‘Riding through the glen’
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Riding through the glen;
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
With his band of men.
Feared by the bad,
Loved by the good,
Robin Hood,
Robin Hood,
Robin Hood!
Theme song by Dick James for The Adventures of
Robin Hood (Granada TV series, 1955–9)
The chapters on twentieth-century medievalism have increasingly focused on literature, the art in which English-speaking people have since the Reformation expressed themselves more readily than in painting or music. The medieval has contributed more to literature, especially to poetry, than it has to other forms of cultural expression; or so it seems to someone interested in poetry. Literature in English has a long history, and it has for centuries been conscious of its history. The syllabus of some older universities has long required the study of texts in early forms of the language, which, thanks partly to the Norman Conquest, are more remote from its modern forms than is the case in other European vernaculars. The effect of the recovery of medieval literature is visible in writers from Gray to Hopkins, and the impress of the academic study of Old and Middle English literature stamps the writing of poets from Ezra Pound to Geoffrey Hill. Old English verse has been translated by Edwin Morgan, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.
In the twentieth century, the Medieval Revival often took up Christian themes. This may be because poets have come to feel they are an endangered species with a need to defend ancient springs. This fear, which goes back as far as the myth of Orpheus, had visited a number of English poets in the eighteenth century. Language is a defining human gift, and in poetry the patterning and power of language appear fully. In some poetry, figures such as metaphor and symbol use language to point beyond itself, as religious language can. If transcendence is essential to religion, Christianity is also a religion of immanence and history, and historical awareness has vastly increased since the late eighteenth century. But the rise of history does not show a triumph of consensus. Narratives of English history have lost confidence in a single national perspective. The simpler assumptions of the Whig consensus are not made by conscientious professional historians, though such assumptions retain popular resonance. Academic history is both ideologically contested and fragmented by specialisation. Many modern historians know little medieval history, and the same goes for professional students of modern English literature. Sophisticated voices have suggested that true historical knowledge is unattainable, a position which robs enquiry of its point. For these and other reasons, the textbooks which gave outlines of a connected national history were discarded in the 1970s. But the abandonment of Our Island Story, like the dropping of Grammar, leaves a vacuum. BBC radio has run, and repeated, an updated, and politically corrected, version of Winston Churchill’s super-Whig History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Television surveys of English history, such as that by Simon Schama, can succeed. Publishers exploit niche instances of both popular and professional history. But in the continuing absence of a connected national historiography, haziness has grown, especially regarding earlier periods. In popular legend, the only golden age which is reliable at the box office is the age of Elizabeth I, unspotted by the blood shed in enforcing religious uniformity and in colonising Ireland.
The period between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries, once almost uniformly obscure, has been studied in detail, so that scholars can now articulate this vast stretch of history. Since English medieval history involves reading in Latin and two vernaculars, medieval historians are never simply nationalist. Two generations ago, an inclusive survey of medieval Europe in its widest geographical sense, achieved in 1996 by Peter Brown in The Rise of Western Christendom, could scarcely have been attempted by a British historian.1
The narrative of events, and the publishing of medieval records, have long been supplemented by social history and a host of specialist studies. The part played by religion in history is now studied in its own terms, not explained in other terms. Two generations ago, the writings of David Knowles offered an overdue understanding of the monastic order in the Middle Ages. Academic medievalists have gone beyond events and politics to include, for example, medieval art-history, museum curatorship, manuscript studies, medieval Latin writing, linguistics, the social and economic history of cities and of agriculture, medicine, demography, the liturgy, medieval literary theory, the world of the female mystics, numismatics, place-name studies and medieval archaeology. Revived forms of medievalism have, with the exception of the revived religious orders, become more academic, as for example in the revivals of medieval drama and of medieval music. As Larkin the librarian said, of England, ‘There’ll be books; it will linger on / In galleries’.
At the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era, although the English Church and state, landscape and language, have medieval roots, it seems that living influences from the Middle Ages are now less acknowledged in politics, social thinking and the visual arts than they were in the nineteenth century, when a newly rich Britain was interested in its origins. The present effort to identify and trace the leading developments in medievalism has concentrated chiefly on its manifestations in high culture: in literature, social thinking, the arts, political thought and religion. This study, like others, is limited by the author’s interests and knowledge, and further limited by conscious decision. Different areas might well have been considered, and other instances might very well have been chosen. A list of what has not been considered might include the Jacobite tradition; the more Christian of the socialist utopias celebrated in Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (the English tradition owing more to the guild thinking of Ruskin and Morris); other experiments in communal Christian living and social theory; the Arts and Crafts movement, ecclesiastical history, the formation of library and museum collections, the development of palaeography and textual criticism, the history of History and of English and other academic disciplines, legal history, liturgical studies and musicology, the early music movement, the story of twentieth-century cathedral building, the architecture of Sir Ninian Comper, public ceremonials such as coronations and funerals, the study of typography and book illustration, the painting of Samuel Palmer at one end of this story, and of David Piper towards the other end, and the revival of medieval and mock-medieval music. Yet the author’s expertise is in literature, medieval and modern, in English.
A criterion adopted at the outset of this essay in cultural history was that medievalism must have some historical reference to a set of medieval texts or facts. Gothic fiction was ruled out as fantasy. This decision was made in full consciousness that the border between history and fiction is a debatable land, and that the atmosphere through which it is viewed changes over time. Thus Scott’s medievalist romances had a historical grounding, or clothing, and were welcomed as acceptable, if imaginary, pictures of medieval life; not unlike Shakespeare’s History plays. With growing historical knowledge, however, the historical setting of romances such as Ivanhoe came to seem flimsy. The historical criterion applied only tangentially to the world which Tennyson created from Arthurian romance and legend, a domain to which Victorian painters so devoted themselves that medievalism remains a defining characteristic of Victorian culture. Gothic Revival architecture is so often Victorian that it seems a constitutive element of that cultural phase. It is said that we shape our buildings, and that they afterward shape us. An example of this is the monastic church which Edward the Confessor built to the west of London. This Minster has for nearly a millennium been the place of consecration of the English monarchy and around it have grown up the buildings which house the British government and Parliament.
Tracing the course of medievalism shows that the historical/textual criterion initially adopted applies best to the work of Percy and Scott, and works well with the applied medievalism of the period 1840 to 1870, sometimes very well. But it does not apply well to late Victorian art and poetry, which are less medievalist than mythological. The Medieval Revival which began in about 1900 was consciously Christian, and has typically continued as (Anglo-)Catholic. In close parallel with this development, a historically informed medievalism, instituted in the educational syllabus, became a positive element in the poetic literature of modernism, beginning with Pound and Eliot, and continuing in David Jones, Auden and Geoffrey Hill. In prose fiction, the figure of Evelyn Waugh stands in as belated and isolated a position as he could have wished. Après lui le déluge.
But for more than a century, mass civilisation and minority culture have pulled apart. In a democracy increasingly dominated by popular media, the high culture of the past can be seen, and is now often represented, as too exclusive. Its contrary, an exclusive populism, now threatens the quality of education and therefore of democracy. For what is called popular culture is now very largely a commercial product, promoted by the media in order to make money for those who own the media. Rupert Murdoch is a worthy successor to the press barons of the Rothermere–Beaverbrook era and to the moguls of Hollywood. The discourse of British political, social and cultural life has firmly been taken in populist directions, often by educated people. Correction is not likely to come from any institutional source, for professional elites are under attack from government. Churches have become marginal, and universities have lost independence. The Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England said that ‘It was once the role of Governments to provide for the purposes of universities; it is now the role of universities to provide for the purposes of Governments.’2 An Oxford-educated Conservative Prime Minister described the study of history as a luxury, and a Cambridge-educated New Labour Minister of Education did not want people to study medieval history. Degrees in History now often neglect earlier periods. The literary syllabus usually begins with Shakespeare. In the school syllabus, and in the syllabus of many universities, he is the only required pre-Romantic writer, which makes it difficult to study him historically.
It takes time for new knowledge to become a public possession, and the divide between high and popular culture is widening. Until now, the art of the elites has regularly drawn on the culture of the people, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Percy to Scott to Dickens. Popular art has in its turn recycled high culture. Shakespeare, who recycled medieval history and romance, has been endlessly recycled. Scott and Dickens have been staged, put to music and filmed. Chaucer’s cruder tales have been put on the stage. Even Beowulf is translated, staged and filmed. But the transfer of cultural capital to global audiences is shaped by strong market forces, and popular culture is dominated by a media industry which treats history as a theme park or a source of violent fantasy, as in the American TV series Game of Thrones, based on a sexed-up version of formulas deriving from Ivanhoe, Alexandre Dumas and Norse saga. The future of high culture, outside its own elites, is precarious, and the elites become precarious. The names of Turner and Ruskin do not sit well in the same sentence as the Turner Prize. The future roles of history, tradition and cultural inheritance are obscure, though the medieval will hold its place among them.
The rise of the visual media, film, television, video, DVD and other forms of electronic transfer, has transformed the mediation of the stories which human beings need, stories previously transmitted through the spoken, the written and the printed word, or by words spoken in live theatres. The visual entertainment media of greater Anglo-Saxondom now have global audiences, and the Middle Ages, like other historical periods, are thereby mediated more by images than by words, though images derived from words. Scott’s own romances were staged as soon as they came out. The popularity of historical costume drama transferred quickly into film. ‘Medieval’ costume dramas have, since Ivanhoe, been more romance than history. There are scores of films in the mould of Ivanhoe, and of the swashbuckling European romances which followed in the wake of Scott’s Quentin Durward, such as Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires of the 1840s. Scott’s Kenilworth, which tells of the love of Elizabeth I and Leicester, and the murder of Leicester’s mistress, Amy Robsart, is told too slowly to be popular today. Yet every year brings a new film on the supposed love life of the Virgin Queen, and, increasingly often, the heroine, like Keats’s Madeline, ‘loosens her fragrant bodice’.
The exaggerations of popular romance, when rehearsed by sophisticated writers, are often consciously playful; Byron rightly called Scott the Ariosto of the North. On stage, and in Hollywood, this turns into self-parody. Chaucer made fun of romance, and Shakespeare of wizardry. ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time,’ jokes Lear’s Fool. The words quoted at the head of this epilogue come from the theme song of a TV series descended from Ivanhoe. They show the tendency of burlesque is towards vacancy. Nottinghamshire being a county without a glen, Dick James here salutes Walter Scott.
Keats, as we saw, drastically revised Scott’s idealised medievalism. Much later, the visit of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee to King Arthur’s Court turned out very badly.3 Thackeray wrote a comic sequel to Ivanhoe in Rebecca and Rowena, and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone perfects a comic modern Arthurianism. In the cinema these revisionary impulses make very old jokes. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a burlesque, in which John Cleese’s ability to fight on after his legs have been cut off parodies a scene found in medieval popular romances. The Grail film is also a crusade against chivalry. In comparison, Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder TV series, though critical of some historical practices, was more a send-up of the cinematic conventions of historical costume drama.
Film, like fantasy, lies beyond the scope of this study. Yet it would be odd to close without mentioning the success with which moving pictures of various kinds have recently fed the appetite for medieval romance. We have noted the success of children’s books by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, members of the Oxford Inklings. Tolkien became a cult on American campuses in the 1960s: the slogan ‘FRODO LIVES’ decorated the New York subway in 1965. These children’s stories, the Inklingasaga, share a social, ethical and metaphysical structure informed by scholarly reading in medieval epic and romance, though their form is mediated by the authors’ childhood reading. Innocent, and without the complications of adult sexuality, they feature the brave young man of humble background, the grasping old lord in his castle, the lovely princess, the old dragon guarding gold in the ground, and good and bad magic. They are set in a legendary pre-history or in a fairyland reached through a wardrobe in the school holidays. They take for granted that courage, fidelity, self-sacrifice and love are virtues, and provide the satisfactions of poetic justice and providential endings. It is a boy’s world, not of history but of romance: ultimately pre-medieval but clothed (especially by Tolkien) in medieval forms which descend from the romances of Walter Scott, the verse tales of William Morris and the fantasy of George MacDonald. J.K. Rowling is old-fashioned enough to use her initials, like Tolkien and Lewis, but she is no medievalist.4 Her school stories have access to a magic world, but have little more than that in common with the tales of C.S. Lewis. She crosses the formulas of the boarding school story (bullies, snobs, swots, games, tyrants and crushes) with the formulas of kiddie Gothic (the magic castle, the young hero, broomsticks, witches, forbidden knowledge). She has Good and Evil, but her morality is less Christian than that of the Inklings.
These phenomena of popular culture do not rely on historical knowledge; their debt is to romance. All are downstream from the meltdown of neo-classical canons and the recovery of pre-modern history and popular literature which began in the mid-eighteenth century. Their mode goes back to kinds of story readmitted at that time, and recreated by Scott. As for history itself, any history written for a general readership needs a story, and stories require prior simplifications. These simplifications have changed since 1760 and since 1860 and since 1960, and are changing now. Those who know any history are now more aware than they once were that the origins of England are medieval and European. Despite one reading of the result of the ‘Brexit’ referendum, the English are no longer bound to the story of a national independence gained for reasons of conscience at the Reformation, nor to the prospectus of the Enlightenment, nor to imperial projections of the Elizabethan age as simply glorious.5 Thanks to historical researchers, visionaries, prose romancers and poets, England has since 1760 regained an awareness of and regard for her medieval past, which is now a permanent part of her identity and of her future.