phantasmagorical

The medieval craze [of the Victorian era] had its comic side. In 1839 a twenty-six-year-old sportsman, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, go the notion of holding at his Scottish estate a magnificent chivalric tournament, complete with chain-mailed jousters on caparisoned horses, a court of noble women attending the Queen of Beauty, and the pageantry and (preferably) bloodless combat proper to medieval entertainment. The cream of British society was invited and spent a huge sum - in a year of great economic distress among the people - equipping itself with gorgeous medieval costumes, armor, and all the correct accouterments. The host himself laid out £ 40,000. On the opening day, there was a thirty-mile traffic jam on the Ayr-Glasgow road that led past Eglinton, and the grounds were crowded with 100,000 commoners, some of whom had come great distances to see Scott’s romances brought to life. But within a few hours a raging storm sent them struggling homeward through morasses of mud, and the blue-blooded cast of hundreds, finding that jousting under umbrellas was impractical, retreated into tents and other temporary structures that spouted water at every crevice. There, from under medieval hairdos now become sodden and lank, they beheld their armor beginning to rust and the noble ladies’ gowns stained with mud and shrunken. To keep their hand in, some of the knights tilted with mops and brooms in the waterlogged ballroom, and when the sun eventually reappeared the ladies made parasols by sticking arrows through their programs. The press had a field day of its own.

Hilarious as the ill-fated Eglinton Tournament was, it was also symptomatic. Its glamorized medievalism anticipated Disraeli’s Young England movement with its theory that the revival of chivalric noblesse oblige was the solution for the nation’s ills, and it bore a certain oblique relationship to the Oxford Movement as well. … The faster the rate of change and the more bewildering their orientation became both physically and intellectually, the more some Victorians longed for a fixed order. The Middle Ages, they persuaded themselves, had provided a spiritual terra firma for the people who had lived them. Change was so slow as to be negligible; cathedrals took centuries to build.