"Faire Emelye": Medievalism and the Moral Courage of Emily Wilding Davison

Abstract

It is one of the most memorable images of the British women's suffrage movement: the day is June 4, Derby Day, 1913, the scene the track at Epsom, at a turning known as Tattenham Corner. As the field of horses approaches and thunders by, a woman suddenly ducks out from under the railing and moves onto the track in order to stop the king's horse, Anmer. A film of the moment shows her deliberately reaching her hands up to the bridle when suddenly horse, jockey, and woman become a blur resolving into an image of bodies—human and equine—strewn across the racecourse. The woman who ran onto the track that day to her death was Emily Wilding Davison, whom history terms a militant suffragette, and whose act has invited the terms mad, rash, and incomprehensi- ble. Almost as soon as she was carried from the track, speculation began to circulate concerning her object and intention. It was a mad suicide attempt, some said dismissively. The death certificate records that the coroner attributed her death to a fracture at the base of her skull when she was accidentally knocked while willfully rushing onto the race course, 1 hinting at uncontrolled impulses, a charge also implied by Sylvia Pankhurst's reminiscence that, there had been a general desire . . . to discourage her. . . . She was condemned and ostracized as a self- willed person who persisted in acting upon her own initiative without waiting for official instruction. 2 Others interpreted her death as a martyrdom for the cause of women's suffrage, citing Davison's own conviction that the vote for women would only come after the spilling of blood. 3 This interpretation derived credence from the inscription her family had carved on her gravestone, words from John 15:13, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. But Emily Davison's decision to use the occasion of the race to further the suffragette cause was not a willful or impulsive one, nor was it a delib- erate self-sacrifice. 4 Recent biographers and historians have begun to accept what some of her close contemporaries believed: that Davison's