Conan Doyle exorcises the Restoration

So, definitely not mediaeval.  Maybe mediaevalist, though, or at least following the same lines of thought. 

I’m half-TAing for three classes, one of which is on the genre of the mystery novel.  Unsurprisingly, it contains The Hound of the Baskervilles.  In fact, I’ve a bundle of essays in my bag beside me on the bus right now on how The Hound is both Gothic and anti-Gothic.  The basic intent of the set question is that the story contains Gothic elements and creates an atmosphere highly suggestive of the supernatural, cashing in on the thrill inherent in that genre, but has it both ways in that cold science and human agency carry the day. But I attended the lecture just now, and found myself questioning what Gothic actually means in this context.

The prof taking the course highlighted certain elements in the story that he regards as particularly Gothic – the emphasis laid on the age of Baskerville Hall (at one point he called it mediaeval), the animal savagery  in the face of Selden (the convict hiding up on the moors) – without explaining just what made them Gothic in the society in which Conan Doyle was writing.  The age of Baskerville Hall – its decrepitude? Suggestions of a dark past? The (probably figurative) ghosts of past ages of who-knows-what morality? The fact that the sheer size of the house (temporally as well as spatially) suggests ominous and unknowable secrets? What was it in the figure of Selden that would give the average reading Victorian a frisson?  Both, I think, are linked in the story that initiates the drama, the 18th century manuscript telling a story of the 17th, the story of Sir Hugo Baskerville.

The prof in question pointed, again, to certain aspects of this story as Gothic, and again I would have preferred to shift his emphasis.  He spoke of Hugo Baskerville as the Gothic villain because, as a lord of the manor, he ought to take a paternal attitude towards his dependants and he fails rather spectacularly in this.  He also pointed out the final vision of the hellhound lifting its bloodied jaws from Hugo’s throat, and the horror of his erstwhile companions.  Now, I certainly wouldn’t dispute that a Gothic story needs a good old bad-to-the-bone villain who epitomises the worst of humanity, or even something beyond the human, and also a good shock of gore.  But ingredient don’t make atmosphere; and for me the Victorian terror lies elsewhere.  The strongest Gothic moment in that tale-within-a-tale, so far as I’m concerned, is the moment when Hugo Baskerville rides off ahead of his companions into the dark on the moor, surrounded by his dogs, baying for the blood of his hapless (female, naturally) victim.  There we have simultaneously the moment when human darkness turns over completely to the diabolical, and the terror of the darkness and the unknown in the dark, of what is happening ahead on the moors, until that moment of shock and revelation when the hound raises its head.  And Hugo?  Well – he’s set very precisely in historical time.  He’s a Restoration libertine. 

The libertinism of the Restoration, of course, was looked back on with varying degrees of romanticism and dutifully appalled fascination by later generations.  Filtered through Conan Doyle’s eyes, the Restoration (in the person of Hugo Baskerville) stands in for the darkest and cruellest in English history, a time of the most shocking and unmentionable drunken depravities known to man (or fiend)[1].  The age of the house is partly sinister because it provides a link to the deeds of this man, the ethos of this time, in the vast and unsettling halls that swallow you up in visions of old carousing and predation, the darkness beneath the surface.  And there we have Selden – the animal in man, the werewolf, the vampire, the monster hidden under the veneer of civilisation that Hugo Baskerville became when he consigned his soul and body to the devil if he might only overtake the girl, clapped his spurs to his horse and sped off with his hounds.  The modern villain of the novel, Stapleton, is associated through his own actions with both the devil-invocation and uncontained sexuality of Conan Doyle’s libertine era.  In creating the devil dog, he consciously calls up the “devil” to do his work, just as did his ancestor Hugo[2], and his adultery and exploitation of the two women in his life turns them both into interchangeable victims (though not so helpless as the nameless damsel).   Plus there’s the tiny issue of gruesome murder, of course.

The Gothic need not recall the Restoration in its every occurrence, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that in Hound of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle does relate it to a time period and corresponding (perceived) historical mindset.  As such, it turns into a metaphor for the terrors within, the supernatural and diabolical that give rise to the werewolf but are always ultimately human. Holmes defeats these elements of the story and proves them false by the powers of Reason and Science and Logic – the thinking man’s triumph over the savage.

There we are – I have convinced myself.   

I don’t say this in criticism of the prof in question.  This is all, after all, beyond the scope of the lecture.  But certain of his statements and omissions started me thinking – and that’s certainly something to thank him for!

 

[1] Which just goes to show how sex-obsessed the Victorians really were, because only part of the libertine movement was about sex.  A large part of it was about freedom of religion, too, while Conan Doyle’s vision completely excludes the divine and is scrabbled over by greedy fingers of the devil.

[2] Though with differences, necessitated by the physicality of the events in the real world.  Both men intend to run their victims to death, probably by setting their dog(s) on them – in Hugo’s case his real dogs never get a look-in, as something far scarier than them comes along. Both the damsel and Sir Charles Baskerville die of fright after fleeing their pursuer, rather than being mauled.  And Hugo calls on the devil to help him catch the damsel, while Stapleton builds his own faux devil, and presumably, in doing so, gives the real one his soul once his body is sucked down into the mire (devoured by his master below!).

Alcohol: shame and usefulness.

So, how do the rest of you find it? This whole, brain-doesn't-switch-off, over-activity-of-the-grey-matter, how-do-you-stop-thinking-all-the-time thing? You see, alcohol may be frowned on generally, but it can actually be really useful when it comes to relaxing. Whether it be because you're practising your vocal exercises for a singing exam, and your mother is disturbed and distressed by your confession that it's far easier when you've had a half-cup of wine but it makes damn sense because it switches off the instinctive muscular tightening and clamping that is sabotaging your performance through over-thinking everything and the inability to trust your body to support your performance unsupervised; or because your stomach is cramping horribly because, well, that's what it does once a month, and your body doesn't consult you first to ask whether you've got, say, a paper due to be delivered (performed) tomorrow and you just need to turn brain and muscle off because you've done as much as you can for the time; or just because it's the end of the day and your brain hasn't realised yet and keeps doing interesting things with texts which, yes, are interesting but I'm trying to relax now and go to sleep please shut up...

... Am I alone in thinking this is somehow shameful? Or am I alone in thinking it's maybe, within moderate limits, acceptable?

Teaching the Glossa Ordinaria

No, I’m not.  Though I may be teaching the second half of a class on sci-fi literature tomorrow (or possibly next week), with two days’ notice (or nine), and no, I have no idea why.  Or on what.  Hoorah for improvisation skills! 

But we’re looking at the Glossa Ordinaria on the Song of Songs in one of my classes (ed. Mary Dove, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), and have been asked to think about how we might use it in a general cultural history course – what we might pick out from it for students, how would we read other texts through it, what we would pair with it.

Well, first I choose to disregard that ‘general cultural history’ stipulation, or at least set it aside briefly to assume a very long course in which I could spend a lot of time delving into the mediaeval and playing Disprove The Myths.  The myth in question would be the general perception of the Middle Ages being a time in which everyone was miserable and hated themselves for being lowly dirty worms and thought about boring religious stuff all the time.  I would then throw this and some saints’ lives – from the Gilte Legende, possibly, but I’d make a goodly effort to get Christina the Astonishing in there, because who doesn’t love stories about women flinging themselves in ovens and perching on church rooftops while their families hang around below looking increasingly hassled and waving the shackles enticingly?  And that’s rather the point – whether or not everyone thought about religion all the time, the cultural spectrum included under ‘religion’ was just a tad broader than nowadays, and needn’t entail either boredom or self-flagellation (unless you’re into that, of course).  Meanwhile, offering two such different text – academic/popular, analytic/narrative, Latin/vernacular, Biblical/apocryphal, high-flown/good rolicking fun – is a great way to smash that idea of a homogenous huddling “everyone”, which is part and parcel with the idea of Dark Ages. 

And what they do have in common is revealing too.  Others may come up with some other overreaching unifying feature, but for me it would be passion.  Legend or gloss, this matter is far from boring to its authors.  The glossators on the Song of Songs don’t try to quash the sensual delight in their text – they use it, glory in it, redirect it towards Christ and heaven.  It doesn’t require excuses, just translation: the passion itself is entirely appropriate.  The theological aspects of the Gilte Legende aren’t nearly so sublime.  They tend to feel more generic, more obligatory; but the same enthusiasm resides elsewhere in the stories.  People’s more everyday hopes, terrors, delights, schadenfreude, secret kinks, all there in much more accessible format, what entertains and what instructs.

Of course, one could easily turn that into a chapter in a general cultural history course anyway.  Continue on to the Reformation and throw some Thomas More at them, or better, the hotly debated religious arguments used in Henry VIII’s attempts to get under Anne Boleyn’s skirts; consider the implications of Hamlet senior’s ghost apparently confirming the existence of Purgatory; look at some of the inflammatory pamphlets printed about the Catholic/Irish plots during the English Civil Wars.  Just because religion permeated (almost) every aspect of people’s lives doesn’t make it boring: generally the opposite, I’d say, because people aren’t good at being bored.  They make things interesting.

The Gilte Legende and disjointed saints.

There are the saints everyone knows. They tend to have a well-defined life story, usually set in a particular place and time in history, a collection of miracles done before and/or after their death, and a particular personality and purview that leads to them being called on for certain things (patron or not).

Then there are the saints who are essentially a collection of folklore and local associations, or blends of one and another, Christianised versions of a couple of incidents from classical mythology with some half-remembered local story mixed in and tacked on to the name of someone who might be a regular saint or might be a duplicate or no one at all, really. And these ones rather tend to fail on the whole coherent narrative front.

Most of the stories in the Gilte Legende are actually somewhere between these two categories. Nicholas, for example, is well known and well defined and doesn’t stand much danger of being confused with anyone else. But the events of his life are more a series of vaguely connected events than any coherent narrative; and over a third of the space devoted to him in the Gilte Legende[1] is a conglomeration of miracles[2] attributed to him that took place after his death, which are essentially two stories repeated with slight variants, or at least miracles organised along two common themes (whence his popular personality):

• A Christian debtor attempts to cheat a patient Jew, who brings him to judgement. The Christian hands the Jew a staff, swears that he has given the Jew the money he owes him, then receives his staff back. He goes free, but is hit by a cart which kills him and breaks open his staff to reveal the gold inside. Men advise the Jew to take the money, but he refuses and says that he will only do so if the dead man should come to life again by the power of St Nicholas. This duly happens, and the Jew is christened.
• A Jew takes an image of the saint and keeps it in his house, charging it to keep watch over his goods. When thieves break into the house and steal everything but the statue, the Jew “bette [the image] and tormented it cruelli” (Nicholas ll. 244-45), and the wounded saint, appearing to the thieves and berating them for getting him thumped, so terrifies them that they return everything they stole. And everyone lives happily ever after – ie, the thieves become righteous and the Jew becomes a Christian.
• Nicholas raises a dead child to life, after the sorrowing father berates him for neglecting to protect a family who was so devoted to the saint.
• A man prays to St Nicholas that he might have a son, promising to give the son and a gold cup to the church. The child being of age, the father has a cup made, decides he likes it too much to give it up, has another of equal weight and value made, and offers that instead. He travels to the church by boat, and commands his son to bring him water in the first cup, upon which boy and cup fall overboard and are lost. Arriving, he offers the second cup, but it is thrown down from the altar three times. Then the child appears, with the first cup, and claims to have been saved from the sea by St Nicholas. The father, rather prudently, offers up both cups.
• A child is born, again by Nicholas’ intervention, and his father builds a chapel to Nicholas in gratitude. The king takes the child into service, and on St Nicholas’ feast day the child misses his home, knowing how his father would be celebrating it. Standing before the king and holding a rich cup he bemoans this, and the king declares that “for ought þat þy Nicholas can doo þou schalte abide here now” (ll. 305-6). And of course Nicholas immediately poofs him back home to his father. Or possibly he was born in Normandy and kidnapped by the sultan while overseas (Crusading? Serves him right), who liked to beat him, particularly on Christian saints’ days, for some reason. But praying to St Nicholas on that saint’s day, and thinking of the joy at his house on that day, he awakes to find himself in his father’s house again.

Despite the fact that he apparently has popular, wide-spread, firm associations for many people, Nicholas remains thematically disjointed. The Jew has little to do with the child, and neither has any obvious parallel in the story of his life. One can argue similarities between the miracles. For example, the theme of guarding possessions and the possibility of covetousness appears in both Jew stories and the second child story, and the cup appears in the third but has lost its narrative function. The grieving father in the first child story berates Nicholas in a way that seems similar to both Jews exhorting Nicholas to return them their possessions, providing a link to the idea of the child as property to protect to the other stories. But the connection is a tenuous one and no more convincing than, I daresay, one could make between almost any collection of stories attributed to multiple saints.

Saint Nicholas, however, looks like a picture of unity compared to Saint Makary. Here’s what he gets up to:

• It begins “Makarie went oute of a place of desert and entred [in] the sepulture of a dede man and leyed his hede downe vpon the dede bodi in stede of a pilow” (St Macarius ll. 1-3). No, there is no context or motivation or preamble – why do you ask? A fiend with nothing better to do decided to scare him and made the dead body speak. Makary “dred hym nothyng” (l. 7), but instead beat the body up, which made the fiends flee and is probably exactly what Jesus would have done.
• This one time Makary was heading for his cell and met a fiend who told him he couldn’t attack him because of his humility.
• When Makary was feeling troubled by temptations, he used to take a sack of gravel and go walking in the desert, of which he said to Theosebe (no, we aren’t told who he is) “I slee hym that sleith me” (l. 22).
• Once he met a fiend who was tempting his brethren with wine. And he asked the fiend which of them was succumbing, and the fiend told him Theotist. And so Makary talked to him and told him that wasn’t such a good idea, and next time he met the fiend, the fiend was rather piqued that Theotist was now holier than all of them.
• Once he found a severed head and had a chat to it about where its soul was.
• While going into a “ferre desert” (l. 50) he dropped rosary beads to mark his way, probably figuring that this sack of gravel was really heavy and the birds wouldn’t eat rosary beads. But a devil gathered them up and put them next to his head, which just goes to show that birds are secretly evil.
• Once he advised a brother who was considering leaving his cell not to do so!
• Once he killed a flea for biting him, or possibly a fly, and then repented and went to live naked in a desert so lots of flies could bite him.

See what I mean? The only common threads are that sometimes he talks to dead people and that he likes a nice masochistic stroll in the desert. I think I like him.

The entry for St Julian the Hospitaller is disjointed in a rather different way [3]. The author is confronted with the fact that there are, in fact, six or possibly seven different Julians that his audience may be familiar with (not to mention St Juliana), and the only way they can be distinguished is by their stories. So he tells all the stories, while insisting that his focus is on the Hospitaller – although only 64 lines out of 218 are actually about that man. To summarise:

• Julian was bishop of Emans, and people claim he was Simon the leper that Jesus healed. And people say that this is the Julian that people pray to for safe harbour, but they would be wrong.
• There was another Julian of Auvergne, who was beheaded by the provost Crispin.
• There was also another Julian who was the brother of… well, a Julian. They built a church and made people stop and help them work on it and smote people who tried to trick their way out of it.
• Then there was the Saint Julian that we were going to talk about, who killed his own mother and father out of ignorance when they were his guests. Which is why we pray to him for safe harbour. He saw the error of his ways, you see.
• Also there was Julian the Apostate who did nasty things to Christians. But he was not a saint. Saint Basil smote him. Do not get any of the other Julians confused with him. No, not even the one who killed his guests who were also his parents. He didn’t mean to.

And of course, when dealing with saints, there’s always the really literal meaning of disjointed. One could probably make a very complicated connecting argument out of the disjointed nature of the tales reflecting the torn-up bits of martyrs scattered hither and yon, sometimes over an entire country (or beyond, thank you Pardoner). It’d be a bit of a reach, because it assumes some kind of overreaching cultural intent behind these stories – authorial intent pretty much goes out the window when you’re just collecting a bunch of stories from all over the place and trying to work out how they fit together without changing them much.

Although, come to think of it, from one angle it’s not that far-fetched – if it’s about possession and example, which end up being the same thing, just with different intents of proof. As for example: the physical limbs of a martyr (or traitor, as I wrote about once before) can be strewn over a wide range to provide an example to as many people as possible, from the point of view of their enemy, and to prevent their reassembly come Judgement Day. But for the sympathetic, or the faithful, their very triumph over the latter obstacle is proof of their power, and their power is by the same token disseminated over a wider range, letting more villages and provinces lay claim to a bit of a saint - or a bit of the saint’s stories. And in many cases, the post-mortem perambulations of the persecuted in popular legend may be due precisely to the pressures of possession – we have a bit of his arm bone in our reliquary, his head was carried through this very town on the way to its burial, Bertha’s great-grandmother had a friend who touched the cloak of the person carrying his ashes towards Rome. And, well, if so many people from all over the place can lay claim to him, he (or his bits) must have really got about.

Of course, in many cases, it’s just that the stories were never whole in the first place. And that cutting fictional people up is fun.

-------------------

[1] Following Hamer’s two-volume edition, EETS 327-328, 2006-2007. Of the entry on St Nicholas, ll. 1-199 are his life, 200-319 later miracles.

[2] What's the collective noun for miracles?

[3] The actual story of Julian’s life, when we reach it, is conversely as perfectly structured a narrative as one could wish for. I may look at it in another post.

Poor Piers.

I just translated a sentence from a small Latin chronicle. The translation came out as "And in regarding him, the son of the king was suddenly struck with such love that he formed a potent and intimate bond with him, choosing above all other mortals to entangle with him in indissoluble chains of pleasure."

And the word I translated as 'bond', 'foedus', can mean alliance or treaty, or marriage contract, or union, or sexual relationship - and when it's an adjective, it gets into moral hysteria about FILTHY and BASE and REPUGNANT and OBSCENE and UNNATURAL.

Poor Piers Gavaston. Everyone gets so steamy-headed as soon as they start talking about him. Hugh never had this problem.

And another thought...

I walked past a shelf today (containing books, as often happens in my life) on which a title caught my eye: "Discovering the Middle Ages". As I was heading somewhere at the time I didn't stop to find out whether this was, say, a record of archaeological research, or a book on the 19C England's revival of interest in the mediaeval ("Though the Philistines may jostle you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand"[1]), but the title niggled at me. It sounded irritatingly as if, for one thing, there is only one MIDDLE AGES to discover, and that it can all be convincingly DISCOVERED if one goes about it the right way. And the combination of that with the title beside it (something about how people suddenly had the idea of being INDIVIDUAL in the 12th century) sounded even more irritatingly like it might even be a book on the people (all over Europe and elsewhere, across all those centuries) discovering their identity as MIDDLE AGERS.

Which I dismissed as an unfair judgement on a book I hadn't actually looked at very closely. But it got me thinking - I don't think I've ever come across anyone writing about the Middle Ages from the perspective of what I'm choosing to call temporal identity. National, obviously, religious, yes, social, financial, of course. But as being members of a body at a particular time in history, or as being defined as distinct from the actions of their forebears, or even descendants? Surely it's an idea that must hover around the edges of rather a lot of writing, particularly once we hit those highly visible events that cause rapid social change, oh, say, the Norman Conquest, or the Black Death. But each of those brings with it other identity factors that tend to steal the limelight: English/Norman, language, dispossession: economic crises that empower different social groups.

I suppose the instinctive reaction would be to say "oh, people in the Middle Ages just thought they were one big blob, they didn't differentiate from generation to generation". And even if one acknowledges a change in character from one century to the next, it's generally assumed, I think, that this is visible only in hindsight, that the lack of access to information about their own history made people only vaguely aware of it, a sort of mess of fable and tradition, there to inform and instruct but not necessarily something that they feel their times to be a unique part of.

But people do. We have, on the small scale, Gen X and Y, children of the nineties, sixties hairstyles and so forth. And if comic and satiric writing across the ages are anything to go by, the kernel of temporal identity - the griping against and between children these days/back in my day and the stodgy older generation - is as universal as fart jokes. Just ask Aristophanes. Once you have the basic them and us, and the sense of differentiation and movement that implies, the basic and possibly strongest form of time-based identity is there for the reaping. And repeating. And complaining about.

That doesn't necessarily lead to a larger perception of one's place in linear history, but there's no firm reason for it not to. Is this something we should be looking into? Or has it been, and I've just not noticed?

In fact, as it turned out, I hadn't looked at the book very closely at all. On passing it again later today I realised what it, and all its companion volumes, actually said on the spine: Dictionary of the Middle Ages.

Oh well!

[1] Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience, Bunthorne explaining to the audience how to best go about being "an aesthetic sham". For all those who, you know, didn't spend three years in their early teens being completely obsessed with them, which I realise is probably a substantial percentage of the population.

A brief thought on forms of memory.

If we can say that there is a time (say, the first two centuries after the Norman Conquest in England) when collective and individual memory shifted from being recorded aurally to written record. And that this involved not just a change of habits and accepted forms (though those are not to be underestimated in their effects on society) but a fundamental change in the way individual memories were shaped from childhood to be used, and therefore the capacity of each individual (generally speaking) to record and retain certain types of information. Then what are we to make of the current shift from the written to the digital, to the tendency to carry most information around on an external hard drive? More to the point, what will historians and sociologists make of it in a century or two? If, you know, we still exist by then.

Also, the change to written record had an obvious and fundamental effect on what information and how much of it is likely to survive to the next generations. The methods and platforms with which electronic information can be accessed are far more susceptible to change. Floppy disc, USB, bluetooth? Will we be able to access daily and personal records in ten years, or only the official ones that have been perforce updated as time went by? And how will this affect our perception of the past? Particularly as digitised information may prove to be more or less democratic than the book - potentially more generally and easily accessible, but literacy becomes even more essential and more complex, and more monolingual at that. The book is more lasting than the spoken word, but will the row of 0s and 1s be more or less enduring, and access to it more or less restricted by social parameters?

Dryden his Tale of the Wyf of Bathe

Only one of my courses for this semester is mediaeval: the other is as close as I can get, restoration literature. Which means I actually have to read up and remember what the Rump Parliament did and memorise a new set of names and motivations and get a feel for the time and develop an opinion on Cromwell's motives and, far from least, read a lot of new work by people like Dryden, Pope, Milton, Marvell, Sidney and a certain Earl of Ill-repute.

The only text I've actually acquired so far is not the stipulated edition of Dryden's poems (ed. Hammond and Hopkins), but a much prettier one, which is a very important consideration, the Globe edition published in 1881 by W. D. Christie, still with beautifully tight binding, and containing a lengthy and very Victorian account of his life, complete with repeated assurances that he was a very discerning man because he liked Shakespeare when no one else of his era bothered with him, and repeated moralising judgements on his lifestyle and relationship with his wife. It pleases me very much.

What pleased me more, of course, was the discovery that he had 'translated' some of Chaucer's poems from the Canterbury Tales. So of course I was immediately distracted from questions like "which of these poems are we likely to be studying this semester" to questions like "ooo, what does he do with this line or that line in the tale of madame de Bath?"

The answer tends to be that the actual lines stay the same, but the setting and connotations shift - sometimes quite a way.

For example, he takes Chaucer's 'fairyland' introduction and makes something sanitised and pretty of it, with some very Shakespearean fairies:

The king of elves and little fairy queen

Gambolled on heaths, and danced in every green;

And where the jolly troop had led the round,

The grass unbidden rose, and marked the ground.

Nor darkling did they dance; the silver light

Of Phoebe served to guide their steps aright,

And, with their tripping pleased, prolonged the night. (3-9)

Compare this to Chaucer's simple

Al was this land / fulfild of ffairye
The Elf queene / with hir ioly compaignye
Daunced ful ofte / in many a grene mede [1] (3-5)

Dryden then casts this into nostalgia in returning to the present day:

I speak of ancient times, for now the swain
Returning late may pass the woods in vain,
And never hope to see the nightly train. (16-18)

Despite Chaucer’s “ ther as wont/ to walken was an Elf / Ther walketh now...” form (17-18), he has no palpable sense of loss or regret. He remains more matter-of-fact, stating that one existed and the other exists, while Dryden repeats “in vain” three times in six lines (17-22) and depicts milkmaids[2] sighing over uneaten cream left out for the little folk. Interestingly, the effect of this is resentment against the priests and friars, which translates nicely into an anti-papist sentiment that is, naturally, missing in poor Chaucer’s original.

The other interesting thing in this introduction is the depiction of these little country rituals relating to the fairies:

In vain the dairy now with mints is dress'd,
The dairymaid expects no fairy guest,
To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast.
She sighs and shakes her empty shoes in vain,
No silver penny to reward her pain. (19-23)

I didn’t know about the mints, or that the fairies were meant to leave payment in your shoe (conflation with the fairy cobbler idea?). Perhaps the lack of fairies in Britain today can be directly attributed to the lack of mints.



[1] Sadly, I lack my Riverside, so quotes from the Tale come from a transcript of the Hengwrt manuscript, because that's more fun to read.
[2] Does the pastoral count as idealistic nostalgic in itself at this point? If Shakespeare was any indication, I’d guess so. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, after all!

The Earl of Kent's confession

This is my translation of the Anglo-Norman text of the Earl of Kent's confession, taken from the appendix to E. M. Thompson's edition of Murimuth (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889). He prints it there because it appears so in just one of the manuscripts of the chronicle - I believe it's also printed in Latin in Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (Rolls Series, 1863) ii 351, but I haven't verified this, and am not sure what the relationship is between the two versions.

For those who don't know, or do know and quite understandably quite keep the events of these few years straight, here's a brief summary:

- Isabella, queen of England, invaded England to depose her husband Edward II, with the help of her lover Roger Mortimer and Edward's brother Edmund, earl of Kent.

- Having deposed Edward II, they set up his son, a rather young Edward III, in his place. Isabella and Mortimer proceeded to have a party.

- Not long after, Edward II apparently died in captivity at Berkeley Castle. This was terribly unfortunate, and suspiciously convenient, especially for Mortimer. Even more conveniently, no one actually seems to have seen him dead. Anyway, he vanished.

- People proceeded to become more discontented with Isabella and Mortimer's rule.

- Suddenly, the Earl of Kent and a good number of other rather prominent people, as well as people who were rather likely to be in the know, were arrested/accused/looked at funny for trying to rescue the officially dead former king from durance vile in Corfe. Note that one of the men listed below, Sir John Pecche, was apparently the steward in charge of the castle in question, and therefore rather likely to know who was locked up in his charge.

- Despite this, they were naturally all just being terrible malicious liars who were out to upset the established order and oust their true king Morti- er - Edward III, and so many of them, including Kent, lost their heads. Others, according to proof and position, were exiled, fined, or just looked at funny for a while.

- Not long after this, Edward III decided he'd had enough of being a figurehead for a man who liked to do things like stage expensive tournaments in which he dressed up as King Arthur while asserting that he had no designs on the throne and had Edward's uncle executed for trying to rescue his father, had Mortimer executed and his mother politely retired, and took over ruling properly.

- The definitely-not-still-alive Edward II, meanwhile, wandered over to Italy where he spent the rest of his days pottering quietly about the gardens in a nice little monastery, and possibly digging ditches and clipping hedges, just like he'd always wanted to.


Alianore, over at her Edward II blog, made a series of posts on Kent's conspiracy, in which she untangled the characters and sequence of events beautifully: parts one, two, three and four.

The Anglo-Norman is below the translation, verbatim as published in Thompson's edition, if anyone wants to cite it - or disagree with me, of course!

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Please note: I have no qualifications in Anglo-Norman, or in fact in any form of French. The following translation is intended as a fun exercise, not a rigorous scholarly undertaking, and accuracy and finesse are in no way guaranteed.

This statement was given before Robert Howel, crowner of the king’s household, and afterward before the barons and peers of the realm, at Winchester, on the sixteenth day of March in the fourth year*:

Let it be known that E[dmund] Earl of Kent admits that the pope charged him, on his blessing, to bend all his pains and diligence to deliver E[dward] his brother, sometime* king of England, promising to cover his costs.

And he says that a friar preacher of a London convent came to him in Kensington, near London, and told him that he had raised the devil, who had told him most assuredly that E[dward] his brother, sometime king of England, was alive.*

And he says that the Archbishop of York sent to him a chaplain, Sir Aleyn, who bore a letter of credence reading thus: that he would give him for the deliverance of his brother 5000 pounds and more, so much as he had and could supply.

And he says that Sir Ingelram Berenger spoke to him in London on behalf of Sir William la Zouche, saying that he would do all in his power for his brother’s deliverance.

And he says that Sir William de Cliff came to him with the same message, by this token: that they rode together between Woking and Guildford, and he said that he avoided the town of Guildford because his niece Despenser* was there in that town; and that same Sir William spoke to him of the alliance between Richard, the son the Earl of Arundel, and his daughter *, and also said that it would be the greatest honour that ever befell him, and that he would aid him as far as he could to achieve these things.

And he says that the same William came to him on behalf of Hugh Despenser*, to say that he would be well pleased to be with him; because he said that he would be sure of accomplishing the deliverance within a little time.

And he says that Sir William de Derham, clerk of his letters, and Brother Thomas Bromfeld were those who most aided and urged him to undertake these things.

And he says that Sir Robert Taunton brought him word of these things on behalf of the Archbishop of York, saying that he had ready 5000 pounds to answer his needs in the undertaking, from the coffers of Sir Hugh Despenser.

And he says that the same Sir Robert and two friar preachers who are out of their order, the one named Edmund Savage and the other John, were the intermediaries of this affair.

And he says that Sir Fulk Fitzwarrene came to him at Westminster to pray and urge him to undertake this business, emboldening him in these things, and told him that it would be the greatest honour that ever befell him, and that he would give body, heart and all he could to help him.

And he said that Sir Ingeram Berenger came to him on behalf of Sir John Pecche, being in accord with that man, to say that he would give body, heart and all he could.

And he says that Sir Henry Beaumont and Sir Thomas Roscelyn spoke to him in Paris*, in the chambers of the Duke of Brabant, saying that they were prepared to come to England to assist in this venture; and that they urged him on to this end; and that they made shore near Scotland, with the aid of Donald of Mar, who was prepared to aid them to achieve these ends so far as he could. But they arrived too late.

And he says that Sir Richard Pontefract, confessor to Lady de Vescy, came to him on this business at the coronation at Kensington, and then at Arundel, on behalf of the Archbishop of York.

And he says that a monk of Quar and John Comminges, his cousin, had furnished a ship, a barge and a boat to carry his brother to his castle of Arundel, and thence wherever he would. And he says that all this matter had been revealed to Sir E. de Monchiver and George Percy.

And he says that the letters which he had sent to Sir Bugues de Bayeux and to John Deveril, sealed with his seal, that he did send – and that there was also one letter written in his wife’s hand.

And he says that Ingelram Berenger, Malcolm Musard and John Cumming had laboured and bent their backs to do these things.

And he says that Sir Ingelram Berenger came to him at Arundel, in his chambers above the chapel, and said that the bishop of London would aid him so much as was in his power in the deliverance of his brother.

And all these things he admits as true, and confesses himself guilty, that he has wrongly set himself to the unmaking of his lord king and his crown, by the advice of those aforesaid; and he wholly delivers himself to the will of that king, to come barefoot to London, in his shirt, or to whatsoever place the king shall name, with a rope about his neck to London, or whatsoever place the king may name, to do with him as he please.

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Ceste reconissance fuit faite devant Robert Houel, coruner del hostel le roi, et puis devant le grantz et piers de la terre, a Wyncestre, le xvj. jour de Marcz lan quarte: - Cest a saver, qe E. counte de Kent conust qe le apostoille ly charga, sour sa beneizon, qil meist sa peine et sa diligence deliverer E. soun frere, jadis roi Dengleterre, et qil a ceo trovereit ses costages. Et dit qe un frere prechour du covent de Loundres vint a ly, a Kenssingtone juxte Loundres, et ly dit qil avoit leve le deable, qe li dit serteinement qe E. soun frere, jadis roi Dengleterre, fut en vie. Et dit qe le ercevesqe de Everwik ly manda per un chapeleyn, syr Aleyn, une lettre de credence, et fut la credence tiele: qil ly eidroyt a la deliverance soun frere de v. mille livres et outre de quant qil aveit et quant qil poreit reindre. Et dit qe sire Ingeram Berenger dist a ly a Loundres de par sire William de la Souche qil mettroit quant qil porreit a la deliverance soun frere. Et dit qe sire William de Clif vint a li en mesme le message, par celes enseignes qils chivacherent ensemble entre Wokkingge et Gildeforde, et li dist qil eschuast la vile de Gildeforde par la reson de sa nece la Despenser qe fust em mesme la vile de Gildeforde; et mesme sely sire William ly parla de lalyance entre le fitz Richard, counte de Arundel, et sa filie, et dist outre qe ceo serrent le plus grant honur qe unqes ly avynt, et qil ly aidereit en tant com il poeit a ceste chose faire. Et dit qe mesme sely sire Wiliam vint a ly de par Hugues le Despenser, qe ly dit qil serroit bien seant qil fut ovesqe ly; kar il dit qe il seroit sour de la deliverance en bref temps. Et dit, qe sire William de Derham, clerk de ses lettres, et frere Thomas de Brounfelde furent ceux qe plus ly abetterent et enticerent a cestes choses susdite faire. Et dit qe sire Robert de Tauntone de par le ercevesqe de Evirwik eu message de ces choses avantdites et li dit qe il avoit prest v. mille livres a cele besoigne susdite par faire, et ceo de largent sire Hugues le Despenser. Et dit qe mesme sely sire Robert et deus freres prechours qe sunt hors de lour ordre, des quex lun se fait apeller Edmoun Savage, et lautre Johan, furent les brokours de ceste bosoigne. Et dit qe sire Fouke le fitz Waryn vint a ly a Westmonstre et ly pria et ly entica de ceste chose comencer, et ly enbaudi a cestes choses faire, et ly dit qe ceo serroit le plus grant hunur qe unqes ly avynt, et ly dit qil ly aideroit ou corps, quer, et quant qil avoit. Et dit qe monsire Ingeram Berenger vynt a ly de par sire Johan Pecche, qe fut de cele covyne, et a ceo mettreit cors, et quor, et quant qil avoit. Et dit qe sire Henry Bemound et sire Thomas Roscelyn parlerent a ly en Parys, en la chaumbre le Duk Braban, qil fusent prest de venir en Engleterre en aeide de cestes avantdites; et qils ly enticerent de cestes choses faire; et qil ariveroient devers les parties de Escoce, par abet de Donalde de Maar, qe il serroit en aeide de eux, a celes choses maintenir, et quant qil poeit. Mes le temps de lour venue est passe. Et dit, qe sire Richard de Pountfreyt, confessour la dame de Vescy, vynt a ly a Kensingtone, al corounement, et puis a Arundel, de par le ercevesqe de Everwike, pur cestes choses avantditz. Et dit, qe un moigne de Quarrer et Johan Cymmygs, soun cosyn, avoient aparaille une nyef, une barge, une batel, a menir soun frere et ly a soun chastel de Arundel et dilloqes la ou homme ust ordine. Et dit qe de cestes choses avantdites il soi descovereit a sire E. de Mounchiver et a Jorge de Percy. Et dit qe les lettres quelx il ad envoie a sire Buges de Baiouse et a Johan Devroillie, enselez de soun seal, qil les envoia – qe la une lettre fut enscripte de la meyn sa femme. Et dit qe Ingeram Berenger, Maucelym Musarde et Johan Cymmynge travaillerent et firent lour peine a cestes choses faire. Et dit qe sire Ingeram Berenger vynt a ly, a Arundel, en sa chaumbre a mount la chapele, et dit qe le evesqe de Loundres ly aideroit a la deliverance soun frere de quant qil avoit. Et cestes choses il conust estre vereies, et se rent coupable qil se ad malveisement porte en defesance de soun seignor lige et de sa corune, par abet de ces avantdit; et se met de tut a la volunte le roi, de venir nu pe, en sa chemise, a Loundres ou a ceste vile, ou par la ou le roi voudra ordiner, ou une corde entour soun col, de faire de ly ceo qe ly plerra.

The Air-brush and Red Blaming Pen of History

I've never read Froissart start to finish, only dipped into bits depending on what I'm researching at the time. And now that I've set out to read his Chronicles as a whole, I'm becoming increasingly relieved that I only ever quoted his version of Edward II's reign and deposition to demonstrate "tales that were told later about these events", rather than "how these events happened, no really, and this is crucial to my argument". I'm going to assume his 'historical' value rises as he gets closer to his own time and events that he witnessed, but the way he conflates certain characters and events and smooths over others is, in the light it sheds on the transmission and construction of history, more fascinating than accuracy.

Edward II, he claims, is "no part of our subject" (5)[1]. Still, he spends a few chapters narrating his reign - primarily, it seems, to provide contrast with those of his father and his son. For "it has often been observed that between two valiant kings there has most commonly been one less sufficient both in wit and valour" (4). When the recent family history of your (erstwhile/occasional) patron includes events like, oh, said patron's mother overthrowing his father with the help of her lover and setting the patron up as king in his father's place and then being overthrown by the new king who then hangs her lover like a thief, there's some delicate narration to be done, and this is probably going to necessitate finding a few scapegoats to shoulder all their own blame and as much as possible of everyone else's. Edward II is definitely one of Froissart's scapegoats. Positive references back to Edward I ("valiant, prudent, wise and bold" (5)) prove that Our Hero did come of good, strong lineage: his father was just an aberration.

Another scapegoat is Hugh Despenser, who takes the blame for his own deeds, most of Edward II's worst behaviour (as opposed to his simple incompetence), the entirety of the disputes between king and barons, the death of Thomas of Lancaster ("a wise and saintly man" (7)), and, obligingly, the role of Piers Gaveston. Gaveston doesn't appear in Froissart's history at all; instead, we are told that Edward II "truly governed his country with great cruelty and injustice, by the advice of Sir Hugh Despencer, with whom he had been brought up since childhood" (ibid). Now, on the face of it, this could be absolutely correct. He was, in the latter and most notorious part of his reign, strongly influenced by Despenser. And Despenser was one of the ten pueri in custodia hand-picked by Edward I as suitable companions to his growing son in the 1290s. But so was Piers Gaveston (Edward I really knew how to pick them), and it was he to whom the young Edward most adhered, he who was to influence the formation of his personality, political attitudes and developing relationship with his father and barons and his own crown until well after Gaveston was murdered in 1312. Despenser, by contrast, wasn't really in Edward's favour until 1316 at the earliest, and doesn't appear to have substantially affected his decisions before his appointment as chamberlain in 1318[2]. And that's without even considering all the lesser favourites in between and around those times, like Roger d'Amory and Arundel.

But that's complicated, and creates an unnecessary duplication of the main villain of the piece, which, as any film writer will tell you, confuses the audience. There was always a favourite, and he was someone who'd been raised with the king since childhood, and Edward's government was strongly influenced (or just carried out) by him. And Hugh Despenser fits that description, is easiest to villainise (Gaveston gave half the barons insulting nicknames, which is funny), is most memorable and got executed in a horrible way, so he's much the best candidate for the scapegoat hat.

However, there's absolutely no way we can make his hat big enough to take the blame for Isabella invading England, the dubious legality of deposing a king (or forcing him to abdicate, if you prefer). So we need scapegoat #3. The obvious candidate? Roger Mortimer.

Unexpectedly, then, he barely appears at all in the account of the invasion. Edward II takes all the blame for this one. Isabella escapes his tyranny, fleeing to France with her son[3]. She hears the pleas of the oppressed English, wishes to help them, pleads with king of France and count of Hainault for help (on her knees, weeping, because this is proper and appropriate and very touching), Sir John of Hainault swears to her that "you may count on me as your own knight" (12), which is all very admirable, and he helps her enter England. Naturally, the country rises up to meet her and rejects Edward. Mortimer appears once, just after the queen has (independently) decided to answer her people's call:

Then she left her lodging as quickly and quietly as she could, with her son, who was then about fifteen years old, the Earl of Kent, Sir Roger Mortimer and all the other English knights that had come away with her. They passed right through France... (11)

So right now, Mortimer's function is to avoid stealing Isabella's glory (er, sorry - piety). We need Isabella to be a hero for now, and we don't need him as a villain yet, not until after Edward II and Despenser are out of the picture and we come to the awkward question of Isabella's tyranny. At that point, he will be necessary not only evilly convince Edward III to kill his uncle Kent and to be the focus of Edward III's coup, but also to retrospectively take the blame for any doubts still lingering about Isabella's actions in and after the invasion.

And then, of course, there's the awkward question of adultery. The woman in question is, remember, Froissart's patron's mother, and possibly the most influential woman in the country's memory. Froissart does his best to side-step it - largely by the simple expedient already mentioned, of leaving Mortimer out of the history altogether. If one were to try to pair Isabella's name with that of any man over the course of the campaign, it would be Sir John of Hainault: but he firmly defined their relationship at the outset as a very proper lady-and-her-champion courtly trope. There is a hint of adultery, or rather of some vague inappropriateness, before Mortimer's name is ever mentioned, when Isabella in France is warned that "in all truth, if she did not behave discreetly, the King her brother would have her sent back to her husband in England, and her son with her" (11). But this is muddied by context: it is preceded by Isabella's distress at hearing of England's unhappiness, and followed by "because it did not please the King of France that she should stay away from her husband" (ibid). So the indiscretion is there, if one knows the story, but it's as far from suggestive as he can manage.

Similarly, the only hint we have before the denouement of any relationship between Isabella and Mortimer is painted primarily as mutual interest and influence, and it comes on the very verge of their catastrophe, when Froissart is piling up the tension against them:

The young King of England was ruled for a long time by the advice of his mother and of Edmund Earl of Kent and Sir Roger Mortimer, as you have heard. At length jealousy arose between these two lords, to the extent that Sir Roger Mortimer, with the connivance of the Queen Mother, advised the King that the Earl of Kent was going to poison him... (51)

Leaving aside what Froissart may or may not have known about the actual accusations against Kent[4], this neatly places the Blame of Evilness on Mortimer, while allowing Isabella's "connivance" to the extent that it shows a powerful bloc working against young Edward taking on the full robe of government, elevating Edward III while demeaning his mother as little as possible. Where there is glory to be seen in the actions of Isabella's party, she is allowed to take full responsibility, adorned in the robes of chivalry's belle dame; where something unsightly peeks through, she is, naturally, a woman, and is absolved from true responsibility by the weakness of her sex.

But then, of course, came the part that Froissart couldn't ignore: that little detail where Isabella was suspected of being pregnant with Mortimer's child, and Mortimer's downfall. What he can do, of course, is a) assert that it was all rumour and he can't speak to its truth, and b) shift the focus away by using that as a prologue to AND THEN EDWARD REALISED MORTIMER WAS EVIL AND SMOTE HIM MIGHTILY. And to accentuate this MIGHTY SMOTIFYING, how was Mortimer killed? Not merely hanged as Murimuth and pretty much every contemporary source would have it, oh no:

[The barons and nobles] replied that Mortimer should suffer the same fate as Sir Hugh Despenser, and this sentence was carried out without delay or mercy. Mortimer was dragged through the streets of London on a hurdle, and then tied to a ladder in an open square. His private parts were cut off and thrown onto a fire, as were his hearts and entrails, since he was guilty of treason in thought and deed. His body was then quartered and sent to the four largest cities in England, the head remaining in London. Such was the fate of Sir Roger Mortimer; may God forgive him his sins. (52)

And so all the evil people were punished evilly for their evil, and the rest of them lived happily ever after.

Now, I don't suggest that every instance in which Froissart varies from what we (more or less) know to have happened is a deliberate and conscious attempt on his part to wrest history into a more fitting course. I haven't yet managed to track down a copy of Jean le Bel's chronicles, which I understand Froissart was to a large extent following (alright, copying) for the earlier books. So for some of the "Froissart"s above one perhaps ought to read "Jean le Bel" - and for some, one must surely read "rumour, folklore, that old bloke in the pub and Everyone Knows".

I skimmed through a high-school or undergrad level book yesterday on the events of the English Civil Wars (it had diagrams!). One phrase caught my eye - it said something about "to understand this period, one must..." Well, why must I? Why can't I just take the facts and - well, turn them around my way and make my own understanding of them?

To understand, one must make history into a story in one's mind. Froissart, and the people around him, had certain tropes and shapes into which the facts and events and clouds of history had to fit to become a good, coherent story. It can't be a story until it has meaning - and sometimes it needs to take a few hammer-blows first.


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[1] All quotes are from the edition of the chronicles trans. and ed. John Jolliffe (New York: Modern Library, 1968). Eventually I will get around to reading them in French.

[2] Adam Murimuth doesn't find it necessary to refer to him before his first exile in 1320.

[3] In itself another example of simplifying events by placing blame and telescoping the sequence. Isabella went to France on Edward's instructions to negotiate terms with the king, her brother, who eventually agreed to receiving homage (for the French lands held by the English crown) not from Edward II but from his son the prince. Edward II was reluctant to send his heir over into the custody of his wife and her family, but eventually consented, sending a large loyal retinue with him. Isabella managed to manoeuvre people and events such that the retinue was sent home, and she was left holding the baby, as it were.

[4] Though if he had heard that the charge was actually about trying to help his brother (former Edward II, officially dead) escape from the place where he had been firmly assured by many notable and trustworthy people that he was, in fact, still being held prisoner, and should probably still be king... well, that was probably a good version of the story to leave out, because there's a whole mess of nasty legitimacy business there that I can't imagine Edward III would have wanted him to drag out. Come to that, I translated Kent's answer to the charges the other day: maybe I should post that.