The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth

by Charles Derek Ross

The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality—daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chrètien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel. Unlike other scholars who have dismissed it as pure literary convention, Charles Ross finds serious social purpose behind the custom of the castle.

Ross explores the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broad array of moral issues in the many castle stories. He concentrates on single scenes that are common to a series of epics, showing how their nuanced narratives reflect real social limits of order, violence, justice, civility, and political conformity. His investigation of masterpieces from the thirteenth-century Lancelot to The Faerie Queene —by way of Malory, Boiardo, and Ariosto—demonstrates for the first time the impact on Shakespeare's plays, particularly Macbeth , of an earlier way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social customs.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

215 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 1997

About the author

Charles Derek Ross (1924 – 1986) was an English historian of the Late Middle Ages, specialising in the Wars of the Roses. He was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bristol until his death in 1986, when he was killed by an intruder in his own home.

His best known works are his biographies of Edward IV and Richard III in the Yale English Monarchs series. These influential books were the first modern comprehensive studies of the Yorkist kings' politics, retinues and landownership.

Reviews

[Peter Aronson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is perhaps inconstant to be annoyed by an academic work for being too academic, but that is my reaction to this book. There's a certain amount of use of lit-crit technical jargon where there are perfectly good standard English words would be unambiguous, many of the asides that would be of the most interest to general readers are buried in the end notes, and the whole main argument about the individual verses custom is carried into places (like Shakespeare) where it is not well supported by the source texts. The author seems to treat the custom of the castle as if it started with Chrétien de Troyes, ignoring the earlier Welsh texts that also used that motif (or, as he would use, topos). Yes, there is the possibility that the Welsh sources were cross-contaminated with the French romances, but then the author states here (and in other places) that Geoffrey of Monmouth fabricated King Arthur out of whole cloth as propaganda to justify the Norman Conquest (which is an, er interesting theory that is not at all universally accepted, and almost certainly an overstatement of the facts), which would not give him a lot of reason to consider any pre-Geoffery sources, like the Welsh.

So, an interesting argument, but I'm really not convinced. But a fairly entertaining, if dry-ish read, particularly if you read the longer end notes.