The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman [Hardcover]

Mr. Mark Girouard (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (September 10, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300207387
• ISBN-13: 978-0300027396
• ASIN: 0300027397
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #456,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, September 18, 2011

By 

Stephen Cooper (South Yorkshire, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Paperback)

There is a problem for the Englishman, perhaps for any speaker of the English language, in approaching the history of the Middle Ages, which is the immense barrier erected by the writers and artists of the nineteenth century. The Victorians were so obsessed by medieval culture that it is difficult to avoid seeing medieval England through their eyes. Everywhere one goes one sees their idea of the Middle Ages, in castles, churches, cathedrals, the decorative arts, heraldry and statuary. In prose and poetry, it is the Victorian idea of Arthur and his Round Table which occupies the mind. In the worlds of art, architecture, painting and design, we see the Middle Ages through a glass darkly, and the glass is very often Victorian and stained. In Leeds City Square there is a fine statue of the Black Prince, but it is a Victorian burgher's idea of the man and what he stood for.

Mark Girouard was well qualified to write this fine book. He worked for Country Life for many years, and is an authority on the English Country House. In almost twenty finely crafted chapters, he explains the many different ways in which the English explored and appreciated the medieval world in the nineteenth century. `The Return to Camelot' is an apt title, for he focuses on the re-invention of the idea of chivalry, which had fallen into abeyance in the preceding period. It is an enthralling and highly entertaining story, full of those eccentric characters for which the English have become justly famous. Read for example the story of Charles Lamb, who participated in the Eglinton Tournament in Scotland, but also devoted much of his life to writing the chivalric history of his guinea-pigs. Read too the story of the four friends of Baddesley Clinton, which tells us much about late Victorian attitudes to sex and romantic love.

There is one aspect of the Victorians' approach to the Middle Ages which the author does not address. They did not simply construct their own idea of medieval life. They did much to preserve the real thing. They founded the Public Record Office, the Early English Text Society and dozens of other such institutions, devoted to the preservation of learning, literature and ostensibly mundane records. They helped preserve hundreds of genuinely medieval buildings. They founded the schools of `Modern History' in Oxford and Cambridge, and the Victoria County History. They began the serious study of the Middle Ages by reference to primary sources. The Victorian road to the past did not always run through Camelot.

Still, Girouard explains better than anyone how and why their idea of Camelot was important. The age of chivalry, thought by Burke to have gone when Marie Antoinette was executed in 1793, clearly survived all through the nineteenth century in Britain, and there is a good case for saying that it was only slaughtered in the trenches of France and Flanders between 1914 and 1918. Even then, its ghost lived on in the armed forces, the Boy Scouts, the public schools and the grammar schools, and one can still find gentlemen, and ladies, who live by it even today.

Stephen Cooper