The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature)

THE CREATION OF LANCASTRIAN KINGSHIP The arguments used to justify the deposition of Richard II in 1399 created new for...

Author: Jenni Nuttall

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THE CREATION OF LANCASTRIAN KINGSHIP

The arguments used to justify the deposition of Richard II in 1399 created new forms of political discussion which developed alongside new expectations of kingship itself and which shaped political action and debate for centuries to come. This interdisciplinary study analyses the political language and literature of the early Lancastrian period, particularly the reigns of Henry IV (1399–1413) and Henry V (1413–1422). Lancastrian authors such as Thomas Hoccleve and the authors of the anonymous works Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger and Crowned King made creative use of languages and idioms which were in the process of escaping from the control of their royal masters. In a study that has far-reaching implications for both literary and political history, Jenni Nuttall presents a new understanding of how political language functions in the late medieval period. J E N N I N U T T A L L is a College Lecturer in English at St Edmund Hall in the University of Oxford.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

General editor Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University Editorial board Zygmunt G. Baran´ski, University of Cambridge Christopher C. Baswell, University of California, Los Angeles John Burrow, University of Bristol Mary Carruthers, New York University Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania Simon Gaunt, King’s College, London Steven Kruger, City University of New York Nigel Palmer, University of Oxford Winthrop Wetherbee, Cornell University Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, University of York

This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages – the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek – during the period c. 1100–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them.

Recent titles in the series Ralph Hanna London Literature, 1300–1380 Maura Nolan John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture Nicolette Zeeman Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire Anthony Bale The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1300–1500 Robert J. Meyer-Lee Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt Isabel Davis Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages John M. Fyler Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante and Jean de Meun Matthew Giancarlo Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England D. H. Green Women Readers in the Middle Ages Mary Dove The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions A complete list of titles in the series can be found at the end of the volume.

THE CREATION OF LANCASTRIAN KINGSHIP Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England

JENNI NUTTALL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Saõ Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521874960 # Jenni Nuttall 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN

978-0-521-87496-0 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on quotations and references Note on editions Abbreviations

page vi vii viii x

Introduction

1

PART I

7

HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVES

1 Stereotyping Richard and the Ricardian familia

9

2 The dissemination of the Ricardian stereotype

17

3 Politicizing pre-existing languages

27

4 From stereotypes to standards

41

5 Household narratives in Lancastrian poetry

55

PART II

73

6

CREDIT AND LOVE

Promises, expectations, explanations and solutions

7 A discourse of credit and loyalty

75 94

8 Credit and fraud in Hoccleve’s Regiment

109

Conclusion: Lancastrian conversations

120

Notes Bibliography Index

131 169 182

v

Acknowledgements

During the course of my researches, I have been very fortunate to have been shown the way by many wise counsellors. I am greatly indebted to the supervisor of my doctoral thesis, Paul Strohm, who gave me confidence in my research, guided me most generously and, in particular, directed me towards the work of J. G. A. Pocock. David Lawton provided the seed from which this research grew during an MA course at the University of East Anglia. I am also very grateful to the examiners of my thesis, Helen Barr and James Simpson, whose encouragement and advice greatly helped to shape the transition from thesis to book. Ralph Hanna provided scholarly inspiration, references and much good gossip. Many thanks must also go to the staff of the Upper Reading Room and of Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian and to Sean Cunningham of the National Archives for friendly assistance and advice. From time to time during my studies, I have needed rescuing from what Thomas Hoccleve, describing the gloomy perception brought about by melancholic or depressive thought, memorably calls ‘this troubly world’ (RP, 2). This book is therefore dedicated with much gratitude to all those who came to rescue me and to show me that this world is not always inescapably troubly. Amongst many others, I would particularly like to thank my parents Neil and Margaret Nuttall, Ruth and Richard, Tom and Cat, Rachel, Julie and Jackie. Last but by no means least, I would like to thank my husband, Jonathan Abbott, who, though this book is finished, is helping me to write the next chapter. I was financially supported during my doctoral research by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academy and by a Tyson Scholarship from Magdalen College, Oxford. Following this, a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, gave me the necessary time to complete this book. I am very grateful to the Warden, Fellows and students of Merton for providing such a supportive collegial environment in which to work. vi

Note on quotations and references

The spelling of quotations is that of the manuscript, book or edition to which I refer. I have removed diacritics and other editorial apparatus from primary texts in certain cases and have supplied punctuation and capitalization where necessary. Abbreviations have been silently expanded in quotations from manuscripts and from older diplomatic editions. Additions and substitutions are shown in square brackets. The initial letter of the first word of certain quotations has been changed to or from a capital if this is more appropriate in the context. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. All quotations from the works of Geoffrey Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and are cited by work and line number. Biblical quotations are from Biblia sacra: iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. Bonifatius Fischer and others, rev. Robert Weber, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Wu¨rttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1975). Translations of biblical quotations are from The Holy Bible: Douay Version Translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1956). In the case of the parliamentary rolls, quotations and translations of these quotations are taken from the internet version of The Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson and others (Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005). Chris Given-Wilson has edited and translated the rolls of the parliaments from 1380 to 1422 from which this book frequently cites. However, for ease of reference, in each case I give the relevant volume and page number from Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et petitiones, et placita in Parliamento, ed. J. Strachey, 6 vols. ([London]: [n. pub.], [1767–77]). These page references provide a convenient way to locate material in the internet or CD-ROM versions of the Parliamentary Rolls via the ‘page view’ option.

vii

Note on editions

Following are abbreviations and/or shortened forms for works frequently cited in this book. Annales Ricardi Secundi: Johannis de Trokelowe, et Henrici de Blaneforde, monachorum S. Albani, necnon quorundam anonymorum: Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley, RS, 28, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), I I , 199–239. Continuatio Eulogii: Eulogium, historiarum sive temporis, ed. F. S. Haydon, RS, 9, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1858–63), I I I , 322–421. Historia Anglicana: Thomæ Walsingham, quondam monachi S. Albani, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, RS, 28, 2 vols., (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863–64). MED: Electronic Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and others (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952– ) [internet version]. PPC: Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, ed. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, 7 vols. ([London]: [n. pub.], 1834–37). Rotuli Parliamentorum: Quotations and translations of quotations from the Parliamentary Rolls are taken from the internet version of The Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson and others (Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005). Volume and page references in the text refer to Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et petitiones, et placita in Parliamento, ed. J. Strachey, 6 viii

Note on editions

ix

vols. ([London]: [n. pub.], [1767–77]) in order to provide a convenient method of locating material in the internet and CD-ROM version of the Parliamentary Rolls. Vita Ricardi Secundi: Historia vitae et regni Ricardi Secundi, ed. George B. Stow, Haney Foundation Series, 21 ([Philadelphia]: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977).

Abbreviations

CK LMR MB MSS PRO RP RR RS TNA

Crowned King La Male Regle de T. Hoccleue Moral Balade Mum and the Sothsegger Public Record Office Regiment of Princes Richard the Redeless Rolls Series (Rerum Britannicarum medii scriptores) The National Archives

x

Introduction

‘Politics is very largely the use of language.’1 This is as true for England in the later Middle Ages as it is in the twenty-first-century world of spin doctors and sound bites. Language does not simply provide the means by which political actions are carried out, but also shapes the form of politics itself. Following decisive and unforgettable turmoil, the language of political debate changes in ways which then influence subsequent action. Political upheaval creates memorable discourses which are kept in mind and frequently returned to in the months and years following the initial moment of crisis. One such indelible event was the deposition of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke in the summer and autumn of 1399.2 Henry, whom Richard had exiled in September 1398, returned to England in July 1399 to reclaim the inheritance withheld from him following the death of his father, John of Gaunt. Very soon after his landing, however, Henry’s ambitions grew from the recovery of his inheritance to the English throne itself. By the middle of August, Richard had fallen into Henry’s hands and the process of securing the usurpation had begun. Once Richard was in custody and those remaining loyal to him had been overcome, Henry and his supporters set about formulating words and ideas to explain and justify recent events, to convert their illegal usurpation into a legitimate deposition. As well as constructing a title by which he could claim the throne, Henry and his advisers needed to explain how the throne had come to be vacant. The explanation chosen was that Richard had resigned the throne voluntarily because of his failings as king. A deputation of lords visited Richard in the Tower on 29 September where they heard him read aloud a bill in which he resigned sovereignty of his own accord. The bill (as reported in the official Record and Process narrative of the deposition) records that Richard recognized that he should resign the throne because of his notorious faults (‘propter mea demerita notoria’).3 He acknowledged that he was incapable of governing the kingdom (‘insufficientem . . . et inutilem’). At a 1

2

The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship

public ceremony held the following day at which Richard was not present, this bill was read aloud in Latin and in English. During the ceremony, the previously unspecified demerita notoria, Richard’s notorious flaws, were given definite form in a list of articles.4 Those present were asked to give their assent to these articles which constituted an exemplification of Richard’s shortcomings and to agree that the demerita notoria comprised sufficient cause for deposition.5 This was followed by the reading of the formal sentence of deposition which again accounted for Richard’s resignation on the basis of his many misdemeanours and crimes.6 Richard’s demerita notoria were therefore the key fiction of the deposition. His supposed awareness and admittance of his inadequacy and errors caused him to resign the throne, creating a vacancy which Henry could fill without illegal usurpation. The demerita notoria in effect rewrote the history of Richard’s reign. They categorized Richard as a failure, an unsuccessful, dishonest and selfish king who had acted against the interests of his subjects. In doing so, they also rewrote the terms of political debate for the early Lancastrian period. They reset the agenda for parliamentary exchanges, literary production and the writing of history. A chronicle compiled at the Cistercian abbey at Dieulacres in Staffordshire illustrates the sudden and total derangement of prevailing political conditions. The earlier part of the chronicle, covering the period from 1337 to 1400 and written by an author loyal to Richard, calls Henry and his supporters enemies of the kingdom (‘inimici’) who usurped the innocent king (‘regem innocentem’) by deceiving Richard with gentle words (‘verbis blandis’).7 The later part of the chronicle, covering the period from 1400 to 1403, was written by another monk supportive of the Lancastrian cause. Faced with a preceding text which contained a very different representation of Richard (particularly as regards his treatment of the Appellants in 1397/8) from the one put forward in the deposition articles, the later chronicler begins his continuation by telling his readers that there are numerous places in which the earlier author ‘vituperat commendanda et commendat vituperanda’ [condemns that which ought to be commended, and commended that which ought to be condemned].8 In a single summer, the polarities of political debate had been reversed, and the effects of this reversal were to be long-lasting. This book therefore follows Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne in using the events of 1399 as a starting point for an exploration of early Lancastrian literature and political discourse.9 It uses a different method of enquiry, however, and thus produces different results. Its methodology is that laid out by the historian of political thought, J. G. A. Pocock, in a classic essay on political language.10 Pocock outlines a type of reconstitutive

Introduction

3

analysis which reads political texts in the light of the linguistic context – that is, a network of associated or surrounding texts – in which they were written. Whilst this mimetic reconstitution can never be complete or total, Pocock argues that we can work towards ‘providing co-ordinates’ for the production and reception of texts at specific historical moments.11 This reconstruction is achieved linguistically: ‘The primary component of this context has to be language.’12 By language, Pocock means particular linguistic and textual matrices, which he variously calls ‘specialized idioms’, ‘vocabularies’ and ‘rhetorics’, used and sometimes shared by different institutions, factions and individual agents to participate in key political debates or to comprehend historical events at certain moments.13 As I see them, these matrices incorporate many different linguistic elements including literary topoi, narrative structures and allusions to particular literary or historical archetypes. Once these languages are identified and coordinates established, a text can be seen as a historical event in its own right, something which happens at a particular moment using a particular set of linguistic and conceptual circumstances.14 In his two collections of essays on political thought and history and in articles elsewhere which put forward a method for research into the history of political discourses, Pocock offers an illuminating explanation of how political language functions.15 His analysis provides much of the inspiration for this book. By means of these politicized languages or textual matrices, speakers and writers create what Pocock calls paradigms, ways of talking or writing which ‘structure thought and speech’ in favour of certain explanations or certain versions of events (though they cannot successfully preclude other versions or explanations).16 For Pocock, the creators of these paradigms are both borrowers of previously extant languages and innovators who transform language usage.17 Yet these new or newly important paradigms can themselves be appropriated and reused in different and unexpected ways by other political voices.18 Whilst Pocock’s own researches concentrate on the early modern period, this book aims to show that his theorization of political language works equally well for late medieval political discourse and political literature. Pocock’s writings provide a structure which can explain the relationship between official documents disseminated by the Crown and other texts which respond to the language of these documents, particularly contemporary chronicles and literature addressing political topics. Following Pocock’s lead, this book examines the creation and afterlife of two languages or specialized idioms arising from the demerita notoria which legitimized the deposition. Firstly, the demerita notoria prioritized a particular stereotype or paradigm of Richard and his household as simultaneously

4


youthful and tyrannous, prone to luxury and self-indulgence, and dismissive of the advice of truthtellers and wise counsellors. Rather than remaining solely confined to Richard and his household, however, these stereotypes shaped both the Lancastrian Crown’s self-presentation and the challenges, comments and criticisms made to it by its subjects. They evolved into the substance of Lancastrian literature itself in works such as Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and poems by John Gower, Henry Scogan and Thomas Hoccleve. Secondly, the textualization of the deposition gave rise to a distinctive picture of Richard’s financial practices which moulded subsequent discussion of Lancastrian finance. It focused attention both on ideal reciprocal exchanges of love and credit and on fraudulent or contradictory exchanges. Existing discourses which linked together credit, loyalty, advice and love were revitalized. Again, vernacular literature, particularly Crowned King and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, internalizes this newly politicized language. Both of these languages were used by a wide range of speakers and writers when participating in and recording historical events and the cultural and political struggles which they engendered. Rather than a study of direct sources and influences, or of one-to-one interaction between an author and his patron, this book reconstitutes a larger linguistic environment. The existence of these two related languages is traced in the widest possible range of literary and non-literary texts and genres, including poetry written by named authors close to the centre of national government and by anonymous poets elsewhere, various chronicle accounts of current events written in religious institutions and by private individuals, and bureaucratic sources such as the Parliamentary Rolls, the Patent Rolls, letters and other documents of record. Yet literature is at the centre of this exploration. Literary works written in the aftermath of the deposition cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the changing languages of national politics. The post1399 works of Hoccleve, Scogan and Gower, the political poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102, and the anonymous poems Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger and Crowned King reflect and seek to reconfigure the linguistic and political environment in which they were written. These texts can properly be described as Lancastrian literature, both chronologically and culturally, because all of them respond in some way to Henry’s accession and its impact on political debate. Frank Grady has memorably called such texts ‘the generation of 1399’, texts generated more or less directly by the deposition.19 Political and literary cultures are inseparable, demanding simultaneous study and analysis. What becomes most evident and exciting when such study is undertaken is the rapidity and complexity with which political protagonists, poets and

Introduction

5

chroniclers responded to the changes in political discourse inaugurated by the deposition. They did not accept these linguistic and conceptual changes uncritically or indiscriminately, but instead identified them, discussed them, recycled them and challenged them. Rather than making any simple distinction between subordinated and uncritical reproducers of Crown propaganda and those who opposed and challenged it, we must therefore map out a new position occupied by these writers. Early Lancastrian authors employed languages and idioms which were in the process of escaping from the control of their originators. They adopted the linguistic suggestions and propositions of royal authority, but made more ambiguous or unexpected use of them, transforming these discourses themselves into the subject of Lancastrian literature. They are not for or against the Lancastrian Crown but rather in conversation with it. Furthermore, elements of Lancastrian literature which might be thought of as idiosyncratic or private are seen to be strategic political interventions when considered against the background of the changes in political culture brought about by the deposition. Thomas Hoccleve, for example, is well known for talking about himself in his poetry.20 He tells us about his youthful riot in La Male Regle, when he drank at the Paul’s Head Tavern and was famous amongst the innkeepers and cooks at Westminster Gate and the taxi-boatmen at Paul’s Wharf for his generous tips. In the Prologue to the Regiment of Princes, he describes his anxieties regarding his current difficulties in gaining payment of his wages from the Exchequer. He records the often unseen hardships of long days spent in scribal labour and his fears for the future when he retires from his job as a Privy Seal clerk. Yet these autobiographical confessions also participate in public dialogues, sharing paradigms and imagery with the discussions which proliferated following the identification of the demerita notoria. Hoccleve’s simultaneous and contrary presentation of himself as an extravagant wastrel and as an employee defrauded by the shaky machinery of government finance can be explained, as Chapter 6 will show, by comparison with attempts at financial reform fashioned in part by the deposition. Reconstructing the linguistic environment of which early Lancastrian literature forms a part allows us to see these texts in their full intricacy and energy. One difficulty in reading fifteenth-century literature is its seeming preference for conventional topoi and commonplaces of political and ethical advice. Many of the linguistic elements employed by fifteenthcentury authors have a long diachronic history and are present in texts throughout the Middle Ages. A diachronic history, however, does not prevent certain very familiar elements of language from acquiring a

6


temporary synchronic significance of one kind or another, a connection to a particular event or argument or person. This book shows how such temporary political significance can become attached, for example, to de casibus narratives, the figure of the pauper superbus or the priceless Aristotelian advice-giver. The works of Hoccleve and his fellow authors are only formulaic or conventional when political discourse is itself seen as static, unchanging and undisputed. David Lawton warns that it is a ‘failure of response’ to describe such poetry as offering nothing more than ‘convention or commonplace’.21 This book seeks to provide a context for early Lancastrian literature which makes such a failure unimaginable.

PART I

Household narratives

1

Stereotyping Richard and the Ricardian familia

RICHARD’S NOTORIOUS FLAWS

The creation and acceptance of Richard’s supposed demerita notoria were pivotal to the success of the Lancastrian usurpation. Richard’s statement of insufficiency and his awareness of particular acts of incompetence were put forward as the primary explanation of his resignation of the throne, thus establishing the vacancy which Henry claimed he had a right to fill. The demerita notoria laid the foundations both for dynastic and linguistic change, creating both the Lancastrian monarchy and the terms of reference for Lancastrian politics.1 Their strategic importance explains the emphasis placed by the official Record and Process account of the deposition on the self-evident quality of Richard’s notorious flaws. The bill of resignation declared that Richard himself was now fully aware of his deficiency (‘veraciter ex certa sciencia’).2 His insufficiency, and the events which demonstrate it, are notorie, their authenticity is guaranteed by their status as commonly accepted knowledge. The demerita notoria were written down in a fixed form and publicized more widely supposedly to remove any doubt or suspicion surrounding the deposition.3 This removal of doubt reveals an awareness that any uncertainty about the authenticity of these notorious flaws also threatened the efficacy of the post hoc justification of the deposition. This is also demonstrated by the rewriting and revision of the list of articles. The Record acknowledges that whilst the majority of the articles were read aloud at the ceremony, it was only during the composition of the Record itself that all of the articles were included.4 This delay allowed time for additions and alterations aimed at improving their persuasive powers.5 Richard himself was aware of the use to which his supposed insufficiencies had been put and he tried to resist and refute these charges. The deposition narrative included in the Annales Ricardi Secundi describes in more detail than the Record a meeting between Richard and Sir William 9

10


Thirning, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, during which the procedures of the deposition were explained to Richard and the fealty of his subjects formally withdrawn from him.6 When Richard asked to retain certain aspects of his sovereignty after the deposition, Thirning reminded him that he had admitted in his bill of resignation that he was not capable of governance. Richard replied: ‘Non sic, sed quia non placuit populo gubernatio sua’ [It was not thus, but rather because his governance did not please the people]. Thirning restates the official position that the deposed king himself was self-confessedly incompetent, but Richard counters that it was his unpopularity rather than his insufficiency which has led to the usurpation. He makes clear the artifice of the Lancastrian account of autonomously professed failure. The exchange between Richard and Thirning was excluded from the official record because the compilers of the Record were conscious of the need for unchallenged acceptance of Richard’s supposed inadequacies and the acts which bore witness to them. Self-confessed inadequacy and self-evident transgressions were indispensable for the elision of Lancastrian agency in the narrative of the deposition. RETROSPECTIVE STEREOTYPING

Whilst the Lancastrian claim to the throne combined a number of potentially conflicting strategies, the representation of Richard and his reign as contained in the official account of the deposition was internally coherent and consistent.7 Subsequent to Richard’s acknowledgement of his notorious but unspecified flaws in the bill of resignation, these defects were exemplified first in the thirty-three deposition articles preserved in the Record and Process and second in a sermon given by the reinstated Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, immediately following Henry’s accession to the throne. When compared in detail, both of these documents present a coordinated picture of Richard, his familia and his particular style of government. In doing so, the two texts employ many of the classic manoeuvres of the stereotyping process.8 They associate Richard, Ricardian government and Richard’s familia with fixed and homogeneous assumptions. Their post hoc representation of Richard’s reign is predominantly evaluative though they claim to be simply descriptive. They attempt to limit flexible thinking about what kind of sovereign Richard had been, giving the illusion of precision in their descriptions of Ricardian government whilst at the same time narrowing and simplifying their representation of Richard’s twenty-two-year reign. They imply a


11

general consensus that his reign had been a failure and that it had ended because Richard himself was an incompetent ruler who displayed traits which easily identified him both as a tyrant and as a youthful sovereign. Likewise, they stereotype representations of his familia regis. RICHARD AS TYRANT

First and foremost, the deposition articles present Richard as governing England on his own impulse and in his own interests.9 Through limited lexical variation on the same adverbial theme, Richard is said in a variety of instances to have acted solely according to his own will and desire.10 This stress on Richard’s wilfulness strongly associates him with a pre-existing image of bad kingship.11 While Richard was not explicitly called a tyrant in the official Lancastrian depositional narrative, the repeated emphasis on the role of his will, lust or desire in the formulation of his public activities implied that Richard’s rule could be categorized as tyrannous and therefore inadequate.12 Works of political theory such as the De regimine principum of Giles of Rome offer analyses of the differences between a true king and a tyrant. The articles draw on such descriptions of bad, false or tyrannical kingship in order to construct a picture of Richard’s rule as tyrannous.13 Rather than acting for common profit, that is, in the best interests of their subjects, tyrants let their own self-interest and desires take precedence. The De regimine principum states that one of ten key differences between tyrants and true kings is that ‘a kyng takeþ heede to þe comyne profit and a tyrand to his owne profit’.14 This same distinction between singular and common profit is used to structure many of the accusations made in the deposition articles. Article 13, for example, records that rather than choosing sheriffs for each county for the common profit of the kingdom (‘pro bono et utilitate regni’), Richard appointed these officials solely for his and their individual benefit, which harmed the interests of his commonwealth (‘pro suo et aliorum commodo singulari; ad magnum gravamen populi sui’).15 Tyrants are also avaricious. They treat their kingdoms and subjects merely as an economic resource to be exploited for their own ends.16 Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum positions this attitude to money as one of the absolute differences between tyranny and true kingship: ‘He þat setteth his felicite in money principallych wol gadre money and tresour to hymself, and is therfore a tyraunt and nou3t a kyng.’17 Such covetousness is motivated by the need to consolidate his position as ruler. A tyrant uses illicitly appropriated wealth to buy power, status and security.18 Richard likewise

12


is characterized consistently in the deposition articles as being motivated by avarice. Article 21 suggests that Richard instituted his policy of blank charters because he wanted to suppress his people and to gain their goods by deception.19 Article 15 alleges that, despite having amassed immense wealth through harsh taxation, Richard nevertheless owed large amounts to his subjects for the extravagant expenses of his household.20 The illicitly raised funds are squandered on self-promotion rather than good governance (‘ad sui nominis ostentacionem et pompam ac vanam gloriam’).21 As well as wasting money on self-promoting display and luxury, Richard abuses his position by using public money to reward private individuals who are undeserving of such gifts. Article 15 accuses Richard of giving away the Crown estates which should have funded his governance to unworthy individuals (‘personis indignis’), a restatement of the same accusation made earlier in Article 1.22 This may be compared with the first of the De regimine principum’s contradistinctions, which indicates that, unlike a true king who distributes revenue for the benefit of the community, tyrants ‘spenden in hoores and strumpetes, in flaterers and in oþere vnworthie persones’.23 Whilst they deal with a variety of specific and general charges against Richard, the deposition articles are nevertheless coordinated in order to narrow the range of possible perceptions of Richard and his style of government. The compilers selected particular types of action and motivation which accorded with the pejorative view they wished to promote. The stereotypical Richard is consistently motivated by inner desire, by self-interest and by avarice. He uses illicitly raised revenue for acts of selfpromotion and self-indulgence. These characteristics align him with the pre-existing stereotype of the tyrannous ruler. Although there was no generally agreed doctrine on the right of subjects to resist a tyrant (and thus Richard was not explicitly denounced as tyrannous in the theory of the deposition), the compilers tacitly used the negative associations of tyranny to construct a pejorative stereotype of Richard as king which contributed to their strategies of retrospective justification.24 YOUTH VERSUS MATURITY

Pejorative stereotypes gain much of their impact from opposition to related laudatory stereotypes and vice versa.25 As well as stereotyping Richard as a tyrannous king, those producing texts in favour of the Lancastrian claim to the throne created a new and fixed idea of what Lancastrian government could and would be like.26 In the sermon preached by Archbishop Arundel


13

immediately following Henry’s accession, an opposed set of pejorative and laudatory stereotypes was submitted to the assembled audience for consideration.27 The sermon takes its tripartite structure from I Corinthians 13. 11: ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.’ Organized around the three activities of speaking, understanding and thinking, the sermon offers examples of the differences between youthful and mature behaviour.28 First, a child’s words are unreliable, he is changeable in speech and frequently reneges on his promises.29 In contrast, an adult has the mature ability to guard his tongue wisely (‘circa linguam servare custodiam’). Second, a child only accepts gratifying flattery, hating those who criticize him or speak the truth.30 In stark contrast with this childish behaviour, maturity is a state in which childish understanding is left behind in favour of wisdom and veracity. The third part of Arundel’s sermon follows the pattern of the previous two, describing childish reasoning as dominated by the impulses of the will. A mature ruler will instead act according to sapientia, striving continually for the common profit of those under his dominion. Arundel figures childish thought allegorically as the expulsion of reason and integrity: ‘Cum igitur puer regnat, voluntas sola regnat, racio exul. Ubi vero voluntas regnat et racio recessit, constancia fugata est, et ita iminet magnum periculum’ [When therefore a boy reigns, will alone reigns, and reason is exiled. Where indeed will reigns and reason draws back, constancy is put to flight, and thus great danger threatens]. The relevance of these opposed types of youthful and mature behaviour to the deposition is made clear by the biblical theme which prefaces the sermon: ‘Vir dominabitur populo.’31 Youthfulness and maturity, two opposed styles of self-governance, are employed in sequence to construe the sudden shift from Ricardian to Lancastrian rule. England was formerly governed by an immature administration but the deposition has established mature rule.32 Arundel’s sermon labels the reign of Richard as childish and designates Henry’s return from exile and his accession to the throne as the arrival of a mature style of government.33 The creation of the difference between Ricardian and Lancastrian government as being one of youth and maturity was, in fact, an instance of illusory precision. Richard and Henry were of similar age, having been born in 1367 and 1366 (or possibly 1367) respectively.34 Despite this illusion, contemporary witnesses readily grasped Arundel’s thinly-veiled allegory of youth and maturity. The chronicler Adam Usk’s summary of the sermon shows that he understood it to refer to Henry’s good qualities and to Richard’s failings.35 Usk’s interpretation is confirmed by the links between the

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sermon and the deposition articles which preceded it. Arundel’s assertion that children are inconstant in speech, for example, is foreshadowed by Article 25 of the deposition schedule which accuses Richard of being so changeable in his speech and writing that he was considered untrustworthy and arbitrary by all.36 This coordination between Arundel’s sermon and the deposition articles was made possible because aspects of the two emerging stereotypes of Richard as king, that is to say Richard as tyrant and Richard as childish sovereign, intersect.37 As we have seen, tyrants are dominated by their individual will, passions and desires.38 Such domination means that they are effectively childish in their governance. Six ‘euel maneres’ of youths are described in Book I , Part 4, Chapter 2 of the De regimine principum.39 According to Giles, young people fail to govern their irrational passions by the application of reason: ‘Children ben not expert noþer hauen gret vnderstondyng and prudencia and ben more ilad by passions þan by reson, wherfore comynlich he folweþ passions.’40 Their rational faculties not yet fully formed, young people cannot regulate their behaviour by reason because, at this stage in their lives, they are physiologically ‘passyng hote’.41 In the tetradic system of Galenic and Hippocratic medicine, the sanguine humour, with its moist and hot qualities, predominates during childhood, while the choleric humour, with its hot and dry qualities, predominates during adolescence.42 This physiological heat generates ‘appetite of lecherie’, leading the young to ‘folwen passions, and namlich likyng of body, and ben incontinent and folwen lechery’. Young people are characteristically ‘vnstable and vnstedefast’ because, given that ‘þe soule folweþ complexions of þe body’, the ‘gret meuying’ of their physical humours affects their mental processes. Thus youths are said to have ‘vnstabil likynge and wil’. The emphasis on Richard’s self-will, selfish desires and instability in the deposition articles therefore both associates him with tyranny and simultaneously reinforces the idea of Ricardian kingship as essentially immature and childish. RESPONSES TO TRUTHTELLERS

In addition to narrowing representations of Richard as an individual, those constructing this retrospective view of his reign also instituted a standardized account of how he dealt with his subjects. The deposition articles and sermon offer a homogeneous idea of how Richard and those around him responded to those who approached the king intending to inform, to counsel, to criticize or to complain. A particular narrative


15

pattern in which Richard and those close to him resist and rebuke truthtellers is established in both texts. Arundel’s sermon suggests that children dislike criticism and retaliate against those who chastise them. This vice is illustrated in an allegory which interprets the deposition as a sequential shift from an unfavourable state to a more beneficial one. Ricardian rule is imagined as an oppressive environment in which truthtellers are afraid to speak: ‘Quondam autem veritas fuerat subpeditata, ut nullus auderet loqui’ [Previously, however, the truth was trampled underfoot, so that no-one dared to speak].43 With an astute allusion to Henry’s own position as returning exile, Arundel predicts that mature rule will result in the return of these oppressed personifications: ‘Veritas ergo intrabit, adulacio recedat’ [Truth therefore will enter, let flattery draw back].44 Arundel’s allegory suggests that Richard is surrounded by flatterers who suppress truthtellers. Lancastrian rule is figured as the arrival of truth and the expulsion of flattery from the familia regis and the kingdom at large.45 Similar but non-allegorical suppression of truth and those who tell it occurs throughout the deposition schedule. Article 5, for example, describes how, following violent and illegal infringements of their rights by the Cheshire guardsmen whom Richard employed as his personal bodyguard, anonymous subjects responded by bringing serious complaints to the king’s notice (‘graves queremonie . . . ad audienciam dicti regis’).46 These graves queremonie have a dual sense of both generalized complaint and specific legal action.47 Rather than assisting his wronged subjects, however, Richard does not provide any form of remedy. This lack of legal redress is compounded by the king’s preferential treatment of the Cheshire guardsmen. Rather than punishing them for their actions, he continues to favour them and to rely on them above all others. Richard thus misses his opportunity to make appropriate atonement, and shows that, like the child described in Arundel’s sermon, he prefers to protect favourites and to oppress those who criticize his actions. A variation on this narrative appears in Article 23: Item, in pluribus magnis consiliis regiis, quando domini regni justiciarii, et alii, onerati fuerant ut fideliter consulerent regi in tangentibus statum suum et regni sui, idem domini justiciarii, et alii, frequencius in dando consilium juxta discrecionem suam fuerant per regem subito et tam acriter increpati et reprobati, quod non essent ausi dicere pro statu regis et regni in consiliis suis dandis dicere veritatem [Also, in many royal great councils, when the lords of the realm, justices, and others, had been charged with faithfully counselling the king in matters touching his estate and that of the realm, the same lords, justices, and others, when giving counsel in accordance with their understanding were frequently

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rebuked and reprimanded, suddenly and so bitterly that they did not dare to speak the truth in giving their advice on the welfare of the king and the kingdom].48

When civic-minded magnates and justices are called to bring true counsel to the sovereign’s presence, they are thwarted in this truthtelling process and are scorned and rebuked. The same pattern is followed in Article 20 in which Richard is accused of having instructed sheriffs to arrest and imprison those who spoke critically of him in public or in private.49 Richard fails in comparison with the exemplary model of a king who acts on and rewards good counsel.50 The mutually beneficial verbal exchanges which ought to occur between sovereign and subjects are replaced by confrontation and frustrated communication. Malefactors are confirmed in their actions while truthtellers and those acting for the common good are ignored or mistreated. In the official texts of the deposition, the many and varied impressions available to those who had experienced all aspects of Ricardian government were displaced in favour of a single, inflexible and, in Pocockian terms, paradigmatic representation of Richard and his style of rule. Paradigms and stereotypes promote certain structures of thought and speech above others, they present matters selectively, highlighting certain values, arguments and ideas and diverting attention away from others.51 Each paradigm ‘encourages the presumption that we are situated in a certain reality and are called on to act, speak or think in certain ways, and not in others’.52 In this case, Ricardian rule was swiftly recast as a paradigmatic example of bad kingship, distinguished by its tyrannical and immature qualities and its dislike of truthtellers. Such kingship, supposedly acknowledged by Richard himself and illustrated in the deposition articles in a series of homologous examples, created a reality in which Richard’s resignation was necessary, advantageous and inevitable. At this vital political moment, the deposition articles and sermon stereotyped Richard and his rule as childish, tyrannous and detrimental to his subjects, rewriting them via a set of interrelated paradigms. Yet while paradigms such as those put forward in the deposition schedule may attempt to limit representations in certain ways, they can never be successfully preclusive. The varied and sometimes surprising evolution of this paradigm of Ricardian rule will be the subject of the next chapter.

2

The dissemination of the Ricardian stereotype

‘The diffusion of a language’, Pocock tells us, ‘may be a very different story from its creation.’1 Because speakers and hearers (or writers and readers) do not own but share their languages, authors of texts cannot guarantee or circumscribe the ways in which statements will be understood and answered, producing instead ‘an open-ended series of effects’.2 Respondents engage with the paradigms put forward but their reaction cannot be secured or prescribed. Rather, the hearer or reader ‘begins to ‘‘read’’ the text, taking the words and speech acts it contains to himself and reiterating them in ways and in contexts of his own selection’.3 The deposition schedule thus acted like a pebble thrown in a lake, setting in motion a sequence of responses. Contrary to the laws of physical science, however, the linguistic ripples created were not predictably concentric but rather independent and ungovernable. Stereotypes and paradigms of Richard and Ricardian rule were presented both to those at the 30 September ceremony and at Henry IV’s first parliament and to those further afield who acquired information about the deposition at second hand. According to a London chronicle, during the first parliament of Henry’s reign proper the Commons petitioned that the ‘horrible causes’ of the deposition might be ‘redde, shewed, and declared thurh England in euery shire’.4 The Record and Process was included in the roll of this parliament and also circulated independently.5 Adam Usk embeds quotations from the deposition articles in his retrospective account of Richard’s reign, and the Record and Process is quoted almost verbatim in the Annales Ricardi Secundi.6 Other manuscripts reveal that individual documents relating to the deposition, such as Richard’s resignation or Henry’s claiming of the throne, found their way to many different locations.7 Historiographers are thus the first witnesses to the sequence of linguistic responses inaugurated by the Lancastrian coup d’e´tat. They engaged with the paradigms supplied by the Record and Process and associated documents not 17

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only when narrating the deposition itself, but also when retrospectively writing the history of Richard’s reign.8 A significant number of accounts of the latter part of Richard’s reign were written after the deposition with the benefit of hindsight and as a response to the paradigms provided by the Record and Process.9 Whilst there were texts available after the deposition which resisted or disregarded the Lancastrian reinterpretation of Richard’s reign (either because they had been composed before the deposition or because they were composed by those hostile to the Lancastrian cause), the majority of representations of Richard’s reign were written after the deposition with some awareness of the retrospectively created stereotype of Richard and his rule.10 The Annales Ricardi Secundi was written after 1399, as was the section of Adam Usk’s chronicle covering the years from 1377 to 1400 which was written in the spring of 1401.11 The second part of the Vita Ricardi Secundi, covering the years from 1390 to 1402, was written after 1404.12 The Continuatio Eulogii, describing the years from 1367 to 1405, was written in or shortly after 1405, incorporating and supplementing a shorter Latin original ending in 1401.13 Two poetic treatments of Richard’s reign, John Gower’s Cronica tripertita and the anonymous Richard the Redeless, were also composed shortly after the deposition.14 FROM EFFECTS TO CAUSES

Such post hoc chronicles do not rewrite history radically, but they explain certain events and policies from the latter part of Richard’s reign in line with the deposition articles’ paradigm of Richard as a simultaneously youthful and tyrannical sovereign. They draw on the deposition articles for information regarding Richard’s activities and add to their descriptions adverbial and adjectival clauses which comprehend these events as predominantly caused by tyrannous and youthful qualities. They import stereotypes circulating after the deposition into pre-depositional history. The arrest of the three leading Appellants in June 1397, for example, was brought about, according to the Vita Ricardi Secundi, because Richard’s actions were youthful and foolish (‘iuuenum et insipiencium’).15 The author of the Annales writes that the execution of Arundel, the murder of Gloucester and the imprisonment for life of Warwick came about because of Richard’s artfulness, fickleness and arrogance (‘astutia, levitate, et insolentia’).16 Gower, in one of the Cronica tripertita’s summarizing rubrics, indicates that he will next describe how Richard tirelessly pursued projects designed to increase his own wealth, to oppress his subjects and to exploit his kingdom tyrannically (‘vt suum regnum tirannice disperdat’).17 Gower’s reference to Richard’s tyrannical


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nature shows that the implicit paradigms contained in the articles and sermon were more freely articulated in subsequent texts. These interlocking paradigms succeeded in influencing authors predisposed to accept the Lancastrian representation of Richard and his reign because they rendered amorphous, chaotic and perplexing events explicable and narratable. They offered a cause-and-effect account of the momentous affairs of the latter part of Richard’s reign. Tyrannical avarice, for example, provided a comprehensible motivation for many of the significant events of the later 1390s. A number of incidents are assigned to Richard’s desire simultaneously to acquire wealth for his singular profit and to suppress rebellion by impoverishing his subjects. These included the removal of the Crown Jewels from the Tower, the lack of repayment on the loans of August and September 1397, the one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths (along with the wool subsidy for life) granted in the parliament held at Shrewsbury in January 1398, and the blank charters exacted from London and sixteen surrounding counties in late summer 1398.18 The author of the Annales suggests that the blank charters (not in fact blank but containing an admission of guilt and submission to the king’s grace) were designed to ensnare and trample down (‘illaqueare et suppeditare’) Richard’s subjects in order to prevent them regaining their rights.19 The Brut chronicle blames the creation of these blank charters on Richard’s ‘gret coueti3e’.20 Taxes and subsidies were demanded not for reasons of common profit but for reasons of singular profit. The Vita Ricardi Secundi accuses Richard of having raised taxes on the false pretences of military defence (‘sub colore inimicos expellendi’) which were in fact spent foolishly (‘inaniter’) on extravagance (‘insolenciam’).21 The Continuatio Eulogii reports that Archbishop Arundel reprehended Richard for having impoverished the realm by the imposition of taxes and tallages, not for common profit but rather to satisfy his avarice and pride.22 Gower likewise accounts for Richard’s revenge on the leading Appellants in terms of tyrannical covetousness: ‘Tunc accusare quosdam presumpsit auare, | Vnde catallorum gazas spoliaret eorum’ [Then he greedily presumed to make accusation against certain men, so that he might despoil them of their treasured possessions].23 The evaluative stereotypes created in the deposition schedule are thus turned from effect to cause and retrospectively inserted as motivating forces into the narrative history of Richard’s reign.24 FABRICATING RICARDIAN LUXURY

Less constrained by the formal and quasi-legal framework of the deposition schedule, post hoc chroniclers also supplemented the deposition articles

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with more evaluative illustrations of Ricardian misgovernance. Nevertheless, these supplementary details were shaped by and remained within the paradigms offered in the official account of the deposition. Having accused Richard of tyrannically extorting money from his subjects in accordance with the deposition articles, chroniclers imagined what these vast sums might have been spent on. The articles suggest that Richard had given Crown resources away to undeserving candidates and that he wasted other resources vaingloriously, but they do not offer an itemized explanation. In providing one, post hoc chroniclers devised details according to conventional descriptions of youthful and tyrannous behaviour. Both young people and tyrants, ruled not by reason but by their passions, are driven by their lack of self-regulation to indulge their physical desires for food, drink, sex, fashion or other luxuries, and entertainment.25 Correspondingly, Richard was reprehended in post hoc chronicles for various types of self-indulgence. The author of the Continuatio Eulogii describes two occasions on which Archbishop Arundel chastised Richard both for his own intemperate lifestyle and for that of his household. Before his exile in 1397, Arundel is said to have anticipated the criticisms of the deposition schedule by preaching a sermon attacking the Ricardian household’s riotous living, particularly its avarice and pride which was infecting the whole kingdom.26 On his return in 1399, the archbishop confronted Richard with a very similar charge: ‘Incontinenter vixisti, et fœdo exemplo tuo curiam tuam et regnum maculasti’ [You have lived intemperately, and you have polluted your court and your kingdom by means of your shameful example].27 In a short epitaph following the entry describing Richard’s death in February 1400, the author of the Vita Ricardi Secundi likewise claims that Richard set no limits to his consumption of food and drink, and had no pattern in his hours of sleeping and waking, often staying up for part of or all of the night.28 These claims, unproved and unfounded in historical fact, create a posthumous representation of life at the Ricardian court which accords with the deposition schedule’s interdependent paradigms. In addition to augmenting paradigmatic representations with extra illustrative detail, post hoc chroniclers also reinterpreted existing historical details in line with the new stereotype of Richard and his court. Abstract accusations about self-indulgence and extravagance were corroborated by the choice of selective examples from recent history. The Vita Ricardi Secundi, for example, records that Richard spent Christmas 1398/9 at the episcopal palace at Lichfield as the guest of the bishop, John Burghill. Selecting one particular aspect of these Nativity celebrations because it


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illustrated the accusation that Richard was prone to indulgence and excess, the author of the Vita Ricardi Secundi describes these Christmas entertainments as occurring on a lavish scale. Numerous people supposedly consumed on a daily basis twenty-eight oxen, almost three hundred sheep, and an almost limitless amount of poultry.29 Richard may well have had good reason to put on such an elaborate display – he was entertaining a deputation from the Byzantine court sent by the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus to request financial help for the blockaded city of Constantinople, yet this explanation is not mentioned.30 This portion of the Vita was written after the deposition and thus we must also consider this entry to form part of the amplified stereotype of Richard’s court as sinfully self-indulgent. In making these accusations, the Continuatio and the Vita assign an alternative meaning to the activities of the Ricardian court which is consistent with the underlying paradigm of tyrannous behaviour. According to De regimine principum, tyrants ‘trowen þat men acounten hem in greet felicite 3if þei ben eche day in greet outrage of mete and drynke, in dronkenesse and in greet festes’.31 Elsewhere, tyrants are said to prefer ‘bodilich likynge’ to common profit: ‘þei ben not sobre but glotons and not chaast but lechours’.32 Kingly magnificence is reinterpreted as a form of excessive indulgence which exemplifies Richard’s tyrannical qualities. According to these post hoc chroniclers, Richard demonstrated his taste for luxury not only through food and hospitality but also via the grandiose display of his sovereignty and power, particularly through expensive clothing and ceremonial splendour.33 The author of the Vita records in his epitaph that Richard was immeasurably ostentatious in his feasts and clothing.34 Again, this opinion is pre-emptively substantiated by the selection of particular details for the Vita’s narrative history which corroborate its epitaph. In his description of their journey from North Wales to London in September 1399, the author of the Vita records that Richard’s captors forced the king to observe a certain humility in his appearance: ‘Nec in hiis omnibus diebus permittebatur rex mutare uestes suas, sed semper in uno eodemque i[n]dumento per omnes uillas predictas simplic[i]ter equitabat’ [Not even was the king allowed to change his clothes during all of these days, but instead at all times he rode simply through all the aforementioned towns in the same set of clothes].35 These simple garments are swiftly and ironically contrasted with rumours of a ‘tunicam’ worth 30,000 marks, made of gold, pearls and other precious stones, which Richard had supposedly commissioned for himself.36 The Annales similarly draws attention to the elaborate outfits worn by Richard during the negotiations for his second marriage to Isabella of France.37

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Similar retrospective claims were made regarding Richard’s supposed taste for extravagant ceremony on public occasions. Usk, for example, pauses during his description of Henry IV’s coronation feast to refer with heavy irony to an uncorroborated rumour that Richard had planned to crown Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey, as king of Ireland in Dublin on the very same day in 1398 with great ostentation and vainglory.38 Chroniclers singled out the first session of the 1397/8 parliament, held at Westminster in a specially built marquee due to the ongoing reconstruction of Westminster Hall, as a particular instance of regal magnificence. The Vita Ricardi Secundi records that Richard presided over this parliament with unparalleled ostentation: ‘In qua gloriosius et sollenius sedebat, quam unquam aliquis rex istius regni [p]residere consueuit’ [In which place he sat more magnificently and more solemnly than any king of this kingdom had ever been accustomed to preside].39 This view of Richard and his court as exceptionally opulent, extravagant and sinfully indulgent, though not illustrated overtly in the deposition schedule, quickly became a commonly accepted fact about Richard’s reign. Writing in 1422, James Yonge employed a brief history of Richard’s governance to illustrate for his patron, James, earl of Ormonde, the doctrine that devout and pious kings inspire the obedience of their subjects. Richard lost this respect because, following his second marriage, ‘than regnyde avoutry and lechurie in hym and his howse-maynage’.40 In the earliest version of John Hardyng’s chronicle (composed between 1440 and 1457), the Ricardian household is notable for its excesses. Hardyng, quoting earlier chroniclers as his authority, reports somewhat hyperbolically that ten thousand men and women were given food and drink in the royal household by three hundred cooks and other servants.41 Like Yonge, Hardyng accuses the Ricardian familia of sexual misconduct, and links this vice with the charge that Richard’s household style was visually ostentatious: ‘Grete pride he helde and passyng grete aray | And in his house grete vyce and lechery, | Fornycasioun and eke avoutry ay | Full comoun was.’ By the middle of the fifteenth century, Richard had become the epitome of extravagant kingship: ‘Thar was neuere kyng helde suche a regyment | Of housholde grete.’ THE TREATMENT OF TRUTHTELLERS

Just as these post hoc chronicles amplified accounts of Richard’s luxury and misrule, so they provided additional illustration of his treatment of truthtellers. As we have seen, the deposition articles contained a number of


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instances in which Richard ignored or punished those who had come to his presence in order to provide advice, criticism or other forms of truthtelling. These instances were allegorized in Arundel’s sermon which described the Lancastrian usurpation as the return of personified truth and the banishment of flattery. One of the first responses to this proffered stereotype came in parliament on 17 October 1399 in a reply made by John, lord Cobham to the Commons’ petition that Edward, duke of Aumale, Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey, and John Hollard, duke of Exeter, should be arrested for their part in Richard’s revenge on the Appellants. Cobham said that during Richard’s reign the condition of the English had been worse even than the conditions of the heathens.42 Even though pagans were wrong in their beliefs, they remained truthtellers: ‘tamen vera loquuntur, vera faciunt, veraque fatentur’ [nevertheless they speak truths, they assert truths, and they demonstrate truths]. In contrast, the English people under Richard did not dare to speak the truth for fear of damaging repercussions. Like Cobham, post hoc chroniclers responded enthusiastically to the deposition schedule’s paradigmatic representation of Richard’s animosity towards truthtellers. As they had done with Richard’s supposed luxury and vainglory, they selected for particular emphasis the events of his reign which pre-emptively corroborated this latterly established stereotype. The Annales eliminates the allegorical element of the deposition sermon and applies the paradigm of Richard as unceasingly hostile to truthtellers to his treatment of two particular individuals: Nec audebat quisquam pro veritate stare, vel fateri quod verum fuit, propter Regis tyrannidem atque malitiam; nempe quilibet eo majori [timore] percellebatur verum loqui publice, quo cernebat Fratres Johannem Parys et [left blank in MS], Doctores in Theologia, viros famosos, detineri in carcere, et usque ad summas pecuniarum, importabiles etiam locupletibus, multari et emungi, quia prædicaverant de malo Regis regimine, et consiliariis ejus nequam [And no one dared to stand for the truth, or to acknowledge what the truth was, because of the tyranny and malice of the king; indeed, everyone was too much overpowered by great fear for the truth to be spoken publicly, particularly by those who saw Friars John Paris and [left blank in MS], doctors of theology, and renowned men, being detained in prison, and being fined and cheated of the greatest sums of money, not payable even by the wealthy, because they had preached about the evil of the king’s governance, and the worthlessness of his counsellors].43

The name omitted in the Annales may well have been that of Thomas Prestbury, a monk of Shrewsbury Abbey who, according to Adam Usk, had been detained by Richard for preaching against his excesses.44 The reference occurs as an aside in Usk’s account of the Lancastrian party’s landing

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at Ravenspur and their victorious journey through England towards London. At Ludlow Castle on 4 August 1399, Usk says that he procured Prestbury’s release from detention from Bolingbroke and Archbishop Arundel. While the larger motive behind this aside must be Usk’s desire to commemorate his own small role in the wider narrative of the deposition, this anecdote again reinterprets prior events in the light of the paradigms on offer in the deposition schedule.45 Prestbury is in Usk’s account an identifiable figure who had spoken out against Ricardian excesses. Imprisoned and silenced by Richard, Prestbury, as a truthteller from the Lancastrian viewpoint, is recognized, restored and rewarded by members of the Lancastrian faction. Usk shows himself, Henry and Archbishop Arundel jointly cooperating in this action, inserting himself alongside these two leading figures in a paradigmatic narrative. This small digression contrasts the punitive treatment which truthtellers received at the hands of the Ricardian court and the favourable treatment which such truthtellers could expect from the newly arrived Lancastrian party. THE COMPOSITION OF THE RICARDIAN FAMILIA

In addition to supplementing or exemplifying the paradigms on offer, those responding to the deposition schedule were at liberty to transpose and amalgamate various aspects. When considering the Ricardian familia, and particularly those who advised or influenced the king, post hoc chroniclers applied to those around him the qualities of youth and self-interest which the deposition schedule had allocated to Richard himself. Chroniclers suggested that those closest to Richard were either too young or too self-regarding to provide suitable counsel and assistance. The Vita Ricardi Secundi records in its epitaph that Richard was unpredictable in his behaviour because he followed the advice of young men rather than mature noblemen.46 Gower gives a similar verdict in the Cronica tripertita: ‘Stultorum vile sibi consilium iuuenile | Legerat, et sectam senium dedit esse reiectam’ [He took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected].47 This imagined preference for incompetent advisers again accords with the deposition schedule’s underlying stereotype of Richard as tyrannous. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that ‘tyrants are always fond of bad men, because they love to be flattered’.48 Richard’s flaws are applied most extensively to members of his familia in the alliterative poem Richard the Redeless.49 Of all the post hoc accounts of Richard’s reign, this text responds most creatively and illuminatingly to the paradigmatic elements of the deposition schedule.50 The poem presents


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itself as a treatise addressed to Richard himself, written to ‘mende him of his myssededis’ (RR, I. 38), though it must have been written in the spring of 1400 at least three months after Henry’s coronation.51 In Passus I of the poem, the stereotype of Richard as a simultaneously youthful and tyrannical sovereign is extended to encompass the personnel of the Ricardian familia. The motives of self-indulgence or wilfulness reserved for Richard in the articles here apply to those around him. Richard’s retainers are identified as ‘gylours of hem-self’ who ‘walwed in her willis forweyned in here youthe’ (RR, I. 112–14). Their only concern is their ‘solas and ese’ (RR, I. 115) and ‘lustus of lordsch[i]pe’ (RR, I. 117). Similarly, Richard’s vanity and vainglory is, in this poem, also characteristic of his ‘knavis’ (RR, I. 199) who counselled Richard for singular rather than common profit: ‘All that they moued or mynged in that mater | Was to be sure of hem-self and siris to ben y-callid’ (RR, I. 190–91). Richard the Redeless shares with other accounts of Richard’s reign the opinion that his counsellors were too young and inexperienced to assist him properly in the task of government: ‘The cheuyteyns cheef that ye chesse euere, | Weren all to yonge of yeris to yeme swyche a rewme’ (RR, I. 175–76). Richard’s supposed immaturity also extends to those who are supposed to restrain him. Such cross-fertilization demonstrates that post hoc chroniclers were guided but not restricted by the deposition schedule paradigms. They modified them in ways which were made possible but not fully anticipated or sanctioned by the official documents of the deposition. Passus I of Richard the Redeless, for example, integrates different types of household member into an aggregated representation of a stereotypical Ricardian courtier. The youthful self-interested courtier is conflated with that of the Cheshire guardsmen who were cited in the fifth deposition article for their vicious treatment of Richard’s subjects.52 The poem makes this conflation as it describes those who diminished Richard’s sovereignty through their misconduct: Full preuyly they pluckud thy power awey, And reden with realte youre rewme thoru-oute, And as tyrauntis, of tiliers token what hem liste, And paide hem on her pannes when her penyes lacked. For non of youre peple durste pleyne of here wrongis, For drede of youre dukys and of here double harmes. (RR, I. 139–44)

Whilst the violent behaviour of those nearest to Richard is that of the Cheshire guardsmen, the rank allocated to them in line 144 identifies them as much more senior members of the Ricardian court who had become

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notorious in the latter part of Richard’s reign. Richard created five dukes, a duchess, a marquis and four earls on a single day in the 1397/8 parliament.53 This group of nobles, according to the Annales, was derisively known by the general public as the ‘dukettos’ or dukelings.54 In this passage, two types of household member are integrated to form a homogeneous representation of a Ricardian courtier who shares the negative qualities allocated to Richard by the deposition schedule. Like Richard himself, they are tyrannous (‘as tyrauntis’, line 141) and purvey goods from subjects without being able to meet their debts. They oppress Richard’s subjects both by impoverishment and by physical violence. They also create an environment in which truthtellers and complainants are too intimidated to speak out.55 In these retrospectively constructed accounts of Richard’s reign, the paradigms promoted by the deposition schedule are subject to supplementation and evolution. The schedule, as an initiating linguistic move, is unilateral, seeking to impose its homogeneous view of Richard on public opinion, but the responses to it are polymorphous and unconstrained.56 Even in post hoc chronicles which produce narratives of the deposition highly favourable to the new Lancastrian administration, the stereotyped representations of Richard and his court are variable and dynamic rather than static and unchanging. Moreover, as well as rewriting the Ricardian past, these irrepressible stereotypes become connected to other pre-existing discourses and literary topoi. The next chapter will show how these paradigms of Richard and the Ricardian past escape yet further from Lancastrian control, temporarily politicizing particular narratives and tropes with which they become associated.

3

Politicizing pre-existing languages

Following Saussure, we distinguish between individual speech acts or paroles (which can, of course, take the form of written text) and the abstract linguistic system or langue of which they are a part.1 A langue is in fact comprised of many different langues, the particular vocabularies, idioms or rhetorics jointly shared and understood by individual users of a language. For a parole to be comprehended, it must be produced within the available possibilities of the existing langue, yet these paroles can also influence and modify aspects of the same langue from which they are constructed. ‘There is’, says Pocock, ‘a history formed by the interactions of parole and langue.’2 Furthermore, these interactions occur within individual texts themselves: ‘Texts are composed of langues and paroles, of stable language structures and speech acts and innovations that modify them.’3 The deposition schedule and post hoc chronicle accounts of Richard’s reign exploited existing linguistic and conceptual paradigms of tyranny and immaturity to consolidate and justify Lancastrian actions. They used the pre-existing resources of the langue to create politically motivated paroles. Yet this interaction between langue and parole is a two-way process. Through the creation of these particular paroles, certain aspects of the langue itself became politicized. Pre-existing elements of the langue, namely particular topoi or metaphors, were found to be especially pertinent to the political project at hand. They became useful because they were already available and readily understood. They set the events of the deposition within a more universal and timeless context, yet at the same time these neutral elements of the langue became temporarily politicized and partisan. By studying the interactions of langue and parole, this temporarily politicized use of certain seemingly conventional or commonplace discourses or topoi can be reconstructed. As well as paying due attention to the longer diachronic history of these idioms, we can also thus take account of synchronic moments in which such idioms become temporarily associated with particular events or speakers or political actions. In order to 27

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understand fully the impact of the deposition on political language and literature, we must therefore also be alive to its effect on existing parts of the langue. Three particular elements of the langue and their politicization will be considered, firstly de casibus narrative, secondly the trope of the excessively fashionable young man, and thirdly representations of the social geography of royal or noble households. RICHARD AND DE CASIBUS NARRATIVE

One such interaction between parole and langue came about when commentators on the deposition compared its leading figures to literary, historical or biblical predecessors. The stimulus for these analogies was Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s allusions to the protagonists of the Old Testament books of I and II Maccabees in the immediate aftermath of the deposition.4 In mandates sent on the final day of the first convocation of Canterbury following the deposition, Archbishop Arundel wrote that God had sent Henry IV like another Maccabeus (‘velut alterum Machabeum’) to rescue England from imminent destruction.5 This statement formed part of an order that the clergy and laity should give thanks for Henry’s arrival and ask for God’s blessing on the new dynasty. The archbishop compared Henry to Judas Maccabeus who led armed resistance against the religious oppression committed in Judaea at the instigation of Antiochus IV, king of Syria from 175 to 164 BC. Arundel compared Henry and Judas on the basis of their shared identity, from the Lancastrian viewpoint at least, as divinely ordained military heroes who successfully liberated oppressed peoples and defended moral values. Ten days earlier, Arundel had opened the first parliament proper of Henry’s reign by taking a verse from I Maccabees as the theme for his opening speech.6 The theme quoted was from I Maccabees 6. 57 (‘it lieth upon us to take order for the affairs of the kingdom’), the conclusion of the initial narrative where, following Antiochus IV’s death, the Syrians, led by Antiochus V and his advisor, Lysias, temporarily abandon their siege of Jerusalem, make peace with the Jews and undertake to restore Jewish religious rights. In addition to comparing Henry directly to Judas Maccabeus, Arundel thus aligned the new Lancastrian administration with the new Syrian administration which followed the death of Antiochus IV. If Henry was a type of Judas Maccabeus, Arundel’s comparisons therefore also implied the association of Richard II and Judas Maccabeus’s antagonist, Antiochus IV.7 Antiochus shares with the stereotyped representation of Richard qualities characteristic of the medieval conception of the


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tyrannical ruler. Antiochus, as he is portrayed in I and II Maccabees, is avaricious as well as sacrilegious. His financial resources run low because he gives his money to his soldiers as well as distributing gifts ‘with a liberal hand’.8 Seeing his funds running out, he raises more by taxing his subjects. He is proud and angry, oppressing the Jews and retaliating against those who stand up to him.9 The implied comparison of Richard and Antiochus made by Arundel was adopted by at least one contemporary observer. Following an account of the 1397/8 parliament, Adam Usk’s chronicle contains an unexpanded aide-memoire of historical and biblical parallels which could elucidate recent events: ‘Exemplum Cosdre, de Baldesar, de Antioco, et aliis tirannis populum affligentibus’ [the examples of Croesus, of Belshazzar, of Antiochus, and of other tyrants who have persecuted their people].10 The story of Belshazzar’s extravagant and impious feast was relevant here because it contained both elements of mature truthtelling (namely the writing on the wall and Daniel’s subsequent interpretation of it) and of riotous or childish excess which caused the premature end of a king’s reign.11 Croesus, king of Lydia from circa 560 to 546 BC, was similarly overthrown by Cyrus despite the great wealth he had accumulated.12 Usk’s note suggests that he thought that Richard, like Croesus, Belshazzar and Antiochus, had overreached himself in this parliament, setting in motion the events which would lead to his downfall. Although Richard’s royal power reached its fullest expression in this parliament, in Usk’s eyes his overthrow was prefigured and inevitable. Such comparisons with kings who, despite immense wealth or power, fell dramatically from their positions of authority occur elsewhere in Usk’s chronicle. His epitaph for Richard focuses on the ironic contrast between Richard’s earlier splendour and his ultimate fate: Sed, quamuis cum Salamone dapsilis, cum Absalone pulcher, cum Assuero gloriosus, cum Belino magno precellens edificator existens, ad modum Cosdre regis Persarum in manus Eraclii, sic in medio glorio tue, rota labente fortune, in manus ducis Henrici miserrime, cum interna populi tui maledictione, cecidisti [Yet, although you were as liberal as Solomon, as fair as Absalom, as grand as Ahasuerus, and as outstanding a builder as the great Belinus, nevertheless, just as Chosroes king of the Persians fell into the hands of Heraclius, so too were you, at the height of your glory, cast down by the wheel of fortune, to fall miserably into the hands of Duke Henry, amid the silent curses of your people].13

As well as linking Richard to a further series of historical antecedents, this comment indicates that Richard’s fall from prosperity to adversity could be explained as a result of the turning of Fortune’s Wheel.14 This suggestion

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was echoed by other post hoc commentators.15 A poem addressed to Henry V by Thomas Elmham in 1413 advises the new king to learn from Richard’s example: ‘Regis Ricardi crebro memorare secundi, | Cujus fortunæ sit cito versa rota’ [Be mindful often of King Richard II, the wheel of whose fortune was speedily turned].16 Likewise, a poem in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 78 casts Richard in the role of a precursor who illustrates for educational purposes the malign effects of Fortune: Aftur þat Kynge Richarde to dethe wes bro3te, Bothe kynges and other of hye estate Hure owne dethe and his hathe be dere bo3te Boþe ferre ago and also ry3te late. For suche myschevys and oþer dyvers also Y counsayll you me þynkyth ry3te weele: Yn þe begynnynge þenke wel what ye do Leste in þe ende Fortune turne hure whele. (fol. 1v )

Here Richard is the originator of a series of de casibus falls from the height of Fortune’s Wheel from which those addressed should learn. Similarly, in what is now usually known as Giles’s Chronicle, the description of Richard’s death at Pontefract Castle is immediately followed by a long interpolation concerning the falls of great men (‘virorum casus illustrium’) ascribed to ‘W Fer[u]by’.17 Although Giles’s Chronicle was not compiled until 1421, Clarke and Galbraith suggest that a Chancery clerk with northern connections, very possibly William Ferriby himself, may have previously amassed some of its component parts at an earlier date.18 This Chancery clerk may have been the William Ferriby who was part of the deputation to Richard in the Tower on 29 September 1399.19 The interpolation uses Richard’s murder at Pontefract as a narrative hook on which to hang more general comments about the ultimate instability of earthly power and riches. Richard’s death is merely the latest example in a long line of sudden falls from magnificence into wretchedness: Nostris quoque temporibus, Deus majestatis intonuit, quod sicut audivimus sic et vidimus, quod famosissimi seculi principes tam ornatu qu[a]m facie splendidi, natalibus gloriosi, assecurati fœderibus, solio sublimes, quum se in adepto felicitatis culmine putabant firmiter stabiliri, a summo prosperitatis vertice in abyssum miseriæ insuspicata ruina subito corruerunt. Causa vero tanti et tam insuspicati casus illustrium et dignorum poterit esse du[ple]x, videlicet seductoria familiae adulantis fallacia et deceptoria fortunæ adulantis illecebra [Likewise in our times, the God of Majesty has thundered forth vehemently (which just as we have heard so we have also seen) that the most famous leaders of the world, as brilliant in dress as in countenance, renowned as a result of their parentage, secured with treaties,


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seated high on their throne, while they considered themselves to be securely established in having obtained the height of happiness, they suddenly fell with an unexpected collapse from the highest pinnacle of prosperity into the abyss of misery. Indeed, the cause of so great and so unexpected falls of illustrious and worthy people may be twofold, namely the misleading deceit of a flattering household and the deceptive enticement of flattering fortune].20

Although the point is made by juxtaposition rather than direct explanation, the attribution of the cause of these falls to the flattery of household members and of Fortune herself indicates that Ferriby saw Richard’s fall within these terms. As we have seen, Richard was retrospectively characterized as a king who preferred flattery to truthtelling, and his household was retrospectively considered to have been composed of unsuitable and flattering courtiers. Like Usk, Ferriby implies a sense of inevitability about Richard’s downfall, deflecting responsibility for dynastic change away from Lancastrian agency and towards the seemingly non-partisan pattern of de casibus narrative. By comparing Richard with noteworthy antecedents and by stressing the role of Fortune in his downfall, commentators such as Arundel, Usk and Ferriby made use of a pre-existing and well-established langue in the form of a particular literary topos. These authors interpreted Richard’s demise through a particular generic framework, that of de casibus literature.21 In its most simple classification, the de casibus genre comprised a collection of short narratives (or simply a list of names) describing different historical figures, compiled to demonstrate the irresistible power of Fortune as illustrated by these characters’ sudden and unexpected falls from prosperity to adversity.22 In some cases, these falls occur simply as a result of seemingly random Fortune, while in others individual sin and misrule play a part. In particular, the tradition stresses the irony that it is the most wealthy and powerful who are most likely to fall in spectacular fashion. This topos, linking comments on Fortune’s capricious power with the provision of historical examples of the falls of kings and other great men, was inaugurated by the second prosa of Book I I of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiæ. Philosophy, speaking in the persona of Fortune herself, describes Fortune’s powerful inconstancy, citing the historical precedent of Croesus, king of Lydia, for the narrator’s benefit.23 Following Boethius, one of the most widely disseminated texts containing a de casibus section was Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. After her description of Fortune and Fortune’s mansion, the character of Reason illustrates the arbitrary and irresistible power of Fortune with the example of Croesus from Boethius’s De consolatione, supplemented with those of Seneca and

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Nero drawn from Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum.24 Following these classical examples, Reason turns her attention to more contemporary proofs of the power of Fortune. She narrates more recent examples from the 1260s of Manfred, king of Sicily, Conradin, his nephew, and Henry of Castile.25 De casibus narrative became a distinct genre in itself, as opposed to forming part of a longer, more generically mixed text, in the 1360s following the composition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus illustrium virorum.26 Boccaccio’s de casibus text was translated into French by Laurent de Premierfait first in 1400 and again in 1409 as Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes.27 It was not until John Lydgate’s translation of Premierfait as the Fall of Princes, undertaken between 1431 and 1438, that a Middle English text of Boccaccio could be consulted.28 Following Boccaccio’s lead, however, Chaucer introduced the de casibus genre to English readers in his Monk’s Tale (begun, perhaps, in the early 1370s and added to in the latter half of the 1380s).29 This tale, which may have previously circulated independently before its incorporation into the Canterbury framework, identifies itself in its subtitle as an English example of Boccaccio’s new genre: de casibus virorum illustrium.30 As in the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer added contemporary examples of Pedro of Castile, Pierre de Lusignan, Bernabo` Visconti and Ugolino of Pisa to more familiar biblical and historical precursors such as Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Nero, Croesus, and Antiochus. The Roman de la Rose and Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale show that authors supplemented the original classical and biblical examples of the de casibus tradition with comparable instances from recent history, whether this was from the 1260s or the 1380s. This open-ended flexibility within the de casibus genre allowed contemporary events to be added to a pre-existing list of earlier falls from power.31 It was thus easily possible to incorporate Richard’s deposition into this tradition. By retrospectively contrasting Richard’s former prosperity and stability with his sudden downfall in keeping with the de casibus tradition, commentators implied the inevitability of the deposition. De casibus narratives were politically useful because they allowed the deposition to be described according to an already available and readily understood discourse which replaced Lancastrian agency and ambition with the rotations of Fortune’s Wheel. Usk’s particular innovation was to imagine Richard himself participating in this de casibus discourse. Usk writes that he was taken to the Tower on 21 September 1399 by Sir William Beauchamp in order to ascertain Richard’s demeanour.32 During dinner, Richard demonstrated his depression and distraction by linking his own situation with that of his historical


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precursors. England, from Richard’s perspective, is a fickle land characterized by the de casibus falls of its rulers.33 After this lament, Richard takes on the role of an English de casibus compiler, reciting the names and histories of such men.34 This in turn prompts Usk to consider his own de casibus response to Richard’s situation. Usk records that he was emotionally moved by Richard’s fate, and that he left the Tower reflecting on Fortune and its effects. Although this episode is an eyewitness record of Richard’s state of mind and of the attitudes of those around him, it is also an interpretation of recent events within the pre-existing generic framework of de casibus narrative. VESTIMENTARY SIGNS IN TRUTHTELLING NARRATIVES

The pre-existing literary langue of de casibus narrative was thus newly politicized through its incorporation into descriptions of Richard’s downfall. A similar process occurs in Richard the Redeless in which another pre-existing literary topos was enrolled into the narrative of the deposition. The second half of Passus III of the poem describes Richard’s ‘yonge lordis’ and the ‘fauutis’ which gave rise to their ‘cursidnesse and combraunce’ (RR, III. 112–14). In the imagined Ricardian household as represented in Richard, fashionable clothing (and the strutting required to show it off to its best advantage) is the sole consideration for such courtiers: For ben they rayed arith they recchith no forther, But studieth all in strouutynge and stireth amys euere; For all his witte in his wede ys wrappid for sothe, More than in mater to amende the peple that ben mys-led.

(RR, III. 120–23)

Virtues such as wit or intelligence become smothered in fabric and hence obliterated as clothing becomes the paramount concern. Moreover, fashion becomes the primary way in which members of the household are ordered and arranged. A hierarchy of fashion and luxury replaces meritocratic advancement. Courtiers borrow money in order to buy fashionable clothes because they believe that fashionability will guarantee promotion to more influential positions: g[uy]leris, joyffull for here gery jaces; And for her wedis so wyde wise beth y-holde. They casteth hem to creaunce the courte for to plese, And hopen to be hied in hast, yif they myghthe, Thoru swiche stif strouutynge that stroyeth the rewme.

(RR, III. 130–34)

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In the Ricardian household, external appearance is used to determine inner qualities, thus allowing deceivers who wear extravagantly shaped outfits to be considered wise because of the width of their dress. Again, the author of Richard extends one of Richard’s own supposed faults, namely his fondness for elaborate clothing and display, to members of his familia. In describing these faults, the author of Richard augments his representation of Ricardian courtiers not with original or unfamiliar details but with elements from a well-known literary tradition. Principal amongst these amplificatory topoi is matter drawn from satirical complaints about the costly and excessive fashions chosen by young men, by ambitious or unsuitable courtiers, or by the lower classes in imitation of their superiors. Privileging of clothes and fashion to an extreme and disruptive degree defines the lusty gallant or pauper superbus character who can be found in a range of satiric poems written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.35 Variants appear in sermons and in penitential treatises illustrating and condemning the sin of pride and in contemporary visions of sinners in Purgatory.36 They also feature in satires attacking particular types of courtier and are presented as negative examples to be avoided in advice manuals and courtesy books.37 These descriptions of extreme or excessive fashions (and those who wear them) have manifold variations but it is possible to draw out common themes. Writers highlight the impracticality of these garments, either because of their obscene lack of physical coverage or the excess of fabric which hinders movement.38 Furthermore, it was felt that the widespread adoption of these new fashions would result in a lack of social recognizability – it would become impossible to distinguish servants from masters.39 Finally, extreme fashions were thought to impoverish both individual consumers and craftsmen and also the national economy.40 The description of the Ricardian courtiers in Passus III of Richard draws on each of the major strands of these pre-existing interrelated topoi. The Ricardian courtiers buy belts, chains and other decorative items at Cheapside market, weakening English currency and creating ‘pens-lac’ (RR, III. 138–42) because these luxury goods were often imported and thus English specie was removed to the continent in payment. They wear voluminous sleeves trailing down to their heels which have been bought on credit rather than paid for in full (RR, III. 152–55). Despite their lack of capital, the courtiers’ new finery means that it is now difficult to distinguish servants and ‘gromes’ from their superiors, the ‘goodmen’ and ‘grette maistris’ (RR, I. 152–54, III. 343–45). Prompted by hints in the deposition articles about Richard’s own luxury and


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ostentation, the author of Richard amplifies and simplifies his description of the Ricardian familia by making its inhabitants typical examples of the pauper superbus figure. Yet Richard does not simply reproduce and combine deposition paradigms and associated topoi in straightforward fashion. Passus III also carefully and intricately connects temporarily politicized stereotypes both to scripture itself and to the dramatization of the gospel story on the medieval stage. Such biblical references show the extent to which depositional paradigms can be creatively amplified, reunited with prior discourses and, most importantly, explored and extended. The scriptural allusions are concentrated around gospel narratives in which vestimentary symbols play a significant part. The narrator reports that, because of the overwhelming emphasis placed on clothing at the Ricardian court, Richard believed too willingly in information told to him by his outrageously dressed courtiers, what the poem calls ‘the tale of a trifflour in turmentours wede’ (RR, III. 118). The idea of a particular style of dress associated with tormentors, which is worn by socially ambitious and socially disruptive young men, has a parallel in an earlier satiric poem, the Simonie: A newe taille of squierie is nu in everi toun: The raye is turned overthuert that sholde stonde adoun. Hii ben degised as turmentours that comen from clerkes plei.41

As the reference to the ‘clerkes plei’ suggests, the dress of the squires in the Simonie and the courtiers in Richard is compared to the clothes worn by those playing the parts of the Roman soldiers in dramatic presentations of Christ’s buffeting and scourging before the Crucifixion. The manuscript of the Towneley Plays names these characters as ‘tortor’, equivalent to the vernacular turmentour.42 This allusion therefore links the behaviour of Richard’s courtiers to the evangelic narratives of the buffeting and scourging of Christ by Pilate’s soldiers in Matthew 27. 27–31, Mark 15. 16–20 and John 19. 1–4. The author of Richard alludes to these particular scenes of buffeting and scourging because they contain a substantial vestimentary component. The Roman soldiers symbolize what they see as a discrepancy between Christ’s supposed status as king of the Jews and his commitment to humility and to voluntary poverty by dressing him temporarily in either a scarlet cloak or an imperial purple garment and by crowning him with thorns. Later in the narrative, this mock regalia is contrasted with Christ’s seamless robe for which they draw lots.43 The Simonie’s reference to a particular style of costume for the players in the buffeting and scourging scenes indicates that

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the contrast between the soldiers’ worldly appearance-based view of sovereignty and Christ’s emphasis on interior spiritual values was emphasized when such scriptural scenes were dramatized by dressing the torturers in luxurious or unusually elaborate clothing.44 The supposedly elaborate clothing of members of Richard’s familia therefore associates them with Christ’s tormentors, insinuating that they prefer showy ostentation to authentic humility. Richard the Redeless is not alone in making this connection. The Annales Ricardi Secundi, written after Richard’s deposition, describes the eight noblemen who appealed the leading Appellants of treason in 1397 as prancing around in parliament as if they were playing the part of these theatrical torturers.45 This association with Christ’s tormentors in dramatic representations of his buffeting and scourging was prompted by their distinctive dress. All eight wore red silk robes edged with white silk and embroidered with gold lettering.46 The Appellants, in this pro-Lancastrian account of the Revenge Parliament, are here seen as humble truthtellers mocked and mistreated by elaborately dressed Ricardian courtiers who behave and are dressed like Christ’s torturers. As with the Annales Ricardi Secundi, in Passus III of Richard biblical references gloss the depiction of Richard’s familiares not only in relation to their dress but also in their attitude to truthtellers. The Richard-poet alludes to a second biblical passage which relies in part on vestimentary signals for its effect but also introduces questions of good and bad counsel and of truthtelling. Lines 126–28, describing how in the Ricardian world fancily dressed men are welcomed into the royal household and are much admired by the foolish, are annotated as follows: ‘Qui mollibus vestiuntur in domibus regum sunt : in euangelio.’47 This gloss (which the poem’s editor treats as authorial and integrates into the body of the poem) forms part of Christ’s speech to a Galilean crowd in response to John the Baptist’s messenger’s question: ‘Art thou he that is to come, or look we for another?’48 Christ asks the crowd: What went you out in the desert to see? . . . A man clothed with soft garments? Behold, they that are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings. But what went you out to see? A prophet? Yea, I tell you, and more than a prophet.49

These questions refer back to the description in Matthew 3. 1–6 of John’s ministries in the deserts of Judaea. John’s garments are notably austere. He wears simple garments of camel hair and leather.50 His asceticism contrasts sharply with those dressed in luxurious clothes in royal palaces. Christ’s speech to the Galilean crowd addresses the issue of expectation. In vestimentary terms, what should the Messiah or a prophet look like? Two


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points are made. First, a prophet’s notable characteristics are not worldly status symbols of affluence or indulgence. Second are problems of recognition and association. John doubts Christ’s identity, and Christ’s questions to the crowd suggest that, if judged by worldly standards, John’s status as prophet can also be doubted. The uncertain relationship between external appearance (here primarily one’s clothing) and prophetic or truthtelling ability implied by the scriptural glosses given animates much of Richard the Redeless. Because they place such a high premium on fashionability, Ricardian courtiers are unable to recognize virtues such as wit and wisdom when they encounter them within the household. This negative correlation between truthtelling and the wearing of fashionable or luxurious clothing provides the action of an allegorical narrative which is inserted into the description of the Ricardian courtiers in Passus III of Richard. This narrative is an amplification in the form of full-blown Langlandian allegory of the latent personifications of Archbishop Arundel’s deposition sermon. As we have seen, embedded within the sermon is an allegory in which abstractions are personified using verbs of human action. When a child rules, self-will also rules, but reason is outlawed and steadfastness is chastised. Under immature government, truth is oppressed and subjugated. The return of Henry Bolingbroke from exile sees the return of these oppressed personifications. The author of Richard transforms this political rhetoric into literary allegory. The figure of Wit appears suddenly as ‘that steddeffaste stode amonge this reccheles peple’ at line 209. The narrator describes his treatment at the hands of the imagined Ricardian court with distinct emphasis on the role of clothing in this encounter. In comparison with the expensive and elaborate dress of the courtiers, Wit appears: Well homelich yhelid in an holsum gyse, Not ouerelonge, but ordeyned in the olde schappe, With grette browis y-bente and a berde eke, (RR, III. 212–15) And y-wounde in his wedis as the wedir axith.

Both in terms of clothing and in terms of age and maturity, Wit is the antithesis of the young ‘berdles’ courtiers (RR, III. 235) who currently dominate the Ricardian household. In this narrative, Wit’s unfashionable but functional clothing inspires physical and verbal violence and ultimately exclusion from the household. Wit is verbally ‘arouutyd for his ray and rebuked ofte’ (RR, III. 221) and these threats soon become physically violent. Ricardian retainers are ordered to ‘schoppe at his croune’ if he returns to the court (RR, III. 230). Finally, Wit is literally kicked out by a

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‘portir with his pikis’ (RR III. 232). As Barr notes, the pun on pikis as ‘spiked weapon’ and ‘piked shoes’ worn by a lowly porter shows both ‘the decadence of court and also its unmannerliness’.51 It also verbally rehearses the combination of fashion-related images with physical violence or threat that we have seen elsewhere in the poem. The ‘sleues that slode vppon the erthe’, metonymically representing the fashionable Ricardian courtiers, encourage further violence against Wit with cries of ‘Lete sle him!’ (RR, III. 234). Likewise, courtiers shout at Wit and ‘schorned him, for his slaueyn was of the olde schappe’ (RR, III. 235–36). This narrative combines references to dress with verbal and physical violence (particularly blows to the head) in ways which are reminiscent of the biblical archetype of Christ’s buffeting and scourging alluded to earlier in the poem. The court’s nonrecognition of Wit because of his poor clothing – he ‘was not y-knowe’ and the king ‘knewe him not’ (RR, III. 225–27) – affirms the Ricardian inability to recognize and reward truthtellers or prophets. They are unaware of the biblically sanctioned divergence between John the Baptist’s humble appearance and his role as prophetic truthteller and are thus unable to recognize Wit or to welcome him appropriately into the household. TRUTHTELLING AND THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE HOUSEHOLD

Just as certain pre-existing topoi relating to extreme fashionability were co-opted into the narration of the deposition, so too were ideas of the royal household both as an institution and as a physical space. The encounter between Wit and the imagined Ricardian court takes place within the social geography of the great or royal household. The author of Richard the Redeless would have been aware of the organization of the household both as a practical reality and as it was represented in courtesy books which prescribed the expected behaviour of host and guests.52 This social space is organized into what might be imagined as concentric circles of access: the chamber, the dais, the great hall, the courtyard, and the liminal area outside the gates.53 Such stratification of access was doubly important in the royal household because the king’s familia constituted what David Starkey calls ‘the core of the informal system of government.’54 In its twofold role as household and court, ‘the royal household was the fountain-head of patronage and favour. It was the place to which everyone who wanted anything of significance had to go for part of the time at least.’55 Observers might thus draw a correspondence between the type of people granted the greatest level of access within the household and the type of governance forthcoming from the sovereign.


39

Unlike the Ricardian retainers who observe no form of social decorum, Wit withdraws to a ‘herne’ or corner ‘at the halle ende’ (RR, III. 211), socially and physically as far as possible from the lords and ladies on the dais. Despite this reticence, Wit is sent away without the provision of food or shelter because of his unfashionable clothing and the ‘witt that he vsid’ (RR, III. 220). Studies of early modern hospitality rhetoric show that a household’s open-handed provision of food for poor visitors demonstrated the charitable reputation and virtuous qualities of the head of the household.56 Of particular importance was the reception given to the poor stranger or traveller. As Felicity Heal points out, strangers visiting households had a ‘peculiar sacrosanctity’, deriving in part from the story of Abraham entertaining angels unawares in Genesis 18.57 The Ricardian familia fails to observe the expected norms of hospitality and fails to welcome a humble stranger into the household in a virtuous and circumspect manner. An exclusion zone of sorts is set up about the court (RR, III. 228–31). Wit thus retreats to the liminal area ‘without the gatis’ while ‘Malaperte’, that is Impudence, becomes ‘myghtffull and maister of hous’ (RR, III. 237–38). Wit is expelled from inside to outside, joining the crowd of beggars at the gate awaiting the appearance of the lord’s almoner with his alms dish.58 As one might expect from a narrative involving allegorical personifications, this social space is also in some respects a mental landscape. The figure of Wit (or Wisdom or Steadfastness), representing good judgement, prudence, truthtelling and discretion, is unknown to Richard and his knights, unknown both in the social terms in which the narrator has framed this encounter and also excluded from the mental faculties allegorically represented. Impudence is installed as master of the Ricardian intellect whilst Wisdom is ostracized to a region beyond the cranium. Truthtelling and good governance are not central but liminal or even absent from the imagined Ricardian familia. The position of master, the chief official responsible for decorum within a particular space or environment, is allocated to a personification who is antithetical to common sense and truthtelling.59 Following the allegorical expulsion of Wit, it is not surprising that the narrator figures the Lancastrian usurpation in terms of a divinely inspired invasion of a single household. Sitting in his ‘see’ (RR, III. 351) (primarily the heavenly kingdom but also conveying the senses of the dwelling-place of a monarch and the royal throne), God witnesses the misbehaviour within the Ricardian familia and gathers together his own ‘seruantis’ in response (RR, III. 356). As motivating factor which again displaces Lancastrian

40


agency, God is both a reformer and a type of householder or master himself. His combined corrective force of ‘baronys and baccheleris’ and ‘comunes [of] contres’, led by a ‘duke doughty in dedis of armes’ (RR, III. 357–59), pursues Ricardian retainers to the heart of the household where they are ‘awakyd [fro] wecchis and wast that they vsid, | And for her breme blastis buffettis henten’ (RR, III. 363–64).60 The buffets repay the fierce blows previously dealt out to subjects by the familia.61 This invasion reverses earlier narratives in which innocent truthtellers are scourged and buffeted. Reversing Wit’s expulsion, the divinely led fellowship enters the household by force and wakes the familia from its all-night party. Readers are invited to see Henry’s conquest as a return of divinely sanctioned qualities of common sense, moderation and maturity within the boundaries of the royal household. In this case, as with de casibus descriptions of the falls of kings and the placement of the figure of the pauper superbus within the Ricardian household, already established aspects of the langue are absorbed into the much more circumstantial and historical accounts of Richard’s deposition. But this process also occurs in reverse as these well-known rhetorical strategies are temporarily politicized and given an added short-term significance. In Lancastrian texts, there is a subtle relationship between the conventional and the transitory. In Passus III of Richard the Redeless, preexisting topoi relating particularly to clothing, truthtelling and the social or physical geography of the familia regis are used to supplement and develop the paradigms on offer in the deposition schedule. This assimilation is not simple hyperbole or propaganda but is given depth and complexity by scriptural comparison. Richard’s biblical citations reveal the skill with which individual aspects of the deposition paradigms are related to existing archetypal narratives. In turn, however, these preexisting topoi are themselves given a fresh political resonance. The linguistic ripples created by the deposition schedule not only supply the langue with new elements but also alter perceptions of current discourse. To see Richard as a de casibus figure, for example, is both a political manoeuvre and also a move which temporarily politicizes the de casibus genre itself.

4

From stereotypes to standards

Richard the Redeless shows us that the Crown’s depositional rhetoric became expanded and modified as it emerged in literary form. Henry IV and his advisers were therefore faced with a range of responses to the deposition schedule which they may not have expected. Such freedom and nonconformity is a property of language itself, especially those parts of a language which are ideologically or politically significant and hence strongly contested. Pocock stresses a speaker’s or writer’s inability to control the reception and application of his own statements. Listeners or readers impute to his utterances ‘consequences, implications and entailments he may not have intended or wish to acknowledge and they will respond to him in terms determined by these imputations’.1 The paradigms prioritized by the deposition schedule altered the nature of political debate in unforeseen ways, encumbering the Lancastrian Crown with consequences which it had not fully envisaged. Appropriation of these paradigms by others occurred because they were available and possessable rather than exclusive and monopolized. The new Lancastrian Crown temporarily claimed ownership of these paradigms, but their ownership could not be guaranteed and their commitment to the values embodied within these paradigms could be doubted. Observers were highly aware that the Lancastrian deployment of positive and negative stereotypes of kingship was a temporary manipulation of rhetoric to achieve a particular political end.2 The narrator of Mum and the Sothsegger, a poem written circa 1409 by the author of Richard the Redeless, reminds Henry that Richard’s flaws and insufficiencies were openly discussed in the immediate aftermath of the usurpation and that individual subjects were invited to add their own personal perspective to the Lancastrians’ politically motivated discussion: . . . whenne oure comely king came furst to londe, Tho was eche burne bolde to bable what hym aylid And to fable ferther of fautz and of wrongz, 41

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The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship And romansid of the misse-reule that in the royaulme groved, And were behote high helpe, I herde hit myself (MSS, 143–48)3 Y-cried at the crosse.

The ‘fautz’, ‘wrongz’ and ‘misse-reule’ are the vernacular equivalents of the demerita notoria in his person and his government which Richard was said to have admitted.4 As we have seen, the notorious faults were initially delineated in the deposition articles and were subsequently illustrated and developed in post hoc accounts of Richard’s reign. Henry is reminded that, in the act of compiling a list of current faults and presenting himself as a reformer, he had publicly committed himself to providing ‘high helpe’ to individual complainants. The lines quoted above, however, betray a certain scepticism on the part of the Mum-poet as regards Henry’s genuine commitment towards truthtelling and the correction of faults. The verbs describing the delivery of these accusations (babelen, fablen, romauncen) have a primary denotation of ‘to speak’ or ‘to tell’ in this context, but they retain their secondary connotation of ‘to speak incoherently or foolishly’ or ‘to invent imaginatively’. This connotation hints that the populace’s complaints were more the product of political enthusiasm and propaganda than actual grievance. The cynicism expressed in this passage indicates that by 1409 the professed Lancastrian commitment to truthtelling and reform was considered to be a temporary and pragmatic measure rather than a genuine gesture. Their interest in cultivating discussion of Ricardian bad governance and necessary Lancastrian reform was latterly understood to be merely a temporary rhetorical promise which Henry had never intended to keep. At first, the narrator of Mum pointedly says that he ‘can not discryue’ how Henry has kept ‘the couenant’ on which the new reign was established (MSS, 150). In time, however, Henry is shown to have failed to keep his promise to receive truthtellers and complainants sympathetically and to act on their complaints. The Lancastrian household has become as inaccessible and hostile to truthtellers as its Ricardian predecessor: ‘oure corouned king is kepte fro tho ludes, | Forto [saye] hym the sothe sum while among’ (MSS, 115–16).5 Both Henry and his critics appreciated that the arguments and strategies required by the process of deposition constituted, in some form or another, an implicit promise or covenant.6 The notion that Henry’s claiming of the throne had included certain promises about the quality of English government took root both among Henry’s subjects and within the administration itself.7 In March 1402, one John Sparrowhawk was arrested for repeating the seditious words of an unnamed tailor’s wife who, amongst other things, had said that Henry had not


43

keep his promise to the realm, referring particularly to a promise supposedly made by Henry not to levy taxes except for military purposes.8 Two months later, a general proclamation was made to arrest those dissidents who were of the opinion that Henry had not kept the promises made at his coronation.9 Both his supporters and critics recognized that by co-opting the language of reform into the justification of the deposition, Henry had therefore promised to reform and improve the government of England himself. This implicit pledge provided his critics with an effective means of challenging the king. If Henry as reformer failed to make improvements, or if he was seen to make mistakes similar to those imputed to Richard, then he too could be challenged by those who would reform the reformer on behalf of the realm. This reasoning surfaces in the Continuatio Eulogii’s account of the two major rebellions against Henry in July 1403 and May and June 1405. The author of the Continuatio imagines a series of dramatic verbal exchanges between Hotspur and the king at Shrewsbury in July 1403. Proclaiming to his army his reasons for rebellion, Hotspur acknowledges that he was one of those who had supported Henry in 1399.10 He had assisted Henry in the usurpation because he believed that Henry would provide better government than Richard. This expectation had not been satisfied and thus Henry’s legitimacy was undermined: ‘Et quia nunc cognovit quod pejus regit Henricus quam Ricardus ideo intendit corrigere errorem suum’ [And because he now recognized that Henry rules worse than Richard, therefore he intends to set right his error].11 A similar motivation is offered for Archbishop Richard Scrope’s part in the June 1405 rebellion at York. The archbishop preached a sermon at the Minster in which he encouraged the laity to join the rebellion to correct and reform current bad government.12 Participation in insurrection is here construed as participation in reform. Appropriating the Lancastrians’ own tactic of listing illustrative faults in governance, Scrope composed a list of articles criticizing Henry’s government which were posted on the city gates in English and sent to parish curates to be further disseminated among their parishioners.13 The reforming rhetoric of the deposition, in combination with the promises which it implied, provided the means by which Henry’s own government could be criticized and challenged. In the face of such criticism, those supportive of the Lancastrian cause tried to reclaim the depositional arguments and rhetoric which they themselves had created. The open letter sent to the king on 4 May 1401 by Philip Repyngdon, Abbot of Leicester and Henry IV’s ‘clericus specialissimus’, reasserts the claim that the new Lancastrian administration was sympathetic to truthtellers.14 The letter was circulated beyond its immediate recipient – it is preserved, for example, in Usk’s chronicle.15

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Repyngdon concedes that England has descended into violent and unlawful chaos since Henry’s arrival and that there is fear amongst prudent observers of imminent disorder.16 Repyngdon writes that the letter contains no more than he has already told Henry in person (‘vivæ vocis oraculo locutus sum vobis apud vos manens’).17 The letter therefore pre-emptively guarantees for all other readers that Henry remains receptive to truthtelling. He has already accepted these carefully couched criticisms and is happy for Repyngdon to repeat them in the form of an open letter. Furthermore, Repyngdon has knowingly chosen to be a truthteller rather than a flattering courtier: ‘elegi magis abjectus esse in domo Dei mei, pro veritate, cum Baptista, quam regalibus interesse deliciis’ [I have chosen, like the Baptist, rather to be abject in my God’s house, for the sake of truth, than to be in the midst of royal pleasures].18 This is a partial paraphrase of Psalm 83 (84):11: ‘elegi abiectus esse in domo Dei mei magis quam habitare in tabernaculis impietatis’ [I have chosen to be an abject in the house of my God: rather than to dwell in the tabernacles of sinners]. Although from Coverdale onwards, the Hebrew caphaph, meaning ‘to stand at or guard the threshold’, has been translated as ‘doorkeeper’, medieval readers of the Vulgate’s abiectus took it to mean one who is downcast, disheartened, mean or worthless rather than someone who controlled access to the household.19 The Wycliffite vernacular bibles translate abiectus as ‘cast awei’ and as ‘out cast’, whilst the Glossa Ordinaria annotates abiectus with ‘opinione hominum’ – worthless in respect to the opinon of men.20 Repyngdon’s chosen self-representation relies on the same dichotomy used in Richard the Redeless to distinguish the stereotyped flattering Ricardian courtiers from truthtellers who are excluded and punished. He adopts the role of such a truthteller, comparing himself to John the Baptist (‘cum Baptista’).21 Richard the Redeless, as we have seen, glosses lines 126–28 of Passus III with a biblical citation which contrasts John’s clothing with the soft clothes worn in the houses of kings. The author of Richard develops the vestimentary contrast made in this gloss as a major thematic element of his description of the fashionable Ricardian courtiers’ treatment of Wit, another modestly dressed truthteller in the mode of John the Baptist. By adopting the role of a Baptist-like truthteller who is both exiled and humbly dressed, and by suggesting that Henry would react sympathetically to his letter, Repyngdon revives one of the arguments (and its attendant rhetoric) which had accumulated in the aftermath of the deposition. As a supporter of Henry’s government, Repyngdon reasserts the validity of the Lancastrian promise to accept truthtelling whilst others categorize this promise as expedient and temporary.


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FROM PROPAGANDA TO CONTESTED DISCOURSE

These repetitions of Henry’s political and linguistic covenant with the realm demonstrate that both his supporters and critics were aware of Lancastrian usage of paradigmatic representations and the political power which could be wielded by controlling or redirecting such discourse. While the Lancastrians had initially chosen these for their short-term rhetorical and political gain, such representations in fact became established as a valuable and much contested discourse. Such a discourse became desirable because its negative representations of Richard and his government could be converted into standards and principles for Lancastrian rule. Expectations were generated that Henry would not make the same mistakes as Richard and that his government would avoid the types of notorious faults exemplified in the deposition articles. These positive paradigms and expectations did as much to shape the nature of political debate and discussion as the negative representation of Ricardian rule. What started out as temporarily advantageous stereotypes endured in ways Henry can hardly have expected. Pocock describes how when ‘men in speaking commit themselves to a load or fabric of meanings greater that they can control, it is possible for others in reply to employ the same words to convey the loads of meaning they desire to select’.22 Lancastrian claims of improved personal and political behaviour, designed to justify and consolidate Richard’s deposition, were repeated by others in order to criticize or challenge Lancastrian government on its own terms or to limit Henry to actions which were seen as being consistent with their earlier promises. This transformation of pejorative stereotypes into positive expectations can been seen in Richard the Redeless, which, though it claims to have been written for Richard’s benefit, also addresses itself to ‘euery Cristen kyng that ony [croune] bereth’ (RR, I. 43) who may learn from Richard’s downfall. England’s new sovereign, Henry IV, is thus its implied reader. In Passus III, the narrator transforms retrospective stereotypes into conditional accounts of what the ‘grette’ (RR, III. 190), that is the governing elite, could and should do if they had the inclination: For wolde they blame the burnes that broughte new gysis, And dryue out the dagges and all the Duche cotis, And sette hem aside and sc[h]ort of hem telle, And lete hem pleye in the porche and presse non ynnere, Ne no proude peniles with his peynte sleve; And eke repreue robbers and riffleris of peple,

46

The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship Flateris and fals men that no feith vseth, And alle deabolik deoris dispise hem ichone, And coile out the knyghtys that knowe well hem-self, That were sad of her sawis and suffre well [couude], And had traueilid in her tyme and temprid hem-self, And cherliche cheriche hem as cheff in the halle For to ordeyne officeris and all other thyngis, Men shuld wete in a while that the world wolde amende; (RR, III. 192–206)23 So vertue wolde flowe whan vicis were ebbid.

Those in need of expulsion are generalized versions of the conflated figure of the Ricardian courtier described elsewhere in the same passus. Again, the social geography of the royal or noble household provides the underlying structure for the advice the narrator gives. Unsuitable courtiers should be allowed no further than the porch whilst more self-aware, self-regulated and mature knights should be appointed to the most senior positions in the great hall.24 This advisory section uses the latent expectations of the deposition stereotypes to produce a household narrative which every king and magnate ought to follow. The deposition of Richard II thus created particular standards and expectations for Henry IV and his administration to meet. It also provided particularly charged ways of expressing those standards and of criticizing Lancastrian government when it fell short of these expectations. In particular, narratives of household exclusion and inclusion, such as those reclaimed by Philip Repyngdon, became most keenly fought over and discussed. As the lines from Richard the Redeless quoted above show, the Lancastrian household was expected to be better regulated than its Ricardian predecessor. It was expected to welcome truthtellers and other suitable officials and to dismiss inappropriate courtiers, particularly those prone to flattery, vanity or self-interest. Furthermore, if Henry’s subjects were dissatisfied with any aspect of Lancastrian government, their dissatisfaction was frequently expressed through criticism of Henry’s household. One might argue that this interest in household composition simply reflects continuing practical anxieties about royal finance and about the network of advisers and counsellors who could best assist a king in governing the realm. The cost and composition of the royal household was criticized at some point during the reigns of most, if not all, late medieval English kings, and thus, it might be thought, it is no surprise to find this concern replicated in administrative, historical and literary texts.25 This line of argument, however, does not take account of the possibility that some kinds of criticism were temporarily more


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significant than others because of their temporary politicization in the wake of the deposition. The structures and categories employed to effect Richard’s deposition prioritized certain types of argument and rendered others less effective, providing ready-made channels of argument along which political debate flowed back and forth between the Crown and its subjects in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Such prioritized formats were particularly effective ways of expressing dissatisfaction with Henry’s governance because they had acquired a more immediate and more obvious topicality and political purchase thanks to the deposition. Narratives concerning the entry, exit, appearance and treatment of truthtellers, framed using the social geography of the familia regis, consequently appear in many types of political exchange during Henry IV’s reign. HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVES IN PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE

Such household narratives were transformed into both parliamentary petitions and political action. In the January parliament of 1404, for example, the Commons directed their attention towards the composition and expenses of the royal household.26 In response to their concerns, it was agreed that the king’s confessor, the abbot of the Cistercian abbey at Dore in Herefordshire, Master Richard Derham and one ‘Crosseby de la chambre’ should be expelled from the household.27 The exclusion of only four named members of the household was a token gesture in economic terms, but this action shows that household entries and exits retained considerable political significance. Following these expulsions, the Commons introduced a petition regarding the ideal composition of Henry’s household.28 The summary of this item given in the parliamentary roll shows that this petition and the associated ordinance were intended to replace these four individuals with unnamed but trustworthy truthtellers: ‘Pur mettre honestes persones en l’ostelle du roi’ [The appointment of honest persons to the king’s household]. In order to encourage parliament to agree an adequate subsidy in this parliament, the Chancellor, Archbishop Arundel, on behalf of the king, admitted that the royal household lacked good governance and requested that the lords assisted the king in reforming its administration, size and finance.29 This plan for reform was reported to the Commons who welcomed the proposals and granted the necessary subsidy. The composition of the household was also discussed in the Long Parliament of 1406, which sat, as Douglas Biggs describes it, as ‘an ad hoc

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great council’ to safeguard governance during the period of Henry IV’s ill health from May to December.30 On 7 June, the Speaker, Sir John Tiptoft, reported the Commons’ opinion that despite the reforms made in 1404, the royal household remained a place containing inappropriate or unsuitable individuals: ‘il est meyns honurable et plus de charge qe ne soloit estre, et unqore y ne ad nulle substance des persones vaillantz, et suffisantz, si bosoigne y serroit, mes de raskaile pur la greindre partie’ [it was now less honourable and more of a burden than it used to be, and still had no core of brave and worthy persons should need arise, but rascals for the most part].31 Biggs suggests this criticism may have formed part of wider alarm, prompted by Henry’s illness, about the king’s ability to discern and reward good counsellors.32 On 22 December, thirty-one articles were agreed which tried to establish ‘the pattern of governance’ until the next parliament by defining the various responsibilities of the king’s councillors.33 Article 3 drew attention to the possibility of there being certain people in the household who might influence the king or queen for their own advantage or to favour them in certain legal matters.34 These dimly imagined people are recognizable as versions of the self-interested courtiers familiar from representations of Richard’s familia. The king’s councillors are made responsible for publicly expelling such persons from Henry’s household (‘overtement voidez hors de company de nostre dit seignour le roy, et de nostre dame la roigne’). Given Henry’s recent infirmity and the possibility of future incapacity, the articles sought to protect him from malign influence in part by regulating the membership of the royal household. Parliament expressed anxiety about governance in 1404 and 1406 by seeking to remove certain members of the familia who symbolized the inadequacies in Lancastrian government and by seeking to introduce honest truthtellers into Henry’s household. In contrast to previous characterizations of the parliaments of the first half of Henry IV’s reign as confrontational and highly critical, recent articles by Pollard, Dodd and Biggs have argued instead that these assemblies provided merely limited, supportive and pre-approved reforms.35 Even if the actions agreed in these parliaments were cooperatively agreed reforms and attempts to safeguard governance during Henry’s ill health, they show nevertheless that the royal household was still being used as a screen on which to project certain anxieties about and hopes for royal governance. Household misgovernance was now not simply a Ricardian quality, but had become a mode in which parliament could express its concerns in Lancastrian England.


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HENRY’S UNRULY HOUSEHOLD

As with parliamentary debate, chronicle accounts of Henry’s reign also draw attention to the behaviour of members of his household as a way of implicitly criticizing Henry’s ability to govern well. As concerns about Henry’s capability grew, his knights and esquires began to be represented as unsuitable companions in ways which are reminiscent of Richard’s unruly familia. In entries for 1403 which explain that the greed of Henry’s household prevented him from suppressing Welsh rebellion, the Annales Ricardi Secundi and Walsingham’s Chronica maiora comment similarly that these knights and esquires were more influenced by Venus than Mars, and more like Laverna (the goddess of unlawfully obtained profit) than Pallas Athene (the goddess of wisdom).36 Lancastrian household knights are more interested in self-indulgence and acquiring money than in assisting Henry in military activities or fulfilling their roles as supporters and advisers. Both the Annales and Walsingham’s Chronica maiora offer anecdotes which portray Henry’s household knights and esquires as behaving irreverently and irreligiously, exerting considerable influence over the king who is unwilling to discipline them. Henry’s knights and esquires lack respect for members of the clergy, for Church possessions and for Church practices. In order to find the necessary funds for the campaign against the Welsh, a meeting was held between the king and senior clergy in autumn 1403. At this meeting, these same household knights and esquires suggested, much to the offence of the clerics present, that the archbishops should hand over their money and horses in order to fund future campaigns and return to their homes on foot.37 A further instance of anticlericalism occurred during the Coventry parliament in 1404.38 Following an outbreak of dysentery in the town, the Host was taken in procession through the streets. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, while venerating the Eucharist, noticed that a group of the king’s knights deliberately turned their backs and continued their conversations while the Host passed by. Arundel was outraged, denouncing the retainers in public and complaining to the king about his negligence in failing to discipline members of his household. Walsingham, in his Chronica maiora, reports another incident within Henry’s household during the Long Parliament of 1406.39 Sir Robert Waterton, Master of the King’s Horse, was said to have incited one of his own servants to insult a Master of Theology, Thomas Alkerton, as he stepped down from the pulpit. Alkerton had been preaching at St Paul’s Cross against calls for the confiscation of Church property. According to Walsingham, Henry was minded to treat this episode as an

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amusing prank, but Archbishop Arundel required that Waterton make public and private recompense for the offence. Reading between the lines, such disrespect for Church possessions, senior clerics and the Eucharist reflects fears that certain members of Henry’s household were sympathetic to Wycliffite attitudes towards the Church’s temporal possessions.40 These anecdotes are clustered primarily around the Coventry parliament of 1404 at which, according to Walsingham, parliamentary knights put forward a proposal to improve Crown finance by confiscating Church property and goods.41 Nevertheless, these anecdotes also focus on the relationship between the king and his familia, in particular his ability to control and discipline its members. They therefore remain in some senses instances of household narratives. Chroniclers also address the issue of Henry’s control of his retainers in circumstances which place less emphasis on attitudes towards ecclesiastical and theological matters. The Continuatio Eulogii alleges that a member of a similar group of favourite household knights and esquires encouraged the king to show no mercy to Archbishop Scrope following the 1405 rebellion by threatening to leave the household if the archbishop were not executed at once.42 The author of the Annales tells a very similar story about the Shrewsbury rebellion in 1403. Henry, it is claimed, wanted to spare the life of Thomas Percy, but the king’s friends insisted on his execution.43 As a whole, these chronicles intimate that a group of household knights and esquires had acquired too much influence over Henry’s decision-making abilities. Such unsuitable members ought to be disciplined or expelled, but instead Henry tolerates their presence in the household. Household narratives now provide evidence of failure in Lancastrian rather than Ricardian governance. MUM AND THE SOTHSEGGER: REMAKING HENRY’S HOUSEHOLD

Concern about the composition of the Lancastrian royal household is also expressed by the narrator of Mum and the Sothsegger. The beginning of the poem is missing in the single extant manuscript, but it is possible to reconstruct the poem’s opening narrative strategy from its recapitulative summaries: Now ye haue y-herde of the haselle names, Of officiers withynne and without eke, ... Now is Henry-is hovs holsumly y-made And a meritable meyny of the most greet And next I haue y-named as nygh as I couthe,

From stereotypes to standards And the condicions declarid of alle, Rehersing no rascaille ne riders aboute.

51 (MSS, 29–30, 206–10)44

The extant section names and describes the offices of the treasurer and the chancellor, and thus we can assume that the missing opening of the poem identified and described other key officers of Henry’s household. The opening section of the poem poetically constitutes the ideal household in a way which is analogous to the Commons’ attempts to alter the membership of the royal household in 1404 and 1406. The narrator considers that most important household officer currently missing from the familia is a ‘sothesigger’ (MSS, 38) or truthteller and sets out on a quest to find one for Henry’s household. The middle section of the poem describes the narrator’s energetic search to find out the current whereabouts of such a truthteller so that he can be reinstalled in the familia regis ‘yf the king wolde | Haue hym in housholde as holsum were’ (MSS, 101–02). He encounters the figure of Mum, who personifies self-interested silence as opposed to hazardous truthtelling. At lines 255–62, Mum acknowledges what readers suspect throughout the poem – the narrator himself is in many senses the sought-after truthteller necessary for Henry’s familia.45 They debate the benefits and drawbacks of their respective strategies of truthtelling and keeping silent. The quest motif allows the narrator to offer a great variety of truthtelling commentary on the flaws and failings of the various institutions he encounters, but the images and narratives of household entries and exits are sustained throughout his journey. The narrator visits a wide range of religious institutions – ‘abbeys of Augustyn and many hooly places’ (MSS, 537) – but their door policies are as unwelcoming to truthtellers as those of the Ricardian court in Richard the Redeless. The narrator is turned away from each of these institutions because of his lack of money, humble appearance and lowly estate: ‘But for I was a meen man I might not entre’ (MSS, 540). Like the figure of Wit or Wisdom in Passus III of Richard, the narrator is ejected from one of these religious houses by the porter responsible for controlling admission to the household: Thus thaire portier for my pourete putt me thens, And grauntid me of his goodnesse to go where me luste (MSS, 550–52) And to wandry where I wolde without the gates.

In the passage of time between the composition of Richard and the composition of Mum, such treatment of truthtellers has shifted from a supposedly Ricardian feature to a national phenomenon. Truthtelling encounters first suggested by the deposition schedule, and subsequently

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developed in Richard, are here used in Mum to describe the present and ongoing state of affairs throughout the kingdom. The narrator visits not one household but hundreds, and finds such treatment of truthtellers endemic on every social level (see lines 788–99). Despite their initial selfpresentation as a household that would offer access to external truthtellers, the narrator places the Lancastrian familia and the other households which he encounters in his quest to provide Henry with a truthteller in the role formerly occupied by the Ricardian household. In part, this dissatisfaction with Henry’s household and other households in the realm is the result of a widening gap between the religious beliefs of the author and the anti-heresy programme embarked upon by the Lancastrian administration. Mum contains criticisms of the institutional Church corresponding to reforms demanded by the Lollards, and the poem is particularly disapproving of the anti-Lollard Constitutions drafted and promulgated during Arundel’s chancellorship.46 The narrator links the present lack of a truthteller in Henry’s familia to legislative attempts to suppress Wycliffite dissent. The list of various punishments given in lines 167–69 which may be inflicted on a subject who might ‘bolde hym’ to ‘bable the sothe’ are, as David Lawton pointed out, very similar to the punitive actions listed in the 1401 act of De haeretico comburendo.47 Yet whilst the Mum-poet’s disappointment with Henry may have been caused by religious rather than political policy, the poem’s polemical strategies remain those which were politicized by their co-option into the textual environment of the deposition and those with which this poet had previously engaged in Richard. Household narratives remain the chief organizing principle of the poem. The Beekeeper’s description of the beehive which serves as a model for the ideal political state in the concluding section of the poem employs the social geography of a great household to structure its discussion of political theory. Expanding on his named source of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, the Beekeeper’s description of the interior of the beehive in lines 1002–12 adds architectural details of rafters, timber and tiling which shifts the mental picture formed by this description away from the natural construction of geometric wax cells towards the masonry and woodwork of the late medieval great house.48 This description of the beehive is particularly appropriate in a poem whose sections are thematically linked by household images and narratives because it imagines the nation state as a household, united under a single roof. The king has a great chamber of his own and is surrounded by an extended familia of citizens living in separate chambers and mansions.


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The Beekeeper, the sole figure of uncorrupted authority in the poem, acts as a kind of porter or doorkeeper, regulating the access to this symbolic national household. He tells the narrator that a hive should have a ‘gardyner’ who should ‘wisely a-waite whenne dranes furst entren | And nape thaym on the nolle ere thay thaire neste caicche’ (MSS, 1059–61). (The drones represent those unproductive members of society who eat the bees’ honey while refusing to work for the common profit of the hive.)49 The position and duties envisaged for the gardeners stationed at the entrance to each hive echo the role and responsibilities which the narrator observes the Beekeeper undertaking in the initial description of his dream-vision: He houed ouer a hyue, the hony forto kepe Fro dranes that destrued hit and dide not elles; He thraste thaym with his thumbe as thicke as thay come, (MSS, 966–69) He lafte noon a-live for thaire lither taicches.

There are distinctly practical reasons for catching the drones in this liminal space as they enter the hive – the intricate arrangement of the bees’ cells means that it is impossible to search out and remove the drones once they are within the hive. However, in the light of the symbolic entries and exits to the household identified in other literary and political contexts, the Beekeeper’s role also exemplifies the door policy of the well-governed household in which wasteful, unproductive and politically dangerous members of the familia (here symbolized by the drones) are expelled and denied re-entry.50 The Beekeeper’s role is analogous to the position taken by the Commons in 1404 and 1406 in seeking to regulate entry to Henry’s familia. This hive-household shows the ideal system of regulated access and hospitality, in contrast to the households whose porters deny entry to Wit/Wisdom in Richard and to the narrator in Mum. The Beekeeper concludes his speech by repeating the formula that a truthteller is the ‘holsemyst hyne for halle and for chambre’ for kings, lords, knights or dukes (MSS, 1209–16). In response, the narrator naively asks how to arrive at the place in which such a figure lives (MSS, 1221), indicating that he still conceives of his quest for a truthteller in external geographic terms. The Beekeeper then reveals that the location of truth is not external but internal: ‘Yn man-is herte his hovsing is, as hooly writte techet | And mynde is his mansion’ (MSS, 1224–25). It exists in the mental household as the internal voice of the truthtelling conscience:

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The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship Hye the hens to his hows and hippe euene amyddes; For though his loigge be lite hit is vnloke euer, That thou mays intre eche day bothe erly and late. (MSS, 1240–42)

Like an ideally accessible and welcoming familia, the mental household is significantly free from a porter whose job it usually was to lock the gates at night around 9 or 10 p.m. and unlock them again in the morning around 5 a.m.51 The Beekeeper’s instructions indicate that the mental household is accessible at times beyond these usual household regulations, suggesting unlimited right of entry. Each individual can find truth internally by entering at any time, somewhat paradoxically, into his own mind and heart where truth is located. This mental household, however, is permanently in danger of becoming the wrong type of household in which access and hospitality are denied to truthtellers. One of Mum’s confederates continuously ‘dwellith faste by the dore’ (MSS, 1254–57), waiting to tempt the individual conscience into switching allegiance from truthtelling to self-interested silence. Often he succeeds, and then he ‘taketh Couetise the keye to come ynne when hym liketh’ so that ‘Dreede with a dore-barre dryueth oute the beste, | And maketh the sothe-sigger seche a newe place’ (MSS, 1261–63). When Mum predominates in an individual’s mentality, then a different set of household narratives of entry and expulsion occurs. The inner truthteller is ejected from the mental household whilst the figure of covetousness is given unlimited access. This expands the application of truthtelling narratives to the widest possible extent. There is now a responsibility on the part of every individual to regulate their own interior household and to conform to these newly politicized standards in his or her own internal psychomachia. The possibility of an unruly household is now a danger for all to guard against. In Mum and the Sothsegger, as in contemporary chronicles and parliamentary petitions, household narratives, particularly the entries and exits of positive and negative figures, are used to criticize or reform certain aspects of Henry’s own government. Paradigms which originated in the deposition schedules concerning the treatment of truthtellers and the favourable or unfavourable representations of the familia regis were now out of Lancastrian control. They could be reused in parliament by those seeking to regulate Henry’s government, but they also escaped this more narrow political framework to become the subject of poetry itself. In Mum, household narratives are played out within the head of every political subject.

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Household narratives in Lancastrian poetry

Responses to the language made memorable by the deposition changed as Henry moved from usurper-reformer to an established monarch whose own governance was discussed and debated. The Mum-poet extended depositional rhetoric in a manner supportive of the Lancastrian usurpation in Richard but, in his later poem, these politicized paradigms appeared in a form far outside of Lancastrian control. Despite the Mum-poet’s claim to be seeking out a truthteller for the familia regis, his anonymity and his pro-Lollard views suggest that any direct communication between him and the Lancastrian court was more imaginary than actual. Yet authors such as Hoccleve, Gower and Scogan, in poems written for and within the Lancastrian affinity, also responded creatively to depositional rhetoric. These authors addressed poems directly to Henry IV, his sons and members of his government or household. Yet despite this close contact, their poems are not pieces of subordinated propaganda, repeating willingly or involuntarily the paradigms and rhetoric which had been used to justify the deposition. Neither do they avoid depositional rhetoric in favour of neutral and impartial language. Instead, they adopt a third position, closer than one might think to that of the author of Richard and Mum, in which recently politicized elements reoccur in different forms, with different targets or with different emphases. They exploit the capacity of political language to be multiple in both time and referent, able simultaneously to revive moments of past importance, to describe current difficulties and to shape future responses. EXPANDING DE CASIBUS NARRATIVE

Like the author of Richard and Mum, Gower, Hoccleve and Scogan transform the rhetoric of the deposition into the subject of Lancastrian poetry itself. This linguistic transformation can be seen in their use of the de casibus topos, which, as we have seen, provided an apposite explanation 55

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of Richard’s fall for those recording their responses to the deposition. Lancastrian poets return de casibus narratives from direct commentary on the deposition to what is seemingly a context of more widely applicable political advice. In the Male Regle, a begging-poem composed between 29 September 1405 and 26 March 1406 and addressed albeit indirectly to the then Treasurer, Thomas Nevill, Lord Furnivall, Hoccleve generalizes those subject to de casibus trajectories to include the category of nobility as a whole: Albeit þat my yeeres be but yonge, Yit haue I seen in folk of hy degree How þat the venym of faueles tonge Hath mortified hir prosperitee, And broght hem in so sharp aduersitee Þat it hir lyf hath also throwe adoun.1

Though comments such as this remove Richard as direct referent, they insist on the recent and memorable qualities of such falls. This de casibus rhetoric is more widely applied but has not yet lost its temporary politicization. In the Prologue to the Regiment of Princes (addressed to Henry, prince of Wales, in 1411), Hoccleve similarly has personal but unspecified knowledge of another de casibus fall which must be that of Richard himself: ‘Me fyl to mynde how that nat longe agoo | Fortunes strook doun thraste estat rial | Into mescheef.’2 In Scogan’s Moral Balade, directed according to its manuscript rubric to the four sons of Henry IV, the addressees of the poem are encouraged to make such falls present in their own minds: ‘Taketh also hede, that lordship ne estate, | Withoute vertue, may not longe endure . . . ay the vicious, by aventure, | Is overthrowe’ (MB, 57–58, 61–62).3 Also selected for particular attention in the Moral Balade are de casibus accounts of historical antecedents: Rede, here-ayenst, of Nero vertulees; Taketh hede also of proude Balthasar; They hated vertue, equitee, and pees. Loke how Antiochus fil fro his char, That he his skin and bones al to-tar! Loke what meschaunce they had for hir vyces! Who-so that wol not by these signes be war, I dar wel say, infortunat or nyce is.

(MB, 174–81)

De casibus predecessors are cited in order to warn those in power to take heed of the likely result of failure in self-governance. The falls of earlier kings demonstrate that authority is conditional and precarious, being reliant on the avoidance of political fault. While comments such as these


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appear universal, however, they do not lose their newly acquired political resonance. Richard’s deposition, the event to which this politicized de casibus rhetoric owes its existence, shows that the attribution of political vice is not an idle generalization but a potent strategem. De casibus narratives are not only applicable to figures from the past, but are present and pertinent for those currently in power. Hoccleve and Scogan make the shift from explanation to expectation which we have seen in Mum and the Sothsegger and other texts from Henry’s reign. They present their Lancastrian patrons with advice framed in terms which they themselves had already endorsed. A similar expansion of de casibus narrative is made by Gower in a poem now known as To King Henry the Fourth in Praise of Peace, written in the first year of Henry’s reign.4 While courteously celebrating the establishment of Lancastrian kingship, Gower argues in this poem that only the pursuit of peace rather than war can sustain sovereignty.5 One of the strands of this argument draws in part on a transformation of depositional rhetoric. The poem is structured around the opposite qualities and effects of war and peace. While peace is a stabilizing force, war acts in a manner very like Fortune in de casibus literature. The mortality of war obliterates both ‘conqueste and conqueror also’ (line 98) and its destablizing nature is associated with the revolutions of Fortune: ‘The fortune of the werre is evere unknowe . . . That now is up, to morwe is under grave’ (lines 290, 292). Gower invites Henry to interpret the Nine Worthies, the military heroes assembled by Jacques de Longuyon in his romance, Les Voeux du Paon, as something approaching de casibus fallen rulers rather than as enduring chivalric heroes: See Alisandre, Ector and Julius, See Machabeu, David and Josue, See Charlemeine, Godefroi, Arthus, Fulfild of werre and of mortalite. Here fame abit, bot al is vanite; For deth, which hath the werres under fote, Hath made an ende of which there is no bote.

(lines 281–87)6

The celebrity of the Nine Worthies, rather than explaining their longevity as a literary topos, here becomes part of a de casibus contrast between the height of their fame and the inescapability of the trajectory toward death. In Gower’s reasoning, only peace and divine assistance can secure reputation as a Worthy rather than as a de casibus failure. Given that Henry was initially presented by Arundel as a reforming Maccabean figure, this varying of the perception and genre of Judas Maccabeus shows how

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depositional rhetoric can be turned towards ends very different from those initially intended by its originators. Lancastrian poems therefore demand renewed consideration of depositional paradigms by their Lancastrian addressees. Hoccleve includes de casibus memories in both the Male Regle and the Regiment of Princes. Scogan and Gower return to figures such as Antiochus and Judas Maccabeus who were made politically meaningful following the deposition in order give them a different focus. Scogan discreetly reminds his readers of contemporary explanations of the deposition which de casibus precedent had confirmed. Rather than remaining solely applicable to Richard, however, Scogan emphasizes that all those in authority must take note of de casibus history and act accordingly. Gower’s warning is more stark. Without peace and divine assistance, reforming figures who model themselves on Judas Maccabeus can be recast as victims of Fortune themselves. YOUTHFUL RIOT POLITICIZED

Many of the particular traits of Lancastrian poetry thus respond to the new polarities of political debate following the deposition. Hoccleve and Scogan, for example, each include biographical descriptions of past periods of youthful riot and misbehaviour in poems which counsel and inform Lancastrian readers. When considered in isolation, each description might appear to be an autobiographical and personal account of the past lives of these poets. Yet because this biographical pose is simultaneously adopted by two writers we must accept that it forms part of a public strategy of engagement with their Lancastrian readers. It is in fact employed twice by Hoccleve who endows the figure of the Old Man whom he meets in the Prologue to the Regiment of Princes with a similar biography.7 Scogan’s allusion to his ‘mispent juvente’ (MB, 11) in the Moral Balade is the less specific of the two. He tells us that he cherished vices rather than virtues in his youth (MB, 15–16) and was ignorant of any consequences (MB, 29). He asks for God’s assistance in shunning the influences of ‘vanite | Of worldly lust’ and ‘blynd prosperite’ on his ‘flesshe so frele’ (MB, 17–24). Hoccleve’s account of his own misspent youth in the Male Regle and the autobiographical confession of similar youthful misbehaviour made by the Old Man in the Prologue of the Regiment are more detailed evocations of the same state of unregulated youth. Hoccleve likewise claims a knowledge of the dangers of blind prosperity (LMR, 33–36) and was similarly ‘vnwar’ and ignorant in his youth (LMR, 41–44). His ‘lustes blynde’ and ‘folie and inprudence’ (LMR, 61–62) caused him to abandon the service of


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personified Health and to fall under the influence of Sickness. Hoccleve correlates this autobiographical illustration of the causes and effects of immaturity – what he calls the ‘seed and fruyt of chyldly sapience’ (LMR, 64) – with the conventional behaviour of youths described in the abstract. Youth rebels against reason and ‘hatith hir doctryne’ (LMR, 65–66). Short-term pleasure and indulgence thus triumph over longterm consequence because youths are ignorant ‘of perils þat been likly for to fall’ (LMR, 74). The Old Man’s autobiographical confession of his unregulated youth (which comprises lines 610–721 of the Regiment) is highly reminiscent of Hoccleve’s own confession in the Male Regle. His later summary of this passage collocates blind prosperity, insufficient reason and worldly lust in exactly the same way, suggesting that essentially the same type of youthful riot is being invoked: Whyler, my sone, tolde I nat to thee What habundance in yowthe I hadde of good? And how me blente so prosperitee That what God was I nothyng undirstood? But ay whil that I in my welthe stood, Aftir my flesshly lust my lyf I ledde, And of His wreche nothyng I me dredde.

(RP, 1317–23)

Both the narrators of the Moral Balade and the Male Regle and the persona of the Old Man in the Regiment authenticate the advice they offer by referring to personal experience and earlier life history. In their biographies, each of them has negotiated the same transition from youthful immaturity to old age. They are retrospectively aware of the typical faults of youthfulness to which they succumbed, particularly bodily desires and intellectual blindness or ignorance, and are now able to warn others about the incipient dangers of youth. Whilst Scogan’s misspent juvenility is alluded to but not described, Hoccleve in the Male Regle and the Old Man in the Regiment give illustrative examples of the characteristic behaviour of their ‘wilful youthe’ (LMR, 107). Hoccleve confesses that he consumed food and drink in excess for over twenty years, spending both time and money in the Paul’s Head Tavern with a ‘conpaignie’ of fellow rioters (LMR, 146). The Old Man likewise tells Hoccleve that he spent a great deal of time playing at dice in taverns, though he, like Hoccleve, was too much of a coward to get into any pub brawls (RP, 626–27, 638–44). Both men place their individual desires, their singular profit, before public responsibilities, leading to a variety of activities characterized by unnecessary self-indulgence. The Old

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Man possessed a ‘lucratyf’ position of employment (RP, 659) which, through corruption and perjury, allowed him to spend a hundred marks per year on fashionable clothes and entertainment. He owned gowns ‘of scarlet, | Sangwyn, murray, and blewes sadde and lighte; | Greenes also, and the fair violet’ as well as horse and harness (RP, 694–97). Hoccleve was always to be found in the tavern unless some ‘charge’ (LMR, 127), that is some official responsibility or business, intervened. He likewise draws attention to his administrative role in a further confession of riot. There was no ‘macche’ for him in the Privy Seal when it came to staying awake ‘by nyghtirtale out of al mesure’ (LMR, 305–08). Both men’s biographies also illustrate the distorting power of wealth. As long as they have resources to spend, those around them flatter them in order to gain this money. Hoccleve is extravagantly complimented by the innkeepers at Westminster Gate and the boatmen at Paul’s Wharf. He is duped into spending money because they increase his feelings of selfworth: ‘Methoghte I was ymaad a man for euere’ (LMR, 203). Similarly, the Old Man reports that while his ‘coynworth’ (RP, 710) lasted he was well respected by his company, who also complimented his masculinity and maturity: ‘They me conforted ay in myn excesse, | And seide I was a manly man withalle’ (RP, 719–20). In both cases, once their money has run out, this respect and flattery quickly evaporates. Hoccleve finds himself either ignored or ‘desteyned’ (LMR, 340) because his ability to pay for others is exhausted (LMR, 349). The Old Man describes how he is now ‘mislookid on and lourid’ by those who formerly honoured him (RP, 703). The past histories of Hoccleve in the Male Regle and the Old Man in the Regiment are broadly similar, both incorporating many of the conventional faults ascribed to young people and to tyrants which underpinned the presentation of Richard in the deposition articles. In adopting the pose of youthful tyrants, they absorb into their own biography vices which were no longer politically neutral. The detailed accounts of the Old Man’s ‘pryde and leccherie’ (RP, 648) and Hoccleve’s ‘riot and excesse’ (LMR, 330) reiterate on a personal level faults which were ascribed to Richard and the Ricardian familia in the aftermath of the deposition and which had become key indicators of failing government. The negative stereotype of Richard and the self-presentation of Hoccleve and the Old Man share a lack of self-regulation (in terms of expenditure, food and drink, late nights and lechery) and a weakness for vainglorious self-display (in terms of fashionable clothing or ostentatious largesse directed towards favourites). Both are particularly susceptible to the attentions of self-interested flatterers, and both surround themselves with


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unsuitable or inappropriate companions. Hoccleve and Scogan internalize youthful flaws, many of which are also the characteristic flaws of tyrannous kings, in their own life histories, and, in the case of the Regiment, in the life history of the Old Man. In their poems, Hoccleve and Scogan look back on their youth with what looks like candid honesty. They confess their youthful misdemeanours in order to authenticate the acquisition of their hard-won wisdom and knowledge. In making this passage from youth to maturity, however, they embody the Lancastrian narrative of the deposition in their own life story. As we have seen, Archbishop Arundel’s sermon justified the deposition as a transition from Ricardian childishness to Lancastrian maturity. Hoccleve and Scogan claim to have made this transition in their own lives, as the Old Man in the Regiment also declares that he has. They have progressed from a position of youthful ignorance, tyrannical wilfulness and egocentricity to one of mature knowledge based on life experience, counsel and political wisdom. This makes the poetic counsel they offer inescapably relevant for Lancastrian readers. PERSONALIZED EDUCATION AND EXEMPLIFICATION

Having remodelled their own life histories into a narrative pattern made highly political in the deposition schedule, Hoccleve and Scogan return this narrative to their patrons in the form of a cautionary lesson. These politicized autobiographies and biography offer instructive warnings to Lancastrian readers in forms which require them to remember and to sustain the standards of good kingship promoted in opposition to the paradigms of bad kingship used to depose Richard II. Hoccleve, addressing his own failings in the Male Regle, acknowledges that he is a negative exemplar of the effects of these particular youthful insufficiencies: ‘What riot is, thow taastid haast, and preeued’ (LMR, 389). Hoccleve has, supposedly, gained knowledge and experience of youthful riot on a personal level. By recording this knowledge in the Male Regle, he illustrates by example the dangers of youthful misbehaviour for his readers. As part of his mendicant strategy, he is required to offer a ‘lesson’ in exchange for assistance from his addressees (LMR, 397–400). Given that the majority of the Male Regle is devoted to Hoccleve’s past history, these personalizing elements constitute the larger part of the instruction on offer. An educative or monitory intent is also given by Scogan as justification for the particular generic combination of autobiographical complaint plus moralizing verse which he offers to the four royal princes:

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The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship My lordes dere, why I this complaint wryte To you, alle whom I love entierly, Is for to warne you, as I can endyte, That tyme y-lost in youthe folily Greveth a wight goostly and bodily, I mene hem that to lust and vyce entende.

(MB, 33–38)

The intention and capacity of these newly politicized idioms to educate and to preserve is also demonstrated in the Prologue to the Regiment. It is the Old Man’s description of his riotous youth and descent into poverty which first begins to lessen Hoccleve’s anxiety: ‘Grant mercy, deere fadir, of your speeche. | Yee han right wel me conforted and esid’ (RP, 750–51). By presenting these idioms as effective advice, counsel and education, Lancastrian authors invite their readers to maintain their engagement with depositional paradigms and to maintain the standards of mature governance in all its forms. The exchanges between the narrator and the Old Man in the Regiment also replicate a further newly politicized paradigm in order to remind the Regiment’s readers of the need to take a mature attitude to truthful advice and criticism. This paradigm, that of a hostile encounter between a member of the king’s household and a truthteller, is fictionalized in the meeting of Hoccleve and the Old Man. When the Old Man first approaches, Hoccleve arrogantly and harshly tells him to leave him alone: ‘go thy way, talke to me no more; | Thy wordes alle annoyen me ful sore. || Voide from me’ (RP, 139–40). He does not believe that a ‘poore olde hoor man’ (RP, 122) can assist him or provide him with useful advice: ‘It lyth nat in thy power, poore goost, | To hele me; thow art as seek almoost | As I!’ (RP, 165–67). His judgements are based on a visual assessment of the Old Man’s age and health, his lack of visible wealth and other indicators of high social status. He equates power and prestige with the ability to counsel or to assist: ‘It muste been a gretter man of might | Than that thow art that sholde me releeve’ (RP, 176–77). This equation is repeatedly challenged by the Old Man, who makes clear that Hoccleve’s behaviour is that of a fashion-obsessed young man: But thogh I old and hoor be, sone myn, And poore be my clothynge and array, And nat so wyde a gowne have as is thyn – So smal ypynchid ne so fressh and gay – My reed in hap yit thee profyte may, ... Now, goode sone, have of me no desdeyn, Thogh I be old and myn array untheende, For many a yong man, woot I wel certeyn, Of corage is so prowd and so hauteyn


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That to the poore and old mannes doctryne Ful seelde him deyneth bowen or enclyne. (RP, 407–11, 555–60)

The Old Man is confident that he can improve Hoccleve’s lot as long as he allows himself to be counselled. Hoccleve has the choice either to accept advice (and perhaps criticism) maturely, or to act according to his ‘childissh misreuled conceit’ (RP, 195). Even though it takes place in the fields, the initial stages of the dialogue play out a form of household encounter with a truthteller.8 Hoccleve, with his wider and more finely pleated gown, arrogant attitude and characteristically youthful behaviour, again embodies aspects of the stereotype which had recently been used to denigrate the Ricardian familia. The Old Man, poorly dressed in ‘bare old russet’ (RP, 675), is correspondingly a version of the humbly dressed truthteller who is scorned and badly treated by fashionable courtiers. Like the Ricardian court described in Richard the Redeless, and the households visited by the narrator in Mum and the Sothsegger, Hoccleve is initially hostile to a truthteller because of his appearance, in particular his dress. Following the Old Man’s account of his riotous youth and subsequent fall into poverty and powerlessness (itself a highly relevant political lesson), Hoccleve sees the error of his ways and begins to recognize the Old Man’s truthtelling ability. He apologizes to his interrogator (‘What I first to yow spak, be nat displesid’, RP, 753) and disowns his former appearancebased logic: ‘deemeth nat that in despyt | I hadde yow for age or povertee’ (RP, 764–65). He now recognizes the Old Man as a source of wise counsel and assistance: ‘Your wys reed hope I hele shal my wownde’ (RP, 775). Despite this disavowal of his earlier youthful reasoning, the presence of Hoccleve’s ‘childissh misreuled conceit’ (RP, 195) in the Regiment’s Prologue forms part of the poem’s educational and self-authorizing strategies. Most obviously, the Old Man serves as a proxy for Hoccleve himself. Just as Hoccleve learns to accept advice from the Old Man, so Prince Henry, the Regiment’s named reader, ought to accept advice from an older but humbler man, a Privy Seal clerk of twenty-four years’ service whose robes, as the presentation miniature on folio 37r of London, British Library MS Arundel 38 shows, are not as luxurious as those of the prince.9 Despite Hoccleve’s humble appearance, the advice given in his book is valuable and necessary. The book being presented to the prince is a piecemeal translation of three widely popular regiminal texts, each composed to provide advice for princes and kings. From these source texts, the Regiment proper supplies the prince with exemplary stories of actions to be followed and to be avoided, direct advice on various aspects of monarchical rule, and

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descriptions of princely virtues such as magnanimity and prudence which implicitly challenge Prince Henry to maintain these standards. Despite his earlier childishness, the latter half of the text therefore shows Hoccleve to be a princely adviser and authoritative truthteller.10 Prince Henry must likewise show himself to be able to accept advice provided by such a truthteller and to avoid the characteristic faults of youth. The perpetual possibility of childish reasoning serves to remind the prince and other politically active readers of the urgent political necessity of being able to identify and to accept truthtellers. Richard’s supposed inability to recognize truthtellers had been employed retrospectively to justify the deposition. This negative stereotype had mutated into a positive standard (that is: ‘the royal household should be able to recognize and welcome truthtellers’) promoted both by the Commons in parliament and by the author of Mum. It had become a way of judging and preserving the standards of Lancastrian government. Household encounters were so effective as a way of presenting political advice to Lancastrian readers that they were worth reiterating even when not strictly plausible in biographical terms. Six years on from the Male Regle in which he censured youth from a position of maturity, and now probably forty-four years old, Hoccleve in the Regiment creates a narrator-protagonist whose initial actions manifest aspects of the chyldly sapience which he claimed to have forsaken in the earlier poem. This personalizing strategy makes a political point at the expense of a strictly logical progression through Hoccleve’s autobiography. THE POLYVALENCY OF LANCASTRIAN POETRY

As political actions, these biographical lessons are multipurpose, neither simply critical of Lancastrian government nor sycophantically working in its favour. This to be expected given that, as Pocock argues, ‘any text or simpler utterance in a sophisticated political discourse is by its nature polyvalent’.11 This is because such discourse draws its power from necessarily contested concepts which are capable of being reapplied and reallocated from target to target, from general to particular, from theory to practice and back again. In one way, by repeating key tenets of the deposition these biographical lessons poetically reaffirm parts of the Lancastrian explanation of Richard’s resignation. In another, by reiterating elements of the rhetorical and political covenant to which Henry and his supporters had tacitly agreed, Hoccleve and Scogan revive these standards and expectations. Their biographical lessons are simultaneously capable of


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demonstrating perpetual political and social maxims, recapitulating the Lancastrian justification of the deposition and recasting this justification in the form of new standards and expectations. For Pocock, it is in the nature of political rhetoric to be thus multifunctional. Because it is designed to reconcile divergent views into a single universally agreed view, ‘the same utterance will simultaneously perform a diversity of linguistic functions’.12 It evaluates but its methods of evaluation can always be redeployed. These repetitions and developments of deposition schedule paradigms are here independent of their originators’ control because they are not limited in their application to the events of Richard’s reign. Like the author of Mum and the Sothsegger, Hoccleve and Scogan use newly politicized rhetoric and topoi to discuss current as well as past events. Depositional paradigms appear in these poems as a means of referring to contemporary Lancastrian failings rather than remaining circumscribed by retrospective reference to Ricardian history. Hoccleve and Scogan present England as currently falling prey to the same types of errors and misrule which had characterized the retrospective accounts of Richard’s reign. Just as Ricardian England was a nation in which truth was suppressed, so Hoccleve in the Male Regle sees a general abandoning of truth at present: ‘Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes. | Men loue it nat. Men wole it nat cherice’ (LMR, 281–82). One might argue that this nowadayes is the generalized ‘now’ or ‘present times’ of much satiric literature, forever comparing current woes with the imagined securities of the former age. But as with Mum and the Sothsegger, it is the fact that these paradigms have escaped the past and are occurring in the present which gives them their real significance. Household narratives describing the nonrecognition of truthtellers, for example, are located in the Lancastrian present rather than the Ricardian past. The Male Regle contains a brief household narrative which immediately precedes Hoccleve’s comments about the lowly status of truth nowadayes: But whan the sobre, treewe, and weel auysid With sad visage his lord enfourmeth pleyn How þat his gouernance is despysid Among the peple, and seith him as they seyn, As man treewe oghte vnto his souereyn Conseillynge him amende his gouernance, The lordes herte swellith for desdeyn And bit him voide blyue with meschance.

(LMR, 273–80)

The Old Man in the Regiment levels a similar criticism about noble households at the present time, suggesting that they misrecognize truthtellers

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because of vestimentary signals just as the Ricardian familia did in Richard the Redeless: If a wight vertuous but narwe clothid To lordes courtes now adayes go, His conpaignie is unto folkes lothid; Men passen by him bothe to and fro, And scorne him for he is arraied so. To hir conceit is no wight vertuous But that he of array is outrageous. But he that flatere can or be a baude, And by tho tweyne fressh array him gete, It holden is to him honour and laude.

(RP, 540–49)

A comparable household narrative occurs, semi-submerged, in the Moral Balade. Although Shirley’s rubric presents the Balade as being addressed to the four sons of Henry IV, in an alternative rubric tradition used by Caxton and later printed texts which may draw on another now lost manuscript, the poem was said to have been written for ‘the lordes and gentilmen of the kynges hows’.13 This is a plausible suggestion given the concern expressed about Henry IV’s household in parliament and in chronicles. In keeping with this possibility, Scogan imagines his audience as being youthfully unreceptive to his truthtelling message: ‘Ye lordes have a maner now-adayes, | Though oon shewe you a vertuous matere, | Your fervent youthe is of so false alayes | That of that art ye have no joy to here’ (MB, 134–37). This passage proposes that Scogan’s primary audience are likely to misrecognize truthtelling and invites members of this audience to prove the poet wrong by accepting his message wholeheartedly. Here, as elsewhere, depositional arguments and rhetoric escape the retrospectively decided past and are refocused on the present situation. The relocation and redirection of paradigms which had earlier been used to criticize the Ricardian court occurs not only with narratives of truthtelling but also via satire or complaint about excessively fashionable dress. The Old Man’s long diatribe against modish and immoderate dress in lines 421–552 of the Prologue of the Regiment, for example, contains many abuses temporarily politicized by their association with members of the Ricardian court. The Old Man sees fashionable men wearing scarlet gowns ‘twelve yerdes wyde’ (RP, 422–23) with sleeves so voluminous and ‘encombrous’ (RP, 466) that their wearers cannot defend their lords but instead ‘sweepe away the filthe out of the street’ (RP, 534).14 He denounces current versions of the proud paupers who buy more fashionable clothes on credit than they can afford to pay for and complains on behalf of the artisans who


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go unpaid for their work (RP, 484–90). Fears about lack of social recognizability also motivate his concern about excessive fashions: Sumtyme afer men mighten lordes knowe By hir array from othir folk, but now A man shal studie and musen a long throwe Which is which. O lordes, it sit to yow Amende this, for it is for your prow; If twixt yow and your men no difference Be in array, less is your reverence.

(RP, 442–48)

Though these are generalized comments directed towards the nobility as a whole, they are nevertheless specific and political because they locate formerly Ricardian flaws within the Lancastrian here-and-now. Because of the temporary politicization of certain types of discourse, the repetition of seemingly timeless satiric formulae is itself a specific political gesture. This eruption of the Ricardian past into the Lancastrian present takes place in chronicles and in parliamentary records as well as literary texts. In ˆ r’s insurrection in the midst of chronicle entries describing Owain Glyndw Wales in September and October 1400, the author of the Vita Ricardi Secundi pauses to criticize the arrogant obsession with clothing (‘insolencia indumentorum’) which was widespread in the first year of Henry’s reign.15 He was particularly unimpressed, like the Old Man in the Regiment, by coats with long deep sleeves (‘togarum cum profundis et latis manicis, uocatis uulgariter pokys’). Such sleeves were cut so generously that they trailed on the floor, reaching below the feet or the knees (‘usque ad pedes, uel saltem ad genua’). The chronicler fears that because of these and other outrages, God is angry with the English people and will harry the English with further attacks and rebellions from the Scots, French and Welsh. Satirical images of extravagant and impractical clothing are recycled to express inadequacies in Lancastrian, rather than Ricardian, government. The currency of these criticisms of exaggerated clothing is shown by their re-emergence as topics on which parliamentary petitions were made to Henry IV. In 1402 and 1406, the Commons petitioned the king that he should implement new legislation regulating the apparel of different social classes.16 The sumptuary petitions put forward by the Commons in these parliaments included the provision that no one of lower rank than a banneret should wear large hanging sleeves or gowns which trailed on the floor (‘grosses maunches pendantz ouertez ne closez’ or ‘longe Goune qui touche la terre’). Henry did not ordain new legislation, but rather referred the matter for further discussion, giving the Council permission to ordain new sumptuary laws if it were thought necessary. There is no

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evidence that any such laws were implemented. Such petitions seem to be largely formulaic gestures and were treated as such by the Crown, but they show that these representations of excessive dress were current in Lancastrian England as symptoms of misgovernance which required the king’s attention. The Old Man’s long attack on abuses in dress (as well as Hoccleve’s initial self-presentation in the Regiment as a young man who places too much emphasis on appearance, particularly clothing) is therefore redolent of stereotyped representations of Richard and his court, but it expresses the same current anxieties which motivated the Commons’ petitions for sumptuary legislation in 1402 and 1406. In both cases it is the shift from past to present which is significant. The advice and complaint as regards vestimentary governance, in combination with the biographical details provided by Hoccleve and the Old Man in the Male Regle and the Regiment – both of which are sometimes dismissed as evidence of Hoccleve’s digressively loquacious tendencies – are, in a sense, doubly political, employing arguments and rhetoric firstly politicized following the deposition and secondly recycled to express unease about Lancastrian government.17 When read in the light of this double politicization, much of what seems incidental, idiosyncratic or charmingly autobiographical in Hoccleve’s poetry is in fact in dialogue with the paradigms and topoi recently prioritized by the deposition. We might consider, for example, the passage in the Male Regle in which Hoccleve casts his eye over his implied audience in order to identify other clerks who find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning following late-night drinking sessions: But on the morn was wight of no degree So looth as I to twynne fro my cowche, By aght I woot. Abyde; let me see. Of two as looth I am seur kowde I towche. I dar nat seyn Prentys and Arondel Me countrefete, and in swich wach go ny me, But often they hir bed louen so wel þat of the day it drawith ny the pryme Or they ryse vp. Nat telle I can the tyme Whan they to bedde goon, it is so late.

(LMR, 317–26)

As Andrew Wathey points out, John Prentys and John Arundel were not Hoccleve’s junior colleagues in the Privy Seal office as is sometimes stated, but were instead clerks of the King’s Chapel.18 In post by 1401, they were appointed jointly to collect the Chapel clerks’ wages from the Exchequer in 1403 and acted together on a bond in 1404. Their propensity for staying in


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bed even longer than Hoccleve does not seem to have hindered their later careers: Prentys was appointed Dean of St Stephen’s, Westminster, in 1418 and Arundel Dean of St George’s, Windsor, in 1419. Because they are Chapel rather than Privy Seal clerks, a seemingly innocent time reference becomes a neatly constructed joke. Matins and lauds have already been and gone when Prentys and Arundel stagger out of bed near prime. Whilst the initial reference to the two clerks is humorous, Hoccleve does have a semi-serious point to make. Despite their laziness, Prentys and Arundel avoid punishment from the senior authority, Health, because ‘they, in mirthe and vertuous gladnesse, | Lordes reconforten in sundry wyse’ (LMR, 335–36). A contrast is made between Hoccleve’s illness and penury and the success enjoyed by Prentys and Arundel. We might question whether entertaining lords is appropriate behaviour for clerks in the Chapel Royal. Hoccleve is keen to point out that it is a virtuous type of mirth and gladness, but there are more examples of duplicitous and selfinterested mirth in the poem as a whole than mirth of an innocent kind. The riotous company in the Paul’s Head Tavern ‘talke of mirthe’ (LMR, 144), and, in the more didactic section on flattery Hoccleve recognizes that ‘feyned wordes of plesance | Annoyen aftir’ (LMR, 241–42). As an illustration of this deceptively entertaining flattery, Hoccleve refers to the ‘meermaides in the see’ who ‘mirie syngith’, lulling the sailor into a false sense of security before devouring him (LMR, 233–40). The correct approach, as exemplified by Ulysses plugging the ears of his sailors with wax, is to avoid such ‘song’ and ‘armonye’ (LMR, 249–58). The destructive power of the sirens was used by other writers as an explanatory gloss for Richard’s deposition. John Whethampstede, abbot of St Albans, compared the misleading advice given to Richard by his unsuitable counsellors to the songs of sirens.19 In this literary and political context, Prentys’s and Arundel’s comforting words, which allow them to escape illness and penury, are flatteringly ambiguous rather than exemplary. Hoccleve therefore draws attention to the disparity between the treatment of Prentys and Arundel and his own precarious situation in order to illustrate at the smallest and most trivial level that supposedly Ricardian flaws are now re-emerging within the Lancastrian court. The contrast between the behaviour and reward of Prentys and Arundel evokes in entertaining miniature a further variation on the stereotyped image of the unsuitable Ricardian familia member, in this case the overly powerful Chapel clerk who placed influence at court before liturgical duties.20 This negative image of Richard’s Chapel clerks was widespread, with Walsingham in the Chronica maiora blaming Richard’s foolhardy

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behaviour in the grotesque torture of a Carmelite friar in 1384 on the fact that he had relied too much on his usual counsellors who were two Chapel clerks, Nicholas Slake and another unnamed man (‘consuetos consiliarios suos, duos videlicet Capellæ suæ clericos, Nicholaum Slake et quemdam alium’).21 When Slake, along with other clerks connected with the Chapel such as John Lincoln, Richard Medford and Richard Clifford, was first arrested and then imprisoned throughout the Merciless Parliament, Walsingham comments that Slake was then Dean of the Chapel Royal and that he said much at court.22 Although he was appointed Dean of St Stephen’s, Westminster, in April 1396, Slake remained closely associated with Richard. Adam Usk describes how on 11 August 1399, the citizens of London searched Westminster Abbey, hoping to capture Richard on Henry Bolingbroke’s behalf. They instead found and detained ‘Rogerum Walden, Nycholaum Slak et Radulphum Selbi, regis speciales conciliarios’ [Roger Walden, Nicholas Slake and Ralph Selby, the king’s special counsellors].23 Thomas Merks, whom the author of the Vita Ricardi Secundi identifies as one of two men who were ‘privati viri et maximi consiliarii cum rege Ricardi’ [the personal men and leading counsellors accompanying King Richard], was also a clerk of the Chapel from 1394 to 1396.24 The reputations of these particular individuals gradually evolved into a widely accepted fact about the Ricardian household. The first version of John Hardyng’s chronicle shows the long-lasting nature of this derogatory view of Richard’s Chapel clerks: In his chapell were clerkes of prelacy, Wele mo than nede of gode perfeccioun, That in clergy had full smale inspeccioun. Lewde men thay were in clerkes clothynge, Disgysed fayre in forme of clerkes wyse, Thayre parisshyns full lytill edyfyynge In law dyuyne or els in goddes seruyse, Fully instructe in pride and couetyse Eche yer to make a grete colleccioun In thair parisshe in stede of all correccioun.25

As Hardyng sees them, these Chapel clerks have become uniformly inadequate, putting self-interest above their clerical responsibilities and providing another example of Ricardian misgovernance. Even at the level of small-scale, inter-departmental jokes therefore, Hoccleve’s personalizing strategies rely upon archetypes which had become intensively politicized in the wake of the deposition. The jokey reference to Prentys and Arundel hints at recent articulations of corrupt government at the Ricardian court.


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The Lancastrian familia is becoming susceptible to what were formerly seen as characteristically Ricardian faults, in this case the undue influence of Chapel clerks. As Prentys and Arundel are members of Henry’s familia, Hoccleve’s raillery at their expense is a humorous version of the continuing criticism of the royal household current in the Parliaments of 1404 and 1406. The Male Regle invites those readers with influence over the management of the familia regis to correct the disparity between the treatment of Prentys and Arundel and Hoccleve’s own situation. Hoccleve’s begging poem is thus in some ways another putative household encounter.26 It challenges those controlling the remuneration of members of the royal household to recognize the humble, mature and repentant Hoccleve as a truthteller bearing useful political advice and to reward him as such with payment of his overdue annuity.27 In this instance, as with many aspects of the poems under consideration, the topics on which advice is given or about which complaints are made by Gower, Hoccleve and Scogan are those which had been highlighted by the deposition and which had swiftly become the subject of political negotiations during Henry’s reign. The poems’ personalizing or biographical strategies are themselves also responses to the changes in political rhetoric brought about by the deposition. Politicized arguments and paradigms are treated indirectly, refracted into the personal history of the poems’ narrator-protagonists. Via this indirection, Hoccleve and Scogan, like the author of Mum, talk to and about the Lancastrian Crown, court and household by reminding their members of those policies to which they had already subscribed during the deposition. To recycle elements of this political and rhetorical covenant was an astute linguistic strategy. Hostile responses were preemptively deflected because the standards and expectations to which Hoccleve and Scogan refer had already been authorized by the Lancastrian regime. Philip Repyngdon, in his admonitory letter to Henry IV, comments on the way in which Richard’s failings will remain memorable and relevant for future generations: ‘sicut, infra biennium, in rege Ricardo, tanquam in speculo stupendo, vidimus exemplatum, universo orbi et omnibus superviventibus indelebiliter et indefectibiliter memorandum’ [just as, within the last two years, we have seen an example in the person of King Richard, as it were viewed in an amazing mirror, indelibly and unfailingly remembered by the whole world and by all successors].28 The arguments and rhetoric which were used to effect the deposition, and which were later recycled by Henry’s critics, are likewise indelibly impressed on Lancastrian poetry.

PART II

Credit and love

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Like ripples from a stone thrown in a lake, the paradigms of youthful tyranny and household misgovernance put forward in the deposition schedule reverberated through political debate in the decades following the deposition. They politicized pre-existing discourses with which they came into contact and changed the priorities and forms of political speech and action. Moreover, they escaped from the control of their creators, rebounding in unexpected ways upon the Lancastrian Crown. Household narratives and youthful misdemeanours gave distinct forms to Lancastrian poetry, shaping the manner in which authors such as Hoccleve, Scogan and Gower addressed Lancastrian readers. Yet the rule of the self and the household were not the only areas in which discussion changed following the deposition. From the same beginning, a parallel process occurred in discussion of Crown finances and of the Crown’s fiscal relationship with its subjects. The deposition set in motion a series of changes in financial debate in both political and literary contexts. Retrospective representations of Richard’s financial policies, in combination with promises and expectations which emerged following Henry’s accession, shaped both the explanations given for deficits and shortages in Crown finance and the solutions proposed by Henry, his Council and his Commons. This newly politicized language was used to discuss both practical problems in the financing of national government and also wider questions concerning the Crown’s symbolic credit, that is the loyalty and affection felt towards it by its subjects. These changes can be seen in political debate, government policy, chronicle history and vernacular literature. Lancastrian poetry, such as the anonymous alliterative poem Crowned King, makes these transformations in political discourse the focus of its rhetorical exchanges with the Lancastrian Crown. Similarly, Thomas Hoccleve’s frequent recourse to mendicant appeals and autobiographical descriptions of his money worries are not simply idiosyncratic responses to personal circumstance but are part of this evolving linguistic contest. 75

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Once again, the deposition schedule is the starting point for these linguistic and conceptual changes. As part of the implied representation of Richard as a tyrannical monarch, he is shown in the deposition articles to have a particular financial attitude to his subjects. As we have seen in Chapter One, tyrants are more interested in their own profit than in the common profit, oppressing their subjects financially to secure their own position and giving extravagant gifts to flatterers and ‘oþere vnworthie persones’.1 In the first and fifteenth articles, Richard is likewise accused of giving away the resources of the Crown to undeserving candidates.2 He spends money unnecessarily and ostentatiously, expenditure which becomes the target of post hoc chroniclers’ sarcasm and invention.3 This unnecessary wasting of money leads him to impoverish his subjects with frequent grants of taxation, blank charters, and the double payment of fines and fees for letters patent. The deposition articles are indiscriminate in their presentation of Richard as a financially unscrupulous sovereign. He both accumulates, owes and dispenses great sums of money in a manner which defies mathematical logic but is symptomatic of tyrannical kingship. He is paradoxically both a great debtor and a great hoarder of wealth, as the conclusion to Article 15 demonstrates: ‘Et pro victualibus hospicii sui, et aliis empcionibus suis, maxime summe pecuniarum in regno suo debentur, licet diviciis et thesauris plus quam aliquis progenitorum suorum, de quo recolitur, habundavit’ [And for provisions for his household, and other purchases of his, very great sums of money are owing in his realm, although he abounded in wealth and treasure more than any of his progenitors of whom there is memory].4 Richard, according to the deposition schedule, breaks all of the rules and standards of financially responsible kingship. PROMISES AND EXPECTATIONS

The picture of Richard’s peculations put forward in the deposition articles created the conditions for change in financial discourse. In opposition to Richard, who was represented in the deposition articles as an exploitative and extravagant king, Henry presented himself as a financially prudent and responsible monarch. The Lancastrian revolution revived customary expectations in the minds of Henry’s new subjects of near self-sufficiency and successful financial management on the part of the Crown.5 Henry’s promises as regards financial matters were not announced formally, in a manner comparable with Arundel’s sermon on truthtelling and mature government, but can instead be reconstructed from the testimony of various contemporary witnesses. The most


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significant promise was to avoid unnecessary direct taxation. Thomas Gascoigne, describing the causes of the dissent which provoked the rebellion at York in 1405, reported that Henry had broken a promise made at Knaresborough during his victorious journey towards London in 1399 not to levy taxation on the clergy or laity.6 Henry was also reminded of a similar commitment by the citizens of London when he wrote to them asking to borrow money during the first year of his reign. According to the continuator of the Eulogium, the citizens excused themselves by reminding the new king that he had himself promised to abstain from loans and tallies of this sort.7 John Hardyng, in the second version of his chronicle, includes a unique document which he identifies as the manifesto with which the Percies challenged Henry at the Battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403. This document claims that Henry swore on the gospels during the usurpation that he would not levy direct taxation except at times of greatest need, namely when under attack from enemies.8 The Percies’s reference to enemies suggests that Henry had sworn to tax the realm solely for traditional reasons, summarized in the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum as being ‘for werre being or his [the king’s] sones to bee maad knyghtes or his doghtres to be mareyed’.9 In line with this expectation and his supposed pledge, Henry duly began his reign without asking his realm for direct taxation. In addition to cancelling the collection of the final instalment of the one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths granted by the Shrewsbury parliament of 1397/8, Henry did not ask his first parliament for any form of direct subsidy (though the grant of the wool subsidy for life was renewed).10 Moreover, as well as a promise not to levy direct taxation for general expenditure, Henry’s accession also brought with it an expectation of increased resources for the Crown as a whole. The new king possessed a large private landed estate in his own right. Henry was not only king but also duke of Lancaster and Hereford, and earl of Derby, Leicester, Lincoln and Northampton. This extensive landed patrimony, when combined with the Crown lands and other sources of income available to Henry, created an expectation that Lancastrian government would be self-supporting to a major degree. With these resources available to him, Henry would be able to fund Crown activity without recourse to direct taxation. This expectation was encapsulated in the hope that the king would, in the contemporary phrase, be able to live of his own successfully. As B. P. Wolffe defines it, the hope that a king might live of his own at the end of the fourteenth century meant that the king should live within the limits of his lawful income without incurring debts or seizing property or goods illegally.11 This did not mean that direct taxation was wholly prohibited. But, as the

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Mum-poet describes, the king was expected to rely on taxation only for certain purposes and for the shortest possible duration: For nedis moste our liege lord like his estat Haue for his houshold and for his [haynous werres] To maynteyne his manhoode there may no man seye o[ther] But of his owen were the beste, who-so couthe hit bringg[e]; To lyve vppon his laboriers, hit may not long indure. (MSS, 1664–68)

Henry, in making his promise at Knaresborough, invoked the traditional notion that as king he would live of his own if at all possible. His patrimony, in the minds of his subjects, further increased the chance that the Crown might be predominantly self-supporting. His proposed style of kingship therefore included a return to traditional restrictions on direct taxation. Unlike Richard, who was accused in the deposition articles of having taxed his subjects heavily for no good reason, Henry promised to exercise fiscal selfrestraint. In doing so, Henry forged a link between the legitimacy of his accession as king and his future financial good governance. LANCASTRIAN PROBLEMS

Henry’s reign thus began with expectations of high fiscal standards. The Lancastrian version of the deposition characterized Richard as acting tyrannically vis-a`-vis the financial resources of his kingdom. Henry, by contrast, set out to prove himself a financially responsible and prudent king. This self-restraint and prudence, however, was quickly undermined by the unprecedented financial circumstances which he faced throughout his reign. In terms of expenditure, the Crown faced a series of unprecedented demands on government revenue. In addition to the ongoing costs of defending Ireland, Calais and Gascony, and maintaining the naval force safeguarding English coastal waters, the Crown was also responsible for meeting the costs of suppressing the Welsh rebellion in the years between 1400 and 1409 and for defending English interests in the Scottish Marches.12 Furthermore, there were the unexpected expenses of dealing with the Epiphany rebellion of Christmas 1399/1400, the Percy rebellion of July 1403 and the uprisings led by the earl of Northumberland and Archbishop Scrope in May and June 1405. There is also evidence that Henry consolidated his position after the usurpation both by renewing royal patronage of many of Richard’s former supporters and by granting payments on royal resources to members of his own faction.13 As regards Exchequer pensions, for example, Henry confirmed £1,623 of existing grants and added £4,625 of new grants, further burdening the already


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over-stretched Exchequer.14 In 1401, the King’s Council estimated that the bill for annuities granted on Crown lands amounted to £24,000 per year.15 This annual bill was a huge increase on the figure for the first year of Richard’s reign (£14,325) and even exceeded estimates of the amount of annuities which Henry had inherited from Richard in 1399 (£22,000).16 Unfortunately, this increase in expenditure coincided with a decline in royal revenues. This decrease in royal income was primarily caused by a slump in the revenue from customs duties on wool, though this was compounded by several of Henry’s initial policies.17 The lack of any direct taxation in the first year of the reign was itself a serious hindrance, prompting Henry to find more short-term and costly ways of raising money.18 Rather than lay and clerical taxation, Henry supplied his Exchequer with loans from London merchants such as John Hende and Richard Whittington, members of the civil service such as Henry Somer, and ecclesiastics such as Henry Beaufort.19 The Crown also undertook general loans in May 1402 (raising £14,020) and June and July 1410 (raising £4,340 and £2,486 respectively).20 Although usurious practices were officially banned by the Church, such obstacles were evaded by having the creditor officially loan a percentage more than he had in fact supplied.21 The Exchequer thus paid out around £30,000 in interest on loans during Henry IV’s reign.22 Both in terms of increased expenditure and reduced income, the Lancastrian Exchequer faced highly unfavourable circumstances. Henry was soon forced to break his initial promise not to ask for direct taxation, being granted a tenth and a fifteenth by the parliament of January 1401.23 Moreover, not only was this promise broken, but initial hopes that Henry would be a financially secure monarch were soon dashed. The Lancastrian Exchequer, as we shall see, frequently disappointed its creditors and defaulted on its financial obligations. This disjunction between the promises and hopes created in the immediate aftermath of the deposition and the subsequent financial reality set the tone and the terms of subsequent political debate. These original commitments and presumptions provided particular linguistic channels through which complaints were made and solutions were sought. MISSING MONEY

Most important amongst these channels of communication was the continuing conviction that there really was enough money available to meet the Crown’s needs. Peter McNiven usefully describes these hoped-for

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resources as a kind of ‘false panacea’, a source of funds which could be identified mentally but not accessed practically.24 Primary amongst these illusory resources were monies and treasure whose existence and importance had, in a sense, been created by the process of deposition. Richard, as has previously been described, was criticized posthumously by proLancastrian chroniclers for his lavish lifestyle, particularly his expensive tastes as regards clothing, jewellery and entertainment. These post hoc rumours of unprecedented luxury were matched by accusations that Richard had both acquired his wealth illegally and that he was privately hoarding his ill-gotten gains. Drawing on the twenty-fourth deposition article, the continuator of the Eulogium accuses Richard of stealing the Crown Jewels from the Tower in order to increase this secret hoard: ‘Rex intravit Turrim, et omnia jocalia pretiosa a prædecessoribus suis ibidem reposita tulit secum’ [The king entered the Tower of London, and carried off with him all the precious jewels stored in that very place by his predecessors].25 The rumours of a secret hoard centred, with genuine foundation, on Holt Castle in Cheshire. The author of the Annales mentions Holt as being the place in which the majority of Richard’s treasure was kept.26 Modern research concurs that perhaps as much as £43,964 was sent to Holt between 1397 and 1399.27 Jean Creton’s eye-witness chronicle confirms that Holt Castle had become known as a repository of considerable sums of royal money and valuables.28 As the Lancastrian Crown encountered financial difficulties, contemporary observers remembered these claims of hidden or hoarded money. If such missing money could be found, current shortages could be rectified. Richard’s secret hoard was thus soon the focus of much administrative interest. An inventory was made and presented to the Commons in the Hilary parliament of 1401.29 By 4 November 1402, John Ikelington, the king’s clerk who acted as administrator of this Cheshire treasury, had returned nearly 66,000 marks along with jewels and other goods to various people following Richard’s posthumous instructions and had delivered the residue to the Crown.30 Yet even the return of such a large sum could not replenish the Exchequer sufficiently and thus the hoard had more impact as an object of speculation than as a financial remedy.31 According to one account of the November 1402 parliament, the Commons enquired as to the whereabouts of the hoard after they had been told that the king had no money: ‘Communitas quæsivit ubi sunt thesaurus Ricardi Regis. Tandem responsum fuit quod comes Northumbriæ qui Regem introduxit et alii illum habuerunt’ [The Commons asked where King Richard’s treasure was. Finally [the Commons] were answered that the earl of


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Northumberland, who brought the king in [in 1399], and others had it].32 Whilst the residue of the hoard had already been returned, it remained in existence as an imaginary resource, passed from hand to hand but ultimately remaining irretrievable. The expectation that Henry might live of his own also produced a type of missing or illusory money. The addition of the extensive resources of the Duchy of Lancaster to the usual sources of royal income created the hope that the Crown would be much more solvent than under previous monarchs. This expectation, however, was unsustainable in reality. Whilst the annual income of the Duchy was around £14,000 per annum, the majority of this revenue was necessarily spent on Duchy fees, annuities and administration.33 Even if Henry had been able to spend Duchy resources on the Crown’s necessary expenditure, this income would not have covered the annual costs of the Great Wardrobe and King’s Chamber.34 The Duchy income was insufficient to cover its own necessary expenses as well as the expenses of the royal household and other requirements of the Crown. It existed as an idea and was referred to by those contemplating Crown finance, but had little impact in reality. The author of the Continuatio Eulogii, narrating the events of the parliament of January 1404, describes the Commons’ disbelieving response to Henry’s request for a large subsidy: ‘Rex habet omnes proventus coronæ, ducatus Lancastriæ, ac theolonia notabiliter excessive elevata per regem Ricardum’ [The king has all the incomes of the Crown, and of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the levies notably and excessively raised by King Richard].35 The Commons resist the demand for taxation by referring to these imagined but inadequate solutions to the Crown’s financial needs. This misleading sense that plentiful sources of income were close at hand – the resources of the Duchy, Richard’s hoard, and the existing taxes and subsidies – determined the essentially conservative nature of proposed reforms. Rather than responding to present shortfalls by tapping new sources of revenue, both the Crown and the Commons based their solutions on the premise that the Crown would have sufficient money to meet its demands if only it were not going missing in some way. The solutions agreed by the Crown and Commons display a belief that money was being illegally concealed or appropriated, or that it was being frivolously wasted or granted away. To balance the budget, this missing money merely needed to be retrieved, resumed or reallocated. The quest for missing money can be observed in various administrative efforts made to improve the situation. A general commission across all the counties of England was instigated in 1406:

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de omnibus et singulis pecuniarum summis et aliis proficuis et commoditatibus ad nos debite pertinentibus per quoscumque Vicecomites Esceatores Vlneatores Custumarios Contratorulatores et alios officiarios nostros compotabiles in Comitato predicto ad vsum et proficium sua propria de quibus se in compotis suis ad scaccarium nostrum redditis minime onerauerunt nec nobis inde satisfecerunt nomine nostro et ad opus nostrum receptis et per ipsos fraudulenter concelatis et penes se detentis ac de quibuscumque extorsionibus per quoscumque Ministros nostros Comitati predicti qualitercumque colore officiorum suorum factis siue perpetratis [concerning all and every sum of money and other profits and products pertaining to us owed by whichsoever sheriffs, escheators, ullagers, custom officials, comptrollers and other of our accountable officials in the said county, of which, to their own advantage and profit, they paid too little in their accounts delivered to our Exchequer, nor in respect thereof made amends to us in respect of our debt and for the use of our revenues, and concerning money fraudulently concealed by them and kept in their hands, and concerning whatsoever extortions brought about or accomplished by any of our officials of the aforementioned county in any manner by pretext of their office].36

The wording of this general commission of enquiry demonstrates the conservative nature of attempts to increase royal income by seeking out money which was being concealed or withheld. Money is retained by private individuals at the expense of Crown revenues. This was an ongoing assumption throughout Henry IV’s reign. In his first parliament, the Commons petitioned the king to investigate the illegal concealment of revenues received on his behalf by customs officers, collectors of customs, escheators and sheriffs.37 They also petitioned for enquiries into those who had borrowed money from the king and those who had the king’s goods or were withholding money owed to the king.38 Similarly, in the parliament of October 1404, the Commons were again concerned that many of the officials who received revenue on behalf of the Crown might be defrauding the king by false accounting and by concealing and retaining the majority of revenues.39 The Commons requested that the final accounts of these officials be audited to discover the ‘fraudes et desceitz’ which allowed them to conceal royal revenues for their own use. If such accounts were found to be fraudulent, the Commons petitioned the king for harsh penalties. Convicted officials should, amongst other punitive measures, pay back three times what they had originally concealed. On 29 July 1410 Henry Lescrope, the then Treasurer, was similarly commissioned to enquire into reports ‘quod diuersa custume et subsidia ac diuersa pecuniarum summe que ad nos pertinent et pertinere debent a nobis per quosdam Officiarios et Ministros nostros ac alios concelata et subtracta existunt’ [that various customs and subsidies and various sums of


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money which pertain to us [i.e. to the Crown] and which ought to pertain to ourselves are concealed and taken away by certain of our officials and ministers and others].40 All these measures tried to ensure that Henry could live of his own, that the Crown could be funded by money already granted to it which had been concealed by collectors or administrators of those revenues. In order to meet the initial promises and hopes engendered by the deposition, missing or fraudulently concealed money was imagined and sought after by the Crown and Commons alike. THE DESERVING AND THE UNDESERVING

A second explanation of the Crown’s missing money was that it had been granted away too generously in the form of annuities or other rewards. Richard had been accused of giving away the resources of the Crown to undeserving candidates. As with criticism relating to the royal household, attacks initially directed at the past history of Richard’s reign were quickly recycled into contemporary criticisms of Henry’s own governance. In the first parliament proper of Henry’s reign, the Commons petitioned the king that he should repeal large gifts made to undeserving recipients (‘les outrageous douns faitz par nostre seignour le roy as persones qe ne ont deservis’) and asked him to award grants only by the advice of his Council.41 Further complaints that Henry was awarding gifts and grants too generously, inappropriately, or without the restraining advice of his Council, were made in 1401, 1402, 1404 and 1410.42 Whilst the Commons were keen to retrieve Crown resources from the undeserving, they were simultaneously conscious of the need to honour the Crown’s obligations to deserving grant-holders. Reversals in policy show the Crown and Commons struggling with two contrary impulses. On the one hand, they wished to pay royal household debts and, more generally, to reserve Crown resources for current priorities. On the other hand, they intended to honour the Crown’s obligations to its deserving servants. In 1402, the Commons petitioned that those with the oldest grants should be paid first before more recent grantees.43 The king agreed, but ordered that the expenses of the household should be paid as a priority. Yet in 1406, when the Commons asked that certain revenues be set aside to pay household debts, they nevertheless requested that any annuities granted on these revenues should continue to be honoured.44 In 1408 and 1409, when certain revenues were assigned for payment of household expenses, this was done with the proviso that it did not prejudice annuitants whose grants were drawn on those revenues.45

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At moments of extreme financial shortage, however, the Crown and Commons were ultimately willing to sacrifice the needs of deserving annuitants and other grant-holders in order to retain urgently needed funds at the Exchequer. Their desire to restrict the amount of royal income distributed in the form of grants had its fullest expression in temporary moratoriums on payments of annuities undertaken in 1404 and during 1410 and 1411. These measures effectively withdrew income from servants of the Crown who had been previously rewarded (of which Thomas Hoccleve, as a Privy Seal clerk, was one) in order to help increase revenues received at the Exchequer and to lessen the Crown’s deficit. The king and Council suspended the payment of annuities in the summer of 1404, informing sheriffs that they were to pay no annuities from their revenues until further orders were made with the assent of Council in the following parliament.46 Yet this moratorium was justified by appeals to the supposed needs of deserving annuitants. The suspension was enforced, so the writ claimed, in order that all those who had given the king productive service (‘obsequia fructuosa’) should be paid promptly.47 In that next parliament, things got worse rather than better for annuitants such as Thomas Hoccleve. All those holding annuities, fees or wages from Richard or Henry had one year’s income from Easter 1404 to Easter 1405 withheld from them.48 Similarly, holders of royal castles, manors, lands, tenements, rents and possessions were ordered to surrender one year’s income under the same terms.49 The Issue Rolls correspondingly show no payments for Hoccleve for Michaelmas 1404 and Easter 1405 – he was finally paid his half-yearly sum for Michaelmas 1405 on 26 March 1406.50 The 1404/5 suspension created individual instances of missing money for annuitants such as Hoccleve, money which was owed to them but which was denied in order to improve the Crown’s finances as a whole. In 1410 and 1411, the impetus to deprive annuitants of income came from the King’s Council led by Prince Henry and his associates.51 Aware that the chevance or general loan of June 1410 might not raise sufficient funds, the Council agreed that no annuities on various revenues would be paid until Michaelmas 1410. Letters announcing the moratorium on payment were sent on 4 August to the sheriffs of each county, the collectors of customs at various ports, the collectors of ullage and Robert Claydon, king’s clerk and Keeper of the Hanaper of Chancery. Ostensibly, this moratorium was undertaken because the king had heard reports that annuities were being paid irregularly, with preference often being given to less deserving recipients (‘certas personas . . . minus dignas’) whilst more deserving (‘magnis dignis’) servants of the Crown were being paid little or nothing.52 All


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annuities were to be stopped whilst the Crown evaluated the competing claims of various award-holders. Finally, the officials involved were to present themselves before the Treasurer of the Exchequer on Michaelmas Day following when new instructions would be given. No changes were made to the preferment roll established in 1408, however, suggesting that this measure was put forward as an excuse to improve the state of government finances generally.53 On Thursday 19 March 1411 at a Great Council held in Lambeth, this policy of restricting the payment of annuities was continued. The surviving copy of a budget produced at this meeting shows that the Council decided that nothing would be provided for Exchequer annuities in the forthcoming financial year and that councillors resolved not to pay themselves their ‘regards’ or wages in the forthcoming year.54 They also agreed not to attempt to repay the king’s debts in the household, Wardrobe and other departments. The budget concludes by recording that if there was a surplus of revenue, it should be certified to the king so that it could be used with the advice of the Council for the Exchequer annuities of deserving servants (‘les bones et loiaux servitours du Roy’).55 The impact of these measures on an Exchequer annuitant such as Hoccleve can be seen clearly from the entries concerning his annuity preserved in the Issue Rolls. After receiving his half-yearly wage on 17 July 1410, Hoccleve was not paid again until 8 July 1411 when he received only half the amount due to him for the intervening year. On 26 February 1412, he received an entire year’s wage of 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.), thus finally obtaining payment in lieu of the missing half-yearly sum for 1411.56 The various initiatives put forward by the Crown and Commons reveal the importance of ideas of entitlement, preferment and merit to those attempting to improve Crown finances and to those depending on the Crown for wages and reward. As with the increased significance of household rhetoric, the pre-eminence of these terms in Lancastrian financial debate and action occurs as a response to the post hoc justification of the deposition. While Richard had been accused of lavishly rewarding the undeserving, the Lancastrian Crown was expected to deal responsibly with grants and annuities. Unforeseen financial difficulties soon meant that these positive and negative paradigms were not restricted to past history but were used to negotiate current difficulties. Henry’s grantmaking, like Richard’s, was criticized as being excessively generous and wrongly targeted. The paradigms used to condemn Richard’s financial governance were repeated in order to criticize and correct Henry’s giftgiving and grant-making. In administrative attempts to improve the

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situation, grant-holders and possible recipients were divided into two distinct groups, namely those who deserved to be paid and those who were or might be in future unwarrantedly in receipt of Crown resources. Moreover, the Crown itself borrowed the language of entitlement and merit to excuse its own emergency measures. The supposed needs of the deserving were employed to justify suspensions in payments for all grantees. For an Exchequer annuitant such as Thomas Hoccleve, the language of merit and entitlement could both reward and deny. Rather than remaining passively at the mercy of such language, however, Hoccleve engages these discourses and incorporates them into his own autobiographical poetry. HOCCLEVE AS LABOURER AND WASTER

Hoccleve embodies the Lancastrian Crown’s financial difficulties both in delays or omissions in the receipt of his annuity as recorded in the Issue Rolls and also in the rhetorical strategies of his poetry. Hoccleve does not submissively accept the language offered to him by the Crown to explain its financial difficulties and initiatives but deflects and deforms it. He negotiates with his patrons using terms which they themselves had already exploited. He draws attention to the consequences of the Crown’s financial and linguistic strategies by creating both patterns and inconsistencies in the information he offers regarding his personal finances and his financial relationship with his employer, the Crown. Within the entire corpus of his poetry and within individual poems, he combines a number of contradictory explanations for his perennial lack of personal wealth and his frequent recourse to mendicant appeals. On the one hand, he admits personal responsibility for the situation. In three humorous roundels which record an exchange between Hoccleve and Lady Money, he confesses that he himself is responsible for Money’s current absence: ‘I leet yow out’ (line 8).57 Lady Money likewise blames her absence from Hoccleve’s purse on his ‘excessif largesse’ (line 23). The Male Regle similarly portrays its author as being foolishly generous. He bought wine and wafers for his riotous companions in the Paul’s Head Tavern and paid the taverners, cooks and taxi-boatmen generously because they flattered him so extravagantly (LMR, 145–52, 177–84, 193–200). He acknowledges a similar prior history of liberality in the Regiment, disclosing that he has been guilty of ‘the vice of prodigalitee’, spending all his money so that his purse began ‘to gape and gane’ (RP, 4360–82). On the other hand, Hoccleve’s financial difficulties are not solely the product of his own foolish liberality. His poems also draw attention to the


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fact that the salary due to him for his work in the Privy Seal was frequently either in arrears or not paid at all.58 The Male Regle concludes with an appeal to Health to provide the then Treasurer, Thomas Nevil, Lord Furnivall, with the means to pay the latest instalment of his Exchequer annuity which was then overdue (LMR, 417–24).59 He asks merely for that ‘þat due is’ for the preceding Michaelmas term running from October 1405 to March 1406 and says pointedly that he will not ask for what is owed to him for previous years (LMR, 423). In the Regiment, Hoccleve tells the Old Man that payment of his annuity is ‘hard to gete’ nowadays (RP, 825). The Old Man suggests that Hoccleve should ask Prince Henry to change his Exchequer annuity into an annuity payable from the Hanaper, the department of Chancery which administered the profits of the Great Seal (RP, 1877–80). Hoccleve replies that this is impossible ‘by cause of th’ordenance: | Longe aftir this shal no graunt chargeable | Out passe’ (RP, 1881–83). He most probably refers to the letters sent to the Keeper of the Hanaper, Robert Claydon, in August 1410, which were intended to stop the payment of annuities drawn on the Hanaper.60 Aware of these letters and the other measures which accompanied them, Hoccleve points out to the Old Man the impossibility of getting paid from either department: ‘as sikir as that I stande heere, | Whethir that I be symple or argh or bold, | Swich an eschange gete I noon to yeere’ (RP, 1891–93). Faced with this impasse, Hoccleve appeals to the Regiment’s dedicatee, Prince Henry, to make a personal intervention which will ensure the payment of his annuity (RP, 1898–1904, 4383–89). As well as describing the delays in the payment of his wages, Hoccleve emphasizes his entitlement to those rewards. In the Regiment, he draws his readers’ attention to his near twenty-four years of service in the Privy Seal and to the physiological effects on his body of this long career (RP, 801–05, 985–1029, 1853–58). He describes the ‘travaillous stilnesse’ of this work and the intense concentration required by scribes who write for a living: ‘It is wel gretter labour than it seemeth’ (RP, 993). A ballade addressed to Henry V by Hoccleve on behalf of two other clerks (see the reference to ‘vs three’ in line 8) also emphasizes the lengthy and arduous service of these administrative officials: ‘Our long seruice also berith witnesse, | We han for it [their payment] be ful laborious’ (lines 15–16).61 In line 20, the three clerks are described as Henry’s ‘seruantz of the olde date’. These constructions are reminiscent of the administrative formulae used to record grants of annuities to Crown employees. Hoccleve, for example, was awarded his first annuity in 1399 for honest and commendable service (‘pro bono et laudabili servici’) over an extended period (‘a longo tempore’).62 The

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ballade reminds Henry that some part of these long-serving clerks’ wages remains unpaid, telling the king that ‘the somme þat we in our bille expresse | Is nat excessif ne outrageous’ (lines 13–14). In providing an explanation for his lack of funds, Hoccleve thus plays the part both of an extravagant and undeserving waster and an honest, hardworking and deserving servant. Whilst these contrary self-presentations occur separately in his shorter poems, in the Regiment of Princes the combination of entitlement and liberality is more subtly and simultaneously engineered. Hoccleve’s confession regarding his own foolish liberality is delayed until the conclusion of the John of Canace exemplum in the eleventh section of the Regiment proper.63 This confession is carefully avoided at several earlier points in the poem. In the Prologue, Hoccleve freely responds to the Old Man’s questions regarding the difficulty of getting payment from the Exchequer, but he is careful to withhold the extra information that his own riot has greatly exacerbated the problem until a later point.64 Nevertheless, this later confession of liberality is prefigured (for those readers familiar with the earlier Male Regle) in the persona of Old Man whose life history so much resembles Hoccleve’s. Hoccleve’s interlocutor, who also seems to have been employed in some official capacity (he alludes to his ‘office . . . lucratyf ’ at line 659), claims to have spent ‘an hundred mark by yeer, | Al thyng deduct’ until his fortunes changed (RP, 645–46). In fact, the Old Man admits to being both a frivolous waster of money and a fraudster – he would often perjure himself ‘for the desir fervent of covetyse’ (RP, 632) – and with the benefit of hindsight he concludes that ‘as it misgoten was, mis was despendid’ (RP, 664). In the Regiment’s Prologue, the two contrary roles of waster/fraudster and labourer are held in tension by the interaction of the labouring Hoccleve and his proxy, the Old Man with his riotous past. The deferral of Hoccleve’s confession until the end of the Regiment proper allows these two self-representations to be dramatically united. This confession bursts forth into the poem as Hoccleve acknowledges that he, like John of Canace, is guilty of foolish liberality: ‘I, Hoccleve, in swich cas am gilty; this me touchith’ (RP, 4360). He confesses that he has spent his money frivolously and tells the addressee of the poem, Prince Henry, that only he can provide help: ‘whens it come shal, can I nat gesse, | My Lord, but it proceede of your hynesse’ (RP, 4373–75). Hoccleve is thus both a deserving annuitant who finds it impossible to extricate payment of his laboriously earned annuity from the Exchequer or the Hanaper, and a foolish and undeserving wastrel who requires personal help from Prince Henry. The logical flaws in this paradoxical


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self-presentation mimic current irregularities in the relationship between the Crown and its employees. The Regiment, it must be remembered, is a text written by an annuitant whose annuity was suspended during the period of the poem’s likely composition in 1411. It is dedicated to the head of the Council responsible for this suspension and for evaluating the competing claims of the Crown’s creditors. It is thus a complex response to a complex situation. Hoccleve alludes to the current stoppage in Exchequer annuities, but does not identify those who have brought about this moratorium. Prince Henry is presented as possible solution rather than cause. In order to explain his lack of credit without blaming the Crown directly, Hoccleve presents himself as a deserving annuitant (hence the emphasis on scribal labour and long service in the Prologue) who has nevertheless spent his funds frivolously. He emphasizes or invents a deficit in character in order to replace the deficit in his wages caused by Lancastrian financial policy. Elsewhere, he presents himself as hard-working and deserving, an appropriate strategy to employ when the Crown camouflaged its moratoriums in annuity payments as preludes to more meritocratic allocation of these grants. Moreover, as well as creating a deficit in his character and a deficit in the logic of his overall self-presentation, Hoccleve also explains his current lack of funds in terms of fraudulently concealed or inexplicably missing money. As with administrative attempts to improve Lancastrian finance, the Regiment’s financial policy is essentially conservative, focusing on money which is currently missing in some way rather than advocating new sources of revenue. Hoccleve explains the parlous financial situation currently experienced by himself and fellow Privy Seal clerks not in terms of Crown mismanagement but rather by relating the details of a damaging scam which deprives the clerks of their usual fees and favours from Privy Seal clients. Lines 1499 to 1547 describe the activities of a ‘lordes man’ who defrauds the clerks by interposing himself into the process of bringing a legal action to the Privy Seal. The ‘lordes man’ acts as a quasi-legal facilitator for petitioners wishing to bring an action to the Privy Seal, unwarrantedly using his lord’s reputation to further the action with the king when the original petitioner has no genuine connection with the lord. As Hoccleve describes it, the clerks have no hope of redress because ‘his tale shal be leeved but nat ouris’ (RP, 1518). Thus ‘that that is us due | For our labour’ disappears into the lord’s man’s pocket (RP, 1501–02). Such a ‘bribour’ interrupts the circulation of money between petitioner and clerk, siphoning off the wages due to the clerks and leaving them without any hope of redress because the original petitioner believes them to

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have been paid in full. Hoccleve recounts this narrative to the Old Man in order to demonstrate the lack of patronage, ‘thanke and lucre’ (RP, 1544) currently experienced by himself and his fellow clerks. The anonymous ‘lordes man’ is a ghostly figure who deflects blame for the clerks’ lack of wages away from the Crown and towards the type of fraudulent or undeserving official imagined by the conservative responses to the Lancastrian deficit. Instances of missing money or patronage occur throughout the Regiment’s Prologue. Hoccleve draws attention to them by paradoxically describing these absences as verbal or conceptual presences.65 He renders them verbally filled or satisfied whilst they remained simultaneously unsupplied in actuality. In doing so, these absences become very like the imagined but unachievable money which dominates discussion of Lancastrian finance more generally. He miserably tells the Old Man that currently he has ‘a large lyte’ (RP, 1240), a paradoxical formation which quantifies lack rather than substance.66 Similarly, the Old Man enquires if his fellow clerks are taken care of at their Chester’s Inn hostel and are provided with benefices. Hoccleve replies: Yis, fadir, yis. Ther is oon clept Nemo: He helpith hem, by him been they chericed; Nere he, they weren poorely chevyced; He hem avanceth, he fully hir freend is; Sauf oonly him, they han but fewe freendes.

(RP, 1487–91)

Hoccleve records the clerks’ lack of patronage with a verbal witticism which again highlights what is currently missing from their financial situation. Nemo is grammatically present, supplying a subject for the verbs in these lines, but these actions are non-existent because the subject who performs them is, like the name chosen by Odysseus during his encounter with the Cyclops in Book Nine of the Odyssey, a nobody.67 The clerks’ lack of payment and support is represented in the Regiment as the result of present but absent money or assistance, just as the deficit in the Crown’s budget was understood more generally in conservative plans for financial reform to be the result of fraud or concealment. Both Hoccleve’s inconsistent self-presentation and his portrayals of fraud and significant absences represent unexplained deficits of reasoning or money. These are essentially tactful or pragmatic responses to the situation in which he found himself. Unable to name openly the cause of his lack of funds, he makes his appeal to Prince Henry directly while expressing the reason by indirect means, though of course those in the know would have found his inconsistencies and omissions significant. Yet despite these


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evasions, the Regiment reiterates in all seriousness the logic of merit and entitlement which the Crown and Commons had used somewhat disingenuously to justify suspensions in payments. Hoccleve associates his own needs and predicaments with those of other servants of the Crown who are currently denied adequate reward for their services. He aligns his own long service in the Privy Seal with the ‘manly labour’ (RP, 878) of soldiers who previously fought for England in the war with France and are now ignored and in need of financial assistance. By a series of verbal repetitions Hoccleve links his own situation with both particular and theoretical instances of unpaid but due wages. The language of merit and deserts temporarily used to justify suspensions in payment here describes both Hoccleve’s own entitlement and becomes part of the advisory material directed towards Prince Henry. Hoccleve first admits his pessimistic expectations for his own ‘duetee’ (i.e. what is owed or due to him) which he has ‘boght | With my flessh and my blood’ (RP, 949–50) in his conversation with the Old Man, before advising Henry in the Regiment proper that ‘he that his flessh despendith, and his blood, | My Lord, in your service’ (RP, 4173–74) should be well rewarded with gifts. Finally in this set of images, he bemoans the fact that, unless they can curry favour like flatterers, a ‘knyght or squyer . . . | Or yeman, that hath in pees and in werris | Despent with his lord his blood’ will currently be denied ‘his lordes grace’ (RP, 5279–85). Very similar phrasing expresses both individual and hypothetical assumptions of entitlement. The expenditure of flesh and blood by servants and retainers should be rewarded with lordly or kingly expenditure in the form of reward. One might also compare Hoccleve’s description of his own lack of ‘duetee’ in the autobiographical Prologue with the advice given to ‘what man a ledere is or a chiefteyn | Of peple’ (RP, 4722–23) in the section warning against the vice of avarice. Such a leader must be ‘free unto his sowdeours’ (RP, 4724) and ensure ‘specially, that he hir duetee | Abregge nat, ne nat syncope hir wages | That hem assigned been’ (RP, 4726–28). The movement of the ‘duetee’ from particular individual to theoretical group and back again shows how a particular type of language cannot be exploited as a temporary justification without becoming accessible for reapplication or reconnection to many other claims, both theoretical and definite. Such emphasis on collective ‘duetee’ reminds the Prince and other Lancastrian readers of the importance of meeting their own financial and moral duties towards their servants. These duetees remind them of the obligations which accumulate when they themselves exploit the language of entitlement. The Regiment also uses lexical repetition to demonstrate how offers of reward were being distorted and exploited by his Lancastrian patrons. Lines

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281–329 of the Prologue commemorate Prince Henry’s involvement in the burning of John Badby for heresy in March 1410. As part of the prince’s unprecedented attempts to persuade a heretic to recant mid-burning, the Old Man reports that Henry promised Badby that ‘souffissant lyflode eek sholde he have | Unto the day he clad were in his grave’ (RP, 307–08). Walsingham says that the prince promised to pay Badby’s daily pension of three pence not from his own household treasury but from the royal treasury (‘de fisco regio’), an offer which would have been particularly galling for Exchequer annuitants such as Hoccleve whose payments had been suspended in 1410/11 in order to improve Crown finances.68 Throughout the Regiment, Hoccleve contrasts this offer of livelihood with other promises of livelihood, particularly livelihood in retirement, on which the Lancastrian Crown has defaulted. In the course of his conversation with the Old Man, Hoccleve explains that his anxiety and melancholy is partially caused by pessimistic thoughts regarding his own ‘smal lyflode’ (RP, 41), a lexical choice he and his interrogator repeat at lines 932, 1786, 1798–99 and 2031. Hoccleve’s troubled thoughts concern both the present difficulties he has encountered in the payment of his Exchequer annuity and also his gloomy prediction that it will be even more difficult to collect payment when he is ‘in elde and out of court’ (RP, 836). He bases these dismal predictions both on personal experience and the current treatment of retired soldiers which he describes in lines 870–89. As he admits: ‘The lak of olde mennes cherisshynge | Is cause and ground of al myn hevynesse’ (RP, 793–94). Comparison is here made between Prince Henry’s proposed treatment of Badby and the current situation of Exchequer annuitants. An unworthy heretic is offered present and future livelihood whilst hardworking Privy Seal clerks such as Hoccleve and longserving soldiers, both worthy recipients, are denied theirs. Again, these points of connection show how strategic offers of reward cannot exist in isolation but call to mind other previously agreed and now defaulted promises of payment. If some elements of Hoccleve’s negotiating strategy were thus distinctly pragmatic and sympathetic to Lancastrian explanations (namely his adoption of the conservative ‘missing money’ explanation of the Exchequer’s ongoing lack of resources and his paradoxical self-presentation as both waster and labourer), his adoption of the discourse of entitlement and merit in the Regiment is more critical.69 As we have seen, deserving grantholders were frequently denied payment in order to satisfy other creditors and the language of merit and preferment was used to justify these suspensions. Hoccleve restates this fraudulently employed rhetoric in


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order to make claims for the payment of his own annuity and those of other Crown grantees. As with the household narratives first used to justify the deposition of Richard II and then adopted in order to debate the qualities of Lancastrian governance, Hoccleve recycles the language of meritocratic preferment in a manner unforeseen by those who initially promoted it. By incorporating this language and the language of missing money into his own autobiography, Hoccleve constructs his strategies of advice-giving and patronage-seeking using linguistic forms already sponsored by the Lancastrian Crown. The Regiment provides evidence that the discourses of missing money and of entitlement and preferment had, like those of the demerita notoria and household narratives, become objects of interest and contestation in their own right, reflecting the conflicting demands for Exchequer resources.

7

A discourse of credit and loyalty

Like Hoccleve and the addressee of the Regiment, Prince Henry, the Crown and its subjects were united by reciprocal relationships of subsidy, service and reward. Yet this reciprocal relationship included not just the mechanisms of grant and payment outlined in Chapter 6, but also incorporated other less straightforwardly economic exchanges. The financial dealings between a sovereign and his subjects were inextricably linked to discussions of other matters, particularly the reciprocal exchange of loyalty, love and respect between king and people, and the amount of authority and respect which a monarch could command. Henry IV’s unsteady claim to the fealty of the English people, in combination with the breakdown in financial relations between the Crown and many of its subjects in the first decade of Lancastrian rule, threw this reciprocal bond into stark relief. Lancastrian authors correspondingly prioritized exchanges of advice, money and love between a monarch and his people in their poetry. They revived pre-existing discourses which linked credit, counsel and loyalty together. The relationship between the Crown and its subjects, in financial and in more abstract terms, and the language in which this relationship was negotiated, receives heavy emphasis in many forms of Lancastrian writing. This chapter explores four particular locations where what one might call a discourse of credit (punningly incorporating belief in and loyalty towards a monarch’s sovereignty as well as purely financial resources) was used or revitalized in Lancastrian texts. The first two are to be found in documents of record, namely the Continuatio Eulogii chronicle and the parliamentary rolls, while the second pair is literary in nature, being the metaphors used to value Aristotelian advice texts and the related strategies of an alliterative poem of 1415, Crowned King. The juxtaposition of these four instances shows clearly that both Lancastrian literature and Lancastrian politics made use of shared discourses of loyalty, advicegiving, credit and love. 94


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CREDIT AND LEGITIMACY: THE CONTINUATIO EULOGII

As we have seen, Henry IV’s promises at his accession revived expectations of more successful financial management by the Crown. His failure to keep this fiscal promise was swiftly linked, at least in the minds of those critical of Henry’s governance, to doubts about his legitimacy as king and the loyalty felt towards him by his new subjects. The anonymous author of the continuation of the Eulogium historiarum persistently associates Henry’s lack of legitimacy and popularity with his lack of funds. In particular, references to Henry’s financial problems in the Continuatio are associated with the usurpation itself, perhaps because the raising of direct taxation illustrated one of Henry’s broken promises and thus demonstrated his inherent illegitimacy. For example, the continuator describes a change in public opinion in 1402: Anno Domini 14028, et anno hujus Regis 38, populus cœpit Regem graviter fe[r]re et Regem Ricardum desiderare, quia dicebant quod ipse cepit bona eorum et non solvebat [in the year of our lord 1402, and the third year of this king, the people began to be upset with the king and to long for King Richard, because they said that he [Henry] seized their goods and did not make payment for them].1

This popular discontent relates primarily to problems with unpaid purveyance, part of the royal household’s general inability to repay loans and reimburse suppliers of labour or goods. As described by Given-Wilson, ‘non-payment for purveyed goods could be used as a safety-valve by financial officials in times of financial difficulty’.2 This was certainly the case at the beginning of Henry IV’s reign, when the Keeper of the Wardrobe accumulated debts of over £10,000.3 Yet the Eulogium continuator’s record of this dissatisfaction also suggests a general perception that Henry’s financial difficulties and his lack of authority were linked. Insinuations regarding his financial untrustworthiness, particularly with the implication of fraud or missing money, occur regularly in the continuator’s narratives of dissent or rebellion against Henry’s sovereignty. Archbishop Scrope, during the 1405 rebellion, accused Henry of having impoverished merchants by excessively raising taxes and customs and seizing their merchandise under the pretence of loans (‘sub colore mutui’).4 This is doubly critical of Henry, suggesting both that too much money was asked for and that goods were acquired falsely. These hints of fraud and missing money also occur in the continuator’s reconstruction of several confrontations between the king, the earl of Northumberland and his son Hotspur preceding the Battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403.5 Northumberland asked for payment of money due to him for his role in defending the Northern Marches against the Scots.

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Henry IV answered him with blunt economy: ‘Aurum non habeo, aurum non habebis’ [I have no riches, you will have no riches].6 Northumberland challenges the king’s assertion of this need, turning Henry’s declaration of his lack into an accusation of fraud and missing money: ‘multa a regno annuatim accipitis et nihil habetis, nihil solvitis’ [you receive much annually from the kingdom and you have nothing and pay for nothing]. What modern historians perceive as a simple deficit – Henry’s available income fell far short of his necessary expenditure – the Percies (as portrayed by the author of the Continuatio) perceive as a suspicious and fraudulent lack. Such a lack hints at Lancastrian illegitimacy in a number of ways. Henry’s financial fraud reveals a tyrannical attitude towards the fiscal relationship between sovereign and subject. Similarly, his inability to honour deals, either political or financial, indicates both his innate unsuitability and the murky circumstances in which he ascended the throne. Hotspur emphasizes the imbalance between Henry’s income and expenditure in his explanation of the causes of the Shrewsbury rebellion, associating it strongly with Henry’s lack of legitimacy: Tu regnum spolias annuatim, et semper dicis te nihil habere. Thesaurarius tuus nihil habet. Solutiones nullas facis, domum non tenes, hæres regni non es [You rob the kingdom annually, and always you say that you have nothing. Your treasurechamber has nothing. You make no payments, you do not maintain your household, you are not the heir of the kingdom].7

The Percies, in the continuator’s representation, offer a distinct picture of the Lancastrian financial situation. Henry receives a great deal of money from the realm, but offers no payment, hospitality or royal magnificence in return. The Percies’ accusations return to the inexplicable fact that Henry says he has nothing when he ought to have something. Henry is shown to be happy to deprive his subjects of due payment when his own coffers ought to be full. Like Richard, who, according to the deposition articles, was paradoxically both a hoarder and a debtor, Henry has become an unsuccessful monarch whose money is mysteriously missing. This lack of financial credit produces a lack of emotional credit, a lack of belief in Henry’s kingship and a corresponding lack of loyalty amongst his subjects. This lack of credit provides the rationale for rebellion against Henry. PARLIAMENTARY NEGOTIATIONS

In the Continuatio Eulogii, Henry’s mysterious financial deficit justified a similar deficit in his credibility and in his subjects’ belief in his sovereignty,


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resulting in rebellion against that sovereignty. In a related but much less seditious fashion, ideas of credit and loyalty were also brought together in Henry IV’s parliaments where the Crown and Commons agreed the subsidies which Henry needed. Negotiations concerning grants of taxes and customs were made using ambiguous language which blurred the boundaries between exchanges of money, love and advice. Subsidies were not asked for directly, at least in the written records of these parliaments, but were alluded to indirectly via the analogous process of giving and receiving advice. The opening speeches made to parliament by Henry IV’s chancellors frame the exchanges which will occur in each parliament as being those of counsel and assistance rather than purely financial transactions. They highlight other non-financial relationships between the Crown and the Commons, showing them to be linked together by relationships of loyalty and consultation. Parliament is presented as being primarily gathered together for the purpose of exchanging advice and opinion, with financial exchanges being a small or unmentioned part of the process. The Commons were told, for example, that the king wished to have ‘bone aide, conseil, et advis’ or ‘lour bone et sage conseil’ or ‘lour bon et discrete advys’.8 In January 1404, Henry Beaufort flatteringly compared the assembled representatives to a gathering of wise men by choosing as his theme ‘Multitudo sapientum’, a phrase from Wisdom 6. 26 (‘now the multitude of the wise is the welfare of the whole world: and a wise king is the upholding of the people’).9 Beaufort’s sermon requested not financial assistance but advice, council and agreement (‘advis, conseil, et assent generalment de toutz les estates’).10 At Coventry in October 1404, Beaufort again depicted parliament primarily as a gathering of wise counsellors, choosing as his theme ‘Rex vocavit Seniores Terre’.11 In 1406, Beaufort’s replacement as chancellor, Thomas Langley, employed not one but three citations to support the notion that Henry had assembled his parliament primarily to provide advice rather than subsidy. Taking as his theme a phrase from Aquinas’s Summa theologiæ (‘Multorum consilia requiruntur in magnis’), Langley declared that in gathering together his Lords and Commons, Henry was following the wise example of King Assuerus (Xerxes) in requesting counsel from his subjects.12 To support this claim, Langley cited Ecclesiasticus 32. 24 (‘son, do thou nothing without counsel: and thou shalt not repent when thou hast done’) and verses from the Book of Esther.13 Langley’s multiple citations unequivocally present parliament as a forum for the giving and receiving of advice rather than financial aid.

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This substitution of exchanges of advice for negotiations concerning taxes and customs might seem to be a type of specious euphemism constructed by Henry’s chancellors for the formal opening of parliament. Consideration of the parliamentary rolls suggests, however, that this was not simply heavy-handed rhetorical distortion by the Crown. Both Crown and Commons understood and exploited the ability of certain phrases and rhetorical formulations to simultaneously connote specific financial support and more general loyalty, advice, mutual dependence or assistance. The official chosen to open parliament on the king’s behalf and the Speaker chosen to respond on behalf of the Commons both favoured ambiguous terms such as ‘aide’ (meaning both ‘assistance’ or ‘help’ and a contribution levied for the defence of the realm) or ‘bone governance habundante’ (connoting both sufficient or adequate government and government that is well supplied with resources of various kinds).14 The Commons’ willingness to participate in these kind of blurred or ambiguous rhetorical exchanges can be witnessed in negotiations between king and parliament in the January parliament of 1401. Petitioning the king about challenges made by the French to English noblemen which might be a precursor to war, the Commons adorned their petition with an elaborate rhetorical trope. The petition argued that good government requires three things, namely sense, humanity and wealth. Henry himself is instilled with good sense, assisted by the counsel of the lords spiritual and temporal, while the lords, knights and gentry comprise the necessary humanity in times of military action. The third component, wealth, is provided by the commonwealth as a whole: Tiercement, quant a richesse; coment il est overtement conuz de les entiers coers queux nostre seignur le roy avoit de soun poeple devaunt soun darrein venue en Engleterre, et en soun venue, et puis soun venue. Et outre ceo, les ditz communes monstrerent a mesme nostre seignur le roy, qe la pluis greindre tresor et richesse du monde est a chescun roi d’avoir le coer de soun poeple. Qar par consequence s’il ait le coer, il est verraisemblable q’il auera ceo qe luy bosoigne de leur biens [Third, regarding wealth, it is commonly known that our lord the king had the complete love of his people before his recent arrival in England, and on his arrival and since his arrival. Following on from this, the said commons explained to our same lord the king that the greatest worldly treasure and wealth that a king might have is the love of his people. In consequence, if he has their love, it is probable that he shall have that which he needs of their possessions].15

This convoluted analogy has a dual purpose. It reassures Henry that, in case of such challenges or the war which might result from them, he has the necessary resources to succeed. Yet the petition also reminds Henry of the


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great expenses and great risks presented by chivalric or military engagements. These expenses are not only financial but symbolic. The Commons offer their love as surety or symbolic credit for the loyal nature of their petition and promise that if Henry earns this symbolic treasure, he can rely on appropriate but unspecified financial aid and purveyance of goods. Less loyally, this formulation tried to limit Henry to behaving in ways which sustain this symbolic or political credit. His reply joins in the rhetoric, emphasizing his own role as recipient of both taxes and symbolic wealth. He thanks them for this great treasure (‘grand tresor de leur coers’) and asks for advice on how this treasure should be preserved and spent most beneficially (‘pluis longement estre gardez et meulx despenduz’). In his eyes, symbolic credit can be conserved and spent in a manner analogous to actual resources. The Commons offered an either/or choice, but Henry responds with a much more pragmatic strategy which admits the possibility that a king may choose to use up or to exploit some of his symbolic credit in the pursuit of his own policy aims or to acquire actual subsidy from his subjects. This imagery of a king’s most valuable treasure made possible subtle negotiations as regards the strength and limitations of royal authority. The wealth referred to is ostensibly metaphorical, describing the reciprocal relationship of mutual dependence between a king and his subjects. But because parliament was assembled precisely in order to facilitate actual financial exchanges between Crown and Commons, the vehicle of this metaphor is frequently too close for comfort to the tenor it describes. This produces a range of extremely useful ironies and double meanings, allowing both sides to negotiate exchanges of material and symbolic credit without explicitly alluding to the threats and concessions being made. Such negotiating power could be exploited both in order to resist taxation (as it was in January 1401) and in order to elicit funds from the Commons. Opening parliament in January 1410, Henry Beaufort also chose to invoke the idea of his people’s love being a king’s most valuable resource, in this case because it creates the most effective security and defence: le roy Alexander avoit conquis plusours diverses regions, terres, et citees, et entre autres il avoit conquise un grande citee, et demanda conseille de Aristotille coment y purroit pluys surement fortifier mesme la citee, par mure ou autrement. A qi le dit Aristotille respondi, et dist, qe la soveraigne seurtee et garde de chescun roialme et citee est, d’avoir l’entier et cordial amour de poeple, et de lour garder en lour loies et droitures [King Alexander had conquered many different regions, lands and cities, and, among others he had conquered a great city, and asked for advice from Aristotle on how he could most securely fortify the same city, by a wall or

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otherwise. To whom the said Aristotle replied by saying that the best security and guard for each realm and city is to have the whole and cordial love of the people, and to maintain them in all their laws and rights].16

Initially, Beaufort’s sermon seems designed to reassure and flatter the Commons by demonstrating that the Crown is aware (via the precedent of Aristotle and Alexander) of the need to act in ways which preserve the symbolic credit of its people’s heartfelt love. This exemplum seeks to persuade the Commons that the Crown is much more interested in the symbolic credit of its subjects than in the actual financial resources they might provide. As one might expect, however, the rest of the sermon sets out to convert this symbolic credit into the actual credit of renewed parliamentary subsidy. Beaufort next asserts that subjects owe their sovereign various dues, namely honour and obedience, respect and goodwill, and, most importantly, ‘cordial assistance’. Assistance, as described above, can mean both generalized aid and specific financial grants. Purporting to explicate Aristotle’s advice, Beaufort’s speech transmutes ‘cordial amour’ into ‘cordial assistance’, making ‘amour’ something which is not earned or conserved but merely received in a quasi-financial way by a sovereign. Slippages in the language of credit and loyalty are used by both Crown and Commons to navigate the combined political and financial exchanges which are required in parliament. THE POET AS THE MONARCH’S

‘GOLD

IN COFRE’

As Henry Beaufort’s reference to Aristotle indicates, the source of these formulations of subjects’ love as king’s treasure or precious resource was the Secreta secretorum, an apocryphal text supposedly presenting letters sent from the philosopher to his former pupil, Alexander the Great. In the Secreta, Aristotle tells Alexander that ‘thy Subiectis bene thy tresure, by whych thy roialme is confermyd’.17 The Secreta was one of the three sources from which Hoccleve drew material for his Regiment of Princes, and a passage explaining the necessity of sustaining symbolic credit can be found in the section dealing with prudence: Love withouten a good governaille A kyng hath noon, for thogh men no word seye, If he his peple oppresse, it is no faille, They love him nat in no manere of weye; They may his heestes outward wel obeye, But in her hertes is smal obeissance, And unto God they conpleyne hir grevance.


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And swich a kyng is nat prudent ne wys That of his peple purchaceth him hate, For love excedith al tresor in prys; So hath it been and so be wole algate. Whan that richesses ebben and abate, If love endure, it may hem restore, And love is goten by prudences lore.

(RP, 4817–30)18

As with the parliamentary use of such imagery, Hoccleve here blurs together both types of credit. The love of the commonwealth is more precious than wealth which has a monetary value, but such symbolic credit retains its economic nature (hate can be purchased, love has a price, it is ‘gettable’). This advice-giving strategy attempts to limit a monarch’s conduct to those actions which preserve his symbolic credit. As with negotiations between Crown and Commons in parliament, the passage advises its royal reader to maintain his stock of symbolic credit in order to allow actual credit to be restored. This idea of a subject or subjects being the king’s most precious resource also has a specifically literary application. In the F Prologue of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Alceste employs a version of this idea of symbolic credit to lecture her husband, the kingly God of Love, on his attitude to his subjects: For he that kynge or lord ys naturel, Hym oghte nat be tiraunt ne crewel As is a fermour, to doon the harm he kan. He moste thinke yt is his lige man, And is his tresour and his gold in cofre. This is the sentence of the Philosophre.

(F Prologue, lines 376–81)

The rhyme on gold in cofrePhilosophre indicates Alceste’s source for this concept in the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum. Chaucer raises the stakes in this political commonplace by comparing an angry, tyrannical or vindictive king to a ‘fermour’, a collector of rents, taxes or Church revenues, or alternatively a bailiff or steward in charge of a town or manor.19 This comparison with the conventional figure of the unscrupulous tax-collector or wicked bailiff indicates a tyrannical style of kingship which privileges money and singular profit above the common good. A ‘fermour’ king treats his subjects as nothing more than convenient providers of economic credit, resembling more a financial official than an authentic sovereign. Chaucer’s second innovation is to employ the idea of symbolic credit to describe not an entire population but a single individual. The ‘yt’ of line

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379 refers both to an abstract encounter and to the case in hand of Geoffrey Chaucer who has offended the God of Love with his translations of the Roman de la Rose and Boccaccio’s Il filostrato.20 A monarch’s ‘gold in cofre’ is thus not only his subjects in general, but also his poetic adviser in particular – a poet who, in the persona of Alceste, lectures the God of Love with Secreta-derived material. Moreover, a king’s poet is valuable both in his own right as a quasi-Aristotelian counsellor and because the advice he provides is itself considered to be precious. Alceste’s metaphorical description of Chaucer as a monarch’s ‘gold in cofre’ draws on a longstanding tradition which represents the text of Aristotle’s supposed advice to Alexander as being either as metaphorically valuable as actual wealth or even more valuable than wealth itself. The preface to the Secreta describes the text as containing rare ‘hevenly secretes and previte´s’ concerning government, physiognomy, medicine and alchemy.21 The dedicatory preface added by Philippus Tripolitanus to the full Latin translation of the Secreta develops this figuration, describing the text in its Middle English translation as ‘þis preciouse margarite of Philosophye’ which he and his patron, Guy de Vere, bishop of Tripoli, found in Antioch.22 John Shirley’s copy of the Secreta in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59 duplicates this idea in its subtitle: ‘þe Secrete of Secretes and Tresore Incomperable’.23 The possibility of rhyme in the vernacular on gold in cofrephilosophre, which Chaucer exploits in the Prologue to the Legend and elsewhere, solidified this association between Aristotelian advice literature and symbolic credit.24 Lydgate’s versified translation of the Secreta employs this rhyme in the Prologue describing the genesis of ‘the book . . . | Called Secrees of Old philisoffres | Of more valew than is gold in Coffres’.25 In the Regiment, Hoccleve acknowledges that the Secreta will be one of his sources, describing how: Aristotle, moost famous philosophre, His epistles to Alisaundre sente, Whos sentence is wel bet than gold in cofre, And more holsum growndid on treewe entente.

(RP, 2038–41)

Hoccleve extends this image in the following stanza, describing how Aristotle’s ‘tendre love’ and ‘fervent chertee’ for Alexander caused the philosopher to want to be the king’s ‘welthe durable’ (RP, 2045–51). Moving beyond the idea of valuable advice, Aristotle assumes the role of provider of symbolic credit to a monarch. Advice literature and advice-giving poets are valuable and durable because they furnish royal readers with the ethical and political advice necessary to sustain their symbolic treasure, the love and


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loyalty of their subjects. This figure is, as one might expect, particularly useful for Lancastrian literary texts which deal more topically with exchanges of credit and advice between king and commons and between king and poet. Texts such as Hoccleve’s Regiment and the alliterative Crowned King unite the more established image of the poet as king’s treasure with more temporary concerns regarding Lancastrian finance and government expressed in a manner very similar to that used in parliamentary negotiation. CROWNED KING: DEBATING ROYAL FINANCE IN

1415

Crowned King, an alliterative poem of 144 lines, brings together the political and literary applications of this flexible language of advice, credit and loyalty.26 The poem exploits the inner ironies of this discourse, employing parliamentary fiscal negotiations as the starting point for its own narrative strategy. It begins by offering a fictionalized account of the unprecedented grant of two tenths and two fifteenths made to Henry V by the parliament of November 1414 in order to support a proposed invasion of France. The opening section of the poem describes how the narrator falls asleep after a long night of ‘redyng of romaunces, and reuelyng’ with a group of friends, six or seven miles from Southampton.27 In a subsequent dream, the narrator sees a great crowd of people gathered in a dale, so many that ‘it myght not be [noumbred]’ (CK, 34). He overhears a ‘crowned king’ (CK, 35) ask this assembly for ‘a soleyn subsidie to susteyne his werres’ (CK, 36), just as Henry V had requested an unparalleled subsidy from his parliament. Following the granting of this request, the king is addressed by a clerk who kneels before him. The rest of the poem comprises the text of the address which covers many topics familiar from the advice-to-princes tradition. The narrator’s dream thus expands a specifically parliamentary interaction into a more inclusive encounter. The anonymous crowned king negotiates a subsidy not from the elected and representative House of Commons but from the larger commons or commonwealth. The address of the clerk is similarly quasi-parliamentary, being a version of the various complaints, criticisms and petitions put forward by the Commons as they attempted to exact concessions from the Crown in return for grants of taxation. As we have seen, the Chancellor’s opening sermon to parliament often euphemistically represented the Commons as an advice-giving body rather than referring directly to their tax-granting powers. This mutual exchange of criticism and taxation is made explicit in the narrator’s dream-vision in which in return for the agreed subsidy the clerk provides the crowned king with nearly a hundred lines composed of ‘sawes of Salomon’ (CK, 44).

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This echoing of parliamentary exchanges is both general and specific. The poem responds directly to the language used to negotiate the November 1414 subsidy by repeating but also supplementing and altering the Crown’s rhetoric. The narrator describes the grant as a ‘soleyn’ or extraordinary subsidy, but he also notes that the king intends that the tax should be a fair one. The money is to be raised only from ‘such as were seemly to suffre the charge’ (CK, 38). Moreover, the subsidy should be levied via a system of proportionality or graduation: ‘they that rekened were riche by reson and skyle | Shuld pay a parcell for here poure neighbowres’ (CK, 39–40). This visionary account of the November 1414 subsidy, which represents Henry V’s fiscal policy as principled and wellorganized, might well be thought of as putting forward the official line on parliamentary taxation. Yet the clerk’s address which forms the remainder of the dream includes a variety of other ways of imagining the financial relationship between a sovereign and his subjects. Following the narrator’s positive presentation of the parliamentary grant, the clerk offers the king a piece of advice which, like the Commons’ rhetorical strategy in the Hilary parliament of 1401, values the symbolic credit of a people’s love (figured using familar king’s treasure imagery) above the actual credit of a king’s financial resources (dismissed using the figure of money as filthy lucre): The loue of thi liegmen, that to thi lawe are bounde, Take hit for a tresour of hem that are true, That may the more availl in a myle wey Thanne moche of thy mukke that manhode loueth neuere.

(CK, 61–64)28

Symbolic ‘tresour’ is privileged above actual ‘mukke’ in these lines, a choice which offers a different perspective on the financial exchange witnessed by the narrator. The clerk’s advice reminds Henry V of the need to act to sustain his symbolic credit, even during a time when parliament was willing to grant him unprecedented levels of actual subsidy. The clerk warns the king not to ignore the ‘playnt’ of his ‘pouere peple’ (CK, 65), indicating some of the less welcome implications of taxation by acknowledging that advice, criticism and reform inevitably go hand in hand with subsidy. More strikingly still, the clerk argues that not only do a sovereign’s subjects constitute his symbolic treasure, they also provide a king with the material trappings of his sovereignty: . . . [they] swope and swete and swynke for thy fode; Moche worship they wynne the in this worlde riche, Of thy gliteryng gold and of thy gay wedes,

A discourse of credit and loyalty Thy proude pelure, and palle with precious stones, Grete castels and stronge, and styff walled townes.

105 (CK, 66–70)

The commons cultivate this sovereignty through arduous agricultural labour. Pre-eminent amongst these various signs of kingship produced by subjects’ toil is the ‘most preciouse plente’ which Henry’s ‘pouere peple with here ploughe pike oute of the erthe’ (CK, 71–72). The particular identity of the plant remains mysteriously unspecified in the text. Helen Barr notes the possible pun on both ‘plant’ and ‘plenty’, which might lead readers to identify the plant as symbolizing both the grain and other goods produced by the commons and, more widely, the abundance of all kinds of valuable commodities present in a well-governed and mutually dependent kingdom.29 She also points to the relevance of Piers Plowman, in which Holy Church describes love as ‘þe pl[ante] of pees, moost precious of vertues’.30 If his subjects’ love is a king’s most precious resource, here via Langlandian imagery such love is cultivated like a crop for a sovereign by those subjects. Whatever its precise genus, this precious plant is farmed by Henry’s commons by means of toil and sweat. In using this imagery of agricultural labour, Crowned King rewrites the rhetorical strategies used by the Crown to encourage the granting of this unprecedented subsidy in the November 1414 parliament. A phrase from Galatians 6. 10 (‘dum tempus habemus operemur bonum’ – ‘whilst we have time, let us work good’) was chosen by Henry Beaufort as the theme for the sermon which opened parliament.31 The phrase itself does not define the nature of this work but the surrounding verses make clear that this work is metaphorically that of cultivation and harvest: Be not deceived; God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. And in doing good, let us not fail; for in due time we shall reap, not failing. Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith.32

The text of this sermon shows that Beaufort employed imagery of germination and harvest to encourage the Commons to grant the subsidy necessary for Henry V’s proposed campaign in France. Using the temporal metaphor of his chosen theme, Beaufort argued that just as a tree has different kinds of time – germination, flowering, fruiting and resting – so mankind has two kinds of time, a time for peace and a time for war and labour (‘temps de pees, et temps de guerre, et de labour’). He went on to explain that as Henry V had securely established a time of peace in

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England, it was now possible to pursue Henry’s claim in France. This time of war and labour would, it is implied, require the labour of the Commons to match the military endeavour of Henry himself. Having set out this biological justification for commencement of a French campaign, Beaufort returned to more familiar territory, asking the Commons for three things to enable such a campaign to take place. These three things comprise the fruits of the labour required from the Commons, namely loyal and wise counsel, strong and true assistance, and, of course, a generous cash subsidy (‘copious subside daniers’). Beaufort’s sermon asks for the fruits of the labour but places little emphasis on the labour itself. Crowned King responds to this deployment of biological imagery, but alters the focus and import of Beaufort’s metaphor. The sermon frames its request for financial subsidy in figurative language which evokes the idea of different times of almost spontaneous germination, fruition and decay. While Beaufort makes a single reference to a time of war and labour, it is not made clear that this labour is the agricultural work implied by the passage from Galatians 6. 7–10 as a whole. The effort required by the Commons to produce the necessary subsidy is largely elided in Beaufort’s sermon. In Crowned King, this labour is prioritized. Here the sense is of difficult human cultivation rather than natural growth. The poem focuses on the backbreaking agricultural labour undertaken by the commons in order to produce the material effects of Henry’s sovereignty. They labour, sweat and toil (‘swope and swete and swynke’, CK, 65), and ‘pike oute of the erthe’ (CK, 72) on Henry’s behalf. The clerk’s address thus includes elements which complicate the initial parliamentary exchange, offering more realistic and pragmatic explanations of the financial relationship between sovereign and subject which expose the assumptions underpinning the Crown’s approach.33 This exposure of the true nature of financial relations between king and commonwealth is sustained in the clerk’s discussion of the interdependence of actual and symbolic credit. As we have already seen, the poem begins with negotiations concerning actual finance provided by the Commons to the Crown, but the clerk’s address quickly demands that the king acknowledge his people’s love as the location of his symbolic treasure. Furthermore, the poem also recognizes that symbolic credit is often supplemented or reduced by the Crown’s actions as regards the actual wealth of its subjects. The clerk advises the king to reward his military ‘champions and chief men of arms’ with the spoils of battle such as prisoners, castles and walled towns (CK, 94–97). These material rewards will not only provide actual resources for the king’s servants, but will also


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improve the king’s symbolic credit rating: ‘Geve hem as gladly – than shalt thou gete hertes’ (CK, 98). The clerk compares this mutual exchange of credit with Christ’s injunction to his disciples at the Last Supper to ‘love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another’ (John 13. 34): ‘For God in his gospell asketh no thyng elles, | But oonly loue for love . . .’ (CK, 99–100). These lines make unmistakably clear the importance of reciprocity and mutual dependence as regards material and symbolic credit.34 The paralleling of Henry’s financial policy and Christ’s new commandment at the Last Supper forms part of Crowned King’s series of comparisons between earthly and heavenly kingship. This mutual generosity is an earthly version of the mutually sacrificial relationship between Christ and his saints described at the poem’s climax. The clerk advises the king to consider their example: Of alle the seyntes in heven that for hym deth suffred, For his loue thei were so large her lyves they lost, And for loue of that Lord aloft now they dwelle (CK, 138–41) With that crowned kyng that on cros dyed.

The earlier mutual exchange of gifts and hearts explained as love for love is here transformed into a reciprocity of martyrdom and heavenly reward. Whilst this divine analogy serves to solemnize Henry V’s military campaign and the exchanges of credit which it requires, it also implies certain expectations of his relationship with his subjects. The Commons have granted the king an unprecedented subsidy which physically quantifies the extent of their love. Henry must provide matching symbolic (and sometimes material) credit in the form of suitable rewards and wages, attention for complaints, good governance, Christ-like self-sacrifice and love. Crowned King is thus both idealistic about the possibilities of reciprocity and mutual dependence, but also pragmatically aware of the role of money in maintaining the balance of symbolic credit between a king and his subjects. The clerk emphasizes that the commons’ role as provider of money and goods allows them to purchase good government from Henry: ‘They yeve her goodes to gouerne hem euen’ (CK, 73).35 The clerk implies that taxation and purveyance are the visible evidence of a deal between subjects and sovereign in which money and goods are exchanged for appropriate and successful government by the Crown. Whether these affirmations of reciprocity and mutual dependence are realistic or not, they aim to promote caution on Henry V’s part, to limit him to actions which preserve the symbolic credit he receives from his subjects and to remember the role of the commonwealth in the production

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of both actual and symbolic wealth. The subsidy itself and Henry’s proposed military campaign are not criticized, but the clerk reminds Henry that certain responsibilities accompany the reception of such a large grant. Whilst the poem begins with an unprecedented gift of money to the king, it ends with a warning against monarchical covetousness: A kyng shuld not of curtesie couetouse be holde, For ther-as couetyse is knowe in a kynges brest Ther is corage out of kende when mukke is his maistre.

(CK, 130–32)36

Crowned King neither censures nor justifies Henry V’s fiscal policy and proposed military campaign. Instead, it provides cautious advice by engaging with the types of rhetorical strategies frequently used in parliament to negotiate direct taxation. Using such rhetoric, the clerk’s address points out some of the possible anxieties, problems and solutions involved in this negotiated exchange of material and symbolic credit. The author of Crowned King exploits the flexible discourse of credit, examining both purely financial exchanges between sovereign and subject, and the trades in the symbolic credit of love and allegiance which accompany it.

8

Credit and fraud in Hoccleve’s Regiment

Crowned King addresses its implied reader, Henry V, through an interwoven language of advice-giving, credit and loyalty. It accepts the financial commitments demanded by his proposed French campaign but uses this pliable discourse to remind the king of the responsibilities which accompany such a large subsidy. Yet during his father’s reign, when the financing of the Lancastrian Crown’s domestic activities was much more uncertain and disputed, Thomas Hoccleve addressed this same discourse to Prince Henry (as he then was) to produce a much wider range of ironies and paradoxes which revealed the parlous state of the Crown’s symbolic and actual credit. Pseudo-Aristotelian advice texts such as Hoccleve’s Regiment are key interventions in this discourse because they themselves are traditionally figured as valuable treasuries of political knowledge. Vernacular advice literature, and vernacular authors in particular as Chaucer himself suggested in the persona of Alceste, supply English monarchs with valuable counsel which will enable them to sustain their symbolic credit. Hoccleve posthumously confirms Chaucer as a national asset in the Regiment, describing him as ‘this landes verray tresor and richesse’ (RP, 2081). Similarly, in one of his manuscript prologues, John Shirley plays on the paradox that even supposedly penniless poets like Lydgate can still provide symbolic credit for royal readers: Yet for all his much konnynge, which were gret tresore to a kynge, I meane this Lidgate, munke Daune John, his noble bene spent I leue ychon.1

The Regiment of Princes, the most substantial advice text produced for the Lancastrian dynasty, takes this paradox further, making it part of the poem’s raison d’eˆtre. Hoccleve presents himself, as Shirley presents Lydgate, as a Chaucerian poet who supplies valuable advice for a royal reader. In the Regiment, however, the paradox alluded to by Shirley becomes dominant, as Hoccleve employs this complex discourse of credit and loyalty to demonstrate the dangers of allowing actual financial 109

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difficulties to weaken the metaphorical bond of symbolic credit between sovereign and subject. FAILING RECIPROCITY IN THE REGIMENT

Hoccleve’s combination in the Regiment of pseudo-Aristotelian advice literature (which, as we have seen, is frequently figured as a kind of symbolic credit) and traditional begging-poem strategies (which imply a lack of actual credit on the part of the author) draws attention to many different types of failing or failed reciprocity between sovereign and subject. Hoccleve himself points out the basic paradox to Prince Henry in the short section introducing the Regiment proper: ‘Thogh that my lyflode and possessioun | Be scant, I ryche am of benevolence; | To yow therof can I be no nygoun’ (RP, 2031–33). Goodwill is shown towards the prince by offering to provide him with symbolic credit in the form of a pseudoAristotelian advice text even though the poet’s reserves of actual credit are low. Earlier in the poem, Hoccleve employs another familiar beggingpoem topos in which his ability to produce literature is linked with his financial status.2 He tells the Old Man that ‘whyl it with me stood | So that I hadde silver resonable, | My litil wit was sumwhat convenable’ (RP, 1237–39). Credit allows Hoccleve’s poetic ingenuity to facilitate poetic exchanges with his patrons but now, in a situation of financial hardship, Hoccleve reveals that ‘my dul wit can to me nothyng profyte’ (RP, 1242). He asks the Old Man to teach him ‘how to gete a golden salve’ and offers to split in half any reward they can obtain (RP, 1245–46). The Old Man’s solution is to produce a text for the prince for which Hoccleve might receive payment (RP, 1898–1904). This sustained emphasis on Hoccleve’s lack of credit, in combination with the customary begging-poem correlation between financial status and literary production, serves to make his symbolically valuable advice text a particularly meaningful gift. Hoccleve presents himself as a provider of symbolic credit, but qualifies the relationship between adviser and king by focusing on his simultaneous lack of actual wealth. This qualification occurs not only in the Prologue but also intrudes into the Regiment proper. Hoccleve indicates the imminent conclusion of his text at the end of the penultimate section by returning to the begging-poem topos which links literary production with financial reward: More othir thyng wolde I fayn speke and touche Heere in this book, but swich is my dulnesse, For that al voide and empty is my pouche,

Credit and fraud in Hoccleve’s Regiment That al my lust is qweynt with hevynesse, And hevy spirit commandith stilnesse. And have I spoke of pees, I shal be stille. God sende us pees, if that it be His wille.

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(RP, 5013–19)

This stanza prays for ‘pees’, the subject of the Regiment’s concluding section, ‘de pace’. It also punningly requests financial reward in the form of ‘pieces’ or coins.3 Hoccleve’s willingness to furnish the prince with symbolically valuable advice has finally been overwhelmed by his lack of actual resources. By revealing the point at which this symbolic credit runs out, Hoccleve indicates the extent to which the Regiment represents a kind of self-imposed economic fraud which is of benefit to Henry rather than to himself. Though owed payment for his labour in the Privy Seal, he continues to produce his valuable text for Prince Henry, creating in effect something out of nothing, a valuable commodity out of a debt. Throughout the Regiment, Hoccleve emphasizes the reciprocal relationship based on actual and symbolic credit which unites a sovereign and his subjects. He does this, however, in a manner which demonstrates how this relationship can become unequal, unbalanced or even fail completely. Frequently, reciprocal exchanges are replaced by fraudulent deals in which subjects are disadvantaged or defrauded. One set of metaphors, for example, describes the exchange of symbolic and material credit in terms of the movement of liquids. In the section on liberality and prodigality, Hoccleve describes the effect of excessive taxation in watery terms: ‘The pot so longe to the watir gooth | That hoom it cometh at the laste ybroke’ (RP, 4432–33). He makes the point that a king’s people do not provide him with an inexhaustible supply of credit. Eventually, they are sucked dry of funds and become resentful: ‘Hem thynkith that they over ny been soke’ (RP, 4436). This imagery is reversed in the following section which discusses avarice. Here it is the king who must provide free-flowing largesse for his subjects: Largesse yput is unto the liknesse Of vessels whos mowthes han greet wydnesse And hilde out hir licour habundantly; Thus seith the Philosophre treewely. And in as mochil as a well also, At the which many folk hir watir fecche, Needith to han the larger mowth, right so The largesse of a kyng moot ferther strecche, If he of his estat anything recche,

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The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship Than othir mennes, for hir inpotence Strecchith nat so fer as his influence.

(RP, 4645–55)

A king’s liberality is compared first to a wide-mouthed vessel and then to a well, reversing the earlier image of the commonwealth as a king’s water supply. Hoccleve draws this imagery from his source, but also extends it in the pun on influence both as power or control and as the flowing in of liquid.4 Through these reversals of imagery, the Regiment reveals the mutually dependent nature of financial exchange within a kingdom. A king’s subjects furnish him with money in the form of taxation, yet the sovereign is expected to supply his people superabundantly with money in the form of gifts, wages and rewards. This macroeconomic relationship between sovereign and subjects should be paralleled by an analogous one-to-one relationship between Hoccleve and his named reader, Prince Henry. Yet this circular or reversible exchange, where each party should both supply and receive credit, has broken down at present. When Hoccleve uses similar liquid imagery to describe his own relationship with the prince, what is demonstrated is the lack of reciprocity therein. He asks for Henry’s permission to declare in writing his ‘inward wil that thristith the welfare | Of your persone’ (RP, 2027–28).5 Such thirst is twofold, both desiring Henry’s individual welfare and a share of his prosperity. This is reiterated when Hoccleve makes another direct appeal to the prince for assistance in the section of the Regiment discussing largesse and prodigality: For if myn hertes wil wist were and preeved How yow to love it stired is and meeved, Yee scholden knowe I your honour and welthe Thriste and desyre, and eek your soules helthe.

(RP, 4395–96)

Hoccleve’s wishes here are unavoidably double-edged, particularly in their mendicant context. He both desires honour and wealth for Henry and from Henry. We know that he is thirsty in financial terms because, as he has explained to the Old Man in the Prologue, he is owed money by the Lancastrian Crown. He should not be thirsty because kings are advised to be liquidly superabundant. Nevertheless, despite his own deficits, Hoccleve provides a liquidly imagined text for the prince. In the short section which introduces the Regiment proper, Hoccleve tells Prince Henry that he will play to his strengths and provide him with ‘a kynges draght’ because ‘of othir draghtes lerned have I naght’ (RP, 2120–21). This offer puns on a range of meanings of draught/draft – not only a treatise and a copy of a piece of writing, but also a move in chess and a trick or a stratagem.6 It also


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has liquid connotations, namely ‘a mechanism for drawing water from a well’ and ‘the quantity of liquid that one drinks at a time’.7 Both these senses are relevant given Hoccleve’s employment of liquid metaphors to describe the financial exchanges between sovereign and subject. This liquid possibility is hinted at in the apology Hoccleve makes for his extensive treatment of sovereignty in the Regiment: ‘thynke it nat to longe, | Thogh in that draght I sumwhat wade deepe’ (RP, 2143–44). Hoccleve is supplying a draught, a liquidly imagined text, when he himself is thirsty for wealth and supplying a valuable text when he himself is penniless. His addressee, Prince Henry, is representative of the government which has failed to keep its side of the bargain. As we saw in Chapter 6, Hoccleve combines two seemingly opposed personalizing strategies which portray him both as entitled labourer and as waster, thus explaining his current lack of funds without explicitly blaming the Crown. Nevertheless, the multiple instances of failed or failing reciprocity in the Regiment and of sovereign-subject relationships which are fraudulent or paradoxical make it clear that the Crown is failing to honour its obligations to its annuitants. Hoccleve makes up for the deficit in the Crown’s own supply, producing a liquid text in a drought, a something from a nothing. FRAUD AND THE JOHN OF CANACE EXEMPLUM

The most amplified instance of something-from-nothing in the Regiment is the John of Canace exemplum which illustrates the dangers of excessive generosity in Section 11 of the poem.8 In order to win back the love and respect of his married daughters who have flattered him into spending all of his money and then spurned him, John borrows £10,000 pounds from a merchant friend which he locks inside a chest. John then arranges a scene in which his daughters and sons-in-law see him unpacking the money and counting it in the middle of the night, a scene which prompts a rapid change of behaviour from his relatives. Despite the money being secretly returned to the merchant, John’s daughters sustain him comfortably until he dies. Having obtained the keys to the chest by making donations to various religious houses, the relatives open John’s coffer and find, instead of the £10,000 on which they had been banking, a ‘passyngly greet sergeantes mace’ (RP, 4349) inscribed with the following gloomy warning: ‘Who berith charge of othir men and is | Of hem despysed, slayn be he with this’ (RP, 4354). John uses the borrowed £10,000 to trick his relatives into providing for him during his old age. They do this willingly, believing the money to be

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still present inside the box when in fact the box is first empty and then filled with the mace and its moralitas which is sapientially rather than financially valuable. Given the images of fraud elsewhere in the poem, it is no coincidence that this exemplum forms the substance of the most innovative section of the Regiment proper. The John of Canace narrative is the longest and most developed of the exempla which Hoccleve draws from De ludo scaccorum.9 It is significant both because of this amplification and because it prompts the re-entry of autobiographical and mendicant discourse into the advisory section of the poem. The exemplum induces Hoccleve’s confession of his own liberality, a confession carefully delayed and avoided at several points in the Prologue.10 By delaying it until this point, he diverts the application of the exemplum’s moralitas from the addressee of the text, Prince Henry, to himself (RP, 4360). He acknowledges that he has spent all his money frivolously and tells the prince that only he can provide help (RP, 4373–75). This revelation and supplication, which makes Hoccleve the principal pupil of the mace’s lesson, serves momentarily to diffuse any tension that might result from too precise a meditation on the implications of the moralitas for Prince Henry. Such diffusion, however, is shown to be merely temporary when the John of Canace exemplum is read in combination with the material that succeeds it in the text. After his confession and appeal in lines 4360–89, there comes a short restatement of Hoccleve’s good intentions in presenting the text to the prince (RP, 4390–4403). Following these stanzas, he continues the business of translating and compiling material from his three sources. Returning to the Secretum which he quotes authoritatively in the margin, Hoccleve provides the princely application of the mace’s moralitas which he had earlier deferred and restricted to his own autobiography: What kyng that dooth more excessyf despenses Than his land may to souffyse or atteyne Shal be destroyed . . . Fool largesse geveth so moche away That it the kynges cofres makith bare, And thanne awakith poore peples care, For al that shee despendith hath and waastid They moot releeve – therto been they haastid.

(RP, 4404–06, 4413–17)11

Here Hoccleve makes clear the implied comparison between John of Canace’s triple-locked box and the coffers in which a king’s income and treasure is stored. In a practical sense, royal treasuries are emptied by foolish liberality, but they can be quickly refilled by taxing subjects harshly.


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The box of symbolic credit, however, which represents a king’s authority and the loyalty his subjects feel towards him, is permanently emptied as subjects become unhappy and mutinous, seeing the king’s singular profit triumphing over the kingdom’s common profit. Hoccleve underlines the intended relationship between the John of Canace exemplum and royal finance by linking the discord provoked by royal prodigality with the dissent produced by excessively frequent royal taxation: Nat speke I ageyn eides uttirly – In sum cas they been good and necessarie, But whan they goon to custumablely, The peple it makith for to curse and warie.

(RP, 4425–28)

The seriousness of the social unrest and revolt implied here should not be underestimated, particularly given Hoccleve’s choice of representative labourer who suffers from a king’s excessive taxes: ‘The tylere with his poore cote and land’ (RP, 4418).12 In this context, Hoccleve’s anonymous tile-maker or tiller reminds the reader of the much more well-known leader of the 1381 rising, the infamous Wat Tyler. The extreme seriousness of the historically proved advice which Hoccleve is offering elucidates his decision to end the section on generosity and prodigality with four stanzas concerning the two possible modes of addressing a superior, namely flattery and truthtelling. Hoccleve describes the customary social paradox in the treatment of the two types of speakers – flatterers receive the ‘thank’ (RP, 4451) of their lords while truthtellers ‘suffre torment’ (RP, 4460) – but appeals to a higher power to justify truthtelling even in difficult circumstances. God’s anger at truth which is knowingly hidden will ultimately provide punishment for flatterers and reward for truthtellers. This argument in favour of ‘hoomly trouthe’ (RP, 4442) and the ‘treewe man’ (RP, 4446), in a section ostensibly concerned with financial policy, appears as a pre-emptive defence mechanism designed to deflect any possible rancour or animosity generated by the exemplum and its surrounding counsel and advice.13 Thus, even though Hoccleve speedily appropriates the mace’s moralitas for himself, the textual apparatus following the narrative returns attention to a princely application or interpretation of this exemplum, a reading which requires pre-emptive defence on Hoccleve’s part. This princely reading, it must be admitted, is not simple or one-dimensional. The John of Canace exemplum does not offer an obvious moral lesson. If princely readers identify with John as a positive example, his story illustrates both foolish liberality and the trickery required to negate the effects

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of this foolishness. Whilst John exhausts his resources by foolishly giving gifts to his daughters, he is able to restore his credit fraudulently through deceiving them with borrowed money. Although his exemplum initially demonstrates the dangers of foolish liberality, he goes to his grave having been comfortably provided for in his old age. The mace’s moralitas warns that whoever pays for other people and is despised by them will be slain by the mace. This warning might apply both to John in the opening section of the narrative, but later to his daughters and their husbands who pay for John’s hospitality while he contemptuously deceives them. Yet the mace does not physically harm its new owners and thus its application extends beyond the text to Hoccleve and his readers. This exemplum is thus far from straightforward. The mace’s moralitas supposedly applies more to Hoccleve than to Prince Henry. Hoccleve’s foolish liberality has, he claims, led to the difficulties and anxieties he describes to the Old Man in the Prologue and, in order to improve his situation, he creates something from nothing. This something from nothing, Hoccleve’s valuable advice created despite his own lack of resources, parallels John’s creation of renewed symbolic credit from borrowed resources. Yet the mace’s message and its textual surrounding plainly direct the moralitas of the exemplum towards princely readers who deal with national rather than personal finance. The wording of the mace’s moralitas warning punningly extends its lesson to the public sphere.14 Read literally, John’s testament warns that those who pay (i.e. who bear charge) for people who hold them in contempt will be killed by the mace, but it simultaneously warns that whoever has charge in the form of authority over other people and is yet despised will be similarly treated.15 This reference to public office-holding, particularly an office involving the receipt of monies, is confirmed if the full connotations of bearing charge are realized. Charge can, on the one hand, be used as a synonym for an impost, levy or tax.16 Bearing charge is thus in some sense being in receipt of taxes. On the other hand, charge can refer more generally to monies received, particularly in accounting practice. From the London Guildhall Plea and Memoranda roll for 1436/7, we have the administrative formula ‘summa totalis of alle manere charges of money’.17 This reflects the use of a lined or chequered cloth to calculate or audit accounts by subtracting counters representing the discharge (i.e. payments made) from counters representing the charge (i.e. revenues received).18 The danger of bearing charge of others in the mace’s moralitas thus also alludes by punning extension to the risks involved in receiving and administrating corporate funds.


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It is in this public context that royal readers of the exemplum should fear the consequences of being despised by those for whom they bear charge. Hoccleve’s autobiographical interruption provides an immediate illustration of circumstances which might cause the text’s named reader, Prince Henry, to be despised. He asks the prince directly for a personal intervention to relieve his poverty, but he also reminds Henry that his welldeserved annuity is ‘al behynde . . . | Which causith me to lyven in langour’ (RP, 4384–85). Despite his protestations of extravagant spending, it is in fact the moratorium on annuity payments imposed by the Great Council of March 1411 which has created Hoccleve’s penury. It is the public rather than the private management of money which ultimately endangers sovereigns and threatens the livelihood of individual subjects. The prince, like John, is able to sustain his government by relying on borrowed credit and unfulfilled promises, but his symbolic credit is inevitably weakened over time. The exemplum is thus not uncomplicatedly exemplary and theoretical but is rather representative of current circumstances in which traditional reciprocal exchanges have broken down. Sovereignty which relies on fraud, on the king being in economic and symbolic debt, endangers the necessary bonds of love and loyalty between monarch and subject. John’s ‘stronge bownden chiste’ and his borrowed credit of £10,000 in this more public context serve as a model for a sovereign’s symbolic treasure provided by either an individual adviser or by his subjects as a whole. The narrative is thus an illustrative or diagnostic representation of current relations between the Crown and its subjects. Most obviously, the exemplum describes the failure of a reciprocal relationship based on love and loyalty. As we have seen, Hoccleve makes this same connection between the narrative exemplum and the effects of excessive liberality on ‘kynges cofres’ in lines 4413–17. The narrative presents repeated instances in which non-financial bonds of familial loyalty, support and allegiance are replaced by attempts to buy such bonds with cash, gifts and expectation of future profit. The narrative begins with a relationship in which John exchanges ‘his good’ for his relatives’ ‘cheere’ and ‘plesant maneere’ (RP, 4190–91). This exchange quickly becomes fraudulent, with the relatives flattering John shamelessly in return for ‘outrageous’ expenditure on his part (RP, 4197). When his funds run out, all good will and benevolence cease. Turning the tables, John then becomes the fraudster, purchasing respect and support in his old age by constructing a fraudulent deal with his relatives. Finally, the mace’s moralitas offers a stern warning about what may happen to those whose relationships of symbolic credit are thus transformed into mere material exchanges which are

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combined with mutual disloyalty. In the exemplum, financial metaphors of benevolence and mutuality are parodically actualized in terms of the material filling and emptying of John’s coffer. In place of priceless loyalty metaphorically represented by ‘gold in cofre’, the chest is finally filled with the sergeant’s mace and its grim warning about authority and corporate finance. The reappearance of credit fraud in this climactic section is fitting. Hoccleve returns throughout the poem to the notion of producing something from nothing and the Regiment’s central paradox is that it is a valuable text produced by a penniless poet. There is an ongoing sense that things do not add up and that financial deals are somehow illogical, contradictory or fraudulent. John of Canace’s triple-locked coffer, representative of the symbolic treasure supplied to a sovereign by poets or by the commonwealth as a whole, is likewise found to be fraudulently empty and illusory, though temporarily effective. Hoccleve’s poem warns that imbalances, inequalities or even fraud in this reciprocal relationship of credit and loyalty cannot be sustained indefinitely without the monarch’s symbolic treasure also becoming devalued. If this relationship breaks down, the monarch’s symbolic ‘gold in cofre’ becomes, like John’s box, merely a tool in the creation of a fraudulent arrangement. The Regiment thus shares with Crowned King a certain pragmatism about financial relations between sovereign and subject. Both texts employ idealistic metaphors which imagine a king’s people to be his ‘gold in cofre’, but both texts also make clear the exchanges of actual credit which underpin this relationship. Furthermore, both texts are keen to demonstrate the potential dangers to sovereigns who might too readily appropriate their subjects’ wealth or deny money owed to them, who might fail in their duty to bear charge and charges responsibly. The Regiment is particularly interesting because it describes the private effects of the moratorium on annuities on individual annuitants as well as dealing with government finance in the abstract. Hoccleve is in some respects a loyal respondent, producing a symbolically valuable poem when he himself is owed money and textually reproducing many of the Crown’s attempted solutions or explanations in his autobiographical descriptions of his own frivolous expenditure and the mysterious frauds that afflict the Privy Seal clerks. This individual loyalty, nevertheless, cannot help but highlight the collapsing state of government credit generally. The numerous instances of failing or failed reciprocity in the poem, culminating in the John of Canace exemplum, corroborate the sense of fraud and loss of symbolic credit. Hoccleve participates in the contemporary discussion of government


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finance by adopting the pose of penniless advice-giver, making the Crown’s preservation of his actual and symbolic credit particularly meaningful. His contribution to the debate does not employ its language as euphemism or promise or excuse, but instead combines the actual and metaphorical discussion of credit exchanges to make his advice indispensable and unavoidable for its royal reader.


Rather than categorizing Lancastrian literature either as rebellious criticism or cowed propaganda, this book has argued instead that such works are in their political engagements both pragmatic and innovative. Lancastrian literature can easily be mistaken for propaganda because it closely tracks the Crown’s concerns and uses official rhetoric as its starting point. Yet it transforms these official languages and frequently directs them towards different ends. It addresses its Lancastrian readers in language which they themselves had initiated. Lancastrian literature reminds the Lancastrian dynasty of its linguistic origins in order to demonstrate how it has broken its promises, fallen short of expectations or changed its priorities.1 It is aware of the Crown’s perspective and policies and it puts forward dependent yet different points of view. These are the perspectives of the subject rather than the sovereign, of the employee rather than the employer. Lancastrian literature adopts the mind-set of the advice-giver, the truth-teller, the tax-payer, the unpaid servant and those who have seen monarchs rise and fall. Such perspectives are accurate and informed, both politically and linguistically. This accuracy and political acumen is not surprising given that the authors and audience of Lancastrian literature were drawn from the Crown’s councillors and administrators, those attending its parliaments and serving in the familia regis. By audience, I mean here not its named patrons or addressees but those secondary readers amongst whom such texts were likely to be circulated after or alongside presentation copies. Amongst its authors, Hoccleve worked as a clerk in the Privy Seal while Henry Scogan was an esquire in Richard II’s household.2 The anonymous author of Crowned King may have been a Chancery clerk or comparable member of the Westminster bureaucracy.3 Though formerly tentatively identified as a parliamentary clerk, the author of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger is now thought likely to have been a member of the household of Sir Thomas Berkeley.4 Berkeley’s pivotal role in Richard’s deposition and his attendance at Henry IV’s councils would have given the 120


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Mum-poet insight into political events and the language used to discuss them.5 The lawyer and landowner John Gower, while not employed directly by the Crown, can be closely associated with the bureaucratic, political and household circles which served the Lancastrian dynasty.6 Amongst Gower’s executors, for example, were Sir Arnold Savage I and William Denne.7 It is likely that this William Denne was the William Donne who worked alongside Hoccleve in the Privy Seal between circa 1388 and circa 1400.8 At the time of Gower’s will, Donne was a canon in the King’s Chapel where he must have served alongside the more junior Prentys and Arundel named in Hoccleve’s Male Regle. Hoccleve and Donne were both bequeathed sums of money by a more senior Privy Seal clerk, Guy de Rouclif, in his will in 1392, with Hoccleve also being left ‘uno libro vocato Bello Troie’.9 Rouclif can also be linked with Gower, from whom he had purchased two manors ten years earlier in 1382.10 Gower’s other executor, Savage, was MP for Kent six times between 1390 and his death in 1410 and was the Commons’ Speaker in 1401 and 1404.11 He was Steward of Prince Henry’s household between 1401 and 1403, and a member of the Council from 1402 until 1406. As the identities and associations of Gower’s executors indicate, these close-knit communities of royal household staff, bureaucrats and political representatives overlapped and were interrelated. Not only providing the authors themselves, these overlapping communities also formed the likely first readership of Lancastrian poetry. Members of the civil service have recently been put forward as readers of Piers Plowman and other poems in the alliterative tradition, and it is probable that non-alliterative poetry also found an audience amongst such circles.12 A poem such as the Male Regle, with its jokey but politically meaningful reference to two clerks of the King’s Chapel, Prentys and Arundel, suggests that Hoccleve’s poetry was read by or read to an audience who knew the two men personally or who knew of them by reputation. While the named or implied addressees of works such as Hoccleve’s Male Regle and Regiment and Gower’s In Praise of Peace were senior members of the Lancastrian royal family and nobility, it is likely that they were also read simultaneously by fellow-workers and associates.13 The performance situation suggested by Shirley for Scogan’s Moral Balade, for example, indicates an audience composed both of members of the royal family and those who worked for them and supplied their household: Here foloweþe nexst a moral balade to my lord þe prince, to my lord of Clarence, to my lord of Bedford, and to my lord of Gloucestre by Henry Scogan at a souper of feorþe merchande in the Vyntre in London, at þe hous of Lowys Johan.14

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The poem is addressed to Prince Henry and his brothers (here given their later titles) but its performance is sponsored by Lewis John and is witnessed by other vintners. Lewis John, the host of the occasion, was a merchant specializing in wines who served as Deputy Butler to the royal household from November 1402 to November 1407.15 His immediate superior, occupying the post of Chief Butler from 5 November 1402 to 13 May 1407, was Geoffrey Chaucer’s son Thomas.16 Shirley’s proposed location therefore seems plausible given the repeated allusions to Scogan’s friend and fellow poet in the poem.17 Scogan quotes the whole of Chaucer’s Gentilesse as stanzas fourteen, fifteen and sixteen of his poem, in addition to paraphrases of the Wife of Bath’s Tale at lines 67–69 and 97–99.18 He imagines Chaucer as his own superior tutor and ‘mayster’ (MB, 65, 98 and 104), saluting his literary achievements as ‘noble poete of Bretayne’ (MB, 126). Scogan’s decision to praise Chaucer fulsomely and to pay him the posthumous compliment of quoting his poems in the process of educating and advising royal princes would have thus been particularly apt if his son, Lewis John’s immediate superior, was present at the event Shirley describes. Thomas had established close links with Prince Henry very early in the new Lancastrian administration, having been appointed by him to a stewardship in the Thames Valley worth £40 per year on 26 October 1399.19 The occasion at which Scogan’s poem was performed therefore celebrates both horizontal links between colleagues, friends and family, as well as more hierarchical links between patrons and their patronees. Both patrons and members of their households, their retainers, servants and officials, are likely to have had shared knowledge of Lancastrian literature of the sort discussed in this book. The size of these interrelated communities of readers should not be underestimated, particularly those involved in bureaucratic and administrative service. There were large numbers of professional civil servants and bureaucrats in royal service living and working in Westminster in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. J. L. Kirby, describing the situation in 1399, estimates that there were around one hundred officers and clerks working in the Upper and Lower Exchequer.20 In the Chancery, there were twelve clerks of the first form, twelve of the second form, and twenty-four of the third form, plus the officers and clerks responsible for sealing and dispatching documents, and the staff of the Hanaper who collected fees for documents. The Privy Seal was a much smaller department of between six and fourteen clerks led by the Secondary and supported by several junior or apprentice clerks.21 Within the royal household, there were between twenty and thirty-five household clerks, as well as


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between five and ten chaplains and clerks of the King’s Chapel.22 There were also five or six Privy Seal clerks working within the royal household, in reality clerks of the Signet supervised by the King’s Secretary.23 These bureaucrats are documented as readers of vernacular poetry in the Lancastrian period. The earliest recorded owner of a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales was a member of the Westminster civil service. In 1419, Richard Sotheworth, a Chancery clerk, bequeathed ‘quendam librum meum de Canterbury Tales’ to his fellow clerk, John Stopyndon, who was later to become Henry V’s personal secretary in March 1422, Keeper of the Hanaper of Chancery in 1426, and Keeper of the Rolls in November 1438.24 Thomas Kent, a Privy Seal clerk who rose to be appointed Secondary of the Privy Seal in March 1444, also owned a Canterbury Tales manuscript.25 Kent had been in royal service since 1409 and, at the time of his death in 1468 was a noteworthy bibliophile, naming a large number of books by secundo folio in his will.26 Henry Somer, first Clerk of the Receipt of the Exchequer, then Baron of the Exchequer, then Deputy Treasurer, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the addressee of two of Hoccleve’s poems, and was a friend or acquaintance of both Geoffrey and Thomas Chaucer.27 Thomas Chaucer was himself the addressee of a poem by John Lydgate wishing him a safe voyage to France.28 Officials of the familia regis such as the Chief Butler, Thomas Chaucer, who also served as councillors and Members of Parliament, are also recorded as book-owners and readers. Sir Walter Hungerford, for example, was MP for Wiltshire six times and for Somerset once, Speaker in the parliament of April 1414, a member of Henry V’s and Henry VI’s Councils, and Steward of Henry V’s household.29 Hungerford’s will makes reference to several books, including a Legenda aurea and a book called ‘Le Sege de Troye’, and it is possible that he too owned a Canterbury Tales manuscript.30 His literary and political knowledge was sufficient for him to be named as a guarantor for the quality and acceptability of the text in the envoy to the 1436 version of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye.31 As Hungerford’s supervision of the Libelle indicates, Lancastrian vernacular poetry was circulated amongst readers who had a precise and detailed knowledge of Crown policies and rhetorics. Lancastrian poetry therefore takes its shape from the shared knowledge and interests of its producers and consumers. The form and content of Lancastrian literature are moulded by the political understanding gained during the careers of these readers and writers, whether it be biographical framing devices, the pose of unpaid truthteller, or the political utility of household narratives. In the early Lancastrian period, the language of government policy and

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activity becomes that of vernacular poetry in an unprecedented way. The digression on coining in Hoccleve’s Dialogue, for example, is the product not only of Hoccleve’s thematic patterning of the Series but also of the practical knowledge of his friends, acquaintances and, presumably, readers amongst the bureaucratic community.32 Hoccleve knew two of the Wardens of the Mint in this period. Guy de Rouclif was Warden of the Exchange and Mint in the Tower of London from January 1388 until his death in December 1392, and Henry Somer held the same post and was also responsible for the Mint at Calais from November 1411 until December 1439.33 Lewis John, host of the occasion at which the Moral Balade was read, was Master of the Mints in London, the Tower and Calais from April 1413 until February 1422.34 The Dialogue discusses the difficulties of choosing a text to offer to a royal patron, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, while the extant holograph manuscript of the Series directs the work to Joan, countess of Westmorland, signalling noble patronage and readership.35 Yet at the same time the digression on coining draws on the professional knowledge of Hoccleve and his acquaintances, reminding us of the likelihood of other unnamed readers in his immediate circle. Lancastrian readers and writers were therefore united by their shared knowledge of different aspects of the Crown’s priorities, dilemmas, successes and failures. Moreover, as office-holders and administrators, they had first-hand access to the linguistic forms in which the Crown’s actions were described and discussed. Hoccleve, as one of a relatively small number of Privy Seal clerks, was familiar with the details of decision-making at the very centre of national authority. Most obviously, he would have gained information from his work in the Privy Seal which was, as A. L. Brown describes it, ‘the translation of decisions taken outside the office into formally-worded, official, acceptable documents’.36 But Hoccleve may have had access to more privileged information than merely the contents of the documents which crossed his desk. The Keeper of the Privy Seal, it must be remembered, was ex officio a member of the King’s Council.37 Keepers in the early fifteenth century had often begun their careers within the civil service and may have maintained their links with colleagues who did not receive such rapid advancement.38 Nicholas Bubwith, for example, was a King’s Clerk by 1387 before becoming King’s Secretary in 1402, Keeper of the Rolls in September 1402, and Keeper of the Privy Seal in March 1405.39 Moreover, the Privy Seal also provided administrative support for the Council itself. John Prophet, later Keeper of the Privy Seal from October 1406 until June 1415, was appointed to write Council records circa 1389, and by 1391 he was first one of the clerks in the Privy Seal office


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and then appointed Secondary in 1394.40 Prophet was followed as Clerk of the Council by Robert Frye, one of Hoccleve’s colleagues in the Privy Seal, who began writing Council records in 1397 and continued as Clerk of the Council until 1421.41 Men such as Prophet and Frye provided routes through which the Crown’s policies and linguistic choices might be disseminated to lower-ranking members of the bureaucracy. Because of their insider knowledge, members of the civil service were considered to be well informed and influential by those viewing the political community from the outside. The Clerk of the Council, Robert Frye, was chosen to sit in the Commons as MP for both Wilton and Shaftesbury in 1406, and was MP for Wilton on four further occasions before representing Shaftesbury once again in 1417.42 Frye was joined as MP for Shaftesbury in 1406 by John Scarburgh, a Chancery clerk from 1373 until circa 1413 and Clerk of the Commons in parliament by 5 March 1385 until circa 1414.43 Similarly, Scarburgh’s successor as Clerk of the Commons, another Chancery clerk by the name of Thomas Haseley, sat as MP for Lyme Regis in 1410 and Barnstaple in May 1413.44 Haseley can be closely associated with Thomas Chaucer, and was appointed Keeper of the Exchange on 9 November 1419, an appointment which brought him into contact with Henry Somer, then Warden of the Exchange and Mint, and Lewis John, then Master of the Mint. These Westminster men were chosen as representatives ahead of local figures because of their accurate and informed knowledge of the Crown’s policies and the opinions of the king and his advisers. With this knowledge, they could successfully represent the interests of the localities who had paid their expenses to sit as MPs. Such access to high-level political discussion, either directly or through colleagues and associates, supports an assumption that this circle of bureaucratic and household readers had an informed and detailed knowledge of current political discussion and action. We should therefore expect Lancastrian literature to be equally accurate and insightful, both in terms of policy and rhetoric. Hoccleve, and perhaps the author of Crowned King if he was indeed a Chancery clerk, had similar access to the type of information which made men like Frye, Scarburgh and Haseley so valuable as members of parliament. Readers looked to Lancastrian literature for political insight just as they employed Westminster civil servants to sit as their MPs. Members of the bureaucracy, household and Commons mediated between the Crown and the wider community of the realm both in parliaments and councils and through the texts that they produced and read, both bureaucratic and literary. They were able to perform this role because of their intimate

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knowledge of the Crown’s policy and the language in which decisions were discussed, made and disseminated. We should not underestimate the public’s knowledge of and interest in political language and political decision-making in this period. Subjects encountered the Crown’s official rhetoric most frequently through the system of royal proclamations. Through this system, centrally produced statements, putting forward both the Crown’s instructions and its preferred linguistic paradigms, could be heard at up to two hundred places in the kingdom.45 James A. Doig gives a list of just over a hundred dates and places at which the proclamation suspending payment of annuities in 1404 is known to have been read out.46 Documents relating to or recording notable political events were also circulated widely. The Record and Process narrative of Richard’s deposition, for example, was acquired in whole or in part by Adam Usk, by the author of the Annales at St Albans, by the author of the Vita in Evesham, and by the Cistercian chronicler at Kirkstall Abbey in West Yorkshire.47 Yet as well as these authorized documents, alternative accounts of political events were supplied by visitors to Westminster and by civil servants themselves. Members of the Commons reported significant parliamentary events to their local electors by word of mouth and in newsletters. Such a newsletter survives copied into a letter-book for use in Durham Cathedral’s chancery office.48 The letter contains an eye-witness account of the Hilary parliament of 1404, summarizing Beaufort’s opening speech and giving verbatim the strained exchanges between Henry IV and the Speaker, Sir Arnold Savage I, in ways which differ significantly from the parliamentary roll. Official accounts of events thus coexisted with more informal or independent tracts and narratives. Members of the bureaucracy and royal household were employed as authors of narratives which combine information gained from their author’s access to official documents with eye-witness information. Both Adam Usk and the Monk of Evesham relied for their chronicle accounts of the parliament of 1397/8 on a tract or pamphlet perhaps written by a Chancery clerk who had access to the official roll.49 One of the Westminster chronicler’s sources was a roll describing the events of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 made for or by John Burton, Keeper of the Rolls of Chancery from 1386 to 1394.50 Similarly, Thomas Chillenden, Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury and a member of the deputation which visited Richard in the Tower on 29 September 1399, is likely to have written the text now known as the Manner of King Richard’s Renunciation, a report of Richard’s deposition which was sympathetic to yet differed from the official account of events.51 Adam Usk


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was an advocate in the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a member of the committee assembled to advise on Richard’s deposition.52 His chronicle contains an account of the deposition which draws on official records whilst introducing independent and supplementary information. William Ferriby, Chancery clerk and later chancellor of the prince of Wales’s household, is likely to have compiled parts of what is now called Giles’s Chronicle.53 Official and semi-official accounts of events and policies thus circulated side-by-side in Lancastrian England. Interested subjects therefore had access both to Crown rhetoric and to alternative accounts which commented on, supplemented or altered these official narratives. They could isolate Crown rhetoric and consider it as an object of interest in its own right. Lancastrian literature participates in this process of commentary, engaging closely with the Crown’s own rhetoric. The texts themselves, and the identities of their likely readers and writers, suggest a political community highly aware of the power of words and the manipulation of language to define different priorities and different interpretations of events. These manipulations are rapid and subtle, responding to the Crown by complicating and modifying its own rhetoric. Such delicate modifications can be illustrated by returning to the responses to Henry Beaufort’s opening sermon to the parliament of November 1414 requesting financial aid for Henry V’s French campaign. As outlined in Chapter 7, the author of Crowned King transforms Beaufort’s biological justification of the campaign into an agricultural reminder of the role played by the labouring commonwealth in the construction of Henry’s sovereignty. This is not the only response to Beaufort’s injunction that the realm should work well to assist the king in his proposed French campaign. Another reaction is contained in an undated and fragmentary written draft of the advice put forward by an assembly of peers and knights gathered together in Westminster in order to discuss future military action.54 Rather than agreeing unreservedly to the proposed campaign, the draft recommends that Henry should first send ambassadors to France to pursue further the possibility of a diplomatic rather than a military solution. The draft encourages Henry by telling him that such an embassy, even if it fails, will allow ‘alle youre workes’ in pursuing his claims overseas to ‘take the better spede and conclusion’. Having been told by Beaufort that it is time for the Commons to work well for the realm, the assembly turns their attention not only to Henry’s works but makes its own work and labour contingent on diplomatic activity. If Henry accepts the assembly’s advice and sends ambassadors for further negotiations, they reassure him:

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in the mene while that alle the werks of redynesse that may be to youre viage thought or wrought that hit be doo by the hie avis of you and of youre noble conseil. . . . we shul be redy with oure bodyes and goodes to do yow the service that we may to oure powers as fer as we oughte [of ryght] and as our auncestres have doo to youre noble progenitours en cas semblable.

If negotiations proceed, the assembly promises that ‘alle the werks of redynesse’ necessary for Henry’s proposed voyage will be performed by them. The verb operor used by Henry Beaufort in the phrase from Galatians 6:10, meaning to work, labour or toil, has its corresponding noun opera (work, labour, task, endeavour), which becomes, in the English vernacular, either dede or werk, an action, task, work, or office. The draft of the assembly’s advice draws attention to Henry’s own workes and makes their own werks of redynesse contingent on Henry’s acceptance of further diplomatic negotiations. Moreover, they offer their bodyes in fulfilment of these werks but not, on second thoughts, their goodes which is struck through in the draft. This transforms Beaufort’s request for work in the form of parliamentary taxation into less financially demanding preparation and service according to prior custom and obligation. Beaufort’s rhetoric of labour is thus repeated but has its emphasis altered in the assembly’s draft response. Such subtle transformation of the Crown’s argument and imagery can also be seen in the thirteenth poem in the MS Digby 102 collection of political poems written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, named Dede is Worchyng by its editor.55 The neatly arranged chronological series of dates for the poems’ composition suggested by their editor should be treated with suspicion, but Dede is Worchyng does seem, as Kail suggests, to have been composed, like Crowned King, in response to the November 1414 parliament. Dede is Worchyng also begins by creating a parliamentary context for the advice it offers its readers: ‘Whanne alle a kyngdom gadrid ysse | In goddis lawe, by on assent, | For to amende þat was mysse, | Þerfore is ordayned a parlement.’56 It then makes a series of complaints about the current government of England. Truth is suppressed in parliament for financial reasons, for example, and too much cronyism has corrupted England’s systems of law and punishment. Next, the poet highlights the role of the commons in government. To stand with the commons in support of their rights is, according to the poet, the ‘hy3est poynt of charite’ (line 34). Gradually, the poet begins to address a ‘you’, an individual reader who must, it seems from the later references to a proposed overseas campaign, be Henry V. Henry must listen to complaints (‘3oure tenauntes playntes 3e mot here, | Ffor þey kepen all 3oure tresour’, lines 43–44) and, like the author


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of Crowned King, the Digby poet stresses the role played by the commons in constituting sovereignty: ‘þe puple is goddis, and no3t 3oures. | þey paye 3oure rente, to gouerne lawe’ (lines 51–52). The poem then discusses how the ruler being addressed should protect his commons by punishing traitors and other criminals, by receiving wise counsel and by banishing wicked advisers from court. The poet turns his attention from government at home first to defence and then to the possibility of a French campaign. Only once the king has established peace within the realm can he then reclaim the Crown’s ‘kynde heritage’ in France (lines 105–08). The poem ends with a series of instructive pieces of advice: fortify castles, don’t treat with the enemy, use the courage of the young and the experience of the old, consider the role of knights and the clergy in foreign conquest, and finally remember that the French will attack ‘wiþ word’ while the English can triumph ‘wiþ swerd’ (lines 121–68). As its modern title suggests, the poem extends and alters Beaufort’s sermon rhetoric.57 Dede is Worchyng concentrates not solely on the work of the Commons in providing financial subsidy, but much more widely on the large range of related and reciprocal deeds or works which need to be performed simultaneously by members of the polity in order to produce a well-run society. Moreover many of these deeds need to be performed or directed by the ‘you’ addressed in the poem, that is the king, in this case Henry V. This change in emphasis most clearly occurs in the burden of the poem, the word dede which is repeated in the final line of each stanza. The burden dede most frequently relates to actions which Henry (in combination with his knights and clergy) should perform and the heavenly rewards they will gain. For example, Henry will gain divine thanks for ‘3oure dede’, God alone ‘may quyte þat dede’, Henry ‘shal haue heuene for þat dede’, and a military campaign is thought of as a ‘dede’ which can be performed by the sword (lines 16, 40, 56, 160). The commons should be the recipients rather than the instruments of action, work and labour. The final lines of the poem focus solely on the sovereign’s werkis and deeds: God 3eue 3ow grace þis reme to 3eme, To cherische þe goode, and chastyse þe nys, And also serue god to queme Þat 3oure werkis preue 3ow wys. And in 3ow þe helpe it lys, Þe puple in goddis lawe to hede. Do so now, 3e wynne 3ow prys And heuene blisse for 3oure dede.

(lines 161–68)

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Indeed, it is the sovereign’s werkis which will preue the quality of his kingship. Henry’s own works become central to a poem written in response to Beaufort’s call to the Commons to work well on behalf of the realm. As well as altering the identity of those at work on behalf of the realm, the Digby poem also challenges Beaufort’s notion of an appropriate time for such labour. Beaufort’s sermon suggests that Henry has already established a state of peace and tranquillity in England. Dede is Worchyng, on the other hand, describes in its first half an England which is still troubled by disorder, corruption and inequity. It is only when these injustices have been ameliorated that Henry’s campaign overseas should be begun. The poem makes Henry’s French campaign conditional on establishing internal stability. Henry should only turn his attention overseas ‘Whanne 3e han made pes wiþ-ynne’ (line 105, my italics). England is not as peaceful and tranquil from the perspective of the Digby poet as Henry V and Beaufort claim it to be. Crowned King, Dede is Worchyng and the draft response of Henry’s council, like the other texts considered in this book, demonstrate that Lancastrians texts do not fall easily into a simple duality of criticism or propaganda. Instead, what we see is a fluid and evolving conversation about the respective roles, work and duties of a king and his subjects. This conversation is conducted in terms which the Crown itself had put forward, transformed in order to encompass different ends and to offer different perspectives. Such sharing and transformation of linguistic features is characteristic of the way in which language is used in political action and discussion in many times and places. When performing any ‘verbalized act of power’, Pocock suggests that both the addressee and the addresser ‘enter upon a polity of shared power’.58 This is because when we tell people things, when we ask for things, negotiate things, demand things, command things, support, criticize or challenge things, we have to do it through language. Language, for Pocock, is a ‘necessarily impure’ medium: ‘there is a certain refraction and recalcitrance in the medium which ensures that the language I bend to perform my own acts can be bent back in the performance of others’ acts against me, without ceasing to be available for my counter-replication’. Political speech is therefore never one-sided, it is always an ongoing and evolving conversation. Even in texts remote from us in time, there is a remarkable subtlety in their conversations with official rhetoric and in their responses to already politicized languages and idioms. This conversationality is the defining quality of Lancastrian literature.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Paul Chilton, Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 14. 2 For a historical introduction to the events surrounding the deposition, see Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). Many of the relevant documents are collected and translated by Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 3 The official Record and Process narrative can be found in Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 415–53. The bill appears at I I I , 416–17. 4 Ibid., I I I , 417–22. 5 Ibid., I I I , 422: ‘ille cause criminum et defectuum erant satis sufficientes et notorie ad deponendum eundem regem’ [that those examples of his crimes and faults were sufficient and well-known enough to depose the same king]. 6 Ibid., I I I , 422: ‘ac propter sua demerita notoria non inmerito deponendum, per ipsum Ricardum prius emissa, ac de voluntate et mandato suis coram dictis statibus publicata, eisque notificata et exposita in vulgari’ [and because of his notorious faults – already acknowledged by Richard himself, and at his will and command made public before the said estates, and announced to them and explained in the vernacular – worthy to be deposed]. 7 M. V. Clarke and V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 14 (1930), 125–81 (p. 170). 8 Ibid., p. 174. 9 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See also his article on ‘Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 640–61. 10 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought’, in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 21–34. 131

Notes to pages 3–9

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11 Ibid., p. 24. Pocock’s proposal is echoed by Gabrielle M. Spiegel who enjoins critics to understand texts as ‘situated uses of language’ by focusing attention ‘on the moment of inscription, that is, on the ways in which the historical world is internalized in the text and its meaning fixed’: ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 65 (1990), 59–86 (pp. 77 and 84). 12 Pocock, ‘Texts as Events’, p. 25. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Ibid., pp. 24, 28–29. 15 See particularly the following works by Pocock: Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1971); ‘The Reconstitution of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought’, MLN, 96 (1981), 959–80; Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and ‘The Concept of a Language and the me´tier d’historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 19–38. 16 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 17–18; ‘Reconstitution of Discourse’, pp. 964–66; Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 9; ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 21. 17 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 6. 18 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 6, 9; ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 24. 19 Like this book, Grady charts the impact of 1399 on particular aspects of the form and structure of the first generation of Lancastrian literary texts, namely the absence of the dream-vision genre and the use of legal and parliamentary discourse: ‘The Generation of 1399’, in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 202–29 (p. 204). 20 Details of Hoccleve’s life and literary career can be found in J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages, 4 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994). 21 David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 761–99 (p. 773).

1

STEREOTYPING RICHARD AND THE RICARDIAN FAMILIA

1 My analysis here of the Record and Process will focus on the implicit stereotype offered of Richard II as both tyrannous and childish, but for a wider discussion of the ‘ideology of kingship’ operative within the Record, based on common law tradition as well as fourteenth-century political theory, see John M. Theilmann, ‘Caught Between Political Theory and Political Practice: ‘‘The Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II’’’, History of Political Thought, 25 (2004), 599–619 (quoting from p. 599). 2 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 417.


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3 Ibid., I I I , 417: ‘valde foret expediens ac utile regno predicto, pro omni scrupulo et sinistra suspicione tollendis, quod plura crimina et defectus per dictum regem circa malum regimen regni sui frequencius perpetrata, per modum articulorum in scriptis redacta, propter que, ut idem asseruit in cessione facta per eum, esset ipse merito deponendus, publice legerentur, quodque essent populo declarata’ [it would indeed be expedient and useful to the aforesaid realm, in order to remove every scruple and malevolent suspicion, that the many crimes and faults so frequently committed by the said king in the bad government of his realm, on account of which, as the same king admitted in his cession, he himself was worthy to be deposed, which had been put down in writing in the form of a series of articles, should be read in public, and should be made known to the people]. 4 Ibid., I I I , 417. 5 For example, Article 33, concerning Richard’s treatment of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, is likely to have been added at a later date: Chronicles of the Revolution, p. 183, n. 15. 6 Annales Ricardi Secundi, pp. 286–87. Recent research by James G. Clark suggests that Thomas Walsingham was not the author of the chronicle in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 7, known from the printed edition as the Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, as was previously thought, and suggests Walsingham’s contemporary, William Wintershill, as an alternative candidate. Clark accepts that Walsingham was the author of the Chronica maiora printed in Chronicon Angliæ: ab anno domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388, auctore monacho quodam Sancti Albani, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, RS, 64 (London: Longman, 1874), The St Albans Chronicle, 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), and the Historia Anglicana. He dismisses Galbraith’s argument that Walsingham composed long and short versions of his chronicle for separate circulation, suggesting instead that the complex manuscript tradition of the Chronica maiora reflects ‘the interventions of the many other compilers and copyists active during Walsingham’s lifetime or in the generations immediately following’: ‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered: Books and Learning at Late-Medieval St Albans’, Speculum, 77 (2002), 832–60 (pp. 844–47, quoting from p. 847). On the writing of contemporary history at St Albans, see James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c. 1350–1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 238–67, especially pp. 258–63. 7 Paul Strohm discusses the multiple rhetorical and argumentative strategies employed by Henry and his supporters to justify his claim: Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 75–90. 8 Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: AddisonWesley, 1954), pp. 191–92; Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–21; T. E. Perkins, ‘Rethinking Stereotypes’, in Ideology and Cultural Production, ed. Miche`le Barrett and others (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 135–59.

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Notes to page 11

9 The king’s will or voluntas was vital to the process of government in the English political system. As John Watts has argued, ‘the personal will of the king was the one essential prescription for public acts of judgement and so, by analogy, for all legitimate acts of government’. This sovereign power, however, was given to the king on the condition that he represented and acted for the common interest of his subjects as a whole. Richard’s supposed selfinterest and impulsive decisions thus reveal him to be an incompetent king. Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 16–19, quoting from p. 17. Throughout this chapter I am indebted to Watts’s illuminating explanation of the constitutional norms of fifteenth-century English government (pp. 13–101). 10 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 418–21: ‘pro voto suo’; ‘pro sue libito voluntatis’; ‘secundum sue arbitrium voluntatis’; ‘ut in parliamentis suis liberius consequi valeat sue temerarie voluntatis effectum’; ‘ut liberius adimpleri et sequi posset in singulis sue arbitrium voluntatis’ and ‘ut liberius exequi et sequi valeret sue inepte et illicite voluntatis arbitrium.’ In the first parliament proper of his reign, Henry, by contrast, promised that he would not make decisions solely based on his own individual impulses. Arundel promised on Henry’s behalf that the king would be guided by advice at all times (Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 415): ‘il est la volunte du roy d’estre conseillez et governez par les honurables, sages et discretes persones de soun roialme, et par lour commune conseil et assent faire le meulx pur la governance de luy et de soun roialme; nient veullant estre governez de sa volunte propre, ne de soun purpose voluntarie, singulere opinione, mais par commune advis, conseil et assent’ [it is the will of the king to be advised and ruled by the honourable, wise and prudent people of his realm, and by their common advice and consent to do the best for the government of himself and of his realm; not wishing to be governed by his own will, nor by his arbitrary inclinations or personal opinions, but by common advice, counsel and consent]. 11 For an example of another value-system which lies behind the presentation of events in the Record and Process, namely the ‘powerful and emotive’ narrative of disinheritance which also features in popular romance, see C. D. Fletcher, ‘Narrative and Political Strategies at the Deposition of Richard II’, Journal of Medieval History, 30 (2004), 323–41 (p. 324). 12 For the complex tradition available to those considering the definition of tyranny in 1399, see Margaret Schlauch, ‘Chaucer’s Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants’, Speculum, 20 (1945), 133–56, and J. D. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition, Chaucer Studies, 2 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), pp. 11–43. 13 Caroline M. Barron notes that the misdeeds alleged in Article 15 of the schedule ‘might well pass as a contemporary definition of tyranny’ even if the article stopped short of explicit use of the term: ‘The Tyranny of Richard II’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 41 (1968), 1–18 (p. 1). 14 Quotations from De regimine principum are taken from John Trevisa’s Middle English translation: ‘The Governance of Kings and Princes’: John Trevisa’s


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Middle English Translation of the ‘De regimine principum’ of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley, Garland Medieval Texts, 19 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 333. For discussion of tyrants and their characteristic behaviour, see Book I I I , Part 2, Chapters 6–7, 9–14. See also the definition of a tyrant’s character given in Coluccio Salutati’s treatise, De tyranno: ‘It is his character . . . to pursue what is specially profitable to himself and to increase his own wealth.’ Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 77. 15 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 419. 16 Thomas Aquinas, in his De regno: ad Regem Cypri (also known as De regimine principum following its conflation with a work of the same name by Ptolemy of Lucca in the early fourteenth century), gives the following explanation for tyrannical exploitation: ‘Since a tyrant, despising the common good, seeks his private interest, it follows that he will oppress his subjects in different ways according as he is dominated by different passions to acquire certain goods.’ On Kingship: To the King of Cyprus, trans. Gerald B. Phelan, rev. edn, rev. I. T. Eschmann (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949), pp. 15–16. 17 Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 20. 18 Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum links financial exactions with political control (Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 342): ‘tyrauntes wollen þat here sogettes be so pore þat þei ben so occupied to gete here liflode þanne þei mowe not a while to caste ou3t a3enst þe tyrauntes.’ 19 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 421: ‘nitens subpeditare populum suum, et bona sua subtiliter sibi adquirere, ut diviciis superfluis habundaret’ [striving to trample on his people, and cunningly to acquire their goods for himself, in order to acquire superfluous wealth]. 20 Ibid., I I I , 419: ‘Et pro victualibus hospicii sui, et aliis empcionibus suis, maxime summe pecuniarum in regno suo debentur, licet diviciis et thesauris plus quam aliquis progenitorum suorum, de quo recolitur, habundavit’ [And for provisions for his household, and other purchases of his, very great sums of money are owing in his realm, although he abounded in wealth and treasure more than any of his progenitors of whom there is memory]. Compare De regimine principum (Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 345): ‘Tyrauntes hauen not so moche moneye as verrey kynges, for hem nedede to spende moche in veyn.’ 21 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 419. 22 Ibid., I I I , 417 and 419. 23 Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 338. 24 For an illustration of the contested status of tyrannicide, see the condemnation by doctors and masters of the University of Paris and members of the Council of Constance of Jean Petit’s attempt to justify the assassination of Louis, duke of Orleans, by John, duke of Burgundy in 1407 as tyrannicide in his Justification du duc de Bourgogne: Alfred Coville, Jean Petit: la question du

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tyrannicide au commencement du quinzie`me sie`cle (Paris: Picard, 1932), pp. 403–561. Likewise, John of Salisbury’s defence of tyrannicide in Book V I I I , Chapter 20 of the Policraticus ‘contains many reservations, qualifications, and outright contradictions’: Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, ‘John of Salisbury and the Doctrine of Tyrannicide’, Speculum, 42 (1967), 693–709 (p. 693). Salutati, in De tyranno, expresses a similar view, writing that John ‘seems to me to reach no result’ on the subject of tyrannicide (Humanism and Tyranny, p. 90). 25 Perkins, ‘Rethinking Stereotypes’, p. 144. 26 Theilmann (‘Political Theory and Political Practice’, pp. 601–02) agrees that the articles reveal ‘a normative theory of . . . good kingship’ and ‘can be inverted so as to provide a positive theory of the conduct of a ‘‘good’’ king’. This potential inversion occurred immediately in the deposition process in the form of Arundel’s sermon. 27 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 423. 28 The locus classicus for the characteristic behaviour of youth is Chapter 12 of Book I I of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Via Giles of Rome’s reworking of Aristotle’s description of youth in Book I , Part 4, Chapter 2 of his De regimine principum, these age characteristics became a widespread topos. See, for example, the character of ‘Love-Lust-Liking’, representing man between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, in the morality play Mundus et Infans. Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. G. A. Lester (London: Benn, 1981; repr. London: Black, 1997), pp. 117–18 (lines 123–55). Michael E. Goodrich examines these stereotypes of youth in a wide range of texts and genres in his From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250–1350 (Lanham: University of America Press, 1989). 29 ‘parvulus inconstans est in loquendo, faciliter vera loquitur, faciliter falsa; faciliter verbo promittit, set quod promittit cito obliviscitur’ [a child is inconstant in speaking, he easily speaks the truth, easily tells lies; he easily promises with a word, but what he promises he quickly forgets]. 30 ‘Parvulus enim non sapit nisi placencia et adulatoria, arguentem secundum veritatem non diligit, ymmo odit supra modum’ [For a child does not understand anything except what is pleasing and f lattering, and does not love a person who censures him according to the truth, but hates him beyond measure]. 31 From I Kings 9. 17: ‘And when Samuel saw Saul, the Lord said to him: Behold the man, of whom I spoke to thee. This man shall reign over my people.’ 32 ‘Modo autem non puer dominatur set vir’ [Now however not a boy but a man rules]. 33 Arundel, describing the events of the deposition ceremony to the first parliament proper of Henry’s reign, gave a summary of his own sermon which restated the transition from childish to mature rule. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 415: ‘cest honurable roialme d’Engleterre . . . avoit estee par longe temps mesnez, reulez, et governez par enfauntz, et conseil des vefves; par ont mesme le roialme feust en point de perdicioun, et d’avoir este mys a tresgrande


34 35

36

37

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desolacion et meschief tresdolorousement, s’il ne feusse qe Dieu toutpuissant de sa grand grace et mercy avoit mys un homme sachant et discret pur governance de mesme le roialme’ [this honourable realm of England . . . had been for a long time led, ruled and governed by children, and by the advice of widows; as a result of which the same realm was on the brink of ruin, and of being most grievously and terribly destroyed and devastated, if almighty God had not through his great grace and mercy sent a wise and prudent man to govern the same realm]. Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 12; J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London: Constable, 1970), pp. 11–12. Usk gives the following account: ‘dominus meus Cant’ archiepiscopus sub isto themate, ‘‘Vir dominabitur eis’’, collacionem fecit, multum ducem Lancastr’ ipsiusque uires, sensus et uirtutes summe commendando, ipsum ad regnandum meritoque extollendo; ac inter cetera recitata per eundem de demeritis regis Ricardi’ [my lord the archbishop of Canterbury delivered a sermon on the theme, ‘‘A man shall rule over them’’, in which he praised unreservedly the vigour, good sense, and other qualities of the duke of Lancaster, commending him, and deservedly, as ruler; he spoke also, among other things, of King Richard’s crimes]. The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 68–69. A semi-official account of the deposition is preserved in a short narrative in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 59 which describes itself as La Manere de la renonciacione del Roy Richard de sa corone et de la eleccione del Roy Henri le Quarte puis le Conqueste etc. Chris Given-Wilson argues convincingly that this narrative may have been composed by Thomas Chillenden, prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, as a sympathetic yet independent report: ‘The Manner of King Richard’s Renunciation: A ‘‘Lancastrian Narrative’’?’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 365–70. For the text of the Manere, see G. O. Sayles, ‘The Deposition of Richard II: Three Lancastrian Narratives’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 54 (1981), 257–270. The Manere (p. 269) summarizes the sermon as follows: ‘il declara coment un roy vivera et luy governera sa gentz et sa roialme, et quoi appent al governaile d’un roy’ [he explained how a king will live and how he will govern his people and his kingdom, and what things belong to the governance of a king]. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 420: ‘idem rex consuevit quasi continue esse adeo variabilis et dissimilans in verbis et in scripturis suis, et omnino contrarius sibi ipsi . . . quod quasi nullus vivens habens noticiam sue condicionis hujusmodi poterit aut velit de eo confidere. Ymmo reputatur adeo infidelis et inconstans’ [the same king was accustomed almost continually to be so changeable and dissembling in his words and writings, and altogether contrary to himself . . . that almost no living person who knew what sort of person he was, could or wished to trust him. Rather he was thought to be so untrustworthy and inconstant]. In contrast to my reading of the sermon, Peter McNiven suggests that what he calls ‘inordinately laboured references . . . to the need for the rule of a man

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38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45

46

Notes to pages 14–15 rather than a boy’ were most likely directed at the eight-year-old earl of March (whose claim to the English throne was technically more legitimate than Henry’s) rather than pertaining to ‘Richard’s minority, or even his immature behaviour in his adult years’: ‘Legitimacy and Consent: Henry IV and the Lancastrian Title, 1399–1406’, Mediaeval Studies, 44 (1982), 470–88 (pp. 480–81, n. 38). McNiven’s comments, however, do not take account of the close links between the sermon and the deposition articles which precede it and the summaries provided by Usk’s chronicle and the Manere. De regimine principum (Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 339): ‘Tyrauntes . . . desiren not but here owne profit and money and lust and likynge.’ Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 338. Giles’s term pueritia blends together the discrete periods of infans, pueritia and adolescentia which are examined separately in other ages of man schemes. On the variety of different methods of dividing up the human life cycle into different ages in the Middle Ages, see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Because humans comprise an intellectual soul and a corporeal body, they possess both irrational desires like animals and rational capabilities like the angels. Given this combination of qualities, mature individuals should be able to use their reason with discretion to govern their irrational desires. E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Warburg Institute Studies, 6 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975), pp. 2, 17 and 55–56. Goodrich, From Birth to Old Age, pp. 91 and 105–06. Burrow, Ages of Man, pp. 12–13. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 423. Ibid., I I I , 423. In what follows, I use the words household and familia interchangeably to refer to the domestic organization of family, attendants and servants who surrounded and supported the head of the household, dwelling both in the king or magnate’s primary residence but also accompanying him on peripatetic tours to other residences. Unlike the domus (the permanent household which, as Chris Given-Wilson describes it, ‘coped with the king’s bodily needs, provided his secretariat, and formed his bodyguard’), the expanded familia was a larger and more loosely defined grouping who might supplement the permanent membership of the king’s domus in order to play their part in military activities, to counsel or advise, or to participate in ceremonial, social or religious occasions: The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 2. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 418. On the formation of the Chester retinue, see R. R. Davies, ‘Richard II and the Principality of Chester 1397–9’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London: Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 256–79 (pp. 267–70). Reference to Richard’s Cheshire guardsmen may have been included as a


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further indication of Richard’s tyrannous nature. Aristotle writes in the Politics that ‘the guards of a king are citizens, but of a tyrant mercenaries’: The Politics, trans. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 130. 47 Revised Medieval Latin Word-List From British and Irish Sources, ed. R. E. Latham (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), s.v. querela. 48 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 420. 49 Ibid., I I I , 420. 50 This model is described by Watts, Henry VI, pp. 25–29. 51 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 17–18, 273–91; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 8–9; Pocock, ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 21. 52 Pocock, ‘Reconstitution of Discourse’, p. 964.

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THE DISSEMINATION OF THE RICARDIAN STEREOTYPE

Pocock, ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 24. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 6. Ibid., p. 20. Chronicles of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 56. 5 The Record appears as a separate item in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 596 (fols 65r–80v) though the text of Thirning’s withdrawal of fealty is omitted. A manuscript of the Vita Ricardi Secundi (now fols 1r–38r of London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius C IX) supplements the chronicle account of the deposition with a further summary of events including the list of notorious flaws which supposedly caused the deposition, as well as Henry’s claim of the throne, Arundel’s sermon, Henry’s speech of acceptance and Thirning’s withdrawal of fealty (fols 38r–44v). 6 See, for example, Usk’s account of the Cheshire guardsmen which draws heavily on Article 5 of the deposition schedule (Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 48–49). Annales Ricardi Secundi, pp. 252–86. 7 The chronicle of the reign of Richard II written at the Cistercian abbey at Kirkstall contains abbreviated versions of Richard’s bill of resignation and of Henry’s claim to the throne and his speech of acceptance: The Kirkstall Abbey Chronicles, ed. John Taylor, Publications of the Thoresby Society, 42 (Leeds: Thoresby Society, 1952), pp. 79–81 and 124–25. The Vita Ricardi Secundi written by an Evesham monk contains Richard’s resignation and the list of witnesses, along with Henry’s two speeches (pp. 157–60). Two parchment leaves now preserved in London, British Library MS Stowe 66 represent further evidence of the circulation and copying of material relating to the deposition (Sayles, ‘Three Lancastrian Narratives’, pp. 258–59, 264–66). Document A, as these two leaves are called by Sayles, comprises the text of Richard’s resignation, the list of witnesses and Henry’s two speeches in English, as well as Richard’s protestacio in which he attempted to retain certain elements of his sovereignty after his abdication. The protestacio is not found anywhere else in this form, and thus Document 1 2 3 4

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9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

Notes to page 18

A may provide evidence for the circulation of an earlier draft of what was later to become the Record and Process (as does the exchange between Richard and Thirning recorded in the Annales which is also omitted from the official account). Simon Walker, in an article which traces the changing reputation of Richard in the seventy years following his death, has also noted the way in which after the deposition ‘certain sharply defined interpretations of the recent past established themselves’: ‘Remembering Richard: History and Memory in Lancastrian England’, in The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 21–31 (p. 23). Caroline Barron notes that for the years from 1395 to 1400, with the exception of the Cistercian chronicle written at Kirkstall, ‘there survive no accounts of these years which were not written after the deposition of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV’: ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, in Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. John Taylor and Wendy Childs (Gloucester: Sutton, 1990), pp. 132–49 (p. 136). Chronicles such as those written by Henry Knighton and the anonymous Monk of Westminster, which were completed before the deposition, provide representations of Richard’s reign which are free from retrospective colouring. Chronicles written on the continent (such as the Chronicque de la traison et mort Richart Deux or the Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard attributed to Jean Creton) likewise challenge the official Lancastrian account of the deposition. On these French chronicles, see J. J. N. Palmer, ‘The Authorship, Date, and Historical Value of the French Chronicles on the Lancastrian Revolution’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 61 (1978–79), 145–81, 398–421, and Craig Taylor, ‘‘‘Weep Thou for Me in France’’: French Views of the Deposition of Richard II’, in Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 207–22. George B. Stow, ‘Richard II in Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicles’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 68–102 (pp. 81–83); Chronicle of Adam Usk, p. xlvi. Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 3; Given-Wilson, Chronicles of the Revolution, p. 126, n. 1. G. B. Stow, ‘The Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum: Some Revisionist Perspectives’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), 667–81 (p. 680). A. G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore, ‘The Latin Works: Politics, Lament, and Praise’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siaˆn Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 153–64 (pp. 158–59). Helen Barr, ‘The Dates of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger’, Notes & Queries, 235 (1990), 270–75. Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 137. Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 201. The Cronica tripertita is printed in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902), I V , 314–342. The above quotation is taken from a marginal gloss to Book I I I . 11–21 (Complete Works, I V , 330). The author of the Annales wrote that Richard began to tyrannize (‘tyrannizare’) his people in 1397 (Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 199).


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18 On the financial exactions practised by Richard in the latter half of his reign, see Barron, ‘Tyranny’, pp. 2–17. 19 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 235. Barron finds no clear evidence to confirm the chronicler’s suggestion that these blank charters were used to extort money (‘Tyranny’, pp. 12–13). 20 The Brut: Or, The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, EETS o.s. 131 and 136, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1906–08), I I , 356. 21 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 167. 22 Arundel says (Continuatio Eulogii, p. 382): ‘Regnum non rexisti sed spoliasti, theolanea notabiliter elevando, tallagia annuatim extorquendo, non ad utilitatem regni, quam nunquam procurasti, sed ad avaritiam tuam satiandam et superbiam ostendendam’ [You have not ruled the kingdom but you have plundered it, notably by raising levies, by annually extorting taxes, not for the advantage of the kingdom – indeed you have never taken care of it – but for the satisfying of your greed and for the displaying of your pride]. 23 Translations of the Cronica tripertita are taken from Eric W. Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), pp. 289–326. Complete Works, I V , 315 (trans. Stockton, p. 290). 24 Two other poems also describe the latter part of Richard’s reign with what looks suspiciously like the benefit of hindsight. See the poem beginning ‘O Deus in coelis disponens cuncta fidelis’ in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. Thomas Wright, RS, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859–61), I , 366–68, and Gower’s poem beginning ‘O Deus immense’ (Complete Works, I V , 362–64). On the date of Gower’s poem, see George R. Coffman, ‘John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 69 (1954), 953–64 (p. 964). 25 De regimine principum (Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 339): ‘Tyrauntes . . . desiren not but here owne profit and money and lust and likynge. And for lust most and likynge is in mete and drynke and in sencible lecherie, tirauntes withoute refraynynge vsen such lust and likynge.’ This expands Aristotle’s definition of tyranny in Book V , Chapter 10 of the Politics: ‘a tyrant, as has often been repeated, has no regard to any public interest, except as conducive to his private ends; his aim is pleasure’ (Politics, trans. Everson, p. 130). Compare this with Aristotle’s description of the lack of self-regulation in youth: ‘the young are prone to desires and inclined to do whatever they desire. Of the desires of the body they are most inclined to pursue that relating to sex, and they are powerless against this. They are changeable and fickle in desires, and though they intensely lust, they are quickly satisfied; for their wants, like the thirst and hunger of the sick, are sharp rather than massive . . . And all the mistakes they make are in the direction of excess and vehemence, contrary to the maxim of Chilon [‘‘Nothing too much’’]; for they do ‘‘everything too much’’: they love too much and hate too much and all other things similarly.’ On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 165–66. 26 Continuatio Eulogii, pp. 376–77.

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27 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 382. 28 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 166: ‘luxurie nimis deditus, uigilator maximus, ita ut aliquando dimidiam noctem, non nunquam usque mane totam noctem in potacionibus et aliis non dicendis in sompnem duceret’ [too much devoted to extravagance, he was the chief reveller, just as he would spend at one time half the night, at another the whole night all the way until morning, in drinking bouts and in other unmentionable types of idleness]. 29 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 151: ‘xxviii uel xxvi boues, et oues quasi ccc, uolatile quasi sine numero.’ This retrospectively constructed reputation of culinary extravagance may explain why the scribe of London, British Library MS Add. 5016 (or its exemplar) chose to attribute a pre-existing recipe collection to those who provided Richard’s supposedly munificent entertainment: ‘[The?] forme of cury was compiled of the chef Maister Cokes of kyng Richard the Se[cu]nde kyng of [En]glond aftir the Conquest, the which was acounted þe best and ryallest vyaund[ier] of alle cristen [k]ynges’. Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler, EETS s.s. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 20 and 23–24. 30 James L. Gillespie, ‘Chivalry and Kingship’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. James L. Gillespie (Stroud: Sutton; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 115–138 (p. 129). 31 Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 339. 32 Ibid., p. 346. 33 This particular retrospective stereotype may have had some basis in fact. Helen Barr demonstrates Richard’s consistent emphasis on his regalia as ‘material signs of power’ in a recent discussion of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women: Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 80–89. See also the essays collected in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas and Caroline Elam (London: Harvey Miller, 1997). 34 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 166: ‘in conuiuiis et indumentis ultra modum splendidus.’ See also the Continuatio Eulogii’s description of Richard’s tastes (p. 384): ‘In thesauris et jocalibus, in vestibus et ornamentis regalibus, in quibus vehementer excessit, in splendore mensae, in palatiis quae aedificavit, nullus in regibus eo gloriosior diebus suis’ [in treasures and in jewels, in robes and in regal trappings, in all of which he very much surpassed others, in sumptuousness of the table, in palaces which he had built, no one was more glorious than he in the course of his days as king]. 35 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 156. 36 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 156. Kay Staniland’s re-examination of Great Wardrobe accounts reveals that the image of Richard as an extravagant and foppish dresser needs ‘to be modified, if not totally annihilated’. Richard’s increased household and Wardrobe expenditure in the 1390s can be readily explained in terms of the necessities of international diplomacy. Moreover, Henry IV maintained these levels of spending during the first four years of his reign. Richard’s extravagant tastes thus have more to do with retrospective


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stereotyping than with contemporary fact: ‘Extravagance or Regal Necessity? The Clothing of Richard II’, in Regal Image of Richard II, pp. 85–94 (p. 85). 37 Annales Ricardi Secundi, pp. 189 and 191–92. 38 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 76–77. 39 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 139. 40 Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, ed. Robert Steele, EETS e.s. 74 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1898), p. 136. 41 The earliest version of Hardyng’s chronicle remains unprinted (see C. L. Kingsford, ‘The First Version of Hardyng’s Chronicle’, English Historical Review, 27 (1912), 462–82). My quotations are taken from the earliest surviving version of the chronicle in London, British Library MS Lansdowne 204 (fol. 201r). Compare the later version in The Chronicle of John Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Rivington, Payne, Wilkie and Robinson, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Cadell and Davies, Mawman, and Evans, 1812), pp. 346–47. 42 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 306. 43 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 223. 44 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 54–55. 45 Froissart makes similar comments about Richard’s lack of tolerance of named truthtellers: ‘En ce temps n’y avoit si grant en Angleterre, qui osast parler de chose que le roy fesist, ne voulsist faire’ [At this time, there was no one in England, however great, who dared to speak of things that the king did, or wished to do]. Oeuvres de Froissart: Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 26 vols. (Brussels: Devaux, 1867–77), X V I (1872), 83. 46 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 166: ‘quia, spreto antiquorum procerum consilio, iuuenibus adherebat, magis eorum quam illorum consilium sequens’ [because, the advice of elders and of leading noblemen having been spurned, he began to be devoted to youths, following their advice more than that of those former advisers]. 47 Complete Works, I V , 314 (trans. Stockton, p. 290). 48 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Everson, p. 137. 49 The text of Richard the Redeless is edited by Helen Barr in The Piers Plowman Tradition: A Critical Edition of ‘Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede’, ‘Richard the Redeless’, ‘Mum and the Sothsegger’, and ‘The Crowned King’ (London: Dent, 1993), pp. 101–33. Further references to the poem will be given following quotations in the text. The topicality of both Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger is considered by Barr in her thesis: ‘A Study of Mum and the Sothsegger in its Political and Literary Contexts’, 2 vols. (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1989), I , 21–56. 50 For further examples of how Richard responds to its political moment, see Grady, ‘Generation of 1399’, pp. 210–12 and 223–26. 51 Barr, Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 16. 52 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 418: ‘magnam multitudinem malefactorum de comitatu Cestrie, quorum quidam cum rege transeuntes per regnum, tam infra hospicium regis quam extra, ligeos regni crudeliter occiderunt, et


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53 54 55

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quosdam verberaverunt, vulneraverunt, et depredarunt bona populi, et pro suis victualibus solvere recusarunt, et uxores et alias mulieres rapuerunt et violaverunt’ [a great multitude of evildoers from the county of Cheshire, of whom some, going about with the king through the realm, both within the king’s household and without, cruelly killed the lieges of the realm, and beat some, and wounded some, and plundered the goods of the people, and refused to pay for their provisions, and carried off and raped wives and other women]. Ibid., I I I , 355. Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 223. John Scattergood notes that the suppression of truthtelling is a major topic of both Richard the Redeless and the later poem by the same author, Mum and the Sothsegger, but treats this as a direct response to Richard’s actions during his reign rather than to the stereotype put forward in the aftermath of the deposition: ‘Remembering Richard II: John Gower’s Cronica tripartita, Richard the Redeless, and Mum and the Sothsegger’, in The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 200–25 (pp. 216–25). This paragraph draws on Pocock’s discussion of move and countermove in Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 19–20. 3

POLITICIZING PRE-EXISTING LANGUAGES

1 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 13–15. 2 Pocock, ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 20. 3 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 20–21. 4 A pictorial precedent associating English kingship with Maccabean imagery was close at hand for Arundel in the extensive murals commissioned by Edward I for the Painted Chamber at the Palace of Westminster depicting events from I Maccabees 1–9. See Paul Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster, Society of Antiquaries of London Occasional Papers, 9 (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1986). This chamber was used both as a royal bedroom and as one of the meeting-places of parliament throughout the fourteenth century. It was described by two visiting friars in the spring of 1323 as ‘that famous chamber on whose walls all the warlike stories of the whole Bible are painted with wonderful skill’ (p. 1). In addition to the Maccabean material, the south wall of the chamber depicted ‘the deeds of tyrannical kings, their subjugation of peoples, and their eventual downfall’ (p. 96). Binski suggests that Edward may have chosen this decorative scheme in order to align himself with ‘the persona of Judas Maccabeus as liberator’ (p. 97), and also because the murals illustrated ‘a form of antithesis between good and bad kingship . . . biblical history read in terms of sterile and tyrannical kingship, with a very pointed view of the end of such kingship’ (p. 99), iconographic associations which the usurping Lancastrians may also have wished to exploit a hundred years later. Henry’s


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grandfather, Edward III, was described as a ‘Maccabee in wars, who revived the kingdom by probity’ on his tomb: Paul Binksi, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 197–98. 5 For the text of the mandates, see Wykeham’s Register, ed. T. F. Kirby, 2 vols. (London: Hampshire Record Society, 1896–1899), I I , 491–92. 6 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 415. 7 Simon Walker also notes the analogy made between Henry and Judas Maccabeus, and argues that Rehoboam, the tyrannical king of Judah, provided contemporary observers with another scriptural typology for remembering Richard ‘in the context of the biblical past’ (‘Remembering Richard’, pp. 25–26). 8 I Macc. 3. 27–31. 9 II Macc. 9. 4 and 7. 10 Chronicle of Adam Usk, trans. Given-Wilson, pp. 36–37. Given-Wilson here translates ‘Cosdre’ as Croesus in keeping with the de casibus collocation of Croesus, Antiochus and Belshazzar, though it is possible that Usk had in mind Chosroes, a Persian king with a reputation for cruelty, rapacity and luxury who was deposed following military defeat, as he names him as ‘Cosdre’ in his epitaph for Richard on pp. 90–91. 11 Daniel 4. 27–5. 31. 12 For the story of Croesus, see Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, V I I . 2727–60. 13 Chronicle of Adam Usk, trans. Given-Wilson, pp. 90–91. 14 Simon Walker also observes the way in which ‘the topic of mutability’ was used both to remember Richard and to express a ‘more general sense of destabilisation’ following the deposition (‘Remembering Richard’, p. 25). Nicholas Perkins also discusses how Richard became established as a negative exemplum in literary and political tradition: Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 65–70. 15 French writers also saw Richard’s demise in this light: Taylor, ‘French Views of the Deposition’, pp. 213–14. 16 Political Poems and Songs, I I , 118–23 (p. 119). Richard also appears in Lydgate’s miniature de casibus poem, Of the Sodein Fal of Princes in Oure Dayes, lines 8–14: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, Secular Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 660–61. 17 Incerti scriptoris Chronicon Angliæ de regnis trium regum Lancastrensium: Henrici IV, Henrici V, et Henrici VI, ed. J. A. Giles (London: Nutt, 1848), pp. 11–18. 18 Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition’, pp. 149–51. 19 Ferriby was appointed Proto-Notary of Chancery in November 1397 and was later chancellor of the household of the prince of Wales. For full details of his career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–59), I I (1958), 678–79. 20 Chronicon Angliæ, ed. Giles, p. 12.

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21 On the de casibus tradition as a whole, see Paul Budra, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). On the political values of the genre, see Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 119–34, 215–29. 22 For texts in which lists are given of those who suffered at the hands of Fortune, see the works cited by H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (London: Cass, 1967), 70–71, n. 3. 23 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiæ: opuscula theologica, ed. Claudio Moreschini (Munich: Saur, 2002), 31–3. 24 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Fe´lix Lecoy, Les Classiques Français du Moyen Age, 92, 95 and 98, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Honore´ Champion, 1965–70), I , 196–99, lines 6383–470. 25 Roman de la Rose, I , 203–7, lines 6601–746. 26 Giovanni Boccaccio, ‘De casibus illustrium virorum’ by Giovanni Boccaccio: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, intro. Louis Brewer Hall (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962). 27 On these translations, see the introduction by P. M. Gathercole to her edition of Book One of Laurent’s text: Laurent de Premierfait, Laurent de Premierfait’s ‘Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes’: Book I, ed. Patricia May Gathercole, University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 74 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 15–33. 28 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS o.s., 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27). 29 Riverside Chaucer, pp. 241–52, 929. 30 On the possibility that Chaucer’s de casibus narratives circulated separately, see M. C. Seymour, ‘Chaucer’s Early Poem De casibus virorum illustrium’, Chaucer Review, 24 (1989), 163–65. 31 In relation to Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, David Wallace discusses the extra ‘power and frisson’ which is produced by introducing contemporary history into the de casibus genre: Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 299–336 (p. 299). 32 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 62–65. This passage is also briefly discussed by Wallace (Chaucerian Polity, pp. 355–56). 33 Chronicle of Adam Usk, trans. Given-Wilson (pp. 64–65): ‘‘‘O Deus, hec est mirabilis terra et inconstans, quia tot reges, tot presules, totque magnates exulauit, interfecit, destrucit et depredauit, semper discencionibus et discordiis mutuisque inuidiis continue infecta et laborans’’’ [‘‘My God, this is a strange and fickle land, which has exiled, slain, destroyed, and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men, and which never ceases to be riven and worn down by dissensions and strife and internecine hatreds’’]. 34 Ibid., pp. 64–65: ‘Et recitauit historias et nomina uexatorum a primeua regni inhabitacione’ [And he recounted the names and the histories of those who had suffered such fates, from the time when the realm was first inhabited].


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35 See, for example, ‘Huff! A Galaunt’ printed in Historical Poems of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 138–39; the poem known as ‘On the Times, 1388’ beginning ‘Syng I wolde, butt, alas!’ in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the University of Rochester, 1996), 140–46 (especially lines 117–208); and the poem beginning ‘Ye prowd galonttes hertlesse’, in Political Poems and Songs, II, 251. For an indication of some of the features and varieties of this archetype, see Tony Davenport, ‘Lusty Fresche Galaunts’, in Aspects of Early English Drama, ed. Paula Neuss (Cambridge: Brewer; Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1983), pp. 111–28; V. J. Scattergood, ‘Fashion and Morality in the Later Middle Ages’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 255–272; and Wendy Scase, ‘‘‘Proud Gallants and Popeholy Priests’’: The Context and Function of a FifteenthCentury Satirical Poem’, Medium Ævum, 63 (1994), 275–86. 36 G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, Blackwell, 1966), p. 369. Descriptions of modern fashions appear in a penitential context in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, X . 416–30. The vision of Purgatory seen by William of Stranton in 1409 describes both the elaborately decorated costumes of those with ‘pride of hert and of aray’ and the horrible punishments they experience. Collars and girdles begin to burn, decorative jagging turns to adders, dragons and toads, and jewelled chaplets turn into ‘nailes of yren brennyng’. Most horribly, those who wore the fashionable long sleeves or pokes have similar sleeves cut by the fiends from their own skin. St Patrick’s Purgatory: Two Versions of ‘Owayne Miles’ and ‘The Vision of William of Stranton’ together with the Long Text of the ‘Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii’, ed. Robert Easting, EETS o.s. 289 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 86–98. 37 On the long association between elaborate fashions and criticism of the court, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 178–81. One courtesy book warns its readers to avoid the behaviour of one ‘ruskyn galaunte’: Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 3 (London, Tru¨bner, 1868), pp. 44–49. See also Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, ed. Charlotte D’Evelyn (Boston: Heath; London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 82–83. 38 Chaucer’s Parson complains about the current ‘synful costlewe array of clothynge, and namely in to much superfluite, or elles in to desordinat scantnesse’ (Parson’s Tale, X . 414). See also Idley’s Instructions, p. 159, and ‘On the Times, 1388’, lines 141–80. 39 Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 406; Idley’s Instructions, p. 160. 40 See, for example, the poem beginning ‘Now is England Perished’ in Historical Poems, pp. 149–50, and ‘Ye prowd galonttes hertlesse’, lines 1–8. 41 Medieval English Political Writings, p. 203 (lines 283–88).

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42 The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM I, ed. A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976), fols 73v–92r. 43 John 19. 23–24. Drawing on the same archetypes, the Vita Ricardi Secundi (p. 156) draws an ironic comparison between the jewel-encrusted robe worth 30,000 marks supposedly commissioned by Richard and this seamless garment: ‘O bone Iesu! nunquid tua tunica inconsutilis, in Euangelio lecta, sic appreciata fuit? Et tamen illa preciosiorque uirtuosior’ [O good Jesus! surely your seamless robe, read about in the Gospel, was not valued in such a way? And yet that thing was more valuable and more miraculous]. 44 For documentary evidence of the distinctive dress worn by the actors playing Christ’s tormentors, see Meg Twycross, ‘Apparell comlye’, in Aspects of Early English Drama, pp. 30–49 (pp. 35, 37). The Brut chronicle (ed. Brie, I I , 297) alludes to such theatrical costumes in describing the elaborate clothes adopted in 1346 by the English in imitation of contemporary foreign fashions: ‘if y soþ schal say, þey were more liche to turmentours and deuels in hire cloþing and schewyng and oþer arraye.’ 45 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 215: ‘se magis repræsentabant tortores theatrales quam milites vel viros sobrios.’ 46 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 142; Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 26–27. This detail is likely to have been present in the tract written by a Chancery clerk or similar eyewitness used by the author of the Vita and by Usk as the basis for their accounts of the 1397/8 parliament: Chris Given-Wilson, ‘Adam Usk, the Monk of Evesham and the Parliament of 1397–8’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), 329–35. 47 ‘Those who are dressed in soft clothes are in the houses of kings: in the gospel.’ This gloss resembles Luke 7. 25, ‘qui in veste pretiosa sunt et deliciis in domibus regum sunt’ [they that are in costly apparel and live delicately are in the houses of kings], as Barr notes in her edition, but is in fact a direct quotation of Matthew 11. 8. 48 Matthew 1. 3 and Luke 7. 19. 49 Matthew 11. 7–9, and see also Luke 7. 24–26. 50 See also Mark 1. 4–8. 51 Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 281. 52 See the social norms of household access and reception described by Jonathan Nicholls in his The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985), pp. 92–93, 97–98, and 114–31. 53 For an indication of the physical and social divisions within a great household, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 23–36. 54 Starkey contrasts the informal processes of policy formation and counsel within the household with the ‘formal structures’ of government outside it (namely parliament, the judiciary, and the central civil service consisting of the Exchequer, the Chancery, the Privy Seal and the Signet), though he also points out that ‘all the departments of state – from the exchequer or chancery


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down – had originally been part of the royal household, or (more precisely) of the upper household or chamber’: ‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the Arts c. 1350–c. 1550’, in The Context of English Literature: The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 225–90 (p. 263). 55 Ibid., p. 263. 56 Heal, Hospitality, pp. 1–22. 57 Ibid., p. 17. See also the injunction in Hebrews 13. 2: ‘And hospitality do not forget; for by this some, being not aware of it, have entertained angels.’ 58 Heal, Hospitality, pp. 33–34. 59 Impudence becomes the equivalent of the King’s Steward or Seneschal, the chief officer of the domus. A late fifteenth-century royal ordinance gives the following description of this role: ‘The secundary astate and rule vnder the king of all the excellent household is holy comitted to be ruled and guyded by his reson, and his comaundmentes principally to be obeyed and obserued for the king.’ The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 142. 60 Barr points out that the naming of the ‘duke doughty’ conflates Henry and God (Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 286, note to line 359). 61 See Richard the Redeless I. 98, I. 142, III. 230, III. 308–10, III. 327–30, and III. 333–37. 4

FROM STEREOTYPES TO STANDARDS

1 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 6. 2 This awareness constitutes one of Pocock’s tests for the existence of a language, the presence of ‘critical and second-order languages’ used to identify and to criticize the original language: Pocock, ‘Concept of a Language’, p. 27; Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 10. 3 For the text of Mum and the Sothsegger, see Piers Plowman Tradition, pp. 137–202. Further references to this poem are given after quotations in the text. For the date of Mum, see Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 23. 4 For other ways in which Mum engages with the politics of the earlier part of Henry IV’s reign, see Grady, ‘Generation of 1399’, pp. 212–22 and 226–29. 5 Similar claims that Henry’s household is isolated from truthtelling and national opinion are made at lines 156–64 and 1141–42. 6 Theilmann (‘Political Theory and Political Practice’, p. 616) also suggests that the Record and Process offered ‘a prescription for good kingship . . . that was coupled to the implied threat of redressive action if the standards were violated . . . a guide for future royal conduct’. 7 Henry made the following promise in his speech of acceptance (Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 423): ‘it es noght my will that no man thynk yt be waye of conquest I wold disherit any man of his heritage franches or other ryghtes that hym aght to have, no put hym out of that that he has and has had by the

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gude lawes and custumes of the rewme, Except thos persons that has ben agan the gude purpose and the commune profyt of the rewme.’ 8 Henry ‘nad pas tenuz couenant a sez communes’ [had not kept his covenant with his Commons]. Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, ed. and trans. G. O. Sayles, Selden Society Publications, 88 (London: Quaritch, 1971), pp. 123–24. 9 Foedera, conventiones, literæ, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, inter reges Angliæ, ed. Thomas Rymer, 10 vols. (London: Tonson, 1726–35; repr. Farnborough: Gregg Press, [1967]), I V (1740), 27; Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 73 vols. (London: HMSO, 1901–86), Henry IV: 1401–05, I I (1905), 126–29. 10 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 396: ‘Et fecit ibi Henricus proclamari, dicens quod ipse fuit unus de illis qui maxime agebat ad expulsionem Regis Ricardi et introductionem Henrici, credens se bene fecisse’ [And in that place Henry [Hotspur] made proclamation, saying that he himself was one of those who most especially agitated for the rejection of King Richard and the bringing in of Henry, believing himself to have done well]. 11 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 396. 12 Continatio Eulogii, p. 405: ‘ad correctionem mali regiminis regni’ [for the correction of the bad government of the kingdom]. 13 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 406. 14 For Repyngdon’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A D 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–59), I I I (1959), 1565–67. Paul Strohm (England’s Empty Throne, pp. 174–79) and Frank Grady (‘The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 552–75 (pp. 552–54)) argue that the letter presents Henry IV as a powerful sovereign who has the ability to rectify current difficulties, thus contributing to what Grady calls ‘Henry’s royal selfrepresentation’. Perkins is more sympathetic to the letter’s claim to be an instance of genuine truthtelling: Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, p. 67. 15 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 136–43. A further copy of the letter can be found in London, British Library MS Stowe 67, fols 67r–70v. 16 For the text of the letter, see Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. George Williams, RS, 56, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1872), I , 151–54 (p. 151). 17 Ibid., I , 154. 18 Ibid., I , 151. 19 See Psalm 83 (84). 11 in the CD-ROM BibleWorks for Windows (1998). 20 The Holy Bible . . . Made From the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), I I , 824. Biblia latina cum Glossa Ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps: Adolph Rusch of Strassburg, 1480–81, ed. Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson, 4 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), I I I , 563. 21 As alluded to in Richard the Redeless, the figure of John the Baptist provides a biblical archetype of the exiled truthteller. John is ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness’ contrasted with those dwelling in royal households. See Matthew 3. 3,


22 23

24

25 26 27 28

29

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Mark 1. 3, Luke 3. 4 and John 1. 23. Repyngdon and the author of Richard are not alone in making this connection. Gower describes Arundel’s exile in terms which evoke the description of John the Baptist as ‘vox clamantis in deserto’ (Complete Works, I V , 326–27 (Cronical tripertita, marginal gloss to Book I I . 233–50), trans. Stockton, p. 307): ‘expulsusque insuper absque vllo mundi releuamine, solum deum reclamans exul et pauper ab Anglia recessit’ [and he was driven out without any worldly comforts; and crying out to God alone, he withdrew from England an exile and a pauper]. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 286–87. See also the positive and negative models described in lines 247–98 of Passus III which draw on many of the stereotypes generated in the aftermath of the deposition (namely Richard’s youthful counsellors, his violent retainers, their extravagant household festivities and their treatment of truthtellers). The mirror-for-princes tradition provides much advice on how a monarch should evaluate and choose his counsellors. Book I I I , Part 2, Chapter 18 of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum discusses ‘What manere consailloures kynges scholde haue’ (Governance of Kings and Princes, pp. xxvii and 356–57). See also Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, pp. 102–04, 209–11, and ‘Secretum secretorum’: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS o.s. 276 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 77–80, 185–86, 188–90, 564–67. Chris Given-Wilson (Royal Household, pp. 22–27) catalogues the many criticisms of the royal household between the years 1360 and 1413. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 524. For the background to this parliament, see Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 163–70. Ibid., I I I , 525. Ibid., I I I , 525: ‘Item, mesme le samady, les ditz comunes prierent a nostre dit seignur le roy, q’en l’ordinance affaire en l’ostelle mesme nostre seignur le roy, y serroient nomez et faites persones honestes et vertuouses, et bien renomez, des queux notice se purra faire as ditz seignurs et comunes en cest parlement, et qe tiel ordinance se ferroit qe purroit estre plaisant a Dieux, et honur et profit pur l’estat du roy et de soun roialme’ [Also, on the same Saturday, the said commons requested of our said lord the king that in the ordinance to be drawn up for the household of our same lord the king, honest and virtuous persons, and of good repute, should be nominated and appointed to it, and that notice of them could be given to the said lords and commons in this parliament; and that such an ordinance would be made as would be pleasing to God, and to the honour and advantage of the estate of the king and of his realm]. Ibid., I I I , 529: ‘mesme nostre seignur le roy veullant qe bone ordinance se ferroit en soun hostelle, pria as ditz seignurs, q’ils ferroient leur aide et diligence de le mettre en bone et sufficiente governance, et de covenable nombre, au fyn qe le poeple purroit estre paiez pur leur vitail, et pur les despenses de soun dit hostiel’ [our same lord the king, wishing that a good ordinance should be drawn up for his household, requested the said lords to help him to the best of their ability to put it under good and sufficient

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government, and to reduce it to an appropriate size, so that the people could be paid for their victuals and for the expenses of his said household]. 30 For a detailed accounts of this parliament, see T. E. F. Wright, ‘Royal Finance in the Latter Part of the Reign of Henry IV of England, 1406–1413’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1984), pp. 62–95; A. J. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History, 14 (1995), 103–119; Gwilym Dodd, ‘Conflict or Consensus: Henry IV and Parliament, 1399–1406’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton, Fifteenth Century Series, 7 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 118–49; and Douglas Biggs, ‘The Politics of Health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (York: York Medieval Press, 2003), 185–202. 31 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 577. 32 Biggs, ‘Long Parliament’, p. 195. 33 Biggs, ‘Long Parliament’, p. 199. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 585–89. 34 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 586. 35 See n. 30 above. 36 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 373: ‘Affuerunt ibi milites et scutiferi, magis Dionæ quam Martis, Lavernæ quam Palladis.’ Historia Anglicana, I I , 259 (trans. The ‘Chronica Maiora’ of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest with introduction and notes by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), p. 329): ‘Astitere sibi tunc milites et scutiferi magis Dionæi quam Martii, Lavernæ quam Palladis’ [The knights and esquires that he had around him at that time were more followers of Venus than Mars and of Laverna rather than Pallas Athene]. 37 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 373. Historia Anglicana, II, 259. 38 Annales Ricardi Secundi, pp. 394–96. 39 St Albans Chronicle, p. 2. 40 For these attitudes and especially the proposal made to the parliament of 1410, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 114–15 and Margaret Aston, ‘Caim’s Castles: Poverty, Politics and Disendowment’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1984), pp. 45–81. 41 Historia Anglicana, I I , 264–67. 42 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 407: ‘quidam miles aulicus regis . . . dixit regi: ‘‘Si iste archiepiscopus Eborum vivet, omnes nos a vobis recedemus’’’ [a certain knight of the king’s household said to the king: ‘‘If the archbishop of York remains alive, all of us will leave you’’]. 43 Annales Ricardi Secundi, pp. 370–71: ‘quamvis rex, ut dicitur, vitam sibi voluisset [concedere]; tantum exacerbaverat animos amicorum regis’ [although the king, as it was said, had initially wanted to spare his life; this had greatly irritated the feelings of the friends of the king].


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44 Barr notes that the exclusion of ‘rascaille’ in line 210 may be a direct allusion to the Commons’ complaint about ‘raskaile’ in the royal household in the Long Parliament of 1406. Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 301 (note to line 210). 45 Hence the bibliography of books containing descriptions of contemporary abuses which the narrator provides at the end of the poem (MSS, 1343–1750). 46 Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 23 and notes to lines 408–13. 47 David Lawton, ‘Lollardy and the ‘‘Piers Plowman’’ Tradition’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), 780–93 (p. 788). 48 Compare these lines with the chapter on bees in Trevisa’s Middle English translation of De proprietatibus rerum: ‘On the Properties of Things’: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus, ‘De proprietatibus rerum’: A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour and others, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–88), I (1975), 609–14. 49 Barr argues that this apiarian analogy presents ‘a Wycliffite view of civic society’ and thus the drones are to be identified with the fraternal orders (Socioliterary Practice, pp. 165–69). I would argue, however, for the possibility of a simultaneous political interpretation. The second poem in the early fifteenth-century collection of political poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102, describes an encounter between a flattering courtier and a hardworking soldier who serves his sovereign ‘with spere and launce’ (line 45). The man who fights for ‘moche thank’ (an ironic comment on the lack of reward he will receive) rather than ‘mede’ compares flatterers and faitours (deceivers, imposters or false petitioners) to drones in what seems to me to be a secular household setting: ‘I likne a gloser, in eche weder | To folwe the wynd, as doth the fane. | 3e begeten hony togedere; | To stroy3e that cometh the drane. | Me thenkeþ þere wit is wane | To stroi3e the hony, and foule hit shede; | Gloser hath brought faytour lane | To halle and chambre, to lordes, for mede.’ Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS o.s. 124 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1904), pp. 6–9 (lines 57–64). 50 Grady (‘Generation of 1399’, p. 214) also notes the fact that the gardener stands outside the hive-kingdom, but sees the gardener as a figure for Henry IV himself who likewise reformed England from the outside. However, it is Henry’s household, not Richard’s, which is now in need of a truthteller at the start of the poem and whose policy of access has become misguided. Thus Henry is no longer an external reformer but a householder in need of reform himself. 51 See the household timetables given in C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 85. 5

HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVES IN LANCASTRIAN POETRY

1 La Male Regle, lines 209–14. Quotations from the Male Regle are taken from Thomas Hoccleve, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), pp. 64–78. Further references are given in parentheses in the text. Lee Patterson briefly highlights further possible points of political relevance in the Male Regle, seeing it as ‘an apparently personal poem

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2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10


that can barely hide its political subtext, a poem in which private conditions reciprocally cause and are caused by public effects’: ‘ ‘‘What is me?’’: Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), 437–70 (p. 456). Regiment of Princes, lines 22–24. Quotations from the Regiment are taken from Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the University of Rochester, 1999). Further references to the Regiment are given in parentheses after quotations in the text. Scogan’s Moral Balade was written sometime between Chaucer’s death in the latter part of 1400 (at line 65, Scogan acknowledges ‘My mayster Chaucer, god his soule have!’) and Scogan’s own death in October 1407. According to one of its copyists, the scribe John Shirley, the poem was presented to the four sons of Henry IV and performed at a supper of merchants in the Vintry in London. The Moral Balade is printed in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), pp. 237–244. Further references to this poem are given after quotations in the text. For an alternative reading of the poem, see Robert Epstein, ‘Chaucer’s Scogan and Scogan’s Chaucer’, Studies in Philology, 96 (1999), 1–21. Complete Works, I I I (1901), 550. For the text of the poem, see I I I , 481–92. See also Russell A. Peck, ‘The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Echard, pp. 215–50 (p. 237). Frank Grady has unravelled the complexities of Gower’s address to Henry IV in this poem (‘Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity’, pp. 559–72). The Nine Worthies are Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar (the three pagans); Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus (the three Jews); and Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon (the three Christians). Texts describing the exploits of the Nine Worthies can be found in The Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Israel Gollancz (London: Nichols, 1897), 14–37, 119–44. For a further Middle English example of the Nine Worthies topos, see T. F. S. Turville-Petre, ‘A Poem on the Nine Worthies’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 27 (1983), 79–84. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, pp. 18–20. ‘Mede and Muche Thank’, the second poem in the MS Digby 102 collection of political poems, also imagines a household encounter in an outdoor setting. In a picturesque forest glade, the narrator overhears a debate between a flatterer dressed in ‘gawdy gren, | Blasande bri3t, embrowdid gay’ who ‘held al with mede’ and a hardworking and faithful servant ‘in mene array’ who advocates faithful service in the hope of ‘moche thank’ (Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, pp. 6–9, lines 7–12). See Plate 1 and pp. 116–17 in Perkins, Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’. The different motivations and rewards of truthtellers and flatterers are a major concern in the Regiment to which Hoccleve returns at various points in the text. See lines 1921–46, 2941–48, 3039–98, 4951–21 and 5253–85.


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Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 9. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 17. Chaucerian and Other Pieces, p. 237. For a further contextualization of this passage in terms of Roger Dymmok’s comments on mollicia in his Liber contra duodecim errores et hereses Lollardorum, see Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 121–24. 15 Vita Ricardi Secundi, pp. 168–69. 16 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 506 and 593. 17 Antony J. Hasler views the contents of the Regiment’s Prologue as ‘digression on digression’, seeing a fundamental aimlessness in the conversation between Hoccleve and the Old Man in the Regiment: ‘Both partners in this debate maintain a neurotic loquacity which in theory furthers Hoccleve’s ‘‘cure’’, but which simultaneously defers it.’ ‘Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body’, Paragraph, 13 (1990), 164–83 (p. 173). 18 A. B. Wathey, ‘Music in the Royal and Noble Households in Late Medieval England: Studies of Sources and Patronage’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1987), pp. 152, 166–67. 19 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 585, fol. 38r: ‘syrenis cantus incantant vsque in extinctum’ [the songs of mermaids bewitching almost to destruction]. These comments on Richard’s reign are taken from the brief histories of English kings given in the entry on Anglia in Whethampstede’s Granarium. 20 On the influence and activities of Royal Chapel clerks in the 1380s and 1390s, see Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London: Arnold, 1973), pp. 66–70; Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 67, 175–83; and Wathey, ‘Music in Royal and Noble Households’, pp. 77–84. 21 Historia Anglicana, I I , 113. 22 Historia Anglicana, I I , 173. Wathey, ‘Music in Royal and Noble Households’, pp. 77–82. 23 Chronicle of Adam Usk, trans. Given-Wilson, pp. 60–61. 24 Vita Ricardi Secundi, p. 165; Wathey, ‘Music in Royal and Noble Households’, p. 82. 25 MS Lansdowne 204, fol. 201r. Compare the later version in the printed Chronicle of John Hardyng, p. 347. 26 Unsurprisingly, given the political context I have been describing, household encounters in one shape or another feature in many of Hoccleve’s poems. His Balade to Edward, duke of York imagines the entry of Hoccleve’s proxy, a rhetorically plain, metrically unsophisticated, palaeographically clumsy book (the bibliographical and textual equivalent of the poorly dressed truthtellers who are unknown in Ricardian and latterly in Lancastrian households according to the Mum-poet) into the ducal household, where it will meet, be judged by and hopefully assisted by ‘maistir Picard’, one of the duke’s household officials. Similarly, in the Balade to John, duke of Bedford, Hoccleve’s book will enter Bedford’s household and be benevolently evaluated by ‘maistir Massy’, 11 12 13 14


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that is William Massy, recorded as the duke of Bedford’s Receiver-general and General Attorney on 13 August 1403. Both poems thus challenge their named readers to recognize and accept truthtellers in encounters which are explicitly staged within the household. See Jenni Nuttall, ‘Household Narratives and Lancastrian Poetics in Hoccleve’s Envoys and Other Early-Fifteenth-Century Middle English Poems’, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850–c. 1550: Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body, ed. Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 91–106. For the texts of the poems, see Selections from Hoccleve, pp. 55–57. On Massy and Picard, see Thorlac Turville-Petre and Edward Wilson, ‘Hoccleve, ‘‘Maistir Massy’’ and the Pearl Poet: Two Notes’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 26 (1975), 129–33. 27 The indirectly named addressee of the Male Regle, Thomas Nevill, Lord Furnivall, was Treasurer of the Exchequer from 5–9 December 1404 until his death in March 1407. As clerks of the Chapel Royal, Prentys and Arundel were members of the royal household, receiving robes from the Wardrobe (though this allowance was sometimes paid in cash through the Exchequer) and wages from the Exchequer. Hoccleve, as a Privy Seal clerk, was in a more ambiguous position. He received an allowance for robes from the Wardrobe, and, after 1399, was granted an annuity of £10 payable by the Exchequer, but did not live in the royal household. T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 6 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920–1933), V (1930), 83–89. Privy Seal clerks like Hoccleve dwelt for the most part in the hostel provided for them by the Keeper of the Privy Seal although they remained nominally and historically part of the king’s household: ‘As late as 1409 the Exchequer was maintaining the fiction that [the Keeper’s daily allowance of one pound] was paid only until arrangements were made for the keeper and the clerks to live in the king’s household.’ A. L. Brown, ‘The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 260–81 (p. 265). See also Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 67–68, for the ambivalent position of the Keeper of the Privy Seal and his clerks vis-a`-vis the royal household. 28 Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekyngton, I , 154. 6

PROMISES, EXPECTATIONS, EXPLANATIONS AND SOLUTIONS

1 2 3 4 5

Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 338. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 417 and 419. Ibid., I I I , 419. Ibid., I I I , 419. For accounts of royal finance during the reign of Henry IV, see Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 158–84; Wright, ‘Royal


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Finance’; E. F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485, Oxford History of England, 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 73–90; and K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 93–101. 6 Loci e libro veritatem: Passages Selected from Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary Illustrating the Condition of Church and State, 1403–1458, ed. James E. Thorold Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), p. 230. 7 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 387: ‘quomodo ipse promisit se ab hujusmodi mutuis et tallagiis abstinere’. 8 Chronicle of John Hardyng, pp. 352–53: ‘maximam indigenciam pro resistencia inimicorum tantummodo et non aliter’. 9 Dorothy K. Hodnett and Winifred P. White, ‘The Manuscripts of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum’, English Historical Review, 34 (1919), 209–223 (p. 221). 10 J. S. Roskell, Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, The House of Commons, 1386–1421, 4 vols. (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), I , 129. On Henry IV’s policy as regards taxation throughout his reign, see two articles by Alan Rogers: ‘Henry IV, the Commons and Taxation’, Mediaeval Studies, 31 (1969), 44–70, and ‘Clerical Taxation under Henry IV, 1399–1413’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 46 (1973), 123–44. The second half of the tenth granted to Richard II by the northern clergy in May 1399 was, despite Henry’s supposed self-restraint, collected as planned during 1400: Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 127. 11 B. P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History: The Crown Estate in the Governance of the Realm from the Conquest to 1509 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), pp. 40–51 (p. 50). 12 Rogers, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and Taxation’, pp. 44–45. 13 Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 83 and 135–36. See also A. L. Brown, ‘The Reign of Henry IV: The Establishment of the Lancastrian Regime’, in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 1–28. 14 Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, p. 16. 15 PPC, I , 154 and I I , 57. 16 Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 136; Edmund Wright, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and the Recovery of Royal Finance in 1407’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), pp. 65–81 (p. 67). 17 McNiven, Heresy and Politics, p. 158 and n. See the graphs of English raw wool exports from 1275 to 1547 which clearly show a sudden slump after 1402 in E. M. Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 122–23. 18 McNiven, Heresy and Politics, p. 163. 19 A. B. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 81–102. 20 Steel, Receipt of the Exchequer, pp. 86, 100.

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21 On the various mechanisms through which loans to the Crown were arranged, see G. L. Harriss, ‘Aids, Loans and Benevolences’, The Historical Journal, 6 (1963), 1–19. 22 McNiven, Heresy and Politics, p. 163. 23 The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I , 129. 24 McNiven, Heresy and Politics, p. 160. 25 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 380. This chronicle entry is based on an accusation made in Article 23 of the deposition schedule (Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 420). 26 Annales Ricardi Secundi, p. 249. 27 Davies, ‘Richard II and the Principality of Chester’, p. 271. 28 Creton’s Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard is edited by John Webb in Archaeologia, 20 (1824), 295–423 (p. 346). 29 Rotuli Parliamentorum I I I , 457. See also the extensive indenture (over three hundred entries) testifying to the delivery to the King’s Chamber on 20 November 1399 of valuables formerly belonging to Edward III, Richard II, Queen Anne and others: Francis Palgrave, The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury of His Majesty’s Exchequer: Together with Other Documents Illustrating the History of that Repository, 3 vols. ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1836), I I I , 313–61. 30 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 487–88. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry IV: 1401–05, I I (1905), 167. 31 Steel (Receipt of the Exchequer, p. 88) notes that the ‘overburdening of revenue with large assignments became marked’ during December 1402, despite the return of the remainder of Richard’s hoard. 32 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 395. 33 McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 159–60. 34 Given-Wilson has calculated the half-yearly totals of expenditure by the Wardrobe of the royal household for the reign of Henry IV (Royal Household, pp. 271–72). The smallest half-year total was £12,002 (for the period from 9 March 1401 to 30 September 1401) while the largest was £49,008 (for the period from 7 January 1405 to 7 December 1406). 35 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 399. 36 TNA: PRO C66/374, m. 8d; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry IV: 1405–08, I I I (1907), 153–55. 37 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 439. 38 Ibid., I I I , 439. 39 Ibid., I I I , 557. 40 TNA: PRO C66/383 m. 5d; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry IV: 1408–13, I V (1909), 228. 41 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 433. 42 Ibid., I I I , 478–79, 495, 523–24 and 625. 43 Ibid., I I I , 508. 44 Ibid., I I I , 586–87. 45 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry IV: 1408–13, I V (1909), 35 and 151. 46 Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry IV, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1927–38), I I (1929), 377 and 382 (cancelled under 5 July 1404


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but issued under 28 August 1404). See James A. Doig, ‘Political Propaganda and Royal Proclamations in Late Medieval England’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 71 (1998), 253–80, for the speed at which this suspension of payment was promulgated to ‘fourteen towns within a week’ (p. 263). 47 TNA: PRO C54/253, m. 3d. 48 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 549. Calendar of the Fine Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 22 vols. (London: HMSO, 1911–62), Henry IV: 1399–1405, X I I (1931), 288. The following exceptions were made to the oneyear moratorium: the Chancellor, the Treasurer, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, Henry’s Justices, the Barons of the Exchequer, the King’s Serjeants and other court officials. 49 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 549. 50 Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 15. 51 Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, p. 282. On the prince’s control of the Council in 1410 and 1411, see McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 185–98, and McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, pp. 102–13. 52 TNA: PRO C54/259, m. 1; Calendar of Close Rolls, I V (1932), 52. 53 Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, pp. 246–47. 54 PPC, I I , 6–13 (p. 12). 55 PPC, I I , 13. 56 Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, pp. 40–41. 57 Selections from Hoccleve, pp. 29–30. 58 Hoccleve received his wages in the form of annuity, a sum paid by the Exchequer in two instalments at Easter and Michaelmas. Hoccleve was first granted an annuity of £10 per year for life on 12 November 1399. This grant was increased to 20 marks per year (£13 6s. 8d.) on 17 May 1409: Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, pp. 8–9, 34, 39–40. 59 On the causes of this stoppage in Hoccleve’s annuity, see above p. 84. A marginal note in Hoccleve’s autograph manuscript of the Male Regle records: ‘Annus ille fuit annus restrictionis annuitatum’ [that year was the year of the restriction of annuities]. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 15. 60 See above, p. 84. This stoppage of Hanaper annuities formalized a change in policy concerning annuities granted on the Hanaper initiated by Henry Beaufort, one of the prince’s key supporters. Richard II had awarded a small number of Hanaper annuities to some of his favoured retainers in the last two years of his reign, but Henry IV granted some £210 worth of new annuities to courtiers in his first two years in government. These highly favoured new annuitants would have been aware, like Hoccleve, that, notwithstanding temporary moratoriums, it was often easier to extract money from the Hanaper than from the Exchequer. During Henry Beaufort’s first period as Chancellor from 1403 to 1405, however, the granting of Hanaper annuities ceased and only one more annuity was awarded during the rest of Henry IV’s reign to Thomas Morstede, Henry IV’s personal surgeon. Hoccleve thus contrasts the treatment of Henry IV’s trusted servants, paid through the more prosperous Hanaper, with the fate of clerks like himself paid through the

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61 62 63 64

65

66

67 68 69


overburdened Exchequer. See N. Pronay, ‘The Hanaper under the Lancastrian Kings’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section), 12 (1967), 73–86. Selections from Hoccleve, pp. 53–54. Compare the reference to his ‘long labour’ in the Regiment (RP, 4384). Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 34. On the John of Canace exemplum itself, see below, pp. 113–19. See, for example, lines 1331–44, in which the Old Man advises Hoccleve to spend his money wisely and to ‘be war of outrage’. Unusually in the conversational Prologue, the Old Man ventriloquizes Hoccleve’s reply (‘Nathelees þou maist ageyn me replie. . .’), thus avoiding any moment at which Hoccleve might confess to what readers of the earlier Male Regle would already be aware of, that is his ongoing tendency to liberality. See also lines 1398–1400 where Hoccleve is advised ‘what þou has a-gilt in tyme past, | Correct it’ – again Hoccleve’s guilty secret remains unspecified. Perkins (Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, pp. 39–40, 45–46) draws attention to these moments where nothing is described as something, arguing that for Hoccleve speaking and writing are ‘generative’ (p. 45) and provide a means of escaping from social, financial and linguistic constraints. Sarah Tolmie (‘The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 281–309) also focuses on these moments of ex nihilo creation in the Regiment, connecting them not with the political and financial circumstances in which Hoccleve was writing, but with the type of ‘nonmimetic poetics’ she sees him developing in the poem, based on a series of absences which demonstrates the availability of ‘the poet’s will . . . the paradoxical antimatter that fills the empty purses – impervious, untouchable, potentially annihilating, a force of pure critical intention’ (pp. 300, 304). See also the Old Man’s description of the contents of his purse in lines 676–78. In describing its contents, Hoccleve playfully exploits the fact that zero was considered a position-marker rather than a number in medieval mathematics: ‘in this purs so grete sommes be | That ther nis contour in al Cristientee | Which that hem can at any noumbre sette.’ See Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 12–13. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shewring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 107–08. Historia Anglicana, I I , 282. For a reading of the Regiment which sees it as forming part of Prince Henry’s ‘program of kingly self-representation’, see Derek Pearsall, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 386–410. Larry Scanlon also sees it as a poem designed to secure Lancastrian authority: Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 298–322. James Simpson puts forward a differing view of the Regiment which sees it as offering ‘very carefully modulated doses of both threat and supplication’: ‘Nobody’s Man: Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes’, in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King, Westfield


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Publications in Medieval Studies, 9 (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995), pp. 149–80 (pp. 170–71). Tolmie (‘Prive Scilence’) extends these threats further to include a kind of poetic blackmail. Judith Ferster sees Hoccleve as being both critical and submissive: Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 137–59. Perkins (Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, p. 4) sees Hoccleve as providing ‘powerful and disturbing messages . . . by design’ in the Regiment.

7

A DISCOURSE OF CREDIT AND LOYALTY

1 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 389. 2 C. J. Given-Wilson, ‘Purveyance for the Royal Household, 1362–1413’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 56 (1983), 145–63 (p. 161). 3 Ibid., p. 161. 4 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 405. 5 On the relationship between Henry and the Percies, see Alastair Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales, 1389–1413 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 95–104. 6 Continuatio Eulogii, p. 396. 7 Ibid., p. 397. 8 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 485, 567 and 622. 9 Ibid., I I I , 522. 10 Ibid., I I I , 522. 11 This is a paraphrase of III Kings 20. 7: ‘vocavit autem rex Israhel omnes seniores terrae’ [and the king of Israel called all the ancients of the land]. Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 545. 12 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 567. The phrase chosen from the Summa comes from a section discussing whether extensive counsel and deliberation are required before entering the religious life: ‘diuturna deliberatio et multorum consilia requiruntur in magnis et dubiis, ut Philosophus dicit’ [long deliberation and the advice of others are necessary in important and doubtful matters, as Aristotle says]. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, ed. Thomas Gilby and others, 61 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964–81), X L V I I : ed. and trans. Jordan Aumann (1973), pp. 264–65 (2a2æ. 189, 10). 13 The citation from the Book of Esther reads: ‘Rex Assuerus sapientes interrogauit et illorum cuncta faciebat consilia.’ This is an abbreviated quotation of Esther 1. 12–13: ‘unde iratus rex et nimio furore succensus interrogavit sapientes qui ex more regio semper ei aderant et illorum faciebat cuncta consilio scientium leges ac iura maiorum’ [whereupon the king, being angry, and inflamed with a very great fury, asked the wise men, who according to the custom of the kings were always near his person, and all he did was by their counsel, who knew the laws, and judgements of their forefathers].

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14 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 454, 485, 569 and 572; MED, s.vv., aide and aboundaunt. 15 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I I I , 456. 16 Ibid., I I I , 622. 17 Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, p. 213. 18 On the sources of the Regiment, see Perkins, Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, pp. 85–125. 19 MED, s.v., fermour. 20 The historical particularity of this encounter is further suggested by the possibility of making an identification between the God of Love and his Queen and Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. Such an identification is by no means certain or exclusive – the evidence is circumstantial at most – but, as David Wallace notes (Chaucerian Polity, p. 355), the representation of the God of Love ‘must, at some level of consciousness, have encouraged associations with Richard II’. 21 ‘Secretum secretorum’, p. 30. 22 Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, p. 41. 23 ‘Secretum secretorum’, p. 203. 24 Chaucer also uses this rhyme in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (I . 297–98) and in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale (I I . 25–26). 25 Lydgate and Burgh’s ‘Secrees of Old Philisoffres’, ed. Robert Steele, EETS e.s., 66 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1894), p. 2. 26 Derek Pearsall has recently re-evaluated the poem and its contexts: ‘Crowned King: War and Peace in 1415’, in The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Jenny Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 13 (Donington: Tyas, 2003), pp. 163–72. 27 Crowned King, line 22. For the text of the poem, see Piers Plowman Tradition, pp. 205–10. Further references to Crowned King are given in parentheses in the text. 28 Compare the third poem in the MS Digby 102 collection of political poems which also identifies a king’s treasure as something other than readily available cash and jewels (Twenty-Six Political and other Poems, p. 11): ‘Old speche is spoken 3ore: | What is a kyngdom tresory? | Bestayle, corn stuffed in store, | Riche comouns, and wyse clergy; | Marchaundes, squyers, chiualry | That wol be redy at a res, | And cheualrous kyng in wittes hy3e, | To lede in were, and gouerne in pes’ (lines 65–72). 29 Helen Barr, Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition, Piers Plowman Studies, 10 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 65–66. 30 B. I. 152. Variants of this line appear in A. I. 136–37 (‘loue is þe leuest þing þat oure lord askiþ, | And ek þe plante of pes’) and in C. I. 148 (‘Loue is [þe] plonte of pees, most precious of vertues’). Quotations are taken from Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. George Kane, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).


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31 Rotuli Parliamentorum, I V , 34. 32 Galatians 6. 7–10. 33 Crowned King’s active engagement with Crown policy and rhetoric is clearly visible in contrast with other less critical reproductions of Henry’s publicity campaign. Compare, for example, John Carpenter’s description of the king’s negotiations with the City of London in March 1415: Henry Thomas Riley, Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1868), pp. 603–05. 34 The author of the collection of political poems in MS Digby 102 also stresses the mutual dependence of king and commons (Twenty-Six Political and other Poems, p. 55): ‘A comons my3t sone be shent, | Wiþ-outen kyng or gouernour, | And a kyng wiþoute rent | My3t li3tly trussen his tresour, | For comons mayntene lordis honour, | Holy chirche, and religyoun’ (God Saue the Kyng, and Kepe the Crown, lines 137–42). 35 A similar sentiment (‘þe puple is goddis, and no3t 3oures. | þey paye 3oure rente, to gouerne lawe’) occurs in the thirteenth poem of the MS Digby 102 collection, which also mentions the possibility of a French campaign: TwentySix Political and other Poems, p. 57, lines 51–52. This poem is further discussed in my Conclusion, pp. 128–30. 36 See also line 125: ‘Sir, more-ouere be not gredy gyftes to grype.’ 8

CREDIT AND FRAUD IN HOCCLEVE’S REGIMENT

1 Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 209. 2 Perkins (Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, pp. 40–41) also discusses Hoccleve’s use of this topos in relation to other verbal economies in the Regiment. 3 MED, s.v., pece, entries under 4b (b). 4 Hoccleve’s source is here Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Compare Governance of Kings and Princes, p. 78, lines 25–31. MED, s.v., influence, entries under 1 (a) and 2 (a). 5 This phrasing is echoed in the later description of Aristotle ‘thristynge’ to be the ‘welthe durable’ of Alexander in lines 2045–47. 6 MED, s.v., draught, entries under 2 (b) and (e), 5 (a), and 6 (c) and (d). Perkins (Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, p. 41) and Tolmie (‘Prive Scilence’, pp. 298–99) discuss the puns on writing and chess-playing in these lines. 7 MED, s.v., draught, entries under 1 (c), 4 (a) and 7 (a). 8 For alternative readings of this exemplum, see Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 320–21; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 196–214; and Perkins, Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment’, pp. 111–14. 9 For Hoccleve’s Latin source, see the parallel-text edition of Das Schachzabelbuch Kunrats von Ammenhausen . . . nebst den Schachbu¨chern des Jakob von Cessole und des Jakob Mennel, ed. Ferdinand Vetter, Bibliothek a¨lterer Schriftwerke der deutschen Schweiz, supplementary volumes (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1887 and 1892), cols. 705–14. An English translation of the John of Canace story can be

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10 11

12

13

14


found in William Caxton’s translation, The Game of Chess, based on a composite version of two French translations of De ludo scaccorum by Jean Ferron and Jean de Vignay: Caxton’s ‘Game and Playe of the Chesse’, ed. William E. A. Axon (London: Stock, 1883), pp. 148–50. The story circulated in other collections of exempla in the Middle Ages, particularly those compiled to assist preachers. See, for example, the Latin version printed by Thomas Wright which gives the father’s concluding message in English and French: Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Wright, 31 vols. (London: Richards for the Percy Society, 1840–52), V I I I (1843), 28–29. It also appears in Dives and Pauper, a Middle English treatise on the ten commandments composed c. 1405–c. 1410, where it introduced as an actual event which occurred locally: ‘Nout longe is gon sith þat fel þis cas in Colcester.’ See Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, 2 vols., EETS o.s., 275 and 280 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976– ), pp. 311–13. On the delaying of Hoccleve’s confession in the Prologue, see above, p. 88. The marginal gloss from the Secretum reads as follows (Regiment of Princes, trans. Blyth, p. 241): ‘Aristotelis, de regimine, capitulo de vitio superfluitatis: Dico tibi quod quis rerum superflue contulerit donationes ultra quod regnum suum possit sufficere, talis rex procul dubio destruit et destruitur, et cetera’ [Aristotle on the Rule of Princes, chapter on the vice of superfluity: ‘‘I say to you that who contributes gifts superfluously beyond what his kingdom is able to supply, without doubt such a king destroys and will be destroyed, etc’’]. Furnivall’s 1897 edition of the Regiment glosses this occupation as ‘Tiller and Labourer’ whilst Blyth’s 1999 edition gives the occupation as ‘tile-maker’. Both are possible on orthographic grounds. The different motivations and rewards of truthtellers and flatterers are a major concern in the Regiment, returned to at various points in the text. See the discussions at lines 1921–46, 2941–48, 3039–98, 4951–21 and 5253–85. It is no coincidence, however, that Hoccleve chooses both to reaffirm his good intentions and to defend truthtelling in the section of the Regiment which most innovatively discusses a topic of contemporary importance. The choice of sergeant’s mace also implies a public interpretation of the exemplum. Hoccleve transforms the clava or club of his source into a sergeant’s mace, punning on the customary Latin title of the sergeant-at-mace, servans ad clavam (Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v., servitium). Such ceremonial maces were carried as a symbol of office by a range of officials, from the sergeants-at-mace themselves who were minor borough or city officers, but also by other officials such as mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, sub-bailiffs and sergeants-ofarms (MED, s.v., mace). In addition to symbolizing civic authority of some kind, the sceptre representing royal sovereignty could also be described as a mace. Furthermore, a mace symbolized both royal authority itself and the devolution of that power to lesser officials in the form of a king’s mace carried by a sergeant. Hoccleve clarifies some potential ambiguity by designating his clava to be a ‘sergeantes mace’, but the authority it symbolizes could be simultaneously royal and municipal. Larry Scanlon (Narrative, Authority,


15 16 17 18

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and Power, p. 320) suggests that parliamentary authority in the form of the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons was being invoked, but this position was instituted for the first time in 1415 and thus postdates the Regiment. For the history of the Common’s Sergeant-at-Arms, see Philip Marsden, The Officers of the Commons, 1363–1965 (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966), pp. 78–79. MED, s.v., charge, entries under 3 a. (a) and 9 (a). MED, s.v., charge, 10 (a). MED, s.v., parcel, entry under 1 a. (e). W. T. Baxter gives a lively description of how the charge–discharge system was used in the Exchequer to audit the accounts of county sheriffs: ‘Early Accounting: The Tally and the Checker-Board’, in Accounting History: Some British Contributions, ed. R. H. Parker and B. S. Yamey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 197–235 (pp. 223–28). CONCLUSION: LANCASTRIAN CONVERSATIONS

1 Robert Epstein (‘Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44 (2002), 16–33) has also recently identified this obsessive reiteration of aspects of the textual environment of the deposition as one of the defining qualities of Lancastrian literature. Rather than avoiding subjects or styles which might remind readers of the 1399 deposition, it instead ‘repetitively returns to that original opposition and disunity and seems almost intentionally to emphasize it’ (p. 19). 2 Ethan Knapp considers the influence of bureaucratic culture on Hoccleve’s poetry in The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). On Scogan’s career, see May Newman Hallmundsson, ‘Chaucer’s Circle: Henry Scogan and His Friends’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 10 (1981), 129–139. I have found no documentary evidence that Scogan was retained in Henry IV’s household or that he acted as tutor to the four Lancastrian princes as has sometimes been thought on the basis of the pose of ‘master’ which he adopts in the Moral Balade. 3 Derek Pearsall, ‘Crowned King: War and Peace in 1415’, p. 171. 4 Barr, Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 17; Barr, Socioliterary Practice, pp. 161–64. Whatever his occupation, the Mum-poet makes use of his knowledge of the ‘materialities of documentary practice’ (p. 185) as a means of ‘conceptualizing and justifying poetic work’ (p. 190): Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 177–90. 5 For Berkeley’s role in the deposition, see Ralph Hanna III, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage’, Speculum, 64 (1989), 878–916 (pp. 888–91). Berkeley attended council at least eight times during the chancellorship of Henry Beaufort (28 February 1403 to 1 March 1405): J. L. Kirby, ‘Councils

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and Councillors of Henry IV, 1399–1413’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th s. 14 (1964), 35–65 (p. 63). 6 For Gower’s life records, see John Hines, Nathalie Cohen and Simon Roffey, ‘Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siaˆn Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 23–41. 7 John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 67. For Gower’s will, see Complete Works of John Gower, I V , xvii–xviii. 8 Alfred L. Brown, ‘The Privy Seal in the Early Fifteenth Century’, 2 vols. (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1954), I I , 59–60. 9 Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 33. On Rouclif’s career, see Tout, Chapters, V , 48, 89, 92, 102 and 112. The connection between Hoccleve and Rouclif was first noted by Elizabeth Morley Ingram: ‘Thomas Hoccleve and Guy de Rouclif’, Notes & Queries, 218 (1973), 42–43. Hoccleve stood surety for Rouclif in July 1392 (Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, p. 33). 10 Fisher, John Gower, p. 64. 11 On the life and career of Sir Arnold Savage I, see The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I V , 306–10. 12 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427’, New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), 59–84. 13 On Hoccleve’s patrons, see John J. Thompson, ‘A Poet’s Contacts with the Great and the Good: Further Consideration of Thomas Hoccleve’s Texts and Manuscripts’, in Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy, York Manuscript Conferences, 4 (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 77–101. 14 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59, fol. 25r. 15 Information on John is taken from his biography in The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I I , 494–98. 16 See his biography in The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I , 524–32. See also Martin B. Ruud, Thomas Chaucer, Studies in Language and Literature, 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1926). 17 See the short poem Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan in which he is addressed as ‘frend’ (line 29). 18 Wife of Bath’s Tale, I I I . 1131–32 and 1121–22 respectively. 19 The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I ,525. 20 J. L. Kirby, ‘Clerks in Royal Service’, History Today, 6 (1956), 752–58. 21 Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I , 295–96, and, on the position of Secondary, I , 312–315. 22 Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 67. 23 Ibid., pp. 67–68. 24 Malcolm Richardson, ‘The Earliest Known Owners of Canterbury Tales MSS and Chaucer’s Secondary Audience’, Chaucer Review, 25 (1990), 17–32. 25 John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), I , 166–69.


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26 TNA: PRO Prob 11/5 (26 Godyn), fols 205r–206v. 27 For Somer’s life and career, see The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I V , 400–04. On his links with Thomas Chaucer, see p. 402. Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 532–33. 28 Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, Secular Poems, pp. 657–59, lines 22–23 and 36–37; commentary in John Lydgate: Poems, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 119–22. 29 On the life and career of Sir Walter Hungerford, see The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I I , 446–53. 30 Susan H. Cavanaugh, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England, 1300–1450’, 2 vols. (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1980), I , 452–53; Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, I , 104. Hungerford also owned London, British Library MS Royal 20 B XIV, a miscellany mainly of French religious and philosophical pieces. 31 The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power, 1436, ed. George Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 57–58, lines 1150–55: ‘it is sothe in verray feythe | That the wyse lorde baron of Hungerforde | Hathe thee oversene, and verrily he seithe | That thow arte trewe, and thus he dothe recorde, | Nexte the Gospell: God wotte it was his worde, | Whanne he thee redde all over in a nyghte’. 32 Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’ and ‘Dialogue’, ed. J. A. Burrow, EETS o.s., 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 40–47 (Dialogue, lines 99–196). See also Burrow’s ‘Excursus III’ on numismatic legislation, pp. 120–24. 33 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Richard II: 1385–89, I I I (1900), 462; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Richard II: 1391–96, V (1905), 199; The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I V , 401. 34 The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I I , 495. 35 ‘Complaint’ and ‘Dialogue’, pp. 61–66 (Dialogue, lines 526–655) and p. x. 36 The types of instructions received by the Privy Seal are discussed by Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I , 16–124. 37 James Fosdick Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 74. 38 Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I , 322–32. 39 On Bubwith’s life and career, see Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, I (1957), 294–96, and Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I I , 230–31. 40 Alfred L. Brown, The Early History of the Clerkship of the Council, Glasgow University Publications, n.s., 131 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1969), pp. 8 and 13. Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I I , 232–33. 41 Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, I , 313–21. 42 The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I I , 143. 43 The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I V , 315–17. 44 On Haseley’s career and associations, see The House of Commons, 1386–1421, I I I , 307–10.

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45 James A. Doig describes how proclamations were used as ‘a significant medium of political communication’: ‘Political Propaganda’, p. 255. 46 Doig, ‘Political Propaganda’, pp. 275–80. 47 See above, p. 17. 48 Constance M. Fraser, ‘Some Durham Documents Relating to the Hilary Parliament of 1404’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 34 (1961), 192–99. 49 Given-Wilson, ‘The Parliament of 1397–8’, p. 333. 50 The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. xlviii–li. 51 Given-Wilson, ‘Manner of King Richard’s Renunciation’, pp. 365–70; Sayles, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, 266–70. 52 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 62–63. 53 Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition’, pp. 149–51. 54 PPC, I I , 140–42. The assembly may be parliament itself or another meeting held in the autumn of 1414. It has been suggested that the draft is the result of the meeting which Walsingham (Historia Anglicana, I I , 302) describes as occurring near the feast of Michaelmas (i.e. 29 September), thus predating Beaufort’s sermon. However, I think the references to the various works of preparation for the French campaign point towards the meeting to which this draft relates having been held after Beaufort had given his opening speech. 55 Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, pp. xvii–xx. 56 Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, pp. 55–60, lines 1–4. Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 57 This poem was first connected to the sermon by Kail (Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, p. xx): ‘Perhaps even the burden ‘‘dede’’ was suggested by the word ‘‘operemur’’ in the theme of the Archbishop.’ 58 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech’, Political Theory, 1 (1973), 27–45 (p. 33).

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Index

advice-giving, see truthtelling Alexander the Great (356 BC–323 BC) supposed recipient of Aristotle’s advice 99–100 Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti 9, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 26, 36, 49–50, 126, 133, 140 Antiochus IV (c. 215 BC–164 BC), king of Syria 28–9, 145 Aquinas, St Thomas (1224/5–1274) De regno: ad Regem Cypri 135 Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) advising Alexander as regards symbolic credit 99–100 as valuable himself 102 Politics 24, 139, 141 Rhetoric 136 Arundel, John (d. 1454) 68–9, 70–1, 121, 156 Arundel, Thomas (1353–1414), archbishop of Canterbury 10, 12, 20, 24, 28–9, 47, 49–50, 134, 136

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (d. 524 or 525) De consolatione philosophiæ 31 Bolingbroke, Henry, see Henry IV, king of England Brown, A. L. 124 Brut chronicle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Kk. 1. 12) 19 Bubwith, Nicholas (c. 1355–1424), bishop of Bath and Wells 124 buffeting of Christ 35, 38 bureaucrats as Members of Parliament 125 as readers of vernacular literature 123 numbers of 122–3 Burton, John ( f l. 1386–1394) 126 Chancery 122 see also John Burton, Thomas Haseley, John Scarburgh, Richard Sotheworth, John Stopyndon charge bearing charge 116–17 charge–discharge system of accounting 165 Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340–1400) 122, 123 Canterbury Tales, The manuscripts of 123 Monk’s Tale, The 32 Wife of Bath’s Tale, The 122 Gentilesse 122 Legend of Good Women, The 101–2 as valuable poet 109 Chaucer, Thomas (c. 1367–1434) 122, 123, 125 Chillenden, Thomas (d. 1411) 126, 137 Chosroes (d. 579 BC), king of Persia 145 Chronicles see Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, Brut chronicle, Chronicque de la traison et mort Richart Deux, Continuatio Eulogii, Jean Creton, Dieulacres Chronicle, Giles’s Chronicle, John Gower, John Hardyng, Kirkstall

Badby, John (d. 1410), see Henry V Barr, Helen 38, 105, 142, 143, 148, 149, 153 Beaufort Henry (1375?–1447), bishop of Winchester 79, 97, 99–100, 105–6, 126, 127–30, 159 Joan (1379?–1440), countess of Westmorland 124 Belshazzar (d. c. 539 BC) 29, 145 Berkeley, Thomas (1353–1417), fifth Baron Berkeley 120 Bible I Maccabees 28–9 see also Painted Chamber II Maccabees 28–9 see also Antiochus IV, Belshazzar, buffeting of Christ, Christ’s tormentors, John the Baptist, Judas Maccabeus Biggs, Douglas 47, 48 Binski, Paul 144 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375) De casibus illustrium virorum 32

182

Index Abbey Chronicle, Henry Knighton, London Chronicle, Adam Usk, Vita Ricardi Secundi, Thomas Walsingham, Westminster Chronicle, William Wintershill Chronicque de la traison et mort Richart Deux 140 civil service, see bureaucrats Clark, James G. 133 Clarke, M. V. 30 Clifford, Richard (d. 1421), bishop of London 70 Cobham, John (c.1320–1408), third Baron Cobham 10, 23 Commons, clerk of the 125 see also Thomas Haseley, John Scarburgh Commons, House of, see parliament Continuatio Eulogii 18, 19, 20, 21, 43, 50, 77, 80, 81, 95–6 counsel, see truthtelling credit 4 symbolic credit of Crown 75, 94–100 symbolic credit of poet 101–3, 110, 117 Creton, Jean ( f l. 1386–1420) Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard 140 Croesus, king of Lydia (d. c. 546 BC) 29, 31, 145 Crown, Lancastrian self-presentation 4, 9, 23 Crowned King 4, 75, 103–8, 109, 118, 120, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130 de casibus topos 6, 30, 55–8 Denne, William, see William Donne deposition of Richard II 1–2 articles of deposition 10, 11–12, 14–16, 20, 22, 76 bill of resignation 1–2, 9, 10, 17, 139 ceremony on 30 September 1399 5, 17 claim of throne by Henry IV 17, 139 demerita notoria 2, 3–4, 5, 9, 10, 41–2 protestacio made by Richard II 139 sermon given by Thomas Arundel 10, 12–15, 16, 23, 37, 61, 76, 136–8, 139 speech of acceptance by Henry IV 139, 149 textualisation of 16, 17, 26 withdrawal of fealty from Richard II 139 see also La Manere de la renonciacione del Roy Richard, Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II Dieulacres Chronicle 2 Digby 102 poems 4 Dede is Worchyng 128–30, 163 God Saue the Kyng, and Kepe the Crown 163 Mede and Muche Thank 153, 154 Treuthe, Reste, and Peace 162 Dodd, Gwilym 48 Doig, James A. 126, 168 Donne, William (d. after 1408) 121

183

Duchy of Lancaster, see Henry IV, patrimony Edward I (1239–1307), king of England 144 Edward III (1312–1377), king of England 145 Elmham, Thomas (d. in or after 1427) 30 Epstein, Robert 154, 165 excess in dress 66–7 complaint tradition 34 criticism during reign of Henry IV 67–8 petitions by Commons regarding 67–8 Exchequer clerks of 122 Lancastrian 79 see also Henry Somer familia regis, see royal household fashionability, see excess in dress Ferriby, William (d. after 1409) 30, 127, 145 Ferster, Judith 161 finance, Crown Lancastrian 4 discussion of 75 expectations regarding 77–8 enquiries into 81, 82–3 loans 79 ‘missing money’ 79–83 moratoriums on payment of annuities 84–5, 117 payment of deserving 83–6 problems facing 78–9 proposed reforms of 75, 81–6 revenue decline in 79 demands on 78 ‘living of the king’s own’ 77–8 Fletcher, C. D. 134 Forme of Cury 142 fraud 4, 111, 118 Froissart, Jean (1337?–c. 1404) Chroniques de France, d’Angleterre et des pais voisins 143 Frye, Robert (d. 1435) 125 Galbraith, V. H. 30 Gascoigne, Thomas (1404–1458) Loci e libro veritatem 77 Giles of Rome (d. 1316) De regimine principum 11, 14, 21, 135, 136, 138 Giles’s Chronicle 30–1, 127 Given-Wilson C. J. 95, 137, 138, 145, 158 governance Lancastrian, 12, 13, 15 expectations regarding 45 criticism of 46–54

184

Index

governance (cont.) Ricardian retrospective view of 10–11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 Gower, John (d. 1408) 4, 55, 71, 121 Cronica tripertita 18, 19, 24, 151 ‘O Deus immense’ 141 To Henry the Fourth in Praise of Peace 57–8, 121 Grady, Frank 4, 143, 150, 153, 154 Hanaper 122 annuities payable from 87 Hardyng, John (d. in or after 1464) Chronicle 22, 70, 77 Haseley, Thomas (d. 1449) 125 Hasler, Antony J. 155 Hende, John (d. 1418), mayor of London 79 Henry IV (1366–1413), king of England 2, 9, 10, 13, 126 compared to Judas Maccabeus 28, 57 deposition of Richard II 1 grants and annuities 78–9, 83–6 implied addressee of Mum and the Sothsegger 41–2 implied reader of Richard the Redeless 45 legitimacy of 95–6 patrimony of 77, 81 petitioned by Commons in parliament of January 1401 98–9 promise not to levy taxes 43, 77, 78, 79, 95 promises of good governance 42–3, 134 self-presentation as financially prudent 76–8, 95 supposed attitude to truthtellers 24, 42, 44 Wardrobe expenditure 95, 142, 158, 159 Henry V (1386/7–1422), king of England burning of John Badby 87, 92 draft response to his proposed French campaign 127–8, 130 implied addressee of Crowned King 103–8, 109 named addressee of Hoccleve’s Regiment 63–4, 86, 88–9, 90, 91, 94, 109, 110, 112–13, 114, 116, 117 Hoccleve, Thomas (c. 1367–1426) 4, 5, 6, 55, 57, 58–71, 75, 86, 94, 109, 120, 124, 125, 156 Balade to Edward, duke of York 155–6 Balade to Henry V (beginning ‘Victorious King’) 87–8 Balade to John, duke of Bedford 155–6 La Male Regle de T. Hoccleve 5, 58–71, 86, 87, 90, 92, 121 Regiment of Princes, The 4, 5, 56, 58–68, 86, 87–93, 100–1, 102, 103, 109–19, 121

John of Canace exemplum 88, 113–18 Roundels on Lady Money 86, 88–9 Series, The 124 Dialogue 124 his annuity 84, 85, 87 self-presentation 86–93 household, the domus 138 expectation of charity to visitors 39 familia 138 narratives of truthtelling within 50–4, 62–3, 65–6 royal 138 clerks of 122 of Henry IV alleged irreligiosity of 49–50 criticism of 46–50 expectations regarding 46–52 proposed reform of 47–8 of Richard II 3–4, 10–11, 22, 24–6 compared to Christ’s tormentors 35–6 clothing and 33–8 King’s Chapel clerks 69–70 supposed attitude to truthtelling 37–8 supposed exclusion of humble visitors 39 supposed luxury and excess 25 supposed tyrannical qualities 25, 26 supposed wilfulness 25 supposed youthfulness 24, 25 social geography of 38, 46 Humphrey (1390–1447), duke of Gloucester 124 Hungerford, Walter (1378–1449), first Baron Hungerford 123 John, Lewis (d. 1442) 121–2, 124, 125 John of Salisbury (d. 1180) Policraticus 136 John the Baptist humility of 36–7, 44, 150–1 Judas Maccabeus 28 see also Painted Chamber Kail, J. 168 Kent, Thomas (d. 1468) 123 King’s Chapel, 68, 123 kingship bad, see tyranny good 11, 12, 16 Kirkstall Abbey Chronicle 126, 139, 140 Knapp, Ethan 165 Knighton, Henry (d. c. 1396) Chronicle of Henry Knighton 140 Langland, William (c. 1325-c. 1390) Piers Plowman 105, 121

Index Langley, Thomas (c. 1360–1437), bishop of Durham 97 Lawton, David 6, 52 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye 123 Lincoln, John (d. by 1415) 70 literature, Lancastrian 4, 5–6, 40, 120, 123–4, 127, 130 authors of 5, 120–1 readers of 121–4 London Chronicle (London, British Library MS Cotton Julius B 11) 17 love 4, 94, 98–100 Lydgate, John (c. 1370–1449/50?) 109 Fall of Princes, The 32 Of the Sodein Fal of Princes in Oure Dayes 145 On the Departing of Thomas Chaucer 123 Secrees of Old Philisoffres (completed by Benedict Burgh) 102 maces, ceremonial 164–5 Manere de la renonciacione del Roy Richard, La 126, 137 manuscripts London, British Library MS Arundel 38 63 London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius C IX 139 London, British Library MS Stowe 66 139 London, British Library MS Stowe 67 150 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 596 139 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102 see Digby 102 poems Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 78 30 Massy, William (d. after 1426) 156 matrices, linguistic 3 see also paradigms, linguistic maturity, characteristic behaviour of 13, 138 McNiven, Peter 55, 137–8 Medford, Richard (d. 1407), bishop of Salisbury 70 Merks, Thomas (d. 1409/10), bishop of Carlisle 70 Mints Master of London, Tower and Calais 124 Warden of Tower of London 124 Warden of Calais 124 Modus Tenendi Parliamentum 77 Morstede, Thomas (d. 1450) 158, 159 Mum and the Sothsegger 4, 41–2, 54, 55, 63, 64, 71, 77–8, 120, 155 Mundus et Infans 136 Nevill, Thomas (d. 1406), Lord Furnivall 56, 156 newsletters account of parliament of January 1404 126

185

‘O Deus in coelis disponens cuncta fidelis’ 141 Painted Chamber at Palace of Westminster 144 paradigms, linguistic 3, 16, 17, 19, 54, 75 amplification of 35 politicization of pre-existing langues 27–40 temporary politicisation of 27 use in literature 64–5 see also matrices, linguistic parliament of February 1388 126 account compiled by ?John Burton 126 of September 1397 22, 26, 29, 36 account written by ?Chancery clerk 126, 148 of October 1399 17, 23, 77, 82, 83, 134, 136 of January 1401 80, 98–9 of September 1402 80 of January 1404 47, 48, 97, 126 of October 1404 49, 50, 81, 82, 97 of March 1406 47–8, 49, 97 of January 1410 99 of November 1414 103, 127 opening speeches to 97–8, 99–100, 103, 105–6, 127–30 use of language of credit and advice in 97–100 Patterson, Lee 153 pauper superbus 6, 34, 35 Pearsall, Derek 160, 162 Percy family 77 Henry (1341–1408), first earl of Northumberland 95–6 Henry (1364–1403), Sir, called Henry Hotspur 43, 95–6 Thomas (c. 1343–1403), earl of Worcester 50 Perkins, Nicholas 145, 150, 160, 161, 163 Pocock, J. G. A. 2–3, 16, 17, 27, 41, 45, 64, 65, 130 Pollard, A. J. 48 Premierfait, Laurent de (d. 1418) Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes 32 Prentys, John (d. 1445) 68–9, 70–1, 121, 156 Prestbury, Thomas (d. 1425) 23–4 Privy Seal 122, 124 position of Keeper 124 relationship to royal household 156 see also Nicholas Bubwith, Robert Frye, Thomas Hoccleve, Thomas Kent, John Prophet proclamations, royal 126 Prophet, John (d. 1416) 124–5 purveyance 95

186

Index

reciprocity between Crown and subjects 94 in Hoccleve’s Regiment 110–13 Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II 9, 10, 17–18, 126, 134, 140 Rehoboam (d. 915? BC) 145 Repyngdon, Philip (c. 1345–1424), bishop of Lincoln open letter to Henry IV (1401) 43–4, 71 Richard II (1367–1400), king of England 9–10, 13 as tyrant 4, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 140 as victim of Fortune’s Wheel 29–31 as youthful king 3, 11, 13–14, 16, 18 Cheshire guardsmen 15, 25, 138 creation of dukettos 25–6 de casibus genre and 28, 29, 30, 32–3 grants and annuities 79, 83 hoard 80–1 located at Holt Castle, Cheshire 80 notorious flaws, see deposition, demerita notoria plan to crown Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey as king of Ireland 22 regalia 142 retrospective representation 10–11, 12, 17, 18–26, 60–1 revenge on Appellants 18, 19 supposed admission of incapacity 1, 2, 9, 10 supposed attitude to truthtelling 4, 14–16, 22–4 supposed financial malpractice 4, 11–12, 19, 75, 76 supposed luxury and excess 19–22, 80 see also Forme of Cury supposed wilfulness 11, 134 voluntary resignation of throne 1, 2, 9 Wardrobe expenditure 142–3 Richard the Redeless 4, 18, 24–6, 33–40, 41, 44, 45–6, 51–2, 63, 120 Roman de la Rose 31–2 Rouclif, Guy de (d. after 3 December 1392) 121, 124 Royal, Chapel, see King’s Chapel Salutati, Coluccio (1331–1406) De tyranno 135, 136 Saussure, Ferdinand de 27 Savage I, Sir Arnold (1358–1410) 121, 126 Scanlon, Larry D. 160, 163 Scarburgh, John (d. after 1413) 125 Scattergood, John 144 Scogan, Henry (c. 1361–1407) 4, 55, 57, 71, 120 Moral Balade 56, 58–66, 121–2, 124 Scrope, Richard (c. 1350–1405), archbishop of York 43, 50, 95 Secreta secretorum 100–3, 114 as valuable text 102

Selby, Ralph (d. 1420) 70 Shirley, John (c. 1366–1456) 102, 109, 121, 154 Shrewsbury, battle of 43, 50, 77, 95–6 Signet, clerks of the 123 Simonie, The 35 Simpson, James 160 Slake, Nicholas ( f l. 1376–1401) 70 Somer, Henry (d. 1450) 79, 123, 124, 125 Somerset, Fiona 155 Sotheworth, Richard (d. 1419) 123 Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 132 Staniland, Kay 142 Starkey, David 38 Steiner, Emily 165 Steel, A. B. 158 stereotyping and stereotypes 10, 12, 16 Stopyndon, John (d. 1447) 123 Strohm, Paul 2, 150, 163 subjects as king’s most valuable resource 98–101, 104, 117 see also credit, love, reciprocity Theilmann, John M. 132, 136, 149 Thirning, Sir William (d. 1413) 9–10 Tiptoft, John (c. 1378–1443), first Baron Tiptoft 48 Tolmie, Sarah 160, 161 tormentors, Christ’s 35–6 costume in dramatic representation 35–6 Towneley Plays, The 35 truthtelling and truthtellers 4, 6, 65–6, 115 clothing and 37–8, 63–4 tyrannicide 135–6 tyrants, see tyranny tyranny 11–12, 14, 20, 21, 24, 60–1, 101, 134, 135, 139, 141 Usk, Adam (c. 1350–1430) Chronicle of Adam Usk 13, 17, 18, 22, 23–4, 29, 32–3, 70, 126, 126–7 Vita Ricardi Secundi 18, 19, 20–1, 22, 24, 67, 70, 126, 139, 148 Walden, Roger (d. 1406), archbishop of Canterbury 70 Walker, Simon 140, 145 Wallace, David 146, 162 Walsingham, Thomas (c. 1340–c. 1422) 133 Chronica maiora 49–50, 69–70, 133 Historia Anglicana 133, 168 Wathey, Andrew 68 Watts, John 134

Index Westminster Chronicle 126, 140 Whethampstede, John (c. 1392–1465) 69 Whittington, Richard (c. 1350–1423), mayor of London 79 will, the king’s 134 Wintershill, William (d. after 1430) 133 Wolffe, B. P. 77 Worthies, Nine 57

187

Yonge, James ( f l. 1405–1434) The Governaunce of Prynces 22 York, 1405 rebellion against Henry IV at 43, 50, 77, 95 youth characteristic behaviour of 13, 14, 20, 58–60, 136, 138, 141 physiology of 14

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