Ivanhoe

CHAPTER II

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.