FANTASY LITERATURE IS in some ways a direct descendent of medieval romance, though it picked up influences from various genres and ideologies on its way to the late twentieth century, when George R.R. Martin began writing A Song of Ice and Fire. Authors such as William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison purposefully reached back for romance influences, especially “saga literature, Arthurian legend, Old French romances, Anglo-Saxon philology, utopian visions, and vigorous medieval and gothic scholarship.” These influences help to explain why fantasy is so often set in a medievalist or neomedieval world. Also, as Kim Selling points out, the Middle Ages are “comfortable” for readers; myth and fairy tale have had a profound enough influence on Western culture that the neomedieval vision of the Middle Ages is familiar, yet different enough and far enough away for readers to believe that fantastic things could happen there and then. In Raymond Thompson's comparative study of medieval romance and fantasy literature, he points out several clear parallels between the genres: both highlight the chivalric virtues of the heroes; both have adventures meant to encourage the hero to discover his own inner strength; both require the hero's virtues – “prowess, courage, loyalty, courtesy, and wisdom” – to be proven; and both set their stories in the past or a secondary world that is “representative rather than realistic.” Perhaps it is because of this link between fantasy and romance that some today think of medieval romance as shallow and escapist, full of knights in shining armor who always live up to the greatest ideals of chivalry and protect women, children, and the innocent. This viewpoint is not limited to non-academic readers, either; W.R.J. Barron claims that romance is idealistic, portraying the world as it could be if people would strive to their highest potential. He also points out the link between fantasy and romance, especially in plot structure and motif; fantasy, he argues, contains such romance motifs as:

MEDIEVALIST FANTASY is a blend of the modern and the medieval, containing many colonial and postcolonial issues to be parsed. Despite the possibilities offered by the fantastic to explore unfamiliar realms inhabited by creatures that do not exist and humans with magical abilities, writers are still restricted by their own experiences as well as the necessity of communicating their ideas to an audience. Thus, ideas and cultures from the familiar world will still creep in, and for Western writers, this can include an almost subliminal imperialism. Nancy Batty and Robert Markley argue that science fiction is frequently imperialist in its assumption of the “manifest destiny” of human exploration and colonization of space. Fantasy, as Myles Balfe argues, tends to be set in a “moralized neo-medieval Europe,” and the plot is often concerned with “the efforts of various (male) heroes to defend ‘their’ (Good/familiar/ known) landscapes from attacks by ‘Others’, or with the inability of the heroes’ emasculated Eastern counterparts to do the same.” The people of the “Eastern” lands in these tales, Balfe claims, are in some way evil or corrupt and need the efforts of the Western heroes to save them, as they “cannot redeem their cultures, their selves, let alone […] protect their landscapes from outside invaders. Indeed, ‘their barbarous nature’ arguably serves to continually threaten the land- scapes and homelands in which they live.” Helen Young discusses at length how issues of race, Orientalism, and distrust of the Other are hard-wired into fantasy through Tolkien and Robert Howard, and how these issues have been perpetuated throughout the genre. While Martin does not set up obvious dichotomies between good and evil, black and white, Us and Other, his various peoples experience differing levels of invasion, occupation, colonialism, and postcolonialism, creating a dense tapestry of interaction between the cultures.

Examining a medieval, medievalist, or neomedieval text through a postcolonial lens can be tricky, as postcolonial critics, especially foundational ones such as Edward Said, tend to believe that imperialism is a post-medieval construct and thus no pre-modern history or text can be colonial or postcolonial. However, medieval scholars have argued, at length, that imperialism and colonialism are not restricted to the modern era just because the concept was not defined and explored until the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER 1 IDENTIFIED SOME of the problems with William St Clair's thesis that there was a ‘mass extinction of old ballads’ in the Romantic period. Crudely, there wasn't, but there was a shift in the style and subject matter of some of the ballads coming on to the market between, say, 1774 and the 1820s. More fundamental, though, is St Clair's casting of the matter in terms of a history of mentalities. On the one hand, the perpetuation of the old canon, for commercial reasons, is said to have kept the populace in ‘ancient ignorance’. On the other, the moment the 1774 watershed was reached and new publications entered the cheap end of the market, that same populace is depicted as having been only too ready to cast off the ‘old canon’. This is somewhat confusing, for it is not clear when, how, or why the posited shift in mentality took place: was it a consequence of the demise of the old canon, or was it already in place and waiting to bring about that demise the moment commercial conditions became favourable? Really, the conundrum illustrates the intrinsic difficulty of reading mentalities from imaginative literature.

Nevertheless, the charge of ‘ancient ignorance’ does have at least a superficial resonance with the idea of a resistance to modernity in ballads. The sub-genre of murder ballads is one that links early modern right through to Victorian balladry, even if such things as the format of the printed ballad did undergo a change during that period. Early modern murder ballads and related literature have been fruitfully used by historians in helping to chart a particular aspect of early modern mentality – that is, the reliance on, and the gradual decline in the reliance on, providence as a mechanism in the detection and punishment of crime, especially murder, in the absence of a functioning investigative police force and modern forensic techniques. The work of Alexandra Walsham and Malcolm Gaskill has explored in depth the mentalities of people who, it is pretty safe to assume, did not think quite like ourselves. So, it is worth investigating the persistence of some of those ways of thinking throughout the history of the ballads, even though, in line with the reservations already expressed, it is not going to be safe to read broader conclusions about mentalities directly from the ballad literature.

IF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN the so-called traditional ballad and the more literary ballad, which (perish the thought) might even have an identifiable author, was already blurred, then the appearance of the full-blown ‘literary ballad’ at the end of the eighteenth century appears as less of a special moment in literary history. There is no need to claim that ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ or ‘The Eve of St John’ or ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’ are the same thing even as ‘William and Margaret’, but if ballads were coming into print and entering the repertoire throughout the century, then the idea of ‘imitations of old ballads’, characterized by the presence of a selfconscious author, loses some of its force. The idea of literary influence, and its accompanying anxieties, is pretty firmly established by now – though it does, of course, clash with the fundamental idea of the author as individual genius, which was emerging at the period in question and which the Plain Dealer had already identified with the author of ‘William and Margaret’ many years before. David Mallet made more of a splash than did Michael Bruce, ‘the Gentle Poet of Lochleven’ (1746–67), who wrote one of the Scottish ballads of ‘Sir James the Rose’, but even so, the mere fact of Bruce's authorship misled Child into an aesthetic judgement that, with the benefit of hindsight, turns out to have quite misrepresented the cultural traction of ‘Sir James the Rose’.

‘Sir James the Rose’, popular print, and ballad medievalism

In the posthumously published autobiography of the shoemaker and writer John Younger (1785–1860), of St Boswells in the Scottish Borders, there are a couple of passages that testify to the importance for working-class culture of the chapbook literature around the end of the eighteenth century, both prose tales and verse ballads.

Finding those who, in these words of Margaret Spufford, might slip ‘between the meshes of the net’ is a task well suited to a micro-study where hearth tax listings of householders, supported by a fortuitous survival of good local records relating to the administration of poor relief and parish rates, permit glimpses of otherwise elusive individuals. By tracing these individuals we can reach a better understanding of the administration and implementation of both hearth tax and poor law. However, Spufford was writing about more than this. Throughout her working life she sought to understand better the human condition, to know how individuals, their families and communities lived, harvested, traded, prayed, celebrated and suffered. For most of the people of Woking, like the majority of their countrymen of that time, the parish was the stage upon which they acted out their lives against the backdrop of the political, social, economic and religious issues of the day, and it is primarily through the medium of the parish documents that we can see traces of that ‘real situation’ which Spufford strived to find and describe in her own work.

Woking parish documents coinciding with the hearth tax period 1662–89 include lists of those paying rates to repair the church and relieve the poor, and also those who received relief, either regular pensioners or those given intermittent payments. They not only reveal a sophisticated operation of poor relief management, but cast light on the vexed question of what proportion of householders the hearth tax might have included, or omitted, from its Woking lists. This carries significance for local and wider demographic studies. Historians estimating the size of adult population in the later seventeenth century often use a set multiplier of the hearth tax to assist them.

When I first met Margaret in August 1959, she was working on three different things. When she stopped being able to work any more in the autumn of 2012, she was working on three different things. What I should like to do is to say how she got from one to the other.

In the beginning she was working on Cambridgeshire house types, on the size of selions in open fields and on a village history, of Longstanton in Cambridgeshire. When she had to give up, she was working on the hearth tax of the whole of England, on the clothing of the ‘common sort’ in seventeenth- century England, and on a village history of Kami Shiojiri in Nagano Province of Japan.

Her work on house types turned into a lecture for the then young Vernacular Architecture Group, but it was never published, because Peter Eden, with much more technical expertise, published on the subject instead, although without figures in the houses, which were Margaret's forte.

She very soon got me involved in her work on selions in the open fields and had me going out with a surveyor's chain to hold the other end for her. This work turned into the only publication under her maiden name, Margaret Clark. Soon after we were married in 1962, a kind friend wrote to say how very sad it was that Margaret would never be able to publish on the subject, because somebody called ‘Clark’ had done so!

Her work on Longstanton, which she put in for the national prize for local history, the John Nicholls Prize, came second to a book on the lost rivers of London. It did, however, change her life. The chairman of the judges, Professor Herbert Finberg, asked her to call on him. He was much taken by her quality and proposed her for a postgraduate studentship in his Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester. So she went to Leicester and was interviewed by a committee chaired by the Vice-Chancellor, who also thoroughly approved of her, until they realised that she had no first degree.

MOVING FROM THE PAST of the ballad to the past depicted in the ballad, the previous chapter touched on the idea of the ballad past as constructed memory. Although Michael Bruce thought of the ballad as being ‘founded on some passage of history’, this was clearly not the case in any real sense. Even ballads like Fair Rosamond, The Lamentable Fall of Queen Eleanor, or Jane Shore (ostensibly medieval, but actually early modern), though founded on passages of history, are really indistinguishable from other pieces like Patient Grissel or The Wanton Wife of Bath, or the ‘disguised king’ ballads. ‘The Battle of Otterburn’, ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’, and the endlessly reprinted broadside Chevy-Chase, versions of the ballad that so moved Sir Philip Sidney, rework a battle that was ‘of virtually no strategic or historical importance’. Rather, Andrew Taylor infers, ‘The emotional power of the old Border ballad of Percy and Douglas lay in part in its invitation to emulate the old knights, as Sidney did throughout his life and in the last rash cavalry charge in which he died, and in the implicit promise that the knight who did so would not fully die but would have his own deeds remembered.’ So here is another glimpse of ballad medievalism and the ballad past as constructed memory coming together, at a strikingly early date.

Matthew Hodgart generalizes: ‘No ballad can be called truly historical, for none is reliable on matters of fact. There is rarely any proof that such ballads have been written within living memory of the events they describe.’ That is probably not entirely true if one considers, say, historical and frequently overtly political, but also frequently ephemeral, ballads on things such as the Anglo-Dutch Wars or Monmouth's rebellion. The corpus of murder and execution ballads, ‘last dying speeches’, too, were very much written for the occasion, although their representation of ‘matters of fact’ is quite likely to be highly partisan and governed as much by convention as by the actual events. But Hodgart is entirely correct in the sense that ballads – printed ballads as well as ballads from the folk song collections – do not relate episodes from the past for the sake of the historical record.

When Margaret Spufford published Contrasting Communities in 1974, it appeared to be another example of the ‘anthropological turn’ in history, the attempt to recover lost cultures and belief systems that had inspired E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Yet while the sheer ambition of Thompson's and Thomas's monumental achievements partly explains why they founded no methodological ‘school’, Spufford's ostensibly more focused attempt at recovering the religious beliefs of Cambridgeshire villagers has inspired two generations of historians, many of them her own graduate students, to develop her mixture of economic and social methods with the political and ecclesiastical in increasingly fruitful ways. This impressive legacy is demonstrated by the essays in this volume, which span social, economic, religious and cultural history. The product of Spufford's former students, academic collaborators and peers, they offer powerful testimony of her ongoing contribution to the study of early modern history. In this volume, we have organised these contributions around three themes that we see as critical to Margaret Spufford's work: faith, place and people.

Faith

The three distinguished historians who have contributed to this part share Spufford's attention to the significant details of local records, as well as noticing their significant silences, and her alertness to the lived religious experience at the parochial level, which so often forces us to revise our assumptions about national religious culture. Much previous historiography on the English Reformation had analysed clerical debates and elite expressions of religious opinion, or made broad statements about an implicit conflict between the prosperous ‘godly’ and the ignorant, easy-going religious beliefs of the poorest. However, Contrasting Communities sought to recover the thoughts and feelings of villagers as sentient individual humans. Since the ecclesiastical courts concerned themselves with the behaviour of the laity, not their opinions, Spufford's search for individuals dissenting against moral and doctrinal pressures had to use inventive methods to overcome the inherent limitations of official sources. Thus she was an early pioneer of ‘reading against the grain’, drawing attention to the silences in the documents, as Steve Hindle does in his chapter in this part.

THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BALLAD, the object of dedicated study from the time of Francis James Child – if not a good deal earlier (John Selden and Samuel Pepys, Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, William Motherwell) – is inherently backward-looking. That is to say, on the one hand, the ballad looks indefinitely to its own past, the history of the genre, in consequence of its multiplicity and the absence of a single authoritative text. On the other, the ballad is in many instances engaged with a historical past, which may be more or less specific and more or less real or imagined. Yet this very observation that the ballad is backward-looking is also a problematic one because it encourages the thought that there is an inherent continuity to the genre, which continuity in turn equates to ‘tradition’, which is also frequently taken to be the defining characteristic of ‘folk song’. The argument is in a real sense circular, because tradition itself carries the implication that something is ‘age-old’. For Cecil Sharp, folk songs and folk singing formed ‘part and parcel of a great tradition that stretches back into the mists of the past in one long, unbroken chain, of which the last link is now, alas, being forged’. And it is not just an outmoded, romantic view from a previous century. Here is the folk song scholar C. J. Bearman, usually a stickler for precision, prefacing a list of the songs Sharp collected most frequently in Somerset: ‘Most of these were in print and available as broadsides, but that is not the point here: they were “traditional” in the sense of having been in circulation time out of mind, and had not been made up by ballad-mongers between 1800 and 1850.’

The purpose of this chapter is to sketch in just why anyone should want to impose that sort of assumption of continuity on to a genre that actually manifests a great deal of observable discontinuity, and then to develop a theoretical position that is capable of reconciling the fact of discontinuity with the backward-looking nature of the genre. This is not a book about tradition per se, but fundamental to it is the recognition that tradition is something that does not have an autonomous existence, but that is rather an idea about the past that is enacted in the present, identified with particular cultural artefacts and activities.

GEORGE RAYMOND RICHARD MARTIN is well known among fantasy fans and in the greater pop-culture zeitgeist, primarily for his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–), which has been adapted as Game of Thrones (2011–), a TV series on HBO. However, A Song of Ice and Fire is hardly his only fiction, and Game of Thrones hardly his only foray into television writing and production. Martin began writing fiction at a young age, using his collection of Miller Aliens toys and pet turtles as inspiration for science-fiction stories. When one of his college professors allowed him to write a historical-fiction story rather than a term paper, then submitted it to a magazine on Martin's behalf, Martin discovered that submitting and being rejected was not as bad as he had feared and began pursuing publication on his own. His first professional publication was a science-fiction story in Galaxy magazine in 1971; since then he has published science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In 1983, he released Armageddon Rag, a novel about a rock band that was equal parts love letter to and chiding of the Baby Boomer generation. Unexpectedly, it failed on the market and, in his words, “essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time.” However, this failure led to opportunities in Hollywood; the screenwriter who attempted to turn Armageddon Rag into a movie hired Martin as a writer for The Twilight Zone (1985–9), and thereafter, he worked on other TV shows such as Beauty and the Beast (1987–90) and The Outer Limits (1995–2002). He has won four Hugo and two Locus awards for his short fiction, two Hugos for screenwriting for Game of Thrones, and an Emmy for Game of Thrones.

Martin has expressed frustration with working in television, claiming that it was not as rewarding as writing prose fiction. He was frequently asked to reduce the size of his cast, down-scale the effects, or cut back other aspects of his scripts that would render them too expensive to shoot. He also struggled with attempts to write and produce new shows that were not picked up by studios, saying that undertaking all that work without a reader or a viewer was “ultimately unsatisfying.”