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.
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.
1 (p. 116) epigraph: The lines are from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c.1592; act 2, scene 1).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 (p. 167) epigraph: The lines are from Thomas Parnell’s The Hermit (1729; 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.
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
