Languages Of Power In The Age Of Richard II

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Staley, Languages of Power

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languages of power in the age of richard ii


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Lynn Staley

languages of power in the age of

Richard II

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania


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Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Staley, Lynn, 1947– Languages of power in the age of Richard II / Lynn Staley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0–271–02518–2 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1 100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Power (Social sciences) in literature. 3. Great Britain—History—Richard II, 1377–1399—Historiography. 4. Richard II, King of England, 1367–1400—In literature. 5. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 6. Power (Social sciences)—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 7. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 8. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Political and social views. 9. Kings and rulers in literature. 10. Monarchy in literature. I. Title. pr275 .p67S73 2005 820.9'358—dc22 2004013330

Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences —Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1992.


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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

one

The Hawk on the Wrist and the Fool in the Chimney Corner

two

Inheritances and Translations

three

Princely Powers

four

French Georgics and English Ripostes Epilogue

339

Bibliography Index

387

357

75

165 265

1


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This book is an inquiry into one of the most dramatic periods of English history—the reign of Richard II—as it appears through the lenses aªorded by the many literary, political, chronicle, and pictorial texts that mark the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Here, I do not so much read literature through history as oªer a way of reading history through its refractions in literature. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which late-fourteenth-century English writers used, analyzed, and altered the languages of power. Moreover, I seek to understand the nuances and purposes of court ly address by reading literary works within the contexts of historical and explicitly political texts that sought to organize and define the events of the age and by using literary works to provide a context for those events we call “history.” This book isolates and traces what is an actual search for a language of power during the reign of Richard II and scrutinizes the ways in which Chaucer and other writers participated in these attempts to articulate the concept of princely power. During the reign of Richard II, the prestige of the English crown and the terms used to define that crown were in flux. The Rising of 1381, the challenge to the church voiced by John Wyclif that escalated from the early 1370s on, the tensions of war with France, and the personal and political di‹culties Richard had in assuming a position of true sovereignty after his accession to the throne as a child in 1377 were all factors in what has been described as a long crisis of authority. I maintain that for Richard and for those around him, there was a moment when kingship lacked a defining rhetoric. That moment occurred in 1387– 88, when those who opposed the king and his friends moved against them in the Merciless Parliament, where Richard was made to oversee the destruction of many of his closest associates. I argue that we need to see these events as not simply altering the nature of Richard’s reign, as many fine historians have pointed


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out, but also as changing the very language—and possibly the focus—of courtly address. The Merciless Parliament was by no means the only moment when Richard was checked, but it became a marker for subsequent attempts to understand the reign of Richard II. In the work of John Gower, Adam of Usk, Thomas Walsingham, and the author of Richard the Redeless, there is evidence for a contemporary reading of Richard’s deposition in relation to the charges brought against him by the Appellants. Indeed, the Articles of Deposition repeat many of the same charges of 1387–88. In 1399, however, Richard was not described as being a hapless victim of others’ perfidy, but as a knowing perpetrator of crimes against his subjects.1 What is more, after the Merciless Parliament, the language of address begins to change in texts that we might associate with royal circles. The ornate, courtly rhetoric of the early to mid-1380s is displaced by works like the Melibee or Gower’s later work or even Richard Maidstone’s Concordia. These texts are concerned with counseling mercy, with oªering a princely reader an image of prudence and sagacity as a model. Where texts predating the Merciless Parliament give the impression of a youthful (and at times heedless) leader, those written afterwards attempt to figure authority in terms of adult measure. They suggest their writers’ awareness of Richard’s probable feelings but, at the same time, they oªer means by which a monarch might take rational control of a di‹cult situation. The first two chapters are concentrated around the figure of Richard II and the relationship between his need for a language of power and the needs of poets for a language of princely address. The courtly literature of the early years of Richard’s rule frequently takes the forms of erotic petition. It employs the rhetoric of frustrated love to express a relation between center and periphery that figures power (the lady or the prince) as imperious and remote, often idealized, and always the source of favor. After the events surrounding the Merciless Parliament, however, a language previously used despite its limitations became manifestly empty and unworkable. The first chapter discusses writing we can loosely define as “courtly”—Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, and some of the Canterbury Tales as well as Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Usk’s Testament of Love—in relation to 1. Nigel Saul’s Richard II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997) is essential for Richard’s reign. For Richard’s deposition, see also Chris Given-Wilson, ed. and trans., Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), and Michael J. Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1999).


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the events of Richard’s court and the ways in which contemporary writers recorded those events. I argue that the authors of these texts did far more than draw upon the fictions of erotic petition to address a prince. They explored the very limits of the language they used, thus indicating the need for a new figuring of regal power. Chapter 2 focuses upon the Merciless Parliament as it was described by the chroniclers and upon the noticeable change in modes of courtly address as they appear in literary and political texts until 1396 or 1397, when Richard began to behave in ways that threatened the privileges of the nobility. From the sorts of texts sponsored by or addressed to Richard, it is clear that either he or his advisers likewise understood the need for a new rhetoric of royal address. In the France of Charles V might be perceived a possible antidote to the challenge of the Merciless Parliament. What was attractive about Charles V was his ability to mingle magic with Aristotle, to present himself as embodying both the mystique of French sacral kingship and the rational and natural order of a hierarchically fixed system ruled by a good and wise king. By the time Richard and/or his advisers sought to invent such a theory for England, the terms they attempted to appropriate from Valois France could not define an ideal of English communal identity. A vigorous literature of political address throughout Richard’s reign provides evidence of opposing eªorts to develop a language that could be used to describe the regal image or the scope of royal power. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, Richard should not be considered the only English prince who might have understood the necessity of creating a language of power. Both John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock saw the relationship between cultural production and patronage as a component of such a language. Both men can be connected to the interdependent worlds of English devotion, art, and literature, and both certainly made serious bids for power during their lives. Though this chapter is the most speculative one of the book, it nonetheless suggests that authors like Richard Maidstone and the Gawain-poet possessed an agency that acted through the delimitations of patronage. It also provides evidence that their works belonged to a broader national preoccupation with the figuring of power. The final chapter concerns the household, one of the central metaphors promulgated by the propagandists of Valois France—and, not coincidentally, one of the central metaphors of Chaucer’s mature Canterbury Tales. The household, of course, rests upon marriage, both a social institution and a sacrament, the means by which society and ecclesia perpetuate their interdependent systems of order.


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This chapter reads the English literature of the household—which I assimilate to the georgic mode—against contemporary French household literature in an eªort to understand the terms of the English conversation about the nature of power. The juxtaposition points up both the careful intentionality of the Valois sponsorship of the georgic mode and the diªerently intentioned English literature of the household. The one locates the household within the discourse of imperium; the other establishes the household as implicated in the confusions attendant upon claims of regal prerogative. Those English texts that can be thought about as potentially georgic or as sharing concerns and language that belong to the georgic mode ask questions about household order and integrity that are fundamental to the dynamics of late-fourteenth-century political events. Richard can be described as misunderstanding the languages of his own subjects, the clamorous impulses and anxieties that Chaucer captured with such amazingly charitable verisimilitude. This book, then, seeks to understand a period of English history by listening to its writers. Rather than isolate individual authors or types of literature, it portrays the world of late-fourteenth-century England as composed of discrete discourses that inevitably overlapped to form conversations we must listen to in order to understand the history of the period. I have used Chaucer throughout as the best and savviest of interlocutors. His grace and wit and shrewd intelligence may make him the most bracing of companions, but, as this book demonstrates, his voice is one of many. In The Powers of the Holy, David Aers and I attempted to suggest the relative freedoms of the late fourteenth century, especially in comparison to the early fifteenth century, when the Lancastrians were establishing their authority to rule an English nation. Our suggestions are borne out by the present study, for the talk in England is rich and varied. Ralph Hanna’s London Literature likewise demonstrates the vigor of England’s indigenous legal, literary, and religious cultures. He draws upon manuscript evidence that allows him to think about manuscript production, transmission, and consumption; about the links between London and provincial centers; and about a national interest in various kinds of texts in the vernacular. As Hanna argues, long before John Wyclif or Henry IV or Geoªrey Chaucer, England was filled with biblical and legal scholars and literary voices concerned with creating a pragmatic, imaginative, and devotional literature available in the vernacular. The conversations I discuss here can be traced to some of those midcentury conversations, as I indicate throughout—but, nonetheless, they have their own concerns


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and anxieties. These fourteenth-century conversations can, in turn, be linked to those of the fifteenth century and to the Lancastrian eªort to forge national and regal identities. If in this book I am less interested in historicizing literary texts than in understanding what sorts of (contemporary) questions they intended to prompt in their audiences, my own work can certainly be set within a historical context.2 My former graduate adviser, D. W. Robertson Jr., began to apply the tools of the social historian to Middle English culture late in his scholarly career. Perhaps without realizing it, he forecast the direction medieval studies has taken for the last twenty-five years. His preliminary work in this direction, along with the work of Anne Middleton, Lee Patterson, Paul Strohm, and Ralph Hanna, has laid a foundation for all of us who might be described as historicist in our approaches to medieval literature. In addition, the late fourteenth century, which has never lacked for trenchant historical studies, has maintained its hold on the imaginations of historians. Caroline Barron, Michael Bennett, Anthony Goodman, Chris Given-Wilson, Nigel Saul, and George Stow are the latest in a distinguished line of scholars to whom we literary critics owe a great debt. On the other hand, the recent work of David Aers, James Simpson, or David Wallace can be said to enrich and illuminate the labors of historians. I oªer this book in the spirit of an enterprise that must be collaborative—as my piece of a conversation I have had over the past many years with the quick and the dead. No book stands alone, and if this one is my piece of a conversation, it is also a testament to the generosity of many in the academic community. Without Harrington (“Duke”) Drake’s gift of an endowed chair to Colgate and without Jane Pinchin’s decision to grant me that chair, I never would have had the resources or the time to begin this project. Near the end of my work, I received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which gave me additional time and resources to return to the libraries and manuscripts I have used, to include illustrations in this book, and to complete this project with a deliberation that

2. For recent studies that read late-fourteenth-century texts as socially engaged, see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and John M. Bowers, The Politics of “Pearl”: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2001).


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cannot be had during a teaching year. I would like to thank for their help manuscript librarians in the British Library, the Bodleian Library, in the Gonville and Caius and Trinity Hall libraries of Cambridge University, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the Advocates Library of the National Library of Scotland. I am especially grateful to those libraries that supplied me with photographs and allowed me to reproduce them. Early versions of some portions of this book have previously appeared: parts of Chapters 1 and 3 appeared in Speculum 75 (2000); of Chapter 3, in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000) and in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002); and of Chapter 2, in Imagining a Medieval English Community, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A. S. G. Edwards has answered many questions for me during my times in the British Library. Both Paul Needham of the Firestone Library at Princeton University and François Avril of the Bibliothèque Nationale were extraordinarily helpful about some of the texts related to Charles V. A special thanks goes to Ann Ackerson, head of the Interlibrary Loan O‹ce of Colgate University’s Case Library, who has delivered to me treasures I did not think to be able to have on my desk. For the desk, I can thank Judy DeMuro, head of Circulation, who has continuously granted me a library carrel, the best of working spaces. I would also like to thank audiences at the University of Maryland, the University of Rochester, Cornell University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Tennessee for their comments and questions about sections of this book that I have presented as invited lectures. For very welcome help and encouragement, I also thank David Aers, John V. Fleming, Anthony Goodman, Anne Middleton, and Lee Patterson. As readers for Penn State Press, Ralph Hanna and Nigel Saul gave me just the sort of astute and quizzical attention I wanted. Their comments, along with the example each provides of scholarly acuity and integrity, have been invaluable guides and models. And, finally, I thank manuscript editor Laura Reed-Morrisson for her intelligent reading of the manuscript and Peter Potter, editor-inchief of Penn State Press, for his knowledgeable interest in and sponsorship of this project.


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The Hawk on the Wrist and the Fool in the Chimney Corner At the end of December 1375, in Bruges, during the final period of negotiations for a truce to the Hundred Years War, the English contingent rode into the city with several lords, twenty-two knights, and about three hundred horse. The duke of Lancaster rode at their head with a hawk on his wrist.1 Some ten years later, a group of Trojan knights rode out to meet a group of Greek knights. A prince of Troy rode with them to watch a Trojan citizen, Criseyde, being taken oª to the Greek camp. He rode “in wise of curteysie, / With hauk on honde.”2 In Geoªrey Chaucer’s hands, this scene belongs to a new English sense of necessity, far removed from the duke who rode into Bruges wearing feudal insouciance on his wrist as a sign that England, though bargaining at a disadvantage, still waved the banner of courtliness. The language in which power is cast is always of interest, but during the reign of Richard II, that language was particularly subject to negotiation and fluctuation. Not only did actual power (in the sense of military power and economic might) fluctuate and thus become the object of negotiation, but the prestige of the English crown and the terms used to define that crown were also in flux. For Richard and for those around him, there was a moment when kingship appeared to lack a defining rhetoric. This chapter seeks to explore the search for a means by which power might be figured and addressed, focused through the writer’s appreciation of the impulses, lapses, and violence that underlay a language as or1. This report comes from a Florentine merchant’s letter cited in G. A. Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 60. 2. Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 5, lines 64–65, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mi›in, 1987). Hereafter cited in text as Troilus. All subsequent citations of the works of Geoªrey Chaucer refer to The Riverside Chaucer.


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Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II

nate and refined as that of late medieval public rhetoric. Geoªrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, John Clanvowe, and John Gower were each deeply involved in the aªairs of the 1380s. Of these, only Sir John Clanvowe might be accurately described as a courtier, though all served the powers associated with Richard’s court. Moreover, these writers were conversant with one another’s work and seem to have shared an audience made up of lesser gentry, civil servants, knights, and esquires —literate, articulate, engaged men who frequented Westminster and who therefore understood the codes through which those issues could be examined.3 Chaucer’s work from this period (the Legend of Good Women as well as Troilus and Criseyde and the tale of Palamon and Arcite), Usk’s Testament of Love, Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis all share a vocabulary of ritualized love, a persistent interest in language and its relationship to truth, a conceited use of imagery, and an appeal to a figure of power for remedy or adjudication. Though each of these works takes as its ostensible subject the frustrations that attend lovers and their suits, none of these works can simply be described as “about” the self in love, or even as “about” interiority. Each text employs the language of courtesy or of erotic petition in order to explore the much more dangerous subject of power—individual, communal, and regal. These texts seem to participate in a highly coded and private conversation among men who style themselves as bumbling lovers and, simultaneously, in public forms of address that are meant to be overheard, if not completely understood, by the mighty. Rather than appearing to radiate from Richard II, these English works speak about him and his court in ways that suggest a search for a mode of address that can also be applied as a finely honed analytic tool. In a conversation as multidirectional as it was multivocal, Chaucer, Clanvowe, Usk, and Gower capture the constrictions, the deficiencies, and finally the impossibilities of employing the rhetoric of courtly speech as a semiotics of power. Not only do they appear to speak among themselves and to share a common set of terms and stances, but they also, in their several ways, seek the terms of a more precise and perhaps assertive language with which to address either the prince or those in power. In book 7 of the Confessio Amantis, Gower gives an account of the fool unobserved in the chimney corner, one whose very marginality allows him to advise his prince. He thus provides a cameo portrait as conventional 3. All inquiries into this subject must begin with Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1977): 68–74; Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–1 14; and Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 137–45.


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and as revered for poets as that of hawks on wrists for young noblemen. But both Gower and Chaucer indicate what Clanvowe does not and Usk cannot: that the mode of address must change because the audience has changed. The courtly rhetoric of love, with its language of petition and desire, positions the prince (or the lady) at the exact center of a web made up of favors and needs. It idealizes or magnifies the source of favor. Desire has a voice but is checked by an elaborate system of social ritual or control. The language of courtly desire was not static; medieval poets constantly scrutinized and tested its limits, examining the ethics and practices of specific social institutions. In England, however, after the events surrounding the Merciless Parliament—which went far beyond the simple checking of regal power that was attempted in the Good Parliament of 1376 and the Wonderful Parliament of 1386—the previous terms of discourse were no longer thinkable. This chapter inquires into the ways in which Chaucer, Gower, Clanvowe, and Usk interrogate (or perhaps deconstruct) their own linguistic practices and possibly those of the court itself. Neither the fictions of courtesy nor the rhetoric of desire could describe the complexities of the world after June 1388, when, at the end of a parliament that violated Richard’s very terms of kingship, he renewed his coronation oath at a mass of reconciliation in Westminster Abbey.4 My argument is grounded in the hypothesis that literary texts might be used as guides to history—that authors such as these four, who were deeply involved in the events of their own day, do more than simply respond to those events. By their language and metaphors, their chosen subject matter and focus, they suggest active engagement with the very terms of political discourse as it may have been practiced at court, and they indicate both the direction of literary development and the scope of contemporary political disenchantment.5 By the time Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale, England’s political and social situation had substantially changed from that of the early days of Edward III. I have drawn a half-fanciful relationship in the opening sen4. See Saul, Richard II, 195. 5. I use the term “court” to designate not so much a place or an administrative institution as the gathering of people around a source of power and thus “the arena in which debate occurred”: see Rosemary Horrox, “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth? Courtiers in Late Medieval England,” in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. R. E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 14. On medieval courts and their terminology, see Horrox as well as Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in NorthWest Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–33.


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tences of this chapter. The duke of Lancaster who entered the final stages of negotiations at Bruges —to which the English had been brought, in part, by his own bungled expedition in France during 1373–74—has no literal connection to Troilus riding with his own group of knights to watch Criseyde being exchanged for the man who will eventually betray a Troy whose ideals have been cut to serve its needs. The duke’s gesture at once reflected the postures of countless welldressed young men in the margins of manuscript pages and the actual tastes and habits of his class. (The Bruges conference itself was punctuated by a good deal of hunting and feasting, so much so that the French complained of the excesses of their own ambassador, Louis d’Anjou, the brother of Charles V.) The duke of Lancaster’s entrance was upstaged a few days later by the more splendid arrival of the French dukes, who were preceded by four hundred valets on horseback, carts of luggage, falconers, a leopard, squires, knights, mace bearers, minstrels, and special sword-bearing knights. The English were outmaneuvered in more ways than this, for the conference did nothing to restore to England its lost French holdings, nor did it repair England’s prestige or its sense of national security.6 Moreover, it earned John of Gaunt his first real taste of popular criticism. Chaucer, as we know, was not in Bruges, nor did he participate in John of Gaunt’s expensive and futile long march south from Calais, then west to Bordeaux. During the first years of the 1370s, Chaucer is listed as an esquire of the king’s chamber; while serving the king, he was sent to Genoa and Florence as a member of an economic commission from December 1372 to May 1373. This was his first Italian journey. A few years later, in 1378, he was sent again. On this second visit, he encountered the works of Boccaccio, which provided him 6. On the conference at Bruges and its eªect on the subsequent Good Parliament, see Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (London: Constable, 1904), chaps. 5 and 6; Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 53–54; and Holmes, Good Parliament, chap. 3. Holmes oªers an extensive analysis of this conference in relation to English foreign and domestic policy. J. J. N. Palmer argues that the object of this conference was the alienation of Aquitaine to John of Gaunt, a strategy that would avoid the problem of the king of England’s having to pay feudal homage to the king of France: see Palmer’s England, France, and Christendom, 1377–99 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 33–36. He implies that the plan was alive as late as December 1375. For the documents, see E. Perroy, “The Anglo-French Negotiations at Bruges, 1374–1377,” Camden Miscellany 19 (Camden Third Series 80 [London: Royal Historical Society, 1952]), 1 1, as well as xvi–xvii. If so, did John of Gaunt’s gesture conceal his desire to see those negotiations conclude in his favor? Or might contemporaries have recognized his ambition as well as his vain attempt to cover it in his studied (but entirely feudal) appearance?


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with the inspiration for the Knight’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Franklin’s Tale.7 In August 1373, he went to Dartmouth, again on the business of trade between Italy and England. In 1374 Chaucer was appointed as a controller in the port of London, for which he was given the use, rent-free, of a residence at Aldgate. In addition to the annuity he received from Edward III, he was granted an annuity in 1374 by John of Gaunt.8 At this time, John of Gaunt (whose ambitions in both France and Spain were frustrated by his lack of military success and whose popularity in England was waning) sought to reinvigorate an English regal prestige that had been severely compromised by Edward III’s decline into senility. What followed in England altered the terms of political discourse: the Good Parliament’s attempt to chasten royal expenditures, reactions to the Good Parliament, John of Gaunt’s possible deployment of John Wyclif to shore up the powers of the English crown, papal schism, Wyclif ’s growing sense of prophetic vocation, the deaths of the Black Prince and of Edward III, and, finally, the English Rising of 1381. The di‹culties Chaucer seems to have had with the House of Fame and the deceptively sudden brilliance of the Parliament of Fowls appear to mark a shift, too, not simply in Chaucer’s poetic skill but also in a broadening of his very mode of perception and analysis. His handling of Troilus’s feudal gesture—the hawk on the hand—is but one instance of his ability to infuse a text with a contemporary political significance that is at the same time belied by its grounding in tradition. The detail is not Chaucer’s; Boccaccio, whose Filostrato is Chaucer’s primary source for Troilus and Criseyde, presents an account of the exchange that Chaucer clearly translated in part. But Chaucer’s habits of translation are almost always acts of invention.9 Boccaccio’s original is richly detailed and complicated, using Criseyde’s scorn for her Greek captors to suggest the insu‹ciencies of both Greeks and Trojans. She is handed by one old man, Priam, to another old man, her fa7. David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1985); Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 106–9. 8. For Chaucer’s activities during this period, see Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds., Chaucer: Life-Records (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 32–40 and 123–293, which also provides evidence for his other legal and financial involvements. For a detailed account of this period of Chaucer’s life, see Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 95–105. 9. I have written much on Chaucer as a translator. See, most recently, “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” in The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, by David Aers and Lynn Staley (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).


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ther, while a young man who holds a hawk as an act of courtesy watches and mourns. Chaucer’s changes to this scene point up the sexual contest between Diomede and Troilus: Diomede receives her almost directly from Troilus, Criseyde is muted during the interchange, and there are no references to Priam and Calchas. The hawk on Troilus’s wrist marks his feudal impotence just as surely as Diomede’s hand on Criseyde’s bridle and his swift assertion of love highlight his ability to capitalize on the present moment and thus dominate the scene. Where the remainder of canto 5 of the Filostrato describes Troilus’s grief, Chaucer follows Benoit de St. Maure and includes Diomede’s quick assessment of the situation between Troilus and Criseyde and his carefully coded wooing speech to Criseyde.10 In oªering to be her “frend” (Troilus 5.128) and in asking her to “command” him (5.132) and to treat him as her “brother” (5.134), Diomede briefly sketches the main points in what had been Troilus’s long pursuit of Criseyde. By the time they arrive at her father’s tent, Diomede has confessed, “I loved never womman here-biforn / As paramours, ne nevere shal no mo” (5.157–58). He ends by reminding her of the competitiveness she will generate in the Greek camp: “Ther ben so worthi knyghtes in this place, / And ye so fayr, that everich of hem alle / Wol peynen hym to stonden in youre grace” (5.169–71). Diomede’s use of the language of chivalric courtship is pragmatic and practiced, sharply contrasting with Troilus’s earlier and more halting rhetoric of desire. Like Pandarus, that consummate courtier, Diomede demonstrates the ways in which the rhetoric of desire can be used knowingly as the means to an end. Troilus’s extraordinary sorrow over Criseyde’s departure, which recasts his earlier speeches of desire and fulfillment into the rhetoric of grief, is thus separated from her actual departure by the figure of Diomede, who belongs to the future. What Troilus shares with John of Gaunt at Bruges is the failure to capture the moment—or the failure, perhaps, to understand the moment. Chaucer here does far more than translate a scene from an Italian or French poem into an English one. His reformulation of both Boccaccio and Benoit is but one instance of his exploration of the fundamental impotence of a courtly mode that could, in the end, only fall back on gesture.11 10. For an analysis of Troilus in relation to Chaucer’s handling of his sources, see Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 37–137; for this scene, see 69–70. For a parallel edition of Chaucer and Boccaccio that includes citations from Chaucer’s other sources, see B. A. Windeatt, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (New York: Longman, 1984). 1 1. On Chaucer’s scrutiny of the inadequacies of Troy, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 84–164.


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Chaucer’s focus upon courtly semantics as an indicator of political or selfunderstanding is consistently and coherently developed in Troilus and Criseyde, where he “invents” for the Trojans a language so polysemous that it finally means nothing.12 Pandarus, friend and courtier, is, of course, the master of the discourse of deception. Even in his early conversation with Troilus about the identity of the prince’s beloved, Pandarus’s praise of Criseyde for her “bounty,” “graciousness,” “honor,” and “virtue” employs the terms of one type of conversation to set in motion a process that is diametrically opposed to the very qualities he has implied. “And also thynk, and therwith glade the, That sith thy lady vertuous is al, So foloweth it that there is some pitee Amonges alle thise other in general; And forthi se that thow, in special, Requere naught that is ayeyns hyre name; For vertu streccheth naught hymself to shame. . . .” (Troilus 1.897–903) If Pandarus uses words like “vertuous,” “pitee,” and “shame” with knowing worldliness, Troilus speaks a far less self-aware tongue. “But herke, Pandare, o word for I nolde That thow in me wendest so gret folie, That to my lady I desiren sholde That toucheth harm or any vilenye; For dredeles me were levere dye Than she of me aught elles understode But that that myght sownen into goode.” (1.1030–36) Troilus here appears either disingenuous or blind. He seems most concerned that Pandarus and Criseyde not think he wishes to bring her “harm” or “vilenye.” Rather, he wants Criseyde to understand that he wishes her that which “myght 12. For a study of the semantics at work in Troilus, see D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 472–503.


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sownen into goode.” It is hard to understand his meaning. Villainy is a type of bad fame, a social harm that might come to Criseyde if she were to become incautious about her reputation. If Troilus appears to be assuring Pandarus of his discretion, how can he also assure him that he wishes Criseyde only what might “sownen into good”? Chaucer’s use of “sownen” (sound, resound with, be consonant with) amplifies the sense that Troilus is speaking of fama, the force that Virgil lets loose when Dido and Aeneas become lovers. How can a secret “friendship” be consonant with the good? This type of interchange—between the one who knows the language he uses does not mean what it says and the one who refuses to acknowledge the emptiness of his terms —is not confined to the private conversations between Troilus and Pandarus. In book 3, when Pandarus attempts to get Troilus into Criseyde’s bed, he starkly confronts her with the inadequacy of the metaphoric mode of exchange she has chosen. Criseyde attempts to send Troilus a ring as a token of her fidelity, one that will keep him through the night until she can assure him herself in the morning. Pandarus brushes aside all signs as useless. “A ryng?” quod he, “Ye haselwodes shaken! Ye, nece myn, that ryng moste han a stoon That myght dede men alyve maken; And swich a ryng trowe I that ye have non. Discrecioun out of youre hed is gon; That fele I now,” quod he, “and that is routhe. O tyme ilost, wel maistow corsen slouthe!” (Troilus 3.890–96) What might words like “discrecioun,” “routhe,” and “slouthe” mean in this context? Pandarus calls for the thing itself—Criseyde, unmediated by symbols — but in so doing, he uses a dialect whose pragmatism is rooted in a semantics of context. Whatever value words have obtains only momentarily: Criseyde’s “pitee” must be as concrete as a stone that literally raises the dead. But Pandarus’s slippery use of language has a far more knowing mind behind it than that of Pandarus himself. Chaucer uses it to indicate a type of political inadequacy that is fundamental to the courtly mode of Troy. Thus in the famous scene in the Trojan parliament where Hector speaks against the proposed trade of Criseyde for Antenor, Hector’s plain speech stands out as peculiarly ineªectual.


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“Syres, she nys no prisonere,” he seyde; “I not on yow who that this charge leyde, But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle, We usen here no wommen for to selle.” (4.179–82) Hector here casts the exchange in the mercantile language of contemporary warfare. Because Criseyde is not a prisoner but a free citizen of Troy, she cannot be bartered. His words do more than expose the self-interest that undergirds the Trojan parliament; in “selle,” he epitomizes a critique of the relationships among war, inflated language, commerce, and governing bodies. Chaucer thereby oªers a far more complicated ironic commentary upon contemporary government and its uneasy relationship with the rhetoric of rule than, say, John Gower does in book 5 of the Confessio Amantis, when he, too, recounts Hector’s speech against entering the Trojan war. So were it reson forto schewe The peril, er we falle thrinne: Betre is to leve, than beginne Thing which as mai noght ben achieved; He is noght wys that fint hem grieved, And doth so that his grief be more; For who that loketh al tofore And wol noght se what is behinde He mai fulofte hise harmes finde13 Gower is content with the simple irony of Troy’s bad perspective and Hector’s relative weakness insofar as his heroic position seems to give him no rhetorical authority, except to those of us who read his speeches centuries later. Chaucer, though, at once suggests Hector’s rational appraisal of the situation and his fatal Trojan inability to alter the force of Troy’s will to destruction. Hector is caught in a web of heroism and self-interest and, to speak at all, he must violate the linguistic codes of Troy, wherein a thing must not have its own name. 13. Confessio Amantis, bk. 5, lines 7344–52; see vols. 2 and 3 of G. C. Macaulay, ed., The Complete Works of John Gower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901; repr., Grosse Point, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1968). Hereafter cited in text as CA. On Hector, see Lynn Staley Johnson, “The Medieval Hector: A Double Tradition,” Mediaevalia 5 (1979): 165–82, especially notes 20 and 21.


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In linking the war to commerce, Hector neglects to use the chivalric and parliamentary euphemism “exchaunge,” which suggests that a Greek soldier is exchanged for his Trojan equivalent. It goes without saying that his words also imply the hypocrisy of a war fought because of a woman—a war whose bartering of a woman must be defended using the language of high chivalry.14 Chaucer thus compounds the irony by having the same parliamentary body that votes to return Antenor, the future traitor, accuse Hector of illusory honor (or of some less defensible motive, perhaps) in seeking “this womman thus to shilde,” which would cause them to lose Antenor (Troilus 4.187). They thereby dehumanize Criseyde (she becomes “this womman”) and finally say to Hector, “‘lat tho fantasies be!’” (4.193). Pandarus will, of course, later in book 5, urge Troilus to do the same thing—to abandon the fantasies that bind him to Criseyde. But if Troilus is caught by his own desire, Hector is equally caught in a lineage and a war whose momentum will finally grind him down. Chaucer’s semantic sleight of hand in Troilus suggests that his concern is less with bedroom politics than with the ways in which political institutions can be driven by the very myths that generate them. In his handling of both tales of chivalry that occupied him during the middle years of the 1380s—the tale of Palamon and Arcite and that of Troilus —he seems to insist that what is missing is a language of self-understanding. To do so overtly at a time when he depended for his livelihood on royal patronage, when Richard was under censure for his excessive household expenses and his inattention to the wisdom of his elders, and when John of Gaunt was impatiently looking to Spain to ameliorate his frustrated ambitions at home, would have been an act of stupidity beyond Chaucer’s ken. But in speaking through the texts upon which he drew for these poems, Chaucer suggests that he saw in the gestures (or the religion) of courtesy a practice that lacked the semantics necessary to begin framing questions about the present and its inherent conflicts. This is not to say that Chaucer looked back either fondly or with dread upon a “lost” chivalric era, but rather to focus upon his estimate of present realities, of the political dynamics that obtained in the early years of Richard’s reign. Nor is it to say that Chaucer did not change his mind about a political situation as volatile as the one through which he lived. I want to use Troilus’s gesture as a

14. On Trojan hypocrisy, see David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 1 17–42, and John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 72–154.


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way into a period of enormous complexity that was watched and analyzed by writers whose political skills were matched by their authorial ones. The political atmosphere changed in the period from about 1385 to the early 1390s, and Chaucer, in particular, underwent a seemingly radical development as both a writer and a political thinker. I should say early on that I do not think Chaucer had a political agenda; I am not sure that he had a solution for the world he observed so minutely and intelligently. Gower thinks more prescriptively than Chaucer. I do believe, however, that Chaucer learned how to ask questions that probed at the very basis of authoritative institutions and, consequently, at the language that gave those institutions life. He developed an art that urged his audience to do the same. But in order to do so, he needed to discover his voice. What type of poetry did he, as a writer, need to write? This question, of course, appears to impose a modern writer’s dilemma upon a medieval poet, but Chaucer’s restless and metamorphic handling of the materials he inherited from the past proclaims his own search for a poetic that might serve his needs and his ends. During the early years of the 1380s, when he was first grappling with the impact of Boccaccio’s poetry, he was working on texts that would find their way into the Canterbury book (the tale of Palamon and Arcite, the legend of Cecilia), on the Parliament of Fowls, and on Troilus.15 Though he drew upon Boccaccio’s Teseida for his description of the garden of love and the temple of Venus in the Parliament of Fowls and for the tale of Palamon and Arcite that became the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer’s use of Boccaccio suggests neither simple imitation nor word-for-word translation. Rather, Chaucer needed to work his way toward a poetry that spoke to English institutions. In the Parliament, he situates the colloquial and self-interested riot of English parliamentary bird talk within Boccaccio’s recognizably traditional pastoral landscape. If Chaucer was, in fact, composing the tale of Palamon and Arcite just after this, his appropriation of the Teseida became even more assured as he mined it for the story of Palamon and Arcite. In place of Boccaccio’s epically proportioned poem, Chaucer wrote a romance whose characters seem deliberately fixed in chivalric positions.16 The Teseida 15. For information about the likely dating of Chaucer’s works, see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson. 16. For a point-by point comparison of the two poems as well as a digest of critical commentary on the relation between the two, see the explanatory notes to the Knight’s Tale by Vincent J. DiMarco in The Riverside Chaucer as well as Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Medium Aevum


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presents the conflict between the cousins over Emilia as set within the dark history of Thebes and the future destruction of Troy. Boccaccio details the account of Theseus’s victory over the Amazons in book 1 and recapitulates Theban history in book 2, a history Arcites also recounts in book 5. To the tournament in book 6, which will decide who marries Emilia, come the heroes of the Trojan War—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Ulysses, Diomedes —as well as Lycurgus, Castor, Pollux, Chromis, Evander, Peirithous, Pygmalion, Sichaeus, Minos, Rhadamanthys, Sarpedon, Admetus, and many others. In contrast to this roll call of martial prowess, which also looks forward to future defeat and death, Chaucer describes Palamon and Arcite as backed by only one major figure and his retainers. Like the representatives of France and England who attempted to negotiate a truce in 1375, these kings are encrusted with jewels and accompanied by animals: more than twenty wolfhounds, “grete as any steer,”17 range about Lycurgus’s chariot, while Emetreus, king of India, has many tame lions and leopards running alongside. Chaucer does not give his characters the sense of historical place that some of Boccaccio’s characters display, nor does he allow himself the grandeur of Boccaccio’s scenes. Rather than imitate Boccaccio’s own elegant imitation of epic sprawl, with its continual references to the past, Chaucer seems intent on suggesting his characters’ inability to live self-consciously in a present they do not understand.18 Boccaccio’s heroine is both more articulate and more conventional than Chaucer’s Emelye. Unlike Chaucer, Boccaccio does not present Emilia as a threat to male power: she is more aware of the nature of her feminine role within chivalric society. Though Emilia is hardly unchaste, she is certainly conscious that Palaemon and Arcites watch her from their prison window; she takes pleasure in being watched and enjoys what becomes for her a performance of her beauty before two helpless admirers (book 3). What Boccaccio depicts as a complicity of desire (both men lament their loves to one another, maintaining their friend-

Monographs, n.s., 8. (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977). For the texts, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), and Boccaccio, The Book of Theseus: Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia by Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. B. M. McCoy (New York: Teesdale Publishing Associates, 1974). For critical commentary, see Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman Antique” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 247–81. 17. Geoªrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, frag. I, line 2149. Hereafter cited in text as CT. 18. For a study of Boccaccio’s handling of the past in Teseida, see David Anderson, Before the “Knight’s Tale”: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s “Teseida” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 138–91.


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ship, while Emilia enjoys her eªect upon them) is heightened when Arcites returns in disguise to Athens and Emilia recognizes him but says nothing (book 4). In her prayer before the altar of Diana in book 7, Emilia signals her happiness with her present state of virginity, but she asks Diana’s forgiveness if the fates have decided that she should be subject to the laws of Juno. She implores that the one who loves her best will win her. During the course of the tournament, Emilia deliberates about the two knights and about the grand fight held in her honor, and she finally makes a conscious decision to fall in love with Arcites, the victor (book 8). Where Chaucer’s Knight presents Emelye’s desire “to ben a mayden al my lyf ” (CT I.2305) as directly threatening the foundations of community, Boccaccio’s heroine awakens to her attractions and her pleasure in her own beauty even as she signals her willingness to participate in what is finally a history that operates through marriage and the order it signifies. Just as Hippolyta’s kingdom is undermined by Theseus, so Emilia’s fastness yields to the lovers’ gazing and competitive play, which never achieves the intensity of the irrational hatred that is unleashed in the Knight’s Tale. In fact, Palaemon and Arcites continue to behave with courtesy and love toward one another. That love’s battles can end in death is represented by the histories of Thebes and Troy that shadow Boccaccio’s poem, histories the characters know but do not acknowledge as exempla.19 Moreover, Chaucer’s handling of Arcite’s death takes away the stark mystery of Boccaccio’s Eriny, who appears suddenly, frightening the crowd and causing Arcites’s horse to rear and crush him with his own saddle (book 9). Before describing the entrance of the Fury, Chaucer describes Arcite as caught by his own chivalric attitude of martial potency. This fierse Arcite hath of his helm ydon, And on a courser, for to shewe his face, He priketh endelong the large place Lokynge upward upon this Emelye; And she agayn hym caste a freendlich ye (For wommen, as to speken in comune, Thei folwen alle the favour of Fortune) And was al his chiere, as in his herte. (CT I.2676–83) 19. See ibid., 192–224.


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After these lines, which sketch a complex relationship between chivalric pride, the feminine favors of fortune, and faulty judgment, Chaucer introduces the Fury. Out of the ground a furie infernal sterte, From Pluto sent at requeste of Saturne, For which his hors for fere gan to turne, And leep aside, and foundred as he leep; And er that Arcite may taken keep, He pighte hym on the pomel of his heed (I.2684–89) Chaucer here muddies the issue of causality in a way that focuses attention upon the man who undid his helmet and rode around a stadium looking upward—and so could not be “aware” of what his horse might do when frightened. It is also unclear whether anyone except the horse saw the Fury. In the Teseida, the Fury frightens everyone; Chaucer, though, gives the impression that only the horse is paying attention. If Boccaccio at times seems interested in capturing the ways in which his characters cope with forces outside themselves, Chaucer appears intent on the Boethian lesson of intentionality.20 This lesson is most pronounced when we compare the final scenes of the Teseida and the Knight’s Tale. In the Teseida, Theseus summons Palaemon some days after Arcites’s obsequies and speaks to him publicly about the need to put aside undue sorrow in the face of a natural occurrence. Theseus counsels Palaemon to put oª unmanly sorrow (book 12) and to carry out Arcites’s last request: as he died, Arcites had wished Palaemon and Emilia to marry. Palaemon responds by saying that he does not wish to appear to profit by his dear cousin’s death, nor does he wish to continue as a slave to Venus. Theseus, however, con20. This is, of course, an oversimplification of both works. Boccaccio, however, infuses his poem with the dark history of Thebes in more overt ways than Chaucer does, and the three principals display a historical consciousness just before Arcites dies. Palaemon goes on to build a temple on the spot of Arcites’s pyre, suggesting his ability to link events (that is, the ability to tell a story). Chaucer’s version is profoundly diªerent. Most obviously, the narrator’s eªorts to guide our response to the events by locating an explanation in the human will increase the distance between character and audience in ways that inevitably change our reading of the tale. Once it is the Knight’s voice that tells the tale, which is then echoed and fragmented by the process of tale telling, the story of Palamon and Arcite becomes something else again. For another discussion of the complications of this moment, see H. Marshall Leicester Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 333–35.


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vinces him that it would be no disgrace to marry Emilia. Only then does Theseus turn to Emilia and tell her to marry Palaemon. She responds by saying that she must be unlucky and should not be given to a good man, lest Diana punish her by harming him. Theseus tells Emilia not to be silly and to return to wearing joyful clothing. Not long after, the nuptials take place. Chaucer’s emphasis is very diªerent. Rather than counsel Palaemon and command Emilia, the Theseus of the Knight’s Tale seeks to persuade Emelye and hardly bothers asking Palamon if he would like to marry her. Moreover, Chaucer’s Theseus begins his speech not with the inevitability of death, but with the First Mover’s creation of the “faire cheyne of love” (CT I.2988) whose order includes the duration (I.2996) of the days of all “engendred in this place” (I.2997). Marriage, as Theseus tells Emelye, complements this order by channeling disorder, allowing us to make joy from woe, virtue from necessity. That marriage is also an alliance between two well-matched young people and between two formerly warring cities is further evidence of the ways in which human institutions can serve as figures for a greater harmony. It is this principle—ratified by the Athenian parliament—to which Emelye is asked to agree. Once the story takes its place as the first in the Canterbury book, it gains a level of irony that it cannot have on its own.21 Just as Theseus seeks to contain or channel those forces that threaten civil and personal order by locating them in towers or tournament theaters or institutions like marriage or chivalry, the Knight, his teller, seems determined to oªer a narrative structure that also contains and explains. Chaucer, on the other hand, hints at the political implications of literary form and prepares us for the spectacle of characters who explode the provisions he has made for them and inhabit his text like so many grinning dervishes. The history of Thebes; wrath, lust, death, and dismemberment, which figure in the scenes depicted on the walls of the oratories built into Theseus’s “noble theatre” (I.1885); even time itself, as Saturn grimly describes it: all the darkness at the edges of the tale is firmly contained by the four-part structure, by a narrative that oªers not dark mystery but an arena for the working out of destiny, a semirationalist explanation for sudden death, a remedy for time in marriage. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it does not work, as the Miller so quickly demonstrates.22 Boccaccio embeds mythic history in the

21. I have written on the ironic relation the Clerk establishes between his tale and the Knight’s. See Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 244–46, 257–59. 22. See L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 244–79.


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Teseida, and Chaucer deletes it—but Chaucer embeds the tale itself within a series of voiced narratives that dramatize the conflicting forces that the Knight neither wishes to confront nor can analyze. The challenge to social order posed by Emelye is nothing compared to those challenges oªered by the pilgrim tellers, who seek to present solutions to problems they perceive in the worlds they inhabit. The elegant figure with a hawk on his wrist cannot address the unacknowledged complexities of contemporary England. Chaucer is not alone in his quizzing of the terms of discourse. In 1385 or 1386, Chaucer, Clanvowe, Usk, and Gower all wrote works that appear to examine the conventions of court poetry as a mode of public address. Each opens with conventional scenes in which the poet locates himself hierarchically in relation to a source of power as a means of commenting upon the ethics of rule. Gower achieves this by placing himself at the service of the king. I thenke and have it understonde, As it bifel upon a tyde, As thing which scholde tho betyde,— Under the toun of newe Troye, Which tok of Brut his ferste joye, In Temse whan it was flowende As I be bote cam rowende, So as fortune hir tyme sette, My liege lord par chaunce I mette; And so befel, as I cam nyh, Out of my bot, whan he me syh, He bad me come in to his barge. (CA, prologue, lines 34*–45*) Gower here attempts to depict a scene that is “true” both to life and to the metaphors of English public address. Thus, Gower is in a boat on the Thames, and the king is being carried on his royal barge. The Thames is not merely a river, however, but the flowing source of London’s life—and London is not London, but New Troy, founded by Brutus. Gower thus flatters Richard in terms of his own actual magnificence and power, but he also suggests that the English river scene participates in the mythic history of England itself. Richard, as Gower’s “liege lord,” bids him into the barge, where he goes on to charge the poet to write


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some “newe thing” for him to read. The poem that ensues is therefore produced by the relationship between poet and king.23 Similarly, in the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which was written about the same time as the Confessio (and possibly in a spirit of collaborative competition24), Chaucer presents himself as one who occupies a hierarchically defined position within a highly mannered courtly society. If Gower describes himself as rowing a boat on Brutus’s great river, Chaucer appears as the hapless scholarly devotee of the daisy who runs afoul of Cupid one May morning. Chaucerians have recognized the possible political significance of the scene between the poet and the god of Love, who is dressed, with true Ricardian magnificence, in silk embroidered in green, his gilt hair crowned with a sun.25 Chaucer heightens our sense of the gap between regal and poetic power by striking the poet dumb in the face of Cupid’s wrath; Alceste, Cupid’s queen, speaks in the poet’s defense. When Chaucer at last speaks, it is first to Alceste, who brushes aside his self-defense and sets his penance in the form of a “glorious legende / Of goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves, / That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves.”26 Chaucer goes further here than Gower in his description of royal prerogative. Gower’s Richard patronizes the Confessio but does not prescribe it. Chaucer’s Cupid may not be argued against (“Love ne wol nat countrepleted be,” LGW, F prologue, line 476) and may only be appeased through penitential acts so strict that their failure is preordained. Alceste demands that Chaucer promise to devote himself to Love’s sentence—“yer by yere, / The moste partye of thy tyme spende” (line 482)—a promise that was hardly fulfilled. Chaucer’s stylus did a good deal more than plow the demesne of royalty. Indeed, the very 23. David Wallace’s term “absolutist poetics” is apposite here, especially to Richard’s late reign, though I think the term needs the sort of historical quizzing I provide. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), especially chap. 12. 24. See John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 235–44; John Livingston Lowes, “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Considered in Its Chronological Relations,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 20 (1905): 749–864; A. J. Minnis with V. J. Scattergood and J. G. Smith, The Shorter Poems, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), chap. 1; and Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 191–93. 25. For recent work on the politics of the poem, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, chap. 12, and Saul, Richard II, especially 353–55. For studies investigating Chaucer’s scrutiny of the language of love and poetry in the Legend of Good Women, see Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the “Legend of Good Women” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); and Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 65–71. 26. Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F prologue, lines 483–85. Hereafter cited in text as LGW.


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form of the work of his final years suggests his intention to set aside the constraints of the court and its aesthetics. In the Boke of Cupide, John Clanvowe draws upon the same set of courtly conventions and describes himself as a lover in the service of a power far more ruthless and omnipotent than he.27 Love sends the sleepless poet out into the May morning, where he searches for the song of the nightingale. Like the Chaucer of the dream visions and the Legend (and like the Pearl dreamer), Clanvowe’s lover finds himself in a landscape of heightened beauty, where the ground is “poudred” with symbols of the beloved. Both John Scattergood and Lee Patterson have pointed out ways in which the poem must be understood in terms of a codified courtly language founded in the French poetry that also provided Chaucer with his own early models.28 Clanvowe’s debts to Chaucer, to whom he may have been close, are apparent throughout. He begins the poem by quoting a couplet from the Knight’s Tale: “The god of love, a! benedicite, / How myghty and how grete a lorde is he!” The Boke of Cupide is even more indebted to the Parliament of Fowls in its description of birdsong and bird talk—and in its comedy of a narrator’s bewildered insu‹ciency. But the Boke of Cupide is not the Parliament of Fowls all over again. The philosophical scope that Chaucer builds into his poem with his use of the Dream of Scipio suggests that the concept of the common profit is of overarching importance to the Parliament of Fowls, which contains a lounging Venus, a moderating Dame Nature, and a parliament composed of posturing eagles and noisy lower fowl. The Boke of Cupid, which is more narrowly focused, seems rather to belong to a later conversation about the very language employed by the court. Patterson emphasizes Clanvowe’s interrogation of the court’s verbal practices and thus locates the poem within a particular set of concerns relevant to the court during the mid- to late 1380s, not to the entire sweep of Richard’s reign.29 As Patterson has shown, Clanvowe’s birds debate the precision of court lan-

27. The Boke of Cupide, God of Love, in V. J. Scattergood, ed., The Works of Sir John Clanvowe (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1975). Hereafter cited in the text as BC. All subsequent citations of the works of Clanvowe refer to the Scattergood edition. 28. See Scattergood, ed., Works of Clanvowe, 9–14, and Lee Patterson, “Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe,” in Culture and History, 1380–1450, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester, 1992), 7–41. See also W. W. Skeat, ed., Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), lvii–lxii, although Skeat’s dates are incorrect. 29. I am extrapolating from Patterson here, who assimilates his observation to a broad description of Richard’s court and to Ricardian absolutism. I seek here to distinguish the 1380s from the 1390s.


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guage in ways that are germane to Chaucer’s concerns in works like Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women. Through the argument between the nightingale and the cuckoo, Clanvowe explores the frequently tenuous relationship between language and ethical behavior. He does so with a good deal of sly humor. In response to the nightingale’s request that he go away and “let vs that can synge duelle here” (BC, line 1 13), the cuckoo states that his own song is “bothe trewe and pleyn”: that is, though he cannot warble, every person may understand him (lines 1 18–20). He then accuses the nightingale of being di‹cult to understand, of uttering “queynte” cries —like “ocy! ocy!”—that have no meaning (lines 124–26). The nightingale translates “ocy” as meaning that all should be slain who are neither true lovers nor servants of the god of Love. The cuckoo responds that this is a “queynt lawe,” one requiring him to subjugate himself to love or be killed. In fact, he intends neither to die nor to live as a slave (lines 136–40). They go on to debate the merits of lovers. The cuckoo describes lovers as continually disappointed and as in bondage to a blind lord, in whose court “ful selde trouthe avayleth, / So dyuerse and so wilful ys he” (lines 204–5). Though the nightingale asserts the worth of Love as a lord and the ennobling eªect he has on his servants, in the end, she lacks force. The narrator himself can only end the debate by throwing a stone at the cuckoo, who mocks the narrator’s naiveté as he flies away through the woods. The Boke of Cupide does not display the barely sheathed sexual energy of the Parliament of Fowls; Clanvowe is not concerned with the issues that occupied Chaucer during the early 1380s.30 The form and conventions upon which Chaucer drew to explore the relationship between self-interested bodies of “order,” ideals of civic order, and the dictates of natural law serve Clanvowe well in his later attempt to say something about the laws (“queynt lawes,” perhaps) that operate at court. Are these the requirements for being a court man? Must he become his own bumbling persona? Must we bow to the god of Love or be slain? Like Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women, Clanvowe feminizes his persona, explicitly aligning him with the female nightingale as a powerless subject of mighty and censorious Cupid. The gruª male cuckoo, whose unmelodic exclamations (“ey”) and skepticism counter the sibilant worship of the “gentle” 30. On the public function of the Parliament of Fowls, see particularly David Aers, “The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the Knower, and the Known,” Chaucer Review 16 (1981): 1–17; Larry D. Benson, “The Occasion of The Parliament of Fowls,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. L. D. Benson and S. Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 123–44; and Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 192–94.


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nightingale, provides the poem with its obvious point of tension. The fun Clanvowe has with his naive persona gives him the space he needs to suggest that the debate is not as simple as the narrator may think. In the Legend, Chaucer employs a persona whose own authorial history can be described as a record of cuckoo talk. There, Chaucer—bookish and industrious but passionately devoted to the courtly practice of daisy worship—is alone in a highly feminized landscape where male speech is turned by Queen Alceste to worthy poetic labor. By inference, if Chaucer has spoken too plainly against love in the past, he will learn how to sing “ocy” in the future. The opposing “male” voice in the Legend is Chaucer’s own, a voice that Cupid attempts to banish. In the end, though, the poems demonstrate the triumph of poets as makers of speech. Clanvowe closes by nodding again to Chaucer and having all the birds decide to hold a parliament at which the eagle shall preside. But more profoundly political are the references to the aristocratic eagle who will lead the parliament—and, even more, to the queen, before whom the birds will appear at Woodstock on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day. Chaucer, of course, promises to deliver his book of true women to Alceste at the royal residences of Eltham or Sheene. We are thus returned to “order”: the order of aristocratic power, the order of poetic address, the order of the queen’s window, the order of the courtly fiction of Valentine’s Day itself. Like later entertainments such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Lady of May, the Boke of Cupid demands that its audience participate by listening closely to the debate in order to understand the language, which echoes the cuckoo in truth and the nightingale in metaphor.31 Clanvowe’s “ocy, ocy” says that court is no place for an honest man. But we must be courtiers before we can understand the song. The cuckoo may have a point, but he has little chance of making it because he can neither decipher the words of the nightingale nor speak in a way that is comprehensible to her. To say that one bird is right and the other wrong is to miss the deliberately reflexive humor of the poet’s own courtly performance.32 But that same carefully maintained irony allows Clanvowe (as it allowed Chaucer, Gower, and Sidney) to speak halfway boldly within a carefully maintained court

31. For brief discussions of the Lady of May as courtly address, see Lynn Staley Johnson, The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 149–50, and Stephen K. Orgel, “Sidney’s Experiment in Pastoral: ‘The Lady of May,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 198–203. 32. Lee Patterson, too, refuses to see the debate as merely an exercise in opposition; see, in particular, “Court Politics,” 24–25.


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culture. In the Manciple’s Tale, Chaucer gave his white crow the cuckoo’s plain speech. In fact, the angry and disillusioned Phebus says to the crow, “‘Thou songe whilom lyk a nyghtyngale; / Now shaltow, false theef, thy song forgon’” (CT IX.294–95). By that time, Clanvowe was probably dead, but Chaucer’s memory for talk may have called back briefly from the grave an old associate who similarly did not wish to see himself as a tame bird. If the tale does belong to the later Canterbury period, Richard would have been more like the dangerous Apollo than the angry but impotent god of Love.33 As the work of Ricardian poets demonstrates, the constraints of patronage are more elastic than they appear. The very history upon which a monarch wishes to impress his image may be told so that it contains more than an obvious lesson. Fundamental to such poems is our recognition that poets have the ability to elide the powers that patronize them. But what is more important to the point I wish to make about the Boke of Cupide, the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and the early version of the prologue to the Confessio Amantis is the picture they provide of a court in which such poems were both possible and meaningful. In our eªorts to discover a historical or political message within the poetry associated with court, it is easy to miss the fun of what was a conversation directed at various levels by poets who could do more than “speak double.” These poems can suggest ways in which poets spoke playfully to one another and perhaps used days like St. Valentine’s as referential moments within the world of courtly culture. The poems might also provide hints, though, of ways in which the sovereign himself chose to be addressed or of a carefully distanced conversation between courtiers and a monarch whose French was as good as anyone else’s.34 Though a number of scholars have pointed to Chaucer’s portrait of Cupid as indicating something about Richard’s formidable regality, is it possible that Chaucer was able to write the scene between Chaucer and Cupid because it oªered such an exaggerated version of Richard during the mid-1380s? Is Gower’s portrait more “true to life” (and I use 33. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 952, for remarks about the dating of the Manciple’s Tale. 34. I use “French” to indicate a whole mode of address encapsulated by the French poetic tradition encouraged by Charles V in his role as patron of the arts. See Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representations in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 1 and conclusion. See also Saul, Richard II, 465. Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues convincingly for the recreational function of the LGW, linking the poem to French courtly games and to the ironic strategies fundamental to such poetry.


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the term half-facetiously)? That account of a king recognizing a poet and bidding him enter his barge one summer evening does not sound like the Richard of the 1390s, who sat sti›y in hall, looking straight ahead until he summoned a bow with an icy glance. How could the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women be conceived of as courtly speech, if Richard was a cold tyrant in the period just before the Merciless Parliament (the tyrant that many thought he had become during the last few years of his reign)?35 This is not to say that Richard was casual about his o‹ce; few medieval kings were. But it makes little sense to see the twenty-two years of Richard’s reign as a monolithic period during which the king was not a participant in a vigorous, highly charged, carefully coded conversation about prerogative. Finally, the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women, like the Boke of Cupide, will work only if the sovereign is not dangerous. If he is, then no humor is possible, and Chaucer’s picture of a bumbling poet, a fiercely accusatory Cupid, and an absurdly stringent penance loses the wit and the festivity that allow it to be courtly address—or even mock courtly address. But neither can we say that these poems are purely occasional and do not address real issues. Clanvowe establishes the language of the court—or, as Patterson describes it, the “social practice” of courtly language—as the grounds for complaint. Chaucer’s Cupid takes umbrage with Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose and with Troilus and Criseyde, which contains the story of the false Criseyde. Chaucer is then commanded to write stories of ladies who were true in love. In other words, truth, not love, appears to be the issue. The poem Gower says he will write for King Richard’s sake is a poem addressed to an England divided by the falsehood and self-interested behavior of each estate. What the poems urge on any kingly “listener” is more authority, not less. Thus to the nightingale’s complaint against the cuckoo near the end of the Boke of Cupide, one bird (who speaks for all “by assent,” line 271) suggests the remedy of a parliament. That plan, almost as futilely conceived as the rat parliament in Piers Plowman, looks to the noble eagle and “other perys” (BC, line 277) for protection against the rude cuckoo. What can be the wise choice here? The cuckoo’s cynicism about courtly speech is set against the helpless fury of the nightingale 35. For a discussion of Richard’s absolutism as establishing the terms of courtly speech, see L. Patterson, “Court Politics,” 17–19; see also Minnis with Scattergood and Smith, The Shorter Poems, 9–35; and Percival, Legendary Good Women, 94–95. The picture of Richard as a tyrant forms the major conceit of Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity. For a reading of the LGW that sets it within a textual community dominated by Cupid, whose arbitrary reading practices the legends themselves demystify, see James Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73–100.


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and the other birds who look to the peers for validation of their verbal practice. That circle made up of men of the world, the court, and the pen with whom we associate Chaucer, Gower, and Clanvowe would have had as few illusions about a parliament controlled by eagles as about speech fashioned solely as courtly singing. What is laid before the king is not his despotism but his very authority as the necessary center for the integrity of the court. Alceste is more explicit. She urges Cupid to listen more carefully, to learn how language works. This man to yow may falsly ben accused That as by right him oughte ben excused. For in youre court ys many a losengeour, And many a queynte totelere accusour, That tabouren in youre eres many a sown, Ryght after hire ymagynacioun, To have youre daliance, and for envie. Thise ben the causes, and I shal not lye. (LGW, F prologue, lines 350–57) The passage is a rich one, and I would like to consider it both in relation to Chaucer’s sense of the role he played as a poet at court and to his sense of his position within a community of courtly writers. First, Cupid has accused Chaucer of being a worm too close to the “flower” that is his “relyke, digne and delytable” (LGW, F prologue, line 321). By translating the Romance of the Rose and by writing of Criseyde, Chaucer has slandered and hindered Love’s servants (“mysseyest” and “hynderest,” lines 323–24).36 Chaucer’s portrait of Love is fierce enough, but it is unclear whether Love has read and disapproved of these texts or is simply repeating the accusations of others. Alceste thus remarks that “this man” may be falsely accused. The direction of Chaucer’s irony seems to play with Cupid but to aim at the courtiers who bring him tales, a suggestion that is borne out by Alceste’s description of the court itself. The very absurdity of the situation the poem describes leads us beyond the conversation between a worm with no understanding of love talk and a god of Love who promises horrible penance for the poet’s skepticism. Moreover, by linking his translation of the Romance

36. Though in the revised G prologue Chaucer expands this section and has Cupid prescribe the sources for a new history of virtuous women, in the F prologue Cupid merely accuses the poet of speech that misleads Love’s potential servants.


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of the Rose to Troilus and Criseyde within the context of courtly address, Chaucer hints at the political valences of both works: each poem locates love within a broader field of truth as it relates to a theory of language.37 Chaucer also implies that he sees himself as a courtly writer, one who speaks to the god of Love’s servants and one whose identity is bound up with his status at court. But he allows Alceste to defend him and to define that status. In Alceste’s lines, quoted above, Chaucer appears to play with Clanvowe’s own metaphors in ways that hint at a supple conversation that only comes to us in fascinating echoes. Chaucer’s play with his own fame, the worm too near Cupid’s flower, functions as a modesty topos, but it must also have been funny to those who mockingly styled themselves as the lowly servants of the great. Similarly, Clanvowe’s self-portrait at once establishes his lower status and must have called up a laugh from those who knew him to be no clown. More strikingly, Chaucer gives to Alceste the plain speech Clanvowe’s cuckoo says is his own. Alceste doesn’t bother to mince words; she tells Cupid that his court is full of “losengeours” (flatterers) and “many a queynte totelere accusour.” The double adjectives here, crafty (perhaps carrying the same sexual connotation that Clanvowe implies with his emphasis upon the word “queynte” as a description of courtly speech) and tattling, modify “accusour” and expand upon her earlier remark that Chaucer may be falsely “accused” (line 350).38 She sketches a courtly world in which truth is divorced from language, where too many speak to amuse the king and to assuage their own envious regard for others. Words like “accuse” thus lose their significance as terms pertaining to law and the consequent need for evidence. Instead, they merely describe the meaningless and malign speech 37. For considerations of the semantics articulated within the Roman de la rose, see John V. Fleming, The “Roman de la rose”: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), chap. 3; L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 408–9; and Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, eds., Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Images, Reception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For a look at the sorts of tensions that underlie courtly love poetry—as well as at recent attempts to explain these in either psychological or social terms —see Sarah Kay, “The Contradictions of Courtly Love and the Origins of Courtly Poetry: The Evidence of the Lauzengiers,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (1996), especially 223–24. 38. “Queynte” is a contested term. For a vigorous argument against this word used as a pun with sexual double meanings, see Larry D. Benson, “The ‘Queynte’ Punnings of Chaucer’s Critics,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. P. Strohm and T. J. Heªernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). For equally vigorous counterarguments about the serious and destabilizing function of puns, see Susan Crane, “Medieval Romance and Feminine Diªerence in The Knight’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 47–63, and Delany, Naked Text. My reading of the above passages supports the project of destabilization, particularly as the word “queynte” describes the language of the court.


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of court. The object of the satire both here and in the Boke of Cupide is the court, not the king, but both writers inevitably suggest that only the king can bring order to a kingdom badly run by mating birds, eagles, or courtiers and their “queynte” laws and tongues. Reading these poems as addressed to a king hardly the tyrant makes sense in terms of the complaints about Richard during the middle years of the 1380s. His heedlessness and extravagance preoccupied the Commons; his disinterest in the war his “eagles” wished him to wage with France was the focus of the nobility’s dissatisfaction.39 The Appellants’ crude force and their unsubtle reminders of Richard’s relative powerlessness point up the disregard in which he was held. The Merciless Parliament at which he presided—giving tacit legitimacy to the “accusations” that his closest associates had committed treason by leading him astray—showcased a toy king, not even a tin-pot tyrant. But the Richard who emerged from the Merciless Parliament was a diªerent sort of monarch, one before whom the festive, highly sophisticated, and only half-veiled political conversation of the 1380s could hardly be staged. The audience had changed, for the king was no longer young in experience. The textual histories of both the Confessio Amantis and the Legend of Good Women evince their authors’ political understanding of both works as well as the di‹culties each had with adapting these poems to a new political situation. Gower rewrote portions of the Confessio at least twice during the early 1390s. After Queen Anne’s death in 1394, Chaucer rewrote the prologue and then apparently abandoned the Legend.40 Clanvowe, who died in Constantinople in 1391, followed the Boke of Cupide with a prose treatise (The Two Ways) as “plain” as any cuckoo, or Lollard, might wish. Gower’s revisions perhaps best epitomize the complexities of a situation that was both political and rhetorical.41 Gower first completed the Confessio in 1390. That first recension, which contained the 39. See my remarks on Chaucer’s Melibee and its relation to the issues of the 1380s in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 217–33. 40. Minnis with Scattergood and Smith, The Shorter Poems, 326–29, questions this. But then see Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 191–97, whose argument I find most persuasive. 41. For discussions of Gower’s revisions of the Confessio Amantis, see Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, 2:xxi–xxviii; Fisher, John Gower, 1 16–22; and James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s “Anticlaudianus” and John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 293–94. For a discussion of the problematics of Gower’s rewriting as it is reflected in the manuscripts, see Peter Nicholson, “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 10 (1984): 159–80; Nicholson, “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 123–43; and Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature,


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river scene and Richard’s request that Gower write a poem, was dedicated to King Richard. A few months later, in the fourteenth year of Richard’s reign (thus between June 22, 1390, and June 21, 1391), book 8 was rewritten to delete both the dedication to the king and the fond reference to Geoªrey Chaucer. Instead, Gower ended the poem with a more general meditation on the state of the kingdom and the duties of the good ruler. Finally, in the third recension of the Confessio, Gower oªered his poem to Henry of Lancaster, his new liege lord. In place of the semi-idyllic river scene that served as the original genesis for his poem, he says that he will make “A bok for Engelondes sake, / The yer sextenthe of kyng Richard” (CA, prologue, 24–25). “Engelondes” thus replaces “king Richard’s,” and Gower then substitutes a lament for the world’s decay for his account of the interchange between poet and liege. By carefully dating the prologue, however— the sixteenth year of King Richard, or the year of June 21, 1392–93—Gower links the generalized trope of the world’s decay to a particular year and hence connects the poem to the exigencies of that year and reign. Similarly, in the last portion of book 8, Gower substitutes a general address to the estates for an elaborately complimentary presentation of his book to the king. In the original version, his praise for Richard’s justice, piety, mercy, and virtue outlines the ethics of the good king and thus becomes a species of advisory rhetoric. In this other version, Gower addresses not the king but the country, suggesting that the Confessio is more than a “mirror” for princes. The genre of the miroir is firmly tied to a concept of ethical kingship and thus to the possibility that poets and their texts are active participants in a type of educative dialogue. But Gower’s changes suggest that such a poem might have more than one audience, as indeed the Confessio did. During Gower’s lifetime, it seems to have circulated in all three recensions (and, even then, with a predominance of the first-recension manuscripts, which were addressed to Richard). The very fact that he could so easily substitute one name for another is, as Larry Scanlon has pointed out, indicative of Gower’s interest in the institution of kingship rather ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 130–42. Nicholson has argued that Gower’s rededication to Henry was more casual than pointed. If so, and the density of his argument should be carefully considered, it is possible that the request to create a “Lancastrian version” came from John of Gaunt (see Chap. 3 below). M. B. Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1995), 81–121, concurs with Nicholson and suggests that copies were commissioned by specific patrons. The non-uniformity of the revisions may owe something to the needs of the patrons themselves and the scribes’ access to diªerent exemplars.


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than in a particular king.42 The scope that Gower tries to build into his poem is not apparent in Chaucer’s Legend, nor in Clanvowe’s Boke, nor in Usk’s Testament. Those works seem strongly linked to a courtly audience or a set of political conditions. To some extent, the question of “scope” is a question of a work’s rhetorical underpinnings. In the case of Gower’s Confessio, the subject of rhetorical structure is part of the very strategy of the work itself and is integral to Gower’s joining of two narratives exploring the nature of personal and national (or regal) authority.43 There are, in fact, times when the skeleton seems more prominent than the flesh intended to cover it, and Gower’s fascination with ordering systems threatens to overwhelm a reader trying to make sense of and enjoy this vast, encyclopedic work. Recent studies have suggested, however, that the Confessio is less monolithic than it can sometimes appear and that its Latin glosses (which in manuscripts move from margins to text), Latin poetry, shifting narrative perspectives, manipulation of source texts, and two distinct manuscript traditions combine to form a text whose potential for instability may well have been part of Gower’s original intention.44 The manuscript tradition alone—the work’s popularity throughout the fifteenth century, the deluxe treatment it was frequently accorded, its illustrations—suggest that it oªered later readers stories and perspectives that continued to speak to their needs for wisdom, for entertainment, and for political analysis. Gower himself seems to have felt that the poem’s political counsel provided him with his overarching purpose, as he suggests in the Latin colophon to the Confessio.45 There, as Chaucer did in his retraction, Gower describes his oeuvre, dedicating the Confessio to Henry of Derby and noting, first, the account of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and Daniel’s prophecy in the prologue, 42. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 252. 43. On the relationship between the work’s structure and its content, see Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s “Confessio Amantis.” Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1978), 139–59; Elizabeth Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm and the Political Macrocosm,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 135–62; Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: Scolar Press, 1988), 184–85; and R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 197–208. 44. See J. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, chap. 7; Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995): 61–93; Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 1–40; and Richard Kenneth Emmerson, “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143–86. 45. Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” also discusses this colophon.


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then Aristotle’s advice to Alexander that constitutes book 7, and last, the stories of love and lovers that seem to dominate the poem. He may appear to be oªering a skewed perspective upon what we might naturally think of as a poem about love and lovers. But he directs our attention first to the dream of mutability and change and, second, to Aristotelian advice to princes as a means of suggesting a scope for the Confessio that (as Russell Peck, Elizabeth Porter, and James Simpson have shown) must necessarily include the individual and his ability to understand and control his passions. Moreover, Gower’s use of Aristotle’s link between the well-governed prince and the well-governed state allows him to create a text whose potential for malleability is a part of its very rhetorical identity. Simpson has most recently analyzed the Aristotelian structure of book 7 by comparing it to the scheme found in Brunetto Latini’s Li livres dou tresor rather than those in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principium or the Secreta secretorum.46 Simpson argues that Gower follows Brunetto’s version of the ordering of the sciences, and he stresses that the real “frame” of the Confessio is not the confession of Amans but the matter of book 7, which considers philosophy in general and the practical science of politics, or good governance, in particular. He locates the Confessio within Gower’s own fundamental constitutionalism, which insists upon a consensual dialogue among the body’s hierarchical parts. While Simpson’s description of Gower as a constitutionalist seems slightly premature, he has nonetheless focused attention upon Brunetto Latini in ways that suggest Gower’s own careful manipulation of Aristotelian political thought. Both Giles of Rome and Brunetto Latini were widely available in the late fourteenth century. Though both based their treatises upon Aristotle, they did so in diªerent ways and toward diªerent ends. Giles of Rome wrote for the king of France; Brunetto Latini, for the communes of Italy. Giles —an Augustinian, a student of Thomas Aquinas, and a doctor of the University of Paris —was appointed tutor to the young Philip the Fair by Philip III. At the king’s request, he wrote a book of instruction for the prince, which Philip ordered translated into the vernacular upon his accession to the throne in 1286.47 The work was popular, and not only in France. It was copied nearly 250 times, and 53 of these manuscripts have a medieval English origin 46. J. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 21 1–29. See also Alastair Minnis, “‘Moral Gower’ and Medieval Literary Theory,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, ed. Minnis, 71–78. 47. See Samuel P. Molenaer, ed., Li livres du gouvernement des rois: A xiiith-Century French Version of Egidio Colonna’s Treatise, “De regimine principium” (New York: Columbia University Press and Macmillan, 1899; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), introduction.


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or provenance.48 Simon Burley, tutor to Richard II, was known to have owned a copy, and Giles’s privileging of monarchical power as a key principle of the common good is thought to have helped shape some of Richard’s ideas about royal prerogative.49 In the 1390s, John Trevisa translated it into Middle English at the request of Thomas Berkeley, whose own ideas about patronage were fundamental to his sponsorship of a cultural program.50 The De regimine principium not only elaborates a theory of secular absolutism for the common good but also locates civil order in the authority of the wellordered prince. Giles organized the book into a tripartite structure that epitomized the three authoritative Aristotelian texts of instruction: the Ethics, the Politics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. Translations of these books were among those commissioned by Charles V of France, and Nicole Oresme, their translator, described them as necessary for a political education (see Chapter 2 below). In other words, the French monarchy linked Aristotelian thought as well as this categorization of Aristotle’s political ideas to its own realization of “benign absolutism,” its definition of the common good. Consequently, in book 1, Giles describes the highest good and the need for the prince to recognize and carry out the works of wisdom. He lays out the necessary virtues a wise prince should possess —prudence, justice, courage, continence, liberality, honor, humility, dignity, kindness, amiability, truthfulness, and sociability. He goes on to discuss the emotions and, finally, the habits. In the second book he builds outward from the principles of individual ethical instruction and, drawing upon the Economics, he outlines the household as a species of absolutist rule, where the wife and children are governed according to law and reason.51 Arguing that human beings are social by nature and desire companionship, he then insists that the same process of ethical rule can be applied hierarchically by the wise

48. C. F. Briggs, “Manuscripts of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principium in England, 1300–1500: A Handlist,” Scriptorium 47 (1993): 61; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principium”: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21–24. 49. Richard H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 155–63; Saul, Richard II, 249–50. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principium,” 61–63, suggests that Giles need not be credited with Richard’s absolutist ideas. Thomas of Woodstock also owned a copy of Giles, and Briggs points out that Thomas would have found much in Giles on a king’s responsibility to seek wise counsel. 50. David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 189ª; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principium,” chap. 4. See also Ralph Hanna III, “Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage,” Speculum 64 (1989): 885, 914–16. 51. Molenaer, ed., Li livres du gouvernement, 145.


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prince to the members of his household. He pays a good deal of attention to the companionate nature of the marriage bond and devotes the second part of this book to the care and education of both sons and daughters. The third part focuses upon the other elements of the household, discussing its physical maintenance as well as the servants and nobles who frequent a great household. Book 3 is drawn from the Politics and extends the notion of the wise ruler into the government of the orderly state, where the common good depends upon a single figure (of, preferably, hereditary rule) whose wisdom manifests itself in suitable judges and counselors along with a reverence for the law. Though Giles certainly admits the reality of tyranny, he focuses upon the education of the wise prince, whose inner authority is reflected in the continual peace and welfare of his household and his state. Giles’s dedication of his book to Philip frames it. He states that the book oªers principles that ensure stable hereditary rule because they are both natural and rational. He also praises Philip as a glorious, noble, amiable prince, whose care both for his son and his people has inspired the volume. Philip’s own sense of law and reason, his respect for his lineage, his care for the future, and his faith are catalytic, in the sense that what Giles writes has been achieved through Philip and can now be extended into the next generation through his son. Thus the education that the De regimine outlines is rooted in Giles’s approbation of Philip’s own good rule and in his recognition of the innate hereditary privilege of the young prince. He retains his authorial rights by stating that he made the book because he found Philip’s request a laudable one, but the dedication places the prince squarely in the center of what is a series of widening rings outward from his authority. What the author writes at his command is first realized in the heart of the prince and then manifested in the kingdoms of household and state, whose order is but an outward sign of the prince’s own inner kingdom. The method of organization that Giles of Rome used in the De regimine was employed by Christine de Pisan in Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, which she was commissioned to write after Charles’s death.52 Her use of Giles’s structure for her biography of Charles further indicates the ways in which the Aristotelian absolutism described by Giles was firmly tied to the contemporary absolutism of medieval France—and indeed, her biography characterizes Charles V as the supreme example of the wise man, husband, father, and ruler. His king52. For a discussion of Christine’s debt to Giles of Rome, see S. Solente, ed., Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, by Christine de Pisan (Paris: H. Champion, 1936), 1:xxx–xxxvi.


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doms exist in a series of harmonies where the common good is an expression of the ruler’s own wisdom. The link between ruler and kingdom that Gower explores throughout the Confessio is fundamental to Aristotelian political thought, but, as Scanlon has pointed out, Gower’s dedication hardly places the prince in such a central position. Instead, the poet steps forward as the figure in whom authority lies.53 Thus in the prologue to the Confessio, Gower never subordinates himself to Richard II (or to Henry of Derby). In both versions of the prologue, the poet’s ability to understand the times serves as the impetus for the poem. In the first version of the prologue, Richard asks him to write “som newe thing” (line 51*) for him. In the second, Gower presents the poem as emerging from his own observation of the state of the times and describes himself as sending it to Henry, “with whom myn hert is of accord” (line 85). The statement subtly marginalizes Henry in favor of the poet, who oªers the book to Henry because he finds him worthy of it. In other words, Gower’s own perception and judgments are given more weight than princely patronage. Similarly, the description of Aristotle’s education of Alexander in book 6 is occasioned by Amans’s own rather tired desire to hear something diªerent. Bot this I wolde you beseche, Beside that me stant of love, As I you herde speke above Hou Alisandre was betawht To Aristotle, and so wel tawht Of al that to a king belongeth, Whereof min herte sore longeth To wite what it wolde mene. For be reson I wolde wene That if I herde of thinges strange, Yit for a time it scholde change Mi peine, and lisse me somdiel. (CA 6.2408–19) Like a petulant sovereign (or like the Richard of the prologue or the Arthur of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Amans wishes to change the subject for a bit, hoping that philosophy may take his mind oª love. 53. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 250–52.


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It is, of course, the philosophy of statecraft that gives Gower his conclusion to the poem. In the first version, he closes the Confessio with praise for Richard that also serves as advice about the need for justice, mercy, largesse, and charity as necessary components of wise rule.54 In the later version of the poem, Gower closes by elaborating upon the perilous state of England, whose divisions stem from widespread greed, where “trouthe hath broke his bond / And with brocage is goon aweie” (8.3032–23). After expanding upon the evils of a rampant mercantilism that has broken the bonds formerly holding people together, Gower ends by describing the duties of the wise king, who could heal the divisions in present-day England. Although he here outlines a picture of regal authority, he places that picture of kingship not only under the scrutiny of God but also, implicitly, under the scrutiny of the poets whose language can categorize and memorialize. The second version of the closing is not so much distinct from the first as an elaboration upon its implied meaning, which urges Richard to recognize his authority and to use it accordingly. Rather than foregrounding divine right or sacramental kingship, Gower foregrounds himself. He may be too old to be a lover, but he is not too old to look around him. Gower’s subtle sidelining of lordship has much in common with Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, which speaks directly to its reader about the acquisition of wisdom. Where Giles of Rome maintains a sharp regal focus throughout the De regimine, Brunetto presents his book as a book of treasures that, unlike a lord’s physical treasure, is implicitly available to anyone who wishes to study his book. Thus, where lords amass treasure to increase their power and status, he has amassed for us treasures that can enable us to have knowledge, acquire happiness and virtue, and learn the rhetorical skills necessary for good government. His analogy depends upon the very mercantilism of the Italian city, and, rather than decry it, he extends the theme of acquisition into the abstract arena of philosophy. Nonetheless, he continually argues from a theory of use, insisting upon the practical application of his book. Brunetto employs a tripartite structure that mimics the three branches of philosophy: theory, practical application (ethics and logic), and rhetoric. His argument traces a movement from pure knowledge—the nature of the soul, the nature of the world, the study of history, the branches of natural science—to the business of self-government and finally to the communal virtues. Aristotle’s Ethics provides him with the foundations of his second book, which he describes as ultimately relating to 54. Ferster, Fictions of Advice, chap. 7, discusses Gower’s strategies of princely advice.


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the highest art of all, the art that teaches how to govern a city.55 Accordingly, he teaches the ability to recognize virtue and then explores the various states of character, considering courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, anger, truth and falsehood, justice, constancy, friendship, service, delight, happiness, and beatitude. After chapter 50 of this book, he concludes his translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and “clarifies” Aristotle by quoting from other classical authors, notably Cicero and Seneca, upon the subject of the virtues. The two halves of the second book mirror one another, with the second half providing a classical gloss to Aristotle’s Ethics. In both halves, the cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—provide him with the major headings under which he considers other virtues, habits, and social characteristics.56 Because Brunetto maintains his control over all of the authors whose works he mines for his treatise, it is his voice, the voice of the contemporary teacher, that validates the worth of the treasures he has amassed. In the third book, he begins with Cicero and the science of rhetoric and concludes with Aristotle’s Politics, linking the ability to speak—that is, the ability to think logically and strategically—with the ability to govern cities. Here, he distinguishes between two types of government: one French and absolutist, and the other Italian, where lordship is elective. The first Brunetto describes as of little benefit to the city dweller, for o‹ces are “sold” by the sovereign. The second emerges from Italian city government, where communities elect magistrates they think will best serve the common good. Brunetto wrote his Tresor in France (and in French) while in exile from Florence in the 1260s, and he belongs to a period of Italian political thought that saw the erosion of republican self-rule throughout Italy as lords came to dominate cities. Florence was the exception. Quentin Skinner has argued that Brunetto’s thinking about the ideology of rule grew out of the rhetorical schools imported from France, which taught oratory by teaching classical authors such as Cicero. Skinner suggests that Brunetto and other writers in this tradition not only oªered strong and early defenses of republican values but also created a mode of civic or political analysis, one whereby the strengths and weaknesses of 55. Tresor, bk. 2, chap. 3. Citations of the Tresor refer to Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure, trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993), and Francis J. Carmody, ed., Li livres dou tresor de Brunetto Latini (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948). On the sources Brunetto Latini employed and how they should be interpreted within the context of Italian prehumanist thought, see Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 1–56. 56. Tresor, bk. 2, chap. 3.


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a government might be understood.57 The intense practicality of the Tresor is inextricable from its pedagogy, for Brunetto insists throughout that the treasures he lays before us are things that can, indeed, be taught. If knowledge and virtue can be taught, and if virtue is that rubric under which we group the qualities suited to governors, and if the best governors are elected by knowledgeable and virtuous citizens, then we have, almost unwittingly, entered an academy where the degree is the capacity for lordship (or discernment, at the very least). For Brunetto, as for Giles, order is the expression of good government, but the quality of lordship each espouses is radically diªerent. The latter is devoted to the education of the prince; the former, to the education of the citizen. The appeal of the Tresor for civic o‹cials can be seen in the version of it that Andrew Horn included in his Liber Legum Regum Antiquorum, the volume that he intended as a formal record, or secular chronicle, for the city of London.58 Horn was London’s chamberlain from 1320 to 1328 and, as Anne Sutton describes him, he was a key figure in the careful rebuilding of the city’s liberties during the last years of Edward II and the first of Edward III. The texts he assembled articulate London’s liberties by collecting laws, charters, ordinances, selected statutes, the annals of London, and extracts from the Tresor into a single volume (now scattered).59 Horn carefully abridged and rearranged the Tresor in order to form a book of instruction for the mayors of London—and in fact, for the original terms denoting lordship, he substituted “meire.” The transcription provides a shrewd look at the ways in which the Tresor could be seen as curtailing the very lordship it sought to endow with knowledge. All of the portions (and there are

57. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:27–41. 58. See Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis: Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum et Liber Horn (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), vol. 2. For an incisive commentary upon Horn’s achievement and his probable reasons for compiling the volume, see J. Catto, “Andrew Horn: Law and History in Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to R. W. Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis, J. M. WallaceHadril, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 367–92. Catto also oªers a close comparison of the Tresor with Horn’s edition of it. 59. Anne Sutton, “Merchants, Music, and Social Harmony: The London Puy and Its French and London Contexts, Circa 1300,” London Journal 17 (1992): 12. For studies of the manuscripts, see Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae, 1:xii–xiii; N. Ker, “Liber Custumarum and Other Manuscripts Formerly at the Guildhall,” The Guildhall Miscellany 3 (1954): 37–45; Lynda Eileen Dennison, “‘Liber Horn,’ ‘Liber Custumarum,’ and Other Manuscripts of the Queen Mary Psalter Workshops,” in Medieval Art, Architecture, and Archaeology in London, ed. Lindy Grant (Oxford: British Archaeological Association, 1990). For the most recent and accurate study of Horn, see Ralph Hanna, London Literature, c. 1320–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).


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only eight of them) are drawn from the third book of the Tresor. The transcription begins by describing the three pillars of good civic government: justice, reverence, and love. It then outlines the virtues a good mayor should possess, the proceedings for electing a mayor, his conduct on resigning his o‹ce, his conduct during his tenure, the advantages and disadvantages of severity and leniency, and, finally, the diªerence between a king and a tyrant.60 The checks on the o‹ceholder are far more prominent in the English transcription, where a mayor’s resignation of his term (he is advised not to accept a second), his accountability, and the city’s own procedures for electing a mayor emphasize not individual power but London’s own civic authority. Given the volatile nature of London politics at this time, it is not surprising that the transcription should seem even more republican than the original.61 It is nonetheless significant that the Tresor should be the chosen source for a handbook of English civic liberties and perceived as capable of producing a manual of communal ideology. J. H. Burns has described the writings of the thirteenth-century Italian communes as providing early examples of the language of a patriotism rooted in amicitia and fraternitas, which, by their very natures, exclude domination and vengeance.62 Certainly Horn’s use of the Tresor suggests that it was perceived as not allied with absolutist politics in the way Giles of Rome’s De regimine certainly was. I do not wish to become overly schematic about the distinctions between the two books. Both authors certainly owe something to Aristotelian thought as it was being absorbed and worked out during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. (In fact, both texts were included in the manuscript prepared for Edward III upon his marriage to Philippa of Hainault, a manuscript that has been described as an instruction manual for the young Edward III.63) The two texts have diªerent foci, however, and they allow us to locate Gower’s own version of an Aristotelian education within an English conversation about authority. Skinner describes the moral assumptions of the Italian prehumanist writers, of whom

60. The sections transcribed—and, in some cases, abridged or rearranged—from book 3 of the Tresor are, in order, chaps. 74, 75, 102, 103, 104, 105, 97, 98, 96. 61. Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Merchant Community: The Grocer’s Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), and see Chap. 4 below. 62. J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 596–97. 63. M. A. Michael, “A Manuscript Wedding Gift from Philippa of Hainault to Edward III,” Burlington Magazine 20 (1985): 582–89. The manuscript may have been prepared by Isabella, the young king’s mother—see Briggs, Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principium,” 56—or by his wife.


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Brunetto is the most important, as focused by a belief in peace as a victorious force. Such a victory begins with rulers whose devotion to wisdom and justice binds a city together in concord and equity, which, in turn, brings about the common good and the triumph of peace.64 What Skinner outlines is a process that begins in a ruler’s heart and ends in a civic triumph, but the process is also a means of analyzing civic discord, because discord is perceived as the force that undermines the common good. Moreover, because the “ruler” of the Tresor rules only for a year, the treatise is devoted not simply to educating a single ruler in the love of wisdom but also to informing a broader public, whose own selfinterest and attachment to faction can threaten the common good even as a ruler seeks to promote concord. Gower’s scheme in the Confessio is, as Simpson has stated, far closer to that of the Tresor, and his goals seem more aligned with Brunetto Latini’s. He may well have known Andrew Horn’s encyclopedic portrayal of civic liberty and responsibility, because Horn collected the manuscripts for the city and deposited them in the Guildhall, where he intended them to remain: “And my will is, that they shall remain there for ever, in the custody of the Chamberlain for the time being; and that whosoever shall be Chamberlain hereafter, shall be answerable to the City aforesaid by indenture for the same.”65 What Jeremy Catto characterizes as a “school for statesmen” was intended as a public text, or series of texts, for the use of those responsible for the well-being of London’s civic life. In book 7 of the Confessio, Gower gives evidence of working within a similar scheme of virtues, but also, like Horn, of thinking his way through the Tresor so as to adapt it to the conditions of late-fourteenth-century London. He divides policy into five parts: truth, liberality, justice, pity, and chastity. Because Brunetto discusses pity as a part of justice, liberality as a part of fortitude, and chastity as a part of temperance, Gower is likely working within the frame of the four cardinal virtues, perhaps assimilating truth to prudence (or replacing prudence with truth). In the Tresor, prudence is described as preceding the other four virtues —as lighting the way for the rest, according to Cicero (Tresor 2.57). Truth is considered as a characteristic of prudent speech. Gower says, “Among the vertus on is chief, /

64. Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti,” 20. For a discussion of the political implications in latefourteenth-century England of praising peace and disparaging war, see Nigel Saul, “A Farewell to Arms? Criticism of Warfare in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Fourteenth-Century England, vol. 2, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 131–45. 65. Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. x. See Fisher, John Gower, chap. 2, for a record of Gower’s professional life as well as his connections to London lawyers like Ralph Strode.


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And that is trouthe” (CA 7.1723–24). Distilling much of Brunetto’s advice about moderate and truthful speech, Gower goes on to link truth to acts of speech, arguing that a king needs to be true to his word and prudent of tongue. In the literature of the mid- to late 1380s in England, truth is a charged and highly political or topical reference—at once a virtue in its own right and a quality that writers such as Chaucer, Usk, the Gawain-poet, and Clanvowe all suggest is in short supply at court.66 And it is under the rubric of truth that Gower tells the story of Queen Alceste’s sacrifice for her lord, setting it within the tale from 3 Esdras in which Dares asks three wise men who is more powerful—kings, women, or wine. Zorobabel’s answer caps all: he argues that truth is finally more powerful than any of them. Chaucer’s use of the legend of Queen Alceste, of course, appears in the Legend of Good Women, which is likewise focused upon truth and its relationship to courtly speech. Gower’s handling of truth should be seen as his own adaptation (or “Englishing”) of the Tresor, a “translation” arising from the mutually (or covertly) expressed concerns of his peers. What is more, the entire poem, especially the Lancastrian version, is framed by Gower’s horror at the “diversity,” or factionalism, of his times; by the consequent need for a wise leader; and by his fervent hope for peace in his own land. His nationalism is to some extent an expression of his analysis of his country as split into factions. The peace for which he prays should be seen as a realization of an otherwise elusive nationhood. Through Amans, Gower (like Brunetto Latini in the Tresor) stresses the connection between individual self-interest and civic or national factionalism out of which the poem, like the treatise, grows. The distinctions between Gower’s rewritten portions of the poem and the original version seem most evident here. Gower’s understanding of secular power shifts slightly once Richard is removed from the picture. The two versions do not make diªerent points about the necessity of observing the common good so much as oªer diªerent perspectives. In the first version, Gower addresses Richard and, by discussing his virtues, establishes the outlines of the kingdom in relation to the sovereign. In the Lancastrian version, he begins with his own recognition of God’s sovereign power, asking him to set the land in the way of “good governance” (CA 8.2988). Gower then goes on to state that if men could remember what it is to live in unity, every estate would desire peace. The desire for peace, then, is the beginning of the complicated process by which peace is 66. On truth, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).


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finally achieved. The lines that follow consider the estates in relation to the need to recognize a common good. The last of the “estates” is that “Above alle othre on erthe hiere / Which hath the lond in his balance: / To him belongith the leiance / Of Clerk, of knyght, of man of lawe” (8.3056–60). Acknowledging the king’s enormous power, Gower subordinates it not only to God but also to his “covenant,” or o‹ce (8.3074). Bot though that he such power have, And that his myghtes ben so large, He hath hem nought withouten charge, To which that every kyng ys swore: So were it good that he ther fore First un to rightwisnesse entende Wherof that he hym self amende Toward his god and leve vice, Which is the chief of his o‹ce; And aftir al the remenant He schal uppon his covenant Governe and lede in such a wise, So that ther be no tirandise, Wherof that he his poeple grieve Or ellis may he nought achieve That longith to his regalie. (8.3064–79) Nothing Gower is saying here about the delimitations upon regal power is especially radical. Kings were continually reminded of the need to live virtuously and of the dangers of tyrannical behavior. The later version of book 8, however, is reworked to foreground an o‹ce, not a person, and to locate the king within a relational hierarchy that, as a whole, must regain its memory of unity. The king’s individual reformation is one piece of what Gower outlines as a general process of reformation in which each person, by living according to the demands of his o‹ce, will share in recapturing a vanished peace. The peace that is longed for will be, like Brunetto Latini’s, a sign of a triumphal process. By incorporating the broader rhetorical structure of the Tresor into the version of the Confessio addressed to Henry of Lancaster, Gower attempts to translate into English the more republican concerns of the Tresor. Thus, where the


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first recension of the Confessio lavishly praises Richard, using encomium as the vehicle for advice, Gower holds up to Henry of Lancaster the duties of a good prince in relation to the need for secular reform. The two versions of Gower’s closing lines are even more diªerent than they appear. In the first, Gower presents his book to his king, protesting his own simplicity and Richard’s worthiness; he then rea‹rms his age and resolves to write of mundane love no longer. In the later ending, Gower promises that “whatever” king obeys God’s laws shall bring prosperity to his kingdom and earn a memorial for himself. He then borrows Chaucer’s phrase and says that his “English” book stands “betwene ernest and game,” hoping that it will not be refused by “lered men” because it is written with “rude wordis and with pleyne.” He thus brings the Confessio to an end by stressing its Englishness, its playful ambiguity, and its lack of rhetorical sophistication. Despite his modest disclaimers, Gower achieves an English poem capturing the treasures of the past for his own place and time. While the poem can serve as a gift for princes, it can also become a storehouse of civic memory. And if he dedicates it to Henry, presumably it can be rededicated at a later date should the need arise. Fittingly, the place between earnest and game is the place for the poet, the fool in the chimney corner who speaks from a peculiar (and peculiarly disregarded) vantage. The story of the fool appears in book 7 of the Confessio as part of the discussion of pity, the fourth point of policy. The emperor Lucius asks his steward and his chamberlain what men say of him. The steward simply praises the king. The chamberlain says that the people blame the king’s council, not the king, for untruthfulness. The fool, who has been sitting in the chimney corner playing with his “babil,” unnoticed by those discussing the issues of the realm, tells the king that if the king were good, the council would not be bad (7.3996–97). The fool’s wisdom awakens the king’s conscience, and he puts away the vicious, takes to himself the virtuous, amends the laws, and addresses himself to the common good. Like Chaucer’s much longer Melibee, the tale employs a marginal figure— a woman or a fool—to tell the king what he would not otherwise hear. The plain speech Gower claims for himself near the end of the Confessio, as well as his admission of foolishness in having been an old lover, locates him within the environs of the chimney corner, where poets can play unnoticed with “babils,” observe the state of their worlds, and speak from what Gower describes as “foles evidence” (7.4002). The word “evidence” encompasses both the authoritative evidence of history and the empirical evidence a man might himself gather. Perhaps Gower, like Chaucer, needed the screen provided by the phrase “betwene


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ernest and game.” If evidence is taken into account, men change, moods change, and the estimation of poets must accordingly alter. If so, we are considering judgment, not praise. Within this company of Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Gower, Thomas Usk is the odd man out. Paul Strohm’s description of Usk as “a scrambler . . . living by his wits and talent” epitomizes the man who survived the rough politics of London only to go under when the Appellants moved against those who surrounded the king.67 Early in his career, Usk—by profession a scrivener—had been closely associated with John of Northampton, who was mayor of London from October 1381 to October 1383. Possibly Usk had been with Northampton from as early as 1377–78. After two terms of o‹ce, during which Northampton sought to move aggressively against the opposing party ruled by London’s merchant capitalists, he lost a third term to Nicholas Brembre, a staunch supporter of Richard II. Northampton continued to agitate against Brembre during 1384. When John of Gaunt, who protected Northampton, was out of England in June 1384, Brembre and his faction moved against Northampton, accusing him of treasonous activity and imprisoning Usk as a member of Northampton’s inner circle. Usk then turned against his old associate, bringing an appeal against him in which Usk accused Northampton of disrupting the peace of the city of London by exacerbating the factionalism of city politics.68 The appeal provided evidence that allowed Brembre to place Northampton on trial, and Usk testified at the trial. Usk himself was imprisoned several times during this period, but under conditions that would have allowed for the writing of the Testament, probably between 67. Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144. For Usk, see also Ramona Bressie, “The Date of Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” Modern Philology 26 (1928): 17–29; May Newman Hallmundsson, “The Community of Law and Letters: Some Notes on Thomas Usk’s Audience,” Viator 9 (1978): 357–65; Paul Strohm, “Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 83–1 12; Andrew Galloway, “Private Selves and the Intellectual Marketplace in Late Fourteenth-Century England: The Case of the Two Usks,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 291–318; and Anne Middleton, “Thomas Usk’s ‘Perdurable Letters’: The Testament of Love from Script to Print,” Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998): 63–1 16. For the most recent account of Usk’s life as it sheds light on the Testament of Love, see the introduction to Thomas Usk: Testament of Love, ed. Gary W. Shawver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), to which my account of his activities is indebted. 68. For the appeal, see R. Allen Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk: The Testament of Love (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 423–29; for a reading of this moment in Usk’s life, see Strohm, “Politics and Poetics,” and Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 14–16.


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December 1384 and June 1385. In taking hold of Nicholas Brembre’s coattails, Usk also signaled his loyalty to the king.69 The Testament—possibly addressed to Richard or to those who, like Usk, served the powers surrounding Richard— means to elucidate Usk’s own good name, prove his fundamental truth, and plead his worthiness for royal preferment. In September 1387, just a few months before the Appellants brought charges against Richard’s friends, Richard made Usk under-sheriª of Middlesex. Usk was ripe for the political paybacks enacted by the Merciless Parliament. On March 3, 1388, Usk was tried and brutally executed the day the sentence was made. Usk can be linked to other victims of the Appellants, men with whom Chaucer also had a‹liations —Robert Tresilian, the chief justice of the king’s bench, and Robert Bealknap, the chief justice of the common bench.70 To this extent, Usk’s ghastly death emphasizes just how precarious Chaucer’s own position must have been, for Chaucer counted among his friends or associates Nicholas Brembre and Simon Burley, both targets of the Appellants’ wrath. The Testament of Love is at once a profoundly political text underwritten by Usk’s own political ambitions and a valuable witness to the literary conversations in London during the middle years of the 1380s. Most notably, the Testament evinces its author’s familiarity with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Boece and with Gower’s Vox clamantis. The Testament can also be used to understand the rhetorical practices that appear to predominate among writers with political concerns and perhaps to explore what was considered an acceptable mode of address to those in power.71 Like contemporary works by Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Gower, the Testament suggests the ways in which the highly coded language of ritualized love was used to examine the intertwined political relationships upon which both court and city rested. Although Usk can be described as a city man rather than a court man, his account of his political experience is cast in language as profoundly unstable as Clanvowe’s, Chaucer’s, or Gower’s echoes of the verbal practices of courtiers. 69. Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 26. 70. For these associations and others, see Hallmundsson, “Community of Law,” 362–65. Recently, Lucy Lewis has suggested a link between Usk and Thomas Berkeley: see “The Identity of Margaret in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” Medium Aevum 68 (1999): 63–72. 71. For remarks about dating, see Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 24–26. Middleton observes that the Testament, Chaucer’s “Envoy to Scogan” or LGW, and Gower’s “In Praise of Peace” or Confessio Amantis are “all texts . . . which participate in a larger conversation among men of letters about their shared condition as thinkers and actors in a world in which they were ultimately dependents” (“Usk’s ‘Perdurable Letters,’” 68). She sees the Testament as addressed to men such as these, not to those in power.


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Usk presents his treatise as the testimony of a faithful lover. Like Gower, Chaucer, and Clanvowe, Usk constructs a persona who avers his lowly status among the successful and the mighty: “yet have I ensample to gader the smale crommes, and fullyn my walet of tho that fallen from the borde amonge the smale houndes. . . . Yet also have I leve of the noble husbande Boece, although I be a straunger of connynge, to come after his doctryne, and these great workmen, and glene my handfuls of the shedynge after theyr handes.”72 In these two similes drawn from the prologue to the Testament, Usk likens himself to the forceful, the faithful, and the disempowered. He first compares himself to the New Testament woman who pushes herself into the house where Jesus has gone to be alone and insists that he cast a demon out of her daughter (Mark 7:24–30). Because she is a Gentile, Jesus points out that the “children” should be fed before the dogs. She answers, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Second, as Ramona Bressie has pointed out, Usk draws upon Higden’s use in the Polychronicon of the story of Ruth (and possibly upon Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Latin) to describe his work as a gleaning of wisdom dropped by superior workmen.73 What is more, where Trevisa refers to “Booz,” Usk writes “Boece,” suggesting both his similarity to the tenacious and faithful Ruth and his nod to those “great workmen” who labor for the husbandman Boethius —among whom is, of course, Geoªrey Chaucer. In the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer also describes himself as “glenyng here and there” (line 75). The passage suggests the rhetorical complexity of Usk’s treatise, his ability to use his own tongue with a sinuousness worthy of a Philip Sidney. He at once locates himself hierarchically in relation to his peers and manifests his own humble worthiness to ask for the sustenance he requires. As an example of petitionary rhetoric, the Testament may cloy, but it may also be unparalleled. The first book opens with a Boethian lament. Usk, who is estranged from his lady, the precious Margarite (making him, like Chaucer, a daisy worshiper), bemoans his sorrowful state. The favor of Margarite is what he lacks —favor described in the language of love but meant as the political favor he has lost and now seeks. Into his misery comes the allegorical figure of Love, a lady who, like Lady Philosophy, engages him in dialogue designed to move him away from his extraordinary sorrow. Usk’s immediate task is to assert his long-standing love 72. Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 47. 73. Bressie, “Date.” Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 213, suggests that Usk is using Trevisa’s translation.


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of Margarite, which he does by describing a bewildering walk through the woods, a stormy voyage, and, finally, the sight of a rare pearl upon which his desires have focused “ever since.” 74 Having established his desire, he seeks to justify the earlier misadventures of his life, including his reasons for providing evidence against his former master, John of Northampton. In chapter 6 of book 1, Usk provides a less generalized autobiographical account, describing himself as “drawn,” in his youth, to matters pertaining to the “ruling of cytezins.” He describes these matters as “conjuracions,” as his “drawers in and exitours,” as “so paynted and coloured” that they seemed to him “noble and glorious to al the people.” He insists that he always worked for “commen profyte,” which he defines as peace and tranquility, with just governance proceeding from such profit. But he came to see that the “firste paynted thynges” were malicious, auguring only tyranny for the people. He justifies his subsequent actions by underlining his love for the city of London and for its peace. He goes on to say, “For my trouthe and my conscience ben wytnesse to me bothe, that this knowynge sothe have I sayde for no harme ne malyce of tho persones, but onely for trouthe of my sacrament in my leigeaunce, by whiche I was charged on my kynges behalfe.” Usk attempts to clear his name by emphasizing his folly in taking a painted thing for a real one and by noting the sacral nature of his allegiance to truth, which he then links to his allegiance to his king. Near the end of his education into the false nature of worldly value, human agency, necessity, and the true good, Usk finds inscribed within himself what the Lady has taught him: “Tho founde I fully al these maters parfytely there written: howe mysse-rule by fayned love bothe realmes and cyties hath governed a great throwe; howe lightly me might the fautes espye; how rules in love shulde ben used; howe somtyme with fayned love foule I was begyled; howe I shulde love have knowe; and howe I shal in love with my servyce procede” (TL 3.8). His disillusionment is educative, for he says he is now sure of how to proceed in the service of love. In fact, his new understanding makes him a potentially better lover than he was in his youth. In seeking to create a textualized account or justification of his actions, Usk adapted, compressed, and extended the consolatio as it had been inserted into medieval culture by Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius’s five-book structure delineated his despair at his unjust imprisonment, his gradual reori74. Usk, Testament of Love, bk. 1, chap. 3, in Thomas Usk, ed. Shawver, 57. The Testament is hereafter cited in the text as TL, with references to book and chapter numbers.


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entation through dialogue with Lady Philosophy about the relative worth of what the world perceives as a good, and the stirring account of humankind’s ultimate freedom of will within a providentially ordered universe. For this, Usk substitutes three fairly short books that point up the inherent politicism of the Consolation. In the third book, Usk draws upon St. Anselm’s De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio to examine the human will as it operates within a political community.75 In other words, the Testament makes explicit what is an implicit appeal to a reading community in the Consolation—an appeal meant as far more than an exercise in philosophical reasoning, for through it Boethius also testifies in his own defense, setting down his actions, presenting his last will and testament for posterity. The Consolation is thereby also an appeal against the Roman state, or against the ruler of that state, Theodoric, who is either blinded by or implicated in the injustices through which Boethius was imprisoned and would be executed. In the Consolation, Boethius pits the individual against the state, demonstrating that the man who is truly free need not fear the false powers of the world. As such, the work is a stinging indictment of political institutions organized around the shifting values of profit and need. In adapting Boethius to the circumstances of London politics in the 1380s, Usk transposes the relatively clean style of the Consolation into the ornate, conceited style favored by Clanvowe’s nightingale. He thus speaks of himself as a disappointed lover, of his mentor and counselor as Love (rather than as Philosophy), of his lost honor or favor as his Margarite (or pearl), of the object of his desire as the knot in the heart that ties two as one. Usk does not simply translate classical and monastic philosophy into the vernacular; he also produces a work whose symbolic language proclaims its secrecy, or the need for secrecy, in a world as dangerous as it is unstable. Like the picture Chaucer creates of himself as a daisy worshiper, or Gower’s of the aging, ridiculous lover, Usk’s selfportrait serves to emphasize his powerlessness and incomprehension in a world where very few can be trusted. To penetrate the linguistic codes of any of these works is to signal our own awareness of the risks of public life. 75. For work on Usk’s use of his sources, see George Sanderlin, “Usk’s Testament of Love and St. Anselm,” Speculum 17 (1942): 69–73; Stephen Medcalf, “Transposition: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 181–95; Lucy Lewis, “Langland’s Tree of Charity and Usk’s Wexing Tree,” Notes and Queries (1995): 429–33; and Middleton, “Usk’s ‘Perdurable Letters,’” 64–65. Middleton, “Idea of Public Poetry,” discusses Usk in relation to Boethius.


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For example, Usk uses the image of the knot to signify the fidelity of lovers.76 He begins his expansion of the image in book 2, chapter 4, in a dialogue with Love: “But for as moche as every herte that hath caught ful love, is tyed with queynt knyttynges, thou shalt understande that love and thilke foresayd blysse, toforne declared in this provynges, shal hote the knot in the hert.” “Wel,” quod I, “this inpossession I wol wel understande.” “Nowe also,” quod she, “for the knotte in the herte muste ben from one to another, and I knowe thy desyre, I wol thou understande these maters to ben sayd of thy selfe in disprovyng of thy first servyce and in strengthynge of thilke that thou haste undertake to thy Margaryete perle.” 77 Read within the context of Usk’s argument in the Testament, what sounds like a description of lovers’ allegiances is meant to be extended to political alliances. Love describes love as a knot within hearts that joins two people. Once she establishes the definition (or the image), she uses it to disallow Usk’s “first servyce,” which he has already described in the first book of the Testament. That first service was to John of Northampton, whom he discusses in terms of untruth, as someone who has broken the peace of the city. His rejection of his former master has caused him to be mistrusted, losing him the regard of his Margarite (see TL 1.10). He ends the first book by complaining that he is in a world where false is taken for true and true for false because truth lacks the goods to purchase “justice.” His plight, then, is clearly not simply a lover’s dilemma but a social or political one as well: having made an initial false alliance and then broken it, he is judged untrustworthy and now longs for a pearl whose true worth he now perceives. The knot of true alliance with that Margarite is the symbol for the object of his desire, an objective that is hindered by the world’s untruthfulness. The very possibility of achieving the knot whereby hearts are linked to hearts ap-

76. For contextual remarks about Usk’s use of the knot as an image, see Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk, 10–12. In Guigemar, Marie de France employs a knot as a sign of faithful love, and in chap. 57 of the Showings, Julian of Norwich uses the image to describe our relationship in love to God. 77. See Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 92–93. Usk introduces the knot by saying, “consente of two hertes alone maketh the fastenynge of the knotte” (TL 1.9).


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pears to be obviated by those very goods—riches, dignity, power, renown—that he lacks. Love, like her ancestor Lady Philosophy, proves that these are but gifts of fortune, not “ways to the knot” but impediments to it. Because Margarite is virtuous, the only way to the knot is by the lover’s own virtue and truth. In the second book, Love promises, “And thou lache not on thy syde, I wol make the knotte. Certes, in thy good beryng I wol acorde with the psauter. I have fou[n]de David in my servyce true, and with holy oyle of peace and of rest longe by him desyred, utterly he shal be anoynted” (2.14). Usk’s insistence that the knot is only achieved through truth seems to echo, in a far cruder way, Chaucer’s own focus upon truth as a component of love. In Troilus (5.687–770), Chaucer recounts Criseyde’s lament about Troy, which slides into her half-passive inclination to accept Diomede as her lover. She begins by going over her situation: she is alone in the Greek camp; she cannot steal back to Troy without the risk of being caught and killed as a spy; Troilus must think she is untrue to him. She then recalls Troilus’s own worth and the pleasures and joys she once had in Troy, whose towers she can see. She regrets not having run away with him and resolves, finally, to steal away and go with him wherever he wishes. Chaucer ends this sequence, in which Criseyde circles back over her own unhappiness, with the following stanza. “For which, withouten any wordes mo, To Troie I wole, as for conclusioun.” But God it wot, er fully monthes two, She was ful fer from that entencioun! For both Troilus and Troie town Shal knotteles thorughout hire herte slide; For she wol take a purpos for t’abide. (5.764–70) In the next stanza, Chaucer switches to Diomede, whose intent is to bring Criseyde into his net, to “fisshen” her. He especially prizes her because she appears to have a lover in Troy, so the man who achieves her “myghte seyn he were a conquerour” (5.794). Chaucer thus swiftly moves from Criseyde’s heart, which will not hold a knot, to Diomede’s net (which is composed of knots) and his grasp of chivalric renown as expressed through competitive possession. Troilus, of course, shadows this sequence, for he is the single figure in the poem who has taken the one Chaucer describes as “slydynge of corage” as a point of reference.


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“Corage” means heart, determination, will, feelings —the sort of courage that is linked to a person’s very nature. That Criseyde’s “corage” is not stable is finally less important within Chaucer’s poem than the fact that Troilus locates his own stability in her. While Chaucer dramatizes a situation fraught with meaning for all in power who locate authority in those with shifting hearts, Usk laments his own early and false attachment to an unstable good. He does so by evincing just how well he understood the philosophical implications of the images employed by Chaucer and Gower. Troilus describes himself as a rudderless boat (Troilus 1.416) before he achieves Criseyde’s love, and then, having lost her, as a boat that lacks a lodestar (5.638–41). Chaucer uses the image to heighten our sense of Troilus’s passivity, of a will directed by circumstance. In the Vox clamantis, Gower describes a sequence (meant to allegorize the Rising of 1381) whereby he flees from beasts turned wild and dangerous only to take refuge on a ship that, upon taking sail, is caught in a storm as fearful to Gower as the beasts are on the land. He finds a point of reference in the Virgin Mary.78 Usk’s use of the ship to express his own di‹culties suggests his ability to exploit the image in a way that at once politicizes and personalizes it. In book 1 of the Testament, he describes his recent experience as a sort of walk in the woods gone bad; in fact, he warns against the urge to travel in the woods, where it is too easy to get lost. The beasts he flees impel him to take ship. (He says, however, that he is brought to the ship by sight, lust, and will.) When the ship encounters a storm, then, he is doubly trapped—by the forces holding him on the boat and by the storm that threatens it. Like Gower, Usk captures the uncertainties and chaos of the political and social community in pictures of bestiality and natural violence.79 But Usk’s ship, like Troilus’s, is also a figure for his own unmoored state of mind. Where Troilus connects his boat’s safety to Criseyde of the sliding heart, Usk describes himself as finding and losing a pearl of such worth as to alter his whole sense of value. He then reverts to the voice of the lover: “my brennyng wo hath altred al my hewe. Whan I shulde slepe, I walowe and I thynke, and me disp[eire]. . . . For ever the more I brenne the more I coveyte. The more that I sorow, the more thrist I in gladnesse” (TL 1.3).80 78. See Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk, 320 n. 258ª. 79. See Strohm, “Politics and Poetics,” 101–2, for a reading of this passage that links it to Usk’s recent experiences with Northampton. 80. Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, emends “me disporte” to “me dispeire.” For an explanation, see 225. Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk, follows Skeat and retains “disporte.”


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What Usk accomplishes here seems both slavishly imitative and knowingly original. By linking Gower’s description of beasts and a ship to Chaucer’s description of Troilus’s lover’s woe, he prepares the way for the real project of his Testament: his account of his education at the hands of Love, an education ending in a new identity, or a new and redirected will. Because Usk does not truly understand the Margarite, or pearl, for which he longs, he needs Love to teach him that the goods of fortune are not ways toward union with the pearl. Love does so in the second book of the Testament. In the third, her focus is upon the will and its freedom to choose. Troilus negates this freedom by creating and keeping a picture of himself as “acted upon,” but Usk seeks to highlight freedom, bringing the lover to what is also Boethius’s final injunction to his reader: “Withstond thanne and eschue thou vices; worschipe and love thou vertues; areise thi corage to ryghtul hopes; yilde thou humble preieres an heyhe. Gret necessite of prowesse and vertu is encharged and comaunded to yow, yif ye nil nat dissimulen; syn that ye worken and don (that is to seyn, your dedes or your werkes) byforn the eyen of the juge that seeth and demeth alle thinges.” 81 Boethius here locates the active will within a providential scheme, where a judge both sees and judges all things. God’s foreknowledge, or sight, in no way limits the capacity of the will to choose and to act accordingly. The identity of the Margarite for which Usk longs (and that he says at the end “betokeneth grace, lernyng, or wisdom of God, or els holy church”) is thus finally less important than Usk’s own understanding of the role he plays in seeking to acquire this good. Clearly the Margarite can be described as virtuous, but, as countless sixteenthcentury sonneteers will demonstrate, even a pearl can have a foolish lover. What Usk is at pains to clarify is the changed quality of his own love, a change that can only be reckoned by understanding the language of the Testament he has written. He ends the book, therefore, by emphasizing the truth of his words: “Christ now to the I crye of mercy and of grace, and graunt of thy goodnes to every maner reder ful understandyng in this leude pamflet to have, and let no man wene other cause in this werke than is verily the soth. . . . The letter sleeth; the spyrit yeveth lyfelych understandyng. Charyte is love, and love is charyte. God graunt us al therin to be frended. And thus the Testament of Love is ended” (TL 3.9). Usk collapses the allegorical fiction of the Testament into a plain statement—the hope that we will look for the truth, the real meaning of the work, a meaning that can 81. Chaucer’s Boece (which Usk knew), in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 469.


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also be gleaned from those greater bonds of charity that tie us together. Because he has identified envy, a few lines earlier, as the cause of social discord, Usk is using his Testament to reinsert himself into the community. It bears witness to his changes and to his hopes for a newly harmonious community. The proof of the Testament, for Usk, hangs on our ability to read his language. Chaucer’s concern in Troilus with language as a necessary but inherently unstable medium of social bonding is inextricable from his focus upon truth as a necessary component of love. Chaucer’s emphasis upon Pandarus’s adroit use of words —whereby virtue becomes “slouthe” (Troilus 2.286), chastity “cruelty” or “pitilessness” (2.342, 349), and a sexual liaison “aventure” (2.281), even as Pandarus swears, of course, in the name of “his trouthe”—forms a key strand of the densely woven poem that Usk commends to his readers at the end of the Testament for what it can tell us about God’s foreknowledge of bad works.82 In addition, Chaucer demonstrates that the heroic language of wartime Troy, a language exposed by Hector’s vain attempt to save Criseyde from being traded, conceals nothing finer than the short-sighted pragmatism of the merchant community. The selling of Criseyde for Antenor mimics both Criseyde’s own barter of herself for the security she thought Troilus would oªer her and Pandarus’s selling of his niece for Troilus’s favor, a seemingly endless chain of merchandising accomplished by means of the elaborate and ritualized language of Troy-in-love. Chaucer flatly states in the proem to book 2 that “in forme of speche is chaunge,” that a lover in later years might well say of Troilus’s wooing, “‘So nold I nat love purchace.’” He thus slyly locates love, language, and his own poem within the sliding scales of the mercantile community, where most things have a price. The prologue to the Testament plays with language, or with the arts of translation, in ways that suggest Usk’s familiarity with contemporary remarks about language. He begins —in a way that recalls Gower’s original Ricardian ending of the Confessio Amantis—by remarking upon his own lack of rhetorical flourish: “And for rude wordes and boystous percen the herte of the herer to the inrest poynte and planten there the sentence of thynges so that with lytel helpe it is able to spring, this boke, that nothyng hath of the great floode of wyt ne of semelych colours, is dolven with rude wordes and boystous, and so drawe togyder to maken the catchers therof be the more redy to hent sentence.” 83 Compare Gower’s lines: 82. See Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, 266, and Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk, 401. 83. Shawver, ed., Thomas Usk, prologue and 45.


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That I no Rethoriqe have used Upon the forme of eloquence, For that is not of mi science; But I have do my trewe peyne With rude wordis and with pleyne To speke of thing which I have told. (CA 8.3064*–69*) Gower employs the passage as one movement within an elaborate modesty topos, whereby he oªers the book to his king and signals his own relative powerlessness. Usk, though, argues from a theory of language as a transferable commodity. He has tailored his style to his audience, choosing his words with the end of being heard. He then justifies his use of English, rather than French or Latin, precisely because “the understandyng of Englysshmen wol not stretche to the privy termes in Frenche . . . let us shewe our fantasyes in suche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.” In the three books that follow, Usk demonstrates just how elaborately he can write in his “dames tonge,” the tongue of “lovers,” of politicians, and of those who seek preferment or to “purchase” love (as Chaucer puts it). The truth for which Love argues appears as elusive as the plain speech espoused by Clanvowe in his final work. As to the “truth” of Usk’s testament—how can we tell, given its author’s own reminder that he speaks with an eye on the marketplace?84 In an earlier document he had recorded his appeal against John of Northampton, his former boss and the former mayor of London, using it to proclaim his stability in the face of his apparent instability in deserting Northampton for Brembre. Likewise, he here uses the Testament to bear witness to his reformed heart. Let me return to a passage. He closes with a tidy bit of allegorization that explicitly links his method with that of holy scripture. Also I praye that every man parfytly mowe knowe thorowe what intencion of herte this treatyse have I drawe. Howe was it that syghtful Manna in deserte to chyldren of Israel was spirytuel meate; bodily also it was, for mennes bodies it norisshe[d]. And yet never-the-later, Christ it signyfyed. Ryght so a jewel betokeneth a gemme, and that is a 84. On Usk’s deployment of documentary prose, see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, and Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 289–90.


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stone vertuous, or els a perle. Margarite a woman betokeneth grace, lernyng, or wisdom of God, or els holy church. . . . Flesshe is flesshly understandynge; flessh without grace and love naught is worth. The letter sleeth; the spyrit yeveth lyfelych understandyng. Charyte is love, and love is charyte. God graunt us al therin to be frended. And thus the Testament of Love is ended. (TL 3.9) Usk does more than argue here for a higher meaning for his work. By suggesting that the Margarite means grace, learning, or heavenly wisdom, he neatly sidelines any political meaning this new appeal might be thought to have. Shifting the focus to his active will, and thus to his will to reform, he styles himself as Love’s penitent, no longer as a lamenting lover. He asks now for God’s grace, no longer for his lady’s. Usk, like the Chaucer, the Gower, and the Clanvowe of the 1380s, uses conceit as the patois of the initiate and as a tool that exposes the instabilities or falsities of that tongue. The elaborate fictions each author creates, which inevitably include self-portraits as clues to the worlds these protagonists inhabit, continually remind us of the codes we must know to understand the works. Each of these self-portraits inserts the author into a company of lovers in which the protagonist describes himself as unsuccessful or unsophisticated by virtue of ignorance or age or folly. These self-portraits of the authors as outsiders and petitioners certainly suggest rank, coterie, privilege—the inner circles to which they are not privy. But they also seem to comment upon a conversation that may well have been the common speech of the court during the 1380s, when the court circle around the king (a circle whose innermost member was Robert de Vere) was not unchecked by the powers of Parliament but at times may have imagined itself as young and unconstricted. Put simply, was Richard’s court during this period a place of love talk? Does the language of the courtly poetry of the 1380s echo or form an elaborate commentary upon the language of Richard’s inner circle, or upon what was an acceptable language of petition? I use the term “love talk” not to designate sexual practice but to describe what may have been the language that expressed relationships of power. For example, in his account of Robert de Vere’s debacle at Radcott Bridge in 1387, Walsingham (alone of the chroniclers) recounts that the king’s letters to de Vere were found in the baggage he left behind him as he fled into the Thames. Walsingham reports that the letters urged de Vere to come quickly to London with great power “et rex cor apponeret ad vivendum et


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moriendum cum eo.”85 In exchange for de Vere’s support, the king promises to bestow his heart in order to live and die with him. Such courtly speech does not (at least in the Chronicon Angliae) disgust Walsingham because he suspects the two of physical joining.86 Rather, Walsingham’s references to de Vere describe his instability, his status as court favorite, and his inattention to decorum and degree, and they thus serve to adumbrate the heedlessness of a court in which de Vere rose to such heights of power. For Walsingham, at this point, the most dangerous eªect of the circle around the king was its alienation of the king from the older nobility—and for Walsingham, Michael de la Pole, Robert de Vere, and Simon Burley intended to isolate Richard from his uncles. Moreover, he saw these advisers as profiting from the distress into which they had plunged the country.87 Froissart quite overtly “feminizes” de Vere, comparing him to an otter in a fishpond, or to a wife with no thought for her husband’s honor and prosperity. He describes de Vere as serving the king “de belles parolles et de grandes huiseuses et la royne aussi, pour eulx complaire.”88 Peter Ainsworth’s account of Froissart’s portrait of de Vere demonstrates the degree to which the language of courtly flattery or double-talk was perceived as threatening the kingdom by threatening the king. Similarly, in his Chronicon, Knighton describes Alexander, the archbishop of York, Robert de Vere, Michael de la Pole, Robert Tresilian, and the rest of their associates as “seducers of the king” (“seductores regis”).89 The mid-fifteenth-century continuation of The Brut refers to de Vere as “Ser Lover.”90 Walsingham’s later suggestions in the Historia Anglicana (with 85. E. M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliae, 1328–1388, by Thomas Walsingham (London: Longman, 1874; repr., Kraus, 1965), 385. Knighton uses the term “amicum specialissimum” to describe de Vere’s relationship to the king. See G. H. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 418. See also George B. Stow, ed., Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 1 13, for the same language. As Stow points out, this chronicle follows Walsingham’s version of this series of events (195 n. 270). 86. See George B. Stow, “Richard II in Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicles,” Speculum 59 (1984): 68–102, for crucial work on the distinctions among Walsingham’s various rewritings of his chronicle. In the 1390s, Walsingham rewrote his earlier account of the 1380s to insinuate a sexual relation between Richard and de Vere. 87. See E. M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliae, 372, 374, 375–76, 383. For the later version, see Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Historia Anglicana, by Thomas Walsingham (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863–64; repr., Wiesbaden: Kraus, 1965), 2:148, 149, 156, 160, 161, 168, 169. For a discussion of these distinctions, see Stow, “Richard II in Walsingham’s Chronicles.” 88. Cited in Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the “Chroniques” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 198, 199. 89. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 392–93. 90. Friedrich W. D. Brie, ed., The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, Part 2 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1908), 341. Charlotte Morse, “Griselda Reads Philippa de Coucy,” in Speaking Im-


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their hardly veiled sexual insinuation) that Richard’s aªection for his favorite was obscene, or perhaps prompted by magic, are made to fit neatly with his earlier sour estimate of Richard’s knights as more qualified for the bedchamber than the battlefield, more handy with language than lances.91 His remarks about de Vere serve as a preamble for his account of the Appellants’ formal move against Richard’s friends, whom Walsingham had described in the Chronicon as sealing the king oª from the older nobility, murmuring to him about his eªective lack of power, and softening him with leisure and gossip.92 It would not be unusual for language that we associate with lovers to be used at Richard’s court. Simon Walker discovered that a 1399 letter long thought to be from Lady Joan Pelham to her husband, John Pelham, was, in fact, written by John Pelham to Henry Bolingbroke just before the usurpation. This confusion shows just how personal-sounding the language of public address could be. Pelham’s terms (“my dere Lord . . . derest & best yloved oª all erthlyche Lordes . . . dere Lord . . . dere Lord . . . my dere. . . . By yhowr awnn pore J. Pelham”) seem those of the wife, but are those of the subordinate.93 Richard Firth Green has described such language as “the metaphorical expression of an aspect of courtly society,” practiced with the “knowing connivance of a sophisticated audience.” 94 Walsingham’s statement that Richard wrote so to de Vere (if he did) locates the king, then, in a subordinate and petitionary role. What is at stake is the king’s prestige, his constitution of his own power. The point Walsingham is making in the Chronicon Angliae, at least, is not about sex; it is about the inappropriate nature of the king’s rhetorical relationship with one who lacks truth and stability. Just as Chaucer’s portrait of Criseyde can be seen as less an attack upon her than as a comment upon Troilus’s decision to fix his stability upon one whom he knows to be “slydynge of corage,” so Walsingham comments upon Richard’s friendship with de Vere as a way of expressing a more general concern, a concern the older nobility certainly had. It is entirely possible that Chaucer’s focus upon Pandarus’s adroit use of the ages: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), 358, also mentions this reference but in a diªerent context. 91. Riley, ed., Historia Anglicana, 2:156. 92. See E. M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliae, 367, 372, 374–75. See also Stow, “Richard II in Walsingham’s Chronicles,” 86–88. 93. Simon Walker, “Letters to the Dukes of Lancaster in 1381 and 1399,” English Historical Review 106 (1991): 75. 94. Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 100, 107.


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language of flattery, of language designed to allow Troilus to hide from the truth, gives dramatic fictional form to what was perceived as Richard’s own perilous condition. In the opening stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer identifies himself as one “that God of Loves servantz serve” (Troilus 1.15), going on to say that he dares not love for his “unliklynesse.” The narrator here begins his poem where Gower ends the Confessio, admitting that he is unsuited to love. Chaucer then addresses “loveres, that bathen in gladnesse” (1.22), reminding them of the adversities that accompany love. In book 1, the narrator describes Troilus’s increasing passion, including the audience in his account of love’s power: “For ay the ner the fir, the hotter is — / This, trowe I, knoweth al this compaignye” (1.449–50, emphasis added). In the proem to book 2, the narrator once again links his story to the experience of those listening. And forthi if it happe in any wyse, That here be any lovere in this place That herkneth, as the storie wol devise, How Troilus com to his lady grace, And thenketh, “So nold I nat love purchace,” Or wondreth on his speche or his doynge, I noot; but it is me no wonderynge. (2.29–35) As Usk demonstrates, desire, passion, frustration, and betrayal belong to love, but they also belong to other sorts of allegiances. Though those who first listened to Troilus may have been lovers, as both Derek Pearsall and Paul Strohm have suggested, they were most likely civil servants, men such as Cliªord, Clanvowe, Scogan, Hoccleve, Usk, Gower, and Strode.95 Moreover, these men may well have thought of themselves as servants to the god of Love’s servants, as observers rather than players. The Troilus frontispiece in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College ms 61, which is the subject of Pearsall’s essay, depicts Chaucer as reading to a group of well-dressed men and women, possibly courtiers. Pearsall argues that the frontispiece should not be seen as a realistic picture of Chaucer’s private audience, or even as a “picture” of a command performance before the court, but as an image reflecting the illustrator’s desire to enhance the poem’s 95. Pearsall, “Troilus Frontispiece”; Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience,” Literature and History 5 (1977): 26–41.


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prestige by linking it to a fictitious court performance. Pearsall suggests that the illustrator has “taken the fiction of the audience as it is created within the poem (‘al this compaignye’ of lovers ‘in this place,’ Troilus 1.450, 2.30) and treated it as a reality.” 96 We should also think of the frontispiece as a reading of Chaucer’s more searching analysis of this company in this place and hence of a poem not so much addressed to the court as addressed to the ways in which the court serves as a place for the “purchasing” of “love.” The fact that Chaucer, Clanvowe, Usk, and Gower all employed the rhetoric of sexual desire or favor as a way of exploring broader social issues may indicate that such language was current among favor seekers at court—those who burned the hotter the closer they moved to the source of power. To some extent, these are rhetorical gestures inherited from much earlier Continental models. As studies by Gerald Bond, Michael Clanchy, Georges Duby, Stephen Jaeger, Sarah Kay, Laura Kendrick, Pamela Sheingorn, and James Wimsatt have demonstrated, the language of love—which has its origins in the classical language of friendship—was the common tongue in which political relationships were celebrated.97 Jaeger describes the social function of the language of lovers as “policy made visible,” as indicating the honor associated with Ciceronian friendship, which was explicitly elitist and exclusive. The classical terms of intense friendship were carried over into Christian culture and used to describe the relations between members of the medieval nobility, whose claims to superior privilege were linked to their claims of superior morality. He goes on to argue that such courtly fictions and fictional forms were integral to the know96. Derek Pearsall, “Middle English Romance and Its Audiences,” in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (Groningen: Walters-Noordhoª, 1985), 38. 97. Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages, 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Michael Clanchy, “Law and Love in the Middle Ages,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 47–68; C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Pamela Sheingorn, “The Bodily Embrace or Embracing the Body: Gesture and Gender in Late Medieval Culture,” in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Alan E. Knight (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 51–90; and C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia, 1999).


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ing “play” of courtly power and prestige.98 By the time heterosexual desire became a conventional topic for expression, what was originally the language of classical friendship and then of early and high medieval power relations easily accommodated a female figure as the focus for the overpowering and consuming desire a “subject” has for his elusive and all-powerful beloved. Kendrick has argued that the twelfth-century games of love “became the vernacular language school of courtiers.” Such verbal contests of love allowed courtiers to refine their powers of persuasion, forcing them to find more sophisticated ways of turning words to the advantage of the contestant.99 That such desire was seen as “ennobling” the lover, whose eloquence must find ways to represent his longing and to persuade the beloved of his truth, was a key component of the courtly fiction whereby the lover/courtier was chastened and educated through love. Moreover, a subject’s eloquence was seen as evidence of his worthiness. Bond, in fact, contends that in centers such as Blois and Poitiers, around the turn of the twelfth century, artists, writers, and public figures began to adapt the classical language of desire and friendship and to evolve rhetorical constructions of themselves as desiring subjects. Such rhetorical games were strategic in the sense that they were directed at figures of power or sources of socioeconomic advantage. The lover, or petitioner, wrote for his own good. Bond sees the group of writers associated with Baudri (who used the term “f(o)edus,” or contract, to describe the bond between lovers) through a network of monastic and cathedral schools as forming an Ovidian subculture whose very exclusivity was manifest in its ennobling and highly conceited language. Bond goes on to describe how language associated with clerical elitism became a marker for a type of particularly noble secular world, one with a decidedly humanist and literary cast, where value was attached to the ability to express desire. By putting on the guise of the despairing lover, a writer could use the language of love as a means of negotiating whatever demands or desires he felt. What Bond refers to as the “discourses of subjectivity” were thus rhetorical positions that could serve as masks for the self and its needs.100 Duby has gone even further in suggesting that the discourse of “courtly love” strengthened the state, that its elaborate game served 98. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 6, 19, 29, 33, 36, 42. 99. Kendrick, Game of Love, 185. See also David Starkey, “The Age of the Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts, c. 1350–c. 1550,” in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 252–53, and Elizabeth B. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in “Cleanness” and Its Contexts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 138–41. 100. Bond, Loving Subject, 2, 4, 160, 65, 69, 99, 1 10.


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to control the sexuality of those courtiers whom dynastic policy decreed should remain unmarried.101 Even as a form of social control, the ritualized game of love must still have oªered a reward to the disenfranchised lover/courtier, whose focus upon a center defines the very perimeter of the circle he describes. And that circle—the court—would be composed of other lovers, whose controlled desire, noble behavior, and eloquent speeches, songs, and poems were indices of the very status to be found at court. Lovers, perhaps; courtiers, surely. And in any case, both lovers and courtiers are beggars. This is not to say that there were not lovers in the Middle Ages. But the language of love is social and should be understood as practiced within a set of conditions that, in the case of the medieval court, cannot be understood without reference to power and to the terms of social harmony that power produces. By the later Middle Ages, the language of love belonged not only to the court but also to the city, where the issues of power and social control were equally pertinent. The source and/or impetus for civic festive poetry were the Puys —the civic or “bourgeois” literary societies on the Continent. The Puys were made up of merchants, an international and diverse group that, within the context of their festivals, seem to have had a relatively democratic relationship with one another. There was a London Puy, but it probably disappeared during the reign of Edward II. We are left with an account of its regulation that was inserted into the volume compiled by Andrew Horn sometime in the early years of Edward III. In French culture, Wimsatt describes a mutually nourishing relationship between courtly and civic poetry, suggesting that courtly groups openly imitated the Puys. The regulation of the Festival of the Puy to be found in Andrew Horn’s book— like the excerpts he also copied into the volume from Brunetto Latini’s Tresor— portray a mutually supporting community whose members maintained a yearly ceremony of song in honor of love, masses for departed members, and alms for the poor. The Puy mimicked medieval society in that it was hierarchical but diverged from it by electing its prince every year. Though its members composed songs praising love for the annual festival (which was also a competition), women were not allowed to attend. As the opening statement explains, the grounds for establishing a London Puy were as much civic as “amorous.” En le honour de Dieu, Madame Seinte Marie, touz Seinz, e toutes Seintes; e en le honour nostre Seignour le Roy e touz les Barons du pais; e por 101. Duby, France in the Middle Ages, 180–81.


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loial amour ensaucier. Et por ceo qe la ville de Lundres soit renomee de touz biens en tuz lieus; et por ceo qe jolietes, pais, honestez, douceur, deboneiretes, e bon amour, sanz infinite, soit maintenue. E pur ceo qe touz biens soient mis avaunt, e touz maus ariere.—Li amerous compaignoun qui sont demoraunt e repairaunt en la bone cite de Lundres ount ordinee, conferme, et establie une feste ke hom apele “Pui.”102 The Puy, then, testifies to ennobling love within an already noble society. It is because London is already known for its happiness, peace, honesty, pleasure, courtesy, and good love that it attracts the “amerous compaignoun,” who then wish to establish the festival that men call the Puy. The songs composed for the festival were intended to elevate love and celebrate lovers’ desire. They were thus songs whose fictions proclaimed their subjects’ “subjection” to the love binding them together into a company. Though the Puy disappeared, its written trace did not, because Andrew Horn included it in a book that both Catto and Sutton have argued was composed to establish the very civic liberties that Horn saw as threatened by the reign of Edward II.103 Like his adaptation of the Tresor for London’s mayors, his inclusion of the Puy regulations oªers an idealized picture of communal harmony, one whose outward manifestation was the annual celebration of love poetry. Gower, Chaucer, and Usk were, of course, men of the city. While they would not have had immediate experience of London’s Puy, they might have known Horn’s book or, as Sutton speculates, they might have encountered the elegant Puy traditions of merchant song—to which the Blessed Virgin was central—in Continental towns such as Arras. Love talk as an index of eloquence and nobility, of course, forms a thread throughout late medieval poetry. The Marguerite poems of both Machaut and Froissart, which Chaucer drew upon in the Legend of Good Women, employ a series of codes by which a poet can discuss not simply love but also the truth that is a condition for love or for courtship in general.104 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet describes Gawain’s appeal to the members of Bercilak’s court in terms of his eloquence.

102. Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 216. 103. Catto, “Andrew Horn”; Sutton, “Merchants, Music.” The language of amity was also fundamental to the city’s imagination of itself. See, for example, Thomas Wimbledon’s sermon preached in 1388 at Paul’s Cross, in “Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: ‘Redde racionem villicacionis tue,’” ed. Nancy H. Owen, Medieval Studies 28 (1966): 176–97. 104. On these, see Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries.


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“Now schal we semlych se sle3tez of 5ewez And 5e teccheles termes of talkyng noble, Wich spede is in speche vnspurd may we lerne, Syn we haf fonged 5at fyne fader of nurture. God hatz geuen vus His grace godly forso5e, 4at such a gest as Gawan grauntez vus to haue, When burnez bly5e of His bur5e schal sitte And synge. In menyng of manerez mere 4is burne now schal vus bryng, I hope 5at may hym here Schal lerne of luf-talkyng.”105 The poet here links knightly skill, noble speech, and love talking in ways that demonstrate that Gawain is far more than simply a knight; he is a courtier as well. His eloquence, which is also his ability to dodge and weave in evading Lady Bercilak’s attempts to lure him away from his carefully maintained chivalry, will, of course, be severely tested by both the lord and his wife. But even in this first scene in the castle, the poet hints at Gawain’s courtier’s predicament, as Bercilak takes Gawain “by the lappe” and leads him away for private talk. That loose fold of garment by which Pandarus leads both Criseyde and Troilus is here a sign of Gawain’s ultimate inability to recognize and thus evade the superior cunning of his smiling captor. The Gawain-poet, like Chaucer, Usk, Gower, and Clanvowe, seems fully aware that though lovers and courtiers may well know the terms of noble speech (and hence of nobility), their eloquence should also be seen as a sign of unfulfilled desire or powerlessness. The bumbling personae who inhabit the poetry of Clanvowe, Chaucer, and Gower from about this period certainly serve as screens for the poets themselves, but they might indicate impatience, too, with a language as small, as conceited, and as hyperbolically humble as must be practiced by subjects at the court of love. The rhetoric of desire is less in evidence in the literature of the last decade of the century. Clanvowe’s stark prose treatise, The Two Ways, oªers no hint that he 105. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: “Pearl,” “Cleanness,” “Patience,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), lines 916–27. All subsequent citations of these poems refer to the Andrew and Waldron edition.


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might also have been the author of the Boke of Cupide. The self-reflexive humor, the deployment of metaphor, the ornate and sometimes ambiguous allegory, and the formal versification of the Boke of Cupide all disappear into a prose so simple that its only gesture in the direction of ornament is its title, whose two ways —the one broad, the other narrow and di‹cult—are those Jesus himself outlined. Clanvowe achieves here a reformation of language that inevitably locates the bird language of his earlier work within a world of falsity and confusion. Moreover, he explicitly describes the language of the world as issuing from an unstable and ignoble subjectivity that is determined by desire: “And also 5e world worsshipe5 hem muchel 5at woln bee venged proudly and dispitously of euery wrong 5at is seid or doon to hem. And of swyche folke men maken bookes and soonges and reeden and syngen of hem for to hoolde 5e mynde of here deedes 5e lengere heere vpon eerth, ªor 5at is a 5ing 5at worldely men desiren greetly 5at here naame myghte laste loonge after hem heere vpon eerth” (lines 491–99). His language here echoes Criseyde’s, who feared that her name would be “rolled . . . on many a tonge,” that “unto the worldes ende,” no good word of her will be “ywriten nor ysonge” (Troilus 5.1058–61). What Wyclif wanted for the church, a stripping away of the encrustations of the Roman past, Clanvowe manages for English. Having employed the discourse of desire, he jettisons it for plain speech. Gower’s similar gesture is more explicit, for, in leaving the company of lovers where “lusty Youthe” is a captain (CA 8.2462–63), he recognizes his age and thus his unfitness for the game he has been playing. The sequence Gower describes — Amans’s desire to be released from love, his growing recognition that it is a young man’s pastime, the dart withdrawn by Cupid, and the conversation with Venus— is, as Peck has argued, a moral awakening into ethical self-governance, an awakening with a good deal of relevance for the greater political community or for the common profit.106 But it is also a move away from the very practice of courtship. Venus beheld me than and lowh, And axeth, as it were in game, What love was. And I for schame Ne wiste what I scholde ansuere; And natheles I gan to swere 106. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, 172–84.


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That be my trouthe I knew him noght; So ferr it was out of mi thought, Riht as it hadde nevere be. . . . . . . . . . . “Ma dame.” I seide, “be your leve, Ye witen wel, and so wot I That I am unbehovely Your Court from this day forth to serve: And for I may no thonk deserve, And also for I am refused, I preie you to ben excused.” (CA 8.2870–77, 2882–88) Gower’s move away from Love’s court coincides with his resumption of his own name, John Gower. He is polite, but also politely firm, in his refusal to accept the fiction he has hitherto practiced. “Be my trouthe I knew him noght” rings out with all the emphasis the word “trouthe” can have in a period when the word encompassed what for us are separate terms, “truth” and “troth.” Here, the abstract concept cannot be distinguished from its function within the political community, and Gower’s recognition of his “trouthe” makes him realize that he is “unbehovely” for the court of love. In his faded color, thin cheeks, dim eyes, and gray hair (8.2825–31), he sees an old, ridiculous lover as he peers into the mirror. But the image is also one of a ridiculous courtier, of a man who signals that he no longer can conceive of love talk coming from an aged man, particularly when love talk has no purchase in “trouthe.” Chaucer’s examination of lovers’ eloquence goes back as far as the Book of the Duchess and continues well into the Canterbury period. Both the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Fowls employ the lady—who is the focus for this language—as the primary critic of an ornamented and potentially false speech. The Black Knight’s account of his first attempt to woo the Good Fair White also describes a rhetorical impasse. His lengthy and frequently metaphoric narration of his lover’s plight, his sighs, his poems, and his halting and impassioned supplication of her come to an abrupt halt when he says, “And whan I had my tale y-doo, God wot, she acounted nat a stree Of al my tale, so thoghte me. . . . . . . . . . .


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. . . this was the grete Of her answere: she sayde ‘Nay.’”107 Similarly, the formel eagle in the Parliament of Fowls does not deny her duty to Nature—that is, her duty to multiply within the bonds of the natural order— but she rejects the language of courtship with which the three rival male eagles declare their passion. She says, “I wol nat serve Venus ne Cupide, / Forsothe as yit, by no manere weye.”108 Chaucer continues to refract courtly speech through common sense in later work like the Miller’s Tale, where the Miller’s scorn for what he sees as courtly ways cloaks “hende” Nicolas in false (and ignobly punished) eloquence. Chaucer more sharply examines the linguistic practice of lovers or courtiers in Troilus, where the full tragedy of Troy and its noble ways is miniaturized in the history of Troilus himself. Troilus, like the city he comes to represent, does not have a language capable of serving as a means of self-analysis; his limits are reflected in the very paucity of the terms he can use to describe himself, his passion for Criseyde, and his grief over her loss. He can therefore not hope to understand the gravity of his situation because he does not have the rhetorical skills he needs. Diomede’s cruder and more brutal deployment of language assures his survival into another age. I do not here mean that Diomede is to be praised for his sharp practices, but that in the contest between Troilus and Diomede, Chaucer dramatizes the terrible causality inherent in unexamined rhetoric. In the Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer plays upon the perceived links between eloquence and worthiness as a way of illustrating the ultimate limitations and confusions of courtly talk practiced outside of the court. Neither of the two possible sources for the Franklin’s Tale—two versions of the same story by Boccaccio—contains the double emphasis upon eloquence and nobility that is fundamental to the Franklin’s performance.109 Beginning with his elaborate compliment to the Squire, by which he cuts short the Squire’s already overlong and overplotted tale, the Franklin joins “gentil” speech to the virtue to be found in nobility. In a speech of slightly more than twenty lines (CT V.673–94), the 107. Chaucer, Book of the Duchess, lines 1236–38, 1242–43. 108. Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, lines 652–53. 109. They are the fourth narrative in Il filocolo and Decameron 10.5. See Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed., Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 233–34; W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941), 377–83. See also Wallace’s fine discussion of Il filocolo as the most likely source for the tale in Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, 61–67.


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Franklin employs the term “gentil” three times; he also praises the Squire for his “eloquence,” his “discretion,” and his sentiments, bemoaning the fact that his own son would rather talk with a page than with a “gentil” person. The Franklin’s own reply to the Host’s exasperated “‘Straw for your gentillesse!’” is unru›ed and polite. He then goes on to recount a “laye” that he ascribes to “these olde gentil Britouns,” not to Boccaccio. Boccaccio sets both versions of the story within a frame narrative. In the version in the Decameron, the story is the fifth of the tenth day and concerns the virtue of generosity or magnificence in love. In the Filocolo, the tale also concerns liberality but is posed as a question, so that its hearers may debate which of the three male figures is the most liberal or generous. Both versions recount the story of a wife who seeks to rid herself of an importunate cavalier before her husband learns of the man’s passion. She gives him the impossible task of creating a garden in January. Thus, the husband who surrenders his honor, the cavalier who surrenders his passion, and the magician who surrenders his fee are each potential rivals in this game of generosity. In Boccaccio’s versions of the tale, only the magician is a poor commoner. In addition, Chaucer’s Franklin alters the emphasis of the story by centering it upon the subject of hegemonic marriage. He also introduces the issue of class, stating that Arveragus, in wooing his wife-to-be, recognizes that Dorigen is of such high station that he dreads to tell her his “woe.” Dorigen does finally accept Arveragus for his many labors and for his “obeysaunce” (CT V.739), agreeing to take him “for hir housbonde and hir lord.” Of his own free will, however, Arveragus swears that “against her will” he will never assume “maistrie” or cause her jealousy but will obey her and follow her will, save that he wishes to retain the “name” of “soveraynetee,” “for shame of his degree” (V.745–51). Upon accepting this oªer, Dorigen says, “‘Sire, sith of your gentillesse / Ye profre me to have so large a reyne / . . . Sire I wol be youre humble trewe wyf ’” (V.754–55, 758). This bargain does not occur in either of Boccaccio’s tales. The elements of the story borrowed from Boccaccio are thus set within a sort of double frame— the Canterbury telling itself and the Franklin’s description of a marriage between a noble lady and a less noble knight, a marriage that he describes as blissful because it is without “maistrie.” The bliss lasts for a little more than a year, when Arveragus goes to England for two years to seek “worship and honor” in arms (and presumably wealth, though the Franklin does not mention commerce except in reference to the clerk/magician). In his version of the story, the Franklin maintains his focus upon sentiment


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as a sign of nobility. He stresses the deep feelings of grief Dorigen experiences when her husband departs. Now wol I stynten of this Arveragus, And speken I wole of Dorigen his wyf, That loveth hire housbonde as hire hertes lyf, For his absence wepeth she and siketh, As doon thise noble wyves whan hem liketh. (CT V.814–18) Just as Dorigen’s feelings signify her class, so does the supposed fool’s errand she gives to Aurelius become a sign of her deep and noble grief. The Franklin’s persistent interest in and admiration for “gentil” behavior substantially alters the nature of the tale Chaucer borrowed from Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s husbands have no problem with marital sovereignty, nor is class an issue in either of the two tales. In the Filocolo version, the wife is ordered to fulfill her promise secretly to the lover who made a garden bloom in January and warned to make no more rash promises. The version in the Decameron has an added edge, for the husband sharply chastises the wife for entering into any such agreement, even in jest. He then tells her first to try and bargain with the lover, and if that fails, to yield him her body but not her soul! The Franklin treats Dorigen with far more respect for her noble sentiments, linking her agreement with Aurelius to her fear for her husband’s safety.110 At the end of both Italian versions of the story, Boccaccio’s narrators ask which of the three (the husband, the lover, or the magician who made the garden) was the most generous or liberal. The Franklin asks which was the most “fre.” Although “fre” means generous, a quality thought to be inherent in the nobly born, the Middle English term is even more specifically linked to class. “Fre” was used to describe someone of non-servile status and could thus denote either a state or a condition. To be un-”fre” is to be restricted by either legal or social status or by inclination (that is, not noble). For this reason, perhaps, the Franklin is careful to have no churls in his tale. The brother who finds a remedy for Aurelius’s misery does so because he pities his abjection. The clerk in Orleans who is a magician likewise has “routhe” for Aurelius (CT V.1261) and tries to hasten his calculations in order to end his misery, and so on until the end, when each man renounces his “claims” to honor, love, or cash. 1 10. See also Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 237.


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Given the nature of the tale he tells, the picture of marriage that he crafts, and the relentless courtesy of his presentation, it is easy to see why the Franklin has been both lauded as an idealistic spokesman for a new order and excoriated as a crass social climber.111 Chaucer, that most generous of authors, does neither but instead uses the Franklin as a voice (or body) for a rhetorical position that is also a political position, one with far graver implications than those of simple status seeking. Although the tale is usually—and logically—discussed in relation to the subject of marriage, it needs also to be seen as emerging from the atmosphere of “quitting” that Chaucer establishes in fragment I as partial grounds for the sporadic animosity that flickers between certain pilgrims. A number of studies have focused upon the relationship between the Franklin’s Tale and those of other pilgrims —the Wife, the Squire, the Merchant, the Nun’s Priest, the Knight, and the Miller.112 And certainly, as any reader of the Canterbury Tales knows, Chaucer manages to achieve a work that thickens as we progress through the tales, for pilgrims echo other pilgrims, reformulate earlier motifs, and maintain a “conversation” far richer than any literal conversation could ever be. The Franklin’s Tale participates in this conversation by echoing it in a way that appears to synthesize opposing points of view and to ameliorate discord. But through the Franklin, whose status as landed gentry includes positions with a good deal of communal importance—justice of the peace, “contour,” sheriª, and frequent member of the parliamentary Commons —Chaucer suggests the confusions of a rhetoric founded upon principles of consensus or compromise.113 Like his fellow public servant, the Man of Law, and like John Gower and Thomas Usk, the Franklin begins by stressing his lack of proficiency in rhetorical flourishes. Even as he modestly calls himself a “burel” man (that is, lay or unlearned; Gower calls himself a “burel clerk” [CA, prologue, 52]), the Franklin hints at his fundamental nobility: “Colours of rethoryk been to me queynte; / My spirit feeleth noght of swich mateere” (CT V.726–27). In other words, his “plain” tale should be seen as evidence of his deep feelings, feelings he has al111. For discussions of the Franklin and his tale, see Derek Brewer, “Class Distinction in Chaucer,” Speculum 43 (1968): 290–305; Middleton, “Idea of Public Poetry”; Aers, Chaucer, Langland; Douglas J. Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Franklin and the Truth about ‘Trouthe,’” English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 359–74; Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Cooper, Canterbury Tales. 1 12. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 896. 1 13. For an explanation of these occupations, see D. W. Robertson Jr., “Chaucer’s Franklin and His Tale,” Costerus, n.s., 1 (1974): 1–26.


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ready linked to nobility in his compliment of the Squire’s performance. The Franklin goes on to tell a tale whose opening echoes the Squire’s focus upon noble behavior—a tale that “unmakes” the Merchant’s worldly dramatization of folly, lechery, and chicanery loose in a paradisal garden setting. The Franklin will not engage the problems foregrounded in the Clerk’s provocative picture of tyranny and/or extraordinary faith; he removes the disagreeable subjects of “maistrie” and of commercial gain from the Wife’s depiction of marriage; he denies the churls’ chaos of desire oªered by the Reeve and the Miller; and he provides a more contemporary analogue to the Knight’s working-out of order but without the grim realities of mutability and death against which the Knight balances the final order of his tale.114 The Franklin also employs words, phrases, and sentences that are key to the meanings of other pilgrims’ tales and frequently seem to allude to those tales directly: “maistrie,” “jalousie,” “obeye,” “soveraynetee,” “reyne,” “youre humble trewe wyf ” (V.758); “Wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee” (V.768); “Pacience is an heigh vertu” (V.773); “Who koude telle, but he hadde wedded be, / The joye, the ese, and the prosperitee / That is bitwixe an housbonde and his wyf ?” (V.803–5); “Men may so longe graven in a stoon, / Til som figure therinne emprented be” (V.830–31); “purveiaunce” (V.865). The assertions of the Wife of Bath, praise for Griselda, echoes of the Merchant’s language, and a speech on God’s providence (which seems to evoke, in a more banal way, the terms of Theseus’s Prime Mover speech) all occupy the same elastic space. In the process of the extraordinary synthesis the Franklin attempts, Dorigen appears to surrender her “reign” in her marriage and to obey her husband’s command to keep “trouthe” by giving herself to Aurelius.115 The vexed subject of sovereignty thus disappears into the marital bliss of which the Franklin can no longer speak. Though the outlines of the tale may well belong to Boccaccio, by having the Franklin echo some of the tales he has supposedly heard, Chaucer remakes an urbane tale told by sophisticated Italian raconteurs into the tale of a particular Canterbury pilgrim.116 1 14. For my earlier remarks about these tales, see Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, chap. 5. 1 15. On Dorigen’s passivity, see Crane, Gender and Romance, 109–1 1. Crane links Dorigen’s incapacities of gender to the incapacities of the estate figured in the Franklin. 1 16. I am intentionally not discussing any possible relationship between Boccaccio’s frames and their greater thematic meanings and Chaucer’s use of tales taken from such metanarratives and relocated into his own. For resonant discussions of Boccaccio’s intentions as Chaucer might have perceived them, see Anderson, Before the “Knight’s Tale”; Robert Hanning, “‘And countrefete the speche of every man / He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale’: Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for The Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 27–58; and James H. McGregor, The Shades of


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That pilgrim, the Franklin, is not without his own political significance in the history of late-fourteenth-century England. Chaucer’s portrayal positions him within the group of wealthy non-noble landowners who were responsible for maintaining local systems of justice, collecting royal revenues, making accountings to the exchequer, and representing their shires in parliamentary Commons.117 Although the Commons began to forge an identity for itself during the 1370s as the conscience of the realm and to seek a representative for itself in a speaker, Commons did not simply respond to the needs of the shires. On some issues, such as the local administration of justice, it constituted itself in terms of the shire community. On issues involving labor, it tended to assimilate itself to elite interests—of the magnates, the gentry, the landowners.118 Chaucer’s picture of the Franklin in the General Prologue, as many have pointed out, is dominated by an emphasis upon comfortable living. The ability to live well and to extend hospitality to others was, of course, seen as a sign of status in medieval society; what to us can seem like ostentation or waste was seen as conferring honor upon its provider. Even though Chaucer’s description of the Franklin’s bounteous table and his Epicurean tastes is no doubt hyperbolic, his picture of the Franklin seems to point out not so much his venality as his bifurcated allegiances. He pays far more attention to the Franklin’s love of pleasure than to his sense of communal duty and, when Chaucer finally focuses upon what the Franklin has done (in the final six lines of a thirty-line description), he splits that assessment in two, with two lines describing the Franklin’s appearance. In all, there are only four lines that tell us anything more about the Franklin than that he is a wealthy, well-dressed, pleasure-loving man. Jill Mann’s analysis of Chaucer’s portrait of the Franklin is well worth recalling for what it reveals about the literary conventions that are woven together here.119 As Mann points out, Chaucer appears to borrow the long account of the Franklin’s love of food from gluttony satire but omits the disgusting physical descriptions that usually accompany such satire. His emphasis upon the Franklin’s hospitality, along with his non-pejorative description of the Franklin,

Aeneas: The Imitation of Vergil and the History of Paganism in Boccaccio’s “Filostrato,” “Filocolo,” and “Teseida” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), chap. 3. 1 17. See Robertson, “Chaucer’s Franklin,” 3–6. 1 18. See Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 183–92, where I have discussed these issues in relation to Chaucer. 1 19. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the “General Prologue” to the “Canterbury Tales” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 152–59.


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certainly locates the pilgrim in the world but does not allow us to vilify him. He is similarly noncommittal about his account of the Franklin’s public o‹ces. Where estates satire normally linked such o‹ces with the theme of corruption and oppression, Chaucer only mentions the o‹ces the Franklin has held and neglects to include any hints of corruption. He places in the foreground what might well be background (the Franklin’s style of living) and relegates to the background those details that locate the Franklin in relation to contemporary social and political structures. The rhetorical elasticity of the Franklin’s Tale, then, seems a not unlikely sequel. As Mann demonstrates throughout her study, Chaucer certainly mined the wealth of estates satire for his accounts of the pilgrims in the General Prologue, but satire was not his end. His art was an art of analysis, one that demanded well-honed techniques of indirection and ambiguity that would urge an audience less toward judgment than toward the ability to frame intelligent or provocative questions. David Aers has analyzed the Franklin’s language in relation to the medieval institution of marriage, arguing that the Franklin’s di‹culties in describing the type of marriage he appears to advocate reveal the persistent power that “traditional ideologies and practices” have over human consciousness. Aers suggests that the Franklin’s error is his inability to recognize the power of dominant attitudes, which is, in eªect, his inability to understand the moral confusions of his own tale (where, for example, Dorigen is commanded both to use her body to validate her husband’s honor and to maintain the secrecy of her liaison with the Squire). Aers feels that the Franklin’s final question—“Which was the mooste fre?”—trivializes the poem’s di‹culties and thus abandons it altogether.120 But if we take the position that the Franklin’s views about marriage are less the reason than the occasion for the tale, that Chaucer creates in the Franklin a voice with a good deal of political and social relevance, we must pay attention to the broader social implications of his carefully modulated and frequently puzzling performance. Let me rephrase that sentence as two short and related questions. What type of shire representative would a figure such as the Franklin be? What position would such a figure (who is, of course, a composite) occupy in the Merciless Parliament? Both issues were serious ones for Chaucer, who had served in Commons in 1386 when the duke of Gloucester—who would later mastermind the Merciless Parliament—predominated, moving both the peers and the Commons to seek 120. See Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 163–69.


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to replace the circle around the king and to bring the king to task.121 Two years later, the subject of parliamentary prestige and control was even more crucial. Just before the Merciless Parliament actually began, Richard appealed to his legal experts, who, predictably, declared that the articles of appeal did not comply either with civil law or with the law of the land.122 The Lords Appellant denied Richard’s appeal by averring that the crimes alleged in the articles, which were perpetrated by peers of the realm, must be dealt with in Parliament by the laws of Parliament.123 In his analysis of the Merciless Parliament, Tout discussed this statement as a crucial declaration of parliamentary supremacy in opposition to the judges’ assertions of the supremacy of the courts of law, which were perceived as instruments of monarchical control. As Tout emphasized, the lesser oªenders, such as Usk, were not allowed an appeal but were impeached in full Parliament by the Commons, with the temporal lords acting as judges. Tout read this incident in terms of parliamentary history, as one segment in a prolonged tug-of-war between Parliament and crown. Chaucer had ties to the crown and to some of the men who were impeached by a Parliament controlled by the Appellants (and especially by the duke of Gloucester), and he was likely interested in and aware of the dynamics of parliamentary voicing. How might Chaucer have “heard” the rhetoric of parliamentary supremacy, especially as it was primarily shaped by the Lords Appellant? Whose voice was, in fact, the voice of parliamentary Commons? For whom did it speak? Was it driven by self-interest or fear or conciliation or illusion? These are fair questions to ask of all representative bodies, particularly in times of crisis. If the Franklin’s Tale is, as it is presumed to be, a product of the 1390s, Chaucer had had ample time to think about the implications of political speech or to consider the ways in which rhetoric is also a form of action. The Franklin’s description of Arveragus’s marital status, which evinces more than his inability to articulate the terms of a “new” marriage, is cast in the language of contemporary social relations. Heere may men seen an humble, wys accord; Thus hath she take hir servant and hir lord— 121. See John P. McCall and George Rudisill Jr., “The Parliament of 1386 and Chaucer’s Trojan Parliament,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63 (1959): 276–88. 122. For an analysis of this move, see T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920–33), 3:431–35. For further discussion of these events, see Chap. 2 below. 123. Rotuli Parliamentorum (London, 1767–77), 3:236. See also Article 15 of the impeachment of Simon Burley, which begins, “la Ley de la Terre est faire en Parlement” (RP 3: 243).


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Servant in love, and lord in mariage. Thanne was he bothe in lordshipe and servage. Servage? Nay, but in lordshipe above, Sith he hath bothe his lady and his love; His lady, certes, and his wyf also, The which that lawe of love acordeth to. (CT V.791–98) The key term here is “accord,” or agreement—a word Theseus uses to Emelye in describing the congruence reached between him and his parliament as one reason why she should take Palamon for “housbonde and for lord” (I.3081–82). The Franklin describes his “accord” as humble and wise, subtly commenting on the Knight’s earlier, hierarchical agreement, one by which Emelye agreed to the concept of lordship as a condition of marriage and the social and political harmony it signified. The Franklin’s “accord” joins two opposed qualities, lordship and “servage”—a term that means servitude, bondage, slavery, or the condition of serfdom or subjection as well as a class of people in bondage or servitude.124 Chaucer uses the term twice in the Clerk’s Tale (lines 147 and 482). First, Walter so describes the condition of marriage. He later uses his people’s supposed reluctance to be in “servage” to Griselda’s child as his justification for taking away Griselda’s daughter. But these terms have more than a Canterbury valence. In the period after the Rising of 1381, “lordshipe” and “servage” cannot be detached from the social rhetoric of the rebels who demanded the abolition of serfdom and who sought to call lordship to account. The Cambridge parliament of fall 1388, in fact, rea‹rmed the categories of lordship and servitude as necessary to the good of the realm.125 In seeking to link the two, the Franklin, as Aers also points out, falls into a linguistic confusion that inevitably reflects the social confusion submerged in his 124. Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath with Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), s.v. “Servage.” 125. For work on the Cambridge Parliament and its “half-life” in contemporary literature, see Lynn Staley Johnson, “The Pearl Dreamer and the Eleventh Hour,” in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the “Pearl”-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1991); Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208–318; and Bowers, Politics of “Pearl,” chap. 2. For the language of the Rising, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), especially chap. 4.


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attempt to define such an accord. Notwithstanding the fact that it is hard to see how someone other than Christ could, in a medieval poem, be both servant and lord, the Franklin’s description of this state does not make sense.126 First, he asserts that Arveragus is both in lordship and in “servage.” He then returns to the term “servage” and denies its negative ramifications, saying that Arveragus is superior in lordship because he has both his lady and his love. These two terms are equivalent, though, so he then emends them so that they stand in opposition to one another: he states that Arveragus has his lady and his wife. This binary terminology, which his emendation serves to emphasize, thus appears to locate emotional gratification or romantic sentiment under the category of servitude and marital status under the category of lordship. As Dorigen’s lover, Arveragus is privately in servage; as her husband, he assumes public lordship. But the Franklin’s shu›ing of terms, his di‹culty in explaining just what he means, and his use of the term “accord” (which the Knight has previously employed) focus attention upon the social nature of the agreement. Later, when Arveragus orders Dorigen to go to the Squire, he says that he would rather be stabbed than have Dorigen not keep her “trouthe,” going on to say that “‘Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe’” (CT V.1479). In so doing, the Franklin seems not to realize that he has gone even further into a rhetorical confusion with even more contemporary relevance. First, as many critics have recognized, Arveragus does not have the right to order Dorigen to do anything because he gave up lordship in all but name. The Franklin does more than add this detail to Boccaccio’s tales; he emphasizes it, making it fundamental to the meaning he adduces for his tale. Moreover, he describes Arveragus as “swearing” this of his own free will to his future wife. In exchange, she gives him her “trouthe” that she will be his “humble trewe wyf ” (V.758–59), language that recalls the ending of the Wife of Bath’s performance. That Dorigen might not be bound by the “troth” she gave Aurelius (which contradicts the “trouthe” she earlier gave her husband) is not debated. Instead, Arveragus sees “troth” as something worth keeping, even if it means that he is further reduced by her actions.127 Second, his remark that truth/troth is the highest thing man may keep reminds

126. Julian of Norwich knowingly used the social language of power to explain God’s utterly loving power as well as His willed powerlessness. For a discussion of her parable of the lord and the servant in relation to contemporary events, see Staley in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 166–69. 127. This is indeed an issue in the Filocolo, where Fiammetta argues that the wife may not take an oath without the will of her husband, as the wife is one body with her husband. The subject of mastery or marital hierarchy is assumed in both Italian versions.


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Chaucer’s audience of the fundamental relationship between what for us are two separate terms. Green has referred to “truth” as a “keyword” during the late fourteenth century, a period he describes as witnessing the “gradual erosion of faith once placed in the truth of human beings” as a written, “depersonalized intellectual truth” came to predominate over the concept of “communal coherence founded on ethical truth.”128 In a‹rming troth, or one’s word, the Franklin, through Arveragus, a‹rms this older concept of truth, but the Franklin does not address why communal coherence (or honor) should be reified by forced adultery. Moreover, the statement that “trouthe” is the highest thing that man may keep is true only if troth is allied with truth. Troth without truth can hold conspirators together as well as politicians or wise men. Arveragus, the unmanned husband who, in the end, can only hold onto a purely oral and ethically empty concept of “trouthe,” is as powerless as any shire knight in the grip of the duke of Gloucester, and he is certainly as eager as the Franklin is to avoid public controversy. The Franklin uses charged terms like accord, lordship, “servage,” and “trouthe”—terms that Chaucer plays with knowingly throughout the Canterbury Tales—but mu›es their potential resonance in courtesy and sentiment, which, from his perspective, are indices of nobility. What he achieves is ambiguously poised between idealism and flattery, deferring to the audience a judgment he does not wish to make. But if “fre” is the Franklin’s question, it might also be Chaucer’s. How “fre” is the man whose voice has been co-opted? What, finally, are the terms of political or social “servage”? The Franklin takes a position without a position and, in so doing, mouths a less acerbic echo of Boccaccio’s tales, an echo that echoes yet other tales. His voice is only the desire for conciliation; his accord is meaningless compromise, and his troth lacks grounding in truth. Rather than accuse the Franklin of venality or corruption, I am suggesting that in him, Chaucer created a voice that is the last echo of the old language of love and courtesy by which Troy defined itself in Chaucer’s last complete truly courtly poem. What Chaucer examined with such awful care in that poem continued to preoccupy him into the 1390s, when he saw its terms played out on the political stage of the Merciless Parliament. As the poetry of the Puy and the Testament of Love remind us, “city men” certainly made use of (and frequently enriched) what in earlier times had been the language of classical friendship, then 128. Green, Crisis of Truth, 39. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, also discusses “truth” as a keyword. See 326–35 for Green’s diªerent reading of the tension between private and public truth that underlies the Franklin’s Tale.


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clerical address, and then noble relationships. Those who used the language of love to describe social relations also examined that language, testing its capacity for truth or deceit. For lovers as for courtiers, the language of desire has always been double. Chaucer’s tongue, however, was more supple than that of the courtier or the lover, and he chose to pay particular attention not simply to duplicity but also to the confusions inherent in an unexamined practice borrowed from another set of conditions. In the Franklin, he turns upside down the convention that sentiment ennobles. The gestures and the practice that Amans rejects as ridiculous in the Confessio (once he sees his reflected age), that Clanvowe shelves for the plain talk of Lollard prose, Chaucer presents in all their illogic in the mouth of a figure like many who may well have pledged “troth” and stood by while they were assured of the supremacy of parliamentary law. But afterward, how could they employ the language of love in Richard’s court or suggest that lordship is only a social fiction? In fact, the language of love or desire depends upon an imbalance of power for the tension it establishes between lover and beloved. There are two issues here, both crucial for late-fourteenth-century English writers. First, how could the love talk of an earlier tradition (one clearly important to the literature and language of medieval Europe and specifically to Richard’s court during the 1380s) be used after the king’s position and his charisma had been compromised in the drama of the Merciless Parliament, his friends killed or exiled? That language is the language of unequivocal power, a power of lordship that Richard had in name only during the staging of the parliament. Power belonged to the Lords Appellant. The impatience with the constrictions of courtly language that we find in works of the 1380s becomes sharply critical once Richard has been deprived of his circle. Second, what price does the man pay who seeks to employ the terms of “noble talk” to rationalize the realities of contemporary struggles for power? As Chaucer, Gower, and Clanvowe demonstrate, the price for using such language without examining it is higher than a thinking man would pay. That said, what is the language of this altered world? What tongue does a writer choose?


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What Richard needed seems to have become apparent only after he had lost it. The need for a new language of regality is inscribed upon the very record of events of the Merciless Parliament—the events that destroyed his monarchical charisma. At a time when he should have been able to conceptualize a stable regal image, by virtue of his own inclinations or inabilities (or the aspirations of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock), Richard found himself overseeing a situation that forced him to reinvent himself just after the midpoint of his reign. The concept of his court as a center of, or model for, authority was eªectively shattered by the Merciless Parliament, and Richard’s task was to restore a monarchical prestige that the Appellants had understood all too well how to damage. What had been the language of the court and its terms of royal address, refracted in the courtly poetry of the period, drew upon a set of assumptions and metaphors rooted in a particular royal fiction. The courtly language of the 1380s had served the purposes of Chaucer, Gower, Clanvowe, and Usk: it had given them a lexicon for their analysis of courtly speech as a rhetoric of false appearances, all in poetry as coded as that of any Tudor courtier. But the constrictions of that courtly rhetoric, which these authors at once employ and test, are reflected in (or reflect) the imaginative limits of its users, giving them finally no means of understanding the present or of eªecting any truly creative change in the future. As Gower demonstrates, a knowing, sighted self can only reject the lover’s mask as false, untimely, outmoded, unsuitable. But what were to be the terms of a new language of address? Throughout Richard’s reign, a vigorous literature of political address provides evidence of the perceived need to develop a language that could define the


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nature of royal power or describe the regal image. The making of a regal identity is inevitably bound up with the construction of community, a double process that, in England, had produced a fruitful tension between baronial and regal concepts of law and power. From such tensions emerged texts like The Song of Lewes, the Magna Carta, Westminster Abbey, insular romance, and the English coronation ordo—the ceremony by which a king is invested with the garments of majesty—as well as those moments in English history where struggles between kings and barons broke out into violence or into the incremental change of statute law or parliamentary implementation.1 If Richard inherited the throne of his grandfather, Edward III, he also inherited the throne of the deposed Edward II and ruled over a country with an indigenous set of ideas about the limits of regal power and a baronial history of curbing what could not be advised or chastened. The texts of political advice associated with the reign of Richard II, and particularly with the period after the Merciless Parliament, describe a debate about the king’s image that is eªectively a debate about the nature of regal power and the language used to articulate it. In the France of Charles V had emerged the outlines of what could seem an antidote to the challenge of the Merciless Parliament. There are hints that Richard and/or some of his advisers sought to translate into English a rhetoric of French royal address. Translatio, or the act of transferring authority or significance— of transplanting, grafting, transposing—meant, for the literate, that ideas, meanings, words, or things would be moved from one sphere to another.2 The very act of removal was intended to convey the carefully interlocked sets of meanings that had obtained in the original sphere to the new, thus investing the new 1. On law, see S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 4; J. E. A. Jolliªe, Angevin Kingship (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955); G. D. G. Hall, ed., The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England, Commonly Called Glanvill (London: Nelson, 1965); and Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, 1189–1327 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). On kingship, see Tancred Borenius, “The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry III,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 40–50; F. Wormald, “The Throne of Solomon and St. Edward’s Chair,” in De Artibus Opuscula xl: Essays in Honour of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1961); and Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). For literature, see Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), chaps. 1 and 2. 2. Any discussion of translation as a cultural practice must be indebted to Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).


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medium with the power of the old. Or, to use France as the prime example of the arts of translation, if the authority of the empire was to be transferred from a pagan and classical world to the powers of an emerging Christian civilization, the symbols or rituals of Rome must also be relocated in the Christocentric kingship of the early Frankish nation. Charlemagne or Pepin would thus graft Roman imperium onto themselves in a transfer of significance that located the majesty of Rome and the powers of Christ the conqueror in men whose own power demanded an authoritative, iconic status. The motto of the victorious Christ—“Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat”—was used as a sort of charm and invested swords, belts, and coins with extraordinary powers.3 Everyday things, the “things” that were used to define community, became emblems linking the community of France with that of Christian empire. If texts were the objects of translatio, they had to be transplanted into the soil of the vernacular with the apparatus of the academy, the culture to which and out of which they were meaningful, still somehow intact. Academic culture was one of privilege and power; to relocate it in a vernacular sphere was to transfer or “give” wisdom to its patron, usually a prince.4 What is, in fact, moved from one place to another is privilege, power, a set of meanings now singled out and given new and protected life. In part, the story of medieval institutions is a history of translations, from Rome to France or Germany or England, from the libraries of the golden and silver ages to those of the monks of Benedict, from the highly stylized world of a Constantine to that of a Henry or a Louis, from the lecture halls of the late antique world or of the medieval university to the prince, the court, and finally to the laity. But it is also a history that underlines the ways in which translatio was so firmly linked to invention, to the recognition that the old could not be so easily grafted onto the new, that the very act would create a new entity. The continual acts of translation of kings, advisers, thinkers, and poets were also ways of coming to terms with inheritances that must necessarily change or become obdurate and useless. The concept of translation was thus directly relevant to the medieval understanding of the ideology of rule, and perhaps nowhere is this congruence so aptly, or so futilely, illustrated as in the cultural relationship between England and France during the reign of Richard II. The 1390s are a cru3. E. H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations, University of California Publications in History 33 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946). 4. See Copeland’s discussion of Jean de Meun’s preface to his translation of Boethius in Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 135.


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cial period of English political consciousness, but only by turning to Richard’s native and Continental inheritances does the urgency of the last decade of the century become understandable. Nigel Saul has argued for the influence of Valois kingship upon Richard’s views of himself and his role during his maturity. More particularly, I believe that the carefully worked out sacramentalism of French regality, especially as it was expanded upon by Charles V, should be seen as providing Richard with the key to his own needs.5 Richard, or those who surrounded him, came late to the recognition that unlike its rival, France, England did not have an ideology of sacramental kingship that also served to define the political community. The terms they attempted to appropriate, however, could not define an ideal of English communal identity, especially in the aftermath of the Merciless Parliament. Though the cultural presence of Philippe de Mézières in England as well as works like the Wilton Diptych suggest just how powerfully attractive sacral reality was as a component of kingship, the additional Wycli‹te challenge to sacramental change had created an environment where the very subject of sacrality was contested. This contestation of sacrality informs the texts—chronicle, pictorial, political, and literary— of the last decade of the fourteenth century, including the Canterbury Tales. If it is the business of rulers to imagine identities for themselves and the communities they thereby constitute, they must create knowingly out of the past but in the language of the present. By the last half of Edward III’s reign, England’s lack of an ideology of rule became apparent, in hindsight at least, partly because it seemed that the language of chivalry could no longer completely account for the world that was emerging from the ongoing war between France and England. In late December 1375, English and French diplomats had met in Bruges to negotiate a peace between the two nations. That conference, along with the military engagements or nonengagements between England and France during the last decade or so of Edward III’s previously illustrious reign—which had coincided with that of Charles V of France (1364–80)—saw the waning of English prestige. Charles risked the scorn of his contemporaries for his strategy of delay, military harassment, and diplomacy, but he placed France in a far stronger position than it had been since the beginning of the Hundred Years War, when Edward claimed the French throne as its rightful heir.6 The terms of warfare be5. Saul, Richard II, chap. 14. 6. For discussions of Charles V in relation to English policy, see Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, chap. 4; Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–1450


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gan to change. In 1356 Edward, the Black Prince, had captured John II of France at the battle of Poitiers. Negotiations for his release broke down, and in 1360 a large English army invaded France. This campaign was less spectacular; John’s son, the future Charles V, refused to give battle, adopting a policy of skirmish and harassment that wore down the English forces.7 Exhausted by weather and hunger, the English no longer had the upper hand in negotiations. The situation did not change when Charles acceded to the throne in 1364. In her account of the reign of Charles V, Christine de Pisan reports that the duke of Lancaster scorned Charles for an attorney, not a “sage prince.” Upon hearing of the quip, Charles replied, “Si nous sommes avocats, nous leur batirons tel plaid que la sentence les ennuiera.” 8 His threat—that he aimed for a sentence of exhaustion— displayed both his understanding of the attack upon his chivalric reputation and his refusal to be baited in such crude terms. He had other, more substantial ends in mind that could not be gained by wasting time and energy in empty gestures of noblesse oblige. The achievement of Charles V reflects his keen understanding of the dangers he faced and the past he inherited, both of which were bound up with the greater issue of royal prestige. In both 1316 and 1328, France was confronted with a succession crisis. In 1316, after Louis X and his infant son died, his only living child, the future Queen Jeanne II de Navarre, was passed over for the king’s brother. Then, in 1328, Louis X’s second brother and the last Capetian king, Charles IV, died without a son. In order to prevent Edward III of England from ascending to the throne by means of his mother (Isabelle, sister of Charles IV), a law was passed preventing female succession. The law also prevented any claims made by the king of Navarre. The Valois insistence upon hereditary male kingship was, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 22–24; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 229–34; and Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Fire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 51 1–14. 7. I am using Goodman, John of Gaunt, 35–37, here, partly because he recounts the campaign in terms of personalities. The Black Prince and John of Gaunt were playing by an older set of rules, whereas Charles had created a type of non-battle that eschewed the glamour of pitched battle. But I am oversimplifying the situation in France, where there was a great deal of suªering. The war was, after all, fought in France; the people of France paid the toll for the war in high taxes, destroyed crops, damaged towns. That Charles V could hold to his policy says much about his own understanding of the terms of sovereignty. For careful analyses of the French situation, see John Bell Hanneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France Under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), chaps. 4–6; Palmer, England, France, and Christendom, introduction and chap. 1; and Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1998). 8. Quoted in Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 66.


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of course, the genesis for the two great military threats to its stability. Both Edward III, the king of England, and Charles the Bad, the king of Navarre, challenged the reigns of John the Good and Charles V. For much of his reign (1356–64), John the Good was England’s captive, and it therefore fell to his son, at an early age, to deal with what were described as acts of treason.9 Not only did Charles increasingly display a decisiveness and a keen sense of policy that governed his actions in relation to both enemies, but he also used the opportunity to continue the Valois program to emphasize the identity of France, its language, and its people—and to enhance the prestige of the French crown.10 He thus backed up his military strategy with a political one that was expressed in his patronage of cultural texts in the vernacular. His ends, praised by Christine (for whom he was the exemplar of the sage prince), were to be gotten in negotiation. They were the fruits of wisdom, or of wise rule. Unlike Edward III, Charles V had inherited a coherent theory of sacral kingship. From at least the coronation ordo of 1250, the French court, in collaboration with the ecclesiastical centers of Rheims and St. Denis, began to evolve an ideology of the French monarchy that set it apart from all other species of rule.11 With its careful delineation of myths of descent, as well as its employment of cultic symbols, the French court created a myth of sacral kingship that was increasingly documented and articulated during the fourteenth century, when the Valois claim to legitimacy became the occasion for the Hundred Years War.12 Charles V seems to have been particularly sensitive to the need to maintain and enhance the status of the French monarch. In his now classic study of the myths of kingship, The Royal Touch, Marc Bloch argued for Charles V as a 9. S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 170, 172, 180. 10. See Claire Richter Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s Coronation Book: Jeanne de Bourbon and the Ordo ad reginam benediendem,” Viator 8 (1977): 265. 1 1. Jacques Le Goª, “A Coronation Program for the Age of Saint Louis: The Ordo of 1250,” in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 55. 12. See Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), and Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s Chronicle Tradition of St. Denis: A Survey, Medieval Classics: Texts and Studies 10 (Brookline, Mass., and Leyden: Classical Folia Editions, 1978), and “Moral Imagination and the Rise of the Bureaucratic State: Images of Government in the Chroniques des rois de France, Chantilly ms 869,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 157–73. See also the introduction to Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), for important accounts of the ways in which texts were used to create a history of legitimization.


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king who set out to strengthen the monarchy—particularly after the crisis of the battle of Poitiers—or to strengthen the monarchy’s hold on the minds of its subjects.13 To a great degree, Bloch associates the unique status of the French crown with the carefully constructed myths of descent that had been developed over the centuries by the monastery of St. Denis, which, as Gabrielle M. Spiegel describes it, “became the o‹cial custodian and interpreter of royal history, virtually without parallel in the Middle Ages.”14 Even by the thirteenth century, kingship was constructed diªerently in France. The law was linked more closely to the king himself, and, were “his peace” threatened, the king had more power to encroach upon well-established institutions than the king of England did. But such a theocratically conceived kingship must also be maintained, and by more than sheer might.15 Charles V certainly inherited myths that endowed him with a sacral identity and a coronation ordo that centered power in him in ways that the English ordo did not, but he also emerged as a stunning model for the sovereign who might wish to create an o‹cially sanctioned culture. Here, again, he demonstrated his sensitivity to the history of the French crown’s patronage of a humanism that was rooted in vernacular textuality.16 Throughout the thirteenth century, the French court had been engaged in the production of a variety of historical texts that centered power in the crown, but it also sponsored books on good rule that anchored the ideas of sacral kingship to those of Aristotelian statecraft. As noted above, Philip III had appointed Giles of Rome, former student of Thomas Aquinas, as tutor to Philip IV (Philip the Fair), for whom Giles wrote the De regimine principium. When Philip acceded to the throne in 1286, he asked that a vernacular translation be made.17 In attempting to strengthen their links to the Capetian kings, 13. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 79. 14. Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, 7. Bloch’s analysis of the power of the French cult in relation to the relative weakness of the English is borne out by Binski, Westminster Abbey, 6. 15. For studies that discuss the legal histories of England and France in the late Middle Ages, see Burns, ed., Medieval Political Thought, especially the essays by Canning and Dunbabin, and W. Ullman, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961). The above remarks are indebted to chap. 4 of Ullman’s work. 16. For a discussion of the French and English coronation orders, see Ullman, Principles of Government, 201–6. On the English coronation, see H. G. Richardson, “The Coronation in Medieval England: The Evolution of the O‹ce and the Oath,” Traditio 16 (1960): 111–203; Percy Ernst Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. L. G. W. Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). For important discussions of the ways in which textuality became ancillary to French kingship, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, and Spiegel, Romancing the Past. 17. Molenaer, ed., Li livres du gouvernement.


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the Valois kings extended what was a preexisting emphasis upon cultural production. Charles V’s father, John the Good, was, as Claire Richter Sherman notes, the first French king to envision a program of artistic patronage for political ends. He commissioned and bought manuscripts throughout his life.18 John founded the royal library that was housed in the Louvre and commissioned Pierre Bersuire to translate Livy’s Ab urbe condita and the Dominican Jean de Sy to translate the Bible into French. Even his four years of captivity in England did not alter his commitment to creating an o‹cial French culture, for he continued to acquire and commission texts with a good deal of significance for monarchical power and prestige.19 For example, the prologue to the Ab urbe condita suggests that Rome was once a small and insignificant town, but through the wisdom of its rulers and the strength of its military forces, it became the ruler of the known world.20 Such an emphasis upon wisdom became a signifier for Charles’s carefully constructed image of kingship. What John the Good began, Charles V continued, and he did so in a way that established his court as a type of sacral and fully legitimate household. It is to Charles V that the real accolades for cultural production go. Moreover, his interest in creating a vernacular political culture seems especially significant for England during a period when English political thinkers must have been looking for some direction. In the late 1380s or early 1390s, what would the English have found in the court of Charles V? By that time, Charles was dead, but the political legacy he had founded had continued to provide France with stability under Charles VI. By mixing magic with Aristotelian thought, Charles managed a feat of political alchemy that looks like a brilliant achievement even now. In royal manuscripts such as the Grandes chroniques de France, the Coronation Book of Charles V, and the Traité du sacre (the first treatise on the French coronation ceremony), all either continued and shaped by Charles or commissioned by him, we can find evidence for a kingship whose power is sacramentally derived. At a time when the Valois claim to the throne of France was under siege either 18. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 4 (also discussed in chap. 1). For an account of John’s sumptuous captivity, part of which was spent in John of Gaunt’s Savoy palace, see Sumption, Hundred Years War, 290. 19. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 4; Keith V. Sinclair, The Melbourne Livy: A Study of Bersuire’s Translation Based on the Manuscript in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961), 15–16. 20. Sinclair, Melbourne Livy, 15–16. Sinclair also notes that about eighty manuscripts of Livy survive, one of which was owned by Thomas, duke of Gloucester (16).


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literally or metaphorically by England, Charles was careful to link himself to the ritual practices of the past. This is especially evident in his commissioning of a continuation of the Grandes chroniques de France, the o‹cial history of the kings of France that had been written from the 1270s through the early fourteenth century by the monks of St. Denis as a means of establishing the distinct sacral identity of French kingship and hence of French nationhood.21 Unlike the polyvocal and highly idiosyncratic English chronicle histories, which can have monastic rather than royal agendas, the Grandes chroniques speak with a single and specially sanctioned voice. The history firmly locates French identity in a glorious and pious past, one that could certainly be traced to Trojan origins but is most firmly anchored in the figures of Charlemagne and Louis IX (St. Louis), in whose reign the history was begun. The equation of national identity and pious kingship is also central to Charles V’s continuation of the Grandes chroniques into his own reign. To the traditional history of the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian kings was added the history of the Valois.22 Charles, however, did not simply have the chronicle continued; he continued to tinker with the history. As A. D. Hedeman has demonstrated, he commissioned three distinct stages of execution, including both new material and miniatures that served to legitimize the Valois dynasty by linking it to the figure of Louis IX. A series of illustrations further inscribed the Valois line in French history by demonstrating its potency and mastery of the discordant forces opposed to its suzerainty.23 Queens are obviously central to this line, and the prominent position given to Jeanne de Bourbon, the queen of Charles V, in the illustrations both for the Grandes chroniques and Charles V’s Coronation Book is meant to establish the legitimacy of Valois kingship by looking forward to the succession of Charles VI.24 What 21. See Jules Viard, ed., Les grandes chroniques de France, 5 vols. (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1920), for the Grandes chroniques; see R. Delachenal, ed., Chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V, 4 vols. (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1916), for Charles V’s continuation of the Grandes chroniques, and see Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition. 22. I am drawing here upon A. D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 95. For the texts, see Delachenal, ed., Chronique des règnes, and Viard, ed., Les grandes chroniques. 23. For the illustrations, see Delachenal, ed., Chronique des règnes, vol. 4. They include pictures of the coronations of John the Good and of the double coronation of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon, of the Order of the Star, of the États Généraux in 1356 and 1357, of the Jacquerie, and of Charles V and the Holy Roman Emperor. On the illustrations for the entire history, see Hedeman, Royal Image. 24. See A. D. Hedeman, “Copies in Context: The Coronation of Charles V in His Grandes Chroniques de France,” in Coronations, ed. Bak, 72–87, and Hedeman, Royal Image, 109. But I cannot do justice here to the intricacy of the argument, which sheds real light on the construction of a textual culture.


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is thereby articulated is a “religion royale” carefully put together by a man to whom John of Gaunt had scornfully referred as only an “avocat.” Similarly, the Coronation Book of Charles V and the Traité du sacre, both of which were passed on to the duke of Bedford, regent of France, at the death of Charles VI in 1422, play heavily upon the magical elements of French coronation ritual.25 The Coronation Book, sumptuously copied and illustrated, is a splendid artifact of Charles’s magnificence. The thirty-eight illustrations themselves are designed to indicate the momentous nature of the event they record. Beginning at the point in the ceremony when the king arrives at the church door and is met by the bishop, they capture the sacramental meaning of the coronation in the colors and types of clothing both Charles and his queen, Jeanne of Bourbon, are wearing during each stage of the ceremony. The fact of investiture is made visual here: what happens when a king of France is crowned is a form of re-dressing that has less to do with earthly power than with the miraculous action of the Holy Spirit upon a king anointed with the oil of Clovis. Even the powers vested in the churchmen who celebrate the ceremony are subtly secondary to the drama taking place between king and God. Indeed, though the churchmen are agents for such divine magic, their robes — embroidered with the fleur-de-lis of France—proclaim them as ancillary to the king, in whom France is concentrated and constituted. Similarly, though Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon were known to have had a companionate marriage (and her prominence in the illustrations for the Coronation Book may well reflect that), her presence also serves a more political end. She is the sign of marriage, the figure through whom the future is guaranteed, the steward of Charles’s own well-ordered household.26 Where Charles’s re-clothing as king is meant to suggest the process of sacralization, Jeanne is not re-dressed in the blue robes embroidered with fleurs-de-lis that her husband wears. She is only crowned and given a scepter, anointed, and then veiled. While the illustrations certainly underline her importance, they do so by placing her in relation to her husband, the newly anointed and therefore mystically altered king. The images underscore the text’s emphasis upon Charles as the focal point for his intimate, 25. The Coronation Book is still in England, in the holdings of the British Library (ms Cotton Tiberius B.VIII). The illustrations, which form a distinct section, have been removed and bound separately. The volume has been edited; see E. S. Dewick, ed., The Coronation Book of Charles V of France (Cottonian ms Tiberius B.VIII), Henry Bradshaw Society 16 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1899). 26. See Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s Coronation Book,” on Jeanne as companion to Charles.


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courtly, and national households. But as French political thinkers also knew, Charles ruled by more than sagesse. His rule was a sign of God’s special favor toward the French. Charles V did not invent the idea that the French king was diªerent from all other kings by virtue of his royal blood and thus possessed a healing touch. Nor did he create the Salic law specifying that no woman should inherit the crown. But, like other Valois kings, he saw the need to shore up a shaky legitimacy and did so with a thoroughness and singleness of vision that provides a fascinating lesson in political understanding. Moreover, he and his circle of advisers, most of them clerics, certainly capitalized upon the implications of an increasingly formalized system of sacramental theology to locate French kingship within a framework that would allow the king both a priestly function and a husband’s authority and power. To some extent, Charles lived in the right place and at the right time for what he had to do, but he also had the foresight, intelligence, and restraint required to pull together a number of religious and social developments in ways that seem less schematic than natural. For example, the Capetian kings had worked hard to create the French myths of origin and kingship that continued to flourish throughout the later Middle Ages. As Bloch has demonstrated, the king’s relation to the “body politic” was graphically expressed by his ability to heal a diseased member of that body by his sacred touch. French kings were not the only kings to claim a healing touch, but they were the only ones to create a special status for the monarchy, giving it a cultic power. In his own eªorts to strengthen the legitimacy of the Valois line, Charles linked this cultic power to developments in sacramental theology, which by the mid-fourteenth century had been explained in such a way as to codify the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds. By the late Middle Ages, sacraments were described as more than signs of the sacred: they were both signs and causes of grace. Thomas Aquinas said that sacraments cause through signification—that they are instrumental agents, both cause and eªect—and that they derive their power from Christ’s suªerings. He went on to say that all sacraments are ultimately related to the Eucharist, the sacrament of faith that came to define the very constitution of Christian society throughout late medieval Europe. Through its e‹cacy, the Eucharist, the sign and embodiment of God’s mercy and grace, was also seen as circumscribing the community of the faithful: the body politic became identified with the body of Christ. The history of medieval eucharistic thought is inevitably a history of its social ramifications and the ways in which social and political theorists


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employed the sacred and its symbols.27 By commissioning Jean Golein to translate into French William Durandus’s (ca. 1230–96) popular Rationale of the Divine Offices, which is a highly symbolic discussion of the Latin liturgy, and to insert a treatise on the French coronation ceremony into it, Charles V evinced his absolute comprehension of the terms of the power he sought to unite and pass on to his descendants.28 Moreover, Golein’s treatise, the Traité du sacre, is inserted after book 1 of the Rationale, directly after the chapter entitled “De ecclesiasticis sacramentis.”29 Golein’s opening sentence links the consecration of a French king—and Charles in particular—to the sacramental symbolism and e‹cacy discussed by Durandus. He begins with an account of the sacred oil with which only the French kings were supposed to have been anointed. Though all kings were anointed, only the French were anointed with “sainte liqueur celestiele qui est en la sainte ampole la quele est a saint Remi de Reins conservee et gardee, comme celle qui fu du ciel aportee par la main des angelz pour oindre les nobles et dignes Roys de france.” 30 The French king, therefore, need recognize no temporal lord. He is subject to divine law and invested with his power, which is also his meaning, by a divine act of oblation, which is signified through the holy oil brought down from heaven. Golein assimilates the anointing to the baptism of Christ in a way that stresses sacramental change: “Aussi comme il plut a dieu le pere a dire a son filz en lonction du baptesme. Hic est filius meus dilectus in quo michi complacui, et le saint esperit descendi en forme de columbe qui loingni oleo leticie pre participibus suis. Et le filz en char humaine recut celle sainte consecration.”31 Anointed, mystically recognized by the Father, then newly clothed in regalia whose meanings are also “mystical,” the king “est signifiance de mixtion Royal avec prestrie, de quoy il est escript. Vos estis genus electum regale sacerdocium.”32 The king is more than 27. Seamus P. Heaney, The Development of the Sacramentality of Marriage from Anselm of Laon to Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 128; Ian Christopher Levy, “Sacraments and Sacramental Theology,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 544–54; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1948), vol. 4, supplement, qq. 41–49, pp. 785–820. On the social implications of sacramental theology, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 28. R. A. Jackson, ed., “The Traité du sacre of Jean Golein,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1 13 (1969): 305–24. 29. William Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum, ed. A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), vol. 1. 30. Jackson, ed., “The Traité du sacre of Jean Golein,” 309. 31. Ibid., 309–10. 32. Ibid., 316.


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the defender of the church; he himself has a priestly function. Golein’s treatise is as ornately symbolic as Durandus’s, and, by its end, the king has been transformed by the sacre, or by Golein’s discussion of it, into a figure for divine e‹cacy. But as a sacerdotal figure, he is also the one through whom grace operates. He can make because he has been made. Short of proclaiming Charles divine, it is hard to see how much further Golein could have gone in his eªort to associate the French crown with sacramental ordering, with the alignment of cause and eªect. There are many statements of royal power, and scholars have suggested that Richard came to envy that power during the final years of his reign, when he tried to adapt Valois majesty to his own public image.33 For example, Golein insists that the king of France recognizes no temporal lord, that he communicates directly with the holy. Golein then includes two prayers —one of the king to the Virgin Mary, and one to Jesus Christ—that are not included in the o‹cial ordo of Charles V.34 He not only allegorizes each part of the ceremony but also devotes a good deal of attention to the regalia, discussing the meaning of symbols of power (like the scepter and banner) and items of clothing that make up the newly clothed king. Golein brings his treatise to a close by rea‹rming the priestly and therefore male nature of the French king (“Ne onques femme naprocha si pres de ordre prestral comme lonction Royal”), suggesting more or less baldly that a study of the French coronation ceremony demands someone adept in the terms of theology.35 He claims, of course, more than political science. He contends that a special wisdom underlies the royal mystique, or he claims divine magic of the type that inhabits sacramental change. As in the sacrament of the altar, the ministers of the church are servants of a power they do not themselves possess. All lies in the king’s touch. This is heady stuª, and, along with Raoul de Presles and Nicole Oresme, Golein formed part of a distinguished company of men whom Charles V entrusted with creating a national literature of rule in the vernacular. Charles added to his vernacular library of instructive texts (which can be seen as an index of his far-reaching political sensibility) by maintaining a corps of clerics who supplied translations into French of politically relevant works by John of Salisbury, Seneca, Vincent of Beauvais, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Petrarch, Aristotle, and 33. See Saul, Richard II, 349. See Jones, Royal Policy, for suggestions about Richard’s deliberate use of ceremony in the construction of his kingship. 34. Jackson, ed., “The Traité du sacre of Jean Golein,” 31 1 n. 43. 35. Ibid., 323, 324.


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St. Augustine.36 In addition to his collecting devotional manuscripts, scripture (both Latin and French), coronation ordines, historical chronicles, and works of mathematical and scientific instruction as well as many geomancies, he displayed a pragmatic interest in texts that grounded political order in a firmly Aristotelian endorsement of natural order. The thirteenth-century writers Brunetto Latini and Giles of Rome are of obvious importance here, for both were transmitters of Aristotelian political thought.37 Both Li livres dou tresor and De regimine principium describe the body politic as a manifestation of the prince himself: the prince’s ability to create a system of order for himself and his household is the central determinant of the well-ordered state. If Brunetto seems more interested in explaining how to define lordship within what is a dynamic political arena and Giles more inclined to outline the underlying philosophy of good governance, both writers reflect the Aristotelian emphasis upon a natural order that the well-governed man or state must recognize or else risk personal and/or civil chaos. As noted above, Christine de Pisan borrowed Giles’s Aristotelian organizational method in the rhetorical structure for her Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V. She drew upon historical sources like the Grandes chroniques in her presentation of French kingship and origins, but she also assimilated Charles to Aristotle’s wise ruler, whose sagacity, justice, largesse, chastity, familial devotion, sobriety, truth, and piety form the core of a nation whose chivalric glory magnifies the wisdom of its prince. Christine’s portrait of Charles was as true to life as an icon can be, for Charles was indeed learned, temperate, deeply patriarchal, known for his interest in his own children and regard for his queen, and at all times conscious of the prestige and stability of the crown he inherited. Charles exerted minute control over the production of French cultural texts. For example, as Sherman and Hedeman have demonstrated, Charles did not simply commission the rewriting of history. He or his court also oversaw the miniatures of the king inserted into such manuscripts, which thereby presented a consistent and recognizable portrait type of the king that was used even in the initials that decorated royal charters.38 This is the image of the wise ruler who presides 36. On Charles’ library, see L. Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, roi de France, 1337–1380, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907; repr., Amsterdam: Gérard Th. van Heusden, 1967). On the translators, see vol. 1, chap. 9. See also Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, bibliography. 37. On Horn’s collection made for the city of London in the 1320s, which contains extracts from Brunetto Latini’s Tresor in French as a guide for London’s mayors, see Chap. 1 above. 38. Claire Richter Sherman, The Portraits of Charles V of France, 1338–1380, Monographs on Archaeology and the Fine Arts 20 (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 34–35, 64, 79; Hedeman,


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over a kingdom organized according to the principles of a common good. What Charles promulgated was far more than a reputation for bibliophilia. By insisting on the translation of key classical texts into French, he sponsored a deed “pour le profit et utilité de votre royaume.”39 This phrase, which appears in Raoul de Presles’s preface to his translation of the City of God, is cast in language that, as Sherman notes, also appears in o‹cial documents recording payments to artists. In other words, it is o‹cial language. Charles has asked for the translation, which serves the good of “his” realm—and thus the humanism for which Charles is praised is directly related to the state of France, the king’s household, that relational construct presided over by the beneficent and wise ruler. Kingdoms, like households, were conceived of as corporate hierarchies. Instruction was therefore necessary for all entrusted with responsibility. If young men were to grow into wise rulers (in the broadest sense of that term), they needed to be taught the elements of good rule. If young women were to become good wives, they needed to understand their position within such a corporate body and how to maintain that body in as orderly a manner as possible. Here, the Ethics, the Politics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics became the authoritative texts necessary for a political education. Oresme described the Ethics as teaching good morals and the Politics as teaching the art and science of government; the Economics taught the more mundane but equally necessary art of household management.40 Oresme clearly saw all three Aristotelian texts as interdependent, for he links them at the beginning of the Livre de Yconomique d’Aristote, saying that the Ethics is about the mastery of the self; the Economics, about managing a family group; and the Politics, about establishing the science of managing groups or of governing cities.41 In the work itself, he presents the household as a kind of kingdom whose borders need to be very carefully guarded. If externally contained, then internally, the household “Copies in Context”; Hedeman, Royal Image. This oversight also included the queen’s image; see Sherman, “The Queen in Charles V’s Coronation Book.” 39. Cited in Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 7. 40. Susan M. Babbitt, Oresme’s “Livre de politiques” and the France of Charles V, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 75, pt. 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985); Albert D. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique d’Aristote, by Nicole Oresme, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 47, pt. 5. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1957). Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, argues that Oresme planned the program of illustrations for his translations and did so with an eye to instruction. 41. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 801. See Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), for searching discussions of Oresme’s role in French thought and politics.


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should be well organized, with a place for everything. Within the boundaries of this kingdom, the wife serves as the subregent, who exercises powers of dominion within it (though not over her husband’s money). The success of the husband’s care for the education and regulation of wife, servants, and children is manifest in the children themselves, who, if carefully trained, will grow up to care for the parents in their old age. The emphasis throughout is upon the naturalness of the marriage bond and upon the rationality that is a key component of all human relationships. If this is a picture of a little kingdom, it is a kingdom in which the powers of the just husband (or prince) are unlimited because they are just.42 Furthermore, the Yconomique seems less focused upon the nobility than upon a household defined by methodology of rule (even more than by class, because the household may or may not have more than one servant). In other words, the Yconomique does not present itself as an exclusively aristocratic ordo that depends upon knightly culture but as a discussion of a household as strictly monarchical as that of Charles’s France. In fact, what Charles had established in France, with a good deal of eªort and intelligence, was his own authority. When he came to the throne, he was not perceived as a figure of strength, but he managed to deal with both internal and external threats to his position and also manufactured for himself an image that came to be identified with that of France itself. The Yconomique sparked a vogue for books of household management during the fourteenth century, books that seem to have held a real interest for Charles V. He had had Pietro Crescenzi’s Duodecim libri ruralium commodorum (1300) translated, and the last quarter of the century saw four works, all in French, of the same type: Jean de Brie’s Le bon berger (1379), Jean Boutillier’s La somme rurale (1380), Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (1371), and Le menagier de Paris (1393).43 The political relevance inherent in the Yconomique is manifest in its opening statements, whereby a household—which “unlike a state has only one figure of authority”—is expressly compared to a monarchy, a nonconstitutional

42. On Giles of Rome and the powers of the prince, see Jean Dunbabin, “Government,” in Burns, ed., Medieval Political Thought, 477–519. 43. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 786. Though Menut insists that these volumes are not strictly “indebted” to Aristotle’s Economics, they share the same broad (and inevitably political) interest in teaching the arts of stewardship and management. But Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, argues for an organic textual development; see chap. 24. For a discussion of these texts, see Chap. 4 below.


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government where power is not shared. As subregent, the wife’s dominion derives from her husband’s favor and will.44 As with other texts commissioned or encouraged by Charles V, the theory of government that underlies the discussion of marriage is designed to emphasize its corporate nature. Sherman notes that Oresme’s glosses on the Economics emphasize the companionate nature of marriage, which she links to the relationship between Charles V and his queen, Jeanne de Bourbon.45 But the picture of marriage that is fundamental to Charles’s cultural program is, as we saw in reference to the Coronation Book, a political construct.46 Similarly, in the De moneta (Oresme’s treatise on coinage, which he derived from Aristotle’s Politics), Oresme seeks to articulate the corporate rationale validating all forms of commercial exchange accomplished through coinage bearing the stamp of the authority issuing it— but not belonging to that authority. The coin of the realm belongs to the realm, and the prince has no right to tamper with its standards. Indeed, such a prince would exercise tyrannical powers over something belonging to the public.47 If the face on the coin signifies the good of the realm, the face produced and placed into circulation by the court of Charles V was that of benign control. More important yet, Charles V exerted a sophisticated kind of control, one that maintained itself by staging textual performances of dissent. For example, Le songe du vergier, the long dialogue between a clerk and a knight seeking to define the powers of the two arms of the state, was written at the request of the king and finished in a Latin version in 1376. The French text was in the hands of the king by 1378.48 Some think Oresme himself wrote the work, but in any case,

44. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 786, 809–1 1. 45. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 301. 46. See Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), for a discussion of marriage as a political metaphor. 47. See Charles Johnson, trans., The “De moneta” of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956). See also Peter Spuªord, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 295–301; Carolyn P. Collette, “Reading Chaucer Through Philippe de Mézières: Alchemy, the Individual, and the Good Society,” in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, ed. C. Huber and H. Lähnemann (Tübingen: Attempto, 2002), 183. 48. For the text, see Marion Schnerb-Lièvre, ed., Le songe du vergier, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982). For discussion of this work, see Fiona Somerset, “‘As just as is a squyre’: The Politics of ‘Lewed Translacion’ in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 196, as well as the entry in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), vol. 11, s.v. “Somnium Viridarii.” For studies of this work, see Jeannine Quillet, La philosophie politique du Songe du vergier (1378), Sources doctrinales (Paris: Librarie philosophique J. Vrin, 1977).


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its author was clearly familiar with Oresme’s writings. The Songe is addressed to the king, whom it praises for his power, wisdom, and peace, for the tranquility of his people, and for his humility. It does not hesitate to address itself to issues of profound significance for the medieval conception of the political corporation. The Knight and the Clerk debate the relative powers of the monarch and the pope, the ways in which ecclesiastical corruption compromises ecclesiastical authority, the merits of sexual abstinence and marriage, ecclesiastical wealth, and the moral status of the mendicant orders; they end by debating the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The author gives the last word to the church in the Clerk’s a‹rmation of the doctrine and his praise of Mary, but the Songe nonetheless stands as a testament to the powers of the state and of the French king in particular. By creating a space for debate and by frequently putting into the Knight’s mouth some of the more extreme positions (including a dispraise of chastity that sometimes can seem like an early Wycli‹te attack on clerical abstinence), the author of the Songe subtly presents a picture of Charles V that declares his manifold power, his utterly pacific and intellectual nature that never stoops to tyrannical control. In the epilogue, where the dream is passed on to the king for his discretion and understanding, Charles is imagined as the one who, in deciding the relative merits of the opposing arguments, eªects a mutually beneficial peace between the powers of church and state. Charles looks to no higher power for adjudication (an estimation of his power that is also apparent in the frontispiece: see Figure 1). Both the more aggressive Knight and the Clerk defend the special status of the French crown, the sanctity of which does not depend on a ceremony of the church—or else all kings would share this status.49 Implicitly, the powers of the church are presented as secondary to (or separate from) those of the king. The church depends upon the king of France for its defense from those who, like the Knight, would seek to undermine its authority.50 While the work presents itself as debate, it raises potentially inflammatory subjects only to mu›e them in a stream of rhetoric that is finally deferred to the king for his judgment. 49. Schnerb-Lièvre, ed., Le songe du vergier, 75–78. 50. These are ideas directly linked to Oresme’s championship of Gallicanism. Thus, the king of France was described as independent of the papacy in temporal matters and the General Council was seen as superior to the Pope. The clergy and the king needed to cooperate in order to preserve the liberties of the French church, but the French king was consistently a‹rmed as having a unique status in regard to the church. See Babbitt, Oresme’s “Livre de politiques,” chap. 6. Babbitt links the Songe to Oresme; see 137.


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By allowing an o‹cial forum for a vernacular exploration of the nature of civil power, Charles at once sanctions dissent and demystifies it. In the realm of the just prince, the body politic is allowed its voice. The dialogic murmur of the academy has a place within the magically sacral rule of the heir to Clovis. The issue, finally, is the king’s face, the face patterned and produced and stamped on the coins that signify the people’s business. In his De moneta, Oresme had discussed the literally bimetallic nature of coinage and the fact that the king must not alter the ratio unless the value of the metals is materially altered by a new source of supply. Charles V understood more than the art of money; he understood the principle of alloyed mixtures. The one metal gave strength to the other—the magic of anointing, the rational arts of good rule. If the alloy held, the coin rang true. Even this selective look at French political culture in the last quarter of the fourteenth century gives evidence not only of a dialogue about the nature of social institutions but also of the terms employed by the interlocutors. The reign of Charles V began inauspiciously and presented its king with many conflicts— with the merchants, with the king of Navarre, with the towns, and, of course, with England, including all the problems that come with war—but we perceive the period of Charles’s reign as he and his advisers wished us to see it. Charles is so interesting a figure because his reign appears to be a rational response to a potentially disastrous national situation. Whatever its merits or deficiencies, he and his advisers thought through and executed a mode of governance that had an extraordinary coherence: the system was simultaneously political and fiscal as well as cultural and religious. Even from this distance, France—notwithstanding its great suªering and, in many places, devastation—oªers the illusion, if you like, of a well-lighted space, the dignified, educated, sober household of the king himself. If that household dissolved with the reign of Charles VI (and really only after 1392, with the king’s mental illness), its myth and the domestic language used to describe it continued to have currency, as the writings of Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pisan illustrate. England was a very diªerent place, in part because of the personalities of those who held power. Edward III did not pass on to his grandson what Charles V passed on to Charles VI. During the last years of his reign, Edward III was in no condition to think his way through to a policy on the royal image. It was a subject that concerned him in the early days of his authority and was clearly of interest to those sur-


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rounding him.51 The treatise of Walter de Milemete entitled De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum was written in 1326 for Edward III, who had just been placed on the throne although his father, Edward II, was still living. It is designed to oªer the young king an instructive picture of kingship. The text describes the king as pious, as the protector of the church, as noble, wise, prudent, just, merciful, deliberate, equitable, and constant. The slightly later text of Milemete’s treatise amplifies this regal image with pictures of a king, knights, combats, and courtiers.52 Though the pictures oªer a recognizable type of a young king—fair, young, dignified—neither the pictures nor the text oªers more than advice. The treatise does not outline a philosophy of rule that might be translated into an idea of community, unlike many of the works sponsored by the Valois court. The manuscript made for presentation at the marriage of Philippa of Hainault to Edward III late in 1326 powerfully suggests an attempt to co-opt for him the model of the good ruler that the Valois kings were so eager to appropriate for themselves.53 The compilation begins with Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, which gave the ruler all he needed to know about the universe, about the vices and the virtues, and about the rhetoric of government; the political satire Le dit de Fauvain by Raoul le Petit; a treatise by Julius Caesar (perhaps the Gallic Wars?); a copy of Giles of Rome’s De regimine; the Statutes of England; a translation of the paternoster into French; and the coronation ordo of the kings of France. But by the time Charles V was cementing his military strategy of negotiation and harassment and his centralization of culture (as Daniel Poiron has called it), Edward III was far removed from the business of governing. His oldest son, Edward the Black Prince, was incapable of exercising such authority. And John of Gaunt was set on the course of a career that never quite earned him the prize he wanted. Richard II inherited a very diªerent kingdom from that

51. W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society, 1327–1377 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), describes Edward III as one of the “most image-conscious” kings of the later Middle Ages (45). See his study for an analysis of Edward’s reign. 52. This is the Christ Church manuscript, the facsimile of which was published in 1913. 53. I am drawing here upon the description of the manuscript (Paris, BN ms Français 571) to be found in Michael, “Manuscript Wedding Gift.” For recent political readings of the manuscript’s preparation and contents, see Ardis Butterfield, “French Culture and the Ricardian Court,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Andrew Wathey, “The Marriage of Edward III and the Transmission of French Motets to England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 45 (1992): 1–29. See also Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds., Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms Français 146 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).


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of Charles VI. English kings had not evolved a program of patronizing vernacular culture, nor had they attempted to link royal patronage to a concept of national identity. Only in the last decade of his life is there evidence that Richard or those around him came to understand his need for a language of royal power and groped for a remedy. If they looked to France, and particularly to the France of Charles V, it was by that time too late to attempt to translate a myth from one national language into another. Nor do they appear to have understood the elements of that myth or how it had been fashioned through vernacular textuality. First, England had never been that country.54 Moreover, England had at least one public figure—John Wyclif—whose carefully worked out challenge to what was thought of as order presented it with a puzzle that, by the time Richard took the throne, had already begun to make a diªerence to possible constructions of sovereignty. The complicated and many-pronged threat to authority that was already taking shape in England needed a sovereign of real insight and ability, one given to the sort of study that characterized France’s “lawyer-king.” Wyclif made a diªerence because what he had to say was not relevant simply to the university world of Oxford but also to the political and social world of London. From the mid-1370s (and probably until the end of Wyclif ’s life), John of Gaunt supported Wyclif for reasons that were less related to Wyclif ’s religious views than to his political usefulness. Gaunt, the most powerful man in the realm during his father’s senescence and the early years of the reign of Richard II, worked to promote the prestige of the crown. In his eªorts to undo the work of the Good Parliament of 1376 and to frustrate the ambitions of William Courtney, bishop of London, who was explicitly opposed to Wyclif ’s spreading his views, Gaunt seems to have found Wyclif worth employing on occasion and thus worth protecting.55 Whereas John of Gaunt had his own political agenda (including increased clerical taxation), John Wyclif, as Michael Wilks has de54. See Jolliªe, Angevin Kingship, and F. W. Maitland, “Wyclif on English and Roman Law,” Law Quarterly Review 12 (1896): 76–78. 55. The degree of Gaunt’s involvement with Wyclif has recently been questioned by Richard Rex. For the evidence and the debate, see Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), vol. 1, chap. 2; K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (New York: Macmillan, 1953), chap. 3; Joseph H. Dahmus, “John Wyclif and the English Government,” Speculum 35 (1960): 51–68; Holmes, Good Parliament; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 60–73; and Richard Rex, The Lollards (New York: Palgrave, 2002), chap. 2. Though Wyclif challenged only ecclesiastical authority, his arguments about dominion left open the door to challenging secular authority, as some followers seemed to do. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 359–67.


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scribed him, sought to reform the realm.56 It is during the period from about 1371 to 1378, when Wyclif seems to have been useful either to Gaunt or to his party at court, that Wyclif, extending the ideas of Richard FitzRalph, developed his theory of lordship and grace. FitzRalph had denied lordship to anyone in a state of mortal sin, and Wyclif followed him in applying this argument to the ecclesiastical sphere. Moreover, Wyclif looked to the prince to become the prime agent of clerical reform by depriving the clergy of its wealth and untangling its involvement in the secular realm.57 While he was building his arguments defending the prince’s right to deprive unrighteous clerks of endowments and to despoil the church of its possessions, he twice provided material for government use. In 1377 he argued against the collection of papal taxes in England, and in 1378 he defended the infringement of sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.58 Wyclif was known outside the lecture halls of Oxford. He was a popular preacher, preaching in both Latin and the vernacular—popular enough to be perceived as a threat by ecclesiastical authorities in 1377 and 1378. Both Thomas Walsingham and Henry Knighton linked him and his ideas to the Rising of 1381, though, as Anne Hudson points out, these accusations were written after Wyclif ’s condemnation in 1382.59 Recent attempts to understand the early Wycli‹te movement are finding the links between Wyclif and his academic disciples and the supporters of Wycli‹te ideas among the nobility and the gentry increasingly important.60 What by the mid- to late fifteenth century was a “movement” more 56. Michael Wilks, “Reformatio Regni: Wyclif and Hus as Leaders of Religious Protest Movements,” Studies in Church History 9 (1972): 109–30. See also Reginald Lane Poole, ed., Tractatus de civili dominio, by John Wycliªe, intro. Johann Loserth (London: Trübner, 1885; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966), vol. 4. Rex, The Lollards, discounts the contemporary importance of Wyclif ’s views. For studies of the profound challenge to systems of thought and learning posed through Wycli‹te thought, see Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Kantick Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 57. See Aubrey Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 62–67. See also Michael Wilks, “Wyclif and the Wheel of Time,” Studies in Church History 30 (1997): 177–93. 58. See Dahmus, “John Wyclif and the English Government,” 61–62, and Hudson, Premature Reformation, 64, for a fuller discussion. For the parliamentary record, which Hudson cites, see RP 3:10, 37, 50. The argument defending the infringement of sanctuary rests upon the concept of the king’s safety, which, of course, might also have been used ten years later during a similar violation of the Abbey’s sanctuary by the Appellants. 59. Hudson, Premature Reformation, chap. 2, especially 64–73. See also Wilks, “Reformatio Regni,” and Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond, eds., Lollardy and the English Gentry in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), introduction. 60. See the cogent discussion of these issues in Hudson, Premature Reformation, 110–17; J. Anthony Tuck, “Carthusian Monks and Lollard Knights: Religious Attitudes at the Court of Richard II,”


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to be found in the artisan class began with the support of those whose wealth and privilege protected and aided the eªorts of the early Wycli‹tes. Finally, though Wyclif was a trained academic and used the precise language of theological investigation to explore some very polemical issues, he nonetheless put into play a conversation about the nature of things and about the premises upon which social order rested. That conversation continued—to some extent publicly—until the first decade of the fifteenth century. To argue that the social order of the late Middle Ages, and particularly its construction by the Valois kings and especially by Charles V, was inextricably bound up with an intense and carefully considered sacramentalism is not to deny a religious mystery in favor of a social one.61 It is rather to suggest the ways in which two spheres, theological and sociopolitical, mutually respond to one another. The French understanding of kingship and its legacy in the Valois articulation of royal potency can be seen as a development of sacramental theology, just as the fervor that came to define the late medieval theological discussions of the sacraments can be seen as, in some measure, a response to the economic and political shifts of the period. Neither purely materialistic nor purely intellectual or devotional, the worlds of faith and politics continually alter one another because they are not distinct. Charles’s cultural program, to which the emphasis upon sacramental kingship was integral, encouraged and/or patronized studies of statecraft, household management, the education of the young, the coinage of money, the place of the church, and the role of the sovereign. This cultural program was one part of his response to the national or political situation he faced early in his reign. The di‹culties that presented themselves to Charles V upon his succession to the French throne were somewhat diªerent from what lay ahead for Richard II. Charles was not only older and had already assumed

in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. P. Strohm and T. J. Heªernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 149–61; J. Catto, “Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist,” in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); J. A. F. Thomson, “Knightly Piety and the Margins of Lollardy,” in Lollardy and the English Gentry, ed. Aston and Richmond; and J. Catto, “Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life: Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff, ed. Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 1 1 (Woodbridge, U.K.: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1999), 141–62. 61. For work on the complex relationship between sacramental theology and late medieval institutions, see Sarah Beckwith, “Sacrum Signum: Sacramentality and Dissent in York’s Theater of Corpus Christi,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264–88, and Rubin, Corpus Christi.


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much responsibility while his father, the king, was in captivity in England, but early in his public life, too, he had faced political and social challenges. Richard came to the throne as a boy who had known nothing of rule. Moreover, he did not simply inherit an England that contained the “normal” amount of anticlericalism associated with papal taxes and charges of corruption and conflicts of interest. In his England, the ongoing theological speculations of John Wyclif gave an added edge to what might be otherwise excoriated as the ethical and institutional lapses in the marriage between church and state. Until Wyclif began to challenge papal authority and the doctrine of transubstantiation, he could still be seen as belonging to the world of Oxford, a world of vigorous academic argument that sometimes spilled over into the public sphere when it was useful for it to do so. But after 1377 or 1378, when Wyclif was called to account by Gregory XI for his political views and chose to question or reject Rome’s authority to censure him, he began to take a path that would finally lead him out of Oxford.62 In 1379 he attacked the theology of the Eucharist, averring that the miracle of faith does not depend upon the words of a priest—that the words make the occasion, not the miracle, and that the miracle takes place in the heart. But what saved Wyclif from the severest penalties for so challenging the spiritual authority of the church to make and unmake was, as K. B. McFarlane has suggested, the very crisis of authority that obtained in England for the rest of Wyclif ’s life.63 Edward III, who had not truly reigned for almost a decade, had died in 1377, and a boy sat on the English throne. In 1378 Gregory XI died, and for thirty years Christendom was ruled, depending upon its political allegiances, by one of two popes. Rome would not risk alienating England by persecuting an English theologian, and Wyclif, though censured by the English ecclesiastical authorities, may have been protected by John of Gaunt and was allowed to write and die in peace. Deprived of Oxford, he was not deprived of his powers of rhetoric. The authority he questioned, by its very weakness, made it possible for him to continue to question it. The two issues—papal authority and Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist— are, of course, linked.64 Wyclif did not deny the presence of Christ in the ele-

62. See Gordon Leª, “John Wyclif: The Path to Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 52 (1960): 143–80; McFarlane, John Wycliffe, 79–88. 63. See McFarlane, John Wycliffe, 89. 64. On this, see Gwynn, English Austin Friars, 257. For a discussion of Wyclif ’s views on the sacrament, see Maurice Keen, “Wyclif, the Bible, and Transubstantiation,” in Wyclif in His Times,


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ments of the mass. He denied that a priest could turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ, thus altering substance while the accidents of bread and wine remained. As he himself pointed out, Wyclif was not alone in a‹rming the sacramental and spiritual (rather than the sacramental and actual) presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but, by the fourteenth century, such views were heterodox. For Wyclif, not only did the doctrine of transubstantiation seem idolatry of the carnal, but giving that magical power of change to a possibly corrupt human being, whose words were thought to alter the nature of matter, also seemed to emphasize the wrong aspect of the mass. Why should he worship false magic when there was more than enough true magic in Christ’s presence in the hearts of the faithful? In May 1381, around the time he vacated Oxford for Lutterworth, he published his Confession, which contained his views on the Eucharist.65 Here he reiterated his arguments against the doctrine of transubstantiation, backing them up with scripture as well as authorities such as Ignatius, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. In the Confession, Wyclif raises an earlier set of authorities against those of the contemporary church, but, in eªect, he brings the evidence of the human senses and the recesses of the human heart against the hierarchically conceived authority of the Roman curia and its priests. In so doing, Wyclif did more than raise the standard of nonconformity (to appropriate McFarlane’s term). He began a process by which authority itself could be ignored or rejected, and he located that process in the heart. He insisted upon the faithful and predestined heart, but the heart itself, as anyone—including, of course, Chaucer—knows, is never still for long. Once Wyclif’s views became theologically extreme rather than politically useful, he lost the overt support of men like John of Gaunt. They, like Charles V of France, would have understood all too well upon what base power lay. Wyclif ’s questioning of ecclesiastical authority and sacramental magic came at a time of great social and political stress in England, when civil authority was

ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1–16. Keen sees Wyclif’s attack on the real presence as growing out of his work on the De veritate sacre scripture. See also Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 60–62. 65. For the Confession, see W. W. Shirley, ed., Fasciculi zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ascribed to Thomas Netter of Walden (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 1 15–32. The Confession was answered point by point by Thomas Winterton; see 181–238. See also Johann Loserth, ed., John Wyclif ’s “De eucharistia” (London: The Wyclif Society, 1895).


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itself a subject of critical inquiry. The Rising of 1381, the political tensions of the 1380s, and the parliamentary dissatisfaction with the young Richard II that culminated in the acts of the Appellants near the end of the decade all helped create a world with very diªerent needs and a very diªerent lexicon than the world overseen by Charles V. What England had was not so much a world whose verities were lost or eroding but a world in which the very identity of authority— and consequently of community—was not clearly defined. The support among the gentry for Wycli‹te thought, perhaps best exemplified in the figures of the “Lollard knights,” suggests the degree to which Wyclif ’s ideas maintained their appeal and thus aroused the fears of churchmen about the Wycli‹te challenge. In their chronicle entries for the 1380s, both Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham give the names of several knights whom they accuse of sympathy with Lollard causes. As work by Michael Wilks, J. Anthony Tuck, and J. A. F. Thomson has demonstrated, the Lollard emphasis upon personal salvation and private devotion had an appeal for some members of the late medieval landed class. What can seem like an unbridgeable divide between the habits and ideals of the late-fourteenth-century knight and those of the early Wycli‹te appears instead as a feature of the genuine range of religious attitudes at Richard’s court. Thus men like Sir John Clanvowe and Sir William Neville died on Crusade in the Holy Land, and Sir Lewis Cliªord’s name appears on Philippe de Mézières’s list of members of the Order of the Passion. Some of these men seem to have been part of Joan of Kent’s circle of advisers, though others, such as John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, figure only politically (and peripherally) in the world of early Lollardy.66 England did not have a king who could see his way to a solution for a potentially bad situation, either. And it lacked the safe arena—the “theater,” to use the Knight’s term for Theseus’s tournament space—for dissent. Instead, it had conflict, some of it in the streets of London, some of it in Parliament. Let me return briefly to Wyclif ’s Confession, in which he a‹rms the real presence in the host but not Christ’s actual, essential presence. About midway through his argument, he stops to sum up the three ways in which “secta nostra” diªers from

66. Thomas of Woodstock owned a copy of the Wycli‹te Bible (London, British Library mss Egerton 617, 618). In Trinity College Dublin Library ms 244, fols. 212v–219v, there is also a Lollard tract, a dialogue between a friar and a secular clerk that begins, “Moste worshipfulleste & gentilleste lord duke of Glowcestre youre seruaunts sendi5 3ou.” Gloucester thus becomes the figure of adjudication that the fiction of the piece demands. For further discussion, see Chap. 3. The tract is presently being edited by Fiona Somerset; see Somerset, “‘As just as is a squyre,’” 197–98.


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the “sectae signorum.”67 The word secta, of course, was a charged term, thrown about by many in an eªort to categorize an opposing group as essentially marginal, wrongheaded, or subversive. Here, Wyclif uses it to characterize the established, prelatical church, modifying it with the word signorum, meaning of signs, of symbols, of tokens, of images. In the context of the middle years of the fourteenth century, especially considering the eªorts the French court had made to reinforce just such a belief in a sacramentally endowed view of lordship, Wyclif ’s stark dismissal of a whole universe of meaningful signs, of images that mysteriously embodied a divine essence, comes like a statement of negation. What you see is what you get: “our sect” adores the sacrament of the altar, but the outlines of the material universe are not aªected by the act of consecration. Though he allows for mystery, it is a diªerent mystery, one where the Aristotelian concept of good rule is no longer married to the magic, healing person of the king. What was played out later in the scene between Wat Tyler and the young King Richard at Mile End may not have been inspired by Wyclif, but perhaps the authorities were right to see the two challenges as part of the same challenge. What was threatened was sacrament itself.68 For Richard, the years directly after the Rising constitute a period about which the chroniclers are critical—particularly of those in the king’s circle. Although the Monk of Westminster twice in 1385 mentions Richard’s violent temper—once directed at John of Gaunt and another time at the archbishop of Canterbury— he presents Richard not as tyrannical or venal but as impetuous and badly advised. John of Gaunt had discovered a plot on his life made by those who surrounded the king. In coming to speak with Richard at Sheen, Gaunt took care to take an armed escort. Once with Richard, he first addressed the subject of advisers, telling Richard “nam inhonestam est regem in suo regno, cum sit dominus omnium” to vindicate himself by an act of private homicide. Gaunt’s figuration of Richard’s regal duty is here firmly rooted in an assessment of regal dominion. He then told Richard to surround himself with good and faithful advisers who would keep him from illicit actions. The archbishop of Canterbury likewise chided Richard about the damage bad advisers did to the prestige of the crown. The public scolding caused Richard to draw his sword on the archbishop;

67. Shirley, ed., Fasciculi zizaniorum, 125. 68. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 139–41, discusses the Lollards’ views on the Eucharist as threatening to the entire Lancastrian project.


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the king was only restrained from running him through by those in attendance.69 Richard’s response to the Wonderful Parliament (1386) and its appointment of a council to oversee and put to rights all aspects of the king’s household and to repair “defaults and misprisions found in other courts, o‹ces and places, o‹cers and ministers” was even less measured. But again, the chroniclers attribute Richard’s decision to vacate London during the year of the council’s rule to the whispering of those around him, who persuaded him that irreversible damage was being done to the king’s dignity. And it is at the feet of Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere that they lay the charge of alienating the king from the Lords.70 The version of events that has come down to us in the chronicles describes a situation of relative simplicity, wherein a young king has surrounded himself with highly rewarded favorites who seek to supplant those formerly in power. The chroniclers oppose John of Gaunt, Thomas of Woodstock, and Richard Arundel to Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere, and the king’s will appears the victors’ prize.71 During these years in which Richard was treated by the chroniclers as a young and heedless king, he seems also to have felt the need to assert the charisma of his o‹ce. In 1385 he “permitted” the archbishop of Canterbury to kneel before him in order to beg his pardon. The Monk of Westminster, for whom this is a deeply disturbing event, ascribes to the king an appetite for glory and a desire to have his very o‹ce venerated. He ascribes to the archbishop an unbecoming and spineless worldliness that could benefit from the lesson oªered by Thomas à Becket, who did not bend the knee of the church before a prince of the world.72 In 1385 Richard also sent a special letter to the pope regarding the possible canonization 69. See L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 1 14–15, 1 16–17. The original quarrel between Richard and his uncles was over the war in France. Gaunt and Gloucester wished Richard to lead an expedition into France; royal policy, directed by Michael de la Pole, was attempting to treat for peace (Palmer, England, France, and Christendom, 81–85). At this point Joan of Kent was still alive and reconciled Richard with his uncle. See also E. M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliae, 364; Saul, Richard II, 133–34. 70. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 186–87; E. M. Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliae, 374. For Chaucer’s possible reaction to the Wonderful Parliament, which was controlled by Gloucester (Gaunt had already left for Spain), see McCall and Rudisill, “Parliament of 1386.” 71. As Palmer pointed out years ago, the situation is a good deal more complex, for the object of negotiation may well have been peace itself. The nobility was for an increased war eªort, while de la Pole was pushing hard for peace with France. See Palmer, England, France, and Christendom, chaps. 4–6. 72. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 138–39.


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of Edward II.73 In January 1386, when the king of Armenia was in London to help negotiate a peace between France and England, Richard took him through Westminster Abbey by candlelight, showing him not only the relics housed there but also the royal insignia of English coronations.74 The Monk attributes Richard’s unsound fiscal policies to his sense of the crown’s dignity as well. He describes Richard’s bounty as so lavish as to dispense funds to any who asked, leaving him to turn to Commons for support. These are the unthinking mistakes of youth in the beginning of a new reign: “erat namque rex iste in sui primordio tam liberalis.” Such words seem to anticipate the description of Arthur’s fair and luxurious court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as being still in its “first age.”75 In the questions Richard posed to his handpicked judges in the fall of 1387 about the legality of the Wonderful Parliament, we can detect a desire to articulate more clearly the nature of the o‹ce he held. Richard’s protest at the end of the Wonderful Parliament—that the commission set up to run the kingdom for a year threatened the prerogatives and liberties of the crown—looks forward to the ten questions he laid before the judges.76 The terms “regality” and “prerogative,” in fact, define the nature of Richard’s reaction to the establishment of this commission. It was clear that power had been stripped from him. His chancellor had been impeached, the finances were out of his control, and the great and privy seals were in the hands of those who opposed him.77 In Richard’s estimate of what type of power had been taken from him, though, he evinces his awareness that power may well be personal but, in the case of a king, it is also symbolic. Hence, the first five questions he posed to the judges concern the eªect of the commission upon the king’s regality and prerogative and ask how those who induced the king to accept the commission and who hindered the king from exercising his regality and prerogative ought to be punished. The last five concern the king’s relation to Parliament—whether any other than the king can control its proceedings, its dissolution, and its justice. Even more germane to the issue of sacramental kingship and community is the drama produced by the Lords Appellant during the Merciless Parliament of 73. Ibid., 158–59. 74. Ibid., 156–57. Bennett, Richard II, 25–26, also discusses Richard’s early sense of regality. 75. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 160–61; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 54. 76. S. B. Chrimes, “Richard II’s Questions to the Judges, 1387,” Law Quarterly Review 72 (1956): 376, makes this point. For the king’s protest, see RP 3:224. On the questions to the judges, see Jones, Royal Policy, 38–42, and Saul, Richard II, 173–75. 77. Tout, Chapters, 3:418; Chrimes, “Richard II’s Questions,” 376.


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1387–88. The accounts we have of the Merciless Parliament powerfully testify to the Appellants’ self-conscious use of Parliament as a theater of the realm. Their dramatic entrance, arm in arm, wearing golden coats, and the judicial order of the trials themselves, all carefully written into the o‹cial historic record of the proceedings, suggest just how thoroughly they understood the uses of political ritual. Thus, at the parliament’s end, the lords —who had also masterminded the trials of Michael de la Pole, Nicholas Brembre, Simon Burley, Robert de Vere, and others —“in full and cheerful submission” made the customary allegiances to their king.78 After both king and lords had retaken oaths binding them to one another in law, the king agreed to pardons for the perpetrators, which would prevent him from avenging the harm done to him and his associates. After the epilogue of feudal homage was concluded, the parliament came to an end. The immediate “audience” for this production was the king himself, who watched and participated in the undermining of his own sovereignty. In order to maintain his throne, he had little choice. Where he quibbled—and this is leaving aside his ongoing pleas for his close associates, his assertions of their innocence of the charges brought against them—was over the issue of sacrality. Two incidents drawn from the written and frequently conflicting contemporary accounts of the Merciless Parliament capture an underlying conversation about sacrality that went on to become the defining concern of Richard’s mature reign, which manifested itself in a quest for a regal identity. What is especially intriguing about these two events and the various written accounts of them is their position in the semi-liminal space of the Merciless Parliament, when all the participants inhabited positions and roles not necessarily connected to the roles and positions they had inhabited previously and would inhabit afterward.79 For Richard, the opportunities were many: whether player, victim, or king, or all three, he could only succeed by determining an identity for himself. But for the chroniclers who recorded these events, that search for a royal identity—either by Richard himself or by his advisers —was also bound up with the articulation 78. The language here is the Monk of Westminster’s (“cum omni subjeccione ac grato animo”). See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 342–43. 79. Much has been written on the Merciless Parliament. See especially Anthony Goodman, The Loyal Conspiracy: The Lords Appellant Under Richard II (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971); Saul, Richard II, chaps. 8 and 9; and Frank Grady, “St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2000): 179–212. For a discussion of the Merciless Parliament in relation to Chaucer, see my “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity” in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, especially 217–33.


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of an emerging national identity, one that was challenged by what was billed as a Lollard threat to the order of the realm. The first event that I would like to discuss is the investigation, or discussion, of Lollardy that occupied four days of the Merciless Parliament, just after the trials of Sir Simon Burley, Sir John Beauchamp, Sir James Berners, and Sir John Salisbury.80 The Monk of Westminster says that a great deal of talk broke out in full Parliament about the Lollards, their preaching, and their books, which led people astray. Though some Lollards were summoned to appear before a tribunal headed by the pope’s subcollector, the Lollards refused to answer the charges against them because they did not grant the members of the tribunal (some of whom were friars) authority over them.81 A few weeks later, when the Monk again recounts the king’s concern for the life of Sir Simon Burley, the subject of these Lollards and their condemnation by the pope’s tribunal is again noted. Directly thereafter, the Monk describes Burley’s execution.82 Henry Knighton also includes an account of Lollard errors immediately after his brief account of the events of the Merciless Parliament. His depiction of the Lollards is more extensive than that of the Monk of Westminster. According to Knighton, the Lollards were summoned to Parliament and reproached for their errors, which he then lists. Knighton’s list is closely related to the Twenty-Five Articles, the confessional tract designed to answer objections to Lollardy raised by outsiders.83 After he catalogues the false beliefs of the Lollards, he describes both the Lords and the Commons as beseeching the king to remedy a situation that threatened to swamp the ecclesiastical vessel (navem), the “ark” of the faith wanting governance, and the realm itself (regnum Anglie).84 The king responded not only by ordering his bishops to do their duty—to chastise oªenders, scrutinize books, and seek to unite the people in orthodox faith—but also by sending out letters patent to every county in the kingdom, ordering that books and beliefs be scrupulously examined. Just before Knighton includes the text of the letter,

80. Michael Wilks, “Thomas Arundel of York, the Appellant Archbishop,” in Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c. 1100–c. 1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 12 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1999), 80–81, also notes this event. 81. See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 318–20. 82. Ibid., 330–32. 83. See Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 432–39. For the Twenty-Five Articles, see T. Arnold, Select English Works of John Wyclif (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), 3:455–96. For discussion, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 210–1 1. 84. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 438–39. Regarding this event, see also H. G. Richardson, “Heresy and the Lay Power Under Richard II,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 16.


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he remarks that this had little eªect because “nondum hora correccionis aduenit.”85 Knighton’s concern with the “hour of correction” (still some years in the future) deflects attention from the curious set piece of a Lollard trial inserted into an account of the Merciless Parliament. A play within a play, it purports to stage a semi-idyllic relationship between the king and Parliament at a time when the king himself hung in the balance. Moreover, that semi-idyllic relationship between king and Parliament is figured as a workable hierarchical relationship in sharp contrast to the force, and show of force, that drove the Merciless Parliament. Let me turn to an earlier portion of Knighton’s script, whose very drama and color capture the high theater of the events.86 In his entry for December 26, 1387, Knighton describes the Appellants and their army, arms and armor shining, drawn up before the gates of London, receiving the keys to the city from its mayor. After encamping in the city, which quite naturally had no desire to risk their displeasure, they went to the Tower the next day to meet with the king. They found Richard in a vineyard there, in a tent “royally arrayed with hangings”—“sedentem in papilione apud Turrim in quadam uinea, regaliter cum indumentis aureis strata.” The scene, or Knighton’s description of it—the regally hung tent, the vineyard, the king who appears to command the scene— makes a point that the Monk of Westminster’s account does not. The Monk, who correctly assigns this scene to December 30, describes the Appellants and five hundred armed men visiting the king. They find him in the open, enthroned near the chapel, and do him reverence by prostrating themselves three times before him. After this, they adjourn to the chapel where they castigate the king for his bad faith and force him to submit to the rule (regimini dominorum) of the Appellants. Walsingham, too, emphasizes the force of the Appellants and their overpowering of the king, who, according to Walsingham, was threatened with deposition. One chronicler in a manuscript from Whalley Abbey, Lancashire, described by M. V. Clarke in 1937, states that Richard was actually deposed for three days but was reinstated because Thomas of Woodstock and Henry of Derby quarreled about the succession.87 In sharp contrast to these ac-

85. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 438–39. 86. For the following account, see ibid., 424–27, and see Martin’s introduction for a discussion of Knighton’s handling of his sources. For the Monk of Westminster’s account, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 226–27. 87. M. V. Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies, ed. L. S. Sutherland and M. McKisack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 91. See also Saul, Richard II, 189.


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counts of Richard’s ordeal, Knighton’s quasi-biblical scene with its vineyard and tented king seems to hold out the promise of a sort of renewal or harmony. The conversation he includes between king and lords is cast in the courtly speech of host and guest, not of prisoner and guards. Knighton’s account of the Lollard investigation in the midst of the Merciless Parliament similarly figures Richard’s power as part of the organic unity of the realm. Thus, the lords petition the king for a remedy for the incipient chaos of Lollardy, and the king listens and consents to the wise counsel of the whole Parliament (“Rex uero sano consilio tocius parliamenti”).88 Richard is then presented as “ordering” (iussit), as the agent of the will of those who are acting for the good of the realm, and as having the power to span the realm with his letters patent and directives. Knighton inserts a copy of this letter into the chronicle at this point. He follows it with a unique document, apparently from parliamentary Commons, asking Richard to assume his regality, to redress the abuses prompted by the Appellants.89 Shortly thereafter, he presents his account of the Merciless Parliament. Knighton’s account of the events of 1387–88 seems designed to represent sacramental kingship even as the Appellants were transgressing the boundaries between anointed king and lord. Moreover, the accounts by both the Monk of Westminster and Knighton seem to suggest that the Lords Appellant tried to displace their own violations of sanctuary (in that term’s broadest sense) upon the Lollards, who can be accused of splitting the church and thus the kingdom. Regardless of whether Wilks is right in thinking that the Lollards must have opposed the Appellants (and thus were members of the king’s party, possibly in Parliament), this written version of the scene strongly implies that what was at issue was sacramental power or authority. The twenty-five errors of the Lollards that Knighton includes in his account of the Merciless Parliament relentlessly question the authority of the clergy to mediate between humankind and God. From the opening statement (which asserts that no pope since St. Sylvester has been a true pope) to subsequent denials of the clergy’s power to grant indulgences, oªer absolution for sin, or excommunicate sinners, the opinions quiz the status of ordained priests. Other “errors” include the call for priestly purity, apostolic poverty and disengagement from secular o‹ces, and an assertion that the consecrated bread of the sacrament of the altar is a sign of a thing, not the thing itself (“signum rei, non 88. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 438. 89. Ibid., 442–50. See Chap. 4 below for further discussion.


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ipsa res”).90 The remainder focus upon the self—upon the e‹cacy of solitary prayer, confession, and devotion—and upon the idolatry encouraged by devotion to the saints. The agenda is certainly a familiar one to anyone who has read Lollard treatises, but within the context of the Merciless Parliament and its business of dismantling Richard’s network of friends and associates, it seems a peculiarly studied eªort to oªset any potentially negative thoughts about the o‹cial transgressions of the Appellants with a vivid account of the Lollard threat to order. The text of Lollard error that Knighton creates manifests the Lollard challenge to the fundamental idea of sacramental authority that underpinned the order of medieval ecclesiastical and social institutions. By implicitly locating spiritual authority in the self, the Lollards inevitably raised the specter of pluralism, or relativism. What the Appellants were engaged in—the forceful correction of the king’s misgovernance—was not unlike what the Lollards proposed to do in the ecclesiastical realm. The lords’ infringement upon the king’s person, canopied within a vineyard, Richard certainly saw as a violation of his sanctity. The vineyard is, of course, a potent detail. Knighton probably embellished the scene between the king and the Appellants, for his account is certainly diªerent from the Monk of Westminster’s, who was closer to the action. But Knighton’s version has a point, for he captured his sense of the encounter’s importance—just as his attempt to turn it into a conversation rather than a show of force suggests his own reading of how kings and lords ought to behave. What he describes is a scene that resonates with the imagery of Old Testament kingship, just as Richard’s positioning himself as enthroned in the open, rather than within the chapel, bespeaks his own awareness of the moment’s dramatic needs and thus his understanding of the location of center stage. (The Monk of Westminster’s account of the lords’ prostration before Richard evinces a similarly dramatic impulse with its own message of political relationships, but it is less elaborately drawn than Knighton’s.) By giving such primacy to the inquiry by the Merciless Parliament into Lollard error, an inquiry that is also recorded by the Monk of Westminster, Knighton points up the theme of authority, spiritual in this case, and links it firmly to a picture of a king who acts with the advice and will of Parliament. He has, in eªect, made a picture whose truth is ideological rather than actual. A similar urgency about sacrality underlies the Monk of Westminster’s account of a second key event of the Merciless Parliament: the arrest of Robert 90. Ibid., 436.


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Tresilian in late winter 1388. Tresilian, accused of being a false justice, had been one of the justices to whom Richard had turned in late summer 1387 when he needed an answer about the extent of royal power.91 Though brought to trial, Tresilian had so far eluded his captors until parliamentary proceedings were already under way. There are various accounts of his arrest. According to the Monk of Westminster, he was found in one of the sacristans’ houses within the sanctuary of Westminster.92 In order to take him, the lords had to ignore the bounds of sanctuary, something that had brought trouble to John of Gaunt in 1377, when he insulted the bishop of London in St. Paul’s.93 This time there was no trouble from an angry mob. Accounts of the incident suggest, however, that contemporaries saw it as significant enough to warrant careful fashioning.94 The Monk of Westminster, as he does for the entire Merciless Parliament, provides two versions of what happened. The first is taken from the Parliament Rolls. O‹cially, “Robert Tresilyan fuist pris hors de Westm’ et amesne en plein parlement”—thus outside Westminster. Later, the Monk oªers his own version, which I have already mentioned. Froissart botches the order of the events and their parliamentary significance and presents the capture of Tresilian as high farce, with the chief justice lurking in an inn as a tenant, who is then recognized and apprehended by a squire of the duke of Gloucester. Favent presents an equally colorful version in which he foregrounds the crowd that apprehends Tresilian. Near the end of his Latin account of the arrest, Favent captures the popular voice in the cry, “We havet him. We havet him.” Knighton describes Tresilian as hiding before his discovery, and Walsingham simply describes Tresilian as captured early. These accounts do not broach the issue of sanctuary, and the accounts of Froissart and Favent outline a sequence of events in which the crowd is the active force behind Tresilian’s apprehension and arrest. Favent goes even further and describes Tresilian as wearing russet, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He then describes Richard’s

91. See Saul, Richard II, 173–75, and Chrimes, “Richard II’s Questions.” 92. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 310 n. 4. 93. See Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 151–53. 94. For the Monk of Westminster’s own account, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 310–13; for the account from the Parliament Rolls, which he also includes, see 282–83. For Favent, see May McKisack, ed., “Historia siue narracio de modo et forma Mirabilis Parliamenti apud Westmonasterium,” Camden Miscellany 14 (Camden Third Series 37 [London: Royal Historical Society, 1926]); for Jean Froissart, see Chroniques, trans. John Bouchier, Lord Berners (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 5:25–28. For other discussion, see Grady, “St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament,” 193–97.


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friends, whom the Appellants had accused of treason, as thorns, thistles, and tares —terms that, like references to russet clothing, were used to describe the followers of John Wyclif. But the Monk of Westminster flatly states that the justice “was in the sanctuary of Westminster.” He describes the arrest as a violation of sacred space: Tresilian was forcibly dragged out of the sanctuary in the fell hands of the above-named lords. The scene, then, is dramatically diªerent, depending on the chronicler. The Monk of Westminster depicts the Lords Appellant as the driving force. He describes the duke of Gloucester as taking a mace and arresting Tresilian himself, shielding the judge from an angry crowd. The Rolls of Parliament are more remote, and Favent describes what is a popular arrest by the city itself, going so far as to suggest that Tresilian and the others, disguised as servants of the king, were rather to be seen as thorns and tares in the field of the realm and thus as violators of a higher order. What is at issue here is more than parliamentary ethics or procedure. As Tresilian argued, he had the privilege of sanctuary. It was an argument later echoed by King Richard, whose own sacred space had been violated by the position he was made to take in the proceedings. The subject of Westminster’s privileges was, of course, of great interest to the monk who wrote its chronicle, and he refers to the issue several times, giving the arguments a good deal of space.95 (The incident thus serves as an occasion for talking about what could not be discussed.) Walsingham is most succinct. Just before Richard was to meet with Parliament, he had attempted to change his mind about the meeting. The lords told him that if he did not do as he had agreed, they would renounce him. Later, Walsingham tersely describes Richard’s helplessness in the face of the sentence against his old tutor, Sir Simon Burley, making it clear that the king had no choice: “Deinde exactum est juramentum a Rege, ad standum regulationi procerum; et non solum a Rege, sed a cunctis regni incolis, idem juramentum est expetitum.” 96 The privileges of Westminster may well have been transgressed, but what was at stake here was the broader concept that also buttressed that of sanctuary.97 95. See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 312, 324. 96. Riley, ed., Historia Anglicana, 2:174–75. 97. There is an irony only history can produce in the fact that the chancellor of England, Thomas Arundel, pronounced a judgment against those privileges, though the king and his associates dissented. As archbishop of Canterbury under Henry IV, who at this point stood with the Appellants (one of whom was his brother Richard Fitzalan), Arundel would threaten with treason all who violated England’s sacred spaces. But for now, Richard defended the church, and Arundel, the secular realm or secular pragmatism. On the other hand, though the incident was veiled in the o‹cial record


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As many historians have pointed out (including Saul, most recently), the search for an ideology of power seems to have preoccupied Richard during the last decade of his reign. But in the accounts of the Merciless Parliament, we can find evidence for a submerged or displaced conversation that helps us understand why the issue of Lollardy is entwined throughout the written history of the period. Scholars like Gordon Kipling and Geoªrey Koziol have reminded us that political ritual constitutes a language of conflict and ambiguity, a measure of perceptions, or a test of strength.98 In Richard’s early attempts to define himself as sacred space, or in the chronicle writers’ curiously elastic descriptions of scenes that may or may not have occurred, we can find the beginnings of a royal performance already understood as iconic at a time when the very subject of signs and sacramental reality was contested. What seems to have been performed, or written as performed, was expiatory, in the sense that the lords knew the dangers of devaluing royal power. At the same time, that devaluation was displaced onto another play, the Lollard inquiry, which would flame out in the early fifteenth century. Here we find in the ritual performances of power and powerlessness a conversation about sacrality that would continue at least until Henry shut it down by snu‹ng out the signifier.99 Richard had available to him a number of ways of thinking about, or creating, an image of English kingship that would serve to enhance and protect his own status. First, there was a specifically English program for image making that stared him in the face each day he was in Westminster. Both Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace were designed as embodiments of royal power.100 Henry III, who first designated Westminster Abbey as the locus for the cult of English kingship, had a finely honed sense of the power of images and an equally

of Tresilian’s arrest and recreated in other terms by Favent, both the duke of Gloucester and Sir John Cobham recognized the enormity of what they had done but not wished entered in the o‹cial record. In May 1388 they presented themselves to the abbot of Westminster for his correction. 98. Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Geoªrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 99. See Strohm’s recent study of this issue in England’s Empty Throne. 100. I am indebted throughout this discussion to Paul Binski’s Painted Chamber at Westminster, Society of Antiquaries Occasional Paper 9 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), and his Westminster Abbey, which present a finely detailed discussion of these buildings. In Westminster Abbey he draws a distinction between an art that is a form of power and an art that exemplifies power, saying that Westminster Abbey was intended as a form of power, as the embodiment of a formative political culture (9).


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acute understanding of the need to attach kingship to a figure of national sanctity. In his use of marble for interior enrichment, his choice of design and adornment, and his patronage of the figure of St. Edward the Confessor, Henry used the Abbey to proclaim the notions of regal bounty and magnificence as the natural components of the value system of the local cult of Edward. He therefore underlined the direct link between himself and St. Edward.101 Though the influence of Westminster Abbey on English architecture had to wait until the fourteenth century and the work of masons like Michael of Canterbury and Henry Yevele, the building and its secular companion, Westminster Palace (which was destroyed by fire in 1834), say a good deal about English eªorts to create a myth of kingship as potent as those to be found in other European kingdoms.102 Edward the Confessor’s power was saintly rather than martial. The cult of St. Edward is first connected to the reign of Henry II, the grandfather of Henry III. Henry II was descended from both Saxon and Norman royal lines, and when he came to the throne, he was described as ending the strife caused by the Norman Conquest.103 The cult of St. Edward the Confessor was promoted because Edward had dealt honorably with William, duke of Normandy, as the true successor to the English throne. Edward was also the founder of Westminster Abbey, and two years after the act of canonization, Edward’s body was enshrined there, with Archbishop Thomas à Becket presiding.104 In the preface to his Life of St. Edward, Aelred of Rievaulx calls Henry the cornerstone at which the two walls— English and Norman—come together. Thus, for Aelred, as later for Henry III, the building itself can be identified with the very body of the king. Aelred goes on to praise Edward as a figure of peace, temperance, simplicity, charity, and chastity who, on his deathbed, foresaw the coming dissension in England. Aelred then spends the remainder of the Life recounting the miracles associated with the saint, coming in chapter 34 to an account of the saint’s dead body. He says that thirty-six years after his death, the tomb of St. Edward was opened so the monks could see the body and satisfy their belief in his holy virginity. Aelred notes that everything was still fresh, and the body was still flexible. All the monks

101. I am echoing Binski here. See Westminster Abbey, 47, 51. 102. Ibid., 51. 103. For information about the early cult, see J. Bertram, trans., Life of St. Edward by Aelred of Rievaulx (Guildford, U.K.: St. Edward’s Press, 1990), introduction and the Life. For other lives, see H. R. Luard, ed., Lives of Edward the Confessor (London: Rolls Series, 1858). 104. Bertram, trans., Life of St. Edward, 9.


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wanted to touch it; the bishop of Rochester even tried to take a hair from the saint’s beard as a relic. The body maintained its integrity, however. It could not be divided for relics, which are described as a form of wealth.105 Even in death, Edward the Confessor suggested the unworldliness of his values. And in fact, as Paul Binski has pointed out, he is an odd model for kingship, because many of the things he did—maintain a chaste marriage, give away everything that came to hand to any beggar who approached him, scorn the magnificence that characterized high status —seem not to belong to the ideal king.106 What he oªered, however, was a model for stability and national harmony. The two scenes from St. Edward’s life that Henry had painted in the royal bedchamber of Westminster Palace expressly link sanctity and royal power. There, the scene of Edward giving the wealth he had on him—a ring—to St. John, who is disguised as a beggar, faced a picture of St. Edward’s coronation. They served as twin components of an idea of kingship. Similarly, La estoire de saint Aedward le roi, which was dedicated to Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, around 1245, is a story of sacral kingship, of the special spiritual status of Edward, who, as a descendant of King Alfred, had been chosen by God to reign. He is compared to Solomon in his sense, courtesy, manners, and wisdom but praised as a sort of monk/king, who maintains a chaste marriage with the virtuous Edith and who is granted a eucharistic vision, the ability to cure disease, and, finally, a prophetic sight of England’s future, which is fulfilled in the peace of the reign of Henry III. The Life ends with praise for Westminster as the site of English kingship and identity.107 Richard II was the first English king after Henry III to pay as much attention to the cult of St. Edward, and the decorative program Henry initiated for the painted chamber at Westminster would have been a continual presence for Richard as he tried to work out the terms of his own kingship. Binski’s work on this chamber is a richly informed account that gives a clear sense of the relationship between the Palace and the Abbey and of the ways in which the Palace functioned as a site of royal life and administration. In the gable, next to the entrance, Henry had painted the text, “ke ne dune ke ne tine ne prent ke desire” (“he who does not give up what he possesses shall not receive what he desires”). The text, of course, captures St. Edward’s own overflowing charity, which was then pictorially represented in the iconography on the great bed of state. Large 105. Ibid., 130–32. 106. Binski, Westminster Abbey, 6; see chap. 2 for further discussion of Edward. 107. Luard, ed., Lives of Edward the Confessor.


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pictures of the triumphant virtues (Largesse defeating Covoitise, Debonerté defeating Ira, Verité, and Fortitude [?]) were painted on the walls. The combined eªect suggested Henry’s understanding of his own regal identity as derived from that of his saintly ancestor. But Richard would also have had other scenes to contemplate. Binski argues that the Old Testament scenes that formed a series of frieze-like bands around the upper walls and contained both narrative and commentary were commissioned by Henry’s son, Edward I. The scenes (a number of which are drawn from 1 Maccabees) are primarily examples of biblical chivalry, such as that provided by Judas Maccabeus, or examples of good and bad kings, together with the prophets who served as mouthpieces of God. Binski then goes on to argue that the scenes were intended to celebrate Edward’s expulsion of the Jews as his triumph over Jewish history, but the murals were saved after their contextual meaning had been lost or forgotten because they were seen as exemplary of kingship in general.108 After his death, Edward II had the life of his father done in the chamber next to the painted chamber, thus linking the two rooms —one exhibiting biblical heroism, and the other, that of contemporary England. If Henry III’s program for regal iconography was an attempt to create for England the sacral power claimed by the French crown, Edward I seems to have been drawn to an idiom of kingship concerned with moral courage, the proper use of power, and martial strength. Though neither king was finally able to accomplish the magic that the monks of St. Denis were able to work for the kings of France, both programs would have been available to Richard II, in the sense that the pictures were still clearly visible and the written accounts of sacred and English history had not been lost. Moreover, the buildings in which these pictorial programs could be found were royal holdings and public buildings; their care came within the purview of the clerk of the king’s works, an o‹ce that Geoªrey Chaucer held from 1389 to 1391.109 Chaucer, then, along with others in the king’s household, would have been familiar with a room whose murals told the stories of Joab, Abner, and David, the second book of Maccabees, Abimelech and Jotham, Hezekiah and Isaiah, the Assyrians (called the Arabians), the captivity of Jehoiachin, the destruction of the Temple, Elijah and Elisha, the exploits of Judas Maccabeus, and the misdeeds of King Antiochus. All of these stories, forming an ascending frieze of six levels around the chamber, were super108. Binski, Painted Chamber, 35, 71–102. 109. See Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 210–14.


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intended by large pictures of the virtues around the windows and, opposite the king’s bed, the image of St. Edward giving his ring to the beggar.110 A language of kingship was not only written upon the walls of Westminster but also written into the language of political ritual. That it was an ever-shifting and expanding language has been demonstrated by the work of scholars like Percy Ernst Schramm, E. H. Kantorowicz, and H. G. Richardson, whose surveys of the English coronation ordo, by underlining the relationship between the English ceremony and the ordo of Rheims, suggest ways in which the terms of English kingship were indeed diªerent from the French. English kings had neither the sacral power nor the legal power of French kings because the English common law worked to check the legal force of the crown. Hence the English coronation ordo, which positioned the king’s assumption of regality after the acclamation of the people, hints at a productive tension between king and Parliament. Richard II’s advisers quibbled unsuccessfully with this particular feature of the ordo, which was created soon after the deposition of Edward II. It is only the step of a century from Edward II, the ancestor whom Richard II tried to have canonized, to Richard’s own attempts to work out a program of royal iconography that would anchor his own rule with a cultic apparatus that Henry III had seen as a necessary feature of the strong king—or a step from Edward II to his gloriously chivalric and then senile son, Edward III, to Richard. A key part of Richard’s increasingly self-conscious kingship in the last decade of his reign was his attachment to St. Edward the Confessor, particularly after the death of Queen Anne in 1394. It was then that he had the arms of the Confessor impaled upon his own, and it was probably during the same period that the Wilton Diptych, which locates Richard within the protective aura of St. Edward, St. Edmund, and St. John the Baptist, was created.111 Richard’s early largesse, which the Monk of Westminster at once praises and laments, may also have been inspired by the legend of St. Edward. Moreover, like Henry III, Richard performed his piety in ways intended to recall that of St. Edward. He had a habit of proceeding to the Abbey with the monks, going barefoot and wearing peni1 10. H. M. Colvin, ed., The History of the King’s Works: The Middle Ages (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery O‹ce, 1975), 1:499. 1 1 1. On Richard’s attachment to Edward the Confessor, see Saul, Richard II, 31 1–13. The dating of the Wilton Diptych is a vexed issue. For the argument, see Saul, Richard II, 304–1 1; Dillian Gordon, ed., Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, intro. Caroline Barron (London: National Gallery of Art, 1993); and Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas, and Caroline Elam, eds., The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 19–26.


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tential clothing, as Henry III had done in 1247.112 Caroline Barron has gone even further and suggested that Richard imitated Edward’s chaste marriage with Edith in his own union with Anne of Bohemia.113 Richard’s first steps toward creating a mature regal identity for himself came a year after the end of the Merciless Parliament. In May 1389, the twenty-twoyear-old Richard summoned a Great Council and declared himself of age.114 The language of the proclamation is careful and measured, weighty with the sense of his assumption of kingly responsibility and labor for his people: “et comodum populi nostri et regni intendimus de cetero assidue laborare.” The next spring, in March 1390, Richard sent to Westminster a pair of red velvet shoes with fleursde-lis worked on them in pearls. The shoes had been blessed by Pope Urban VI just before his death and were intended to replace a pair belonging to the regalia that had been lost at Richard’s coronation. As the Monk of Westminster notes, the newly crowned king typically goes into the vestry, removes the regalia, and puts on garments that have been laid out for him before returning to the Palace of Westminster. But Sir Simon Burley picked the young boy up in his arms and went into the palace by the royal gate. In the press from the crowd, one of the consecrated coronation shoes was lost. In replacing a lost item of the regalia, Richard replaced one of the signs of the king’s consecrated identity. As John of Gaunt had just returned to England in December 1389 and, in the January parliament of 1390, had been advanced to the dukedom of Aquitaine, he may have had something to do with the presentation of the shoes.115 (The duke of Lancaster’s acute sense of regal prestige had sparked the animosity between himself and his nephew just before he left for Spain, when he reminded Richard that he should not stoop to countenance murder.) But Richard also had a textual reminder of royal charisma in the treatise on the regalia that had been written for and dedicated to him by William of Sudbury, a monk of Westminster. Sudbury, who had entered the monastery in 1373, lived at Oxford from around 1376 to 1 12. Binski, Westminster Abbey, 199. The Westminster monk Richard of Cirencester (d. 1400) devoted nearly a quarter of the pages of his Speculum historiale to the reign of Edward the Confessor: see J. E. B. Mayor, ed., Richard of Cirencester: Speculum Historiale (London: Rolls Series, 1863; repr., London: Kraus, 1970), 1:clxviii. 1 13. See Barron’s introduction to Gordon, ed., Making and Meaning, 15. Barron’s speculation is followed up by Bowers, Politics of “Pearl,” 168. Binski thinks not: see Westminster Abbey, 220. 1 14. For the text of the proclamation, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 390–93. 1 15. John of Gaunt visited Westminster Abbey on December 13, 1389, and was received with great honor (see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 408–9). For Gaunt and his influence upon Richard, see Chap. 3 below.


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1387. His treatise on the regalia is usually assigned to that period; it was inserted into Richard Cirencester’s Speculum historiale.116 Sudbury traces the regalia back to King Alfred, who is described as bringing them from Rome. He defines the regalia as consecrated signs of o‹ce. The regalia are, of course, firmly attached to the Abbey itself. From the mid-1380s, there is evidence that Richard sought a way to define himself as king. In so doing, he seems to have been interested in more than simply discovering the scope of his actual power. The language of the questions he presented to the judges, his manner of greeting the Appellants in the Tower, his reaction to Tresilian’s arrest, his attempt to have Edward II canonized, and his interest in the coronation ritual and in the regalia all suggest early eªorts to approach kingship as more than a political entity. Moreover, these incidents all respond to the cruder realities of what was a political situation in England. The need for sound fiscal management, the tension between the war party composed of the older nobility and the peace eªorts of Michael de la Pole, the unwillingness of parliamentary Commons to grant more in taxes, the factionalism and violence of London itself, and what looks to be the cliquishness of the court are subjects that can be analyzed as problems with possible solutions. These are the stock-in-trade of historians —and they supply the poet, too, who wishes to advise his prince via a multitude of subjects that can be outfitted in the clothing of myth and legend. After the Merciless Parliament, Richard seems not only to have grasped the need to confront these realities but also to have moved toward a new way of conceiving of his own role. Saul has argued that in the early 1390s, the language of royal address begins to indicate an increasingly elaborate image for Richard, no doubt in response to Richard’s own wishes. Saul plausibly suggests that Richard coveted the majestic aura of French kingship.117 The impulse that can be traced in the 1390s has its genesis in the events of the 1380s that Richard apparently perceived as violations of his royal prerogative (a key term in his questions to the judges).118 For Richard, clearly, a boundary had been 1 16. See Mayor, ed., Richard of Cirencester, 2:26ª. For information about Sudbury, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, xxxvii–xxxviii. 117. Nigel Saul, “Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship,” English Historical Review 110 (1995): 854–77; Saul, “Richard II and Chivalric Kingship” (lecture, Inaugural Lecture Series, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1998). The Continental formalism and piety of his father, the Black Prince, would also have been passed on to Richard through his uncles and through his tutor, Simon Burley: see Saul, Richard II, 344–45, and H. F. Chettle, “The Boni Homines of Ashridge and Edington,” Downside Review 62 (1944): 40–55. 1 18. The English (and French) word “prerogative” can be found in the Parliament Rolls in 1293 to denote the sovereign rights of the king, “in theory subject to no restriction or interference.” In


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transgressed, but the exact nature of that boundary seems not to have been fully articulated. To move forward to the mid-1390s is to move into a court where Richard’s attempt to foster the ideology of a Valois-style kingship is well documented.119 The pronounced sacramental emphasis of that ideology, though, recalls the events of the 1380s and the incipient iconoclasm of both the Wycli‹tes and the Appellants. A rich literature of political advice and engagement flourished almost throughout Richard’s reign. Some of these texts are disguised as fictions, such as the poems we refer to when we think of Ricardian literature, poems whose political relevance is a matter for critical discussion and debate. Others are more overtly directed at Richard himself. Still others appeared after the deposition as diagnoses of failed kingship. (Perhaps no other English monarch has inspired so much interest in the nature of the king’s image, except Elizabeth I, who took control of her own image from a fairly early stage of her reign.) It is the second category of texts that I would like to consider in relation to the English argument about sacrality, which had its origins in the French literature of kingship. The debate itself is not framed in constitutional terms; in other words, it is not about the actual limits of the king’s power or about the relationship between king and Parliament. The debate concerns how the king should be perceived, or, possibly, how the king should perceive himself. In that sense, it is pertinent to the thought processes of men like Chaucer and Gower, poets who were deeply interested in perceived realities. With the exception of the first of these texts, the Wycli‹te Tractatus de regibus, all, including the pictorial texts, appear to have been addressed to Richard himself and consequently provide us with evidence for what must have been an ongoing and frequently contentious series of bids for Richard’s consideration. The Tractatus de regibus was probably not written for Richard, but it evinces the early vernacular appeal of Wyclif ’s political writings.120 It exists in a single 1387 Trevisa used the term in English to denote man’s divinely given advantage. For these usages, see the Oxford English Dictionary. 1 19. In addition to Saul, Richard II, see Jones, Royal Policy. 120. For the text, see Jean-Philippe Genet, ed., Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, Camden Fourth Series 18 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 5–19. For information about the manuscript in which the tract is found and about dating, to which my remarks are indebted, see Genet’s introduction (1–4). For information about ms Douce 274 (which contained the Lay Folks’ Catechism) and 273, see Anne Hudson, “A New Look at the Lay Folks’ Catechism,” Viator 16 (1985): 243–58, and Hudson, “Lay Folks’ Catechism: A Postscript,” Viator 19 (1988): 307–9.


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manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Douce 273) that was once joined with another (ms Douce 274). The manuscript, as it originally was compiled, contained the Lay Folks’ Catechism, On the Twenty-Five Articles, Tractatus de regibus, Seruaunt of Criste and his Chirche, Speculum vite christiane, and Septem hereses contra septem petitiones. Genet describes the version of the Speculum vite christiane, the sermon by John Thoresby, archbishop of York (d. 1373), as a Lollard version of the sermon. The text of the Lay Folks’ Catechism likewise contains hints of heterodoxy. Genet dates the Tractatus to after 1382, but the manuscript is later than the tract because On the Twenty-Five Articles was written in 1388–89. The Tractatus encapsulates Wyclif ’s views on the relationship between church and state, forming a short but powerful argument against any “medelynge” of the two spheres.121 The Tractatus begins by endorsing a truth that is available and unvarnished: “Sythen witte stondis not in langage but in groundynge of treuthe, for 5o same witte is in laten 5at is in Grew or Ebrew, and trouthe schuld be openly knowen to alle maneres of folke, trowthe move5 mony men to speke sentencis in yngelysche 5at 5ai hav gedirid in latyne, and her fore bene men holden heretikis.”122 Such statements about the value of the vernacular formed a key trope of Lollard discourse. What is especially interesting about the statement here—particularly in relation to John Clanvowe’s preoccupation with the same subject—is its insistence upon the plainness of truth. The Latin in which many sentences are found hides truth from “alle.” The writer then goes on to explore the “truth” of kingship. He says that three things move men to speak of the king’s o‹ce: so that kings may see that they should rule by God’s law; so that they should not tyrannize over their people but rule by the reason that falls to their estate; and, most important, so that God’s law should be better known and defended. The tract openly justifies temporal rule, as sanctioned by Christ, as necessary for civil order, and as deserving of honor or “worship” by its very nature. By advocating a strict separation of the spiritual and the secular spheres and supporting the king’s primacy, the writer inevitably paints a picture of the king as the exemplar of righteousness and the “overlord” of the church. He specifies that kings require magnificence, that they must maintain “suche maner of folk 5at hav o‹ce for to wyrche dedis nedeful to rewmes,” including knights, governors, clerks, and priests. The king should not only punish sins that imperil the realm but also 121. Genet, ed., Four English Political Tracts, 3. On this version of the Lay Folks’ Catechism, see Hudson, “New Look.” 122. Genet, ed., Four English Political Tracts, 5.


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“hire” priests to purge the realm of other sins.123 Kings should sustain the church in its spiritual o‹ce as well. He a‹rms that both king and church should be honored, but he notes that the king’s honor is “grounded” in his estate, and the priest’s, in virtue. For the author of the Tractatus, the king is sovereign in his own realm. He does not outline any practical system of checks and balances for royal power.124 He criticizes lords who compromise what is the wealth of the king by reason of his estate and denounces the ways in which the church has encroached upon judicial privileges that belong to the king. He uses his advocacy of a strict separation between church and state to justify his argument about ecclesiastical poverty. Though the tract reads as though it merely toadies to regal power, the argument, which is Wyclif ’s, at once gives the king enormous powers, delimits those of the church, and constructs royal power not as charisma but as a type of judicial power derived from the truth of God’s law. For example, in chapter 7, which focuses upon the king’s powers, the author outlines a way of thinking about regal power that appears to give the king many of the o‹ces now associated with the priesthood, but it does not construe the king as a sacerdotal figure. Kings should thus punish the “sins” that destroy realms, such as murder, theft, and ravishing of women. Kings should also punish adultery, destroy wicked men, and sustain Christ’s church in “good” religion. Accusing the “pope’s law” of being designed to steal regal power, the author continues, “For by kyngys schulden synnes best be nowe dystroyed. . . . Lorde, who schuld let a kynge to do gode to his soule and to worschippe his God ande to profyt to his chirche.” The answer, of course, is that only one of the Antichrist’s men would prevent a king from doing good to his soul, honor to God, and profit to his church. But by eliding personal virtue with right action, or the scourging of an impure church, the author argues that the king is accountable to God’s law as Wycli‹te doctrine construes it. The king’s power belongs to the king’s estate, but the king’s estate owes its power to God’s law, which insists upon a particular set of duties for the king. Chapter 12 warns kings who do homage to the fiend by imprisoning “true” men, but it leaves unclear what, exactly, is to be feared. Presumably, God punishes a realm with division if its king does not rule according to divine law. The implied relation here is covenanted, and the agreement is made between the king 123. Ibid., 10, 1 1, 12. 124. For a discussion of this aspect of Wyclif ’s political writings and the unacknowledged contradictions involved in his conception of Christian discipleship, see David Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church: Writing in England, 1360–1409 (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2000), chap. 6.


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and God in the sight of a prophet, who, like Nathan or Elijah, outlines the nature of regal responsibility. Though the king’s power appears without actual limits, its limits are inscribed in the very conception of the king as God’s arm of justice. He who defines the just ruler and is thus the mouthpiece of God is the one who writes or speaks in the simplicity of English to the king and the realm. Embedded in the argument is a contractual agreement.125 If the author of the Tractatus de regibus appears to suggest a series of contractual relationships that bind the realm in harmony, the author of De quadripartita regis specie oªers Richard advice by revealing a spectacular picture of the king as a figure of Solomonic wisdom and magnificence. This treatise is the opening work of a volume compiled for Richard, possibly by the author of the De quadripartita.126 The volume’s contents all pertain to the science of good rule, for following the De quadripartita are the Phisionomia Aristotellis, an introduction to the Sompniale Danielis, the Sompniale, and, beginning with fol. 9r (which also contains a miniature of Richard II gorgeously dressed in blue), a geomantic treatise, the Liber judiciorum. Charles V had several geomancies in his library, so Richard’s apparent interest in astrological “science” as a determinant of prudent action was not unusual.127 Whereas the Tractatus opens with truth, the first chapter of the De quadripartita directly addresses Richard as a wise governor, a true prince, and a king of England and France, notable for his intellect and splendor. The text itself is indebted to the Secreta secretorum, the mirror for princes supposedly composed by Aristotle at the request of his pupil Alexander the Great, which became increasingly popular throughout Europe beginning in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.128 Its author compresses the opening letters 125. This, of course, follows Wyclif ’s argument in the Tractatus de officiio regis. See Alfred W. Pollard and Charles Sayle, eds., Tractatus de officiio regis, by John Wycliªe (London: Trübner, 1887). 126. Genet’s introduction to Four English Political Tracts contains the best account available of the manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Bodley 581). The manuscript, which is beautifully planned and illuminated, appears to have been meant as a handbook for Richard. For other accounts of it, see Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (London: John Murray, 1968), 40–41, and Patricia J. Eberle, “The Politics of Courtly Style at the Court of Richard II,” in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. G. S. Burgess and R. A. Taylor (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 168–78. 127. Genet, ed., Four English Political Tracts, 22n, notes that another copy of the Liber judiciorum had been made for Richard early in his reign (London, British Library ms Royal 12 C V). 128. See Robert Steele, ed., Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres: A Version of the “Secreta Secretorum,” Early English Text Society, extra ser., 66 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894); M. A. Manzalaoui, ed., Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, Early English Text Society 276 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Ferster, Fictions of Advice. Ferster deals with the Secreta throughout the book, but see particularly chaps. 3 and 4, in which she argues for a reading of the text as at once oªering praise to and a rule for the prince.


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of address with which the Secreta begins into the brief address to Richard of the first chapter, then moves directly into an abridgment of the first sections of the Secreta, which describe the four types of kings —categorized according to their attitudes toward public and/or private largesse—and the king’s need for temperance, reverence, good repute, and wisdom. In chapters 6 through 1 1, which Genet describes as ideologically conventional, the author draws upon the Solomonic literature of kingship, holding up King Solomon as a mirror because of his wisdom, prudence, knowledge, and magnificence. The treatise advises as it praises, urging the king to seek wise counsel, to follow the paths of virtue, and to understand the greatness of his power and thus his responsibility to his subjects. The mode of the treatise, however, is far diªerent from that of the Wycli‹te tract, for the author of the De quadripartita does not create a polemic whereby we see the lines of confrontation drawn between church and state. Rather, he makes his point by creating an image of kingship. Nor does he seek to imply that the state is made up of a series of contractual relationships between king and realm, or between king and church. With its many citations from sapiential literature and its eye to the good fame Richard wishes to generate, the treatise speaks to the excellencies of the past, urging upon the king a role that would fit him into a line of wise princes. Vested in majesty, imbued with the four cardinal virtues, the king’s face inspires both awe and love, and as an icon, it draws us into a world where spiritual and physical are inextricably blended. In fact, the author of the De quadripartita appears to oªer Richard a verbal portrait of himself that complements the actual miniature to be found at the beginning of the Liber judiciorum. (See Figure 2.) Chapter 5 opens with a description of the king, vested in wisdom and prudence, sitting between his nobility and his counselors just as a figure of justice and reason sits in the midst of opinions and controversies. Chapter 8 also begins with an icon, a depiction of the king whose virtues of wisdom, prudence, and providence serve to ornament his vestments with gold, pearls, and other precious gems. He thereby acquires divine aid, honor, and praise from the people, and his entire reign prospers. One of the signs of princely wisdom is an abundance of wise counselors. Chapter 9 follows up on these depictions of the king as vested with virtues and surrounded by counselors with a more detailed argument about the prince’s need to surround himself with counselors who do not delimit his prerogative but help him deploy it wisely. The praise is lavish, and the portrait of a king in the midst of his court is elaborately drawn,


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but the guidance appears to be tailored to a king who had great need of sage advice. Genet dates the treatise to the early 1390s, which places it in “conversation” with Chaucer’s Melibee and Gower’s Confessio. Its author describes himself as the humble servant of the treasurers of Ireland in his opening chapter, telling Richard that the “renovation” of an “innocent exile” would be his consolation. If this exile were someone who had suªered at the hands of the Appellants and was seeking aid, the De quadripartita should be read as oªering Richard a program whereby he himself might regain the power he had lost.129 If so, like Chaucer’s Melibee from about the same period, the De quadripartita employs the conventional language of princely address to urge Richard to assume responsibility through the judicious search for trustworthy counselors. The author ends the treatise by looking forward to the next work, the Phisionomia Aristotellis, which will help the king understand and judge the inner natures of those faces around him. Like the Liber judiciorum, these texts make it possible for the prince to evaluate situations, people, and conditions. With its debts to the Secreta secretorum, the De quadripartita certainly displays the combined impulses of praise and advice that Judith Ferster details in her study of this tradition, but the treatise praises with more than words. The volume in which it appears —with its many pictures, beautiful decorations, and elaborate presentation—is very much a king’s book and serves as a reminder of his magnificence. Moreover, the verbal “pictures” with which the treatise itself is decorated oªer Richard icons of good rule, such as the Solomonic king surrounded by the splendor of wise and noble counsel. If the Tractatus speaks with the voice of the prophet, the De quadripartita employs the proverbs and sayings of wisdom literature to show Richard what a king looks like. The picture of Richard that introduces the geomancy is a bearded figure, who, perhaps like Edward III (whose bearded e‹gy lay in Westminster Abbey as a symbol of regal sagacity), might be seen as a figure of wise rule. Like several other texts addressed to Richard from the 1390s, including Richard Maidstone’s Concordia facta inter regem Riccardum II et civitatem Londonie and Chaucer’s Melibee (which are discussed in the next chapter), the De quadripartita suggests that those who 129. See Genet’s introductory remarks in Four English Political Tracts, 25–30, for speculations about the author—possibly John Thorpe, who was appointed treasurer in July 1393 and was in Ireland from September 1393 to mid-1394. He was perhaps a clerk of the king’s works around 1387 and in 1391 was employed in the court of chivalry, which was under the jurisdiction of the constable of England, a position filled by Thomas of Woodstock in the late 1380s. Thorpe was appointed to a number of important benefices and was associated with the exiled archdeacon of Suªolk.


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tra‹cked in the king’s image sought Richard as an audience; the wares they held out were versions of his own face from which they urged him to choose. That Richard was receptive to a mode of address that can be described as iconic is clear from the two dazzling and probably commissioned portraits of him, the Westminster portrait and the Wilton Diptych, both of which preserve him, as does Maidstone, in rare and youthful beauty. Two other voices from the same period oªer similarly iconic portraits to Richard: those of Roger Dymmok and Philippe de Mézières. Roger Dymmok’s Liber contra xii errores et hereses Lollardorum was written in response to the Twelve Conclusions presented to Parliament by the Lollards in 1396. It was presented to Richard sometime in 1396 or 1397, soon after his return from Ireland.130 That presentation volume, which is now in the library of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, is both text and artifact. It bears witness to the fierce conversation about images that prevailed during Richard’s maturity. The Twelve Conclusions invite a redefinition of the terms of political thought in language that oªers to sweep clean a nation in which the church has crippled and diseased its people: “We pore men, tresoreris of Cryst and his apostlis denuncyn to 5e lordis and 5e comunys of 5e parlement certeyn conclusionis and treuthis for 5e reformaciun of holi chirche of Yngelond, 5e qwyche han ben blynde and leprouse many 3ere be meyntenaunce of 5e proude prelacye, born up with flatringe of privat religion 5e qwich is multiplied to a gret charge and onerous puple her in Yngelonde.”131 “Poor men,” Christ’s “treasurers,” are thus set against the blind and leprous, practitioners of a “private” religion that underpins the worldliness and hierarchy of the prelatical church. If the hands behind this document understood the power of the English language, Dymmok evinces his own acute reading of their challenge. In fact, as H. S. Cronin pointed out almost a century ago, Dymmok’s Liber preserves the original force of the Conclusions by preserving the English in which they were cast. He does so, however, in order to translate them into the tongue of o‹cial discourse: “Quod in Latinum translatum eloquium hanc sonat sententiam.”132 Dymmok here rejects the vernacular text that, in France, Charles V encouraged as a language manifesting his power. Each of the Twelve 130. H. S. Cronin, “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” English Historical Review 22 (1907): 290–304; Cronin, ed., Roger Dymmok: Liber contra xii errores et hereses Lollardorum (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1922). 131. Cronin, ed., Roger Dymmok, 25. 132. See Cronin, “Twelve Conclusions,” 295, and Cronin, ed., Roger Dymmok, 25.


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Conclusions, in English, serves as the heading for each of Dymmok’s twelve chapters. Dymmok reinscribes each into Latin and then goes on to refute the assumptions of each Conclusion, implicitly seeking to demonstrate the limits of vernacular rhetorical practices. But what is in some ways most striking about the volume is its focus on the king.133 It begins with an epistle to the king, but the manuscript itself serves to address the king in a visual way. On its edges are painted the arms of England and France, and the first page of the epistle, which is bordered in gold, red, blue, and green foliage, is ornamented for the king’s eye. In the upper right corner is a grotesque figure playing a bagpipe; lower down, on the same side, is a shield that quarters the arms of England and France; in the lower margin are two white harts with gold antlers and wearing gold crowns. In the initial is a miniature of Richard enthroned (see Figure 3). This first page identifies the text as an object meant as a species of address. Though the first page is the most elaborate, the chapters are introduced by partial borders and decorative initials, and there are two other miniatures, both of which belong to the iconography of Richard’s court. The second miniature appears in the beginning of the prologue and depicts John the Baptist holding a lamb and preaching to four people who surround him in a semicircle. The third miniature depicts a crowned king presenting the pope with the gift of a church. It occurs in the first chapter in a discussion of the donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester (fol. 14a). Like other manuscripts associated with Richard II, Trinity Hall ms 17 displays an attention to luxurious detail that, as Patricia Eberle has suggested, was an integral part of Richard’s own image of rule.134 The Book of Hours of the Virgin Mary (Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Lat. liturg. f. 3), perhaps made as a wedding present for Anne of Bohemia, features margins filled with delicately drawn and colored birds and foxes, marvelous miniatures (one of which represents the marriage of Richard and Anne), and exquisitely ordered pages. It bespeaks the elaborate court culture against which, perhaps, Chaucer wrote a work like the Parliament of Fowls, whose birds are as ambiguously contained as the storks eating fish in the margins of this manuscript. (See Figure 4.) This elegant book seems, like the Wilton Diptych itself, to freeze Richard in beardless youth. Other Ricardian manuscripts are similarly regal. The “Bible of Richard II” (London, 133. See also the remarks of M. R. James, quoted by Cronin in his introduction to Roger Dymmok, xvi–xvii. 134. Eberle, “Politics of Courtly Style.”


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British Library ms Royal 1 E IX), which was probably made for the king, is not simply lavishly adorned but also decorated by images of rule. The most prominent images are those of kings, who appear where we expect them—in stories like those of King David—but also populate the books of Esdras, Job, and the wisdom literature. The wisdom literature was, of course, associated with Solomon; the miniatures thus present the king as a wise teacher who, for the most part, is blond and bearded. Another text (London, British Library ms Cotton Nero D.VI) associated with Richard is a codex containing treatises on peace between France and England as well as England and Scotland, the coronation of Richard II, the Modus tenendi parliment, a chronicle for the king of England (which begins with Noah and ends with Edward III), and the Modus faciendi duellum coram rege as well as some Ricardian statutes and ordinances. Like the texts, which could serve as a primer of kingship, the miniatures seem to link wisdom and good rule. The kings are depicted both with and without beards, suggesting an uncertainty about the image Richard himself wished to promulgate. Unlike Charles V, who was consistently recognizable in contemporary manuscripts and charters, Ricardian kings can appear either heavily lined and bearded (as in Dymmok’s Liber) or breathtakingly young, as in Philippe de Mézières’s Letter to King Richard, London, British Library ms Royal 20 B VI. (See Figures 3 and 6.) If luxury marks the king’s magnificence, what marks the king’s face? In the above paragraph I pose a “miniaturized” conversation about beards that I think is less a dialogue about beards or verisimilitude than a more searching and farreaching dialogue about the king’s image. Richard’s appearance has long preoccupied art historians—primarily as a means of dating the Wilton Diptych, which portrays Richard as a very young and beardless man, more in keeping with the Westminster coronation portrait than with the more mature man of the 1390s who seems indeed to have worn a beard as a sign of his age, wisdom, or sense of responsibility.135 But Richard’s beard and even the details of his face seem in a constant flux that responds to the image the writer or compiler of the manuscript wished to produce. For example, the Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard II, which belonged to Charles of Anjou and is now in the British Library (ms Harley 1319), contains a series of illustrations that forms a powerful commentary on the author’s tale of Richard’s betrayal by those who formerly 135. For speculations about Richard’s appearance in relation to portraits of him, see S. Whittingham, “The Chronology of the Portraits of Richard II,” Burlington Magazine 1 13 (1971): 12–21, which presents a series of very diªerent contemporary depictions of Richard.


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were honored by him. Richard is consistently depicted as bearded and looking old. By the eighth picture, Richard has landed at Milford and is disguised as a priest. For the remainder of the sequence, the plainness of the king’s dress stands out against the richness of that of his courtiers. Both literally and figuratively, the manuscript describes the king’s unvesting or divesting, particularly if we compare it to either French or English illuminations of the coronation ordo.136 Richard was neither old nor young in the 1390s; he was a man in his mid- to late twenties, as his tomb e‹gy in Westminster Abbey captures him. The beard he wore as a mature king was probably meant to evoke the visages of his father and grandfather, who were depicted, like most men and certainly all of the English kings, as bearded—and hence wise and responsible. Richard was deeply interested in the traditions of English regality and lived intimately with images we visit as tourists, but again, his o‹cial face varied. In part, Dymmok oªers a superb key to this conversation about the king’s image. His point-by-point rebuttal of the Lollards was intended to provide Richard with an image he could make his own. The Twelve Conclusions are these: 1. The church is harmed by temporalities. 2. Priesthood, which is now of “sygnis” and “rytis,” is not what Christ ordained. 3. Priestly celibacy encourages sodomy. 4. The doctrine of transubstantiation is false. 5. Ceremonies of sanctification (exorcisms, blessings, and so on) are fraudulent. 6. The mingling of civil and spiritual spheres creates a hermaphrodite, as when a bishop holds a civil o‹ce. 7. Present practices of oªering masses for the dead encourage simony. 8. Pilgrimages are akin to idolatry. 9. Auricular confession is false and frequently harmful. 10. Manslaughter is against Christ’s gospel. 1 1. Women who choose virginity or the mantle and ring of widowhood should be encouraged to marry. 12. The present multitude of crafts nourishes a devotion to luxury. 136. The work is attributed to Jean Creton, who served Richard for about nine months. There are many copies of it. I have used the Harley manuscript, but see also John Webb, “Translation of a French Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard the Second,” Archaeologia 20 (1824): 1–242, for an English translation as well as a commentary.


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Though the Conclusions at first seem to evoke the relative unworldliness of the Sermon on the Mount, they actually oªer a fiercely social reformation of community. Thus they first separate the spiritual from the civil sphere, chastising a church whose commercialism is all too like the world’s, and they then go on to hint that the two spheres might be considered as one if both were reformed as a community of saints. Hence priests might marry in the Lord and women should be married in the Lord; the church must divest itself of the world and the world must become more godly. As scholars like Hudson and Wilks have pointed out in a number of erudite studies, Wyclif and his followers oªered a radical challenge that would refigure the world as it refigured the church. Moreover, the real threat hidden in the message from the “poor men,” the “treasurers of Christ,” was a contractual rather than sacramental theory of social relation. This Dymmok understood, and his book is informed by a powerful argument for sacramentalism that is intended to oªer Richard a highly focused image of himself in relation to a world not yet stripped of its mystery. In the dedicatory “Epistle to Richard,” Dymmok begins by asserting that kings in their power ought to support the church, as did biblical kings like David and Solomon, ancient leaders like Julius Caesar and Octavian (who maintained the state in peace), and Christian kings like Charlemagne, Arthur, Edward III, and the Black Prince. If Richard is here oªered a portrait gallery that inserts him into the worthies of wise rule, the body of the text goes on to present the world as the site of true meaning. The very wealth the “poor men” scorn is defended as necessary if the church is to perform its mission now.137 What began perfectly in poverty must now be maintained with the world’s coin. Dymmok warns that if the hierarchy that is visibly embodied in the Eucharist is cast aside, then respect for all hierarchies will crumble, with the final result of social chaos (91). When he considers the process of consecration, Dymmok asks a question that might well appeal to Richard (if he were to read the book): “how does a king diªer from all men, or how is a child diªerent after baptism?” (129). He accuses the Lollards of undercutting the whole process or reality of sacramental transformation by requiring a visible or physical event as evidence for change. Even section 7, which refutes the Lollards’ critique of intercessory prayer, constitutes an argument for a sacramentally conceived universe where boundaries are not so strictly defined, where things might have more than one meaning. When he comes to the final 137. “Epistle to Richard,” in Cronin, ed., Roger Dymmok, 40. Subsequent citations of the “Epistle” refer to page numbers in this edition.


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conclusion against the mechanical arts, Dymmok defends the prince as a figure of substance (293). As the example of Solomon demonstrates, the relationship between the sovereign and the arts is fundamental. Dymmok agrees with the Lollards that the arts that encourage sin are not to be praised, but he refuses to foresee a world theorized as good only when it has been brought into harmony with a spiritual utilitarianism. In defending what now is, Dymmok held out for Richard not a picture of a king who inherited the Wycli‹te “patrimonie of the crucified” but a Solomonic portrait, where the godly king protects the church and maintains the realm in peace and prosperity. It is a picture to which Charles V of France would have nodded assent.138 The figure who would have provided a link between the ideas of Charles V, the reign of Charles VI, and the political needs of England was Philippe de Mézières, whose career can serve as a map of the political world of the mid- to late fourteenth century.139 He was born in 1327 in Picardy of a noble but not wealthy family. At about nineteen, he began what was an amazing career, one that turned him into the figure with perhaps more knowledge than any contemporary European of the political climate of the East. From 1345 to 1360, he served Lucchino Visconti in Lombardy and King Andrew of Naples; fought in the campaign of Smyrna (1346); visited Jerusalem; established relations with the Lusignans, the rulers of Cyprus; and served the marshal of France in Normandy. In 1360 he returned to Cyprus to serve Pierre I. In Cyprus Philippe was in a position to understand the links and tensions between West and East, the economic ties between the two, and the crusader’s fervor that came to define his own vision for international peace. During this time, he traveled widely as an emissary to the courts of European princes. After Pierre I was assassinated (which Chaucer’s Monk laments in his tale), Philippe went to Avignon and then to Paris, where, from 1373 until Charles’s death in 1380, he was the close adviser to the king of 138. The phrase “patrimonie of the crucified” can be found in the English version of the Wycli‹te Rosarium (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius ms 354/581) under the entry that defines the true preacher. For a discussion and a partial edition of this text, see the introduction to The Middle English Translation of the Rosarium Theologie, ed. Christina von Nolcken (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979). 139. For my brief remarks about Philippe’s life, I am indebted to A. H. Hamdy, ed., La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion de Jhesu Crist, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts (Alexandria University, Egypt) 18, pts. 1 and 2 (1963): 45–55, 1–104. Also see G. W. Coopland, ed., Philippe de Mézières: Le songe du vieil pelerin, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Coopland, ed. and trans., Philippe de Mézières: Letter to King Richard II (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975). Both scholars have told Philippe’s story in far more detail than I can here. His career should be set in relation to Wallace’s account in Chaucerian Polity of the Italian political situation because, with his wide-ranging diplomatic missions, Philippe would have been the link between many courts.


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France. Thereafter, until the end of his life in 1405, he lived in Paris at the convent of the Celestines, becoming one of the most prolific of political writers as he sought to end the war that divided France from England, manifested in the schism in the very Christendom that ought to be a single and triumphant world force. Philippe de Mézières’s diplomatic career is astonishing enough, as is his productivity as a writer. Taken together, they mark him as a figure of remarkable influence for fifty years of European history. He not only lived history but also attempted to alter it, first through a series of arduous diplomatic missions, then through written speech—the books that, to some extent, bring to us a habit of thought that can seem as fantastic as it is astute about the dangerous fissures that characterized contemporary Europe. Like Charles V, Philippe de Mézières looked for a remedy for disorder in the principles of sacramental ordering. These two subjects —Christendom’s disorder and sacramental renewal—form the core of his numerous and lengthy treatises. As a remedy for the gap that divided East from West, or the holy city of Jerusalem from European Christians, Philippe says that as early as 1347 he envisioned an international order of chivalry.140 In 1368–69, near the end of his time of service with Peter of Cyprus, when he was in close contact with Peter Thomas, the papal legate (whose crusader’s zeal was as fierce as that of Peter of Cyprus), Philippe drew up his first plan for a new order of chivalry.141 Later, in 1384, when Charles V of France was dead and the schism that split the church (and, inevitably, Europe) had further eroded the international situation, Philippe wrote a second redaction of the Nova religio milicie passionis Jhesu Christi pro acquisicione sancte civitatis Jherusalem et terre sancte and in 1396, months before the battle of Nicopolis, he wrote a third redaction. Sometime between 1389 and 1394, Philippe de Mézières wrote a shorter version entitled La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion de Jhesu Crist en Francois, which was delivered to England and is now Bodleian Library ms Ashmole 813, once owned by the Arundel family. Possibly it was sent to Thomas Arundel, whose grandfather, the earl of Lancaster, was one of the early supporters of the order, or it may have been given to Richard’s brother, the count of Huntington, by Robert the Hermit, who came to England from France to urge support for the order. In the manuscript of the third redaction of his Rule, Philippe appended a list of his supporters, a list that linked members of principal European aristocratic 140. Coopland, ed., Le songe, 2, 6; Hamdy, ed., La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion, pt. 1. 141. For a discussion of the manuscripts of the Rule, see Hamdy, ed., La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion, pt. 2.


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houses within the framework of an order intended to redeem Christendom and restore Jerusalem to Christian rule.142 Philippe de Mézières’s other works share with his Rule an ornate allegorical apparatus, a passionately argued sacramental cast of thought, and a profoundly political sensibility. For example, he brought to the West the celebration of the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It received papal approval in 1372. Philippe also wrote a presentation play for the feast, a Latin liturgical drama originally intended to be preparatory to the mass on the feast of the Presentation on November 21.143 Along with the play, which is very specific about details —the colors the actors should wear, their movements during the play, their behavior, the drape of their costumes—Philippe included a letter explaining that the celebration of the feast might well inspire worshipers with a due sense of mystery that, in turn, might help heal a world sick from its own sin and willfulness. In other words, the observance of the feast of the Presentation can be described as having a sacramental function. It is remedial: a sign of invisible mystery and the thing itself. Sometime between 1385 and 1389, Philippe wrote Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, which was addressed to a noble married lady. The treatise, which is a “mirror” for married women, has manuscript links both to Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry and Le menagier de Paris.144 In 1389, Philippe wrote Le songe du vieil pelerin, which was addressed to his former pupil, Charles VI of France.145 Here, the emphasis is upon kingship and the ways in

142. Hamdy guesses that Bodleian Library ms Ashmole 813 might have been intended for Thomas Arundel, whose grandfather was a sponsor of the order (see ibid., pt. 2, p. 5). The Bodleian notes on the manuscript describe it as given to the count of Huntington by Robert the Hermit. On Robert the Hermit, another strange and compelling international figure and messenger for Philippe, see Coopland, ed. and trans., Letter, xxiii. For a transcription of the list of contemporary supporters of the order, see Muriel Brown, “Philippe de Mézières: Order of the Passion: An Annotated Edition” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1971), 259–67. See also Auguste Molinier, “Description de deux manuscrits contenant la règle de la militia passionis Jhesu Christi,” Archives de l’Orient latin 1 (1881): 362–64. 143. See M. Catherine Rupp’s introduction to Philippe de Mézières: Figurative Representation of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, ed. and trans. Robert S. Haller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971). 144. See Joan B. Williamson, ed., Philippe de Mézières: Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 18–19, and M. Y. Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), introduction. The manuscript history suggests a complicated relationship among all three texts. Philippe’s story of Griselda is reproduced by the author of the Menagier, and Le livre de la vertu was sometimes bound with copies of the same tale. I discuss these texts in Chap. 4. 145. See Coopland, ed., Le songe, 8. For a discussion of Le songe in relation to Chaucer, see Collette, “Reading Chaucer Through Philippe de Mézières.”


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which the king (or Charles VI, who is described as a young Moses) may become a true shepherd to his people and reform France by his own ascent of Mount Sinai. In 1395, through the emissary Robert the Hermit, Philippe presented to Richard II the Letter to King Richard II, proposing marriage between the two royal houses as the sacramental remedy for schism—a remedy that would lead to the creation of the new Order of the Passion, thus bringing peace and unity to a torn world.146 Each of these treatises is lengthy and oªers detailed allegorical readings of contemporary aªairs that can prove dizzying to a modern reader. But though the details can be overwhelming, they nonetheless evince a type of didacticism that fits into the cultural program identified with Valois kingship and specifically with Charles V. Moreover, Philippe’s international expertise and familiarity with the European nobility made him at once a conduit for others’ ideals and a powerful spokesman for his own remedial diplomacy. The Letter is of obvious importance to diplomatic relations between France and England during the last five years of Richard’s reign, but this work also needs to be considered in relation to Philippe’s focus in two previous works, the Nova religio milicie and Le livre de la vertu. In both treatises Philippe opposes sacramental ordering to a malady (or maladies). By describing chivalry or knighthood as holy and by proposing an international order of knights with a special system of government, a special currency, and a distinctive dress, Philippe in eªect proposed a secular order within the church. There were, of course, other such military orders —including the English Order of the Garter—and some of them were, like Philippe’s, dedicated to the delivery of Jerusalem. But for Philippe, the Order of the Passion was to do more than liberate Jerusalem. Jerusalem delivered would be the result of European unity, not its cause. In other words, the order itself would heal a Europe torn apart by war and schism; the sign of that healing would be the recovery of the Holy City. The order, to some extent, makes the most spiritual sense in relation to sacramental theology, whereby a sacrament was defined as more than a sign but also as a cause of grace. By adopting his Rule, the members of this holy order of knights are at once changed into something other than themselves —symbols of the Passion—and through the sacramental e‹cacy of their union, they become agents of world peace and unity. The epistle that prefaces the Rule serves as both an apology for 146. See Coopland, ed. and trans., Letter. J. J. N. Palmer argues that Richard’s choice of a bride was in negotiation and that the Letter was written to dissuade Richard from marrying Yolande of Aragon: see Palmer’s “The Background to Richard II’s Marriage to Isabel of France (1396),” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 44 (1971): 1–17.


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the order and an analysis of the defects Philippe sees in his own world. The remedy cannot be separated from the disease, the “lacks” of a fallen world, where dissension, violence, greed, and pride have brought only division. Thus Philippe specified the dress, or habits, and other daily details of the members of his “new” order as a way of marking the order as a type of holy order within the world. If by the sacrament of Holy Orders a man was changed from a man to a priest, by entering the Order of the Passion, a knight became a holy knight: “L’abit de la sainte Chevalerie de la Passion Jhesu Crist se confermera a l’entencion de la sainte regle, c’estassavoir en representant es vestemens la Passion du doulz Jhesu.”147 (See Figures 7 and 8.) Social harmony might thus be guaranteed by a sacramentally conceived international order of chivalry that reformulated the details of daily life as aspects of a religiously conceived body, a corporate whole. The six pictures representing the costumes of the order in ms Ashmole 813 designate each as a knight or a lady “de la religion”; the “commune” banner and arms are similarly designated “de la religion.” By putting on Christ’s armor, which is also a “habit,” the knights become at once symbols and agents. Philippe here links membership in the Order of the Passion to the sacramental sanctification that can be found in certain deeds that, though not necessary for salvation, prepare for what is necessary for salvation. In On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, Hugh of St. Victor says, “Again, there are other sacraments which seem to have been instituted for this alone, that through them those things which are necessary for the sanctification and institution of other sacraments in some manner may be prepared and sanctified either about persons in performing sacred orders or in consecrating those things, or others of this kind, which pertain in the attire of sacred orders.”148 In the second book, Hugh of St. Victor discusses sacred garments as external signs of an inner nature, going on to allegorize the eight garments with which the priest is clothed. Philippe de Mézières’s discussion of the habit for his order certainly does not suggest that military vesting is like ordination. On the other hand, he describes the knights as wearing the Passion of Christ, which is Christ’s armor. Again, for Philippe de Mézières, the contemporary “moment” was one of war and schism and could only be mended through sacramental observance. Philippe played on an international stage and, in the last fifteen years of the fourteenth century, he paid particular attention to the situation between France and En147. Hamdy, ed., La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion, pt. 2, p. 85. 148. Roy J. Deferrari, Hugh of Saint Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), bk. 1, pt. 9, chaps. 6 and 7 (p. 164).


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gland. From 1368, when he first expounded his ideal for the founding of the Order of the Passion, until 1397, after the disaster of Nicopolis, he worked to bring together the warring factions of Europe into a new order of chivalry. He did this not only in the various redactions of his treatise on the order but also by soliciting the help of key members of the European nobility and by finding, in Robert the Hermit, an emissary who could go back and forth between the French and English courts. In 1393, during the peace negotiations at Leulingham, Robert the Hermit made an impression upon Charles VI as well as upon the English delegates, including John of Gaunt. Thereafter, he became a messenger for the projected peace between the two countries.149 In May 1395 Philippe de Mézières collected his ideas about that peace into the Letter to King Richard II. The treatise, which is as heavily conceited and ornamented as anything he ever wrote, has as its project two interrelated goals: first, the establishment of a lasting peace between France and England, which in turn will heal the schism in Christendom itself, and second, the creation of the new Order of the Passion, which will make possible the retaking of the Holy Land. The seal to be set upon the peace is marriage between the two royal houses. (See Figures 5 and 6.) This marriage may result in the two objectives of healing and conquest. In the introduction to the Letter, Philippe sketches a sacramental world whereby kings are like precious stones. Peace between the kings, he writes, will heal the church. The journey overseas by these two kings will be sanctified by a new order of knighthood. The carbuncle (Richard) and the diamond (Charles) will be further sanctified by means of wine from the vineyards of Engadi. Fantastic as it sounds, the Letter nonetheless oªered intelligent diplomatic advice to a world Philippe saw as wounded, a victim of its own pervasive self-interest and courtly preoccupations. The body of Christ can therefore only be healed by sacramental remedies. By way of encouraging royal initiative, he describes the two kings as champions of Christ, eager to right the wrongs that have been done Him. One of those initiatives, only possible since the death of Queen Anne in 1394, is a negotiated marriage between Richard II and the young daughter of Charles VI. As for the “goods” of royal marriages, Philippe specifies that they secure the succession, make honorable alliances, achieve or preserve peace in kingdoms, and allow kings to live honestly and chastely according to the sacrament of marriage. Though he praises chastity, Philippe says that kings should marry. He then goes on to other subjects, including war, saying that the 149. See Coopland, ed. and trans., Letter, introduction (especially xxiii–xxiv).


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two kings should fear shedding royal blood and that when they make war on one another, they risk becoming the “serfs” of their subjects. In other words, Philippe, like many a royal counselor before him, emphasizes the royal prerogative in order to underline the degree of responsibility a king must take for the health of his country—or in this case, the world. What he advises is as hardheaded as the counsel of Chaucer’s Prudence in the Melibee: recognize the situation for what it is; recognize your mutual responsibility for it and the likely venality of courtiers; choose peace, alliance, and triumph. The marriage that will be the seal of responsible action looks forward to the immersion of the two royal stones in the precious wine from the Engadi vineyards (or, in the parlance of the theologians, all sacraments look forward to or prepare for that of the Eucharist). Philippe thus presents the world’s problems and oªers them up to rational action and sacramental remedy. Philippe de Mézières’s blend of political shrewdness and sacramental devotion is central to his understanding of the international situation and his solution. His suggestions—diplomatic marriage and a transnational fighting force— were traditional responses to schism and fissure. But his insistence that these proposals must be understood as more than diplomatic acts of speech provided (or was meant to provide) the participants in history with a perspective upon themselves that was more than political or ethical. Just as Charles V had meddled magic with Aristotle to arrive at a recipe for his own understanding of kingship, so Philippe urges his reader(s) to see ethical behavior in the light of its metaphysical significance. That Philippe had found the terms of a language that meant something to his intended audience is clear from the hints of his influence that we can detect. For example, Philippe de Mézières called Robert the Hermit, John de Blaisy, Louis de Giac, and Oton de Granson his “four evangelists”; between 1390 and 1395, they preached the “new Gospel of the Order of the Passion.” They probably carried with them manuscripts of the Sustance de la chevalerie, one of which, as noted above, is ms Ashmole 813, which stayed in the possession of the Arundel family until it became the property of Lord William Howard (1563– 1640).150 In De la chevallerie de la passion de Jhesu Crist (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms 2251), which also contains the praises of the four men mentioned above, Philippe de Mézières left the list of key members of the international nobility who supported his order. The list testifies not only to the appeal Philippe’s ideas 150. Ibid., xxxiii–xxxiv; Hamdy, ed., La sustance de la chevalerie de la passion, pt. 2, p. 5. On these “four evangelists,” see Palmer, England, France, and Christendom, 188.


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had for men who were bound together by class and breeding, if not by country, but also to his own appraisal of the need to build a constituency within the courts of the kings he sought to persuade. Moreover, the list—and particularly the English courtiers who appear on it— suggests a fascinating if sometimes paradoxical conversation among the privileged and powerful.151 Oton de Granson, whom Chaucer praised as a poet/maker in the Complaint of Venus, was a knight of Savoy aligned with Richard II and in the entourage of John of Gaunt. The English knights were Edmund of Langley, the duke of York; his son, the earl of Rutland; Thomas Mowbray, the earl of Nottingham; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland; John Gilbert, treasurer and bishop of St. David’s; Mons. le Despenser (who may be either Henry, the bishop of Norwich, or Thomas); Mons. Hue le Despenser; Mons. Louis Cliªord, knight in the retinue of Joan of Kent, a Wycli‹te, and a friend of Chaucer’s; Thomas West (who may have been an associate of Chaucer’s); William Heleman; John Harlestone (who may also have been known to Chaucer); William Fenistone; Raoul de Persy, brother to Hotspur and son of Henry Percy; Mons. Hervy filz Hue; Mons. Symon Felbrig; Mons. Richart Albery; Mons. Hervy Guine; Mons. Thomas Herpignen; Mons. de Rochefort; Mons. Robert Morley; Piteux, escuier; and Richart Chelmesinch, escuier du roy. The arrangement of the list suggests a fierce attention to categories. The first group is that of the four quasi-evangelists. Second, Philippe names the members of the French court, beginning with the duke of Bourbon and Jean Boucicaut, the marshal of France. He then names knights from Spain, from Gascony, from Navarre, and from Germany. Then come the English names (and one Scottish one). He subsequently lists French knights who have oªered to help the order: John, duke of Berry, and Louis, duke of Orleans, head this sequence. After this group, which also includes the name of Pope Benedict XIII, three other English knights are added—Thomas, duke of Gloucester; John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; and “Le conte de Nornthone / frere du roy d’Engleterre.”152 Not only are the knights divided according to nationalities, but the groups themselves are also ranked according to social status and power. This display of nation and rank, however, is meant to serve the higher purpose of dissolving such distinctions by cre151. I am here referring to Brown’s transcription of the list in Philippe de Mézières: Order of the Passion, 260–67. In the cases of le Despenser, Thomas West, Harlestone, and Percy, I am using her annotations. See Brown for other suggestions about the identity of men on the list. When it is not clear to whom the designation refers, I leave it as it appears in the original. 152. None of Richard’s half brothers carried this title; see ibid., 267, for suggestions.


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ating a new community with its own ranks, currency, and codes whose scope is international and whose ideals are those of the Passion. The categories demonstrate Philippe’s attention to the values of courtship and his reading of the ways in which those values might be translated into the legal tender of another sort of nation. The Eurocentric world he envisioned was one whose stability could only rest on an absolute—the Passion of Christ—and be guaranteed by the sacrament of the altar, the feast that focused the devoted eyes of the Christian faithful. There is consequently no room in Philippe’s vision for what cannot be assimilated to the Eucharist. He had no sympathy for Jews, and none for pagans. For him, women figured only as wives, hierarchically arranged in relation to the knights who were to be the prime movers of this new world. What he sought was a solution to a world he saw as broken, a solution that, for him, could only be eªected from the top down and by a renewed attention to sacramental ordering. He did not appeal to peasants or merchants but to princes and nobles. Whatever his appeal and influence in France—and even G. W. Coopland, whose work on Philippe de Mézières is unparalleled, admits that we cannot finally know how figures like Philippe or Robert the Hermit actually were seen by their contemporaries—his “presence” in England testifies to the ongoing power of Charles V’s court culture. Perhaps the most mysterious and arresting voice from Richard’s court is the Wilton Diptych, which probably belongs in the juncture between Richard’s attempts to rule as king in his own right and his disastrous assumptions of Valois majesty that became most apparent around 1397. It seems only natural to refer to the Diptych, as many have done, as an icon. It confers upon itself more than a simple artistic status.153 Like the Westminster portrait of Richard (c. 1395), the Wilton Diptych presents Richard as frozen in eternal youth at a point around 1395–96, when Richard had already had his tomb e‹gy made showing him in full maturity, bearded, the twenty-eight-year-old man and king who would lie beside Anne of Bohemia as one more sagacious figure of English rule in that great cathedral. If Richard had his tomb made in 1395, soon after the death of Queen Anne, he also had both public and private images of himself made that deliberately recalled the innocence and vitality of the boy who had first been conse-

153. Though some scholars wish to date the Diptych early in Richard’s reign, I find that the strongest arguments locate it in the 1390s. Literature on the Wilton Diptych is vast. Two recent volumes contain some of the most interesting recent work on the piece and its relationship to Ricardian ideology. Both books have ample bibliographies and give full reviews of the arguments about dating that are integral to the Diptych’s meaning. See Gordon, ed., Making and Meaning, and Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, eds., Regal Image of Richard II.


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crated as king.154 Those who place the Wilton Diptych in the mid-1390s on the basis of heraldic and diplomatic evidence have strong arguments; we need to see the work, though, as another piece of the conversation about images of rule that went on during the latter part of Richard’s reign. The Richard of the Wilton Diptych kneels, the focal point for a web of images that validate a sacramentally conceived chivalric kingship. Directly behind him stands St. Edward the Confessor, who holds a ring. The detail recalls the ring St. Edward gave to the pilgrim, a story that forms a crucial part of his legend. But by 1395–96, the ring may also have been meant to present Richard as sacramentally bound, or married, to his realm. William of Sudbury, at Richard’s request, had provided a complicated series of metaphors that explicitly linked sacramental kingship to the institutions of both marriage and chivalry. By way of explaining the coronation regalia, William says that the ring serves as a sign of the marriage contract and a knight’s arms as a sign of the honor of his o‹ce; the regalia, then, are a sign of o‹ce. He goes on to say that the clothes, which he traces to King Alfred, the first English king, have been consecrated by the pope.155 In terms of the legend of St. Edward, the ring binds king and church. In terms of the theory of sacramental kingship that Richard apparently wished to articulate or to have articulated, the ring is a sign of the sacramental union between himself and the body politic. Directly across from St. Edward in the Wilton Diptych, the Blessed Virgin’s thumb and forefinger encircle the Christ child’s foot in exactly the same gesture as that used by St. Edward to hold the ring. Christ’s physical body remains securely in the Virgin’s hand, even as the haloed baby reaches out to bless (or greet) the young king whose open hands mirror those of the child. The tokens of encirclement mirror one another while the sacramental king and the babe by whom sacrament proceeds gaze upon each other in attitudes of courtly welcome. We, of course—or Richard himself, for whom the Wilton Diptych was probably intended—gaze upon these icons of power. What Michael Camille has described as a “democratization of the gaze” that a king’s image ought to eªect locates all viewers in relation to the kneeling king.156 The Wilton Diptych comes to us as an artifact of late-fourteenth-century English culture, but both it and 154. I here refer to the likely function of the Wilton Diptych, which is portable and was probably intended for Richard’s own devotional use. See Saul, Richard II, 304. 155. Mayor, ed., Richard of Cirencester, 2:26–39. For Edward the Confessor, see bk. 4. See also Richardson, “Coronation in Medieval England,” which notes that the ring is indeed part of the regalia; see 136–37 for the oblation Richard made at his coronation. 156. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 282–83.


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the Westminster portrait of Richard II were commissioned. They are images that were intended for certain uses. They oªer the king an image of magnificence, of cultic rule, of sacramental transformation. They do not suggest that the magic that transforms men into kings or men into knights, that binds king and people (or invisible hosts to the material world), is in any serious way contractual; that it depends upon worthiness for its reality; or that it can be subjected to the sorts of questions about authority that Wyclif persistently asked or that Chaucer’s pilgrims ask in their advance upon Canterbury. To turn to Chaucer and ask that he comment upon this conversation about the figuring of regal authority is to ask the master of indirection for an answer he can give only obliquely. His own development as a writer, however, gives evidence that he came to understand that the world in which he lived and out of which he wrote could no longer be thought about in terms of sweepingly diagnostic allegory. In addition, the move from the Troilus to the Canterbury Tales and the di‹culties he seems to have experienced in recasting the Legend of Good Women suggest that he no longer thought it feasible to construct fictional worlds composed around the court. Nor did he wish his language to be circumscribed by the aesthetics of courtly forms. Chaucer began to move away from court circles sometime during 1386, just after he finished the Troilus.157 In Kent, where he was removed from the volatility of the London political world, he began to work on what would become the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer probably wrote the General Prologue in the late 1380s, and in it he provides a picture of a society or an audience at a far remove from that sketched in his earlier works. As many have pointed out, the picture of England captured in the General Prologue is hardly true to the social realities of Chaucer’s own experience, as it notoriously slights both the upper and the lower ranges of society. Neither does the pilgrim company represent what Chaucer might have thought of as the audience for his work.158 Jill Mann has described the General Prologue as “a poem about work”— and, more specifically, about “work as a social experience.”159 Indeed, it pro157. See Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 36–37; Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 204–5. 158. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 797–98, for remarks about the General Prologue. For this distinction between “society” and “audience” and how we might use the terms as foci for a literary analysis of Chaucer’s works, see Strohm, Social Chaucer, chap. 3. As Strohm points out, neither Chaucer’s picture of a society nor his suggestion of an implied audience for any of his works should be seen as actual. 159. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 202.


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vides evidence for the social fluidity of late medieval life, a fluidity that reflects an increasingly money-based economy frequently at odds with the idealized social forms of an earlier period.160 More important for the issue of sacral reality, neither the General Prologue nor the tales themselves suggest a world whose perceived needs could be met by sacred magic. I say “perceived needs” here to indicate not Chaucer’s set of religious or social beliefs but an observation about his world that serves as a topos for analysis throughout the Canterbury book. David Aers’s argument that Chaucer has absented the Eucharist—the central event of late medieval Christian worship—from tales where we would expect to find it sets the tales against such contemporary works as Pearl, Sir Gawain, and Piers Plowman.161 While these poems, like the mystery plays that are expanded throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, oªer pictures of societies in which the sacrament of the altar is fundamental to a particular version of social order, the world of the Canterbury pilgrimage is focused through a diªerent lens. Whether we describe that lens as a category, such as class or gender, or as an idea, such as profit, we approach the Canterbury community as not so much desacralized as “asacral.” There are at least three moments in the tales where the sacrament of the altar appears to be invoked: the poisoned meal of bread and wine in the Pardoner’s Tale, the conversion to be magically accomplished in the alchemist’s crucible in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, and the Manciple’s oªer of wine to the drunken Cook in the prologue to the Manciple’s Tale.162 Though each of these parodic eucharistic moments is produced by the need for fiscal profit that drives most of the pilgrims, the last seems the most insidious in its asacrality. The Manciple does two things in his prologue that suggest his usurpation of prerogative. First, noting the Cook’s drunkenness, he “excuses” him from his tale (CT IX.29). He not only deprives the Cook of his chance to speak (with all the implications of knowing and unknowing speech that Chaucer has woven into the tales) but also denies Harry Bailey the rights of governor, judge, and recordkeeper that had been voted him by the pilgrims in the General Prologue. 160. See Robert Swanson, “Social Structures,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 397–403. See Alcuin Blamires, “Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 51 (2000): 523–39, for a reading of the General Prologue as reactionary. 161. Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church, chap. 2. In particular, Aers discusses the Clerk’s and the Second Nun’s tales. 162. On the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, see Lynn Staley, “The Man in Foul Clothes and a LateFourteenth-Century Conversation About Sin,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 37–47.


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The Host, however, is well up to the task of maintaining order. He assents to this silencing of the Cook, then warns the Manciple that his rough treatment of the Cook may well occasion financial and/or legal embarrassment for him, that the Cook “Another day . . . wole, peraventure, / Reclayme thee and brynge thee to lure” (IX.72–73). Harry’s gift for metaphor is apparent throughout the interstices of the tales, but this particular image is striking for what it says about the community of profiteers the Manciple represents. Hawks are trained by hunger, by their need for food; a trained hawk may appear to fly free but is, in fact, a slave to its needs and to its owner’s estimate of them. City man and businessman that the Manciple is, he, in Harry’s turn of phrase, is reduced to a bondsman whose servile status marks his churlish nature. Ignoring the nature of Harry’s thrust, the Manciple responds by saying that he will oªer the Cook the wine he carries in his flask. The Cook, who has no need of wine, drinks. And of that drynke the Cook was wonder fayn, And thanked hym in swich wise as he koude. Thanne gan oure Hoost to laughen wonder loude, And seyde, “I se wel it is necessarie Where that we goon, good drynke with us carie; For that wol turne rancour and disese T’accord and love, and many a wrong apese. . . .” (IX.92–98) In the Host’s laughter is a future many centuries beyond where Chaucer stood. The unsanctified wine, cynically oªered and haplessly received, occasions drunken thanks and reglues the pilgrim community—and belongs on no altar. The Manciple’s knowingness, which Harry Bailey recognizes and to some extent shares, is the knowledge of worldly gain, a consciousness that seems to feel no need for any reality other than that within his grasp. Chaucer here has gone well beyond the world of the Troilus, where the mysteries of love and chivalry may have been illusory or celebrated in the language of illusion but nonetheless constituted the fabric of Trojan society. But if the very starkness of the worlds of thieves, alchemists, and businessmen seems to point up the emptiness at the heart of a desacralized world, there are other indications of Chaucer’s estimate that a return to such a world might be impossible, if not a step backward. His interrogations in Troilus of individual actions and public events that suggest the relationship between self-understanding and


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an understanding of history (and an acknowledgment of one’s place in it) emerge in later Canterbury works as well, such as the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is partly a comic echo of Troilus.163 Through Chauntecleer, who learns the lesson of agency and so escapes history’s net, returning his “community” to a greater degree of safety, Chaucer touches on some of the political dangers that must have been apparent to him and others in the court of the 1390s. Though the rooster at the end of the tale wins our regard because of his wits, the rooster at the beginning is as brilliantly detailed as any figure in the Wilton Diptych. His coomb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailled as it were a castel wal; His byle was blak, and as the jeet it shoon; Lyk asure were his legges and his toon; His nayles whitter than the lylye flour, And lyk the burned gold was his colour. (CT VII.2859–64) With red comb, black shiny beak, azure legs and toes, white nails, and burnedgold color, Chauntecleer is the very image of a royal rooster. He sits high up on a perch in the hall, surrounded by his wives, who are his sisters and paramours. A number of critics have commented upon the heraldic, formal, and courtly qualities of Chaucer’s description of Chauntecleer, thereby steering our understanding of it away from strict realism and toward its striking visual appeal.164 What we see is not a rooster but the icon of a rooster—and at a time when Richard began to adapt some of the Valois mannerisms of regality to his public appearances in his own hall.165 The gender comedy of the tale and the exquisite ren163. On Troilus and Chaucer’s handling of history, see L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, chap. 2; Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Fleming, Classical Imitation. For my earlier essay on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, see Lynn Staley Johnson, “‘To Make in Som Comedy’: Chauntecleer, Son of Troy,” Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 226–44. See also my essay, “Personal Identity,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Brown, 360–77. 164. See R. T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 334, and Elizabeth Salter, “Medieval Poetry and the Visual Arts,” Essays and Studies 22 (1969): 19. For other comments about this passage, see Derek Pearsall, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoªrey Chaucer 2, pt. 9 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 150–51. 165. See Saul, Richard II, 340–58, for an analysis of the mannerisms of Richard’s court.


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dering of the beast fable work to shield us from the portrait of iconic kingship on its perch. But Chauntecleer’s fascination with his own magnificent image almost brings his realm into utter ruin, into the type of chaos reminiscent of the Rising of 1381. So hydous was the noyse—a, benedicitee!— Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille (VII.3393–96) In “remembering” the Rising and the violence against resident aliens in London’s streets, Chaucer does not stop to decry civic chaos but instead suggests that it results from a failure of true authority. Chauntecleer’s studied posturing and his willingness to listen to flattery threaten more than his own life; they unleash the disorder submerged within any attempt at communal ordering. In performing power, Chauntecleer has lost control, something he is clever enough— even when in mortal danger—to tempt the fox into emulating: “Sire, if that I were as ye, / Yet sholde I seyn, as wys God helpe me, / ‘Turneth agayne, ye proude cherles alle!’” (VII.3407–9). Troilus’s failures, like the regal rooster’s, may be private, but Chaucer uses them to detail the utter inadequacy of a chivalric world that can neither know itself nor comprehend the terms by which it purports to speak. Chaucer’s farewell to his book at the end of the Troilus puts paid to tragedy and to the very institutions that are fundamental to it. To be in Troy is to be without escape from Troy, its history, its mannerisms. To see it is to leave it, as the narrator does. That he returned in works like the tale of Chauntecleer is only to say that he chose to see what type of ending might bring release in comedy.166 If Chaucer’s fable looks back to his own work, it also looks out upon a world, 166. For an argument that Chaucer invented tragedy as we know it, and for speculations about Chaucer’s definition of comedy and comic form, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), chap. 3. In L. S. Johnson, “‘To Make in Som Comedy,’” I suggest that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale oªers a pattern for comic form in Chauntecleer’s literal (rather than metaphoric) movements. For a close reading of the tale’s formal strategies and the ways in which Chaucer employs them to investigate the nature of authority, see Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 229–44. See also Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 97–123, for comments about Chaucer’s use of the tale as textual “authority.”


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captured in the Canterbury Tales, whose contingencies cannot allow a simple borrowing of signs from another culture and time. Tellingly, Chauntecleer traces out a comic trajectory in which the formalized iconic authority of a barnyard fowl is replaced by empirical shrewdness. The community presumably reconstituted around the newly savvy Chauntecleer is implicitly less vulnerable because its “governor” has escaped the fates of his parents, so eloquently recalled by the flattering fox. French majesty—whether in feathers or cloth of gold—is not easily translated into the flock’s common tongue. Although Chaucer does not detail the arguments of Wyclif or analyze the actions of the Appellants, he presents a world in the Canterbury Tales where the hierarchical mysteries of class, gender, and religion are subjects under constant review by a wide variety of debunkers. Whatever his own views, the talk on the road to Canterbury runs strongly against the need for magic. It is perhaps for this reason that the tales of fragment VII stage a confrontation between modes of social analysis, a confrontation that Chaucer brings to a sort of pause with the tale of the Nun’s Priest. In the two tales he assigns to himself in the Canterbury book, Sir Thopas and the Melibee, he seems, as Lee Patterson has suggested, to play with the outlines of the social roles a poet might inhabit.167 If he discards the older minstrel voice, he does not seem to endorse entirely that of the sage whose moral prose instructs in the need for measured self-awareness as a prerequisite for rule. In fact, Chaucer generously allows himself to be upstaged by his own creature, who tells the last tale in fragment VII and does with Chauntecleer and comedy what Chaucer did less gracefully and in a good deal more space in the Melibee. The Nun’s Priest, with his ability to focus the fable upon the issue of agency, his humorous disclaimers, and his injunction to look for the “fruyt” and discard the rest, also oªers a subtle, not rancorous revision of the Monk’s fatalistic vision of political history. In place of Chaucer’s truncated tail-rhyme romance or his “litel thyng in prose” (CT VII.937) or the Monk’s histories of men and women who appear to fall either helplessly or by a sort of divine caprice, the Nun’s Priest tells a tale of folly, pride, vanity, and self-recognition. No meaningless tragedy here: the tale’s comic renewal is a product of genuine authority.168 The Nun’s Priest oªers reliable political advice that sounds a 167. Lee Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’ Authorial Self-Definition in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 1 17–75. For a critical and historical discussion of the Melibee, see Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 219–33. 168. On the Monk’s Tale, see the careful analysis of the literary and political contexts for the histories the Monk recounts in Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, chap. 1 1. Wallace’s work on Boccaccio in


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note of warning about the dangers that images can pose for those who adopt them, but his good sense is also canny. If authority wears feathers (even gorgeous ones), the plumes can serve as ba›es for the man who does not wish to hear and who might withdraw his favor from an unwary teller. The fable of the cock and the fox, like Chaucer’s translation of Renaud de Louens’s translation of Albertanus of Brescia’s treatise, can be as pointed as we wish it to be.169 Fragment VII as it now stands also suggests a degree of authorial uncertainty that may well be connected to Chaucer’s awareness of the political implications of this group of tales. The very lack of polish at points in this fragment—the “female narrator” for the Shipman’s Tale, the canceled passage in the epilogue of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale that appears in the prologue to the Monk’s Tale, and the ways in which Chaucer appears to repeat himself—make the fragment doubly interesting because it oªers a rare glimpse of Chaucer’s own hand still at work. Thus the material in the epilogue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in which Harry Bailey praises the priest for being a “trede-foul aright,” is reworked in the prologue to the Monk’s Tale.170 There, Harry does more than blazon the Monk’s masculinity; he defines it against a society where “borel men” are “shrympes” (CT VII.1955) and where wives must look to “religious folk” who can pay Venus’s debt with true coinage. Harry thereby sketches a world that would grow less vigorous with each generation, save for the surreptitious infusions of clerical vitality. His linkage of the “coin of the realm” with the “coyne” of sexuality echoes the Clerk’s closing remarks at the end of his tale, where he decries an adulterated and overly alloyed coin that will not bear an image. If the Clerk glances at wives, or those under authority, Harry points the finger at authority itself and its insu‹ciencies in an age where all appears commodified.171 The fluctuations in the international money market are capitalized on privately in the Shipman’s Tale, and they mark the world as needing a concept of authority that the Monk himself cannot provide and that Harry sees as lacking in society at large.172 Moreover, Chaucer’s remarks in his own prologue to the Melibee (where he

this chapter is foundational. For a debate that captures many of the questions inherent in the Monk’s performance, see “Colloquium on the Monk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 379–440. 169. On these two texts, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 214–21. 170. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1 133. 171. I have suggested (Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 256–57) that, by “wives,” Chaucer means to include the very body of Parliament—the king’s wife, the spouse who is no longer a true Griselda and thus has no means of checking tyrannical power. 172. See Chap. 4 below.


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a‹rms the “sentence” that “is al oon” of the four gospelers, despite some of their diªerences) are then echoed by the Nun’s Priest near the end of his tale, where he says, “Taketh the moralite, goode men. / For Seint Paul seith that al that writen is, / To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis; / Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (CT VII.3440–43). Chaucer’s injunctions suggest that we look for similarities among the tales themselves. What they have in common is a persistent focus upon social fragmentation or fissure, for which there appears to be no remedy in the society presented in the tales. The devalued world of the Shipman is, ironically enough, set in St. Denis, the northern suburb of Paris that was home both to the abbey that defined French sacral history and to a cloth fair that helped define French commerce. The Shipman does not identify the abbey to which the Monk belongs as the Abbey of St. Denis, but it is clearly close enough to the Merchant’s house to allow him to come on short notice. If the Shipman oªers a picture of a churchman whose merchandising skills are equal to (if not better than) those of his friend the merchant, the Prioress points toward a more conventional target for social contagion and describes an Eastern city “split” by a “Jewry.” In response to her tale of vengeance and meaningless suªering—a tale whose analysis of social fissure avoids any actual problems or lapses in the latefourteenth-century English community—Chaucer responds with Sir Thopas, which, like the Melibee, locates violence within the institutions of Christian society. Moreover, as Geoªrey slyly notes in telling his tale, Christian chivalry is indebted to Jewish artistry, for Thopas’s plate armor is “ywroght of Jewes werk” (VII.864). What the Prioress describes as separate and inimical, Chaucer binds together in mutual dependence. The Monk’s relentless tragedies that seem to have neither agents nor remedies draw upon conventions Chaucer borrowed from Boccaccio, but, compressed into the Monk’s threatened series of a hundred such tales, they seem to lack any relevance to the complexities of the social body as it appears in fragment VII. Taken as a group, or as a “phrase,” the tales can only be made to make sense in light of the Nun’s Priest’s recommendation that we live historically and/or self-consciously. The utterly secular and commercial world of the Shipman’s Tale, where husbands have no authority over wives or households, is righted not through magic but through a fall and consequent self-recognition. The problem is not the wife or the hen but the husband whose practices create vacuity. The social contention and uncertainty that the Prioress displaces onto the exotic East—and onto Jews, who were not resident in an England where usury was practiced by Christians —are located by the Nun’s Priest in an English barn-


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yard whose peace depends upon a rooster. And, finally, the Nun’s Priest demonstrates both to the Monk and to Geoªrey a mode of advice. That advice might be taken or ignored, but its very deftness and its self-reflexive humor might well engage a prince with no interest in long moralities or tales of tragedy. In giving Chaucer the last word, I position him in the ambiguously defined space he appropriated for himself, suggesting that we can catch echoes within his works of conversations held on much higher levels of power than those he frequented. But I also suggest that Chaucer made himself into a poet whose rare quality could only have emerged from a world in search of stabilizing images of rule. The search, moreover, was a real one: the English court, particularly after Richard’s declaration of his majority in 1389, soon after his humiliation at the hands of the Appellants, actively sought to produce a royal image as magically endowed as that of the French kings. But Richard did not completely understand that Valois magic was firmly grounded in a vernacular culture that Charles carefully patronized and shaped. The Ricardian age is the first great age of formal English translation, but these texts do not proceed from the court.173 Nor did Richard seem to understand the tensions and energies of English translation, energies that are evinced in texts translated for Sir Thomas Berkeley by John Trevisa, in the Wycli‹te Bible, and in the works of writers like Chaucer, Usk, and Gower. Richard’s interest in the Valois monarchy is well known, but the nature of the conflict over the language of sovereignty is less understood. What was the king to be? Many thought that they could answer the question, and Chaucer had the quickness in moments like the Nun’s Priest’s Tale to record a conversation about the use or appropriation of images that was also and inevitably a debate about the nature of the English community. He did more than record: he suggests that if acts of translation are attempts to appropriate the terms of empire, translators might think again. Empires dissolve and become acts of translation. Or, put another way, translation succeeds only by dissolving the past into a contingent present. 173. For a sense of the vigor and scope of English translation, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).


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Figure 1. King in judgment. London, British Library ms Royal 19 C IV (Le songe du vergier), fol. 1v. By permission of the British Library.


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Figure 2. Richard II. Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Bodley 581, fol. 9r. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.


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Figure 3. Richard II. Cambridge, Trinity Hall ms 17, fol. 1r. By permission of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University.


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Figure 4. Wedding of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Lat. liturg. f. 3, fol. 65v. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.


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Figure 5. Letter to King Richard II. Title page, the crowns of France and England joined through the Crown of Thorns. London, British Library ms Royal 20 B VI. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 6. Letter to King Richard II. Philippe de Mézières presenting his book to King Richard. London, British Library ms Royal 20 B VI. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 7. The knights’ clothing for the Order of the Passion. Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Ashmole 813. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.


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Figure 8. The ladies’ clothing for the Order of the Passion. Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Ashmole 813. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.


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Figure 9. Plan of St. Paul’s Cathedral. From William Dugdale, A History of Saint Paul’s Cathedral (1716), 161. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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Figure 10. Blanche of Lancaster’s tomb. From William Dugdale, A History of Saint Paul’s Cathedral (1716), 91. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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Figure 11. Pearl maiden medallion. Detail of Twelve Brooches, French, Paris (?), c. 1400. Gold, enamel, precious and semiprecious stones, and pearls. Diameter of the medallion 4.5 cm. © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003. Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1947.507.


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Figure 12. De fistula. London, British Library ms Sloane 2002, fol. 24v. By permission of the British Library.


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Figure 13. The Pearl-dreamer sleeping. London, British Library ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 14. The Pearl-dreamer at the stream. London, British Library ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 15. The Pearl-dreamer talking with the maiden. London, British Library ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 16. The Pearldreamer sees the maiden in the heavenly Jerusalem. London, British Library ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 17. God creating water and fish. London, British Library mss Royal 6 E VI–6 E VII (Omne bonum): 6 E VI, fol. 1v. By permission of the British Library.


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Figure 19. Aqua. London, British Library mss Royal 6 E VI–6 E VII (Omne bonum): 6 E VI, fol. 125v. By permission of the British Library.

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Figure 18. Aqua. London, British Library mss Royal 6 E VI–6 E VII (Omne bonum): 6 E VI, fol. 126v. By permission of the British Library.


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Figure 20. The moment of St. Augustine’s conversion. The Carlisle Cathedral stalls. © English Heritage, National Monuments Record.


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t h r e e

Princely Powers: John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock The two previous chapters have focused on the figure of Richard II and the relationship between his need for a language of power and the search for a meaningful and acceptable language of princely address. But when we look at the court and the strategies of “courtship” employed or described by writers, we must also recognize that in the late fourteenth century, the king’s court was not necessarily the center of (or for) cultural productions that it became in the sixteenth century. The Lancastrian attempt to centralize and normalize might be described as a shrewd reading of Richard’s ambitions, but for Richard, these remained ambitions. We can find much evidence for the roles played by both the nobility and the gentry in generating and/or patronizing late medieval English texts.1 Moreover, throughout his reign, Richard’s court also included two prominent and powerful men: his uncles John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester.2 Both men fully understood the need for a language of power; both made their own individual grabs for regal power; both were fully capable of patronizing the creation of texts that would magnify their status. Indeed, both men were linked to the interdependent worlds of English devotion, art, and literature in ways that sug-

1. See particularly G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957); K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley”; and Aston and Richmond, eds., Lollardy and the English Gentry. 2. For work on both, see Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy and John of Gaunt.


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gest that we should broaden our understanding of what “courtly culture” might mean in Ricardian England. Both men had objectives, too. Thomas of Woodstock may be a simpler figure, in part, because he never enjoyed the extensive wealth and position of his older brother. He wished for more of both, but he also, just before the Merciless Parliament, tried to become king. Pulling back from such an ambition, he thereafter sought to maintain his position (and no doubt to enhance it). John of Gaunt, whose obsessive focus upon his chivalric identity, keen sense of prerogative, and vast holdings made him the most princely of English noblemen, was, unlike Thomas, never disloyal to the king. In fact, from the time of his father’s senility and his older brother’s protracted illness, he protected the rights of Richard of Bordeaux, the heir to Edward III, and Edward, the Black Prince. When Richard acceded to the throne, Gaunt was a key figure among the young king’s advisers. He also pursued his own ambitions in France and in Spain for much of his life, however, and, failing there, pursued those of his children— particularly of his one legitimate son, Henry Bolingbroke. For both John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, identity was public and performative, inseparable from political and social ambitions and drives. Acts of piety and benefaction and intellectual and cultural gestures were features of their political intelligences, of men who saw themselves as princes of the blood and manifested it in a living rhetoric that promoted personal and English prestige. Patronage of all sorts was therefore a symptom of the princely state. Charles V of France and his brothers, the dukes of Burgundy and Berry, had, of course, fully realized the degree to which cultural patronage became a prince or served as a key feature of the language of princely power. Both John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock had the experience and expertise to “read” the text of French courtly influence. This chapter is an eªort to reconstruct a world that, for a multitude of reasons, has been obscured. In seizing the throne from Richard, Henry Bolingbroke did more than murder his cousin and accede to his kingdom. He united under a regal title the greatest private inheritance in England—the duchy of Lancaster—with the public, national power of the English crown. His private inheritance included the palatinate of Lancaster, within which he enjoyed extensive and unusual private powers. From Richard he gained not only the crown but also the palatinate of Chester and the royal lordships of the principality of Wales and the duchy of Cornwall, which would normally have passed to Richard’s children, had he not remained childless. That these private estates re-


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mained in crown hands during Richard’s reign and were used as parts of a private a‹nity by Richard helped generate many of the tensions of Richard’s later years. On attaining the throne, Henry immediately made a distinction between his private inheritance and his public estate and had all deeds relating to the duchy of Lancaster collected, sorted, and copied into two great volumes.3 Though the bookkeeping registers of the duchy of Lancaster allow fascinating glimpses into the complexities of this empire, they cannot tell us everything and are not complete. We do not have many records for the private expenditures of Thomas of Woodstock.4 Moreover, Thomas of Woodstock had masterminded the Merciless Parliament, drawing in his nephew at a point when John of Gaunt was absent in Spain. And Thomas had, of course, been murdered by Richard, who had the magnificent holdings of Pleshey, the seat of the “treasonous” duke, inventoried and seized for the use of the king.5 It is highly unlikely that there should be much hard evidence detailing the princely ambitions of either Thomas or John of Gaunt—or of Henry himself. What time and accident did not destroy was perhaps muddied even earlier. From his father, Henry probably learned the importance of creating a textual record of events, a history made with an eye to an uncertain future. What we do know about the activities and ambitions of John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, though, can be used to deepen our understanding of the complex web of relationships that constituted a system of cultural patronage and to sharpen our sense of the sorts of questions posed through and by literary texts. The last half of this chapter locates the Gawain-poet within the spheres of these two princes, suggesting ways in which this poet sought to analyze the very systems of power that gave him his living and provided him with a language. The mosaic I piece together throughout this 3. Robert Somerville, “The Cowcher Books of the Duchy of Lancaster,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 598. For suggestions regarding Lancastrian interests in copying and disseminating texts that served their broader political ends, see Ralph Hanna III, “Contextualizing The Siege of Jerusalem,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 109–22, and Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 84, 93. For remarks on Richard Frampton, who compiled the Lancastrian coucher books, see A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 192. 4. Some records for household expenses (mainly provisions) at Pleshey are in the Public Record O‹ce. Most of the records were destroyed by fire at Gray’s Inn: see R. Gough, The History and Antiquities of Pleshey in the County of Essex (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1803), 173. 5. Harold Arthur Dillon and W. H. St. John Hope, “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels Belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and Seized in His Castle at Pleshy, Co. Essex, 21 Richard II (1397),” Archaeological Journal 54 (1897): 275–308.


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chapter is intended to complicate our sense of late-fourteenth-century English culture by describing a world where texts were conceived of as acts within a field whose participants constantly renegotiated their positions with regard to one another. Gower’s rededication of the Confessio Amantis implicitly prompts just this sort of inquiry into the agency that was perceived to be inherent in texts. The dedication to Henry of Derby, which I discussed in Chapter 1, did win the poem a long life under Lancastrian patronage, but the story is not so straightforward. G. C. Macaulay has suggested that one manuscript of the Confessio was created as a presentation copy for Henry of Derby and that the new forms of the prologue and the epilogue were at first intended only for private circulation, which would account for the preponderance of manuscripts of the first recension.6 Moreover, the first (Ricardian) version of the poem also contained lines in Latin in the margin of the prologue that praised Henry of Derby. As Macaulay has noted, the lines indicate that for Gower, at a certain period, praise for Henry was not inconsistent with loyalty to Richard.7 Eªorts to pinpoint the cause for Gower’s rededication have focused upon two incidents that might have prompted a disaªection for Richard’s rule. George Stow, in particular, has suggested that during the early 1390s, Richard was laying the foundations of later absolutism. Stow notes that Richard reinstated the clerical court clique that had been swept away by the Appellants in 1387–88. He sees the issue of livery and maintenance as a key part of Richard’s vision and the Smithfield tournament of 1390, at which the king distributed the badges of the White Hart, as the moment where Richard’s bid for aristocratic support was first unveiled. Stow cites Sheila Lindenbaum’s essay on the Smithfield tournament, which describes it as excluding the city and as totally concentrated by and on the court.8 Stow thus pushes back the point of dissatisfaction to October 1390, where Macaulay and others have seen 1392 as perhaps the date when Gower became alarmed by the implications of Richard’s actions. In 1392, what Caroline Barron describes as a long-standing grudge between Richard and the city of London broke out into open hostilities when the citizens of London re6. Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, 2:cxxxvii. 7. Ibid. 8. George B. Stow, “Richard II in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 3–31; Sheila Lindenbaum, “The Smithfield Tournament of 1390,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 1–21.


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fused the king a loan.9 In May of that year, he issued a writ informing the London sheriªs that the court of common pleas had been removed to York; he then removed the chancery, the exchequer, and the inmates of Fleet Prison. A few weeks later, Richard sent a writ summoning the mayor, the sheriªs, and all the aldermen to appear before him at the end of June. Richard had them imprisoned, replaced the city government, and levied a large fine on the city. Richard pardoned the city later that summer but required the sum of 10,000 pounds as the cost of his pardon. As the Monk of Westminster puts it, Richard also demanded that “on the day appointed for his progress, which was 21 August, they should come out to meet him and receive him at Wandsworth with appropriate pomp, each city craft in its own livery and mounted on horseback, to escort him with all honor through the city to Westminster.”10 The Westminster chronicler describes the citizens as carrying out these conditions to the letter.11 The Carmelite friar Richard Maidstone also recorded the pageant in a Latin poem.12 The Concordia facta inter regem Riccardum II et civitatem Londonie is both an account of the pageant and a reading of it, an interpretation of its script in terms of contemporary political language. It describes the reconciliation as taking place between the city of New Troy and its spouse, king, and master. Torn apart by evil counsel, the two now enact a moment of marital reunion. Richard is presented as beautiful, merciful, kindly, and pious and the city as gaily decked like a bride to receive her husband 9. Caroline M. Barron, “The Quarrel of Richard II with London, 1392–97,” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. DuBoulay and C. M. Barron (London: Athlone Press, 1971), 173–217. See also Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), chap. 1. Charles Roger Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia facta inter regem Riccardum II et civitatem Londonie per fratrum Riccardum Maydiston” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1972), 15–41, oªers a diªerent reading of the relationship between the king and the city, suggesting that the city was not innocent and that Richard cannot simply be read as an aggressor. 10. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 504–5. 1 1. See also C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia,” and Helen Suggett, “A Letter Describing Richard II’s Reconciliation with the City of London, 1392,” English Historical Review 62 (1947): 209–13. It is interesting—particularly in light of similar accounts of Richard in the 1380s —that contemporaries do not lay the blame on the king or on the city for the original conflict, but instead blame Richard’s counselors for misleading him. See, for example, Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 496–97. 12. C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia.” For discussions of this poem, see C. R. Smith’s introduction to the work, as well as Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1576 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 64ª; Gordon Kipling, “Richard II’s ‘Sumptuous Pageants’ and the Idea of the Civic Triumph,” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David M. Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 83–103; Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 107–1 1; and Staley in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 249–51.


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and lord. Maidstone’s account, which is far more detailed than that found in the Westminster Chronicle, elaborately plays with this drama of courtship and reconciliation between two magnificent figures, the well-appointed wife and the kingly husband. He records for Richard (and for posterity) a picture of the king as frozen in perpetual youth, describing him as Paris, Troilus, Absalom, and Solomon simultaneously and New Troy as the site of bounty. In putting together such a set of examples, Maidstone most likely intended to instruct as well as to praise his prince, implicitly urging him to maintain control by maintaining a wisdom those earlier figures did not possess. He thereby oªers Richard a portrait of himself as triumphing over both the powers of time and of rebellion. Moreover, he does so in a way that is emphatically ceremonial, formal, and hieratic, at a far remove from the festive mode that characterized the earlier addresses of Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Gower. Richard’s attention to the details of spectacle as evincing the nature of his regality was also a key feature of the 1390 Smithfield tournament, which occurred early in this period of royal image making. Though power was certainly at stake throughout the period, the figuration of power was an equally urgent issue. In order to understand the reasons that lay behind Richard’s increasing appropriation of a public language of power, we must take into account one other event: the return of John of Gaunt to England in 1389 at King Richard’s request. The duke had, of course, been absent for three years; at his departure, his relationship with his nephew had been at a particularly low ebb.13 Things were markedly diªerent when he returned, and during the last decade of his life he maintained his status as the king’s close adviser and as a diplomat possessing unparalleled knowledge of the world of European aªairs. This is not to paint a simple portrait of a complicated political intelligence, however, whose care for his son’s fortunes was as continuous as his concern for English regal prestige. Richard’s response to the Appellants’ threat to his regality—and a broadening of courtly address to include purposes and themes that might also serve Lancastrian ends —must be considered in light of John of Gaunt’s role in the production of late-fourteenth-century English culture. Gaunt’s power and wealth were second only to the king’s, but for most of his life, he had been in search of a kingdom, a dynasty he might hand on to his oldest legitimate son, Henry of Derby. His career is a history of attempts, both military and diplomatic, in France and Spain to realize ambitions that were al13. For details, see Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 301–3; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 87–1 10.


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ways frustrated by bad weather, bad planning, contemporary events, or parliamentary intractability. And his reputation at home and abroad had risen and fallen as wildly as his political fortunes. Rumors about his ambitions continually circulated. At various times, he was thought to wish to secure the crown of England for his heirs, and as far back as 1376, he was linked to plans to alienate Aquitaine as a way of finessing the king of England’s unwillingness to pay feudal homage to the king of France. If during the 1370s and 1380s John of Gaunt had been accused of badly concealed ambition and the crude use of power, by 1389 the complexities of his situation seemed to provide him with new or more subtle ways of expressing his views about and desire for dominance. Rather than question his loyalty to King Richard, it seems more important to understand how his attention to Richard’s status and his lifelong focus upon that of his son and heir might have served to influence the historical record that we have of the period, its expression in courtly culture, and its eªect upon our broader understanding of the literature of the late fourteenth century. There is, of course, much work devoted to John of Gaunt. No one who considers him can help but be indebted to the biographies by Sydney Armitage-Smith and Anthony Goodman and to Simon Walker’s study of the Lancastrian a‹nity. But we should also recall Elizabeth Salter’s insistence that in John of Gaunt we might find a figure of literary patronage whose territorial domain stretched over England. Salter’s work on Gaunt has focused upon his enormous wealth, far-flung power, and family network, which linked him to other families of cultural importance in the period. As she points out, the Lancastrian holdings describe a map of the kingdom.14 I would like to use Salter’s observations as a starting point for considering the ways in which John of Gaunt’s political intelligence, patriotism, family pride, and personal imperialism worked to influence the period during which Richard sought to create an image for himself. I believe that the duke was, during those same years, seeking to create an image for his son, Henry Bolingbroke, the earl of Derby—the man who had been knighted with Richard and whose career shadowed, in all sorts of curious ways, that of his king and cousin. For John of Gaunt it was not a question of divided loyalty but of a mutually enriching—or exploitative—series of moves. We are increasingly familiar with the impulses of Lancastrian historiography and the degree to which they have influenced our own perceptions. In the first 14. Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 60–63, 68, as well as Elizabeth Salter, “The Alliterative Revival I” and “The Alliterative Revival II,” Modern Philology 64 (1966): 146–50 and 233–37.


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half of his Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, K. B. McFarlane has made a strong case for Henry of Derby’s deliberate shaping not simply of English events but also of English history. McFarlane argues that Bolingbroke was motivated by opportunism and guided by a shrewd political intelligence that allowed him to capitalize upon Richard’s weaknesses. He could then construct a historical record of Richard’s last years as turbulent and unpopular. Barron has underlined the importance of McFarlane’s work by studying the “record” of Richard’s unpopularity. She eªectively destroys the simple binarism of Lancastrian-produced history, whereby Henry in his heroic simplicity dispels the ornate tyranny of the feckless and unpopular Richard.15 Michael Wilks has further argued that the process of deposition was set in motion several years before the event by Thomas Arundel, who saw in Henry a more likely scourge for Lollardy than Richard.16 Studies of the reign of Richard II are, consequently, particularly attentive to his deposition. Richard’s life—as written according to those Lancastrian principles of historiography that Paul Strohm has recently scrutinized— seems to trace a clearly defined arc, a fall for which Richard himself bears much responsibility.17 But is there reason to think that the desire to create a textual record of Richard’s lapses that we tend to associate with Henry IV and his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, began with Henry’s accession to the throne? Is there not another possibility—a textual “campaign” waged not necessarily against Richard but for Henry of Derby at this early date, and by one of the most experienced political figures of the century, John of Gaunt? A situation emerged early in 1390 that may well have grown increasingly uneasy as Richard himself grew older and perhaps more canny and less trusting. The year itself is rich in historical events that suggest the ways in which power was being negotiated, now that Richard had declared his majority.18 In the January parliament of that year, Richard sought to address the Commons’s complaint about the negative eªect the practice of livery and maintenance had upon 15. Caroline M. Barron, “The Deposition of Richard II,” in Politics and Crisis in FourteenthCentury England, ed. John Taylor and Wendy Childs (Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1990), 132–49. 16. Wilks, “Thomas Arundel of York.” 17. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne. I seek to push the process of legitimation that Strohm analyzes back into the early 1390s and to implicate John of Gaunt as the ultimate author of the project. 18. Stow, “Richard II in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” pays much attention to the January parliament of that year. See also R. L. Storey, “Liveries and Commissions of the Peace, 1388–90,” in The Reign of Richard II, ed. DuBoulay and Barron, 131–52. For a detailed account of the year as well as the parliament, in addition to the Rolls of Parliament, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 410–55, which includes the statutes that were published in May after the parliament ended (Statutes of the Realm [London, 1810; repr., London: Dawsons, 1963], 2:68–75).


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county justice, to rea‹rm the conservative social impulses of the Cambridge parliament of 1388, and to confirm his grandfather’s earlier statute against provisors, which identified the English church as a benefice of the king and not of the pope. He also appointed the duke of Lancaster to be the duke of Aquitaine for life, to hold the gift from Richard himself (as king of France) and his heirs. The text of the parliament seems designed to oªer an image of Richard as central to English order and prosperity: its laborers, knights, churchmen, and lords all derive status from the king’s power.19 Both R. L. Storey and George Stow have suggested that the picture of royal command was an illusion. If so, it was a deliberately thought-out and executed illusion that dominates the o‹cial record of the parliament. The chancellor’s opening remarks served to announce that the king is no longer the creature of others. Thus William Wickham, bishop of Winchester, stressed Richard’s coming of age, his desire to govern his people in “quiete, pees, & tranquillite, droit & justice,” his awareness that England was surrounded by enemies (and, consequently, its need for strong treaties), and his abiding concern for the Commons’s request for laws and statutes that would ensure peace in the realm. During the remainder of the year, Richard appeared equally intent upon creating a public identity for himself. He was perhaps aided by his uncle, whose cares in this year would have been double, for at about the same time Henry of Derby also began to distinguish himself not only from the former Appellants but also from Richard himself. If, in fact, the duke of Lancaster’s is the concealed intelligence behind some of the events of 1390, it makes sense that so many of them can be understood as manifestations of chivalric noblesse oblige. The duke’s concern for royal power during the 1370s (directly after the Good Parliament); his animosity toward Peter de la Mare, speaker for Commons during that parliament; his highhandedness during the events of the early 1380s; and even the suggestion that he might have “commissioned” the Chandos Herald’s biography of the Black Prince as a way of reminding the young Richard of his father’s chivalry are all signs of a political character that is less manipulative than feudal, chivalric, and perhaps imperialistic.20 John of Gaunt’s biographers stress his devotion to the ideals of

19. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 64–66, discusses Richard’s public opposition to the practice of livery and maintenance during the two years following the Merciless Parliament as an elaborate performance designed to woo parliamentary Commons with issues of public order. 20. J. J. N. Palmer, “Froissart et le Héraut Chandos,” Le moyen âge 88 (1982): 276–77. See Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 57. Hanna, London Literature, doubts this attribution.


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chivalry, his thorough allegiance to a language of privilege that was a common tongue among men of his breeding throughout Europe in the late fourteenth century. After the steely political acts of 1387 and 1388 and 1389’s apparently quiescent calm, 1390—with its tournaments and battles —seems a return to the world so beloved by Froissart, its most famous chronicler. In April and May, three French knights celebrated the truce between France and England by inviting the best English knights to a great tournament at St. Inglevert. Their defense of French chivalry was unmatched, and the grandeur of the tournament served to advertise French civilization. Froissart described the tournament in great detail, and it is also mentioned by the Monk of Westminster.21 (After touching on the tournament at St. Inglevert, the Monk goes on to lament the tribute exacted by the Saracens in Turkey and to describe a tournament at Smithfield given by Richard in early May and the plans for another to be held in October of that same year.) The most elaborate account of 1390—the two parliaments, jousts, outbreak of plague, goings and comings of the king and nobles—is that found in the Westminster Chronicle. What seems especially curious, however, about its version of events is a half-submerged story about Henry of Derby, the main part of which is quite literally marginal to the principal narrative. Henry of Derby first enters the narrative for 1390 on May 4, when he and his companions left for the coast in hopes of aiding the Christians under siege by the Saracens in Africa. He remained in Calais from May 13 to June 5, but he was unable to get a safe-conduct from the king of France and so returned to England.22 Several pages later, after recounting matters dealing with the king and his business, there is a pointing hand in the Westminster Chronicle with a note saying, “in isto loco scilicet viij.die Augusti, processus comitis Derbeye inscriberetur. Vide infra ad tale signum o+o.”23 L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, the editors of the Westminster Chronicle, record this account as one of the sources collected, used, and inserted into the Monk’s main narrative. This is by no means the only such source; indeed, one of the values of the chronicle lies in its author’s (or authors’) assiduous use of written source material.24 In the Historia Anglicana, Thomas Walsingham drew

21. See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 432. The English chroniclers are brief, probably because the French knights won the day. Froissart is far more enthusiastic. 22. Ibid., 434–37. 23. Ibid., 444 n. a. 24. Ibid., 444–49; see also John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 86–88.


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upon the same source (which, Hector and Harvey suggest, may be the roll of the marshal of the Teutonic Knights), but he compresses several pages of description into a shortish paragraph. Henry Knighton also mentions the expedition, saying that its success brought joy to all Christians.25 The account itself places the earl in the foreground, underlining his bravery, his success in battle, his command of others, and the regard in which he is held by his foreign peers. Despite the chroniclers’ frequent suspicion of the duke of Lancaster and criticism of his attitude toward the church, a history that could only serve to magnify the house of Lancaster is eªectively “read” into the semio‹cial records of the history of England. As his editors point out in reference to another entry, the Monk of Westminster was well informed, because both Thomas of Woodstock and John of Gaunt and their households had long-standing connections with Westminster Abbey. Highly placed people gave him information, or bits of information, that he was able to elaborate upon in his account of events. It therefore seems likely that someone in the duke of Lancaster’s household saw fit to provide an account of Henry’s exploits in Prussia, exploits that far outshine the manifestation of French chivalry at St. Inglevert and even the display of Richard’s power and magnificence at the Smithfield tournament of that same year. As the account was inserted into what had already been written, the Monk suggests not only his methods of compilation but also a desire to shape history by shaping the perception of its events. Henry thereby stands out as a potential hero, as a man who fights real battles and not merely tournaments, a defender of the faith against pagans, a commander of men. The chivalric repute that he won earlier that year at St. Inglevert is realized, from the perspective of chronicle history, in the success of his expedition.26 That the entire expedition was financed in great part by the indemnity his father had gained from renouncing his claim to the Castilian throne is not a part of the record. Nor is the extraordinarily luxurious manner of Henry’s self-presentation abroad mentioned, for Henry’s every move during the expedition was designed to announce his position, heritage, and wealth.27 This expedition became a key part of Henry’s own personal myth, for late in 25. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 444–45 n. 1. See Riley, ed., Historia Anglicana, 2:197–98, and Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 536–37. 26. See F. R. H. DuBoulay, “Henry of Derby’s Expedition to Prussia, 1390–91 and 1392,” in The Reign of Richard II, ed. DuBoulay and Barron, 155, for remarks about Henry’s success at St. Inglevert. 27. For the wardrobe accounts of the expedition, see L. T. Smith, ed., Expedition to Prussia and the Holy Land Made by Henry Earl of Derby in the Years 1390–91 and 1392–93, Camden New Series 52 (Westminster, 1894).


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his life he described this time with the Teutonic Knights in the battle against the Lithuanians as a “reyse.”28 As F. R. H. DuBoulay notes, the word was “virtually a term of art: the Reise, the Journey, the ‘blessed viage’ of English texts which refer to late medieval crusades.” Later, in 1392, Henry returned to Prussia, but he was no longer needed because of local political negotiations. He therefore went on to Prague, Vienna, Venice, Rhodes, and Jerusalem and returned through Cyprus, Venice, Milan, Paris, Calais, and England. The journey to Jerusalem was likewise incorporated into his personal myth, as Shakespeare’s picture of the dying king indicates. Though Henry and his archbishop, Thomas Arundel, certainly sought to create a portrait of Lancastrian kingship after the deposition of Richard II, the careful promotion of Henry’s exploits after John of Gaunt returned to England late in 1389 seems to indicate that someone was interested in creating a particular image for him at a time when Richard also was a young man (though still a man without heirs of his body). DuBoulay asserts that Henry’s life was characterized by a rivalry with the duke of Gloucester. Might we not, though, come to think of a very early awareness that Henry must be fitted into the historical record as a leader, as a champion of Christian chivalry, and as a serious person—when Henry himself is a rather hazily described figure in the drama of English history? He, of course, had been an Appellant. But as Goodman has pointed out, his father was not in England during this period, and it is unclear whether he would have joined with the Appellants had his father been there to advise him. In any case, he seems to have joined the Appellants later and not as zealously, for he, with Richard, pleaded for the life of Simon Burley.29 His desire to defend the Christians in Africa (which was frustrated by the king of France in June 1390), together with his venture against the pagan Lithuanians, semi-o‹cially marks him as another sort of figure altogether: not a man who would challenge his king, but a force in the battle against wrong. The nature of the complicated networks that linked magnate families would have encouraged the sort of dense conversation I am postulating here. To an already existing tension between Richard and the Arundel family—and between Richard and his uncle the duke of Gloucester—what John of Gaunt contributed on his return seems pacific, politically astute, and calculating. Wilks has pro28. I am drawing here upon DuBoulay, “Henry of Derby’s Expedition,” 160, 167. Chaucer uses the term “reyse” as a verb in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales to describe the Knight’s activities. Like Henry of Derby, the Knight has “reysed” in Prussia and Lithuania (CT I.54). 29. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 337–40; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 144–47; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 153–56.


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posed that throughout the 1390s, Thomas Arundel sought to move toward a principle of dualism in regard to the distinction between ecclesiastical and royal power.30 To his attempts to define ecclesiastical power as belonging to its own sphere of religious concerns, Richard himself stood in the way, maintaining the centrality of the king and the inclusive nature of the regal sphere. Wilks articulates a “conversation” between Richard and Arundel that was less conversation than struggle for power, one that Wilks sees coming to its conclusion in the deposition of the king, which was also Arundel’s triumph. Wilks goes so far as to suggest that the Twelve Conclusions might well have been planted by Arundel himself as a means of forcing Richard to return from Ireland and accede to his views about the gravity of the “religious” situation in England. When Richard, in a sense, turned on the man who sought to manipulate him by refusing to persecute these Lollards, Arundel, in collusion with the pope, saw the need to support a diªerent type of king.31 Though Richard removed Thomas Arundel from the see of Canterbury soon after he declared himself of age and executed his brother Richard for treason in 1397, his victory was short-lived, for Thomas would inhabit Canterbury during the reign of Henry IV and influence English history in ways that we are only now beginning to understand.32 Despite the tantalizing hints about Queen Anne’s interest in some parts of the program associated with John Wyclif (such as the translation of the scriptures into English), we cannot answer the question of the degree of Richard’s sympathy for Wycli‹te views or for those who held them. We still must count the Lollards as participants in the political machinations of the 1390s, however.33 This in no way disparages Richard’s piety or orthodoxy but instead points to an atmosphere where many views about regal power and duty not only obtained but also were given written or oral expression. Moreover, John of Gaunt, who had no sympathy for Wyclif ’s views on the Eucharist, had nonetheless used and supported Wyclif during a crucial point in both men’s careers. With his funda30. Wilks, “Thomas Arundel of York.” 31. Wilks’s argument is dense and fascinating, and I am hardly doing it justice. Regardless of whether one agrees with Wilks’s ultimate reading of Thomas Arundel, he nonetheless oªers a way of thinking about the internal politics of the period that puts the events of 1399 into a continuum. 32. See Hanna, “The Di‹culty of Ricardian Prose Translation: The Case of the Lollards,” Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1990): 319–39; Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy; and Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64. 33. For important studies of the Lollards and the politics of the late fourteenth century, see Margaret Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition, 1381–1431,” Past and Present 17 (1960): 1–44; Hudson, Premature Reformation; and McFarlane, John Wycliffe. Rex, The Lollards, argues against the Lollards’ importance.


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mental belief in the king’s power—a view that complemented his disbelief in the church’s having any civil power—Wyclif ’s political writings could be described as potentially attractive to a king or to a king’s brother or uncle searching for a means of strengthening the monarchy.34 On the other hand, Gaunt was also a‹liated with the Arundel family, and Thomas Arundel’s decision to back Henry of Derby when both were in exile in Paris late in the 1390s could not have been a sudden move. The duke of Lancaster was neither a heretic nor an Appellant. He was uncle to the king of England and father to a man he wished to see occupy a position of power he himself had never fully achieved. His actions during the first five years of the decade suggest that he was trying to clear a path by which Henry of Derby would step into history. If we look at 1390 by concentrating our focus upon John of Gaunt, we can begin to frame new questions about the nature of his ambitions and about the direction Richard’s actions might take. From the hints within the chronicles (which are hardly objective historical accounts of events), the duke appears to be helping create images for his two “sons” that would further his own designs in the long run. As I have suggested, Henry of Derby acquired a diªerent sort of appeal once his father returned. Though he had always been known for his prowess, the image of the Christian knight, serious leader, and magnificent prince came to replace the picture of the Appellant. Moreover, he was out of the country for extended periods in 1390–91 and 1392; whatever Richard may have thought of his cousin’s stance in 1388 might have dissipated when he was absent.35 Nor does Henry’s knightly ability bring him into the spotlight during October 1390, when Richard was said to triumph during the first day’s matches at the Smithfield tournament. The danger of David upstaging Saul was thereby removed. But John of Gaunt was also interested in the king’s own image. In July 1390, when Richard was at Leicester with him, the duke raised the subject of John of Northampton. In 1383, John of Northampton—whose patron was John of Gaunt—had become entangled in the factionalism of city politics and had been imprisoned for trying to overturn London’s mayoral elections. (As I noted in Chapter 1, Thomas Usk played a key role in bringing down his old master in this city drama.) The duke had been able to have him released, but Northampton had been banned from ever appearing in London. In 1390, the duke requested 34. See Wilks, “Reformatio Regni.” 35. Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, 2:xxiv–xxvi, also suggests this point.


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that John of Northampton and his associates might return to London and resume their trades. On one level, this is an obvious attempt by a powerful man to demonstrate his authority by reinstating a man supposedly under his protection. On another, it is a story about a lesson in a certain type of kingship. According to the Monk of Westminster, Richard replied that it was not in his power: “non est in potestate mea.” His uncle responded, “On the contrary . . . you could do that and more. God forbid that your power should be so cramped (‘vestra potestas esset in tantum restricta’) that you could not extend grace (‘graciam’) to your liege subjects when the circumstances call for such action.” 36 The Monk’s next sentence captures Richard’s quick grasp of Gaunt’s message about royal power: “At this the King hesitated for a moment and said, ‘If I can do what you say, there are others who have suªered great hardships; so that I know what to do for my own friends who are now overseas.’” Though Richard successfully granted Northampton the right to enter London and later, in December 1390, granted him a full pardon, the “friends who are now overseas” (especially Robert de Vere) could not be helped. Nonetheless, the advice John of Gaunt oªered must have suggested to Richard that he was not as bound as he might have thought. The king’s “non est in potestate mea” was met with the assertion that royal power should not be so restricted, that the king’s “grace” was his to extend to his subjects. Even as his cousin was displaying his might and wealth in Prussia, where heralds announced his every move and where painted wooden shields, made for the occasion, hung outside each place where he lodged on his journey, Richard prepared for the great tournament at Smithfield where he proclaimed his own livery of the White Hart. As clerk of the king’s works, Geoªrey Chaucer oversaw the construction of the scaªolding.37 The tournament has received a good deal of attention from scholars, because there Richard first promoted the livery of the White Hart as his, and the badges of the White Hart became symbols of his own personal livery and maintenance. Livery and maintenance had, of course, been the very evils supposedly redressed by the January parliament of that year, when the king had banned both and restricted the judi36. Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 440–41. Knighton mentions the king’s visit to Leicester but does not recount this conversation. See Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 534. 37. Stow, “Richard II in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” makes eªective use of Lindenbaum’s “Smithfield Tournament” to suggest that at this point, Gower began to pull away from Richard and toward Bolingbroke—that, as a city man, he objected to the subtext of elite courtly power Lindenbaum detects in the tournament. For the tournament, see Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 451.


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cial powers of the aristocracy and their liveried followers. No provisions had been made for the enforcement of the ordinance, though, and late in the same year, baronial representatives seem to have been easily reinserted into the shire commissions that oversaw local “justice.”38 Richard was hardly the pawn of John of Gaunt. Nor did John of Gaunt “invent” the Smithfield tournament, which was one of a series of events marking the truce with France.39 According to the Monk of Westminster, the Smithfield tournament had been “promised” to the duke of Guelders as a chance to see the king attired for combat. The duke was not able to return at the time appointed— but the tournament did not need him in the audience. There are at least two other important factors to consider when exploring Richard’s handling of the Smithfield tournament, with its panoply of sovereignty. First, much evidence links Richard’s love of the elaborate public displays of kingship to the influence of the public theater created by the French monarchy. England and France kept a close eye on one another, and information about the doings of the two royal houses was conveyed back and forth across the English Channel.40 Second, Richard’s closest advisers seem to have been trained in civil law, which (unlike the common law) emphasized the scope of monarchical power. From all we know about Richard, he was a highly self-conscious king, one deeply interested in his English past and in the international rituals of monarchy. Three days after the tournament began, Richard and Anne observed the feast of the Translation of St. Edward on October 13 by joining the monks of Westminster Abbey for the observances. During high mass, Richard sat in the choir wearing his crown; the queen sat wearing her crown in the north side of the choir.41 The day, which is but one small example of Richard’s attention to the details of his iconic function, thus served many purposes: it displayed the king as an icon, as a pious prince, and as the heir to St. Edward. The living theater of such events is frozen in the commissioned portraits of the king—the Westminster portrait and the Wilton Diptych. Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore John of Gaunt’s presence in England, his enormously improved relations with his nephew, and 38. Storey, “Liveries and Commissions.” 39. See Lindenbaum, “Smithfield Tournament,” 9. 40. See especially Saul, Richard II, 349–53, 249, for a discussion of French influence as well as for the eªect of the language of political theory to be found in civil law that Richard might have absorbed from his close advisers. For the importance of civil law, see especially Jones, Royal Policy, 131–54, and Gwynn, English Austin Friars, chap. 4. 41. See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 450. Saul, Richard II, 340, also mentions this incident.


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his heightened political fortunes. Moreover, it was the very subject of the king’s regality or prerogative that had occasioned words between the duke and his nephew in 1385 (see Chapter 2 above).42 The duke of Lancaster had been made duke of Aquitaine for life, but the title did not pass on to his heirs. Between 1390, when he was granted the title, and 1394, when the inheritance of Aquitaine was refused, John of Gaunt must have felt himself in a position of enormous potential power. He was, of course, Richard’s closest adviser during this period, the adviser most actively involved in the truce negotiations with France. Insofar as his personal ambitions were concerned, not only did he have hopes of being able to pass the title of Aquitaine on to his son and found the dynasty he had been trying to establish for most of his life, but the English succession was, at this point, an open question as well. Michael Bennett’s discovery of a charter dating from late 1376 or early 1377— probably a copy of a copy enrolled in chancery—in which Edward III entailed the crown upon his male heirs refocuses attention upon Gaunt’s long-range ambitions.43 The letter privileges John of Gaunt before Roger (the son of Philippa, who was daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence) and Edmund Mortimer, the earl of March. Edward’s care was for the succession if his grandson, Richard of Bordeaux, died while a minor; Edward thus designated his next living son, John, as Richard’s successor. But as Richard and Anne were childless, the question remained important. The continuator of the Eulogium reported that in 1385, Richard named Roger Mortimer as his heir.44 Nonetheless, according to the terms of Edward III’s charter, Henry, the earl of Derby (Gaunt’s only legitimate male heir), stood in direct line of the throne.45 The story reported a few pages later in the Eulogium—that in the January parliament of 1394, Gaunt had tried to secure the succession for Henry—has, until now, been given little credence. In light of Bennett’s discovery, however, the account should be taken seriously as one more sign of the degree of anxiety produced by the duke’s power and dynastic ambitions, ambitions that were, in fact, grounded in his own father’s 42. On Gaunt’s sense of prerogative, see Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies, 36–52. 43. Michael J. Bennett, “Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376–1471,” English Historical Review 1 13 (1998): 580–607. Bennett oªers a close reading of political tensions and personalities in both Edward’s and Richard’s courts. 44. Frank Scott Haydon, ed., Eulogium (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 3:361. Bennett, “Edward III’s Entail,” 595, also discusses this entry. 45. As J. M. W. Bean puts it in From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), “discussions whether Gaunt actually sought the throne or whether the earl of March was the recognized heir presumptive are beside the point; a coup such as Gaunt’s son achieved in 1399 had never been inconceivable” (78).


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wishes.46 The duke led the English negotiations for peace with France in Amiens in 1392; Henry of Derby accompanied him on that mission. Soon afterward Henry made his second trip to Prussia. If Gaunt seems everywhere for a few years—advising the king, conducting commissions in England, pursuing his own business, negotiating in France—Henry seems a prince whose education was in process. What is more, that education was being conducted in full view of the world, or at least of the parts of the world that noted and recorded events of state. What Henry of Derby did not have was a court, and John of Gaunt would have recognized that lack with the fierce understanding of the language of power only available to the son of Edward III and the brother of the Black Prince. In particular, Edward the Black Prince, the older brother of John of Gaunt, had established during his years in Gascony a court whose repute far outlasted the prince himself. That court, with its elaborate ceremonies, lavish spectacles, and splendor, quite possibly influenced the increasingly formal and ritualistic turn that the English court took during the later years of the 1390s.47 John of Gaunt would not have had to hear about the magnificence of his brother’s court (as Richard did), for he witnessed both the military prowess of the Black Prince and his eªorts to establish himself in both France and Spain. Even as the Black Prince began to decline in health and military and diplomatic successes, John of Gaunt began his own rise to wealth and power. With his brilliant marriage in 1359 to Blanche of Lancaster (an alliance that his father, Edward III, had arranged) and the unexpected death of his father-in-law, Henry, duke of Lancaster, in 1361, John of Gaunt had the controlling influence over the greatest English magnate inheritance.48 In his maturity, the duke of Lancaster had as close to a royal court as a man not quite a king could ever hope to achieve because he had recognized early in his rise to power that courts consisted of more than retainers. They were complicated nodes of desire and influence as well as centers of culture expressing or magnifying the power that dispensed the endless favors holding men together in a‹nity.49 What was thereby “bought” in a process of exchange that describes 46. See Haydon, ed., Eulogium, 3:369–70. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 77–78, gives more credence to the story than most scholars have in the past. 47. See Saul, Richard II, 344–45, for descriptions. 48. See Goodman, John of Gaunt, chap. 3, as well as p. 39. 49. For an analysis of the internal organization of the duchy of Lancaster under John of Gaunt, see Robert Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster (London: The Chancellor and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1953), vol. 1, chaps. 6 and 7. As Somerville illustrates, Gaunt’s holdings were


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“courtship” was both the crude power of might and the more carefully disguised power of repute. Just as the prince was courted by men in need of his protection, favors, and powers, so he courted those whom he wished to bind to him by his dispense. The language used to express the frequently hard-eyed relationships made between men who truly understood exigency may have been the language of love, but the end was somewhat more di‹cult to define. Michael Clanchy has described the way in which terms like “to make love,” “love boon,” “lover,” or “friend” were used to describe purely feudal and political relationships in the legal documents of the early Plantagenets.50 Bargains sealed by kisses, such as we see in the arrangement made between Sir Gawain and Bercilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, were signifying components of the language of feudal power from very early times. Similarly, the a‹nity John of Gaunt wove around himself, which Walker has so painstakingly analyzed, may have been described in the language of love but was finally about power—power that the duke had to retain or lose the ability to attract others through favors, land, and money.51 His purchasing power, like his reputation, grew with use. Thus his eªort in 1390 to win the reparation of John of Northampton was at once disinterested and profoundly self-interested because the two forms of regard could not really be separated. What purpose would there be in severing a bond between the self and another that reified both men’s identities? Courts are composed of more than one type of relationship, however, and patronage itself comes in varieties that variously magnify the power of the center. From an early period, John of Gaunt seems to have collected about him some men who can be loosely described as men of letters. There is, of course, an old tradition linking Chaucer to John of Gaunt. Not only did Chaucer receive an annuity from Gaunt from 1374 onward, but the Book of the Duchess also celebrates the bereft “lover” of Blanche of Lancaster. It is a public poem in the sense that it commemorates a great and public lady and does so in ways that are designed to present an image of the duke. Lee Patterson has argued that the central historical problem the poem poses concerns John of Gaunt and the benefit he derived from Chaucer’s so extensive that their administration demanded a method of organization not unlike that of England itself. For studies of the late medieval English court, see Green, Poets and Princepleasers; Eberle, “Politics of Courtly Style”; and Vale, Princely Court. Vale’s valuable study ranges over Europe, with numerous cameo discussions of the economics, organization, and culture of the late-fourteenthcentury English court. 50. Clanchy, “Law and Love,” 48. 51. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity; see particularly 94–1 16, where Walker discusses the realities of the a‹nity and the relatively light hold such ties seem to have had on the feelings of those involved.


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representation of him as the Black Knight.52 Patterson speculates that the very image of Gaunt as young and feckless—or as young and private, or as disappointed— provides an implicit “defense of privilege” by presenting the second most powerful man in England in such human terms. John of Gaunt was hardly disappointed in love, but he certainly was and remained frustrated by his ambition. The Book of the Duchess poses another (and equally hard to answer) historical question, too. Was John of Gaunt concerned enough with the business of “courtship” to create or to patronize figures of known literary or intellectual acumen? There are a number of ways in which we can connect the duke to what Armitage-Smith has described as “that early humanism which was beginning to refine English society.”53 Gaunt, of course, figures prominently in Froissart’s Chronicle, and his well-known interest in chivalric history prompted Walter of Peterborough of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire to dedicate a poem on the Spanish campaign of 1367 to him. Walter did not get the reward for which he hoped, but the hope itself suggests that others saw Gaunt as a potential patron of learning. He was a patron of Corpus Christi at Cambridge, and both his son Henry Beaufort and his grandson Henry V attended Queen’s College, Oxford. His daughter Philippa of Lancaster, the queen of Portugal, was known for her careful education of her children; moreover, Gower’s Confessio Amantis was translated for her into Portuguese by an English canon at Lisbon.54 Henry IV was frequently mentioned as interested in books and music. During the campaign of 1390–91, he had six minstrels in his pay, and in 1392 he also took with him six musicians.55 At least two and possibly three of the Bohun manuscripts are linked to Henry of Derby and his wife, Mary de Bohun.56 He appointed the poet Scogan as tutor to his sons, who were all well educated. John Capgrave praised him for his intellectual acumen and appreciation for scholars, and his name appears on the list of principal benefactors of the Oxford University Library.57 Gower, 52. Lee Patterson, “The Disenchanted Classroom,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 538–41. 53. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 415. 54. Ibid., 413–15; May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 529. 55. L. T. Smith, ed., Expedition to Prussia, xcvi; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 156; Jeanne E. Krochalis, “The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle,” Chaucer Review 23 (1988–89): 50–78. 56. They are Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Auct. D.4.4; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum ms 381950; and Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek ms Thott. 547.4. For identification and discussions, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385 (London: Harvey Miller, 1986), 2:157–62. 57. S. H. Cavanaugh, “A Study of Books Privately Owned in England, 1300–1450” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980), 408–1 1. See also K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 22–23.


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of course, rededicated the Confessio to Henry and in 1393 received a collar from him. Gower’s tomb shows him wearing the SS collar of the Lancastrian livery.58 In 1395–96 Chaucer received gifts from Henry of Derby, and the “Complaint . . . to His Purse” was addressed to Henry as king.59 Early in his reign, Henry invited Christine de Pisan to England and kept her son for three years in England as a sign of his friendly interest in her.60 Nor should we forget Hoccleve, whose position within the Lancastrian administration is so crucial a part of his poetic identity. Henry’s genealogical links to culture and cultural production are more than attributes of his father’s political ambitions, though. His mother, Blanche of Lancaster, was the daughter of Henry of Lancaster—knight, soldier, politician, and writer—and his wife, Mary de Bohun, was from a family associated with the revival of English manuscript culture. Even as a man newly married, Gaunt had used the occasion of his and Blanche’s progress to London as an occasion for public theater. He held jousts along the way to London to entertain his knights, ending with a tournament that brought the citizens of London into the royal celebrations.61 Along with his dashing approach to the business of warfare, his delight in such chivalric “swashbuckling” indicates his consciousness of the ways in which a public identity might be performed. Similarly, and for reasons that were certainly political and may have also been private, Gaunt patronized John Wyclif who, along with Chaucer, casts a long shadow over the last quarter of the century (on this, see Chapter 2, above). In the 1390s John of Gaunt recruited musicians from northern France for his English chapels, an act that Andrew Wathey links to Gaunt’s ambitions as a European prince—ambitions that certainly extended to his children and the ways in which he used them to create a Lancastrian dynasty.62 Chaucer is the most prominent of those authors whose names are linked to Gaunt’s. Thomas Speght, whose sixteenth-century edition of the works of Chaucer had such an influence upon the “renaissance” Chaucer, credited 58. On this, see Doris Fletcher, “The Lancastrian Collar of Esses: Its Origins and Transformation Down the Centuries,” in The Age of Richard II, ed. James L. Gillespie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 191–204. 59. Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer: Life-Records, 275; Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 223. See Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, chap. 4, for a discussion of Henry’s kingly interest in the poet Chaucer. See also the Epilogue below. 60. See Cavanaugh, “Study of Books Privately Owned,” 41 1, and Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 92. 61. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 35. 62. Andrew Wathey, “John of Gaunt, John Pycard, and the Amiens Negotiations of 1392,” in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 29–42.


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Blanche of Lancaster with commissioning Chaucer’s poem to the Virgin, An ABC. While there is no hard manuscript evidence for such an ascription, it is possible that Speght had access to a manuscript owned by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Blanche’s grandson.63 There have been several other attempts to create a special relationship between Chaucer and Gaunt that Derek Pearsall rightly, I think, has dismissed as romantic or fantastic. Pearsall disparages eªorts to find pervasive patterns of allusions to the duke in each of Chaucer’s poems or to turn what was a medieval a‹nity (or annuity) into a modern or intimate relationship.64 Leaving aside the issue of a special relationship between someone like John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Geoªrey Chaucer, esquire, Chaucer nonetheless appears in the Lancastrian registers and in contexts that seem especially significant.65 There are three references to Chaucer in Gaunt’s surviving registers that possibly shed light on Gaunt’s interest in maintaining an “a‹nity” composed of men of a variety of strengths, both intellectual and martial.66 The first is dated January 20, 1375, and records annuities to the Poitevin Sir Jean Manburni, who was retained by Gaunt from 1374 to 1386; Geoªrey Chaucer; Sir Thomas Doweville; Robert de Plessington of Lancashire, Gaunt’s attorney at the exchequer, who was also chief of Thomas of Woodstock’s council; William Welhome, another attorney; Juan Gutierez, dean of Segovia; Sir Oton de Granson of Savoy, who was both a knight and a poet; Sir Jean Grivère, another Poitevin; William de Wynceby and William Degher, chaplains; Sir William Croyser, who had advised Gaunt for many years; and Ralph Ergham, his chancellor.67 On November 8, 1379, an entry records payments to another diverse group of people, among whom are Arnald Fauconer, Gaunt’s falconer; Juan Gutierez; Gaunt’s daughters Philippa and Elizabeth; Geoªrey Chaucer; two Davids, both chaplains who sang

63. See Laila Z. Gross’s notes to An ABC in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1076. 64. Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 83–84. 65. Chaucer’s son, Thomas, also received annual grants from John of Gaunt. See Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 276–82; Bean, From Lord to Patron, 262; and Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 266. 66. These references —which there are abbreviated to pinpoint Chaucer—are cited in chap. 10 of Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer: Life-Records. There is also the grant of June 8, 1374, in which both Geoªrey and Philippa Chaucer are mentioned. See Sydney Armitage-Smith, ed., John of Gaunt’s Register, Camden Third Series 20, 21 (London: Royal Historical Society, 191 1), vol. 1, no. 608. 67. For the entry, see Armitage-Smith, ed., John of Gaunt’s Register, vol. 2, no. 1662; for information about the men, see Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 12, 53, 103. For more information about the organization of the duke’s household and finances, see Eleanor C. Lodge and Robert Somerville, eds., John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379–1383, Camden Third Series 56, 57 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1937), vol. 1, introduction.


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at St. Paul’s where Blanche was buried; John Grantham, dean of his chapel; two friars; Robert de Plessington; and Richard Daveler, for work on Blanche’s tomb. Still others are listed for clerical and administrative work and for attending upon him, his wife, and his daughters. On May 12, 1380, payments are recorded again for Sir Jean Manburni; Sir Jean Grivère; Oton de Granson; chaplains who sang before Blanche’s tomb; Geoªrey Chaucer; and Arnald Fauconer.68 We can make several guesses about these entries. Though the listings certainly include those who had been retained by Gaunt and members of his inner circle of administrators, they also include those who appear to be receiving fees for specific tasks. What Chaucer’s “task” was is not clear, but when his name appears, it is among names of either international significance or, possibly, cultural significance— such as Oton de Granson, whom Chaucer praised in the Complaint of Venus as “the flour of hem that make in Fraunce” (line 82). As Walker notes, the Lancastrian a‹nity included a number of figures whose “home” in England was the Lancastrian court. Their presence served to mark Gaunt’s a‹nity as cosmopolitan and his ambitions as European.69 Gaunt’s ambitions were far more than military. Though the registers certainly record Gaunt’s far-reaching network of indentures, or military relationships, they are also filled with records of gifts of money, vestments, and books to chapels; of money to chaplains; of money to Richard de Goldbourne, a hermit in Lancashire; support for the College of Our Lady at Leicester; funds to the house of the London Minoresses at Aldgate; and fees to minstrels (who could be either reciters or musicians) on the many occasions when his household lavishly entertained. One entry records his care for a religious foundation of nuns and brothers at Eton, scolding them for their reputation for laxity.70 The registers are not complete—they end in 1383—so the picture of Gaunt’s involvement in the cultural world of England and Europe during the last fifteen years of his life 68. Lodge and Somerville, eds., John of Gaunt’s Register, vol. 1, nos. 92 and 296. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only entries for people mentioned other than Chaucer. 69. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 12. See also P. Guérin, ed., “Recueil des documents concernant le Poitou contenus dans les registres de la chancellerie de France,” Archives historique du Poitou 21 (1890): 181–85; P. E. Russell, “João Fernandes Andeiro at the Court of John of Lancaster,” Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 14 (1938): 20–30; G. S. C. Swinton, “John of Swinton,” Scottish Historical Review 16 (1918–19): 261–79. 70. See Armitage-Smith, ed., John of Gaunt’s Register, vols. 1 and 2, nos. 256, 330, 332, 437, 915, 918, 949, 1017. The entries for minstrels are numerous in both registers, as are those for chaplains and clerks. For a detailed discussion of Gaunt’s patronage of the church, see “Gaunt and the Church” in Goodman, John of Gaunt, 241–71. On the importance and function of minstrels, see Pearsall, “Middle English Romance,” 39–40; and Vale, Princely Court, 292–94.


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is frustratingly speculative. But as Salter has pointed out, we could tentatively link Gaunt to several other fourteenth-century writers —Oton de Granson, Richard Maidstone, John Clanvowe, and the Gawain-poet.71 Salter’s argument is anchored by her intimate knowledge of the interconnections among baronial families and the networks of power that were woven throughout England and between England and the Continent, and it posits a diªerent dynamic driving the cultural production of late-fourteenth-century England. Rather than focusing upon cultural output radiating from a single center, the king’s court, Salter has underlined the need to understand the various courts that might well have served as centers of patronage.72 For example, Oton de Granson received annuities both from John of Gaunt and from Richard, who doubled the amount Gaunt paid. As Walker suggests, having his men in the king’s retinue added luster to Gaunt’s a‹nity, and in addition, the men themselves received extra income that the duke did not have to pay.73 The very presence of Oton de Granson’s name within the listings of Gaunt’s retainers from 1374 to 1393 suggests that from an early date, Gaunt was building a special sort of a‹nity. James Wimsatt has credited Oton de Granson with much of the cross-fertilization of French and English poetry during his lifetime, and his reputation for both chivalry and poetry was international.74 There are other writers in Gaunt’s periphery. Nicolas of Lynn presented his Kalendarium to him in 1386, a work with which Chaucer was familiar. The Carmelite confessors who formed an inner core of Gaunt’s household were also distinguished men of letters, men such as William Badby, Walter Diss, and John Kynyngham, as well as Richard Maid71. Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art, and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zieman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 68, 62; Salter, “The Alliterative Revival II,” 233, 237. In his transcripts from the Duchy of Lancaster papers, on file in the library of Magdalene College, McFarlane notes a gift of £26-13-4 to John Clanvowe (DL 28/III/3). See also Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes.” 72. See Salter, “The Alliterative Revival I” and “The Alliterative Revival II.” See also Derek Pearsall, “The Alliterative Revival: Origins and Social Backgrounds,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 34–53, who argues for a connection between the baronial courts and the cultural world of the great monasteries of the southwest Midlands. Pearsall’s argument provides important information about manuscripts and libraries that underlines the ways in which what we perceive of as separate worlds, in fact, interpenetrated and drew strength from one another. 73. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 46, 104, 108, 270. 74. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, chap. 7. See also Haldeen Braddy, Chaucer and the French Poet Graunson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), chap. 2, and Helen Phillips, “The Complaint of Venus: Chaucer and de Graunson,” in The Medieval Translator, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 123 (Binghamton, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 86–103.


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stone. The duke also provided for grammar schools and maintained poor scholars at university.75 Richard Maidstone was a fairly prominent figure in the religious and social worlds of the late fourteenth century. Like Gaunt’s most intimate spiritual advisers (and two manuscripts describe him as one of Gaunt’s confessors), Maidstone was a Carmelite. He was known for his controversy with the Lollard John Ashwardby (for which there is manuscript evidence), for a number of other works no longer extant, for the Concordia that celebrated Richard’s return to the city of London, and for his Penitential Psalms, which may have been finished either sometime around 1380, just after he completed his Bachelor of Divinity and was teaching at Oxford, or possibly a decade later.76 As I suggested earlier, the Concordia should not be seen as the script for the Londoners’ pageant but as an interpretation of what had been staged by the city for Richard. Maidstone’s address to Richard at the beginning of the Concordia also establishes the poem as a species of princely advice. He begins with Cicero’s commendation of friendship, saying that without a friend with whom one may share experiences, those experiences themselves will be without value.77 He then notes the various ties between himself and Richard: they share the same name, they are bound together by Richard’s authority over him, and they are linked through friendship. Maidstone thus ascertains that the “friendship” between them is not between equals; his inferior status is the place from which he speaks. He goes on to oªer Richard a picture of himself as led astray by gossip and as consequently estranged from his “bridal chamber,” i.e., London (Concordia, line 24). But Maidstone describes Richard as ultimately compassionate. He is not given to vengeance, despite the many wrongs he suªered during the Merciless Parliament and from London’s intransigence. Maidstone also praises Richard for his support of the church’s ancient rights (lines 33–34) and for his disdain of the ungrateful, the avaricious, the foolish, and the truculent. He then compares the young King Richard to Solomon, who in his youth was wise and benevolent. 75. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 245, 247–48, 253. 76. See the Dictionary of National Biography for Maidstone’s entry. For details of Maidstone’s relationship to Gaunt, see Valerie Edden, “The Debate Between Richard Maidstone and the Lollard Ashwordby (ca. 1390),” Carmelus 34 (1987): 1 15 n. 10. Saul, Richard II, 343 n. 61, also says that Maidstone was Gaunt’s confessor in the early 1390s. On Maidstone’s life, see C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia,” 1–14 (and 3–4 on dating the Penitential Psalms), as well as Valerie Edden, ed., Richard Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, Middle English Texts 22 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), 3, 1 1–13, who suggests that he finished the Psalms in the last decade of his life. 77. For the text, see C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia,” line 6. All subsequent citations of the Concordia refer to this edition.


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Maidstone’s depiction of Richard’s character shares certain rhetorical positions with two of Chaucer’s works, the Legend of Good Women and the Melibee. In the Legend of Good Women, Alceste warns Cupid that he is being misled by tattlers at court—“losengeours”—and that his anger at the hapless poet has less to do with reality than with the malicious tongues of those to whom he listens. (See Chapter 1 above.) And of course one of the things Chaucer has done wrong is write the Troilus, a poem supposedly against love. But as I and others have noted, Troilus and Criseyde may have more to say about princely authority—or the abrogation of it—and about Troy’s false and inflated language than it does about romantic love. Chaucer’s remarks in the Legend of Good Women about courtly speech, like those of Clanvowe in the Boke of Cupid, seem to reflect anxieties about Richard’s associates in the years just preceding the Appellants’ move against them. In the Melibee, which was probably written after the Legend of Good Women and in response to the political situation that obtained after the Merciless Parliament, Chaucer oªers a piece of advice suited to a prince who has sustained great harm and must learn how to gain control of events by gaining control of himself. Despite what he acknowledges are wrongs done to Melibee, Chaucer depicts Melibee as ultimately merciful, as a ruler who is capable of listening to prudence. Near the end of the Melibee, Chaucer expands upon his French original in ways that heighten our sense of what the language of princely advice might sound like if one were counseling a prince in the ways of mercy.78 Thanne the wiseste of hem thre answerde for hem alle and seyde, / “Sire,” quod he, “we knowen wel that we been unworthy to comen unto the court of so greet a lord and so worthy as ye been. / For we han so greetly mystaken us, and han offended and agilt in swich a wise agayn youre heigh lordshippe / that trewely we han disserved the deeth. / . . . / we submytten us to the excellence and benignitee of youre gracious lordshipe, and been redy to obeie to alle youre comandementz, / bisekynge yow that of youre merciable pitee ye wol considere oure grete repentaunce and lowe submyssioun / and graunten us foryevenesse of oure outrageous trespas and offense. / For wel we knowe that your liberal grace and mercy strecchen hem ferther into goodnesse than doon oure outrageouse giltes 78. J. Burke Severs notes that from about line 1 120 to the end of the Melibee, Chaucer translates more freely (see Severs, “The Tale of Melibeus,” in Bryan and Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues, 612n). What Chaucer embroiders onto the French text is praise.


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and trespas into wikkednesse, / al be it that cursedly and dampnablely we han agilt agayn youre heigh lordshipe. (CT VII.1815–25, emphasis added) Chaucer’s expansions (italicized above) in the passage wherein Melibee’s former enemies sue him for mercy do more than function as examples of courtly flattery. They illustrate ways in which praise can function as advice. If the Melibee were intended for Richard, as I believe it was, it provides a picture of lordship that is strategically and consciously aligned with mercy. Chaucer’s language also suggests his awareness that hierarchy itself has been violated. The references to lordship, along with the repetition of the word “outrageouse”—a word with the sort of legal ramifications that would place outrageous acts in opposition to lordship—underline his recognition of a wrong. Similarly, Maidstone praises Richard for his benevolence (Concordia, lines 40, 407), for his wisdom (line 104), for his pietas (line 407), and for his acts of mercy (lines 185–92). And in depicting Richard as merciful, Maidstone describes an event that is not mentioned in other accounts of the civic pageant. In Southwark, Maidstone says that Richard was approached by an outlaw, a murderer recently banished into exile, who prostrated himself in front of Richard’s horse and begged for mercy. Richard granted it and is praised for his gift of compassion to a miserable man. In rendering mercy to a man who had killed, Richard did no more than the Appellants had invited him to do after the Merciless Parliament; in praising him for his public act of benefaction, Maidstone remarks that the grace Richard donates or bestows will be returned to him (“Gracia quam tribuit restituatur ei”). Just as Le livre de Melibee et Prudence depicts in Melibee a man who has to be instructed in the ways of prudent rule, so Maidstone oªers hints about London that might well be seen as advisory. For example, in describing the aldermen who come out to meet Richard, Maidstone echoes Henry of Huntingdon’s description of London as Rome (a portrayal that could also be found in Andrew Horn’s compilation of texts for the city): “Iure senatorio urbs hiis regitur quasi Roma / Hiisque preest maior, quem populus legerit” (Concordia, lines 73–74).79 Like Rome, the city is ruled according to senatorial law and by a mayor who is elected by the people. Earlier, Maidstone had announced the king’s coming to the city by saying that he who took the city’s “libertates solitas” away has now returned to give them back in greater number (“plures,” lines 43–44). Here his 79. C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia,” makes this ascription in his note to these lines.


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description serves to mark London’s singular position. If Richard is being reminded of his compassion, he is also being reminded of London’s ancient and well-articulated identity, an identity to be found in Horn’s books (which, as noted above, also contained the epitome of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor that served Gower so well in the Confessio Amantis). Maidstone’s Concordia celebrates both Richard’s regality and London’s own dignity and civic traditions. Its o‹cials and guildsmen in their splendid clothing, all hierarchically arranged, are presented as bounteously submissive to Richard’s return. The one point of comedy belongs to the court. With the royal party progressing toward Cheap, a cartful of royal ladies falls to the ground, and one of these ladies exposes herself—“Femina feminea sua dum sic femina nudat”—whereupon the crowd can hardly contain its laughter (Concordia, lines 252–54). Maidstone uses the incident to prophesy the crumbling of extravagant, bad love. Inevitably, however, the court lady with her skirts turned up, the laughing crowd, and the dignity and order of the representatives of the city’s government suggests that laxity is to be found in Westminster, not in London. Moreover, whereas the Monk of Westminster describes Richard and Anne as proceeding from London Bridge to Fish Street to Eastcheap to Temple Bar to Westminster and to the Abbey, Maidstone says that the procession moved from Cheap to the Conduit to St. Paul’s, which was the city’s cathedral. After observing a pageant before its doors, the king and queen visited the holy places of St. Paul’s, the most important of which was the shrine of St. Erkenwald, just behind the high altar at the eastern end of the nave. In so doing, they were very close to the splendid tomb John of Gaunt had had built for Blanche of Lancaster, which was the site for annual commemorative masses in her honor. (See Figures 9 and 10.) Dugdale’s drawing of the nave makes it clear that John of Gaunt had picked and embellished a spot for Blanche’s tomb that was central to the cultic space of the city’s cathedral.80 Robert Braybrooke, the bishop of London (1382–1404) and another member of Gaunt’s ecclesiastical “a‹nity,” had decreed in 1386 that the Deposition (April 30) and Translation (November 14) of St. Erkenwald would be elevated to first-class feasts.81 He thereby elevated one of London’s own bish80. For the pageant, see ibid., 203 n. 350. On St. Paul’s, see William Dugdale, A History of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (London: Thos. Warren, 1658; repr., London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1818), 161, 91. For a discussion of St. Paul’s, see Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes.” Ruth Nissé, “‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” English Literary History 65 (1998): 279–80, also mentions Richard’s visit to St. Paul’s. 81. See Cliªord Peterson, ed., Saint Erkenwald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 1 1; see also 13, where Peterson suggests that Braybrooke may have had his own reasons for


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ops and the patron saint of the city’s cathedral to a status that insured a dignified remembrance. He also put John of Gaunt’s chantry for Blanche (and what was to be the site for Gaunt’s own tomb) only slightly to the left of center stage. Braybrooke, an old associate of Gaunt’s who was related to Joan of Kent, was also a‹liated with Thomas of Woodstock, who had tried to use him as an intermediary between the king and the nobility in 1387.82 Bishop Braybrooke had worked to increase the prestige of St. Paul’s. He had sought to bring the secular canons of St. Paul’s into a state of good governance and to reform and consolidate its colleges, providing the priests associated with these with housing and a refectory. After John of Gaunt died, his son built a new chapel at the joint tomb and a chantry of priests was founded there. Bishop Braybrooke donated a piece of land for a dwelling for these priests.83 In other words, Braybrooke attempted to create at St. Paul’s an atmosphere remarkably similar to that of a university, where men sharing similar interests, education, and habits of thought could live and work together. The duke of Lancaster certainly benefited from these eªorts, but it is also likely that he encouraged them. He was known for his care for the church and for the church’s good governance. He would be even more careful about a cathedral where he intended to lay his body, which would be clothed penitentially in the scapular of the Carmelite order.84 Nor does it seem unlikely that poets would have been among these men of education drawn from all parts of England to its capital. Perhaps one of them wrote St. Erkenwald. The cathedral school of St. Paul’s has long been thought the place where Chaucer received his early education in the classics. Its library, which was extensive, was also available to its former students, so the precincts around the cathedral must have oªered an atmosphere of learning as well as commercial bustle.85 wishing to see Erkenwald’s feast days elevated. He may have been seeking to redress neglect of his predecessor’s cult and, implicitly, of the patron saint of the cathedral. 82. See the DNB entry for Braybrooke. K. B. McFarlane’s notebooks, held at Magdalene College, Oxford, contain notes outlining the bishop’s relation to Joan of Kent. For Braybrooke and Gaunt, see Goodman, John of Gaunt, 254. 83. The Victoria History of London (London: Archibald Constable, 1909; repr., London: Dawsons, 1974), 409–27. For the world of the cathedral, see N. Ker, “Books at St. Paul’s Cathedral Before 1313,” in Books, Collectors, and Libraries: Studies in Medieval Heritage, ed. A. Watson (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 209–42; Edith Rickert, “Chaucer at School,” Modern Philology 29 (1932): 257–74; W. Sparrow Simpson, ed., Documents Illustrating the History of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: Camden Society, 1880); and Simpson, ed., Registrum statutorum et consuetudinum Ecclesiae Cathedralis Sancti Pauli Londinensis (London: Nichols and Sons, 1873). 84. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 245. 85. For more on St. Paul’s, see Rickert, “Chaucer at School”; Ker, “Books at St. Paul’s”; A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d. 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,


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Gaunt’s influence on Maidstone’s subtle political pointing in the Concordia is, of course, impossible to verify. But the poem does display a political awareness of Richard’s sense of prerogative and of the city’s sense of its identity and status, an awareness that allows it to advise by praising. Unlike the other versions of the civic pageant that we possess, it explicitly shapes our response to its minutely depicted scenes. Gaunt would certainly have been in a position to warn the king about the dangers of ignoring the city’s liberties and traditions. From 1376 until 1381, he had been the target of a good deal of popular dislike, much of it associated with his championing of royal prerogative and with the power he exercised over the young king.86 His greatest loss came during the Rising of 1381, when the rebels, along with marauding Londoners, acted out their dislike and fear of him by burning to the ground the Savoy, his London residence and one of the grandest palaces in England. From 1381 until he left England for Spain in 1386, Gaunt continued to serve as a focus for political controversy; as his biographers have suggested, the Gaunt who returned to England in November 1389 was a diªerent, more mellow presence. If he had a hand in Maidstone’s Concordia, its hints about civic traditions might well have been the observations of hard-won experience. For all his vast wealth and power, Gaunt had had to learn to accommodate other sources of power, and London’s economic and political clout must certainly have been a point of reckoning. Richard would have courted disaster not to recognize this. But if Gaunt was a sort of shadow patron for the Concordia, Maidstone was no hack. Maidstone’s craftsmanship is fully attested to by his Penitential Psalms, the only vernacular poetry of his that remains extant. Maidstone’s psalms circulated widely during the late Middle Ages, surviving in whole or part in twenty-seven manuscripts, some clearly designed for the clergy but others intended for lay readers.87 Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms thus belongs to a period of increased lay devotion. Lay men and women desired aids for private meditation and prayer, and, consequently, the poem enjoyed a wide circulation during the fifteenth century as the reading public for such works grew. The seven psalms —6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142—are staple parts of books of hours and private devotional books

1957–59), 3:2147–49; and Henry Hart Milman, Annals of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: John Murray, 1868), appendix A. On the cultural life of Westminster, see Justice and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work. For speculations about St. Erkenwald, see Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes,” 19–24. 86. Here, see Goodman, John of Gaunt, 42–86. 87. Edden, ed., Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, 1 1–12. See 12–19 for a description of these manuscripts, one of which is the Vernon manuscript.


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and were commonly used as devotional or penitential aids. Richard Rolle had translated and commented upon them, and both his translation and commentary were popular during the last half of the fourteenth century. Of the psalms, Maidstone makes a long poem, combining the seven into a single meditation that is meant to help its reader recognize and admit shame over sin and rest hope in the merciful “mending” of God.88 For each of the psalms’ verses, he creates an eight-line stanza that rhymes abababab. There is certainly nothing contemptible about the craftsmanship, and, in places, Maidstone achieves a powerfully subjective tone, sometimes seeming to anticipate John Donne’s evocation of grief and supplication. For example, in rendering the fourth verse of Psalm 6 (“Convertere, Domine, et eripe animam meam; saluum me fac propter misericordiam tuam”) into English, he writes, Turne 5e, lord, my soule outwynne, Make me saf for 5i mercy; For foule wi5 fe5er ny fische wi5 fynne Is noon vnstidfaste but I. Whenne I 5enke what is me wi5inne, My consciense make5 a careful cry; 4erfore 5i pite, lord, vnpynne, 4at I may mende me 5erby. (lines 33–40) Donne’s plea to Christ in the final lines of “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” plays with the same series of ideas embedded in this verse. O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree; I turne my backe to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, Burne oª my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.89 88. Penitential Psalms, line 944. All citations of the Penitential Psalms refer to the Edden edition. 89. Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., Donne: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 308.


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Rather than plead that God turn to the soul, Donne describes the soul’s turning from God. In asking for correction he reverses the pattern of Maidstone’s “Make me saf for 5i mercy,” praying that God “thinke mee worth thine anger.” Maidstone follows the psalm in praying for God to “turn,” but Donne turns the poem by praying for God to “turn” him, dramatizing the “careful cry” that Maidstone ascribes to conscience. But both poets describe the act of “mending” or penitential restoration as dependent upon God’s prior act of mercy. Donne would, of course, have known intimately the uses of the seven penitential psalms, and there were enough manuscripts containing Maidstone’s poem (a not unlikely text for St. Paul’s to own) for the dean of St. Paul’s to have known it. What Maidstone captures in his poem is the very tone of vernacular devotion. In eªect, he translates both the spirit and the letter of the psalms. For example, Maidstone’s second line in the above passage, “Make me saf for 5i mercy,” is a cry as simple as the prayers the psalms are. It nicely balances the recognition of the need for penance (a movement of the active will) with the saving grace of God, by whose act mercy is bestowed. Though it is not known what set of circumstances led Maidstone to create this vernacular meditation upon the penitential psalms, it is certainly not a work to which John of Gaunt or members of his household would have been indiªerent. Gaunt’s piety and benefactions have been carefully detailed by Goodman. Gaunt was not simply generous to the church: he and each of his wives were frequent visitors in monastic establishments. Moreover, Gaunt’s particular attachment to the Carmelites, an eremitical order, was further enhanced by his special attachment to the Virgin.90 Considering that Blanche of Lancaster’s father had written a vernacular devotional text, it makes sense that a translation of the seven penitential psalms into English poetry might be a welcome volume in the Lancastrian household and might well have recommended Maidstone to Gaunt when he returned to England in 1389. The period between 1389 and 1390, or the years after 1392, are those during which Maidstone could have served as Gaunt’s confessor (as he is reported to have done).91 To attempt to link the poems ascribed to the Gawain-poet to Lancastrian patronage is to move into informed speculation. Nonetheless, the poems can be contextualized in ways that suggest both a London provenance and a patron (or patrons) of great if not overweening power. The poems also suggest a poet who was con90. See Goodman, John of Gaunt, chap. 1 1. 91. See C. R. Smith, ed. and trans., “Concordia,” 8–9. Smith remarks, “It is tempting to associate Maidstone with Gaunt about the time of the Concordia” (9).


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versant with the contemporary languages of power and more than capable of employing those languages to question the very powers that no doubt paid him. Throughout the history of scholarship and debate about the poems of the Pearl manuscript, there have been attempts to discover the name of the poet, to link him with the author of St. Erkenwald, or to find, at the very least, where he lived and wrote.92 None of these attempts has predominated. In a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association convention in 1959 and later expanded into an article, Morton W. Bloomfield adopted a slightly diªerent stance and outlined some of the questions we might ask of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, questions that can also be applied to the other four poems traditionally assigned to the same poet.93 Two of the major questions Bloomfield posed are still relevant and unresolved: For what purpose was this poem (or these poems) written, and for what audience? I would like to follow the suggestion of both J. P. Oakden and Elizabeth Salter that we should look to the figure of John of Gaunt for answers to both questions.94 Though the work of Michael Bennett and John Bowers has aimed to locate the poet within the group of Cheshiremen attached to Richard II, these poems seem “less suitable” for Richard’s court and/or needs than for Gaunt himself.95 Three of the poems (the exception is Pearl) reflect Gaunt’s interests and needs during two crucial periods of his career in England. Moreover, Gaunt’s holdings in both Lancashire and Staªordshire, as well as his numerous donations to religious foundations and friendships with important clerics, created an intricate network that would have served well the ambitions or intelligence of a lo-

92. For a cogent account of these attempts, see Malcolm Andrew, “Theories of Authorship,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 23–34. 93. Morton W. Bloomfield, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal,” in Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 24–58. 94. J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1930), 257–61; Salter, “The Alliterative Revival I” and “The Alliterative Revival II.” 95. See Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class, and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bennett, “The Historical Background,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 71–90; and Bowers, Politics of “Pearl.” Bennett describes the broad horizons of late-fourteenth-century careerists, especially the degree to which many sought positions in the circles of royalty, enjoying livings elsewhere in England or in France. Though he argues for the centrality of Richard’s court or sphere of influence in regard to the Gawain-poet, his argument could as easily be applied to that of John of Gaunt. Much, or everything, depends upon dating. Bennett dates these poems somewhat later than I do; both of our arguments depend upon historical circumstance. Bowers reads Pearl as an elegy for Queen Anne, locating the poet within the sphere of royal courtliness.


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cal clerk.96 Such a man might find himself installed in London (possibly associated with St. Paul’s) or in one of the chapels in one of Gaunt’s palaces or in the library of the Savoy. In other words, he would have been in places where he could come into contact with legal and patristic texts, with Continental poetry, and with contemporary English works. What is more, though the poems foreground topical matters —clerical purity, the need for patience, national and chivalric identity, dejection—they do so while interrogating courtly privilege and power.97 Cleanness, as David Wallace has noted, seems designed to produce anxiety in its audience.98 The source of this anxiety is the quality of lordship ascribed to God. It announces a focus upon clerical impurity in the seventh line, where the poet denounces priests who “handle” and “use” God’s body but “conterfete crafte, and cortaysye wont” (lines 7–13). With its depictions of God as “clene in His courte” (line 17) and “honeste in His housholde” (line 18), the poem counterposes the churlish and chaotic to the orderly and clean. Its retelling of the parable of the wedding feast from both Matthew 22:1–14 and Luke 14:6–24 presents heaven as an aristocratic banquet, where God acts with all the imperiousness of a secular lord who, spurning those guests who neglect his invitation, opens his doors to all in an act of noble largesse. In fact, even before the poet recounts the parable in Cleanness, he draws an analogy between God’s banquet (a type of the church) and an earthly feast. For what vr5ly ha5el 5at hy3 honour haldez Wolde lyke if a ladde com ly5erly attyred, When he were sette solempnely in a sete ryche, Abof dukez on dece, with dayntys serued? (lines 35–38) The words “ha5el,” “haldez,” and “dukez,” as the poet specifies, describe earthly lordship, or power that is “held” (in contrast to God’s power, which is insepa96. For an account of John of Gaunt’s vast Staªordshire holdings, see Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 209–34. 97. See Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes,” 7–25. As I mentioned earlier, John the Good was held in the Savoy; we do not know the holdings of what must have been a magnificent library. See the very pertinent remarks in chap. 1 of Jane K. Lecklider, Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1997). Lecklider argues that the poet was possibly a secular clerk in an ecclesiastical household. Her remarks about the poet’s use of source material would make equally good sense in relation to Gaunt and the wide network his a‹nity would have opened up for a poet. 98. David Wallace, “Cleanness and the Terms of Terror,” in Text and Matter, ed. Blanch, Miller, and Wasserman.


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rable from His being). Nonetheless, the poet’s description of God’s imperiousness is justified by means of this analogy: being cast out of God’s banquet into outer darkness is like falling out of favor with an earthly lord and being placed in the stocks (line 46). Thus, the man who makes the mistake of appearing in a dirty wedding garment is dramatically punished for showing up in “no festiual frok, bot fyled with werkkez” (line 136) because he oªends the dignity and majesty of heaven’s lord: “Hopez 5ou I be a harlot 5i erigaut to prayse?” (line 148).99 The poet makes it clear that God not only rejects an unclean “garment” but is also especially angered by fleshly crimes. Langland, through the person of Hawkyn, uses the incident of the man in foul clothes to stage the inherent problems of life in a world where the values of the marketplace are used as a universal standard and to quiz a church that has—to its diminishment—adopted that standard (Piers Plowman, B text, passus 13, 14).100 By comparison, the author of Cleanness provides a list of fleshly crimes that arouse God’s anger (Cleanness, lines 179–88). Langland’s Hawkyn describes his life in vivid detail, a life that is modeled according to an increasingly dominant work ethic that David Aers has described as providing Langland with the grounds for his careful inspection of traditional social views. Aers suggests that Hawkyn represents the impulse to buy and sell that invigorated both small traders and powerful merchants. Hawkyn’s validation of trade is at once the sign of the deterioration of the traditional community and an inescapable fact of contemporary society. To ignore Hawkyn, or to ignore what he represents, is to refuse to search out faith’s relevance to a pervasive materiality.101 But the author of Cleanness identifies the sins of a potentially violent and litigious society, including pride, boasting, covetousness, malice, dishonest deeds, perjury, manslaughter, drunkenness, theft, strife, robbery, villainy, disinheriting, depriving widows of their dowries, “spoiling pearls” (or innocents), maintaining villains, treason, treachery, and tyranny (lines 179–88). While these crimes are to some extent stated generally, the list is radically diªerent from Hawkyn’s account of his activities. Hawkyn describes buying and selling and business trips. His to99. In the Gospel, the man shows up without a wedding garment. For a discussion of this incident as it informs other contemporary poems, thus placing the Cleanness author in dialogue with Langland and the Erkenwald poet, see Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes.” 100. For the B text, see Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, ed. George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1988–97). 101. On Hawkyn and the problems staged through him, see Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 27–29, and David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), 58–62.


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tal focus upon mercantile activity seems designed to speak to a broadly conceived English audience. The list in Cleanness is a list to which any knave might aspire, but it mainly describes crimes of the privileged. But to which privileged group might the poem’s harsh scrutiny be directed, and for what set of reasons? This is not so much to query the concept of “audience” as to think about a set of conditions encompassing a poet, a patron, and concerns that can be thought about in relation to Cleanness. The poet’s initial description of a type of uncleanness that angers God is precise enough to warrant further attention. As renkez of relygioun 5at reden and syngen, And aprochen to Hys presens, and prestez arn called; Thay teen vnto His temmple and temen to Hymseluen, Reken wyth reuerence 5ay rychen His auter, 4ay hondel 5er His aune body and vsen hit bo5e. If 5ay in clannes be clos, 5ay cleche gret mede; Bot if 5ay conterfete crafte, and cortaysye wont, As be honest vtwyth and inwith alle fyl5ez, 4en ar 5ay synful hemself, and sulpen altogeder, Bo5e God and his gere, and Hym to greme cachen. (Cleanness, lines 7–16) The lines, which describe men who “are called priests,” depict these men of religion as a corporate body who share certain functions. They read, sing, go into God’s temple, care for the altar, and both handle and use God’s body. The lines are an accurate account of the ideals and observances undergirding the colleges of priests, or canons, to be found in the major cathedrals of England. Their duties were those of richly endowed stewards: celebrating the Eucharist, singing the divine o‹ce, preaching, and overseeing the estates and parishes owned by the cathedral. The corporate ideals that defined these colleges are those that the poet emphasizes throughout Cleanness. The canons, dignitaries, and lesser clergy who peopled the closes of the great medieval cathedrals enjoyed an atmosphere of privilege within the church.102 They were secular clergy in the sense that they 102. Kathleen Edwards, The English Secular Cathedrals in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949); David Lepine, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1995).


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were not strictly enclosed and did have possessions, living on distributions of income from the common fund of the chapter or other sources, such as cathedral oªerings or rents from its outlying estates. Though a cathedral had a set number of resident and nonresident canons, its working staª would have been much larger, with the vicars and the vicars choral doing most of the daily business of a large cathedral containing many chapels and chantries and services, particularly because many canons had duties elsewhere and were often absent. In addition to the cathedral staª, the bishop (within whose diocese the cathedral was) and the dean who administered the cathedral would have had households equivalent in size to those of noblemen.103 In such settings could be found men of learning—men frequently involved in civil and legal aªairs, libraries, and grammar schools or song schools; teachers; and a variety of clergy engaged in maintaining the cathedral as a place of prayer as well as an incorporated body with its own set of rules, financial concerns, and requirements for common life. Not only did the issue of residence prove a continual source of tension for colleges of canons, as many enjoyed plural appointments or benefices, but attached to residence, too, was the obligation of hospitality—which, in cathedrals like St. Paul’s, could prove extremely expensive. During his first year, a new residentiary at St. Paul’s was obliged to feed those who worked under him, to feed all who came to his house on the first day of his residence, and to provide for a number of banquets on special days for city and court o‹cials and for the choir. By the fourteenth century, there were eªorts to reduce the required scale of hospitality, but the burden was still crushing enough to deter many except the wealthiest from taking up residency. Only in the early fifteenth century did the chapter of St. Paul’s scale back somewhat by simply charging an entrance fee of one hundred marks.104 Such lavishness was justified by means of biblical models of hospitality (models also employed by the Cleanness poet). Bishop Lacy of Exeter looked back to Abraham for his generosity to strangers and to Lot for his oªer of his daughters (rather than his guests) to the lustful Sodomites.105 The sorts of abuses castigated by chapter meetings largely concerned infractions of the rules of common life. The minor clergy were disciplined for misbehaving in the choir, fornicating, drinking and leaving the close, dining with 103. See, for example, W. L. Warren, “Simon Sudbury, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury” (Ph.D. diss, Oxford University, 1956), 285, for a description of Bishop Braybrooke’s London household of eighty-five. 104. K. Edwards, English Secular Cathedrals, 62–63. 105. Cited in Lepine, Brotherhood of Canons, 132.


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laymen, being drawn to fashion, carrying arms, and entertaining strangers (especially women) in the houses in the close, all typical “student” oªenses to be expected from a group of younger men living within a corporation of older and wealthier clergy. There appear to have been relatively few references to breaches of clerical discipline by residentiaries and only a little satire directed at cathedrals—mainly the charge that the closes were filled with the family members of bishops.106 Concern over the standards of conduct of the minor clergy led to the establishment of common halls that gave them a more clearly defined identity as a corporate body.107 There were, however, moments in which the submerged tensions of a cathedral came to occupy political space, as when Edward III in 1371 wrote a letter to Simon Sudbury, the bishop of London, about the abuses to be found among the resident canons of St. Paul’s. The king’s letter was prompted by conflict between the residentiary and non-residentiary canons at St. Paul’s and was no doubt solicited—and perhaps composed—by the royal clerks who, as non-resident canons themselves, denounced the excesses of the residentiaries. As such, it witnesses a struggle for power within the cathedral itself, especially as the cathedral was also a place of royal patronage. Nonetheless, the letter expresses its concerns in terms that the author of Cleanness also uses.108 The letter takes as its theme the ignoble transformation of a once clean and noble institution. Edward begins by noting that St. Paul’s is not only the resting place of his most famous progenitors but is also a foundation that he himself has privileged and enriched. Here, the wording of the letter seeks to undercut Westminster Abbey, whose royal graves and shrine of St. Edward competed for prestige (and profit) with the ancient graves and shrine of St. Erkenwald at St. Paul’s. The letter goes on to rumble that the present mismanagement of the cathedral is now pressed upon “our ears.” The king charges Sudbury with negligence of or connivance in abuses that include renting out interior rooms to fornicators and the pilfering or sale of the sacred vessels, acts that he opposes to 106. K. Edwards, English Secular Cathedrals, 277; Lepine, Brotherhood of Canons, 17, 155, 182. 107. See, for example, the statutes of the minor canons of St. Paul’s in Registrum statutorum, ed. W. S. Simpson, 329–59, which seek to contain just these impulses. 108. Thomas Rymer, ed., Foedera (London, 1830), 3:ii; for the letter, see Registrum statutorum, ed. W. S. Simpson, 195–97; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1370–74 (London: H. B. M. Stationery O‹ce, 1914; repr., Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1971), 43. For discussions, see Milman, Annals of St. Paul’s, 82, who misdates the letter to 1376; W. L. Warren, “Simon Sudbury,” 130–35; and C. N. L. Brooke, “The Earliest Times to 1485,” in A History of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Men Associated with It, ed. W. R. Matthews (London: John Baker, 1964), 88.


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the proper and ancient ministry of the church, which has now been turned over to abominable acts of the laity. He orders a restoration of the old order, with more attention paid to the daily o‹ces of chantries and altars, the common table restored, the bakehouse and brewery rebuilt, and chapter funds derived from these and the cathedral’s outlying manors distributed to both residentiaries and non-resident canons. In other words, though the letter concerns the allocation of revenues, it castigates the bishop for allowing the residentiaries to turn sacred space into lay space—into halls for workmen (“caenacula et tristega mechanicorum”) and refuges for fornicators —as well as for destroying the original sense of community, turning sacred vessels to commercial uses, and befouling the foundation’s pristine antiquity. What was orderly has become base. Edward III, or whoever composed the letter, speaks with the voice of God in the Old Testament (which the Cleanness-poet also captures), whose senses are oªended by the uncleannesses of humankind. The king, like God, appears to pause before he moves against what is a violation of the covenant between steward and lord. The letter should certainly be read as evidence of a private quarrel between resident and non-resident canons over the distribution of funds within the cathedral itself. But the tensions it evinces are also rooted in the intimate political relationship between church and state. Because clerks were highly educated, they filled many civil o‹ces even as they occupied prebends in cathedrals and other ecclesiastical positions that were attached to livings. The anticlericalism of the late fourteenth century frequently included critiques of such “pluralism.” The practice of collecting and exchanging benefices could be lucrative, and the late fourteenth century seems to have been a period when churchmen could even avail themselves of brokers who charged fees for their o‹ces.109 Chaucer’s often quoted description of his Parson (which also underlines the necessity for clerical purity) as not renting out his benefice and running to “Londoun unto Seinte Poules / To seken hym a chaunterie for soules” (CT I.509–10) suggests the currency of such satire. Reformist diatribes against the buying and selling of church o‹ces likened the practice to sodomy, and they powerfully suggest the ways in which simony was seen as an abusive practice.110 This is not to highlight an extraordinary corruption for the English church during the late fourteenth cen109. Brooke, “The Earliest Times to 1485,” 81–85; A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Clergy and Their Organization in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 107. 1 10. For the most recent outline of evidence and discussion of this rhetoric, see Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies,” Speculum 76


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tury but to point to an important strain of clerical scrutiny, and in many cases self-criticism, that can be found in a wide variety of texts —ecclesiastical and lay, Latin and vernacular. Such critiques had a particular political edge in the 1370s. During this period, John of Gaunt, despite his friendship with and patronage of many varieties of churchmen, began also to patronize John Wyclif, partly because Wyclif ’s anticlericalism (which Gaunt had the reputation for sharing) suited Gaunt’s desire to have the papal tax on English clergy reduced so that the government could seize the funds.111 In fact, in these years, the government was in an anticlerical mood, and many found Wyclif ’s ideas about ecclesiastical disendowment useful. Later, Wyclif posed too great a threat to ecclesiastical authority for Gaunt or others to champion him openly.112 In 1371, Gaunt had returned from France with his second bride, Constance of Castile. His older brother, the Black Prince, was ill, and Gaunt was increasingly involved in royal aªairs. It is unlikely that he did not know about the letter of 1371 or about its circumstances because many of the canons of St. Paul’s were also royal servants (and therefore non-resident canons).113 If the author of Cleanness were associated with the household of John of Gaunt, he, too, would have known of the controversy. If so, and if the poem explores the broad issue of clerical purity in response to the royal charges against the resident canons of St. Paul’s—particularly as they can be filtered through images of hospitality—then we might begin to expand our notion of how this poet addressed himself to an issue and, presumably, to a patron. Edward’s complaint that the building and vessels of St. Paul’s were being used profanely certainly seems related to the account of Balthazar’s feast, the final incident in Cleanness. The poet’s careful description of the temple vessels, set on a banquet table and filled with wine for a prince of Babylon and his prostitutes, is, like Edward III’s charge of the theft and sale of the sacred vessels and the renting of rooms for fornication, an account of the willful defilement of the holy.114 Along (2001): 663–68. The Wycli‹te Twelve Conclusions likened churchmen who held both civil and ecclesiastical o‹ces to “hermaphrodites.” 1 1 1. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 241; Holmes, Good Parliament, 165–77; Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13. 1 12. J. Catto, “An Alleged Great Council of 1374,” English Historical Review 82 (1967): 771. In my term “ecclesiastical authority,” I include the implications of Wyclif ’s eucharistic views. See Chap. 2 above. 1 13. Brooke, “The Earliest Times to 1485,” 53. 1 14. This incident is a key figure for pollution in Charlotte Morse’s discussion of the poem: see Morse, The Pattern of Judgment in the “Queste” and “Cleanness” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978).


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with the opening lines that focus upon an impure clergy and the portraits of both Noah and Abraham as pure figures of sacerdotal e‹cacy, the poem appears to castigate unclean sacramental practices and to oªer examples of proper worship. Much of the poem, however, is also taken up with a discourse against sodomy. If this discourse owes something to the contemporary association between sodomy and the spiritual sterility of churchmen who fail to preach the word or who are given to merchandising the sacred through simony, a practice (and a critique) with which the non-resident canons of St. Paul’s or any of the great cathedrals would have been familiar, the poet may well be covertly turning his pen against the court faction that occasioned or even composed Edward’s letter detailing noxious abuses at St. Paul’s. If so (and there are many deliberate uses of “if ” in this paragraph), then the poem can be read as a subtle probe of the inherent conflicts within the church’s worldly institutions.115 Such a reading would change our critical estimation of Cleanness, whose harshness and apparent univocalism has found few enthusiasts among modern readers. More important, such a reading would shift attention to the poet’s ambiguously defined scrutiny of privilege in all four of the poems, which oªer conflicting views (perhaps intentionally) of those assumptions upon which privilege is based. The man in foul clothes is a direct aªront to a feast that has already been compared to a banquet in a noble household, where a duke or a worldly prince would be outraged to see someone enter wearing torn and dirty clothing. The menu the lord describes for the feast in Matthew is a noble one. “For my boles and my borez arn bayted and slayne, And my fedde foulez fatted wyth scla3t, My polyle 5at is penne-fed and partrykez bo5e, Wyth scheldez of wylde swyn, swanez and cronez. . . .” (Cleanness, lines 55–58) 1 15. Though Allen Frantzen, “The Discourse of Sodomy in the Middle English Cleanness,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 1 1 1 (1996): 451–64, has argued that the language describing sodomy needs to be considered in relation to actual same-sex acts, there are no extant English charges of sodomy during this period (see L. Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch,” 663). V. A. Kolve, “Ganymede/Son of Getron: Medieval Monasticism and the Drama of Same-Sex Desire,” Speculum 73 (1998): 1014–67, has suggested that we might look to the monastic schools for a discourse about sodomy and its sublimation into charitable love. Cathedrals, of course, had schools attached to them, and St. Paul’s was no exception. Though this is a potentially interesting line of inquiry, I think the evidence is far stronger for the poet’s non-literal use of sodomy as an unclean (or, as Keiser, Courtly Desire, points out, a boorish) practice, contrasting with God’s courtliness and cleanness.


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Swans, cranes, partridges, and boars were to be found on the tables of lords, ecclesiastical or secular, as Chaucer’s account of the Monk’s dining preferences reminds us. Moreover, the very origins of courtliness and the insignia of the gentle life can be traced to the ecclesiastical households of the high Middle Ages, whose ideals and expectations were translated into secular courts.116 The vast sums spent on entertaining within cathedral closes or within the grand episcopal residences that lay to the west of St. Paul’s were comparable to the expenditures of a secular lord. For example, the palace of the bishop of Ely in Holborn was used by Gaunt when he was in London. (Gaunt may have leased it, as he never rebuilt the Savoy.117) But the poet emphasizes more than an abundance of goods; he emphasizes abundance as a feature of the lord’s hospitality. Thus, where Matthew’s account of the parable of the wedding feast simply notes that the king came in to see the guests, finding there a man without a wedding robe, Cleanness depicts a lord’s graciously hospitable entrance into his own hall to welcome or cheer “rekenly” (courteously) both rich and poor to increase their pleasure (lines 125–28). He goes from his “bour” (private room) to the public space of the hall, moving from table to table, welcoming his guests. His graciousness then meets the ungraciousness of the man in foul clothes, whose crime is presented as an act of churlish transgression. “How watz 5ou hardy 5is hous for 5yn vnhap to ne3e, In on so ratted a robe and rent at 5e sydez? 4ow art a gome vngoderly in 5at goun febele; 4ou praysed me and my place ful pouer and ful gnede, 4at watz so prest to aproche my presens hereinne. Hopez 5ou I be a harlot 5i erigaut to prayse?” (lines 143–48) The king here accuses the man of dishonoring his house by his clothing and of assuming that the king himself was of as low a status (“a harlot”) as the man himself. What is thus transgressed is the distance between king and churl, between gentle and base. The feast itself, which was likened to the church or to its final reality as the kingdom of heaven, has thus been violated. In establishing a 1 16. See Jaeger, Envy of Angels. See also Ad Putter, An Introduction to the “Gawain”-Poet (New York: Longman, 1996), 1–37. 1 17. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 255.


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series of analogies between proper observance of the sacrificial feast of the mass, the orderly abundance of a noble dinner, and the kingdom of heaven, the poet locates the biblical concept of cleanness or purity along a scale that includes mannerly behavior. Accordingly, the man in foul clothes is not simply badly dressed, or impure, but mute as well. All he can do is hang his head in the face of the king’s scorn. We are not encouraged to feel for this man but to see his wordlessness as another sign of his literal and metaphoric churlishness. If the poem were occasioned by concern during this period over clerical purity (and especially the state of aªairs among the canons of St. Paul’s), the poet balances a topical concern with a devotional emphasis upon penance as an act of anxious self-recognition: “And pure 5e with penaunce tyl 5ou a perle wor5e” (Cleanness, line 1 1 16). In counseling his audience about the need for penance by reference to a God who is described in terms of his nobility and courtesy, the poet at once reflects the lay devotions of the late fourteenth century and cloaks that devotional impulse in the habits of the nobility. Lines 1057–67, which assimilate the techniques of holy love to those of courtly wooing as described in the Roman de la rose, speak to the tastes of a noble audience. In its account of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem “5e ryche,” where Mary and Joseph enjoy a sort of royal poverty and of the “nobleye” of Christ’s “norture” (see lines 1074–92), we have no stark depiction of holy poverty but envision instead a God who would be comfortable in an aristocratic household. If the poem were originally intended as a comment upon unclean priests, that comment is set within a highly focused message of penitential cleansing, one that can also be found in Le livre de seyntz medicines, a midcentury text by Henry, duke of Lancaster, Gaunt’s father-in-law. In that work, Henry of Lancaster does more than look inward; he looks at sin as it is manifested in the courtly life. When describing covetousness, Le livre de seyntz medicines admits the crimes of a great lord who perpetuates injustice in his own court. In discussing the mouth as an instrument or avenue of sin, it refers to the ways in which flatterers sing in the service of “courtly wooing”; it details the inordinate love of goods and the inherent sensualities of the magnate life; it describes lechery as an attempt to entice with subtle and false words.118 Though intensely devotional, Le livre de seyntz medicines is rooted in a profound awareness of class. Not a book for or by a man of small estate, it is at once an indictment and an endorsement of the noble life. This message of devotional abjection, which found many courtly patrons during the late Middle Ages, was also 1 18. See, for example, E. J. Arnould, ed., Le livre de seyntz medicines (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940), 18–19, 46, 52.


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a message that Gaunt was, by the 1380s, hearing from his Carmelite confessors. After the burning of the Savoy in 1381, Gaunt did public penance for his long adultery with Katherine Swynford: he publicly renounced her and moved into a phase of his own life marked by his special attachment to the Virgin. As Goodman notes, neither this attachment nor his association with the Carmelites was new in the 1380s, but both may have become more intense and central to his religious and political life.119 By assimilating penitential cleansing to the pleasures of loving, or being like, this clean and courteous lord, the poet oªers us both the anxieties of the contrite conscience and the assurance that God’s court is at least as elegant as any to be found on earth.120 The courtliness depicted in the poem is at once obvious and attractive and frighteningly imperious. What is honest or clean is truly courtly. The priests who counterfeit the mass, “handling” God’s body without courtesy—like the fleshly lovers of the antediluvian world, or the Sodomites who wish to teach the angels about their type of love, or Balthazar, who uses temple vessels at a profane banquet—touch what is sacred with rough and unclean hands. The clean, such as Noah and his family, Abraham, and Daniel, were conventionally associated with the true ecclesia. The ark was a standard type of the church, in which Noah performs the role of priest, guiding the ark as Christ guides the church. Noah’s first act upon disembarking is one of orderly sacrifice: “When bremly brened 5ose bestez, and 5e bre5e rysed, / 4e sauour of his sacrafyse so3t to Hym euen / 4at al spedez and spyllez” (Cleanness, lines 509–1 1). In his preparing the meal for the angels, Abraham, too, is described as carrying out a priestly function: “As sewer in a god assyse he serued Hem fayre, / Wyth sadde semblaunt and swete of such as he hade; / And God as a glad gest mad god chere” (lines 639–41). Daniel, the man who is not corrupted by Babylon, who leads Nebuchadnezzar to penance, and who prophesies the fall of Balthazar, is similarly set apart as a judge and visionary. God is described as an elegant lord and a true lover. But he is also a frightening figure of harsh judgment, and those he punishes —who may well be unclean—are described as having soiled God’s image, of which Henry of Lancaster also accuses himself in Le livre de seyntz medicines.121 In Cleanness, noble 1 19. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 246. 120. Keiser, Courtly Desire, is very good on the courtly aspects of this poem, especially the poet’s emphasis upon heterosexual, or courtly, love as a sign of God’s being. Lecklider, Cleanness, 4–8, suggests that the poem is less a broadly apocalyptic warning than a personal exhortation to penance appropriate for the season of Advent. 121. Arnould, ed., Le livre de seyntz medicines, 3.


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living is at once the answer and the problem, especially in the accounts of Sodom and of Babylon, where both Lot and Balthazar enjoy the privileges and concomitant dangers of worldly comfort. The poet’s self-presentation in Patience also suggests his awareness of the conflicting demands of courtly behavior. A. C. Spearing has commented upon the very absence of “authorial self-presentation” as a noteworthy feature of the poet, whose narrative voice he describes as “a series of local eªects of narration itself.”122 The eªect Spearing articulates, in terms of its narrative function, may also reflect the writer’s sense of his own contingent status. Where Langland actively queries his position in relation to contemporary institutions and Chaucer plays with his own marginality, the Gawain-poet presents himself in relation to external ideas, situations, and forms. In Patience, he seems to dramatize himself as both in and out of a relationship with a lord. There, he twice refers to his poverty: “Bot syn I am put to a poynt 5at pouerté hatte” (line 35) and “Thus pouerté and pacyence arn nedes playferes. / Sy5en I am sette with hem samen, suªer me byhoues” (lines 45–46). But he does not describe himself as unattached, for a few lines later he says, “What dowes me 5e dedayn, o5er dispit make? / O5er 3if my lege lorde lyst on lyue me to bidde / O5er to ryde o5er to renne to Rome in his ernde” (lines 50–52). He speaks here of someone powerful enough to command men on long journeys —something John of Gaunt could certainly do, as he bade Juan Gutierez, the dean of Segovia, to “go to the court of Rome with our message” in May 1380.123 In fact, the poem is informed by relationships like those between a powerful lord and his servant. If the poet does not feel that he can escape his lord’s will, Jonah does, and he suªers the consequences. Moreover, Jonah’s mission is to preach penance loudly enough for all of Nineveh to hear. It is precisely because the king hears of Jonah that the city is saved. The poem thus slyly reminds its audience that poets and princes alike are in the hands of an unknowable God and that poverty may be the preliminary step in blessedness. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet speaks with the traditional voice of one who recounts an old story to an audience versed in the conventions of the courtly romance. Bennett has argued that that old story seems also to capture the drama of the late Ricardian years by evoking the very landscape of the 122. A. C. Spearing, “Poetic Identity,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 44. Spearing’s entire essay probes this issue in a very provocative way. 123. Lodge and Somerville, eds., John of Gaunt’s Register, vol. 1, no. 128.


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region to which Richard withdrew throughout his reign. Bennett has also suggested that the poem serves as a kind of elegy for Richard’s kingship.124 Though there have been many attempts to discover the landscape described in Sir Gawain (ranging from Cheshire to Staªordshire), the setting may reflect not the world of the poem’s patron but that of the poet’s own youth, a source for his imagination.125 I would prefer to ask what problems the poem attempts to investigate. Is there a point at which the topic of truth or treachery was especially relevant? Who might have wanted to patronize such a poem? We could certainly be justified in thinking about Sir Gawain in relation to the world of the early 1390s, just after the Merciless Parliament, when Gaunt returned to England to find his son, Henry of Derby, in a dangerously volatile political situation. With its emphasis upon the finer points of chivalry, its account of a young man who is also a relation of the king almost led astray by more seasoned adults, and its portrait of the perilous state of a young king’s court and reputation, Sir Gawain oªers its own trenchant rewriting of Arthurian “history” and/or Ricardian tensions. Where the threat to that court dissolves in the end into forgiving laughter, the poem’s depiction of the inherent weaknesses of castles made of fame, wealth, and beauty suggests a historical imagination put to the service of political acumen. Read in this way, the poem—which, in its fourth line, links truth and treachery as not necessarily oppositional—can be seen as at once begging pardon and oªering advice. Moreover, the very dates during which Sir Gawain is tempted and fails correspond to those momentous days just before the Merciless Parliament when Richard was virtually a captive in the Tower, days during which Thomas of Woodstock was thought by some to have made a gesture toward the crown. There is one chronicle account from Whalley Abbey in Lancashire that presents Richard as actually deposed by the Appellants for three days sometime between December 28 and 31.126 According to the narrative, he was restored to his crown because Thomas of Woodstock and Henry of Derby quarreled over which of them should succeed him. Though this is the only record of the king’s actual deposition at the hands of the Appellants, its veracity is not to be discounted, particularly in light of the confession wrung from Gloucester just be124. Bennett, “The Historical Background.” 125. See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 105–18. 126. For the narrative, see Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies, 91. For discussion, see 91–95, as well as Saul, Richard II, 1889–90.


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fore his death: “Also, in that I was in place ther it was communed and spoken in manere of deposal of my liege Loord, trewly I knowlech wele, that we were assented therto for two dayes or three, And than we for to have done our homage and our oothes, and putt hym as heyly in hys estate as ever he was.”127 As M. V. Clarke notes, the dating here is fuzzy, but as the army of the Appellants was camped before the Tower on December 27 and a council was held on January 1, the day on which this interview with the king and deposition occurred was likely either December 28 or 29. This same period is, of course, central to Sir Gawain.128 In the period between Christmas and January 1, there is one day unaccounted for—December 28—and the hunts, culminating in Gawain’s acceptance of the girdle, take place on December 29, 30, and 31. The Appellants themselves would have known what happened—and the abbey in Lancashire, where Gaunt had requisitioned horses for France in 1373, is a not unlikely origin for a uniquely revealing narrative of the interchange between Appellants and king.129 By placing the crucial action of his poem during this same post-Christmas period, the Gawain-poet chooses days of spiritual significance that would also have had political significance for Lancastrian circles. The suggestion is not intended to fix a remarkable poem in the glue of historical realism but to argue that the Gawain-poet, like those writers who were his contemporaries, should be seen as having had a political sensitivity not at odds with his knowledge of meter, traditional materials, or the liturgy. If the poet also enjoyed the patronage of Gaunt, who was concerned both with the status of the crown and the career of his son, Sir Gawain demonstrates an ability equal to Chaucer’s to speak through a tale of adventure and chivalry. In its depiction of a young and heedless court confronted by a figure whose maturity and assuredness is as terrifying as his seasoned use of the language of law and chivalry, the poem questions not chivalry itself but the means by which it is understood and through which it is performed in Arthur’s court. The passage describing the changing seasons that begins the second fitt, 127. See RP 3:379, as well as Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies, 93–94. See also James Tait, “Did Richard II Murder the Duke of Gloucester?” in Historical Essays by Members of the Owens College, Manchester, ed. T. F. Tout and James Tait (London: Longman, Green, 1902), 193–216, and Matthew Giancarlo, “Murder, Lies, and Storytelling: The Manipulation of Justice(s) in the Parliaments of 1397 and 1399,” Speculum 77 (2002): 76–1 12. 128. See Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the “Gawain”-Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 54–55, for a chart paralleling the action of the poem to the feasts of the liturgical year. Chap. 2, above, discusses the various accounts of the interview between Richard and the Appellants as suggesting the violation of sacred space. 129. See Goodman, John of Gaunt, 219, 260.


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though certainly a common enough theme, was also linked to the genre of the “mirror for princes” and can be assumed to have an advisory subtext. The second section of the Secreta secretorum oªers the prince advice about governing his physical self. After sections dealing with astronomy and the necessity of finding a good physician, the Secreta describes the four seasons as both actual agricultural seasons and as figures for the human cycle, from youth through maturity and age to death.130 In Lydgate and Burgh’s later version of the Secreta, this section is vastly expanded into an elaborate compliment to Chaucer. It contains echoes of many of Chaucer’s works, not least the opening lines of the General Prologue. Despite the temptation to read Lydgate’s verses as merely slavish flattery, his ventriloquism has, I think, a serious point. His Chaucerian imitation strongly suggests that what looks to be a conventional description of spring is, in fact, a logical way of beginning a poem that will deal with issues pertaining to authority and community. Similarly, the Gawain-poet uses the passing of the seasons to warn of time’s inexorable swiftness and our need for “productivity” and to hint at the relevance of this theme for a poem that paints a disturbing picture of kingship and of the court surrounding that king. The Secreta secretorum had established a link between the theme of government and the seasonal cycle, and the poet’s urgent description here points up a general moral or eschatological message and a more particular use of that warning in relation to the princely estate. The poet, however, is subtle enough to use the passage as a detail rather than forcing it to carry the rhetorical burden of the poem—though its eªect shades our apprehension of the heedlessness of Arthur’s court. But, here, too, what looks almost like advice is transformed into an ambiguous festivity. Gawain’s failure to perceive the real dangers in his dealings with Bercilak is presented as an understandable failure, but one for which he is culpable. And even Bercilak, finally, can blame his challenge to the court on Morgan le Faye, Arthur’s aunt, who, improbably enough, set the plot in motion to make trial of Camelot’s pride and to frighten Guinevere and “gart her to dy3e” (GGK, line 2460). What seemed a threat with the gravest political implications is miniaturized into a quarrel between women; what seemed mighty is only a family matter. But Gawain’s return to Camelot, his confession that he now wears the girdle as a “token of vntraw5e” (line 2509), dramatizes him as a knight whose self-conscious appraisal of his weakness and sin has changed him into a man 130. For the Secreta and its relevance for Ricardian literature, see Chap. 2.


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who will not again commit crimes of “untruth.” The breach is described as like Adam’s but also as a lapse of the very standards of chivalry blazoned on his shield: “Now am I fawty and falce, and ferde haf ben euer / Of trecherye and vntraw5e—bo5e bityde sor3e / And care!” (lines 2382–84).131 In his anguish, does Gawain ventriloquize Derby as Gaunt wished him to sound? If Gaunt stands somewhere behind this poem, then Sir Gawain, like the Concordia, magnifies courtship by way of interrogating it. Sir Gawain begs pardon only to warn Richard that he, too, is set in history—the histories of the declines of Troy, Rome, and Camelot.132 Pearl was, I believe, written not for Gaunt but for his brother, Thomas of Woodstock, another figure who sought a way to manifest his power and prestige. Thomas of Woodstock, in dash, authority, wealth, and historical longevity, ran his older brother, John of Gaunt, a poor second.133 Thomas was born in 1355 and was fifteen years younger than the brother whose career shadowed and deeply influenced his own. They were to die within two years of one another: Thomas while under arrest by the king in September 1397, and John of old age in January 1399. In 1373, Edward III provided for Thomas, his youngest surviving son, by arranging for him to marry Eleanor de Bohun, one of the two heiresses of the vast estate of Humphrey de Bohun. Contemporary rumor (and Froissart) had it that Thomas hoped to persuade Eleanor’s younger sister Mary to join a convent, thereby allowing him to inherit the entire fortune, but he was foiled by John of Gaunt, who in 1380 married his son Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, to Mary. The inheritance was thus split, leaving Thomas a good deal less wealthy than he had hoped to be. As Goodman notes, “As a consequence of Derby’s marriage, Thomas, for the rest of his life, was dependent on Crown grants rather than on inherited resources to maintain the income of a leading magnate.”134 Still, in marrying Eleanor and having granted to him half of the Bohun properties, including the castle, town, and manor of Pleshey, the family seat, Thomas came into more than sheer wealth. He came into a cultural tradition that the Bohun family had long maintained, including its well-established pa131. The York Adam cries, “Allas! for sorowe and care! oure handis may we wryng.” See L. S. Johnson, Voice of the “Gawain”-Poet, 68. 132. I am drawing here upon my study of the poem: see ibid. 133. For much more detail, see Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, especially chaps. 4 and 5. See also remarks throughout Goodman, John of Gaunt, and Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt. I am indebted to the work of both scholars. 134. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 89, 90; Saul, Richard II, 178.


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tronage of the art of book illumination, which was centered at Pleshey.135 He also inherited Humphrey de Bohun’s position as constable of England.136 The 1380s were of great moment in the history of Thomas of Woodstock. Whatever his relations with his father had been, he began to achieve some prominence in the early reign of Richard II.137 He campaigned (albeit unsuccessfully) in northern France in 1378 and 1380 and was actively involved in quelling the Rising of 1381. During this period his popularity was far greater than John of Gaunt’s. The latter’s wealth and prestige had made his London palace, the Savoy, a target for mob violence. Thomas seems to have gained a certain amount of influence over the king, who in 1385 elevated him from earl of Buckingham to duke of Gloucester. He remained loyal to his brother, despite their diªerences, and was quick to defend him in 1384 when Lancaster was accused of treason. From 1385 onwards, Thomas was increasingly allied with those who attempted to reform the king’s household and became the guiding intelligence behind the Appellants’ impeachment and harsh punishment of the king’s ministers.138 One of those Appellants was, of course, Henry of Derby, his nephew and brotherin-law. During this period, Thomas and his wife had four or five children. Their only son, Humphrey, was born in 1381. Anne was born probably in 1380, Joan after Humphrey, and Isabel in 1384. There was a fourth daughter, Philippa, who is mentioned as dying young. Both Anne and Joan were destined for marriage, but Isabel was donated to the house of the Minoresses without Aldgate in infancy, clad in a monastic habit.139 135. Lucy Freeman Sandler, “A Note on the Illuminations of the Bohun Manuscripts,” Speculum 60 (1985): 364–72; Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds., The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400 (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 1987), 501–2. 136. DNB 19:633, s.v. “Thomas of Woodstock.” 137. See Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 5–6, on Thomas’s relations with Edward III. Even early in Richard’s reign, however, the clash between the retainers of the Black Prince, most notably Sir Simon Burley, and John of Gaunt and those loyal to him (like Thomas) was apparent. Both brothers were omitted from the first council that was convened to run the country after Richard acceded to the throne. See Saul, Richard II, 28. 138. For an account of both the personalities of the Appellants and the issues they were raising, see Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy. See also Saul, Richard II, chap. 9. Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies, suggested that Thomas was more than the guiding intelligence of the Merciless Parliament and in fact oversaw the deposition of Richard for a short period, after which the king was reinstated. She speculated that Thomas put himself forward in the line of succession, an act that eªectively put the king back on the throne. 139. Anne was married in 1392 to Thomas, the third earl of Staªord. He died in that year, and in 1398 she married his brother Edmund, the fifth earl of Staªord. Joan (d. 1400) was betrothed but died unmarried. See F. Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England . . . to the Year 1677 (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1677) 3:xv; DNB 19:637. For Isabel, see the Victoria History of London,


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Though that last phrase may chill the blood of any early-twenty-first-century person, medieval parents, particularly aristocratic parents, often sent very young children away for their nurture and education. Convents had from very early times served as places to educate royal children. The practice at once gave convents a source of income and, in the case of daughters, oªered a suitable place to send young girls for training.140 Frequently children who were sent to convents or monasteries for early education were in fact “destined” for religious life and remained where they had been placed at an early age. In large families, it was not uncommon to make one or two daughters nuns, in which case they received the equivalent of dowries but were not co-inheritors in an estate.141 They could not make their professions before a suitable age, twelve or later, when they were given the veil, and they had to wait even longer before they could be solemnly professed by the bishop. Such arrangements provided comfortably for a daughter, assured the spiritual well-being of the family itself, and allowed a more substantial inheritance for those children who were destined for the world and marriage. Nuns were endowed by their families with portions (marriage, whether to Christ or to an earthly bridegroom, was an economic venture as well as a chance to forge a set of alliances), and the donation of a young child to a religious house was both a pious and a worldly gesture. The house in which Thomas of Woodstock placed Isabel, that of the Minoresses without Aldgate, was one that had been patronized from its inception by English royalty. By the time Edmund, earl of Lancaster, the younger brother of Edward I, and his wife Blanche, the widow of Henry le Gros, the king of Navarre, founded the Abbey of the Minoresses of the Order of St. Clare in London in 1293, the order had long abandoned the ideals of poverty and the imitatio Christi that St. Clare herself had wished to preserve. Clare had won the right of both for her order from Pope Innocent III, who decreed that the order could be forced by no one

518; and W. H. Bliss and J. A. Twemlow, eds., Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland (London: Mackie, 1904), 5:385. See also Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 79. 140. Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London: Methuen, 1984), 63–64; Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275–1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 25–26. Inevitably there were complaints about the practice, especially as it interfered with the devotional life nuns were supposed to lead. 141. Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 18–25. There is additional information about the presence of children in monasteries in John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). Boswell, however, focuses upon boys, particularly those who were abandoned to monastic establishments.


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to accept possessions. Soon after Innocent’s death in 1216, the order was forced to accept possessions; in 1263, Urban IV drew up a final rule for the order that essentially ignored some of St. Clare’s most cherished ideals. The London house was under a rule known as the Isabella Rule that had been agreed upon for the French house of Minoresses in Longchamp near Paris. This rule explicitly allowed the house to accept special licenses and privileges. In 1293, a papal bull ordered perpetual enclosure for all women religious.142 The life thereafter of a Minoress was not unlike that of a Benedictine nun, for a life of enclosure placed the work of the daily o‹ce and of intercessory prayer at the center of the day, as a fifteenth-century rule for the Minoresses (the manuscript of which belonged to the abbey at Aldgate) makes clear.143 The English abbey, whose site covered five acres of ground outside the city walls in the parish of St. Botolph, Aldgate, was under the protection of a long line of royal and noble patrons, including Isabella, queen of Edward II; Henry of Lancaster, earl of Derby; John of Gaunt; and Eleanor de Bohun, who died there.144 This is not to suggest that the abbey was unusually luxurious or corrupt but that the duke and duchess of Gloucester were not donating a child to an order where she would be expected to sleep on the bare earth, as St. Clare had, or endure the extreme physical privation that Clare joyfully undertook under the guidance of Francis. In fact, in her will of 1399, Isabel’s mother left her a bed of cloth of gold. Also I devise to my daughter Isabel sister of the aforesaid Minoresses a bed of cloth of gold of Cyprus partly black & red with the entire 142. A. F. C. Bourdillon, The Order of Minoresses in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), 3; Patricia Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 66. For a history of the possessions of the London house, see E. M. Tomlinson, A History of the Minories: London (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), chap. 3. H. Fly, “Some Accounts of an Abbey of Nuns . . . ,” Archaeologia 15 [1803]: 93, notes that this branch of the order was often called the Rich Clares because they received endowments. 143. See W. W. Seton, ed., The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses enclosid, Early English Text Society, o.s., 148 (London: Oxford University Press, 1914). Seton’s introduction contains much information about the nature of the Isabella Rule. 144. Tomlinson, History of the Minories, 1 1–75. As Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, notes, “From Blanche of Navarre to Anne Duchess of York there are ten generations and, with two breaks, the tradition of patronage of the Minoresses was held to faithfully” (49). She provides a genealogy of these noble patrons in the Appendices. See also W. E. Hampton, “The Ladies of the Minories,” The Ricardian 4 (1978): 15–22. The patronage was a real necessity: by the fourteenth century it was hard to start a new house of Clares unless support could be guaranteed. See John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 406–16. See also David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995), chap. 1.


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Image not available

Abbey of the Minoresses. A reconstruction by Martha Carlin originally produced in Institute of Historical Research, Social and Economic Study of Medieval London, Final Report to ESRC on Stage 2 (Aldgate Project), ed. Derek Keene, fig. 2. Reproduced here with the permission of Martha Carlin and The Hambledon Press.


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belongings, tester, coverlid, curtain and tapestries Also a Bible of French in two volumes with two clasps of gold enamelled with the arms of France Also a book of decretals in French, Also a mixed history Also a book ‘de vitis patrum’ & the pastorals of St. Gregory Also an old Psalter down to the nocturn of ‘Exultate’ illuminated, another new book copied from the first ‘domini exaudi’ down to ‘Omnis spiritus laudet dominum’ Also £40 in money Also a girdle of black leather with a buckle and pendant and twelve round and plain [barres] of gold which belonged to my lord and husband.145 In contrast, the duchess left to the abbey £6 13s 4d. and a tun of good wine. None of the items “devised” to Isabel sounds like what might have been willed to a sister of the second order of St. Francis, whose foundress had wanted the most stringent poverty for the order (although Eileen Power has noted that it was not unusual for a novice to be provided with or willed furniture).146 The bed, the books, the money, and the girdle with its pendant and golden bars are all tokens of the world in which the duke and duchess of Gloucester moved. The gifts from mother to daughter do not so much bring the world into the abbey as remind us that the abbey, though enclosed, participated in a network of favors and exchange as much as any other outpost of prayer and patronage. The spiritual economy of intercessory prayer (which, to some extent, drove the late medieval founding of chantries and houses of religion) was underwritten by the goods of the very magnates who needed the prayers.147 Isabel spent her life in

145. Quoted in Tomlinson, History of the Minories, 43, from John Nichols, A Collection of All the Wills, Now Known Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England . . . and Every Branch of the Blood Royal. . . . (London: J. Nichols, 1780), 177. Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, points out that Isabel appears to have been still unprofessed, as she was a minor of fifteen or sixteen. 146. See Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 20. See also W. G. Clark-Maxwell, “The Outfit for the Profession of an Austin Canoness at Lacock, Wilts., in the Year 1395,” Archaeological Journal 69 (1912): 1 16–24, and Berenice M. Kerr, Religious Life for Women, c. 1100–1350: Fontevraud in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), chap. 3. 147. I am oversimplifying somewhat here. The ways in which the doctrine of Purgatory influenced the relationship between religious foundations and patronage have been scrutinized by Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (London: Rout ledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). For the goods themselves, as well as the wills that record them, see Penelope Eames, “Documentary Evidence Concerning the Character and Use of Domestic Furnishings in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Furniture History 7 (1971): 41–61. See also Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economics: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 5.


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the abbey in a setting that has been described as rustic, and, when given the opportunity to leave and rejoin the world by claiming her inheritance soon after her mother’s death, she refused.148 In 1421 she was its abbess. Her own presence in the house inevitably maintained its prestige, for she was singled out for favors by Richard II as well as by Henry V.149 The fragments of a life that I have briefly described cannot be disassociated from the very real impulse to piety and patronage that was as much a part of Thomas, duke of Gloucester, as his own need for money, his desire for increased political influence or power, and his firm belief in the values of a chivalric world. The duke of Gloucester most perfectly illustrates that late medieval blend of extreme worldliness and sophistication and highly literate piety that seems to have characterized a certain segment of the English nobility.150 There is ample evidence for the degree of literacy and administrative accomplishment of members of the higher nobility—as well as for the crucial role played by these men as religious and devotional patrons. The inherent paradoxes of what appear such widely divergent foci seem not to have bothered men like Thomas of Woodstock, whom Froissart could describe as a “rough and ready soldier” but also as a “man of books, devotion, and independent views.”151 Thomas of Woodstock was no angel: his reputation for temper, brusqueness, and political chicanery is as entrenched in contemporary accounts as is John of Gaunt’s extraordinarily welldeveloped manner of noblesse oblige. Neither brother, however, allowed the busi-

148. The Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, ed. Bliss and Twemlow, describes her as never having made her profession. Because all of her sisters and brothers were dead, the letter to the bishop of London, which was initiated by a petition from Arundel, mandates, “lest the duke’s inheritance devolve to strangers, the bishop and archbishop are to withdraw Isabella, whose mother is the archbishop’s niece, place her beyond the jurisdiction of the said friars and nuns, examine her upon her wish to remain in or leave the monastery, and in the latter case to license her to do so; otherwise, to put her back in the monastery. The aid of the secular arm is, if necessary, to be invoked” (385). 149. For Richard, see Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 178 n. 12; for Henry V, see Tomlinson, History of the Minories, 45. When she was abbess, Isabel was granted an annuity of £17 6s 8d. (Bourdillon, Order of Minoresses, 38). 150. Here, the work of McFarlane, Nobility of Later Medieval England; J. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl, and B. Worden (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 43–55; Catto, “Sir William Beauchamp Between Chivalry and Lollardy,” in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1990), 39–48; and Tuck, “Carthusian Monks and Lollard Knights,” is central. For an account of Richard’s interest in the devotional life, see Saul, Richard II, 448–49. 151. Cited in Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility,” 54. The best and most sustained study of Thomas of Woodstock is that of Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, chap. 4.


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ness of the life of a magnate to obliterate the spiritual business of salvation and active charity. Both maintained a public display of piety that seems to have been the visible sign of inward devotion. John of Gaunt had kept close ties with the Carmelite order; he and Blanche, his first wife, had chosen the Carmelites as their confessors, and his attachment for the order grew stronger throughout his life. He had a special devotion to the Virgin. He was charitable throughout his life, continuing the patronage of the College of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin in the Newarke in Leicester, which had been founded by his fatherin-law, Henry of Lancaster.152 His will, which specified his obsequies, testifies to his piety and charity and to his awareness of the public dimensions of both.153 Similarly, he maintained a care for the anniversary and the tomb of Blanche of Lancaster, who had died in 1368 (and by whom he would eventually be buried in St. Paul’s). The anniversary services were celebrated each September 12, the day of the duchess’s death, and included a high mass, supplementary masses, distribution of alms, and expressions of the duke’s hospitality to magnates and the clergy of St. Paul’s. The important architect and mason Henry Yevele had been commissioned to construct her tomb, which contained an alabaster image of Blanche. A special altar had also been constructed for the purpose of singing masses for her throughout the year.154 What is of course played out here is a display of piety and devotion that does not have to be passed oª merely as display. John of Gaunt’s private devotions can be as intentional as Sir John Clanvowe’s Lollardy; The Two Ways is not compromised by the Boke of Cupide. Nor does John of Gaunt’s public devotion to the memory of Blanche of Lancaster, the author of his wealth and the mother of his one legitimate son, or his public display of charity and piety alter the equally compelling record of a lifetime of religious benefaction and private devotion. Thomas of Woodstock, like his older brother, took a wife from an illustrious and wealthy family, one associated with England’s own native artistic traditions. In marrying Eleanor de Bohun, Thomas of Woodstock married into a family whose members were the greatest patrons of English book illumination during 152. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 255ª; Goodman, John of Gaunt, chap. 1 1; and A. H. Thompson, English Clergy and Their Organization. 153. See Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, appendix 1; McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, 207–21; and J. B. Post, “The Obsequies of John of Gaunt,” Guildhall Studies in London History 5 (1981): 1–1 1. 154. N. B. Lewis, “The Anniversary Service for Blanche of Lancaster, 12 September 1374,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 21 (1937): 176–92. For services in her memory and for her tomb, see Lodge and Somerville, eds., John of Gaunt’s Register, 1:76–77, 138–39, 221.


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the fourteenth century. The Bohun manuscripts, of which about ten survive, were made in what appear to have been three phases between the 1340s and the 1390s. During the middle period, from c. 1350–55 to c. 1385, two of these artists, who were detached Augustinian friars, worked at Pleshey in Essex and were treated as family retainers. During the later period, or during the maturity of Thomas and Eleanor, the manuscripts were ordered from London and display a‹nities with other important commercial manuscripts.155 The “younger” Bohuns’ interest in manuscripts was more than aesthetic or ancestral. For example, Mary de Bohun, the younger sister of Eleanor and the wife of Henry of Derby, inherited her father’s psalter, made before 1373, and introduced into it some personal prayers. She also ordered a prayer book for herself, which contained the Hours of the Virgin, the penitential psalms, and the O‹ce of the Dead.156 Both Eleanor and Thomas commissioned texts that clearly interested them: a book of hours (Oxford, Keble ms 47); a psalter supposed to have been Eleanor’s (Edinburgh, Advs. ms 18.6.5); Thomas’s two-volume Bible in English (British Library mss Egerton 617 and 618); and a Polychronicon (Oxford, Bodleian Library ms Bodley 316), which he presented to the college at Pleshey.157 Thomas is also the focus for the Dialogue between a Secular and a Friar to be found in Trinity College Dublin Library ms 244, a collection of miscellaneous Wycli‹te tracts.158 The treatise begins with a dedication to the duke of Gloucester, “Most worschipfulleste & gentilleste lord duke of Glowcestre: 3oure seruaunt sendith 3ou disputusun written that was bifore 3ow by twixe a frere & a seculer 3oure clerk. preiying of bothe sidis to chese and apreue the trewth for as seyeth oure bileue.”159 The treatise itself has a noble history of which Thomas 155. Lynda Eileen Dennison, “The Stylistic Sources, Dating, and Development of the Bohun Workshop, ca. 1340–1400” (Ph.D. diss., Westfield College, University of London, 1988), abstract. See also M. R. James and E. G. Millar, The Bohun Manuscripts (Oxford: The Roxburghe Club, 1936); Sandler, “Note on the Illuminations of the Bohun Manuscripts”; Alexander and Binski, eds., The Age of Chivalry, 501–2, 156; and Christopher de Hamel, “A New Bohun,” in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), 19–26. 156. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility,” 49. 157. Dennison, “Stylistic Sources,” 269–70; Lynda Eileen Dennison, “Oxford, Exeter College ms 47: The Importance of Stylistic and Codicological Analysis in Its Dating and Localization,” in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg (Los Altos, Calif.: AndersonLovelace, 1990), 41–60. On Keble ms 47, see M. B. Parkes, The Medieval Manuscripts of Keble College Oxford (London: Scolar Press, 1979), 215–23. 158. The dialogue is presently being edited by Fiona Somerset for the Early English Text Society. See Somerset, “‘As just as is a squyre,’” 197–98. 159. Trinity College Dublin Library ms 244, fol. 212v.


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must have been aware. Though such dialogues capturing debates between persons of diªerent estates were popular throughout the Middle Ages, Charles V had patronized a massive expansion of the Dialogus inter militem et clericum in the Somnium viridarii, possibly composed by Nicole Oresme in 1376 and translated into French (Le songe du vergier) by 1378. (See Chapter 2 above.) John Trevisa’s Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk (c. 1387), with which he prefaced his translation of the Polychronicon,160 is also a translation of the Dialogus inter militem et clericum. In designating Thomas as the judge of this debate, the translator engages in some not-so-subtle flattery, suggesting that Thomas’s royal blood and his reputation for intelligence and fairness would allow him to distinguish the “truth” of a debate held before him, either actually or virtually. Together with his ownership of a vernacular Bible (which was commissioned), the Dialogue suggests the duke’s interest in and willingness to be associated with the issues and ideas of the day. (At about the same time, Thomas of Woodstock showed up on the list circulated by Philippe de Mézières as a supporter of his Order of the Passion; see Chapter 2.) Thomas of Woodstock was indeed a cultured and intelligent man. Goodman notes that when he was younger, Gloucester formed a “company of May,” which may have celebrated spring with poetry and song. He was fond of music and liked chivalric entertainments. In his position as constable of England, the figure who arranges for battles to settle quarrels (and thus decides on weapons and procedure), he was also an author, writing sometime before 1390 a treatise dedicated to Richard II entitled “The Order of Battle in the Court of Chivalry.”161 In it he mandates that a knight must swear that he bears only the requisite weapons and has not concealed “ne stone of vertue, ne herbe of vertue, ne charme, ne experiment, ne carocte, ne other enchauntment . . . by the which thou trustest the 5e bettir to ovircome the foreseide . . . ne that thou trustith in noon othir thyng, but oonly in God and thi body.”162 Thomas would have been the first to point out Sir Gawain’s concealment of the magically endowed green girdle as a crime against chivalry, just as he and his fellow magnates would also have been alert to the protocol of hunting practiced in the court of Bercilak. “The 160. Somerset, “‘As just as is a squyre,’” 196, also mentions the French tradition; on Trevisa, see 195–96. See also Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 3. 161. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 77. 162. Thomas of Woodstock, “The Order of Battle in the Court of Chivalry,” in The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. T. Twiss (London: Longman, 1871), 317.


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Order of Battle” was translated somewhat later for John Paston under the title “Ordinaunce and Forme of Fighting Within Listes as settled by Thomas, duke of Gloucester.”163 Thomas was also deeply pious, both privately and publicly. He and his wife, Eleanor [Alianore], were benefactors of Westminster Abbey, and information provided either by the duke of Gloucester or by members of his household figures in the Monk of Westminster’s chronicle account of much of Richard’s reign.164 Before his departure for Prussia in 1391, the duke made an especially impressive gift to the Abbey of a full set of vestments of cloth of gold, elaborately embroidered with a T. A. monogram (“cum litteris grossis sub hac figuracione”) for his and wife’s first names, interspersed with swans done in matching pearls (“compositis cum cignis de margarytis”); a jewel inset with a cylinder large enough to contain the host when it is borne in procession; and silver and gilt altar furnishings.165 In 1388 he made a donation to St. Albans of cloth of gold and of a circular collar decorated with a swan with open wings. The ancestor of the Bohun family was supposed to have been Lohengrin, the swan knight, son of Lady Blanchefleur and Sir Perceval. The gift thus linked the duke of Gloucester, through his wife, to the splendor of the Round Table.166 The benefaction to Westminster Abbey captures much about pious giving. Splendidly luxurious, adorned with the initials of the duke and duchess, the swan badge of the Bohun family made of pearls, all elaborately and prominently worked, publicly given and meant to be publicly displayed, and bound by the legalities of goods, the gifts bear witness to the piety of the Swan Knight and his wife that is inextricably attached to their royal blood and social position. Similarly, the gift to St. Albans mingles family pride, Arthurian myth, and contemporary piety in ways that stamp the gift with the status and identity of the giver. But Thomas of Woodstock also had a home near the conventual church of the Minoresses without Aldgate. The house had been built in the 1350s by Elizabeth 163. It is ms Lansdowne 285 in the British Library. See the introduction to Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. Twiss. 164. See Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, introduction. 165. Ibid., 478–79. The Monk notes that the duke had already given these gifts to the Abbey but had taken them back by indenture, enjoining that after his death, the gifts would revert to the Abbey. By this gift he countermanded his own bond and gave them outright to St. Peter’s. 166. See Fletcher, “Lancastrian Collar of Esses.” The gift is recorded in a catalogue of gifts to St. Albans, British Library, ms Cotton Nero D.V.II, fol. 1 10 (p. 193). I have not seen this manuscript.


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de Burgh, a cousin of Edward III, on land rented from the abbey.167 The credentials of her builder, Richard de Felstede, were as notable as her own: Felstede had worked at Kenelworth for Henry, earl of Lancaster, the father of Blanche, and the house he built for Elizabeth de Burgh was not a humble one. As the reconstruction of the abbey indicates, the house was well situated within the precincts of the abbey, near the great abbey gardens and the church, where the nuns would be enclosed from view within their choir.168 Elizabeth de Burgh had been granted privileges to visit the abbey, privileges that were later extended to Thomas.169 The nuns allowed him the privilege of making a door between his house and the abbey so that he could enter the church as he pleased. This was an unusual procedure; the nuns did not extend the same privilege to the next resident of the house.170 Whatever his attraction to the church—the presence of his daughter, the simple proximity of a church, or the combined pleasures of the two, along with that of the privilege conferred upon a prime benefactor—he visited it when he was in London, and his wife Eleanor visited there after his death and died in its precincts. She, like her husband, was buried in the more public cultic space of English kings, Westminster Abbey. Both the duke and duchess seem to have shared an interest in private devotion. In 1391 they were given the right to enter enclosed monasteries for a period of prayer.171 In his final appeal to King Richard, Thomas characterized himself as especially devoted to Mary Magdalene, a saint whose links to penitential devotion and ecstatic love made her a popular figure for lay piety.172

167. For an account of this remarkable woman’s life, see Frances A. Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Elizabeth’s granddaughter was Elizabeth de Burgh, the countess of Ulster, the wife of Lionel of Antwerp, in whose household Chaucer first enjoyed service. See Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer: Life-Records, chap. 2. Chaucer later lived nearby, above Aldgate. 168. Martha Carlin, “Holy Trinity Minories: Abbey of St. Clare, 1293/94–1539” (unpublished manuscript, Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 1987), 15. The paper can be obtained from the Institute of Historical Research. 169. Jennifer C. Ward, “Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare (d. 1360),” in Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon Press, 1994); Carlin, “Holy Trinity Minories,” 38–40. See also Hampton, “Ladies of the Minories,” and Robert Ellis, “Excavations at 9 St. Clare Street,” The London Archaeologist 5 (1985): 1 15–19. 170. Victoria History of London, 518. See also Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 79. Carlin notes in “Holy Trinity Minories,” 40, that Thomas had probably had the house since the 1370s. She also speculates that the “public” door to the church must have been on the north side, which would place it fairly close to the house (14–15). 171. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 80. Goodman speculates that they possibly meant to procure prayers for the success of Thomas’s crusade into Prussia. 172. For the figure of the Magdalene in relation to Pearl, see L. S. Johnson, Voice of the “Gawain”Poet, 148–61.


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There is much other evidence for Gloucester’s care for religious foundations, including his own founding of a college at Pleshey in 1394.173 More important yet is the list of Gloucester’s belongings (along with their individual value) that was compiled after his death.174 The contents of the inventory suggest a taste for luxury in keeping with his royal blood, but they also suggest a lively and informed intelligence that encompassed a wide variety of genres as well as a keen interest in the devotional life that was expressed both semipublicly, in the splendor of his private chapel, and more privately, in the books he amassed for that chapel. The inventory is arranged by subheadings: tapestries, bed hangings (of silk and cloth of gold and of worsted), vestments for the chapel, plate, maces, books (for the chapel and for his own library), robes of fur, and armor. The subjects for the tapestries are mainly taken from chivalric romance—Charlemagne, Godefrey of Boulogne, St. George, the battle between Gawain and Lancelot—but some are biblical, including the Nativity and the story of Judith and Holofernes. A few, like the story of the “discomfiture” between a wodewose (a wild man of the woods) and a lion, are drawn from more popular stories. The bed hangings are equally splendid. Embroidered with the arms of the duke and with flowers, fantastic beasts, wodewoses fighting, jousters, and parrots, they disclose a series of private spaces within the more public arena of Pleshey.175 The chapel vestments are of rich and colorful fabrics, wonderfully worked to manifest the glory of God and the house of Gloucester. One cope is described as blue, decorated with diverse birds and beasts with frets of pearls with garters inscribed with the Garter motto, which was also added to the end of Sir Gawain: “hony soit qui mal pense.” The list of vestments is breathtaking, reminding us of the rich materiality of the medieval world, of the color and detail against which the habits of the religious must have struck a far more severe contrast than in our own more soberly dressed world. Like the vestments, the books for the chapel (for the most part illuminated and richly bound) and the plate used there are details of a life whose public performance of power and wealth was central to its nature. The list also reminds us of the intertwining of the chivalric and devotional realms. The Garter motto 173. For an account of these, see Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 82–83; Gough, History and Antiquities of Pleshey, 173, 175–81, appendix, 69–87; Medieval Essex (Chelmsford, U.K.: Essex County Council, 1962). 174. For this, from which my own remarks are drawn, see Dillon and Hope, “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels.” For a list and brief discussion of the books in Gloucester’s library, see Cavanaugh, “Study of Books Privately Owned,” 844–51. 175. On the importance of beds and bed furnishings, see Eames, “Documentary Evidence.”


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and the prominently displayed wealth and power of the duke form the very warp and woof of the vestments in which priests reenacted the Passion for the household at Pleshey.176 The contents of the duke’s library at Pleshey indicate even more about his tastes and interests.177 He had married well: his wife brought him a fortune, but she also brought him into a family for whom books were objects and/or texts to be commissioned, acquired, and passed on. The list of books at Pleshey is an impressive one. It includes a number of French works, a Roman de la rose, a copy of Livy, a Romance of Alexander, an account of the Trojan War, the story of Tancred, several Arthurian romances, a book of law, the French statutes, several French devotional or meditative treatises, the miracles of the Virgin, and a life of St. Thomas of Canterbury. There are a number of works relating to history— chronicles of English history and of the papacy—as well as books of law and government, including the Digests, the Decretals, the English statutes, and a copy of Giles of Rome. The books of theology and devotion comprise an English Bible, a “novel livre” of the evangelists glossed in English, two Apocalypses, a copy of the Speculum de humane salvatione, a glossed Job, St. Augustine’s De trinitate, a book of Bible stories, Gregory’s Pastoral Care, the Mirror of Divinity, the Meditations of St. Bernard, and a book in French called the Crown of Tribulation containing lives of the saints, a book of prayers, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard as well as other books of moral and spiritual inquiry. There was also a copy of Mandeville’s Travels, one of Barlaam and Josephath, and a volume labeled “un veil livre de Dict Poeta3.” Eleanor of Gloucester’s will suggests that she, too, like other members of her family, was alive to the meaningful gesture implied by the collecting and distributing of books.178 In her will, dated August 9, 1399, she not only left books 176. When he received permission to endow the college at Pleshey, Thomas moved the original church to the site of the college. Nothing is left of either the castle or the college today. But see the map of what Pleshey must have looked like. 177. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 80, points out that some of these volumes, as well as some of the hangings, may have been commissioned and acquired by his father-in-law, Humphrey de Bohun, one of the great lay patrons of the arts in the fourteenth century. I am not suggesting that all of these goods were in Pleshey during the 1380s. The beautiful copy of the Roman de la rose (British Library ms Royal 19 B XIII) was owned by Gloucester only from 1395 to 1397, as it was purchased from the estate of Sir Richard Stury after his death in 1395. 178. For lists of the books commissioned and owned by other members of her family, see Cavanaugh, “Study of Books Privately Owned,” 106–12. They include a number of unspecified liturgical and devotional books; the Middle English romance William of Palerne that was translated from the French for Humphrey de Bohun (d. 1361); the celebrated “Bohun Manuscripts,” some of which were commissioned for Eleanor’s father, Humphrey de Bohun (who inherited the earldom from his


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to each of her children but also carefully specified which books.179 To her son Humphrey, who had gone to Ireland with Richard and died soon after Bolingbroke landed in England, Eleanor left a chronicle of France, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principium, a book of the vices and virtues, the French poem The Knight of the Swan, and a psalter. To her daughter Anne, who was married to the earl of Staªord, she left a French translation of the Golden Legend. To her daughter Joan, who would die betrothed but unmarried in 1400, she left a psalter, a primer, and other works of devotion. Finally, she left that hefty list of books that I have already mentioned to her daughter Isabel, the Minoress. In the process of discussing Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, I have come a long way from his daughter Isabel and an even longer way from any reference to Pearl or the Pearl maiden. The very process of sketching a possible context for this highly wrought poem about a lost child encapsulates one of the issues that lies at the very heart of the poem itself. What is the subject of the poem—or, more properly, who is the subject?180 The child, living or dead, was hardly a typical subject for English poetry in the fourteenth century. In his 1921 edition of Pearl, Sir Israel Gollancz included Boccaccio’s Olympia, his elegy for his own dead daughter, as a possible source for Pearl. Though the Italian poem may have been known to the Pearl-poet, the one poem does not explain the other. There was certainly an elegiac tradition in medieval verse, but there was no tradition of children’s elegies. Children were not even treated to the complexly ritualized burial practices of dead adults.181 Bowers has recently gone so far as to uncle Humphrey de Bohun in 1361), and were produced at Pleshey; John of Bridlington’s Prophecies, which he dedicated to that same Humphrey de Bohun; and a commentary on Walter Map’s Valerius ad Ruffinum, which bears the Bohun badge. Mary de Bohun, the younger daughter of Humphrey de Bohun and sister to Eleanor, seems to have commissioned several of the Bohun manuscripts after her father’s death. Mary seems also to have owned a Lancelot du Lac. The manuscript bears the arms of England, Bohun, and Leon and Castile, kingdoms claimed by John of Gaunt, her father-in-law. For Eleanor’s will, see N. H. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta (London: Nichols and Son, 1826), 1:147–48. 179. She died in October 1399 of grief, it was said, over her son’s recent death. For Eleanor’s death, see the DNB, s.v. “Thomas of Woodstock.” 180. The problem of the poem’s subject, or rather its extreme subjectivity, has been posed by David Aers, “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl,” Speculum 68 (1993): 54–73. 181. See Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997). Children are only rarely mentioned by Daniell and not at all by Binski. Sarah Stanbury, “Feminist Masterplots: The Gaze on the Body of Pearl’s Dead Girl,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), also mentions the dearth of references to dead children; see 108– 9, along with notes 38 and 39 to those pages. There are treatments or depictions of the baby Jesus,


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suggest that Pearl is not about a child’s death at all; it celebrates the figure of Richard’s queen, Anne of Bohemia, who died in 1394.182 As arresting as Bowers’s argument is, Anne was not a child when she died, and it does violence to Pearl’s own fictions and symbols to wrench it away from the subject of childhood. But does it do violence to Pearl’s fictions and symbols to suggest that it records a benefaction, a living child given to the metaphoric death—or marriage, perhaps —of the religious life? As Felicity Riddy has most recently pointed out, the poem calls attention to itself as an elaborately made work of art, fit only for the most splendid of collectors.183 She also argues that the model of the poet who writes for himself was Italian, where cultural conditions were very diªerent from those in England. In other words, we should not make the assumption that Pearl is about the author’s dead child.184 If the poem is a product of the patronage system, commissioned in a way similar to whatever set of conditions produced the Book of the Duchess, its very value as a jewel indicates the wealth and status of its likely patron. If the families who might have “aªorded” to own an object like Pearl can be numbered in late-fourteenth-century England, can we also inquire into their family histories and find a dead two-year-old daughter?185 My language here is deliberately mercantile and necessarily crude. People in the Middle Ages clearly loved their children, but they seem to have valued references to children (see especially the Innocents plays), and, increasingly by the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, treatises on their nurture and training. There are relatively few discussions or evocations of the deaths of children, though. I do not mean to suggest that their deaths were not remarked: for example, the Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys (1380–1422), ed. Louis François Bellaguet (Paris: Crapelet, 1839), 1:518–19, notes the birth and death of a daughter to Charles VI and Isabelle. Her body was interred in the abbey of Maubuisson. For some evidence for the inclusion of children’s e‹gies in tomb monuments, see Sophie Oosterwijk, “‘A Swithe Feire Grave’: The Appearance of Children on Medieval Tomb Monuments,” in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. R. Eakes and S. Tyas (Donington, U.K.: Shaun Tyas, 2003), 172–92. 182. Bowers, Politics of “Pearl.” Though I am not in agreement with Bowers’s reading of the poem, his book nonetheless provides an important step in relocating this poem within the artistic and political concerns of late-fourteenth-century culture. 183. Felicity Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 143–56, locates the poem within a culture sustained by the exchange of luxuries —jewels, works of art, and poems. For a study of the language of commodification within Sir Gawain, see Jill Mann, “Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 187–205. 184. Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” 151 and n. 24. 185. For rich studies of late-fourteenth-century noble families, see Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility; and McFarlane, Nobility of Later Medieval England.


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their children in ways that are very diªerent from those that appear normative in early-twenty-first-century England or America. By way of illustration, let me begin in the household of John of Gaunt. Blanche of Lancaster, one of the greatest ladies in the land, died on September 12, 1368. She was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old; she had had five children in nine years, two of whom (both sons) had died in infancy, the last in 1368. Because in 1404 Henry IV exempted the College of the Newarke in Leicester from contributing to the eªort to quell the Glyndwr rebellion because both his wife and his brothers were buried there, we can tell that the children were buried in the foundation started by their grandfather, Henry of Lancaster. This was an important site for Lancastrian donation and devotion, but Blanche herself was buried in St. Paul’s.186 John of Gaunt buried his second wife, Constance of Castile, in Leicester; his will specified that he should be buried by Blanche’s side. There is no reason to doubt his aªection for Blanche. He maintained services for her throughout his life, and her tomb in St. Paul’s was magnificent and well known. Indeed, Blanche had brought him his fortune, and her wealth had made him the incredibly powerful figure he was, so it was only right that he should choose to be buried by her in a London church that was itself a site of privilege.187 That he buried his dead infants and his second wife in Leicester does not say that he did not care about them but that he understood the subtleties of cultural practice. If the Blanche of Lancaster who died of plague, the woman whose body at twenty-six or twenty-seven must have been tired from its five pregnancies and no doubt marred by the disease that killed her, seems more material, more physically experienced, than the Good Fair White who puts oª young lovers with ease, what of her son’s wife, Mary de Bohun?188 Henry Bolingbroke was fourteen in 1380 when he married his eleven-year-old wife. As a minor, Mary de Bohun remained with her mother after the wedding. She was pregnant within a few months, however. Her first son died in infancy. She may have lost another child before her oldest son, Henry, was born in 1387, when she was eighteen. In 186. On the importance of the Newarke, see Goodman, John of Gaunt, 256–57. For Henry IV’s exemption, see A. H. Thompson, English Clergy and Their Organization, 91. 187. The best voice here is that of Pearsall, who comments sensibly about the business of marriage in the late Middle Ages: see his Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 261. 188. Information on Mary de Bohun is hard to find. Both the Monk of Westminster and Henry Knighton mention her death; she died within months of Queen Anne and Constance of Castile, John of Gaunt’s second wife. See also Bryan Bevan, Henry IV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 7–8, and J. D. Gri‹th Davies, Henry V (London: Arthur Barker, 1935).


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quick succession she gave birth to three other sons, then two daughters. She died giving birth to the last daughter in July 1394. At twenty-five, she had been married fourteen years and had had eight pregnancies with only two deaths. Six of those children had been born in seven years, though, so between eighteen and twenty-five, she was constantly pregnant. I say all of this not because I want to sentimentalize women’s experiences during the Middle Ages but because it is so hard to find out about such things. Only rarely do women (even those of high stature) have listings in the Dictionary of National Biography. Their jobs, for which they themselves were bred, are subsumed into their husbands’ entries. The author of the St. Albans Life of Christina of Markyate depicts the saint’s father and mother as pragmatic about the business of marrying daughters, saying that Christina was so intelligent, so prudent in aªairs, so e‹cient in carrying out her plans, that if she had given her mind to worldly pursuits she could have enriched and ennobled not only herself and her family but also all her relatives. To this was added the fact that her parents hoped she would have children who would be like her in character. So keen were they on these advantages (“fructus”) that they begrudged her a life of virginity. For if she remained chaste for the love of Christ, they feared that they would lose her and all that they could hope to gain through her.189 Although Christina’s parents express themselves through unusual acts of brutality toward their daughter, their sentiments could easily have been seconded by Joan Bohun, Mary’s mother. It was Joan who helped John of Gaunt frustrate Thomas of Woodstock’s plans for his young sister-in-law. Rather than the Abbey of the Minoresses, where Mary would have spent her days in prayer (and Thomas would have spent her half of the Bohun estate), Joan saw to it that Mary was married to a husband as prominent as that of her older daughter.190 For the highly placed, marriage was about property, and aristocratic women knew how they fit into a network of social, political, and familial relationships. The echoes of women’s feelings for children, dead and living, may perhaps be found in the laments and/or lullabies of the Virgin as she gazes on the babe she cradles or on 189. C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 68–69. 190. See Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 24.


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the broken body of her crucified son.191 We may hear them in the mothers’ grief in plays about the Innocents. We may find evidence of their care and love and grief in Griselda’s silences in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. But we do not find poems that elegize the children, and Pearl is not a poem that memorializes a mother’s grief.192 This is a poem about a child’s absence, a poem that, as many of its critics have pointed out, is as concentrated upon the male mourner who has lost a pearl, a gem, as it is focused by the maiden’s clear-eyed refusal to play the social role of the lost love object. She will not be Good Fair White. But the poem is far more than a response to the courtly construction of feminine value. The poem written to commemorate a lost pearl is itself a jewel that a lord like Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, could set beside the poem written for the dead Blanche. Thomas of Woodstock may have been loyal to his older brother, but he was also ambitious in his own right. Did he perhaps envy Gaunt his vast network built upon gifts? As I have noted earlier, Gaunt’s a‹nity or circle of associates included a number of men linked to the arts or to intellectual life. Though neither his power nor his wealth was of the magnitude of his older brother’s, certainly Thomas’s prestige was enhanced by his connections to the Bohuns’ cultural patronage. With his well-known love of luxury items, his intellectual and devotional leanings, and his desire for increased prominence, could the gift of a daughter to an aristocratic London abbey have provided the occasion for a festivity, perhaps one commemorated in a poem as bejeweled as any of the ornate badges or vestments decorated with pearls that the Swan Knight and his wife wore or bestowed as another type of oblation? If Thomas and Eleanor would have celebrated Isabel’s betrothal and marriage with an imposing mixture of business and ceremony, would they have wished to remark their daughter’s symbolic marriage to Christ, especially as it manifested their own spiritual status? Jewels were, of course, given by the wealthy and powerful as gifts throughout the Middle Ages. One such jewel—another “pearl maiden,” probably made in France sometime in the 1380s —may have been given by Margaret of Brabant, 191. One of the most wrenching of these is “Who can not wepe, com lerne of me,” in Frederick J. Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1867), 126–27. 192. For recent work on the issue of late medieval parenthood, see the Fall 1997 issue of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter. In it, Joan Cadden has a notice from 1477 of a father’s sorrow over a daughter’s death, but the fact that such a notice is worth remarking upon suggests how rare it is. See also Gail MacMurray Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 95–1 10.


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daughter of Duke Jean III and wife of Louis de Male, count of Flanders, to the Virgin of Louvain. Such medallions were frequently used as garment clasps. In 1393 the daughter of Philip the Bold was said to have given her husband a “golden clasp with a white lady.” (See Figure 1 1.) The medallion is an example of a new type of technique, one for which Paris became famous throughout Europe during the late fourteenth century. It was decidedly luxurious, featuring gold mounts for gems, gold leaves with veins, clustered stationary pearls, pearls hanging loosely, and “thick incrusted opaque white enamel on gold.”193 The lady who is the focal point for the set is crowned in green, wears white, and is surrounded by pearls. Such a gift, whether given to a bridegroom or a saint, manifests the taste and status of its giver. Pearl announces its interest in status in its opening section. Where Chaucer begins the Book of the Duchess with a narrator whose accidia prevents him from sleeping or feeling anything—or whose lack of sleep produces his accidia—Pearl begins with a narrator who falls into sleep out of bewilderment and sadness. But Pearl also rivets our attention upon a particular spot, the location of the lost pearl, which will become the focus of the narrator’s growing enlightenment.194 Chaucer has his protagonist’s dream emerge from his reading of Ovid and the story of Seys and Alcyone, and in the conversation between the narrator and the Black Knight, he works out the issues embedded within the Knight’s loss (and presumably the narrator’s). The Pearl dreamer’s experience emerges more directly from the spot where he lost his gem and is inextricably linked to the garden, whose spices, flowers, and earth are used as reminders of loss and also as evidence for the agricultural productivity that he must come to accept. The poem, however, begins with an assertion of the pearl’s value as a worldly object. Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye To clanly clos in golde so clere: 193. Description from William D. Wixom, Treasure from Medieval France (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967), 252–53. I would like to thank Russell Peck for first showing me a picture of this object, which is also reproduced in Sarah Stanbury, ed., Pearl (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Bowers, Politics of “Pearl,” fig. 7, reproduces a gold crown (which he links to the Pearl maiden) with 12 pinnacles and 126 pearls, thought to have been brought to England by Anne in 1382. Such are the luxury items of the late fourteenth century, items that would have been known by someone attached to a noble household. 194. I am using C. A. Lutrell, “Pearl: Symbolism in a Garden Setting,” in Sir Gawain and Pearl: Critical Essays, ed. R. J. Blanch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 60–85, as a guide to medieval literary gardens. See also Laura Howes, Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).


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Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye, Ne proued I neuer her precios pere. So rounde, so reken in vche araye, So smal, so smo5e her syde3 were; Queresoeuer I jugged gemme3 gaye I sette hyr sengeley in synglure. (Pearl, lines 1–8) But the speaker here praises more than the gem’s obvious value: he defines her value in relation to his own judgment and connoisseurship.195 The first two lines describe the pearl as fit for a prince’s pleasure, but it is a pleasure singular to the one who owns the pearl, who will enclose the jewel in gold. In other words, the mourner assimilates the pearl to other objects (or women) of value, something worth collecting because of its rarity. Its identity thus is bound up with his own fine eye for the fair. The last four lines of this stanza go on to describe his grief over losing this rare gem, which dropped from him in a garden. The remainder of the stanzas in this section do not describe the lost pearl; the narrator describes his past self as returning to the spot of loss, searching for the gem, regretting that its beauty is marred by the clay into which it fell. How might it serve a princely patron to hear himself characterized as someone who has lost a priceless gem? Most obviously, the opening lines flatter someone who was capable of possessing such a pearl. If that same “prince”—a title I do not think Thomas of Woodstock would have been ashamed to bear, even for the moment of a poem—had actually given away this gem, and to another sort of “enclosure,” his loss underlines his magnanimity, his willingness to let slip from him what anyone else would enclose in settings of gold as signs of its extrinsic value. The language here may also play with the etymology of Pleshey, the castle on high ground, watered with a brook on the north and other canals on the south and adorned with many parks, that Thomas and Eleanor inherited as part of her share of the Bohun holdings. The eighteenth-century antiquarian Philip Morant claimed that the name came from the French plaisir (pleasure), though this has been disputed in favor of the Old French plaisseis or plaisseiz, signifying an enclosure. If in his description of the mourner’s landscape, the landscape from which he lost his pearl, the poet praises the beauties of Pleshey, the 195. See E. V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), and his notes on lines 4 and 10, which discuss the poet’s use of the feminine pronoun. Similarly feminine and courtly terms of value are used in Cleanness, lines 1055–68, to describe Christ.


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above lines would also magnify the pearl’s new setting. And if that setting were the convent of the London Minoresses, with its royal a‹liations, then listeners could both delight in the beauty and nobility of the new location and remind themselves of the greatness of the benefaction.196 They could also reflect on the diªerence between the two forms of life available to Isabel: one as a prince’s daughter, fit to be married to a prince, and the other as a nun, whose physical beauty would henceforth be enclosed, hidden from the eyes of the world and from the pleasures of secular life. The Apocalypse manuscripts—whose pictures look forward to those post-temporal events the dreamer describes —owned by Thomas of Woodstock and perhaps by Joan Bohun likewise testify to the great wealth of their owners, but they are also reminders that such wealth is not necessarily a defense against the contingencies of time and death and judgment.197 Against these, the donation of a child (which, of course, would include her dowry), like the gift of a coucher book to a convent, a jewel to the Virgin, or vestments to Westminster Abbey, might be a seemly gift. These lines allow room for the poet to address the very nature of the noble life. What is staged here is possession—taste, to be sure, but also the sheer power or wealth to think to possess what is unique: “I sette hyr sengeley in synglure.” The very garden that is described in this first section resonates with the language of privilege. To some extent, we are so familiar with this garden—the love garden of countless medieval poems —that it is easy to ignore the obvious. Such gardens, with their rare, medicinal, culinary, and exotic plants, enclosed (“I entred in,” Pearl, line 38) and containing turf benches (“5at floury fla3t,” line 57), were possessions, tokens of power, even currency.198 The turf 196. On Pleshey, see Philip Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (London: T. Osborne, 1768), 2:451, and J. H. Round, “Pleshy,” Essex Archaeological Society Transactions 16, pt. 4 (1923). For evidence of the striking physical space Isabel occupied, see the unidentified female figure recovered from the site of the London Minoresses, reproduced in The Age of Chivalry, ed. Alexander and Binski, pl. 439. Alexander and Binski note that the statue is probably from an interior niche. It retains extensive traces of its original paint and gilding and, in its elegant drapery and stance, it recalls the influence of the French style associated with Jean Pucelle. Whomever she was intended to represent, she is certainly fashionable (390–91). 197. Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” 146, mentions the “high status” appeal of Apocalypses. See also Muriel A. Whitaker, “Pearl and Some Illustrated Apocalypse Manuscripts,” Viator 12 (1981): 185–96. Joan Bohun, Eleanor’s mother, was the owner of an Anglo-Norman illustrated and glossed Apocalypse, now Oxford, New College ms D.65: see Richard Kenneth Emmerson and Suzanne Lewis, “Census and Bibliography of Medieval Manuscripts Containing Apocalypse Illustrations, 800–1500,” Traditio 41 (1985): 403. The inventory of the Pleshey goods includes two Apocalypses. 198. See Lutrell’s “Pearl: Symbolism in a Garden Setting” for work on words like “huyle” and “fla3t” as features of the garden landscape.


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Pleshey. Reproduced from Medieval Essex (Chelmsford, U.K.: Essex County Council, 1962). Crown copyright; reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery O‹ce.


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benches alone require special attention. We are familiar with them from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, where, in the G prologue, the narrator has his bed made up outside. In The Medieval Garden, Sylvia Landsberg notes that turf seats or benches are first mentioned by Albertus Magnus but that there are no contemporary directions for constructing them. She goes on to provide some instructions. A turf bench can be made by cutting a vertical face and a horizontal surface into a natural bank, by building up banks and covering them with turf or other plants, or by stacking turfs layer upon layer and pegging turf to the upright faces.199 Chaucer, however, gives us the detail we need in order to appreciate such a bench (or contrived hill). He says that his garden seats were “Ybenched newe with turves fresshe ygrave” (LGW, G prologue, 98). In fact, a turf seat, as Landsberg notes in her directions, is hard to keep up. It needs to be re-turfed constantly if it is to look as such seats look in medieval illuminations. A turf bench, interplanted with daisies, speedwell, ground ivy—or one imaginatively interplanted with the dreamer’s gilliflowers, ginger, gromwell, and peonies, which, as C. A. Lutrell points out, do not bloom at the same time— is but one small detail of the aristocratic life that forms the background to Pearl. Another such vignette is adumbrated in the third section, where the dreamer follows “Doun after a strem 5at dry3ly halez” (Pearl, line 125), thinking that the water is “a deuyse / Bytwene myr5ez by merez made” (lines 139–40). The landscape is designed to suggest the pleasure garden of the Roman de la rose, where a stream leads to pools of water, at once linking and dividing them. The dreamer thus assumes, or hopes, that he is in a pleasure park whose careful landscaping allows for an extension of the delight concentrated in the smaller garden space. Such parks were not only features of poems but also elements of great estates. They sometimes encompassed hunting grounds, where game was raised and protected. What the dreamer thinks he is seeking, then, can be understood in terms of his ease in such a landscape. The landscape is finally a reflection of his own set of desires and expectations (or he perceives its limits as such). Does Pearl’s integrity depend upon an actual death? The first five stanzas of Pearl, which dramatize the dreamer’s loss of the pearl, serve as a carefully and richly coded introduction to a poem in which loss is tied inextricably to wealth, to the delight in the luxury of possession that renders a gem’s loss like the death 199. Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 51.


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of spirit.200 What is mourned is at once a gem “lost” in the grass, a “color” newly “clad in clot” (line 22), a seed that must die to bloom (line 31), and a “spot,” about a hand’s span, that is the site of mourning and loss. But the jeweler’s initial description of a gem of singular beauty, meant to be enclosed in a prince’s setting, round, with smooth sides, but lost in a garden, immediately locates the poem in the realm of courtly production whose conventions provide him with his lover’s language.201 Later, the maiden he sees set in another garden redefines herself by using another courtly image. She calls herself a rose that “flowred and fayled as kynde hyt gef,” but now, transposed, is truly proved a pearl of price (lines 270, 272). She goes on to mark the distance between the realm she inhabits and that of the jeweler, saying that his body (made corruptible in Eden) must sink into the earth before he can cross the water and live with her. Later, in the ninth section, the dreamer reveals that what he lost was a girl who “lyfed not two 3er in oure 5ede” (line 483). She responds by a‹rming her glorious status as a bride of Christ, one among the 144,000 virgins who accompany the Lamb. In the final stanzas, the dreamer is returned to the site of his loss, but it has become the place where he can see and meditate upon the priest’s daily consecration of the host. As this brief summary indicates, there are certainly references to physical death (both the maiden’s and the dreamer’s) in the poem. These specific references are typical in that they focus upon the corruption of the flesh and the disjunction between spiritual life and physical decay.202 On the other hand, the references both to mortification and to the child’s age when she lived in the dreamer’s “country” would not be out of place in a poem that celebrated her translation into another place, one that was typically seen as a reflection of the garden of Paradise. Even the term “5ede” (that is, according to the Medieval English Dictionary, people, a body of persons forming some kind of group, land, country, region, or language itself ) underlines the dreamer’s perception of the maiden’s new dwelling place or family. The word could describe the afterlife, but it could also be used to describe an entirely distinct earthly “setting” for the maiden, once an infant and now (imaginatively) a maiden

200. See, for example, the careful notes on the stanzas provided by Andrew and Waldron, eds., Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 53–57. 201. See Aers, “The Self Mourning.” 202. See Susan Powell and Alan Fletcher, “‘In Die Sepulture seu Trigintali’: The Late Medieval Funeral and Memorial Sermon,” Leeds Studies in English 12 (1981): 195–228.


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bride. The language of monastic enclosure included the language of both marriage and death, but not in that order. In “dying” to the world, the postulant entered into a state of spiritual marriage that anticipated its consummated reality in Paradise.203 This death was, of course, figured in the moment of the final profession, when the pall, the covering of the dead, was placed over the nun and the Dies Irae was sung. The dark clothing, sheared head, and severely restricted body of the nun proclaimed her new identity as a bride of Christ even as it concealed her sexuality, the “smooth sides” of female fecundity that were emphasized by the cut of late medieval courtly dress. The fifteenthcentury Rewle of Sustris Menouresses enclosid describes the nun as a treasure kept to the sovereign king, specifying that the novices should wait in the cloister and “as sone as 5ey schullen be schorne, 5ey schullin leue 5e robis of the worlde.” When a Minoress has to go into the outside world, she should be covered down to the eyes because she is wedded to the king and should show herself only to him.204 Similarly, the garden setting that served as the landscape of earthly love and death and the pastoral language of erotic love were as frequently used by monastic writers to describe the Virgin’s sealed purity, the delights of the garden of Paradise (Apoc. 22), or the hide-and-seek of spiritual love and desire.205 The Pearl-poet’s description of the maiden herself resonates with the language of privilege as it defines virginity. When the dreamer first sees her in the landscape of vision, he sees “A mayden of menske, ful debonere / . . . As glysnande golde 5at man con schere, / So schon 5at schene anvnder schore” (lines 163, 165–66). He continues to describe her in the language of courtly value. She is “4at gracios gay withouten galle, / So smo5e, so smal, so seme sly3t” (lines 189–90). And she is now decked in pearls and wearing a pearl crown. 203. Hildegard of Bingen indicated this by allowing her nuns to wear the bejeweled crowns of virgin brides when they sang divine service. On Hildegard, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), chap. 6. For the language of monastic enclosure, see W. G. Henderson, ed., The Pontifical of Archbishop Bainbridge of York (1508–14), Surtees Society 61 (Durham, U.K.: Andrews, 1875), 154–55, 237–47, and J. W. Legg, ed., Missale ad usum Ecclesie Westmonasteriensis, Henry Bradshaw Society 1 (1891; repr., Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1999), 1 197–212. 204. Seton, ed., Rewle of Sustris Menouresses, 82, 83. For a discussion of the ways in which the liturgies of religious profession increasingly drew upon marriage rites, rites of penance, and funeral rites, see Edward Foley, Rites of Religious Profession (Chicago: Archdiocese of Chicago, 1989), 19–20. 205. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961); E. Faye Wilson, “Pastoral and Epithalamium in Latin Literature,” Speculum 23 (1948): 35–57.


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A py3t coroune 3et wer 5at gyrle Of marjorys and non o5er ston, Hi3e pynakled of cler quyt perle, Wyth flurted flowrez perfet vpon. To hed hade ho non o5er werle; Her lere-leke al hyr vmbegon; Her semblaunt sade for doc o5er erle, Her ble more bla3t 5en whallez bon. As schorne golde schyr her fax 5enne schon, On schyldere3 pat leghe vnlapped ly3te. Her depe colour 3et wonted non Of precios perle in porfyl py3te. (lines 205–16)206 The picture described in the above stanza, including the crown, is —as E. V. Gordon has noted—a picture of a young virginal noblewoman, probably of a bride. For example, in The Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser, who did not know the Pearl, describes his bride in remarkably similar fashion. Clad all in white, that seems a virgin best. So well it her beseemes that ye would weene Some angell she had beene. Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre, Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres a tweene, Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre, And being crownèd with a girland greene, Seeme lyke some mayden Queene.207 Hildegard of Bingen dressed her nuns as brides of Christ with jewels. Saint Faith, who appears in a wall painting in St. Faith Priory, Norfolk,208 also has flowing fair hair as a sign of her unbound virgin state. The Pearl-poet’s description could as easily describe an aristocratic bride or 206. Bowers suggests a relationship between the maiden’s crown and that of Queen Anne in Politics of “Pearl,” 106–7, 158, and fig. 7. 207. The Epithalamion, lines 151–58, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–1957), vol. 8. 208. See Alexander and Binski, eds., The Age of Chivalry, 313.


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a nun on the verge of her solemn profession as the virgin brides of Apocalypse. Both the aristocratic bride and the nun are dressed in white, go through a ritual that signifies their change of state, and are given a ring as a sign of that change. But only the nun goes through a three-day period of silence that is like death, a period that marks the boundary between her two lives. Because the dreamer can see things in his visionary state that he cannot see while awake in his “erber,” he sees her as she actually is, as the bride, the “lady” the ritual of solemn profession proclaims a young virgin to be once she has taken her vows and been reclothed in garments that cover her from any eyes but those of her bridegroom, Christ. The pearl who lived but two years in the dreamer’s world is here translated into another, where she has grown into this beautiful young woman whose beauty is assured of not fading. Moreover, she has lost none of her noble qualities: he perceives her in terms of her courtesy, her countenance fitting a duke or an earl, as debonair and precious as when she was a child. Pearl draws upon the discourse conventional to discussions of vowed virginity. Santha Bhattacharji has linked much of Pearl’s language, particularly the references to pearls, to the Common of Virgins, which in one of its forms would have been heard from twenty to twenty-five times a year, depending on local calendars.209 In addition, passages in Pearl have a‹nities with the Northern Metrical Version of the Benedictine Rule (which addresses nuns) as well as with the ceremonies for the making of nuns, a vernacular version of which is in the same manuscript in which the Rule appears.210 For example, in answer to the statement, “Now, sen our mighty lord Iesus / Vnto hys kyngdom euer cals vs,” the writer asks, “Domine, quis habitabit in tabernaculo tuo?” 4us of our lord he askes & says: “Lord, who sall won in 5i palays Or ryst a-pon 5i haly hyll?” And 5us oure lord answers 5er-till: “Qui ingreditur sine macula.” (Rule of St. Benet, lines 121–22, 133–38) 209. Santha Bhattacharji, “Pearl and the ‘Common of Virgins,’” Medium Aevum 64 (1995): 37–50. 210. Ernst A. Kock, Three Middle English Versions of the Rule of St. Benet and Two Contemporary Rituals for the Ordination of Nuns, Early English Text Society 120 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902). The manuscript is British Library ms Cotton Vespasian A.xxv and dates from the early fifteenth century.


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The passage cites Psalm 23:3–6 or Psalm 14:1–3, which the maiden quotes in section 12, where the refrain is “4e innosent is ay saf by ry3t.” “Lorde, quo schal klymbe 5y hy3 hylle, O5er rest wythinne 5y holy place?” Hymself to onsware he is not dylle: “Hondelyngez harme 5at dyt not ille, 4at is of hert bo5e clene and ly3t, 4er schal hys step stable stylle”: 4e innosent is ay saf by ry3t. (Pearl, lines 678–84)211 Line 683 of Pearl, in its alliterative weight, its stillness, beautifully and simply captures the long list of virtues (lines 139–58) that characterize the stable life of the convent in the Northern Metrical Version of the Rule. Later, in describing the relationship between the prioress and the nuns of a Benedictine order, the author of the Rule of St. Benet echoes St. Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 12 of the unity of the church. For haly writ sais wele 5air-bi “In crist we er all o body.” . . . . . . . . . . For crist on cristyn folk is heued And we his lyms 5at here er leuyde; And godes seruandes in haly kirk, 4at er ordand his werk to wirk, Aw to be lufid in ewyn degre Of hir 5at sal 5air souerayn be. (Rule of St. Benet, lines 413–14, 421–26) The maiden draws upon the same verses when she answers the dreamer’s questions about her status in Paradise: “Of courtaysye, as saytz Saynt Poule, / Al arn we membrez of Jesu Kryst; / As heued and arme and legg and naule / Temen to hys body ful trwe and tryste” (Pearl, lines 457–60). The maiden’s use of the tra21 1. The translation of this passage in the Wycli‹te Bible reads: “Who schal stie in to the hil of the Lord; ethir who schal stonde in the hooli place of hym? The innocent in hondis, and in cleene herte” (Ps. 23).


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ditional language of vowed virginity points up the stability, purity, and harmony of her new setting, especially in relation to the dreamer, who stands in the world and thus lacks the interior landscape in which she resides. Ceremonies for the ordination of nuns emphasized appearance. The bride’s secular clothing was removed, and she was gowned, shorn, and veiled. In order to become God’s bride, the nun gives up the world—its trappings and its values. The ring she wears as a sign of her marriage symbolizes her chastity, the new state she inhabits. What we see, when we “see” a nun, is the outward sign of an invisible (to us) state. That is the state Hildegard of Bingen sought to vivify in her convent as she defended her sartorial rituals: “She (the virgin) stands in the simplicity and the wholeness of a beautiful paradise that will never fade but remain forever green and ripe as a branch in blossom. . . . Virgins are wedded in the Holy Spirit to holiness and the dawn of virginity; therefore, it befits them to come to the High Priest as a whole burnt oªering consecrated to God.”212 Nicholas Watson has pointed out that Pearl’s construction of purity as virginity owes most to the so-called virginity treatise directed toward the career virgin—the nun or the anchorite. In English, that tradition is encapsulated by Hali Meidhad.213 Thus the Pearl maiden’s beauty is assimilated to spotlessness; virginity, to her royal, wedded heavenly estate. Young in the world’s years, she is “maskele3,” and that very innocence elevates her to her present condition. As the dreamer describes her (see lines 745–56 of Pearl), she has taken on a new and unnatural beauty: “Quo formed 5e 5y fayre fygure? / 4at wro3t 5y wede he wat3 ful wys” (lines 747–48). Her dress, which includes the Lamb’s badge insuring grace (“Lasse of blysse may non vus bryng / 4at beren 5ys perle vpon oure bereste,” lines 853–54), is a marked feature of this process of transformation. She functions at times as a “figure,” as a sign of this virginity that has guaranteed her new identity. The problems Watson sees with this picture—that the poet’s treat212. Quoted in Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 221–22. See the entirety of chap. 6 for Hildegard’s language of vowed virginity, including her remarks about the flowing hair of virgins. On the origins of the liturgy of profession and its relation to the marriage ceremony, see René Metz, La consécration des vierges dans l’Église romaine (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), which notes that in the liturgy of Durandus, the nun is given a crown by the bishop (307). For the liturgy of profession, see Legg, ed., Missale ad usum Ecclesie Westmonasteriensis, cols. 1 197–212; see also Henderson, ed., Pontifical of Archbishop Bainbridge, 154–213, 237–49. 213. Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 300–302. For Hali Meidhad, see B. Millett and J. WoganBrowne, eds., Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).


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ment of virginity turns on its head the carefully formulated idea that virgins earn their crowns through their endurance as virgins —might well not apply if the poem were not about the death of a young girl but about the donation of a young girl to a life of virginity.214 The Pearl maiden’s childlike innocence, her pristine purity, is preserved by the garden into which she is set, perhaps by a father whose worldly wisdom is a key part of the poem’s argument. The language of enclosure (or setting) characterizes the rule for the London Minoresses, the first part of which is focused by the need to restrict and cloister tongues, manners, bodies, and dress —each aspect of the women’s lives. Its specifications about turnstiles and gates and curtains, which obstruct the sight lines of outsiders, underscore the ways in which the architecture of the cloister figured the ideals of religious communities.215 Pearl’s focus upon the dreamer’s vision as both literally and metaphorically frustrated, as well as upon his awareness of the distance between himself and the maiden, plays with the sorts of boundaries between lay and “living,” cloistered and “dead,” that are integral to descriptions of the vowed life for women. Does it make sense to consider Pearl as celebrating Thomas of Woodstock’s gift of his little daughter to the Minoresses, to a house whose seal depicted the coronation of the Virgin? Does the poem’s supposed “date” (“In Augoste in a hy3 seysoun,” Pearl, line 39) contain a reference either to the date of her donation or to the principal feast day of the house itself, the Assumption of the Virgin?216 Or, if the “date” is August 1, the feast of St. Peter in Chains, a day that commemorates Peter’s freedom and implicitly our liberation from the chains of sin (and in England known as Lammas, a day of agricultural harvest, the date 214. The sixteenth-century anticlerical poem Why I Can’t Be a Nun, in Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 227–46, though focused upon the laxities of nunneries, employs many of the same tropes used in Pearl, suggesting either a familiarity with the poem or a common use of the metaphors linked to the vowed life. Why I Can’t Be a Nun is built around a father-daughter conflict, wherein the daughter’s desire to remain chaste leads her into a garden where she falls into exhausted sleep upon a “bench” of chamomile: “My wofulle hede I dyd inclyne, / And so I lay in fulle grete pyne” (lines 1 15–16). She dreams and has a dialogue with a lady called “Experience,” who ushers her through a meadow toward a building, a nunnery that serves as an anti-type of the heavenly city. The sight she receives of the nuns’ misgovernances convinces her that she cannot become a nun. Though the poem (which is incomplete) is not nearly as accomplished as Pearl, there are points where it seems a reverse picture of the world depicted in Pearl, and at times, its cadences seem designed as clumsy echoes of Pearl’s language. 215. See Seton, ed., Rewle of Sustris Menouresses. 216. For the controversy about this date, see Andrew and Waldron, eds., Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 56 n. 39.


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on which quarter rents were paid and debts rendered), is the daughter’s enclosure her liberation, her loss figuratively Thomas’s payment and the promise of his own freedom? Thomas of Woodstock may have been a thoroughly worldly man, but, as noted above, he was also a man known for his public and private acts of piety and for his interest in devotional or theological texts. When he pleaded for Richard’s mercy in 1397, he employed the language of devotion in ways that were at once typical and possibly unique: “that he wyll, for the passion that God soªred for all mankynde, and the compassion that he hadde of his Moder on the Cros, and the pytee that he hadde of Marye Maudeleyne, that he wyll vouchesauf for to have compassion and pytee.”217 None of these invocations is unusual, but they should not be passed oª as mere convention, either. I have argued elsewhere that the pseudo-Origin Planctus Mariae Magdalenae oªered the poet a model for his treatment of the spiritual distance between dreamer and maiden—that the dreamer’s utterly material and tactile response to his vision of a spiritual reality, as well as the way in which their dialogue articulates the diªerence between physical and spiritual love, owes much to conventional treatments of the Easter morning garden scene between the risen (and now diªerent) Christ and the grieving, earthbound Magdalene.218 The scene and the dialogue between Mary Magdalene and Christ were popular subjects for devotional writing. Indeed, in the F prologue to the Legend of Good Women (line 428), Chaucer himself lists a now-lost translation of that text, one that he ascribes to an earlier period of his life. If the duke of Gloucester indeed had a special devotion for the Magdalene, might not the Pearl-poet have chosen to appropriate and transform such a key scene, one having special meaning for his poem’s patron? Other elements of the poem, too, point to a patron of extraordinary world217. RP 3:379. Quoted also in Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 78. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility,” 50, cites Thomas’s devotion to the Magdalene, as well. 218. See L. S. Johnson, Voice of the “Gawain”-Poet, chap. 4. This scene was also dramatized in the Meditationes vitae Christi, the important Franciscan text originally written for a Poor Clare. For a fifteenth-century English translation, along with comments about the centrality of the Meditationes for Franciscan spirituality, see Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love’s “Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ” (New York: Garland, 1992), introduction and chap. 52. For books owned by the London Minoresses, see Bell, What Nuns Read, 149–52. The list includes the Rule I have already mentioned; a volume of Hilton’s work (British Library ms Harley 2397) containing the second part of The Scale of Perfection, The Mixed Life, and the commentary on Psalm 91; The Doctrine of the Heart; a psalter; an Hours of the Virgin; and a copy of the Poor Caitif, which, like the books given by Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, is untraced. The manuscript of Hilton’s pieces, which I have examined, is not a “showpiece” but a text meant to guide readers. It has red markers as part of its program, and The Mixed Life contains red summaries in the margins.


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liness and devotional intensity. Despite its focus upon virginity as concomitant with salvation, the poem also oªers ways in which the worldly man may avail himself of the grace the maiden enjoys through her purity. In particular, the parable of the vineyard at once explains the maiden’s “eleventh-hour” elevation (she “deserves” the penny, even though she did not work or “endure” through the day) and speaks to the dreamer’s own condition. In this sense, the parable of the vineyard, which describes work, also does work within the poem. The urgency of the dreamer’s situation is highlighted when we remind ourselves that the parable of the vineyard is the Gospel reading for Septuagesima Sunday, or the Sunday that signals the beginning of the pre-Lenten period of preparation.219 It is the day the Alleluia disappears from the mass. There are several features of the service for this Sunday that are relevant to Pearl. First—and we can find this reading in the Wycli‹te sermon cycle, in Mirk’s Festial, and in the missal—the eleventh hour is interpreted in an apocalyptic sense as referring to the present age and thus strongly reminding us of the need to labor.220 The Old Testament reading is from Genesis and includes the story of the Fall, where the necessity for labor began. Each of us, then, is potentially an eleventh-hour worker sorely in need of the innocence the maiden has achieved. In a much earlier essay, I suggested that we should see the parable as a warning to the dreamer, whose eleventh hour is upon him. It reminds him of his need to regard time as a medium for work.221 The dreamer’s quibbles certainly expose his idleness, but they do so in a way familiar to a reasonably educated or alert patron. The urge to penitential reflection before Lent would be one to which a patron like Thomas of Gloucester might gladly hearken. He and his wife, like his brother John of Gaunt and his mother-in-law, Joan, were common enough visitors in and patrons of monastic establishments. What the dreamer comes to “see,” however, whether through a procession of nuns on days of solemn feasts or through the Apocalypse page of a splendid manuscript such as those the Bohun family owned, is 219. J. P. Oakden, “The Liturgical Influence in Pearl,” in Chaucer und Seine Zeit: Symposium für Walter F. Schirmir, ed. Arno Esch, Buchreihe der Anglia, Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 14 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 343–45; Ian Bishop, Pearl in Its Setting (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 124–25. 220. Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–96), 1:378–83; Theodor Erbe, ed., Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 64; F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, eds., Breviarium ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Sarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1879–86), 1:cdlxxxiii–diii; Prosper Guéranger, ed., The Liturgical Year, trans. L. Shepherd (London: Burnes and Oates, 1909), 4:125; Legg, ed., Missale ad usum Ecclesie Westmonasteriensis, cols. 82–85. 221. L. S. Johnson, “The Pearl Dreamer and the Eleventh Hour.” See also John Watkins, “‘Sengeley in synglure’: Pearl and Late Medieval Individualism,” Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 1 17–36.


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nonetheless finally and unalterably “his”: “my little queen.” Like Pleshey, heaven is a moated structure, but this time, he is on the outside. Though he will come there through labor, the maiden, because she is a vowed virgin, will always occupy higher ground. The poet’s pointing of time throughout the poem—the spring garden in the opening stanzas, the August “date,” and the September labor of the vines — suggests that the dreamer himself is in his eleventh hour. If he seems perilously close to the harvest’s impartial justice, he nonetheless has time for penitential cleansing. When the dreamer quibbles with God’s magnanimous dispensation of grace (Pearl, lines 590–600), he argues against himself. The maiden’s assertion of God’s bountiful grace, her statement that “4e innosent is ay saf by ry3t,” works to assure the dreamer that a state of innocence can indeed be restored through acts of penance. Watson describes the poet as formulating a version of Christian belief “which is applicable not to contemplatives . . . whose energies are given over to the processes of inner reformation, but to laypeople who continue to be preoccupied with life in the world.”222 Although the dreamer is decidedly unchildlike, his child’s innocence is nonetheless available to him through God’s grace. Moreover, what sounds like the (to Watson, specious) language of vernacular theology might well echo the language of courtly address. The gift given redounds upon its donor. By donating innocence, does he reap its rewards? Does he, to use Ian Bishop’s phrase, acquire “a relative at court”?223 If Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, were the patron for Pearl, it served him by remarking upon his gift and his place in a community of career virgins, the London Minoresses, where he was allowed to be a viewer at the spectacle of their mass. It also remarked his piety and his interest in and ability to follow arguments about the nature of grace. In her will, Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, displayed a sensitivity to the public performance of a spiritual identity that fits well into a period that was also characterized by the ScropeGrosvenor trial and its display of the anxieties of chivalric identity.224 Eleanor’s 222. Watson, “Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian,” 303. 223. Ian Bishop, “Relatives at the Court of Heaven: Contrasted Treatments of an Idea in Piers Plowman and Pearl,” in Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle, ed. M. Stokes and T. L. Burton (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 1 1 1–18. Bishop here employs “court” as both a court of law and a ceremonial headquarters, thus underlining Pearl’s emphasis upon both courtliness and judgment. 224. On this trial, see, for example, R. Stewart-Brown, “The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, 1385–1391,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 89 (1937): 1–22. For a study of the case in relation to chivalric identity, see L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 180–86.


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last act was a piece of devotional theater—almost, but not quite, as dramatic as the obsequies of her brother-in-law, John of Gaunt. In her will, before she divides her books among her children, she specifies that on the day of her burial her body should be “covered with a black cloth with a white cross and an escutcheon of my arms in the middle of the said cross, with four tapers round it, and four full mortars being at the corners.” She naturally designates that masses be said for her soul and for the soul of her late husband, but she then indicates that at each mass, “before the priest commences ‘et ne nos’ he pronounces with a loud voice, turning towards the people, ‘For the soul of Thomas, sometime duke of Gloucester, and Alianore his wife, and all Christian souls, for charity paternoster.’”225 While there is nothing unusual about her intention of being publicly remembered through a mass, her will is nonetheless marked by her determination that the duke and duchess of Gloucester be publicly identified by their piety and by their station.226 Such a pair might well have commissioned another sort of gem—an Apocalypse as splendid as any volume in the library at Pleshey, a poem as fit for princes as for the daughter whose virginity it blazons, a poem that also and inevitably celebrates its patron’s wealth, taste, intelligence, and devotion, a prince of the blood.227 I have left out grief, the grief the poem we know as an elegy sets out to rechannel. I have tried to indicate what I could not find—ceremonies for dead children, evidence even for the mothers of those children, care for daughters. I do not mean to suggest that children were not loved and cherished, but the men and women of the Middle Ages were not men and women of the present age. It is clear from one entry in John of Gaunt’s register that Thomas of Gloucester took his children seriously. When his daughter Anne was born, John of Gaunt attended the christening of his niece at Pleshey, presenting her with presents worth £96 3s 5d. Thomas was similarly lavish, rewarding the esquire who brought him word of Anne’s birth and giving sums of money to the many people 225. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, 1:147. 226. Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, was a notorious snob. Her reaction to John of Gaunt’s marrying his longtime mistress, Katherine Swynford, gave Froissart some gossip—she would have to give place to a governess! See Goodman, John of Gaunt, 156. 227. For work on the intensely visual nature of the poem and its possible relationship to the art of book illumination, see Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 31–33. 228. Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 90. There are also references scattered in John of Gaunt’s Register to sums paid for the care of his own children. Henry of Derby gave careful instructions about the education and care of his family; see McFarlane, Nobility of Later Medieval England, 243–45, which includes other evidence for the early education of aristocratic children, frequently at monastic


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who waited on the infant.228 Rather than speculate about the degree of grief someone like Thomas of Woodstock or any other medieval father felt when a daughter died in her youth, though, it seems more useful to look at the poem we do have and seek to understand the way in which grief is constructed and the ways in which that construction is fundamental to the work’s power. The poem is, after all, as Pearsall has reminded us, not only addressed to bereaved fathers.229 As other studies of Pearl have pointed out, the narrator’s grief is presented as a fantasy of possession, in which “issues of identity, gender, and power are inseparably linked in the discourse of love.”230 We, of course, do not know what medieval parents thought when they gave their infants as religious oblations; in so doing, though, they gave away a portion of their own earthly futurity. Did the poet use the staging of the father’s grief and dislocation as a way into some of the issues that might be pertinent to a magnate, his need for power and the display of wealth, and his lifelong involvement with religious practice? If, as I suggest, Pearl is yet another type of courtly address, that does not mean that its patron was venal or that the poem is facile. On the contrary, the suggestion pushes the poem into the shifting and highly sophisticated realm of a late-fourteenth-century English conversation whose masters were as gifted as the Gawain-poet in French conventions and the “teccheles termes of talkyng noble.”231 What subtly compliments a patron may also be used to query the systems of patronage that made art possible. In that case, the argument about the realities of justice in the parable of the vineyard that the maiden uses to warn the dreamer of the dangers of idleness has a real target, and her reminder of the requirements of the eleventh hour should not be taken lightly. Because innocence is a prerequisite for salvation, and innocence can only be reclaimed through penance, the dreamer needs to be advised again about the dangers of worldliness.

foundations. See also the extracts from the will of Richard, earl of Arundel, dated 1392 (Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, 1:129–34), which has many fond references to his “dear” children. 229. Pearsall, “Alliterative Revival,” 50. 230. Aers, “The Self Mourning,” 62. Here also see Spearing, “Poetic Identity,” 48–51. By disallowing the “fiction” of a narrator who is poet, mourner, and, to some extent, butt of the poem, Spearing encourages new ways of conceiving of the poem’s function. 231. These are the terms by which Sir Gawain is valued in Hautdesert; see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 917. French was, of course, the language of social privilege: as Caroline M. Barron notes in the introduction to Medieval London Widows, ed. Barron and Sutton, the nuns in the Minories would most likely have spoken French (xxx). On the poet’s familiarity with French conventions, see A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 12–18, and chap. 4. For an echo of Pearl’s opening (the bereft narrator and the lost jewel) in Oton de Granson’s Songe saint Valentin, see Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 226.


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This might well be a penitential message that Thomas of Woodstock found meaningful, given his taste for devotional literature.232 Moreover, the jewel that Pearl itself is is also a sign of those luxurious details of a private/public life that characterized the world of the magnate. Gems, books, daughters, and poets become items in a catalogue of ownership, rendering men incapable of moving beyond the possessive description of one who is now a bride of Christ—“My lyttel quene” (Pearl, line 1 147). The discourse of courtly love in Pearl that others have analyzed serves as a critique of a social practice, a critique as stunning as that oªered by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, where the language of Troy is finally the tongue of commodification, or pragmatic ownership.233 In Thomas of Woodstock, we have a fit and likely patron for Pearl. The circumstances of his political, financial, devotional, and family life provide a context for patronage, particularly for Pearl, with its theological focus, attention to luxurious detail, and Continental allusiveness, all designed as a delicately wrought ornament for a patron whose taste and sophistication are evident throughout. I find it hard to believe, given what we know about the conditions of writing in late medieval England, that a “jeweler” would make such a luxury item for himself: it can only have been bespoke. But I have gone even further and suggested that Pearl commemorates not a girl’s death but her oblation— or, rather, her father’s oblation of her. The paradise “seen” in the poem is thus the paradise to come as well as the nun’s paradise, the garden of delight and purity so often described by monastic writers. What the dreamer “sees” is his little queen, dressed in monastic dress as a child of two, who has grown in that garden into the maiden. She is the child, maiden, and bride whose presence is at once available and restricted. The poet’s final description of a dreamer who is both a man barred from her presence and a voyeur at the mass is also a lesson in viewing—through the present to the future, where the gift of her fulfills them both. 232. See Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, for Thomas of Woodstock’s relationship to Sir Henry Scrope of Masham (Yorkshire), which was familial, political, and devotional. Goodman notes that the two men not only shared a taste for Richard Rolle but were also associated with the London Minoresses (81). Idleness was a heavily freighted political subject in the 1380s (see Justice and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work), but the Pearl-poet’s handling of the subject has none of the edge of Langland’s. The self-definition that the dreamer needs can be acquired through the sacerdotal church. See Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility,” for remarks about the theological interests of Thomas of Woodstock and other members of the nobility. The statutes created for Thomas’s foundation at Pleshey specify the degree to which the canons are to be upright, uniform in behavior, and clean. See Gough, History and Antiquities of Pleshey, 176–80. 233. For remarks linking the preoccupations of both poems, see Aers, “The Self Mourning.”


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The suggestion that Pearl recognizes a moment of oblation within a semiroyal aristocratic household does not make the poem any less extraordinary, for there is even less precedent for oblation poems than for children’s elegies. The one moment that would encompass both varieties of experience would be Candlemas. On that day, the Virgin and Joseph make an oblation of a dove in fulfillment of the law of death that the child they carry will render unnecessary through his gift of the Cross. But that ceremony is, in essence, a ritual of female reentry, purification, and recognition, whereas Pearl scrutinizes the state of lordly possession.234 It is focused by the dreamer’s self-characterization, by the language he uses to describe his relationship to the maiden, and by his admission that, on his side of the barrier, he cannot attain the perfect vision he seeks. A patron for this particular poem would need to be more than the master of great wealth. He would need to be up to the task of “reading” a poem that at once patronizes his estate, complements his gift, and points up the ways in which that estate might well compromise his spiritual freedom. Pearl testifies to its patron’s wealth, piety, and degree of intellectual sophistication even as it locates these in the region of earthly longing and unfulfilled desire. In order to speculate about a patron for the Pearl-poet, however, we need to take into account the anomalies of late medieval systems of patronage. As both J. M. W. Bean and Simon Walker have most recently argued, the realities of a‹nity were as complex and unstable in the late fourteenth century as they were in the late fifteenth. Indentures of retinue pertained only for so many days per year, and people were not always retained for life.235 Like poets, men of arms and secretaries might seek out other situations —not, perhaps, with the keenness that attends job hunting in the early twenty-first century, but self-interest was hardly absent from late medieval calculations. The begging poems that themselves form a minor genre in Middle English verse, as well as the self-promotion that is evident in some longer poems, help to sketch a world where we might look not for a single patron but for a situation in which a poet might find patronage for a specific period of time or work.236 From what we know of the life of Chaucer or Gower, this makes a good deal of sense. On the other hand, the 234. On the ritual of Candlemas, see Gail MacMurray Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon: Churching as Women’s Theater,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 139–54. 235. I am summarizing Bean, From Lord to Patron, here. See also McFarlane, Nobility of Later Medieval England, chap. 1, and Walker, Lancastrian Affinity. 236. Here, too, Bennett’s Community, Class, and Careerism is pertinent.


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author of Pearl may not have had the relative freedom of either Gower or Chaucer and may have been more closely attached to a household. This could account for his focus upon the conflicts associated with the noble life. Such speculations underline the degree of consanguinity that might have influenced Ricardian literature as it certainly determined the shape of Ricardian politics. Did Thomas of Woodstock borrow his brother’s poet and, in so doing, did he seek to have made a poem as splendid as his own estate demanded during the mid-1380s, when Gaunt was in Spain? Gaunt had had the image of Blanche carved in alabaster for her tomb in St. Paul’s as well as having her memorialized in verse. Did Thomas also command an image, picked out in pearls, of his own pristinely orthodox piety and power? The poem would, of course, befit a prince. Does the author of Pearl and the other three poems in the manuscript “belong” in the variegated poetic conversations of the 1380s? The manuscript, along with any evidence for literary influence, points toward the north and toward the Midlands. But as Hoyt Duggan has stressed, while the scribe was certainly from Cheshire or Lancashire, “the poet’s natal dialect is less likely to have been formed in Cheshire, Lancashire, or Derbyshire than further south in Staªordshire.”237 Duggan thus places the poet in a slightly less isolated position and in an area where John of Gaunt had vast holdings.238 Late medieval alliterative poetry is certainly linked by similarities of subject matter, style, and language to the traditionalism of provincial households, but the lords of those households also had holdings throughout England and moved frequently on business. They had need of a trained corps of clerks who could attend to their wide interests —and among these, there were certainly poets. Studies by Elizabeth Salter, Derek Pearsall, K. B. McFarlane, Michael Bennett, and Ralph Hanna emphasize the impact of the late medieval household’s mobility upon the literature and the textuality of the period.239 Although it is hard to deduce much about the poems from the manuscript in which they are found, the illustrations for the manuscript do contain hints 237. H. N. Duggan, “Meter, Stanza, Vocabulary, Dialect,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 242. 238. For an account of these, see Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 209–34. 239. Bennett, Community, Class, and Careerism; Bennett, “The Historical Background”; Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley”; Ralph Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek Pearsall (York, U.K.: York Medieval Press, 2000), 91–102; Pearsall, “Alliterative Revival”; and Salter, English and International.


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of a not-dismissible pedigree. British Library ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3, appears to have been written in the second half—some say the last quarter—of the fourteenth century. The manuscript is probably later than the poems themselves, and the pictures may have been added some time after the text was written.240 There is no consensus as to the number of stages of copying that preceded the manuscript, nor as to whether the poems were copied from a single manuscript or several. Though the manuscript is certainly not a grand one, and the pictures themselves have been the subjects of many disparaging comments, Kathleen Scott has more recently argued for their integrity. Scott holds that around 1400, the owner of the manuscript made the “unusual gesture of adding full page pictures to a vernacular work,” specifying to the artist which scenes he wished illustrated. She also provides a contemporary context for the artist’s style, in which she includes the artist who did the figure of John of Gaunt for the Benefactors’ Book of St. Albans Abbey (British Library ms Cotton Nero D.VII). More important, she suggests that the artist for the Pearl manuscript may in fact have also done the frontispiece for British Library ms Sloane 2002, which contains a copy of the surgical manual known as John Arderne, whose frontispiece, De fistula in ano, shows the surgeon how and where to cut. (See Figure 12.) She tentatively locates the production of some of these manuscripts, including the Pearl manuscript, in the north (in the northwest Midlands or in York), though the Book of Benefactors was probably produced in London.241 In addition, the illustrations for Pearl have a remarkable similarity to several to be found in the biblical cycle of James le Palmer’s Omne bonum, the massive compendia that le Palmer himself produced in London during the third quarter of the fourteenth century. Le Palmer was a clerk of the exchequer under Edward III, who gave him a pension and the right to occupy rooms over the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, London. The Omne bonum was the work of his lifetime, for he not only sought out, selected, and organized entries but also wrote the text for the volume. In addition, he employed four artists to execute the miniatures and historiated initials of his book.242 I am concerned 240. A. S. G. Edwards, “The Manuscript: British Library ms Cotton Nero A.x,” in A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet, ed. Brewer and Gibson, 199. 241. Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2:67, 390. 242. For le Palmer, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (British Library mss Royal 6E VI–E VII) (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 1:20–34, 76.


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here with the first of these artists, who probably laid out the decoration of the manuscript and illustrated the first sections of the book. According to Lucy Freeman Sandler, whose edition of the Omne bonum is a masterpiece of detective work, this artist worked for other patrons as well. She describes the artist as a professional, working in a fairly conventional if not archaic style. The illustrations of the religious subjects, including those of the Creation (which the Pearl illustrator seems to follow), echo standard compositions to be found in prefatory miniatures for psalters or books of hours. This suggests either that the artist for Pearl knew the Omne bonum or the models used by this particular artist. The illustration of the Pearl dreamer beside the stream in ms Cotton Nero A.X, art. 3, fol. 41v, is similar to that of God creating the world in the Omne bonum British Library ms Royal 6 E VI, fol. 1. Both figures raise their right arms so that the palm of the hand is uppermost and the index finger is pointed up. The left arms of both figures are slightly akimbo. Both stand by a stream that ascends in wavy lines from the bottom left to the top right of the page. Both streams contain fish coiled among the lines of the water. Just as the Omne bonum artist used this configuration for the seven illustrations of the Creation, so the Pearl artist employs it in the next two pictures, which depict the dreamer talking with the maiden. Where in the first of these pictures the dreamer appears nearly as large as God would likely be in the Creation garden, in the next two, the dreamer is shrunk, made to look more human, placed in the lower left of the page, and the maiden appears on the other side of the stream. The disproportional trees are also common to both sets of illustrations. (See Figures 14–19.) The first of the Pearl illustrations (see Figure 13) seems to evoke the work of another artist. On the stalls of Carlisle Cathedral, a sequence of paintings depicts scenes from the life of St. Augustine. The panel depicting Augustine’s moment of conversion shows him reclining near an open book in a garden where the mounds are powdered with flowers (see Figure 20). An angel leans towards him with a banner bearing the words “Tolle, lege.” Without the angel and the banner, the picture looks remarkably like the first of the illustrations for Pearl and clearly, as Pierre Courcelle suggests, it is indebted to the iconography of the love vision. The inscription for the panel also locates Augustine within a similar set of conventions. It reads, “Her wepyng and walyng as he lay / Sodenly a voice thus herd he say: Tolle, lege, tolle, lege.” Though the stalls were painted in the late fifteenth century, they were most likely copied from scenes in much ear-


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lier illuminated manuscripts, at least one of which might have been in the possession of Richard le Scrope, archbishop of York.243 The similarities between the Pearl illustrations, the Creation pictures from the Omne bonum, and perhaps one drawn from the life of St. Augustine suggest that the owner of the Pearl manuscript found an artist who had connections to other artists or who had access to patterns and models that circulated throughout England. Though the manuscript may have been produced in the Midlands, it need not have been illustrated there. It may also be a witness to the grandeur of the poems’ origins, for the owner’s wish to have such a book contain large illustrations may suggest his awareness that these have no ordinary provenance. If the physical evidence of the manuscript suggests, even tentatively, that we can assimilate these poems to other late-fourteenth-century productions, the poems themselves evince their debts and contributions to the cultural richness of the period. As I have suggested, it makes good sense to place Cleanness in dialogue with the B text of Piers Plowman and St. Erkenwald.244 We might also begin to think about Pearl as responding to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, especially if we wish to locate the poet within a Lancastrian a‹nity. Usk’s use of the pearl as a symbol in the Testament of Love also suggests ways in which the Pearl author might be linked to the literary world of the capital. As Usk tends to recycle the work of others, it is not impossible to suspect that he knew of Pearl. Wimsatt has suggested that Oton de Granson’s Le songe saint Valentin, which he dates between 1386, when Oton de Granson left England for Savoy, and 1392, when he returned to England, echoes the opening section of Pearl.245 Chaucer’s Parson’s well-known disclaimer that “I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre” (CT X.43) indicates that even a “Southren man” was well aware of the techniques of alliterative verse and argues for the prominence of alliterative poetry in latefourteenth-century London. But Chaucer’s comment may be seen as even more 243. See Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1963); Bertram Colgrave, “The St. Cuthbert Paintings on the Carlisle Cathedral Stalls,” Burlington Magazine 73 (1938): 17; Edmund Colledge, “The Augustine Screen in Carlisle Cathedral,” Augustiniana 36 (1986): 78–80; and L. S. Johnson, “The Pearl Dreamer and the Eleventh Hour,” 6, 13 n. 13. Colgrave focuses on the St. Cuthbert cycle, which he traces to a specific manuscript. As he points out, the same artist executed the St. Augustine cycle; both were done under the direction of Thomas Gondibour, prior of Carlisle between 1484 and 1507, and they suggest the use of illuminated manuscripts as copies for paintings in other media. 244. Staley, “Man in Foul Clothes.” 245. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 120–26, 334 n. 25. If Wimsatt is correct, this would place Pearl prior to 1386. He argues that Granson wrote the Songe while he was away and returned with it as a gesture of admiration for Chaucer.


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pointed, because the Parson clearly associates alliterative verse with entertainment. Sir Thopas, the rollicking and truncated echo of popular romances the pilgrim Geoªrey attempts to recount, also evinces a sly awareness of the conventions embedded in the opening stanzas of Pearl. Into this first section of Sir Thopas, Chaucer crams the spice garden of the Roman de la rose, which, as in Pearl, is the setting for a vision of an otherworldly woman—not a pearl maiden but an elf queen. And, as in Pearl, the protagonist sets oª into a new realm in search of her. The poem then veers oª into chivalric swashbuckling. Both the Pearl author and Chaucer were familiar with the Roman and its literary heirs, so no hard case can be made for a relationship between the two works, but if the author had a foot in London, Chaucer likely knew of him or his works. It is not worth discounting the set of cross-references that might well trace an ongoing conversation among the writers I have mentioned. There certainly seems to have been an ongoing conversation among alliterative writers, who are no longer “confined” to the north of England. It is now commonly accepted that these writers probably moved around as much as any medieval clerk attached to a great lord would, so limiting their sphere of influence or their own awareness of contemporary work to one region does not make much sense. As A. I. Doyle notes, “wherever and whenever a piece of pronouncedly alliterative character originated, it could have wide dissemination, by no means all amateur or provincial, and lasting beyond the middle of the fifteenth century, outside the northern regions.”246 Such remarks underline the importance of thinking about the ways in which authors, texts, scribes, and illustrators moved in and out of the capital. But they also second Salter’s insistence that we should look to the nobility in our eªorts to understand late-fourteenth-century literature, for their holdings necessitated a constant mobility that would inevitably cross-fertilize regional culture. There are two other texts (one of them alliterative), both found in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, that suggest a relationship to the works of the Gawain-poet and argue for the poet’s presence in this literary world. The first of these poems is the alliterative A Pistel of Susan, dated to the late 246. A. I. Doyle, “The Manuscripts,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David A. Lawton (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 97. See also Rees Davies, “The Life, Travels, and Library of an Early Reader of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999): 49–64. 247. See Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 120–21; Russell A. Peck, ed., Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications,


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fourteenth century and written in a dialect of southern Yorkshire.247 A Pistel is written in a demanding thirteen-line alliterative stanza and, like two of the poems in the Gawain manuscript, is a retelling of a biblical story. Like the last section of Cleanness, A Pistel is set in Babylon and employs Daniel as its figure for wisdom. Its opening lines describe Joachim, Susan’s husband, as comfortable within what is an alien environment: “4er was in Babiloine a bern, in 5at borw riche / 4at was a Jeu3 jentil, and Joachin he hiht” (lines 1–2). The opening of A Pistel—the sense that householders can so easily be threatened by local injustice— recalls the description of Lot in Cleanness, where he is identified with the luxurious structure against which he leans. In 5at ilk euentyde, by aungels tweyne, Meuand mekely togeder as myry men 3onge, As Loot in a loge dor lened hym alone, In a porche of 5at place py3t to 5e 3ates, 4at watz ryal and ryche so watz 5e renkes seluen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4e bolde to his byggyng bryngez hem bylyue, 4at watz ryally arayed, for he watz ryche euer. (Cleanness, lines 782–86, 81 1–12) The description of Susan’s garden, with its “popejayes perken and pruynen for proude” (A Pistel, line 81) and “Bli5e briddes o 5e best, / In blossoms so briht” (lines 77–78) seems a living version of the exquisitely rendered scenes of bird and plant life on the vessel Balthazar desecrates in the final narrative of Cleanness. And al bolled abof wyth braunches and leues, Pyes and papejayes purtrayed withinne, As 5ay prudly hade piked of pomgarnades; For alle 5e blomes of 5e bo3es wer blyknande perles And alle 5e fruyt in 5o formes of flaumbeande gemmes (Cleanness, lines 1464–68) Both the description of Joachim as defined by his own wealth, reputation, and 1991), 73, 76; and Hanna, Pursuing History, 76, 205–14. Quotations from the poem refer to TurvillePetre’s edition.


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naiveté within a potentially hostile city and the highly wrought description of Susan’s garden do more here than gesture toward Cleanness, or vice versa. The a‹nities between the poems suggest a poet seeking to exploit—to come to grips with—a poem whose emphasis and technical achievements interested him. For example, the temple vessels with their ornate embellishments are more than objects of art: they are sacred vessels, taken from the Holy of Holies and then violated at Balthazar’s feast. The description of Susan’s garden is a vast expansion of its biblical description and even manages to “outdo” Pearl in its depiction of garden space. Not only is this garden a locus amoenus, in the sense that it evokes other notable paradisal gardens, but it is also the private place of Joachim and Susan, the place where they exist in a natural harmony, the inner sanctum of their marriage and of Susan’s identity. The elders who spy upon her bath and who ask her to lie with them violate the function of this garden just as Balthazar violates the function of the vessels. In both poems, Daniel is the figure who establishes the link between acts of human injustice and heavenly justice. Though the two poems explore diªerent sorts of questions, the connections between them suggest the subtlety of influence that obtained among English poets. As noted above, A Pistel appears in both the Simeon and Vernon manuscripts. The two manuscripts are related to one another in various ways, and both must have been patronized by a devout and wealthy person who could aªord the making of such large books. Doyle remarks that both manuscripts are institutional, meant for nunneries. In the margins of the Simeon manuscript appear the words “Joan Bohun,” who was the mother-in-law of Thomas of Woodstock and Henry Bolingbroke. As a widow, she appears to have lived a life of great piety and discipline. She is also linked to other extant manuscripts and texts. Her death is noted in the Luttrell Psalter, for instance, and she may have owned the AngloNorman apocalypse, Oxford, New College ms 65. Thomas Hoccleve translated for her the verse “Complaint of the Virgin.”248 The Bohun family was responsible for much of the manuscript art of the period as well as for at least one alliterative poem. William of Palerne—a romance whose intricate plot includes a good deal of shape-shifting—was translated from the French at the request of Humphrey de Bohun. That poem includes a reference to one of the Bohun res248. See The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. Poet.a 1, intro. A. I. Doyle (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 15–16, also cited in Peck, ed., Heroic Women, 78. On Joan Bohun, see K. Jambeck, “Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200–ca. 1475,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. J. Hall McCosh (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 236–37.


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idences in Gloucester, and its language links it to the West Midlands. Thus, though the bulk of the Bohun holdings were in Wales and in the eastern counties (and indeed, both Joan and Humphrey were buried in eastern England), Humphrey employed a Midland poet when he wished a translation of a French romance. Joan Bohun’s possible association with the Simeon manuscript likewise suggests the degree to which Middle English literature need not be categorized along sharp geographical boundaries.249 The second poem that bears some relation to Pearl is The Lamentations of Mary to St. Bernard, a Middle English verse adaptation of the Latin Meditation by pseudo-Bernard on the Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin, known as the Quis dabit. There is also a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman verse adaptation of the Latin text to which the Middle English versions are indebted. The poem probably was also included in the Simeon manuscript.250 The Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts as well as the Latin devotion were popular, and the Middle English version shows up in manuscripts of both northern and southern provenance. At one point, the poem was attributed to Richard Rolle, though in his edition of the Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, Carl Horstmann refutes this and goes so far as to attribute it to Richard Maidstone. Considering the work’s relative popularity in all of its versions, its devotional intensity, and the types of manuscripts in which it appears, it is unlikely that the author of Pearl would not have known of it. Indeed, the Lamentations shares many general features with Pearl, as well as one striking instance in which the poems seem to 249. For a study that underlines the mobility of the educated, see Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989). 250. For a text of the Quis dabit from an English medieval manuscript, see Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), appendix 1. For an edition of the Middle English poem, see Carl Horstmann, ed., The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, Early English Text Society 98 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 297–328. All subsequent citations of the Lamentations refer to the Horstmann edition. For the most cogent discussion of the Middle English poem, see C. W. Marx, “The Middle English Verse ‘Lamentation of Mary to Saint Bernard’ and the ‘Quis dabit,’” in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 137–58. Though Marx corrects points in the following, see also F. L. Utley, “Lamentation of Mary to Saint Bernard,” in A Manual of Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 3, ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972), 685–87, 842–43. My account of the manuscript history of this poem is indebted to Marx. I first encountered this poem in manuscript, in Bodleian Library ms Laud misc. 463, a late-fourteenth-century miscellany of English devotional texts, and was immediately struck by the cadence and wording of some of its lines. I was not working on Pearl at the time, but that is the poem I “heard” through this poem. Though I retained my note cards, I did not have the correct manuscript reference. Many thanks to A. S. G. Edwards for figuring out which Oxford manuscript contained this particular poem.


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echo one another. Both the Anglo-Norman and the Middle English Lamentations are dialogues between Bernard and Mary. As Marx notes, only the Middle English text fully realizes the eªects of the dialogue form.251 The dialogue captures an anguished and instructive conversation between Bernard, who wishes to learn to weep by aªectively experiencing Christ’s pain and Mary’s sorrow, and the mother of God, now in Paradise, who answers his questions about her experience of Christ’s Passion. The poem thus moves its audience to the consolation that Bernard finally achieves at the end of the poem through his “understanding,” his secondhand experience. The rhetorical a‹nities with Pearl are striking, but more so are some of the verbal a‹nities between the two poems. Like the Pearl dreamer’s, Bernard’s is a quest for experience. Early in the Lamentations, Bernard begs the Virgin for tears: “Ladi, 5e teres 5at 5ou 5er 3ef, / Graunte me summe!” He goes on to ask, As 5ou art queen of heuene-blisse, And I am here in great perile, Swete ladi, 5ow me wisse, 4ou3 I be synful mon and vyle. As 5ou art moder and Mayden I-wis: What dude my lord in his exile? (Lamentations, lines 135–42) The language here expresses the same sense of distance or diªerence that the dreamer expresses between himself and the maiden. When he first recognizes her in the land of vision, he says, “Sy5en into gresse 5ou me agly3te, Pensyf, payred, I am forpayned And 5ou in a lyf of lykyng ly3te, In paradys erde, of stryf vnstrayned.” (Pearl, lines 245–48)

251. See Marx for an analysis of the relationship between the Quis dabit and its appearance as vernacular poetry. Like the Planctus Mariae Magdalenae, the Quis dabit is an example of monastic spirituality translated into the language of lay spirituality; both would have had a strong appeal for figures like Thomas of Woodstock. The inventory of Thomas’s books includes a “small book of the meditations of St. Bernard”: see Dillon and Hope, “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels.”


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And later, he adds, “In blysse I se 5e bly5ely blent, And I a man al mornyf mate; . . . . . . . . . . “Bot now I am here in your presente, I wolde byseche, wythouten debate, 3e wolde me say in sobre asente What lyf 3e lede erly and late. . . .” (lines 385–86, 389–92) Like Bernard, the Pearl dreamer describes himself as sorrowful, as pained by the diªerence between his own state and that of a soul in bliss, and as urgently curious about the details of a holy life. Both the maiden and the Virgin instruct Bernard, who wishes to mourn, and the dreamer, who mourns in the wrong way, about the realities that give meaning to their present situations. The lines point up ways in which the author of Pearl may have drawn upon texts to which he had access and gained inspiration from a native tradition of texts not necessarily alliterative. Alliterative poets shared a vocabulary and influenced one another, but they also used and enriched the language of English poetry as it was being worked out in the late fourteenth century. Moreover, these texts circulated through and by means of noble households that had the administrative and clerical staªs and the wealth to patronize what was a vigorous outpouring. By locating the Pearl author among those patronized or helped along by John of Gaunt, we locate him in the most cosmopolitan of worlds. There, he would have met people from all over England; he would have had access to texts and ideas that he might encounter nowhere else and firsthand experience of the wealth and power that characterized the nobility. This could also help explain something about the manuscript history of these poems. Come into his own (or into the crown) at last, Henry might not want to retain evidence of his father’s flirtations with anticlericalism or his own with treason. And he might wish to distance himself from his uncle, whose bid for power just after Christmas in 1387 looked a little too like his own more successful and equally brutal grab in 1399.252

252. McFarlane’s notebooks, held at Magdalene, make it clear that he thought Derby a schemer from the beginning.


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The histories, points of convergence, and speculations that I have outlined open up the possibility of thinking about John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock as acutely aware of the relationship between power and cultural production. With his enormous wealth, his ambitions, his political failures, his keen understanding of the worlds within which he moved, and his mercurial temper, Gaunt should be considered a figure every bit as important and every bit as fascinating as Richard II. This is not to say that the poetry of the period is “about” Gaunt, but there are ways in which the trajectory traced by his career could give a poet much to explore and a brother much to reckon with. We should look to the houses of Lancaster and Gloucester as alternate centers of power, at once competing with and mutually reinforcing the prestige of the royal court. Rather than being Richard’s satellites, they may have rivaled or surpassed whatever Richard could produce, in so doing dispersing power and detracting from that of the center. In the end, Richard alienated those very magnates. There is no evidence to suggest that John of Gaunt ever considered overthrowing the king and seizing power, but he continually sought to find a court of his own that could be passed on to his heir, Henry of Derby. Whether in Spain, in Aquitaine, or possibly in England (should Richard die childless), Gaunt’s ambitions were directed at founding a dynasty of his own. Though poets or writers or theologians could not make imperium, they were part of the furniture of the princely world. What Richard II might have learned by hearsay from the France of Charles V, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock would have known directly. There are many good reasons to associate these men with the rich cultural life of the late fourteenth century—and to see Henry IV as wishing to identify himself and his reign with an articulated English cultural program. But there are equally good reasons for seeing the 1390s as the period when what was a courtly a‹nity became a more sharply defined program for the house of Lancaster. When John of Gaunt returned to England in 1389, he found his son in a far diªerent position from the one in which he had left him in 1386. Although (as Goodman points out) Henry was in close communication with his father, who was overseas during the Merciless Parliament, it could not have entirely pleased Gaunt to return to a son who was now an Appellant. Most scholars agree that Henry was among the least ferocious of the Appellants and, in fact, sought to temper their justice; he remains a shadowy and uncertain figure until 1399, 253. Goodman, John of Gaunt, 153–55. The latter description is Froissart’s, cited by Goodman.


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devoted to his father, an accomplished and enthusiastic knight, courteous, pleasant to all.253 Rather than allow Henry to remain in England, where he might become a target for Richard’s resentment, the duke financed the Prussian campaign. Gaunt had seen to his son’s interests earlier by eªectively taking Mary de Bohun out of a convent to marry her and her great fortune to his son, and during the 1390s, as we have seen, he planned to further those interests by attempting to found a hereditary principality in Aquitaine. But 1394 changed everything. Gaunt and the earl of Arundel blew up at one another in the January parliament, shattering the tentative accord that had obtained during the previous few years. Richard backed the duke, but the atmosphere between Richard and his uncle became increasingly guarded.254 That same parliament made it absolutely clear that John of Gaunt’s heirs would not inherit the duchy of Aquitaine, and the Commons’s refusal to accept the draft peace treaty that had been hammered out with the French helped undermine the amicable relationship between Richard and Gaunt.255 It is at this point, when Gaunt must have felt that events had once more halted his progress, that the story of the duke’s attempt to alter the English royal succession appears in the continuation of the Eulogium. In the spring and summer of that year, Constance of Castile (Gaunt’s second wife), Mary de Bohun (the wife of Henry of Derby), and Queen Anne all died. The political field had significantly changed. Any hopes Gaunt had had of establishing a dynasty for his son, Henry of Derby, were diminished by the trouble with France, by the mood in Parliament, and, finally, by the queen’s death. Richard and Anne had been childless, but Richard and a new queen might well have children. Aquitaine was his until death, but then it would revert to the crown. Only the palatinate of Lancaster, which had been entailed to his male heirs in 1390, could be passed on. In 1396, the duke married his longtime mistress, Katharine Swynford, and legitimized the four children she had borne him. In 1398, Thomas of Woodstock was murdered—probably on the orders of his nephew, Richard II. Thereafter, the field belonged to Henry of Bolingbroke, who must already have learned a good deal about the ways of centering a court. Though these princely powers, along with their ambitions and disappointments, have passed, the voices of the poets they sought to command 254. Both ibid., 153–54, and Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, 350–56, discuss this parliamentary exchange. See RP 3:313–14. 255. See Saul, Richard II, 221–25. For the parliament, see RP 3:309–23, and Hector and Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicle, 516–18.


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have not. We have been left with literary texts of great beauty and subtlety; they also constitute the fragments of a conversation about the terms of lost languages of power by those commissioned to figure powers they at once elaborated and scrutinized. The cultural production that Richard could not or would not focus upon himself, or through the crown, testifies at once to his misunderstanding of the terms of English discourse as it was being worked out throughout his reign and of the very sources of a multivocality that worked against the commands of sovereignty.


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f o u r

French Georgics and English Ripostes

Power was figured by more than the commands of princes. If men like John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock understood the need for a language in which to express their powers and their ambitions, patronage does not provide a simple lexicon for the languages in which late medieval culture was written. We must turn to the texts themselves to understand the conversations within political communities. In this chapter, I would like to think about the political uses of a literary mode—the medieval georgic— as a way of exploring the nature of England’s political situation during the last decade of the reign of Richard II, when more than one prince sought a language in which to express a symbolic identity. As I have suggested, what was attractive about Charles V was the very nature of his power, his ability to present himself as embodying both the mystique of French sacral kingship and the rational, natural order of a hierarchically fixed system ruled by a good and wise king. Charles was both the magically endowed king of the French and the good and wise husband to the realm. The language used to articulate his reign defined a cultural program emanating from the crown itself. Again, the legal and political conditions in England were very diªerent from those in France; moreover, English social and religious tensions had created a world, both actual and textual, where the sovereign’s assertion of sacramental ordering did not have the force to implement sacramental change. Not only had Richard misunderstood the real genius (or grim pragmatism) of Charles V’s figuring of his own place within French political realities, but he had also failed to grasp the terms of the English conversation about the nature of power. Especially when read alongside the French literature of the household and its economies, the works of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, as well as anonymous works


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like A Pistel of Susan, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and Athelston, evince a keen understanding of those distinct impulses that invigorated the texts of the English household. My use of the word “household” is intended as a synecdoche for kinds of texts that are often thought of as distinct. The word itself had a broad application: in Middle English, it could apply to an aristocrat’s “meyne” or “meignee,” to the members of or holdings of a family, or to the hundreds of figures of varying degrees and o‹ces who made up the king’s administrative household.1 The word also denoted the range of concerns addressed by pseudo-Aristotle in the Economics and by Virgil in the Georgics. Both works, as well as the conventions upon which each author drew, employ a didactic mode to teach a set of skills whose ostensible end is the well-being of a political community that is conceived of as a household. While the traditions of the Aristotelian household economy can easily be detected in works of conduct or household management, the traditions of Virgil’s Georgics are less often seen as informing aspects of medieval culture.2 But Virgil’s poem of labor, of humankind’s eªorts to understand and to channel natural law to the benefit of society, forms a powerful commentary on all our eªorts at order, a commentary that underlies, in part, the great medieval encyclopedias of the natural world that inquire into the created universe and its 1. For two recent studies of the medieval household as an actual and a metaphoric construct, see Vale, Princely Court, and D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). See also Starkey, “Age of the Household,” for remarks about the importance of the household for the arts and for systems of government. 2. See Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Baswell points out that in Virgilian collections, the Georgics was not as well annotated as either the Eclogues or the Aeneid (5). But it is clear from appendix 1, which contains a list of Virgilian manuscripts in England, that the poem was certainly widely available. L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 270–313, outlines the later influence of the Georgics. He notes its influence in Walafrid of Strabo’s De cultu hortorum, in Latin poems about the passing of the seasons, in Rabanus Maurus’s De universo, in the ceremony for the blessing of the candles on Easter Eve, in John of Salisbury, and in Dante. For Dante, see also Robert Hollander, “Dante’s ‘Georgic’ (Inferno xxiv, 1–18),” Dante Studies 102 (1984): 1 1 1–21. On the possible relevance of the Georgics for English medieval culture, see Ordelle G. Hill, The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance English Literature (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993), 75–88. The georgic is usually seen as an eighteenth-century form, though there is an increasing interest in finding its traditions in earlier English poetry. See William Sessions, “Spenser’s Georgic,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 202–38; Alastair Fowler, “The Beginnings of English Georgic,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 105–25; Annabel Patterson, “Pastoral Versus Georgic: The Politics of Virgilian Quotation,” in Renaissance Genres, ed. Lewalski, 241–67; and Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), s.v. “Georgic.”


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systems of order.3 When shaped into economies of house and farm, scientific knowledge assumes the emphasis to be found in works in the tradition of the Economics and the Georgics. In sponsoring a species of georgic literature in the vernacular, Charles V held out the picture of domestic order to a France stressed both internally and externally. His commissions reflect his sense that works of domestic economy and pastoral management—what I am assimilating to the georgic mode—are linked to a concept of nationhood.4 The French georgic sponsored by Charles V, however, was diªerent from the English (if, indeed, we can apply the term “georgic” to the English literature of the household). While French order in all its forms was described as coming from the king, English order was wrung out of a centuries-old process of household opposition to royal power. The English literature of the household is thus a householder’s literature whose multivocality speaks to a construction of power as bound by a duty to order, rather than as informed by the order of grace. For all the di‹culties of his reign, its external threats and its internal dissent, Charles managed to project an image of order through the texts that belong to his court. One of the most important court authors —and the primary mouthpiece for Aristotelian thought—was, as Claire Richter Sherman has argued, Nicole Oresme, who used Aristotle to further Charles’s own political program, which was also a moral and social system.5 With its profoundly hierarchical set of assumptions, Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of the whole, of the common good, could be used as a way of thinking about the household of the realm. 3. I am here compressing a thousand years of cultural history into a single sentence. Needless to say, Virgil cannot be credited with the renewed interest in science in medieval Europe, nor with the influx of Arabic knowledge. His poem, however, adumbrates a process by which we learn in order to work, in order to create lives for ourselves. The focus upon the individual that we can find in the Eclogues does not exist in the Georgics. In Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 197, Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter associate the second book of the Georgics with medieval descriptions of seasons and seasonal landscapes, a tradition also to be found in the medieval encyclopedia. 4. This recognition is more usually applied to the eighteenth-century English georgic and its exploration of the economic continuity of the Empire. See Rachel Crawford, “English Georgic and British Nationhood,” English Literary History 65 (1998): 123–58, and Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789,” in The Country and the City Re-visited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 160–79. The seminal study of the georgic as a dialectic exploring or expressing a set of social values is Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 5. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 303–5.


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Thus, Oresme did not simply translate the Politics and the Ethics into French but also wrote the De moneta, which concerns the practice of commercial exchange as it pertains to the natural order of things. He translated the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics as well.6 The latter, which is literally about family organization, reflects Charles’s keen interest in books of household management. As I noted in Chapter 2, at least four other such texts can be associated with the reign of Charles V: Pietro Crescenzi’s Duodecim libri ruralium commodorum (1300), which Charles had translated into French; Jean de Brie’s De l’état, science et pratique de l’art de bergerie (Le bon berger) (1379); Jean Boutillier’s La somme rurale (1380); and Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (1371). Albert D. Menut, the editor and translator of Le livre de Yconomique d’Aristote, says that these texts are not “indebted” to the Economics, but we can certainly think of them as indebted to, or perhaps as reflecting, Charles’s broader political strategies of order as well as his practical interest in educating the nobility, and particularly the members of his council, in the techniques of eªective governance.7 The pseudo-Aristotelian Economics is composed of three books, but in the Middle Ages, only books 1 and 3 were known as the Economics.8 The treatise was translated into Latin in 1267 by William of Moerbeke. This was not the first Latin translation of the work, but it was the first to be widely available and popular; within a few years, it had acquired a commentary by Albertus Magnus. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Economics was well known at the University of Paris. In the early fourteenth century, there were other translations made (now lost) of books 1 and 3 of the Economics as well as an anonymous translation of all three books from the Greek original. As Menut points out, Oresme evolved a method of translation that amounted to amplification: for one Latin word he frequently supplied two or more French words, and in other places he took liberties with the text in order to point up Aristotle’s meaning for those who were not philosophers. He also supplied a running gloss that paraphrases earlier Latin commentaries on the text.9 Oresme thus translated into French the didactic con6. Babbitt, Oresme’s “Livre de politiques”; C. Johnson, trans., The “De moneta” of Nicholas Oresme; Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique. 7. See Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 786. On Pietro Crescenzi, see Robert Calkins, “Piero de Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elizabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1986), 157–69. Calkins notes Charles’s practical interests on 161. See also Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, chap. 24. 8. See Aristotle’s Oeconomica, trans. G. Cyril Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library 271 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). This volume contains William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of book 3. 9. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 786–88, 792–96.


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cerns of a work that presents the household as a kind of monarchical kingdom whose borders need to be very carefully guarded. The Economics is a book about the regulation and training of human instincts by means of moral science. Though its focus is the household, as Oresme notes in his gloss, the city is composed of “une multitude de citoiens” and, hence, of households. A city made up of fractious and unproductive households he calls a “malvese policie,” a political system that cannot guarantee its citizens good living nor indeed presage a future for the city itself (Le livre de Yconomique, 808–9). The treatise considers the disposition of goods; the management of the land (“la cure georgique,” 810); the need for the relationship between husband and wife to be rational and free from the irrational desire of the lower animals (812); the necessity of children, realizing that they exist for the good of the whole, for its “unity and profit” (813); and the treatment of slaves, laborers, and servants and the equitable disposition of their labors (817–26). The second book concerns marriage and is, in eªect, a conduct book for a young wife. It specifies rules for the wife. For example, she should not allow anyone to enter the house without her husband’s permission (826); she should spend less on her appearance than allowed by the laws of the city (827); she should obey her husband (828). In all things she should patiently conform to her husband’s will, bear misfortune, realize that her duties within the household are holy (“saincte,” 830), and model herself after figures like Alceste and Penelope, also praised by Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women, who earned their fame by suªering their husbands’ adversities. A properly trained and virtuous wife helps produce virtuous children, but the well-being of the household depends upon the quality of the laws (“lays,” 835) the husband lays down for his wife. The final chapters of this second book are concerned with the husband. He must be honorable, rational, just, temperate, faithful, and loving in order to make rules for living that will be obeyed by his household. We can find a similarly benign but powerful monarchical dynamic articulated in the prologue to the Livre du Chevalier, where the author presents his material as a conduct book for his daughters, a book that he writes in order to instruct them in the dangers of the world. He locates those dangers in courtly speech. I remembryd me of the tyme when I was yong and roode with my felauship and companyes in poytou / and in other places / And I remembre me moche wel of the fayttes and sayenges that they told of


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suche thynges / as they fond with the ladyes and damoyselles / that they requyred and prayd of loue / . . . For they had neyther drede ne shame / so moche were they endurate and acustomed / And were moche wel bespoken and had fayre langage. . . . And thus they doo no thyng but deceyue good ladyes / and damoysellys.10 The emphasis here is upon “courtship” as manifested through speech. In an eªort to counterbalance the false speech of such courtier knights, the Knight says that he went out into his garden, where he found two priests and two clerks. He asked them to read him stories from the Bible, from the deeds of kings, and from chronicles of France and England, as well as other histories. He thus presents his own household as a pastoral, ordered space. Its good father has seen fit to include in it such figures of education and piety as priests and clerks who can, at his direction, help put together a book for the instruction of its daughters. Fittingly, the book will help them maintain their own future households as sites of peace focused upon the husband, for whose peace the book is supposedly written. In order to emphasize the book’s validity as moral instruction, the Knight stipulates that it shall not be “set in ryme but al along in prose for to abredge and also for the better to be vnderstonden.”11 The analogy I here suggest between the Knight and Charles V is intended to underline a particular construction of the father as a benign monarch—or of the benign monarch as a father—that obtained during the reign of Charles V. The Knight presents himself as a sovereign who employs a select group of scholars to translate and supply instructive texts for his approval. The Knight’s control of his household is as lovingly patriarchal as that of the king, whose care for his children extended to care for their education and whose care for his court very much included care for the great library he assembled as the repository for the cultural program that stamped his reign. By about 1360, before he acceded to the throne, Charles had begun to commission translations (first of astrological texts, and then, increasingly, of devotional and historical works), all of which were made available to his court. The program of building a library of vernacular translations was certainly in full swing by the time the Chevalier de la TourLandry (which was in Anjou) began his own program of compiling a volume 10. This is Caxton’s translation; see Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 12. For the original, see Anatole de Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (Paris: Jannet, 1854), 2–3. 1 1. Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 13.


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that would instruct his own more intimate household.12 Though the Knight describes his beloved wife as dead, and his daughters as thus without her guidance, the relationship he recalls between them when she lived is as companionate as the publicly companionate marriage of Charles and Jeanne de Bourbon. There is no evidence that the Knight’s book was known to Charles (there is no reference to it in the inventory of Charles’s books), nor am I suggesting that the Knight is meant to be an allegorical figure for the king. Nonetheless, his rhetorical position can be used as a way of thinking about a type of household book as a text with an ambiguously defined cultural or political application. In fact, the very popularity of the Livre du Chevalier in both England and France raises questions about readership that are ultimately relevant to perceptions of power and the relationship between civil and familial figurations of authority.13 As its author announces at the beginning, he writes a book of self-governing (“I wolde make a book and an examplayre for my doughters to lerne, to rede and vnderstonde / how they ought to gouerne them self / and to kepe them from euylle”) by which a young woman may supposedly acquire the historical acuity that will allow her to maintain a home in virtuous concord.14 Whereas earlier medieval texts for women, like the Ancrene Wisse, represent the anchorhold as a superior household and Christ as a far more satisfying husband than any mortal man, the Livre du Chevalier depicts marriage as a species of the vowed life.15 Thus, in place of the spiritual housekeeping outlined in texts devoted to the benefits of virginity, the Knight oªers a view of the world in which a young woman may find in marriage the spiritual fulfillment she might have sought in a nunnery. His first chapter, which would be elaborated upon by the author of Le menagier de Paris, discusses the prayers to be said upon awakening and before going to sleep. Just as clerks divide the day into canonical hours, so the young 12. See Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 6–12, for a discussion (which includes dating) of the translations Charles sponsored. See also Daniel Poiron, Le poète et le prince (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 26–30. For a study of the Livre du Chevalier in relation to gender roles and ideas of community, see Roberta L. Krueger, “Nouvelles Choses,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 49–85. 13. See, for example, Roberta L. Krueger, “Intergeneric Combination and the Anxiety of Gender in Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles,” L’ésprit créateur 33 (1993): 61–72; Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996): 66–86; and Kathleen Ashley, “The Miroir des bonnes femmes: Not for Women Only?” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Ashley and Clark, 86–105. 14. Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 13; Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier, 3. 15. See Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 249–50, for a discussion of the emphasis upon marriage in Old French romance.


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women are reminded that their first labor is that of praise and adoration. The author of the Menagier, like the now-dead Charles V (whose fame grew greater throughout the unhappy reign of his son, Charles VI), goes much further and specifies which prayers should be said at which times, providing French translations of these for his young wife, to whom he refers as “Chiere seur.” As though she were a vowess, he describes what modest dress and manner ought to be for a wife, and, in the third article of the first part, he provides her with a treatise on the mass, which includes a discussion of the sins.16 Just as Oresme’s Yconomique moves from interior to exterior systems of ordering, so these manuals of female conduct begin with devotion as the first component of a well-ordered household. What is, of course, implicit in such discussions is the idea that devotion to God is tightly linked to devotion to one’s husband—that, finally, the issue is one’s relation to a figure of sovereignty. The Knight says to his daughters, “Also my dere doughters / ye ought to faste tyll that ye be maryed thre or foure dayes in the weke. For the better to adaunte youre flesshe / that it meue not ouermoche / for to kepe yow more clene and holyly in the seruyce of god.”17 The habits of semimonastic self-control they acquire as unmarried women serve to prepare them for their roles as wives, where the virtues of courtesy, humility, and obedience will increase their sphere of influence within marriage. Devout virginity within the world is thus a type of novitiate for the married state. A nun went on to take vows to Christ the bridegroom; these fourteenth-century French women, by comparison, were intended for worldly husbands and for households whose concerns would be their domains. But, like courtiers or statesmen, their eªectiveness lay in the degree of their devotion to the good of their sovereigns and hence in their ability to discern false from true. The Knight therefore counsels his daughters to help them become wise counselors. Not only are they to keep themselves from vice, but they should also obey their husbands in all reasonable things (chapter 72), keep their husbands’ secrets (chapter 74), exhort their husbands to devotion (chapter 75), and avoid answering an angry husband (chapter 96), for which the story of Queen Esther is the example of wise behavior. The Knight includes a number of exemplary tales drawn from contempo16. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, eds., Le menagier de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), distinction 1, articles 1–3. 17. Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 19; Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier, 14–15.


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rary times. Some of these seem to problematize marriage in ways that appear to undermine his ultimate purpose. In chapter 112, he tells the story of a fair, young, genteel woman married to a short, hunchbacked, and uncourteous man. To the amazement of “many man,” she loved, honored, and served him “as ony woman can or may loue any man.” He follows the story with praise for a young, beautiful wife of an old “simple” man who lived in a trance and was as incontinent as a young child. Significantly, these wives are praised for their devotion and for their refusal to remarry after their husbands’ deaths, thereby escaping the great danger of marrying someone of lower estate. He then moves into a group of chapters concerned with community, with the need for daughters to follow their parents’ advice about marriage, and with the dangers of infamy, after which he includes a chapter comparing the chaste woman to the precious pearl. He then stages a debate between himself and his now-dead and beloved wife upon the subject of whether a lady might love “peramours” in a certain case, giving his wife the last (negative) word about any relationship not bounded by marriage. In her concern for repute and in her distrust of the language of love, which she describes as driven by base desire, she emphasizes that a woman needs to be able to regulate herself by “reading” the people around her. The wife, like a truly prudent counselor, is the one who speaks for marriage as the only relationship in which a woman should be bound. The Livre du Chevalier ends with the misogynist story of Cathonet, the son of Cato, who ignored his father’s profoundly worldly advice. On his deathbed, Cato gave his son three pieces of wisdom: not to seek o‹ce of his sovereign lord and thereby put himself in subjection, not to overturn a justly delivered sentence of death in case he becomes morally responsible for any subsequent crime, and to test his wife before he entrusts her with any secrets. Though Cathonet forgets and breaks the first two injunctions, he finally remembers the entire series in a dream and goes on to test his wife by telling her of a terrible crime that he has supposedly committed. Predictably, his wife fails the test of secrecy. She tells his secret to a lady in waiting, who tells the empress, who tells the emperor, who condemns Cathonet to death. Cathonet saves himself by revealing the truth, but he then resigns his public o‹ce, repents his actions, and remarks somewhat laconically upon the inability of women to keep secrets: “But I gyue me not to grete merueylle therof / For hit is not of newe how that a woman can not kepe secretely that whiche men sayen to her in counceylle.” The Knight uses the tale to draw the moral of the necessity of female prudence and circumspection, but its deep look at a world of flawed hierarchical relationships works to position


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the Livre du Chevalier in a realm of political exigencies. Thus Cathonet, in resigning his o‹ce, says: “And by cause I shold haue suªysaunce / he commaunded and charged me / that neuer I shold put my self in subiection of none oªyce vnder my souerayne lord / For yf I dyd so by couetyse of more good / somme enuyous by somme fals repporte / shold make me to lese my good and my self also / And that hit was a peryllous thynge to serue ony prynce or grete lord of lyght and hasty wylle.”18 Unlike Cathonet’s wife, the emperor proves that he is more than capable of rewarding a just man and heaps benefits upon him, despite his speech. Nonetheless, the story underlines the dangers of serving “hasty” lords, dangers that are like those the Knight’s daughters must face in seeking to understand the terms of the world they are on the verge of entering. The story is poised somewhere between outright misogyny, for the Knight hopes the tale will leave his daughters with a powerful final example, and jaundiced courtship—for courtiers, like women, place themselves in subordinate positions to the lords they serve. In fact, it sketches a complicated series of relationships between just and unjust kings (or husbands) and prudent and imprudent courtiers (and wives) by subtly linking the household to the household of the realm. What Cathonet tells his wife privately in the middle of the night becomes public property the next day. On the other hand, though the Knight certainly has examples of bad husbands, he focuses our attention upon the wives’ conduct. We are invited to become “good” wives. Those examples of angry or scornful or churlish or senile husbands, though, remain unresolved parts of the text, reminding the reader of the very worldliness that Cato explicitly describes. This is not to say that the Livre du Chevalier is not addressed to women, but to say that its treatment of female conduct and of marriage fits into a cultural context of political relationships, whereby men, like women, should consider the perils of hasty assignations. The Knight, its narrator, uses his exemplary histories in a strategy of containment that regulates female conduct even as it regulates his own. In presenting marriage as the only possible choice for a woman, it presents the husband as the sole figure of power in a wife’s field of concentration. But its very praise of marriage leaves unresolved an anxiety about the figure who wields power that is as pertinent to courtiers as it is to wives. Like the Livre de Melibee et Prudence, which follows it in two of the twenty-one manuscripts 18. Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 189–90; Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier, 287.


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in which the French text is found, the Livre du Chevalier is at once unswervingly hierarchical and unnervingly forthright about the uncertainties that belong to hierarchical systems.19 But whereas the story of Melibee examines the means by which a ruler can maintain a kingdom by making the sorts of choices that ensure wise rule, the stories collected by the Knight of the Tower suggest less the need for wise husbands than that for vigilant wives. As the Knight presents himself as a benevolent ruler, the underlying fiction of the book authorizes his control. But if the book can also be used as a way of thinking about analogous relationships, then the Knight may be thought of as a wife—as, like Cathonet, one who exists in relation to another, higher power. Cathonet is lucky in having a lord who can see the truth when it is laid out for him, and, except for advising his daughters not to tell all they know, the Knight leaves us with a sense that courts can be dangerous places for the guileless. Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry belongs to the aristocratic world of the early 1370s and reflects, if not the ethos of the court of Charles V, the values and anxieties of a reign that sought to concentrate power upon a sovereign who went to great lengths to create a particular image of himself and hence of the nation he ruled. The Aristotelian Le livre de Yconomique is built around the conceit that a household is like a monarchy that is, in turn, founded upon the ideal of voluntary self-regulation. The rules established by the master of the house that encourage married friendship, simplicity of life and manner, and a natural order and orderliness are willingly internalized by its subordinate members.20 The women who are the ostensible audience for the Livre du Chevalier are not presented as objects of courtly love but as seconds-in-command, subordinate but companionate, whose sphere is the world radiating from their husbands.21 Le menagier de Paris, which resembles the Livre du Chevalier and, at points, seems indebted to it, belongs to a diªerent world.22 First, though its author recounts

19. For the manuscript history, see Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier, preface, and Oªord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, xx–xxi. 20. Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, especially 807, 808, 813, 826, 827. These are also descriptions of Charles V’s own household. 21. See Alice A. Hentsch, De la littérature didactique du Moyen Âge s’adressant spécialement aux femmes (Cahors, France: A. Coueslant, 1903; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1975), 127, for remarks about the ways in which this text represents a break from traditional books of female conduct. 22. See Brereton and Ferrier, eds., Le menagier de Paris, introduction. For an argument identifying and contextualizing the author as Guy de Montigny, who had served the duke of Berry, see Nicole Crossley-Holland, Living and Dining in Medieval Paris: The Household of a FourteenthCentury Knight (Cardiª: University of Wales Press, 1996).


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events as far back as 1358 or 1359, the book itself seems to have been written about 1394. By 1394, Charles V had been dead for fourteen years, and his son, Charles VI, had had his first attack of madness two years before. Like other great monarchs, such as Elizabeth I of England, Charles V’s shadow grew longer with time, and the days of his reign came to be seen as a golden age for the prestige of the French court. The values and principles of order he imposed upon the household of the realm as a way of strengthening the Valois monarchy were neither forgotten nor easily available in the France of the 1390s. Charles V’s economic advisers, guided by Nicole Oresme, had advocated a monetary policy that proved primarily advantageous to landowners and restored to France a prosperity and stability that had been lost during the first twenty years of the Hundred Years War. Moreover, “at home,” Charles lived in a manner that emphasized the virtues of simplicity, prosperity, and stability. The court of Charles VI had none of these. Nor was the France of Charles VI in any sense a household that radiated from a single wise figure of authority.23 The narrator of the Menagier, who is much older than his fifteen-year-old wife, is thus the spokesman for a household order that hearkens back to that of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry—or to that of Charles himself, as expressed through Oresme’s translation of the Economics. But the narrator of the Menagier is not a member of the aristocracy with feudal ties to the crown; he belongs to the Parisian bourgeoisie. Accordingly, he is extremely sensitive to issues of class, warning his wife to avoid the festivities of the mighty: “toutesvoies sans desirer ne vous oªrir a repairier en festes ne dances de trop grans seigneurs, car ce ne vous est mie convenable ne aªerant a vostre estat ne au mien.” He echoes this

23. The problems of Charles VI’s reign are familiar. He came to the throne as a child; France was thus ruled by uncles whose extravagance and ambition threatened to undo the work of their brother. When Charles declared himself of age, he proved capable enough, but after his first attack of madness was never truly fit to rule (though by divine right, his reign continued). His wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, was no Jeanne de Bourbon. See R. C. Faniglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York: AMS Press, 1986), chap. 1, on Charles VI and his illness. For economic studies of the reign of Charles VI in relation to his father’s achievements, see Harry A. Miskimin, Money and Power in Fifteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), chap. 1, and Spuªord, Money and Its Use, 295–301. For remarks about contemporary views of the early reign of Charles VI, see Coopland, ed., Le songe, introduction. The most obvious point of comparison is the Burgundian court, ruled over by Charles V’s brother, Philip the Bold, and then by his sons. Like the French court, the Burgundian court was autocratic, locating all, including the nobility, in relation to a single source of power. See C. A. J. Armstrong, “Had the Burgundian Government a Policy for the Nobility?” in England, France, and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 214–15.


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warning about “comporting yourself according to your estate” when he later warns her about proper dress for her age and station.24 Though his subject, like that of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, is self-governance, the narrator of the Menagier is a reminder of the world of the city and of the subtleties of class that were key to medieval oligarchies. By means of his older, class-conscious narrator, the author creates a work wherein one world is shadowed in another, where a voice of the past seeks to guide a person situated in the present, even to the point of advising his young wife about her second husband. In a sense, the recipe is faultless, for the author presents the old as if it were new; he suggests applying the rules or categories of an older feudal and aristocratic world to the needs of a new urban society. The values the narrator of the Menagier advocates are meant to establish the household within the bounds of the natural order as enhanced by Christian faith. Like such works as Li livres dou tresor and De regimine principium, whose prominently displayed organization is fundamental to their didacticism, the Menagier manifests its author’s belief in order in the carefully presented series of distinctions into which it is divided. Giles of Rome had used a three-book structure to lay out the education of a prince. Though the author of the Menagier does not describe himself as engaged in so lofty a pursuit, his prologue self-consciously outlines the contents of the three books, or “distinctions,” by which he aims to educate his wife. The first distinction is the longest and provides the foundation for the others. It is divided into eight articles that, together, are designed to teach the love of God and the salvation of “your” soul (as well as how to acquire and keep the love of “your” husband). He thus aims at peace in this world and the next. This is the most traditional section, in the sense that it contains spiritual advice and instruction, stories about good and bad wives, and remarks about proper and improper behavior and dress. The first three articles are primarily concerned with the inner state of the honorable woman and contain instructions about which prayers to say at which point of her day, warnings about the spiritual dangers of bad companions, and instructions in the mass and the seven deadly sins. Article 4 focuses upon the need for chaste living and contains the biblical story of Susannah. Article 5 emphasizes fidelity. Article 6, which concerns obedience, underlines the relationship between the narrator’s ideals of orderly marriage and those of late medieval French society. In stressing the need for wives to obey their husbands, he cites Ephesians 5:22 and its injunction that wives be subject to their 24. Brereton and Ferrier, eds., Le menagier de Paris, prologue, p. 1; distinction 1, article 1, p. 10.


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husbands as the church is subject to Christ: “le commandement de Dieu est que les femmes soient subgectes a leurs maris comme a seigneurs.” He backs up Paul’s words with a citation from Hebrews 13:17, which enjoins us to be obedient to our superiors and be subject to them (“Obedite prepositis vestris et subiacete eis”).25 He then amplifies this with “C’est adire: ‘Obeissez a voz souverains et soiez en bonne subjection vers eulx,’” and he goes on to emphasize a wife’s subject status in relation to her husband, regardless of his class. He follows these statements with warnings about choosing her second husband, inserting Philippe de Mézières’s version of the story of Griselda at this point. He apologizes for the tale’s cruelty but nonetheless uses it as an example of how a wise woman gets her husband’s love in the end.26 In fact, the entire article on obedience suggests the ways in which properly observed hierarchy, or the wife’s internalized acquiescence to hierarchy, is the key to order. From obedience, the narrator moves to articles on thoughtfulness, temperate speech, and, finally, wisdom and discretion in the ninth article, which contains Renauld de Louens’s redaction of Albertano of Brescia’s story of Prudence and Melibee.27 From instruction in the seven deadly sins (which is modeled closely on the popular thirteenth-century treatise La somme le roy) and on the mass to lessons in keeping a house free from insects (advice that is included in the seventh article, on thoughtfulness), this distinction oªers the wife, or subject, a mode of life whereby peace comes, as in Giles’s De regimine, through voluntary self-government and regulation.28 Although it is easy enough to mock the narrator of the Menagier as simply a fussy and controlling husband, or to pass oª the treatise as a quaint look at life in late medieval times, the treatise, like the Livre du 25. Ibid., 1.6, pp. 70–71. The verse enjoins obedience, because our superiors are vigilant so that they may render an account of our souls. The Latin reads, “oboedite praepositis vestris et subiacete eis ipsi enim pervigilant quasi rationem pro animabus vestris reddituri.” The two versions of this verse in the English Wycli‹te Bible reflect a shift in the direction of secular power. The early version reads, “Obeye 3e to 3oure prouostis, or prelatis”; the second, “Obeie 3e to 3oure souereyns, and be 3e suget to hem.” 26. For relevant readings of the tale, see Anne Middleton, “The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 121–50; Charlotte Morse, “The Exemplary Griselda,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 51–86; Carolyn Dinshaw, “Griselda Translated,” in Chaucer’s Sexual Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Staley in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 233–59; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 261–98; and Larry Scanlon, “What’s the Pope Got to Do With It? Forgery, Desire, Didacticism, and the Clerk’s Tale,” New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 129–66. 27. Recall that the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry was twice bound with copies of this treatise. 28. On the author’s use of La somme le roy, see Brereton and Ferrier, eds., Le menagier de Paris, xxxiv–xxxvi.


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Chevalier, contains far more than curiosities. For example, the stories of Susannah, Griselda, and Prudence are not merely domestic dramas but also describe what can easily be seen as social or political issues. Moreover, they do so by implicitly problematizing issues of social justice, such as equity, tyranny, or wise rule, in relation to a discussion of female conduct in marriage. The wives in each story are above reproach. Susannah is a model of chastity; Griselda, of patience; and Prudence, of wise counsel. Therefore, what each tale might well question is not the woman but the systems of unjust or lax rule by which she becomes the focus for the tale’s message and, in two of the tales, the object of its cruelty. At the same time, each tale makes it clear that her role is one not of action but of silent virtue or, in the case of Prudence, of virtuous counsel. It is Daniel, not Susannah, who brings corrupt judges to justice. Similarly, Griselda does not actively engage Walter about his inhumane treatment of her, nor does she ever question his right to rule. Neither does Prudence suggest that Melibee, by his folly, might not be a fit ruler (though she eªectively warns him that unstable kingdoms are symptomatic of unwise rule). If a chaste, obedient, and wise wife can be seen as a remedy for an ineªectual, tyrannical, or hasty husband, what, then, is the subject’s role in the larger social or political household? The narrator of the Menagier never suggests such an application for his treatise, but his own choice of tales, many of which had long-standing political associations, directs us toward a broader field of vision than that of the bourgeois household. Or, by its focus upon the urban household, the book inevitably reminds its reader of the social change that has made such a household a reality. Its overarching message of order—how to become it, create it, purchase it, make it, and pass it on—also testifies to a world where order was very precious indeed and possibly to a world where wives were hardly chaste, silent, and obedient. The next two distinctions of the Menagier ring with all the immediate practicality of a world whose values were derived from an idealized time of largesse and gentility. Though the second and third distinctions are fascinating looks into the housekeeping practices of the late Middle Ages, they also remind us that unless the wife who runs the household understands its workings, she has little chance of success. Moreover, the book speaks from a world where such practices are not necessarily passed on but need to be taught or written down. In the second distinction, the narrator of the Menagier begins by recommending to his young wife the habit of diligence. He then gives her a book of instructions that covers gardening duties, the hiring and supervision of servants, remedies for vermin and pests, the care of garments, and a treatise addressed to “Maister Jehan”


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on the choosing and care of a horse. This distinction ends with a long section on food, including a collection of recipes, which in all three known manuscripts occurs after the unfinished third distinction.29 The third distinction, which was intended to have three articles, contains only one—a treatise on hawks. Even falling short of his original plan, the narrator nonetheless oªers his young wife a guide for living that does not violate the stratifications of late medieval society (she is admonished to stay within her class and budget) but oªers a pattern of life whose orderly gentility assimilates city money to older aristocratic values. The author’s absorption of material drawn from royal manuals (La somme le roy), from texts describing aristocratic householding, and from older literary compilations serves to translate the terms of an idealized past into a problematic present. Like Charles V, he provides his household with a library of moral instruction through his assimilation of textual culture. And it is clear that the key to these values is the household. In order to maintain household order after the husband’s death, the wife must understand its inner workings and her role as subregent. Without the moral weight of the first distinction, the second and third are curiosities. Taken together, the three sections root the well-ordered household in the wellordered spirit of an obedient subject. But the very fact that the rules for living needed to be written down for the next generation suggests the anxiety of loss that the rules are intended to remedy. Just as the Knight of the Tower presents himself as writing so that his daughters will not be wooed by the vapidities and greediness of courtiers, the narrator of the Menagier seeks to turn his wife’s eyes away from the mercantilism of the city and the vagaries of fashion and instead toward the solid values of a hierarchy whose order was the natural manifestation of its piety. If those values did not seem especially apparent in the volatile and devalued world of Paris in the last decade of the fourteenth century, its author might not have felt the urgency of his message so thoroughly. It makes sense, too, that the three existing manuscripts of the Menagier—all of which date from the fifteenth century—are of Burgundian provenance. The Valois dukes of Burgundy, unsurprisingly, shared Charles V’s focus upon authority, upon the household as an institution of the state, and upon the need to educate the young. They maintained Burgundy in a position of power and wealth until the end of the fifteenth century, and their roles as patrons of the arts are very well known. Among the recipients of Burgundian patronage was Christine de Pisan, whose 29. See ibid., xix.


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life of Charles V was commissioned by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. After his death, she addressed herself to his son, John the Fearless.30 Philippe de Mézières’s works span the reigns of both Charles V and his hapless son but also, as discussed in Chapter 2, form a bridge between the courts of France and England. Philippe’s handling of marriage as a figure for social ordering makes explicit use of sacramental thought because marriage, unlike knighthood—his other great preoccupation—was one of the seven sacraments codified by canon law. Before Peter Lombard, who first grouped the seven sacraments together, marriage presented di‹culties. Theologians considered it simply a remedy for concupiscence. Peter Lombard felt that its remedial character was enough to warrant its inclusion as a sacrament and designated the consensual union between married persons, including the union of intercourse, as a sign of the union between Christ and the church. St. Thomas Aquinas took this further and stated that because the sacramental character of marriage was instituted by Christ at the wedding in Cana, it was, like the other sacraments, an e‹cient cause of grace. He thus did not excuse marriage but defined it instead as holy, as both a remedy for sin and a cause of grace. The sacramental bond of marriage is made by the words that express mutual consent.31 On sacramental agency, Aquinas said that sacraments cause through signification, that they are signs of a hidden eªect, and that all sacraments derive their power from Christ’s suªerings and relate to or prepare for the Eucharist. Even marriage symbolically relates to the Eucharist as a sign of the union between Christ and the church. Moreover, marriage maintains the church through procreation.32 Philippe de Mézières’s Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage oªers a perspective upon marriage that may not provide recipes for vinegar (as the narrator of the Menagier does) but does promote the system of thought that makes that vinegar possible. By arguing from the premises of sacramental change, Philippe endorses the household, and all its analogues, as the site of transformation. He begins the prologue by quoting John 15:12: “Hic est preceptum meum, ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexi vos.” The discussion of the sacrament of marriage that follows from this precept—to love others as Christ loves us —is one that 30. See Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984), 1 17–18 and chap. 8. 31. Heaney, Development of the Sacramentality of Marriage, 28–29, 66–73, 129; C. Donahue, “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 144–58. 32. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 4, supplement, qq. 41–49, pp. 785–820. See also Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement, ed. Jordan, s.v. “Sacraments and Sacramental Theology.”


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Philippe presents for the comfort of married ladies. The discussion has a far broader application, however, because it is concerned with the theological rationale for a union conceived of as hierarchical. He styles himself as “un simple jardinier” in contrast to Christ, “le grant Jardinier.” He adds that he will oªer his reader some gleanings from his garden that are meant to refill or replace marital ingratitude with love. Abandoning the metaphor of the garden and gardener as a description of his treatise, he likens the work to a four-sided mirror in which married women may find lasting comfort and consolation. As his account of the mirror indicates, though, it is hardly a simple looking glass that reflects the vanities of the viewer. This mirror, like other medieval devotional, historical, or scientific specula, comprises a select group of narratives meant to eªect a change in the gazer. Philippe’s account of the mirror’s four sides inevitably suggests the demands of four-part allegory and thus the need to see in the experiential, literal world a greater and defining reality. The first side of the mirror allows us to see the diamond of marriage as spiritual marriage to God and to understand Christ’s love for the church and for the Blessed Virgin. The second side allows us to see marriage figured in the sorrows of the Queen of Heaven and the great di‹culties of humanity’s redemption. The mirror’s third face makes it possible to see the great virtue of the sacrament of spiritual marriage between a man and a woman as it is presented through examples and stories. This face allows women who do not have a proper understanding of marriage to find remedies or cures for their maladies and will comfort those who are unhappy in their marriages. The fourth side makes it possible to see the singular virtue of the sacrament of spiritual marriage between God and the reasonable soul. As Philippe’s phrasing powerfully suggests, each face of the mirror enables sight—“se porra veoir,” he repeats. The mirror, then, does not reflect the viewer; it reflects a reality that will transform the viewer. The mirror is designed as an agent of change because it reflects the virtue of the sacrament of marriage.33 As is clear even from the prologue to Le livre de la vertu, the story of Griselda, the marquise of Saluce, is fundamental to the purpose he sees for his book. The story is presented not in the third book, where we find stories about marriages, but in the fourth book, which considers the marriage between God and the soul. Philippe says, “Encores en la dicte quarte face du miroir se porra veoir le biau [miroir] des dames mariees en la gracieuse histoire de la noble marquise de 33. For the description of the four-sided mirror, see Williamson, ed., Le livre de la vertu, prologue, 46–47.


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Saluce, de sa merveilleuse bonté et constance, loyauté, amour et obeissance envers le marquis son mari.”34 (He then gives the book’s full title: De la vertu du sacrement de mariage espirituel et reconfort des dames mariees et de tout bon Crestien par un devot example de la Passion de Jesu Crist et du miroir des dames mariees, la noble marquise de Saluce.) In book 3 he addresses women who are unhappily married. For their discontent and sorrow, he suggests that they devote themselves to the seven sacraments, the seven works of mercy, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, saying that the story of the marquise of Saluce should be a consolation to them. Having drawn the lesson of consolation from the story of Griselda, Philippe launches into a discussion of the theology of the sacrament of marriage.35 There are at least two things about Philippe de Mézières’s remarks that can strike a Chaucerian as odd. First, he persistently refers to her by her title rather than as Griselda (or patient Griselda, as she is sometimes called). She is only identified in terms of her husband’s aristocratic status. Second, as the Clerk’s version of the story in the Canterbury Tales underlines, this is not a tale of simple consolation. Nor does it seem designed as a salve for marital woes. Rather, it points up the di‹culties of hierarchical bonds, including marriage. But within the framework of Philippe’s book, it is key to understanding the sacrament of marriage. What, for Philippe de Mézières, is the sacrament of marriage? He makes explicit use of Hugh of St. Victor’s On the Sacraments (which is also central to Durandus’s discussion of marriage in the Rationale) primarily because he is at great pains to demonstrate the e‹cacy of spiritual marriage. Whereas St. Thomas, in his treatment of marriage, was deeply concerned with defining the “o‹ce” of marriage as both a remedy for sin (“it is better to marry than to burn”) and as a cause of grace, Hugh of St. Victor placed his greatest emphasis upon the spiritual bond of marriage. He describes “matrimony itself ” as well as the o‹ce of matrimony, saying that “both” are sacraments. The first is a sacrament of a “kind of spiritual society” grounded in the hierarchical relationship between God and the rational soul. The second is the mingling of flesh, through which can be shown the mystery of Christ’s assumption of flesh in the Incarnation. Here, too, we are reminded of hierarchical ordering, for man “engenders” and woman “conceives” and “bears,” just as the rational soul can only 34. Ibid., 47. 35. See ibid., 219. This allusion to the story of Griselda is from the first chapter of the third book. The discussion of marriage constitutes the second chapter.


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bear fruit if it receives the seed of virtue.36 Though Hugh of St. Victor a‹rms the good of marriage, he walks a thin line between the o‹ce of fallen flesh and the sacrament of grace. [T]he o‹ce of marriage in the intercourse of flesh typifies that union which was made between Christ and the Church through His assumption of flesh, and thus the sacrament of Christ and the Church could not be where carnal commerce had not been. Yet true marriage and the true sacrament of marriage can exist, even if carnal commerce has not followed; in fact the more truly and the more sacredly it can exist, the more it has nothing in it at which chastity may blush but has that of which charity may boast.37 Philippe de Mézières’s discussion of marriage as a sacramental remedy for marital discontent is similarly rooted in his belief in marriage as a spiritual good. Employing the metaphor of illness, he argues that both married women and priests should keep in mind the number seven and its multiples when seeking to treat “femmes malcontentes de leur mariage.” Prime among the “sevens” are the seven sacraments, wherein marriage and holy orders, unlike the other five, are sacraments of the will and not necessary for salvation but productive of it.38 From these magical elements can be made a potion as powerful as that which raised Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. That potion is the memory of Christ’s Passion, a Passion that stands against the passions of earthly loves. The health we seek can be found by looking into the first face of the mirror of marriage and at the Queen of Glory. He goes on, “Et en la fin sera presenté le merveilleux miroir de la marquise de Saluce dont la vertu de loyauté [et] de merveilleuse pacience ne se trouverent pas en petit musse.”39 The “practical” remedies he enumerates in the succeeding chapters of this book are all focused, in a sense, upon the revelatory story of Griselda, who represents a marvelous mirror for our infirmity. Discontented women are thus urged toward a fuller understanding of themselves as pilgrims in this world. They need the virtues of patience in suªering, faith, penance, and the intensively purgative cure eªected through penitential observance. By seeing marital discontent as a spiritual malady, like greed 36. Deferrari, Hugh of Saint Victor, 151, 152. 37. Ibid., 326. 38. Williamson, ed., Le livre de la vertu, 254–55. 39. Ibid., 257.


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or anger or envy, Philippe can argue that the unhappy woman should replace discontent with love of Christ, purging the vice and replacing it with a virtue. As one of the illustrations in this third book, he tells the story of St. Cecilia. The use he makes of the legend is far diªerent from Chaucer’s in the tale of the Second Nun. For Philippe it is a story of obedience and conversion, a celebration of spiritual marriage that should comfort discontented wives: “aprés l’example et miroir de la Passion du doulx Aignelet occys, de doivent remirer pour desenfler ou miroir de Cecilie, suiant le Cruxefis, qui dit a ses amis, ‘Aprenéz de moy qui suis humbles de cuer et debonnaire, et ce faisant vous trouveréz repos en vos ames.’”40 Not only is marriage assimilated to Christ’s suªering, but that suªering, mirrored in Cecilia’s creative martyrdom, oªers an almost maternal repose for the soul. The wide-open arms of the crucified Christ embrace and comfort unhappy wives, allowing them, in turn, to fulfill their roles as nurturers. Cecilia is not the semimilitant preaching woman of Chaucer’s tale but a glorious married virgin and martyr. Philippe de Mézières’s handling of the story of Griselda seems as deliberately conventional and pacific as his use of the St. Cecilia legend. The story, which is anticipated throughout the Livre de la vertu, is finally told in the fourth book, which describes the delights of marriage between God and the rational soul. Where Chaucer’s Clerk waits until the end of his performance to suggest ways of reading (and not reading) the tale, Philippe de Mézières introduces the story by saying that it is “un example solempnel et plaisant a Dieu, non tant seulement aus dames mariees d’amer parfaictement leurs maris, mais a toute ame raisonnable [et] devote d’amer entierement Jhesu Crist son Espous immortel.” After stressing the story’s importance both to married women and to the devout soul espoused to Christ, he goes on to say that the constancy, loyalty, love, and obedience that the marquise had for the sacrament of marriage, which was like that of the saints and martyrs, surpasses the story of any virtuous married woman that he has told.41 He does admit that it would be di‹cult, if not impossible, for any actual woman to emulate Griselda, but his use of her example in remarks throughout the Livre nonetheless suggests that he sees the story as a spiritual remedy for married women as well as for devout souls. Moreover, Philippe’s French retelling of Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boc40. Ibid., 274. On Cecilia, who is the subject of Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale, see S. L. Reames, “A Recent Discovery Concerning the Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale,’” Modern Philology 87 (1990): 337–61, and Staley in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 198–21 1. 41. Williamson, ed., Le livre de la vertu, 356.


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caccio’s tale demonstrates his own interest in marriage as a sacrament that results in social unity.42 Rather than describe Walter’s subjects as simply “the people,” as the other contemporary versions of the tale do, Philippe categorizes them as “ses barons et son peuple,” a division that becomes even more elaborate when he refers to “les barons, chevaliers et subgés du marquis.”43 Philippe’s introductory portrait of Walter is also subtly diªerent from that in other versions, where Walter, from the beginning, is pleasant but mysterious. In Le livre de la vertu, Walter does not simply respond to his subjects’ request that he marry but also empathizes with their anxiety after he has heard them speak: “Finees les paroles, le marquis, meu de pitié et d’amour de [ses] subgiés, respondi doulcement et dit. . . .”44 Near the end of the tale, when Griselda prepares to leave her palace for the new bride to enter, she asks to be able to keep her smock on so she will not expose the womb that bore Walter his supposedly dead children. Chaucer only says that Walter allows her her smock and then “wente his wey, for routhe and for pitee” (CT IV.893). Both Petrarch and the anonymous French translator say that Walter is filled with pity and has to turn his face away to hide his wet eyes, speaking to her with di‹culty. Griselda then strips to her shift and walks back to her father. Philippe de Mézières goes even further in marking Walter’s tears of grief and approbation of her loyalty: “Le marquis lors ne se pooit plus tenir de plourer de la pitié qu’il avoit de sa tres loyale espouse, tourna sa face, et, larmoyant, li fist baillier une seule chemise, et se parti a grant dolour.” Griselda strips not before the people but before the court, “tous des chevaliers et dames,” taking oª her rich clothes and ornaments, and she returns to her father accompanied by all the “barons, chevaliers, et dames,” who weep, regretting her great virtue, loyalty, and marvelous bounty.45 When Walter finally ceases testing his wife, he praises her in language that serves as both a spiritual and a social encomium: “Ta vraye foy et ta loyaulté, l’amour de toy envers moy et ta constance, l’obedience et vraye humilité de toy bien esprouvees me sont trop bien congneues; et croy qu’il n’a homme soubz le ciel qui 42. For the texts, see Severs, “The Clerk’s Tale,” and Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale,” Yale Studies in English 96 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942). See also E. Golenistcheª-Koutouzoª, L’histoire de Griseldis en France au xive et au xve siècles (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1933), and Golenistcheª-Koutouzoª, Étude sur “Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et reconfort des dames mariées” de Philippe de Mézières (Belgrade: Svetlost, 1937). Philippe also refers to the tale in his Letter to King Richard II. 43. Williamson, ed., Le livre de la vertu, 359, 360. 44. Ibid., 360. 45. Ibid., 372.


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par tant experimens l’amour de mariage ait tant esprouvé et congneu comme j’ay fait en toy.”46 If Griselda is a good “wife,” as Walter here a‹rms —faithful, loyal, loving, constant, obedient, and humble—she is also a good subject and a good soul. Philippe uses the chapter headings, as he does throughout Le livre de la vertu, as a running gloss, at once epitomizing the succeeding chapter and giving his reader a perspective upon it. Where Chaucer employs the voice of his narrator, the Clerk, as a means of pointing up the tale’s di‹culties, the chapter headings in Le livre de la vertu create a deliberately seamless narrative texture that prevents us from reacting to Walter’s apparent cruelty in the way the Clerk encourages us to do. Though Philippe does describe Walter as cruel to his wife and rigorous in his testing of her, by constantly praising Griselda’s constancy and loyalty he focuses our attention upon the quality of her virtue. He ends the book by pointing out and lamenting the tragedies that make up the warp and woof of human history, including biblical history, saying that we must turn to God for comfort and seek to cleanse ourselves so we may come to the great wedding feast properly dressed. He then goes on to a‹rm God’s love for us despite tribulation and to recount two miracles of the Virgin, and he ends with prayers to the Virgin. Mary, mother and bride, brings together all earthly relationships in one triumphantly humble response to supposedly unbearable pain. In terms of the fourth book, and indeed of the entire Livre de la vertu, the story of Griselda is meant to oªer us not di‹cult questions about the nature of authority (which Chaucer seems to build into the Clerk’s performance) but the comfortable reassurance of a king and husband who weeps even as he tests. Her story can comfort wives by locating suªering within a metaphysical framework—and indeed all souls by reminding us that we are the wives and subjects of heaven’s king. Finally, in Mary’s sorrow, we find our human identity mirrored and transformed just as we, through sacramental observance, are similarly transformed. Philippe finishes by saying that our true comfort is the sacrament of the altar, and he repeats prayers to be spoken at the elevation of the Pain de Vie. Walter, his “barons, chevaliers, et dames,” and his wife are all gathered into the body of Christ. It is Philippe de Mézières’s version of the story of Griselda that the narrator of Le menagier de Paris inserts into the sixth article of the first distinction. For the author, the story is important enough to warrant mentioning it in the pro46. Ibid., 376. Philippe’s language here is closer to the anonymous French translation than to Petrarch’s Latin. See Severs, “The Clerk’s Tale,” 328–29.


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logue, where he gives the plan of the work: “Le .vi . article que vous soiez a lui humble et obesseissant a l’exemple de Grisilidis.”47 Later, after recounting the story of Griselda, he underlines its usefulness, saying that it was translated to show the need for wifely obedience, an obedience that can then be compared to the soul’s obedient response to the adversities that God may send. The narrator’s use of the tale is poised somewhere between Philippe’s sacramental handling of Griselda’s suªering and Chaucer’s bold social and political construction. In the context of the Menagier, the tale of Griselda is included as an exemplary tale of obedience, the tale that sets the standard for the article’s other stories of wifely disobedience. But the narrator also specifies that it does not apply to their marriage: he is no marquis, she is no shepherdess. Neither is he unreasonable. Such disclaimers beg the real question here (and raise others relating to social inequity and the nature of authority). What if he were a marquis and she a shepherdess? Does class provoke irrational attitudes and demand extraordinary acts of obeissance? The narrator does suggest, though, that a wife’s obedience is a necessary component of marital harmony. Translated into the social sphere, the example focuses attention not upon a husband’s cruelty but upon a wife’s response to the apparently unreasonable. Moreover, the narrator’s use of the story seems even more problematic because he does not include the sacramental pointing that is fundamental to Philippe de Mézières’s narrative. He does not assimilate Griselda’s suªering to Christ’s, nor does he attempt to broaden our sacramental understanding of suªering itself. By focusing upon the household, he (intentionally or not) leaves us with the inequities, the potential fissures of the household, whether that household is the king’s or the merchant’s. Those problems can be solved, he seems to say, by the wife’s willingness to submit her will to her husband. In other words, the story of Griselda may be an impossible one, but, essentially, it is a true one. By locating his treatise so thoroughly within the exigencies of the world—and of the late-fourteenth-century Parisian world, at that—the author of the Menagier eschews Philippe’s sacramental ordering in favor of a version of reality whose order is grounded in a profound awareness of hierarchy and in a subject’s ability to respond with virtuous alacrity to the demands of the moment. Like Philippe, the anonymous author of the Eschez amoureux (c. 1370–80) employs not simply marriage but also instruction in marriage as a trope for a particular type of order. This poem, which Alastair Minnis has tellingly described 47. Brereton and Ferrier, eds., Le menagier de Paris, 3.


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as an attempt to “prune” Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose as part of the statesponsored vernacular hermeneutics of Charles V, follows a lover’s instruction in love with Pallas Athena’s advice to that lover to search out the honest life—that is, the married life.48 (The text of this poem exists only in fragments and memories of a Dresden manuscript destroyed in World War II. The original poem contained in that manuscript was described by Stanley J. Galpin in 1920; the fragment that is now all we have of the poem has been edited by Christine Kraft. The early-fifteenth-century commentary on the poem—whose author, Évart de Conty, physician to Charles V, was identified by Françoise Guichard-Tesson and Bruno Roy—has been translated by Joan Morton Jones.49) Even in its fragmentary state, the Eschez amoureux is as heavily symbolic, as encyclopedic and freighted with meanings, as anything Philippe de Mézières ever wrote. The poem locates us in the rose garden of love whose inhabitants are familiar from the Roman de la rose, and it describes a chess game, each of whose pieces is both exquisite and symbolic. The lover receives instruction from the god of Love that, again, is drawn from the Roman. Pallas then enters to warn the lover about the entire amorous enterprise and advises him to avoid such love and seek out true happiness. Though Évart de Conty sought to explain the allegory of the first part of the poem (the love lesson), when he came to the end, he wrote, “Finalement, la déesse Pallas, c’est-à-dire la sagesse ou la prudence ou encore la raison, vint lui faire un long discours afin de la blâmer et de lui reprocher sa folie.” Wisdom’s reproach for his folly is instruction: she shows him that pleasure is contrary to reason and nature, a discourse that needs no gloss.50 Pallas’s forthright speech, which was partially transcribed and completely summarized by Galpin, seems to issue from the same source that inspires treatises about wifely duties and household economies. More important, it is ad48. Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 6. 49. Stanley L. Galpin, “Les eschez amoureux: A Complete Synopsis, with Unpublished Extracts,” Romanic Review 1 1 (1920): 283–307; Jones, Royal Policy; Christine Kraft, ed., Die Liebesgarten— Allegorie der “Échecs amoureux”: Kritische Ausgabe und Kommentar (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1977); Anne-Marie Legaré, F. Guichard-Tesson, and Bruno Roy, Le livre des échecs amoureux (Paris: Chêne, 1991); Minnis, Magister Amoris, 260–69. 50. Legaré, Guichard-Tesson, and Roy, Le livre des échecs amoureux, 77. In Le miroir de marriage, Deschamps treats marriage as a figure for disorder. Deschamps, like Philippe de Mézières, served both Charles V and Charles VI. He probably wrote the Miroir during the mid-1380s. For suggestions about the relationship between France’s internal and external stresses and Deschamps’s use of the trope of marriage, see Michelle Stoneburner, “Le miroir de mariage: Misunderstood Misogyny,” in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier Poet: His Work and His World, ed. Deborah M. SinnreichLevi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 145–62.


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vice that identifies the well-run mind with the French nation. The lover has made the mistake of choosing the voluptuous life. In response, Pallas first suggests that he consider the contemplative life, a way best exemplified in the schools of Paris. She describes Paris as honorable, excellent, noted for its authority throughout Europe, and filled with wonders and people (above all, schools and scholars). She praises the king of France, his subjects, the children of France, the craftsmen and artists of France, and the ways in which the city and the university support Christian truth. If he has no aptitude for the contemplative life, then Pallas recommends the active. Pallas’s description of the active life is Aristotelian, in the sense that she describes the activities and duties of a political unit, which she divides into four parts: princes, counselors, judges, and people. Each division has its duties —wisdom, courtesy, integrity, justice, and, in the case of the people, obedience, even to a tyrant. Pallas then discusses knights, whose chivalry serves the tranquility of the whole, and priests, whose exemplary lives provide patterns of behavior. Finally, at the request of the lover, Pallas discusses marriage. Her discussion, or the summary of it that we now have, reads like a distillation of those sections of the Economics dealing with marriage that also inform Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry and Le menagier de Paris. Marriage is described as a natural good, as necessarily rational, and as potentially productive. Pallas discusses women’s dress; the duties of nurses; the care of babies; the father’s education of his children, including religious instruction, because he has knowledge; childhood deportment; exercise; household architecture and placement; and, finally, the various ways of earning a living that can lead to honor and comfort. The manuscript ends with Pallas’s discussion of money and exchange, which she describes as a less honorable vocation but nonetheless one that does teach something about bad and good gold. Évart de Conty rightly deduced the author’s Aristotelian emphasis, for in his prologue to his commentary on the poem, he says that there are various analogies to be drawn from chess. First, he compares the game to human polity and to the civic community, quoting Aristotle’s Politics on the causes or ends of towns and cities. They are six: towns allow us to live more joyously, to live in a more comfortable alliance, to live more securely, to do business more conveniently, to arrange marriages more profitably, and to live more virtuously. He then goes on to discuss the importance of the various pieces of the game—king, queen, bishops, knights, rooks, and pawns. The vast commentary that follows is directed toward understanding the ways in which order can be understood from what frequently appears as disorder, including the dis-


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order of human desire.51 Both the author of the poem and Évart de Conty employ the Aristotelian concepts Nicole Oresme translated into French to provide an ordering system that can be identified with France, or with the France of Charles V. A hierarchically conceived marriage and the productive household issuing from it were the signifiers of this order, as they were in Charles’s own program of royal iconography (see Chapter 2). A similar interest in productive order is apparent in Charles’s patronage of works dealing with estate management, works that Menut has classified as relating to Aristotle’s Economics. The French translation of Pietro Crescenzi’s Ruralium commodorum, which the Bolognese lawyer wrote after he retired from the law in the early fourteenth century, telling how to manage an estate in each month of the year, was commissioned by Charles V. It was widely disseminated in manuscript before it was printed in 1486.52 The preface identifies the treatise as translated at the request of Charles V, going on to praise him for his knowledge and generosity. The treatise itself is practical. Directed at the owner of a large estate, it contains chapters on the house and the placement of fountains, court, and parks, on the nature of plants, on fields, on labor, and on trees, herbs, and beasts. The introduction to the Ruralium commodorum (9v–10v), however, clarifies Charles’s interest in making such a work available in the vernacular. From its opening reference to prudence, the introduction constitutes a meditation on agricultural order that is aligned with peace and profitability. It does not decry the state of contemporary agriculture or of local discord but instead oªers itself as a guide to a scientific knowledge that is grounded in a philosophy of order. The translation may well signal Charles’s keen sense of the eªect of the English armies on the French countryside. By attempting to reclaim the order of ancient times, the Ruralium commodorum looks forward to a productive order in the present that the translator locates in Charles himself and the books he made available for his nobility. Charles also commissioned Jean de Brie’s Le bon berger, ou Le vray régime et gouvernement des bergers et bergères (1379).53 Le bon berger epitomizes the broader 51. See Jones, Royal Policy. 52. Calkins, “Piero de Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden,” and Robert Calkins, Programs of Medieval Illumination, The Franklin D. Murphy Lectures 5 (Lawrence, Kans.: Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, 1984); Menut, ed. and trans., Le livre de Yconomique, 786. I have used an early-fifteenth-century manuscript (BN ms Français 12330). 53. This work (Jean de Brie, Le bon berger, ou Le vray régime et gouvernement des bergers et bergères, reprinted with an introduction by Paul Lacroix [Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1879]) has been reprinted from an edition printed in Paris in 1541. According to Lacroix, the manuscript itself is lost. It may have


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aims of Charles V’s cultural program. As Paul Lacroix points out in his introduction, Charles’s commissioning of this book complements his desire to translate scientific knowledge into French. Lacroix cites Christine de Pisan’s account in Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (book 3, chapter 12) of the king’s similar desire to have all nineteen books of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum translated into French. Christine de Pisan praises Charles for his love of wisdom, shown by his accumulation of a large and diverse library intended to expand the minds of those rendering judgment for the “profit of the people.” Christine goes on to praise Charles’s decision to have De proprietatibus rerum, in particular, translated because it contains all knowledge of creation, allowing its reader to invest himself in the clothing of wisdom, as Aristotle advised. The man who, according to Christine, was so faithful and obedient a subject as to undertake this vast project of translation was Jean Corbichon, Charles’s chaplain, who also translated Pietro Crescenzi’s book of agronomy.54 While Lacroix rightly fits Le bon berger into this Aristotelian tradition of scientific knowledge, it is even more important to recognize the way in which the didacticism of the georgic mode was perceived as speaking to the claims of imperium. Le bon berger is less about sheep than about the good shepherd, behind whom stands, as the opening statement maintains, “souverain pasteur le créateur de toute choses,” who suªered death for our redemption. The book is ascribed to the commandment of the prince most excellent in nobility, in might, in love of wisdom, in prudence and knowledge, Charles V, king of France, “our” lord, reigning in great glory and felicity. The book is divided into chapters whose

passed into England with the more than eight hundred books from the Louvre library taken by John, duke of Bedford, who was regent of France from 1422 until his death in 1435. (On these books, see Jenny Stratford, “The Manuscripts of John, Duke of Bedford: Library and Chapel,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams [Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1987], 329–50.) The work was printed four times in the sixteenth century. I have also consulted a reproduction of Le bon berger from the edition of 1539, which was added to Le grand calendrier & compost des bergers (Paris: Nicolas Bonfons, 1589), which, in turn, is a copy of the edition of 1516 that contains Jean de Brie. The text of Le bon berger (which begins with chap. 2 and continues to the end) begins on fol. vib. Jean de Brie was in the service of Jean de Hetomesnil, who was a canon of St. Chapelle and counselor to the king. See Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage, eds., Dictionnaire des lettres françaises (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 755. For the most recent work on the identity of Jean de Brie, see Gustaf Holmér, “Jean de Brie et son traité de l’art de bergerie,” Studia Neophilologica 39 (1967): 128–49. Holmér provides contemporary references for Jean de Brie, but he also suggests that Jean had help in composing it. 54. Jean de Brie, Le bon berger, introduction, xiii–xiv; hereafter cited in text as BB, with references to page numbers in the 1879 edition, intro. Lacroix. See Solente, ed., Le livre des fais, vol. 2, chap. 12, and Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, 1:91–92.


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initial emphasis is philosophical rather than veterinary, signaling a reader who is not a shepherd but a lord, in keeping with Charles’s project of building a library as a resource for his inner circle. In its construction of the good shepherd, its perspective upon rural life, and its abiding emphasis upon utilitas, Le bon berger depicts a society whose harmonious hierarchy reflects that of the king’s “household.” From the beginning, Jean de Brie describes the good shepherd as a steward whose duties are not directed toward himself but toward the good of his lord. The first chapter, which sketches in his life as a shepherd, recounts his early recognition that a shepherd’s job is to attend to the “government and administration” of the sheep’s “nurture” (BB 19). He learned the “bonne doctrine” (20) early by taking care of animals. Moreover, Jean de Brie is described not as a “mercenary” but as a steward who cared for the “profit” of his master (20). There are numerous references to the good shepherds of the Gospels, the pictures Jesus provides of the shepherd who enters by the door of the sheepfold, who gives himself for his sheep. In recounting his rise to greater responsibilities over the flocks of greater lords, Jean de Brie is described as having achieved this without “simony” (22). Instead, he augmented his estate through his knowledge and attention. His success is attributed not to a crude desire for higher estate but his humble acceptance of his station and duties, his obedience to his superiors, and his acquisition of a knowledge of the natural world—the winds, birds, and seasons, subjects that were also covered by scientific writers like Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Albertus Magnus, who likewise inhabited the library of Charles V. Jean de Brie employs language Christine de Pisan also uses to describe Charles V. In Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, she describes him as a protector and defender of his people and of the public interest, emphasizing his love for his subjects, his justice, clemency, and his nurture of his children.55 Moreover, in chapters 9 and 10 of The Book of the Body Politic, Christine specifies that the good prince is like a good shepherd, whose love for the public good exceeds his own. She goes on to describe the duties of the good shepherd who guards, feeds, and maintains the health and cleanliness of his sheep. In return, he will be repaid by their fleece, “shorn in good time and in season.”56 Her description 55. See, for example, Solente, ed., Le livre des fais, 1:xxi, 64; 2:25. 56. Kate Langdon Forhan, ed. and trans., The Book of the Body Politic, by Christine de Pizan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15–18. For a Middle English translation, see Diane Bornstein, ed., The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s “Livre du corps de policie,” Middle English Texts 7 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977).


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of the shepherd’s duties and rewards epitomizes the points made in Le bon berger, suggesting that Charles’s interest in commissioning such a treatise may have been more than simply practical. By way of emphasizing the pleasure he takes in occupying his position as steward to the great, Jean de Brie locates his o‹ce within biblical history and notes the shepherd’s usefulness to the body politic. He recalls the shepherds of the past—Abel, the first shepherd; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the sons of Jacob; Moses; David (BB 38–42). He observes that shepherds carry crooks, as bishops do (75). Although many people live in search of worldly glory or power or great learning, the shepherd achieves honor through his humble occupation (15–17). Honor notwithstanding, “l’art de bergerie” (43; emphasis added) is necessary to the common good of civilization. Quoting Psalm 8, Jean de Brie says that God has put all things under the feet of man—birds, oxen, sheep, and all the beasts of the field—allowing him to use the created world for his good. In return, we should return thanks to God for the “bénéfices,” a term denoting both worldly profits and benefits and ecclesiastical livings (in other words, the fruits of good stewardship). He goes on to enumerate the benefits of the sheep. First, wool provides cloth for princes, kings, and great lords as well as other persons needing clothing (32). The skin provides parchment for books and leather that can be used in many diªerent ways (33). The gut can be treated and used in many musical instruments, which he names (35). Though the author does not explicitly say it, by feeding, clothing, educating, and amusing us, the sheep, the shepherd’s cure, makes society possible. The shepherd’s calling is useful and necessary to the common good, and in addition, Jean de Brie presents the shepherd as living in harmony with the natural world. The book includes a “Labors of the Months,” which specifies the shepherd’s duties in accordance with the time of the year. It also includes a section on sheep diseases and their cure. Like Le menagier de Paris, Le bon berger outlines the life of the obedient subject, whose happiness and harmonious life is the result of humility, obedience, and dutifulness toward the health and welfare of those he (or she) serves. The degree to which shepherds or wives are able to achieve order inevitably contributes to the good and to the profit of the social body. What is useful is thus both profitable and hierarchically located within a world that emanates from the king himself. I am here extrapolating from what I have loosely referred to as the medieval “georgic,” a mode of writing that encompassed the laws of the natural and domestic worlds as they could be made to yield social benefits. As part of the cultural world of Charles V, it is a literature of containment, one in-


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tended to provide systems of interlocking order within the field, the home, and the very hearts of wives and servants. The georgics of Charles V illustrate not the imposition of order but the internalization of principles that create and maintain order. Whether in keeping bedding free from vermin or sheep free from disease, the good steward comes in by the door and maintains the life of the enclosing fold in accordance with a set of higher principles of order. In its emphasis upon regulation, this literature has much in common with the spiritual “georgic” of St. Benedict, the Rule. Benedict’s Rule is founded in the “Roman” idea that common profit should take precedence over individual.57 He consequently seeks to create a rule that can be internalized by each member of the order. He addresses the reader as “son,” recommending that his spiritual son welcome the “labor of obedience” in order to help create the Lord’s community. He describes the “instrumenta bonorum operum” (Rule 180) that the monk will need to build this community as love of God, humility, obedience, self-command, and patience. He divides the day and the year into cycles of spiritual labor (the “opus dei”). He insists upon daily manual labor, saying that idleness (“otiositas”) is inimical to the soul (248). Labor (as opposed to idleness), the common good (as opposed to individual satisfaction or sorrow), order taken into the soul and then imposed on the cycles of nature: these are the themes of the literature of the household, whether that household is a Roman villa, a Christian monastery, a nobleman’s estate, or a Parisian townhouse and whether the projected audience for that literature is a landowner, husband, daughter, wife, or monk. And that same georgic impulse can be found in much of the library that Charles assembled for the benefit of his counselors. Later, after Charles’s death—and in a France far more chaotic than that ruled by him—Christine de Pisan would also draw upon the language of beneficent and communally oriented labor to describe her increasing mastery of the “tools” she learns to use in order to build the City of Ladies. If Charles V, like Augustus, perceived the outline of imperium in the georgic, he (perhaps again like Augustus) saw only the orderly toil, the expanding glory of city and university and court, the cloth for the robes of kings and princes, the household linen laid away, the marriages made to secure the future. He may have ignored what Virgil did not in his Georgics: that an order may be a good but has a cost nonetheless. In his study of the Georgics, Michael C. J. Putnam has cap57. See Timothy Frye, ed. and trans., The Rule of St. Benedict (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1981). All subsequent citations of the Rule refer to this edition.


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tured the dreadful poise that Virgil builds into a work that describes human intervention into nature—that is, the “concomitant loss or suªering” that inevitably accompanies and possibly balances productivity.58 From the first sentence, Virgil links human labor to nature and to the natural cycle. Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites conveniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis, hinc canere incipiam. (What makes the crops joyous, beneath what star, Maecenas, it is well to turn the soil, and wed vines to elms, what tending the kine need, what care the herd in breeding, what skill the thrifty bees —hence shall I begin my song.)59 The relationship here suggested between natural fecundity and human toil continues throughout the poem. Cereals, wine, meat, and honey are thus the products not simply of nature but also of the ability to shape nature, to know when to plant, when and how to conjoin vines and elms, how to help cattle breed, to tend and harvest honey from the “thrifty” bees. Similarly, Virgil employs verbs throughout that underline the inherent violence of these eªorts. Plowing, pruning, culling, and branding all describe acts of violence upon the natural world whose justification is productivity (and hence profit). Early in the poem, Virgil makes it clear that he sings of no golden age. He notes the tributes of saªron, ivory, frankincense, iron, beaver oil, and mares sent to Rome by conquered nations, locating the world from which he writes as the heir to Deucalion’s stony race (“durum genus,” 1.56–63). Moreover, he balances his early references to fauns, Neptune, Pan, Minerva, and Sylvanus with an address to Caesar that reminds Augustus of his inevitable death, the debt he, too, pays to nature. Though 58. Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 265. My reading of the Georgics is darker than his, but I am deeply indebted to Putnam’s probing and humane reading of the poem. See also W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), chap. 4. Johnson describes Virgil as “a poet who shows us what the darkness means” (154). 59. Georgics in H. Rushton Fairclough, ed. and trans., Virgil, Loeb Classical Library 63, 64 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), bk. 1, lines 1–5. All subsequent citations of the Georgics refer to this edition.


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Virgil says it is not clear into which company of the gods Caesar shall be translated (1.24ª ), he nonetheless reminds Caesar that his human potency is circumscribed by the very force the agricultural arts seek to control. Virgil weaves reminders of death and disease throughout the four books of the Georgics by oªering remedies for the maladies that accompany farming. To become sentimental about the Georgics is not simply to miss Virgil’s point but to miss, too, the superb control of the poem, its unflinching look at what must be sacrificed in order to create Roman civilization (a theme he would go on to enlarge in the Aeneid). Perhaps the most famous of the four books of the Georgics is the fourth, which discusses bees —ancient figures for an industry founded upon the standard of the common good. Virgil begins the book by recounting the mundane details of siting and building hives, and he describes the physical needs of a hive, which, like any city, demands a source of running water and protection from predators and the weather.60 Like that of the Romans, bee society is militaristic: the bees go into battle behind their “king” and enjoy the sounds and challenges of battle.61 Bee society, however, needs a beekeeper. Though thrifty and organized, bees can be fickle, tempted to abandon their hives and engage in idle play. In order to check these wayward instincts, the beekeeper is told to tear the wings from the kings so the bees will remain in place and then to provide their yard with fragrant flowers and herbs, which should keep them busily at home (4.103–15). Virgil then describes the traits that nature has given bees (4.149ª ), and he praises them for their common labor, their lack of sexual passion, their hierarchical society, and their observance toward their king, all of which are features of the ideal household as presented in the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. After telling the beekeeper how to break into the hive and harvest honey while leaving the bees enough for winter, Virgil admits that bees, like men, are subject to disease and death. Sometimes entire hives can be destroyed. The final part of this fourth book is focused less on apiary science than on the mysteries of regeneration as passed down through Aristaeus, a son of Apollo and Cyrene, whom Virgil addresses in the Georgics as the guardian of the groves (“cultor nemorum,” 1.16). Before Virgil tells the story of Aristaeus, he describes the bugonia, the generating of bees from the putrefying carcass of a steer. Where 60. His account of the bees has a long history in Western literature. See, for example, Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 135. 61. See Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 262.


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Varro in De re rustica merely notes that bees can be generated from the rotting carcass of a bullock,62 Virgil’s description of this process has more than a scientific focus. In comparison to the chatty and profit-oriented account of beekeeping that the republican Varro directs to the small landowner, Virgil’s is shaped by the self-conscious imperialism out of which he wrote. Virgil’s account of the bugonia removes any illusion we might have had that he writes in this fourth book only about bees. The process begins by searching out a confined location that is made even more so by the building of a small, close house, roofed with tiles, that contains four windows (oriented toward the four winds) to aªord slanting light. (Putnam has compared the structure to a sepulcher or a prison.63) Next, as Virgil says, seek out a young bull, one whose horns are just beginning to curve. Then, huic geminae nares et spiritus oris multa reluctanti obstruitur, plagisque perempto tunsa per integram solvuntur viscera pellem. (4.300–302) (Spite of all his struggles, both his nostrils are stopped up, and the breath of his mouth; then he is beaten to death, and his flesh is pounded to a pulp through the unbroken hide.) Heaped with herbs and left through the spring, the carcass, warmed and moistened by the spring winds, will generate bees. Aside from what one editor has referred to as the “curiosity” of this process, what Virgil has described is dreadful not because a bull is sacrificed—something that happens all the time in ancient literature—but because the bull is first smothered and silenced before it is beaten to death. In fact, what is curious about the description is, as R. A. B. Mynors points out, that Virgil has the orifices stopped up before death, not after.64 From the silencing and torture of the bull come bees, who swarm together in the air like a shower, or like arrows pulsing from the string (4.310–14). At this point,

62. Varro, De re rustica, 3.16.4. See On Agriculture/Marcus Porcius Cato; On Agriculture/Marcus Terentius Varro, ed. and trans. William Davis Hooper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). 63. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 273. 64. R. A. B. Mynors, ed., Virgil: Georgics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 298. See also Richard F. Thomas, ed., Virgil: Georgics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); see lines 295–314.


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we do not need to be reminded that bees are hierarchically organized around the king, that they create societies with a single aim, that they rejoice in war. The story of Aristaeus with which Virgil ends this fourth book likewise mixes peace with violence, honey with death. He ends by saying, Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum fulminat Euphraten bello victorque volentis per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo. (4.559–62) (Thus I sang of the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates and gave a victor’s laws unto willing nations, and essayed the path to Heaven.) “Care” is not an exact translation of cultus, however: the one denotes charge, guardianship, solicitude, and the other, cultivation, intervention, civilization itself. Virgil has, indeed, sung of cultivation, of the art of creating bees from silenced creatures who may struggle but, in the end, accept the victor’s laws. Moreover, he here stakes a claim for the labor of the writer. The otium of the Eclogues singer is transformed into the toil of the Georgics poet, whose song of empire comments upon and gives shape to pastoral labor and military might.65 Here, Virgil achieves a deliberately unresolved “resolution” to a question that would bedevil William Langland in his eªorts to define writing as worthy labor throughout Piers Plowman.66 I do not mean to suggest that my heavily nuanced reading of Virgil’s bugonia was common currency in the Middle Ages. Servius’s important commentary certainly foregrounds the bees’ political system, noting that it is made up of a king, a city, and a people, pointing out that Virgil means great things by way of small.67 In fact, treatments of bees from Pliny’s Natural History to Thomas of 65. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 250, points out that the poem ends with “a stand-oª between two distinctive sovereigns, the emperor and the poet.” 66. As Anthony Low notes in The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 18, at the exact center of the Georgics (2.541–42) is a description of a plowman as a writer. 67. See Virgil: Opera (Venice, 1544; repr., New York: Garland, 1976), vol. 1, fol. 124r. For the bugonia, which he only discusses technically and grammatically, see fol. 135r. In the Etymologiae, bk. 12, chap. 8, Isidore of Seville passes on Servius’s commentary on Virgil’s bee-lore, including a truncated version of the bugonia, as science. Isidore says that in order to have bees born from the cadaver of


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Cantimpré’s Bonum universale de apibus, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, and the late-fourteenth-century Mum and the Sothsegger emphasize their social structure, their labor, and their absolute devotion to their king. Thomas of Cantimpré compares bee society to monastic society, drawing analogies between the king of the bees and the prelate, the worker bees and those under the prelate’s governance. The Bonum universale de apibus, which elaborates on book 9 of his De natura rerum, was extremely popular and, translated as Bien universel des mouches à miel, was in the library of Charles V.68 Another of the great encyclopedists of the thirteenth century, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, included a long entry on bees in book 18 of the De proprietatibus rerum. Bartholomaeus drew not only upon the information to be found in Pliny’s Natural History but also upon Aristotelian science, the De animalibus (translated into Latin before 1220), Avicenna, and others.69 He praises bees for their clean housekeeping, their observance of discipline, their equity, and their devotion to their king. Bartholomaeus’s description of the king of the bees is presented as natural history but could serve as a précis for a “mirror of princes.” Hence the bees’ king is armed not with a sting but with “lordschipe and mageste.” Or, if he has a sting, nature prevents him from using it: “And so it is so5 5at 5e emperour vse5 not his stynge.” He is loved by his people; when they are in need, he is “within” (the hive) as their “gouernour.” When the king is dead, all the bees “been wo for sorew and do5 for hem as it were seruice for 5e dede.”70 The georgic literature that Charles commissioned and collected does not simply celebrate labor but also attaches it to a particular construction of society that emanates hierarchically from a just and wise prince. What is more, by sponsoring an ambitious program of vernacular translation, Charles suggested that the French georgic was a manifestation of France itself—or of the France that he constructed as a mirror of a similarly carefully constructed Valois identity. To this end, “France” is less a concept than “Charles” is, the figure of the just prince a steer, the flesh of a struck steer must be beaten and left to putrefy until bees issue from the cadaver (cols. 469–70). He does not cite Virgil, but, in book 17, which concerns rustic things, he names Virgil as one of the prime authors of rustic matters (col. 597) and cites him in several places. 68. See Arjo Vanderjagt, “Thomas of Cantimpré,” in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Strayer, vol. 12. The volume is now Bruxelles, Bibl. Royale de Belgique ms 9507. See François Avril, La librairie de Charles V (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1968), 1 1 1. 69. M. C. Seymour, ed., Bartholomaeus Anglicus and His Encyclopedia (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1992), 208–9. For the text, see M. C. Seymour, ed., On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:1 141–48. 70. For these citations, see Seymour, ed., On the Properties of Things, 2:1 143–45. This translation was commissioned by Sir Thomas Berkeley, a Lancastrian loyalist.


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whose sagesse is reflected in the culture of his reign. Malcolm Vale has recently argued that medieval courts were not places where princes deployed propaganda; rather, they were polycentric and eclectic. Though I might not use the term “propaganda” to describe the literature of Charles V’s court, his understanding of the ways in which literary texts could serve as models for identity certainly seems well developed. Vale goes on, however, to say that he sees the court as promoting a “sacralization of the secular,” a term that aptly describes the georgic belonging to the reign of Charles V.71 With its pronounced emphasis upon vocation and upon creating and maintaining orderly rules for everyday life, this literature encourages us to see duty as a type of stewardship. The texts addressed to women read as though there is little diªerence between married life and the monastic housekeeping of the nun described in spiritual guides. (For example, a Middle English translation of Gerard of Lièges’s De doctrina cordis owned by Franciscan nuns in London advises them to clean the houses of their hearts and to use soft, sweet speech as befits “Cristis wife.” It goes on to oªer a long allegory of wifely counsel.72) By depicting rules as internalized rather than imposed, works like Le bon berger oªer concomitant pictures of order that reflect the benevolent justice of the wise prince, just as books of wifely counsel are voiced by benevolent fathers and husbands whose wisdom and experience seek to guide the reader as though she were entering a novitiate. Emile Mâle’s recognition that the labors of the months that appear on medieval cathedrals might be described as georgic poems suggests ways in which images of agricultural labor were subsumed into the greater image of spiritual and social order provided by those cathedrals.73 Both Jonathan J. G. Alexander and Michael Camille have argued that the treatments of labor in medieval manuscripts should not be seen as reflecting a reality but as attempts to produce one.74 In his study of the Très riches heures created for the duke of Berry, Charles V’s brother, Alexander stresses the negative images of peasants that proliferate throughout the depictions of the labors of the months. Male and female peas71. Vale, Princely Court, 295–300. 72. Sr. Mary Patrick Candon, “An Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Middle English Translation of Gerard of Lièges’ De doctrina cordis” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1963). The book was given to the Minoresses by their abbess in 1445 (Cambridge, Trinity College Library ms B.14.15, fols. 1–79). 73. Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 67. 74. Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 3 (1990): 436–52; Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On the Très riches heures, see also Calkins, Programs of Medieval Illumination, 151.


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ants appear half-dressed; in some cases, they expose their private parts or are entirely undressed. Their labor in the duke’s fields is dwarfed by his many diªerent castles, which appear in the upper portions of the pictures for March through October as well as December. Alexander reads these pages as a “program of ducal power,” locating them within the context of the peasant unrest of the late Middle Ages. Despite the actual decaying splendor of many of the castles depicted shimmering in the far distance of these pictures (and despite the insecure fortunes of the duke himself ), the pictorial labors of the months, like the georgics of Charles V, assimilate orderly toil to the princely image of carefully constructed proportions. Likewise, in his rich study of the Luttrell Psalter, Camille seeks to move us away from appreciating the pictures as reflections of daily life and toward an understanding of the ways in which the psalter meant to shape a chivalric identity that, in the end, never came to pass the way Sir Geoªrey Luttrell wished. The famous pictures of plowing and sowing, tending sheep, and feeding chickens that abound in the psalter’s margins should be understood as aspects of lordship, as impulses contained within and by the master of both the land and its people and the psalter he caused to be made. Camille argues that the image is perhaps more stable than the reality, because the image is designed to produce a reality that does not yet exist.75 If Charles V indeed saw the image as active and productive, he necessarily ignored or did not understand what Virgil had built into poems that were also commissioned. In making poems, poets can also make images of princes, assign them qualities, and address them about the results of land “reforms,” foreign conquests, lost liberties, and heroic gestures. Poems of order are not always what they appear. Or perhaps Charles understood this —and, in the varied literature of his reign, he might have sought to contain debate within and by the aura of his kingship, just as he commissioned a translation of the Vulgate into French. The frontispiece for Le songe du vergier (see Figure 1) expresses just this relationship. Charles sits enthroned at the apex of a composition in which each figure is relational to its king. This is not to say that there was not a literature of dissent in France, but rather to seek to understand the nature of what was a court-sponsored literature of orderly work, a literature in which work is a form of holy orders whose aim is the harmony and prosperity of a nation conceived 75. For a study of the Medici support for studies of natural history and horticulture that might be used to build harmonious worlds magnifying their own classical ideals and contemporary wealth and power, see Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Gretchen A. Hirschover, eds., The Flowering of Florence (Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2002).


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of as a household. In England, these same tropes were used to make another set of points. As I have noted above, the cultural, social, and political situation in England was very diªerent from that in France. That diªerence can be approached through texts that cannot be categorized as patronized by the crown. In Insular Romance, Susan Crane has argued that the traditions of England’s insular romances resist “the political principle that national or royal interests must come before baronial ambition.”76 Crane grounds England’s vernacular romance—including AngloNorman romance—in negotiations between crown and baronage, beginning with Henry II’s attempts to intrude upon baronial rights and continuing through the legal conflicts between crown and baronage in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. As she reiterates, the Magna Carta illustrates the nature of what was a conflict between royal and baronial rights. Subsequent movements of baronial reform were similarly marked by a desire to establish principles of government in keeping with the law of the land.77 By the time of Richard II, these stances were well established and even better developed, especially in regard to the role of Parliament and the increasing tendency of Commons to identify itself with the voice of the realm. Of course, in the late fourteenth century, England was not poised on the brink of anything approaching democracy, nor were Chaucer and his contemporaries Whigs awaiting their century. But we may ask what written evidence for something like an English “household” was available to thinkers like Chaucer. In what native terms did they conceive of order? Is it possible to think about English domestic order as revealing anything about England’s resistance to French ideas of order transmitted through figures like Philippe de Mézières? I would like to refine these broad questions by looking at the contents of two collections with which Chaucer might have been familiar. Both have a London provenance. The first I have discussed in Chapter 1: the volumes given to the Guildhall by Andrew Horn in 1328. The second is the Auchinleck Manuscript, which Thorlac TurvillePetre has called “a handbook of the nation.” 78 Both are miscellanies that seem designed to provide an image of England for those who looked into them.

76. Crane, Insular Romance, 221; Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 269–380. 77. See Crane, Insular Romance, chap. 1. 78. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290– 1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1 12. On the idea of community submerged in the Auchinleck Manuscript, see Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript.”


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When he died, Andrew Horn, chamberlain of the city of London, left a collection of books to London’s Guildhall. In his will, they are six: one great book of the History [de Gestis] of the English, in which are contained many things of utility; also one other book on the ancient . . . of England; with a book called Bretoun, and with a book called “Mirror of Justices”; also, another composed by Henry of Huntyngdone; as also, another book on the Statutes of England, with many liberties and other matters touching the City. And my will is, that they shall remain there for ever, in the custody of the Chamberlain for the time being; and that whosoever shall be Chamberlain hereafter, shall be answerable unto the City aforesaid by indenture for the same.79 Horn, who had been a champion of the city’s liberties during the reign of Edward II, here signals a sophisticated awareness of the uses of texts, an awareness as finely tuned as that of Charles V. But rather than create a library meant to reflect the figure of the good prince, Horn collected texts that promoted the idea of the city, a city that might receive a charter from a prince but whose liberties were nonetheless its own. Where Charles had acquired texts for the use of his counselors, Horn willed the texts that he had compiled (or had arranged to have compiled) to the Guildhall for the use of those, like himself, who sought to maintain the city’s integrity. The volumes themselves have been scattered and torn apart and no longer form a complete set in the Guildhall. Anyone reading them in the fourteenth century, though, would have received an education in the laws of England, in the charters of liberty, in some of the statutes, and in the ordinances of London. The books also contained a carefully edited version of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, the only record we possess of the regulations of the London Puy (see Chapter 1 for a discussion of these two texts), a listing of the provinces and counties of England, an early history of England, and a description of the city of London in its earlier days as well as the two

79. Quoted in Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. x; ellipsis occurs in the Riley edition. For information about Andrew Horn, see Catto, “Andrew Horn,” and Sutton, “Merchants, Music,” as well as Chap. 1 above. For a discussion of what is a complex manuscript situation, see Ker, “Liber Custumarum.” For the most recent and clear discussion of the Horn manuscripts, see Hanna, London Literature, who focuses on the ways in which this collection can be seen as a statement regarding the city’s ancient laws —and thus its sense of identity.


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most widely disseminated English treatises on estate management, the Seneschaucy and Walter.80 The English literature of estate management belongs to the thirteenth century, to the age of great estates and the needs of estate administrators. Robert Grosseteste was the author of the first known treatise on estate management. Next are the Seneschaucy, which was written around 1276, and Walter, by Walter of Henley (written a few years later and partly as a commentary upon the prior text), which appear together in legal compendia. Frequently, Walter appears alone in monastic estate books. The texts also show up in other contexts: they appear in one sixteenth-century compilation containing agricultural rules drawn from Virgil, Crescentius, Columella, Varro, and Palladius, and in an earlyfourteenth-century manuscript containing the poem by Walter of Bibbesworth on learning French, a poetic debate between the body and the soul in French, Walter, and Proverbs de bon enseignement by Nicole Bozon, which paraphrases certain verses in the Vulgate. Dorothy Oschinsky points out that this manuscript suggests ways in which these texts were seen as complementary; she also notes that the three texts by Walter of Bibbesworth, Walter of Henley, and Nicole Bozon demonstrate that the three knew one another’s work, and she trenchantly links the popularity of these treatises to the idea of legal redress. The eleventh chapter of the Statute of Westminster II allowed auditors to commit fraudulent bailiªs and o‹cers to the nearest royal prison, making farming less risky, expansion attractive, and e‹cient organization essential.81 The manuscript evidence powerfully suggests that these treatises were meant to appeal to “governors,” to those who had great holdings or responsibilities and wished for guides that defined the duties of bailiªs, stewards, reeves, haywards, swineherds, and dairymaids as well as auditors and lords. Chapter 1 1 of the Seneschaucy specifies that accounts should be audited at each manor, that the audit should be attended by the steward, and that it should be rendered by both the bailiª and reeve of each manor (who should be held equally accountable for discrepancies). The final chapter, which gives the lord advice, recommends that he be true, love God, and not take advice from hasty young men, from a flatterer, or from anyone who can be bribed. The lord should command and arrange 80. For information on these texts, see Dorothy Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), introduction. See also Elizabeth Lamond, ed., Walter of Henley’s Husbandry Together with an Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie and Robert Grosseteste’s Rules, intro. W. Cunningham (London: Longmans Green, 1890). 81. Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley, 75, 16, 44, 72.


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a system of accounting whereby he is not likely to be cheated by his bailiª. Those who are honest and who made him a profit he should retain; regarding others, he should learn the truth from them about their actions and send them away. Walter, which presents itself as advice from a father to his son, tells him, “vivez sagement solum diex e solum le secle.” After two quick paragraphs telling him how to live wisely according to God—think on the Passion; remember the wheel of fortune and the dangers of desiring greater riches —Walter of Henley focuses on practical matters. He counsels against overextension, going into debt, ostentation, and unseemly avarice. Though charitable, a lord should also be wise; he should pay attention to the cost of things, to lands under cultivation, to methods of plowing, to the relative cost of diªerent work animals, to methods of feeding livestock, and to the capacities of servants and others who work for him. The model these authors project is a model oriented toward profit and productivity. The estate is less an image of its lord than a reflection of its lord’s practical intelligence and careful attention. The fact that Andrew Horn included these treatises in his gift to the Guildhall suggests his awareness of the practical needs of city men, men also concerned with productivity and with the degree of liberty wealth gave them both individually and corporately. Between 1325 and 1327, Isabella of France commissioned a book (Oxford, Christ Church ms 92) for her son on the art of kingship. The commission suggests her awareness that he needed to pay attention to what M. A. Michael has called “the complex balance between the crown and the body politic which existed in England in the Middle Ages.”82 Michael notes that the text and the many miniatures reflect Henry de Bracton’s sense of the complicated relationship between the king and the crown and the body politic: both the text and the miniatures present the king as God’s representative on earth, but they also reflect the view that the king is under the jurisdiction of the law, that he must work with the advice of his magnates. As Michael observes, the treatise is especially valuable because it testifies to Isabella’s reading of contemporary events and to her desire to educate her son in the realities of English kingship.83 English notions of kingship, which evolved partly in reaction to Norman theories of kingship— and thus from an idealized pre-Norman past, from the Angevin identification of law with the sovereign’s discretion, from growing civic consciousness on the part of Londoners, from moments of baronial struggle for which the Magna 82. M. A. Michael, “The Iconography of Kingship in the Walter of Milemete Treatise,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 43. 83. Ibid., 47.


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Carta and The Song of Lewes are markers, and from the deposition of Edward II— were written into a coronation ceremony that, by the late fourteenth century, expressed an altered relationship between king and people.84 The service, as it was rewritten for the coronation of Richard II, subtly shifted the order of moments within the ceremony written for Edward II to locate the king within a web of interlocking relationships. Thus, only after the new king pledges to serve, to rule according to justice and truth, to be faithful to the laws of England, and to observe future legislation by the people, do the people themselves proclaim their assent and their willingness to obey him. The change reflected what was seen as a relationship between the power of the crown and that of the people under the law.85 The Guildhall volumes that Horn bequeathed underline this same sense that texts can serve as models for education, or as ways of establishing identity (in this case, a civic identity).86 Consequently, there is an emphasis upon English law, including pre-Norman law codes, and upon London’s own customs and ordinances. The image that emerges is of a nation not so much conceived hierarchically—though there are accounts of coronation rituals —as bound horizontally by means of practical and judicial considerations and rights. Property, taxation, profit, custom: these take precedence. The record the volumes supply of England’s kings highlight those kings’ relationship to England’s laws, to the body politic. They provide a picture of community as diversely composed as Chaucer’s own, and it is a picture, again like Chaucer’s, that comes into focus only when individual frames are accepted as an aggregate whole. It is important to stress that Horn’s library constitutes not a literature of dissent but a literature of identity. Like slightly later “city” works, such as “What the Good Wife Told Her Daughter,” the construction of civic order (and hence supervision and education) is emphasized.87 Such texts pass on the accumulated wisdom of common experience and are designed to do more than simply show ways by which 84. Jolliªe, Angevin Kingship; Ullmann, Principles of Government. See Michael, “Iconography of Kingship,” 36, for the relevance of the Articles of Deposition of Edward II to the Milemete Treatise. 85. Schramm, History of the English Coronation; Richardson, “Coronation in Medieval England.” 86. For an analysis of these volumes that corroborates my remarks, see Hanna, London Literature. 87. On this poem, see Riddy, “Mother Knows Best.” Riddy notes that the earliest version of the poem dates from the middle of the fourteenth century, in a manuscript (Cambridge, Emmanuel College ms 106 [I.4.31]) probably from the West Midlands, possibly in the Worcester diocese (70). My use of the term “city” here is metaphoric; this poem, as Riddy analyzes it, is a piece of town culture, at once an attempt to superimpose order upon youth and a glimpse of what medieval “youth culture” might have been. Riddy also discusses other late medieval manuscripts that collect advice about management and conduct. See also Kathleen Ashley, “The Miroir des bonnes femmes.”


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the lower orders can ape the higher. Horn’s careful collection, or the poem of some twenty-five years later, suggests the degree to which the city saw itself as a shaping force capable of creating an identity for itself that did not necessarily depend upon a prince for its reality. James le Palmer was another Londoner, the son of a mercer, who created a text fit for a far more powerful figure than he. (His sumptuous encyclopedia, Omne bonum, has been studied and edited by Lucy Freeman Sandler; I have suggested that the text relates to the Pearl manuscript.) A clerk of the exchequer, James was born just before Andrew Horn left his books to the city and was dead shortly before 1375. As Sandler describes him, James not only devoted a considerable amount of time to planning and copying his encyclopedia but also may have used his position in the exchequer to obtain the ink and parchment he needed for such an endeavor. If not, he spent an ample amount on the manuscript’s production. His initial words evince his own estimate of the magnitude of his work: “I James . . . whose surname I wish to be kept hidden from others for a reason, have compiled the present work with great labour and with unwavering striving.”88 His education was the type a boy could receive in fourteenth-century London, an education possibly like that of Chaucer himself, in a city increasingly becoming a “modern capital.”89 In its scope, its antifraternalism, and its focus upon clerical purity, the Omne bonum identifies itself as the work of an intelligence with a particular point of view and set of ambitions. Both Andrew Horn and James le Palmer created collections in Latin, or in Latin and French, that bespeak the complexities of identity making in the period just before Chaucer. The Auchinleck Manuscript (c. 1330–40), for its date, size, and variety, is one of the most important extant collections of English poetry.90 With the exception of a few Anglo-Norman phrases and some Latin tags, it demonstrates what can be written in the English language. As such, the Auchinleck Manuscript is an encyclopedic eªort. It contains popular religious legends, lives of women saints, a number of English romances, devotional poems, poems of advice, a Middle English translation of Marie de France’s Lay le Freine, Sir Orfeo, the Liber Regum Anglie (in English), and The Simony. It has long been 88. Quoted in Sandler, Omne bonum, 1:13. For the details of his life and his education, see chap. 1 of Omne bonum. 89. The phrase is Tout’s. On London, see T. F. Tout, “The Beginnings of a Modern Capital: London and Westminster in the Fourteenth Century,” Proceedings of the British Academy 10 (1923): 489–51 1; Rickert, “Chaucer at School”; Sandler, Omne bonum, 26–28. 90. See The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ ms 19.2.1, intro. Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (London: Scolar Press, 1979).


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linked to a London provenance; it was probably made in London either for a wealthy merchant family, as Laura Hibbard Loomis has argued, or for an old crusading family like the Beauchamps, as Thorlac Turville-Petre has suggested.91 Loomis has gone so far as to argue that Chaucer knew the manuscript and was familiar with its contents. As Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham note in their introduction to the facsimile edition of the Auchinleck Manuscript, “No proof is possible, and no further evidence is to hand other than that Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript were in London at the same time. But the hypothesis is natural, probable and pleasing, and to the student of the present facsimile, irresistibly romantic.” 92 If Chaucer did know the manuscript, the experience of studying it must have been an electrifying one because, in its range of genres, its tonal shifts, and its emphasis upon its own Englishness, the manuscript could well have provided him with the sense of what he might accomplish in his native tongue. Though the combined eªect of the works is hardly sophisticated, it nonetheless suggests the vigor of the tradition that Chaucer tapped, a vigor that, again, appears to owe less to a princely figure than to a household of the realm. With texts for all members of a household—bombastic knights, pious wives, children in need of history and advice—and reminders of England’s families of honor in the Battle Abbey Roll and, in The Simony, of the dangers of bad kings, it oªers an image radically diªerent from that projected by the collection of Charles V of France. Nor did any English king seek to do what Charles V or Andrew Horn or James le Palmer or the compiler of the Auchinleck Manuscript did—that is, create a “library” stamped with the image of its maker. The manuscript’s devotional texts certainly suggest an audience concerned with the intricacies of family drama.93 The Life of Adam and Eve, which must have been the eighth item in the manuscript (as there were probably five items, 91. Laura A. Hibbard Loomis, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck ms: Thopas and Guy of Warwick,” in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown, ed. Percy Waldron Long (New York: New York University Press, 1940), 1 1 1–28; Loomis, “Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck ms,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 14–33; Loomis, “The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 57 (1942): 595–627; and TurvillePetre, England the Nation, 134–38. Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” also suggests that the volume was commissioned, associating it with the same collecting impulse that motivated Andrew Horn. 92. Auchinleck Manuscript, intro. Pearsall and Cunningham, xi. For discussion of the present and likely past state of the manuscript, see the introduction and the outlines and diagrams that follow it. 93. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, oªers a reading of the manuscript in terms of its appeal to a female reader. Pearsall, “Middle English Romance,” 42, also describes the manuscript as probably belonging to a household.


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now lost, before it), presents the Fall in terms far more moving and humane than any of the pageants in the extant English cycles.94 This poem, which appears either in part or in variant versions in three other medieval manuscripts, including the Vernon manuscript, uses the Fall of Adam and Eve as a pivotal moment in a long and complicated human drama. The fragment that we have begins conventionally enough with Li3tbern’s (Lucifer’s) refusal to honor God, his fall from grace, and his evil designs upon the new human beings that he intends to perpetrate through Eve, the weaker of the pair. But the poem prevents us from reading Eve in terms of a crude and simplistic misogyny. After describing the Fall in terms of mutual responsibility (“4urch 5e fendes comberment / And 5urch his wiues enticement / Godes comandment he breke,” lines 101–3), the poem describes not God’s wrath but Jesus’s sorrow. And god out of heuen cam And cleped anon after Adam. 4an seyd swete Jesus: “Adam, Adam, why destow 5us? 4ou hast ybrou3t 5i selue in wo And Eue, 5i gode wiif al so; For 5ou hast min hest ybroke, For so5e, Adam, ichil be wroke; 3e haue ydon a sori dede, For so5e, 3e schul haue 3our mede.” (lines 1 13–22) By omitting the triple set of questions and answers between God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent that are found in Genesis and by using Jesus as Adam’s sole interlocutor, the author focuses both upon Adam’s responsibility for his sin and his responsibility for his and his wife’s salvation. Jesus speaks less in wrath than in sorrow, recognizing that Adam’s act has vast consequences that are his to mend. Moreover, he describes Eve not as Adam’s burden or his nag but as his “gode” wife. Eve herself displays a keen sense of guilt soon after God has sent 94. This text has been edited in Carl Horstmann, ed., Sammlung altenglischer Legenden (Heilbronn: G. Heninger, 1878), 139–47. This is the version of the Life of Adam and Eve in the South English Legendary; see James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 121–24. In the Auchinleck Manuscript, the poem begins and ends imperfect. All subsequent citations of the Life of Adam and Eve refer to the Horstmann edition.


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them from Paradise. Naked and unable to find food, they spend the first six days in misery. Finally, Eve blames herself for their plight, asking Adam to slay her so that he can try to return to Paradise. Adam responds by telling her that he cannot slay his “owhen flesche and blode / Bo5e in flesche and in bon / Jesus Crist ha5 made ous on” (lines 164–66). Lacking the ability to find food, Adam recommends that they do penance by standing up to their chins in the Tigris for forty days; he will stand six days beyond that, because God made the world in that amount of time. Their penance, of course, reflects the sacrament of baptism, and Adam’s desire to stay six days longer demonstrates his implicit recognition that he can only gain identity by assimilating himself to Christ. The rest of the poem, as it appears in the Auchinleck Manuscript, bears out this view of Eve as Adam’s sometimes weak but good wife, turning the story of “old Adam” into a narrative of familial trauma and, in the end, piety. During their stay in the Tigris, Eve is once more tricked by the fiend, who convinces her that twenty days is enough. Despite his frustration, Adam is also worried about his wife’s anguished reaction to her mistake (“Adam was in gret care / 4at sey3e his wiif so iuel fare,” lines 285–86). After they conceive Cain, Eve goes away alone and lives in penance. Adam finds her when she is in labor. There is a break in the Auchinleck poem during the birth of Cain, but, in the version in Oxford, Trinity College ms 57, after his birth, Eve foresees that Cain will kill Abel.95 Only after another hundred years are they commanded to have another child. This is Seth, who is the first of a large family of sons and daughters. When Adam feels himself getting old, he calls his family around him and passes on their family history. He does not blame Eve alone but asserts their mutual responsibility for history as they know it: “For ich & 5i moder weren at asent / To breke godes comandment” (lines 363–64). Eve continues to lament her sin, but Adam tells her to “lat be 5i fare” (line 389) and send Seth to the gates of Paradise. Eve, like any mother, fears for her son, because she knows that this mission will attract the attention of the fiend, whom she herself addresses. The fiend tells her that his malice is not toward God but toward their family. Despite this danger, Seth stands by the gates until an angel comes to give him a message for Adam. Adam shall die, the angel says, but after a time, marvels shall happen. The end of the poem describes a scene of family piety: Seth’s return, Adam’s peaceful and holy death, Jesus’s care, and finally Eve’s death. As a pious widow, she calls her children around her, recounts the family history, and bids them write their parents’ lives, 95. Horstmann, ed., Sammlung altenglischer Legenden, 130, lines 469–77.


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“euerie smite” (line 616). Her children bury her where Abel and Adam are buried and mourn her; Seth begins to write the history of his parents. The history is lost but survives the Flood, and it is found by Solomon, who learns by grace how to read it and builds the temple on the site where he found the history—the same place where Adam used to pray. Like many medieval vernacular accounts of sacred history, the Life of Adam and Eve is garnished with the meaningful details of medieval life. Here, the details are those of family identity: a family history, a conflict between sons, a mother’s sorrow, a commission laid on one of the sons that binds him to that history, holy deaths, a family site, a lost document that forms a link between past and present. At the end, the poet enters the poem to remind his audience of its relationship to the story they have just “heard,” pointing out that Adam and Eve lived here on earth, as we do, and that this story precedes other events in salvation history—the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the salvation of Nineveh through Jonah’s lessons of fruitful penance, and finally God’s “lightening” in the Virgin Mary and His death on the Cross for all our sins. The poem ends by telling us that Jesus brought Adam out of hell, urging us to seek to win grace so that we can achieve the “ioie 5at Adam now is inne” (line 780). This last section sets us explicitly within history, but in terms of the way in which the history of Adam and Eve is constructed, it seems redundant. The poem links the audience to the story by creating what is, in fact, a double set of images. The standard biblical account, along with its inherent exegetical message, provides a frame for a set of images emphasizing the di‹culties of marriage, rising family fortunes, relationships among family members, the need for a family history, the importance of death and burial rituals, and Christ’s compassion for his human family. Eve may well have begun the process of the Fall, but here she is a loving wife whose wits are outmatched by the fiend’s. Adam may sometimes despair, but he cares for his wife and his children. God may deliver punishment, but in the person of Jesus, he continually oªers mercy in exchange for our sorrow over our mistakes. The dramatic interest of this piece is likewise apparent in the legends of Saints Margaret and Katherine that follow the Life of Adam and Eve, and in the Harrowing of Hell, which is fragmented in the Auchinleck Manuscript. The Harrowing of Hell, again, gives Eve a voice whose urgency is our own. She speaks after Adam, saying, “Knawe me, lord, ich am eue.” 96 After an account of a miracle of 96. W. H. Hulme, ed., The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907), line 177.


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the Virgin, the Speculum Gy de Warewyke, and Amis and Amiloun comes the legend of another woman who turns failure and weakness into charisma and strength: Mary Magdalene.97 This piece is followed by the Nativity and Early Life of Mary, a treatise on the seven deadly sins, the paternoster in English, and a poem about the Assumption as well as later works that might also have been attractive to the female readers of this manuscript, such as more Marian material, a Latin-English version of Psalm 50 (“Misere,” one of the penitential psalms), other penitential works, and an alphabetical praise of women. Neither these works nor the many romances collected in the Auchinleck Manuscript display the sort of antifeminism that can be found in Latin collections intended for clerics. They speak to a reader who is thoroughly engaged by the world—its delights, perplexities, and griefs.98 The world either reflected by or constructed through such quasi-historical devotional writings oªers men and women pictures of worldly relationships and, for female readers, pictures of women who are examples of wifely devotion and piety (Eve and Mary) and of outstanding and singular faith (Margaret, Katherine, Mary Magdalene). When we recall Chaucer’s account of his writings, he, too, boasts a fair number of such works: a “Deth of Blaunche the Duchesse . . . Boece . . . Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde . . . the lyf also of Seynt Cecile . . . Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne” (LGW, G prologue, lines 405–18) and “othere bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun” (CT X.1087). Though some of these are lost, they bespeak Chaucer’s engagement with his own culture. They may also suggest ways in which he might have read the Auchinleck Manuscript as an anthology of English literature that existed for the household, either a great household or the household of the realm. The bulk of the material collected in the Auchinleck Manuscript is, of course, not devotional. Like Chaucer’s oeuvre, “solas” outweighs “sentence.” The manuscript contains an impressive collection of romances written in English, a number of which stress their Englishness in their use of place names or in their valorization of specifically English heroes. Again and again, Christian society is 97. For a study of the Magdalene’s importance in England, see Theresa Coletti, “Paupertas est donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Speculum 76 (2001): 337–76, and Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 98. D. L. D’Avray has made this point regarding marriage sermons intended for the laity; see D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture Without Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.


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opposed to Saracen society, calling attention to the English crusading ideal.99 But despite the obvious appeal to an audience that appreciated battle scenes, some of them gory, the romances depict female figures who are every bit as strong and politically astute as Mary Magdalene, Margaret, or Katherine—perhaps more so than the latter two, for these secular heroines do not end as martyrs. The romance certainly can be located within the concerns of family life, as Felicity Riddy has argued: its foregrounding of matters of inheritance, marital roles, land rights, friendship, and piety stamps it as appealing to audiences whose interests and anxieties were those of people of property, whether rising or not.100 Moreover, the family structures articulated in some of the romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript suggest not so much patriarchal order as a concern with justice in the face of power. Often, the romances employ a female protagonist whose intelligence or virtue undermines unjust figures of power. Perhaps one of the most interesting of the romances in relation to Chaucer is The King of Tars, which appears early in the manuscript, just before the Life of Adam and Eve and the legends of Saint Margaret and Saint Katherine. The King of Tars appears in three manuscripts (the Auchinleck, the Vernon, and the Simeon).101 The latter two manuscripts contain primarily devotional material and are possibly linked to the Bohun family and to Joan Bohun in particular; the inclusion of The King of Tars in these manuscripts suggests its quasi-devotional use and perhaps its attractiveness for a female reader. The King of Tars has a heroine rather than a hero—a heroine whose history is remarkably similar to that of Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale, but whose command of circumstances is far more decisive. Like Custance, she marries a Moslem prince, but she chooses to marry him to save her father’s troops from destruction by the sultan, who is besieging them for her hand. Reassured by Jesus in a dream, she pretends to convert to Islam and carefully conceals her own faith. She bears the sultan a son who is shapeless, but when he is baptized into Christ, the child is transformed 99. Furthermore, in the Auchinleck Manuscript, both St. Margaret and St. Katherine are tested and martyred by Moslem rulers. On both the nationalism and the use of the Crusades, see TurvillePetre, England the Nation, 114–30, who notes that the English crusading hero dominates the romances in the manuscript. 100. Felicity Riddy, “Middle English Romance: Family, Marriage, Intimacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 101. Judith Perryman, ed., The King of Tars, Middle English Texts 12 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980). See the introduction for a discussion of the three texts. Perryman also summarizes the theory that The King of Tars may have been produced for the bookshop that produced the manuscript (34–41).


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into a beautiful child. Once he converts to Christianity, the sultan’s “hewe” (line 945) is changed, and he achieves great prosperity and military might. It has been suggested that Nicholas Trivet had access to the story, which dates from around 1300, and used elements of it in his account of Constance in his Chronicle.102 The story certainly has the same shape as the tale of Constance, for it adumbrates a causal link between faith and prosperity, the goods of family, wealth, and power. It is, however, radically diªerent in emphasis because of the diªerence between the two heroines. If Chaucer knew The King of Tars, which he probably did, his decision to give the tale of Constance (rather than that of the heroine of The King of Tars) to the Man of Law suggests his awareness of the diªerence between them and his need, in this case, for a heroine who is passive, not active. Like the Wife of Bath, the heroine of The King of Tars deceives her husband; like Cecilia, she teaches the elements of the faith; like Prudence, she is a diplomat. In fact, a look at many of the romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript suggests ways in which Chaucer may have been at once indebted to its amazing generic variety and eager to go beyond it in order to explore the social and political impulses of his world. In addition to the Englishness of the manuscript, the predominance of strong female figures in the devotional texts, and the emphasis upon family in the secular romances, Chaucer would have encountered stories that perhaps led to his decision to play with certain themes and stances in the Canterbury Tales. For example, Sir Degaré, one of the Breton lays in the Auchinleck Manuscript, tells the story of a princess who is raped by a fairy knight. Lay le Freine, a translation of the lai by Marie de France, depicts a woman as gentle and forbearing as Griselda, whose very meekness brings an end to her suªering. Bevis of Hampton, in all its swashbuckling sprawl (which includes Arondel, the wonderful horse), plots a course as ambitious geographically and thematically as the tale the Squire does not get to finish. What is more, each of these works sketches a world in which its heroes or heroines are not among the powerful. The princess in Degaré must keep her pregnancy—and then the fact that she is no longer a maiden—from her father through all his attempts to find her a husband. Finally, she is miraculously rescued by her lost son and then by his father, the fairy knight. Le Freine, as oblate, novice, and mistress, can only speak through her gentleness or through the material token of her birth with which she welcomes her lover’s new bride (her own unknown twin sister). Be102. L. H. Horstein, “Trivet’s Constance and The King of Tars,” Modern Language Notes 55 (1940): 354–57; Perryman, ed., The King of Tars, 53–54. Perryman also discusses Chaucer’s possible use of this tale (54–56).


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vis, married to the intelligent and tempestuous Josian, continually struggles against kingly powers. It is tempting to speculate that Chaucer’s own tendency to present himself as marginalized and to focus upon the relationship between power and authority was awakened or reinforced by the types of texts collected in the Auchinleck Manuscript. Perhaps the most sophisticated piece in the Auchinleck Manuscript is Sir Orfeo.103 Composed either in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the poem speaks to many of the political anxieties that characterize late-fourteenthcentury literature. Set in England, where Orfeo is a king (lines 39–40), the poem takes the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice and transforms it into a tale of violation, kingship, and good stewardship. Heurodis, Orfeo’s beloved queen, retires to her orchard in the beautiful month of May, taking her maidens with her. And went in an undrentide To play bi an orchardside, To se the floures sprede and spring And to here the foules sing. Thei sett hem doun al thre Under a fair ympe-tre, And wel sone this fair quene Fel on slepe opon the grene. (lines 65–72) The poet here describes cultivated space, hence private space—a orchard filled with birds and flowers and grafted trees. While the queen is asleep (“As ich lay this undertide / And slepe under our orchardside” [lines 133–34]), she dreams of another king who will come and fetch her whether she will or not, as she later tells Orfeo. Despite her husband’s eªorts to save her, she disappears. Orfeo is unable to recover from his sorrow. He ordains a “steward” (line 205) to rule his kingdom, and he then tells his counselors to “Make you than a parlement / And chese you a newe king” (lines 216–17) when they learn of his death. He departs, discovers Heurodis, and approaches the court of this other king in order to oªer him minstrelsy in exchange for his wife. With Chaucerian directness, the fairy 103. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995). All subsequent citations of Sir Orfeo refer to this edition.


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king asks him, “What man artow”—a question that occurs three times in the Canterbury Tales. Having redeemed his wife, Orfeo and Heurodis return and discover that the steward has been faithful to his charge, that he is a “trewe man” (line 554). Orfeo changes his pilgrim clothes, and “tired . . . as a king apert” (line 586), he processes back to Winchester, is newly crowned, and lives happily with his wife. The poem certainly emphasizes the themes associated with minstrelsy (memory, harmony, sensual pleasure) that Chaucer would play with and at in Sir Thopas, and it is perhaps for this reason that Harry Bailey asks Chaucer “What man artow” in the prologue to the Thopas.104 Sir Orfeo, however, also points up the fears that power might choose to violate private space, that kingship might not be accountable to a “parlement,” that stewards might not be true to their charges. It articulates concerns that appear not only throughout the Canterbury Tales but also in other fourteenth-century works like A Pistel of Susan and Athelston, where the relationship of power to justice figures prominent ly.105 Both of these poems were current in the late fourteenth century. A Pistel appears in two manuscripts possibly a‹liated with the Auchinleck (the Vernon and the Simeon). Athelston appears in only one manuscript. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe has suggested that Athelston may have emerged from Lancastrian views of Richard II after his deposition. If the poem can, like Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger, be ascribed to Lancastrian concerns, it is a careful reading of those elements of English romance that capture the tensions between princely rule and the rights of the body politic, especially its baronial limbs. Athelston’s depiction of a king who listens to gossip and false counsel and consigns his sworn brother to death without benefit of the law (and of an intercessory queen who suªers the eªects of her husband’s irrationality by losing their unborn son and heir to the throne) expands upon themes of friendship, just rule, marriage, and inher104. Though he does not mention the instance of this question in Sir Orfeo, Lee Patterson addresses Chaucer’s consideration of the minstrel identity in “‘What Man Artow?’” On the Orfeo poet’s use of tropes relating to minstrelsy, see Seth Lerer, “Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo,” Speculum 60 (1985): 92–109, and Roy Michael Liuzza, “Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions, and the Poetics of Performance,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991): 269–84. 105. For A Pistel of Susan, see Turville-Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry; all subsequent citations of A Pistel refer to this edition. For Athelston, see Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds., Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). For suggestions linking Athelston to the concerns of the late fourteenth century, see Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, “The Female Body Politic and the Miscarriage of Justice in Athelston,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 79–98. Crane describes Athelston as illustrating the subordination of royal power to justice (Insular Romance, 69).


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itance rights that were germane to the English romance as well as to those collected in the Auchinleck Manuscript. A Pistel of Susan, based upon the biblical story of Susannah and the elders, is a poem about a miscarriage of justice that employs marriage as a trope for what is at risk in an unjust realm. It is thus a much more politically nuanced story than the version of Susannah’s story in Le menagier de Paris. Like the works I have discussed so far, A Pistel recounts the trials of the privileged. In the first line, the poet notes that there was dwelling in Babylon a young man who was rich. He then describes Joachim’s household in terms of its wealth and its apparent invulnerability: his orchards are moated, his halls upon a high hill. In the second stanza, the poet describes Joachim’s wife, Susan (“sotil and sage,” line 14) and devotes the next eight stanzas to the orchard, the beautiful private space where Susan goes to relax and bathe with her maidens. The orchard is filled with marvelous flowers, birds, and fruits, but even more important, it is private space, space that the false judges violate with their eyes and presence even as they attempt to violate Susan herself. The poet indicates the association between Joachim’s marriage and the sanctity of his private space by linking the two with words relating to sight: God’s sight of the judges’ iniquity (lines 34, 57), the judges’ lecherous viewing in the orchard (lines 44, 53, 132), Susan’s beauty (lines 50, 1 18), and the orchard’s attractiveness (lines 69, 73, 78, 85, 92). If the orchard resembles a terrestrial paradise, it is also Joachim’s private holding (and, like his wife, vulnerable to the threat of unjust seizure). Daniel’s intervention—his intelligent gathering of evidence—allows for true justice, just as, in Athelston, the trials by fire reveal who is the victim and who the knave. Though both poems can be assimilated to the anxieties over legal redress during the late fourteenth century, they also reflect the midcentury English romance’s concern with the household and its vulnerability to the unjust or to the unforeseen. Here, the female body, which to some extent defines the household, serves as a marker for that perilous inviolability that is frequently opposed to an unjust use of power. The Auchinleck Manuscript has a number of such works: the Life of Adam and Eve, Seynt Margrete, Seynt Katerine, Life of Mary Magdalene, Nativity and Early Life of Mary, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Sir Degaré, Floris and Blauncheflur, Bevis of Hampton, Lay le Freine, Sir Orfeo, and Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild. The final eªect decenters those figures of power, conferring authority upon others who operate outside of the center but cannot be described as marginal or weak. Such texts focus attention upon the hero’s or heroine’s integrity, strength, devotion, or chivalry in ways that work against the con-


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struction of an ideological structure such as that promulgated by the Valois cultural program. The sense that the prince is acted upon by his passions or by outside influences like flatterers or weak, mistaken, or false wives (or is vulnerable to such influences), that the household that is the extension of his charisma is not inviolable, is further borne out by the explicitly educative poems in the Auchinleck Manuscript. The Seven Sages of Rome is an account of a son’s education in wisdom. Set against the backdrop of the reign of Diocletian, it oªers a stark picture of the dangers of court, especially the dangers posed by a treacherous stepmother. The Sayings of the Four Philosophers is a complaint about Edward II.106 Its prime symbol is a potent one: a royal charter made of wax and then held too closely to the fire, so that it melts. The two stanzas describing this event precede the traditional account of the sayings of four wise men who tell “whi engelond is brouht adoun” (line 20). The resounding stresses in the short lines for each stanza (“ªor miht is riht / Liht is niht, / And fiht is fliht” [lines 27–29]; “Nu on is two, / Wel is wo, / And frend is fo” [lines 39–41]) are memorable in the same way that some of the letters of John Ball powerfully capture the cadences of English put to the service of social complaint. The breakdown of law, human relations, and charity that the poem lays at the feet of its hapless king is even more urgently detailed in The Simony, which is sometimes called “On the Evil Times of Edward II.”107 The Simony looks forward to the estates satire of the latter part of the century, especially to Piers Plowman and to portions of the Canterbury Tales.108 In its ruthless catalogue of reasons “Whii werre and wrake in londe and manslauht is i-come, / Whii hungger and derthe on eorthe the pore hath undernome, / Whii bestes ben thus storve, whii corn hath ben so dere” (lines 1–3), the poem assumes the rhetorical stance of a visitation to the kingdom by God. God begins by “greeting” the clergy, who are not simply luxurious and lazy but also corrupt in ways that destroy the households of the kingdom. If a man is tired of his wife, he can bring two false people with him to the consistory court and purchase a divorce 106. For the poem and commentary on its various versions, see R. H. Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 140–43, 324–26. 107. See the text and comments in James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), 180–82, 193–212, 227–36. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 108. Dean enumerates links between the poem and Chaucer. For Langland, see Elizabeth Salter, “Piers Plowman and The Simonie,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 203 (1967): 241–54.


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(lines 199–204); then he can take his neighbor’s wife “and bringeth hire to his house” (line 206). The picture of the English household The Simony provides is a disorderly one: scheming doctors fool wives about the health of their husbands (lines 21 1–40); those who have wealth no longer go on Crusade but harry the population, no longer training their sons to be proper knights; the desire for fashionable clothing can be seen in every town. The Simony, like the charges the Merciless Parliament laid at Richard’s feet, depicts the king as shielded from knowing the true state of England by false counselors and greedy servants, who skim oª the tax money, demand money in exchange for influence, and buy and sell justice. The kingdom is described as hungry, diseased, and filled with strife, the weak preyed upon by the strong. A sely workman in a toun that lyve in trewthe fre And hath a wif or children, peraunter to or thre, He sueteth many a suetes drope, and swynk he never so sore Alday fore a peny or fore a peny more, Be cas, At eve when he setteth hit, half is stole alas! (lines 487–92) These lines describe not a king’s garden invaded by a stronger force but a poor tradesman’s household at the mercy of others’ greed and chicanery, with no means of redress. They surely anticipate Langland’s pictures of the small, impoverished households of Will’s London, and, like Piers Plowman, they attach these households to the greater household of the realm. The king may not be paying attention, but God is: “But crafty Kyng of kende that ever set al thyng, / He sey how al misfarde and how they ledde the kyng, / He sente bote of bale and awrak here deth” (lines 517–19). Grim as it is, The Simony seems designed to teach the duties of stewardship to those who are not true to their o‹ces. The two explicitly historical works —the Liber Regum Anglie, a version of the Short Metrical Chronicle that recounts England’s history from Brutus to Edward II, and the Battle Abbey Roll—oªer carefully focused pictures of English history designed to speak to the concerns of the manuscript and probably to those of its original owner. The Liber Regum Anglie, as Turville-Petre has pointed out, is the “backbone” for the “historical” romances in the volume. Its roll call of English kings also inevitably reminds its reader, though, of the swift passage of time, of the chaos in which Brutus first found England and to which


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the land could return without wise leaders.109 The Battle Abbey Roll, which purports to list the names of all the Norman knights who fought with the Conqueror, can be described as history made to order.110 Some of the names on the Roll seem to have been enrolled in the baronage only in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. For example, the name de la Pole appears on the list; as H. M. Smyser speculates, it may have been “inspired by Sir William de la Pole, a merchant of Hull who was knighted in 1296 and who died about 1329.” Smyser contends that the list was intended to valorize the baronage, linking it to the two explicitly anti-Edwardian poems, The Sayings of the Four Philosophers and The Simony.111 Coming after The Sayings of the Four Philosophers and preceding the three long poems devoted to the English hero Guy of Warwick, the Battle Abbey Roll underscores the crucial role England’s nobles played in its history at a time when awareness of Edward II’s laxness was all too fresh. Lacking a wise king, a country must have a baronage whose canniness and integrity can assure the land order. This manuscript provides a way of thinking about the traditions of English poetry in the period just before that dominated by Chaucer and Langland. As a London manuscript (and one with which Chaucer may have been familiar), the Auchinleck miscellany captures the astonishing variety and vigor of an English poetic tradition into which Chaucer sought to insert himself. The manuscript can also serve as a reflection of English impulses and anxieties that are quite diªerent from those of a court-centered French cultural tradition. A few years after the creation of the Auchinleck Manuscript in London, Charles V sought to co-opt the vernacular for royal purposes in a program of translation that presented French literature as emanating from the king. The English literature of the privileged, however, suggests not a court but multiple courts. It is a literature that depicts a land populated by heroes, a decentered but not necessarily chaotic land. The nation’s order is a manifestation of its laws and, as such, is a land of households vulnerable to greed or force or villainy. In this sense, it is a literature that is oppositional; it is not populist but jealous of the rights of the 109. See Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 108–12. 1 10. This has been edited and discussed by H. M. Smyser, “The List of Norman Names in the Auchinleck ms (Battle Abbey Roll),” in Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, ed. U. T. Holmes Jr. and Alexander J. Denomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948). My remarks about the Roll are indebted to Smyser’s introduction to it. In England the Nation, Turville-Petre has suggested that the original owner of the Auchinleck Manuscript must have wanted the Roll in the manuscript because his name was on it. 1 1 1. Smyser, “The List of Norman Names,” 271.


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nobility. In its very particularity, it contains the possibility of finely tuned social analysis. The last quarter of the fourteenth century is, of course, dominated by Langland and Chaucer, both of whom employ English poetry as a medium of analysis. Works like Piers Plowman emerge from the traditions of the spiritual autobiography and of the jeremiad, which, like The Simony, holds society up to a standard of perfection. In his scrutiny of the very basis for communal life, Langland may have best captured the spirit of Virgil’s Georgics.112 Langland’s preoccupation with labor, with what constitutes worthy work, captures Virgil’s canny positioning of the individual laborer (and especially the writer) in relation to the community. In the important section that encompasses the first 104 lines of passus 5 of the C text of Piers Plowman—a passage that Pearsall has labeled “Will’s ‘Apologia pro vita sua’”—Langland asks those questions about work and identity that are essential to the Georgics.113 Virgil’s concern with time, with labor as an aspect of the common good, and with profit can likewise be found in the questions Will asks of himself in the person of Reason. Reason first asks Will if he does anything useful. Can he serve at mass or sing in church or pile hay or mow or make bonds for sheaves or reap or hedge or harrow or drive geese or “eny other kynes craft 5at to 5e comune nedeth?” (PP, C text, 5.20). Though Will first attempts to justify himself using language drawn from the parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 14), Reason maintains a contemporary language of “rendering” that locates Will’s eªorts at self-definition in relation to what the “comune nedeth.” As Anne Middleton has argued, Reason’s questioning takes as its premise the Second Statute of Laborers enacted by the Cambridge parliament of 1388, which sought to enforce worthy agricultural labor during harvest time upon all craftsmen who could be spared, to fix all agricultural workers of twelve and over where they were, and to exact agricultural labor from all vagrants in 1 12. In “Langland as Schoolmaster? The Hands that Fed Him and How They Matter,” a paper read at the 2002 meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Anne Middleton demonstrated the likely classical underpinnings of Langland’s education. For a description of Langland’s carefully constructed use of the language of agriculture, see Elizabeth D. Kirk, “Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988): 1–22. 1 13. See Justice and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work, 13–21. See also essays in that volume by Hanna and Middleton that concern the subject of work and by Pearsall that discusses the small households of Langland’s London as well as the themes of commerce and profit. For the text, see George Russell and George Kane, eds., Piers Plowman: The C Version (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Hereafter cited in text as PP, with passus and line numbers.


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the countryside.114 If the statute captures the imperial command whereby national order and the goods of common profit are the rewards of worthy labor (likewise the lesson of the bees), Will’s eªorts to understand his place in that world and to understand the ways in which that world may not be the locus for truly worthy labor suggest a recognition as potentially disruptive as Virgil’s. (Virgil ends his poem by claiming a place for himself alongside Caesar.) The final scene of Piers Plowman, which describes a world ruled by need, riddled with disease, and dominated by self-interest, a world that Conscience vacates in search of Piers the plowman, deconstructs georgic harmony, leaving us with the demands and insights of the individual conscience. By at once transferring authority to the self (Conscience) and situating Will squarely within the world of institutional authority, Langland, like Virgil, hints at the ambiguities of his position. Though his labors may have no place in an imperial realm, that realm is necessarily where he must continue and is therefore the site of authorial labor (and of salvation).115 The early-fifteenth-century poem Mum and the Sothsegger, which belongs to the concerns of the reign of Henry IV, employs the georgic mode in one section to articulate a language of kingship. The narrator’s search for ways to operate in the world (to be mum or to tell the truth) results, at one point, in a dream vision.116 The dream joins the section on bees found in Bartholomaeus Anglicus with Virgil’s remarks about a remembered garden (Georgics 4.1 16–48). In his dream, the narrator wanders into a freehold boasting not a garden of idleness and love but a working garden, with herbs, grafted trees, fruit trees, and, at its heart, an old beekeeper and his hives. Like the garden Virgil says he cannot take time to describe fully, the working garden of Mum and the Sothsegger is a place of ordered bounty. Its humble and industrious owner exemplifies a simplicity and discipline that contrasts to the present age. When we first see him, he is squashing the drones who do nothing. The beekeeper espouses the rules of all gardeners: he pulls up weeds that destroy his plants, destroys slugs that eat his greens, 1 14. Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy,” has analyzed the matrix of biblical and social associations invoked in this dialogue; see especially 248–52 and 280–88. For the text of the parliament, see Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 507–27. 1 15. See Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church, for a discussion of the double roles of Conscience and of Will in the last part of the poem. 1 16. For the poem, see James M. Dean, ed., Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). The vision comprises lines 944–1287. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. For a study of the poem in relation to Langland, see Helen Barr, Signes and Sothe: Language in the “Piers Plowman” Tradition (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), chap. 4.


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and searches out the drones that do nothing but eat up all his honey, citing 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (“Qui non laborat non manducet,” line 987). The beekeeper then describes bee society to the narrator, dwelling upon its monarchical government. The king lives in the highest of the holes in the hive (line 1002), while the others make “mansions” (line 1004) beneath. He describes their craftsmanship, industry, and communal existence. He then returns to the king of the bees, praising him for his mercy, meekness, virtue, reasonableness, and the love he inspires in his subjects. The beekeeper’s job is to tend the hive and to kill the drones. The bees themselves, concerned with “comune profit” (line 1078) and their labors, do not notice stolen stores and thus do not revenge themselves upon the drones until it is so late in the year that they risk winter starvation. The narrator is taken with the old man’s wisdom and asks him his pressing question: when in the world, should he keep mum or tell the truth? The old man supplies the answer Chaucer’s Manciple cannot: “And loke thou seye ever sothe, but shame not thy brother / For yf thou telle hym trouthe in tirantis wise, / He wol rather wexe wrother thenne forto wirche after” (lines 1270–72). Here, the poet links beekeeper and poet, whose duties are to preserve the harmony of the whole—one by rooting out nonproductive drones for the gentle king of the bees, the other by learning to speak the truth in a way that is not “tyrannical,” that allows a sovereign to use judiciously what he has heard. Though the poem grants the poet a voice, it locates him in relation to a good that emanates from a good and wise (Lancastrian) king. I do not mean here to denigrate the concept of the common good, which undergirded medieval ideas of community, but to indicate ways in which, when linked to georgic labor and to absolute kingship, it could serve ends that Virgil at once foresaw and sought to forestall by asserting his own independence of voice and vocation. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, like Langland and earlier makers of English verse, created voices through which he explored those impulses that apparently prevented the imposition of an order emanating from the king or from a kingship conceived of as sacral. The process of staging what is an extended sic et non begins with the Parliament of Fowls, which opens with a dramatic version of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, where the doctrine of common profit is explicit. Chaucer then juxtaposes this high-minded and disinterested view of the community with the posturing of the eagles, who wish to “sacralize” courtship, and with the practicality and impatience of the lower birds. Put oª from choosing their mates and going about the business of nesting, they call, “allas, ye wol us shende! / Whan shal youre cursede pletynge have an ende?” (PF, lines 494–95); “Al this nys not worth a flye!” (line 501); and “For comune spede,


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take on the charge now, / For to delyvere us is grete charite” (lines 507–8). Chaucer’s refusal to valorize the noble eagles, whose use of love language is made to seem ridiculous, is matched by his decision not to ennoble the seed fowl and worm fowl and water fowl, whose self-interest prevents them from seeing beyond their own immediacy of desire. Whatever the common good is, as a concept, it belongs to Nature and to Scipio. As an actuality, it does not yet exist. Similarly, in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes not household order but household disorder, creates a governor whose ability to maintain a productive order is rooted in tenuous and limited compromise, and presents a world where Philippe de Mézières would have much to do in order to realize the sacrality he saw as a remedy for a world’s fissures and absences. Like Langland’s, Chaucer’s households seem to ignore Aristotelian economies of house and land. They instead suggest vulnerabilities to outside threat and to inner turmoil. In those moments in Piers Plowman that flash with suggestions of the actualities of a fourteenth-century world, Langland oªers glimpses of households that no medieval king would wish described as emanating from his sagacity. Particularly in passus 5 and 6 of the C text, where Will wakes in his cottage in Cornhill with Kit, his wife—hardly prosperous and not at all respected—or where Repentance preaches to figures like Purnel Proud-heart, to Covetousness, whose wife is a duplicitous spinner, and to Glutton, whose experiences open a window onto a world of drunken spendthrifts and tired wives and children, Langland seems to echo The Simony and its picture of a slovenly English household. There are no lessons here in vinegar making or in keeping vermin from the linens. In these cottages, we can be sure of the vermin and, implicitly, just as sure that Cornhill’s ba›ed misdirection represents the overflow of Westminster’s disorder. Thus, at the end of passus 20, when Will dreams that he calls his wife and daughter and bids them go to church with him on Easter, Langland signals through the reunited household a new stage of Will’s understanding.117 In his attempt to see the social body as an extension of the body of Christ, Will is alone, as passus 21 makes all too clear. The brewer who speaks for his own self-interest, the uneducated vicar, the greedy lord, and the king argue for individual rights. 117. See M. Teresa Tavormina, Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in “Piers Plowman” (Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 195. Tavormina oªers an extended study of Langland’s use of marriage throughout the poem. In chap. 1, which focuses upon the marriage of Lady Meed, she analyzes both the legal and metaphoric aspects of this section of the poem, which prepares us for succeeding depictions of marriage in the rest of Piers Plowman. For an analysis of the medieval metaphors of home, see chap. 6 of David Aers, Sanctifying Signs (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).


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By ending this passus with a brief interchange between the king and Conscience, Langland powerfully suggests the tensions between such a focus upon individual rights and a concept of the common good. As Pearsall notes, the king speaks from a concept of regality that accorded with Wycli‹te ideas.118 The king asserts that his crown signifies his rule over the commons and his defense of the church, and he contends that the law grants him the right to take what he lacks because he is head of the law; all others are but members of the body politic. Conscience responds in terms that reflect the English awareness of the rights of the body, or of the head’s relationship to the body. “In condicioun . . . 5at 5ou [5e] comune defende And rewle thy rewme in resoun [as] riht w[o]l and treuthe [Haue 5ou mayst] thyn askyng as thy lawe asketh: Omnia [tua sunt] ad defendendum sed non ad deprehendendum.” (PP, C text, 21.477–80) Conscience here adds a legal qualifier to the king’s assertion of regality: On condition that you defend and rule in right reason and truth, only then may you have as your law asks. The Latin tag reminds the king that all is for him to defend, not to spoil. Conscience locates the king within the rights of the body itself, to some extent echoing the sentiments of works like The Song of Lewes or the laments for Simon de Montfort that remained current in the fourteenth century: “Again, let him know that the people is not his own but God’s, and let him be profitable to it as a help. . . . It is the part of the prince not to crush but to protect.”119 The semipopulist tone of baronial opposition translates easily into the fourteenth-century complaints of the commons. In employing such language, Langland indicates more than tension between diªering views of the king’s relation to law; he evinces the tensions within the self occasioned by injustice. It is, of course, Conscience who ends the poem by leaving it in search of Piers. Chaucer’s households are fissured by varying degrees of self-interest. Though the Knight advances marriage as a remedy freighted with symbolic meanings of personal and communal harmony, the rest of the tales problematize marriage by 1 18. Derek Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), passus 21, n. 477. 1 19. The quoted passages are from The Song of Lewes in English Historical Documents, ed. Rothwell, 909; see also 899–917. A poem about the Battle of Lewes and a lament for Simon de Montfort are items 23–24 in ms Harley 2253. See Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 199.


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depicting households of varying degrees of discord.120 It is not unlikely that Chaucer’s decision to turn the tale of Palamon and Arcite into the Knight’s Tale reflects his familiarity with the ideas of Philippe de Mézières.121 Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage was written between July 1385 and the end of 1389; the Letter to King Richard II, in 1395.122 As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the ideas of Philippe de Mézières were certainly available in England, especially to someone like Chaucer, with his set of social and political contacts. Where the Knight, like Philippe de Mézières, uses the marriage between Palamon and Emelye to bring Thebes into alliance with Athens, to ameliorate grief over Arcite’s death, and to extend Athenian harmony into the future, what follows the Knight’s Tale is a series of debunking narratives in which marriage is depicted as a tenuously erected hedge against inevitable chaos. Works like Le livre de la vertu and Le menagier de Paris (which includes the tales of both Prudence and Melibee and Philippe de Mézières’s version of the tale of Griselda) provide images of households that reflect the sacral nature of marriage and hence of the social order. But in the pilgrims’ tales, Chaucer creates questions from what in the French are assertions. Chaucer pairs the tale of Melibee with minstrel material—perhaps hearkening back to the spirit of collections like the Auchinleck Manuscript, and certainly signaling his debts to and his distance from that tradition—and uses the tale not simply as an example of wifely temperance but also as a lesson to a prince about the limits on his power. Moreover, he enhances our estimate of feminine authority in ways the French does not. Rather than use the story of Griselda as a lesson in obedience, as Philippe does, Chaucer splits it with the Clerk’s interjections, pointing up its inconsistencies in ways that force us to consider its di‹culties and hence its political implications. Chaucer does not use his disorderly households as opportunities to reprimand slovenly wives. Instead, his households are extensions of the husbands who create them as reflections of their own desires for status, comfort, security, or pleasure. To read the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics against the Canterbury Tales is to learn more than a little about Chaucerian humor. 120. See my discussion (including notes) of the Knight in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 245–46, 257–59, as well as Chap. 1 above. 121. Both Paul A. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 60, and Collette, “Reading Chaucer Through Philippe de Mézières,” see Chaucer as endorsing many of Philippe’s messages. For a study of the ways in which the sacrament of marriage was anchored to social order in the marriage sermons “broadcast” to the public by the friars, see D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons. 122. Williamson, ed., Le livre de la vertu, 7–9; Coopland, ed. and trans., Letter, xxiii. On the possible diplomatic provenance of the Letter, see Palmer, “Background to Richard II’s Marriage.”


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But there is more here than humor. Chaucer’s governors, beginning with Harry Bailey, seem by their insu‹ciencies intended to explore contemporary issues of regality. And it is in Harry Bailey’s remarks in the interstices of the tales that Chaucer submerges the georgic reminders of time as the medium of productivity. These reminders constitute one of the great understated “poems” in English. With characteristic insouciance, Chaucer introduces Harry’s timekeeping speeches as though they are meant to be funny or, at best, bits of Senecan advice, part of the machinery that holds the fiction of tale telling together. Harry first cuts short the Reeve’s lament about the miseries of old age by speaking “lordly as a kyng” (CT I.3900), going on to admonish, “‘Sey forth thy tale, and tarie nat the tyme. / Lo Depeford, and it is half-wey pryme! / Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne! / It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne’” (I.3905–8). The warning becomes more urgent in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, where the narrator spends fifteen lines telling us about the Host’s ability to tell the day of the year by the sun’s position in the sky and the hour by the length of a shadow relative to the body causing the shadow. Noting that it is ten o’clock in the morning on April 18, he exclaims, “Leseth no tyme, as ferforth as ye may. Lordynges, the tyme wasteth nyght and day, And steleth from us, what pryvely slepynge, And what thurgh necligence in oure wakynge, As dooth the streem that turneth nevere agayn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It wol nat come agayn withouten drede, Namoore than wole Malkynes maydenhede, Whan she hath lost it in hir wantownesse. Lat us nat mowlen thus in ydelnesse. . . .” (CT II.19–23, 29–32) Harry Bailey here opposes negligence, “wantonness” (which connotes illgovernance), recklessness, willfulness, sexual indulgence, and idleness to the labor of tale telling, which it is his self-appointed job to further. The “stream that will not come again” echoes the Reeve’s earlier metaphor of life as a wine cask where death drives the tap, a metaphor the Host earlier spurned. But he turns the Reeve’s helpless lament to good purpose, for he urges the pilgrims not to


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sleep, not to lose consciousness of time, but to use it. Later, the Host attempts to wake the Cook from his drunken disregard, saying, “Do hym come forth, he knoweth his penaunce; For he shal telle a tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Awake, thou Cook! . . . What eyleth thee to slepe by the morwe?” (CT IX.12–13, 15–16) The Cook’s sleeping during the day wastes time; tale telling, Harry’s “penance,” is oªered as the remedy. In excusing the Cook of his tale and stealing his moment, the Manciple at once attempts to preempt Harry’s o‹ce and, implicitly, deprives the Cook of the possibility for this penance. In the prologue to the Parson’s Tale, both the narrator and Harry Bailey signal their profound awareness of time and its uses. The narrator, as the Host did earlier, tells the time by the length of his shadow on the ground, deducing that the day draws near its end. Saying that they lack only one tale, Harry signals the limits of his o‹ce. Fulfilled is my sentence and my decree; I trowe that we han herd of ech degree; Almoost fulfild is al myn ordinaunce. (CT X.17–19) He ends by admonishing the Parson, “Telleth . . . youre meditacioun. But hasteth yow; the sonne wole adoun; Beth fructuous, and that in litel space. . . .” (X.69–71) Only Chaucer can achieve so much with so little. Both Spenser and Shakespeare achieve dense and evocative meditations upon time, but only Chaucer takes a few simple words, puts them into the mouth of a taverner, and steps back, content with the very shadows the words leave in our hearts. The message here is,


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of course, the message of georgic verse. Be fruitful in a little space; hasten, the sun goes down. But Chaucer does not give his poem about time to a prince, nor to a gardener, nor to a writer who might serve the prince. He gives it to a figure who is part of the city’s business, who is all too aware of profit and loss, whose voice bespeaks his worldliness. In freeing the georgic language of productivity from the constraints of imperium only to attach it to those of a monetized world, Chaucer manages, as he usually does, to have it both ways. The world that the Host represents, the world of the victualers, was also a political allegiance, or faction, within the city of London.123 The Host indicates his awareness of his own mercantile a‹nity by his familiarity with pilgrims like the Cook and the Manciple, both of whom are in the food business. It is clear from the Host’s remarks in the General Prologue that he understands the demands of advertising, of attending to a guest’s needs, of paying attention to status, and of diplomacy, all in the interests of profit. The prologues and epilogues to the tales also make evident just how well the instincts of the businessman serve those of civility: Harry Bailey, committed as he is to keeping the pilgrims together in order to bring them back to a supper “Heere in this place, sittynge by this post” (CT I.800), preserves the peace between warring pilgrims. If the law is the law of profit, it can have other benefits. Lest we be tempted to think Chaucer might be endorsing this new world, though, where figures like Harry can step forward and “govern,” even for a term—a world all too like Chaucer’s own hectic London—Chaucer provides evidence that Harry’s own house is hardly in order. Aristotelian measure and Christian sacrality are not apparent in the vignettes the Host provides of his life with Goodelief. In his responses to the Clerk’s Tale (IV.1212a–g) and to the Merchant’s Tale (IV.2419–40), he hints at the nature of a household he describes more fully in response to the tale of Melibee. He ascribes to Goodelief all the vices that Prudence does not possess: she is impatient, wrathful, vengeful, contemptuous, and physically imposing (VII.1895–1922). Harry Bailey, like so many of the pilgrims and the husbands in their tales, is not a “governor” in his own home. The panorama of husbands deceived into kneading tubs, of husbands snoring away while wife and daughter lie with strangers, of husbands foiled by mothers, of husbands tricked by profiteering wives, and of husbands waylaid by their own vanity, folly, anger, or self-absorption adumbrates a world where money may be made but meaning seems oddly absent. The tales, 123. See Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London: Longman, 1949).


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however, do more than chastise mercantilism. Chaucer allows the tales — separately and as a collection—to become ways of asking questions about the possibility and impossibility of building a community. At a time when the concept of a national community was depicted in France as like a well-kept household whose heart was sacramental relation, Chaucer portrays an English household where a dozen vying impulses make the importation of such a concept impossible. The impulses of English vernacular texts (which themselves reflect opposition to Angevin notions of regality) work against the tendency to image the realm as the king’s household; those of Wycli‹te dogma desacralize the crown even as they grant the secular arm enormous powers over the church. In positioning the Parson’s Tale where he does and giving it such authority, Chaucer may be elaborating upon Langland’s decision to end Piers Plowman with Conscience. Conscience is that faculty operative in penance and, for the Parson, an agent of social change. That said, Chaucer also explores the relative incapacities of the human conscience in tales where self-interest dominates all too often. By way of explaining what could be called Chaucer’s ambivalence or skepticism (and what I like to call his preference for questions), let me end this chapter by thinking about what Chaucer, in one stage of his composition of the Canterbury Tales, might have meant to suggest in what is referred to as the “endlink” of the Man of Law’s Tale. These twenty lines have had a long history in the annals of Chaucer criticism. They appear in thirty-five manuscripts of the tales but are omitted in twenty-two manuscripts, including the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere manuscripts.124 The endlink probably belongs to a period when Chaucer thought of a sequence beginning with the introduction (but not the prologue) to the Man of Law’s Tale, which was most likely the Melibee, then the endlink, which was designed to lead into the Wife of Bath’s Tale, which was probably what we now know as the Shipman’s Tale. Though Chaucer’s ideas changed, the lines were not destroyed and were used by later scribes who had access to them to introduce the tales of the Squire, the Summoner, or the Shipman.125 The endlink certainly appears designed to relate some of the concerns expressed through the Man of Law to the Wife’s fabliau. The Host’s praise for the “thrifty” 124. See Ralph Hanna’s textual notes in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1 126, and Patricia J. Eberle’s explanatory notes to the Man of Law’s Tale, 862. 125. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds., The Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 2:188–90; Hanna in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1 126. Donaldson accepted the lines as introducing the Wife of Bath’s prologue as we


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tale he has just heard the lawyer tell echoes the Man of Law’s earlier complaint that he doesn’t know any “thrifty” tale that Chaucer has not already told in English. Both what is now the Shipman’s fabliau and the Wife of Bath’s prologue also employ the word “thrifty” to describe the “goods” of worldly prosperity. (Virgil also uses “thrifty,” a householding word, to characterize the bees [“parcis”].) Possibly Harry Bailey’s cut at the Parson in the endlink (“I smelle a Lollere in the wind”) is related to the Man of Law’s interest in Chaucer and the subject of translation, which occupies most of his introduction. As we know, Lollards were linked to vernacular literacy. The last lines of the endlink seem to promise a tale with a female narrator who proclaims the tale as issuing from her “joly body,” as “waking” the pilgrim company, and as containing neither philosophy nor “queinte” terms of law. The Shipman’s fabliau, with its early indications of a female narrator, its emphasis upon the clothing of the female body, and its final triumphant allusion to the wife’s “joly body” (with which she will pay back her shopping debts), suggests Chaucer’s careful phrasing of a particular line of thought. My question is deceptively simple. What were Chaucer’s reasons for initially associating the Man of Law’s performance—assuming that it at this point was the tale of Melibee—with the Wife’s tale of “tallying” through a link that included a prominent reference to Lollardy? Alcuin Blamires has given us some strong reasons for aligning the Wife of Bath with many of the issues germane to contemporary discussions and fears of Lollards, but I would like to speculate about the phrasing in what became a reworked sequence of tales.126 What might Chaucer have originally had in mind? In the Melibee, which is commonly dated to the late 1380s, Chaucer explored some of the problems involved in an understanding of civil authority that must rest on more than might. After the wounds Richard certainly suªered at the hands of the Appellants in the Merciless Parliament of 1387–88, there were very clear questions about how the king would proceed. Chaucer used a translated tale, and a venerable one at that, to analyze a situation that only a king could remedy by creating and maintaining a hierarchical yet harmonious relationship with his subjects. As the tale implies, Richard can only accomplish such a task if he is willing to see himself as bound by and to others —hence the importance

now have it, inserting “Wife of Bath” into line 1 179. In a paper a few years ago, Lee Patterson rea‹rmed this reading by pointing out that the insertion accords with the line’s metrical pattern. 126. Alcuin Blamires, “The Wife of Bath and Lollardy,” Medium Aevum 58 (1989): 224–42.


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of counsel—and as needing to maintain himself as a rational, objective leader of the whole body politic. The interchange between Harry Bailey and the Man of Law in the introduction to his tale would not be out of place as a preamble to an analysis of the political relationships submerged in the Melibee. First, Harry’s rhetoric places the Man of Law on trial. He stands in the tale telling at Harry’s “judgment”; he must “acquit” himself of his promise by doing his best to tell a tale. The lawyer answers by recognizing his debt and by saying that “swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight, / He sholde hymselven usen it, by right” (CT II.43–44). He then goes on to raise the provocative issue of English translation by naming the tales, mostly aligned with or drawn from the Legend of Good Women, in which Chaucer has recounted the victimization of significant women who lacked the political power or skills of the men who betrayed them. After praising Chaucer for not telling incestuous tales like those of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyre (which are also political tales), the Man of Law promises a “tale in prose,” which the narrator tells us we shall now hear. The Melibee, a translated tale, in which Prudence shows her husband how to become an agent and a wise ruler—rather than a victim or a tyrant—could easily follow this introduction. Moreover, the comedy of having his own creature turn his critical lens on his writing allows Chaucer the screen he frequently prefers for moments of political critique or commentary. The fact that the lawyer is the vehicle for the performance may also be intended to remind his audience of the script of the political situation that included the Merciless Parliament. In an eªort to countermand the power of the Appellants, in August 1387, Richard had posed a series of questions concerning regal prerogative to a handpicked group of justices (later punished severely by the Merciless Parliament for their support of the king). If the introduction is, in fact, an introduction to the Melibee, Chaucer again achieves a degree of irony that touches on the very nature of political advice and analysis, for the Melibee does not so much guarantee royal prerogative as consider it inevitably bound up with royal prudence. During the Merciless Parliament, as I have argued in Chapter 2, the Appellants were engaged in a forceful correction of the king’s misgovernance that was not unlike what the Lollards proposed to do in the ecclesiastical realm. Richard certainly saw the Appellants’ infringement upon the king’s person as a violation of his sanctity, and many saw Wyclif ’s challenge to sacral reality as a violation of community. The speaker in the Man of Law’s endlink who responds to Harry


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Bailey’s command to be silent and listen to a “Lollere” preach is certainly outraged by the possibility of a Lollard sermon. “Nay, by my fader soule, that schal he nat!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven alle in the grete God . . . He wolde sowen som di‹culte, Or springen cokkel in our clene corn.” (CT II.1 178, 1 180–83) The speaker here links community to faith—a faith and community that would be split by false preaching, scriptural interpretation that would sow di‹culty and make many of one. If that speaker is female and goes on to tell the fabliau of the wife with the shopping habit, the venal monk, and the cuckolded husband who come together in the Parisian suburb of St. Denis (where the French king’s sacral identity and actual wealth were maintained and protected), the possible ironies of the sequence multiply in a dazzling fashion. By its parodic transformation of biblical symbols, which has the eªect of monetizing all forms of spiritual and communal bonds, the tale does far more than point up the venality of Daun John, the lusty, treacherous monk.127 We are left at the end with the tail, the tally, the tale, all means of acquitting ourselves of our debts: “God us sende / Taillynge ynough unto oure lyves ende” (CT VII.433–34). We are, in fact, left with a thoroughly secularized world, one stripped finally of all sacrality and hence all mystery. In rejecting a Lollard sermon, the unidentified speaker of the endlink to the Man of Law’s Tale has substituted a world whose only stability rests in mercantile exchange, which is no stability at all. Whether the speaker’s target (supposing what is now the Shipman’s Tale was intended to follow) is the profit-oriented and preoccupied husband or the monk who is all too dependent on worldly goods, in its amoral acceptance of merchandising,

127. Theresa Coletti, “The Meeting at the Gate: Comic Hagiography and Symbol in The Shipman’s Tale,” Studies in Iconography 3 (1977): 47–56, and Coletti, “The Mulier Fortis and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 236–49; Gail MacMurray Gibson, “Resurrection as Dramatic Icon in the Shipman’s Tale,” in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. J. P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr. (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 102–12; Thomas Hahn, “Money, Sexuality, Wordplay, and Context in the Shipman’s Tale,” in Chaucer in the Eighties, ed. J. N. Wasserman and R. J. Blanch (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 235–50.


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the tale depicts a bleak world, one stripped of any meaning except the literal. In her rejection of the sacramental basis for marriage in the beginning of her prologue, the Wife of Bath links the tropes of social, household, and sacramental order and goes on to produce a far more complicated performance than the one Chaucer perhaps originally intended for her. Can we use the endlink to the Man of Law’s Tale as a palimpsest that tells us something about his early wish to link prudence, Lollard bashing, and monetization in a sequence that was meant to analyze what Chaucer saw as the real issues before the king? Before returning to the story of the Merciless Parliament, Knighton in his chronicle includes a document that G. H. Martin notes is unique and probably datable to the summer of 1388, when there was a certain amount of popular discontent with the Appellants’ conduct.128 In this document (which, Martin suggests, comes from the political community of the shires), the commons petitions the king, asking him, in eªect, to rule. The petitioners point out the harm that has resulted from dishonor to the crown and the perils facing the church. But the bulk of the document focuses upon the inequities between rich and poor in matters of peace and justice, the ways in which both civil and ecclesiastical o‹cials extort money from the poor, and the terrible burden the “poor commons” suªer from taxation. Noting that Parliament has sat for a long time, it urges Richard to direct its attention to these grievances, to achieve sovereign good government, and to appoint six or eight to see to these perils to the stability of the kingdom so that the king’s honor may be sustained and the people governed in peace. The document exhorts Richard to act in accordance with his regal identity as “nostre treshonure seignur.” After a brief account of peace treaties with the Flemings, Knighton returns to the trials of Richard’s friends. As Martin points out, both the petition to Richard and the discussions with the Flemings probably did not occur in the early spring of 1388, but, in Knighton’s version of the Merciless Parliament, they are placed between the Appellants’ negotiations with the much-weakened Richard in December and January of 1387–88 and the trials of his friends, which took up the spring of 1388. I do not here mean to use Knighton’s sequence as the model for Chaucer. Chaucer is rarely schematic and never, to my mind, simple. If we try to think with him, the movement from the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, to the Melibee, to the endlink, and then to the fabliau raises those issues that either explicitly or im-

128. Martin, ed. and trans., Knighton’s Chronicle, 442–51. I mention this document in Chap. 2.


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plicitly were expressed in accounts of the Merciless Parliament—victimization, authority, instability, justice, sacrality. David Aers has recently argued that the way in which Wyclif “dichotomized Christian discipleship, in the contexts of his ecclesiology and politics, outlines a de-Christianization of the laity” and that “Wyclif could not see that he was substituting a new secular regime for . . . the kingdom of God in the Gospels he revered.”129 Does the very tale that pillories the greedy, lusty monk actually quiz the world toward which Lollardy seems to point? In telling a tale that preempts Lollard sermonizing but nonetheless strips the clergy in the neighborhood of St. Denis of all their authority, denies that marriage might look like anything other than a contractual relationship between two consenting adults, and leaves us in the precincts of the modern shopping mall, does this disruptive female teller become a sort of closet Lollard who does not realize the implications of her tale? Does the tale, especially when linked with the Melibee, argue for a type of authority utterly lacking in its picture of merchant life? That Chaucer wished to retain the connection between the two tales is clear. In fragment VII, though, where both appear, the fabliau comes first, introducing us to a world whose disruptions are fundamental to its values. The reference to Lollardy disappears; the Wife is relocated to join the Friar and the Summoner; the Man of Law loses his tale of counsel and tells one of Custance and her perils. In moving the tales around, Chaucer obscured the devices of social truth telling and preserved his authorial distance. But the concerns of a kingdom where regality had been shattered by the lordly Appellants and sacrality threatened by a now-dead theologian continued to preoccupy a writer who figured and refigured the irresolutions and contradictions of the world in which he lived and whose future he sometimes eerily foresaw. I have played intentionally and not entirely anachronistically with the terms of the georgic, a descriptive noun that did not enter the English language until the seventeenth century, when it began to be used to designate a certain type of agricultural literature. In canto 10 of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser, perhaps for the first time in England, suggested the association between Aristotelian control, husbandry, and nationhood that we can find in the cultural program promulgated by Charles V. In learning from Contemplation that he was stolen by a fairy as an infant, the Red Crosse knight hears his true identity. 129. Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church, 147–48.


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Thence she thee brought into this Faerie lond, And in an heaped furrow did thee hyde, Where thee a Ploughman all vnweeting fond, As he his toylesome teme that way did guyde, And brought thee vp in ploughman state to byde, Whereof Georgos he thee gaue to name130 As Thomas P. Roche notes of this etymology, Spenser here links Red Crosse to the earth through the Greek georgos, but, as St. George, Red Crosse is also a figure for England itself. Thus Langland’s upright and laboring plowman, the husbandman of Greek and Latin poetry, and the figure of an awakening English identity all exist within the story of Red Crosse’s origins. Whereas in Piers Plowman Conscience leaves the world of the poem in order to find Piers, Red Crosse will be sent into the world to labor there for England. Spenser thus manages to fuse two fragments of a tradition that in Chaucer’s England remained disparate. Selfhood and emerging nationhood were not conceived of as inevitably joined. Although Middle English did not employ “georgic” as a generic term, medieval England had a vigorous literature of the household. The discourse of the household, estate, sheepfold, and plot of earth that in France was linked both to productivity and to the sacral authority of the king or the husband was, in England, a literature for a household more commonly concerned with its own productivity and identity and, hence, its own existence under the law and thus in relation to other powers. These literary households can be used to examine a nation that was beginning to imagine itself in terms of language, history, geography, and judicial codes. Chaucer shares with Langland a willingness to avoid creating an artificial order out of contradictions or irresolutions. Here, surely, lies part of their greatness and profundity as poets, for neither is impelled to romanticize or sentimentalize a society whose labor is as furiously productive as its fictional households were fissured. Nor do they oªer as remedy for such fissures a sacral regality that would be immanent in the households of the land. Chaucer, in particular, seems to examine consciously the conditions that make sacrality impossible, suggesting what has been lost, what has been well lost, and what appears to lie ahead. The image of the world projected by Philippe de Mé130. Thomas P. Roche Jr., ed., Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), bk. 1, canto 10, st. 66.


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zières or Roger Dymmok or through the Wilton Diptych cannot be imprinted upon the frieze of the Canterbury tales, whose tellers, all laborers of one kind or another, are as eager for advancement, identifying gestures, secure rights, and futurity as any baron or merchant or civil servant who planned the Auchinleck Manuscript, the Liber Horn, or the Omne bonum.


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Epilogue: The Coin of the Realm

A search for a language of power is, inevitably, a search for the coin of the realm, the currency (symbolic and actual) by which power is understood, valued, described, and analyzed and upon which the current face of power is stamped.1 This book has described that search as it appears in the many texts —chronicle, pictorial, devotional, and literary—of late-fourteenth-century England. These texts themselves constitute a conversation about the figurations of power, a conversation that continued through the beginning of the reign of Henry IV. During these years, Henry sought to justify his seizure of the throne and to establish the terms by which his own reign could be defined. Many of his acts —his grasp of the significance of cultural production; his use of Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, to centralize and normalize ecclesiastical practice; his attempts to stamp out heterodoxy—should be seen as appropriating the terms of sacral kingship promoted in Valois France by Charles V, terms that Richard II could not eªectively translate into England during the last decade of his reign.2 Henry’s father, John of Gaunt, and uncle, Thomas of 1. The pun I would like to make (i.e., the “koine” of the realm) was not possible in medieval England, as “koine” did not enter English until later. For an exploration of the currency of exchange as it relates to medieval poetry, see R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1983). 2. For discussions of Lancastrian constructions of national identity, see Given-Wilson, ed. and trans., Chronicles of the Revolution; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 127–70; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne; and Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 129–58. Of later English sovereigns, Henry VIII and, especially, Elizabeth I had the surest grasp of the ways in which a ruler might employ the tropes of regnal legitimation as a means of creating a religious, cultural, and political identity for an emerging nation.


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Woodstock, seem to have understood a prince’s need to understand and control the languages by which he was to be known and addressed. Yet this book has oªered more than evidence for princely control. It has suggested ways in which those very poets who are necessary to princes create images of power. Such creations are not merely flat reflections of princes but also means by which we can begin to ask the sorts of questions about power that allow us to understand it and our relation to it. By way of ending my exploration of this conversation, I would like to return to three ways of considering princely power that were current during the final years of Richard’s reign. The author of the alliterative A Pistel of Susan, John Gower, and Geoªrey Chaucer each suggest the outlines of their own complex relation to a figuration of power that is also a figuration of community. A Pistel of Susan, as I have suggested, does far more than provide a model for wifely chastity. In sharp distinction to the story to be found in the apocryphal chapter 13 of the Book of Daniel, which is followed closely in the version in Le menagier de Paris, the English poem expands key elements of the story.3 Two elements, in particular, suggest the poet’s careful use of the story to explore a figuration of power that is cast in the language of marriage. Not only does Susan and Joachim’s garden function as an elaborate trope for the household space that is threatened by the judges’ willingness to bend the law to their own desires, but the relationship between Susan and her husband also oªers a picture of marriage whose terms can be assimilated to the contemporary discourse of marriage as a political entity employed by Maidstone in the Concordia, by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, and by Philippe de Mézières. The author of the Pistel adds considerable texture to his narrative by drawing a picture of Joachim that is not present in the biblical account. I suggested in Chapter 3 that Joachim’s almost complacent comfort in an alien city may be related to the portrait of Lot found in the alliterative Cleanness. But where the story of Lot describes his escape from the world of Sodom and his separation from his wife, who turns to look back at her destroyed world, Joachim’s is a husband’s story. Joachim’s wealth cannot protect his wife from incarceration in a penal system whose details are not biblical but recognizably medieval.

3. Peck, ed., Heroic Women, 73–75, also discusses these elaborations. My remarks about A Pistel do not depend upon the date of the poem’s composition, which might be several decades earlier, as Ralph Hanna suggested to me in a private communication. The poem is preserved in five manuscripts. The two earliest—the Vernon and the Simeon—both date from the late fourteenth century (Turville-Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry, 120). In other words, the poem spoke to a set of concerns relevant to the period I discuss here.


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4ei dede hire in a dungon 5er neuer day dewe, While domesmen were dempt 5is dede to declare, Marred in manicles 5at made wer newe, Meteles whiles 5e morwen to middai and mare, In drede, 4er com hir fader so fre With al his a‹nité, 4e prestes sauns pité And ful of falshede. (A Pistel, lines 174–82) The poet here sketches a picture that resonates with more than simple marital treason. The dungeon, the freshly made manacles, and the lack of food suggest far more serious charges, charges leveled at highly placed men like Thomas, duke of Gloucester, Richard, earl of Arundel, or Thomas, earl of Warwick, during the last years of Richard’s reign, when he paid back the Appellants for the Merciless Parliament.4 These events constitute the charges Gower lays at Richard’s feet in book 2 of the Cronica tripertita. I am not arguing that A Pistel is “about” the punishments meted out to these three. Rather, I suggest that its account of unjust imprisonment, a family a‹nity that cannot prevent seizure, false judgment and consequent death, and figures of authority who are patently dishonest and self-interested belongs to the discourse of high treason (or to another level of household, where infidelity also describes a breach in troth). These themes were certainly meaningful to someone like Joan Bohun, mother-in-law of Thomas of Woodstock and Henry of Derby, whose name may appear in the margins of the Simeon manuscript, which contains A Pistel. In this story Joachim is not the accuser. He is the steward of the garden and the helpless husband of his falsely accused wife. In joining the two o‹ces, the author of A Pistel provides a way of asking questions that are central to the search for a language of princely power. It is quite possible to assimilate this poem to the story of the Fall in Genesis: its beautiful garden and its portrait of marital bliss, despair, and then a renewed harmony based upon experience rather than the childlike innocence of the poem’s opening stanzas (which describe Susan as a “child” [line 46]) certainly play with the language of a para4. For a recent discussion of some of these injustices, see Giancarlo, “Murder, Lies, and Storytelling.”


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dise lost and regained. On the other hand, the centrality of law and the legal apparatus —the ways in which Daniel’s adroit use of testimony is opposed to that of the two false judges —locates the garden squarely within a postlapsarian world. The Edenic garden of which Joachim’s garden is a type also has a venerable place in England’s self-description. In the first chapter of his widely known Historia Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon expanded Bede’s influential account in the Historia ecclesiastica of England as a blessed island-garden. This expansion forms one piece of a separate quire inserted into Andrew Horn’s text of the Leges Anglorum in the vast custumal that he gave to the city.5 This quire contains two other important texts: the extracts from Brunetto Latini, discussed in Chapter 1, and William FitzStephen’s late-twelfth-century description of London that served to introduce his life of St. Thomas à Becket.6 FitzStephen follows Bede in describing London as a garden but focuses less upon the eschatology of England’s history than upon London’s position in the world. He describes London as famous for its wealth, wide-ranging trade, salubrious air, Christian religion, strong fortifications, citizens’ honor, and matrons’ chastity. The city he constructs is a site where georgic labor and not bucolic otium reigns —where, like Joachim, the citizens have spacious private gardens; where pastures, meadows, and cornfields are within easy access; where the men are honorable, valiant, and noble; and where “Urbis matronae ipsae Sabinae sunt.” If the matrons of the city are like Sabines, the city might well be a new Rome, well situated, well planted, well defended. He goes on to describe the schools of the city, the types of trade to be found, the Smithfield horse market, the goods that pour in from Arabia, Scythia, Babylon, Egypt, China, France, Russia, and Scandinavia, and the games played by boys and young men, probably echoing Virgil’s description of Rome in the Georgics. FitzStephen ends by praising London’s progeny: Constantine for donating Rome to the pope and then removing himself to Byzantium; the Empress Matilda and Henry III for their magnificence; Thomas for his glorious martyrdom. Thomas, who may well “help us when we are sick” (as Chaucer states), also earned his martyrdom by opposing princely power. The London that FitzStephen describes and that joins Henry of Huntingdon’s ac5. Diane Greenway, ed. and trans., Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon: Historia Anglorum (History of the English People) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 10–13. 6. For the text, see Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae, 2:2–15; William FitzStephen, Norman London, trans. H. E. Butler, essay by Sir Frank Stenton, and intro. F. Donald Logan (New York: Italica Press, 1990), 47–60.


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count of Britain and Brunetto Latini’s portrait of the well-run city is a site whose very identity demands a steward of remarkable judiciousness. What the Joachim of A Pistel would lose with his wife is the intangible identity of their garden, the sign of their marital prosperity and harmony—both of which depend upon her chastity, or upon the “fame” of her chastity. Where Richard of Maidstone in the Concordia employs the tropes of marital infidelity to describe the noble husband (Richard II) taking back his penitent wife (London), the author of the Pistel oªers a scene that is less concerned with presenting a husband as merciful than with showing his perceptiveness and his unwillingness to believe false witness. After she is judged guilty, Susan asks to speak with Joachim (though she does not in the biblical account). The stanza that recounts their meeting resounds with questions that go well beyond the concept of marriage as a strictly defined hierarchy, a concept that we find in the works of Philippe de Mézières. Heo fel doun flat in 5e flore, hir feere whon heo fand, Carped to him kyndeli as heo ful wel cou5e: “Iwis, I wra55ed 5e nevere, at my witand, Nei5er in word ne in werk, in elde ne in 3ou5e.” Heo keuered vp on hir kneos and cussed his hand: “For I am dampned, I ne dar disparage 5i mou5.” Was neuer more serwfuller segge bi se nor bi sande, Ne no soriore siht bi nor5 ne bi sou5; 4o 5are 4ei toke 5e feteres of hire feete, And euere he cussed 5at swete. “In o5er world schul we mete.” Seide he no mare. (A Pistel, lines 248–60) This stanza encapsulates the breadth of the conversations among late-fourteenthcentury English poets. Written in a thirteen-line alliterative stanza that rivals the complexities of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, A Pistel employs language that is used in a diªerent way in Cleanness and Patience: it portrays authority not as wrathful or punitive but as loving and oddly helpless.7 In both Cleanness 7. For remarks about the complex versification of the Pistel and its relation to earlier poems, see Alice Miskimin, ed., Susannah: An Alliterative Poem of the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.:


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and Patience, those who suªer God’s judgment are guilty of disobedience and cry out for a mercy they admit they do not deserve, but here, Susan announces her innocence to a husband who is suªering with her. The pathos of the scene— Susan on the floor in chains, Joachim oªering her love and humanity—is used to a diªerent eªect than such scenes in Cleanness as the drowning of the antediluvian population, where friends and lovers and women and children are parted, or the binding of the man in foul clothes with fetters before being put “Depe in my doungoun” (Cleanness, line 158). Moreover, the scene between Susan and Joachim oªers a radical alternative to scenes we can also find in Chaucer’s works. Where neither Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale nor Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale speaks, Susan is eloquent in her wronged innocence. Griselda swears to Walter that “nevere willyngly, / In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye” (CT IV.362–63). Susan swears that neither in word nor in work has she ever angered Joachim, asserting her blameless life with him. She kisses his hand not as an act of subservience but in recognition that she is judged guilty and will not therefore “disparage” his mouth. Joachim’s sorrow is matched by his unquestioning love: taking the fetters oª her, he kisses her. The picture is one that starkly contrasts with that of the imperious Walter, who allows Griselda to be shamed and who watches her faint at his feet upon discovering her children are there before her. He raises her up in the end, but he has been the one to cast her down. The author of A Pistel describes a husband whose wife and companion is at the mercy of unjust judges. Everything that Joachim thought he held—his wife, his garden, his position in the world—can only be secured through due legal process. Providence may well preserve Susan, but Providence operates through Daniel, the smart and honest lawyer. And Daniel is aroused to action only after Susan has prayed to God in her own defense, which she does just after the scene with her husband. “4ou Maker of Middelert 5at most art of miht, Bo5e 5e sonne and 5e see 5ou sette vppon seuene. Alle my werkes 5ou wost, 5e wrong and 5e riht; Hit is nedful nou 5i names to neuene. Se55e I am deolfolich dampned and to de5 diht, Lord hertelich tak hede and herkne my steuene Yale University Press, 1969), 57–64. I see this poem as gesturing—both formally and thematically— to other English texts.


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So fre. Se55e 5ou mai3t not be sene Wi5 no fleschliche eyene, 4ou wost wel I am clene. Haue merci on me.” (A Pistel, lines 263–73) The language here is arresting in its self-assurance and self-awareness. Susan acknowledges God’s might, his ability to make and unmake—and, consequently, his ability to hear her prayer and to display mercy. She admits her frailties by saying that God knows all her works, “the wrong and the right,” but she insists that of this crime she is “clean.” Her prayer is indeed “heard” by the Holy Ghost, who in turn moves Daniel to her defense. The Susan of A Pistel is neither a passive heroine like Custance nor a patient, silent, and faithful wife like Griselda. Nor has she chosen a life of physical abstinence like Cecilia. She is a woman who takes pleasure in her garden, who enjoys great status with her husband, who normally kisses him on the mouth (not on the hand), and who places the burden of belief upon Joachim and his prior knowledge of her. Joachim’s power is both checked and reinforced by law, and he is saved by his wife’s voice, which spurs Providence to operate through the canniness of Daniel. The Edenic garden is maintained through the eloquence and chastity of its matron and through its lord’s unwillingness to believe what is false. The law, in the person of Daniel, maintains their possession of one another and of their estate. In relation to Maidstone’s advisory picture of husbandly magnificence and mercy and Chaucer’s starkly problematic depiction of husbandly power, the author of A Pistel oªers another model, where order depends less upon a strictly defined hierarchy than upon truth, love, and faith. That model opens up a new way of figuring authority as enmeshed in social responsibilities and relationships. The emphasis is not upon the sacral nature of marriage as articulated by Philippe de Mézières but upon the bonds of intent and history that are forged by husband and wife. Nonetheless, the prosperous garden—the sign and fruit of such a marriage—rests upon a vulnerability as profound as that experienced by Bede’s England or FitzStephen’s London, for the garden demands a steward of keen wisdom, a true husbandman, not an “owner” of rapacious might. We might go further and consider the ways in which the language of marriage that predominates in the poetry of the 1390s was designed to create figurations of power far more complexly companionate than Richard sought to create through texts like the


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Westminster portrait and the Wilton Diptych. Those works, which portray Richard as a young lover, sacral bridegroom, or sanctified youth, cannot admit the sorts of nuanced exchanges about the nature of power that are deliberately prompted by the Concordia, the Canterbury Tales, or A Pistel of Susan. Both the iconic portrait and diptych are statements about Richard’s kingship; the literary texts are pieces of a conversation whose very language forces a new set of questions. To the end of his career, Gower participated in this conversation. There are a number of indications throughout his work that his figuring of power was firmly tied to his estimation of his own role as a poet to princes. R. F. Yeager has argued that Gower chose to represent himself in the Confessio Amantis as Arion because of the classical musician’s association with universal peace, with the ability to create harmony between lord and subject.8 The prince may wield power, but princely power rests upon the poet, the world’s fool, who can charm and instruct and is prepared to speak the truth. Gower’s self-presentation has an even more trenchant point. Despite a use of encomium that can appear dog-like, Gower’s praise underlines the poet’s real power—his ability to make the prince. Throughout his writing life, Gower recycled earlier poems by rededicating to Henry what had once been addressed to Richard. Rather than write these rededications oª as examples of crass toadying, let us focus on the patterns that emerge from his use of his own works. The Trentham manuscript, prepared for Henry IV, epitomizes Gower’s understanding of the modes of princely address.9 The manuscript contains the English poem in praise of Henry IV now known as “In Praise of Peace,” followed by the Latin poem beginning “Rex celi deus.” After these two poems, the Trentham manuscript features a French and Latin dedication to Henry IV of Gower’s Cinkante Balades. This is the sole copy of a fifty-poem sequence capturing the formalized conversations between a lover and his lady that vocalize the themes of power and powerlessness, dedication and betrayal, and rational and irrational love to be found in other works of courtly play and in the poetry of the earlier days of Richard’s court. John Fisher has linked these ballades (which he dates to 8. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic, 241. See also Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, 22–23, and Saul, “Farewell to Arms.” A crucial concept here is Middleton’s articulation of a public poetry in “Idea of Public Poetry.” 9. For descriptions of the Trentham ms, see Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, 1:lxxxv, and Fisher, John Gower, 71–72. On the state of the Gower manuscripts and the degree to which they indicate scribal involvement, see Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity.”


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before the Confessio) to the conventions of the London Puy, which Gower would have known through the city traditions memorialized in Andrew Horn’s books.10 After the Cinkante Balades, the Trentham manuscript contains the Traitié pour ensampler les amantz marietz, the series of ballades that Gower appended to the Confessio and appears with it in some manuscripts. The Traitié, like the earlier anonymous Eschez amoureux (see Chapter 4), collapses the fictions of love into a praise of marriage, which is allied with the greater harmony of the created world and the communal harmony that emerges from the lawful containment of base desire. The sin here castigated is adultery because it violates the sacrality of marriage and unleashes appetite. The Traitié concludes with Latin verses, probably written much later than the body of the work, that note Gower’s own late marriage. In these last verses, he assimilates marriage to custom. The one regulates the individual body; the other, the communal. The collection ends with a Latin poem to Henry, “Henrici quarti,” written in the first year of Henry’s reign, when Gower’s eyesight was beginning to fail.11 Fisher has shrewdly described this manuscript as “a collection bringing together samples of Gower’s poetry in all three languages to make a complimentary volume for the King,”12 but the manuscript does not so much compliment as articulate the very nature of Henry’s power. Rather than employ the intensely sacramental allegory of marriage that Philippe de Mézières uses to depict sacral kingship (and hence to construct a particular type of community), Gower suggests that what is at stake for Henry is far more contractual than sacral. The opening poem, “In Praise of Peace,” establishes this perspective by recalling Henry’s duties to God and people. Paramount among them is the creation of peace, which is not simply “the chief of al the worldes welthe” (line 78). The pes is as it were a sacrement Tofore the god, and schal with wordes pleine Withouten eny double entendement Be treted, for the trouthe can noght feine; Bot if the men withinne hemself be veine, 10. Fisher, John Gower, 78–83. 1 1. Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, provides the texts of “In Praise of Peace” (3:481–94) and “Rex celi deus” (3:550–54; see also 4:416), the Cinkante Balades (1:335–78), and the Traitié (1:379–92, 470–72). For “Henrici quarti,” which exists in later forms in other manuscripts, see 4:365–66, 419–20. 12. Fisher, John Gower, 72.


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The substance of the pes may noght be trewe, Bot every dai it changeth uppon newe. (lines 309–15) Gower’s emphasis here is upon the sacral nature of peace, which may only be administered by a “plain” man, one who does not speak with double intent. The stanza at once criticizes Richard for his lack of truth and puts Henry himself upon warning. If a man is not “true,” peace, no matter how great a good, will not hold because its substance will not be true. Gower, who loathed the Lollards, here positions himself very close to Wyclif ’s own views on sacramental e‹cacy: an untrue man cannot eªect sacramental change. The king here is neither the object of the sacrament (as he is in the French coronation ritual) nor its priest (as Jean Golein suggests in the Traité du sacre). Instead, he is its worthy servant. The poem ends with Gower noting that Henry has “ever yet” demonstrated his mercifulness, urging him to keep peace: “So schal the cronique of thi pacience / Among the seintz be take into memoire” (“In Praise,” lines 369–70). He continues: And to thin erthli pris, so as y can, Which everi man is holde to commende, I, Gower, which am al thi liege man, This lettre unto thin excellence y sende, As y which evere unto my lives ende Wol praie for the stat of thi persone In worschipe of thi sceptre and of thi throne. (lines 372–78) This penultimate stanza is as delicately provisional as Chaucer’s Clerk’s nod of obedience to Harry Bailey. Gower acknowledges his duty to commend his prince, his feudal relationship to him, but also suggests his own agency. He “sends” the letter to Henry and, until the end of his life, he will pray for Henry because he honors the symbols of the o‹ce, the scepter and the throne. He follows this poem with “Rex celi deus,” reworking a poem he had once addressed to Richard for Henry. Gower does not say that he would withdraw his praise and alter his record of Henry’s reign should the king turn away from peace, but the record of Gower’s own rewriting of earlier works is pointed enough. The Traitié “revises” the Confessio, or highlights the lessons emphasized at the end


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of the Confessio, by insisting that the language that ought to define relation is not petitionary desire but marital concord. Placed in this manuscript just after the Cinkante Balades, the Traitié substitutes the language of exemplary history for lovers’ plaints. Gower’s use of the stories of true and untrue love locates the lover in history, not in a timeless realm of hope and grief. History is the preserve of the poets who then make the history that we read. Gower’s use of the term “cronique” (line 369) in the “Praise of Peace” captures the sense of poetic agency that also drives the Cronica tripertita. The Cronica was written late in Gower’s career and appended to the Vox clamantis, the long Latin poem he worked on during the late 1370s and early 1380s.13 The Vox clamantis, in which Gower adopts the prophetic voice to recount a dire vision he had of England’s moral state, is addressed to the young King Richard, whom he praises by way of advising him. An early form of the poem “Rex celi deus,” asking that God guide and care for his youthful king, constituted book 6, chapter 18 of the Vox. In later versions of the Vox clamantis, Gower replaced this with a chapter detailing the duties of the just king; he then revised “Rex celi deus” so that it celebrated Henry and used it as a conclusion for the Cronica tripertita. The earlier version of chapter 18 of the Vox clamantis, which is erased and written over in four manuscripts and preserved in five, depicts Richard as young and gloriously handsome, as a figure of magnificent rule, holding shining scepters of gold, riding in triumphant splendor behind four snow-white horses. The iconic portrait belongs to a type of princely address employed by Chaucer in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, by Maidstone in the Concordia, or by those who planned the Westminster portrait and the Wilton Diptych, where youthful beauty is an attribute of kingly power. The revised and expanded poem that concludes the Cronica tripertita praises Henry not for his beauty but for his piety, for his ability to cleanse, amend, and renew the past and to inaugurate a new future by a reign that shuns avarice. Both versions of this poem assimilate English kingship to Roman imperium in ways that suggest that Gower’s own self-presentation was intimately bound up with his understanding and deployment of the languages of power.14 In the first version, Gower praises Richard as a new Augustus. He wishes that the pub13. For both texts, see Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, vol. 4, and Eric W. Stockton, trans., The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962). 14. See G. K. Coªman, “John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 69 (1954): 953–64, for a reading of Gower’s estimate of his own advisory capacities.


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lic praise Augustus had from Rome would be renewed for Richard and hopes that the empire of “our leader” (“nostri ducis,” VC 6.1 181*) will expand. The republican ideals of the city of London—ideals that inform FitzStephen’s description of the city as well as Andrew Horn’s collection of texts —seem absent from Gower’s early encomium, though he goes on to instruct the young Richard as one might not dare to instruct Augustus. In the poem “Rex celi deus,” Gower retains the reference to Augustus’s public praise but hopes that Henry will be memorialized in “gestis Anglia” (line 40). He prays that Henry may be given the strength to wield the scepter, that he may stay magnanimous and maintain the realm, and that Christ may expand the empire for him and increase his years. Gower shifts the emphasis of these lines toward Henry’s own responsibility for imperium. The warning to Henry of his stewardship precedes the wish that Christ will increase empire and years. In the early version, the wishes for Richard are preceded by the wish that he be granted a firm hold on the scepter and that the day will come when the beautiful king will go forth behind four snow-white horses. The reference here to Ovid’s Ars amatoria, in which Ovid sketches the scene of a triumph as an example of a good occasion for seduction, at once establishes a festive tone for Gower’s flattery, compliments Richard’s beauty and youthfulness, and looks forward to Richard’s vanquishing a disordered world.15 The prophecy for Henry is less magically endowed: it oªers Henry immortality in English poetry if he earns it. That immortality is granted by the poet. The anonymous Latin poem that compares Gower to Virgil suggests something of Gower’s own sense of his relationship to princely power.16 The poem, described as having been sent to Gower by a philosopher, appears in five Gower manuscripts, including the Fairfax and Staªord manuscripts. The poem praises Gower for taking unto himself the meters of the Aeneid, Bucolics, and Georgics, for seeking to win for himself the praise Virgil has surrendered. Though Gower’s three long poems do not appear to imitate Virgil’s three, his mastery of French, Latin, and English poetry marks him as one who has translated the Roman poetic achievement into the languages of contemporary Christian England. The anonymous Latin poem was not only not lost but was well copied and preserved, so the analogy must have been important either to Gower or to the scribes responsible for publishing his works. But 15. Stockton, trans., Major Latin Works of John Gower, cites the Ars amatoria (1.214) as the source for this image. 16. See Macaulay, ed., Complete Works of Gower, 4:361. Fisher, John Gower, 3–4, also briefly discusses this poem.


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where Virgil sang the gains and losses of Roman imperium, ending in the founding of Rome itself under “pius Aeneas,” Gower oversaw the making of another sort of state founded by Henry, his “Rex pie” (“Rex celi deus,” line 10). The many references to Henry’s piety in Gower’s late poetry seem designed to assimilate him to Aeneas but also to warn him that his success in the future depends upon his attention to the verities of the past. In the Cronica tripertita, where he attempts to build a theory of rule that could justify the realities of England’s political life, Gower presents the prince as a necessary reader of the text of history, a text Richard ignored and the very text that he now oªers to Henry. The first two books recount recent history. The first is an account of the events of the Merciless Parliament that reads the acts of the Appellants as oªering Richard a lawful lesson in the laxities of his own early rule. The second describes Richard’s illegal moves against Arundel, Gloucester, and Warwick, using the coded language also employed by the author of Mum and the Sothsegger, wherein Arundel is the noble Horse, Gloucester (the swan knight) is the Swan, and Warwick, the beleaguered Bear. The third book of the Cronica tripertita tells the story of Henry’s own accession to the throne. Because Gower frames Richard’s faults in terms of his abuse of England’s laws, this third book is a legal justification for Henry’s seizure of the throne. It notes Richard’s use of blank charters, his exile of Bolingbroke, and his attempt to take control of the Lancastrian inheritance after the death of John of Gaunt. Once Henry accepts Richard’s surrender, Gower focuses on the legal process of acclaiming Henry king. He describes a process17 whereby the court (“curia,” 3.295) relinquishes Richard to Henry’s justices. Then Henry, the glory of the English and the best of good men, is elected king (“fuit electus regno,” 3.299). Though Gower presents the Lancastrian version of events whereby Richard abdicates the crown, his language points less to Henry’s divinely appointed right to the throne than to his election to it because of his worthiness. The final sections of this third book of the Cronica tripertita attempt to straddle the ideological di‹culties occasioned by the deposition. Gower indicates Henry’s right to the throne by succession, election, and peaceful conquest. He tells the Lancastrian story of Richard’s death from sadness and starvation.18 More important, he presents Henry as aªectionately bound to London, as acclaimed by the

17. See Cronica tripertita, bk. 3, lines 284–307. 18. For the best account of the Lancastrian version of the deposition or abdication in relation to contemporary texts, see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, chap. 4.


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people, as far worthier than Richard. Unlike Richard, Henry is not rapacious but peaceful, merciful, and attentive to due legal process. Gower ends with the warning that this “chronicle of Richard” should be read as a lesson for rulers: his honor, glory, and praise have disappeared because he was proud. As the figure who confers praise, Gower concludes not with a depiction of regal sacrality but with a reminder of the lasting power poets have to create the images of kings. “Qualis erat vita, cronica stabit ita”: such was his life, so stands the chronicle. Having eschewed the role of the lover, Gower assumes that of the Virgilian sage, commenting upon the rise and fall of empires, the deeds and sins of princes. Like the city of London and the Parliament of the realm, Gower holds the king accountable for his own worthiness. This is not to say that Gower is not a man of his time—he certainly does not advocate modern systems of popular government—but he does oªer Henry a figuration of rule that is as squarely republican as any to be found in Horn’s books. Where Gower can seem to become a virgin all over again in his enthusiasm for Henry and the new age on England’s horizon, Chaucer casts a cooler eye on what were the last events of his own life. I have used Chaucer as an interlocutor throughout this book, and it seems fitting to end with him, with his perceptions of princes and poets and the furnishings of power. Two of his short poems, “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” suggest his ironic appraisal of the shifting languages of power. These two poems cannot be dated with any certainty but are generally ascribed to the 1390s; certainly the “Lenvoy” addressed to Henry that closes “The Complaint” is among the latest of Chaucer’s poems.19 In both poems, Chaucer begins by playing with the terms of lovers’ rhetoric but ends by indicating his weariness with what is now an irrelevant mode. “Lenvoy . . . a Scogan” epitomizes many of the concerns discussed in Chapter 1, particularly the frustrations of serving in the court of love. Chaucer aªectionately chides Scogan—who must be Henry Scogan, a squire in the king’s household, landowner, poet, and tutor to the sons of Henry IV—for giving up his lover’s suit. He writes, “Swich thing as in the lawe of love forbode is, / That, for thy lady sawgh nat thy distresse, / Therfore thow yave hir up at Michelmesse?” (lines 17–19).20 He accuses Scogan of so upsetting Venus by this act that her tears 19. For remarks about dating, see The Riverside Chaucer’s explanatory notes. 20. For Scogan, see G. L. Kittredge, “Henry Scogan,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 1 (1892): 109–17; Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer: Life-Records, 500, 502; The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1086.


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are likely to drown everyone in “this deluge of pestilence” (line 14). Though he chastises Scogan for his unrealistic expectation that his lady would notice and pity his distress, Chaucer signals his own awareness that lovers’ labors are but barterings. He worries that, because of Scogan’s inattentions, Cupid will turn against them all: “Than shal we for oure labour have no mede” (line 33). The word “mede,” or reward, is, of course, charged with associations that Langland drew upon in his portrait of Lady Meed, who demands courtship in order to reward with favor. He then describes himself in terms Gower also uses in the closing section of the Confessio Amantis, as too old for making lover’s rhymes. Chaucer’s muse “rusteth in my shethe stille in pees” (line 39), an image that links rhetorical prowess to sexual vigor. After the final line (“Take every man hys turn, as for his tyme,” line 42), Chaucer closes with an “envoy” that melds the language of worthy Ciceronian friendship with that of commodified love. Scogan, that knelest at the stremes hed Of grace, of alle honour and worthynesse, In th’ende of which strem I am dul as ded, Forgete in solytarie wildernesse— Yet Scogan, thenke on Tullius kyndenesse; Mynne thy frend, there it may fructyfye! Far-wel, and loke thow never eft Love dyªye. (lines 43–49) This stanza is perfectly poised between dignified utterance and festive play. The stream’s head of grace, which recalls the language of the Reeve and the Host in the Canterbury Tales, provides Chaucer with his image for time; Scogan kneels at its head, Chaucer dully at its end. This stream also metaphorically extends Venus’s flood of tears, a flood that Scogan has caused by his skepticism. By positioning Scogan as kneeling at the stream’s head, Chaucer (with what degree of reflexive irony we cannot know) plants him in the petitionary stance of the lover or the courtier, despite his impatience with love’s posturing. Chaucer then asks him to recall Cicero, to remember his friend in ways that may “fructify,” asking him never again to defy love. If Chaucer here seems to redefine love as Ciceronian friendship, he also suggests that someone who still kneels at the stream’s head may help someone who is “as ded” at its end. Scogan may thus channel water to Chaucer’s wilderness! Is this the personified Love, the Cupid of the Legend of Good Women, who is also to be found in the Boke of Cupid? In suggesting Sco-


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gan’s weariness with lover’s talk as it may aªect his own chances of success, Chaucer seems to hint at concerns that belong to courtiers rather than to lovers. The careful public tone of the poem, together with the statement that “never erst Scogan blamed for his tonge” (line 21), suggests a recognition that men other than Chaucer understood the necessity for a language of address and used that language ironically and impatiently among themselves. Chaucer is blunter—and probably older—in his “Complaint . . . to His Purse.”21 The poem uses the language of love to describe a need for money. The purse, like a fickle lady, is “light”; Chaucer, like a sorrowful lover, is “heavy.” Like lovers of whom he has written, Chaucer lacks his “lyves lyght,” his “quene of comfort,” his “hertes stere.” In describing the need for money in the language of love, Chaucer inevitably points up the underlying mercantilism of a world where everything—even a metaphor—has a price. Moreover, in attaching to this poem about the desire for money an “envoy” to Henry IV, he signals a shift in the very terms of princely address. O conquerour of Brutes Albyon, Which that by lyne and free eleccion Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sende, And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende, Have mynde upon my supplication. (“Complaint,” lines 22–26) In describing Henry as “conquerour,” Chaucer speaks a truth Henry chose to mu›e in fictions of Richard’s abdication of power. He nods to his princely lineage. The term “free eleccion” is slippery, too. Does Chaucer here mean to indicate Henry’s own freely elected will to become king, or the fact that he was freely elected? Either reading is a long way from acclaiming him as an anointed king. Like Gower, Chaucer says that Henry “may” amend England’s ills, but he ends by asking Henry to be mindful of his own supplication. The purse that should hold the coin of the realm is empty: fill it. If we must use the language of love in the service of the self, let us do so. I am not suggesting that Chaucer did not use this poem to renew the annuity he had received from Richard II, but the terms he used, in their grace and humor, nonetheless signal his awareness 21. For a reading of the last stanza of this poem that locates it within the concerns of the Lancastrian claims to the throne, see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 88–92.


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that the language of the world he lived in as an old man was not that of the world in which he had started out. Poets, like lovers, search for patronage and furnish ladies or lords with the very terms of their power. And Chaucer had captured in his tales of Canterbury a world that now belonged to the merchant who traded in those very coins, stamped with the king’s image, that held together “Brutes Albyon.” Among the works of these three authors, the Wilton Diptych, if we could insert it here, seems no less magnificent—but out of place and out of date, an attempt to create a language for English kingship that, as in France, aligned power with sacral authority. The Wilton Diptych presents its viewer with complex images that describe the king in relation to a symbolic and historical reality. It does not oªer the viewer a choice as to whether he a‹rms that reality. Instead, it takes belief as an inevitable consequence of the picture itself. Similarly, by likening the French coronation to the mass, Jean Golein forecloses a whole set of questions about power, authority, and belief that are fundamental to the English texts I have discussed throughout this book. Those questions are perhaps most explicit in the works of John Gower; they are most obliquely voiced by Chaucer. Even an author like the Gawain-poet, whom I would describe as the most enmeshed in a system of patronage, creates poems that examine and subtly deconstruct the presumptions upon which power is based. This book does not end with a resolution, because there can be none—only a lead into another story, one inevitably fabricated with details borrowed from the one I have attempted to tell in bits and pieces. But the stories comprise far more than events, as I hope this book has made clear. Stories are made of language, and language is the stockin-trade of poets who, as lovers or merchants, oªer princes images of power they may or may not recognize. If Richard chose to produce himself as a young bridegroom and simultaneously had his e‹gy prepared as a sagacious adult, if John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock sought to present themselves as figures of power, wealth, piety, and intelligence, the poets who “belonged” to them engaged in conversations that rewrote the history (or the lessons) of power. Chaucer has the last word, because he presented what I have called a “conversation” as multiple conversations among persons of various degrees, each of whom has a position upon and a solution for a world their maker knew was headed back to the Tabard, become by now a franchise, before achieving “Jerusalem celestial.”


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Index

Abraham, 201, 205, 208 Absalom, 170 Adam of Usk, x Aelred of Rievaulx, 1 12 Aeneas, 352 Aers, D., xii, xiii, 68, 70, 120 n. 124, 140, 199, 227 n. 180, 336 Ainsworth, P., 52 Albertus Magnus, 268, 293 Alceste, 17, 20, 23–24, 37, 190, 269 Aldgate, 5, 187, 214–16, 223, 252 Alexander, J. J. G., 301–2 alliterative poetry, 251, 255, 260 Ancrene Wisse, 271 Anne of Bohemia, 20, 25, 1 15–16, 125, 134, 137, 177, 180–81, 192, 228, 229 n. 188, 262 Anselm, St., De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio, 44 Antenor, 8, 10, 49 Appellants, x, 25, 40–41, 53, 69, 75, 100, 104, 106–8, 1 10, 1 18, 123, 144, 147, 168, 170, 173, 176, 190–91, 210–1 1, 214, 261, 332– 33, 335–36, 341, 351 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 28, 81, 85, 281, 283 Aquitaine, 1 16, 171, 173, 181, 261–62 Aristotelian household economy, 89–90, 266, 275 Aristotelian thought, 28–31, 35, 81, 88–89, 101, 290–91, 292, 300, 325, 330, 336 Aristotle, xi, 28–29, 31–33, 82, 87–88, 91, 121, 123, 135, 266–68, 290–92 Economics (pseudo-Aristotle), 89, 268 Ethics, 89 Armitage-Smith, S., 171, 184 Articles of Deposition, x Arundel, Richard Fitzalan, 4th earl of, 102, 1 10 n. 97, 341

Arundel, Thomas, 1 10 n. 97, 130, 172, 176–78 Arundel family, 135, 176 Ashwardby, John, 189 Athelston, 317 Auchinleck Manuscript, 303, 308–9, 31 1–16, 318–19, 321, 327, 338 Augustine, St., 88, 99, 226, 253–54 Badby, William, 188 Ball, John, 319 Barron, C. M., xiii, 1 16, 168, 172 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 87, 292, 293, 300, 323 Baswell, C., 266 n. 2 Battle Abbey Roll, 309, 320 Bealknap, Robert, 41 Bean, J. M. W., 181 n. 45, 250 Beauchamp, Sir John, 105 Bede 342, 345 bees, 297–99, 300, 323–24 Bedford, John, Duke of, 84, 292 n. 53 Benedict, St., 77, 295 Bennett, M. J., xiii, 181, 197, 209–10, 251 Benoit de St. Maure, 6 Berkeley, Thomas, 29, 147 Bernard, St., 226, 259 n. 251 Bernard, pseudo, 258–60 Berners, James, 105 Bevis of Hampton, 315 Bhattacharji, Santha, 240 “Bible of Richard II, The,” 125 Binski, P., 1 1 1 n. 100, 1 13–14 Bishop, I., 246 n. 223 Blamires, A., 332 Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, 182–83, 185– 87, 192–93, 196, 215, 220, 224, 229, 231, 251 Bloch, Marc, 80, 85 Bloomfield, M. W., 197


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[388] Boccaccio, Giovanni, 4–6, 1 1–15, 62–64, 66, 71–72, 227 Boethius, 42–44, 48, 77 n. 4 Bohun family, 213 Bohun manuscripts, 184, 214, 221, 226 n. 178 Bolingbroke, Henry of. See Henry IV Bond, Gerald, 55, 56 Boutillier, Jean, La somme rurale, 90, 268 Bowers, J., 197, 227–28, 232 n. 193 Bracton, Henry de, 306 Braybrooke, Robert, 192–93 Brembre, Nicholas, 40–41, 50, 104 Bressie, R., 42 Brie, Jean de, 90 Bon Berger, Le, 268, 291–94, 301 Briggs, C. F., 29 n. 49 Brown, M., 136 n. 151 Bruges, 1, 4, 6, 78 Brunetto Latini, 28, 32–34, 36–38, 57, 88, 94, 192, 343–44 Burgundy, 166, 280–81 Burley, Simon, 29, 41, 52, 69 n. 123, 104–5, 1 10, 1 16, 176, 214 n. 137 Burns, J. H., 35 Camille, M., 138, 301–2 Candlemas, 250 canons of cathedrals, 200–205 Capgrave, John, 184 Carlin, M., 224 n. 170 Carlisle Cathedral, 253 Carmelites, 188, 193, 208, 220 Catto, J., 36, 58 Chandos, Herald, 173 Charles V, xi, 1, 4, 21, 29–30, 76, 78–87, 90–95, 97, 99–100, 121, 124, 126, 129–30, 132, 135, 137, 222, 261, 265, 266–68, 270, 272, 275–76, 280–81, 289, 291–95, 300–302, 304, 309, 321, 336, 340 Charles VI, 1, 82–84, 93, 95, 129, 131–32, 134, 272, 276, 289 n. 50 Chaucer, Geoffrey, xii, 1–5, 10–1 1, 16, 18–20, 23–24, 26–27, 37, 39–42, 44, 47–48, 51, 58–59, 61–62, 69, 73, 75, 99, 1 14, 1 18, 170, 179, 183, 185–88, 193, 209, 21 1–12, 250, 265, 303, 307–9, 313–16, 321–22, 337, 341, 343, 345–46, 353, 356 and the georgic, 330 “L’envoy a . . . Scogan,” 352–54 LGW, 17, 19–25, 139, 190, 236, 269, 333, 350, 353

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Index lost works, 244 PF, 5, 1 1, 18–19, 61–62, 125, 324–25 Tr, x, 5–10, 46, 49, 53–55, 62, 72, 139, 141, 249; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61 54; Hector 8–10, 49; Pandarus, 6–8, 10, 49, 53, 59 Works: ABC, 186 Boece, 42, 313 BD, 61–62, 183–84, 228, 229, 231, 232, 254 “Complaint to his Purse,” 353, 355 Canterbury Tales, 139, 317, 324–27, 331; Fragment VII, 144–46, 336; Cecilia, 345; Clerk, 348; Custance, 344–45; Diomede 6, 46, 62; Griselda, 345; Harry Bailey, 140–41, 145, 317, 328–30, 332–33, 348; Man of Law, 333; Squire, 315; Wife of Bath, 66, 71; Parson, 254 Tales: ClT, 70, 145, 231, 285–88, 327, 344 CYT, 140 FranT, 62–69, 72–73 GP, 67, 139–40, 203, 206, 212 KnT, 1 1–16, 327; Thebes 12–13, 15, 327; Theseus, 12–15, 66, 70, 100 ManT, 21, 140–41, 324 Mel, x, 39, 123, 145, 190–91, 275, 327, 331–33, 335–36 MilT, 62 MLPrologue, 333 MLT, 15, 314 MLT (Endlink), 331–32, 335–36 NPT, 142–44, 146–47 ParT, 331 ShT, 145–46; 332, 334 SNT, 285 Thop, 146, 255, 317 WBPr T, 331, 332, 335 Chevalerie de la Passion Jhesu Crist, La, 130 children, 89–90, 215, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 246, 247, 248, 249, 269, 271, 325 chivalry, 10, 15, 59, 78, 1 14, 130, 132–34, 138, 141, 146, 173–76, 188, 210–11, 213, 222, 290, 318 Christina of Markyate, 230 Christine de Pisan, 30, 185, 292–93, 280 Book of the Body Politic, The, 293 Book of the City of Ladies, 295 Livre des fais et bonne meurs du sage roy Charles V, Le, 30, 88, 292–93 Cicero, 33, 36, 55, 189, 324, 353 Clanchy, M., 55, 183


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Index

Page 389

[389]

Clanvowe, John, x, 2–3, 16, 18–25, 27, 37, 40–42, 44, 50–51, 54–55, 59–60, 73, 75, 100, 1 19, 188 190, 353 Clarke, M. V., 106, 21 1 Clifford, Sir Lewis, 54, 100, 136 clothing, 84, 127, 199, 205, 206, 277, 286 College of the Newarke, 220, 229 colleges of canons, 200–201 Constance of Castile, duchess of Lancaster, 229 n. 188, 262 conventual enclosure, 238, 242 Copeland, Rita, 76 n. 2, 77 n. 4, 96 n. 56 Coopland, G. W., 137 Corbichon, Jean, 292 coronation, 76, 80–82, 84, 86–88, 94, 1 13, 1 15– 17, 126–27, 138, 307 French, 349, 356 Coronation Book of Charles V, 82, 83, 84 Courcelle, P., 253 Courtney, William, bishop of London, 95 Crane, S., 66 n. 1 15, 303, 317 n. 105 Crescenzi, Pietro, Liber ruralium commodarum, 90, 268, 291–92, 305 Creton, Jean, 127 n. 136 Cronin, H. S., 124 Cupid, 17, 19–24, 60, 190, 353

Edward III, 3, 5, 34–35, 57, 76, 78–80, 93–94, 98, 115, 123, 126, 128, 166, 181–82, 202–4, 213, 224, 252 Edward, prince of Wales (the Black Prince), 5, 79, 94, 1 17, 128, 166, 173, 182, 204 court, 182 Eleanor de Bohun, duchess of Glouscester, 213, 216, 220–21, 223–24, 226, 227, 231, 233, 244 n. 218, 246, 247 n. 226, 257 Eleanor of Provence, 1 13 Elizabeth I, 1 18 Elizabeth de Burgh, 224 Eschez amoureux, 288–89, 348 estate management, 291, 305–6 Estoire de Saint Aedward le Roi, La, 1 13 Eucharist, 85, 87, 98–99, 101, 107, 128, 135, 137, 140, 177, 200, 281, 287 Évart de Conty, 289

Daniel, 208, 256, 279, 344–45 D’Avray, D. L., 313 n. 98 Dean, J., 319 n. 108 De quadripartita regis specie, 121–23 Degaré, 315 Deschamps, Eustache, 289 n. 50 Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk, 222 Dialogue between a Secular and a Friar, 221 Dialogus inter militem et clericum, 222 Diss, Walter, 188 dit de Fauvain, Le, 94 Donne, John, 195–96 Doyle, A. I., 255, 257 Dream of Scipio, 18, 324 DuBoulay, F. R. H., 176 Duby, George, 55–57 Duggan, H., 251 Durandus, William, 86–87, 283 Dymmok, Roger, 124–29, 338

Galpin, S. J., 289 gardens, 1 1, 66, 232–34, 236–38, 243–44, 246, 249, 253, 255–57, 270, 282, 289, 302, 320, 323, 341–46 Gascony, 182 Gawain-poet, xi, 37, 167, 188, 196, 343; Pearl manuscript, 251–54, 308 Cleanness, 198–209 254, 256–57, 340; Noah, 208 Gawain, 31, 58–59, 103, 183, 209, 211, 213, 222, 225, 248 n. 231 Patience, 209 Pearl, 213–60; illustrations, 252, 254 georgic, xii, 265, 267, 294–95, 300–301, 302, 322, 323, 328, 330, 336, 343 Genet, J.-P. 1 18–19, 121 n. 126, 123 n. 129 Gerard of Lièges, De Doctrina Cordis, 301 Giles of Rome, 28–30, 32, 34–35, 81, 88, 94, 226–27, 277–78 Given-Wilson, Chris, xiii Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of, xi, 68–69, 72, 75, 100, 102, 106, 109–10, 136, 165, 175, 176, 193, 210, 213–15, 216, 218– 23, 227, 230, 231, 243, 247, 257, 259 n. 251, 260–62, 265, 340–41, 350, 355

Eberle, P., 125 Edward I, 1 14, 215 Edward II, 34, 57–58, 76, 94, 103, 1 14–15, 1 17, 216, 304, 307, 319–21

Favent, Thomas, 109–10, 1 1 1 n. 97 Ferster, J., 32, 123 Fisher, J., 347–48 FitzRalph, Richard, Archibishop of Armagh, 96 FitzStephen, William, 342, 345 Frantzen, A., 205 n. 1 15 Froissart, Jean, 52, 58, 109, 174, 184, 213, 219


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[390] Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of, (continued) books, 226 inventory of goods, 225–26 and Pearl, 213–51 Order of the Passion, 222 piety, 225, 244–45 Golden Legend, 227 Golein, Jean, Traité du Sacre, 82, 84–87, 349, 356 Gollancz, I., 227 Goodman, A., xiii, 171, 176, 196, 208, 213, 222, 226 n. 177, 249 n. 232, 261 Gower, John, x, 2–3, 9, 1 1, 20–23, 47–51, 54–55, 58–60, 65, 75, 79 n. 7, 1 18, 147, 170, 250, 265, 340, 352, 354–55 CA, x, 2, 9, 16–17, 21, 25–27, 31, 3542, 44, 49, 59–61, 73, 123, 168, 184–85, 192, 346, 354 CinkBal, 346, 349 CronTr, 341, 349, 351–52 “Hen. quar.,” 347 n. 1 1 “Praise of Peace,” 346–49 “Rex celi deus,” 349–51 Traitié, 347–48 Trentham manuscript, 346–47 Vox, 41, 47, 349 Grandes Chroniques, 82–83, 88 Granson, Oton de, 188, 248 n. 231, 254 Green, R. F., 53, 72 Griselda, 66, 70, 278–79, 282–83, 287, 315, 327 Grosseteste, Robert, 305 Guichard-Tesson, F., 289 Hali Meidhad, 242 Hanna, R., xii-xiii, 251, 340 n. 3 Harrowing of Hell, 312 Hedeman, A. D., 83, 88 Henry, Duke of Lancaster, 182 Livre de Seyntz Medicines, Le, 207 Henry II, 1 12, 303 Henry III, 1 1 1–16, 343 Henry IV, xii, 26, 27, 31, 38–39, 53, 1 1 1, 166–68, 170–74, 172, 177, 178, 181–82, 213–14, 216, 227, 229, 257, 260–62, 323, 339, 341, 346– 52, 354 and cultural production, 184–85 as an Appellant, 106, 176, 210, 261 expedition, 174–76 Henry of Huntingdon, 191, 342 Henry V, 219 Higden, Ranulf, Polychronicon, 42, 221–22

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Index Hildegard of Bingen, 238 n. 203, 239, 242 Hilton, Walter, 244 n. 218 Hoccleve, Thomas, 54, 185, 257 Horn, Andrew, 34–36, 57–58, 191–92, 303–4, 306–9, 342, 347, 350, 352 Horstmann, C., 258 household, xi, 29, 251 Hudson, A., 96, 128 Hugh of St. Victor, 283–84 Humphrey de Bohun, 213, 226 n. 177, 258 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 186 Hundred Years War, ix, 4, 79 n.7, 80, 262, 276 Isabel, daughter of Thomas of Woodstock, 214–16, 218–19, 227, 231 Isabella of France, 306 Isabella Rule, 216 Jaeger, S., 55–56 Jean de Brie, Le Bon Berger, 268, 291–94, 301 Jeanne de Bourbon, 83–84, 91, 271 Joan de Bohun, 230, 234, 245, 257–58, 314, 341 Joan of Kent, 100, 102 n. 69, 136, 193 John of Bridlington, 227 n. 178 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, xi, 1, 4–6, 10, 40, 79, 84, 94–96, 98–102, 109, 1 16, 134, 136, 165–67, 170–73, 175–83, 193– 94, 197, 204, 206–7, 213–14, 216, 219–20, 229–31, 247, 251–52, 260–62, 265, 339, 351, 355 affinity, 183, 192 and Chaucer, 5, 184–87 and the Gawain-poet, 198, 204, 209–1 1, 213 image, 185, 192–93 and Maidstone, 189, 194 patronage, 182–85, 187–88, 196, 197, 260–61 piety, 193, 196, 208, 220, 229, 245 and the succession, 181 and Wyclif, 95, 204 John of Salisbury, 87, 266 n. 2 John II (the Good), king of France, 79, 80, 82, 198 n. 97 Jones, J. M., 289 Julian of Norwich, 71 n. 126 Katherine, St., 312, 313–14 Kay, S., 55 Keiser, E. B., 208 n. 120 Kelly, H. A., 143 n. 166 Kendrick, L., 55 King of Tars, 314–15


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Index kingship, 1, 3, 26, 32, 78, 80, 92 n. 50, 94, 103, 107–8, 1 13–14, 1 18–19, 122, 126, 131, 135, 138, 143, 179, 306, 316–17, 323–24 English, 1 1 1–13, 1 15, 1 17, 138, 306, 349, 355 French, xi, 77, 80–83, 85, 88, 97, 265, 302 Ricardian, 1 15, 1 18, 138, 345–46 Valois, 7 xi, 8–80, 82–83, 85, 87, 94, 97, 132, 147, 276, 300, 319, 339, 347 Kipling, G., 1 1 1 Knighton, Henry, 52, 96, 100, 105–9, 175, 335 knot, 44–46 Kolve, V. A., 205 n. 1 15 Koziol, G., 1 1 1 Kraft, C., 289 Kynyngham, John, 188 labor, 20, 249 n. 232, 266, 267 n. 3, 272, 295–97, 299–302, 31 1, 322–24, 328, 337 Labors of Months, 294, 301 Lacroix, P., 292 Lamentations of Mary to St. Bernard, 258–60 Lancaster, Henry of Grosmont, 1st duke of, 216, 220, 224, 229 Livre de Seyntz Medicines, Le, 208 Lancaster, duchy of, 166, 167, 182 n. 49 Lancastrian, xiii, 317, 324, 352 Landsberg, S., 236 Langland, William, 209, 265, 299, 324, 353 Piers Plowman, 22, 140, 199, 254, 299, 319–20, 322–23, 325–26, 331, 337 Hawkyn 199 Le Palmer, James, Omne bonum, 252, 254, 308–9 Lecklider, J. K., 198 n. 97 Liber Regum Anglie, 308, 320 Life of Adam and Eve, 309, 312 Life of St. Edward, 1 12 Lindenbaum, S., 168 Le Livre de Melibee et Prudence, 191, 274 Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, 90, 131, 268–69, 271, 274–75, 276, 279, 280, 290 Livy, 82, 226 Ab Urbe Condita, 82 Lollardy, 25, 73, 100, 105–8, 1 1 1, 1 19, 128, 177, 333–36 London, 16, 34–36, 40–41, 43–44, 50–51, 57–58, 95, 100, 102, 106, 1 17, 139, 143, 178, 192, 221, 252, 303–4, 307–9, 320–21, 330, 342– 43, 345–46, 347, 350–52 Lot, 201, 256 Luttrell psalter, 257, 302

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[391] Macaulay, G. C., 168 Machaut, Guillaume de, 58 Maidstone, Richard, xi, 123, 169, 170, 188–89, 190, 258 Concordia, x, 189–94, 342, 343, 345 Penitential Psalms, 189, 194–96 man in foul clothes, 199, 205–7 Mann, J., 67–68, 139 manuscripts Bodleian Library: ms Ashmole 813: 130, 131 n. 142; ms Bodley 316: 221; ms Bodley 581: 121 n. 126; ms Lat.liturg. f.3: 125; ms Laud misc. 463: 258 n. 250 British Library: ms Cotton Nero D.VI: 126; ms Cotton Nero D.VII: 252; ms Cotton Nero A.X, art.3: 251–54; ms Cotton Tiberius BVIII: 84 n.25; mss Egerton 617 & 618: 100 n. 66, 221; ms Harley 1319: 126; ms Harley 2397: 244 n. 218; ms Lansdowne 285: 223 n. 163; ms Sloane 2002: 252; ms Royal 1.E.IX: 126; ms Royal 20.B.VI: 126 Cambridge: Gonville and Caius ms 354/ 581: 129 n.138; Trinity Hall ms 17: 125 Edinburgh Advs. ms 18.6.5: 221 Oxford, Keble ms 47: 221 Trinity College Dublin Library ms 244: 100 n. 66, 221 Map, Walter, 227 n. 178 Margaret, St., 312, 313–14 Marie de France Lay le Freine, 308, 315 Guigemar, 45 n. 76 marriage, 13, 15, 30, 63, 65–66, 68–70, 84, 90– 92, 1 13, 1 16, 125, 132, 134–35, 138, 269, 271–74, 277, 279, 281–86, 288, 290–91, 312, 313, 317–18, 320, 325–27, 335–36, 340–41, 343, 345, 347 Martin, G. H., 335 Mary de Bohun, duchess of Derby, 184, 185, 213, 221, 227 n. 178, 229, 230, 262 Mary Magdalene, 224, 244, 313 Mâle, E., 301 McFarlane, K. B., 172, 188 n. 71, 251, 260 n. 252 Meditationes vitae Christi, 244 n. 218 Melibee, story of, 327 Menagier de Paris, 90, 131, 271, 275–80, 287, 290, 294, 327, 340, 341 manuscripts of, 280 stories of: Griselda, 287, 288; Melibee and Prudence, 279, 327; Susannah, 279, 318


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[392] Menut, A. D., 90 n. 43, 268 Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard II, 126 Michael, M. A., 306 Middleton, A., xiii, 41 n. 71, 322, 323 n. 1 14, 346 n. 8 Minnis, A., 17, 22, 25, 27–28, 288 Minoresses without Aldgate, 187, 214–16, 223, 230, 234, 243, 244 n. 218, 246, 248 n. 31 minstrels, 4, 184, 187, 317 n. 104 Mirk’s Festial, 245 Modus tenendi Parliment, 126 Monk of Westminster, 101–2, 105–10, 1 15–16, 169, 174–75, 223 Morant, P., 233 Morse, C., 204 n. 1 14 Mum and the Sothsegger, 266, 300, 317, 323, 351 Mynors, R. A. B., 298 Nicolas of Lynn, 188 Northampton, John of, 40, 43, 45, 50, 178–79, 183 Northern Metrical Version of the Benedictine Rule, 240 nuns, 237–38, 240, 242, 272, 301 Oakden, J. P., 197 oblation, 214, 248–50 oil of Clovis, 84 The Order of Battle in the Court of Chivalry, 222 Order of the Passion, 100, 132–35 Oresme, Nicole, 29, 87, 89, 91–93, 267–69, 272, 276, 291 De Moneta, 91, 93, 268 Yconomique, 89, 90, 268–69, 275 Ormrod, W. M., 94 n. 51 Oschinsky, Dorothy, 305 Ovid, 56, 351 Oxford, Robert de Vere, 9th earl of and duke of Ireland, 51–53, 102, 104, 179 Palmer, J. J. N., 4 n. 6, 102 n. 71, 132 n. 146 parable of the vineyard, 245, 248 Paris, 170 Parliament, x, 51, 69, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 1 15, 1 18, 124, 145, 172, 303, 335, 352 Cambridge Parliament, 70, 173, 322 Commons, 25, 65, 67–69, 103, 105, 107, 1 17, 172–73, 326, 335 Good Parliament, 3–5, 95, 173 Merciless Parliament, ix, x, xi, 3, 22, 25, 41,

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Index 68–69, 72–73, 75–76, 78, 103–9, 1 1 1, 1 16–17, 210, 214 n. 138, 320, 332–33, 335–36, 342, 352 Wonderful Parliament, 3, 102, 103 Paston, John, 223 patronage, xi, 10, 21, 29, 31, 80–82, 95, 1 12, 165–66, 182–83, 188, 228, 250, 260, 265, 280, 291, 355 Patterson, L., xiii, 18, 20 n.32, 22, 144, 183–84, 317 n. 104 Pearsall, D., 54–55, 186, 188 n. 72, 248, 251, 267 n. 3, 309, 322, 326 Peck, R. A., 28, 60, 232 n. 193 Pelham, Sir John, 53 Penelope, 269 Percival, F., 21 n. 34 Peter de la Mare, 173 Peter (the) Lombard, 281 Petrarch, Francis, 87, 286 Philip III, 28, 30, 81 Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 276 n. 23 Philip the Fair, 28 Philippa of Hainault 35, 94 Philippa of Lancaster, 184 Philippe de Mézières 78, 93, 100, 124, 126, 129–33, 135–37, 222, 281, 303, 325, 327, 337, 340, 343, 345, 347 Letter to King Richard, 126, 132, 134–35, 327 Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 131, 282–85; Cecilia, 285; Griselda, 278, 281–83, 285–88, 327 Songe du Vieil Pelerin, Le, 131 Sustance de la Chevalerie de la Passion de Jhesu Crist en Francois, 130 Pistel of Susan, A, 255, 266, 317–18, 340–45 Planctus Mariae Magdalena, 244, 259 n. 251 Pleshey, 167, 213, 221, 225–26, 233, 234, 247, 249 n. 232 Pliny, 299 pluralism, 203 Poiron, D., 94 Pole, Sir Michael de la, 52, 102, 104, 1 17 Porter, E., 28 prerogative, 22 Purgatory, 218 Putnam, M. C. J., 295 Puy, 57–58, 72, 304 “queynte,” 24 Quis dabit, 258


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Index Rabanus Maurus, 266 n. 2 Raoul de Presles, 87, 89 regalia, 86, 1 16–17, 138 Renauld de Louens, 278 Rewle of Sustris Menouresses enclosid, 238 reyse, 176 Rex, R., 96 n. 56 Richard Fitzalen, earl of Arundel, 177, 262, 342, 352 Richard II, ix-xi, 1–3, 10, 16, 18, 21–22, 25–26, 29, 31–32, 41, 51–54, 69, 73, 75–76, 78, 97, 100, 125, 132, 147, 165–68, 171–72, 174, 176–80, 182, 188–89, 219, 265, 303, 335, 339–41, 343, 345–46, 348, 354 absolutism, 22 n. 35, 29 advice to, xi, 1 18, 121–24, 191–92, 194, 213, 332, 335, 347, 349, 351 badge of the White Hart, 179 coronation, 30 court, 51, 100, 168, 197 death, 352 deposition, x, 172, 176, 210, 317, 352, 355 early reign, 21–22, 25, 51–54, 98, 100–102, 346, 349–50 as example, 353 and Gaunt, 101, 170, 178–81, 192–94 image, 104, 1 1 1, 1 14–17, 121, 123–27, 137, 170–73, 175, 180, 189–90, 355 and the King of Armenia, 103 later reign, 352 marriage, 1 16, 125, 134 and the Merciless Parliament, 106–8, 1 10 patronage, 261 prerogative, 103, 1 17, 170, 177, 194, 333 quarrel with London, 168–69 and St. Edward, 1 13, 138 succession, 181 temperament, 101 and Valois kingship, 137, 142 views of kingship, 78, 95, 102–4, 1 16, 127, 138 Westminster portrait 180, 346, 349 Wilton Diptych, 78, 1 15, 124–26, 137–38, 142, 180, 338, 346, 349, 355 and Wyclif, 177 Richard the Redeless, x, 266, 317 Richardson, H. G., 1 15 Riddy, F., 228, 234 n. 197, 307 n. 87, 314 Rising of 1381, ix, 5, 47, 70, 96, 100–101, 143, 194 Robert the Hermit, 130, 131 n. 142, 132, 134–35, 137 Robertson, D. W., Jr., xiii

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[393] Roche, Thomas P., 337 Rolle, Richard, 249 n. 232, 258 Roman de la Rose, 22–24, 207, 226, 236, 255, 289 Romance of Alexander, 226 Rosarium, 129 n. 138 Roy, B., 289 Rule of St. Benet, 241 sacrality, 78, 104, 108, 1 1 1, 1 18, 140, 325, 330, 334, 336–37, 347, 352 sacrament, xi, 43, 85, 97, 101, 128, 132–34, 138, 281–86, 31 1, 348 Salic Law, 85 Salter, E., 171, 188, 197, 251, 255, 267 n. 3 sanctuary, 96, 1 10 Sandler, L. F., 253, 308 Saul, N., xiii, 78, 1 1 1, 1 17, 180 n. 40 Savoy, 194, 198, 206, 208 Sayings of the Four Philosophers, 321 “The Sayings of the Four Philosophers,” 319 Scanlon, L., 26, 31 Scattergood, J., 18 Schism, 5 Schramm, P. E., 1 15 Scogan, Henry, 54, 184, 352 Scott, K., 252 Scrope, Sir Henry, 249 n. 232 Scrope-Grosvenor trial, 246 Secreta Secretorum, 28, 121, 123, 212 Seneca, 87, 328 Seven Sages of Rome, 319 Shakespeare, William, 329 shepherds, 132, 293–94 Sherman, C. R., 82, 88–89, 90 n. 43, 91, 267 Short Metrical Chronicle, 320 Sidney, Sir Philip, 20, 42 Simeon manuscript, 255, 257, 314, 317, 341 Simon de Montfort, 326 Simony, The, 308–9, 319–20, 322 Simpson, J., xiii, 22 n. 35, 28, 36 Sir Orfeo, 308, 316–17 Skinner, Q., 33, 35–36 Smithfield tournament, 168, 170, 175, 178–80 sodomy, 205 Solomon, 1 13, 122, 126, 128–29, 170, 189, 312 Somerset, F., 100 n. 66 Somme le Roy, 278, 280 Song of Lewes, 307, 326 Songe du Vergier, 91, 222, 302 Spearing, A. C., 209, 248 n. 230 Speculum Historiale, 1 17


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[394] Speght, Thomas, 185, 186 Spenser, Edmund, 329 Epithalamion, 239 The Faerie Queene, 336 Spiegel, G., 81 St. Clare, 215–16 St. Denis, 80–81, 83, 1 14, 146, 334, 336 St. Edward the Confessor, 1 12–13, 1 15, 138, 180 St. Erkenwald, 192 St. Erkenwald, 193, 197, 254 St. George, 337 St. Inglevert, 174–75 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 109, 187, 192–93, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 207, 220, 229 Stanbury, S., 227 n. 181, 232 n. 193, 247 n. 227 Statutes of the Realm, 34, 94, 126, 304 Steingorn, P., 55 Storey, R. L., 173 Stow, G., xiii, 168, 172 n. 18, 173, 179 n. 37 Strode, Ralph, 54 Strohm, P., xiii, 40, 54, 101 n. 68, 139 n. 158, 172, 173 n. 19 Sudbury, William of, 1 16–17, 138 Sudbury, Simon, bishop of London, 202 Sutton, A., 34, 58 Swynford, Katherine, 208, 247 n. 226, 262 Tavormina, M. T., 325 n. 1 17 Thebes, 12, 13, 14 n. 20, 15 Thomas, earl of Warwick, 342 Thomas à Becket, St., 102, 1 12, 226, 342 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, 300 Tout, T. F., 69, 308 n. 89 Tractatus de Regibus, 1 18–19, 121 translation, 5, 1 1, 22, 29, 33, 37, 42, 44, 49, 76, 77, 81, 89, 94, 145, 147, 268, 285, 291–92, 299–300, 301, 302, 308, 315, 321, 332–33 transubstantiation, 98–99, 127 Tres Riches Heures, 301 Tresilian, Sir Robert, 41, 52, 109–10, 1 17 Trevisa, John, 29, 42, 147, 222 Troilus, 170 truth, 2, 20, 22, 24, 33, 36–37, 43, 45–46, 48–50, 53–54, 56, 58, 61, 71–73, 88, 108, 1 19–21, 210, 307, 323–24, 326, 336, 346, 348 Tuck, J. A., 100 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 303, 309, 320 Twelve Conclusions, 177 Twenty-Five Articles, 105, 1 19

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Index Usk, Thomas, x, 2–3, 16, 27, 37, 40–51, 54–55, 58–59, 65, 69, 72, 75, 147, 178, 254 Vale, M., 301 Varro, 298, 305 Re Rustica, De, 298 Vere, Robert de. See Oxford, 9th earl of vernacular, 28, 44, 56, 77, 80–81, 87, 93, 95–96, 1 18–19, 124–25, 267, 270, 289, 291, 300, 303, 312, 321, 331–32. See also translation Vernon manuscript, 194 n. 87, 255, 257, 258, 310, 314, 317 Vincent of Beauvais, 87 Virgil, 8, 266, 295–99, 302, 305, 322–24, 332, 343, 351–52 bugonia, 298–99 virginity, 13, 1 12, 127, 271–72 language of, 238, 240 Walafrid of Strabo, 266 n. 2 Walker, S., 53, 171, 183 n. 51, 187–88, 250 Wallace, D., xiii, 17 n. 23, 22 n. 35, 129 n. 139, 144 n. 168, 198 Walsingham, Thomas, x, 51–53, 96, 100, 106, 109–10, 174 Walter de Milemete, 94, 306 Walter of Henley, 305 Walter of Peterborough, 184 Warwick, Thomas Beauchamp, earl of, 351 Wathey, A., 185 Watson, N., 242 Westminster Abbey, 3, 76, 96, 103, 1 1 1–12, 123, 127, 202, 223–24 Westminster Palace, 1 1 1–15 Whalley Abbey, 106, 210 “What the Good Wife Told Her Daughter,” 307 Why I Can’t Be a Nun, 243 n. 214 Wilkinson, L. P., 266 n. 2 Wilks, M., 172, 176 William of Moerbeke, 268 William of Palerne, 226 n. 178, 257 Wimbledon, Thomas, 58 n. 103 Wimsatt, J., 55, 57, 188, 254 Wyclif, ix, xii, 5, 60, 95–101, 1 10, 1 18–20, 128, 139, 144, 204, 333, 336, 349 Wycliffite sermon cycle, 245 Yeager, R. F., 347 York cycle, 213 n. 131

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