SOURCE: Donatelli, Joseph M. P. “The Medieval Fictions of Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy.” University of Toronto Quarterly 60, No. 4 (summer 1991): 435-51.

[In the following essay, Donatelli argues that Warton and Percy were leaders in a movement that inspired a popular fascination with the Middle Ages.]

The enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages during the latter half of the eighteenth century finds various forms of expression. Yet the visitors who flocked to Walpole's Strawberry Hill instead of Glastonbury Abbey, the readers who purchased Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry instead of Joseph Ritson's scholarly editions, and the antiquarians who preferred Matthew Prior's prettified and sentimental version of ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’ to the original remind us that the pseudo-medieval was often more attractive than the genuine article. For the past was invested with a significance that might prove offensive to contemporary beliefs, tastes, and values: a medieval building carried an objectionable taint of Catholicism,¹ and medieval poems were considered to be ill-formed compositions of ‘wild fancy’ and ‘rude meter.’ These are but two of the qualities that offended an age which, as William Shenstone had repeatedly advised Thomas Percy, had little taste for ‘unadulterated antiquity.’² One writer expressed this predilection when he declared that ‘a happy imitation is of much more value than a defective original.’³

Yet eighteenth-century scholars, let alone the public, were often hard put to discriminate between imitations and originals. For instance, George Steevens, the Shakespeare scholar, settled a score with Richard Gough, who was then director of the Society for Antiquaries, by fabricating an inscribed stone in commemoration of Hardicanute, an Anglo-Saxon king whose name had been immortalized, appropriately enough, in Lady Wardlaw's ballad forgery.⁴ The inscription, in Anglo-Saxon letters, declared that Hardicanute had expired by drinking too much at the wedding of a Danish lord. Gough was convinced of the authenticity of this monument, and at his instigation the inscription immediately became the subject of a learned disquisition by the well-respected antiquary Dr Samuel Pegge, who confidently identified the stone as the work of the eleventh century. Steevens then exposed the hoax in the General Evening Post, and Gough was pilloried in the Gentleman's Magazine for his credulity. Cruel, yes, but Steevens's revelation might also be viewed as an act of mercy, for other controversies about originals and forgeries raged on, and they admitted no such easy solution.

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first published in 1765, and Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, the first volume of which appeared in 1774, are pre-eminent among the works of literary scholarship which catered to, and promoted, this fascination with the Middle Ages. In doing so, these works directed their attention to the medieval and pseudo-medieval alike, and their authors, both knowingly and unknowingly, often turned one into the other. The Reliques and the History won large audiences not because of their scholarly accuracy, which few were in any position to judge,⁵ but because they presented coherent and seamless accounts of a distant past for audiences which had little taste for ancient poetry. As has often been noted, the narratives which these scholars fashioned have much in common with the fictionalized accounts of the past found in the Gothic novel. This essay will consider precisely how these widely read texts conditioned the expectations of readers about the Middle Ages in a way that corroborated, if not encouraged, the fabrication of pseudo-medieval backdrops of Gothic fiction, for the blending of fact and fiction, the historical anachronisms, and the skewed view of the past were to be found in those authoritative scholarly works which stood closest to genuine medieval sources.

Before examining the medieval scholarship of the eighteenth century, we should consider briefly the remarkable achievement of the seventeenth century, which produced what David Douglas has termed ‘the longest and most prolific movement of medieval research which [England] has ever seen.’⁶ The ‘revival’ of interest in medieval institutions and culture certainly does not begin with Hurd, Walpole, the Wartons, or Percy. The groundwork for later scholars was laid by men such as Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, William Dugdale, and Thomas Hearne, as well as Anglo-Saxonists such as George Hickes and Edward Thwaites. Although a scholar like Anthony Wood might pursue his antiquarian studies to indulge ‘the humour of making discoveries for a man's own private information,’ the researches of these scholars were largely purposive and utilitarian. They scrutinized Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Norman documents of the past for the light which they shed on the contentious ecclesiastical, political, and legal issues of the Civil War and Restoration. Since matters of polity and church depended upon these texts, scholars took a sober and grave attitude towards their research. Textual accuracy was valued highly, and close study of the lexicon was promoted by a pressing concern with minutiae. The cast of these studies is considerably different from the eighteenth-century scholarship which we are about to consider: the ponderous tomes of Dugdale's great Monasticon Anglicanum and the Anglo-Saxon editions of Hickes were forbidding and largely inaccessible to those who did not have the competence to deal with the primary texts.

Except for the notice of a few antiquaries, these scholarly volumes gathered dust during the latter half of the eighteenth century.⁷ These studies had lost their topical relevance, for the crises of church and polity which had brought these texts into being had long since been resolved. Without that impetus, few had the competence or patience to wade through such trying and weighty scholarship. We are therefore correct in identifying the reception of medieval culture in the middle of the eighteenth century not as the first expression of interest in the Middle Ages, but rather as a new development and direction. Warton's comment in the History is instructive, for it indicates the scorn that was heaped on the projects of earlier scholars: ‘The antiquaries of former times overlooked or rejected these valuable remains [‘fables of chivalry’], which they despised as false and frivolous; and employed their industry in reviving obscure fragments of uninstructive morality or uninteresting history.’⁸ The researches of a Dugdale or Hickes (which, we might note, Warton had relied upon in the History) were directed to serious ends; therefore, these scholars had little use for the romance materials which so fascinated Percy and Warton, yet Warton's smug attitude is ironic, for these seventeenth-century editions and compilations continued to be useful to students of the Middle Ages long after eighteenth-century efforts, including Warton's own History, had been superseded and exploded.⁹

The goals of Percy's Reliques and Warton's History were entirely different from those of the scholarship of the previous century. Although these works provided scholarly discussions of the history of literature for the serious student of antiquities, they were equally, if not primarily, addressed to ‘readers of taste’ who did not have, nor did they wish to have, first-hand knowledge of medieval texts. In his preface to the History, Warton had addressed himself to both classes of readers: ‘I hope to merit the thanks of the antiquarian, for enriching the stock of our early literature by these new accessions; and I trust I shall gratify the reader of taste, in having so frequently rescued from oblivion the rude inventions and irregular beauties of the heroic tale, or the romantic legend’ (History of English Poetry; hereafter cited as HEP 1:viii). The rhetoric of this statement is noteworthy: Warton speaks of his bibliographic achievement when addressing the antiquarian, but he appeals to the imagination of the ‘reader of taste’ by evoking the image of his noble rescue of ‘heroic tale’ and ‘romantic legend’ from oblivion, much as a knight might rescue a damsel. The antiquary did not have to be persuaded of the merits of the subject, but a general readership had to be encouraged to appreciate its value. The remarkable public success of both works, especially Percy's Reliques which went through four editions during his lifetime, would indicate that Percy and Warton succeeded in widening and broadening the appeal of the Middle Ages.¹⁰ As the cantankerous but scholarly Joseph Ritson pointed out, with some justice, in his vicious attacks on both authors, such renown was won by the sacrifice of, or lack of interest in, painstaking scholarship, and by the invention of a ‘tissue of falsehood’ about the Middle Ages.¹¹

Both Percy and Warton were well aware of the burdens which their works placed on the reader. Percy expressed his concerns to Richard Farmer prior to the publication of his anthology: ‘When I consider what strange old stuff I have raked together, I tremble for its reception with a fastidious public. What rare hacking and hewing will there be for Mess^rs the Reviewers!’¹² In the Preface to the Reliques, Percy anticipates such attacks by adopting an apologetic tone: ‘In a polished age, like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them.’¹³ Although individual compositions might tax the reader because of their ‘rudeness,’ both authors counselled patience to their audience, for they insisted that the value of such poetry was teleological: with these ‘reliques,’ one could appreciate ‘the gradual improvements of the English language and poetry from the earliest ages down to the present’ (Reliques 1:8). Warton promised his reader that he would experience ‘a conscious pride, arising in great measure from a tacit comparison of the infinite disproportion between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our present improvements in knowledge’ (HEP 1:i). Nevertheless, despite such excuses, Percy and Warton were convinced that the images and customs depicted in medieval literature had intrinsic value, for this literature exerted a power to ‘forcibly strike a feeling imagination’ (HEP 1:ii) with its potent mix of the fabulous and the heroic. These two strains—one apologetic, the other enthusiastic—run throughout both works.¹⁴ They might be compared to similar cross-currents in the Gothic novel: in her Preface to the Old English Baron, Clara Reeve recognizes that it is ‘the business of romance … to excite attention,’ but she stipulates that it must be ‘directed to some useful, or at least innocent, end.’¹⁵ In Ann Radcliffe's Gaston de Blondeville (which was written in 1802 but remained unpublished until 1826, after her death), Willoughton, while reading a medieval manuscript which he has acquired, is alternately amused and repelled by the absurdity of medieval superstition and lore, yet ‘he sometimes found his attention seized, in spite of himself, by the marvellous narratives before him.’¹⁶

Since the Reliques and the History sought to address a general readership, both Percy and Warton devised strategies for putting the reader who had little taste for ancient poetry at ease. This was accomplished by bridging and foreshortening the vast historical distance between a barbaric past and an elegant, refined present. In the Reliques, Percy sought to atone ‘for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems,’ by concluding each of the three volumes ‘with a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing,’ which were offered as a palliative for the reader who had struggled through the ‘ancient’ ballads (Reliques 1:8). Of course, the ballads themselves were not nearly as old as Percy considered them to be. Creating a wonderfully evocative image that was to have a long history in Romantic poetry, Percy claimed that his ballads had originally been composed by noble bards and minstrels who had performed at the houses of great nobles, and that these ‘reliques of antiquity’ preserved ‘the customs and opinions of remote ages’ from before Chaucer's time.¹⁷ The dating of ballads continues to be a vexed question, of course, but Percy overestimated the antiquity of his texts by centuries. Moreover, the oldest ballads, such as Sir Cauline and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, were those which Percy had completely rewritten, not only to mitigate the ‘rudeness’ of the language and metre, as Percy had openly avowed, but also to reshape plots extensively so that these works would appeal to the sentimental and neoclassical tastes of eighteenth-century readers.¹⁸ These ‘reliques’ then, which had been offered with such profuse apologies, were simply not that old, but a reader of the anthology who had little or nothing to compare them to would be left with the impression that he had read ancient songs and poems, which, for all their ‘rudeness,’ were not only remarkably lucid, but similar in conception and sentiment to contemporary literature.

In the prefaces which Percy provided for each poem or ballad, he produced a hotchpotch of information, with strange historical conflations and juxtapositions. In the introduction to Sir Cauline (Reliques 1:61-2), for example, Percy discusses both the origin of the Round Table and the association of women with the art of healing. Having planted the image of the Round Table in the poem himself in a lengthy interpolation, Percy glosses his own fiction by explaining in his preface that ‘the Round Table was not peculiar to the reign of King Arthur but was common in all ages of chivalry,’ and he cites Dugdale's description of a ‘torneament’ held at Kenilworth during Edward I's time as evidence. While the image of a lady as a ‘leeche’ who ministers to a knight does appear briefly in the original text (‘Fetche me downe my daughter deere, / She is a leeche fulle fine’ [Reliques 1:63, lines 29-30]), Percy makes much of this image, devoting half his preface to the subject. He declares that the association of women with the art of healing is ‘a practice derived from the earliest times among all the Gothic and Celtic nations,’ and that women ‘even of the highest rank’ continued to practice the art of surgery even as late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This informed discussion, wherein he cites Dugdale, Ste-Palaye, Mallet, and Harrison's preface to Holinshed, covers a span of over a thousand years in a few sentences, thereby foreshortening the historical distance between the contemporary reader and the past, and creating a jumble of earlier periods in which Goths and Celts, Arthur, Edward I, and Elizabeth are invoked, and, in some sense, coexist on one page together. There is little depth or contour to this historical discussion, but the parade of these great names results in a highly evocative short narrative, which competes, I would suggest, with the ballad itself (which was largely Percy's own composition) for attention. This impressive collection of historical personages in a fictional context is analogous to the historical casts which are assembled in novels such as Sophia Lee's The Recess.¹⁹

Whereas Percy's prefaces address individual works, in the first volume of the History of English Poetry, Warton composes an extended narrative about the medieval period, which I would like to consider here as remarkably similar in form and content to a work of fiction. While the History could not match the popularity of the Reliques, it claimed a readership which extended well beyond the small circle of antiquaries and scholars: we know that the work was read by Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Ann Radcliffe.²⁰ One reviewer praised the ‘graces and ornaments’ which this ‘poetical historian’ had brought to the study of antiquity.²¹ Upon opening the first volume, Walpole remarked that the History seemed ‘delightfully full of things I love,’ yet he (as well as other readers) became increasingly disenchanted with subsequent volumes, which had less to offer the dilettante and aesthete.²²

Warton rejected Pope's and Gray's schemes for histories of English poetry, which would have grouped works according to various types and schools, choosing instead to construct a continuous, chronological narrative whose shape was determined by what Warton termed the ‘free exertion of research.’²³ This design was tantamount to granting himself poetic licence, and it led to the baggy and digressive structure of the History, a failing which Ritson pointed out when he uncharitably described the History as ‘an injudicious farrago, a gallimawfry of things which both do and do not belong to the subject.’²⁴ Since David Fairer's invaluable study of Warton's notebooks, the earlier view that Warton's History of English Poetry is a fuller execution of the plan and method of the earlier Observations on the Faerie Queene can no longer be held.²⁵ It is clear that Warton had been ‘laying in materials for this work’ as early as 1752-4, and that, during the long interval between his conception of the project and its publication, he had repeatedly cast about in order to find the proper format for his research.²⁶ Since Warton's work was without precedent, we should not underestimate the difficulties which Warton faced in composing a chronological survey of English verse.²⁷ When the History was finally launched, the narrative was constructed around bits and pieces of texts which Warton had encountered (and copied) during years of reading in medieval manuscripts and early printed editions. In elucidating these texts, the History draws upon a wide range of sources, and the work therefore serves as a clearing house for the earlier scholarship which had become so unfashionable. References to sources as varied as Du Cange, Ste-Palaye, Froissart, Dugdale, Hickes, Wormius, Mabillon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth are woven together, with some skill, into a collection of seamless narrative vignettes in the footnotes.²⁸ Warton is primarily interested in extracting memorable anecdotes and striking images from these authors. The ‘plot,’ if you will, consists of Warton's selection from his vast fund of primary and secondary materials. Just how skewed Warton's selection might be is indicated by his peremptory dismissal of the Anglo-Saxons as an ‘unformed and unsettled race’ and of their poetry as unworthy of notice:

But besides that a legitimate illustration of that jejune and intricate subject would have almost doubled my labour, that the Saxon language is familiar only to a few learned antiquaries, that our Saxon poems are for the most part little more than religious rhapsodies, and that scarce any compositions remain marked with the native images of that people in their pagan state, every reader that reflects but for a moment on our political establishment must perceive, that the Saxon poetry has no connection with the nature and purpose of my present undertaking.

(HEP 1:vi)

Undoubtedly, part of the ‘intricacy’ of the subject was owing to Warton's ignorance of Anglo-Saxon,²⁹ a testimony to the decline of scholarship from the high-water mark of the seventeenth century, a state of affairs which was not to be remedied until the revival of Anglo-Saxon studies at Oxford with the establishment of the Rawlinson Chair.³⁰ But Warton has also taken the measure of his audience, and he shows that he is perfectly willing to sacrifice a subject (although in this case he had little choice) if it means holding the reader's interest, for the success of the History demanded that ‘the curiosity of the antiquarian’ be connected ‘with taste and genius’ (HEP 1:209). In place of the Anglo-Saxon past, Warton offers a study of the origin of romances which reviews fashionable theories about the Eastern origin of romances, and their transmission through Spain or, as Percy had suggested after reading Mallet, through Scandinavia.³¹ Hence, the History begins with oriental fantasies and ruminations on the migration of the Asiatic Goths to the northern climes of Scandinavia. With its mixture of the exotic and the sublime, sections of Warton's text work powerfully on the imagination in a way that is reminiscent of the Ossianic poems and of the settings of Gothic fiction: ‘In the mean time, we may suppose, that the new situation of these people in Scandinavia, might have added a darker shade and a more savage complexion to their former fictions and superstitions; and that the formidable objects of nature to which they became familiarized in those northern solitudes, the piny precipices, the frozen mountains, and the gloomy forests, acted on their imaginations, and gave a tincture of horror to their imagery’ (HEP 1:diss I, sig d4). Elsewhere, we read assertions that recall the potent mix of orientalism and medievalism in Beckford's Vathek: ‘The books of the Arabians and Persians abound with extravagant traditions about the giants Gog and Magog. These they call Jagiouge and Magiouge; and the Caucasian wall, said to be built by Alexander the Great from the Caspian to the Black Sea, in order to cover the frontiers of his dominion, and to prevent the incursions of the Sythians, is called by the orientals the Wall of Gog and Magog’ (HEP 1:diss I, sig b3r-v). Sensational pronouncements (e.g. ‘Dragons are a sure mark of orientalism’ [HEP 1:diss I, sig c1]) abound. Indeed, Warton seems to disapprove of Anglo-Saxon poetry because it does not contain that which he and others treasured in the Ossianic poems—hopelessly romanticized ‘native images of that people in their pagan state’ which were remarkably free of the ‘religious rhapsodies’ (and Catholic, at that) which Warton and other readers apparently found offensive. One might say that his cursory readings in the origins of English poetry do not serve his ‘plot,’ and that they were therefore jettisoned in favour of more exotic and sensational materials. Warton's decision not to begin at the beginning was probably determined as much by aesthetics as by scholarship.³²

Warton's dismissal of Anglo-Saxons and their literature results in a radical historical foreshortening so that a reader who was guided solely by Warton would come away with the impression that the history of English literature began with the Norman Conquest. Yet Warton's historical displacement of Anglo-Saxon literature also meant that the genesis of this ‘epoch of chivalry’ could be traced to a distant past which evoked images of oriental dragons, dramatic continental migrations, and primitive ‘Celtic tribes, who were strongly addicted to poetical compositions.’ A large part of the History is devoted to romance, the literature of this ‘epoch of chivalry.’ Again, the technique was to quote liberally from the romances, but the selections frequently emphasized the pageantry of court life (especially individual contests in the lists), the superstitions which had been imported from the East during the Crusades, the gallantry which knights extended towards ladies, and the ubiquitous presence of bards and minstrels who, since Warton knew Percy's views well, sang at houses of the great.³³ These are, of course, the very scenes that serve as commonplaces in the medieval settings of Gothic fiction. In a few later works, Warton's History has obviously played a role in disseminating these images.³⁴ However, it would appear that scholarship did not serve as a source for fiction, but rather that scholarly and fictional works shared this imagery because these texts were conceived in a similar cultural matrix and were aimed at similar audiences: in both Longsword and The Old English Baron (both of which were published prior to the History), meagre historical sources have been amplified with individual combats in the lists, minstrels who sing ‘native lays about Arthur’ before nobles, gallant knights who defer to ladies, and colourful pageants and tournaments.

The language of the original texts which Warton had collected presented severe challenges to the reader. The reviewer for the Gentleman's Magazine declared that the specimens of Norman-Saxon poems in the History were ‘curious only as antiquities,’ for they were scarcely readable.³⁵ Another reviewer, commenting generally on editions of ancient poems, declared that ‘the labour of reading was not repaid by the pleasures which were communicated by the poetry.’³⁶ ‘A refined age,’ he noted, ‘must have all its amusements, without the labour of attainment.’ The hit-and-miss glossing of the History reveals that even Warton himself was not always in command of the Middle English, and one can well imagine that readers (who are perhaps not that different from those today who read the History without adequate preparation in Middle English, Scots, Old French, Italian, and Latin) looked only at Warton's comments rather than reading the excerpt. It was therefore possible to ignore these inset quotations from manuscripts, and to pay attention solely to Warton's synopsis. Indeed, the above-mentioned reviewer for the Gentleman's Magazine praised the ‘skill and taste’ of Warton's commentary while dismissing the poetry itself as ‘dross’: ‘the dross of these old bards … has here received both lustre and value from the skill and taste with which they have been refined and illustrated.’³⁷

Warton's commentary contained idealized portraits of medieval society and institutions, especially since Warton followed his contemporaries in regarding romances as historical documents which provided accurate descriptions of ancient manners and times, with exception being taken only to their accounts of the fabulous. The quotations themselves are composed of graphic and detailed imagery; Warton's comments produced a highly abbreviated, though attractive, portrait, one which approaches the level of abstraction and generalization that one finds in the Gothic novel's medieval veneer. For example, most of Warton's observations about Richard I were drawn from the romance Richard Cœur de Lyon. Thus we read that the ‘first of our hero's achievements in chivalry is at a splendid tournament held at Salisbury’ (HEP 1:153), and ‘Richard arming himself is a curious Gothic picture’ (HEP 1:166). In commenting upon a passage from this romance, Warton mistranslates faucon, that is ‘falchion’ or ‘sword,’ as ‘falcon.’³⁸ Citing various learned sources as well as corroborating evidence from tapestries, he unhesitatingly asserts that ‘in the feudal times … no gentleman appeared on horseback, unless going to battle, without a hawk on his fist’ (HEP 1:166). This lexical error provides the occasion for a lengthy footnote on the practice of hawking, but it also leads to a reading of the action of the romance which is Warton's fiction, rather than the medieval poet's: ‘The soldan is represented as meeting Richard with a hawk on his fist, to shew indifference, or a contempt of his adversary; and that he came rather prepared for the chace, than the combat’ (HEP 1:166). When discussing Edward III's foundation of the Order of the Garter, Warton describes Edward as a ‘romantic monarch’ who venerated his predecessor, Arthur, and established ‘this most antient and revered institution of chivalry’ in his honour (1:252). Edward's court ‘was the theatre of romantic elegance.’ Elsewhere, in commenting on a passage from the romance Ipomedon, Warton draws a picture of court life that resembles the parlour-rooms of eighteenth-century polite society: ‘In the feudal castles, where many persons of both sexes were assembled, and who did not know how to spend the time, it is natural to suppose that different parties were formed, and different schemes of amusement invented’ (1:199, n. x).

If Warton's History may be read as a fiction, we can identify both a narrative persona and voice. Warton delivers his pronouncements on medieval texts and culture with a voice that is authoritative, sensible, informed, urbane, and at times reverential. Having cultivated this persona in his poetry and in Observations on the Faerie Queene, Warton presents himself as a genial guide who is there to escort his readers as they wander through ancient times.³⁹ One reader of the History spoke of being guided by the ‘torch of genius through ruins in which he [Warton] loves to wander,’ a metaphor which evokes images of the dimly lit corridors in the fiction of the period.⁴⁰ Warton seeks to bridge historical distance while still allowing the reader to appreciate the strangeness of ancient times and beliefs. Despite his enthusiasm, Warton's point of view remains that of one who is firmly convinced of the advantages of his own period. Although he reads Bede, for example, he comes to the text with expectations conditioned by Gibbon. He reminds us that for Bede ‘the importation into England of the shin-bone of an apostle’ was more significant than victories or revolutions (HEP 1:diss II, sig e1). Warton also invites the reader to enjoy historical vistas, which are not unlike the prospects of Radcliffe's novels, but instead of looking out over space, we look over time. In a letter to Gray, Warton declared his intention to include such ‘terraces’ from which readers might survey the past: ‘I should have said before, that although I proceed chronologically, yet I often stand still to give some general view.’⁴¹ Warton's remarks prior to introducing Chaucer (who does not appear until the end of the first volume) provide such a panoramic vista as we reach one of the many ‘summits’ in the History:

As we are approaching to Chaucer, let us here stand still, and take a retrospect of the general manners. The tournaments and carousals of our antient princes, by forming splendid assemblies of both sexes, while they inculcated the most liberal sentiments of honour and heroism, undoubtedly contributed to introduce ideas of courtesy, and to encourage decorum.

(HEP 1:339)

Chaucer's achievement was largely made possible by this ‘politeness and propriety,’ but Warton, using figurative language, makes it clear that this advance in the growth of manners and literature, which seem to march hand in hand, was only temporary:

I consider Chaucer as a genial day in an English spring. A brilliant sun enlivens the face of nature with an unusual lustre: the sudden appearance of cloudless skies, and the unexpected warmth of a tepid atmosphere, after the gloom and the inclemencies of a tedious winter, fill our hearts with the visionary prospect of a speedy summer: and we fondly anticipate a long continuance of gentle gales and vernal serenity. But winter returns with redoubled horrors: the clouds condense more formidably than before; and those tender buds, and early blossoms, which were called forth by the transient gleam of a temporary sun-shine, are nipped by frosts, and torn by tempests.

(2:51)⁴²

Clearly, Chaucer's achievement is being judged in terms of Warton's present. The fifteenth century, which had provided Horace Walpole with such little amusement, is roundly condemned because the literature of this period failed to appeal to the fancy of Warton or his eighteenth-century audience. Warton, I would suggest, found it infinitely more difficult to shape a self-contained imaginative narrative, with sensational and evocative images, from the disparate materials of fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century verse. As has often been noted, Warton's enthusiasm is dampened at a certain point in the History⁴³: one of the reasons, I would suggest, is that as Warton approached his own period, and discussed literature that was more widely known, it became increasingly difficult for him to compose the kinds of fictions which had so engaged readers of the first volume. Paradoxically, as the History became more scholarly, it proved less attractive to contemporary readers.

Percy's Reliques and Warton's History may also help to explain the popularity of the recovered manuscript as a narrative convention in Gothic fiction.⁴⁴ The first edition of The Castle of Otranto purports to be William Marshal's English translation of an original black-letter edition printed at Naples in 1529, which recounts events that occurred during the Crusades.⁴⁵ Appropriately enough, the volume was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. In the first edition of the Old English Baron, Reeve claims that the tale is preserved in a manuscript written in Old English. The novel breaks off repeatedly in places where the manuscript is discontinuous, illegible, or damaged. Radcliffe uses the device in several novels: although it serves merely as a device to introduce the narrative in The Italian and A Sicilian Romance, in Gaston de Blondeville Radcliffe elaborates the description of the manuscript. Willoughton, an antiquarian of sorts, obtains a manuscript, ‘written on vellum and richly illuminated,’ which contains an English translation of an original Norman account dating from the time of Henry III.⁴⁶ Conveniently for eighteenth-century readers, the narrative is a modernized copy, which Willoughton has written for a friend ‘who was fond of the subjects it touched upon, but had not industry enough to work his way through the obstructions of the original.’⁴⁷ In the novel, Radcliffe reproduces the title page of this manuscript, which announces, in appropriate but improbable archaic spellings and black letter, that this account, originally dated 1261, has been ‘changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, Monk of Seȝnt Marie Priori in Killingworth.’⁴⁸ Charles Maturin also uses the device in Melmoth the Wanderer. The manuscript which John Melmoth discovers in his uncle's closet is ‘discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that ever before exercised the patience of a reader.’⁴⁹ Walpole, the bibliophile, had owned such black-letter editions and manuscripts, and Maturin, a clergyman who took a degree at Trinity College, Dublin, was conversant with textual studies.⁵⁰ It seems less likely, however, that Reeve or Radcliffe, any more than many other novelists who used the device, had ever seen, let alone read, the kind of manuscript which they describe in their fiction.⁵¹

Although this narrative device was in vogue because of the popularity of French historical and epistolary novels, works such as Percy's Reliques and Warton's History had given manuscripts a prominence which they had not previously had. Readers had been primed for this kind of archival digging by the very public controversies concerning the forged manuscripts of Macpherson's Ossian poems and Chatterton's Rowley poems, and some readers undoubtedly turned to the Reliques and the History in hope of finding more of the kind of poetry that they had read there. Moreover, the manuscripts which had contributed to the Reliques and the History were described colourfully: Percy gave himself a heroic role when he described how he had rescued the manuscript containing his ‘ancient reliques’ from under a bureau at the house of one of his friends, where it was being used by the maids to light the fire.⁵² When a controversy erupted about whether the manuscript existed or not, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a portrait of Percy, with the famous folio manuscript under the bishop's arm. The History conveys Warton's excitement as he sifts through hundreds of manuscripts which have lain unread for many years. Warton's scholarly persona comes alive, in a way that reminds one of Alonzo copying Adonijah's manuscript in Melmoth the Wanderer, when he poignantly states about the Pricke of Conscience: ‘I prophesy that I am its last transcriber’ (HEP 1:256). The remarks of a reviewer demonstrate the association of this kind of scholarship with the sensational and lurid imagery which describes manuscripts in the fiction of the period: ‘The laudable desire of examining the antiquities of our country, has occasioned many works of our old poets to be emancipated from the dust and obscurity of musty libraries … poems, really ancient, have been recovered from the cobwebs by which they were concealed, and from worms, which had already commenced their depredations.’⁵³

Hence, the manuscripts which commanded public attention allowed readers to appreciate a distant past, but they were remarkably free of the lexical and conceptual difficulties which had taxed even a Thomas Warton. This was accomplished either by the mediation of scholarly works, such as those of Percy and Warton, whose commentaries provided ‘texts’ which readers could follow even if they could not read the original materials,⁵⁴ or by forged or doctored texts, which had been designed so that they would appeal directly to eighteenth-century sensibilities. Moreover, the idealized views of the Middle Ages which these manuscripts conveyed repeatedly invited comparison and identification with the mores and values of contemporary society. Warton, who was at first convinced by the Ossian poems, marvelled that ‘the early poetry of a barbarous people, should so frequently give place to a gentler set of manners, to the social sensibilities of polished life, and a more civilised and elegant species of imagination’ (HEP 1:diss I, sig g2v). Elsewhere, Warton had noted that the institutions of chivalry had ‘salutary consequences in assisting the general growth of refinement’ and in ‘teaching modes of decorum’ (HEP 1:diss I, sig 13v). Similar confusion of the past and present is evident in Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance, which described medieval romance as ‘an Epic in prose,’ and considers the genre as ‘the polite literature of those early ages.’⁵⁵ She envisions a readership for these works which mirrors contemporary concerns about the effect of Gothic fiction on impressionable young minds: ‘In the days of Gothic ignorance, these Romances might perhaps, be read by many young persons as true Histories, and might therefore more easily affect their manners.’⁵⁶ Is it odd then that the manuscripts of Gothic novels set in the past should speak so directly and coherently to the present, except for the occasional archaic form?

The point has often been made that what eighteenth-century readers saw in the Middle Ages was a mirror of their own values, society, and taste, and that once the slender trappings of chivalry have been put aside, the characters of novels like The Old English Baron and Longsword behave as eighteenth-century ladies and gentlemen. However, it would be incorrect to consider that novelists made informed choices between fact and fiction, since both were intermingled in the authoritative scholarly accounts of the period. By reading Percy and Warton, we become aware that these highly influential works created a hall of mirrors down which both readers and novelists looked when they considered the Middle Ages. Those scholarly sources which stood closest to original medieval texts were themselves full of the pseudo-medieval; indeed, their success depended upon the creation of ‘fictions’ about the Middle Ages that would cater to the ‘reader of taste.’

Notes

1. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, 4th ed (London: John Murray 1974), 99-107.

2. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone, ed Cleanth Brooks, vol 7 of The Percy Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press 1977), 51, 72-3, 118, 136-7.

3. James Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts in England (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies 1800), 159.

4. For an account of this hoax, see B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1519-1800) (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1937), 2:91; a drawing of the stone was published in the Gentleman's Magazine 67 (1790), 217; see also 290-2.

5. Their contemporary, Joseph Ritson, was a notable exception because of his painstaking and careful scholarship. In Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry (London: J. Stockdale and R. Faulder 1782; repr New York 1971), a scathing critique of the History of English Poetry, Ritson sneered at both men, declaring that Percy's ‘knowledge in these matters seems pretty much upon a level with your own’ (4). For his critique of the Reliques, to which Percy felt himself obligated to respond in the fourth edition (which appeared in 1794), see Ancient English Metrical Romances, rev E. Goldsmid (Edinburgh: E. and G. Goldsmid 1884-6), 1:58.

6. David C. Douglas, English Scholars (London: Jonathan Cape 1939), 16; I am indebted to Douglas for the following brief survey of seventeenth-century scholarship; see also Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co 1982).

7. Douglas, 354-67.

8. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, with an introduction by René Wellek, 4 vols (1774-81; repr New York 1968), 1:209; hereafter abbreviated as HEP. In elucidating ‘fables of chivalry,’ eighteenth-century scholars supplemented the meagre information they gleaned from the English tradition by turning to continental sources, such as J. B. de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye's Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie (1759-81) and Paul-Henri Mallet's Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc (1755), for there had been a continuous tradition of the study of early French literature (see Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century [London: Athlone Press 1964], 22-4).

9. See, for example, the apologies and corrections offered by Richard Price in his edition of the History (London: Thomas Tegg 1824). William Carew Hazlitt condemned Warton's ‘whole narrative’ as ‘emphatically slipshod’ (x) in the preface to his edition of the History (1871; repr New York 1970). He nevertheless thought it worthwhile to publish a new edition, albeit with extensive corrections.

10. The works of these popularizers may be compared with similar efforts by classicists to aim at a wider polite market. See Penelope Wilson's essay ‘Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader,’ in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed Isabel Rivers (New York: St Martin's Press 1982), esp 83-90.

11. Observations, 48.

12. Percy to Farmer, 10 Feb 1765; The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer, ed Cleanth Brooks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1946), vol 2 of The Percy Letters, 82.

13. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed Henry B. Wheatley (1886; repr New York 1966), 1:8. All references are to this edition.

14. Previous critics have called attention to conflicting voices in Warton's History. In The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970), Lawrence Lipking views the conflict as a dialectic between imagination and reason (375-6 and 392-404). See also R. D. Havens, ‘Thomas Warton and the Eighteenth-Century Dilemma,’ Studies in Philology 25 (1928), 36-50.

15. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron with the Castle of Otranto (London: J.C. Nimms and Bain 1883), 12.

16. Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne (1826; repr New York 1972), 1:74.

17. For a recent discussion of this image in Romantic poetry, see Kathryn Sutherland, ‘The Native Poet: The Influence of Percy's Minstrel from Beattie to Wordsworth,’ Review of English Studies ns 33 (1982), 414-33.

18. On Percy's revisions to the ballads, see Joseph M. P. Donatelli, ‘Thomas Percy's Use of the Metrical Romances in the Reliques,’ in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (Albany: SUNY Press 1989), 225-35; Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1961), 203-12; Walter Jackson Bate, ‘Percy's Use of His Folio-Manuscript,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 43 (1944), 337-48.

19. On the responses of eighteenth-century readers to historical fiction, see James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York: Modern Language Association 1949), 186-224; and J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (London: Methuen and Co, 1932), 232-42.

20. Horace Walpole's letters to William Mason, dated 23 March 1774 and 7 April 1774 in Horace Walpole's Correspondence with William Mason, ed W. S. Lewis, Grover Cronin Jr, and Charles H. Bennett, vols 28-9 of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press 1955), 1:140, 143; Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785; repr New York 1970), vii-xi; Gaston de Blondeville, 1:61-2.

21. Gentleman's Magazine 44 (1774), 370.

22. ‘He has dipped into an incredible ocean of dry and obsolete authors of the dark ages, and has brought up more rubbish than riches … it is very fatiguing to wade through the muddy poetry of three or four centuries that had never a poet.’ Walpole to Mason, 18 April 1778, Correspondence, 1:385. See also a reviewer's remarks on the second volume: ‘The learned and ingenious Writer has prosecuted his respectable labours with great assiduity, but possibly, with too much prolixity. On that account only it is to be feared that his valuable book may become the solitary inhabitant of consulted libraries’ (Monthly Review 59 [1778], 132).

23. HEP, 1:iv-v; See René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1941), 162-5.

24. Ritson, Observations, 48.

25. ‘The Origin of Warton's History of English Poetry,’ Review of English Studies ns 32 (1981), 37-63.

26. Fairer, 40-5.

27. On the precursors to the HEP, see Wellek, chap 5.

28. On Warton's use of sources in the HEP, see Clarissa Rinaker, Thomas Warton: A Bibliographic and Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1916), 121-3, 177-232.

29. For considerably less shrill assessments of Warton's philological competence than Ritson's (see below n 32), see David Nichol Smith, ‘Warton's History of English Poetry,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 15 (1929), 77-9, and A. M. Kinghorn, ‘Warton's History and Early English Poetry,’ English Studies 44 (1963), 197-204.

30. See Richard C. Payne, ‘The Rediscovery of Old English Poetry in the English Literary Tradition,’ in Berkhout and Gatch, 156-9.

31. For a discussion of these theories of romance origin, see Johnston, 13-31.

32. Ritson again stands alone among Warton's contemporaries in calling attention to this gross historical distortion: ‘You, Sir, have sometimes been a biographer; and did you ever find it necessary to commence the story of your hero at the 15th or 16th year of his age, and to assert that the time of his birth and infancy had no connection with the story of his life, because, forsooth, he was become a very different person when grown up and sent to college, from what he was when born, breeched, and sent to school?’ (Observations, 2).

33. HEP 1:diss I, sig c3v-c4v.

34. In Literary Hours (3rd ed, London 1804), Dr Nathan Drake refers to Warton when describing the production of ‘Legendary and Romantic fiction’ in Britain (3:257-8); in Gaston de Blondeville (1:141), ‘Maister Henry,’ the versifier, sings the ballad of the Giant of Cornwall before Henry III—he is none other than Warton's Henry of Avranches (HEP 1:46-8).

35. Gentleman's Magazine 44 (1774), 373.

36. Critical Review 61 (1786), 172.

37. Gentleman's Magazine 44 (1774), 429.

38. This lexical error, as well as many others, had not escaped Ritson's notice: ‘Though such unparalleled ignorance, such matchless effrontery, is not, Mr. Warton, in my humble opinion, worthy of any thing but castigation or contempt, yet, should there be a single person, beside yourself, who can mistake the meaning of so plain, so obvious a passage (which I much suspect to have been corrupted in coming through your hands) I shall beg leave to inform him that a Faucon Brode is nothing more or less than a Broad Fauchion’ (Observations, 9).

39. On the close connection between Warton's creative corpus and his scholarly efforts, see John A. Vance, Joseph and Thomas Warton (Boston: Twayne Publishers 1983), 37-40; Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973), 176ff; Lipking, 377-84; and Frances Schouler Miller, ‘The Historic Sense of Thomas Warton, Junior,’ ELH 5 (1938), 71-92.

40. Quoted by Pittock, 203.

41. Warton's letter to Gray, 20 April 1770, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. P. Toynbee and L. Whibley (Oxford 1935), 3:1129.

42. According to Warton, this kind of ‘night’ had fallen before when a budding interest in the liberal arts during the twelfth century was overwhelmed by ‘the barbarous and barren subtleties of scholastic divines’: ‘this promising dawn of polite letters and rational knowledge was soon obscured. The temporary gleam of light did not arrive to perfect day’ [HEP 1:diss II, sig k3].

43. Vance, 115-21; Pittock, 203-8; Lipking, 392-6.

44. For previous discussions of this convention, see Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press 1979), 10-11, 35-6; and Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (1938; repr New York 1964), 169-70.

45. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1964), 3.

46. Gaston de Blondeville 1:49.

47. Ibid, 1:75.

48. Ibid, 1:76.

49. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed William F. Axton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1961), 21.

50. Maturin graduated with honours in classics: see Robert E. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1975), 14. In Melmoth, Maturin alludes to the biblical scholar Johann Michaelis ‘scrutinizing into the pretended autograph of St. Mark at Venice’ (21).

51. However, Radcliffe apparently looked for old books when she visited Belvedere House, the seat of Lord Eardely. See ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe,’ in Gaston de Blondeville 1:68.

52. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances (London: N. Trübner and Co 1867-8), 1: lxxiv.

53. Critical Review 61 (1786), 169-70.

54. When speaking of original texts, one should keep in mind that most editors smoothed over orthographic problems silently: Warton, for example, declared himself unwilling to reproduce the ‘capricious peculiarities and even ignorance of transcribers’ (HEP 1:220).

55. Progress of Romance, 1:13, 38.

56. Ibid, 1:57.