Links & Letters 2, 1995 63-76

Ivanhoe and the Making of Britainl

Chris Worth
Departament of English
Monash University

Abstract

Scott's Ivanhoe is more than a literary landmark or relic.The ideologicai work done by the
novel has been underrated. Ivanhoe is a memorable narrative of a national myth: the syn-
thesis of England from Norman and Saxon peoples. It contributed to the making and cir-
culation of the analogous idea of a «British»nation during the imperial era. Highly popular
in Europe, it provided a paradigm for imagining a synthetic nation bringing apparently
opposed interests together. The historical fictions of the novel reflect a number of Scott's
anxieties about contemporary political issues. Class conflict is displaced by the opposition
of national and the alien. Scott's use of the Robin Hood legend demonstrates how he adapted
his material: the first writer to link Robin Hood to a surviving Saxon resistance, Scott
appears to combat Ritson's account of Robin as radical folk-hero by presenting him as a fig-
ure co-operating in a a natural community linking ail levels of society in resistance to that
which is foreign, cosmopolitan, without stake in the land. The figures in the novel who
cannot be accomodated within the newly imagined state must be defeated and exiled.
Rebecca, as Jew, representative of commerce and science and perhaps as sexualized fe-
maie, is multiply alien to the nation as imagined. Read critically, Ivanhoe continues to be
an instructive text.
Key words: Scott, Nationhood, Fiction, History.

This paper began as a lecture in Melbourne in a series called ((Landmarksin

the European Novel)).There is something rather depressing about calling a
novel a ((landmark)).Who reads landmarks? We see them a long way off, on
the horizon, familiar guides to territory we have long since passed by, or, per-
haps, at best as signposts on the journeys we are still taking -but always
somewhere other than where we are going. And we preserve them, unused or
misused, or worse still, enclosed in glass. 1s Ivanhoe such a preserved landmark?

1. This article is an abridged version of a lecture given by Chris Worth at the Universitat
Autonoma de Barcelona in April 1994. We are grateful to Dr. Worth for agreeing to short-
en his original paper.
64 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

Can it be: anything more? When ScottS novels were first published they ap-
peared anonymously and their author was jocularly called «&e Great Unknown)).
It has often been suggested he should be renamed «the Great Unread)),for he
is no longer part of most educated people's experience, despite his importance
as an historical novelist among the most influential writers in nineteenth-
century Eturope. In this paper 1 want to reassess not so much the literary merit
of Ivanhoe as its ideological seriousness. 1 believe the novel can still be visited
as a functioning text, although it may now no longer be possible to inhabitit
as some of its earliest readers did or as younger readers continued to do through-
out the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper will focus on
one motivated or interested reading of Ivanhoe: 1 consider it as illustrating a
paradigmatic intervention of fiction in the construction of synthetic nationhood.
Ivanhoe, composed in 1819, was, Scott wrote in his 1830 «Introduction»,
a conscious attempt to explore new fields, being «an experiment on a subject
purely English)).In his previous novels he had used Scotland as his scene and
dealt witli narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aban-
donment of Scottish dialect and the engagement with English history were
both, to iny mind, aspects of a very deliberate widening of focus. There was the
commer<:ialprospect of opening up a new market. But 1 believe the novel was
also motivated by ScottS recognition of the potential of his historical fictions
to intervene in the turbulent political arguments of the post-Napoleonic period.
Scott was an interesting political agent of the time, interpellated in complex
ways by a variety of long-standing and contemporary discourses. He was a
patriot, a great believer in Scottish identity and in the nation of Scotland as
defined rhrough Scottish ballads, historical narratives and literature, but he
was also powerfully constrained by the need to support the continuance of the
rational lUnion of Britain that had taken place in 1707, by his recognition of
the economic value of such resolutions of ancient rivalries, by an ideological
commitnnent to the value of a progressive and gradual evolution of the current
constitutional settlement of the united kingdoms and by his engagement with
universalizing chronotopes of Enlightenment and civilization. Not surprisingly,
notions of nationality and the nature of national identity are anxiously at issue
in almost: al1 his political statements and major fictions. There are further com-
plications: he had numerous strong social and political views, mainly Tory,
conservative and anti-democratic in cast, typical of those circulating through
his milieu, but the discourses of Romanticism also affected the positions he
took on a variety of issues (earlier works include translations of Sturm und
Drang dramas and his own romantic narrative poems, such as The Lay of the
Last Minstrel, indicative of his interest in Romantic redefinitions of huma-
nity). The historical novel in Scott's hands becomes, in part at least, a means of
exploring the fraught seams and ragged edges between these competing ideo-
logies from behind the safety of a pseudonym or mask, of examining the dis-
concerting gaps, for example, between local or national rivalries and universal
humanism, between feudal and mercantilist obligations, between subjectivity
and society, between Enlightenment rationality and the new insights of a
Iuanhoe and the Makine of Britain Link & Letters 2, 1995 65

romantic sensibility. Like some of the best of his early novels, then, Ivanhoe
responds to political issues and social tensions of the day. Although it is cer-
tainly not the first historical novel about England (perhaps the first good one!),
it is the first to have as one of its principal themes a sustained investigation of
the nature of the English national experience in ways that also suggested an
analogous construction of British and eventually Imperial identity. But the
very success of its ideological positioning, its endless reproduction in the fabric
of popular culture, has occulted the cultural work that it has done.
Stripped of its romance component (dealing with the disinherited Saxon,
Wilfred, and his love for the Saxon princess, Rowena), Ivanhoe tells the story
of the ending of Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest and the creation,
in the emblematic figure of Richard 1, of a king who is «English»rather than
Norman or Saxon, one who, «even more than Ivanhoe))is «a symbol of nation-
al uniqm ('Johnson, 1970, 1: 742),a king who has the respect (from his hered-
itary relationship to William 1 and his demonstrated military and chivalric
prowess) of the feudal Norman aristocratic ruling elite, but also the respect
and love of the «native»Saxon-derived yeomen and common people (effec-
tively presented in the scenes in the forest and the interactions with Locksley
and the outlaws). Al1 this is made very clear in the opening pages of the first
chapter, in which Scott sets the scene by describing not only a location and a
period, but also an ethnic issue. From the blend of Norman and Saxon comes
the pre-destined and superior ethnic grouping of the «English».The process
supposedly has an analogy in the emergence of the English language out of
Saxon and Norman. The reader is offered an image of a synthetic nation state
forged2, out of the providentially enriching merger of different races. Ivanhoe
offers a powerful and memorable fiction by which a particular version of nation-
al emergence is given narrative shape. In terms of already available narrati-
vizations of English national myths it fills an obvious hole, a part of history
not touched on by Shakespeare, for example.
The narrative of Ivanhoe fleshes out the bare bones of the legitimation
imagined in its opening chapter. For example, the description of the Saxon
aristocratic world at Cedric's house and then Athelstane's castle is contrasted
with the description of their speech: whereas the Saxon language is pointedly
described as adding a «manly»quality to the new hybrid English, Cedric and
Athelstane are shown to be failures at coping with the reality of political life,
Cedric impulsive, short-sighted and obsessed by the past, Athelstane lazy,
unambitious and selfish. The effect is to suggest effectively that the vitality
of the Saxon culture has devolved upon the lower classes, initially represented
by the loyal and resourceful Gurth and Wamba, but eventually given para-
digmatic representation in the skills and competence of the yeoman Locksley,
Robin Hood. Alone, the unalloyed Saxon world deserves to perish in the

2. Linda Colley (1992) brilliantly argues that the image of the British subject hammered out
in the period 1707-1807 was the great sustaining myth of the Empire.
66 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

competitive environment of medieval life, but, allied with the positive featu-
res of Norman chivalry and education, it will flourish. Elsewhere the excesses
of feudalism are emphatically associated with the tyranny of certain groups
of Normans who have escaped the moderating bounds of either obligation
to a sovereign (Bois-Guilbert or De Bracy with his ((FreeCompanions))),
Christianity (Bois-Guilbert and Front-de-Boeuf), or a chivalric code of honour
(Front-de-Boeuf and Waldemar Fitzurse). Feudalism itself is not scrutinized
and, indeed, the right of Richard at the end of the novel to disperse favours,
grant rights of «vert and venison)),and so on, is an essential part of the reso-
lution of the story. The tyranny of feudal nobles in early medieval England is
certainly historical. But Scott transforms this into one of the quintessential
conservative motifs of British jction: the motif of the absentee landlord whose
bad steward exploits the poor or subservient. Whereas for generations of refor-
mist thinkers the idea that the Norman Conquest imposed tyrannical feudal
customs on a democratic Anglo-Saxon constitution had enabled them to con-
ceive of an earlier, Edenic, nation-state, Scott ensured that the dominant
image of the Norman chivalric nobility that survives from reading Ivanhoe is
of its potential to contribute to «Englishness»,once purified from corrupting
«foreign»influences by contact with the people of the land and wood, under
the protection of a just and hybrid sovereign. The parallels with the seven-
teenth -and eighteenth- century creation of a Britain joining the best of
Scots, English, etc., are patent.
Scott's construction of the state of English society in the 1190s is, of course,
a fiction, not a generally agreed historical account but an artifice which shapes
historical ~nderstandin~ as much as it reports a state of knowledge. What Scott
does in the opening paragraphs of Ivanhoe is surely deliberate, not a failure to
understand the past. He fills the poorly documented social life of Richard's
reign with images derived from his own concerns, linking together severa1
disparate groups of stories, while retaining a whole host of accurate (if
sometimes achronological) and often documentary details about people, pla-
ces and manners. As has been frequently pointed out (by literary critics and
historians alike), not only is the surviving heir of Harold (Rowena) fictitious,
but also the whole idea of a surviving Saxon culture. Saxon resistance had cer-
tainly evaporated Iong before the 1190s, indeed, in any organized sense had
done so by the 1090s. Richard was an Angevin brought up as a Poitevin
(Holt,1989:183) and had as little in cornmon with some of the Norman nobles
as he had with most of his «English»subjects (nor was he necessarily very popu-
lar). The concept of an accommodation between Saxon and Norman laws has
little validity (although tensions between central authority and independent
power brokers were common whether the kings were Norman or Saxon and
whether the local war-lords were dukes or earls). It is even uncertain whether
the processes by which English evolved as a separate language can be descri-
bed in the way that they are in the novel. Wilson, in his Penguin edition, gives
other examples of anachronisms (and also a lively defence of Scott against
pedantic criticism of his inaccuracies). More generally, the novel effectively
Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 67

replaces the dynastic and religious concerns of pre-rnodern Europe with the
administrative and national concerns of post-Enlightenrnent national states.
And what is more, by suggesting that rnodern national forrnation can suc-
cessfully be a synthetic procedure, it allows for nationality to be a process of
joining, not just of separation. As such it can be seen to apply powerfully to
nineteenth-century ernpire-building ideologies.
Let me here introduce something of the cornplex story of the novel's recep-
tion. Ivanhoe was published in Decernber 1819 and was an instant success.
The 10,000 copies of the first edition were sold by the publishers within two
weeks (Johnson, 1970, 1: 686-87), an extraordinary result given the thirty-
shilling, nominal retail cost of each copy. The early three-volurne editions
were followed by numerous others, eventually in cheaper and cheaper for-
mats, widely distributed cornrnercially and educationally. But the novel's cri-
tical reception was sornewhat less enthusiastic than its general success. To
surnrnarize very ruthlessly, the initially mixed reactions were the result of vary-
ing degrees of interest in the subject rnatter together with varying degrees of
distaste for the means by which Scott had made his material accesible to read-
ers. Soon a distinct split develops in British responses to Ivanhoe. O n the one
hand, it became, and continued to be, a verypopular text, indeed, so popular
that it ranks almost with Shakespeare's plays, Frankenstein and Dracula as
among the rnost widely recirculated of al1 British fictional text,s,if not directly,
then in its echoes in most recent versions of the Robin Hood stories. O n the
other hand, it attracted considerable intellectual disparagernent. There is room
here only to sketch briefly the arnazing spread of irnages, retextualizations,
etc., of Ivanhoe. Sorne eighty-odd full editions of the novel had appeared
within a century (Harvie, 1983:18). Six dramatic productions of Ivanhoe were
being performed on London stages within a year of publication. There have
been, some 250 other stagings of Ivanhoe since then, including a very
successful operatic version by Arthur Sullivan, burlesques, even an equestrian
version. There have been comic-books of Ivanhoe, and filrns, the first two in
1913, the best-known the 1952 MGM version with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth
Taylor and Joan Fontaine. The best-known B.B.C. TV series appeared in
1970. Although some of the numerous Robin Hood stories familiar in popu-
lar culture are quite distinct frorn the novel, many still show the tinge of Scott's
irnpact -e.g. antagonisrn between Saxons and Normans indicates intertex-
tuality with Ivanhoe, as Holt points out:
Whatever strange fantasies Robin's narne had aroused one was notably absent.
So far no one had suggested that he stood for the oppressed Anglo-Saxon, the
genuine Englishman struggling against the Norman oppressor. That role was
foisted on him by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe in 1820.. . There was nothing
to support it. (1989: 183)

In contrast to its popular and comrnercial success, British literary figures

and critics began to deprecate the novel systematically not long after its appear-
ance. Thackeray's parodic version, ((Proposalsfor a Continuation of "Ivanhoen»,
68 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

later expanded as Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance (1850), may
have encouraged the development of an image of Scott's book as suitable only
for youth. By the time the discipline of English studies was firmly established
in England in the 1920s, Ivanhoe was seen, as Sir Herbert Grierson put it, as
«mainly a good adventure story for boys», or, in Una Pope-Hennessfs words:
«first and 1 s t a bofs book» (Duncan, 1968: 142). By the 1950s it had been
deleted from academic consideration outside the community of Scott schol-
ars -hence Duncan's defence of the appropriateness of taking the novel seriously
in his revisionary article of 1955. This intellectual disparagement was, howev-
er, contemporary with the widespread adoption of the novel as a pedagogic
text, as indicated by the memories of many people who went to all-male
schools before the 1950s and by the existence of various school editions, in
Britain and its dependencies. The adoption of Ivanhoe as part of school curricula,
beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the Second
World War, 1 find particularly significant. To my mind, the critical dispar-
agement oE the novel, begun well before its loss of popular status, while part of
the post-romantic aesthetic programme that placed the highest premium on
literature of the individual psyche, was also directly related to the construc-
tion of English Studies themselves as necessarily withdrawn from political or
sociological tasks. Meanwhile, within the national and imperial educational
agenda, the role of literature was being defined in much more instrumental
terms, in ways which relied precisely on the work which a novel such as Ivanhoe
could do in the maintenance of specific ideological structures3. 1would claim
that Ivanhoe, consciously or unconsciously, gave imaginative form to a useful
and successful myth of the British enterprise, circulating as widely as any
formal historical account.
As the case of Shakespeare in Richard 111and Henry Vindicates (Holderness,
1988; Bate, 1989), the potential of Ivanhoe to affect popular understanding

3. Christopher Harvie notes that Scott's fiction became (&e acknowledged precursor of those
reconstnictors of historic identity who were to dorninate European nationaiisrn in the nine-
teenth ct:ntury» (1983, 444; see also Massie, 1983). Ivanhoe in particular played a central
role in this process, as the exarnples collected by Buchan (1932: 201), Wilson (1980: 208),
Ochojoski (1973), and Jack (1973), arnongst others, indicate. Perhaps the most interesting
case is qiloted by Katona in her study of the reputation of Scott in Hungary. She notes:
«When Ivanhoe was first translated into Hungarian in 1829 the translator rnade it clear
that he undertook the job as a patriotic duty, and so did the publisher who declined al1
profit)) (273- since this was presurnably András Taisz's six-volurne translation it was no
srnall sacrifice to rnake!). In general, the production of Ivanhoe-like historical novels al1
over Europe was strongly associated with the ernergence of nationai narratives «irnagining»
the authenticating past of new national consciousnesses. While poetry was an essential
dernonstration of the reality of a nationai language, historical fiction was the natural vehi-
cle for circulating the key narratives of nationai culture and cultural formation. Although
its vivid recreation of the past, its rnedievalisrn, rnay well have contributed to Ivanhoe's
success overseas as in Britain, its ideological undertones were an essentiai ingredient in its
influence on severai ernerging national literatures.
Ivanhoe and &e Making of Britain Links & Letrers 2, 1995 69

of the past and the notion of the synthetic nation-state comes not from some
brilliant aesthetic strategy that defeats a «true))representation of history, but
from its attachment to already circulating ideological notions. For Ivanhoe
these include the following: notions about the first «heroic» king in English
history, the focus for a whole series of national legends about strength and
fidelity; folktales about the democratic tastes of good kings; concepts of exo-
gamic ethnic strengthening, attached to language but also to stereotypes of
national type and national behaviour; notions about military strength (e.g.,
the combination of chivalric prowess with the potential of the «English»long-
bow that here partly defines Richard's Englishness and preserves his life, but
which really belongs to the later successes of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers);
legends which associate the «native»with a «local habitation))and hence with
both nature and the «national»soil (legends echoing interestingly in the treat-
ment of the outlaws). Al1 these are features evident in the later circulation of
the Ivanhoe story and those versions of the Robin Hood story influenced by
the novel.
The melding of Norman and Saxon in the person of Richard 1 was presum-
ably widely understood to prefigure or typ@ the experience of Scots and
English, brought together under one crown in 1603, constitutionally linked
by the 1707 Union, «now»,in 1819, hopefully evolving towards a new Great
British alignment. It is easy to see Ivanhoe as a novel as much concerned about
the evolution of the synthetic British subject as about the evolution of the
English subject. 1 would speculate that it was precisely its contribution to the
great sustaining myth of the Empire which explains the repeated appearance of
Ivanhoe on school syllabuses and examination curricula well into the 1950s,
in Britain, Australia, India and elsewhere. There is of course a grim irony in
Ivanhoe S' success, given the ever-increasing absorption or complicity of Scotland
within the United Kingdom or Britain during Scott's life, an absorption he
resisted but also from which he benefited. Benedict Anderson answers the
question of why Scotland did not become more nationalist towards the end
of the eighteenth century (as so many places in Europe did) by suggesting that,
unlike the American States, say, or Ireland, Scotland had access to the admi-
nistration of the nation state and to «English»as a language, i.e., that it shared
fully in the image of Britain. The account of the battle for control of «access»
to the good seats at Ashby in Chapter 8, access protected as much by the Saxons
as by the Normans, might then be a fable of the success of the forging of the
Briton as subject, Scottish aristocratic complicity in the Union, and, at the
same time, a token of Scott's own ambivalent participation in the subordina-
tion of Scottish local identity to a more competitive and fateful imperial citi-
zenship.
Other implications of the Ashby scene might be framed within the analo-
gies between Ivanhoe and political processes in Scott's time. Accounts of the
creation of the identity of England in Ivanhoe tend to assume it to be linguis-
tic and cultural. Saxon and Norman represent an advantageous ethnic mix-
ture,,a potential for successful combination of institutions (i.e., strong Norman
70 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

feudal sovereignty with free Saxon parliaments and courts), languages and
habits. Bu.t, as one or LWO critics have pointed out, there are some interesting
class parailels too, and here the sub-textual ideologicai structures of the novel
begin to do further work. Scott's writing is not that of a romantic feudalist,
rather that of a Burkean conservative, anxious to reject unfettered and arbi-
trary power as much as mob rule. The rejection of tyranny in the novel is effec-
tively imaged in, for example, the fail of the castle of Torquilstone, not only
an exciting episode, the kind of «hoy's own» adventure story that everyone
agrees Scott wrote quite well, but also a metonym for local tyranny in ruins,
defeated by the combination of a brave and concerned ruler and his loyal and
liberty-coriscious people. But the anxieties of Ivanhoe in the end seem to me to
be less about resistance to tyranny than about the potentiai for anarchy that
follows tyranny. In this sense, the novel is Scott's equivaient of Shakespeare's
Wars of the Roses cycle. The historicai context is crucial here. The years after
the end of the Napoleonic Wars were tense ones for conservative politicians,
as the pent-up frustrations of moderate and radical reformists stimulated
working-class audiences into open action around Britain. In August 1819 the
disaster of J?eterloo4 brought the culmination of this unrest, occurring just as
Scott was writing Ivanhoe. From a modern perspective the Government's repres-
sion of the radical democratic dissent of 1819 was crushingly effective: the
gagging acts of 1819 left Sidmouth and the government in almost dictatorial
control of the country. But it was not so clear to Scott and his circle that they
were safe from a threatening democratic storm. Rather than an escapist text
looking away from the problems of the age back to the «romantic»middle
ages, 1, like Brown or Wilson (1984), see Ivanhoe as a distinctive combination
of powerful images of politicai life, motivated by ScottS response to such con-
temporary issues.
Take the following passage from the scene of the Tournament at Ashby
which describe the ((sufficientlymiserable)) (Scott, 1852,16:99) condition of
England under Prince John's regentship, an account highly relevant to what 1
a m proposing about the novel. Roaming the land are bands of «lawlessresolutes))
(ibid.,100), ~accomplishedin the vices of the East, impoverished in substance,
and hardened in character, and who placed their hopes of harvest in civil com-
motion));in addition, there are bands of outlaws «driven to despair by the
oppression of the feudal nobility)), for, unchecked by central authority,
the nobles raise private armies and tyrannize over their neighbours. John
and the Norman landowners raise money from moneylenders to support their
behaviour «at the most usurious interest, which gnawed into their estates like
consuming cankers)).Scott concludes:

4. «Peterloo» or the Manchester Massacre refers to a rnass meeting, held in St. Peter's Fields
on 16 August 1819, of cotton workers demanding manhood suffrage, which was dispersed
by a charge of cavalry in a cruel and unnecessary manner. Viscount Sidmouth, rnentioned
below, was Horne Secretary at the time.
Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 71

Under the various burdens imposed by this unhappy state of affairs, the peo-
ple of England suffered deeply for the present, and had yet more dreadful
cause to fear for the future. To augrnent their rnisery, a contagious disorder
of a dangerous nature spread through the land; and, rendered more virulent by
the uncleanness, the indifferent food, and the wretched lodging of the lower
classes, swept off rnany whose fate the survivors were ternpted to envy, as
exempting them frorn the evils which were to come. (Scott, 1852,16:101)

The disease is clearly both literal and allegorical. The evocation of a land
ravaged by the effects of discord between elements of its population and threat-
ened with the prospect of outright civil war seems to resonate pointedly with
the distressed condition of Britain in 1819. Consider the narrative at this
point: the disloyalty of John and some of the nobles to the constitutional
structures under which a civil society might subsist, opens the country to a
host of disasters and warring factions. Scott vividly represents these: the po-
tential power of transnational pseudo-religious and cosmopolitan communi-
ties such as the Templars; the violence of self-interested men of power, of
varying degrees of moral quality (from Front-de-Boeuf to De Bracy and his
ambivalently narned Free Companions); and the plague of potentially com-
munistic popular movements, again of varying degrees of morality (from the
loyal and hierarchically organized community of Robin Hood's forest-dwellers
down to those bands of ((lawlessresolutes~,<caccomplishedin the vices of the
East», etc., mentioned so early in the novel). Only by the reimposition of an
idealized, feudal constitutional monarchy (tali~manicall~ acknowledged by
the outlaws) is there any hope that the disparate political forces and classes
of the country will be successfully united to wrench «Merry England)) out of
the hands of aliens, villains and radicals. Each of the fictional threats has its
counterpart in Scott's personal demonology of contemporary political life (as
seen in The Visionary, for example): Scott's lingering anti-Catholicism, mild
anti-Semitism and interest in Freemasonry play a role in the depiction of the
Templars; wealthy manufacturers without an interest in land and politicians
only protective of their personal interests, both currently undermining Britain's
established parliamentary constitution, could be seen as analogous to the
medieval freebooters; the bands of lawless wanderers are clearly equivalent to
the «mobs»of radicals and strikers Scott so despised. Ivanhoe, by apparently
resolvingin its narrative the class conflicts of history, offers a means by which
to imagine the triumphant destiny of England, by vividly demonstrating the
community of interests (between king, landowners, yeomen and peasants) on
which this destiny might be supposed to depend. Analogically this process
might then be transferable to the imagining of «Britain» and the «British»
(concepts of extraordinary artificiality whose fragility is only now beginning
to be fully recognized (Nairn, 1977).
As with so many discourses of nationalism, the narrative which recon-
structs the past in order to gloriSl the present must rapidly obliterate al1 sites
of conflict. So, although the opposition of Norman and Saxon runs through-
72 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

out Ivanhoe, a series of images redirect that conflict into a much less threat-
ening arena by making, in typical melodramatic style, the most villainous
Norman characters in the book not only anti-Saxon, but also essentially alien.
Nothing could be more fitting in 1819 than for Waldemar Fitzurse to be
banished to his castle «in France)).(Given that Richard 1 spent a great deal of
time and eventually died for the principle that his domains in the British Isles
and on the Continent were not separate countries, this is somewhat of an
irony.) Ivanhoe, of course, unlike Scott's political pamphleteering, is a great
deal more than a neat fable about the need of various sections of society to
unite against threats to the continuing well-being of the community. But it does
work, 1suggest, towards a similar end imaginatively, circulating an ideology
of national co-operation benveen interests that might be seen (certainly by
left-wing historians) as essentially opposed, in favour of the maintenance of
an ((imaginedcommunity)) able to resist the alien, the entrepreneurial, the
radical.
1 am particularly interested in the ways in which Scott specifically used
Robin Hood stories to secure and extend his resolutionary narrative. Consider
Scott's treatment of the idea of the origins of Locksley. By 1819, the most
widely accepted account of Robin Hood's putative origins identified him as a
dispossessed nobleman. Already an accretion to the popular late-medieval stor-
ies, this notion had appeared first in the Scottish chroniclers, who Scott certainly
knew well. The eccentric antiquary and democrat, Joseph Ritson, a cor-
respondent of Scott's, whose widely influential «literary» collection of the
ballads and traditions of Robin Hood was first published in 1795, positively
identified Robin Hood as being born at Lockesley in Nottingham County in
1160, real name Robert Fitzooth. By contrast, Scott returned to the older
image of Robin Hood as essentially a yeoman hero, attempting to associate
him and his followers not just with self-interested resistance to the feudal forest
laws, but also with a mythical still-active Saxon alternative to arbitrary, monarch-
less feudal rule. The Friar Tuck figure in the novel, the Clerk of Copmanhurst,
exchanges a Saxon toast with his disguised guest -Richard, proving his pan-
English interests again- (Scott, 1852,16: 250, see also 16: 255, 276); the
outlaws ((werechiefly peasants and yeomen of Saxon descent)) (ibid., 276);
Locksley is naturally supportive of Cedric and Athelstane (ibid., 286) and
Locksley appeals to Richard to aid in the rescue at Torquilstone to show his
sympathies with Saxons. It is possible that Scott may have been more sensi-
tive than others to analogies benveen stories told about Robin Hood and those
about the one real Anglo-Saxon resistance leader, the numinous Hereward the
Wake in the 1070s (Keen, 1 9 7 3 , but it is more likely we have here a con-
juncture that says much about positioning of Ivanhoe in relation to contem-
porary political discourses.
A case can be made, for example, for seeing Scott's reinvention of Robin
Hood as a deliberate intervention in the interpretation of the legends. To
Ritson, Locksley was a democratic hero, a Lafayette, abandoning his class to
wage a struggle on behalf of the disenfranchised:
Zuanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 73

a man who, in a barbarous age, and under a complicated tyranny, displayed a

spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common
people, whose cause he maintained (for al1 opposition to tyranny is the cause
of the people), and, in spite of the malicious endeavours of pitiful monks.. .
to suppress al1 record of his patriotic exertions and virtuous acts, will render his
name immortal. (1887 edition, 1, xi)

To Scott, Locksley was more like his friend Robert Erskine, a gentlemanly
yeoman, loyal to the ideal of an old-established constitution. Throughout
Ivanhoe, the libertarian aspects of the popular Robin Hood legends are
down-played. Although the novel's outlaws do clearly steal from the rich and
levy fines on passers-by, especially on the well-off and the clergy, they are not
the ((primitive rebels» that dominate some versions of the stories. Again the
contrast with Ritson's Robin Hood is evident, for he stresses the image of
the outlaws as exercising a kind of primitive communism.
My point is that the appearance of the novel at the beginning of 1820
vividly put into the mass public domain a version of the story of Robin Hood
which connected the by then canonical story of Robin's aid to Richard 1 against
Prince John to a fiction of the continuing resistance of the Saxons to their
Norman conquerors, creating a version which was immediately popular, one
which to some extent replaced existing traditions. By refusing Ritson's des-
cription of Robin as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon, Scott not only
showed an appreciation of an essential part of the whole popular ballad-tra-
dition, but also connected him to resistance to tyranny affected neither by
radicalism (as Ritson's Robin Hood so evidently was) nor by disloyalty. Instead,
ScottS narrative embodied Robin Hood's role in confirming the emergence of
a distinctive cooperativesynthetic national community, one imagined through
a fictional reinvention of history.
The conflict-displacing process of inclusion within the nation state 1 have
defined, which is powerfully imaged in the novel and which is, 1believe, one
of the reasons why Ivanhoe was such a favoured model in the schools of the
Empire, is paralleled by the imaging of the process of exclusion from the nation-
state, important even to synthetic nation-states such as the England of the
novel or the Britain which 1 think the novel encodes. To define themselves
nations exclude that which seems to threaten their coherency and well-being.
As Patrick Wright puts it,
the ccnationn acts within the culture as a ~ ~ r o u n
ford the proliferation of other
definitions of what is normal, appropriate, or possible)).If the maintenance
of hegemony depends upon the winning of assent and upon the regular mobi-
lization of consensus, then the idea of the nation is an important medium
through which this consensus can be drafted. (Turner, 1986: 108)

And, as Renan observed, nations need to forget, as well as to forge, many

things (Anderson, 1991: 199-20 1). While Scott's fiction carefully papers over
some of the glaring fissures in society, glueing together disparate interest groups
74 Links & Letters 2, 1995 Chris Worth

in a fiction of a genetically richer race, it also represents processes of the repu-

diation of the unacceptable.
Two groups of characters stand out as unassimilatable: the Jews, as repre-
sented in the foreground of the fiction by Rebecca and Isaac, and the Templars.
Both are exiled at the end of the novel. The case of Rebecca is particularly
interesting and not just because generations of readers have felt some internal
logic in the text which seems to require Ivanhoe to marry her rather than
Rowena. The ambivalence that her status generates is simply insoluble, not
only because she is superfluous to the resolution of conflict, a reminder of the
uncontairiable existence of ethnic and religious difference, but also because
she signifies the Other of gender; her exclusion takes place not because of her
weakness, but because of her power. Carrying with her knowledge of science
and commerce, the two forces inimicable to the continuing myth of feudal-
ism, she also leaves behind a world in which the accomodation of patriarchy to
the state is not threatened by the disruptive forces of sexuality and female self-
consciousness. Rebecca is identified as exotic, the unassimilatable Other of
nationhood: Jewish, Oriental, and dangerously female. The treatment of the
Templars is also of great interest. They were as much a potentially alien for-
mation in medieval times as the Jews (as Eco's Foucaultj Pendulum has recently
reminded us) and it is onto their brand of cosmopolitanism that Scott
appears to concentrate the punishment meted out in actuality fairl evenly be-
tween the Templars and the Jews in late twelfth-century England . As in The Y
Tdlisman, the Templars are dangerous and potentidy treacherous because their
loyalties lie outwith the bounds and bonds of the imagined community of the
nation state and thus provide a convenient scape-goat for the whole political
structure envisaged by Scott.
Pointing, even sketchily like this, to the treatment of minorities in Ivanhoe
could lead into a larger discussion of how to read the novel in the very changed
circumstances of a late twentieth-century audience in, say, a post-colonial,
supposedly multi-cultural but frequently prejudiced society such as Australia,
itself deeply paternalistic and conservative in orientation, riven by anxieties
about national identity. Here Ivanhoe's audience is likely in general to be more
female than male, reading within tertiary education institutions, conscious of
difference, gender, ethnicity, power relationships. It will certainly be less English
and probably less likely than Scott's immediate readership to see a fictional
medievalism or political conservatism as possible alternatives to the ills of
contemporary life. Especially in intellectual circles there is an understandablg

5. Keen records the grim fact, suppressed in Ivanhoe, but alluded to by Thackeray, that before
the northern knights who joined Richard on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land left York,
they seized a number of Jews and burned them, together with the bonds issued over the
security of their estates, bonds which, in fact, circulated widely in the period as an essential
part of the money supply; Scott is right to represent the Jews as the victims of feudal re-
sistance ito early capitalism, but wrong to identify their persecution as the work of only the
«bad steward~.
Iuanhoe and the Making of Britain Links & Letters 2, 1995 75

suspicion of the nation state itself, that political order to which the ideology
of Ivanhoe is so closely tied (see R. Crawford, 1992). In such circumstances,
can Ivanhoe be re-read as an adult text at all? 1 hope that it is clear from what
1 have been saying that it is certainly possible to take Ivanhoe seriously. But
can we read it any better, or with any more enthusiasm? Surely the answer
to this rhetorical question can be answered positively. There are other ways
of approaching the novel. 1 have been stressing the seriousness of the text,
trying to draw attention to the ways in which the showy spectacle of Scott's
imaginative writing nevertheless embodies ideological dimensions of consi-
derable significance. My account, like so many such attempts to do justice to
the importance of landmarks, has neglected the entertaining aspect of the
novel, its resistance to over-intellectualization and, conversely, its figures of
personal despair, disorder and dislocation, those elements that Judith Wilt
(1985), for example, has highlighted in Scott's writing. Ivanhoe need not be the
static landmark of a moment in literar~history that some critics have con-
demned it to be. The spectacle at Ashby with its first great set-piece works
textually as entertainment -an invitation to take the seat offered by its engag-
ing narrator and to watch history being staged. The dramatic nature of Scott's
writing liberates not only the past from its parchment, but requires an engage-
ment with the present. In our seat in this theatre of history we can respond
in many ways to the elements deployed in Scott's exciting and sometimes
infuriating text. No matter what these responses are, history is being made in
Ivanhoe, the past itself brought to bear on our imagination of, for example,
nationhood. As such it would be a brave prophet who would deny its rele-
vance to the world of the 1990s.

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