History over the Water (2004)

30Historically Speaking · July/August 2004 History over the Water Derek Wilson Though the Philistines may jostle, you wifl rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, Ifyou walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand. In Britain medievalism is back in fashion— or so one might assume from the recent offerings of publishers, film and television companies, and the press. The modern aesthetewandering down PiccadiUy, wiU not, like Gilbert and SulUvan's precious poet, be walking his "flowery way," but he may weU turn aside from the rain lashed pavements into the RoyalAcademyto marvel atthe craft ofthe document iUuminator or hurry home to curl up with a chronicle ofthe Grail quest. He is even more Ukely to spend a melodramatic evening in the cinema with The Return oftheKing, the concludinginstallment ofthe epic based on Tolkein'sLordofthe Rings. Butthatis fantasy, nothistory, you protest WeU, yes, butsuch mythic adventures are not onlyfundamental to our culture onthis side of the Atlantic, they also get tangled up—perhaps inextricably—with our understanding of pre-Renaissance history, so that periodically we are assailed with medievaUsm or pseudomedievalism from the printed page, the screen, or the exhibition display. The Lord ofthe Rings trilogy is a classic Good versus Evil adventure justly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as a cinematic milestone. However, its appeal in Britain, where it works better than Star Wars or any other fantasy epic, is in no smaU measure due to its pseudo-medievaUsm. It keeps audiences speUbound with representations ofsiege warfare , limpid-eyed damsels, armor-clad knights engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and an undercurrent ofmagic—or, at least, sorcery. It touches a bedrock ofthe British imagination , which is as solid now as it was when the poets and painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement iUustrated the old legends orPugin and Scott reworked the Gothic or the clerics of the Oxford Movement went in search of preReformation doctrinalpurity. The attraction is more than long-range nostalgia for a supposedly uncompUcated age, not troubled by science or democracy, not marred by industryor sprawlingurbanization—an age which, like Chaucer's Knight, revered "truth and honor, freedom and courtesy." Our very landscape connects us to the medieval past. There is scarcely a person in these islands who Uves more than five miles from an impressive Gothic building. Few people now attend their parish churches but many feel proprietorial about them. Their self-confident towers and aspiring spires speak subliminally to us of a semi-mythical "age of faith" which adhered to convictions we no longer hold—but wish we did. Making a plea for more teaching of medieval history in schools in a recent article , Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, made the point that such studywould create for students An awareness of Europe, and Britain within it, as part of a Eurasian landmass over which peoples have migrated—and continue to do so ... . More recent European conquest and colonization, not to mention transatlantic slavery, have obliterated these larger and enduring continuities between our continents, which awareness ofmedieval empires—Mongol, Abbasid, Mameluk—can restore. Study ofthe medieval world inevitably widens ourhorizons. Britain, as part ofWestern Christendom, shared so much with its continental neighbors. And this sense ofa common past, no less than our unconscious identifying with ancient beUef systems, lurks within the national psyche. The mythology upon which Tolkein drew is not uniquely British. His Middle Earth is culturally contiguous with the Netherlands ofWagner's Nibelungenlied (or ofthe 13th-century source upon which the composer drew). The Arthurian Britainvividlyportrayed byMalory and, before him, by Geoffrey ofMonmouth can hardly be distinguished from the topographyofthechansonsdegeste . Froissartfc breathless , wide-eyed narrative spans Europe from Scotland to Italy. Chaucer drewfrompools of fabliaux and chivalric tales common throughout the Christian world. It may frustrate the residents ofthe White House and 10 DowningStreet , butthe factis thatoursharedEuropeanperceptions faroutdate and outweighthe special relationship, as the huge crowds of protestagainstthe Iraqwarin London, Paris, Berlin, and other European cities testified. But to retreat from poUtical comment to the safer ground ofmedieval historiography, writers setting out to hunt down fact in the coverts oflegend mayfind themselves caught in a double...