Sharon Bennett Connolly's 'Women of the Anarchy' 2024

Amberley Publishing first edition - 2024

I am afraid I have the same criticism as I had with Kathryn Warner's John of Gaunt, another Amberley production (see my Blog of 18 June 2022). Whilst there is certainly evidence of considerable 'secondary' research, there is also evidence of an inability to sort out the 'wheat from the chaff' - i.e to focus on the book's specific subject matter. All too often the narrative is drenched in yet another (often irrelevant) date or off piste account of who married who, who their ancestors were and, then, their offspring. A better title for the book, perhaps, would be The Anarchy: including a look at some of the Women involved. Perhaps I am being too critical, but there really wasn't enough information (or the author hasn't found/used it)) to sustain an account of nearly 250 pages. There is too much repetition (especially in the first, 'background' chapters); one gets the feeling that the author throughout forgets what she has written in previous chapters, as the same point or fact is regurgitated, often in almost the same words. It is entirely constructed from Secondary sources, or translations of Primary sources by other Historians. A clue lies in the Notes at the end, where the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, oxforddnb.com appears to be the most favoured source.

Perhaps the most useful chapter is the Epilogue, where Connolly compares and contrasts the two most important women - the Empress Matilda and Queen Matilda, King Stephen's wife.

The disparity in the statuses of these two women is evidenced throughout the Anarchy. The empress is judged for fighting for her own inheritance, whereas the queen is praised for fighting for the inheritance of her son...on closer inspection, however, the similarities between the two women are more noticeable than their differences. Both empress and queen demonstrated a level of piety which can only have come from their family connection, namely their mutual descent from Margate of Wessex, Queen of Scots and later saint. Each Matilda was willing to do whatever it took to protect the interests of her children.

Both empress and queen were adept at negotiating to achieve their aims, demonstrating impressive diplomatic skills in the most difficult of circumstances.

What really differentiated them was the way they went about achieving their aims. The queen's deferential attitude, acting on behalf of her husband rather than in her own right, was more acceptable to the people of the time than the empress's more direct assertion of her own claim.

There were, of course, other positives to be taken from the book. Connolly rightly puts forward, and explains, the importance of other women - such as Aleliza of Louvain, Henry I's second wife; and the feisty Gundreda de Warenne, Countess of Warwick, Ada de Warenne and Matilda of Gloucester. The appraisals of King Stephen, his brother Bishop  Henry of Winchester, Empress Matilda's second husband,  Geoffrey of Anjou, and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, are all standard fare. The de Beaumont and de Warenne families are flagged up, as are Brian FitzCount, Baldwin de Redvers and Miles of Gloucester. The [in]famous Geoffrey de Mandeville makes a fleeting appearance.

I learned material I hadn't known about. 

• The Queen's Ferry crossing on the Firth of Forth, for which Margaret of Wessex (later Saint Margaret) had persuaded her husband. King Malcolm III Canmore to remit the charges for genuine pilgrims going further north to St. Andrews, was named for the queen. 
• Queen Matilda (there are too many Matildas!), Henry I's wife, commissioned William of Malmesbury to write the Gesta Regum Anglorum.
• I hadn't previously twigged that Prince Henry of Scotland had married Ada de Warenne who, at one stage, was the first lady of the Scottish court. Two of their three sons became kings of the Scots: Malcolm IV and William I.

I finished the book admiring Queen Matilda of Boulogne, Stephen's wife, even more - particularly her steadfast and successful attempt to get Stephen released from captivity after the disastrous Battle of Lincoln; and retaining my liking for her husband, in spite of the serious errors he made. I further understood how important the Empress Matilda's brother, Earl Robert of Gloucester, was to her cause and how vital Bristol was as a base for her campaigns. Context, of course, is vital for the understanding of individual, whether past or present; but the 'context' here overwhelmed the more intimate account of the two Matildas and several other relevant women during what we refer to as the Anarchy. Perhaps their stories are best suited to the shorter accounts in the much-used Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Alberto Moravia's 'Roman Tales' 1954

 

Penguin Books first edition - 1959

It's been some time since I read an Alberto Moravia novel (in the English translation, of course). I see one of my first Blogs - on 4th March 2020 - was to praise his most famous work, The Woman of Rome. I bought this well-preserved Penguin on a day trip to the lovely Leicestershire town of Market Harborough (only my second visit ever and done due to my writing Blogs on 8th June earlier this year, on the excellent two-volume History of the town), where there are two good second-hand bookshops - I bought this in the Oxfam one.

Moravia's novels and short stories are, possibly, an acquired taste (like Camus or Gide). Usually devoid of any humour (even levity?), they deal with undoubtedly realistic, but often rather grim, daily lives and characters. Social alienation figures highly, as does (non romantic) sexuality. I read somewhere that his writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie. Spot on. It comes as no surprise that he was an atheist, with little time for any 'comforts' supposedly provided by religion. Moravia was, in fact, a pseudonym; his real surname being Pincherle. Born in November 1907, to a wealthy middle-class family, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone and had to spend five years more or less bed-ridden. He used the time to read voraciously - Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Gogol, Molière and Mallarmé... Totally out of sympathy with Mussolini's Fascist rule, some of his writings were banned and not until May 1944, after the liberation of Rome, did Moravia return to the city. The 1940s to the 1960s were the years of his greatest successes, with works such as The Woman of Rome (1947), The Conformist (1951), Two Women (1957), and The Empty Canvas (1960).  Between 1984 and 1988, Moravia served in the European Parliament as a member of the Italian Communist Party. In September 1990, he was found dead in the bathroom of his Roman apartment.

There are twenty-seven stories making up Roman Tales (I Racconti Romani in their Italian original), all based in or around Rome and dealing with the lower bourgeoisie - shopkeepers, washerwomen, spivs, thieves and prostitutes. Some I enjoyed more than others and, towards the end, I began to cry out for just one beautiful  woman and genuinely honest man! The first person narrative, employed in all the stories, certainly gave the sense of immediacy and, usually, authenticity that particularly fits the genre. Of the 27 tales, I picked out half a dozen that I elevated above the others. The Lorry-Driver does have a touch of wry - even bitter - humour to it. The narrator - I am lean and nervous, with thin arms and long legs, and my belly is so flat that my trousers keep slipping down: in  fact I am exactly the opposite of what is required to make a good lorry-driver - shares the long-distance driving with Palombi, a real lout...he had the good fortune to be stupid, so that he formed one single piece with his lorry. The two make regular trips from Rome to Naples and back. At Terracina, they are asked by Italia - a provoking girl [who] had a long neck, a small brown head and two large green eyes. In contrast to her very long body, her legs were short and rather crooked, so that she gave the impression of walking with her knees bent to give her a lift. From then on, regularly once or even twice a week, Italia gets the drivers to take her from Rome to Terracina and back. This goes on for over two months. The narrator thinks he is making headway with her, even writing in white letters on the windscreen: 'Viva l'Italia' - other lorry drivers ask why has he turned so patriotic! Unknown to the narrator, Palombi has also been flirting with the girl. Both are aghast and then bitter, when they see her in an Inn at Terracina, clearly working as a waitress and linked to the hunchback owner. They had been hoodwinked into giving her free lifts all that time!

The Baby relates the story of a couple with six children - they explain to the lady from the Infant Welfare Society that 'If we could afford it, we should go to the pictures in the evening...As it is, since we haven't got the money, we go to bed, and so the children get born'. They live in a room has nothing in it but a lot of mattresses spread on the floor, and, when it rains, the water pours down on us... So, on a seventh pregnancy, they decide to leave the new baby in a church.  Several churches later, having failed to deposit the infant in any of them,  they pop it in the back seat of a car and quickly depart. However, the wife has second thoughts - there is something missing here - and they return to recover the baby. Just then, a short middle-aged man, with a look of authority about him goes to his car. The wife grabs her baby, 'You and your wife couldn't ever have a child as fine as this one...' and struts off, leaving the man standing there red in the face and open-mouthed, almost having a fit. 

The Perfect Crime is attempted by a bartender against his colleague whom he has grown to dislike intensely -  I hated his sturdy, stupid face, with its low forehead, and small eyes, its big, hooked nose, its full lips and slight moustache. Why? because this Rigamonti always lured away any girl the narrator linked up with. He plans to shoot him by a railway, just as a train goes by, thus disguising  the shot. He says a pretty girl will be waiting for him there. Rigamonti, ever eager, goes to the spot. A black figure of a woman nears. ...she frightened me. She must have been at least sixty, and she had strange mad-looking eyes painted with great black circles, a heavily powdered face and a crimson mouth... The narrator had not known it was a place to pick up prostitutes! His perfect crime had evaporated.

I liked The Girl from Ciociaria because it dealt with a Professor, an old man, with a white pointed beard and moustaches who is desperate for a maid from the narrator's native village. The story is a satisfying  one, but I was particularly drawn to the description of the Professor's home where books were piled up as in a bookshop: they began at the front door, where there were quantities of them hidden behind some green curtains, and went right through the house, in every passage and room and recess: they were everywhere except in the bathroom and the kitchen. His books were as precious to him as the smell of a rose, and woe betide anyone who touched them; and there were so many of them that it seemed impossible he could have read them all. Elysium! I am reading of a doppelgänger!

Silly Old Fool appealed to me because of its first paragraph. If you are in the habit of flirting with women, it is difficult to realize when the time for that is past and women begin to look upon you as a father or - even worse - a grandfather. It is especially difficult because every middle-aged man has, inside his head, another head: his outer head has wrinkles, grey hair, decayed teeth, lustreless eyes; his inner head, on the other hand, has remained just the same as when he was young, with thick black hair, a smooth face, white teeth, and bright eyes. It is the inner head that looks longingly at women, imagining itself to be visible to them. But of course women see the outer head, and say: 'What does he want, the old scarecrow? Can't he see he's old enough to be my grandfather?'  Mmm. Ouch! I have great empathy with the narrator, a barber of some thirty years' standing.

The final story, The Nose, has a wonderful description of the narrator's friend, Silvano, one of the most luckless creatures I knew. Adversity was written on his brow...by his nose, especially, you could see that he was doomed to bad luck - a nose like the clapper of a bell, crooked, livid, with a lump at the end surmounted by an ugly brown mole. It was a nose that made you feel depressed, even to look at it; imagine what it must have been like to wear it! And, sure enough, when the two enter a house and attempt to steal a ring off a dead man's finger, they are caught by the police. At the moment all I did was to look at Silvano and shake my head in concentrated rage. With a nose like his there was nothing to be done; the fault was entirely on my side, for not having realised that before.                                     

G.P.R. James' 'Margaret Graham. A Tale Founded on Facts' 1848

Parry and Co. first edition - 1848

This is quite an unusual novel for James. Firstly, he has eschewed his usual, expansive three-decker approach for a much shorter and tighter two volumes. Secondly, it comes across as one of his most deeply felt stories, 'modern' and quite political. In his Advertisement (or Preface/Introduction), he writes that the short tale's general construction and the details are exceedingly simple. Moreover, it can hardly be called a fiction; for though two histories have been blended into one, each is more than founded upon fact (as his sub title proclaims). The author also informs the reader that both the gentleman, Captain F, who related to me the story of my hero, and Mrs. S, to whom I am indebted for that of my heroine, are persons of undoubted veracity, and vouched for the truth of the narrative. The tale initially appeared serially in The New Monthly Magazine during 1847, and was published in book form the following year.  

After the usual authorial paeon to the splendours of nature, James finally tells the reader that the story is set in Cumberland, in a small town which I shall call Brownswick, and in a neighbouring village. The time can be pinpointed to the early 1830s, although a date is never mentioned. The whole of Volume I  is more showers than sunshine and depicts a rural society with deep divisions between the poor and the affluent (wasn't it ever thus?). James divides his account into two Parts: The Days of Prosperity and The Days of Adversity and if I had stopped reading at the end of this Volume, it would have been a very gloomy tale indeed. It is the [usual] James story of love winning out, but this time through several vicissitudes, with, additionally, a background of severe hardships for the rural labourers who form an important part of the plot.

I have looked up again my copy of Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawn and George Rudé (1969), where they say they have tried to describe and analyse the most impressive episode in the English farm-labourer's long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation...he became not merely a full proletarian, but an underemployed, pauperised one. His situation was such as to make some sort of rebellion inevitable. The object was not revolutionary but a desire for a return to a stable social order and improved economic means. The most incendiary (although marginal) aspect was the burning of ricks and destruction of farm machinery. This occurred all over the East and South of England in 1830 and again in 1834-5 and 1843-4. 'Captain Swing' was the fictitious name used to sign threatening letters during the riots in 1830. The New Poor Law of 1834 knocked the last nails into the coffin of the ancient belief that social inequality could be combined with a recognition of human rights. For the next two decades the farm labourer waged a silent, embittered, vengeful campaign of poaching, burning and rural terror...which erupted into epidemics of incendiarism and cattle-maiming at moments of acute distress, notably in 1843-4. Such behaviour spread north - to Cumberland, the county in which James' novel is placed.

From the outset, it is clear that the author admires the agricultural labourer. In point of plain common sense, and natural strength of intellect, they are generally very far superior to parallel classes in the manufacturing districts...their notions are sounder, firmer, more precise, as their bodies are more vigorous, healthy, and enduring. Two such stout middle-aged fellows, cousins Ben and Jacob Halliday, are homeward bound, in deep discussion about the iniquities of the New Poor Law. The gentlemen pretended, when they got up this new law, that the poor's-rates were eating up all the property of the country. That was a lie, Ben, in the first place; but even if it were true, I wonder whose fault that was if not the magistrates who suffered it? Moreover, the two complain about the cost of building new Workhouses (all the contracts went amongst themselves), while I tell you what, Ben, I have often thought that the old poor-law was a very safe thing in times of famine or want of work...now if one can get only five shillings a week...he must give up his cottage, sell his goods, put himself out of the way of all work, and go a pauper to the Union, where he is separated from his wife and children, and few and treated worse than one of the prisoners in the gaol. This goes on for several more pages - it is more of a tract than a novel at this stage. No wonder the story includes poaching and one instance of rick burning.

 Although still on the Moor, the scene shifts to two more characters - one the village idiot, an increasingly unpleasant and dangerous Tommy Hicks; the other, the book's young hero, Allan Fairfax. Both are to play major parts in the tale. The rascal misdirects the traveller into a miry part of the moor and gets whacked for his pains; then Fairfax finds shelter with Ben Halliday and soon makes friends with the labourer's little family. Fairfax is actually making his way to the local 'big house', having been invited there by its owner Mr. Graham, a wealthy man who ran the only Bank in Brownswick. Graham loved to do good to all around him, to see happy faces, and to know there were happy hearts...his principal object was to give employment to the peasantry of the district, which he does. He spends his money on building a fine house, improving the land around it and entertaining his friends. It is at one such party that Allan Fairfax now finds himself part of. And it is here that he meets Margaret Graham, the banker's daughter. He was remarkably handsome - that was the first thing apparent; he was remarkably well-dressed (he had changed!); he had all the ease, grace and self- possession, of a man of high station; she had her mother's beauty and many of the finer qualities of her father. True to form (at least, James'), they go wandering together and they fall in love. All appears bright and fair: a successful banker, a beautiful house and daughter, happy, well-paid and fed peasants and a very handsome stranger. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything. No wonder Part the Second is labelled The Days of Adversity. Both Halliday families have suffered greatly from a downturn in their fortunes. Their homes are lacking in the basic amenities, their food minimal, their children emaciated. Why? Instead of the kind Mr. Graham they now have over them Farmer Stamps, a believer in the New Poor Law, denying Ben a penny of outdoor relief; as cousin Jacob says: they've given the sheep to be taken care of by the wolf... Adversity struck at the same time apoplexy struck Mr. Graham. The latter had lent a great merchant in Liverpool money for an extensive speculation, not knowing the merchant had actually been insolvent at the time. He lost £50,000 and, struck down by his stroke, he never recovered health nor wealth. Bankruptcy occurred; he lost his property and moved to a small house in Brunswick. Further misfortune followed. His dearest contemporary and friend, Doctor Kenmore, who had already loaned Graham a cottage and furniture, now suggests he marries Margaret so that her father won't feel beholden! Unlikely? Yes, but she agrees and they marry. To cap it, Fairfax returns from India, travels to Cumberland, learns of the marriage and despairs. 

The first volume ends on an even lower note. Doctor Kenmore is struck down whilst returning from a call out and is found dead on the moor. Her father, having never really recovered, also dies. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or does he? Fairfax re-establishes contact; widowed Margaret agrees to marry him and a brighter future appears possible. However, on going through his desk for some papers he had requested, she finds the very old-fashioned silver shoe-buckles Doctor Kenmore was wearing when he was killed. Had Fairfax murdered her husband to claim her? I must not give any more of the story away, safe to say the truth eventually comes out. The real murderer is caught and Fairfax purchases the old home of Margaret's father - Allerdale House. The estate is put in good order and the Hallidays' fortunes are also revived.

It is a rather unlikely tale, but it is really a vehicle for an attack on the plight of rural labourers in the first half of the 19th century and, in particular, the venom all the working class (and, it seems, James) felt for the provisions of the New Poor Law and its Workhouses. Farmer Stamps and others represent this cold new approach; Graham, Kenmore and Fairfax, the kinder, older way of treating their social and economic inferiors. Thanks to Fairfax, Ben Halliday thrives and prospers, as does his family. Jacob, of a more unsettled disposition, betook himself to the Land of Liberty and Repudiation, where he is now a wealthy and prosperous man. 

A moving story, all the better for being tautly written and much shorter than a typical James novel.