The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks 9782503536804, 9782503547442

Table of contents :
Front Matter ("Contents", "Preface"), p. i

1. Presences, p. 1
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00102

2. The Owl and the Nightingale: The Interpretative Stakes of Time, Place, and Author, p. 19
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00103

3. Sir Orfeo: The ‘Taken’ Discourses of Order and Intelligibility, p. 51
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00104

4. Pearl: The Limits of History, p. 89
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00105

5. Piers Plowman: The Essential (Ephemeral) Project, p. 115
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00106

6. The Canterbury Tales and Some Other Chaucerian Compositions: The Pursuit of Heresy and Dangerous Textual Liaisons, p. 143
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00107

7. Morte Darthur: The Endgame of Authority, p. 213
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00108

8. Location, Location, Location, p. 259
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00109

Back Matter ("Bibliography", "Index of Persons, Places, and Texts"), p. 269

Citation preview

The Presence of Medieval English Literature

CURSOR MUNDI Cursor Mundi is produced under the auspices of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles Blair Sullivan, University of California, Los Angeles Executive Editor Editorial Board Michael D. Bailey, Iowa State University Christopher Baswell, Columbia University and Barnard College Florin Curta, University of Florida Elizabeth Freeman, University of Tasmania Yitzhak Hen, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Lauren Kassell, Pembroke College, Cambridge David Lines, University of Warwick Cary Nederman, Texas A&M University Teofilo Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 14

The Presence of Medieval English Literature Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks by

Alan J. Fletcher

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fletcher, Alan J. (Alan John) The presence of medieval English literature : studies at the interface of history, author, and text in a selection of Middle English literary landmarks. -- (Cursor mundi ; v. 14) 1. English literature--Middle English, 1100-1500--History and criticism--Theory, etc. 2. Canon (Literature)--History--To 1500. 3. Presence in literature. 4. Society in literature. 5. Literature and society--England--History--To 1500. I. Title II. Series 820.9'355'0902-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503536804

© 2012, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2012/0095/113 ISBN: 978-2-503-53680-4 Printed on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated with affection and gratitude to the many students I have taught at University College Dublin.

Contents

Preface ix Chapter 1. Presences

1

Chapter 2. The Owl and the Nightingale: The Interpretative Stakes of Time, Place, and Author

19

Chapter 3. Sir Orfeo: The ‘Taken’ Discourses of Order and Intelligibility

51

Chapter 4. Pearl: The Limits of History

89

Chapter 5. Piers Plowman: The Essential (Ephemeral) Project

115

Chapter 6. The Canterbury Tales and Some Other Chaucerian Compositions: The Pursuit of Heresy and Dangerous Textual Liaisons

143

Chapter 7. Morte Darthur: The Endgame of Authority

213

Chapter 8. Location, Location, Location

259

Bibliography 269 Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

295

Preface

I

acknowledge with thanks the permissions of editors of those periodicals in which some of the content of this book appeared in an earlier form. Part of Chapter 2 first appeared as ‘The Genesis of The Owl and the Nightingale: A New Hypothesis’, Chaucer Review, 33 (1999), 1–19, while material appearing in Chapters 3 and 6 first appeared respectively as ‘Sir Orfeo and the Flight from the Enchanters’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 141–78, and as ‘Chaucer the Heretic’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 53–121. Chapter  4 is based on material first appearing as ‘The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland: Textual Revision as Ethical Process in Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 15 (2002), 61–84. All have been revised, updated, and rewritten for present purposes.

Chapter 1

Presences

‘If you awaken the consciousness of people, if you allow them to feel the presence of other forces around them, if you make them aware of their past, the past of their country, the past of their area, if you convince them of the ethics of the past times, and if you convince them of the persistence of past times, that in itself is probably enough for any writer to do.’ Peter Ackroyd1

T

he traces of our medieval past are present all around us, though not always in self-evident ways.2 Perhaps most obviously, those traces register in material culture, where a striking architectural legacy continues to make its presence felt. Far less obviously, those traces are imprinted in many of the words used daily and taken for granted, yet which carry a stain of medieval history that only philological elucidation can now bring to light. In yet other walks of our lives, the presence of the medieval comes cooked for consumption on a menu of options that ranges from theme-park presentations and virtual realities, where a medieval past is confected for the sake of commercial entertainment, to the heritage business, where the aim, if again commercially driven and by no means devoid of interactive thrills, is to make the medieval past present in ways that try to adhere to the historical accuracy of the information presented and to aspire to authenticity in the nature of the experience purveyed. The traces of our past whose presence this book seeks to investigate are literary. They have been left by six different authors, three known, three anonymous, whose writing has been accorded a privileged place in the modern canon of medieval English literature. The genres and narratives in which they deal have ranked among some of the most productive for modern industries of the past of the kind earlier mentioned, and have helped provide them with much of 1  2 

Quoted in Vianu, ‘Interviewing Peter Ackroyd’, p. 69. This claim applies most comprehensively, of course, to European readers of this book.

Chapter 1

2

the staple that they work with. They are the kinds of text that hold out to our age the prospect of what it considers desirable commodities, offering to stock present-day imaginations with tales of colourful characters on a Canterbury pilgrimage, for example, or inspiring celluloid fantasies of chivalrous knights and fair ladies who lived in heady days of high romance for whose consumption little or no imagination is required. To facilitate broad access, translations into modern English of the original literature in which much of this staple was first found are undertaken frequently, often by those same academic medievalists whose professional calling is to strive to ‘get the past right’. Their translations find their way onto the shelves of heritage centres as much as onto those of campus bookshops catering to university reading lists. Indeed, even when in chaster moments it fights for its honour against consumerist medievalism, rarely in practice does academe altogether elude such medievalism’s reach. The translations just mentioned, for example, act as a bridge over which a two-way traffic passes back and forth: while bringing some of the work of academe palatably before a wider, non-specialist audience, they also permit the expectations of that audience to cross back over and touch the work of academe, determining in some degree what that work seeks to do. These opening reflections on how the medieval continues to be present to us now, on the values with which our modern culture tends to overwrite it, and on the power its afterlife exerts, are relevant to a book operating under a title such as this one has chosen, for they help locate its project within the current scheme of things. It is a book that makes no pretence to stand wholly outside that scheme nor, indeed, outside the industries of the past; on the contrary, it is thoroughly implicated in them. To begin with, it must confess that, were it not for a certain marketing of medieval English literature already at work in academe during the period in which its author first read the core canonical texts, a period with its own particular estimate of what the value of those texts was and why they should be considered worthy of belonging to a core, it might never have been written.3 That academe of a generation ago similarly felt itself obliged, as academe still does, perhaps now even more so, to deliver the medieval English literature on its syllabus in tasty, bite-sized chunks calculated as much to whet undergraduate 3 

That marketing (in the early 1970s) was already itself partly driven by still earlier opinions about what medieval texts modern readers would most profit from being introduced to. Elements of a medieval literary canon in the modern period had formed at least by 1921, when Sisam, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, was first published, an anthology with a remarkably resilient shelflife. Equally resilient in anthologies that have since superseded Sisam’s has been the repetition of certain of Sisam’s core texts (for example, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, and Piers Plowman, each of which will also be treated in the present book).

Presences

3

appetites as to challenge them. Even the category ‘Medieval English Literature’ that supplies part of this book’s title, although it has been around long enough to have come to seem entirely natural, must own itself merely the outcome of a packaging strategy. After all, the two-hundred-year or more period in which the texts examined in this book were written did not periodize itself as ‘medieval’, nor did it normally esteem and classify ‘literature’ in terms of some of the qualities often invoked today. The ‘Medieval English Literature’ of the very title, then, throws a post-medieval cordon of convenience around the chosen objects of this book’s concern and promises a certain potential palatability to present-day tastes. To put it simply, what will be dealt with here, from the modern reader’s (and publisher’s) perspective, is on the face of it likely to seem a pleasingly safe bet.4 Yet, while the book admits that some of the chief considerations behind even so basic a matter as its selection of texts are driven by thoroughly modern and bankable conceptions of the presence of medieval English literature and what its current market value may be, it must simultaneously find the means to disavow those considerations and to parry their claims upon our attention. For its quest for presences will explore ways that incidentally deliver the canonically celebrated texts under review from some of those controlling senses in which they are rendered present to us now. Even as the book acknowledges that something as fundamental as its text selection has already been influenced by modern prejudices about what constitutes worthwhile medieval reading matter (prejudices forged, as previously noted, both in the academic and popular spheres and in the powerful symbiosis that exists between them), it will seek to make its canonically privileged texts appear richer and stranger than they may hitherto have done. By that same measure, it is hoped, it will make them interesting in unexpected ways. In short, the book will be concerned to reconnect with certain lost presences that it will argue the various texts discussed here once had, aiming to render a group of familiar medieval works in verse and prose a little less familiar by restoring them to their moment in ways that allow aspects of their former presence to live again. As a result, these resurrected presences will challenge how those works are currently felt to be present to us today. 4 

In the moment that Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (pp. 82–110) goes against the grain by placing the Orrmulum on the critical map, that text, a sample of which was included in the first edition in 2000 of Elaine Treharne, Old and Middle English: An Anthology, finds itself dropped from the second edition in 2004 (Treharne, Old and Middle English, c. 890– c. 1400). Whatever interest Cannon’s lone critical voice seeks to persuade us is to be found in the Orrmulum seems unequal to preventing its recent deselection from the canon implicitly present in Treharne’s influential anthology. The demands of the market are with us always.

Chapter 1

4

The book will chiefly pursue two aims that might broadly be characterized as ‘holistic’, and which will also generate a centre of gravity around which all the individual chapters will orbit. First, the book will try to understand how each text under review may have been felt to be present to the society in which it was originally conceived; and second, it will try to understand how that society was present within each text.5 These two questions — the presence of a text to its own age and the presence of that age within it — though related, are not identical. Between them, however, they help access and plot the contours of vanished historical landscapes in which texts become available for inspection not merely for their own sake, but as cultural landmarks that actively constituted part of those landscapes and that afforded vantage points from which the landscapes themselves could be viewed and appreciated. In other words, texts thus interrogated become considerable not for any self-validating display of ‘literary merit’, for their possession, for example, of those old, belleletristic values that even today continue to influence critical taste and outlook,6 but because the holistic understanding of those texts, and of what they may be invited by the procedures adopted in this book to disclose, only exists relationally, in lines of force flowing between them, their authors, and their authors’ ambient culture. This idea of relation forms one of the book’s basic premises, therefore, and its objects of study are deemed interesting in terms of the sets of relations that they can be perceived to have contracted in any of these cultural directions.7 Indeed, the attempt to hold these various directions of relation in mind should introduce us to new ways into the presence of the medieval that await exploration. Because they cannot be accessed without effort, these ways may well prove demanding to follow; this book is not an elementary guide to its subject. However, effort will be rewarded not only by access to new presences, but also by our weaning from the kind of regard for early texts that simply turns them into present presences, vain mirrors that merely flatter our own likeness, or convenience foods that pander to an unadventurous appetite for reassuringly familiar flavours.8 Consequently, the 5 

Compare Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 4–5. In this regard I am in full accord with the second point of the manifesto outlined by Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, p. xv. 7  My emphasis on relation is comparable to the idea of the affiliated text discussed by Edward Said, the text in relation to its world and its history; see Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 174–77. 8  This book therefore implicitly sets its face against some recently announced projects that abandon all attempts to reinstate early texts in their historical moment on the basis that, since such attempts are never fully achievable, they are therefore not even worth attempting. 6 

Presences

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book will try to adhere to its two cardinal aims even while it buys into a canon of medieval English literature which is itself, as earlier observed, largely a function of modern taste, preoccupation, and pedagogical expedience — all of these things, to be sure, being historically contingent matters of fashion, no matter how durable some of that fashion has proved, and is likely to continue to prove, to be.9

‘A View from a Hill’ The question then arises about what the most fitting heuristic methods for developing the sort of understanding of presence advocated in this book may be, an understanding that has been stated to emerge only relationally. How and where are those relations that traverse the landmark texts to be discerned? A cautionary tale seems an appropriate preliminary before giving an answer. In one of M. R. James’s short stories, ‘A View from a Hill’, that early twentiethcentury medievalist and ghost-story writer pictured the endeavour to get a clear sight of the past as a darkly necromantic act. Dead men’s bones were decocted by the villain of the piece into an evil syrup that, once infused into pairs of field glasses, allowed anyone looking through them to see former sights as the medieval dead had once been able to see them. The desire to see through dead men’s eyes might also be said to be an important engine of this book, and in the court of final arbitration, the scholarly necromancy practised here might well be fearful of arraignment. For it is a necromancy, and in absolute terms, the commonly heard postmodern claim that the past is that which is not available opposes its necromantic overreaching with an unanswerable case. This book, however, is content to settle for the less than absolute. It clings contumaciously to its dark art, and while the consequences of practicing that must stand trial in scholarly tribunals, the book persists in believing that former landscapes are there for the glimpsing, however partially it may have succeeded in exposing them to view.10 Or to apply to the heuristic method adopted here a different bodily 9  It goes without saying that the fashion for reading Chaucer, for example, contrasted to that for reading some of the rest, has been a perennial one. 10  And any success in this respect is necessarily rendered partial when the question of the existence of multiple, variant copies of a text is introduced. Which version of a text are we speaking about and trying to assess? In the case of Sir Orfeo, for example (see Chapter 3 below), there are three extant manuscript witnesses, one of which in particular registers extensive substantive variation against the other two. The ensuing discussions confess and recongize that they are based on privileged textual versions — those estimated by modern editorial scholarship to come closest to the readings of the authorial originals. In the best of all possible worlds

6

Chapter 1

sense metaphor based on Carolyn Dinshaw’s suggestive trope: the present may somehow be guided to touch the past across time, and perhaps be touched by the past in return.11 The book’s relative success in its aims will, of course, be for others to estimate. But before any ‘seeing’ or ‘touching’ can happen that can hope to begin to consider itself unblinkered or unbound, the necessary first requirement will always be information, information that provides the raw material for allowing us to start discerning what the shaping yet shifting master discourses of two hundred years or more of medieval English culture were and where they make their presence felt, and against or within which the texts under review must be situated. Information is the essential prerequisite for helping to install us in the position from which we can hope to begin perceiving our canonical texts relationally, and it is something of which there can never be enough, especially when the method we are adopting often asks us paradoxically to look away from our object of study in order to perceive it more clearly. (Since skill and self-awareness are required in knowing how to apply this information, it can be taken for granted that the critic of late medieval texts envisioned in this book should be prepared to consider it from theoretically astute perspectives, but not that s/he should necessarily feel constrained always to look from the same perspective: different sorts of critical lens seem prudent when the texts under review encode between them not one but a series of medieval world views that exist sporadically and discontinuously across the various social classes of more than two centuries.)12 Further, the object of study may need to be tilted at fresh angles to this desired information so that the relations predicated of it in theory might be seen to emerge in empirically plausible ways. The information required will fall into different discursive categories. Since all of it is historical, some may have been effaced by the passing of time. This is an obstacle very likely to impede any attempt to assess signs inherited from a culture most of which has disappeared, signs that may therefore be said to be in decay since the networks in which they were originally created, which they in turn helped to sustain and in which historically they once were more meaningful, are no longer present. It may be that in earlier times the information that scholars (although not the most practicable of ones), some attempt would also need to be made to reckon with the different histories that the sheer fact of textual variation may itself imply. 11  Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 38–40. 12  The sole proviso is that the critical lens adopted should respect history; see the final chapter of this book for further reflection on this principle.

Presences

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now have to ‘dig deep’ for, in Michel Foucault’s phrase, was common knowledge.13 Alternatively, the information may not have been common knowledge at all, but have existed as a surplus even beyond the author’s ken, for the author’s product can disclose more about its culture than its author actually knows, and to that extent is more interesting than its author. While in this book authors matter very much and will be taken seriously, they nevertheless do not matter as final arbiters of the fuller significance of what they have written, since such authority is beyond them, and certainly, they do not matter for the sake of any authorial ‘genius’ that they might be thought to have possessed and that, as Roland Barthes seminally put it, might incline a readership today to bow down in worship at the altar of the author-god.14 If something of their authorial presence returns to our present-day awareness in the course of reading this book, it will return in the sense that this book pursues, that is, as a constituent of a network of relations in which works are situated, but not for its own sake nor as an end in itself.

The Landmarks Since the modern canon of medieval English literature is of far greater compass than this book could possibly have scope for, and since this canon also continually undergoes modest realignments as hitherto peripheral texts are being rehabilitated for incorporation in it, a sample has been taken of authors and their works that would generally be agreed to have achieved central canonical status, and that also offer challenging case studies for some of the different ways in which we might nevertheless bracket the claims of modern canonicity even as we acknowledge them and as we try to think ourselves back into the presence of these landmarks of medieval English literature, there to see them in a new light. The earliest canonical specimen is the debate (or altercacio, as one of its manuscripts calls it) of The Owl and the Nightingale, a poem that has been widely praised for its pre-Chaucerian sophistication and for the way it epitomizes a dialectical inconclusiveness of the sort that came to interest Chaucer in his own bird poem The Parliament of Fowls,15 yet which perhaps of all the texts discussed in this book focuses most 13 

Foucault, ‘De l’amitié comme mode de vie’, pp. 167. Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, pp. 61–67 (this essay, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, originally appeared in 1968). 15  For example, Minnis, with Scattergood and Smith, The Shorter Poems, pp. 290–91. But placing The Owl and the Nightingale, or indeed any text, in such transhistorical relation simply serves traditional literary history (which in turn may go on to abet the old estimations of what 14 

8

Chapter 1

acutely the problem of information deficit and the collateral damage that that may inflict upon our ability to think of a text relationally. Thus Chapter 2 will prove in large part an exercise in literary archaeology, an unearthing of things deemed needful to know; it practises a variety of excavation that attempts to retrieve and then reassemble a series of cultural fragments and to contemplate the original social function of the artefact that can be reconstructed from them. Once this reconstruction of The Owl and the Nightingale is completed and offered for inspection, the text emerges looking somewhat different than hitherto; certainly, it will be seen to be less important for any supposed pre-Chaucerian sophistication than for the nature of its sophisticated presence to its own time. While it may be appropriate to think of this poem as having been present to that time primarily as entertainment, under dissection, the anatomy of entertainment seldom proves a simple matter. This is equally true in the case of The Owl and the Nightingale, where a condition of the pleasure of its consumption may have been a raised awareness of the constructedness — and hence potential arbitrariness — of certain of the key cultural assumptions that it manipulates and that were current in the society that received it. Thus the contemporary cultural consequence of its bird debate may have been less parochial and ephemeral than the immediate narrative context in which the debate unfolds — the corner of some country field in summer — may at first blush seem to suggest; on the contrary, the debate enacted in the text presumes, or at least encourages, a capacity for reflection not simply upon its contested topics but upon the processes of their contestation that is anything but provincial and hidebound. Hence it will be argued that the presence of this poem to its age was that of an entertainment made effervescent precisely because, in having cultivated a certain comic intellectual distance between itself and its inherited cultural materials, it opened itself to the possibility of absorbing the energy of an incipient, radical scepticism about those materials. This is what the poem will be argued to have achieved, irrespective of any capacity in its author for consciously conceiving the cultural work that his writing was able to effect quite in such terms. From the radical, but essentially jovial, scepticism of The Owl and the Night­ in­gale’s bird debate, we turn in Chapter 3 to another landmark text in the medi­ eval English literary canon, the poem of Sir Orfeo, in an attempt to map its own peculiar presence. Indeed, a potential for radical emancipation from the stabilizing truth claims of some of the master discourses of Sir Orfeo’s ambient culture is also something that this chapter will seek to establish. Written perhaps a little makes literature ‘count’). Such is not the interest of the present book.

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later than The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Orfeo, another text which, again like The Owl and the Nightingale, has been oriented in relation to Chaucer in that its earliest extant version appears in a manuscript whose contents some have supposed Chaucer actually knew, is nevertheless not customarily viewed in The Owl and the Nightingale’s company, chiefly because it is not a debate but the offspring of an entirely different literary genre, romance. Like The Owl and the Nightingale, however, an important cultural effect of the presence of Sir Orfeo would have arisen from the terms in which it was positioned relative to various of the truth claims available to the society of its audience, for it too, however momentarily, allows a certain distance and detachment to grow between some of those claims that, in the real world outside the text of the poem, provided medieval minds with coherent existential frames of reference. Alienating insanity is dimensioned in this romance in more subtle guises than its most obviously iconic one, the figure of the mad, self-mutilating woman thrust upon the audience’s attention soon after its narrative has started. Sir Orfeo’s romantic but uncanny otherworldliness, it will be argued, was achieved in large part through an absorption, and then a blurring, of discourses significant to the lives of those who read it or heard it recited. Like The Owl and the Nightingale, it too is likely to have been consumed and experienced as entertainment, but this time one far less euphoric and indeed potentially chilling. The presence of both these early texts to their age may thus be thought of as having been a questioning presence, though in both cases the questioning was inflected very differently; the presence of the first was quizzical, and that of the second, coldly interrogative, without the least presupposition that its interrogations might hope to succeed in eliciting any response that would be found adequate in standard sets of terms. Instead, its interrogations clear a space in which a new, alternative awareness finds room to develop of where dependable cultural capital and security may be thought to lie. Moving forward in time from these two earlier works to the second half of the fourteenth century, the book next visits three prominent contemporary members of the literary canon who formed a trio central to John Burrow’s vintage endeavour to identify a distinctive set of stylistic and thematic habits characteristic of a ‘Ricardian’ school of English literary writing: 16 the author of Pearl, who remains without a name despite strenuous attempts to settle one on him, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the last remaining a vast magnetic presence at the centre of present-day English literary academe’s industry of the past.

16 

Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, pp. 11–46, 93–129.

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Chapter 1

The fourth chapter, on Pearl, will contemplate one ‘View from a Hill’ that some recent critical discussion, in pursuing it own preoccupations, has risked occluding. Pearl will be situated in relation to a neglected province of medieval clerical culture and endeavour, first, by introducing and discussing a contemporary Latin analogue for some of Pearl’s central theological concerns, next, by locating those concerns in the wider discursive field that the analogue belongs to, and then finally, by estimating the results of the absorption of that field of reference into Pearl. Pearl will emerge in this chapter as focusing one of the key principles of this book outlined earlier, that the presence of the age within a text is not equatable with how a text may have been present to its age, although between them, both these varieties of presence help to map a text’s landmark position. Pearl will be seen to resist any easy assimilation to the agendas that accompany any of the various cultural materials that it incorporates, whether those materials be sociopolitical, as recent historicist approaches to Pearl have tended to stress, or theological, as similarly in the case of some theologically oriented approaches. Instead, Pearl will be presented as a work poised in an alternating relation either of cultural contestation or of acquiescence to the different fields and discourses that have supplied its substance. As a result, the unique articulation that it achieves causes it to bilocate as a work at once outside and inside its culture; moreover, through mixing contestation and acquiescence, that bilocation stands as a metonymic equivalent to the taut debate between the imperatives of the time-bound and the timeless realms with which the poem’s narrative matter is principally preoccupied. Yet, unless great critical care is taken, the extraordinary poise of Pearl in this regard is in danger of going unnoticed, and the poem’s unassuming but self-assured aloofness, not only from certain expectations inherent in its contemporary surrounding culture that it both courts and challenges, but also from the presumed effectiveness of some of the procedures that present-day critics have adopted for its exegesis, will fail to be appreciated. Whereas the first poem chosen from our canon of medieval English literature, The Owl and the Nightingale, laughed jovially at cultural materials with which it was at ease, and whereas the second, Sir Orfeo, threw the efficiency of some of its cultural materials off balance in order to make room in which alternatives of its own might evolve unencumbered, this third poem invites its culture to acknowledge the limits of some of its most treasured resources while still continuing to cherish those resources. Thus its invitation to what might be termed a cultural transfiguration, one that valued but yet transcended what it touched, could only proceed from an authoritative stance whose sheer self-confidence is likely to have commanded respect from anyone who came into its presence. Pearl unapologetically offers itself as a costly treasure that will variously accept, refuse, or manipulate as it will

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its culture’s dearest value systems. It therefore mounts an argument in action for seeing culture itself not as an inpenetrable given but as a process, one negotiable through a dialogue in which it dares to participate with an authoritative, nonnegotiable voice. Self-awareness, self-questioning, and tact are therefore repeatedly required of critics as they estimate the former presence of a medieval text and go about exploring the nature of its relation to the information recruited to help reach their interpretation. The case of Pearl in particular will provide an object lesson in how a text must always be given the chance to be heard as a partner in a relational dialogue with that information, rather than conscripted as a mere ventriloquism of it (a principle about which Mikhail Bakhtin has already commented so extensively and effectively).17 Necessarily, the parameters of a text’s interpretation are liable to alter in relation to the particular nature of the information recruited around it, but that does not entail any difficulty or imply unsettling arbitrariness or contradiction; it simply illustrates how appropriate it may be that textual appraisal should proceed as a cumulative, ramifying process, with no one ‘View from a Hill’ necessarily prevailing at the expense of another.18 Nevertheless, if appraisal has been conducted within the terms that this book considers creditworthy, its various ramifications ought not to prove impossibly at odds with each other. This does not mean that a text in its moment had a single, determinate presence; far from it. It does mean, however, that when receptions of that presence may be thought to have varied, those variations should themselves admit the likelihood of historical concordance. Or to put this in other words, each variation should technically be reconcilable with the other in a relation that an appeal to historical information and precedents may be found to support and help account for. Following the discussion of Pearl, Chapter 5 will consider William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a text, like Pearl, also driven by an Anselmian ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides querens intellectum) and one similarly concerned to put mankind in the way of transfiguring grace. Also like Pearl, Piers Plowman holds the prospect of being culturally authoritative dear. But in the means adopted to attain that end exists a profound difference between the two works. While Pearl takes the pose of authority for granted, braced as it is in extraordinarily tight prosodic geometries and buttressed with an emphatic formal closure which 17 

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Holquist. Compare the position of Barr, Socioliterary Practice, who finds that ‘socioliterary practice is simultaneously material and endlessly open to interpretation’ (p. 198, my emphasis). 18 

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implicitly invite us to think that it regarded its project as exemplary narrative to be a completed achievement, Piers Plowman, by contrast, is an open-ended workin-progress, existing over the course of its lifetime in some three or possibly four versions. The cultural authority that Piers Plowman yearns towards is approached via an entirely different, and exploratory, route: it is the route of textual mobility through time, and this partly of necessity because Piers Plowman is so much more engaged in tracking and responding to the flux of the temporal than was Pearl, the vanishing point of whose route lay beyond time-bound things. Piers Plowman is urgently dimensioned in contemporary social terms, whereas that dimension, though arguably present in Pearl, is there in a much more oblique and muted way.19 In Piers Plowman, narrative development itself, leave alone narrative content, dimensions unceasing socio-theological struggle, and hence narrative turbulence is this work’s ethical norm in a way in which in Pearl it would never be. Whereas the form of Pearl was fixed and crystaline, that of Piers Plowman is supply adaptive and organically responsive to change. These things have their ideological corollary: in Pearl, truth would be static and transcendent, while in Piers Plowman, it would be restlessly dynamic and immanent. Nevertheless, both invest the notion of authoritative truth with some seriousness, the one by presuming to speak on its behalf from the transfigured location that truth has authorized, the other by searching ceaselessly for a way into truth’s presence even among the bric-a-brac of routine, everyday existence. It seems that we can know and surmise rather more about the circumstances of William Langland than we can about those of the elusive Pearl-author, even though the sum total of that knowledge still remains relatively modest and not always unequivocal. Modern inquisitiveness about an author’s life and personality has squeezed from this tiny handful of details of biographical likelihood or certainty a biography, however shadowy, and the attempt has been abetted, to be sure, by Langland’s own self-imaging in his poem. Langland the man is present for many critics today as a listless, socially marginal figure who roams abroad through his society and yet always returns, obsessively, as it may seem, to one centripetal concern, his unending work as a ‘maker’. His biography, thus sketched, may certainly appeal to inherited romantic fancies about the lot of the alienated literary author that our time still hankers after, despite the best efforts of postmodernism to kill the author off. Yet, whatever the truth of that, were the truth even knowable, the intent of Chapter 5 will be to move beyond the modern 19 

For further working out of the Anselmian dictum in relation to Langland, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 215–32. For studies of Pearl that have chosen to explore its contemporary secular social dimension, see further in Chapter 4 below.

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reader’s (and the medieval author’s) positioning of the maker of the poem, and to conceive instead the restless drive behind Piers Plowman’s composition less as the product of some idiosyncratic personality than as Langland’s response to a compositional ethic at large in his time but of which we have now lost sight, partly because it was observable more in action than stated conspicuously up front in some objective theoretical formulation. Once reunited in relation to this forgotten ethic, Langland’s reiterated ‘making’ may itself be seen as an ethical response through which its author, however marginal in some senses he may now appear to be, was in fact taken to the heart of contemporary late medieval imperatives dictating how the tools of salvation should be handled and honed. These salvific tools were essential but ephemeral, indispensable but endlessly provisional, and into this nexus of sacred ephemerality and provisionality Langland’s own craft as ‘maker’ can be fitted. That is not to say that Langland’s handling of those tools would not have passed off without some enduring affective consequence for himself, some personal emotional correlate to his ethical poetic intervention; quite possibly there was one, since affectivity is often sustained by, as it may also sustain, ethical practice, and the fourteenth century provides ample other evidence of that particular loop.20 But the exact affective consequence of his own work on Langland himself must forever remain a surmise; more interestingly demonstrable is his ethical fellow-feeling with a parallel compositional practice of his time, and what that practice was it will be the task of Chapter 5 to elucidate. In doing so, it will also illustrate some new ways in which to rethink Langland’s presence to his time, as well as the presence of Langland’s time within his ‘making’. It seems appropriate that the sixth chapter, the longest in a book devoted to medieval English literary landmarks, should be concerned with the biggest wheel in the academic (and popular) industry of medieval English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer. Outside the Pearl-author, Chaucer is the one writer considered in these pages whose oeuvre is known to comprise a number of discrete works (Langland is disqualified because his three or possibly four Piers Plowman versions essentially play variations on the same fundamental themes). Consequently, Chaucer’s texts afford between them peculiarly multiple possibilities of presence, and for practicality’s sake some choice amongst these must necessarily be made. His preeminent work for us today is The Canterbury Tales, and hence in a book that deals with canonical landmarks, these are to the fore in this chapter. However, even these are ecclectic, and thus invite a corresponding range of different inter20 

Indeed, the one documented social consequence of Langland’s work that we know about was its sowing the seed for a rallying cry during the Peasants’ Revolt. Rallying cries, of course, mix the affective and the ethical in order to fire up social action.

14

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pretative approaches. In these circumstances, some economy must be practised: the chapter identifies a major contemporary discourse that allows us to revisit a single important aspect of the presence of The Canterbury Tales shared by some of Chaucer’s other less famous work, hence the comparatively wider utility of this discourse as we seek to position ourselves in the presence of this supremely canonical late medieval poet. The principal aspect of his former presence that the chapter seeks to resurrect is his literary relation to the discourse of religious radicalism and heresy, since the galvanizing force of this discourse stirred up such a quantity and range of cultural activity in late medieval England, literary work included, and with this activity important elements of Chaucer’s oeuvre can also be shown to connect (these incidentally helping further to establish him as being a less politically detached figure than has often been supposed).21 Exploration of the radical/heretical theme has the additional advantage of allowing a number of Chaucer’s works not usually associated to be corralled together, permitting us to see a relation emerging between them in the light of their joint participation in, and exploitation of, a common topical discourse. The chapter will move from the rather less well known poem An ABC, to the now increasingly studied Legend of Good Women, and then finally to the canonically central The Canterbury Tales, a selection of the latter claiming the lion’s share of the chapter’s attention. If some of Chaucer’s writing can be associated more closely than has been supposed with the tropes that dissenting religion, or in its most extreme manifestation, heresy, was making current in his day, it naturally follows that potential questions arise about his personal relation to this discourse, and to these questions the chapter also provides tentative answers. However, in keeping with what was stated earlier in this introduction, biographical access will remain a by-product, not a prime objective, of the chapter. For its investigation principally aims to restore the presence of the radical/heretical ferment in Chaucer’s writing in ways which, in accordance with a tenet of this book, should become the more persuasively legible in proportion to their weight of empirical historical demonstrability. Although the chapter will turn chiefly on the three aforementioned texts, its calculus will also include a codicological and linguistic factor. It will propose that Chaucer’s own Adam Scriveyn (pilloried in the famous poem that Chaucer wrote highlighting Adam’s scribal incompetence and whom recent research has claimed to be the London scrivener Adam Pynkhurst, copyist of the prestigious Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales),22 either had a hand also in 21  There has, of course, been in the last few years a growing critical momentum tending in this direction and with which the chapter coincides. 22  And who also worked on a number of other literary manuscripts, including an important

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the production of a manuscript containing an anthology of radical/heretical vernacular Wycliffite prose texts that has been overlooked, or that alternatively, parts of this anthology were copied by a member of Adam Pynkhurst’s scribal ‘school’.23 Thus two possibilities arise, of which even the less spectacular still remains interesting: if the scribe in question in the manuscript anthology was a ‘school’ member, then the copying of radical/heretical texts would seem to find a place within the scribal milieu that Pynkhurst inhabited; hence this milieu, that saw the copying of some of the major literary works of the late fourteenth century, would also now need to be seen as a possible context for the copying of some of that period’s radical/heretical vernacular theology. The other possibility, were the scribe in question indeed Pynkhurst, would entail a highly significant implication: the copying of texts opposed to the clerical establishment by a man whom Chaucer knew, and whom he engaged to copy some of his poetry, would bring Chaucer himself into a suggestive, if circumstantial, alignment with a body of writing in which the radical/heretical ferment of his poetry would stand parallelled in its most naked and unmediated form. Whichever way, one important aspect of the presence of The Canterbury Tales to their time would have located in the way some of them were ingesting materials that sailed close to the wind in matters of national controversy. Is there any sense in which this radical/heretical Chaucerian presence might be thought to resemble the presences earlier invoked for his other two late fourteenth-century contemporaries considered in this book, the Pearl-author and William Langland? While it may generally be agreed that the later Middle Ages, as James Simpson argues, ‘win admiration not for the values of coherence and unity, but rather for divided jurisdictions, unresolved juxtapositions, accretive bricolages, and the affirmation of human initiative’,24 and that these three (ostensibly very unlike) Ricardian writers may be thought to illustrate this pattern, their presence arguably brought with it a similar shared preoccupation, a preoccupation for which the discursive diaspora projected by Simpson may also to some extent and paradoxically be a unified figure. However, in some ways this preoccupation is perhaps most profitably pursued in connection with our final literary landmark, one which takes us far into the fifteenth century. Unlike all our previous texts, the object of study of the seventh chapter of this book is copy of the B-text of Piers Plowman; see Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’. 23  Details of the case are set out in Fletcher, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution’. For a critique of the case, see Horobin, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution’, and for a dismissal of this critique, Fletcher, ‘What Did Adam Pynkhurst (not) Write?’. 24  Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 560.

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the product of a known and very specific historical moment (c. 1469–70) and biographical circumstance (an author writing from prison), and these very facts help steady our focus on what its former presence to its age, and of the age within it, may have been. The chapter will aim to expose a peculiar slant in how the content of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur was presented, a slant also arguably apparent in plain sight in some of the marginalia of the Winchester Manuscript for which Malory himself may ultimately have been responsible. This slant can be read as inscribing Malory’s responsiveness to, and negotiation of, a group of concerns that had already stirred the earlier Ricardian authors and that were still continuing to be available as a common cultural capital in Malory’s time, if handled by him in his own characteristic way. He had acquired these concerns, either more or less consciously, and had made them part of his own mental furniture. Indeed, the aetiology of a gentleman prisoner who, as it transpired, was not to live much longer after the completion of his work, suggests the acquisition of those concerns would have been a predictable circumstance.25 A recursive set of tropes and formulas will be traced throughout the Morte Darthur with common roots in a preoccupation with authority, with where authority may be thought to be found and whether, upon the finding, it proves a thing substantial enough to rely upon. The chapter will also argue that a side-effect of Malory’s peculiar encoding of the nature of authority was the erection of the romance genre itself as a funeral monument, one implicitly raised at once to its author in so far as it commemorated the passing of aspirations imputed to the kind of society to which, as a knight, he likewise belonged. Authority in the Morte Darthur, then, will be construed as a propelling force within the narrative that, in order to retain meaning and potency, nevertheless called for its own extinction as the price of that retention; somewhat like the dynamic that Stanley Fish identified within the poetry of George Herbert in a later age, Malorian authority was only enabled to the extent that it became a self-consuming event.26 The landmarks of the canon of medieval English literature visited in these chapters might be thought of as eminences. From their height, the changing landscapes that they survey, and amongst whose contours they may reciprocally be rendered more intelligible, will show how eventful the ‘View from a Hill’ can be once the twin presences pursued in this book are attended to. The variety that the views from these eminences disclose will also expose any facile unitary conception 25  His death shortly after completion of the Morte Darthur applies whichever of the two chief Malory candidates may prove to be the work’s actual author; see further on this in Chapter 7 below. 26  Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, pp. 156–223.

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of ‘medieval English literature’ for what it is, a mirage that certain literary histories have sometimes been at risk of promoting.27 The views are offered to readers in chapters that can either stand alone or, as I prefer to hope, be read together as an elaborated set of illustrations of some of the different ways in which to apply the central paradoxical procedural principle that connects them all: namely, that the ostensible object of their study is most fully perceived by also looking away from that object and by seeking to establish in which alternative directions one can most helpfully look in order to understand the object’s location; by seeking to comprehend where some of the neglected directions of the object’s cultural relations may lie; and by attempting to offset the object’s presence to us now, the place from which we necessarily start, with an enhanced sense of what its former presence, through empirically and theoretically informed investigation, may be thought to have been. It is also by providing for that latter category of former presence that anyone interested in imagining the early cultural work that these texts are likely to have done will best be served. Between them they exhibit a wide range of types of literary engagement with English culture as that was evolving within an approximately two-hundred-year period. The range will only be appreciated once all the chapters are read, but for the convenience of readers whose interests narrowly concern specific canonical landmarks, that range is summarized, along with the book’s general procedures, in an epilogue in Chapter 8. Readers in the early days of their acquaintance with these texts may find the chapters ahead challenging, because they invite journeys down paths that elementary introductions do not usually beckon towards. The book makes no apologies, however, for any of the challenges it poses in its endeavour to carry readers who have become intrigued by these canonical literary landmarks beyond their comfort zones of elementary familiarity. Similarly, readers of longer acquaintance may find challenges of a different order. For them, if they accept the various calls to contemplate fresh relations between their well loved texts and the historical moment in which those texts were conceived and which they therefore in one sense or another reciprocally address, they may find things that will surprise them. It is hoped that even seasoned readers of the medieval English literary canon will enjoy responding to the book’s invitation to enter presences where all is strange, yet nothing new.

27 

And against which Simpson’s argument (see n. 24 above) stands as a corrective antidote. Yet, the epilogue to this book will suggest how most, perhaps even all, of the canonical texts studied here can be thought either consciously or unconsciously alive to the same fundamental question: how in vernacular literary inventions may cultural authority be aspired to or negotiated?

Chapter 2

The Owl and the Nightingale: The Interpretative Stakes of Time, Place, and Author

T

he Owl and the Nightingale, a poem that flags itself as a debate, auto­matically by that circumstance courts an association with an important dynamic at work in medieval English, indeed European, culture. This landmark poem thus offers itself to our inspection very much as one in which the ferment of this dynamic is to be discerned.1 Medieval English society was highly ‘debate conscious’: debates had real-time as well as literary textual dimensions, and each dimension found reciprocal support in the practice and presence of the other. Thus debates might be staged in a host of practical institutional settings — in schoolrooms, courts of law, manorial households, theology faculties, or parlours of bishops, for example — or encountered exclusively on parchment in more readerly ways. The Owl and the Nightingale, long agreed by critics to stand at the forefront of extant medieval debate poems in English, promises some of the greatest rewards to a presentday reader interested in observing how one of late medieval society’s driving mechanisms might be called upon to operate in literary terms. However, it cannot do so without first confronting that reader with a commensurate set of challenges. It is some of these that this chapter hopes to rise to as it seeks to install a new sense in our critical consciousness not only of how The Owl and the Nightingale’s age was present within it, but also of what the presence of it to its age may have been.

1 

For a more general study of debates in Middle English, see Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution.

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Socially Productive Binaries From the social point of view, the important thing about any debate, whether today or in times gone by, may paradoxically locate less in the disputed issues at stake and any outcome in favour of one disputant over another than in the communal bonding that the debate fosters. Once the disputants settle into the binary positions in which both agree to differ, they begin to shape identities for themselves simply in terms of their opposition: ‘I am an Owl because I stand for a, b, and c’, or ‘I am a Nightingale because I on the other hand stand for d, e, and f ’. At a deeper level, therefore, contestation may have a consolidating function in the way in which it actually binds the disputants together in identities mutually affirmed precisely because they are contrary; contraries in these circumstances become interdependent. Binary thinking, a thought process dramatized in and propelling The Owl and the Nightingale, is perennial, for binaries now, as in former times, bond those who subscribe to them in a shared social moment, irrespective of how antithetical individual experiences of that moment may be. From the point of view of that shared social moment, each ostensible antithesis simply offers its particular perspective on how the content of that moment can be regarded, and helps establish the alternative terms and parameters within which its content is available for inspection. Sometimes, the alternatives proposed in a debate can even seem to fold back into each other (and in The Owl and the Nightingale there are passages when this, too, appears to happen, when the Owl seems to adopt positions that sound more typical of what the Nightingale might be expected to declare, and when the Nightingale behaves similarly). If and whenever such a coalescence of positions occurs, it seems clearer than ever that what finally emerges as mattering is the cohesion that the binary has generated. Each apparent polar term becomes a twin partner in one communal, if variously figurable, event. On these occasions, differences start appearing more superficial than significant, as the centre of interest shifts to the unity that unresolved opposition is paradoxically able to create. There is, of course, a tension here, for debates normally aim to get somewhere, to shut down the issues in dispute by closing upon a determinable truth. In the later medieval period, notwithstanding occasional expressions of scepticism about their effectiveness, debates were generally prized as a heuristic procedure geared precisely to this end.2 Yet The Owl and the Nightingale, supremely aware of the constructed nature of the debate medium in which truth was notionally 2 

Brown, Contrary Things, p. 40. Here she is discussing the opinion of John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon on the excesses and limitations of dialectic.

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21

accessible, comes close to presenting truth itself equally as a construct rather than an absolute that may be thought to exist ‘out there’. Further, it seems to ask, and precisely via the debate medium through which truth was traditionally thought to be accessible, ‘Who’s worried about getting at truth when there’s dialectic?’. The text could therefore be said to stage a carnival celebration of a culturally central heuristic practice dethroned, however temporarily, by a parodic rhetorical counterfeit. The inversion releases potent social force, one consequence of which is the highlighting of the constructed nature of personal and social experience. The poem seems to release a sense of a community busily and joyously exploring positions less for the positions’ sake than for the sake of forging interchangeable identities for itself which it can occupy without commitment and in whose interchangeability it can survive and even thrive; here, indeterminacy is perceived as a source of strength rather than weakness. Exactly how each bird stood for a polar endpoint of a socially, as well as textually, productive binary remains, then, to be seen as this chapter develops; likewise, how each sparked off the other to create between them a potent social force field which, by playing a polyphony of genres in the ears of the members of its audience, would have had a consciousness-raising effect upon them. This was a poem with the capacity to bring its audience to perceive the boundaries and dimensions of their cultural awareness.

The Debate(d) Poem The intellectual and literary feat that The Owl and the Nightingale achieves explains why it should have secured a place in the modern canon of medieval English literature, although there is scope to understand the nature of that feat somewhat better than we currently do. In the poem, two birds, an Owl and a Nightingale, battle it out over the question of who sings the best, while also pulling in all sorts of other topical issues as their debate develops. The plan is that Master Nicholas of Guildford, whom both birds agree is so brilliant and impartial that he makes an ideal judge, will be appealed to for a verdict when the debate is over. No verdict, though, is ever returned; after over 1700 lines of heated argument, another bird, the Wren, intervenes and advises the disputants to fly off as earlier agreed to Portesham in Dorset where Master Nicholas lives to put their case before him in the hope of receiving his definitive judgement. At this point the text ends as briskly as it began. Although as it unfolds The Owl and the Nightingale will strike up all sorts of local genre resonances — I spoke of a genre polyphony — its overarching and

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structuring generic category, as stated at the outset of this chapter, is dialectic or debate. In one of the two manuscripts in which the poem survives, a Latin heading preempts the reader’s expectations of what may lie ahead: Incipit altercacio inter filomenam et bubonem (‘Here begins the debate between the Nightingale and the Owl’).3 Whether this heading was editorial or authorial is unimportant. It broadly advertizes the genre to which the poem was early perceived to belong, and provides an initial orientation: it was an altercacio, a common term designating ‘debate’ whether as a literary textual or actual social practice. Whichever bird early audiences inclined towards when the debate was over, it seems ironically appropriate that the avian dispute should also have set presentday critics at odds, and not only about the issues debated and about whether any judgement between the birds is even possible. Today, it has also generated argument about its original historical circumstances, and questions about who wrote it, for whom, where and when remain unsettled. Yet current critical discussion, losing confidence that these questions are soluble, has backed off from them and preferred instead to focus on various interpretive matters that have been imagined to need less contextual information for their determination. But by that same measure, the value of this criticism is limited, for in several important respects it has abandoned the chance of reconnecting the poem with what this book claims as its key concern, the poem’s presence to its age and the presence of the age within the poem. The historical questions matter, and are not mere academic trifles. Moreover, even many of the interpretive issues in which critics have latterly sought refuge cannot be properly deliberated unless the poem’s historical questions are engaged with. In order, therefore, to understand better its cultural work and positioning, historical questions about author, audience, time and place persist if we are determined to treat our text to the most ambitious retrospective affordable. The approach to The Owl and the Nightingale adopted here, then, which is wedded to the belief that an optimal understanding of it textually accompanies an understanding of it socially, could be pictured in archæological terms. We have in front of us, let us say, various shards of a broken pot. That it was a culturally significant pot is clear because one of the shards, the literary one of the poem itself, is so sophisticated and highly wrought. But how are all the pieces to be assembled so that the proportion and shape of the whole artefact can be seen aright? Restoring this totality will help recuperate an understanding of exactly how this notional pot served its society. Did it dispense wine, ale, milk or water? The social 3 

The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. by Cartlidge, p. 2. All subsequent line references will be to this edition.

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situations of drinking each of these liquids, after all, were often likely to have been very different. Theoretically, there should be some fit between the literary shard and the various historical ones. Yet our sense of the patterns we think we see on the literary shard must not coerce our sense of the patterns we think we see on the historical ones, or vice-versa. Nevertheless, somehow the patterns must all join together. With due care, they ought to be cross-referenceable. The pot emergent in this chapter will, of course, be a hypothesis for debate in itself, but it should at least have hypothetical integrity. So the following discussion will avoid sheltering in the kind of narrow, literary discussion that risks occluding the poem from the cultural work and mechanisms with which its lively debate genre affiliates it. The task, then, will be to try to read the dialectical dynamic of The Owl and the Nightingale associationally within a particular cultural formation whose temporal and geographical situation we can now proceed to try to delimit. Although the information deficit cannot be fully repaired, it may be possible to go further than critics traditionally have.

When, Where, and Who? No one knows exactly when The Owl and the Nightingale was written, where, or by whom, though there has been no shortage of debate on all these questions — appropriately enough, given the contentiousness that is this poem’s driving force.4 Strictly speaking, the best that can be said for its date of composition is some time up to the terminus ad quem suggested by the palæography of its two extant manuscripts, MS Cotton Caligula A. ix (hereafter C) and MS Jesus College 29 (part II) (hereafter J). The handwriting of J had long been considered to date to the latter part of the thirteenth century, and that of C to the first half. Neil Ker modified this opinion, estimating that C equally belonged to the second half of the thirteenth century.5 He compared C with London, British Library, MS Royal 3 D. vi, dateable between 1283 and 1300, and Malcolm Parkes has also suggested a comparison of C with London, British Library, MS Additional 24686, dateable c. 1284.6 In declaring both manuscripts to be near contemporaries, Ker’s re­ 4  Indeed, Hume, The Owl and the Nightingale, argues that contentiousness is the prime topic of the poem (pp. 127–29). 5  The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile, intro. by Ker, p. ix. And a number of datable texts in J suggests that it was copied sometime in the last three decades of the thirteenth century, but before 1300. See Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’. 6  The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile, intro. by Ker, p. xvi, and Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas, p. 70.

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appraisal paved the way for a reconsideration of the composition date of The Owl and the Nightingale that had currently been finding favour, 1189–1216.7 Recent investigation by Neil Cartlidge has followed through the implications of Ker’s redating of C.8 By adding new weight to the view held by J. E. Wells that the history of the poem’s textual transmission is probably quite short, conceivably even as short, Cartlidge suggests, as a matter of months, he has persuasively argued that the theory that the poem was composed not long after the death of Henry III in 1272 has much to commend it.9 Therefore, the composition of The Owl and the Nightingale could have occurred not so very long before C and J were copied.10 But another, linguistic, piece of evidence should be factored in in support of this. There is a batch of words in The Owl and the Nightingale that the historical dictionaries first attest, or first attest in the sense that their context seems to require, here in the poem (for example, afoled, alegge, bataile, carter, dahet, faucun, huing, ipeint, kukeweld, plait, plaiding, stable). After The Owl and the Nightingale, the next dictionary attestations start clustering from c. 1290 onwards. Now, if The Owl and the Nightingale is to be dated between 1189 and 1216, this means that in these cases we must believe that no attestations of the words in question — and none seems particularly abstruse or exotic — were recorded for two, maybe three, generations; that is, that eighty or ninety years lay between their (supposedly early) appearance in The Owl and the Nightingale and the end of the thirteenth century when their attestations come thicker and faster. Believing this seems to require a greater act of faith than simply believing that the attestations in The Owl and the Nightingale are in fact near contemporaries with the next earliest ones that the dictionaries cite and which, as noted, start clustering from c. 1290. (The objection that the coverage of texts in English is less extensive in the thirteenth century, so making big gaps in the linguistic record likely, seems less consequential when the words in question, as observed, are not recherché.) In short, the balance of probabilities suggests that the lexis first noticeable in The Owl and the Nightingale is also that which other near-contemporary texts are beginning to register at about the same time and whose composition dates to late in the thirteenth century. Important interpretive consequences, excluded if we believe the earlier dating, automatically follow once we accept that the poem is a post-1272, pre-c. 1284 7  The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Stanley, p. 19 (Stanley’s edition was first published in 1960, three years before Ker’s redating). 8  Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’. 9  Wells, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale and MS Cotton’, p. 519. 10  Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, pp. 233–34.

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25

product; these will be considered later, but for the moment, it can broadly be observed that by the late thirteenth century times have changed and a different cultural formation than existed c. 1200 would now be supporting the text and its author. At the latter end of the century, rather different historical circumstances obtained and conditioned in their own unique way the horizons of response in the audiences receiving his poem. If the case for late thirteenth-century composition is strong, what also of the other questions? Where in England was the poem written, by whom, and of what local histories might its author have been cognizant? Its composition by an author trained to write in Dorset, Hampshire or Surrey, perhaps indeed in Guildford itself, was once thought likely on linguistic grounds.11 But a fresh investigation of this evidence, fortified by the latest work in Middle English dialectology, has determined that while this traditional view may indeed be correct, not enough is known to fix the poem’s language to these counties quite so firmly, leave alone to fix it to Guildford. In fact, solely on linguistic grounds, it could hale from ‘almost anywhere in Wessex, the Home Counties or the south-west Midlands’. 12 And as for this author’s identity, opinion has ranged as widely, between either the Nicholas of Guildford vaunted within the poem as supreme arbiter of the disputatious birds, or a friend or acquaintance of his, or a certain ‘Mayster Iohan […] of Guldeuorde’ whose name featured in a quatrain formerly found in J, or even some anonymous female author, perhaps the inmate of a religious house.13 To launch a new hypothesis on these interrelated questions of place and authorship, a hypothesis necessarily consistent with, and further supportive of, the later dating proposed for the poem, we may now turn to some evidence for the early readership of The Owl and the Nightingale that can be inferred from a 11 

Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, p. 234, says ‘probably a dialect of central southern England (Dorset, Hampshire or Surrey)’, a view modified in Cartlidge, ‘The Linguistic Evidence for the Provenance’. 12  Cartlidge, ‘The Linguistic Evidence for the Provenance’, p. 261. 13  The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Stanley, pp. 19–22, surveys earlier opinions on authorship and offers his own, which follows suit with some earlier critics and which I also share, that an acquaintance of the said Nicholas seems the most likely authorial candidate. My preference for this option is a necessary corollary to the argument that will be made in the course of this chapter and the reasons for it will become clear as the argument progresses. Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, inclines to the view that Nicholas was himself the author (p. 240, n. 6), a view still held, though gently qualified, in his subsequent article: Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, pp. 256–57 and 267–68, n. 56. The possibility of female authorship has been most notably championed by Barratt, ‘Flying in the Face of Tradition’. She has suggested as author a Benedictine nun of Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset.

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resemblance establishable between it and part of another, later, text — a resem­ blance so striking that it cannot be gainsaid.

The Early Readership of The Owl and the Nightingale What sort of early readership had The Owl and the Nightingale, and amongst whom were its socially productive binaries active? The former belief was that no information on this survived. This may no longer be true. Manuscripts C and J — it should be mentioned that both are poetic anthologies — have been said not only to show no sign of customization for any specific original readership or interest group, but also that no specific readership is inferrable from their contents, since these appeal to tastes ranging widely from the clerical to the secular; moreover, that not all clerical and secular tastes were necessarily mutually exclusive. Thus C and J may have suited ‘a friary, a convent, a cathedral chapter, a magnate’s court or the household of a country gentleman’.14 In principle, the poem may indeed have found a wide readership of the sort envisioned here, especially once it had left its author’s desk and begun travelling in anthologies which of their nature often cater to a wide range of tastes. The point about the permeability of reading interests across professional divides is an efficient one. Yet without denying this, the facts about the early readership of The Owl and the Nightingale come down to two whose broad consistency is worth bearing in mind: the first is that certainly one copy, and maybe two copies, of the poem also turned up in anthologies whose contents were strikingly similar to those of C and J and that had been kept in the library of a religious house of Premonstratensian canons in Titchfield, Hampshire, a fact to which we will return; and the second is that the only actual medieval reader of the poem for whom a plausible case can be made was a Dominican friar, and a famous one: this was the philosopher, theologian and preacher, Robert Holcot (d. 1349), who appears somehow to have encountered it in the early part of the fourteenth century and not far from where we may suppose it originated, maybe indeed in the very place of its origin. The evidence for Holcot’s acquaintance with the poem is as follows. On reading his Moralitates, one comes across the following passage: It is related that a natural hatred exists between nightingale and owl, so much so that when the nightingale sings sweetly at night, [the owl] tries to seize [her] as [her] prey and lays ambush for her stoutly. Chary of this, the nightingale enters a bramble or the densest thorns on a bush, and guards herself there against the owl’s snares.15 14  15 

Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 262. Holkot, In librum Sapientiæ regis Salomonis prælectiones ccxiii, p. 732: ‘Narratur, quod

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There can be little doubt but that the opening of Holcot’s moralitas bears a striking resemblance to the opening of The Owl and the Nightingale. From its outset, the Middle English poem emphasizes the animosity between the two birds (compare its ll. 3–10 with Holcot); specifies that song is the chief instigator of their antagonism (compare its ll. 11–12 with Holcot, and note how Holcot’s text is similarly to be read to imply that a causal connection exists between the nightingale’s sweet singing and the owl’s felonious intent);16 and presents the Nightingale as being well aware of the Owl’s disposition and hence expediently choosing to safeguard herself by perching in the middle of a bushy fastness (compare ll. 13–20 and 56–60 with Holcot). There can be only three principal ways in which to explain this resemblance: either Holcot actually knew The Owl and the Nightingale (the Moralitates were written after c. 1334 and before 1342, several years after the composition of the poem, whenever precisely that might prove to be);17 or he knew its congener, a text which may or may not have been in English;18 or he knew a source or tradition, inter philomenam et bubonem est naturale odium, in tantum, quod cum philomena in nocte cantat dulciter, nititur ipsam in praedam rapere, et ei fortiter insidiatur. Quod cauens philomela, rubum vel spinam densissimam in frutice intrat, et ibidem a bubonis insidijs conseruatur.’ The passage occurs in the twenty-ninth moralitas in this edition. Holcot goes on to moralize as follows: ‘the nightingale represents the devout, faithful soul, created to praise God through perpetual contemplation and watchful devotion. But the owl who lies hidden in dark places, that is, the devil, who inhabits the dark region of hell, lies in ambush for the soul that renders praise in this way. Lest the soul be seized by the devil, she enters a thorny bramble, that is, a life of harsh penance and one strewn with hardships.’ While the moral interpretation that Holcot fastened on the text is worth knowing, it by no means compels us to read The Owl and the Nightingale in similar terms. The poem, or its congener, has simply served Holcot as a textual mulch for his moralitas. It might be noted that this owl and nightingale motif seems to have been popular with Holcot. It is also found in some manuscripts of the work known as Convertimini, a collection of moralized tales and similitudes (see, for example, MS Royal 7 C. i, fol. 112v, col. b). Convertimini may be another of Holcot’s works. 16  This reading is supported by Holcot’s moralitas; its outline is given in n. 15 previously. 17  Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, p. 146. 18  Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, draws attention to the contrast in singing between owl and nightingale in the late thirteenth-century treatise on the French language by Walter de Bibbesworth: ‘Aloms ore iuer a boys, | Ou la russinole, the nithingale | Meuz chaunte ki houswan en sale houle’ (‘Now let’s go to play in the woods, where the nightingale, the nithingale, sings better than the owl, houle, in the hall’ (p. 127); also in Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth, ed. by Owen, p. 110). Yet this would still be no match for the details related in Holcot and in the poem. Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 264, n. 24, draws attention to the classification amongst manuscripts containing French texts of one of

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not necessarily in written, but perhaps in oral, form, with which The Owl and the Nightingale’s author had also been acquainted, or which its author had even brought into being. It seems impossible to decide finally between these three options, but two facts in combination may incline us towards the first, Holcot’s acquaintance with the actual poem, and away from the second two. Firstly, he ascribes no source to the passage, as he normally (though not invariably) does to his other Moralitates. This lack of ascription would be perfectly understandable were his source a vernacular text rather than a respectable Latin bestiary or the like, some work of established currency and academic pedigree to which reference, in the scholarly milieu in which Holcot customarily moved, could fittingly be made.19 At the same time, he uses the verb ‘Narratur’ (‘It is related’) of the way in which this source has communicated. Admittedly, the exact meaning of ‘related’ here might strictly be interpreted as wandering in a no-man’s-land between the oral and the written. Was his source ‘related’ on the page or ‘related’ by word of mouth? Yet when a verb as common as ‘Dicitur’ (‘It is said’) would have been as available to Holcot, as it was to his contemporaries, to refer to words actually uttered (for example, a medieval author retailing a story found in Bede is more likely to say that Beda narrat than Beda dicit the story in question), ‘Narratur’ in this context sounds as if it may have intended the written medium. And secondly, indeed perhaps more tellingly, the tradition of the animosity between owl and nightingale is not anywhere known in bird lore, so far as I am aware, outside the Middle English poem.20 To be sure, absence of evidence should not be mistaken as evidence of absence, but until such time as a congener or a common source or tradition may be identified which may explain this mutuality in both The Owl and the Nightingale and the Moralitates, their resemblance broaches possibilities, not least that of Holcot’s being the only known subsequent reference to the Middle the putative copies of The Owl and the Nightingale in the library of Titchfield Abbey (on which see further below). But he plausibly explains this on the grounds that the manuscript may simply have been classified after its first and longest item, an Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone. 19  This is not to imply, however, that Holcot was squeamish about using the vernacular. He allows it momentary space in other works (for example, in the Convertimini, on which see n. 15 above), and he depends crucially on English words to derive the requisite moralitas for an allegorized castle in one of the Moralitates that did not find its way into the published edition (see MS Arundel 384, fols 93r–94v). 20  Hume, The Owl and the Nightingale, pp. 16–17 and n. 4. Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’, p. 100, n. 14, observed that she had found an earlier association and contrast between an owl and a nightingale only in Walter Map’s ‘Epistle to Valerius’ (composed before September 1181). But the association and contrast there is not of the same order as that developed by the Middle English poem or by Holcot.

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English poem yet known, that are worth pursuing. But before following them up, the facts about the early readership of the poem can be summed up in a sentence: whatever about a possible secular readership of this poem, the one known about for certain was clerical.

Two (Bird) Characters in Search of an Author The evidence for an early clerical readership may have some circumstantial bearing on the question of the poem’s author, his professional circle and also the circle in which Nicholas of Guildford was chiefly known and in which the poem imagines him as deserving promotion. Let us for the sake of the present argument grant that Holcot knew The Owl and the Nightingale itself rather than some lookalike tradition. How and where might he have come to know it? Since texts travel, especially ones so readily port­ able in size as are the poem’s two extant manuscript witnesses, then it might easily have come to him. In which case, it could have done so from virtually any part of England. Conversely, he might have gone to where it was, or have visited the area close to, or overlapping, that in which it was composed and in which, at least in the earliest years of its existence, it is first likely to have circulated. Holcot, as earlier noted, was a Dominican, and it was the essence of his Order, as indeed of the mendicant Orders generally, to travel. What is known of his movements shows him to have travelled in the central Midlands (for a long period he was resident in Oxford), but also in the diocese of Salisbury, where in 1342 he was licensed to hear confessions.21 And 1342 marks the terminus ad quem for the composition of the Moralitates. In this diocese he would have been very close to the place of origin traditionally advanced for The Owl and the Nightingale, Guildford, Surrey, in the adjacent diocese of Winchester, and actually in the diocese in which the poem’s only other place-name, Portesham in Dorset, is located.22 At the very least, it can be said that at about the time when Holcot wrote his Moralitates, he was spending some time in an area not incompatible with that to which the original 21 

Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, p. 136. He may have been in Cambridge, and also attached for a while to the familia of Richard of Bury, bishop of Durham, though whether in the north or elsewhere is unclear. During the last years of his life, from 1343, he was with the Dominicans at Northampton. 22  The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. by Cartlidge, p. 94, n. to ll. 1749– 54, is mistaken in the assertion that both Portesham and Guildford were in Salisbury diocese; only Portesham was.

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written language of the poem’s author might be thought to correspond, and that he was in broad geographical proximity to the two place-names which the poem mentions. But this only raises the possibility of his having encountered the poem in the likely region of its origin while on his travels in the southern parts of England; it proves nothing for certain. We will return briefly to speculate on the possible cultural implications of the Holcot connection towards the end of this chapter. First, let us reexamine the association between The Owl and the Nightingale and Guildford. As is well known, the place-name occurs once in the poem when ‘Maister Nichole of Guldeforde’ is introduced and credited as being the best judge of the birds (l. 191). As Cartlidge has observed, ‘Maister Nichole’ was doubtless very familiar to those who first received the poem.23 Where were they familiar with him? The Wren at the end of the debate (ll. 1752–54) says that he lives now in Portesham, ‘Bi þare see in ore utlete’, to where Owl and Nightingale fly off out of sight to seek their judgement in the poem’s concluding lines. The Wren is describing a distant geography to her audience, and there is reason to suppose that the author was doing likewise to his. Would the implied audience of The Owl and the Nightingale, a community ‘in the know’, and indeed, as many critics have thought, some kind of clerical coterie,24 need to be told where Nicholas lived if that community were already in Portesham (unless, of course, that was precisely the point, an elaborately redundant joke)? But historical Portesham supported no community to match that implied in the poem, so the answer must be probably not. Did the implied audience, then, comprise the nearby Benedictine monks of Abbotsbury? After all, the abbey had the advowson to the Portesham living that Nicholas of Guildford apparently held.25 If so, the joke was just as elaborate in its overkill: the monks were on the doorstep a mile and a half away, would have been perfectly aware of Portesham by virtue of their temporal interest in it, and that they were all living in the county of Dorset. So are we dealing with a joke in which the blindingly obvious was being stated and in which a distance was being fictionalized for fun or, alternatively, no joke, a statement in which actual distance was being imputed 23 

Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, p. 230. For example, Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, p. 91. 25  Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 257, speculates that the intended audience of the poem may have been the monks of Abbotsbury. However, the idea that lines 729–30 (‘Clerkes, munukes & kanunes, | Þar boþ þos gode wicketunes’) may allude to such a community is weakened by the mention of ‘kanunes’. These call to mind a congregation of secular or regular canons, hardly a community of Benedictines. Thus the lines seem best interpreted as a generic reference to male religious. 24 

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and a relatively foreign geography being described? There is another piece of evidence, not without difficulties in interpretation of its own, to be sure, but which could suggest that the latter reading is correct, and that the author was writing about Portesham at a remove. The possible implications of the content of the quatrain on the ‘broaken leafe’ formerly found in J and now missing from that manuscript deserve fuller consideration, for conceivably they provide the tie breaker to a question that literary arbitration alone cannot resolve.26 The quatrain apparently ran as follows: Mayster Iohan eu greteþ. of Guldeuorde þo. And sende eu to Seggen. þat synge nul he no. Ac on þisse wise he wille endy his song: ‘God Louerd of Heuene. beo vs alle among. amen.’27 (‘Master John of Guildford greets you then, and sends to you to say that he won’t sing, but will end his song in the following way: “May God, the Lord of heaven, be amongst us all. Amen.”’)

Whether these verses, which read like a tongue-in-cheek missive from ‘Mayster Iohan […] of Guldeuorde’, were found in the common exemplar, X, which lay ultimately behind both C and J, as Celia Sisam thought, or were added to some intermediary copy of that exemplar lying between X and J, as Betty Hill thought equally possible, is immaterial for the present argument.28 More to the point is the fact that there appeared on the ‘broaken leafe’ someone else who, by virtue of his name, seems to have had a Guildford link. Two different and independent names, therefore, one ‘Maister Nichole’ inside the text of The Owl and the Nightingale, and the other, a certain ‘Mayster Iohan’, outside it and within a text of his own on the missing ‘broaken leafe’, need to be weighed in relation to the question of the provenance of a portion of J’s contents. Both names are ‘of Guildford’, and together they lend substance to the supposition that at least some of the contents of the X exemplar (if Sisam is right) or of an exemplar intermediary between X and J (acknowledging Hill’s suggestion) may have had a Guildford connection.29 26 

On the whole question of the ‘broaken leafe’, see Sisam, ‘The Broken Leaf in MS. Jesus College, Oxford, 29’, and Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’. 27  The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Stanley, p. 4. The quatrain was almost certainly copied by Thomas Wilkins, the seventeenth-century bibliophile and one-time possessor of J, from the ‘broaken leafe’. 28  Sisam, ‘The Broken Leaf in MS. Jesus College, Oxford, 29’, p. 342, and Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’, p. 104. 29  A third possibility is just conceivable, that the quatrain was added at the stage of the

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The combination of Guildford names is not proof positive of this, of course, but it is of circumstantial interest. Moreover, ‘Mayster Iohan’s’ quatrain has all the wonted appearance of the sort of scribal whimsy randomly added to many a medieval manuscript and which can sometimes prove helpful in determining the early provenance of a manuscript’s contents. Indeed, Sisam made a strong case that the quatrain was independent and sufficient unto itself, not some mere appended colophon.30 Yet ‘Mayster Iohan’ of the broken leaf has sooner been recruited by critics into the uncertain service of trying to establish who the author of The Owl and the Nightingale may have been than in helping to forge any link between some of the texts in J (or indeed in X) and Guildford, although this is the capacity in which ‘Mayster Iohan’ would seem more gainfully employed. Who he was may never be known, but he was evidently a cleric of some sort. In this regard, it might be noted in passing that two Johns of Guildford, either or neither of whom may be the John in question here, appear in episcopal registers for the diocese of Winchester at a date compatible with our mooted composition date, nor have I found any others of this name in early episcopal registers of any other English diocese. The earliest extant Winchester register, that of John de Pontissara (bishop of Winchester between 1282 and 1304), notes a Johannes de Guldeford, acolyte, admitted to the church of Elvetham, Hampshire, in the diocese of Winchester, on 4 December 1304.31 The register of Pontissara’s successor, Henry Woodlock (bishop between 1305 and 1316), also records this man having received his dimissory letter for the subdiaconate as rector of Elvetham on 12 March 1305, and notes his ordinations as deacon and priest respectively on 12 June and 18 December in the same year.32 Elvetham is some fourteen miles west-north-west of Guildford, so this Johannes, a local man, was serving locally. Another Johannes, however, Frater Iohannes de Guldeford, Augustinian canon of Merton, was ordained subdeacon on 22 February and deacon on 20 December 1309. Yet it is of incidental interest to note that since Merton is only some twenty miles northeast of Guildford, the same may be said of him as of his Elvetham namesake, that he was a local man serving locally (and his ordination to the diaconate, as it happens, also took place in the Guildford church of Holy Trinity).33 compilation of J itself, and not derived from any J exemplar. 30  Sisam, ‘The Broken Leaf in MS. Jesus College, Oxford, 29’, pp. 339–43; and see also Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’, pp. 101–02 and n. 24. 31  Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, ed. by Deedes, i, 181. 32  Registrum Henrici Woodlock, ed. by Goodman, ii, 764, 769, and 779. 33  Registrum Henrici Woodlock, ed. by Goodman, ii, 828.

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If we acknowledge, therefore, that the hypothesis of an actual Guildford connection of The Owl and the Nightingale has circumstantially more in its favour than either the mere appearance in the poem of a ‘Maister Nichole of Guldeforde’ or its original written dialect could ever between them hope to prove, let us follow the hypothesis through to see where it may lead. The issue of the poem’s auspices would naturally arise, and of whether Guildford could have nourished writing of such stature and sophisticated content. Was a cultural formation available there to equal that which the poem manifests? For in spite of the apparent self-effacement of its composition in English, the poet was culturally literate in several provinces: he was acquainted with canon law; knew too something of the procedures of the common-law courts; and was conversant with traditions courtly as well as clerkly.34 The answer to the question may be yes, but hardly before 1275, the year in which Guildford’s Dominican priory was founded by Queen Eleanor of Provence.35 Apart from the priory, Guildford was not otherwise well served with religious houses or parish churches of sufficient known distinction to support the intellectual environment to which the writing of the poem seems best to answer.36 Guildford’s sole exception would have been its Dominican priory, and furthermore, the cultural literacy demonstrated in the poem was precisely of the class that Dominicans were currently renowned for. Exactly how needs to be explained, for were Dominican auspices to be fastened on this poem, it would have major consequences for our understanding, not least for our understanding of how it may have transpired that The Owl and the Nightingale was also preserved, almost certainly in one copy and probably also in a second, in the library of Titchfield Abbey, a Premonstratensian house to the south of Winchester diocese, not far from the Hampshire coast. To begin with, it should be noted that Guildford’s Dominican priory was no ordinary foundation, but a royal one. It had been established by Henry III’s widow, Eleanor, in memory of her grandson prince Henry, who had died at Guildford on 34 

On the poet’s knowledge of civil and ecclesiastical law, see Witt, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale and English Law Court Procedure’. He considers that the poet was ‘acquainted with, even well-versed in judicial matters’ (p.  282), though no exact parallel between the structure of the birds’ debate and actual law-court procedure, whether civil or ecclesiastical, can be shown. Rather, the poem is given a competent legal ‘colouring’. A useful impression of the poet’s cultural formation emerges in Barratt, ‘Flying in the Face of Tradition’, although I do not subscribe to her thesis of female authorship. 35  Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, pp. 82–83. 36  For Guildford’s religious establishments (chiefly, a hospital), see Knowles and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, p. 552; and for its parish churches, see VCH: Surrey, ed. by Malden, ii.

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20 October 1274. The young prince’s heart, deposited in the priory church, was exposed to view as the anniversary of his death approached.37 Thus the priory’s institutional link with the Crown was maintained in repair well after the initial foundation. Given this sustained royal attachment, it might be expected that court culture would find easy accommodation among the Guildford Dominicans, especially when the general fact is also borne in mind that by the second half of the thirteenth century the Dominican presence at court was already pervasive. The royal confessor was a Dominican, and the king often had Dominicans in his company. At court they had, in fact, a permanent establishment, and their services to the Crown continued to grow apace during the reign of Edward I.38 Court versatility and an acquaintance with its literary culture would therefore have been de rigueur for the royally-connected Dominican. While some such affiliation as this might account for the marriage of the clerical and the courtly that critics have detected within the poem,39 far more is needed if the proposition of its Dominican authorship is to be convincingly fleshed out. To turn next, then, to the poet’s familiarity with the procedures of the civil and ecclesiastical courts: this also would have been entirely germane to Dominicans. Involvement in civil and ecclesiastical cases was frequently the lot of the Dominican who found employment outside his Order. Dominicans functioned in various administrative capacities, including often royal and episcopal ones. So much were their legal counsels coveted that they found themselves increasingly embroiled in the handling of actions, arbitrations and judgements, to the Order’s official dismay.40 They were customarily contracting responsibilities, then, for which a knowledge of law, civil and canon, was indispensable.41 To cite but one particular instance from the letters of Robert Grosseteste (bishop of Lincoln between 1235 and 1253): in the very year of his consecration, Grosseteste wasted no time in requesting from the Provincial of the English Dominicans the assistance of friars John de St Giles and Geoffrey de Clive, ‘adding to them some third member of your brethren, who has been tried and tested in [his] practical knowledge of civil 37 

VCH: Surrey, ed. by Malden, ii, 114. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, pp. 460–69. 39  Barratt, ‘Flying in the Face of Tradition’, p. 474. 40  Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, pp. 422–24. 41  The Dominicans had a strong tradition of canonists (the celebrated Raymond of Pennafort was one of their number, for example), nor was their interest in canon law confined to Continental brothers like him: Simon of Hinton, incumbent of the chair in theology at the University of Oxford from 1248, was another notable case (Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, pp. 369–74). 38 

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and canon law, whose wholesome and uncorrupted counsel I can discreetly use in so many doubtful cases that ceaselessly arise, and in such great wavering and uncertainly various opinion of the secular men of law’.42 When a civil and canon lawyer was needed, a Dominican was likely to qualify. Thus the twin legal aspects of The Owl and the Nightingale would fit snugly in a Dominican context.

Dominican Auspices And what of the prospect of a Dominican writing English poetry in the first place? This poses little difficulty. The Dominicans had already begun composing substantial work in the vernacular soon after the arrival of the Order in England. Ancrene Wisse, the case for whose Dominican authorship has been convincingly reinvented, is perhaps the most substantial example.43 It was probably composed soon after 1224.44 And it is interesting, incidentally, to note certain similarities of subject matter that connect The Owl and the Nightingale with Ancrene Wisse and also with Hali Meiðhad, since it is conceivable that these two latter prose texts were by the same author.45 Strictly speaking, of course, these similarities could stem from common traditions, but if both Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad were produced by a Dominican and thus first available within the Dominican Order, such coincidences are worth briefly pausing to observe.46 Therefore, neither the poem’s content, nor the very fact of its composition in English, militate against Dominican authorship. Let us persevere, then, with our supposition that a Guildford-based Dominican wrote The Owl and the Nightingale. How might the appearance of one or probably two copies of 42  Grosseteste, Epistolæ, ed. by Luard, p. 61: ‘addentes eisdem aliquem tertium de fratribus vestris, qui in juris civilis et canonici peritia fuerit probatus et exercitatus, cujus possum sano et incorrupto uti secretius consilio, in tot dubiis casibus incessanter emergentibus, et in tanta jurisperitorum hominum secularium, nutante et incerta varietate’. Grosseteste regularly had two Dominicans and two Franciscans as members of his familia (Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers, p. 449). Note again how in a letter of 1245 to Cardinal Hugh of St Cher Grosseteste declared that the archbishop of Canterbury needed friars skilled in civil and canon law, in the law of the land, and in the law of God (Grosseteste, Epistolæ, ed. by Luard, p. 336). 43  Millett, ‘The Origins of Ancrene Wisse’. 44  Fletcher, ‘Black, White and Grey in Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse’. 45  Fletcher, ‘Black, White and Grey in Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse’, p. 71. 46  For Ancrene Wisse resemblances, see Barratt, ‘Flying in the Face of Tradition’, p. 475. The resemblances with Hali Meiðhad, notably in the portrait of the Owl, are more arresting, and I am indebted to Neil Cartlidge for drawing them to my attention.

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his poem in the library of Titchfield Abbey be explained? First and in general, there were longstanding institutional links between the Dominicans and the Premonstratensians — the Dominicans had derived their Rule from Prémontré — which may have encouraged some ongoing association between the Orders.47 It consequently comes as no surprise to notice a vita of St Dominic singled out as one of the items in a volume listed in the Titchfield Abbey library catalogue.48 But second and in particular, apart from such foundational affinities, Titchfield Premonstratensians and Guildford Dominicans were brought into regular contact, if nowhere else, at their ordinations. Although no diocesan ordination lists are extant for the period that we are exploring in connection with the poem’s possible date of composition, c. 1275 or a few years later, lists follow soon after, and in them potential lines of communication between Guildford and Titchfield are clear. To cite but one: on 23 September 1312, in the parish church at Kingston, the Dominican Ricardus de Guldeford was ordained acolyte with Iohannes de Cantuaria, canon of Titchfield.49 Richard’s name follows immediately after John’s in the ordination list. It would be unwarrantable to imagine that such congress would have been unwonted in the 1270s. Consequently, were texts to find their way from Guildford into the impressive library at Titchfield, cultural and perhaps even personal contacts are in evidence that would make that eventuality unsurprising, not to mention the comparative proximity of both places (about forty miles between) within the same diocese. The catalogue of the library of Titchfield reveals striking correspondences between various items available there and several of those found in either C, in J, or in both.50 The reason for this patent, if puzzling, connection may be finally unsearchable, but other reasons than those currently proposed seem equally credible. Cartlidge has suggested that C, J, and their common exemplar, X, were 47 

See Millett, ‘The Origins of Ancrene Wisse’. Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, ed. by Bell, p. 249 (the manuscript in question bore the shelfmark .Q.V.). Moreover, vitae of St Dominic may have been a comparative rarity; I have not noticed any others in medieval library catalogues published to date. 49  Registrum Henrici Woodlock, ed. by Goodman, ii, 847. Note too a certain John of Titchfield being ordained subdeacon in Guildford on 20 December 1309 (Registrum Henrici Woodlock, ed. by Goodman, ii, 828). Whether John of Titchfield was a canon of Titchfield is not noted, but a Titchfield-Guildford association is again evidenced. 50  The correspondences were first detected by Wilson, ‘The Medieval Library of Titchfield Abbey’, and Wilson, ‘More Lost Literature, II’. The correspondences were amplified by sub­ se­quent scholars, and are usefully summarized by Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 251. 48 

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all produced in some religious house, ‘quite possibly one linked in some way to the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield’.51 This is perfectly plausible. Just as plausible is the suggestion that C, J, and X were all actually assembled and copied at Titchfield. The immediate objection to this would seem to be that the written dialect of C and J is strongly West Midlands: C has been localized in Worcestershire and J in Herefordshire.52 Moreover, the X exemplar itself had a number of scribes working on it, two on The Owl and the Nightingale alone, who were also producing a West Midlands written dialect.53 But the belief that the written dialect of a piece of Middle English must indicate the place or region in which that Middle English was copied has proved a stubborn one.54 A written dialect can, of course, indicate only one of two things: either it may indicate, in those cases where a scribe ‘translated’, to greater or lesser extents, the orthography of his exemplar into his own preferred orthography while copying, where that scribe was originally trained to write; or it may indicate that he was a careful, literatim-copyist who reproduced the orthographies of his exemplar more or less faithfully, keeping his own preferences in abeyance.55 In the latter case, the scribe could have been copying his Middle English anywhere; no personal intrusions would betray any alternative regionalisms. And in the former, he could easily have moved from the region of his origin and have done his copying in some other area where, though a different written dialect prevailed, he continued to produce the orthography of his erstwhile region of origin. Such a state of affairs would have been highly likely in Titchfield, in fact, because the abbey was initially founded c. 1232 by a colony of monks transplanted from the mother house in Halesowen, Worcestershire, in the West Midlands.56 We are therefore entirely 51 

Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 261. For C, see Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas, p. 70; and for J, located quite precisely in the region of Ledbury, see A Linguistic Atlas, ed. by McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, iii, 171, LP 7440. 53  Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, p. 235, discerns in the X exemplar, apart from scribes X1 and X2 who have generally been recognized to have copied The Owl and the Nightingale, evidence of the activity of at least two further scribes, perhaps even of a third, who similarly wrote a West Midland dialect. 54  For example, Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’: ‘while the poem’s original language was probably a dialect of central southern England […] its copies were certainly made some distance away in the West Midlands’ (p. 234). 55  A Linguistic Atlas, ed. by McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, i, 13–19, contains a classic statement of scribal practice in these respects, and see also Laing, ‘Dialectal Analysis and Linguistically Composite Texts’, and Smith, ‘Tradition and Innovation in South-West Midlands’. 56  Colvin, The White Canons in England, p. 184. 52 

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justified in assuming a strong West Midlands presence at Titchfield, especially in its early days, and this could have made itself felt in the scriptorium. However, if C and J were assembled and copied at Titchfield, it must be admitted that both had presumably migrated from there by the time that the library catalogue was compiled (c. 1400), since it lists no single volume whose contents and order quite match those of C or J. Yet migration is not impossible: Premonstratensians made arrangements for their library books to be loaned out, just as they were permitted to receive books on loan.57 Another indicator of production in some centre at a south-easterly remove from the West Midlands location suggested prima facie by their written dialect is perhaps to be found in some of the content of J. As Hill has noted, it contains at least four texts with south-east Midlands affinities.58 A site in Hampshire might be thought more readily placed to acquire such texts (and recall that it was canon John of Canterbury who was ordained next to brother Richard of Guildford in 1312). In addition, research into the original provenance of C and J has not been able to connect either manuscript conclusively with the West Midlands. Hill’s hypothesis concerning J, that it may have been culled from some monastic library by one of the Commissioners for the dissolution, Edward Carne (d. 1561), observes that while Carne and his associates worked their way westwards through the counties of England, they began in Winchester.59 And while Carole Weinberg’s analysis of the Latin marginal glosses that appear in C’s copy of Laȝamon’s Brut has concluded that they could have derived ultimately from materials held by the library of Worcester Cathedral, the glosses were probably not an original contribution of their scribe in C, but an inheritance from his exemplar, and thus of considerably less value in helping to determine the original provenance of C itself.60 57 

Colvin, The White Canons in England, p. 319. Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’, pp. 103–04. They are the Shires and Hundreds of England, the Proverbs of Alfred, Poema Morale, and Anthem of St Thomas. 59  Hill, ‘The History of Jesus College, Oxford MS. 29’, p. 212. Thus they began their commission in the diocese in which both Titchfield and Guildford are situated. But there is not even any certain evidence that Carne trawled for books in the way that some other Commissioners did. 60  Weinberg, ‘The Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript’, pp. 114–15. Of course, just as Titchfield Abbey would have been well placed to receive texts from the southeast, it would have been well placed to receive texts from the west via the mother house in Halesowen. Laȝamon’s Brut would be an obvious candidate for transmission along this route, and as Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29: Addenda’, p. 103 and n. 32, and others, have observed, perhaps the ‘Hystoria Britonum’ contained in the lost Titchfield Abbey, MS C. II, before a ‘De conflictu inter philomenam et bubonem in anglicis’, was a copy of Laȝamon’s Brut. Cartlidge, 58 

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So to summarize this reasoning, it would be no surprise were texts originating among the Dominicans of Guildford to find their way into the library of Titchfield Abbey, and this would be compatible with the hypothesis concerning the genesis of The Owl and the Nightingale that is being explored here. It seems appropriate now to tie up these hypothetical threads, since the case has long since moved from a comparative terra firma, what seems to be a reminiscence of The Owl and the Nightingale in Holcot, to a terra speculativa in which have been pursued questions of text and manuscript provenance. If Guildford provenance be accepted for the poem, one final speculation may be permitted to knit up the feast. Towards the end of the debate, the Wren and the Owl express dismay at the stunting of Nicholas’s ecclesiastical career, and give their views on how this should be remedied (ll. 1760–76). These lines have often been discussed in the context of trying to decide whether or not the poem really is a plea for preferment: ‘He naueþ bute one woning — Þat his bischopen muchel schame, An alle þan þat of his nome Habbeþ ihert & of his dede. Hwi nulleþ hi nimen heom to rede Þat he were mid heom ilome, For teche heom of his wisdome, An ȝiue him rente a uale stude Þat he miȝte heom ilome be mide?’ ‘Certes,’ cwaþ þe Hule, ‘þat is soð: Þeos riche men wel muche misdoð, Þat leteþ þane gode mon, Þat of so feole þinge con, An ȝiueþ rente wel misliche, An of him leteþ wel lihtliche. Wiþ heore cunne heo beoþ mildre An ȝeueþ rente litle childre!’

‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 265, n. 29, doubts this, saying that the lost ‘Hystoria Britonum’ was much more likely to have been a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, citing The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile, intro. by Ker, p. ix, n. 4. But Ker merely queries Geoffrey of Monmouth as a possibility. Whatever the truth of the matter, a copy of Laȝamon’s Brut at Titchfield Abbey would not seem unlikely, given the abbey’s connections with the West Midlands (The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile, intro. by Ker, p. ix, n. 4). For other texts in C and J with West Midland connections, see Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, pp. 25–51.

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(‘He’s only got one dwelling, and that’s a great shame on his bishops and on all those who’ve heard of his words and deeds. Why don’t they make up their minds to have him with them often, so that he can teach them some of his wisdom, and why don’t they give him income from several places so that he could be with them often?’ The Owl said, ‘Yes, that’s true. These powerful men do much wrong by passing such a good man over who knows about so many things, and they distribute revenues quite indiscriminately, and think very little of him. They’re kinder with their own kin, and distribute revenues to little children!’)

The Wren observes that Nicholas has only ‘one woning’, presumably the living at Portesham whose value, historically, was indeed quite modest.61 She goes on to say that this shames his bishops, who ought to ensure that he is provided with income from several livings so that he has the means to associate with them, presumably taking up residence in their households. In this way they can benefit from his sagacity at first hand. Evidently, the Wren supports the system of pluralities, a particularly sensitive practice in the thirteenth century after consciousness of it had been raised by various legatine constitutions.62 The Owl agrees with the Wren’s proposal (their joint agreement perhaps indicating that this was also the view on pluralities shared by the author?), and adds the criticism that ‘þeos riche men’ do wrong to dispose revenues from livings indiscriminately, setting no store by Nicholas. With their own kindred they are more lenient, however, and give revenues to little children. Who are ‘þeos riche men’? The bishops referred to in line 1761?63 Possibly, but not necessarily. ‘Þeos riche men’ may, alternatively, constitute a generic reference to noble, secular patrons who held rights of presentation to benefices.64 If so, Wren and Owl would have been seen as combining to censure lapses in the two chief contemporary mechanisms of ecclesiastical preferment, namely, collation and presentation: the Wren, by alluding to negligent episcopal collations, and the Owl, to nepotistic secular presentations, to 61 

VCH: Dorset, ed. by Page and Pugh, ii, 14. Legatine constitutions of the thirteenth century were largely intolerant of the system of pluralities, the simultaneous holding of more than one benefice with cure of souls. Pluralities were, however, allowable on condition that due dispensations had been secured. Since the system had proponents at a high level (as, for example, Walter Cantilupe, bishop of Worcester from 1237 to 1266), its functioning was likely to continue, despite the best efforts of reforming bishops and archbishops to enforce the legatine constitutions. See Douie, Archbishop Pecham, pp. 98–113, and Gibbs and Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215–1272, pp. 170–73. 63  As, for example, Cartlidge, ‘The Composition and Social Context’, p. 256, interprets them. 64  The meaning which Baldwin, ‘Henry II and The Owl and the Nightingale’, seems to read in this line (pp. 225–26). 62 

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benefices. This may be a more likely interpretation of the Wren and Owl’s words than that they were exclusively targeting the bishops. A bipartite censure would certainly be more even-handed, and indeed historically justified, since, whatever about the negligence of bishops, nepotistic secular presentation was by no means rare. Robert Grosseteste in a letter c. 1238, for example, is found explaining why he would not install Thomas, the son of earl Ferrers, in a benefice when the youth was not ordained, nor was he quite of canonical age for ordination (at least eighteen years for the subdiaconate, twenty for the diaconate, and twenty-five for the priesthood).65 But of the cases of under-age presentation during the period under present review for the possible composition of The Owl and the Nightingale, one is egregious, and corresponds closely to the circumstances excoriated by the Owl. In the very region argued here for the poem’s origin, the diocese of Winchester, there occurred a highly controversial and well publicized scandal of the secular presentation of a ‘little child’ to a rich benefice. The story is complex, but the gist of it can be quickly summarized. Peter of Guildford, who was chaplain to John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury between 1279 and 1292, had been collated to the rich living of Crondall, a place some thirteen miles west of Guildford, by John de Pontissara, bishop of Winchester, not long after Pontissara’s consecration on 12 June 1282. It seems, however, that before that time, and also with Pontissara’s complicity, provision had been made to bestow Crondall on a child, James of Spain, the bastard nephew of the wife of Edward I, Eleanor of Castile.66 The young James had been presented to Crondall on 6 August 1282, but was evidently soon removed on account of his minority and illegitimacy; by 7 February 1283, he is on record being presented as rector of Rothbury, Northumberland, in the diocese of Durham.67 The king had intended the vacated benefice to descend to Nicholas de Montimer, the queen’s physician, but Pontissara’s preemptive collation of Peter of Guildford had now brought himself into confrontation with 65  For the case of Thomas, son of earl Ferrers, see Grosseteste, Epistolæ, ed. by Luard, p. 151. The canonical ages were clearly stipulated in the Clementines (the body of canon law constitutions issued by Pope Clement V). These were the last constitutions to be officially introduced into the canon law corpus. See Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Friedberg and Richter, ii, col. 1140 (Lib. i, tit. vi, cap. iii). 66  Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, ed. by Deedes, i, xv, 264–65. I have not found his birth date, but the fact that Pecham referred to him as a ‘puer’ may suggest a prepubescent child. Also, James of Spain is known to have died probably a little before 16 October 1332 (see CPR: Edward III, ii, 359), so the chance of his being a ‘little child’ in 1282, the year of his presentation to Crondall, is indeed very high. 67  The Register of John le Romeyn, ed. by Brown, i, 369. The circumstances of James of Spain’s career are conveniently presented in Emden, BRUO, iii, 1737.

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the king. In 1283, matters came to a head. Archbishop Pecham intervened on Pontissara’s behalf, though he reminded him in a letter of 23 May of that year that he had acted against ‘our advice and contrary to canonical sanctions’ when he had allowed the child to be admitted to Crondall in the first place.68 Circumstances of the affair had become a public talking point (a rumor publicus), said the archbishop.69 In another letter of the same date addressed to Robert Burnell (bishop of Bath and Wells between 1275 and 1292), who had briefly found himself elected to the see of Winchester between the death in 1280 of Bishop Nicholas of Ely and the appointment of Pontissara,70 Pecham now chose by contrast to foreground royal responsibility for the intrusion: ‘A child — it is said an illegitimate one — has been thrust upon the same church [i.e., the church of Crondall] by royal force of arms.’71 So depending upon whom he was addressing, Pecham chose to aspect the affair a little differently. To Pontissara, he remonstrated that he only had himself to blame, and to others, that it was the royal hand that lay so heavily on the business. It seems impossible to prove or disprove that The Owl and the Nightingale could have been covertly alluding to the dilemma attending Peter of Guildford’s preferment. But at least one thing is clear: the poem seems full of contemporary allusion, and this would be an additional instance of it, whether Peter of Guildford were being specifically glanced at or not, in a conciliar period which had made matters such as these sensitive.72 But of course, were Peter of Guildford intended, the composition of The Owl and the Nightingale would need to be fixed at c. 1282, a late, but not impossible, date, and one which would certainly require that C and J be regarded as copies made very soon indeed after the event of the poem’s composition, as Wells many years ago had thought.73 68  Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, ed. by Deedes, i, 265: ‘consilium nostrum et contra Canonicas sanctiones’. 69  Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, ed. by Deedes, i, 265. 70  Edward I urged Burnell’s election on the monks of Winchester. The election was subse­ quently quashed by Pope Nicholas III. 71  Registrum epistolarum Johannis Peckham, ed. by Martin, ii, 556: ‘Intrusus est in eandem ecclesiam puer ut dicitur illegitimus vi et armis regalibus.’ 72  But I should stress that I have found no case that provoked such comparable documented outrage as did Peter of Guildford’s. The poem’s stance on pluralities and preferment might be another indicator, incidentally, of a thirteenth- rather than a twelfth-century composition date. 73  The example that Cartlidge, ‘The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale’, chose to cite of rapid textual dissemination soon after composition is, interestingly, Ancrene Wisse, a text probably of Dominican origin (pp. 234–35).

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This hypothesis, that the author of The Owl and the Nightingale may have been a Dominican, and that his poem may have originated in Guildford after 1275, perhaps even as late as c. 1282, accommodates the few known facts concerning the poem with an efficiency equalling, if not exceeding, that of other hypotheses currently in circulation.

Is There Life after Dialectic? Some things seem to hold true whether we believe the precise detail of this hypothesis or not. The clerical training of the author seems clear, and not only did he bond vocationally with his professional circle in a clerical ideal of community, but he, they, and all his early readers, also bonded conceptually in a wider ideal of community that the binding power of his dialectic fostered and projected. This wider, virtual community of the likeminded was one in which all consumers of his poem were invited to participate, whose values they would come intellectually to recognize, and through that recognition, quietly ingest. So while we do not know who the author of the poem actually was — though believing him to have been someone who knew Nicholas of Guildford, not Nicholas himself, remains creditworthy despite recent counterarguments — more interesting is the sense of identity that he registers as he fashioned and was doubtless in turn fashioned by his poem, and the nature of the circle of the likeminded in which he invited his audience to gather.74 As earlier suggested, this circle’s space could never be neutral. It was electrically charged in providing for the simultaneous dimensioning of two socially potent forces: on the one hand, it offered freedom to contemplate with detached clarity the constructed nature of a socially shaping genre and its cultural underpinnings; and on the other, room for recognition and acceptance of the negotiable, not the inevitable, nature of the conventions upon which that constructedness depended. In short, the putative Dominican poet wrote a dialectic that raised consciousness not simply about the various issues that the birds disputed — that happens self-evidently — but also about the dialectical process itself and then, by extension, about the social stakes of dialectical thinking. Nevertheless, although the poem has forced dialectic to break cover as a genre, it does not follow that dialectic, once seen for what it is, a negotiable system of rhetorical constructs, can be abandoned. The poem’s dispassionate take on dialectic may, paradoxically, pave the nearest way towards endorsing and naturalizing it. 74 

The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Stanley, pp. 19–22, if contested by The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. by Cartlidge, pp. xiv–xv.

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Support for an argument that the poem renders dialectic self-reflexive, and that it does so with socially shaping force, is strong. Further, the self-reflexiveness takes various forms. Having begun by flagging its genre affiliation with dialectic, the poem then proceeds to lay bare for scrutiny certain assumptions that dialectic would routinely otherwise take for granted. One of these assumptions is dialectic’s inclination to take itself seriously. Many in the poet’s society, as we noted much earlier in this chapter, subscribed to the serious belief that the truth was ‘out there’ and could be accessed dialectically. Thus dialectic played for serious truth stakes. But it is as if the poem pulls faces at the genre to which it professes affiliation. Consequently, it collapses any ready assumption that dialectic be taken seriously as an heuristic tool. The poem similarly gestures towards its affiliated genre’s inclination towards seriousness in another way. Many of the human issues that the Owl and Nightingale debate are inherently serious: the plight of battered wives, for instance, or the trap of loveless marriages. Especially shocking is an unflinching description uttered by the Owl of a brutalized wife having her husband’s fist smashed into her teeth (ll. 1531–38). But a lighthearted counterbalance to matter inherently serious is always at hand in how the poem’s serious issues are staged; constant reminders never let us forget that the debaters are simply birds, however human-sounding their voices. And so yet another binary in a poem already bristling with them crystalizes here between an opposition between the lighthearted and the serious, insinuated by the poet into the heart of the genre that he manipulates and that again contributes towards the genre’s exposé as a construction in its own right. This particular debate poem seems to be on holiday from serious debating as a means for seriously resolving anything. This does not mean that it is trying to deny that debating can ever achieve such resolution; it is just that this particular instance will not achieve it. In a sense, then, The Owl and the Nightingale enters a dialectic with some of its affiliated genre’s standard assumptions. Laughter at the genre’s expense nevertheless brings the genre up close. There are some other medieval debate poems that superficially resemble The Owl and the Nightingale in the way they too seem to stage a wry stand-off from their genre in not finalizing a judgement, devolving instead the responsibility for any such resolution upon the audience. But the poem seems to work far more determinedly at cultivating a dialectical stance towards its own genre than do these related texts. Alongside the unsettling, latent in the deferral of judgement, of regular dialectic’s faith that a determination is reachable, several passages in the poem show the narrator reflecting less upon what his birds say than upon how they choose to say it and upon what the practical consequences of their choice are likely to be. These passages risk being drowned out by the din of the birds’

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sensational slanging match, yet the interest they betray in the inner mechanics and psychology of debate, in debate purely as a set of strategic moves, seems a little unusual in the run of medieval debate literature. It is tempting to regard this interest as a sign of the poet’s acquaintance with sophistic, a branch of rhetoric that the late thirteenth century was finding increasingly fascinating. Sophistic, with its emphasis on the tricks and strategies of debate, and on audience psychology, was transmitted to the later Middle Ages via Aristotle’s Rhetoric, translated into Latin c. 1269 by the Dominican William of Moerbeke, and then given further prominence a few years later in the commentary written on it by Giles of Rome.75 Giles was much interested in the very thing that interested The Owl and the Nightingale author: debate as tactic rather than as content. The net effect of the passages in The Owl and the Nightingale that betray a similar interest is again to denaturalize and foreground the debate medium by shifting attention away from the message and towards the medium. Of course, the social result of this denaturalizing might be a subsequent renaturalizing of the debate genre precisely by forcing a jocular consciousness of its materiality. Necessarily, once a genre acquires differentiated social realizations — recall how real-time debates in the Middle Ages served a variety of practical institutional contexts — so through differentiation the genre is potentially liable to emerge for inspection as a phenomenon in its own right, a thing no longer to be taken for granted. Being made aware of how a genre can be differently inflected also raises awareness of the genre’s very existence and of the ways in which we agree to recognize its parameters. The method of The Owl and the Nightingale seems to abet this potentiality for self-consciousness. It argues an author alive to at least some of the various guises that debate assumed in his society. The poem could have been composed only by a person with a relatively high degree of cultural awareness, someone deeply literate in the discourses of ‘debate culture’. That fact about the author can also be proved collaterally from the sheer range of other sorts of genres that he was able to ventriloquize. The poem is full of voices, and not just of the two that are the most vocal. Compare the following passage, part of the Nightingale’s attack on the Owl’s purported dirty habits, which also incidentally displays many of the qualities that endeared the poem to an earlier generation of literary critics (ll. 101–26): Þat oþer ȝer a faukun bredde — His nest noȝt wel he ne bihedde: Þarto þu stele in o dai, 75 

Copeland, ‘Sophistic, Spectrality, and Iconoclasm’, pp. 121–24.

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& leidest þaron þi fole ey. Þo hit bicom þat he haȝte, & of his eyre briddes wraȝte, Ho broȝte his briddes mete, Bihold his nest, iseȝ hi ete. He iseȝ bi one halue His nest ifuled uthalue. Þe faucun was wroþ wit his bridde, & lude ȝal and sterne chidde: ‘Segget me wo hauet þis ido! Ov nas neuer icunde þarto: Hit was idon ov a loþ viste. Segget me ȝif ȝe hit wiste!’ Þo quaþ þat on & quad þat oþer: ‘Iwis, hit was ure oȝe broþer — Þe ȝond þat haued þat grete heued. Wai þat he nis þarof bireued. Worp hit ut mid þe alre wurste Þat his necke him toberste! Þe faucun ilefde his bridde, & nom þat fule brid amidde, & warp hit of þan wilde bowe, Þar pie & crowe hit todrawe. (‘The other year a falcon was breeding. He didn’t protect his nest very well. One day you crept up to it and laid your filthy egg in it. When eventually the falcon hatched his eggs and chicks appeared from them, he brought his chicks food, looked at his nest, and saw them eating. He saw that the outside of his nest had been fouled on one side. The falcon was furious with his chicks and yelled out loud and gave them a stern ticking off: ‘Tell me, who’s done this? This was never your habit. A vile wet fart has been landed on you! Tell me if you know about it’. Then one after the other said, ‘Sure, it was our own brother, the one over there with the big head. A pity he’s not detached from it. Chuck him out with everything that’s nasty so that he breaks his neck’. The falcon believed his chicks and seized that foul bird around the middle and flung it from the wild bough to where magpies and crows ripped it to bits’.)

Not only have we here a showcase of the author’s brilliance in evoking a spoken idiom, something for which his poem has often been praised, but we also catch him ventriloquizing a Nightingale ventriloquizing a falcon and then the falcon’s chicks. (Multiple voices are also a stylistic asset to a poem that, in terms of plot action, is extremely static; since very little actually happens, the dynamism of the poem’s verbal action makes a good surrogate, and local vistas like this prevent a

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fixed dramatic situation, the corner of a field in summer where the debate unfolds, becoming monotonous.) But genres are voices too, and this little tale of daddy falcon and the nest-crashing owlet itself introduces a new genre voice — beast fable — and adds it to the poem’s overarching genre of debate. There are many other local examples of the author’s genre ventriloquism: lyric, sermon, satire, and others, are all grist to his poetic mill. Thus his cultural fluency similarly shows in the way he achieved a polyphony of genres, as well as of mimicked voices, within the compass of his poem. Since the auditorium of his debate is so accommodating, it is not particularly surprising to find that it also welcomes such a densely binary style, because binaries similarly aim at accommodating a totality between their polar endpoints. Furthermore, on reflection, it becomes clear that binaries are themselves microdialectics; they are mini-debates (war vs peace, hawks vs doves, owls vs nightingales). Consequently, in the encircling debate genre of the poem, binary style might be expected to find a natural habitat. But the more interesting point is that the poet has cultivated this style in a curiously emphatic manner; the poem is strewn with evidence of it. Indeed, it seems iconized in Master Nicholas of Guildford himself, who derived his star quality precisely from his ability to discriminate between opposites: there was a time when he fancied nightingales, but now he’s cooled down totally, and so owls needn’t worry that he won’t be impartial. In short, over time, Nicholas has appreciated the ways of both birds.

The Reconstructed Pot We might hold the nature of that star quality in mind as we finally try to fold back our inferences about the poem’s author and his cultural formation into the geohistorical moment that we tried to delimit earlier. How might our inferences fit? What sort of pot have we? Hypothetically, the pot might look as follows. The hostility of the birds dialogically convenes an amiable, community spirit among the readers/audience who are a party to it. (Most people enjoy a good spat, and spats spectated are consoling reminders of our ease as distant, contented spectators.) Note, too, that it is a communal ease; at the end of his poem, the author conceived his comfortably positioned audience as a plural community, all of one mind with curiosity piqued about how the debate might turn out. Indeed, at the very end he effaces himself as omniscient author by suddenly relocating himself amongst that community, saying that he cannot reveal what the debate’s outcome was because the narrative he has been relating has suddenly expired. He is no wiser than they, and so is one with them. Not only does this disingenuous move allow his poem to convene

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both him and his plural audience into one emotionally bonded community, but also into a community of shared intellectual interests and, at least by implication, capacities. The author, on a safe assumption, was (if not Dominican) clerical. So were the earliest audiences of the poem for which there is reliable evidence. Yet he was not so sternly clerical that he prevented sacred discourse from fraternizing with secular narrative. Nor would the community imagined in his poem have found such fraternizing offensive either; here again they were likeminded. For both author and audience, sacred and secular might be another binary that had dialectical integrity and could thus prove mutually enhancing.76 If late thirteenth-century Guildford really was the poem’s geohistorical epicentre, and its author connected in some way to Guildford priory, perhaps a more specialized aspect of mendicant skill was refracted in the poem’s pronounced interest in marriage issues. To be sure, marriage issues were broached in a variety of medieval texts, but their judicial arbitration, in the real world, was almost invariably the prerogative of the ecclesiastical courts. May contact with them have played some part in stimulating our clerical author’s interest? But especially beguiling is the fact that the mendicant Orders, at around the time mooted for the poem’s composition, were great mediators to the laity in their English sermons of the scholastic doctrine of contraries, that ‘opposites set next to each other are mutually enhancing’ (opposita iuxta se posita magis apparent), as one Aristotelean epitome in circulation at the time put it. This is the principle, after all, around which the poem also turns. The first known likely reader of the poem, Robert Holcot, was a Dominican friar. Like the author of The Owl and the Nightingale, neither was he an unfailingly stern man. (Contrary to the modern stereotype, churchmen are seldom invariably solemn.) In Holcot’s learned discourse On Wisdom, for example, he found time to tell the one about an artist who painted superbly, but whose children were startlingly ugly. When the discrepancy was pointed out, the artist replied, ‘Ah yes, you see, when I’m producing my paintings I work during the day when I can see what I’m doing.’77 So genially and robustly liberal a cleric might be expected to have enjoyed a poem similarly liberal in mingling sacred with secular. 76 

As Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, p. 137, puts it (though in an approach to The Owl and the Nightingale focused rather differently to that adopted here), by the end of the poem there occurs a turn ‘to valuing every position, to envisioning a collection of voices able to assist each other toward a general betterment’. 77  Freely translated from an entry in lectio 194A in Robert Holcot’s In Sapientiam (see Balliol MS 27). The joke circulated more widely, however; see Tubach, Index exemplorum, no. 3574.

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It is as a superlative literary example of the debate, then, that the poem may first have earned its place in the modern canon of medieval English literature. But an important early social consequence of that superlative achievement, the kind of consequence that this book prefers to ponder, may have been a denaturalizing and renaturalizing of debate as a constitutive cultural force. The presence of The Owl and the Nightingale to its time connected its author and his community with the exhilarating if dangerous truth that the Truth might sometimes simply lie in their own hands.

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Sir Orfeo:

The ‘Taken’ Discourses of Order and Intelligibility

T

he next landmark encountered on our travels through the medieval English literary canon locates in a different genre’s province, though it is one of similarly formative potency from a cultural perspective, romance. As with The Owl and the Nightingale, so too attempts to situate this particular landmark precisely are hampered by a lack of detailed information. It is not clear exactly when the lay of Sir Orfeo was written, although a date a little later than The Owl and the Nightingale seems possible, if not likely: the Auchinleck Manuscript, the earliest of the manuscripts in which Sir Orfeo is recorded, was probably copied sometime between 1331 and 1340, and solely on linguistic grounds, the lay’s language in Auchinleck suggests that its composition could have occurred at any time in the second half of the thirteenth century.1 A composition date c. 1300 might therefore be considered a reasonable work­ing estimate for present purposes, although ideally, one would wish to be able to be exact.2 Where precisely its unknown author was active is equally a mystery. However, because he was someone who was culturally fluent, a fact more fully demonstrated later, the likelihood is that he had come within range of cosmopolitan circles, perhaps even ones of a relatively high social order. Conceivably, 1 

Cooper, ‘Lancelot, Roger Mortimer and the Date of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, p. 95. Also, Sir Orfeo, ed. by Bliss, p. xxi. All line references will be to this edition of the poem. 2  Some critics have inclined to the view that Sir Orfeo was composed during the reign of Edward II (1307–27) on the basis of perceived topicalities uniting its text to events of that reign; see, for example, Falk, ‘The Son of Orfeo’. Even were this view, were the truth known, correct, there currently seems no objective way of proving it.

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his base of operation was in London, or if not, in some other place within striking distance of metropolitan culture. In any event, what certainly seems true is that the Auchinleck Manuscript itself was the product of a London bookshop, and that it was intended to cater to the reading tastes of a relatively upper-crust clientele.3 Just as The Owl and the Nightingale stands out from the run of Middle English debate poems, so too there are unique aspects to Sir Orfeo that make it a salient specimen of the early Middle English romance genre; this chapter will begin its exploration of presences by taking its point of departure from one of Sir Orfeo’s outstanding strangenesses in this respect.

Horrors Nothing in the extant corpus of early Middle English romance quite matches the extraordinary chamber of horrors that awaits Orfeo when he enters the glittering castle of the fairy king: Þan he gan bihold about al & seigh liggeand wiþ-in þe wal lying Of folk þat were þider y-brouȝt, & þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt. seemed dead and were not Sum stode wiþ-outen hade, head & sum non armes nade, & sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde, & sum lay wode, y-bounde, mad; tied up & sum armed on hors sete, & sum astrangled as þai ete; drowned & sum were in water adreynt, shrivelled up & sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt. Wiues þer lay on child-bedde, Sum ded & sum awedde, raving wondrous many & wonder fele þer lay bisides: slept out their noontides Riȝt as þai slepe her vnder-tides Eche was þus in þis warld y-nome, taken brought there by enchantment Wiþ fairi þider y-come.4

This passage is not the only shadow cast across the bright lyrical surface of Sir Orfeo, but it is one of the longest. Thrust unexpectedly into view, the sordid eventualities 3  4 

See further below, p. 000. Sir Orfeo, ed. by Bliss, p. 34, ll. 387–404.

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catalogued here disrupt the ease of the reader abroad in romance’s wonderland. Their appearance is perhaps not entirely unprepared for; earlier in the poem, the deformation following her first encounter with the fairy folk of Heurodis’s formerly tranquil and beautiful body with scars of self-inflicted violence, related too graphically for the reader to set aside, plus the generic expectations aroused from outside the poem, that fearful things sometimes lurk under a fair aspect, may already have struck a note of warning.5 But why this particular waxworks of the undead? It is an uncomfortable reminder of the real world outside the text where hideous, or at the very least unpredictable, eventualities are possible, even if they are ones that, as here, appear preternaturally suspended in a frozen moment. The waxworks recalls the world that the romance genre more usually puts on hold and thereby evades. Interpretation can choose to back off from the passage; it can be left alone as part of the ‘irreducible mystery’ that A. C. Spearing finds in the poem.6 Yet mystery exerts its force precisely because it persists in teasing and defying human reason. In the case of this passage, the challenge is to try to organize its apparently random contents into a consolingly intelligible shape: why is this medley of unfortunates here, leave alone the question of how it can be that many of them bear all the signs of mortality yet are dead, or dying, only in seeming? Such questions, for anyone provoked to ask them, return no fully adequate answers, or at least none that the text is prepared to vouchsafe. Rather, the reader is fobbed off with an answer so superficial and paltry that, in leaving more unexplained than it reveals, advertizes its fundamental indifference to the demands of intelligibility in the very moment that it stimulates them: ‘Eche was þus in þis warld y-nome, | Wiþ fairi þider y-come’ (ll. 403–44). There is nothing more disclosed than that. The fairy folk have brought them there. Only two things, then, are clear: first, that these people have been collected in their agony and taken to their eternal gallery ‘wiþ-in þe wal’ of the castle to be exhibited like trophies upon some inscrutable whim of fairyland;7 and second, that the fairy 5 

Here and throughout I have seemed to beg the question of the manner of the reception of the text by using the word ‘reader’. ‘Reader’, however, must be understood as a mere convenience: it does not exclude other possibilities, and notably the active possibility of aural reception, the rule rather than the exception for popular literature during this period (see Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public; Crosby, ‘Oral Delivery’, is also still of value). On a recurrent theme in certain early romances, where scenes which, while having the veneer of a locus amoenus, finally betray how the beauties of human craft have been applied as a disguise for a latent danger, see Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, p. 108 and n. 4. 6  Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 77. 7  Strictly speaking, their location was simply ‘wiþ-in þe wal’ of the castle (wherever exactly

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folk, to whatever extent they can be said to have a legible motive, seem to be as much the connoisseurs of chaos as they are of luxury and beauty, and to have followed their collector’s instinct. For what the gallery’s exhibits all share, that common quality which appears to have made them eligible for collection in the first place, is their all having being touched by an unpredictable fate, in most cases one that is also violent or fearsome. Thus this gallery of icons of the unforeseen constitutes a site of resistance within the text to the reassurances of explanation and, as this chapter will seek to demonstrate, this resistence was present to early audiences of Sir Orfeo on at least three different fronts. At least three authoritative medieval discourses, the cognitive models whereby (otherwise unmanageable and unruly) aspects of human experience may be squared into a rational, explicable picture, are mobilized and challenged. We have already observed that the gallery’s contents are the casualties of a baffling universe that obviates prediction or explanation: no reasons are explicitly ventured within the terms of the text itself which would make their fates at least understandable, and hence reassuringly circumscribable, within known schemes of things. At the purely narrative level of plot advancement too, the introduction of the gallery is inexplicable, indeed gratuitous; perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, some commentators have avoided its challenges by dismissing it as an interpolation.8 It is even hermetically sealed within the narrative as a presence unto itself, a place within a place, since it exists in a magical temporal stasis, untouched by the processes of change to which the rest of the narrative is subject.9 So any attempt to explain it, which is as much as to say as to try to contain the danger of its threat to that was), so my use of the term ‘gallery’ throughout this chapter is tendentiously metaphorical, calculated to emphasize the sense of their being displayed like so many statues in an exhibition. Indeed, it is precisely this tableau-like quality that has struck some modern readers (for example, Riddy, ‘The Uses of the Past in Sir Orfeo’, p. 6). For a more sustained and interestingly historicized exploration of the ambivalent attitudes towards three-dimensional statuary in contemporary Christian tradition and their possible resonance within Sir Orfeo, see D’Arcy, ‘The Faerie King’s Kunstkammer’. 8  Mitchell, ‘The Faery World of Sir Orfeo’. But the drastic shift of gear in lines 387–404 is, I believe, a symptom of the poem’s complexity, not evidence of interpolation. Riddy, ‘The Uses of the Past in Sir Orfeo’, marginalizes the lines in a different way, finding them mere ‘images of grotesquerie rather than suffering’ (p. 6). It will become clear that I do not concede their diminution in these terms either. 9  While it may be on account of the fairy folk that interruptions occur in the linear world, and while they fraternize with an altered time scheme through association with the people in the gallery, since they are caught up in the process of narrative, they are nevertheless touched by linear time in a way that the gallery folk never are (or are never seen to be, Heurodis excepted).

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intelligibility, must be imported from resources existing outside the text. It is here that the trope of madness that critics have long acknowledged within the text assumes a truly frightening proportion, as unintelligibility is allowed to extend to touch and disable even those very cognitive models by means of which the horrifying aspects of reality were customarily grasped and domesticated. Sir Orfeo, then, enacts an enchantment of unreason in two overlapping domains: in the intratextual domain of the narrative, Orfeo struggles to negotiate a flight from this enchantment, salvaging intelligibility, in his case, by recuperating the stability of his marriage and hence the social stability that his marriage figures; in the extratextual domain of England at the turn of the thirteenth century, readers formed in that historical circumstance have to negotiate a flight of their own from an enchantment of unreason and the sinister spell of existential disorientation that it is able to cast. It will be argued, then, that available to early audiences of Sir Orfeo were at least three principal discourses in whose terms those audiences might have tried to make sense of the various refractions of chaos accumulated in lines 387–404 of the poem. Three important (and ordinarily stable) cognitive models were available c. 1300 for making sense of the human damage that these lines evoke.10 It will also be suggested that some of the remarkable imaginative power long acknowledged to inhabit the poem depends upon the compelling invitation that these lines would have extended to audiences to join in a contemplation of the entropy of both the human and of the discursive master narratives by which human beings live. However, this contemplation, thrilling in its scope and richness, was also frightening in bringing readers to the brink of being unrewarded with the prospect of salvaging any settled meaning from entropy after the adventure of contemplation was over.11 Sir Orfeo’s readers, too, were invited to become, momentarily, the connoisseurs of chaos. And the poem goes about purveying its entropic vision in a sophisticated way: the three discourses in question have Therefore, the timescape inhabited by the fairy folk is qualitatively different from the stasis of the gallery. While fairyland somehow encompasses that timescape, it is not coterminous with it. 10  I will not argue that all would have had equal familiarity with each of these, although the first, medieval Christianity, would presumably have been a constant where the other two, astrology and fairyland, quite possibly were not. 11  That is, at any rate, not as far as the text itself is concerned. Of course, readers might have resorted to their own resources for explanations, but in such self-recourse the text does nothing to assist. Rather, it is more likely to confuse, for reasons that will become clear (and see also nn. 46 and 71 below). The only ‘settled meaning’ that will eventually be derived from Sir Orfeo, as will be seen, will simply bracket entropy, not negate it.

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been absorbed and then dislocated in the moment of their expropriation into the text. The very artistry of Sir Orfeo, therefore, like the fairy folk populating its narrative, may be seen as both beautiful and dangerous, capable of carrying off discourses from the real world of its readers away into itself. The lesson would seem to be that discourses too, like the people who live by them, may be taken.12 The poem’s capacity in this respect to digest and transform the familiar fosters a subtle symbiosis between its status as literary fiction and the historical reality of contemporary England (perhaps, more specifically, of London or its cultural environs c. 1300) that it will also finally be a purpose of this chapter to trace. In Sir Orfeo, the consolations of intelligibility, the trophies that the mind returns with after its quest to search out reassuring reasons behind events, perhaps grounding those events in a stable ‘Providence’, but in any case tidily pigeon-holing them into some known category, are to be temporarily lost from view. Early readers, it will be argued, would have found whatever explanations for chaos that they could arrive at starting to shimmer like a mirage; hence the disturbing imaginative power of the text. Thus as the text refracted unitary explanation into variegated possibilities — here were many explanations and yet no one explanation — beauty and danger would once again have found a way in.13 After explanations have come close to exposure by the poem as human constructs, vulnerable because negotiable, the reader’s world could never as a result be quite the same again, just as Orfeo’s was not, even though by the end of the narrative he had done his utmost to repair, stabilize, and shore it up.14 Since the three discourses alluded to were historically contingent, they will need elucidation before the nature of their dislocation can be clearly grasped and appreciated. To anticipate, the consequence of their collection within the gallery ‘wiþ-in þe wal’ is to reify chaos as an object of aesthetic contemplation, a project which seems unusual not just within the early Middle English romance corpus, 12 

In italicizing taken, I allude to the influential reading of lines 387–404 by Allen, ‘Orpheus and Orfeo’. 13  The pleasure which Roland Barthes associated with the abandonment of prescriptive mean­ing may serve as a modern analogy for what I have construed in Sir Orfeo as ‘beauty’ and ‘danger’ (Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, p. 103: ‘Le plaisir du texte, c’est ça: la valeur passée au rang somptueux de signifiant’). ‘Beauty’ and ‘danger’ were qualities also identified in the poem (if less formally) in the useful reading of Lucas, ‘An Interpretation of Sir Orfeo’. 14  There are signs at the end of the poem that Orfeo’s kingdom remained a fragile polity; Falk, ‘The Son of Orfeo’, has plausibly read the absence of an heir for Orfeo as a gap in the text that would have disturbed early readers, since these were people likely to have regarded the question of ensured dynastic succession as a matter of prime importance.

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but also within the canon of early Middle English poetry in general.15 One of the dislocations contributory to this reification has in fact already been identified at a formal, narrative level — Sir Orfeo presents a plot that accommodates the puzzling paradox of both linear (that is, humanly familiar and comprehensible) and non-linear (that is, humanly unfamiliar and incomprehensible) time — but there are others that our distance from the poem’s cultural matrix has rendered obscure. These will be examined next in the context of the three discourses in which they are effected. Finally, we will consider the nature of the refuge from chaos that Sir Orfeo ends by constructing, and how the poem’s attempted quarantine of beauty and danger witnesses to, and underwrites, a distinctive social praxis, characteristically current in aristocratic circles. In the Sir Orfeo poet, then, we must prepare to face not only a writer well versed in a literary tradition, but also a fluent reader of the various sets of ground rules by which his culture operated.

The Discourse of Late Medieval Christianity In the real world surrounding Sir Orfeo, that is, and as has been supposed here, in London or its cultural environs c. 1300, most of the human casualties listed in Sir Orfeo’s catalogue of the taken were already sadly familiar. One of the church’s most pressing social initiatives was the explanation of what deaths and disasters such as those accumulated there might be thought to signify and how, in spite of their awkwardness, they might nevertheless be reconciled within the providential order, thereby salvaging from the human débris some comforting 15 

Even later when Chaucer, in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, came close to catching the dark temper of Sir Orfeo when he made a frightening fresco out of the turmoil caused by Mars, or when he made Saturn rehearse his baleful catalogue of effects (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 1975–2038 and ll. 2454–69 (pp. 52–53 and p. 58) respectively), he still grounded human disaster in these cases in an efficient cause, namely, in astrological influence. We will see that while Sir Orfeo may have prompted some of its readers to consider astrological causality a possible explanation, it has stopped short of actually naming it. This textual gap has important interpretative consequences that will subsequently become clear. Cartlidge, ‘Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld’, usefully traces within other contemporary medieval texts a courtship of existential disorientation. His examples are mainly in French and Latin. However, his one vernacular example, in the Peterborough Chronicle entry for 1127, though certainly containing motifs genetically similar to ones found in Sir Orfeo, cannot really bear sustained comparison with the way in which those motifs in Sir Orfeo are deployed. The chronicler makes the appearance of the Wild Hunt in 1127 correlate with an injustice comitted in the real world — the nepotistic appointment of Henry of Poitou as abbot of Peterborough — while in Sir Orfeo, no comparable grounding in any moral infraction accounts for the incursion of the fairy folk into the lives of Orfeo and Heurodis.

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sense of a divine, if in the last analysis unfathomable, rationale. Indeed, the very power of the Church over temporal affairs was in part coextensive with the trust reposed in its authority as an arbiter of matters such as these. In view of this socio-­theological mandate, it is interesting to note that the deaths and disasters installed in Sir Orfeo’s gallery have not been randomly assembled. On the contrary, they appear to have been deliberately selected for their maximum sensitivity within the discourse of late medieval English Christianity. They were (acknowledged) irritants that goaded that discourse into action by provoking within it considerable anxiety. In the later Middle Ages, the ideal form of Christian death — one might say the normative death — was the death well prepared for. This death was most typically codified and celebrated from the late fourteenth century within the Artes moriendi tradition, yet it was a death already coveted at the time when Sir Orfeo was composed.16 To die in one’s bed, in a controlled environment where one could be fortified, as death’s door swung perilously open, with the last sacramental rites of confession, extreme unction and viaticum, was a consummation devoutly to be wished. The converse, a mors improvisa, was greatly to be feared.17 It lacked the reassurance of a neat Christian closure. The crisis of confidence within the discourse that the mors improvisa was liable to precipitate found expression in the grave concern often voiced as to how the exequies of those dying in less well regulated circumstances should be conducted. As their deaths were difficult, so too were their burials. Similarly the ‘dead’ in Sir Orfeo, who were in no position to enjoy any of the benefits in extremis that the Church would otherwise have conferred upon them, would likewise have been focuses of 16 

On the Artes moriendi, see O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well. For an example of the value implicit in a meticulously ordered deathbed scene in a text composed before Sir Orfeo, compare the account of the death of William Marshall in L’Histoire de Guillaume le maréchal, ed. by Meyer. This biographical poem was written between 1219 and 1226. Also, compare the story of the goldsmith who went to purgatory because death had caught him unawares in The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham (The Cartulary of the Abbey of Eynsham, ed. by Salter, ii, 319–20); this visio of the monk Edmund of Eynsham is recounted in a work of Adam of Eynsham, who died sometime after 1233; Edmund’s visio is dated to 1197. In this latter case, a daily tracing of ‘Ihesus Nazarenus’ on the brow and breast would have protected against a mors improvisa. 17  Binski, Medieval Death, p. 36. Compare the anxiety implicit in the popular belief that anyone seeing a consecration at Mass was safeguarded that day against violent death. Though later than Sir Orfeo, John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests (probably composed some time in the last quarter of the fourteenth century) bears witness to this long tradition. Mirk attributed it to St Augustine: ‘As seynt austyn techeth a-ryȝt, — | þat day þat þow syst goddes body, | þese benefyces schalt þou haue sycurly: | … Soden deth that ylke day, | The dar not drede wyþowte nay’ (Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. by Kristensson, p. 85, ll. 315–17 and 322–23).

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anxiety and liable to be perceived by the poem’s early audiences as problematic. Since for all classes in society the fate of the soul was felt to be linked to that of the corpse,18 what became of those who, like most of the casualties in Sir Orfeo’s gallery of horrors, died beyond the pale of church and churchyard? These were uncomfortable deaths, ones at which the technocrats of death, the clerics, were not in ministering attendance.19 So, in terms of the ideals of dying which late medieval Christian discourse promulgated, most of the casualties in Sir Orfeo would have been regarded as dying outside of a secure context. They would already have been perceived as dislocated, therefore, because their counterparts in the real world repeatedly challenged the discourse to negotiate their safe reintroduction into the fold of Christian intelligibility. It seems appropriate to consider Sir Orfeo’s ‘dead’ and taken in order, indicating where the anxieties which they galvanized lay deepest, and how the discourse strove to sedate those anxieties with consolations tailored to the circumstances. The tour of the gallery begins with a standing group of headless bodies (l. 387). It is not explained how their decapitations came about. In theological literature, decapitation was a common form of martyrdom and hence a relatively positive exit from this world, one implying a happy heavenly resolution.20 But in Sir Orfeo, coloured by association with the next two groups of persons, people without arms and people wounded in their bodies (ll. 388–89), the headless of line 387 may have beckoned the reader’s imagination towards a bleaker prospect, the carnage of war. Here, by contrast, Christian anxiety about how to dispose of the bodies of those slain in battle was acute.21 More often than not it happened that they received no adequately supervised Christian burial at all. Alternatively, were the decapitations of line 387 the results of execution?22 In which case, by 18 

Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, p. 60. The late twelfth-century Paris theologian John Beleth expressed the view in his Rationale divinorum officiorum that if the dying person had made a final confession, it might act as a guide to the living as to how the body should be disposed of (see Beleth, Rationale divinorum officiorum, col. 159). That is, the confessed person would be accorded the benefit of any doubt and buried with the full circumstances of Christian exequies. 20  As Daniell, Death and Burial, points out, Christ’s athletes often suffered violent deaths, amongst which decapitation was a favourite (pp. 78–79). 21  Daniell, Death and Burial, p. 107. Also, note the view of the thirteenth-century canonist William Durandus that people killed in a just battle might be buried in the cemetery but their bodies must be kept out of the church, ne pauimentum sanguine polluatur (‘lest the [church] pavement be polluted by blood’; Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum i–iv, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 62, ll. 150–52). His Rationale was written between 1285–91. 22  Compare Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 19 

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an association of judicial ideas, the armless state of the people listed next to the decapitated might suggest the dismemberment inflicted on certain capital traitors.23 Or were the decapitations caused by some unforeseen maiming? It is already becoming clear that part of the cruel unintelligibility foregrounded in this passage arises precisely from the fact that the efficient causes of the various forms of human distress piled up in the gallery are not generally explained at all but, in being left open, are also left open to the worst imaginings and to dark surmise. Those wounded in body (l. 389) might also conceivably have been subjects of murderous attack, in whatever context,24 or even have been the victims of their own violence. As ever, the passage is reticent about causes, leaving gaps in the text in which fear can breed. Mad people (l. 390) next to those wounded in body were commonly restrained lest they injure others or themselves,25 and so again, by an association of ideas, self-injury may also have been connoted here, since madness and suicide were often thought to keep ii, 496, for instances of thirteenth-century executions by decapitation in cases of manifest grand larceny (an alternative was to hurl the convict from a rock into the sea). For other crimes punished by decapitation, see further below. 23  Compare the case of Simon de Montfort’s dismemberment after the battle at Evesham in 1265. His head (and testicles, one inserted into each nostril) were cut off and sent to the wife of one of his enemies. Other members were sent to various parts of the kingdom (The Chronicle of William de Rishanger, ed. by Halliwell-Phillipps, pp. xxxi–xxxii). Similarly, compare the case of the Scottish rebel William Wallace, who was hanged, drawn, quartered, and beheaded in London in 1305 and his limbs subsequently exhibited in various places in England and Scotland ( John of Fordun, Chronica gentis Scotorum, ed. by Skene, i, 340). Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, notes the increase in the use of mutilation as a punishment for capital crimes in the late thirteenth century (p. 324). D’Arcy, ‘The Faerie King’s Kunstkammer’, chooses to see the incomplete bodies as specimens of fragmented statuary which nevertheless retain their force as tokens of imperial spolia (pp. 20–21). I would read this a little differently, for while statuesque, certainly, the people in the gallery are nevertheless not quite statues, and as such escape explanation quite entirely in the way D’Arcy seems to propose. Alternatively, and granting the value of the sources that D’Arcy has drawn upon as underwriting what she identifies as ‘imperial discourse’, one could argue that Sir Orfeo may allude, but not fully conform, to the ‘imperial discourse’ that those sources underwrite. 24  Note, too, that Durandus said that those dying in a brawl or tumult were not to be buried in a cemetery (Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum i–iv, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 62, ll. 142–44). See also Hanawalt, ‘Violent Death’, who notes that in the data that she had examined by far the commonest murder weapon was the knife (see especially Appendix iv, p. 319); the commonest motives for murder were arguments, felonies, and acts of revenge (Appendix v, p. 320). 25  As testified in Book vii, Chapter 5 of Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, p. 283.

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company (as still today). 26 Why some were armed on horseback (l. 391) is equally mysterious. Presumably it was for some military encounter. That would be consistent, of course, with carnage of the sort hinted at at the start of the passage. Or was it, perhaps, for a joust? But jousts too were equivocal pastimes, being at best tolerated by the Church;27 more usually, they drew ample Church censure. Clerics were not even permitted to attend such spectacles where the danger of bloodshed was very real.28 Thus if a jouster were to be killed, he would not be dying auspiciously in the Church’s view, neither might any cleric be at hand to administer the last rites. In the next line (l. 392), in contrast to the martial world, whether real or stage-managed, the reader is now confronted by the death’s head at the feast, and for the first time in the list there appears some hinted relation between an efficient cause and its effect — in this case, between eating and choking. Yet, not necessarily. It may be, alternatively, that these strangulated people were imagined by early readers as having been throttled by some other agency while in the course of doing something as domestic and routine as eating. Demons, for example, were fond of choking people,29 26 

And if so, the conjunction of wounding and madness may have intimated diabolic instigation; see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 20–21. In the medieval period, a sin > madness > suicide trajectory was widely acknowledged. It often began in diabolic possession (this normally presumed a sinful disposition in the possessed person in the first place, since possession was something to which those in spiritual health were not prone). However, although sin and madness were commonly associated (as Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, pp. 49–53, has emphasized), the efficient causes of madness were thought to be various. Several are to be seen competing in Froissart’s anatomy of the madness of Charles VI of France, for example (and see further below on this in n. 69). 27  On the attitude of the Church to jousting, see Barber and Baker, Tournaments, pp. 142– 45. Also John Beleth declared in his Rationale divinorum officiorum that if anyone dies jousting, without benefit of penance and priest, he should be buried instar asini (‘like an ass’; Beleth, Rationale divinorum officiorum, col. 159). 28  Compare, for example, a legislation in the synodal statutes of 1279–83 for the diocese of Dublin in this respect: Ab illicitis spectaculis se abstineant. & precipue torniamentis/ Luctis/. & aliis vbi sanguinis effusio poterit formidari (‘Let them [i.e., clerics] abstain from spectacles, and especially from tournaments, contests and other [events] at which bloodshed is to be feared’; Dublin Diocesan Records, D 6/1, fol. 27). 29  The idea features a few times in the influential Legenda aurea of the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacobus de Voragine. See Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Graesse, p. 222 (a demon waits to strangle a knight if he omits to say his daily Ave Maria) or p. 342 (one Carpasius, having blasphemed his pagan gods, is throttled by a demon). Choking while eating, whether by the devil’s agency or not, might also be used to add further brushstrokes of horror to a moral exemplum horrendum. Compare again the Legenda aurea’s account of the death of King Herod. The sequence of events leading to his demise begins with him choking on an apple, next

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but whether or not readers imagined demonic agency here — choking would certainly seem to have made available this option — the Christian discourse sometimes strove to contain unusual and unexpected death like this by viewing it as a justifiably merited end, one commensurate with, and diagnostic of, some spiritual malaise within the asphyxiated patient.30 Thus, for example, to cite a related instance from 1244, when Enguerrand de Coucy suffered a bizarre death by drowning and simultaneous piercing with his own sword, the chronicler Matthew Paris was able to ascribe his end to his vicious character, correlating the two. The peculiar misadventure of de Coucy’s death was read and rationalized by Paris as indicating the measure of the man.31 De Coucy’s case neatly anticipates the next group in the gallery, the drowned (l. 393), who in turn seem appropriately paired with their elemental binaries, people shrivelled up in fire (l. 394).32 Possibly the fire/water dyad was abetted by recollection of the ordeals of fire and water which by the time of the poem’s composition had been abandoned as juridical procedures in England but whose memory lingered on.33 However, as we have by now come to expect of this text, no explanation is offered for these deaths by fire and water either. The reader has been left free to conjecture the circumstances. The drowning cases may have been the results of execution,34 or deaths by misadventure, or by suicide, since death by drowning seems to have been one of suicide’s better recognized preferences.35 trying to kill himself out of sheer frustration and being prevented, and finally dying five days later ( Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Graesse, p. 66). 30  Although a fifteenth-century witness, Thomas Gascoigne betrayed a similarly representative mentality when he gloated that Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, who had been seized with an obstruction in the throat some days before his death, had received a visitation appropriate to one who had legislated to stop the mouths of almost all preachers in the realm for the sake of silencing a few heretics. See Loci e libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 34–35. 31  Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. by Luard, iv, 360–61. Matthew Paris also chose to illustrate this bizarre scene in a picture. His verdict on de Coucy was not necessarily spiteful — though it would have been easy enough for anyone spitefully inclined to entertain thoughts of an enemy’s death in similar circumstances in such terms — but belonged to an old tradition in which singular death was regarded as the just deserts of singular wickedness. 32  The elemental binary may have suggested the pairing, but also the possible reminiscence of their pairing as forms of ordeal. 33  Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, notes that ‘many priests and prelates continued to countenance the practice and, indeed, did so well into the thirteenth century’ (p. 94). 34  See n. 21 above on execution by drowning. 35  Compare the case from Bedfordshire in 1278 in MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 23. The Liber poenitentialis of Robert of Flamborough, composed between 1208 and

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How to arrange for the burial of a drowned person, then, could often pose difficulties, even when the actual reason for the drowning was known or could be safely guessed, and one famous case arbitrated by Pope Innocent III succeeded in finding its way into canon law. A young girl, fleeing from a group of men intent on her rape, fell from a bridge into the river below and was drowned. The anxiety of the local clerics, in spite of their awareness of the circumstances of her death, is interesting to observe. After the body had been fished from the water, ‘the chaplains of the same place hesitated to commit the body to burial’.36 They hesitated even though they knew that she had fled for an honest cause and had not actually thrown herself in. But as the pope implied, these were the key exonerating factors. Throwing herself in would have been suicide and an entirely different matter. In this girl’s case, the canonical maxim would have applied that ‘the just man may be saved whatever hour he dies in, especially if he was exerting himself about some legitimate business’.37 Nevertheless, had not her death caused problems for the local clerics, this case would never have come to light, leave alone set precedents in canon law. Those devoured by flame may have suggested again deaths by chance, since fiery self-immolations do not feature in the way that hanging and drowning do as preferred methods of suicide. But another possible resonance here would have been that of the deliberate, judicial execution, and e­ xecution by burning was often reserved for heresy and its associated taints of sodomy and witchcraft.38 Whatever about drowned bodies, dead heretics, of course, were absolutely forbidden church burial. The burning of relapsed or impenitent heretics, which had become a widely accepted civil policy after 1224 with the decrees of Frederick II, had been adopted for the Church by Pope Gregory IX in his constitution Excommunicamus et anathematisamus of 1231. By the mid-thirteenth century, Pope Alexander IV declared anyone knowingly causing a heretic to be buried in consecrated ground excommunicate.39 So while on the one hand the 1215, puts suicide by drowning at the head of his list of methods of self-destruction (Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, ed. by Firth, p. 211, ll. 30–44). His other listed forms of suicide were hanging, stabbing, and poisoning. 36  Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Friedberg and Richter, ii, col. 553: ‘dubitaverunt capellani eiusdem loci corpus tradere sepulturae’. Innocent III’s arbitration was sent in a letter to the archbishop of Tours. 37  Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum i–iv, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 62, ll. 148–50: ‘Iustus […] in quacumque hora moritur saluatur, presertim si dabat operam alicui licite rei.’ 38  Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, ii, 549– 50, 556–57. 39  Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, p. 57.

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mention of people consumed in fire could have suggested that a fearful mors improvisa had befallen them,40 on the other it may as soon have called to mind the supreme punishment for heresy.41 Whichever way, unease and anxiety haunted holocaust death. And finally comes the last category of unfortunates in the gallery, women either dead, or raving, in childbed (ll. 395–96).42 There was some variety of Church opinion about how the body of a woman dying in labour should be disposed of, for this too was a delicate matter. One view, expressed, for example, by the late twelfth-century Paris theologian, John Beleth, maintained that while the woman could not be buried in church, she could be legitimately buried outside it. The child must nevertheless be cut from her and buried outside the cemetery itself.43 Alternative views were expressed by the thirteenth-century canonist William Durandus. He agreed that a woman so dying should not be set to rest within the church, ‘lest the church pavement be defiled with blood’, but should be buried outside in the cemetery, and he also agreed that her dead, unbaptized child should be removed from her womb and buried outside the cemetery. Yet Durandus noted that there were others who took a more lenient approach to this distressing human predicament, ‘who say that the birth product must be buried in the cemetery with the woman, because it is considered to be a part of her viscera’.44 As we take in Sir Orfeo’s gallery ‘wiþ-in þe wal’ at a retrospective glance, a consistency of fear emerges, fear contoured as much by the current shibboleths of prevailing Christian ideology as by natural human instinct. The catalogue of casualties has concentrated together anxieties too familiar and sensitive in the Christian society of England c. 1300 to suggest that they have been assembled for anything other than deliberate reasons, while at the same time it has withheld any of the palliatives that contemporary Christian discourse had to offer for the alleviation of those anxieties. It has managed to do this by keeping obscure, for the most part, the exact nature of the efficient causes of the deaths and afflictions of those in the gallery. This results in their spiritual prognosis becoming hard 40  Again, whether their burning came as a result of malice, war or accident is all the same: it was a mors improvisa. 41  Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, ii, 549. 42  This is the second and only other causal relation hinted at in the gallery. This time it is between the labour of childbirth and death/madness. 43  Thus Beleth, Rationale divinorum officiorum, cols 158–59. 44  Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum i–iv, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 62, ll. 165–67: ‘ne pauimentum ecclesie sanguine polluatur’ and ‘qui dicunt quod partus debet una cum muliere in cimiterio sepeliri, eo quod pars uiscerum esse censetur’.

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to gauge. As we have seen, in the Christian discourse, even when their efficient causes were obvious, deaths like these were still experienced as highly problematic and their palliatives costly enough to come by. Their near intractability in this respect probed and helped to define the discourse’s boundaries. But displaced from whatever consolations the rationalizing discourse could otherwise attempt to devise for them into Sir Orfeo’s romance narrative, the anxieties which they focused have been left utterly raw and unsalved. Therefore, once any possible solace of Christian intelligibility has been occluded (at least in any explicit form), their (calculated) legacy to the medieval reader would have been unmitigated fear. We find a strikingly comparable catalogue of human disasters in a sermon composed by the popular late fourteenth-century preacher John Mirk, and the passage, in his sermon for Rogation Days, is worth quoting for the sake of comparison. Devils, says Mirk, are reminded whenever they hear thunder pealing of the din they heard before the gates of hell when Christ harrowed it. As a result, they fall to the earth and do not fly back up into the air again until they have instigated multiple woes below: Þan þei reren werres [stir up wars], makyth tempeste in þe see, drowneth schyppes and men; þei makyth debates betwyssen neghburres and manslawtes [manslaughters] þerewith; þei tendon fyres and brennyn howses and townes; þei reren wyndes and tempestes and bloweth down howses, stepulles and trees, and þei makyth womman to ourelygge [lie upon and smother] her schylder [children]; þei make men to sclen hemself [slay themselves], hongyn himself, or drown hemself in wanhope [despair], ande suche oþer many cursyd dedys.45

The key thing here is Mirk’s attribution of all these things to demonic agency, and by that means he offered a reassurance of sorts; these things were not random but motivated. In the circumstances of Sir Orfeo, however, readers could only rely on their personal Christian resources in trying to assuage the fear that the text has unleashed; it did nothing to help them towards whatever forms of Christian relief or explanation might have been available. And even if they persisted in their resort to the discourse of Christianity for consoling answers, even there they would not have found solutions to be effortless, but rather to be fraught with uncertainty.46 45 

Mirk, ‘Festial’, ed. by Powell, p. 139, ll. 35–41. It could be argued that the withholding of any of the explicit Christian gestures of containment would have stimulated Christian readers to supply them, and that their withholding was, as it were, a gap or deficit in the text that readers could be expected to make good. But against this is the fact that those gestures were various and, as has been seen, for some, uncertain. 46 

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The Discourse of Late Medieval Astrology However, some medieval readers of Sir Orfeo are likely to have had another formation also available to them, for it was not left solely to contemporary Christianity, however much in the vanguard, to wrestle chaos into a meaningful shape. Astrology, which at this date was attracting fresh attention,47 also existed for some as a parallel, indeed perhaps a competitive, discourse, and by its means a different set of explanations could be sought for life’s calamities. At the time Sir Orfeo was written, the belief in the domination of earth by sky was widespread.48 It can be seen percolating through other contemporary vernacular writings, and in their company this chapter’s claim for a potential astrological resonance in lines 387–404 should seem less exceptional. The Owl and the Nightingale, for example, the landmark text with which this book began, had evinced a notable interest in astrology, and out of this interest proceeded the Owl’s litany of assorted fates that she claimed to be able to foretell. Indeed, their sombre tone is generally reminiscent of the Sir Orfeo passage under consideration: Ich wot of hunger, of hergonge; Ich wot ȝef men schule libbe longe; Ich wat ȝef wif luste hire make; Ich wat war schal beo niþ & wrake; Ich wot hwo schal beon anhonge; Oþer elles fulne deþ afonge; Ȝef men habbeþ bataile inume, Ich wat hwaþer schal beon ouerkume. Ich wat ȝif cwalm scal comen on orfe; An ȝif dor schul ligge astorue; Ich wot ȝef treon schule blowe; Ich wat ȝef cornes schule growe; Ich wot ȝef huses schule berne; Ich wot ȝef men schule eorne oþer erne; Ich wot ȝef sea schal schipes drenche; Ich wot ȝef smiþes schal uuele clenche.49 Which should be made? No guidance is given, not to mention the (complicating) availability of the two alternative and competing discourses which this chapter will consider next. 47  Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, ii. 48  Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, ii. Also, see Richard of Wallingford, ed. by North, ii, 84–85. 49  The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. by Cartlidge, p. 29, ll. 1191–

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(I know about famine and military campaigns; I know if men will live for long; I know if a woman will lose her husband; I know if there will be feuding and vengeance; I know who shall be hanged, or else have a horrible death; I know who shall be overcome if men join battle; I know if disease will descend on cattle and if animals will lie dead; I know if trees will be blown down; I know if corn will grow; I know if houses will burn; I know if men will go on horseback or on foot; I know if the sea will drown ships; I know if smiths will do their job badly.)

So the contents of Sir Orfeo’s gallery could have invited for some readers a con­ temporary astrological understanding of their causality, and just as many of the gallery’s human tragedies, as was seen, had a peculiar Christian resonance corresponding to whatever causality the reader chose to attribute to them, so too they would have had a peculiar astrological one for such readers as had even the most rudimentary acquaintance with astrological discourse. The selection of most of the gallery’s casualties could therefore once more be supposed to have been deliberate and calculated according to their exemplary value, this time of the activity of the two baleful planets of the zodiac, Mars and Saturn.50 Those in the gallery would have been readily recognized by anyone acquainted with theories of planetary influence as Mars and Saturn’s ill-starred children. Since the works of the second-century astrologer Ptolemy were a prime source in the thirteenth century of astrological lore, we might most conveniently consider lines 387–404 principally in Ptolemy’s terms in any attempt to trace the lineaments of a putative medieval reader response that was astrologically informed.51 Decapitation (l. 391) and other mutilations (l. 392) were to be put down to malign conjunctions of Mars, as were deaths by fire (l. 398) and in childbed (l. 400). Victims of Mars’s planetary influence may likewise have been people wounded in body (l. 393). Those prepared for some martial encounter or other (l. 395) were self-evidently Mars’s offspring.52 Madness (l. 394), and its associated propensity to suicide, was a condition that Mars was thought to bring about.53 In Ptolemy’s terms, there is one possible exception: death by strangula1206. On the astrological resonances, see Cawley, ‘Astrology in “The Owl and the Nightingale”’. 50  But whether deliberate or not, the point is that an astrologically informed reader could have discerned in them a Mars/Saturn causality. 51  These were generally in the air in England c. 1300. His Tetrabiblos had been translated into Latin from Greek by 1138, and his ideas informed much of what later English writers believed (for example, Bartholomeus Anglicus; see Braswell-Means, ‘Utilitarian and Scientific Prose’, p. 339, and North, Chaucer’s Universe, p. 410). 52  Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. by Robbins, pp. 326–27 and 428–35 for all these. 53  Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. by Robbins, pp. 328–29 and 430–31. However, for evidence of

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tion (l. 396) was attributable to an evil aspect of Jupiter.54 But this apart, all the rest were Mars’s handiwork, plus one instance — a salient one — Saturn’s, death by drowning (l. 397).55 The proximity of the discourses of Christianity and astrology c.  130056 — and for some important commentators, it should be stressed, their incom­ mensurability — is reflected in the struggle that was taking place in some quarters to reconcile them. For some, finding an accommodation between them had proved a relatively easy matter, while for others it had proved exceedingly difficult, if not downright impossible. Thus the theologian William of Auvergne (c. 1180– 1249) abhorred the astrological enthusiasms of his associates and explicitly censured Ptolemy’s influence. William’s criticisms, of course, testify to the strength of astrology’s current vogue, and for all that astrology had eminent detractors like himself, it had eminent supporters too.57 One such, William’s more famous contemporary, the Dominican theologian Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), held the teachings of Ptolemey by contrast in high esteem.58 Yet although Albertus believed that a reconciliation between the two systems was possible, the general debate continued unresolved over how compatible belief in divine Providence and belief in the rule of the stars might be, especially when the question of human free will had also to be factored into the equation. Astrology might easily collapse into fatalism, and so earn Christianity’s interdict. However, even if we conceive a reader response to lines 387–404 that may have had more in common with an Albertus Magnus than a William of Auvergne, the salient point is this: the operation of these planets is not explicitly named the contemporary belief in the influence also of the moon on madness, see for example Book v, Chapter 3 and Book viii, Chapter 30 of Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Bartholomæi Anglici de Genvinis rervm coelestivm, pp. 125 and 415 respectively). 54  Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. by Robbins, pp. 428–29. 55  Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. by Robbins, pp. 326–27 and 432–33; at the head of the famous litany of Saturn’s disastrous consequences in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2456–69 (p.58)) stands death by drowning. 56  Astrology was studied at many respectable Christian centres even earlier, as, for example, in the school at Hereford Cathedral in the late twelfth century. See Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, pp. 106–28. 57  Richard of Wallingford, ed. by North, ii, 84–85, emphasizes the general acceptability of astrology, its critics notwithstanding, during this period. 58  For a survey of thirteenth-century responses to astrology, see Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers. See also Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, ii, and for the views of William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus, see respectively Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, ii, 369 and 582–83.

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inside the poem as the cause of the damage; it is only to be inferred, if at all, from the vantage point of an astrological discourse available to certain readers outside the poem. Thus the discourse of astrology too has been disabled in the moment of its engagement, because even if the casualties invited those readers to consider an astrological explanation, no such explanation is ostensibly registered within the text itself to help endorse their interpretative choice. That is, readers had no ostensible help from the text in settling upon astrological causality; they were on their own once again to make that connection, just as they were on their own if they tried to understand the gallery in terms of Christian discourse. These readers would have found no satisfactory closure any more forthcoming from astrology than they would from Christianity. Moreover, such readers as were in touch with both discourses (anyone knowing some astrology would doubtless have known Christianity) would necessarily have been confronted with an even greater surplus of possible explanations, and hence no one definitive explanation. Thus in the moment that the range of interpretative options for some readers was becoming luxuriously multiple, their access to settled knowledge was becoming proportionally more complicated; any chance of singular certainty was increasingly being put at risk by the prospect of plural possibility. The potential astrological resonance of lines 387–404 seems all the clearer for being so largely consistent. In the main it is Martian. Yet as has been emphasized here, none of this is made explicit in the text itself. The astrological discourse has been disabled — one might say decapitated — just as the Christian one, by a somewhat different set of procedures, also was, and installed acephalous into fairyland. While the planets, especially Mars, might have been credited with the gallery’s disasters, that was an inference left solely to the reader to make, just as the reader’s own initiative would have had to struggle to supply any closure in Christian terms. A third discourse remains for investigation which, like Christianity but by con­ trast with astrology, is explicitly registered in the poem, and this is the discourse of fairyland. If Christianity cannot easily reconcile the mortes improvisae of the gallery, and if astrology has no clear internal textual sanction by which their responsibility can be offloaded onto Mars and Saturn, may it be that causality can be explained in terms of fairyland’s rules?

The Discourse of Late Medieval Fairyland A problem that arises immediately here is that, of the three discourses under review, fairyland proves the most elusive, although as will shortly be seen, its

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broad outlines are not utterly beyond retrieval. However, existing as it did chiefly at the oral and preliterate level, it was the least likely of the three to leave palpable traces. By that same measure, its traditions may have been far more fluid, and therefore less coercive as artistic influences, than were the more densely scripted traditions of Christianity and astrology. To that extent, fairyland’s broad outlines are all that may have been available at the best of times.59 When it came to this particular discourse, storymakers and poets may have felt themselves more at liberty to improvise around its broad themes, and been less constrained in points of detail. Thus each treatment of fairyland is likely to have left more to the creative initiative of whoever was handling it. The comparative lack of written accounts of fairyland and its associated traditions is implicit in Dorena Allen’s explication of the gallery’s ‘dead’ and taken, the first to afford lines 387–404 any sustained critical attention. This depended in the main on post-medieval folk analogues — unavoidably, she doubtless thought, given the intrinsically ephemeral nature of the folk culture that she was trying to access.60 She believed nevertheless that her analogues, many of them of Gaelic and Breton origin, witnessed not just to the longevity in folklore of motifs also active within Sir Orfeo, but to a perennial human need to contain such unsettling aspects of life as Sir Orfeo’s ‘dead’ and taken also epitomize.61 The author of Sir Orfeo, Allen argued, had inherited an ancient narrative that had undergone an evolution. The classical fable of Orpheus’s reclaiming of his dead wife Eurydice from Hades had been subsequently infiltrated, reinterpreted according to prevailing folk beliefs which held that death might be no more than an illusion, a masking of what had in fact been a fairy abduction. Her analogues, she thought, were a testimony to folk attempts to transfigure and so alleviate the peculiar pathos of untimely death. Whether that was a solace also extended to readers of Sir Orfeo is, however, a very different matter, and it is worth noting A. C. Spearing’s historically alert reminder, itself a response to Allen’s study, that the poet of Sir Orfeo was not a Gaelic or a Breton storyteller but an Englishman who wrote in or not far from London.62 59 

Compare, for example, the attempt of Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, to find a consensus in how medieval elves were presented; he arrives at a consensus only in the broadest of terms: ‘The consensus of these references is fear’ (p. 66). 60  See Allen, ‘Orpheus and Orfeo’. 61  Allen, ‘Orpheus and Orfeo’; indeed, several of her references date to classical antiquity (those on pp. 107–08, for example). 62  Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 71.

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Even so, analogues have their value, and since the time Allen wrote, another has come to light closer to the original circumstances of the composition of Sir Orfeo than any she was then able to adduce. The evidence of this new analogue is worth citing, for it establishes, more compellingly than any Gaelic or Breton analogue could, that closely contemporary with Sir Orfeo there actually existed a popular oral English discourse of fairyland. This evidence provides a basis for an analogical comparison, therefore, that lays a greater claim to our attention since it has the advantage of immediate historical relevance and purchase.63 In its discussion of the sin of sloth, the early fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook known as the Fasciculus morum contains the following passage: But, I ask, what is to be said about wretched and superstitious folk of this sort, who have claimed that at night they see very beautiful queens and other maidens dancing with the Lady Diana, goddess of the pagans, and leading ring dances? In our language these [beings] are called elves. And folk believe that these [creatures] can transform both men and women into other shapes/natures and take them with them into elfland, where now, as they say, dwell those most mighty champions, that is, Onewyn and Wade and others.64

According to the Fasciculus, fairyland was a place into which men and women could be carried off. In it dwelt Onewyn and Wade, figures now relatively mysterious.65 Its fabulous denizens could also change men and women into other shapes or natures. The fleeting, but unmistakeable, similarities between these motifs and ones used in Sir Orfeo are too obvious to need labouring here. What is of present interest is the passage’s proof that yet another discourse currently existed 63 

A few other medieval English references to elves and elven ways not mentioned by Allen (or by Cartlidge and D’Arcy either) would be worth further comparative study. For example, references appear in Laȝamon’s Brut and in the South English Legendary, both thirteenthcentury compositions, or in the fourteenth century, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in Chaucer. None that I am currently aware of, however, comes as close as does the Fasciculus morum passage discussed below to mapping traditions similar to those active in Sir Orfeo. 64  Fasciculus morum, ed. by Wenzel, p. 578, ll. 61–67: ‘Set rogo quid dicendum est de talibus miseriis et supersticiosis qui de nocte dixerunt se videre reginas pulcherrimas et alias puellas tripudiantes cum domina Dyana choreas ducentes dea paganorum, que in nostro vulgari dicitur elves? Et credunt quod tales possunt tam homines quam mulieres in alias naturas transformare secum ducere apud eluenlond, ubi iam, ut dicunt, manent illi athlete fortissimi, scilicet Onewyn et Wad et ceteri.’ 65  Of ‘Onewyn’ I have discovered nothing, though perhaps on the strength of the association made here, s/he may have been a character from the lost Wade narratives. And on Wade, see further in n. 67.

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by means of which some late medieval English men and women, superstitious though they were in the Fasciculus author’s view, might seek to explain certain aspects of their lives. This was the discourse of fairyland.66 The Fasciculus passage shows that it was confined not merely to some literary genre, though understandably, imaginative literature of the romance sort might be the first to register and transmit it: it was also at large in the daily lives of some. And it probably ranged between both ends of the social spectrum, from the relatively demotic that the Fasciculus author seems to have had in mind to the far more elite, even to the courtly.67 What is also worth remarking in the Fasciculus passage, however, is a certain difference distinguishing its fairyland from that which Sir Orfeo evokes. This difference will be revisited presently. Allen’s reading sheds light on an important aspect of Sir Orfeo’s artistry: part of its transhistorical appeal is founded on the immemorial fears to which it gives an imaginative shape. But while Sir Orfeo’s appeal in this respect may be legitimately dehistoricized — for dehistoricizing is the likely consequence of a reading largely dependent on non-contemporary analogues — it must also be historicized and thus made present to its age, as the passage from the Fasciculus, along with the two contemporary discourses surveyed earlier, have begun to make plain. Has the discourse of fairyland, then, been left intact, or has it, like the other two, also in some sense been taken? To be sure, the Fasciculus passage is brief, and what there is of it in which to discern contemporary ideas about fairyland is slender enough. Yet the signs are that something has happened to fairyland too. Its version in Sir Orfeo may not be quite that which the Fasciculus author described in one important respect. The fairy folk were able to carry people away into fairyland, said the Fasciculus author, and this they also did in Sir Orfeo: ‘Eche was þus in þis warld y-nome, | Wiþ fairi þider y-come’ (ll. 403–04). But according to the Fasciculus, they were also able to change men and women into other shapes or natures, and this was a power attributed to them prior to the detail that they could carry people off. In fact, the text may even be read to imply that the shape-changing was a condition of the abduction. In Sir Orfeo, however, the fairies’ instrumentality in 66 

For other examples, see Cartlidge, ‘Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld’. At the elite level, compare the social tone of the context of Chaucer’s two Wade ­allusions, one in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ and the other in Troilus and Criseyde (see, respectively, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 1424 (p. 156) (‘Wades boot’) and l. 614 (p. 522) (a ‘tale of Wade’)). Wade is alluded to as a character of romance (in company with Havelok and Horn) in the Laud Troy Book: ‘Off Hauelok, Horne, & of Wade; — | In Romaunces that of hem ben made | That gestoures often dos of hem gestes | At Mangeres and at grete ffestes’ (The Laud Troy Book, ed. by Wülfing, i, 1, ll. 21–24.). This extract also seems to imply a higher social level for the consumption of Wade narratives than that which the Fasciculus author seems to have been responding to. 67 

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this regard is far less certain. Any ghastly transformation suffered by the people in the gallery apparently happened first in the real world, not at the hands of the fairies. These, it seems, are to be credited only with spiriting them away, not with any transformation per se such as the Fasciculus author spoke of.68 The fairies of Sir Orfeo were collectors who merely followed their passion. This makes them even more alarming than had they simply been presented as the efficient cause of disaster. Were causality attributable to them, it would render them intelligible within terms of the discourse of fairyland, as these are reconstructable from a text like the Fasciculus, and therefore they would be less frightening, since they would be seen behaving in a wonted way. But it is not. True, the fairies could claim themselves capable of murderous intervention, and such was their threat to Heurodis if she did not do as they had bidden her. But the question of their direct responsibility for chaos, at least as far as the gallery manifests it, is in fact left wide open. There is no doubt that they were associated with it in some way — there is even a suggestion that they may have had a taste for it — but the crucial thing is that the text refuses to name them categorically as its instigators. With their instrumentality left in doubt, the fairies of Sir Orfeo fail to serve as a final explanation of chaos either. And while fairyland’s intervention might offer an explanation of sorts for how the gallery came to be assembled in the first place, fairyland itself, as we understand it from a text like the Fasciculus, is collected into the poem’s album of discourses, one among others against which fairyland is similarly obliged to compete for any monopoly on explanation. Furthermore, its collection and adjustment would be understandable, given the considerations earlier outlined: the discourse of fairyland was not one to have put up much resistance to creative manipulation and reworking, certainly not by comparison, say, with either Christianity or astrology and their stiffer textual backbones. At the close of this survey, we may now be better placed to see how the stabilizing authority of these three discourses is not only problematized, but their very plurality has undermined any one definitive way of making sense of lines 387–404 — unless, that is, the reader consciously decided to choose between the options. But in helping the reader thus choose the text offers little guidance. And so in the end, chaos is left as terrifyingly inscrutable as it ever was. 68 

Cartlidge, ‘Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld’, observes that medieval authors could access a pool of ideas about fairyland that they could ‘simultaneously draw on and add to’ (p. 215). In this regard, the apparently liberated practice of the Sir Orfeo poet would seem to stress, at least in his particular case, the element of authorial independence that is implicit in Cartlidge’s formulation. Certainly, the reading of Sir Orfeo proposed in this chapter is reluctant to flatten the poem into any simple identity with traditions upon which it admittedly draws.

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The Flight from the Enchanters The captured discourses in Sir Orfeo, key adjutants to mediating the poem’s peculiar presence to its age, resonate incomplete, incapable of satisfactorily containing chaos in one totalizing explanation. A certain fascination subsists in being allowed to recognize them from without, as it were, in their gallery ‘wiþ-in þe wal’, rather than from within, from the position of one who is subject to their authority in daily life and who lives unquestioningly inside their terms: once routinely familiar in their wonted everyday context, where they could hold sway with all the customary power of assumptions left unexamined, now transferred here they are displayed in an unwonted light as objects of scrutiny.69 In their poetic re-cognition lurks a potential existential confusion too. As has been seen, the options available c. 1300 to men and women for making sense of some of the most intractable human predicaments have been allowed to multiply. In the wake of such multiplication, which explanatory discourse is to be preferred by them? Sir Orfeo offers no guidance. It seems reasonable to imagine that its early readers, or to speak strictly, those who had prior acquaintance of the discourses that it has abducted, experienced a similar disorientation. After all, at the turn of the thirteenth century, the praxis of Christian, astrological and fairy beliefs (though in literate culture, of course, most widely and pre-eminently that of the first) was of great importance, for these were beliefs according to which people actually shaped their lives. Consequently, the defamiliarization of these beliefs in the gallery would presumably have left a contemporary reader in a position not unlike that occupied today by anyone who finds cherished assumptions suddenly appearing less absolute than they had seemed before. In everyday life c. 1300, the 69  Displayed thus uncustomarily for scrutiny in an arena, they become objects made strange by contemplation. The effect here resembles what the Prague School of theatrical theory identified and enunciated in its first principle: essentially, the very fact of an object’s appearance on stage (for ‘on stage’ read ‘in the gallery’ in Sir Orfeo) suppresses the object’s practical function in favour of a symbolic or signifying role. As Brušák, ‘Signs in the Chinese Theater’, observed, ‘while in real life the utilitarian function of an object is usually more important than its signification, on a theatrical set the signification is all important’ (p. 62). Something similar might be said of the displayed discourses, disconnected as they have become in the gallery from routine practical application. The signification that combinatively they help to bear and that displaces their everyday function is chaos — that very thing against which ordinarily they stood as bulwarks. This estrangement of the familiar from itself could equally be conceived in terms of the culture of ‘play’ with which the poem collaborates (and see further below the comments on the poem as performance). As Handelman, ‘Reflexivity in Festival and Other Cultural Events’, has noted, ‘play’ culture is liable to ‘take apart the clock-works of reality, and question their organization, and indeed their very validity as human and as cultural constructs’ (p. 163).

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hegemony of the three discourses was protected in that each normally operated within its own exclusive province, its discreteness, and therefore integrity, even being patrolled by the striking of hostile, reactionary attitudes. Thus, for example, contemporary Christianity, which of the three discourses had the largest stake in organizing the culture enfolding Sir Orfeo, might often be heard reprobating astrology (for all that astrology had its share of contemporary Christian apologists), just as it was quicker still to reprobate as a devilish phantasm any belief in fairyland.70 In the gallery, however, whatever barriers may have been erected between the discourses elsewhere are removed, with the result that they freely associate, each becoming less absolute in the company of the other. The presence of the poem to its age may therefore be a strangely disturbing one. Bereft of any authoritative indication from the poem itself as to which to elect as an interpretative key, the mind of the reader is liable to return defeated from its attempt to make steady sense of that mysterious realm embodied in the human casualties and ever promising to infringe unexpectedly on quotidian reality.71 In addition, and as has been seen, in the terms in which that realm has been constructed in Sir Orfeo, it has been allowed to exceed the reach of the domesticating logic of either of the discourses. And beyond these, what other major paradigms of intelligibility would medieval readers have had at their disposal? In the last part of the poem Orfeo, and the reader by proxy, are able to flee from the enchanters. But it is not to the refuge of any ‘rational’ discourse from whose resources chaos may be disciplined that they resort. The refuge awaiting Orfeo, rather, is dictated and invented by a trick of fiction: the narrative loop must be completed by returning him to the happy-ever-after, incomplete 70 

Note that by the fourteenth century, astrology was coming more strongly under attack from the Church (see Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, ii, 949–50). And for an example of Church reprobation of belief in fairyland, we need look no further than the trenchant Fasciculus author. For him, ‘All these things are nothing but phantasms and are shown to them by an evil spirit’ (Que omnia [non] sunt nisi fantasmata et a maligno spiritu illis demonstrata; Fasciculus morum, ed. by Wenzel, p. 578, ll. 67–68). 71  Defeated, that is, unless that mind can access the resources of its prior cultural formation for guidance. But as has been argued, Sir Orfeo problematizes that access. The demolition of certainty conducted in this part of the poem, of course, clears a space in which the ideology constructed in the latter part can stand unrivalled. Though admittedly later than Sir Orfeo by about a century, it is interesting to compare the competing attempts to explain the madness of Charles VI of France in the Chroniques of Jean Froissart. Froissart exposes a rich relativism, as different folk seize on different ways to explain the king’s madness, always according to their inclination or bias. Their various explanations are summarized in Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, pp. 45–49.

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in some respects though that may be.72 What refuge, alternatively, awaits the reader? Later an attempt will be made to gauge it, but for the moment, suffice it to say that it cannot be so simple. Things may have come more or less right for Orfeo inside the narrative, but the reader outside the narrative has been led to a frightening appreciation of how elemental chaos of its nature might admit no clear motive or rationale. Perhaps the correlative of this, in the narrative’s terms, is that fairyland may have been quitted but not dispatched; for the while out of sight, it still remains there. In any event, the aporia towards which the poem has allowed its readers to stray is not Orfeo’s, and for them the anxieties provoked must be addressed differently if they are to be addressed at all. While existential confusion, as noted earlier, may inhabit this aporia, perhaps also to be found there was the exhilaration of novelty, as belief systems formerly taken for granted were now tilted at an odd angle and readers discovered themselves empowered to choose, or even not to choose, between their relative claims. However, such value-free emancipation is the luxurious condition of the spectating connoisseur, and it resembles that of the person prepared to sever form from content, appreciating the one heedless of the other. An aesthetic capacity of this sort risks encouraging a certain moral vacuousness, and this was necessarily a perilous pathology in the culture in which the poem was produced.73 Ultimately, the master narratives of the age demanded a readerly refuge from this ‘black hole’ opening up in morality. If readers had strayed towards the fascinating and dangerous brink of this event horizon in the text, finally those narratives dominant in England c. 1300 would ensure that they would recoil from its edge. Nevertheless for a little while, it may be that, like the fairy folk, readers too were permitted to occupy in their imaginations a morally vacant space, becoming in turn detached connoisseurs, momentarily licensed to find intriguing and appalling the terms in which the reification of chaos had been held before their minds.74 Thus the gallery 72 

As, for example, Falk, ‘The Son of Orfeo’, has noted. Here, in everyday life, people would normally operate according to, and certainly at least be conscious of, strongly enunciated moral codes that in many cases had been powerfully endorsed by an attribution to them of teleological significance. It is also probable that the majority of folk were too preoccupied with the routine business of living to have had much time for interrogating those codes or scrutinizing them in any sustained and systematic way. That was a prerequisite of the leisured classes, though even there the more dangerous speculations seem to have been conducted at a clerical level, and policed, moreover, by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Nevertheless, Sir Orfeo has opened up a morally vacant space, and the degree of fascination and horror in readers accepting the invitation to occupy that space would have been proportional to the extent of their acculturation to the prevailing moral codes. 74  Lucas, ‘An Interpretation of Sir Orfeo’, shrewdly speaks of fairyland in this poem being 73 

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in fairyland may be seen as a trope for a state where decisive interpretation was not possible, perhaps, indeed, where it may not even have mattered. As such it may be supposed to have had the potential to inspire a sort of interpretative hedonism that colluded to push monolithic answers and solutions, that is, authoritative meanings, for a while into free fall. What, exactly, was the refuge from this available to medieval readers who lived by master narratives outlawing such free fall of meaning? For irrespective of the discursive relativism that the gallery may have exposed, it cannot, finally, cause everything thereafter to dissolve in a joyous Nietzschean indeterminacy, committing readers ‘to an endless free play, unconstrained by a sense of allegiance to anything beyond this freedom’.75 That may well have been a momentary aperçu, as has been argued, but if so, it was as a parcel of the giddy terror of chaos, not an emancipation embraced in its own right in the way the postmodern might embrace it today. To read Sir Orfeo like that would be to read it anachronistically and against the grain of its informing culture: our calibration here of the presence of this text to its age seems that it must also reckon with a certain resistance of that age to its presence. As a preliminary answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paragraph, we might consider first the proposition that a readerly refuge existed in the very ephemerality of the poem. It is conceivable that medieval readers could afford to take a short vacation from the security of the certitudes habitually enjoined upon them in their everyday lives precisely because, after all, their readerly detachment ultimately cushioned them from any seriously damaging implications of what they had appreciated: if they experienced any alarm from the interpretative disorientation that the poem purveyed, in the context of a (vernacular) work of literature whose probable immediate motive was (evanescent) recreation, it would doubtless have come as a thrill rather than as a threat.76 At this date, seriously durable literary gravitas meant to be taken lastingly to heart where its weighable merits could influence the way people lived ‘frightening, as well as fascinating’ (p. 6). I would regard beauty and danger as being even more deeply recessed within the text: the reader seduced by fairyland’s ostensible beauty is convicted of a dangerous moral vacuousness in the moment of seduction. This seduction confounds aesthetic response inextricably with questions of moral value. 75  Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 488. Compare Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Bass, p. 292. 76  Compare the observation of Handelman, ‘Reflexivity in Festival and Other Cultural Events’, that ‘the active freedom of the self in festival is complementary to its restriction and incorporation in everyday life’ (p. 172). Sir Orfeo could similarly be viewed as a ‘festival’ text in this sense.

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would doubtless either have come packaged in Latin or have been grounded in some other way by appeals to an authoritative Latin base.77 A purely vernacular literary culture, by contrast, especially that represented by some secular poetry, may have tended to inscribe its own impermanence in this respect, something not contradicted by the fact that the practice of secular poetry by the late thirteenth century had strong institutional roots.78 So preliminary foundations of a readerly refuge could have been laid in the very insubstantiality of the vernacular at this date as a credited truth-bearing medium: the beauty and danger at large in Sir Orfeo might be defused by trivializing them into the harmless pastime of a moment, one finished once the tale was told, the book put away, and the proper business of living resumed. But another, and possibly more reliable, refuge was also available to the reader.79 It would take shape in a different, less negative set of terms, ones which also appropriately answered to the social milieu in which Sir Orfeo can reasonably be suspected as having originated; analysis of these terms will occupy the last part of this chapter.

‘Out of the swing of the sea’ Whatever refuge may have been available to readers in a self-marginalizing vernacular, then, it is, in addition, the performative culture which the poem 77 

While such authoritative information was available in the vernacular — compare the moral and spiritual instruction broadcast in vernacular preaching, for example — the vernacular in such contexts frequently legitimated itself by reference to an underwriting Latin auctoritas. Indeed, it may be the sheer weight of Latin’s prestige as the standard language of clerical literary culture that contributed to the linguistic interference sometimes manifest in texts which, though probably delivered originally in English, came either to be written up in Latin or, even more tellingly, in a curious Mischsprache of Latin and English (and on the ideological stakes of this phenomenon, see Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, pp. 33–66). 78  The current general view among literary historians would doubtless state this more strongly. However, my suggestions below about the original auspices of Sir Orfeo necessarily call the view into question. Hence my use of the verb ‘tended’ in the sentence above should be allowed full force in aiming to temper current orthodoxy (and compare Salter, FourteenthCentury English Poetry, pp. 22–23, who noted that there is ‘no simple answer to the question of who read and wrote English poetry during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, and that the choice of French over English cannot be safely predicted from ‘the nature of the patrons, the intended public, or the subject-matter’). 79  While a refuge of sorts might be found by dismissing the existential threat from aspects of the poem on the grounds of the marginality of its vernacular, to do so might also entail depreciation of the ‘performative’ refuge afforded by the poem that will be explained below.

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predicates that fights to make itself heard above the meaningless din of chaos. In that fight the harper, and through him the consolidating power of performative culture that his harping represents, is allowed to become stability’s champion. This proposition, that the poem is in effect inhabited by a fourth and countervailing discourse, will be clarified later. First, let us consider the status of harping inside and outside the poem. Inside the poem, within the narrative, it is granted specifically to harping to retrieve stability and to be the instrument of a deliverance at once private and public.80 That is, harping performs social normality for Orfeo, Heurodis, and their kingdom — a large claim. To be sure, it is not necessarily the case that chaos has gone away for good, as has been seen, much less been routed, but for the time being, thanks to harping, it is in abeyance, and an exit has been opened once more into stability. No doubt the flight from the enchanters — whether that of Orfeo from the fairies or that of medieval readers from the somewhat different sort of disturbing magic worked by the text’s existentially disorienting strategies — should be imagined as coming finally as a relief. Medieval readers may have been grateful for having found their toll gate into a heaven-haven normality, even if it was one over which the sign ‘By Courtesy of Harping’ was writ large and to which their attention had to be drawn as the price of admission. To the modern reader, conversely, it may seem, in view of the volatile forces that the earlier part of the poem managed to unleash, that to claim for harping so formidable a triumph in the face of them is almost bathetic. And yet, was crediting this coup to harping really so preposterous? In medieval terms, perhaps not, though the medieval reader may also not have winked at the politics couched within the claim. The equation of harping with healthy civilization in Sir Orfeo cannot merely be regarded as a traditional piety inherited by its author from his predecessors in the romance genre. True, harps and harpers had long been celebrated there and in other literature too,81 and the restorative 80 

Lucas, ‘An Interpretation of Sir Orfeo’, p. 5, rightly considers the poem’s concern with ‘private love and the public loyalty which is its corollary’ to be in excess of anything it could have inherited in this respect from the Orpheus legend. The attitude of the fairy king to harping might be contrasted: for him, it seems that all that he appreciates in it is its aesthetic surface. 81  Examples of the celebration of harping in anterior romances are too numerous to catalogue. To cite but two: a performance is related in the Tristan of Thomas (c. 1170), in which Iseut sings lais to harp accompaniment: ‘The lady [Iseut] sings sweetly, her voice in accord with the instrument. Her hands are beautiful, the lais are good, sweet is her voice and deep/soft her tone/music’ (La dame chante dulcement, | La voix acorde a l’estrument; | Les mainz sunt beles, li lais bons, | Dulce la voix, e bas li tons; Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, ed. by Bédier, i, ll. 843–46); and again in the Roman de Horn also of Thomas (c. 1170), Horn sings lais to

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power of harping would inevitably feature in any narrative descended from the Orpheus legend. But the terms in which the equation has been formulated in Sir Orfeo seem to be unique. The example of lines 387–404, which have shown how Sir Orfeo, refusing to limit itself to the world of self-referrential literary convention,82 might reach out from this domain to touch the lived experience of its contemporary historical readers, suggests that the terms of the insistence on harping as the access to civil society might themselves be investigated to see whether they have exceeded literary convention too. It may be that the twinned cure of private and public disorder that the performance of harping alone has been allowed to effect inside the narrative, a cure that inflates harping’s salutary value beyond mere individual panacea into essential medication for a healthy body politic, is presented in such a way as to build another bridge between letters and life. The nature of this presentation may also have afforded the reader a second, more reliable refuge, not merely one cast in a negative set of terms such as was discussed earlier. Given the likely time and place of Sir Orfeo’s composition, its grand claim for harping could be regarded as indexed to the pre-eminent status to which a London harper at the turn of the thirteenth century might aspire; equally, its claim necessarily implied a related esteem for the whole phenomenon of performative culture that harpers serviced and helped to deliver. The elaborate Pentecost feast held by Edward I in London in 1306 in which harpers were egregious provides a convenient index of their contemporary prestige and testifies to their central role in assisting Edward’s objectification and projection of a social harmony commensurate with his rule.83 (After all, whatever else they were, feasts served as showcases of royal achievement.) In Edward’s reign, however, harpers seem harp accompaniment: ‘And when he has done all this [i.e., played a harp prelude], he begins to play the aforesaid lai of Baltof, in a loud and clear voice, just as the Bretons are versed in such performances. Afterwards he made the strings of the instrument play exactly the same melody as he had just sung; he performed the whole lai for he wished to omit nothing’ (E quant il out issi fait, si cummence a noter | Le lai dont or ains dis, de Baltof, haut e cler, | Si cum sunt cil bretun d’itiel fait costumier. | Apres en l’estrument fet les cordes suner, | Tut le lai lur ad fait, n’i vout rien retailler.; The Romance of Horn, ed. by Pope, i, 97, ll. 2839–44). Outside the romances, one of the most important archetypes of the noble harper was, of course, King David, commonly to be identified in iconography by the harp that he bore. 82  Another aspect of the timeliness of Sir Orfeo has been persuasively argued by Lerer, ‘Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo’, pp. 98–101. He demonstrates how up-to-date the poem was in its references to the decorative and architectural arts of the period. 83  See Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum multitudo, pp. 27–28, for a statistical analysis of the composition of the minstrel classes.

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to have been especially favoured among minstrels in the royal household where they were privy to the king himself, the prime mover of the political order.84 Also — and the detail is noteworthy — when Edward’s queen was entertained with miracula (‘wonders’?, ‘plays’?) at Lanercost Priory in Cumberland, in 1307, it was a harper, a certain James de Cowpen, who was one of their impresarios.85 This case aptly illustrates how harpers might be agents of contemporary performative culture in the most general sense; de Cowpen convened performances that were not narrowly musical, though in them music had presumably a significant role to play. Sir Orfeo has been said to be about minstrelsy, and while this view is valid, it can be adjusted and deepened in two respects.86 One is, of course, that Sir Orfeo is self-evidently about the harping aspect of minstrelsy. It even implies its own performance to harp accompaniment,87 whether in reality or as a fictional evocation for its audience to fancy, and its royal hero is a harper.88 Even if we choose to regard it as mere coincidence that harpers at this date appear to have been the most socially well positioned of all the minstrel classes in London (or, indeed, wherever the court assembled), the weight of their current status would still have borne unavoidably upon the contemporary reception of the poem. The value set on harping in Sir Orfeo should certainly not be taken to imply that its author was himself a minstrel harper, but without question it illustrates how his poem happens for whatever reason to have collaborated staunchly with the professional interests of a particular minstrel caste that was culturally ascendant.89 Whether the primary motive behind the poem was the 84 

See Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum multitudo, pp. 10–11, for the role of the harper; also, Southworth, The Medieval English Minstrel, pp. 87–100. 85  He was also a King of Heralds; other references to him are catalogued (under Caupeny) in Bullock-Davies, Register of Royal and Baronial Domestic Minstrels, pp. 21–22. Cowpen is named as having performed the miracula with ‘Johanni de Cressy et aliis menestrallis’ (‘John de Crecy and other minstrels’; the account of his payment is transcribed in Rastall, ‘Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Household Account Books’, p. 7). 86  Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 79. Sir Orfeo is about minstrelsy in the wider sense that it is about performance, as will be explained further below. 87  Sir Orfeo, ed. by Bliss, pp. 2–4, ll. 1–24, and p. 50, ll. 597–602. 88  As Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 79, has observed. (The tradition of harperhero stories seems to have been characteristically British; see Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, pp. 229–30, n. 60.) The conflation of royalty with harping powerfully endorses the latter. But in addition, as the roles of king and performing harper-hero merge, so the actual performer of Sir Orfeo in reality (whether public reciter or private reader) could also through role assimilation have been brought into alignment with the fiction’s value system: see further in the note following. 89  Baugh, ‘The Middle English Romance’; see pp. 9–14 for a good argument for minstrel

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furtherance of the mystique of the harper’s profession is unclear. That is not impossible — the poem patently subscribed to their contemporary professional rating — but as already stated, another motive, less conspicuously self-interested, may have been at work: we need in addition to reckon with the broader and related issue of the socially performative power of secular vernacular poetry that the event of Sir Orfeo would have set free. However ephemeral the vernacular may have been, that ‘vernacular ephemerality’ serving, indeed, as one sort of refuge against apprehensions of existential chaos to which aspects of the text might have given rise, the sheer performativeness of the text in delivery, the text as an event, would have constituted a second, perhaps more reliable, refuge for the reader to shelter in. The performance of secular vernacular poetry evidently had an important, socially cohesive function to fulfil — this is implicit in the fact of its institutional tenacity — even if we are content to label that function somewhat superficially as ‘entertainment’. Before finally clarifying further this question of Sir Orfeo’s performative value (and setting aside the question of any immediately self-interested motive on the part of its author), let us recall first the contemporary esteem in which harping was already widely held on account of its practical benefits in real life, as a remedy for psychic distress, for example, and for the way it supplied a range of social desiderata.90 The narrative of Sir Orfeo does more than echo such traditional esteem, it reciprocally feeds it, incarnating it, as it were. The pre-existent esteem for harping’s salutary effects is given a local instantiation through the poem’s narrative. And in a second, performative, stage, in the event in which the poem can alone exist, those effects are released back again into the society and historical reality of the reader. That is, the salutary effects imaged in the narrative take a tangible shape in the real world through performance. Thus the performance event palliates through its sensual immediacy the intellectual apprehension of chaos induced by aspects of the narrative. Or to put this more simply, and from the audience’s perspective, it is as if the performance event allows them to say, ‘publication’ of the original author’s literary composition in the case of several romances. Wherever the reader (reading aloud, probably) was the ‘publisher’, s/he might be conceived as acting in the minstrel’s stead and hence to have embodied, by performative association, the value system fettled on minstrelsy. For a useful survey of medieval modes of ‘prelection’ (a term borrowed from John of Salisbury to signify the reading of a text aloud to one or more listeners), see Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public. Compare also Walker, ‘Oral Delivery or Private Reading?’. 90  Evidence for therapeutic music in general is gathered in Cosman, ‘Machaut’s Medical Musical World’.

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‘We are here, reading/hearing this tale and, disturbing though it is, we are still here’. Sir Orfeo, then, can be regarded as iconic of the cultural intervention that performance was capable of making. One aspect of its complex presence to its age would have been the way it served to remind that age of its dependence on performance for the value that performance had as a socially cohesive good. Early performances of Sir Orfeo could have taken various forms. They may have been in public, possibly in some circumstances to the sort of musical accompaniment to which the author seems to have been so alive, or in private — whatever, in fact, the full range of practical manifestations of ‘Romanz-reding on þe bok’ could have been at that date.91 Performance, then, both as narrated in the text and enacted in its reading, no matter what the exact modality of that reading, has a twofold status. It is both the literary figure and also the literal actualization of a contemporary esteem for harping and the associated benefits that the performative culture helped release into actuality: actual performance of Sir Orfeo mimes palpably in the real world the salutary effects that are claimed for performance within the poem’s narrative. This is an important key to the second refuge from chaos prepared for the reader outside the text. This second, readerly refuge locates, then, not in any discourse commonly encountered in verbal formulations, as were the discourses, inadequate as they here proved, of Christianity, astrology, and even fairyland, but in an unverbalized, performative social practice, one especially characteristic of courtly culture at those moments when it sought to show itself off at its most optimistic and sanguine. 92 Performance, in such a society, makes a material difference to reality: it effects change. The moment of the reception of the poem would necessarily, after all, have been a tranquil, perhaps indeed convivial, one, a far remove from the transgressive upheavals catalogued in lines 387–404. The poem’s performance hallowed the calm and ordered social moment in whose context alone its event could unfold and be received. Indeed, even the simplest imaginable context for the event of the poem, a private reading, unadorned with actual musical accompaniment, could have been understood as an enpowering enactment of socially therapeutic musica for this reason: musica, in medieval terms, was thought to encompass 91 

Havelok, ed. by Smithers, l. 2328 (p. 64) (especially apt for citation in the present context because its composition date would not have been so very far either before or after Sir Orfeo). Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public, pp. 84–85, summarizes the wide range of ‘prelectors’, in addition to minstrels, to which sources witness. ‘Prelectors’ included authors, priests, daughters of noblemen, and even the ‘wilde wymmen’ mentioned in one of the Harley lyrics. 92  And compare also Olson, Literature as Recreation, who explicates the medieval medical theory that public reading was considered beneficial to the physical and mental health of listeners.

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both musical sounds and read or recited poetic words; because music and poetry share in common the measurement of sound in time, both versification and musicianship were considered reciprocal arts.93 Only performance, therefore, could close the circle, completing and actualizing for the reader through that performance a value system that the narrative had put in place as a refuge for its hero. So the benefits of performative culture were dealt in double measure in that their figure and agent, performance, was the point at which intra- and extratextual reality converged. While self-evidently about minstrelsy in its harping aspect, therefore, Sir Orfeo may also be said to have been about the socially recuperative power of performance as opposed to that of a mere verbalized, ‘rational’ discourse.94 The event of the poem, even if experienced by its consumers no more strongly than as heart-warming entertainment, valorizes performance as a healing art, and in valorizing performance, Sir Orfeo has necessarily politicized it. Its political dimensions, in conclusion, are worth exploring, for they might be further suggestive of the cultural ambience in which the poem was fostered. In short, these bring us to consider additional aspects of the presence of this poem to its age following upon our considerations of how exactly it may have been that aspects of the age were absorbed into the poem. Any real-life performance of Sir Orfeo would have brought into being a shared performative community in which were implicated author, book and reader (or author, reciter and audience, depending upon the medium of delivery). Participants in this community inhabited an imaginative continuum where musica (in the medieval sense just defined), royalty, love and loyalty, sanity and civilization, could be synchronized as performable goods. The harmonious rapprochement of the intra- and extra-textual performances of Sir Orfeo, therefore, builds another bridge between the world of fiction and contemporary reality, one all the more sturdy, paradoxical as it may seem, the more lighthearted the context of the poem’s actual social consumption. Whether or not the poem was primarily intended to further narrow professional interests, its performance would also have held a broader, holistic brief: performance would have put substance back into ceremony, proclaiming as a refuge for the reader the prospect 93 

See Stevens, Words and Music, p. 377. Within the narrative, performance was both alluded to (performances of lays to the harp) and directly enacted (when Orfeo took out his harp and played, in private and in public). See respectively Sir Orfeo, ed. by Bliss, pp. 2–4, ll. 1–24, pp. 24–25, ll. 267–80, and pp. 37–38, ll. 435–42. 94 

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of the self-presence of meaning located not within some one verbalized discourse but within a currently valorized social practice. Sir Orfeo, as Seth Lerer has pertinently noted, is a text full of (aristocratic and ceremonial) bright surfaces, especially its fairyland which is presented as a kingdom of artifice ‘for the awe and delectation of the beholder’.95 But awe and delectation, the connoisseur’s prerogatives, are finally empty unless, at the hands of the harper with his societyperforming skill, they can be reunited with an undergirding morality that they ought, by rights, to predicate.96 Similarly, the fairy king must be held to account and obliged to put content back into his words, honouring the substance that they signify: what he says, for the sake of the human and social happiness that is at stake, must not be allowed to become sundered from that to which it refers. So words can be mere glittering surfaces too once they lose their purchase on reality. The final testing of the steward, an episode that has caused some modern readers difficulty, can also be understood as the logical extension of this drive to marry nomen with res (‘sign’ with ‘signified’). Professed attitudes must be shown to connect with reality, and so the steward needs to be seen to mean through his conduct what his words have said. The test is a way of vesting his declared loyalty in flesh and blood; it makes loyalty really happen, at least as far as the world of the narrative is concerned.97 But the marriage of nomen and res is celebrated too in the real world of the reader when the performance of the poem is experienced as cordial entertainment. So the event of Sir Orfeo has articulated as a second refuge against chaos a politics of declarative performance in which moral substance has been reunited with the outward accidents of stately show,98 and this is a reunion that it can only hope fully to enact by being performed itself. Performance is the 95 

Lerer, ‘Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo’, p. 93. So the text could be conceived as having attempted to salvage the self-presence of the sign, something it had earlier shown to be in peril, and therefore to stand relatively early in the tradition of late medieval poets who demonstrated a central fear (as Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word, p. 32, has argued), that the sign would become non-referrential, a semiotic dead letter. The poem is touching in its reaffirmation of the possibility of self-presence in the face of the bugbear antithesis that it can be said to have invoked. Sir Orfeo’s community of performers has been given an object lesson in how it too might easily lose sight of moral substance. 97  While the manner of Sir Orfeo’s activation of the loyalty theme is peculiar to the poem, Turville-Petre, Reading Middle English Literature, p. 119, astutely notes a general preoccupation with loyalty and with the ‘ideals that underpin society’ elsewhere in other texts of the Auchinleck Manuscript. 98  Logically, this argues sharp awareness in the poet of how empty systems of signification could sometimes prove to be. 96 

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poem’s implicit fourth discourse. By contrast with the other three, it alone is cap­ able of furnishing some refuge. In view of the performative power being claimed for it here, the event of Sir Orfeo would seem to fit well within that echelon of medieval society that we know from other historical evidence to have been habituated to moral pageantry and spectacle, where games of aristocratic display, as well as catering to awe and delectation, were contrived to advance messages thought conducive to the personal, and hence to the communal, weal. Those games could also be contrived to play their messages into historical reality in a fashion approaching that argued in this chapter for Sir Orfeo on literary grounds.99 Indeed, it may be surmised that the miracula staged by the harper-impresario James de Cowpen for Queen Margaret in 1307 served a similar double function in at once effecting delight and social consolidation, social changes even if in a minimal sense. Be that as it may, some performances provided a venue in which a more consequential political consensus could be actualized, or sometimes in which a new or tendentious agenda could be smuggled in and normalized under a consensual, festive guise.100 This is the sort of performative culture to which Sir Orfeo can most appropriately be imagined as having belonged. An author so fluently conversant with current social practice as has been inferred here, someone so steeped in the (competing) discourses of his day,101 and so deft at inviting them in as subtexts to his poem, would necessarily have been culturally well tutored. Hence his formation at least in some urban centre, where a cosmopolitan pluralism might be expected to have prevailed, seems likely. This likelihood is consistent with the opinion that the poem’s place of origin was London or some centre touched by London culture. Was the poem really a bourgeois product, as has often been supposed? The question is worth posing again, for it has bearings on our understanding of the particular social level at which the interdependence between the social and the literary maintained in this chapter would have operated. Even were it possible to prove decisively that the Auchinleck Manuscript was made for some wealthy, 99 

No better examplar of such a culture is needed than the court of Edward I. The King’s Arthurian theatricalizing of himself (and certain of his knights) as much for political, as for recreational, ends, at his wedding festivities on 10 September 1299 (Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’; see especially pp. 118–19), is an excellent case in point. 100  Performances of the latter sort are well evidenced in Edward I’s Arthurian games noted above. For further observations on the medieval practice of ‘imaginative activity which could transform received structures of value incrementally’, see Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, esp. pp. 256–59. 101  At least the discourses of Christianity and fairyland, since these are explicit in the poem.

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aspirant member of the middle classes, the circumstances of the poem’s survival in such a context should not be permitted to foreclose this question of its ultimate origin.102 But in any case, this view of the manuscript’s auspices has recently been cast into doubt. Thorlac Turville-Petre has argued that, more probably, it was commissioned for some very rich secular household, perhaps one with historic crusading connections.103 Such auspices would certainly better agree with the poet’s cultural literacy implied in this chapter’s analysis, for such literacy both feeds upon as much as it nurtures a mutual sophistication in its implied audience. In these circumstances, it seems that what Turville-Petre’s research on historical grounds could be pressed into suggesting deserves also to be suggested on literary grounds, namely, that the original cultural epicentre of Sir Orfeo was, if not the court, then somewhere within the court’s striking distance. (Such a milieu, incidentally, would also help justify the present consideration of astrology as a possible component in the contemporary reader’s formation because astrological interests were evidenced at court from at least as early as the reign of Henry II.104) And lest we cavil at the necessary corollary of this suggestion — the prospect of an aristocrat at this date enjoying literature in English, rather than French — a passing remark in another Auchinleck romance, Of Arthour and of Merlin, deserves to be accorded full counterbalancing weight. Its narrator declared that: ‘Mani noble ich haue yseiȝe | Þat no Freynsche couþe seye’.105 And precisely for that reason the narrator of Of Arthour and of Merlin felt justified in telling his tale in English. 102 

This is the view of its origin held, for example, by Pearsall and Cunningham, The Auchinleck Manuscript, p. viii. 103  For a persuasive attempt to read the tastes to which the Auchinleck anthology has catered, see Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 108–41; especially pp. 136–38. Further objections to the view of the bourgeois production of Auchinleck may be found in Coss, ‘Aspects of Cultural Diffusion’, esp. pp. 40–41. Mercantile literary taste seems, if anything, to have out-Frenched the aristocracy in London at this date; see Sutton, ‘Merchants, Music and Social Harmony’. Sir Orfeo squares uneasily with the literary activity of the mercantile London puy, as far as this can be gauged. The puy was modelled on a French institution and heavily indebted to French precedents in the way it was run and organized. 104  See Carey, ‘Astrology at the English Court’, esp. p. 41 and n. 1. 105  ‘I have seen many noble folk who can speak no French’; Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson, ll. 25–26 (i, 5). Even were this more a polemical than a neutral observation, it would amount to the same thing: it implies that English is worthy of the aristocracy. And as Turville-Petre, England the Nation, p. 138 has observed, ‘It was all right to read romances in English’ at that social level at that date. Note too a potential sympathy for English vernacular culture implicit in the anti-French claim of Edward I in 1295 that the French were plotting to wipe out the English language (see Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century, p. 90).

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It is to be hoped that these comments will have complicated the understanding of the particular socio-literary dimensions that the event of Sir Orfeo took. Once its existence is thus reconceived, as an event, the poem’s presence to its age registers a degree of interactivity between the social and the literary that has seldom been conceded to it. In two different ways, then, the poem facilitated a flight from the enchanters that it had called into being. Its hero discovered one sort of refuge and its readers another. If Chaucer ever read the Auchinleck romances, as some have persuasively argued,106 then he would not only have found in Sir Orfeo a promptbook for certain of his own motifs and ideas, but also one in which his particular predilection for competing discourses had been anticipated, and perhaps anticipated by someone who, like himself, had moved within courtly precincts.

106 

Three articles were contributed by Laura Hibbard Loomis: Loomis, ‘Chaucer and the Auchinleck MS’; Loomis, ‘Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck Manuscript’; and Loomis, ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop’. More recently, the case has been plausibly argued by Cook, ‘Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and Sir Orfeo’.

Chapter 4

Pearl:

The Limits of History

F

rom landmarks in the genres of debate and romance, we turn in this chapter to one in the similarly influential medieval genre of dream vision, although it might be said that so to call it is only to attach to it a handle of convenience, for this text is complex beyond any one single category, as indeed are many of the others considered in this book, in its absorption of the resources of a number of genres, debate and romance included. Pearl is a poem whose rich genre allusiveness may in part be held responsible for much of the fascination it exerts and for why it continues to tease us into imagining what sort of person its author was who had those genres at his fingertips. Who, then, was this person capable of achieving within his poem’s 1212 lines such a feat of style and formal symmetry?1 Thus far, his identity has eluded detection, even though research has suggested some interesting possible candidates.2 In default of an identifiable author, the sole access to him and to his cultural formation necessarily comes via his work, and that includes, alongside Pearl, three other poems most probably also his that follow Pearl in its unique manuscript: Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.3 As for where this anonymous author came from 1 

For example, one of the most obvious of Pearl’s various numerological significances (the number of its 1212 lines expresses 12 × 12 = 144, where 144,000 happens to be the number of the company of the heavenly Jerusalem) has long been recognized. 2  A number of critics have been disposed to attach the name of John Massey or John de Mascy to him, but who this man was amongst a number of people sharing that name remains a matter of debate. The search for his identity, a topic of some interest in the scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, seems latterly to have grown cold. 3  The sole extant manuscript of these is MS Cotton Nero A. x. See Cooper and Pearsall, ‘The Gawain Poems’. A fifth poem also uniquely extant (this time in MS Harley 2250), St

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and when he wrote, a few things seem either clear or likely. Internal references suggest that he was personally acquainted with the geography of the north-west Midlands, and maybe he was raised in this region; furthermore, the manuscript’s written Middle English dialect is compatible with such acquaintance, seeming best to fit in north-west Staffordshire or south-east Cheshire, although this does not necessarily mean, of course, that he was in this region when he composed his work.4 The best recent opinion on the date when he was writing has suggested the 1380s, thus placing him early in the reign of Richard II.5 Since a familiarity with the ways of the upper classes seems to inform certain aspects of his work, it has been supposed that he had experience of upper-class, if not indeed courtly, society, although exactly how near or far from this society he was is something currently undeterminable; also, that he was in all probability some kind of cleric, a view that the present chapter will fully endorse.6

The Critical Project Of all the landmark texts visited in these pages, perhaps this anonymous author’s poem Pearl focuses the most clearly on certain issues arising from the pursuit of presences to which this book is devoted. In order to work towards the general critical project of this chapter — the recuperation of aspects of Pearl’s former presence — two things will be attempted. The first is not likely to be controversial, since it will draw attention to a widely circulating fourteenth-century text where one of Pearl’s prime concerns, the question of whether heaven’s reward comes by grace or by merit, is similarly given a special place of prominence, and this in the context of a discourse on the Holy Innocents, those infant martyrs whose presence is equally heard echoing in Pearl.7 Thus this text will offer a hitherto unregarded analogue for a distinctive association of ideas that Pearl also makes central to its argument. While not claimed here as one of the poem’s direct sources — the Erkenwald, is conceivably to be included in his oeuvre. However, the possibility continues to be disputed; see Benson, ‘The Authorship of St. Erkenwald’. 4  Although it is generally agreed that the manuscript is a scribal copy, not a holograph, it seems nevertheless not far from reflecting the written dialect of the elusive author. 5  Fein, ‘Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English’; she opts for a date in the 1380s. 6  There is an old debate about whether the author was clerical or lay. However, his acquaintance with clerical sources, which is especially clear in Pearl, is more easily explained as the sort of acquaintance available to a clerical insider rather than a lay outsider. 7  The key study here is Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting (see esp. pp. 104–12).

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text is an analogue solely — it nevertheless demonstrates a fourteenth-century currency for this association of ideas and shows where else the poet may have met it. The second strand of the chapter, however, arising from this analogue’s rich implications, will argue against the grain of some current critical thinking on Pearl which has emphasized the immanence within it of a particular historical and political moment — a perceived presence of its age within its text. This moment, so the argument goes, has determined in fundamental respects how the poem came to be written.8 The second strand of the chapter will therefore maintain that Pearl, while unquestionably to be viewed as a work that draws crucial nourishment from its moment, nevertheless at once resists wholesale determination by that moment: Pearl warns us, if we once start imagining ourselves possessed of certain historicopolitical circumstances surrounding its author that we then proceed to discover refracted in his text, to be on guard against reading his text deterministically as if it were a thing available to be flattened into identity with matters that may have impinged upon it. To put this another way, in terms accordant with those of this study, the presence of the age in Pearl is by no means equatable with how Pearl may have been present to its age. For as will be argued, Pearl would not have been so familiar a part of its cultural landscape that it would have ended up blending invisibly into it. On the contrary, in its resistance to the familiar, Pearl, as this chapter hopes to show, would have stood out as a conspicuous landmark, one that incidentally by that same token exposes a general danger haunting the historicist enterprise. This is the danger of sometimes allowing our thinking about this (and potentially any other) text to be coerced by a sort of historical determinism that at best reduces, at worst neutralizes and falsifies, the text under review even as it imagines it to have been elucidated. Such coerced thinking may cause the text to be apprehended so much as the reflex of a variety of contemporary circumstances that its own voice, along with the ideological position from which that voice speaks, is drowned out in the babble of current discourses to which that voice, to be sure, owes much of its vocabulary.9 There is no doubt that the reaction in literary studies against the dehistoricized text so dear to the New Criticism in vogue between the late 1930s and early 1960s has achieved impressive results. It has also succeeded in doing so at a time when New Criticism’s marginalizing of history has unexpectedly returned in those quarters of postmodernism that have insisted that, outside the text, there is nothing. Yet, even if they defy postmodern 8 

Notably Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’. Of course, it might be argued that the resistance to the familiar of which I speak is itself historicizable. 9 

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declarations that history, since it is ultimately beyond reach and unavailable, is therefore redundant, how are hapless historicist critics to reintroduce a text like Pearl satisfactorily to its history if, as has already been implied and will further be maintained, they face the added difficulty of reckoning with a text written so as to block in some ways the unthinking allegiance of its early readers to the claims of its historical moment, thus relaxing history’s grasp upon them even as it may acknowledge history’s presence? While it is enlightening to read attempts at explaining possible ways in which Pearl feeds off its historico-political moment, it seems almost inevitable that these explanations will risk occluding how the poem rephrases, perhaps in some respects countermands, that moment’s claims.10 In short, the task of understanding a text that may finally beckon its readers away from an unreflecting identification with the historical formation of which it is nevertheless inescapably an expression will entail that some nice discriminations be made. The basic rule of thumb must be that a sense of the poem’s contingent history must not be allowed unlicensed control over how the poem comes to be read, flattening out its possible difference and resistance; and any excitement we may feel when we guess that we have discerned within the poem the lineaments of its contingent history needs sobering by an awareness of what the limits of that history’s sway over the poem’s interpretation may be and how the poem itself may be responsible for administering them. A responsible historicist reading of Pearl’s presences will therefore be such as both to allow and refuse history, just as the poem may be said to do. A further and related proposition to be argued here is that Pearl, if it relies upon its audience’s acquaintance with things culturally and historically familiar, renders some of them richer than hitherto and strange; if still recognizable, they are nevertheless not quite as they were before. In this way the poem keeps faith with the defamiliarizing logic of heaven to which it notably subscribes.11 If the poem owes a final allegiance, it is to this logic, and not to the evanescent topicalities of any contingent historical moment, even though it is necessarily true that certain of the resources of some such moment helped bring the poem into being. 10 

While Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, insists that ‘My attempts at exposing Pearl’s investments in its historical context should never be confused with privileging the material culture over the literary artefact’ (p. 24), I am not persuaded that his reading entirely escapes the grip of the sort of historical determinism that it is one of the aims of this chapter to loosen. 11  And as has been long recognized, perhaps most eloquently by Spearing, The GawainPoet, pp. 96–170. For his most recent reflections on Pearl, see Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, pp. 137–73.

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The Supply of Text and History Reasons for believing that Pearl refutes too historically determinist a reading are not far to seek. Preliminary ones reside in a condition mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the sheer variety and eclecticism of the poem’s cultural indebtedness. Very broadly speaking, the channels of that indebtedness were two. On the one hand, the poet received content from his specific historical situation (through his direct personal immersion in contemporary events and discourses, or his connection with them second-hand via reports or hearsay, etc.). Whatever else it provided, this channel might also be expected to have been capable of supplying him with content of a topical, politically charged sort.12 And on the other hand, content came to him specifically from those written texts that, though current in his time, were not the compositions of his time, as well as from the related social practices that certain of those old texts sustained. ‘Legacy’ texts of this sort might be expected to have supplied him with content less timebound or evanescently topical, such as the theological propositions, citations of Scripture and Biblical narratives that he was demonstrably acquainted with and some of which he probably experienced dimensioned in the liturgy. Thus his written textual sources, it is clear, were predominantly clerical (and some recent scholarship has especially stressed, even within the field of clerical texts, the liturgical provenance of many of these) or, when his writing echoes texts of secular literature, the echoes often prove to be of motifs that clerical writing had already assimilated for religious ends.13 Yet, unlike his written textual sources, the sources afforded by his specific historical situation, conversely, may be far more elusive to track down. This is partly because there is less certainty about what that situation actually was and what the nearest events and discourses impinging on him consequently were, but also simply because they are less susceptible of demonstration. As Frederic 12 

For example, some aspects of the poem’s contemporary mercantile resonance are analysed in Barr, ‘Pearl’; and for the poet’s acquaintance with legal discourses, see Schless, ‘Pearl’s “Prince’s Paye” and the Law’, and most recently, Spencer, ‘Pearl’. 13  A strong case for the poet’s extensive acquaintance with certain parts of the liturgy has been made by Bhattacharji, ‘Pearl and the Liturgical “Common of Virgins”’; a prime example of the absorption into clerical literature of an image especially cultivated in secular literature is the image of the rose, an image also recycled in Pearl as a symbol of decaying earthly beauty. Compare Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 269–70 (p. 10); all subsequent references to Pearl are to this edition). Wilson, The Gawain-Poet, p. 31, notices the currency of Pearl’s image of the withering of the rose with sermon literature (and see further on this, Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, p. 204, ll. 108–23 and p. 214, n. to ll. 108–23).

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Jameson has observed, ‘History is not a text, […] but […] as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form’.14 And often history’s effects, if they do not entirely elude inscription, may nevertheless elude successful decryption. Some historical circumstances, to be sure, may have left textual traces that seem legible enough to be uncontroversial: for example, Pearl’s opening invocation of the ‘Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye’ conceivably struck a familiar note at a time when Richard II was surrounding himself with a lofty language of regalian distance in the lexicon of which the word ‘prince’ was now starting to feature conspicuously.15 This historical circumstance is well documented. Similarly, it is conceivable that certain aspects of the historical moment that surrounds the poem are to be seen refracted in texts of a different order, items of material culture. Thus, for example, the Wilton Diptych, generally now dated between 1394–96, has been argued to show certain stylistic and thematic objectives comparable to ones in Pearl.16 Other of the poet’s sources of this more topical and contemporaneous kind are perhaps in principle traceable to actual incidents. Thus again, for example, one critic has argued, though here less persuasively, that the death of Queen Anne in 1394 was the real-time cue for the death of the girl child in Pearl, and another, that the girl child’s death metaphorically encodes the enclosure in the religious life of Thomas of Woodstock’s daughter Isabella, born in 1384 and given to a house of London Minoresses in her early years. This reading, too, fails finally to convince.17 So whether today they seem more, or less, palpable, the rich criss-crossing of textual and historical material causes providing Pearl’s existence nevertheless remains beyond dispute. Certainly, its causal underpinnings were complex. Yet, as earlier suggested, it is precisely this rich complexity that also serves as a basis for arguing a certain distance in the poet from everything supplying his poem. The breadth of his textual and historical supply, and the evident deliberation 14 

Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 35. Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’. What the evaluative consequences of recognizing this might be for the poem remain, however, matters of conjecture. 16  Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, pp. 28–30. Note, too, the valuable study of Field, ‘The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl’, which demonstrates the poet’s familiarity with a repertoire of Apocalypse imagery, most of which we know today from survivals of late medieval sacred mat­ erial culture (principally in manuscript illuminations). But relevant to the argument developed in the present chapter is the fact that here, too, the relation of Pearl to this culture is not servile, but negotiatory and interactive. 17  The Pearl-maiden/Queen Anne link is urged by Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, pp. 151– 86, and the Pearl-maiden/Isabella of Woodstock link by Staley, ‘Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety’. See further below for objections to the arguments of both. 15 

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with which its poetic reconstitution has been achieved, suggest that he had no uncomplicated or politically unconscious commitment to any dominant ideology in which each of his various textual or historical components singly and elsewhere may have participated and helped perpetuate. Simply, his poem is too knowing. The very nature of his compositional process prevented it becoming a mere mouthpiece of any single, unmediated ideology.18 Thus while scholarship has been able to suggest plausibly that some aspects of Pearl were historically familiar presences (historical in the sense explained earlier), and to demonstrate empirically that other aspects were textually familiar presences (textual in the sense again explained earlier), the balance and blend of all these elements was evidently the poet’s own, an accumulated presence greater than the sum of its parts and therefore finally unfamiliar.19 If the very act of picking and choosing in order to achieve his poem simultaneously enabled a site of independent reflection, wittingly or no he cleared a space for himself in which to ponder his cultural responsibilities, whether to transmit, modify, or even contest, the ideology with which each of his sources already and elsewhere came concomitantly freighted. That said, it is certainly not that we are dealing with a poet whose compositional procedures rendered him agenda-free; rather, given the nature of those procedures, he is not credible as the unthinking mimic of some pre-existent agenda, for he moves too nimbly among his various kinds of 18 

Classic treatment of the process whereby in literary works ideology may be deprived of hegemony by entering into polyphonic dialogue with other ideological formations or voices is afforded in various of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin; see, for example, Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Holquist. 19  I agree with Watson, ‘The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian’, in finding the voice of the poet to be idiosyncratic and independent. I am less certain, however, that that idiosyncrasy is doctrinal in nature (Watson, ‘The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian’, p. 299). Watson considers Pearl’s replacement of ‘career virgins’ (professed religious who in medieval virginity literature were often spoken of as comprising the Apocalyptic Lamb’s heavenly retinue of 144,000), by a retinue exclusively of innocent infants, to be a ‘conscious theological solecism’, a ‘deliberate distortion’ of an ancient tradition of thinking (Watson, ‘The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian’, p. 302). The fact is, however, that the key components for the poet’s representation in this respect already existed, even if as a quieter tradition, in places like Gregory’s the Great’s Dialogues (see further below, n. 35), or indeed in the poet’s own century in the sermon analogue presented in this chapter, where another group of infants, the Holy Innocents, comprises the Lamb’s retinue, and who in the sermon are consciously represented as displacing those adults whose lifetimes of spiritual service, were justice alone sole arbiter, might be thought to earn them a prior place. The conscious displacement of the ‘just’ in the sermon resembles their conscious displacement in Pearl. Thus idiosyncrasy is not best attributed to the poet on the grounds of having made infants alone members of the company of 144,000.

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source. His amphibious positioning in this respect is something that the analogue introduced below will further help illustrate. His particular stance vis-à-vis the various value systems in which, as a late fourteenth-century man, he was necessarily implicated and which it was often the job of his textual and historical sources to reproduce, has proved a focus of modern critical interest.20 His stance will be revisited, if incidentally, as we try to gauge the limits of history within his poem, but at this point suffice it to say that it may be more complex than some have allowed.

A New Analogue If a measure of confident authorial independence in the poet is thus to be inferred from his management of his poem’s historico-textual affiliation and his farming of its wealth, independence will come yet again to the fore once we have passed on from the analogous content of the text given below to consider the particular clerical circumstance in which it appears and what its implications may be for any attempt to do as much justice as possible to appraising the totality of Pearl’s cultural situation. But first, to present the analogue and to explain its connections with Pearl. As already noted, recent scholarship on the textual sources of Pearl has stressed their liturgical provenance, and it is unquestionably true that certain liturgical feasts exhibit dense constellations of matter that find a comparable accommodation in the poem.21 While the critics who have pointed this out are too wise to have taken the rash step of claiming that the liturgy was Pearl’s principal textual resource, the focus of their research might nevertheless risk conveying that impression, just as does the focus of critics who have emphasized the shaping significance for the poem of its contingent political history. The present analogue suggests that we should strike a different balance, for it appears not directly in the liturgy, but in a related area of clerical endeavour, preaching. Sometime in the early fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar Nicholas de Aquevilla wrote two sermon collections, one for the Sundays of the year and 20 

Such interest is strongly evinced, for example, in two eloquent analyses by David Aers, although I do not follow Aers, however, when in the course of defining the poet’s preoccupations he classifies his theology as neo-Pelagian (Aers, ‘The Self Mourning’, pp. 71–83, and Aers, ‘Christianity for Courtly Subjects’, p. 101). 21  Since Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting, see now especially Bhattacharji, ‘Pearl and the Liturgical “Common of Virgins”’ (an important article, though apparently omitted from consideration by Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’).

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another for saints days and feasts. Judging by the evidence of their recopying, editing, excerpting and also (if selectively) their translation, towards the end of that century, into English, by which time Pearl had been composed, both collections had become a popular preaching staple.22 The sermon for the feast of the Holy Innocents in de Aquevilla’s collection for saints days and feasts is the one of present concern, for like Pearl, it too raises the question of how the innocent and the righteous are to be rewarded with salvation, the sermon highlighting the question in a way comparable to the poem and drafting in some similar material in the process. Nowhere in the liturgy, it might be mentioned, is this question similarly highlighted. Indeed, such liturgical echoes of it as exist are distant and fleeting. Therefore, on this occasion, one of Pearl’s central preoccupations is less convincingly to be anchored in the liturgy, whatever other liturgical affiliations the poem may have, than it is in a different, if allied, area of clerical endeavour.23 The pertinent parts of de Aquevilla’s sermon (on the theme, Hii sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati) are translated here.24 ‘These are they who have not polluted themselves with women; for they are virgins, and follow the Lamb wherever he goes’. Revelation 14. 4. These words are to be understood in a twofold sense. First, how they are appropriate to the Innocents, and second, how they are appropriate to the faithful righteous. In respect of how they are appropriate to the Innocents, three things must be considered.[…] [The sermon proceeds to the first thing to be considered, the fortitude of the Innocents. Fortitude is to suffer for Christ and to sustain adversities for him, and this is noted when it says, ‘These are they who with’, etc. These are the first fruits to God and to the Lamb. The second thing to be considered is their purity of body and heart, and this is noted when it says, ‘who with women’, etc.] […] For they are virgins; truly, they are clean of every stain of sin and of the stain of actual sin, because they never committed actual sin and were cleansed from the stain of original sin by the shedding of their blood, because their blood was their baptism, which washed them 22 

See especially Spencer, English Preaching. Little is known about de Aquevilla; a few fur­ ther references are given in Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland, p. 383, item 1076. 23  To put this as circumspectly as possible, it seems most appropriate to say that this pre­ occupation registers not only in sermons, but also in those clerical areas where the theology of salvation might find itself discussed in some detail. Nevertheless, a strong case can be made for the poet’s familiarity with the culture of preaching, especially if we believe him also to have authored the other poems in the manuscript (Cleanness and Patience) where critics have also detected sermon influence. Wherever exactly the poet derived his preoccupation from, the essential point to establish is the breadth of his clerical textual acquaintance beyond the liturgy. 24  The Latin text is given in an Appendix to this chapter.

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from the original stain [of original sin]. And therefore it is said in Revelation 14. 5, ‘they are without stain before God’s throne’, and before God as judge. The third [thing] is great dignity, and this is noted when it says, ‘they follow the Lamb’, that is, Christ, wherever he goes. The Gloss: in wholeness of spirit and body. Truly, it is a great dignity and glory, because they follow Christ their Lord wherever he goes. Whence Ecclesiasticus 23. 38 says, ‘It is a great glory to follow the Lord’. Indeed, it speaks very well when it says that the Innocents follow the Lamb. The lamb is a gentle and innocent animal, and in Ecclesiasticus 27. 10 it says, ‘The birds of the air seek their like’, and in Ecclesiasticus 13. 19 it is said that ‘Every animal loves its like’. It speaks well when it says that these Innocents follow the Lamb wherever he goes, and this is what the Lord says by the prophet in Psalm 24. 21, ‘The innocent have cleaved to me’, et cetera. Therefore I say, ‘These are they who have not polluted themselves with women’, et cetera. The second sense is, that these words are appropriate to righteous men and women. In these words, three things must be considered. The first concerns the constancy of the righteous in good works, which is indicated when it says, ‘These are they’. Add the Gloss: the nursing infants were killed on Christ’s behalf. Therefore, young men and mighty men and women, who witness so great a multitude of nursing babes passing into the eternal kingdom today by the sword, grow ashamed at the entry of those or of these children. These women or these men, remaining in sins because of the lack of a small amount of penitence, lose the kingdom of heaven. But on the other hand, the righteous constantly undertake the toils of penitence, according to what is said in Wisdom 5. 1, ‘The righteous will stand in great constancy against those who have distressed themselves’, not only in the future, but also in the present, bearing the arms of penitence against the difficulties of temptations.[…] [The sermon continues by making the distinction that the purity of the righteous consists in two things, first a purity of body and second a purity of heart. It illustrates each category, advising what to do if one wishes to retain both. Those who follow Christ are free of stain, the idea of the stain (macula) being resumed in the section that follows.] […] And certainly, those who wish to follow Christ and live with him in glory, it is necessary that they be without that stain (macula). ‘Lord’, as David says, ‘who will live in your tabernacle? Or who will rest upon your holy mountain?’, Psalm 14. 1. And the Lord replies, ‘He who enters free of the stain of lust’. And similarly the Song of Songs 4. 7–8. The bridegroom says to the bride, ‘You are entirely beautiful, my beloved, nor is there stain upon you’, and because ‘there is no stain upon you, come from Libanus, come and you will be crowned’. Therefore in truth, it is those who are not defiled with women literally, or who are clean in their hearts. The Gloss says, for they are virgins who have cleanness of heart, and they follow the Lamb, et cetera. Concerning the third, it remains to be seen how these must follow the spotless Lamb. And this is noted when it says, ‘they follow the Lamb’. Likewise the Lamb is

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Christ, who was the spotless Lamb, because he committed no sin, ‘neither was guile found in his mouth’, 1 Peter 2. 22. That Lamb was sacrificed on account of our sins, whence 1 Corinthians 5. 7, ‘For Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed’. Truly, by the precious blood of that most sweet Lamb, that is, Jesus Christ, we have been redeemed from the devil’s slavery.[…] [The remainder of the sermon discusses how we and all the righteous must follow the Lamb, not any other animal, like wolves or lions and the sins they represent.]

Hii sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati and its Implications for Pearl The content of this sermon resembles Pearl’s matter in several respects. The essence of the sermon’s opening theme, Hii sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati (Revelation 14. 4), where the virgins are described as following the Lamb, also informs Pearl in at least three places (ll. 867–70, 889–900, and 1093– 1116). And when after this theme the sermon embarks directly upon the issue of who it is that might expect salvation, it distinguishes two groups, the innocent and the righteous, with which we can directly compare Pearl’s distinction: Ryȝt þus I knaw wel in this cas Two men to saue is god by skylle: it is right that two kinds of men be saved Þe ryȝtwys man schal se hys face, Þe harmles haþel schal com hym tylle.25 innocent man

Moreover, this distinction introduced by the Pearl-maiden which draws together two ideas found respectively in Psalms 14. 1–2 and 23. 3–4 compares with the sermon not only in terms of content but also of procedure: the distinction may betray in the poet a distinctio-driven habit of thought that again associates him either with the culture of preaching or with some academic (doubtless clerical academic) environment where certain of the procedures also followed in preaching were likewise to be found.26 The sermon then proceeds to raise 25  Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 673–76 (p. 25). Admittedly, the distinction is implicit in the Psalm verses that lie behind these lines (Psalms 14. 1–2 and 23. 3–4), but the point is that the poet phrases it as an explicit distinctio: ‘Ryȝt þus I knaw wel in this cas | Two men to saue is god by skylle’. See also the next footnote. 26  For the poet’s acquaintance with the academic practice of distinctio, see further Fletcher, ‘Reading Radical Metonymy in Pearl’, p. 51. Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting, p. 37, rightly notes the phenomenon of the distinctio in the context of the Jerusalem exegesis in Pearl, but the influence of distinctio procedure in Pearl is even more pervasive.

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comparable issues to Pearl and to do so sometimes using comparable Biblical allusion, and this in at least four departments. First, de Aquevilla’s mention of the shedding of blood as the occasion of the Innocents’ baptism allows him to air an aspect of baptism theology concerning infants, a topic equally absorbing to the poet. Second, the theme of the appropriateness of regarding the Innocents, and those who are innocent, as followers of the Lamb similarly provides both the sermon and Pearl with another common centre of interest. Third, citation of Psalm 24. 21 in the sermon, and the echo in Pearl between lines 675–82 of the related Psalm 23. 3–6, are in concordance. And fourth, a cluster of other related Biblical lemmata align both sermon and poem: the sermon’s emphasis on the spotlessness of those who dwell with the Lamb, and the spotless Lamb himself (1 Peter 2. 22, ‘neither was guile found in his mouth’), compares with a concording lemma in Pearl (Revelation 14. 5, ‘there was no deceit in their mouths’, which is rendered at lines 897–98 ‘For neuer lesyng ne tale vntrwe | Ne towched her tonge for no dysstresse’); the use of Psalm 14. 1 in the sermon (‘Lord’, as David says, ‘who will live in your tabernacle? Or who will rest upon your holy mountain?’) compares with a concording lemma in Pearl (Psalm 23. 3, which is rendered at lines 678–79 ‘Lorde, quo schal klymbe þy hyȝ hylle, | Oþer rest wyþinne þy holy place?’); and citation of the Song of Songs in the sermon (Song of Songs 4. 7–8, ‘come hither my sweet love, for there is no blemish in thee’), is heard again in Pearl (at ll. 763–64, ‘Cum hyder to me, my lemman swete, | For mote ne spot is non in þe’). Furthermore, like the formal clerical and academic device of the distinctio noted earlier, a means whereby text is manipulated and organized in order to facilitate its systematic discussion, so another affiliated clerical procedure for achieving a similar end, also well established by the fourteenth century, helps generate both poem and sermon: concordance.27 Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from such similarities of content and procedure, and that contributes to our general understanding of Pearl, is how diversely dependent on clerical culture the poet was. A community of clerical resource and textual practice, wider than might be found in any one exclusive domain of clerical endeavour, was at his disposal. His movement between different areas of that community is an example in small of the mobility we have already observed him showing as he moved between his resources in general, including, as we will soon see, those of his historical and political moment, and in that movement he helped further assert his poem’s own voice, making it no simple ventriloquism of any one type of source, whether sacred or secular. And of course, 27 

The operation of concordance as a generative principle has also been convincingly argued in the case of Piers Plowman by Alford, ‘The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman’.

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another aspect of that movement was linguistic, his projection of his clerical resources in English, expropriating them from the Latin domain in which otherwise and elsewhere they might more routinely be expected to exist.28 The past decade has seen much valuable discussion on vernacular theology as a distinctive genre in late medieval England;29 in the case of the author of Pearl, he may not so much have been operating in this genre — in any event a dangerous one at the time he was writing since it was increasingly falling under suspicion of heresy — as incidentally doing a more limited and safer sort of theology, pastoral theology, because English had ever been the language in which much theology of the pastoral kind had necessarily to be transacted (as indeed in preaching’s case when the laity, not generally literate in Latin, was the target audience). Since English was one of pastoral theology’s inevitable linguistic environments, its pursuit in that environment was traditional and respectable enough.30 In addition, it was often English versified. By the late fourteenth century, vernacular verse had become a well established conduit for delivering pastoralia more memorably to the laity. It was therefore a medium validated by custom, and hence by appeal to custom defensible against orthodox reactionaries in the late fourteenth century who wished to close off the vernacular as a forum for any kind of theological discussion.31 If, then, the poet’s use of clerical resources betrays a certain eclecticism in its mix and an individualistic approach that are in turn evidences of his authorial independence, something similar can be said of his use of the resources of his historical and political moment (provided, of course, that we can permit ourselves to feel confident about knowing what those resources actually were; as earlier noted, in the main they seem more slippery to grasp). It is as if the poet 28  Of course, when delivered from the pulpit, de Aquevilla’s sermons, if delivered to the laity, are likely to have been preached in the vernacular; the prestige language of written record being Latin, it was the default language in which much vernacular preaching nevertheless came to be recorded. 29  The theme has been extensively developed by Nicholas Watson (see notably, for example, Watson, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation’; Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’; Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’; and Watson, ‘The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian’). 30  The twin tasks of preaching and confession ranked among the most important forms of lay pastoral instruction during this period (see Chapter 5 following for some further discussion on this), though poetry too might be enlisted. In Pearl, arguably, theological deliberation is only indulged to the extent that it may serve a pastoral need; it is not speculative. 31  The attempt to ban the vernacular as a medium of theological discussion came to a head with the Oxford Constitutions of 1409; in practice, they proved unworkable, however. For a discussion of their repercussions, see Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’.

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has allowed his sacred resources to leach into his secular ones, and possibly vice versa, resulting in a blend, a variegated hybrid owing no unconscious allegiance to ideological claims of any one exclusive hue. His poem seems to accommodate so full a confluence of resources, textual and historical, that early readers would have been hard put to privilege any one at the expense of another, considering it dominant and therefore according it a greater degree of interpretative deference. Yet, having said that, and having claimed that his poem finds its own voice precisely in plurivocality, it may nevertheless be possible to build an hypothesis about early reader response and suggest a scale of likelihood, indicating where early readers would have found certain potential resonances elicited by the poem nevertheless liable to supersession by yet others.32 This scale of likelihood can be conveniently illustrated from two examples chosen partly because they are related, and partly because they have become topics of recent critical discussion: the question of the nature of the Pearl-maiden’s magnificent array and crown; and the question of the Pearl-maiden herself and of the historical situation(s) that, it has been maintained, called her into being. First, the detailed picture of the Pearl-maiden. The final impression left by the poet after he has described her so meticulously is of a study chiefly in white with occasional hints of gold: white raiment adorned with pearls, a pearl crown, and gold introduced momentarily in the description of the colour of her hair.33 An attempt to historicize this picture in the light of contemporary secular sources has pointed out that in literary texts, pearl imagery had been typically fastened upon Richard’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia. This is unquestionably true.34 But what weight ought this fact be accorded when reading Pearl, and what should its interpretative consequences be? Certainly, it should not insist on itself too loudly, given the fact that pearls were already and anciently associated with the life of heaven and post-baptismal innocence, matters transparently of concern in so many other parts of the poem.35 (Arguably, any contemporary vogue for pearls 32  To be sure, it was not to the poem’s advantage that other resonances be entirely drowned out when, as I argue, its project depended upon the setting up of a scaled differentiation between possible resonances and the ways of seeing that they imported; alternative resonances, in being intrinsic to the scale being established, were thus indispensable. 33  Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 213–14 (p. 8) (compare also the first description of the radiance of the Pearl-maiden; Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 165–66 (p. 7)). If the colour of gold is suggested by mention of her crown, it is present only by inference; see further the discussion below. 34  Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, pp. 158–59. 35  Compare the letter of St Hilary of Poitiers to his daughter Abra, in which he stressed the radiantly white raiment and the centrality of the pearl in the adornment of the bride of Christ: ‘And first I saw the raiment; I saw, daughter, I saw something that I am unable to describe. […]

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at court could itself be seen as capitalizing on this ancient theological association, since court culture at this date, to recall its projection in the Wilton Diptych, for example, seems to have been eager to sacralize itself and present itself under a heavenly aspect.) Thus for a culturally connected early reader of Pearl, and certainly for its clerical author, any specifically Ricardian and courtly connotation that pearls held is likely to have been co-extensive with pearls’ ancient and established theological connotations. This co-extensiveness may have been accommodated by the early reader in one of two chief ways: either their reading may have conserved intact a tension between the sacred and the secular domains in which pearls were a common currency, eliciting a response that maintained the unresolved multivalence of a heaven and an earth that, while overlapping, were not entirely commensurable; or it may have prompted a syncretic response where the sacred and the secular merged, allowing the secular to emerge sacralized, and vice versa. But in fact it may be doubted that such a ‘co-extensive’ reading, whether conserving a tension between the domains or merging them in some kind of syncretic way, would even have been all that common: the particular combination of pearls with white raiment connects less with any tradition associated with Queen Anne — at least not with any that is known about — than Were not winter snows black in comparison to its whiteness? […] Afterwards I saw a pearl, at the sight of which I fell prostrate. For my eyes could not bear to behold it, so great was its hue. For neither the splendor of heaven, nor of light, nor of the sea, nor of the earth could be compared to its beauty’ (Ac vestem primo vidi: vidi, filia, vidi quod eloqui non possum. […] Numquid candori ejus nives comparatæ non nigrescebant? […] Post quam vidi margaritam: qua visa statim concidi. Non enim potuerunt oculi mei sustinere tantum ejus colorem. Nam nec coeli, nec lucis, nec maris, nec terræ species pulcritudini ejus poterat comparari.; from Hilarius Pictaviensis, Opera, PL, 9, cols 549–50). I owe this reference to Anne Marie D’Arcy. A partially related group of ideas also appears in Gregory I, Dialogues. Gregory’s account of the passing of the girl child Musa relates that ‘on a certain night, the holy mother of God, ever virgin, appeared to her in a vision, and showed to her girl children the same age as herself [that is, of Musa’s age] in white garments’ (quadam nocte ei per visionem sancta Dei genitrix semper virgo Maria apparuit, atque coævas ei in albis vestibus puellas ostendit; PL, 77, col. 348). Some days later, Musa died, and her soul went to dwell amongst those young virgins. The account prompts Gregory’s interlocutor in the Dialogues, Peter, to observe: ‘Given that mankind is so subject to many innumerable vices, I reckon that the largest part of the heavenly Jerusalem must be filled with little ones and infants’ (Cum humanum genus multis atque innumeris vitiis sit subjectum, Jerusalem coelestis maximam partem ex parvulis vel infantibus arbitror posse compleri; PL, 77, col. 349). Here, the idea of virgin girl children clad in white, who keep company with the Blessed Virgin, suggests itself for comparison with Pearl; so too does Peter’s view of their preponderance in peopling heaven, when, apart from the Lamb and the Blessed Virgin (and a few other heavenly attendants given passing mention and who derived from the source in Revelation), the only heavenly citizens heard about in Pearl are similarly virgin girl children.

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it does with a demonstrable tradition of theological iconography.36 Further in this respect, the combination of white with hints of gold in the Pearl-maiden’s portrait seems to invite a safer comparison and conclusion before it would have evoked any similar combination for which Queen Anne is known to have been famous:37 namely, that it would first have evoked the traditional Marian colour scheme of the Assumption, a major feast (a festum duplex principale, than which there is no higher in liturgical status) falling in the same month, August, in which the poet so deliberately set the jeweller’s dream.38 All this is not necessarily to deny that some early readers would have made a connection between pearls in Pearl and current court fashion, or even with Queen Anne’s wearing of them; but it is to deny that the connection was either inevitable or even the most likely one to make. So if the connection occurred at all, available evidence suggests that it might be better conceived as having ranked somewhere at the lower end of the scale of likelihood in the gamut of possible reader responses. As for the Pearl-maiden’s crown, as part of the same project to affiliate her with Queen Anne it has been argued that this was ‘modeled […] after Queen Anne’s crown’ (currently kept in the Schatzkammer of the Residenz in Munich), and that this modelling was even done with care.39 However, in view of the poet’s categorical remark that the Pearl-maiden’s crown was ‘Of mariorys [pearls] and non other ston’, this critical claim seems overheated and hard to justify. Alongside pearls, the extant historical crown also incorporates enamel, diamonds, sapphires, and rubies, thus producing to the view a much more polychromic effect. In addition, as the text describes it, the Pearl-maiden’s crown seems to have been different in another fundamental respect: conceivably it was to be understood as 36 

See, for example, the references in the preceding note. Indeed, Chaucer’s portraiture of her via Alceste in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, something that we can feel more confident about deciphering historically, clothes her chiefly in green. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 594, F242 and G174. 38  The feast of the Assumption is also echoed in lines 763–64 of the poem (Pearl, ed. by Gordon, p. 28), in as much as the Song of Songs 4. 7–8, to which these lines are indebted, is to be heard in one of the epistle lections used on alternating days throughout the octave of the Assumption. (In Sarum Use, selections from Chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7 of the Song of Songs were used as an epistle reading which alternated every other day during the octave of the Assumption with a reading from Ecclesiasticus 24. 7–15. This Song of Songs epistle selection included Chapter 4. 7–8; see Missale ad usum Sarum, ed. by Dickinson, col. 866. The lemma also occurs in Sarum Use for masses recalling feasts of the Blessed Virgin; see Missale ad usum Sarum, ed. by Dickinson, col. 645.) 39  Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, p. 107. On the probability that this crown belonged to Anne of Bohemia, see Cherry, ‘Late Fourteenth-Century Jewellery’. 37 

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being fashioned not as crowns in this world are, a combination of jewels and metal, but as being entirely of pearls. (The poem speaks only once of pearls mounted in gold, in its opening lines, and there the perspective on them is the inappropriately confining and confined earthly one of the jeweller that the poem labours so long and hard to correct.)40 The description of the Pearl-maiden’s crown installs no sense of gold whatsoever, but solely of pearls; any gold requires the reader’s (earthly) inference. A crown exclusively of pearls, of course, would be a rich and strange thing indeed in worldly terms, but quite in place in a poetic heaven much of whose fabric was not simply a replica of the fabric of earthly courts.41 What the two domains had in common was richness: the fabric of Pearl’s poetic heaven, like its royal counterpart on earth, remained rich, but unlike its earthly counterpart, it was now also inescapably strange in the unexpected distribution of that richness (for example, compare the unearthly collocation of the organic and the inorganic in the dream landscape that the jeweller walks through, where trees may seem made of silver and indigo).42 That strangeness seems important. It would have made room for a certain crucial, critical distance from the world beneath the sphere of the moon and all that went on in it, even a distance from the commerce of its most exalted, heavenish echelons at court where assent and deference were inculcated and repeatedly invented through rich rituals of display. So either the Pearl-maiden’s crown, in its difference from Queen Anne’s (even assuming that we admit that the poet knew the actual historical crown) maintained its distance or — and this seems to require the lesser leap of faith — the poet was simply allowing himself and others to react against their conventional understanding of earthly crowns in general, not modelling the Pearl-maiden’s crown on Queen Anne’s in particular. He was not wholly rejecting earthly crowns, to be sure, but instead deviating from a standard awareness of them so that his crown might 40 

Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 1–4 (p. 1). It is interesting to compare the unearthly crown of the fairy king in Sir Orfeo, whose otherworldliness was communicated partly in terms of its composition solely of dazzling crystal (Sir Orfeo, ed. by Bliss, ll. 149–52 (pp. 14–15): ‘Þe king hadde a croun on hed; | It nas of siluer, no of gold red, | Ac it was of a precious ston | – As briȝt as þe sonne it schon’). Approaching this question of heaven’s difference from a different angle, Putter, An Introduction to the GawainPoet, pertinently says, ‘heaven [in Pearl] is in fact not at all like a conventional court, where royal favour is the object of fierce rivalry between its members. If we draw on our knowledge of the way courts work — the maiden’s idiom after all invites us to do so — we discover that we would be better off without it’ (p. 167). 42  Compare the comment of Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, p.  159: ‘It is as if he [the dreamer] had awakened from his sleep inside a manuscript illumination, or rather inside a product of some impossible combination [my italics] of all the luxury arts of his time.’ 41 

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serve as yet another of the (many) pointers towards a heavenly reality which only a perceived distance from the familiar could begin to dimension. 43 The biographical implication folded within the poet’s use of his materials, should we wish to unfold it, may well suggest him to have had some acquaintance with society’s higher levels, as indeed critics have often and justifiably believed, but not in any way that we can now narrowly define. The way in which early readers would have responded to the strangely rich crown of the Pearl-maiden also raises issues related to her ontological status and the puzzle of her identity. Since she is a queen in heaven, one modern critic has chosen to resolve the puzzle by hearing further intimations of Anne of Bohemia behind her portrait, partly on the basis of that queenly status.44 Inconvenient to this reading is the poem’s declaration that the Pearl-maiden was an infant not yet even two years old when she left this world; Queen Anne, on the other hand, was a woman of twenty-seven at the time of her death. 45 Thus in order to help her mooted connection with Queen Anne to stick, the significance of the Pearlmaiden’s stated age has been minimized and even queried as unreliable. 46 But before we consider the crown of the Pearl-maiden further and weigh the possible implications of her age, two other (unremarked) inconveniences inhibiting easy parallelism between the Pearl-maiden and the historical Anne might be noted. First, if, as seems the case, Anne enjoyed a reputation for her developed literacy, the jeweller’s claim that the Pearl-maiden knew neither the Paternoster nor Creed when she died would have seemed, to say the least, inappropriate to some putative early reader disposed to see Anne figured in the Pearl-maiden.47 And second, the jeweller’s sense of impropriety, provoked by what he considers the exorbitantly lavish nature of the Pearl-maiden’s heavenly reward, rests wholly on the fact that, while on earth, she seems not to have been of noble blood at all.48 On that basis 43 

Conceivably, one could argue that this poetics of estrangement, that both needs and reacts against its shaping materials, constitutes a poetic version of what historical documents tell us was happening in Richard II’s court, where the king seems increasingly to have occluded his human approachability by rituals of regalian distance; compare Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, p. 193. But if so, the poem has gone one better, lifting its final loyalties even away from that court culture to which it owes so much. 44  Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, pp. 155–70. 45  Pearl, ed. by Gordon, l. 483 (p. 18). A similar objection has also been levelled against Bowers by Staley, ‘Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety’, p. 99. 46  Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’, pp. 153–54. 47  Krochalis, ‘The Books and Reading of Henry V and his Circle’, esp. p. 60. 48  Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 489–92 (p. 18).

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he considers her heavenly reward generous to a fault. This implication that her former earthly existence may have been outside the circle of nobility again fits awkwardly if a connection with Queen Anne is to be contemplated, or indeed, if a connection with Isabella, the young daughter of Thomas of Woodstock, is to be contemplated, a child offered up by her father to a conventual life. And in this latter case a second, perhaps more fundamental, weakness of argument is the fact that, for want of any evidence to the contrary, Isabella was Thomas’s voluntary donation, while the Pearl-maiden was the jeweller’s involuntary loss. It would require special pleading to reconcile this difference.49 Perhaps more plausible as an early reading would be one that found the Pearlmaiden’s crown and the two-year compass of her age to echo two things in chief: baptism theology again, plus a tradition that returns us once more to the Holy Innocents. As Ian Bishop has already shown in connection with the crown, there was a longstanding association of the baptism of every Christian, no matter what her or his actual social status, with coronation.50 In baptismal rites before the fourteenth century, the association might even be made manifest by clothing the newly baptized in white and setting on her or his head a circlet. In the thirteenth century, Durandus described these baptismal accoutrements in his Rationale divinorum officiorum: But in certain places, a white raiment is given to the baptized as a sign of [their] priesthood; as well as a certain circular crown, as a sign of the crown of the kingdom of life: because he [that is, the newly baptized] is a member of Christ who is king and priest. For indeed, all Christians are called kings and priests, whence the Apostle Peter says: ‘You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood’. 51

The tradition described by Durandus of making visible the theological symbolism of baptism was of course much older, and a considerably earlier instance may be found in the ninth-century De clericorum institutione of Rabanus Maurus:

49 

And even were one to indulge in such special pleading, the result would still be to abstract Isabella of Woodstock away from ready earthly recognizability, thus diminishing the need or significance of any awareness of her as the originary point of the Pearl-maiden. 50  See especially Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting, pp. 114–21. 51  Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum v–vi, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 414, ll. 21–22: ‘Datur autem, in quibusdam locis, baptizatis candida uestis, in signum sacerdotii; et quedam rotunda mitra, in signum corone regni uite: quia ipse est membrum Christi qui est rex et sacerdos. Omnes enim uere christiani reges et sacerdotes dicuntur, unde Petrus apostolus ait: Vos estis genus electum, regale sacerdotium.’

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After baptism, however, a white garment is given to the Christian, signifying innocence and Christian purity, which he must maintain spotless by diligence of holy conversation after the ancient stains [of original sin] have been washed away, to present [it] before Christ’s tribunal. Indeed, all who are reborn are clad in white raiment, following the mystery of the Church rising again, just as the Lord himself was transfigured in the presence of the disciples.[…] His [the Christian’s] head is covered after holy unction with a mystic veil, in order that he understand himself to be a sharer of the heavenly crown and priestly dignity, according to the Apostle: ‘You’, he said, ‘are a royal and priestly people […]’ For priests in the Old Testament always used to adorn their head with a certain mystic veil […] and he [the Christian] is a member of the head [Christ], who suffered and rose again for us.52

It seems immaterial whether the baptismal accoutrements described in the thirteenth century (and earlier) were still in actual use in fourteenth century England or not when knowledge of them would have lived on in any clerical consciousness steeped in liturgical commentaries such as these.53 Theological 52 

‘Post baptisman autem traditur Christiano vestis candida designans innocentiam et puritatem Christianam, quam ablutas veteres maculas studio sanctæ conversationis immaculatam servare debet, ad præsentandum ante tribunal Christi. Cuncti vero renati albis induuntur vestibus, ad mysterium resurgentis Ecclesiæ, sicut ipse Dominus coram discipulis transfiguratus est. […] Tegitur enim post sacram unctionem caput ejus mystico velamine, ut intelligat se diadematis regni, et sacerdotalis dignitatis portitorem, juxta Apostolum: Vos estis, inquit, genus regale et sacerdotale.[…] Nam sacerdotes in Veteri Testamento quodam mystico velamine caput semper ornabant […] et illius sit capitis membrum, qui passus est et resurrexit pro nobis’; Rabanus Maurus, De clericorum institutione, in PL, 107, cols 313–14. 53  If he did not read the commentaries directly, their content is likely to have been ‘in the air’. But in fact there are hints of his possible direct acquaintance with one or other of the commentaries and these are to be found in at least two details of the Pearl-maiden’s discourse on baptism. Part of her discussion of the equality of heaven is dependent upon ideas expressed in 1 Corinthians 12. 12–17 and 21–27 (Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 457–66 (p. 17)), and it is to these ideas that Rabanus Maurus also briefly alluded when discussing the clothing of the newly baptized and the Eucharist: ‘therefore he must receive these things [that is, the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist] in order that he may merit having Christ live within him, and be a member of that head’ (haec ideo accipere debet, ut Deum habere mereatur in se habitatorem, et illius sit capitis membrum; Rabanus Maurus, De clericorum institutione, in PL, 107, col. 313). The subtext in Durandus is similar; see the citation noted above (Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum v–vi, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 420): ‘because he is himself a member of Christ, who is a priest and king’ (quia ipse est membrum Christi qui est rex et sacerdos). Also, the motif that baptism was instituted by the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side, though ancient, is repeated by Durandus (Guillelmus Durantus, Rationale divinorum officiorum v–vi, ed. by Davril and Thibodeau, p. 414) and also by the Pearl-maiden (Pearl, ed. by Gordon, ll. 649–56 (p. 24)).

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associations encouraged by the commentaries might also partly explain other aspects of the Pearl-maiden’s presentation, such as her stern, quasi-sacerdotal pose and her capacity for learned, sermon-like admonition: her baptism had conferred not only the degree of royalty on her, she was now also of the priestly caste that the Apostle spoke of, and so de facto empowered to instruct and to preach.54 Earthly priesthood was male; the heavenly version of it embraced both sexes, thus creating, from earth’s point of view, another of heaven’s strangenesses. Therefore, whatever about any reminiscence of the crown of Anne of Bohemia, on the face of it the case is weightier for heeding the parallel between the Pearlmaiden’s crown and a certain strain of baptism theology, and also between her white array adorned in pearl and another, related theological strain; and although her death when not even two years old may have sat uncomfortably alongside the historical Queen Anne (and perhaps alongside the entry into the religious life of Isabella of Woodstock),55 it fitted snugly with the Holy Innocents. For the Vulgate stresses their age within a two-year span at the time of their death in the word bimatus, ‘the age of two years’ — a rare word, and in all of Scripture used but once when the age of the Innocent was specified (Matthew 2. 16). To hear an echo of the Holy Innocents in this detail in Pearl too, especially when their presence is already so well attested elsewhere in the poem, seems the more likely response that would have attended the Pearl-maiden’s age and the associations accruing to it. Her age, then, would seem to deserve attention, not repudiation as an irrelevance. In sum, an early reader of Pearl would have had to set aside one obstacle after another before any putative connection between Queen Anne and the Pearlmaiden, or Isabella of Woodstock and the Pearl-maiden, could be made, as well as to have been deaf to the many theological resonances attending the Pearl-maiden’s portrait that dress her character in a fashion more spiritually recognizable than it 54 

Generally speaking, the perception was that the priest with cure of souls was under a duty to preach; as an unpublished, orthodox sermon in MS Laud misc. 706, fol. 144, observes, the office of preacher is ‘onliche be ordinans of holy chirche comittyt to clerkys and curatis’. See also Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 59–62. 55  Clearly, Isabella was very young when admitted into the London house of Minoresses, but her age is not exactly known; there is no clear evidence that she was of the age of the Pearlmaiden, namely, less than two years old. All that is known is that she was in infancia (CPL, v: AD 1396–1404, ed. by Bliss and Twemlow, p. 385). This detail, given in a letter of 14 April 1401 sent to Robert Braybrooke, bishop of London, asking him and Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, to visit the convent and ascertain Isabella’s wishes about wanting to stay with the nuns or not, might simply mean that she was in her minority in the legal sense when she was admitted. The age of minority would include not only babies, but also young persons.

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was earthly. Indeed, these resonances would have been liable to capsize any sense that a historical dead queen, or aristocratic child, lay at the basis of that portrait, even granting that any such sense were there in the first place. And even were it so granted, that some readers nevertheless made the Anne/Isabella connection, the evidence suggests, in the circumstances, that it could only have been made accidentally (for example, as times and readerships changed and with them the meanings with which any text can come to be invested). Thus there is good reason for believing the mooted Queen Anne/Isabella of Woodstock/Pearlmaiden link either to rank among those connections between the poem and its historical moment that would have registered, if indeed it registered at all, only marginally, or that perhaps registered as the text, adrift in its mouvance through history, became a palimpsest overwritten with later significance that it could not quite entirely resist but which it had never originally courted.

Looking in from the Outside and Looking out from the Inside It seems appropriate to sum up the stages of this discussion before adding a few concluding remarks. It began by adducing an analogue to an important thematic centre of Pearl, one that is not to be paralleled in the liturgy, where critics have recently tended to source many of the poem’s sacred materials, but in preaching. Not that the preaching context itself need be insisted on, even though the poet’s familiarity with preaching is to be inferred from other evidences; what it signals is the diverse location of the poet’s clerical resources, of which the sermon analogue is but another instance. The poet’s evident acquaintance with that clerical diversity, an acquaintance that allows him to select and recombine anterior materials, hybridizing rather than merely mimicking any one of them, is a caution against too readily assuming that he would have treated his historical resources any differently. Though the pressure of these too may register in his text, their exact point of origin in some cases is harder to perceive than some historicist criticism has fancied. And when the poet’s polymorphous sacred resources show themselves well able to assimilate, perhaps even overwhelm, some of the imagined points of contact between his poem and its secular historical moment, the claims of history over how we should read it necessarily find that limits have been imposed upon them. The attempt to construct scales of likelihood in reader response, as has been done here in two particular instances, is another of the (various) ways in which to begin plotting the limits of history in Pearl. To wish to do so is by no means to deny history its weight, for that, though now difficult to quantify as precisely

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as we would like, can nevertheless be trusted to have remained essential to the poetic project that Pearl has undertaken. This is a point that this chapter has stressed, in fact. Yet, for reasons earlier argued, the weight of history seems not to have been overmastering to the extent of finally coercing Pearl’s interpretation. Rather, history made interpretation ramify, precisely because its effects upon the poem, since they are never transparent but mediated, are, by that same token, restricted. Some recent modern scholarly picturings of what that history was risk encouraging deterministic readings of Pearl when, as argued at the outset of this chapter and even before these two instances were considered, history’s hold over the poem had been moderated as a result of the particular compositional process that the poet had elected. History, it seems, was a shifting collaborator in the production of the text’s meaning as it may momentarily have been meaning’s originary point, a point difficult enough now to perceive with any confidence. Similarly, the chance that the poet’s sacred resources might themselves come entirely to determine its reception and meaning was also thwarted by the spirit of detached appraisal implicit in his agile movement between them. Perhaps we might permit ourselves to think of the poet, without intending any irreverence to his work’s evident devotional commitment, as a tourist in the wide province of clerical textual endeavour, visiting some of the sites and bringing back a selection of souvenirs for a use subsequent to the uses to which they had originally been put when first he encountered them. This difference of use itself entailed a certain limitation, a check and balance, this time inserted against the various claims of another cultural sphere, written clerical culture. Pearl’s nature is thus to frustrate any attempt to synchronize it with either its historical or its textual moment that is too relentlessly pursued; as has been shown, its approach to its materials, whatever their characteristic prior domain, is such as to situate it both inside and outside the force fields of ideology that those materials helped elsewhere to reproduce. Paul Macherey’s reflection on the nature of literary rhetoric is, to a point, à propos here: ‘Ultimately, we might say that rhetoric absorbs ideology and then exudes it in an unrecognizable form, in a form in which it ceases to inspire, or even require open support’.56 In Pearl’s case, we could enter the qualification that ideologies are absorbed, then recognized as unrecognizable; their lineaments are seen and acknowledged, yet only in the context of their transition into something other. If as a result of reading Pearl received ideology ‘ceases to inspire, or even require open support’, 56 

Macherey, The Object of Literature, trans. by Macey, p. 237 (originally published in 1990 as À quoi pense la littérature?).

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that is the vulnerable place into which readers have been manoeuvred before new possibilities, which might indeed begin ‘to inspire, or even require open support’, open to view, although what these precisely might prove to be would remain to be seen. Pearl, then, cannot easily be seen to serve in any servile way the value systems current in late fourteenth-century England since the terms of its participation in them have themselves not been servile. If it does embrace the claims of some contemporary cultural logic or committed discourse, it does not do so without the prior adoption of a critically independent stance that enables its distance; perhaps without this distance, Pearl’s transcendental moves, its gestures beyond the horizons of its polymorphous sources, cannot be attempted. Put simply, it might be said that Pearl is constructed in such a way as to permit it to begin building a vantage point on heaven’s transcendence from a position of agnosticism about the presuppositions of its own earthly materials. Itself a product of words and of the human world, Pearl’s last word is that words and the human world can nevertheless not be granted the last word, and this even when their resources are employed — perhaps especially when they are employed — to image the seductive, heaven-aping glories of the court and to help in the contrivance of its quasi-sacral lustre. The textual conduct of Pearl is such as to be always open to the possibility that the very power relations out of which it has been produced are not themselves beyond manipulation and are open to being exceeded.57 It seems safer therefore to conceive Pearl’s relation to its historical moment paradoxically, as both profound, yet also as loosely fitting and fluid, just as its relation to the various provinces of clerical written culture has been shown to be. In broad outline, while both kinds of relation may seem clear and compelling, once pressed for specificity, their exact terms dissolve and become elusive. Pearl, if it seeks to make heaven legible through the familiar clothing of royalty, nevertheless also makes the royal strange in the process, transfiguring royal trappings and the attendant values that perhaps (who knows?) were close to the poet’s actual historical acquaintance. Thus while remaining the child of texts and of history, Pearl nevertheless limited the claims of its various contingencies by refusing assimilation to the interests of any one faction that it permitted itself to be touched by, and in so doing discovered an authentic voice whose accent, if familiar, was not entirely of any known worldly realm.58 That accent was audible in its delicate resistances to its time. Pearl has taught a general principle: the diligent effort to 57 

Compare Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Nice, p. 165. Indeed, Pearl might be viewed as an ‘interstitial’ cultural product, in the sense defined by Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 1–27. Here, at the interface of binary opposites, a space 58 

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attend to such resistances may enable a matching delicacy in how a historicist critic holds the view that a text both speaks to and is spoken by its history, is both present to its age, and negotiates the presence of its age within it.

Appendix The excerpt given below from Nicholas de Aquevilla’s sermon on the Feast of the Holy Innocents on the theme, Hii sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati, is edited from MS Laud lat. 94, fols 153r col. b–153v col. b. References to chapters of the Bible have been supplemented with their modern verse numbers, spelling conventions have been standardized, and a modern system of punctuation supplied. Any mechanical scribal copying errors have been corrected without notice, and all abbreviations silently expanded. Any editorial substantive textual emendations have been recorded in the notes. |fol. 153 col. b| ‘Hii sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati: virgines enim sunt et secuntur Agnum quocumque ierit’, Apocalypsis 14. 4. Verba ista dupliciter sunt consideranda. Primo, quomodo conveniunt innocentibus. Secundo, quomodo conveniunt iustis fidelibus. Secundum quod conveniunt innocentibus, tria sunt consideranda … Virgines enim sunt; vere, ipsi mundi sunt ab omni macula peccati et a macula actualis peccati, quia numquam actuale peccatum fecerunt et a macula originalis peccati mundati fuerunt per sanguinis eorum effucionem, quia sanguis eorum fuit eis baptismus, qui lavit eos a macula originali. Et ideo dicitur Apocalypsis 14. 5, ‘sine macula sunt ante tronum Dei’, et ante Deum iudicem. Tercium est magna dignitas, et hoc notatur cum dicit ‘secuntur Agnum’, id est, Christum, quocumque ierit. Glosa: integritate anime et corporis. Vere, magna est dignitas et gloria quod secuntur Christum dominum suum quocumque ierit. Unde Ecclesiastico 23. 38, ‘Magna est gloria sequi Dominum’. Certe, optime dicit quando dicit quod innocentes secuntur Agnum. Agnus animal dulce et innocens est et in Ecclesiastico 27. 10, ‘Volatilia ad sibi similia conveniunt’,59 et Ecclesiastico 13. 19 dicitur quod ‘Omne animal diligit sibi simile’. Optime dicit quando dicit hii innocentes secuntur Agnum quocumque ierit, et hoc est quod dicit Dominus per prophetam in Psalmo 24. 21, ‘Innocentes et recti adheserunt mihi’, et cetera. Dico igitur quod ‘hii sunt qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati’, et cetera.

opens in which discourse is disrupted, a space potentially productive of new meanings. This emergent ‘new’ culture celebrates hybridity and has the capacity to destabilize cultural identities. 59  similia conveniunt: MS reads consimilia veniunt.

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Secundum quod ista verba conveniunt iustis viris et nobilibus. Tria sunt in illis consideranda. Primum est de iustorum in bonis operibus constancia quod notatur cum dicit ‘hii sunt’. Supple glosa: pueri lactantes pro Christo interfecti. Erubescant igitur ad intuitum eorum vel |fol. 153v, col. a| horum parvulorum iuvenes et fortes viri et mulieres, qui vident tantam multitudinem lactancium hodie per gladium transire ad eternum regnum. Ipse vel ipsi pro defectu modice penitencie manentes in peccatis amittunt regnum celorum. Sed econtra iusti constanter sustinent labores penitencie secundum id quod dicitur Sapiencia 5. 1, ‘Stabunt iusti in magna constancia adversus eos qui se angustiaverunt’, non tantum in futuro, sed et in presenti, sustinentes arma penitencie contra angustias temptacionum … |fol. 153v, col. b| Et certe, illi qui volunt sequi Christum et habitare cum ipso in gloria oportet eos esse sine macula ista. ‘Domine’, sicut dicit David, ‘quis habitabit in tabernaculo tuo? Aut quis requiescet in monte sancto tuo?’ [Ps 14. 1] Et respondit Dominus, ‘Qui ingreditur sine macula luxurie’,60 similiter et Canticum Canticorum 4. 7–8. Dicit sponsus sponse, ‘Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te’, et quia ‘macula non est in te, veni de Libano, veni, coronaberis’. Vere, igitur, illi qui non sunt coinquinati cum mulieribus ad literam vel cum cordibus mundi. Dicit Glosa: virgines enim sunt qui habent cordis mundiciam, sequuntur Agnum, et cetera. Videndum est de tercio quomodo isti debent sequi Agnum sine macula. Et hoc notatur cum dicit ‘sequuntur Agnum’. Item Agnus Christus est, qui Agnus fuit sine macula, quia peccatum non fecit, ‘nec inventus est dolus in ore eius’, 1 Petri 2. 22. Iste Agnus immolatus fuit propter peccata nostra, unde 1 Corinthiorum 5. 7, ‘Etenim pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus’ vere sanguine precioso istius Agni dulcissimi, id est, Ihesu Christi, redempti sumus a servitute diaboli.

60 

The word luxuria has been added; compare Psalm 14. 2: ‘Qui ingreditur sine macula’.

Chapter 5

Piers Plowman: The Essential (Ephemeral) Project

‘But many intractable problems remain for future editors of Piers Plowman […] [they will face] a long drawn-out and arduous process of editing and re-editing, with no certain hope of reaching a secure end point with which fellow readers of the poem will agree’.1

W

illiam Langland’s Piers Plowman, classed in literary genre terms like Pearl as a dream vision, could nevertheless in so many other respects not be more unlike. While Pearl reaches towards a spiritual medication for a private grief (albeit one that any reader of the poem may share by empathy), the perspective of Piers Plowman is far more insistently public, outwardlooking, and socially oriented. Again unlike Pearl, whose tight structural symmetry conveys a defined formal closure, the form of Piers Plowman is much more fluid and open, allowing roomy accommodation to scenes many of which come and go, it would seem, according to a loose logic of association of the sort that dreams are made of. The status of Piers Plowman as more public property seems further endorsed by the simple fact that, unlike Pearl, it exists in multiple manuscript copies. Moreover, the texts that they contain witness to at least four different authorial reworkings. A broad critical consensus holds that its first known recension (the Z-text) dates to early in the 1360s (though not earlier than 1362), its next (the A-text) to the late 1360s, its next (the B-text) to sometime between 1377 and 1379, and its last (the C-text) to around 1385 or 1386 (though some have suggested a date a couple of years later still).2 Thus unlike 1  2 

Brewer, Editing ‘Piers Plowman’, p. 433. Arguments for dating the Piers Plowman recensions are conveniently outlined in

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Pearl once again, its evolving life straddles the reigns of two monarchs, Edward III and Richard II. About its author, although this time we appear to have a name to attach to him, we otherwise know very little.3 The autobiographical touches that he included in his poem paint a picture conceivably true in general outline, but that might be a little less trustworthy, were the truth known, if pressed in point of detail. As with the anonymous authors already considered in this book, so aspects of this particular named author’s personal formation are most reliably to be inferred obliquely from what the nature and content of his poem imply about it.4 In addition, it is interesting that since some important B-text manuscripts were almost certainly made in London, they chime with the disclosure of the author’s persona, the Dreamer, that for a while he lived in London; and the written dialects of many important C-text manuscripts constellate around Malvern in Worcestershire, the region in which the dreaming narrator of Piers Plowman famously pictured himself as wandering at the start of the poem.5 Thus it seems that the geographical (and professional) situations of Langland’s early audiences can be thought of as having been various; some were provincial, and a notable group of them centred on the capital.6

World without End The spread of his poem’s early reception, and its demonstrable textual evolution,

an evolution that may simply have been arrested by the author’s death rather than by that evolution having run its natural course, challenge our study of presences to say something that may be generally meaningful about how Langland’s age

Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, pp. xxiv–xxvi. For the possibility of a date for the C-text that may even be slightly later, see further below, pp. 139–40. 3  See Kane, Piers Plowman; Hanna, William Langland, pp. 17–24; and Burrow, Langland’s Fictions, pp. 82–108. 4  As Schmidt observes, ‘virtually nothing is known about the poet except what can be deduced from the text itself ’ (Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, p. xx). 5  Samuels, ‘Dialect and Grammar’. Horobin, ‘“In London and Opelond’”, has argued against Samuels that these C-text manuscripts were metropolitan, rather than south-west Worcestershire, products, and that they have preserved south-west Worcestershire orthographies derived ‘from a common exemplar’ (though Horobin would more appropriately have expressed this as descent not from a common ‘exemplar’ but from a common archetype or hype­ archetype). 6  See further Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’. For the professional locations of a number of those early audiences, see n. 38 below and the reference there given.

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was present in his text and about how his text was present to its age. Is there any constant that can be isolated amidst all this evidence for diverse dissemination and reception? There may indeed be a steady point of reference in all this flux that can be assessed for comment, and it locates precisely in the issue of the unfinished evolution of Langland’s work. Whether she was conscious of it or not, the vanishing horizon of settled knowledge at which Charlotte Brewer gazes at the end of her book Editing Piers Plowman, a quotation from which provided this chapter’s epigraph, is strangely synchronous with the ending of the poem whose editorial history she has sought to trace. The B- and C-text finish bleakly with the security of Unity Holy Church compromised by sin — focused as the atrophy of contrition at the hands of Friar Flatterer (aka Sire Penetrans-domos) — and with Conscience anxiously resuming the quest for the one who will rectify and compose the disorder that has flowed through the breach: ‘“By Crist!” quod Conscience þo, “I wole bicome a pilgrym, | And walken as wide as the world lasteþ, | To seke Piers þe Plowman, […]”| And siþþe he gradde [cried aloud] after Grace, til I gan awake’.7 It is an ending that is an ending in form only, because in terms of its content, it yearns towards another beginning that awaits exploration beyond the horizon of the text. The unfinished modern business of editing may be taken as an inevitable modern corollary of the unfinished late medieval business of Langland’s poem, figured poetically in an ending that is in fact perpetually deferred, but experienced also in practical terms, and by modern editors most dauntingly, in the restlessness of its process whose traces we have come to call Z, A, B, and C. That process, as is well known, has been made muddier not simply by mechanical scribal error but also by wholly deliberate forms of scribal interference — here in some cases we have to reckon with a rewriting of Langland’s words, co-authorial in propensity, by ‘participatory scribes’, as they have been called.8 One point that will incidentally arise from the observations made in this chapter is that the modern editing of Piers Plowman does us a great service when it exposes, rather than occludes as so much clutter, the restless process, both authorial and scribal, of the poem, and when it foregrounds the poem’s open-endedness and mouvance,9 rather than when it exclusively seeks to fasten down Langland’s 7 

B.xx.381–83 and 387. All quotations from Piers Plowman are taken from Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt. 8  Bowers, ‘Piers Plowman’s William Langland’, has some further reflections on this (p. 68). 9  The term was first applied by Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, pp. 70–72, to the fluidity characteristic of many medieval texts in transmission. For him, the oeuvre existed in the collectivity of its different manifestations, its various états du texte. As my assessment of it

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ipsissima verba — a tricky business, that, at the best of times, though to be sure, also a worthwhile endeavour, provided it does not exalt itself as ‘the end of all our exploring’.10 For the pursuit of Langland’s very own words at the expense of a respect for his poem’s life through process, a process that he began and that some of his scribes in their lesser ways perpetuated, will miss an ethical imperative that drives his writing and that also perhaps colours the indifferent attitude of some of his scribes to the fixity of what he wrote. And if we may defy indictment on grounds of vainly trying to resurrect the dead author, it could be said that he took this ethical imperative very seriously: it was not just his private whimsy; it got under his skin from the world outside, since it finds its counterpart already elsewhere in his contemporary culture. It is this question of an ethical writing via process, over and above the mundane and mechanical forms of process that texts are inevitably heirs to once they fall into the hands of scribes, that has helped to generate our heated editorial industry in the first place, and we might try to understand better its ethical dimensions. Whatever else he may have been doing, Langland was being ethical, then, in a way that his culture would have recognized through his regard for process, through his acceptance of, and accommodation to, the provisionality of his text.11 should subsequently make clear, the ethical impetus that I believe must take some credit for prompting the mouvance in Langland’s case is not specifically canvassed by Zumthor and the other critics listed in n. 10 following. 10  For an extreme reaction to the desire to reconstruct the ‘author’s original’, deeming the desire fundamentally misconceived, see Foulet and Speer, On Editing Old French Texts, pp. 1–39, and Speer, ‘Wrestling with Change’. See also Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante. Applications of these theoretical developments in the field of Middle English studies are considered by Patterson, ‘The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius’, and Pearsall, ‘Editing Medieval Texts’. 11  Nor do Langland’s explicit views, such as they are, on the vulnerability of texts at the hands of their copyists, tell against this conclusion. When Schmidt cites B.xi.303–06 (C.xiii.116–19) as exemplifying Langland’s concern that textual transmission should be stable, it is worth noting that here the texts Langland had in mind were legal, that is, texts whose litteratim copying would have been dictated by pressing exigencies of law (Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, p. lx). Copying of this sort was therefore of a qualitatively different order. This is not to imply, of course, that Langland was indifferent to the copying of texts that were, by contrast, ‘literary’ (though it must be remarked that when Kane, ‘The Text’, alludes to B.xv.373 to support his contention that Langland would have worried about the friability of text in scribal transmission because he worried about his own minutiae of literary composition (p. 196), it is not clear that Langland had composition in the vernacular rather than in Latin in mind when he criticized the inability of clerks to ‘formaliche endite’ (B.xv.373)). Paradoxical as it may seem, it is possible to envisage an author who, though taking trouble over his composition, may have been less troubled than we would like to think about what copyists, within a certain latitude of reason, did to his text.

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To observe that provisionality was, of course, thrust upon him by the exploratory nature of his poem, an exploration that never ended, as far as we can see, or that it was thrust upon him because his poem had committed itself to responding to (changing) historical circumstances to a degree that no other text that we have considered so far had, is not to remove the fact that provisionality became, in effect, part of his poem’s ethical essence. Langland’s release into the world of at least three or four versions of it may implicitly acknowledge that provisionality was not only an acceptable, but also an ethically mandatory, part of its existence in time, and would similarly so have been regarded by his contemporaries, including some of his ‘co-authorial’ copyists.12 His revisions of revisions may have been driven by motives not all of which have been sufficiently well grasped. His attempt to vindicate his personal social usefulness, so much the burden of his apologia newly prefaced to the revised Passus V of the C-text, may also be equally manifest in his regard for recasting his poem, as in the self-evident usefulness of the moral matter that his chosen themes purvey. Obviously, in their day these might be considered usefully edifying in and of themselves, and indeed, evidence for the poem’s early reception suggests that these were what it was often valued for.13 Langland, then, may have been socially justified by his ongoing work; and this ongoing work may have been a means whereby the doubts about personal and social value that haunt the construction of his poetic persona — most vocal in the famous apologia of C.V.1–108 — were in some measure to be allayed. The unpacking of these remarks will occupy the rest of what this chapter will say, and will lead us in particular to revisit the question of Langland’s relation to a field of writing in which a similar compositional ethic can be observed with especial clarity. This is the culture of preaching, to which Langland has long been acknowledged to have been profoundly indebted.14 And the bridging point be12 

In their B-text edition (Langland, Piers Plowman: B-Version, ed. by Kane and Donaldson, pp. 98–127), Kane and Donaldson have persuasively argued that the text that Langland worked from when revising to the C-text was a corrupt scribal copy of the B-text. (They also suggest that one motive behind the revision to C was the purgation of errors from the scribal B-text.) Was it misfortune or insouciance that led Langland to use a corrupt scribal copy? That question can never be answered, but it is worth posing when Langland’s seemingly endless revisions implicitly recognize, in retrospect, that his composition is provisional, and in being so, indeed, in a fundamental way ephemeral. 13  See Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, p. 109; also Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature, pp. 102–16. 14  Previous commentary on Langland’s relation to sermons and preaching is usefully surveyed by Wenzel, ‘Medieval Sermons’. Wenzel also draws attention to a few further sub­stantive and formal similarities between Langland and sermons hitherto unremarked. In this chapter,

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tween this culture and Langland that may especially be considered is the theology of contrition and the nature of its textual and social construction. Let us begin by reflecting on that section of Piers Plowman from which we will take our point of departure, Passus V.

Passus v First, the sermon that by the time of the C-text redaction has swollen from the first fifty-nine lines to absorb the passus completely. How important the husbanding and harvesting of contrition is! To speak in such terms is to inhabit for a moment the persona of a late medieval preacher, and if we may take the declaration of the Dreamer at face value, the sentiment of our hypothetical preacher would not have been so unlike his own: ‘Contrition alone/of itself removes sin’ (Sola contricio delet peccatum), says the Dreamer.15 Since contrition alone was enough to wipe out sin — something that both radical and conservative theology in Langland’s day agreed that it did — it was mighty indeed in the economy of salvation.16 The heart’s insemination with contrite feeling might be achieved in various ways but preeminently through the office of preaching; preaching was the mass-medium of contrition.17 This was something that Chaucer also knew: ‘“But precheth nat, as freeres doon in Lente, | To make us for oure olde synnes wepe”’, recommended the Host to the Clerk of Oxford.18 Indeed, when in the B-text however, it will be proposed that we should consider the debt of Langland to the culture of the preachers less in terms of substantive and formal appropriation than in terms of a more radical inspiration, a shared compositional ethic expressed in comparable (though not, of course, entirely commensurable) textual dimensions. Langland’s art was self-confident enough to clothe itself with the means also used in sermons without turning Piers Plowman into a sermon by another name. But the compositional ethic of the medieval sermon, to be explored later, may either have given Langland his radical inspiration or have nurtured it in him simply by virtue of its existence as an influential analogical instance of it. 15  B.xi.82. The sentiment is pervasive in Piers Plowman; compare ABC.v.126, BC.xi.130, BC.xii.176, B.xiv.18, 84–90 (this omitted in C but compare C.xvii.29), BC.xvii.294, and BC.xix.328. Alford, ‘The Figure of Repentance in Piers Plowman’, includes a useful summary of the primary and secondary critical literature on sola contricio (see p. 11, n. 23). 16  On the radical/conservative agreement over the theology of contrition, see Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 404–05. 17  One of the most spectacularly famous instances of this appears in the following century, when the preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in Florence precipitated the Bonfire of the Vanities. 18  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 12–13 (p. 137). The Host’s reaction is antici-

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Langland’s Repentance repeated the theme of Reason’s sermon to Will, he ‘garte Wille to wepe water wiþ hise eiȝen’.19 And there are many other evidences, if more prosaic, all testifying to the late fourteenth-century regularity of this twin event: that tears on the cheeks of the audience were considered the proper meed of the preacher, and that preaching and penance went hand in hand.20 The friar who composed the (unpublished) Middle English sermons unique to Longleat, MS 4, for example, a man necessarily well acquainted with preaching by virtue of his mendicant profession, argued that the preacher who moved his audience to contrition for their sins should be allowed to capitalize at once on the mood of the moment by hearing their confessions: Þe prechour of Goddys word schulde han power to herin schryftis [to hear con­ fessions], and to asoylin and vnbindin men of here synnys, for it is wol vnsemli [very inappropriate] þat þe prechour which sterith men to repentaunce and to amendement of here lijf [their life] schulde ben priuyd of auctorite [deprived of authority] and powere to heryn schryftis of hem þat wyln ben schreuyn [of those who wish to be confessed] to hym.21

What the friar defended is precisely what happens in Passus V, of course, and so we must recognize that in progressing from sermon to confession, Langland’s narrative follows an expected trajectory, one more routinely familiar to his contemporaries, in fact, than even John Burrow’s vintage analysis of the narrative development of the second vision of Piers Plowman would lead us to pated in a contemporary sermon on the theme Veritatem dico, quare non creditis mihi? ( John 8. 46) contained in the great Benedictine sermon compilation, Worcester Cathedral, MS F. 10, fol. 213: ‘similarly, people nowadays gladly hear sermons and believe the preacher as long as he doesn’t preach against their sins and move [them] to penitence’ (similiter moderni libenter audiunt sermones et credunt predicanti quamdiu non predicat contra peccata eorum et mouet ad penitenciam). 19  B.v.61. The ‘Wille’ in question here seems either to be the abstract human power of the soul, ‘will’ or voluntas, that stands in need of correction, or Will the Dreamer, Langland’s fictionalized self (or even both simultaneously). But if we assume some trace of Will the Dreamer in this, as it seems very reasonable that we should, then in C his weeping is relocated to this moment of contrition at the end of the apologia. 20  And this was a combination powerfully urged at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which legislated for preacher confessors. See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, i, 239–40 (canon 10). For other instances of the intimate and commonplace liaison of preaching with confession, see Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 102–03. 21  Longleat, MS 4, fol. 50v, col. a. Though in saying this the author was evidently affirming what to him was the norm in the face of attempts to restrain the hearing of confessions. For a study of the Longleat collection, see Hudson and Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work’.

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suspect.22 It is worth stressing how utterly commonplace in its day the related enterprise of preaching and penance would have seemed. So Reason through his preaching sows the seed from which contrition can grow; 23 Repentance harvests its crop, not without difficulty, in the act of the oral confession of the Seven Deadly Sins (occurring later in Passus V in the B-text, and in the C-text distributed over Passus VI and VII); and the last phase of the completed act of penitence, satisfactio operis, is left to the penitential fasting of which some of the sins speak and chiefly to the pilgrimage to St Truth that propels Langland’s narrative along into the passus ahead. What Langland’s poeticizing of the inception of penance has done is to refurbish and imaginatively appropriate a thoroughly established institutional practice, one which doubtless to many would have seemed wearily familiar; thus his poetic re-cognition of the sacrament of penance may have been of use to both himself and to his audience in reinscribing in both him and them a conviction of the urgency and salvific value of this particular sacrament. It also marks his hope in a sacrament whose praxis had characteristic textual correlates, ones, as will be argued, that are similarly manifest in the process in which his poem, through time, exists. Preaching, whose mounting status within Piers Plowman registers in the formal prominence increasingly afforded to the Passus v sermon from Z to A to B to C,24 coincides with the poem’s promotion of its first practical, systematic response to the damage that the evil at large in society inflicts. Various exhortations against social evil and legislative gestures for curbing it were made en route to Passus v but they simply amounted to local, reactive measures: secular attempts at reform feature in the rats’ parliament of the Prologue, but they were specifically directed at the marauding ‘cat’; then there are the (social) precepts of Holy Church in Passus I, but they are uttered as private counsels to the Dreamer, not at large; next, the king takes a secular initiative against corruption in B.II.193–205, but the culprits simply flee and take refuge amongst various corrupted classes — friars, merchants, pardoners, physicians, minstrels, and messengers; another reform is 22 

Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature, pp. 80–102. Langland’s fiction is constructed from historically real components. 23  In the A-text, it is Conscience who preaches; part of the process of B and C is the fleshing out of the scene so that Conscience is reallocated a role as crucifer and Reason is introduced as preacher. On the role of Reason, see Alford, ‘The Idea of Reason in Piers Plowman’. 24  A case for the priority of Z in the order of composition is argued by A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer in Langland, Piers Plowman: The Z Version, ed. by Rigg and Brewer, pp. 12– 20. For a study of passages in Piers Plowman where preaching or issues related to preaching are raised, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 201–14.

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attempted when the king tries to marry Meed off to Conscience, but the initiative proves vain and the king gives up on it.25 In contrast to all these, the (penitential) sermon flags the first proactive measure. Its object is no less than preaching’s chiefest end, a radical conversio morum, yoked in the wonted way, as we have seen, to the sacrament of penance, and it is an enterprise all the more breathtaking for its nationwide sweep: Reason preached ‘tofore al þe reume’.26 Large-scale contrition, then, both as activated in the practice of Langland’s day (noticeably during the prime preaching season of Lent) and as figured in Piers Plowman — if figured there with a momentousness that optimistic poetic licence has authorized — was the responsibility of a particular social intervention, namely, acts of preaching. Preaching fertilized contrition, ‘the verray sorwe that a man receyveth in his herte for his synnes, with sad purpos to do penaunce’, as Chaucer’s Parson put it.27 Contrition marked the effective beginning of personal, and hence social, reform, of the conversio morum that issued in a general common profit. However, if the conversio morum and its socially desirable by-products were to be sustained, contrition must ever be renewed. It was not a once-off event. The con­versio morum, the essential purpose of any sermon, required a corresponding con­versio textus (let us say) as its unavoidable textual corollary. (We will come on in due course to note examples in which the same basic sermon came to be made and remade as altered circumstances dictated.) That is, ongoing contrition, which alone can foster a sustained conversio morum, is necessarily a site that only fluidly adaptive text is likely to succeed in constructing: a continuing conversio morum requires a coextensive conversio textus; it demands an ongoing, restless adaptation, process, and remaking in the very agents of its manufacture.28 Writing, and the unending business, until death, of repenting and doing well in the real world, may for Langland have been reciprocal activities, and this reciprocity, it may be 25 

It is as if initiatives without an accompanying conversio morum are doomed to fail. Signs of reform become more hopeful once Reason joins the king’s council in B.iv, though reform is not inaugurated systematically until B.v in Reason’s preaching to the realm. 26  C.v.114. One might look to parliamentary sermons, at which all the three estates were represented, rather than to Crusade sermons, as Burrow did, for a real-life analogue closer to the sort of preaching scene that Langland evokes. 27  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l.  128 (p.  290). The Parson spoke with the momentum of an ancient tradition behind him. 28  This model would accommodate the view of Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, p. 116, that the chanson d’aventure might parallel and explain some aspects of Piers Plowman’s narrative structure. According to the model proposed in this chapter, the secular chanson genre would itself be seen to undergo a conversio textus. But just as a secular genre must be converted, so too must sacred ones: no genres are privileged beyond conversion.

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argued, yields another way of accounting for why he was drawn repeatedly back to his poem. His repeated acts of ‘making’ may in themselves have embodied a moral venture as much as they indulged some guiltily self-absorbed pleasure in the writing of poetry: certainly, there seems to be unease on Langland’s part that ‘making’ may be construed as, if not actually be, mere idleness; as Anne Middleton puts it, Langland ‘raises […] a purposeful crisis over the social standing and cultural authority of literary “play”’.29 But B.xii.23–24 strives to excuse ‘making’ in terms of holy utility; and Carl Schmidt has shown how formidably the excuse is achieved: ‘“And of holy men I herde”, quod I, “how þei ouþerwhile | Pleyden, þe parfiter to ben, in [places manye]”’.30 Repeated acts of ‘making’, then, could be viewed as an ethico-textual practice which, by virtue of the spiritual benefit that might accrue from it, bore a resemblance to the benefit accruing from the practice of penance. In turn, this espousal of process bore a resemblance to the textual practice typifying the (penitential) sermon, as we will shortly see.

The Ethico-Textual Mobility of the Medieval Sermon The text from which preaching, the agent of large-scale contrition, was wrought was mobile; that is, its matter was constantly revised to suit shifting circumstances. Ask editors of medieval sermons what the characteristic difficulties facing them in their editorial work are and some of them may well remark on a fluidity in their texts not so unlike that which confronts editors of Langland’s poem.31 29  Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, p. 120. Literary play clears a space in which the truth claims of culturally authoritative discourses can be scrutinized. As Piers Plowman is permitted to ventriloquize various (sometimes competing) truth claims, we are allowed to stand outside them and observe them less partially than might otherwise be possible. The fiction enables a clarifying distance, a theatrical playing space, as it were, where discourses are exhibited as objects of contemplation, not to be unquestioningly taken for granted. 30  Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker, pp. 14–19. 31  The ‘participatory’ activity that many sermons elicit from their copyists complicates the stages of their textual transmission profoundly. To cite but one example: the collation of an unpublished Nativity sermon extant in CUL, MS Gg. 6. 16, fols 38–41, MS Harley 2247, fols 13–15, and MS Royal 18 B. xxv, fols 12 r–13v, MS e Museo 180, fols 200v–05v, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 50, fols 24–30, and Gloucester Cathedral, MS 22, pp. 45–56, produces a dense apparatus criticus often longer than the edited text itself (Fletcher, ‘A Critical Edition of Selected Sermons’, pp. 35–58 and 126–34). Yet even the sermon holograph may present a work with multiple potential ‘identities’. An excellent case in point is MS Additional 46919, the sermon manuscript of William Herebert, OFM (d. c. 1333), a friar known to have been active in Oxford in the second decade of the fourteenth century and whose native conventual house was probably

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Which text constituted the authentic utterance? That question, so characteristic of the enterprise of much modern textual criticism, is in this context a vain one. The preacher was liable to return to his material and rearrange it over time as occasion required: should he dock or prolong his sermon to suit his audience’s disposition, for example, or how might his matter best be moulded to fit his audience’s capacity and the perceived needs of the moment? Each redaction was a complete version of a text, sufficient unto the day: yet there were many days, and his work was never done. It was, after all, his life’s vocation. This process resulted in ‘Z-’, ‘A-’, ‘B-’, and ‘C-type’ sermons, so to speak. Several flexible considerations were likely to define the preacher’s approach. While his ends may always have been the same — the conversio morum — through time their means varied, causing him ever to adapt his matter. If he were entrusting his sermon to writing for the benefit of posterity, literary considerations might well come into play that were liable to nudge his text into a shape different again from that actually preached. (The fact that Piers Plowman had no oral existence that we know about before being written down is irrelevant here: what is important is the illustration of comparable process in a related textual field, and the elucidation of some of the motives by which that process was driven.) Take the example of Langland’s contemporary, the Oxford preacher John Felton. We can see how Felton, setting down his sermons on parchment, was fully aware of them now changing into literary events.32 Also, in their codified form he could now include for a reader’s convenience indices to the matter contained in them, and thus he implicitly invited readers to cull out from his sermon collection whatever suited their particular circumstances and individual interests.33 Some readers, in fact, were preachers with specific agendas of their own, who turned Felton’s written Latin back again into English (presumably the original language in which Felton delivered his sermons), while further modifying the Latin sermons’ form and matter.34 But Felton’s approach implies that he had already in Hereford (for a summary of his life, see The Works of William Herebert, ed. by Reimer, p. 4). Herebert’s (holograph) sermons are ‘full of corrections and additions in Herebert’s hand, and there are many notes which have not been worked into the text but are suggestive of ways in which topics mentioned could be further elaborated. […] We are thus presented with a series of very fluid and shifting works’ (The Works of William Herebert, ed. by Reimer, p. 14). The English Wycliffite sermons, by contrast, are relatively unusual in the comparative rigidity of their textual transmission. 32  For a study of Felton, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 58–118. 33  Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, p. 79. 34  Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 80–84.

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foreseen — indeed, had facilitated and encouraged — such continuing redaction by others of what he had written, just as he had redacted the matter of anterior preachers when he originally preached himself, and then redacted his redactions further when he installed his preaching in written form. There are plenty of similar cases of the reinvention of the same essential matter by the same preacher to produce what, for the sake of analogy, have been called ‘Z-’, ‘A-’, ‘B-’, and ‘C-type’ sermons. Only one need be cited here, the work of a sermon author who will be revisited later. We do not know who he was, but also like Felton he was Langland’s contemporary, and he may have been active on Langland’s home ground of Worcestershire.35 He provides a sermon for the first Sunday of Lent (on the theme Ductus est Jesus in desertum a spiritu; Matthew 4. 1), and then offers an optional expansion to it: For as myche as þis gospel spekeþ principalli of þre synnes (þat is: glotenye, veyn­ glorie, and couetise) þerfore, whose wole [whosoever wishes], after þe tyme þat he seeþ þat he haþ disposicion of his auditorie [once he sees that he has his audience’s predisposition], he mai dilate his matere, spekynge scharpeli bi þe ground of [on the basis of] Scripture aȝens þese þre synnes.36

The optional expansion follows, and is not far from being twice the length of the sermon to which it can be attached. The point is that we have here, as it were, an ‘A-’ and a ‘B-text’, the latter conceived in order to provide the preacher with yet more matter with which to move his audience to contrition, bidding him speak ‘scharpeli bi þe ground of Scripture’ against his targeted Deadly Sins.37 (One is tempted to recall Lewte’s rhetorical question to the Dreamer, ‘Þyng þat al the world woot, wherfore sholdestow spare [refrain] | To reden it in retorik to arate [to teach it in poetry to reprove] dedly synne?’; B.xi.101–02.) Who can doubt, then, that part of the social applicability (and ethical commitment) of Piers Plowman, just as in the case of many a late medieval preacher’s recycling of the substance of 35 

See Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman. Though these sermons may be the work of different authors (Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, p. lxvii), they seem to have been assembled and coordinated by a single editor. Both of the chief manuscripts in which this collection is found have linguistic affiliations with Worcestershire, but this is especially true of the second scribe of the better textual witness of the two, MS Additional 41321 (see Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, pp. xl–xli). The possible significance of the Worcestershire overlap has gone unremarked. 36  Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, p. 130, ll. 1–5. 37  The adverb ‘sharply’ is a standard collocation in contexts of the administration of shrift and the fostering of contrition (compare, for example, ‘The Parson’s Tale’, where a man is ‘sharply’ admonished by his confessor in shrift to abandon his sin; The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 582 (p. 306)).

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his sermon, inhered in the remodellings to which it was subjected by its author.38 It might, of course, be objected that one does not have to resort only to sermons to discover examples of authors tolerating such sustained textual fluidity; other genres of socially adaptable text existed. To be sure; but those genres do not thematize the necessity for contrition as the condition of individual (in which may be included the author), social, and hence necessarily textual, change in the way that sermons, like Langland, do.39 Notice too, incidentally, that our ‘A-’ and ‘B-text’ example just cited was from a sermon for the first Sunday in Lent, the prime penitential season. Of course, there is a second, more ostensibly arresting, reason for revisiting this area of coincidence between Langland and the preachers. Since, as William of Ockham famously concluded, ‘entities are not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary’ (entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem), the culture of preaching provides an economically obvious vantage point from which to make the ethical comparison with Piers Plowman that is being proposed here, because in so many other, far more empirically tangible, ways, links between it and Piers Plowman are plainly to be seen. Perhaps a descent from the conceptual altitude of the present argument precisely into such comfortable empiricism may be permitted for a moment, not just to provide a mental breather, but also a further reminder and proof that, since even the empirical connections between Piers Plowman and the culture of preaching have not been exhausted yet, reflection upon the nature of Langland’s affiliation to that culture continues to be warranted. Gerald Owst was the first major commentator on Piers Plowman’s homiletic kinship, and while he overstated his case in claiming that the poem was no less than the quintessence of English preaching, his demonstration of extensive substantive overlap between the poem and the culture of the preachers continues to be useful. 40 Aspects of 38  And it may be worth noting that ordained clergy, likely to be preachers de facto, were amongst the earliest identifiable owners of Piers Plowman manuscripts: Piers Plowman had found one of its early audiences precisely among such as were professionally connected to that culture of ethico-textual provisionality to which Piers Plowman itself, as is argued here, belongs. The largest identifiable group of early clerical readers were Benedictines; see Hanna, William Langland, pp. 34–35. At the turn of the fourteenth century, several members of the Benedictine Order were actively engaged as preachers at the parochial level; see Fletcher, ‘Piers Plowman and the Benedictines’. 39 

Note too the way in which many sermons are prefaced by the preacher’s reflections on the office of preaching and on his own unworthiness for the task (Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, p. 69, n. 42). His preaching enterprise may be self-reflexive, therefore, just as Langland ‘day by day made the book of his conscience’ (Schmidt, ‘Langland’s Visions and Revisions’, p. 26). 40  Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 295; also, Owst, Literature and Pulpit, chap. 9.

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formal overlap between Piers Plowman and the preachers were more successfully analysed by Elizabeth Salter,41 soon to be followed by Tony Spearing, who was equally persuasive in his discussion of formal similarities, extending them well beyond those that Salter explored.42 Since then, formal similarities have continued to dominate, notably in John Alford’s compelling account of Langland’s use of Latin lemmata to structure and generate his English narrative.43 I speak of ‘the culture of the preachers’ advisedly because it is hard, as Wenzel, ‘Medieval Sermons’, pp. 155–56, has noted, to attribute the substantive overlap specifically to preaching, as opposed to other related fields of clerical literary production. 41  Salter, Piers Plowman, p.  24 and following ; perhaps most persuasive were her brief comments about the digressive and associative aspects of sermon composition to which the associative processes of Piers Plowman seem sometimes akin (pp. 47–48). And compare A. C. Spearing’s exfoliation of a similar idea in n. 42 following below. 42  Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, pp. 107–34, esp. pp. 119 and 123–24, where his illustrations of the affinity of Langland’s composition with the associative homiletic method (and for an actual example of this see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 71–74) are especially well grounded. Spearing’s work originally appeared in 1964, just two years after the first edition of Salter, Piers Plowman in 1962. Wenzel’s assertion (Wenzel, ‘Medieval Sermons’, p.  168) that the associative method characterizing Holy Church’s speech to the Dreamer (B.i.12–209), a speech which otherwise in its formal respects he considers to resemble a sermon, is ‘not at all characteristic of fourteenth-century sermons’, is a little too absolute. The fact is, contrarily, that sermons existed that advanced by association, as Salter and Spearing appreciated, and which were not hidebound by the precepts characteristically promulgated by the artes predicandi. While the artes may in general have recommended sermon composition according to the (relatively tight) rules of the ‘modern’ sermon form, it is also quite clear that several artes tolerated, indeed in some cases expressed their respect for, other, freer forms of sermon construction. Similarly, Wenzel’s verdict that ‘Arts of preaching, preachers’ handbooks, and actual sermons thus demonstrate page after page that sermon construction progressed from choosing a thema to dividing it and then to finding confirming authorities’ (p. 160), verges on an absolutism that anyone less well versed than he in medieval sermon literature is at risk of taking at face value. Such absolutism would be confounded, for example, by the sermons of another of Langland’s contemporaries, John Mirk, whose Festial arguably proved to be the most influential vernacular sermon cycle of the period. 43  Alford, ‘The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman’. Though Alford’s claim (p. 99) that this procedure, so characteristic of sermons, was ‘moribund’ by the time Langland used it should not be taken to mean that it was at death’s door; it was practised with great success by John Felton, for example, whose work has already been referred to (see n. 32 above), and he outlived Langland by several years: indeed, Felton’s methods won the approbation of that sermon connoisseur, the Chancellor of Oxford, Thomas Gascoigne, who summed Felton up as a ‘a glorious preacher, of good life and learning’ (gloriosus predicator in bona vita et sciencia; MS Arundel 63, fol. 77). Also, the procedure identified by Alford seems to operate only locally in Langland’s narrative. Another generative procedure, also characteristic of the medieval sermon, is the associative one perceived by Salter and elaborated by Spearing (and see notes 41 and 42 above).

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There is more to say in both these categories, the substantive and the formal. Here are very brief examples in both. The substantive. Who is Tom Stowe who appears in Reason’s sermon (B.v.28–29), there charged to retrieve his wife from her public disgrace and to take with him two rods when he did so, presumably to administer a chastizing of his own? He is probably the man who appears earlier in the century in a sermon whose sole surviving copy known to date was once kept in the library of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.44 There he is, quite clearly, a generic type for the proverbially feckless husband. Reason the preacher has done no more than preachers were wont in reality to do when they cited stock characters to exemplify failings that they wished to target. That strategy had the rhetorical advantage of personifying the sin without naming some actual sinner, because the contrary practice of naming names was generally frowned on as unsound pulpit policy.45 The preacher was encouraged to allude to errant behaviour rather than to single out individuals who were guilty of it. Or again, when we hear of prayer piercing the palace of heaven, or more specifically in Langland’s case, of the Paternoster doing so (B.x.462), the collocation may not simply be Langland’s lyrical confection (his ‘fine naive expression’, as Talbot Donaldson put it),46 but one whose ingredients had already been put about in the culture of the preachers from at least as early as the first half of the thirteenth century.47 There are many 44 

Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 21–40. Compare Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, ll. 555–59 (p. 38), where the preacher says: ‘I speke noyþer of Richarde, nor of Robert, nor of William, nor of Dan Ion; & tervorin no man ha me suspect [on account of that let no man suspect] þat I speke of hym, but ȝif it be swich an vnþrifti man þat I speke of. Of him I speke & of no oþer’ (the punctuation and capitalization of Grisdale’s edition have been silently adjusted). 46  Donaldson, Piers Plowman, pp. 52–53. 47  Johnson, ‘“Persen with a Pater-Noster Paradys oþer Hevene”’, notes that Langland’s phrase ‘Palace of Heaven’ ‘is in keeping with a fairly well-established tradition of describing heaven in terms of a city, particularly a royal one’ (p. 85) — which may be true, but the exact collocation palatium celi was also already directly available in the culture of the preachers. Compare Odo of Cheriton’s use of it in his sermon for the second Sunday in Advent: ‘Man thus wounded and harrassed by the devil, since he could not be saved by his own devices, fired arrows or messengers of love into heaven, that is, prayers, tears and sighs, by means of which he effectively pierced the hosts of heaven, even the king of heaven, so that he was compelled to come to us out of the palace of heaven’ (Homo sic uulneratu[s] et a diabolo vexatus, cum per se saluari non posset, sagittas, uel nuncios [amoris], misit in celum, id est orationes, lacrimas, et suspiria, quibus celestes phalanges, immo celi regem, efficaciter uulnerauit, ita quod de celi pallatio ad nos uenire compulsus est; Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 109, fol. 4v, corrected from Cambridge, Trinity Coll., MS B. 15. 22). Odo’s sermons were enjoying renewed currency in the late fourteenth century, and by at least c. 1400 had been Englished, as Spencer, ‘The Fortunes of a Lollard Sermon45 

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other substantive cases, hitherto unremarked, to be found in sermons — the opposition between the ‘tower’ and the ‘dungeon’ that creates the spatial and moral termini to the field full of folk in the Prologue, for instance, or Conscience personified as a speaker at a parliament in B.iii and B.iv, or the collaboration of Conscience and Reason as personifications in B.iv, or the pilgrimage through the land of the Decalogue in B.v, but these must wait.48 The formal. There is a pervasive use in Piers Plowman of a particular sort of Latin quotation, not the structural sort that Alford has analysed, but one in which Langland tailors Latin seamlessly in and out of the syntactical (and metrical) fabric of his English, so that part of the cachet of the procedure lies in its sheer macaronic play. Carl Schmidt suggests that Langland may have learnt his technique from the macaronic lyric.49 This is quite possible, though in the lyrics, macaronic writing normally occurs with a patterned, sometimes even isochronous, regularity, and that is absent in Langland’s case.50 It is equally possible to see its cousin in a variety of clerical discourse, one occasionally refracted in sermon prose, and for which sermon prose serves at least as an analogue, if not a key precedent. From the late thirteenth century onwards, a curious species of sermon comes to light in which Latin and English words unpredictably alternate, even within the boundary of a Cycle’, has shown. For the metaphor of prayer piercing, compare Langland’s proverbial Breuis oratio penetrat celum (C.xi.298), ultimately from Ecclesiasticus 35. 21 (‘oratio humiliantis se nubes penetrabit’), and which also appears in the early fourteenth-century preachers’ handbook Fasciculus morum (Fasciculus morum, ed. by Wenzel, ll. 54–55 (p. 510)); also Alford, ‘Some Unidentified Quotations in Piers Plowman’ (p.  390). Compare too the prayer which can ‘persche þe heuen’ in Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, l. 54 (p. 52). 48  For the tower and dungeon, compare Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, ll. 167–69 (p. 14) (this appears in a sermon by the preacher Hugh Legat osb, possibly to be dated after 1409); for Conscience personified and speaking in parliament, compare A Study and Edition of Selected Middle English Sermons, ed. by O’Mara, ll. 189–91 (p. 63) (in a sermon of Richard Alkerton, preached in Easter week of 1406); for the collaboration of Conscience and Reason, compare an unpublished sermon of Thomas Cyrcetur, early fifteenth-century canon of Salisbury, in Salisbury Cathedral, MS 174, fol. 340v; for a pilgrimage through the land of the Decalogue, compare A Study and Edition of Selected Middle English Sermons, ed. by O’Mara, ll. 113–19 (p. 60) (in the same sermon). A further substantive similarity between Piers Plowman and sermons has been elucidated by Wenzel, ‘Eli and his Sons’. 49  See Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker, pp. 27–41, for a general discussion of Langland’s verse structure; also, on his macaronic language, see Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, pp. xlviii–xlix. 50  What does seem to be regular is the persons who speak macaronically in Piers Plowman — for the most part they are authority figures (Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, p. 60 and n. 64).

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single sentence.51 The result is an effect not unlike that experienced occasionally in Piers Plowman, except, of course, that prose sermons needed only tailor their macaronic Latin syntactically, not also metrically.

Conversio morum as conversio textus: Passus v Again The interest of this chapter, however, is more of a conceptual than an empirical kind; the empirical has been mentioned chiefly to chivvy critical attention back once again to Langland’s general relation to the culture of preaching. Since empirical comparisons with that culture are by no means exhausted, it may be that the fruitfulness of conducting a comparison at the conceptual level is not yet exhausted either. We have seen how in its mobility the text of the preacher was not wholly unlike Langland’s, since both were sensible of conversio morum as conversio textus: of necessity, there was no monolithic permanence about the textual work of either, for the tailoring of their matter had to be forever provisional and openended; in part, that provisionality was a function of their responsiveness to the perceived needs of the moment, especially to the seismic moments of contrition.52 So the compositional flexibility of Langland’s writing can itself be read as being ethically valorized in a way akin to, without being fully commensurate with, the valorization of flexibility which is an implicit characteristic of the culture of preaching: the flexibilities of preaching and of the poem come about for various reasons, but some of them, important ones, are overlapping. While it is by no means being claimed here that Piers Plowman is a sermon — it plainly is not — 51 

The following sentence, quoted from an atelous sermon on the theme Estote sicut filii in MS Laud misc. 706, fol. 145v, gives a flavour of the style in question: ‘talis populus may wel be lykened to a serpent’. (This sermon was probably composed in the early fifteenth century, perhaps shortly after the restrictions on preaching issued by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1409, and may be the work of Hugh Legat osb of St Albans in Hertfordshire.) 52  Even if, to be sure, those needs might in other respects be very different in nature. The general point is not negated by the various specific sorts of motive that critics have identified as driving Langland’s revisions. To cite but two: Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, whose thesis turns upon the C-text increasingly assimilating, or up-dating in line with, new traditions of anticlericalism; or Kerby-Fulton, ‘“Who Has Written This Book?”’, who, like some others before her, sees Langland revising out of his C-text possible Lollard implications (p. 104 and nn. 11–12; though Hudson, The Premature Reformation, cites cases in the C-text where Langland might be thought not to have tempered his words in order to disociate himself from implications of Lollardy (p. 408, n. 73)). The general point remains that many changes made for their own local reasons are conditioned in common by a moral responsibility as the text is made more adequate in its applicability and social usefulness.

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it is being claimed that a great moment of ethical correspondence remains to be explored between Piers Plowman and the textual ethos of personal conversion (or metanoia in Christian theological terms) in which sermons typically participate. The poem, then, is more profoundly consonant than has been recognized with aspirations cherished in the culture of the preachers: Piers Plowman and sermons unite in their embrace, one flexed less in any explicit theoretical statement than in their argument-in-action, of the necessarily friable, ephemeral nature of their textual work.53 The textual shape-shifting in which conversio morum lives, moves and has its being constitutes one of the (neglected) meeting places in which syncretism between Langland and the preachers can be pondered. 54 Preachers knew reinvention as an ethical imperative. So, arguably, did Langland, and for reasons not wholly dissimilar. Where does that leave the status of his text? It is ethical precisely and only in process. Which also means that we are dealing not simply with some private, idiosyncratic and obsessive passion in his persistent return to meddling with makings, though it may be a convenient shorthand to think of his attitude to his work in those terms. Nor are we dealing with something that can be expressed as simply as Langland’s fear of the tyranny of form, as John Alford has put it.55 It means, rather, that we are dealing with Langland’s own instantiation, sui generis though it certainly is, of a collective ideal expressed clearly, if indirectly, in homiletic culture that provides our Langland with a bit more company out there on the margins in which he appears to write himself, and where some have become accustomed to imagine him existing.56 It would seem to follow that moments in Piers Plowman where penance and contrition are most densely thematized may be potential epicentres of conversio 53 

Salter, Piers Plowman, p. 31, comes close to this point. The word ‘syncretism’ is deliberate, in the strict sense of an accommodation, a point at which various beliefs/practices overlap, not a general merging into identity, for as has been affirmed here, Piers Plowman is not a sermon. 55  Alford, ‘The Figure of Repentance in Piers Plowman’, p. 28. 56  Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service’, put it aptly: ‘The complex and idiosyncratic authorial persona Langland developed has perhaps contributed to our modern impression of a literary loner’ (p. 61). Indeed, they also proceed to make a persuasive case for Langland’s participation in some kind of metropolitan coterie, a case made stronger if their claim that Adam Pynkhurst was copyist of an important copy of the B-text of Piers Plowman be accepted; see Horobin and Mooney, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript’. Cogent dissent, however, has been expressed by Roberts, ‘On Giving Scribe B a Name’. On Pynkhurst more generally, see Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’. His scribal activity is also discussed in Chapter 6 following. 54 

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textus. And this, arguably, is what we find.57 Let us consider how one of the most important of the revisions to the C-text fits snugly into this paradigm of ethicotextual provisionality: the apologia pro sua vita sua newly invented by Langland as a preface to C.v. This particular revision comes entirely à propos at this point. Note that it is stimulated into existence in the context of the (penitential) sermon that, for a while at any rate, will precipitate society’s contrition and wholesale conversio morumo.58 Since the Dreamer too is part of that society, Reason’s sermon applies equally to him, and so Langland the author is moved to write himself into his fiction at precisely this juncture of penitential interrogation. Such interrogation is fully compatible with a scene of penitential preaching, as will be shown below. That Langland has done so in terms that may invite comparison with the genre of visionary autobiography is, in this present context, a related but separate issue. The present argument does not seek to contradict Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s contention that the apologia has a background in the traditions of visionary autobiography, but rather to redimension it in view of the ethicotextual paradigm reconstructed in this chapter and within which the apologia may also be seen to be justified.59 As observed above, a scene thematizing nationwide conversion has moved Langland to convert his text at one of its most substantial moments of meta­ morphosis from B to C, and that textual conversion similarly inscribes spiritual conversion in its maker: the end of the interrogation sees him contrite in church, 57 

Apart from C.v.1–108, the Dreamer’s apologia, to which we will shortly turn, five major passages of revision distinguish the C- from the B-text. (By ‘major’ I intend new additions to the C-text which comprise ninety lines or more.) They are: C.iii.314–406 (92 lines); C.ix.71–161 (90 lines); C.ix.187–279 (92 lines); C.xii.156–249 (93 lines); and C.xiii.1–99 (99 lines). Of these five passages, three are introduced in the context of Langland’s reflection on penance and pardon (C.ix.71–161, C.ix.187–279 and C.xii.156–249). There is no reason, of course, why preoccupation with penance and contrition should not be capable of converting the text locally and briefly: compare, for example, the seven-line addition of praise for true confession at C.vi.331–37. 58  The fact that it has taken its cue retrospectively from the impending sermon is not problematic. There are various cases in the C-text of similar procedure. Compare, for example, C.iii.90–114 (not found in the Z-, A-, and B-text), in which it is observed that the prayer of those unjustly injured may prevail against civic well being, and that mayors should diligently examine which citizens are enfranchised. This passage appears to have taken its cue retrospectively from the up-coming lemma Ignis devorabit tabernacula at C.iii.124. 59  See Kerby-Fulton, ‘“Who Has Written This Book?”’; also, Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apoca­ lypticism and Piers Plowman, where she argues for the dependency of Langland’s self-­portraits on anterior Latin traditions of visionary biography (pp. 64–75).

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‘Byfore þe cross on my knees knokked Y my breste, | Syȝing [sighing] for my synnes, seggyng my Pater-noster, | Wepyng and waylyng til Y was aslepe’ (C.v.106–08). Reason’s questions to the Dreamer, it will be noticed, proceed from a normative model of social usefulness grounded in three-estates thinking (such ideology, of course, was typical pulpit fare, as Reason’s sermon, indeed, proceeds to prove):60 can the Dreamer justify his existence by a) his service to the Church; b) his manual labour; or c) living off revenue from his lands? That is, is he a cleric, a labourer, or a member of the landed classes?61 If he does not fit within these traditional three-estates categories, where does he fit and what excuse can he frame for the position he occupies? The Dreamer’s answer entwines self-definition and selfjustification, and its terms are just as normative — conservative, in fact — in their three-estates presuppositions as those which have driven Reason’s questioning. Also, in systematically interrogating the Dreamer in the way he does, Reason the preacher is behaving as Reason the confessor.62 Note again the commonplace conjunction of preaching and confession implicit in this dual role. And the very choice of word, the fact that Reason ‘apposede’ the Dreamer (C.v.10), puts the interrogation onto a familiar clerical footing.63 60 

See further Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 201–14. Probably in this context the member of the landed classes should call to mind an aristocrat rather than just a rich person, given the gravitational pull of normative three-estates thinking that the first two classes, clerics and labourers, would have exerted. 62  Kerby-Fulton, ‘“Who Has Written This Book?”’, pp. 110–11, hears in this interrogation an echo of the probator of visionary autobiography. Traditions of influence need not be mutually exclusive, of course, and we are surely dealing with a generic hybrid in Langland (as Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, p. 122, amongst others, has stressed), not with any single uncomplicated generic affiliation. To be sure, the confessional role is subsequently displaced from Reason the preacher onto the personification of Repentance who enters for the first time in the B-text (such a manoeuvre is typically Langlandian; compare, for example, the displacement of an aspect of the Dreamer into the personification Rechelesnesse, as observed by Pearsall in Langland, Piers Plowman: C-Text, ed. by Pearsall, n. to C.xi.196). Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature, pp. 87–88, has also usefully drawn attention to the Secretum of Petrarch, c. 1350, a Latin work in three dialogues between ‘Augustinus’ (St Augustine) and ‘Franciscus’ (Petrarch’s fictionalized self ). In the second dialogue, Augustinus ‘apposes’ Franciscus, examining him, as a confessor might, on the Seven Deadly Sins, though less formally. Burrow does not explicitly connect Reason’s interrogation in Piers Plowman with the office of the confessor, however. In the search for generic affiliations, one might equally well note the ‘apposing’ dialogue between confessor and penitent that Robert of Flamborough contructed as a fictional frame for his Liber poenitentialis (Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, ed. by Firth). 61 

63 

As the previous note has argued, the footing seems broader than that simply of the probator of visionary biography. ‘Apposing’ is what clerics were wont to do (see MED, s.v. ap(p)

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We might usefully compare the barrage of questions ‘apposing’ the three estates that the preacher Thomas Wimbledon put to the people of London in his famous sermon on the theme Redde racionem villicacionis tue. Composed in 1387, this Paul’s Cross sermon was addressed, one might say, urbe et orbi.64 Here was a sermon, closely contemporary with the composition of the C-text and delivered in London,65 that, like the interrogation and sermon of Reason the preacher, also launches itself from a basis in three-estates thinking. So it is right that we appreciate that, whatever the compatibility of the apologia with traditions of visionary autobiography, it is also the entirely natural product of the twin event that is preaching and confession. Since that event includes the whole realm, it now includes the Dreamer himself, as Langland’s converted text is allowed to convert its author, certainly in fiction (who knows, perhaps also in fact?) at precisely the point where such conversion might most naturally be expected.66 For given the reciprocity of conversio morum and conversio textus, Langland may have hoped to be converted not simply by considering his shape as reflected in the mirror of his self-representation, but through his repeated acts of making of which that self-representation was itself a part: the very act of remaking might be an exercise, and figure, of salus anime.67 The conclusion of the exchange osen v., ‘to confront […] with a question […] especially about Scripture, doctrines of the Church, etc.’). It is quite clear that clerical examinations in doctrine extended to interrogation about one’s way of life (necessarily, since doctrinal belief is likely to express itself in choices in personal conduct; in this regard, compare, for example, the ‘apposing’ of William Thorpe by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in 1407; see Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. by Hudson, pp. 24–93). 64  Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. by Knight. The sermon is also published in Owen, ‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon’. 65  Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy’, has argued that C.v shows the influence of the 1388 second Statute of Labourers concerning vagrancy. If her argument be accepted, then as well as implying a slightly later date for the C-text’s composition, the possibility also follows that Langland had heard or read Wimbledon’s sermon. 66  There may have been little practical distinction between Langland writing and Langland being written by his writing. 67  Middleton, ‘William Langland’s “Kynde Name”’. She observes in conclusion, ‘It is in [Langland’s] perpetually inadequate yet obsessively necessary “making” that he best represents the communally as well as individually restorative project of salvation history as the confrontation, at once shameful and exhilarating, of “myself in a mirour”’ (p. 84). The allusion is to B.xv.161–62: ‘Clerkes kenne me þat Crist is in alle places; | Ac I seiȝ hym neuere sooþly but as myself in a mirour: Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem’. If Piers Plowman is to be regarded as a moral speculum, then not only its matter, but also its process, at least for its author, was part of its reflecting surface. And this view would accommodate that of Middleton, ‘William Langland’s “Kynde Name”’, that ‘What the name inscribed in the poetic text proclaims is not [Langland’s]

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with Reason (and Conscience) — the Dreamer goes contrite to church — was an exemplum of soul-heal. If ‘contrition alone / of itself removes sin’ (or to quote its regular Latin formula, sola contricio delet peccatum), this final condition was, in essence, a perfect penance (and as the Dreamer has said only moments earlier (C.v.84–85), ‘Preyers of a parfit man and penaunce discrete | Is the leuest labour þat Oure Lord pleseth’).68 So penance is a work, meddling with makings is a work — works which, if not fully coextensive, are nevertheless at least overlapping — and since penance may motivate the one, so making may reinvigorate and be a figure of the other. Both processes, penance and poetry, if in some measure mutual, are also restless, ongoing and open-ended. Both take shape in textual dimensions that are to a marked degree comparable, as we have seen. We may chose, with John Alford, to conceive Langland’s ‘restless need to constantly remake his poem’ as a function of the poet’s fear ‘of the tyranny of form’, a fear shadowed too in his ‘repeated narrative shedding of the outer forms of penance, pilgrimage and pardon’.69 That also happens to be an appealingly up-to-date way of putting it, speaking as it does to our heightened postmodern awareness of the slippery relation of signs to signifieds. Indeed, the anxious issue of nomen sine re (perhaps translatable as ‘a name lacking a real-time referent’) seems also to have worried Langland, so it would appear that we have some licence thus to make him our contemporary, making him present to us now in a currently fashionable way.70 But his need to remake may also be conceived in terms of categories of medieval presence that are verbal fabrication, but an ethical fabulation of which he makes himself the center’ (p. 28). 68  Pearsall, ‘Will’s “Apologia pro vita sua”’, takes Conscience’s response to the Dreamer, ‘Y can nat se this lyeth’ (C.v.89), as meaning ‘I cannot see that this is at all to the point’ (p. 19). But it is more likely to mean, ‘I cannot see that this [i.e., the Dreamer’s position statement] is wrong’, even though Conscience proceeds to question the perfection of begging, since he deems begging impermissible in the Dreamer’s case. In fact, the Dreamer agrees. Therefore, Conscience is in essence endorsing the Dreamer’s sentiments that ‘Preyers of a parfit man and penaunce discrete’ are indeed ‘the leuest labour þat Oure Lord pleseth’, not setting them aside, as Pearsall’s translation would have it. 69  Alford, ‘The Figure of Repentance in Piers Plowman’, p. 28. I follow him with regard to pilgrimage and pardon — practices about which there was considerable current debate — but they were not also sacraments. I am less convinced, however, that the narrative also sheds the outer forms through which the sacrament of penance operates. 70  There are other ways of doing this: in the person of the transfigured Piers, for example, there is room to see a reassuring logocentrism, to put it in postmodern terms, for through him transcendent authority shines, making what you see into what you get. But the way of conceiving the impetus behind Langland’s constant remakings that this chapter presents seeks to establish the existence of a medieval ethico-textual practice from which that impetus proceeded.

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contemporary with him, categories observable more in medieval practice than in explictly stated theory. Poetic remaking can stand as an instance of how contrition empties into action, in this case, action through poetry. Other, more obviously practical forms of ethical intervention and engagement are lost to us in Langland’s case, apart from the ‘economy of contrition’ that the poem itself discloses in its autobiographic passages, namely, spiritual labour on behalf of patrons. Unlike those self-consuming artefacts discussed by Stanley Fish, 71 however, the poem, for its author at any rate, is not finally used up and abandoned, but returned to and resumed, since poetic action can necessarily only empty once more into poetry, reinventing that poetry as it yearns towards some final still point, forever deferred, in Langland’s turning world. At the end of the B- and C-texts, the reason why Conscience’s search is on again is because it is contrition that is in intolerable peril of becoming a nomen sine re. Contrition is denatured beneath the bastardizing ‘sign’ administered by the friar: Thus þoruȝ Hende-Speche entred þe frere, And cam in to Conscience and curteisly hym grette. ‘Thow art welcome’, quod Conscience, ‘kanstow heele sike? Here is Contricion’, quod Conscience, ‘my cosyn, ywounded. Conforte hym’, quod Conscience, ‘and tak kepe to hise soores. The plastres of þe person and poudres ben to soore, And lat hem ligge ouerlonge and looþ is to chaunge hem; Fro Lenten to Lenten he lat hise plastres bite’. ‘That is ouerlonge!’ quod this lymytour, ‘I leue, I shal amende it’ And gooþ, gropeþ Contricion and gaf hym a plastre Of ‘A pryuee paiement, and I shal praye for yow, And for alle hem that ye ben holden to, al my lif tyme, And make yow [and] my Lady in masse and in matyns As freres of oure fraternytee for a litel siluer’. Thus he gooþ and gadereþ, and gloseþ þere he shryueþ — Til Contricion hadde clene foryeten to crye and to wepe, And wake for hise wikked werkes as he was wont to doone. For confort of his confessour, contricion he lafte, That is þe souerayneste salue for alle kynne synnes.72

Courteous Speech

dressings; parson (he) lets them lie licensed friar; believe you are obliged to gathers; flatters entirely forgotten most effective balm

This little scenario certainly shows how vulnerable to divorce nomen and res were for Langland, but it also expresses his hope in the possibility of their union, however temporary, even if for the moment that possibility has been postponed. 71  72 

Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, pp. 3–4. B.xx.355–73.

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Once Contrition’s wounds have been probed by the friar, he emerges from the medication no longer as contrition in fact. However, there is a reliable nomen corresponding to the res that contrition more properly should be: it is the contrition ministered to by the parson with his biting plasters.73 So the answer to the question of Langland’s poetic restlessness may be more interesting and more situatable in his time than some (postmodern) flight from the tyranny of form. Penance is a central sacrament in Langland’s work,74 and the contrition that is its inception is too crucial to the economy of salvation to be allowed to atrophy into something less than its full stature. Yet it is of the essence of contrition that it be made again, reinvented — of necessity, since ‘sin seweþ us euere’ — and that is a condition which, if it may be helped into being by poetry, will mean that poetry will reciprocally become the subject of reinvention too.75 Langland’s poetic practice, then, visits kenosis upon narrow literary genres and upon whatever fancies of self-sufficient fixity those genres might entertain.76 The poem’s invitation to its very useability extended to others besides its author, and emptied into other forms of engagement with reality. Some that we know of were practical and activist.77 Others were manifest at the interface of text and world where practical consequences of one sort or another were liable to have 73 

For normative standards of penance, compare Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 61–62. 74  As Simpson, Piers Plowman, p. 242, insists. 75  Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, p. 116, may be wrong to assert that the penance of Will ‘would stop the poem’. Conversio morum was a never-ending process, a dying daily to sin. Human frailty would ensure that penance be an unending, not a finite, work. 76  Langland has been compared with Chaucer in terms of the latter’s concern to secure textual stability and to resist textual ephemerality, a resistance expressed famously in his reproach of Adam Scriveyn (see Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, p. lx). But the comparison may be superficial. Chaucer seems more preoccupied with such stability than does Langland, and an objective correlative of this is perhaps visible in the relative care and scribal supervision expended on the copying of Chaucer’s manuscripts and on those of members of his circle (compare, for example, the scribal supervision of Gower manuscripts noted by Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, pp. 111–12). More controlled scribal networks existed than those that published Piers Plowman; why did Langland not avail of such networks, or why was his poem not taken up by them? The answer is presumably to be sought in the varying briefs according to which different scriptoria and copyists operated. Piers Plowman may have found copyists of the kind that its own restless textual process and engagement anticipated. For a useful study of vernacular composition at this date as a variety of kenosis, see Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’. 77  ‘Piers Plowman’ seems to have become a rallying cry of the Peasant’s Revolt (Hudson, ‘The Legacy of Piers Plowman’, pp. 251–52).

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ensued but which are now unknown. And what texts might be analogously more active at that interface than sermons? We think of the ‘Piers Plowman tradition’ as comprising five, politically committed poems (The Crowned King, Piers the Plowman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and Death and Liffe). That corpus has recently been implicitly redefined by invoking the more inclusive concept of a ‘Piers Plowman legacy’. Since prose is now admissible to the corpus, sermons technically come within sight, though Anne Hudson, the propounder of the ‘legacy’, has omitted to consider the possibility of admitting to it the sermons already adduced here in this chapter as prime examples of a preacher’s conversio textus in the service of conversio morum. These are a collection of Lollard sermons represented in MS Additional 41321 and two other related manuscripts.78 It was Elizabeth Salter who first drew attention to the way these prose sermons sometimes modulate into alliterative verse of the familiar Langlandian aa/ax type, thereby sharing moments of remarkable formal prosodic similarity with his poetry. Following the opinion of Gloria Cigman, the editor of the sermons, Salter thought that they were to be dated c. 1380, and suggested that, along with certain other venacular homiletic materials, they ‘may not simply “echo” or “reflect” the great named [poetic] works of the age, but may provide both their staple material and some of their basic metrical forms’.79 Circumstantial empirical evidence requires, however, that we consider regard­ ing the sermons as eligible for inclusion in the Piers Plowman legacy. First, their composition postdates Piers Plowman Z, A, B, and probably C. The C-text’s exact date of composition, though reckoned by many to be somewhere around 1385 or 1386, is still, of course, undecided. Malcolm Parkes has ventured c. 1385 for the earliest extant C-text manuscript (Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 212), though as Parkes would also be the first to admit, palæographic dating is an inexact science, and the circa is to be accorded full weight. And Anne Middleton suggests that an echo of the 1388 Statute of Labourers may be heard in C, which necessarily means, if she is right, that C was still in process sometime after then.80 The fact that the sermon compiler has used the Lollard florilegium known as the Rosarium theologie, a work which, though of uncertain date, is an abbreviation of a longer 78 

The others are Manchester, John Rylands, MS Eng. 412 and MS Rawlinson C. 751. Salter, ‘Alliterative Modes and Affiliations in the Fourteenth Century’, p. 178. Pearsall, ‘The Alliterative Revival’, mentions MS Additional 41321 (p. 40), but takes us no further than Salter did in raising the question of a possible influence from this sort of prose upon Piers Plowman. 80  And Bowers, ‘Dating Piers Plowman’, has convincingly demolished the case for finding any use of the C-text in Thomas Usk’s The Testament of Love, completed between December 1384 and June 1385. 79 

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Lollard florilegium known as the Floretum, whose date can be set between 1384 and 1396, establishes 1384 as a terminus post quem for the sermon collection of the MS Additional 41321 group.81 If I am right in detecting an epitome of Thomas Wimbledon’s London sermon incorporated within the funeral sermon of the collection, this would further advance the terminus post quem to 1387.82 That is, the compilation of the sermon collection was either nearly contemporary with Langland’s last efforts on the C-text (whenever they precisely were), or postdated them by some few years. Whichever way, the circulation of Piers Plowman was well advanced by the time the sermon compiler was at work. Second, circulation of Piers Plowman may have been assisted, most conspicuously in the case of the C-text manuscripts, by scribes trained in the written dialect of the West Midlands, notably in that of Worcestershire, in fact.83 It happens that the scribal dialect of the manuscript most accurately witnessing to the authorial text of the sermon compiler locates also in Worcestershire.84 Is this mere co­incidence, or evidence 81 

For use of the Rosarium in MS Additional 41321, see The Middle English Translation of the ‘Rosarium theologie’, ed. by von Nolcken, pp. 36, 277, and 279–82. On the date of the Floretum, see Hudson, Lollards and their Books, p. 20; von Nolcken thinks the Rosarium is likely to have been adapted only shortly after the compilation of the Floretum (The Middle English Translation of the ‘Rosarium theologie’, ed. by von Nolcken, p. 29). 82  See Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, p. 222, ll. 524–54. After announcing the gospel lemma Redde racionem villicacionis tue, the sermon notes that the three estates must each give an account of their reckoning at the Judgement before Christ, first prelates and priests, next temporal lords, and finally the common people. The sermon also implies the sorts of questions to be put to them. This passage may be a digest and reminiscence of Wimbledon; unless both it and Wimbledon have used a common source, its similarity at the very least must be confessed as striking. And it would come as no surprise had Wimbledon been consulted by a sermon compiler of such evident Lollard sympathies as this one was; Redde racionem villicacionis tue seems to have found favour with Lollards and in some manuscripts to have travelled with texts of clear Lollard persuasion (Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 213–14, n. 58). The funeral sermon is no longer extant in MS Additional 41321, but formerly existed there, as cross references to it in other sermons of the manuscript make clear; see Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, p. xlviii. A reasonable conjecture would be that the MS Additional 41321 sermon collection and its related manuscripts took shape in the last decade of the fourteenth century. 83  On the Worcestershire clustering of the C-text manuscripts, see Samuels, ‘Langland’s Dialect’, and Samuels, ‘Dialect and Grammar’, esp. pp. 206–08. However, see also now the qualifications entered by Horobin, ‘“In London and Opelond’”. 84  The main scribe of MS Additional 41321 may have been trained in Worcestershire, and its second scribe certainly appears to have been. Cigman (in Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, pp. lx–lxi) also considers MS Additional 41321 a more reliable witness to the original than its Rawlinson congener. Moreover, I know of nothing comparing closely with the particular alliterative investment of these sermons anywhere else in the extant corpus of Middle English

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of Langland’s legacy being handed down in the county in which we presume he originated? If we agree to admit these sermons as a canonical part of the ‘Piers Plowman legacy’, they testify to a response to Piers Plowman from the province of preaching that reciprocates the response to that province’s associated agendas that Piers Plowman, as this chapter has argued, has itself made; they also circumstantially support the case put forward here. The essential sermon is the ephemeral sermon. Similarly, the essential Langland is the ephemeral Langland. The presence of Piers Plowman to its age — and that includes its presence to its very author — stimulated social engagements of one kind or another, activisms both political and poetic. Perhaps the presence of Piers Plowman to its age even stimulated a vernacular variety of theological engagement through the writing of a particular subgenre of sermon. All these activisms nevertheless congregated and cohered as modalities of conversion, a spiritual imperative of Langland’s age essentially yet ephemerally present in his text. Though the mouvance of that text, as Charlotte Brewer anticipated, may always cause its modern editors migraine, perhaps some consolation is to be had in reflecting on how morally bracing some of the original tensions may have been that are now experienced some seven hundred years later as editorial headache.

sermons. For a convenient introduction to this corpus, see Heffernan and Horner, ‘Sermons and Homilies’, pp. 3969–4167. A detailed conspectus is available in A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ed. by O’Mara and Paul.

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The Canterbury Tales and Some Other Chaucerian Compositions: The Pursuit of Heresy and Dangerous Textual Liaisons

W

hile Langland’s work has been argued to incarnate in its very mobility an ethical response analogously present in an affiliated field of contemporary writings, the work of our next author, by contrast, is unruffled by any such concern. Tempting as it may be to correlate aspects of Piers Plowman with the private disposition of its author, there are alternative ways available for conceiving how he was personally invested and present within his work, as well as of how his work may have been present to him and to his age, that are less psychologically than ethically grounded. Whichever way these things are conceived, in one sense or another the modern critical enterprise continues to be haunted by considerations of historical biography. While it may generally be said that all dead authors refuse to lie quietly in their graves, this seems especially true when, unlike the authors whose presences were glimpsed in the chapters hitherto, they have left biographical traces substantial enough to tease us with a real prospect of being able to gauge ever more meaningfully the two main presences privileged in this book, that of the author’s times in the author’s work, and that of the work to its times. It is especially authors of this sort who persist in returning to haunt us, and from this book’s perspective, perhaps this is as it should be. Tall among such literary revenants walks the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer, for in the last thirty years or so, the writing of scholarly assessments of Chaucer the man and of the nature of his presence to his age has, if anything, accelerated, acquiring defiant momentum in the face of postmodern theories that would insist that he ought not matter.1 Even when mindful of the scepticism of the theorists, 1 

See Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. by Heath, pp. 142–48. The decentred author is

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commentators on Chaucer have finally shown themselves undeterred by it, and continue to harbour a conviction that something solid about him ought still to be salvageable even after theory has done its problematizing worst. Doubtless, the stiffening of their resolve results in part for highly problematical reasons, from Chaucer’s ability to sustain so convincing an illusion of an empirically available authorial identity that some readers, even as technically they confess the illusion, have been emboldened to parry the objections of theoretically driven scepticism with increasingly sophisticated attempts at determining whether the illusion anywhere accesses reality. They have tried to winnow authorial fact from fiction, finding things to say about the historical Chaucer that might be thought to sediment out from the artifice of his various self-representations and, from the slippery rhetoric of his writing in general, things whose historical palpability can be defended against many theoretically invigorated forms of objection.2 Arguably, even that very slipperiness might be susceptible to an historicized understanding and an explanation in terms of historically real considerations and of demonstrable discourses within whose terms Chaucer lived, moved, and had his being.3

The Presence of the Restless Dead Author Traditionally recognized sites exist of course for transacting the business of recuperating the presence of dead authors, the most obvious being the literary biography, a site tenanted most recently in Chaucer’s case by Derek Pearsall. In also familiar from the 1969 essay by Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’. 2  Though not, of course, of all forms; the insistence of some theorists (Louis Althusser, for example) upon the unanalysability of historical totalities is one liable to undermine the medievalist’s usual endeavour. The present chapter, similarly threatened by such insistence, attempts the compromise of the petit récit (see n. 6 below). 3  There are several excellent recent examples of this, but to take two which will later be engaged with: Aers, ‘Vox populi and the Literature of 1381’, p. 444, reflects on Chaucer’s apparent relative aloofness from the rebellion of 1381 thus: ‘what seems absent may, in its very absence, be a present force in shaping a work […] even the most dazzling complexities may be replete with significant social implications which are themselves part of a distinct political response to a determinate situation’. His thinking in this respect agrees with that of Lynn Staley, his co-author for The Powers of the Holy; compare, for example, Staley’s characterization of The Canterbury Tales’ relation to its political moment (Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy, p. 180): ‘If we can find very few explicit references to contemporary events in Chaucer, we can nonetheless find the issues that fueled contemporary conflicts refigured in the fiction of the tales.’

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writing a literary biography, he accordingly consorts with the values of an old and resiliently self-perpetuating biographical genre predicated on equally old and, more often than not, unreconstructed notions about why the author as subject should matter. Pearsall’s Life, notwithstanding its nod at theory’s scepticism, might thus represent a turning back of the clock in more senses than one.4 Yet as this chapter began by saying, the return of the dead author is perhaps as it should be, for come what may it is bound to happen, even if by a backdoor, in any historicist enterprise; historicisms will ensure that the author as subject continues to matter, though not for some of the reasons after which literary biography still hankers. The big-picture dash and seductively broad brushstrokes of Pearsall’s Life can beguile readers into forgetting its astute preliminary disclaimer that what it compasses is a form of scholarly impressionism.5 This chapter will be more interested in a matter of pointillist detail because, if impressionism is what we are inevitably going to be put to even as we try to conjure the presence of a long dead author, it will be out of the quality of their pointillism that compelling impressionist works emerge. The detail in question, the petit récit of the present enquiry, is aspects of Chaucer’s relation to contemporary religious radicalism, if not to outright heresy.6 Of all the authors considered so far, Chaucer is, of course, unique, both in terms of the tally of his surviving works and the extent of the biographical and historical information that can be marshalled around him. Thus many ways are potentially available as entrées into the Chaucerian presence. The way followed in this chapter has been selected both for its relative underinvestigation, and also for its service in bringing into alignment a group of Chaucer’s works, ones among The Canterbury Tales included, that would not normally otherwise be seen 4 

For example, when Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, says, ‘although [Chaucer] tells us little about himself, or about his attitudes to the great events of his day, the quality of his poetic presence is such that he stimulates in us an unusually powerful desire to know what he was “really” like’ (p. 5, my italics), his rhetorical ‘us’ here enjoins upon all readers a universally uniform response. Should it? The sentence would position us as members of a like-minded community, one accustomed to having the traditional curiosities that traditional biographies cater for satisfied. The present chapter, however, even as it teases that community’s curiosity, will finally disavow allegiance to it. 5  Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 7. 6  I lift the idea of the priority of the petit récit, the micronarrative, for any viable form of history writing, from Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. by Bennington and Massumi, p. 60. Blamires, ‘Crisis and Dissent’, p. 140, notes the ‘interesting signs that [Chaucer’s] writing breathes the wider “crisis of dissent” of the 1380s and 1390s’, and invites further reflection on this topic. The present chapter in part responds to that invitation.

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as consorting together. The chapter has flagged its aims under a broad banner heading, ‘The Pursuit of Heresy and Dangerous Textual Liaisons’, intended to be as eye-catching and duplicitous, in its way, as is the illusion of Chaucer’s presence in his writing, the elvish presence that has beckoned so invitingly to the biographers.7 The gambit has served its turn. Time for its replacement with something more exact: what this chapter precisely seeks to unfold are the two principal ways in which Chaucer responded to and enlisted what will be called the culture of heresy in a number of his writings. On the one hand, we must consider his invention of poetic personae which are less, or more, evidently to be seen as poetic alter-egos, and in whose construction heresy, or heresy’s lesser harbinger, error, constitute overt and important figures; and on the other, there are his allusions to sentiments and turns of phrase characteristically current in the chief radical/heretical discourse of his day, whose presence makes some of his writings arenas in which that radical/heretical discourse may be thought to contend.8 The range of these allusions, despite recent investigations, has still not been sufficiently appreciated.9 Overt heretical figures appear in An ABC and also 7 

The award-winning essay by Meyer-Lee, ‘The Allure of the Phantom Popet’, focuses the appeal of the illusory presence with neat concision (p. 6). 8  The compound radical/heretical here is used advisedly. It attempts to contain the complex and shifting status of reformist ideology c. 1380–1420, a period during which many positions within that ideology, though originally orthodox, increasingly lost their orthodox respectability as they became characteristically colonized by the heretics. Thus, broadly speaking, orthodoxy during these years may have gradually come to distance itself from some of its own earlier reformist impulses. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, identifies this shift well when he speaks of ‘the transformation of “reform” into “heresy” after Wyclif ’s abortive trial in London before Bishop Courtenay in 1377’ (p. 233); or again (p. 236) when in commenting upon ecclesiastical disendowment, he ventures that when William Langland wrote the B-text of Piers Plowman, ‘disendowment was an indistinct lump of reformist ideology not yet the property of anyone’, but ‘by the time [Langland] wrote C, it belonged so completely to Wyclif that no one else wanted it’. Some recent critics, however, are increasingly tending to apply the term ‘reformist’ to texts hitherto referred to as ‘Lollard’ or ‘Wycliffite’ (for example, Patterson, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch’, p. 644). While understandable, this application is problematic. Although it is true that the shifting espousals of reformist ideology during this period may create grey areas in which distinctions between the radical orthodox and the conservative Lollard may now be difficult for us to perceive, originally there were distinctions, or at least, distinctions were felt to exist, irrespective of whether everyone would have agreed on where precisely the lines of a distinction were to be drawn. Therefore, as increasing use of the word ‘reformist’ blankets out the words ‘Lollard’ or ‘Wycliffite’, it practises its own form of effacement of distinctions now difficult enough for us to distinguish, thus helping ensure that they remain irretrieveable. In this chapter, notwithstanding their limitations, I retain the more traditional terms ‘Lollard’ and ‘Wycliffite’. 9  The assertion of Nicholas Watson that Chaucer had a ‘detailed interest’ in the

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in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women; while serial allusions to heresy’s contemporary discourse (or in some cases one might more circumspectly say, to an earlier theological radicalism that contemporary heresy came characteristically to espouse and in so doing either to absorb or to court confusion with) appear throughout certain of The Canterbury Tales. Illustration of these two manifestations of the culture of heresy in Chaucer’s work will comprise the first part of the chapter’s brief; the second part will be to speculate, on the back of them, about what his personal investment in the culture of heresy may have been. Thus the aim will be to amplify into present-day audibility an original radical/ heretical resonance in certain of his writings that, notwithstanding recent advances, we disadvantaged modern readers are no longer capable of hearing, and also to consider how we may be tempted to read back from that resonance, back from the oeuvre into the actual life, of the author (though not so as to worship at the altar of the author god, nor to provide so gratifyingly total a package as a cradle-to-grave Life promises). In short, we will try first to see whether anything new in this respect can be detected in Chaucer’s work and, following on from that, whether the historical Chaucer can be thought to have divulged any new personal secrets. Anticipating the destination, fresh knowledge there may be, but it will finally succeed only in stimulating fresh speculation.

Heretical Types and Conditions The heretic, in being so vibrantly transgressive a character, was assured of an enduring textualized existence, often less in terms of his own making than in those made for him by his orthodox detractors. His various incarnations had long preoccupied Church writings — indeed, had served orthodoxy as a convenient means whereby it could define its own boundaries — where the precise terms of his heresy could be isolated, exposed and, the orthodox hoped, quarantined. We should first be clear, however, about where the later Middle Ages thought heresy resided. Aquinas’s definition would have held good for Chaucer’s contemporaries, and this, quite simply, maintained that the heretic was someone who not only believed something contrary to standard Church teaching, but theological, social, and linguistic contours of Lollardy (Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, p. 346) is surely right, but needs fuller demonstration (though very recently Watson, ‘Christian Ideologies’, seems to have become more cautious about this: ‘Chaucer may or may not have been interested in all the ideas associated with Lollardy’ (p. 81)). Certain aspects of that familiarity and the sophisticated literary uses to which Chaucer put them are ably explored by Blamires, ‘The Wife of Bath and Lollardy’.

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who perversely willed to remain in the error of his contrary belief. Heresy’s distinguishing condition lay in this, that it was error voluntarius.10 Theological error, though dangerous enough, was not in itself heresy, but became so if the erroneous believer contumaciously persisted in the face of orthodoxy. Once that kind of believer also expressed his heresy externally, by words or signs, he might expect to incur an automatic, public ecclesiastical sanction, the standard one being excommunication. So we have to reckon in the first instance with error and then with heresy, the former developing into the latter by dint of a stubborn act of will. What, then, of the penitent narrator of Chaucer’s poem An ABC, who invokes the idea of error twice, its first occurrence being in the very opening stanza of the poem: Almighty and al merciable queene, To whom that al this world fleeth for socour, To have relees of sinne, of sorwe, and teene, Glorious virgine, of alle floures flour, To thee I flee, confounded in errour.11

There is nothing in the poem’s immediate source, an ABC poem forming a section of Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine of Guillaume de Deguileville, that could have suggested an exact match to this, nor in the wider context of the Pèlerinage either. Deguileville simply says: A toy du monde le refui, Vierge glorieuse, m’en fui Tout confus, ne puis miex faire; A toy me tien, a toy m’apuy, Relieve moy, abatu suy.12

Even after invoking Helen Phillips’ valuable principle of ‘redistributive’ trans­ lation, it is not possible fully to explain the appearance of error here in ‘redistributive’ terms.13 To be sure, there is a personification of error’s endgame, Heresy, 10 

Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. by Caramello, 2a2ae, Q. 11, art. 1 (ii, 64–65). The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 1–5 (p. 637); my italics. All subsequent references to Chaucer’s writing are to this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically in the text. 12  Chaucer, The Complete Works, ed. by Skeat, i, 261. Skeat’s edition conveniently includes the Deguileville source along with Chaucer’s text. The standard edition of Deguileville’s poem is Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, ed. by Stürzinger; see p. 338 for the corresponding stanza. 13  Phillips, ‘Chaucer and Deguileville’. 11 

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elsewhere in the Pèlerinage outside its ABC section, but Deguileville’s penitent pilgrim, though hard pressed, managed to avoid falling into Heresy’s snares. And although the penitent pilgrim saw himself as one who ‘strays by the wrong path’ (erre par [la] voie torte) when seven thieves (the Seven Deadly Sins) give him chase, this is not an exact fit against Chaucer either. Evidently, then, the detail of the error-confounded penitent was Chaucer’s emphasis, not Deguileville’s.14 The same can be said of its second appearance in An ABC. Here, the penitent generalizes away from himself to embrace all who, like him, have been guilty of error. For such people Mary is a sovereign recourse (ll. 67–70): For whan a soule falleth in errour Thi pitee goth and haleth him ayein. Thanne makest thou his pees with his sovereyn And bringest him out of the crooked strete.

Deguileville has nothing exactly matching this either, even though Chaucer’s ‘crooked strete’ metaphor has been ‘redistributed’ here from an earlier Deguileville stanza: Quar quant aucun se desvoie, A ce que tost se ravoie, De ta pitié li fais convoy.15

But what could Chaucer’s penitent have meant by saying that he was errorconfounded? Had his condition specific theological significance, or was it some vague expression of general moral malaise? Certainly, Chaucer elsewhere appears to have understood this technical theological meaning of the word errour, as is clear, for example, from its use in a stanza of Troilus and Criseyde where Pandarus expects that Troilus, now converted to Love, will prosecute Love’s cause all the more zealously (ll. 1002–08): Ensample why, se now thise wise clerkes, That erren aldermost ayeyn a lawe, And ben converted from hire wikked werkes 14  Interestingly, Chaucer has come closer to retrieving the emphasis of the earlier work that Deguileville used, a homily on Luke by St Bernard of Clairvaux; see Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Homily on Luke’, in PL, 183, especially cols 70–71: ‘Following her, you will not deviate […] thinking upon her, you will not err’ (Ipsam sequens non devias […] ipsam cogitans non erras). 15  Chaucer, The Complete Works, ed. by Skeat, p.  265; Stürzinger (Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, ed. by Stürzinger, p.  342) has the corresponding stanza. Phillips, ‘Chaucer and Deguileville’, p. 7, acknowledges the difficulty of matching the idea of falling into error with anything in Deguileville.

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Thorugh grace of God that list hem to hym drawe, Thanne arn thise folk that han moost God in awe, And strengest feythed ben, I undirstonde, And konne an errowr alderbest withstonde.

The wise clerk who has erred, and afterwards renounced his wicked work, will henceforth be God’s most loyal servant and best placed to detect errour in future. Moreover, this technical theological meaning was well established in Middle English generally, as a glance at its entry in both the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Middle English Dictionary (MED) will show.16 In fact, it is this meaning that the lemmata cited under MED’s first definition of the word attest.17 Yet MED, under its third definition of errour, records another meaning which, although also bearing theological weight, does so far less specifically. Here, errour is defined in a much more general way as an ‘Offense against morality or justice; transgression, wrong-doing, sin’.18 It is under this third definition that MED has chosen to locate the errour of An ABC, and subsequent authoritative Chaucer glossaries have followed suit, defining errour in An ABC as ‘sin’ in this wider, less particularized sense.19 However, we should reconsider whether MED (and all later glossaries) are justified in making quite so crisp a distinction. To begin with, the grounds for denying errour in An ABC one of its commonest meanings — theological error — are not firm. In fact, the five other lemmata taken from texts earlier or contemporary with Chaucer that MED cites in support of its more generalized third sense either fail to support it or are at best equivocal. The earliest, an errour that appears in the Auchinleck Manuscript version of the Romance Of Arthour and of Merlin, is uttered in the context of a recrimination by the burgesses of Winchester and the people of England against the usurping King Fortiger at the 16 

The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Simpson and Weiner; Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Kurath and others. 17  The equivalent meaning in the OED is listed there under subsense 3 of error. 18  The OED records a near equivalent sense to this under subsense 5 of error, where it offers the meaning ‘departure from moral rectitude; a transgression, wrong-doing’, citing its sole instance earlier than Chaucer from Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle of c. 1338: ‘William the Conquerour changis his wikked wille, | Out of his first errour, repentis of his ille’ (Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle, ed. by Hearne, i, 78). Yet this too is equivocal: it is perfectly clear from its context that the error in question is specifically a transgression against God and the Church, for William had allowed his men to burn churches and relics; though he later relented and restored Church temporalities, no penance was done for his original sacrilege. 19  For example, A Chaucer Glossary, ed. by Davis and others, p.  48; or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 1244.

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turning point of his fortunes and when he is nearing his overthrow: ‘Wicke traytour | Þou schald abigge þine errour!’.20 But the Romance has made it clear that the errour that Fortiger was guilty of was not merely his traitorous usurpation, a ‘sin’ in the sense of a treasonable transgression against legitimate royal descent, but the errour of perverting the Christian faith. This he did by consorting with those archetypal infidels of the Middle Ages, the Sarracens. He had married one, ‘And was curssed in al his liue | For he lete Cristen wedde haþen [‘heathen’] | And meynt [‘mixed’] our blod as flesche and maþen [‘maggots’]’. As a result, ‘Þer was wel neiȝe al þis lond | To þe Deuel gon an hond’.21 And finally, when Fortiger and his family got their comeuppance (being burnt in a siege), the narrator summed up his career thus: ‘Þus ended sir Fortiger | Þat misbileued a fewe ȝer’.22 The important word here is misbileued. Whatever else it was, Fortiger’s errour was misbelief, the lapse defined by Aquinas as one of the gravest of sins in being a sin against God himself, and one classifiable as error in the technical theological sense.23 So MED’s earliest citation in support of its third generalized meaning actually sits better under its first meaning of theological error. Exactly the same can be said of MED’s next citation, again antedating Chaucer. The author of The Seven Sages of Rome relates a tale of seven masters in Rome who had grown rich on the proceeds of charging people for dream augury: ‘So longe þai vsed þis errour | Þai were richcher þan þemperour’.24 They also consulted books — dreambooks of arcane lore, we should doubtless infer — from which they spun their divination. The author of The Seven Sages has sided with the orthodox view categorically expressed in Gratian’s Decretum on the question of dream divination, and has used errour with technical theological accuracy for what the seven masters were doing: they were not committing a ‘sin’ or ‘transgression’ in MED’s third generalized sense at all but, like pagans and apostates, were committing a very particular kind of sin, one against the faith itself and against God.25 Their sin was of the sort that might lead 20 

Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson, ll. 1811–12 (i, 133). Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson, ll. 482–84 and 487–88 (i, 37). 22  Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson, ll. 1899–1900 (i, 139). Also, note the fact that Fortiger died by burning, which might have been considered a singularly appropriate purge for his particular sin; the burning of heretics was originally provided for by Pope Gregory IX in his constitution Excommunicamus et anathematisamus of 1231 (and see Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, ii, 549–50, 556–57). 23  Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. by Caramello, 1a2ae, Q. 73, art. 3 (i, 331–32); 2a2ae, Q. 5, art. 3 (ii, 37–38). 24  The Seven Sages of Rome, ed. by Brunner, ll. 2343–44 (p. 107). 25  Decretum Gratiani, pars secunda: c. 26, C. xvi, q. 7 (Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Friedberg 21 

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to heresy. Thus, like the misbelieving Fortiger, the dream interpreters of The Seven Sages too were in errour in MED’s first sense. MED’s next two citations in support of the third generalized sense are contemporary with Chaucer. The problem with these lies in the nature of the source from which they both derive. Their value as witnesses to the state of current idiomatic English usage is compromised for the simple reason that they come from the English Wycliffite Bible (Early Version).26 As is well known, the Early Version’s translation of the Vulgate was notoriously literal and unidiomatic, prone to render the Latin in whatever English words were of nearest resemblance. Thus the Latin word error in the Vulgate would be liable to appear in Middle English as errour, as indeed it does, irrespective of whether errour’s semantic field in English might be inappropriate in any way, and therefore not strictly the best translation choice. Most lexicographical citation from the English Wycliffite Bible’s Early Version must confess this intrinsic limitation. The fifth lemma cited by the MED in support of errour’s third sense is drawn from Book 7 of Gower’s Confessio amantis, and here the lemma may be thought to lay rather better claim to illustrate the sense that MED seeks to define. However, even this citation is not wholly without difficulty. A philosopher warns a king against flatterers at court, distinguishing for him three errours that flatterers are guilty of. The first of these is an errour ‘toward the goddes hihe’.27 That is, the first clause of the philosopher’s ternary distinction on flattery maintains that court flatterers assail the gods themselves. This proposition is given a sharper, Christian edge in the accompanying Latin marginal gloss, which asserts that the first party whom court flatterers offend is God himself. That is, Gower presents court flattery in the worst possible light when he uses errour of it; it is not simply a generalized ‘sin’, but a sin contra Deum, as the gloss makes clear, and to that extent, of a piece with errour in the technical theological sense. Certainly, Gower may have taken a theological liberty here in choosing to stigmatize court flattery in such resounding terms, but the point is that, as Gower uses it, errour may be retaining the gravity of its technical theological charge without being technically theologically correct. Therefore, although this time MED justifiably cites errour here as an illustration of the third generalized sense, it may simultaneously be missing the nuance that Gower’s semantic licence seems to be introducing as he and Richter); see also Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, pp. 7–16. 26  Romans 1. 27; James 5. 20. The word error is also allowed to carry over into the more idiomatic Later Version. 27  Gower, The Complete Works, ed. by Macaulay, l. 2181 (iii, 292). The passage on the three distinctions of flattery runs between ll. 2177–2206.

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damns court flatterers all the more deeply in branding their sin as error contra Deum, error resonating with the danger of incipient heresy. Having exhausted MED’s antecedent and contemporary attestations, we return to Chaucer and An ABC. As has been seen, it seems that the grounds are unsound for reading An ABC’s errour in the ‘diluted’ third sense that MED and subsequent Chaucer glossaries propose. But there is another reason for suspecting that An ABC preserves something of the technical theological sense of errour so amply illustrated in MED’s first definition: this lies precisely in the poem’s configuration of its erring, penitent sinner in relation to the Virgin Mary, for increasingly from the twelfth century, Mary was promoted as heresy’s sovereign antidote. She was at the forefront of the reconciliation of those in error, and of those whose contumacious error had toppled them into heresy proper.28 Thus when Chaucer specified from the outset of his poem that his penitent was in error, not only is there no good lexicological reason for denying errour here any trace of its technical theological sense, but also, following the source, since his penitent is placed in relation to theological error’s traditional remedy, the Virgin Mary, the case for regarding the penitent as someone guilty of technical theological error is strengthened even further. If a case needs to be made for Chaucer’s having evoked the culture of heresy in the terms in which he has presented the penitent of An ABC, no such case needs to be made for his presentation of his own persona in The Legend of Good Women, for there the evocation is explicit. Chaucer uses the word ‘heresy’ but once in his extant works, and it is here in the Prologue to the Legend. The heresy of the Legend, of course, is less a representation of an actual spiritual sickness requiring a recognized antidote than a playfully rhetorical, literary conceit that Chaucer the author causes the God of Love to project onto Chaucer’s persona. Through that projection, as we will shortly see, the God of Love becomes himself implicated in a particular social dialectic that mirrors the terms in which the discourse of heresy is being conducted in Chaucer’s real world. Playful though its final effect may be, the terms from which the Legend’s heretical conceit is fabricated originate in the language of heresy’s real-life discourse. In order to illustrate this, let us consider those terms a little more carefully, beginning at that moment in the text when they are most vocal. The God of Love’s 28  Compare the commentary of St Bernard of Clairvaux on the Marian liturgical apos­ trophe: ‘You alone have confounded all heresies’ (Tu cunctas haereses sola interemisti); Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. by Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, v, 265, ll. 4–8. And on the early thirteenth-century tradition, see Kienzle, ‘Mary Speaks against Heresy’; also, Szövérffy, ‘Maria und die Häretiker’.

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opening words frame Chaucer’s persona in an accusation: he has no business, claims the God of Love, in approaching the daisy (F, ll. 320–31): ‘For thow’, quod he, ‘art therto nothing able. Yt is my relyke, digne and delytable, And thow my foo, and al my folk werreyest, And of myn olde servauntes thow mysseyest, And hynderest hem with thy translacioun, And lettest folk from hire devocioun To serve me, and holdest it folye To serve Love. Thou maist yt nat denye, For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose, Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose, That is an heresye ayeins my lawe, And makest wise folk from me withdrawe’.

If it is true, as the notes in the Riverside Chaucer edition maintain, that the heresy motif was here instilled in Chaucer’s head by virtue of its appearance in his French sources, then it must also be confessed that in those sources the motif was at best embryonic:29 one of them, Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne, has nothing obviously suggestive of it,30 and that poem’s subsequent companion piece, the Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, contains only the idea, alleged by the Lady Bonneürté against the poet, that he has held and previously expressed in writing a ‘descouvenue’ (an ‘impropriety’) against women for which he must do penance.31 That is all. Nor is there much in another source, the Roman de la Rose, other than the announcement by the author, Jean de Meun, to the ‘leal amant’ that if he ends up confused about the meaning of the dream narrated, he will have it all explained ‘once you hear me gloss the text’ (quant le texte m’orrez gloser).32 In its own time, the third quarter of the thirteenth century, this business of explanatory textual glossing invoked by de Meun had little specifically heretical implication clinging to it, but not by Chaucer’s day, when glossing had come to acquire a peculiar sensitivity to which we will return; the glossing that might be neutral for de Meun would subsequently serve Chaucer with a more tendentious 29 

The notes in Riverside Chaucer risk suggesting that heresy was transparently present in Chaucer’s sources (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 1060). It was not. 30  Guillaume de Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Bohemia, ed. and trans. by Palmer. 31  Guillaume de Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Navarre, ed. and trans. by Palmer, l. 918 (p. 42); Lady Bonneürté accuses Machaut of writing his opinions earlier (ll. 866–68 (p. 38), where she refers to the opinions expressed in the earlier Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne). 32  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Lecoy, l. 15120 (ii, 210).

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point of departure.33 These earlier precedents, then, are the most fleeting of hints that Chaucer for some reason picked up and ran with.34 We should appreciate how consistently Chaucer contoured the Prologue passage quoted above in accordance with a real-life discourse of contemporary heresy, for it contains a remarkably coherent network of ideas echoing that discourse. While some earlier medieval accessus to Ovid’s Heroides may have suggested to Chaucer this interview between his persona and the God of Love — for example, one such twelfth-century accessus prologue provides a striking parallel in explaining that Ovid wrote the Heroides as an act of reparation after he had been arraigned by Caesar for corrupting the morals of matrons through discussing in his earlier writing illicit love affairs — it is not in terms of heresy that the accessus constructs Ovid’s offence.35 Whether or not Chaucer derived his idea for the interview from some prior accessus to the Heroides, the God of Love begins his accusation against Chaucer’s persona with a charge that finds its analogue, rather, in contemporary (and also in established) orthodox writings on heresy, that the enemies of holy things — as all heretics are — are not to approach those things (indeed, in some cases will not even have the power to do so).36 Thus, from the very first, the God of Love projects onto Chaucer’s persona a characterization whose terms are already steeped in heretical potentiality. That potentiality actually crystalizes in the word ‘heresye’ proper a few lines later: heretics, the orthodox maintained, were traditionally defined through their malevolent opposition to the established order, its representatives and its icons.37 33 

For some notes on the history of glossing and its catachresis, see Smalley, ‘The Gospels in the Paris Schools’, pp. 193–95. 34  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 1060; as there expressed (for the ‘underlying fiction of Chaucer’s heresy against love, there are various literary parallels, in addition to Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre and Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne […] including Jean de Meun’s excuses’), the impression is perhaps conveyed that the motif was common. 35  See the excellent account by Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 188–89. 36  The motif of the impious being supernaturally disabled from approaching holy things features elsewhere in Chaucer in ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’, where the Pardoner turns it to unscrupulous ends (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 377–84 (p. 195)). Compare the idea found, for example, in John Mirk’s Festial, that the reason why heretics/Lollards attacked churchmen was because the former were out of charity (Mirk, ‘Festial’, ed. by Powell, ll. 35– 41 (p. 151)); and since charity was traditionally regarded as one of the prerequisites of the good Bible translator and exegete, the heretic, being out of charity, could not therefore be a sound translator. For a discussion of medieval conceptions of what made a good translator, see Johnson, ‘Vernacular Valorizing’. 37  The idea of the heretic as militant aggressor, as uncharitable enemy of the sacred, is

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The heretical discourse ramifies as the God of Love goes on to say that the weapon used by Chaucer’s inimical persona in waging war against the God of Love and his folk is ‘translacioun’: by its means, the God of Love’s ‘olde servauntes’, that is, his devotees in times past whom Chaucer has written about in English, have been reviled and vilified. The net result, he says, is that folk are impeded in and deterred from their devotion to him. The literary and cultural politics of translation in The Legend of Good Women have recently attracted searching critical commentary.38 For the sake of the present argument, some additional points need to be made. Translation had been recognized by the orthodox as an activity to which heretics were vocationally drawn (preeminently in their case, of course, to translation of the Bible) long before it ever became a hallmark issue of the prime popular heretical movement of Chaucer’s day, Lollardy.39 So the God of Love’s hostility towards translation, or at least, towards the sort of translation that he claims Chaucer’s persona had been practising, also complements the heretical complexion of Chaucer’s persona achieved in this passage. Yet it complements it not only in a traditional way — as earlier remarked, canon law had long since identified the inclination of heretics to translate — but also contemporaneously, when under the stimulus of the Wycliffite heresy the traditional issue of heretical translation was acquiring a new immediacy and a controversial edge. While Anne Hudson has been at pains to emphasize that it was not until 1407 that translation of the Bible into English was banned outright, being before that time an open issue,40 this should by no means deter us from hearing a note of reactionary anxiety in the God of Love’s use of the word ‘translacioun’ here that finds its reflection in the anxiety felt by orthodox churchmen at precisely the time when Chaucer was writing the Legend, some twenty years earlier than the ban of 1407, at the prospect of a mass, unmediated lay access to the key texts of clerical culture.41 Just implicit here and found widely elsewhere in contemporary characterizations of the heretic’s temperament (compare, for example, John Mirk’s characterization of the heretic cited in the previous note). The heretic therefore becomes recognizable, inter alia, by his lack of charity. 38  See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation; also Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation’. 39  For example, the Decretum observes the fondness of heretics for Bible translation (Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Friedberg and Richter, ii, col. 785). See also Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions, p. 24 (where she attributes the first official pronouncement on translation to a letter of Gregory VII, written in 1079, in which he expressed the view that Scripture, once made widely current by translation, ‘might be falsely understood by those of mediocre learning, and lead to error’). 40  Hudson, ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’. 41  The topicality of the issue of translation at the time the Legend was being written (Frank,

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as Chaucer’s persona is both implicitly and overtly characterized as a heretic, so too the God of Love projects that heretical characterization from a position which is itself freshly recognizable within the politics of current heretical discourse of the mid-1380s, from the position of the aggrieved and defensive authority of orthodoxy. Translation for the God of Love has amounted to lèse-majesté; he complains of losing control on account of it. This complaint essentially compares with the political analysis offered by Wyclif himself, a couple of years before the Legend’s composition, of the real motives lurking behind orthodox churchmen’s objections to the making available of the Bible and other clerical writing in English.42 In one sense, Alastair Minnis is quite right to arbitrate that ‘there is nothing specifically Lollard about the discourse of translation which we find reflected in the Legend’, but in another sense, this arbitration may be misleading, for reasons that will shortly be made clear, if it also results in the effacement of a certain contemporary political immanence in the Legend’s translation discourse. Minnis’s statement would be unhelpful were it to lead to divorcing translation’s contested enterprise from the culture of contemporary heresy: after all, the God of Love himself did not seem to think that anyone should dissociate the two when he cited ‘pleyn text’ translation of the Roman de la Rose, ‘withouten nede of glose’, as a heresy against his law. Minnis perceives here commonplaces about translation Chaucer and the ‘Legend of Good Women’, pp. 1–10, makes a good case for the Legend’s inception in 1386) is clearly witnessed, for example, in the defence of translation mounted in 1387 by John Trevisa in his Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation. It is not important that this work has nothing overtly Wycliffite about it (though without question, Trevisa shared a cultural formation in Oxford similar to the Lollard Nicholas Hereford, whose possible involvement in the project of vernacular Bible translation can be more confidently credited); it participates in a wider, associated vernacularizing movement to empower the laity with knowledge not exclusively theological. Useful investigation of this aspect of late fourteenthcentury culture has been undertaken by Somerset, ‘Vernacular Argumentation in The Testimony of William Thorpe’. See also Somerset, ‘“As just as is a squyre”’. 42  For example, in Wyclif ’s De triplici vinculo amoris (Wyclif, Polemical Works in Latin, ed. by Buddensieg, i, 168, ll. 6–9): ‘from that is the foolishness evident of those who want to condemn writings as heretical for this reason, because they are written in English and teach sharply on the sins that throw that province into disarray’ (ex eodem patet eorum stulticia, qui volunt dampnare scripta tamquam heretica propter hoc, quod scribuntur in anglico et acute tangunt peccata, que conturbant illam provinciam). The De triplici vinculo amoris is dated midto-late 1383 by Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf, pp. 294–95. Also compare Wyclif ’s view in his Opus evangelicum, composed between 1383 and the end of 1384 (Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf, p. 220), that ‘friars, bishops and their accomplices deplore that the gospel be known in English’ (fratres, episcopi et sui complices abhorrent quod evangelium in Anglico cognoscatur); Wyclif, Opus evangelicum, ed. by Loserth, p. 115, ll. 7–9.

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that amount to this: that Chaucer was in touch with an earlier exegetical tradition that prized the literal sense of Scripture and that warned that the literal sense was in danger of suffocating beneath the higher levels of exegesis. This return to the literal sense was orthodox before the Lollards, following Wyclif ’s example, ever chose to champion it. When Wyclif declared the sensus litteralis to be the one that must be afforded priority as ‘the sweetest, wisest and, as it were, the most precious to embrace’ (dulcissimus, sapientissimus et tanquam preciosissimus amplectandus),43 he was not, on this occasion at least, saying anything particularly radical. All this is true. But let us consider a little more carefully what the God of Love appears to be accusing Chaucer’s persona of doing, and the wider valence of that accusation in Chaucer’s own time. What is really being said here? There seem to be three distinct possibilities, though finally, whichever one or more of the three we opt for, the net consequences of each tend in a similar general direction. Minnis explains ‘For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose’ as meaning that Chaucer’s persona is being credited with having produced a translation of the Roman de la Rose so transparent that no further apparatus of explanatory glossing is called for. 44 Perhaps this is so. The fact remains, however, that the God of Love is threatened by the existence of such a translation. Is it being said that the Roman de la Rose itself contains heresy against the God of Love’s law? If it is, as some of the sceptical content of de Meun’s continuation of the Roman might reasonably incline us to suppose, then Chaucer’s persona aids and abets that heresy in that, having translated the Roman in so perfectly pellucid a way, its heretical tenets are communicated fluently and thus served up unchecked for general consumption. Or is it that the production of a translation ‘in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose’ is where the problem lies, an irresponsibly dangerous undertaking of its very nature since, in that case, the volatility of textual meaning goes undisciplined? Moreover, when such translation is afforded to a text as potentially subversive in its meanings as the Roman, when text of this sort is left to speak for itself, with no sanitizing gloss to help protect the unwitting reader against infection by senses inconvenient to the established sovereignty — one might say, in recognition of his aura of quasi-clerical authority, the magisterium — of the God of Love, then ‘pleyn text’ translation ‘withouten 43 

Wyclif, Sermones, ed. by Loserth, i, 83, l. 17; compare also iii, 170, l. 34, where Wyclif maintained that the most important thing was that the literal sense be clear; or iv, 140, l. 13, that it is wrong to explain away the sensus litteralis. For some recent commentary on Wyclif ’s theory of exegesis, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, pp. 22–66. 44  Minnis, with Scattergood and Smith, The Shorter Poems, p. 334. Delany, The Naked Text, had also canvassed this possibility, as one among others (pp. 122–23).

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nede of glose’ may become, in effect, a strategy of opposition. Or is it, rather, that it is a translation driven by ill will, rather than charity, that Chaucer’s persona is accused of having produced, its lack of gloss serving only to highlight its malice aforethought? He has slandered the God of Love’s ‘olde servauntes’ through his translation, and by so alleging, the God of Love reinvents in poetic guise an idea which, though of ancient lineage, was currently being rejuvenated: that the heretic is a slanderer, and that the heretic’s acts of translation, since they do not proceed from charity, are a malpractice.45 Hardly surprising, then, in view of these terms, that the God of Love experiences a slanderous lèse-majesté, when the love/ charity that he presumes to embody is assailed by such translation.46 Whichever explanations we choose, Chaucer’s persona is charged with having engaged in a translation that, knowingly or unknowingly, furthers heresy. Either he is a heretic, or willy-nilly is heresy’s accomplice. Certainly, the God of Love considers him a wilful heretic by the time he reaches the end of his accusation.47 And while Minnis may be distantly right to maintain that commonplaces circulating in the general exegetical tradition have prompted the detail about the translation’s lack of ‘glose’, it should also not be forgotten that the question of whether textual glossing is provided or withheld is one raised sharply in contemporary consciousness by the debates surrounding Wycliffism, and that such debates constituted part of the immediate intellectual context in which the Legend was received.48 To be sure, Wycliffites did not object to glossing per se. Yet whatever traditional reservations may already have existed about a potential obfuscation of the sensus litteralis that glossing might entail, Wycliffites were quick to further any such unease by castigating glossing specifically as practised by those who regarded themselves as the guardians of orthodoxy, a glossing of the perverted sort that, in the Lollard view, deliberately traduced and disabled the literal meaning of texts that otherwise might expose the baselessness of the clerical status quo.49 45 

See Johnson, ‘Vernacular Valorizing’. I wish to thank Anne-Marie D’Arcy for helpful discussion on this point. 47  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 598, F336, 339–40: ‘For thogh thou reneyed has my lay, | […] If that thou lyve, thou shalt repenten this | So cruelly that it shal wel be sene!’ The God of Love states that the fierceness of the penance will be plainly evident; conceivably, Chaucer’s early readers would have understood the God of Love to intend the spectacle of public penance, an appropriately plainly evident penance if heresy was really what was at issue. 48  Minnis seems to be reacting to Delany, The Naked Text, p. 120. While Delany’s account oversimplifies, I believe it to be essentially correct. 49  We need to distinguish two views of glossing from the Wycliffite perspective. There 46 

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Indeed, an antipathy generally to glossing seems to have become a trademark of at least some quarters of the Lollard movement. Thus while this antipathy cannot be considered exclusively theirs, it is nevertheless theirs characteristically.50 Bishop Reginald Pecock, a mid-fifteenth-century opponent of the Lollards, may not have been representing them altogether fairly in claiming that they maintained ‘that alle expowners and glose ȝeuers to Holi Scripture ben cursid’51 — some Lollards did, after all, practise glossing — but the spirit of his observation was essentially sound. And another witness well placed to gain acquaintance of how Lollardy’s habits of thought might typically find expression, Thomas Gascoigne, on various occasions chancellor of Oxford University and Pecock’s contemporary, associated with diversi heretici their characteristic exploitation of a particular vernacular word play, the purpose of which was to denigrate glossing. (Evidently the ‘diverse heretics’ that Gascoigne had in mind were the Lollards.) The word play in question turned upon the fact that since ‘gloss’ and ‘gloze’ were homonyms in Middle English, their ready confuseability could be diverted by heretics to polemical ends: ‘For if [the word] “gloss” is uttered in the vernacular, was legitimate glossing; compare the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, for example, an argumentin-action for legitimate glossing, and perhaps also what the accusation levelled at the Parson by the Shipman may imply (‘He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche’; The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 1180 (p. 104)), for this conceivably refers to a characteristic, line-by-line exposition practised in some Wycliffite exegesis. (I retract as premature and incomplete my earlier explanation of the meaning of the accusation that the Parson might ‘glosen the gospel’, published in Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, p. 206.) There was also illegitimate glossing, conventionally attributed by Wycliffites to their opponents, especially to the friars. For some examples of their accusations of illegitimate glossing, see n. 53 below. 50  An instance of comparable antipathy to glossing earlier than Lollardy is found in Piers Plowman, where friars glossed the gospel ‘as hem good likide’; Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 9, l. 57 (further references to Piers Plowman are to this edition, unless otherwise stated). The equivalent sentiment also appears in the Z-text (possibly a little earlier than the A-text just cited, if A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer (Langland, Piers Plowman: The Z Version, ed. by Rigg and Brewer, pp. 12–20), are correct; though as Schmidt maintains (Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, p. xxiv), the Z-text cannot be before 1362). The hostility to glossing in the early Z- and A-text is carried over into the later B- and C-text versions, as B.xiii.70, 73–74 witnesses: ‘Periculum est in falsis fratribus! […] Ac I wiste neuere freke þat as a frere ȝede bifore men on Englissh | Taken it for hir teme, and telle it wiþouten glosyng!’ (Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 516). Indeed, even St Francis, ironically enough, had worried about the application of sense-distorting glosses to his own words (rendered faithfully from the original in the Wycliffite translation of St Francis’s Rule; see Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 47). 51  Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. by Babington, i, 65. The Repressor is dated to c. 1449 (p. xxii).

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it may be interpreted as “falseness” by anyone [i.e., as “gloze”]. For diverse heretics say that holy doctors “gloss/gloze” the gospel by supposition, according to their own will’ (‘Glosa’ enim, si dicatur in vulgo, aliquo putatur ‘falsitas’. Dicunt enim diversi heretici quod doctores sancti putative ‘glosant’ evangelium secundum voluntatem propriam).52 False glossing (or glozing, as modern English might now distinguish it) had evidently been one of the more insistent charges levelled at the exegesis of the orthodox clergy in Lollard polemic.53 It is easy to see how the orthodox clergy had walked into the trap of this accusation because, distrusting as they generally did the capacity of anyone beyond the pale of clerical privilege to interpret the plain text of Scripture accurately and safely,54 they valued the way 52  MS Lincoln College 118, fol. 111v (Loci e libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 142–43, has misread the Lincoln College manuscript’s falsitas here as felicitas). 53  A preoccupation consistent with Wyclif ’s; compare, for example, his Opus evangelicum: ‘And thus do they often write upon God’s law as [they do] upon the gospel and other parts, hauling the whole meaning of God’s law by evil glosses into line with their intention’ (Et sic scriptitant super legem Domini ut super evangelium et partes alias trahentes per suas glossas sinistras ad suum propositum totam sentenciam legis Dei; Wyclif, Opus evangelicum, ed. by Loserth, p. 15, ll. 8–11). Among the many vernacular examples, compare these in Piers the Plowman’s Crede: ‘That folweth fulliche þe feith and none other fables, | With-outen gabbynge of glose as the godspelles telleth’; ‘Lere me to som man my Crede for to lerne, | That […] loueth no synne, | And gloseth nought the godspell’; ‘Swiche a gome godes wordes grysliche gloseth; | Y trowe he toucheth nought the text, but taketh it for a tale’ (The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. by Barr; see respectively ll. 274–75, 343–45, and 585–86 (pp. 73, 75, and 85)); or this in the tract De pontificum Romanorum schismate: ‘in oure dayes seiþ Antecristis clerkis, þat among alle lawes þat evere God suffride, beþ boþe his testamentis falseste of alle oþere; and herfore men schulde glose hem aftir her owne wille, and þe wordis of þes glosatouris passiþ Goddis lawe’ (Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 258, ll. 15–19). A few other vernacular examples are given in Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary’, p. 178, n. 27. 54 

Wyclif accused the orthodox of monopolizing the right of interpretation. For example, in his letter, given under the heading De condemnatione xix conclusionum in the Fasciculi zizaniorum, he remonstrates: ‘And thus the pope can remove any book from the canon of Scripture and add a new one, and consequently he can make the Bible anew, and thus hereticate the whole of sacred Scripture, and make Catholic what is opposed to the Christian faith’ (Et sic papa potest quemlibet librum de canone scripturae subtrahere et novum addere, et per consequens potest totum bibliam innovare, et per consequens totam scripturam sacram haereticare, et oppositum christianae fidei catholicare; Fasciculi zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ed. by Shirley, p. 481); or again in his Latin sermons: ‘For they [i.e., the evil sects within the Church] pervert the sense of Scripture with their fictions, they impede Christ’s simple [folk] from the preaching of the gospel by their invented machinations, and they appropriate unto themselves the whole interpretation of Scripture with their cunning quibbles’ (Pervertunt enim sensum scripture suis simulacionibus, impediunt simplices Christi a predicacione evangelii suis fictis machinacionibus et trahunt ad se totam interpretacionem scripture suis subdolis cavillacionibus;

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that their glossing might forestall any interpretation which they were liable to consider ‘perilous’. Thus, for example, we find an orthodox vernacular preacher, composing his sermon sometime between 1389 and 1404 and fully conscious of the threat that Wycliffism posed, revealing tellingly his heightened (orthodox) awareness of the value of prophylactic glossing when commenting on a passage of St Paul: ‘Þe comen glose declariþ þis texst o þis wyse, & I pray ȝe takis good hede, vor it is a perlus texst but a man take þe glose þerwith’.55 This was the sort of hermeneutic that Wycliffites held in the greatest suspicion, accusing the orthodox of premeditated textual hijacking and claiming that such glossing/ glozing was being used to skew the meaning of a text in directions supportive of vested interests. Thus Chaucer’s persona, in producing a ‘pleyn text’ translation ‘withouten nede of glose’, has produced the kind of text that, in the real world, we have evidence that many a Wycliffite would have been thought to have approved (notwithstanding any actual glossing that certain Wycliffites may themselves have generated around the canonical texts). To sum up so far: outside The Canterbury Tales (and in addition to the Troilus and Criseyde passage noted above), Chaucer dealt at least twice with heretical types and conditions. First, we need to introduce into our reading of An ABC an awareness of how Chaucer may have constructed his penitent in terms of the culture of heresy, situating him within error. (Incidentally, were it to prove that this construction stemmed from Chaucer’s acquaintance with newly urgent heresy, it follows that An ABC was written sometime after 1381–82, the time after which heresy became an increasingly alarming issue for the English Church.56) And second, we also need to introduce to our reading of the ‘Prologue’ to The Legend of Good Women a fuller awareness of how Chaucer caused the God of Love to cast Chaucer’s persona in an oppositional role, that of heretical challenger to his authority. While in An ABC heresy’s real-life discourse seems to be inscribed, as it were, in ‘pleyn text’, in the Legend, that discourse is sophisticated into the playful Wyclif, Sermones, ed. by Loserth, i, 404, ll. 4–8). 55  The text is found in the great Benedictine sermon anthology preserved in Worcester Cathedral, MS F. 10, fol. 44 (Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, ll. 369–71 (p. 33)). 56  Fourteenth-century England was not noticeably agitated by heresy before the arrival of Wycliffism. Gregory XI’s bull listing Wyclif ’s errors was issued in May 1377 (see Fasciculi zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ed. by Shirley, pp. 242–44, and see Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. by Wilkins), iii, 123, for the list of errors there condemned; the condemnation is studied by Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclyf, pp. 25, 49–51), but it was not until 1382 that Wyclif ’s Eucharistic doctrine was hereticated at the Blackfriars Council in Oxford (the Blackfriars proceedings are outlined in Workman, John Wyclif, ii, 140–48).

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literary ‘glose’ through which Chaucer’s persona, and his relation to the God of Love, is to be understood; in this poem, the culture of heresy is transmuted into a trope that endows the God of Love’s pronouncements, and the transgressions of Chaucer’s persona, with their own peculiar pseudo-solemnity. A fresher resonance is audible in this passage, and then again in Alceste’s later defence of Chaucer’s persona,57 once it is acknowledged that we have to reckon here not just with traditional ideas about translation and exegesis, but also with their status as contested practices in a current and increasingly polemicized debate. How all this may, or may not, open a window into Chaucer’s biographical presence is a question that the last part of this chapter will explore.

Intertextual Heresy in The Canterbury Tales From An ABC and The Legend of Good Women, we turn now to The Canterbury Tales, and so from poetic personae framed in relation to the culture of heresy to a series of intertextual allusions to sentiments and turns of phrase characteristically current in Wycliffism. Recent work on this particular Chaucerian intertextuality has yielded impressive results, notably in the case of the Wife of Bath.58 However, much more remains to be said. We will begin by revisiting the pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales whom many have found the most reprobate, the Pardoner, before moving to some of the other Canterbury culpables. Finally, we will consider their moral antithesis as represented by the paragon Parson; for if the culpables illustrate between them things wrong in the Church, the paragon illustrates something right in it. The paragon, and the culpables, counterpoint and help to define each other, legitimating in the process a grid of ecclesiological norms. But many of the terms that Chaucer chose for constructing that grid and expressing the poles of clerical right and clerical wrong were not neutral, as we 57 

Essentially, Alceste argues four points in support of Chaucer’s persona: 1) there is much malice at court, so he may stand falsely accused; 2) he may have acted in innocence, not out of malice, ‘for he useth thynges to make’; 3) he may have acted in response to a command that could not be gainsaid (compare John Trevisa’s claim that he was responding to the express request of Lord Berkeley in translating Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon; The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, pp. 134–35, ll. 132–60); and 4) he has certainly written material supportive of the God of Love in the past. Also, Chaucer’s persona maintains his innocence, since his intention had been ‘To forthren trouthe in love and yt cheryce’ (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 601, F472); on the intention of the translator, see the references in notes 36, 38, and 41 above. 58  Blamires, ‘The Wife of Bath and Lollardy’.

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shall see; on the contrary, they carried with them a radical, if not factional, charge that would have sounded increasingly alarming the further on the right wing of orthodoxy early readers positioned themselves. Which means that in this aspect of his writing, Chaucer would have been rather more topically present to early readers than has generally been allowed, and to some of them, not only topically but also provocatively. In short, in this aspect of his work, as in so many others, Chaucer laid the basis for a range of possible reader responses, all of which were nevertheless refreshed in common with contemporary relevance, not left dustily bookish and remote. The Pardoner Orthodox believers within the Church were as troubled as Lollards were by a grass-roots abuse that had grown up around the Church’s theology of pardon and indulgence (though Lollard objections extended even further, to defy the orthodox theology of pardon and indulgence itself ). Well before the 1390s, ecclesiastical legislation had been put in place to curb embezzling pardoners. By Chaucer’s day, as is well known, they had scandalous reputations.59 (Their first recorded appearance in English known to date is in the two earliest versions of Piers Plowman, the Z- and the A-text, composed by William Langland probably sometime in the early 1360s.)60 Yet while the Church was well aware of its delinquent pardoners and was making some effort to police the ranks, it was not Church policy to publicize at large shortcomings uncovered so uncomfortably close to home. This ecclesiastical habit of not washing dirty linen in public, and certainly not in the vernacular, where the ‘lewd’ laity would get to hear of scandalizing clerical crimes that would breed resentment between the estates, had a long history. And the policy was widely advertised: compare, for example, the advice given to clerics in various preaching manuals, that castigation of clerical vice should be strictly reserved for clerical audiences and occasions.61 So while 59 

See Kellogg and Haselmayer, ‘Chaucer’s Satire of the Pardoner’. It has been argued by Mann, Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 149, 208–12, that Chaucer’s inclusion of the Pardoner in the ‘General Prologue’ was influenced by Langland, and her view is endorsed by Patterson, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch’, p. 671. However, the fact that pardoners have a substantial existence in the vernacular Wycliffite derivatives could as easily be used to argue Chaucer’s proximity to Lollard writing as much as to Langland’s, and thus renders the proposed Langlandian influence here much less compelling; connections between Langland and Chaucer are better argued on other grounds than these. 61  Compare, for example, the fourteenth-century De modo componendi sermones of the 60 

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criticism of pardoners, or of any other ‘noble ecclesiaste’, for that matter, was perfectly legitimate (and certainly traditional), there were strong (orthodox) views on what the appropriate forum for that criticism might be. Chaucer, like Langland, had implicitly flouted those views.62 So, of course, had the followers of John Wyclif, but this on principle.63 The fourteenth-century citations given for the word ‘pardoner’ in the OED and the MED reveal a suggestive fact. Apart from Langland, who already held a mandate for social reform earlier than anything that the subsequent arrival of Wycliffism might have put into his head,64 the only vernacular (and therefore necessarily public) instances of the word ‘pardoner’ appear in Chaucer and in various English writings of Wycliffite sympathy.65 Is this coincidence between Chaucer and the Lollards solely the result of the randomness of record survival? More may be at stake than that. In the context of what the orthodox considered fit matter for public discussion, to assert that Chaucer’s Pardoner was merely a traditional bête noire misses a political dimension to his presentation that is accessed by the very fact of his public airing in English.66 Dominican preacher Thomas Waleys: ‘where there is laity only present, do not inveigh against the clergy or against vices which the clergy alone are wont to display, because this is to encourage the laity to scorn the clergy’ (ubi solum est populus, non invehatur contra clerum aut vitia quae solum clericis consueverunt inesse, quia hoc est exhortari populum ut clerum contemnat; Artes praedicandi, ed. by Charland, p. 338). 62  It would seem to matter little, as far as the spirit of the Church’s advice was concerned, that Chaucer was of lay status: he would still have risked appearing to have been out of charity. Langland’s case, of course, if he really was in minor Orders, was much more sensitive. 63  Note the blunt Wycliffite contempt for the Church’s policy of discretion in not openly mentioning sinners by name: ‘anticristis prelatis & veyn religious seyn þat it is aȝenst charite to nemne hem bi name in open sermon & in here absence’ (Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 273, in the tract How Satan and his Priests). 64  See generally Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism. The question of the relation between Langland and Lollardy is complex. For some recent commentary, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 201–14. 65  The vernacular Wycliffite tracts and polemics, many of which have been published in Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, and Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, are, for the greater part, notoriously difficult to date with precision. Nevertheless, it is likely that the majority was produced within a period of approximately thirty years, between c. 1390 and c. 1420; and further, that the bulk of them appeared earlier, rather than later, in this period. 66  On the traditional literary aspects of the Pardoner, see Mann, Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 145–52. Yet as she rightly observes, there is often some ‘topical situation in which Chaucer conceives of his estates stereotypes’ (p. 277, n. 14). Indeed, the topicality of the Rouncival reference in Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner was early noticed by Moore, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner of Rouncival’.

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This dimension is probed further. There are several other pungent details of Chaucer’s presentation that the anticlerical lobby of the 1390s, irrespective of whether its members would have consciously regarded themselves as followers of Wyclif or not, would have soon sniffed out and relished. The unholy alliance between the Pardoner and the Summoner, for example, opens up the vista of a chain of corrupt clerical collusions which in Wyclif ’s writings and those of his even more stridently partisan followers was conceived as reaching throughout the orthodox Church and right up to Rome itself.67 Why did Chaucer pair the Pardoner and the Summoner in the way he has, if not to capitalize on a familiar, dangerous liaison that some radicals were already minded to detect between such dubious Church functionaries?68 Work on ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’ has thrown light on the extent to which this text is in touch with the terms of the contempory Lollard versus orthodox controversy.69 A case already made need not be repeated, but it seems worth noting that more can be said for it than has been, and this in at least three 67 

Compare Wyclif ’s polemical figure of ‘the twelve daughters of the leech’. These ‘daughters’ ranged from popes and cardinals at the top of the Church hierarchy down to pardoners at the bottom: ‘In the clerical arm are twelve daughters of the leech, that some men name as follows: popes, cardinals, bishops, archdeacons, officials and deans, rectors, secular priests, the religious (possessioners and mendicants), clerks, and pardoners. However, these twelve, following the endowment of the Church and, after the clergy, inclined towards greed for temporalities (which according to the Apostle is the root of all evils), are [become] extorters of temporalities and a burden on, not a profit to, the Church’ (sunt duodecim filie sanguissuge in brachio clericali, quos quidam sic nominant: pape, cardinales, episcopi, archidiaconi, officiales et decani, rectores, presbyteri seculares, religiosi possessionati et mendici, clerici et questores. Isti autem duodecim post dotacionem ecclesie et postquam clerus sit ad cupiditatem temporalium que est radix omnium malorum secundum Apostolorum inclinatus, sunt tortores temporalium et ad onus ecclesie, non profectum; Wyclif, Sermones, ed. by Loserth, iii, 453). 68  For example, they fraternize in one of the stanzas of The Plowman’s Tale (Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Skeat, pp. 147–90; see ll. 325–28 (p. 157)). This Lollard poem may have been written in the early fifteenth century (Wawn, ‘The Genesis of The Plowman’s Tale’, p. 39), though it is extant only from the sixteenth century; see also Walker, ‘The Textual Archaeology of The Plowman’s Tale’. (I make this point without intending to exclude other suggestive areas opened up by Chaucer’s pairing; for example, Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, makes an interesting case for seeing the Summoner and Pardoner as inversions of the keys of binding and loosing (pp. 184–85).) 69  Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 266–80; see also the sensitive reading of Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 55–99. The frame of reference argued in the present chapter for reading the Pardoner (that is, for reading him morally within terms established by a field of orthodox versus radical/heretical texts), is given additional nuance by Patterson, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch’, pp. 664–71. For commentary specifically on the substance/accident

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departments. One is the question of the position that ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’ takes on the theology of pardon and indulgence itself. As is well known, the orthodox rationale for pardon, and the theological mechanisms by which pardon was thought to operate, were commonly considered indefensible by the Lollards.70 It is also true that, well before Lollardy, the operation of pardon had already occasioned debates within orthodoxy. Indeed, some of this antecedent (orthodox) anxiety about pardon’s praxis may be refracted in the controversial scene in the A- and the B-text of Piers Plowman where Piers tears up the pardon sent from Truth.71 Yet, while orthodoxy fully recognized some of the theological danger inherent in its own praxis, it never rejected that praxis per se, as would the Lollards later. Even as Piers tore up Truth’s pardon, Langland never allowed things progress as far as that.72 One could thus regard the Lollard position on pardon as having exploited the fissure of anxiety already running through pardon’s orthodox praxis, though now in Lollardy widened to the point of collapsing that praxis. But did Chaucer through his Pardoner do something similar? This is far more difficult to decide, but what seems of interest is that disquiet resides in the very fact of its undecideability. To illustrate how provocative what the Pardoner says about pardon may have sounded, we need to set it carefully within its contemporary context, and remark what emerges. The Pardoner’s verdict on pardon constitutes the momentary ‘paroxysm of agonized sincerity’ that George Kittredge famously perceived the Pardoner to lapse into towards the end of the ‘Tale’ (ll. 916–18): And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche, So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.73 issue to which ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’ alludes (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 538– 40 (p. 197)), see Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Lollard Joke’. 70  For the orthodox theology of pardon and indulgence, see quaestiones 25 to 27 of Thomas Aquinas on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard (Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. by Caramello, iii, 75–83). Lollard objection to pardon and indulgence is well attested; compare, for example, the ninth of the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards posted in 1395 (Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 27–28, ll. 114–34), and the further discussion below here. 71  Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 345, ll. 101–07 (A-text), 344, ll. 115–21 (B-text). For a recent analysis, see Minnis, ‘Piers’ Protean Pardon’. 72  Langland stresses his orthodoxy on the question of the validity of pardon and indulgence (Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 351, ll. 158–64 (A-text), 350, ll. 174–79 (B-text), and 351, ll. 324–29 (C-text)). 73  See Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry, p. 217.

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Let us try to estimate how this ‘paroxysm’ would have been received by Chaucer’s orthodox contemporaries. Before we can properly do that, it will be helpful first to compare what another text, one of impeccable orthodoxy, says about pardon, and use it as a benchmark. The text in question is extracted from a sermon written by Chaucer’s contemporary, the Augustinian canon John Mirk, probably during the decade in which Chaucer started work on The Canterbury Tales.74 On the face of it, it would seem that Mirk has done something similar to what the Pardoner has done in suggesting that there is a hierarchy of pardon. Commenting on the papal indulgence that granted a full pardon every fifth year to pilgrims to Rome, Mirk reasonably observed that not everyone could manage to get there to avail of it. So, what of them? Bot for alle mowe not come þidur [But because not everyone can come there] and haue þis pardon, þe Pope of Heuen, Ihesu Criste, of hys special grace graunteth alle men and wommen ful pardon of hure synnus in here deth-day, so þat þei wol kepon be here lyve [provided that they will keep during their life] þre thyngus þat ben nedeful to hem. Þe wheche ben þese: fful contricion wyth schryuing, hol charite wythoute feynyng, and stabul fayth wythowtyn flottering. Sothly, wythowtyn þese þre, þer may no man haue pardon at Rome ne ellyswhere.75

Here, the ‘Pope of Heuen’, Jesus Christ, implicitly supersedes the earthly pope. But in that may lie the precise distinction between Mirk and Chaucer. Such supersession in Mirk is present only implicitly; it is not overtly exploited. Chaucer, by contrast, allows his Pardoner to say bluntly that Christ’s pardon is best. Since the best pardon is Christ’s pardon — even John Mirk, had that proposition been put to him, could not have disagreed — any other form is necessarily inferior. (Also, since any other form appears so regrettably prone to unscrupulous manipulation — witness the Pardoner’s corrupt modus vivendi — readers unconcerned about nice distinctions may have found pardon’s demonstrated vulnerability the next best thing to an attack on the theology behind it.) The sheer absoluteness of the Pardoner’s words thus potentiates a judgement on the orthodox praxis of pardon: his moment of ‘agonized sincerity’ could be interpreted as working to undermine both him and the institution that fosters him by nudging orthodox readers into contemplating a position that they would not ordinarily contemplate. When this corrupt deceiver expresses a truth — Christ’s pardon is best — it is an unmediated truth that, in the moment of 74 

On the date of Mirk’s Festial (probably c. 1382–90), see Fletcher, ‘John Mirk and the Lollards’. My edition of MS Cotton Claudius A. ii, fol. 42v (edited with small differences in Mirk, ‘Festial’, ed. by Powell, p. 71, ll. 14–21). 75 

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its utterance, has also laid the foundation for a critique both of the Pardoner’s profession and, whether intentionally or not on Chaucer’s part, of the orthodox institution of pardon. Thus Chaucer’s text makes explicitly clear something that is only latent in Mirk, and in so doing, it has manoeuvred readers into considering the final step in a logical sequence: if Christ’s pardon is best, why bother with any other? The explicit supersession in the Pardoner’s words gestures now towards the contemplation of an actual suppression of the praxis. And suppression, of course, is the Lollard position: ‘þer comeþ no pardon but of God for good lyuynge & endynge in charite, & þis schal not be bouȝt ne solde as prelatis chafferen [buy and sell] þes dayes’.76 There is no pardon but God’s, claims this Wycliffite tract, so let all the rest be done away with. Has the Pardoner, then, announced an orthodox position on pardon and indulgence, or has he broached a Wycliffite one? The answer seems undecideable. Yet that very undecideability leaves reader response teetering on an edge between orthodox and heterodox possibilites. 77 Through the Pardoner and his words, the standard, orthodox theology of pardon and indulgence is left looking sickly. Whether rightly or wrongly, some could have guessed Wycliffism here at the time this Tale was written. As if this troubled take on orthodox pardon and indulgence would not have sounded suspicious enough in some quarters, tinier details of the Pardoner’s portraiture are also likely to have sounded similar. We come now to a second group of instances. To be told, for example, in ‘The General Prologue’ that the Pardoner’s wallet was ‘Bretful of pardoun comen from Rome al hoot’ is mischievous when we recall what people’s sensitivities currently were: ‘But of þo pardoun þat men use to day fro þe Court of Rome, þei have no sikernesse [warrant] by holy writte ne resoun, ne ensaumple of Crist or his apostlis’,78 says the Lollard tract Fifty Errors and Heresies of Friars, and another (related) Lollard argument against pardon and indulgence was that one of the chief beneficiaries of swindling pardoners was the Roman curia itself. Through their agency, good English money was haemorrhaging Romewards.79 So Chaucer’s naming of the source of the Pardoner’s walletful of pardons, Rome, catches at a topical, pro76 

Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 238 (in the tract Of Servants and Lords). And compare the indeterminacy identified in ‘The Monk’s Tale’ by Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, p. 161, where he finds Chaucer situating the ‘Tale’ ‘between the Wycliffites and their monastic opponents’. 78  Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 385. 79  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 687 (p. 34). To reference but two Lollard complaints on the export of currency, see, for example, Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 82 (in the tract Of Prelates) and p. 154 (in the tract The Office of Curates). 77 

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nationalist resentment that Lollards, very prominently, were capitalizing on and thus, necessarily, becoming identified with. In addition to this, the Pardoner’s sprightly indifference to what happened to the souls of those he fleeced (ll. 405–06) — ‘I rekke nevere, whan that they been beryed, | Though that hir soules goon a-blakeberyed!’ — sounds like Chaucer’s poetic reworking of another motif commonly found in Lollard writing, namely, that mercenaries like the Pardoner do not care about what happens to the souls they traffic in: ‘ȝif mennus soulis gon to helle bi brekynge of goddis comaundementis no warde [no matter], so þat þe peny come faste to fille here hondis & coffris’, observes one Wycliffite author, and another, ‘ȝif þei han money & gold at here lykynge bi extorsion & robberie, þei recken not of cristene soulis [they do not care about Christian souls] hou foul deuelis deuouren hem’.80 And a precisely dated instance of this Lollard preoccupation with men of the Church whose cura is of Mammon, not of souls, appears in a sermon by Chaucer’s contemporary, the Lollard Robert Lychlade, which he preached in Oxford on the vigil of the Ascension in 1395: ‘See, therefore, how pastors nowadays, who ought to set an example to people, pursuing the Mammon of iniquity and not caring for eternal life, bring the souls of Christ’s flock to perdition, barely or not at all having zeal for [their] souls, but for [their] money’ (Videte igitur quomodo pastores, qui populis preesse debent, temporibus modernis sequentes mammona iniquitatis et non querentes vitam eternam animas perdunt gregis Christi, modicum aut nullum zelum habentes pro animabus set pro pecuniis).81 The likes of the uncaring Pardoner, then, for whom souls are as milch cows, inhabit the pages of contemporary Lollard polemic in terms that come very close to Chaucer’s own, even were his detail about postmortem rambles to pick blackberries his own unique touch. More of Chaucer’s construction of the Pardoner than has been recognized may have been suggested by radical, indeed heterodox, models such as these. Certainly, in their company, the Pardoner’s opinions sound strangely familiar. The third department in which Chaucer’s invention of the Pardoner connects with current controversy requires a return to the famous ‘gelding or mare’ equivocation of ‘The General Prologue’. More remains to be said about this. In Chaucer’s time, as so today, society’s objects of polemical attack might find themselves tarred with some infraction of those gender normativities through which 80 

Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, pp. 72 (in the tract Of Prelates) and 266 (in the tract How Satan and his Priests), respectively. Compare also The Plowman’s Tale (Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Skeat, ll. 729–32 (p. 170)): ‘A cure of soule[s] they care nat for, | So they mowe money take; | Whether hir soules be wonne or lore, | Hir profits they woll nat forsake.’ 81  Wenzel, ‘Robert Lychlade’s Oxford Sermon of 1395’, p. 212.

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society customarily articulated its sense of selfhood. The Pardoner has without question been conscripted to the margins where the representations authorized by dominant ideology typically oblige such abjected objects to exist. The mapping of the particular marginal terrain that the Pardoner inhabits has been most rewardingly undertaken by Carolyn Dinshaw.82 While much has been made of the Pardoner as ‘eunuch’, in various senses of that word, rather less has been made of the Pardoner as ‘hermaphrodite’.83 Yet this latter status deserves greater attention. For whatever else it may be, the Pardoner’s polemical sexual projection is also hermaphroditic, and what seems to call for fuller appreciation is the way in which this hermaphroditic projection writes and literalizes in the Pardoner’s flesh a polemical metaphor — conspicuous less in terms of formally attested frequency than of high public profile — mobilized in a famous moment of Lollard versus orthodox dispute. The either/or equivocation of ‘gelding’ or ‘mare’ that summarizes the impression that Chaucer the pilgrim has formed of the Pardoner in ‘The General Prologue’ — ‘I couldn’t say whether he was one thing (a castrated male [horse]) or another (a female [horse])’ — mimes in its syntax of indecision the radical undecideability with which hermaphroditism similarly plays in its unhinging, see-saw balance between (usually and normatively distinct) genders.84 And should this reading seem too subtle, the hermaphroditic intimation that 82 

Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics; also, Dinshaw, Getting Medieval. The category ‘hermaphrodite’ in the Pardoner’s case is highly complex, however. The medi­eval hermaphrodite was generally understood as a simultaneous combination (though not necessarily a simultaneous plenitude, complete in every last detail) of male and female genital equipment, however that combination was precisely registered and achieved physiologically. In the portrait of the Pardoner in ‘The General Prologue’, his hare’s eyes suggest an hermaphroditic condition directly and positively, but in the ‘gelding or mare’ equivocation, he is also characterized as hermaphrodite negatively, in terms of absences, not of simultaneous male and female genital presences: according to the equivocation, either he is a gelding (penis, no testicles, so a ‘not-man’, as Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 158, notes, but not a woman either); or he is a mare (no male genitals, or their displacement by female genitals, and thus their absence by displacement, but again a ‘not-woman’, as Dinshaw notes, because he is still a ‘he’). However, could it be that the ground of the Pardoner’s equivocal definition, in its second term, ‘mare’, is being allowed to shift, and that he is now starting to be defined less in terms of varying degrees of absence of male genitals than in terms of his taking the ‘mare’s’ role in heteronormative (and hence gender-defining) sex acts (that is, in terms of an absence of the male penetrative role)? If so, this would leave him as ‘not-woman’ in actual genital terms, but as not-man in sex-act terms, thus preserving the suggestion of hermaphroditism around him while shifting the duality that constitutes hermaphroditism onto a different level. 83 

84 

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the syntactic equivocation figures is figured less controversially in the Pardoner’s eyes, eyes that glare with the intensity of a hare’s, an animal long recognized as hermaphrodite in bestiary lore.85 But in 1395, it was for the polemically derogatory, neither-this-nor-that muddle of hermaphroditism that the Lollards reached when they sought an appropriate figure for churchmen who perversely, in their view, mixed spirituality with temporality.86 Lollards maximized the circulation of this figure, moreover, when they posted their Twelve Conclusions on the doors of Westminster Hall (also of St Paul’s Cathedral, according to the chronicler Walsingham) during the time of the parliament that sat between 27 January and 15 February.87 Thus an intimation of hermaphroditism, in this context, may become not simply one of a strangely unmeasurable sexuality, but also a contemporary partisan construction, one in which Chaucer’s Pardoner, a confounder of the material and spiritual, just as his body seems to confound the traditional exclusivities of gender, might also be reckoned to have participated. The Friar When looking for material to manufacture his Friar from, Chaucer had, of course, a huge legacy of antimendicant writing and sentiment to hand. Criticism of the friars had been piling up now for the best part of a century and a half.88 Consequently, it comes as no surprise to find that each of the four principal attributes of the Friar in ‘The General Prologue’ — an insinuation of lechery, his cultivation of the well-to-do, the disputed question of his claims against parish curates to be able to hear the confessions of their parishoners, and his general venality in the matter of imposing penance — is plentifully in evidence well other (as, for example, does the fine article by McAlpine, ‘The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters’). 85  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, pp. 824–25, n. to l. 684. 86  The English text of the Twelve Conclusions is edited in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 24–29; see p. 26, ll. 62–72, for the sixth conclusion in which the slur is made. The conclusion also calls men ‘of duble astate’ ambidexters, a term whose significance Hudson’s commentary neglects (as also does Hudson, ‘Hermofrodita or Ambidexter’), but as Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, has perceived (pp. 79–80), it is a traditional one (and see the further material in n. 125 below). 87  Fasciculi zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ed. by Shirley, pp. 360–69; Liber contra xii errores et hereses Lollardorum, ed. by Cronin. See also Walsingham, Historia anglicana, ed. by Riley, ii, 216. 88  For a general survey, see Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature.

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before the 1390s.89 Attributes like these were musty antimendicant stereo­ types. But what requires notice is the way in which Chaucer appears to have spring-cleaned them, bringing them up to date and so making them seem less stereotypical than they actually were. While certain aspects of the Friar’s presentation, therefore, have a traditional ring to them, others have been couched in terms that may be more recent. These renovated aspects would have given a varnish of contemporary relevance to what otherwise might have seemed a stale and familiar matter. (And stale familiarity would doubtless have been a depressing prospect to any poet entertaining ambitions approaching Chaucer’s.) So we should not be surprised to find that even some of the most traditional failings attributed to the Friar appear to have been refurbished in a contemporary style. Three can be considered here. First, there is the detail that the Friar’s ‘semycope’, a short cloak comprising part of his habit, was luxurious. (Luxury can be inferred from the fact (l. 262) that it was made ‘Of double worstede’.90) It was therefore contrary to the spirit of holy poverty officially cherished by his Order. This question of luxuriously habited friars was one of the disputed issues raised in the attack launched against the mendicant Orders by John Ashwardby, a vicar of the University church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford in the late 1380s. Ashwardby, as his more famous opponent, the Carmelite friar Richard Maidstone, insinuated, was a follower of Wyclif.91 Ashwardby’s attacks, delivered publicly from the pulpit in English, and which amongst other things urged the laity not to give alms to friars vested in capae (‘cloaks’) that were expensive, do not survive, but their substance can be deduced from Maidstone’s rebuttals of them.92 The date of the Maidstone versus Ashwardby controversy is hard to 89  See Janette Richardson’s headnote to ‘The Friar’s Tale’ in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, pp. 807–08. 90  ‘Double worsted’ is a favourite target in other Lollard contexts. Compare Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede: ‘His cope that biclypped him wel clene was it folden, | Of double worstede y-dyght doun to the hele’ (The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. by Barr, ll. 227–28 (p. 71)); and The Plowman’s Tale (Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Skeat, l. 1002 (p. 179)) where the monk is said to be ‘With double worsted well y-dight’. In Friar Daw’s Reply, Daw turns the tables, using Lollard-sounding accusations against his accuser Jack Upland (Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoiner, ed. by Heyworth, ll. 364–65 (p. 84)): ‘Why is þi gowne, Iakke, widder þan þi cote, | And þi cloke al aboue as round as a belle’. 91  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, pp. 808–09; see Edden, ‘The Debate between Richard Maidstone and the Lollard Ashwardby’ (another account of the dispute, convenient but less detailed, is found in Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 95–97). 92  Edden, ‘The Debate between Richard Maidstone and the Lollard Ashwardby’, p. 123: ‘he openly taught that no one should give alms to a friar who perhaps might have a capa worth

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pinpoint, though it is likely to have developed over a period of time, after 1384 and probably a little before 1390.93 Thus it occurred close to Chaucer’s writing of ‘The General Prologue’, generally thought to date between c. 1388–92.94 This is not to suggest that the dispute between Ashwardby and Maidstone was the source of Chaucer’s ‘semycope’ detail, and that he had somehow got to hear of it. But what it does show is how topical the detail was and this in the heated atmosphere of a debate that was not simply anticlerical, but associated with the current war of polemic being waged between orthodoxy and Wycliffite heterodoxy. In fact, other Wycliffite sources that are also closely contemporary single out for censure the richness of the cloth used for friars’ ‘cloaks’ in a similar way. 95 The Lollard tract Jack Upland, for example, composed c. 1390,96 poses the accusing question: ‘Frere, what bitokeneþ ȝoure greet hood, ȝoure scapalarie [scapular], & ȝoure knottid girdel, & ȝoure side & wide copis þat ȝe maken ȝou of so dere cloþe [your ample and wide cloaks that you make of such expensive cloth for yourselves], iþ lesse cloþis & of lesse prijs is more token of pouert [since meaner and less costly clothes are a greater token of poverty]?’97 more than all his possessions’ (expresse docuit quod nullus daret elemosinam fratri qui forte haberet meliorem capam quam essent omnia bona sua). 93  Crompton, ‘Fasciculi Zizaniorum’, has suggested a date c. 1392 (see p. 157). However, Edden, ‘The Debate between Richard Maidstone and the Lollard Ashwardby’, argues strongly for a date between 1384 and 1390, perhaps a little before 1390. She notes that Ashwardby was vicar of St Mary’s from 26 November 1384 to January 1395, so Maidstone’s rejoinder must fall between those dates (pp. 114–15). Ashwardby is referred to as meus doctor by Maidstone, a degree Ashwardby received some time before 1391. 94  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. xxix. 95  The Latin word for ‘cloak’ in these sources is capa and the English word is ‘cope’. (It should be understood, of course, that the capa / ‘cope’ here refers to the cloak which formed part of the mendicant habit, not the liturgical vestment.) 96  Heyworth’s dating of Jack Upland to between c.  1390 and 1420, perhaps to rather later than earlier in this period, needs revision. A composition anytime between the death of Wyclif at the end of 1384 and the year 1401 is possible; Doyle, ‘William Woodford, O.F.M. (c. 1330–c. 1400), his Life and Works’, pp. 90–91; and also Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, pp. 196–97, n. 44. Further consideration of Jack Upland’s dating by Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience, pp. 216–20, concludes that ‘the versions of Jack Upland available to us were produced or revised in the early 1380s to early 1390s’ (p. 217). The questions found in Jack Upland appear in Latin in the Responsiones ad questiones lxv of the Franciscan friar William Woodford, written some time between 1389 and 1396; Catto, ‘William Woodford, O.F.M.’, pp. 31–36. They are found uniquely in MS Bodley 703, fols 41–57. 97  Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoiner, ed. by Heyworth, p. 60, ll. 140– 43. Note that the friar whom Jack Upland attacks seems a generic composite, not identifiably

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The Latin source from which this question seems ultimately to derive speaks simply of cape (‘cloaks’),98 doubtless to be understood in their context as luxurious ones, but the English text has left nothing to chance in explicitly describing the ‘cloaks’ as ‘ample and wide’ and made of ‘expensive cloth’.99 A counterargument should be considered, that Chaucer, the Lollard suspect Ashwardby and the radical author of Jack Upland all coincidentally gave greater local colour and particularity to an old idea that went back a long way in the tradition of antimendicant thinking.100 One Latin poem, for example, composed probably not long after 1382, points out, though in terms vaguer than those used by Chaucer, Ashwardby and Jack Upland, that friars’ habits are luxurious and that these habits have substituted for appropriate ‘shame’ inappropriate ‘great honour’: ‘They [i.e., the friars] clothe themselves in a habit of superior cloth, not, however, out of shame, but for the sake of great honour, and they keep out the cold with tunics and furs.’ (Non tamen dedecoris, sed magni honoris, | Habitu se protegunt panni melioris, | Tunicis, pelliciis frigus claudunt foris).101 Yet the fact that a member of any one mendicant Order. Friar Daw’s Reply similarly implies a generically representative friar (Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoiner, ed. by Heyworth, p. 8). 98  MS Bodley 703, fol. 42v col. a: ‘The twelfth quaestio: what do the wide capuces, or cloaks, of the friars signify, their scapulars and knotted cords?’ (Dvodecima questio. Quid signant capucia fratrum lata, vel cape, scapularia et corde nodose?). It is interesting to note how in his response, Friar Woodford turned the tables on the accusers in a way reminsicent of the table-turning of Friar Daw in Friar Daw’s Reply (MS Bodley 703, fol. 42v col. a): ‘Likewise I say that the same can be asked of the Lollards: what do their wide, furred hoods, extended as far as their scapulars, signify? And under their scapulars [are] shirts of fine cloth and delicate linen; similarly, their belts adorned with silver and long pendants; and similarly, their gowns or little cloaks [are] furred and hanging to their feet’ (Item dico quod similiter potest queri a Lollardis: quid signant eorum lata capucia furrata extensa vsque ad scapulas, et subter eas eorum camicie de tela subtili et tenui lino, similiter eorum zone ornate argento et pendente longo; et similiter eorum toge siue clocule furrate extense vsque ad pedes). 99  The quality and costliness of the mendicant habit is a refrain of Lollard polemic. Compare, for example, these lines from the late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century poem ‘The Friar’s Answer’: ‘Þan þei loken on my nabete, | & sein, “forsoþe, withoutton oþes, | Wheþer it be russet, black, or white, | It is worþe alle oure werynge cloþes”’ (Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. by Robbins, p. 167, ll. 21–24). 100  Even though this counterargument still might be thought not entirely to explain the (otherwise fortuitous) degree of coincidence between Chaucer, Ashwardby, and Jack Upland. 101  Political Poems and Songs Relating to the English History, ed. by Wright, i, 256. This poem, entitled Heu! quanta desolatio Angliae praestatur, is evidently Lollard, and introduces a roll call of Lollard greats ( John Wyclif, Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, and Richard FitzRalph are all extolled; Political Poems and Songs Relating to the English History, ed. by Wright, i, 259–60 and 262–63).

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these more general terms seem to contain the germ of an idea that appears more colourfully developed in Chaucer, Ashwardby and Jack Upland is not a wholly adequate explanation. Irrespective of whether Chaucer, Ashwardby and Jack Upland had recycled an inherited motif and expressed it with richer particularity, the precise terms of that particularity do not appear to be as old as the idea itself may have been.102 So while it is true that the seed of the criticism of friars’ luxurious habits could have been sown more than a century earlier in William of St Amour, the first major opponent of the friars who was active in thirteenth-century Paris and who had spoken out about the false outer show that friars made ‘in their habit’ (in habitu),103 and while that seed was later more widely scattered in a field of antimendicant writing produced both in England and on the Continent,104 it remains the case that its particular flowering in Chaucer, as far as Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognized it, corresponds most nearly to that found in Ashwardby (a Wycliffite, if Maidstone was right), and in the Wycliffite tract Jack Upland. The significance of this shared similarity for an informed reader of 102 

It is worth noting that even the more generalized description of the Latin poem Heu! quanta desolatio Angliae praestatur appears in a text that once again is staunchly Wycliffite. (I have not noticed the detail, incidentally, in any of the writings of two of the earlier seminal antimendicant authors, William of St Amour and Richard FitzRalph.) Williams, ‘Two Notes on Chaucer’s Friars’, ventured that the motif may have been ‘a commonplace, well known to Chaucer and his readers’ (p. 118). But if it was, to date I know of no cases of it other than Lollard ones. 103  He drafted into his argument Matthew 23. 5 (‘All their works they do in order that they might be seen by men; for they widen their phylacteries and enlarge their tassels’). This gospel lemma provided antimendicant critics with convenient amunition, given that the mendicant Rule itself forbade luxurious dress. Also, see Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, p. 39. 104  Notably, in the tract Filios enutrivi of Jean d’Anneux, composed in 1328 (MS Bodley 52, fol. 195v) and in a quaestio of Thomas de Wilton, who was also active in the 1320s (MS Rawlinson A. 273, fol. 100v; de Wilton’s quaestiones are headed on fol. 99v, ‘Authorities against able-bodied mendicants’ (Auctoritates contra ualidos mendicantes)). On d’Anneux and de Wilton, see Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, pp. 82–84 and 94–95 respectively. Note also that the treatise Omne bonum of James le Palmer absorbs both d’Anneux and de Wilton, along with other works, in its article on Fratres (Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, Appendix B). The fringes/phylacteries motif was also entering Lollard sources, for example the De perfectione statuum written by Wyclif in 1383 (Wyclif, Polemical Works in Latin, ed. by Buddensieg, ii, 473, ll. 6–10), but there the motif appears in its (parallel) guise, closer to its guise in the thirteenth century where it originated, than in the guise developed by Chaucer, Ashwardby or Jack Upland. (As Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, pp. 204–07, notes, the motif also entered secular literature in the Roman de la Rose.)

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the 1390s is easy to imagine. It would have extended beyond any putative origin of the idea in earlier tradition. Thus merely to identify an early prototype for the idea is not enough to account for the likely response that Chaucer’s particular treatment of it in the 1390s would have triggered. The second ‘General Prologue’ detail concerns the small knives and pins that the Friar had stuffed into his tippet, gifts for the women that he was angling to seduce (ll. 233–34): His typet was ay farsed ful of knyves And pynnes, for to yeven faire wyves.

This motif is more striking still in that it does not seem current before the four­ teenth century.105 However, once invented, it proved popular, and by the fifteenth century had been appropriated for utterly scurrilous uses. One of the most outrageous runs: Fratres Carmeli navigant in a bothe apud Eli. Non sunt in celi, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk. Omnes drencherunt, quia sterisman non habuerunt. Fratres cum knyvys goth about and txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt.106 (‘Carmelite friars sail in a boat at Ely. They are not heavenly/unfortunate107 because they fuck the women of Ely. They all drowned, because they had no steersman. Friars with knives go about and screw men’s wives.’)

The translation above in brackets renders in italics the words that the original gives in cipher. The encrypted words contain a text in English and dog Latin necessary to complete these bawdy macaronic verses. The verses are not notice­ably Lollard, and feature in a late fifteenth-century manuscript whose contents, for 105 

The earliest and closest case of which I am aware occurs in Richard FitzRalph’s Defensio curatorum (completed in 1357) where FitzRalph refers to the ‘little gifts’ (munuscula) that friars give to youths to lure them into their Order (BL, MS Lansdowne 393, fol. 253): ‘youths enticed by the deceits of the friars and by the small gifts given to them’ (iuuenes fratrum fraudibus et munusculis datis allecti). 106  MS Harley 3362, fol. 47. 107  Two different translations seem possible. If in celi is to be understood as Latin, it is ungrammatical, for were the Latin correct, in celis (‘in heaven’ or ‘heavenly’) is what the line should have read. But alternatively, in celi could be understood as playful English (for ‘unseli’, meaning ‘unfortunate’). Thus in celi could be taken in two senses, depending upon whether it is read as barbarous Latin (the friars are not heavenly because they fuck the women of Ely) or as skittish English (the friars are not unfortunate, for the same reason). The word play here makes a useful supplement to the interesting study of ‘sely/silly’ by Knapp, Time-Bound Words, pp. 143–57.

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the rest, are not noticeably Lollard either.108 They demonstrate how longlived and widely used the motif was destined to be. But in the 1390s, it is only in Lollard texts and contexts that it seems to be recorded, and here with some frequency. The Lollard tract Of the Leaven of Pharisees, for example, says: Ȝif þei [i.e., friars] becomen pedderis [pedlars] berynge knyues, pursis, pynnys and girdlis and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris [furs] for wymmen, and þerto smale gentil hondis [dogs], to gete loue of hem and to haue many grete ȝiftis for litil good ore nouȝt [in exchange for little or nothing]; þei coueiten euyle here neiȝeboris goodis [they wickedly covet their neighbours’ goods].109

And friars were presented in Lollard sources not only as bearers of fine knacks for ladies; the motif of the ingratiating gift also gelled with that of the friars’ devices for procuring children to swell their Orders: ‘þei [i.e., friars] feeston hem [i.e., they regale children] and ȝyuon hem ȝiftus as applus, pursos and oþre iapes [purses and other trifles]’.110 Rumours of child abduction had been doing the rounds 108 

The motif may have passed from characteristically Lollard contexts into more general antimendicant ones, where it may also have been preferred for its potential value as a doubleentendre (since ‘knife’ may connote ‘penis’). The first editors of these verses, Wright and Halliwell, observed that a version of them was still popular among schoolboys (though in a considerably more sanitized form as quoted in Wright and Halliwell; see Reliquiæ Antiquæ, ed. by Wright and Halliwell, i, 91). Another fifteenth-century example of the motif, again without Lollard affiliation, appears in Benedict Burgh’s rendition of the Disticha Catonis (Förster, ‘Die Burghsche Cato-Paraphrase’, ll. 289–93: ‘The lymytour, that visiteth the wyues, | Is wise inouh. Of hym a man may leer | To yiuen girdiles, pynnes and knyues. | This craft is good; thus dothe the celi freere: | Yiueth thynges smale for thynges that been deer’ (p. 310)). On Benedict Burgh (d. 1483), see Emden, BRUO, i, 309. 109  Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 12. Another example, from MS Cotton Cleopatra B. ii, fol. 62v, is as follows: ‘Þai [i.e., friars] dele with purses, pynnes, & knyves, | With gyrdles, gloues for wenches & wyues’ (Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. by Robbins, p. 158, ll. 37–38). This poem betrays its Lollard affiliation by using the CAIM anagram; this anagram appears often and only in Lollard contexts, as Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, p. 196, notes, and see especially Aston, ‘“Caim’s Castles”’. The poem also occurs in its manuscript immediately after the Lollard Heu! quanta desolatio Angliae praestatur poem excerpted above. 110  Thus the Vae octuplex (English Wyclifite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and Gradon, ii, 368, ll. 66–67; compare in the sermon for the Vigil of St Andrew in ii, 182, ll. 101–02: how friars ‘wiþ dyuerse and luytule ȝiftus, and false wordus, dysseyuon chyldron’). The precise mechanics of their coercion seem not recorded in Wyclif himself (compare Wyclif, Opera minora, ed. by Loserth, p. 339, l. 3; p. 340, l. 22), nor in Richard FitzRalph, though the latter levels at friars the accusation of child theft, to be sure (see n. 111 following and compare n. 105 above where ‘youths’ [iuuenes], are in question). Even so, this is not quite the ‘knives’ motif. Hudson and

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much earlier than this; Archbishop Richard FitzRalph, for example, perhaps the most strenuous opponent of the friars in the mid-fourteenth century who took his case against them as far as the papal curia in Avignon until his death halted it in 1360, wove variations on this theme into his own campaign, though there he relied not merely on hearsay, but cited a case known to him personally of ‘an honest Englishman’ who had complained that friars at Oxford had poached his son, a lad not yet thirteen years old.111 But once again the point is that the precise circumstantial details in which the theme is here couched do not appear to have been recorded before the late fourteenth century. Thus another of the nuances in the way Chaucer presented his Friar could have been construed by an ultra orthodox reader as evidence that he had been culling his material from infected sources. The third and last General Prologue detail is the matter of the Friar’s venal ‘In principio’ (ll. 253–55): For thogh a wydwe hadde noght a sho, So plesaunt was his ‘In principio’, Yet wolde he have a ferthyng, er he wente.

From an early date, these two words, which open the gospel of St John, were used for para-liturgical, sometimes magical, purposes, so by the time Chaucer was writing, people may have been used to hearing them bandied about.112 But what has not been appreciated is that by the late fourteenth century, the friars’ Gradon (in English Wyclifite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and Gradon, v, 203–05), neglect in their commentary to consider whether FitzRalph’s Defensio curatorum may have any bearing on this Vigil of St Andrew sermon. The wording of the Defensio is in places strikingly similar. Compare, too, FitzRalph’s point in the Defensio (BL, MS Lansdowne 393, fol. 253) that, if the theft of a cow or a sheep is punishable, even more so is the theft of children, with Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 348: ‘And here men noten many harmes þat freris don in þe Chirche. […]Þei stelen pore mennis children, þat is werse þen stele an oxe’; and with iii, 374: ‘And siþ he þat steelis an oxe or a kow is dampnable by Gods lawe, and monnis also, myche more he þat steelis a monnis childe, þat is bettere þen alle erthely godis, and drawes hym to þo lesse perfit ordir’ (in the tracts The Church and her Members and Fifty Heresies and Errors of Friars respectively). But such similarities cannot be further pursued here. 111  vnus probus homo de Anglia; MS Lansdowne 393, fol. 253. Also see Szittya, The Anti­ fraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, p. 205, n. 62, for a discussion of the Oxford statute of 1358 against underage recruitment by friars. The statute noted that people were afraid to send their sons to Oxford lest mendicants snaffle them. Compare too the cases cited by Erickson, ‘The Fourteenth-Century Franciscans and their Critics’, pp. 112–13 and 116–18. 112  Bloomfield, ‘The Magic of In principio’. Bloomfield did not observe that any of his sources connected In principio typically with the friars.

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use of In principio was characteristically being sneered at by Lollards and turned by them into antimendicant amunition. The spin Lollards put on In principio was that friars had bastardized it for conning cash out of the unsuspecting. Criticism of In principio appears in the radical tract Jack Upland, where friars ‘winnen more wiþ In principio þan Crist & hise apostlis & all þe seintis of heuene’.113 It also appears in two poems both entered in a fifteenth-century hand onto the flyleaf of a late fourteenth-century copy of the Middle English prose treatise known as Pore Caitif.114 The first poem, which betrays its dissident origin through using typically Lollard catchphrases, contains the accusation: ‘In principio erat verbum | Is þe worde of god, all & sum, | þat þou sellest, lewed frere.’115 Here, the friar is presented as a simoniac selling sacred Scripture. And the second poem pictures a beleaguered friar complaining that: When I come into a schope for to say ‘in principio’, Þei bidine me [bid me], ‘goo forþ, lewed poppe!’ [get out, lewd little fop] & worche & win my siluer so! [work and earn my money that way].116

Here, In principio is not connected to a specific abuse, but is the unwelcome herald of the friar’s sidling arrival. Advertizing the abuse of In principio by the mendicants, then, may have had a familiar Lollard ring to it. Moving on from Friar Hubert of ‘The General Prologue’, the next major portrayal of friars (of whom Friar Hubert is in any event a generic representative) is to be found in ‘The Summoner’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’.117 Recent research has 113 

Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoiner, ed. by Heyworth, p.  64, ll. 240–42. As Bloomfield, ‘The Magic of In principio’, noted, but he did not develop the possible implication of this. 114  The Works of a Lollard Preacher, ed. by Hudson, p. xix, incorrectly says of these poems that ‘one [is] against the friars and the other [is] in their defence’. In fact, both disparage the friars. Pore Caitif has itself been thought to have a Lollard connection (though Brady, ‘“The Pore Caitif ”’, concludes that the Lollard connection is no stronger than the tract’s circulation with other writings of more obviously Wycliffite temper (pp. 542–48)). 115  Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. by Robbins, p. 166, ll. 4–6 (‘The Layman’s Complaint’). Its antimendicant accusation ‘Goddis law ȝe reuerson’ (Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. by Robbins, p. 166, l. 13) registers typical Lollard turns of phrase (on Lollard discourse and sect language, see the references in n. 53 above). 116  The poem is called ‘The Friar’s Answer’ in Historical Poems of the xivth and xvth Centuries, ed. by Robbins, p. 167, ll. 13–16. It is probably also a Lollard product by association. 117  I pass over the satirical reference to them at the beginning of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (ll. 865–81).

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shown that several antimendicant themes of the ‘Prologue’ and ‘Tale’, like those we have been considering in connection with Friar Hubert, were not wearily traditional but topical or based on current topicalities — for example, the friars’ infestation of the arse of the devil — so there is no need to cover that ground again.118 One further supporting detail is worth noticing, however, whose innocence is very doubtful indeed. Friar John of ‘The Summoner’s Tale’ had with him a ‘felawe’ (friars customarily travelled in pairs) who carried (ll. 1740–45): A peyre of tables al of yvory, And a poyntel [stylus] polysshed fetisly [elegantly], And wroot the names alwey, as he stood, Of alle folk that yaf hym any good, Ascaunces that [as if] he wolde for hem preye.

Much is made of these elegantly manufactured ‘tables’ on which the names of the friars’ benefactors were inscribed with a beautifully polished stylus. Ostensibly, they were to serve the friars as aides-mémoires from which to recall their benefactors’ names in their prayers. The ‘tables’ are alluded to again a few lines later in Friar John’s mendicant sales patter (l. 1752): ‘lo! Heere I write youre name’ — provided, that is, that in return for writing the name he gets alms in cash or in kind. Evidently the trick worked, for when the ‘tables’ make their third and final appearance five lines later (ll. 1757–59), Friar John is seen rubbing out the names inscribed once he has secured his donation and made his getaway. In view of all this, it is interesting to note that one of the Lollard arguments against perceived mendicant abuses against which a vigorous opponent of the Lollards, Friar William Woodford, took up arms, similarly fastened on this practice of entering the names of benefactors on tabellae (‘tables’): ‘Friar, since God knows all things, why do you write the names of those who give you alms on tabellae? For it seems by your writing that God would not otherwise remember them if you did not write them here’ (Frater, quare scribis tu nomina illorum qui tibi conferunt elemosinam in tabellis tuis ex quo Deus omnia nouit? Apparet namque ex scriptura quod aliter Deus non reminiscaret illis nisi tu scriberes hic).119 Chaucer’s ‘tables’, doubtless because he is writing poetry and not a spare polemic, are treated in a more richly particularized way. They are sumptuously made of ivory — like 118 

For this and other themes, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 281–303. MS Bodley 703, fol. 47v, cols a–b. The English equivalent in Jack Upland reads: ‘Frere, whi writist þou mennes names in þi tablis? Wenest þou þat God is suche a fool þat he wot not of mennes dedis but if þou telle hym bi þi tablis?’ (Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoiner, ed. by Heyworth, p. 66, ll. 282–84). 119 

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habits of double worsted, hardly compatible with the friars’ profession of holy poverty — and into the bargain he has dramatized their use in an actual scam. To that extent, the simple tabellae of the Lollard argument have assumed a singularly more elaborate guise in Chaucer’s version of them. Yet the essential issue is similar: the Lollard argument disapproves of tabellae, while Chaucer similarly enlists them into the paraphernalia of mendicant deceit. If attacks on the tabellae of the friars had been an old commonplace of antimendicant writing, it might have gone some way towards accounting for the ‘tables’ that Chaucer put into his ‘Tale’. But such attacks seem to have been rather more recently introduced into the growing antimendicant tradition. A growing tradition is, after all, an evolving tradition, and to my knowledge, Chaucer’s satire on the friars’ ‘tables’ is parallelled only in Lollard contexts. The Summoner Next, the Summoner. The mutual hatred between Summoner and Friar would have seemed to many of Chaucer’s contemporaries not simply a narrative device for propelling their tales along, but also another link in an ominous chain of associations. Lollards had been prompt to point out that the orthodox clergy — in their view clerks of Antichrist — when they were not in collusion, were habitually at loggerheads. Their animosity, as much as their collusion, was a sign of Antichrist’s dominion within the Church: ‘the members of Antichrist tread reciprocally upon each other’ (membra Antichristi reciproce se conculcant), observed Wyclif.120 The Summoner and the Friar’s mutual hatred, conventionally read by literary critics as another operation of Chaucer’s ‘quiting’ motif, also gave Chaucer’s contemporaries the option of viewing that mutual hatred from the vantage point of current Lollard opinion: to echo Wyclif once again, within the Church, ‘the members of Antichrist tread upon each other’. Furthermore, the Summoner’s alliance with the Pardoner implicates him in the rhetoric of Lollard polemic in a similar way.121 A pardoner and a summoner make a brief joint 120  Wyclif, Opus evangelicum, ed. by Loserth, p. 75, ll. 4–5. The ominous view that emerges of the Church from such clerical strife (and that Fleming, ‘The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale’, had observed purely on the basis of astute literary analysis) had already been identified by Wyclif as a sign of Antichrist’s dominion within the Church. 121  They are paired too in terms of comparable descriptive techniques that inscribe in their flesh their underlying spiritual perversions. Of the Summoner’s physical blemishes, Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, says, ‘Both the disease and its resistance to the more violent remedies suggest inner corruption’ (p. 57); similarly, Braswell-Means, ‘A New Look at an Old Patient’, says that

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appearance in one of the stanzas of The Plowman’s Tale, a Lollard poem written possibly in the early fifteenth century, though arguably here, the Lollard author has been prompted by their association in Chaucer rather than by some specifically Lollard tradition.122 Be that as it may, of all the people that the Pardoner could have taken up with, Chaucer has selected as his ‘compeer’ another corrupt official of the Church. The choice hardly seems accidental once located within the network of anticlerical writing circulating in the 1390s; on the contrary, it begins to look provocative, or at least, as if it could so have appeared to people familiar with the current controversies. So the net effect of Chaucer’s unholy pairing of Summoner and Pardoner is to contribute towards The Canterbury Tales’s wider projection of a canker riddling the Church and this, of course, was the comparable, if more emphatic, projection of the Lollard reformers at the time The Canterbury Tales were being composed. Lollards did not have a monopoly on calls for ecclesiastical reform, to be sure, but the terms in which they characteristically dressed their reformist sentiments seem to single them out, binding them in a group solidarity, and probably helping to corrall those reformist sentiments, whatever their first point of origin, into the Lollard camp. By contrast with that of the Friar, it must nevertheless be admitted that Chaucer’s portrait of the Summoner contains rather less that is likely to have the Summoner’s facial traits ‘can be seen as real indicators of the moral corruption of his soul and the corrosion of his profession’ (p. 273). Thus both Cooper and Braswell-Means avoid closing on a specific spiritual diagnosis. But if the Summoner’s physical symptoms would have been diagnosed as leprosy (as Cooper thinks, though Braswell-Means is unsure), the Summoner’s inner corruption may have been interpreted as heresy, since leprosy was often thought heresy’s physical symptom. An addition of Nicholas of Lyra to the Glossa ordinaria makes this tradition clear (Nicholas of Lyra, Biblia sacra, fol. 236 v): ‘According to catholic doctors, by leprosy is understood the false doctrine of heretics in their customs or in their faith, and therefore according to those [doctors] they are called heretics who are numbered in the Church, but who follow the blemishes of error’ (Secundum doctores catholicos per lepram intelligitur falsa doctrina hereticorum in moribus vel in fide, & ideo secundum ipsos leprosi dicuntur qui de numero sunt ecclesiae, sed varias sequuntur maculas erroris; I am grateful to Anne Marie D’Arcy for drawing my attention to Lyra’s gloss). And a sermon for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity from the influential Sermones dominicales cycle composed by the early fourteenth-century Franciscan, Nicholas de Aquevilla, makes a similar identification: ‘Heretics, and certain men and women believing in witchcraft and [astrological?] terms, are implicated in that leprosy’ (Ista lepra occupati sunt heretici et quodammodo homines et mulieres in sortilegiis et terminibus credentes; MS Bodley 857, fol. 67). Thus yet again the Summoner would match the Pardoner, whose religious hypocrisy similarly suggested heresy as his underlying spiritual disease (Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 266–80). 122  Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Skeat, ll. 325–28 (p. 157).

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alarmed orthodox sensibilities. Summoners came with nothing near the amount of polemical baggage as did friars, nor were they widely decried as corrupt agents of orthodoxy in Lollard writings.123 Yet such appearances as they make there agree with Chaucer’s essential presentation, namely, that summoners cite people on false pretences to the ecclesiastical courts in order to extort their money.124 That, in a nutshell, is the main narrative thrust of ‘The Friar’s Tale’. And Lollard writings make the further point, again not unlike the point that Chaucer makes about the summoner of ‘The Friar’s Tale’, that such Church minions are thoroughly familiar with the sexual misdemeanours of the working classes, and that they exploit that familiarity to summon lechers to ‘chapiters’ (that is, to sessions of the archdeacon’s court) where they can be robbed.125 Though the summoners appearing in Piers Plowman, a work whose early versions antedate Wyclif ’s papal con123 

Modest evidence for corrupt summoners in English historical documents was gathered by Haselmayer, ‘The Apparitor and Chaucer’s Summoner’; see p. 55 for vernacular examples, though evidently Haselmayer did not include Wycliffite sources. A useful supplement on the historical malpractices of summoners is Hahn and Kaeuper, ‘Text and Context in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale’. Mann, Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire, observes that summoners do not appear in estates satire much before Langland (p. 274, n. 60). 124  The tract entitled The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned says: ‘Also somenors bailies and servauntis, and oþere men of lawe, kitten [cut] perelously mennus purses, for þei somenen and aresten men wrongfully to gete þe money out of his purse’ (Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 320). 125  Compare ‘The Friar’s Tale’, l. 1361. Also, the Wycliffite theme that Church minions (summoners qualified as such) are familiar with the sexual incontinence of the labouring classes and that they prey upon it, is reminiscent of the (more elaborate) presentation of this theme in Chaucer’s summoner of ‘The Friar’s Tale’, a man whose network of spies ensured his successful detection of lechers. Compare with ‘The Friar’s Tale’, ll. 1310–26 and 1338–74, the kernel of a similar idea in the Wycliffite tract On the Seven Deadly Sins: ‘Þo þridde part of þo Chirche [i.e., the estate of those who labour] is not clene of lecchorie, for þei gone togedir as bestis. And þis is knowen to bischop clerkis, for þei spoylen hom in chapiters, as who wolde spoyle a thef ’ (Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 166). However, the idea that diocesan administrators might ‘eat and drink the sins of the people’ predates the Wycliffites, and as in so many other respects, so here, Wycliffites may have been embroidering in their own characteristic ways an idea already traditional. John of Salisbury, for example, warned an archdeacon of his acquaintance in a letter of c. 1160–61 not to let the archidiaconal office become a sort of business. John feared that deans and archdeacons might live off the misery of the poor, reckoning their discomfiture good sport, and he called such clerics ‘ambisinistrous’ (ambilaevi; see John of Salisbury, The Letters, ed. by Millor and Butler, p. 194). Compare the corrupt ambidexters of the Lollard Twelve Conclusions and see also n. 86 above). Chaucer’s hinted collusion between archdeacon and summoner in ‘The Friar’s Tale’ is another example, in small, of those corrupt ecclesiastical collusions introduced in several places in The Canterbury Tales.

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demnation of 1377, were also slaves to money, and though Langland presented them as fraternizing with peculating clerics of the kind that Wycliffites too ­later complained about, in no other respects do Langland’s summoners quite compare with those of Chaucer and of the Wycliffites, for these summoners have their besetting sins more fully and consistently laid out.126 Even so, it would be wrong to press the similarities between the treatments of Chaucer and the Wycliffites to the point of identity. We find ourselves on more clearly dangerous ground in the person of the final flawed ‘ecclesiaste’ to be considered here, the Monk. The Monk The Monk, says Chaucer the narrator, was a handsome man. The very next thing we hear about him (l. 166) is that he was an ‘outridere’, that is, his business took him outside his monastery. His dealings outside the cloister, focused and then justified (from his point of view, if not necessarily from the narrator’s) in the rhetorical question ‘How shal the world be served?’, become a key issue in his portrait.127 The traditional monastic antidote for worldy preoccupations of the sort the Monk is busied with was withdrawal from the world into a quiet and regular life of contemplation, labour, and prayer. Structured retreat of this sort was a founding principle of monasticism, but here in the description of the Monk in ‘The General Prologue’ (ll. 173–88), it is branded as ‘old and somdel streit’ and shelved. In broaching this issue of the acceptability, or otherwise, of the monk out of his cloister, Chaucer accessed a current controversy about monastic (and indeed general clerical) involvement in worldly affairs.128 Prominent among those argu126 

Most of Langland’s summoners collocate with sisours, the latter being members of sworn assizes of inquest (the B-text instances are representative: B.ii.59; B.iii.134; B.iv.167; and B.xix.373). At B.ii.170, summoners have a line of verse to themselves, but follow on in the company of Simony and Civil from the previous line; and at B.xv.132, summoners collocate with executors and sub-deans. Langland’s summoners are generally drafted to exemplify the corrupt interface between the Church and the law. 127  ‘How shal the world be served?’ (l. 187), posed ostensibly in rhetorical justification of the Monk’s worldly involvement, in effect entices the reader to ponder what underlying legitimacy a justification merely rhetorically made may have. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, shrewdly comments, ‘Chaucer was, by virtue of his friendships, in a position to ponder Wyclif ’s arguments from favourable and unfavourable perspectives and probably was reflecting this position when he had his Monk ask, “How shall the world be served?”’ (p. 165). 128  Already in 1371, Parliament had been presented with a petition that the king no longer employ clerics in posts dischargeable by laymen (see Rotuli parliamentorum, ii, 304).

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ing the case pro such involvement when Chaucer was writing was the Benedictine monk Uthred of Boldon (d. 1397), who had tried to justify the participation of clergy in secular government and administration.129 The case contra, that argued that all churchmen should hold themselves aloof from compromising worldly activities, was being urged by Wycliffites, to be sure (for example in Wycliffite writing, as noted earlier, men who juggled with clerical and secular careers might even be stigmatized as hermaphrodites),130 but also by the friars. In fact, it is not clear whether it was the protests of Wycliffites or mendicants (or both) that galvanized Uthred of Boldon into writing.131 We know that John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s patron, was conservative on this issue, being opposed in principle to clerics occupy­ing high secular positions (even though he did not object to clerics helping run his own household).132 So too was Chaucer’s friend, the poet John Gower.133 In view of this, Chaucer’s fellow-feeling may have lain first with his patron and with his friend, and with the Wycliffites and mendicants only co­incidentally. But the matter does not end there. Certain other vivid touches in the Monk’s description, when their characteristic field of use is borne in mind, could have encouraged contemporaries to veer towards a more radical, if not indeed ‘Wycliffite’, reading of this issue of the permissibility of churchmen following secular occupations. Of one of these touches Chaucer was fond, for he used it twice, once in ‘The General Prologue’ description of the Monk and again in the allusion to the Monk made in the ‘Prologue’ to ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’: 129 

In his treatise De dotacione ecclesie sponse Christi; Durham Cathedral, MS A. iv. 33, fols 69r–99v. 130  And also ambidexters; see the aforegoing discussion, and notes 86 and 125 above. Compare also, for example, Wyclif ’s De officio regis (Wyclif, Tractatus de officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 142). The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned tract opposes the secular employment of bishops as follows: ‘þei may not wel togidre do her gostly office and worldly, for Crist and alle his postlis, wiþ alle here witt, kouden not and wolden not entermete wiþ worldly office, but fledden it as venym’ (Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 335). Of course, opposition to clerical involvement in secular affairs was mounted well before Wyclif and his sect; see Swanson, Church and Society, pp. 103–10. 131  Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, suggests that the De dotacione ecclesie may have been provoked by attacks from friars rather than from Wycliffites (p. 170). 132  On John of Gaunt’s position, see Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, pp. 162–63; also, Bisson, Chaucer and the Late Medieval World, p. 81. This position did not go as far as blanket disapproval, however; Gaunt’s own household affairs were substantially run by clerics (see Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, i, 115, 364–69). It should also be recalled that until Wyclif incurred condemnation for heresy, Gaunt had been his protector. 133  For example in his Mirour de l’Omme (Gower, The Complete Works, ed. by Macaulay, i, 228, ll. 20245–56).

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this is the seemingly innocuous and colourful little detail that bells decorated and jingled on the bridle of the Monk’s horse.134 The detail as Chaucer introduces it is, as we might expect, highly picturesque. To be sure, there also existed a widespread, earlier tradition that keeping plushly caparisoned horses was evidence of pride, and so seasoned moralists in Chaucer’s audience would have been able to make the connection between the Monk and this earlier tradition. For example, the influential Summa vitiorum of the French Dominican William Peraldus, issued in 1236, declared that equestrian pride betrayed itself in four guises: first, the keeping of too many horses; second, the use of horses in unnecessary circumstances; third, the keeping of fine horses for vanity’s sake; and finally, the bedecking of horses in trappings of gold and silver while Christ, in the persons of poor folk, was sent naked and empty away.135 It is well known that Peraldus’s Summa provided Chaucer with one of the principal sources for ‘The Parson’s Tale’, and here, the four topics of Peraldus just paraphrased may ultimately lie behind the following lines of the ‘Tale’ (ll. 431– 32 and 434): Also the synne of aornement [adornment] or of apparaille is in thynges that aper­ tenen to ridynge, as in to manye delicat horses that been hoolden [maintained] for delit, that been so faire, fatte, and costelewe [costly]; and also in many a vicious knave that is sustened by cause of hem; and in to curious harneys [excessively elaborate harness], as in sadeles, in crouperes [cruppers], peytrels [poitrels], and bridles covered with precious clothyng, and riche barres and plates of gold and of silver. […] This folk taken litel reward of [give little heed to] the ridynge of Goddes sone of hevene, and of his harneys whan he rood upon the asse, and ne hadde noon oother harneys but the povre clothes of his disciples; ne we ne rede nat that evere he rood on oother beest.136

The moral contrast pointed up by the introduction into this passage of Christ’s humble ass, while not in Peraldus, is certainly also found in other writings before 134 

The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 169–72 (p. 26) and ll. 2794–97 (p. 252). Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, ed. by Pearsall, p. 133, n. to l. 3984, ‘nere clynkyng of youre bellis’, omits mention of the Lollard analogues discussed below. 135  Gulielmus Peraldus, Summae virtutum et vitiorum, p. 405. On the Summa vitiorum and its date, see Dondaine, ‘Guillaume Peyraut’, esp. pp. 184–97. 136  The question of the sources of ‘The Parson’s Tale’ is complex, and to date has been most satisfactorily addressed by Siegfried Wenzel, in Summa virtutum de remediis anime, ed. by Wenzel. While Wenzel’s case that Chaucer used a redacted Peraldine source is conceivable, the possibility nevertheless remains that what he actually used was some further version intermediary between himself and the Peraldine redaction.

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Chaucer. (For example, one anecdote used by medieval preachers for enlivening their sermons told of an old woman who seized the bridle of a preacher’s horse and then pointedly asked him whether Christ ever rode on the like.) It is also probable that when Peraldus penned his passage on equestrian pride he was himself recalling an earlier, twelfth-century authority, though he did not cite the authority by name. This was St Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a work on the manners and office of bishops drew a picture in stark contrasts between the pomp of riding bishops and the plight of walking poor men: Jumenta grandiuntur onusta gemmis, et nostra non curatis crura nuda caligulis. Annuli, catenulae, tintinnabula, et clavatae quaedam corrigiae, multaque talia, tam speciosa coloribus, quam ponderibus pretiosa, mulorum dependent cervicibus.137 (The horses [of bishops] are aggrandized and loaded with jewels, while our naked legs are unprotected by shoes. Little rings, chains, bells, and certain studded reins, and many suchlike things, both splendid in their colours and precious in their weight, hang from the necks of their mules.)

Yet, more can be said than this, that the Monk’s proud horse with its jingling bridle bells and its (implicit) contrast with Christ’s humble ass may simply have come to Chaucer from a medley of ancient and traditional motifs.138 There is evidence that Lollards had embraced the ‘proud horse’ theme afresh, so much so that it had become, and was seen to be, something of a hallmark of Lollard invective. This is revealed by the author of the Lollard tract On the Twenty-five Articles, who maintained that orthodox churchmen — bishops and friars in this case — were conscious of how ‘pore men’ (an expression which probably encoded a reference to members of the Lollard sect)139 not only used the ‘proud horse’ theme, but were inclined to harp upon it:

137 

Bernard of Clairvaux, De moribus et officio episcoporum, in PL, 182, col. 816. Compare also St Bernard’s condemnation of ‘proud horses’ expressed in his Apologia ad Guillelmum (Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. by Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, iii, 103, ll. 13–16) which the Lollard Robert Lychlade recycled in his sermon of 1395 and which is quoted below. 138  Mann, Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire, notes that Chaucer may not have been original ‘in giving his Monk a taste for fine horses’ (p. 23). She cites the case of the midfourteenth-century Tournai poet Gilles li Muisis who discanted on monastics keeping fine horses and entourages. Mann’s analysis of the literary potential of the jingling bells (pp. 26–27) omits the motif ’s Lollard currency, however. 139  See Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary’, pp. 170–71.

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Also bischops and freris putten to pore men þat þai sayne [bishops and friars put it to poor men that they say] þat men of þo Chirche schulden not ride on so stronge horsys, ne use so mony jewelis, ne precius cloþis, or delicate metys, but renounce alle þingus and ȝyve hem to pore men, goynge on fote, and takynge stavys in hondis […] Here Cristen men thynken no grete heresie, þowe worldly prelatis [think it no great heresy if worldly prelates][…] renounce alle vanitees and waste godis, and selle þer fatte horsis and all þer waste jewelis and waste clothis, delynge hem to [sharing them with] pore men.140

Note the claim in the first sentence, that bishops and friars had a habit of charging ‘pore men’ with blaming the clergy for their vain equestrian tastes. Nor was this awareness of orthodox churchmen that the ‘proud horse’ theme was common in Lollard discourse unfounded: the Twenty-five Articles author himself used it earlier in his tract, on that occasion with no evident self-consciousness.141 And because the theme also made its way into Lollard sermons, it found an even wider audience and circulation than it would had it remained confined solely to the written page. It is often impossible to tell whether a medieval sermon surviving in manuscript was ever actually preached — and thus potentially capable of reaching a large number of people — or whether its existence was primarily literary and consultative, hence relatively more limited and private. But of the sermon preached by a disciple of Wyclif in Oxford on 15 May 1382 (Ascension Day) there can be no doubt. The sermon survives in note form, and was jotted down by an orthodox spy who had been sent along to listen and report back to the Church authorities about what had been said. The preacher, the notorious Lollard Nicholas Hereford, included in a wide-ranging attack on clerical abuses a swipe at the monastic possessioners (the possessionati), of whose ranks was Chaucer’s Monk. These men, said Hereford, ‘want to be called “Lord” and to ride about on fine horses and in solemn array’ (volunt vocari ‘domini’ et equitare in magnis equis et apparatu sollempni).142 Similarly, in a sermon delivered in Oxford on 19 May 140 

Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 494–95. Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 473: ‘And efte Bernarde sais, Seye, ȝee bischoppis, what dos golde in ȝoure bridel? hit dryves not away cold; ȝoure bestis gone honourid wiþ gemmys, precius stonys, and jewelis, ande oure sidis bene nakid, seyne pore men’. The reference to St Bernard here is specifically to the question Dicite, pontifices, in freno quid facit aurum?, appearing in Chapter 2 of Bernard of Clairvaux, De moribus et officio episcoporum (PL 182, col. 815). 142  Forde, ‘Nicholas Hereford’s Ascension Day Sermon’, l. 66 (p. 239). Compare Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 181–83 (C.v.156–62). There is some historical justification for the perception that monastics had a weakness for equestrian pomp, and that it was not merely a literary topos (see the notes by Susan H. Cavanaugh on the Monk’s 141 

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1395 (the date of the vigil of the feast of the Ascension in that year), the Lollard preacher Robert Lychlade recruited another of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s works to similar effect: Quid enim, ut cetera taceam, specimen humilitatis est, cum tanta pompa et equitatu incedere, tantis hominum seruitorum stipari obsequiis, quatenus duobus episcopis vnius abbatis sufficiciat multitudo? Mencior si non vidi abbatem sexaginta equos et eo amplius in suo ducere comitatu.143 (For what sort of humility is it — to bypass others — when such a one proceeds in great pomp or on horseback and is surrounded by so many servants that the retinue of one abbot would suffice two bishops? I would lie if I said that I had never seen one abbot lead sixty horses and more in his entourage.)

By expressing themselves like this, Hereford and Lychlade fanned the orthodox expectation, identified so clearly by the Twenty-five Articles author, of the sort of anticlerical accusation that Lollards might typically be heard coming out with. In fact, the ‘proud horse’ theme appears in yet other Lollard sermons (though their status as preached texts, unlike the 1382 and 1395 sermons of Hereford and Lychlade, is not definitively known). For example, in a sermon for the first Sunday in Advent that was collected into a Lollard sermon anthology, possibly in the 1390s, we hear the following: And heere auȝten [ought] proude men of þis world, but principalli prelatus and prestis, be sore aschamed to see her Lord and her Mayster, whom þey schulden principalli suen [emulate], ride in þus pore aray, as is bifore seide and þey to ride so proudeli in gai gult [gay, gilded] sadeles wiþ gingelinge brideles and v score or vi score hors of prout arayid men, as þouȝ hit were a kynge rydinge toward a reuel, and her chariottis wiþ her jeweles goynge tofore ful of grete fatte hors fed for the nones [for the nonce]. But fer beþ þe true disciplis of Crist from þis arai.144 portrait in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 806). Knight, ‘“My Lord, the Monk”’, reads the Monk as embodying ‘estate false consciousness’ (p. 382) in having such tastes, seeing him as ‘a bogus knight’ (p. 383). 143  Wenzel, ‘Robert Lychlade’s Oxford Sermon of 1395’, pp. 214–16. Compare Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. by Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, iii, 103, ll. 13–16. The work is the Apologia ad Guillelmum. 144  Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, pp. 1–2, ll. 26–34. Compare also in the second Sunday in Advent sermon in the same collection another attack on proud prelates who keep ‘gret multitude of fatte horses and proude, wiþ gai gult sadeles and schynynge brideles, wiþ miche wast and proude meyne’ (Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman, p. 23, ll. 423–24). For a hypothesis that this sermon collection dates to the last decade of the fourteenth century, see Chapter 5 of this book, especially pp. 139–41.

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The gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent was the account of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matthew 21. 1–9). This gave the anonymous Lollard preacher his chance. It was an ass that Christ rode on, he said, and in doing so he challenged prelates and priests nowadays to consider how wide of the moral mark was their preferred means of transport. The favourite topics of Lollard discourse could prove resilient and that of the ‘proud horse’ was no exception: in Lollard texts, simply to mention a cleric on horseback was to sound a note of disapproval. Taking their cue from St Bernard, Lollards elaborated the theme further, exploiting a damning contrast between clerics who rode and clerics who walked. A simple but obvious moral opposition, they claimed, could be seen within the ranks of the clergy in this regard: riders were proud, walkers humble. Another Lollard Ascension Day sermon promoted this distinction when it observed how Christ had said to his disciples: ‘Going into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature.’ In signification that they might truly be humble and going on foot, not proud and going on horseback. For that reason he says ‘going, and not ‘riding’.145

In the light of this Lollard emphasis on the moral pedestrian cleric as opposed to the immoral equestrian one, the detail in ‘The General Prologue’ (ll. 491–95) that Chaucer’s Parson went around his wide parish on foot to visit his parishioners may not be a mere fleck of local colour, a small brushstroke in the general picture of a good pastor striding out staunchly in all weathers to tend his flock. While it does help to do that, it also has precedents, and these most notably in Lollard writings: the detail is therefore entirely consistent with the many other hints of Wycliffism that critics have long recognized to cluster around the Parson.146 In moral, and 145  ‘Euntes in mundum vniuersum predicate euangelium omni creature’. Ad denotandum quod essent vere humiles pedestres et non equestres superbi. Ideo dicit ‘euntes’ et non ‘equitantes’; MS Laud misc. 200, fols 134v–35r. On this sermon collection, see von Nolcken, ‘An Unremarked Group of Wycliffite Sermons’. 146  Swanson, ‘Chaucer’s Parson and Other Priests’, provides a valuable historical contextualization of the Parson, but the literalism of his reading strategies causes him to miss the polemical nuance contained in the detail that Chaucer’s Parson walked around his parish (whatever about his riding as part of a troupe of pilgrims): ‘After all, there is an obvious, though generally ignored, paradox in this depiction of a paragon who does not abuse his benefice and walks around his parish to minister to his flock: here is he, on pilgrimage to Canterbury. Simply to be in that position he must have accumulated a surplus from his revenues; even if only for a short time, he must have abandoned his parish to the charge of a stand-in. Nor is he walking’ (p. 80). For a historical application of this particular Lollard polemic, note how the notorious Leicester Lollard John Belgrave twitted Philip Repingdon, bishop of Lincoln and

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perhaps also in factional, terms, the walking Parson and the riding Monk define each other by opposition. The most noticeable equivalents to this, at the time Chaucer was writing, were Wycliffite. Encountered both in the ‘mass medium’ of preaching, as well as more privately on the written page, the sheer frequency of the ‘proud horse’ theme in Lollard writing suggests that the author of the Twenty-five Articles tract was certainly not exaggerating. The theme had indeed been commandeered by Lollards. And this necessarily means that Chaucer’s own application of it to the Monk (especially in the context of how the Parson, by contrast, normally got about) could have been interpreted by anyone with ears to hear not only as another moment of anticlericalism, but a tendentious one into the bargain.147 A final example of the ‘proud horse’ theme may be cited in illustration of the resilient adaptability of some of the characteristic themes of Lollard thought. These were often supple enough to recombine with yet other favoured motifs. Proof of the Lollard outlook of William Thorpe is available at many turns of the interview one-time follower of Wyclif, on the occasion of the bishop’s visitation in 1413: ‘saying of the current bishop that he contradicts sermons that he formerly preached, because if he did what he preached when he was young, he would go around the country on foot and preach in the manner of the apostles’ (dicens de episcopo moderno quod contravenit predicacionibus per ipsum olim factis, quia si faceret secundum quod olim in minoribus constitutus predicavit, circuiret per patrias pedibus eundo et more apostolorum predicaret; Crompton, ‘Leicestershire Lollards’, p. 40). 147  A few examples of the motif in Lollard discourse are: Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 60 (in the tract Of Prelates): ‘O lord! what tokene of mekenesse & forsakynge of worldly richesses is þis; a prelat as an abott or a priour, þat is ded to þe world & pride & vanyte þer-of, to ride wiþ foure score hors, wiþ harneis of siluer & gold, & many raggid & fittrid squyers & oþere men swerynge herte & bonys & nailis & oþere membris of crist’; Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 92 (in the tract Of Prelates): worldly prelates ‘leuen not as pore prestis aftir crist & his apostlis, but as lordis, ȝe kingis or emperours, in shynynge vessel & delicat metis & wynes, in fatte hors & precious pellure & ryche cloþis & proude & leccherous squyeris & meyne’; Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 149 (in the tract The Office of Curates): ‘hou euyl it is to suffre pore men perische for hungire & þriste & cold, & here curatis han fatte hors with gaye sadlis & bridelis’; Wyclif, The English Works, ed. by Matthew, p. 210 (in the tract How Satan and his Children): ‘Ȝe, prelatis & men of singuler religion, þat taken þe charge to ben procuratouris & dispenderis of pore mennus liflode, cloþen fatte horsis & gaie sadlis & bridlis & mytris & croceris wiþ gold & siluer & precious stonys & suffren pore men & children perische for cold’; Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 520: a petition to king and parliament, that poor men should not be coerced into paying tithes to worldly clerics who go about ‘wiþ fatte hors, and jolye and gaye sadeles, and bridelis ryngynge be þe weye, and himself in costy cloþes and pelure, and to suffre here wyves and children and here pore neyȝboures perische for hunger and þrist and cold’; English Wyclifite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and Gradon, iii, 128, ll. 16–17: bishops are arrayed ‘in hors and meyne’ and are great in their household.

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that he reported taking place between himself and Archbishop Thomas Arundel not to need to depend on Thorpe’s scorn of ‘þe gingelynge […] Cantirbirie bellis’ (on the horse bridles of Canterbury pilgrims) as evidence of it.148 Yet, his choice of this detail, as should by now be clear, is once again consistent with the Lollard emphasis earlier identified. In Thorpe’s case, however, the motif has mutated. This time it is not proud clerics who are guilty, but worldly pilgrims vainly indulging in pilgrimage (another reprehensible pursuit, according to Lollard belief ). It does not seem accidental that Thorpe the Lollard should siphon off parts of the ‘proud horse’ motif for instilling into his general disapproval of pilgrimage. To Archbishop Arundel he reputedly said: Also, sire, I knowe wel þat whanne dyuerse men and wymmen wolen goen þus aftir her owne willis and fyndingis [wish to go thus following their own devices and desires] out on pilgrimageyngis, þei wolen ordeyne biforehonde to haue wiþ hem boþe men and wymmen þat kunnen wel synge rowtinge songis [who well know how to sing bellowing songs], and also summe of þese pilgrimes wolen haue wiþ hem baggepipis so þat in eche toun þat þei comen þoruȝ, what wiþ noyse of her syngynge, and wiþ þe soun of her pipinge, and wiþ þe gingelynge of her Cantirbirie bellis, and wiþ þe berkynge out of dogges aftir hem, þese maken more noyse þan if þe king came þere awey wiþ his clarioneris and manye oþer mynystrals.149

And notice, too, the comparison that Thorpe annexed to his reworking of the ‘proud horse’ theme in the last sentence: pilgrim entourages made such a noise that one might suspect the king himself to be riding by with all the ceremonial music of state. That exact comparison was heard before, in the vernacular Lollard sermon for Advent Sunday quoted earlier.150 So this celebrated vignette of a late medieval pilgrims’ progress may have been painted with more than simply scenic touches: it is dressed in rhetorical tropes customized by Lollards to convey their moral disapproval and which other Lollards would promptly recognize. So would their enemies. And would those Lollards and their enemies have been any the less capable of recognizing a comparable trope within Chaucer’s use of the detail, whatever the original motive may have been that led him to introduce it, twice over, into his portrait of the Monk? To sum this section up: we have seen new ways in which Chaucer’s presentation of the Pardoner, Friar, Summoner, Monk and Parson have networked inter148 

Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. by Hudson, p. 64, l. 1326. Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. by Hudson, p. 64, ll. 1320–29 (italics mine). 150  And compare the inappropriate ‘kingliness’ of clerics criticized in the tract Of Prelates cited in n. 147 above. 149 

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textually with the contemporary culture of heresy, thus enmeshing Chaucer ever more closely than already appreciated within that particular cultural formation. That much would seem incontrovertible. The consequent questions of biographical interest lie largely ahead in the final part of this chapter, and grow naturally from the attempt to grasp as fully as possible Chaucer’s personal relation to the culture of heresy.

Chaucer the Heretic? Where, then, does all this leave the historical Geoffrey Chaucer, quarry of the biographers? Various questions arise. An obvious one — it has dogged Chaucer criticism for many years — is that of his own relation to Lollardy. What, exactly, was this? And related to it is a wider question of what cultural work he accomplished by yoking his writing to radical/heretical discourse. To phrase these questions in the form generally posed in this book: first, in what way was this aspect of Chaucer’s times present not only in his text but also in himself; and second, how was what he wrote present to his times? To take the first question first. It admits various responses along a sliding scale of degree: at one end, the sense in which it has been most frequently asked in the past, would he have regarded himself as a Lollard; or at the other, was he simply an interested, though essentially neutral, observer of the ideals of a group of people who were increasingly being identified and disparaged as ‘Lollards’ by reactionaries within the Church. Some earlier critics supposed Chaucer was committed to Lollardy in fact, and it is easy to see why.151 Indeed, we have seen here further Chaucerian motifs chiming with typically Lollard ones, apparently being matched in some cases only in texts that adopt a more, or less, pronounced pro-Wycliffite stance. (Nor would the fact of the availability of prototypes of certain of those motifs in anticlericalisms predating Lollardy seem sufficient wholly to explain the coincidence, for reasons earlier presented.) Nevertheleses, what can be categorically claimed about the complexion of the historical Chaucer’s confessional allegiance on the basis of this new evidence may be modest, for reasons soon to be made clear, unless, that is, the evidence introduced in the fifth and following section of this chapter can be permitted to alter the picture. On the basis of what has been adduced so far, the historical bottom line, 151 

See Chaucer, The Works, ed. by Robinson, pp. 663–64, for references to early studies of Chaucer as Wycliffite. Indeed, the earliest critics on record to regard Chaucer as a crypto-Lollard were his sixteenth-century editors. See also Swart, ‘Chaucer and the English Reformation’.

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as earlier observed, must be that Chaucer emerges as yet further conversant with the culture of heresy over several years, with radical/heretical sentiment and the turns of phrase in which that sentiment was characteristically couched.152 Any venturing beyond this bottom line must be tentative, and at this juncture must also engage with some other recent opinions on the nature of Chaucer’s relation to Lollardy. Anne Hudson seems to believe that Chaucer may indeed have had Wycliffite sympathies, if only in the minimal and coincidental sense that, since several Wycliffite themes also coincided with general intellectual interests of the time, Chaucer would have been similarly (and coincidentally) interested in what Wycliffites were saying; yet while putting this view forward, she also acknowledges that Chaucer deliberately clothed his Parson, a pilgrim whom most critics would agree was meant to be regarded as a paragon, in ‘a suggestion of Wycliffism’.153 (Here in her analysis, there is a slippage from coincidence to deliberateness.) This second point, that elements in the Parson’s depiction would have corresponded to a recognizably Wycliffite ideal for the priesthood, is surely correct and has been given fresh support in the present chapter although, of course, it is not new: well before Hudson and this chapter, the Parson’s Wycliffite colouring was something that critics had already perceived, if with less finesse and sometimes for reasons not always fully reliable. However, Hudson’s first point concerning Chaucer’s possible coincidentally ‘Lollard’ interests is rather more difficult to arbitrate: how may we effectively discriminate between coincidental correspondences and deliberate ones? Since normally we may not, the value of the distinction is theoretical and of limited practical consequence. If we reflect on Hudson’s minimal and coincidental sense, that common concerns pervading 152 

Consonant with this would be Chaucer’s acquaintance with the text of the English Wycliffite Bible, recently demonstrated by Fehrman, ‘Did Chaucer Read the Wycliffite Bible?’. 153  Hudson, The Premature Reformation, p.  392. In fact, there is more evidence of the Parson’s Wycliffite colouring than Hudson has acknowledged, though earlier critics had laid the ground for its recognition: Ives, ‘“A Man of Religion’”, seems to have been the first to notice the frequency of the appeal to ‘Christ and his apostles’ in Lollard writing as one of its typical collocations (see p. 145; an identification of the collocation as characteristically Lollard was made more forcefully by Loomis, ‘Was Chaucer a Laodicean?’, pp. 142–43). Little, ‘Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism’, claims of the Parson that ‘Chaucer does not seem to be at all concerned about whether or not his ideal is viewed as Wycliffite; instead he simply gives us a portrait of a reformed priest’ (p. 238). Not only do I disagree with this, Little’s argument verges on internal inconsistency when she goes on to speak of the ‘Wycliffite undertones’ of the Parson, and of how ‘Chaucer does not include anything in his description to distance the Parson’s portrait from Lollardy’ (pp. 239–40). If Little is saying that Chaucer facilitates his Parson’s identification with Lollardy, then she has contradicted herself.

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Chaucer’s culture would have caused his interests to converge coincidentally with Lollard ones, nothing particularly remarkable or surprising has been said. Nor does such a view, unless more carefully articulated, amount to much when we can demonstrate that Chaucer has deliberately skewed his presentation of some of those supposed common-property interests in ways that appear to have been characteristically, if not distinctively, Lollard (as in the Parson’s case just referred to or in many of the other cases opened in this chapter). Presumably he did so because he was for some reason content that they should also register a factionally Lollard, rather than vaguely general, topicality.154 If, alternatively, we pursue the maximal sense — nowhere apparently ruled out by Hudson and certainly ruled in by some earlier critics — that Chaucer’s ‘Lollard’ correspondences may signal an active Lollard sympathy in Chaucer himself, we run into difficulty again for a different set of reasons. To anticipate part of this chapter’s conclusion, in spite of his familiarity with the culture of heresy — evidently much closer than hitherto suspected — and his implicit willingness that this familiarity should resonate in some of his writing, it seems impossible finally to decide whether Chaucer was, or was not, even as moderately committed in reality towards certain of the ideals of the Lollard radicals as the word ‘sympathy’ might be assumed to suggest, even if, in order to maintain that indecision, we have to turn a deaf ear to the suggestiveness of the evidence that will be examined in the fifth and following section of this chapter.155 But in any event, there is ample room to move beyond Hudson’s rather rudimentary digest of Chaucer’s relation to Lollardy. More carefully nuanced and strongly argued are the analyses of Lynn Staley and David Aers, who both propose specific detailed correspondences of theme and idea between Chaucer and the culture of heresy, and who in the light of them incidentally gauge his position vis-à-vis heretical discourse. To that extent, their projects resemble that undertaken here.156 The present aim, by contrast, has been to highlight unremarked intertextual affiliations, ones that by that very token seem more empirically palpable.157 Yet for all that they may be thought 154 

And Chaucer demonstrated the fact of his awareness of Lollardy as a factional possibility when he had the Host ‘smelle a Lollere in the wynd’ in respect of the Parson (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 1173 (p. 104)). 155  Though this may not necessarily mean that we should stop trying. Lawton, ‘Chaucer’s Two Ways’, sees ‘uncertainty’ as much as ‘sympathy’ in Chaucer’s attitude to Lollardy (p. 36). 156  Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy; Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church. See too the excellent article by Besserman, ‘“Priest” and “Pope”, “Sire” and “Madame”’, for a judicious assessment of Chaucer’s relation to Lollardy (especially pp. 221–22). 157  Aers also cites approvingly what is in fact a dangerous procedure that he has discovered

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more palpable, the Chaucer that can be derived from them is less consolingly determinate than the Chaucer emergent from the analyses of Staley and Aers. This is a Chaucer who, while not personally aligned with Lollardy, nevertheless used his poetry to ask questions with which Lollards were similarly concerned;158 who also made some of it a site for critical meditation on specific Wycliffite positions, such as the heresiarch’s faith in the expansion of kingly power as a possible solution to current ecclesiastical ills.159 This Chaucer was evidently well acquainted with various Wycliffite issues and through his poetry engaged in their searching interrogation, yet who, in the moment of raising them, at once resisted their final determination, and who, analytical and cool, maintained his own independent attitude. That attitude insulated him from unreflecting adherence either to Wycliffism or to the reactionary Catholic orthodoxy currently being formulated by the likes of the Canterbury archbishops Courtenay and Arundel and their theological fellow travellers. Were the truth known, these analyses, attractively stable and coherent, are perhaps historically correct.160 But the fact is that the range of Chaucer’s writing eligible for the sort of critical investigation in hand in this chapter is extensive and its exact chronology, though unknown, is at least known to have spanned a period of several years. Therefore, any a priori assumption that it should sustain a fixed picture through time of his relation to the culture of heresy has no sound logical basis. As a result, the best we may hope for from the analyses of Staley and Aers, grounded as they are on detailed, though selective, samplings, are focused snapshots of particular Chaucerian moments. As such, while certainly valuable stimulants of debate, their analyses are also necessarily contingent. In illustration of this, let me introduce to their (relatively steady) picture of Chaucer’s relation to the culture of heresy a teasing and complicating possibility, and allow its unproveability also to flag the uncertainty that complicates attempts in Hudson, The Premature Reformation, the mounting of arguments ex silencio (p. 391). This procedure is, logically, perilous. 158  Staley, in Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy, p. 216. This Chaucer sounds a little like one of Hudson’s mooted Chaucers, someone coincidentally interested in issues also of interest to Lollards. 159  Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church, p. 37. 160  To this extent, the indeterminate stance of Chaucer would resemble the indeterminacy that Arnulf of Orléans, for example, observed as the characteristic of poets generally: ‘in the manner of the philosopher he [Lucan] puts forward three opinions, but in the manner of the poet he neither resolves nor affirms any of them’ (Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Minnis and Scott, p. 115).

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to read back from the oeuvre into the life. We know that Chaucer, eventually left exposed to the scrutiny of the new regime after 1399 on account of his former loyalty to the circle of Richard II, seems to have attempted a damage limitation exercise by addressing a soothing poem, the Complaint to his Purse, to the usurping Henry IV.161 In this poem, that echoes with Lancastrian arguments in favour of the usurpation, Chaucer strove to signal his allegiance to the new regime and to underwrite Henry’s claim to the throne.162 Since he was evidently capable of using poetry to give himself a secular political make-over, may he not also have given himself a theological make-over in An ABC? One recent investigation of An ABC declares that ‘this is not autobiography’.163 Perhaps. Yet why sever it from its author’s own self-interest quite so categorically? After all, as we saw, precisely in its manner of introducing theologically transgressive error into the penitent’s persona, this poem is not quite an exact replica of Deguileville’s pieties. Instead, the penitent’s presentation was customized in a way unmatched in Deguileville, which Chaucer was personally responsible for, and which would have been an increasingly familiar and significant penitential pose (his own included?) after c. 1382, when the Wycliffite heresy took a new turn in notoriety following the condemnations issued at the Blackfriars Council in Oxford.164 It seems safer to say that the question of whether Chaucer was also using the penitent of An ABC for his own mouthpiece, as much as for a universal, penitential voice, is one better left open, not closed by the declaration that ‘this is not autobiography’.165 Supposing, for argument’s sake, that it were somehow proveable that Chaucer intended that An ABC should launder him in orthodoxy. He would then emerge, if obliquely, as publicly backing off from a former personal commitment to positions that the 161  Conceivably, the poem’s ostensible annuity-wheedling disguises something more material to Chaucer’s interests: it might serve as a pretext for a blanketing flattery of the new king and a reassurance of where Chaucer’s loyalties now lay. 162  Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, pp. 75–94. 163  Crampton, ‘Chaucer’s Singular Prayer’, p. 202. 164  Crampton, ‘Chaucer’s Singular Prayer’, p. 203, also observes that ‘the speaker [of An ABC] leaves his spiritual vita fastidiously general’. But the penitent’s emphatic error, discussed above, damages the categorical clarity of this view. (While no substantial argument about the date of An ABC can be based on the date of its surviving manuscripts, it is nevertheless interesting that none of these is as early as the earliest surviving manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales. May An ABC have in fact been written not just after the c. 1381–82 suggested above, but very late after it?) 165  More moderate is Quinn, ‘Chaucer’s Problematic Priere’, pp. 136–37, for his delicate balancing of the communal and personal voices in An ABC.

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Church had decreed erroneous, and thus potentially heretical. Such a Chaucer would, of course, be different from Staley and Aers’s, though reconcileable with theirs once the possibility, elided in their analyses, had been acknowledged that the nature of his relation to the culture of heresy might alter through time. Such a putative, formerly erroneous Chaucer might also be thought compatible with the man prepared to valorize within The Canterbury Tales certain salient aspects of Wycliffite ecclesiology — though far less obviously any salient Wycliffite theo­ logy — for undisputably, this is what a cluster of his tales appears to have done.166 So the contribution of the evidence gathered so far in this chapter towards solving the Chaucer-as-heretic conundrum puzzling the biographers summarizes as follows: in certain writings, Chaucer deployed his appropriations of the culture of heresy with versatility, now using them either to manoeuvre his audience into a scandalizing apprehension of the state of the Church, or to remind that audience of what the ecclesiological opinions it already held were (and this within some of The Canterbury Tales where, as previously noted, a broadly sketched ecclesiology is valorized in whose outline certain Wycliffite precedents would have been clearly recognizable); or now using them as the raw material for his rhetorical self-fashioning, either for the sake of game (The Legend of Good Women) or con­ceivably, though unproveably, even in personal earnest (An ABC).167 In brief, Chaucer diverted matter originally of ecclesiastical sensitivity into the domain of a courtly practice and conversation, where theological concerns and topicalities (ones becoming dangerously volatile as the 1390s advanced) were aired to differing effect according to the work in question; in The Canterbury Tales, if the political turbulence attending those concerns and topicalities was not entirely dispersed by their being cast in a fictive guise — and it is difficult to imagine how it could have been — then perhaps that guise might still have been thought enough to veil their author from seeming too closely identified with the issues he was raising.168 In terms of its wider cultural work, Chaucer’s activity in 166 

While an ecclesiology is necessarily the practical expression of a particular theology, it might nevertheless be thought to express that theology far less directly. It seems to me that in The Canterbury Tales, it is not so much contested theological issues that are foregrounded than the ecclesiological ones to which the theological issues, to be sure, have given rise. Broadly speaking, the ‘new sects’ of the Church (to use the Lollard parlance) come off badly in The Canterbury Tales, but not the seculars, the only wing of the clergy having members evangelically sanctioned and of whom Wyclif therefore approved. 167  Their use as analysed by Besserman, ‘“Priest” and “Pope”, “Sire” and “Madame”’, pp. 220– 21, should also be added to the compound assessment given here. 168  The opinion that Chaucer may have used his fiction to screen himself from unwelcome

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relocating matter from one arena to another also resembles a democratizing of access to the intellectual property of clerical culture that the 1380s and 1390s were generally witnessing (partly, indeed, as a consequence of pressure exerted from the orthodox versus heterodox debate to air in English questions hitherto reserved for discussion in Latin).169 In this larger cultural movement, whether more or less knowingly, certain of Chaucer’s writings similarly participated. This, then, is what Chaucer has done, but why did he do it? Motives have been conjectured in the case of An ABC and The Legend of Good Women; conjecturing them in the case of The Canterbury Tales breeds possibilities beyond those raised in Hudson’s elementary account, or even in the more considered analyses of Staley and Aers. Two that seem not to have been broached but that may usefully extend the range currently available are as follows. Conceivably, the Lollard rapprochement in some of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales anticlericalism, a rapprochement that as has been observed registers less obviously in theological than in ecclesiological positions, could have amounted to a literary version of what behavioural psychologists might now call ‘postural echo’, a sign simply of his inclination to play to the anticlerical gallery at court, mimicking its characteristic poses and by a display of kinship signals bonding with its group; after all, given the existence in certain court circles of a degree of what on the basis of historical evidence may more confidently be termed sympathy ­towards the values of the radicals, such moves in some of Chaucer’s writing would doubtless have been well received.170 Perhaps, then, that writing, like a defining mirror, reassured and gratified the target community before which it was placed by reflecting some of that community’s cherished ecclesiological postures. Indeed, attention is persistent amongst critics; both Staley and Aers express it, and similarly Reames, ‘Artistry, Decorum, and Purpose’, where after an account of how the ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ may allude to contemporary political persecutions, she ventures that ‘Chaucer’s exceptional caution in the [‘Second Nun’s Tale’] is significant because it suggests that the persecuting authorities he had in mind were so powerful and so near at hand that he did not dare write openly against them’ (p. 199). 169  Valuable work in this area has been undertaken by Aston, ‘Lollardy and Literacy’; also Aston, ‘Wycliffe and the Vernacular’. See also generally Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience. 170  On the question of court Lollardy, Tuck, ‘Carthusian Monks and Lollard Knights’. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, persuasively imagines ‘the royal court’ as ‘almost a second convocation for ecclesiological dispute’ (p. 127). Thus Chaucer’s stances in this respect further the dialogue at court in which he was well placed to participate and which he encourages elsewhere in his work (and compare again Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, p. 26: ‘The Canterbury Tales are a simulated conversation designed to promote court conversation’).

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rather than conceive his echoes of Lollard ecclesiology as indicating any sincere adherence on his part, or even, after the school of Staley and Aers, as indicating any sincere personal commitment to exploring issues that nevertheless avoided their final determinate resolution, this sort of Chaucer could simply be a club member for whom the belonging was what mattered: the need simply to belong might supersede worrying about the letter of the club rules. And here we might additionally ponder how meaningful any mooted ‘sympathy’ on Chaucer’s part could be that also tolerated at other places within the Canterbury sequence matter that Lollards characteristically despised, or that sometimes permitted itself to collapse in helpless laughter at issues that they took very seriously.171 (Their writings, unlike many of Chaucer’s, are normally written in dogged earnest and are not noted for their developed sense of humour.) Such ‘sympathy’ in Chaucer, if we finally choose to believe in it, is at best intermittent or partial, making him an à la carte Lollard who selected most noticeably from the Wycliffite ecclesiological menu; of course, selectivity is historically credible, for as Margaret Aston has so ably argued, Lollardy in some quarters might be a variable creed.172 Looked at from another angle — for example, as a sort of literary anthropology – such ‘sympathy’ might be thought shallow to the point of evaporation. From this angle, may Chaucer really be considered ‘sympathetic’ in any sense more tangible and accurate than he may be considered either more or less consciously calculating, if not ultimately indifferent? Of course, this sort of Chaucer, unlike the man on the brink of a committed integrity such as the appealing account of Aers, especially, seems to figure, risks becoming less congenial for idealists to believe in. He may even seem a time-server, someone resistent to the consoling myth that would incline to make great poets also into great people. Alternatively, or perhaps complementarily, what if Chaucer’s primary loyalties were to the momentum of writing itself, to an aesthetic excitement pure and simple that fed luxuriously on the political excitement aroused by the culture of heresy but that finally floated free from any determinate moral commitment 171  The dependence, for example, of ‘The Second Nun’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’ (originally a pre-Canterbury Tales composition) upon the Legenda aurea of the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine and upon other, Franciscan-inspired material, was upon precisely the sort of fabulation that staunch Lollards would have deplored. See Reames, ‘A Recent Discovery Concerning Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale”’, and Raybin, ‘Chaucer’s Creation and Recreation of the Lyf of Seynt Cecile’. And in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, predestination, an issue of grave importance to Wyclif a few years earlier, becomes the stuff of jest, as Hudson, The Premature Reformation, has noticed (p. 393). 172  Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition’, p. 9. This view has received support from various critics (though not from Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 382–89).

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either to it or to the cultural stakes it played for? Indeed, such exploitative artistic ingestion might be thought well exemplified in the exchange between the Host and the Monk that prefaces ‘The Monk’s Tale’. There is good reason not to find out-and-out Lollardy in the Host, but even he is permitted to voice radical (if not indeed ultimately Lollard-inspired) opinion. This time what is at stake is the question of clerical celibacy.173 It is conceivable that Chaucer has served us in this exchange with a momentary slice of life, a glimpse into the kind of grass-roots support that at least certain aspects of radical theology had come to enjoy in late fourteenth-century London, becoming now so thoroughly naturalized even to the extent of turning into the stuff of secular, working class banter.174 However, 173 

Comedic interest in the prospect of a married clergy was already in the air, as the continued manuscript copying in the fourteenth century of earlier Goliardic works such as the Convocacio sacerdotum testifies (for example, in MS Titus A. xx). The Convocacio was itself a jesting response to a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 mandating clerical celibacy (The Latin Poems Attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. by Wright, pp. 180–82). The Lollards held a more serious view of the matter, however. Wyclif himself opposed the obligation of clerical celibacy, though he seems not strenuously to have advocated a married clergy (see Hargreaves, ‘Sir John Oldcastle and Wycliffite Views’). Others, however, did (see the references in Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp.  114, 292, and 357–58). One such, the chamber knight Sir Lewis Clifford, had been a member of the ‘Chaucer circle’ (Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 181). In 1402, Clifford recanted his Lollard beliefs before Archbishop Arundel, and informed on certain Lollardi whom he knew, passing their names on to the archbishop. The second of these beliefs recalls, albeit in a more extreme form, the position jokingly entertained by the Host: ‘that virginity and priesthood are not states approved by God, but that the married state is best, and ordained by God. Wherefore virgins and priests and religious people ought to get married, or be of a mind and disposition to marry, if they want to be saved’ (quod virginitas et presbyteratus non sunt status approbati a Deo, sed status conjugii optimus est, et ordinatus a Deo. Quapropter omnino virgines et presbyteri, religiosique populi, si salvari desiderant, debent conjugari, vel esse in voluntate et proposito conjugandi; Walsingham, Historia anglicana, ed. by Riley, ii, 252). Blamires, ‘The Wife of Bath and Lollardy’, p. 241, n. 41, believes that the Host’s view of the Monk as a potential ‘tredefowel’ illustrates that such views were not exclusively Lollard, but this avoids the more interesting question of where the Host may be supposed to have derived his view from. Indeed, the Host is fond of celebrating the sexual potency of clerics; compare his attitude to the Nun’s Priest (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 3447–61 (p. 261)). In 1402, Clifford also recanted the view that religious celibates, by refusing to marry and procreate, were murderers of potential offspring in their seed. Again, this is somewhat similar to the Host’s view of why the Monk should beget children. In the light of the view of Clifford and his associate Lollardi, F. N. Robinson’s note, recycled in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 929, that the Host’s argument was seldom used and that there was little reference to the effect on the population of celibate clergy, needs revision. 174 

Certainly, by the time Chaucer was working on The Canterbury Tales, a theological radicalizing of the general London populace had already been underway from at least the year 1377,

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we should also reflect on the place occupied by such momentary radicalism in the larger web of rhetorical strategies that consititute the Host’s intervention. The Host’s speech is full of imagined role reversals and role projections. His first reaction on hearing ‘The Tale of Melibee’ is to recall his virago wife Goodelief, and wish that she had been present to take note of the patience of Melibee’s wife, Prudence. He then ventriloquizes one of the typical role reversals that Goodelief projects onto him. He has not, she would remonstrate, sufficiently taken her part (ll. 1905–07): ‘False coward, wrek [avenge] thy wyf ! By corpus bones, I wol have thy knyf, And thou shalt have my distaf and go spynne!’

Cut off from his ‘knyf ’ and man’s work, he must handle a distaff instead. This rich rhetorical emasculation is imaged as a moment of comic transvestism, a momentary picturing of an alternative, carnivalesque reality where such reversals and inversions might just happen to come true. And once set in motion, notice the rollicking gamut of role changes to which the Host proceeds to submit himself as the passage progresses. He becomes in Goodelief ’s view (though we remember that he is the one who takes credit for reporting it) by turns a ‘milksop’, a ‘coward ape’; to satisfy her appetite for retribution he must become a ‘wilde leoun’; then, in self-deprecating appreciation of the Monk’s impressive physicality, he pictures himself and all laymen by contrast as ‘shrympes’ or ‘fieble trees’ that produce weedy offspring; religion has claimed the best breeding stock, he says. And his moment of radical/heretical imagining — abandonment of clerical celibacy — is tucked effortlessly into this series of rhetorical transformations and alternative picturings: imaging himself now back in the human world where he holds sway as ‘pope’, his fiat would allow all such mannish men of religion to take wives.175 Since it falls within imaginative literature’s remit to license the site of ‘What if ?’, opening up a realm of alternatives where the discourses and metanarratives by which people actually live in the real world put in an appearance, but are nevertheless allowed to clash and combine in ways that, in the real world, would seem outlandish, then in this unbordered terrain of literary free space, heresy equally becomes a when according to the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, Wyclif ran from church to church preaching and causing a stir (Chronicon Angliae, ed. by Thompson, pp. 116–17). 175  It might also be noted that the prospect of the Host as a lay pope packs a rum Lollard joke, given that according to Wyclif, the real pope was the most just man alive, and thus anyone, whether clerical or lay, was a potential papal candidate, the Host included (see Wyclif ’s views, for example, in Wyclif, Sermones, ed. by Loserth, ii, 352, ll. 35–36 and 353, ll. 11–13).

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trope readily lending itself for acquisition, and perhaps simply for this reason: it is of heresy’s essence that, in common with the practice of literary fiction, it too dares to imagine and celebrate alternatives. This being so, the heretical impulse is necessarily partly allied to the creative one, and may provide the creative artist with additional impetus. As the heretical impulse redimensions itself, emptying into artistic action, its final achieved value in the (plurivocal) art work may inhere less in any authentic testimony that it bears to prior ideological commitment in the artist from whom it sprang than in its power to help stir literary life into the art work being undertaken. That literary life animates a discourse that may fasten the real-life discourses sustaining it into an allegiance to nothing other than itself, and in that supervening allegiance, the historical reality of the author, although it may not be utterly lost, and hence still in principle be worthy of speculation, will be variously refracted. Yet if the question of Chaucer’s personal relation to the culture of heresy may ultimately prove undeterminable (not least because it may have vacillated through time), the range of hypothetical answers to the question may contain somewhere within its boundaries a variegated truth. For that reason the range continues to remain worth exploring. Furthermore, that exploration receives every encouragement from the possibilities that we now turn to.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Pynkhurst? Thanks to research by Linne Mooney, we possibly now have a better idea of who Chaucer’s ‘Adam Scriveyn’ was.176 He may have been the London scrivener Adam Pynkhurst, whose hand has been thought to feature in a number of manuscripts.177 Mooney believes that Pynkhurst was responsible for prestige copies of The Canterbury Tales (the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere manuscripts), and, appropriately enough in view of what Chaucer had said in his squib ‘Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scriveyn’, for certain extant copies of Chaucer’s Boece and of Troilus and Criseyde too.178 Apart from copying by direct appointment to 176 

Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’. Her case, however, is still not proved beyond doubt; see the important reservations entered by Roberts, ‘On Giving Scribe B a Name’. 177  For an inventory of those currently thought by Mooney to be by him, see Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, pp. 112–14. 178  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 650. The possible activity of Pynkhurst in a Boece manuscript in Aberystwyth, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, MS Peniarth 393D (the shelfmark

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Chaucer, Mooney considers that he also worked on manuscripts containing the works of other poets, though this time whether he would have been commissioned by them personally is undeterminable. An important copy of the B-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman has been attributed to him,179 and he may have had a share in copying a manuscript of John Gower’s Confessio amantis.180 According to Mooney, the list does not end there, however, so Pynkurst is not to be regarded solely as a literary scribe, even though the bulk of the copying attributed to him to date comprises literary texts. His professional contact with other, more practical walks of life and their associated characteristic textual apparatuses is witnessed in two dateable manuscripts in which he possibly had a hand. If so, they supply the sort of enviable chronological exactness that the literary manuscripts credited to him do not (even though attempts have been made to estimate the chronological sequence of the latter on linguistic grounds). They are, Mooney believes, the petition of the Folk of the Mercerye, dateable between late 1387 and early 1388; and, again for the London Mercers, a set of accounts, running from 1391 to 1393.181 All of this makes for respectable enough copy: literary work, on the one hand, and, on the other, administrative documents executed, for the larger part, on behalf of a powerful London guild. Yet there may have been another, less ‘establishment’, side to Adam Pynkhurst’s copying career that associates it precisely with the radicalism that this chapter has argued bubbles as a heretical ferment through some of Chaucer’s poetry. For on the strength both of a combination of its palæographic and its linguistic features, there are grounds for believing either that Pynkhurst was also active as one of the two scribes of Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244 — we can call the similar scribe in question here P — or if not, that P was a member of Pynkhurst’s scribal ‘school’ (either in a proximate sense that he worked in close association with him, or in a remoter sense that he inhabited a similar sort of metropolitan scribal milieu). In the context of

394D cited in Horobin and Mooney, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript’, p. 66, is erroneous), was first noticed by Stubbs, ‘A New Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe?’ I am grateful to Dr Stubbs for discussion on this manuscript. 179  See Horobin and Mooney, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript’. 180  First pointed out by Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies’ (although his identity as Adam Pynkhurst had not as yet been mooted; he was known at that stage simply as Scribe B). 181  For his close association over a number of years with the Mercers, see Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, pp. 106–12. His oath of admission in the Scriveners’ Common Paper also falls within this category.

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the present discussion, what is striking about the Dublin manuscript is that its contents are almost exclusively Lollard.182 Were P in fact to prove to be Pynkhurst, the eventuality would confer upon him an incidental distinction: he would become the first identifiable Londonbased copyist of vernacular Lollard writings on record in the history of the Wycliffite movement.183 For, although Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244 may not be precisely dateable, the orthographic profile of P shares more in common with orthographies that Pynkhurst appears to have favoured in the earlier, rather than later, stages of his career.184 P’s spelling system more nearly corresponds to that peferred in the petition of the Folk of the Mercerye (dateable, as noted, to late 1387 or early 1388),185 rather than to the spelling systems preferred in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales (although its kinship even to Hengwrt and Ellesmere orthographies continues to be close, just as would seem appropriate if orthography is to be pressed into supporting palæography in a case claiming scribal identity).186 Of the orthographic choices of P, it might further be said that, as with P’s palæographic features, these choices too could be argued to enter a cline with Hengwrt and Ellesmere. For the greater part, P’s preferred spellings correspond exactly to those favoured in those two later manuscripts. Where his spelling variants against those manuscripts might at first sight seem to disturb a case for scribal identity, the disturbance in most cases disappears on two counts: first, all such variants were also commonly available London orthographies of the period; and second — perhaps most tellingly — several of those same variants 182 

Fletcher, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution’. A critique of this by Horobin, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution’, is dismissed by Fletcher, ‘What Did Adam Pynkhurst (not) Write?’. 183  See Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Book Producers in London in 1414’, for a valuable study of early fifteenth-century activity in London; also, Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380, p. 310, for additional evidence suggesting London’s importance as a place of propagation of copies of the Lollard Bible. 184  Always assuming, of course, that these manuscripts were all the work of Pynkhurst. There may, however, be a possibility that Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244 was copied c. 1389 or very soon thereafter; see Fletcher, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution’, p. 628 and n. 96. 185  P’s orthography also corresponds, although to a lesser extent than it does to that of the Petition, to that of the B-text Piers Plowman, which has been dated linguistically by Horobin and Mooney, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript’, rather early in Pynkhurst’s career, and certainly before his copying of Hengwrt and Ellesmere. 186  Both Hengwrt and Ellesmere are generally now accepted as dating from c. 1400, with Hengwrt copied a few years before Ellesmere; see Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, pp. 113–15.

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were actually used by Pynkhurst in other contexts, as for example when he copied the petition of the Folk of the Mercerye (always allowing, of course, that the petition and the other texts in play were indeed his work).187 In view of these considerations, the (few) major orthographic divergences between P and the later manuscripts attributed by Mooney to Pynkhurst cease to disturb the case for scribal identity. As for the palæographic similarities between P and Pynkhurst, it might first be observed that Pynkhurst, if all the manuscripts currently attributed to him were indeed by him, was versed in the hierarchy of scripts and capable of a range of graphetic choices and effects. Some of these were doubtless conditioned by the nature of the text that he was copying (whether, for example, it was in verse or prose, in Latin or the vernacular) and the relative premium that the text’s status either invited or that he decided to confer upon it. Other of his graphetic choices may have been influenced by the way the exemplar from which he copied was laid out, and yet others may have been the consequence simply of his personal whim. His hand is most familiarly known in its verse-copying capacity: the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales manuscript stands at one extreme of the palæographic cline, ranking highest on the scale of formality and calligraphic elaboration; the other literary manuscripts that he has been argued to have copied would rank somewhere a little further down the scale; and at the opposite end of the cline would stand his hand as witnessed in Trinity Coll. Dublin MS 244, if he and P are indeed the same person. Here, some of the differences in the hand’s appearance relative to Ellesmere (and to a lesser extent, to the other literary manuscripts) may be a function of the more pragmatic nature of Trinity 244: this manuscript is an economically executed anthology of utilitarian prose texts whose general visual aspect, not surprisingly, is correspondingly utilitarian. Nevertheless, in order for the case for scribal identity to hold, characteristic graphetic features must necessarily be present at both extremes of the Pynkhurstian graphetic cline. It can be said with confidence that P shares several such features in common even with that most formal of the products that Mooney thinks is by Pynkhurst, the Ellesmere manuscript itself. If P was Pynkhurst, and if Pynkhurst really was the scribe of Chaucer described by Mooney, his involvement in the dissemination of Lollard texts, given his personal relation to Chaucer, several of whose writings, as this chapter has shown, resonate with the tropes of Lollard discourse, would constitute a remarkably suggestive circumstance. This Pynkhurst was not likely to have failed 187 

A matter far from settled in the view of Roberts, ‘On the Naming of Scribe B’.

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to realize that from the ecclesiastically orthodox point of view, the Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244 tracts were odious, and that by very dint of copying them, he had made himself a party to something that was repugnant to many in the established Church. There comes a point at which it becomes very difficult to believe that scribes were merely neutral transmitters of what lay open in front of them, even if such may have been the case with most scribes for most of the time. Could Chaucer have been the innocent and unwitting patron of someone prepared to copy work such as this? And who, indeed, was the author (or were the authors) of the tracts that Pynkhurst, if that is who P was, was prepared to copy? Who supplied him with them? Even if it were somehow finally determinable that P and Pynkhurst were two different people, the similarity of their scripts and orthography nevertheless seems to corall them together as members of the same scribal ‘school’, in one of the senses of that word earlier defined. In which case, the copying of Chaucer’s poetry (and that of a group of other late fourteenth-century poets) would, by implication, be brought within a similar ambit of the copying of religious radical texts of a sort that orthodoxy considered pernicious.

Radical Perceptions The ultimate answer to all the questions that have just been raised is, we do not know. Nevertheless, were we to credit Pynkhurst’s agency in Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244 we would be left facing a number of teasing possibilities. To be sure, as far as Trinity Coll. Dublin, MS 244’s implications for Chaucer the man are concerned, the curiosity of the traditional biographers may still have to go unsatisfied for the time being. But although decisive answers to all these questions — whether or not Chaucer was either Lollardy’s vocal promoter, its sympathizer, or its committed scrutineer, or whether he was simply a social opportunist who made the right ‘noises’, or a literary opportunist whose writing the culture of heresy helped galvanize — may be beyond our present reach, just as interesting historically is the answer to a question less frequently asked. Irrespective of his own religious inclination through time, whether radical, conservative, or drifting over the years along a continuum between both extremes, could Chaucer have been viewed as a Lollard by his contemporaries, however much it might be supposed that the loophole of fiction let him slip past a personal identification with certain issues to which his writing alluded (and with which his ‘owne scriveyn’ conceivably collaborated)? Notwithstanding fiction’s veil, could any of Chaucer’s contemporaries have perceived him as having been on Lollardy’s side? Or indeed, as having been partisan for it, since in the eyes of the beholder, the line between

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being a side-taker and a fully paid up club-member is likely to have been exceedingly fine. This is a question that also has every reason to pique the biographers, and its answer, self-evidently, is yes, that whatever the reality, he could have been so perceived.188 And it is also conceivable that as Chaucer neared his death, this perception worked towards his disadvantage. But to support this concluding suggestion, we need to return to some ground already tilled by Anne Hudson. Hudson’s attempt to situate and understand Chaucer’s stance and the nature of his relation to Lollardy is evidently also conditioned by her prior assumption of a more temperate climate prevailing before 1401 (the year of the draconian De heretico comburendo, when the Church successfully petitioned the secular arm for legislation enacting death by burning for recidivist heretics). In this pre-1401 period, she says, ‘there were many questions on which it was possible to write or speak without commitment — questions that later divided the “orthodox” from the “heretic”’.189 Again, Hudson’s position is not new; in fact, it sounds remarkably similar to Paul Olson’s, advanced two years before she wrote.190 Hudson’s implication seems to be that issues characteristic of Lollardy could have been explored, even promoted, quite safely during this (relatively tranquil) period without much attendant fear of personal taint from doing so or of risking possible prejudice to life and limb. Without question, party lines are likely to have hardened after the passing of the capital legislation of 1401; De heretico comburendo upped the stakes dramatically, and to that extent, Hudson’s view is justified. But on the one hand, it fails to consider whether any perceived Lollard sympathy in one as socially well placed as Chaucer would have been regarded by the new regime in quite the same way as in someone outside court circles whose views, because they were held beyond the pale of political power, were far less likely to matter; and on the other, her ‘before-and-after’ chronology is not without its difficulties. It risks conveying too black and white an impression of a (pre-1401) calm before a (post-1401) storm. For how comparatively balmy were the months immediately before the time when, according to Hudson’s pivotal 1401 chronology, everything changed and attitudes polarized? The question needs asking. 188 

Although were we to discover for a fact that Chaucer had been a known Lollard sympathizer, his sympathy would have done little to advance his cause after Arundel returned from exile. 189  Hudson, The Premature Reformation, p. 394. 190  Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, pp.  128–29; the only material difference between him and Hudson is his choice of 1407–09 (the years of the draft and issue of Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions), as opposed to hers of 1401, for marking the decisive turning point in policy.

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The Lollards themselves would not have thought that they were. Their writings are often haunted by the spectre of persecutions, some imagined, some real. And Lollards had every reason to be concerned.191 Two years earlier, in 1399 when Chaucer was still alive, Archbishop Thomas Arundel had swept back into power, now vindicated and massively supported by the usurping king whom he necessarily supported in return; the uprooting of heresy was now newly urgent since it was coextensive with the uprooting of treason against an incoming king who was nervously aware that he appeared an arriviste.192 Two years earlier than that, in 1397, the orthodox authorities had made their first push to secure a statutory death penalty for heresy. Two years earlier again, in 1395, the twelve outspoken Lollard conclusions calling on the king to move against a corrupt Church had been publicly posted in London, as earlier noted, during a sitting of the parliament; and as Margaret Aston has plausibly suggested, it may have been the alarm generated by this incident that prompted the prosecution of certain notable Lollards later in that year.193 Thus whatever the life-and-death proportion into which issues would inflate in and after 1401, do events like these not very long before suggest that the period immediately before De heretico comburendo was a time of comparative nonchalance when ‘there were many questions on which it was possible to write or speak without commitment’? On the contrary, already as Chaucer approached his death — if the traditional death date of late autumn, 1400, is correct, De heretico comburendo was enacted but a couple of months after — some of the things that he had written earlier in the decade may have come back to plague him. Paul Strohm has argued strongly for a perceived ‘commensurability between Lollardy and anti-Lancastrian activity’; Chaucer, if perceived as a Lollard, would also have been perceived as anti-Lancastrian.194 But that is no more than his Ricardian affinity might already have prompted some of the new ascendancy to suspect. Even if we go as far as conceding that Chaucer may originally have been unperturbed about making allusions to certain issues, even ones becoming increasingly contentious and alarming for the orthodox party when he was penning them, we should less quickly assume that nothing had changed immediately before his death.195 191 

On orthodox efforts to suppress Lollardy in the 1380s and 1390s, see Richardson, ‘Heresy and the Lay Power under Richard II’. 192  And see McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV, p. 92. 193  Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition’, pp. 22–23. 194  Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, p. 59. 195  Traditionally, 25 October 1400 (Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p.  276).

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So a good case can be made that, even if Chaucer foresaw no damaging con­ sequences for himself in what he wrote precisely at the time he wrote it,196 he may with the benefit of hindsight have been playing with fire. If we wish to persist in seeking a pivotal year when all things changed, then as far as Chaucer was concerned, 1399 seems a worthy candidate. Even if Chaucer had found it possible at court to valorize aspects of Lollard ecclesiology within The Canterbury Tales without risking threat to career or personal safety, by the time of Archbishop Arundel’s return in 1399, that valorization may in retrospect have seemed foolhardy, commensurable as it may now have appeared, to repeat Strohm, with the anti-Lancastrian camp. Times had changed already before Chaucer’s death in a way that would reveal much of the anticlericalism in The Canterbury Tales as something that, if weighed in Archbishop Arundel’s strict scales, would have been found woefully wanting.197 It may not have been ‘worldly vanitees’ alone Other critics have seen the 1390s as a dangerous time for being frank about certain religious views: Lawton, ‘Lollardy and the “Piers Plowman” Tradition’, says that by the later 1380s and 1390s, ‘Lollard sympathizers would have had to make a choice whether to accept or reject an increasingly dangerous label’ (p. 780); and Blamires, ‘The Wife of Bath and Lollardy’, says ‘however much Chaucer wished to gain a hearing for Lollard views via the Wife, he would not have deemed it prudent to advertise this too explicitly (even in the case of a speaker for whose words he pretended to admit no responsibility). He was writing at a time when the risk attaching to lay polemic founded upon “express” scriptural warrant, if difficult to quantify, could not have been minimal’ (p. 235). 196  For some discussion of the constraints placed upon writing theological statements between 1378 and 1406, see Simpson, ‘The Constraints of Satire’, pp. 11–30. 197  In 1464 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, ownership of a copy of The Canterbury Tales was cited as evidence in a Lollard heresy trial. (On this group of Chiltern Lollards, see Cross, Church and People, pp. 22–25.) Hudson, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, has dismissed the Amersham authorities as knee-jerk reactionaries who simply fastened on the possession of anything written in English as a basis for incrimination. But perhaps they had greater cause for alarm than Hudson allows. In the company of certain other texts, whose orthodoxy is far from clear, the temper of the anticlericalism of The Canterbury Tales may have looked amiss at that time and in those circumstances. (And we might recall that radical Protestant reformers in the century just ahead had no difficulty in perceiving in Chaucer opinions that coincided with their own, and praised him for his covert opposition to Rome and all her evils: Swart, ‘Chaucer and the English Reformation’; Georgiana, ‘The Protestant Chaucer’. The other texts owned by these Chiltern Lollards included ‘a play of seint Dionise’, a ‘Myrrour of Synners’, a ‘Myrrour of Matrimony’, a ‘lyff of oure Lady’, ‘Adam and Eve’, ‘sermones’, biblical translations, and other religious works (See Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520, pp. 243–44). The saint play of its very nature is not likely to have been Lollard, since Lollards were not notable advocates of religious drama (see Davis, ‘The Tretise of Myraclis Pleyinge’); also, there existed an orthodox tract known as the ‘Mirror of Sinners’ ( Jolliffe, A Checklist of ME Prose Writings of Spiritual

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that Chaucer was revoking in his Retractions; when it came to ‘the tales of Caunterbury’, conceivably ‘thilke that sownen into synne’ included ones tinged with a guilty anticlericalism and ecclesiology of the sort that the orthodoxy fanfared in the Retractions, had it admitted interrogation on the point, would presumably have turned its face against. So to end where we began, dead authors refuse to lie quietly in their graves. Even as it began by professing its avoidance of the grand project of the biographical Life, the petit récit of this chapter nevertheless recognizes how liable to assimilation into such a project it may be, for its findings are haunted not only by the presence of a certain sort of dead author, but also by the idea of the presence of his place in a certain sort of historical narrative: a ghostly scenario unfolds of an historical Chaucer at the end of his life, watching his world convulse, keeping his head down, suing for favour, reinventing himself in a realignment of loyalties, and doing so, given the momentary unorthodoxies that The Canterbury Tales might be seen to underwrite, with a greater cause for alarm than we have customarily fancied.

Guidance, p. 81), which perhaps corresponds to the ‘Myrrour of Synners’ in the cited list. But certain other cited texts are less clearly likely to have been orthodox: the biblical translations, for example, and perhaps even the ‘Myrrour of Matrimony’; could the latter have been a copy of the Lollard tract Of weddid men and wifis (Wyclif, Select English Works, ed. by Arnold, iii, 188–201)?

Chapter 7

Morte Darthur: The Endgame of Authority

T

he final literary landmark for us to visit is the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, written c.  1469–70 while its author was a prisoner. Which Malory was it, he of Newbold Revel, in Warwickshire, or he of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire?1 Both men are the chief contenders for authorship, each with things that can be said for and against his candidacy, but for the purposes of this chapter, final determination of this question may not be too pressing; the key issue, the ways in which the Morte Darthur would have been present to its age, as well as the ways in which its age was present within it, still remain available for exploration beyond the question of exact authorial identity even though, to be sure, the clinching of that would permit us to imagine more accurately what the Morte Darthur’s exact point of social insertion and inter­ vention was. In any event, exploration itself will be what this chapter explores: it will argue that the Morte Darthur was present to its age as a ‘metaquest’, one capable of bringing an ideological force to bear upon the real world outside the narrative that worked towards moulding that world’s existential outlook.

Desperately Seeking Something By the close of Malory’s narrative, as is well known, everything has unravelled. The glorious King Arthur is gone, and the fellowship of the Round Table, whose

1 

Yet others have been suggested, but these two are chief. The arguments for and against both are conveniently summarized by Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, pp. 170–73.

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like, as Arthur foretold, would never be seen again, is also ‘disparbeled’.2 At the ebbing of the Arthurian world, its changes having been recounted to him by Sir Bors, Sir Lancelot is moved to the question from which this chapter’s exploration could appropriately take its cue: ‘Alas, who may truste thys world?’3 The question posed by Lancelot is rhetorical, calculated to provoke an answer in the reader that is already there: of course, no one may trust this world, for it is treacherous by nature. Long before Malory lifted his pen, the influence of various authoritative late medieval discourses, like the cosmology that proclaimed the transience of all who lived in the sublunary sphere, or Christianity’s reciprocal pose of contemptus mundi, had readied his readers for that glum conclusion. Even the everyday genre of proverb or sententia played its part, keeping notions about the world’s ephemerality and untrustworthiness alive as a stock wisdom on which the routines of ordinary conversation could draw. Indeed, the very form of Lancelot’s expression beckons towards aphorism, for the question that he poses is intended to apply not just to himself but to all humankind, and its globalizing drift from the particular, centred in one person’s experience within a literary narrative, towards a proverbial universal, applicable in the real world beyond the bounds of fiction, is an aspect of Malory’s style that will be visited again later. It ranks as one amongst a range of other contributors to a wider scheme identifiable in the Morte Darthur, aspects of which this chapter will also be concerned to trace. In Lancelot’s question about trustworthiness and its location, then, private, intratextual experience is additionally dimensioned with the status of public authority, having both intra- and extratextual sanction and applicable in both the fictional world and that of the later fifteenth century in which Malory wrote. Its sententious pessimism does not merely appear out of nowhere as a detached philosophical reflection, but as one anchored first in a personal anguish, in one man’s longing to trust, if not this world, because this world, in both its fictional and historically real sense, always disappoints any trust reposed in it, then at least to trust something. And any entire severance of Lancelot’s question from its origin in one particular human experience is also inhibited by the care Malory has taken to amplify the personal, emotional volume that surrounds Lancelot’s asking of it. It is embedded within one of those comparatively rare moments in the Morte Darthur where body language is also allowed to talk: Lancelot ‘threwe hys armes abrode’ before asking his question, thus clasping its universal proverbial 2  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, p. 1162, ll. 31–33 [hereafter represented by the convention 1162/31–33]. All quotations from the Morte Darthur are taken from this edition. 3  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1254/12.

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sentiment within the embrace of a physical gesture at once personally declarative — and conspicuously so, given the relative infrequency of Malory’s use of this sort of detail.4 Furthermore, all this urgency, simultaneously personal and proverbial, condenses within a small room: it comes together within a couple of lines that, in owing nothing to the Middle English stanzaic Morte Arthur, Malory’s principal source at this point, lay just claim to being considered indicative of some especial authorial interest and investment on his part.5 In Lancelot’s question, Malory has bridged the twin points of proof reference that served many a medieval scholastic debate, (private) experience and (public) authority.6 4 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1254/11–12. What exactly was Lancelot’s gesture? It has eluded critical comment, including that of what still remains the best general study of Malory’s style, Field, Romance and Chronicle, and also in the more specialized study of Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative. Perhaps this omission is not surprising when the stanzaic Morte Arthur that Malory drew on at this point is clear that the arms in question were weapons, not physical limbs: ‘He threw hys armys to the walle, | That ryche were and bryght of blee’ (Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 115, ll. 3778–79). Yet there is room to believe that Malory turned the source’s arms (‘weapons’) into arms (‘limbs’) through their collocation with the adverb ‘abrode’, one very commonly applied in the context of the movement of physical limbs (see MED, s.v. abrod(e), subsense 3), and the verb ‘throw’ was commonly used, as it still is, of any vigorous movement of parts of the body. Further, there is other medieval indication of a body-language convention of asking a despairing question with one’s arms outstretched (compare, for example, the stage direction of the fourteenth-century Planctus Marie from Cividale del Friuli requiring Mary Magdalene to start her lament O fratres et sorores, ubi est spes mea? ‘with arms stretched out’ (cum brachijs extensis; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, i, 507; evidence from medieval stage directions was not consulted in Burrow’s study). Observation of non-verbal communication, though rare in Malory, has precedents; compare how Malory registers Balin’s tact when, on encountering a sorrowing knight, Balin allows him space to express his grief by moving away and diverting his gaze towards the knight’s horse (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 86/25–33). This detail is Malory’s own addition to his source. 5  Amongst other things, this chapter will aim to establish empirical underpinnings for certain of the ideas that in the study of Batt, Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, tend to be left identified at the level of theoretical observation or generalized comment (especially her view that the work enacts a ‘narrative search for stability’ (p. 2) or that it betrays ‘implicit desire for, and frequent absence or problematization of, other forms of institutionalization and control’ (p. 35)). 6  The movement between experience and authority in Lancelot’s case would seem to reflect a commerce between these two categories already more widely recognized in medieval culture; for some famous earlier literary instances from Chaucer, compare, for example, the opening of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, or Theseus’s comments on the ‘firste moevere’ and ‘cheyne of love’ near the end of ‘The Knight’s Tale’, or Chaunticleer’s definition in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ of men of authority as people who ‘han wel founden by experience’ (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson; see respectively ll. 3000–02 (p. 65), and l. 2978 (p. 255)). A useful study of the experience-and-authority antinomy in Chaucer is offered by Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction,

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I have dwelt on this moment of ‘authoritative’ personal despair in Sir Lancelot not long before the Morte Darthur concludes because it seems to thematize with especial force the importance to the work of a quest for authority at once privately and publicly resonant, one that assumes some synchronicity between the view of authority internal to the text and that external to it in the world in which the text was received. Yet in the way Malory has undertaken it, it is also a troubled quest. Lancelot’s question, for example, has focused one of the many moments when the confidence crisis that dogs authority generally throughout the Morte Darthur breaks through. This crisis nevertheless helped drive Malory’s writing, supplying not only some of its narrative topics and their treatment, including Lancelot’s question, but also outcropping in a variety of characteristic stylistic choices and decisions. This chapter will examine a selection of these, and trace in his text a network of tropes and formulas in which authority and its crisis were captured and articulated.7 This network, criss-crossing the surface of his text, may be efficiently accounted for as a symptom of the Morte Darthur’s pervasive underlying apprehension about where authority may be found, even as individual tropes and formulas strive in their own immediate local narrative contexts to prove reliably authoritative. Whatever else they may achieve, these tropes and formulas may be argued to flow from a reservoir of anxiety running beneath the surface of the Morte Darthur about authority, about how faith in authority may sometimes end up being confounded, and about whether, behind authority’s various traditionally credited guises and institutions, there may be any pp. 5–22 (see also Justman, ‘Medieval Monism and Abuse of Authority in Chaucer’). Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, finds the experience/authority association unusual, the more traditional one being that between authority (or faith) and reason (p. 13). He also links Chaucer’s twinning of authority and experience with the rise to prominence of experience within the scientific disciplines, especially those associated with Robert Grosseteste and his school; here, experience was commonly appealed to as a valid source of proof. While appeals to experience may have bulked large in that context, they were nevertheless also found in discourses less abstruse than the scientific. For example, in sermons addressed to popular audiences, the familiar tag experiencia docet might introduce an experience-based, as opposed to an authority-based, proof; see Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, p. 155 and n. 28. 7  More of these are available than present space provides scope for. Certain formulas have been omitted from extensive discussion here, like the following: the contrast between the way things were done in the past and the way they are done now; the expressing of a point of view by a number of unison voices; or the appeal to a familiar and consistent track record as a way of justifying a present course of action. The same is true of certain tropes, like the following: prophecy, predictions, and dreams; shows and ceremonies; invocations of the chivalric norm; or the grounding of events in known geographical locales. However, it is hoped the instances selected for investigation in this chapter will prove sufficiently illustrative.

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real stable substance or core on which to rely at all. The final part of the chapter will try to historicize what it will argue has constituted the work’s undergirding disposition in this respect. Should the Morte Darthur’s ‘metaquest’ for authority fail and show the very idea of authority to be unreliable, or, through the failure of authority’s traditionally sanctioned repositories, expose it as being too slippery to instil satisfying conviction, there would be grounds for anxiety indeed. Yet, the work goes beyond this. Anxiety also constitutes a site of trust, paradoxically, since anxiety is the necessary condition of any faith, in this case, of faith in the practical achievability of reliably authoritative points of reference; anxiety about where authority resides is predicated on a belief that authoritative reference points must sometimes be establishable, points from which people both in fiction and in reality can confidently take their bearings. Even if authority’s traditional bedrocks may sometimes afford no absolutely secure foothold — the institutions of chivalry and its power to regulate society, for example, or even those of the Church8 — Malory’s sustained commitment to his authority-quest suggests his equally persevering belief, in principle, in authority’s achievability. And the belief proves to be justified: as will be seen, a source of stable authority does eventually emerge in the Morte Darthur, although it arises in, and is forced upon the author from, an uncongenial quarter. This chapter will argue that Malory has colonized his Morte Darthur with tropes and formulas of authority to the point of preoccupation.9 To dub authority an authorial preoccupation seems empirically justified when some of these tropes and formulas, though matched to a certain extent in Malory’s source texts, do not register there with anything like as much frequency; others, indeed, seem his unique contribution.10 Together, they constitute a web of refrain-like moments 8 

Batt, Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, p. 35. It is therefore interested, as preceding chapters have also been, in resurrecting a dead author, at least to the extent of exploring the historical network that informed his literary self-fashioning. Interest in Malory’s authorial presence, as also in Chaucer’s case noted in the previous chapter, has never been lost from sight, despite modern theoretical scepticism that has decreed that authors are dead things. For example, Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, observes: ‘When we read the Morte Darthur, we see and feel and think with Malory, and because it is a great book, it may tell us more about his mind than we could know about the mind of any other English subject of the fifteenth century’ (p. 171); see also Field, Romance and Chronicle, pp. 142–59, for an assessment of the nature of our sense of Malory’s mind as he narrates the story). Appropriately cautious, however, Field quickly qualifies this, stressing the difficulty nevertheless of knowing for sure that the vagaries of Malory’s mind have been rightly apprehended. 10  This observation is made always under the caveat that we are still not fully certain about what the exact range and nature of those sources were. 9 

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within which the issues of tormented authority outlined earlier reverberate. As such, they deserve recognition for their contribution to the artistic and cultural work that Malory’s writing undertook, and go a long way towards contouring its presence to its age.

Tropes of Authority (1) Let us move backwards in the narrative from Lancelot’s anguished question — in view of the chapter’s opening remarks we might now begin thinking of it as an example of one of the Morte Darthur’s authority tropes — to consider the recent event that has helped prompt it, the death of King Arthur. As we do, it will become clear how cardinal moments of the king’s passing are thematically of a piece with Lancelot’s question of authoritative despair: they ring the changes on the authority trope at another key moment of narrative development. Arthur’s passing, like Lancelot’s nodal question, similarly attracts a cluster of ideas concerned with authority, and these too, like the issues that Lancelot’s question raised, are unprecedented in the sources upon which Malory drew at this point. Sir Bedivere has finally done Arthur’s bidding and returned Excalibur to the waters. Now, having helped the stricken king to the water’s side, the barge with its complement of ladies, each hooded in black, receives him, and Arthur utters the last words that Malory allows him: ‘A, my lorde Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye go frome me and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes?’ ‘Comforte thyselff ’, seyde the kynge, ‘and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!’11

This final exchange is not present in Malory’s principal French source at this juncture, La Mort le Roi Artu, and present only in embryonic form in his principal 11  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1240/29–35. In the stanzaic Morte Arthur, Malory found a template for Sir Bedivere’s question here (‘lord, whedyr ar ye bowne? | Allas! Whedyr wyll ye fro me fownde?’; Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 107, ll. 3512–13), as well as for King Arthur’s reply that he is Avalon-bound (‘I wylle wende a lytell stownde | Into the vale of Avelovne, | A whyle to hele me of my wounde’; Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 107, ll. 3515–17). There is no known source equivalent, however, for: ‘Comforte thyselff ’, seyde the kynge, ‘and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in’. An earlier appearance in the Morte Darthur of a situation in which the defeated knight Sir Palomides tells Sir Tristram that he must repose no trust in him suggests the idea for Malory had something of the status of a topos (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, ii, 746/32–33).

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English one, the stanzaic Morte Arthur.12 Its dialogue seems to be Malory’s invention, and again what emerges from it is its oppressive sense of the failure of trust and reliability, and this in excess of the mere fact that Malory works with a narrative preordained to witness the collapse of the Arthurian society it celebrates. Even were we to turn a blind eye to the self-destructive tendency of the logic — here is a supreme representative of authority in the narrative who authoritatively pronounces himself devoid of authority — Arthur has proclaimed his epitaph, and by association that of the order of chivalry with which his life was identified, in terms of a poignant warning about misplacing trust: the best that can be said of ‘truste’ is that its former location is now desolate and void. ‘Who may truste thys world?’: it is King Arthur’s own trust-lorn situation a little earlier in the narrative that has eventually helped precipitate Lancelot’s despairing question, and thus everything is made to connect. Indeed, leave alone not trusting ‘thys world’, but also who may trust King Arthur himself who, as convenor and focal point of the chivalry that society in the Morte Darthur principally revolves around, was this world’s mainstay? No one may, by his own (conflicted) declaration. And this happens in another moment of narrative climax owing nothing, it would appear, to Malory’s sources. Working towards similar ends, though approaching them from a different route, is the version of the authority trope figured, if less obviously, in the Morte Darthur’s numerous inscriptions, letters, and, especially, tomb memorializations, to which the mention just made of Arthur’s self-declared epitaph conveniently leads.13 The Morte Darthur’s written testimonials to the mini-narratives that have been conducted within its larger narrative frame (testimonials like the salient events of a person’s life carved on their tomb, or letters, sometimes with authenticating signs of provenance and credibility14) may become sites of anxiety in which the Morte Darthur’s troubled quest for authority also finds a natural 12  For the French, see La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, and for the English, see Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 107, ll. 3510–17. 13  The section of the Morte Darthur par excellence in which to encounter authoritative inscriptions is the Quest of the Holy Grail. However, here I will be more concerned with letters and inscriptions that attend the death of characters in the narrative. 14  For an example of the latter, compare the papal Bull entrusted ‘undir leade’ to the bishop of Rochester (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1194/13–17), or his acceptance of the great seal from King Arthur ‘as he was a trew and anoynted kynge’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1194/26–28); as has been noted (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1623), the invocation here of kingly annointing as a guarantor of authenticity is not present in the French source). Again, the bishop of Rochester brings ‘sure wrytynge’ to show to Sir Lancelot (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1195/1–2).

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stage for display. Anxiety is implicit in Malory’s concern that the evidentiary value of these written records should be reliable, that they should be accurate witnesses of what they purport to represent.15 It is appropriate to examine some of these inscriptions and letters in order to establish and illustrate the shared centre of concern from which they all seem to proceed. Sir Patryse, the hapless victim of a poisoned apple whose venom causes his body to burst, is laid to rest in Westminster in a tomb that memorializes his dramatic death and that, like many an actual tomb in Malory’s day, was built as a conspicuous public witness to an ended (and socially edited) life narrative. As such, real-time tombs were important points of reference within the community, providing the focus of a socially cohesive cultural act: their social benefit was that they memorialized not simply the individual but also implicitly celebrated the communal process surviving him or her, notwithstanding the local abeyance of that process that, at least on the personal level of the deceased, they might be thought to represent. Tombs, while proclaiming personal endings (however much their terminal implications were offset by reminders of the commemorated soul’s continuation post mortem), thus also represented a reassuring continuity for the communities in whose midst they were erected. In one sense, therefore, the tomb’s monumental finality was a comfort, since its message was intelligible only in the context of an ongoing social narrative: the erection of tombs presupposed the social survival and continuity of a community capable of interpreting them. Tombs of a literary sort, like those within the Morte Darthur, may reasonably be assumed to have shared to some extent, or at least to have alluded to, this function fulfilled by their counterparts in the real world. But in their literary form in the Morte Darthur, tombs and their inscriptions come also endowed with the status of ‘microchronicle’; that is, in being couched within a chronicle-related genre to

15  This implicit anxiety finds its corollary in Malory’s characteristic way of talking about unreliable acts of representation, or ones considered unreliable, if sometimes wrongly, by characters in the narrative, which will be examined later. Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, astutely observes the reliability of the Morte Darthur’s inscriptions: ‘writing on tombs has a particular credibility in the early books and in the Grail quest’ (it might be added that it has similar credibility in the later books, too), and she notes it as symptomatic of ‘an urge to reinstate immanent significations’ (p. 167; compare her later comments on p. 177). Again (p. 168), ‘Malory suggests an essentialist understanding of the world, against the grain of story material that stresses the arbitrariness of conventional meanings and the accidental and non-essential relations of signifiers to signifieds’.

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which the Morte Darthur itself has been so plausibly affiliated, their chronicling epitaphs doubly participated in that genre’s perceived authoritative status.16 Consequently, Malory’s literary tombs and their associated epitaphs were firmly positioned to share in the respect conventionally accorded to the chronicle as a repository of dependable factual record. And this is what we find happening in his narrative. If the French equivalent to the tomb inscription written for Sir Patryse is compared (in the French, the knight in question, the brother of Sir Mador de la Porte, is named Gaheriz li Blans), the significant difference to emerge in Malory’s version is the sheer onus it shoulders to get things right: HERE LYETH SIR PATRYSE OF IRELONDE, SLAYNE BY SIR PYNELLE LE SAV­EAIGE THAT EMPOYSYNDE APPELIS TO HAVE SLAYNE SIR GAWAYNE, AND BY MYSSE­FORTUNE SIR PATRYSE ETE ONE OF THE APPLIS, AND THAN SUDDEYNLY HE BRASTE. And also there was wrytyn uppon the tombe that

quene Gwenyvere was appeled of treson of the deth of sir Patryse by sir Madore de la Porte, and there was made the mencion how sir Launcelot fought with hym for quene Gwenyvere and overcom hym in playne batayle. All thys was wretyn uppon the tombe of sir Patryse in excusyng of the quene.17

Compare this ‘microchronicle’ with the relatively terse and, had the truth been known to onlookers, misguided account announced by the French tomb in­ scription: 16  Today, of course, we are acutely aware of how partisan medieval chronicles often were, with narratives framed to suit their compilers’ political interests. In such a context, forensic truth would always be a casualty. Yet, there is extensive evidence for a contemporary, official faith in the reliability of chronicles, and for a deference, even if sometimes only in the form of lip service, to their cultural position as authoritative witnesses. For a useful general restatement of the perceived authoritative status of chronicles, see Turville-Petre, ‘St Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles’, esp. p. 363; also, Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 48–49. When a committee was convened to search out evidence supportive of Henry IV’s claims to the throne, chronicles were one of its first ports of call (Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 4–5). And within Malory’s own text, in the Emperor Lucius narrative, King Arthur, requiring authoritative information, declares that he has looked for it in ‘the cronycles of this lande’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 188/5–6). Momentary anxieties expressed over the reliability of chronicles nevertheless seem the inevitable obverse of the trust more normally reposed in them; for a useful study that identifies such ‘chronicle anxiety’ in the context of a medieval English romance from an earlier period, Havelok the Dane (c. 1300), see Kleinman, ‘Animal Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok’s First Fight’. 17 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1059/17–1060/2. It might also be noted that the Morte Darthur’s epitaph for Sir Patryse was written by the Lady of the Lake, a woman of supernatural power and authority.

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ICI GIST GAHERIZ LI BLANS DE KARAHEU, LI FRERES MADOR DE LA PORTE, QUE LA REINE FIST MORIR PAR VENIM.18

(Here lies Gaheriz li blans of Karaheu, the brother of Mador de la Porte, whom the queen made to die by poison.)

Here, apart from its brevity, another discrepancy immediately becomes clear. In the French, the tomb memorializes an untruth — Guinevere had nothing to do with the poisoning — and the French Mort has no qualms about letting that stand. It could do so partly because, at that point in the French narrative, Guinevere had not yet been acquitted of the poison charge, as she had by the time the tomb came to be inscribed in Malory’s version. Testimonials in real life are not always reliable, of course, and the French Mort was content to tolerate this example as yet another of life’s familiar ironies, one of those instances when public report does not square with what happened in reality.19 Indeed, the Mort is full of signs that mislead; they seem to constitute its pessimistic epistemological norm.20 But for Malory, this would not do, for it seems that, at least when it came to the closure that burial publicly commemorated, it was important that the tomb inscription should bear reliable witness. The apple ultimately responsible for bringing everyone to contemplate Sir Patryse’s tomb was poisoned without Guinevere’s knowledge, Malory stressed, and while his general rule was to reduce the content of his sources, here he departed from it. His version of the tomb inscription takes considerable pains to set the record straight in a way that the French was indifferent to, and it has done so with an elaboration that the mere timing of the tomb’s inscription subsequent to the queen’s acquittal cannot entirely explain. As observed, the pains taken about the inscription have even required Malory’s brief departure from his more usual procedure of source condensation. This departure alone may signal the relative significance of what Malory was doing here. 18 

La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 63, ll. 8–10. Colliot, ‘Les épitaphes arthuriennes’; see p. 150, where she identifies tomb inscriptions in the Mort as sometimes being ‘mensongères, perfides’. They are never thus in Malory. As sometimes happens in Malory, though, they too may prophesy future actions: ‘ainsi les épitaphes messianiques de Lancelot: dans ce dernier cas, le texte funéraire n’est pas une fin, une conclusion prononcée sur la mort: au contraire, elle débouche sur un avenir humain, elle est le prélude d’une action fatidique’ (and see Colliot, ‘Les épitaphes arthuriennes’, pp. 158–60). However, epitaphs of this sort are distant from real-time ones. 20  This norm is well explored by Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, pp. 132–42. 19 

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A less obvious tomb inscription a little earlier in the Morte Darthur, but one of no less evidentiary value, is that implicitly afforded to the cowardly Sir Meleagant whom Sir Lancelot, even with his self-imposed handicap of having one arm tied behind his back, had dispatched with a head-cleaving sword blow. Meleagant’s corpse is taken away, and ‘at the grete instaunce of the knyghtes of the Table Rounde the kynge suffird hym to be entered, and the mencion made uppon hym who slewe hym and for what cause he was slayne’.21 Here, we should doubtless infer that Meleagant’s ignominy lives on in stone — the ‘mencion made uppon hym’ — where it can be read aright as a reliable witness to the final stages in a now concluded narrative. The events that have led to his ending have been made publicly available and in a trustworthy form in his tomb’s act of annalistic closure, in its function and value as an evidentiary site of completion. Possibly this treatment of Meleagaunt’s end was Malory’s responsibility; certainly, this was not the way it was treated in the Vulgate prose Lancelot that Malory drew on.22 Other terminal inscriptions in the Morte Darthur likewise offer ripe opportunities for staging this particular version of the authority trope, but they cannot all be dealt with here.23 Three salient examples have therefore been selected for comment: the letter held in the dead hand of the fair maid of Astolat, Elaine le Blanc; the letter written by Sir Gawain at the point of his death to Sir Lancelot; 21 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1140/7–10. See The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. by Sommer, iv, pt. 2, 227, ll. 3–6 and pt. 2, 282, ll. 1–2. There, Meleagaunt’s body is retrieved by thirty knights and carried off in a rich litter; eventually his body is taken to the Castle of the Four Stones and guarded in secret. When later in the narrative King Baudemagus goes to the Castle of the Four Stones and arranges for his son’s body to be buried in a hermitage, there is no mention whatsoever of any memorial inscription. 23  Other examples of tomb inscriptions may be found in Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 72/8–11; i, 72/17–19 (this one a prophetic inscription ‘with lettirs of golde’, where ‘golde’ is guarantor of authenticity/authority); i, 81/1–3; i, 81/27–29 (another prophetic inscription with ‘letters of golde’); and i, 91/16–18 (the inscription on the tomb appearing in ii, 793/3–6, which contains a serpent that Lancelot kills, partakes in the authority trope of prophecy and prediction, and to that extent is of a different order, though a tomb is again the inscription’s locus. It is thus best classified as a species of the authority trope that prophecy and prediction represent). Wenthe, ‘The Legible Corpses of Le Morte Darthur’, usefully identifies the Morte Darthur’s preoccupation with rendering dead bodies intelligible to participants in the narrative. This happens not only through textual glossing of various kinds, but sometimes also through accompanying sensory signs (as for example when bodies emit odours of sanctity). Such signs are capable of supplying their own sort of authoritative gloss. The approach of the present chapter differs in identifying especially the prestige of writing as a truth-bearing medium in medieval culture and applying the possible interpretative consequences of that to a reading of the Morte Darthur. 22 

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and finally, the most complex and interesting of the three, the mysterious inscription found on the tomb of King Arthur. The sombrely bedecked barge carrying the body of Elaine le Blanc, the hapless woman whose unrequited love for Sir Lancelot caused her to pine away, along with the other arrangements that she made for staging the circumstances of her death, turn her passing into a funeral-pageant whose significance becomes fully legible only once its accompanying explanatory letter is read out. This scene is so reminiscent of contemporary traditions of public spectacle, itself often mounted with the intent of enforcing an authoritative point of view and where inscriptions might help explain to spectators the meaning of the dramatic imagery on display, that it is conceivable that Malory’s readers would have recognized some similar relation.24 Elaine’s letter serves as the authoritative key without which her impressive terminal dumbshow would nevertheless have remained incomprehensibly mute. The letter allows her to speak in death, as it were, and in death, her words achieve a final, authentic testimony as ‘microchronicle’ of what has passed and of what her role in events has been. While many signs and situations in the Morte Darthur are either set up to be deliberately deceptive or are seen as vulnerable to misinterpretation, words uttered in articulo mortis, at least, and captured in writing, enjoy a special exemption. They are accorded a peculiar solemn respect, invested as they are with inviolable authority. No one whose death is the subject of sustained narrative interest in this text dies deceived, nor do they come to be memorialized falsely. Last records, whether personally authorized or drafted by another, always prove trustworthy. Malory himself seems to have invented the detail that Elaine’s letter was put into her right hand, fastening it into identity with her corpse as her hand grew cold. Thus he bears responsibility for having conflated, in effect, letter and dead body in their moment of unified and definitive explanation and closure. In the French source, by contrast, the letter is simply discovered tucked away in ‘a purse’ (une aumosniere) that hangs by Elaine’s side.25 If Malory’s innovation here were alternatively imagined for a moment in terms of certain authoritative contemporary written practices typically current 24  Spectacle was an established modality of authority in Malory’s day; more might be done to investigate possible intersections of the Morte Darthur with contemporary performative culture. For a useful essay collection that reflects a rising modern critical awareness of the importance of performance in the formative cultural matrix of late medieval England (though the collection dwells on Chaucerian examples), see The Performance of Middle English Culture, ed. by Paxson, Clopper, and Tomasch. 25  La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 71, l. 30. McCarthy, ‘Malory and his Sources’, errs in saying the letter is in her hand (p. 87). The difference between the French and the English, though on the face of it slight, produces a telling adjustment of focus.

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in the culture of academic textuality and mise-en-page, the letter in Elaine’s hand could be viewed as an explanatory ‘gloss’ on the ‘text’ that was her body; and glossing, since it presumed the glossator’s accuracy and reliability, was implicitly an act undertaken by people who laid claim to authority. (More often than not these people were clerics, or people trained within reach of a clerical milieu.) The very act of glossing in Malory’s culture presupposed authority responsibly and legitimately exercised, otherwise glossing would never have become the vexed issue that it did in certain of the polemical debates of his time.26 Seen from this perspective, Elaine’s letter fulfilled expectation in proving an authoritative gloss, for it accurately elucidated its (corporeal) text, the terminated history whose content it unfolded and authenticated. Though she had no actual tomb that the text vouchsafes us to see, Elaine’s body in conjunction with her epitaph letter became a legible, completed, and crucially reliable ‘microchronicle’. There seems to be a general concern in the Morte Darthur that the authority of writing, whatever writing’s context, should remain intact,27 a circumstance that supports Richard Firth Green’s proposition that writing retained trace associations of authoritative power in medieval England, and indeed also extends the applicability of his proposition late into the fifteenth century.28 In Malory’s case, the imperative that writing retain its authoritative stature undiminished is especially conspicuous when, as in Elaine le Blanc’s case, writing is associated with moments of death. When writing is not reliable — and the fact that that happens but once in the whole work seems an index of its enormity29 — or also, indeed, when those verbal acts of report in which people or events may be ‘written up’ in speech prove unreliable, then writing, and oral utterance, become loci of a corol26  Notably, in the contested use of glossing in debates between orthodox and radical camps within the Church, consequences of which were still being played out in Malory’s day; a short account of those debates, their earlier history, and some of the issues involved, is found in Chapter 6 above. 27  And compare the observation of an almost universal association between writing and authority made by Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 344. 28  Green, A Crisis of Truth; see pp. 248–92 for a useful investigation of these issues. His interest is primarily in fourteenth-century materials. 29  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, ii, 677/25–33 (the letter devised ‘of treson and wyeles’ by the dastardly King Mark) and again at ii, 678/15–23 (again King Mark’s perfidious letters). Note the text’s explicit censure of King Mark’s practice as a perversion. If literary representations of the use of writing to misrepresent a king’s words put such misrepresentations on a level with treason (see Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. 278), how much worse when the author of misrepresentation proves to be a king, thus shattering faith in any notional ideal of a reciprocal symmetry uniting kingly with writerly authenticity/authority.

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lary anxiety whose resonance requires fuller appreciation (and about which more later). Again by contrast with the French, Elaine’s words, emptied by Malory of their bitter reproach towards Lancelot, contribute authoritatively instead towards Lancelot’s endorsement; far from detracting from him, as happens in the French, in the Morte Darthur his prestige as a ‘pereles’ knight is underwritten by her posthumous words, helping at an authoritative moment of death further to raise the edifice of Lancelot’s good name which Malory generally took so much trouble to burnish.30 In death, then, the fair maid is made both to authenticate finally her own history and to annotate authoritatively Lancelot’s excellence. Her exit and the inscription attached to it are contrived in such a way as to supply a local but important network of authorizing moves in this section of the Morte Darthur; viewed more broadly as another permutation of the authority trope, however, these things enter the general network of tropes and formulas that, as noted earlier, criss-cross Malory’s text as functions of its undergirding disposition. Not surprisingly, it is in this and the other final sections of the Morte Darthur where things are falling apart that examples of the authority trope dimensioned as farewell letters or tomb inscriptions tend to throng. Malory’s management of Sir Gawain’s last letter bears a striking similarity to his management of Elaine’s in respect of the indissolubly close wedding of its words and author. While Elaine’s letter, seemingly on Malory’s initiative and owing nothing to his sources, was physically identified with her body by being fastened within her dead hand, so Gawain’s letter, again on a similar initiative, entered a like liaison: this was a letter written partly in Gawain’s own heart’s blood.31 Thus letter and author were again uniquely made by Malory to conflate here, just as they were in Elaine’s case. The letter was Gawain’s authoritative metonymic proxy, a Gawain now clearsighted and authentically reporting those parts of his history that mattered in the current circumstances. Thus like Elaine’s, his letter too constituted an authoritative statement, a reification of Gawain’s personal essence in written form in which trust could be reposed. Indeed, the Morte Darthur seems generally to subscribe to, or at least to strive to uphold, this touchingly naïve confidence in the reliability of things written. And yet, the ‘fact’ of Gawain’s letter also happens to be prefaced with one of Malory’s notoriously baseless appeals to the legitimating authority of his 30 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1096/28–35. If readers find themselves man­ oeuvred into feeling regret that Lancelot was unable to return Elaine’s affection, his inability nevertheless entails no recrimination against him; rather, it redounds to the wider sense of tra­ gedy, to a general regret at how things might otherwise have turned out. 31  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1231/8–1232/10.

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‘Freynshe booke’.32 There, while Gauvain’s farewell speech to Artu would certainly have provided a rough template for some of what Malory composed, no letter as such was to be found.33 That Malory should have been prepared to manipulate the authority of his ‘Freynshe booke’ in order to bolster his readership’s confidence in the authority of his own report, a report that his narrative fully vindicates as warranting trust, implicates him in contradictions surrounding the issue of authority that his writing sometimes more effectively courts than resolves, but by which it can nevertheless be efficiently propelled.34 If it be the case that on occasion the authority trope in Malory merely comes down to that, a rhetorical product available for opportunistic use by an author seeking credence, then authority does not invariably reside, as the dominant ideology of the late fifteenth century might wish people reassuringly to believe, in a disinterested, external point of reference to which appeal can be made. Rather, such authority may merely be an ‘authority effect’, the product of an author’s own literary contrivance. Who may trust this world, or King Arthur, or even, at moments like this, the authorizing Sir Thomas Malory himself ? Perhaps Malory wanted to have it both ways, now honouring the dominant ideology’s standard projection of authority as dependably attaching to certain external points of reference,35 and now sometimes yielding to the temptations of pragmatism, taking authority into his own hands, while maintaining a pretense of its objectivity — ‘as the French book sayeth’ (when the truth is that sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t).36 Although, as Peter Field has shown, Malory delivered in his ‘unweary32 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1231/7. La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 194, ll. 2–18. 34  Admittedly, this view rests on a presumption that Malory has not simply misremembered his source. Yet there are other moments in his text when it is perfectly clear that he was prepared to credit his sources with providing material that he appears to have introduced himself. Another way of looking at what seems his cavalier deference to his sources is that he may have imagined himself as authentically transmitting their spirit, if not their letter. In this way he may have justified to himself what he was doing. Be that as it may, an authorial liberty has been taken. 35  A good example of this ideology analogously contouring the thought of one of Malory’s contemporaries is afforded by the chronicler John Capgrave. His text The Solace of Pilgrimes, written c.  1450–52 and shortly after a trip to Rome, is alive to the weight and claims of experience and authority. He says his first priority was to draw on written sources: ‘I schal not write but þat I fynde in auctores — as is […] writyn in autentik bokes’. But he also relies on his personal experience, ‘þat I sey with eye’, writing ‘as fer forth as our rememberaunce may atteyne’. Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, ed. by Mills, ‘Author’s Preface’, pp. 1–2, also pt. 2, chap. 6, p. 83, and chap. 13, p. 96. For a recent study of the Solace, see Lucas, ‘An Englishman in Rome’. 36  It did, for example, at Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1194/15–16 (compare 33 

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ing factual style’ a ‘definite sense of history which is ipso facto unalterable’,37 or to gloss this, the sense of an authoritative history which is ‘out there’ as ‘given’, in practice, whenever Malory personally authorized authority, as he seems to have been doing here, he wrote an anxiety into his authorial position in contradicting, however momentarily, the prevailing ideology that revered authority as an objective phenomenon, the ideology to which, elsewhere, he was also prepared to defer, not least when conveying a ‘definite sense of history which is ipso facto unalterable’. While a mystique of trust in the authenticity of the written word may persist in the world that Malory evokes — witness the dependable letters discussed earlier — it is in danger of being exposed as precisely that, a mystique, and a naïve one into the bargain, unless the author was prepared to buy his trust in it at the price of turning a blind eye to what with his other hand he was also doing. It may be that, having invented a letter for Sir Gawain, Malory passed over as superfluous the further opportunity to record the tomb inscription that the French Mort would have afforded him.38 But he did not decline to linger over the question of the death of King Arthur, and here to record a tomb inscription for which the French had no parallel, the mysterious epitaph ‘HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS ’.39 As with the passing of Elaine le Blanc and Gawain, so yet again here, Malory’s personal initiative came to the fore in the way he finally chose to present the episode. In fact, the presentation of the king’s passing in the Morte Darthur moved Malory to one of his rare moments of direct self-representation, causing him to break cover. 40 the note on these lines in Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1622) or at iii, 1217/12–13 (compare La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 172, ll. 6–19), and it apparently did not (for example, at Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1190/17, here, a relatively brief passage in the stanzaic Morte Arthur seems to be the source). This latter case is an example of Malory inventing authority (unless he was simply careless in recollecting the English source as a French one). The habit of inventing authority was not, of course, Malory’s monopoly, and is found more widely. Compare the mid-fifteenth-century romance in Camus, L’Histoire d’Olivier de Castille et Artus d’Algarbe, pp. 985–1087), which appeals to the Recueil des Croniques of the chronicler Jean de Wavrin, composed earlier in the fifteenth century, to authenticate an apparently fictional event at the end of Chapter 49. I am indebted to Elizabeth G. Williams for drawing my attention to this. 37  Field, Romance and Chronicle, p. 145. 38  La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 194, ll. 15–16. 39  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1242/29. 40  For useful analysis of Malory’s indirect insinuation of his authorial presence into his text, see Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, pp. 177–84.

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He represents himself as an author on a quest for historical accuracy and authority among his sources, as he strives to ascertain the truth of what really happened. What seems to have stimulated his self-inscription in his text and into its wider project of authority-quest is this sense of powerless entanglement, of an author lost in the web of sources. He conveys the impression of moving among various authorities, but what sits awkwardly with him is the fact that on this important question his authorities do not entirely agree, nor indeed do they all exist in written form. For if his ‘som men say’/‘many men say’ ascription of the legend of Arthur’s mysterious return be taken at face value, the legend also circulated orally, and if scribal variation in the written account of an event is likely to transmit confusion, how much more embroilled in variants will the Chinese Whispers of oral transmission be? Malory’s self-representation is inflected with a sense of earnest endeavour, of an author struggling for accuracy: ‘Now more of the deth of kynge Arthur coude I never fynde’.41 But on this question of Arthur’s passing the sources, written and oral, have let him down because they return contradictory answers.42 When authorities collide, often the felt need of the chronicler will be to try to reconcile them, if not to arbitrate between them, otherwise uncertainty remains and a hiatus yawns open where no stand can be taken.43 This makes a depressing prospect for a chronicle writer when his very project of chronicling urges authoritative closure upon him. If nature abhors a vacuum, the chronicler’s corresponding abhorrence may be caused by a vacuum of authority. But in intervening in the reconciliation of, or arbitration between, discrepant sources, the chronicler will necessarily arrogate authority himself in arbitrating between the differences that he has encountered. Thus Malory too arrogated authority at this point of his narrative simply by arbitrating between what the books in front of him said and what he had also heard men speak about. Essentially, his sources either told him that King Arthur was dead, or that he was mysteriously 41 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1242/15. My italics. For a convenient summary of the various anterior traditions about Arthur’s passing, see Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’. 43  This generally seems to hold (compare, for example, John Lydgate’s unequivocal stance noted below), notwithstanding the Brut chronicle’s tolerance of uncertainty when it says of Arthur’s supposed death: ‘Arthure himself was wondede to þe deth, but he lete him bene born in a liter to Auyoun, to bene helede of his wondes; and ȝitte þe Britons supposen þat he leueþ in anoþere lande, and þat he shal come ȝit and conquere al Britaigne; but certes þis is þe prophecie of Merlyn: he saide þat his deþ shulde bene dotous; and he saide sothe, for men þerof ȝitte hauen doute, and shal for euermore, as me saiþ, for men weten nouȝt wheþer þat he leueþ or is dede’ (Brut, ed. by Brie, i, 90, ll. 18–25). 42 

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alive somewhere and awaiting a future return. In arbitrating between these traditions, the stand Malory took is clearly identifiable (even though it has caused some modern critics difficulty).44 It was as follows. In Malory’s view, King Arthur was dead. He rejected the tradition of mysterious survival (the ‘Breton hope’), as indeed the poet John Lydgate also had only a generation earlier. 45 Yet, he welcomed the palliation of mortality implicit in the survival tradition in so far as he was happy to emphasize the king’s dying as Christian dying; here, survival was assured in the sense that Arthur had now ‘chaunged hys lyff ’.46 Through using that particular expression, Malory claimed Christian dying for Arthur in the way that Christian dying was being referred to in contemporary vernacular devotional manuals, where death might characteristically be described as a ‘changing of life’. These manuals provide an explanatory context for Malory’s phraseology that critics have overlooked.47 Perhaps it was his awareness of the sheer strength of the alternative survival legend that prompted him to reach for this reconciliation and compromise; after all, by his own admission the legend of Arthur’s future return was well known and so could not easily be ignored.48 Thus Malory found himself manoeuvred into the anxious position of authoritative arbiter. Obliged to chose his ground, by exposing his act of deliberation and its invented synthesis he nevertheless imperilled his own voice’s authority; he exposed it to the risk of appearing solipsistic, an authority that was merely relative, even if it tended to 44  For example, Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, p. 175, ‘The final fate of Arthur is a matter on which Malory will not commit himself ’, or Wenthe, ‘The Legible Corpses of Le Morte Darthur’, pp. 134–35, ‘Malory himself concludes ambiguously that Arthur “chaunged hys lyff ” […] with no certain statement that the change in Arthur’s life was death’. 45  Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. by Bergen, pt. 3, p. 910, ll. 3109–22. 46  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1242/27. 47  Fletcher, ‘King Arthur’s Passing in the Morte Darthur’. It might incidentally be noted that, having sided with the tradition that turned its back on the ‘Breton hope’ in holding that Arthur had indeed died, Malory had aligned himself with various contemporary vernacular chroniclers (and also with the poet John Lydgate, as earlier mentioned); compare also, for example, the fifteenth-century Abbreviation of Chronicles of John Capgrave (Capgrave, ‘Abbreuiacion of Cronicles’, ed. by Lucas, p. 69, ll. 19–22), or the mid-fifteenth-century chronicle of John Hardyng (for a comparison of Hardyng’s treatment with the Brut version and others, see Moll, Before Malory, p. 174). Both depend ultimately upon the French Mort, which specifies Arthur’s burial in the Black Chapel (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 227, ll. 2–8). These chroniclers may be added to the list of those named in Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’. 48  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1242/22 (‘som men say’) and 1242/27 (‘many men say’).

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side with one pre-existing body of opinion on Arthur’s fate (namely, that Arthur had indeed died). The anxiety latent in the relative isolation of Malory’s voice as it reached towards an individual negotiation of the variant traditions would have been all the greater if the survival legend had a more powerful momentum driving it than critics have customarily imagined. If so, it would have been all the more formidable for Malory to reckon with, while also explaining his need to name it explicitly as something that ‘many men’ talked about. Where, then, did this survival legend, encoded in the only tomb epitaph in the Morte Darthur left in Latin, a language of authority in its own right, originate, and to what extent might we be justified in reappraising our sense of its former power? Definitive tracking of something orally transmitted to its point of origin is seldom likely to be fully successful, but it may be possible to contribute a few further explanatory notes towards the genealogy of Arthur’s tomb inscription. These indeed confirm how influential the survival legend had actually become by Malory’s day, an influence already hinted at in his felt need to acknowledge the tradition’s existence. And we will see how through acknowledging it, Malory inscribed himself in that very place that his text was in such a variety of ways starting to make inhospitable even as it longed for it not to be so, the place of stable authority.

Once and Future Kings and their Progeny It has generally been supposed that the Latin inscription on King Arthur’s tomb was borrowed from another English vernacular source that Malory had occasion to use, if less extensively than he used the stanzaic Morte Arthur.49 This was the alliterative Morte Arthure, composed in the north Midlands, possibly c. 1400.50 Its text was certainly known to Malory, and in its unique extant manuscript, copied 49 

Lumiansky, ‘Arthur’s Final Companions in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, esp. pp. 9–10. Benson, ‘The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, though Field, ‘Morte Arthure, the Montagus, and Milan’, considers a date as early as 1375 possible (p. 113). Mary Hamel (Morte Arthure, ed. by Hamel, pp. 53–58) essentially accepts Benson’s dating of the poem and has extended its terminus ad quem to 1402–03. Benson makes a good case for considering certain details of the poem prompted by circumstances surrounding the deposition of Richard II in 1399; without going as far as to suggest that the Morte Arthure is a roman à clef, he also finds hints of Richard II in Modred’s presentation and hints of Henry IV in Arthur’s. For a recent investigation of possible liaisons between the poem and its times, see De Marco, ‘An Arthur for the Ricardian Age’. 50 

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c. 1440 by Robert Thornton, the epitaph Hic jacet Arthurus rex qondam rexque futurus is added immediately after the alliterative Morte Arthure’s last line. However, since inspection of the manuscript reveals that the hand copying the epitaph was not Thornton’s but that of a subsequent, if near contemporary, scribe, this scribal supplement raises certain questions.51 First, there is room to doubt whether the epitaph was ever intrinsic to the alliterative Morte at all; since it seems to be a later addition in another hand, it is even conceivable that it was not present in Robert Thornton’s alliterative Morte exemplar. It could have been supplied by the subsequent scribe simply on the basis of his personal reminiscence of a tradition that reading about King Arthur’s death in this section of the manuscript recalled to his mind. Second, although the epitaph might be thought to serve Arthur’s career and character in the alliterative Morte with a convenient narrative closure, it hardly serves the alliterative Morte itself with one, because the narrative of this, like that of the stanzaic Morte Arthur, or indeed, of Malory’s own work, extends well beyond Arthur’s death. Thus, were one to suppose the epitaph original and integral to the alliterative Morte, its somewhat inappropriate position at the end of that text would be difficult to explain. It is easier to believe that the appearance of the epitaph in the Thornton Manuscript reveals a scribe annotator who was independently aware of it.52 If so, this would incidentally support what Malory’s reference to the epitaph similarly seems to imply, namely, that it was currently ‘in the air’.53 If a clearly identifiable point of documentary origin for the Malorian epitaph and its attendant matter is beyond reach (although, as will soon be seen, there exists another early written analogue, hitherto unacknowledged, for the rex futurus half of it), the next best thing might be to locate its origin in an established dis51 

The Thornton Manuscript, intro. by Brewer and Owen, fol. 98v. Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’, p. 67, considers the epitaph to be probably also in Thornton’s hand. However, I follow Erik Björkman (Morte Arthure, ed. by Björkman, p. 11) in believing the hand to be that of a subsequent scribe (though of one not quite so far removed in time from Thornton as Björkman seems to have supposed). 52  Some support for this possibility may derive from the fact that the first recorded instance of the Hic jacet epitaph is not in the Thornton copy of the alliterative Morte, but in the short vernacular metrical chronicle Arthur uniquely extant in Longleat, MS 55 (the Red Book of Bath), a manuscript compiled between 1412 and 1428; for this date, see Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of MSS Containing ME Romances, p. 232. Arthur is edited by Furnivall, Arthur; see p. 19, l. 624. 53  Incidentally, the hand of the epitaph, if a little later than Thornton’s, seems contemporary with Malory in dating to the middle of, or early in the second half of, the fifteenth century. See Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’, p. 76.

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course, one in which any putative point of documentary origin may itself have been implicated.54 One such discourse emerges as a plausible candidate: political prophecy. Political prophecy was a genre existing not only in written form but also circulating orally as rumour and political gossip.55 The genre, of course, was entrenched long before Malory — for example, certain passages in William Langland’s Piers Plowman spring to mind in this regard56 — but at the beginning of Malory’s century, the ideology wars conducted by the Lancastrians during their campaign to consolidate their usurpation led them to colonize the genre,57 and they generated some striking analogies to the Arthurian epitaph’s claims. If we examine certain of the political prophecies circulating during this troubled time around the year 1400 when Richard II was being written out as king and Henry IV written in, we find in them plentiful evidence of the absorption of the popular imagination both with ideas of a once and future king and with ideas of a king to come who will win back the Holy Land (along with the lost territories in Normandy and the Aquitaine).58 Since political prophecy, enjoying both written and spoken existence, was an amphibious genre, it was liable to prove powerfully constitutive of contemporary thought across a range as wide socially as geographically; so pervasive a presence was it that it might reach a very wide audience indeed. 54 

The documented antecedents or congeners of Rex quondam, rexque futurus are complex. Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’, pp. 69–70, notes the appearance of the line Rex fuit Arthurus rex est post regna futurus, evidently a witness to a cognate survival tradition couched in terms approaching those of the epitaph, as the incipit of a poem appended to the account of the death of King Arthur in the Chronicon de Monasterio de Hailes (c. 1300). This poem ‘is at least fifty years earlier than the earliest possible date for the text of the English metrical chronicle Arthur (which Barber, ‘The Vera historia de Morte Arthuri’, dates to c. 1360, although there seems no reason to suppose that a date a generation later, c. 1400, could not also serve (p. 67)). Thus something approaching the content of the epitaph found in Arthur, at the end of the alliterative Morte, and then in Malory, was already in existence c. 1300. The Hailes poem perhaps exhibits the first recorded trace of it. 55  Aspects of the culture of political gossip are reflected in several of the texts assembled in Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’. For a valuable general account of the genre, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs. 56  See Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. by Schmidt, i, 136 (B.iii.323–30); i, 314 (B.vi.320–29); and i, 522 (B.xiii.152–57). 57  See especially Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 1–32. 58  The notion of a once and future king, of course, is not new at this time, but is currently being refashioned in political contexts. It is the conjunction of Malory’s epitaph content with his account of the traditions surrounding Arthur’s death that seems to link him with the early fifteenth-century matrix, not both of these elements singly and in isolation.

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The instances of it that are of nearest present concern are the political prophecies with which discussions of the circumstances surrounding the coronation of Henry IV were textured, and general talk about the idea of a rex futurus at the beginning of the fifteenth century — whether that future king were Henry, whose propaganda machine c. 1400 was working hard to convince subjects that he was king by a prophesied destiny, or even his deposed predecessor Richard II, whose shade continued to haunt the new regime in rumours that he was still alive and waiting in the wings to return one day and claim his throne. A legend concerning an ampule of holy oil, supposedly delivered by the Virgin to Thomas Becket while he was in exile in France, and to be used to annoint the fifth king of England from the one then reigning (that is, Edward II, fifth in succession after Henry II), is first on record during Edward II’s reign.59 It appears that Edward wanted to avail of the benefits of this recently discovered miraculous oil, since it had been told to him that his political misfortunes directly stemmed from his not having been annointed with it at his coronation. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Lancastrians revisited and refurbished the holy oil legend in order to help legitimate the claims of the usurping Henry IV, and it is into their version of it that the expression rex futurus seems first to have been intruded.60 As a document from the early part of the new reign expressed it: there are future kings of the English who, annointed with this unction, will be good men, fighters for the Church.[…] Indeed there is a king who is to come [rex futurus] who, after annointment with this unction, will retrieve without force thelands lost by his forebears, that is, Normandy and the Aquitaine. This king will be the greatest of kings and he it is who will reclaim many churches in the Holy Land and will put to flight all the pagans from Babylon and have holy churches built there.61

The inconvenient bit in the earlier form of the prophecy, from the Lancastrian point of view, about the fifth king from the one then reigning and which made it applicable to Edward II, has here been conveniently airbrushed. Now the prophecy floats free, waiting for some other king to claim it. The pro-Lancastrian 59 

In a letter of Pope John XXII to Edward II, 2 June 1318; English Coronation Records, ed. by Legg, pp. 169–70. 60  While the actual words rex futurus did not appear in the papal letter of 2 June 1318, it necessarily implied the concept of a rex futurus. 61  English Coronation Records, ed. by Legg, pp. 169–70: ‘sunt autem reges anglorum futuri qui ista vnccione vngentur benigni et pugiles ecclesie erunt.[…] Est etenim rex futurus qui post ista vnccione vngetur qui terras a parentibus amissas videlicet Normanniam et Aquitaniam recuperabit sine vi. Rex iste maximus erit inter reges et est ille qui recuperabit multas ecclesias in terra sancta et effugabit omnes paganos de Babilonia, et ibidem plures ecclesias sanctas edificari faciet.’

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chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who also worked up the legend in his Historia anglicana, maintained that the oil was discovered by a holy man who gave it to Henry, duke of Lancaster, while Henry was waging war abroad on behalf of Edward III. Henry later gave it to the king’s son, Prince Edward, against the day of his own eventual coronation and royal annointing (which his premature death, of course, forestalled). The oil was then locked securely in a chest in the Tower of London, and lay there more or less forgotten until the time of Prince Edward’s son, Richard II. In 1399, says Walsingham, Richard happened across it, read the prophecy attached to it, and sought to have himself annointed with it. According to Walsingham, Richard asked the archbishop of Canterbury to oblige. He refused, saying that Richard’s former coronation annointing was sufficient and ought not be repeated.62 Richard then carried the oil about with him, and when he returned from Ireland later in the year, he handed it up at Chester, declaring that he now knew that his annointment with it was not after all God’s will, but that it should be reserved for another. It was then kept close until the coronation of Henry IV who, Walsingham stressed, ‘is the first king of England annointed with a liquid of such worth’ (primus Regum Angliae unctus est tam pretioso liquore).63 Thus through a Lancastrian hijacking the story of the holy oil and its miraculous properties was reserved for Henry alone, making him the first beneficiary of the prophecies associated with it. In the story’s retelling Henry, in effect, had proved to be the rex futurus. But in the deposed King Richard there now existed a redoubtable rex quondam, whom countervailing rumours had also begun promoting as a rex futurus in his own right: in 1402, Henry’s new administration was alarmed to note that ‘foolish persons’ were putting it about that Richard was alive in Scotland, and messages were sent to every county announcing severe punishments for anyone proclaiming such views. So current was the rumour that it had even been heard circulating in Henry’s own royal household. Treason trials of 1402, as Paul Strohm has noted, ‘repeatedly document the rumor’s propagation’.64 These vigorous traditions of political prophecy early in the fifteenth cen­tury, then, depended upon a matrix of key elements that seem still to echo in Malory even though they do so some two generations later: a king to come who, amongst his other achievements, would win back the Holy Land (compare Malory’s report that the returned King Arthur ‘shall wynne the Holy Crosse’); plus the actual 62 

Walsingham, Historia anglicana, ed. by Riley, ii, 239–40. Walsingham, Historia anglicana, ed. by Riley, ii, 240. 64  Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, p. 107. 63 

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collocation rex futurus (matching the second half of King Arthur’s tomb inscription); and in the countervailing rumours surrounding the dead King Richard, that he was in fact alive and abiding a time to return, an exact correspondence to the notion of a once and future king that Arthur’s tomb inscription similarly proclaimed. Therefore it may have been content like this, once current in the discourse of political prophecy c. 1400, that had been transfused into opinions that two generations later Malory said ‘many men’ held concerning King Arthur.65 Just as English monarchs had long been known to cultivate Arthurian associations for themselves and their enterprises,66 so some of the content of the Arthurian literary tradition itself may have crystalized under the pressure of real-time royal political propaganda.67 In this case the permeable interface of life and literature may have located in the genre of political prophecy, where a fluid commerce of reality and fiction stocked the popular imagination with content at once political and literary. If the rex quondam, rexque futurus idea had really fed upon so powerful a discourse, it would help explain Malory’s evident need to reckon with it, even if the immediate political topicality of these ideas c. 1400 had doubtless faded by the time Malory was writing. Nevertheless, that former topicality would have given those ideas added impetus; they would not have needed to retain all their earlier topical significance in order to continue enjoying the wide circulation that this significance would originally have ensured. They too may have ‘changed their life’, dissociated from an earlier historical moment and living now instead chiefly as a set of evocative, prophetic propositions readily assimilated by the romance genre. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, the epitaph enshrining the rex quon­ dam, rexque futurus idea spoke from a position in an alternative authority base opposed to that which grounded some of Malory’s other sources, obliging him 65  For this suggestion to work, it must necessarily assume some commerce between the content of political prophecy and that of certain of the traditions of medieval romance. Precedents for such commerce, however, are not far to seek (compare for example the prophecies of Merlin, political in drift but uttered by a character of romance literature). It must also assume the longevity of orally transmitted material, though that is a circumstance so frequent as hardly to require illustration. 66  Perhaps from as early as the reign of King Stephen, when one of the manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae was dedicated to him around 1136, and certainly from the reign of Henry II; Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, pp. 114–15. 67  For a recent investigation of precisely one such imprint of history on the Arthurian literary tradition, compare also Cooper, ‘Lancelot, Roger Mortimer and the Date of the Auchinleck Manuscript’.

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to negotiate between their rival sets of claims. And this undertaking brought an additional burden, since the explication of political prophecy was traditionally more the prerogative of some member of the learned clerical class than it was of a knight, whether of Newbold Revel, Papworth St Agnes, or anywhere else. Malory’s intervention may thus also have constituted an unaccustomed arrogation of authority from one medieval estate by another, an inherently uneasy and unauthorized move in a culture so frequently given to reminding its members what the legitimate bounds of their social membership were. Even so, appropriating moves of this sort did not daunt him, and later we will see him acting similarly in yet other contexts. This excursus into the early fifteenth century has drawn attention to elements in a discourse of political prophecy to which the rex quondam, rexque futurus epitaph equally seems cognate, and has suggested an explanation for their currency by the time Malory was writing and for why he may have felt obliged to square up to an epitaph whose message, given such circumstances, was so resonant. Yet, if the epitaph was to remain consistent with Malory’s other authoritative tomb inscriptions, it must also somehow retain an authoritative status within the terms of his text; its message must remain in some sense incontestable. And indeed, this is what it manages to remain, except that in settling, at least for himself, the question of what happened to King Arthur, Malory seems now also to have negotiated the mysterious idea of the king who is to come into compatibility with the Christian idea of the ‘the life of the world to come’ (vitam venturi seculi), as the Nicene Creed puts it: Arthur will return in the sense that any dead Christian will return. Thus, whatever authority the idea of a rex quondam, rexque futurus had already acquired outside Malory’s text received a negotiated admission as an authority inside it, one whose negotiation, as remarked, had itself also depended upon an unauthorized arrogation, the presumption on Malory’s part to stand in the place of the exegete of political prophecy.

The Authority of Things Written Although as earlier seen Malory tends to leave the authority of inscriptions and letters, or in short, the authority of the written text, intact, even if, as in the case just discussed, it is occasionally a negotiated authority, it seems almost inevitable that their unreliable inverses will also be encountered in his work. If nothing else, the presence of these inverses helps endorse the authority that inscriptions and letters more normally embody. Often, these inverses are constituted from signs of a different, non-linguistic order, ones in which, were the truth known, no trust

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would be placed: they may take shape in certain narrative events or situations that are either accidentally misinterpreted, or misinterpreted by design because they have been set up precisely so that misinterpretation should happen and that incorrect inferences should be drawn from them. Written signs, conversely, are usually left untainted and unproblematic, contributing very little towards the Morte Darthur’s sum total of interpretative inaccuracy. In a world bedevilled by contingency, where misunderstanding is rife as the result either of chance or strategy — a world which therefore renders its characters ever vulnerable and whose precariousness the Morte Darthur had emphasized in some respects even beyond the epistemological scepticism already present in certain of its sources — when it comes to the domain of writing, Malory nevertheless seems to have wanted to cling to the dream of the possibility of immanent meaning and essence. This he did notwithstanding some of his own writerly practices that seem to work against that possibility.68 It is as if he wanted to have his cake and eat it; he would manipulate, yet not readily disavow either, the inviolate cultural prestige of the written word as a truth-bearing medium. Perhaps writing’s mystique of authority was easier for layfolk like himself to believe in than clerics whose professionally closer familiarity with written practices may have caused some of their mystifying glamour to wear a little thin. Be that as it may, whenever linguistic signs in Malory are shown to prove unreliable, more normally they belong not to writing but to speech. Their perceived unreliability is identified and stigmatized in the word ‘language’ (less frequently, ‘babbling’), Malory’s favourite word for allowing his characters to label utterances that either actually are, or are perceived as being, misrepresentations.69 Scepticism about the reliability of speech registers through a shift of attention from the content that speech mediates towards the materiality of the mediation — speech identified as ‘language’ — a shift that is often meant to sound alarm bells of suspicion. It is as if authenticity is being said to be warranted only if the medium remains invisible, forgotten as one forgets a transparent window pane through which something is viewed. This quarantining of unreliable ‘language’ is a means whereby Malory could try to conserve at least the 68  Witness the Morte Darthur’s letters and inscriptions, for example, which, save those of the perfidious King Mark, prove trustworthy in every case. Mark’s letters are the exception to prove the rule (see n. 29 above). 69  Another, gentler, means by which Malory allows certain characters to indicate the objective unreliability of the words of others is to have them draw attention to the subjective truth of those words, thereby implicitly questioning their objective validity. Thus words are seen as truer witnesses to a character’s disposition — ‘ye say as hit pleasith you’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1189/34) — than to the reliability of what the character asserts through them.

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appearance of some consistent strand of authority within the system of signs. In fact, however, since several of his own practices for inventing authority elsewhere in the Morte Darthur have been exposed as rhetorical contrivances, they have proved this appearance merely a mask covering a threadbare creed of immanence, no matter how much Malory may have tried to salvage and shore up writing’s immanent authority locally within the narrative. To reconnect with and extend the pertinence of the original question with which this chapter began: not only is the question one of ‘who may truste thys world’, but also one of who may trust the authorizing Malory, when aspects of the authority that his work quests for may similarly just boil down to an effect of ‘language’. Authority’s acceptability in the Morte Darthur sometimes seems to have been bought at the cost of conveniently forgetting authority’s constructedness.

Tropes of Authority (2) The final case in this selection of Malory’s authority tropes that will be considered before we move on to examine briefly a few examples of his authority formulas introduces an authoritative discourse of a different order. This trope implicates Malory in yet another arrogation, one commensurate with his arrogated stance as exegete of political prophecy discussed earlier, for like that it too entails a similar imaginary trespass into an estate in which he did not in reality belong. The discourse introduced by this trope does not register extensively in his writing, but by that same token stands out more sharply whenever it does.70 And this time it was less a discourse thrust upon his attention — the sheer force of the alternative survival tradition surrounding Arthur’s death, as was seen, may have insisted on being reckoned with — as one which he deliberately cultivated. One famous passage into which the discourse is channelled is especially ripe for investigation, precisely because, in seeming a passage largely of Malory’s own devising, it was not mechanically predetermined by anything that his immediate sources could dictate. The conclusion of the train of events set in motion by King Arthur’s summons to a great tournament near Westminster at Candlemas (which rounds off a sequence 70 

Though not analysed in this chapter, traces may also be detected in Lancelot’s speech of regret at having to quit the ‘most nobelyst Crysten realme’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1201/9–22). While the speech was possibly inspired by that of Lancelot in the French Mort (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 138, ll. 15–24.), the homiletic tone so pronounced in Malory’s treatment of it, as well as his appeal to the authority of history and chronicles, is absent in the French.

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of events in the Winchester Manuscript and constitutes the final paragraphs of Book xviii of Caxton’s edition of the Morte Darthur) has attracted much critical commentary.71 The conclusion contains a remarkable tapestry of ideas, though less remarked has been a prominent thread in its weave that resembles, and that Malory arguably intended should simulate, the discourse of contemporary preaching. That Malory was capable of shifting into a sermon-like register should come as no surprise when there is abundant evidence that other lay people of his time sometimes expressed themselves by appropriating terms that preaching supplied, or terms associated with preaching characteristically. In extreme cases, when layfolk imported authoritative and sententious turns of phrase typical of the pulpit wholesale into their utterances, they risked appearing to usurp clerical authority and to be seen as upstart pseudopreachers. This was another instance of the sort glanced at earlier when one medieval estate encroached upon territory characteristic of another.72 A famous fictional case in point a couple of generations before Malory is Chaucer’s Reeve in The Canterbury Tales who, determined to steal the moral high ground from the Miller, appropriated homiletic discourse only to find himself brought down for his presumption by the Host: ‘The devel made a reve for to preche’, the Host retorted, thus revealing his perception that the Reeve had breached and trespassed beyond his social class in the way he had chosen to speak.73 Sometimes, the discourse relocation from the clerical to the lay estate helped focus the discourse’s status purely as discourse at the same time as it registered the relocation’s social transgressiveness. In Malory’s own century, various historical examples are recorded of perceived lay misappropriations of ways of speaking over which preachers were thought more rightfully to preside.74

71 

While printed as an introduction to Caxton’s Book xix of the Morte Darthur by Vinaver, and retained thus in Field’s edition, recent work has stressed how this passage in fact ended Book xviii; see Grimm, ‘Knightly Love and the Narrative Structure of Malory’s Tale Seven’, and Grimm, ‘Editing Malory’, pp. 7–9. 72  See p. 237, above. 73  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 3903 (p. 78). 74  One such clear case is that of Margery Kempe. Moreover, her perceived abberation was all the more pronounced for having issued from a woman: ‘a gret clerke browt forth a boke & leyd Seynt Powyl for hys party ageyns hir þat no woman xulde prechyn. Sche, answeryng þerto, seyde, “I preche not, ser, I come in no pulpytt”’ (The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Meech and Allen, p. 126, ll. 16–19). Another instance seems present in the First Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley Cycle of mystery plays, where the First Shepherd accuses the Second Shepherd of speaking out of place in sounding like a preaching friar (The Towneley Plays, ed. by Stevens and Cawley, i, 121, ll. 560–64).

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Thus homiletic discourse was widely available and was used, sometimes incurring censure if perceived as presumptuous, in contexts outside its wonted clerical one. A strong case can be made that Malory, too, drafted in homiletic discourse when he composed this conclusion to the Westminster tournament episode in which he further prepared the ground for the momentous ending of his work.75 Not that he would necessarily have provoked his contemporaries, as the Reeve provoked Harry Bailey, for having behaved as he did, but undisputably, his collection of the discourse amounted to an arrogation once more, just as did his self-positioning, examined earlier, as arbiter of traditions of political prophecy, a role which, like that of preacher, was more customarily reserved to men of the clerical estate. In a number of places, Malory’s literary praxis wrote him into authoritative social positions where in actuality he did not belong, and into implied authoritative authorial identities which, since he could lay no real-time claim to them, were therefore in fact only authorial fictions of convenience. In the conclusion to the Westminster tournament episode, the month of May topos acts as a catalyst to convene a group of topics and stylistic choices typical of homiletic discourse. Their general effect is to suffuse the conclusion with a colour of (clerical) authority and thus help it command a peculiar respect and attention from the reader. Just as May had acquired rich associations in the secular literary tradition, so too had it acquired religious ones, and it is probable that Malory was aware of them. In the previous century, for example, some lines in Richard Rolle’s poem Luf es Lyf had epitomized neatly an established, religiously-charged linkage of the impermanence of fleshly human love with the month of May and the transitoriness of the summer season that May stands for: ‘Bot fleschly lufe sal fare as dose þe flowre in May, | And lastand be na mare þan an houre of a day’.76 It is a similar linkage that Malory would also come to reproduce, if in a far more complex and leisurely way, in his conclusion to the Westminster tournament episode. Here, he combined May’s association with evanescent human love additionally with ideas of chivalric rectitude, as well as with perceptions of the way things were done ‘in kynge Arthurs dayes’ in contrast to how they were being done now.77 Malory’s conclusion projects received authoritative secular norms in 75 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1119/1–30; 1120/1–13. Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Brown, p. 104, ll. 57–58. This is but one instance chosen from among many such religiously motivated moralizing connections. For the homiletic/religious currency of the theme of man’s life as a flower, compare Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, pp. 214–15, n. to ll. 108–23. 77  Contrasts between the way things were done in the past and the way they are done now also comprise another of Malory’s authority formulas not traced in the present chapter; see n. 7 76 

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love and conduct through a lens of homiletic discourse, giving them a ‘soft focus’ of authority more commonly associated with the pulpit. The conclusion begins by keying itself to the linear march of the narrative, mentioning in the conventional way Christian feasts as calendrical milestones marking the passage of time (‘thus hit passed on frome Candylmas untyll Ester’), until May arrives, at which point the homiletic resonances are engaged. Evidence of this engagement mounts steadily as the conclusion develops. A convenient homiletic benchmark for comparison is available in the following excerpt from a sermon whose manuscript copies may be directly contemporary with Malory. It describes the life-cycle of the rose, and it is instructive to consider it alongside Malory’s passage: Ffor mans lyfe may well be likened be roses in iij degreis. Ffirste there is a bud in þe whiche the rose is closed in. And after owte of this bud spryngethe a feyre rose, a swete and a delicius, and sone after withe wyndes and weders the levis fadythe and fallythe to þe grownde, and so turnethe to erthe. So gostly, in every man and woman of the worlde there bythe iij ages. The firste age is childhode, in þe whiche the flowris of manhod and womanhode ben closed in. Ffor ther is no man can tell what schall falle of a childe in tyme commyng, whethere he schall be riche or pore, good or bad, wyse or vnwyse, riche or recheles. Ffor his flowris schall spryng, increce and growe after governaunce. And after þis commethe ȝowthe; then hathe he or sche lyȝtnes, swiftnes, wantonnes and many other ornamentis of kynde. But þen at the laste commethe age; then schrynkethe his flessche, then fadythe his colowre. His bonys be very sore, his lymmys wexythe febyll, his yeesyȝte felythe and wexithe very dyme, his bake begynnythe to bow and croke downwarde to the erthe þat he cam of. Then his flowris declynethe and fallythe awey to þe grownde. And so man hathe none abidyng.78

The first thing to note about this excerpt is its general preceptive tone, which should be compared with the similar tone struck by Malory throughout his conclusion. But the excerpt reveals ways in which Malory’s conclusion is also reminiscent of some of its ideas: notably, the flowering rose, implicitly the bloom of the summer months, and its erasure by the inclement ‘wyndes and weders’ of the latter end of the year, as man’s impermanence is borne in upon him in terms of an associated series of seasonal images, suggest comparison with Malory’s management of the downward spiral of his conclusion.79 The inexorable huabove for a shortlist of further tropes and formulas left unexamined here. 78  Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, p. 204, ll. 108–23. 79  And that is repeated in the breathtaking reversal of the introduction to Caxton’s Book xx

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man decline insisted on in the sermon is similarly rehearsed in the inexorable entropy of the Round Table’s society from which, like human decline, none in Malory’s text can escape. The certainty that everything in the sublunary sphere will finally falter is projected authoritatively in the preacher’s discourse, and a comparable authority echoes also in Malory’s conclusion. The conclusion’s similarity to homiletic discourse is further underlined by Malory’s introduction of words liable for use in sermons because they already lend themselves to moral discussion. Take, for example, Malory’s interest in ‘stability’, a word which could itself be said to contain in microcosm the authority issue under present review.80 Where may stability be found? The preachers said that often stability was recognized in its absence, in the moral shortcoming of unstableness: ‘vnstabulnes’, for example, is the condition of the ‘ȝonge man […] prompt vnto vicious lyvynge’, according to another English sermon whose manuscript copy may again be contemporary with Malory, or, as a popular preachers’ resource widely quarried for sermons in the fifteenth century put it, there are many ‘who are to be called absolutely unstable, because they now submerge themselves in the depths of lust’ (qui omnino instabilies dici debent, eo quod modo se in profundum voluptatum immergunt).81 Preachers in Malory’s day, then, might typically speak of stability, or of its contrary, and often when discussing lust, whose nature was to be ‘sone hote, sone colde’.82 This is precisely the sort of context that Malory has provided here, thus making his account of unstable love between men and women sound just like the kind of thing that preachers might incline of the Morte Darthur (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1161/1–8). One might compare, though, by way of a possible connection with some earlier literary tradition here, certain of the passages that which O. D. Macrae-Gibson (Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson), ii, 70–72 refers to as ‘headpieces’ in Of Arthour and in Kyng Alisaunder. Malory’s Maytime reversal might sit alongside the evocation of ‘mirie’ April in Of Arthour (Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. by Macrae-Gibson, i, 19–21, ll. 259–64), before attention is suddenly turned there to the infidel Fortiger taking over England. 80  Note also Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1204/4–5, Lancelot’s declaration that ‘I wote well in me was nat all the stabilité of thys realme’. The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Simpson and Weiner defines the meaning of ‘stability’ here as ‘immunity from destruction or essential change; enduring quality’, and cites this lemma as the first recorded instance of this sense. 81  Fasciculus morum, ed. by Wenzel, p. 654, ll. 22–23. Though probably composed c. 1300, this manual was widely copied and quarried by preachers well into the fifteenth century. 82  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1120/2. This was an old proverb; see Whiting and Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases, p. 294, item H554 (though they did not notice an example much earlier than the one they cite (from John Lydgate) in The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. by Cartlidge, p. 31, l. 1275).

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to talk about.83 And as Malory discanted on this homiletic theme, he further introduced an appeal to the authority of daily experience by way of proof of what he has asserted: for in many persones there ys no stabylité: for we may se all day, for a lytyll blaste of wyntres rasure, anone we shall deface and lay aparte trew love, for lytyll or nowght, that coste muche thynge. Thys ys no wysedome nother no stabylité, but hit ys fyeblenes of nature and grete disworshyp, whosomever usyth thys.84

Malory’s appeal to the proof that daily experience can provide places him yet again in the company of the preachers, for whom the marshalling of proofs derived from everyday experience, as well as from received textual authority, was, as earlier seen, a familiar (and originally scholastic) procedure for helping to confirm an argument.85 If sufficient has been said to demonstrate empirically the moral kinship to sermon discourse of the tone and content of the conclusion to the Westminster tournament episode, the corollary follows that Malory has turned preacher for the nonce, and in the turning, however momentarily, arrogated what customarily was the preacher’s authoritative place. In so doing, he has added another dimension to his portfolio of authority arrogations.

Formulas of Authority It is time now to move on to review a short selection of Malory’s authority formulas. The first of these, the maxim/proverb formula, has already been anticipated in the proverbializing drift of Lancelot’s question about trust with which the chapter began, and it also follows appropriately from what has just been said about Malory’s use of the discourse of preaching, for maxims and proverbs were also commonly characteristic of medieval sermon usage. Sermons, being didactic as well as hortatory undertakings, readily accommodated the popular authority of maxims and proverbs, and in practice sometimes put them on equal footing with more canonical ‘proof ’ texts marshalled by preachers for clinching arguments.86 83  For another contemporary example of the absorption into secular vernacular literary writing of characteristically clerical preoccupations with ‘unstable’ human love, compare The Assembly of Ladies (and see Stephens, ‘The Questioning of Love in The Assembly of Ladies’). 84  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1119/16–21. 85  Compare the references in n. 6 above. 86  On the promotion of the proverb to virtual parity with the canonical auctoritas as a

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Critics have noted the frequency of maxims and proverbs in the Morte Darthur and offered various explanations of their presence and function.87 But in the present context, it might be observed that a habit in Malory’s characters either to extrapolate universally applicable maxims from a reflection on their particular experience, or to conceive their experience in ways already imaged in proverbial wisdom, coincides with the Morte Darthur’s wider inclination to reach for authoritative consensual points of reference. Thus maxims and proverbs lay fair claim to being considered one of Malory’s favourite authority formulas if for no other reason than their relative frequency. While they are too numerous to warrant a comprehensive survey here, a few illustrations will demonstrate how serviceable they were to the authority-quest of Malory’s text. Although maxims and proverbs also appeared in Malory’s sources, they were by no means as common there, with the result that his amplified use of them confers upon his work a comparatively more sententious tone.88 For example, unparallelled in the French source is Sir Lancelot’s triple proverb/maxim cluster uttered within a single speech in the Fair Maid of Astolat episode where he says, ‘For hit ys an olde-sayde sawe, “there ys harde batayle thereas kynne and frendys doth batayle ayther ayenst other,” […] all shall be wellcom that God sendith […] thys that ys done may nat be undone’.89 In other places, too, the essential difference between the French and Malory in respect of maxims and proverbs may consist in the Morte Darthur’s enlarged use of them.90 A similar point may be made in means of clinching an argument, see Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching, pp. 194–95. On the use of proverbs in preaching generally, see Wenzel, Verses in Sermons. 87  For example, Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, observes that Malory ‘relishes consensual opinions, both proverbs and generalizations resembling proverbs’ (p. 172). 88  Field, Romance and Chronicle, noting the increase of proverbs in the final books, considers that they ‘help to give an air of universality and impersonal authority to much of what is said in the final tragedy’ (p. 127). In commenting on one of the marginalia of the Winchester Manuscript, Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience, observes, ‘This marginalium […] indicates the perhaps surprising fact that Malory’s book was considered an appropriate theatre for “Parson”-like sententiae’ (p. 76). The evidence adduced in this present chapter, however, makes this ‘fact’ rather less ‘surprising’. 89  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1084/4–6, 8–9, and 10–11. While sententiousness has its moments in the French Mort (as when, for example, Elaine speaks sententiously about love; La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 22, ll. 32–33), such a mode is not characteristic there. 90  For another good illustration of this tendency to proverbialize, see Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1212/25–26, where Lancelot expresses the idea ‘better ys pees than allwayes warre’ (the proverbial status of this expression is underwritten by Guinevere’s use of it earlier; see Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1128/16–17). In the French Mort, while a seed for

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respect of the English sources. The stanzaic Morte Arthur expresses the occasional maxim or proverb, and some of these Malory adopted. One such case is when he had Sir Bors declare that ‘all ys wellcom that God sendyth us, and as we have takyn much weale with you and much worshyp, we woll take the woo with you as we have takyn the weale’.91 These lines were doubtless prompted by some lines in the stanzaic Morte: ‘“Syr,” he sayd, “sithe it is so, | We shalle be of hertis good | Aftyr the wele to take the wo”’.92 But two things distinguish Malory’s treatment. First, relative to the stanzaic Morte, Malory doubled the maxim/proverb density of Sir Bors’s remarks (he added ‘all ys wellcom that God sendyth us’, whose status as a common fifteenth-century maxim seems also suggested by Sir Lancelot’s earlier use of it in the triple maxim/proverb cluster previously cited above);93 and second, the idea of accepting the weal with the woe is recycled again later by Sir Bors where this time the stanzaic Morte contained nothing similar.94 It is tempting to regard Malory’s much heavier dependence relative to his sources on maxims and proverbs as disclosing a personal authorial disposition, especially when he is again seen inclining towards this particular authority formula when writing, it would seem, largely under his own steam, unifluenced by any immediate source. Thus, for example, his famous and apparently personal reflection on the fickleness of the English concludes in a maxim that seems to allude to a widely held national stereotype — ‘Alas! Thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme’95 — and similarly this idea is also found (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 145, ll. 14–15), it is not delivered with any such proverbial flourish as Malory affords. 91  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1169/24–26. 92  Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 56, ll. 1889–91. 93  Whiting and Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases, p. 238, G262: ‘Thank God for whatever he sends’ (Lydgate, dating from c. 1449); compare also p. 239, G271: ‘To take such as God sends’ (dating from c. 1450 onwards), where this particular instance in Malory is cited. 94  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1171/22. Thus not only are maxims and proverbs relatively frequent, some are also repeated, suggesting their favoured status with Malory as sententious expressions (compare again the proverb that ‘better is war than peace’ referred to in n. 90 above). 95  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1229/13–14; see also the words of Sir Gawain, which may be largely Malory’s invention (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1175/12–13). It is worth contrasting how the stanzaic Morte Arthur presents the English volte-face purely as a matter of fact without further comment (Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 92, ll. 3058–61). The French Mort comments, justifying the English turnabout (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 184, ll. 1–5 and p. 185, ll. 1–3). But for Malory, it has happened because the English are ‘new fangill’. Perhaps, however, the seed idea for Malory’s expostulation, or more exactly, for the

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his reflections which conceivably issued from his direct personal experience on the miseries suffered by prisoners who succumb to illness.96 Yet without denying that the store set by this particular authority formula may disclose Malory’s personal taste, since tastes are often socially constructed and get into people from the outside, it may equally be possible to view his predilection as revealing one more widely available in the fifteenth century. Indeed, Malory’s practice finds another cultural analogue in contemporary literary texts like collections of moral fables. These routinely derived an ‘authoritative’ moral from reflection on an antecedent experience and, as may also happen with Malory, at times the reductive moral derived did less than full justice to the richness of the experience upon which it was based.97 While a perceived incommensurability opening up between experience and the moral distilled from it provoked no perceptible authorial unease, perhaps that unease was instead devolved upon any reader who had a feeling for it. So whether in reality there was or was not unease in either the author or the reader, what continues to be clear is that, as used by Malory and certain of his contemporaries, the authority formula of maxim and proverb was potentially a haunted category overcast by doubts about its capacity to manage adequately the life experience that had prompted it. These hovering doubts, in Malory’s case, would not be exorcized simply by the relative frequency of his deployment of this particular authority formula; in fact, quite the reverse, if it be the case that the author ‘doth protest too much’. As with maxims and proverbs, comparative frequency also characterizes Malory’s use of the next authority formula to be considered, the asseveration ‘wit you well’. This commonly appears when one character in the narrative strives to impress upon another the truth value of what s/he asserts.98 The formula is also occasionally used by the author directly to address his readers outside the narpassage immediately before it (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1228/33 to 1229/5), is to be found in the French Mort (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 188, ll. 13–23). 96  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, ii, 540/30–34. 97  Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, puts her finger on this aspect of Malory’s style when she observes, ‘The thematising layer of commentary on action is thinner in substance than the richness of the texture of narrative fact’ (p. 74). Compare, for example, the Moral Fables of Robert Henryson, whose moral reduction in some cases contradict implications within the fable itself; see Khinoy, ‘Tale-Moral Relationships in Henryson’. Of course, there may be different reasons for the perceived discrepancy in Henryson and Malory. 98  General instances are too numerous to list. One notable and frequent ‘wit you well’ collocation, however, is its use as a preface to a declaration of a character’s personal name to another (for example Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, ii, 539/23–24; 583/9; 594/2; 602/18; 621/19; 641/10; 645/33–34; 687/21, 23–24; 696/9; 697/1, 7–8; 721/14; 749/5; etc.).

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rative, when he advises them to credit a particular event or state of affairs, or to be assured of some particular emotional response that circumstances elicit.99 The imperative syntax of ‘wit you well’ makes it the most immediately commanding of the forms that this authority formula takes.100 And while ‘wit-you-well’ parallels exist in both Malory’s French and English sources, their occurrence there, as with the maxims and proverbs discussed earlier, is also comparatively modest.101 Thus apart from the function that each Malorian ‘wit you well’ serves in its immediate narrative context, the effect of their pronounced accumulation furthers the general sense of urgency arising from the Morte Darthur’s underlying preoccupation with, and quest for, authority. Moreover, as well as being sometimes repeated insistently within the space of just a few lines, ‘wit you well’ can also collaborate closely with yet other authority formulas, like the formula ‘as the (French) book sayeth’, whose refrain-like repetition throughout the Morte Darthur was earlier alluded to,102 or sometimes with the authority formula of the maxim or proverb previously discussed.103 Thus its nucleation with other examples of the 99 

Its first appearance (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 177/10–11) is as an authorto-reader address. Its occurrences start to proliferate from Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 313/16 (Caxton’s Book vii, Sir Gareth of Orkney) and thereafter. 100  Relative to those other forms, ‘wit you well’ is also by far the most common: compare such (less frequent) variants as ‘I lat the wyte’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1122/13), or ‘we lat you wete playnly’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1190/31–32), or ‘ye shall ryght well wyte’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1134/15–16), or ‘I woll that ye all wyte’ (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1198/11–12). Characters in the Morte Darthur occasionally use other asserverations having similar force (for example, ‘whyle I am a man lyvyng’; Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1168/35), but ‘wit you well’ far predominates. 101  A representative case of this occurs at Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1176/17, 19, 25 and 31–32, where compared with this cluster of four ‘wit you wells’, the French Mort has only a single ‘sachiez bien’, nor is even this exactly parallel to Malory’s use (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 98, l. 18). In the stanzaic Morte, there occurs a ‘know thou well’ (Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 55, l. 1852; compare Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1167/33– 34), and a ‘wit you well’ that Malory takes up (Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 78, l. 2600; compare Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1187/18). The expression in French also has a small range of variant forms; for example, ‘sachiez vos tout veraiement’ (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 8, ll. 14–15); ‘sachiez veraiement’ (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 26, ll. 6–7); or ‘sachiez bien’ (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 55, l. 10; compare here Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1090/5, where Elaine le Blanc is speaking to Lancelot). 102  For example, Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, i, 317/12 and 22; i, 378/17 and 29; i, 419/18 and 34; and iii, 1048/7. Malory’s ‘as the (French) book says’ is evidently related to the frequent ‘or di li contes’ of his French source (for example, La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 158, l. 9, etc). 103  As at Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1047/18–20 or iii, 1051/29.

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authority formula helps further amplify authority’s audibility as an abiding concern throughout Malory’s work. The aggregated effect of all these ‘wit you wells’ echoes beyond the immediate local narrative significance of each, and registers in frequency far beyond anything that Malory’s sources could be held responsible for inducing. Something similar may be said of the two remaining authority formulas that may be reviewed before finally drawing the threads of this discussion together. One is the habit of characters to preface their subsequent behaviour with what amounts to a prologue of self-justification.104 Notably in the last books, these prologues can be strikingly elaborate, amounting to detailed declarations of a position taken or careful explanations of the rationale underlying some subsequent course of action. They authorize, in effect, what follows them, and the more detailed of them resemble the explicit procedural moves in medieval legal suits whose incremental steps might be publicly recited and recorded. In this respect they are therefore reminiscent of the stages of official due process where what is about to come next is prepared for and validated by a public rehearsal of what has gone before. The almost forensic deliberateness of some of these prologues lends them this formal, quasi-judicial aspect, and it may be suspected that Malory’s use of the authority formula of the prologue of self-justification in this way owes something to the law, another authoritative discourse with which he demonstrably had some acquaintance.105 Finally, to conclude this short selection of Malory’s authority formulas, his habit might be noted of having characters consciously call to mind past precedent as an authoritative point of reference when they seek to make present judgements about a person’s nature and likely future behaviour. There is nothing inherently surprising in this, of course, since people routinely predict future performance according to their experience of past form. In Malory’s case, however, the cachet of the habit seems to lie in the evidentiary value of completed experience; things past, being finite, now in their finitude become determined and knowable, just as memorializations of past life narratives on tombstones in the Morte Darthur were never allowed to be misleading, but ever reassuringly dependable. The past, 104 

For examples of these prologues, see Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1188/1–37, 1189/16–17, 1196/6, 1200/21–24, 1215/30–32, 1217/26–28, 1219/17–19, and 1220/24. 105  Recent studies on Malory and contemporary law include Kelly, ‘Malory and the Common Law’, and Harris, ‘Evidence against Lancelot and Guinevere’. While critics have detected parallels between aspects of Malory’s text and the legal procedure of his day, they have less been inclined to note how legal procedure may have suggested structural models for the way in which Malory organized certain sections of his text.

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like the tomb, has, in its capacity as the repository of ended narratives, a fixity and imperviousness to change, qualities intrinsically capable of conferring authority; indeed, its inviolable completions resemble the eternal changelessness of divine authority itself. Thus Malory’s preoccupation with stability may be thought to return modulated here in another key, in his work’s valorization of endings, endings that can be confidently appealed to as authoritative since no change can ever reach them to upset their settled content. The inner dynamic of this final authority formula depends essentially upon appeal being able to be made to the past as a stable site of reference. And this leads appropriately enough to our final consideration, the emergence in the Morte Darthur of a metanarrative source of authority: its valorization of the past. As with authority tropes, the listing of authority formulas could be further extended, but doing so would serve only to descant on a theme now sufficiently developed. It simply remains to gather the threads of this discussion together and to assess the nature of the authority that the past and the endings that the past contains were capable of exercising.

The Authority of Ending As this chapter hopes to have shown, an underlying preoccupation with authority in the Morte Darthur, explored in terms of particular categories of trope and formula that appear with considerable frequency, seems to have driven Malory’s writing. While their implications may not always have been fully thought through, and sometimes, indeed, betraying authorial sleight of hand in their articulation, ideas about authority nevertheless congregate in the Morte Darthur and help explain what has seemed to some readers the work’s general inclination to strike authoritative poses. These ideas register on the surface of Malory’s narrative in sets of distinctive formal and thematic features, only a sample of which has been considered here. One could speculate that they were expressive of an authorial desire, whose outworking was more impulsive than premeditated, for accumulating a healthy bank balance of authority that would have been culturally impressive; since an appetite for invoking authority already existed as a cultural predisposition beyond merely the literary (to cite but one notable example, a number of contemporary social bodies and interest groups regularly performed their authority hierarchies publicly in pageant form),106 this inclination would 106 

Pageantry was the mode par excellence whereby late medieval culture might rehearse and explain its processes to itself. For some theoretical reflection on the way in which dramatic

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naturally also find reciprocal local expression at the level of individual personal appetite, nor necessarily scruple about achieving a full consistency of product in its rush to satisfy itself. Indeed, that is something that has arguably happened in Malory’s case. Whatever the truth of the possible ‘authority resonance’ of his age within his text, it is at least certain that in undertaking to write within a chroniclerelated genre where issues of authority, as was seen, were already endemic, Malory implicated himself in those issues and in the stakes for which they wagered. Given the weight, relative to his sources, of his investment in marshalling authoritative positions or positions that aspired to appear so, the authority-quest propelling his narrative may sometimes risk seeming more clamorous than efficient, especially when occasionally, as earlier noted, it was in danger of collapsing the very object of its desire. Yet, although on scrutiny an aporia may threaten to open within certain of Malory’s constructions of authority, one form of authority that manages to survive intact emerges in an uncongenial quarter: the past.107 The past necessarily proved uncongenial because the recessing of authority there meant that this authority was of a kind that would take shape in nothing less than the context of time’s inevitable erasure of the chivalric world espoused by the narrative; the past occluded that world’s best chivalric ambitions. Once it had exerted its power, then, the authority of the past, if we may so term it, would bring an author so evidently committed to celebrating chivalric ideals to a hard place.108 The tradeoff was costly: authority won, to be sure, but in the moment of putting beyond reach a chivalric order that had even provided the arena in which authority issues could be staged. Self-evidently, Malory was working with a fated storyline, for King Arthur’s world would necessarily have to end. This was a narrative given, as everyone knew. But what we are assessing here is the nature of Malory’s chosen management of that inherited ending, the evidentiary value that he seems to have imputed to endings generally (as witnessed with particular eloquence, as we saw, in the text’s various tomb memorials and utterances in articulo mortis); and we are also assessing that unique aspect of Malory’s authority-quest that it was reserved to his sense of ending to supply. performance opens up the seams between itself and social performance, the ‘invisible theatre’ of everyday life, see Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, pp. 35–116. 107  Crofts, ‘Death in the Margins’, concludes with this telling observation: ‘Whether intentionally or not, Malory’s Morte is haunted by the finitude of its names, and of the world, neither romance nor chronicle, to which they belong’. Such ‘haunting by finitude’ is an aspect of the Morte Darthur that the present chapter seeks to position within the work’s wider quest for authority. 108  One need look no further than Malory’s idealization of Sir Lancelot to appreciate the esteem his work accorded to chivalric ideals.

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In order to feel sure that the chivalrous classes and the values that gave their world meaning had ever existed at all, it might actually help to think of them as being inviolably absent. The Morte Darthur is sewn together with reminders that its society was passing away. Just as the passage of time can confer the reassuring finality of closure upon what is time-bound, so the world evoked in the Morte Darthur, increasingly marked in the last books as moving into the past and ceasing to be, was in that same moment being rendered authoritatively fixed: its eventual absence, though on the one hand a painful matter of regret, would nevertheless on the other hand secure for it a credit surplus of authoritative determinacy that might prove bankable. For authority thus constituted via absence, any possibility that time’s passing contents may somehow be revisited — hence upsetting time’s standard linear march towards an ending, an upset, indeed, such as the prospect of Arthur’s future return would introduce — may therefore in fact have threatened the very stability that absence promised.109 Thus by this logic it is apparent that the setting in stone of written tomb memorials in the Morte Darthur might provide a natural refuge not only for the idea earlier explored of authoritative writing, but also for the idea of a writing of authoritative absence (and this abetted by the fact that writing itself is inherently a form of absence, a symbolization deprived of the actual thing symbolized). As a supporting corollary to this, it might equally be remarked how insistently the Morte Darthur’s religious system is presented as one of worldly renunciation; seldom is the asceticism of its religion offset by much sense of the heavenly bliss and joyful reward that might ultimately be expected to follow a life lived well in appropriate self-denial.110 While it could be observed, of course, that renunciation was already the predominant temper of much late medieval religious thought, it nevertheless seems too convenient a coincidence that such thought furthers the Morte Darthur’s bitter-sweet discovery of the authority that it seeks for within the self-same time-driven absence of those very things that elicit its affective attachment. Hence its chilly religion of worldly 109 

Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience, p. 58, touches on an important point: ‘for the literary imagination of the fifteenth century at least, the ruling principle of King Arthur was his being quondam, since in his being dead lay his exemplary status’. 110  On the face of it, elements in the description of Sir Lancelot’s death (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1258/7–10) might be thought to run counter to this. For example, his corpse is said to have worn a smile (a detail not included in the stanzaic Morte) and to have been surrounded with a sweet savour (a detail included neither in the stanzaic Morte nor the French Mort). But this would be to read superficially. These traditional elements lifted from descriptions of saints’ deaths have been recruited by Malory simply to amplify the stature of his hero, not to introduce any balance of joy to the Morte Darthur’s otherwise ascetically pinched religion.

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renunciation colludes conveniently with this particular authority-building process, in so far as religion of this caste is similarly conscious of ending chiefly in terms of the ending of time’s earthly contents and of the worldly ties that those contents engender. The gloomy teleology of the Morte Darthur’s religious outlook confers by analogy its implicit approval on things in the narrative which end, endorsing ending itself as a fit and proper condition; thus things achieve authority as reliable points of reference in the moment that they cease to be. Malorian endings, consequently, may play to the overarching, entropic destiny of the Arthurian social body whose heat must necessarily be felt to ebb away before it can be perceived as having been a cherishable body at all. We might take as a byword for the Morte Darthur’s peculiar absorption, relative to its sources, with ideas of ending the way Malory chose to dwell more extensively than his sources did upon the ending of the fellowship of the Round Table, the global ending to which many local endings in the text are tributaries and which they adumbrate. For example, as Sir Gawain and Sir Gareth declare in unison that ‘now ys thys realme holy destroyed and myscheved, and the noble felyshyp of the Rounde Table shall be disparbeled’,111 their voices converge in a sort of authoritative, tragic chorus unparallelled in the French or the English texts on which this passage was based.112 Both men unite in their forecast of a future time of ending when all that is present shall be past, and as such, their view commands respect, less for any fatalism that it might be thought to condone, than for its prophetic vision of completion, since completion is necessarily something that ending brings in its wake. Their prediction also chimes with various other predictions of ending that recur throughout the Morte Darthur and that likewise prove unfailingly authoritative.113 Just as the Round Table is an organic entity, a confederation of men and a few associated women, so all organisms of their nature must die: as Sir Lancelot says, ‘ayenste deth may no man rebell’, pressing into this theme’s service another of the Morte Darthur’s maxims not found in the source.114 Necessarily men are subject to death, like the fair rose iconized in the 111 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1162/31–33. Views expressed in unison voices constitute another of Malory’s devices for conveying the sense of an authoritative position, as again, for example, when Lancelot’s departure from the court is attended by universal regret (excepting of course Sir Gawain; Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1202/22–28). While a seed for this idea is perhaps found in the French, it remains a remote one (La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. by Frappier, p. 137, ll. 19–20). 113  Consonant with this, Field, Romance and Chronicle, notes that prophecies are normally made by authority figures (p. 147). 114  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1251/13–14. 112 

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sermon, and unless supported by memorialization, the social structure that they inhabited is at risk of passing with them. Those who seem to speak fatalistically in the Morte Darthur might instead be regarded as speaking prophetically, not only because they are correctly in touch with the appointed end of all created things (a realization that the Morte Darthur’s chilly religion, analogously, has set such store by), but also because ending has been configured as a place where authority can be depended on to reside. Their prophetic utterances in which the prospect of ending is conjured up thus fulfil a role beyond the requirements of their immediate narrative circumstances. The last books especially throng with authoritative appeals to ending, some so quiet that they may even escape notice, distantly echoed as they are in intimations rather than bruited in bald declarations. Queen Morgan’s words to her dying half-brother are a striking example of the sort: ‘A, my dere brother! Alas, why have ye taryed so longe frome me? Alas, thys wounde on youre hede hath caught overmuch coulde!’115

Here, ending is intimated obliquely through a glance at a sad future inevitability. Morgan, of course, is right: the head wound has grown far too cold; only one sorry result will follow from that; and its intimation is wholly Malory’s responsibility, owing nothing, it seems, to any source.116 Arthur’s end, not predicted up front in as many words, is instead implicitly hinted at within this understated and yet authoritative moment of female cherishing.117 The king left finally in the hands of women images authoritatively the ultimate fragility of his own life and of the way of life for which he has stood. The womanly tenderness that ministers him to his expiration operates securely from its gendered fastness: such (terminal) care is woman’s work; and for Arthur, the care itself proves authoritatively proleptic.118 115 

Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1240/23–25. It is not in the French Mort, and while its seed is found in the stanzaic Morte (‘“Broder”, she sayd, “wo ys me! | Fro lechyng hastow be to longe. | I wote that gretely greuyth me, | For thy paynes ar full stronge”’; Le Morte Arthur, ed. by Bruce, p. 107, ll. 3506–09), Malory has developed it quite differently. 117  Arguably, a gendered ‘completeness’ also contours this moment, making it authoritative from the point of view of dyadically conceived gender responsibilities: men do one sort of thing, women another. The corollary of this seems present in Malory’s difficulty with women who are authoritative in ways traditionally occupied by men (note, for example, his mishandling of the motif of the wife of Solomon, illustrated by D’Arcy, Wisdom and the Grail, pp. 344–45). In Arthur’s dying hours, the woman who cherishes may speak authoritatively precisely in her capacity as cherisher, for that is one of the things that women appropriately do; here, they are on home ground. 118  The old enmities between Morgan and Arthur so evident in the earlier parts of the Morte 116 

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The Morte Darthur’s aggregated investment, then, in a sense of ending, one which nothing in the sources comes close to, erects an authoritative epitaph to the Arthurian chivalric culture that has nevertheless provided the work with its substance and to which it has committed itself. Another important aspect of the Morte Darthur’s terminal design is the way in which its conclusion has also served Malory with the opportunity for a final moment of authorial self-fashioning: he has written his personal situation, interests, and, by implication, the class interests of his target peer audience of ‘JENTYLMEN AND JENTYLWYMMEN’, into the ending of his work.119 Suggesting comparison with the terms of address of many a contemporary tomb inscription, Malory’s closing words immur and memorialize him within the sepulture of his book, allowing his own personal social abeyance to speak to, and thus to unite him through his literary proxy with, an ongoing social narrative in the real world outside the text whose continuance after he had gone was to be presumed whenever people took up his book and read it.120 Was the paradox of the cold yet solidly dependable commemoration of the past one of the things that attracted Malory in the first place to this tale of a noble order made strangely secure and palpable only by its demise? A retrospection on the glory days of chivalry may have helped him valorize the current imprisonment in which we understand his work to have been composed and that could easily have appeared to portend the circumstances of his own ending; his personal descent on Fortune’s wheel may have struck him as already anticipated in the course charted by his narrative. If so, the analogy would not have been wasted in helping him reconcile himself to his present condition as to an inevitability of Fortune: such was chivalry’s appointed end, both in the written tradition and in Malory’s private reality. Thus the Morte Darthur, in making an effigy both of that tradition and of its author, filled by literary surrogation two vacancies created by Darthur are here elided. The role of women as healers is noted in several places in the work by Edwards, ‘The Place of Women in the Morte Darthur’, p. 43). 119  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1260/20–29. For commentary upon the status of the epitaph relative to its author, see Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, pp. 177–84. 120  The idea of the literary address to posterity was commonplace, especially in the form of addresses from the dead to the living. For epitaph poems of the ‘As I was so you are now, as I am so you shall be’ tradition, see Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, pp. 310–15; also, Gray, ‘A Middle English Epitaph’. The words of the final stanza of the epitaph written on the death of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (d. 1447), are attributed to the dead duke, who is presented as posthumously addressing posterity. The epitaph may have been devised for consultation in the presence of the duke’s tomb in St Albans; see Robbins, ‘An Epitaph for Duke Humphrey’.

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the abeyance of both those originals.121 Perhaps consolation was to be found in fancying oneself surrounded by the noble company of the past; and to be sure, it was to a gentry audience in the present and to a noble future posterity that Malory allied himself in how he addressed his work. Even if the past was a place that his text had both enabled and recoiled from, better to imagine and cling to an authority residing there within a deceased order than nowhere at all, or to trust solely in some of authority’s other more makeshift and ersatz habitations such as Malory himself was not beyond fabricating en route to his work’s finish. The conflation of the Morte Darthur’s conclusion with Malory’s personal conclusion as he may have conceived that taking shape in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV is itself managed in the context of an authority formula.122 First, Malory asks for the prayers of his gentle readers for his deliverance while still alive and then after death for his soul. This casts his work in another traditional, socially sanctioned light, of meritorious labour in return for which he might appropriately expect to request spiritual suffrage.123 Then finally, his last sentence builds further upon this traditional formulaic appeal: ‘ FOR THIS BOOK WAS ENDED THE NINTH YERE OF THE REYGNE OF KYNG EDWARD THE FOURTH, BY SYR THOMAS MALEORÉ, KNYGHT, AS JESU HELPE HYM FOR HYS GRETE MYGHT, AS HE IS THE SERVAUNT OF JESU BOTH DAY AND NYGHT’. This conclusion’s ternary rhyme on ‘KNYGHT’, ‘MYGHT’ and ‘NYGHT’ seals the amalgamation of author and narrative within the final

authority formula that Malory permitted himself,124 for it structures a formula of ending of a kind commonplace in contemporary vernacular religious writings,125 121 

For useful comments on the cutural force of the effigy, see Roach, Cities of the Dead, pp. 36–39. 122  Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, iii, 1260/20–29. 123  To cite but one example from many, the ending of the late thirteenth-century romance Havelok concludes: ‘And forþi Ich wolde biseken you | Þat hauen herd þe rim nu, | Þat ilke of you, with gode wille, | Seye a Pater Noster stille | For him þat haueth þe rym maked, | And þer-fore fele nihtes waked, | Þat Iesu Crist his soule bringe | Biforn his Fader at his endinge’ (Havelok, ed. by Smithers, p. 82, ll. 2995–3002). To extend the tomb analogy, it might also be recalled that many tombs solicited from passers-by prayers for the souls of the deceased. 124  Note, too, the way in which Malory ends the Quest of the Holy Grail (Malory, The Works, ed. by Vinaver, ii, 1037/11–14). Here again a similar rhyme pattern is used, though it is only a double, not a triple, one. 125  Compare Mirk, Festial, ed. by Erbe, p. 168, ll. 11–13: ‘And praye we now alle to the Holy Trynyte that we may so worschip here yn erthe yn vnyte, that we may come ynto hys mageste where he ys veraye Gode yn persons thre. Amen’; or A Litil Tretys on the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. by Van Zutphen, p. 25, ll. 28–30: ‘Fro þe seed of sorwe þat is synne god schyld vs þorwh

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and shows Malory even at the last reaching out from his base in romance and chronicle towards a stylistic resource available in a corroborating discourse of superior authority, appropriating to himself and his cause whatever support it may have been capable of offering. Tilting the Morte Darthur in order to read it from the angle of its quest for authority prompts fresh reflection on the socially constitutive propositions that the work stages, as well as suggesting a broad explanation of the motives that drive several of its formal stylistic choices. Malory seems to have forged an identity for himself within and through his work, raising his authorial effigy within an ideological continuum wherein any socially isolative implications of actual imprisonment may have been overwritten, if not, at least rhetorically, erased. Indeed, via his work, his very imprisonment may even have been metaphorized into something socially connected and useful through its conflation with ideas of epitaph, removal from the world, and authoritative ending; as earlier observed in the context of tomb memorials, their images of death-imprisoned absence paradoxically fostered a sense of continuity within the community that had suffered the loss to which they witnessed. Malory’s ‘voice in absence’ from the mausoleum of the Morte Darthur might be regarded as their literary chivalric simulacrum.126 In the Morte Darthur the outline of a real-time and historically contingent ideology of authority seems recoverable both behind such of Malory’s tropes and formulas as have been surveyed in this chapter as well as in less obvious locations, in his strategic authorial decisions to annex this or that genre resonance, for example, or in his choice of this or that procedure for organizing and managing text. Perhaps it is recoverable, too, even in features of the mise-enpage of the Winchester Manuscript itself, especially if the origin of its marginalia is authorial rather than scribal, as Peter Field has argued.127 In short, Malory his mercy & grawnt vs his grace. That we mowe after our hennys wendyng come to heuene þat blisful place. Amen’. Or A Study and Edition of Selected Middle English Sermons, ed. by O’Mara, p. 121, ll. 167–68: ‘þe wylke he graunt ȝow and me þat for vs deyd apon þe rode tre. Amen’. Instances could be multiplied. 126  The Morte Darthur might be viewed as Malory’s reinsertion of himself into the realtime order that had politically disenfranchised him. Necessarily, that reinsertion could only have been accomplished in terms of a surrogacy of one kind or another. In this Malory was again in tune with his time. It has been noted that the heirless wealthy of late medieval England, their line facing dynastic extinction, were nevertheless inclined to leave lavish memorials of themselves; compare the contemporary case of Lord Cromwell studied by Saul, Death, Art, and Memory, p. 238. Though their line might vanish, they would still be remembered. 127  See Field, ‘Malory’s Own Marginalia’. Preoccupied with making his forensically detailed case, Field does not observe the more general point that the provision of medieval manuscripts

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selected between a range of writerly options and positions, several of which demonstrably did service as the literary correlatives to aspects of late medieval ‘authority’ culture. If both the Arthurian narrative and its author ended in a hard place, at least that final resting place within authority’s sway, and within a belief in the possibility of the recuperation of a society in which that authority might remain serviceably meaningful, furnished that hard place somewhat more habitably than otherwise might have been the case. Like Boethius, also writing from prison so long before, Malory found his own peculiar reconciliation between virtue and necessity. Ever the survivor, in writing for his notional upper-class audience he cut his private losses and, he has implied, the losses accruing to his society. Such was his presence within his text, and his text’s presence to its age.

with a marginal apparatus often did more than merely register ‘reader response’ to what was going on in a particular text (although, of course, it could also do that): a marginal apparatus endowed, or could be seen to endow, the text it accompanied with cutural authority; the very mise-enpage of a medieval manuscript could therefore enact cutural authority in visual terms. The presentation of the Winchester Manuscript arguably also aspired to do something comparable. It is also striking to notice that a significant number of its marginalia coincide with narrative moments that on literary grounds this chapter has argued constitute focal points of the authority issue (moments, for example, like deaths, or dreams and prophetic visions; Gawain’s death-bed letter also has one such marginalium attached to it, and is reproduced on the cover of this book).

Chapter 8

Location, Location, Location

T

hough it was a sense of the presence and value to us now of some of the cardinal texts in the canon of medieval English literature that initially prompted their inclusion in these chapters, each chapter has nevertheless also tried to quit that sense by seeking to rehabilitate something of the two former senses of presence, both today derelict, to which this book has declared a prior allegiance: the presence of the text’s original age within it in tandem with its presence to its age. The chapters thus hope to have rendered texts that modern literary tastes and our present-day industry of the past first made familiar somewhat less so. This making strange ensued as locations that each text once occupied were revisited, locations that the culture we inhabit today, like any organism an evolving and changing thing, eventually came to vacate in the course of its onward movement through time. The vacated places sought for have comprised, amongst other things, abandoned ideological formations and deserted cultural networks which can now only be recuperated, if at all, with some scholarly effort; however, if they can be illuminated, their reflected light throws our once familiar texts into a relief which makes them look different than before. Yet, it is not enough merely to recognize these differences in a vague and general way. They must as far as possible be brought into focus: how is it, exactly, that each text appears different, and also can we be confident that the particular formation or network in whose light it appears so is the most appropriate one to bear in mind, or even, in some cases, a legitimate one to bear in mind? These questions enjoin a concomitant habit of self-scrutiny regarding how we go about first identifying, comprehending, and then finally reconciling such formations and networks with the texts chosen for appraisal. Indeed, the habit constitutes a critical regime without which our understanding of the presence of medieval English literature will be much less robust. Some formations and networks are likely, after all, to have greater relevance than others for our understanding of

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presence, while yet others may have little or no relevance at all. The particular aspects of the times with which the texts discussed here enter a dialogue are by no means the only ones among the totality that in theory, given enough information and a matching dexterity in its deployment, could be restored and inspected. However, they commend themselves because they have the capacity to cast light on largescale cultural conditions that our texts absorbed and responded to. By that same measure, all the interpretations offered in this book may be regarded as macro-interpretations; that is, even when synthesized from an accumulation of small, in some cases disparate and scattered, details, the interpretation finally has something to say about the nature of each text generally and about its larger cultural intervention. As such, the interpretation may be considered to make a strong bid for our attention in view of its appreciable capacity to account for what some of the salient aspects of the text’s former presence were. The interpretations arrived at in this book, then, have rested on hypothetical but disciplined reconstructions assembled from the contingent data of the past. It has been essential, first, to try wherever it was not immediately apparent to retrieve that data, although of course, retrieval was not always fully possible. Take the case of the historical author, for example. Authors have been said to matter here to the extent that since they are themselves the products of history, they are self-evidently the conduits of history into the texts they write. Consequently, in order to build the sort of interpretations of concern, the more that can be known about those authors and their cultural connections and training the better. But of the five authors treated, the names of only three are known, and even then only one of those three, Geoffrey Chaucer, emerges bearing anything like a substantial weight of external biographical information with which to work.1 More usually, the impression that we form of the authors arises obliquely from what they write, as a biographical by-product of our impression of what the historical situatedness of their texts may have been. The data quarried for in order better to understand that situatedness, and through having done so, to ready ourselves to appreciate its possible implications, were not quarried simply for the sake of heaping up the sort of antiquarian detail that traditional literary history has tended to value. On the contrary, these data were prerequisites to set in apposition to our texts before the presences sought for could hope to be entered. Historical excavation, then, has been here a fundamental code of practice, whose watchword has been ‘location, 1 

And of these, that of William Langland is itself a surmise, since he nowhere explicitly names himself in his work. Nor is the identity of Sir Thomas Malory quite established, either, if for a different set of reasons; see Chapter 7 and note 1. I omit scholarly attempts to fasten a name to the Pearl-author; see Chapter 4 and note 2.

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location, location’: when was the text written, where was it written, who wrote it and in what circumstances? Questions as basic as these, perhaps most pressingly foregrounded in the first chapter on The Owl and the Nightingale, need to be borne in mind as we start seeking primary orientation in the environing field of formations and networks that are ultimately going to be of interest. In fact, they will help us discriminate between which formations and networks will be appropriately available for comparative inspection, and which will be liable to prove mere distractions. Only when we start to move among them again as if they were living presences can we begin appreciating which will profitably reward exploration in relation to the text under review; these fundamental questions of location help plant our feet firmly on the ground as our first steps are taken. It is a common circumstance of the study of early writing that their asking may not yield prompt answers, nor perhaps yield any answer at all in certain cases. Yet, that ought not deter reflection on them nor the weighing of the possible interpretative consequences that flow from knowing, or even not knowing, what the answers are. Even if enquiry does not finally result in leading quite to the location that may be ideally hoped for in order to visit a text in its originary habitat, it may perhaps have led to one close enough for it to remain in some measure interpretatively helpful. No matter how partial or provisional, answers to the various questions of location need to be ventured before we will be most suitably positioned to begin choosing the best paths for an interpretative quest to follow, starting to see each text relationally and contemplating the ‘View from a Hill’ that it affords. With the point of departure that the issues of location help to establish clarified as adequately as possible, the interpretative quest proceeds from it, operating from a simple principle: respect must be fostered for the cultural embeddedness of every text, but also alertness cultivated to where that embeddedness can be most appropriately discerned. Once discerned, reflection is then necessary on how exactly that cultural embeddedness may be pressed into service as a heuristic assistant in acts of interpretation. Outside observing this principle of historical respect, the interpretative quest need not feel itself constrained exclusively by the terms of any single pre-existent master theory or interpretative strategy. A number of modern and postmodern critical theoretical practices are available to raise our consciousness of what some of the moves are that we make upon texts when we interpret them; to that extent, they may indeed prove useful. However, the interpretative quest finally remains an art, one faced with the job of discovering new ways in which not only to discover but also to negotiate and apply the historical data that the questions of location help establish, and the terms of this art cannot be entirely predicted in advance. Since the data established are

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different in each case, the interpretative quest will tend to resist the homogenized heuristic approach to them that adherence to any one critical practice, particularly any with a rigidly preconceived agenda, may risk promoting. The interpretative quest cannot be wholly preempted by the rules of any single master theoretical narrative also because it needs to afford flexibility to how the critical process operates in assessing the nature of the cultural embeddedness of the texts whose presences have been sought. Since each text under review was polyvalent in its day, some number of historicized views of it will be authentically possible: after all, as Chaucer pertinently observed of textual interpretation when, unbeknownst to him, he donned the hat of reader-response critic, ‘diverse folk diversely they said’.2 As our individual, though ever historically respectful, interpretation of the text ramifies, it may, as noted, helpfully avail of any of a number of recent theoretical procedures for its further development and in order to raise its level of self-awareness. Yet, as it does so, it will simultaneously have been liberated from any possible coercion exerted by those procedures by its prior subscription to one basic tenet: the rich and changing particularities of the past that inform, and are informed by, the texts whose presences have been sought finally elude explanatory containment within any one set of modernist or postmodernist terms; for this reason, interpretation is not in thrall to the imperatives of any single theoretical perspective. On the contrary, theoretical pluralism rather than monopoly seems a healthier disposition for anyone enquiring into the presence of medieval English literature. This pluralism can afford to be fully open save only in one regard: it should close against theories that ignore the contingencies of a text’s cultural embeddedness, or worse, theories seductively pretending to respect it while in practice marginalizing it or even leaving it far behind. For anyone on a journey into the presence of medieval English literature, the problem with adopting some sole theoretical perspective is that it may lead down a cul de sac, not least the cul de sac of flattening a text into the image that it is already predisposed to project onto it. Any theoretical monopoly, especially one whose practice tolerates little or no dialogue with the movement of history, will risk making each text come out looking pretty much like another. As far as this book is concerned, the very historical differences that necessarily distinguish one text’s presence from that of another call into question the appropriateness of applying any one, nonnegotiable, theoretical procedure in a dogmatic way. Between them the different presences of the texts studied here fracture easy, totalizing accounts of the two hundred years or more of literary and cultural 2 

The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, l. 3857 (p. 77).

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history to which the texts belong, rendering them useful, if at all, only in the most general of terms: the texts as a group carry the presence of, just as they were present to, no one monolithic history but a series of shifting histories. Thus to speak glibly of the English literature of the late Middle Ages as if that expression held any more meaning than simple chronological descriptiveness may not be especially helpful, for it has been seen how the various canonical texts visited in the preceding chapters engaged so variously with their society that unitary definitions of the nature and role of literature during this period risk quickly becoming reductive. As proof of that, the variety that our canonical landmarks have disclosed in the previous pages is worth briefly summarizing. However, before doing so, it is worth observing that one thing that they all seem to have in common is their relatively confident handling of their society’s cultural materials. Recall, for example, The Owl and the Nightingale, where these materials are also approached with a measure of respectfulness. This poem, if indeed the work of a late thirteenth-century member of the Dominican Order, an Order where the cut-and-thrust of scholastic debate had become a habit of thought, would seem perfectly at home in such a milieu, yet it would also be seen enacting the Latinintellectual playfulness of that milieu through the vernacular; here, the learned agility more usually typical of the higher end of Latin clerical culture would now spill into and train itself upon the contents of the more characteristically secular culture that its chosen language would have brought within closer range. Other texts of our canon, conversely, might succeed in wrong-footing received formations and networks enough to allow alternative ones to take root in their stead. This was argued to have happened in Sir Orfeo, a poem which celebrated performance itself as a competitive and socially cohesive good in the face of other, more traditional, master discourses. The performative ethic to the fore here seems more likely to associate with the ethos of secular culture once again, and that at an upper-class level. However, since even less can be surmised about the social location of the author of Sir Orfeo than about that of the author of The Owl and the Nightingale, the location of the former cannot be appealled to for any corroboration of the interpretation advanced. In any event, whatever its author’s actual social location, Sir Orfeo may disclose a view of a sector of society which was imaginatively capable of moving beyond exclusive reliance on customary and familiar sources of security and meaning. Yet other possibilities of socio-literary engagement were provided by the cluster of canonical texts selected from the later fourteenth century, and each was seen to have its characteristic valence in this respect. The first of these, Pearl, did not unhinge received discourses in the manner of Sir Orfeo so much as

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infiltrate them, causing them to point to realms exceeding their former horizons of expectation. Pearl is a text in which a formidable sense of conviction is legible, and from it one seems justified in inferring an author who was a self-assured appraiser of what he considered the value and limitation for his purposes of the diverse resources that he manipulated. If, and perhaps at least in this regard like Sir Orfeo, Pearl too was destined for upper-class consumption, its uncompromisingly preceptive pose could perhaps be regarded as a function of some social context either currently or recently nervous enough about the security of its position to have sought remedy not only in authoritarian forms of expression and thought, but also in installing new sorts of cultural sythesis through which it would make its authoritative presence felt. Piers Plowman, on the other hand, conducted its social engagement in a very different set of literary terms. By attempting to track the traces of a truth immanent within the vagaries of an unfinished and restless social process, one more mobile and wider in compass than any addressed in Pearl, it opened itself to the necessity of a textual evolution quite alien to Pearl. Yet, for all their differences of approach, both Pearl and Piers Plowman remain committed writings to extents far outstripping anything comparable in the work of the third member of this late fourteenth-century trio, Geoffrey Chaucer. Indeed, one may wonder if commitment is to be discerned in him, or at least in his writing, at all. While he demonstrably showed an appetite later in his career for appropriating politically committed discourses — radically so in some cases — it remains a moot point whether that appropriation also served to attach their committed agendas to some similar one of his own or simply to sprinkle the spice of topicality over work that for the larger part may have been literary exercise, an activity committed to little other than authorial self-interest, if not self-advancement. For Chaucer the author, as perhaps also for the author of The Owl and the Nightingale a century or so before him, truth seems to have been in some measure a function of labile rhetoric, something more like a ‘truth effect’, as it were, than an extrinsic fixed reality that remained uncoloured by the medium through which it was viewed. As such, the ‘truth’ enabled by the Chaucerian text, so often simply and conspicuously the offspring of rhetoric, may convey little sense that it correlates with any objective unchanging essence already believed to exist ‘out there’ that rhetoric has merely helped to bring into focus. The practice of this kind of ‘literary truth’, as it could be styled, was liable to inscribe both author and reader in a place of radical emancipation, in a comparatively value-free zone where ultimately nothing save the act of writing and the private motives behind it had primacy. Perhaps the key difference to observe between the earlier and the later writer is that, while the author of The Owl and the Nightingale most probably worked within the clerical fold, where

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truth-bearing narratives were professionally rehearsed routines, and where he would most likely have been a party to those routines if for no other reason than that they underwrote his personal institutional existence, Chaucer the layman, conversely, did not similarly locate, no matter how many works of a clerical cast he had accumulated on his bookshelves and had even directly turned to from time to time for source material. Rather, his personal institutional existence was most proximately conditioned by the shifting contingencies of secular politics. Perhaps this is the world whose characteristic evasions, prevarications, negotiations, and compromises come refracted through analogous aspects of Chaucer’s writing style. If so, then one important presence of his age within his work would stem directly from his occupancy of a particular sort of social niche whose dimensions were also played out in matching sets of literary terms. By contrast, for the authors of Pearl and Piers Plowman, truth might perhaps have indeed notionally existed ‘out there’, awaiting access, at least in principle, through the practice of a rhetoric that, conversely, had prior commitment to the belief that a still point existed in the turning world beyond the text into whose presence rhetoric might try to pave a way. The kind of lay onus shouldered by Chaucer to invent temporary and local truths in ephemeral literary terms seems also to have weighed, if perhaps somewhat more heavily, upon Thomas Malory, whatever disingenuous and pious protestations his Morte Darthur made about its abrogation of personal authorial responsibility through obediently narrating what ‘the French book sayeth’. However, a basic difference between both secular authors in this regard is that, while Chaucerian literary truth necessarily assumed chameleon hues as it migrated from one work to another, those works having been written over a period of several years and in a variety of genres, its Malorian counterpart was far less variegated. This was because the literary truth erected by Malory was the function of a single project which, even while uneven through having been pieced together from different source materials, was broadly consistent in its overarching design. Another difference distinguishing Malory from Chaucer in respect of the issue of lay authorization of truth through vernacular literary means locates in the more troubled presence of authority as a motivating force behind the Morte Darthur’s composition. The Chaucerian preoccupation with authority was in general playful and intermittent, while the Malorian one was more serious-minded and arguably endemic. In seeking the presence of medieval English literature, this book has incidentally contributed ideas towards a history of socio-literary forms for its chosen period. These ideas have been provoked among the twists and turns of the various ways in which the age was present in each text, and of the ways in which

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each text was present to its age. Of course, generalizations about the cultural work that the landmark texts have collectively performed within their period are always possible, even though, as earlier observed, they risk becoming reductive. If readers wish to identify a gravitational centre around which the different chapters of this book would all appear to orbit, one has steadily emerged as the chapters have progressed: it is issues surrounding the status of cultural authority within these texts that unite them all. Indeed, this pervasive disposition could itself be profitably historicized, a task whose more thorough discharge others may care to undertake.3 For example, the thesis that the texts stage vernacular meditations on, and mediations of, concepts of late medieval auctoritas, a prestige quality most noticeably rehearsed in Latinate cultural circles, secular as well as sacred, is worth pursuing. Conducted now in the vernacular, and therefore at a certain remove from the anchorage that Latinate culture provided, those meditations and mediations had the opportunity to become in some degree freer, more exploratory. However, by that same token, once disconnected from the steadying influence of traditional stores of cultural confidence and regulation, they were potentially more open to becoming anxious about the procedures they adopted. Anxiety, needless to say, often proves a productive stimulus to creative writing. Variations on a theme of anxiety, played sometimes quietly, sometimes far more audibly, depending on the work in question, could nevertheless be thought to have orchestrated all the landmark texts discussed in this book. Yet that said, it is a sop to the desire for generalization, whose merits, as earlier observed, are necessarily limited. The hubris of a trend in some scholarship to invent for periods their grand récit, a ‘theory of everything’, which prompts critics to strive for definitive summaries of periods of cultural endeavour (and, one suspects, to derive in the process lasting personal monuments), would seem to find its correction in a chastening, repeated immersion in the choppy sea of historical contingencies and particularities that eddies around every text, certainly around each of those visited here, no less than around other texts of the medieval English literary canon here passed over. Although it is a sea whose ripples can never in practice be fully counted, this does not mean that interpretative navigations into the presence of these texts should never be undertaken; after all, that is precisely what the preceding chapters here have attempted. But it does mean that voyagers should be wary of imagining that only one port of call looms on the horizon, 3 

Readers rightly recognizing within this book affinities to the projects of new historicism and cultural materialism (though not, I should stress, servility to either of those projects), and who are in sympathy with them, may be the ones most inclined to the task.

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however more eventful and interesting, let it be said, one port may undeniably prove relative to others. In the end, what the destinations of the interpretative quest may be are limited only by the limits of history itself, and by the extent of our ability accurately to chart history’s waters.

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Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Abbotsbury (Dorset): 30 Abra, daughter of Hilary of Poitiers: 102 n. 35 Ackroyd, Peter: 1 Aegidius Romanus; see Rome, Giles of Aers, David: 96 n. 20, 196, 196 n. 157, 197, 199, 200, 200 n. 168, 201 Albertus Magnus: 68, 68 n. 58 Alexander IV, pope: 63 Alford, John: 128, 128 n. 43, 130, 132, 136 Alkerton, Richard: 130 n. 48 Allen, Dorena: 70, 71, 71 n. 63, 72 Althusser, Louis: 144 n. 2 Amersham (Buckinghamshire): 211 n. 197 Ancrene Wisse: 35, 35 n. 46, 42 n. 73 Anne, of Bohemia, queen of England: 94, 94 n. 17, 102–04, 104 n. 37, 104 n. 39, 105–07, 109–10 Anneux, Jean de: 176 n. 104; Filios enutrivi: 176 n. 104 Anselm (St) of Canterbury: 11 Apologia ad Guillelmum; see Bernard (St) of Clairvaux Aquevilla, Nicholas de: 96–97, 97 n. 22, 100, 101 n. 28, 113, 183 n. 121; Sermones dominicales: 183 n. 121 Aquinas, Thomas (St): 147, 151, 167 n. 70 Aquitaine: 233–34 Aristotle: 45; Rhetoric: 45 Arthur: 232 n. 52, 233 n. 54 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury: 62 n. 30, 109 n. 55, 131 n. 51, 135 n. 63, 193, 197, 202 n. 173, 209 n. 188, 209 n. 190, 210–11, 235

Ashwardby, John: 173–74, 174 n. 93, 175 n. 100, 176, 176 n. 104 The Assembly of Ladies: 244 n. 83 Aston, Margaret: 201, 210 Augustine (St) of Hippo: 58 n. 17, 134 n. 62 Augustinian canons: 32, 168 Auvergne, William of: 68, 68 n. 58 Babylon: 234 Bakhtin, Mikhail: 11, 95 n. 18 Barthes, Roland: 7, 56 n. 13, Bartholomeus Anglicus: 67 n. 51, 68 n. 53; De proprietatibus rerum: 68 n. 53 Beket, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury: 234 Bede, Venerable (St): 28 Bedfordshire: 62 n. 35 Beleth, John: 59 n. 19, 61 n. 27, 64; Rationale divinorum officiorum: 59 n. 19, 61 n. 27 Belgrave, John: 191 n. 146 Benedictine order: 30, 121 n. 18, 127 n. 38, 186 Benson, Larry D.: 231 n. 50 Berkeley, Lord: 163 n. 57 Bernard (St) of Clairvaux: 149 n. 14, 188, 188 n. 137, 190–91; Apologia ad Guillelmum: 188 n. 137 Bibbesworth, Walter de: 27 n. 18 Bible; see Vulgate Bishop, Ian: 107 Björkman, Erik: 232 n. 51 Blackfriars Council (1382): 162 n. 56, 198 Bloomfield, Morton: 179 n. 112

296 Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Boethius: 258 Boldon, Uthred of: 186 Bowers, John: M. 106 n. 45 Braswell-Means, Laurel: 183 n. 121 Braybrooke, Robert, bishop of London: 109 n. 55 Brewer, Charlotte: 117, 141 Brut; see Laȝamon Brut, chronicle: 229 n. 43, 230 n. 47 Buckinghamshire: 211 n. 197 Burgh, Benedict: 178 n. 108; Disticha Catonis: 178 n. 108 Burnell, Robert, bishop of Bath and Wells: 42, 42 n. 70 Burrow, John: 9, 121, 123 n. 26, 134 n. 62 Bury, Richard of, bishop of Durham: 29 n. 21 Caesar, Julius: 155 Cambridge: 29 n. 21, 129 n. 47 Cambridgeshire: 213 Canterbury: 2 Canterbury, John of: 36, 38, 193 Cantilupe, Walter, bishop of Worcester: 40 n. 62 Capgrave, John: 227 n. 35, 230 n. 47; The Solace of Pilgrimes: 227 n. 35 Carmelite orders: 173, 177 Carne, Edward: 38 Cartlidge, Neil: 24, 35 n. 46, 36, 71 n. 63 Caxton, William: 240, 240 n. 71, 242 n. 79, 248 n. 99 Charles VI, king of France: 61 n. 26, 75 n. 71 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 5 n. 9, 7, 9, 13–15, 57 n. 15, 68 n. 55, 71 n. 63, 72 n. 67, 104 n. 37, 120, 123, 138 n. 76, 143–44, 144 n. 3, 145–46, 146–7 n. 9, 147–48, 148 nn. 11–12, 149, 149 n. 14, 150, 150 n. 18, 151–54, 154 n. 29, 155, 155 n. 36, 156–59, 159 n. 47, 162–63, 163 n. 57, 164, 164 n. 60, 165, 165 n. 62, 165 n. 66, 166–75, 175 n. 100, 176, 176 n. 104, 177, 181–84, 184 n. 125, 185–87, 187 n. 136, 188, 188 n. 138, 189, 191, 191 n. 146, 192–94, 194 n. 151, 195, 195 n. 152, 196, 196 nn. 154–56, 197, 197 n. 158, 197 n. 160, 198, 198 n. 161, 199, 199 n. 168, 200, 200 n. 170, 201–02, 202 n. 174, 204–05, 207–09, 209 n. 188, 210–12, 215–16 n. 6, 217 n. 9, 240, 260, 262, 264–65;

The Canterbury Tales: 13–15, 144 n. 3, 145, 147, 162–63, 168, 184 n. 125, 198 n. 164, 199, 199 n. 166, 200, 202 n. 174, 204, 206–07, 211, 211 n. 197, 212, 240; ‘The General Prologue’: 169–71, 171 n. 83, 174, 177, 180, 185–86, 191; ‘The Knight’s Tale’: 57 n. 15, 68 n. 55, 215 n. 6; ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’: 180 n. 117, 215 n. 6; ‘The Friar’s Tale’: 184, 184 n. 125; ‘The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale’: 180–82; ‘The Merchant’s Tale’: 72 n. 67; ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’: 155 n. 36, 166–67, 167 n. 69; ‘The Tale of Melibee’ 203; ‘The Monk’s Tale’: 169 n. 77, 202; ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale’: 186, 201 n. 171, 215 n. 6; ‘Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale’: 200 n. 168, 201 n. 171; ‘The Parson’s Tale’: 126 n. 37, 187, 187 n. 136; The Parliament of Fowls: 7; The Legend of Good Women: 14, 104 n. 37, 147, 153, 156, 156 n. 41, 157, 157 n. 41, 159, 162–63, 199, 200; Boece: 204, 204 n. 178; Troilus and Criseyde: 72 n. 67, 149, 162, 204; Complaint to his Purse: 198; An ABC: 14, 146, 148–50, 153, 162–63, 198, 198 nn. 164–65, 199–200 Cheriton, Odo of: 129 n. 47 Cheshire: 90 Chester: 235 Christ: 59 n. 20, 65, 98–99, 102 n. 35, 108 n. 53, 140 n. 82, 169–70, 187–88, 191 Chiltern Hills: 211 n. 197 Chronicle; see Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne Chronicon de Monasterio de Hailes: 233 n. 54 The Church and her Members: 179 n. 110 Cigman, Gloria: 139 Cividale del Friuli (Udine): 215 n. 4 Cleanness: 89, 97 n. 23

Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Clement V, pope: 41 n. 65 Clifford, Sir Lewis: 202 n. 173 Clive, Geoffrey de: 34 Confessio amantis; see Gower, John Continental mainland of Europe: 176 Convertimini; see Holcot, Robert Convocacio sacerdotum: 202 n. 173 Cooper, Helen: 183 n. 121 Coucy, Enguerrand de: 62, 62 n. 31 Courtenay, William, bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury: 146 n. 8, 197 Cowpen, James de: 81, 81 n. 85, 86 Crecy, John de: 81 n. 85 Cromwell: 257 n. 126 Crondall (Hampshire): 41–42 The Crowned King: 139 Cumberland: 81 Cyrcetur, Thomas: 130 n. 48 D’Arcy, Anne Marie: 60 n. 23, 71 n. 63, 103 n. 35, 159 n. 46 David, biblical king of Israel: 80 n. 81, 98, 100 Death and Liffe: 139 Decretum; see Gratian De clericorum institutione; see Rabanus Maurus De dotacione ecclesie sponse Christi: 186 n. 129, 186 n. 131 Defensio curatorum; see FitzRalph, Richard Deguileville, Guillaume de: 148, 148 n. 12, 149, 149 nn. 14–15, 198; Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine: 148–49 De heretico comburendo: 209–10 Delany, Sheila: 199 n. 48 De officio regis; see Wyclif, John De pontificum Romanorum schismate: 161 n. 53 De proprietatibus rerum; see Bartholomeus Anglicus De perfectione statuum; see Wyclif, John De triplici vinculo amoris; see Wyclif, John Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation; see Trevisa, John Dialogues; see Gregory I, pope Dinshaw, Carolyn: 6, 171, 171 n. 83 Disticha Catonis; see Burgh, Benedict Dominic (St): 36, 36 n. 48 Dominican order: 29, 29 n. 21, 33–34, 34 n. 41, 35, 35 n. 42, 36, 39, 43, 45, 48, 61 n. 29, 68, 120 n. 17, 165 n. 61, 187,

297

201 n. 171, 263 Dorset: 21, 25, 25 n. 13, 29–30 Dublin: 61 n. 28, 206, 208 Durandus, William: 59 n. 21, 60 n. 24, 64, 107, 108 n. 53; Rationale divinorum officiorum 107 Durham: 41 Edward I, king of England: 34, 41–42, 42 n. 70, 80–81, 86 nn. 99–100, 87 n. 105 Edward II, king of England: 51 n. 2, 234, 234 n. 59 Edward III, king of England: 116, 235 Edward IV, king of England: 256 Edward, the Black Prince: 235 Eleanor, of Provence, queen of England: 33, 41 Elvetham: 32 Ely, Nicholas of, bishop of Winchester: 42 England: 14, 25, 29–30, 35, 38, 55–56, 60 n. 23, 62, 67 n. 51, 76, 101, 108, 112, 150, 162 n. 56, 176, 224 n. 24, 225, 234–35, 243 n. 79, 257 n. 126 Evesham (Worcestershire): 60 n. 23 Excommunicamus et anathematisamus; see Gregory IX, pope Eynsham, Adam of: 58 n. 16 Eynsham, Edmund of: 58 n. 16 Fasciculi zizaniorum: 161 n. 54 Fasciculus morum: 71, 71 n. 63, 72, 72 n. 67, 73, 75 n. 70, 130 n. 47 Felton, John: 125, 125 n. 32, 126, 128 n. 43 Ferrers, Thomas: 41, 41 n. 65 Festial; see Mirk, John Field, P. J. C.: 217 n. 9, 227, 257 Fifty Errors and Heresies of Friars: 169, 179 Filios enutrivi; see Anneux, Jean de First Shepherds’ Play; see Towneley Cycle Fish, Stanley: 16, 137 FitzRalph, Richard, archbishop of Armagh: 175 n. 101, 176 n. 102, 177 n. 105, 178–9 n. 110; Defensio curatorum: 177 n. 105, 179 n. 110 Flamborough, Robert of: 62 n. 35, 134 n. 62; Liber poenitentialis 62 n. 35, 134 n. 62 Florence: 120 n. 17 Floretum: 140, 140 n. 81 Folk of the Mercerye, petition of the (1387/88): 205–06, 206 n. 185, 207 Foucault, Michel: 7

298 Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Fountains Abbey (North Yorkshire): 129 France: 234 Francis (St) of Assisi: 160 n. 50 Franciscan order: 35 n. 42, 96, 174 n. 96, 183 n. 121 Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman emperor: 63 Friar Daw’s Reply: 175 nn. 97–98 ‘The Friar’s Answer’: 175 n. 99, 180 n. 116 Friars, mendicant orders: 172, 186, 186 n. 131 Froissart, Jean: 61 n. 26, 75 n. 71; Chroniques: 75 n. 71 Gascoigne, Thomas: 62 n. 30, 128 n. 43, 160 Gaunt, John of: 186, 186 n. 132 Glossa ordinaria: 183 n. 121 Gloucester Cathedral: 124 n. 31 Gower, John: 138 n. 76, 152, 186, 205; Confessio amantis: 152, 205; Mirour de l’Omme: 186 n. 133 Gratian: 151; Decretum: 151, 156 n. 39 Green, Richard Firth: 225 Gregory I, pope: 103 n. 35; Dialogues: 103 n. 35 Gregory VII, pope: 156 n. 39 Gregory IX, pope: 63, 151 n. 22; Excommunicamus et anathematisamus: 63 Gregory XI, pope: 162 n. 56 The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned: 184 n. 124, 186 n. 130 Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln: 34, 35 n. 42, 41, 216 n. 6 Guildford: 25, 29, 29 n. 22, 30–33, 33 n. 36, 34, 36, 36 n. 49, 39, 41, 48; Guildford priory: 33–34, 48 Holy Trinity church: 32; Guildford, John of: 25, 31–32 Guildford, Nicholas of: 21, 25, 25 n. 13, 29–31, 33, 40, 43, 47 Guildford, Peter of: 41–42, 42 n. 72 Guildford, Richard of: 36, 38 Halesowen (Worcestershire): 37 Hali Meiðhad: 35, 35 n. 46 Hampshire: 25–26, 32–33, 38 Hardyng, John: 230 n. 47 Harley lyrics: 83 n. 91 Havelok the Dane: 221 n. 16, 256 n. 123 Henry, duke of Lancaster: 235

Henry II, king of England: 87, 234, 236 n. 66 Henry III, king of England: 24, 33 Henry IV, king of England: 198, 210, 221 n. 16, 231 n. 50, 233–35 Henry, grandson of Eleanor of Provence: 33–34 Henryson, Robert: 247 n. 97; Moral Fables: 247 n. 97 Herbert, George: 16 Herebert, William: 124–25 n. 31 Hereford: 125 n. 31 Hereford Cathedral: 68 n. 56 Hereford, Nicholas: 157 n. 41, 175 n. 101, 189–90 Herefordshire: 37 Herod, biblical king: 61 n. 29 Heroides; see Ovid Hertfordshire: 131 n. 51 Heu! quanta desolatio Angliae praestatur: 175 n. 101, 176 n. 102, 178 n. 109 Heyworth, Peter L.: 174 n. 96 Higden, Ranulf: 163 n. 57; Polychronicon: 163 n. 57 Hilary (St) of Poitiers: 102 n. 35 Hill, Betty: 31, 38 Hinton, Simon of: 34 n. 41 Historia anglicana; see Walsingham, Thomas Historia regum Britanniae; see Monmouth, Geoffrey of Holcot, Robert: 26–27, 27 n. 15, 27 n. 16, 27 n. 18, 28, 28 n. 19, 28 n. 20, 29, 29 n. 21, 30, 39, 48; Convertimini: 27 n. 15, 28 n. 19 Moralitates 26–28, 28 n. 19, 29; On Wisdom (In Sapientiam): 48, 48 n. 77; Holy Innocents: 90, 95 n. 19, 97–98, 100, 107, 109, 113 Holy Land: 233–35 Holy Trinity church; see Guildford Home Counties of England: 25 How Satan and his Children: 192 n. 147 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester: 255 Hudson, Anne: 139, 156, 172 n. 86, 195, 195 n. 153, 196, 200, 209, 209 n. 190, 211 n. 197 Innocent III, pope: 63, 63 n. 36 Instructions for Parish Priests; see Mirk, John Ireland: 235

Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Jack Upland: 174, 174 n. 96, 175, 175 n. 100, 176, 176 n. 104, 180, 181 n. 119 James, M. R.: 5; ‘A View from a Hill’: 5, 10–11, 16, 261 Jameson, Frederic: 93–94 Jerusalem: 89 n. 1, 99 n. 26, 103 n. 35, 191 John XXII, pope: 234 n. 59 Kempe, Margery: 240 n. 74 Ker, Neil: 23–24 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn: 133 Kingston-upon-Thames (Gtr London): 36 Kittredge, George: 167 Kyng Alisaunder: 243 n. 79 Laȝamon: 38–39 n. 60, 71 n. 63; Brut: 38–39 n. 60, 71 n. 63 La Mort le Roi Artu: 218, 222, 222 n. 19, 228, 230 n. 47, 239 n. 70, 245 nn. 89–90, 246–47 n. 95, 248 n. 101, 252 n. 110, 254 n. 116 Lancastrians: 234 Lanercost Priory (Cumbria): 81 Langland, William: 9, 11–13, 13 n. 20, 15, 115–18, 118 n. 9, 118 n. 11, 119, 119 n. 12, 119–20 n. 14, 120–21, 121 n. 19, 122, 122 n. 22, 123–27, 127 n. 39, 128, 128 nn. 42–43, 129, 129 n. 47, 130, 130 n. 47, 130 n. 49, 131, 131 n. 52, 132, 132 n. 56, 133, 133 n. 57, 133 n. 59, 134 n. 62, 135, 135 nn. 65–67, 136, 136 n. 70, 137–38, 138 n. 76, 140–41, 143, 146 n. 8, 164, 164 n. 60, 165, 165 n. 62, 165 n. 64, 167, 167 n. 72, 184 n. 123, 185, 185 n. 126, 205, 233, 260 n. 1; Piers Plowman: 2 n. 3, 11–13, 100, 115, 115 n. 2, 116–17, 117 n. 7, 120, 120 n. 15, 121–22, 122 n. 24, 123, 123 n. 28, 124 n. 29, 125–27, 127 n. 38, 128, 128 n. 41, 130, 130 n. 48, 130 n. 50, 131–32, 132 n. 54, 134 n. 62, 135 n. 67, 138 n. 76, 139–41, 143, 146 n. 8, 160 n. 50, 164, 167, 184, 205, 206 n. 185, 233, 264–65 Laud Troy Book: 72 n. 67 ‘The Layman’s Complaint’: 180 n. 115 Legat, Hugh: 130 n. 48, 131 n. 51 Legenda aurea; see Voragine, Jacobus de Leicester: 191

299

Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine; see Deguileville, Guillaume de Lerer, Seth: 85 Libanus: 98 Liber poenitentialis; see Flamborough, Robert of Lincoln Cathedral: 124 n. 31 Little, Katherine: 195 n. 153 Lollards: 131 n. 52, 146 n. 8, 155 n. 36, 158, 160, 164–65, 167, 170, 172, 175 n. 98, 175 n. 101, 182–83, 188, 190–94, 196–97, 201, 201 n. 171, 202 n. 173, 210, 211 n. 197 London: 52, 56–57, 60 n. 23, 70, 80–81, 86, 87 n. 103, 94, 109 n. 55, 116, 135, 140, 146 n. 8, 202, 202 n. 174, 204–05, 206 n. 183, 210, 235 Paul’s Cross: 135 Rouncival hospital: 165 n. 66 St Paul’s Cathedral: 172 see also Westminster Lord Cromwell: 257 n. 126 Luf es lyf; see Rolle, Richard Lychlade, Robert: 170, 188 n. 137, 190 Lydgate, John: 229 n. 43, 230, 230 n. 47, 243 n. 82, 246 n. 93 Lyra, Nicholas of: 183 n. 121 Machaut, Guillaume de: 154, 154 n. 31; Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne: 154; Jugement dou Roy de Navarre: 154 Macherey, Paul: 111 Maidstone, Richard: 173–74, 174 n. 93, 176 Malory, Sir Thomas: 16, 213–15, 215 n. 4, 216–17, 217 n. 9, 218, 218 n. 11, 219–20, 220 n. 15, 221, 221 n. 16, 222, 222 n. 19, 224, 224 n. 24, 225, 225 n. 26, 226–27, 227 nn. 34–5, 228, 228 n. 36, 229–30, 230 n. 47, 231–32, 232 n. 53, 233, 233 n. 54, 233 n. 58, 235–38, 238 n. 69, 239–41, 241 n. 77, 242–43, 243 n. 79, 244–45, 245 n. 87, 246, 246 nn. 93–5, 247, 247 n. 97, 248, 248 n. 102, 249, 249 n. 105, 250–51, 251 n. 108, 252 n. 110, 253, 253 n. 112, 254, 254 nn. 116–17, 255–56, 256 n. 124, 257, 257 n. 126, 258, 265; Morte Darthur: 16, 213–14, 214 n. 2, 215–18, 218 n. 11, 219, 219 n. 13, 220, 220 n. 15, 221, 221 n. 17, 223,

300 Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

223 n. 23, 224, 224 n. 24, 225–26, 228, 228 n. 40, 231, 238, 238 n. 68, 239–40, 240 n. 71, 245, 248, 248 n. 100, 249–50, 251 n. 107, 252–54, 254 n. 118, 255–57, 257 n. 126, 265 Malvern: 116 Mann, Jill: 188 n. 138 Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne: 150 n. 18; Chronicle: 150 n. 18 Map, Walter: 28 n. 20; ‘Epistle to Valerius’: 28 n. 20 Margaret, queen of England: 81, 86 Marshall, William: 58 n. 16 Mary, Blessed Virgin: 103 n. 35, 104 n. 38, 149, 153, 234 Mascy, John de: 89 n. 2 Massey, John: 89 n. 2 Merton: 32 Metalogicon; see Salisbury, John of Meun, Jean de: 154, 158; Roman de la Rose: 154, 157–58 Middleton, Anne: 124, 139 Midlands of England: 25, 29, 90 Minnis, Alastair: 157–59, 159 n. 48 Mirk, John: 58 n. 17, 65, 128 n. 42, 155 n. 36, 156 n. 37, 168, 168 n. 74, 169; Festial: 128 n. 42, 155 n. 36, 168 n. 74 Instructions for Parish Priests: 58 n. 17; Mirror of Sinners: 211 n. 197 Mirour de l’Omme; see Gower, John Moerbeke, William of: 45 Monmouth, Geoffrey of: 39, 236 n. 66; Historia regum Britanniae: 39 n. 60, 236 n. 66 Montfort, Simon de: 60 n. 23 Montimer, Nicolas de: 41 Mooney, Linne: 204–05, 207 Moral Fables; see Henryson, Robert Moralitates; see Holcot, Robert Morte Arthur, stanzaic: 215 n. 4, 218 n. 11, 219, 228 n. 36, 231–32, 246, 246 n. 95, 248 n. 101, 252 n. 110, 254 n. 116 Morte Arthure, alliterative: 231, 231 n. 50, 232, 232 n. 52, 233 n. 54 Muisis, Gilles li: 188 n. 138 Mum and the Sothsegger: 139 Munich: 104

Musa, girl child known to Gregory I the Great: 103 n. 35 Newbold Revel (Warwickshire): 213, 237 Nicene Creed: 237 Nicholas III, pope: 42 n. 70 Normandy: 233–34 Northampton: 29 n. 21 Northumberland: 41 Ockham, William of: 127 Of Arthour and of Merlin: 87, 150, 243 n. 79 Of Prelates: 192 n. 147 Of the Leaven of the Pharisees: 178 Of weddid men and wifis: 212 n. 197 The Office of Curates: 192 n. 147 Olson, Paul: 209 Omne bonum; see Palmer, James le On the Seven Deadly Sins: 184 n. 125 On the Twenty-five Articles: 188–90, 192 On Wisdom (In Sapientiam); see Holcot, Robert Opus evangelicum; see Wyclif, John Orléans, Arnulf of: 197 n. 160 Ormulum: 3 n. 4 Ovid: 155; Heroides: 155 The Owl and the Nightingale: 7, 7 n. 15, 8–10, 19–20, 21–27, 27  n.  15, 28, 28  n.  18, 29–33, 35, 37, 37 n. 53, 39, 41–45, 48, 48 n. 76, 49, 51–52, 66, 261, 263–64 Owst, Gerald: 127 Oxford: 29, 34 n. 41, 124 n. 31, 125, 128 n. 43, 157 n. 41, 160, 162 n. 56, 170, 173, 179 n. 111, 189, 198 St Mary the Virgin church: 173–74 Oxford Constitutions: 101 n. 31, 209 n. 190 Palmer, James le: 176 n. 104; Omne bonum: 176 n. 104 Papworth St Agnes (Cambridgeshire): 213, 237 Paris: 59 n. 19, 64, 176 Paris, Matthew: 62, 62 n. 31 Parkes, Malcolm: 23, 139 Patience: 89, 97 n. 23 Paul (St): 162 Paul’s Cross; see London Pearl: 2 n. 3, 9–13, 15, 89, 89 n. 1, 90, 90 n. 6, 91–92, 92 n. 11, 93, 93 n. 13, 94, 94 n. 16, 95 n. 19, 96–97, 99, 99 n. 26, 100,-01, 101 n. 30, 102–03,

Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

103 n. 35, 104–05, 109–12, 112 n. 58, 115, 260 n. 1, 263–65 Pearsall, Derek: 136 n. 68, 144–45 Pecham, John, archbishop of Canterbury: 41, 41 n. 66, 42 Pecock, Reginald, bishop of Chichester: 160 Pennafort, Raymond of: 34 n. 41 Peraldus, William: 187–88; Summa vitiorum: 187 n. 135 Peter, figure known to Gregory I the Great: 103 n. 35 Peter (St): 109 Peter the Lombard: 167 n. 70; Sentences: 167 n. 70 Petrarch: 134 n. 62; Secretum: 134 n. 62 Phillips, Helen: 148 Piers Plowman; see Langland, William Piers the Plowman’s Crede: 139, 161 n. 53 Planctus Marie: 215 n. 4 The Plowman’s Tale: 166 n. 68, 183 Poitou, Henry of, abbot of Peterborough: 57 n. 15 Pontissara, John de, bishop of Winchester: 32, 41 Pore Caitif: 180, 180 n. 114 Portesham (Dorset): 21, 29, 29 n. 22, 30–31, 40 Prague: 74 n. 69 Premonstratensian order: 26, 33, 36, 37–38 Prémontré Abbey (Aisne): 36 Ptolemy: 67–68; Tetrabiblos 67 n. 51 Pynkhurst, Adam: 14–15, 132 n. 56, 204, 204 n. 178, 205, 205 n. 180, 206, 206 n. 184, 206 n. 185, 207–08 Rabanus Maurus: 107; De clericorum institutione: 107 Rationale divinorum officiorum; see Beleth, John; see also Durandus, William Recueil des Croniques; see Wavrin, Jean de Repingdon, Philip, bishop of Lincoln: 175 n. 101, 191 n. 146 Responsiones ad questiones LXV; see Woodford, William Rhetoric; see Aristotle Richard II, king of England: 90, 94, 102, 106 n. 43, 116, 231 n. 50, 233–36 Richard the Redeless: 139

301

Rolle, Richard: 241; Luf es lyf: 241 Roman de Horn: 79 n. 81 Roman de la Rose; see Meun, Jean de Rome: 151, 166, 168–69, 211 n. 197, 227 n. 35 Rome, Giles of: 45 Rosarium theologie: 139, 140 n. 81 Rothbury (Northumberland): 41 Rouncival hospital; see London Salisbury (Wiltshire): 29, 29 n. 22, 130 n. 48 Salisbury Cathedral: 130 n. 48 Salisbury, John of: 20 n. 2, 82 n. 89, 184 n. 125; Metalogicon: 20 n. 2 Salter, Elizabeth: 128, 139, 139 n. 79 Sar(r)acens: 151 Savonarola, Girolamo: 120 n. 17 Savoy, Boniface of, archbishop of Canterbury: 35 n. 42 Schmidt, Carl: 124, 130 Scotland: 60 n. 23, 235 Scriveners’ Company (London), common papers: 205 n. 181 Secretum; see Petrarch Sentences; see Peter the Lombard Sermones dominicales; see Aquevilla, Nicholas de The Seven Sages of Rome: 151–52 Shaftesbury Abbey (Wiltshire): 25 n. 13 Simpson, James: 15 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 71 n. 63, 89 Sir Orfeo: 2 n. 3, 5 n. 10, 8–10, 51, 51 n. 2, 52, 54–55, 55 n. 11, 56, 56 n. 13, 57, 57 n. 15, 58, 58 n. 16, 59, 60 n. 23, 64–67, 71, 71 n. 63, 72–73, 73 n. 68, 74, 74 n. 69, 75, 75 n. 71, 76 n. 73, 77, 77 n. 76, 78, 78 n. 78, 79–80, 80 n. 82, 81, 81 n. 86, 81 n. 88, 82–83, 83 n. 91, 84–85, 85 nn. 96–7, 86–87, 87 n. 103, 88, 105 n. 41, 263–64 Sisam, Celia: 31–32 Skeat, W. W.: 148 n. 12 The Solace of Pilgrimes; see Capgrave, John South English Legendary: 71 n. 63 Spain, James of: 41, 41 nn. 66–67 Spearing, A. C.: 53, 70, 128, 128 n. 41 Staffordshire: 90

302 Index of Persons, Places, and Texts

Staley, Lynn: 196–97, 197 n. 158, 199–200, 200 n. 168, 201 St Albans (Hertfordshire): 131 n. 51, 255 n. 120 St Amour, William of: 176, 176 n. 102 St Cher, Hugh of: 35 n. 42 Stephen, king of England: 236 n. 66 St Erkenwald: 89–90 n. 3 St Giles, John de: 34 St Mary the Virgin church; see Oxford St Paul’s Cathedral; see London Strohm, Paul: 210–11, 235 Stubbes, Estelle: 205 n. 178 Summa vitiorum; see Peraldus, William Surrey: 25, 29 Talbot Donaldson, E.: 129 Tetrabiblos; see Ptolemy Thomas, poet: 79 n. 81; Tristan: 79 n. 81 Thornton, Robert: 232, 232 nn. 51–53 Thorpe, William: 135 n. 63, 192–93 Titchfield: 26, 37–38; Titchfield Abbey: 33, 36, 38 n. 60, 39, 39 n. 60 Titchfield, John of: 36 n. 49 Tournai (Hainaut): 188 n. 138 Tours, anonymous archbishop of: 63 n. 36 Towneley Cycle: 240 n. 74; First Shepherds’ Play: 240 n. 74 Trevisa, John: 157 n. 41, 163 n. 57; Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation: 157 n. 41 Turville-Petre, Thorlac: 87 Twelve Conclusions: 172, 172 n. 86, 184 n. 125, 210 Vae octuplex: 178 n. 110 The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham: 58 n. 16 Voragine, Jacobus de: 61 n. 29, 201 n. 171; Legenda aurea: 61 n. 29, 201 n. 171 Vulgate Bible: 152 Waleys, Thomas: 165 n. 61 Wallace, William: 60 n. 23 Walsingham, Thomas: 203 n. 174, 235; Historia anglicana: 235 Warwickshire: 213 Watson, Nicholas: 101 n. 29, 146 n. 9 Wavrin, Jean de: 228 n. 36; Recueil des Croniques: 228 n. 36 Weinberg, Carole: 38

Wells, J. E.: 24, 42 Wenzel, Siegfried: 187 n. 136 Wessex: 25 West Midlands: 37, 37 n. 53, 38, 39 n. 60, 140 Westminster (Gtr London): 239, 241, 244 Westminster Hall: 172 Wilkins, Thomas: 31 n. 27 William I, king of England: 150 n. 18 Williams, Elizabeth G.: 228 n. 36 Wilton, Thomas de: 176 n. 104 Wimbledon, Thomas: 135, 135 n. 65, 140, 140 n. 82 Winchester (Hampshire): 29, 32–33, 38, 41–42, 42 n. 70, 150 Woodford, William: 174 n. 96, 175 n. 98, 181; Responsiones ad questiones LXV: 174 n. 96 Woodlock, Henry, bishop of Winchester: 32 Woodstock, Isabella of: 94, 94 n. 17, 107, 107 n. 49, 109, 109 n. 55, 110 Woodstock, Thomas of: 94, 107 Worcester Cathedral: 38, 121 n. 18, 162 n. 55 Worcestershire: 37, 116, 116 n. 5, 126, 126 n. 35, 140, 140 nn. 83–84 Wyclif, John: 146 n. 8, 157, 157 n. 42, 158, 158 n. 43, 161 nn. 53–4, 162 n. 56, 165–66, 166 n. 67, 173, 174 n. 96, 175 n. 101, 176 n. 104, 178 n. 110, 182, 182 n. 120, 184, 186 n. 132, 189, 192 n. 146, 199 n. 166, 201 n. 171, 202 n. 173, 203 n. 174; De officio regis: 186 n. 130; De perfectione statuum: 176 n. 104; De triplici vinculo amoris: 157 n. 42; Opus evangelicum: 157 n. 42, 161 n. 53 Wycliffite Bible: 152, 195 n. 152, 206 n. 183 Wycliffite Glossed Gospels: 160 n. 49 Wycliffites: 159, 160 n. 49, 162, 184 n. 125, 185, 186 n. 131, 195 Yorkshire: 129 Zumthor, Paul: 118 n. 9

Cursor Mundi

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field.

Titles in Series Chris Jones, Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and its Rulers in LateMedieval France (2007) Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom (2008) Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, ed. by Ildar Garipzanov, Patrick Geary, and Przemyslaw Urbanczyk (2008) William Walker, ‘Paradise Lost’ and Republican Tradition from Aristotle to Machiavelli (2009) Carmela Vircillo Franklin, Material Restoration: A Fragment from Eleventh-Century Echternach in a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Codex (2010) Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c.1000-1200), ed. by Haki Antonsson and Ildar Garipzanov (2010) Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, ed. by Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson (2011) ‘This Earthly Stage’: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (2011)

In Preparation Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, ed. by Carlos Fraenkel, Jamie C. Fumo, Faith Wallis, and Robert Wisnovsky Claudio Moreschini, Hermes Christianus: The Intermingling of Hermetic Piety and Christian Thought The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World, ed. by Maijastina Kahlos Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c. 1350 – c. 1650, ed. by David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbesmeyer Luigi A. Berto, The Political and Social Vocabulary of John the Deacon’s ‘Istoria Veneticorum’ Barbara Furlotti, A Renaissance Baron and his Possessions: Paolo Giordano I Orsini, Duke of Bracciano (1541-1585) Wendy Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England Writing Down the Myths, ed. by Joseph Falaky Nagy