4 - Chartism and Medievalism: Retrospective Radicalism in the English Nineteenth Century

Summary

IN HIS RECENT book Medievalism: A Critical History, David Matthews comments that the decade of the 1840s, notable for medievalism, was also the time of Chartism, and that ‘the Middle Ages were genuinely put forward as offering practical solutions to contemporary problems’. Some instances he cites are ‘one-nation’ arguments from people like Carlyle and Disraeli, concerned to reconnect the interests of lords and peasants, very much in favour of the former. But there were alternative medievalist positions available, including some in the context of the Robin Hood tradition as it developed after Joseph Ritson's 1795 anthology, Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Song, and Ballads, now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw. Ritson's reorientation of the Robin Hood tradition in his anthology allowed the development of a radical image of the Middle Ages. At the same time, a more politically conservative version of Robin Hood remained on offer. This chapter will pay particular attention to political medievalism as it featured in nineteenth-century novels and poems in the wake of Ritson's reinvention of Robin Hood, and will look in particular at the intersections between political medievalism and Chartism.

Medievalism and Radicalism

Ritson was certainly a radical – he favoured the French Revolution and liked calling his English literary colleagues ‘Citizen’: even the conservative Scott thought quite highly of Ritson, but because of his scholarship not his politics. Like Thomas Percy, Ritson saw real value in gathering the voices of the medieval past, which he regarded as an alternative to the modernity of novel-heroes and heroines, and self-aggrandising authors, whether Gothic or merely Romantic. Ritson makes a major political statement about Robin Hood, saying he ‘displayed a spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common people, whose cause he maintained’ and was especially opposed to ‘the crimes and follies of titled ruffians and sainted idiots’. Ritson's Robin Hood anthology and its introduction would remain the dominant source for the outlaw myth until J. M. Gutch's augmented edition, which appeared in 1847 with the title A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, with other ancient & modern ballads and songs relating to this celebrated yeoman, with more historicism and some introductory criticism of Ritson.