Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter

By Stephanie Trigg

"It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."—HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Founded by Edward III in 1348, the Most Noble Order of the Garter is the highest chivalric honor among the gifts of the Queen of England and an institution that looks proudly back to its medieval origins. But what does the annual Garter procession of modern princes and politicians decked out in velvets and silks have to do with fourteenth-century institutions? And did the Order, in any event, actually originate in the wardrobe malfunction of the traditional story, when Edward held up his mistress's dropped garter for all to see and declared it to be a mark of honor rather than shame? Or is this tale of the Order's beginning nothing more than a vulgar myth?

With steady erudition and not infrequent irreverence, Stephanie Trigg ranges from medieval romance to Victorian caricature, from imperial politics to medievalism in contemporary culture, to write a strikingly original cultural history of the Order of the Garter. She explores the Order's attempts to reform and modernize itself, even as it holds onto an ambivalent relationship to its medieval past. She revisits those moments in British history when the Garter has taken on new or increased importance and explores a long tradition of amusement and embarrassment over its formal processions and elaborate costumes. Revisiting the myth of the dropped garter itself, she asks what it can tell us about our desire to seek the hidden sexual history behind so venerable an institution.

Grounded in archival detail and combining historical method with reception and cultural studies, Shame and Honor untangles 650 years of fact, fiction, ritual, and reinvention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780812206630

Book preview

Shame and Honor

SHAME AND HONOR

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A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter

STEPHANIE TRIGG

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trigg, Stephanie.

Shame and honor : a vulgar history of the Order of the Garter / Stephanie Trigg. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4391-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Order of the Garter—History. 2. Orders of knighthood and chivalry—Great Britain—History. I. Title.

CR4827.T75 2012

929.7’10941—dc23

2011044323

For Paul James and Joel Trigg

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Ritual Histories

Chapter 1. Ritual Theory and Medievalism

Chapter 2. Origins: Motto, Emblem, and Myth

Chapter 3. Histories: Love, Honor, and Medievalism

Part II. Ritual Practices

Chapter 4. Honor, Shame, and Degradation

Chapter 5. Ritual, Change, and Tradition

Chapter 6. Bodies, Clothes, and Medievalism

Part III. Ritual Modernities

Chapter 7. Royalty and Medievalism, Medieval to Postmodern

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

It’s a nice piece of pageantry which I think a lot of people enjoy. . . . Rationally it’s lunatic but in practice everyone enjoys it I think.

—HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in The Queen’s Castle

They wear trailing mantles of blue velvet lined with white silk, a red velvet hood pinned to the right shoulder with a red sash draped across the body, and a black velvet hat piled high with white ostrich feathers. On the left shoulder, their mantles are adorned with a large embroidered scutcheon featuring a red cross surrounded by a motto in gold letters. A white silk ribbon is tied in a bow on each shoulder, and a heavy enamel and gold chain is draped around the neck, weighted further with an enamel model of a knight slaying a dragon. A long golden cord with large tassels is tied and looped so that one end sits lower than the other, as it has done since the fourteenth century. Underneath this elaborate costume, they wear a gray suit, or a long white dress. This is the modern medievalism of the Most Noble Order of the Garter in the twenty-first century (figure 1).

As the members of the Order of the Garter move slowly down the hill from the keep at Windsor Castle to St. George’s Chapel they are accompanied by the cheers and applause of the crowd on either side, the music of military bands, and the click of cameras. The procession is led by the military knights of Windsor and the officers of arms; it moves slowly, in deference to both the crowds and the age of some of its members. Several, indeed, have already been driven down the hill. When the Garter Companions appear, the newest members come first, and the last to pass by is the Queen, the train of her mantle held by two young pages. The long parade winds into the south side of the chapel, and the crowd settles down on the grass to listen to a broadcast of the service, following along with the help of the printed glossy guide. The sound quality is terrible. After an hour or so, there is more movement. The procession leaves the chapel down the broad steps on the west side, and the members climb into cars or open carriages for the trip up the hill. Women in elaborate hats and dresses and men in morning suits emerge from the chapel, enjoying their turn to be the object of the gaze of tourists, royalists, and photographers. An academic observer (and amateur photographer) is also there to observe the procession. The crowds on the lawns are all dressed rather more practically, wearing comfortable shoes and standing amid the clutter of folding chairs and picnic lunches (figure 2).

Figure 1. Prince Andrew and Prince Edward in the Garter procession, 2009. Photographer Chris Jackson. © Getty Images.

The annual procession of the Order of the Garter is one of the principal events in the ritual year of the English monarchy. Like many examples of proud display and ritual practice in the royal calendar, the procession represents a symbolic inheritance from the Middle Ages. The Order was founded in the 1340s, and has a more or less continuous history of activity, though the Garter procession in its current form at Windsor Castle dates from a postwar revival in 1947. The robes and regalia worn by the Companions represent an accretion of styles from different centuries. Carrying the weight of medieval tradition, the procession provides an excellent opportunity for loyal subjects to feast on the visible accessibility of the royal family and the other members of this elite chivalric order. It offers a perfect blend of royal tourism, heritage culture, celebrity culture, and the magnificent costumes of medievalist dress-ups, yet Garter Day is a less familiar spectacle than the daily Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. In contrast to that daily fixture of London’s international tourist calendar, the annual procession at Windsor attracts a higher proportion of English visitors and dedicated royalists who demonstrate their affinity with the royal family and their comprehension of the day’s significance by ordering tickets in advance and making the hour-long train journey from Waterloo Station in London to Windsor. Lining the route, the crowds are players in the ritual performance, for a procession needs an audience in the way the changing of the guard does not. As they clap and cheer the familiar faces of the royal family and past prime ministers, and acknowledge the less familiar members of the Order, these visitors are also taking part in an act of medievalism, celebrating the modern ritual of the medieval Garter.

Apart from its ornate costume, one of the most striking things people remember about the Order of the Garter is its putative foundation myth. According to this story, the Order was founded by Edward III to honor an embarrassing occasion. The king is said to have been dancing with a lady, perhaps the Countess of Salisbury, when the garter holding up her stocking fell to the floor. As the courtiers laughed at her distress, the chivalrous or enamored king is said to have retrieved the garter and tied it around his own leg, declaring Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shamed be he who thinks evil of this or more proverbially, Evil be to him who evil thinks) and promising to found an order of knighthood in honor of the garter that would become so famous that all those now laughing would want to join it.

Figure 2. Guests at Garter service. Photo by the author.

This story of a medieval royal scandal about sex and underclothes has often been dismissed as a fantastic or romantic invention, but it has nevertheless given rise to a long and beloved tradition. Again and again, the venerable history of the Garter returns to this mythical moment of ritual disruption. There have been many attempts to displace this scandalous narrative with a series of more palatable explanations of the Order’s origins, but such attempts have been largely unsuccessful: there is something pleasant, even gratifying to the popular imagination and to the national mythology about finding a desiring royal body and an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction at the heart of one of the monarchy’s proudest rituals. Even when the Order’s official and apologetic historians dismiss this story as a romantic fiction, attempting to control the irreverent mythologies of popular medievalism, they are condemned to a similar logic as they repeat the story in order to transcend it. Like the king in the Garter myth, they seek to transform this trace of medieval frivolity into something nonmedieval, something that will endure without embarrassment into a future, modern temporality.

The Order of the Garter was established in the fourteenth century, but it resonates both backward and forward in time. Historical accounts of its foundation are contradictory, but all indicate a commemorative function of some kind, in memory of an event at Edward III’s court, Richard I’s crusading heroics, or Arthur’s Round Table. The Order also anticipates its own futurity, especially through its enigmatic motto. In its first, immediate setting, this little French text anticipates a querulous response to the English chivalric order, but it also knowingly generates centuries of puzzled speculation about its meaning. Those centuries of speculation, along with the transformations of the Order’s ritual forms, have the effect of destabilizing the medieval qualities of the Order, as it takes on a double life as a historical phenomenon and as an ongoing project of medievalism.

This book traces those cultural, symbolic, and narrative transformations. I have joined together a series of diachronic and thematic approaches to the long and varied traditions of the Order to compile a cultural history of this medieval institution and its survival into contemporary culture, long after the social and political forces that framed its formation have disappeared. It would be misleading in the extreme to suggest that modern chivalric orders now carry the same cultural, social, or political importance they did in the past: the contemporary dynamics of shame and honor, for example, are almost unrecognizable from medieval and early modern codes. But it is precisely because this Order, with a more or less continuous history from the 1340s to the present, has had to make so many accommodations with its medieval origins that it poses such an intriguing set of questions and problems about the afterlife of the medieval in postmedieval culture.

A repeated theme of Shame and Honor will be the necessary tensions between the Order’s periodic appeals to its medieval foundations, on the one hand, and its insistence, on the other, that it can update itself and remain responsive to the ever-changing imperatives of modernity. Much of the Order’s official discourse is careful to position it between these two poles. There is also a significant strand of laughter, or a sense of the ridiculous, that threads through the Garter’s history from the foundational myth right through to contemporary meditations on its practices.

A recent television documentary offers a characteristic moment. The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, as Ranger of Windsor Great Park, is our host and guide over the vast estates and elaborate interiors of the castle. Much of the second part of the three-part series is concerned with the preparations for the annual feast, procession, and service in St. George’s Chapel for the Order of the Garter, and the duke comments casually on the festivities, It’s a nice piece of pageantry which I think a lot of people enjoy. . . . Rationally it’s lunatic but in practice everyone enjoys it I think. His remarks are typical of the low-key, chatty style of his commentary throughout the program, but they draw loosely on a long tradition and a powerful structure of thought and feeling about the Order of the Garter and perhaps also about English eccentricity as part of the national character. Where Edward III’s motto boldly dares the casual observer to mock or find fault with royal practice, the Duke of Edinburgh expresses, in a more faltering way, a sense of the ridiculousness of the ritual, and a more superficial sentiment: popular enjoyment. The two men share a consciousness that the royal court can be seen as ridiculous, but they resolve that tension in different ways. The medieval king proudly forces a hierarchical division between insiders and outsiders, whereas the modern consort appeals tentatively to a much broader sense of a public audience on whose behalf he projects the enjoyment of spectacle.

At one level, the duke’s words seem refreshingly candid and surprisingly modern, and to this extent, give voice to one of the oppositions that structure this book. The medieval ritual of the Order of the Garter—and all that it represents for English heritage culture, historical tradition and royal tourism—is charismatic and intriguing in its remoteness from everyday reality; but by the same token, it also threatens to seem laughable. Along with other activities of the English royal family and the monarchy in general, it invites curiosity and tremulous interest, helping to sell millions of newspapers and attracting millions of visitors to Britain, visitors who in turn spend millions of pounds on royal tourism and royal souvenirs. Like many other royal ceremonies, the Order of the Garter is both a time-honored tradition and a media circus. No matter that the monarchy is regularly derided or dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary British culture and society: such ceremonies and processions are popular features of traditional English heritage and play an important role in the nation’s image and economy, both domestically and internationally.

As a member of the Order, and as a rational modern subject, the duke is perfectly able to keep these two views in comfortable suspension with each other. He seems to experience no personal contradiction or threat to his self-hood in dressing up in a long blue velvet robe and hat with flamboyant white ostrich feathers to parade from one part of his castle to another in front of thousands of royalist fans, to take part in a religious service that many believe commemorates a light-hearted exercise in fourteenth-century chivalric manners.

It is easy for an outsider to look dispassionately or critically at the elaborate forms of royal pageantry and find them lunatic or laughable. It is more surprising to find this attitude voiced by one of the most privileged players in such pageantry, although the duke’s insouciance is matched by his sense of the enduring popularity of the tradition. Similarly, another television program commemorating the Queen’s eightieth birthday in 2006 shows John Major, the former prime minister, being presented with his Garter star by the Queen in a private ceremony. I love the story, he says. Yes, it’s fun, isn’t it? she replies benignly, as she pins the star on his jacket.¹

The dualism voiced here—I love its importance, but I can see it is also ridiculous—is analogous to the logic of the fetish, in which the inanimate object both does and does not stand in for the absent body, generating its own rituals of desire. This logic is played out at several historical and cultural levels in the Garter’s traditions. In the Garter myth itself, the king’s desire and the possibility of heterosexual scandal are strategically transformed into an expression of the ideals of chivalric brotherhood. And in the long history of the Order, the story of the woman’s garter, while often dismissed as a trivial trace of medieval gossip, nevertheless enjoys great popularity, especially in England, as a powerful sign of the medieval past, reminding us of all that seems quaint or unfamiliar about the Middle Ages. At the same time, the Order of the Garter remains the rarest and most elevated sign of royal favor in the modern honors system, the greatest distinction a monarch can bestow, even if lesser awards to musicians, actors, and athletes receive greater coverage in the press. The distinctive regalia of the Order can function as fetish objects, too, either in their highly decorated form (spelling out the words of the Garter motto in hundreds of diamonds, for example) or in the increasingly rare sight of a ribbon or buckle tied below the knee over white court stockings. Similarly, the honor of belonging to such an order can quickly give way to a sense of the ridiculous or, at least, the irrelevantly archaic. The cultural and social history of the Order of the Garter cannot be written simply from within, then, as has often been the case. This is a tradition of ritual practice whose meaning has developed and changed over the centuries in constant dialogue between insiders and outsiders, through different layers and levels of understanding, interest, sympathy, or contempt.

The Order’s Companions may speak lightly of the Garter, as we have just seen, but they speak as insiders or initiates. By way of contrast, the Duke of Edinburgh’s comments are counterpointed in the same program by the far more reverential remarks of the Queen’s Master of Ceremonies, Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, who is responsible for making sure that the Garter procession at Windsor runs smoothly. He speaks of it as a magnificent and very ancient procession, full of really the most distinguished people in the country, one way and another. He is obviously less willing or able to express a sense of the Garter procession as lunatic. For such household officers, the pageant is coded much more firmly as work. The enjoyment of which the duke speaks is not experienced equally by everyone: it is the product of scrupulous and achingly detailed labor. In the same documentary, for example, Garrison Sergeant-Major Billy Mott checks that the heels of the guards lining the route are perfectly aligned with the curb, while the staff setting the table for the Garter feast take pains to position the olive oil for the Prince of Wales’s place setting, even as it disturbs the symmetry of the butter dishes for everyone else. This exception, the accommodation of personal preference in a highly regimented and ritualized celebration, is willingly incorporated into the preparations. Such a tiny example may seem to indicate merely the indulgence of a fussy eater, but it also signals the ritual’s capacity to respond to modern (sophisticated) taste. It is one of the many ways in which the Order of the Garter willingly proclaims its readiness to reconcile medieval traditions with the imperatives and innovations of modernity.

The significance of the Order of the Garter in contemporary culture is highly uneven. As a persistent reproduction of medieval tradition it is a key component of a lucrative tourism industry that depends heavily on heritage culture. The Garter is lauded as the preeminent rank of the English honors system, though its political and diplomatic significance is much reduced from previous centuries. Its numbers are tightly restricted, and it is both starkly elitist and socially remote from most of our daily realities, although it might also have seemed that way, once, to the daughter of an English grocer, Margaret Thatcher, and the New Zealand beekeeper, Edmund Hillary, who came to adorn its ranks as the 980th and 981st Companions, respectively, in 1995. It is easy to see the Companions’ blue robes and ostrich feathers as the trappings of a hopelessly archaic remnant of past glory; to dismiss the Order’s survival as a historical accident; and to regard the whole affair as no more than a vestigial trace of a defunct empire. Indeed, there is a sustained tradition of mocking and ridiculing the Order for its rituals and robes, a tradition we will have occasion to visit in later chapters.

It is also easy to translate this exclusiveness into a version of conspiracy theory. When we think of the Order of the Garter, or rather, when I have mentioned my work on this book over the past few years, the response has often been to ask: Isn’t it some sort of secret society? And indeed, the Order often features in some free-wheeling associations between Freemasonry, demonic worship, right-wing conspiracy theory, and the Illuminati.² The Garter is also sometimes associated with witchcraft, and there is a slender tradition (to be considered in Chapter 2) arguing that Edward III’s choice of the emblem indicates his support for a native English Wiccan tradition.

More recently, in the space where conspiracy theory meets tabloid gossip, there was also speculation around the time of Prince Charles’s second marriage that he had asked the Queen to make Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, a member of the Order, and that his mother had refused, though it is presumably only a matter of time before the duchess is elevated by Elizabeth, or by Charles, on his succession, to the position of Lady Companion (such as Baroness Thatcher) or Lady of the Garter (such as Princess Anne). It was also widely rumored in Australia, in 2008, to considerable public amusement, that former prime minister John Howard, whose government had recently lost office, might be made a Companion of the Order, and wear its robes and plumes, though this rumor seems to have had little currency in the United Kingdom. Such rumors and backstories about the filling of Garter vacancies are the stuff of both history and fiction. Many readers will recall Plantagenet Palliser’s dilemma in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Prime Minister (1876) whether to uphold tradition and recommend his own name to the Queen, or the names of various other, less deserving members of the peerage.

The Garter attracts only a small number of conspiracy theories, relative to those that surround the medieval church and the Catholic Church, for example, but Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and a range of similar films and fictions testify to the appeal of the darker versions of medievalism that throw a colorful tint over the Order and other similar institutions, insisting on their arcane mysteries. Umberto Eco describes the appeal of this version of the Middle Ages: An eternal and rather eclectic ramshackle structure, swarming with Knights Templars, Rosicrucians, alchemists, Masonic initiates, neo-Kabbalists, drunk on reactionary poisons sipped from the Grail, ready to hail every neo-fascist Will to Power.³ For Eco, this is "the Middle Ages of so-called Tradition, or of occult philosophy (or la pensée sapientielle)."

Tradition is a concept that will feature largely in this book, though not always in the sense Eco invokes. The Order of the Garter can certainly function as a filter for gossip, conspiracy theories, and fantasy; and its role in the cultural formation of what Nickolas Haydock calls the medieval imaginary is one of my main concerns.⁴ But Eco’s sense of tradition here is a relatively unhistorical one (an eternal and rather eclectic ramshackle structure), framed more by his taxonomy of the various cultural revivals or dreams of the Middle Ages—his famous ten Little Middle Ages—than by the continuity of historical rituals such as the Garter’s. Instead of seeing tradition as a species of medievalist revival, I turn his reasoning around in order to argue that the medieval past plays an important, unacknowledged role in structuring our understanding of English cultural tradition, especially in the area of heritage culture. Tradition thus appeals to a cosmology or worldview in which temporal continuity and the repetition of ritual practice are meaningful signs of a greater truth: a vision of an ordered social world.

More specifically—and this is the central rationale for this book—the Order of the Garter, while undeniably an elite institution directly affecting only a handful of individuals at any given time, is symptomatic of the diverse, fluctuating, and ongoing life of medieval traditions in postmedieval culture. The Order has for centuries been the object of serious historical study by antiquarians and scholars of heraldic ceremonial, but it is also associated with heritage culture that is often coded as popular and commercial.⁵ I argue that we can understand the dynamics of English cultural heritage with greater precision by examining the treatment of its medieval components, using analytical frames drawn from the study of ritual practice and medievalism. Thus, when I use the term modernity, I mean not that the modern has replaced the traditional but rather that the social world has a different dominant sense of time, space, and embodiment. Medieval tradition now sits inside this social frame, domesticated and routinized as medievalism.

The Order is an ideal phenomenon for such a study of continuity and social change, as it offers an example of medieval ritual practice that extends from the 1340s to the present day, even if there have been long periods of abeyance in its elections and the performance of some of its rituals. On the one hand, it deserves to be read in historical, cultural, and imaginative terms. It cathects much of our fascination with royal spectacle, personality, and performance, a fascination that is played out in poetry, fiction, music, art, and gossip, as well as in the more formal discourses of heraldry and history writing. But on the other hand, the Order also has much to tell us about the way Edward III’s foundation has been transformed, reinvented and revived over the intervening centuries, and the way this medieval institution expresses both continuities and discontinuities with the past. I read its history, then, as a species of medievalism: the conscious or unconscious practice of, and interest in, medieval culture. Because the Order has a continuous if uneven history, it provides a unique record of changing attitudes to medieval traditions, and the various attempts to revive and reform those traditions. At different periods in this long history, the dominant forces of English culture and society have sought to express different relationships with the medieval past, through the performance of rituals that necessarily invoke or make connections with that past. I thus use the 650-year history of the Order as a bridge between two disciplines that have sometimes seemed antithetical: medieval studies (the study of medieval texts and cultures) and medievalism studies (the study of postmedieval revivals or reprises of those cultures).⁶ In many respects, the distinction between these two disciplines is barely sustainable: for one thing, a long tradition of ritual practice like the Order of the Garter helps us see how hard it is to declare the end of the medieval and the beginning of medievalism.

Unlike the literary, visual, and historical texts that are the usual objects of research in medievalism, the Order of the Garter offers an example of medievalism as a tradition of ritual practice and behavior. Its traditions are not even or stable, though, and my argument does not depend on a pattern of unbroken continuity. Periodically, the Order revises its formal statutes and makes changes to update its regulations, customs, and costumes, and there have also been several periods where the Order’s traditions and rituals have sunk into disuse or been deliberately suspended. These changes constitute an intriguing register of the way the monarchy thinks of itself and its relation to its medieval past, over periods of civil and national war, religious strife, and longer patterns of social and cultural change. The Order sees itself as honoring its ritual traditions, but also as open to progressive stages of renewal in response to changing social expectations. As we will see in Chapter 5, however, it is also possible to write its history as one of disruption, decay, and radical reform. My principal concern throughout this book is with the changing valencies and representations of the medieval origins of the Garter in various discourses about its history and traditions. As the Order of the Garter is revived, reformed, and modernized, it bears the weight of both its medieval origins and later revivals, reformations, and modernizations. At any given moment, it is both medieval and modern, and many other things besides. It thus exemplifies the capacity of medievalism and its multiple, contradictory temporalities to destabilise a simple linear model of temporal and cultural progress.

In a recent essay, Louise D’Arcens coins the term "paramodern to describe the way premodern culture is sometimes invoked in contemporary critical theory, as a premodern existing not before the modern, but alongside it and within it as a trace, a simultaneous presence and absence."⁷ Drawing on Bruce Holsinger’s concept of theoretic medievalism, D’Arcens remarks: Conceived as paramodern, the medieval period is thus in a synchronic rather than diachronic relationship with the modern.

I draw loosely on D’Arcens’s insights here to suggest that the Order of the Garter similarly destabilizes diachronic history. Given its changing appearance over time, we might conceptualise the Order of the Garter as an example not of the paramodern but of the paramedieval. The effect, however, is very different. My argument in Shame and Honor is that the medieval content of the fetish and its rituals actually lives on today as tradition, but that it is at the same time reformed in terms of modern sensibilities and temporalities. It is thus both synchronic and diachronic.

The Order of the Garter sometimes appears in medieval guise, then, but for most of its history, its clothes, feasts, and processions offer a layered mixture of inherited tradition, contemporary fashion, and deliberate revivalism.⁸ Amid such contradictory markers of multiple temporalities, the medievalism of the Garter is manifested as a kind of paramedieval, whereby its medieval origins sit alongside it and within it as a trace, a simultaneous presence and absence.

Accordingly, this book works against conventional chronologies by suggesting that the postmedieval history of the Order of the Garter can help us understand its origins, most obviously in Chapter 2, which explores some of the deeper anthropological meanings of the Garter myth, but also in other chapters that explore the ritual life of medievalist objects, clothes, and patterns of behavior.

Shame and Honor investigates the ongoing cultural life of the Order of the Garter from the 1340s into the first decade of the twenty-first century. While there is a considerable body of historical material that discusses the Order, its practices are normally most fascinating not to outsiders but to itself, and those followers most in sympathy with its ideals or the symbolic, cultural, and traditional authority it seems to confer. The Garter’s historians, heralds, followers, and modern Society of Friends are intimately and passionately concerned with its own traditions, its origins, its regulations, its dress code, and its membership: who was let in and why; and sometimes, who was expelled. Most histories of the Order are celebratory, written from the inside, as it were, or by admiring outsiders. They are concerned principally with setting the Order of the Garter at the heart of an ancient chivalric tradition, with extolling the continuities of this English order, or with tracing the biographies of its thousand-odd Companions. Recent years, however, have seen a number of more impartial scholarly studies, and I have drawn gratefully on them, particularly on those that focus on the specific details and politics of appointments to the Order and its role in court and state politics.⁹

Shame and Honor starts from different premises. While it is interested in the historical and political context of the Garter rituals, it is more closely concerned with the historiography of ritual practice: the different ways people think, talk, and write about the performance of those rituals, and especially the extent to which they are seen, or thought of, as medieval or medievalist, at different periods and in different contexts. Its concerns, then, are rarely biographical or straightforwardly sequential. Rather, cultural history and poetics take center stage here, as a means of measuring and analyzing the changing medievalism of the Garter.

Throughout its 650-year history, the Order has often performed a strategic balancing act between its appeal to the longevity of its medieval traditions and the question of its political, religious, and social relevance to the present. At other times it has been profoundly unconcerned with how it has been perceived by outsiders. The Order of the Garter has been written about, painted, and recorded in many forms. It has been heavily regulated, neglected, reviled, ridiculed, and revived. Above all, it has been performed and embodied in a range of fashions and styles, many of which actively downplay its medieval origins. In its current manifestation, the Garter represents neither a straightforward survival nor a simple revival of medieval practice.

Although its membership is tightly restricted, the Order nevertheless generates enormous symbolic resonance, and so the commentaries around its rituals offer a rich symptomatic register of social and cultural sensibility about the monarchy, about the nation, and about the relationship of the medieval past to the present.

Reading and analyzing the cultural history of this medieval institution thus calls for a flexible approach. As a long history, Shame and Honor has affinities with other cultural histories that stretch from the present back to the Middle Ages, like studies of Chaucer’s literary reception or Arthurian tradition. But it is not a straightforward or comprehensive narrative of the Order’s history. Like my book on Chaucer’s reading history, Congenial Souls, this book is what I call a symptomatic long history; it is especially interested in those moments when the Order of the Garter turns to examine its own traditions, or when changes in its rituals foreground the tension between inherited medieval tradition and the impulse to modernize those traditions.¹⁰ Unlike Chaucer, however, the Order of the Garter has not generated a tradition of familiarity with a medieval figure. The presiding tropes in this tradition are not the sense of knowing Chaucer across the ages. Instead, they are tropes of not knowing, of mysterious and occluded origins and secret ritual practices.

As a study of changes in ritual practice, structural patterns are of greater importance than, for example, a prosopographical study of Garter membership, although I will sometimes consider the selection of members and the individual passage of several Companions into—and out of—the Order. To help orient readers to the overall shape of the Garter’s long history, Chapter 1 presents an outline of the main features and changes in the Order’s history, but I make a point of resisting the conventional diachronic narratives that characterize most celebratory and biographical accounts of the Garter. Unlike most such accounts, Shame and Honor also foregrounds imaginative literature and popular culture throughout.

In this book I deliberately set selected aspects of the Order’s official history against some of the less official stories and patterns of its reception. I follow several partial diachronic trajectories in the first part and develop a number of thematic clusters in the second. I make no claim to offer a disinterested or comprehensive narrative; indeed, I often use as starting points those moments, events, or images that seem to jump out in their bizarreness and oddity. I also foreground the various manifestations of shame and honor in the Order’s practices and its history, in contrast to the official insider’s emphasis on the honor the Garter bestows and celebrates. The history offered here is thus a vulgar history in two senses. First, it is neither continuous nor comprehensive, but moves between historical and thematic approaches, bypassing the commemorative impulses of official histories and embracing many of the contingent aspects of ritual practice. Nor does this book examine all the literature, art, music, and drama associated with the Garter, but selects from a range of familiar and less well known texts. Second, Shame and Honor returns repeatedly to the myth of the woman’s dropped garter, so often dismissed as a vulgar invention, both in its content, and in the form of its dissemination through gossip and rumor. The improper nature of this story is a means of exploring the persistent connections between the popular imagination, sexuality, and medievalism, writing from a position outside the official discourse of the Order.

Beyond the vulgar history of the Garter, this has also become a book about temporality and cultural allusion, the capacity of the Order, its costumes, its motto, and its practices to set up patterns of reference and allusion that move us back and forth in time, in and out of the charmed circle of proper or historical understandings of the Garter. The Order of the Garter struggles to speak directly to most of us. Yet as a survival of a medieval fraternity, its political and cultural traditions and the power structures they represent invite us to contemplate the ongoing life of the medieval into modernity