Throughout the complex weave of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scots court poetry, beneath its cloudy figures and sometimes dazzling aureate surfaces, are common questions about auctoritas – where it resides, or with whom, and whether it can be attached to new writing – differently conceived and often only obliquely answered, but which afford a focus for this difficult to conceptualise literary period. The careers of its foremost poets are, I think, better described in terms of their heterogeneity and individual temperament, rather than as the products of a ‘literary system’ premised on Chaucerian reception or the ‘institutional simplifications and centralisations’ of Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution (see Chapter 1). Skelton, Dunbar, Hawes, and Douglas evidence a spectrum of ideas of authorship – not stages in a transition from a ‘medieval’ to a ‘modern’ paradigm, but rather four distinct engagements with tradition and opportunity, united by their utilisation of a particular form. Their similarities and differences transcend national and period divisions. Dunbar and Hawes seem relatively cautious, or perhaps simply pragmatic, in their strategies for authorial self-promotion: Dunbar's poetry works to evoke a lively, literary court culture in which makaris can flourish and flyt; Hawes, meanwhile, assures the approbation of his writings by interweaving his poetic fictions with the texts and iconography of the image-conscious early Tudor court. That neither poet supplies biographical details beyond vague allusions to their royal service speaks of an imaginative and material dependence on the court and its systems of patronage; yet it is Dunbar and Hawes whose names appeared in print alongside Chaucer and Lydgate during the first decades of the sixteenth century (even if authorial self-promotion and commercial opportunism are difficult to disentangle in the early years of printing). Skelton and Douglas make more obviously author-centred claims for the authority of their writings: Skelton, by affiliating his poetic labours to those of the idealised Skelton Poeta; Douglas, by associating his name with the implied author for the Eneados. Both had the advantage of a clerical income and time to devote to the reading and emulation of classical and humanist poets – less evident in the poetry of Dunbar and Hawes.

271. Milne to the Secretary of the Admiralty

[ADM1/5759]

Nile at Halifax

8 July 1861

[received 25 July]

No. 287

Sir,

I deem it advisable to forward to their Lordships the enclosed letters1 from Messrs Esson, Boak and Co. of this City dated the 29th Ulto. and 2nd Instant relative to their Schooner the Tartar being boarded by the United States Steamer (of War) Union and her registry endorsed [with a warning not to enter any U.S. port south of Chesapeake Bay], as I conceive a record of the manner in which the United States Cruizers are exercising their belligerent right of visit and search may be useful for reference at some future date.

2. – But it is I conceive of even still greater importance at the present moment that the attention of Her Majesty's Government should be drawn to the comprehensive terms in which the notice of Blockade is couched, as the warning ‘not to attempt to enter any Port of the United States South of Chesapeake Bay, said Ports being under Blockade’ obviously embraces the whole of the Ports between that Bay and the Mexican Frontier and should it prove that any of these Ports are not effectively blockaded, which I more than suspect must be the case, it may become a question how far Neutral Commerce will have suffered prejudice from this departure from the Law of Blockade … to the effect ‘that the notice of the Blockade must not be more extensive than the Blockade itself[’].

3. – I shall forward a copy of this despatch to Lord Lyons.

272. Hickley to Milne

[ADM1/5759]

H.M.S. Gladiator

at New York, 8 July 1861

Sir,

I have the honor to inform you that having left New York on the afternoon of the 21st of June, I proceeded under sail and arrived within 30 miles north of Cape Hatteras on the 28th …

Proceeding round Cape Hatteras I came to in the evening off the Shoals … and weighing on the morning of the 29th, I sighted Ocracoke Inlet, when at the entrance I observed a small Steamer, with the Secession Flag up, which on our approach steamed under the protection of a small Fort on the right Bank, both Vessel and Fort firing blank cartridge.

The Hebrew Bible came to the Icelanders not only through successive translations, but also through successive layers of exegesis that transformed it into the Old Testament: Christian Scripture that speaks of Christ and the Church. In fact, translation and exegesis are closely linked, to the extent that the latter might be thought of as a development of the former: exegesis as a translation of the reality that lies behind the words. All early Christian exegesis is dependent on translation: the Scripture of the early Church was not the Hebrew Bible, but the Greek Septuagint (LXX), a translation supposedly made independently by 72 scholars, who all miraculously produced the same text. Some of the earliest biblical exegetes were actively involved in translation and textual criticism: one of Origen’s great achievements was the compilation of the Hexapla, a multiple-column parallel Bible in which the LXX was set out alongside the Hebrew, a transliteration into Greek, and three other Greek translations. Likewise, Jerome was initially asked to translate the LXX into Latin, but turned instead to the Hebrew Bible – a choice that attracted criticism at the time, most notably from Augustine. His translation, which became the Vulgate, was not fully accepted by the Church until the sixth century, by which time it had accrued some of the sanctity that originally applied to the LXX. Augustine, who knew very little Hebrew, used Old Latin translations probably made in North Africa, although in his De doctrina christiana he did recommend learning Hebrew and Greek, as well as Latin, before taking on the task of biblical exegesis. By the twelfth century, it was rare to read the Bible without some form of commentary, whether prefaces, glossaries, lists of Hebrew names, or the huge interpretative framework of the Glossa Ordinaria, which incorporated both interlinear and marginal annotations. In this chapter, I look at some of the ways in which the Old Testament was read in the Middle Ages, from Origen and Augustine, to Hugh of St Victor and Peter Comestor, to the vernacular translations known as Bibles historiales. I focus, in particular, on the development of allegorical readings, and the rediscovery in the twelfth century of the Bible as historical narrative.

Types and Figures

The earliest allegorical readings of the Old Testament are within the New Testament itself.

THIS chapter offers the first full critical reading of a much overlooked but significant contribution to Scots Calvinist poetry, Alexander Hume's Hymnes, or Sacred Songs, wherein the right vse of Poesie may be espied, a collection of verse and prose which was printed in Edinburgh in 1599. It demonstrates that the Hymnes is a carefully designed collection of a minister's writings, its sequence of prose and poetry precisely crafted and structured to explore the identities, roles and relationships of the ‘Godly’ poet and his reader, in terms both of delineating a method of private piety and of drawing the reader into a sense of community with other members of the faithful elect. By exploring Hume's collection in depth, the chapter also promotes a more complete understanding of the sophistication and complexity of Scottish devotional poetry at the turn of the seventeenth century, a period on which there is a growing body of scholarship but which remains less well-understood than later seventeenth-century religious writing. Recent work on seminal Reformation writing in Scotland including The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, on poetic and artistic masterpieces by Protestant writers such as Elizabeth Melville and Esther Inglis, on the growth of neo-Latin literature, and on post-Reformation music has done much to expand our knowledge of creative responses to the Reformation in Scotland by the turn of the seventeenth century. Much of this work has been directly facilitated by Professor Roger A. Mason's illumination of Scottish Reformation culture, particularly on the prominent and prolific figures of John Knox, George Buchanan and Andrew Melville. His work on these individuals and the intellectual connections between them, and more generally on Reformation historiography, provides essential context for my re-examination of the Hymnes, or Sacred Songs, its pastoral purpose and literary context. In particular, Mason's work has frequently considered the emergence of the ‘new Protestant self-image’, an important concept for understanding Alexander Hume's exploration of voice, self and identity in the Hymnes, or Sacred Songs. In his essay ‘Usable Pasts’, Mason reminds us of the significance of Arthur Williamson's earlier scholarship on the anxious mental world of early Reformation Scotland and its ‘tortured complexity’, a particularly pertinent piece of advice for any reader of Hume's Hymnes.

In October 1907, Captain Dumas began to hear rumours that yet another change (i.e. increase) was contemplated in the German naval law [40]. The prospect of a further expansion of the German fleet a mere two years after the previous amendment to the naval law was a worrying development and reporting the rumours and then the reality of this proposal took up much of the naval attaché's attention in the last year of his posting in Berlin [42, 43, 44, 46, 52]. The fact that back in Britain the Committee of Imperial Defence was once again investigating the possibility of an invasion of the British Isles also impacted on Dumas's work and he touched upon the question of a German invasion in several of his reports [47, 48, 53, 55]. Not surprisingly, the position he adopted was the same as the Admiralty’s, namely that no major landing in the British Isles could be planned and executed in secret. However, his most significant and wide-ranging memoranda from this period were the two substantive overviews he conducted of Anglo-German naval relations. The first of these was his report on the German navy for 1907 [48]; the second was his summary of affairs produced on giving up his post [57]. Both were remarkable documents. They stressed the intensity of anglophobia in German and warned that, although there was no immediate danger of a conflict, the German desire to challenge the Royal Navy's maritime supremacy and thereby to supplant Britain's place in the world heralded a future conflagration. Intended as both warnings and as a spur to decisive counter-measures, they proved prescient analyses of affairs.

40. Philip Dumas, Germany N.A. Report 53/07

Berlin, 3 October 1907

The Rumoured New Navy Bill to be Introduced in the Next Reichstag

I have the honour to call your attention to the frequent statements in the German newspapers of late as to the introduction, during the forthcoming session of the Reichstag, of either a new Navy Bill or of an amendment to the existing one.

I may say here that while calling at the Admiralty a short time ago I asked if anything of the sort was projected and was told by my usual informant, one of Admiral von Tirpitz’ Naval secretaries, that he personally knew nothing about it.

James Simpson's scholarship has long been committed to the idea that “literary texts both illuminate and unsettle discursive patterns in disciplines that might seem more powerful.” These powerful alternative disciplines are generally based in language – Simpson goes on to name them as “theology, economics, psychology, politics” – but this idea might inspire questions also about the power of literary words to illuminate or unsettle discursive patterns in other media. In this essay, I will borrow the Simpsonian framework to explore how literary words engage visual media, in particular, and how visual media engage them. Do they illuminate each other? Do they unsettle each other? Which is more powerful? And what is the role of literary language, specifically, in the relation between visual and verbal representational forms?

These are questions that Simpson has also taken up in his influential work on iconoclasm. If images offer a powerful force countering the dominance of the word, iconoclasm registers the results of a contest between words and images in which words have ostensibly won. But does iconoclasm lead, also, to the development of a language that is precisely literary? Or, put another way: is the relegation of images to the sidelines necessary somehow for the development of literature? I will suggest here that it is not – that understanding late-medieval texts and images as mutually illuminating, mutually unsettling, allows us to ask how literary language emerges from an environment that includes both words and pictures. Iconoclastic discourses claim a separation of text and image that – for all its stridence – is almost always illusory. Simpson himself describes the ways in which an iconoclastic yet idolatrous poet like Milton refuses the opposition, even while the refusal causes “psychic pain.”5 But refusing the opposition between text and image is characteristic of medieval aesthetics, and seems to cause, in general, much less pain. Indeed, late medieval artifacts often reinforce the necessary reliance of one art form upon the other, illuminating and unsettling each other in a dynamic that seems less like a power struggle, perhaps, than a dance. Reading the intermedial engagements of the manuscript page counter-intuitively as an exploration of verbal form, I will suggest that some kinds of literary language in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries developed in concert with the visual textures of literacy.

The Geneva Conference had failed because neither the British nor the American Governments gave it close enough attention, largely eschewing preliminary negotiations, which would have flagged differences, and did not choose appropriate delegations. It suffered also from the undue prominence, in the American delegation, of naval officers, notably Rear Admiral Hilary P. Jones. Towards the end, Churchillian opposition to cruiser parity led to the temporary recall of the British Delegation, a death blow to an already fading conference.

By 1930, different men headed governments and navies and, spurred by a clause in the Washington Five Power Treaty of 1922 that there should be a review of capital ship and aircraft carrier provisions in 1931, they resolved to subsume that with a renewed attempt to resolve the problems thrown up by Geneva in a conference at London early in 1930. The proposed naval discussions ran in tandem with other talks on preparations for a World Disarmament Conference. The President of the United States from March 1929 was Herbert Hoover, the leading international philanthropist of his day, and anxious to go down in history as a great peacemaker. Since June 1929 the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had been the pacific Ramsay MacDonald. Their arrival in office was the signal for a fresh attempt at friendlier Anglo-American relations and a commitment to secure world peace and disarmament. Their basis was the so-called ‘pact of peace’, the Pact of Paris (more commonly known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact) of 1928–29, which proposed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy and gained the ready signature of most powers. Both leaders made gestures towards limitation by cancelling ships. The conduit between these two men of peace and goodwill was the new American Ambassador to London, the ebullient and energetic Charles Gates Dawes. Most of the extensive preliminary discussions were carried on by MacDonald, via the enthusiastic Dawes, and Hoover's Secretary of State, the austere Henry L. Stimson, a commanding figure, experienced in public service and a member of the internationally minded ‘East Coast Establishment’. Both Stimson and MacDonald were determined to keep discussions firmly in their own hands. The issues were aired in a frank exchange of views and sealed by MacDonald's visit to Hoover in October 1929, a meeting that would be termed later a ‘summit’ conference.

[fol. 67v] Factum est ergo ut mox perempto Simone et exuto ab armis in quibus iacebat mortuus, quidam ex filiis Belial accederent ad corpus eius abscidentes ei manus et pedes, de quarum altera manu sic se habet uera relatio. Erat quidam marchius in comitatu Cestrie. Hic erat cum Edwardo in bello Eusamie qui post bellum arripiens interfecti Simonis manum de qua ante dictum est, misit illam per clientem inpietatis sue ad uxorem suam ut gauderet de interfectione inimici, cuius interfectionis certissimum signum erat manus amputata. Cum qua ueniens ad predium domini sui cliens et non inueniens predii dominam domi, properat ad ecclesiam parochialem ubi erat non longe a predio uiri sui sitam. Quo cum uenisset cum manu quam portabat in gremio panniculo inuolutam accessit ad dominam loquens ei in aure de interemptione Simonis. Ac inquit, ‘Istud est signum occisionis eius,’ uolens ostendere ei manum amputatam. Set mulier, ne uerecundaretur uel forte metuens Deum, [fol. 68r] tunc cum persisteret in oratione sua noluit manum uidere set neque attrectare, licet cliens instanter persuaderet ei ut allatam acciperet et penes se retineret. Cui perperam suadenti ait domina, ‘Opperire donec diuina fuerint percelebrata.’ Ad iussum igitur domine secedens stabat in multitudine populi ut ascultaret missam. Et factum est dum eleuaretur sacrosancta hostia et populus eleuaret manus suas pariter et cliens ad Dominum a sacerdote eleuatum adorandum, ecce manus sancti uiri quam baiularat satelles diaboli satellitis supra capud eius absque omni sensibilitate eius diuinitus est eleuata ita ut preeminencia altitudinis melius cerni potuisset quam manus preeminentioris hominis de omni multitudine hominum qui ibi tunc aderant. Que dum adoraret Dominum maiestatis in eleuatione eius de qua dictum est, ut inclinauerat se uersus altare ad adorandum eum, omni dicto citius iterum reclinata est in id ipsum unde exierat non sine uirtute diuinitatis, panniculo quo inuoluebatur inuento integre

Miracles from the Melrose chronicle

London, British Library, Cotton MS Faustina B IX, fols 67v–68v, 71v–72r

And so it was that, as soon as Simon was killed and stripped of the armour in which he lay dead, some of the sons of Belial approached his body and cut off his hands and feet, of which one hand is the subject of a true story, as follows. There was a marcher in Cheshire.

Although relatively brief, the Australian career (1913–22) of Captain Walter Hugh Charles Samuel (Hugh) Thring is of more than passing interest; not least because his major achievements were intellectual and have long gone unrecognised in his adoptive Service. Arguably the early Royal Australian Navy's (RAN) most accomplished strategic thinker, he was undoubtedly a key figure in readying the fledgling navy for the onset of the First World War, and would eventually become responsible for practically all its wartime administration. Described in 1918 as a ‘clever, silent well-informed man’, he was also an inveterate inventor and prolific writer, with particular interests in Pacific affairs, the history of trade routes and the technology of Naval warfare.

Born in Wiltshire on 30 May 1873, Hugh Thring was the ninth child of the Reverend John Thring and his wife Lydia. Entering the Royal Navy via HMS Britannia in 1886, he earned 12 months time-gained on graduation and then served in the Channel, Pacific and China Squadrons. Recognised early as a zealous and promising officer, Thring followed qualification in gunnery with an appointment to command the new ‘Thirty-Knotter’ destroyer HMS Desperate, later taking part in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Review. In 1900 he was serving in the Mediterranean as Lieutenant (G) in HMS Revenge when the spontaneous ignition of a cordite charge threatened to spread to the remainder of the magazine. Thring's conduct in entering the fume-filled compartment to prevent a further explosion received written praise from the Admiralty. An accomplished draughtsman and engineer, in 1902 he also designed one of the first ‘rate of change of range’ instruments to be used at sea. Promoted commander in 1903, Thring followed a staff appointment with several years as second-in-command of HMS Vengeance, serving on the China Station until the end of the Russo-Japanese War. He joined Admiral Lord Charles Beresford's staff in 1908 and the next year his zeal and ability again received special mention, after the adoption of his ‘rate of change of bearing’ lines for the Dumaresq rate of change instrument. Thring went on to complete the Naval War Course, but his promising career thereafter faltered in the wake of bouts of ill-health and the ongoing fallout from the dispute between Beresford and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher. In the promotion list for 30 December 1910 seven officers were promoted over his head from the Commanders’ list.

Froissart's vivid descriptions of the discomforts of campaigning in Scotland and the absolute necessity of ensuring that the armies were properly supplied with victuals and all the other things needed provide the background to Edward I's concern with using the Naval resources of his kingdom to supply his forces in Scotland. In 1327 Froissart wrote:

In 1298, at the siege of Falkirk, the English army had almost starved for lack of supplies; clearly an army could not expect to live off the country in Scotland but must rely on all supplies being brought up from the south with transport by water being the most practical method.

The documents printed here illustrate two aspects of the need to provide shipping to support campaigns in Scotland in the later years of Edward I's reign. First there are four accounts which give details of the building of vessels, usually called barges, for the king [1–4], and secondly there is a selection of writs and accounts which provide examples of the way in which shipping was arrested by the Crown for these campaigns and the kind of problems which could arise [5–7]. All the documents come from the class of Exchequer Accounts Various (E101) at the National Archives at Kew.

Edward I had become involved in the affairs of Scotland after the death of Alexander III in a riding accident in 1286, leaving no direct heir except a young girl, Margaret, the Maid of Norway, his granddaughter. Her mother, also Margaret, who had been sent from Scotland to Norway to marry King Eric II, had died, probably in childbirth, leaving this little daughter as the only surviving direct descendant of Alexander, whose two sons had predeceased him.

This, the final chapter, looks at the reports of the last British naval attaché in Berlin, Captain Wilfred Henderson. Henderson – or ‘Wilf’ as he was known in the service – was an extremely able and well thought of officer. Earlier in his career, he had been a close associate of Admiral Fisher and had served as secretary to the Committee on Designs, the body responsible for producing the plans of the Dreadnought. Subsequently, he wrote the Admiralty manual on seamanship. He was by all accounts eminently suited for the position of naval attaché. However, at the time of his arrival in the German capital he was preoccupied with the health of his wife, a consideration that almost led him to resign his post only a few months after taking it up. In the end he did not do so, but the outbreak of the First World War meant that he was resident in Germany for less than a year. During this time he mostly reported on technical matters, focusing on airships [206, 215] and submarines [208, 221]. He also held a number of interesting interviews with Admiral Tirpitz [207, 216] and Prince Henry of Prussia [210] and reported on and then discounted the possibility of a new German naval Novelle [218, 220, 222]. Interestingly, he sent in no reports on the question of the German threat and, although informed by Admiral Tirpitz that he could inspect Germany's ship yards, on the instructions of the British Admiralty, he never did so.

206. Wilfred Henderson, Germany N.A. No.47/13

Berlin, 17 October 1913

Loss of German Naval Airship L.2

I have the honour to attach hereto what details I have been able to obtain concerning the destruction by fire and explosion of the German Naval Airship L.2, which took place this morning at 10 am at the Johannisthal flying ground.

I also append some remarks concerning the recent loss of L.1.

[Enclosure]

206a. Loss of German Naval Airship L.2.

The accident which resulted in the loss of the German Naval Airship L.2. was witnessed by an expert German Airman who was watching the flight, and he informs the German admiralty that at about 10 a.m. he saw a sudden flash of flame in the foremost Gondola; the envelope above that Gondola immediately caught fire and the flame spread with great rapidity from bow to stern accompanied by the explosion of the Gasoline tanks.

IN 1881 the publishers of the St Andrews Citizen produced An Alphabetic Guidebook to St Andrews by David Hay Fleming – a local man whose father John had a china and stoneware business which David would sell two years later to finance a life focused on all things antiquarian. His guidebook pointed to the usual tourist attractions, including the skating rink at the west end of the Scores where workmen had unearthed a lead seal of Pope Innocent IV, a pontiff described by Hay Fleming as ‘inferior to none of his predecessors in arrogance and insolence of temper’. In comments such as these it was clear that Hay Fleming offered more than a map to the boulevards of the town: he also suggested he had the measure of its soul. Anticipating the black tourism of later generations, while clinging unapologetically to hegemonic Protestant ‘truths’, Hay Fleming began this volume by guiding visitors around sites of execution and iconoclasm, imbuing the built environment of St Andrews with the memory of religious fervour.

Yet Hay Fleming’s, as one might expect, was not the only voice when it came to St Andrews’ heritage around this time. In 1861 Selkirk born Andrew Lang enrolled at St Andrews University.