THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES the contributions made by medievalism to Chartism's strategies of legitimisation. It argues that ‘Chartist medievalism’ is a heterogeneous ideological formation which plays a significant role within the Chartist imaginary. The chapter is organised around a series of medieval moments drawn from a variety of Chartist sources and spanning the history of the movement. It begins in 1839 with the ‘Chartist’ sermons of the Rev. Joseph Rayner Stephens, continues through the columns of McDouall's Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate (1841), the English Chartist Circular (1841–43), Thomas Cooper's Chartist epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), to the late Chartist poetry of Gerald Massey (published 1848–51), and a lecture series given by the movement's final leader, Ernest Jones in 1851; the chapter concludes with an analysis of a sequence of poems meditating on England's medieval history taken from W. J. Linton's The Plaint of Freedom (1852). The chapter situates these diverse sources in relation to three strategies of legitimisation used by Chartism – Constitutionalism, Natural Rights and Christianity. It argues, therefore, for the presence of different, but not necessarily competing, versions of medievalism within English Chartism.

Chartist Medievalism and Constitutionalism

Generally speaking, Chartism understood itself as a restorative movement, charged with the task of reclaiming constitutional rights which had been lost as a result of the ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed following the Norman Conquest of 1066. In particular, many Chartists believed in the existence of an essentially democratic Anglo-Saxon constitution. For the Chartists, as for earlier reformers, Anglo-Saxon England had practised a form of direct democracy in the shape of the ‘Folkemot’ or ‘Folkmoot’, an annual gathering of free men called to give their assent to any new laws proposed by the king and his advisors. The popular preacher Rev. J. R. Stephens offers his own version of this practice in a sermon given on 3 March 1839. After inviting his hearers to consider why their ancestors built such large cathedrals, he supplies an answer: