Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) David Matthews - Writing to the King_ Nation, Kingship and Literature in England, 1250-1350-Cambridge University Press (2010).
241 Pages
In the century before Chaucer a new language of political critique emerged. In political verse of the period, composed in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, poets write as if addressing the king himself, drawing on their sense of the rights granted by Magna Carta. Th ese apparent appeals to the sovereign increase with the development of parliament in the late thirteenth century and the emergence of the common petition, and become prominent, in an increasingly sophisticated literature, during the political crises of the early fourteenth century. However, very little of this writing was truly directed to the king. As David Matthews shows, the form of address was a rhetorical stance revealing much about the position from which writers were composing, the audiences they wished to reach, and their construction of political and national subjects.
David Matthews is Senior Lecturer in Middle English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester.
Preface I began this book at the end and came to its topic obliquely. I fi rst read Laurence Minot’s poetry in Joseph Ritson’s edition in connection with another project and was perplexed at the relative neglect of the lively work of a poet active during Chaucer’s youth. Th inking about this, I was led to another antiquarian work, Th omas Wright’s Political Songs of England , fi rst published in , reissued by Peter Coss in facsimile in and still a valuable anthology. It furnished a great deal of the material discussed here and pointed me towards much else. Hence, although this book will appear to be a straightforward work of medieval studies , it is informed by and grew out of earlier work on antiquarian medievalist scholarship and the early shaping of the discipline.
Some regard this as medieval ism ; this book refl ects my larger contention that the study of medieval literature should go alongside considerations of how that literature and its study have been constructed. At its simplest, the book began as an attempt to do more with the genre, or genres, of political verse in England in the period before Minot’s presumed death date of , stopping short of the revolution in English writing which then took place in the second half of the fourteenth century. Th e political verses inhabit a grey zone between historical source material and literary writing. Th omas Wright’s own assumption was that they were sources for the social historian. To a degree, however, he also saw them as expressions of the voice of the people and some later inquiry into them has been motivated by a desire to recover such voices. Alternatively, many of these political verses can be seen as quite skilful creations of voice, ventriloquisings of various possible speaking positions, probably composed by clerics. In that regard, they could be viewed as having something in common with the similarly (if immensely more sophisticatedly) ventriloquial Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman .
Th e main focus of this book is the century before ; I do not ultimately attempt to make all the possible links forward to Ricardian writing. In this respect, the book responds to the tendency in Middle English studies of the past two decades to broaden the discipline’s horizons. One of my concerns in this book is to help bring the century before Chaucer back into view, just as the half-century after Chaucer has been, in recent criticism, so brilliantly explored. It is no exaggeration to say that we have seen a renaissance in studies of fi fteenth-century England in the past decade.
Benefi cial though this has been to a more inclusive and arguably accurate sense of what Middle English literature is, it has also lent itself to a refashioning of literary history which links Chaucer ever more fi rmly forward to Wyatt and the sixteenth century, at the cost of detaching him and his contemporaries from their predecessors. Th e re-establishing of the fifteenth-century writers is new; the downplaying of the period before , with its consequent tacit re-placing of Chaucer as Father of English Poetry, simply restates assumptions prevalent from the sixteenth century onwards. My aim here is to counter the increasing tendency to assume that it is only with the birth of Chaucer that Middle English becomes interesting. Firmly linking the thirteenth century and the early fourteenth with the period after may not provide an easily negotiated, curriculumfriendly period. But it might just give a truer sense of the development of late medieval English literature. In reading the ‘pre-Ricardian’ writing discussed in this book, I have found again and again concerns in it that do anticipate the later and better-known work – and in such a way as to revise some recent critical paradigms. It would be surprising if it did not.
Much of the literature in question, after all, is what would have been available to the young Chaucer, Gower, and Langland before they began to write and absorb the lessons of continental literature. I embark on this project with an introduction which discusses the idea of ‘writing to the king’. Here, I juxtapose the literary materials with the common petition, in order to show how the motif of ‘writing to the king’ – literally possible via the petition – is routinely deployed in literary writings.
Th is suggests that ‘ documentary culture’, as discussed by Emily Steiner in particular, was not confi ned to Ricardian writing but (not surprisingly) goes back to the period of the beginnings of parliament. Th e introduction also considers writing that fl ows in the other direction, from king to people: the well-known letters addressed by Henry III to his subjects in , written in English. In closing the introduction, I consider the implications of this unusual move, not to be repeated until the fi fteenth century, and look at the claims and counter-claims that have been made about nationalism in the Middle Ages, in order to conclude that although they may well not describe any existing form of political community in England, the letters are an attempt to wish political harmony into being by imagining it. Th ere is little surviving political verse in English before the Barons’ Wars in the s. Chapter is largely devoted to discussion of such Latin verse as Th e Song of Lewes , found in London, British Library, Harley MS , and it considers the implications, for a sense of Englishness, of such clerkly and Latinate productions. Th e survival of one English poem, however – ‘Th e Song Against the King of Almaigne’ – does suggest that a lively English tradition of political satire and advice was also in existence. Chapter examines the abusive Anglo-Norman and English verses of Langtoft’s Chronicle , which provide a commentary on the invasion of Scotland by Edward I in .
Th ese I consider in relation to recent arguments for the emergence of an English national self-consciousness from the late thirteenth century. Chapter examines poems from the very end of the reign of Edward I through to Edward III’s entry into personal rule in . While examples of Anglo-Norman verse are still found in this period, there was now a growing tradition of complaint, satire and advice in English. Such poems as ‘Th e Execution of Sir Simon Fraser’, the Anglo-Norman ‘Outlaw’s Song of Trailbaston’, two versions of the ‘Elegy on the Death of Edward I’, and Adam Davy’s dream visions of Edward II are juxtaposed with chronicle materials in this chapter in order to examine their meditations on kingship and justice in the context of troubled handovers of power between and . Chapter also considers the reigns of the fi rst three Edwards but focuses in particular on the s and the major crisis confronting Edward III at the beginning of that decade. It looks at complaint writings, such as William of Pagula’s Speculum Regis Edwardi III and English poems: the ‘Song of the Husbandman’, ‘Against the King’s Taxes’, Th e Simonie , ‘King Edward and the Shepherd’. Chapter then considers views of the s and s from which this sense of crisis is entirely absent. Praising his king and positing a unity between king and nation, Laurence Minot constructs an aggressive English nationhood. Finally, in the conclusion, I will consider the implications of this study for the reading of later fourteenth-century literature. It is a very happy task to acknowledge those who helped me in the writing of this book, which took place through many changes. It was begun in the Rare Books room of the British Library, to the staff of which I am deeply indebted; I am also grateful to the University of Newcastle for two periods of research leave in which the early work was done.
I continued work in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; my thanks are due to the staff of reading room U in particular, to all at the Collège Franco-Britannique (especially my neighbour, Penou-Achille Somé), and to the De Landtsheer family. I gratefully acknowledge early conversations about what I might be doing, before I had any sense of the book’s shape, with Gordon McMullan and Andy Gordon. My thinking about the discipline of Middle English studies, and how I might fi t my work into it, has benefi ted enormously from separate but sometimes overlapping conversations with three acute scholars, Stephen Knight, Ruth Evans, and Larry Scanlon, who often have a better idea of what I am trying to do than I have myself. Richard Osberg and Tom James participated with me in a session on Laurence Minot at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in which proved to be particularly stimulating – I am grateful to all who were present for the discussion. I thank also Stephanie Trigg and Ruth Evans for their tough but sympathetic readings of the Minot material, to Jill Rudd for letting me teach it to undergraduates, and Tom Goodman for letting me talk about it at the New Chaucer Society Congress in . I also wish to record my thanks to the editors of Viator , in which some material in chapter fi rst appeared, in volume (). Other material from the book has been aired at the Middle English seminar at the University of Manchester (I am grateful to Murray Pittock for this seminar’s revival in recent years), and in the School of English at the University of Leeds, in which I thank Alfred Hiatt, and Catherine Batt and Oliver Pickering for their help with the elegy on Edward I. Eric Stanley issued an invitation which gave me an opportunity to air some thoughts about Simon Fraser, and Richard Firth Green, at the resultant session, helped my thinking along. In the fi nal stages, I was hugely helped by a stint at Harvard University as Morton W. Bloomfi eld visiting scholar, where the time aff orded and the resources of the Widener Library let me all but complete the book; my particular thanks go to Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, and Amy Appleford for that enormously pleasurable period. Th e unique research facility run by Rohan Mead in Melbourne gave me the space to write a fi nal chapter. Th e book constantly brought me up against my own limitations in fi elds beyond English literature.
I am tremendously grateful to Tony Edwards and Julia Boff ey for their freely given advice and help in the world of manuscripts and their contexts; Mark Ormrod generously responded to queries about fourteenth-century history; Ros Brown-Grant and Daron Burrows gave invaluable help in Anglo-Norman. In all these matters, remaining errors and opinions stubbornly adhered to are my own. I, and the book I kept promising, arrived at the University of Manchester in . I am grateful to all my new colleagues in English and American Studies for the environment they have provided. Elsewhere at Manchester, I owe my thanks to Steve Rigby, who was an invaluable interlocutor on matters of fourteenth-century history and read a complete draft, saving me from numerous diffi culties; to Adrian Armstrong and Anna Dezeuze, who invited me to speak at their seminars; and to Steve Milner, whose comments were greatly appreciated.
Fergus Wilde at Chetham’s Library was generous with his compendious knowledge of Langtoft. To David Alderson and Laura Doan, Heads of English while I was completing this project, I am very grateful for numerous small but vital bits of help. Kate Ash took time out of her own doctoral studies to work as an editorial assistant on my other commitments, giving me back valuable time; I am very grateful to her, and to Graham Ward of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures for making that possible. In early stages at Manchester, John Anderson was an enthusiast for the project and helped me on the translation from the St Albans chronicle on the fi rst page; it is a great sadness that he did not live to see the book completed. At Cambridge University Press, I am very grateful to Linda Bree and her team for calmly shepherding the book through at all stages, for an anonymous reader’s report which helped me reshape the central sections, and to Geraldine Stoneham for her meticulous editing. Finally, my greatest debt is to Anke Bernau, who did not type the manuscript, nor do the index, but made everything worthwhile.
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