The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The White Company (1891)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The White Company was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first appeared in Cornhill Magazine (Jan-June 1891). Its sequel was Sir Nigel (1906). Although Doyle (1859-1930) is known today primarily for The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, he was a competent professional writer who produced a range of material, his best work being his historical adventures rather than his mysteries. Conan Doyle preferred his historical novels to his other work, and The White Company was his favorite. He called it “the most complete, satisfying, and ambitious thing I have ever done.”¹ 

The White Company is primarily about Alleyne Edricson, a young Englishman of the fourteenth century. He begins the novel as a member of the Abbey of Beaulieu, having spent his entire twenty years there. But according to his father’s will when he turns 20 he must spend a year in the world, after which time he can choose the monastic or secular life. So Alleyne ventures out into England, discovering that it is as sinful and dangerous as place as he anticipated but also that it is full of brave and good men. He meets two of the latter in Hordle John, a massive, brawling, good-natured yeoman who was thrown out of the Beaulieu Abbey for the sin of carrying a woman across a stream, and Samkin Aylward, a boastful, genial, well-traveled archer. Aylward is headed for the White Company, a band of freelances and mercenaries, bearing a letter to Sir Nigel Loring, the leader of the White Company. After Aylward beats John in a wrestling match and Alleyne discovers that his brother, the Socman of Minstead, is a scoundrel and a caitiff, the trio set off to join the White Company at Christchurch.

At Christchurch the three are accepted into the Company. John joins Aylward with the archers (the White Company consists primarily of archers and spearmen with only a few of the noblemen, like Sir Nigel, acting as the classic mounted knight in full plate). Alleyne becomes the squire to Sir Nigel and teacher to Sir Nigel’s daughter, Lady Maude. Alleyne had earlier saved Maude’s life and virtue from the Socman of Minstead, and Alleyne and Maude enjoy each other’s company. This enjoyment deepens to love, although Alleyne’s lack of status means that the two can have no future together. But just before Alleyne leaves on campaign with the White Company Maude gives him a token, so he is not completely discouraged.

In Bordeaux the White Company meet Prince Edward and Don Pedro, the Spanish Prince Edward intends to place on the Spanish throne. Feelings run high between the White Company and the local French and Spanish knights, so a tournament is held at which the English knights distinguish themselves and Sir Nigel re establishes his reputation as the doughtiest knight in Europe. After the tournament Sir Nigel, Alleyne, and a handful of other White Company men head into France to rendezvous with a group of White Company men who are living as bandits. Sir Nigel and his men temporarily stay at the castle of the Seneschal of Villefranche, a harsh lord who mistreats his peasants. When the peasants revolt Sir Nigel and his men are forced to fight their way out of the castle, losing some of their own men in the process. Sir Nigel and his men rejoin the White Company, march on Spain, and win a bloody battle with the Spanish. Sir Nigel and Aylward are captured, but Alleyne remains free, and because he is unable to help Sir Nigel or Aylward he returns to England. Alleyne’s brother, the Socman, has been killed trying to storm Sir Nigel’s castle. This leaves Alleyne as the Socman, and he is now of sufficient position to court Lady Maude. She says agrees to marry Alleyne, and everyone’s happiness is increased when Sir Nigel and Aylward are freed from captivity. After that, everyone lives happily ever after.

The White Company is one of the most enjoyable historical romances of the nineteenth century. Doyle performed an enormous amount of research in writing the novel, and it shows; the novel is full of large and small details of medieval life. Doyle’s descriptions of Sir Nigel and the English knights is sentimentalized, and Doyle sanitizes the history of the time toward the end of making the novel more innocent that an accurate historical recounting would allow. But Doyle does not shy away from the brutality of the era; his portrayal of a France ravaged by constant war, and of peasants living little better than animals, is harrowing.

The White Company, though a part of the “New Romance” revival of the 1890s (see: From the Memoirs of a Minister of France), lacks a certain self-awareness and even cynicism that other New Romances had. This is largely due to Doyle’s patriotism, not to say jingoism, about Britain’s imperial destiny, which is a recurring theme in Doyle’s historical romances.

The medieval novels construct a myth of a heroic past, and allude to England's future imperial destiny from within their medieval setting...this vision of England's "children" spreading across the earth, which is read forward in the narrative as a prophecy, is actually, of course, a history of the expansion of the British empire read backwards from the late-nineteenth century. The empire is foretold as Britain's destiny; for the reader, this would reaffirm the belief that the empire is Britain's destiny. Moreover, the novel's action is placed in the context of "the whole course" of British history, which culminates in the contemporary empire. The medieval romances also construct a myth of a democratic British past...this myth does recognize that some injustice did exist in England but it is precisely because the injustice is located in the past that the myth, a modern construction, can be reaffirmed.² 

The novel is quite entertaining. Doyle is a dab hand at concise and colorful characterization, which he establishes through dialogue and action rather than description. He does have a regrettable tendency to describe action through dialogue:

It is dried wood from the forest. They pile them against the walls and set them in a blaze. Who is this who tries to check them? By St. Ives! It is the good priest who spake for them in the hall. He kneels, he prays, he implores! What! Villains, would ye raise hands against those who have befriended you? Ah, the butcher has struck him! He is down! They stamp him under their feet! They tear off his gown and wave it in the air! See now, how the flames lick up the walls!³ 

But this sort of thing is more uncommon than common, and although it reads peculiarly Doyle is skillful enough as a writer to make the dialogue naturalistic.

Doyle has some wonderfully colorful descriptions, of clothing and people and scenery, and his action scenes are well-written. Interestingly, the story has an international feel to it. The popular impression of the Middle Ages is that most people did not travel far from their homes, if at all. But Alleyne and Sir Nigel and the White Company go from England to Bourdeaux to France and then to Spain, and attending the tournament in Bourdeaux are knights from across Europe, including Lithuania and Hungary. Doyle occasionally gets off a pithy line:

Neither entreaty nor courtly remonstrance came from the English prince; but Sir Hugh Calverley passed silently over the border with his company, and the blazing walls of the two cities of Miranda and Puenta della Reyna warned the unfaithful monarch that there were other metals besides gold, and that he was dealing with a man to whom it was unsafe to lie.⁴ 

There is also a welcome hint of the supernatural in the clairvoyancy and predictions of Tiphaine Raquenel, the wife of the Seneschal of Villefranche.

Doyle does acknowledge the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor in the Villefranche section of the novel, so that the reader gets a disturbing glimpse at what the lives of the have-nots were like during this era, and that much of the happiness of the nobles came at the expense of others. And the underlying ethos of the novel, that honor is more important than anything and that the knightly life is the best way to live, is at times undeniably stirring.

But part of the novel’s ideology will be troubling to the modern reader. In some ways Doyle is presenting an idealized version of the fourteenth century. As part of this idealization Doyle has his heroic protagonists, especially Sir Nigel, voice an ideology which privileges honor over all else, and defines honor as skill-at-arms and courage, entirely divorced from how those abilities are put to use. So a pirate and murderer is praised by Sir Nigel because “he carried himself like a very gentle and débonnaire cavalier,”⁵ and men whose only capability is their ability to fight are recommended as “honorable cavaliers” or “courteous gentlemen,” and Sir Nigel says of a strong fighter that “I met him but the once, but I have never seen a man for whom I bear a greater love and esteem.”⁶ 

Recommended Edition

Print: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Works. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009.

Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/903