The Secret to Successful Medieval Movies

Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to try King and Conqueror (BBC One). The period covered – the run-up to the Norman Conquest – is much better documented in contemporary narrative sources than any earlier stage in English history. The detailed stories of the reigns of Edward the Confessor and his doomed successor Harold II are replete with political drama of the highest order. But the details are not always compatible: there is still no agreement among historians about much of what was going on. The tensions, contradictions, and gaps left plenty of scope for scriptwriters to develop plausible plot lines. They could not have asked for more suggestive material.

What they did, however, was to substitute events which are incontestably recorded with ones for which there is absolutely no evidence, and which are – or should be – inconceivable. King Edward may or may not have been tied to his mother Queen Emma’s apron strings, but he did not, in a psychopathic rage, batter her to death with his new crown. In reality, that crown had first been placed on his head in Winchester Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1043, not in what appears on screen as a cramped chapel – and Duke William of Normandy was certainly not present. Imagine what the splendour of an accurately portrayed coronation might have revealed about 11th-century English kingship. On screen, those of Harold and William take place in the same pokey venue, quite unlike the true one, the enormous, newly consecrated Westminster Abbey. In other respects, the footage fails to reproduce a ceremony the full form of which survives, elaborated by eye-witness accounts. There is not a shred of evidence that Harold lost at Hastings because he was betrayed by Mercian forces under the command of Earl Morcar (really earl of Northumbria, not Mercia), in cahoots with William.

It is not just that false and implausible facts are substituted for true. The 11th century is crudely made to comply with a contemporary progressive agenda. Harold and William are presented as metro dads, taking a hands-on role in caring for their infant children. Women are shown to be at least as potent as men as political actors. Baldwin, count of Flanders appears as an accomplished gourmet chef, rustling up delicious dishes in the manner of Vinnie in GoodFellas. All this anachronism patronises viewers, and contributes nothing to their understanding of the world that the series purports to depict – a world so strange that great imaginative ingenuity has to be deployed to convey it on screen. How might that have been achieved?

In my view there are three exemplary models. The most popular, and therefore perhaps the most appropriate for television, is El Cid (1961), also set in the 11th century. This works for two reasons. First, many of the scenes scarcely move at all; they are brilliantly coloured tableaux, reminiscent of illuminations in medieval manuscripts. Second, the film does not ignore or contradict the sources. It cleaves to the legend of the Cid that had developed by the early 13th century, embodied in the Cantar de Mio Cid, which presents him as a generic chivalric hero. That legend has been shown to be false in many respects, but it has compelling emotional force. It does not substitute a modern agenda.

My other examples are still more effective, because their writers and directors understood that it is impossible to depict the Middle Ages in terms of humdrum physical realism. And given that medieval sources are uninterested in individual character, as distinct from ideal types, it is very difficult to devise a dramatic narrative in the modern or ancient sense, involving interactions between characters. (The television adaptation of Wolf Hall worked because by the early modern period individual personality had become a central focus.) For both reasons, the best way to try to capture something of the Middle Ages on film is to represent medieval beliefs in the highly stylised fashion characteristic of the sources. Given that the medium is not just visual, but photographic, this means devising a sequence of striking images.

My second example is Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a crusader returning to Scandinavia during the Black Death plays chess for his life with Death, a game which he will inevitably lose. That game is the film’s defining image, but there are many others of the crusader and his squire as they ride through a world which many of its inhabitants are aware is falling apart. The characters of the crusader and his squire are developed a little, but it is the Apocalypse alluded to by the film’s title which is the film’s theme. It is consummated in another searing image, of Death leading some of the characters in a procession – the Dance of Death – along the ridge of a hill.

My third example is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), about the eponymous 15th-century icon and fresco painter. Like El Cid, but unlike The Seventh Seal, this concerns a historical figure, but one about whom little evidence, other than his paintings, survives. Even more than The Seventh Seal, the film is a series of discrete episodes. Its main subject is Christian faith, epitomised in the concluding scene where Rublev observes the son of a bell-founder obliged to cast a bell. He has no experience and little idea how to do so; but he succeeds, by throwing himself on God’s mercy.

It is even more difficult to portray the Middle Ages successfully in a popular than in an art house film; the only hope of doing so is to take inspiration from medieval sources, and to be more optimistic about modern attention spans than the makers of King and Conqueror were. They tried to blend Made in Chelsea with EastEnders in armour.
 

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of St Hugh’s College at Oxford University.