Juliet Barker Research Articles

Devoted Sister or Cynical Saboteur? The Two Faces of Charlotte Brontë

Many critics, including Juliet Barker, Edward Chitham, Christopher Heywood and Janet Gezari, have made reference to Charlotte Brontë’s meddling in her sisters’ work following their deaths. This article offers a detailed examination of the many interventions Charlotte made to the sixteen, arguably seventeen, poems by Emily that she selected for publication in 1850. Whilst some of these might be considered as editorially valid (such as changing explicit Gondal references and a minority of punctuation alterations), most, this article will argue, are not. Worse, the nature of Charlotte’s interventions impact negatively on Emily’s original vision and words. Through her 420 punctuation changes, 103 individual word changes, thirty-five whole-line or part-line substitutions, six instances of stanza deletions and additions, rewriting of the last two lines of ‘No coward soul is mine’ and the possible inclusion of one of her own poems, Charlotte effectively reframed Emily’s poetry as more orthodox and conventional than it was. In addition to a comprehensive analysis of all these interventions, this article will also consider the motivations behind the image of Emily that Charlotte sought to put forward through her editorial changes and in the ‘Biographical Notice’ and ‘Preface’ that accompanied the publication of the poems.

1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (by Juliet Barker)

<i>1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt</i> (by Juliet Barker)

Editorial

Charlotte remarked, ‘I am sorry you have changed your residence as I shall now again lose my way in going up and down stairs, and stand in great tribulation, contemplating several doors, and not knowing which to open.’ (Juliet Barker’s The Bronte’s).

1381: the year of the Peasants' Revolt

Written with the fluency readers have come to expect from Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants provides an account of the first great popular uprising in England and its background, and paints on a broad canvas a picture of English life in medieval times. Skeptical of contemporary chroniclers accounts of events, Barker draws on the judicial sources of the indictments and court proceedings that followed the rebellion. This emphasis offers a fresh perspective on the so-called Peasants Revolt and gives depth and texture to the historical narrative. Among the book s arguments are that the rebels believed they were the loyal subjects of the king acting in his interests, and that the boy-king Richard II sympathized with their grievances.Barker tells how and why a diverse and unlikely group of ordinary men and women from every corner of England from servants and laborers living off wages, through the village elite who served as bailiffs, constables, and stewards, to the ranks of the gentry united in armed rebellion against church and state to demand a radical political agenda. Had it been implemented, this agenda would have transformed English society and anticipated the French Revolution by four hundred years. 1381: The Year of the Peasants is an important reassessment of the uprising and a fascinating, original study of medieval life in England s towns and countryside.

Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination, by Simon Marsden

Reviewed by: Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination by Simon Marsden, and: The Brontës in Context ed. by Marianne Thormählen, and: Law and the Brontës by Ian Ward Beth Newman (bio) Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination, by Simon Marsden; pp. 183. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, £60.00, £18.99 paper, $110.00, $29.95 paper. The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen; pp. xxxiv + 388. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, £69.99, £17.99 paper, $115.99, $27.99 paper. Law and the Brontës, by Ian Ward; pp. vi + 195. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £60.00, $100.00. Thanks to the work of the last quarter of the twentieth century culminating in Juliet Barker’s massive family biography The Brontës (1994), we have moved past the Brontë myth. Even Barker no longer feels compelled to fend off absolutely the discredited image of three naive spinsters who, despite being cut off from the main currents of Victorian life, produced some of the most impassioned and enduring novels of the nineteenth century. If she had, surely she would not have taken the surprising step of subtitling the second edition of her biography “Wild Genius on the Moors” (2013). The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen, provides a useful representative collection of post-Brontë-myth scholarship. Like the other volumes in Cambridge’s “Literature in Context” series, the book is intended for both academic and general readers. Its forty-two essays by thirty-six well-respected Brontë scholars, many of whom have elsewhere broken new ground, are lively and short, informative rather than interpretive. The first section includes biographical essays and addresses such topics as the correspondence, the juvenilia, and the path to publication. A shorter middle section quickly traces five periods of reception plus adaptations and translations. Seventeen more essays explore historical and cultural contexts. Much of the material will be familiar to scholars, but by no means all of it. The sheer number of essays makes it difficult to isolate highlights and surprises, but I’ll mention Stephen Colclough’s illuminating essay on the non-serial modes of distribution at first publication, Victor A. Neufeldt’s contribution about Branwell, and Stephen Prickett’s discussion of Julius and Augustus Hare’s Guesses at Truth (1827) as an introduction to the British intellectual world of the Brontës’ time. In post-Brontë-myth spirit, Michael Baumber confirms the accuracy of Charlotte’s characterization of Haworth and environs as a “remote district where education had made little progress,” though taken out of context it has contributed to the romantic picture of three visionaries writing in splendid isolation (16). And it’s refreshing to read Thormählen’s warning in her introduction about new myths springing up to replace the old. One of these, she notes, is a tendency now to see Charlotte as the bossy big sister who self-servingly misrepresented her younger siblings. She provides a moving and salutary defense of Charlotte as a grieving but courageous survivor, the family “doer” [End Page 111] whose unflagging determination while all three were alive secured their places in posterity (4). Overall the book is a pleasure to browse, a helpful guide to further reading, and a handy compendium in which answers to questions about, say, the extant Brontë portraits, or the various conjectured originals for Wuthering Heights, Thornfield, and the other houses are conveniently gathered together. Ian Ward, who contributed the collection’s essay on law, treats the subject more expansively in his Law and the Brontës. A law professor who has published widely on the field’s relation to literature, Ward explains that one oft-cited justification for such work is to awaken an “otherwise dormant ethical sensitivity” in lawyers and law students (3). Because the Brontës were writing domestic fiction about women living under the doctrine of coverture (and, in Heathcliff’s case, about the marginalization of bastards), considering their work alongside the relevant statute and case law can enable us to empathize with those who cannot make law but who nevertheless live, and often suffer, under its strictures. Many...

Remembering Sir James Roberts

The traditional church service that precedes the Annual General Meeting of the Brontë Society took the form on 7 June 2008 of a service of thanksgiving and remembrance commemorating Sir James Roberts's gift of the Parsonage to the Brontë Society. St Michael and All Angels was full for the service, which was conducted by the Rector of Haworth, the Revd Jenny Savage. Bible readings were by Sir James Roberts's grandson, Anthony Roberts, and by his great-grandson, James Roberts; Cathy Geldard, who presented the posy to Lady Roberts in 1928, also attended the service. Sir James Roberts's address at the opening of the Parsonage Museum was read by Lyn Glading, and Sally McDonald read the reply of the Society's then president, Sir Edward Brotherton. As 7 June is also the anniversary of the death of Patrick Brontë, Leslie McDonald read Juliet Barker's account of Mr Brontë's death, and Stephen Whitehead gave the address that is presented here.

Literary Biography: The Cinderella Story of Literary Studies

There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular? One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped. Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education. Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily...

The Cambridge companion to the Brontes

Chronology Introduction Heather Glen 1. The Haworth context Juliet Barker 2. The Brontes' childhood writings Carol Bock 3. The poetry of the Brontes Angela Leighton 4. The Professor, Agnes Grey, and Wuthering Heights Stevie Davies 5. Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Jill Matus 6. Shirley and Villette Heather Glen 7. Ideology, personality, and the Bronte characters Rick Rylance 8. Women writing and publishing Kate Flint 9. The Brontes and religion John Maynard 10. The Bronte myth Patsy Stoneman Guide to further reading.

CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELISTS

IT IS TIME to assess where contemporary biographies of Victorian novelists are heading. With two more books about George Eliot, still others on Jane Austen, and another on Anthony Trollope, we see redundancy everywhere. As for other major figures, the Brontës have finally quieted down with Juliet Barker’s monumental biography; Dickens has settled in with Peter Ackroyd and Fred Kaplan, and whoever is waiting in the wings for another stab at his life is probably wise to await the completion of the magnificent Oxford University Press edition of the letters, now passing Volume 11.

Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in The Professor

Charlotte Bronte's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in The Professor Carl Plasa As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to read it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (59) The opening chapter of Charlotte Bronte's first novel, The Professor (completed in 1846 but published only posthumously in 1857), features a "copy of a letter, sent [..Ja year since" by William Crimsworth, the novel's first-person narrator and central protagonist, to Charles, "an old school-acquaintance" (5) whom he had known at Eton. While the letter is designed to furnish Charles with an account of its writer's post-Etonian existence, such a purpose remains unrealized. As Crimsworth explains at the end of the chapter, his missive meets with no reply because its desired recipient is at home no longer: To this letter I never got an answer—before my old friend received it, he had accepted a government appointment in one of the colonies, and was already on his way to the scene of his official labours. What has become of him since I know not. (14) JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 30.1 (Winter 2000): 1-28. Copyright © 2000 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 2 JNT Charles's silent withdrawal to an unspecified colonial margin provides Crimsworth with the opportunity to take up where the letter leaves off, regaling "the public at large" with the autobiography—in the shape of the novel itself—originally begun for the "private benefit" (14) of his mysteriously estranged correspondent. The story of his professional and personal fortunes that Crimsworth recounts has three distinct phases. The first sees him moving from the south of England to the north, where he is employed as "second clerk" in the Yorkshire textile mill owned by the entrepreneurial Edward, his elder brother and "managefs] the foreign correspondence of the House" (18). Dissatisfied with the task of "copying and translating business-letters" and feeling victimized, in particular, by the "Antipathy" (30) his employer/brother demonstrates toward him, Crimsworth invokes the translator's prerogative, converts his linguistic mobility into geographic form, and travels to Belgium. Here he teaches English as a foreign language, first to male and then female students in boarding-schools run by Monsieur Pelet and Zoraïde Reuter, respectively. It is here, also, through a combination of endeavour and chance, that he eventually secures his financial independence. In the novel's brief final stage, Crimsworth returns to England, accompanied by his Anglo-Swiss wife and former pupil, Frances Evans Henri and their refractory young son, Victor. For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both artificial and clumsy. It is, they argue, the sign of an early gaucherie on the part of a would-be novelist perilously aspiring— like Charles and Crimsworth in their own spheres—to secure a professional status within the male-dominated literary establishment of mid nineteenth-century England. Yet as Brontë informs the reader in the "Preface " to The Professor, the faults of her "little book" should not be excused on the basis of a "first attempt [. . J as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn down a good deal in a practice of some years" (3). The principal allusion here is to the vast and sprawling body of Bronte's Anglian writings, produced in collaboration with her brother, Branwell, between 1829 and 1839 and situated in a phantasmagoric colonial space "carved," in the words of Juliet Barker, "out of the interior of Africa" {Juvenilia 270). It is thus apparent that the divergence of career between Charles and Crimsworth with which The Professor begins at the same time enacts a certain shift, inaugurated by The Professor itself, in Bronte's Charlotte Bronte's Foreign Bodies 3 own fictional trajectory: like Crimsworth, her novels will remain, for the rest of her career, securely located within English and/or continental borders . Yet if colonialism is excluded as a literal presence in Bronte's post-Anglian fiction—no longer setting the...

James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics by Donald F. Theall, and: The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake by Eric McLuhan

ESC 25, 1999 scription of Branwell’s idiosyncratic presentation bring alive the writing process. The periods, for example, which are liberally scattered over Branwell’s pages, “indicate nothing more than Branwell resting his quill while trying to think what the next word(s) should be” (footnote, xxvii). Surprisingly, the scholarly apparatus of this volume realises more vividly than anything else I have ever read the extraordinary habits of the Bronte children. NOTES 1 Joan Rees, Profligate Son: Branwell Bronte and His Sisters (Lon­ don: Robert Hale, 1968). 2 Juliet Barker, The Brontes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994). 3 Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte (Ox­ ford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 4 Robert G. Collins, The Hand of the Arch-Sinner: Two Angrian Chronicles of Branwell Bronte (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). xxxix. 5 Ibid., xvii. 6 Ibid., xxxiv. MAGGIE BERG / Queen’s University Donald F. Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: Uni­ versity of Toronto Press, 1997). xxii, 246. $50.00 cloth. Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toron­ to: University of Toronto Press, 1997). xvii, 340. $50.00 cloth. The name of James Joyce has always been associated with avant-garde cultural movements. Donald F. Theall’s fascinating and important book shows just how extensive that association was. By situating Joyce in the pre-history of cyberspace, Theall outlines the complex nature of what he calls the Irish writer’s “techno-poetics,” that is, of the interrelationship between sci­ ence, mathematics, technology, and semiotics in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 98 R E V IE W S In his opening chapter, Theall delves into Joyce’s treatment o f the art work as “machine” and aligns it with the contem­ porary projects of Duchamps, the Dadaists, and the Futur­ ists. When Joyce spoke of himself as a “poetic engineer,” he meant that he was both a bricoleur (in Levi-Strauss’s sense) who uses whatever fragments of language, myth, and legend are at hand, and a modern pragmatic engineer who system­ atically designs and puts them together. His last two books, therefore, abound in references to diverse aspects of professional engineering, such as mechanics and strategic planning, to the trope of the book as machine, as well as to new modes of social organization and technological production. Joyce’s merger of the figure of bricoleur and engineer allowed him to construct a playful “chaosmos,” a fictional cosmos of ordered disorder that anticipated the discovery of the complementarity or uncertainty principle in physics, as reflected in the polyphonic voices, words, and languages of the Wake that produce “a chaos that still has a kind of intelligibility” (12). Joyce assumed the role of cultural assembler with some am­ bivalence, however. While intrigued by the new technological advances, Joyce nevertheless satirized their underlying spirit: “If he realizes people are machinic ... they are not mechanized” (9). Theall adapts the term “machinic” from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari to designate an assemblage of bodies in a society rather than the production of goods. “Machine” and “machinic” are not intended to be synonymous, even though the two senses sometimes overlap. Leopold Bloom can thus lament the negative aspects of what Nietzsche called “the ma­ chine age” : Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Labour saving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured mon­ sters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. ( Ulysses 391) In passages such as this one, Joyce’s characters seem to part company with the tenets of the Futurists. If mechanization is one of the key motifs of our century’s discourse about what con­ stitutes the “modern,” as Theall rightly claims, then it would 99 ESC 25, 1999 be fitting to set Joyce’s reservations alongside those of con­ temporaries such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, among others, who viewed the impact that the new technologies were having on everyday life a good deal more sceptically than enthusiastically. Theall notes the ambiguity of Joyce’s response but does not probe its full implications. Consequently, some important points still need to be consid­ ered. Given Joyce’s libertarian political vision, for example, how would he have...

The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë: An Edition ed. by Victor A. Neufeldt

R E VIE W S Browning and Schoolcraft, look like errors in judgement rather than interesting examples in a coherent and useful argument. TERRY GOLDIE / York University Victor A. Neufeldt, ed., The Works of Patrick Branwell Bronte: An Edition, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Garland, 1997). xxviii, 464. $84.00 (U.S.). The first of the three-volume The Works of Patrick Branwell Bronte makes me wonder whether the nineteen poems that the brother of the Bronte sisters published during his lifetime con­ stitute authorship, and whether this attempt to produce him as an author is entirely justified. The Writings of Patrick Bran­ well Bronte might have been more appropriate, since the vast majority have negligible literary merit (volume one was written from the ages of nine to thirteen). Neufeldt himself cautions that all but a handful “were never meant for actual publica­ tion. They are the result of childhood play and adolescent fan­ tasy, often written in the headlong rush of fevered composition” (xxviii). It strikes me that juvenile writings require an inordi­ nate amount of effort to discover the crude origins of mature themes or motifs. In the case of Branwell Bronte, moreover, there is no mature work to illuminate. There are, however, good reasons for reading this volume and the others to come. The first is its contribution to Bronte biography. Neufeldt rightly blames Charlotte Bronte for origi­ nating the myth of Branwell as the “Profligate Son” ;1 she wrote with relief at her brother’s death, “It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent” (xvii). The image of Branwell as ir­ responsible, licentious, alcoholic, and drug addicted has sur­ vived even Juliet Barker’s modifications (in her 1994 biography o f the Brontes) supported with impressive historical evidence.2 Neufeldt takes Terry Eagleton to task for perpetrating the leg­ end even while reviewing a book whose aim is to contradict it. “Nowhere,” says Neufeldt, does Eagleton mention, in a re­ view of Robert Collins’ edition of two previously unpublished tales, Branwell’s “publications or ... his success as a transla­ 95 ESC 25, 1999 tor of Horace’s Odes” (xix). Neufeldt’s edition carries the onus of correcting the myth: “A just, informed assessment of Branwell ’s achievement will not occur until all of his work has been published” (xix). Neufeldt believes that Charlotte’s disappointment in her brother was partially founded on ignorance of his literary suc­ cess. He claims that she must not have known of the nine­ teen poems that Branwell had published in newspapers before his early death, and that thus gained a wider readership than the sisters’ poems and placed him among poets with estab­ lished reputations. It seems unlikely, however, that Charlotte would not have recognised Branwell’s pseudonym, since it was invented in the course of their collaborative plays, and was a name readily acknowledged and used by Branwell’s friends in correspondence. It seems more likely that the poems that Branwell published before Poems By Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell actually constitute the literary promise that Charlotte regarded as wrecked by her brother’s personal dissolution. Although volume one does confirm previous observations of Branwell’s early erudition and classical education, and is “remarkable for the seriousness and pretension with which the thirteen year old boy sets about the task of producing ‘great’ literature,” 3 I am not sanguine that these “works” will lay to rest the myths. Collins makes the persuasive case that Branwell came to inhabit his fictional alter-ego(s) Rougue/Alexander Percy/Northangerland, who provide a “pattern of despair” that he eventually followed.4 As ‘psychobiography,’ or portraits of an individual’s psyche, Branwell’s contribution to the chronicles o f Glass Town (the imaginary kingdom he shared with Char­ lotte) is startling in its obsessive repetition of the masculinist activities o f war-mongering, political machinations, and bloody battles. There is a taste for the gruesome not surprising per­ haps in a precocious young boy, but shocking in its detail. The Poems of “Young Soult the Rhymer” (Branwell’s pseudonym and the poet of Glass Town) contains “The Ammon Tree Cut­ ter,” which tells of the capture and punishment...

The Brontës. Juliet Barker The Art of the Brontës. Christine Alexander Jane Sellars

Book Review| September 01 1996 Review: The Brontës., by Juliet Barker and The Art of the Brontës., by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars The Brontës.Juliet Barker The Art of the Brontës.Christine AlexanderJane Sellars Donald D. Stone Donald D. Stone Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (1996) 51 (2): 240–244. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933966 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Donald D. Stone; Review: The Brontës., by Juliet Barker and The Art of the Brontës., by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 September 1996; 51 (2): 240–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933966 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1996 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Another Branwell Liaison?

In her book The Brontes, Juliet Barker has pointed to a possible liaison involving Branwell during his time as a tutor at Broughton-in-Furness. The resulting illegitimate child is said to have died in infancy. 1 She further alludes to another liaison of Branwell'swhich may have occurred before this, nearer to his own home.2 The child in question, Mary Ann Judson, married and bore children, whose descendants are still alive. Since this is now in the public domain, it seems right to offer the available evidence for such a liaison. Mary Ann Judson was born at Buckley, Stanbury, in Haworth township, on 1st December 1839. She was the fifth child of Martha, the wife of James Judson. When James registered the birth at Keighley Register Office on the 14th of December 1839, he stated that he was a farmer and that his wife was formerly Martha Feather. Both James Judson and Martha Feather were born into local families whose origins were firmly rooted in the hill farms of the Haworth township and the Worth valley. Both family names appear in the fourteenth century Manor Court Rolls relating to Stanbury and in 1354 a John Judson was elected reeve of Stanbury. James was born on 17th November 1809 to Mary and William Judson, who farmed at Upper Ponden, Stanbury. William was one of three local Judsons who were invited to Ponden for the funeral of Robert Heaton on 22nd November 1817. Martha was the ninth child of John and Mary Feather, whose second, third, and fourth children were born at Withins. Martha was born on the 13th of February 1813, at Rush Isles, an old substantial farmstead in the Worth Valley close to Ponden. Her father, John Feather, was recorded as a weaver. There is no doubt about the local roots of the Feather family. One of the .earliest decipherable tombstones in Haworth churchyard records the family of 'John Feather of Within', who died 5th.Feb.1786 at the age of 78'. Mary Ann Judson, born in 1839, was my great grandmother .. Her first-born was my grandmother, Annie, who married Elijah Helliwell in December 1882. My mother, Clara, was born in December 1889, the youngest of their three daughters. In 1892, Elijah HelliweU died· of

Richard Barber &amp; Juliet Barker, Tournaments. Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Age.

Richard Barber &amp; Juliet Barker, <i>Tournaments. Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Age.</i>

The Tournament in England, 1100-1400

Juliet Barker surveys the tournament in England from its first emergence in the twelfth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, when it was revolutionized by the emergence of technical changes which altered its very nature. original publication of this study, deriving from Juliet Barker's PhD thesis supervised by Maurice Keen, re-established the importance of the tournament at the heart of medieval chivalric culture. first serious scholarly publication for over half a century, it dramatically reawakened interest in the historical context of tournaments, and is especially valuable for its detailed evidence on the early years. Tournaments are shown as far more than just sport. They had wide political, social and military implications; in England their potential as a political instrument was quickly realized: for the disaffected they became a means of rebellion and feuding, but for the king and court they were a powerful propaganda machine. Participation in tournaments was also a way to earn a coveted reputation for chivalry; the passion for tourneying could bring knights lasting fame. Military demands accounted for the increasing sophistication of armor and weapons, partly in response to the demands of the tourneyers, who needed military training that reflected their role in actual combat. This wide-ranging study looks at the tournament from all these angles, and in so doing produces an exemplary history of the first three hundred years of their development. Juliet Barker is a well-known broadcaster and writer, whose other books include The Brontes and Wordsworth: A Life in Letters.