Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

an image Scott was surely thinking of his own antiquarian souvenir hunting on the field of
Waterloo.
As the Epistle continues it develops a justification in the face of Dryasdust’s imagined
objections for ‘intermingling fiction with truth’, the literary equivalent of the witch’s
supernatural resuscitation. The reasoning here is pragmatic. While Templeton will use the work
of antiquaries, Joseph Strutt (1749-1802), whom he names, and Joseph Ritson, whom he omits,
but who was Scott’s principal source for the Robin Hood legends, he will also take those liberties
with the material requisite to make it readable, for the same reasons that he will not write in
Norman French or have the text printed in black letter. ‘It is necessary, for exciting interest of
any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners as well as
the language of the age we live in.’ 116 Manners and customs, like Gothic architecture in the
1820s, were still to be adapted to Georgian taste, the sense of anachronism needs to be modified
by art. And so the narrative will use the same licence as the landscape painter. The principal
features and the ‘general colouring’ will be taken from reality, the rest will be at ‘the artist’s
disposal’. 117 Yet this apparently plain statement of method and intent was, of course, placed in
the mouth of one fictional character addressing another. Narrative is already welling up around
the argument, ready to float it off the rocky ground of historical fact into romance.
At the end the Epistle retreats once more into multiple narrative layers. The main source
for what follows is, Templeton explains, not Strutt but the ‘Wardour Manuscript’, another
fictional artefact borrowed from The Antiquary. This ‘singular Anglo-Norman MS., which Sir
Arthur Wardour preserves with such jealous care in the third drawer of his oaken cabinet’
Templeton has persuaded Sir Arthur to let him read. 118 It is cited from time to time in special
Gothic lettering, at Sir Arthur’s request, throughout the text. The device of the manuscript known
only to the author had a long and suitably ambiguous history. From Geoffrey of Monmouth, who
cited a book belonging to his friend Walter the Archdeacon as the source of some of the more
unlikely information in his Historia Regum Brittaniae (c1136) to Macpherson’s claims to own
the originals of the Ossian poems, it signalled, like the reference to Ossian in The Antiquary, to
116 Scott, Ivanhoe, p.9.
117 Scott, Ivanhoe, p.11.
118 Scott, Ivanhoe, p.12.
136