In The Great Reclothing of Rural England, published in 1984, Margaret Spufford observed that ‘the social historian does not normally look at histories of costume with a serious analytical eye’ and that such studies of clothing as there were typically focused on the clothing of the elite. Spufford's analysis of the stock-in-trade of itinerant traders was, as she described, her initial attempt to explore the clothing of the non-gentle. As she acknowledged, the main difficulty with exploring non-elite clothing culture in the seventeenth century is the lack of coherent documentary evidence. Spufford subsequently identified what she described as a ‘new’ source (in the sense that it was a source that had been under-exploited) for this purpose, the probate account. Using evidence from some 800 accounts she published two articles about the cost of clothing in the seventeenth century.

Spufford was right to draw attention to the paucity of sources for the clothing of the non-elite, although coverage of non-elite groups is uneven. Below the elite those for whom the most coherent documentary sources survive are the poor, since parish overseers’ accounts frequently record the cost of clothing the parish poor. The poor were also typically the perpetrators and victims of clothing and textile theft, and a surprising amount of information about their clothing and its provenance can be found in Quarter Sessions records. Perhaps the most intractable in terms of documentary sources are the ‘middling sort’ – yeomen, more affluent husbandmen and trade and craftsmen. Probate inventories are informative about the domestic material culture of this group, but they generally record little or nothing about clothing; wills, as Spufford pointed out, are ‘slow to mine’ and provide no information about provenance. One source for this group, as Spufford identified, are probate accounts, but of course these only record the clothing of minor children and, like wills, they seldom supply information about clothing provenance. It is perhaps because of these evidential difficulties that the study of seventeenth-century non-elite clothing is still a relatively neglected area, in contrast to the eighteenth century, which is now reasonably well covered. At the present time the two most substantial monographs on seventeenth-century clothing remain Aileen Ribeiro's Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England and Susan Vincent's Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England, both of which deal exclusively with the elite.

THOMAS PERCY's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (first published 1765) can be justly regarded as the foundation document of the European ballad revival. It can also be taken as a prime embodiment of the sort of desire for continuity outlined in the context of the discussion of Cecil Sharp's theory of folk song in the previous chapter. Percy set out to present the ballads as the ancient indigenous poetry of the English language which had been transmitted from the Middle Ages down to the present, eighteenth-century, day. In doing so, he gave considerable impetus to the gothic strain in English literature. The irony is that, for all Percy has been reviled by later generations of ballad scholars, ‘consigned […] to the special hell reserved for bad editors’, as Albert Friedman memorably put it, his literary historical project was to all intents and purposes taken over by Francis James Child and subsequent generations of ballad scholars. The alternative would have been to say that the ballads mostly come from early modern broadsides, or that they were written in the eighteenth century, or that the majority of the songs collected in the first decades of the twentieth century go back not much further than the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Much better, then, that they should belong with ‘a body of materials that were old and widely distributed and perhaps came from the “general stock of mediæval fiction”’.

The ballad to 1600

For ballad studies, however, ‘medieval’ or the ‘Middle Ages’ is a tricky designation, compounded by a paucity of evidence and a range of assumptions, some of which are the subject of this chapter and some of which are not. The Middle Ages is usually taken as that long period of European history that extends from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, c.500 ce, to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492, or simply to the beginning of the Renaissance and the emergence of recognizably early modern societies by the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Historians justly question whether the period really does constitute a distinct middle, falling between two quite different ages, at all.

WHEN A SONG of Ice and Fire began to climb the bestseller charts and The Lord of the Rings film franchise was a box-office smash, Hollywood began looking for the next fantasy epic, and naturally lit on Martin's work. Having worked in Hollywood before returning to novel writing, Martin was understandably nervous about entrusting his series, which he claimed was written “with an eye toward unproduceability,” to Hollywood executives. “There's so many cases where they just keep the title and change everything,” he commented. Various studios wanted to adapt only part of the story – perhaps one character's storyline – or to commit to just a single film rather than a series. Martin was, fortunately, in a financial position that allowed him to turn down all of these suggestions. He was determined that only HBO, which had pioneered the trend of morally grey antiheroes on television with The Sopranos, could do his work justice.

In 2005, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, having read the books and loved them, met with Martin to pitch their idea for an HBO series. The lunch lasted hours and concluded with Martin asking Benioff and Weiss who Jon Snow's mother was as a litmus test for their interest in the story in the books. “Maybe if we had gotten it wrong, he would have let us do it anyway,” Weiss says. “It was still obvious that we love this, and that we wanted to do it more than anything in the world, and that we would respect it and honor it. I think getting (the answer) right probably helped.” Martin, in turn, thought that Benioff and Weiss were “mad”; “It's too big,” he recalls telling them, “It's too complicated. It's too expensive. HBO doesn't do fantasy.” But Benioff and Weiss’ enthusiasm convinced him. Benioff and Weiss took Martin's permission and their pitch to HBO, and in March of 2010, HBO announced that it had greenlit the series for production and a basic cast – Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Tamzin Merchant (who would later be replaced by Emilia Clarke). Over the next few months, Martin used his “Not a Blog” Livejournal to pass on casting and production news, turning casting into a game for his fans by giving them clues regarding the actors’ identities and letting them guess before officially announcing the casting.

IF PRESSED TO OFFER some sort of a conclusion after the foregoing chapters, it might be something along the following lines. The ballad is what Douglas Gray calls a ‘simple form’ (in musical as well as textual terms), and it is also a backward-looking form, resistant to literary modernity in terms of both style and substance. The ballad, so to speak, carries with it, right to the present day, its own generic past. Those same characteristics have imbued the genre with the flexibility to endure for a very long time and to bear the appearance of a substantially unchanging form. The fact that a few individual ballads actually were around at the end of the Middle Ages, and rather more looked as if they might possibly have been, enabled scholars like Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, Francis James Child, Cecil Sharp, and A. L. Lloyd, from their different perspectives, to identify and theorize continuity. But the same simple form was proving just as adaptable to the production of early modern political ballads and satirical libels, and then to ballads about things like shipwrecks and the opening of new railway lines, which proved mostly less enduring and which have to date attracted less scholarly attention. That is beginning to change now and researchers are starting to engage with ballads in the wider contexts of street literature and popular literary and musical culture.

There is no harm in scholars having singled out for study those ballads that can be linked in some way to the collectanea of the Romantic and the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Indeed, there is good reason for their having done so, frequently on aesthetic grounds, but also because they constitute a corpus of songs that held a value for working men and women, especially in the decades running up to the First World War, in the face of rapid social and cultural change. But there are two points to bear in mind here. (i) Those ballads that were actually current in earlier times did not necessarily carry the same cultural status then as they did at this later date, once they had come to be particularly valued for their perceived age. (ii) Both early and late, all of the ballads shared often exactly the same cultural marketplace with all sorts of other verses and songs.

ONE OF THE REASONS A Song of Ice and Fire gets so much attention, and draws so much criticism, is its portrayal of sex. Media critics have taken exception to the explicit and numerous descriptions of consensual and non-consensual sex, especially to how those descriptions frequently victimize women. Martin has responded to these critics by pointing out that, for the most part, the violence in the books receives much less comment: “I can describe in exquisite detail an axe entering a man's skull, and splattering blood and brains – not a peep. I describe a penis entering a vagina in equivalent detail – the world is ending.” What these critics may miss is that, while at times Martin's approach to sex and sexuality can be unsettling, ultimately the texts make a point about sexuality, gender roles, societal expectations, and his belief that the people of the Middle Ages were not significantly different from people today. A side effect of amplifying the toxic masculinity and oppression of women, as discussed in the last chapter, along with Martin's “Barbaric Age” view of the Middle Ages, as discussed in the introduction, is the prevalence of rape. At the same time, Martin steps slightly outside the usual view of the Middle Ages by including portrayals of homosexuality in A Song of Ice and Fire, though these portrayals are often problematic in their own right. While his approach to rape and sexual violence has an anchor in chivalric romance, as so much of A Song of Ice and Fire does, his depictions of queer sexualities are entirely modern. Sex is a major part of A Song of Ice and Fire, both in politics and interpersonal relationships, and deserves to be examined closely and thoroughly.

“I had her before, a hunnerd times”: Male Sexuality and Rape

In chivalric romance, male sexuality is generally portrayed as disruptive, if not explicitly violent. Several times, Martin has characters express sentiments that indicate a similar outlook: for example, Varys asks Tyrion whether a man has a choice between wit and a penis, and Cersei claims that Varys is dangerous because he is a eunuch and therefore does not have his thinking clouded by testosterone.

AS A GENRE, medievalist fantasy is often not taken seriously, at least in part because of its blend of medievalism and fantasy; neither has been particularly well regarded by the academy or those parts of the public that frown on “escapism” and genre literature. Medievalism itself suffers from its association both with the medieval – often used as shorthand for barbaric, backwards, stupid, and infantile – and with inaccuracies and bad history. Medievalism studies are frequently seen as the lesser cousin of medieval studies, the consolation prize for scholars in countries that do not have a medieval history as it is typically understood in Europe. Fantasy, likewise, has been derided as escapist, childish, even psychologically dangerous, and has its own connections to the medieval, particularly through romance, that further keep it from being treated seriously. Thus, it is no real surprise that Martin so vocally rejects the usual tropes of medievalist fantasy and strives for realism and a grounding in medieval history; historical precedent and a lack of traditional fantasy elements might lead to his work gaining more respect than that of other fantasy writers. That attempting to make medievalist fantasy more palatable to those who traditionally frown on such things requires a “grimdark” approach and insistence on the worst parts of the human condition – violence, rape, slavery – being foregrounded is unfortunate. While a medievalist and/or fantastic setting may allow readers and writers to examine modern issues at a comfortable remove, it can also reinforce the stereotypical understanding of the Middle Ages as the “Barbaric Age” – dirty, violent, brutal, patriarchal, sexually deviant – while allowing readers and writers to gloss over the fact that modern life has many of these same issues, to believe in the myth of progressive history and relegate inequality and savagery to the distant past.

The insistence on a realist medievalism also invites criticism on grounds of accuracy and authenticity, shifting the focus from traditional literary analysis to whether Martin got the Middle Ages “right.” While examinations of Martin's source materials can be valuable and interesting (see, for example, Carolyne Larrington's Winter is Coming [2016]), especially as a gateway to history for those interested in such things, it is important to keep in mind that A Song of Ice and Fire is, ultimately, high fantasy, not set in any approximation of the historical Middle Ages.