ABSTRACT
This chapter examines crusading fiction written by author-educators from 1825 to 1917 and demonstrate how the crusades served as a vehicle of enculturation for the empire's youth. Crusader medievalism can be seen to have borne the weight of complementary attempts to educate young readers in what it meant to be a patriotic, chivalrous and pious Briton in the century leading up to the First World War. A generation later, Sir Henry Newbolt's version of a glorious and chivalric thread of national history was expressed in his fiction and the patriotic verse he was better known for–and in his vision for an English curriculum. Newbolt's understanding of the past was most clearly revealed in a chapter taken from his novel The Old Country, in which an early twentieth-century youth named Stephen Bulmer accidentally travelled back in time to the fourteenth century. There, medieval characters taught Stephen the nature and value of chivalry.
