Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  Crimes tried by the Cinque Dragownes included: “Evil Tendings” – magic with an inherently malevolent purpose; “False Magic” – pretending to do magic or promising to do magic which one either could not or did not intend to do; selling magic rings, hats, shoes, coats, belts, shovels, beans, musical instruments etc., etc. to people who could not be expected to control those powerful articles; pretending to be a magician or pretending to act on behalf of a magician; teaching magic to unsuitable persons, e.g. drunkards, madmen, children, persons of vicious habits and inclinations; and many other magical crimes committed by trained magicians and other Christians. Crimes against the person of John Uskglass were also tried by the Cinque Dragownes. The only category of magical crimes with which the Cinque Dragownes had nothing to do was crimes by fairies. These were dealt with by the separate court of Folflures.

  In England in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a thriving community of magicians and fairies was continually performing magic. Magic is notoriously difficult to regulate and, naturally enough, not all the magic that was done was well intentioned. John Uskglass seems to have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the creation of a body of law to govern magic and magicians. When the practice of magic spread throughout England, the southern English kings were only too grateful to borrow the wisdom of their northern neighbour. It is a peculiarity of that time that though England was divided into two countries with separate judiciary systems, the body of law which governed magic was the same for both. The southern English equivalent of the Cinque Dragownes was called the Petty Dragownes of London and was situated near Blackfriars.

  39 The two magicians

  1 In the late seventeenth century there was a glovemaker in the King’s city of Newcastle who had a daughter – a bold little thing. One day this child, whom everyone supposed to be playing in some corner of her father’s house, was missed. Her mother and father and brothers searched for her. The neighbours searched, but she was nowhere to be found. Then in the late afternoon they looked up and saw her coming down the muddy, cobbled hill. Some of them thought for a moment that they saw someone beside her in the dark winter street, but she came on alone. She was quite unharmed and her story, when they had pieced it together, was this:

  She had left her father’s house to go wandering in the city and had quickly come upon a street she had never seen before. This street was wide and well-paved and led her straight up, higher than she had ever been before, to the gate and courtyard of a great stone house. She had gone into the house and looked into many rooms, but all were silent, empty, full of dust and spiders. On one side of the house there was a suite of rooms where the shadows of leaves fell ceaselessly over walls and floor as if there were summer trees outside the windows, but there were no trees (and it was, in any case, winter). One room contained nothing but a high mirror. Room and mirror seemed to have quarrelled at some time for the mirror shewed the room to be filled with birds but the room was empty. Yet the glovemaker’s child could hear birdsong all around her. There was a long dark corridor with a sound of rushing water as if some dark sea or river lay at the end of it. From the windows of some rooms she saw the city of Newcastle, but from others she saw a different city entirely and others shewed only high, wild moors and a cold blue sky.

  She saw many staircases winding up inside the house, great staircases at first, which grew rapidly narrower and more twisting as she mounted higher in the house, until at the top they were only such chinks and gaps in the masonry that a child might notice and a child could slip through. The last of these led to a little door of plain wood.

  Having no reason to fear she pushed it open but what she found on the other side made her cry out. It seemed to her that a thousand, thousand birds thronged the air, so that there was neither daylight nor darkness but only a great confusion of black wings. A wind seemed to come to her from far away and she had the impression of immense space as if she had climbed up to the sky and found it full of ravens. The glovemaker’s child began to be very much afraid, but then she heard someone say her name. Instantly the birds disappeared and she found herself in a small room with bare stone walls and a bare stone floor. There was no furniture of any kind but, seated upon the floor, was a man who beckoned to her and called her by her name again and told her not to be afraid. He had long, ragged black hair and strange, ragged black clothes. There was nothing about him that suggested a king and the only symbol of his magicianship was the great silver dish of water at his side. The glovemaker’s daughter stayed by the man’s side for some hours until dusk, when he led her down through the house into the city to her home.

  2 See Chapter 33, footnote 3.

  3 Perhaps the eeriest tale told of John Uskglass’s return was that told by a Basque sailor, a survivor of the Spanish king’s great Armada. After his ship was destroyed by storms on the far northern coasts of England, the sailor and two companions had fled inland. They dared not go near villages, but it was winter and the frost was thick upon the ground; they feared they would die of the cold. As night came on they found an empty stone building on a high hillside of bare frozen earth. It was almost dark inside, but there were openings high in the wall that let in starlight. They lay down upon the earth floor and slept.

  The Basque sailor dreamt that there was a king who watched him.

  He woke. Above him dim shafts of grey light pierced the winter dark. In the shadows at the farthest end of the building he thought he saw a raised stone dais. As the light grew he saw something upon the dais: a chair or throne. A man sat upon the throne; a pale man with long black hair, wrapped in a black robe. Terrified, the man woke his fellows and shewed them the uncanny sight of the man who sat upon the throne. He seemed to watch them but he never moved, not so much as a finger; yet it did not occur to them to doubt that he was a living man. They stumbled to the door and ran away across the frozen fields.

  The Basque sailor soon lost his companions: one man died of cold and heartbreak within the week; the other, determined to try and make his way back to the Bay of Biscay, began to walk south, and what became of him no one knows. But the Basque sailor stayed in Cumbria and was taken in by some farm people. He became a servant at that same farm and married a young girl from a neighbouring farm. All his life he told the story of the stone barn upon the high hills, and he was taught by his new friends and neighbours to believe that the man upon the black throne was the Raven King. The Basque sailor never found the stone barn again, and neither did his friends nor any of his children.

  And all his life whenever he went into dark places he said, “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart” – in case the pale king with the long black hair should be seated in the darkness waiting for him. Across the expanses of northern England a thousand, thousand darknesses, a thousand, thousand places for the King to be. “I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart.”

  4 A Faire Wood Withering (1444) by Peter Watershippe. This is a remarkably detailed description by a contemporary magician of how English magic declined after John Uskglass left England. In 1434 (the year of Uskglass’s departure) Watershippe was twenty-five, a young man just beginning to practise magic in Norwich. A Faire Wood Withering contains precise accounts of spells which were perfectly practicable as long as Uskglass and his fairy subjects remained in England but which no longer had any effect after their departure. Indeed it is remarkable how much of our knowledge of Aureate English magic comes from Watershippe. A Faire Wood Withering seems an angry book until one compares it with two of Watershippe’s later books: A Defence of my Deeds Written while Wrongly Imprisoned by my Enemies in Newark Castle (1459/60) and Crimes of the False King (written 1461?, published 1697, Penzance).

  5 Lord Liverpool’s London home, a quaint, old, rambling mansion which stood by the Thames.

  40 “Depend upon it; there is no such place.”

  1 The citizens of Brussels and the various armies occupying the city were intrigued to learn that they were now situated in a far-away
country. Unfortunately they were much occupied in preparing for the coming battle (or in the case of the richer and more frivolous part of the population in preparing for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball that evening) and hardly any one had leisure just then to go and discover what the country was like or who its inhabitants were. Consequently for a long time it was unclear where precisely Strange had put Brussels on that June afternoon.

  In 1830 a trader and trapper named Pearson Denby was travelling through the Plains country. He was approached by a Lakota chief of his acquaintance, Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Man-afraid-of-the-Water asked if Denby could acquire for him some black lightning balls. Man-afraid-of-the-Water explained that he was intending to make war upon his enemies and had urgent need of the balls. He said that at one time he had had about fifty of the balls and he had always used them sparingly, but now they were all gone. Denby did not understand. He asked if Man-afraid-of-the-Water meant ammunition. No, said Man-afraid-of-the-Water. Like ammunition, but much bigger. He took Denby back to his camp and showed him a brass 5½—inch howitzer made by the Carron Company of Falkirk in Scotland. Denby was astonished and asked how Man-afraid-of-the-Water had acquired the gun in the first place. Man-afraid-of-the-Water explained that in some nearby hills lived a tribe called the Half-Finished People. They had been created very suddenly one summer, but their Creator had only given them one of the skills men need to live: that of fighting. All other skills they lacked; they did not know how to hunt buffalo or antelope, how to tame horses or how to make houses for themselves. They could not even understand each other since their crazy Creator had given them four or five different languages. But they had had this gun, which they had traded to Man-afraid-of-the-Water in exchange for food.

  Intrigued, Denby sought out the tribe of Half-Finished People. At first they seemed like any other tribe, but then Denby noticed that the older men had an oddly European look and some of them spoke English. Some of their customs were the same as the Lakota tribes’ but others seemed to be founded upon European military practice. Their language was like Lakota but contained a great many English, Dutch and German words.

  A man called Robert Heath (otherwise Little-man-talks-too-much) told Denby that they had all deserted from several different armies and regiments on the afternoon of 15th June 1815 because a great battle was going to be fought the next day and they had all had a strong presentiment that they would die if they remained. Did Denby know if the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon Buonaparte was now King of France? Denby could not say. “Well, sir,” said Heath philosophically, “Whichever of ’em it is, I dare say life goes on just the same for the likes of you and me.”

  2 General Rebecq also made up a Dutch version of his jingle which was sung by his soldiers on the way to Quatre Bras. They taught it to their English comrades and it later became a child’s skipping rhyme, both in England and the Netherlands.

  3 Copenhagen, the Duke’s famous chestnut horse, 1808–36.

  4 In 1810 Messrs George and Jonathan Barratt, the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens, had offered Strange and Norrell a vast sum of money to stage displays of magic every night in the gardens. The magic which the Barratts were proposing was of exactly this sort – illusions of magical creatures, famous persons from the Bible and history etc., etc. Naturally enough, Mr Norrell had refused.

  5 The accepted magical technique for creating confusion within roads, landscapes, rooms and other physical spaces is to make a labyrinth within them. But Strange did not learn this magic until February 1817.

  Nevertheless this was arguably the decisive action of the campaign. Unknown to Strange, the French general, D’Erlon, was trying to reach the battlefield with 20,000 men. Instead he spent those crucial hours marching through a landscape which changed inexplicably every few minutes. Had he and his men succeeded in reaching Quatre Bras it is probable the French would have won and Waterloo would never have happened. Strange was piqued by the Duke’s abruptness earlier in the day and did not mention to any one what he had done. Later he told John Segundus and Thomas Levy. Consequently historians of Quatre Bras were perplexed to account for D’Erlon’s failure until John Segundus’s The Life of Jonathan Strange was published in 1820.

  6 In actual fact Mr Pink was only one of the civilians whom the Duke pressed into service as unofficial aides-de-camp that day. Others included a young Swiss gentleman and another commercial traveller, this time from London.

  42 Strange decides to write a book

  1 William of Lanchester was John Uskglass’s seneschal and favourite servant, and consequently one of the most important men in England.

  2 Thomas of Dundale, John Uskglass’s first human servant. See footnote 2, Chapter 45.

  43 The curious adventure of Mr Hyde

  1 The Dyke is a great wall of earth and stones, now much decayed, which divides Wales from England – the work of Offa, an eighth-century Mercian king, who had learnt by experience to distrust his Welsh neighbours.

  2 At the time of Strange and Arabella’s marriage Henry had been Rector of Grace Adieu in Gloucestershire. While there he had conceived a wish to marry a young lady of the village, a Miss Parbringer. But Strange had not approved the young lady or her friends. The living of Great Hitherden had happened to fall vacant at this time and so Strange persuaded Sir Walter Pole, in whose gift it lay, to appoint Henry. Henry had been delighted. Great Hitherden was a much larger place than Grace Adieu and he soon forgot the unsuitable young lady.

  3 The books Strange possessed were, of course, books about magic, not books of magic. The latter were all in the possession of Mr Norrell. C.f. Chapter 1, footnote 5.

  4 The meaning was perhaps a little more than this. As early as the twelfth century it was recognized that priests and magicians are in some sense rivals. Both believe that the universe is inhabited by a wide variety of supernatural beings and subject to supernatural forces. Both believe that these beings can be petitioned through spells or prayers and so be persuaded to help or hinder mankind. In many ways the two cosmologies are remarkably similar, but priests and magicians draw very different conclusions from this understanding.

  Magicians are chiefly interested in the usefulness of these supernatural beings; they wish to know under what circumstances and by what means angels, demons and fairies can be brought to lend their aid in magical practices. For their purposes it is almost irrelevant that the first class of beings is divinely good, the second infernally wicked and the third morally suspect. Priests on the other hand are scarcely interested in any thing else.

  In mediaeval England attempts to reconcile the two cosmologies were doomed to failure. The Church was quick to identify a whole host of different heresies of which an unsuspecting magician might be guilty. The Meraudian Heresy has already been mentioned.

  Alexander of Whitby (1230s?-1302) taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the different parts relate to each other. Alexander was forced to issue a retraction of his thesis and priests were henceforth on the lookout for the Whitbyian Heresy. Even the humblest of village magicians was obliged to become a cunning politician if he or she wished to avoid accusations of heresy.

  This is not to say that all magicians avoided confusing religion and magic. Many “spells” which have come down to us exhort such-and-such a saint or holy person to help the magician. Surprizingly the source of the confusion was often the magicians’ fairy-servants. Most fairies were forcibly baptized as soon as they entered England and they soon began to incorporate references to Saints and Apostles into their magic.

  45 Prologue to The History and Practice of English Magic

  1 No one in England nowadays knows this language and all we have left of it is a handful of borrowed words describing various obscure magical techniques. Martin Pale wrote in De Tractatu Magicarum Linguarum that it was related to the ancient Celtic languages.

  2 Variously Thomas de Dundelle or Thomas
de Donvil. It seems that several of Henry’s noblemen recognized Thomas as the younger son of a powerful Norman magnate who had disappeared one Christmas fourteen years before. Given the circumstances of his return it is doubtful whether they felt particularly pleased to have him back.

  3 When he was a child in Faerie the Sidhe had called him a word in their own language which, we are told, meant “Starling”, but he had already abandoned that name by the time he entered England. Later he took to calling himself by his father’s name – John d’Uskglass – but in the early part of his reign he was known simply by one of the many titles his friends or enemies gave him: the King; the Raven King; the Black King; the King in the North.

  4 The name of this Daoine Sidhe King was particularly long and difficult. Traditionally he has always been known as Oberon.

  46 “The sky spoke to me …”

  1 The spell to detect magic appears in The Instructions by Jacques Belasis.

  47 “A black lad and a blue fella – that ought to mean summat.”

  1 John Uskglass’s arms were the Raven-in-Flight (properly called the Raven Volant), a black raven on a white field.

  2 Presumably the Raven King’s original Sidhe name, which Jonathan Strange thought meant “Starling”.

  48 The Engravings