1).
12 (p. 21) Ingulphus … Geoffrey de Vinsauf: Ingulphus’s twelfth-century “History of Croyland” (not Croyden) is now thought to be a forgery. Similarly, Geoffrey de Vinsauff, a poet supposed to have accompanied Richard I on the Third Crusade, is no longer thought to be the author of the account of Richard alluded to here by Scott. He inherited the mistakes from Robert Henry’s The History of Great Britain (1771-1785).
13 (p. 21) the gallant Froissart: Fourteenth-century French poet and historian Jean Froissart provided romantic accounts of the age of chivalry in his Chronicles of England, France, and Spain. That work, which Scott read in the 1523-1535 translation by Lord Berners, had great influence on the writing of Ivanhoe.
14 (p. 22) Sir Arthur Wardour: Wardour is a Tory antiquarian in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816). The manuscript referred to is thus also fictitious.
15 (p. 22) the Bannatyne MS., the Auchinleck MS.: Scott refers to poetic manuscripts dating from the sixteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively. The Auchinleck manuscript contains a fragment of the anonymous romance Richard Coeur de Lion, an important source for Ivanhoe.
16 (p. 22) Robin of Redesdale: This is the popular name given to the prehistoric image of a hunter carved into stone in a Northumberland field. In the late eighteenth century, the landowner was so annoyed by trespassing tourists that he blew up the stone.
17 (pp. 22-23) Gath … Arthur’s Oven: With “Tell this not in Gath,” Scott quotes the Bible, 2 Samuel 1:20, where. David orders that news of Saul’s death not be broadcast among the Philistines; the phrase is used colloquially to mean keeping something secret. Arthur’s Oven was an ancient dome-shaped building thought to mark the northern edge of the Roman occupation of Britain. It was destroyed by the local landowner in 1743 and its stones used to repair a dam. The reference to King Arthur is to the site of his last battle, in nearby Camelon (Camlann).
1 (p. 27) epigraph: The lines are from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey (1725; 14.453-456), slightly altered. The passage refers to the return of Odysseus, which is implicitly compared to Ivanhoe’s return from the Holy Land.
2 (p. 33) “A devil draw … confound the ranger of the forest”: [Author’s note] The Ranger of the Forest. A most sensible grievance of those aggrieved times were the Forest Laws. These oppressive enactments were the produce of the Norman Conquest, for the Saxon laws of the chase were mild and humane; while those of William, enthusiastically attached to the exercise and its rights, were to the last degree tyrannical. The formation of the New Forest bears evidence to his passion for hunting, where he reduced many a happy village to the condition of that one commemorated by my friend, Mr. William Stewart Rose—
Amongst the ruins of the church The midnight raven found a perch, A melancholy place; The ruthless Conqueror cast down, Woe worth the deed, that little town, To lengthen out his chase. The disabling dogs, which might be necessary for keeping flocks and herds from running at the deer, was called lawing, and was in general use. The Charter of the Forest, designed to lessen those evils, declares that inquisition, or view, for lawing dogs shall be made every third year, and shall be then done by the view and testimony of lawful men, not otherwise; and they whose dogs shall be then found unlawed shall give three shillings for mercy; and for the future no man’s ox shall be taken for lawing. Such lawing also shall be done by the assize commonly used, and which is, that three claws shall be cut off without the ball of the right foot. See on this subject the Historical Essay on the Magna Charta of King John (a most beautiful volume), by Richard Thomson.
3 (p. 35) King Oberon: Oberon is the fairy king in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Wamba is certainly referring to a text more contemporary (although still anachronistic) to the setting of Ivanhoe, namely Huon of Bordeaux, a thirteenth-century romance.
1 (p. 35) epigraph: The lines are from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the “General Prologue,” I:165-172.
2 (pp. 38-39) natives of some distant Eastern country: [Author’s note] Negro Slaves. The severe accuracy of some critics has objected to the complexion of the slaves of Brian de Bois-Guilbert, as being totally out of costume and propriety. I remember the same objection being made to a set of sable functionaries whom my friend, Mat Lewis, introduced as the guards and mischief-doing satellites of the wicked Baron in his Castle Spectre. Mat treated the objection with great contempt, and averred in reply, that he made the slaves black in order to obtain a striking effect of contrast, and that, could he have derived a similar advantage from making his heroine blue, blue she should have been.
I do not pretend to plead the immunities of my order so highly as this; but neither will I allow that the author of a modern antique romance is obliged to confine himself to the introduction of those manners only which can be proved to have absolutely existed in the times he is depicting, so that he restrain himself to such as are plausible and natural, and contain no obvious anachronism. In this point of view, what can be more natural than that the Templars, who, we know, copied closely the luxuries of the Asiatic warriors with whom they fought, should use the service of the enslaved Africans whom the fate of war transferred to new masters? I am sure, if there are no precise proofs of their having done so, there is nothing, on the other hand, that can entitle us positively to conclude that they never did. Besides, there is an instance in romance.
John of Rampayne, an excellent juggler and minstrel, undertook to effect the escape of one Audulf de Bracy, by presenting himself in disguise at the court of the king, where he was confined. For this purpose, he stained “his hair and his whole body entirely as black as jet, so that nothing was white but his teeth,” and succeeded in imposing himself on the king as an Ethiopian minstrel. He effected, by stratagem, the escape of the prisoner. Negroes, therefore, must have been known in England in the dark ages.gw
3 (p. 40) covereth a multitude of sins: See the Bible, 1 Peter 4:8.
4 (p. 43) Knights Templars: The order, founded in 1118 during the Crusades, takes its name from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the knights were headquartered. Their initial mission was to protect Christian pilgrims on their journeys to the Holy Land, but with the blessing of the pope, the order quickly spread throughout western Europe, gaining enormous wealth and political influence.
5 (p. 44) Hereward… Heptarchy: The Anglo-Saxon hero Hereward’s resistance to William the Conqueror significantly postdates the demise of the Heptarchy, the name given to the seven original Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Danish invasions beginning in the seventh century.
6 (p. 45) houris of old Mahound’s paradise: “Mahound” is a derogatory variation on “Muhammad”; the Prior is referring to a commonly held Western belief that the Koran promises virgins in paradise to the “blessed” who die in the name of Islam.
