BOOK: Alistair Moffat, "The Reivers"

Alistair Moffat: The Reivers: The Story of the Border Reivers. New Edition. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2017. (First ed.: 2007.) 9781780274454. xiii + 334 pp.

In the late middle ages and early modern period, when England and Scotland were still two separate kingdoms with separate monarchs, the area along the border between these two countries was somewhat wild and chaotic, and its inhabitants, it seems, spent their time largely in organizing raids into each other's territory, stealing cattle* and everything else that wasn't nailed down. But this curious ‘criminal society’ (as Moffat often calls it in the present book) inspired a remarkable side-product: ballads.

[*I always guessed that reivers must be somehow related to robbers, and judging by the etymologies in the Wiktionary it is true; reive (or reave) and rob are both from the same Germanic root, but rob made a detour by being borrowed into French on the way.]

This is how I first encountered the Borders as a phenomenon, many years ago; I read the Oxford Book of Ballads and noticed how many have something to do with the border between England and Scotland. Border ballads are among my favourite kinds of poetry; they have a sort of telegraphic terseness to them, they are sparing with details, they move the story along quickly and in few words, they have a quick and lively rhyme, they often have violent or supernatural elements, emotional turmoil, great melodrama, and for some reason I find the northern dialects in which they are written very charming. I still hope to eventually get around to reading some of the other well-known collections of ballads: Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and of course Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Moffat's book, The Reivers, is a wonderful overview of the society that gave rise to these ballads, showing what it was like, why it emerged and how it came to an end. It was an almost tribalistic society, and people's main object of allegiance was not their kingdom or their region but a social group that Moffat calls the “surname”. Such people did indeed share a surname (he includes a list of reiver surnames on pp. 307–9) and were, or at least believed they were, related by common descent (p. 11). The surname had a sort of leader, the heidsman, and when he told people to saddle up and join him for a raid they did not in the least hesitate to do so. One is tempted to compare this to a clan (p. 18), but Moffat also emphasizes that there were some notable differences between the Border surnames and the Highland clans, most notably in the fact that the latter identified with an area rather than with a name (p. 162).

Thus, although this was happening in the border area between Scotland and England, much of the reiving had little to do with the conflict between these two countries, but was inspired by simple greed or by the endless feuds and vendettas between the various surnames (pp. 29–31). Many aspects of life in the Borders were adaptations to the constant instability; local magnates built fortified “peel towers” to protect themselves, their servants and animals from attack (p. 63), while less wealthy people built “bastle houses”, fortified farmhouses which they hoped would be strong enough to discourage at least the less determined would-be plunderers (p. 70).

The overview of the Borders society and lifestyle, which covers approximately the first one-third of the book, was interesting, but what I really liked was the history of the Borders, which covers most of the rest of the volume. Before reading this book, I vaguely imagined that the Borders were always this chaotic and lawless, that it was something of a natural state that must extend back into the dim mists of prehistory. But as I learnt here, this is far from the case. The Borders as we know them from the ballads are largely a 16th-century phenomenon, with a history going back another one or two centuries. Prior to that, the area was not nearly so rough; it had a higher population (p. 44), the economy was better developed, with more cultivation of fields than later, and it was also a major exporter of wool to Flanders and Italy (p. 107). How then did it become the rough and wild place we see in the ballads?

One of the factors was climate change (p. 47); the Little Ice Age forced farmers to abandon some of their fields, especially in the upland areas; this contributed to a reduction of the population and increased the importance of animal husbandry (and I guess you can't develop a culture built around cattle-rustling until there's enough cattle to rustle :)).

But most of the reasons seem to have been political; lack of heirs on the Scottish throne, or long periods of regency during the minority of an heir, led to struggles for power and hence to instability. Decades of non-stop warfare in the early 14th century tore the Borders society apart (pp. 101–2), shattered its economy (pp. 107, 130), got the local bigwigs accustomed to acting on their own and ignoring any higher authority (p. 109), and led to the emergence of a “pattern of raid and retaliation” (p. 114); raiding became “a habit of mind” (p. 125). The great abbeys and monasteries of the area were destroyed or taken over by local bandits (p. 153). Plague epidemics didn't exactly improve matters either (p. 111). The Border society entered a “vicious downward spiral”: as it “descended into organised criminality, it became progressively poorer. And its governing dynamic turned from production to larceny” (p. 129).

Occasionally, Border raids were more than just a manifestation of local criminality; large raids might be encouraged by one or the other kingdom and functioned as a part of an “undeclared war” between them (p. 173).

This glorious sentence from p. 152 is a good illustration of the instability of the times: “The outbreak of peace did not last.” :)))

In the 16th century, France and England vied for influence over Scotland (pp. 196–7, 220); Henry VIII organized outright invasions of Scotland that were infamously destructive (pp. 179, 184, 191), and he paid pensions to notables on the Scottish side of the border to get them under his influence (p. 185); religion was also a cause of conflict, as many of the Borderers held on to catholicism for a longer time than the rest of Britain (p. 176).

In the wake of all this came the most intense period of raiding, covering the second half of the 16th century; apart from the reasons mentioned above — climate change and political instability — raiding may have been encouraged by the awareness, among the heidsmen of the Borders, that the times for raiding might soon come to an end: Elizabeth, the queen of England, had no heir and after her death, James VI of Scotland would inherit the English throne, and once both kingdoms were ruled by the same person there would be no obstacle to suppressing raiding and restoring peace in the Borders (pp. 204, 270). Some of the best-known ballads refer to raids and events that happened during this period, e.g. Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead (p. 241) and the rescue of Kinmont Willie (p. 267).

The world of the reivers came to a fairly abrupt end in the early 17th century, when James VI also became James I of England and brutally suppressed raiding in just a few years (pp. 274–6), with mass executions and legal changes such as the restrictions on the carrying of weapons or possession of good horses (p. 276). Some of the more politically astute Border heidsmen “lined up on the side of law and order” in good time and were rewarded with titles and estates, while those who persisted in their raiding ways were crushed (p. 276). Among these latter, Moffat particularly mentions the Armstrongs, but is happy to point out that at least one of them got to go to the moon :) (pp. 154, 277).

Moffat concludes with some interesting remarks on later attitudes to the Borderers (p. 277). Authors and ballad collectors like Walter Scott often romanticised them (p. 78), but Moffat does not in the least deny, here and elsewhere throughout the book, that they were brutal criminals (at one point he compares them to Chicago gangsters; p. 144); and yet it seems clear that he, like many of us, can't help admiring their “dash and bravery” and “their disregard for central authority” (p. 277). In this I am happy to agree with him. This is yet another manifestation of the old conflict between the boredom of civilization and rule of law on one hand, and the thrill of freedom and anarchy on the other. We always end up choosing the former, but hate ourselves for it (as we well should), as I wrote on the pages of this blog before.

Sure, the world of the reivers would be a horrible one to live in, but at least they had blood flowing through their veins, and not water like most of us do nowadays (myself very much included). The best and greatest justification for their anarchic society is that it gave rise to the Border ballads. (“If we have died only that a poem is made, then we have died for a better thing than ever we lived for”, as Aneirin says in Men Went to Cattraeth). What sort of literature did orderly civilization produce in Britain in the same period? Shakespeare and Spenser, you might say. Well, I could never quite get into Shakespeare, and as for Spenser, I liked him a great deal, but if I had to choose between him and the Border ballads, I would certainly choose the latter. If you want to read epic poems of chivalry, you can always get Italian ones [1, 2, 3] in translation — but where else would you get anything like the Border ballads?

Moffat's book ends with an interesting appendix with a selection of five Border ballads, but these were hardly among my favourite ones. It looks as if they were chosen for their documentary value, they mostly report about real battles and raids, are a bit short on emotional drama and quite devoid of the supernatural element.

This was a really interesting book, a delight to read, richly seasoned with curious factoids and asides, and it's a great introduction to Borders society and history for someone who, like me, has previously only known about the Borders through their ballads.

ToRead:

• Andrew Greig: Fair Helen. A novel inspired by the ballad of the same name; mentioned here on p. 77.

BOOK: Pier Candido Decembrio, "Lives of the Milanese Tyrants"

Pier Candido Decembrio: Lives of the Milanese Tyrants. Translated and with an introduction by Gary Ianziti; edited by Massimo Zaggia. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 88. Harvard University Press, 2019. 9780674987524. lii + 339 pp.

The book begins with an introduction by the translator, Gary Ianziti, which tells us more about Decembrio's life and the history of Milan during that period (approx. the first half of the 15th century). Until now I had known nothing about the subject except being vaguely aware of the names of the two the rulers whose biographies appear in this book, so I found this introduction very interesting. Decembrio spent much of his career as an official in the employ of Filippo Maria Visconti and thus much of his biography of this duke is based on first-hand experience and observation — a notable difference compared to Suetonius's biographies of the Roman emperors, which otherwise formed an example that Decembrio tried to follow in his biography of Visconti (p. xxiv). Suetonius, of course, lived 50–200 years after the emperors he wrote about, so his work was based on written sources rather than personal experience.

The Visconti line came to an end in 1447 when Filippo Maria died without an heir. He had apparently earlier made efforts to have a half-brother and a nephew declared heir (Life of Visconti, 40.3; n. 84 on p. 284; n. 150 on p. 295), but later changed his mind when they turned out to be reckless and ill-behaved. Upon the duke's death, the leading citizens of Milan set up a sort of oligarchical regime called the Ambrosian Republic (p. xvi). I remember having heard of this republic in the ITRL before, in the work of Francesco Filelfo, who was clearly not fond of it (see my post from a few years ago). [Filelfo would later emerge as one of the leading humanists under the Sforza regime, and even went so far as to write an epic poem, the Sphortiad, in praise of the new ruler; but it was apparently not very good: see nn. 6–7 on p. 296.]

Decembrio, by contrast, seemed to get along just fine with the republican government, and served it as a secretary (pp. xviii, xxxi). He gives a nice overview of the turbulent atmosphere in Milan at the time in his Sforza biography, 35.2: some people (mostly merchants) wanted a republic, some (mostly noblemen) a strong ruler, and the conflict intensified all the way to conspiracies, massacres, executions, exiles and the like (see also n. 99 on pp. 309–10). To make matters worse, a famine also developed; “according to Simonetta, the starving Milanese were eventually reduced to eating not only dogs and cats but even rats and other things ‘disgusting and repugnant to humankind.’ ” (translator's note 101 on p. 310).

Duke Visconti had been involved in frequent wars, especially against the Venetians, and these same wars also plagued the short-lived Ambrosian Republic. They engaged the services of Francesco Sforza, a condottiere who had already served under the late duke (and was in fact married to the duke's illegitimate daughter, Bianca Visconti; Life of Visconti, §27, 38.3). They soon found themselves depending so much on Sforza that it was hard to resist his claims that he should become the next duke, and the republic's fate was finally sealed when he betrayed them by switching over to the Venetian side. Sforza became the new duke in 1450.*

[*In fact it seems that his title was a matter of some dispute. The Visconti family had obtained the title from the Holy Roman Emperor in the time of Gian Galeazzo, Filippo Maria's father (Life, §4, and n. 11 on p. 273), and that title was supposed to have become extinct with their line; and Francesco Sforza never managed to obtain an equivalent title from the then emperor.]

Decembrio spent the first few years of the Sforza rule in Rome (pp. xxviii–xxix) and was never able to gain as much influence in Milan under Sforza as he had had under Visconti. His biography of Sforza was an effort to suck up to the new duke, but with very limited success (p. xli). Apparently it is also rather inaccurate, as Decembrio didn't have much first-hand knowledge of the new duke, and the Sforza government ignored his requests for more information that would have been of use to him in writing the book (p. xli).

Life of Filippo Maria Visconti

As mentioned above, Decembrio's biography follows the examples of Suetonius, though it is perhaps a bit longer than Suetonius' biographies of the emperors are on average. It is not arranged strictly chronologically, as biographies often are, but thematically, with sections about the duke's ancestors, his warfare and foreign policy, his domestic policies, his personality and pastimes (e.g. playing with tarot cards; §61.1 and n. 119 on p. 289), etc. There's a chapter about his favourite dishes, but none of them struck me as particularly appetizing (§52).

It is the earlier part of the duke's career that struck me as the most impressive; although the Visconti family had been rulers of Milan for several generations by then, they lost control over much of their territories during the reign of the duke's elder brother, and he spent much of his early career trying to recover these lost territories. He was keen on military matters, but later in life got so fat that he couldn't even ride a horse (§49.2) :))

Despite his long and close association with the duke, Decembrio is not afraid to say unflattering things about him, but he manages to do this in a matter-of-fact manner that comes across as objective and not overly judgemental. Perhaps he felt that many of the bad things the duke had done were simply things that a suitably Machiavellian ruler had to do in order to keep himself in power. Besides, as he says in his letter to Leonello d'Este, to whom he sent a manuscript of the biography, his aim was not “to cover my prince with opprobrium, but to spread his fame and glory”; but for this to work, the book had to be credible, and this meant also honestly describing his negative side (p. 253).

Visconti appears to have been a very unpleasant and paranoid character, treating his wives badly (§39), spying upon his citizens (§55.2), distrusting even his closest advisors (“Filippo Maria was a man so tormented by suspicion that he hardly trusted even himself” — The Deeds of Francesco Sforza, 30.2), constantly playing mind-games upon them, deliberately behaving in an unpredictable, threatening and confusing manner, and doing everything he could to make sure nobody could ever feel comfortable around him. He liked to surround himself with “well-endowed young men of great beauty” (§46.1), and when they grew too old for him, he made them his favourite confidants and spies (§46.2).

Sometimes there was method to his madness: “His technique was to appoint honest men of great learning and then give them vile and morally corrupt colleagues. He did this in order to prevent the former from gaining influence by exploiting their righteousness, and the latter from doing so by resorting to treachery.” (§34.1).

And sometimes there was just plain madness. He forbade people from entering the palace in dark-coloured clothing (§48.1, 51.1). He “disciplined horses that neighed too much (and at the wrong times) by having their tongues or their testicles cut off” (§59.3).

Overall his paranoid style of rulership reminded me of what one usually hears about mafia bosses — no matter how powerful the boss is, he doesn't have a moment's peace, but must constantly stay on the alert for possible threats, either from the law, from his rivals, or from his own minions who might be seeking to overthrow him at any moment. That Visconti, who in theory at least was the legitimate ruler of Milan, had to resort to the same degree of paranoia, suggests to me that there was in a certain sense something fundamentally illegitimate about his rule. But then I think this is true about any monarchy in which the ruler is not a mere figurehead, and Visconti seems to have been just another in a long line of examples demonstrating what a bad mode of government monarchy is.

The Deeds of Francesco Sforza

This biography is somewhat shorter than the previous one and, as the title suggests, it focuses more on Sforza's activities as a ruler and less on other aspects of his life and personality — a notable contrast with Decembrio's biography of Visconti (or Suetonius's biographies of the caesars, for that matter). I guess this is partly because Decembrio was not that well informed about the private side of Sforza's life, and partly his aim was to ingratiate himself with the Sforza regime by praising Sforza as a ruler, so that's what he focused on.

Whatever the reason, the result is that I found this biography a good deal less interesting to read than the Visconti biography. Sforza's career comes across as mostly a long series of wars and battles, which for me are one of the most boring things about the history of Renaissance Italy. Decembrio makes use of this opportunity to kiss Sforza's ass in truly outrageous fashion, comparing his abilities as a general to those of Alexander the Great (§2) and Julius Caesar (§20.2).

But I liked the early sections, which go into a fair amount of detail about Sforza's ancestry, especially the career of his father, Muzio Attendolo, who was a noted condottiere in his own right and whose efforts provided Francesco with a starting point without which he probably wouldn't have been able to become the ruler of Milan. It was with Muzio that the surname Sforza originated, as a nickname inspired by “his aggressive battle tactics” (n. 4 on p. 296).

Another interesting thing about reading this biography were the numerous notes by the translator pointing out Decembrio's errors, some of which are honest mistakes due to his being poorly informed, while some are deliberate distortions in an effort to show Sforza in the best possible light (see e.g. notes 40, 45, 48, 60, 86).

*

All in all, this was a fairly interesting book. When you read about the Renaissance in Italy, it seems to usually be about Florence, and then sometimes perhaps Rome or Venice, but not so often about Milan, so from that point of view it was nice to see something new here. Visconti and Sforza, who had been little more than names to me before I read this book, are now a tiny bit more than names, though I don't doubt I'll forget most of the details again very soon anyway.

ToRead: an interesting book is mentioned in the translator's notes (n. 109, p. 311): Anthony F. D'Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Harvard UP, 2016). Considering that most of my experience of Malatesta so far comes from Pius II badmouthing him regularly in every book of his autobiography, it might be interesting to read something more sober about him :)

BOOK: Giovanni Pontano, "The Virtues and Vices of Speech"

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: The Virtues and Vices of Speech. Edited and translated by G. W. Pigman III. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 87. Harvard University Press, 2019. 9780674987500. xxxvii + 497 pp.

When I saw the title of this book, I wasn't quite sure what to expect; and now, having read it, I'm still not quite sure what (or whom) exactly it's supposed to be good for. I guess I was naive in hoping for something a little more practical, good rhetorical techniques or something like that. Instead, Pontano mostly stays on the level of vague generalizations and spends a great deal of time saying things which, in retrospect at least, seem blindingly obvious and (therefore) quite useless.

On the subject of virtues and vices, he is keen on the idea famously promoted by Aristotle, namely that a virtue is a mean between two extremes, which are vices. For example, if you always (pretend to) agree with your interlocutor, that makes you a yes-man and a sycophant, which is a vice; if you never agree with your interlocutor, you're being contentious and trying to pick a quarrel, which is also a vice; what is virtuous is to be at the mean between these two extremes, and agree or disagree with your interlocutor as appropriate.

You can of course apply this same line of thinking along many different axes and always come up with a virtue and two opposing vices. Another example: speaking too little is a vice (taciturnity), speaking too much is also a vice (loquaciousness), somewhere between them is a virtuous mean. Pontano spends about half of the present volume (books 1 and 2) doing this sort of things with all the zeal of a 19th-century entomologist, giving names to all the resulting virtues and vices (the rich vocabulary of Latin serves him well here, occasionally he ventures to coin a new (neo-)Latin word, and once or twice he has to admit that the virtue he's talking about has no suitable name, which however doesn't stop him from continuing to talk about it), sometimes subdividing one of them into several sub-types, and then writing a page or two about each of them: this is what liars are like, this is what dissimulators are like, this is what flatterers are like, etc., etc., et-bloody-neverending-c. (“Book two, chapter eight: on the four classes of ostentatious men.”)

You might say that speaking to excess is bad, period, but Pontano treats us to separate chapters on the verbose (1.19), the loquacious (1.20) and the triflers (1.21), as if describing these fine differences and giving them names really helps anyone in any way. I wonder if any trifler was ever cured of his vice after reading the section dedicated to it in Pontano's book. I did, however, learn one or two useful things from all this entomologizing; for example, he makes an interesting distinction between simulation and dissimulation: “we simulate things that are in no way true, that we ourselves have neither done nor said [. . .] we dissimulate things that have in fact been said or done, just as if they were not said or done” (2.7.5).

Pontano's ideal in describing these various virtues and vices is the sort of conversation that one imagines in connection with educated, urbane and presumably rather well-off people (Pontano himself moved in some pretty high circles while working for the king of Naples, after all); elegant, charming, and careful not to offend. Pleasant and affable conversation, he believes, restores a person's spirits after a day full of cares and labours. Cheap jokes and rustic buffoonery get no praise from him. He summarizes his ideal in one word: wittiness (facetitas;* 1.12.8–10), and this is what the second half of the work (books 3–6) is mostly about.

[*This was also new and interesting to me: in English, facetious usually means flippant, treating serious things with inappropriate levity, but it seems that in Latin its sense was wider and not so negative.]

I suppose his ideal type of witty conversation has its uses, but it mostly just leaves me bored. Occasionally (e.g. 4.3, 4.11, 5.2, 6.2 — a few long chapters) he quotes examples of what he regards as witty remarks and anecdotes, some about his own contemporaries (a few from his own family: 5.2.41, 5.2.45–48, 5.4, 6.4.15), many taken from ancient literature (especially Plautus' comedies), but they hardly ever moved me to smile, and never to laugh. I guess I need stronger stuff than that — but then who wouldn't, after a couple decades of wallowing in all the vilest muck that the internet has to offer?

But I shouldn't sound too critical of Pontano. He chose a difficult subject. I don't think you can simply teach someone to be witty; there must be some kind of talent involved — though perhaps Pontano would disagree with that: after all, it is or was generally believed that the art of rhetoric, unlike that of poetry, can be taught and learned, and he might say that his ideal of wit is much closer to rhetoric than to poetry in terms of what it requires from the person who practices it. In any case, he makes a very decent effort; after stating some (supposedly) witty anecdote, he usually tries to give a brief explanation of what makes it work — or, to use his phrasing, what “place” it comes from (apparently “place” — Greek topos, Latin locus — was a technical term in rhetoric); and I am not one of those people who think that analyzing a joke stops it from being funny; but still, after reading his explanations, I generally felt none the wiser as to how I would go about using them to come up with witty remarks in my own life. But then, that is more likely due to my own lack of wit than due to his explanations being bad.

Miscellaneous

I was interested to see that the original Latin title of this work is De sermone, meaning “on conversation” or “on speech” (n. 11 on p. xxiv). Clearly this word is the source of the English word sermon, but its meaning must have been narrowed down at some point during the borrowing.

Some good news on a semi-related note: we've had a volume of Pontano's dialogues in the ITRL a while ago, in 2012 (see my post about it), and I was wondering when the next volumes would finally appear; well, it appears that they will be ready soon (“in press”, n. 11 on p. xxiv). In fact I now see that they are now also mentioned on the HUP website as due to appear in September this year (vol. 2, 3).

There's a funny anecdote about a man who was addicted to lawsuits; upon being asked how they were going, “he replied that they were going well [. . .] but that he was dragging out two or three because otherwise he would waste away in leisure” (1.18.4) :))

The famous line about man being wolf to man is apparently from Plautus; Pontano quotes it in 2.12.3 here, in the form “Man is a wolf and not a man to man”. According to the translator's note, it is from the Asinaria, line 495.

Pontano mentions the well-known observation that truth hides at the bottom of a well (2.14.4) and attributes it to Democritus. (According to translator's note 35 on pp. 442–3, Democritus said that “truth is in the depths” and the well only appears in later authors, such as Lactantius and Isidore of Seville.) I was mostly familiar with this observation because of Gérôme's beautiful painting, Truth Coming Out of Her Well (and see also what happens next).

A nice pun from 3.17.15: Alfonso, king of Naples, who was very fond of dogs and hunting, asked Antonio Panormita whether someone in Naples had “published something on the nature of dogs”; Panormita recommended to him a certain gentleman as an expert on dogs, since “for over forty years he has kept such company with this kind of animal that even at night he has slept with a little bitch [canicula]” :)))