The Black Knight and Friar Tuck enjoy some delicious pie

I’m studying Ivanhoe right now, and I came across some interesting articles about the book and its connection to a real-life trial by combat… in 1817. So I thought I would blog about the details, because though I think it is really interesting it will probably never make it into my paper.

Anyways:

The Ashford v. Thornton case of 1817 was the last case of a trial by combat challenge in Britain. It came at a time of rising interest in medieval England, chivalry, and romance. But of course the early nineteenth century wasn’t a time when trial by combat was considered anything other than absurd and (frankly) barbaric. Most people thought the case allowed a guilty man to get away with rape and murder. How? Through his very willingness and ability to commit murder.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott was published two years later, in December of 1819. It includes a trial by combat, and several scholars have argued that the case of Ashford v. Thornton was popular enough that both Scott and his readers would have been very aware of the case during the climactic final scene of the novel. Scott indeed mentions the Thornton case in his private letters (Letters; click “Vol. IV“).

Details of the Ashford v. Thornton case (1817)

In 1817 Abraham Thornton was accused of raping and murdering 20-year-old Mary Ashford. Her body had been pulled from a pit of water outside a very small village, several miles northeast of Birmingham. At a party the previous night, Thornton had boasted that he’d already had Mary’s sister, and he would also have Mary, who was also at the party. Thornton later told police that he did have sex with Mary that night, but that it was consensual. Although we’ll never know for sure what happened, Thornton does not come across as a very sexually appealing fellow, considering his rude boasting and his appearance. The London Times noted that Thornton’s “natural thickness is greater than common, but his excessive corpulency has swollen his whole figure into a size that rather approaches to deformity.” [1]

At the initial trial, Thornton was found “not guilty” after only five minutes of jury deliberation. Again, based on the details available to us today, it is impossible to say whether he actually was guilty or innocent.

Mary’s brother, William Ashford, was allowed by English law to make an “appeal,” such that Thornton was called upon again to plead his innocence. Except this time, on the advice of his attorneys, he pleaded “Not guilty, and ready to defend the same upon my body” (qtd. in Dyer 386), at which point Thornton threw down the proverbial gauntlet (in this case a yellow leather glove). William, being a skinny teenager, did not accept the challenge. And so Thornton was free. (For what it’s worth, the weapons of the fight were to be “oak clubs.”)

The public at the time was shocked, given that it was the first demand for a trial by battle since 1638. It was an old law that had basically been forgotten about by the courts, and so it had never been repealed. For the public, Thornton had basically turned the chivalric code upside down. Chivalry asks men to use their power to defend women; Thornton used the chivalric code to get off the hook after supposedly raping and killing a woman. William Ashford, who actually was trying to defend a woman, was out of luck (being a skinny teenager, and all).

Ashford v. Thornton and Ivanhoe

"Combat de chevaliers dans la campagne" by Eugene Delacroix

Ivanhoe‘s trial by combat surrounds  the saintly Jewess, Rebecca, who has been threatened with rape by the Templar knight Sir Brian Bois-Guilbert. Her staunch resistance to his advances causes him to fall even further in love with her. Eventually, she is accused by the Knights Templar of being a witch who has seduced Bois-Guilbert.

There are a few obvious differences between the case of Ashford v. Thornton and Ivanhoe‘s trial by combat. In Ivanhoe, the trial by combat is demanded by the threatened woman, Rebecca, not the villain (though it is Bois-Guilbert who secretly suggests it to her, because he wants to save her life). The combat also does not let someone get away with murder; technically, it saves Rebecca’s life. Indeed, the real villain, Bois-Guilbert, even though he is never on trial, ends up killed in the middle of the combat due to “the violence of his own contending passions” (490), and justice ends up actually being served. (The “contending passions” refer to Bos-Guilbert’s will to win the duel and thus further his ambitions towards eventually becoming the Templar Grand Master, and his conflicting will to save Rebecca, with whom he’s fallen in love.)

The two main scholars to take on the similarities of the Ashford vs. Thornton case and Ivanhoe are Gary Dyer and Mark Schoenfield. Both argue that Scott is attempting to rescue chivalry in some way, even if he realizes it’s not at all feasible in the modern world.

I think the idea of rescuing chivalry in a world in which it’s not feasible is a pretty important aspect of Scott’s Ivanhoe. Part of romance involves a kind of lost golden age we can never get back to, and despite the subtle critiques of chivalry and romance in Ivanhoe, I think that the world we are introduced to is indeed a romantic golden age. Although we can’t get back to that golden age, it is an important part of our history. In Schoenfield’s words, for Walter Scott, chivalric institutions (such as the trial by combat) “rendered modernity intelligible” (81).

[1] I saw part of this quotation originally in Mark Schoenfield’s article, and he cites it as 9 August 1817. But I could only find it in the 11 August paper. It is in regards to a Friday trial, which is why it appears three days after, on the Monday instead of Saturday.

Cited Stuff:

Dyer, Gary. “Ivanhoe, Chivalry, and the Murder of Mary Ashford.” Criticism 39.3 (Summer, 1997): 383-408. Print.

Schoenfield, Mark. “Waging Battle: Ashford v. Thornton, Ivanhoe, and Legal Violence.” Prose Studies 23.2 (2000): 61-86. Print.

Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. Ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Oxford World’s Classics.

- – - . “The Letters of Sir Walter Scott E-Text.” The Walter Scott Digital Archive. Edinburgh University Library. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.

“Warwick Assizes, Friday, Aug. 8. Trial of Abraham Thornton For The Murder Of Mary Ashford.” The Times [London] 11 Aug. 1817, Law sec.: 3. The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985. Web. 3 Jan. 2010.

When my Victorian Realism seminar got to the topic of Trollope’s crazy writing habits, I was reminded of comments I have often read from writers about what it’s like to write. It seems to me that if you ask an amateur writer, they’ll say something along the lines of how a writer can’t help but write; they are compelled to sit down at a computer (or a typewriter, a pad of paper, a pile of napkins, or whatever) and write for hours each day, because they just can’t help themselves. It’s like a drug fix. This has always seemed to me to be a silly myth. From what I’ve read about working, successful writers, they admit that it is, in fact, pretty difficult to soldier on through the drudgery of putting thousands of words to a page, again and again, until finally those thousands of words add up to a completed draft of a novel.

So, with that said, what I have here are a few writing habits that I’ve found to be pretty interesting. However, I suppose what I have here is not what would normally be considered the wildest or most unique set of writing habits (e.g., Michael Ondaatje’s literally cutting and pasting his stuff with scissors and tape) so much as habits about the grind of producing a completed, coherent text.

Anthony Trollope

Just a note that I’m getting a good deal of my info from a book called The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope by Walter Kendrick and from Trollope’s Autobiography.

Over the course of his life Anthony “the machine” Trollope wrote 47 novels and 16 other books. For about the first 20 years after the publication of his first novel in 1847, while he continued working as a novelist, he also maintained a full-time job with the Civil Service in the Post Office, a job he actually took a great deal of pride in. Here’s how he did it: Trollope paid a servant an extra ¬£5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words. According to him, it “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (An Autobiography 272). He admits that he never did write more than three novels in any one year, but, like, c’mon man, give him some slack. He was pretty darn prolific.

Like other novelists of his time, Trollope’s works have been associated with attempts to convey “the real.” (A lot of this part now is sort of an off-shoot from class discussion.) To do this, he tried to reduce the significance of the physical text (the signifier) as much as possible. He “lived” with his characters (the signified) in his imagination all day, every day. Then he would put his characters to paper as fast as he could, over the span of a few hours every morning, as if doing so reduced the obtrusiveness of the text. To Trollope, a text should just be a clear window to its characters. He was very pleased by a comment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, who said Trollope’s novels were just as real “as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of” (qtd. in An Autobiography 145). Trollope seemed to enjoy living with his characters in his imagination, but considered the physical act of writing to be a job to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is kind of funny when you actually read his books and notice the way his narrators often directly address the reader and reveal the very artificial and constructed aspects of the novel. My favourite are his narratorial intrusions that completely break a novel’s flow: “How easily would she have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr. Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?” (Barchester Towers II.32). Or, in the conclusion of the same novel, he says “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be filled with sweet meats and sugar plums” (II.266). Addresses like these blatantly show the reader that the plot is unfolding the way it is purely for the sake of art and fulfilling the rules of the genre, and not for the sake of being “real.”[1] (I was also amused to learn just how much this drove Henry James bonkers.) I should add, though, that Trollope wasn’t big on plot; it is a common criticism against him, and he openly admits to using plot purely as a vehicle for his characters.

This is my own interpretation, now, but it seems to me that “plot” was too caught up in literary conventions for Trollope’s taste. We all know the novel is going to end in a marriage, and that the ambitious, scheming chaplain won’t get the girl, so why bother pretending otherwise? Let’s just admit that the heroine isn’t going to fall for the bad guy and move on (Trollope does exactly this in Barchester Towers). Let’s focus on the characters, because that’s where there is actually some freedom to represent something “real.” The plot is too pre-determined by the traditions of the novel. Most of the interruptions from the narrator that highlight the story’s fabricated aspect focus on its plot. The characters, however, are completely “real,” and it’s not a coincidence that it his characters whom Trollope purports to have lived with everyday in his imagination.

Footnotes:

[1] Compare that to the Chapter 17 digression in Adam Bede, where George Eliot breaks the flow of the narrative to do the exact opposite; defending the actions of her characters because, though their actions may not create a thrilling, romantic narrative, they supposedly create a more “real” one.

Some Stuff I Cited:

Kendrick, Walter M. The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980. Print.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

- – - . Barchester Towers. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.