Concerning Geffray Teste Noire: A Gallery

In “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” Morris engages with the dramatic monologue, the Victorians’ greatest poetic innovation. Morris experiments with the form throughout his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere (1858), in which “Teste Noire” first appeared. Critics generally cite Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning as the two primary creators of the form, though recently some critics have argued that Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon originated the form earlier in the century. While Tennyson and Browning composed monologues as early as the 1830s, the form found…

Nineteenth-century Britons recognized three major epochs of history—the classical period, the middle ages (reaching into the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries), and the “modern” period, their own age. As the industrial revolution, population growth, and urbanization brought vast changes to their landscape and culture, many Victorians were drawn to uncover and preserve the remains of Britain’s medieval past. This interest prompted the translation, publication, or republication of medieval poetic epics (such as Beowulf), legends (such as Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur), and histories…

In 1853, the Crimean War broke out between the Russian and Ottoman Empires to determine whether the Eastern Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church should possess sovereignty over Christians in the Holy Land. While Queen Victoria initially hoped to keep Britain out of the conflict, growing concerns that Russia might use Black Sea access to claim India and other parts of the British Empire ultimately motivated her to join with France and the Ottoman Empire in 1854. The war lasted another two years, and while Britain and her allies won, the country exited combat humiliated. Around 20,000 of…

William Morris (1834-96) was a multi-sided Victorian--a poet, designer, businessman, translator, fantasy writer, art theorist, and socialist leader. Born in Walthamstow, then a rural suburb east of London, the young Morris enjoyed riding horseback and wandering on the grounds of his family’s property. His father, a prosperous banker, died when he was ten, and his firm-minded and religious mother, moved her family to a slightly smaller house (Water House, now the William Morris Gallery) to raise Morris and his siblings--brothers Arthur, Thomas Rendall and Edgar and sisters Henrietta, Emma,…

Morris’s departure for Oxford was a great event in his life. He made close friends who shared his interest in historical and contemporary art, poetry, and contemporary affairs--Edward Burne-Jones, a future painter, Cromwell Price, a future headmaster, Vernon Lushington, a future judge, and Richard Watson Dixon, a future poet and clergyman. This “Oxford Brotherhood” admired the poems Morris had begun to write, and when they decided as a group on the ambitious venture of founding a magazine, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Morris became its first editor and chief contributor, writing…

“Concerning Geffray Teste Noire” is set in south central France, near the Castle of Ventadour in the French department of Ardèche; on the map this is placed in French-controlled territory.

From the 1350s-70s onwards a number of outlaws took advantage of French losses from the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) to plunder French villages and seize fortresses under the pretext of serving the English. The strongest and the cruelest of these bandits was Geffray Teste Noire, who according to Jean Froissart’s Chronicles was a Breton, not (as in Morris’s poem) a Gascon thief. According to…

Beginning in 1337 and concluding in 1453, the Hundred Years War saw the English and French monarchies battling for control of France. William the Conqueror, who had been duke of Normandy in France, gained control of England in 1066, and from that point forward, the English kings retained French titles and control of certain French lands. When Charles IV, King of France, died in 1328 without any immediate successor to the throne, Edward III of England emerged as the nearest heir. The French wanted a French King, however, and as a result, Philip VI ascended to the throne when chosen by an…

About 1378 Teste Noire had seized the well-protected fortress of Ventadour, and for the next ten years he plundered or extorted tribute payments from those in surrounding regions. There were other garrisons of castles in the area which practiced the same profitable ‘protection racket,’ and although in the late 1380s most of them agreed to be bought out of their strongholds and withdraw, Geoffray refused. In response, in 1387 the powerful duke of Berry, a co-regent for the young King Charles VI and governor of neighboring Auvergne, sent troops against Ventadour under Sir John Bonne Lance…

Jean Froissart, French poet, historian, and, as John of Castel Neuf identifies him in “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” canon of Chimay, lived between roughly 1333 and 1400. Born in Valenciennes, Froissart received his education from the Church before embarking on a literary career. After writing for a number of different patrons, he became the personal secretary of Philippa of Hainaut who was then Queen of England and who had also been born in Valenciennes. He wrote poetry while working for Philippa, and both before and after her death in 1369, just as the Caroline War broke out, he…

Morris’s first volume faced mixed, even discouraging, reviews. It didn’t help that he had dedicated his volume to his mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was disliked by certain reviewers. These retaliated by condemning the Defence as showing Pre-Raphaelite influence--notably in arcane subject matter and a concentration on detail.

More important was the reviewers’ reaction to the medievalism of the Defence poems. Whether they liked or disliked them, most agreed that Morris’s poems were original and even powerful, but they could not fully understand them (often they hadn’t read the…

Throughout his life Morris made many efforts to present his writings in artistic form: inscribing them in illuminated manuscripts, co-designing with Edward Burne-Jones woodblock illustrations for a projected edition of his poem The Earthly Paradise, and beginning, also with Burne-Jones, an illuminated and illustrated version of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In 1891 he co-founded the Kelmscott Press with Emery Walker, an experienced printer, and for this he created new typefaces and designs which refined fifteenth century examples.

In his role as director of the Press Morris…