Sutcliffe, Pam the Fiddler

The Pennines of Pam the Fiddler

Halliwell Sutcliffe

Pam the Fiddler, London, T. Werner Laurie, nd, [1910]

Pam the Fiddler is one of the most controversial of Sutcliffe’s historical novels and is a useful test-case to show what a historical novel can look like if it is guided by romance rather than realism.    Where Phyllis Bentley’s historical fiction retains her social realist interest in economics, Pam the Fiddler has no interest in the economy of Yorkshire at the time of the Rebellion of the Northern Earls (1569).  History is shaped into Historical Romance in which Mary Queen of Scots is Queen of Hearts and the chivalric focus of those wishing to restore the Catholic faith.  That such an idea could be considered entertaining by 1910 is an interesting sign of the times.  The legalisation of Catholicism in Britain had a long and troubled history throughout the 19th century, which met with much resistance; indeed the final instalment of readmission, the Universities Tests Act which allowed Catholics into British universities, had been passed in 1871, only 39 years before Pam the Fiddler was published: https://www.britannica.com/event/Catholic-Emancipation  

Inadvertently Sutcliffe’s attitude to Catholicism places him at a significant distance from Charlotte Bronte, whose Shirley provides the pattern for Sutcliffe’s Industrial Revolution novels.  In Villette Charlotte seems to address readers personally when Lucy explains why she has rejected the invitation of the Catholic priest who has sympathised with her loneliness and depression in Villette.   She rejects his invitation to come to his house: ‘Did I, do you suppose, reader, contemplate venturing again within that worthy priest’s reach?  As soon should I have thought of walking into a Babylonish furnace,’ (Villette, Harmondsworth, Penguin, Chp 15p235).  As late as 1853, Charlotte, daughter of a Church of England parson, thinks it appropriate to evoke ‘Babylon’, which has New Testament implications of the last days of Revelation as well as Old Testament denotations of persecution.  Following these inferences presents the Catholic church as a sinister, conspiratorial organisation, whose return to the UK could provoke Armageddon.

Indeed, from the 16th to 18th centuries the threat of the return of Catholicism or a Catholic ruler provoked violent conflict.  Parliamentary forces in the Civil War claimed that Charles I’s Catholic Queen was scheming to impose Catholicism on Britain.  The Catholic James II was tolerated until he produced an heir.  This led to a generation of armed struggle against himself and his son Charles, ranging from James’ invasion of Ireland in in 1689 to the two Jacobite uprisings supporting ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ in 1715 and 1745.  I spell this out at length because Sutcliffe’s Pam the Fiddler, despite its historical setting, has no similar historical perspective.   That a 1569 pro-Catholic rebellion will plunge England, if not Britain into a violent civil war, anticipating that fought against Charles I, does not seem to occur to any of the characters or the author.    Sutcliffe is content to present a text in which the most admired characters are those who refuse to compromise and treasure Catholicism as representing the true faith.  Pam the Fiddler idolises Bolton Priory and ‘the good days’ when ‘the walls were roofed and folk went to Mass there,’ (Chp 1, p11).  Bolton Priory is an odd example to choose in so far as the west end of the Priory church was converted into a parish church dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert

http://www.boltonpriory.org.uk/the-priory-in-history/

 in the same way as Bridlington Priory became St Marys http://www.christianityandculture.org.uk/partnerships/micklegate-priory-revealed

 and York Priory became Holy Trinity, Micklegate   http://www.christianityandculture.org.uk/partnerships/micklegate-priory-revealed

Easby Abbey, stripped of assets druing Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541)

and afterwards allowed to decay into ruin.

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Dissolution-of-the-Monasteries/

Skipton Market Place

Despite being at the gates of their enemy's stronghold, Skipton Castle, the Norton stage a daring rescue here.

Richard Norton saves his son Christopher from being hanged in the market-square by their Protestants rivals the Cliffords (Chap XIV).

‘Zealous’ is a word accepted unchallenged, without noting its connection with ‘zealot’.    To an anti-Puritan writer like the 17th century playwright Ben Johnson ‘zeal’ is a word used to mean fanatic; a word he associates with radical Puritans.   In Sutcliffe’s version of English history Queen Elizabeth is not a woman presiding over the creation of a Church of England that offered compromise.    The Elizabethan Church of England contained measured ritual, such as priestly vestments and a sacred altar, to appeal to moderate Catholics and sermons and an English translation of the Bible to appeal to moderate Protestants.    Sutcliffe’s Elizabeth appears uninterested in such things.   She is not a woman trying desperately to reconcile her nation to the religious and economic changes that have divided it since the days of Henry VIII.    She is simply part flirt and part politician: ‘loving policy more even than she loved masterfulness’ (Chp XI p167).  She is capable of holding personal grudges above national politics, harbouring ‘a long resentment’ against Catholic families like the Nortons (Chp XI p167).   By contrast Sutcliffe plays down Mary Queen of Scot’s disastrous choice of political and sexual partners.   Mary is, literally, a queen to die for.   ‘If all’s lost –it was my fault – and if all’s won back – I will make you reparation,’ (Chp VIII p115) she tells her rescuer Kit as he prepares to fight overwhelming odds. 

Rystone Manor, the home of the Norton family.  

The present building looks more cosy than the building described by Sutcliffe.  At the north end of the village is a large fishpond that might have been associated with a medieval manor.

Fishpond

This is first shown in Chapter VIII ‘The Bridge Fight’ where Kit and Matthew defend a bridge against pursuers.  Like Stormtroopers in Star Wars, the enemy obligingly offer themselves up for slaughter until Kit and his side-kick Matthew have killed eleven of their attackers and allow two to escape.  The text does not seem to be concerned that this is an action in which neighbours are killing each other; Englishmen are killing other Englishmen and the implication is that if eleven Protestants have to die for every true Catholic it is a price worth paying for restoring the True Faith.  By contrast the first three parts of Phyllis Bentley’s Take Courage have shown the reluctance of England to go to war and the text is narrated by a woman appalled at living in ‘times very troublous and perplexed’ (‘Penninah Remembers’), a woman who constantly reminds readers of the human cost of conflict.   Where Lister spends the later chapters of Take Courage repenting the battle fury that leads him to kill a man attempting to surrender (IV.3), Kit is simply ‘filled with a still sort of wonder’ (Chp VIII p125) after he has helped kill eleven men.    Queen Mary is equally unworried about the cost of her freedom and knights Kit with the sword that has shattered during the fight, a sword with a ‘soiled, broken blade,’ (Chp VIII p125).  The word ‘soiled’ rather than ‘bloodied’ makes the killing of Scrope’s men resemble waste-disposal rather than killing.     

It seems almost churlish to interrupt Sutcliffe’s high romance by pointing out that Mary was not violently rescued from Bolton Castle and violently recaptured.   As the Mary Stuart website explains:  ‘Knollys worried himself constantly over Mary's possible escape but Mary, choosing to see herself as a guest rather than captive, made no such attempt during that time,’ http://www.marie-stuart.co.uk/Castles/Bolton3.htm  It was Sir Francis Knollys not Lord Scrope, as in Sutcliffe, who was her custodian in Bolton Castle.    

Bolton Castle

If the building had not been slighted (partially destroyed) by Parliamnetary besiegers in 1645,

 it would have survived intact to the modern day.

The story of Mary’s escape from Bolton Castle seems to be based on a folk tale that Mary briefly escaped from her captors and reached Leyburn only for her shawl to get caught in trees allowing her to be recaptured.   The place has been called ‘Leyburn Shawl’ ever since.    The story represents both escape and recapture as being without the spectacular violence Sutcliffe offers.   This site profess reluctance to believe a less romantic explanation of the word ‘Shawl’ /www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/10015731.shawl-tales-of-queen-marys-escape/

Nevertheless, as it admits, the word ‘shawl’ probably refers to a screen of trees or a shepherd’s hut rather than a garment.  An alternative explanation that this was where Mary loved to walk because she could look towards Scotland seems unlikely as the views are all to the south or west.

Penhill from Leyburn Shawl

As might be expected from the author of the Striding Dales the routes to and from Bolton Castle are accurately described but fiction is employed closer to home.   Waterfall Gill is renamed ‘Waterford Ghyll’ and made into a frontier between the embattled Catholics of Rylstone Manor and the Protestant Cliffords of Skipton Castle.

Waterfall Gill

Norton Tower, which exists, has been promoted from a watchtower into a ‘peel-tower’ matched by an entirely fictitious Clifford Tower ‘not a mile away on the edge of the high moors,’ (Cp III p37).  Despite ‘these two peels, each built on the like, four-square model’ (Cp III p37), presumably manned by look-outs, Emily Norton has no difficulty conducting a romance with the younger Clifford.  The Romeo-and-Juliet intimations of the love affair peter out as family loyalty and religion prove more important to Emily and Clifford.  The families are not brought together at the end by the tragedy or triumph of the young people’s love.  Emily and Clifford do not unite and the Norton family remain defiant rebels.  

Norton Tower.

It is a thin-walled single tower unlike the thick-walled ‘four-square model’ of Bolton Castle

Norton Tower is an enigmatic structure.   The size of its rooms, judging from the surviving lower floor, look too small for sustained domestic use.   Its walls are thin, which does not suggest that defence was a priority.  It is well sited for overlooking the valley but not the heights.   P Dixon points out that the tower’s hill site has the remains of a more substantial wall and ditch (Archaeological Journal, vol 136 (1979), pp240-252).  The book that cites this reference (Maurice Turner Yorkshire Castles, Ilkley, Westbury, 2004) considers the tower to be entirely separate from this earlier feature.  Turner reports a ‘local tradition’ that the tower was built ‘purely for recreation after the medieval period’.  This tradition questions the closely-knit family shown by Sutcliffe; it claims that the tower was a ‘retreat’ for ‘Richard Norton’  ‘from his seven daughters and eleven sons’ (Turner, pps198-9). 

Norton Tower, room size.

This closer look at Norton Tower reveals how creative Sutcliffe's imagination was and how quickly it departed from historical fact.

He builds up Norton Tower and imagines a rival fortification opposing it like a pair of Bolton Castles.  

Although Pam the Fiddler takes no part in the fighting he is the lynch pin of the text.  He unites the world of the spirit, represented by the priest Father Cyprian and the world of action, represented by Kit and Matthew.   He does this through his music.  The word ‘fiddler’ usually refers to the use of the violin to play traditional dance-tunes or recreational music mostly deriving from oral transmission.   In the case of Pam ‘fiddler’ is a misnomer.   Pam is a Debussy-like violinist who lives on the moors above Rylstone and plays anachronistic Impressionist-Romantic evocations of war and scenery: ‘His fiddle spoke of drought across the uplands, of weary biding for the rain that would not come, of brown pastures and of brooks run dry between their bare, hot beds of stone,’ (Chp 1 p14).  His music has a Svengali like power over men and he can deflect Matthew from an inn to ‘slake’ his thirst at a ‘well-spring’ (Chp 1 p6).   Like a true Romantic he is as much a conduit as a composer.    He claims it is his ‘fiddle sounds the music – she’s more wit than I have,’ (Chp 1 p9), in other words his fiddle detects and responds to the spirit of the time.   He is wedded to his muse, regarding his fiddle: ‘as if it were the wife of his old age,’ (Chp 1 p9).  The implication is that his music, even tunes encapsulating ‘all the din and speed of battle’ (Chp 1 p16), harmonise with the ‘deep, majestic beauty’ (Chp1 p11) once produced by the Catholic priories.

The Moors above Rylestone in days of ‘drought across the uplands’ (April 30 2019)

In himself he epitomises the vagueness about economics that dominates the book.  He lives up amidst the heather of Padmire on Rylstone Fell to the east of Rylstone.   Perhaps his cottage is supposed to be a small-holding but peat soil does not encourage the growing of vegetables.   His playing is applauded but never rewarded; readers never see Pam paid for any tune or perform at a social gathering, let alone professionally.   The economics of the novel are equally vague.  The cost and means of restoring the money and land stripped from the Catholic Church during the Dissolution of the Monasteries concerns neither Pam not Sutcliffe.    In Pam’s ‘Magical Realist’ version of history the restoration of a Catholic monarch will automatically restore the priories and monasteries of Catholic Britain.   This exercise in pure idealism is unaffected by Sutcliffe’s hindsight.  He does not explore the way in which tensions between Catholic and Protestant contributed to or were the main cause of the Civil Wars in Britain and the Thirty Years War on the continent.    To be fair to Sutcliffe Marxist historians and Marxist dramatists have found it equally hard to ascribe solid economic reasons for the emergence and duration of the Thirty Year’s War.   Joseph Polisensky’s The Thirty Years War (1970) does its best to locate the origins of the war in the conflict between capitalism and a ‘dying feudalism’.   However, these stresses were felt throughout Europe and do not explain why some states should remain Catholic and some become Protestant in the face of these economic pressures or why this should have produced such a long lasting war that the participants were content to see as being inspired by religious idealism.  Berthoud Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1939) reduces economics to showing how one woman attempts to profit from the conflict.  Her opportunism cannot be projected as a model of emergent capitalism or as an explanation of the origins of the war.   Nevertheless, these texts pay attention to the economic troubles of the time and the devastation war brings which Sutcliffe refuses to do.  He prefers readers to take away an impression of Pam, sustained in a wilderness even more miraculously than Elijah, cleaving to the old faith, embodying and enlivening the bleak moors with his violin.

What the Ordnance Survey calls ‘Yethersgill Head or Padmire’.

Sutcliffe opts for the shorter name.    Padmire's bleak lack of fertility and small-holdings is evident in a photograph taken at the start of spring (April 30 2019).