right to marry the king’s daughter, who bears him “15 sonnes.” In Percy’s rewriting, in contrast, Sir Cauline is fatally wounded killing the giant, who, as Hales and Furnivall note, no longer has five heads.6 Although she is still a doctor, Christabelle simultaneously shows an eighteenth-century sensibility, so that when she comes to doctor him, she “skriek[s] and swoun[s] awaye.” After telling her, “For thee I wisht to die,” Sir Cauline expires. Pronouncing, “ ’Tis meet that I shold followe thee, Who has bought my love so deare,” Christabelle also dies as her “gentle hearte” bursts “in twayne.” The problem of interclass marriage is thus avoided. Percy gives a reason for these changes in his introduction, where he explains that in his manuscript this “old romantic tale” was in so very defective and mutilated a condition (not from any chasm in the MS., but from great omission in the transcript, probably copied from the faulty recitation of some illiterate minstrel), and the whole appeared so far short of the perfection it seemed to deserve, that the Editor was tempted to add several stanzas in the first part, and still more in the second, to connect and complete the story in the manner which appeared to him most interesting and affecting.

If the corrupt version is due to “the faulty recitation of some illiterate minstrel,” this romance, as implicitly many others in his collection, has only survived by moving into the oral tradition of the common people, and therefore might reflect their ideas rather than the ideas of the aristocratic originators. The transmission of ballad romances would thus be as follows. Romances like “Sir Cawline” were in the Middle Ages a high art-form that represented the values of the aristocracy. As they moved from courtly minstrel compositions into the oral tradition, they tended to remain in circulation in the memories of the illiterate classes, while the educated classes moved on to other art-forms. As a result, wording, rhyme and rhythm, and even social and moral content might be influenced by the transmitters. Percy here makes no claim to authenticity of the type that his Victorian editors desired, but he is trying to be true to his imagined version of the Middle Ages, one in which chivalric values such as knightly conduct and respect for women and


64


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 64

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

65

the social hierarchy that they support are paramount. For a medievalist such as Percy, a text that may actually be from the medieval period may still not be medieval enough.7 Percy’s myth of origins for the process of oral transmission remained central to more ambitious attempts to recover minstrelsy from the oral tradition, such as Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. With the aid of enthusiastic friends, Scott had more success than Percy and Ritson in collecting ballads from oral sources. He may have had too much success, since some individuals aspiring to be his friends, such as Robert Surtees and (probably) James Hogg provided him with songs apparently taken down from oral recitation that were their own, or at least modern, compositions. McLane has drawn attention to “the numerous notices of ‘late’ minstrels (e.g. Charles Leslie of Aberdeen, deceased at 104 years old),” and how they “function collectively as a race of last minstrels haunting the ballad collections” (66). Ballad-fakery has been well-discussed elsewhere;8 I would stress, though, that from the controversy over James Macpherson’s “edition” of the Ossianic poems onward, antiquarians looked to “common” people to provide the verification of the tradition. For example, Surtee’s claim that “Anne Douglas, an old woman who weeded his garden” provided him with an imperfect memory of “Barthram’s Dirge” fooled Scott partly because like Percy and Ritson, Scott was finding that collecting ballads from oral transmission was a difficult task and he accepted any contributions gratefully; and partly because Scott appears to have regarded the supposed source, an illiterate, elderly, working-class woman, as only capable of repeating, not of inventing. Hence James Hogg’s appeal to his own mother to recite “Auld Maitland” was the ultimate way to satisfy Scott that this was indeed an authentic memory of the time of Edward III that had survived in the popular tradition.9 “Auld Maitland,” placed second in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after the also dubiously medieval ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” and subtitled “Never before published,”10 supported Percy’s claim that the border between England and Scotland was particularly rich in ballad tradition. Scott expands on this idea in the original 1802 Introduction. Here, Scott attributes the ballad tradition to the area providing a refuge for displaced peoples such as “the Saxon families, who fled from the exterminating sword of the Conqueror” (1:56), and who thus represented older traditions. If in the Border district can be seen the physical “monuments of ancient valour” (128), then the ballads are equivalent memorials in language. The Borderers retained their separate identity because “they were, in truth, during




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 65

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

66


There has hardly been found to exist a nation so brutishly rude, as not to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of their bards, recounting the exploits of their forefathers, recording their laws and moral precepts, or hymning the praises of their deities. But, where the feelings are frequently stretched to the highest pitch, by the vicissitudes of a life of danger and military adventure, this predisposition of a savage people, to admire their own rude poetry and music, is heightened, and its tone becomes peculiarly determined. (156–57)

The Borderers lived by raiding, and hence “the minstrels praised their chieftains for the very exploits against which the laws of the country denounced a capital doom. An outlawed freebooter was to them a more interesting person than the King of Scotland exerting his power to punish his depredations” (157). Having explained Border poetry as a form of resistance of established power, Scott also notes the instances of “popular superstition” (144), another distinctive feature of Border minstrelsy that move them farther from the sensibilities of his ideal reader. Scott was nevertheless interested in characterizing the “popular.” In this 1802 introduction to The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott frequently uses the word “popular” to describe the values and beliefs of ordinary Borderers. He employs the phrase “the popular creed,” for example, to refer to local beliefs in ghosts (1:143) and guardian spirits (1:152). When he wrote a new Preface for the edition of his works appearing in the early 1830s, he called the essay “Introductory remarks on Popular Poetry” (1902, 1:1).11 The essay opens by following the now-standard practice of noting that in the early stages of all societies, poets were persons of distinction. Scott is careful not to claim for early poets a truly divine function, but assumes that “the poet must have that original of embodying and detailing circumstances, which can place before the eyes of others a scene which only exists in his own imagination” ([1902]1:4). The historian can rescue “lays . . . from the gulf of oblivion” (1:6–7), and “must not disdain to gather from the tradition conveyed in ancient ditties and ballads the information necessary to confirm or correct intelligence collected from more certain sources” (1:7). After conceding that the ballad form in oral transmission is susceptible to conventional repetitions of lines, rhymes, and stanzas, Scott repeats Percy’s


the time of peace, a kind of outcasts against whom the united powers of England and Scotland were often employed” (115). But Scott devotes equal time to suggesting that the violence of Border history was inherently the subject-matter for heroic poetry:


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 66

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

67

myth of the fall of minstrelsy by ascribing the “flatness and insipidity, which is the great imperfection of ballad poetry,” not to the authors but to “the ignorance and errors of the reciters or transcribers, by whom they have been transmitted to us” (1:9). He departs from Percy, however, in suggesting that “modernizing,” rather than refining, usually has the result of “degrading and vulgarizing . . . the rugged sense and spirit of the antique minstrel” (1:11–12). As a result, We must often expect to find the remains of Minstrel poetry, composed originally for the courts of princes and halls of nobles, disguised in the more modern and vulgar dialect in which they have been of late sung to the frequenters of the rustic ale-bench. (1:13)

Just as Scott seems about to turn to the inhabitants of the “rustic ale-bench,” however, he shifts direction to provide an overview of the scholarly study of Scottish ballads, and especially of the antiquarian dispute between Percy and Ritson. Although the rest of the essay does not fulfill its promise to talk about popular poetry, Scott’s overview reveals that by 1830, antiquarian editors had multiple collections of Scottish songs. Scott himself, of course, deserves a considerable part of the credit for the surge in interest in popular song. Yet the central figure in bridging the gap between antiquarian scholarship and the national melody is Robert Burns.

Bleeding with Wallace In a commonplace book that he kept from 1783 to 1785, Robert Burns mourns that no “Scottish Poet of any eminence” has emerged from his native country, the ancient Baileries of Carrick, Kyle, & Cunningham, famous both in ancient & modern times for a gallant, and warlike race of inhabitants; a country where civil, & particularly religious Liberty have ever found their first support, their, & their last asylum; a country, the birth place of many famous Philosophers, Soldiers, and Statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottish History, particularly a great many of the actions of the Glorious Wallace, the Saviour of his Country. (36)



The words “Glorious Wallace” and “Saviour” are written larger than the rest of the words on the page to emphasize Wallace’s revered status as a national hero. In several of his poems, Burns shows his admiration for the late thirteenth-century William Wallace, who led


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 67

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

68


At Wallace’ name, what Scottish blood But boils up as a spring-tide flood? Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace’ side, Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, Or glorious dy’d!

“Ode for General Washington’s Birthday” makes an explicit parallel between the present’s aspirations for liberty and the heroic past. The poem urges Alfred and the ancient bards, repositories of constitutionalism and national tradition, to turn to America as their true successor: Alfred, on thy starry throne, Surrounded by the tuneful choir, The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre, And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire, No more thy England own!

The parallel Scottish figure for Alfred is Wallace: Where is that soul of Freedom fled? Immingled with the mighty dead Beneath that hallow’d turf where Wallace lies!

Burns was not alone in suggesting that Wallace represents the ancient spirit of the Scottish nation. Medievalism is an uncommon strain in David Hume’s History of England, yet Hume emphasizes that Wallace was and remains a national hero. Although Hume supports his own century’s union between England and Scotland, he characterizes Edward I’s claim on Scotland as “very advantageous to England, perhaps in the end no less beneficial to Scotland, but extremely unjust and iniquitous in itself” (Hume 2:267). Hume writes from a Scottish point of view when he describes how Wallace’s “courage prompted him to undertake, and enabled him finally to accomplish, the desperate attempt of delivering his native country from the dominion of foreigners” (2:307). Wallace has the characteristics of a popular hero: he was not a great nobleman, but “of a small fortune, but descended of an ancient family in the west of Scotland” who achieved his military leadership not through rank but through ability (309). He later


Scottish armies against the invading Edward I of England. In “To William Simpson of Ochiltree,” for example, he asks,


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 68

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

69

“voluntarily resigned his authority” to preserve national unity (311). For Hume, as earlier for the Scottish historians and later for Burns, Wallace also provided the inspiration for the younger Robert Bruce’s victory over the English. Although as a good Enlightenment rationalist Hume notes that Wallace’s “valorous exploits are the object of just admiration, but have been much exaggerated by the traditions of his countrymen” (307–8), the historian himself cannot resist using such phrases as “Wallace, universally revered as the deliverer of his country” (310). This might refer to Wallace’s reputation in the 1290s, but it also seems to apply to Hume’s present; Wallace is still “universally revered” as the embodiment of both what was good and what was bad about the medieval period, a time with opportunities both for great deeds of arms and for great brutality. According to Hume, after Edward I had defeated Scotland, in a story parallel to his killing of the bards, he entirely “rased or destroyed all the monuments of antiquity: such records or histories as had escaped him former search were now burned or dispersed” (318). Wallace was betrayed and brutally executed as a traitor in London, although, says Hume, “he had never made submissions or sworn fealty to England” (318) and therefore was no traitor to his nation. The result was that he was “universally regarded as the champion of Scotland, and the patron of her expiring independency” (319). Historians, though, held no monopoly on the Wallace story. The fifteenth-century verse epic Wallace, by Blind Harry, invented or drew from folk tradition many of the details of Wallace’s exploits, and the multiple editions of this work provided a link with medieval times, albeit a much later period than when Wallace lived. Graeme Morton lists eleven eighteenth-century editions of Wallace and notes that by the time Scott’s publisher Ballantyne printed an edition in 1820, Blind Harry (also spelled Hary) had transformed into the more decorous Henry the Minstrel (Morton 35–36). At the same time, as Romantic nationalists embraced the Wallace myth, Harry’s insistence that while always a champion of “freedom” Wallace was of a distinguished family who owned large property was, as in Hume’s version, muted to emphasize that Wallace was a man of the people. Like George Washington, he became a national leader because of his patriotism and leadership skills, rather than his nobility—an easily justifiable interpretation of the story, since all versions agree that the Scots nobility’s jealousy of Wallace’s success led to his betrayal. A cheap 1795 printing of a 24-page pamphlet, Life and Surprising Exploits of that Renowned Hero, Sir William Wallace, probably from Edinburgh, outlines some of Wallace’s deeds and concludes that although he was




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 69

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM


“only a private gentleman,” he “wrought the salvation of his country, and rescued its liberties, its ancient rights and privileges from the else certain destruction which brooded over them” (24). A slightly later and phenomenally successful version of the Wallace story, Jane Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810), presents a sanitized version of Wallace as Christian knight in a form accessible to juvenile readers.12 Porter claimed as part of her inspiration the popular ballad tradition preserved by oral tradition, explaining that she was hardly six years of age when I first heard the names of William Wallace and Robert Bruce:—not from gentlemen and ladies, readers of history; but from the maids in the nursery, and the serving-man in the kitchen: the one had their songs of “Wallace wight!” to lull my baby sister to sleep; and the other his tales of “Bannockburn,” and “Cambuskenneth,” to entertain my young brother. (Retrospective Introduction, 10)

Porter’s Wallace is inspired both by patriotic love of his country and by human love; other than in the heat of battle, he only kills to revenge the murder of Marion Braidfoot, who is his pregnant wife and not his mistress as in some other accounts, and even this episode tones down Porter’s sources. Porter’s Wallace moves comfortably among the nobility and among the poor; for example, a poor Irishwoman holds up her child and promises that “the first word he speaks, shall be Wallace: the second liberty” (161). Irresistibly attractive to women yet true to the memory of his wife Marion, he is driven not by personal ambition—he rejects the offer of the throne—but by the desire for freedom (404–5). Porter spares her readers the brutal details of Wallace’s execution. Although according to multiple historical records, the English condemned Wallace to die as a traitor and half-strangled him before castrating, eviscerating, and quartering him while still alive, Porter’s Wallace invites God to cut “life’s cord” on the scaffold and falls dead (624). Wallace’s manly beauty remains intact in death, since the sympathetic Earl of Gloucester substitutes the corpse of a murderer to be quartered and exposed “in the stead of his who was no traitor” (626). The case of Wallace is distinctive since his life-story survived in popular culture in so many forms. Whereas much of the Middle Ages was dimly known, Wallace, and to a lesser extent Robert the Bruce, provided a historical focus for Romantic nationalism. When Robert Burns embarked on his project of cataloging national song, relatively few of the words that he found discuss historical specifics; those that


70


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 70

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM

71

do tend to allude to much later events such as the Highland risings of the eighteenth century. A year or so after he noted the absence of a national poet, Burns began to work with the music engraver James Johnson to collect and publish Scottish songs. The chosen title, The Scots Musical Museum, connects nation, song, and antiquarianism. In most cases, the words are traditional, or in the traditional style; they do not, however, invoke the Middle Ages. Burns was more specifically historical in “Tam O’Shanter,” which he wrote for Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland. Grose’s catalog of ancient Scottish monuments demonstrates the Romantic period’s new interest in national heritage, a phenomenon that Scott was to continue in his account of the “popular” in his prefaces to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. At the same time, recording oral traditions in printed form for an antiquarian readership moves these traditions away from the local practitioners into scholarly discourse. “Tam O’Shanter” provides a rare example of the union of the popular and scholarly through its dialect account of an oral tradition of gatherings of witches at Alloway Kirk that takes the form of a three-page antiquarian footnote. Burns seems closest to the National Melody in “Scots, Wha Hae With Wallace Bled.” This song is fully medievalized in that the internal addressees are the Scots fighting with Robert Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn, as they see “approach proud Edward’s power— Chains and slaverie.” The second stanza is a call for national liberty: Wha for Scotland’s King and Law Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand or freeman fa’, Let him follow me! By Oppressions woes and pains, By your sons in servile chains, We will draw our dearest veins But they shall be free! Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow! Let us do, or die!



David Daiches observes that “Scots Wha Hae” is “more in the eighteenth-century rhetorical style (inspired equally by the Scottish War of Independence and the French Revolution) than in the Scottish folk tradition” (308). At the same time, Daiches states that the air, “Hey Tuttu Taitie,” is “supposed to be the tune to which Bruce’s


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 71

12/5/2010 12:09:10 PM


army marched into battle at Bannockburn” (308). “Let him follow me!” gives the speaker the voice of Robert Bruce, and through him, William Wallace; but at the same time the voice could be Robert Burns, or anyone challenging the current political climate. This is the true medievalist moment: a supposed medieval air and historical incident provide the means of commenting on current oppression. Wallace, whose body the English literally tore apart, becomes not just for his near-contemporary Bruce but for Burns and his readers the embodiment of the national quest for individual right.

Making Nations In “Scots Wha Hae” Burns finds a way to bridge the gap between antiquarianism and the social classes that their work had excluded. What distinguishes the National Melody from antiquarian efforts to collect old songs is that in most instances, the authors did not so much as pretend to have recovered ancient lyrics, but wrote their own based on their own conceptions of the national past. The form is self-proclaimedly populist, claiming a connection with folk tradition but avoiding the kind of scholarly distancing that characterizes even collections like Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The National Melodies made no serious claims to authenticity, even though the writers frequently claimed to be inspired by snatches of old songs or familiar tunes; for example, Thomas Moore wrote the lyrics for his Irish Melodies to older tunes, which were then arranged by Sir John Stevenson and later by Henry Bishop. Moore’s original performances were in highly selective gatherings at the homes of wealthy patrons, such as the leading Whig politicians Lord Lauderdale, Lord Holland, and Lord Moira13 and the Anglo-Irish patron of the arts, the dowager Lady Donegal. Yet within a few years, the words and music of Moore’s Irish Melodies and other collections of national songs were available for purchase and home performance.14 To a lesser or greater extent, all the National Melodies drew on the bardic tradition revived, or in many instances invented, in the eighteenth century. The bardic tradition imagines the druidic function of poets as priests, prophets, law-givers, and repositories of national consciousness surviving into the Middle Ages, and its revival was clearly a stimulus to the Romantic conception of the poet. Thomas Gray’s 1757 poem “The Bard” describes the last of the Welsh bards, who, according to legend, were killed by Edward I upon his invasion of Wales. Such an act, had it occurred, would have been an attempt to obliterate the national memory preserved in bardic song, an attack on


72


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 72

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM

73

Welsh identity itself. Percy believed that the bardic tradition was not just a phenomenon of the British Celtic fringe, but that bards and their successors in Christian cultures, minstrels, were held in reverence by all early peoples, “but by none more than our own Teutonic ancestors” ([1775] 1:19). He also depicted the bards as largely supportive of the social order: “it can be proved from undoubted records, that the minstrel was a regular and stated officer in the court of our Anglo-Saxon kings” (1:xxvi). For Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers, however, the bardic tradition was a form of resistance to the notion of a unified Britain, a claim to continuing national identity Part of the inspiration for the National Melodies was, of course, the popularity of Burns’s poetry. Burns did not himself use the term Melody, but he did play a major role in compiling the Scots Musical Museum, where in many instances he used parts of traditional folksongs. Others, however, called their collections Scottish National Melodies: for example, John Graham published Scottish National Melodies in New York in 1841.15 Moore seems to have responded to an invitation from the music publishers James and William Power to create the Irish Melodies series (Kelly 73–75). Early in his poetical career Byron was commissioned to write the “Hebrew Melodies,” which were set to music by two Jewish composers, Braham and Nathan. This suggests that by 1815, the concept of “National Melodies” was such a part of English-speaking culture that the form could be used to stake a claim to nationhood.16 Moore’s Irish Melodies (published in ten installments from 1807 to 1834) and the critically neglected Welsh Melodies of Felicia Hemans (published in 1821), however, stress the loss of the medieval past and with it rights and liberties. Although Burns may have provided inspiration, the form of the National Melody follows Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. Moore himself modeled his song collection upon Edward Bunting’s recovery of old Irish tunes. In his biography of Moore, Terence de Vere White defends him from the charge of simply having adapted Bunting’s tunes and suggests that Moore himself may have collected at least some of the melodies independently (80). This may be true in some cases, but in a letter from March 1807, Moore reveals that he has forgotten his copy of Bunting’s melodies and badly needs it; he also asks for Sydney Owenson’s 1805 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, With English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards (Russell 1:219). Bunting’s General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796) claimed inspiration from a gathering of Irish harpists in Belfast in 1792—not insignificantly, the same year that Iolo Morganwg organized the first gathering of Druids




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 73

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM


in London. Bunting argued that the bardic tradition was common among Celtic peoples, and that the Welsh bards had sought instruction from the Irish harpists (Bunting 1:iii). His collection of tunes claimed to be authentic, yet even here Bunting opened up the tunes to a wider audience by setting them in pianoforte arrangements. Many of Moore’s most famous songs reflect a loss of past glory and freedom. As in the instance of the sword-carrying Minstrel, his songs often depict suppression of the national voice through military action or other forms of violence, although sometimes this violence is presented by implication rather than directly. A famous example is as follows: The harp that once through Tara’s halls The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls, As if that soul were fled— So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory’s thrill is o’er, And hearts, that once beat high for praise Now feel that pulse no more. No more to chiefs and ladies bright The harp of Tara swells; The chord alone, that breaks at night, Its tale of ruin tells. Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes, The only throb she gives, Is when some heart indignant breaks, To show that she still lives. (13–14)

The harp, symbol of national song, here parallels the heart, the symbol of feeling. The concluding reference is not to a muted harp but to a broken heart, apparently in the present. Moore could, of course, claim that this reference is ahistorical, and that at any time or at any place, hearts could break at the loss of freedom, but the poem is most easily read medievally, as a contrast between the glories of Tara’s past and the loss of freedom of the present.17 But when exactly was this lost moment of national pride and freedom, Ireland’s equivalent of the age of Wallace and Bruce? A few of the early songs in the Irish Melodies suggest that it must have been in the reign of Brien Boru, who united Ireland under his High Kingship at the end of the tenth century, as in “Remember the glories of Brien the Brave.” Brien’s reign is also, the notes inform us, the setting for “Rich and Rare were the Gems she wore,” in which a knight asks a


74


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 74

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM

75

woman traveling alone with a gold ring on her wand, “Are Erin’s sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted by woman or gold?” The woman replies, “No son of Erin will offer me harm:—For though they love woman and golden store, Sir Knight! They love honour and virtue more!” (19).18 Yet as the notes disclose, this “excellent administration” of Brien Boru praised by antiquaries lasted only until the Battle of Clontarf in 1016, when Brien was killed by the Vikings, limiting the Golden Age of medieval Ireland to about twenty years (251–53). Moore composed and performed his Irish Melodies primarily in London, and there can be little doubt that in many instances the medieval setting functions as an outlet for Moore’s desire for a nationalist free speech at a time of repression throughout the British Isles, but especially in Ireland. The British Government saw Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen movement of the late 1790s as treachery inspired by the French Revolution at a time when Britain and France were at war. After the suppression of the movement, the Act of Union effectively meant that Ireland’s political representation was entirely through the London Parliament. Moore was friends with Robert Emmett in college, and although he denied knowledge of the armed rebellion that led to Emmett’s execution in 1803, the Minstrel Boy’s nationalist fervor may recall Emmett as much as it does a medieval scene. Certainly, the secret tears shed in “Oh! Breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade” can be read as a lament for Emmett. Similarly, “Avenging and Bright” is on the surface capturing the emotional response to Connor King of Ulster’s murder of Usna’s three sons, a story that Moore’s note reveals that he knew from sources lately recovered and translated from the Gaelic by antiquarians.19 The final stanza is purportedly an address to Connor: Yes, monarch! tho’ sweet are our home recollections, Tho’ sweet are the tears that from tenderness fall; Tho’ sweet are our friendships, our hopes, and affections, Revenge on a tyrant is sweetest of all!

The words can be read as specific to the middle ages (Ireland will take revenge against the medieval king Connor), general (the people will take revenge on tyrants), but more dangerously, specific to the present (the people might take revenge on King George and the government that rules in his name). The medieval settings provide a means of allegorizing contemporary concerns at a time when stating them directly would have been imprudent at least—Emmett’s head ended




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 75

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM


up impaled at Dublin Castle. But at the same time, there is surely a hope that if at some moment in the Middle Ages, poets could express their national feelings openly, such a time of free bardic expression may come again. Moore’s poems are better-remembered than Hemans’s Welsh Melodies, despite the fact that “Mrs. Hemans” was one of the most frequently reprinted poets of the entire nineteenth century and author of such well-known poems as “Casabianca.” The poem eulogizing the boy who would not move from the “burning deck” until he heard “his father’s word” is usually cited as an example of submission to authority, but the boy’s fruitless calls to his absent father may have had a personal meaning for Hemans, whose husband went off to Italy after the birth of their fifth son and never came back. After her abandonment, Hemans moved back into her family home in Wales. She was already a successful poet when she published her Welsh Melodies in 1821; John Parry arranged the music to traditional Welsh tunes. For example, “The Sea-Song of Gafran,” one of two poems that pay tribute to the island tombs of virtuous Druids, can be sung to the tune known in English as “All Through the Night.” Here as elsewhere, Hemans emphasizes national freedom, using the harp as a bardic symbol just as Moore had done. The first poem, “The Harp of Wales,” recalls invasions by the Romans and Saxons (here “Saxon” actually refers to Edward I), and reminds the harp, “Thine was the voice that cheer’d the brave and free; / They [the Welsh] had their hills, their chainless hearts, and thee.” Other poems recall Druid resistance to the Romans and scenes from medieval history, generally involving Welsh resistance to the English. According to Hemans, Mount Snowdon, or Eryri Wen, was a sacred spot, or the “temple of the bard! /And fortress of the free!” (151). Hemans has the same problem as Moore in not having a distinct sense of what medieval Wales was like, and as Moore does, tends to adopt language associated with the Anglo-Saxons. For example, “Grufydd’s Feast” begins “Let the yellow mead shine for sons of the brave,” and depicts the twelfth-century Welsh drinking mead out of horns in their lord’s hall. Some of the poems have intertextual references: “Madoc’s Farewell” recalls Robert Southey’s poem of epic length “Madoc” and two poems explicitly recall the situation in Gray’s “The Bard.” In “The Dying Bard’s Prophecy,” Gray’s Bard speaks again, but in Hemans’s version, he specifically envisions Wales’s future. He asks the “Saxon” Edward I, “Think’st thou, because the song has ceased, / The soul of song hath flown?” (152). The answer to his own question is


76


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 76

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM


77

The Bard seems specifically to be prophesying the revival of Welsh song in forms such as the National Melody; through the Bard, then, Hemans connects her own poems with the Middle Ages. This is all the more bold since apparently, Hemans regarded the story of the massacre of the bards as a legend. “Chant of the Bards before their Massacre by Edward I” contains such lines as Rest, ye brave dead! Midst the hills of your sires, Oh! Who would not slumber when freedom expires! Lonely and voiceless your halls must remain— The children of song may not breathe in the chain!

Yet a footnote comments on this massacre of the bards, “This sanguinary deed is not attested by any historian of credit. And it deserves to be also noticed, that none of bardic productions since the time of Edward make any allusion to such an event” (151). The note is correct: not merely do most early sources not mention the massacre of the bards, but many people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who professed to care about bards accepted that the story was mythical, and that its mythic significance was more important than historical fact. The end of Gray’s poem, where the Bard leaps off Mount Snowdon to “endless night,” symbolically connects Wales with void as the bard’s self-immolation represents the suppressed nationalist voices of the Welsh. Hemans’s “Welsh Melodies” have their own sublime concluding moment in the poem, “The Rock of Cader Idris.” The headnote explains that “[i]t is an old tradition of the Welsh bards, that on the summit of the mountain Cader Idris, is an excavation resembling a couch; and that whoever should pass a night in that hollow, would be found in the morning either dead, in a frenzy, or endowed with the highest poetical inspiration” (152). The poem is especially intriguing because of its first-person voice. The speaker recounts how he (or she) “lay on that rock where the storms have their dwelling” until


No, by our wrongs, and by our blood! We leave it pure and free! Tho’ hush’d awhile, that sounding flood Shall roll in joy through ages yet to be.

a spirit came o’er me; Man’s tongue hath no language to speak what I saw; Things glorious, unearthly, pass’d floating before me, And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 77

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM

78


I saw what man looks on, and dies—but my spirit Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour; And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power! Day burst on that rock with the purple cloud crested, And high Cader Idris rejoiced in the sun;— But oh! What new glory all nature invested, When the sense which gives soul to her beauty was won!

Perhaps Hemans would have claimed that she represented the words of an imagined character, but as in the case of Moore and Burns, the first-person voice lends itself to double interpretation, so that the poet herself might be identified with the one who gains the poetic eye and ability to comprehend the sublime. On a more pragmatic note, the opening historical statement is interesting, because if the Welsh bards were all dead, they would not have a tradition. As Welsh bardic practices were revived as part of druidry, Hemans participated at least from a distance; in 1822, she wrote a song called “Meeting of the Bards” for an Eisteddfod in London. The “bards of old,” the poem proclaims, met “not in kingly hall or bower, / But where wild Nature girt herself with power” (246). Yet although the bards still meet in the sunlight, For us, not ours the festival to hold, Midst the stone circles hallow’d thus of old; Not where great Nature’s majesty and might First broke all glorious on our infant sight; Not near the tombs, where sleep our free and brave, Not by the mountain-llyn, the ocean-wave, In these late days we meet—dark Mona’s shore, Eryri’s cliff’s resound with harps no more!

By referring both to “Mona” (Anglesey) and to “Eryri” (Snowdon) and to stone circles as the meeting-place of bards, Hemans’s poem brings together the traditional locations of Roman-era Druids and medieval-era bards. The use of Welsh place-names (“llyn” is glossed as “a lake or pool”) helps to restore value to the Welsh language and poetic tradition. Yet if Felicia Hemans lays subtle claim to being a bard, Moore’s own career is closer to that of a minstrel. His poems seem both


After a vision of “the mighty of ages departed,” the concluding stanza, which ends the Welsh Melodies, continues in the first person:


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 78

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM

79

medievalistically detached from present-day concerns and medievalistically to claim a social and political relevance partly because they were composed for a London audience. The Minstrel Boy tells his harp, “Thy songs were made for the pure and free. / They shall never sound in slavery,” so the question remains as to whether Moore was sounding his songs in slavery, or finding a popular medieval form that was at heart subversive.




9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 79

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM


9780230103740_04_ch02.indd 80

12/5/2010 12:09:11 PM

M e di e va l ism Onstage i n t h e Fr enc h R e volu t iona ry E r a

E

ven more than the National Melody, drama written for stage performance1 was a means of spreading a vague but positive sense of the medieval past to a wider audience. Many plays of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century claim a medieval setting; any self-respecting theater company could produce a stage-set including a “Gothick Window” as required in plays such as George Colman’s Feudal Times. Of these dramas, however, relatively few display the double consciousness and juxtaposition of past and present that characterize popular medievalism. Indeed, many of the dramas with medieval settings, while taking advantage of the set and costume possibilities of the Middle Ages, involve antimedievalist assumptions. The reason for choosing the medieval setting seems to be to move the characters outside English law into a world of structured oppression in which upper-class power is absolute and lower-class characters and women are at the mercy of such power. For example, Joanna Baillie set her two 1802 Ethwald plays2 in Saxon England, but as part of her series of “Plays on the Passions,” the focus is less on historical setting than on the emotion of ambition and its social consequences as Ethwald wrests the throne of Mercia from King Oswal and forcibly marries Oswal’s daughter. Of AngloSaxon times, Baillie writes,


Chapter 3

This was a period full of internal discord, usurpation, and change. . . . I have, therefore, thought, that I might here, without offence, fix my story; here give it a “habitation and a name,” and model it to my own fancy, as might best suit my design.—In so doing, I run no risk of


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 81

12/5/2010 12:07:19 PM

82


Rather than presenting the medieval setting as an example for the present to follow, Ethwald implies that a society such as that of AngloSaxon England was at the mercy of its rulers’ characters. Baillie makes the parallel with Shakespeare’s most famous depiction of an ambitious and ruthless ruler clear when Ethwald consults a hundred-yearold “Druidess” who, as Baillie’s note acknowledges, prophesizes like Macbeth’s witches (2:195). Following Robert Henry, Baillie argues that “the superstitious practices of the Druids continued long after their religion was abolished” (2:184). Her play, then, steers a path between claiming some historical grounds for characters and actions and a focus on universal human emotions. Other playwrights, though, pointedly depicted situations dependent on their medieval settings. National feeling, rather than universal emotion, was a basic assumption of George Watson’s England Preserv’d, An Historical Play. The drama was performed multiple times at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden in 1795,3 and it was apparently popular, since the printed version went to a second edition. In a time of war against France, the story sends a very simple message to its audience. The play is set in the early years of the reign of the boy-king Henry III, when Louis VII of France almost succeeded in taking over the rule of England, which Watson represents as a threat to the rights inscribed in Magna Carta in the reign of Henry’s father King John. In the drama, Henry III’s regent, the Earl of Pembroke, and his son-in-law, the Earl of Surrey, resist the French occupation and rally the English in support of Henry III and the Great Charter. Matilda, Lady Surrey and Pembroke’s daughter, has the most interesting action of the play; she breaks into the prison where her husband is being held and wins over a French guard to assist them. Beyond the kindly French guard, the French are shadowy villains who oppose English “Independence,” a word used repeatedly in the play and always capitalized. The impetuous Fitzwalter, for example, is supposedly of the French party, yet speaks for the English barons:


disturbing or deranging the recollection of any important truth, or of any thing that deserves to be remembered. However, though I have not adhered to history, the incidents and events of the plays will be found, I hope, consistent with the character of the times. (2:x)

Are we, at councils, are we in the field, Treated as free-born Britons, equals all With these same upstart foreigners? Oh! Shame! Oh! vengeance for insulted rights! (28)


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 82

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM

M e di e va l i s m O n s t a g e

83

Turn upon these foreigners, Teach them, to venerate our ancient laws, To dread our vengeance, for those laws attack’d, To own that Independence guards our cliffs, And, thro’ all chances, England must be free. (29)

In this instance, the medieval setting provides a means of commenting on the contemporary war against France. In the conclusion, Pembroke spares the French and sends them home, requesting that they tell their compatriots “Ne’er to assail our sacred Isle again.” Pembroke speaks the epilogue that makes the current relevance clear: Oh! Native land, from hence for ever rest, In Freedom, Union, thus supremely blest! And should thy Genius, Britain, know a times, When Civil Discord flies from clime to clime; When with the shock each neighb’ring Empire groans, And Ruin, menacing an hundred thrones, Shakes Europe’s centre with his giant-form— Calm, and collected, shalt thou face the storm; Within thy sea-girt rock, securely shrin’d, Shalt stand, the guardian of oppress’d mankind. Blest in a Prince, whose Virtue shall deserve, Whose Spirit, his important trust preserve, Shall still thy splendor, in those darksome days, Break on the world, with undiminish’d blaze, Survive the fall of each surrounding state, Nor cease, till all Creation yield to fate! (80)

England Preserv’d takes a populist view of medievalism: English rights were articulated in Magna Carta, and it is the duty of the state to uphold those rights. Because the play was written for a time of war, though, the play emphasizes that the rights create and preserve English identity. Yet the play is not radically reformist; as far as can be told through this epilogue, King George III and his representatives are the preservers of the constitution. The medieval past thus serves the basic function of explaining how Britain came to be as it is. In contrast, Ann Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin presents a more complex yet still populist view of the medieval past and its meaning for the present. The play’s title page proclaims it to be “Earl Goodwin, An Historical Play, By Ann Yearsley, Milk-Woman of Clifton, Near Bristol, Performed with general applause at the Theatre-Royal,


He looks forward to a time when the English may


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 83

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM


Bristol.” Yet the emphasis on the playwright’s identity as a working woman does not automatically make this a “popular” drama. Mary Waldron has argued convincingly that Yearsley was not uneducated and that she resisted attempts by her first patron, Hannah More, to characterize her as an untutored “natural” working-class genius (46; 63–73). The dedication reveals that the play was performed with the help of her subsequent patron, the Earl of Bristol. With the support of her patrons, Yearsley’s play was performed many times in 1789 in Bath and Bristol, apparently with some success, since she received at least eighty pounds.4 Buried within the appeal to patronage, however, is a belief in English rights in the populist tradition. Yearsley directly confronts the question of history when her Preface proclaims her play to be revisionist. In response to the criticism that she has “departed from verity of character,” she asks, Where is the proof? We are assured the characters of individuals have been blackened, nor those alone, but even the conduct of Kings, by the infernal spirit of Party. In more early ages, the chain of Superstition fell heavy on the people of England; learning was confined within the cloister, among the frozen, yet ambitious Monks; and the man who dared trust his reason or his faith beyond priestly rule, was pronounced an alien to God and Society . . . I will not stand reproved for endeavouring to withdraw a character from the malignant shade of ancient Malice! (Preface)

Yearsley is hence revising the historical view of Earl Goodwin or Godwin. Although most histories give this name as “Godwin,” she may have found not only the spelling “Goodwin”5 but also a detailed account of the Earl’s life in a new edition of Paul Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England, translated into English and published in the 1780s.6 In particular, Goodwin is the representative of humanist-inspired legalism in the play, Yearsley describing him in her Exordium as “seriously what I wish every man to be.” It is hence appropriate that his name proclaims him “Good” rather than (of) “God.” Godwin, Earl of Wessex, was the father-in-law of King Edward the Confessor and the father of Harold, the last Saxon king. Rather than retelling the story of the Norman Conquest, however, Yearsley’s play covers the trial by ordeal of Edward’s mother, Queen Emma; Edward’s refusal to consummate his marriage with Goodwin’s daughter Editha; Goodwin’s role in reaffirming English law against Roman Catholic “oppression”; and the revolt of Goodwin’s son Tosti (otherwise Tostig). It closes with Goodwin’s death at a royal banquet. In Yearsley’s depiction, Goodwin is the wise statesman who resists superstition and supports


84


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 84

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM

85

the rights of ordinary Englishmen. Goodwin proclaims, “I will not sleep till Edward turn his ear / To the complaint of England” (19). He patriotically exposes the archbishop of Canterbury as a murderous plotter and convinces Edward to abandon the ordeal law and take him, not the priesthood, as his “guide.” Traditionally, two of these stories imply supernatural interference. In later medieval sources, Heaven is said to have proved that the accusations that Emma had committed adultery were false by enabling her to walk unscathed over burning plowshares. Most accounts implicate Godwin in the death of Edward’s brother Alfred, whose eyes were put out so brutally that he died in prison soon afterward. This murder is mentioned in Yearsley’s play, although she calls the murdered prince Arthur rather than Alfred.7 Yearsley completely exonerates Goodwin of the murder, since in her version, Lodowicke, a character that Yearsley seems to have invented, and the archbishop of Canterbury, based very loosely on Robert of Jumièges, commit the crime and then try to blame Goodwin. The archbishop reminds Lodowicke, Did’st thou not wrest His spirit from her mansion? Did’st thou not (I privy to the guilt) accuse the Earl, And poison his fair character, full charg’d With the young prince’s murder? (54)

According to the chronicles, at dinner with King Edward, Godwin invoked Heaven protesting his innocence in Alfred’s murder—and immediately dropped dead.8 As Yearsley claims, both of these stories appear only in much later versions and not in contemporary sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Yet rather than abandoning these stories as superstitious legends, she rationalizes them. As in the legend, in Yearsley’s play, the blindfolded Queen Emma blunders across burning plowshares without realizing that she has undergone the ordeal. The play, however, describes her acquittal as due to “chance” (25), not providence, and suggests that the charge of adultery itself is the work of the sexually repressed priests who advise King Edward. Goodwin, poised to become Edward’s trusted legal adviser who represents the interests of all Englishmen, dies at the banquet not of choking but when he is poisoned by Lodowicke, who immediately repents. Throughout the play, Yearsley has presented Goodwin’s resistance to the King as a heroic defense of the English against “tyrant superstition” and his son Harold as the fair-minded protector of the realm. She




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 85

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM


probably drafted the drama before the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the play treads lightly over one of the charges against Edward the Confessor, that his upbringing had made him too French to be a good king of England. Yearsley’s patron was not only the Earl of Bristol but also the Anglican bishop of Derry, and a key opposition in the play is between Englishness and Roman Catholic oppression. Edward listens uncritically to the Roman Catholic clergy, who tell him that ordeals show the judgment of God and that virginity is a more blessed state than a consummated marriage, but by the end of the play he accepts that the first obligation of a ruler is toward the people. Earl Goodwin does not merely offer a model of good statesmanship, however; it also makes a medievalist critique of the present. The postscript to the printed edition of 1791 reminds readers of the topical question of just rule. Noting that Lodowicke survives the play to feel “remorse,” Yearsley’s note reminds the reader that Mankind depend [sic] on mercy:—were we emulous in gaining its first gradation, would 72,000 souls have been executed in the reign of Henry VIII? Or would twenty men be suspended of a morning, on a spot of some few yards wide, in London, and under the cognizance of our Most Gracious Sovereign George III.?

The socially critical tone continues into the Epilogue, written by “Mr. Meyler,” 9 which contains the lines, But, thank my stars, that Superstition’s train O’er all the globe is in a rapid wane. Lo! The poor Frenchman, long our nation’s jest, Feels a new passion throbbing in his breast; From slavish, tyrant, priestly fetters free, For VIVE LE ROI, cries VIVE LA LIBERTE! And, daring now to ACT, as well as FEEL, Crushes the convent and the dread BASTILLE!

The six italicized lines were, according to the footnote in the printed edition, “omitted by command of the Lord Chamberlain.” Even though in 1789 to support the demand for liberty in France did not necessarily imply a critique of the British government, apparently the Lord Chamberlain’s office did not wish to encourage the audience of Earl Goodwin to make connections between its representation of just rule and the current state of Britain. Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin makes no mention of the event of this time period most likely to be familiar to her audience, the story of


86


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 86

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM

87

Lady Godiva, even though this story is on the page following the account of the death of Goodwin in Rapin’s Impartial History of England (1:120). Godiva, or Godgyfu, was the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and seems to have been a patron of the small community of Coventry and a landowner in her own right. According to legend, although even the earliest version dates from a century after her death, she rode naked on horseback through the streets of Coventry to win the people relief from her husband’s oppressive taxes. The people of Coventry hence agreed, or were ordered, not to look at her, but a substantially later legend tells that a tailor named Tom peeped at her and died or was struck blind as a result. This story is included in Rapin’s Impartial History of England, where Tom is said to have died, although a footnote hints at skepticism (1:120). The tale has a number of points of relevance for an understanding of popular medievalism. The first point is that the taxation is characterized as oppressive and that everyone except Leofric agrees that it is unjust. Second the people do not champion their own rights; instead, a member of the aristocracy agrees to lose her trappings of rank and to expose her body, the mark of her common humanity. Finally, the agreement or decree that nobody will look seems to be confirmed by natural or divine law, since the person who violates it, Tom, is punished by supernatural means. The story of Lady Godiva formed the basis for a widely performed popular drama with music by the Irish dramatist John O’Keefe. First performed in Dublin in the 1780s, the drama, or versions of it, remained in the theatrical repertoire as a short, second presentation to be performed as a companion piece to the top-billed drama. Yet as its title suggests, Peeping Tom of Coventry moves the focus from Lady Godiva to the tradesman Tom. Tom’s wife, Maud, is being pursued by the lecherous mayor of Coventry, who spends much of the action hiding in a hamper. Also in Coventry is the Earl of Mercia with his new wife, Godiva. The earl’s daughter has been rescued from the Danes by a peasant whose bravery contrasts with the cowardice of her Norman suitor, Count Lewis. On learning that the exiled Earl Goodwin’s son Harold is in the neighborhood, the earl fines the city a thousand marks and vows that “the power of men shall not induce me to abate one scruple” (29). The mayor’s wife sees a legal loophole in this reference to “the power of men” and leads the townswomen to appeal to Lady Godiva for relief from the tax. The earl proposes the ordeal as a joke, but Godiva takes him seriously and is determined to carry it through, so he orders the townspeople not to look at her on pain of death. Both Tom and the mayor try to peep, and Tom




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 87

12/5/2010 12:07:20 PM


succeeds. Because Tom has sheltered the earl’s daughter and because the current mayor has been chasing his wife, Tom is made the new mayor of Coventry. The brave peasant who saved the earl’s daughter reveals himself as not a peasant at all but none other than Harold, son of Goodwin. Although Peeping Tom of Coventry was written before the French Revolution, it continued to be in the theatrical repertoire during the entire revolutionary period, which suggests that its message was not seen as socially critical. The earl’s daughter does not marry a peasant but the noble future King Harold, who is clearly superior to the cowardly Frenchman Count Lewis and who pronounces that “not the force of love, nor the frost of age, shall check my spirit in the cause of Britain” (28–29). The people enlist Lady Godiva as their champion, but they do not make the decision not to peep at her; rather the earl orders them not to look on pain of death, although he later changes his mind. All the same, the main focus is on Tom and his wife, ordinary people who, through some modest trickster behavior and a benevolent aristocracy, end up safe and successful. While implied aristocratic nudity is part of the appeal of the story, Lady Godiva does not, of course, appear naked on stage; her ride is narrated from others’ assumptions as to what she is doing. Nor is the play consistently medieval: Tom sings a song where he recalls, “The Clock struck Twelve in merry Chime, / The Priest said Grace in Saxon rhyme,” but the Saxons did not have chiming clocks, nor forks or tobacco, which are mentioned later in the song. Although the social hierarchy is only marginally disrupted, the legend itself, that Tom suffers divine retribution for his prurience, is restructured so that the popular hero survives and there is no supernatural element, or even invocation of heaven; what happens in Coventry is entirely in the human realm. The text of Peeping Tom of Coventry seems to have been marketed both as an “operetta,” which stresses the musical content, and as a “farce,” which emphasizes the comedic aspects. For the modest sum of threepence, enthusiasts could buy Songs, Duets, and Chorusses, in the New Musical Farce of Peeping Tom of Coventry, As Performed at the Theatre-Royal, and learn to sing for themselves such lines as “Merry is your ding dong, / Happy, gay and free.” They could also buy the music, by the royal organist Samuel J. Arnold, in harpsichord and flute arrangements. It was in a semiprofessional performance of Peeping Tom in Dublin that Thomas Moore, who played the role of Peeping Tom, met his future wife Bessie, who was playing Lady Godiva (Kelly 81).10 The story of Godiva and Peeping Tom provides an example of


88


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 88

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


89

Druids, Bards, and Minstrels Onstage In George Watson’s England Preserv’d, the young John Plantagenet, the grandson of Pembroke the Lord Protector of England, describes to his11 mother the scene awaiting his father Lord Surrey’s return: On the hill, his Knights Are posted, all so bright in arms! Around The moat, his tenantry are dancing; while, Upon the draw-bridge, sits the Bard, who chaunts Such stories of our Ancestors, such deeds— Is all that, truth, the Minstrel sings? (31)

His mother confirms that it is; the didactic purpose of the play similarly depends on the fact that the deeds of the past are true. John Plantagenet has described the idealized past of medievalism: the knightly classes are united, and the peasants are supportive of, and protected by, them. Moreover, the Surreys have their own bard or minstrel who, in this play centered on the theme of preservation, preserves the memories of the heroic past. In other plays of this period, Druids and bards also play a role in preserving memory and in foretelling the national future. Like Ann Yearsley, James Mylne, a Scottish tenant-farmer, was represented by others as a “natural” poet; he seems to have had aspirations of being a second Robert Burns. Mylne’s play The British Kings, A Tragedy was never performed, as far as I have been able to determine, and shows a distinctly eccentric vision of the early medieval past. The play depicts the conflict between Cadwallan, King of the Britons, and Osricke, the adopted son of King of Northumberland. Cadwallan encounters a Druid has been in his cave for “four score winters” and has “twice told . . . the natural age of man” (147).12 The 140-year-old Druid, who hardly surprisingly is “the last of his race,” discloses to Cadwallan that Osricke is actually the British king’s long-lost son; Cadwallan, who has raped Osricke’s love Lena, allows Osricke to kill him, and Osricke and Lena also die. Fortunately, Prince Arthur appears in the fifth act and takes the throne to unify Britain. The ancient Druid, who also dispenses


medievalism as a form of freedom in which ordinary people, provided that they can win the good will of their overlords, can redress their social wrongs—and where tailors can peep at naked ladies and live to become mayor.


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 89

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM

90


Your children’s children, and their latest race Shall bless you the first founders of this union, For, when the island all shall so unite, Old seers fortel, that Britain’s power shall stride From the sun’s rising to his setting place. (238)

James Boaden makes an even stronger claim to historicity in The Cambro-Britons, an Historical Play, which was performed at the Theatre-Royal, Haymarket with a stellar cast that included the playwright-dramatists William Barrymore as Llewellyn and Charles Kemble as Prince David. The plot depicts Edward I’s invasion of Wales, his fabled expulsion of the Bards, and the personal relations between Llewellyn and his brother David, who both desire the lovely Elinor. Boaden had adapted two of Ann Radcliffe’s novels for the stage, but rather than follow the novelist that he ardently admired by rationalizing away seemingly supernatural elements, he creates a climactic moment in the appearance of the Welsh princes’ mother’s ghost. Rising from her tomb, she warns them to “Forbear!” and make peace with each other. Boaden’s Preface shows consciousness of his medievalism: “I have looked at the stage with attention; and, while I sincerely approve its silence upon the politics of contending parties, I think it deficient in its noblest duty, when it inspires no ardour against an invading foe.” The topical reference is again to war with France, yet in the play the invader is Edward I of England; the play is hence patriotic in suggesting resistance to oppression, but potentially socially critical in noting that an English monarch may also be an oppressor. As the title suggests, the focus of The Cambro-Britons is on the Welsh, and Edward I is treated less sympathetically than the Welsh princes. Edward’s ally Mortimer comments on the Welsh landscape, Never, in all the warfare I have pass’d, Have I contended with such natural foes! ’Tis as the genius of the country rose, Arm’d with ten thousand terrors to resist us! (75)


herbs to alleviate Lena’s madness, has the last words of the play:

Mortimer here shows an awareness of the sublime in the tradition of Edmund Burke but more specifically of Ann Radcliffe. Yet Edward replies, Think you I let the soldier hither, but To gaze and shudder at the wonders Nature Flings from her daring hand, and so retire? (75)


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 90

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM

91

Not only is Edward scornful of the Romantic sublime, he is also the destroyer of poetry. The King’s army is attacked in a “narrow pass” as a chorus of Bards “pour out their execrations upon his head, in a full chorus to the harp only” (stage direction, p. 76). The Chorus sings the opening of Thomas Gray’s poem “The Bard,” and it is the first Bard who addresses King Edward: —tyrant, persecutor!— Cool, unrelenting, bloody ravager!— Behold the last remains of that high race Thy policy has butcher’d! Fondly deeming, That, with the bard, who gave the brave to fame, Freedom itself, and courage would expire! Impious and vain! Think’st thou the British muse Within thy power to quench? (77)

Thus reminding Edward of the power of poetry, the first Bard claims for himself “prophetic fury.”13 Unwilling to hear more, Edward orders his troops to “silence the race for ever.” The soldiers pursue the other Bards offstage, but, as in Gray’s poem, the first Bard “flings himself into the torrent below him” (79). In this play, the English king represents invading oppression, while the Welsh princes and their Bards embody British freedom. The Bards are in the prophetic tradition of the Druids, but Boaden makes a clear distinction between bards and minstrels. Earlier, Llewellyn has invited Elinor to meet him at his mother’s tomb through sending “minstrels” to her, who sing her a song about King Arthur before passing her a note from her lover. Llewellyn himself is disguised as a minstrel in the scene at his mother’s tomb. Minstrels function here as the repositories of national song, but bards embody nationhood and the spirit of national freedom.

George Colman: Moderate Medievalism Plays of national prophecy depend on the audience’s recognition of their present as foreshadowed by the heroic actions of the past. The historical plays of George Colman the Younger retain a heroic vision of the national past, yet the social critique is even more muted; Colman was always careful to avoid explicitly political material. All the same, Colman’s most successful play, John Bull (1803), represents the virtuous patriotism of an ordinary Englishman, in contrast to a corrupt aristocracy, and in most of his plays the heroes and heroines are of modest social status. Even the seemingly bland representations of relationships between rich and poor in his historical dramas are




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 91

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


complicated by the underlying commentary on the social effects of war, by his methods of adaptation, and, in a number of instances, by his provocative prefatory material in the printed editions. His father the first George Colman, the contemporary of David Garrick and Samuel Foote, had purchased a financial interest in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, London in 1777. Although both Colmans associated with the rich and powerful, to this day, the Haymarket Theatre, rebuilt in close proximity by John Nash in 1820, bills itself as “London’s oldest and most-loved theatre” and specializes in British dramas with a broad range of appeal. The many printed editions of Colman’s plays, some including the entire script and some the words of the songs which could be bought for a few pence, suggest that while London theater-going may have been out of the reach of the poorest members of British society, the success of Colman’s dramas depended on reaching the widest audience possible. Establishing what kind of people attended a theater is no easy task, although Marc Baer has shown that the theater provided a location for various forms of public disorder during this period. Two notorious incidents from the history of the Haymarket illustrate that it was a theater for everyone, from royalty to tradespeople. On February 3, 1794, the King and Queen, together with “the six Princesses” visited the Haymarket “for the first time this season”; their sons the future Kings George IV and William IV also attended, although they were careful not to sit near their parents. The crowd hoping to see the King and Queen was so great that, to quote The Times, no less than FIFTEEN people of both sexes, mostly females, fell victims to an unfortunate curiosity. The crowd had began to assemble before three o’clock, and the moment the outer door opened, those who were the first, were forced precipitately down the stairs leading to the Pit, which are much too steep for the entrance of a Theatre. A few persons falling, the crowd gave way, and more than seventy persons fell. (Feb 04, 1794, p. 3)

The final death-toll is believed to have been twenty, the victims including a ship’s captain, law-students, and a butcher’s wife; some were reported as coming from the grand neighborhoods such as PallMall, while others came from areas known more for manufacturing and trade such as Clerkenwell and Holborn. This tragedy relates more to the experience of going to the theater than to the plays themselves, yet a later incident was a response to the choice of production. In August 1805, the Haymarket Theatre


92


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 92

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM

93

announced a revival of The Tailors; A Tragedy for Warm Weather 14 as a benefit for William Dowton. Dowton, who was to go on acting for a further forty years, apparently selected the play to be performed, and it seems reasonable to assume that he would have played Francisco, the role originated by Samuel Foote, with its bizarre death scene. Foote had first produced this mock-tragedy in 1767, when it was a topical response to a wage dispute between journeymen tailors and their employers.15 The play seems a strange choice for a benefit since it had the potential to give offense to many groups. All the characters have fanciful dramatic names. The women’s names are merely silly, but most of the rebellious journeymen have names that an English audience would have identified as Jewish albeit with a Greek twist: for example, the leader Abrahamides has a lady-love called Tittillinda. They later enlist the help of Irish tailors, who rename their leader Jack Jackides as he proclaims “Fame, Fortune, Honour, all are now at stake!” At first the tailors, a group who, as the Prologue written by David Garrick reminds the audience, “never were as heroes known before,” express their displeasure by breaking windows. Abrahamides, however, tries to poison the masters and the master-tailor Francisco, whose wife is having an affair with a journeyman called Isaacos, dies. This death is not treated seriously in dramatic terms: after Francisco dies muttering “Cab-bage!” his servant Robin says, “There fell the pride and glory of all Tailors. Bear him off!” To this Francisco replies, “No; I won’t trouble you; I’ll walk off” (46). Even though Francisco is not particularly dead, however, Abrahamides is hanged, leaving his successor Bernardo with the sacred duty of running up the prices of clothing forever. Hardly surprisingly, tailors considered this an insult to their trade. At the revival on August 15, 1805, the London tailors, many of whom would have been Irish or Jewish, succeeded in buying up the cheaper tickets, so that the galleries and a great portion of the pit were occupied by some hundreds of persons of that trade as soon as the doors of the Theatre were opened. The utmost noise and confusion prevailed until nine o’clock, as the rioters would not suffer a syllable of the play to be heard. (The Times, August 16, 1805, p. 4)



Approximately twenty people were arrested, The Times stating that most of them were Irish. The incident shows that workers in skilled trades such as tailoring were fully aware of what was being presented at theaters such as the Haymarket, and that ticket-prices were within their reach.


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 93

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


Although Colman was unlikely to present anything that would be unacceptable to his friend the future George IV, he still needed to present a worldview that did not alienate the ordinary theater-goer. During the French Revolutionary era, Colman wrote a number of plays with medieval settings that no-one could describe as hard-hitting social critique. At the same time, Colman’s choice of potentially controversial stories from medieval history shows that he was willing to make his audience think about questions of justice. The Battle of Hexham debuted less than a month after the storming of the Bastille, before most Britons had had the chance to reflect upon what events in France might mean for their own nation. William J. Burling states that with “The Battle of Hexham (1789), Colman created a new genre, the historical musical drama, which audiences found original and intriguing” (Oxford DNB Online). The title page of the prose drama with songs announces it as “A Comedy,” yet the subject-matter itself, set during the grim years of the Wars of the Roses toward the end of the Middle Ages, is hardly comedic. The historical background to the drama is Margaret of Anjou’s war on behalf of her husband, the mentally incapacitated Henry VI, and her teenaged son. Queen Margaret’s Lancastrian party was to be defeated by the House of York led by the future Edward IV; after the Battle of Hexham, some thirty of the leading Lancastrians were executed. In the years that followed, her son was killed, her husband died in suspicious circumstances in the Tower of London, and Margaret spent the rest of her life in exile. The play’s focus, however, is on the consequences of civil war for citizens, rather than on struggles among the nobility. In the first Scene the protagonist Adeline is in men’s clothes in “Henry VI’s Camp.” While women dressed as men are a stage commonplace, thematically, Adeline doubles Queen Margaret as a wife and mother taking a male role in her husband’s absence. Henry VI remains absent in “pious meditations” (17) for the entire play, Colman probably judging that the representation of a king’s insanity might not be palatable at a time when George III had recently recovered from a similar complaint. In contrast, Adeline’s absent husband Gondibert, slandered by the Yorkists, reappears as the Robin Hood-like leader of a band of robbers who will “pluck you a thousand crowns from a rich fellow’s pocket with one hand, and throw his share of ’em into a hungry beggar’s hat with the other” (28). The robbers show their own idealized version of the medieval past when they sing that


94

When Arthur first at court began To wear long hanging sleeves,


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 94

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


95

Although the robbers have democratic ideals of the rulers serving the servants, Gondibert does not entirely agree since he instructs them that on encountering survivors of the Battle of Hexham, If there be any whose appearance denotes a more than common birth, treat him with due respect, and conduct him to my cave—as to the plunder, our wild life obliges us to exact from the way-worn passenger; on this occasion, prithee, good comrades, take sparingly, and use your prisoners generously. (30)

Gondibert himself attempts to rob Queen Margaret and her young son,16 explaining himself as “One of those who, stripp’d of all by an oppressing world, now make reprisals” and motivated by his needs of his comrades and “biting want.” Such a justification might seem sympathetic to the French Revolutionary cause, but when Margaret entreats him to “save my son, the son of your anointed king,” Gondibert’s loyalty is immediately rekindled: “Oh long and ever, be there seen a heaven-gifted chain round majesty, to draw confusion to the wretch who, watching a transient cloud, that dims its lustre, dares think on his sovereign with irreverence” (37). All ends happily, as Gondibert, granted amnesty, is reunited with Adeline, and Margaret leaves to gain support in France. The Battle of Hexham seems ultimately to confirm existing hierarchy. At the same time, even though Margaret claims divine right for her husband’s cause and Gondibert endorses it, Adeline, the central character of the play, laments, “Oh, Gondibert, too faithful to a weak cause—our ruin is involved with our betters” (6). When her faithful but cowardly manservant Gregory Gubbins states that the houses of York and Lancaster “ought both to be pull’d down, for a couple of nuisances to the nation,” Adeline bids him hold his peace: “half such a word tho’ spoken at random might cost your life—the times, Gregory, are very dangerous” (7). Margaret’s Fool sings that there is very little difference between the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, so that “Tom Fool is for the right rose” (15). For those of the lower ranks of society such as Gregory and the Fool, the effects of the power struggle are homelessness, hunger, and personal danger, and those audience members who knew any medieval history would be aware that the Wars of the Roses, and their consequences not just for kings but for ordinary people, are not over at the end of the play.


He entertained the serving men, And all of them were thieves.


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 95

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


If the Wars of the Roses seems an odd choice for a comedy, another episode from medieval history, Edward III’s French campaign, is even more provocative, especially since Colman’s Surrender of Calais opened in July 1791, by which time Edmund Burke had published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Britons were forming heated opinions on the French Revolution. Like The Battle of Hexham, The Surrender of Calais features positive portrayals of French characters. In the earlier play, Margaret’s ally La Varenne embodies French medieval chivalry: fresh from honoring ladies in tournaments, he is eager to fight for Margaret and “right her cause and punish her oppressions” (18) in a real battle, even though real battle conditions prove very different from those of the tournament. The Surrender of Calais turns the focus from knighthood to citizenship. The action derives from the fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart’s story of selflessness and magnanimity, although presenting the action largely from the point of view of the citizenry. According to Froissart, Edward III, who claimed the throne of France, had besieged the town of Calais for a year.17 When Calais’s leader, Jean de Vienne, tried to negotiate a surrender through the mediation of the chivalrous Sir Walter Manny, Edward agreed to spare the people provided that six of the citizens handed themselves over to him, along with the keys of the city. Six leading citizens18 (bourgeois or burghers; burgesses in Lord Berners’ sixteenth-century translation) volunteered and walked out to the English camp in a state of undress with ropes around their necks. Edward would have put them to death but for the intervention of his pregnant Queen, Philippa, who begged for their lives and sent the citizens back with gifts. Colman evidently had access to a version of Froissart such as Lord Berners’s translation because he follows the events fairly closely, even including references to details not directly germane to the plot such as Queen Philippa’s military campaign against the King of Scotland. Starvation is not, of course, the ideal subject for a musical, yet hunger is a constant theme in The Surrender of Calais, even as occupants try to make the best of a bad situation. The French king is absent throughout the play, and as in The Battle of Hexham, this absence is treated discreetly; the soldiers are only able to raise a faint “Huzza!” when told to cheer their king (7), but nobody directly criticizes Philip VI for abandoning Calais to its fate. The soldiers sing,


96

My comrades, so famish’d and queer, Hear the drums, how they jollily beat, They fill our French hearts with good cheer,


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 96

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


97

Then hark to the merry-ton’d fife, To hear it will make a man younger; I tell you my lads, this is life, For any one dying with hunger. Toot a toot toot, &c. The does to inspire ye to beat, Only list to the trumpet so shrill; Till the enemy’s killed we can’t eat, Do the job, you may eat all you kill. Ranta ranta, ran &c.

The soldiers, as is appropriate in a musical play, find some comfort in music, and the hint at cannibalism in the last line is muted both by the humor and presumably by the fact that a trumpet is being played while it is sung. While the soldiers seek relief in music, the ordinary citizens of Calais take comfort in the fact that the weather is fine; although Froissart states in his chronicle that the poorer people had been allowed to leave the town, in Colman’s version, ordinary townspeople are still present. Colman is quite willing to make fun of French stereotypes; the first Citizen, whose part is “Spoke as a Frenchman,” is addressed as “Monsieur Grenouille,” (Frog). He explains, “I am French—I am gay—dere is myself, my poor dear vife—half a loaf, seven children—three sprats, a Tom cat and a pipkin of milk—I am hungree—mais il fait bien temps [the weather is nice]—I dance—my family starve—I sing—toujours gay, the sunshine—tolderol lol” (8). Since no help is coming from the King of France, the citizens expect the governor to do something about the situation; ultimately, as in Colman’s source, the help comes from among the citizens themselves. The play opens with “A Dark View of the English Camp, with a View of Calais,” as the French officer Count Ribemont and his man-at-arms La Gloire are smuggling supplies to the starving people of Calais. When La Gloire says he has “little appetite” for their mission, Ribemont reminds him to think of “our countrymen perishing with hunger.” La Gloire replies, “Truly, sir, it moves the bowels of my compassion; yet consider the risque, consider your rank, the gallant Count Ribemont, flower of Chivalry, cream of the French army, turned cook to the corporations of Calais” (4). A count as caterer points to the class fluidity of the play.


Although we have nothing to eat. Rub a dub dub, &c.


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 97

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


In addition to the patriotic and humanitarian goals of feeding the hungry, both Frenchmen have other reasons for entering Calais: Ribemont sighs for the governor’s daughter Julia, while La Gloire has not only a “mistress” called Madelon but a father in the city as well. La Gloire’s father is Eustace de St. Pierre, named by Froissart as the first to volunteer to give his life to save his fellow-citizens. Froissart implies that he was an important citizen; in Colman’s play, he is a leader but clearly “bourgeois,” while his son, who he bound to Ribemont as a new-born baby, is a serving-man. When the governor announces that six of the “first and best-reputed citizens” must surrender themselves to Edward III “to suffer instant death,” Eustace immediately steps forward, stating, “I render myself up for sacrifice” (24). As in Froissart’s account, three of his kinsmen also volunteer; Froissart does not give the names of the last two volunteers, however. Colman’s play imagines the fifth and sixth as representing chivalry and lower-class loyalty in the persons of Ribemont, who determines to disguise himself “in humble seeming” (27); and La Gloire, who follows his master’s and father’s examples. To be truly noble, they must be ordinary. As the citizens arrive at the English camp, the audience is reminded of history. The Chorus sings that the volunteers “shall flourish, flourish long in memory, / Recorded still, in future years” (31), while King Edward reminds his Queen that “should we not now resent [their stubbornness], in future story our English would be chronicled as dullards” (33). Yet another volunteer comes forward: Julia, who has been dallying with a singing Irishman,19 now decides that she loves Ribemont. Disguised as a boy, she challenges his right to die as a citizen and volunteers herself in his place. Queen Philippa then makes a last plea for everyone’s lives, and Edward finally relents. The Finale praises English military victory, but concludes, “heav’n-born mercy best becomes the brave” (40). Both English and French and all social classes are chivalrous and generous, and women remind men of the civilizing influence of mercy. Some of the French are comic stereotypes, but the play suggests that suffering merits sympathy. At a time when events in present-day France were turning increasingly bloody, The Surrender of Calais imagines a time when, with the help of their rulers, citizens managed to avoid becoming casualties of political struggles. The Surrender of Calais uses its medieval setting and themes as a way of pleasing everyone. The number of printed editions of The Battle of Hexham and The Surrender of Calais suggest that Colman had found a dramatic form that would appeal to a wide range of audiences; the plays were also


98


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 98

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM

99

performed in Dublin and appeared in American editions. As the French Revolution continued, however, Colman chose to downplay the medieval elements in two of his more popular plays and to make a distinction between the connotations of the Gothic and the Middle Ages. In The Iron Chest, written on a commission from Drury Lane Theatre and first performed in March 1796, Colman took the seemingly impossible step of rewriting William Godwin’s Caleb Williams without its political message; Colman explains in his Advertisement to the Reader, “The stage has, now, no business with Politicks” (xxi). I have already cited this novel as antimedievalist, since Falkland’s obsession with a chivalric code of honor implies that medievalism might lead to murderous egocentrism. Colman refers to this in his Preface, where he ascribes to this character’s “romantick, half-witted principles” (ix), yet the play mutes the references to chivalry, while still containing more nostalgia for the past than its original. The Iron Chest retains the idea of a curious secretary, now named Wilford, who uncovers the secret of an old murder among the possessions of his master, called Sir Edward Mortimer. An aged retainer, Adam Winterton, sings of “Sir Marmaduke,” who Never turn’d the poor from his gate; Good man! old man! But always ready to break the pate Of his country’s enemy. What knight could do a better thing, Than serve the poor, and fight for the king? And so may every head Of an ancient family. (16)

Immediately afterward, Wilford (who, unlike the audience, has not heard this song), remarks of Mortimer, “ ’tis strange that a man should be so ill at ease, who is continually doing good” (17); even if it is not explicitly stated, then, The Iron Chest recognizes that feudal claims of obligation apply to both rich and poor. When Wilford becomes increasingly curious because Mortimer’s demeanor seems out of keeping with his feudal benevolence, Mortimer attempts to charge Wilford with crimes and briefly drives him out of the community. Yet Wilford has the support of his love the cottage-girl Barbara and other honest characters, and the play comes to the un-Godwinian conclusion that “Heaven to whose eye the dark movements of guilt are manifest, will ever watch over, and succour the innocent, in their extremity” (107). Mortimer has an apoplectic fit, and Wilford survives to marry Barbara.




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 99

12/5/2010 12:07:21 PM


After delicately handling the question of whether the ruling classes deserve to rule within the drama, however, Colman took the strange step of publishing the play with a provocative preface that uses the rhetoric of class as a means of self-defense. From Colman’s own account, the first performance of The Iron Chest did not go well; the play was overlong, the actors were under-rehearsed, the composer of the music was dying, and even the stage-set was perfunctory. Rather than sharing in the collective blame, Colman explains that he is unwilling to “damn myself for a bungling workman” (i) and that due to illness, he was unable to supervise the production or make changes to the script. Having characterized himself as a “labourer” who carried out a task assigned to him, he places responsibility for the dramatic failure on the royal shoulders of “King” Kemble (vi). He uses “a homely cudgel of Narrative” (iii) to explain that in addition to Colman’s own illness, John Philip Kemble had also been unwell and had drugged himself with opium before the first performance. The audience objected to a long scene with old Adam, and they became restless in Kemble’s opening scene. If “King” Kemble is the tyrant who causes unrest among the people, Colman, the workman-playwright, is the hero of the people; the third preface to the second edition explains that he was able to revise the play and make it a popular success. In this way Colman portrays his relationship with his audience as more democratic than the surface text of his play. Colman went even further in avoiding the medieval in Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! A Dramatick Romance. This “Syllabub” (iv), 20 which premiered in January 1798, drew its inspiration from the Charles Perrault’s story from the Tales of Mother Goose (1695), explicitly set in the distant past. Colman continues with the themes of liberation and female enterprise of his medieval plays, but makes some significant changes. In the original story, a young woman is married to a man with a blue beard, who tells her to stay away from a mysterious chamber in his mansion. She cannot resist unlocking the chamber with the magical key Blue-Beard has shown her, where she finds the bodies of Blue-Beard’s six previous wives. Blue-Beard knows that she has entered the room because of traces of blood on the key, which, as scholars of fairy-tale motifs have pointed out, is the only supernatural element in the story (Tatar 19–21). Fortunately, before Blue-Beard can kill her too, the seventh wife’s sister signals to her brothers to come quickly and rescue her. The story’s appended moral presents the story as a warning against curiosity. A second moral appended to some early versions, however, reassures the young reader that this “is


100


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 100

12/5/2010 12:07:22 PM

101

a story of times gone by; there are no longer such terrible Husbands who demand the impossible” (144). Colman’s version stresses the dangers of curiosity (which had been both a theme in The Iron Chest and the ascribed cause of the deadly theater stampede of 1794). It replaces this historical distancing in the second moral, however, with an oriental setting and elements of the currently fashionable Gothic. In the Preface to the second printed edition, which could be purchased for one shilling and sixpence, Colman announces, “The following Trifle is not a Translation from the French, nor from any other Language: —I have the exclusive right to all it’s imperfections” (iii). Blue-Beard is no longer a French gentleman of the later Middle Ages but a Turk named Abomileque, which suggests both an Eastern name like Abimilech 21 and “abomination”; while his seventh wife bears the Islamic name of Fatima. In Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives, Maria Tatar gives a brief overview of pre-twentieth-century uses of the Blue-Beard motif. Although she notes the tendency to orientalize the story from the mid-1800s onward, she cites no version of the Blue-Beard story as early as Colman’s that takes this approach. She gives Arthur QuillerCouch credit for calling Blue-Beard’s seventh wife Fatima in 1910 (40). Tatar quotes Andrew Lang as pointing out that the wife’s brothers are explicitly stated to be a dragoon and a musketeer—French soldiers—and that if Blue-Beard was a Turk, he could have had more wives than one at a time (quoted Tatar, 36–40). As far as I have been able to discover, Colman may be the first to make Blue-Beard a Turk. At the beginning of the play, Fatima already has an admirer named Selim who remarks that “When Power is respected, it’s basis must be Justice” (9). Her father, Ibrahim, not the girl herself as in the original tale, consents to the marriage. Curiosity drives Fatima to look in the forbidden Blue Room, which is now a supernatural space. Upon the insertion of the key, 22 “the Door instantly sinks, with a tremendous crash, and the Blue Chamber appears streaked with vivid streams of Blood.” Pictures of love change to “subjects of Horror and Death,” and center stage is “a large Skeleton, seated on a tomb (with a Dart in his hand), and, over his head, in characters of Blood, is written ‘THE PUNISHMENT OF CURIOSITY’ ” (17). Colman returns to his source with Blue-Beard’s discovery of the bloodstained key and his declaration that he will cut off Fatima’s head in a few minutes. As in the representation of women in most of Colman’s plays, however, Fatima is not a passive victim. Although as in the source-story, the wife’s sister (whom Perrault names Anne and who is now called Irene)




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 101

12/5/2010 12:07:22 PM


and soldiers who arrive at the last minute assist her, in this new version, the soldiers are led by her lover Selim, while she herself physically resists. As Fatima arms herself with a dagger and the soldiers break into the Blue Chamber, the Skeleton comes to life and kills Abomileque. The natural and the supernatural thus combine against oppression. If in Blue-Beard, Colman replaced the medieval with the oriental, he did the reverse in Feudal Times, Or, The Banquet-Gallery, which, like Blue-Beard, was first presented in Christmas pantomime season. Lacking the specific chronicle detail of The Surrender of Calais, the historical setting is medieval but vague: an early reference to the Barons’ Wars and the stress on feudalism would suggest the twelfth century, but the play calls for the use of cannons, which did not exist at that time. Feudal Times imagines an idealized Middle Ages. A town-crier urges the happy villagers of a fishing-port in the north of England to fulfill their feudal obligations to Baron Fitzallen: “Maintain his Honour—for his Honour maintains You” (4). Despite learning that the cause of the dispute is not territorial but personal— Baron Ruthenwolf has abducted Claribel, the young woman that their baron’s son Edmund intended to marry—the villagers pledge to “spill the last drop of our blood for the house of Fitzallen” (5). They sing, though, that “He who comforts the poor / May always be sure / To find good support in his Peasantry” (6). Baron Ruthenwolf’s bad character cannot inspire such loyalty. His vassal Martin, whose life Edmund Fitzallen has spared, changes his allegiance; he suggests that Edmund enters Ruthenwolf’s castle through the “Gothick window” in the old Banquet-Gallery. As luck would have it, Ruthenwolf is having a banquet at the time, but due to the arrival of Baron Fitzallen’s feudal army and some special effects (sawn through by Martin, the drawbridge collapses under Ruthenwolf), Claribel is rescued and order is restored, so that the soldiers can “greet their wives, their children, and their friends again” (55). This brief two-act play is little more than a sketch with interesting scenery; Claribel, for example, has no opportunity to show the enterprise of earlier Colman heroines. Yet the printed edition raises some provocative questions. In a postscript to his Preface, Colman claims not to be interested in the historical specifics; antiquaries have contested his use of the term “Banquet-Gallery, but I leave the discussion to Antiquaries, and Nomenclators; whose attention (without meaning the slightest offence to a learned, and indefatigable body of men) has often been sedulously employed upon a subject of as little importance” (v–vi). Presumably the antiquarians pointed out that the terms


102


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 102

12/5/2010 12:07:22 PM

103

are not authentically medieval, the words “banquet” and “gallery” both entering the English language in the later fifteenth century. By “Banquet-Gallery,” Colman implies the great hall of a castle, which, as the space in which the overlord exercises both legal authority and benevolence, defines the feudal system. The idea of feudalism as potentially benevolent, though, is undercut by another claim in the Preface, namely, that Feudal Times is indebted to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s 1787 opera Tarare (v). Some at least of his readers would have been aware that the pro-Revolutionary Beaumarchais had critiqued aristocratic privilege in works such as Le Mariage de Figaro.23 Tarare, with music by Antonio Salieri, is an oriental opera that, like Feudal Times, features the abduction of the hero’s beloved and the hero’s entry into the villain’s seat of power in disguise; once again, the hero is assisted by those who appreciate his virtue. With typical caution, Colman does not reproduce the ending of Tarare, where the people elect Tarare their new king, but the thin plot of his two acts makes it clear that feudal overlords need to rule with the willing consent of their tenants. Even more provocatively, to invite comparisons between Tarare and Feudal Times is to suggest a parallel between English feudal “vassals” (to use Colman’s word) and slavery under an oriental despot. While this avoids the historical particularities of his earlier dramas and suggests that medievalism and orientalism are parallel methods of allegorizing states of society, it confirms the theater as a vital space for exploring popular notions of justice. Ironically, in his last years, Colman worked for his friend George IV (whose Regency Pavilion shows the appeal of both theatricality and oriental despotism) as examiner of plays. Having shown such adeptness both at self-censoring and at understanding how plays could represent a popular voice, Colman proved a highly effective public censor.




9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 103

12/5/2010 12:07:22 PM


9780230103740_05_ch03.indd 104

12/5/2010 12:07:22 PM

Th e R a dic a l Best i a ry

I

n 1795, Major John Cartwright pronounced that English democrats believed that the right to universal male suffrage was not only to be found in the law of England, but to have the solid support of nature and truth, so obviously as to admit in the attentive mind of no doubt: in short, that legislative representation, in every political community too large for the personal consultation of all its members, is due to a man, because HE IS A MAN; and not a beast. (lxi)

In the age of the Rights of Man, a crucial part of the English radicals’ claim was that even the poorest English were humans, rather than beasts, and as such, they were entitled to the rights that nature gave to all men.1 This is an ahistorical claim, yet in the English radical tradition throughout the French War period and a few years beyond, the ahistorical claim of natural right derived from humanity is constantly linked with a sense of medieval inheritance. Indeed, in this chapter I shall argue that in terms of a sense of cosmic structure, the English radicals represent the last historical moment in which a medieval idea of defining humans as distinct from animals is possible. Claims to rights might at first appear to be in two distinct categories: natural rights, that are a fundamental part of being human; and historical rights, acquired through specific actions identifiable in time and place. To give familiar examples of each, an Englishman might base a claim to freedom on the belief that all humans have a right to be free; on the other hand, he could also claim it on the basis that the English constitution, ratified by Magna Carta and continuing to the present through common law, gives him a historical right to freedom. Yet these categories are frequently blurred, so that natural rights are


Chapter 4


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 105

12/5/2010 12:07:32 PM


based on a sense of societal origins, and historical rights in common law are represented as the English confirmation of natural right. Jean Jacques Rousseau is the most quoted influence on the concept of right of the French Revolutionary era. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) appealed to the Romantics at least partly because Rousseau implies a regret for the loss of the state of nature. “Savage man,” Rousseau suggests, lived in a state of equality, where the earth provided for everyone’s wants; the miseries of human life postdate the beginnings of inequality, which began with the notion of private property: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society” (234). Rousseau accounts for different levels of inequality in different societies by the level of inequality already functioning at the establishment of their institutions. Rousseau is emphatically not a medievalist: his example of the best model of society is the Roman Republic, and for the most autocratic, feudalism. The Social Contract (1762) further explores the processes through which groups of humans give up their rights under natural law and form civil societies. According to Rousseau, groups of people compact to form a society and laws: thus magistrates hold status only as those who ensure that the law of the people is carried out. Individuals have the right to choose not to be part of a society; as members of a society, however, they have compacted to be governed by the general will. Rousseau’s use of the word “contract” may hence be slightly misleading. He does not appear to be envisaging a written constitution such as that of United States, since he imagines each individual compacting with a society, and a general will that would have a right to change the law. Moreover, a constitution does not need to establish rights, since human beings already have rights: the question is merely which of those rights they are prepared to surrender to live in a state of civilization.2 The English advocates of the notion of historical rights had a far more contractual idea of civil society than Rousseau’s. Although Rousseau was anti-medievalist and less contractual in his thought about rights than the Romantic-era English radicals, his writings unquestionably influenced British writing: with the possible exception of Keats, the leading Romantic poets knew them either through study or by reputation. William Godwin certainly knew Rousseau’s work, and his writing in turn helped shape the early thinking of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin demonstrates that he is


106


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 106

12/5/2010 12:07:32 PM

107

familiar with Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Social Contract. Like Rousseau, Godwin constructs an ahistorical theory of human rights based on human perfectibility. Yet like Rousseau, he cannot entirely avoid historicizing his argument. Rousseau presents a model of a government based on equality and the recognition that morality is a social contract, yet this model requires active involvement on the part of all citizens, who will personally participate in, for example, meetings of a general assembly. In contrast, for Godwin, “government is, abstractedly taken, an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind” (2:2). Godwin argues that institutions such as assemblies are only needed when a country is in crisis, and if all people conduct their lives according to reason, then only minimal government is required. Godwin pours scorn on those who claim historical rights for their own nation: Instead of enquiring what species of government was most conducive to the public welfare, an unprofitable disquisition has been instituted respecting the probable origin of government; and its different forms have been estimated, not by the consequences with which they were pregnant, but the source from which they sprung. Hence men have been prompted to look back to the folly of their ancestors, rather than forward to the benefits derivable from the improvements of human knowledge. Hence, in investigating their rights, they have recurred less to the great principles of morality, than to the records and charters of a barbarous age. As if men were not entitled to all the benefits of the social state, till they could prove their inheriting them from some bequest of their distant progenitors. As if men were not as justifiable and meritorious, in planting liberty in a soil in which it had never existed, as in restoring it where it could be proved only to have suffered a temporary suspension. (1:123)

Godwin is challenging those who base their claims for rights on history, but his remarks seem particularly directed to those ascribing to the “Norman Yoke” theory. The problem with Godwin’s own argument is that if government is not a natural phenomenon, the fact that any government exists must be through specific historical circumstances. Godwin falls into the trap of origins in his discussions both of kings (“inequality w[as] necessary as the prelude to civilization” [2:492]) and of law, which, he says, “was originally devised, that ordinary men might know what they had to expect” (2: 402). Nevertheless, Godwin is advocating a way of life based on universal justice derived from common humanity, rather than on national and historical particulars.


Th e R a dic a l Be s t i a r y


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 107

12/5/2010 12:07:32 PM


In contrast, radicals whose income placed them below the property qualification for voting based their claims to rights emphatically on history and nation. Most publications aimed at the unenfranchised (or, in their own belief, the disenfranchised) classes barely refer to Rousseau, but instead emphasize English thoughts about rights, including citations from John Locke and Tom Paine. Yet what they add to these is a heavily historicized sense of right, something that Locke and Paine had tried, perhaps not entirely successfully, to avoid. John Locke had explored the problem of whether freedom is a natural or historically specific right as early as his First Treatise of Government of 1698. Replying to Sir Robert Filmer, who had argued in his Patriarcha that humans were not naturally born free but derived their position in society from the Deity, Locke argued that even in the biblical account of human origins, God gave Adam freedom, but did not establish the beginning of a hierarchy to rule the earth (169–70). In the second Treatise, Locke asserts the “equality of Men by Nature” (288), yet immediately adds that the “State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (289) Fairly rapidly, humans living in a state of nature will appoint men to control those who choose not to keep the laws of nature, and thus human law is a complement to natural law. Unlike Godwin, Locke does not appear to regret that civil society has been created at the cost of some natural rights. Government comes into being within communities who have agreed to be bound by the general will to protect what Locke defines as “Property,” namely, “their Lives, Liberties, and Estates” (368). Locke asserts that “all Men are naturally” in a state of nature “and remain so, till by their own Consents they make themselves Members of some Politick Society” (296), which would seem to preclude either historical rights or historical limitations to rights: he thus emphasizes the continued power of the individual within the “Common-Wealth.” The goal of the Treatises is, however, historical: Locke is attempting to explain how kingship came into being, and, by implication, why the English were entitled to remove one monarch (James II) and replace him by others (Mary II and William III). Although the beginnings of civil society cannot be traced to one specific historical event, each person replays the beginnings of that society when he or she makes the decision to be a member of a society and thus to give up some natural rights to freedom.


108


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 108

12/5/2010 12:07:32 PM

109

Paine shows a similar emphasis on the continued rights of the individual within civil society, yet unlike any of the thinkers previously discussed, insists that rights need to be written: in other words, a constitution is a written document that contains the code of laws by which a nation is governed. He had not, however, fully developed this notion in his earliest publication, Common Sense (1776). In the introduction to Common Sense, Paine invokes the “natural rights of all mankind” against which the king of England has declared war (ii). Paine agrees with Locke and Rousseau that society was formed by mutual agreement to protect the interests of all members. He hence asks, “how came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check?” (6; italics in original). For Paine, kings are the usurpers of the authority of the people. Some may have originally been elected for their merits, yet it is more than probable, that, could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang. . . . Those who elected him can have had no thought of creating an hereditary succession. But as few or no records were extant in those days, and traditionary history stuff’d with fables, it was very easy, after the lapse of a few generations, to trump up some superstitious tale conveniently timed, Mahomet-like, to cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar. (12–13)

The current monarchy of England traces its descent from William the Conqueror, yet a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original. (13)

Paine is unclear in Common Sense as to what kind of government he thinks preceded the Norman Conquest, but Paine’s vision of the origin of civil society would appear to be natural equality, followed by voluntary democratic society, giving way to elective kingship (presumably in England the Saxon kings), which in turn gave powerful rulers the opportunity to usurp all power for themselves. Like Thomas Jefferson, Paine tends to blame not England, or even the English government, but the King of England for the American crisis, thus characterizing him as a new William the Conqueror. The American colonists have the opportunity to recreate the second stage of human development, the voluntary democratic society.




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 109

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM

110


That is was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was overrun with tyranny, the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated. (4)

Clearly, Paine at this time believed that the English Constitution emerged in medieval times, but it is less clear whether he is specifically referring to Magna Carta, or simply to the establishment of king, lords, and commons as it came into being by the thirteenth century. Yet the publication of Common Sense predates the Declaration of Independence by some six months, and after the success of the American independence movement and the establishment of a written constitution, Paine’s thought moved toward a narrower definition of constitution, namely, a written document. Of course, many thinkers, radical and conservative alike, claimed that England already had a constitution that took a number of forms: common-law precedent; the traditional “checks and balances” of the monarch, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons; and the written charters that established specific rights, principally defined as Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest, the Bill of Rights, and the Habeas Corpus Act. In the Rights of Man, written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine argues that Burke’s almost hysterical defense of the English Constitution is absurd, since the English have no constitution: Can then Mr. Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that thought it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form. Mr. Burke will not, I assume, deny the position I have already advanced; namely, that governments arise, either out of the people, or over the people. The English Government is one of those which arose out of a conquest; and though it has been much modified from the opportunity of circumstances since the time of William the Conqueror, the country has never yet regenerated itself, and is therefore without a constitution. (54)


Early in Common Sense Paine discusses the English Constitution as an existing, if imperfect, entity:

Paine thus distinguishes between government, the authority in a nation that may be imposed by any means, and constitution, the agreed contract between a people as to how they will be governed.


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 110

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM

111

He is also adamant that a constitution does not require the people to make permanent surrender of rights, and that certain freedoms are only given up by the consent of active participants, not in perpetuity: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies” (9). In summary, although Paine is interested in the origins of societies, he is not proposing a return to an earlier age of government. The establishment of the United States of America and of the French Republic, in both of which Paine played a personal role, are to some degree an attempt to return to the exciting moment when groups of humans first agreed to become civil communities; yet Paine insists on the primacy of the written word. The most revolutionary radical thinker of the English Romantic period, Thomas Spence, did not subscribe to the “Norman Yoke” theory but, like Paine, urged for the establishment of a state of society that had never yet been achieved.3 Even here, though, Spence returned to the idea that before kingship, land had been held in common: for example, in The End of Oppression, the Old Mechanic tells the Young Mechanic, “Landed Property always was originally acquired, either by conquest or encroachment on the common Property of Mankind” (4). Thus for Spence a system of common landownership was returning to a natural state of society. Where this system would differ from early human societies was that it would still have money. Spence’s model of farming seems somewhat like the feudal system, except that those performing the labor would own the land communally in “parishes” and would share the profits (Rights of Man 10–12). Both Paine and Spence are vague about English history after the original formation of civil society and before the Norman Conquest, and it is here that those radical writers who believe in history fill in details that Paine omits. Following the “Norman Yoke” theory popularized by Cartwright, radical journalists such as those in The Black Dwarf and The Medusa argued for the coincidence of natural right and established English rights. All these examples suggest that in thinking about ideal nationhood, the radicals could not escape England’s medieval past. In attempting to discuss medieval politics, radical writers sometimes adopted medieval tropes. Since both natural right and manhood suffrage depended so much on an understanding of the entitlements of being human, talking about what a man is becomes a medievalist means of articulating England’s class problems, especially when writers contrast their ideal of humanity with animal imagery in the bestiary tradition.




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 111

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM


Throughout the human experience, animal imagery seems to have been used to articulate problems such as life and death and how humans should relate to one another. The bestiary formed a medieval genre, albeit one at least partly derived from classical sources such as the Physiologus, a widely disseminated work listing numerous animals.4 A bestiary was a catalog of knowledge describing and often depicting the appearance and habits of wild animals and birds. Some readers may have been tempted to wonder why the Creator had formed so many animals, from the generally familiar fox or weasel to the exotic unicorn or dragon. Christianity taught them that beasts were formed for the use of humans, and obviously, many animals were eaten or domesticated for human use; but it is hard to see the usefulness of an exotic or fabulous animal such as an elephant or a mermaid. For this, the theologians had an answer. In her study of medieval bestiaries, Debra Hassig quotes Thomas of Chobham’s explanation: The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creature we may contemplate not only what may be useful for the body, but also what may be useful in the soul . . . there is no creature in which we may not contemplate some property belonging to it which may lead us to imitate God, or some property which may move us to flee from the Devil. (quoted Hassig [1995] xv)

Humans have divine authority to use animals to fulfill both their physical and their moral needs: human may not only use (although according to most theologians, not abuse) animals for food, protection, and labor, but they can also learn from studying the habits and characteristics of animals. This double application of the diversity of animal species survived into the nineteenth century, albeit with a more general sense of what one learns from animals. Enlightenment writers tended to stress the value of facts about animals as pure knowledge, rather than for the direct moral applications of that knowledge, but they would have agreed with medieval thinkers that animals had value both for practical human uses and for human understanding. Radical writers, however, still used animals as exempla of human strengths and weaknesses. I am not claiming that the radical writers of the early years of the nineteenth century were directly familiar with the medieval bestiary; indeed, much as radicals yearned for the early Middle Ages, they were equally likely to blame the high Middle Ages as the age in which England succumbed to Roman Catholicism and lost its traditional freedoms. Much medieval iconography, moreover, was destroyed


112


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 112

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM

113

during the Reformation, bestiary-related illustrations remaining only in a few public examples such as misericord seats.5 Yet the tradition of using beasts as examples survived through biblical teaching (many radicals came from nonconformist families and knew their Bibles well); in the classical tradition, including adaptations as children’s literature, such as Aesop’s fables; and in folk-legends. One of the most accessible sources of natural history for English readers, Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774) shows some awareness of ancient bestiary accounts of animals, and although he rejects some, other stories continue to be presented as fact. For example, in his description of the hyena, Goldsmith (probably drawing on Buffon) dismisses the bestiary stories of hyenas changing their sex as “absurdities,” yet seems more accepting of another ancient story with moral applications, namely, “that the hyaena makes its moans to attract unwary travelers, and then to destroy them” (3:343–45). The Romantic era, however, marked the final moment when humans and animals could be thought of as separate creations, with a natural distinction between them. For the Romantics, as for medieval people, animals were for the use and edification of humans; they were not, as they were to become with the theories of geology and evolution from the 1830s onward, part of the continuum of nature, but in a natural hierarchy of beings decreed by the Creator. Goldsmith states the orthodox position in his discussion of the great apes: through his account of the “Ouran Outang,” he urges his readers: Perceive at what a distance the first animal of brute creation is placed from the very lowest of the human species. Even in countries peopled with savages, this creature is considered as a beast. . . . The gradations of Nature in the other parts of nature are minute and insensible; in the passage from quadrupedes to fishes we can scarce tell were the quadrupede ends and the fish begins; in the descent from beasts to insects we can hardly distinguish the steps of the progression; but in the ascent from brutes to man, the line is strongly drawn, well marked, and impassable. (4:203)

Yet elsewhere he does not seem quite so certain of the distinction: for example, a few pages later, he relates supposed traditions of Africa and America that monkeys are really men capable of speech, “but obstinately dumb, for fear of being compelled to labour” (4:231). Joyce E. Salisbury has suggested that even by late medieval times, when the church still decreed the separation of people and animals, the boundaries were becoming blurred (9). An imperative for the Romantic-era radical claimers of rights is therefore to oppose this




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 113

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM


recurrent inclination to blur boundaries and to insist upon the distinctive nature of humanity. At the same time, however, as the radicals see the ruling classes as attempting to diminish their humanity, they make such social oppression itself seem less than human by using animal images to describe the actions of the oppressors. The significant distinction between the medieval and the Romantic-era radical use of such imagery is that whereas medieval writers were largely allegorizing relationships between the spiritual and the human, the radicals focus on relationships between human social classes, albeit under the assumption that the universe is governed by natural law. The breakers of that natural law must be something other than human.

Savage Beasts Eighteenth-century rationalist natural histories such as Goldsmith’s agreed with medieval bestiaries that animals were for the use and edification of human beings. English radicals were constantly concerned that this crucial division between humans and animals, whether divine or natural, was being undermined by those who treated those in the lower social strata as creatures for their use, or as having less than human rights. The recognized primary use of animals at this time was as food, yet Enlightenment writers chose not to think of humans as simply part of nature’s pattern of eating and being eaten. Keith Thomas states that at least by the eighteenth century, one of the standard distinctions between humans and animals was that humans eat to fulfill their bodily needs, whereas animals are obsessed by food (36–37). For example, Goldsmith claims, “Of all other animals, we spend the least time in eating; this is one of the great distinctions between us and the brute creation; and eating is a pleasure of so low a kind that none but such as are nearly allied to the quadrupedes desire its prolongation” (3:6). Goldsmith describes some animals as inherently noble, such as the horse, the dog, and the falcon, all of who understand their role to serve human beings. More, though, are described as “rapacious,” such as the tiger and the owl; and many others as “voracious,” including the otter, the ostrich, the vulture, the raven, and the shark. Goldsmith dismisses certain bestiary fables, such as that the pelican is the type of Christ because she feeds her young with blood from her breast; yet since the pelican, with its huge beak, becomes in Goldsmith’s account an exemplar of “gluttony,” the pelican still presents the reader with the moral lesson that humans should be not be greedy. In the hard years after Waterloo, food was a friction point between social classes in England. The poor believed, probably correctly, that


114


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 114

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM

115

the 1815 Corn Laws designed to protect British farmers from cheap imports of grain kept the price of bread artificially high. At the same time, the Prince Regent was legendary for his gluttony. As early as 1792, James Gillray had engraved the Prince as “A Voluptuary” who has gorged himself on food; a surviving menu from an 1817 dinner for Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia at the Prince’s Brighton palace lists thirty-six entrees and over a hundred dishes in all. Radical publications thus depicted the ruling classes as animals feeding off the poor, especially when the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, partly in response to riots protesting the price of food. After 1815, peace was not bringing more prosperity to the poor, and the populist movement for widening the suffrage took on new momentum. Some campaigners, such as the long-lived Major John Cartwright, continued to insist that universal male suffrage and annual parliaments were the Englishman’s historical rights, and that when these were regained, just plenty would naturally follow. Others, such as William Cobbett in his Political Register, believed that household suffrage was a more realistic goal. Radical Members of Parliament including Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane presented numerous petitions to the House requesting parliamentary reform. The public orator Henry Hunt also had a large following, and it was partly in response to his public rallies in Spa Fields, where some participants displayed French Revolutionary imagery, such as pikes and red caps, that parliament voted to suspend Habeas Corpus in March 1817. Yet government spies also reported that Spenceans were planning an armed uprising, and hence that the constitution was in danger.6 As the Examiner pointed out, the followers of the idealistic Thomas Spence could hardly be considered a major threat, given that they probably only numbered a few dozens, and any revolutionary rumblings were largely due to agents provocateurs. Still, the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth argued that sufficient grounds existed to allow the arrest of those merely suspected of endangering government and property. John and Leigh Hunt’s7 Examiner, established in 1809, declares itself “a Sunday Paper, On Politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals”; the paper was to be the champion of Wordsworth and the publisher of works by Keats and Shelley. Early in 1817, the Examiner stated the need for a radical press:



in the year 1792, Mr. Burke became a pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr. Thomas Paine was outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been the great


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 115

12/5/2010 12:07:33 PM

116


Radicals viewed daily papers and The Times in particular as little more than tools of the government and sought to represent their own political views in a format available to the poorer classes at prices that they could afford. For example, Thomas Spence charged a penny for his paper, while the Medusa’s subtitle was The Penny Politician. Also in 1817 appeared the first edition of The Black Dwarf, edited by T. Jonathan Wooler. On the frontispiece to the first volume, the Black Dwarf is portrayed as a tiny black-skinned figure, dressed in inky black, dancing with a satyr and surrounded by a crown covered by a fool’s cap, judges’ wigs, legal documents, and broken manacles.8 Wooler retains for himself this position of the outside observer, free to comment on current events as he sees fit. Yet he reveals his place in the radical tradition in this first issue, which begins with an overview of English rights that shows the distinct influence of Major John Cartwright. In its first issue in January 1817 The Black Dwarf agreed with Paine that the “English were conquered by the Norman, William, and the country held long in vassalage, by the right of conquest” (1:1). Even when talking about the constitution, Wooler cannot resist characterizing the king and his government as animals. The people always desired freedom, but “they did not combat tyranny generally, but the effects of tyranny; they contented themselves with paring the nails of the royal tigers, instead of chaining them in their cells. The consequence was, that the nails grew as fast as they were pared, and a constant struggle ensued between the people, and the monarch.” Wooler agrees that Magna Carta is the declaration of preexisting rights, rather than the creation of those rights: “The country has boasted of being free, because Magna Charta was enacted; when the least share of penetration would have taught us, that Magna Charta was only enacted, because our ancestors were determined to be free.” Yet the “temple of civil liberty” has decayed through time, so that the “foundations are snapped, the baneful ivy has crept into the crevices, and eat away the battlements that it seemed to support. It has become the residence of the most unclean birds, the most obnoxious animals”—those animals that Goldsmith terms “voracious.” This first issue also contains a poem titled “The Constitution” that claims that “in ancient times” Britain already had a constitution that “foil’d” Julius Caesar’s invasion. But “fell dissention spread around, / And


enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense engine for the purposes of good or ill, having a fatal bias given to it by the two mainsprings of fear and favour. (26)


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 116

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM

117

tainted Freedom’s hallow’d ground . . . Till Alfred rose, the wise, the great, / And wak’d to life a morbid state.” The Saxons are thus not in this poem the creators of the constitution; rather, it would appear that the Ancient Britons preserved the natural freedoms of the first humans, and this very humanity is currently under threat. Wooler’s work gained new impetus—and new dangers—from the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. The radical printer William Hone was arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act and charged (and acquitted) with three blasphemous libels. Hone’s famous Political House that Jack Built depicts the English constitutional documents as the “Wealth” of England, while the representatives of government (church, army, and law) are named “the VERMIN / That plunder the Wealth / That lay in the House / That Jack Built!” If the reference to “vermin” were not enough in itself, all those who knew the nursery rhyme would be able to recognize that the government stands in the role of rats in the original. Like Hone, Wooler himself was to spend time in prison under the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and his publishing business was to suffer when the government imposed the Six Acts, which include fourpence duty on all periodicals published more than once a month. Whereas Wooler tended to present the government as fools and animals, he personified Habeas Corpus, so that an advertisement for The Black Dwarf includes a coffin labeled “H.C.” and the words, “Alas! Poor Habeas!” In a parody of newspaper accounts of state trials headed “The Ministry—versus—Habeas Corpus,” The Black Dwarf writes, “This notorious offender, Habeas Corpus, has been at last happily subjected to the punishment of the law. He has long been suspected as the principal party toward inciting the people to unite and tell the truth, and to demand their rights, and other gross offences against social order in the present day” (1:95). Just as he believed that Magna Carta confirmed ancient rights, Wooler believed that Habeas Corpus, the right not to be imprisoned without charge, was an ancient English freedom confirmed by Magna Carta and merely restated in the Bill of Rights (1672) and the Habeas Corpus Act. In his State Trials parody, Wooler personifies Habeas Corpus and portrays the “law” opposing it as a monster. Habeas Corpus, he says, might have been excused “had it not been a matter of public notoriety that he was related to, or descended from, two notorious traitors of old times, called Magna Charta, and the Bill of Rights.” “Poor Habeas” is found guilty and “sentenced to be hanged until the first day of July next.” The Black Dwarf suggests that during the suspension, “it would not be an ineffectual mode of expressing public opinion, if every man




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 117

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM


would put himself into mourning, and wear a back dress entirely” (1817, 101). Through his Black Dwarf persona, Wooler hence starts to make a distinction between “justice” (by which he means the conduct of society in accordance with equal rights) and “law”: “Fool that I was, I thought that justice had enchained the monster law; and that I might pass by its horrid cavern without apprehension.” Law itself becomes animal-like: “Thus LAW ceases to be LAW, and eats law, and disgorges law, just as the said minister pleases” (708). At the same time that they were personifying legal acts and rights, the radical periodicals made use of specifically animal imagery in representing the relationship between government and populace. William Hone went so far as to publish The Political Showman—At Home! Exhibiting his Cabinet of Curiosities and Creatures—All Alive! (1821) that caricatured the government and their supporters as monstrous animals. Marcus Wood has pointed out that some of Cruikshank’s engravings are parodies of Goldsmith’s History of the Earth. For example, the Chancellor Lord Eldon is portrayed as a crocodile, and Wellington as a scorpion (184–85); footnotes also connect the illustrations with Goldsmith. Similarly, a letter to the Medusa thanks the editor for revealing the truth about the ruling classes, using the word “voluptuary” that had become attached to the Prince Regent: “The number of sharks and blood-suckers that you lately exhibited, will be appreciated as it ought, by all who are smarting under the pressure of the iron hand of taxation, leavened by harpies for the support of the voluptuary and the pander” (Medusa [June 26, 1819] 149).9 The letter also mentions locusts, reptiles, and maggots. Nevertheless, the letter holds out some hope, described in the form of an animal straight out of a medieval bestiary, namely, the phoenix: “But delusion surely is near at hand, the clouds of oppression and despotism will be dissipated by the bright and effulgent beams of reason; the fetters of corruption shall be broken, and Britain, like a phoenix, shall rise from its ruin and desolated state with redoubled splendour.” The use of the word “delusion” is strange here, although a safer word than the one that would make more sense, namely, “revolution.” At the same time, the animal metaphors clearly portray the governing classes as feeding off the poor and ravaging the “body” of Britain. Although the native dog-fish is very similar to a shark, the shark is not found in British waters. Nevertheless, it already had proverbial connotations as a devouring beast: Goldsmith included in his natural history some horrifying stories of sharks devouring slaves, and the image of the shark must have served to hint to English readers that like the kidnapped Africans, their freedoms were lost to greed.


118


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 118

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM

119

The “blood-sucker,” although natural histories contain descriptions of vampire bats, was familiar to Britons as the cure-all of doctors, who were sometimes referred to as “leeches.”10 The radical press called the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth “the Doctor,” a term that increased in irony after the infamous “Peterloo Massacre” of 1819, when the local yeomanry charged the crowds assembled for a political demonstration in Manchester, resulting in several deaths and many injuries. Noting that his father was “a respectable dealer in medicine,” the Black Dwarf explained the Home Secretary’s nickname in 1821, “I conjecture he was named, lest the state should be suddenly seized with the cholic, the gripes, or any local inflammation, when his skill in phlebotomy, with the assistance of the patent yeomanry lancets, might be found as useful, as on the plains of Peterloo” (1821: 479). Supposedly, a doctor cures the body, yet while Sidmouth might himself have claimed to “cure” civil unrest, from the radical point of view, his methods involved blood-letting and amputation. Another “leech” from the radical point of view was The Times, whose editor John Stoddart was called “Dr. Slop” after the inept male midwife in Tristram Shandy; the name seems to have remained both with the newspaper after Stoddart’s departure to work for another pro-government publication in 1817, and with Stoddart, who was the target of Hone’s A Slap for Slop in 1821. With some justification, the radicals saw The Times as the tool of the government, and the association with the male midwife suggests an undignified bringer forth of questionable news; at the same time, a slop bucket served for many people the function of an indoor toilet, and Cruikshank could not resist illustrating Tory muckraking as a “Slop Pail.” Sidmouth himself is not merely “a leech” as a slang term for a doctor, but identified with the blood-sucking creature itself. Spence writes of “blood-sucking Landlords and State Leeches” in the Preface to his Rights of Man (iv). In his political poems, unpublished during his lifetime, Percy Bysshe Shelley draws on this vernacular tradition of animal imagery. The sonnet “England in 1819” describes Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling.



This poem concludes with the statement that all England’s ills are “graves, from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst to illumine our tempestuous day” (575–76). Shelley’s “phantom” performs a similar function to the “phoenix” of the Medusa letter, and perhaps with similar subconscious acknowledgment of wishful thinking: the very


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 119

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM


real animals such as leeches and vultures may be defeated by phoenixes and phantoms, but phoenixes and phantoms may not exist in the modern world, even if they did in the ancient one. In “Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819,” Shelley compares the hated politicians Sidmouth and Castlereagh to a series of these bestiary creatures: As from an ancestral oak Two empty ravens sounds their clarion, Yell by yell, and croak by croak, When they scent the noonday smoke Of fresh human carrion:— As two gibbering night-birds flit From their bowers of deadly yew Through the night to frighten it, When the moon is in a fit, And the stars are none, or few:— As a shark and dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic isle, For the Negro-ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate,11 Wrinkling their red gills the while— Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one. (573)

Shelley’s twenty lines form one sentence of similes, a type of compression that was not to the interests of the radical publishers, who at times seem desperate for enough material to fill their small journals. But he is using the kind of language that would be familiar to the readers of such periodicals, and also familiar images of “voracious” beasts that kill or devour other animals. For a further characteristic linking the creatures of the poem is that they do not recognize humans as their superiors, but rather place them in the category of flesh that they will use their power and cunning to devour. Some of the animals even have class implications: Goldsmith says of wolves and foxes, for example, “the wolf is more hurtful to the peasant, but the fox to the gentleman” (3: 327), and radical writing does not seem to characterize the government as “foxes” (perhaps Charles James Fox’s proclamation of himself as their champion had some part in this).12


120


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 120

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM


121

But at the same time, the metaphorical use of savage beasts raises the question of whether the poor, their prey, are animals too.

The letter to The Medusa containing a catalog of devouring beasts is signed “A Fellow of the Swinish Multitude,” a phrase that has resonance for the British poor throughout the Romantic era, although its use is commonest in the 1790s and after the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817. In his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke had notoriously referred to the populace as “the swinish multitude.” In context, Burke is continuing to discuss his own notion of the origin of civilization. Having asserted that “When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot be estimated,” Burke insists that Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence . . . . Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. (172–73)

Burke’s image is based on Christ’s injunction “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Matthew 7:6). Yet whereas the “swine” in Christ’s image are those who choose not to accept the gospel, in Burke’s version, the “swine” are the lower classes who, led astray by intellectuals, fail to understand the natural bond between aristocracy, learning, and religion. Although the biblical image is not based on class, an interpretation based on social class can be found in the work of a medieval English writer. Pigs do not feature extensively in medieval bestiaries,13 but they can be found in English vernacular texts. In John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, written in the last years of the fourteenth century, the poet describes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in beast-imagery terms.


The Swinish Multitude


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 121

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM

122


There was one jackdaw trained in the art of speaking, whom no cage could keep at home. With everyone watching, he spread his wings and shouted out that he had foremost place, although he was unworthy. Just as the Devil was placed in charge of the legion of tricksters, so this no-gooder became the leader of the wicked mob.

He sees others of the mob transformed into asses, cattle, pigs, dogs, cats, foxes, birds, owls, flies, and frogs. While pigs are only one of the catalog of transformations, Gower’s description of the Kentish rebels as pigs who squabble among themselves, and who have no-one to keep them from the crops or to put rings through their noses to stop them rooting in the soil has definite class implications, since they turn from their normal forest food of acorns to human food and drink: “The pigs’ greediness grew so much, that a rich man in the city could barely obtain even the modest food to which he was accustomed” (4:366–67). The pigs do not have a leader among themselves, although one of them is described as a savage wild boar14: rampaging through the New Troy (London), the pigs foul beds in palaces and roar like lions in their self-importance: “these were pigs into whom a cursed spirit had entered, as holy scripture relates.” Gower’s Vox Clamantis was not available in print during the Romantic era,15 yet the English continued to describe perceived human failings as swinish. Typically, when English people called each other pigs, hogs, or swine, they were suggesting a loss of the characteristics of humanity and implying greediness, dirtiness, or laziness: in their Poetry for Children, for example, Charles and Mary Lamb warn children not “to be over-nice” when eating, or “court surfeits by excess,” and then provide the reasons: The first, as finical, avoid; The last is proper to a swine: By temperance meat is best enjoyed; Think of this maxim when you dine.16


Their leader, Wat Tyler, is described as a graculus, a jackdaw or a jay, commonly named Wat (41). The poet states that in his dream,

My focus here, though, is on the political implications of the comparison. In contrast with the standard idea of humans violating natural order by being like pigs, in the dream vision of Vox Clamantis, the pigs’ desire to claim the rights of humans marks a violation of order in which the lower classes forget their natural place in society. In this aspect, as in his adaptation of biblical imagery, Burke’s reference to


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 122

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM

123

the “swinish multitude” might be interpreted like that of his medieval predecessor. In such a reading, Burke is not chastising the lower classes for having the manners of pigs, but rather saying that they are pigs, and that they cannot trespass on the domains of humanity. Hardly surprisingly, champions of the English lower classes, who had always believed Burke more sympathetic to social equality than many others of their leaders, were less than delighted to be compared to pigs.17 Their case was dependent on the “Rights of Man”—the equality of all humans—and by suggesting that some members of society were less than human, Burke was presenting a challenge both to the idea of natural right and to the historical theory that English people used to be free. The concept of the English poor as pigs prompted outrage on the part of many radicals, but, as in the sarcastic signature to the Medusa letter, it could also be adapted to the radicals’ advantage. In The English Pig, A History, Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris trace people’s relationships with pigs in England. By the nineteenth century, ownership of a “cottage pig” was a mark of success among the poorer classes. At the same time, changes in the methods of raising pigs were in themselves commentaries on the diminution of English rights. The traditional way of raising a pig was to let it wander common ground and look for its own food, and in pastoral poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century, pigs are still depicted as roaming the autumn forests looking for acorns: pigs are thus associated with the quintessentially English tree, the oak.18 This practice, however, was changing as common spaces gave way to clearly demarked property and land that had been public under common law became private. Pigs moved into sties usually close to the owner’s home, and lived on household waste, reinforcing the pig’s ancient reputation as a dirty, greedy animal, one distinctly less noble than its bestiary ancestor, the wild boar. Robert Bloomfield’s immensely popular Farmer’s Boy (1800)19 depicts a transitional moment where pigs live in sties part of the time, but are free to wander when the weather is suitable: No more the fields with scatter’d grain supply The restless wandering tenants of the STY; From oak to oak they run with eager haste, And wrangling share the first delicious taste Of fallen ACORNS. (53–54)



Similarly, John Clare describes February’s thaw as when “the gladden swine bolt from the sty / And round the yard in freedom run” (301).


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 123

12/5/2010 12:07:34 PM


All the same, these pigs at least belong to owners of modest means. When swineherds looked after others’ pigs, they could not even aspire to the Romantic pastoralism of a shepherd; they were raising the dirty animals that others would eat. As the jester Wamba remarks in Scott’s Ivanhoe, another work of the Peterloo period, “Swine is good Saxon,” but pork “is good Norman-French” (32). Saxon thralls such as Gurth raise the swine, while the landowning Normans eat the pork. Whether an animal reminding the English of free land, or an animal that marked the thralldom of private property, the pig was fed and looked after as well as possible, but people owned pigs with the intention of killing and eating them. Pigs were for the use of people, and to associate the poor with pigs was not merely to suggest their dirty, greedy, qualities, but to imply a cosmos where the poor were not beings equal in the sight of Creation. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, pigs that behaved like people were a major public attraction. A Learned Pig of the 1780s was believed by some to have witnessed the French Revolution at first hand and may even have helped inspire Burke’s “swinish multitude” phrase: a contemporary cartoon by Samuel Collings shows the Learned Pig and other circus curiosities trampling the Muses (Bondeson 19–35). William Blake sarcastically wrote of giving “pensions to the learned pig” (615). The date of this line20 suggests that Blake may have been referring not to the Learned Pig of the 1780s but to Toby the Sapient Pig. Toby was sufficiently sapient to publish his Life and Adventures, With his Opinions on Men and Manners around 1805; Toby’s “Proprietor and Teacher” Nicholas Hoare published and sold the work for a shilling, and may, one suspects, have been Toby’s ghost-writer. The book was “embellished with an Elegant Frontispiece, Descriptive of a Literary Pig Sty, With the Author in Deep Study” (fig. 4.1). Toby, who explains his precocious talent as possibly due to his mother’s selective consumption of a gentleman’s library “in the early stage of her pregnancy” (23), is shown in a pigsty writing his autobiography while consulting books that include Plutarch, Terence, Rousseau, Hume, and Shakespeare, all works of literature frequently cited in discussions of human nature. Both these pigs performed reading and number tricks, and their exhibitors seem to have made some claims that they could read thoughts. Such popular oddities prompted the question of just how different people were from pigs, and the poor were often given cause to suspect that the difference was not that important to the rich: far from treating the poor as equal humans entitled to a role in the government of the country, they clearly often saw them as existing for the use of their social superiors.


124


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 124

12/5/2010 12:07:35 PM


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 125

12/5/2010 12:07:35 PM


Figure 4.1 Contradicting Burke’s claim that the Swinish Multitude would be the death of learning, Toby the Sapient Pig writes his autobiography. Frontispiece to The Life and Adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig. © The British Library Board. British Library 992.i.6 f.p.


To return to Major John Cartwright’s words, the radical reformers believed that the principles of democracy was “due to a man, because HE IS A MAN; and not a beast.” Although Cartwright might here appear to be claiming the ahistorical universality of human rights, his pamphlet The Commonwealth in Danger is largely a response to Arthur Young, who in Cartwright’s opinion had showed a similar change in his principles to Burke himself. Before the French Revolution, Young had commented on the social injustices in France, but in The Example of France a Warning to Britain (1794) Young had warned Britain against the dangers of trying to change society. Cartwright was especially incensed that Young disputed his claim that the constitution had been corrupted over time, which, according to Young, “tends strongly to give an idea to the ignorant and unwary, that the constitution has declined. . . . There is no man, acquainted with the history of England, who does not know this is a gross error” (73). To add insult to injury, Young concluded that “In antient times, [the constitution] knew nothing but the domineering superiority of regal or aristocratic tyranny; the commonalty of the realm, slaves— villains—boors—cattle; unprotected, and unrepresented” (78). For Cartwright, this was tantamount to saying that in his beloved Saxon times the poorer English classes had only the political rights of farm animals, and that he himself was teaching false knowledge. Young’s appendix, Cartwright wrote, “for the most part would figure better among the antiquarian trash of the Gentleman’s Magazine” than in a political discourse of 1794. Hence Cartwright disputes Young’s “idea, that the Commons in those days were no better off than he represents them to have been after the Norman conquest and tyranny in the times of Ed.I and Ed.III. when according to him, none had representation in parliament, but ‘land possessors holding by military tenure; all beneath were of no more account, in great national assemblies, then the cows, sheep, and hogs of the kingdom’ ” (238). But indignation might be equally effectively expressed through sarcasm. In his 1799 “Ode to a Pig, while his Nose was Boring,” Robert Southey reminds the pig, “To man o’er ev’ry beast the pow’r was giv’n,” and describes the social contract in piggish terms:


126

The social Pig resigns his natural rights When first with man he covenants to live; He barters them for safer stye delights, For grains and wash, which man alone can give. Sure is provision on the social plan, Secure the comforts that to each belong.


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 126

12/5/2010 12:07:36 PM


127

And you resist! you struggle now because Your master has thought fit to bore your nose! You grunt in flat rebellion to the laws Society finds needful to impose! Go to the forest, Piggy, and deplore The miserable lot of savage swine! See how the young Pigs fly from the great boar, And see how coarse and scantily they dine!

As a parodic version of Rousseau’s fall of the state of nature, the poem seems an amusing one—the pig is merely squealing at having his nosed bored for a ring—yet owners bored pigs’ noses to restrict their movements: a pig with a ring was less able to squeeze into fields of crops or root in the soil. Moreover, the ending is thoroughly unpleasant, at least from the pig’s point of view: And when, at last, the closing hour of life Arrives (for Pigs must die as well as Man) When in your throat you feel the long sharp knife, And the blood trickles to the under pan; And when, at last, the death wound yawning wide, Fainter and fainter grows th’expiring cry, Is there no grateful joy, no loyal pride, To think that for your master’s good you die! (Curry 159–61)

The question hence arises as to how much the reader is able to identify with the pig. Malcolmson and Mastoris present the poem as reflecting the life and death of English pigs of the French Revolutionary period. But as a product of Southey’s radical phase, the poem simultaneously suggests that if the pigs are the poor allegorized, their lives are entirely at the disposal of the rich. For such people, there is scant “grateful joy” and “loyal pride” at dying for their social superiors. In The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, Claudine Fabre-Vassas suggests that rituals associated with the killing of pigs often function within cultures as a means of approaching taboos, and to allegorize the poor as pigs and the rich as the ones who kill and eat them is to draw close to the same taboo of cannibalism suggested by the use of “savage beast” imagery—except that in the pig allegory, it is the human who is unnatural. As we have seen earlier, recurrent animal imagery in the radical press likens the government to creatures


Oh, happy Swine! th’impartial sway of man Alike protects the weak Pig and the strong.


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 127

12/5/2010 12:07:36 PM


that devour other animals, or even humans. In some respects, the idea that the rich think of the poor as pigs is a useful one to radical propaganda, because it confirms the idea that the poor are killed, and in some instances “devoured,” by the rich. George Cruikshank’s cartoon of the Peterloo massacre portrays the crowd who had attended the demonstration in support of political rights as heroically human. Yet that others think of them as the “swinish multitude” is suggested by the butchers’ tools wielded against the crowd: the animal-like yeomanry brandish meat cleavers and carry sharpeners for them on their belts (fig. 4.2). This idea, however, was not a new one: after the yeomanry killed people during riots in Sheffield in 1795, the file-cutter and radical singer Joseph Mather sarcastically wrote, Oppression need not fear alarms, Since tyranny has got such swarms Of gallant heroes bearing arms, To butcher-grunting swine. (Song XXIX)21

Mather’s song provides an example of how radicals coopted the “swinish multitude” image relatively soon after the publication of the Reflections to express the attitude taken by the wealthier classes toward them. Thomas Spence wrote a rhyme supposedly in the voice of Edmund Burke called “Burke’s Address to the Swinish Multitude,” which includes the lines, Do you think that a KING is no more than a Man? Ye Brutish, ye Swinish, irrational Clan? I swear by his Office, his Right is divine, To flog you, to feed you, and treat you like Swine! Get ye down!

Here Spence uses sarcasm to attack the dismissal of the poor as swine. Yet Spence also pointedly referred to Burke’s expression when he called his publication aimed at the working classes One Penny Worth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. “Pig’s Meat” in this context means food for pigs, and much of the publication consists of quotations on rights and liberties from earlier writers. The majority of these are British: authors quoted with apparent approval include Locke, Richard Price, and Godwin, with nothing from Rousseau. Spence or his friends also wrote original verses and articles for Pig’s


128


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 128

12/5/2010 12:07:36 PM


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 129

12/5/2010 12:07:36 PM


Figure 4.2 George Cruikshank. The Massacre of Peterloo, 1819. The yeoman cavalry attacking the crowd carry butcher’s cleavers and wear sharpening tools on their belts.

130


Q. A. Q. A.

What is Man? An irrational, unsocial, cowardly, and covetous animal. How do you prove he is irrational? His actions are as much influenced by present passions and interests as are the actions of other animals deemed irrational. Q. How do you make it appear, that man is a cowardly animal? A. Because he hunts in packs like hounds, the most cowardly of all dogs.

The point is made that humans are all different, whereas pigs are not, so the questioner goes on to ask, “Did not Edmund Burke then most improperly term his starving fellow-creatures the Swinish Multitude?” This receives the reply: Yes, therein he blundered most egregiously. For a very slight observation, he would find real Swine to be more noble animals, and far from being so obsequious. They will not quietly suffer on any account, much less by the encroachment of their fellow-creatures. If any great hog offer to thrust them from the trough, they will scream most seditiously, and will, without regard to consequence, insist on having their noses in, one side or the other. . . . They do not understand slaying each other for their masters. They only know bravery in persisting in what they think tends to their own happiness, and that they will most obstinately do. Mr. Burke must think of some other name for his silly brethren, for they will not have the sense or the spirit to defend their Rights and Interests like Swine. (261–62)

In Spence’s vision, the pigs have a clearer sense of their natural rights than do many humans, who passively allow their rights to be taken away. (This is of course a Spencean allegory in that the first right is the right to bodily sustenance, from which all other rights naturally follow; for the medievalists, the first right is political.) By the time that Shelley wrote his version of Oedipus Tyrannus, which is given the subtitle of “Swellfoot the Tyrant,” the practice of using animals to articulate political roles was well-developed. The first issue of The Black Dwarf had described the English constitution as “harder than the enigma put to Oedipus.” Very possibly, this is coincidental; as Michael Scrivener remarks, though, Shelley was nevertheless drawing on the radical tradition in making characters out of animals, including a chorus of pigs (262). In her notes to her husband’s poetry, Mary Shelley claims that the inspiration was


Meat, including a dialogue titled “The Rights of Man. By Question and Answer.”


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 130

12/5/2010 12:07:37 PM

131

“pigs at the fair of San Giuliano” (410). Seeing real animals may have prompted Percy to think about pigs, but Mary’s comment should not obscure his indebtedness to the radical use of animal imagery; in fact, his friend Leigh Hunt had in August 1818 printed “A New Catechism for the use of the Natives of Hampshire, Necessary to be had in all Sties,” which begins: Q. What is your name?—A. Hog or Swine. Did God make you a hog?—No! God made me man in his own image; the Right Honourable SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL made me a swine. (Examiner August 30, 1818)

Hunt footnotes Burke’s Reflections to ensure that his readers do not miss the allusion. Some twenty-seven years after Burke had referred to the “swinish multitude,” the image was clearly still powerful. Shelley’s play is a satire of the Queen Caroline affair: on his accession in 1820, George IV encouraged his ministers to tarnish his estranged wife’s22 reputation (something that she was quite capable of doing herself), and subsequently shut her out of the Coronation. As Michael Erkelenz remarks, critics have pondered why Shelley would have cared about the not particularly personable Queen Caroline (510). The answer is, I would suggest, that Shelley was continuing his identification with the popular radical cause as seen in poems such as “England in 1819” and “Similes.” Nothing could be more self-conscious of its Englishness than a translation, and the literal translation of Oedipus, Swell-Foot, seemed particularly apt for the gouty gourmand George IV. In adopting the vernacular for a poem said to be “translated from the original Doric,” Shelley also adopted the stance of the English populace who believed that Caroline had been severely wronged by her husband, hence following the radical example of using the quarrel between king and queen almost as an allegory of social injustice. In doing so, he imbues what initially appears a classicist endeavor, a satire based on a classical source, with many of the features of English popular medievalism. Moreover, unlike the unprinted poems, Shelley published Swellfoot the Tyrant and received a repressive response similar to that of the radical publishers.23 Yet Shelley’s play does not quite allow the “swinish multitude” to determine its own destiny. At the beginning of the drama, Swellfoot worships at the Shrine of Famine and tries to ignore the Chorus of Pigs. They immediately historicize their rights in medievalist terms:



Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs Were bless’d as nightingales on myrtle sprigs,


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 131

12/5/2010 12:07:37 PM

132

Pop u l a r M e di e va l i s m i n Rom a n t ic -E r a Br i t a i n Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew, And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too (392)

Now if your Majesty would have our bristles To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gristles, In policy—ask else your royal Solons— You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, And sties well thatched; besides it is the law!

The pigs thus claim rights that at least in the allegory, include material provision. Yet they are confronted by the butchers and gelders, who represent the Malthusian position toward the poor. Their names, Solomon, Moses, and Zephaniah, are Jewish. Although pigs are in the Jewish belief unclean beasts, Fabre-Vassas has shown that in Christian folk-tradition, Jews are often simultaneously depicted as killers of pigs and of Christians (134–35). An example from medieval English tradition is the story of Hugh of Lincoln, where, at least in the ballad version circulating in the Romantic era, a Jew’s daughter lures a Christian child into her house and kills him as a pig would be killed: She’s led him in through ae dark door, And sae has she thro nine; She’s laid him on a dressing-table, And stickit him like a swine. And first came out the thick, thick blood, And syne came out the thin, And syne came out the bonny heart’s blood; There was nae mair within.24

Shelley specifically describes the three as “butchers and gelders,” and Fabre-Vassas notes that many medieval versions of the “Sir Hugh” story suggest that the Christian child is circumcised or mutilated before he is stuck like a pig. I do not think that Shelley can be entirely acquitted of anti-Semitism in imposing the medieval legend of swine-cumChristian-killing Jews onto his classical translation, even though he is using it to satirize the relationships between rich and poor (this, of course, makes the Jews the rich, conforming to another Romantic-era stereotype). Still, I would agree with Scrivener that the names are also those of prophets and wise men, as the population theorists Thomas


The Pigs continue the image of devouring that Shelley had used in his other animal allusions and suggest that Swellfoot will eat them:


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 132

12/5/2010 12:07:37 PM

133

Malthus and his supporters claimed to be, prophesying doom as population increases and causes Famine (conversely, in Swellfoot, Famine is caused not by the population, but by the Tyrant and his ministers). Like the butchers and gelders, a number of characters in the play can be identified with reasonable certainty as satirizing specific figures: Swellfoot is the king; Iona Caroline; Purganax the hated Castlereagh; Laoktonos, the Duke of Wellington; Dakry is most probably the Lord Chancellor Eldon; and Mammon the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, keeper of the “Green Bag” of incriminating secrets and introducer of paper currency with the result the many poor people were hanged for uttering forged notes.25 The English people are represented both by the pigs (although pigs who express the desire of becoming bulls) and by the Minotaur, who identifies himself with John Bull, a traditional representation of Englishness that was growing in popularity at this time.26 Because he was following the radical satirical tradition, just as it is important that the pigs do not have individual names but represent the multitude, Shelley most likely had people or concepts in mind for all the named characters.27 In 1921, Newman I. White suggested that the Gadfly, the Rat, and the Leech represented public attackers of Caroline, namely Sir John Leach, William Cooke, and Browne of the Milan Commission (332–46). There are certainly precedents for this in the radical press: Hone’s The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, for example, simultaneously refers to John Leach as a leech and a rat when the King “sees the rat Leech turn toward Milan’s walls.” I would agree with Erkelenz, however, that Shelley was probably not as much interested in the details of the Queen Caroline Affair, or in Caroline as a person—after all, in naming her Iona Taurina, he is doubly calling her a cow—as he was in how the incident was a rallying point for radicalism. I would suggest that Shelley gives the Rat, the Leech, and the Gadfly the characteristics of organized repression as maintained by the Home Office, its network of spies, and the pro-government press. Like leeches, rats are common in radical satire of the time; the implied rats in William Hone’s Political House that Jack Built are a case in point. In 1821, the Black Dwarf records that “our old, and comparatively inoffensive black-rat, has been almost annihilated by the new species of voracious quadrupeds, of that species. And, if we suppose our old Norman aristocracy to resemble the black-rat, and the new race of political adventurers who have crawled into the higher places, to resemble the new race of four-footed destroyers, we shall have a tolerable parallel” (1819] 713). Hone’s readers would have known this




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 133

12/5/2010 12:07:37 PM


brown rat (rattus norvegicus) as the Hanoverian rat, since it arrived in Britain about the same time as George I; he thus slyly develops the parallel without confirming that the Hanovers themselves might be both “voracious” and “political adventurers.” In other works, Hone portrays the attorney general Robert Gifford as a rat.28 The Gadfly, though, seems to be Shelley’s own classicist addition, since Hera sent a gadfly to torment Zeus’ love Io when she was in the form of a cow. Purganax mentions this, and adds that From his convex eyes He sees fair things in many hideous shapes, And trumpets all his falsehood to the world. Like other beetles he is fed on dung. (394–95)

The Gadfly, whose song is a repeated “hum,” is proud never to have left Iona alone. Its skill at spreading slander suggests that it may be a frequent target of the radical press, namely “Dr. Slop” or The Times. Purganax describes the Rat as “So thin with want, he can crawl in and out/ Of any narrow chink and filthy hole” (395). Elsewhere Shelley links Castlereagh and Sidmouth as partners in the oppression of the poor, so the Rat may represent the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth with his network of spies, although readers of Hone’s work would also know the association of the attorney general Gifford with a rat. As previously mentioned, Sidmouth was known as “the Doctor,” and the Rat threatens to “let blood” from Iona’s “weasand” (her throat). In contemporary caricatures, Sidmouth, like the Rat, is portrayed as a skinny man. Finally, Purganax describes the Leech as Fit to suck blood, with lubricious round rings, Capaciously expatiative, which make His little body like a red balloon, As full of blood as that of hydrogen, Sucked from men’s hearts; insatiably he sucks And clings and pulls—a horse-leech, whose deep maw The plethoric King Swellfoot could not fill, And who, till full, will cling for ever.


134

The Leech could simply be another aspect of Sidmouth. On the other hand, the reference to the leech’s “little body” and his propensity for sucking blood may be an attempt to identify him with someone specific—perhaps “little” (as he is called in the radical press) Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who from the radical point of view


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 134

12/5/2010 12:07:37 PM

135

could certainly be seen as a blood-sucker.29 In combination, these three attack the pigs’ physical well-being, state of mind, and political freedoms. Thus far, Shelley is working within the radical vernacular of popular medievalism. The play’s conclusion, though, suggests that Shelley was unable to see the “swinish multitude” as self-determining. That the Pigs know Caroline’s innocence is distinct from the mere hint at the beginning that the Pigs know their historical rights. Although Shelley may be correct in noting that it was easier for the poor to focus on Caroline’s rights as a wife and queen than on their historical rights as Englishmen, at the play’s conclusion, she, not the pigs, leads the protest. Purganax believes that he can convince the pigs of Iona’s guilt if the queen is “invited to attend the feast of Famine” and anointed with the contents of the Green Bag. The Pigs tell the “Bull-Queen” that Those who wrong you, wrong us; Those who hate you, hate us; Those who sting you, sting us; Those who bait you, bait us. (404)

Iona Taurina then asserts her acquired national identity by observing that the “tender heart of every Boar” has acquitted her of “any act incongruous/ With native piggishness.” She appeals to the Middle Ages: Innocent Queens o’er white-hot ploughshares tread Unsinged, and ladies, Erin laureate sings it, Dekced with rare gens, and beauty rarer still, Walked from Killarney to the Giant’s Causeway, Through revels, smugglers, troops of yeomanry, White-boys and orange-boys, and constables, Tithe-proctors, and excise people, uninjured! (405)

Iona refers to the story of the Anglo-Saxon Queen Emma, mentioned in chapter 3,30 and the Irish legend in Thomas Moore’s “Rich and rare were the gems she wore.” In the Irish Melody, Moore recreates a time in Ireland’s history when, in contrast with modern-day rebellion and persecution, a maiden might say,



Sir Knight! I feel not the least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm: For, though they love women and golden store, Sir Knight! They love honour and virtue more. (199–200)


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 135

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM

136


empties it over SWELLFOOT and his whole Court, who are instantly changed into a number of filthy and ugly animals, and rush out of the Temple. The image of FAMINE then arises with a tremendous sound, the PIGS begin scrambling for the loaves, and are tripped up by the skulls; all those who EAT the loaves are turned into BULLS, and arrange themselves quietly behind the altar. The image of FAMINE sinks though a chasm in the earth, and a MINOTAUR arises. (408–9)

If the grunting swinish multitude can be turned into placid John Bulls, reverently standing by the altar, by adequate food, Shelley may have little faith in the political commitment of the poor. Only the hungry (those who are still pigs) chase off the “filthy and ugly animals” that represent the government, and even here, they require leadership. Caroline/Iona Taurina, dressed for hunting and mounted on the Minotaur/John Bull, uses the remaining pigs to hunt down the “ugly badgers . . . / These stinking foxes, these devouring otters, / These hares, these wolves, these anything but men” (409). The government has revealed itself to be animals, not men, who deserve “no law (are they not beasts of blood?) / But such as they gave you” (409). Yet at the same time, the claim of the populace to the rights of humans seems to depend on leaders such as Iona Taurina rather than wise old boars. Just as the pigs have almost drowned out the words of Liberty, Shelley does not seem entirely sure that Pigs can speak for themselves beyond a grunt, and in suggesting that the rebels are merely those who are not fed, he is overlooking the possibility that political awareness may not be entirely driven by bodily need but by a sense of human right.

The Rebellion of the Beasts Shelley’s combination of classical learning and medieval bestiary into a popular form is taken even further in the anonymous work The Rebellion of the Beasts! Or, The Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!! The British Library tentatively ascribes the book to Leigh Hunt, whose brother and nephew John and Henry Leigh Hunt published it. In his 2003 edition, Douglas A. Anderson points to some of the chronological problems with this attribution, since the book appeared when


Yet Iona’s medieval ordeal is interrupted by the shadowy figure of Liberty, although her words are “almost drowned by the furious grunting of the Pigs.” Iona Taurina is inspired to seize the Green Bag, and, according to the stage direction,


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 136

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM

137

Leigh Hunt was absent in Italy (ix–x). The repeated and specific references to Cambridge University indicate that this work was, as it claims to be, written by a Cambridge scholar, and the use of the bestiary tradition would also seem to suggest someone aware of medieval prototypes.31 At the same time, the writer, like Shelley, is working in the radical vernacular. Evidently the Hunts considered the work appropriate for the same kind of popular radical readership as the audience for The Examiner. The Hunts, and especially John Hunt, had provoked the government on several occasions; in 1813, both John and Leigh Hunt had been sentenced to two years imprisonment for seditious libel against the Prince Regent, and John Hunt was again imprisoned in the early 1820s. The advantage of The Rebellion of the Beasts was that it could certainly be read as a radical critique of monarchy, but that due to its use of the beast-fable form, it could also be read as a general moral allegory. The work is prefaced with a dedication “To any Lord Chancellor” from a fictitious clergyman named “John Pimplico,” who claims to have found the work in the papers of the deceased narrator John Sprat. The name suggests both “Pimlico,” a nondescript area south of Westminster that had just been approved for development; and “Pimp,” one who sells services for immoral gain. John Pimplico commends the unspecified Lord Chancellor as “the great upholder of most high and superlative legitimate measures, which, but for your lordship, after ——’s fall, would have received a deadly blow” (142). The most obvious meaning is that the Lord Chancellor and the British government helped restore the former monarchies after the fall of Napoleon, something of which Pimplico supposedly approves but that the book’s readers could interpret ironically if they so wished. The irony of Pimplico’s claims is made clear when he expresses a desire to be classed among the “rats” who support government orthodoxy and to receive a clergy benefice; he adds, I do assure your lordship, that, when you have given me a living, I will become a furious and unjust magistrate, a persecutor of poachers, a punisher of untried prisoners, a member of the county Pitt club, a drinker of port wine, a sporting divine, a reader of John Bull, a reviler of methodists, an abuser of bible societies, an enemy to the catholics, a hater of popery, and, in one word, a sound legitimate both in politics and faith. (144–45)



Yet Pimplico immediately strays from the concept of animals as allegorical representations of humans or human characteristics to suggesting that the book proves something about animals. The allegory


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 137

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM


will show, he maintains, that animals deserve human, and especially aristocratic, cruelty; and prove that it also applies to animals that “if you give them an inch, they will take an ell; and there is no saying, what confusion and mischief may be brought of the kingdom, if the dangerous doctrines of humanity are preached to beasts in their present degraded situation” (148). Pimplico’s Preface thus encourages an allegorical reading of the beast-fable, but immediately confuses this reading by arguing that the story represents the potential behavior of real animals. Equally confused is the first-person narrator of the main narrative, a Cambridge scholar named John Sprat. A sprat is little fish, but the name also suggests Jack Sprat, who memorably ate no fat, a use of a nursery rhyme allusion as in Hone’s Political House that Jack Built. Although raised a Quaker, Sprat claims that he was given visions of future glory of becoming the “Liberator of Donkeys” by his parents. During a prank setting off fireworks in Magdalene [sic] College Library, he steals a book that turns out to contain the wisdom of late Middle Ages in the form of a “a work of Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Bestiss,’ ” which pronounces that “Beasts can speak, and he that doubteth the fact may read this booke.” Sprat acquires the power of speaking to beasts and rescues an abused donkey. He soon learns that all animals, from elephants to fleas, have their grievances against humans, who mutilate them, beat them, and eat them and their children. The animals join together, pronounce “The Year of Freedom, One,” and in the name of “Liberty and Equality” declare that “the day is at hand, when all the beasts, rising up in a body against their oppressors, will come in a victorious body to carol forth the hymn of happiness, at the shrine of reason and of liberty” (27). United, the beasts are able to defeat humankind, when they form their own government under the medievalist-idealist model of a “wittenagemot, or mickle-synoth” (81). Their declaration of the “Rights of Brutes” pronounces: I Nature has made brutes and men equal, the distinctions necessary for social order are only founded on general utility. II. Man is a two-legged, unfledged animal, without talons, or tail. (55)


138

But the “beastly republic,” which assembles on in true medievalist fashion on Salisbury Plain, is brief; Sprat’s friend the Ass soon seizes


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 138

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM

139

control. With the aid of the mare Camilla, who betrays her mate the stallion, the Ass becomes king and imposes his own oppression, including a new religion whose priests are elephants and whose highpriest is an owl. In a war between the king-ass and the mare-queen, the religious faction takes the queen’s side and the Ass is defeated and eaten. The narrative ends with the queen as regent for her son, who is one of the “stupidest mules” the narrator has ever seen. The allegory here is slippery, rendered more so by the comically intrusive narrator who continues to admire his friend, the Ass, even as he is slaughtering countless of his enemies.32 Some of the beasts’ declarations of liberty echo French revolutionary sentiments, and were readers to look for a conservative moral, it might be that replacing the existing government will only lead to an even more oppressive form of rule. At the same time, the battle between the Ass and the mare might recall the Queen Caroline Affair and Shelley’s Swell-foot the Tyrant, and the author cannot resist sly jibes at the established church. For example, the elephants compile “The Book of the Mammoth,” which claims “that it was necessary to give the tenth of grass lands to the elephants” and that “the emancipation of mankind was the same as king-killing” (118). The religion of beasts hence defends the right to tithes, class-structure, and the divine right of kings. Although it would be difficult to establish what the author of this work directly knew about bestiaries, the text both uses and comically misuses popular ideas about animal characteristics. The fox, for example, follows his bestiary type as cunning by being “ready to side with any party” (69), while the “rats,” like John Pimplico in the Preface, are the animal world’s “ultra-royalists” (75). The Owl is not wise, but he is clever enough to become High Priest and survive the rebellion against the Ass. Unlike in most of the radical writings, pigs do not play a large part in the story, but as in the English vernacular tradition they still represent those who are not allowed to think for themselves. One of the first dissenters to the Ass’s monarchy is a “luckless Chinese boar” named Gruntius; his name is probably derived from the fourth-century “Testamentum porcelli,” or Will of the Piglet, a parody of a will in the words of a little pig named M. Grunnius Corocotta.33 Gruntius writes “a quarto volume, entitled ‘The Centaur not Fabulous;’ in which he endeavoured to prove by a vast deal of erudition, that the story of the Centaur was currently believed by all antiquity, and therefore true” (111). The Hunts, as publishers if not authors of this work, might have had sympathy for Gruntius, who like them is convicted of libel against the monarch; Gruntius is so harshly punished that he dies. As in The Examiner




9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 139

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM


in 1818, piglets are given a catechism, but here it is to show them their “duty to the elephant and the ass” (the church and the crown). The “little Piggy-wiggy” recites that his duty is to “love, and admire, and implicitly obey, my most high terraqueous master the Ass, whose decrees and commands are as wise as they are beautiful” (120). The Piglet is then sent back to his “stye” for some “nice oatmeal”; he is clearly not the free pig of the medieval forest. At the end of the story, the beasts are still ruling the kingdom, but they have entirely abandoned any ideals they may have had at the beginning of their rebellion. The deep cynicism of The Rebellion of the Beasts distinguishes it from most of the radical works of the period, which continue to hope for a return to the medieval idyll where everyone is treated as human, yet like Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant, animal allegory serves as a means to question present-day Britain’s suppression of national rights.


140


9780230103740_06_ch04.indd 140

12/5/2010 12:07:38 PM

Bu r i e d A l i v e: G o t h ic R e a di ng a n d M e di e va l ist Su bj e c t i v i t y

A

young woman attracts the eye of Francisco Torrejon, a deputy Inquisitor. He has her arrested and placed in a comfortable chamber where she is offered costly clothes and gifts. The young woman is understandably suspicious, asking herself, “must I sacrifice my honour to my fears, and give up my virtue to his despotic powers?” (Christian Martyrdom 139). The Inquisitor’s servant Mary now shows her the Inquisition’s methods of execution: a “dry pan” in which naked heretics are burned alive; a “wheel set with sharp razors” that cuts opponents of the Pope to pieces; and a pit where those who do not respect the clergy appropriately are eaten by “poisonous animals.” On learning that her fate is to be the “dry pan,” the young woman surrenders her virtue to the Inquisitor, “so entirely were the ideas of delicacy obliterated by the force of terror!” She is then introduced to a company of well-dressed ladies; only a few days later is she placed in a prison-cell, where her cell-mate informs her that the ladies are only putting on an act of being well-treated, and that they are all sexslaves of the Inquisitors. Shortly afterward, the French army storms the prison; the young woman gains her release and marries a French officer, which is how her story becomes known to history. Although this story might appear to be a sadistic sexual fantasy, it appears as authentic history, usually presented in first-person narration, in popular English accounts of the Inquisition from the early eighteenth century to the 1820s.1 The British knew that the function of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal was to investigate and stamp


Chapter 5


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 141

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM


out heresy against the Roman Catholic Church; they also seem to have been aware that many of the victims of the Inquisition were Jewish, although they gave far more attention to Protestant cases. What is particularly strange about this autobiography, though, is that there is no charge; Anthony Gavin’s version briefly alludes to a trumped-up charge that the young women’s former lovers had “accused her in matters of religion” (1:129), but this disappears from later versions. Supposedly, British writers reveal the horrors of the Inquisition to show how Roman Catholics force heretics to repent—yet in this story, the young woman is not accused of heresy. Common elements with Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum” (the first-person narrative, the brazen pan/walls, the cutting machine/pendulum, the pit, and the final rescue by the French army) suggest that Poe may have been inspired by some version of this narrative, but in his version, there is no charge or accusation at all.2 In the Protestant imagination, the Inquisition represents punishment without law, the antithesis of the English common-law tradition. Yet rather than becoming something to be shunned, Inquisitional punishment seems to exercise a Gothic fascination over the English reader. This chapter explores the distinction between medievalist and Gothic reading and the implications for the popular reading of medieval law. It would be dangerous to presume that readers who had access to the radical press and who identified enough with the poorer classes of society to suspect that Burke had included them among the “swinish multitude” also had access to Gothic novels. Likewise, with their focus on property and aristocracy, Gothic novels seem removed from the concerns of the poorer classes. Because Gothic novels are so dependent on structures of oppression, though, they need to draw on what a society has judged as oppressive, and an analysis of images of incarceration in the Romantic-era Gothic novel can illuminate popular medievalism’s theory of English rights. Most commentators on the Gothic have noted how the genre received its name almost by accident: Horace Walpole presented his novella The Castle of Otranto as a translation of a medieval work, adding the subtitle “A Gothic Story” in April 1765.3 E.J. Clery observes, “For Walpole’s contemporaries the Gothic age was a long period of barbarism, superstition, and anarchy” spanning the entire medieval period from the fall of Rome to the English Reformation. Yet although she adds that “the term does nothing to describe what was groundbreaking and influential about the novel” (21), the grudging approval of the imaginative power of Walpole’s work that has led this genre to be called Gothic is parallel with the Gothic architectural revival, and


142


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 142

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM

143

shows an important shift in attitudes toward the medieval. Walpole himself seems to have originally conceived of his project as medieval, although his published works and correspondence reveal a characteristic often lacking in medievalists: a self-ironizing awareness of the aesthetic and social appeal of the Middle Ages. As James Watt notes, Charles Eastlake, Victorian historian of the Gothic revival, saw Walpole as an important forerunner of “Mediaevalism” (16–17). For Walpole, Gothic style was only incidentally a political statement; yet the Gothic revival, with its implied rejection of the moral, political, and aesthetic superiority of Greece and Rome, reminded Britons of Gothic law, the supposed origin of the English common law tradition. In British discourse of the Romantic era, the Inquisition is simultaneously Gothic and anti-Gothic: Gothic in bringing the conventions of the Gothic genre to life and opposed to Gothic legal traditions in that it is Roman Catholic law and religion epitomized. The Inquisition took official form only after the medieval period, when Catholicism was threatened by Protestant ideas. British writers acknowledged this, but claimed that the origins of the Inquisition could be traced to the Crusades, and that moreover, the foundation of a body to investigate threats to the Pope’s authority was an attempt to preserve the power of the medieval church. For example, The History of the Inquisitions, published in 1810, contrasts the English sense of rights with that of Catholic nations: whereas the English are imbued with newly-discovered principles, which now appear axiomatic; accustomed to views, which, however lately observed, seem to lie obvious to the most superficial observation; we begin to inquire what potent causes retarded the earlier enjoyment of these blessings, what unpropitious influence checked the development of these sacred principles, what dark or distorting medium obstructed the clear perception of the natural view of things which now present themselves? (vii)4

This new-found liberty contrasts with “the gloomy interval of feudal ignorance, and the degrading influence of feudal policy.” Some commentators therefore went so far as to question whether a Catholic nation could ever achieve modernity. An article on Portuguese literature in the May 1809 Quarterly Review observes that there are


Buried Alive

no modern travels in the language, because the Portugueze, who visit foreign countries, return with freer opinions than would pass an ordeal of the Inquisition. This tribunal is no longer what it once was, an Association for burning persons on false pretences of Judaism, in order to get possession of their property. As an ecclesiastical court, it


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 143

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM

144


More articles discussing the Inquisition appear in early volumes of the Tory Quarterly Review than in the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. Napoleon abolished the Spanish Inquisition in 1809, an act reaffirmed by declaration of the nation in 1813. It seems, however, to have been still functioning in 1820 and was not finally permanently abolished until 1834.5 The British fascination with a clearly declining institution requires some explanation, especially to answer the question of why it should be such a concern to a Tory publication such as the Quarterly Review of the post-Napoleonic era, which supported one of the most repressive governments in modern British history. One reason was whereas the Whigs were inclined to keep religion out of politics, the Tories advanced the idea that part of being English was to uphold the national religion: hence the Edinburgh Review moved in favor of ending “Catholic Disabilities,” in which Roman Catholics could not vote, while the Quarterly Review contended that such restrictions were necessary to national identity. One might therefore expect an article critical of the effect of the Inquisition on Portuguese society to mention bigotry and the imposition of Roman Catholic dogma on unwilling subjects. Instead, the writer ascribes to the Inquisition motives of greed: they were trying to “get possession” of property. At the present time, the article contends, their motive is “controul”: hence they deny the Portuguese people freedom of speech. This might make a little more sense as an argument if the Quarterly Review’s editors actually believed in freedom of speech. In fact, the Quarterly Review was founded with the support of writers such as Walter Scott who considered the Edinburgh Review too progressive in its views so that contributors could show their support for a Tory government that was heavily repressive in its social outlook. The founders of the Quarterly Review did not represent free speech as a universal, or even a national, right. Free speech becomes a dangerous social expression when it is associated with action: not necessarily on the part of the speaker, but on the part of the reader. Although Romantic-era governmental restrictions on free speech were often represented as responses to attacks on character, the true concern was clearly with what those attacks on character might incite. For example, as we have seen, John and Leigh Hunt were jailed in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent in The Examiner. The government’s real concern, though, was evidently not


now does little mischief: but the controul which it exercises over the press is fatal to all political freedom, and prevents the possibility of enlightening the people. (287)


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 144

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM

145

about the attack on the acting monarch’s character, but about the effect that this attack might have on readers. The unspoken fear is that if the populace is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that its rulers are unworthy, the result might be revolution. Free speech may lead to revolutionary thought, which may result in revolutionary action. This chapter explores how the Romantic-era novel allegorizes the notion of revolutionary thought through representing restrictions upon human relationships by the mediation of the Gothic. For some years now, critics have recognized the association between the rise of the Gothic novel and the troubled social conditions of the era of the French Revolution.6 The romance plot of the Gothic novel, which usually involves the physical constraint of the heroine, seems to represent Rousseau’s notion of natural right through depicting the denial of such rights as villainy. I shall therefore focus on instances when the constraint of the protagonist in the Gothic novel is through a quasilegal institution, especially the Inquisition. The Gothic novel reveals British fascination with the notion of the Inquisition as a legislative structure. My interest here is in what this fascination reveals about Romantic-era concepts of human rights, and those rights that British readers regarded as embodied in common law.

Reading Medievally Readerly point of view provides a way to distinguish between Gothic and medievalist writing. Usually, the Gothic presents a negative: the world as it should not be; in contrast, medievalism frequently presents a positive, a world in which the reader might desire to have a part. The reader may, of course, identify with the point of view of the protagonist of the Gothic novel: both the Gothic and medievalist reader read with a consciousness of their modernity and disjuncture from the past. I would suggest, however, that the process of reading the Gothic novel requires greater detachment, and that whatever desire the reader may have for the Gothic world may itself be described as medievalist. What appears to be a binary opposition between the Gothic and medievalism hence collapses into the subjective reading of the past through the thwarted desire on which medievalism depends. This process of reading oneself into the text may, however, suggest another opposition between the Gothic genre and medievalism: namely, that the Gothic is chiefly concerned with the effect of oppression upon individuals, whereas popular medievalism tends to assume that individuals are representative of a larger system. Thus for the medievalist reader, general conclusions can be drawn from individual


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 145

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM


experience about the society in which that individual lives, and the systems under which that society operates. Popular medievalists consistently pointed out that if English law is enshrined in Magna Carta, then English people cannot be arrested without due cause. Although recent scholars such as J.C. Holt and Claire Breay maintain that the original intent of the framers of Magna Carta was not to embody English rights, the thirty-ninth section took on monumental significance for writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century trying to trace a history of English common-law rights. The statement reads, “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land” (Breay, 28, 52). For radical medievalist theorists of English right, this statement was not the foundation of English liberty, but rather its codification. The anonymous author of the 1769 History and Defence of Magna Charta, for example, argues that “The contents of Magna Charta is [sic] the undoubted inheritance of England, being their antient and approved laws; so antient, that they seem to be of the same standing with the nation.”7 The ancient origins of “the English” and their laws were the subject of competing mythologies. If for some the Druids appeared to have inscribed the character of law on the land, many writers argued the same for the Goths—and here the notion of the Gothic becomes complicated. The multiple meanings of the term “Gothic” are captured in one of the earliest literary endeavors of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a school exercise of 1790 that was presumably preserved because it won the approval of his teachers, and that hence can be assumed to be a received rather than an innovatory point of view, the eighteen-yearold Coleridge wrote of the fall of the Roman Empire: Few of all the various evils, which the irruptions of the Goths occasioned, have descended to their Posterity. The Darkness, the Anarchy, and the Profusion of Blood, which attended the Convulsion of the Roman Empire, were indeed dreadful to the Contemporaries; but to us this revolution was productive of great good, of political wisdom, and of liberty. (1:8)


146

Goths are associated with disorder, violence, and the overthrow of classical learning; they are, nevertheless, the ancestors of the English, in whom their legal system survives.


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 146

12/5/2010 12:07:47 PM

147

The other obvious survival from the Gothic heritage was architecture, and the Gothic genre of literature is accompanied by a revival interest in the Gothic style. For example, Horace Walpole, who in addition to writing the novel to which the label “Gothic” was first applied, built himself a Gothic house at Strawberry Hill. This complex relationship among the Gothic literary genre, the physical remains, and law is embodied in a trope occurring in a number of works broadly within the Gothic genre: namely, the immuring of men and particularly women within the physical structure of a Gothic building.

Niches for Nuns In Frances Trollope’s 1833 novel The Abbess, set in Italy in 1575, the title character, who is a secret Protestant, discovers that one of the nuns in her convent is expecting a child. The narrative assumes that readers will automatically make an association between Gothic architecture and oppressive Roman Catholic law to the extent that they will know that the niches so common in Gothic buildings were expressly designed for the walling up of pregnant women. “Who,” exclaims the narrator, In those days, but had heard of that living death?—its hideous preparation?—its maddening stillness?—its dark, cold, lingering agony? Who had not heard that the young, the lovely, the gentle, had been laid a conscious corse, within a loathsome tomb, for being found in the same state as Camilla? (2:62)

Described later are “those awful tombs constructed for the living, which are but too well known to have existed in almost every convent throughout the catholic world,” (2:153–54); as is the process by which the victim is sealed up with a small supply of bread and water to prolong the agony. The Abbess does some architectural investigations and discovers the locations of the secret dungeons built into the vaults: in effect, a concealed space exists within the apparent solidity of the Gothic structure, functioning as the means of Gothic punishment. In this space Camilla is imprisoned, but the Abbess and her niece are able to rescue her by employing a young man with a pickaxe to break down the masonry: because she is a Protestant, her conscience tells her to break Gothic law.8 The emphasis on the physical structure of the Abbey in this novel prompts questions about what Romantic-era Britons observed when


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 147

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM


they contemplated Gothic ruins. Although Camilla’s dungeon is apparently larger than a “niche”—technically, a recess in which a statue is placed—the notion of the hidden space within the structure appears to be inspired by the vaulting of Gothic architecture, which creates spaces that could, in theory, be enclosed with bricks. Since the Reformation, most of the statues in niches and tomb-effigies placed in recesses in English churches in medieval times had been destroyed,9 and thus space was created that Romantic-era observers seem willingly to have supplied with imagined horrors. Thus in observing the ruins of medieval abbeys, almost invariably open to the sky by this time, they performed an imaginative act of enclosing that replicated a sense of the enclosure enforced by Roman Catholic law. Trollope was following a well-established tradition in British Gothic writing, not merely in the details of the punishment, but also in emphasizing that the nun in question, Camilla, was an unwilling member of the order. Thus, although Camilla technically broke the rules of chastity, she was not breaking a willingly given vow, which she more directly owed to the man that she considered her husband. In this way the novel reminds its readers that a Roman Catholic world, even in 1575, is subject to medieval laws and punishments. The Abbess is a pointedly anti-medievalist work, and it may not seem surprising that it affirms as fact the medieval practice of immuring that most contemporary medieval scholars do not believe ever happened. Yet its reading of Gothic architecture follows earlier works more generally sympathetic toward the past, notably Walter Scott’s 1809 poem Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field. Marmion’s first love Constance, a renegade nun who used to follow him in the guise of a page, has been apprehended at Whitby, where she had gone to destroy the new object of Marmion’s affections, Clara de Clare. She and her male accomplice, “a sordid soul, / Such as does murder for a meed” (109), are bricked up alive in “Two niches, narrow, deep and tall.” Scott’s note explains that It is well known, that the religious, who broke their vows of chastity, were subjected to the same penalty as the Roman vestals in a similar case. A small niche, sufficient to enclose their bodies, was made in the massive wall of the convent; a slender pittance of food and water was deposited in it, and the awful words, VADE IN PACE, were the signal for immuring the criminal. (187)


148

Scott’s poem is set at the end of the Middle Ages, and he concedes that it “is not likely, that in latter times, this punishment was often


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 148

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM

Buried Alive

149

There are several ruined arches at the east and west ends, and divers fragments of buildings about the church. These have been pulled down for the sake of the stone. Some years ago, in taking down a tower at the south-west corner of the building, a skeleton of a woman was found, who, from several circumstances, appeared to have been immured. She had her shoes on, which were long preserved in the custody of the minister. (97–98)

This account seems to have been proof enough for Scott. Alexander Allan Carr, however, writing after Scott’s death, records more details in his 1836 History of Coldingham Priory: On removing a portion of the ruins about fifty10 years earlier, the bones of a female skeleton were discovered, inclosed in a niche in one of the walls, which, from its position, and the narrowness of the depository, are supposed to have been the remains of an immured nun. For to those female votaries who broke their vows of perpetual chastity, was awarded a punishment like that inflicted in similar circumstances on the Roman vestals of an earlier age. (316)

Carr adds the standard details on immuring, adding that “Two sandals of thin leather, furnished with latchets of silk, were also found lying in the bottom of the recess.” He then indicates his own skepticism concerning the story. From the Benedictine refounding of the house at the end of the eleventh century, no nuns lived at Coldingham, so that if the skeleton was that of a nun, it would have to have been immured some five hundred years before Scott imagines such an event, in which case the leather sandals would be remarkably long-enduring. Carr suggests that the skeleton was actually that of a monk, buried upright as sometimes in Benedictine tradition. Apparent archeological proof hence becomes culturally interpreted data: all that can be deduced from the skeleton is that by 1789, stories of medieval immuring already existed, and that a narrative of harsh medieval law was imposed upon fragmentary remains. Given the limitations of physical evidence, more probable is that narratives of immuring were derived from other narratives. An influential early instance occurs in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk.


resorted to,” but claims that such a niche, with a female skeleton, was found in the ruins of Coldingham Abbey. Scott’s source for this information was presumably Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, published in 1789. Grose records that at Coldingham Priory, near Berwick-on-Tweed,


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 149

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM


Published in 1796, the novel is set in Spain, the country that Britons most directly associated with the horrific ecclesiastical law of the Inquisition. Entering through a secret grate concealed under the Shrine of St. Clare into the vault beneath, the hero Lorenzo finds a nun, forgotten and left to starve, holding the putrid corpse of her dead baby in her arms. This “victim of monastic cruelty” (396) proves to be his own sister Agnes, who was committed to the convent to force her to take the veil and thus leave her lover Don Raymond available for a marriage that would cement a family alliance. Agnes had imprudently tried to elope with Don Raymond while disguised as the ghost of a Bleeding Nun; unfortunately, her lover had mistakenly eloped with the real ghost of an actual nun. Agnes was thus left behind and was apparently poisoned by the Prioress because she was expecting her lover’s child, but the Prioress had determined to keep her alive at least until she repented by denying Don Raymond. Within the entanglements of this most Gothic of plots lie some significant assumptions about Gothic law. First, the tyranny of the family overrides individual rights, including a right generally assumed by Protestant commentators on the medieval, the right to sexuality. Second, the Prioress is apparently able to function as judge and jury over those in her convent and impose the sentence of death for a failure of chastity. And finally, even this death sentence is apparently not enough, so that in effect Agnes must also become the ghost of a nun: she must suffer death and then the experience of being dead. That such stories circulated widely in Britain is demonstrated by a 1797 theatrical presentation, Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty, by John Carpenter Cross. As a pantomime, the story was told with songs, dumbshow, and caption cards; had the concept been totally unfamiliar, the audience would hardly have followed it. The plot is simple: Julia is taken from her lover Clifford by the villainous St. Pierre. When she refuses to marry him, she is first compelled to become a novice, and then imprisoned in a sepulcher in order, the stage directions state, “to pine away existence, as the melancholy companion of decayed mortality” (Cox 139).11 The convent is closed down because of its cruelties—much like the Convent of St. Clare in The Monk, which is “completely ruined by the united ravages of the Mob and conflagration” (Lewis 394), it becomes a Gothic ruin—and Julia’s lover breaks into the sepulcher to rescue her. Julia of Louvain expands the theme of burial alive in the sense that as far as can be determined, Julia is intentionally left to starve, something that only happens accidentally to Agnes. Yet the drama also brings into sharper focus the connection between burial alive and the state of law. The play is, the


150


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 150

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM

151

title page announces, “taken from a paragraph in a newspaper during the French Revolution” (Cox 139). The vagueness of the statement makes it most likely that the author saw this event as in the spirit of happenings during the French Revolution rather than recalling specific “monkish cruelty” since even in Ancien Régime France, while families could have children involved in relationships they did not like imprisoned by lettres de cachet (this happened to Mirabeau in his youth), people were not literally entombed alive in convents.12 Ronald Paulson identifies “the castle-prison” as “the first Revolution emblem” ([1981] 534) and suggests that “the popularity of Gothic fiction in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century was due in part to the widespread anxieties and fears in Europe aroused by the turmoil in France finding a kind of sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness, confusion, blood, and horror” (536). For example, in the case of Julia of Louvain the association implies an analogy: the Roman Catholic Church establishment represents the Ancien Régime that opposes Julia’s freedom of action; the monkish prison, like the Bastille, is burst open, and Julia’s freedom is restored. As Paulson notes, however, in many cases, the parallel is more ambivalent: in The Monk, for example, Agnes’s imprisonment suggests oppression, yet the mob that destroys her prison and jailers is also terrifying. Even if not all Gothic novels endorse revolutionary action, the distancing provided by the transposition of oppression to the Roman Catholic Church was a way in which the sentiments of pro-Revolutionary writers, and particularly of playwrights, might escape the censor: Lewis himself translated a French Revolutionary-era drama, Les Victimes Cloîtreés, which includes a similar motif, although slightly toning down its republican fervor.13 Distancing, however, may be unconscious as well as conscious: that is, while writers can use the Gothic genre as a means of making indirect criticisms of their own society, at the same time, a writer’s desire to create a state of society different from his or her own (and in the case of a young woman in danger of being buried alive simply for wanting to marry the man she loves, clearly a worse one) may be a means of acknowledging that the state of law is not ideal in one’s own country. The French Revolution itself thus becomes an analogy, one through which the state of English law can be assessed. Even after the Revolution had passed through the Terror and British radicals became, or were forced to be, more cautious about representing it as the fulfillment of human rights, the trope of immuring recurs in British writing. A truly medieval example is T.J. Horsley Curties’s Ancient Records; or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe (1801), published in


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 151

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM


the popular Minerva Press novel series, where the story is set during the Wars of the Roses. The heroine Rosaline (in actuality Matilda), living in an already ruined abbey, is determined to investigate the even earlier story of Sister Anna, who had “broken the sacred rules of her profession, and stained the purity of the devoted Ministers of God, by a disregard of her vows of vestal celibacy” (1:14). Hence Conjectures were so far as to assert, that she had been either burned alive, or enclosed in the horrid dungeon of the Abbey, and left to perish by inches, within the deep precincts of four high stone walls, where she at length expired in lingering tortures. (1:21)

Rosaline finds a dungeon strewn with bones and “the mouldering relics of a coffin” that contains something unpleasantly “moist and clammy” (1:223), but although she interprets the fragmentary evidence as proof that Sister Anna was indeed immured, some of this evidence proves to have been contrived by father’s unnecessarily complex subterfuge to reveal Rosaline’s true identity. Ironically, in this novel actually set in the Middle Ages, immuring proves to be not reality but the product of Rosaline’s romantic imagination. The narrative distancing is even more complex in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The nobleman Alonzo di Moncada tells young Melmoth a story set in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, implying that immuring existed in Roman Catholic countries at least until the abolition of the Spanish Inquisition. Not only is Alonzo himself immured, but later, a parricide monk recounts to him the story of another monk whose friendship for a young novice prompts an investigation. Discovering that the novice is a woman, the parricide monk betrays them to the Superior, who nails them up in a vault behind a secret door. The lovers are left to starve to death, to the gloating pleasure of their betrayer—until he realizes that the woman was his own sister (205–14). These stories have a number of common Gothic elements: romantic relationships forbidden by lovers’ families, the forced assumption of the celibate life, and a punishment for violating celibacy that the religious authorities that impose the sentence apparently enjoy inflicting. The reader shares in the gratuitous horror, since in all but Julia of Louvain the bricking-up is a subplot rather than central to the narrative. Yet the fact remains that as far as is known, the immuring of ecclesiastics who had broken their vows of celibacy was never an actual medieval practice. Moreover, if it had been a real punishment, then it certainly would not have been imposed by the Inquisition,


152


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 152

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM

153

whose mission was to root out heresy. The question hence arises as to why this plot device is so common in Gothic narrative. A number of works are indebted to others: is probably no coincidence that Lewis’s Monk and Julia of Louvain appeared shortly after the 1796 publication of Denis Diderot’s The Nun (La Religieuse), which tells the story of a young girl confined to a convent repeatedly described in terms of a prison; according to Russell Goulbourne, translator of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, about fourteen French editions appeared between 1796 and 1800 (Diderot xiv). Although Diderot composed the story in the 1760s, Goulbourne emphasizes that in “the years leading up to the Revolution the convent was increasingly seen as an emblematic form of social abuse” similar to the practice of imprisonment by letters de cachet that seemed so alien to English readers (Diderot xiv–xv). Yet outside a self-perpetuating myth, I would suggest a populist reading of the medieval dependent on the interpretation of rules as laws. First, as the allusions to “vestals” in a number of these texts imply, ancient laws from the Christian tradition mention the possibility that nuns who broke their vows could be buried alive, as in theory (although seemingly not in practice) were the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome. A seventh-century interpretation of the Codex Theodosianus quotes Roman law on the punishment of Vestal nonvirgins, and hints that the same might apply to nuns; James Brundage, however, dismisses this as “probably only a rhetorical flourish” (151), and no evidence exists that it was ever enforced as law. For Romantic-era Britons, that pagan Roman tradition might be continued by the Roman Catholic Church was a small imaginative stretch. Another possible source, though, has little to do with law. Medieval monks and nuns were indeed “immured” as anchorites, but this was a voluntary act of devotion, not a punishment. In some instances, Ann K. Warren notes of medieval anchorites, the word “immuratus/immurata” might have been applied to punishment, but only to temporary confinement within the convent (292–93). Such a process implies autonomy in punishment when internal rules of the convent were broken, but this is far from the legal autonomy of the Romantic Gothic imagination, a theme that will be the subject of the next chapter. Anchorites were men and women who chose of their own free will to forego society and to live a solitary religious life of prayer and meditation.14 Most frequently in medieval records, the word “immured” has no literal legal or punitive connotations, but is associated with the entirely voluntary process of the enclosing of


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 153

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM


anchorites. Post-Reformation legends about the punishment of ecclesiastics may well have arisen from a misinterpretation of the process by which the devoted became anchorites. Many lived in tiny cells attached to churches, and when they decided on the solitary life, they underwent ritual enclosure in these spaces, sometimes with bricks and mortar. Very often the anchorite died in his or her cell and was buried on that spot. The Office for the Enclosing of Anchorites in the Sarum office-book (Servitium Includendorum) describes this ritual process, noting that the anchorite should not be proud, but believe that it is provided and appointed for his own weakness that he should be set far from the companionship of his neighbours, lest by more frequent sin he should both himself perish and do harm to those who dwell with him, and should thus fall into greater damnation. Let him therefore think that he is convicted of his sins and committed to a solitary confinement as to prison, and that on account of his own weakness he is unworthy of the fellowship of mankind.15

Although the comparison with being in prison is only metaphorical, some memory of this practice may have associated it with personal sins committed, so that rather than a voluntary act out of a general awareness of the sinful nature of humanity, enclosure appears to be an imposed punishment. Why then, should Romantic-era writers and readers so readily have accepted immuring as punishment? Part of the logic (or perhaps illogic) may be that as Warren and Rotha Mary Clay have pointed out, the number of anchorites in England implies a highly developed Roman Catholic society, one that would willingly support the enclosed intercessors who were only productive to the community in a spiritual sense. This contradicts the British nationalist belief that England had never really been a committed Roman Catholic nation, and thus an explanation more in keeping with the standard British view that the Roman Catholic Church worked through oppression rather than through the will of the people seemed appropriate. But narratives of immuring may also mask a discomfort with the state of current English law, and ironically enough, with its departure from the Gothic. In the early eighteenth century, George Hickes had argued for the study of Northern or Gothic languages on the basis that the Saxons, who brought a Gothic tradition of law to England, were descended from the Goths whose invasions displaced the Romans.16


154


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 154

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM

Buried Alive

155

We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The inferior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult. (3:268)

In Blackstone’s view, law evolves over time, but is in essential structure Gothic. Because English radicals interpreted Magna Carta not as the granting of new rights, but as the codification of traditional rights stretching back into ancient times (be they Druid, Gothic, or conveniently both), the term “Gothic” here had the positive sense of confirming that English people could not be imprisoned without due cause. The idea of medieval law as embodying common rights was particularly poignant in the eighteenth century, when common law was supplemented by many statute laws, and all crimes classed as felonies received the sentence of death. In reality, this death sentence was seldom carried out, many sentences being commuted to other forms of punishment. Victorian commentators remarked that under the most draconian laws of the eighteenth century, juries were reluctant to convict: hence the common law institution of the jury served to protect citizens against the excesses of statute law.17 One possible explanation for the frequency of the trope of being buried alive is that it allegorizes the state of English law, marital relations functioning metonymically for law as a whole. Although clearly the reader of the Gothic novel was intended to take a modernist view of the restrictions on love represented in the stories, English law itself had restrictions on marriage in the later eighteenth century. As much as any sense existed of ancient English social custom, readers might assume that marriage was always in England a contract between a man and a woman that required the willing consent of both. Sharon Turner, the first to write a booklength study of the customs of the Anglo-Saxons, noted that AngloSaxon marriages might not “breathe much of the spirit of affectionate romance” in their emphasis on financial contract, but that such contracts required agreement between both parties (3:375). Likewise, in explaining the Common Law, Blackstone states that parental consent is only necessary for underage marriages, and that the age of consent


Half a century later, Sir William Blackstone compared English law to a Gothic castle:


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 155

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM


varies from nation to nation (1:439–40; 4:208). To force a person to marry against his or her will, as in the Gothic novels of immuring, is against English practice (although, of course, the forced extraction of consent is a staple of novelistic plots, the most notable example being Clarissa [1748]). From 1753, though, English law took a stand against Romantic love, at least between minors, when laws were passed in response to what Stephen Parker has suggested was a “moral panic” (35–38): a fear that the youth of the propertied classes might intermarry with lower social ranks. Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 was designed to prevent “clandestine marriages” by regularizing the forms of marriage: all marriages except those of Jews and Quakers had to be announced through publication of the banns and conducted in approved locations. To break the law was a felony, at a time when felonies still incurred the death sentence. In reality, very few prosecutions occurred under the Marriage Act, and the penalties imposed in those rare cases, all of them ones involving propertied families, were light, convictions usually not being for a felony but for contempt of court. Hardwicke himself, who might be expected to be the most severe in carrying out his own law, presided over the first trial under the Act in 1753, where a woman who had married a young heir served a detention of a few months, but only because she refused to cooperate with the court (Butler v. Freeman, 1753).18 On paper, nevertheless, English law had reached a stage where the death penalty could be imposed for marrying for love, and incarceration for marriages without family consent really did occur. The period between the 1688 Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic Wars is often known as the Bloody Code. Between 1688 and 1765, the number of offenses punishable by death rose from about fifty to about one hundred and sixty; between 1765 and 1815, sixty-five more capital offenses were added, not to mention offenses where the death penalty could be imposed (McLynn, ix). If the Bloody Code could go so far as to interfere with romance, it was hard to imagine how the laws of other nations could be worse. In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century, so many criminal offences carried the death penalty that it frequently functioned as a deterrent less to breakers of the law than to juries.19 The sense that the laws of other nations, and particularly those of the Roman Catholic faith, were worse was hence a comforting refuge at a period when Britain’s lawmakers repeatedly considered the possibility of Roman Catholic emancipation, and when the criminal law was badly in need of revision. The central question was whether the identity of English law was


156


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 156

12/5/2010 12:07:48 PM

157

inextricably linked with the state church, yet a convenient transposition of this was to ask how Roman Catholic countries applied Roman Catholic law. During the debates over Roman Catholic emancipation in the 1820s, the Spanish Inquisition became a locus of anti-Catholic feeling. In 1826, for example, Blackwood’s Magazine recorded of the secret prisons: “It would be difficult to conceive anything more truly frightful than these cells; not that they are at present as they have been described, deep, moist, filthy, pestiferous dungeons, unfit for the reception of the most atrocious criminals.” Blackwood’s Magazine may be stating that the prisons of the Inquisition are not like this, but the effect is to recreate in the reader’s mind the Gothic horrors associated with fictions of immuring. Coming merely a year before Catholic emancipation was finally passed, this article demonstrates the fascination with the monstrously “Gothic” laws of the Catholic world, in which the restrictions on individual freedoms of the Middle Ages still survive. Such a position might appear to be a rejection of the past. The reader of the “Gothic” can turn from the medieval world with relief: having vicariously experienced the horrors of immuring, he or she can feel secure that English Protestant justice is in the ascendant. Yet medievalism still has a part. First, the juxtaposition of unjust medieval laws against present practice only serves to highlight just medieval laws in the British inheritance, most notably the guarantee of Magna Carta that no one may be imprisoned without stated cause. Medievalism serves to throw into relief one’s own society, and it would appear that readers of Gothic novels did make at least subconscious comparisons with their own society. The most obvious, and most discussed, way in which this functions is through allegorizing the repression of the Ancien Régime and the liberatory possibilities of the French Revolution. But for English readers, the French Revolution is itself allegory, or at least presents an alternative history for how England could develop, embodying simultaneously promise and warning. A crucial strategy for both pro-Revolutionaries and anti-Revolutionaries is to use the notion of Gothic terror to contrast with a posited past. The most famous example of this is, of course, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gothic terror is not, for Burke, medievalist, but instead a rejection of history. Alternatively, medievalism can be used to secure the reader in the traditions of the national past. Steven Bruhm suggests that in the Gothic novel “literary torture . . . invites an English audience to sympathize, but only so that, in sympathetic pain, it can return to its own protected, private, empowered body; it affirms for the spectator


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 157

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM


a kind of solitary confinement” (119). In a sense, then, to be English is to be immured in the geographical, historical, and legal unity that is England. Finally, even the Gothic reader can enter the world of the narrative with a medievalist subjectivity: in Bruhm’s words, “The self in Romantic fiction . . . can be defined not only in its isolation from another’s pain, but also in the degree to which it feels that pain” (119). A central problem with the notion of Romantic medievalism is that Ruskinian medievalism seems to contradict the awareness of self that is so fundamental to Romantic writing. The most familiar model for British medievalism is John Ruskin’s ideal of the medieval cathedral, which allows its unnamed artisans individual artistic expression through their personal contributions to its embellishment, but where each worker is part of a master plan, ultimately to the glory of God. If the ideal of medievalism is for individualism to function only as a contribution to society as a whole, then Romanticism, with its emphasis on individual feeling, and medievalism, with its focus on social structures, might seem to be contradictory terms. Yet Gothic narratives leave space for personal identification with their characters, and where the reader is imaginatively placing herself or himself within the Gothic world, and feeling some desire, be it a guilty desire or not, to experience a world more dramatic, more emotional, more dangerous, and finally more determined than his or her own, that desire is medievalist. When in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland achieves her desire of seeing Henry Tilney’s Abbey home, she travels to what has been described to her as “one of the finest old places in England” with expectations of entering the Gothic world: every bend in the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, arising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows.

Catherine imagines Northanger Abbey not just as medieval, but even located in a druidic grove; instead, she finds “herself passing through the great gates of the lodge into the very grounds of Northanger, without having discerned even an antique chimney” (167). She enters the house by an “old porch,” but the furniture is “in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste,” while the Gothic windows,


158

on which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the General talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 158

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM

159

reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might even be casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing. (168)

Clearly, as many critics have observed, Catherine is thinking as a Gothic reader.20 At the same time, her architectural notion of Gothic is medieval. As Northanger Abbey reveals, Catherine’s romance reading leads her to misread her surroundings, to the extent that when he learns of her “dreadful suspicions” that his mother fell victim to a Gothic plot, Henry Tilney reminds her to remember “the country and the age in which we live” (199). Even though, however, Henry’s father is not a murderer, he proves to have secret ambitions regarding Catherine’s future; Gothic motives may exist even in the un-Gothicized space of a modern house. Similarly, the genre that has become known as Gothic marks the conflicted space between fearing and wishing, between dread and desire.

Degothicizing the Middle Ages When Henry Tilney reminds Catherine Morland of the country and age in which they lives, he adds, “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (199). “English Christians” of the present day are implicitly contrasted with the Roman Catholics of the Gothic past. Gothic stories of horrors committed in the name of Roman Catholicism point to the continued major difficulty in idealizing the Middle Ages for ordinary Britons during the Romantic era. If the Middle Ages were dominated by an oppressive church, then any claim that Britons were freer or happier at that time than in the present seems counterintuitive. Many Britons, and especially members of the Church of England, would have further charged that such claims were unpatriotic and un-Christian. The French Revolution, however, or least the way that it was characterized by Burke and even by his opponents as a historical aberration, may have helped create in the popular mind a more generalized sense of Christianity’s pairing with monarchy dependent on a very vague sense of history, as is demonstrated by the Birmingham “Church and King” riots. The dissenting clergyman and scientist Joseph Priestley found himself the particular target of “Church and King” riots in Birmingham in 1791. A few years earlier, Priestley had provoked suspicion by his


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 159

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM


historically argued attacks on some of the central tenets of orthodox Christianity. In his 1782 History of the Corruptions of Christianity, Priestley locates the “corruption” of Christianity from a system of belief in accordance with the laws of nature into a religion dependent on miraculous occurrences to the church’s manipulation of folk superstitions as happening during the Middle Ages, which he clearly defines as the period from the fall of the western Roman Empire until the Reformation. Although he titles one section “Of the Worship of Saints in the middle Ages, and till the Reformation,” and adds, “in the middle ages, the common people addressed their prayers to dead men” (1:208–9), he uses the phrase “Middle Ages” very seldom, preferring such expressions as “days of popish darkness” (1:167). In theory, loyal members of the established Church of England ought to have agreed with his characterization of the Middle Ages as the time of corruption of the faith, even if they disagreed with his larger conclusions. During the French Revolutionary era, however, a period when Protestant Dissenters were seeking the end of political discrimination against them, the “Church and King” faction represented Priestley’s historical distinctions as a general rejection of history. The riots of 1791 were in response to an attempt by Birmingham intellectuals to recognize the historical significance of the French Revolution. A group of supporters of the French Revolution, not all of whom were Dissenters, planned and advertised a dinner for July 14 to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Priestley participated in the planning stages but on the advice of his friends did not attend the dinner (Appeal 25). His church and house nevertheless became major targets when the riots broke out on July 14 and were looted and burned by the rioters. As a result, he lost his scientific equipment and many valuable manuscripts in the fire, a disaster that seemed to him of historical significance: someone, he claimed, was “instigating such ravages on general literature, as the European world has not known since the ages of acknowledged barbarism” (Appeal 52). In his Appeal to the Public, on the subject of the riots in Birmingham, published later the same year, Priestley hinted that the rioters were part of scheme by George III’s government to discredit the French Revolution. As R.B. Rose points out, in fact, the government brought in forces to quell the riots and restore order. Possibly, the rioters had quiet supporter from local landowners, but the relatively small number of people indicted afterward were “predominantly from the industrial artisans and labourers of Birmingham” (Rose 83), much the same group involved in the antiCatholic Gordon Riots of 1780.


160


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 160

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM

161

The rioters’ cries of “No Popery!” might seem strange given Priestley’s condemnation of popery as a major corrupting force in Christian history. Priestley’s rejection of the concept of a state church, however, implied that Anglicans had no more claim to legal rights than anyone else, and certainly, had Priestley and his associates succeeded in repealing the Test and Corporation Acts, Roman Catholics would also have benefited. Priestley saw the French Revolution as the start of a new age that would finally end the “corruptions” of the Middle Ages: The whole of the Gothic Feudal System, embracing matters both of a civil and ecclesiastical nature, is beginning to shake to its foundation. This will necessarily produce a convulsion that will be felt in every state in Europe. (Appeal xiv)

The rioters, in contrast, anticipated not a new chapter in history but a repetition of history. Priestley quotes a “Church and King” song to the tune of “God save the King”: Sedition is their [the Dissenters’] Creed Feign’d sheep, but wolves indeed, How can we trust? Gunpowder Priestley would, Deluge the throne with blood, And lay the great and good, Low in the Dust. . . . Hist’ry thy page unfold, Did not their sires of old, Murder their King? (xxx)

Priestley is here characterized as a new Guy Fawkes, and the dissenters as planning a repetition of the acts of their Republican forebears who executed Charles I. The song explicitly appeals to history, while the title “Old Mother Church” stresses the continuity of Anglicanism. If History’s page unfolded, it seems to have been a small and very sketchy page. Much as the “Church and King” riots seemed to suggest that the crowd had forgotten the historical distinction between the Middle Ages and the English Reformation, anti-Catholicism, with its implied rejection of the medieval period, continued as a form of popular patriotism throughout the Romantic era. One valiant attempt to argue for a continuity of Englishness, or at least for a different point of rupture of continuity, was William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant “Reformation”


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 161

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM


in England and Ireland. Cobbett openly directed his publications to a popular readership; for example, in 1816, in defiance of the stamp tax on newspapers of fourpence a copy, he sold his Political Register for twopence a copy, and by bringing his work within the reach of the common reader, he achieved a circulation of 44,000 before the threat of prosecution forced him to flee to the United States. Although he describes himself as “born and bred a Protestant of the Church of England” (1: 264), his History of the Protestant “Reformation,” published in cheap installments from 1824 to 1826, showed his support for Roman Catholic emancipation. Dismissing most histories of England as “little better than romances” (1:11), Cobbett blames the Reformation on Henry VIII’s sexual urges and denies the supposed Gothic excesses of the medieval Catholic church. Now, my friends, a fair and honest inquiry will teach us, that this was an alteration greatly for the worse; that the Reformation, as it is called, was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood; and that, as to its more remote consequences, they are, some of them, now before us, in that misery, that beggary, that nakedness, that hunger, that everlasting wrangling and spite, which now stare us in the face and stun our ears at every turn, and which the “Reformation” has given us in exchange for this ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages by our Catholic forebears. (1:4)

Claiming as his motivation “a bare love of justice,” Cobbett sets himself the task of reimagining the Middle Ages not as the scene of Gothic oppression, but as a prelapsarian world of interclass harmony governed by the rules of law, “the happiest Country, perhaps, that this world had ever seen” (1:18). He avoids the phrase “Middle Ages” and prefers to refer to the long period “before the Reformation.” Appealing to his fellow English, who have been raised to the belief “that the Catholic religion was, and is, something to inspire us with horror” and that “to be a Catholic, was to be a false, cruel, and bloody wretch” (1:5), Cobbett argues that there was more true “civil liberty” in Catholic times than in the Protestant era (1:12). According to Cobbett, in medieval times (although he prefers to describe this time as before the so-called Reformation), Church lands were used to the advantage of the poor and was, in effect, common property:


162

besides the hospitality and charity of the monastics, and besides, moreover, the lien, the legal lien, which the main body of the people


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 162

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM

163

had, in many cases, to a share, directly or indirectly, in the revenues of the Monasteries, we are to look at the monks and nuns in the very important capacity of landlords and landladies. All historians, however Protestant or malignant, agree, that they were “easy landlords”; that they let their lands at low rents, and on leases of long terms of years; so that, says even HUME, “the farmers regarded themselves as a species of proprietors, always taking care to renew their leases before they expired.” And was there no good in a class of landlords of this sort? Did not they naturally and necessarily create, by slow degrees, men of property? Did they not thus cause a class of yeomen to exist, real yeomen, independent of the aristocracy? And was not this class destroyed by the “Reformation,” which made the farmers rack-renters and absolute dependants, as we see them to this day? (1:73)21

Far from being Gothic spaces of captivity, in Cobbett’s vision, monasteries are places of hospitality (“there is now no hospitality in England” [1:90]) and learning, and Cobbett imagines the monks copying out “the charters that inscribe English liberties: the choicest records and treasures in the kingdom were preserved in them. An exemplification of the charter of liberties, granted by King Henry I. (MAGNA CHARTA) was sent to some abbey in every county to be preserved” (1: 63–64). Cobbett moreover emphasizes the effect on the “devastated, sacked, and defaced” landscape, which prompts him to recall the standard commonplace of Alfredian Golden Age: It is related of ALFRED, that he made his people so honest, that he could hang bracelets up by the way side, without danger of their being touched. Alas! That the descendants of that same people should need a tread-mill! Aye, but in the days of ALFRED there were no paupers; no miserable creatures compelled to labour from month’s end to month’s end without seeing meat; no thousands upon thousands made thieves by that hunger which acknowledges no law, human or divine. (83–84)

Cobbett assumes that his readers will know and admire Alfred, to the extent that “if there be a name under heaven, to which Englishmen ought to bow with reverence approaching toward adoration, it is the name of ALFRED” (1:98). He reminds them that Alfred founded many monasteries, and that the “reformers” destroyed Alfred’s own tomb (1:98). The allusions to Alfred indicate that Cobbett thinks of the Middle Ages as a period of long-term stability, the earlier years having similar characteristics to the time directly before the Reformation. The final chapter of the work uses statistics drawn


Buried Alive


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 163

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM


from medieval documents to demonstrate “the ease and happiness ad harmony and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages, by our Catholic forefathers” (1:246). Cobbett’s statistics are questionable indeed: he argues that Britain was more populous before the Reformation, and that workers’ wages fed and clothed them well.22 While Cobbett describes a Middle Ages devoid of Gothic horrors, he simultaneously ascribes violence, imprisonment, and oppression to the agents of the Reformation. Describing the execution of the last of the Plantagenets, the seventy-year-old Countess of Salisbury, who had to be chased down by her executioner, Cobbett asks, Is it a scene in Turkey or in Tripoli that we are contemplating? No; but, in England, where MAGNA CHARTA had been so lately in force, where nothing could have been done contrary to law; but where all power, ecclesiastical as well as lay, being placed in the hands of one man, bloody butcheries like this, which would have roused even a Turkish populace to resistance, could be perpetrated without the smallest danger to the perpetrator. (1:54)

Monks and nuns are portrayed as innocent victims of Gothic villainy: having “never had an idea that Magna Charta, and all the laws of the land could be set aside in a moment, and whose recluse and peaceful lives rendered them wholly unfit to cope with at once, crafty and desperate villainy, [they] fell before these ruffians, as chickens fall before the kite” (1:79). In language familiar to the more radical of his readers, Thomas Cromwell and his fellow despoilers of the monasteries are not only “kites” but “rapacious vultures” (1:84) who destroy handwritten books while stealing everything of value. Henry VIII himself is a Gothic arch-villain. Motivated by greed and lust, he is the most unjust, hard-hearted, meanest and most sanguinary tyrant that the world had ever beheld, whether Christian or Heathen. That England, which he found in peace, unity, plenty and happiness, he left torn by factions and schisms, her people wandering about in beggary and misery. (1: 97)


164

Similarly, his daughter Elizabeth, whom Cobbett sarcastically calls “good Queen Bess,” and whose maiden status he disputes, is such a “foul tyrant” (1:180) that to hear mass, to harbour a priest, to admit the supremacy of the Pope, to deny this horrid virago’s spiritual supremacy, and many other things,


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 164

12/5/2010 12:07:49 PM

Buried Alive

165

As Alice Chandler observes, The History of the Protestant “Reformation” was written when Cobbett was doubtful whether parliament would remove the political limitations on Roman Catholics and when he was seeking a solution to the desperate poverty of both England and Ireland. As a political tract, it probably had little effect on the process of Catholic emancipation, which was finally achieved in 1829. Moreover, Frances Trollope’s The Abbess, published after emancipation, proves that not everyone was convinced that the pre-Reformation world contained no Gothic oppressions. Intriguingly, though, Cobbett’s arguments closely anticipate the vision of the Middle Ages in Augustus Pugin’s Contrasts, published only ten years later, which associated Gothic architecture not with murderous imprisonment but with Christian charity. Cobbett’s work, however, is directed not toward city planners but to readers of modest means and served as a contribution toward creating kindlier feelings about the Middle Ages without having ever once used the term.


which an honourable Catholic could scarcely avoid, consigned him to the scaffold and to the bowel-ripping knife. (1:181)


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 165

12/5/2010 12:07:50 PM


9780230103740_07_ch05.indd 166

12/5/2010 12:07:50 PM

S c o t t ish L aw y e r s, Fe u da l L aw

Ivanhoe was Scott’s first novel to venture into English history. By

the story’s conclusion, the Saxon and Norman peoples have united as the English under their king and under English law. Judith Wilt has argued for a continuity between Ivanhoe and the Waverley Novels (18–48), but because of its resoundingly English theme, Scott’s perspective as a Scot has been less discussed in relation to Ivanhoe than to any of his other major works. While acknowledging that Scott masks himself by his anonymity1 and his fictional English narrator Laurence Templeton, I shall here discuss Ivanhoe as the work of a lowland Scottish lawyer with an outsider’s perspective on English law. Ivanhoe points to the inherent dangers of interpretation in local law and gently implies an alternative in common law, both commonly applied and based on common sense. Scottish law might seem distinct from the scope of this project because it places less weight than English law on the common-law tradition so central to popular medievalism. Scott certainly knew Lord Stair’s Institutions of the Laws of Scotland, published in 1681; it had recently been on his mind because an incident in Stair’s family was the inspiration for the plot of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). In tracing the origins of Scottish law, Lord Stair differs from the practices of English legal commentators in paying particular attention to Roman law. He characterizes English common law as meaning “their ancient and unquestionable customs,” while commenting that the Scots too “in like manner” are “ruled in the first place by our ancient and immemorial customs, which may be called our common law.” But he immediately adds that “sometimes by that name is understood equity, which is common in all nations, or the civil Roman law, which in some


Chapter 6


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 167

12/5/2010 12:09:19 PM


sort is common to very many” (92). In fact, both English and Scottish property law is influenced by Norman feudalism, but Stair stresses the Roman influence more than, for example, Blackstone would later do in his English commentaries.2 W.A. Wilson has remarked that many of the leading Scottish writers on law were also philosophers, so that, more than their English counterparts, they were interested in “justice in the abstract” (5). David M. Walker explains that Stair believes in natural law or the derivation of laws from the divinely appointed natural order (Stair 29–31). Stair does not, however, seem so positive about natural right, remarking that “a right is a power, given by the law, of disposing of things, or exacting from persons that which they are due” (93). Whereas the English common-law apologists would argue that common law upholds natural rights, Stair asserts that law, derived from natural order through the power of human reason, confers rights. The extent to which the law can be perfect would seem to depend on human reason, and Stair is fully aware that “the laws of nations” vary between peoples and their understanding of reason. Unlike English common law, which traditionally claims a perfection through traditional interpretation and ultimately from its derivation from nature, Scottish law acknowledges its hybrid origins and the inherent limitations of a system put together over ages by imperfect people. Scott had earlier represented the problem of the imperfection of Scottish law in The Heart of Midlothian, where in the case of the concealment of a birth, the burden of proof that the child was not murdered fell upon the child’s mother: in such a case, a woman was not innocent until proven guilty, but rather the reverse. More generally, Scottish law complicates the notion of innocence as the opposite of guilt through the verdict of Not Proven. Whereas in English law, a verdict of not guilty means that a person is innocent in the eyes of the law, and all other notions of what truly happened are now irrelevant, the decision of Not Proven suggests a truth that the law has failed to uncover. According to David Hume the Advocate’s Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland, Scottish juries rarely use the word “innocent.” A Scottish jury can find that “the pannel [defendant] is guilty or not guilty, or that the libel [charge] is proven or not proven.” Hume, a nephew of the philosopher and historian, was professor of law at the University of Edinburgh when Scott was studying there. He adds that


168

In later times, our juries have freely made use of the one or the other of these phrases, as they have judged more suitable to the case in hand: Not uncommonly, the phrase not proven has been employed to mark


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 168

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM

S c o t t i s h L aw y e r s , F e u da l L aw

169

Scottish law embodies in its verdicts an awareness of the imperfection of law in uncovering the truth, something that Scott himself had to acknowledge in his own legal career. Scott was Sheriff of Selkirk from 1799 until his death, and although most cases were handled by his deputy, John Chisolm found Scott’s hand in 114 cases, mainly before the publication of Ivanhoe. Most of the cases that Scott decided were relatively minor, but even then, questions of proof arose. For example, in a dispute over the sale of wool in 1812, Scott wrote that “the circumstances of the case afford tolerable evidence that the Bill granted for twelve pounds was meant to close the transactions between the two parties.” This does not seem to have satisfied the litigants, since Scott later writes, In explanation of the epithet tolerable, used in the Interlocutor reclaimed against it, it need only be observed that parties in the present and in similar cases very often conduct a number of petty and complicated transactions in so confused a manner that a judge has not the full evidence for explicating them which he might desire, and must therefore be contented with the best that the case affords. (Chisolm 147)

In a small civil case such as this, the bounds of what a judge can know for certain may seem an insignificant problem; Scott was aware from personal experience of the difficulty of giving good judgment, however, and of the extent to which the task of interpreting the law falls upon the powerful, to the inherent danger of ordinary citizens. A Romantic-era Scottish lawyer might also be in a detached position to look at English law and acknowledge its imperfections. Some Scottish authors of Scott’s time implicitly claimed an authority to judge Britain as a whole. While the Edinburgh Review, a publication largely founded by lawyers, presented its articles as book reviews, the journal judged not just books but the artistic and political ideas behind them; the judicial tone of the Edinburgh was established in its motto “judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur” (the judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted). As the Gothic novel in some ways acknowledges, England too was recognizing problems with the law, as more and more statutes were added. If the law so constantly needed to be revised, then the makers of the law were constantly implying its imperfection, or at least the inadequacy of common law to cover all the exigencies of modern life.3 Moreover, those charged


a deficiency only of lawful evidence to convict the pannel, and that of not guilty, to convey the jury’s opinion of his innocence of the charge. (2: 439–40)


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 169

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM


with offenses were reliant upon the workings of local justice: a sympathetic jury who considered that the offense did not warrant the mandated punishment might simply acquit or find the defendant guilty of a misdemeanor, while a justice or jury hostile to certain types of offenses might be inclined to make an example of a defendant even in the face of dubious evidence.4 Although the huge expansion of statute law might seem to make law more definite than common-law tradition, in fact, it had the opposite effect of creating laws without precedents for interpretation. Interpretation not merely of laws but also of facts was a current concern in English legal theory. In about 1810–1812, Jeremy Bentham compiled a vast collection of commentaries on the law of evidence in England; in the 1820s, the teenaged John Stuart Mill edited these into the Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827).5 Although Scott was probably not aware of this work when he wrote Ivanhoe, Bentham articulates the crisis of English law in a manner that, while Scott would not have agreed with his conclusions, is instructive when considering the presentation of law in the novel. Early in the work, the generally anti-medievalist Bentham6 betrays a hint of the idealized vision of the medieval world as simpler than the legal convolutions of his own time when he suggests that a peasant, the continuer of the traditional way of life, may have a truer notion of natural justice than a lawyer: No peasant is so stupid as to use a hundredth part of the exertion to put it out of his own power, for his own benefit and that of his family, to come at truth and justice within the circle of his family, as that have been employed by those sages to put it out of their power to discover truth and do justice for the benefit of their fellow subjects within the circle of the state. (1:5)

Bentham assumes that without the law, humans have an instinctive notion of justice derived from self-interest. Unfortunately, instinct does not function in a judicial setting. English law has claimed that proofs can be established, yet Bentham argues that nothing can be proved with absolute certainty, and that no one formula for proof holds in all circumstances. The judge should therefore never apply an “inflexible rule, requiring, as necessary to conviction, this or that particular dose of evidence: such as the testimony of two witnesses, the confession of the defendant, or, in a word, any other determinate mass of criminative evidence” (3:392). A court should consider the aggregate of the evidence and recognize that some of the legal byways


170


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 170

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM

171

of the past have been attempts to compensate for the lack of what we can know for certain: Bentham cites as examples of these the medieval practices of “trial by ordeal, trial by battle, wager of law, oaths expurgatory and suppletory” (3:383). Bentham leaves understated the assumption that providence will not interfere in the process of law, apparently believing that his reader will accept that law is based in the material world. Just as Bentham draws on medieval examples in assuming that his reader agrees that law is a human and not a divine process, he chooses as the Rationale’s extreme example of medieval belief no longer held the charge of witchcraft. Since Bentham’s theory of utility is based on the intersection between self-interest and common interest, witchcraft complicates his basic assumptions by providing an extreme example of the dangers of false confession operating against selfinterest: “to produce, and produce extempore, a circumstantial and consistent account of intercourses and conversations with an imaginary being,—this would be scarce possible even to the strongest; and, if possible, where should be the inducement, when the consequence was being hanged or burnt?” (3:126). Witchcraft provides a similarly extreme example of the difficulty of declaring anything improbable, because in times of panic concerning witchcraft, “women were punished, and always with death, for acts of witchcraft; men for acts of sorcery; human creatures of both sexes for being possessed, or causing others to be possessed, by devils; all were punished, or might have been punished, for all sorts of crimes, on the supposed evidence of ghosts.” Bentham adds that “Happily, in the present state of the public mind, this danger does not present itself as being seriously formidable” but is a “violation of a law of nature” (3:340–41).7 Finally, witchcraft serves as the key instance of a charge in which no kind of evidence, circumstantial or testimonial, can be valid, being classed among “those sorts of offences . . . which are not capable of being rendered probable by an quantity of testimonial evidence” (3:392). In sum, witchcraft is for Bentham the charge in which his reader cannot possibly believe, the ultimate contradiction of natural evidence and common sense. In his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, written toward the end of his life, Scott agrees with Bentham’s characterization of witchcraft as a charge in which modern readers cannot believe. Scott gives a number of reasons why people have believed in witchcraft, but his subject-position always remains the same: magic is a contradiction of the laws of nature and therefore can be explained away. Scott acknowledges that Scotland has been particularly cruel toward witches, since




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 171

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM


lawyers “admitted as evidence what they called damnum minatum, et malum secutum—some mischief, that is to say, following close upon a threat, or wish of revenge, uttered by the supposed witch, which, though it might be attributed to the most natural course of events, was supposed necessarily to be in consequence of the menaces of the accused” (242). This type of evidence contradicts the laws of nature in that words cause a change of the natural order. Scott’s conclusion seems progressivist rather than medievalist: “There remains hope, however, that the grosser faults of our ancestors are now out of date; and that whatever follies the present race may be guilty of, the sense of humanity is too universally spread to permit them to think of tormenting wretches till they confess what is impossible, and then burning them for their pains” (320). The legal implication of the Letters, though, would be to recognize that the law and its interpretation can change with society about it; indeed, one of Scott’s most interesting asides in the work comes at the beginning of Letter Six, where he notes that “penal laws” that are “at first hailed with unanimous acquiescence and approbation” may result in “public disgust when the punishments become frequent and are relentlessly inflicted” (161). Although Scott generally avoids criticizing his government directly, he then adds, “Those [laws] against treason are no exception. Each reflecting government will do well to shorten that melancholy reign of terror which perhaps must necessarily follow on the discovery of a plot or the defeat of an insurrection” (161). Although Scott would not go as far as Bentham in claiming to be writing at a crisis point in English law, Ivanhoe may be read as providing a commentary on the imperfections of law by suggesting that English law has encountered crises in the medieval past. Scott shows awareness that the major victims of this will be the least powerful members of society, the kinds of citizens whose cases he had reviewed as a county sheriff. Even though after Scott’s death Ivanhoe was a major source of inspiration for the elitist medievalism that dominated the Victorian period, the novel can simultaneously be read as a commentary on Romantic-era law in the populist tradition.

Common Law in IVA NHOE


172

From the perspective of later legal history, Ivanhoe is set at the last vague point in the history of English law. From the beginning of this study, we have seen the problem of where laws begin, some writers even claiming that English law predates the notion of legal history. In legal parlance, however, “time immemorial,” the point where


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 172

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM

173

common law tradition fades into the unknown, actually has a date: 1191, or the accession of Richard I. Ivanhoe is set “towards the end of the reign of Richard I” (25), and while Scott’s general readers might not have picked up the definition of “time immemorial,” they would have been fully aware that only a few years after the story’s conclusion, King John would be forced to concede to the demands of Magna Carta, so crucial to the understanding of English legal rights. The story also refers to John’s concession of the Charter of the Forest (462), which is included as a fundamental part of the English constitution in populist Romantic-era printings of Magna Carta. Ivanhoe’s setting is at the last point in time before legal memory begins. When the supposed editor, Laurence Templeton, reminds his readers of the difference between the time that he is transcribing from the Wardour Manuscript and their own, he draws the distinction in legal terms: the modern reader, when placed in his own snug parlour, and surrounded by all the comforts of an Englishman’s fireside, is not half so much disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself; that the shattered tower, which now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him up at his own front door without any form of trial; that the hinds, by whom his little pet-farm is managed, a few centuries ago would have been his slaves; and that the complete influence of feudal tyranny once extended over the neighbourhood village, where the attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the manor. (16)

Templeton’s reading of Richard’s reign does not entirely coincide with most modern historians’ interpretations. Richard was absent from England for most of his reign, but at least some of the time he seems to have had a fairly able regent in the person of the archbishop of Canterbury. This is one of many instances where Ivanhoe follows the practices of popular medievalism in conflating medieval history, the result being closer to a description of the state of affairs in the turbulent reign of King Stephen.8 Templeton’s observation nevertheless sets the tone for a world in which law functions in a different way. Whereas in modern society, the attorney, the interpreter of the law, is more important than the lord of the manor, the former upholder or even maker of feudal law, legal interpretation is a constant problem in the world of Ivanhoe. William Godwin asserts in Political Justice that “law was originally devised, that ordinary men might know what they had to expect” (2:402). Although Scott would not have entirely agreed with Godwin’s belief




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 173

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM


that the goal of political justice is to promote equality, Scott and Godwin share with Bentham, and indeed most of their contemporaries, a commitment to law as the product of human reason based on a model of virtue. Given that, as Ivanhoe demonstrates, good people from different social positions and cultures (royalty, nobility, freemen, serfs; Saxon, Norman, Jewish) can recognize goodness in each other, it is all the more problematic that in this society, nobody knows what to expect from the multiple codes of law. Characters in Ivanhoe seem constantly to need to remind each other of the law, and almost invariably when the matter of law is raised, a debate ensues as to how to interpret it. Throughout the story, competing systems of local law are in operation, and they cause the characters doubt, fear, degradation, and physical danger. Norman law is represented in a number of different forms, including the feudal government, the tournament, the Forest Law, and ecclesiastical law. Ivanhoe assumes that its readers have a general awareness of the concept of the Norman Yoke, according to which, as English writers had argued at least since Renaissance times, Norman feudal oppression replaced Saxon constitutional freedoms (Christopher Hill 60). Scott personally seems to have found a benign feudalism attractive: he expanded his own property at Abbotsford to give himself the role of the lord of the manor and enjoyed being a patron to others. The novel appears to condone Ivanhoe’s decision not to remain apart from feudalism but to recognize King Richard as his feudal overlord. By the time that the narrative begins, however, feudalism is not operating as the benevolent system of patronage and loyalty that appealed to Scott and many of his Tory friends. As Laurence Templeton suggests, feudal government, supposedly under the king, is in disarray, so that the king’s feudal underlords are, in effect. the supreme rulers of their own lands. In its famous description of the “condition of England,” in contradiction of the medievalist idealization of English law, the narrative mentions the breakdown of the legal system so that the multitude of outlaws, who, driven to despair by the oppression of the feudal nobility, and the severe exercise of the forest laws, banded together in large gangs, and, keeping possession of the forests and wastes, set at defiance the justice and magistracy of the country. The nobles themselves, each fortified within his own castle, and playing the petty sovereign over his own dominions, were the leaders of bands scarce less lawless and oppressive than those of the avowed depredators. To maintain these retainers, and to support the extravagance and magnificence which their pride induced them to affect, the nobility borrowed sums of money from the Jews at the most usurious interest,


174


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 174

12/5/2010 12:09:20 PM


175

The feudal system moves some people outside the code of law altogether so that they are “out-laws”; ties unprincipled people together through feudalism in local systems of (in)justice; and even encroaches on the law of contract when what should be a mortgage may cost the lenders their lives. The book opens in the domain of the “out-law.” As we have seen, one medievalist grievance of Scott’s time was that pigs used to feed in the forests, on common land, and at the beginning of the narrative, Gurth and Wamba are in the forest with a “scattered herd of swine” who are feeding on beech-masts and acorns (31). In keeping with the concept of the “swinish multitude,” Saxons are associated with pigs through their work and also through references such as Front-de Boeuf’s contempt of “Saxon porkers” (324) and Prince John’s observation that courtesy to Saxons is “casting pearls before swine” (154). Scott thus continues the radical association of the oppressed Saxons with the common people. Although at first appearance the grazing of pigs in the forest evokes the medievalist vision of common ground and common law, in Ivanhoe, the forest marks a space where those who function under different codes of law come together, and the result is frequently conflict. They soon meet Prior Aymer, a fairly benign representative of ecclesiastical authority, who is known as “a lover of the chase, of the banquet, and if fame did him not wrong, of other worldly pleasures still more inconsistent with his monastic vows” (38). Gurth and Wamba have already noted that as Saxons, they are excluded from hunting and banquets (their dog has been mutilated, and the Normans will eat the pigs they raise); the story seems to indicate that they are also excluded from the sexual pleasures hinted at in Scott’s initial description of the Prior. Accompanying the Prior are the Templars, who like the Prior, have their own strict code of conduct: the Grand Master is later to describe them as “statutes,” and the penalties for breaking them are severe. The forest, though, later proves not to be a space outside the law, but to have its own laws, which function with more definition than the systems operating outside it. When Gurth travels through the forest carrying money, the outlaws describe themselves as “deliverers of the commonwealth” (133). When he tells them how much of his own money he is carrying, they shout “A forfeit—a forfeit!”


which gnawed into their estates like consuming cankers, scarce to be cured unless when circumstances gave them an opportunity of getting free, by exercising upon their creditors some act of unprincipled violence. (87)


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 175

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


Eventually, Gurth tells the outlaws the whole story, and strikes their captain down. Yet upon examination of the evidence, notably a “purse embroidered with Hebrew characters,” the captain says that as the servant of the Disinherited Knight, with whose legal status he identifies, Gurth must pass “toll-free” (136). The captain, unnamed at this stage in the narrative,9 uses an animal metaphor to describe their shared “disinherited” state: “dogs should not worry dogs where foxes and wolves are to be found in abundance” (136). What follows is a parody of the Wager of Battle that anticipates the aristocratic version later in the story. In this case, Gurth proves his worth by knocking down the Miller. Even “out-laws” have their own codes of conduct that function as laws. As Locksley later tells the Black Knight, “in these glades I am monarch.” They divide up their spoils according to a strict system, and Richard is astonished to observe that in “men, in a state so lawless, were nevertheless among themselves so regularly and equitably governed, and all that he observed added to his opinion of the justice and judgment of their leader” (351). Robin Hood and his men hence model good law to the man who has failed to protect it at national level. Yet despite this implied criticism of Richard the Lion-Heart as law-giver, the main responsibility for the state of law falls upon his brother Prince John. John is regent, yet he himself does not seem quite sure of how to interpret the laws. Before the tournament, John points out that “the principal business of the day had been forgotten” in not appointing a Queen of Beauty (99). A debate ensures as to whether a Jewess can take this role; the laws prove negotiable when De Bracy suggests that the tournament champion should choose her (100), and the herald adds this to the laws. Before both phases of the tournament, heralds hence “proclaim the laws of the tournament.” All the laws, “calculated in some degree to abate the dangers of the day,” are announced verbally by the herald: an advantage that the tournament holds over most of the legal systems in Ivanhoe, then, inclusive of the English constitution, is that the laws are stated in words. Ivanhoe himself takes part in the tournament using not his own or even an assumed name, but under a legal title: his shield bears “the Spanish word Desdichado, signifying Disinherited” (106).10 The unknown knight and Bois-Guilbert draw their swords, but the “marshals of the field” remind them that the “laws of the tournament” do not permit it. The ritualized warfare of the tournament may seem a code of law that those under its governance actually respect, yet even these laws have to be restated.


176


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 176

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


177

It was pointed out to the Prince, in impeachment of this decree, that the victory had been in fact won by the Disinherited Knight. . . . But Prince John adhered to his own opinion, on the ground that the Disinherited Knight and has party had lost the day, but for the powerful assistance of the Knight of the Black Armour, to whom, therefore, he persisted in awarding the prize. (149)

In the absence of the Black Knight, they award the prize to the Disinherited Knight, who proves to be Ivanhoe; the reader should logically assent to the justice of the decision, but the question arises as to whether Prince John can prevail against divine justice. Prince John has twice failed to change the laws of the tournament; he is now confronted with a problem of English law. Ivanhoe’s father disinherited him for recognizing Richard as his feudal overlord, but he received instead a “castle and manor” that Prince John subsequently bestowed on Front-de-Boeuf. John claims as his “right” the authority “to confer the fiefs of the crown upon the faithful followers who are around me, and ready to perform the usual military service, in the room of those who have wandered to foreign countries, and can neither render homage nor service when called upon” (152). Although the assembly is “too much interested in the question not to pronounce the Prince’s assumed right altogether indubitable,” Prior Aymer gently hints at a higher duty, that to religion, which the would-be liberators of the Holy Land believed that they were fulfilling through the Crusades, but everyone ignores him. John then claims a further feudal right: he remarks of Rowena, “she seems a minor, and must therefore be at our royal disposal in marriage” (154). John is now usurping the fatherly role that Cedric holds as Rowena’s guardian. In Cedric’s territory, Saxon law is still partly in force, and, in contrast with the radical idealization of the Laws of Alfred, it is here heavily associated with the Laws of the Father. At the book’s opening, Wamba and Gurth are two figures in a druidical landscape: “A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition” (28). Although the Druid site has been ruined, “probably by the zeal of some convert to Christianity,” Wamba and Gurth seem by their


On the second day, nothing can happen “until the laws of the tourney should be rehearsed” (142), and even John’s attempts to subvert the system prove vain. Having failed to intervene in the election of the Queen of Beauty, he decides to award the honor of the second day to Le Noir Fainant, the Black Sluggard.


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 177

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


presence in this place, and by Gurth’s “primeval vestment,” to have a connection to England’s earliest times. The brass rings around their necks, however, identify them as thralls owned by the Saxon Cedric. Although radical Saxonists might have denied the claim, in Scott’s version of the Middle Ages, which in this respect follows his source Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, the Saxons also have a feudal system.11 Yet Saxon law is in decline, just as the swine that Gurth guards will be eaten by the Normans. Cedric, who is so proud of his Saxon ancestry, does not seem quite sure himself how Saxon law works. His son Ivanhoe has left home to join the Norman court, contrary to his father’s “wish and command,” and Cedric claims that “in the days of Alfred that would have been termed disobedience—ay, and a crime severely punishable” (166). The Laws of Alfred are the Laws of the Father in implying a foundation in biblical commandments and include the Ten Commandments, of which one is to honor one’s parents. Nevertheless, the Laws of Alfred do not explicitly mention obeying one’s parents. They do state that someone who strikes or curses his father should be put to death, but make no mention of obedience (Liebermann 1:31). Moreover, while in theory Saxon law was severe, most capital offenses were remittable through fines, and it is unlikely that sons were ever executed for striking or cursing their fathers. Cedric hence seems here to be wishing his own parental feelings on to Saxon law. Even Wamba proves more adept at discussing law than Cedric. When Wamba and Gurth are out after the curfew (a Norman law, but one that Cedric accepts that he must keep) in returning with the herd, Cedric threatens them, “I tell thee, shackles and the prisonhouse shall punish the next offence of this kind” (57). When Wamba tells him that Fangs is responsible, Cedric suggests hanging the dog. At Wamba’s rejoinder, that under the harsh Norman forest laws, Malvoisin has maimed the dog, all Cedric can do is bluster and suggest that everybody eat. Wamba has effectively turned Cedric’s exercise of authority over his thralls into a critique of Norman law, and Cedric seems none the wiser. Parallel to the Saxon Laws of the Father are the Jewish Laws of the Father. Scott’s general sympathy toward the Jews in Ivanhoe has been extensively discussed elsewhere;12 it is worth reemphasizing, though, that the novel creates parallels between the Saxon law that many so admired at the time and the seemingly alien Jewish law. Like the Laws of Alfred to which Cedric appeals, Jewish law is based on biblical commandment. For both Cedric and Isaac, for example,


178


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 178

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM

179

the custom of hospitality functions almost as a law. Cedric tells the Templars that “my hospitality must not be bounded by your dislikes” (63), and does not question for a moment whether he should admit Jews under his roof, although he apparently thinks it contrary to his religion to treat them as honored guests. That Cedric regards hospitality as a law rather than a choice is demonstrated by his decision to place the Jews beside Wamba, who mocks what he knows of Jewish law by waving swine-flesh at Isaac. Similarly, the Jews are “as liberal in exercising the duties of hospitality and charity among their own people, as they were alleged to be reluctant and churlish to extending them to those whom they termed Gentiles, and whose treatment of them certainly merited little hospitality at their hand” (124). Isaac states that he has “duly kept every jot and tittle of the law of Moses” (125). Yet, like Cedric, he can be challenged on the interpretation of the law. He later tells Rebecca, “by our law we may not deal with the stranger and Gentile, save for the advantage of our commerce.” Rebecca here appeals to the law of common humanity: “we may not indeed mix with them in banquet and in jollity; but in wounds and in misery, the Gentile becometh the Jew’s brother” (293). She further adds that if Ivanhoe dies because they have not helped treat his wounds, “we are indeed answerable for his blood to God and to man” (294). Whereas many of the codes of law in Ivanhoe seem ambivalent or open to multiple interpretations, the reader clearly is expected to sympathize with Rebecca’s humane reading of what is right, the point where the laws of God and human law coincide.13 Similarly, readers must retain this sympathy while becoming conscious of a difference between medieval times and their own in the major legal scene of this legislation-obsessed novel, Rebecca’s trial for sorcery. Rebecca’s innocence here is not at all ambivalent. Even though Rebecca learned her healing skills from the shadowy figure of Miriam, who was killed as a witch,14 the novel makes clear that Rebecca’s healing abilities are skills, not magic; and that she only uses them for good. Yet Scott is careful not to suggest that because the trial of Rebecca is unjust, all medieval law is simply bad. The Grand Master of the Templars states that since Rebecca “hath flung her enchantments over a brother of the Holy Temple, assuredly she shall die the death” (395). Albert Malvoisin begins to say, “But the laws of England—” when Beaumanoir interrupts him, “The laws of England . . . permit and enjoin each judge to execute justice within his own jurisdiction. The most petty baron may arrest, try, and condemn a witch found within his own domain” (396). The reader is left to guess what the rest of the Preceptor’s




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 179

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


sentence would have been. The laws of England certainly do not permit someone to be condemned without a fair trial, and Beaumanoir is assuming Rebecca’s guilt beforehand. Some of Scott’s readers may, in addition, have been aware that witchcraft was not a separate offence in Britain until after the Reformation, although Blackstone notes that English law, “both before and after the conquest,” rank “this crime in the same class with heresy,” hence punishable by burning (4:60). Certainly, Rebecca could have been tried for heresy, but this is not how Beaumanoir presents the case. My central interest here, however, is Beaumanoir’s assertion of local authority, not merely to enforce the law, but in effect to create and carry through a unique code of laws. Yet even though, as the Preceptor cynically observes, “trial moves rapidly on when the judge has determined the sentence beforehand,” the court has not allowed for the person of Rebecca herself. Rebecca is simultaneously exoticized as an outsider and a moral center with whom Scott’s lessprivileged readers might identify. When she hears she is to be tried, she praises God and states that “the name of a judge, though an enemy to my people, is to me as the name of a protector” (400). Yet in the court the Grand Master is not merely both judge and prosecutor, but at the same time endeavors to try Rebecca for the crime of sorcery and Brian de Bois-Guilbert for breaking the laws of the Templars. Beaumanoir has already shown his inclination to apply local authority to Rebecca’s case; for Bois-Guilbert the difficulty is that laws that the Templars normally overlook, such as “Ut fugiantur oscula,” that they should avoid kisses, are here being applied in the literal way that Cedric had read the Laws of Alfred. (The reader, of course, knows that the Templar has not had carnal contact with Rebecca; the reader may also remember that Bois-Guilbert earlier informed De Bracy that the Grand Master himself granted him a dispensation from his vow of celibacy [222].) Local justice, then, leaves space for uneven justice. But just like the book’s other perpetual outsider, Wamba, Rebecca knows how to appeal to the law. Given that the prosecutor-judge has decided before the trial that at least Rebecca is guilty, a surprising amount of effort is put into producing witnesses. Malvoisin has prepared two soldiers to give the same testimony, and they deliver, “with a precision which would have seemed suspicious to more impartial judges, circumstances either altogether fictitious or trivial,” testimony “which would have been, in modern days, divided into two classes—those which were immaterial, and those which were actually and physically impossible” (411). It is not clear that this court is obligated to find two witnesses who agree, but the implied need to find


180


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 180

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM

181

coinciding testimony itself ironically recalls Jewish law, while it puts Rebecca in a similar situation to Christ in the Gospels. At this point, the narrative directly distances the reader from the historical setting, describing the “circumstances of their evidence” as “in those ignorant and superstitious times, easily credited as proofs of guilt” (412). Just as Bentham makes the initial assumption that his reader does not believe in witchcraft, so Scott assumes not merely that his reader will utterly reject the possibility that Rebecca is a witch, but also that his reader believes that circumstantial evidence is not legal proof. I shall return to the question of circumstantial evidence later in this chapter. Rebecca, however, believes that truth is absolute, and that God provides proof. She appeals to God as judge between Bois-Guilbert and herself, and the book leaves open to interpretation whether God indeed judges her situation The Wager of Battle in Ivanhoe shows Scott’s attitude toward medievalism at its most ambivalent. At first consideration, it seems to mark a distinction between medieval justice and that of Scott’s own period, although as Mark Schoenfield and Gary Dyer have shown, only in 1817, in a civil suit over the murder of Mary Ashford, the courts had deliberated whether a defendant could still claim the right of Wager of Battle, so that an American in attendance later recalled, “It was a mode of trial for dark ages . . . In the highest tribunal of the most enlightened country in Europe, I was listening to a discussion of whether or not this mode of trial was in force in the nineteenth century!” (quoted Schoenfield 65). The reader of Ivanhoe is placed in a similar cultural position to this American observer. On an intellectual level, the reader is aware that the idea that right will prevail in combat does not always coincide with the idea that all are innocent until proven guilty. And given his weakened condition and the might of the Templar, Ivanhoe is not certain to win the contest. As Bruce Beiderwell has argued, however, Ivanhoe conforms to the medievalist evocation of the past in suggesting that in the world of romance, justice will persist (90), and Bois-Guilbert’s death not at Ivanhoe’s hands but as “a victim to the violence of his own contending passions” leaves the reader free to agree with the Grand Master’s verdict that “[t]his is indeed the judgment of God” (490). If that is the case, the medieval law of might, supported by the law of God, may be able to prevail. It is dangerous to conclude that this is Scott’s own judgment, though, since it is spoken by the Grand Master, whose own judgment of Rebecca has been from the outset clearly wrong. A more concrete example of medieval law as wishful thinking might in fact be the Grand Master’s own prompt withdrawal on Richard’s arrival




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 181

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


and the execution of the Malvoisin brothers, who, states the narrative, “only suffered the death which they had both well deserved, by many acts of falsehood, cruelty, and oppression” (496). Even Saxon law is modified by the end of the story, since Cedric accepts Richard as ruler and, in the symbolic free space of the forest, gives Gurth his liberty. If by the end of Ivanhoe, England has moved from the legal state of “time immemorial” and competing legal systems toward the age of Magna Carta, it shows the dangers inherent in local law. The Normans, the Saxons, the forest dwellers, the Jews, and the Templars all endeavor to enforce a local code of laws. The Grand Master has claimed his authority as a judge not from the church but from the “laws of England” that “permit and enjoin each judge to execute justice within his own jurisdiction” (396). The Grand Master seems to be referring to the common-law system of justices of the peace. According to Blackstone, whereas the sheriff “does all the king’s business in the county” (1:328), the justices of the peace owe their origins to “peculiar officers appointed by the common law for the maintenance of public peace” (1:338). The system was established later than the time of Ivanhoe, in the reign of Henry III, but it may well have had earlier precedents. Before the time of Edward III, adds Blackstone, the freeholders of the county elected the custodes pacis; only at this time were they appointed by the crown, given the authority to judge felonies, and “acquired the more honorable appellation of justices” (339).15 Since Blackstone argues for the continuity of English law back to Saxon times, he would probably agree that local judges, under the authority of the king, can “execute justice.” The danger is when local power ignores the larger structure of the king and the laws that he is sworn to uphold. The reader knows that in the case of Rebecca, judgment is contrary to the spirit of the law that protects the innocent, and that Beaumanoir’s claim to local authority is hence not true law but anarchy and a threat to the peace of England. Since Scott was a local judge for more than thirty years, we would have to assume that he believed that good local judges can exist. Yet in Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, he cites the charge of witchcraft as revealing the dangers of local authority; especially in the case of Scotland he criticizes “the too great readiness of subordinate judges to interfere in matter which were, in fact, beyond their jurisdiction” (241). Witch trials demonstrate the need for a centralized justice system, and this is the hope at the conclusion to Ivanhoe. By the end of the story, we see a medievalist optimism for equal laws equally applied, and just as most novels end with the hope of peace


182


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 182

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM

183

and happiness in the next generation, so the story concludes with hopes of true English law preserving the tradition of common rights. This, however, presents the problem of whether different codes of law can exist in the same place and time. In the concluding pages, Rowena advises Rebecca to exchange one code of law for another: “O, remain with us—the counsel of holy men will wean you from your erring law, and I will be a sister to you” (501). Given the story that has preceded it, the reader must suspect some irony in Rowena’s faith in the authority of holy men. Rebecca herself seems to accept that to continue the code of law on which her identity depends, she must leave England. Does this mean, though, that English law must exclude those who place a value on other systems of law? This does not seem to be Ivanhoe’s message, and indeed, it would be an odd message for a Scottish lawyer fully aware that England’s legal system is not the only possible system. Rather, Ivanhoe seems to condemn those who attempt to impose their systems of law on others in defiance of natural justice. The Templars must become a historical curiosity, but English, or more accurately, British common sense holds hope for a future where a Rebecca the Jewess would present no threat to a national law built on natural law.

S IR A NDREW W Y LIE : Lawyer to Laird Sir Andrew Wylie of That Ilk is a rare example of a novel where a lawyer is the hero and, one suspects, wishful thinking on the part of its author, himself at one time a student of the law.16 Francis Jeffrey’s review in the Edinburgh Review in October 1823 sets the tone of most later criticism. After spending many pages on earlier novels by Galt, Jeffrey gives Sir Andrew Wylie one paragraph, calling the story “clumsily and heavily managed” and voicing the suspicion that the “author’s great error . . . was in resolving to have three volumes instead of one” (177). In point of fact, the choice of length was not entirely Galt’s since his publisher William Blackwood commissioned a three-volume work on the strength of Galt’s sketch-like shorter novels. Length does have a virtue in the story, however, in giving a sense of Andrew’s process along with his progress. In many respects, Sir Andrew Wylie anticipates the laying bare of a legal case that has become common in the detective story and its video offshoot, the legal drama. Galt repeatedly shows Andrew at work, and readers are therefore given an opportunity to see an everyday hero in the form of a lawyer grappling simultaneously with understanding human beings and the workings of the law. Andrew Wylie brings his




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 183

12/5/2010 12:09:21 PM


native Scottish intelligence (which the narrative repeatedly describes as his “genius”) to bear on English legal cases. With its proclaimedly modern setting (the story spans the French Revolutionary period and ends about the time that it was published in the early 1820s) and the lawyer-hero replacing the warrior-heroes of the past, at first consideration Sir Andrew Wylie might seem more a product of the Scottish Enlightenment than of medievalist sentiment; unlike most works of popular medievalism, it even contains an affectionate portrait of George III.17 Yet the addition to the title of the words “of That Ilk” mark Andrew’s achievement of a feudal status, and the plot consistently reminds the reader of feudal relationships. At the same time, the novel idealizes its hero’s approach to law. In Sir Andrew Wylie common law and common sense work in tandem. Just as Bentham had suggested that the peasant has a natural understanding of justice, Andrew brings to the understanding of the law both nature and nurture. He consistently demonstrates both the shrewdness that has enabled him to prevail through poverty and the compassion modeled for him in his childhood. Nevertheless, not all law in the novel meets this standard. As in Ivanhoe, the novel warns against the dangers of local justice that may contradict the commonlaw principle that all are innocent until proven guilty. From his childhood, the humbly born Andrew shows a keen sense of natural justice that transcends the rules and laws under which he lives. An orphan raised by his grandmother in Ayrshire, the region associated with William Wallace, Andrew has an early experience with a creature with a criminal reputation. When Andrew’s school friends award him ownership of a magpie, their teacher Dominie Tannyhill finds the bird’s persistence in stealing the boys’ pens a disruption and warns Andrew of magpies’ inherent tendencies to steal. Tannyhill, however, sets the example of a compassionate judge when he tells Andrew that exile is more appropriate than execution: “I would exhort you, nevertheless, to put it away, for it is a wicked bird, and may, by its pranks, entice you to do evil yousel. I dinna, however, recommend that ye should put the poor creature to death:—that would be a cruelty, and besides, ye ken it’s but a feathered fowl, and no endowed wi’ ony natural understanding of good and evil . . . I counsel you just to take it to the woods . . . .” Andrew’s immediate response is to act as Maggy’s legal defender: “It’s but the first fault o’ poor Maggy, master, and ye shouldna be overly severe, for she doesna ken, as ye say, that theeving’s a sin” (9–10). Tannyhill’s prognostications, however, prove correct: Maggy provokes the prim and proper Miss Mizy so often that “justice and vengeance” are “sworn against her”:


184


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 184

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM

185

the boys set the bird loose in Miss Mizy’s house, and she wrings Maggy’s neck. In this simple country society “justice and vengeance” go together: the schoolboys vow revenge “against the murderer of Maggy” and drench her with water from the stable-yard. After this incident, Tannyhill sets his student an example of justice without vengeance: unwilling to beat Andrew, he assigns him the task of learning the first fifty Psalms; this would consist of memorizing more than six hundred four-line stanzas in the Scottish metrical version.18 Although Andrew carries out this task in the impious location of behind the tombstones in the company of Mary Cunningham the laird’s daughter, he apparently absorbs the messages of the conduct of the godly man set out in the Psalms. When Andrew becomes a legal assistant in London, he uses his natural understanding of human behavior to ensure justice. He becomes a rich man through his legal assistance to the Earl of Sandyford and his family. Truly a man of his time, Andrew rejects presumptive evidence despite the social assumption that Lord Sandyford’s wife is guilty of adultery. The sufferings of Lady Sandyford recall medieval characters such as Patient Griselda,19 but unlike her medieval prototypes, she is partly to blame for her predicament, and a simple decree by her husband cannot put the situation right: she needs the help of a wise man of law such as Andrew. When Lady Sandyford adopts the illegitimate daughter of a male friend, Andrew does not rush to conclusions, remarking, “I’ll no say that the counted is an innocent woman, but let us hae some proof o’ her guilt before we condemn. As to the bairn, that’s a living witness of a fact somewhere—I alloo that” (172). But the story needs more untangling, and by investigating “the different presumptions against her,” Andrew is able to prove her faithfulness in deed to the earl. (Conveniently, Andrew’s biblical study seems not to have involved the possibility of committing adultery in one’s heart.) This is not, however, the end of the case. When a Scottish lawyer turned gossip writer attacks Lady Sandyford in a London publication, his exchange with Andrew touches on the nature of English libel: “but, Andrew,” says Nettles, “you should know that folks in London cannot afford their time for nothing, and that characters, like other things, when they are bought must be paid for.” Andrew, whose use of dialect contrasts with Nettles’s avoidance of it, “dryly” replies, “and when they are stown [stolen], the thief maun not only make restitution, but may be made to suffer punishment” (91). Nettles recognizes this as a legal threat, and tries to correct the damage. The novel recognizes the limitations of law in that a lady’s reputation cannot be




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 185

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM


entirely restored by legal means: “to her [Lady Sandyford], however, the mischief was done” (92). Thus far, Sir Andrew Wylie seems very unlike Ivanhoe: a hyperactive lawyer has replaced the often inactive knight of medieval romance, and law can correct most wrongs, although it is more effective for wrongs against men than wrongs against women. The novel’s main parallel with the legal situations of Ivanhoe is through Andrew’s championing of the gipsies, who, like the Jews in Ivanhoe, are sufficiently outsiders in England that most English people set aside the principle that they are innocent until proven guilty, tending to make an equation between ethnic origin and guilt. Andrew shows himself both willing to overlook these cultural assumptions and to take advantage of them. When two young gipsies are accused of robbery and murder, Andrew again shows himself suspicious of presumptive evidence: the fact that the accused gipsies were seen standing over the body of a murdered man and holding his possessions is insufficient to prove that they are the murderers. While Sir Hubert Mowbray, “the lord of the manor and a justice of the peace,” concludes that “there never was a clearer case of guilt” (227), Andrew believes that he can challenge the proof. Just as the testimony against Rebecca is tainted by preconceptions of Jewish sorcery, so the case against the gipsies is influenced by their reputation as thieves; as Lord Sandyford remarks, “a gipsy is from his birth mulcted of more than half the rights of any other man” (231). Andrew has told him that the accused gipsy “is as innocent of the blood as the babe unborn: I would stake my right hand on that; but for rifling the body, I hae little to say for him. I think, however, that it cannot be highway robbery, nor, indeed, anything beyond the lifting of a waif, provided it can be shown that he was willing, upon certification of proof, to make restoration to the heir. Now the heir, in this case, has as yet made no demand” (230). Andrew’s pledge, his right hand, recalls both medieval trial by ordeal and the medieval punishment for thievery, and his work as a lawyer, the writer of the truth. Impressed by Andrew’s level of conviction, the earl replies, “As to that, whether it be law or not, I cannot presume to determine; but I must say it looks very like common sense” (230). The solution that that Andrew has proposed is not really law, but this novel, just as I have suggested of some of stories featuring burial alive, was written at a crisis-point in English law when many English citizens were uncomfortable with the widespread use of capital punishment. Here the association is made not by implication, but explicitly. The Earl of Sandyford, who is representative of the best


186


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 186

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM

187

of English aristocracy, has by this time refused to testify against the gipsies, because “really it is so shocking a thing to be in any way concerned in offering up the sacrifices which the law so sternly requires that a man may well be excused for being reluctant to bear witness in the case of a capital offence” (230). And Andrew depends upon a reasonable court who would not wish to convict a man of highway robbery, also a capital offense. His first consideration is a deduction from fact: both witnesses describe the murdered man’s body as “stiff and cold” when the gipsies were caught. Andrew, in biblical parlance, “treasure[s] it up in his own mind,” assuming that “it was certainly not at all probable that if the gipsies had killed and robbed the man at the same time, they would have returned to the body” (230). Yet the main reason for his challenging the evidence is the accused gipsy’s mother, who accuses the justice of the peace Sir Hubert of the murder. When Andrew, “affecting more indignation than he felt,” asks, “what puts such a thought in your head,” she replies, “What I say is true; and you believe me.” Andrew retorts: “you ought to be flung into a mill-dam, and left to sink as a Christian or swim as a witch” (236). As in the case of Rebecca, who is falsely accused of witchcraft but has knowledge of healing powers unknown to others, both writer and reader know that the old gipsy woman is not a witch because witches do not exist. Rather than deny the existence of special powers, however, the novel explains them in a naturalistic way. Andrew sees not supernatural powers, but true powers of perception: the gipsy’s “power and discernment is no to be disputed” (236). The old gipsy woman is actually very like Andrew himself in her ability to understand human motivations and to interpret body-language, and through working together, the poor Scot and the outcast gipsy are able to see things that others miss.20 They also recruit the legal writing skills of Blondell, a young man “obliged to do all manner of literary labour, under all possible varieties of name” (240). Even though Blondell comments that “no jury can resist facts so strong, nor presumptions so striking” (242), the quixotic nature of the defense seems to appeal to him. At the trial, the gipsy woman again shows herself to be like Rebecca in calling “to the heavens to send down justice” (254). By this time, however, Andrew has learned through the old woman’s investigations that in their youth Sir Hubert and Knarl, the murdered man, “had both attempted to seduce Alice Cresswell, a gamekeeper’s daughter”(252), 21 and hence the new motive of passion replaces the assumed motive of robbery. When Sir Hubert’s guilt is revealed and he commits suicide, the reader has the choice to interpret his death




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 187

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM


as the result of either divine or human justice. The death of Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert is mysterious: the question of whether heaven has judged is perhaps obscured by the narrative’s critique of the court, but it may represent for Scott a desire for a Middle Ages where the forces of natural justice still prevail. Natural justice similarly prevails in Sir Andrew Wylie, yet every step of the process by which Andrew ensures it has been laid bare to the reader, he himself being an ordinary man who becomes the agent of justice. As in the characterization of the Grand Master of the Templars, the role of Sir Hubert reveals the potential danger of local justice, yet two outsiders, Andrew and Blondell, can use their knowledge of English law and of human nature to ensure national justice in which the innocent, whatever their ethnic background, must be set free. The representation of Andrew Wylie might hence seem anti-medievalist: a poor man uses modern knowledge and natural understanding to enter aristocratic society. Yet the name of Blondell itself, that of Richard the Lion-Heart’s minstrel, who used his talents and devotion to find his master, recalls the Middle Ages. And although Andrew does not have aristocracy of birth, his talents enable him to enter the feudal system, of which the Sandyfords are such a classic example. With the exception of their London home Sandyford House, their homes contain flourishes of the medieval in appearance or in associated ritual. The dowagers of the family live at Elderbower, whose lawn opens “to the public road by a pair of iron gates of florid tracery, between two tall embossed and sculptured columns, on the tops of which stood a couple of grotesque statues, intended to represent Saxon warriors, the supporters of the Sandyford arms” (116). This detail, incidentally, seems to imply that the Sandyfords are of such ancient descent that their aristocracy predates the coming of the Normans. The Earl of Sandyford is so aristocratic that he actually owns an estate that he has never visited. Chastington Hall’s name suggests “chaste,” the state of innocence that, contrary to common law, its Lady has to prove. It is described in conventional terms that recall Blackstone’s description of English law as “one of those fine old mansions which are only to be seen in England, and combine, with the antique grandeur of the baronial castle, the cheerful conveniences of the modern villa” (128). On his first visit, the Earl wonders “into what venerable palace, amidst the pageant rites and olden homages of Fairyland, he had been so curiously translated” (130). On being informed that his family’s custom is always to “dine in state while at Chastington,” the Earl “gaily” replies, “Fashions are somewhat


188


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 188

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM

189

changed since the golden age. However, tonight perform your duty as you were wont to do in my father’s time; or rather, if you please, in my grandfather’s” (132). The whole estate reminds him “how much he had neglected this princely mansion, and how he had declined from the patriotic aristocracy of his fathers” (133). “Patriotic aristocracy” is in fact not enough in the modern world. Sandyford is dependent on Andrew Wylie to protect his marriage and his reputation, and even to publicize his opinions: while at Chastington, the earl writes a pamphlet on the French Revolution and “an historical view of the political effects of popular opinions” (135), 22 but is dependent on Andrew to ensure that it is edited and published. Just as Sandyford gives Andrew his social position, so Andrew maintains the earl’s position. Andrew, moreover, thinks feudally himself. He is acutely aware of the feudal difference between Mary Cunningham and himself, explaining, “her father was the laird, and I’m but a cottar’s son” (210). “Cottar” is specifically a term for a feudal tenant who would, as in medieval times, work the laird’s land for a payment in cash or goods. When Mary works on “improving” her father’s estate, Andrew takes the opportunity to buy the cottage in which his grandmother lives for twenty-five pounds (343) and carry out his own improvements on it. Even more significantly, he is able to buy the large Wylie property when owner goes, in Andrew’s phrase, “a’ to pigs and whistles” (366).23 The novel does not suggest that Andrew’s ancestors were the former owners of this property; it seems more likely that they received their family name as tenants. But in Scottish tradition, just as Mary Cunningham’s father is also known Craiglands, the name of his property, Andrew is now Wylie of Wylie, or as he explains, “I am now the Wylie of that Ilk” (366). With this estate, he has the appropriate social position when his friends the Sandyfords contrive to obtain him a baronetcy. Mary Cunningham’s father, however, as the feudal overlord of Andrew’s boyhood, still needs convincing that a “cottar’s son” can be a fit husband to the entailed heir of an ancient family. His sister Miss Mizy, once the enemy of Andrew and his magpie, has a more pragmatic view of eligibility. Relatively early in the story, she embraces a version of the Middle Ages where a poor boy can rise to power in London when tells Mary that she is “sure” Andrew will “be ordained Lord Mayor of London; for he was in a far more likely road to the post than Whittington was when greeting [weeping] wi’ his cat in his arms” (214).24 She can thus triumphantly remind her brother that Andrew has become “the great man I always thought he would




9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 189

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM


be,” having made “a gude bargain of the Wylie estate” (437–38). The Sandyfords finally manage to persuade him when they point out that Andrew, unlike Craiglands, is a member of parliament, so that the laird finds “himself sinking, as it were, into the swinish multitude” (438). Craiglands is unable to resist the argument further, although he is in the “family burying-place” adorned with the “idolatrous beasts of papistry and prelacy” (452) before Andrew marries Mary, thereby uniting the properties of Craiglands and Wylie. Although with help from his well-born friends Andrew has disrupted the feudal hierarchy, he himself works feudally. As a boy, he pays a disabled woman named Janet Pirn to sell good on his behalf, rightly guessing that sympathy for her will encourage sales. When he returns home as a baronet, he feels a feudal obligation to help Janet, paying for her to board with another poor family. Janet herself ensures that this is done in a feudal way: she accepts help, but refuses to dine with him because, she says, “I canna noo sit down on an equality wi’ onybody that I hae fashed for alms” (404). Andrew, described by one observer as a guinea-pig beside a giraffe (354), has moved from trickster at the beginning of his story to feudal lord at the end. He gives up the opportunity to own the English Castle Rooksborough and retires to Scotland, where he improves the estates and rewards his friends and relatives. Throughout, Andrew’s plebeian common sense plays an important role in his success. Sir Andrew Wylie thus embodies a wistful desire to create an aristocracy from a commoner, but in doing so, it preserves feudal structures rather than challenging them. Just as Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk anticipates the detective story, so it anticipates Victorian medievalism with its greater faith in the workings of the law and the law’s reinforcement of social hierarchy.


190


9780230103740_08_ch06.indd 190

12/5/2010 12:09:22 PM

T

his study has considered medievalism as a popular phenomenon in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when medievalism was often a form of resistance to the dominant model of classical rationalism. On several occasions during the 1830s, in contrast, medievalism was coopted not to argue that all British people have the same historic rights but rather to justify a stratified society. Before 1832, the majority of working- and middle-class Britons were in the same situation of having no vote in national elections.1 After the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, many middle-class men were enfranchised, but as the Chartists, who were directly influenced by medievalism, pointed out, the right to vote was still tied to the ownership of property, rather than being seen as a historic right. Nevertheless, parliament itself took a symbolically medieval direction when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834. Part of the medieval building was saved from the fire, but this might have been a moment when the home of the English Parliament could have adopted the classical style that influenced civic building of the period in cities such as Paris and Washington. For example, in the 1790s Sir John Soane had produced elaborate plans for a new “Senate House” inspired by Roman architecture that seemed to proclaim that the idea of representative government was drawn from classical Greece and Rome.2 As late as 1834, Robert Smirke, Government Architect to the Office of Works, proposed a new parliament building in Green Park in the Neoclassical style of Sir Christopher Wren’s buildings (Hyde and Barker 99). A few months later, though, after the fire, the government decided that parliament would be rebuilt either in the Gothic or in the Elizabethan style, so the competition to design a new parliament building was limited to entries that would remind observers of Britain’s historical heritage. Of the ninety-seven entries, the committee selected Charles Barry’s design, which was clearly influenced by medieval Gothic architecture.


E pi l ogu e: M edie va l ism Becomes E x pensi v e


9780230103740_09_epi.indd 191

12/5/2010 12:07:57 PM


Such a choice might seem to imply that Britain’s constitution and historic rights were medieval, as had been repeatedly argued during the Romantic era. This is confirmed by plans for pictures and murals commemorating such events as the first trial by jury, Alfred the Great’s law-code,3 and the signing of Magna Carta. When in 1849, Charles Barry published a description of the new Palace of Westminster, it included a history of the building and its constitutional significance by Henry T. Ryder that pronounced that If in these ancient Halls, in the early days when feudality existed in all its fierce monopoly, and barbarism held sway, oppression long maintained the broad line of demarcation between the Baron and the Serf, if for centuries the arbitrary rule of the few repressed the weak, yet Here “the day star if Liberty rose,” Here were held the discussions leading to events which, however procrastinated, doubtful, and at times utterly disregarded, yet again revived and struggled until the progress of Civilization at length gave freedom to body and mind, encouragement to industry, and protection to property. (2:1)

On the other hand, the lavishness of the new Palace of Westminster was such that it seemed to contradict the vision of a simpler, unified medieval past. The text credited to Barry in Illustrations of the New Palace of Westminster, for example, notes that “without doubt, the interior of the House of Lords is the finest specimen of Gothic civil architecture in Europe; its arrangements and decorations being perfect” (no pagination). Barry originally estimated that the new Palace would take six years to build at a cost of £724,986; in fact, the project took more than thirty years and cost over two million pounds (Palace of Westminster 6). At first consideration some of the choice for fresco decoration might seem in the tradition of popular medievalism, as in William Dyce’s subject for the Robing Room, King Arthur. In execution, however, designs such as these helped move medievalism away from populist social criticism toward a courtly, aristocratic medievalism that maintained rather than reanalyzed existing power structures. The design and embellishments of the Palace of Westminster brought the young architect and designer Augustus Welby Northcote Pugin to the fore.4 Although controversy remains as to how much the interior style of the Palace of Westminster should be credited to Pugin and how much to Barry, Pugin seems to have directed the heavily medieval style of the furnishings and worked with the Minton pottery to produce the encaustic tile in the manner of medieval castles and churches.


192


9780230103740_09_epi.indd 192

12/5/2010 12:07:57 PM

193

Pugin, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1835, was completely convinced that England had been better place both aesthetically and ethically in the Middle Ages. In 1836, he published Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste. The engravings paired modern architecture, which in Pugin’s rendering is influenced both by Neoclassicism and by Utilitarianism, with the same scene in the Middle Ages. For example, a “Catholic town in 1440,” with church spires as its highest point, is paired with a rendering of “The Same Town in 1840,” which includes a gasworks, a lunatic asylum, and a “jail” constructed in the form of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Since the pictures were published in 1836 and depict a town of 1840, Pugin is imagining England’s near future. In fact, at this time, no British jails followed the form of the Panopticon, although Pugin’s own distopian vision of a present without medievalism may have played a role in ensuring that such a future did not come to pass.5 The Palace of Westminster combined a visual style with a national ideology, but at the same time, medievalism became expensive on a personal level. An extravagant offshoot of the medievalism of the 1830s was the Eglinton Tournament of 1839. The story of the Eglinton Tournament has been well-told by Mark Girouard (87–110). A group of young noblemen, led by Lord Eglinton, agreed to hold a fully staged tournament at Eglinton Castle, near Kilwinning in Ayrshire, the same county as Sir Andrew Wylie (Besides George III, Lord Eglinton is one of the few real-life figures to be mentioned in Galt’s novel). The preparations were lavish, and modeled extensively on the tournament in Ivanhoe. Participants enthusiastically spent hundreds of pounds to obtain medieval costumes and armor: Girouard states that the “bill for Lord Glenlyon, who fought at the tournament as Knight of Gael, survives, and comes to £346 9s 6d; it was unlikely that even a more economic knight would get off for less than £200” (93). Although the event was expensive for participants, for the public, tickets were free, and the thousands of people who came indicate the level of interest that the event created. On the day of the tournament, however, rain reduced the field of combat to a muddy mess and the would-be combatants to a laughing-stock. Girouard explains that when the weather improved, the tournament was held fairly successfully, but that to many observers the event “seemed sufficiently ludicrous to burst the bubble of modern chivalry for ever” (103). In point of fact, chivalric aspirations continued throughout the Victorian period; yet the Eglinton Tournament may have been


Epilogue


9780230103740_09_epi.indd 193

12/5/2010 12:07:57 PM


a major contributor toward the end of the vision of medievalism as social equality. Medievalism’s triumphant moment was the “Mediaeval Court” at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Led by Pugin, a group of artists produced items large and small in the medieval style to demonstrate that even in an industrial age, craftsmanship and artistry survived. Many of the artifacts had religious functions, such as lecterns and altarpieces. Others, however, were domestic, such as tableware, fireplaces, and even stoves. The “Mediaeval Court” implied that British design had been more harmonious in the Middle Ages, as was the relationship between the religious and the functional. Yet the Crystal Palace was only in some respects a reworking of a medieval cathedral. The Royal Commission in charge of organizing the exhibition, led by Prince Albert, planned from the outset that the venture would be financially self-supporting, and the official catalog shows a delight in listing how much money was collected for the project.6 The final cost of the building was approximately £140,000.7 Moreover, ticket prices spoke class division. On opening day, May 1, admission was limited to those who had paid an extravagant three guineas for a season ticket;8 one day admittance was originally one pound, which represented a week’s wages for many working people, although by May 6, the price had dropped to five shillings (The Times, May 6, 1851, p. 8). Of the six million admissions to the exhibition, three-quarters came on the days when admission was one shilling.9 Many of the visitors to the Great Exhibition on cheap-ticket days must have realized that they, and their medieval ancestors, would never have been able to afford goods made of costly materials with labor-intensive artistry. The idea of medieval Britain now functioned less as an evocation of ancient rights than as the confirmation of present-day privilege.


194


9780230103740_09_epi.indd 194

12/5/2010 12:07:57 PM

Introduction 1. Examples of useful discussion of the range and implications of medievalism include Michael Alexander’s Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England and Richard Utz’s “Speaking of Medievalism: An Interview with Leslie J. Workman,” Medievalism in the Modern World 433–49. 2. George Whalley’s essay “England—Romantic—Romanticism” presents a history of the word “Romantic” in Hans Eichner’s “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a word, 157–262. 3. Some early examples include the following: Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions does not even use the term “Middle Ages,” referring to the period between the fall of Rome and the fifteenthcentury “revival of learning” as “a night of mental darkness” (87). The word “Mediaeval” is used as an editorial title yet not in the article itself in “Sources of Mediaeval Legend and Superstition” (Blackwood’s Magazine 41:741–52, June 1837). The article draws on Thomas Keightley’s 1828 Fairy Mythology, a book that also does not use the word “medieval,” yet shows a need for it when it adopts the phrase “middle age romance.” Sir Francis Palgrave was among the earliest users of the word: “mediaeval period,” for example, appears in his Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar, 404. Clearly showing its Latin original R.T. Hampson, probably also the author of “Sources of Mediaeval Legend and Superstition,” used the word not just in his Latin title but in his text in Medii Aevi Kalendarium; or Dates, Charters and Customs of the Middle Ages (1841). Palgrave, who reviewed the book in The Quarterly Review in 1843, employs it several times in his article. By the time of the Great Exhibition (1851), the word was well-enough established for Pugin and his friends to sponsor a “Mediaeval Court.” See also Fred C. Robinson’s “Medieval, The Middle Ages.” 4. Richmal Mangnall, a Yorkshire schoolmistress, first published her Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People in 1800; by 1813, the book had reached a ninth edition, and it continued to be revised and reissued at least until 1860. The questions and answers provided for children, and especially girls, represent a progressive, Protestant view of history.


No t es


9780230103740_10_not.indd 195

12/5/2010 12:08:05 PM

Notes

5. See, for example, A. Dwight Culler’s discussion of Ruskin and Victorian Medievalism in The Victorian Mirror of History, 152–84. 6. Although Chandler’s title suggests a focus on English literature, her final chapter is devoted to Henry Adams. 7. Carlyle has twice earlier in Past and Present referred to Gurth’s “parings” from Cedric’s pigs. As I have remarked in Reversing the Conquest, this is wishful reading on Carlyle’s part because in Scott’s novel, as soon as Gurth has the opportunity to escape thralldom, he takes it. 8. Kristine Louise Haugen’s essay on Richard Hurd’s 1762 Letters on Chivalry and Romance discusses the role of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in representing the “real” Middle Ages; for Hurd the poem was “utterly real and historical” (50). 9. Other national groups also claimed historic rights. For example, the idea of Saxon freedom was also of interest to Germans, projects such as Felix Liebermann’s edition of Anglo-Saxon law implying some sense of continuity. 10. All women were excluded from political participation until late in the Victorian period, and only in 1928 did they obtain equal voting rights. 11. Lynn Hunt surveys this in Inventing Human Rights: A History, 2. 12. The Middle Ages are defined as the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, although functionally in Britain, they are the period between the departure of the Romans from the British Isles and the English Reformation. 13. Medievalism suggests that in calling her son Charles Philip Arthur George, Queen Elizabeth II may be dooming him to nonsuccession. Henry VII and James I of England both called their eldest sons Arthur, but neither lived to inherit. 14. May McKisack helpfully surveys the Tudors’ sense of the medieval in Medieval History in the Tudor Age, 26–49. 15. Donna B. Hamilton sets out these arguments in her essay on Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. The classic studies of Saxonism as selective Medievalism are J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought; and Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke.” 16. Translation is from Claire Breay’s Magna Carta: Manuscripts and Myths, 52. 17. As Anne Pallister has pointed out, this was not even an original choice, but echoes earlier portraits, such as the English statesman Arthur Beardmore teaching his son Magna Carta (60).


196

1 Rites and Rights: The Topography of Ancient British Law 1. Because English law is distinct from Scottish law, I shall use “British” when referring to Britain as a whole, and “English” when discussing matters especially germane to English law.


9780230103740_10_not.indd 196

12/5/2010 12:08:05 PM

197

2. Sarah M. Zimmerman argues that “Beachy Head features an antiquary who is Smith’s alter ego in the poem, a figure who collects artifacts such as the ‘enormous bones’ of the ‘huge unwieldy Elephant’ (lines 412, 417), as the poet recalls the natural historical events such evidence indicates” (64). Yet Smith also distances herself from the antiquary, whose labors, like the lives of those he seeks to uncover, will implicitly be forgotten; and projects her own identity in referring to her personal observation of remains (163). 3. Smith is here imaginatively recreating the past landscape: in her time, the woods had disappeared. 4. William Camden’s Britannia implies that Pevensey Castle is Norman: by the late eighteenth century, however, others believed its origin to be Roman. For example, Gough’s 1806 edition of the first volume of Camden’s Britannia proclaims the castle Roman. The area around Pevensey bears signs of much later defenses against invasion: in Smith’s own time, Martello towers were built as a defense against Napoleon, and concrete gun-emplacements were established there during the Second World War. 5. Ronald Hutton discusses further contemporary meldings of legends of King Arthur with what he terms “Druidry” and the defense of popular rights in The Druids, 199–200. 6. 6. My focus here is on the Druids in England, not in Ireland and Wales except where interpretations are tinged with “Celtic” significance. 7. I am reading “circum” as “round them,” although some interpreters have read this as “about” and others as “in a circle.” The latter was most attractive to the eighteenth-century antiquaries, who associated Druids with circles. 8. The Loeb translation reads, “On the beach stood the adverse array, a serried mess of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement.” Loeb 156–57. 9. Edmund Burke, Abridgement of English History, Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1886) 7: 195–96. Burke footnotes an irrelevant parallel from Hickes’s Thesaurus. 10. Aubrey Burl’s The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland, and Britanny discusses recent research on stone circles. Burl dedicates the book to the memory of John Aubrey. 11. A.L. Owen (102–3) and also Richard Gough’s 1806 edition of Camden’s Britannia (1:155) summarize these early theories. 12. He points out that snakes are gold and other beautiful colors, and that the brazen serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness is a type of Christ (Abury 57–59).


Notes


9780230103740_10_not.indd 197

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

Notes

13. Although in the Hebrew Bible Abraham does not sacrifice his son Isaac, in Christian typology Isaac symbolically dies, as in some rabbinical writings. 14. Gough published a complete new edition in 1789, but seems only to have revised the first volume for a new issue in 1806. This volume, however, includes the latest theories on Stonehenge and Avebury. 15. One of his most important sources is the “Ossian” poems “translated” by James MacPherson. Ian Duncan describes the Ossianic poems in medievalist terms, as “the past mourning itself as past in the future” (49), but as far as Henry is concerned they are an authentic antiquarian record. 16. Iolo’s own note explains “templed hills” as “The Bardic Circle, or Druidic Temple, as some call it, wherein the Bards meet, is formed of stones called meini gwynion (white stones), or meini crair (stones of testimony), and in the middle of it the maen gorsedd (presidial stone); by all but the Bards called an Altar.” Of “Robes of light,” he explains, “The Bards of the Druidic Order wore unicoloured robes of white, emblematic of Truth, which was, figuratively, said to be of the colour of light, or the Sun: and unicoloured, or in ever thing, time, and place, one and the same thing.” 17. According to Hutton (2007), Neo-Druids often preserve the three orders of Druids, Bards, and Ovates (191). 18. Stephen Gill discusses the historical background to the “Salisbury Plain” poems in “ ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ and Wordsworth’s Poetry of Protest.” 19. Karen Swann’s assertion that the use of the Spenserian imparts a “gothic” tone to the poem is helpful up to a point; as Kristine Louise Haugen has demonstrated though, in the later eighteenth century, Spenser’s writings were more often considered “authentically” archaic than pastiche, and the use of the Spenserian form becomes particularly problematic in a poem that juxtaposes “what really happened” (recent social injustice, the murder committed by the Sailor) and a past that lives in the imagination. 20. I would agree with Alan Liu (195–200) that the acts of sacrifice are associated with the Druids, but would emphasize that the Druids are agents of the common will. 21. Wordsworth adds a note on the Cormorant as a bird of bad omen. I know of no other source that associates cormorants and Druids, but I find it interesting that the image of the bird in the ring of stones was an augury to Arthur Uther Pendragon in the 1980s. 22. The editorial note describes this plate as an “interpolation” that interrupts the sense of the narrative, and advices “the new reader” to skip the passage—even though, unlike plates 3–5, it is included in all four copies. 23. Peter F. Fisher suggests, “State religion may be absolute in the Druidic sense of a totalitarian community controlled by public opinion and


198


9780230103740_10_not.indd 198

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

199

the exclusion of individuals. Deism is the secular and rational remnant of Druidism—the sceptical reaction against the Druids’ delusion.” The Valley of Vision, 41. According to Camden, Lambeth residents “tell you that a Royal palace stood formerly on the west part of the town near Haling, where the rubbish [of building] is now and then digg’d up by the husbandmen; and that the Archbishops after it was bestow’d on them by the king, transferred it to their own palace, nigher the river” (159). Ronald Hutton discusses the myth of Joseph of Arimathea in Druids, Witches, and King Arthur (60–69). David V. Erdman discusses the details of the case in Blake: Prophet against Empire (403–11). Camden’s Britannia (1722) prosaically identifies it as a “Mile-stone” (317). As late as 1912, Sir Laurence Gomme claimed London Stone to have been “always a remarkable centre of rites, ceremonies and traditions” (55). In Unseen London, however, Walter George Bell maintains that it was unknown before the Middle Ages, and it is a medieval building-block (82–88). Even guidebooks to the Salisbury area make this connection. For example, A Complete History of the Druids (1810) contains an engraving of the wicker man and a descriptive guide to Avebury and Stonehenge. Because I am primarily interested in the imagined version of Boadicea, I shall retain the most literary form except when referring to specific sources. One exception to the idea of Boadicea as liberator is found in Iolo’s Triads, where Boadicea is said to have been a traitor who delivered Caradog to the Romans. Iolo seems to have identified her with Cartismandu, queen of the Brigantes. See Iolo Morganwyg, The Triads of Britain, 29, 80. In Jerusalem 3:74, the daughters of Albion are driven out by Los and become the Canaanites; other women of Genesis have British counterparts (e.g., Dinah/Erin). The sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland thought that Camelodunum was Colchester, but later scholars disagreed with him.

2

Taking Medievalism Home: The National Melody


Notes

1. Trumpener’s main focus is on the rise the National Tale rather than on the National Melody. Her work provides a useful discussion of the origins of bardic nationalism (3–11). 2. Elizabeth Fay has argued convincingly that the figure of the troubadour is “a figure for the combined pursuit of artistic mastery and political resistance that perfectly answered the contingency of a


9780230103740_10_not.indd 199

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

Notes

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

historically turbulent moment” (4). Even though historically, minstrels and troubadours might be different names for the same pursuit, I am here avoiding the term “troubadour” because of the late eighteenth-century construction of the Minstrel as the supporter of feudal patronage. Percy is quoting Anna Williams’s essay “Blondiaux” in her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 46–47. Williams gives her direct source as a sixteenth-century French book edited by Fauchet. Thomas Carlyle mentions the lavish “Opera-Repast” where the band played the song to Louis’s family as a cause of resentment among the starving poor in The French Revolution, A History 1:178–79, 204. Although Hales and Furnivall here use the spelling “Sir Cauline,” I am using the spelling “Sir Cawline” for the ms. version and “Sir Cauline” for Percy’s version. Hales and Furnivall insist that Percy understood the reference to the five-headed giant, but instead created the character of a dwarf who carried five trophy-heads of “kinges which he hath slain” for his master the giant. It seems possible to me that Percy was misled by the word “squier,” but I accept that he preferred a more rational giant sultan to a supernatural figure. Clare Broome Saunders makes a similar point about Louisa Stuart Costello’s translation of Marie de France’s “Bisclavret” (Saunders 25–26). For example, McLane 64–68; Ian Duncan provides a useful overview of recent reconsiderations of the Ossianic controversy (47–52). Observing that “Scott’s confidence in the genuine antiquity of ‘Auld Maitland’ seems to have been due partly to his general enthusiasm for the subject,” Henderson appends a long note on how Hogg presented questionable texts as genuine (1:242). Henderson suggests that the ballad may have its origins in accounts of James VI’s marriage with Anne of Denmark, and that “the absence of any references to it in the older writers is almost proof that it had no existence until towards the close of the sixteenth century” (1:222). The full title is “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry and the Various Collections of Ballads in Britain, Particularly those of Scotland” (1). According to Graeme Morton, a sixteenth-century revision of Blind Harry’s Wallace converted Wallace into a Protestant. Presumably this is why the site www.reformation.org, which reproduces the Classic Comics edition, claims The Scottish Chiefs as “one of the greatest historical novels ever written. It portrays the war for Scottish Independence (1296–1305) from the hated Roman Catholic VikingNormans led by King Edward I” (www.reformation.org/smallchiefs3.jpg, 02/09/2010). The later Marquis of Hastings came briefly into a government position in the Fox-Greville Ministry of 1806–7 and was able to assist


200


9780230103740_10_not.indd 200

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

201

Moore’s father by giving him the position of barrack-master at Dublin. White notes that as late as the 1930s, James Joyce recommended to a singer that he should obtain and learn some of Moore’s songs (White 73). Some of the selections in this collection are not too surprising, such as a lament for Burns composed to the tune of “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” but some are odder. A “Lament for Byron” to the tune “To Anacraeon in Heaven” seems strange in a collection of Scottish melodies, since neither Byron nor the melody, which had already become associated with Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” was Scottish. In 1845, Thomas Commuck, a Narragansett Indian from Wisconsin Territory, published Indian Melodies with assistance from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Commuck’s Indian Melodies set the words of familiar hymns to Indian tunes, but his Preface proclaims the nationalist goal of showing Indian creativity and also preserving Indian traditions at a time when they were they were under threat: he explains that he named the tunes after “noted Indian chiefs, Indian females, Indian names of places, &c . . . as a tribute of respect to the memory of some tribes that are now nearly if not quite extinct” (viii). In 1846, Longman published a new edition of the Irish Melodies illustrated by Daniel Maclise. The pictures suggest only the vaguest notion of what eleventh-century Irish life might be like, and imagine it in a form that is indistinguishable from accounts of the AngloSaxons. There does not seem to be anything especially Irish about the mead-hall in the picture for “The Harp that once through Tara’s Hall,” and even the harp, although close to the illustration on Harp Lager, is similar to depictions of a Welsh harp. Similar stories of the safety of earlier ages are recorded of the reign of Edward Elder and Alfred the Great of England. “The words of this song were suggested by the very ancient Irish story called ‘Deirdri, or the Lamentable Fate of the Sons of Usnach,’ which has been translated literally from the Gaelic by Mr. O’Flanagan” (261, note).

3 Medievalism Onstage in the French Revolutionary Era


Notes

1. The plays under discussion were intended for wide audiences; I am not here discussing the many closet dramas of period that make use of medievalism such as Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler since my focus is on popular representation. 2. These plays do not seem to have been performed, but Baillie clearly wrote them with the hope that they would be. Her play De Monfort was staged at least twice.


9780230103740_10_not.indd 201

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

Notes

3. George Watson (d. 1841) later married into a wealthy slave-owning family and became George Watson-Taylor. 4. Waldron, who provides a helpful overview of the play’s production, notes that “according to a handwritten note on a Bath playbill dated November 24 [1798], preserved in the Harvard Theatre Collection, Yearsley received eighty pounds” (186). 5. The Goodwin Sands are sandbanks in the English Channel that legend holds were once the property of Earl Godwin. The spelling “Goodwin” can be found in other dramas of the age, such as John O’Keefe’s Peeping Tom of Coventry (1784). 6. This version also contains—and criticizes—the story of Queen Emma’s ordeal and the earl’s death. The same text was published as Rapin’s Impartial History of England, translated by John Kelly, in 1784; and in 1789, where N. Tindal is given credit as editor and translator. Not all names coincide with this edition—for example, it favors the spelling “Toston” for Goodwin’s rebellious son, where Yearsley prefers “Tostie”—but it seems likely that Yearsley had access to this kind of annotated text. 7. The story of Alfred’s death bears a resemblance to the story of Prince Arthur in Shakespeare’s King John, so the reference to Arthur seems to be a slip on the part of Yearsley or her printer. 8. According to Rapin, Goodwin tells Edward, “ ‘to give you a fresh proof of my innocence, I pray God that this morsel I am going to eat may choak me this moment, if I had any hand in the death of that prince.’ It is pretended, that upon saying these words, he went to swallow the fatal morsel, but it stuck in his throat and choaked him immediately” (1:119). Notes in the 1784 English translation, however, contradict the story as a monkish fabrication. 9. William Meyler of Bath was a future editor of the Bath Herald who specialized in writing this type of verse. 10. Kelly attributes the play to Charles Dibdin; I have found no evidence to date that Dibdin wrote a Peeping Tom and given the popularity of O’Keefe’s versions, it seems likely that Moore’s play was either a version of O’Keefe’s or some rearrangement of Dibdin’s music to create a similar farce. 11. The part was actually played by a woman. 12. According to the chronicles, Cadwallan died in the 630s, some forty years after the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury yet after the time traditionally ascribed to King Arthur, so no consistency should be looked for in the chronology. 13. In this play the Bard is cut off before he makes an explicit prophecy, yet in Baillie’s Ethwald, Druids, or more specifically Druidesses, are able to foretell the future like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to which Baillie freely admitted a debt (Plays 2:195); in keeping with Baillie’s focus on the passions, though, the Druidess predicts a personal, rather than a national, future.


202


9780230103740_10_not.indd 202

12/5/2010 12:08:06 PM

203

14. The prefatory material to the 1794 printed text spells the title The Taylors, the spelling also used in The Times’s account of the disaster. 15. According the 1774 Dublin edition, Samuel Foote himself wrote the play; the 1794 printed text, in contrast, asserts the anonymous author sent the play to Foote. 16. The young prince was played by a girl in London and a boy in Dublin. Adeline and Gondibert’s children are said to be “safe,” but do not appear in the play. 17. Other passages in Froissart’s chronicle complicate the question of Edward III’s magnanimity. According to Froissart, Edward had allowed “all poor and mean people” of Calais to leave before the siege (ch. 133). The main story of the surrender of Calais is in chapter 146. In the following chapter, however, the king arrests Jean de Vienne and holds him for ransom. 18. The citizens are traditionally referred to as “The Burghers of Calais,” but this phrase does not appear in the play. 19. O’Carroll contributes nothing to the plot, but sings several Irish songs; his role appears to be to increase the comedic and musical aspects of the story. 20. Colman uses the term humorously to confirm that Blue-Beard would have been performed after the main dramatic work of the evening as a dessert after the main course. 21. Abimelech was a priest-king of the time of Abraham, whose name contains the elements both of God and of father; the name’s heavily patriarchal associations make it appropriate for the oppressor of women 22. In the printed text, the revelation of the Blue Chamber is done twice, once by Blue-Beard’s servant and once by Fatima, yet according to Colman’s note, onstage, the first revelation was omitted. A major reason might have been the technical difficulties in making the chamber transform, but if the audience first sees the horrors of the room at the same time as Fatima, the dramatic effect would surely be greater. 23. Thomas Holcroft’s version of the The Marriage of Figaro, The Follies of a Day, was first produced at Drury Lane Theatre in 1784.

4

The Radical Bestiary

1. The word “men” in most instances means that: those of the male gender. Some radicals, including some of those who wrote in The Black Dwarf, also placed women in the category of Man, and thus entitled to equal rights. Most ignored woman altogether. 2. The Constitution of the United States might appear to be the statement in writing of natural rights. The fact, however, that it has been amended many times would seem to contradict the idea that it embodies natural rights. The Supreme Court in theory enforces the constitution, but its law depends upon the interpretation of the document, so that in many cases it creates or takes away rights.


Notes


9780230103740_10_not.indd 203

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

Notes

3. Marcus Wood presents contemporary views of Spence and an interesting discussion of his token coinage in his Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822, 65–82. 4. J. Holli Wheatcroft discusses the classical sources of the bestiaries in her essay, “Classical Ideology in the Medieval Bestiary” (Hassig 141–54.). Florence McCulloch catalogues bestiary contents in her Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. 5. Misericord seats, found in many medieval European churches, have a carved boss on the underside of the seat so that when the seat is tipped up, they can be perched on during lengthy church services that require the celebrants to stand. Animals, both real and legendary, frequently feature in the carvings, sometimes realistically, and sometimes as allegories. For example, at St. Mary’s parish church, Ripple, Worcestershire, pigs are depicted in daily life: in one scene, a man knocks down giant acorns for pigs to eat, and in another, a pig is being killed. Elsewhere, pigs often play musical instruments; at St. Mary the Virgin, Richmond, a pig plays bagpipes while other pigs dance. 6. The Cato Street Conspiracy that led to the execution of four Spencean revolutionaries in 1820 was certainly a real plot to murder government ministers, but the government structure seems never to have been at risk: Sidmouth’s agents were well aware of what was being planned. David Johnson analyzes the threat in Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood. 7. Henry “Orator” Hunt (1773–1835) was unrelated to (James Henry) Leigh Hunt and his nephew Henry Leigh Hunt, who succeeded his father and uncle as editor of The Examiner, although for much of this time, their political stances were fairly similar. 8. The Black Dwarf is said in the prospectus to be a chameleon figure, neither “European” nor “Indian,” neither real nor imaginary; yet he later states that “this is the land I came to in search of freedom” (708); he thus bears some affinity with an escaped slave. 9. “Leavened” does not make much sense in this context, although “levied” might. Perhaps the writer is recalling 1 Corinthians 5:6: “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” 10. For example, a Medusa article of May 8, 1819 is titled, “Condition of the Country, and an Exposition of some of the State Leeches.” 11. Goldsmith’s Natural History includes some gruesome stories of slaves eaten by sharks, 238–41. 12. The satirist Eaton Stannard Barrett, who chose for himself the swinish alias of Cervantes Hogg, published a beast-fable in 1807 where the “fox” who “had seen a Royal brood, /And oft had long’d to taste their blood” appears to be Charles James Fox. Some of James Gillray’s cartoons visually pun on Fox’s name: for example, in “A new Administration” (1783), Fox is portrayed with a Fox’s head as


204


9780230103740_10_not.indd 204

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

205

he helps his coalition partner Lord North administer an enema to Britannia (Draper Hill Plate 4). M.S. Bodley 764, an English bestiary from the mid-thirteenth century, contains some discussion of pigs. “Sows” are described as “unclean,” while wild boars are fierce (Barber 84–87). Gower probably has a specific rebel in mind for the wild boar of Kent, presumably an associate of Wat Tyler. The wild boar does not appear to be inciting the other pigs directly like a leader, although it is clearly setting them an example of how to destroy property. This is apparent in Henry J. Todd’s 1810 Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer, 112–13. Charles and Mary Lamb, Poetry for Children. A common late medieval design for misericord seats was a pig playing a bagpipe, which seems to be a warning to avoid swinish behavior. Surprisingly few responses turn the equation round and point out that the governing classes behave more like pigs. According to David Johnson, the Spenceans sang a song about the Prince Regent “which began ‘There lives a hog in Pall Mall’ to the tune of “Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill” (14). One would presumably need to be fairly drunk to think these words fit the tune. The first chapter of Frederick D. Kershner’s 1938 attack on notions of a decorous Middle Ages, Those Gay Middle Ages, is titled “Pigs is Pigs.” Kershner points out that pigs lived indiscriminately with people in the medieval period. For Romantic-era radicals, this would not necessarily have been a sign that civilization has progressed: after all, if pigs roamed, it suggests a commonalty that is part of the extreme radical vision of an ideal English economy. The Farmer’s Boy sold 25,000 copies in the first two years and went through fifteen British editions by 1827. There were also multiple American editions. According to Stevenson and Erdman, this verse dates from 1809 to 1812, so the reference may be to Toby rather than the first Learned Pig. Another poem about the same incident is spoken by a member of the yeomanry who not only says “The fate of the swine we’ll determine, / Repeated insults they shall rue, /They think us detestable vermin, / More fitted for halters than blue” but identifies himself as sprung “from a vagabond Jew” (Song XXXIII: Raddle-Neck’d Tups). Or one of his wives; the future George IV seems also to have been married to “Mrs. Fitzherbert” of Brighton. P.M.S. Dawson recounts that Horace Smith, who in Shelley’s absence from England took care of publishing the work, was forced to surrender all the copies (179–80). “Sir Hugh, Or, The Jew’s Daughter,” from Jamieson’s popular ballads, where the reciter is the famous recoverer of folk-ballads, Mrs. Brown.


Notes


9780230103740_10_not.indd 205

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

Notes

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Although it is hard to trace the provenance of Romantic-era ballads back to medieval predecessors, the story of Sir Hugh is genuinely medieval. Chaucer’s Prioress alludes to it at the conclusion of her similar tale of a child murdered by Jews, and it was used as grounds for persecuting Jews in England and elsewhere; by Chaucer’s time, Jews had been expelled from England. As Carlos Baker notes, Purganax is Greek for castle-king (Castlereagh); Dakry suggests “tear” in Greek, recalling Eldon’s habit of shedding tears; and Laoktonos may mean “people-slayer” (Baker 179). For example, Washington Irving talks about “John Bullism” in The Sketch-Book (1820); also in 1820, an antiradical paper commenced publication under the name of John Bull; it was also the title of one of George Colman the Younger’s most popular plays, published in 1805. I am not going to attempt to identify the Pork-Butchers, but Shelley may himself have had Malthus and specific Malthusians in mind. For example, in “A Political Christmas Carol,” at the end Castlereagh pets two human-headed rats; one of these, in a judge’s wig, is, I believe, Gifford. The judge-headed rat is also found in Hone’s own bestiary, The Political Showman, where Sidmouth “The Doctor” has no body at all. David Kent and D.R. Ewen follow an earlier suggestion that he is depicted as a clysterpipe, used to give an enema, but the captions include Swift’s line “To bleed adventured he not, except the Poor” (Kent and Ewen 270), so he may possibly be meant to be a leech. I am thus not disagreeing with John Todhunter’s suggestion that the Gadfly is Slander, the Leech Taxation, and the Rat Espionage (207– 8)—but I would contend Shelley is following the radical tradition that associates actual individuals with the characteristics of government. The story is in Higden’s Polychronicon, but it is also mentioned in Todd’s Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer in Todd’s reprint of the sixteenth-century Francis Thynne’s notes on Chaucer (74–75). Interestingly, this ordeal is said to have taken place at St. Swithin’s Church, later the location of London Stone that Blake believed a link to ancient times. Nicholas Roe, biographer of Leigh Hunt, reaches a similar tentative conclusion about the Cambridge connection in his review of Anderson’s edition (191–93). Douglas A. Anderson has noted the resemblance to George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the representation of the corrupting nature of power (vii–viii), but the narrator’s self-interested admiration of the system seems very like John Higgs in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Edmund Champlin provides some bibliographical background in his essay (174). Elizabeth Meyer states that the Testamentum Porcelli was known to St. Jerome, who mentions it in his commentary on Isaiah (63).


206


9780230103740_10_not.indd 206

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

Notes

Buried Alive: Gothic Reading and Medievalist Subjectivity

1. The 1826 work cited earlier, published during the debate on Catholic Emancipation, is largely a compilation from John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. This story, in an appended section on the Inquisition, credits the source as Anthony Gavin’s Master-Key to Popery, printed in 1725, where the narrative of Mrs. Faulcaut, as in later versions told in the first person, takes eighteen pages (Gavin 1:122–40). The story also appears in the 1810 History of the Inquisitions; including the Secret Transactions of those Horrific Tribunals, 294. 2. This raises the question of whether Poe’s narrator is a woman. Most discussions of Poe’s sources, such as that by George E. Woodberry, cite stories and articles in Blackwood’s. 3. E.J. Clery presents a useful overview of the development of the genre in “The Genesis of the ‘Gothic’ Form.” Maggie Kilgour surveys the historical and legal connotations in The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 10–15. 4. Although this introduction initially appears to ascribe a sense of right to modernity, it nevertheless presents the Middle Ages as “the gradual corruption of the pure religion of JESUS, in ages of false philosophy, of dark barbarity, and of refining subtlety” (viii). 5. A source on the end of the Inquisition available to English readers was Juan Antonio Llorente’s Critical History of the Inquisition in Spain, translated into English in 1823. 6. See, for example, Kilgour 23–31; Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution also recognizes the Gothic novel as political commentary. 7. I have discussed the Romantic-era Magna Carta in “Absent Presence: The Romantic-Era Magna Charta and the English Constitution.” 8. One might reasonably expect that her Protestant conscience would baulk at acting the lie of being a Catholic, but this does not seem a concern in the novel. 9. Traditionally, the destruction was attributed to Oliver Cromwell, but most major destruction of figurative representation in English churches more likely occurred earlier, under Henry VIII and Edward VI. 10. If the event was already some years distant when Grose wrote in 1789, the discovery of the skeleton was most likely more than fifty years earlier. I suspect that only about the time that Grose wrote were the facts interpreted as evidence of an immuring. 11. Stage directions for Romantic-era dramas make it apparent that any self-respecting theatre could create a “Gothic” set: for example, the opening stage-direction of Maturin’s Bertram reads, “Night, a gallery in a Convent, a large Gothic window in the extremity through which lightning is seen flashing” (Cox 319).


5

207


9780230103740_10_not.indd 207

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

Notes

12. Michel Foucault draws attention to the public nature of punishment in eighteenth-century France in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 13. In Lewis’s Venoni, or The Novice of St. Mark’s (1808), Venoni’s love Josepha is compelled to take the veil; later, her death is faked and she is buried alive, although all finally ends happily. In this respect, the plot is actually closer to The Monk than is Raymond and Agnes, the play based on the “Bleeding Nun” episode. The original French drama that inspired Venoni was set in the Revolutionary era, but Lewis changed the characters into traditional aristocrats. 14. Although presumably there were many more about whom all records have been lost, according to Warren’s estimation, about one hundred anchorites are known to have lived in England in the twelfth century, two hundred in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and a declining number in the sixteenth century; of these, more than 50 percent were female (Warren 292–93). 15. Translated by Rotha Mary Clay in The Hermits and Anchorites of England, 193. The earliest printed version of the text appears to have been published by the Surtees Society in 1875. 16. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, George Hickes attempted to show that Anglo-Saxon was derived from “Moeso-Gothic” in his Preface to a comparative grammar of the two languages included in his study of “Northern Languages.” 17. G.R. Porter’s compendium of statistics, The Progress of the Nation, explains that the increased rate of criminal convictions in post-Georgian Britain is “in great part a consequence of successive mitigations of the severity by which our criminal code was formerly characterized, and which indisposed juries to convict in cases where the penalty was incommensurate with the crime” (2:179). 18. The full severity of the law could not be imposed because the marriage had taken place at Antwerp, and because the clergyman who officiated claimed not to be party to the fraud (Ambler’s Chancery Reports 1: 301–6). 19. Porter, 2:177–79; Frank McLynn also makes this point. 20. Ronald Paulson presents a good contextualization of Catherine’s behavior as a reader in “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” 532–33. 21. Cobbett’s vision of monasteries as holding in trust communal property may be indebted to Thomas Spence’s idea in of arranging “parishes” as communes. Spence presented this idea as early as the 1780s. (Spence, Rights of Man 11–12); Cobbett located this idyllic form of society in the past, and Spence in the future; even then, Spence describes the establishment of parishes as corporations as the reclaiming of “long lost Rights” (11). 22. Alice Chandler, who presents a useful overview of the work, including its sources, observes that “as history, Cobbett’s study of the


208


9780230103740_10_not.indd 208

12/5/2010 12:08:07 PM

Notes

209

Reformation is often nonsense and his analysis of its effect as ridiculous in some ways as it is profound in others” (74).

Scottish Lawyers, Feudal Law

1. Laurence Templeton’s introduction nevertheless draws a connection with the Waverley Novels by presenting himself on the same plane of reality as Jonathan Oldbuck, Scott’s Antiquary (13). Just how anonymous Scott was has been debated at length: clearly, many people of his time made the connection between Scott the poet and the “Author of Waverley.” 2. One of the very few written commentaries before Stair’s was Thomas Craig’s Ius Feudale, which also assumes a strong Roman connection. 3. In his introduction to Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, John Stuart Mill argues that the system “ought to be reformed thoroughly, and one a comprehensive plan; not piecemeal, but at once” (1:xiii). In fact, by the time that this book appeared in print, Sir Robert Peel was already making extensive penal reforms that would permanently change Britain’s use of capital punishment. By the accession of Queen Victoria, the death penalty was rarely used for any crime but murder. 4. McLynn provides examples: horse-stealing would often result in a death-sentence (90), but for other offenses juries might be reluctant to convict: “On one occasion it was clearly established that a large number of golden guineas had been stolen, yet the jury chose to reduce the charge from felony to misdemeanour by finding that less than forty shillings been stolen!”(xii). 5. Alexander Welsh has discussed the implications for narrative of Bentham’s theory of circumstantial evidence in Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England, 16–42. 6. Unless Mill clearly claims to be speaking in his own voice, I shall ascribe the views to Bentham rather than Mill. 7. Bentham’s comment that nobody believes that witches fly on broomsticks may, in fact, be in question in the Harry Potter era, where children are more likely to identify a broomstick as a wizard’s equipment than a tool for sweeping the floor. 8. For example, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, the editor Edmund King points out that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the barons of Stephen’s reign as both breaking their oaths to the king and unjustly oppressing the people (1). Anarchy, then, violates feudal obligations to support and to protect. 9. The novel’s delay in naming the captain as Robin Hood suggests that Scott expected his readers to recognize the name and significance of Robin Hood when he is finally identified. I have chosen not to discuss the figure of Robin Hood in detail in this study partly because his role as a hero of the people has been well analyzed elsewhere, and partly


6


9780230103740_10_not.indd 209

12/5/2010 12:08:08 PM

Notes

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

because during the Romantic era Robin Hood was less distinctly a “popular” hero than earlier (as in the Robin Hood ballads) or later, when Ivanhoe itself had helped connect the story with the myth of the Norman Yoke. Even the versions of the Robin Hood story that claim him noble lineage, however, imply that the law is flawed. Stephanie L. Barczewski provides a useful survey of the figure of Robin Hood in Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. As Ian Duncan notes, a more accurate translation might be “unfortunate” (544), but the narrative insists on a legal definition. On Scott’s indebtedness to Turner, see Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 53–60, 79–82. See, for example, Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 94–115. Interestingly, this coincides with Stair’s definition of natural law (76). Scott leaves it slightly ambivalent as to whether Miriam was killed as a witch or simply as a Jew, the narrative noting that “the fate of Miriam had indeed been to fall a sacrifice to the fanaticism of the time” (295). Beaumanoir later states that she was killed as a witch (392), but his determination to kill Rebecca for the same reason seems to make the charge of witchcraft merely a cover for the charge of being Jewish. The Lord Chancellor still in theory appoints Justices of the Peace in England. The positions are largely filled through volunteers. Galt explains in his Autobiography that he embarked on the study of law at Lincoln’s Inn, but realized that he had no influential friends to assist him in his career, so he abandoned the endeavor (1:113–115). The fictional Andrew Wylie, in contrast, succeeds in making such friends. George III was, of course, safely dead when Galt portrayed him as a kindly old man of the people. Galt was obliged to explain that the incident in which Andrew unknowingly talks with the king was not based on a real incident from Galt’s own life, but based on his sense of the “half gilly, half gutchard” old king (463). When Andrew returns home, he hears the thirtieth psalm in the Scottish metrical form and remembers his task (377). He seldom quotes the Psalms directly, however, and when he quotes the phrase “pen of a ready writer” from Psalm 45 he uses the King James version, not the metrical version (31). Patient Griselda, whose loyalty is tested by her husband, was known to British readers from the Decameron, and also from Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Maria Edgeworth published a novel titled The Modern Griselda in 1805. Lord Sandyford too is said to possess “an acute perception of the latent powers of character” (65). I have discussed the tendency of baronets to attempt to seduce gamekeepers’ daughters in “Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism.”


210


9780230103740_10_not.indd 210

12/5/2010 12:08:08 PM

211

Andrew himself will, one assumes, end up a virtuous baronet, but it is interesting that the major villain of this plot is simultaneously representative of the oppressive classes of baronet, lord of the manor, and judge. 22. Although the novel explains the entire publication history of the pamphlet, its politics remain obscure. Seemingly, Sandyford, writing at his feudal home, is defending “the venerable institutions of successive wisdom and experience” (135) against revolution. This would be in keeping with the politics of Galt’s publisher’s Blackwood’s Magazine. 23. The phrase “pigs and whistles,” which here denotes financial incompetence, may be related to the musical pigs of misericord seats who represent human self-indulgence. 24. The fourteenth-century Richard Whittington was not a poor widow’s son, but becomes the embodiment of a boy of humble birth who, with the aid of a “wonderful cat,” finds fame and fortune in London and through travel in later stories.

Epilogue 1. Until the very late 1800s, women had no votes at all, so the discussion here only concerns men. 2. Soane’s design, requested by the House of Lords in 1794, was a more practical variation of a design for a “Senate House” to replace the Palace of Westminster that he had begun as early as 1779. Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde present a variety of classically inspired plans for the Houses of Parliament in London as it might have been, 97–99. 3. As Joanne Parker notes, one of the prizewinners for fresco designs for the new Palace was John Bridges’s Alfred submitting his Code of Laws for the Approval of the Witan (J. Parker 129–30). 4. Pugin is not credited in Illustrations, but his name and contribution to the Medieval Revival is probably better-remembered than is Barry’s. The extent of his role in the decoration of the New Palace of Westminster is still a matter of controversy, as explained in Alexandra Wedgwood’s article on the Palace in Pugin, A Gothic Passion, 219–36. Neither Barry nor Pugin were to live to see the project’s completion. 5. As Janet Semple has shown in her study of the concept of the Panopticon prison, just as Pugin’s medieval landscapes are idealized, Pugin’s “present” is more of a distopia rather the representation of an actual workhouse. 6. The “History of the Great Exhibition” in the Illustrated Catalogue states that “on the 29th of April, they had in hand 113,044l. [i.e., pounds]:—namely, 63,344l. arising from public subscriptions; 3200l. from Messrs. Spicer & Clowes for the privilege of printing the Catalogues; 5500l. from Messrs. Schweppe, for the privilege of


Notes


9780230103740_10_not.indd 211

12/5/2010 12:08:08 PM

Notes

supplying refreshments; and 40,000l. arising from the sale of season tickets” (xviii). 7. Hermione Hobbes explains that the original estimated cost of the glass and iron structure was £79,000, which was raised to £107,780 7s 6d as the plan became more lavish. Because the limited time available to complete the project drove the builder’s costs much higher, the commission paid them an additional £35,000 (Hobbes 38–39). 8. Seemingly, the advance season ticket price was two guineas; letters to The Times on April 25 protest the increase to three guineas, and the fact that exhibitors were obliged to buy a season ticket. Three guineas is conservatively the equivalent of $400 today. 9. A shilling is one-twentieth of one pound and one sixty-third of three guineas.


212


9780230103740_10_not.indd 212

12/5/2010 12:08:08 PM

Alexander, Michael. Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Atterbury, Paul, and Clive Wainewright, eds. Pugin, A Gothic Passion. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818; London: Penguin, 1985. Baer, Marc. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Baillie, Joanna. A Series of Plays: In which it is attempted to delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. New Edition. London, Longman, 1821. Baker, Carlos. Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948. Barber, Richard, ed. Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M.S. Bodley 764. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999. Barczewski, Stephanie L. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Barker, Felix, and Ralph Hyde. London as it might have been. 1982; London: John Murray, 1995. Barry, Sir Charles. Illustrations of the New Palace of Westminster, With A History of the Palace of Westminster by Henry T. Ryder. London: Warrington, 1849. Beiderwell, Bruce. Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Bell, Walter George. Unseen London. New edition. London: Spring Books, 1966. Bentham, Jeremy. Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Ed. J. S. Mill. 4 vols. London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827. Biddick, Kathleen. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. London: 1765–69. Blake, George Palmer, ed. The Great Exhibition: London’s Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851. 1851; facsimile edition New York: Gramercy Books, 1995. Blake, William. The Complete Poems. Ed. W. H. Stevenson. Text by David V. Erdman. London: Longman/Norton, 1971, rpt. 1980.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 213

12/5/2010 12:08:15 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Blake, William. The Illuminated Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. 1974; New York: Dover Books, 1992. Boaden, James. The Cambro-Britons, An Historical Play. London, 1798. Bloomfield, Robert. The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem. London: Vernor and Hood, 1800. Bondeson, Jan. The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Sir Jasper’s Tenant. 3 vols. London: Tauchnitz, 1865. Breay,Claire. Magna Carta: Manuscripts and Myths. London: British Library, 2002. Bruhm, Steven. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, rpt. 1990. Bunting, Edward, ed. General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music. London, 1796. Burke, Edmund. Abridgement of English History. Works 7. Boston: Little, Brown, 1886. ———. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. London: Penguin, 1968, rpt. 1986. Burl, Aubrey. The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland, and Britanny. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Burns, Robert. Commonplace Book 1783–85. Ed. David Daiches. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Burns, Robert, the Younger, ed. The Caledonian Musical Museum. 3 vols. Rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1976. Caesar, C. Julius. Gallic War. With a translation by H.J. Edwards. London: Heinemann, c.1917. Camden, William. Britannia; or, A Chorographical description of the flourishing kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Ed. and expanded by Edmund Gibson. 1695. New edition. 2 vols. London, 1722. ———. Britannia. Ed. and expanded by Richard Gough. New edition. 4 vols. London: Stockdale, 1806. Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution, A History. 1837. 3 vols. London: Routledge, nd. ———. Past and Present. 1843. Selected Works. London: Chapman and Hall, 1890. Carr, Alexander Allan. A History of Coldingham Priory. Edinburgh: Black, 1836. Cartwright, Major John. The Commonwealth in Danger; With an Introduction, containing Remarks on some late Writings of Arthur Young, Esq. London, 1795. Cassius, Dio Cocceianus. Roman History. Trans. Earnest Carey. 9 vols. London: Heinemann, 1954–56.


214


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 214

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

215

Champlin, Edmund. “The Testament of the Piglet.” Phoenix 41:2 (1987): 174–83. Chandler, Alice. A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in NineteenthCentury English Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Chisolm, John, ed. Sir Walter Scott as a Judge. Edinburgh: W. Green, 1918. Christian Martyrdom; Being Authentic Accounts of the Persecutions inflicted by the Church of Rome on the Protestants; also, the History of the Inquisition. London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1826. Clare, John. Poems. Ed. J.W. Tibble. London: Dent, 1935. Clay, Rotha Mary. The Hermits and Anchorites of England. London: Methuen, 1914. Clery, E.J. “The Genesis of the ‘Gothic’ Form.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cobbett, William. A History of the Protestant “Reformation” of England and Ireland. 1824–26. 2 vols. New York: Kennedy, 1895. Coleridge,S.T. Shorter Works and Fragments. Ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson. London: Routledge/Princeton University Press, 1995. Colman, George, The Younger. The Battle of Hexham, A Comedy. Dublin, 1790. ———. Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! 2nd ed. London, 1798. ———. Feudal Times; Or, The Banquet-Gallery: A Drama. London, c. 1799. ———. The Iron Chest, A Play. 2nd ed. London, 1796. ———. The Surrender of Calais, A Play. Dublin, 1792. A Complete History of the Druids. Lichfield: Lomax, 1810. Commuck, Thomas. Indian Melodies. New York: A.M.E. Church, 1845. Cowper, William. The Poems of William Cowper. Ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Cross, John Carpenter. Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty. 1797. Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992. Culler, A. Dwight. The Victorian Mirror of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Curry, Kenneth, ed. The Contributions of Robert Southey to the “Morning Post.” Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Daiches, David. Robert Burns. London: Deutsch, 1966. Dawson, P.M.S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Diderot, Denis. The Nun. 1796. Translated and edited by Russell Goulbourne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Duncan, Ian. “The Pathos of Abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson.” Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 215

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Dyer, Gary. “Ivanhoe, Chivalry, and the Murder of Mary Ashford.” Criticism 39.3 (Summer 1997): 388–408. Eichner, Hans. “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet against Empire. 1959; New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Erkelenz, Michael. “The Genre and Politics of Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant.” Review of English Studies 47 (1996): 500–520. Fabre-Vassas, Claudine. The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig. Trans. Carol Volk. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Fay, Elizabeth. Romantic Medievalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Fisher, Peter F. “Blake and the Druids.” Discussions of William Blake. Ed. John E. Grant. Boston: Heath, 1961: 28–43. ———. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Ed. Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Foote, Samuel (?). The Taylors, A Tragedy for Warm Weather. Dublin, 1767. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Furst, Lilian R., ed. and trans. European Romanticism: Self-Definition. London: Methuen, 1980. Galt, John. Sir Andrew Wylie of That Ilk. 1822. Introduction by S.R. Crockett. 2 vols. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1936. Gavin, Anthony. A Master-Key to Popery. 5 vols. London, 1725. Gill, Stephen. “ ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ and Wordsworth’s Poetry of Protest,” Studies in Romanticism 11:1 (1972): 48–65. Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 3rd ed. Rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946. –——. Things as They are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794: London, Penguin, 1988. Goldsmith, Oliver. An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature. 8 vols. London, 1774. Gomme, Sir Laurence. The Making of London. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. Gower, John. Vox Clamantis. The Complete Works of John Gower. Ed. G. C. Macaulay Oxford: Clarendon, 1902, rpt. 1968. Graham, John. Scottish National Melodies. New York, 1841. Gray, Thomas. The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, English, Latin and Greek. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. Grose, Francis. The Antiquities of Scotland. 2 vols. London: S. Hooper, 1789. Hales, John W. and Frederick Furnivall, eds. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. 3 vols. London: Trubner, 1868; reissue with Preface by Leslie Shepard. 1967. Hamilton, Donna B. “Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence: A Catholic Antiquarian Replies to John Foxe, Thomas Copper, and Jean Bodin.” Prose Studies 22:1 (April 1999): 1–39.


216


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 216

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

217

Hampson, R.T. Medii Aevi Kalendarium; or Dates, Charters and Customs of the Middle Ages. 1841. ———. “Sources of Mediaeval Legend and Superstition.” Blackwood’s Magazine 41 (June 1837): 741–52. Hassig, Debra, ed. The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature. New York: Garland, 1999. ———. Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Haugen, Kristine Louise. “Chivalry and Romance in the Eighteenth Century: Richard Hurd and Disenchantment.” Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages. Ed. Clare A. Simmons. London: Frank Cass, 2001: 45–60. Hemans, Felicia. Poems of Felicia Hemans. New edition. Edinburgh: Longman, 1849. Henry, Robert. History of Great Britain on a New Plan. 1771–1785. 6th edition. 12 vols. London: Allman, 1823. Hickes, George. Linguarum vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus grammaticocriticus et archaeologicus. Oxford, 1705. Hill, Christopher. “The Norman Yoke.” Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker and Warburg, 1958. 50–122. Hill, Draper, ed. The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray. New York: Dover, 1976. The History of the Inquisitions; including the Secret Transactions of those Horrific Tribunals. London: Stockdale, 1810. Hobbes, Hermione. The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry; A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. London: Athlone Press, 2002. Holt, J.C. Magna Carta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hone, William. The Political House that Jack Built. Illustrations by George Cruikshank. 3rd ed. London: Hone, 1819. ———. Facetiae and Miscellanies. London: William Hone, 1827. Horsley Curties, T.J. Ancient Records; or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe. 4 vols. London: Minerva Press, 1801. Hume, David. The History of England. From 1754. Rpt. London: Washbourne, 1844. Hume, David (The Advocate). Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland. 2 vols. Revised edition. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1844. Hunt, John and Leigh, eds. The Examiner. Established 1809. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. London: Norton, 2007. Hutton, Ronald. The Druids. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. ———.Druids, Witches, and King Arthur. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. ———. “The New Druids.” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 1999. Ed. Gwendolyn Morgan. Bozeman: Studies in Medievalism, 1999. Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. London: John Murray, 1821.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 217

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Jamieson, Robert. Popular Ballads and Songs. Edinburgh: Constable, 1806. Jeffrey, Francis. “Secondary Scottish Novels.” Edinburgh Review 39 (October 1823):158–96. Johnson, David. Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood. Salisbury: Compton Russell, 1974. Keightley, Thomas. Fairy Mythology. 2 vols. London: W. H. Ainsworth, 1828. Kelly, Linda. Ireland’s Minstrel: A Life of Tom Moore: Poet, Patriot and Byron’s Friend. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Kent, David A., and D.R. Ewen, eds. Regency Radical: Selected Writings of William Hone. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Kershner, Frederick D. Those Gay Middle Ages. Chicago: Willett, Clark and Co., 1938. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995. King, Edmund, ed. The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Langan, Celeste. “Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air.” The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry Ed. Phyllis Weliver. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005: 25–49. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. Ed. Howard Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, rpt. 1992. ———. Raymond and Agnes: an Interesting Drama in two acts. London, c.1809. ———. Venoni, or The Novice of St. Mark’s. London: Longman, 1809. Liebermann, F. ed. Die Gestetze der Angelsachsen. 3 vols. Rpt. Tübingen: Scientia Aalen, 1960. Life and Surprising Exploits of that Renowned Hero, Sir William Wallace. Edinburgh, c.1795. Liu, Alan. Wordsworth, The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Llorente, Juan Antonio. A Critical History of the Inquisition in Spain. English translation 1823; rpt. Williamstown, Mass: John Lilburne Company, 1967. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Malcolmson Robert, and Stephanos Mastoris. The English Pig, A History. London: Hambledon and London, 2001. Malory, Sir Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugene Vinaver. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, rpt. 1983. Mangnall, Richmal. Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People. New edition. London: Longman, 1834. Mather, Joseph. The Songs of Joseph Mather, With a Memoir. Sheffield: Pawson and Brailsford, 1862. Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, reissued 1989.


218


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 218

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

219

McCulloch, Florence. Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960. McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology, A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. McKisack, May. Medieval History in the Tudor Age. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. McLane, Maureen M. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. The Medusa, Or, Penny Politician. London: Thomas Davison, 1819. Meyer, Elizabeth A. Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Milton, John. History of Britain: that part especially now call’d England, from the traditional beginning, continu’d to the Norman Conquest. London, 1677. Moore, Thomas. Irish Melodies. 1807; London, Longman, 1846. ———. Poetical Works. London: Pearson, 1899. Morganwyg, Iolo (Edward Morgan). Iolo Manuscripts, A Selection of the Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, In Prose and Verse, from the collection made by the late Edward Williams, Iolo Morganwyg. Ed. Taliesin Williams. Llandovry: Reeb, 1848. ———. The Triads of Britain. Ed. Malcolm Smith. London: Wildwood, 1977. Morton, Graeme. William Wallace: Man and Myth. Sutton: Stroud, 2001. Mylne, James. Poems, Consisting of Miscellaneous Pieces, and Two Tragedies. Edinburgh, 1790. O’Keefe, John. Peeping Tom of Coventry, A Comic Opera, As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Smock-Alley. Belfast, 1785. Owen, A.L. The Famous Druids: A Survey of Three Centuries of English Literature on the Druids. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Philadelphia, 1776. ———. Rights of Man. London, 1791. Palace of Westminster (factsheet). New edition. London: House of Commons Information Office, 2009. Palgrave, Sir Francis. Review of R.T. Hampson’s Medii Aevi Kalendarium. Quarterly Review 71: 379–91. ———. Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar. London: John Parker, 1837. Pallister, Anne. Magna Carta, The Heritage of Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Parker, Joanne. England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. Parker, Stephen. Informal Marriage, Cohabitation and the Law 1750–1989. London: Macmillan, 1990.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 219

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. ———. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.” ELH 48 (1981): 532–54. Percy, Thomas, ed. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3 vols. London, 1765. ———. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3rd ed. 3 vols. London, 1775. Perrault, Charles. Tales of Mother Goose: The Dedication Manuscript of 1695. Ed. Jacques Barchilon. 2 vols. New York: Pierpoint Morgan Library, 1956. Piggott, Stuart, William Stukeley, An Eighteenth-Century Antiquarian. Revised edition. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Pope, Walter. The Salsbury-ballad. London, 1676. Porter, G.R. The Progress of the Nation. 3 vols. London: Knight, 1843. Porter, Jane. The Scottish Chiefs. 1810. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857. “Portugueze Literature.” Quarterly Review 1 (May 1809): 268–92. Priestley, Joseph. An Appeal to the public, on the subject of the riots in Birmingham. Birmingham, 1791. ———. History of the Corruptions of Christianity. 2 vols. London, 1782. Pugin, A. W. N. Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste. London, printed for author, 1836. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Rapin de Thoyras, Paul. Impartial History of England. Trans. John Kelly. London, 1784. The Rebellion of the Beasts, Or, The Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!!. 1825. Ed. Douglas A. Anderson. Chicago: Wicker Park Press, 2004. Ritson, Joseph, ed. Ancient Songs and Ballads. London, 1790. Robinson, Fred C. “Medieval, The Middle Ages.” Speculum 59:4 (October 1984): 745–56. Roe, Nicholas. Review of Douglas Anderson’s edition of The Rebellion of the Beasts. The Wordsworth Circle 35:4 (Autumn 2004), 191–93. Rose, R.B. “The Priestley Riots of 1791.” Past and Present 18 (1960): 68–88. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.” The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New York: Dutton, 1950. Ruskin, John. “Pre-Raphaelitism.” Lectures on Architecture and Painting. 1853; London: Dent, 1907. Russell, Lord John, ed. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. 8 vols. London: Longman, 1853–56. Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994.


220


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 220

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

221

Saunders, Clare Broome. Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Schoenfield, Mark. “Waging Battle: Ashford v. Thornton, Ivanhoe, and Legal Violence,” Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages. Ed. Clare A. Simmons. London: Frank Cass, 2001: 61–86. Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. 1819. Ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford: World’s Classics, 1996. ———. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Ed. Raymond Lamont Brown. New York: Citadel Press, 1968. ———. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Ed. T.F. Henderson. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1902. ———. Poetical Works. Ed. J. Logie Roberston. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Scrivener, Michael Henry. Radical Shelley The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Semple, Janet Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1905, rpt. 1970. Simmons, Clare A. “Absent Presence: The Romantic-Era Magna Charta and the English Constitution,” Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman. Ed. Thomas Shippey and Richard Utz. Turnhout: Breipols, 1996: 68–83. ———. “Bad Baronets and the Curse of Medievalism.” Studies in Medievalism (2002): 215–35. ———, ed. Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages. London: Frank Cass, 2001. ———. “Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Studies in Medievalism 17 (2009): 28–35. ———. “Proof and Truth: Teaching the Waverley Novels in the Law and Literature Class.” Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels. Ed. Evan Gottleib and Ian Duncan. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009: 114–22. ———. Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Smith, Charlotte. Beachy Head with Other Poems. 1807. Ed. Terence A. Hoagwood. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1993. Smith, John. Choir Gawr, The Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids. Salisbury, 1771. Spence, Thomas. The End of Oppression; Being a Dialogue between an Old Mechanic and a Young One. 2nd ed. London, printed for author, no date. ———. The Rights of Man, as exhibited in a lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle. 4th ed. London, 1793. Spenser, Edmund. Poetical Works. London: Oxford University Press, 1914, rpt. 1975.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 221

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Stair, David Dalrymple, Lord. Institutions of the Laws of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1681. Ed. David M. Walker. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981. Stukeley, William. Abury, A Temple of the British Druids, with Some Others Describ’d. London, 1743. ———. Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids. London, 1740. Swann, Karen. “Public Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain.” ELH 55:4 (1988): 811–34. Tacitus, Cornelius. Annales 13–16. With a translation by John Jackson. London: Heinemann, 1937. Taylor, Dena. “A Note on William Blake and the Druids of Primrose Hill.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. Winter 1983–84: 104–105. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Toby the Sapient Pig. The Life and Adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig. London: Nicholas Hoare, c. 1805. Todd, Henry J. Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer. London: Rivington, 1810. Todhunter, John. A Study of Shelley’s Poetry. London: Kegan Paul, 1880. Trollope, Frances. The Abbess, A Romance. 3 vols. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Co, 1833. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Turner, Sharon. The History of the Anglo-Saxons. 1799. 5th ed. 3 vols. London: Longmans, 1828. Tymms, Samuel. “Antient Peg-Tankards.” Gentleman’s Magazine 97 ii: 490 (1827). Utz, Richard, and Tom Shippey, eds. Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman. Turnhout: Brepols, 1998. Waldron, Mary. Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Warren, Ann K. Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Watson, George. England Preserv’d: An Historical Play. London, 1795. Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. White, Newman I. “Shelley’s Swell-Foot the Tyrant in Relation to Contemporary Political Satires.” PMLA 36 (1921): 332–46. White, Terence de Vere. Tom Moore, The Irish Poet. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977. Williams, Anna. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. London, 1766. Wilson, W.A. Introductory Essays on Scots Law. Edinburgh: W. Green, 1978. Wilt, Judith. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.


222


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 222

12/5/2010 12:08:16 PM

223

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Woodberry, George E. The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Personal and Literary. 1909. 2 vols. New York: Tannen, 1965. Wooler, T. Jonathan, ed. The Black Dwarf. From January 1817. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Ed. J. C. Maxwell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. ———. The Salisbury Plain Poems, edited by Stephen Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Workman, Leslie J., Kathleen Verduin, and Toshiuki Takamiya, eds. Medievalism and Romanticism. Poetica 39–40 (1994). Yearsley, Ann. Earl Goodwin, An Historical Play. London, 1791. Young, Arthur. The Example of France a Warning to Britain. 3rd ed. Bury St. Edmunds, 1794. Zimmerman, Sarah M. Romanticism, Lyricism, and History. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.


Wor k s C i t e d


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 223

12/5/2010 12:08:17 PM


9780230103740_11_wcit.indd 224

12/5/2010 12:08:17 PM

Acton, John Dahlberg, Lord, 11 Aesop, 113 Alexander, Michael, 195 Alfred, Prince, brother of Edward the Confessor, 85, 202 Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, 68, 163, 178, 180, 192, 201, 211 America, United States of, 9, 68, 106, 109, 111, 203 Ancient Britons, 18, 22, 35, 48–55 see also Boadicea; Druids Anderson, Douglas A., 136, 206 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 85, 209 antiquarianism, 10–14, 42, 49, 59, 67, 70, 75, 102–3, 148–59, 197–8 Arthur, King of Britain, 8, 25, 51, 89, 94, 192, 196–7, 202 Arthurian stories, 7, 24, 53 Arthur Uther Pendragon, Neo-Druid, 20–1, 198 Aubrey, John, 24–5 Austen, Jane, 158–9 Avebury, 17, 25–7, 197–8 see also Stonehenge; Stukeley, William Bacon, Francis, 53 Baer, Marc, 92 Baillie, Joanna, 81–2, 201–2 Baker, Carlos, 206 ballads, 13, 58–67, 70, 132, 205–6 Barczewski, Stephanie L., 210 bards, 37, 42, 58–9, 68–9, 198–200, 202 Welsh bards, 29, 31–2, 76–9

Barker, Felix, and Ralph Hyde, 211 Barrett, Eaton Stannard, 204–5 Barry, Charles, 191–3, 211 Barrymore, William, 90 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 103, 203 Bentham, Jeremy, 170–1, 174, 181, 184, 193, 209, 211 bestiaries, 13, 111–21, 136, 205 Biddick, Kathleen, 12 Bishop, Henry, 72 Black Dwarf, 111, 116–19, 130, 133, 203–4 Blackstone, Sir William, 155–6, 180, 182, 188 Blackwood, William, 183 Blackwood’s Magazine, 157, 195, 207, 211 Blake, William, 13, 32, 37–55, 124, 199, 206 Four Zoas, 51 Jerusalem, 38, 43–8 Milton, 38–45, 54 Songs of Experience, 37 Blind Harry (Henry the Minstrel), 69–70, 200 Blondel the Minstrel, 60–1, 187–8 Bloody Code, 156, 170, 186, 208 Bloomfield, Robert, 123, 205 Blue-Beard, 100–2, 203 Boaden, James, 90–1 Boadicea, 13, 20, 25, 48–55, 191 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 1–2 Breay, Claire, 146, 196 Brien Boru, Irish king, 74–5 Bruhm, Steven, 157–8 Brundage, James, 153


I n de x


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 225

12/5/2010 12:08:25 PM

I n de x

Bunting, Edward, 73–4 Burdett, Sir Francis, 10, 115 Burghers of Calais, 96–8, 203 Burgoyne, John, 61 Burke, Edmund, 13, 29, 142, 157, 159, 197 Abridgement of English History, 23–4 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 24, 96, 110, 121–36 see also “swinish multitude” Burl, Aubrey, 197 Burns, Robert, 13, 67–73, 89, 201 Butler, Samuel, 206 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 73, 201 Caesar, C. Julius, 21–3, 116 Camden, William Britannia, 22–6, 199 Gibson’s edition, 25 Gough’s edition, 28–9, 197–8 Camelodunum, 17, 49, 51–2, 199 Canterbury, Archbishops of, 8, 42, 85, 173, 199 see also Lambeth Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 200 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of Britain, 131–6, 139 Carr, Alexander Allan, 149 Cartwright, Major John, 105, 111, 115–16, 126 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 120, 133–4, 206 Caxton, William, 7 Celts, 22–4, 29, 197 “Celtic fringe,” 58, 73 Cervantes, Miguel de, 11 Champlin, Edward, 206 Chandler, Alice, 3, 165, 196, 208–9 Charles, Prince of Wales, 196 Charles I, King of Britain, 161 Charleton, Walter, 24 Chartism, 191 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 206, 210 Chisolm, John, 169

Christmas, 1–2, 206 Church of England, 139–40, 157, 159–65 Church and King Riots, 159–61 Clare, John, 123–4 classicism, 3, 11, 22, 24, 106, 130–1, 134, 136, 191 Clay, Rotha Mary, 154, 208 Clery, E.J., 142, 207 Cobbett, William, 14, 115, 208–9 History of the Protestant “Reformation,” 161–5 Colchester, see under Camelodunum Coleman, George, the Elder, 92 Coleman, George, the Younger, 91–103, 206 Battle of Hexham, 94–6 Blue-Beard, 100–2 Feudal Times, 81, 102–3 Iron Chest, 99–101 John Bull, 91, 206 Surrender of Calais, 96–8 Coleridge, S.T., 33–4, 106, 146–7 common law, 9, 12, 30–1, 111, 123–4, 142, 146–8, 167 origins, 17–83 see also Rights Commuck, Thomas, 201 Cotton, Sir Robert, 8 Cowper, William, 50–1, 54 Craig, Thomas, 209 Cromwell, Oliver, 207 Cromwell, Thomas, 164 Cross, John Carpenter, 151–2 Cruikshank, George, 118–19, 128 Crusades, 60–1, 177 Culler, A. Dwight, 196 Curties, H.J. Horsley, 151–2


226

Danes, see under Vikings Dawson, P.M.S, 205 Dibdin, Charles, 202 Diderot, Denis, 153 Dio Cassius, 22, 49 Domesday Book, 10 Dowton, William, 92


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 226

12/5/2010 12:08:25 PM

Druids, 12–13, 20–55, 76, 78, 82, 89–91, 146, 158, 177, 197–9, 202 Druids, female, 23–4, 29 Neo-Druids, 20–1, 24, 48, 73–4 Patriarchal Druids, 37, 40 Duncan, Ian, 198, 200, 210 Dyer, Gary, 181 Eastlake, Sir Charles, 143 Edgeworth, Maria, 210 Edinburgh Review, 144, 169, 183 Edward I, King of England, 68, 71–2, 90, 126 supposed massacre of the bards, 76–7, 91 see also Gray, Thomas Edward III, King of England, 63, 96–8, 126, 182, 203 Edward VI, King of England, 207 Edward the Confessor, King of England, 84–6, 202 Eglinton Tournament, 193–4 Eldon, John Scott, Earl of, 118, 133, 206 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 164–5 Elizabethan era, 69 Elizabeth II, Queen of Britain, 196 Emma of Normandy, Queen of England, 84–5, 135, 203 Emmett, Robert, 75–6 Enlightenment ideas, 22, 29–30, 62, 69, 114, 184, 191 Erdman, David V., 40, 53, 205 Erkelenz, Michael, 131 Etty, William, 1 Examiner, 115–16, 137–40, 144 see also Hunt family, publishers Fabre-Vassos, Claudine, 127, 132 Fauchet, Claude, 60–1 Fay, Elizabeth, 12, 199–200 feudalism, 60–2, 99–100, 102–3, 106, 168, 174–5, 184, 188–90, 200, 209

227

Fisher, Peter F., 37, 40, 198–9 Fletcher, John, 49 Foote, Samuel, 92–3, 203 Foucault, Michel, 208 Fox, Charles James, 120, 204–5 Foxe, John, 9, 207 France, British representations of, 82–4, 86–8, 95, 97–100, 151, 157 French Revolution, 6, 47, 61, 86, 96, 105–6, 111, 115, 124, 127, 139, 145, 151–2, 184 British reactions to, 157–62 Reign of Terror, 32–3, 35, 98 see also Burke, Edmund Froissart, Jean, 96, 98, 203 Galt, John, 14–15, 210–11 Autobiography, 210 Sir Andrew Wylie, 183–94 Garrick, David, 92–3 Gavin, Anthony, 142, 207 George I, King of Britain, 134 George III, King of Britain, 83, 86, 92, 94, 109, 116, 184, 193, 201 George IV, King of Britain, 92, 94, 103, 115, 118, 144, 205 Queen Caroline Affair, 131–7 Gifford, Robert, 134, 206 Gill, Stephen, 198 Gillray, James, 204 Girouard, Mark, 193–4 Godiva, Lady, 87–9 Godwin, Earl of Wessex, 84–6, 201 Godwin, William, 128 Caleb Williams, 4–6, 99–100 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 106–7, 173–4 Goldsmith, Oliver History of the Earth, 113–18, 120, 204 Gomme, Sir Laurence, 199 Gordon Riots, 160


Index


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 227

12/5/2010 12:08:25 PM

I n de x

Gothicism, 146–7, 154, 162, 164 Gothic architecture, 28, 142–3, 147–8, 158–9, 191–3 Gothic genre, 11, 14, 141–59, 169 Gothic in theater, 90–1, 101–3, 150–1, 207 Goulbourne, Russell, 153 Gower, John, 121–2, 205 Graham, John, 73 Gray, Thomas “The Bard,” 32, 37, 50, 72–3, 76–7, 91 Great Exhibition of 1851, 194–5, 211–12 Grétry, A.E.M., 61 Griselda, Patient, 185, 210 Grose, Francis, 71, 149, 207 Habeas Corpus, 10, 110, 117 Habeas Corpus Act, 10, 115, 117, 129 Hales, J.W., and F.W. Furnivall, 59, 62–4, 200 Hamilton, Donna D., 196 Hampson, R.T., 195 Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, 156 Harold II, King of England, 84–5, 87–8 Hassig, Debra, 111 Haugen, Kristine Louise, 196, 198 Hemans, Felicia, 73, 76–8 Henderson, T.F., 200 Henry, Robert, 29–32, 37, 40, 49–50, 82, 198 Henry I, King of England, 163 Henry III, King of England, 82, 182 Henry VI, King of England, 94–5 Henry VII, King of England, 8, 196 Henry VIII, King of England, 8, 162, 207 Hickes, George, 154, 197, 208 Higden, Ralph, 206 Hill, Christopher, 196 see also Norman Yoke Hobbes, Hermione, 212

Hobbes, Thomas, 47 Hogg, James, 65, 200 Holt, J.C., 146 Hone, William, 206 Political House that Jack Built, 117, 133, 138 Political Showman, 118 Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, 133 A Slap for Slop, 119 Hugh of Lincoln, 132, 205–6 Hume, David, 124 History of England, 22–3, 49, 68–9, 163 Hume, David, the Advocate, 168–9 Hunt, Henry “Orator,” 115, 204 see also Peterloo Massacre Hunt, Lynn, 196 Hunt family, publishers, 53, 115–16, 136, 144, 204 John Hunt, 157 Leigh Hunt, 131, 136–7, 206 see also Examiner Hurd, Richard, 196 Hutton, Ronald, 20–1, 25, 31, 197–9 immuring, 145–55 Inquisition, Spanish, 141–4, 150, 152–3, 157, 207 Ireland, 25, 57–60, 73–6, 87–9, 98, 201, 203 Irish in London, 57–8, 73–4, 78–9, 93 Irving, Washington, 1–2, 206 James I, King of Britain (James VI of Scotland), 200 James II, King of Britain, 108, 196 Jefferson, Thomas, 6 Jeffrey, Francis, 183 see also Edinburgh Review Jews, 93, 132–3, 142–3, 205–6 in Ivanhoe, 174, 178–9, 182–3, 186, 210 John, King of England, 175–7 see also Magna Carta


228


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 228

12/5/2010 12:08:25 PM

“John Bullism,” 126, 133, 137, 206 Johnson, David, 204 Johnson, Samuel, 59 Jones, Inigo, 24 Keats, John, 106, 115 Keightley, Thomas, 195 Kemble, Charles, 90 Kemble, John Philip, 100 Kent, David, and D.R. Ewen, 206 Kershner, Frederick D., 205 Keysler, Johan Georg, 25 Kilgour, Maggie, 207 King, Edmund, 209 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 122, 205 Lambeth, 38–42, 45, 52, 199 See also Blake, William; Canterbury, Archbishops of; London Lang, Andrew, 101 Langan, Celeste, 58 Law British, 10, 17, 27, 36–8, 105–6, 156–7, 167–73, 179–80 divine, 9, 20–1, 26, 179–83 natural, 27, 31, 105–13, 210 see also common law; Rights Leach, Sir John, 133 Leland, John, 199 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 149–51, 208 Liu, Alan, 32, 198 Liverpool, Ronald Jenkinson, 2nd Earl, 133 Llorente, Juan Antonio, 207 Locke, John, 108–9, 128 London, 31–2, 43, 53, 79, 92–3, 122, 185–6, 191–4, 211 London Stone, 45, 54, 199, 206 see also Lambeth Maclise, Daniel, 201 Macpherson, James, 65 see also Ossianic Poems

229

Magna Carta, 10, 15, 82–3, 105, 110, 116–17, 146, 155, 157, 163–4, 173, 182, 192, 196, 207 Malcolmson, Robert, and Stephanos Mastoris, 123, 127 Maldon, 52, 54 Malory, Sir Thomas, 7 Malthus, Thomas, 132–3, 206 Mangnall, Richmond, 1–2, 195 Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, 94–6 Martin, Martin, 25 Mather, Joseph, 128 Maturin, Charles, 152, 207 McCulloch, Florence, 204 McGann, Jerome J., 11 McKisack, Mary, 196 McLane, Maureen, 60, 65, 200 McLynn, Frank, 156, 208–9 Medievalism, 1–2, 11–12, 86, 111, 181–3, 188, 195 antimedievalism, 81–2, 106–7, 109, 160, 170 chivalric medievalism, 4–6, 64, 89, 97, 99–100, 135, 192 medievalism in art, 192, 194, 201, 211 medievalist reading, 142–59 popular medievalism, 6–7, 10–15, 103, 146, 155, 158, 162–5, 176, 191, 194 Victorian medievalism, 4, 15, 158, 172, 190, 196 Medusa, The, 111, 116, 118–21, 123, 204 Meyer, Elizabeth, 206 Meyler, William, 86, 202 Mill, John Stuart, 170, 209 Milton, John History of Britain, 22–3, 42, 49 see also Blake, William minstrels, 57–67, 69, 79, 89–91, 200 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, 151 Moira, Lord (Marquis of Hastings), 72, 200–1


Index


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 229

12/5/2010 12:08:25 PM

I n de x

Mona, Isle of (Anglesey), 23–4, 78, 197 monasticism, 147–54, 162–5 see also Templars Moore, Thomas, 135, 201 Irish Melodies, 13, 57–8, 72–6, 79, 88 More, Hannah, 84 Morganwyg, Iolo (Edward Williams), 31–2, 37, 73–4, 198–9 Morton, Graeme, 69, 200 music, 57–61, 71–9, 88–9, 94–8, 201 Mylne, James, 89–90 Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 10, 47, 137, 199 National Melody, 13, 58, 71–9, 199 Normans, 17, 133, 167–8, 174, 182, 188 Norman Conquest, 65, 84, 126 Norman Yoke, 8–9, 13, 107, 109, 111, 116, 174, 210 O’Keefe, John, 87–9, 202 Orientalism, 101–2 Orwell, George, 206 Ossianic Poems, 31, 65, 198, 200 Owen, A.L., 21, 38, 47, 197 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), 73 Paine, Tom, 10, 108 Common Sense, 109–10 Rights of Man, 110–11, 115–16 Palgrave, Sir Francis, 195 Pallister, Anne, 196 Parker, Joanne, 211 Parker, Matthew, 8 Parker, Stephen, 156 Patriarchs, Biblical, 19, 22, 26–7, 29–30, 40, 43, 51, 108, 178–9, 203 Paulson, Ronald, 151–2, 207–8

Peasants’ Revolt, 45, 121–2 see also Tyler, Wat Percy, Elizabeth, Countess of Northumberland, 58, 60 Percy, Thomas, 58–67, 73, 200 “Sir Cauline,” 62–4 Perrault, Charles, 100–1 Peterloo Massacre, 119, 124, 128–9 Philippa, Queen of England, 96–8 Physiologus, 112 see also bestiaries Piggott, Stuart, 25–6 Pigs, 121–36, 139–40, 175, 189, 196, 209, 211 learned pigs, 124–5 see also “swinish multitude” Plutarch, 124 Pocock, J.G.A., 196 Poe, Edgar Allan, 142, 207 Pope, Walter, 24 Porter, G.R., 208 Porter, Jane, 70, 200 Price, Richard, 128 Priestley, Joseph, 159–61 Prince Regent, see under George IV, King of Britain Pugin, A.N.W., 165, 192–4, 211 Quarterly Review, 143–4, 195 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 101 radicalism, political, 13, 105–40, 142, 146, 151, 155, 164, 205 Rapin de Thoyras, Paul, 84–5, 87, 202 Rebellion of the Beasts, 136–40 Reform Act of 1832, 6, 32, 191 Reformation, English, 8, 113, 161–5, 180, 196 see also Church of England Richard I, King of England (“the Lion-Heart”), 60–1 in Ivanhoe, 173–4, 177, 182–3, 188 Richardson, Samuel, 156


230


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 230

12/5/2010 12:08:26 PM

Rights, 7–8, 15, 17, 49, 55, 57–8, 91 English rights, 10, 14, 82–3, 85, 105–13, 116–36, 143, 145, 155, 173–4 natural rights (“Rights of Man”), 6, 105–13, 123, 138–40, 145, 168, 182–3, 188, 203 rights of property, 9–10, 31, 108, 111, 162–3 see also common law, Magna Carta Ritson, Joseph, 61–2, 65, 67 Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, 70–2, 74 Robin Hood, 94, 175–6, 209–10 Robinson, Fred C., 195 Roe, Nicholas, 206 Roman Catholicism, 8–9, 14, 112, 141–65, 175, 179–82 romance, medieval, 6, 11, 62–4, 152 Romans, 28, 76, 146, 148, 153, 167–8 Romans in Britain, 17–20, 40, 48–52, 116, 154, 190 Rose, R.B., 160 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 128 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” 107–9, 127 Social Contract, 106–7 Ruskin, John, 2–3, 11, 158, 196 Ryder, Henry T., 192 Salisbury, 24, 33, 199 Salisbury Plain, 27, 32–7, 198 Salisbury (Sarum) Order Book, 154 Salisbury, Joyce E., 113 Salisbury, Margaret, Countess of, 164 Saunders, Claire Broome, 200 Saxons (Anglo-Saxons), 13, 17, 19, 76, 81–2, 88, 126, 155, 167, 188 in Ivanhoe, 174–83

231

Schlegel, Friedrich, 11 Schoenfield, Mark, 181 Scotland, 14, 58, 65–74, 89, 183–5, 189–90 Scottish law, 167–70, 189–90, 196, 200–1, 209 Scott, Sir Walter, 167–9, 209 Bride of Lammermoor, 167 Heart of Midlothian, 168 Ivanhoe, 4, 14, 124, 167–83, 186, 196, 210 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 171, 182 Marmion, 148–9 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 65–7, 72, 200 Scrivener, Michael, 130, 132 Semple, Janet, 211 Shakespeare, 11, 82, 117, 124, 202 Shelley, Mary, 130 Shelley, Percy B., 13, 106, 115, 205–6 Defence of Poetry, 32 “England in 1819,” 131 Swellfoot the Tyrant, 130–40 “Two Political Similes,” 119–20, 131 Shenstone, William, 58 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount, 119–20, 134, 204, 206 Smith, Charlotte, 18–21, 197 Smith, Horace, 205 Smith, John, antiquary, 28–9 Soane, Sir John, 191, 211 Southey, Robert, 76, 126–7, 201 Spence, Thomas, 116, 208 End of Oppression, 111 Pig’s Meat, 128–30 Rights of Man, 119, 208 Spenceans, 204–5 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene, 35, 167–8, 198 Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount, 167–8, 210


Index


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 231

12/5/2010 12:08:26 PM

I n de x

St. Alban’s, see under Verulamium (St. Albans) Stephen, King of England, 19, 173, 209 Stevenson, Sir John, 72 Stevenson, W.H., 53, 205 Stoddart, John, 119 Stonehenge, 18, 24–5 and the Druids, 20–1, 24–6, 30, 32–6, 46, 54, 197–8 see also Blake, William; Stukeley, William Studies in Medievalism, 11 Stukeley, William, 25–9, 31, 38, 40, 49, 197–8 Surtees, Robert, 65 Sussex, 18–20, 42–3, 197 Swann, Karen, 198 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 47 Swift, Jonathan, 206 “swinish multitude,” 13, 121–36, 175, 190 see also Burke, Edmund; Pigs Tacitus, 20–1, 23–4, 29, 48–9 Taliesin, 31–2 Tatar, Maria, 100–1 Taylor, Dena, 32 Templars, 175, 179–80, 182 Terence (P. Teretius Afer), 124 Theater, 13, 81–103, 150–1 Drury Lane Theatre, 99–100 Haymarket Theatre, 90, 92–3 Theatre-Royal, Bristol, 83–4 Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, 82 Theatre-Royal, Dublin, 88 Thomas, Keith, 114 Thomas of Chobham, 112 Thorneycroft, Thomas, 51 Times, The, 92, 116, 119, 134, 194, 212 Toby, the Sapient Pig, 124–5, 205 Todd, Henry J., 205–6

Todhunter, John, 206 Toland, John, 25 Tom of Coventry (Peeping Tom), 87–9 Tone, Wolf, 75 Trollope, Frances, 147–8, 165 Trumpener, Katie, 58, 199 Turner, Sharon, 155 Tyler, Wat, 122, 205 Tymms, Samuel, 2 Utz, Richard, 195 Verstegen, Richard, 196 Verulamium (St. Albans), 49, 52–3 Vikings, 17–19, 24, 47, 75 Wager of Battle, 171, 176, 181–2 Waldron, Mary, 84, 201 Wales, 23–4, 29, 31–2, 51, 76–9, 90–1 Walker, David M., 168 Wallace, Sir William, 67–72, 74, 184 Walpole, Horace, 142–3, 147 Warren, Ann K., 153–4, 205 Wars of the Roses, 94–6 Warton, Thomas, 61 Washington, George, 68–9 Watson, George, 82–3, 89, 201 Watt, James, 143 Wedgewood, Alexandra, 211 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 118, 133 Welsh, Alexander, 209 Whalley, George, 195 Wheatcroft, J. Holli, 204 White, Newman I., 133 White, Terence de Vere, 73 Whittington, Dick, 189, 211 Wicker Man, 34–6, 46–8, 199 William I of England (the Conqueror), 8, 108–9, 116 see also Normans


232


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 232

12/5/2010 12:08:26 PM

William III and Mary II, British rulers, 108 William IV, King of England, 92 Williams, Anna, 61, 200 Wilson, W.A., 168 witchcraft, 171–2, 179–82, 187, 210 Wood, Marcus, 118, 204 Woodbury, George E., 207 Wooler, T. Jonathan, 116–18 see also Black Dwarf

233

Wordsworth, William, 17, 46, 106, 115, 198 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 37–40 The Prelude, 33–4, 36 Salisbury Plain Poems, 32–7 Workman, Leslie J., 11, 195 Yearsley, Ann, 13, 83–7, 89, 202 Young, Arthur, 126 Zimmerman, Sarah M., 197


Index


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 233

12/5/2010 12:08:26 PM


9780230103740_12_ind.indd 234

12/5/2010 12:08:26 PM

Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Victorian Christmas in Print (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the City (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the Object (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Popular Theatre in Political Culture: Britain and Canada in focus

Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Diasporas: French emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ''Literary Lower Empire'' (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Lacan's Medievalism

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Victorian Christmas in Print (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the City (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the Object (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Popular Theatre in Political Culture: Britain and Canada in focus

Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Diasporas: French emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ''Literary Lower Empire'' (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Lacan's Medievalism

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Shelley's German Afterlives: 1814-2000 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Recommend Documents