Search results
- The prince drinks a toast to Cedric and one to Athelstane. But Prince John doesn’t know when to stop. In return for his courtesy, he demands Cedric name a Norman to whose health he would drink. Cedric, still fuming over the insulting treatment he’s received, drinks to the health of King Richard.
www.litcharts.com/lit/ivanhoe/volume-1-chapter-14
People also ask
Why did John ask the Saxons to drink to Ivanhoe?
What does Cedric say about Ivanhoe?
Is Ivanhoe a Saxon hero?
Why did John ask the Normans to drink to the Saxons?
Why did John invite the Saxons to a banquet?
Why did John give Ivanhoe a castle?
To soothe the party, John has a goblet passed around, asking the Normans to drink to the Saxons and vice-versa. When his turn comes, Cedric, who has already refused to drink to Ivanhoe or to acknowledge him as his son, says that the only worthy Norman he can think of is King Richard.
- Quick Quiz
Ivanhoe Full Book Quiz. Full Book Quiz false Save. Quick...
- Character List
Ivanhoe and Rowena are prevented from marrying until the end...
- Context
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year...
- Quick Quiz
The prince drinks a toast to Cedric and one to Athelstane. But Prince John doesn’t know when to stop. In return for his courtesy, he demands Cedric name a Norman to whose health he would drink. Cedric, still fuming over the insulting treatment he’s received, drinks to the health of King Richard.
The book lays out its concerns very clearly in this opening scene: readers find themselves in an oak grove (representative of English identity, but also of strength and perseverance) with not just two Saxons but two enslaved Saxons.
Prince John’s demand that a group of Saxons allow Jewish people—the lowest of the low in this social hierarchy—to have their seats contributes to the book’s negative portrayal of the Norman ruling class. It encapsulates the Saxons’ feeling of disinheritance and dispossession in a single moment.
Cedric is so loyal to the Saxon cause that he has disinherited his son Ivanhoe for following King Richard to war. Additionally, Ivanhoe fell in love with Cedric's high-born ward Rowena, whom Cedric intends to marry to Athelstane, a descendent of a long-dead Saxon king.
- Walter Scott
- 1820
And this is without doubt the main ‘thrust’ of Ivanhoe: Scott repeatedly highlights the Saxons’ status as a dispossessed people, whose defeat at the Battle of Hastings over a century earlier has led to a rift in some parts of the kingdom between Normans and Saxons.
John himself waffles between drinking the toast or refusing it. To decline to drink to the king would be impolitic, even for one who is conspiring to seize the throne for himself.
