Conclusion

Summary

‘The story of the Black Prince is the story of a noble life. It is the story of a valiant soldier with all the grand associations that cling around a lofty character. It is the story of a man that placed duty before him as his guiding star. It is the story of a man who was ready to sacrifice his life at any moment, if by doing so he could promote the honour and glory of the country, or the welfare of the people whom he loved so well, and whose … darling he was.’

It is only fitting to return now to the unveiling of the Black Prince statue in Leeds City Square in 1903, and to the questions that it provoked about Edward's image. The inscription on the statue's pedestal praised the Black Prince's heroism at Crécy and Poitiers, his links to chivalry and his triumph at the Good Parliament of 1376. Newspaper articles, letters to the editor, poems, postcards and even a sermon circulating at this time added new and different layers to the story. But, by the early Edwardian period, the statue's celebratory vision of the Black Prince was coming increasingly under attack both in historical writing and in popular culture. While the statue offers a window into the different aspects of Edward's character that were so integral to his popularity as a hero, it represents only one dimension of the Black Prince's story.

This book has used the multiple reinventions of Edward between 1750 and 1914 to offer insight into debates about the uses of the medieval past and specifically the late Middle Ages. It makes the special claim that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a vibrant royal and popular investment in the images of the Black Prince and in other late medieval figures such as Edward III which was distinct from later Victorian uses of the medieval past. At the root of Georgian fascination with the late Middle Ages was a new focus on the language of chivalry and chivalric character and a developing narrative of the British as a martial people. Piecing together the different strands of Georgian medievalism has revealed the interplay between royal and popular uses of the fourteenth-century past. This book makes a strong case for royal influence in shaping the late medieval revival.