Sir Walter Scott - Medieval revival

Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival
Author(s): Alice Chandler
Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Mar., 1965), pp. 315-332
Published by: University of California Press
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Sir Walter Scott and
the Medieval Revival
ALICE
WAS A
IT
CHANDLER
nineteenth-centurycommonplacethat the medieval
revival had been initiated by Sir Walter Scott, but the commonplace was only half true. Quite as much as Scott's poems and novels
created much of the medievalism that followed, they were themselves the distillation of more than a century's interest in the
feudal past. Newman could say that Scott "had first turned
men's minds in the direction of the middle ages"; Carlyle could
believe that he had revived the art of history; Ruskin could call
himself a Tory of "Scott's grand old school." 1 But Scott himself
might have said that he was of the school of the graveyard poets
and the Gothic novelists, the gentlemen antiquaries and the
ballad collectors, the Whig poets and the Tory historians. Mixing both the truths and fantasies about the middle ages that had
grown up during the eighteenth century, Scott created an imaginary medieval world that most of his readers took for real. So
vivid, in fact, was this world that a whole century dreamed and
philosophized about it. (If Wemmick's "castle" is the dream,
Carlyle's St. Edmondsbury is the philosophy.) To be sure, medievalism is incomplete in Scott. He does not use the past to castigate and correct the present, as later medievalists were to do; nor
does he turn feudalism into a political program. But just as his
books would have been impossible without the eighteenth-century
rediscovery of the middle ages, so the pervasive medievalism of
Alice Chandler is an instructor in English, City College, New York.
should be remarked that although most of the impact of Scott's medievalism
probably came from Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, the only two of the medieval
novels that were notably popular, these statements are not merely the expression of
a nineteenth-century myth. Even the twentieth-century historian, G. M. Young,
declares that "when the [medieval] revival came, the whole educated world was
... conditioned to read its documents as Scott would have read them." ("Scott and
the Historians," Sir Walter Scott Lectures, 1940-1948 [Edinburgh, 1950], p. 88.) For
a full discussion of the nineteenth-century reaction to Scott, see James T. Hillhouse,
The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1936).
1 It
[315]
316
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
the nineteenth century is unthinkable without them. Interesting
vn itself, Scott's medievalism is thus a convenient milestone in
the history of ideas.
In a sense, the middle ages had never died, even in Scott's
time. Although the Enclosure Acts had crisscrossed the English
countryside with hedgerows and dotted it with flocks of sheep,
Chaucer's plowman would have found England's rural life very
familiar. The tools and produce of agriculture had scarcely
changed for centuries; the old country customs and festivals
were only slowly dying out; and the whir of the spinning-wheel
had just begun to grow silent. By the 1790's farmers no longer
ate side by side with their workmen, but the abandonment of
the old feudal relationship still caused comment.
Medieval art forms had remained alive, too, except in the city,
where popular tradition had become rootless and denatured. In
the country and at such places as Oxford, the Gothic tradition of
building survived right through the neoclassical period. The old
tales of Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick, long condemned
as "barbaric," kept their place at the rural fireside until their
"simple grandeur" was rediscovered, and the same pattern held
true for folk songs and ballads.
If the unrecognized persistence of medieval customs into the
nineteenth century would make a book in itself (and one that
needs to be written), the conscious revival of interest in the middle
ages, from the sixteenth century on, would make another. Such
a study would include the Tudor historians, who drew upon
the middle ages for lessons in statecraft; the Anglican churchmen,
who used the existence of the medieval English church to justify
their break with Rome; the antiquarians, who gradually accumulated the documents of medieval history; and the linguists, who
slowly unlocked their meaning. It would also require consideration of the graveyard poets and Gothic novelists, for-witness
the Whartons, or Thomas Gray, or even Horace Walpole-scholars and creative writers cannot always be separated. Simply for
convenience, however, we can single out three particular influences on Sir Walter Scott: the scholarly, the Gothic, and the
primitive.
Scott's scholarship began at home, for he learned much about
the past from his childhood exposure to the lingering medieval
tradition. In the Scotland of his youth, where ancient fortifica-
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
317
tions still dominated the landscape, the feudal system of land
tenure still prevailed. Scottish peasants paid their rent with
service as well as money-with
"arriages or ploughings, bounages
or reapings, carriages or carting." 2 Wordsworth's Highland reaper,
singing of "old unhappy far-off things, / And battles long ago,"
was a real figure in an archaic world.
Coming from a family imbued with local pride, Scott was
aware from boyhood of his country's history. In his grandfather's
house he heard "the old songs and tales which then formed the
amusement of a retired country family." 3 His grandmother, for
whom the Border traditions were still vivid, told him "many a
tale of Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwoods, James Telfer
of the fair Dodhead, and other heroes-merry
men all, of the
persuasion and calling of Robin Hood and Little John." 4 And
he learned, especially from his mother, ballads from even earlier
periods of history.
Scott himself dates for us the shift between the unconscious
medievalism that was part of his family life and the conscious
medievalism that shaped his maturity. He tells us how at the
age of thirteen he first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's
Reliques:
But above all, I then first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's
Reliques of Ancient Poetry. As I had been from infancy devoted to
legendary lore of this nature, and only reluctantly withdrew my attention, from the scarcity of materials and the rudeness of those which
I possessed, it may be imagined, but cannot be described, with what
delight I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood,
and still continued in secret the Delilahs of my imagination, considered as the subject of sober research, grave commentary, and apt
illustrations, by an editor who showed his poetical genius was capable
of emulating the best qualities which his pious labor preserved.5
Scott reacted to Percy's collection in the same way that many
late eighteenth-century writers, both English and Continental,
did. Like Herder, who had been inspired by the Reliques to collect
Lithuanian folk songs, Scott began gathering native Scottish ma2J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain, 2nd ed., I (Cambridge,
England, 1930), 109.
3John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Cambridge ed.,
I (Boston and New York, 1902), 15.
4lbid.
5Ibid., pp. 31-32.
318
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
terials. In fact, his youthful interest in ballads was so keen that
at sixteen he wvrotethat he had a "longer acquaintance" with
ballads than with any other form of learning and that "his
industry in this way [was] something marvellous." 6 At seventeen,
when he joined a local debating group, he won the title of Duns
Scotus for his researches in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and early Scottish
literature. At eighteen he lectured on the origin of the feudal
system. By 1792, the year he came of age, Scott was making the
first of seven successive "raids," as he called them, into Liddesdale
-forays that helped provide him with material for his Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border (1802-1803). For this annotated collection
of ballads, Scott had the co-operation of many contemporary
medieval scholars, and he continued and augmented these friendships by his later membership in the Roxburghe and Bannatyne
societies.
But, as stated before, the scholarly interest in the middle ages
did not develop independent of a kind of "poetic" interest in the
imaginative material the middle ages could provide. The English
audience that devoured the Reliques had already been conditioned to medieval interests by almost half a century of poetry
about "the cloister's silent gloom" and "low-browed misty vaults
...
hung
round
with
shreds
of scutcheons."
In his
Gotik
und
Ruine, Reinhard Haferkorn lists almost fifty neoclassical poets
who employ medieval imagery.7
Scott's interest in the middle ages cannot be discussed, then,
apart from the prevailing taste for the Gothic. Before Scott
changed it still further, this taste had already taken two main
forms. Early writers had tended to show the awe and sadness of
the past and usually ended by moralizing over man's frailty.
Thomas Gent, the eighteenth-century antiquary, spoke for a
whole generation of poets and essayists when he wrote that the
"awful Ruins" of Kirkstall Abbey in Yorkshire "were enough to
strike the most hardened Heart into the softest and most serious
Reflexion." 8 Later authors, however, were more likely to use
Gothic settings to provide the reader with a certain thrill of
6 Sir Walter Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C.
Grierson, I
(London, 1932), 4, 7.
7Reinhard Haferkorn, Gotik und Ruine in der englischer Dichtung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Leipziger Beitrdge zuir englischen Philologie, Heft IV (Leipzig,
1924).
8 Thomas
Gent, Antient and Modern History of the Loyal Town of Rippon
(York, 1733), p. 26 (second pagination).
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
319
danger and excitement. Although the changes of taste are too
difficult to trace here in detail, it is safe to say that by 1770
Gothic materials were not used to show the sadness of man's
mortality so much as the precariousness of his fate.
Scott was obviously aware of both aspects of the Gothic tradition, the melancholy and the terror. The writings themselves,
with all their Gothic paraphernalia, show this clearly, and our
knowledge of Scott's reading provides additional evidence. The
Reliques may have excited him at thirteen, but The Castle of
Otranto had been his favorite book at twelve. Later in life, besides knowing the works of Anne Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and
Clara Reeve, he was a friend of "Monk" Lewis and, like him, an
expert in the German tale of terror.
One more aspect of eighteenth-century medievalism remains
to be considered in studying the intellectual background of
Scott's medievalism. That is the concept best referred to as "hard
primitivism," which, quite as much as the "renascence of wonder," is the common factor in medievalism and romanticism.9
Although it stresses the heroism rather than the innocence of
natural man, the concept of "hard primitivism" clearly allies
medievalism to the myth of the noble savage. It was because of
this supposed closeness to nature that late eighteenth-century
writers often found medieval times superior to the classical period. Bishop Hurd, for instance, thought that if Homer had
known of the middle ages, he would have preferred them to the
days of Greece and Troy.10
Owing to the association of the middle ages and nature, a peculiar union was accomplished between medievalism and liberalism. The same writers, usually Whigs, who denounced the
high middle ages as dark centuries of Catholic iniquity and
feudal oppression, somehow also managed to celebrate the stalwart virtues of the earlier Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Norsemen.
As early as 1730, in his ode to Liberty, James Thomson described
the Britons as nature's careless sons, coming "Erect from nature's
hand, by tyrant force / And still more tyrant custom unsubdued." 11
9See Arthur 0. Lovejoy, "The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature,"
Modern Language Notes, XLVII (Nov., 1932), 419-446.
10Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ed. Edith J. Morley (London,
1911), p. 108.
11James Thomas, Complete Poetical Works (Oxford, 1908), p. 375. Prose
historians,
too, managed to ground the English constitution in the hard primitivism of the
320
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
Little direct evidence exists for Scott's exposure to hard primitivism, although he probably read Thomson. But such evidence
is not really needed. Like antiquarianism and Gothicism, such
ideas were in the air. As we shall see later, both Scott's novels
and poetry are permeated with them.
The relationship of Scott's medievalism to the scholarship of
the medieval revival is easily seen by examining the notes he
provided for many of his works. They show, first of all, a wide
knowledge of the primary sources-particularly the poems and
chronicles-that had been reprinted during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Since Scott was not a graduate student, it
is hard to tell what editions he relied on for Froissart's Chronicles,
Commine's Memoirs, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Barbour's
Bruce. But many of them probably date from the same period
that produced the collections of materials on which he so often
relied: Ellis's Specimens of Early English Poets (1790) and Specimens of Early English Romances in Meter (1805), plus Ritson's
Robin Hood (1795) and Ancient English Metrical Romances
(1802). He was also indebted to the revived interest in family and
county history that was helping to develop a real knowledge of
the life of the past. The notes merely to The Lay of the Last
Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake list as sources histories of the
Douglas, Sutherland, St. Clair, and Scott families, and studies of
Cumberland, Westmoreland, Perthshire, and the Western Islands.
Scott's secondary sources also show how much his history was
a product of the best of the medieval revival. In Ivanhoe, for example, he gives as his chief authorities: Joseph Strutt, an expert
social historian for his time; Robert Henry, the best of the lateeighteenth-century medieval historians; and Sharon Turner,
author of the monumental History of the Anglo-Saxons.
So prolonged and so wide a reading of medieval materials was
bound to result in mastery of the available lore. This mastery
is dramatized by Scott's writing Quentin Durward with no other
help than Commine's memoirs, a gazeteer, and a map of Touraine;12 but it is shown consistently by the easy familiarity with
which he always handles details of costume, diet, battle, architecture, and language. The knowledge is not recondite or unusual,
perhaps, but the texture of the novels is unthinkable without
freedom-loving Celts and Saxons. The radical Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, for example, prefaced her History of England (1763-1783) with Thomson's ode.
12Una Pope-Hennessy, Sir Walter Scott (Denver, 1949), p. 92.
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
321
references to manchet bread and rere-suppers,casques and gorgets,
gules and sables. That Scott's history is often inaccurate, and sometimes consciously so, is irrelevant to this paper.13 It merely shows
that in his standards, as well as in his knowledge, Scott was the
product of an age without strict canons of scholarship.
It must be realized, however, that Scott's novels are Gothic as
well as historical. As most commentators recognize, there are
borrowings from the Gothic novels in almost all his works. In
discussing the effects of the Gothic tale on his poems and on his
ten medieval novels-Count Robert, The Betrothed, The Talisman, Ivanhoe, The Fair Maid of Perth, Castle Dangerous,
Quentin Durward, Anne of Geierstein, The Monastery, and The
A bbot14 -we must, therefore, distinguish two types of Gothicism:
(1) that which belongs simply to the tale of terror, no matter
what era it is set in; and (2) that which is only possible for a
story taking place in the middle ages.
Obviously, the first type of Gothicism needs little discussion in
this paper. It includes mainly the use of supernatural events that
could belong to any period: spectral figures, second sight, secret
passageways, magic manuscripts, fiery portents, and their associated flim-flammery. Although Scott never wished to use supernatural occurrences to frighten his reader-to raise hair and
chill marrow-he does use medieval material to make his narSir Walter Scott, Waverley Novels, XVI (Edinburgh, 1829-1833), xxi-xlii.
l&Although authorities differ widely as to the terminal date of the middle ages,
the statement of The Cambridge Medieval History that "the close of the middle
ages has been placed by the general consent of historians at the end of the fifteenth
century," should suffice to justify the presence of the first eight novels on this list.
The inclusion of The Monastery and The Abbot, both dating to sixteenth-century
Scotland, may need, however, further justification, particularly in view of the absence of villeinage and the growth of Protestantism during that period. Briefly, my
criteria for including them have been the extreme backwardness and lack of order
of much of Scotland at that time. Even at the turn of the seventeenth century, Scotland was still a poor country with a primitive economy. Her foreign trade was
scanty, her king still dependent on gifts. The peasants lived, for the most part, in
chimneyless turf or stone huts, whose doors were hung with animal hides. The
roads to these huts were usually mere tracks, often impassable, even on horseback;
and the methods of farming had not changed for centuries. Although the burghs
were more modern, only six had a population of more than 2,000. Although the
persistence of many of these conditions into the eighteenth and even nineteenth
centuries may seem to undercut the validity of these criteria, it seems to me that one
major distinction separates the "medieval" Scotland of the sixteenth century from
the "modern" nation that follows, and that is the establishment of a centralized
and enforceable law in place of the chaos of clan rule. As with so many of
Scott's novels of historical transition, it is just with this shift from a localized,
instinctive society to a more centralized one based on law that The Abbot and The
Monastery deal.
322
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
ratives more exciting. The Castle of Torquilstone in Ivanhoe, in
which the evil Front le Boeuf imprisons the Saxon party, provides an excellent example of the use of a medieval backdrop
for sheer melodrama. Below are the dread dungeons, sweating
with damp and mold, fearful with their bones and rusty grates.
Above are the low passages and stone stairways by which the
crazed Urfrieda creeps from chamber to chamber.
Even more persistently than he uses medieval architecture to
create an effect of drama, Scott employs the Catholic church as a
source of villainy and horror. Although Scott admired the medieval church, he followed the prejudices and practices of most
novelists of his time in ascribing to it all sorts of evil practices.
Thus we have the strange underground celebration of the mass
in The Talisman; the secret Catholic tribunal in A nne of
Geierstein; the imprisonment of the disfigured nun in Castle
machinations of
par excellence!-the
Dangerous; and-villainy
the ruthless Templars, Conrade of Monserrat in The Talisman
and Brian de Bois-Guilbert in Ivanhoe.
The use of Monserrat and Bois-Guilbert as villains points out
still another aspect of Scott's use of the Gothic: his adaptation of
the classic Gothic villain to a purely medieval setting. We have
only to look at the collection of really sinister, as opposed to
brutish, villains in Scott's medieval novels to see that they are
all similar. Whether from the nobility-like
the Templars, or
Sir John Ramorny in The Fair Maid of Perth-or from the lower
classes, like Hayraddin Maugrabin in Quentin Durward, their
characteristics are all the same. They are harsh, isolated, faithless,
atheistical men. Though borrowed from such novels as The
Monk, these characteristics are no accident but part of Scott's
use of the novel as a vehicle for his social philosophy. Turning to
the novels themselves, we shall see how all these elementsin Scott's
scholarship, Gothicism, and hard primitivism-figure
own vision of the middle ages and how this vision links the
conservatism of Burke with "new feudalism" of the Victorians.
Although much of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) is simply
a Gothic pastiche, Scott's avowed interest is in feudal society.
His characters are the early inhabitants of the Borderland. Scott
describes them as traditional hard primitives, living in a state
"partly pastoral and partly warlike, and combining habits of
constant depredations with the influences of a rude spirit of chiv-
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
323
However, since he is a Tory rather than a Whig, Scott
emphasizes the interdependence quite as much as the independence of feudal society. He sees the castle as the center of communal life:
alry."
15
Knight, and page, and household squire,
Loiter'd through the lofty hall
Or crowded round the ample fire.16
At feast times everyone comes together joyously:
Steward and squire with heedful haste,
Marshall'd the rank of every guest;
Pages, with ready blade, were there
The mighty meal to carve and share.17
The knights and squires, of course, were expected to repay their
lord by snatching up their swords and Jedwood axes whenever
the castle was threatened. But even the peasant was caught up in
the reciprocity of feudal relations. In wartime he and his family
could take refuge in the castle, provided he joined the feudal
community in defending it.
Scott also emphasizes the need for interdependence in society
in the less familiar Harold the Dauntless (1817). Set in the preConquest period, Harold has a complete primitive for its protagonist, a Danish earl possessed of the "Berserker's rage divine."
Wherever he goes, his name strikes terror, for he shows no mercy
to his enemies.
... blood he quaffs like Odin's bown,
Deep drinks his sword,-deep drinks his soul;
And all that meet him in his ire
He gives to ruin, rout, and fire.18
But, despite his heroism, Harold is always a villain. He is not
simply an extreme hard primitive. He is a savage-a man outside
society. As such he endangers the social covenant and must either
accept the law or perish. The poem ends, like all Scott's works,
with a restoration of order, as Harold repents and becomes a
Christian.
15
Sir Walter Scott, Poetical Works, VI (Edinburgh, 1833), 37.
16 Ibid.,
pp. 49-50.
Ibid., p. 191.
18 Ibid., XI, 192.
17
324
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
The idea of order is particularly important in Ivanhoe, Scott's
fullest attempt to interpret medieval society in accordance with
his social philosophy. He works in that novel with a wide range
of cultural levels: from Urfrieda, the demented Saxon hag who
calls upon Wotan and Zernebock for vengeance, to Brian de
Bois-Guilbert, who has so far outgrown chivalry and Christianity
as to think honor and religion mere superstitions. As in Harold,
Scott rejects the mere primitive, like Urfrieda, but he is even
more hostile to the rationalist Templar. Bois-Guilbert is specifically stated to be false in his oaths, faithless to women, hypocritical
in his religion. Unwilling to fulfill his feudal responsibilities to
the weak and oppressed, he thinks only of his own freedom and
ambition. In all this, the Templar is a typical Gothic villain, but
he also represents the decay of the medieval ideal and would be
a corrosive force in any age.
Between these two threatening extremes, Scott portrays members of almost every medieval social class-serf,
freeman, and
yeoman; thane, noble, and king-and
unobtrusively suggests
what their relations should be to each other. At the bottom of
the social scale are Cedric's serfs, Wamba and Gurth. Wamba
shows the feudal relationship between master and man in its
purest form. The jester is protected by Cedric-sheltered
under
his roof, fed at his table-in
return for doing what he can:
seasoning Cedric's meals with his jokes and helping Gurth herd
the swine. Too irresponsible to make his own way in the world,
he can nonetheless be as loyal and wise as the Fool in Lear. It is
he, after all, who disguises himself as a monk so that he can enter
Cedric's cell and take his place in the dungeon and at the stake.
The dialogue between master and man, in which Wamba tries
to persuade his lord to let him do this, shows Scott's vision of the
way feudalism should have worked: the serf willing to die for his
master, the master willing to die for the man he considered his
sovereign:
"Leave thee in my stead!" said Cedric, astonished at the proposal;
"why they would hang thee, my poor knave."
"E'n let them do as they are permitted," said Wamba; "I trust-no
disparagement to your birth-that
the son of Witless may hang in a
chain with as much gravity as the chain hung upon his ancestor the
alderman."
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
325
"Well, Wamba," answered Cedric, "for one thing I will grant thy
request. And that is, if thou wilt make the exchange of garments with
Lord Athelstane instead of me."
"No, by St. Dunstan," answered Wamba; "there were little reason
in that. Good right there is, that the son of Witless should suffer to
save the son of Hereward; but little wisdom there were in his dying
for the benefit of one whose fathers were strangers to his." 19
Needless to say, Scott is too kind to allow poor Wamba to
perish. His reward is an embrace from his grateful master and
the assurance of a place at Cedric's hearth. Freedom, however, is
not granted him, for he is not suited to it and does not want it.
"The serf," says Wamba contentedly, "sits by the hall-fire when
the freeman
must forth to the field of battle....
Better
a fool at
a feast than a wise man at a fray." 20
Gurth is a very different character. He exemplifies the recurrent hard primitivism that Scott always associates with the idea
of liberty. Notice the vocabulary that describes his dress and
bearing. He is characterized as "stern, savage, and wild." His
clothing is associated with the earliest stages of society, "being a
close jacket with sleeves, composed of the tanned skins of some
animal." 21 Around his neck is twisted a brass collar, the symbol
of the servitude that galls him in spite of his loyalty to Cedric.
Too good a man to be faithless, he is nonetheless sullen about the
service he renders. When Cedric unjustly punishes him for helping the banished Ivanhoe, he runs away.
Although he demands his freedom, Gurth is no villain who
denies the social covenant. His flight lasts only as long as Cedric
is safe. Then, like Wamba, he works to rescue his master. Because he is capable of it, his reward is freedom. " 'THEOW and
Cedric declares, "'Art thou no longer ... FOLKFREE and
ESNE,'
SACLESS
art thou in town and from town, in the forest as in the
field. A hide of land I give thee in my steads of Walbrugham,
from me and mine to thee and thine for aye and for ever.' "22
Although Scott is scarcely uncritical of Cedric's beliefs and
behavior, the good Saxon does embody many of the values that
Scott held dear. He is a giver of feasts, who welcomes all to share
19Scott, Waverley Novels, XVII, 38-39.
Ibid., 154.
21 Ibid., XVI, 8.
20
22Ibid., XVII, 153
Nineteenth-Century
326
Fiction
in his plenty, even the caftaned Jew. Quick-tempered and slowthinking, he is nevertheless staunch and loyal. Scott obviously
sees in the testy franklin, only too eager to assert his Saxon
toward
heritage, the archetype of the modern squire-patriarchal
his inferiors, intense in his local pride, loyal to his rightful lord
-the sort of man, with an increase in wisdom, that the Laird of
Abbotsford himself desired to be.
But, while Cedric is attractive and the conquering Normans
are not, Scott realizes that society can never be static. The character of the Normanized Saxon, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, illustrates
Scott's Tory belief in the possibility of retaining the best of one
society while gradually shifting to another. Ivanhoe represents
the spirit of chivalry, which Scott defined in an essay he wrote
for the Encyclopedia Britannica as the use of individual freedom
(Saxon) to defend social order (Norman). As he explains to Remaiden, she is the nurse of pure and
becca: "'Chivalry!-why,
stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievhigh affection-the
were but an
ances, the curb of the power of the tyrant-Nobility
empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in
her lance and her sword.' "23
The idea of chivalry, for which the social equivalent is paternalism, can also be found in Scott's next two novels, The Monastery
(1820) and The Abbot (1820). Once again communal dining is
used to symbolize a coherent society. With an oblique thrust at
the changes that had occurred in his lifetime, Scott writes that in
the fifteenth century:
The idea of the master or mistress of the mansion feeding or living
apart from their domestics was ... never entertained. The highest end
of the board, the most commodious settle by the fire,-these were the
only marks of distinction; and the servants mingled, with deference
indeed, but unreproved and with freedom, in whatever conversation
was going forward.24
Perhaps deliberately, Scott presents a contrasting pair of masters
in these novels: Julian Avenel, who is so bent on wars and feuds
that his fields are untilled and his pastures empty, and Halbert
Glendinning, who transforms the same area into a prosperous
little hamlet by offering protection to tenants who will in turn
23
24
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., XVIII, 41.
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
327
help him defend his castle. Glendinning is generous to his retainers: "Two bullocks, and six sheep, weekly, were the allowance
when the baron was at home, and the number was not greatly
diminished during his absence. A boll of malt was weekly brewed
into ale, which was used by the household at discretion. Bread
was baked in proportion for the consumption of his domestics and
retainers." 25
Later medievalists picked up such passages as this in Scott and
used the contrast between medieval plenty and the starvation
diets of nineteenth-century workers as part of their indictment
of the present in relation to the past. They also derived, at least
in part from Scott, the concept, first popularized in The Abbot
and The Monastery, of the social value of the medieval Catholic
church as a source of order, a place of refuge, and a font of alms.
Although Scott himself was fundamentally anti-Catholic, such
books as these, as Newman pointed out, helped set the mood for
the Catholic revival that began a generation later.
Quentin Durward (1823) shows Scott finding a different set
of values in the middle ages. He is not so much interested here
in presenting feudalism as a mode of social organization but
rather as a guide to human conduct. His motto could well be
Burke's famous lament for a lost faith: "But the age of chivalry
is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever." 26 In
fact, some of his passages seem specifically directed against the
Utilitarians. The phrase "sum of happiness" in his opening
sentence has a peculiarly Benthamite ring. He writes that the
novel
is laid in the fifteenth century when the feudal system, which had
been the sinews and nerves of national defence, and the spirit of
chivalry, by which ... that system was animated, began to be innovated upon and abandoned by those grosser characters who centred
[sic] their sum of happiness in procuring the personal objects on
which they had fixed their own exclusive attachment.27
Against this background of change, Scott places two figures,
Quentin Durward and King Louis Xl-the
one symbolizing
25Ibid., XX, 162.
2GEdmund Burke, Works, V (London, 1803), 149.
27
Scott, Waverley Novels, XXXI, xxv.
328
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
the era that is passing; the other, the period to come. Quentin
mere cardboard chevalier who represents the
is unimportant-a
chivalry of the feudal past, just as Burgundy and De la Mack
represent its brutality. Scott's real concern is Louis. He sees him
as a deliberately anti-chivalric force, opposed to all medieval conventions and values. He prefers low amours to courtly love, barbers and hangmen to bishops and princes, mercenary soldiers to
devoted knights. Several times Scott actually compares the king
to Goethe's Mephistophiles, saying both men are constantly
employed "in undervaluing and vilifying all actions, the consequences of which do not lead certainly and directly to selfthe medigratification." 28 Louis' is the spirit that denies-denies
eval principles of generous and disinterested action. He is not,
however, wholly a villain, for Scott realizes that Louis redeemed
many of his faults by his devotion to the national welfare. A
realist, Scott knows that the medieval state, however nobly conceived, was, like all human institutions, imperfect and subject to
change. Louis's shifts and devices were simply unfortunate, but
necessary, steps toward a new society, which would be ruled by a
single law-bound king rather than by a chaos of warring barons.
The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) repeats many of the themes we
have already encountered. The warm ties that bound master and
servant in the middle ages are shown through the relationship of
the master workers with their apprentices and domestics, and the
role of the landowner as representative and protector of his
people is quite explicitly stated. The most important new theme
in the book is that of the seriousness which medieval artisans
devoted to their work. With an emphasis that suggests the later
preoccupations of Ruskin and Morris, Scott shows the pride that
these craftsmen had in their work. Harry Smith, whose surname
indicates his occupation, wears armor only of his own making and
boasts that he can take up a link in a coat of mail as well as his
"mother could take up a stitch in the nets she wove." 29 He is
proud of being able to hurl a mighty hammer and can work off
a horseshoe in a hundred strokes. Simon Glover, too, shows a
craftsman's pride in his more delicate trade, frequently asserting
the ancient honor of glovemakers. In a footnote to his story,
Scott quotes the inscription on the banner of the Perthshire
28
Ibid., pp. v-vi.
XLII, 227.
29 Ibid.,
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
329
glover's guild: "The perfect honour of a craft, or beauty of a
trade, is not in wealthe but in moral worth, whereby virtue gains
renown." 30 One can imagine Ruskin reading this!
Scott's fundamental social aim, it would seem from an examination of these novels, was to reconcile liberty and security. The
character of Arnold Biedermann in Anne of Geierstein (1829),
one of Scott's last-published novels, is a convenient illustration
of the way in which Scott wished to fuse these qualities. A nobleman who has renounced his title for the right of being a free
citizen of the Swiss Republic, Biedermann combines the magnanimity of the aristocrat with the hardihood of the Highlander.
He believes that he has joined the people only to serve them
better, thinking that when the commons are no longer awed by
the vain pomp of title and ceremony, they will be able to regard
the nobles, not as "wolves amongst the flock, but as sagacious
mastiffs who attend the sheep in time of peace, and are prompt
in their defence when war threatens." 31 In this role of protector
and defender, Biedermann leads his people in their just demands
for national independence, first peacefully and then in battle.
His paternalistic concern for his countrymen's welfare and his
simultaneous demand for freedom make him a typical figure
in Scott's line of heroes, both in the poems and in the novels.
Scott believed that in all ages, especially his own, such heroic
aristocrats must lead society. As we shall see this "new feudalism"
of Scott is at the base of all following medieval writings except
for those of William Morris.
Underlying Scott's interpretation of the middle ages was a
highly consistent view of human nature. A conservative by temperament, Scott resisted throughout his life the notion that reason
folk tales of a
was invincible. The legendary and the local-the
winter fireside-captured
his boyish imagination and profoundly
shaped his more mature view of man. Seeing men always as
individuals rather than abstractions, Scott had no patience with
utopian schemes for human betterment. Reason was invaluable,
but it had to be built upon a more solid foundation of passion
and custom. Like all conservatives, he therefore distrusted it and
preferred to have men guided by what had proved workable in
the past rather than what might seem desirable for the future.
30Ibid., p. 127.
31Ibid., XLIV, 87.
330
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
In view of this conception of human nature, it is not surprising
that Scott's "new feudalism" is essentially Burkean.2 His medieval novels, in fact, often serve as illustrations for the great conservative's aphorisms. Burke says that man in society must divest
"himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man ... to
judge for himself and to assert his own cause." 33 Scott shows
us in Harold that uncovenanted man is literally a Berserker,
that he must submit to church and state if he is not to be a
raging devil. Burke distrusts the "sophisters, oeconomists, and
calculators," who, though a part of society, try to remake it according to their erring reason. Scott gives us the Machiavellian
Louis XI, who by unloosing the loyalties that bind his nobles to
him, fulfills Burke's prophecy that "when the old feudal and
chivalrous spirit of fealty is ended," there will ensue, "that
long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political
code of all power." 34
Like all conservatives, Scott does not believe that a narrow
.ationalism or self-interest can be the basis of society. He prefers
to place his faith in the "affections" and loyalties. Burke writes
that affection "must be the surest hold of our government" 35
and insists that the love of the state begins with the love of the
limited circle in which we dwell. For such ideas, Ivanhoe is almost
a demonstration or proof. The welfare of the state is shown to
depend on the repetition on a larger and larger scale-recurring
like ripples in a pool-of
the relationship between Cedric and
Gurth. The action cannot be resolved until Cedric yields to
Coeur-de-Lion the same self-respecting loyalty that Gurth gives
to him.
Scott knew, too, that the common man's love for the state, once
established, had to be nourished and sustained by rituals and
symbols, since government was otherwise too abstract a concept
for him to grasp. Both for Scott and for Burke, as they later were
for Disraeli and the Young Englanders, the best of these symbols
were the customs and ceremonies of monarchy, and the middle
ages was the period during which they flourished best. The importance of such ceremonies to Scott is best shown by the feasts
which figure so frequently in his writings. Occurring in almost
32
Scott admired Burke and praised his "prophetic powers." See Lockhart, V, 302-
303.
33 Burke,
V, 122.
34Ibid., p. 153.
35 Ibid., III, 159.
Sir Walter Scott and Medieval Revival
331
all the medieval novels, these communal meals all share certain
characteristics. Food is plenteous and offered generously; all are
welcome, but rank is carefully observed. The ministering nobles
sit at the head of the table and give inferior places to the receiving
populace. Scott implies that the frequency of feasts and festivals,
with their abundance of meat and drink, helped the medieval
laborer to identify his interests with those of his masters and
eventually of the state as a whole.
In such a society, of course, the leaders bear complete responsicharacteristic
bility for the well-being of their dependents-a
in
most
of
heroes.
Scott's
Cedric
manifested by
Ivanhoe, Sir
Halbert Glendinning in The Abbot, and leading figures in The
Betrothed, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Castle Dangerous-all
believe that wealth is in part for the service of the poor. "What
use," asks one of them, "the mountains of beef and oceans of
beer which they say our domains produce if there is a hungry
heart among our vassalage?" 36
For all their charity, Scott's aristocrats are stern. Unjust demands must be put down, by force if necessary, any signs of rebellion swiftly repressed. Scott's ideal noble is quick to "protect
the commons versus oppression" when they are being wronged, but
equally quick "to put them down when oppressing others" 37-an
ideal one can find acted upon in Scott's attitude toward such contemporary events as the Galashiels weavers' rebellion.
Scott's novels then, present that mixed attitude of fear and
love toward the common man which typifies conservativism and
which, at its best, results in an active concern for the popular welfare. There is, as we have seen, no political novelty here; all
Scott's ideas are traceable to Burke and the general atmosphere
of early nineteenth-century conservativism. What is unique about
Scott is the number of elements he combines. Using an already
established base of interest in the middle ages, he combines
scholarship with sheer Gothicism to create a credible world and
a coherent social philosophy. Although Scott is never dogmatic
about his beliefs, he is persuasive because his middle ages, however inaccurately presented, were as real to his own century as
Athens and Rome had been to the minds of preceding centuries.
Scott, however, was not solely responsible for the unprecedented
success of his own art. His medieval community, with its paternal36Scott, Waverley Novels, XLVII, 286.
37
Ibid., XXXVI, 287.
332
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
istic lords and contented commons, had real meaning for a nation
looking for a way out from the profit of the few and the poverty
of the many, and the shoddiness and ugliness of life in general. It
is impossible to trace all the ramifications of Scott's portrait of
feudalism, especially in relation to popular belief. But such
books as Southey's Sir Thomas More, Carlyle's Past and Present,
Pugin's Contrasts, Disraeli's Young England novels, and many of
Ruskin's works come immediately to mind.38 In these books, the
roast beef, merrimentprosperity of medieval England-feasts,
are all presented in contrast to the penury and drabness of the
present. In the earlier books, there is also a bias toward agrarianism,
which Scott clearly shared; but even in the later volumes, the concept of paternal responsibility, though partially transferred from
the landowner to the manufacturer, is nonetheless the same relationship between master and man that Scott idealizes. In some of
these books, as in Scott's A b bot and Monastery, the medieval church
is seen as the cohesive force in feudal society; in all of them, as in all
of Scott, freedom is paired with security. Carlyle best shows Scott's
influence in this, from Past and Present:
Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by
Dryasdust and others. Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck,
tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I would
call an examplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above
him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him,
and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when
he came home: Gurth to me seems happy in comparison with many
a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall
of anybody.39
After such an indictment of modern England, the logical step
is to programs and laws designed to make an Englishman's life
worth living again. It is certainly no exaggeration to see the influence of Scott, and of such comments on Scott, ripening a generation or two later into the Parliamentary activities of Disraeli's
Young England Party. And it is perhaps not wholly unreasonable
to see distant repercussions of the new feudalism in the modern
British welfare state.
38See Alice Chandler, "The New Feudalism," unpublished doctoral dissertation
(Columbia University, 1960).
39Thomas Carlyle, Works of Thomas Carlyle, Edinburgh ed., X (New York,
1903-1905), 211-212.