by Walter Scott
3 (p. 54) the most odiferous pigments: [Author’s note] Morat and Pigment. These were drinks used by the Saxons, as we are informed by Mr. Turner. Morat was made of honey flavoured with the juice of mulberries; pigment was a sweet and rich liquor, composed of wine highly spiced, and sweetened also with honey; the other liquors need no explanation.—L. T.
CHAPTER IV
1 (p. 55) epigraph: The lines, slightly altered, are from Pope’s translation (1725-1726; 20.314-317, 322-324).
2 (p. 56) the horns of the altar: See the Bible, Psalms 118:27.
3 (p. 61) a truce with Saladin: Saladin was the Western name given to the Sultan of Egypt and Syria whose attack on Christian Jerusalem in 1187 prompted the Third Crusade (1189-1192), in which Richard I participated. After mixed success, and never reaching Jerusalem itself, Richard negotiated a truce with Saladin in 1192.
CHAPTER V
1 (p. 62) epigraph: The quotation is from Shylock’s famous speech from The Merchant of Venice (act 3, scene 1). Scott borrowed much from Shakespeare, most notably the stagy, pseudo-medieval language spoken by the characters in Ivanhoe. With the choice of this epigraph, he explicitly holds up Shylock as his model for Isaac.
2 . (p. 65) “all the babble of the fabulous Sir Tristrem: [Author’s note] Sir Tristrem. There was no language which the Normans more formally separated from that of common life than the terms of the chase. The objects of their pursuit, whether bird or animal, changed their name each year, and there were a hundred conventional terms to be ignorant of which was to be without one of the distinguishing marks of a gentleman. The reader may consult Dame Juliana Berners’s book on the subject. The origin of this science was imputed to the celebrated Sir Tristrem, famous for his tragic intrigue with the beautiful Ysolte. As the Normans reserved the amusement of hunting strictly to themselves, the terms of this formal jargon were all taken from the French language.
3 (p. 65) Northallerton . . . the Holy Standard: The English defeated the Scots in a famous battle on Cowton Moor, near Northallerton, in 1138, at which the English carried the banners of Saints Peter, John, and Wilfred.
4 (p. 66) Knights Hospitallers: A militant order of monks founded in 1120 to superintend the Christian Hospital in Jerusalem. Their importance as a military force grew with the Crusades, and by the late twelfth century they were the Knights Templars’ principal rivals.
5 (p. 66) St. John-de-Acre: A strategically important port in northern Israel taken by Saladin in 1187, St. John-de-Acre was recaptured by the Crusaders four years later. The legend of a victory tournament began with the romance Richard Coeur de Lion (see note 15 to the Dedicatory Epistle, above), which is also Scott’s source for significant details of the Ashby tournament in Ivanhoe.
CHAPTER VI
1 (p. 62) epigraph: The lines are from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 1, scene 3).
2 (p. 76) misery of Lazarus: It would be unlikely for a medieval Jew to refer to the New Testament (Luke 16:20-21), the parable of the poor man at the rich man’s gate. A further irony is that Isaac more resembles the rich man in the story than the beggar.
3 (p. 79) the Jews of this period: Scott significantly underplays the extent of persecution of the Jews at this time. Brought to England with the Normans, they were given royal protection by the Conqueror in return for enormous loans, but their situation in England deteriorated significantly under Richard I, whose coronation day itself was marred by pogroms. Isaac and Rebecca’s departure at the end of the novel is an implicit signal of how intolerable the combination of extortion and violence had become for the Jews in twelfth-century England. They were officially expelled in 1290 by Edward I and not readmitted until 1655.
4 (p. 80) the host of the Pharoah: Isaac recalls the biblical account of the fate of Pharoah’s army at the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14:25.
CHAPTER VII
1 (p. 83) epigraph: The lines are from John Dryden’s medievalist romance Palamon and Arcite; or, The Knight’s Tale (1699; 3.453—463).
2 (p. 92) Bride of the Canticles: Solomon is the ”wise king” whose Temple in Jerusalem Richard has failed to recapture. He is also the supposed author of the biblical Song of Songs, also known as the Canticle of Canticles, a set of poems famous for their lustrous evocation of female beauty.
3 (p. 94) William Rufus: William II of England went hunting in the New Forest in 1100 and never returned. He was shot, presumably by his companion Walter Tyrrell (who fled abroad), but whether by design or accident was never determined.
CHAPTER VIII
1 (p. 96) epigraph: The lines are from Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite (3.580-586).
2 (p. 99) The knights are dust ... with the saints, we trust: [Author’s note] Lines from Coleridge. These lines are part of an unpublished poem by Coleridge, whose muse so often tantalises with fragments which indicate her powers, while the manner in which she flings them from her betrays her caprice, yet whose unfinished sketches display more talent than the laboured master-pieces of others.
3 (p. 104) the arrogance and wealth that finally occasioned their suppression: In the early fourteenth century, Rome turned against the Knights Templars, charging the order with immorality and heresy, though in reality taking aim at their wealth and power. The order’s demise was sealed by a papal bull in 1312, and by the burning of the Grand Master in 1314.
CHAPTER IX
1 (p. 107) epigraph: The source for these slightly altered lines—Dryden’s The Flower and the Leaf; or, The Lady in the Arbor: A Vision (1700; lines 175-177, 184—189)—is another poem in which Dryden, like Scott after him, revisits the Middle Ages.
2 (p. 112) Og the King of Bashan, and Sihon, King of the Amorites: In the biblical accounts (Numbers 21 and 32:33), these two Canaanite kings were killed in battle against the Israelites.
CHAPTER X
1 (p. 116) epigraph: The lines are from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c.1592; act 2, scene 1).
CHAPTER XI
1 (p. 126) epigraph: The lines are from Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (act 4, scene 1).
2 (p. 129) the stream... in the wilderness: See the Bible, Exodus 15:23-27 and 17:6.
CHAPTER XII
1 (p. 133) epigraph: The poetry, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (lines 2599-2610), is taken from ”The Knight’s Tale,” the story of the battle between the knights Palamon and Arcite, from which Scott drew significant details for his account of the Ashby tournament.
CHAPTER XIII
1 (p. 144) epigraph: Misattributed to Homer’s Iliad, the passage nevertheless is strongly reminiscent of Pope’s translation and of the events of book 24, which describe the funeral games following the death of Patroclus. The actual source is a far more obscure eighteenth-century text, William Wilkie’s The Epigoniad 5.141-146.
2 (p. 145) attractions and antipathies: Pliny’s Natural History, an ancient text well known in the Middle Ages, explains specific natural phenomena, such as magnetic force, according to a principle of inherent attraction or antipathy between material objects.
3 (p. 146) myrrh . . . camphire: See the Bible, Song of Songs 1:13-14.
CHAPTER XIV
1 (p. 153) epigraph: The lines are from Thomas Warton’s ”Ode for the New Year, 1787” (lines 1-6).
2 (p. 159) a Saxon would have been held nidering: [Author’s note] Nidering. There was nothing accounted so ignominious among the Saxons as to merit this disgraceful epithet. Even William the Conqueror, hated as he was by them, continued to draw a considerable army of Anglo-Saxons to his standard by threatening to stigmatise those who staid at home as nidering. Bartholinus, I think, mentions a similar phrase which had like influence on the Danes.—L. T.
CHAPTER XV
1 (p. 162) epigraph: The lines are from Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil: A Tragedy (1798; act 2, scene 3). Scott, a great promoter of Bail-lie’s plays, once likened her to Shakespeare.
CHAPTER XVI
1 (p. 167) epigraph: The lines are from Thomas Parnell’s The Hermit (172
9; lines 1-6).
2 . (p. 174) Shadrach . . . King of the Saracens: The king here is Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon; in the Bible, the brothers Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walk untouched through the fire in Daniel 3. The English came to apply the term “Saracen” to any Muslim rather than specifically to the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, its original Greek designation.
3 (p. 177) scissors . . . scimitar of Goliath: In the biblical account, Delilah emasculates Samson by cutting off his hair while he slept (Judges 16:19); Jael nails a tent-peg through the head of Sisera, also sleeping (Judges 4:21); and Goliath’s scimitar fails to defend him from a slingshot to the head delivered by the boy David (1 Samuel 17:40-51).
4 (p. 178) make the harp-strings tinkle: [Author’s note] The Jolly Hermit. All readers, however slightly acquainted with black letter, must recognise in the clerk of Copmanhurst, Friar Tuck, the buxom confessor of Robin Hood’s gang, the curtal friar of Fountain’s Abbey.
CHAPTER XVII
1 (p. 178) epigraph: The lines, slightly altered, are from Thomas Warton’s “Inscription in a Hermitage at Ansley Hall in Warwickshire” (1777; lines 25—30).
2 (p. 179) a ballad in the vulgar English: [Author’s note] Minstrelsy. The realm of France, it is well known, was divided betwixt the Norman and Teutonic race, who spoke the language in which the word “yes” is pronounced as oui, and the inhabitants of the southern regions, whose speech, bearing some affinity to the Italian, pronounced the same word oc. The poets of the former race were called minstrels, and their poems lays; those of the latter were termed troubadours, and their compositions called sirventes and other names. Richard, a professed admirer of the joyous science in all its branches, could imitate either the minstrel or troubadour. It is less likely that he should have been able to compose or sing an English ballad; yet so much do we wish to assimilate him of the Lion Heart to the land of the warriors whom he led, that the anachronism, if there be one, may readily be forgiven.
3 (p. 180) Iconium’s turban’d soldan fell: Iconium is the medieval name for the Turkish city of Konya, which fell to the advancing Crusaders in 1190.
4 (p. 181) a sort of derry-down chorus: [Author’s note] Derry-down Chorus. It may be proper to remind the reader that the chorus of “derry-down” is supposed to be as ancient, not only as the times of the Heptarchy, but as those of the Druids, and to have furnished the chorus to the hymns of those venerable persons when they went to the wood to gather mistletoe.
5 (p. 183) old Ariosto: Author of the romance Orlando Furioso (1516), Ludovico Ariosto was considered in Scott’s time as the modern Virgil, and was widely read and quoted. In his “Essay on Romance” (1822) Scott writes approvingly of Ariosto’s digressive narrative technique, which he alludes to and imitates here.
CHAPTER XVIII
1 (p. 183) epigraph: This epigraph begins a sequence of invented verse passages authored by Scott himself to serve as epigraphs in Ivanhoe. Scott was in a hurry to finish the novel, needing the money from its sales to purchase a commission in the army for his son. There is no better evidence of his haste than his choosing to invent epigraphs rather than go to the trouble of remembering and locating an appropriate verse or passage.
2 (p. 190) Hotspur: Scott refers to the scene in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV in which Hotspur is frustrated by a reluctant and sluggish ally, Archbishop Scroop (act 3, scene 1).
CHAPTER XIX
1 (p. 191) epigraph: The lines are from Baillie’s Orra: A Tragedy (1812; act 3, scene 1).
CHAPTER XX
1 (p. 198) epigraph: The lines are written by Scott.
2 (p. 198) Watling Street: This is the English name for the old Roman road that runs south-north from Dover through London to the northern border.
3 (p. 200) De profundis clamavi: See the Bible, Psalm 130:1, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (King James Version; henceforth, KJV).
CHAPTER XXI
1 (p. 205) epigraph: The lines are from Baillie’s Orra (act 3, scene 2).
2 (p. 209) Tosti . . . the tale: Tosti was King Harold II’s disgruntled brother who, with encouragement from William of Normandy, allied himself to an invading Norwegian force and launched an attack on the King’s forces at Stamford Bridge near York in September 1066. The Norwegians were defeated, and Tosti was killed. Harold was celebrating the victory when word came of the Norman invasion in the south. Harold immediately marched his army to meet William but was defeated and shot dead with an arrow in the eye on October 14 at the Battle of Hastings.
3 (p. 210) the bloody streams of the Derwent: [Author’s note] Battle of Stamford. A great topographical blunder occurred here in former editions. The bloody battle alluded to in the text, fought and won by King Harold, over his brother the rebellious Tosti, and an auxiliary force of Danes or Norsemen, was said, in the text and a corresponding note, to have taken place at Stamford, in Leicestershire [Lincolnshire], and upon the river Welland. This is a mistake into which the Author has been led by trusting to his memory, and so confounding two places of the same name. The Stamford, Strangford, or Staneford at which the battle really was fought is a ford upon the river Derwent, at the distance of about seven [nine] miles from York, and situated in that large and opulent county. A long wooden bridge over the Derwent, the site of which, with one remaining buttress, is still shown to the curious traveller, was furiously contested. One Norwegian long defended it by his single arm, and was at length pierced with a spear thrust through the planks of the bridge from a boat beneath.The neighbourhood of Stamford, on the Derwent, contains some memorials of the battle. Horse-shoes, swords, and the heads of halberds, or bills, are often found there; one place is called the “Danes’ well,” another the “Battle flats.” From a tradition that the weapon with which the Norwegian champion was slain resembled a pear, or, as others say, that the trough or boat in which the soldier floated under the bridge to strike the blow had such a shape, the country people usually begin a great market which is held at Stamford with an entertainment called the Pear-pie feast, which, after all, may be a corruption of the Spear-pie feast. For more particulars, Drake’s History of York may be referred to. The Author’s mistake was pointed out to him, in the most obliging manner, by Robert Belt, Esq., of Bossal House. The battle was fought in 1066.
4 (p. 213) the destined knight: Possibly a reference to a scene in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (22.18-23) where Astolfo blows his horn to warn the inhabitants of an enchanted castle, which then disappears into mist.
CHAPTER XXII
1 (p. 213) epigraph: The lines are from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 2, scene 8).
2 (p. 216) the keys ... to bind and to loose: The reference is to the keys to the kingdom of heaven, as noted in the Bible, Matthew 16:19.
3 (p. 217) “above that glowing charcoal”: [Author’s note] Torture. This horrid species of torture may remind the reader of that to which the Spaniards subjected Guatemozin, in order to extort a discovery of his concealed wealth. But, in fact, an instance of similar barbarity is to be found nearer home, and occurs in the annals of Queen Mary’s time, containing so many other examples of atrocity. Every reader must recollect that, after the fall of the Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church government had been established by law, the rank, and especially the wealth, of the bishops, abbots, priors, and so forth, were no longer vested in ecclesiastics, but in lay impropriators of the church revenues, or, as the Scottish lawyers called them, titulars of the temporalities of the benefice, though having no claim to the spiritual character of their predecessors in office.
Of these laymen who were thus invested with ecclesiastical revenues, some were men of high birth and rank, like the famous Lord James Stuart, the prior of St. Andrews, who did not fail to keep for their own use the rents, lands, and revenues of the church. But if, on the other hand, the titulars were men of inferior importance, who had been inducted into the office by the interest of some powerful persons, it was generally understood that the new abbot should grant for his p
atron’s benefit such leases and conveyances of the church lands and tithes as might afford their protector the lion’s share of the booty. This was the origin of those who were wittily termed Tulchan Bishops,gx being a sort of imaginary prelate, whose image was set up to enable his patron and principal to plunder the benefice under his name.
There were other cases, however, in which men who had got grants of these secularised benefices were desirous of retaining them for their own use, without having the influence sufficient to establish their purpose; and these became frequently unable to protect themselves, however unwilling to submit to the exactions of the feudal tyrant of the district.
Bannatyne, secretary to John Knox, recounts a singular course of oppression practised on one of those titular abbots by the Earl of Cassilis, in Ayrshire, whose extent of feudal influence was so wide that he was usually termed the King of Carrick. We give the fact as it occurs in Bannatyne’s Journal [pp. 55—67], only premising that the Journalist held his master’s opinions, both with respect to the Earl of Cassilis as an opposer of the king’s party, and as being a detester of the practice of granting church revenues to titulars, instead of their being devoted to pious uses, such as the support of the clergy, expense of schools, and the relief of the national poor. He mingles in the narrative, therefore, a well-deserved feeling of execration against the tyrant who employed the torture, with a tone of ridicule towards the patient, as if, after all, it had not been ill-bestowed on such an equivocal and amphibious character as a titular abbot. He entitles his narrative
