The Black Arrow: A Tale of The Two Roses - Chronology and Geography

Chronology and Geography

From the information given in the novel two time references for the two blocks of action that constitute the narrative can be pinpointed: May, 1460 and January, 1461. The important time indicator is the Battle of Wakefield, December 30, 1460, which Stevenson describes in the first chapter of Book 3:

Months had passed away since Richard Shelton made his escape from the hands of his guardian. These months had been eventful for England. The party of Lancaster, which was then in the very article of death, had once more raised its head. The Yorkists defeated and dispersed, their leader butchered on the field, it seemed, - for a very brief season in the winter following upon the events already recorded, as if the House of Lancaster had finally triumphed over its foes.

It is because Richard Crookback, Richard III of England, is presented as an adult active in the Wars of the Roses in January, 1461 that Stevenson provides the footnote: "At the date of this story, Richard Crookback could not have been created Duke of Gloucester; but for clearness, with the reader's leave, he shall so be called." Richard was born in 1452, so he would have been merely 8 years old at the time of this story. A later footnote emphasizes this again: "Richard Crookback would have been really far younger at this date ." Stevenson follows William Shakespeare in retrojecting Richard of Gloucester into an earlier period of the Wars of the Roses and portraying him as a dour hunchback—Stevenson: "the formidable hunchback." (See Henry VI, part 2; Henry VI, part 3; and Richard III (play).) This characterization closely follows the Tudor myth, a tradition that overly vilified Richard of Gloucester and cast the entire English Fifteenth century as a bloody, barbaric chaos in contrast to the Tudor era of law and order.

Curiously, the 1948 film The Black Arrow portrays Richard Gloucester in a more favorable light than in the novel, somewhat anticipating the work of Paul Murray Kendall to rehabilitate him (Kendall, Richard III, 1956). When Gloucester is told he is "more than kind," he replies jokingly that such rumors would ruin his "reputation": the revision of the Tudor myth?

Stevenson liked his characterization of Richard Crookback, and expressed his desire to write about him again. Stevenson alludes both to his novel The Black Arrow and Richard Crookback with the phrase "the Sable Missile" in a letter he wrote Sidney Colvin in the month the final installment of The Black Arrow appeared in Young Folks (October, 1883):

Your remarks on The Black Arrow are to the point. I am pleased you liked Crookback; he is a fellow whose hellish energy has always fired my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written the play after he had learned some of the rudiments of literature and art rather than before. Some day, I will re-tickle the Sable Missile, and shoot it, moyennant finances consideration"], once more into the air; I can lighten it of much, and devote some more attention to Dick o' Gloucester. It's great sport to write tushery.

The Battle of Shoreby, a fictitious battle that is the main event of Book 5, is modeled after the First Battle of St Albans in the Wars of the Roses. This battle in history as in the novel is a victory for the House of York. The presence of an abbey church in Shoreby is reminiscient of the abbey church of Tewkesbury to which the Lancastrians fled for sanctuary after the battle on May 4, 1471.

In the "prologue" Stevenson intimates that the Tunstall of The Black Arrow is a real place: "Tunstall hamlet at that period, in the reign of old King Henry VI., wore much the same appearance as it wears today." In south-east Suffolk, England, 18 miles NE of Ipswich, less than 10 miles from the North Sea a "Tunstall" is located with an accompanying forest. Stevenson and his family had visited Suffolk in 1873. The similarity of place-names near this Tunstall, Suffolk to place-names in the novel also suggest that this is Stevenson's Tunstall: Kettley is Kettleburgh in actuality, Risingham is Framlingham, and Foxham is Farnham, Suffolk. The identities of Shoreby-on-the-Till and Holywood are probably Orford and Leiston respectively. Orford is on the North Sea and is joined to Framlingham by a road going to the northwest (the "highroad from Risingham to Shoreby"), and Leiston is also on the North Sea with a medieval abbey like Holywood of the novel. The River Till, which figures largely in Book 1 of the novel, would then be the River Deben in actuality. The River Deben flows near Kettleburgh.

The name of the main character Richard Shelton and his inheritance, Tunstall, were the name and title of an actual historical personage, Sir Richard Tunstall. He, as a Lancastrian and ardent supporter of King Henry VI of England, held Harlech Castle against the Yorkists from 1465-1468 during the first part of Edward IV's reign. In contrast, Richard Shelton, who becomes the knight of Tunstall at the end of The Black Arrow, is a staunch Yorkist.

Two other anachronisms in the novel are Sir Oliver and others speaking of "Simnel" and "the Walsinghams" as suspected organizers of the Black Arrow fellowship. Lambert Simnel is the focus of rebellion in Henry VII's reign (1485–1509), and "the Walsinghams," Stevenson's renaming of the Woodvilles, would have played a part only after May, 1464, when Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville.

The Black Arrow consists of 79,926 words, so it can be classified a novel rather than a novella, novelette, short story, or flash fiction.