The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought 1688-1863 (review)

154 Reviews Smith, R.J., The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought 1688-1863, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1987; pp.xiii, 231; R.R.P. A U S $81.00. This is a fascinating and very nicely sustained study. It deds with the image of the Middle Ages, felicitously called a gothic bequest, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Throughout the vitd date is 1066; the symboticfiguresWiltiam I and Alfred; the great document Magna Charta. Smith, however, does not treat these as fixed elements in a coherent epoch, more or less accurately understood, but as sharedfoci of attention being shaped and reshaped in the contexts of different preoccupations which themselves redefined the nature and the significance of the bequest In this is displayed both briUiance (Spelman, Brady, Hume, Karnes and Coleridge) and buffoonery. Major John Cartwright was so impressed by Anglo Saxon England that he thought contemporary soldiers should be armed with Anglo-Saxon spears - a Machiavellian recommendation that makes the adage about soldiers being ready for the previous war seem like a comptiment Thefirstpreoccupation was with finding the origins of the present polity, either to authenticate or to undermine it. Through the consequences of such delvings this manifestation of a customary mentdity gave way to a concern for making clear the exemplary character of the gothic world. A g d n increased knowledge strained credulity and, for example, EngUsh Republicans had to back off from claiming a home grown exemplum to authenticate their politicd ideds. Exemplary status gave way to a merely evocative image: symboUc vagueness is the last resort of a dispossessed historian. Thomas Jefferson's respect for Hengist and Horsa is a long way from Major John Cartwright A second preoccupation concerns the changing issues around which understanding of the bequest was organised. In the seventeenth century it was used to answer questions about law, authority and dlegiance. In the eighteenth it was used more to answer questions about the structure of society. In this shift 'feudalism' as we have since designated it was seen first as a set of legd relationships and then gradudly as a socid system. In this change 1066 came to mark a change in manners rather than power and property. The third theme explored by Smith is the way in which through pursuing a range of specific issues, the bequest was distanced from the present the last stage of which as he perceptively remarks was its being located inetrievably in a transhistoricd process of Kantian didectic by Coleridge. The failure of Southey to change Colidgean metaphysics back into exemplum history makes the point clearly enough. A fourth theme is provided by the gradud assimilation of the Anglo-Saxon, medievd world of England to a European context From being sui generis it became, via the attentions of the Scottish School (p. 156) a contingent means of Reviews 155 exemplifying the workings of a primitive people in the fabric of Maine's Ancient Law. Each of these themes is deftly complicated by Smith's attention to the interplay of secular and ecclesiologicd arguments - as reciprocdly informing andogues - and by his attention to the changing nature of explanation. This dteration in explanatory emphasis is (roughly speaking) seen as one from moral criteria to structural and from the consequences of intended to those of unintended action. Smith's treatment of H u m e and Karnes illustrates this as well as the other themes of the book. H u m e is portrayed as wanting to bury the gothic bequest as inelevant and to see the world that followed as its unintended consequence, his own world as the unintended consequence of puritan fanaticism. Hume's was a politicaUy subversive history if one sees the vdue of the gothic, or any other, bequest as present centred and politicd. Yet it is Lord Karnes who represents the apotheosis of destructive scepticism by arguing that the bicameral system of Parliament had its origins in the Anglo-saxon world, but only because sufficiently large hdls could not be found to house the meetings cdled by kings. Yet still the Norman Yoke struggled on to the end of the eighteenth century. In T o m Paine, for example, who...