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On 30 Sep 2018, at 04:01, Nohrnberg, James C (jcn) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Brigands in Book VI:For the location of the Celtic tribe or tribes and the erstwhile Roman client-kingdom of the “Brigantes” in the northwest at the neck of Britain (in Cheshire -- as on the Ebner ms. map for Ptolemy, “Prima Europe tabula”), see Ptolemy, Geography II.1, 3 (pace somewhat different British location for Brigantium [= York] and Caturactonium in the Almagest, II.5, 22-24). Tacitus, Annals 12.40, 2-7 and Hist. 3.45,provides the main historical episode for this people, an account of the schism within the tribe over their queen Cartimandua’s alliance with (or protectorship under) the Roman invader. The schism divided tribal loyalty between one or the other of the two, successive consorts of the queen (ca. 41-71 A.D.), To the Romans she had handed over the resistance leader Caractacus (or Caratacus), who survived imprisonment in Claudius’ Rome (he is apparently identical to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arviragus; “Cataractonium” is a city of the Brigantes listed by Ptolemy as near Isurium). The story of the queen’s two rival consorts may show some resemblence to that of the vexed relations among the Welsh originals for Guinivere, Arthur, Mordred, and the Saxon invader – and, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, for analogously vexed relations between Pastorella, the shepherds, the Brigands’ captain, and the invasive conqueror Calidore. Further Classical references to the conquered and/or rebellious Brigantes are: Tacitus, Agricola 17.1 and 31.4; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis 12; Juvenal, Sat. 14.196; and Pausanius, Description of Greece 8.43. The tribes’ capital was Isurium Brigantium (future Aldborough); they worshiped Brigit or Brigantia (“The High One”: Queen Cartimandua may have been the goddess’s human representation). A unique suggestion in Ptolemy also locates the Brigantes in southeastern Ireland (Geo. II, 1, maps, “…Hibernia,” 9), possibly indicating a strategic resettlement abroad, i.e., apart from the Roman occupation of Britain.More remotely, for the mythopoeia of the Mutabilitie Cantos (see end of its "canto vi" and opening of "canto vii"):We are told that the Celtic goddess Brigantia (in Northern Britain, at the beginning of the Roman era) “may not have received representational form, but her powers would be seen as reflecting themselves in the rushing rivers and thrusting hills of the north. That is not to say that the hills and rivers were worshipped as being divine in themselves, but merely that their force and power and remoteness would epitomize the divinity of the goddess. This conclusion does not spring from the realms of fancy, but from a close consideration of Irish mythology where a river, or a pair of hills, or a wave is especially associated with and named after a sacred being, whose cult legend it embodies.” Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain, p. 461. This is similar to the putative relation between Nature and Arlo Hill, or the Graces and Mt. Acidale (or Sabrina and the Severn in Milton’s Masque). It is also some such reasoning that makes for the longevity of Faunus... .[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg, Prof. Emeritus
Univ. of Virginia
Dept. of English / Bryan Hall 209
P.O. Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Herron, Thomas <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2018 12:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Faerie Queene and Race: Book 6[This post is corrected. Please disregard the last. --Tom]Hello,
Some more Spenserian primary and secondary sources here that inform the “kern vs churl” discussion:
Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1997): 29 and 40-41, which cites Roland Smith, “Spenser’s Scholarly Script…” (Studies in Honor of T.W. Baldwin… 1958) pp 102-103.
The implication of the meaning behind the two terms [kern vs churl] are important then and now, as they are wrongly conflated not only by E.K. in SC, but also (for example) by David Norbrook in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance(pp 128-9), where his use of the term “Churl” associates it with loose roaming thievish types like Spenser’s Brigants.
There is a close association of “Churl” with Irish farmers/workers as noted by Andrew and Kat. It is used this way to describe the Irish in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat(1561), which defines "churl" as what the Irish "call all farmers and husbandmen." [Baldwin, Beware the Cat. Ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988): 12.] Perhaps EK got his wrong definition of "kern" as "churl" from here. Smith, on the other hand, assumes that EK is Spenser, and therefore shakily argues (based on "kern" and other Irish word use in SC, incl “glen”; cf. “the widow of the glenne”) that Spenser must indeed have been in Ireland in 1577, i.e., pre-pub date of SC, which is suggested also by the eyewitness account by Irenius of O’Brien’s execution in the View (cf. also Maley on this score).
As Kat notes, a distinction seems to be mapped in Spenser along a “savage” vs “civilized” spectrum as well as “roaming” vs “settled” dynamic, which is central to romance more generally [is every wandering warrior a kernish post-adolescent chaotic-type until (s)he is better educated, matures and “settles” on a place+mate and fruitfully controls a few “churls” in his/her/their domestic economic sphere, etc?] But what of the salvage individual vs the salvage group? Groups of salvages are also redeemable, to judge by the “salvage nation” in Book I.vi (11.3) who peacefully if falsely worship Una. For Spenser, some isolated savage men are innately human, but others are not: I would argue Malengin is one of these, given his habit and cave-dwelling, although he’s not described as “salvage” and so therefore perhaps not salvageable [he is also a possible parody on Nicholas Sanders, the Jesuit priest of the Rebel earl of Desmond; Sanders snared many “fools” on land with his shepherd’s hook and doctrinal nets before being hunted down in the Munster wilderness; he must have hidden out in many an ersatz priest hole].
As with Malengin, who seems innately corrupt and jesuitical, the problem comes when the individual “salvage” kern shows no innate humanity in his/her post-adolescent stage, and so cannot be salvaged (by senate committee nor anything else). As Kat notes, a bigger problem occurs when this savagery becomes socialized, as when the kernish band together into a raiding force that attacks civilized homesteads full of more humane people, like Meliboe and Pastorella, and destroys their pastoral idyll, which was naive. For the best glaring example of this, see John Derricke’s Image of Irelande: with a Discovery of Woodkerne (1581), in praise of Sir Henry Sidney and dedicated to his son Philip against the kern of MacSweeney and Rory Og O'More [related to the "Mores of Malaber"?]
The merchants who come in from the sea-margins to profit from this spoil by buying the meat –living or dead—recovered from these raids and stored in caves that resemble Malengin's only feed the problems racking the land. Those who profit from this speculation-built-on-raiding-chaos, which can also be inland (such as that criticized by Sp in the View as running through Co. Tipperary along a Cork-to-Dublin route) are local sultanic, turpinic, souldanic, turbanic despots, the Souldans and Grantortos of the world (and neighborhood; for Barbary Pirate raids on Ireland specifically, cf. the Sack of Baltimore of 1631). (cf. Andrew Hadfield’s discussion in Spenser’s Irish Experience of the Irish basis of Malengin and the Brigants, and also my article in SpSt back in the day on the evidence for an archaeological souterrain in the episodes, which bolsters Hadfield’s argument).I would suggest that Spenser in the Brigants episode is subtly criticizing Ormond, whose territory extended across Tipperary and the entire area, SE Ireland, that Ptolemy identified as occupied by “Brigantes” [Brigants also occupied northern England]. Ormond’s family got their foothold in Ireland on the Wicklow coast, at Arklow (and kept the property and barony name in their title). With whom did the 10th earl trade?The tenth earl of Ormond is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: he had enough strength, connections and deep local roots to maintain his palatinate and castles while appearing enlightened and reformed, but he knew how to exploit the local economy of “coign and livery” and cattle-raiding. As the New English like Sp and Churchyard would argue, his court shone like rotten wood; his own family rebelled in the late 1560s, he was a dubious Protestant, and he hardly tamed the “salvage” land around him (cf. Sp’s dedicatory sonnet to Ormond; I would argue that Churchyard praised Ormond and criticized him as well).
What to do with a kernish lord who has successfully hidden his/her wolfish behavior and grown into a sheepish government officer upholding the very principles of the good state while bending the ear of the monarch? The solution is to expose the potentate as innately corrupt, even while defending his/her artistic tastes (no Medici was contented with a cuckoo-clock) and the rule of law. Build a new faction to rebuild a civilized state of virtuous fighting citizens that you approve of. Develop further a taken territory against the protests of the locals and their officials, while labeling them as innately despotic, backwards and in dire need of “salvaging”. --TomThomas Herron
Department of English
East Carolina University
(252) 328-6413
Writer/Director, Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle
http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Kat Addis <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2018 7:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Faerie Queene and Race: Book 6Thankyou so much for such illuminating quotes and comments Andrew!Your final comment in particular brings to mind another question I would love to get to grips with - in what way are these differentiations that Spenser and other English settlers and commentators made ('churl', 'kerne' and 'hind', New English, Old English, Irish) racial? How can we compare them with distinctions that were being or had been made in the context of Atlantic racial chattel slavery at the same moment? What is the relevance of situations of forced and unfree labour or service to these types of distinctions between people? Is the 'churl' also seen the source of neutral labour that can be purchased? (Grey to Elizabeth in the letter about Smerwick: "the same persons came now into mee, & submitted them selves, which I took imposing onely on them to putt me in sufficient pledges and to furni{sh} me for money with Beofes, and to gette mee an hundred Churles to labor {.}" (NA (PRO) SP 63/78/29, 12 November 1580). I read this as: to furnish me, in exchange for money I gave them, with cows and 100 "churles to labour". Where does the money go? Is more known about this?More generally, what do people think about the possible racial elements of the versions of economic and legal bondage that appear in book six? There are two moments in that stand out to me particularly - Pastorella and the brigants, and secondly Disdain, depicted as a muslim "like to the Mores of Malaber" whose aggression toward challengers (e.g. Timias) is not expressed in his trying to kill them but in trying to have them "bound, and thrald without delay" (6.8.11). Disdain has jurisdiction over Mirabella, who is bound by law to remain in his thrall until she has completed a set of (impossible to complete) tasks. Because of the legal nature of the contract, liberty cannot be procured except through Disdain, and thus Mirabella is forced to save her captor's life twice, and refuse Arthur's blithe offer of "liberty" that "if ye list have [...] ye may" (6.8.29). Is this indentureship?Pastorella and her fellow shepherds' enslavement by contrast is extra-legal, they are "the spoile of theeves". But it is nonetheless part of an established economic system (mercantile capitalism - whose relationship to the state + law was indeed always fluid). The brigants mean "For slaves to sell them, for no small reward, / To merchants, which kept them in bondage hard, / Or sold again." (6.x.43). Can these episodes be read as responses to real forms of enslavement that Spenser might have been aware of? Which forms? Pastorella's situation brings to mind aspects of the Iberian racial slave trade from Senegambia to Lisbon & Seville etc (trade which involved several important English merchants from early on). Merchants in Lisbon kept enslaved black Africans in the backroom prison of the 'Casa dos Escravos' from the 1480's on. The officials of the house had access to the shipyards etc "via several arches and gateways that cut the older city walls" (John L. Vogt, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117.1, 1973, p.4). In FQ the brigants taking their captives back to the cave-prison go unseen "for underneath the ground their way was made, / Through hollow caves, that no man mote discover" (6.x.42). However, it's the brigants not the shepherds who are associated with the irreducible otherness of the salvage nation, as they too are "a lawlesse people [...] fed on spoile and booty, which they made / Upon their neighbours" (6.10.39).And of course there are also Barbary pirates and enslaved christians to think about? And with all of these things, in order to know which historical resonances may be discussed, how does one negotiate the question of what Spenser would have or could have known?Kat
Hi Kat,
On the distinction between kern and churl:
1. Note that E. K.'s gloss on line 199 of 'Iulye' in The Shepheardes Calender uses one word to explain the other. 'What neede hem caren for their flocks? / theyr boyes can looke to those. / These wisards weltre in welths waves, / pampred in pleasures deepe, / They han fatte kernes, and leany knaves, / their fasting flockes to keepe.' (ll. 195-200) As E. K. writes, 'Kerne) a Churle or Farmer.'
2. By the time he wrote A view of the present state of Ireland, Spenser seems to have distinguished as you do between the kern as foot-soldier and the churl (the English, I guess Old English, term for a farm labourer):
'I would wishe a proclamation were made generally to Come to their knowledge, that what persons soeuer woulde within twentye dayes absolutely submitt them selues (exceptinge also the verie principall & Ringeleaders shoulde finde grace, I doubt not but vppon the settlinge of these Garrisons soche a terror & nere Conscideration of their perillus estate wilbe striken into most of them that they will covett to drawe awaye from their leaders; And againe I well knowe that these Rebellions them selues (as I sawe by proof in the Desmondes warres) will turne awaye all ther Castle people
whome they whome they thincke vnservicable as ould men weomen Children and hindes which they Call Churles which would onlye waste their victualls & yeild them noe aide but their Cattell they will surely kepe awaye, These therfor thoughe Pollicye would turne them backe againe, that they might be rather consume & afflict the other Rebells yet in pittifull Comiseration I would have them to be Receyved, the Rather for that these base sorte of people dothe not for the most parte Rebell of them selues havinge noe hart therunto but is of force drawen by the grande Rebells into the Accion & Carried awaie with the violence of the streame ells he shoulde be sure to Loose all that he hathe and perhaps his lief too the which nowe he Carrieth vnto them in hope to enioye them theare but he is theare by the stronge rebells them selues soune turned out of all soe that the Constraint hereof maye in him deserve pardon [.]'
(Spenser, A view, Gonville and Caius College MS 188/221, pp. 127-28; note that thought I have lightly standardised this transcription by omitting deletions, I have not checked the transcription as a whole, so it may contain errors).
The churl (English hind) was one of the 'castle people' Irenius thinks most likely to be sympathetic to New English colonial rule, and the peace and stability it (allegedly) offered. As you say, it was by this point New English colonial policy to try to separate the itinerant or nomadic kerns, tagged with language such as 'loose', 'wicked', 'rebellious', etc., from the settled and productive labourers who might be assumed, for the sake of their own social and economic interests, to prefer collaboration with the English. I would want to situate the distinction between kerns and churls next to Spenser's critical account of boolying, or transhumance, which he discusses earlier in the dialogue:
'[Iren:] I will then beginne to Count their Customes in the same ordre that I Counted there nations and Firste with the Scithians or scottishe manners Of the which theare is one vse amongest them to kepe there Cattell & to live them selues the moste parte of the yere in Bollies pasturinge vppon the mounteines and waste wilde places & removinge still to the freshe lande as they haue depastured the former the which appereth plaine to be the mannor of the Scythians as ye maie reade in Olaus magnus & Iohannes Boemus and yet is vsed amongest all the tartarians and thepeople about the Caspian sea which are naturallie Scythians to live in Herds as they call them beinge the verie same that the Irishe Bollyes are dryvinge there Cattell contynuelly with them & feedinge only on their milke & white meates
Eudox: what faulte can ye finde with this custome for thoughe it be an old Scythian vse, yet it is verye behooful in this Countrye of Ireland wheare theare are greate mounteynes and waste desartes full of grasse that the same shoulde be eaten downe and nourishe manie thowsandes of Cattell for the good of the whole realme which can not me thincke well be anie other waie then by kepeinge those Bollies as there ye haue shewed. /
Iren: But by this Custome of Bollyinge there growe in the meane tyme manie great enormityes vnto that Commen wealthe For firste if theare be anie owtlawes or loose people (as they are never withowt some) which live vppon stealthes and spoyles, they are evermore succoured and finde releif onlye in those Bollies beinge vppon those waste places wheras ells they should be driven shortlie to sterue or come downe to the townes to steale relief, where by one meanes or other they would soonne be Caught Besides soche stealthes of Cattell as they make they bringe continuallie to those Bollies where they are receyved readilie and the theif harboured from daunger of Lawe Or soche officers as mighte lighte vppon him Moreover the people that live thus in these Bolies growe therbie the more Barbarous and live more licentiouslye then they Coulde in townes usinge what meanes they liste and practisinge what mischeifes & villanies they will either againste the gouernment there generallie by their Combinations or againste privat men whome they maligne by steallinge there goodes or murderinge them selues, For theare they thincke them selues half exempted from Lawe and obedience, and havinge once tasted fredome doe leike a steare that hathe beinge longe out of his yoke grudge & repine ever after to come vnder Rule againe:
(Spenser, A view, Gonville and Caius College MS 188/221, pp. 61-62 -- same caveats as before)
Here Spenser makes it clearer than in the earlier passage that settledness is a moral, as well as a social and economic, status; that those who move around the landscape physically are also those who transgress legal and moral boundaries licentiously; one sort of movement leads to another. Spenser's approach across the dialogue to the threat posed by these figures is to reduce the waste places by tillage and plantation, then to control those that persist by the placing of garrisons and the securing of the (allegiance of the) churls. (On this latter point, have a look at Irenius' celebration of the way England was divided into shires and hundreds, lathes, and wapentakes, so that 'noe badd person could stirre but he was streight taken holde of by those of his owne tythinge & their Borsholder who beinge his neighboures or next kinsman were prevy to all his wayes & looked narrowlie into his lief'. (Spenser, A view, p. 171) None could 'stirre'; they were 'streight taken holde of' -- movement is bad, fixity is good. Every place divided and structured; every churl in his place.)
I haven't mentioned the etymologies of the words 'kern' and 'churl', but clearly the terminology reflects in some way the complex racial geography of the Irish landscape at this time; and Spenser's negotiation of the terms 'kern', 'churl', and 'hind' seems neatly to reflect the Irish, Old English, and New English strata of that geography, and perhaps their distinctive attitudes and customs.
Andrew
On 26/09/2018 12:16, Kat Addis wrote:Hello all,I am a new member to this list, (thankyou to Andrew Zurcher letting me join) and I have been following this discussion with great interest and excitement.I have a question which I hope is related in a way, Dennis, to your interesting prompt above about solutions. It's to do with the difference between the "salvage nation" that Serena encounters, who live "of stealth and spoile, and making nightly rode / Into their neighbours borders" etc. and the "salvage man" who has previously been her protector and of whom she has said "it is most strange and wonderful to fynd / So milde humanity, and perfect gentle mynd" (this reminds me of the text's earlier pronouncement on Briana and Crudor, that there is "no greater shame to man than inhumanitie" (6.1.26), which seems a bit on the nose following right on the heels of Book 5's escapades).There are of course many differences that Spenser is keen to point to between the "salvage nation" and the "salvage man", the principle being the presence of "humanity" in the latter figure, as well as his solitary nature as opposed to the communal/ritual activities of the former - indeed the links thus forged between solitary/humanity, and collective/cannibalism, seem highly charged if they refer to an indigenous population, whether Irish or American. What kind of "humanitie" peters out when it becomes collective? All kinds? Or just the specific and limited (silent) kind that is being afforded to the "salvage man" in the first place? i.e. does his "humanitie" come exactly at the price of collectivity?But one more question about the Irish context specifically. I have been reading the Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland [1509-1603]. In 1587 and thereabouts I find several documents that seem to indicate a plan or idea "To repress kerne and exalt the churl" (under heading: 'Considerations touching the state of Munster'). As far as I understand it, the "kerne" may refer to Irish foot-soldiers and the "churl" to Irish peasants or "villeins". If this is so (but is it?), is it possible to see an echo of a current colonial agenda in Spenser's effort to textually "exalt" one form of indigeneity ("churl"?) in so far as it may be co-opted to service the needs of the coloniser and then 'repress' another "kerne" who emphatically does not serve them?Thankyou all for such a fascinating discussion so far,Dear all,
Tom's comment provides a nice transition into Book 6 and provokes me to think about the relationship between degeneration (racial, bodily, moral, religious, social) in new ways. I am now convinced that Spenser is really interesting in the process and temporality of degeneration, maybe especially in Book 5.
In moving from the concerns of Book 5 to those of Book 6, might we say that courtesy (or romance) provides solutions to degeneration? Of course, the question is what does it mean to say that that might be so.
all best,
Dennis
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