Sir Nigel: A Novel of the Hundred Years' War (Dover Literature: Historical Fiction)

By the 1890s, historical fiction had long been a fashionable form of writing. Sir Walter Scott initiated this relatively old type of novel with the publication of ''Ivanhoe'' in 1809. He inspired another generation of writers to combine historical fact with ''the novel romance'', and create a wider sphere of fiction to last until the present day. Of the history-loving pupils of Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas is probably the best known; Arthur C. Doyle, however, is very little remembered, primarily because of the notoriety of his Sherlock Holmes novels. Yet these mystery stories were much more lightly esteemed by their own author than what he called ''the most satisfying and ambitious thing I have ever done'', or ''Sir Nigel''. In an 1889 lecture on medieval times, Doyle was inspired to read over one hundred volumes about Edward III and the early Hundred Years War. To present such a broad subject in a fictitious form, Doyle wrote ''The White Company'' and ''Sir Nigel''. Though in his own opinion he knew as much about the reign of Edward III as any specialist historian, ''Sir Nigel'' is quite erroneous in some historical respects, including a serious discrepancy in the time order of the Great Schism, a grave mistake in the arrival of the Bubonic Plague or Black Death in England, and a few other errors in the details of the Breton Campaign of 1356.Perhaps his understanding of 14th century France and England contributed to the pathetic combination of his own romantic and over-chivalrous elements with the brutality of history, a mistake which he himself confessed as being possible. When I ordered this book from Amazon, I had anticipated an imitation of the classic perfection of Scott's historical fiction; for I thought it would truly complete the ''Waverly Novels'' if he had actually written one against the background of the Hundred Years War, something which I could only regret that Walter Scott had never thought of doing. However, Doyle's skill lay in presenting to his audience past events in the manner they took place, and where Scott could transform the bare facts of history into a lively, absorbing scene, ''Sir Nigel" is quite a poor comparison. The scene in his book when King John II of France rallies his men before the Battle of Poitiers, though filled with all the elements of action, history, and heroism with which readers then and today will lose themselves, contains something too standard and historical to make it a novel chapter in the history of historical fiction. For example, five hundred years earlier, Froissart described the eve of Poitiers in Book 1 of his ''Chronicles'', and its somewhat fantastical style is nearly exactly repeated by Doyle. I do not mean that ''Sir Nigel'' was a failure, but that it bears the marks of inexperience in the category of historical fiction (for Doyle was excellent in the mystery and science fiction category). Although these indeed are all my opinions, still ''Sir Nigel'' is a book worth space on anybody's shelf. It is completely independent of its companion piece, ''The White Company'', though this would be better read before the latter. And it deserves to belong to the ''classics'' in many senses of the word.

I have just started reading the book, so the five stars may not prove to be justified, but I am so pleased with the presentation of the book in contrast with the amateurish, difficult-to-read volume I purchased alongside it, The White Company, which earned one star from me. This Dover edition is carefully and professionally type-set, contains the illustrations from the 1906 edition, has high-resolution cover art like a normal book, and includes full publishing information. Amazon's featured paperback edition of The White Company has none of these and looks like a print-on-demand version of the Kindle version. I purchased the Kindle complete writings of Arthur Conan Doyle a long time ago and was seeking a real book to read and keep on my bookshelf, not a cheapo printout that I could have done for myself with a home printer. The Dover Sir Nigel has an attractive font, large enough to read comfortably, with margins that don't force you to give up at the end of the line or bend the book back on its spine to make out the last or first few words of the line. It includes the original preface by Arthur Conan Doyle explaining his use of modern English spiced with a few archaisms instead of attempting to write in Middle English. Each chapter begins on a new page instead of running on from the previous chapter on the same page with A TITLE ALL IN UPPER CASE, as you will find if you are unlucky enough to end up with an Amazon rip-off printout.

I must be losing my taste for things medieval. As a boy I had always enjoyed tales of knights and adventure. Indeed I just about grew up on the stuff. Discovering Arthur Conan Doyle late in life through his Sherlock Holmes tales (I had never been a great fan of detective stories!) thanks to the BBC television series ( The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Boxed Set Collection) )with Jeremy Brett as the inimitable detective, I was fascinated to learn that Conan Doyle was also the author of two historical romances,  The White Company  and Sir Nigel, both set in the high Middle Ages during the Hundred Years War between England and France -- a war for the territories that would ultimately become the modern state of France. Of course the English nobility and, especially, its royal house traced their descent from the French-speaking Normans and their French allies and so both sides shared a common heritage. Indeed, as Conan Doyle makes clear in one preface to the book, the nobility on both sides spoke French and shared a common set of mores and traditions.I guess it's those traditions that made the book so tiresome for me though. Certainly it's true that a tradition of chivalrous knight errantry became enshrined in medieval French and English literature, rooted perhaps in the Christian gloss that had been spread by medieval clerics over the old Germanic warrior culture out of which the English and French peoples arose. In such guise, knights are portrayed as forever concerned for honor and their ladies, and when they fight it's not for anything as mundane as power or land or wealth, but for honor and fame, always. This is a strange and distant echo of the old warrior ethos found in works as diverse as the  The Iliad (Penguin Classics)  or the old Icelandic  Njal's Saga (Penguin Classics) . In these works, too, honor and fame are admired and portrayed as the underlying forces that prompt men to hazard their lives in trying to take the lives of others on the bloody field of war. But the impulses of acquisition, of ordinary human greed for gain, are not so readily forgotten or dismissed in these as they came to be in the later tradition of European chivalry.Conan Doyle clearly wrote this tale in that tradition and, as such, he is at great pains to write in a tone and voice that seek to emulate the late medieval uplifting of the warrior's goals to an otherworldly character. Unfortunately it delivers a rather tiresome story about some rather irksome and predictable players. Young Nigel Loring, himself, is the epitome of this. A near penniless squire of an old knightly family fallen on hard times, our hero lives quietly with his grandmother in what remains of his ancient family estate, their household teetering on extinction as a conflict with the local monastery gathers steam, the greedy monks keen to grab the last vestiges of Loring land. Young Nigel, himself, is too noble a fellow to sully himself by trying to outthink the monks. Rather he disregards them as beneath his notice, even as they conspire to yank from under him all that is left of his father's holdings. When a messenger arrives with a king's summons claiming the last of the Lorings' wealth for the Abbey, Nigel, of course, responds without a thought to the game that is (as Holmes might have said, and as one of the knights in this book actually does say at one point) a foot. Instead he boldly boots the fellow out on his rear and sets his servants on him.As one might imagine, this doesn't go well for him and Nigel is soon hauled before a church court to answer for his actions. But as is always to be the case with our undiscerning hero, luck will out and Nigel shortly finds himself honored by the king who just happens to be passing through. From luck to luck as it were and Nigel is soon inducted into the king's wars abroad in France, learning the arts of nobility first hand from other knights and squires who imagine themselves of better ("gentler") blood than other men. Worshipped by good simple folk who recognize their betters, "worshipfully seeking worship" by crossing his sword and spear with, and trying to kill, other men of "gentle" blood like himself, the stubbornly proud and remarkably dense young Nigel earns himself a suit of armor to go with the magnificent warhorse he had earlier unwittingly gained as he proceeds to follow his king, and a knight who takes him on as squire, to war.In a series of pieces that take them to Calais and deeper into France, Nigel manages to send back the humble yet spiritual messages he has promised his lady as, one by one, he continues to play his part in the battles and confrontations he finds himself in.Meanwhile we meet innumerable knights who, like Nigel himself, are introduced via carefully catalogued pedigrees, reports of their knightly colors and insignia and, of course, their manifold remarkable deeds. (Here we find echoes of the Iliad -- though such formal cataloging in an archaic poem has a certain quaintness and interest that is somehow lost in a nineteenth or early twentieth century opus. And yet one can almost see how the echoes of an English classical education worked to inform the nineteenth century British mind as it blossomed in the Victorian age.)Our noble Nigel, of course, is always quick to take offense or, under suitable circumstances, land a blow, without thought to the implications of his actions for himself and for many others. This, too, we are led to believe is part of the noble code which he was born to observe. More often saved than saving, young Nigel nevertheless earns his spurs and the sobriquet of "sir" in the final battle of the book and lives to carry his own final greeting in person back to his lady. (Of course he does, as this is a prequel to an earlier book in which he is the protagonist!)It may well be that the literature of the medieval period presented warriors in just this way, that is if they were the real thing, i.e., proper Christian knights and not mere commoners or those of noble blood who fell from such an exacting standard. But it strikes one as far-fetched, at the least, that real human beings living in violent societies, who were committed to blood and plunder, ever actually thought or acted according to such standards. More likely this was superimposed on the stories and traditions by clerics seeking to tame genuinely greedy and brutal men. It is in that literary tradition, of course, that Conan Doyle sought to compose his tales of historic chivalry and knightly adventure echoing the high-sounding refrains, the glorious language and codas of a later England and, certainly of the Romantic period that took hold in the Victorian Age. In keeping with the model he elected to follow, Conan Doyle's tale follows an episodic form, taking us from one seemingly self-contained adventure to the next within a broader and less tightly drawn frame and with little characterization or growth. Nigel at the end is just a little more experienced but no less the spiritual fool of a knight that he was at the beginning.As an example of this kind of writing, found also in the likes of William Morris ( The Well at the World's End: Volume I , The Sundering Flood ) who sought to emulate high medieval poetry and romance (see  Amadis of Gaul, Books I and II (Studies in Romance Languages) ), of H. Rider Haggard who did much the same with his Viking novel ( [Eric Brighteyes ... With Numerous Illustrations by Lancelot Speed. ]) and of Cervantes who mocked it all with his  Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) , this one by Conan Doyle seems pale by comparison. Young Nigel Loring is too thick and too naive, one is moved to think, to have actually succeeded as portrayed by Conan Doyle although he is also too lucky, which saps our capacity to care much about him while it papers over his other ill-conceived "virtues".I've read that Conan Doyle actually preferred his simpleminded creation, Sir Nigel, to his famous detective and if that is so, I must say I'm quite surprised. On the other hand, the judgement of readers in his time and afterwards seems to have overridden even that misbegotten authorial passion, for it is Holmes, the fascinatingly eccentric Victorian detective whose intuition masquerades as deduction, we mostly remember today of Conan Doyle's work. The bantam knight Nigel Loring, along with Professor Challenger, another of Conan Doyle's famous creations, remain also-rans to their more noble, and certainly more interesting, detective cousin.On the other hand it remains possible that I am just finally grown tired of the medieval ethos and my appreciation for Sir Nigel must suffer from the lateness of my discovery of it.Stuart W. Mirskyauthor of  The King of Vinland's Saga

The 100 years war was a period when the longbow ensured mastery of the battlefield against armoured knights. Yet the knights of both England and France still held, supposedly, to the ideals of chivalry and courtley romance. A period of the 'plague' and a change in the status of the ordinary man.Would appeal to those who like historic novels and a touch of romance. A nostalgic view of a brutal period for France.

One of the author's finest novels.