The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry 9780812298017

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The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, author. Title: The clerical proletariat and the resurgence of medieval English poetry / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040707 | ISBN 9780812252637 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: English poetry—Middle English, 1100-1500— History and criticism. | Clergy—Secular employment— England—History—To 1500. | Clergy as authors—England— History—To 1500. | Working class authors—England— History—To 1500. | Literature and society—England— History—To 1500. | Clergy in literature. Classification: LCC PR311 .K47 2021 | DDC 821/.109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040707

To all my Canadian and American graduate students, in gratitude for their boundless inspiration, generosity, shared joy in our vocation, and their manifold achievements

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface. “Decidedly not the national language” Introduction. The Clericus Class, Underemployment, and the Golden Age of Middle English Poetry 1. The Clerical Proletariat, the Limitations of Marxist Analogy, and Resurging English Verse 11 2. Career Disappointment: Vicars, Scribes, Bureaucrats, and Singers 16 3. “The ramshackle twin engines of church and state”: King’s Clerks, Reluctant Careerists, and the Zenith of the Clerical Proletariat 25

Part I. Clerical Proletarians and the Resurgence of English Poetry: Vocational Crisis and Self-Representation Chapter One. Precedents for Clerical Crisis and Authorial Intervention in Early Middle English 1. Unfamiliar Friends: English as a “Foreign” Written Language 36 2. The Owl and the Nightingale’s Portrait of the Artist as an Under-Beneficed Clerk 41 3. The Grateful Lawman: Patronage and Liminality in the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut 48 4. Fending Off Xenophobia: Thedmar’s Authorial Intervention, “The Prisoner’s Lament” and London Civic Reading Circles for the Early Lyric 56 5. Clerical Careerist Authorship, Poetic Crisis, and the Fourth Estate in Wynnere and Wastoure 65

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Chapter Two. Poetry of Vocational Crisis in Langland’s Apologia and the Early Langlandian Tradition 1. Case Study 1: Hoccleve’s Career Disappointment and a “Secular” Poet’s Vocational Training for Pastoral Care 86 2. Case Study 2: Love in a Chantry Chaplain’s Account Roll: John Tyckhill’s “A Bird of Bishopswood” 97 3. Case Study 3: “White Collar” Underemployment and the Clerical Proletariat in the Z-text of Piers Plowman 102

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Chapter Three. Career Disappointment and Langlandian Tradition I: Hoccleve’s Missed Opportunity and Self-Portraiture in Vocational Crisis 110 1. From Disappointment to Public Pastor: Hoccleve and Langlandian Intertextuality 110 2. Langland, Hoccleve and Careerist London Literary Reading Circles 131 Chapter Four. Career Disappointment and Langlandian Tradition II: John Audelay as the Voice for a Lost Generation 140 1. John Audelay: Biography, Vocational Crisis, and Proletarian Habit of Mind 143 2. A Word About Form and the Importance of Audelay’s Latin Quotations 149 3. “Pore Prevyd Clerkys”: Audelay’s Mission for Ecclesiological Reform in Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition 152 4. Competition for Benefices, Delinquent Priests, and the Question of Satire in Marcolf 159 5. Performance, “Over-skipping,” and the Choral Proletariat 164 6. Postscript: Corrective Imitation of Langland, or, Audelay Steps out of Langland’s Shadow 171

Part II. The Liturgical and CATHEDRAL SERVICE CLASS AND Resurgent English Verse

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Chapter Five. Cathedral Songs: Lyric Genres of the Choral Ser vice Class and Resurgent English 177 1. Performance, Punctuation, and the Mystery of “Cathedral Lyrics” 177 2. Middle English Goes to Church (Through the Back Door): Carols, Motets, Contrafacta and Cross-Bred Genres 188

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3. Anglicizing the Arcane in Cathedral Choral Culture: The Hall and Classroom Proletarian in “Choristers’ Lament” and Norwich’s MS Arundel 292 206

Chapter Six. Satire, Drama, and Censorship: Submerged Literary Circles at the Cathedral 1. Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts” and Love Amidst Cathedral Fornication Records 220 2. Drama at the Cathedral: The Vicars Choral and the Ecclesiastical Court in the York Cycle’s Second Trial Before Pilate 232 3. Suppression at the Cathedral: Margery Kempe, the York Vicars Choral, and Vernacular Reading Circles 243 4. The Vicars Choral as In-House Authors: Trauma, Censorship, and Cathedral Publicity 252 Chapter Seven. The Clerical Proletariat and Public Genres of the Cathedral World: St. Erkenwald as a St. Paul’s Text 1. St. Erkenwald and In-house Public Histories: Cathedral Tabulae for Visitors in York and St. Paul’s 268 2. The Poet’s Knowledge of the Fabric, Layout and Liturgy of Old St. Paul’s 278 3. The Poet as Public Intellectual: Dramatizing the Dean’s Search of the St. Paul’s Library 292

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Conclusion. The Poet as Public Intellectual: Achievements and Characteristics of Proletarian Writers

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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I l l u s t r at i o n s 0.1

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 105r. The Lewed Vicary (Unlearned Vicar) appearing at Piers Plowman C.XXI.409 5 0.2 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 42r, Piers Plowman (C.IX.106), image of the “Lunatic Lollar” 7 0.3 From James le Palmer’s Omne bonum, Royal 6.E.VII, fol. 197, two groups of clerks, one dressed as dandified laymen, illustrating “De habitu clericorum” 24 0.4a “St. Dunstan-in-the-West Rectors and Vicars,” London, a plaque memorializing the medieval rectors seconded into government to serve as “Warden of the Rolls” 30 0.4b Further detail of “St.  Dunstan-in-the-West Rectors and Vicars,” listing later rectors 31 1.1a Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 323 (B.14.39), fol. 85r, Old English letter mnemonics for eME scribes in Proverbs of Alfred 39 1.1b Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 323 (B.14.39), fol. 24v, a leaf with two lyrics, “Seinte Mari” and “For on þat is so fayr” showing scribal difficulties with English 40 1.2 London, British Library, MS Harley 913, fol. 63r, showing Middle English and Latin stanzas of the poem “Erþ” 42 1.3 Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 31, fol. 135, the fourteenth-century lyric “Ihesu swete,” showing scribal difficulties with English 43 1.4 London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fol. 3, author portrait from Laȝamon’s Brut 49 1.5 Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 753, fol. 9, thirteenth-century image showing a secular canon in his cell compiling on a wax tablet 55 1.6 London, Corporation of London Records Office, Guildhall (London Metropolitan Archives), Liber de antiquis legibus, fols. 160v–161r, “The Prisoner’s Lament” 59 1.7 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 37v, Wastor stealing Piers’ poultry (Piers Plowman C.VIII.149) 72 2.1 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 A 13, Egerton Family Papers, glossed passage from Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes on Aristotle’s advice to Alexander 91

I llust r at i on s

2.2 2.3

3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7a 5.7b 5.8 5.9 5.10 6.1

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Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, fol. 118r, Death approaching a deathbed, illustrating Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Die,” c. 1430 97 London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) 25125/32, “A Bird of Bishopswood,” John Tyckhill’s alliterative poem written into his St. Paul’s rent roll 98 London, British Library, MS Royal 6.E.VI, fol. 298, the Omne bonum, on “Clerici,” illustrating absentee rectors 118 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111, fol. 9v, a Latin gloss in Hoccleve’s Remonstrance Against Oldcastle 127 Originally the chapel of the castle at Knockin in which Audelay conducted ser vices for the Lestrange household 145 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, fol. 22v, containing Audelay’s “Epilogue to the Council of Conscience” 151 Clerics destroying a church, from William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, MS Cecil Papers 290, fol. 13 162 The demon Tutivillus, carved on a misericord in Ely Cathedral 168 A detail of Figure 2.3, highlighting lines 5–7 of “A Bird,” in the hand of John Tyckhill, his St. Paul’s rent roll c.1395–96 181 Detail of the first few lines of “The Blacksmiths” in London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol. 71v 182 London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol. 3, eME “Creed” and “Pater Noster” 183 London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol.70v, “Choristers’ Lament” 185 The Bedern Hall, the dining and recreational hall of the College of the York Minster Vicars Choral 194 Interior of the Bedern Hall 195 Vicars Choral Hall and Close, Chichester Cathedral, with medieval housing 196 Two small windows of the Chichester Vicars’ Hall to light the reader’s lectern 197 St. William’s College, York Minster’s hall for chantry priests 200 “Go’day,” bobbed carol with musical notation from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 26 (SC 3340), fol. 8 202 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 52r, of a schoolmaster beating a child, Piers Plowman, C.XII.123–24 215 A sixteenth-century painting augmented from a fourteenth-century one of the vicars choral of Wells receiving a sealed charter of their privileges 219

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The Chester Cathedral Consistory Court, England’s oldest surviving example 223 6.3 London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, fol. 71, showing one of two lines in “Satire on the Consistory Courts” with elaborated top-line red ascenders 225 6.4 “Vnder a law I me lay,” a Middle English quatrain copied into the Acta capitularia 1410–1429, York Minster Library, MS H 2 (1), fol. 13 228 6.5 Detail of 6.4 229 6.6 Singleton “Penance” form for fornicators, dated 1753, York Minster Library, Historical Collections 231 6.7 York Minster Library, Add. 533, a triptych tabula containing cathedral histories, copied on parchment and mounted on boards for posting in York Minster, central panel of which is the Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE) 246 6.8 Pilgrims visiting the shrine of St.  William, York Minster, one of the ninety-five panels of the St. William Window 251 6.9 London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra  C.iv, fol. 13v, showing part of the Aliud Chronicon Metricum (ACM) 259 7.1 York Minster Library, Add. 534, tabula with histories, De Etatibus Mundi 270 7.2a London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xix, fol. 6r, with York Minster Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE) and scribal marginalia 274 7.2b Detail of a scribe’s marginal image c.1500, apparently mimicking York Minster’s towers, in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xix, fol. 6r, the CMEE 275 7.3 The “New Werke” with rood screen and aisle doors walling off the chancel of Old St. Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar 279 7.4 Floor plan of Old St. Paul’s, William Dugdale, The History of St. Paul’s Cathedral 280 7.5 St. Erkenwald’s shrine, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar, Old St. Paul’s 281 7.6 Diagram of Old St. Paul’s Churchyard c. 1450 283 7.7 London, British Library, MS Royal 13.E.VI, fol. 11 (c. 1199/1200–1209), with King Lucius in a baptismal font, from Ralph de Diceto’s Abbreviationes chronicorum 285 7.8 City of London Common Seal, obverse matrix, Museum of London 287 8.1 London, British Library, MS Royal 6.E.VI, fol. 296v, image from the Omne bonum of James le Palmer (d. 1375), “Clericus coniugatus” 302

preface

“Decidedly not the national language”

Multilingualism in medieval Britain is . . . the subject of many recent books . . . invit[ing] us to be “no longer wedded to an account that . . . concentrates on the emergence of English as a national language.” To accept the invitation, yet to continue to study English at a time when it was decidedly not the national language . . . is to insist, while fully acknowledging Latin and French, that our picture of the time and place would be incomplete without properly accounting—in a non-teleological way, of course—for English. —Matthieu Boyd The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. —Psalm 118:22

One of the few indisputable facts of our field is that England already had an arresting and beautiful literary culture before the French began colonization in 1066, imposing a new literary language on its elite. Even though we now keep the generous inclusivity of newer multilingual approaches firmly in mind, it remains inescapable that, as Matthieu Boyd reminds us here, English was “decidedly not the national language” till very late in the development of Middle English.1 Its emergence—or better, re-emergence—remains mysterious. Something we often forget when we think of English as the language of major poets down to the present day is that it was not inevitable after 1066 that English literature would ever revive again. As a Canadian, I know that all too well: Anglo-Canadians have long desired to make amends for the impact on French culture of Britain’s 1759 conquest of Quebec, and while government

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correctives have abounded— official bilingualism, national educational and language ser vices, bursting French immersion schools, support for francophone literary culture—still to this day Quebec’s French is not, at least not yet, the nationwide success story that Middle English became.2 So, too, we should never take the resurgence, phoenix-like, of early medieval English literary culture for granted. Even Richard II, the king under whom William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Pearl Poet produced their mature works, owned no books in English. When he was deposed in 1399, English literary books were still at best a niche interest among the literate, Latin and French being overwhelmingly the languages of choice. This began to change within a generation or two, and to the established scholarship on this shift, the present study offers evidence for a group of unnoticed authors in multilingual literary circles who boosted the resurgence: the professional but underemployed clerk. Some were working for the church but unbeneficed (that is, without a permanent appointment), some in “secular” alternatives such as government or private households. This “clerical proletariat,” as mid-twentieth-century British historians christened them by analogy with the landless freemen of ancient Rome, lived by their labour, working in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay worlds. It was in this liminal space that many of the most enterprising found new material—and new audiences—for producing poetry in English. Modern literary critics usually elide this liminality somehow to opt for a more convenient binary choice (lay vs. clerical). But our poets never make that mistake, and nor should we. To take one such slippery character as an immediately intelligible example: Chaucer’s Absolon of the Miller’s Tale is, to most modern readers, just some kind of ineptly womanizing parish clerk. But Chaucer has portrayed him quite recognizably to a medieval audience as a holy-water clerk (officium aquebajulatus), a clerkship “to be bestowed on a poor cleric (that is, one without family or patronal support),” preferably not a layman. Such a cleric, however, could hold the position if once married (though not twice married), “as long as he continues to wear the clerical habit and tonsure.”3 Chaucer sketched this social liminality with precision: Absolon is technically free to go courting, yet he maintains the clerical dress code, though only just, with his “gay surplys” but his fan-shaped hair (not exactly tonsure).4 Like all the clerks discussed here, Absolon inhabits both the lay and clerical worlds, and for his real-life counterparts, this was a tense but productive space. This study argues that the Ricardian “Golden Age,” in which Langland’s and Chaucer’s works began to go viral, owes much to the clerks working in liminal

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professional or “careerist” circles. Beginning in the reign of Edward III, London began to see the immigration of young, underemployed clerks to work, for instance, in chantries, writing offices, and courts of church and state. Most often trained or semi-trained for the church, but not necessarily employed or well employed in it (and so harboring mixed attitudes toward it), their numbers rose staggeringly as the Great Schism (1378–1417) and other troubles wreaked havoc on the clerical job market. This immigration drew together many who came to London to seek their fortunes, including some scribes and alliterative writers of the West and North, and more continentally influenced ones of the South and East, making London a mosaic and melting pot of dialects and literary styles. The story, however, doesn’t begin with London. As Ralph Hanna showed, book production in the capital prior to 1380 was only rarely in English.5 So our study begins with a key set of thirteenth-century writers from already sophisticated English literary regions. Our particular interest is in those who established what I’ve called a poetics of vocational crisis. Their early experimentation with meta-discursive authorial interventions in prologues and elsewhere aired writerly concerns with patronage, underemployment, careerist ambition, audience alienation, and changing literary fashion. Paradoxically, these thirteenthcentury writers were both choosing the more avant garde option (i.e., to write in English), yet feeling backwards in tradition for it, as the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut so vividly portrays. This self-portrait of a priest-lawman, likely a household chaplain, turned author and “national” historian invokes the conventions of authorial intervention that I’ve elsewhere called “bibliographic ego.” So, too, does the “work-wanted ad” poeticized in Owl & Nightingale for the allegedly underbeneficed Nicholas of Guildford, portrayed as angling for a king’s clerk position. We can add to this list, among many other instances, the meta-discursive account of the woes of an early civic chronicler, Thedmar, whose preservation of London’s earliest known English lyric, “The Prisoner’s Lament,” even pre-dates the city records of the London Puy (or Pui), where both the lay and clerkly gathered with others of the rising middle class to celebrate French lyric poetry. As Boyd rightly says, “the case for studying . . . Early Middle English involves a plea for inclusiveness (an essential value of our time),”6 even as we avoid “teleology.” Yet writing literary history across the Early and Late Middle English divide still demands historical accountability, and we are faced with the fact that these Early Middle English experimenters proved to be on the side of history, even as they invoked ancient pre-Norman history and semi-remembered Old English literary forms, having to use (in Ardis Butterfield’s words) “an only roughly articulate vernacular” to do it.7 Their meta-discursive interventions in

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English at moments of vocational crisis broke ground for later Ricardian writers, who turned to these conventions when they experienced catastrophic vocational crisis in numbers their forbearers could not have imagined. A further complexity, as Christopher Cannon rightly notes, is that Early Middle English texts have too often been studied “in profound isolation from immediate vernacular models and examples, from any local precedent for the business of writing English.”8 Certainly, and I’d add that a still more profound isolation also exists within our field, where Early Middle English texts are routinely fenced off from the rest of the canon. Yet these are the poets who created a language— in every sense—for Ricardian poets. This is why they are not fenced off here. For the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods, Langland’s legacy of openly addressing authorial employment crisis stands out, and two of his readersturned-poets, Hoccleve and Audelay, imitated Langland directly in their own poetics of vocational crisis in the fifteenth century. Only too slowly as a field are we beginning to realize that the artificial “wall” separating Chaucer and Langland, and their respective intertextual legacies, is no wall at all. Maura Nolan, for instance, has reminded us that Langland, too, wrote “advice to princes” and was read by some Findern Manuscript poets (a collection considered Chauceriana), while Ralph Hanna’s new Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman reminds us that “Hoccleve’s self-presentation, with his various worries about his status as royal counsellor, persistently echoes Langland’s preoccupations here and elsewhere,” noting that both writers, for instance, “appeal for seeing writing as just as back-breaking a labour as agriculture.”9 Named proletarian authors such as these are the subject of Part I of this book, but many writers were anonymous, so Part II uses the tools of Part I for uncovering proletarian writers of unattributed Middle English works. These include some of our most anthologized lyrics from Harley 2253, Arundel 292, and other key texts that can be associated, as I argue here, with those writing in cathedral or choral settings. Among these we find drama by the “York Realist” in the York Cycle, some informal Latin cathedral chronicles, and St.  Erkenwald (set at St. Paul’s). With respect to lyric, relatively few scholars have noticed cathedral contexts, though Butterfield helpfully alludes to it, for instance, in her discussion of “the evocative ‘Byrd on brere,’ ” a lyric that “leaves footprints” in two different manuscripts: “this song bird was preserved with random but telling iteration by an unknown cleric, idly filling in time on a spare piece of papal parchment, and by a Magdalen chorister (most probably) doing the same as a distraction from his lessons.”10 In fact, the historical contexts discussed in the present book uncover just such vicars choral and choristers, usually motivated,

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however, by concerns more urgent than idleness (not all clerical poets experimenting in English were bored!). In fact, our poets here operate in rich multilingual environments that also seriously complicate many of our shared 1990s ideas of vernacularity. This newer perspective, evident, for instance, in more recent approaches emphasizing multilingualism (in work, for instance, by Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Christopher Cannon, Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington and many more), appears in discussion of a range of genres. Arvind Thomas’s 2019 book, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law, for instance, offers a clear account of this newer approach. He notes that “notions of ‘vernacular theology’ and ‘vernacular legality’ advanced by Nicholas Watson and Bruce Holsinger respectively,” who have made influential cases for a “poetics that serves as a fictional complement or, at moments, a supplement to the official Latinate legal culture,” need reviewing. Thomas continues, “Whereas Watson and Holsinger see in a medieval author’s choice of writing in English a challenge to authoritative Latin discourses, or even an appropriation of them, I find in Langland’s choice of writing in English and Latin evidence for the participation of poet and canonist in a shared method of . . . shaping legal thought” (my emphasis).11 While much may depend on the text in question, I will suggest here, too, that many of our proletarian writers are consciously participating in shaping legal, musical, social, or theological thought, writing for tiers of readers, even as they perform outreach to lay audiences or patrons by whom many of the authors were employed. Of our own age, a few words. We live in a time that is less tolerant of historical approaches, but which actually, I believe, needs literary history more than ever. Jeffrey Wilson has recently traced the current intolerance back to New Historicism’s sense of the failure of “objective” history (though I’d note that no serious historian was ever encumbered by that illusion anyway), and back to New Historicism’s view that we are “constitutionally incapable of engaging with the past outside the present’s conditioning influence upon us.”12 These arguments always puzzle me, because they turn on the assumption that since we can never do something perfectly, we shouldn’t even try. This is not a maxim we ever, ever apply to any other sphere of life, so why to literary history? Tensions over historicizing, as usual, seem to come down to dueling straw men: as Wilson says, “The historicist wants to understand the world, the presentist to change it. There are different goals: the historicist wants knowledge, the presentist justice.” This puzzles me too, since historicists also seek justice. And how do presentists know their judgments are sound without the knowledge—and the nuance—that only detailed history brings? “Presentist justice,” unmoored from perspective on

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how it got to be present, is likely to dwindle to arbitrary judgmentalism—or, as Derek Pearsall said in a different context, to become “cues for misreading.”13 It seems more important than ever, then, to return to the Marxist roots of literary critical presentism, which in the 1980s took “cues from Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin, and before them Karl Marx’s complaint that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ ”14 This impatience on the part of Marx certainly inflected the mid-twentieth-century British historians who identified “the clerical proletariat,” and it informs some of the Marxist threads in the present book, which has the more particular goal of deepening, and I hope honouring, the history of our own modern “clerical proletariat,” the young, underemployed intellectuals in our day. They all deserve better than what successive financial downturns, selfinterested governments, and corporate models of the university have delivered. To that end, this is a story of the enterprise, hope, and creativity that motivated the underemployed generation to which we owe still cherished great works in Middle English. Over the course of my career, literary scholars have welcomed a range of approaches, from Derridean rejection of absolute truth to the nearly unquestioning moral absolutism of today’s identity theories (which must have Derrida spinning in his grave). While each approach can provoke insights, none—not even the most avowedly ahistoricist formalism, nor the most impassioned medieval globalism—can flourish without a sense of history. Without the ability to contextualize our literary works historically, we cannot take the full measure of what they offer us. As surely as amnesia or dementia obliterates a single person’s identity, intellectual memory loss obliterates cultural identity. We are our history, and we have always gone to the past for diferent perspectives, not simply for the comforts of “confirmation bias.” I am still confident that if we step back for a moment and let our literary texts breathe historically, they will speak to the present in an organic way, as they have spoken to every “present” since they were written. Some texts will even suddenly have special, effortless resonance with the present. One such discussed here is Thedmar’s preservation of a unique bilingual lyric, “The Prisoner’s Lament.” Being of German descent, alongside it Thedmar wrote a defense of himself against anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence in thirteenth-century London, trying to prove that he was not alien, even as other “aliens” were imprisoned in the Tower of London or victimized by mobs. Thedmar’s claim to be English then, led him to preserve a rare early Middle English poem. Other texts here deal in regional social prejudices (famously, the Wynnere and Wastour

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poet’s fear of sending youth to the South), the abuse of the illiterate (“Satire on the Consistory Courts”), the abuse of children (“Choristers’ Lament”), the “gig economy” (Piers Plowman, among others), precarity (Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes), underemployment (Audelay’s poetry), or breaking intellectual elites (Book of Margery Kempe). These works can speak to present urgencies, but cannot do so without their histories. This study uses Marxist terminology to describe some aspects of medieval social class, best understood, however, as an unstable analogy. Some years ago the late Lee Patterson wrote an influential and deeply theorized study of New Historicism’s rootedness in Marxist thought, coming to this stunning conclusion: The past we reconstruct will shape the future we must live. Nowhere has this recognition been more acutely sustained than in Marxist historicism. In a world and a profession that persistently seeks to suppress the political, Marxist criticism has traditionally been—and remains—the most tenacious voice to insist upon its inescapability. It is also a voice that has rarely been heard in Chaucer criticism, or in Medieval Studies generally. . . . Marxism defines history as a continual class strug gle, . . . diligently, even relentlessly, theoriz[ing] the problematic of historical-textual relations. Whatever limitations may impede its own theoretical program, and they are major ones, Marxist thought lays bare essential questions that all historicist thinking must confront, . . . refusing to allow the fascinated gaze of the aesthete to evade . . . painful social inequalities.15 Literary studies have evolved in some very new political directions since Patterson wrote, especially with the evolution of current theories of identity, and it has also experienced a return to Formalism, but Patterson’s words still resonate. Theories of identity usually deal with social class and inequity from the perspective of race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. But this book is about a class we are unused to seeing as disadvantaged: the educated. And, to make matters worse, so to speak, unfortunately the clericus class, given the inexcusable late medieval proscriptions against the ordination of women, means just educated males.16 But unpromising as this might seem in the twenty-first century, this is a group none of us can afford to ignore. They, too, suffered the scourge of joblessness, underemployment, and job precarity for their most highly educated people, including their university-trained intellectuals. So, the topic of this book

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offers as much contemporary urgency as any other, and its Marxist terminology, albeit unstable as analogy, focusses “the fascinated gaze of the aesthete” back toward “painful social inequalities.” During the period this book was already in press production, in part lengthened by the 2020 pandemic, several new studies emerged, and I have tried my best to flag them where I cannot do more. In a world altered by pandemic, roused by calls for long overdue racial equality, and, unsettling even the small world of Medieval English itself, I hope that this study can remind us that even hegemonic peoples were once migrants, and once subjected to the injustices of colonialization and language loss, a narrative, however, that their educated proletarians helped reverse.

Introduction

The Clericus Class, Underemployment, and the Golden Age of Middle English Poetry

Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy [overmost short coat] For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office. —Chaucer’s Clerk’s Portrait, General Prol., I.290–92 He sette nat his benefice to hyre And leet his sheep encombred in the myre And ran to Londoun unto Seinte Poules To seken hym a chaunterie for soules. —Parson’s Portrait, General Prol., I.507–10 “Sire preest,” quod he, “artow a vicary? Or arte a person [parson]? Sey sooth, by thy fey!” —The Host to the Parson, Parson’s Tale Prol., X.22–23 There was a very large clerical proletariat of priests working for a salary, . . . who acted as assistants to or deputies for the beneficed parish priests, whether resident or non-resident. . . . Socially and economically, this class must have been poles apart from the “sublime and literate persons”, though the case of Langland shows us that a more or less submerged cleric might be the intellectual equal of anybody. The unbeneficed clergy were the ecclesiastical equivalent of the landless labourers, and like the latter, they became restive during the years after the Black Death and demanded higher pay. —W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century

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Studies of both Langland and the “clerical proletariat” have come a long way since W. A. Pantin’s classic history of the English church, but his compelling image of the “more or less submerged cleric” has retained its poignancy and, if anything, gathered urgency over the many decades since.1 In the intervening years, scholars have studied the itinerant priest, John Ball in the Rising of 1381, the Wycliffite movement and its “poor priests,” the crushing impact of the Great Schism on the unbeneficed, and Anglo-Papal tensions over the curtailment of papal rights to appoint foreigners to English benefices (in the Statute of Provisors)—even as English universities begged the pope to provide poor students with benefices.2 Over the intervening years, too, scholars have come to understand that whoever wrote Piers Plowman had a remarkably diverse array of skill sets, well beyond those of a literate parish priest, encompassing government legislation, scribal and documentary culture, common and canon law expertise, and choral experience.3 Whoever wrote this poem had had more than one career—and that in itself is an indicator of membership at some stage in Pantin’s “submerged” class. The clerical proletariat has been long known to modern historians as an amorphous group of clerically educated men who failed nonetheless to secure a church living or “benefice.”4 The label “clerical proletariat” has stuck since the heyday of Marxist history in the mid-twentieth century and competes for modern attention with other (often partially overlapping) medieval “proletariats”: the underclass of lawyers whom historians call “the legal proletariat,”5 the underemployed students and graduates whom university historians call “the academic proletariat,”6 and those whom church historians call “the liturgical proletariat” or “liturgical piece-workers.”7 The clerical proletariat normally earned much less than their beneficed brethren and were much more numerous: in cities such as London, there were at least four times the number of trained clerics as there were benefices in the late fourteenth century.8 These men became the underemployed of the clerically educated world, their collective disappointment and despair all too familiar today given the parallel suffering of our young, underemployed in modern academia. But “untenured” medieval clerks did find employment for themselves across a startling range of professions, some of it unexpectedly productive and rewarding. It is the contention of this book that the unbeneficed contributed disproportionately to the resurgence of Middle English literature, which also, often, contains poetry recording or representing their plight. Needing a day job, they fanned out into a range of professions: ironically, most often as chaplains or vicars9 to the beneficed (who, in turn, paid them a mere fraction of their own incomes for doing the lion’s share of the ser-

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vice duties). Or they found work as secretaries or chaplains to great households, in governments (from royal to municipal), or as schoolmasters, choirmasters, or liturgical singers. Or, with more economic luck, some became chantry priests, or vicars choral in cathedrals or in the nascent secular colleges, since any of these positions could be secure employment, unless or until endowments failed or other property incomes fell (we will look at just such cases at St. Paul’s and at York Minster).10 They also found work in book production as commercial scribes,11 or as professional scribes (to use Malcolm Parkes’s distinction), moonlighting from a day of pen-pushing for another writing office. Or, if unmarried, some became papal notaries, a group who, ironically, often made their money helping the beneficed exchange benefices, or helping (often, as Langland charges, exploiting) another group of proletarians (i.e. the “poure provysors [poor provisors],” university graduates with no patrons, trying for benefices via the papal system).12 Sometimes they were simply parish clerks in minor orders assisting priests, or surviving as paid beadsmen “on-demand” to the laity (proletarian methods of livelihood that appear in Langland’s C.V apologia)—in modern terms, surviving in the “gig economy.”13 In fewer cases, the unbeneficed even became tradesmen, farmhands, hermits, sometimes beggars (Langland’s narrator is asked in the C-text both why he isn’t serving in church or working in the fields).14 As such, this amorphous group makes a complex challenge for medieval church historians and scholars of literacy, liturgy, academia, law, and social class—and now especially for literary scholars, because the clerical proletariat has mostly flown under our radar since Pantin.15 The major poets we study, however, were highly alert to this problem, which was at its height during the period of the Great Schism (1378–1417). Langland’s treatment of the phenomenon eludes succinct summary and will be mostly unpacked in Chapter 2, as will Hoccleve’s (Chapter 2.1 and Chapter 3) and Audelay’s (Chapter 4). But the cameo appearance at the end of Piers Plowman of the “Lewed Vicary,” a classic proletarian, and several of Chaucer’s deft, concise portraits of proletarians make good, familiar starting points here. Although we don’t think of Chaucer as interested in ecclesiology, nothing that affected the social landscape escaped his sharp eye, and he, too, faithfully portrayed the blurred edges between the lay and clerical in his proletarian. To read these passages properly first requires some basic terminology, which Malcolm Parkes set out with helpful clarity in his study of English scribes. Parishes, he notes, were in the charge of beneficed priests, rectors (whose benefice entitled them to “a mass of rights and emoluments to be received, tithes, fees, rents, and so forth”),16 or salaried priests paid on behalf of the rector,

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that is, vicars (vicarii) or parochial chaplains (capellani). A rector or vicar might also be assisted by a chaplain. Other chaplains served chantries in cathedrals or parishes or worked as domestic chaplains in private households.17 It is crucial to remember that just the rectors (rectores) had permanent tenure as beneficeholders. This ecclesiological terminology is also anglicized and ubiquitous in Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve, Audelay, and other Middle English poets. One of the common Middle English words for a rector is “parson”—a term made memorable in Chaucer’s Parson, while another character, Langland’s “Lewed Vicary” (Unlearned Vicar) (C.XXI.409–80),18 offers a mnemonic for the “untenured” vicar who (as the Latin root indicates) stands in the place of an absentee rector. Langland’s Vicar is a member of the clerical proletariat, and fortunately there is picture of this figure in the only surviving illustrative cycle of Piers Plowman, a doubly rare survival since images of humble priests clothed in russet or undyed wool are also surprisingly scarce (Figure 0.1). Chaucer’s Parson, too, is similarly humbly dressed in russet, though portrayed on the securer ground of a benefice. Despite the fact that he is unlearned, Langland fills his Vicar’s lines with blunt home truths, revealing harsh realities on the ground in his parish where ignorance of even basic doctrine, such as the cardinal virtues, is the norm. The only “cardinals” they know, the Vicar puns archly, are papal cardinals, who are themselves so sunk in lechery and corruption that he wishes that “no cardinal come” among the “commune people / Bote in here holinese holden hem stille / At Auenon [Avignon] . . . or in Rome” (C.XXI.420–23). Most importantly, Langland gives him prophetic authority with startling apocalyptic pronouncements in this final climactic section of the poem: though “unlearned,” the Vicar offers a full millenarian programme for the reform of the king’s court by Conscience, and of the clergy by Grace, making Piers a typological messianic figure, both the “angelic pope” and “Last World Emperor” of trending Latin prophecies (“Peres with his new plouh and also his olde / Emperour of al the world” [424– 27]). Though the Vicar’s satire is biting, his ideals are pure, and like Chaucer’s Parson, he “hadde fer hoem” (had a long way to go home [480]). Describing this unique illustration of the Unlearned Vicar, art historian Kathleen Scott notes that the artist ignored many more promising subjects nearby in order to foreground him, and deliberately, given the rarity of images of “ humble parish priests” in medieval iconography (where grander ecclesiastical figures and wellrobed priests are the norm).19 As I have shown elsewhere, the intelligence of the Vicar’s facial features renders him among some of the illustrator’s favourite characters: he shares this facial type with several of the poorest but most sincere

Figure 0.1. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 105r. The Lewed Vicary (Unlearned Vicar) dressed in brown simple russet at Piers Plowman C.XXI.409 where he first enters the poem. Pictures of humble parish priests are rare in late medieval iconography. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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figures in the cycle, including the poverty-stricken ones this illustrator selected, in a gesture of “reverse discrimination,” for dusting with gold (see Figure 0.2 for one of these, the homeless “Lunatic Lollar” sanctified in biblical garb).20 Having now a clear visual image of a clerical proletarian, we can turn to instances of Chaucer’s alertness to these issues in a text we all know, or think we know, The Canterbury Tales. The General Prologue reflects nuanced awareness of the employment status of each of its secular clergy. In the ordering of the portraits, his beneficed Parson is described sometime after his explicitly unbeneficed Clerk of Oxenford, portrayed as a member of the academic proletariat. Of the Clerk he writes: Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy [overmost short coat] For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office. (General Prol., I.290–92) The word “office” is glossed as “secular employment” in the Riverside Chaucer, “frequently as a secretary or member of a government office”—in other words, he refuses to be a king’s clerk.21 So the Clerk is living on what his “freendes” (family or patrons) supply for his studies and returning the favour through his prayers—in effect, as a beadsman, a legitimate form of livelihood among the clerical proletariat, or as we might say today, precariat. By contrast, the Parson is very carefully portrayed as a beneficed priest (the correct meaning of “parson”) and, even more carefully, of a single parish, rural and poor (not all benefices were lucrative), in which he actually chooses to reside, refusing to employ a vicar. This almost astringent set of choices, in fact, far exceeds even John Wyclif ’s in purity of conviction: Wyclif himself was an absentee rector from his parishes during his entire Oxford career— Chaucer’s Parson would not have approved.22 In fact, the Parson is cut from whole cloth, so to speak, of the highest ideals preached in manuals for priests. Chaucer’s model here, I’d note, is not the ideal of Wyclif, but of someone like William of Pagula, author of the most popular priests’ manual in England. (William himself had insisted on residing in his parish, despite his superior academic status.) Chaucer’s Parson is, of course, described thus: A good man was ther of religioun, And was a povre Persoun of a Toun, But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk . . .

Figure 0.2. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 42r, Piers Plowman (C.IX.106), image of the “Lunatic Lollar,” sanctified by the illustrator with the addition of biblical garb and gold dust, like selected other figures of poverty. The illustrator has given him the same facial structure as the “Lewed Vicary” (Figure 0.1). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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He sette nat his benefice to hyre And leet his sheep encombred in the myre And ran to Londoun unto Seinte Poules To seken hym a chaunterie for soules, Or with a bretherhed to been withholde [to be retained, hired, as its chaplain by a guild]; But dwelte at hoom, and kepte wel his folde. So that the wolf ne made it nat myscarie; He was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie. (General Prol., I.477–80, 507–14) Famous though these lines are, Chaucer’s minute alertness to ecclesiastical employment issues in them has been mostly overlooked. The Parson is fully devoted to his parish, having rejected all the blandishments of pluralism, absenteeism, and the lure of exchanging his benefice for a cushier chantry position at St. Paul’s. Not content, Chaucer gets more granular still: the Parson has also deliberately not sought “with a bretherhed to been withholde”—that is, to be hired as a priest to a religious guild—a brilliant wording that the Riverside’s gloss seeks to convey by offering two verbs, since “withholde” indicates not only “retained” but “restrained” (Riverside, Glossary, 1307), a powerful rhyme word delivering a double message. And, in fact, the Parson is a veritable lightning rod, so to speak, of ecclesiastical employment issues in the Tales. At the very end, when the Host asks the Parson to tell the last tale, he begins with a question that is never glossed for modern readers but should be: “Sire preest,” quod he, “artow a vicary? Or arte a person [parson]? Sey sooth, by thy fey! Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley.” (Parson’s Tale Prol., X.22–24) The Host is not just being redundant to fill out the metrical line: he is actually asking the Parson to confirm whether he is beneficed or not—a key aspect of social status. And he is even urging the Parson to be truthful in his answer (“Sey sooth”). The Tales themselves offer more proletarian portraits: the Nun’s Priest is also ordained, certainly skilled as a preacher, but has found employment so far only as a chaplain to a convent of nuns, and is apparently not highly remuner-

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ated (the Host remarks that his horse is “bothe foul and lene” [VII.2813]). In fact, nunneries had trouble, for a variety of ecclesiological and financial reasons, keeping priests in their ser vice.23 Yet Chaucer portrays him as the most effective preacher on the pilgrimage, and obliquely as a bit restless sequestered among the women (buried in the Host’s innuendo about the Priest’s sexual prowess is a hint on this point [3448–55]). Another clerk, Jankyn, who has such a starring role in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, is, like the Clerk, fresh from the academic proletariat (“He som tyme was a clerk of Oxenford, / And hadde left scole, and wente at hom to bord / With my gossib dwellynge in oure toun” [III.527–29]). Exactly how “Jankyn clerk” (548) is making a living in town is not said, but he has brought with him his “book of wikked wyves” (III.685), precisely the kind of material in circulation at Oxford during Chaucer’s lifetime.24 At most in minor orders, so not prevented from marrying the Wife of Bath, he is portrayed nonetheless as deeply formed in the homosocial world of Oxford. However, after a domestic strug gle in which the Wife fi nally gets the upper hand, he is also portrayed as surmounting his homosocial formation in favour of her wishes (the same strug gle is played out with the same happy ending in the Tale as in the Prologue). And, however satirized or idealized, this ability to move between the clerical and lay worlds is a key characteristic of actual proletarian life. The Miller’s Tale, too, is rife with young proletarians: Nicholas is an academic proletarian, and like Jankyn, boarding with layfolk, intellectually accomplished, but full of mischief. Absolon, as we saw in the Preface, is directly portrayed as a clerical proletarian, a holy-water clerk (officium aquebajulatus), who has provided himself with many alternative means of livelihood. He works as a parish clerk (I.3312) who assists at mass but is still in minor orders. Yet he also trained at one of the peripheral schools of dictamen at Oxford to draft legal documents,25 and, for good measure, even trained in some of the barber’s healing trade: “Wel loude he laten blood, and clippe and shave, / And make a chartre of lond or acquitaunce” (I.3326–27). What we have here conforms interestingly to A. K. McHardy’s research about unbeneficed clergy taking on any number of trades to keep body and soul together, some, as here, rather unexpected to modern readers.26 Absolon, too, lives amidst the laity, knows the local tradesmen, has his fateful eye for the ladies, and supplements his parish income by dipping into the “gig economy.” Finally, though emphatically not among Chaucer’s clerical proletarians, and well beneath them in rank and educational level, are the Summoner (plus

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his summoner counterpart in the Friar’s Tale) and the Pardoner. They function as embodiments of the corruption of the ecclesiastical court and papal administrative systems, respectively: summoners were employees of the ecclesiastical courts while pardoners were licensed by popes and bishops to dispense pardons, and—though not themselves trained as clergy—their failings represent common satirical tropes, polemics, and complaints found in reformist proletarian literature (e.g. “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” discussed in Chapter 6.1 below). Altogether, set off against the top tier of the pilgrimage’s secular clerics, that is, the beneficed and exemplary Parson; the skillful, ordained, but underemployed Nun’s Priest; and the earnest, university-trained, but as yet unbeneficed Clerk— Chaucer is gesturing, as so often in the Tales, to gradations within a complex social and clerical hierarchy, and he expects his readers to understand these gradations instinctively. Langland, too, in a set of allusions and characters that will be discussed later, also showcases in nuanced gradations the dilemmas of the clerical proletariat, and apparently for at least some period of his own life, as historians have noted, lived them (see Chapter 2.1). And Hoccleve, whose handling of clerical employment is also very complex, tells us explicitly that he waited years for a benefice, and upon not receiving one, he married (see Chapters 2.1 and 3). In fact, an official record of Hoccleve’s salary, a contract from early in his career printed by John Burrow some years ago, explicitly refers to the possibility of a later benefice for him.27 The expectation for successful government scribes such as Hoccleve was that they might eventually be supported via a benefice, becoming a “king’s clerk”—a complex and ancient tradition that began with the seconding to royal ser vice of men already in religious or ecclesiastical orders, and evolved into the cumbersome system of Hoccleve’s day (see Section 3 below). But by the late fourteenth century, there were plenty of resentments against government clerks being supported by church benefices (as we just saw, Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford considered this alternative too worldly), resentments that grew as many clergy who would have happily worked in ecclesiastical settings were left unbeneficed (a resentment openly expressed by Audelay). This is a topic that Hoccleve and the Old Man dexterously discuss in the Regement’s Prologue, as we shall see. And the difficulty Hoccleve expresses there (at least the “Hoccleve” of the poem, an extension of the “porous” pre-Modern self, as Sebastian Sobecki adroitly says) is palpable, having been left behind as his fellow scribes were promoted to benefices.28 Similarly, the poet John Audelay (Chapter  4) was left unbeneficed, at times embittered, and negotiating the blurred edges of the lay and clerical worlds via his poetry.

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1. The Clerical Proletariat, the Limitations of Marxist Analogy, and Resurging English Verse Modern scholarship has often missed this blurring, too often assuming a stark “lay versus clerical” binary. Just like the “Latin versus vernacular” binary that has now been effectively challenged and nuanced by a range of literary historians, historical linguists, and codicologists,29 the “lay versus clerical” binary also now desperately needs troubling—and especially if we are to really understand the vast influence on Middle English literary texts of clerical and intellectual material—material that didn’t get into our poetry by chance. So, for instance, an excellent modern editor of Thomas Hoccleve has expressed surprise over the extensive allusion to canon law in the Regement of Princes.30 Likewise, a modern editor of Thomas Usk has similarly expressed surprise at the deep-structural allusions to St.  Anselm’s De concordia in the Testament of Love.31 We tend to think of these as “secular” writers, but they were actually, I suggest, amphibians. There is even extensive allusion within such Middle English texts to clerical underemployment itself: Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve, Audelay, and the Wakefield dramatist, just to name a few, all overtly mention or dramatize the clerical proletarian dilemma.32 Several literary authors were themselves part of this demographic—caught in an “in-between” or liminal state: men like Hoccleve, John Trevisa, Audelay, John Shirley, and almost certainly Langland (whoever he actually was) for at least some part of his career. Church and social historians who have traditionally referred to these men as “clerical proletarians” invoke, however loosely, a Marxist theoretical lens for understanding class issues. Of course, this “lens” has often been remade. As Chris Wickham shows in Marxist History Writing for the 21st Century, Marxist historical analysis became more muted after the collapse of the Cold War and as “people stopped reading Althusser or Poulantzas out of the French theorists and began to read Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu—Leftists, for sure, but not classic Marxists by any means.”33 However, he also persuasively shows that as various forces united the academic left in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, “in medieval economic and social history, far from Marxist ideas being dead or moribund, they are everywhere. But they have been normalized” (my emphasis). Similarly, literary scholars such as Katherine Zieman have extended and modernized the Marxist metaphors: in her superb book Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England, she writes especially of the liturgical piece-workers, vicars choral, choristers, and chantry

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priests of the various cathedrals or secular colleges. Zieman portrays in meticulous detail their concern for professionalism and work ethic, their failures (e.g., as articulated in episcopal visitation records, and rules of choral employment or conduct), plus their elaborate concern for performance (musical and elocutionary), for maintaining standards of training (for which they were tested), and for honouring the terms of liturgical and chantry endowments that sustained them financially.34 And Zieman further traces the way the better-off among them, especially the vicars choral of cathedrals, formed in effect their own guilds, or were incorporated as colleges to amass hearty collective income (which has sometimes even earned them the label of “petits bourgeois,” discussed in Section 3 below). In a particularly succinct account to which we will repeatedly return, Zieman discusses the potential for “alienation” (in the Marxist sense) in these professions, noting that for the liturgical ser vice class employed to sing the Divine Office: The diminished prestige of reading and singing that had resulted from their articulation as lowest common denominator skills, and as currency for aspiring choristers, also helped create a clerical ser vice class who exchanged their daily performance for a fixed stipend, freeing canons and other more dignified ecclesiasts from the burden of residency and choral duties. The position of “vicar choral” thus already represented the alienation of singing duties by absent canons. Those who sang for them, furthermore, were often younger clerks waiting to take priest’s orders or priests waiting for benefices. . . . In many cases, then, vicars choral and singing clerks elsewhere were as “alienated” from their liturgical labor as the chantry priests were.35 This is a very astute account of the economic and perhaps also the psychological state of those performing “contractual liturgy.” While we must always remember that “alienation” is a complex concept, and also partly anachronistic, invoking it can help alert us to the lack of agency liturgical singers may have felt when engaged in repetitive work. Drawing especially on Hegel’s Aesthetics, Marx wrote about several kinds of alienation: whether (1) alienation of workers from the products of their labour; or (2) alienation provoked by the repetitiveness of their labour; or (3) alienation from the experience of being human; or (4) alienation from society.36 Thinking then, for instance, about the vicars choral standing in for their absentee canons during long hours in choir, we could ask, how many of these facets might apply? As we will see in relation to Audelay (Chapter 4)

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and cathedral poets (Chapters 5 and 6), it could certainly apply to singing repetitively (Zieman’s “lowest common denominator skills”), and to income inequality in cathedral settings (lower clergy doing the same jobs of absentee canons for much less remuneration). But whether medieval singers were prone to alienation in the psychological (human) or social (societal) senses is a more challenging question, and the answers (as far as we can tell at this distance) are, I believe, complicated. Certainly, the formal complaints of their indolence, gossip, truncated ser vices, and other misbehaviour that populate episcopal visitation records can easily support ideas of alienation. But pride in professionalism, as Zieman also rightly notes, is also equally evident elsewhere. Moreover, spiritual enthusiasm and camaraderie are qualities spontaneously expressed among the writings many of the vicars choral and chantry priests we will study here. And I would observe that scarcity of benefices and rarity of upward mobility also complicate the imputation of “self-interest and alienation”37—since many never aspired upwards or tried. So, for the medieval authors we will examine here (and they are a mostly different set of texts from Zieman’s), I found a wide range of psychological responses. While classic “alienation” could certainly describe, for instance, some of the most bitter moments of Audelay’s thought, it cannot account for other important features of it: his deep, compelling, intimate spirituality; his heightened concern for reverential and precise liturgical performance; and, above all, his sense of playfulness and “grace under pressure.” None of these things easily square with Marxist descriptors, nor does his unique, nearly millenarian programme for peace between the friars and the secular clergy. So, too, many of the anonymous lyrics and chronicles produced by vicars choral writers (including likely the York Cycle play “Christ’s Second Trial Before Pilate” and St. Erkenwald) are not spiritually jaded texts. Still, other cathedral pieces (e.g., Tyckhill’s “A Bird in Bishopswood” or Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts”) do invoke issues such as loneliness or clerical abuse of power (respectively) that could very easily be analyzed as one or more types of alienation. So, this Marxist assumption is helpful in some cases, but not at all in others, and never universally. Equally complicating is the fact that proletarians could find upward mobility or certain forms of job satisfaction in their profession of second choice, in spite of not being beneficed. Hoccleve, a clerk in royal ser vice at the Privy Seal, is certainly one such. Having suffered, as he tells us at length, some form of mental breakdown (his “wilde infirmity”), his life as a government scribe could fairly be read as exhibiting classic psychological “alienation.” Yet in another “both/and” conundrum such as we have just noted with the liturgical singers,

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Hoccleve’s poetry remained highly creative and autonomous, and—less noticed this—his religious oeuvre is surprisingly large, his ability to preach or teach through his poetry increasingly so (see Chapters 2.2 and 3). This kind of complexity explains why in this study I am interested both in what proletarians suffered by way of career disappointment and disadvantage, and in how or when they rose above that, often, to write lasting literary works in English, a language still struggling for recognition and market share in book production.38 So exactly how useful Marxist terminology can be as a tool for understanding the unbeneficed is a complex problem—indeed, I refer to it here as an unstable analogy. But I have come to greatly appreciate the idea of a “clerical proletariat” as an idea to think with and, at times, as a working methodology. Marxist categories remain to this day one of the few conceptual tools at our disposal for prying open a window on an elusive medieval group, or, as Pantin would say “submerged.” The clerical proletariat has indeed represented a “submerged” class of clergy, not least in the sense that they have always been underestimated, but also in part because of how they were defined: that is, as having had only their daily labour to live upon.39 Some proletarians, as we will see, were in real life smarter entrepreneurs than this. And in other senses the Marxist analogy breaks down: as we just saw with concepts of “alienation,” so too with “means of production” theories, because their scribal, bureaucratic or liturgical work did give them a certain access to a “means of production”—especially the power to wield the pen—and the evidence is that many of them did so in the ser vice of hitherto neglected vernacular audiences.40 Whether they created these new audiences through their special insights or whether the audiences were already eager for vernacular texts—or most likely some combination of both—their role was by any measure a critical factor in the resurgence of English literature. To trace this literary resurgence and its connection of employment crises, we have to start when new literary English texts are first visibly reappearing, largely in the thirteenth century, especially with texts by clerical careerists or those in need of patronage, such as The Owl and the Nightingale and Laȝamon’s Brut (see Chapter 1). Though this early period presents a special challenge, not uniquely since much of Middle English is anonymously authored and copied. However, as we will see, the fingerprints of a clerical proletariat at work in Middle English book production are evident in their authorship, editing, copying, translating, illuminating, and setting of musical texts, revealing their many roles in manuscript transmission.41 Historically, by the Ricardian period, the sheer numbers of underemployed clerics are such that we cannot afford to ignore them. In a seminal article,

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“Careers and Disappointments in the Late Medieval Church,” A. K. McHardy studied the demographics of the unbeneficed clergy using the employment statistics from the three poll taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381. To take just three cities from her extensive cross-regional samples, McHardy notes that “71% in Stamford, 77% in Lincoln, and 82% in London” were unbeneficed.42 These are startling numbers, and, though London’s numbers are high, they are by no means extraordinary. “Their duties might be primarily legal, secretarial, administrative or advisory,” and among the less expected alternative careers they took up, she notes, their ranks included, “a small number of doctors, astrologers, and entertainers.”43 Among the latter, several became musicians in a lord’s household, which is pertinent to Audelay’s career, as McHardy notes, and likely sheds historical light, I believe, on Langland’s new urgency in the C-text that the wealthy hire “God’s minstrels”—we can’t ever underestimate Langland’s ecclesiological alertness.44 Many of the underemployed were parish clerks (an office that allowed marriage); still more clerks, McHardy notes, did not make their living primarily as ecclesiastics but rather “as notaries, schoolmasters, choristers, or even members of less likely trades, such as blacksmiths and archers.”45 It is possibly relevant that more Middle English lyr ics showing detailed knowledge of such professions suddenly arise in this period, for example, “Chorister’s Lament,” “Satire on Sinful Townsfolk” (about artisans), or even “The Blacksmiths,” as well as longer poems that take up issues connected with them (see Chapters 5 and 6). So, too, the financial dependence of proletarians on the laity may explain various poets’ preoccupations. Piers Plowman is famously rife with concerns about legal, scribal, administrative, and ecclesiastical issues, and especially in the C-text, with minstrels, beggars, merchants, and lawyers. Moreover, passages unique to the Piers Z-text (a version of the poem likely redacted by a Langlandian enthusiast in a proletarian setting) treat doctors unusually positively (which Langland did not) and also show a new preoccupation with notaries (see Chapter  2, Case Study 3).46 The Z-text also heightens Langland’s original sense of crisis in clerical vocation, which was imitated in the writings of Thomas Usk, Hoccleve, and elsewhere (see Chapter 2, Case Study 1).47 Other works examined in this study show a kind of ambidextrous ability to deal in the minutiae of lay and ecclesiastical occupational matters simultaneously, including several cathedral works: St. Erkenwald (Chapter 7), the “Chorister’s Lament,” and a York Cycle play (Chapter 6), plus “cathedral lyrics” and carols in early English from Norwich, York and elsewhere (Chapters 5 and 6). What Anne Middleton famously observed about the audience for Piers Plowman (that they were involved

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“in those tasks and offices where spiritual and temporal governance meet”)48 is true, it turns out, of clerical proletarian writers generally. It is also true of their Early Middle English forerunners, the careerist poets who record their ambitions and crises of vocation in earlier works like The Owl and the Nightingale, Laȝamon’s Brut, “The Prisoner’s Lament,” and Wynnere and Wastoure (Chapter 1). As McHardy observes, “The unbeneficed had to attract the goodwill and enthusiasm of the laity who were buying their ministry, so we must enquire how well they were able to retain the loyalty of laity.”49 Historians have long talked about this dilemma for the unbeneficed, but the implications of it for late medieval English literary culture have not yet been fully recognized. This book offers some suggestive examples (with the hope that other scholars will uncover more), opening up a new facet of the complex history surrounding the resurgence of literary writing in English. The insistence of certain thirteenthand fourteenth-century poets on using English relates in part, I suggest, to the economic dependence of many proletarians on the laity. This may be why many proletarian writers invoke, self-satirically or other wise, Christ’s Parable of the Unjust Steward (which is about a minor bureaucrat on the brink of unemployment) as an emblem of vocational crisis, some even, like Thomas Usk, doing so explicitly, as he argues for the use of English (not French) in his Prologue to the Testament of Love.50 Far from homogeneous, clerical proletarians are richly varied, creative, articulate, yet interconnected by one great haunting and poignant circumstance: career disappointment.

2. Career Disappointments: Vicars, Scribes, Bureaucrats, and Singers Who exactly were the clerical proletariat? First, it is important to note that proletarian careers were often a moving target: an individual might begin as a promising schoolboy, chorister, or undergraduate, then fall short of a benefice, remaining underemployed for years in one or more alternative clerical jobs. He could then perhaps come in late career to a church position—though statistically, more often not. Or he may even have deferred taking full orders till he did.51 As T. A. R. Evans notes, for instance, ordinations of many fourteenthcentury Oxford university men were put off indefinitely, even into their forties in some cases, or never done at all if the right type of employment did not appear. Even if fully ordained, they might never achieve a higher position, or not until late in life (the poet John Audelay, for instance, only got a chantry as an

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elderly man, in contrast to the poet John Tyckhill, a St. Paul’s chantry priest who was later beneficed). Audelay acquired his chantry only after long household ser vice to a lord that included a range of secular, political, and religious duties, even apparently forms of minstrelsy (which, in turn, perhaps sheds historical light on the type of position behind Langland’s urgent C-text call for the hiring of “Godes munstrels”).52 As Susanna Fein notes, Audelay was even drawn into political disputes in the ser vice of his lord, at one point erupting into deadly violence and embroiling him in a humiliating public scandal.53 Reading Audelay’s life and poetry, one is forcibly reminded of the range of risks clerical underemployment could carry with it in a hierarchical society. In addition to Audelay’s legal troubles, there is a note of resentment in some of his writings, palpable, too, of course, in Hoccleve’s. Though both poets were capable of joy and even fun, and both landed on their feet in quite respectable jobs (Hoccleve, despite his grumbling, was clearly a valued member of the Office of the Privy Seal),54 in terms of standard of living, the unbeneficed were often more economically disadvantaged. And though salaried via a government annuity, the erratic payment schedule that Hoccleve and his unbeneficed colleagues were subject to did render them at times closer to a precariat than a proletariat. In social science, the precariat is a class of those suffering from job insecurity,55 a modern word made by merging “precarious” with “proletariat” but with clear Marxist roots, and roots in the thought of Bourdieu: “In line with Marx’s conceptions of the floating, latent, stagnant, and pauperized populations constituting the industrial reserve army, Bourdieu associated precariousness particularly with what he called the ‘subproletariat.’ ”56 Terry Eagleton puts this problem a different way: “the dwindling of economic stability, settled career structures and the idea of vocation” has produced “an increasing proletarianization of professionals”57—a modern problem that also succinctly describes the medieval clerical proletarian crisis of underemployment. Even worse off were many members of the liturgical precariat, those summed up in Robert Swanson’s words as “living if not from hand to mouth, then from death to death, literally singing for their suppers.”58 But lest we assume that such clergy were the dregs of the profession, Tim Cooper notes of the proletarian parish clergy that “the extensive production of Latin clerical manuals to aid them, and the fact that they were often featured more significantly in their parishioners’ wills than beneficed incumbents, or were more often entrusted with the care of children of dead parishioners, suggests rather that these men were the backbone of clerical ser vice work, be it in praying for the living or dead, ministering in church ser vices or in other

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small ways that their literacy skills offered: drawing up documents, carrying out ad hoc scribal commissions, and more.”59 Given that, as Cooper also notes, “no more than 15% (and in some areas of England, fewer) of the stipendiary clergy were successful in the clamour to obtain benefices” and that “possession of a benefice could only be gained by attracting the attention of a patron, and normally getting a university degree . . . for those without such intellectual attainments, employment mobility was likely to be geographical but not economic.”60 But in fact, the situation for Schism-era clerics is even worse: unlike Cooper’s period (the early sixteenth century), getting a university degree any time before the late fifteenth century did not, in fact, help much toward the attainment of a benefice. T. A. R. Evans demonstrates that until the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the percentage of university-trained men who got benefices was startlingly low: only 10 percent.61 Cooper’s study of early sixteenth-century clergy at Lichfield and Coventry (the “last generation” before the Reformation) reflects this more positive shift for the university trained. But prior to that, benefices were awarded via an incredibly complex and even chaotic system of patronage, controlled not only by bishops but also very often by major landowners, monastic houses, or the papacy itself—a byzantine system of competing interest groups that, despite well-intentioned efforts to support educated clerks without patrons via a university’s direct appeal to the papacy (Langland’s “poor provisors”),62 was mostly not a meritocracy. Still, the system lumbered along until the later fourteenth century produced a “perfect storm” of job scarcity. After the Black Death in 1349, as Pantin observed, unbeneficed survivors “became restive” and demanded more, but their leverage was short-lived. As Evans writes, “A decline in the real revenue of benefices after the plagues . . . encouraged the amalgamation of livings, as well as appropriation by institutions, and pluralism by individuals,” effectively “reducing the pool of livings.”63 Chief among these institutional appropriators were the monasteries, which during the reign of Edward III oversaw “the most dramatic increase” of parish appropriations yet, a juggernaut that would continue unabated until the Dissolution: “the number of appropriated rectories in England rose from about 1,500 in 1291 to 3,300 in 1535.” Though some archbishops negotiated with the monasteries for benefices for university graduates, generally these houses were creaming off the incomes from the parishes, often appointing just waged vicars to their pastoral care, but sometimes members of their own orders (who, of course, unlike the unemployed, did not need the benefice’s living to eat).64 Meanwhile, huge numbers of benefices were still being

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seconded to provide incomes for royal ser vice, a problem only alleviated after 1400 as the laicization of the civil ser vice gained ground. But the real coup de grâce was to be the onset of the papacy’s Great Schism (1378–1417), which “complicated the lives” of benefice seekers as an already inefficient system of papal provision (in which “ferocious competition . . . and confusion . . . had long been the norm”) now fractured and left some “dispossessed because their benefices fell within territories loyal to a rival pope and others unable to take possession at all.”65 Even those with university degrees found themselves in a complex “crisis of patronage,” which R. N. Swanson dates to 1380–1430, crushed by, in William Courtenay’s succinct summary, “a declining number of available benefices because of appropriation, and the dislocations of the Great Schism that produced changes in the mechanisms of patronage.”66 While all our poets complain about the system from various standpoints, the poet who analyzes it with the most meticulous and scathing eye is Audelay, surpassing even the indignant Langland in his insistence upon taking it on in minute and systematic ecclesiological complaint. And, as historians of medieval universities and of diocesan demographics independently show, it looks as if Langland, Hoccleve, and Audelay lived and wrote through some of the worst of the crisis. The rapid laicization of the civil ser vice under Henry IV and V is just one of the factors that eased the pressure on benefices for the fifteenth century: in these periods, increasingly younger men (such as the Middle English poetic anthologist and amateur poet John Shirley) confidently and permanently delayed ordination in the hope of not needing to depend on the benefice system to fund their civil service work (a case discussed further in Chapter 3.1).67 Moreover, the dramatic rise in monastic control of benefices in the early fifteenth century,68 I’d suggest, surely relates to the parallel rise in members of religious orders writing literature in English in the fifteenth century—and helps account for that century’s sharp change in tone from the literature created by proletarians in the fourteenth. As we will see (Section  3 below), the statistics fueling this shift are quite dramatic, and while a full study of this new shift in the age of Lydgate toward Middle English writing by monastic and regular clergy is beyond the scope of this book, it does suggest yet another reason, so far unnoticed, for the unique qualities of late fourteenth-century literature: its preponderance of proletarian voices. Though, of course, there were meritocratic appointments to benefices in the fourteenth century, modern historians widely agree that candidates of skill and education were often overlooked, just as our poets complain. But happily, the image painted by early historians of a ragtag, undereducated proletariat has not withstood the scrutiny of modern studies of key dioceses or those using

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prosopography among their methodologies. It appears that proletarians fared somewhat better socially, educationally, and economically than previously thought—but only somewhat.69 Norman Tanner, in The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, concluded that “it is unlikely that Norwich possessed a large clerical proletariat living at subsistence level,”70 results paralleled in Tim Cooper’s study of Lichfield and Coventry, and Michael Bennett’s on Cheshire and Lancashire. But Tanner’s comparisons of the incomes of beneficed and unbeneficed (1370–1532) shows that among those with wills “half of 62 beneficed priests” in Norwich “left bequests . . . worth at least 10 pounds”; by contrast “among the 201 unbeneficed clerics, the proportion drops to between a third and two-fifths.”71 So the unbeneficed here outnumber the beneficed at least three to one (not counting those without wills). Moreover, incomes rose faster for the beneficed than for the unbeneficed (if at all),72 and even more critically, Tanner found more evidence of poverty among the unbeneficed prior to 1440, that is, during the period of all the major Late Middle English authors discussed in this book. But Tanner notes that how Norwich unbeneficed clerics earned their livelihood still remains a mystery: “Some of them were the priests in charge (parish chaplains) of parishes without rectors or vicars, and such men presumably received the lesser tithes and offerings or a stipend from the owner of the benefice. But wills suggest that the answer . . . lies, to a considerable extent, in bequests for chantry ser vices.”73 As Tanner underlines, the role of chantry and less formalized ser vices for laity account for extra income, thus the urgency of the controversy surrounding chantry ser vices as a topic in the major Ricardian poets, in addition to the usual stipendiary positions (vicars [vicarii] and parish chaplains [capellanes]),74 in ser vice to benefice holders, the rectors (rectores). As we saw above, writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Hoccleve knew and used this language of rank, pointedly distinguishing the beneficed from the unbeneficed. But Tanner’s and Cooper’s “better-than-expected” news about many of the unbeneficed living above the poverty line suggests that we are now a far cry from Pantin’s “submerged” class. But as Michael Bennett has shown from his demographic studies of unbeneficed clerks in Cheshire and Lancashire, chaplains were taxed at about the same rate as the “poorer parsons” (this historical fact may explain why Chaucer’s Parson and Langland’s Unlearned Vicar are both clothed humbly in russet, as we saw).75 Bennett also notes “of 276 tax-payers in this [unbeneficed] category few bore surnames of any distinction.” Rather, they were sons of townsmen, or sons of clerks in minor orders, or sons of yeomen or husbandmen. Social class always played a major role in the question of upward mobility.

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The unbeneficed, however, did have one important advantage, and that was that liturgies of all sorts were getting fancier. The rise of polyphony and other devotional fashions, as McHardy noted, prompted the dramatic growth in the numbers of paid liturgical opportunities throughout the fourteenth century for the unbeneficed, including positions for choristers, for chantry priests, for singing obits (anniversaries of a death), and for participating in large processionals. These were increasingly favoured in ecclesiastical circles (see Chapter  7 on St.  Erkenwald) and by laity who could afford such shows of force for funerals or for relatives (see Chapter 6 on the York vicars choral).76 In many of these cases, it was lay endowment or smaller donations that created the opportunities, but many clerks would have remained in the “precariat” category, living perhaps, to quote Swanson again, “from death to death,” especially among the liturgical proletariat.77 Turning now from questions of income to clerical status, the term clericus (“clerk”) itself (with all its equivalents in England’s working languages) presents a great deal of trouble for modern scholarship since it refers to such a range of literate men across our anachronistic “secular” and “ecclesiastical” divide. Katherine Zieman has illuminated the testing of clerks for reading and singing competencies, legally in the case of the infamous “neck verse,” or more often musically in the employment of vicars choral and other “liturgical piece-workers.”78 In Their Hands Before Our Eyes, Malcolm Parkes explained the term “clericus” in relation to scribes,79 noting that it was generally applied to secular clergy (clerici) in the Middle Ages to distinguish them from monks or canons and, later, from friars, living according to a rule. Already by the sixth century, the term extended even to schoolboys (as we’ll see in “Choristers’ Lament”), and to those who shared the common life of the bishop’s familia.80 By the eleventh century, the Old English term clerec was used to distinguish those in minor orders (lector, exorcist, acolyte) from those in higher orders (diacon, massepreost, and bischeop). By the thirteenth century, it is routine to refer to someone in minor orders, and even to literate laymen who could prepare documents and keep records, as clericus. The term clericus, then, is very complex in its range, fragmenting in applicability to a wide set of offices, social estates (including married clerks), ranks, degrees of education, and rates of pay. Government clerks constitute their own complex category since the Crown used ecclesiastical benefices to support royal administrative work, and “king’s clerks” (discussed below in Section 3) could be resented both by clerks with a serious vocation (as we saw with Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford, and will see with Audelay) and also by lay clerks in government (as we’ll see with Shirley).81 Often initially these were seconded religious or secular clergy, and as early as the twelfth century, as Parkes notes, scribes in the royal

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chancery were called “scriptores capellani,” and in the royal exchequer, “clerici thesaurarii.” But even by the early fourteenth century, as Virgina Davis shows, with religious benefices as the main source of funding for all royal employment, and many trying to evade ordination, modern “binary” or “simplistic divisions between clergy and laymen” become impossible.82 Government scribes also often moonlighted in book production, especially the unbeneficed (famously Hoccleve, and as Sobecki shows, others in his Privy Seal circle)83—and when they not only copied but composed literature, they are pertinent to us here. As Parkes noted, clerici of all kinds were involved in book production: certainly there were beneficed scribes, but many more unbeneficed, clearly having more financial need. For instance, chaplains (capellani),84 turn up in the London Ordinances of the Court-hand Writers, or Scriveners (1373), where they are singled out as unwanted and undertrained interlopers (“those who resort . . . unto the said city, both chaplains and others, who have no knowledge of the . . . usages of the city, and who cause themselves to be called ‘scriveners’”).85 Scholars at Oxford and Cambridge also copied books, including the academic proletariat (a group whose financial options, according to university regulations, could even include begging).86 Though scholars mostly copied in Latin, university hands appear, for instance, in several English lyric collections as both scribes and authors.87 Another scribe-author, John Cok, who copied the massive illuminated cartulary for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, is known to literary scholars because he copied for Middle English anthologist, John Shirley (discussed in Chapter 3), and is perhaps the only scribe of Piers Plowman for whom a portrait survives.88 He also composed extensive marginalia for a version of the Grail legend. Though our interest here is in more ambitious instances of proletarian authorship, Cok is a documentable example of a proletarian scribeturned-writer. And since he eventually joined the order at St. Bart’s himself, he is a good reminder that joining a religious order was a viable route to stability for proletarians, as we will see in Chapter 5 with the case of Thomas Turk.89 Many more proletarian free-lancers would have worked in the areas Linne Mooney has outlined in the various “liberties” of the city of London where scribes could work free of the onerous fees that guild membership entailed.90 A social history of all such scribes is beyond the scope of this book, but scribal activity is what gave many of our proletarian authors “the means of production.” Our authors, where identifiable, tend to be “professional scribes” (in Parkes’ terminology, and in contrast to “commercial scribes”). For Parkes, professional scribes are “those who had to write in the course of pursuing different professions.”91 Among government writing office clerks who, like Hoccleve, turned

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from copying to authorship, it appears that employment grievance was a motivator. One superb example is James le Palmer, who became passionately and rather over-zealously interested in the correction and reform of the clergy sometime after having been appointed in 1368 as Clerk of the Great Rolls of the Exchequer. A professional scribe (in Parkes’s sense), in addition to his day labours, he copied books and authored the Omne bonum, a beautifully illustrated Latin encyclopedia with a reformist-polemical agenda, heavily indebted to ecclesiology and canon law (a subject that also intrigued Hoccleve).92 Less playful than Hoccleve, James critiques fellow clerks in the Exchequer by name (!) in the margins of his entries on correct clerical behaviour. Below is one of many images in his Omne bonum that captures why the term clericus is so vast in its range (see Figure 0.3). The image shows two groups, one of clerks and the other, at first glance, of dandified laymen—but on closer inspection, they, too, are tonsured. So, both groups are clerks, and though James’s accompanying entry preaches in grumpy reformer’s fashion on keeping a proper distinction between clerical and lay dress, both types would have been on medieval streets. But as Lucy Freeman Sandler observes wryly, this grumpiness is also about employment status: “James’s marginal complaints are a bit ‘holier than thou.’ He himself certainly did not commit any of the sins he criticized, nor could he have, because as far as it is known he held no benefices, canonries, or prebendaries, and had not been ordained.” Government clerks, Sandler continues, “were compensated in wages, annual fees, material gifts and in ecclesiastical benefices,” but James was largely passed over (as Hoccleve would be), and so “took being a cleric more seriously than some of his associates.”93 How much of what we now routinely label “reformist” or “anticlerical” actually arose from resentments among unbeneficed writers over promotion jealousy? It turns out that Hoccleve, Audelay, and likely Langland at some point, all shared in this unenviable position, as do several of the anonymous cathedral proletarians (Chapters 5 and 6). Though unfinished, Omne bonum is beautifully illustrated by professional illuminators, a reminder of what kind of access to book production opportunities a government clerk could have for a personal project (so, too, with some of Hoccleve’s presentation copies). Though more cheerful, Hoccleve is another unbeneficed government clerk who mentions fellow office clerks by name and also pronounced on correct ecclesiology, theology, and the kind of pastoral care he was never able to practice as a priest. Other examples of literary works produced by moonlighting government clerks abound, for example, the Douce 104 illustrated Piers Plowman which is dated by regnal year like a government document (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).94 Clerical proletarians did have, as Marxists would say, “access to the means of

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Figure 0.3. From James le Palmer’s Omne bonum, Royal 6.e.vii, fol. 197, two groups of clerks, one group strikingly dressed as dandified laymen, illustrating the entry “De habitu clericorum,” which urges maintaining appropriate clerkly dress. © The British Library Board.

production” and used it in their favourite causes. Interestingly, Parkes’s second category, “commercial scribes,” independent book artisans available for hire, may be less evident in vernacular work.95 Commercial scribes crossing over into literary authorial work are apparently rarer,96 so it was the “moonlighters” who pushed book production in the new niche market of Middle English. The legal proletariat also played a role in the production of literary sources as scribes, editors, and sometimes authors, and this group is especially impor-

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tant in the major Early Middle poetry we’ll study here. Trained as documentary scribes, scriveners, notaries, or even lawyers, they multiplied because, as E. W. Ives has said, lawyers were entrusted with a great deal of work that could only loosely be described as “ legal” and gave the profession an importance that, he observes, its size did not warrant. This phenomenon we will see directly discussed in The Owl and the Nightingale and in Laȝamon’s Brut (see Chapter 1). The legal community, as Ives notes, were often agents of social change,97 and “at the bottom was a proletariat of local legal officials, land agents, professional court-keepers and hommes d’afaires, men miles away from and below Westminster Hall, but at once the most numerous and, for the mass of people, the only lawyers who mattered.”98 Chaucer’s fictional Absolon fits into this spectrum somewhere near the bottom, being, as we saw, a parish holy-water clerk, who also rendered a side ser vice to locals of Oseney who needed a document drafted. But the more stunning example of a legal proletarian discussed at length in this book is that of the highly creative Ludlow scribe who made the famous collection of Harley 2253 lyrics (see Chapters 5 and 6), a man whose life oeuvre includes many extant charters written before 1349, and three trilingual literary/religious manuscripts that all show the lack of formal lineation so common to legal scribes. As Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington and others have recently shown, he was not only a scribe and anthologist, but an extensive author in these manuscripts in his own right.99 And, as we will see in Chapter 5, he likely also at some point worked as a clerk in the Hereford bishop’s familia, another of our proletarians with a complex employment history. The educated underemployed, then, charted myriad career paths through church and state, many of our writers among them.

3. “The ramshackle twin engines of church and state”: King’s Clerks, Reluctant Careerists, and the Zenith of the Clerical Proletariat It remains for us to understand better how these English writers who charted their career paths through church and state were marked by the experience, and how it affected their literary works. Michael Bennett reminds us that “The church was by no means a monolithic institution, and the clergy were far from a homogenous class.”100 He identifies two types of careerist clerks, the first being those who kept organized religion functioning, “engaged in liturgical and pastoral work, and the church bureaucrats and scholars.” His second group of clerk careerists, however, were “aspirants to secretarial and administrative careers,”

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part of the church as “a more open-ended institution, . . . , a major pillar of the [social] establishment, supplying . . . an educated administrative elite and the means to maintain it in secular employment.”101 Modern literary scholars too often miss the second group, but we won’t, especially those I’ve called reluctant careerists, those who crossed over because they didn’t get a benefice in the first group. What makes the recovery of these clerical proletarian authors in both groups from literary, historical, and paleographical sources so important—and not simply an exercise in social history—is that in the attitudes of this proletariat we see many of the key characteristics for which we value some of the best of Middle English literature itself. Proletarian writings, for example, often display compelling attention to human suffering, social injustice, and to experiences among the laity and beyond the homosocial world of the clergy— experiences that elite or beneficed clergy might never have. Their writing is also rife with certain types of complaint and protest that, I argue here, helped to spur on the resurgence of English literature itself. Other characteristics include disgruntlement with both church and state (counterbalanced, often, by strong reforming or visionary ideals); an unusual interest in what today we would call “freedom of information” (even public access to copies of texts); nascent meritocracy (in part owing to the ecclesiastical tradition of upward mobility, in part to the increasing laicization of government ser vice); sophisticated selfdeprecation in meta-discursive moments; and—though more unevenly—some inclusive attitudes toward women (complicated, however, by homosocial training). This does not mean, of course, that all pieces of literature with these characteristics were penned by proletarians, but rather that these are tendencies visible in their writing. Among the proletarian writer-clerks we encounter here are many reluctant careerists who crossed over to secular bureaucracy, and many who remained underemployed in the church. Some unbeneficed in the church were better off than others, and, in Marxist terms, may arguably be more analogous to the petits bourgeois than proletariat: certain chantry priests (some chantries were valuable enough to be exchangeable for benefices), and those in the financially more comfortable groups of vicars choral at some secular cathedrals. What complicates this is that levels of income and workload for vicars choral varied dramatically among cathedrals and across time periods: Ricardian York, for instance, was a time of financial difficulty for the Minster’s vicars choral; and during the same period St. Paul’s had to address issues of failing chantries (see Chapter 6). So, in light of the cathedrals covered here, I have followed Barrie Dobson in rejecting the petits bourgeois analogy. Speaking of the absentee canons and their vicars choral, he writes:

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Such outright exploitation of ecclesiastical wealth in the interests of the notorious absentee “possessioners” of the late medieval cathedral could readily lend itself to a Marxist critique, which in fact it never quite received when Marxist historical analysis was at its most commonplace. Moreover, before the vicars choral of English and European cathedrals are too readily dismissed as the petits bourgeois of the late medieval church, one must remember that few contemporaries ever seriously criticized cathedral canons for leaving their stalls to the care of their vicars while they placed their own administrative skills at the disposal of kings and bishops. Even the young John Wyclif, that most aggressive scourge of the worldly clerics of his day, never opposed such absenteeism in principle and felt seriously disgruntled himself when in 1375 Pope Gregory IX passed him over for a Lincoln prebend and canonry.102 It will come as no surprise that ecclesiastical vocations do not usually attract the sustained attention of Marxist historians, but as Dobson notes, they should: such scrutiny would expose vast systemic complicity, even among the supposed reformers like Wyclif. That Wyclif, of all people, considered himself underemployed and unappreciated is surely in itself a case of brewing “alienation” that was to have long-term consequences for the English church. While this book does not consider Wyclif ’s own biography in this light (tempting as that is), it does consider, via Hoccleve and Audelay, the surprisingly different responses of two proletarian poets to employment issues his movement raised (including “poor priests”). And as we saw, Chaucer’s Parson and even his Clerk of Oxenford far exceed Wyclif ’s ideals about what constitutes truly reformed or pristine clerical employment. Part II of this book deals heavily with singing clerks and the vicars choral, the latter though more comfortable, were still in the bottom rank of cathedral clergy, some remaining in minor orders. In classic Marxism, the petits bourgeois worked, despite their slightly higher status, alongside proletarians as small merchants or free peasants; a better fit for the analogy might be a figure (real or fictional) of the social class of Piers in Piers Plowman, employing other peasants and being quite a taskmaster himself (as the famous Hunger episode shows). Of the petits bourgeois, for instance, Habermas wrote, “Their socialization seems to have been achieved in subcultures freed from immediate economic compulsion, in which the traditions of bourgeois morality and their petit-bourgeois derivatives have lost their function.”103 While the notion of being part of “subcultures

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freed from immediate economic compulsion” is certainly applicable to many of the vicars choral, their values (moral, spiritual, literary, and aesthetic—these were musicians after all) are much more complex than any grid such as “bourgeois morality and their petit-bourgeois derivatives” allows. The artistic and professional values of these groups are not easily mapped onto those of industrial or mercantile societies. But they did run the functional operations of cathedrals as liturgical, scribal, and documentary labour pools, and also as physical keepers of the fabric (in modern terms, plant maintenance). And they were nearly all originally local boys. Yet they were also very creative with some of those tools, as I argue here, creating unnoticed literary and historical texts, musical compositions, pastoral writings, and apparently even contributing to the York Cycle Plays. While their well-endowed communal tables (such as York Minster’s Bedern Hall) certainly appear bourgeois, individual needs do not (e.g. records of vicars stealing communal bread, or of extensive moonlighting in artisanal trades). And, of course, there are no tools in the Marxist kit (nor in the modern literary theoretical kit either, deeply indebted to Marx)104 for understanding their spirituality, which cannot be simply bracketed for the sake of convenience. Dobson’s incisive commentary brings us to another key group of church-and state-crossover: the “king’s clerks,” some being government-seconded, multibeneficed clergy (like Walter de Brugges, absentee canon of York Minster, Baron of the Irish Exchequer, and early owner of Piers Plowman) whom proletarians replaced at reduced wages, or whether they were government clerks hoping (like Hoccleve) for a benefice to become a king’s clerks. Culturally, I would note, it was the presence of king’s clerks that deeply inflected royal government with religious culture (as we’ll see in texts like Wynnere and Wastoure), even as, in turn, court culture inflected them back, so to speak. As we will also see in Chapter 1, the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut seems to suggest latently that the poet has court aspirations, and The Owl and the Nightingale is written as playful propaganda for a would-be king’s clerk, Nicholas de Guildford, who, the poet laments, has as yet only one benefice. Though the tone of the poem is too tongue-in-cheek to know the merits of his case, the poet’s lament on behalf of Nicholas is not entirely implausible: some benefices provided very poor incomes.105 There is a long distance historically between Nicholas and Chaucer’s Parson, created much later in an era less tolerant of pluralism, and likely intended as a genuine example of a parish priest with a low-income benefice. As Dobson says of the king’s clerks drawn from cathedral clergy: “From at least the age of Henry II and Thomas Becket onwards no English monarch or archbishop can have been in any doubt that the secular cathedrals of the realm were the

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single most important instrument for the diversion of surplus wealth from the grass (or rather grain) roots of the English parishes to support not only the most sophisticated features of the medieval church but also the careers of the men who actually ran the ramshackle twin engines of church and state.”106 Dobson’s brilliant final phrase gestures to the semi-functional nature of medieval administration, and for literary scholars offers a gentle corrective to the more idealized way that Anne Middleton famously characterized them as involved “in counsel,” policy, education, administration, pastoral care—in those tasks and offices where spiritual and temporal governance meet.”107 Dobson’s king’s clerks “from at least” Henry II and Becket up to Wyclif, takes us in literary terms from roughly the period of The Owl and the Nightingale (depending on one’s dating) to Ricardian poetry, during which three important shifts occurred in how benefices were used (or abused). The historical trajectory of these shifts is not well known to literary scholars, but luckily, an unusual memorial plaque to the medieval beneficed clergy of London’s St. Dunstan-in-the-West (close to St. Paul’s), offers a sweeping snapshot of it all at a glance (Figure 0.4). It shows, astonishingly to modern eyes, the wholesale royal appropriation of the parish’s beneficed clergy from 1237 to 1316 when all its rectors were seconded to serve the Crown as Wardens of the Rolls— leaving unnamed, of course, the fleets of proletarians who actually ran the parish.108 Jolting as this, the plaque reminds us that the High Middle Ages was an era of secular government heavily manned by actual ecclesiastical careerists (as The Owl and the Nightingale assumes), a hybrid unimaginable today.109 And these were powerful men: one of the absentee rectors listed here, John of Langton, was a major player in the coalition that brought down King Edward II.110 This kind of Crown appropriation of benefices did not end in the fourteenth century, but it did become increasingly a target of reformers. So, interestingly, from 1316 onward, the St.  Dunstan’s plaque shows the rectors restored to their parish once again. But from 1386 onward (in literary terms, as the age of Langland and Hoccleve becomes the age of Audelay and Lydgate), the plaque reflects another macro-historical shift: “The Advowson passed to Abbey of Alnwick.” This is consistent with the newer trend of monastic orders taking over benefices, traceable in ordination records right across England:111 in a sampling H. S. Bennett did, among those holding the titles (or tituli) to the livings for clerics requesting ordination, monasteries comprised only 26  percent in 1327–37, but 70 percent by 1367–77, and a whopping 84 percent by 1427–74.112 That the monastic houses would come to such vast control of benefices in the fifteenth century would have, I suggest, a huge cultural effect on the types of

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Figures 0.4a and 0.4b. Plaque titled “St. Dunstan-in-the-West Rectors and Vicars,” memorializing the medieval rectors of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, London, including those seconded as government Exchequer officials, Wardens of the Rolls. Photo by author.

literature produced for the laity in this period (by now the age of Lydgate, not Hoccleve)—happening, too, just as the civil ser vice was fast laicizing, and the need for king’s clerks was decreasing. Strikingly, by then more careerist clerks were choosing not to be ordained or beneficed, like John Shirley, Hoccleve’s younger contemporary, and anthologist

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of Chaucer and Lydgate, who was granted the kind of benefice Hoccleve had once wanted on two occasions, but each time refused. Yet Shirley still managed to sustain his career in the Exchequer, as bureaucratic culture increasingly found ways other than the benefice to fund itself. Though beyond the scope of this book, we might see Shirley’s massive promotion of Lydgate in this new light— Lydgate was a new voice for a newer generation. As the symbiosis that had existed so powerfully in previous centuries between church and state was partly dissolved, or at least unmoored, fewer “amphibian” clergy were needed. Whether it was the Great Schism, the rise of Wycliffism, the coming of age of the civil ser vice, or a host of other factors, scholars such as Malcolm Richardson, H. S. Bennett, R. L. Storey, T. A. R. Evans, and William Courtenay, to name a few, have traced the sharp drop in requests for ordination.113 The new monastic control of benefices should signal to us why the popular writers of the fifteenth century are no longer members of the clerical proletariat or the civil ser vice (such as Langland, Chaucer, and Hoccleve), but now members of religious orders (like Lydgate, Walton, Capgrave, and Bokenham). In such an environment, binaries like secular and religious, heresy and orthodoxy, and other op-

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positions are bound to flourish more easily, and I would suggest that some of the more judgmental, platitudinous tones we all see in fifteenth-century English writing stem in part from such clerical demographic shifts—and less from censorship of heresy (by Archbishop Arundel or other wise)—as the number of proletarians dropped away into history.114 So, too, the distinctive voices of clerical proletariat authors gave way amidst growing laicization of the civil ser vice.115 The period traced in this book, however, is the heyday of the clerical proletariat author, a finite one that nonetheless gave us the top canonical era of the Middle English period. Finally, an apologia: hundreds of literary critics have studied certain of the authors I discuss in this book, and they may find these authors approached here from a rather unfamiliar angle. This does not mean that I do not value past or recent findings and approaches—quite the contrary. I often take them for granted. My hope, rather, is that by offering a different angle—that of career disappointment and its wholly unexpected outcome—we may open up new vistas on them—and our own times newly, too. This book was inspired by the modern academic proletariat and precariat, and especially the many young scholars in the current generation struggling to find dignified employment in the academy, alongside the many sessional lecturers and adjunct professors who have toiled now for over a generation without proper job security or remuneration in our own academic systems.116 So also did the clerical proletarians of the Middle Ages, and my hope is that they, too, will no longer suffer from invisibility.

chapter 1

Precedents for Clerical Crisis and Authorial Intervention in Early Middle English

The Early Middle English period was a time of rapid linguistic change and literary experimentation; it juggled regional specificities, emerging genres and multilingual environments. Bracketed by the Norman Conquest and the Plague, it featured interactions from Ireland to the Middle East and beyond. . . . The remnants of Early Middle English are often scrappy, diffuse, multilingual, non-standard. . . . We love that about it. —Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Iain McCleod Higgins, Dorothy Kim, and Meg Worley, “Making Early Middle English”

Early Middle English was a period of dramatic experimentation, and since English was not yet a fully renascent literary language, re-emerging English poetry also reveals its writers under vocational pressure to justify a set of pioneering choices.1 For years now, scholars have looked to the Franciscan orders for the vocational origins of much early poetry,2 but this chapter sheds light on a different, unnoticed phenomenon: it was clerical proletarian authors, as I argue here, who also wrote some major Early Middle English (EME) texts,3 though in many cases they have left footprints but not names. On closer inspection, our mostly anonymous writers look to have been underbeneficed king’s clerks, lawmen, household chaplains, civic record keepers, careerist clerks in government—many intended for the church but not employed there, or simply underemployed there. The picture of these EME proletarians is murkier than that of their Late Middle English successors, but without them, there would

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simply not have been Late Middle English (LME) literature. These were the precedents that LME poets knew and drew upon when they, in turn, faced vocational crisis. The poets discussed here, writing mainly in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, deal with vocational ambition, crisis, and patronage issues, setting precedents for the Ricardian period when vocational crisis loomed large, indeed larger, after 1377. Given the relative scarcity of English poetic texts in this early period, its authors perhaps have an extra awareness of swimming upstream, and certainly an alertness to an older native poetic tradition, however vague or transformed—most heavily voiced in the Prologue discussed here in Laȝamon’s Brut, but present in the other texts that also strive to articulate regional difference (Wynnere and Wastoure), or to place England itself geographically in relation to Celtic, French, or Norse (The Owl and the Nightingale). Less well known, though equally alert to older native tradition, is “The Prisoner’s Lament,” paired French and English lyrics with unique surviving music preserved in Thedmar’s London Cronica, a context which itself articulates ethnic difference and exemplifies the human cost of anti-immigrant attitudes. Throughout this chapter we will examine classic deployments of what I’ve elsewhere called “bibliographic ego,” in which an author intervenes in a text in order to gain (or sometimes regain) the respect, affection, or patronage of his (or her) audience. The genre was honed initially in medieval monastic literary culture and then partly in the self-reflexive poetic culture of France before being cultivated by medieval English poets.4 These moments of meta-discursive intervention come from texts written before 1370—the last of them, Wynnere and Wastoure, written just before or as the young Langland would have first started Piers Plowman as an Edwardian poem of the 1360s, and well before its meteoric rise to popularity as the first trans-regional alliterative text in Richard II’s reign (1377–99).

1. Unfamiliar Friends: English as a “Foreign” Written Language We look first at what it meant to be writing in English before the reign of Richard, a language that was still relatively unnatural for many literate people to read or write, even well into the Ricardian period. If we reverse Ardis Butterfield’s insightful concept of “familiar enemies” in relation to French and English literature during the Hundred Years’ War,5 we can see one with equal applicability within the home front: “unfamiliar friends,” that is, the unfamiliarity with written forms of English that literate English speakers routinely ex-

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perienced as the native language began to re-emerge sporadically in literary texts. This was especially but not only true outside of the areas that had preserved more Old English poetic traditions, such as the West Midlands, home of Laȝamon’s Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale manuscripts. As is well known, even Chaucer cut his teeth mid-century on French lyric poetry of a kind written by French civil servants abroad, certainly honed at court, but initially learned “in London in the mercantile and political circles in which his father [a vinter] moved.”6 This chapter examines the regulations drawn up for just such circles of the London Puy (or Pui), the literary club for French lyric poetry active in London at least in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. We know, at least based on survival, that London manuscript production in English during Chaucer’s youth was apparently sparse, excepting the unique Auchinleck Manuscript (Nat. Lib. Scot., MS Adv. 19.2.1), an illustrated collection of romances made c. 1330,7 partly copied by a scribe with Chancery office training.8 Trilingual proletarian clerks working in the writing offices played a major role both in the Puy and in fostering re-emergent English, as did household clerks and chaplains. As Hannah Zdansky has shown,9 Auchinleck represents a type of household collection (part romance, part pastoral) often gathered by household chaplains working in the homes of the great, a classic type of proletarian position (as we will see with the later poet, John Audelay [Chapter 4]). This type of clerk has been well-illuminated for Anglo-Norman romances in Rosalind Field’s groundbreaking research, showing that many such authors of thirteenthcentury were similarly employed in liminal jobs between the lay and secular worlds as: “Clerical authors . . . but with Clanchy’s wide sense of the range of ‘clericus.’ ”10 Field justly rebukes the modern tendency to ignore this demographic: “But by comparison with the interest lavished on audiences, patrons and women, the clerical writers as a group seem to suffer from the Victorian disapproval of ‘monkish writers’. On the other hand, the appearance of the lay author . . . is greeted with enthusiasm, although Clanchy shows how slippery this distinction can be.”11 The present study is all about exactly how “slippery” this distinction can be for English writers, too. Apart from Auchinleck, and the single rare survival of the brilliant early thirteenth-century lyric “The Prisoner’s Lament” discussed below (Section 4), we have to look beyond London for most surviving English literature before 1350, much of which is still uncertain or experimental in its orthography as written forms of English poetry were still less common. Such texts were often copied in documentary hands even in ecclesiastical settings and mostly into trilingual compilations (French, Latin, and English).12 When we think today of copying

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medieval English, we assume that it is both “easier” and “more popular” or accessible than Latin or even French. But we must think again. Even making generous allowance for losses, manuscripts containing thirteenth-century English are rare, and English copying remained so until well after 1400. Even the scribecompiler of the most famous lyric collection of the period, Harley 2253, was more comfortable in French than in English, as John Thompson has shown.13 A few examples will help illustrate what foreign territory English copying was for most scribes. Roughly between 1275 and 1300, an unknown Norwich cathedral scribe more used to copying documents than literature copied a unique early Middle English bestiary (now British Library, MS Arundel 292).14 He uses archaic Old English letter forms, which the scribe (or poet) partly misunderstands: for example, he employs the Old English eth where a Middle English reader expects a thorn; conversely he often uses a “d” where an Old English scribe would use an eth; he uses the Old English wynn for “w”—an increasingly archaic letter by 1300 (see Figure 5.3 in Chapter 5).15 An equally dramatic example occurs in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.39  in which there is a mnemonic list showing its scribes what certain letterforms needed in Early Middle English actually look like (especially originally runic forms used in Old English) and what they are named in thirteenth-century orthography (see Figure 1.1a). As Marjorie Harrington notes, following recent linguistic research, such errors and uncertainties used to be blamed on foreign scribes, but we now know that these were native scribes, unused to seeing English written.16 John Scahill writes this of the Trinity manuscript: The primacy of Latin in the hierarchy of languages, in addition to its quantitative predominance in the collection, suggests that in this milieu it was the preferred language for writing. English, I would argue, is present because it is the preferred language for oral delivery. One kind of evidence for this is the nature of T[rinity]’s English, for there are signs that the scribes (from four to six of them) that copied its English texts were unused to writing the language. At the foot of the first page of its Proverbs of Alfred the following list of characters occurs: “iye” [beside which a yogh is traced], “w” [beside a wynn], “ant” [beside the “and” sign] and “iyorn” [beside a thorn]. This is an aid to dealing with the exotic written English of the exemplar or the present text.17

Figure 1.1a. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 323 (B.14.39), fol. 85r, detail from the first page of The Proverbs of Alfred, showing a mnemonic in the lower margin for the originally Old English letters still in use in Middle English, with their names and sounds (“iye” [yogh], “w” [wynn], “ant” [“and” sign], and “iyorn” [thorn]). Dated after 1253. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Figure 1.1b. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 323 (B.14.39), fol. 24v, a leaf with two lyrics, “Seinte Mari” and “For on þat is so fayr ant bri[ȝ]t” written as prose. The striking orthographic anomalies in the Middle English suggest the scribe is uncertain about copying English: he apparently does not know what a yogh is and mistranscribes (or miscopies) it consistently as an “s” (e.g., “brist” for “briȝt” [bright]; “bristore” for “briȝtore” [brighter]). Dated after 1253. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

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Elsewhere in the Trinity manuscript, I would note, one of the scribes completely misunderstood the letter “yogh” and renders semi-nonsense in his orthography of two Marian lyrics, for example, writing “þoustes” for þouȝtes” (Figure 1.1b).18 Such evidence abounds. At least a generation or more later, c. 1320–30, a scribe (a friar) trained in university cursive script copied the sophisticated poems of the trilingual Harley 913 (once called “The Kildare MS”)19 and he, too, is improvising in spots: for example, he uses the standard abbreviation for the Latin word “autem” to denote the Middle English word “and” (see Figure 1.2).20 Even in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, English orthography can be rough for scribes: Newberry Library, MS 31, a cleric’s vade mecum book of Latin devotional treatises from a medieval parochial library (Whitchurch, Hampshire), contains two Middle English lyrics.21 Although the scribe handles the Latin competently, the Middle English utterly baffles him: he completely misunderstands the role of final “e,” and after making an initial attempt to follow his exemplar in distinguishing thorn and “y” by dotting the latter, he gives up and dots them both (see Figure 1.3).22 These examples from three very different times and regions show the instability and volatility of orthography and scripts in resurgent written English, even in the West Midlands with its strong Old English poetic heritage. Nor does this volatility end with the Ricardian period. While historical linguists have long been aware of these features of EME manuscripts, literary scholars, especially of Ricardian English, are usually not. For instance, scribes often indicate that Latin is the unmarked language or best glossing aid to construe difficult passages even in certain Chaucer manuscripts.23 Despite our tendency to think that “vernacular” indicates “ease” and “transparency” of access, it does not—not until well into the fifteenth century. So, we owe these frontier EME scribes and authors an enormous debt of gratitude. But who were these clerks, and why did the authors among them choose to compose in English? They were often unnoticed clerical proletarians, and in the rest of this chapter, we will look at key self-portraits they have left us regarding employment and social class.

2. The Owl and the Nightingale’s Portrait of the Artist as an Under-Beneficed Clerk Tropes of poetic self-representation in resurgent English poetry long pre-date Ricardian England. In the rest of this chapter we will examine instances of

Figure 1.2. London, British Library, MS Harley 913 (traditionally “The Kildare Lyrics”), fol. 63r, showing Middle English (and alternating) Latin stanzas of the poem “Erþ.” The scribe improvises the abbreviation for the Latin word “autem” to denote the Middle English word “and” (see boxed examples). Dated 1320s–1330s. © The British Library Board.

Figure 1.3. Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 31, fol. 135, opening of a fourteenth-century religious lyric, “Ihesu swete.” The scribe misunderstands the role of final “e,” and after making an initial attempt to follow his exemplar in distinguishing thorn and “y,” he then gives up. Date: s. xiv3. Reproduced by permission of the Newberry Library.

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sophisticated self-representation of the poet’s employment status, patronage, and social profile. Even as early as The Owl and the Nightingale (dated either 1189–1216, or after 1272), we see a dramatized complaint—whether by or on behalf of—an allegedly underemployed clerk, a man who may or may not be the poet. This witty debate between two allegorical birds, ostensibly about whose song is best, seems to have a number of mysterious agendas, one of which is that it advertises the need for ecclesiastical promotion for someone named Nicholas of Guildford.24 In a surprisingly metanarrative gesture, we even get his home address: Nicholas may be found at “Porteshom,” a “tune in Dorsete” (1753): Þat Mayster Nichole, þat is wis, Bitwihen us deme [judge] schulle . . . “Hwat! nute [know not] ye,” quaþ heo, “his hom? Heo wuneþ at Porteshom, At one tune in Dorsete.” (1745–51, with omissions) Whoever Nicholas was, the Owl claims that he will judge fairly between the two birds because through his wise judgments, the entire kingdom “is þe betere into Scotlonde.” But to seek Nicholas is easy because the poor man has only one house, and that, the Owl opines, is much shame to the bishops, who should instead provide him with incomes on many places (“on vale stude”): He naueþ [has not] buten o wunyng [one dwelling]. Þat is biscopen muchel schame . . . Hwi nulleþ hi nymen heom to rede [counsel], . . . & yeue him rente [income] on vale stude [many places]? (1760–67, with omissions) In other words, Nicholas deserves multiple benefices. While “Þeos riche men” prevent a man of Nicholas’s talent from prospering, they readily promote their kin, beneficing even “lutle childre” (1776)—a bitter comment on problems like nepotism and simony plaguing appointment decisions in the medieval church (later echoed in proletarian poets such as Langland and Audelay): “Wiþ heore kunne heo beoþ [m]ildre, / & yeueþ rente [income] lutle children” (O&N, 1775– 76). As Elizabeth Salter noted, Nicholas may have been the recipient of the poem or very plausibly the poet himself. Peter Dronke provided convincing evidence for very similar modes of witty authorial self-naming in Latin literature of the court of Henry II,25 the kind of writing likely to have been a model for

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O&N. Although we cannot know for certain if Nicholas authored the poem to draw attention to his own plight, or whether someone else wrote it on his behalf,26 or even to what extent satire strives with genuine complaint here, the literary historical parallels make Nicholas’s authorship likeliest—and leave no doubt that anxiety about career advancement underpins the text. Not all benefices provided adequate livelihood, so it was possible to be beneficed but quite underpaid. It is unclear whether we are to imagine that Nicholas speaks from such need or is begging to become a pluralist out of careerist ambition, which was more acceptable in the thirteenth century than it would become in the fourteenth. But how might bishops in the poem’s audience have felt about the poet’s comments on episcopal nepotism? While one might think it would discourage their prospective patronage, such issues were so common in polemics on episcopal reform that they would be unlikely to be scandalized, or perhaps even approving of Nicholas’s reformist stance. But at the time this poem was written (whether after the death of Henry II or Henry III),27 would any bishop be addressed in Middle English? This seems less likely and suggests that O&N was targeting a mixed reading circle of both male and female, clerical and lay. Written in octosyllabic couplets derived from French versification and not in the native alliteration, the poem implies an author and an initial audience learned in French literature, Latin law, but also linguistically able to negotiate some Old English-descended forms, however latent.28 Judging by its manuscript contexts and by internal evidence within the poem, the poet and the audience were invested in both literary vernaculars (English and French), and capable in legal and liturgical Latin.29 This is the kind of skill set that careerist clerks, especially those poised between clerical and lay patronage, would have in spades. Since this is such an early survival of a poetic self-portrait on underemployment, it is crucial to know a bit more about these reading circles for emergent English: it turns out they had political, legal, liturgical, and international literary tastes, and they were clearly multilingual. We know of three manuscripts, of which two survive, Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (J) and British Library, MS Cotton Caligula  A.ix (C), both later thirteenth century. Both are unusually committed to preserving English texts. The third, now lost, belonged to Titchfield Abbey and also contained the “Hystoria britonum,” the Latin legendary political and Arthurian history by Geoffrey of Monmouth, also a clue to audience interests. The surviving manuscripts share several French works of devotion and another poem much like O&N, the French Le Petit Plet, also written in the conflictus genre. This style of classical debate was often set as a medieval

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rhetorical exercise in Latin, often about “problems to which there are sides but no solutions.”30 As Salter wrote, O&N is “strikingly reminiscent in mode . . . of distinguished exemplars of the genre in Latin and Anglo-Norman: its ‘Englishness’ is of that international brand.”31 In J, the poem is titled “Altercatio inter filomenam et Bubonem,” and in the lost Titchfield MS, it was “De conflictu inter philomenam et bubone in anglicis,” both suggesting not only formal rhetorical debate, but a dispute in search of a judge.32 J also contains a statute and some other official items, and C contains, like the Titchfield one did, British histories, including another West Midlands treasure, the EME Laȝamon’s Brut.33 These manuscripts illuminate O&N’s actual audience, as do the demands the poet makes of his implied audience. Packed with allusions to a kaleidoscopic array of legal sub-disciplines, O&N raises scores of administrative, jurisdictional, and social issues. As Bruce Holsinger notes, the author shows off a grasp not only of canon law, but also secular law, natural law, marriage law, theoretical law, and procedural law34—suggesting a target audience agile enough to follow it all, among which careerist or would-be careerist clerks must have been prominent. Courtly issues also appear: King Henry is mentioned in the poem (though whether Henry II or III is unknown), as are topics of interest to women, such as the suffering of wives and courtly lovers in the power of brutal partners, so this initial reading circle need not have been exclusively male or exclusively clerical.35 Importantly, mixed audiences are everywhere characteristic of underemployed clergy or clerks seeking patronage of any kind. Whether tongue-in-cheek or earnest, the poem’s treatment of Nicholas of Guildford looks like a meta-discursive intervention on the part of the poet, a moment that “serves to establish, protect or market the author,” or “bibliographic ego.”36 In this case, I would suggest, it is an “ad” for someone hoping to be a king’s clerk. As we saw in the Introduction, beneficed clergy seconded by the Crown, “king’s clerks,” filled many of the most important roles in government and the judiciary. Benefices, for senior administrators often multiple, were awarded as income to sustain them in the royal ser vice. Such benefices were often “without cure of souls” (such as cathedral canonries), but where they demanded pastoral care, the king’s clerk would be officially “absentee” and pay some fraction of his wages to a poorer clerk, a member of the clerical proletariat, to perform the actual duties of the parish. One of the clues indicating that this is a “pitch” for a king’s clerk, I would suggest, is that the poet spends very little time advocating for Nicholas’s pastoral gifts, as one would for a candidate for a benefice with cure of souls, and a great deal of time advocating for his gifts as a judge. In addition to the poet’s

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command of law, which includes knowledge of “Anglo-Saxon” legal terms,37 he models administrative acumen, for example, in dispute-resolution mechanisms and in correct behaviour under verbal attack.38 This he does in part by drawing heavily on the Old English Alfredian tradition: for example, when the Nightingale is furious (“igremet”), after the Owl “hire atwiten hadde” (933–35), she nevertheless sits a while to compose her thoughts (“An sat sumdel & heo biþohte”) because, we are told, wrath steals one’s ability to provide counsel (“wraþþe binimeþ monnes red” [939–40]). Moreover, what is strongly hinted at in the lines about Nicholas’s much-vaunted judicial skill is that he may deserve a top job in administration or the judiciary, often held by multi-beneficed clerics. Even from his simple Dorset home address (in the southern tip of England), Nicholas allegedly dispenses wisdom and good judgments, enlightening the land all the way “into Scotlonde” (1758): Þar he demeþ mony riht dom, & diht & wryt mony wisdom, & þurh his muþe & þurh his honde Hit is þe betere into Scotlonde. (1755–58) The hint here, however lightheartedly intended, is that Nicholas would be an ideal “tocius Anglie iudex”39—the next justiciar—the top job for a king’s clerk in England! Mixed in with all the juridical and administrative allusions, however, are the hints dropped by an ecclesiastical “insider.” Take, for instance, the poem’s theme of one-upmanship about which bird performs liturgical song the best. Liturgical labour, though not limited to the underemployed, of course, was heavily performed by the underemployed (see Chapters 5 and 6). The Owl attempts to relegate the Nightingale’s song to rural priests and ethnic “fringes” of England’s known world, raising the question of how professional liturgies map onto national, regional, and ethnic ones: for example, when the Owl asks why the Nightingale does not sing to or teach priests of other nations (oder þeode) in Ireland (Irlonde), Scotland (Scotlonde), Norway (Noreweie), or Galloway (Galeweie), her point is jurisdictionally specific: men there “lutel kunne / Of songe þat is bineoðe þe sunne / Wi nultu þare preoste singe/ An teche of þire writelinge”? (905–14). Though medieval bestiaries and travel writers often noted that nightingales were absent from places like Ireland,40 this is still multivalent allegory: foreign clerks, the Owl suggests, know little of “songe,” implying questions about the limitations of official liturgical reach (e.g., for Use of

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Sarum, Use of York, etc.) and claiming greater sophistication for English chant. This is clearly a slice of colonialism (however satirical), and the outrageous ethnic disparagement is underlined by the Owl’s earlier claim that no man (presumably in England) would mistake the nightingale’s “pipinge” for any priest’s (“Ne wened na man for þi piping / þat eni preost in chircce singe” [901–2]). The Nightingale had exposed herself to this critique by claiming that she sings for clerks, monks, and canons who arise to sing in the middle of the night (“midelniȝte” [731])41 and for rural priests who sing “upe londe” (733) at dawn— not an impressive list. Since night offices were often notoriously done rather perfunctorily (as we will see in complaints made of cathedral vicars choral), as were, no doubt, country priests’ and curates’ lonely performances at dawn, the Nightingale had undercut her own credibility.42 Since Nicholas is claimed from the start to be a good judge of singing (line 196),43 evidently he is angling, if in a semi-humorous way, for a promotion—a job, that is, with one foot in the ecclesiastical world and one foot in the secular world of administration. This kind of good-humoured angling for careerist employment is well known in the later “begging poems” of poets such as Hoccleve, but it is not often enough remarked upon in the EME period. But we see that even in this early period of re-emergent English, O&N provides not only an important vernacular precedent, but evidence of extraordinary sophistication in the careerist “angling” genre. It also provides evidence of the kind of mixed audience with avant garde tastes for English, tastes such as underemployed clergy in the liminal space between lay and clerical patronage were good at meeting.

3. The Grateful Lawman: Patronage and Liminality in the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut One of the two manuscripts containing O&N also contains the earliest copy of Laȝamon’s Brut, another canonical EME poem with a sophisticated selfrepresentation of its clerk-poet.44 Ostensibly inhabiting the liminal space between the clerical and lay worlds is the Laȝamon of the Prologue, whose name means “law man” (spelled differently in the two manuscripts).45 Nothing is known of Laȝamon outside of what he tells us in the poem. Whether he was actually named Laȝamon or whether, as Bruce Holsinger wrote, he “invented a nom de plume that registers his discursive affiliation with an as yet barely visible professional class of ‘law-men,’” remains something of a mystery.46 But in fact lawmen were already visible in pre-Norman England, where the term (“lahmen”) could indicate a wide

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Figure 1.4. London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fol. 3, author portrait from Laȝamon’s Brut. Laȝamon’s name itself means “law man.” © The British Library Board.

range of different people.47 As Andrew Rabin shows, it can be difficult to know for certain whether an acting “lahman” was a nobleman, cleric, or learned secular man (literatus), since any free person could hire legal scribes and advisors to fulfill this role.48 So given how early Laȝamon’s Brut was composed (c. 1200), I would suggest that this broad definition is relevant, traditionally spanning the categories of cleric and learned layman. Moreover, whoever commissioned the author portrait of Laȝamon in the historiated initial of Cotton Caligula A.ix seems to have been alert to this: there he is portrayed not only as a learned person and as a scribe, but visibly tonsured as a priest (Figure 1.4).49 The image, in fact, marks the opening line of the poem giving his name: “An preost wes on leoden [among the people], Laȝamon wes ihoten [called].”50 In a period in which clergy regularly supplied all

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kinds of roles that we would think of as secular, legal, or governmental today, this image of the lawman-priest is not incongruous—but the significance of its liminality is often missed. It is that significance that we will unpack here in relation to issues of careerism and patronage. Both his own self-description in the Prologue and the initial, however, agree in foregrounding a third key aspect of his identity, his status as an auctor. The initial is invaluable as both an early extant artist’s concept of a lawman and also as the earliest surviving author-portrait of a poet writing in English, as Maidie Hilmo has shown.51 His self-naming is a significant act, since, as Hilmo notes, only two named English poets are really known before Laȝamon (Caedmon and Cynewulf). Indeed, Laȝamon, highly alert to French models, seems aware of what Laurence de Looze identified among French poets as an important thirteenth-century “shift in mentality . . . to relate the authority of the text to the personal experience of its author.”52 The artist’s attention to Laȝamon’s scribal work is minute, rendering not only his book and pen but also the rubrication on the page before him in red—a palpable response to his flamboyant, selfconfessed bookishness. Insular artists had created author portraits like this for centuries, of course, especially in Latin texts, but this one is exceptional in fronting an early post-Conquest text in English—a kind of statement, perhaps, that English “was back”? As Daniel Donoghue says, “After the late-twelfth-century Ormulum, the Brut is the first long poem in the English language (‘long’ according to Middle English standards: the Old English Beowulf and Genesis are far shorter).”53 From E. G. Stanley’s foundational argument in 1969 that Laȝamon self-consciously archaizes as if to recover pre-Conquest poetic traditions, to Kenneth Tiller’s more recent argument from postcolonial theory that Laȝamon rallies English speakers to resist marginalization, scholars have long seen the Brut as an early, bold attempt to give the English back their own history.54 Both the Prologue and the Caligula illustration are meant to stress Laȝamon’s auctoritas as a purveyor of law and of history, genres closely linked in contemporary chronicles. Laȝamon’s main source, Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut, had itself subsumed several “Anglo-Saxon legal documents,” as Yeager notes, documents now in Laȝamon’s text restored to the English language, and both lexically and metrically indebted to a Wulfstanian legal tradition.55 Like O&N, the Brut shows an interest in governance and jurisdiction. It tells the history of the Britons in English, taking in Arthur’s legendary sweep in Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland with a similarly large and (north)westerly sense of geography as O&N. But the Brut especially reflects Welsh influences consistent

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with his Arthurian topics, and its poet represents himself quite literally on the Welsh border (“at Ernleie,” i.e., Areley Kings near Worcester). This geographical orientation, too, figures in his remarkable meta-discursive self-portrayal in the Prologue. But as with all instances of “bibliographic ego,” we need to know the reason for this intervention. It may be significant that, while naming his poem for Britain’s legendary founder, Brutus of Troy (Caligula reads “Incipit hystoria brutonum”), Laȝamon tells how he traveled beyond his homeland to gather sources, “biwon” the books he took as exemplars (“to bisne”), and at least pretends to bring back three books: Bede’s “Englisca boc” (perhaps the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica); a Latin book about the Christianization of England by St. Augustine of Canterbury, who “fulluht [baptism] broute hider in” (allegedly by St. Albin);56 and a third book by the “Frenchis clerc, Wace”—the Roman de Brut, an Anglo-Norman rendering of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britanniae (which we met with O&N, too). Having advertised his gathering of books in the three main working languages of England—or better appropriating them, since, as Tiller points out, the verb “nom” denotes military conquest in the Brut—Laȝamon portrays himself as someone who speaks multilingually for British history:57 He nom þa Englisca boc: þa makede Seint Beda. An-oþer he nom on Latin: þe makede Seinte Albin. & þe feire Austin: þe fulluht [baptism] broute hider in. Boc he nom þe þridde: leide þer amidden. þa makede a Frenchis clerc, Wace wes ihoten [called]: þe wel couþe writen. & he hoe ȝef [gave] þare æðelen [noble]: Ælienor þe wes Henries queen. (16–23) Apparently, the French Wace was his real source, and Laȝamon singles it out for special treatment, reporting that Wace gave the book to Eleanor, Henry’s queen. Whether true or not, the prominent vignette suggests his idealization of a courtly context and perhaps even, as Yeager notes, of a culture in which queens interceded with kings on behalf of those in search of literary patronage.58 The British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii version of the text supplies further evidence of patronage issues: as Thorlac Turville-Petre notes, this copy implies “that it was commissioned by a ‘good knight.’ ” While both manuscripts say that Laȝamon “wonede at Ernleie” (the modern Areley Kings near Worcester), the

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second half of the line (“at æðelen are chirechen” [at a noble church]) is changed in Otho to the more specific “wid þan gode cniþte” (line 3), implying that he lives as a chaplain with a generous lay employer (one of the commonest jobs for underemployed clerks).59 Chaplains in a noble household also often doubled as legal advisors, drafting charters, documents, and more—household lawmen. Though Laȝamon radiates gratitude, the elaborate Prologue is surely intended to do more. Like Nicholas of Guildford (or the coterie poet who boosts him so energetically) in O&N, Laȝamon has gone to a lot of trouble, unusual among alliterative poets, to give us his name and geographical address, and when medieval poets resort to this type of specificity, it is usually about patronage, since requests for prayers (another common reason for meta-discursive intervention) do not require a mailing address. Yet here it is: An preost wes on leoden, Laȝamon wes ihoten. He wes Leouenathes sone . . . He wonede at Ernleȝe, at æðelen are chirechen, Vppon Seuarene-staþe, sel þar him þuhte, On-fest Radestone, þer he bock radde. (1–5) His father’s name (“Leouenathes sone”) tells us that he is of English, not French, stock; his dwelling on the Severn, Redstone Ferry (Radestone) places him literally in the Welsh border area—home to many of the Brut’s Arthurian legends, but also to the “Dunsæte Ordinance” in the pre-Conquest period, with its overt references to lawmen.60 His pointed statement of happiness with his “noble” church (“sel þar him þuhte”) does indeed imply gratitude toward his patron, which the Otho version later heightens (line 3). This adjustment is even more significant if, as Christopher Cannon has argued, Otho was actually Laȝamon’s own later revision.61 But both texts emphasize that reading (“þer he bock radde”) is his real labour.62 So, like Nicholas of Guildford, Laȝamon has employment, but other factors suggest a bid for further patronage, more subtly than in Nicholas’s case. One is the bid to be seen as a national historian. He is first identified (line 1) as a clerk among the people: “An preost wes on leoden”—a resonant word with ethnic overtones, used in the First Worcester Fragment (another local text) to describe the shift from the Anglisaxones to Anglo-Norman authority (“Nu beoþ oþre leoden þeo læreþ ure folc [Now there is another people that teaches our folk]” [18]).63 Laȝamon, too, within a few lines, announces that he will be speaking of past English nobility (“of Engle þa æðelæn tellen”), introducing his book as a project of

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his own conception (“It come him on mode”), arrived at via meditation (“on his mern þonke”), to recover the history of great English leaders and conquerors: It come him on mode, and on his mern þonke, þet he wolde of Engle þa æðelæn tellen; Wat heo ihoten weoren and wonene heo comen, þa Englene land aerest ahten. (6–9) Moreover, he wrote in a nostalgic form of English, too—Stanley called it antiquarianism. As Dickins and Wilson note, he even imitates not only Old English lexis but syntax.64 Donoghue stresses that there had been no such large project (at least known to us) since Ormulum, calling it “a new English genre”: “The implications of this simple fact are significant: with no precedent to guide him, Laȝamon had to improvise a verse style that could accommodate the demands of this new English genre. . . . While alliterative verse and prose were dominant influences, he drew from a range of genres and literatures. . . . [A]ny assessment of his technique should begin by considering it as a response to the demands of sustained narrative never encountered before in English poetry.”65 The question is, at the moment of writing the Prologue, did he have sufficient funding to complete and “publish” (in the medieval sense) such a long, ambitious work? That would have been a tall order: the cost of parchment alone would have been prohibitive for a book of 16,096 lines. Large works were a huge capital investment (even for a monk backed by his abbot, which is not the case here),66 and they required an audience for dissemination orally (normally court or household) and someone with further capital for any reproduction.67 A priest-lawman could not have done this without substantial patronage. The ethnic heritage of his patron or prospective patron is likely indicated by the self-consciousness of Laȝamon’s mission to write English history in English. His portrait shows that he straddles the clerical and lay worlds with ease, and that he had access to books (even if he fictionalized a few), but not so much access that he did not celebrate the privilege in verse—even advertising it. Laȝamon’s text is foundational as the first known work in English to contain what romance scholars call the “Matter of Britain.” So, no matter how one views issues of “nationalism,”68 Laȝamon has to be seen as a pivotal figure during the period in which English was re-establishing itself as a literary language and history. There are hints in Laȝamon’s verbal self-portrait that he was aware of his potentially pivotal position and aspired to a higher profile by it, ideally in courtly circles. The famous passage in which he lovingly caresses the leaves of

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the book is so tactile that some modern critics have resorted to explanations of eroticism. This misses the main point, I think, because books themselves were still rare, precious, and highly expensive to produce. As he takes up the quill to make the three books into one (“Laȝamon leide þeos boc: & þa leaf wende [turned] . . . / & þa þre [three] boc: þrumde [joined] to are [one]” [24–28, with omissions]), there is a sense not only of a renascent literary culture but, in fact, a re-translatio studii (from French back to English), feeling its way across the book-skin and subsuming more dominant cultures as it goes. A contemporary thirteenth-century image from a French manuscript shows a monk in his cell doing just this very type of compilation, composing on a tablet from multiple sources (Figure 1.5), deftly suggesting the intimacy of the activity but also suggesting the rather humble circumstances of it. With hints of Trinitarian phraseology in the line, it is likely no accident that the three books are characteristic of major themes of EME literature: Britain’s legendary history, its Christianization, and its romance tradition—all three characteristic of the mix of genres often blended by clerks serving in liminal spaces, and all three still major clerkly themes in the 1380s, as we will see, in cathedral chronicles and St. Erkenwald (Chapters 6 and 7). But despite the reverential mentions of Bede, St. Albin, and Austin, the Brut is not a pastoral or hagiographical project, but rather historiographical and political, refracted through the Arthurian court. Metrically, the poem is written out in prose with punctuation marking each caesura, as was traditional for alliterative verse, with Old English diction and parallelism, but it is also heavily influenced by French: the two halves of the alliterative lines are often linked by rhyme as well as by alliteration.69 As our “lawman” poet would have known, French was also the most dynamic of the three languages used by the law in the early thirteenth century: as Paul Hyams has shown, it is French (not Latin or English) that contributes to the most creative aspects of English law and its literary vocabulary.70 So Laȝamon clearly wants to link his project visibly to the prestige of French, even while offering a sense of writing English at an auspicious historical moment, and the Prologue is intended to mark, and perhaps market, his own role in that. All the evidence, then, points to Laȝamon as both priest and legal advisor in or appointed by a secular household (either as house chaplain or as a priest whose benefice lies in a local lord’s gift). The Prologue advertises his massive project to take up the mantle of national historian, at the time of writing, still partly aspirational and likely seeking further patronage, or at least consciously sending the kinds of literary signals that writers seeking patronage do, ideally courtly. Apparently, the project did not go unfunded—though the fact that

Figure 1.5. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 753, fol. 9, image from a thirteenth-century manuscript showing (apparently) “Domnus .W. de Curtracho,” a secular canon of Notre Dame of Courtrai, in his cell compiling and composing on a wax tablet with six different manuscripts open in front of him. It is apparently cold in the cell, so he has set aside his boots and wrapped himself up in bed. © Bibliothèque Mazarine.

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only two manuscripts remain may testify to the financial limits on reproduction. Laȝamon, like all the clerkly careerist poets discussed in this book, wrote from “in-between” church and state and, as we will see, as part of an evolving new “estate” with increasing professional status.

4. Fending Off Xenophobia: Thedmar’s Authorial Intervention, “The Prisoner’s Lament” and London Civic Reading Circles for the Early Lyric The reverence Laȝamon shows for his French book and Wace’s presentation of it to Queen Eleanor is a reminder that French culture was still the eminent literary culture in the EME period.71 Just as Laȝamon’s meta-discursive Prologue sought to justify his maverick choice to write in English rather than French, our next writer also deployed a meta-discursive intervention in the ser vice of English identity, and preserved alongside it the earliest surviving London EME poem, “The Prisoner’s Lament.”72 Happily for us, this lyric is not just early but extraordinarily good, though still too underappreciated.73 Arnold Fitz Thedmar, a German-descended London alderman and major civic chronicler, sought to fend off rising xenophobia among Londoners via two interventions added in his own hand sometime after 1271 to his Cronica Maiorum. Called by editors the “Additions,” the first is a strategically selective family history beginning with his grandparents’ immigration to England; the second is Thedmar’s selfdefense against taxation and persecution during hostile years for non-English Londoners.74 Attached to these interventions (carefully preserved between them)75 is the unique thirteenth-century London poem, “Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non [Once I did not know sorrow],” interlineated with its French version and—even more rare—its own music. Known to modern editors as “The Prisoner’s Lament,” this song itself was anonymously composed in a London-area eME dialect, linguistically datable to about 122576—that is, so early that it coincides with the writing of Ancrene Wisse in a region much more noted for its EME productions, the South West Midlands (home of our extant O&N manuscripts and Laȝamon). Since in Thedmar’s copy it is written underneath the French, then the preferred literary language of the vast majority of literate Londoners, we have to ask why he preserved the English at a time and in a city of other wise incredibly scant EME survival. The answer, as I’ll suggest, involves Thedmar’s need to demonstrate English loyalty and identity against antiimmigrant hatred, which he did by invoking a distinctive mode of “biblio-

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graphic ego,” that is, an authorial intervention that “serves to establish, protect or market the author,” in Thedmar’s case, to protect.77 “The Prisoner’s Lament” pairing are actually beautiful French and English contrafacta, composed as innovative, secularized riffs on a famous Marian Latin Planctus, and both meticulously transcribed to align with their music. Resurgent English verse emerges, just like this, unevenly and sparsely in the largely Latin and French manuscript record throughout the thirteenth century in a still very colonial England. Though recent concepts of multilingualism have helpfully nuanced and “democratized” questions of language choice, we know from the scarcity of early manuscripts containing EME literature that English still had a long road ahead to prestige recognition.78 Thedmar, then, is worth celebrating as someone who bucked the status quo, and saved a sterling London rarity. Just how much French was the literary language of choice at the time, we know in part from another civic administrator, Andrew Horn, who a generation later recorded amidst London Guildhall records the statutes of the London Puy, the literary club for French song enthusiasts, organized at nearly the same time as Thedmar wrote his “Additions.” Horn, the city’s chief financial and judicial officer, recorded the statutes of the La Feste royale du Pui in 1321, which lay down rules for lyrics and their music. Horn’s vivid records of the “customs, liberties and pastimes” of the city, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne writes, suggest his participation in “the new record-keeping civic cultures of Europe.”79 Like Horn’s, Thedmar’s book, the Liber de antiquis legibus, a London chronicle of the years 1178–1274, is still the property of the London Guildhall. Thedmar and Horn offer direct evidence for the literary interests of the rising “fourth estate,” that is, the class of clerks, merchants, and lawyers increasingly visible in London cultural history.80 Both Thedmar (alderman and keeper of the civic documents chest), and Horn (Chamberlain of the City of London, 1320–28), left detailed civic history volumes, but they were not above writing themselves, their politics, triumphs, and woes into their compilations.81 Thedmar offers a classic instance of meta-discursive intervention to engage the audience on his own behalf in a crisis, preserved alongside the paired contrafacta “prayer” of those unjustly imprisoned. In 1263 a “Statute Against Aliens” had “restricted office-holding to native-born men, and ordered all aliens to leave the kingdom,” and by 1269, twenty alien merchants were imprisoned in the Tower of London, ostensibly over a dispute about weights.82 Thedmar, vulnerable as an ethnic German and alderman to the German merchants in an increasingly volatile London, wrote an urgent self-defense of his family’s adoptive English identity, via the “Additions.” Interestingly for us, his defense hints that

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he was originally intended for a career in the church, but he became instead a merchant-administrator and chronicler. Antonia Gransden viewed Thedmar’s work as “symptomatic of the ending of the monastic monopoly of historiography,”83 another case of operation in a liminal clerical space, but Thedmar was forward-looking in other ways. Faced with pressures about his ethnicity (even his name was German), as Ian Stone puts it, “he did what any good writer would do, he picked up his pen.” In the first of his “Additions,” “he wrote this family history to place [them] in London, simultaneously acknowledging yet downplaying the factors that made him alien. Thus he wrote so expansively of his maternal grandparents, [who] . . . provided him with a 100-year heritage in London.”84 As Thedmar explains, his grandparents made a pilgrimage from Germany to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket to pray they could conceive a child, and they stayed in London, “so noble and so famous,” so that his grandmother could be safely delivered, the first of several of Thedmar’s stories remarkable for their emphasis on the family’s women during pregnancy. While pregnant with him, Thedmar writes that his mother has a religious vision, involving a missing log from the fire (interpreted as his father’s absence at his birth), replaced by a marble log (ostensibly foreshadowing Thedmar’s own birth, inheritance, and prosperity). Thedmar therefore represents himself implicitly as having always enjoyed some kind of divine protection—certainly a useful message to convey to a hostile audience. It is told as a classic meta-discursive moment in which the third-person narrative suddenly slips into the first person: ‘De quo quod de eo contingebat scribere proposui [I decided to write of the thing which happened to him].”85 Throughout this first “Addition,” English national identity and loyalty to London, and to England’s internationally known saint, Becket, are every where evident. While this addition is cast as a story (beginning “There was a certain man living in the city of Cologne”), the second begins more bureaucratically (“Memorandum quod . . .”), making clever use of Thedmar’s official chest of city documents (a list of which had been affixed after the first), and recording repeated evidence that he had already paid his fair share during a period of heavy royal taxation. It also documents his persecution and harassment on this point, especially by Mayor Henri de Waleys, a powerful AngloNorman—who also, by chance, at this time founded the London Puy. In a world in which the intelligentsia of the city thought of the lyric as French, Thedmar’s interest in an English song and English identity stands out. Preserved between his two “Additions,” is “The Prisoner’s Lament,” with the eME language version lineated beneath the French (see Figure 1.6). Music rarely survives with Middle English verse, and it is copied here not in Thedmar’s

Figure 1.6. London, Corporation of London Records Office, Guildhall (London Metropolitan Archives), Liber de antiquis legibus, fols. 160v–161r, “The Prisoner’s Lament,” with French version in the top line and English underneath. French incipit, “Eyns ne soy ke pleynte fu,” top left, with English incipit beneath it, “Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non.” © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

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hand (writing music was a specialized skill), nor in the hand of some canceled Latin liturgy from reused binding leaves of an older liturgical ser vice book.86 As, Dobson concluded, “There is nothing in the language inconsistent with an origin in London or nearby, north of the Thames,”87 and the LAEME88 entry stresses the unity of the whole, mentioning that folios 160–62 are “possibly fragments of a ser vice book preserved by Arnald Thedmar . . . the main scribe of the manuscript,” given that both the French and eME versions (on fols. 160v– 161v) are “in a single hand.” Ser vice books, of course, usually did not include English and French lyric-pairings. The poem opens with its speaker crying out that though he once knew no sorrow (“Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non”), he is now compelled to make his lament (“Nu ich mot manen min mon”) and suffer shame, though guiltless (“Geltles, Ihc tholye muchele schame”). The French line is copied under the music, the English line below the French, with subtle differences between the versions. Eyns ne soy ke pleynte fu Ore pleyn d’angusse tressu, Trop ai mal e contreyre Sans decerte en prisun sui, Car m’aydes tres puissant Jesu. (lines 1–5 of French)

Ar ne kuthe ich sorghe non Nu ich mot manen min mon Karful, wel sore ich syche: Geltles, Ihc tholye muchele schame, Help, God, for thin swete name. (lines 1–5 of English)89

Calling on Christ for aid and delivery, the poet proclaims he is innocent (in French, “Sans decerte”), yet suffering in prison with companions (“mi autre compaignun”), in the eME “Geltles, Ihc tholye muchele schame.” The music meticulously “tone-paints” the poem. Harrison’s musicological analysis lists words like “tholye” (line 4) and “for” (“for thin swete” [line 5]) as notated with “plicated notes” (transcribed as two notes, one at pitch and one a step lower). These seem to emphasize the most poignant words, just as “two longs” (transcribed as tied notes) emphasize words like “sorghe” in line 1.90 In the poem’s most powerful moment, the poet asks that God forgive those who have thrust them into this evil prison (in the English, “Foryef hem, . . . God, yhef it is thi wille”), in both versions echoing the Lord’s Prayer. It seems likely that Thedmar preserved the poem alongside his account of his own harassment at the hands of xenophobic Londoners, and in the context of non-English Londoners who had suffered even more severely, sometimes imprisoned. The internationally famous Latin Planctus ante nescia (I who never before knew lament) by Godefroid de Saint-Victor upon which the French and English contrafacta are based is not

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copied in the manuscript, suggesting either that it wasn’t useful in a civic environment, or that the Latin was so well known that it could be remembered and compared spontaneously, much as today we instantly recognize a riff on any hummable popular song. Yet as Harrison noted, despite assuming the form of the lais, the French-EME pairing is actually “written in plainsong notation”— not the first thing one expects in a civic chronicle. But unlike the original Latin Planctus, both “disagree with syllable-count and . . . in stress pattern” with the music, so the notating scribe knowledgably “allowed for these differences by writing each half-stanza separately” alongside the music.91 This, I would add, took not only more time, but much more parchment than vernacular lyrics are usually afforded (compare even Harley 2253’s lyrics). But, I would suggest, this is exactly the kind of meticulous care that is described in the London Puy regulations for linking words and music, as we will see shortly—exactly the circles in which Thedmar would have traveled. The paired versions are remarkable, as Monika Otter says, for their delight in code-switching between French and English and “for the democracy of their presentation.” Of the skilled copyist (perhaps the original author), she says “it stands to reason that the person responsible might well have come from the same milieu as the original compiler . . . : law and city administration.” Clerks “code-switched” languages daily in their jobs, and so, unsurprisingly, as Otter notes, the “visual direction of the two texts . . . is of equality and equivalence.”92 Both the English and French versions are lais and hauntingly beautiful when sung; and I would note that modern performers capture something of the liminal state of their compilation and preservation by recording each either as a religious song or as a secular one.93 Despite their immediate adjacency, the poems and Thedmar’s additions are normally mutually ignored by literary scholars and historians, though Ralph Hanna has insightfully noted that Thedmar appears to have gathered the poem in juxtaposition to his own political troubles: “Only by its inclusion here does it refer to Thedmar’s troubles after 1265 (as the book is now bound, his personal narrative begins on the next leaf), but it is the impressive testimony to the fear of factionalism which underlines [his] entire historical collection.”94 In fact, in light of the work of recent historians like Ian Stone, we have now been able to go a step further in linking them. One cannot consider “Prisoner’s Lament” without thinking of the London Puy, though the lyric slightly pre-dates it. There is no mistaking the primacy of its French text under the music, yet its French is so evidently influenced by English “stressings,” as Dobson showed,95 so these multilingual influences went

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both ways. The Puy was a colonial import to London, a literary club for French lyric competitions, founded about 1270 in imitation of the one in Arras that Edward I himself had visited in 1263. Ironically, Henri de Waleys, mayor of London (1273–74), whose egregious overtaxation of Thedmar prompted his second meta-discursive “Addition,” was apparently a leading founder of the London Puy.96 The London Puy flourished at least into the 1320s, and perhaps beyond,97 bringing a new middle class of literary “intelligentsia” together, including careerist clergy of many different ranks. Anne Sutton, historian of the London Puy, distinguishes four groups, “clerks, professional administrators and lawyers” as “naturals for Puy membership,” alongside prominent merchants, whose great halls “may have been preferred for the elegant activity of selecting an annual chanson royale.”98 This grouping, embodying the “fourth estate,” was a rising force socially, but there are not many historical records like Horn’s copy of the La Feste royale du Pui in which today we can catch them all in a “group snapshot” focusing on literary texts together. Horn was himself a man of letters with an eye to international French: into his Liber custumarum he also copied his own translation of Book III of Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor. It exemplifies a trend that civil servants would continue over the next century of shaping civic moral leadership, quietly encouraging meritocracy,99 and seeking patronage from the powerful via translations of “advice for princes” texts (as later in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes). Horn’s Liber custumarum100 was an official compilation of legal and civic materials into which he copied the regulations of the La Feste royale du Pui in French. These explain French lyric, or more precisely song competitions, since by regulation, the lyrics had to be set to music (the original sense of the genre). Like so many medieval guilds and fraternities, the Puy was also a social network, had its own chapel and chaplain (a non-beneficed clerk), and provided support to its own poor (les povres de la compaignie [line 48]), suggesting some downward economic reach to the literate underemployed.101 According to the statutes, “La Feste royale du Pui,” the main purpose of the annual event was to “crown a royal song” (un chaunsoun reale corouner [line 67]). Certain duties were required of each crowned songwriter: the winner had to ensure that a copy of his song was posted in the hall under his blazon, “clearly and correctly written without fail” (apertement et droitement escrite saunz defaute [lines 82– 83]).102 Like so much else in the statutes (and so much else in clerical careerist culture), these injunctions smack of a scribal or “office” mentality. Concern for copies and copying is paramount: “no singer [nul chauntour] ought by right to sing a royal song, or offer [ne profrir] one at the feast of the Pui, until he sees

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[desques a taunt q’ il veit] that the song crowned in the immediately preceding year has been rightly honoured in the aforesaid manner [en le manere avauntdite]” (lines 83–88). This is indeed a club of record keepers, who are nonetheless simultaneously concerned, I would observe, with forming a permanent literary canon visually, via the insistence on posting past years’ winners, and also making sure that everyone has access to copies. We often talk about medieval reading circles or textual communities, but here we have a rare glimpse at rules for one. This is emphasized in a further very clerical kind of provision: “that the common clerk [le commun clerk] of the Puy hold a transcript (le transecrist [lines 63–65]) so that the companions [of the Puy] can seek guidance and have copies at their own expense [le transecrit a lur custages].” This shows striking alertness to the need for originalia—an authentic and authoritative copy of the text to be kept in some safe venue, a fundamental method first of all from legal, governmental, and academic circles but here applied to the lyrics of the Puy.103 As such, it conveys a kind of legal status on the poems. The concern for the availability and cost of transcripts, found elsewhere in the civil ser vice, appears here in literary circles, and will surface again in later clerical proletarian writings. It can come with a strikingly humane insistence on the accessibility and affordability of such transcripts to all—appearing among later English poets, for instance, in household chaplain-poet, John Audelay’s concern for his own originalia (Chapter 4). In the London Puy, affordability is largely assumed (merchants, lawyers, and clerks would all have access to the means of production, in Marxist terms), but there is some concern here for the underpaid literate. In other government contexts, there can be a “public-spirited” provision for free transcripts to the needy: for example, in the Modus tenendi parliamentum, which details the regulations for the holding of parliament, and, in the London Guildhall itself, a system of “open access” allowing for transcripts provided by the civic secretariat.104 These are elements of medieval “publication,” transmission, and preservation of poetry that can be strongly associated with later clerical proletarians. Not only are these “clubbable” record-keepers obsessive, even in their spare time, but they are also endearingly passionate poets, singers, and metrical perfectionists—just such a person, I’d note, carefully copied “Prisoner’s Lament” with its French lyrics directly below its musical line. In the Puy, French lyrics were by statute songs, and so had to be correctly notated and pointed as such: “And that for judging the songs there should be two or three who are expert in song and in music [en chant et en musike], and who can try out and evaluate the sounds and the notation [pur les notes et les poinz del trier et examiner] of the song as well as the words composed for it [auxi bien com la nature de la reson

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enditee]. For without melody, one ought not to call a composition [une resoun endité] a song, nor should a crowned royal song be without the sweetness of sung melodies.”105 This tells us that real expertise in music is the domain of a select few—indeed, only a small number of vernacular lyrics survive in manuscripts with medieval music. Not only the notes (les notes), but also the pointing of the song (les poinz—marking for performance or punctuation) is of minute concern to the Puy judges.106 As we will see in Chapter 5 especially, proletarian choral clerks in cathedrals also composed and copied English songs with special concern for punctuation and performance because they were singers. As Katherine Zieman has shown, regulations for such groups stress verbal articulation above nearly all else.107 Puy membership, of course, included many such clerks, suggesting a forum for cross-fertilization between liturgical and secular verse—exactly what we saw in “Prisoner’s Lament.” Many of the written poetic collections with English before 1300 (a much, much smaller canon) are similarly concerned with performance strategies, as Marjorie Harrington has recently shown of religious lyrics, and liturgical pointing is a major contributor to poetic process.108 I would suggest further that the presence of many legal clerks in such poetic clubs contributed to another fruitful cross-fertilization as legal scripts like Anglicana formata became the signature script for resurgent Middle English literature.109 And of course Puy judges were also required to weigh the nature (la nature) of the words or composition: “une resoun endite”—“resoun” meaning here a discourse or argument. In short, the Feste du Pui statutes were written for the “poet’s poet,” taking a wholistic approach to judging quality verse, and, most hearteningly, insisted that the real “royalty” were not the winning composers, nor the expert judges, but rather the songs themselves—it is the songs that were “crowned.” Socially, a puy was, though not a democratic space (in fact, quite hierarchical), a surprisingly meritocratic space by medieval standards. As James Wimsatt has shown, one account in France refers to both lettered and “unlettered” winners (perhaps minstrels) of puy competitions.110 Moreover, records of the London Puy and its poetic competitions show that the competitions could be held at taverns (always a tantalizing precedent for Chaucerians).111 One early puy was held at a tavern in London charmingly named “ubi le bere toumbeth,”112 perhaps “The Dancing Bear” or, literally, “Where the Bear Tumbles” (tumbling could also be a minstrel’s skill). The tavern name is recorded in this delightful mix of Latin, French, and eME that abounds in writing office culture of the period.113 The resurgence of literary English in relation to French over time is a complex subject, as specialists such as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Ardis Butterfield, and others have shown, and even though we can’t trace the London Puy into

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Chaucer’s time, we know that Chaucer’s earliest poetic attempts (during the reign of Edward III) were almost certainly in French, not English.114 The London Puy, with its lawyers, merchants, and clerks, a rising literate middle class, or some parallel club may have nurtured a young Chaucer, his father being a vintner and the kind of merchant found in the early London Puy. Chaucer’s own poetic competition in the Canterbury Tales is set up under the Host, tavern keeper Harry Bailey,115 though by then, some sixty years after Andrew Horn, competing in English, not French. By the early fifteenth century, civil servant members of the clerical proletariat such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Shirley both speak of dinners held by London vintners and other convivial gatherings of bureaucrats at which vernacular poems were performed, especially in Chaucerian circles.116 These were all rooted in the traditions of thirteenth-century London Puy, gatherings that fostered the literary cultures of the fourth estate, across two centuries, and its clerical careerists. We are about to meet one such careerist poet.

5. Clerical Careerist Authorship, Poetic Crisis, and the Fourth Estate in Wynnere and Wastoure Just a few decades on from Horn’s record of the London Puy, that same social coalition of clerks, lawyers, and merchants with a passion largely for French poetry now appears more active in the ser vice of English poetry. London-based outliers—or better visionary compilers—like the civic clerk Thedmar, who preserved the lovely English version of “Prisoner’s Lament” in the 1270s, or the tantalizing Auckinleck Manuscript copied in part by a Chancery scribe, seem to have been very interested in English identity. So too another “fourth estate” clerk, identifiable not by name but, I’ll suggest, by profile, wrote Wynnere and Wastoure. This “careerist” had a real knowledge of government legislation and the royal court, and he has always been assumed to have been a layman. But I will suggest here that he, too, inhabited a liminal status between clerical and lay worlds. And he, too, wrote a Prologue with metanarrative positioning of the poet’s voice, which, though not an instance of classic “bibliographic ego” (since we never learn his name), nonetheless dramatizes crisis of vocation and lack of poetic patronage. The I-speaker identifies himself as an underemployed poet, a claim he nests amidst traditional prophetic, indeed apocalyptic, warnings about the decline of the world and the art of poetry itself. This unknown author, then, writing c. 1352–70, makes a compelling subject to take us literally to the cusp of the Ricardian period.

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Wynnere and Wastoure (hereafter WW) is a tongue-in-cheek allegory of opposing armies, ostensibly pitting social groups who earn or preserve wealth (led by Winner) against those who give or spend it (led by Waster). The poem offers no simple answer: its king makes peace between the parties, a conclusion that implies that kings love and need both getters and spenders, even at times the unsavoury ones. The poem survives mysteriously only in a fragmentary state and in a single late copy, London, British Library, Additional MS 31042, compiled in the fifteenth century by the great romance collector and Yorkshire country gentleman Robert Thornton.117 Like extant The Owl & the Nightingale manuscripts, Laȝamon’s Brut, and many of the alliterative Harley lyrics (see Chapter 6), WW stems from the sophisticated poetic culture of the West Midlands, in this case the Northwest, which is also the dialectal home of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and St.  Erkenwald (discussed in Chapter  7). The WW poet famously expresses suspicion of the South and of London, which, however, the poet knew as a rising force in government, trade, and, allegedly, consequent corruption. No Western man, he complains in his Prologue, dares send his son to the South these days: “Dare neuer no westren wy while this werlde lasteth / Send his sone southewarde to see ne to here” (WW, 8–9).118 In her edition, Stephanie Trigg pegs this writer as likely a “careerist,” citing Michael Bennett, who showed that careerist clerks with such government ambitions from the region, however, certainly all went south.119 Writing well ahead of Gawain and Erkenwald, probably 1352–70, the poet nevertheless already wields the resurgent alliterative genre with confidence.120 In his Prologue, after having established himself as a prophet of approaching doom, he laments the decline of patronage for serious poetry. Lords, he says, used to love “makers of myrthes that matirs couthe fynde” (that is, poetic “matter” with substance). But now, loyalty is lost, and no one dares speak truth to the mighty, a problem he casts in terms not of politics but of poetry: the result, he argues starkly, is that many wise poems are left unwritten, withheld inwardly (“Wyse wordes withinn that wroghte were never”), implying a climate of selfcensorship and a poignant sense of what is lost when a poem goes unrecorded: Whylome were lordes in londe that loved in thaire hertis To here makers [authors] of myrthes that matirs [material] couthe fynde, And now es no frenchipe in fere [company] bot fayntnesse of hert, Wyse wordes withinn that wroghte were never, Ne redde in no romance that ever renke [man] herde.

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The problem, moreover, he alleges, is generational: Bot now a childe appon chere, withowtten chyn-wedys [beard], That never wroghte thurgh witt thies121 wordes togedire, Fro he can jangle als a jaye and japes [jokes] telle, He schall be levede (or lenede?)122 and lovede and lett of a while Wele more than the man that made [composed] it hymselven. (19–28) The poet appears to mourn the passing of the kind of clerk-patron relationship idealized in the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut, here denouncing the lack of patronage for authors (“makers”) from lords of the land. Medieval patrons provided not only material support, but also a large household audience (“frenchipe in fere”), and welcoming forum in which to be heard (“loved . . . to here”) and disseminated, all aspects of medieval publication. Whether the poet intended “leuede” (believed) or “lenede” (rewarded) in line 27, the suggestion is that now only the shallow poets are heard, or perhaps even “permitted.” Though scholars have long recognized that the classical trope of the neglected poet underlies aspects of this Prologue, the poet is not simply dealing in tropes here. Frustration with juvenile entertainers, for instance, is conventional, but poets such as Langland and Audelay nonetheless also render this frustration with social realism.123 In fact the WW poet goes well beyond rhetorical convention, overturning some common assumptions. These populist artists, he says, are loved “Wele more than the man that made [composed] it hymselven”— evidence, I would note, that directly undercuts the medieval concept that writers simply retold ancient stories, not the creation of new ones, as later overtly articulated, for instance, in John Shirley’s verse prefaces on Chaucer and Lydgate.124 But the WW poet’s approach to narrative is different, closer to the alliterative tradition epitomized by Langland. The WW Prologue, in fact, is laced with the language of literary invention: for example, as John Burrow has noted, the WW poet’s formulation “matirs couthe fynde” is quite specific and likely an English translation of the Latin term inventio (rhetorical creativity). This, then, is a defense of creative rather than reiterative poetry, and that is unusual. He even finishes with a powerful warning to all those who lack originality but pretend to be poets: “Bot, never-the-lattere, at the laste when ledys [men] bene knawen, / Werke [i.e., the literary work] wittnesse will bere who wirche kane [can compose] beste” (29–30). The faith here is that the inventive work will outshine the merely imitative, and outlast it. This, then, despite its conventional

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elements, is a poet speaking relatively early in Middle English about issues of composition, patronage, and even modes of invention. Whether we attribute the voice of the Prologue in some sense to the unnamed author, for instance, invoking Sobecki’s helpful idea of medieval authorial representation as a kind of alter ego of the “porous” self, or whether we see it as an innovative amalgam of literary conventions mimicking authorial voice, as Spearing argues generally following the French dit tradition, will be up to each reader. But in either case, we must also heed John Burrow’s timeless advice to beware of falling into “the conventional fallacy”—that is, just because any passage draws on convention does not make it unhistorical, since human beings do and think conventional things daily in real life.125 That traditional poets were frustrated by the depredations of less serious entertainers (itinerant minstrels, jugglers, and buskers) is also well attested not just in poetry but also in chronicles and biography.126 The fact that such minstrels and their deceptions later become an obsession for Langland, realistically observed, dissected, and deplored by the time he wrote the C-Text, also suggests something bigger than a literary trope, and closer to a social concern.127 Critics have long complained about the complexity of the various I-speakers in WW, and this should be a clue to us that the meta-discursive moment of the Prologue is meant to be read differently—not of course taken at face value—but it is also important to recognize the WW Prologue’s metanarrative positioning moves it closer to the “bibliographic ego” genre, since, whether fictionalized or real, this voice cannot be reconciled with the populist minstrel tropes of the dream vision itself.128 Nor can this voice be equated with, as Thomas Bestul wisely noted, the “simple ‘Westren wy’ with a provincial’s distrust of the city,” however empathetic.129 Rather, his opening lament for his loss of patronage fits an evolving pattern we have seen and will see throughout this book as the poetics of crisis of vocation. This subject would later be heavily associated with Langland and his careerist imitators, but as we have seen, it starts much earlier. In fact, this is one aspect of WW that likely ensured its relevance even by the time the fifteenth-century Yorkshire romance anthologist Robert Thornton salvaged it for posterity some one hundred years after it was composed. Even though by then its political allusions to Edward III and the Black Prince were obscure, the poet’s careerist empathies for the rising professional administrative class, I’d suggest, remained vivid and may account for its survival. Thornton copied it alongside another contemporary alliterative poem that mimics parliamentary procedure (The Parlement of Three Ages), which heralds the era of parliamentary thematizing or parody about to become rife in poets like Langland and Chaucer.

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As Thorlac Turville-Petre observed, the poet is likely “a careerist,” who exhibits “knowledge of national affairs and in particular the customs and ceremonial of the royal court.”130 Stephanie Trigg elaborates further, suggesting the poet was “likely one of the many ‘local’ men from Cheshire or Lancashire employed at the court of Westminster than a resident in these counties. If the poet were a ‘careerist,’ to use Bennett’s term, his language would very naturally reveal [its] present mix of dialects. . . . [He was] perhaps a clerk in the ser vice of one of the lords who had estates in the North-west Midlands and connections with the court in London.”131 For Michael Bennett himself, the WW author had seemed “concerned to explore the threat posed to the traditional order by greed, ambition, and . . . other careerists.”132 The poet, then, is something of a reformer, writing at an historical moment when, as Helen Barr observes, sources as diverse as sermons, sumptuary laws, and poll tax records are just beginning to identify a medieval “fourth estate” (beyond the traditional three of rulers, clergy, and peasants).133 This fourth estate represents the coalition of secularized clerks, lawyers, and merchants as a rising middle class, a group not yet fully accounted for in medieval sociopolitical theory or even the theology and canon law of the day. In fact, Langland, as we will see in Chapter 2, tried overtly to solve the theological issues of this new group and ensure their salvation, cognizant of their uncertain social status in canon law.134 The WW poet, likely writing a bit earlier than Langland (at the latest contemporary with his nascent A-text), is also revelatory on this demographic issue. As TurvillePetre says, the poet “relates his dream of two opposing armies: one consisting of clergy, lawyers and merchants is described in great detail; the other of ‘men of arms’ very cursorily.”135 This tells us a lot about the author’s allegiances. Though modern scholarship has often been preoccupied with the “men-at-arms” elements of the poem (understandably, given all its banners, heraldry, and allegorical “armies”), it is the army of clergy, lawyers, and merchants on Winner’s side that the poet really expends his lines upon, since the opposing faction (Waster’s “sadde men of armes” [line 193]) gets only four cursory lines of description.136 Importantly, the poet is writing in the generation before the rise of massive clerical underemployment in Great Schism–era Ricardian England. In fact he writes during the post-plague generation, when clerical survivors were still scarce, and, as we saw, the clerical proletariat “became restive after the Black Death and demanded higher wages.”137 After further clerical losses in the Second Plague in 1361–62, disillusionment with clerical restiveness, desertions and greed became rife, as literate men working in both church and state could command more.138 This, I’d suggest, may account for some of the WW poet’s laserlike focus on the fourth estate. His remedy, though, is not simply complaint or

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polemic, the most common temptations (Wright’s Political Poems and Songs, for instance, is brimming with such poetry), but satire and prophetic foreboding, an unusual combination. This type of satire was already reflected in some of the alliterative Harley 2253 poems by the time he wrote: indeed, Bestul notes as “most closely related” to WW Harley’s popular apocalyptic prophecy, “Thomas of Erceldoune,” and its “Satire on the Consistory Courts” (discussed in Chapter 5).139 Take, for instance, his deft satire on chanson d’aventure tropes: for example, the picturesque stream by which the dreamer should fall contentedly asleep instead “rudely” keeps him awake (“So ruyde were the roughe stremys and raughten so heghe / That it was neghande nyghte or I nappe myght” [42– 43]). He is also, like many of the Harley poets, an early and determined champion for English language and culture; for example, he takes the trouble to translate the French motto of the Order of the Garter, even making it alliterate in good Northwest Midlands style (the Gawain Poet could not have done better): “And alle was it one sawe appon Ynglysse tonge, / ‘Hethyng have the hathell that any harme thynkes’ ” (67–68). Yet despite his concern with English identity, he is not Insular: his worldview reaches easily and often to the Continent (not just France), and he creates a veritable medieval “E.U.” listing eight European countries in Winner’s army (138–42), which includes the “Estirlynges” (Hanseatic merchants). This is a pan-European perspective and not simply a brief Trojan literary trope about Britain’s founding by Brutus; the WW poet is much more engaged with current affairs than with Troy. And he is still more multi-faceted: our poet is also engaged with Edward III’s policies and ambitions toward the Holy Roman Empire, and its elaborate political theology. This complex, urbane man, then, is interested in both church and state, navigating both worlds with the ambidextrous ease of a careerist probably originally trained, I’d suggest, like Thedmar, for the church. This mix should really come as no surprise then, given that, as Thomas Bestul established some years ago, using a different body of evidence, “the greatest debt of Wynnere and Wastoure is not to the secular, but to the religious allegory.”140 Yet critics have rarely noticed the poet’s religious interests, even though Thornton himself left us many clues. This brings us to the poet’s ability to straddle both church and state, apparently as a careerist who began, like so many, in the clerical proletarian category, widely evident in his generous handling of the rising “fourth estate.” Our poet has a special empathy, I’ll suggest, for all who make a living wielding the pen. So, for instance, he insists that he would rather put his trust in lawyers than armies any day: “I holde hym bot a fole that fightis whils flyttynge may helpe, / When he hase founden his frende

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that fayled hym never” (54–55). Just as in O&N, the formal verbal debate (a “flyttynge”) before a judge is for the WW poet the ultimate refinement in dispute resolution in both civil and ecclesiastical courts, marking anyone who would choose violence rather than law as a fool. The banner under which the lawyers join Winner’s army underlines the law’s superiority archly: it bears images of three white-haired lawyers, eager for verbal battle. Their pens are mightier than the sword, and also more lucrative, since the band of green on their banner alludes to the green wax required to seal a writ, always at extra cost (sixpence to the lawyer):141 “[Their] banere es upbrayde with a bende of grene, / With thre hedis white-herede with howes [lawyer’s caps] one lofte” (149–50). Meanwhile, Waster wants both lawyers and clerks of religion destroyed, linking the latter to “Wanhope [Despair]” and wishing all fasting days (“ymbryne days and euenes of saintes” [310]) cast in the sea. Yet even Waster admits that these pen-wielders are wise, rivaling Aristotle and Augustine, two figures apparently selected to represent state and ecclesiastical law, respectively: And thies beryns one the bynches with howes [lawyer’s caps] one lofte, That bene knowen and kydde for clerkes of the beste, Als gude als Arestotle or Austyn the wyse. (314–16) Scholars have long known that our poet also has a detailed knowledge of government legislation affecting the judiciary, indicating another of his “fourth estate” interests and adding a classic dimension to a hybrid careerist profile. Among the lawmen Waster specifically wishes dead is Chief Justice Sir William Shareshull, whose name is crucial to the dating of the poem (“That alle schent [destroyed] were those schalkes [men] and Scharshull itwiste [too]” [317]). As Bella Millett notes, “the poem’s reference to Sir William Shareshull, who was much-hated Chief Justice 1350–61, suggests that it was written . . . after his role in the passing of the Statute of Labourers (1351) and the Treasons Statute (1352), both designed to reduce civil disorder by armed groups” after the Black Death.142 Some visual sense of such armed thugs can be seen today in the later Douce 104 illustration of the “Wastor” who steals from Piers the Plowman (see Figure 1.7). Clearly these armed groups were a problem, so, as Sue Powell notes, in fact, there actually is nothing simple or derogatory about the WW’s poet’s reference to Shareshull since the poet implicitly conveys his allegiances to Edward III, the Black Prince (d. 1376), and the Wingfield family, who had worked with the Chief Justice.143 The WW poet is such an insider that he apparently

Figure 1.7. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 37v, Wastor stealing Piers’ poultry (C.VIII.149), from the only copy of Piers Plowman with a pictorial cycle, dated 1427. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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makes allusion to the Statute of Treason and even to Shareshull’s speech in Parliament about it.144 This degree of legislative detail tells us how much the poet’s implied audience (doubtless including many careerist clerks) is expected to know and follow with agility.145 Legislatively aware as he is, markers of this complex poet’s clerkly identity have passed mostly unnoticed, surprisingly given the many lines he devotes to church issues, and, as I’ll suggest, given some underappreciated textual evidence inadvertently left by Thornton. For instance, quite unusually for an English poet, and in a period in which anti-papalism was especially heated,146 he vividly and quite positively imagines the papacy on English soil, picturing the pope himself squarely at the head of the Church contingent in Winner’s army. And in a tip of the hat to his “fourth estate” constituency, the poet created a papal banner that only a writing-office clerk could love. It is decorated: With thre bulles of ble white brouden [white colour embroidered] within And iche one hase of henppe [hemp] hynged a corde, Seled with a sade lede [solemn lead seal]; I say als me thynkes, That hede es of holy kirke I hope he be there. (143–46.) This could not be a more documentary image: three papal bulls complete with their cords and seals are lovingly described—it even smacks of the notarial (English notaries, of course, worked directly for the papacy). Moreover, the poet’s image choice is apparently pointedly bureaucratic, since I’d note that highranking medieval churchmen in real life were more likely to use religious symbols on their banners.147 The fact that the poet’s choice of image was unexpectedly bureaucratic is suggested, I think, by the fact that it stumped WW ’s only known scribe: Robert Thornton himself (or a prior scribe he copies verbatim) did not expect the rather notarial gesture because he stumbled over the word when copying it: his manuscript reads not “bulles” but “bibulles,” a word that can refer literally to “Bibles” or any large book, treatise, or collection of books. Modern editors of WW routinely emend it to “bulls,” largely to make sense of the seals described in the next line, but the scribal error or substitution is itself telling (whether Thornton’s or an earlier scribe’s Thornton could not fix).148 The papal banner is followed by invented banners of each of the friars’ orders, and these, too, reflect distinctive clerkish choices. The choices do not stem from any of the easy, popular anti-mendicant tropes in most satirical texts, but rather from more specific knowledge, showing a reformer’s characteristic

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mix of admiration and outspoken critique. So, for instance, the poet implies the Franciscans are mercenaries, but yet focuses on their apostolic and eschatological tendencies (an interest he shares), in creating another unexpected banner: it shows three “galegs,” that is, the only shoes officially acceptable under Franciscan rule (156–62).149 In fact, a rare word (not in the MED), galegs denote the kind of sandals the apostles wore, which the poet describes very carefully. And, once again, as with the pope’s banner, Thornton (or a prior scribe he copies) stumbled over the unfamiliar word, writing instead “galeys” (ships?), which again modern editors emend to fit the sense: The thirde banere one bent es of blee whitte, With sexe galegs, I see, of sable withinn, And iche one has a brown brase with bokels twayne. (156–58) As with the Franciscans, the poet shows a knowledge of Dominican iconography and hagiography: this order’s banner he creates is black-edged with a sun in the middle (“a balle in the myddes, / Reghte siche as the sone es in someris tyde, / When it hase moste of the mayne one Missomer Even” [164–66]). The lines are solemn in respect and poetic in reach, but as with the Franciscans (170), the poet mixes in some oblique, arch critique, here about papal favouritism: since “the pope es so priste thies prechours to helpe” (169), yet they: . . . alle the ledis of the lande ledith thurgh witt, There es no man appon molde to machen thaym agayne, Ne gete no grace appon grounde, undir God hymselven. (171–73) Mingling awe and pointed reference to their political sway, the final stunning thought (that no one below God Himself can grant grace where they were against it) teeters daringly on the edge of reformist rebuke, even as it invokes the theology of mediation. Our poet is a complicated thinker, a clerically trained careerist, perhaps now in a secretariat or government job. And though this mix seems odd to us, medieval government records are full of church-related legislation and texts as well (as we just saw in Thedmar), reflecting a more hybrid cultural world.150 By the time the poet is finished describing all the orders, the alert reader has digested a big swatch of text with very particular views on the international Church and theology (156–90). Most importantly, it is the religious themes, both reformist and theological, that emerge prominently at the end of the poem (so far as we have it) when

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the King sends Winner to the cardinals of Rome (“Wende, Wynnere, thi waye over the wale stremys, / Passe forthe by Paris to the Pope of Rome” [460–61]), who will keep him in silk. And though he will help the king to reclaim the French crown,151 the poem doesn’t end there. Rather in the final two lines extant (the manuscript leaf is torn), the king will travel from Paris with Winner to pay homage at the shrine of the Three Kings (Magi) of Cologne—an unusually specific gesture of political theology: “And sythen kayre as I come, with knyghtes that me foloen, / To the kirk of Colayne [Cologne] ther the kynges ligges” (500–501). Tantalizingly, the poem drops off here, but the lines refer to Edward III as Holy Roman Emperor (a position which, at least after 1348, Edward preferred to enjoy symbolically), also the stuff of a vast corpus of religiouspolitical prophecy related to the prophecies in WW, and also exploited in the reformist apocalypticism of Piers Plowman.152 The cult of the Three Kings of Cologne was actually quite new in the poet’s day (despite its ubiquity on Christmas cards today), first imported to England by Edward III, and quickly popularized in a Middle English translation of John of Hildesheim’s Historia trium regum still extant in some twenty manuscripts. As Matthew Clifton Brown’s work establishes, the WW poet particularly endorses Edward III’s programme for sacralized kingship as a way of establishing empire and overpowering church corruption: “Its Christian imperialist associations made [the Three Kings] text especially attractive for those in the latter half of the fourteenth century who desired to see the English kingship in the role of spiritual leader, virtuous crusader, and imperial overlord. These connections would have been visible to anyone in the royal ser vice at the time.”153 The poet, then, is not just any careerist clerk, but also a theologically alert man, reflecting a specific ethos of political theology in Edward’s court. Large religious ideas are very much at stake for our poet, which even Thornton apparently saw: he also gathered the Three Kings text, as is not often enough noticed, into his manuscript (similarly, Three Kings later travels with another such text, Piers).154 Brown writes of the Historia trium regum, “The ideological thrust of the text would have been attractive to Edward. . . . The Magi story contained an argument that kingship was by nature sacral and imperial, and that kings derived their legitimacy directly from Christ, not mediated by the Church. Edward is known to have desired such arguments in the period during and after the Historia’s dissemination.”155 The WW poet was, I’d note, highly aware of exactly this theological debate as well—the question of whether God directly bestows legitimacy or whether the Church as mediator does also arose in the poet’s treatment of papal power and the two dominant friars’ orders, as we just saw. That the ending gesture of homage

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to the Three Kings of Cologne is a political yet above all a religious power play is clearer when we realize the talismanic quality that the Magi had. For instance, a medieval brooch now housed in the British Museum bears the Latin names of the three Magi inscribed on the back, a sacred talisman thought to protect the wearer.156 The Latin names also appear over their images in an almanac made in the diocese of Worcester c. 1389; and their images were embroidered in gold and seed pearls into a stunning English chasuble (s. xiv3) made at the same time our poet was writing.157 Cologne, then, is the ultimate goal in sacralized kingship, and the Three Kings perhaps the ultimate sacralized way to end a poem riddled with more political theology and religious reformist threads than we normally notice. WW shows us exactly how complicated the profile of a “careerist” poet can be, a witness to the rising “fourth estate” of which he is himself a member, a register of current insecurities about poetic patronage, a crisis of English poetic vocation, and regional and dialectal literary tensions between North and South. As such, Wynnere and Wastoure carries on a hitherto little-noticed EME tradition of these topics, as we’ve seen with Owl and the Nightingale, Laȝamon’s Brut, and the civic record-keeper, Thedmar. The next chapters in this book will show us what happens when LME careerist poets, and the clerically trained class they represent, become underemployed.

chapter 2

Poetry of Vocational Crisis in Langland’s Apologia and the Early Langlandian Tradition

As we saw in Chapter  1, in the initial period during which literary English strug gled to re-emerge, multilingual Early Middle English poets nonetheless made sophisticated allusions to career issues, patronage, vocational crisis, and meta-discursive self-representation. We have looked at these trends from c. 1189–c. 1370 (from the earliest possible date for The Owl and Nightingale to the latest likely date for Wynnere and Wastoure), a challenging task because securely named poets about whom we also have historical information are too few and far between. We come now to the reign of Richard II (1377–400), the “Golden Age” of Middle English, which coincided, unluckily for many who were clerically trained, with the Great Schism and a range of other adverse factors that affected employment prospects. We are blessed here with more names, more documents, and more historical information about our poets, though the biggest single figure among and also for clerical proletarian poets in this generation, William Langland, still remains tantalizingly elusive. It was W. A. Pantin, as we saw in the Introduction, who memorably described the class of unbeneficed clergy to which Langland belonged as the clerical proletariat: “Socially and economically, this class must have been poles apart from the ‘sublime and literate persons’, though the case of Langland shows us that a more or less submerged cleric might be the intellectual equal of anybody.”1 He underlines his Marxist analogy by adding that “the unbeneficed clergy were the equivalent of the landless labourers,” and though that view has now been nuanced by modern historians, he had good reason for it. A. K. McHardy’s seminal

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article, “Careers and Disappointments in the Late Medieval Church: Some English Evidence,” also invoked “men like ‘William Langland’ (if not an individual, then surely a recognizable type), Thomas Hoccleve and John Audeley” as articulate representatives of the vast, unbeneficed class.2 Despite being “men who were talented and learned, and anxious for promotion which they considered their due,”3 members of this class were too often destined for disappointment. In Langland’s case, McHardy is referring of course to what scholars call the C.V “autobiographical” passage, which deserves to be read anew in light of the kinds of issues McHardy raised facing the clerical proletarian class as well as more recent scholarly findings. Despite some detailed archival research by Robert Adams, Andrew Galloway and others, we still do not know Langland’s biography or even identity for certain yet, though we know that for some set of reasons, some likely historical, he added the passage to his final version.4 It is striking that both ecclesiastical historians such as McHardy, and intellectual historians such as T. A. R. Evans, flag Langland’s two younger contemporaries, Hoccleve and Audelay, as significant witnesses to the crisis of clerical underemployment. Hoccleve and Audelay are poets not often thought of together by literary scholars, likely because they are seen to fall on opposite divides of our assumed Chaucerian versus Langlandian binary in early fifteenth-century studies. But each of them, as I will argue in the next couple of chapters, came under the spell of Langland’s mode of self-representation and poetic style, even Hoccleve, whose Chaucerian credentials are of course self-consciously advertised and indisputable.5 This chapter explores some key passages in Langland’s poetry, and aspects of Hoccleve’s exhibiting this same mix of self-representation and clerical proletarian concern (Case Study 1), as well as in the poetry of St. Paul’s chantry priest John Tyckhill (Case Study 2). Case Study 3 details the same characteristics, further heightened, in one of the earliest redactions of Langland’s poem (the Z-text). All these texts have in common the theme of clerical vocational crisis, a theme that I believe Langland made utterly compelling for his own generation (including Chaucer) and the one that immediately followed it. These are the generations most harshly affected by a “perfect storm” of conditions that exacerbated the clerical joblessness already on the rise in the late fourteenth century, further compounded by the complexities of appointments during the Great Schism, the growth of the “liturgical economy” (what Katherine Zieman calls “contractual liturgy,” often paid for by laity), and the growing shift of benefice patronage into monastic hands (which, of course, did not need to hire priests externally).6 As McHardy’s work has shown, despite uneven documentary survivals for different regions, we are fortunate to have the records of the poll taxes of 1377,

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1379, and 1381, since for clerics, the assessors recorded whether the individual was beneficed or not.7 As we saw in the Introduction, the results offer a startling window on clerical underemployment in both rural and urban England: McHardy calculates the odds for trained clerics as a dismal “one in ten” of attaining a benefice, very like Tim Cooper’s calculations for the last generation of the medieval period in the early sixteenth century as 15  percent. Historians of all late medieval periods agree that patronage was crucial for acquiring a benefice, and Cooper argues for his period that a university degree was also often necessary—a factor however, as we saw, not likely to help a candidate in finding a benefice in the Ricardian period. T. A. R. Evans’s research on medieval Oxford discourages the assumption that university study led to upward mobility,8 and studies of both Oxford and Cambridge careers provide little evidence that having a university education was helpful toward a benefice much before the end of the fifteenth century—in fact, as we will see in Chapter 4, Audelay explicitly laments this very issue in his poetry, as does, if we look more closely, Langland. Royal patronage, or powerful networks of influence of any sort, often trumped university learning. As Evans starkly concludes from demographic studies, “Only a small proportion of the parish clergy was trained in a university and most university men did not obtain a parochial cure.”9 In what follows, we will examine how understanding university education in the Ricardian period helps us better grasp what Langland was trying to achieve in his famous C.V passage. Medieval church historians often cite the “autobiographical” passage in Langland’s Piers Plowman as an accurate portrayal of the plight of the unbeneficed, which the poet seems to do with fellow feeling, reflecting on a time when he says he was young (note this qualifier) and—as a medieval reader would instantly see—benefice-less. Early in the passage when Reason interrogates him about why he is not doing something more useful for society, we should understand what medieval audiences would have picked up instantly: that Reason’s list of clerical duties on offer is brief and arranged to indicate that the poet-narrator was not yet ordained as a priest, that is, still in minor orders: “ ‘Can thow seruen’ he sayde, ‘or syngen in a churche, / Or koke [pile hay] for my cokeres [haycock makers] or to the cart piche’ ” (C.V.12–13, followed by a list of further alternative agricultural jobs). The narrator offers this explanation for himself: When Y yong was, many yer hennes, My fader and my frendes foende [provided for] me to scole Tyl Y wyste witterly what holy writ menede . . .

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And foend Y nere, in fayth, seth my frendes deyede, Lyf that me lykede but in this longe clothes. (C.V.35–41, with omissions)10 University students were supported by patrons, most often by their families (“frendes” here, according to the MED, can mean relatives, or other patrons).11 Having been trained as a clerk, and fallen on hard times since the death of his patrons for university study (“scole” means “university” here),12 the narrator still refuses to support himself by doing agricultural labour: “Sertes,” Y sayde, “and so me god helpe, Y am to wayke to worche with sykel or with sythe And to long, lef me lowe to stoupe, To wurche as a werkeman eny while to duyren.” Rather, he says, he will support himself by his clerical and liturgical expertise: And yf Y be labour sholde lyuen and lyflode [livelihood] deseruen, That laboure þat Y lerned best þerwith lyuen Y sholde: In eadem vocacione qua vocati estis, &c. And so Y leue in London and opelond bothe: The lomes [tools] þat Y labore with and lyflode deserue Is pater-noster and my prymer, placebo and dirige, And my sauter som tyme and my seuene psalmes. Thus y synge for here soules of suche as me helpeth . . . . . . on this wyse y begge Withoute bagge or botel but my wombe one. (C.V.42–52, with omissions) The tools that he labours with are those available to a clerk in minor orders: his pater noster and primer, especially the Seven Penitential Psalms and Office for the Dead, via which he lives (to quote Swanson) “if not from hand to mouth, then from death to death, literally singing for [his] supper.”13 Note the emphasis that Langland places in this passage on singing. Like many clerks in minor orders who earned a livelihood singing (see Chapters 5 and 6), he is a liturgical “piece-worker,” earning extra money from disparate lay folks who have asked for prayers. The unbeneficed often lived from contract to contract, on “contractual liturgy” when it pertained to jobs singing masses and other types of prayers. But

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unlike the ordained among them, the narrator cannot sing masses yet, and he is freelancing as a beadsman, much to the concern of his interlocutors, Reason and Conscience. The only mention of institutional affiliation in this passage comes from his time at university (“scole”). In fact, often as this passage has been analyzed, scholars have usually not appreciated that what Langland says here is historically accurate of fourteenthcentury university scholars.14 In the later Middle Ages, losing one’s patrons for university study was a serious life crisis—not only did it drive one into proletarian status (dependent on daily or hourly work), it could also, at worst, drive one officially to a form of begging. In such cases, Oxford university authorities could deliver sealed testimonial letters declaring the student legally “able to seek alms”—an administrative category.15 Poor students might also be expected to live by menial labour working for their colleges or halls, which might even sometimes be agricultural (e.g., there are records of poor students paid to work in the gardens at King’s Hall, Cambridge or paid to help build the new library at Merton College in the 1370s).16 The term in the records for students doing such menial labour for their college is “batellarii.” Moreover, as William Courtenay has shown, some sector of university students in the fourteenth century did engage in agricultural labour by virtue of their social class: “What little evidence we have for fourteenth-century Oxford suggests that the majority of students came from rural middle-class background, ‘sons of yeomen, husbandmen, tenants of great lords or ecclesiastical institutions,’ whose need for additional agricultural labour during the harvest months may well have required the presence of their teen-age children.”17 This is revelatory in a variety of ways about Langland: first, it explains the long-standing oddity, to modern eyes at least, of having a cleric on the defensive about not doing agricultural labour, while the university regulations also offer a plausible explanation for a period of clerical begging during youth.18 Interestingly, even if Langland were some day to be definitively identifiable on the basis of the Trinity College memorandum that claims his father as a tenant of the Lord Despenser,19 it would actually not matter for what the poet is telling us here, ostensibly about his younger, benefice-less years.20 What remains beyond doubt, however, is the fact that, as McHardy notes, Langland is drawing a portrait that to historians is “a recognizable type” from other historical sources regarding the unbeneficed. And, as she also notes, Hoccleve and Audelay would soon go on to write their own autobiographical accounts of career crisis, accounts we can still to some extent document.21 Also less noticed today is the way the passage soon wades into the related issues of ordination. Oxford and Cambridge also had to adhere to the (to us)

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repulsive rules enforced by lords against bondsmen or the “unfree” becoming clerics: in such cases, admission to university was technically against the law because their labour was “owned” elsewhere.22 But since fines were amerced often enough on bondsmen for sending sons to Oxford, we know it happened frequently enough to be essentially a loophole. Moreover, medieval socioeconomics can be complex, and contrary to modern assumptions, the “unfree” could sometimes be financially better-off than free tenants might be.23 This unwelcome competition for already scarce jobs (these were of course tough times for employment) is also addressed in Langland’s C.V apologia, for which he has been much maligned by modern scholars for social elitism: And also moreouer me thynketh, syre Resoun, Me [Men] sholde constrayne no clerc to no knaues werkes, For by the law of Leuyticy that oure lord ordeynede Clerkes ycrouned . . . Sholde nother swynke ne swete ne swerien at enquestes Ne fyhte . . . For hit ben eyres of heuene . . . Domininus pars hereditatis mee, &c . . . For sholde no clerke be crouned but yf he come were Of frankeleynes and fre men and of folke ywedded. (C.V.53–67, with omissions) In short, he says, the ordained should not be drawn from the unfree classes, nor from the ranks of the illegitimate, referring directly to two of the more egregious tenets of medieval ordination regulations.24 In fact, unthinkable as these views are to us, they were simply part of standard ordination requirements and university regulations about who may study, how much they can pay, and who may be ordained.25 Modern critics must decide for themselves whether to penalize a writer for insisting upon contemporary rules, but since Langland is normally more likely to push the envelope on uncomfortable orthodox points of social or spiritual exclusion (such as his inclusive stance on salvation of nonChristians), critics have been puzzled by this passage’s conservatism. The historical context of the passage is crucial: the shortages of clerical jobs, even for the qualified, compounded by the larger problem of public appropriation of Piers by the rebels of 1381 and its subsequent tragedies, must have hung heavily on Langland’s mind. These presented another dimension of vocational crisis for him, and a conundrum that the C.V passage, likely added late to the text, was

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clearly meant to address.26 What Langland is really embittered about here is the buying of benefices and other types of office by the illiterate and unqualified (C.V.70–74). On this point of simony (the sale of benefices to anyone with cash), Hoccleve and Audelay raise very similar concerns, so Langland is not alone here. As other scholars have noted, we get a hint of his own background in the specificity of his lament that for benefice appointments “Popes and patrones pore gentel blood refused” (C.V.78), that is, both papal provisions of benefices (under the Statute of Provisors) and those of other patrons (lay and monastic) are refusing benefices to “pore gentel blood”—a comment with no exact parallel in Audelay or Hoccleve on this subject, suggesting that Langland may likely hail from the lower gentry.27 I will leave aside for now as too complex a problem the intriguing questions this raises about Langland’s biography and whether he actually had a university education (though Arvind Thomas’s new deep analysis of Langland’s command of canon law, a subject difficult to attain outside of a university, strongly corroborates this C.V attestation).28 Whether or not he himself ever achieved a benefice (remember that the C.V passage is set in his youth)—certainly the internal evidence cuts both ways.29 Suffice it to say that poetic portraits of the clerical proletariat such as this were repeated in Ricardian and Lancastrian writing and evident in historical records, as we will see. As Paul Strohm was early to note, Thomas Usk repeated much the same repertoire of “labouring” psalms on his way to his execution in 1388: “Placebo et Dirige, vij. Psalmos Penitenciales, Te Deum laudamus, Nunc dimittis, Quicumque vult.”30 Placebo and Dirige are from the Office for the Dead; Usk is another clerical proletarian who had survived by his wits, in his case by the documentary skills he offered one too many political parties. Multiple scholars have often expressed surprise that Usk, another writer we think of as “secular,” suddenly appears at the end of his life in the historical record in full clerical robes: in fact, the particular Psalms he has chosen reveal that he was in minor orders and in the overlapping clerical and legal proletariats. Usk worked for civic authorities, which were also a branch of the royal secretariat that employed Thomas Hoccleve. Langland’s motif of being unable to work agriculturally is repeated in another, slightly younger contemporary, in Thomas Hoccleve’s “autobiographical” Prologue to the Regement of Princes: With plow can y noght medle ne with harrow Ne wote noght what londe gode is for corne And forto laude a Cart or fille a barow

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To wiche y neuer vsid whas to forne My bak vnbuxum’ hathe swych swynk for sworne. (Hoccleve, Regement 981–85)31 As I have shown elsewhere, there is some evidence that here (and not only here), Hoccleve has Langlandian proclivities,32 but the motif about being too weak to work agriculturally and too reluctant to beg in fact stems originally from the parable of the Unjust Steward in the Gospel of Luke, which had a special resonance for clerical proletarians. In Langland, the complaint comes complete with a long, detailed list of very specific agricultural jobs proposed to the narrator by Conscience and Reason, a list surely indicating Langland’s firsthand knowledge of agrarian communities (parallel to some of the earlier Harley Lyrics about agrarian topics). Hoccleve goes into some detail about the agricultural tasks he does not know (“Considerynge how that I am nat / In housbondrye lerned worth a myte . . .” [948–49ff.]). Both Langland and Hoccleve leaned heavily on the parable. In Luke’s parable, the complaint is voiced by the steward, on the verge of losing his job: “What shall I do seeing that my master is taking away the stewardship from me? To dig I am not able; to beg I am ashamed. [Quid faciam quia dominus meus ufert a me vilicationem? Fodere non valeo, mendicare erubesco.]” (from the parable of the Unjust Steward, Luke 16:1–8).33 The parable, as I have shown elsewhere, was very popular among clerical proletariat writers. In fact, some of these Latin lines appear in the Z version of Piers Plowman, quoted here from Rigg and Brewer’s edition: “For fodere non valeo [to dig I am not able], so feble ar my bones” (Z.V.141, retaining bolded lines unique to Z).34 The Z redactor clearly knew the origin of the trope in Luke and interpolated this Latin allusion into Langland’s text at a strategic point (see Case Study 3 below). But the trope itself crosses a range of genres, especially in prologues (as in Hoccleve)—it even crops up allusively in the self-deprecatory prologue to the Orchard of Syon, written by the anonymous translator of this work by Catherine of Siena: “Grete laborer was I never, bodili ne gostli. I had never greate strengthe myghtli to laboure with spade ne with schovel. Therfore now, devoute sustren, helpeth me with preiers, for me lackith kunnynge, ayens my grete febelnes. . . . For hastly I go to laboure, in purpose to performe this gostli orchard.”35 Although we do not know who translated the Orchard, even at Syon Abbey’s Carthusian house recently recruited scribal “workers in the vineyard” are increasingly evident (as we have seen some clerical proletarians joined religious orders), as monastic control of benefices increased.36 Certainly

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scribal evidence of several books of monastic provenance points to the involvement of such hired labour, especially in urban monasteries.37 In addition to piecework in liturgy, teaching, and book production, clerical proletarians are best known to modern scholars from their slog work in documentary and writing-office capacities. Hoccleve, who worked for the King’s Office of the Privy Seal, tells us explicitly that he gave up waiting for a benefice and married in a lengthy passage analyzed in Chapter 3.38 Many clerks gave up the wait for a benefice, and with odds of 10–15 percent, who can wonder? But what modern scholarship most underestimates is how many clerical proletariat thinkers never discarded their past or training, but rather found different venues in which to employ it. Usk, for instance, whom we think of as a man of political factionalism, interwove serious passages of Anselm’s De Concordia into his Testament of Love, and as Melinda Nielsen shows, makes unexpectedly extensive use of university logic texts for philosophical or theological persuasion. She concludes: “From grammar school to university connections, apprenticeship to involvement in documentary London, possibilities abound for how a London scrivener could develop and gratify his taste to imitate Boethius, translate Anselm, allude to Trevisa, adapt scholastic logic, and pioneer English prose.”39 So, too, Hoccleve, whom we think of as a largely secular poet, also brought to his poetry a distinctive pastoral sensibility, as works such as his “Lerne to Die” show. Hoccleve, as we will see shortly, also uses a great deal of quotation from canon law in the Regement.40 But we should not be surprised about any of these cases; these men were ambidextrous—pastoral passion informs their political thought, and politics informs their ecclesiastical views. Poised between two worlds, they composed and copied works that both taught the laity and entertained the literate—and raised the bar in vernacular writing, still scarce at the onset of Richard II’s reign in 1377. Reading these poets as a group shows, revealingly, that much of the literature composed, copied, or redacted by proletarian clerics is about vocational crisis of one sort or another—a topic we saw evolving already in The Owl and the Nightingale, Thedmar’s “Additions” alongside “The Prisoner’s Lament,” and Wynnere and Wastoure. We have seen Langland’s portrait of what it meant socially to lose one’s university patronage midstream and what living at the edge of clerical status meant, vocationally and socially. So, too, with Thomas Usk, who, though he rose from scrivener to sergeant-at-arms, only ever comes to us in writing when he is in crisis, first in his Appeal, then in his Testament, and finally as he approaches execution, desperately clinging to his clerical status to the

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last.41 And Hoccleve, though he never achieved promotion to a benefice, was a longstanding employee of the Privy Seal (even producing the office’s formulary),42 but he is always in vocational crisis or financial need or both. In the rest of this chapter, I will focus on (1) evidence of the theme of clerical vocational crisis in selected late fourteenth-century poems, and (2) evidence of the ambidexterity of proletarian productions, a mix of “religious” and “secular.” “Ambidexterity” is a term I prefer to “hybridity” for describing proletarian status, since the latter term stems from postcolonial theory (and often implies violent cultural imposition); though clerical proletarians move between two worlds, this is a social organic process. Elsewhere I have discussed another dimension of these problems: evidence—sometimes glimpsed through fissures or unexpected cracks in an anonymous scribe’s professional work—that he may be “underemployed,” given his degree of learning.43 Here, the emphasis will be on clerkauthors we can actually name or literary texts, such as the Z-text, that we can isolate. The upshot is that many of our writers and scribes, then, are more sophisticated than we think. Many of our anonymous (and not so anonymous) “secular” writers are more religious in their training than we think—and vice versa. Three important cases in point follow.

1. Case Study 1: Hoccleve’s Career Disappointment and a “Secular” Poet’s Vocational Training for Pastoral Care One of the many London clerks who did not ever get his much-hoped-for benefice was Thomas Hoccleve, whose case presents a fascinating set of matrices for this study. Hoccleve, who spent his career as a clerk in the king’s Privy Seal office, is both a documented and self-documented case of someone who wanted a benefice and someone whose government contract even stipulated the possibility of a future benefice. Like his contemporary, John Audelay, Hoccleve later in life even wrote somewhat defensive, self-consolatory verses about not receiving a benefice. Mostly read today only as a secular poet, I will suggest here that Hoccleve’s clerical proletarian status is evident not only in what he tells us about his dashed hopes for church employment, but also in aspects of his intellectual orientation and training, still traceable in his poetry—indeed, his earliest modern editor, Frederick Furnivall, memorably refers to him as “bred a priest” and for good reason.44 In the long, confessional self-portraiture of his dialogue with the sage Old Man in the Regement of Princes (RP), Hoccleve identifies himself as early as line 150 as a lettered man, but not until line 1446 does he confess that

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a benefice is what he had wanted, though now past hoping for. Moreover, since it is not until line 1864 of this massive Prologue that we actually learn Hoccleve’s name,45 we have a work that for nearly 2,000 lines speaks repeatedly to the career disappointment not just for an individual, but for a whole group: “But what man wilt thow be . . . ?” “Fadir, I may nat cheese. I whilom thoghte Han been a preest; now past am I the raas.” “Than art thow, sone, a weddid man, par caas?” “Yee soothly, fadir myn, right so I am; I gazid longe first and waytid faste Aftir sum benefice, and whan noon cam, By procees I me weddid atte laste. And God it woot, it sore me agaste To bynde me, where I was at my large; But doon it was, I took on me that charge.” (Hoccleve, RP 1446–56) These lines introducing his vocational turning point are complex: first, speaking of the elusive benefice, he writes “and whan noon cam, / By procees I me weddid atte laste,” expressing all the reluctance to marry of one who had had hopes of priesthood (“I whilom thoghte / Han been a preest”), and of a process of personal acceptance. In real life, Hoccleve may or may not have actually married for love: love was considered the right reason for marrying in the eyes of the Church, and later in the dialogue, the Old Man expresses satisfaction that Hoccleve did so.46 Whether his claims on this point are autobiographical or simply model the Church’s “best practices” (Langland had given the same advice) or, fortuitously, both, we do not know. But in the same breath here (and elsewhere) Hoccleve also expresses the kind of ambivalence toward women and marriage that stems from years of training and living in a homosocial world.47 This is characteristic of proletarian treatments of women, since, as a group, they are often negotiating liminal identities. Hoccleve not only wanted to be a priest, but, as I will argue here, he was also culturally and intellectually trained to be one. Although allusions to pastoral and theological material are discernable through works such as RP, I will suggest here that one does not notice these dimensions so much unless one is also reading the Latin marginal glosses that Hoccleve, like Gower and almost certainly Chaucer, supplied for his own works—one reason among many, as I have argued elsewhere, we should be paying attention to glossing in Middle

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English texts.48 In addition to the three primary sources identified by Hoccleve himself for the RP,49 there are a large number of Latin glosses that travel with the text, which Charles Blyth has very helpfully made accessible in his edition. Blyth notes that about one-third of the Latin glosses in the Regement come from the Vulgate Bible, “ranging from Genesis to Paul’s Epistles. While Genesis, Kings, and Matthew provide sources for biblical narrative, it is significant that over twenty glosses cite Proverbs and the other books associated with the name of Solomon. The biblical glosses are approximately accurate and usually correctly identified. That Hoccleve had access to a biblical commentary (or Bible with commentary) is indicated in the text, where he names and paraphrases Nicholas of Lyra (line 1725).” If so, this is significant: not even every literate person had access to the full Vulgate text, or commentary, and, I would observe, Nicholas of Lyra was mainly studied at higher levels of education. Blyth also notes several citations from classical writers, suggesting they mostly originated in florilegia (“Seneca, Sallust, Martial, and Quintilian, as well as Isidore and Boethius”), not via access to full texts. But as we will see, there is relevant evidence scholars have uncovered from another source, the Complaint and Dialogue, that Hoccleve did have some kind of sustained access to a full text by Isidore—and he even dramatizes his loss of access to this particular book as a metanarrative in his poetry. Furthermore, Melinda Nielsen has made a convincing case for Hoccleve’s knowledge of Boethius.50 As I will suggest, the dilemma of access to serious books was significant enough to Hoccleve that it became fodder (like so many other autobiographical dilemmas apparently) for poetic complaint. I would also note that in the Regement he used several other glosses from some more difficult theological writers such as Jerome, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Comestor, and, though not always correctly identified, Augustine (not necessarily Hoccleve’s fault, since medieval books hosted a riot of false attributions to Augustine). Most tellingly of all, a large number also come from canon law. As Blyth notes, “A third, less expected group of glosses comes from Gratian’s Decretum, the great collection of canon law put together in the twelfth century, giving authoritative weight to the moral injunctions of the poem.”51 I would suggest, given his knowledge of canon law, taken together with the evidence of his familiarity with biblical texts from Genesis to St. Paul, some sustained use of Isidore, and a complex gloss from Nicholas of Lyra, that our “civil cleric” Hoccleve had had some exposure to more advanced education, formal or informal—either at one of the Inns of Chancery (discussed below) where government writing office scribes could be trained, or somewhere else amidst the various ecclesiastical establishments near his own residence.

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As Blyth rightly notes, these glosses, common to the majority of the manuscripts of the Regement, are doubtless authorial.52 Blyth shows at least eight instances of references to canon law in RP, plus several further related ones,53 noting that these “references, and the one to the biblical commentary of Nicholas of Lyra (1725), are revelatory of the learning behind Hoccleve’s poem and its glosses.”54 Moreover, Arvind Thomas, whose deeply researched new book, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law, has begun a new study of Hoccleve’s canon law usage, and has very generously shared some early results with me. In a private communication, Thomas writes, “I am intrigued by Hoccleve’s display of trade-knowledge in the way he cites Gratian. Knowing how to cite canon law and displaying such knowledge on the page is visually enacting the kind of learnedness that should have got him a benefice!”55 Under these circumstances, it is worth our having a closer look at some of Hoccleve’s canon law glosses. The sources of the citations are usually either from canon law or from theological sources cited as if from canon law in Hoccleve’s marginal apparatus of glosses. One example crops up in a discussion of the idea that counsel ought not to be sold, but rather freely offered: Cristen men yilde oghten just jugement Freely, for unleefful is it to selle, Thogh it be leefful and convenient A wys man for reward his reed to telle. A juges purs with gold nat sholde swelle. If on justice he shape his doom to bilde, His jugementz he giftlees muste yilde. (2710ff.) The English verses try to establish a distinction between the idea of selling judgment and the idea of reward for counsel (“to selle” vs. “reed” for “reward”), the latter similar to Langland’s attempt to distinguish “mede” and “mercede” in the C-text.56 But the full sense of Hoccleve’s passage really only emerges when one reads the marginal gloss in Latin alluding to the Decretum, set up in academic form, and even giving the correct questio number: “Xi, questio iii, Non licet, et xiv questio v. Sane Justum quidem judicium gratis reddere debent Christiani quia non licet vendere justum judicium, quamvis viro perito liceat vendere consilium et cetera. [Xi, questio iii, ‘It is not permitted,’ and xiv, questio v. Indeed Christians must render just judgment gratis because it is not permitted to sell just judgment, although a skilled man is permitted to offer advice for a fee, etc.] (Compare Gratian, Decretum, Causa 11, questio 3, canon 71 and Causa 14, questio 5,

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canon 15 in PL 187, col. 865A and col. 965B).”57 In spots like this, Blyth supplies an “L” (for Latin) in the margin of his edition, helpfully indicating the gloss in the notes, but the medieval reader, of course, would have experienced the full glosses on the same page as the text (see Figure 2.1). As such, the glosses change one’s reading experience and even one’s sense of Hoccleve’s learnedness. As I have shown elsewhere, Hoccleve’s glosses do not match the literary inventiveness or command of learning of the Chaucer glosses,58 but they do achieve other things. For instance, they demonstrate amply that Hoccleve knew how to use and cite canon law—not a common skill. Moreover, Hoccleve usually cites canon law correctly, as Blyth says. But it looks like Hoccleve also attributed some glosses to “the Canon” (In Canone) for effect (or copied someone who did). For instance, after the Old Man assures Hoccleve that he believes he has married for love, he offers warnings against adultery with multiple glosses. The first claims to be from canon law: “Now sythen thow hast, to my jugement, Thee maried unto Goddes plesance, Be a treewe housbonde as by myn assent . . .” “Advoutrie and perjurie and wilful slaghtre, The book seith, lyk been and o peys they weye.”59 (1681–83, 1688–89) In fact, the idea that adultery, perjury, and murder are all equal is a bit extreme, and so, unsurprisingly perhaps, not in canon law, but cited as “In Canone,” it certainly has a dignifying rhetorical effect,60 likely what Hoccleve was looking for. Conversely, the next warning against adultery is, in fact, from the Decretum of Ivo of Chartres, but attributed by Hoccleve to Jerome (RP 1690–94, with gloss at 1692).61 In medieval manuscripts generally, of course, mistaken attributions are legion,62 but Jerome was a favorite authority in Chaucer’s glosses and Hoccleve might well have been making a nod toward Chaucerian-style glossing.63 There is also his rather sophisticated citation of Nicholas of Lyra (“Lyre”), which crops up in a fascinating passage about Pharaoh’s desire for Abraham’s wife, Sarah, whom Abraham had tried to disguise as his sister when they entered Egypt (a precaution, however, leaving Sarah vulnerable to Pharaoh’s desires). Even more interestingly, Hoccleve adds an extra layer to the story as a philosophical question of the ethic of intention: The Bible makith no manere of mynde Whethir that Pharao lay by hir aght,

Figure 2.1. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 A 13, Egerton Family Papers, glossed passage from Regement of Princes on Aristotle’s advice to Alexander the Great against causing death through anger. Glossed are: line 3114, “Michi vindictam, et cetera” (Vengeance is mine, etc.), cited from Secreta Secretorum; line 3121, “Facilitas venie incentium prebet delinquendum” (Willingness to forgive provides a stimulus to committing crime) from Ambrose, Expositio Psalmi; line 3123, “Nota contra concessiones cartarum pardonationum de murdris” (Warning against the giving of charters of pardon in murder cases); line 3200, “De pietate Marci Marcelli” (Concerning the compassion of Marcus Marcellus). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library.

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But looke in Lyre and there shalt thow fynde For to han doon it was he in ful thoght; But God preserved hir; he mighte noght. And syn for wil God him punysshid so, How shal the dede unpunysshid go? (1723–29) The point is that since God punished Pharaoh even for the intention (“wil”) to take Sarah, how much more, then, would the deed have been punished? But when one knows the source, the allusion becomes even more interesting. The reference is to the gloss in Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, a rather graphic discussion implying Pharaoh was infertile, alluding to the medieval science of sexuality. As Blyth explains: “The reference here is to Lyra’s Postilla on the Bible, a comment on Genesis 12:17 which reads: ‘The Lord struck Pharao and his household with great plagues: however, the text of Scripture doesn’t say; but the Hebrew commentators say that it concerned an [unnatural] flow of seed which made intercourse difficult or impossible for Pharao and his household. Our expositors say that it involved a closing up of the womb, so that the wife of Pharao and her servants could not give birth.’ (Nicholas of Lyra, Biblia latina cum posteillis, fol. d10v, h.).”64 In other words, this passage in Hoccleve’s RP becomes not only a great deal more racy if one knows the exegetical sources, but also more philosophical (examining the ethic of intention), more scientific (examining sexual physiology), and more metaphorical (the punishing plague turns out to be the slow, subtle shame of infertility visited upon Pharaoh’s household). Even the Hebrew commentators are cited with respect (a tendency in line with more sophisticated academic commentary traditions). As I have noted elsewhere in relation to a similarly graphic sexual allusion to Jerome in the Chaucer glosses to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, sophisticated Middle English writers are apt to write for tiers of readers with differing degrees of Latin learning, and the agility of the top tiers is enviable.65 We do not always get this degree of depth or gloss sophistication from Hoccleve, but it is important to note that here where we do, and that the depth is coming from a source like serious biblical exegesis. What is intriguing about Hoccleve once we start paying attention to some of his glossing in the RP is that, although it does not have all the playfulness we associate with the Chaucer glossing, it has something else distinctive: it is the mark of someone reaching toward canon law and theology and who, he tells us, would have been a priest if he could have. Exactly where Hoccleve got this training we do not know. Ethan Knapp mentions only Hoccleve’s apprenticeship at the Privy Seal and his ser vice as an underclerk to Guy de Roucliff, and though John Burrow notes that Hoccleve

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was “evidently not a university graduate,” he adds that he “may have spent some time at an Inn of Chancery.”66 Not to be confused with the Inns of Court, the “lesser inns (hospicia minora) called inns of Chancery” in Hoccleve’s time “were chiefly for young men at the start of their legal education, to learn the basic elements of the law before entering an Inn of Court to study the common law in greater detail.”67 But these “lesser inns” also catered to a mixed community, providing specialized training in ars dictaminis “in creating and editing . . . exact forms of public documents.” Fellow “boarders would have included junior Chancery clerks, beginning law students, and apprentice scriveners”—an intriguing mixed community for literary scholars (e.g. the two earliest known owners of the Canterbury Tales in 1419 were Chancery clerks).68 This would explain how Hoccleve learned some basics of law necessary to drafting documents, but canon law was a subject normally associated with university study. Courtenay shows that interested students living at or near any of the “inns” along The Strand (Hoccleve was at Chester’s Inn in lodgings for clerks of the Privy Seal) would have had some local resources nearby for learning more about canon law had they been so inclined: Numerous canon lawyers could also be found in the neighborhood of St. Paul’s and St. Mary-le-Bow. They were attached to or attracted by the business of the episcopal and archidiaconal courts of the London diocese or the court of appeal for the Canterbury province known as the Court of Arches, since it was held at St. Mary-le-Bow. Many of these men had received their training in canon law at a university, although some may have studied law at St. Paul’s or through apprenticeship. Their presence provided an opportunity for contact and exchange.69 Lucy Sandler lists some London civil servants who owned canon law books, though nearly all much higher in rank than Hoccleve.70 However, Courtenay notes that at St.  Paul’s even some almonry schoolmasters owned canon law books.71 At the time, there was also something of an Oxford professorial “braindrain” to London, as the biography of Chaucer’s Troilus co-dedicatee, Ralph Strode, suggests.72 Chester’s Inn itself stood in the midst of the many bishops’ palaces that lined the Thames where scholar-patron bishops entertained scores of scholars; belonging to the Bishop of Chester, it stood where today’s Courtauld Institute of Art does, in Somerset House, and was itself at some point in the period “a legal inn of Chancery known as Chester Inn or Strand Inn.”73 Hoccleve may well have benefited from living near one of the London studia

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along The Strand. Nearby was Carmelite Friary—the very location Hoccleve supplies for the Old Man’s daily attendance at mass in the RP Prologue and where he recommends they meet—surely not an accident, given the Carmelites and the various Inns were next-door neighbors.74 We also know Hoccleve had connections with bishops later in life, having on occasion written religious verse addressed to those in episcopal circles.75 However he arrived at his knowledge, it seems that Hoccleve was one of those government clerks who actively sought out more knowledge of canon law—perhaps another clue to his interest in eventually being beneficed? Hoccleve seems quite willing to use canon law in his glossing of his poem, which combined with the heavy use of Vulgate quotation in his glosses (parallel to though not as multivalent as Langland’s) spell a more religious cast of mind than we have guessed of him. For both poets, liturgy may have been a significant source of such quotes, too. Either way, when one reads Hoccleve’s works (to put it in codicological terms) looking at the whole book, as a medieval reader would have, the marks of Hoccleve’s original vocational aspirations become clearer: Figure 2.1 offers an example of how the glosses look on the page (and see Chapter 3, Figure 3.2 for one of his legal glosses).76 These glosses can also help us see beyond the Chaucerian styles he makes so much of in the Prologue. This is intriguing because no matter what one makes of the exact degree of autobiographicality or fictionalization in Hoccleve’s “I” persona (or alter ego of the “porous” pre-Modern self, in Sobecki’s words),77 clearly when he has his narrator declare that he had once hoped to be a priest, he was speaking of something the historical author himself had acquired some real training in. In sum, in two particular areas, canon law and biblical studies, Hoccleve (periodically at least) goes well beyond what your average civil servant could have found in the standard florilegia. Further to Blyth’s theory of Hoccleve’s access to a Vulgate with a Lyra commentary, I would suggest a couple of things. First, Hoccleve’s neighbourhood was in “the Latin Quarter” (as Courtenay calls it) of London, surrounded by the deep libraries of St.  Paul’s, the mendicant studia, and various other schools nearby.78 Moreover, it is clear from some of his sources that Hoccleve was reading theological collections. Most intriguingly, he created a metanarrative episode in the Complaint and Dialogue showing that he traveled in real bookowning circles. In this episode, he regrets having to abruptly return a borrowed book that had deeply engaged him and which, it turns out, he was actually using for composition of this section of the Complaint.79 Remarkably, based on

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the accuracy of Hoccleve’s Latin glosses here, A. G. Rigg was able to work out exactly what book Hoccleve had borrowed. The glosses trace part of a dialogue between Racio and Homo and begin with what was clearly the book’s rubric: “Hic est lamentacio hominis dolentis [This is the lamentation of a grieving man]” (Complaint, line 309).80 The mystery book, Rigg showed, was a copy of Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma, and Hoccleve particularly mines its close dissection of grief and melancholy, which offered theological and philosophical consolation, but also enters some dangerous psychological territory: for example, one of Hoccleve’s glosses reads “O death, how sweet you are to those whose life is bad [O mors, quam dulcis es male viuentibus]” (Complaint, line 330)—a quote drawn, by the way, from an unabridged form of Isidore’s text. Though there is some difference of scholarly opinion as to how much of the Synonyma he knew, as John Burrow notes, Hoccleve’s quotation from the book does break off abruptly, suggesting that the metanarrative about returning the book is true.81 As Burrow shows, Hoccleve read widely to understand his mental illness via theological and scientific explanations, so he clearly had access to books.82 And as Sobecki has shown, Hoccleve also read widely to understand grief, in fact, his own grief for his close friend and Privy Seal Colleague, John Bailey, whose death likely motivated the focus on death in the final Series texts. Second, I think it likely that Hoccleve’s knowledge of the Vulgate also perhaps comes often from liturgical sources, as do many of Langland’s quotations. Like Langland and Usk, as we saw earlier, and Audelay (see Chapter  4), the Penitential Psalms were central to proletarian thought and livelihood and certainly to Hoccleve’s confessional style.83 Chapters 5 and 6 in this book will examine the vast number of proletarians who survived as liturgical singers—a group highly relevant to Langland (as he tells explicitly in C.V), certainly to Audelay, and, I would suggest, to Hoccleve, too. We know, for instance, that Hoccleve worked with and socialized with liturgical clerks on a daily basis. So, for instance, Jenni Nuttall’s study revises our understanding of the significance of Hoccleve’s humorous allusion to the carousing and late-rising habits of his mates, “Prentys and Arondel,” in La Male Regle (line 321). They were not, she notes, Hoccleve’s colleagues in the Privy Seal, but instead clerks of the King’s Chapel, though appointed to collect the Chapel clerk’s wages from the Exchequer and perform other administrative duties in 1403—in other words, these mates were singing clerks of the royal chapel, paid to perform the liturgy, along with various other documentary duties (a common proletarian combination).84 Whether Hoccleve himself had their degree of musical training

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is less likely—the royal chapel choir would have sung a great deal of the very fashionable polyphony (see Chapter  5)—still, basic liturgical training would have been equally important to Hoccleve as the bread and butter of anyone hoping for a benefice. Other dimensions of Hoccleve’s canon, such as his ballad to the Virgin Mary (whether or not, as Burrow notes, it may have been inspired by Chaucer’s), or his many other religious balades, often Marian or Christological,85 or his “Lerne to Die,” certainly comport with a pastoral impulse, and often reached their mark. Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Die” is “an early, if not the very first, treatment of the Ars Moriendi in English”—vernacularization was a common proletarian initiative, a project that in this case Sobecki refreshingly treats as evidence of Hoccleve’s own spiritual life.86 It also had a life of its own, independent of poetic collections, in manuscripts.87 Figure 2.2 shows an illustration of Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Die” in manuscript: here the Disciple (Discipulus) is asked to imagine and meditate upon the image of a dying man, unprepared and facing the torments of hell, supplemented by a visual image and marginal comments, evidence, as David Watt notes, that the Series was seen “as a mirror designed for personal reform.”88 The image itself is jarring to modern perceptions of Hoccleve as a secular poet. This is Hoccleve tackling the subject of death, not Hoccleve the “clubbable” poet, in John Burrow’s phrase, writing witty poems to charm superiors into making late salary payments or support convivial dinner parties.89 As we will see in Chapter 3, in Hoccleve’s Remonstrance Against Oldcastle, he adopts a surprisingly priestly pose in his public sermonics to the Lollard rebel knight. What rattled Hoccleve most about Lollardy, I will suggest, was apparently the prospect of theological teachings or disputations coming from the laity. He advocates against public debate about religion in the poem, bolstering his objection with a learned Latin gloss from canon law (citing Justinian; see Figure 3.2) and a quotation from Constantine against contradicting priests, all the while publicly lecturing Oldcastle himself. Most importantly, it is clear in the Oldcastle poem that Hoccleve does not regard himself as a layman. He made the same case against the public discussion of religious disputes in his Balades to Henry V of the same period, 1413–14.90 Our government clerk, then, is ambidextrous, and finding himself in a liminal space, his career disappointment therefore loomed so large that it swallowed a sizable chunk of his poetic output, gobbling up, as we will see in Chapter 3, a large chunk of the RP Prologue and, as we have seen here, many of its Latin glosses.

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Figure 2.2. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, fol. 118r, Death approaching a deathbed, with the Disciple by the bedside, illustrating Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Die,” c. 1430. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

2. Case Study 2: Love in a Chantry Chaplain’s Account Roll: John Tyckhill’s “A Bird of Bishopswood” I would like now to look at another proletarian case that reveals the opposite kind of reversal of expectations: if Hoccleve is more learnedly religious than we usually think he was, this next proletarian is more secular than we might think,

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Figure 2.3. “A Bird of Bishopswood,” an alliterative poem, written as prose (as traditional) in the hand of John Tyckhill in his St. Paul’s rent roll, 1395–96, dated as the nineteenth year of Richard II’s reign, London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) 25125/32 (face). © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

given his job description. John Tyckhill (or Tickhill), chantry chaplain at St. Paul’s, likely, though not certainly, was ordained when he composed an alliterative poem now called “A Bird of Bishopswood.”91 Part of Tyckhill’s job was to act as a cathedral rent collector (collector reddituum), and so the poem was written down on that most bureaucratic of writing surfaces, a roll, in fact his own St. Paul’s rent roll for 1395–96 (see Figure 2.3). The poem, like Piers Plowman, employs the May morning trope of the chanson d’aventure, but it is also semi-erotic, even a touch Chaucerian. Despite its high quality, and Ruth Kennedy’s good edition, it has not been much studied or anthologized. Tyckhill’s poem manages to capture a compelling sense of interiority, almost apologia, with, I would suggest, a Hocclevian air of melancholy or depression.

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With a kind of poignancy implicit for its clerical author, it laments loneliness during the spring season of love, which is also, fittingly for the poet’s mood, the period of Lent: And I had lenyd me long al a Lentyn tyme In vnlust of my lyf and lost al my joye . . . As a I welk þus and wandryd, wery of myself. (Tyckhill, “A Bird,” 12–13, 17) He sees a beautiful bird “sade in al semblant” who neither “chauntyd ne chatryd,” and it seems to the narrator that that she “Myssyd a make [mate] myrth for to mak here” (30). He fears to go near her in case she flees, laments his own lack of wings, and perhaps lack of something else: For sche had wengys at her wylle and wantyd neuer a fethyr And I vnlyght of my lymus and lyme had I none . . . Ne couth noght cheuysch me with charmys ne chauntyng of bryddys. (34–36) He ends the poem with erotic wordplay and love-longing—especially striking if the author is already a fully ordained chantry chaplain: not only does he lack a “lyme” (note the pun meaning both “limb” and “bait”), but he admits that he lacks the ability to chant like a bird (i.e., as a bird catcher does). And the metaphor speaks volumes in relation to the author’s vocation: the chanting he does professionally is inadequate to this type of love.92 The St.  Paul’s poem is a real treasure, and it opens up a fissure through which we can glimpse the opposite end of proletarian vocational crisis and perhaps even the loneliness of clerical life in a liminal religious status. The poem is almost certainly both written out and composed by Tyckhill, whose corrections appear in the same hand as the draft itself (evident in Figure 2.3). Each collector kept his own roll (the St. Paul’s rolls are cut and sewn together chancery style), apparently in his lodgings. Tyckhill’s rolls themselves tell us a great deal: he also wrote Latin scientific prose into one of them that he may also have authored, since it also shows some sort of active revisions.93 Though his is not, according to Malcolm Parkes, the hand of an Oxford or Cambridge student, nor is it really an ecclesiastical hand, Parkes notes that it is practiced, lay, and functional.94 Yet, Tyckhill was learned; his ability not only to read but to compose in Latin, French, and English made him stand out among his chantry colleagues and may

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(or may not) help explain his promotion at last to a real benefice: a rectorship of St. Gregory’s, a church by St. Paul’s, in 1398.95 Ruth Kennedy assumed, reasonably enough, that Tyckhill was already ordained, despite some conflicting evidence, at the time he wrote the poem. But we cannot be certain, since his first benefice came along only upon his leaving St. Paul’s in 1398, and whether Tyckhill was among them or not, many clerks waited to be sure of beneficed church employment before fully committing to ordination and celibacy. (Clerks in minor orders could sing the Office, but not celebrate mass.) Moreover, as the extensive entries in his rent rolls show, Tyckhill’s day job involved a great deal of association with the laity. At the time of writing the poem, then, Tyckhill was one of the many clerks inhabiting the space between the lay and the clerical. And the topic of the poem is suggestive, especially if one thinks of his fellow London poet, Hoccleve, who at roughly the same time and in the same city waited decades for a benefice, eventually deciding to marry. Of course, the May morning encounter with a bird that leaves the speaker loveless, sexless (“without a limb”), and alone may simply be a fun piece of creative fantasy for an other wise pious churchman to amuse himself with on his days off. But even if that is all it is, it reminds us of the real humanity of proletarians, even those balancing (whether Tyckhill knew it or not) on the edge of career success. Kennedy is at pains to separate him from the “chantry priests of ill repute” in contemporary satires. But his life was not wholly smooth: in 1394 he was part of a group of about twelve chaplains accused of intimidating (“averring threats” against) three other named chaplains.96 And he had had to fight to save his own chantry because during his time at St.  Paul’s, many endowed chantries were no longer viable,97 a battle he lost—and a reminder to us that even chantry priests could be faced with joining the precariat. The character of his accounting activities has not really been studied, and deserve the attention of a cathedral historian, but there are some largely unnoticed clues to London culture to be found in them: the rent rolls he kept show that he dealt daily with people from all walks of life. St. Paul’s was a landowner on a large scale, and he managed financial transactions not only with clergy of all ranks, but from laity of all kinds, including sheriffs, Guildhall officials, and more.98 Whatever his reasons for crafting the poem, it gives us hitherto underappreciated evidence of a St. Paul’s proletarian cleric of the 1390s already apparently deeply steeped in the latest London vernacular styles. The alliterative nature of the poem, its chanson d’aventure style, and its skilled use of the poetic “I” sound by times Chaucerian, Langlandian, and even Hocclevian (whether by circumstance or shared culture). As I have suggested elsewhere, Hoccleve in-

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dulges in alliteration in just such Langlandian moments as his own apologia poetry 99—and Hoccleve certainly did not learn the art of proletarian melancholy from Chaucer. This much we can intuit from the literary parallels in the poem, but there are two rather compelling pieces of new evidence suggesting that Tyckhill might well have been actually connected with Middle English literary circles. One is that Tyckhill’s ser vice at St. Paul’s in the 1390s overlapped with that of another chantry chaplain well known to Langland scholars, William Palmer (d. 1400), because Palmer bequeathed a copy of Piers Plowman to a woman of his parish, Agnes Eggesfield, giving us evidence of Langland’s earliest female reader. William died as rector of St. Alphage in London but apparently served as a St. Paul’s chantry priest in the 1390s.100 We know that in the rather tightknit community of St.  Paul’s chantry chaplains, ideas and texts were shared because a great many records of their book bequests to one another survive (including many books in Latin, French, and occasionally in English).101 A second piece of evidence is the fact that, as I have shown elsewhere, on the dorse of the rent roll that contains Tyckhill’s poem, there are several Latin account entries involving payments to a “Johannis Merchaunt [or Marchaunt].”102 These occur amidst other accounts sporadically relating to the London Guildhall (spelled variously, e.g., “in Gyldhalda” or “ad Gildhaldam”). For instance, one records that Marchaunt drafted a writ for a previously named sheriff.103 John Marchaunt was a Guildhall scribe, the man Mooney and Stubbs identified as Doyle and Parkes’s Scribe D, the most prolific known London scribe of Middle English literature in this period. While some scholars have questioned the identification, most paleographers have not: Scribe D, of course, copied early and important manuscripts with works by Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and other vernacular writers and worked alongside Hoccleve himself on the Trinity Gower (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2).104 John Marchaunt held various Guildhall posts as an attorney in the city’s courts between about 1380 and 1417, and was also known to Thomas Usk. Marchaunt’s appearance in Tyckhill’s roll accounts may offer us a glimpse of one route by which he had accessed Middle English texts—and not the only one, since others at the Guildhall, like John Carpenter, were engaged in Middle English literary transmission, a history of interest in the vernacular that even goes back to Thedmar, as we saw. In any case, it looks like Tyckhill had access to any number of London Middle English writers’ works in the 1390s, if not before—an intriguing possibility since we know from the book bequests among St. Paul’s chantry priests that English books were rare enough to stand out. Since his poem is datable to before 1398 when he resigned his

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St. Paul’s position to take up a benefice, he was certainly among the very earliest readers of Chaucer, Langland, and perhaps even some youthful Hoccleve. Proletarians like Tyckhill exemplify perfectly the type of conjunction today so foreign to us where poetry, account-keeping, and liturgical training converge. To underline the latter, we should conclude by at least mentioning that Tyckhill’s alliterative poem is written out in prose in the traditional way (going back to Old English)105 but, as Kennedy notes, with great attention to punctuation (see Chapter  5, Figure  5.1 and discussion). Having just seen the great care taken to make multiple stanzas work metrically in “The Prisoner’s Lament,” a much earlier Guildhall manuscript with music (Chapter 1, Figure 1.6), we can appreciate that this is what a trained liturgist can do. Tyckhill, too, supplies metrical cues, the more important since the verse is copied in prose, very like the punctuation in the more famous alliterative poem “The Blacksmiths” in British Library, MS Arundel 292. Like “A Bird in Bishopswood,” “Blacksmiths,” as we will see in more detail in Chapter 5, is elaborately punctuated for meticulous performance using the punctus elevatus, the punctus versus, and the virgula suspensiva, not only to mark off the alliterative line units, but to indicate intonation patterns (Figure 5.2).106 Arundel 292 was likely used among the hired secular clerks or vicars choral of Norwich Cathedral Priory, so in a circumstance very like Tyckhill’s liminal situation at St. Paul’s.107 Proletarians appear to have spoken the same language in more than one way and brought a set of liturgical skills to their vernacular writing, which is somehow married up with their more secular work in day jobs like Tyckhill’s account-keeping. It is to their identity as accountkeepers, real and metaphorical, that we turn next.

3. Case Study 3: “White-Collar” Underemployment and the Clerical Proletariat in the Z-Text of Piers Plowman Another dimension of proletarian book production is that it seems to involve an incredible sense of freedom, not to say entitlement, about meddling or just plain interfering in book production. The reason for this is not far to seek: with so many underemployed clerically trained copyists, well-versed both in church and government matters, scribal intervention in texts is confident and often highly intelligent— to the extent that it can be difficult for modern editors to tell scribes from authors. One of the best examples of this I know is the Z-text redaction of Piers,108 which is awash in unique lines added to further emphasize the agenda of the redactor, sometimes quite at odds with Langland’s own views. Most of this

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complex subject cannot be tackled here, but one key aspect must be: Z’s striking tendency to augment clerical proletarian concerns (a topic, as we saw, Langland himself had already found compelling). Here is one such instance: Z adds some extra lines about notaries (all notaries, in fact) coming in behind the allegorical character Simony to lend their seals to his fraud: Sire Simonye ys ofsent to sele the chartres Ant alle the notaryes by name, that they noen fayle, To sette on here sygnes as Symonye wyl bydde. (Z.II.39–41, ed. Rigg and Brewer, retaining the edition’s bold type for lines unique to Z) As Karrie Fuller has revealingly shown, the Z redactor really had it in for notaries.109 The reason, I think, was that he was building upon Langland’s own contempt for their role in oppressing a particular group of poor clerks, the “poor provisors,” with high fees. It is worth quoting again here Beverly Gilbert’s lucid account, “The ‘poor provisors’ of the poem are those who obtained provisions in forma pauperum, ‘poor clerks’ who were graduates of universities and, lacking patronage by local bishops or lay providers, applied to the papal court for provision. . . . Since the preparation and copying of the citations . . . would have been properly notarial work, it is easy to see why the notaries in Piers Plowman ride to London on provisors.”110 Langland, who always comes to the defense of poor clergy, did not easily forgive notaries for this, and the Z redactor eagerly “piled on,” writing insults to notaries wherever he could wedge them in.111 Likely, though not certainly, living in London and from a very similar proletarian background as Langland himself, the Z redactor seems to have known and had access to all three versions of the poem, though it was an A-text he chose to “improve.”112 Among the many things we could examine here if space were endless, let me select two in particular: 1. The Z redactor’s fascination with the Gospel of Luke’s parable of the Unjust Steward, which, as mentioned earlier, resonated as a kind of cri de cœur for multiple proletarian writers in the Ricardian period. 2. The Z redactor’s fascination with Langland’s special treatment of three social groups (merchants, lawyers, and beggars) in the Pardon scene, three groups, as I have shown in more detail elsewhere, of real importance to proletarian thinkers.113

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To begin with the first of these: the parable of the Unjust Steward. In the A- and B-texts, Robert the Robber (one of the voices of Sloth in the Seven Sins’ confessions) has a remarkable moment of interiority: Robert þe robbour on reddite* [pay back] lokide, Ac for þere was nouȝt wherewith he wepte swiþe sore. And ȝet þe sinful shrewe seide to hymselue . . . (A.V.233–35; *cited from Rom. 13:7, “pay back [your debts]”) Invoking the good thief crucified alongside Christ, the thief being a powerful emblem of salvational hope for the desperate, Robert prays for mercy: “So rewe on þis Robert þat red[dere] (to pay back) ne hauiþ, / Ne neuere wen[e] to wynne wiþ craft þat [I owe]” (A.V.240–41). That is, “have pity on this Rob(b)er(t) who does not have the means to pay back, nor [do I] ever think to earn with any craft that which I owe” (but in sixteen manuscripts, “any craft that I know”).114 The lines are poignant, and Langland would return to them in complex ways, especially in the C-text and, latently, in the C.V apologia. Not so latently, however, that a fellow proletarian did not see the connections. In the Z-text, the A lines above are mysteriously augmented with unique Latin lines of the redactor’s own composition, directly quoting the parable of the Unjust Steward that is unobtrusively foundational—for the biblically alert—to Langland’s C.V autobiographical passage: So rewe on me, Robert, for reddere ne habbe Ne nere wene to wynne wyth craft that Y knowe . . . For fodere non valeo, so feble ar my bones: Caucyon, ant Y couthe, caute wolde Y make That Y ne begged ne borwed ne in despeyr deyde. (Z.V.137–38, 142–4) Rigg and Brewer translate these rather difficult last three lines as: “For I cannot dig ( fodere non valeo), so feeble are my bones. If I could, I would prudently (caute) make a down payment (caucyon115), in order not to beg or borrow or die in despair.” To understand this challenging interpolation, one has to know a little bit about loans and bonds, some biblical Latin, and the parable of the Unjust Steward—in short, the kind of mixture of knowledge a proletarian would have. The biblical steward was accused to his master (difamatus est) of dissipating his goods—but we never know whether in fact he is guilty of this. His mas-

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ter then asks him to “render an account of his stewardship” (“redde rationem villicationis tuae”) (16:2). In addition to Langland’s repeated use of this notion of rendering accounts, Middle English scholars also know this verse as the famous theme of Thomas Wimbledon’s popular 1388 sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, being himself most likely a member of the clerical proletariat, and written about the same time as the Z redaction.116 On the verge of being fired, the steward, in a striking moment of interiority, asks himself (ait . . . intra se), “what shall I do seeing that my master is taking away the stewardship from me? To dig I am not able; to beg I am ashamed” (“quid faciam quia dominus meus aufert a me villicationem? fodere non valeo; mendicare erubesco”) (16:3). This parable describes, phrased in modern terms, a crisis of white-collar unemployment. As such, it seems to have caught the attention of Langland, the Z redactor, Wimbledon, Hoccleve, and even the Orchard of Syon author, as we saw earlier. Faced with apparently unpalatable “blue-collar” options, the steward comes up with a shrewd plan to press his master’s debtors for payment of at least part of their debt, taking the initiative (or liberty) of forgiving them the rest. So, one debtor who owes a hundred jars of oil is told “accipe cautionem tuam et sede cito scribe quinquaginta” (Take thy bond and sit down at once and write fifty) (16:6). In this rather entrepreneurial way, he pleases his master by prudently (prudenter) gathering in his debts, if at a loss (16:8). In a parable already laden with ambiguities, the questionable nature of the steward’s remedy was not lost on medieval commentators, and it was not lost on Christ himself, who ends with this cryptic comment: “quia filii huius saeculi prudentiores filiis lucis in generatione sua sunt” (“for the children of this world, in relation to their own generation, are more prudent than the children of the light”) (16:8).117 The parable’s central character, a minor bureaucrat down on his luck, demonstrates a strange mix of interiority, audacious entrepreneurialism, self-interest, and ingenuity. Utilizing a language of law and accountancy, it must have struck many who worked in medieval writing offices (such as the Exchequer or Privy Seal or any that dealt daily in debt issues) as resonant. Indeed, as Linne Mooney has shown, Hoccleve worked often in the Privy Seal with just such payment issues, on one occasion personally overseeing a famous, overdue payment to Chaucer.118 For the Z redactor, apparently Robert the Robber’s “reddere” in the A-text had sparked off an association with the “redde rationem vilicationis” of the parable, so the redactor inserted the “ fodere” passage to nicely cement the allusion. By then, he was really having fun. It strains credulity, however, to believe he was Langland, because the interpolation rather skews the trajectory of the original passage, but he was eager to impress. He came up with the punning

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next line, “Caucyon, ant Y couthe, caute wolde Y make” (Z.V.143), by borrowing the word cautionem (bond) from the biblical parable itself. Then, like a math wizard who dazzles by skipping whole steps while solving a problem, there is a kind of “show off” quality here (an attempt to “out-Langland” Langland), but more importantly, it stakes out membership in a sophisticated club. Here is a stylistically parallel macaronic pun from Langland’s C.V apologia: “Forthy rebuke me ryhte nauhte, Resoun, Y yow praye . . . Non de solo,” Y sayde, “for sothe viuit homo, Nec in pane et in pabulo; the pater-noster wittenesseth, Fiat voluntas dei—that fynt vs alle thynges.” (C.V.82, 86–88, with omissions) The Latin, both adapted from and flagging the fuller verse in Matthew 4:4, reads: “Not by the soil does man live, nor by bread and food [but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God],” creating a pun in which “solo” means “soil” rather than “alone.”119 One has to have somewhat agile Latin grammar to get this (of the kind employed in Latin riddles) and, for the Z redactor, the opportunity to play similarly with the Luke parable to evoke the legal language of loans, financial offices, and places where employment crises were rife was irresistible. Hoccleve, of course, made a poetic career of writing about such crises in his begging poems. For instance, in La Male Regle, he confesses that he dare not “stele, for the guerdoun is so keene, Ne darst . . . nat, ne begge also for shame” (367–68, another allusion to the parable); even Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse” fits into just such a genre of white-collar employment crisis—and the payment of the debt owed him by the Exchequer, as we just saw, was personally overseen by Hoccleve.120 The Z improvisation is very similar to the one in the C.V apologia, where the dreamer renders his own account of his stewardship, as we saw, and winds up the passage with more language of finance borrowed from two more parables, both this time “windfall profit” parables, as we might say today:121 Ac yut Y hope, as he that ofte hath ychaffared And ay loste and loste and at the laste hym happed A bouhte such a bargain he was the bet euere And sette al his los at leef . . . So hope Y to haue of hym that is almighty A gobet of his grace . . . (C.V.94–100, with omissions)

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Members of the clerical proletariat seem to speak the same language and to serve some very specific sets of clientele. Among the strikingly proletarian features of Z that I have discussed elsewhere is his special attention to Piers’s Pardon from Truth, in which Langland had innovatively tried to bring new social groups (merchants, lawyers, and beggars) into the salvational covenant of the Pardon, finding them loopholes under certain moral conditions.122 We saw in Chapter 1 that already in the thirteenth century, the rising group of professional classes (clerks, merchants, and lawyers) formed a “fourth estate,” evident in the members gathered to hear and compose French lyrics in the London Puy. We also saw how crucial that configuration was for understanding clerical and legal careerists in Wynnere and Wastoure. In Piers Plowman, Langland went a step further, of course, trying to solve a theological conundrum for the fourth estate (the uncertain position of merchants and lawyers in canon law), but in the C-text especially, he also—more radically—tries in a detailed way to solve the problem for beggars at the same time (as Arvind Thomas has shown in Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law, this kind of evolution of thinking between the B-Text and the C-Text is typical for Langland). The Z redactor warmly approved of most of Langland’s salvational efforts and embellishes them lovingly wherever he can, but I think he was a good deal less certain about the beggars. Z’s embroidery of this passage emphasizes the physicality of the documentary nature of the Pardon (like the Wynnere and Wastoure poet, he has a palpable relationship to documents), but where in Piers beggars were to remain marginal to the “bull” unless they meet certain criteria, Z shifts them all the way “to the dorse” (back!) of the document: “Beggaueres ne byddares ne but nat in the bulle / But yt be in the bak half [dorse] wythouten, by hemsilue [outside by themselves]” (Z.VIII.68–69). The Z redactor was clearly more conservative than Langland.123 The three “newer” groups Langland was so keen to find a place for in Truth’s document, the merchants, lawyers, and beggars, are also social groups, for many reasons, highly relevant to proletarians, whether via writing-office life and documentary work, or via the support of the merchant classes for contractual liturgy work for chantry priests and other types of liturgical singers (as we just saw with John Tyckhill and will see in Chapters 5 and 6). Beggars, as we have just observed, are surprisingly relevant even to university student life and, as perhaps the most socially frightening spectre for the underemployed generally, become objects of enormous concern for Langland, especially in the C-text.124 Langland had squeezed the merchants into Truth’s Pardon (C.IX.22–24, 27) by giving them a clause in the margin of the “bull,” thus

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emphasizing their marginality in the Church’s schema but slyly claiming they are covered under God’s “secrete (or privy) seal.” This brings a powerful, surprisingly emotional response from the merchant—the only group allowed the distinction of being able to respond to Truth’s offer in the poem itself: “Tho were marchauntes mury; many wopen for ioye / And preyed for Peres the plouhman þat purchased hem þis bulles” (C.IX.41–42). But in the A-text, and in Z, these lines run very differently: Þanne were marchauntis merye: many wepe for ioye, And ȝaf wille for his writing wollene cloþis; For he co[pie]de þus here clause þei [couden] hym gret mede. (A.VIII.42–44) In A and Z, Will (not Piers, as in B and C) is the agent of the merchant’s joy via his scribal work. Z is even more pointed: “And yeuen Wylle for thys wrytyng wollen clothus / For he coped thus here clause, couth hym gret mede” (Z. VIII.43–44).125 Interestingly “copiede” (as Kane points out, quite a new verb) is “coped” in Z, a delightful pun, if deliberate, on the idea of clothing the words in ecclesiastical garb, the “bull” itself. One cannot help but see in A’s (and Z’s) version a moment of writerly vocation (underlined by the fact that scribes were routinely given clothing for their work), indeed, even mission. In Z, it is Will who does the copying (a gesture to the poet’s proletarian status), and the act of copying the “clause” is both allegorized and sanctified quite cleverly. Why should merchants have such a special role? One pertinent factor may be that scribes, scriveners, and notaries did much of their daily work for merchants and lawyers, and as noted earlier, merchants also frequently employed chantry priests and singing clerks.126 What I would like to underline here, though, is that being concerned about the salvation of these groups is a very clerical proletarian impulse. The Church regarded the rising merchant class as a gray area in canon law; someone like Langland must have found this intolerable, or at least unsatisfactory.127 Langland’s move is avant garde here, and progressive theologically, but other proletarians who worked for merchants must have felt similarly. Though the Z redactor is more conservative than Langland on many ecclesiastical issues, as Karrie Fuller has shown,128 his redaction evokes the smell of the inkpot and a brotherhood of scribes even more, and he followed Langland on this one. So important were Langland’s innovations to the salvational system in the Pardon passage that the Z redactor suppressed the Tearing of the Pardon to preserve them, as I have argued elsewhere (echoing Langland’s

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suppression of it in C—scholars often do not realize that Tearing is a reactionary scene).129 It is no wonder. Merchants were an important early audience for vernacular literature generally. From the thirteenth-century evidence of the clientele of a London Puy, to the Guildhall evidence, to the fifteenth-century reading circles preserved by John Shirley, merchants are simply everywhere.130 The clerical proletariat, as McHardy so succinctly put it, are most often clerics who work for the laity. They were ambidextrous, not by choice but by circumstance.

chapter 3

Career Disappointment and Langlandian Tradition I Hoccleve’s Missed Opportunity and Self-Portraiture in Vocational Crisis

1. From Disappointment to Public Pastor: Hoccleve and Langlandian Intertextuality Like our St. Paul’s proletarian poet, John Tyckhill, who lived and worked just blocks from Hoccleve’s home at Chester’s Inn, Hoccleve also had access to the works of both Chaucer and Langland. This much we know via his scribal connections, as we will discuss. But unlike his more obscure fellow Londoner, Hoccleve has a large and widely disseminated oeuvre,1 which makes it all the more unusual that scholars have not looked for internal evidence that he knew both major poets. Hoccleve’s extensive and often overt allusion to Chaucer is remarkable, of course, and has often been studied to great effect,2 but the many suggestions in Hoccleve’s poetry that he also fell under Langland’s sway are rarely even mentioned. Since Langland was so overtly a clerical proletarian poet, his representations of the phenomenon so routinely cited by modern historians as the period’s classic example, the question is important here. In the second section of this chapter, we will look at the extensive London manuscript evidence showing that Hoccleve could not have missed knowing Langland’s work, whatever he chose to do or not do with that knowledge. But apart from that codicological evidence, I will mention here especially some main threads in Hoccleve’s work that suggest intertextualities, and since Langland is the older poet by a few decades, the vectors would seem to point forward from him, not vice versa.3 First

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among these is the topic of personal vocation crisis, as we saw in the previous chapter, but several other topics, and even some aspects of his metrical and allegorical styles, echo a Langlandian tradition. Other topics include, for instance, Hoccleve’s bitterness about corruption in the awarding of benefices, the unworthiness of many candidates, the subsequent neglect of their parishes (a topic he treats with wording parallel to Langland’s), and his frustration with pluralism—now regarded as more controversial than we saw in earlier English texts, like The Owl and the Nightingale.4 The Regement’s case on many of these points is not offered in Hoccleve’s voice, but is carefully cast into the voice of the Old Man, who is more morally and spiritually authoritative than Hoccleve’s I-speaker, but also has the advantage of being unofficial (not representing any government or church office)—a thinly veiled, semi-allegorical voice, reminiscent in strategy to some of the allegorical speakers of moral authority but personal poverty (such as Elde or Patience) that Langland used in his own critiques of the Church. Audelay, as we will see, does something similar with his Marcolf and Solomon dialogue, but with less strategic polish than either Langland or Hoccleve.5 We saw in Chapter 2 that Hoccleve wrote a passage surprisingly parallel to Langland’s famous C.V “autobiographical” passage and that both poets shared a tradition of allusion to the “white-collar” agricultural disclaimers of the Unjust Steward (in the parable in Luke 16:1–8). In Hoccleve, those agricultural disclaimers are couched in markedly alliterative style: With plow can I nat medlen ne with harwe, Ne woot nat what lond good is for what corn, And for to lade a cart or fille a barwe, To which I nevere usid was toforn; My bak unbuxum hath swich thing [swynk] forsworn, At instaunce of wrytynge, his werreyour, That stowpynge hath him spilt with his labour. (Hoccleve, RP 981–87, italicized letters added to indicate alliteration)6 Indeed, the whole “vocational crisis” premise of the Regement’s Prologue is rather Langlandian (especially as Langland developed the theme in C, and as it was heavily embellished, likely by an imitator, in the unique Z-text). Certainly nothing about this passage resonates as Chaucerian. Both Langland (C.V.12–21) and Hoccleve in this passage provide a list of agricultural duties their I-speakers reject, though Hoccleve’s narrator falls back on the clerical professed ignorance

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of farming, as did the Unjust Steward. Meanwhile Langland’s narrator, who is explicitly portrayed as a clerk in minor orders,7 conveniently invokes clerical status as his excuse (an excuse, however, despite the class conservatism of the period, not wholly satisfying to Conscience and Reason, as we saw in Chapter 2, given the norms of the academic proletariat). Hoccleve had already made it clear early in his Prologue that he is a lettered man and certainly (given his explicit hope for a benefice) a clerk in minor orders, too,8 a factor also reinforced here. Both particularly invoke a complaint about the stooping that agricultural work would require, with Langland appealing to his unusual height and Hoccleve ingeniously molding it into a segue to a longer, traditional set of complaints about the toll that scribal work takes on the body. Both find ways to establish their clerical status, liminal though it is, as a bulwark against manual labour. As the number of italicized letters in Hoccleve’s passage above indicate, alliteration plays a fairly prominent role throughout this description of agricultural tasks and also in Hoccleve’s subsequent complaint about scribal life, which goes on for four more stanzas. For instance, in the midst of Hoccleve’s insistence that, unlike other types of workers, a scribe must devote complete concentration to his work (“Mynde, ye, and hand—noon may from othir flitte” [997]), he stresses that a scribe then must repress the urge to speak or sing: And syn he speke may ne synge nat, But bothe two he needes moot forbere, His labour to him is the elengere. (1006–8, italics added) It is not often observed that Hoccleve’s complaint here also aligns him with the group historians call the legal proletariat—a subgroup of the clerical proletariat who share a sense of injustice about long hours of copying and drafting multitudes of law documents for inadequate wages.9 The term “proletariat,” of course, also implies, as we saw (at least in the original Marxist sense), a kind of alienation, whether cultural, psychological, or economic. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6 we will examine in more detail the question of this type of alienation in yet another subgroup, the liturgical proletariat, including the underemployed in various singing positions, but by Langland’s time, also referring to the proletarians who might shift from stint to stint in search of stability or better pay or simply because short-term employment remained the only option. Katherine Zieman discusses several of these issues in relation to “contractual liturgy.”10 Elsewhere, Langland shows his experience (past or present) with both groups, legal and liturgical,11 as, for instance, in his allusion to “office pool” jibes over scribal eye-skip in

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a legal document (making the document legally invalid) and his scorn (shared later by Audelay) of those who “over-skip” in liturgical performance: The gome þat gloseþ so chartres for a goky [fool] is holden So is it a goky, by god! Þat in his gospel failleþ, Or in masse or in matins makeþ any defaute. (Piers, B.XI.306–8)12 Hoccleve, also drawing on alliterative tradition, takes the same complaint about inattention in a different direction, insisting on the tyranny of concentration required in scribal legal clerical work in order to prevent exactly such errors, complaining that unlike “thise artificiers” (workmen) who talk and sing while they work, “we laboure,” Hoccleve writes, “in travaillous stilnesse”: “We stowpe and stare upon the sheepes skyn, / And keepe moot our song and wordes yn” (RP 1014–15, italics added). The passage, while seeming to complain, in fact reinforces the social class divisions, insulating Hoccleve from having to do common labour to pay off his debt. Unlike Chaucer, Hoccleve tends to use alliteration across longer stretches for effect—Hoccleve was a perfectionist in decasyllabic poetry, as Burrow has shown, but I would note that he also had a natural ear for alliterative style.13 Pearsall rightly notes that Hoccleve was the inheritor of Chaucer’s “well bred low vernacular,” but I would add that he was also the inheritor, evident in key spots, of various features of Langlandian style, including (to use Pearsall’s adjective of Langland) a Dickensian sense of homespun imagery. The ability to wield memorable alliteration in labour-related contexts is one of the key characteristics of Langlandian style.14 Another good example of this phenomenon might be “The Blacksmiths,” discussed in Chapter  5, a labour-related descriptive poem that demonstrates the geographical reach of alliterative poetry far beyond the traditional West Midlands region. The way Hoccleve cleverly remakes this medieval tradition of what 1960s folklorists called “songs of work and protest” deserves more attention15—in this case, he repurposes it to align scribes with the labouring classes but preserves a class advantage over them, ensuring that scribes remain solidly part of the fourth estate, not the third. Given the intimacy of London reading circles for English poetry, likely echoes of Langlandian style in Hoccleve are not surprising. And they go far beyond alliteration, appearing in (1) Hoccleve’s fascination with “embryonic” allegories,16 (2) his boldness in articulating at length the plight of the unbeneficed but deserving cleric in a corrupt church, and (3) his unembarrassed airing of his personal crisis of vocation—all features of his poetry he certainly did not learn from

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Chaucer. These are the aspects of Hoccleve’s Langlandian style we will look at in this chapter. In the Prologue of RP, Hoccleve tells the Old Man, “I gazid longe first and wayted faste / Aftir sum benefice” (1451–52), but having taken a wife, he explains that he now subsists on the edge of clerical culture, not as clergyman but rather as a clerk.17 Hoccleve comforts himself with a string of comments of the “sour grapes” variety about those who did attain benefices, several if not borrowed from, at the very least shared with Langland. For instance, those chosen for benefices do not care (“rekketh not”), he says, “though that hys chauncell roofe be al totorne, / And on the hye auter hyt reyne or snewe” (RP 1422–23), referring to the lax parsons of these parishes, whose job it was as holder of the benefice income to maintain the fabric of their churches. Langland had used exactly the same expression to discourage lords from donating “To Religiouse þat han no rouþe þouȝ it reyne on hir Auters / In many places þer þei [persons ben, be þei purely] at ese” (Piers, B.X.318).18 (Note that in Langland’s sights here are parish priests beneficed under monastic patronage, since monasteries were increasingly appropriating the lion’s share of benefices across his lifetime and triggering a major ecclesiastical and cultural shift by Hoccleve’s time). Like Langland, Hoccleve also offers a detailed critique of pluralism with the twist, however, that Hoccleve’s is a critique of the over-beneficed courtier’s pluralism (“Yee courteours,” the Old Man says [line 1403], referring to careerists). Interestingly, even Langland had not always been against pluralism, as the A-text reveals,19 and even Wyclif had not always been against pluralism—career disappointment, as Barrie Dobson noted,20 accounts for a lot of shift in opinion! Hoccleve’s sage Old Man in fact addresses him explicitly as a courtier, who has not yet achieved advancement: Of Holy Chirche, my sone, I conceyve As yit ne hast thow noon avancement. Yee courteours, ful often yee deceyve Youre soules for the desirous talent Yee han to good [to attain goods]; and for that thow art brent With covetyse now, par aventure, Oonly for muk thow yernest soules cure [benefice]. (1401–7) This is not a flattering portrait of the average king’s clerk and his attitude toward the real duties of a benefice. As the twentieth-century administrative historian R. L. Storey explains,

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King’s clerks should not be regarded as genuine recruits to the priestly profession. Many appear to have proceeded to major orders only when this became canonically necessary. The junior clerk’s first gain from the king’s ecclesiastical patronage was normally his nomination to a newly created prelate for a pension until the prelate could provide him with a benefice. The next stage was crown presentation to a minor benefice without cure of souls, custody of a hospital or chapel, or a prebend in a royal free chapel. Parish churches at the crown’s disposal might come later, and only then was it essential to proceed to major orders in order to retain possession. . . . Even after being beneficed with cure of souls, some king’s clerks were able to defer assumption of orders by papal licence. . . . [Storey’s examples given here include Robert Rolleston, a colleague of Hoccleve’s at the Privy Seal in 1403]. Hoccleve records his years of waiting for a benefice and eventual resort to the consolation of matrimony.21 (my emphases) As we will see, Storey’s description of the career trajectory of many king’s clerks (beginning with a benefice without cure of souls and then moving upon promotion to one with) exactly matches those of several of Hoccleve’s colleagues in the Privy Seal. But, indeed, the Old Man would concur with Storey that the king’s clerk is too often not “a genuine recruit to the priestly profession.” As he says: Ful many men knowe I that gane and gape Aftir sum fat and ryche benefice; Chirche or provendre [prebend] unnethe hem may eschape But they as blyve it henten up and tryce. God graunte they accepte hem for the office And nat for the profyt that by hem hongith, For that conceit nat to presthode longith. (RP 1408–14)22 The Old Man here mentions both “chirche” and “provendre [prebend]” and hopes that God may grant that courtiers accept these “for the office” (i.e., drawing on the Latin sense for the function itself), not merely for the “profyt.” I will argue, given what we saw in the last chapter and will see here, that Hoccleve presents himself via this dialogue implicitly as someone who would have happily accepted “for the office” itself and not merely the “profyt.” Nor should we assume that, Hoccleve’s position here, though poetically rendered, is simply conventional moralizing. In fact, the very latest biographical evidence, as Sobecki

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has shown, reveals Hoccleve’s deep admiration for his close friend and Privy Seal colleague, John Bailey, who did receive a benefice, served his parish devoutly, and was even able to generously help Hoccleve financially.23 Bailey’s life witness (cut short by a death that moved Hoccleve to write Lerne to Die, as Sobecki shows) must have further deepened Hoccleve’s sense of the redemptive value of benefices on every level, and heightened his desire to critique bad priests (and imply that he’d have been a good one). Hoccleve’s sense of being passed over may also explain the Prologue’s emphasis on complaint against the Church’s appointment system and exhortation of reformist ecclesiology, of all things—not the first topic one would expect from the author of the Oldcastle Remonstrance. This is a another reminder, of course, that Wycliffites were not the only reformist thinkers and that an author who writes polemic can also be capable of nuance, or as Ethan Knapp so nicely phrases it, “the strong division between orthodox and Wycliffite positions . . . is not so static a division in Hoccleve’s case as it is sometimes assumed to be.”24 So, for instance, in the next lines, the Old Man offers a diatribe against pluralists, those holding not just one but multiple benefices (“pluralitee”), often in parishes not even geographically proximate, and too often awarded to those with no intention of personally ministering in any of them: A dayes now, my sone, as men may see, O [one] chirche unto o man may nat souffyse; But algate he moot han pluralitee, Elles he can nat lyven in no wyse. Ententyfly he keepith his ser vice In court; his labour there shal nat moule [grow moldy]; But to his cure looketh he ful foule. (1415–21) This type of king’s clerk, he says, is convinced that he cannot live on anything less than the multiple incomes (“he can nat lyven in no wyse”), but the only kind of ser vice he performs attentively (“Ententyfly”) is “in court,” not caring about his duty toward “his cure” (cure of souls), which he performs “ful foule.” Nor does he care whether his parish church falls apart (literally, whether it rains on the altar, a metaphor he shared with Langland) or how needful his parishioners are of correction: Thogh that his chauncel roof be al totorn And on the hy auter it reyne or sneewe,

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He rekkith nat, the cost may be forborn Crystes hous to repeire or make neewe; And thogh ther be ful many a vicious heewe Undir his cure, he takth of it no keep; He rekkith nevere how rusty been his sheep. (1422–28) The “rusty” sheep are, of course, an apt inversion and conflation of two metaphors from the famous General Prologue portrait of Chaucer’s attentive Parson, but the “reyne or sneewe” on the altar sounds Langlandian. Pluralism must have been particularly galling to those, like Hoccleve, who could not even land a single benefice (Audelay is even more explicit and angry on this point, as we will see). And it is clear that the critique here is of the absentee rector (absentee rectors would appoint a vicar or chaplain, an underpaid member of the clerical proletariat, for a fractional salary while pocketing the rest). The critique of absentee rectors is sharp, a chronic problem starkly, even satirically emblematized by James le Palmer, a fellow Westminster civil servant of the prior generation in the Exchequer, in his image of the empty church beside his Omne bonum entry on the subject (“Clerici non residentes”; see Figure 3.1).25 Since absentee clerics appointed as king’s clerks were still normative in Hoccleve’s day, it sounds as if Hoccleve, too, was unusually concerned with pastoral care. This makes Hoccleve ostensibly even more eligible for the benefice he never got, since most king’s clerks were absentee rectors and less inclined to complain about the problem. But Hoccleve is here elaborately echoing reformist thinkers and poets, such as Langland, or to a lesser extent, Chaucer (via his Parson)—that is, it is a more Langlandian kind of point of conscience (many scholars have even seen Chaucer’s virtuous General Prologue brothers, the Plowman and Parson, as a nod to Langland). Hoccleve would also likely have known some Latin polemicists on this point—certainly James le Palmer easily accessed many such for his Omne bonum. Not only, I think, is Hoccleve trying to suggest implicitly that his own motives for wanting a benefice were pure, but also, given that government clerks are a large part of his initial and coterie audiences (some of his colleagues even named in his verse), it looks like Hoccleve is trying to exhort them on something that matters to him. In reality, government clerks who won benefices would become rectors, but even absentee ones had serious responsibilities for their parishes: for example, as Hoccleve rightly notes, absentees were still officially obligated for the repair of the fabric of their churches (avoiding the sacrilege of rain on one’s altar [1422– 24]). And even absentee rectors had—at the barest minimum—responsibilities

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Figure 3.1. London, British Library, MS Royal 6.E.VI, fol. 298, the Omne bonum, illustrating one of the “Clerici” entries, this one on absentee rectors (“Clerici non residentes”). The image shows, rather starkly, an empty church, emblematic of the neglect of the cure of souls by absentees. © The British Library Board.

to be present for episcopal visitations,26 for property and financial transactions relating to their parish, and above all, to ensure that the spiritual needs of their parishioners were being met at all times. And even absentee rectors were required to be in full orders (unless, as Storey notes, they had a papal dispensation, a viable loophole).27 And if they did not seek ordination within a year,

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they could be dismissed.28 Moreover, to seek full orders to the priesthood, one normally had to be unmarried.29 What Hoccleve seems to be saying through the Old Man here (and despite some necessary self-deprecation at the end) is: yes, that he concurs with the reformist poets (or their upstanding characters) and more implicitly that, had he been honoured with a benefice, his sense of duty would have exceeded those he critiques. And he was not finished with benefices yet. The Old Man’s critique shifts to yet another embittering aspect of the modern awarding of benefices: the fact that so often those awarded go to the undereducated (“thredbare of konnynge”), the indolent, or the absent: The oynement of holy sermonynge Him looth is upon hem for to despende. Sum person [parson] is so thredbare of konnynge That he can naght, thogh he him wys pretende; And he that can may nat his herte bende Therto, but from his cure he him absentith, And what therof comth, greedyliche he hentith. (1429–35) The lines are complex: “what therof comth” signifies the proceeds of the parish living being scooped up despite the incumbent’s unwillingness, or even unfitness, to preach. Audelay makes the same complaint about the unlearned getting benefices, and his is even more specific, complaining on behalf of the university educated so often left behind in the benefice race (see Chapter 4). Langland, we saw, even attacks notaries who oppress learned poor clerks eligible for a benefice via papal provision, which the Z redactor heightened. As we saw in Chapter 2, Hoccleve did have the education required for pastoral care, and he seems eager to showcase that, for example, in some of his glossing in the RP and, as we will see, in texts such as his Remonstrance Against Oldcastle. Like both Langland and Audelay (poets much more overtly religious than Hoccleve is normally thought to be), Hoccleve paints a portrait of the severely secularized priest (see Figure 0.3), one who cannot “weyve jolitee and wantonnesse”: But wel I woot, as nyce, fressh, and gay Some of hem been as borel folkes be, And that unsittynge [inappropriate] is to hir degree; Hem owith to be mirours of sadnesse, And weyve [avoid] jolitee and wantonnesse. (1438–42)

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Langland and Audelay give much more colourful treatments of such priests inappropriately dressed like seculars (e.g., Langland’s Proud Priest in Antichrist’s vanguard, a semi-vulgar, dandified lady’s man in Piers, or Audelay’s crowdpleasing and woman-satisfying “Sir John”).30 But Hoccleve’s condemnation, voiced, like all this critique, through the sage Old Man, is nonetheless stern and implicitly embittered, as if asking: how is it that even the decadent ones are beneficed when I am not? Benefices were very often an important part of the trajectory of a successful career in royal government. Recent studies of civil servants comparable to Hoccleve shed a great deal of light on this problem, and two who happen also to be authors, again like Hoccleve, will interest us here. The first is Thomas Fovent (or Favent),31 who did the same job as Chaucer, as controller of the wool custom, and the second is the young John Shirley (an Exchequer clerk),32 both intriguing cases in relation to Hoccleve. They both show that a benefice was awarded either (1) as a way of continuing in government ser vice with secure income (with the assumption of hiring a vicar or chaplain to do the routine parish work) or potentially (2) as an end in itself (i.e., a substantial benefice with cure of souls). In Fovent’s case, as Clementine Oliver has shown,33 evidence of how much time he actually spent doing parish work in Wiltshire is unclear, though he is on record as being present for episcopal visitations. Though it seems—from what we can tell at this distance—that Fovent’s main passion was his political chronicle writing and that he was often in London (notably for a court case he was involved with), equally, there is no direct evidence of outright neglect of his parish duties. Whether it was through the influence of a kinswoman who was an abbess,34 or through his government ser vice that he was awarded one of his benefices, his case suggests what ecclesiastical records generally show on a large scale: that family clout or patronage helped a great deal, and that if one lacked either, one might well find oneself, like Hoccleve and Audelay, left on the sidelines. Whether Fovent was “deserving” of a benefice in the terms that Hoccleve sets out is hard for us to assess solely from his extant writing, Historia sive Narracio de Modo et Forma Mirabilis Parliamento apud Westmonasterium . . . per Thomam Favent Clericum Indicta (History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster . . . declared by Thomas Favent, Clerk) (1396).35 The text is in Latin, a political or polemical history in genre, but Andrew Galloway has noted echoes of the Psalms and religious drama in the text, and as Oliver shows, he was sincere in his views about parliamentary reform for the common good and the independence of the civil ser vice. He falls into a category at least of political reformist thinkers with

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whom someone like Langland can be associated, and he seems to have held his benefices ably.36 John Shirley, the chatty and invaluable collector of Chaucerian poetry, is an even more interesting case for comparison with Hoccleve because with this Exchequer clerk, we have direct evidence of someone receiving a benefice with cure of souls, having a vicar as proxy—“living the dream,” as Hoccleve might think—only to reject it entirely after a short period.37 Kathryn Veeman has revealingly uncovered the episcopal records of his appointments, and they show that as a comparatively young man, he was awarded the benefice of Roche, Cornwall, but that Shirley held it for only two relatively short periods, and apparently giving it up both times in order to dodge ordination: on the first occasion, he resigned the benefice himself to prevent it, and on the second, he was dismissed. As Veeman explains, “Stafford’s register explicitly records the reason for Shirley’s dismissal from the benefice: he was deprived of his position because he did not enter holy orders within a year of his commission as rector, as required by canon law.”38 It is invaluable to have this kind of evidence for a literary writer. This fellow civil servant, Middle English poet (albeit a minor one), and compiler of Chauceriana, held the benefice as a clerk in minor orders; while it was not always rigorously enforced, canon law required that beneficed clergy be capable of proceeding to the priesthood within a year. The Church provided one route to social advancement, and many saw taking orders as the first step to a professional career. Clerks in minor orders often delayed taking higher orders until they secured a benefice. However, when Shirley was rewarded with a benefice, he appears to have deliberately balked at becoming ordained. There is no evidence that he was “benefice-hopping” or trying to move to a more lucrative position.39 By November  1400, Shirley was in royal ser vice working for the Lancastrian treasurer and thereafter had a long career in the Exchequer; he was never awarded a benefice again, despite attempts made by his patron on his behalf. Veeman’s evidence shows then that ordination might be evaded, at least for a time, but it also shows that the duties and responsibilities of holding a benefice with cure of souls were very real, even as an absentee civil servant—and that the ordination and the celibacy that went with it were indeed real requirements, though apparently not everyone’s cup of tea. Hoccleve, then, is trying to show that it would have been his, though some in Hoccleve’s own time, and more so

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as the fifteenth century unfolded, would choose against the benefice as a means of support, preferring a secular life to the income security of the benefice. Shirley is emblematic, I think, of the larger story of the laicization of the civil ser vice over the course of the fifteenth century—a fascinating and crucial development in government history and eventual secularity.40 And Shirley’s is a fascinating instance in relation to Hoccleve, not least because of Shirley’s landmark efforts to preserve, compile, and annotate Middle English poetry for a midcentury audience of office or household readers, but also because these manuscripts in some cases contained Hoccleve’s verse, alongside Chaucer’s and that of other London poets.41 In light of this, Hoccleve’s attempt to preserve celibacy (at least official celibacy by not marrying) for so long is very telling as to which of these trajectories he saw for himself, and how seriously he was prepared to take the obligation of a benefice, if it were awarded—especially when viewed in light of the Prologue’s extensive disquisition on the qualities appropriate to the beneficed, and his interest here and elsewhere in pastoral care. The Old Man asks Hoccleve whether his office mates have been beneficed (as indeed John Bailey and some others were), and his response begins an arch-satirical passage on the intrigue of government and court advancement: “But how been thy felawes lookid to At hoom? Been they nat wel ybeneficed?” “Yis, fadir, yis. Ther is oon clept Nemo: He helpith hem, by him been they chericed; Nere he, they weren poorely chevyced; He hem avanceth, he fully hir freend is; Sauf oonly him, they han but fewe freendes.” (1485–91) Unable or unwilling to name the power ful patrons who are helping his colleagues but not (at least not yet) him, Hoccleve instinctively goes for an allegorical solution, a type of riddle: “Nemo” (Nobody) has seen to these promotions. The figure “Nemo” is commonly used in homiletic writings, riddles, and even in law codes (we will see a legal instance cited by Hoccleve in the next section). Many scholars have puzzled over this passage, and the part about benefices has caused some confusion. “Nemo,” James Simpson suggests, may be a reference to Odysseus (who adopted the name as a ruse to evade the giant Polyphemus)42—though, of course, the original epic would not have been known directly to Hoccleve, as Simpson also notes. Whether or not he knew

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the epic’s tale, “Nemo” functions as a ruse here, too, since he employs a personification-allegory as a dodge or joke—a rather Langlandian habit of mind—to avoid saying exactly who has helped his colleagues come to benefice success. “Nemo,” then, just as with Odysseus, was not really “no one”—but very much someone (influential). Indeed, we know that Hoccleve did see office mates promoted upward, and as the cases of Fovent and Shirley demonstrate, major patrons were often behind the acquisition of a benefice.43 In the next stanza (1492–98),44 however, he makes a striking clarification: it is not the clients for whom they write in the Privy Seal, who help by exerting their influence, but rather quite the contrary, and in fact he goes on to say (1499–1505) that such clients can sometimes even cheat them of payment (this launches yet another grievance narrative). But the disappointment or even bitterness in Hoccleve’s voicing here, especially in the “Nemo” passage and elsewhere, is palpable and very like Audelay’s, as we’ll see in Chapter 4). As consolation, both poets fall back on the kinds of condemnation of blind patronage, pluralism, and the promotion of the undereducated we have just seen the Old Man pronounce, partly as a form of self-defense and self-justification. Hoccleve was to remain mostly dependent on his annuity, which had been granted to him in 1399 for life, or, as his contract phrases it, “until he is promoted by us to an ecclesiastical benefice without cure of souls (ad beneficium ecclesiasticum sine cura) to the value of twenty pounds a year.”45 This formulation (sine cura) indicates, as we saw in Storey’s evidence, that the first career step was often not a rectorship (a benefice with cure of souls)—that could come later—but more often a prebend (a position without cure of souls), likely a canonry in a royal chapel, for instance, as one of his Privy Seal contemporaries, William Donne, had.46 Hoccleve himself makes this distinction elsewhere in a passage about benefices, when the Old Man says: Ful many men knowe I that gane and gape Aftir sum fat and ryche benefice; Chirche or provendre [prebend]. (1408–10) As H. S. Bennett explains, “This was a prize for ever dangling before the eyes of the hard-worked clerk. There was always the hope of being appointed to a sinecure which would help him to pay his way without any tiresome conditions of residence or the conduct of ser vices which would interfere with the holding of his clerkship. It required a very substantial living [i.e., benefice with cure of souls] to persuade a man to surrender his civil for an ecclesiastical appointment.”47

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Bennett names three of Hoccleve’s colleagues (Bailey, Donne, and John Wellingborough) who enjoyed such benefices (Donne and Wellingborough in prebends and hospital wardenships)48 and who, unlike Hoccleve, “could afford to regard their official salary with comparative indifference.”49 It sounds as if what Hoccleve, however, most hoped for was top prize, that “very substantial living,” that is, with the duty of cure of souls: he insists that he had wanted to be a priest, and he goes some length toward practicing (at least “virtually,” as we might say today) pastoral care via his poetry. This unexpected pastoral streak in Hoccleve is perhaps most evident by contrast with his mentor Chaucer: it is hard to imagine Chaucer yearning to be a priest, engaging with the finer points of canon law, excoriating a named contemporary on the finer points of Wycliffite theology, or impassioned by a text such as Hoccleve’s “Lerne to Dye.” Chaucer had his sober religious moments, but not moments like these. This difference is perhaps most evident in a text of Hoccleve’s that modern scholars know well but mainly invoke for other purposes: Remonstrance Against Oldcastle, to which we turn next. This is not the place for a full exploration of Hoccleve’s spirituality or religious oeuvre, something that mid-twentieth-century scholars first uncovered, producing results still worth noting, alongside the important insights of more recent scholars (such as Ethan Knapp, Amy Appleford, Nicholas Perkins, and Sebastian Sobecki). Among earlier scholars was Penelope Doob, who argued that key to Hoccleve’s poetic treatment of his own madness was the Penitential Psalms,50 showing that they are a distinctive leitmotif of his poetry (as also for Langland, Usk, and Audelay). They were bread-and-butter texts to a clerk in minor orders and are mentioned explicitly in Langland’s C.V apologia as among the tools he labours with, as we saw.51 Jerome Mitchell, another of the midtwentieth-century new critics, wrote that “religious lyrics form an important group of poems within the Hoccleve canon,”52 often comparing Hoccleve’s religious verse favourably to Lydgate’s, a partiality for Hoccleve also shared by Rosemary Woolf in her major study of the religious lyric.53 But strikingly, what both stress is Hoccleve’s engagingly human treatment of his religious genres. As Mitchell notes, “Hoccleve’s conception of the Deity implies a closer relationship between man and his Maker than one can find in Lydgate’s religious verse. . . . [Lydgate] would not address the Deity in such an intimate fashion.”54 So, too, Mitchell praises Hoccleve’s conception of the Virgin Mary “as a human being” in “Compleynte of the Virgin Before the Cross” and praises his “Lerne to Dye” as a “humanization” of the genre and as “something Lydgate never attempted.”55 Since then there has also been a long-standing tendency to “secularize”

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Hoccleve (e.g. in M. C. Seymour’s Oxford edition he downplayed the amount of religious verse in Hoccleve’s canon,56 choosing to define the genre as strictly devotional and to ignore the religious underpinnings of other texts like the RP, its glosses and religious polemic, even the Remonstrance Against Oldcastle). But more recently, Amy Appleford has freshly analyzed Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue for its inflections of the Office of the Dead and his growing resolution (despite the Friend’s advice) to translate Suso in his Lerne to Dye, concluding that Hoccleve was “increasingly confident in his newfound spiritual privilege.”57 So, too, as noted above, in Last Words, Sobecki intuits from the historical evidence surrounding Lerne to Dye the state of Hoccleve’s spiritual condition, not just his psychological one. Knapp, too, keeps Hoccleve’s religious thought in clear focus, everywhere noting its complexity and his “due reverence for the theology of intercession” in the lyrics, despite the intrusion even there of patronage concerns, and his “persistent skeptical meditation on the power of images” in the Oldcastle poem.58 Like Knapp (and Perkins, quoted below), I believe the Remonstrance is more complicated than the sum of its parts. It is an extraordinary performance, a case of theology at work, offered, I would suggest, as a form of ser vice to the public: Hoccleve fills a role here of “public theologian,” not unlike the modern idea of the public intellectual. The very self-confidence with which Hoccleve weighed in on the doctrinal issues of Lollardy should be seen to some extent as relating to this public-oriented pastoral impulse. Often treated by modern scholars merely as a political maneuver to impress Lancastrian patrons (doubtless also a real factor),59 or a matter of offended orthodoxy, I would stress rather Hoccleve’s confidence in his ability to discuss in English the range of doctrinal issues he does, even at a time when doing so might have been seriously misunderstood. This certainly sets him far apart from writers like Chaucer, who at most dabbled at the edges of the controversy, making oblique jokes or allusions, as Paul Strohm established.60 It even sets Hoccleve apart from Lydgate (though I take seriously Robert Meyer-Lee’s reminder of the shared aspirations of Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s historical self-textualizations in a climate of patronage). As Seymour noted in his edition of the poem: “The poem may be compared, in general terms, with Lydgate’s A Defence of Holy Church (147 ll.), probably composed after the disturbances of 1413–14. . . . Lydgate’s poem is shorter, more literary, less personal; Hoccleve’s poem speaks directly to the purpose with passionate conviction. The differences are characteristic.”61 The poem to Oldcastle is striking for many reasons, but among those relevant to Hoccleve’s proletarian clerical status, are, for instance, those Nicholas Perkins

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has observed regarding his use of “the figure of the martyr as a significant touchstone,” especially his “layered use of allegory and analogy between exemplary figures and readers—including his own poetic persona—draw[ing] the public anti-Lollard rhetoric of the Remonstrance into contact with personal and penitential reflections in The Regiment of Princes and the Series.”62 To this insightful observation, I’d add that even the opening words, “The laddre of heuene,” gesture toward some of the deeper devotional, monastic, or perhaps even mystical “scale” genres; interestingly, Audelay, writing by then in a monastic setting, used exactly the same phrase as one of his own titles.63 More remarkable for our purposes is the extent to which Hoccleve adopts a priestly pose, “talking down” to Oldcastle by reminding him that he is a layman unfit to interpret Scripture— while Hoccleve himself proceeds to do so, implicitly offering the advice not of a peer but of a clerically trained, intellectual superior. Hoccleve goes so far as to insist that Oldcastle should stick to reading romances or—still patronizingly— that if he would read the Bible, to confine himself to its history books. One could not even imagine Chaucer meting out such condescending advice nor— more interestingly given his own clerical status—Langland. Hoccleve uses as his authority the laws of Justinian: The christen emperour Iustinian, As it is written, who so list it see, Made a law deffendyng euery man, Of what condicion or what degree Þat he were of, nat shoulde hardy be For to despute of the feith openly; And there vpon sundry peynes sette he. (Seymour, lines 184–90) Just as with the canon law glosses in the RP, here too the stanza is bolstered by a Latin gloss from Justinian labeled by its incipit, “Lege Nemo,” and written in Hoccleve’s more cursive hand and in different ink (glossing would have been done later; see Figure  3.2).64 In the Latin gloss is the explicit mention of the prohibition against not only members of the military, but even of the clergy (“Nemo Clericus vel militaris”) publicly treating of the Christian faith (“de fide christiana publice”) so as to provoke untruth or tumult. Hoccleve’s English, however, is more general (“deffendyng euery man . . . / of what degree” from disputing of the “feith openly”), an interesting moment of slippage since “Nemo” apparently conveniently excludes Hoccleve, who weighs in publicly himself on a controversial faith matter. We know Hoccleve was sensitive to the implications of this

Figure 3.2. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111, fol. 9v, a Latin gloss in Hoccleve’s Remonstrance Against Oldcastle from Justinian, labeled by its incipit, “Lege Nemo,” and written in Hoccleve’s more cursive hand in different ink (glossing would have been done later in the production process). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library.

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topic because he had elsewhere advocated, in fact in his Balades to Henry V of the same period (1413–14), for a “special prohibition of the discussion of religious matters,” but such a prohibition did not emerge from the Leicester parliament of 1414, as Seymour notes, despite Hoccleve’s plea.65 This pairing of the draconian Latin gloss with Hoccleve’s own public intervention on a matter of heresy, whatever loophole he allowed himself, certainly underlines his own identification with a privileged public intellectual class. In a more famous quote from this poem, Hoccleve goes on to advocate that Sir John Oldcastle stick to readings more appropriate to his knightly social class: Bewar, Oldcastel, and for Crystes sake Clymb no more in holy writ so hie. Rede the storie of Lancelot de Lake, Or Vegece, Of the aart of chivalrie, The Seege of Troie or Thebes. Thee applie To thing þat may to the’ordre of knight longe. (193–98) These are indeed exactly the kinds of works found in abundance in magnate and knightly libraries, but these are not the only such books found there—indeed such libraries often also contained many Latin and French books, biblical materials, and in some cases Bibles.66 Perhaps this is why Hoccleve relents enough to offer Oldcastle this sop: If thee list thing rede of auctoritee, To thise stories sit it thee to goon, To Iudicum, Tegum, and Iosue, To Iudith, and to Paraliponmenon, And Machabe. And sikir as stoon, If þat thee list in hem bayte thyn ye, More autentik thing shalt thow fynde noon Ne more pertienent to chiualrie. (201–8) Oldcastle could, if he wants to read real “authorities” for himself, take on the history books of the Old Testament, but the books of the Bible requiring real theological exposition, such as the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Pauline epistles, are not listed. The histories, Hoccleve implies, a “clericus” would approve for a knight’s reading—that being a role that, at the moment, Hoccleve himself conveniently fills.

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Hoccleve’s inclusion of some extensive Latin quotes in the marginal notes of the Oldcastle poem create, as do the Chaucer glosses, a “two-tiered” audience, or perhaps more.67 The tone or message of the Latin in these is often slightly different in emphasis and, oddly, in this poem less likely to testify to the clergy’s elevated status than the Middle English, which is written to frighten and impress. Take, for instance, the English verses and Latin gloss of Hoccleve’s (frankly) rather overblown apostrophe to Constantine two stanzas later, having rebuked Oldcastle for not obeying priests as did knights of “tymes þat be past” (209), as did even the great emperor Constantine himself. In English, Constantine is made to say of priests that “they been goddes to vs sent” and that it is in no way fitting “That a man sholde goddes iuge and deeme” (228 and 230). The Latin gloss authorizing this statement, however, is rather more sober: it speaks of the marvelous honour Constantine showed to priests (“De admirabili honore quem Constantinus Imperator exhibuit ecclesie Ministris”), and how God constituted them to judge men, but that men might not judge priests (“vos autem non potestis ab hominibus iudicari”). But in the Latin gloss, priests are not deified.68 Once again, in the English, and on the point of clerical power, one senses that Hoccleve doth protest too much. If we add observations like this to the extensive and strident refutations of Lollard doctrine Hoccleve provides (already well known to scholars and the most analyzed aspect of this poem), certainly among the more extensive rebuttals available in English at the time, one has to see Hoccleve’s project here, I think, as more than just a political maneuver. It is more even than just a demonstration of personal orthodoxy. The poem established Hoccleve in a profoundly pastoral role—he becomes a public pastor through his writing, a role he did not have through the official Church. And that is the role, I have suggested, that, in addition to his well-demonstrated political and patronage aspirations, he had sincerely wanted for himself. After all, in seeking the patronage he so widely sought, he could have stuck to flattering or lighthearted roundels and ballades or safe philosophical treatments of material such as forms the main body of the RP. Instead, Hoccleve chose several religious topics across his career, even engaging in spirituality, a subject about which he is rarely original but always sincere.69 Never having captured the elusive benefice, however, Hoccleve represents himself (publicly at least) as practicing acceptance and perhaps also angling for some patronage of a different sort. In the Prologue to the RP, after an extensive discussion of which kinds of clerks and civil servants are or are not suited for benefices, the Old Man refers rather poignantly to Hoccleve’s long-standing

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yearning for a benefice. As long as Hoccleve has worked at the Privy Seal, the Old Man says, he has longed for advancement “unto sum chirche or this (before this)” (1466). But he comforts him that God clearly did not want to have him advanced (“enhanced”) to a church, that He sent him a wife “for thy beste.” So longe as thow, sone, in the Privee Seel Dwelt hast and woldest fayn han been avanced Unto sum chirche or this, I deeme weel That God nat wolde have thee enhanced In no swich plyt; I holde thee wel chanced; God woot and knowith every hid entente; He for thy beste a wyf unto thee sente. (1464–70) The argument that God did not wish it to happen is the ultimate argument (some might say the ultimate dodge), and perhaps therein lay a real consolation, or a public coping mechanism, as he watched others from the office promoted. Chief among the Old Man’s reasons are that Hoccleve might have become just like the beneficed but undisciplined priests he so despises: If that thow haddest par cas been a preest, Thow woldest han as wantounly thee gyed As dooth the nyceste of hem that thow seest. And God forbeede thow thee haddest tyed Therto but if thyn herte might han plyed For to observe it wel. (1471–76) The final question mark, then, over this “road not taken” is: would Hoccleve’s heart have bent (“plyed”) to the task of living up to just observance of his calling (“for to observe it wel”)? Despite the brief and necessarily self-deprecating comments about the possibility that habits of his conventional “misspent youth” (real or imagined) might have re-emerged and gotten in the way of the inclination of his heart, the question is unanswerable. Just such a large question dogs all such meditations on life’s what-ifs. And here in Hoccleve’s major poem, it remains the last lingering personal thought, hanging over the entire Prologue. Some, as Spearing suggests, may read the Prologue as influenced by the fictionalization impulses, whether of the French dit or something else. But given the amount of detailed marginalia Hoccleve himself added verifying its personal historicity,70 and the substantial agreement between the Hoccleve life records

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and the Prologue’s details, I would prefer to read it as a form of poetic selfrepresentation (akin to what Sobecki calls the “porous” pre-Modern self). Either way, one thing is indisputable: this is a compelling portrait of career disappointment, vocational aspiration, and the alleged systemic corruptions that visit this sorrow upon many educated young clerks. This is, in a sense, a lament for a career path that closed, but also a work of consolation for the path taken. And this, too, as it models acceptance, is the act of a public pastorate. In its contours, this is a Langlandian move. Indeed, as noted earlier, the whole “vocational crisis” premise of the R’s Prologue is rather Langlandian, as is the persistent turn to canon law—at least among vernacular models known to be accessible to Hoccleve, Piers Plowman seems closest. Both writers share the impulse toward “bibliographic ego” in their meta-discursive self-representations of vocational crisis. One of the key reasons, as I’ve identified elsewhere, that tropes of bibliographic ego may be invoked are as an aid to overcoming public embarrassment or winning back a critical or offended audience.71 We know from Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue that this was very much on his mind, and even while the dit style may account for some aspects, it cannot account for them all.72 Whatever else Hoccleve learned from Chaucer, he did not learn to write like this. To write an apologia pro vita sua, with this sort of introspective self-questioning, is to invoke the later Langland.

2. Langland, Hoccleve and Careerist London Reading Circles for Middle English Literature Though more conservative than Langland religiously, and writing from the perspective of what the Old Man calls a “courtier,” Hoccleve nonetheless sounds in some patches like the older London poet, especially in his ability to layer allegory (noted in Perkins’s and Spearing’s comments above), and more generally, as we have seen, on the proletarian issues of writing office work (noted in Hanna’s comments above), and the urgent need for ecclesiastical reform. Copies of Langland’s texts would have been readily available in London Middle English reading circles during Hoccleve’s working life—and in book production terms, these were still quite intimate circles. Certainly, many in Hoccleve’s earliest audiences would have known Piers.73 But we can do better than to speak in generalities. We know from recent Middle English manuscript studies that there are now several strong connections between Hoccleve himself and London scribes of Piers Plowman. Of course, one of Hoccleve’s own fellow copyists on the

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Trinity Gower was Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes’s famous Scribe B (this remains an established fact regardless of some recent debate about Linne Mooney’s identification of B as Adam Pinkhurst). This same scribe is also an early copyist of important poetic manuscripts of both Chaucer’s and Langland’s works.74 Hoccleve was Scribe E on the Trinity Gower manuscript, and evidence of his scribal and editorial involvement as a likely literary executor of Chaucer’s work, including the early Hengwrt Chaucer, is a crucial indicator that he worked directly with Scribe B, who copied both Hengwrt and Ellesmere and the important Trinity B-text Piers Plowman.75 Another of Hoccleve’s companions on the Trinity Gower was Doyle and Parkes’s Scribe D, a highly prolific Middle English literary scribe connected with the London Guildhall (more recently identified as John Marchaunt by Mooney and Stubbs).76 Scribe D also copied the Ilchester Piers Plowman (University of London Library [S.L.] V.88), one of his earliest, as Jeremy Smith established. As discussed (Chapter 2, Case Study 2) above, financial entries in Tyckhill’s St. Paul’s rent roll (the one in which he composed “A Bird of Bishopswood” in 1396) relate to John Marchaunt and the Guildhall. Further connections between English literary scribes of the Guildhall and some of those working at the London livery companies show up in textual affiliations, as Simon Horobin explains, among three important early Piers manuscripts: the Ilchester MS; Huntington Library, MS HM 143 (the base text for Derek Pearsall’s C-text edition); and Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102.77 Though Mooney and Stubbs argue for complex connections of Guildhall scribes with Hoccleve or other clerks in royal ser vice interested in English poetry c. 1400, clearly many more scribes copying English worked in London venues other than the Guildhall.78 While, of course, the influence of Chaucer on Hoccleve is tangible throughout his oeuvre, we must not peg Hoccleve as a monotone poet. Hoccleve shows a range of influences,79 and since he was working as Scribe E on a Gower project with the two best-known Middle English London scribes (Doyle and Parkes’s Scribe B and Scribe D) and others, we should not underestimate his connections in this still nascent field of vernacular London book production. This is not the place for a full accounting of the impact of Langlandian tradition (writ small or large) on Hoccleve, a much bigger subject than the topic of this book affords. But a few suggestions from the RP Prologue are appropriate as a way of underlining what it seems that Langland’s writing taught Hoccleve about the role of thought (in Langland, allegorized as Will’s own “Thought,” the very first personification Will encounters on his inward journey) and what exploration of interior monologue might sound like in Middle English poetry.

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Insofar as self-preoccupation is a major characteristic of proletarian poetry (as we also saw in Chapter 1 with EME careerist poets, and as we will see in spades with Audelay), a brief commentary on some of the themes or leitmotifs shared by the two poets (as evident in the RP Prologue) seems important here. The opening of the Prologue is suggestive of an interior monologue as “Thoght” becomes the first allegorical figure the “I” speaker encounters, long before we get to dialogue with the Old Man: At Chestres In, right faste by the Stronde, As I lay in my bed upon a nyght, Thoght me byrefte of sleep the force and might. (5–7) The only agency here belongs entirely to the personified “Thoght.” The Strand is, of course, the main street that still runs between London and Westminster and the location, as Blyth notes,80 of Hoccleve’s La Male Regle, where “thought” was already resonant in his poetry. The Privy Seal clerks’ residence, Chester’s Inn along the Strand, as we saw in the last chapter, was crucial to the intellectual and educational life of the city as a zone in which prominent scholars congregated in bishops’ palaces, in which the Inns of Court and the “lesser inns” of Chancery were housed for legal and scribal training, and in which some of the religious orders held studia for advanced training in theology, philosophy, and other subjects. In this area, near the Temple Inn, was the Carmelite house,81 where, in fact, Hoccleve places the Old Man as attending the Carmelite mass daily. Both London geography and the allegory of “Thoght,” then, dominate the first few lines of the Prologue. Blyth offers this note on the rich word and personification of “thought” and the question of allegory in Hoccleve’s verse: “Spearing (p.  119) remarks on Hoccleve’s un-Chaucerian practice of ‘persistent use of small-scale personification. . . . This is one of the hallmarks of his style throughout his work, and may conceivably indicate the influence of Piers Plowman, a poem that was certainly widely read in the London area in the early fifteenth century.’ However, Hoccleve’s personifications are usually lightly suggested and never developed into Langlandian dramatic scenes.”82 While Blyth is correct about the scale of Hoccleve’s allegories, I would note that Langland, too, uses multiple allegorical techniques, as we have known ever since Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s landmark study years ago, many just as quick, short-lived, and effective while they last as Hoccleve’s.83 Langland’s “dramatic allegory,” for instance (the kind in which one could replace the allegory’s abstract name with, say, Tom, Dick, or Harry and have a coherent, realistic story), can be either

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swiftly developed or developed at length. The very shortest ones Pearsall has referred to as Langland’s “embryonic allegories,” those “momentary flowerings of allegorical visualization that spring from every fissure in the surface of the text,” but they can nonetheless be powerful over their short lives.84 Hoccleve, in fact, can be a very effective user of embryonic allegories—he grasps the technique with naturalness and assurance. Take, for instance, the tiny allegory of “Wach” (Wakefulness): “Ageyn my lust wach proferred his servyse, / And I admittid him in hevy wyse” (76–77). Like having to open the door to an unwanted guest, the narrator, “in hevy wyse” (economically describing both heart and body), admits insomnia. And so, too, in the opening of the RP, the very fact of developing “thoght” (Thought) as an allegory in a personal, self-reflexive context is reminiscent of Langland’s own striking but also rather short-term use of Thought, who functions as a gatekeeper, so to speak, to every other interior personification the Dreamer will meet, an important cognitive moment in a poem full of them. In an amusing passage punning on “thoghte” at the opening of his interior journey, Will meets a “a muche man, as me thoghte ylike to mysulue,” who calls him “be my kynde name.” The Dreamer asks, “What art thow . . . ?” only to be told, “That wost thou, Wille . . . and no wyht bettere.” But still having to identify himself to the slow-witted Will as “Thouhte,” he marvels, having “sued the this seuen yer, saw thow me no rather [sooner]?” (C.X.68–74, with omissions). In other words, till now, Will has not been acquainted with his own thoughts— surely an allegorical way of saying that he “ doesn’t know himself.” Hoccleve’s treatment of thought similarly takes up the idea that Thought follows him everywhere, only for him, somewhat more menacingly: This dar I seyn, may no wight make his boost That he with thoght was bet than I aqweynted, For to the deeth he wel ny hath me feynted. (12–14) In his restless state, he also does something Langlandian: he heads into the natural world. While London had no Malvern Hills, it still had fields— Tyckhill’s poem, in fact, is set in one such field, Bishop’s Wood. And one such field becomes Hoccleve’s wilderness, so to speak, very like the B-text’s opening chanson d’aventure wilderness (and not at all like the daisy-laden world of Chaucer’s dream visions): I roos me up, for boote fond I noon In myn unresty bed lenger to lye.

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Into the feeld I dressid me in hye, And in my wo I herte-deep gan wade, As he that was bareyne of thoghtes glade. (115–19) And in this very Langlandian moment, a guide figure (who would prove a religious guide figure) appears and asks whether he sleeps—so, too, began Will’s first interlocutor early in the poem, Holy Church (“Wille, slepestou?” [Piers, C.I.5]). So, too, begins Hoccleve’s dialogue: “He stirte unto me and seide, ‘Sleepstow, man?’ ” (131). Though not ostensibly a heavenly interlocutor, the Old Man appears suddenly, as in visionary convention (as Erica Machulak argues, Hoccleve has already subverted Chaucerian dream vision expectations),85 with an inevitability and gravity underlined by his almost biblical “I am here”: “A, who is there?” “I,” quod this olde greye, “Am heer,” and he me tolde the manere How he spak to me, as yee herde me seye. (134–36) The Old Man is all the more mysterious because we never learn his name. Similarly, at the end of the lengthy Prologue, another visionary convention is invoked when Hoccleve does not want his guide to leave, echoing, perhaps again, Will’s frightened response to Holy Church’s threatened departure—this is religious visionary convention for which the expression of fear of loss is a sign of spiritual authenticity.86 The Old Man, too, whose significance and very being must be at least partly symbolic of the divine since Hoccleve can from henceforth only find him at mass, perhaps carries more than a hint of allegory: “What, fadir, wolden yee thus sodeynly Departe fro me? Petir, Cryst forbeede! Yee shal go dyne with me, treewely.” “Sone, at o word, I moot go fro thee neede.” “Nay, fadir, nay!” “Yis, sone, as God me speede.” “Now, fadir, syn it may noon othir tyde, Almighty God yow save and be your gyde; And graunte grace me that day to see That I sumwhat may qwyte your goodnesse. But, goode fadir, whan and wher shul yee And I eft meete?” “Sone, in soothfastnesse,

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I every day heere at the Carmes messe, It faillith nat, aboute the hour of sevene.” “Wel, fadir, God bytake I yow of hevene.” (1996–2009) The language of these two stanzas, especially the lexis, is far more Langlandian in tone than Chaucerian (Chaucer wrote nothing like this), right down to the oath “Peter!” collocated with Christ’s name, as so often in key moments of Piers. The reference to meeting at the Carmelites’ mass is also intriguing, staged quite literally in the neighbourhood Hoccleve lived in, and, as Sobecki has recently shown, the Carmelite house where Hoccleve’s close friend and colleague, John Bailey, fervently wished to be buried.87 Most relevant to us in this study is that the first thing that Hoccleve does by way of working toward self-identification (a full revelation of his name, as we know, much delayed till later in the Prologue) is to assert his clerical status. Echoing perhaps the Host’s address to Chaucer the pilgrim at a key moment in the Canterbury Tales, or perhaps Will’s parallel query to Thought quoted above (“What art thow . . . ?”), the Old Man asks, “My sone, hast thow good lust thy sorwe drye / And mayst releeved be? What man art thow?” (143–44). Whether the Old Man is, as he would be in Langland’s allegorical method, a facet of Hoccleve’s own mind, or a heaven-sent interlocutor, or a simple earthly, lay “confessor” figure is hard to say, for we have hints of those possibilities. Though the revelation of the poet’s own name, Hoccleve, is deferred, significantly, the portrait begins with a declaration of his clerkly status, and it, too, invokes a scene in Langland, the one in which Imaginatif sets Will straight once and for all about the fact that intellectual achievement is valuable. Will has raved on like a fool or madman against the value of learning, and anyone who knows Langland’s poem, as Erica Machulak has shown, thinks of this passage when they encounter Hoccleve’s.88 Here is Hoccleve’s: “Art thow aght lettred?” “Yee,” quod I, “sumdel.” “Blessid be God, than hope I, by Seint Gyle, That God to thee thy wit shal reconsyle Which that me thynkith is fer fro thee went Thurgh the assaut of thy grevous torment. Lettred folk han gretter discrecion And bet conceyve konne a mannes sawe, And rather wole applie to reson,

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And from folie sonner hem withdrawe, Than he that neithir reson can ne lawe, Ne lerned hath no maner letterure.” (150–60) The line “And from folie sonner hem withdrawe” seems like a pointed allusion to Imaginatif ’s extensive argument: Imaginatif had caught up with Will (at C.XIII.218ff.) after he had made a fool of himself with Reason, following C. XIV’s long affirmation of the superiority of learning and the clerical life: “he that knoweth clergie cone sounore aryse” (C.XIV.110). It is notable, then, that Hoccleve begins his self-portrait with this. He wants the reader to know that he (his narrator) is part of the clerical club. In the next several lines, he borrows heavily from Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, as Melinda Nielsen has shown, and even from the Wife of Bath’s,89 but shifts back to Langlandian models, however, when the Old Man describes his own ill-spent youth, his “recheles” state (610), a word, like “folie,” heavily used and complexly allegorized in Piers Plowman C’s famous personification, Rechelessnesse (C.XI, XII, and XIII, leading up to the encounter with Reason itself): Whan I was yong, I was ful rechelees, Prowd, nyce, and riotous for the maistrie, And among othir, consciencelees. By that sette I nat the worth of a flie; And of hem hauntid I the conpaignie That wente on pilgrimage to taverne, Which before unthrift berith the lanterne. (RP 610–16)90 In this passage, there is a Langlandian juxtaposition, however underdeveloped, of the reckless (rechelees) and conscience-less (consciencelees) and certainly a Langlandian use of embryonic allegory (the tavern-pilgrims bear the lantern “before unthrift,” a tiny allegory translatable as Reckless Spending, who follows sinisterly in the shadow of those who make taverns their pilgrimage sites). This is developed even more markedly in the next lines, reminiscent of Langland’s comment on false beggars that the “brewhous ben here churches” (C.IX.98). The Old Man continues the allegory: “ There offred I wel more than my tythe, / And withdrow Holy Chirche his duetee” (617–18). Peppered with Langlandian allegory, Hoccleve uses this section to build up a very specific portrait of himself, arriving at the facts about his job in the Office of the Privy Seal:

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“Sauf first, or thow any ferther proceede, O thyng of thee wite wolde I, my sone: Wher dwellist thow?” “Fadir, withouten dreede, In the office of the Privee Seel I wone And wryte—there is my custume and wone Unto the Seel, and have twenti yeer And foure come Estren, and that is neer.” (799–805) Blyth’s note to line 801 underscores the remarkable text length over which Hoccleve builds this self-portrait: “A thousand lines before he reveals his name, Hoccleve here gives precise information about the place and length of his employment. . . . Speaking of King Henry, he even gives the details of his annuity, a remarkably autobiographical moment that aligns exactly with medieval government records about Hoccleve. This does not seem like fiction, nor was it read as such by medieval readers: one put the annotation Privatum sigillum (‘Privy Seal’), beside line 801.”91 Apparently believing that discussions of government salary and payroll delays make for exciting poetry, Hoccleve continues: In th’eschequeer, he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of twenti mark whyle I have lyves space. Mighte I ay payd been of that duetee, It sholde stonde wel ynow with me; But paiement is hard to gete adayes, And that me putte in many foule affrayes. (820–26) He is, in effect, versifying government payroll challenges and consequent financial instability—not the most promising material for poetry one would have thought. But proletarian verse is different on this point, and what is most intriguing about this is that when Hoccleve goes into such details, he is actually describing himself, despite his government annuity, as a member of the labouring precariat. Blyth notes, “Owing to the extensive surviving documentary evidence, it has been possible to analyze Hoccleve’s income with some precision. . . . On May  17, 1409, Henry IV had granted Hoccleve an increased annuity of twenty marks. . . . Hoccleve here says that that amount would suffice, but he has not received his Michaelmas (September 29) 1410 payment and it is nearly Easter of 1411. This money was eventually received in July  1411. Delayed and reduced payments were common owing to financial constraints in the last years of

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Henry IV.”92 And as Knapp has explained in some detail, Privy Seal scribes were also dependent for extra income on “scribal piecework” (a fact clearly relevant to the “Nemo” passage discussed earlier in which Hoccleve explains how the scribes are often defrauded even of this type of casual payment) and on “occasional gifts and rewards of patronage” such as were easier to come by for those closer to the king’s household than the Privy Seal scribes were.93 Taken together, these facts bring us a good deal closer to an understanding of exactly what type of patronage Hoccleve might be hoping to achieve at this point, now that hopes for a benefice are no longer on the table. Identifying himself obliquely as a careerist clerk employed by the court (a courtier), Hoccleve confesses to the fear that really grips him and the entire reason for the lengthy dialogue of the Prologue: Ser vice, I woot wel, is noon heritage; Whan I am out of court anothir day, As I moot whan upon me hastith age And that no lenger I laboure may, Unto my poore cote, it is no nay, I moot me drawe and my fortune abyde, And suffre storm aftir the mery tyde. (841–47) The benefice-less state that Hoccleve finds himself in, supported only by an annuity (not always paid) that will end once he is “out of court,” raises the spectre of what aging means to salaried workers of the proletariat, compounded by the uncertainties of falling into the precariat. It means, in effect, an old age in a “poore cote.”94 Intriguingly, Langland’s apologia conjures up the crisis of vocation of his youth (“romynge in remembrance” [C.V.11]) and alludes to the “cot” in which he and his wife, Kytte, now live (C.V.2)—a “cot” made the poorer by his unwillingness to compromise his ecclesiological ideals about how the unbeneficed should make a living or to compromise his outspokenness, writing of the “lollares” and unlearned hermits of London what reason taught him to write (C.V.4–5). Often missed by scholars is the fact that Hoccleve’s much longer account invokes the “cote” as a future crisis, to occur “Whan I am out of court.” Langland, I believe, was the model, at least loosely, for the idea that vocational crisis could be portrayed in poetic dialogue. And Audelay would take the model even further.

chapter 4

Career Disappointment and Langlandian Tradition II John Audelay as the Voice for a Lost Generation

John Audelay, like his contemporary Thomas Hoccleve, was and remains an invaluable spokesman for the underemployed in his poetry. A clerical poet of historical record who hoped for a benefice with cure of souls that never came, Audelay is invaluable as an articulate witness to a lost generation. With his unusually extensive testimony to the plight of the clerical proletariat, he provides, as I will show in this chapter, the most minute description available in late medieval English poetry on the subject. But perhaps most compellingly, Audelay is unique for his generation in trying to offer a complete programme of church reform to solve the problem of proletarian underemployment.1 Like Langland, who had an advanced programme of church reform (which in Piers Plowman is a type of reformist apocalypticism), Audelay presents serious ecclesiological solutions for the future, tinged with an oblique claim to prophetic or divine inspiration, as, for example, here: Mervel ye not of this makyng, Fore I me excuse—hit is not I; This was the Holé Gost wercheng. (The Counsel of Conscience, lines 495–97)2 Though Audelay’s tendencies are prophetic rather than apocalyptic, and though some of his proposed solutions differ—and quite possibly deliberately—from Langland’s, he is closest to Langland of all Middle English poets in his unwav-

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ering belief that the poet has, in part, a prophetic role in church reform. He also strongly resembles Langland in the confident belief that passionate, detailed commentary on ecclesiological crises makes good poetry (whether or not today everyone shares this opinion!).3 This, together with his Langlandian tendency to self-deprecating introspection and genre experimentation, as well as his adventurous alliterative metrics, makes this still rather neglected proletarian poet attractive. As if this were not enough, I will suggest that Audelay does still more for modern literary history: he offers us a striking example of what Chaucerian scholars (following Ian Johnson) call “corrective imitation.” Like Chaucer, it appears that Langland had his fifteenth-century “corrective imitators,” too.4 Like Hoccleve, Audelay has not been studied before as a clerical proletarian. Too often neglected since Ella Keats Whiting’s pioneering, sometimes obscure 1931 EETS edition,5 Audelay’s fortunes changed with the advent of Susanna Fein’s superb 2009 new edition from the lone surviving manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302.6 In the same year, Fein’s edited collection of essays brought several sterling scholars to the task of elucidating his oeuvre.7 Some mysteries about Audelay, however, remain unsolved. Best known are his oftanthologized carols, such as “Childhood” and “Dread of Death.” The former offers rare, wistful, nearly personal commentary on childhood innocence, taking a shockingly non-Augustinian, almost—to modern eyes—Blakean perspective on the guilelessness of youth, for example, when Audelay pictures the child as without covetousness, content to play with four cherry stones: He covetis noght unlaufully— Fore cheré stons is his tresoure. And God wold graunt me my prayer, A child agene I wold I were! (Carol 14, “Childhood,” ed. Fein, lines 9–12) “Dread of Death” (Timor mortis), Rosemary Woolf believed, surpassed both Lydgate and Dunbar on the same topic: “Of the many Timor mortis poems, by far the most moving is that by Audelay beginning, ‘Dred of deþ, sorrow of syn.’ In this, for perhaps the first time in an English lyric poem, the poet truly speaks in his own voice. . . . The deep distress of each stanza is balanced by the refrain, Passio Christi conforta me, a line from the beautiful fourteenth-century Eucharistic prayer, Anima Christi.”8 In light of the tendency for the religious lyric genre to be, in Jonathan Culler’s phrase, “reader-centred” rather than author-centred,9 and therefore more anonymous, Audelay stood out for Woolf. Consistently

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advocating for the quality of his lyrics (in sterling New Critical style) throughout her magisterial 1968 survey, Woolf ’s comments still raise important issues for today, especially for those interested in interiorities.10 Audelay’s verse also presents important issues of form. Woolf would agree with Ingrid Nelson’s perception in 2016 of the liturgical foundations of many lyric forms: “In later medieval England, the lyric genre is defined as much by its cultural practices as by its poetic forms . . . [emerging] indirectly and obliquely from regulated institutional forms, such as liturgical performance and ecclesiastical chronicles. They are propagated within and outside these institutions, as singers, audiences, readers, and writers follow and depart from their norms in varying degrees.”11 And while treatments of the I-speaker in medieval poetry have grown more complex (e.g., A. C. Spearing’s on autography discussed in earlier chapters),12 a poet like Audelay, I would suggest, rather like Hoccleve, confounds even the most determined students of what Spearing sees as the French dit’s anonymizing influence on English poetry. Take, for instance, this macaronic stanza from “Dread of Death:” Lerne this lesson of Blynd Awdlay: When bale is hyest, then bot [remedy] may be, Yif thou be nyd [troubled] nyght or day, Say “Passio Christi conforta me.” (61–64) Audelay urgently wants the reader’s prayers, and so he does not beat about the bush on the question of authorial self-naming. Named self-reference is legion in Audelay’s work, so he falls into the same category as Hoccleve, but more so, in that we cannot ever quite forget the historical person behind the mask, knowing, of course, that it is still a mask, however, as Derek Pearsall says, “flimsy.”13 What will interest us here is the clerical proletarian dimension of his work, mostly uncharted territory and simply enormous. While we cannot come even close here to doing justice to Audelay’s wide range, telegraphically summarized, it covers: (1) his inventive use of a Langlandian alliterative and reformist tradition;14 (2) his metrical innovations, including his thirteen-line alliterative stanza;15 (3) his Shropshire dialect, an important example of regionalism in Middle English poets struggling to set down a still-evolving written language;16 (4) his small but intriguing corpus of secular poems, such as Henry VI,17 showing his political and historical instincts; (5) the striking intimacy of his spirituality, representation of interiority, and almost compulsive treatment of penitence;18 (6) his nearly unique carol corpus;19 (7) his lucid and,

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above all, balanced comments on Wycliffite issues, which, with remarkable clarity, he never conflates with nor allows to hinder his much larger and more urgent agenda for church reform (nor should we);20 and (8) a still underappreciated dimension of his thought being his highly innovative attempt—and in English—to reconcile the friars and the secular clergy, something rarely attempted during the period, even in Latin. All of these topics are worthy of sustained attention, but our main task here is different: to move beyond the penitential themes and other issues that sometimes overwhelm his modern reputation to examine his unique voice at work on behalf of the Church’s many underemployed clerics.

1. John Audelay: Biography, Vocational Crisis, and Proletarian Habit of Mind Two key issues relevant to Audelay’s proletarian status must be addressed at the outset. First, the question of historical biography: late in Audelay’s life, his longtime employer, Lord Richard Lestrange, Lord of Knockin (1381–1449),21 established a chantry position for him at Haughmond Abbey in Shropshire, thereby ensuring him a secure retirement.22 As A. K. McHardy notes, Audelay’s chantry came too late for him to exchange it for a benefice with cure of souls, a possibility in some cases for chantry priests, though such exchanges were controversial (both Chaucer and Langland commented negatively on them), and Audelay might have balked at the prospect himself.23 Like most clerical proletarians, Audelay worked his entire career for a layman: he served as a chaplain (one of two listed in the records) to Lestrange and his household, and in 1426, near the end of his life, he dated his collected works (now Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302) from his chantry position.24 Not only was Audelay unable to acquire a benefice during his lifetime, but, as Michael Bennett has revealed, even when his own employer had two livings in his gift, he bestowed them elsewhere. Audelay knew career disappointment intimately. In fact, we now know, thanks to Bennett’s biographical research, that a tragic and humiliating event involving the Lestrange family was to mark Audelay’s life and his poetry with a grave concern for penitence—a concern far beyond even the usual centrality of the Penitential Psalms for proletarians (as we noted in Langland, Usk, and Hoccleve).25 Bennett’s detailed analysis focuses especially on the 1417 charge of sacrilege made against Lord and Lady Lestrange, for which they underwent official penance imposed by the bishop, along with

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members of their household.26 The event originated with a quarrel between the Lestranges and Sir John Trussell that erupted in violence during the Easter Day ser vice at St.  Dunstan’s-in-the-East, London.27 Extant records label the Lestrange entourage as the aggressors who wounded and maimed Trussell and killed a bystander who had stepped in, Good Samaritan style, to help part the fighters. Punishments were both judicial (the main perpetrators were imprisoned in the Tower, and the subsequent fines crippled the Lestrange estate) and episcopal (these were officially acts of sacrilege).28 What direct role, if any, Audelay himself played in this event is unclear: he was not among those of the Lestrange group imprisoned in the Tower, though perhaps being a cleric, he was kept in the bishop’s prison. Later, a jury named those it considered the assailants, but Audelay was designated part of a lesser party accused of “aiding, inciting, procuring, comforting, abetting and ordering the assailants.”29 The ecclesiastical court ordered the Lestrange entourage to perform a ritual penance (not unlike those imposed in adultery cases, as we will see in Chapter 6). They were forced to walk barefoot, wearing only penitential shifts, from St. Paul’s to St. Dunstan’s, exposed to the mockery of the London crowds, something that would have certainly been an emotionally scarring experience for Audelay as Lestrange’s own chaplain. Scholars agree that some of the obsessive penitential thrust of Audelay’s collected works likely originates in these events.30 While I certainly agree that the events of 1417 were likely critical psychologically to Audelay, given his poetic range, we need to be careful about viewing him wholly through the lens of the Lestrange household’s tragedy. This was numerically a small household, but Audelay’s role as chaplain would have included, of course, conducting ser vices in the Lestrange castle’s historic chapel (which still survives, including its Norman chancel [Figure 4.1]) and, no doubt, hearing confessions and counseling, but also probably doing some legal documentary and secretarial work. And given his musical skills—evident in his unusual carol collection, frequent allusions to instruments, avid metrical interests, and liturgical instincts—he must also have provided “entertainments,” devotional and other wise, to the household, whence the collection of poems, carols, and communal songs for which he is known today. I will also suggest a different kind of evidence for his interest in performance: a concern he shared with other proletarians, especially chantry priests and vicars choral (see Chapters 5 and 6), to inculcate correct and mindful reading and singing—a concern with real literary implications, as we will see, relating to the formalist issues in his poetry. Another passage that sheds important biographical light on Audelay is the colophon concluding his collected works in Douce 302 (titled “Audelay’s

Figure 4.1. Originally the chapel of the castle at Knockin in which Audelay would have conducted ser vices for the Lestrange household. Now the parish church of St. Mary, originally founded by Ralph Le Strange between 1182 and 1195 as a chapel for the castle. The church has a Norman chancel, nave, and north aisle. Image source: https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/File:Knockin _church.JPG. Photo credit: Oosoom.

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Conclusion” by Fein). There he writes that “furst prest to the Lord Strange he was, / Of thys chauntré” (49–50).31 Written in 1426, claiming to be “deeff, sick, blynd,” he includes a standard colophon-style book curse on anyone who might cut pages from it.32 But he then does something much less usual: he adds an assurance that anyone who asks for a copy may have one. He writes, No mon this book he take away, Ny kutt owte noo leef, Y say forwhy, For hit ys sacrelege, sirus, Y yow say! Beth acursed in the dede truly! Yef ye wil have any copi, Askus leeve and ye shul have, To pray for hym specialy That hyt made your soules to save, Jon the Blynde Awdelay. The furst prest to the Lord Strange he was, Of thys chauntré, here in this place, That made this bok by Goddus grace, Deeff, sick, blynd, as he lay. (“Audelay’s Conclusion,” 40–52, emphases added) Although medieval book curses are common, most do not go this extra mile and willingly offer copies. But Audelay’s gesture here is recognizable, as we saw in the Introduction, as a phenomenon characteristic of the educational and meritocratic impulses of proletarian thought.33 Especially among such scribes and authors, one sees this kind of “freedom of information” impulse in government texts such as the anonymous Modus tenendi parliamentum (where copies to the poor are promised for free and a price per page is set for others)34 and in universities, where students paid fees to hear lectures if or as they were able (de singulis auditoribus suis potentibus).35 We also saw the concern with making scribal copies available in the London Guildhall and in the regulations of the London Puy.36 In these particular clerical sub-cultures, the impulse to make information available to anyone who sincerely asks leans (as we would say today) “democratic,” and in the Puy regulations, and here in Audelay, the impulse also stems from a kind of literary evangelism. In the somewhat skeletal staff of the Lestrange household, an important part of Audelay’s job as chaplain would also have been legal and secretarial, so his sharing in this culture makes sense. Audelay would have had basic training in dictamen and related skills acquired early

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by many parish clerks and priests, and especially by clerks in household ser vice as he was.37 Scholars have differed on the actuality and degree of his visual disabilities for scribal work at the end of his life, though, as Susanna Fein has shown, he was engaged with the work of the two scribes (A and B) who made the compilation. Whether he was himself one of those two scribes, or possibly supervising in a correcting role, we cannot know, but he certainly understands scribal culture intimately.38 Audelay is also meticulous in several of his works about providing his name and often biographical details (his location or patron’s name). As John Burrow showed years ago, poets most often self-identify when they are asking for prayers (“pleas and prayers provide the chief matrix within which . . . ‘autobiographical’ writing grows”). In Audelay’s case, the request always bears a special kind of urgency, evident in the extraordinary frequency of his self-naming.39 He is also anxious to share his poetry, both in the spirit of pastoral care and, I suggest, because of his major ecclesiological reformist agenda, which he must have hoped would be taken seriously. Given the frequent number of his self-identifying “signatures” (Fein counts thirteen throughout the manuscript), I would also suggest that he must have regarded this book as a collection of his own originalia, since he is explicit about wanting it to be kept safely and intact for viewing at Haughmond Abbey,40 in exactly the way, for instance, that Richard Rolle’s work was preserved according to a colophon in the manuscript kept chained at Hampole.41 Rolle was perhaps something of a model for Audelay (as we will see below, he interpolates a passage from Rolle into one of his own works), being very well known to contemporary poets and widely disseminated.42 The intended audience (what Anne Middleton would call “the public”)43 for Audelay’s collection is tougher to determine: although the final colophon says that he left the book for the use of the monks at Haughmond Abbey, its contents most obviously span the kinds of poetry that he would have used as a chaplain to laity in a lord’s household: didactic vernacular poetry, including carols for group singing (a genre often written for use with popular or hymn tunes), is mixed in Audelay’s book with a small amount of secular poetry.44 But there is also serious use of Latin in many places throughout. This is complex and may relate, in Audelay’s mind, to the growing phenomenon of the fifteenth century in which some monastic writers in England were beginning to take an active interest in vernacular literature. This phenomenon, as we saw in the Introduction and elsewhere, has yet to be fully studied and understood, but it surely relates to the unprecedented numbers of benefices with cure of souls that came into monastic hands at this point, a form of wealth consolidation for the

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monasteries.45 Audelay’s long poem Marcolf and Solomon, with its strikingly Langlandian and yet post-Langlandian reformist agenda, detailed complaint about proletarian underemployment, and passion for reconciliation among clerical groups, certainly imagines a wide clerical audience. But its extensive concern, as we will see, to encourage the laity to endow monasteries and chantries, and to be more discerning about the quality of their secular priests (since the right to appoint a priest was often held by laymen) is best understood as addressed to a mixed lay and clerical audience. In other words, what we have here is another clarion instance of ambidextrous literature. There is also a final Latin colophon giving alternative titles to his book that hints at Audelay’s poetic purpose, deliberately repeating information in the English colophon—like Hoccleve, Audelay did not want to risk any loss or misunderstanding of the author’s identity: Liber vocatur Concilium conciencie, sic nominatur, aut Scala celi et vita salutis eterni. Iste liber fuit compositus per Johannem Awdelay, capellanum, qui fuit secus et surdus in sua visitacione, ad honorem Domini nostri Jhesu Christi et ad exemplum aliorum in monasterio de Haghmond. The book is called The Counsel [or Council]46 of Conscience, thus is it named, or The Ladder of Heaven and the Life of Eternal Salvation. This book was composed by John Audelay, chaplain, who was blind and deaf in his affliction, to the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ and to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haghmond.47 The names he gives the collection here (Concilium conciencie, sic nominatur, aut Scala celi et vita salutis eterni) imagine the reader progressing toward heaven (interestingly, Hoccleve had invoked the “Ladder of Heaven” as the incipit of his Oldcastle piece—perhaps both writers wanted to convey both a meditative sensibility and also the great height the target penitent has to climb). The Latin is surely an attempt, in part, to reach out to his local monastic audience: surviving library books from Haughmond, I would note, are all in Latin (e.g., a Bible, a glossed copy of the Gospels, and works by Peter Comestor, Hugh of Fouilloy, Alcuin [De sapientia], and Isidore of Seville [Sententiae]),48 and, though Haughmond was not known as a major centre of learning, it sent monks to Oxford and supported St.  Mary’s College, the Augustinian college there.49 Haughmond is largely in ruins today, but one look at some of the splendours

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that still survive (e.g., the enormous abbot’s house and the beautiful Romanesque chapter house) suggests that this was a well-endowed place and that its monastic inhabitants could certainly read Latin with ease. Audelay’s collection, then, seems to imagine a very wide audience beyond monks: laity—including women—secular priests, and even friars (the latter two groups being those that his Marcolf and Solomon seeks explicitly to reconcile). Like Langland, Audelay was very engaged with the wider world (likely including the abbey’s lay donors) and saw needs everywhere, characteristically for proletarians. He was also engaged with himself. Penitence is among the largest overarching themes of the book, and his own personal penitence is a constant. In fact, the events of 1417, coupled with the heavy autobiographical emphasis in his colophon (“Audelay’s Conclusion”), nicely fit the conventions of “bibliographic ego.”50 In prior chapters, we saw several such instances of medieval authors compelled to enter their own works via meta-discursive moments.51 Originally drawn from a tradition of monastic apologia, we have seen that early English vernacular writers (as in The Owl and the Nightingale or Laȝamon’s Brut) and later clerks, such as Langland and Hoccleve, all wrote themselves (or sometimes appear to have written themselves) into their own works, often in search of patronage, in moments of vocational crisis, or in an attempt to win back an offended public. Audelay, a writer markedly shaped by vocational crisis, seems to fit this type of “bibliographic ego” pattern exactly, that is, making repeated, brief “appearances” in his own work with an eye to winning back, or reassuring, an offended public. He does so in part by focusing repeatedly (many would say obsessively) on penitence that, he insists, he himself is undergoing— even as he advocates penitence to his readers. (This is perhaps a hint that Lestrange’s household was likely his earliest audience, too.) Like Hoccleve, Audelay is self-preoccupied. And like Hoccleve, Audelay is in search of a parish he never had.

2. A Word About Form and the Importance of Audelay’s Latin Quotations Before launching deep into Audelay’s longest and most overtly proletarian poem (Marcolf and Solomon), a word must be said about his formalist complexity. Audelay was musically inclined and clearly knowledgeable about metrical forms. Although we do not know for certain whether he composed all the poetry in the collection (scholars disagree about what might exceed his usual

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abilities),52 we do know that he selected it all, and at least some of the best poetry no one disputes to be his. Audelay’s Shropshire dialect was, like nearly everyone else’s English in the early fifteenth century, still not the unmarked language of most literate men in his time.53 Audelay’s particular use of the thirteen-line stanza, apparently his own formulation, Whiting found comparable to some of the York mystery plays (some of which, as we will see in Chapter 6, were created by proletarian authors)54 and, I would add, comparable to those of the Wakefield playwright, whose modern editor, A. C. Cawley, believed to be a proletarian as well.55 Audelay’s use of rhyme brackets accentuates his sense of form.56 I would point to “Audelay’s Epilogue to the Counsel [Council] of Conscience” as an excellent example of his thirteen-line stanza, here accentuating his thematic sense of prophetic mission.57 In Audelay’s rhyme scheme, typically the D-rhyme forms stack up together in a kind of tour de force at the tenth through twelfth line of each stanza. In fact, in his rhyming alliterative verse, as in other such “long-form” poets (e.g., the Gawain poet), the punch line, so to speak, is delivered in the wheel:58 Mervel ye not of this makyng, A Fore I me excuse—hit is not I; B This was the Holé Gost wercheng, A That sayd these wordis so faythfully, B Fore I quoth never bot hye foly. B God hath me chastyst fore my levyng; A I thong [thank] my God, my Grace, treuly, B Fore his gracious vesityng. A Beware, seris, I youe pray, C Fore I mad this with good entent, D In the reverens of God Omnipotent. D Prays fore me that beth present—D My name is Jon the Blynd Awdlay. C (495–507, emphases added) If we examine this stanza in Figure 4.2, we can actually see how these rhyme brackets work in the stanzas leading up to his final Latin colophon. The climax of the stanza is physically bracketed and emphasized via the stack of three D-rhymes, a boosting of his prophetic claim, which goes far beyond the usual visionary characteristics of the chanson d’aventure genre. Claiming that his col-

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Figure 4.2. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, fol. 22v, containing Audelay’s “Epilogue to the Council of Conscience,” showing how only the D-rhymes are bracketed in the stanzas leading up to his final Latin colophon. Douce 302 was made under Audelay’s direction at Haughmond Abbey. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

lection is, in effect, a “marvel” (“Mervel ye not of this makyng”), worked not through his own abilities, but through the Holy Ghost (a step, by the way, that even his prophetic mentor Langland never directly ventured), he underlines through the bracketed D- rhymes the linkage of God’s omnipotence with his own “entent,” asking for prayers from those that “beth present.” Importantly, this last phrase indicates that Audelay is imagining a physical audience, a performance, such as he likely often gave for the Lestrange household. Although any one of a number of stanzas will illustrate this type of pattern in Audelay, and we will see many more in what follows, this one is especially intriguing: showing his independence from Langland but also showing—perhaps unexpectedly in view of his ubiquitous bitter attacks on the Church’s treatment of underemployed clergy—Audelay’s still very genuine, even (as Woolf noted) moving, sense of intimacy with God. We have seen that modern scholars may

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reasonably theorize, following originally Marxist principles, that daily proletarian performance, as Katherine Zieman said, of “the Office was not entirely free from the potential for alienation and self-interest.”59 But Audelay is one of those proletarians who presents a complex challenge to Marxist views: despite all his just anger about career and church issues, his spirituality is surprisingly vibrant and confident and often beautifully articulated—and it is precisely that spirituality for which there is no category in Marxist theories of alienation. Audelay was also capable of joyful writing, as we saw in the snippet from his carol “Childhood.” But his bitterness is certainly characterizable as a symptom of economic “alienation,” at least from the dignity of “equal pay for work of equal value,” to use a very modern and Marxist concept—and Audelay’s and Hoccleve’s works explicitly show that medieval people felt such inequities just as keenly as the modern underemployed. Lack of job security and lack of upward mobility for stranded clergy are problems that Audelay critiques in the medieval Church, and in such minute detail that the critiques can even resonate with twenty-firstcentury labour issues, despite differences—a complexity we will meet again and again in the remaining chapters of this book.

3. “Pore Prevyd Clerkys”: Audelay’s Mission for Ecclesiological Reform in Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition Long and loosely constructed, Marcolf and Solomon, a poem of indefinite genre, is one of Audelay’s most puzzling works. It is only barely held together by the slight and intermittent framing conceit of advice that the “fool” Marcolf gives to Solomon, Marcolf being, as Derek Pearsall has said, a persona for Audelay, and a decidedly “flimsy” one.60 It is written in the Piers Plowman tradition, imitating Langland’s diction (there is even an allusion to Lady Mede),61 his alliterative style, his social range, and to some extent his use of Latin quotations as ominous or authoritative “over-voice” (the latter Pearsall’s description of Langland’s authoritative voice interventions). In fact, chunks of Langland’s phraseology appear scattered throughout Audelay’s poem, much as one finds undigested phraseology from Chaucer in imitating fifteenth-century admirers (such as Lydgate and Shirley).62 In medieval texts, this is often the mark of a coterie-style writer—not necessarily someone who lacks imagination, but someone who enjoys the echoes so much and, more importantly, knows that other connoisseurs in a close-knit group will as well.63 Marcolf also imitates Langland’s penchant

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for specialized ecclesiological commentary and remarkably confident advice to diverse clerical groups on reform, the vernacular notwithstanding. Like Hoccleve, Audelay announces early in his most lengthy and serious poem that he is clerically trained: “God hath grauntyd grace unto oure lernyng,” a gentle way of asserting, as did Hoccleve early in the Regement’s Prologue, that he is “part of the club.” This is just the type of confirmation we have seen before in other proletarians, including Langland. He clarifies this at the opening of Marcolf, in the first English line, having, however, just dropped a bombshell in the first Latin line: the announcement there is the major and quite astonishing goal of the poem, that is, to reconcile two types of rectores (i.e., those officially appointed to pastoral care), the friars and the secular clergy: De concordia inter rectores fratres et rectores ecclesie [Concerning an accord between friars and secular priests]. God hath grauntyd grace unto oure lernyng Al that we fyndon fayfully wrytyn in Holé Wryt. (1–2) This Latin heading is both diplomatically ground-breaking and (outside of a few of Langland’s most prophetic passages) quite un-Langlandian: it grants friars exactly what secular priests (i.e., the beneficed) had sought to deny them ever since the mid-thirteenth century: authority over cure of souls.64 Audelay’s wording of the Latin is startling in naming both groups rectores, flying in the face of generations of anti-mendicant thought on the part of secular priests (his own guild), having long considered themselves the only true rectores ecclesie. Later in the poem, he gives his reasons, explaining that without the friars’ assiduous university learning, the Church would be lost,65 but here at the poem’s opening, what is remarkable is that the aging chaplain, still himself without cure of souls, should so generously extend the olive branch to the two groups who, between them, were sucking up the revenue that might have officially employed the unbeneficed.66 Audelay’s ecclesiological position in this poem, revolutionary in its way, and despite the noise of its strident complaints, deserves great credit, especially in view of the long history of anti-mendicantism among not only secular clergy but also monastics, two of Audelay’s target audiences. And it especially deserves study as a kind of overturning of the position on friars of his biggest poetic mentor, Langland, perhaps even intended, as we will see, as a corrective to Piers Plowman on this point. One can find these ideas in Piers Plowman, but only in the prophecies and in the hope set out in the famous last lines of the poem as Piers, himself, starts another journey in search of a “fynding” for the friars, when the Dreamer awakes.

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The opening Latin quote of Marcolf does, however, show how each stanza of the poem usually springs from a Latin quote at its head, suggesting that it evolved as Langland scholars suspect that passages of Piers Plowman originally did: from the Latin outward (though Langland’s riotous complexity in his use of Latin quotation tends frequently to obscure the evidence).67 At his best in Marcolf, Audelay, too, uses the Latin quotes ambiguously or obliquely—this he did learn from Langland.68 The Latin is the fixed point of each vernacular “riff,” but frequently Audelay’s method, like Langland’s, is indirection. Another of Audelay’s many strikingly Langlandian tendencies is his ability to use the term “lollare” in a very complex way, and his most original uses have little or nothing to do with the Wycliffites. Ultimately, Audelay is not very interested in Wycliffism, and as I will suggest, he is not very daunted either by the heresy itself or by fear of speaking out about church issues generally—in fact, Audelay’s Marcolf is dramatic evidence of what several scholars of the last decade have increasingly registered as the relative lack of impact of Arundel’s Constitutions on the generation post-1407.69 In Marcolf, Audelay directly but only briefly addresses the topic of Lollard heresy in its formal theological sense, giving an explicit and remarkably succinct account of its recognizable doctrinal errors (678–88). But this is not his main concern, and he does so only after deploring the fear-mongering that can lead to false convictions, even pillorying or burning, of a falsely accused person (665–76).70 Here and elsewhere, Audelay reads this sad state of current affairs prophetically, just as Langland would have (likely, in fact, prompted by a C-text passage, as Simpson notes),71 as the arrival of a time when the corruption of the secular clergy has driven the laity to discount faith and authority: The prophecy of the prophetus, ale nowe hit doth apere, That sumtyme was sayd be the clergy: That leud men, the laue of God that schuld love and lere, Fore curatis fore here covetyse, wold count noght therby. (664–67) In these passages, Audelay exhibits the same theological self-confidence that Hoccleve did in his poem to Oldcastle, except that Audelay is more brief, subtle, and original in his ecclesiastical critique than his more famous fellow proletarian. Audelay, I would suggest, is much less threatened by Lollardy, which he understands correctly not as a binary phenomenon (heresy vs. orthodoxy), but as part of a full spectrum of concern about reform. Of course, Hoccleve is employed in the royal government, and so his treatment of heresy is partly coloured

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by the politics of the Lancastrian campaign (where his own hopes for patronage lay) and the political threat of Oldcastle’s rebellion; but Audelay’s poem has a different thrust: his is part of a genuine and searching concern for the nature of true church reform (something Hoccleve only attempted via the Old Man in the Regement), a very Langlandian approach—and one that rejects binary divisions. Audelay’s stanza below on poor priests is a case in point: Declinate a me, malingni, etc. [Depart from me, ye malignant, etc. (and I will search the commandments of my God.) (Psalm 118:115)]. Yif ther be a pore prest, and spirituale in spiryt, And be devoute with devocion, his servyse syng and say, Thay lekon hym to a [l]ollere72 and to an epocryte. Yif he be besé in his bedus, the Prince of Heven to pay, And holde hym in Holé Cherche, dulé uche day, Oute of the curse of cumpané, and kepe his concyans clene, He ys a nythyng, a noght, a negard, thai say. Bot yif he folou his felows, his chekys mai be ful lene— On hym, men han no mynde. A holy prest men set not by! Therfore ther bene bot feu, truly! Thai kepe not of here cumpany— To hom, men beth unkynde. (131–43) Vintage Langlandian and indebted to the C-text’s elaborate attempts to distinguish among several types of “lollars” (idle, pious, charismatic, or lunatic), Audelay here is attempting to defend humble, devout priests (“spirituale in spiryt”) of low income. That would certainly include a great many of the unbeneficed73 and perhaps even himself. In particular, he defends them from being likened to (“Thay lekon hym”) “a [l]ollere and to an epocryte.” “Likening” to something, as Judson Boyce Allen showed years ago, is the Middle English term for the literary theory of similitude (rhetorically, a simile), so its sense here is  rich.74 Audelay is not talking about heretics here (Lollards, followers of Wyclif)—later in the poem, as we have noted, he does, but this is not his goal here. The clue is the collocation of “[l]ollere” with “epocryte,” which, in fact, quite accurately reflects the original meaning of “lollar(d),” and one recognizable (for instance) in Chaucer’s Host’s comment about the utterly orthodox Parson (“I smelle a Lollere in the wynd”) and still in use in some of the vaguer aspersions

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crowds cast on an exact contemporary of Audelay’s, Margery Kempe (see Chapter 6).75 As Derek Pearsall clarified in an annotation to Langland’s C-text, the word originated in Dutch, and on the Continent, and in Langland’s own usage meant someone perceived as overly pious (originally, someone who mumbles prayers)76 with an overtone of anti-social righteousness or over-zealousness.77 Just so, Audelay notes that if a priest prays his beads daily, keeps himself in church, and avoids “the curse of cumpané,” he will be mistaken for a “[l]ollere” and “epocryte”—but most importantly, he will be utterly neglected (“On hym, men han no mynde”). So, this is not a description of a heretic, and Audelay is very precise about the “offending” behaviour in these lines: it is simply avid devotion and reclusiveness to pray. If he had wanted to talk about Wycliffite heresy and its doctrinal issues here, he would have, but he reserved that for elsewhere (665–76). In fact, if we look more closely, the passage is about which priests get ahead and which ones starve: “Bot yif he folou his felows, his chekys mai be ful lene” (138)—the last half-line provokes a grim smile or perhaps a distant memory of Langland’s lean-cheeked victims of Hunger. In the wheel of the alliterative stanza, which traditionally packs the punch line (so too in Audelay), there is a personal edge as he describes the neglect and disdain that poor, devout priests face: On hym, men han no mynde. A holy prest men set not by! Therfore ther bene bot feu, truly! Thai kepe not of here cumpany— To hom, men beth unkynde. (139–43) Audelay, in keeping with some of the best rhymed alliterative poems, drives the key point home in the short D-rhyme verses of the wheel.78 It is no wonder, he says, that holy priests are poor—men set little stock by them. Like so much else in the poem, this is an attempt to explain why good priests remain unpromoted, and it shows an edge of bitterness against those who commit this neglect, together with his ever-present empathy and praise for priests left behind. In fact, Audelay has much to say in defense of these good priests who get pushed aside, a point on which he does not mince words. For instance, he compares them to Abel, killed by his brother Cain: Filius non portabit iniquitatem patris, etc., set unusquisque onus suum portabit [The son will not bear the iniquity of the father . . . but everyone shall bear his own burden].79

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What was Abel the worse, thagh Kayme his borne broder Were cursid for his covetyse and his creuel dede? No more ys a good prest the worse fore another, That wyle love his Lord God, hym serve and drede. (118–21, my emphasis) Even by Langlandian standards, this is downright abrasive: good priests are likened to the victimized and innocent Abel, and the bad priests who slay the reputation of the priesthood to Cain. Drawing on prophetic language, however, his most powerful phrase for describing good priests left behind comes in a passage on absentee rectors. Neglectful of their parsonages, he accuses them (but only via the Latin) of being thieves, using a clever riff on the gospel verse about how a thief (implicitly, an unworthy priest) gets into the sheepfold. Like the thief, such a priest takes, so to speak, a back door—he gets in via simony: Qui intrat in ovile nisi per hostium, . . . ille fur est et latro [He who enters into the sheepfold except through the door, he is a thief and robber, cf. John 10:1]. Symony is a sun [sin] forbedun be the laue. . . . Curatis that beth unkunyng, hem ye schuld refuse, And aspy pore prevyd clerkys among the clergy, And gef hem awaunsment and a benefyse To save synful soulys with here feleceté[:]80 Goddys wyl hit ys[.] Curatus resident thai schul be, And ald houshold oponly, And part with the pore that beth nedé, And mend that ye do mys. (573–85, with omissions, my emphasis) He lashes out not only at those who take the simoniac route into the sheepfold but, more directly, at those who appoint them instead of pore prevyd clerkys. This is Audelay’s own formulation and draws on the rich word “prevyd” (proven priests, related to the Latin probatio, a trial or testing of the spirit, often in prophetic or visionary contexts).81 Most remarkably, he appears to say that it is “Goddys wyl” that pore prevyd clerkys be beneficed—packing the ultimate punch on this already theologically-charged phrase he has coined for those good

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priests consistently left behind. Those beneficed via simony, he goes on to point out, are often non-resident (577–80), compounding the problem with their absenteeism. Adding insult to injury for the unbeneficed like Audelay was the painful spectacle of the pluralists—those multiply beneficed, and worse, often multiply absent (Hoccleve’s Old Man had made the same case). Audelay’s attack on pluralists is a highly Langlandian passage (later Langlandian, that is). Just as in the passage above, where the line about God’s will is one of the short ones that heads the wheel (in an alliterative poem like Gawain, the bob’s position in fact), so, too, in this next passage, another invocation of God’s will appears in the same position: Inclina cor meum, Deus, in testimonia tua, et non in avariciam [Incline my heart to your testimonies, God, and not to covetousness].82 Ye curatis, fore your covetys ye castun in the new fayre The churches that ye byn chosun to, be Godus ordenauns, And callun hit “permetacion,” cuntreys about to kayre, Bot yif ye han pluralytis, hit is not plesans. I preve the pope principaly ys worthy to have penaunce That grauntus ané seche grace because of covetyng; Hit dous dysese in Holé Cherch, and makys bot dystauns— A mon to have four benefyse, anoder no lyvyng. This is not Godys wyle! The furst benefyce ye ben bound to— Ye schuld not desyre to go therfro, And take a levyng and no mo, Lest ye your soulis spyle. (728–40, my emphasis) The references to the “new fayre” are prominent in Langland’s C-Text in the tavern scene where Glutton and other ne’er-do-wells play a kind of gambling game involving bargaining for each other’s clothing—in other words, pluralists, like gamblers, never have enough.83 Audelay’s blaming of the pope at line 732 (“I preve the pope principaly ys worthy to have penaunce”) is also very Langlandian, if not blunter. And the line “Hit dous dysese in Holé Cherch” is very reminiscent of the famous passage in which Langland portrays the poisoning of the Church via Constantine’s endowments. Most powerfully, though, once again, is the wheel’s opening with a short line prophetically pronouncing God’s

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will: “A mon to have four benefyse, anoder no lyvyng. / This is not Godys wyle!” Nothing Langland or Hoccleve wrote about benefices tops this for bluntness: for one man to have four benefices and another to have none is simply “not Godys wyle.” Whether this is poetry or polemic is debatable, but the model is Langlandian, though the pain that drives it even beyond Langland’s edge is personal.

4. Competition for Benefices, Delinquent Priests, and the Question of Satire in Marcolf Most of the passages we have examined so far are either harsh, whether obliquely so (via use of the Latin), embittered, or poignant on the subject of those left behind. But many critics have also seen or wanted to see sophisticated satire in Audelay, and since satire is a matter of tone, sifting it out is complex. Satire, like beauty, can be in the eye of the beholder. To take a less complicated instance first, chief among such passages are those involving Audelay’s attack on the superficiality of certain types of priests who gain lay financial support via populist measures. Proletarians, as we have noted, were most often dependent on the laity for their livelihood, and with so many unbeneficed, competition for lay attention was fierce. Audelay, whose treatment of this is livelier than Hoccleve’s, compares a superficial, willfully ignorant priest to a bird in a cage kept only for his showy plumage.84 Having no learning to his credit, such a priest often falls back (irrelevantly, in Audelay’s view) on being fashionable: he dances, harps, and wears a gown that is “pynchit [pleated] gay” (558). Audelay’s caged bird is rather like Chaucer’s Absolon in the “Miller’s Tale,” another example of this recognizable proletarian type: a parish clerk who assists at masses, likely as yet in minor orders, dandified, able to dance, Chaucer tells us, in the fashionable Oxford style, and able to earn extra money via his dictamen and legal secretarial skills. While Chaucer’s narrative is more entertaining, both poets are ultimately cruel: Ingnorancia non excusat saserdotem [sic] [Ignorance does not excuse a priest]85 Moné men of Holé Cherche thai ben ale to lewd; I lekyn ham to a bred is pynud [confined] in a cage When he hath shertly hymselfe ale bescherewd [befouled], Then he begynys to daunse, to harpe, and to rage . . . I say you forewhy— Thus leud men thai can say,

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He is an honest prest in good faye, Yif his goune be pynchit gay [gaily pleated]: He getis a salary. (Marcolf, 547–60, with omissions, my emphasis) The wordplay on “pynud” and “pynchit” is clever: the priest is imprisoned (“pynud”) by his desperate efforts to entertain the laity stylishly (“pynchit gay”). The last lines are dripping with sarcasm, a mode Audelay often adopts: in other words, an unlearned priest is a priest only for show—he has no other use. Notice once again the use of Middle English terminology of similitude (“I lekyn ham to a bred pynud in a cage”). The bitterness here is about priests who get salaried via some form of worldly vanity: though unworthy, Audelay implies, the bird is kept at someone’s expense. In a world in which the power to employ priests (more often than we might realize) frequently lay in the hands of the laity (“Thus leud men . . .”), the empty “performances” of such priests are intolerable to the serious and neglected, especially as laymen are taken in by them. Here and elsewhere, a close reading of Marcolf indicates Audelay’s concern with myriad performance issues and with issues of payment: note that Audelay refers to these fashionable priests as “salaried” rather than beneficed, apparently invoking a status distinction, as we will see next. Audelay himself would have been only salaried. In one of the few passages of Marcolf that has been heavily discussed by modern critics, Audelay creates a satirical picture of a fashionable priest just like the caged bird and the opposite of the “pore prevyd clerkys.” This strawman portrait is of the priest, “Oure gentyl Ser Jone,” who is a talented musician, beloved and successful with the laity especially because of his charms, most especially with women. In a passage oozing with oblique eroticism, his “perte pautener [open purse]”86 is said to please “both maydyn and wyfe” (151–52). Though the passage takes off from a Latin text on pride, “Ser Jone” is painted as surprisingly lovable: Increpasti superbos. Maledicti qui declinant a mandatis tuis [Thou hast rebuked the proud. They are cursed who decline from thy commandments].87 Oure gentyl Ser Jone—joy hym mot betyde!— He is a meré mon of mouth among cumpané. He con harpe! He con syng! His orglus ben herd ful wyd! He wyl noght spare his purse to spend his selaré—

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Alas, he ner a parsun or a vecory! Be Jhesu, he is a gentyl mon, and jolylé arayd— His gurdlis harneschit [girdle ornamented] with selver, his baslard [dagger] hongus bye— Apon his perte pautener, uch mon ys apayd, Both maydyn and wyfe. Ifayth, he schale noght from us gon, Fore oure myrth, hit were edon, Fore he con glad us everychon! Y pray God hold his lyve! (Marcolf, 144–56, my emphasis) These lines are widely praised by critics as demonstrating, as Pearsall notes, “an unexpected gift for traditional anticlerical satire,” and indeed, the tone is subtle.88 The musical skills of this “Ser Jone” constitute a form of performance seductiveness (like the caged bird’s and rather similar to those of secular entertainers that the Wynnere and Wastoure poet condemned). These were perhaps disturbing to Audelay’s sensibilities as a religious and household musician. In a very influential translation, Audelay’s first modern editor, Whiting, attractively rendered lines 148–49 (especially “ner a parsun or a vecory”) as “you would never take this fine fellow for a parson or a vicar; he is a gentleman!”89 Nearly all recent literary critics have adopted Whiting’s reading as sustained and clever satire, rich in ironic voice.90 However, I think there are some wrinkles with Whiting’s translation. First, medieval readers would have instantly recognized the derisive iconography of the dandified priest—it is everywhere in the Latin literature of pastoral care, for instance by James le Palmer (see Introduction, Figure 0.3 above), or by William of Pagula (see Figure 4.3 below). It also appears in literary visual iconography (e.g. the Douce 104 Piers Plowman, in which just such a priest is illustrated in the vanguard of Antichrist).91 Medieval episcopal visitation records show that such clerics were to be seen not just in books but in reality (e.g., York Minster records list vicars choral discovered “dressed as laymen with knives and daggers hanging between their legs”).92 A second issue is that, as Richard Firth Green noted, the passage appears to owe something to Langland’s B-text portrait of “Sire Johan,” right down to some of vocabulary: Sire Johan and Sire Geffrey, [ech] hath a girdle of silver, A baselard or a ballok-knyf with botons overgilte.

Figure 4.3. Clerics destroying a church, from William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, MS Cecil Papers 290, fol. 13, English, second half of the fourteenth century. Although they preserve their tonsures, they have “secularized” in abandoning their long robes. Reproduced with permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

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Ac a porthors that sholde be his plow, Placebo to sigge, Hadde he never, [his] ser vice to [h]ave, [And save he have] silver therto, seith it with yvel will. Allas, ye lewed men, muche lese ye on preestes! (Piers B.15.123–28)93 Like Audelay’s Ser Jone, Langland’s Sire Johan and Sire Geffrey also have a “girdle of silver” and sport “a baselard” (“His gurdlis harneschit [girdle ornamented] with selver, his baslard [dagger] hongus bye” [Marcolf, 149]). Some of this is conventional to dandified priests (as Figure 4.3 shows), but the choice of silver girdles for each is rather precise. And both poets have gone to some trouble to represent their delinquent priests as musicians, more specifically as singing clerks (often proletarian).94 In Langland’s version, note that the dandified priest is carrying a porthors, that is, a collection of liturgical texts for singing various offices, used by chantry priests, vicars choral and various singing clerks, but the priests in question, ironically, can only sing to please (a pun on Placebo) when paid.95 Both Langland’s and Audelay’s priests are just the kind upon whom the laity would lavish money for singing masses, obits, or other liturgical prayers—beguiled by delinquents (“Allas, ye lewed men, muche lese ye on preestes!”). So, too, in Audelay, where Sir John is so charming no one wants to part company with him. There is yet another wrinkle with Whiting’s translation: so far no one has noticed the significance of the word “selare” (salary), a form of payment that normally distinguishes the unbeneficed (who are salaried) from the beneficed (who are supported by tithes and other parish income and endowments). The distinction is fundamental, and the Middle English Dictionary (MED) definitions reflect it: first, a salary: “sal4rī(e (n.), definition (c) the stipend of a priest, esp. a chantry priest.”96 Moreover, a “parsun” is not just any parish priest in Middle English but rather the rector, that is, the official holder of the benefice, defined by the MED as: “persǒun(e) n.(2) The cleric having whole right to the tithes of a parish, a parish priest, parson.”97 And there are more terminological distinctions in the passage: a vicar is different again: MED definition 1(a) “One who stands in place of another, a representative, deputy, lieutenant” or 2(a) “One appointed to act as priest in a parish in place of the real parson, a parish vicar”—that is, someone hired by the rector and therefore someone salaried, not beneficed.98 So one perfectly valid reading of these lines would be: “Alas, he were not a parson [i.e., beneficed] or a vicar [i.e., one appointed in place of a parson].” A person who was neither of these and inferior to both would be a chaplain99—that is, someone like Audelay himself, exactly the kind of priest who would be salaried, often dependent on the laity for employment, and not necessarily permanent. Given Audelay’s deep

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and widely attested concerns with issues of the unbeneficed (the good and the bad), a line like “Alas, he ner a parsun or a vecory!” sticks out like a sore thumb in a poet so grimly and personally preoccupied with the corruption and inequity of the benefice system. Interestingly, both Michael Bennett and A.  K. McHardy read the passage as a personal reference to Audelay’s life, since he himself was neither a parson nor a vicar, and he was musically inclined.100 If it is self-referential, it is a piece of black humour. It need not be at all self-referential, of course, but one thing is certain: it refers at least generally to the phenomenon of the musicianpriest-entertainer, living by his wits, as a casualty of the benefice system.

5. Performance, “Over-skipping,” and the Choral Proletariat We have noted that Audelay was musically inclined, experimented with the carol genre (of which, more in Chapter  5), and, as Fein notes, experimented with metrics. Like many proletarians, he was engaged in liturgical work on a regular basis, later as a chantry priest when he compiled his poetry, and earlier in his life, as a chaplain to Lestrange, both in chapel, where he would have sung ser vices, and in the hall, where he would have taught or composed quite a range of music, as we have seen.101 So it is no accident that, like many proletarians, he also cared deeply about correct performance. In the next chapters, we will look at examples from cathedral manuscripts of Middle English poetry meticulously punctuated for performance, but for the moment in Audelay, we have the privilege of seeing a proletarian who explicitly wrote about the importance of correct musical performance. For instance: Servite Domino in timore, et exultate ei cum tremore [Serve ye the Lord with fear: and rejoice unto Him with trembling].102 Both in cloyster and in quere, when that thai syng and rede Aperte et distincte, han mynd for hom thay pray, And kepun her pausus and her poyntis—ellus myght thai gete no mede! (Marcolf, 196–98, my emphasis) The Latin quote enjoins ser vice to God in fear, but very quickly, if obliquely, Audelay links that to the need to both “syng and rede” plainly and distinctly (Aperte et distincte). This second snippet of Latin comes from Esdras, and the full quote says: “And they read in the book of the law of God distinctly and

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plainly to be understood: and they understood when it was read” (2 Esdras 8:8, my emphasis). This snippet, then, pulls into the text with it an oft-repeated reformist concern that the liturgy not be slurred, sung hastily or inattentively, or other wise abridged. Disrespect for the liturgy was a danger not only to the spirit, but as Katherine Zieman shows, to clerical community and professionalism itself.103 In Audelay’s particular case, as we have seen, he somehow maintained his own, undaunted, deep devotional perspective, even as he indignantly attacked the dysfunctional ecclesiological system (two sides of the same coin for a reformist prophetic thinker). Here, Audelay attacks the under-performers and mis-performers, invoking both the “terror” of the Lord and terror of lack of payment (“mede”), stressing that they must perform with an honourable clarity and “han mynd for hom thay pray.” In fact, inattention (praying “with here lyppus; here hertis ben far away” [200]) must have been the single largest challenge for a chantry priest or vicar choral or beadsman. This was a highly repetitive job, and multiple medieval texts denounce what must have been natural, human tendencies toward wandering attention104 or shortcutting—the latter a problem Audelay explicitly also deplores at length. But he goes a step further here: they must also “kepun her pausus and her poyntis,” as Fein correctly glosses: “keep their pauses and their periods—else might they get no reward.”105 I would add here that “poyntis” means even more: “pointing” (a word derived from French) is performance marking in texts with words and music, or punctuation generally, as we saw in the discussion of the London Puy regulations (Chapter 1, regarding lyrics set to music).106 Pauses, of course, are musical punctuation and would refer, in part, to pauses between units of psalm verse (still carefully observed in choral singing today). Audelay says they are to mind the punctuation of the Psalms and other liturgies they perform: in the words of Malcolm Parkes’s brilliant title, they are to mind “pause and effect.”107 As we will see in the next chapter, poetry emanating from the cathedrals, in particular, was remarkably attentive to punctuation and to performance: in short, this is where liturgical vocation meets form, with great implications for poetry. Moreover, this theme of correct and attentive singing was one that Audelay chose to foreground at the very end of his collection. He copied a passage alluding to this topic from Richard Rolle (unacknowledged) into the “Meditative Close”108 and interpolated into it a thirteen-line alliterative stanza that he perhaps originally wrote for Marcolf, as Fein suggests, but later repurposed in the “Close”—perhaps to ensure its prominence? It is interpolated in a spot where his appropriated Rolle text (in prose) suddenly breaks off into verse while listing various kinds of negligence and ingratitude toward God. The interpolated stanza features the amusing

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demon Tutivillus, whose specialty it is to collect verbal faults of all kinds during the service, including instances of clerical negligence and gossip: . . . to conferme not his wyl to Godys wyl, to gif not his entent to his prayers, bot rabul on and recheth never how thai bene sayd. (“The Sins of the Heart,” 48–49) Over-hippers and skippers, moterers [mutterers] and mumlers— Tytyvyllis tytild here wordus and takes ham to hys pray [prey]; Japers and janglers, haukeers and hunters— The holé servys of God thai schend [shame] when thay say. Rofyn [a demon] wyl rede hom ful redely in his rolle anoder day, When thay ben called to here cowntis and to here rekenyng— Hou thay han sayde here servys, the Prince of Heven to pay, Butt rabulde hit forthe unreverently by caus of hyyng [haste], Without dewocion: Fore better hit were stil to be, Then to say Godys servys undewoutly; Thai scornyn God ful sekyrlé, And han his maleson. (“Over-Hippers and Skippers,” 1–13) To do neclegens that he is holdyn to do throgh avowe ore comawndment ore is en-joynde in penans, . . . (“The Sins of the Heart,” 49–50) Note that the interpolated stanza parallels a verse in Piers Plowman where Liberum Arbitrium urges that priests should “ouerhippe nat for hastite” (C.17.118) and an even more closely, free-floating jingle the DIMEV titles “Long sleepers and overleapers,” found most often in the Fasciculus Morum.109 In fact, I would note, the jingle is especially common in cathedral manuscripts (discussed in Chapter 5), where, again, there are large numbers of chantry priests and vicars choral.110 Here is a version of this popular jingle (one of seventeen copies extant) from a Canterbury Cathedral manuscript, where it is highlighted with a marginal nota: Longe slepars [over-sleepers] & ouerlepers [skippers of the service] forskippers & ouerhippers

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I holde hem lither hyne I am not heryn ne thay bith not myne But þey sone amend thay shull to hell pyne.111 Written in prose in the manuscript (as is traditional for alliterative verse), the jingle normally has seven lines (aabcbcb), as here, and the internal rhyme of the first two lines in the stanza makes it “catchy,” as does the I-speaker’s dissociation of himself from this group of lazy singers. Audelay’s appears to be a highly attractive riff on this jingle, which he renders delightfully alliterative, with genuine colloquialism and colour. “Overhippers and skippers, moterers and mumlers” (Over-hoppers and skippers, mutterers and mumblers) are those who say or sing any part of the divine ser vice by taking shortcuts or not bothering to enunciate clearly.112 The interpolated stanza continues to emphasize other common proletarian themes, for example, the dreaded call to “render accounts,” a theme, as we saw in Chapter  2, extremely popular in proletarian texts, originating in the Parable of the Unjust Steward. Here, Audelay explicitly refers to it: When thay ben called to here cowntis and to here rekenyng— Hou thay han sayde here servys, the Prince of Heven to pay. (“Over-Hippers and Skippers,” 6–7, my emphasis) One reason I believe that he set this stanza apart for special treatment is that it draws in a lively way on several themes in “popular” religion that cut both ways across the lay-clerical divide, making it especially memorable and accessible. There is the delightful narrative of Tutivillus, a demon who supposedly collects false or missed words spoken during mass.113 Apparently a democratically minded demon, he collects words missed or mis-performed by clergy, as well as inappropriate words uttered by the laity during mass, especially gossip, clerical or lay (see Figure 4.4).114 As Audelay notes, the demon hunts down the offenders as his prey, whose faults will be read by “Rofyn,” another demon, from his roll on the day of reckoning.115 Many amusing accounts of the antics of these demons survive (Audelay mentions even St.  Augustine’s laughter at the antics of the recording demon),116 so Audelay’s intent here seems to be both to entertain and to edify. Similarly, as we will see in Chapter 5, there are accounts of episcopal visitations in York in which vicars choral were upbraided for missed words and

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Figure 4.4. The demon Tutivillus, represented in a wood carving on a misericord in Ely Cathedral, shown eavesdropping upon, and embracing, two gossiping monks during the ser vice. Courtesy of Ely Cathedral.

ill-delivered liturgical performances.117 So it is no accident that these proletarian themes of precision in oral delivery and reckoning of accounts appear in the same stanza or that Audelay chose to foreground it with tongue-twisting alliteration. Audelay returns again and again to this question of attentiveness and links it, very obliquely, to a remarkable complaint in Marcolf about a burning proletarian issue. Here, the Latin of the stanza speaks of reading and not understanding as a form of negligence, a topic then linked obliquely to a bitter diatribe about Oxford-trained clerics being passed over for benefices: Legere et non intellegere est quasi neclegere. Now yif a pore mon set hys son to Oxford to scole, Both the fader and the moder hynderyd thay schal be; And yif ther falle a benefyse, hit schal be gif a fole,

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To a clerke of a kechyn, ore into the chaunceré. This makys the worchip of clerkys wrong fore to wry, Seth sekeler men schul have mon soulys in kepyng, And pytton here personache to ferme to a baylé [and assign the farming of their benefice’s property to a bailiff], And caston doune here howsold and here housyng, Here paryschun dystroy. Clerkys that han cunyng Schuld have monys soule in kepyng, Bot thai mai get no vaunsyng Without symony! (559–72, my emphasis) This highly unusual stanza covers critiques more often talked of in Latin—it draws together several of Audelay’s most urgent, and angry, themes. The Latin header quote means: “To read and not understand is as if to be neglectful” (with, as Fein observes, punning on legere and intellegere),118 targeting the higher level of the literacy ladder. To read without comprehending was a recognized lower level of literacy (often discussed in relation to nuns’ literacy or schoolroom practices, especially in relation to Chaucer’s clergeoun).119 But there is no excuse, Audelay implies, for those who are trained to comprehend not to comprehend—once again, the issue of inattention. From the Latin, he jumps to a painful truth about Oxford education: that the poor but able were often barred from university entrance, even where the money could be found, and that even if they were accepted as students, they would nonetheless be passed over for employment and the parents “hindered”—apparently socially or financially by their sacrifice. In fact, Oxford regulations explicitly prohibited the “unfree” peasant classes from attending, a problem that Langland also (in)famously touches on in C.V apologia, as we saw in Chapter 2, with far less empathy for the unfree who gain access than Audelay exhibits here. (It is not every day that one comes across a Middle English poet who out-does Langland in social sympathies!) Langland’s concern in C.V, as we saw, is for the waning clerical opportunities in an already congested field for “poor gentle blood” (i.e., those who had mortgaged their estates, he says, to fight for the realm); his particular beef is with the unfree who are now able to purchase their appointments via simony. But Audelay, by contrast, appears to be even more strongly meritocratic than Langland on this particular point, more generally characteristic of proletarians. With escalating bitterness, the poet denounces the undeserved awarding of already scarce benefices: “And yif ther falle a benefyse, hit schal be gif a

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fole, / To a clerke of a kechyn, ore into the chaunceré [Chancery].” This goes straight to the heart of proletarian frustration: “a fole” will be chosen, he says acidly, not an Oxford-educated man (no matter what his parents have sacrificed)—and in fact, Audelay was right: this is borne out by medieval statistics showing the remarkably low number of Oxford benefice placements in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.120 The benefice, instead, will go to someone like a kitchen clerk—a type of household servant perhaps less likely to be appropriately educated)—or to a Chancery clerk—apparently, for Audelay, somehow just as bad! The comment is very rare testimony to ecclesiastical proletarian opinions showing jealousy toward government-awarded benefices, a viewpoint that reveals a chasm between Hoccleve’s perspective and the underemployed clerks Audelay epitomizes.121 However sincerely Hoccleve pined for a benefice, for Audelay and his chaplaincy colleagues, benefices were likely to be wasted on civil servants such as Hoccleve (a sentiment, as we saw, with which modern administrative historians agree).122 As I suggested in Chapter  3, Hoccleve’s earnest campaign in the Regement to confirm his intellectual and spiritual preparedness to take on a benefice suggests an attempt to overcome some of this bias—as if to show that he, too, was or could have been part of the pastoral club. Here, Audelay stresses that these discriminatory practices emasculate the priesthood since “sekeler men schul have mon soulys in kepyng”—an especially painful and frank admission for a proletarian. It is laymen, he suggests, who determine which priests will be left behind and who, even worse, may simply choose to farm out their church property to a bailiff (“to ferme to a baylé”) rather than use its income to support a beneficed parish priest.123 As always in Audelay’s stanza style, the wheel contains the punch line: having destroyed the parish priest’s source of income for worldly gain (“And caston doune here howsold and here housyng”), the wheel opens with the coup de grâce: they then destroy the parish (“Here paryschun dystroy”). Though the educated “Clerkys that han cunyng / Schuld have monys soule in kepyng,” they cannot get a benefice (“thai mai get no vaunsyng”) “Without symony!” The wheel ends with this tour de force explaining why the worthy cannot thrive in the current benefice system, crowned by the mother of all charges: simony. Audelay, sick at the end of his life, is also tired of defending a system that repeatedly shut him out. What saves Audelay’s Marcolf from descending to common or garden-variety reformist complaint is several things: his innovative metrics and sometimes also poetics, however homespun, with their rich sense of alliterative tradition (including but not limited to the Langlandian);124 his adept use of alliterative-rhyming tradition (of the kind shared with the Gawain poet, among others); and his ability

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with the performative arts (including the liturgy, the carols, and, in some form, the cycle plays). He also has truly innovative ideas for future church reforms, sometimes moving well beyond Langland, whose ideas he knew intimately. Above all, one of his greatest redeeming qualities is that he is a man of deep spirituality— he is not interested in piety for piety’s sake, but rather in resurrecting the spirit. Not all religious poets deliver genuine spirituality (many, in fact, do not), but Audelay does, especially in moments where he can escape his own semi-suffocating concern with penance. But we misunderstand him gravely if we do not also see, as we did previously with Hoccleve, the pain of career disappointment throughout Marcolf, a bitterness that runs deep for him and that is a window into the pain of vocational failure played out on a massive scale among fellow proletarians.

6. Postscript: Corrective Imitation of Langland, or, Audelay Steps out of Langland’s Shadow We have already seen some ideologies on which Audelay disagrees with Langland, and so I will finish here with one of the most crucial: his visionary reformist views on endowments, most notably of chantries. Both of these are, again, personal to Audelay. On endowments, the intriguing thing—very unLanglandian—is that he views the religious orders as the poor, that is, those in need of donations. And on this point, Audelay is actually less meritocratic than Langland. Take this stanza in Marcolf, built out from a Latin quotation from the Psalms (40:2), saying “Beatus qui intellegit super egenum et pauperem [Blessed is he who understands above all the needy and the poor]” (221ff.). Readers would be forgiven for thinking that the passage would be about the poor. It is not. It is about the need for the religious to be sustained and succoured with more endowments. (Langland, who had prophesied disendowment of the corrupt monasteries, no doubt turned in his grave!) Audelay goes on to stress the great reward this will bring the donor, once the body is decayed, but prayers for his well-being continue. Echoing his famous carol “Dread of Death,” he offers comfort to potential donors here as the beads of Holy Church continue, “Foreever and for ay” to alleviate one’s fear of death: Fayne mai be the fadyrs and al the fonders [founders] That sustyne or sokeron [succour] relygious in oné way, . . . When your caren [body] is yclunggun and cast into clay, Hore matyns, here masse, fore ham, thai red and syng . . .

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Then the bedis of Holé Cherche, thai beth abydyng Foreever and for ay. And do you dredles out of drede: Thai schal have heven to here mede, That socures relegyous at nede, Her in ané way. (222–34, with omissions) The wheel closes with the punch line that those who “socures relegyous at nede” will have heaven as their “mede” (significantly now a reclaimed Langlandian word). This kind of passage is often written off by critics as an instance of Audelay’s “orthodoxy,” but it is much more than that: denied a benefice all his life, Audelay’s only shot at a chantry came through a monastic endowment, in this case, offered by his own employer, Lord Lestrange, probably in aid of retirement. Not only is this personal for Audelay, but endowment is, as he sees it, a kind of “employment programme” for the many clerical proletarians who are desperately underemployed. And Audelay is urgently concerned with alleviating clerical poverty. Elsewhere throughout the poem, he repeats the message, urging modern laity to do as their fathers did and endow Holy Church, for life and wealth fade like flowers (“This day hit ys fresche, tomorow hit is fadyng” [253]). And—a frequent theme of his—even one’s executors cannot be trusted, so endow now! Modern marketing experts are likely best placed to analyze this dimension of Audelay’s poem, and some of it is effective advertising. Sincere, no doubt, but urgent. Audelay speaks on behalf of a lost generation: Takys fayre ensampyle be your faders that were you before, Hou thai worchypd Holé Cherche hyly to Godys honore . . . : And do as youre faders ded before, here in here levyng Hit is fore the best— Do fore youreself or ye gone; Trust not to another mon (Ellus med of God get ye non!), Bot then ye be eblest. (248–60, with omissions) Langland, by contrast, had a lot less patience with chantries, which he mostly sees, as Chaucer would later articulate in his Parson’s portrait, as an enemy to good pastoral care, as able clergy desert their parishes for lucrative London chantries.125 When compared to Audelay, one has to conclude that Langland likely did not

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have to depend on chantries for his own livelihood at any point—he may have balked at the idea (thus perhaps the “creative” and “purist” form of livelihood via ad hoc prayer-exchanges that Langland portrays in C.V, akin to Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford, who also offers prayers in exchange for financial support). Woven into the fabric of Piers are many indications that Langland had had experience with other kinds of stop-gaps for keeping body and soul together when he was underemployed—Langland certainly understood precariat, as well as proletariat, life. As we saw in Chapter 2, Langland has intimate knowledge of making a living via praying for laity in return for financial support, perhaps even via authorized begging as a university student (permissible for students in financial crisis), and certainly via writing office or government work given his knowledge of scribes and legal documents. And perhaps, as suggested earlier, he did a stint as a vicar choral or singing clerk, given his knowledge of “choir slang,” and his own derision of those who “overhop” parts of the liturgy or mass.126 Of course, writing later in life, Langland may have been writing from a comfortable beneficed position, but he certainly knows what it is like not to be. But unlike Audelay, he does not look to chantries as an employment programme—quite the opposite. Perhaps this tells us something about why the advocates for disendowment like Langland (who at least prophesied it) and the Wycliffites, more extreme still, did not prevail in medieval England the short term: there were too many clerics dependent on chantries, obits, and monastic endowments for a living, and too many laity still heavily convinced of their efficacy and value as a salvational insurance policy. From the late fourteenth century onward, funerals, obits, and religious processions for the better-off laity got grander and employed more unbeneficed clergy. And more options opened in the civil service. By Henry VIII’s time, many social and reforming conditions had changed, as a stable civil ser vice staffed by literate laymen began to establish itself in the fifteenth century, increasingly less dependent on “king’s clerks” to run what Barrie Dobson called “the ramshackle twin engines of church and state.”127 And by the sixteenth century, skepticism about chantries and indulgences overflowed across northern Europe. Audelay’s poetry, to some extent, reflects and exploits these changes. So frightened is Audelay of losing the chantry and endowment system that he pleads with the laity and even ends up threatening them: Withdraw ye not fro Holé Cherche your faderes han yeven before To the prelatis and the prystis, fore hom fore to pray; Bot ye han grace of God hit to restore, Ye schul yild a carful counte on dredful Domysday . . .

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Thenke wel on this: Thai bene acursid be Goddis law, The goodys of Holé Cherche that withdrawe, That other han geven in holdon daw To mayntyn Godys servyse. (274–86, with omissions) Langland’s warning about Doomsday was opposite (see e.g. C.IX.321). So, in one sense, one could say that Audelay offers an (in this case) conservative “corrective” to Langland’s views on endowments and chantries, in the spirit of the his age, which, following Ian Johnson’s brilliant observations about fifteenth-century Chaucerians enacting “corrective imitation” of Chaucer, also happens, I would suggest, within the Langlandian tradition.128 Audelay’s stance in Marcolf looks like a deliberate corrective to Langland’s passionate reformist vision that the semi-disendowment of wealthy or corrupt monasteries could support income redistribution to give the friars a “fynding” (an income) and stop them from begging.129 This is Langland’s programme of generosity toward the friars, but it is largely a prophetic one. Audelay, instead, offers a new solution: to take up the friars’ cause as his own and lobby the laity to give the friars money voluntarily! After all, that approach was working for the monasteries already. In Audelay’s view, the laypeople are an inexhaustible source of wealth; in Langland’s view, the monastic orders are. (Interestingly, neither man turns to the hierarchy of the secular clergy, the episcopacy, for solutions to what was, after all, a crisis of the secular clergy). One look at the remains of Haughmond, Audelay’s home in later life, makes one realize that it was well endowed. But Audelay is too grateful for what Haughmond and Lestrange have done for him, and he hopes the same for others in his “lost generation.” I said at the beginning of this chapter that Audelay imitated Langland’s reformist apocalypticism (a genre I defined elsewhere as “primarily concerned with church reform” to be “accomplished by imminent chastisement” of the corrupt but, nonetheless, ultimately as largely “meliorist”—that is, rejecting the biblical exegesis based on an Augustinian view of the world in permanent decline, and turning to newer exegetes such as Joachim of Fiore or Hildegard of Bingen). Such thinkers regarded the future as “a large canvas,” Beryl Smalley once wrote, on which “each could paint his Weltanschauung.”130 While Audelay is not apocalyptic in his worldview in the sense of expecting an “imminent crisis,” he is certainly so in having projected a visionary “programme” for reform. And, as we have seen, he even goes beyond Langland in portraying himself as having received a prophetic commission from the Holy Spirit,131 something Langland never would have claimed for himself.

chapter 5

Cathedral Songs Lyric Genres of the Choral Ser vice Class and the Resurgent English

We come now to Part II of the book, which deals not in questions of literary biography or autobiography as in Part I, but rather with a large body of anonymous works. Our interest here is in the literary culture created by those living in a liminal clerical status: the singing clerks, chantry priests, and other minor court officials of cathedrals and colleges. Perhaps especially because they left mostly anonymous works, until now this group has been wholly unnoticed or uncharacterized, but they, too, were contributors to the resurgence of English poetry. Using the tools we acquired in Part I for analysis of historically identified writers, Part II asks us to see the works of certain authors we have known merely as “Anonymous” in a new light.

1. Performance, Punctuation, and the Mystery of “Cathedral Lyrics” That underemployed clerics working as household chaplains, secretaries, or civil servants might choose to write Middle English texts is perhaps readily understandable, given that they inhabited trilingual contexts, much frequented by “secular” persons. But this chapter is about the production of Middle English lyrics in cathedrals—of all places—a venue for English literary culture that has passed mostly under the radar. We discuss here the vast and varied group of the choral or liturgical clerks, some more economically privileged than others, but all belonging to a clerical service class. Among those better off were the vicars

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choral of cathedrals, a group, as we saw in the Introduction, sometimes dubbed the petits bourgeois by historians casting about for a Marxist label for these lower clergy of the bishop’s familia. However, vicars choral and their circumstances varied radically from cathedral to cathedral and period to period, but in the cathedrals we will consider here, upward mobility was rare, so I have used the “proletarian” label here for this “choral service class,” especially as we look mainly at York and St. Paul’s during the Great Schism period, a time during which we see various austerities at both cathedrals. From the end of the fourteenth century onward, singing clerks or vicars choral also appeared at the newer secular colleges or royal chapels, a type of institution that would grow increasingly popular as wealthy laity made their own independent chapels in imitation.1 Chantry priests, too, many better off and secure in tenure, also made a living by singing, but their endowments too, were also subject to financial volatility (as we saw with John Tyckhill at St. Paul’s). They said masses for a living, most often funded by the laity, and conducted various record-keeping jobs for the cathedral (Tyckhill collected rents from tenant Londoners), inhabiting their own kind of liminal space. Boy choristers, too, and those who taught them, figure in this group, along with other lower level consistory court clerks and more. As this chapter will show, the English songs and lyrics produced at cathedrals were not even always religious. This cathedral service class proves to be ambidextrous—and cathedrals prove to be, surprisingly, a point of origin for some quite famous, even “secular” Middle English poetry. As we noted earlier, Katherine Zieman’s important book, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England, described the frustrations of lower clergy who sung the Office in a passage worth revisiting here, particularly at secular cathedrals, where canons had long since deputed vicars to perform the opus Dei for them. The diminished prestige of reading and singing that had resulted from their articulation as lowest common denominator skills, and as currency for aspiring choristers, also helped create a clerical ser vice class who exchanged their daily performance for a fixed stipend. . . . Those who sang for them, furthermore, were often younger clerks waiting to take priest’s orders or priests waiting for benefices. . . . In many cases, then, vicars choral and singing clerks elsewhere were as “alienated” from their liturgical labor as the chantry priests were.2 Zieman covers in short space the three main groups we will be concerned with in Part II of this book: vicars choral, choristers, and chantry priests, noting espe-

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cially the indignity of their “fixed stipend,” their expectant “waiting for benefices,” “often [as] younger clerks.” As we will see, however, younger clerks, statistically, usually became older clerks without ever realizing that dream. Moreover, as we saw in Part I, knowing exactly how most of them felt about their jobs is not easy. As we saw in more detail earlier (Introduction), concepts of alienation are complex. Living in an industrial society, Karl Marx, of course, had shown that “the specific form of labour characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labour, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation.” Moreover, “Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labour process, the product of the workers’ labour is in a very real sense alien to the worker.”3 When, however, the product is liturgical song, the Divine Office, Marx’s analogy is a good deal trickier in application. Zieman has drawn attention to the degree of pride many showed in the meticulous performance of their oral work,4 a characteristic not always compatible with ideas of alienation, especially not psychological alienation. As we saw in the last chapter Audelay, a chantry priest, was capable of embittered critique of the Church such as Marx would have recognized, yet he nevertheless offered a powerfully optimistic plan for ecclesiastical reform and an urgent sense of dignity in liturgical performance (for instance, in his “Over-hippers” fragment) and with regard to his own faith. We will find this complete spectrum from outrage to pride and joy among cathedral singers and lyric composers, as we explore this other wise elusive medieval group, a group also marked, like their legal, household, and parish proletarian colleagues in the secular world, by career disappointment. What first alerted me to the existence of what I call “cathedral lyrics” here is the meticulous concern for performance many poems show that are traceable back to cathedral origins. My quotation marks around “cathedral lyrics” pay homage to the ongoing modern debates about which types of poems are lyrics: for instance, as Julia Boffey rightly notes, French or Latin words like chanson, cantus, canticus, cantilena “call to mind the supposed connection between lyric and musical performance,” but cannot completely encompass it. Anne Klinck points to three “ faces” of the lyric, “song, group festivity . . . and personal poetry,” categories that may include any type of “usually non-narrative” forms, from love complaint to religious meditation, though she notes that even longer poems can have or contain lyrical elements.5 While differing technical definitions and genres abound (those most relevant to cathedrals are discussed below), since even longer poems produced in cathedrals settings show engagement with musical or performance expertise, I have opted for “cathedral lyrics” here as an umbrella descriptor.

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Since the origin of so many Middle English lyrics is lost to us, the cathedral connections are revelatory. In Chapter 2, we examined St. Paul’s Cathedral’s John Tyckhill, who composed a surprisingly sophisticated alliterative lyric in his native Yorkshire dialect (“A Bird of Bishopswood”). Poignantly, considering he was a priest, the lyric is a common type of secular love complaint in which the poet is left forlorn among paired-off lovers. Written into his own rent roll sometime before 1396, we saw that it contains echoes or styles from many of the current London poets: Chaucer, Langland, and perhaps even Hoccleve. But what will interest us more here is that it is also (by Middle English poetic standards) elaborately punctuated, as if for careful performance in verse or song. Take, for instance, lines 5–7 of the manuscript (in the native tradition of alliterative verse, the poem is written as prose), which I have transcribed to show the original punctuation:6 grys for to grow grene & glade mennys hartys /~ y îus ech creatur’ comfort hym caght’ } & laxt’ lust’ for to lyf in liking of somer } & j had lenyd me long al a lentyn tyme jn vnlust of my lif & lost al ^my^ joye ~/ & îen j heuyd vp myn hede hert & myn hert hede aftyr The punctuation, a complex use of “an elaborate current punctus versus, or punctus elevatus, or a doubled virgula” (or virgula suspensiva), reminded its modern editor, Ruth Kennedy, strongly of another, much more famous alliterative lyric: “The Blacksmiths.” Take the first three lines of “The Blacksmiths,” as they appear in the manuscript, which I have transcribed to show the punctuation (once again adapting modern keyboard symbols as best one can): Swarte smekyd smeyes smateryd with smoke ~/ dryue me to deth wyth den of here dyntes } Swech noys on nyghte ne herd men neuer ~/ what knauene cry and clateryng of knockes /~ There are three different marks here, suggesting the voice rising after “smoke” (the punctus elevatus, the forerunner of the colon), sustained with a virgula suspensiva after “dyntes” and falling after “knockes” (with the punctus versus, the forerunner of the semicolon, where the voice falls).7 Comparing Tyckhill’s “A Bird,” we see that he, too, is trying to show where the voice rises, for example, appropriately after “glade mennys hartys /~ ” is sustained (twice), or falls, again appropriately at “lost al ^my^ joye ~/ ”—though

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Figure 5.1. A detail highlighting lines 5–7, showing elaborate punctuation in “A Bird,” in the hand of John Tyckhill, now London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) 25125/32, on the face of a St. Paul’s rent roll maintained by Tyckhill, 1395–96, dated as the nineteenth year of Richard II’s reign. © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

his symbols, like his hand, are rougher, reflecting his private draft style. In Pause and Efect, Malcolm Parkes shows how the requirements for punctuating the Psalms for daily singing of the Office “stimulated scribes and readers to apply such analysis to other poetic texts, . . . increasing the range of symbols . . . to distinguish different types of pauses.”8 For the Psalms, basically, “the voice was inflected at the beginning of each verse (intonatio), at the end of the first part of the verse (meditatio), and at the end of the verse (terminatio).” And “longer verse Psalm units might be further divided with another pause (incisum) and a further inflection ( flexa).” What is unusual about both “A Bird” and “Blacksmiths,” as their modern editors first noted, is just this kind of elaborate concern for punctuation.

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Figure 5.2. Detail of the first few lines of “The Blacksmiths” in its unique copy, London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol. 71v, showing its elaborate punctuation. © The British Library Board.

“Blacksmiths” was first brought to modern attention by Elizabeth Salter, who had herself intended to write a full article on its punctuation.9 The most immediate question it raises is: since the punctuation of most Middle English lyrics is often simple (usually at most just employing the punctus or virgula),10 what shared formalist design would prompt two quite different poems— “Blacksmiths,” a boisterous, apparently secular “sound poem” about the noise pollution created by urban blacksmiths, and “A Bird,” Tyckhill’s secular love lament—to be similarly punctuated for careful performance, rather like liturgical music?11 It is likely not accidental, I would suggest, that both poems were copied at a cathedral: in the case of “The Blacksmiths,” into MS Arundel 292, originally made at Norwich Cathedral Priory, perhaps, given its contents,12 for use among the many secular clerks who served in the cathedral schools and choir. Unusually for a book from a monastic cathedral library, Arundel 292 begins with an Early Middle English “Pater Noster,” “Creed,” and assorted Early Middle English prayers, plus the lively and unique Early Middle English Bestiary, all produced c. 1275–1300 (see Chapter 1.1 above). Equally unusually, as Jane Roberts has shown, it also contains rather unique attempts to repurpose some virtually archaic Old English letter forms to copy Early Middle English (eth and wynn, with an unusual use of two types of “g” to distinguish yogh [Figure 5.3]).13 A much later scribe copied “Blacksmiths” (c. 1450) into a blank leaf of Arundel 292, alongside another high-quality alliterative poem of c. 1350,14 “Choristers’ Lament,” a semi-satirical poem about the suffering of choristers

Figure 5.3. London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol. 3, opening page showing the Early Middle English “Creed” and “Pater Noster,” produced c. 1275–1300, using now nearly archaic Old English letter forms (eth instead of thorn and wynn for “w”), and creatively using two types of “g”, one for yogh. © The British Library Board.

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(another group heavily associated with cathedrals) and the exasperation of their choirmaster. Choirmasters, of course, along with grammar masters, were most often members of the clerical proletariat, too,15 and many young choristers were, to coin a phrase, often proletarians-in-training—since many would eventually be underemployed. As the York Minster precentor complained to Archbishop Thoresby in 1367, “various chaplains, holy water carriers, and others were maintaining song schools in parish churches, houses and other places in the city of York,” making it clear, as Barrie Dobson notes, that boys trained in the cathedral song school were not all destined for future service in the Minster choir.16 Though not as heavily punctuated as “Blacksmiths,” “Choristers’” is also copied with an eye to smooth performance, with carefully marked medial pauses such as one finds in well-copied alliterative verse, but instead lineated as rhymed verse (which takes up more parchment). Interestingly, this scribe, though he writes a legal hand similar to the Harley 2253 scribe’s, is not nearly so used to copying in English—at least, like the Newberry 31 scribe mentioned earlier (Chapter 1.1), the distinction between “y” and thorn defeats him (see Figure 5.4). “Choristers’” itself is also overtly concerned with mastering tough liturgical performances under the stern eye of the choirmaster and the pressures of choir professionalism. Its young protagonists simultaneously lament the challenges of learning polyphony and revel in their mastery of arcane musical terminology. It portrays two boys at two different levels (as would Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” where a young chorister consults an older one); together they show off a dizzying array of musical jargon, indulging (as in “Blacksmiths”) a penchant for “sound poetry.” In this complex poem, I would note, the reader simultaneously sympathizes with the boys and the choirmaster, who yells in exasperation at them in French. “Choristers’ Lament,” like “Blacksmiths,” survives only in Arundel 292, a Norwich Cathedral manuscript where it was copied by an East Anglian scribe; however, as Ralph Hanna noted, “Choristers’ ” was composed by a poet whose dialect is either York or Beverly (also Yorkshire cathedral town). As I will suggest in more detail, given that both have cathedrals, the primary (and technically only approved) locations for a song school in either city,17 I think there is every likelihood that the poet had a York or Beverly cathedral education—even though a Norwich cathedral scribe later tried, at least superficially, to adapt it to his own dialect.18 Historians have long known that there was a grapevine among cathedrals for sharing Latin materials:19 but was there also one for sharing Middle English materials? An even more famous lyric collection also bearing connections with a major cathedral certainly suggests that there might have been: as N. R. Ker noted long ago, among the binding fragments of the Harley 2253 lyric collection

Figure 5.4. London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fol.70v, “Choristers’ Lament,” copied for easy performance with carefully marked medial caesuras and also lineated as rhymed verse. The scribe is not as used to copying in English as his near contemporary, the Harley 2253 scribe; the distinction between “y” and thorn defeats him, so he dots both. © The British Library Board.

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are pieces of a Hereford cathedral ordinal.20 An ordinal, of course, tells the clergy of a specific cathedral precisely what the order of ser vice was for their liturgies and particular feast days, so I would add that the Harley binding fragment comes from not just any manuscript a cathedral might own, but an in-house manuscript. The fact that he had access to such a binding fragment, I think, positions the Harley compiler as someone likely to be interested in some of the more unusual topics in the collection, for instance, texts such as “Satire on the Consistory Courts” (not a common topic for a vernacular poetry)—consistory courts, of course, are exclusively cathedral courts.21 The Harley 2253 scribe, I would suggest, with his prominent trilingualism and “ambidextrous” literary abilities, is likely to have been a classic proletarian who made a living in both legal and liturgical piecework. Carter Revard has offered evidence that this scribe was connected with the Hereford bishop’s familia (he copied, for instance, the seal mottoes of the Hereford bishops) but also worked copying charters for clients in nearby Ludlow.22 More recently, Daniel Birkholz built upon Revard’s findings to propose the compilation of Harley 2253 in the court of Bishop Orleton of Hereford (such a court would contain many clerks, both lay and ordained), and though his study just treats the love poetry, and offers no new archival evidence beyond Revard’s, his portrait of the homosocial culture and education of Hereford cathedral clerics is helpful and certainly matches issues we will encounter in examining York, Norwich, and St. Paul’s. Birkholz writes: The most common path into the Hereford Bishop’s familia ran through the Hereford Cathedral School. Here training in basic Latin literacy (“song”) and in the bureaucratic practices necessary for an ecclesiastical career occurred simultaneously with students’ inculcation with a professional clerical ethos. Primary values included loyalty to cohort and devotion to home church. Considering . . . Edward II’s persecution of Orleton and despoiling of his dioceses (1323–25), then the city’s subsequent role as “insurgent headquarters” (1326–27), such socialization programmes may have taken on a special intensity at Hereford.23 As we will see in relation to members of the York vicars choral (Chapter 6), for instance, they also performed legal, secretarial, or scribal duties (in part of the kind portrayed in “Satire on the Consistory Courts”), both inside the cathedral and often abroad, and they, too, were deeply involved in the political insurgency under Archbishop Scrope, harshly suppressed by Henry IV. And the lower clergy of both York Minster and St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (see Chapter 7)

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exhibit intense “loyalty to cohort and devotion to home church” as well. The main point I would want to emphasize here, however, is that the Harley scribe’s great interest in both secular and religious songs and lyrics shows precisely the kind of ambidextrous quality that proletarians exhibit, and it resulted in the precious Harley collection we have today. Whatever connection he might have had to Hereford Cathedral (whether past or present), he was evidently not among the more augustly paid clerks, given the modesty of 2253’s production—in fact, what the cathedral manuscripts containing Middle English lyrics have in common, I would suggest, is modesty. As we saw in the Audelay chapter, and we will see again in this chapter, liturgical singers carried what Langland calls a “porthors” (Latin portiforium), a workbook, as we might say today, often of the singer’s own making.24 How this tradition might relate to the production of manuscripts such as Harley 2253 is significant—at the very least, it tells us that a large group of musically and liturgically literate proletarians wrote their own manuscripts. Several other Middle English productions beyond lyrics may be linked to cathedrals: for example, the romance Sir Firumbras was composed and revised by its author in an Exeter dialect (partly translating from the French, partly redacting an earlier English version) on scrap parchment of documents relating primarily to the diocese of Exeter. As Nicholas Perkins and Alison Wiggins note, clerical origins for romances like this are not surprising (given its themes of Saracen conversion and recovery of Passion relics).25 This material context, and the interest in romance motifs, is reminiscent of Tyckhill’s “A Bird,” composed on a working rent roll at St. Paul’s Cathedral; similarly, the Firumbras poet’s choice of support material for his composition is suggestive of a legal proletarian working for a cathedral. Another example is our one manuscript so far that would break the “modesty” rule, though the reason is itself informative: there is a possibility, as Simon Horobin has recently argued, that the famous Vernon Manuscript collection of Middle English texts had a scribe from Lichfield Cathedral. Horobin’s argument is based on his study of the scribal hands, finding that: “paleographical analysis of the hand of Scribe B suggests . . . Scribe B may have been a member of the secular clergy of Lichfield Cathedral.”26 If his theory is correct, clerks at Lichfield Cathedral might even have made (approved) use of writing space and materials at the cathedral (which perhaps makes good sense given its size),27 or perhaps Scribe B simply even “moonlighted” as contributing scribe for this project: as we know from other cathedral contexts, many members of the lower clergy did (e.g., the vicars choral of York).28 In the case of Vernon, clearly a wealthy patron, whether ecclesiastical or lay (various theories exist), paid for the

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making and illuminating of the manuscript.29 Although a study of Vernon is well beyond the scope of this chapter, I would note that the unusual size of the Vernon Manuscript, the size of large liturgical books used for multiple singers, could also support cathedral scribal origins. A constant complaint, as we have seen, of commercial scribes and scriveners’ guilds is the interloping of just such “part-timers.”30 Finally, as we will see in Chapter 7, clerical proletarian connections may also explain yet another key alliterative poem with apparent cathedral associations: St. Erkenwald, which, based on multiple internal references, is explicitly set at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and shows minutely detailed knowledge of the layout of the cathedral and its close, its architecture, and its liturgical protocols.31 The historical St. Erkenwald was St. Paul’s most famous bishop, so a poetic life of him would make best sense as a cathedral production. But this poem is not in Latin, rather in alliterative Middle English—likely another product of our submerged vernacular cathedral culture. Though this chapter and the next one will strive to solve as many mysteries as possible about what I have called “cathedral lyrics,” much will remain to be done, and it is my hope that the information offered in the present study will encourage other scholars to offer yet more. We turn now to a survey of evidence that earlier song and musicological specialists have established about multiple examples of songs with cathedral origins.

2. Middle English Goes to Church (Through the Back Door): Carols, Motets, Contrafacta and Cross-Bred Genres We have long known that cathedrals were creative spaces for productions in Latin, such as new liturgical works, local and larger chronicles, and local saints’ lives (see Chapters 6 and 7). But somewhere amidst this Latin activity, I will suggest here, there was also some production of Middle English texts, too. Who might have been responsible for such vernacular treasures? Chantry priests in cathedral settings and their fellow liturgical singers, the vicars choral, were groups often marked by a strange mixture of, on the one hand, “windfall” support from lay endowments and, on the other, uneven wealth distribution of those endowments, which could even cease altogether. John Tyckhill, as we saw, fought unsuccessfully to keep one of his chantries at St. Paul’s during a period in the late fourteenth century when the Bishop of London was forced to close or amalgamate several chantries.32 Often in contact with the laity as sources of extra income, both modest and substantial, these groups were involved in production of in-

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house poetic, musical, and (as we’ll see in Chapter 6) dramatic and historical texts, often inflected with issues of performance. This chapter and the next examine these two groups from the lower echelons of the cathedral clergy and their literary associations, with a special focus on Norwich, Hereford, York and (especially in Chapter 7) St. Paul’s. English literature made or associated with cathedral settings seems at first an unlikely animal, rarely imagined, let alone studied. But as this chapter will contend, it appears less strange when we realize that cathedrals were humming with underemployed clerks of sophisticated musical, liturgical, and often documentary training, usually stuck in that liminal space between the lay and clerical worlds, and eager for lay endowment. There has been a tendency in some scholarship to dismiss the vicars choral of medieval cathedrals as semi-literate. But before we do, take note of musicologist John Harper’s account of how much a member of the York vicars choral would have to know to do his job: a chorister would have needed to know about 50 psalm texts, but a vicar would have to know the full 150, not to mention about 130 hymns (the process of learning these hymns began as a chorister).33 Furthermore, the Uses of Salisbury, Hereford, and York each include over 1,800 antiphons and 850 responds. The Gradual34 (the older boy in “Choristers’ Lament” is pictured sweating over his gradual) includes about 1,200 proper chants—introits, graduals, alleluias, tracts, offertories, and communions. One would also have to sing the sequences and chants of the ordinary of the mass, and the repertory of the Processional includes35 about 450 chants. All in all, Harper estimates that this represents “a typical repertory of some 5,000 items of choral chant,” at least to judge by what is “on the books” (though daily realities might vary, of course, affected by various issues, from absenteeism to the possibility of “over-hipping”).36 Even so, this is an awesome canon by any measure, and even this listing, as Harper notes, would not include the skills of improvisation a vicar would have to know: a three-part polyphony, for instance, even choristers were expected to learn would include “sighting,” that is, singing a second melody line four notes above the chant, and they would learn to improvise “a freer third voice below the chant.” Vicars choral would also learn to sing composed polyphony (aptly named “pricksong” in English). Clearly anyone who could do even a fraction of this competently was in some very real sense a very literate person. Add to this the fact that many vicars choral and chantry priests copied their own music manuscripts (e.g., their porthors) and composed music (often for special occasions), and one certainly has a class of men for whom literary composition—especially lyric composition—might seem quite a natural extension of their day jobs. Certainly the detailed punctuation of a poem like

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“The Blacksmiths” or “A Bird in Bishopswood” fits nicely into this context, as does the torrent of musical jargon and vocational bemoaning in “Choristers’ Lament.”37 If we think back to the great care the scribe of “Prisoner’s Lament” took in setting both its French and English lyrics to the music on the lines above (Chapter 1), we have some sense of the mental habits of such training. However, skilled as they might have been, as recent studies of late medieval English vicars choral agree, upward mobility for this clerical ser vice class was rare. In a recent study of their better off, closest relatives in the cathedral hierarchy, chantry chaplains at St. Paul’s, for instance, Rousseau notes that only “a minority of chantry chaplains had ever been vicars choral . . . before being admitted to a chantry.”38 And, while numbers of chantry priests who were promoted to benefices was also fairly small, numbers of vicars choral who were promoted to benefices were even smaller. So, there was something of a glass ceiling between the two groups and, more importantly, another glass ceiling of sorts above both groups. Yet, both jobs required a good deal of education and training to do properly: a chantry priest was required to complete a series of tests in grammar, Latin, and singing, as were the vicars choral.39 These two groups, moreover, also worked closely with lay patrons: most obviously in the case of chantry priests, but the vicars choral of cathedrals often garnered endowments, small and large, and masses or obits from the laity. Moreover, another part of their job was to guide pilgrims or visitors to the cathedral, as we will see in York Minster (Chapter 6), which required them to know a good deal about its shrines, architecture, and history, as at St. Paul’s (Chapter 7). Chantry priests such as Tyckhill were also constantly interacting with the laity on cathedral financial business—as we saw with his rent roll business transactions at the London Guildhall.40 Since Latin liturgy is the basis for many of the themes and metrics first experimented with in English lyrics from the thirteenth century onward,41 it is not surprising that liturgical workers might have been among the early and continuingly active experimenters in vernacular verse. The more codicological, musicological and formalist dimensions we examine, the more this submerged class comes into view, along with the literary genres they most often used: songs, carols, motets, and hymns. Many vernacular lyrics in various genres, it turns out, can be firmly associated with cathedrals or colleges where a cadre of vicars choral and boy choristers were trained and maintained. Mostly, this has passed unnoticed by literary scholars, but two groups of scholars, musicologists and codicologists, have illuminated some of the cathedral connections. We begin first with the carol genre. For instance, in her astute article “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” Julia Boffey suggested three broad principles for understanding carol collections: (1) that authorial

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versus compiling roles could be a fluid (even in a named collection such as Audelay’s), since most collections were likely compiled for practical, not “literary” or bibliographical purposes; (2) that most of the surviving carol collections “with major repertories” tend “to have musical settings with some or all of their carol texts”;42 (3) and that “in terms of provenance, most have been fairly convincingly associated with large religious houses or chapels of some kind.”43 We can now take Boffey’s very helpful information a step further. I would note that a surprising number of these provenances are, yes, religious houses, but we can now be more specific: they are often cathedrals—the settings with vicars choral, especially secular cathedrals—or sometimes in the chapels of secular colleges. A word about the latter: kinds of institutions that historians call “secular colleges” were on the rise, especially at the end of the fourteenth century. Here, singing clerks operated, like the vicars choral in cathedrals, in well-endowed chapel settings such as the Chapel Royal at Windsor or Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham’s independent foundation, Winchester College.44 I will suggest that in these types of communities where singing clerks lived and worked, there was also an interest in and increasing demand for the copying, composition, and translation of vernacular songs, in addition to (and sometimes growing out of) their Latin liturgical texts. And as musicologists suggest, such vernacular songs were most likely utilized not in the cathedral choir itself (or rarely), but in the communal halls of the singers, for recreation, devotion, or edification. And beyond those halls, such songs were likely shared with lay patrons and family (most vicars choral were local men), and some may have found their way into civic productions such as vernacular cycle plays—the vicars choral of York Minster, for instance, are known to have helped in the production of certain York mystery plays mounted by the guilds (see Chapter 6).45 In this kind of context, the writing and copying of Middle English lyrics—still a minority interest among the literati throughout the fourteenth century and even into the early fifteenth—can be increasingly discerned. These groups of vicars choral and singing clerks, in other words, made a mostly unnoticed contribution to the gradual resurgence of English as a literary language. We can begin by sifting out some of the cathedral and college settings where Middle English songs and lyrics were apparently both composed and written down.46 So, for instance, taking just the carol collections that Boffey mentions as “associated with large religious houses or chapels,” I would observe that, more specifically, most were actually associated with a cathedral or college: for example, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. e. 1 likely originates in Beverly Minster; British Library, MS Add. 5665 was associated with Exeter Cathedral; and British

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Library, MS Egerton 3307 was probably associated with the Chapel Royal of St. George’s, Windsor (with its own vicars choral).47 And there are more: British Library, MS Add. 5465 is another manuscript also associated with the Chapel Royal in at least one instance of medieval ownership before 1529,48 and Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden  B. 26 was likely owned by John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester,49 which, rather unusually, connects even a bishop with ownership of vernacular song texts (Worcester was no ordinary diocese, having maintained more ancient ties with Old English culture). But bishops themselves, so far as we know, were unlikely to be composers of English songs, an activity more often found lower down the clerical ranks (though composition in French was different: e.g. in the thirteenth century, two famous bishops, Robert Grosseteste and John Pecham, are known to have authored French literature). The exception that seems to prove the rule is the Latin song collection, much of it original, of Richard Ledrede, the infamous Bishop of Ossory (1317–60). His commonplace book of legal and devotional texts, The Red Book of Ossory is invaluable to lyric scholars for the marginal incipits of Middle English popular songs accompanying his Latin hymns to indicate tune settings. Unusually for a Franciscan poet, Ledrede’s are contrafacta that move only ever from the vernacular to Latin, the opposite of most Franciscan popularizing tendencies: for example, Ledrede’s Marian poem IX, “Peperit virgo,” is famously set to the tune of “Mayde yn the moore lay,” but no Middle English text of that or any other poem is provided (just the tune’s name).50 Most importantly for our purposes in this chapter, a revealing and characteristically testy note in the lower margin of a page of his Latin lyrics explains exactly why. It explicitly says that he composed these for the vicars choral of his cathedral church to prevent them from singing profane songs: “Be advised reader that the bishop of Ossory has made these songs for the vicars of the cathedral church, and his clerks and priests [fecit istas cantilenas pro vicariis ecclesie cathedralis sacerdotibus et clericis suis] to be sung at the great festivals and for entertainment [solatiis], so that their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs that are theatrical, lewd and secular [cantilenis teatralibus, turpibus et secularibus]. Since they are choral singers [cantatores], let them provide tunes suitable for these verses” (my emphasis).51 What is surprising here is not the attack on clerks’ behaviour—as Ledrede’s modern editor, Edmund Colledge, quipped, “records never tell us about clerics who did not sing dirty songs.” Rather, it is the explicit programme to wean the cathedral vicars choral from their vernacular songs and all the lower clergy of the bishop’s familia with them. Ledrede uses the word “cantilena” (a word we noted above in Boffey’s list of lyric genres, also used by Audelay in his Latin carol rubrics), here both pejoratively in the

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memo and positively to denote his Latin songs on the same page. Often indicating a carol, “cantilena de chorea” means, as Colledge noted, “a song to dance to,” mentioning that in 1312, Pope Clement V had condemned clerics who joined in profane singing and dancing (“choreas facere dissolutas et interdum canere cantilenas”). The episcopal register of Bishop Orleton of Hereford Cathedral similarly records that clerks sang lewd songs (“cantica inhonesta canere”) on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene at a local fair.52 Orleton’s alertness to this issue, I would note, is striking especially if his own clerical familia at some point included the versatile Harley 2253 compiler. Clearly, we have much to learn about the trilingual cathedral cultures of the late medieval episcopal familia in which songs played such diverse roles. But this much is certain: these were important literary forums. In fact, only one of the major carol collections Boffey lists, British Library, MS Sloane 2593 (likely from Bury St. Edmunds), is not associated with a cathedral or college setting. For Middle English scholars of songs and lyrics, then, cathedrals and colleges are fertile settings for such vernacular material.53 How exactly did these settings foster vernacular material? Musicologists and codicologists offer several answers: if one sifts sources like Dobson and Harrison’s pioneering Medieval English Songs (a selection of the lyrics, all too rare, that actually survive with music), one finds references to a number of manuscripts with cathedral and secular college provenances, and intriguingly to usage of these texts in their residential halls.54 Though twenty-first-century scholars now justly critique aspects of Dobson and Harrison’s interventionist editorial method, with the help of more recent scholarship in the NIMEV, the DIMEV, and recent manuscript studies, Medieval English Songs can still help create a picture of the authors and users of such lyrics.55 Secular cathedrals (i.e., those not served by monastic houses) were places where a community of resident singing clerks (vicars choral and choristers) laboured at the Divine Office daily, but many of these men were not (or not yet) personally vowed to chastity via ordination, and some never would be.56 They were living in halls or communal housing complexes near the cathedral, and living less strict lives than their counterparts in religious orders might, or even parish priests.57 Some images of these halls should help us understand why these communities nurtured not just Latin but nascent vernacular culture. Figure 5.5 shows the communal dining hall of the College of the Vicars Choral of York. The College was originally founded in 1269 and known as the Bedern, a word first recorded in 1265 (deriving from Old English words for prayer [“gebed”] and house [“aern”]). Figure 5.6 shows the half-timbered interior of the hall, a style familiar in domestic housing of the period, but what distinguishes this from a local

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Figure 5.5. The Bedern Hall, the dining and recreational hall of the College of the York Minster Vicars Choral. Photo by author.

merchant’s hall is that it once boasted a small bay window with a miniature version of York Minster’s vaulting, built in to light the reader’s lectern for oral readings during meals.58 In the world between the clergy and laity, this is a liminal space. York Minster’s row housing for the vicars does not survive, but Figure 5.7a shows the medieval Vicars Choral Close at Chichester Cathedral with its small row houses and gardens running down the left (and originally the right) side of the Close, branching off from the Vicars’ dining hall (centre); Figure 5.7b shows the small projecting bay windows of that hall, again specially lit for the reader’s lectern, as York’s would have been (Chichester’s later made an impression on John Keats when he was composing his Gothic The Eve of St. Agnes).59 One of the more vivid descriptions we have of choral hall life comes from William of Wykeham’s statutes for his newly founded Winchester College, which “provided that when on feast days in winter-time [by] a fire in the hall for the fellows and scholars, [they] . . . might after the meal, for the sake of recreation, pass the

Figure 5.6. Interior of the Bedern, as restored today, a relatively small building, with three main windows on each side. On the left wall (not shown) is now a niche, all that remains of the earliest known bay window in England (c. 1370), originally decorated with a miniature vaulting, in the style of the Minster’s master mason, providing special lighting for the reader’s lectern for a vicar to read aloud at meals. Photo by John Van Engen.

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Figure 5.7a. Vicars Choral Hall and Close, Chichester Cathedral, with houses for the vicars running down both the left and (originally) the right side, branching off from the dining hall (top centre, in the distance). Photo by John Van Engen.

time with songs and other decent entertainments, and occupy themselves more seriously with poems, chronicles of kings, and the marvels of this world, and with other things that were suited to the clerical state.”60 Thankfully, we can match this cozy description of literary hall life at Winchester to one of its surviving musical manuscripts suggesting what was actually sung. Eric Dobson’s research into the history of the owners of the Winchester collection, now Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 5943, shows what Middle English songs were composed, collected, and sung among its early vicars choral. Here we have not only the names of owners but even more rare, the name of one of its composers. The key owner of Add. 5943 was Thomas Turk, who added a quire of songs, both religious and secular, sometime between 1395 and 1401.61 Turk is a classic example of the underemployed, though universityeducated, proletarian such as we hear about in Langland’s and Audelay’s complaints earlier in this study. His was a colourful life: a fellow of Exeter College,

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Figure 5.7b. Two small bay windows jutting out from the wall of the Vicars’ Hall to light the reader’s lectern for reading aloud at meals. The poet John Keats saw the windows in 1819 when visiting an “old dowager,” Mary Lacy, living in the Vicars Hall; they came to figure in his poem The Eve of St. Agnes. Photo by John Van Engen.

Oxford (1384–99) and a chaplain from 1395–97, a fellow at Winchester College from 1395 and subwarden from 1395–97, he became principal of Hart Hall, Oxford in 1399–1400, returning to Winchester in 1401, and soon after becoming vicar of Downton, Wiltshire. By 1411, he was vicar of Bere Regis, Dorset, but in the same year, he was cited by the bishop of Salisbury on a charge of heresy (perhaps indicating the kind of ease with which the frustrated, educated, underemployed could be lured into reformist or extremist circles), finally becoming a Carthusian monk at Hinton Charterhouse, Somerset.62 This is a fascinating biography: contrary to what we might expect, holding teaching positions at Oxford, even being the principal of a hall there, was apparently unimpressive in the medieval benefice system, and Turk never rises above the rank of vicar. Thereafter, he is cited for heresy (one can empathize with what some of his complaints against the Church might have been), before retiring as a Carthusian.

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Into the manuscript he made during his Winchester Hall days, he collected, for instance, a Middle English carol, “Als I lay on Yoolis night,” and another Christmas song, “This Yool.”63 This is a rarity since it is written by an identifiable chorister master at Winchester and, perhaps not wholly by chance, is likely the best of Turk’s collected songs: “This Yool” is actually attributed in Turk’s manuscript (“quod Edmund”); Edmund was a Winchester chapel clerk from 1396–97 and apparently also the informator choristarum—in other words, a singing clerk with choristers in his charge (not enough is known about chorister life, as we will see in Section 3 below on “Choristers’ Lament”). The song itself is interesting for the way it straddles the devotional, courtly and pedagogical worlds. Appropriately for a choirmaster, it opens as an attempt to model patience and even temper to young men, but soon gets a bit pointed, with the poet vowing to remain merry “thys ȝool” and to leave the company of anyone “wam y may fynd angri” (line 7), making a resolution for “þis new ȝeer” (line 13) to remain of “good cheer.” Then in the final stanza, this Christmas song suddenly shifts to a courtly love lyric, emblematic of the “mixed” environment of such choral environments: Thys ȝool ȝeve y my lady bryȝt My hert and love and al my myȝt and pray [y] ȝow to be ȝowr man and ȝow servy ryȝt as y kan þys ȝool. (lines 14–18)64 The song, with its multiple sudden shifts, opens a window on what a choirmaster, teaching Latin liturgy by day, might write in the vernacular, especially intriguing since choirmasters in a setting like this were often men in minor orders and so not celibate. Some of the other songs in Turk’s collection are courtly, many “show some metrical accomplishment,” but often the writer is, as we have seen elsewhere, struggling to make English work in his dialect. Most importantly, Dobson speculates that these songs, especially the less polished ones, may come from ephemeral copies first made for the choristers, concluding that “the quire bound into Turk’s MS was such a performing copy.”65 Somehow on the interface between Latin and vernacular, as musicologist F. Ll. Harrison notes, these halls were fertile ground for a kind of creative crossover between the cathedral music of their day jobs, so to speak, and texts sung, read, or performed in vicars choral halls by evening. So far largely nearly invisible to modern scholars of poetry, the vicars choral, and the young choristers of cathedral song schools for whom they were often responsible, formed the nu-

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cleus of an entire cathedral’s musical life. Looking back at Figures 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7, we see samples of the living arrangements for the vicars choral and their halls in York Minster, called the Bedern, or more fully at Chichester Cathedral, with the Vicars Close and its Hall.66 Completing these circles were the cathedral’s chantry priests, also usually in communal lodgings right nearby: see Figure  5.8, showing St.  William’s College, York, a lovely, large half-timbered building complex with a great hall and courtyard right beside the Minster on the street leading to the nearby Bedern. Even the plentiful exterior wood carvings of St. William’s, largely representing the agricultural labours of the month, speak of the liminal world of this home space.67 These men also also provided the secretarial, accounting, and scribal work around the cathedral (falling largely to the vicars choral at York, and more to the chantry priests at St. Paul’s).68 Such work apparently lent itself nicely to the collection or composition of songs, as we saw in Tyckhill’s rent roll.69 As Harrison notes, the relative scarcity of English songs and collections (when compared to French ones), and the musical difficulty of certain of the extant settings for these lyrics, all point to a musically elite environment for these early English texts.70 Elitism, liminality, linguistic hybridity or “cross-bred” genres are perhaps the key musicological characteristics of the Middle English songs sung in cathedral halls. Built upon Latin and French genres, this was often challengingly elite music, especially the motet genre. Harrison mentions a late thirteenthcentury tractate from Paris in which Johannes de Grocheo proclaims that the motet should not be performed “before ordinary people because they do not notice its fine points,” but rather “before learned people” who can appreciate its “subtleties.”71 Motets could also be the site of linguistic hybridity: structurally, as Harrison notes, a motet involved composition over a cantus prius factus, a preexisting tune, of one or more voices, each with a different text. The motet’s cantus firmus was the tenor voice, which most often sung “a relatively short phrase (neuma) from a liturgical chant,” usually repeated. Remarkably, the upper voices could be singing either in the same or a diferent language, making some songs, in effect, “macaronic”—but unlike macaronic verse, simultaneously so.72 These could be either secular or sacred, and it is here that the innovativeness of the genre becomes apparent. Interestingly, while sacred poems were rarely set over a secular tenor, “secular poems . . . were commonly set over a tenor from church plainsong.” At times, in fact, Harrison notes that to modern ears, these combinations can even seem “sacrilegious”; he offers the example of a Good Friday neuma “dolor meus” upon which a pair of motets was constructed with upper voices singing about the sorrow of lovesickness—a striking mix for so holy a feast day.

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Figure 5.8. St. William’s College, York Minster, Great Hall. Built to house the Minster’s chantry priests in 1461, located in the Close, on the street leading to the Bedern (College of the Vicars Choral). It housed twenty-three priests. Image source: https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/St_William%27s _College#/media/File:St.William’s _College.jpg. Photo credit: Kaly99.

The apparent naturalness of this kind of “cross-bred” or hybrid thinking— so unapparent or unnatural to us—speaks volumes about medieval poetic and liturgical culture,73 and alerts us as literary scholars, I believe, to the need to understand the sophistication of poetic subcultures in these choral settings. It is no wonder then that genres such as the contrafacta poems, the strictest of these “crossover” genres, flourished in such settings: for example, Harley 2253’s famous paired “Lutel wot it anymon” poems, contrafacta I have discussed elsewhere for the complexity of their refrain bracketing on the manuscript page,74 now make more sense given the scribe’s likely Hereford Cathedral associations. We have already seen how contrafacta poems look and work on the musical page with “Prisoner’s Lament” (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.6). But two further genres in

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particu lar, the carol and the motet, were heavi ly used in cathedral and early secular college settings and became, I would argue, sites of experimentation for English poetics, evolving in surprising ways out of the daily Latin liturgy. Just as the arrival of polyphony opened up new professional and vocational opportunities for unbeneficed singing clerks (boys and men),75 the growth of the socially liminal, semi-religious communities in which they lived also gave new opportunities for the evolution of vernacular song. And, thankfully, being literate men, they also began to write such songs down. While up until now literary scholars have more often credited Franciscan collections with this kind of pioneering work (especially in the thirteenth century),76 I would suggest that increasingly in fourteenth century the choral ser vice class also had a key role in our literary history. To finish then with concrete examples of these two significant genres: first, the carol, which provided so many unique opportunities for linguistic, cultural, and religious-secular “crossover.” We have already met this genre in Audelay’s oeuvre (Chapter 4). But Audelay’s texts do not survive with music, though the carol does survive with music from choral contexts. In a carol, there is always a refrain, often two lines, which is simple enough in lay contexts that everyone can join in, while stanza lengths are often four lines, and often with four stresses, as in the carol “Go’day” (“Good day, sire Cristemas our kinge”).77 “Go’day” comes from Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 26,78 which was likely owned by John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, surviving there with its music (see Figure  5.9). Elsewhere, I have discussed it formally as a bobbed carol,79 but here, the cathedral context of its preservation is key. In its original music,80 the two syllables of the words “Go’day” are sung on two identical, sustained notes (in modern music, G), which in performance sound rather like two voiced trumpet blasts at the outset of the bobbed refrain.81 I’d suggest that this detail is intriguing in relation to Eric Stanley’s shrewd hunch of 1972 that bobbed refrains were perhaps “shouted,” a reminder that literary critics, musicologists, and church historians can all be mutually helpful to one another. The copying of musical notation, as here in a manuscript most likely from Worcester Cathedral, was a specialized activity, as is singing “Go’day” in parts— something one would not guess when meeting it in a modern lyric anthology, normally stripped of its music. As Harrison says of the carol, “At some time perhaps in the early fourteenth century, the song-tunes of round dances (carole tunes) were apparently drawn upon for clerical songs for Christmas and other festive seasons, and also for love-songs, some of which may have been used in cathedrals and singing-clerks’ halls.”82 This helps explain why in Piers Plowman,

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Figure 5.9. “Go’day,” bobbed carol with musical notation from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 26 (SC 3340), fol. 8. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Langland imagines the Four Daughters of God “caroling” in triumph on Easter Day (i.e. they are singing and dancing). And it explains why the dour Bishop Ledrede thought to fob his vicars choral off with Latin contrafacta of popular songs appropriated for festive occasion (a losing battle). On festive days, there was more scope for “cross-bred” genres and even for breaking down hierarchies, both social and linguistic. As Harrison notes, “non-ritual songs” could be used during the twelve days of Christmas, for instance, to replace standard liturgical items (e.g. replacing the usual Benedicamus domino), involving the special use of boy choristers, and sometimes liturgical plays performed by subdeacons. Sub-

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deacons, in fact, and members of the vicars choral had a role in the writing and staging of the cycle plays in places such as York and Wakefield (see Chapter 6).83 A record, for instance, in Bishop John Grandisson’s Ordinal for Exeter Cathedral, written in 1337, directs just such a use of choristers.84 The collocation of merriment with the vernacular is instructive as the thin edge of a wedge in the long rise of polyphony and the lyrical in sacred music. We have already seen what we miss when we read a Middle English carol (such as “Go’ Day”) without its music on the flat anthology page. It remains to see what we miss with a motet. The naked text of “Worldes blisse, have good day” looks deceptively simple in a modern poetic anthology (such as Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century or The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse),85 but in fact, it demanded a sophisticated musical form in choral performance. The motet is an elite form that merges (most often) a poetic text over a plainsong tenor. Harrison explains that as the first extant motet with English words,86 “Worldes blisse” was built on the tenor Benedicamus domino, and as Thomas Duncan has explained it is “through composed,” meaning that “each stanza has its own music,” so, like “Prisoner’s Lament” (Chapter  1.4), it is of great interest to text-music scholars.87 Its manuscript context and difficulty point to “a distinct category of consumers, mainly the communities of professional clerics and singers attached to secular cathedrals,” the kind of difficulty in parts that provided more jobs for choral singers, boys, and other unbeneficed groups, as McHardy notes.88 This motet survives in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 8, which exhibits a typical mix, that is, “devotional and amatory,” once again the kind of hybridity that may surprise modern readers, but that by now we recognize as characteristic of the liminal choral ser vice class world. Like “Prisoner’s Lament,” “Worldes blisse” appears on the flyleaf of the manuscript (early fourteenth century, Corpus 8, fol. 270), but the flyleaf itself was cut from a double page of a once extremely large, liturgical-sized book.89 It is devotional in nature, but immediately above it in the manuscript is the ending of a two-part love song in descant style: “ioye and blisce bringet me to bride” (very like the mix in Turk’s Winchester College manuscript).90 The other contents of this remarkable double-leaf binding fragment are “a French motet and some three-part clausulae (i.e., short wordless compositions written on an identified phrase of plainsong).” Harrison concludes: “The nature of the texts, the musical techniques and the writing suggest that the manuscript belonged to a clerical community and contained polyphonic music for church use as well as music for recreational occasions in the community’s common hall. . . . They presumably sang music with sacred texts either in church or hall; in hall they also sang some secular

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songs . . . appropriate to their station and others whose subject matter was decidedly unclerical”91 (my emphases). Harrison’s adjective “unclerical” assumes the kind of binary distinction that, as we have seen in this study so far, does not apply to clerical proletarians, who were ambidextrous creatures. Examining this sophisticated musical text purely as a literary text misses the point: a lot of the complexity is in the music. Its Middle English editor, Brown refers to the first two lines as a refrain (as in “Go’day” above),92 which makes the best sense numerically, but establishing exact stanza lengths is still a bit difficult:93 Worldes blisse, have good day; Nou fram mine herte wend away! Him for to loven min hert is went Þat þurȝ his side spere rent. (lines 1–4)94 It would have been sung over the Latin tenor line Benedicamus domino, with some very complex mathematical relations between the upper and lower voices: as Harrison notes, the tenor tune is aab and, with one significant exception for emphasis, does not coincide with the tune repeat (of the upper tune), a case “in parvo of a technique of non-coincidence.”95 Those who could appreciate the art of this, let alone sing it, were skilled people indeed. This unassuming little poem, then, restored to its original musical context, is no ordinary Middle English religious lyric. But only a literary scholar would notice that the poet uses vocabulary very reminiscent of Ancrene Wisse (one wonders, in fact, if he knew that text, which had quite a manuscript distribution).96 For instance, of Christ’s head, crowned with thorns, he writes: Þi feyre neb [face] was al bispet, With spote and blood meynd al bywet Fro þe crune to þe to [toe] Þi body was ful of pine and wo. (9–12) This swift re-allegorization of the painful death as a shield will protect the speaker from “delves lore,” becoming, then, an intellectual shield (“Ha Jesu! Þe smarte ded / Be my shield, and me ared / Fram delves lore” [16–18]), just like the swift allegorical transformations of the shield in Book VII of Ancrene Wisse, also intellectually demanding.97 The motet’s tenor (sung under the English words and set on the Latin phrase Benedicamus domino) would have been known

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to the composer as “one of the tunes for the Benedicamus at the end of a major office on important festivals.”98 So, once again, I would note, as with the carols above, the English here is actually a “riff” on a piece of liturgy for a feast day. One wonders whether, since hearing the words of all voices in any polyphonic music was itself a challenge (one of the long-standing critiques made by reformers), perhaps multilingual performances could have passed unnoticed except by choral insiders (like so much else in sophisticated choral music, right down to modern times).99 English, then, may also have “snuck in the back door” in multilingual performances during the festivity and merriment of the twelve days of Christmas, when we know for certain that popular tunes at least were most often appropriated. One suspects insiders’ mischief, for instance, in a case that reverses the languages in the sacred motet “Sancta mater gracie,” in which the tenor, unusually, is a highly secular— indeed to use Harrison’s word, nearly “sacrilegious”—English text: “Dou way Robin the child wile wepe dou way Robin.” The English tenor is apparently from some other wise lost secular song,100 in which a woman protests against the importunate and overly hasty physical advances of a would-be lover.101 Chaucer scholars will recall that Alisoun used the same “dou way” phrase in Chaucer’s bawdy “Miller’s Tale” when Nicholas first takes an aggressive approach to wooing.102 And the “Dou way” text here is even more intriguing than Chaucer’s because the woman speaker protests that her child is present. In Princeton Library, MS Garrett 119, one of two surviving texts of the motet, the English is written in red ink, for Harrison perhaps suggesting that “alternatives were contemplated— performance without the tenor text for choir use, with the tenor text elsewhere.”103 So this fascinating little hybrid motet must also perhaps have been intended at least for performance in the vicars or clerks hall, though modern church-goers who have experienced the impishness of organists who quietly slip in hymn-like riffs on “pop” music during a ser vice may wish to keep an open mind about medieval parallels. In the Princeton copy, our song was bound as a flyleaf with a late fourteenth-century English copy of the Alexandreis (an epic romance about Alexander the Great’s exploits), on the other side of which are some kind of clerical accounts—two sides of the same hybrid coin.104 Song collections containing English, then, stem from a range of cathedrals, most especially the secular ones (since they always had vicars choral), but some of the monastic cathedrals, too, brought in singing clerks to supplement the monastic choir (as did Norwich). Some of these hybrids were quite daring: one sober one on the founding of Canterbury Cathedral, had a secular French tenor (Mariounette douche),105 but perhaps the most playful instance of this “cross-bred”

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genre appears in a Durham Cathedral motet with Latin texts on Herod and a tenor based on a rollicking macaronic English and French refrain: “Hey, hure, lure, hey horpendoy! / mettez moy iuse accolez moy” (Hey, hure, lure, hey horpendoy! / Come and embrace me). One can only imagine the giggling among choristers. This exuberance recalls the love of “sound poetry” in Norwich Cathedral’s alliterative lyrics “The Blacksmiths” and “Choristers’ Lament,” poems to which we will turn next. That some of these manuscripts containing crossbred English materials would end up eventually in the hands of minstrels is inevitable (including Audelay’s).106 But the cathedral music remained largely independent of the minstrel traditions, and in the case of secular colleges, no extant records show any personnel overlap between royal singing clerks and royal minstrels.107 This choral tradition was mostly a separate one, requiring musical sophistication. It should be no wonder, then, that vernacular poems of real poetic sophistication, such as Arundel 292’s “Blacksmiths” and “Choristers’ Lament” and Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” came out of this environment. Though literary scholars are too often unaware of musicological analysis, and the associations of these manuscripts with cathedrals and secular colleges too often lie buried in appendices and notes, we must all stop missing such signals of the liminal choral world that created these.108 Indeed, several of the named poets discussed in Part I of this study (Langland, Tyckhill, Audelay, all singers, and even Hoccleve, who may have had some formal song training at the Inns of Chancery)109 assume this kind of sophistication in their readers. The same is true, and in spades, for many of our anonymous Early Middle English poems (e.g., The Owl and the Nightingale and “The Prisoner’s Lament” [Chapter 1]). We turn now to some of the stellar anonymous Middle English poems circulating in the cathedral ambit, I hope with more alertness to issues of form, pointing, and liminal context.

3. Anglicizing the Arcane in Cathedral Choral Culture: The Hall and Classroom Proletarian in “Choristers’ Lament” and Norwich’s MS Arundel 292 We turn now to some famous and often anthologized Middle English lyrics that, however, have never been really contextualized as cathedral lyrics. British Library, MS Arundel 292 was a cathedral manuscript cherished over many years because scribes were making poetic entries into this Norwich manuscript across the generations c. 1275–1450.110 Carrying texts from as far afield as Yorkshire, this Norwich

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anthology also epitomizes the multiregional diversity of several cathedral manuscripts, connected to, as I have come to call it, the inter-cathedral “grapevine.”111 Norwich Cathedral Priory, though Benedictine, was among monastic cathedrals that had augmented its choir with secular clerks, and Arundel 292 captures this hybrid culture well, especially in two poems entered into the manuscript at later dates: “Chorister’s Lament” (c. 1350) and “Blacksmiths” (c. 1400–1450). “Blacksmiths,” as we saw above in relation to its punctuation for performance, is a poem situated between the lay and clerical world.112 Ostensibly written against the policy of allowing smiths to work at night (in reality a matter for city ordinances), the poem, in fact, luxuriates in the sounds of the smithy, which it seeks to imitate in exuberantly over-alliterated lines. Though we tend to think of cathedrals as rarefied spots, they were mostly in urban spaces: the cathedral dominated urban Norwich,113 for instance, and archaeologists have discovered that the vicars choral of York Minster had as their very near neighbour a bronze foundry and workshops of more metalworkers (adjacent on Andrewgate).114 Elizabeth Salter compared “Blacksmiths” to the “urban disturbance” genres in Horace, Juvenal, and Martial, relating it to schoolboy exercises in rhetorical ornament from Geoffrey de Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova.115 But, like Tyckhill’s “A Bird” and like “Choristers’ Lament,” its earlier companion poem in Arundel 292, “Blacksmiths,” too, has the aura of the choir about it (see again Figure 5.2). “Blacksmiths” was the last English poetic addition entered into Arundel 292 (c. 1450) and was written in East Anglian dialect, indicating that the author—like most vicars choral in cathedrals—was originally a local boy. So, the fact that our East Anglian poet indulges in over-alliteration may be part rhetoric, part love of sound poetry in performance, and part local life: Swich nois on nightes ne herd men never: What knavene cry and clattering of knockes! The cammede kongons cryen after “col, col” And blowen here belowes, that al here brain brestes: “Huf, puf!” saith that one; “haf, paf!” that other. . . . (2–7)116 The comedy of the smiths blowing on their bellows so that “al here brain brestes” is accompanied by an orchestra of noise (19–20). Even in its final line, one can hear the water hiss with the hot metal: “may no man for brenwaterys on nyht’ han’ hys rest.” This brilliant use of East Anglian alliterative diction—a rare species—is a significant witness to the reach of alliterative style beyond the West Midlands, written into the manuscript in the mid-fifteenth century, and perhaps

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added as a worthy companion to the alliterating “Choristers’ Lament,” originally composed in Yorkshire and added c.1350. This tells us that for more than a century and a half,117 Arundel 292’s misshapen parchment was, among its other uses, a log for complaint verse that would have been resonant for clerks caught in dead-end choral and semi-clerical schoolmaster positions (we can legitimately speak of choral ser vice class “alienation” in “Choristers’”). This small trilingual volume of popular theological texts originated, rather mysteriously given its Early Middle English content, perhaps in part collected for teaching in Norwich Cathedral’s almonry school, but since Latin was more usual for primers, its real purpose remains elusive.118 Ostensibly a Benedictine collection, Arundel 292 nonetheless opens, as we have seen (Figure 5.3), with a copy of the “Creed” and “Lord’s Prayer” in EME, alongside some interesting EME prayers119 and an alliterating Bestiary, all copied a bit experimentally with some semi-archaic Old English letter forms. Originally written down no later than c. 1300 (perhaps even as early as c. 1275), Arundel 292’s EME Bestiary is a testament to the vitality—and also the growing pains—of the rise of the alliterative long line. So too is the contribution of the later scribe c. 1350, who added the semi-alliterative rhymed poem on the woes of boy choristers (see Figure 5.4). “The Choristers’ Lament” is a sophisticated satire showing the poet’s striking familiarity with choir or song-school vocabulary, with numerous parallels to Piers Plowman, which also uses such “choir slang.”120 Elsewhere, I suggested this earlier date for the poem’s entry into the manuscript and its implications for understanding the trilinguality of songschool life c. 1350.121 Given that the plague of 1348–49 ensured the relative rarity of English poetry from the earliest part of the fourteenth century’s third quarter (a factor that makes Wynnere and Wastour so precious),122 “Choristers’ ” is an especially important witness. When about one hundred years later, the unique copy of “The Blacksmiths” was added, it was written in prose, which shows that the East Anglian scribe understood the native tradition of alliterative verse (Figure 5.2). Its punctuation for performance betrays not only a whiff of the classroom, as we saw, but of the song-school classroom—the very topic of “Choristers’.”123 Arundel’s EME “Pater Noster” and “Creed” represent unusual choices for the opening of an in-house Benedictine book, but even if perhaps for children in Norwich Cathedrals’s almonry school, unusual pedagogically: as Nicholas Orme, Christopher Cannon, and others have shown, children were normally taught to read from Latin, not Middle English (whatever oral concessions were sometimes made to English, as “Choristers’ ” hints).124 Other contents of Arun-

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del include Anglo-Norman religious verse, such as a debate among the Four Daughters of God (De quatre sorurs), as well as a fragment of the Historia regum Britanniae, St. Patrick’s Purgatory (Latin), a bilingual Distichs of Cato (French and Latin, a schoolroom text), and Latin riddles of the kind popular in monastic houses.125 These contents are small clues that the book was used in a mixed environment. Both poems, then, share not only song-school culture,126 but the impulse—still pretty rare—to anglicize it. As such, both “Blacksmiths” and “Choristers’ ” should also be regarded as contributions to cathedral hall culture, since the vicars choral were usually in charge of chorister classrooms, and Norwich Cathedral Priory had multiple schools, including an almonry school. “Choristers’ Lament,” a complex poem that mixes complaint and satire, ostensibly records not only the woes of young choristers, but also more subtly, those training them. As  A.  K. McHardy notes, choirmasters and grammar teachers were most often drawn from the ranks of the unbeneficed.127 Although written in the first-person voices of two young choristers, this poem is actually not aimed, I think, at an audience of young boys. The lyric is in this methodological sense very reminiscent of Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts” (discussed next in Chapter 6), another poem not necessarily aimed at an audience like its protagonist-victim. Though the topics of the two poems differ, both, I’d stress, treat daily cathedral topics, and their poetic strategies are quite parallel. Nor is each poem unique in its manuscript context in sharing such complex strategies. “Choristers’,” as we saw, was written in a Yorkshire dialect, likely originating from one of two cathedrals there (York or Beverly), but copied and adapted by a Norwich-area scribe. This transmission history is also a very literal kind of cross-cathedral poetics, mimicking the kinds of lines of transmission long recognized for Latin texts (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7). Cross-cathedral poetics is apparent also in the sense of shared types of poetic strategies as choral ser vice class poets go about the task of anglicizing certain arcane dimensions of cathedral culture. In both “Choristers’ ” and “Consistory Court,” the poets give voice to— albeit with grim humour—the plight of a disadvantaged, illiterate subclass, normally unable to speak adequately for themselves. In “Choristers’,” the target audience would seem also to be those in charge of the daily choral classroom as their workplace, and the wider cathedral audience with memories of their own song-school education—so a hall poem?128 The poem’s two narrators are not portrayed as innocents, despite their youthfulness; the author is someone who knew choir life intimately, remembers or relives his own classroom experience vividly, recalling both misery and camaraderie. Unexpectedly, the poem begins

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with the dramatic announcement that the young speaker is “unfitted (uncomly)” for the cloister (by the way, textbook alienation in the modern sense). The choristerprotagonists, Wa(l)ter and William, are constantly in trouble with the choirmaster, and the line continues with the idea of cowering in the cloister (no doubt fear of a beating alluded to later): “Uncomly in cloystre . i coure ful of care” (line 1).129 Although the tone of the poem is a bit hard to gauge, shifting (as we’ll see in “Courts”) between the complaining and comic, we know that medieval schooling was heavily conducted with corporal punishment, and this is sympathy arousing (just like, as we’ll see, the flogging of the narrator at the end of “Courts”). The two boys who are the I-speakers of the poem persist in showing off a highly specialized knowledge of musical terminology, which the poet also expected his audience not to need glossed. Song schools generally, as Katherine Zieman has shown, were integral to clerical literacy and therefore part of the rite of passage to professional life.130 Song schools were also usually the jealously guarded domain of the cathedral in a cathedral town.131 And a sense of liminality pervades; even the first line, which one modern translation renders as “Unfitted for the cloister I skulk full of misery,” captures a youth in a stranded between lay and clerical life,132 followed shortly by regrets about having “left the world” (line 8) for this misery. Sadly, evidence about cathedral song schools is too sparse, as Barrie Dobson, Norman Tanner, Nicholas Orme, and others have noted, but records of Norwich Cathedral Priory’s almonry school do survive and offer some intriguing clues. They show that typically almonry boys were tonsured but not required to become monks (Norwich being a monastic cathedral), another aspect of liminality.133 Generally in cathedrals, some number of the choristers did not necessarily become members of the vicars choral or members of the ordained clergy, or enter into religious orders (in monastic cathedrals). As mentioned earlier, the York Minster precentor was exasperated when he realized that several of his former choristers were now trying to run their own schools in the city.134 What socio-economic background the poet imagined for his boy protagonists is unclear, but we know that such career choices were more difficult for poor boys in almonry schools such as Norwich had. The economically dependent child would likely have little alternative but to forsake “al þe mirthe of þis mold [world]” (8). Now, he laments, many is the “sorwfol song” he sings from his book, from which, under the tyranny of both the music’s difficulty and the master’s sternness, he can scarce look up—anyone who has sung difficult choir music will recognize the symptoms of, as musicians say today, “fright-reading,” and can only imagine the pressure of doing it daily under the threat of a thrashing:

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I ga gowlende abowte also dos a goke, mani is þe sorwfol song [I]135 singge vpon mi bok. I am holde so harde vnneþes dar i loke; al þe mirthe of þis mold for god i forsoke. (lines 5–8) The idea is repeated in line 37, part of a stanza rife with French musical terminology,136 where even the romance trope of the appeal to the audience to listen to his “lare” [lore] is amusingly intellectualized: “Qwan I went out of þis world and liste til mi lare / Of effauȝ and elami ne could y neuer are” (38–39). Sisam and Sisam translate these lines as “Of B flat and B natural, of both I was quite ignorant when I gave up secular life.” Walter is at work learning his Gradual: “I gowle on my grayel” (I wail over my gradual) (9), referred to by his master as “Daun Water,” the title for a clerk or scholar.137 The master decries his wasted time, an encounter that leaves Walter “so wo þat wol ner wil he blede” (25), a less than oblique reference to having been beaten harshly. Confiding in his fellow chorister, he says: I donke upon dauid til me tonge talmes [is incapacitated].138 I ne rendrede nowt sithen men beren palmes. Is it also mikel sorwe in song so is in salmes? (30–32) The expression “donke upon dauid” seems to have been a kind of choir slang for tediously hammering away at the Psalms of David till one’s tongue seizes up.139 He says he has not recited before the master since Palm Sunday, a meaningful reference to choral insiders: as we saw, this is the day beginning Holy Week, the one most notoriously strenuous for its elaborate processionals and special additions to the liturgy,140 the start of the most labour-intensive week in the liturgical calendar. He asks Walter a semi-hopeful question: “Is there as much misery in song as there is in the psalms?”141 His classmate is at a different level of study (as later with Chaucer’s song-school clergeoun asking his older classmate for help to learn a Marian song beyond his grade level).142 Walter assures him, in fact, that “song” study is much worse and claims: “Ful litel þu kenes qwat sorwe me ayles / It is but childes game þat þu witȝ dauid dayles [i.e., what you do]” (47–48).143 Some of this is boyish one-upmanship, as each plays the “Man of Sorrows” for sympathy, but even the playful metaphors are painful: Walter compares the shape of certain notes to a “flesh-hooke” (a meat hook, recalling popular descriptions of tortures in hell),144 and William even invokes the Last Judgment, claiming now to know “how judicare [to judge] was set in the Crede” (28).145

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Although there is comic hyperbole, there is also grimness. This is not an affirming treatment of cloistered liturgical experience, but neither is it a rejection of it. It is also balanced—oddly enough—with a spate of sheer delight in specialist musical terminology and virtuosity asserting professionalism.146 Beyond the author’s own chorister training,147 it is clear that his preferred or “top-tier” readers will have enough training to follow the allusions and terminology with agility.148 This blend of interest in pedagogical social justice (on both sides of the desk), the delight in flaunted professional knowledge, and irreverent insider satire of life among the educated (as we’ll see in “Courts”) has multiple parallels in all walks of clerical proletarian thought. The hope here, surely, is that choirmasters might be more empathetic with their young boys, while at the same time feeling empathy for the masters’ legitimate frustrations—clearly teaching the likes of Walter and his buddy required some patience. Part of the strategy of the poem is affirmation that fellow musicians understand the complexity of the art itself and share its challenges, points surely not lost on the early target audience. Chaucer would later choose a much darker route, literally transforming the clergeoun’s fear of being beaten to another type of martyrdom, but “Choristers’” takes a more complex path, steeped in ambiguity—one that Chaucer would have himself admired.149 Whoever copied “Choristers’” into Arundel 292 in the third quarter of the fourteenth century saw the book as an existing cache of native alliterative verse, given the presence of the EME Bestiary with its semi-archaic letter forms. There are no brackets to call attention to the rhyme, but the scribe has regularly provided a mid-line punctus (Figure 5.4) to draw attention to the caesura, as in the traditional alliterative line. The “Choristers’” poet is highly aware of language issues. Though we remain largely ignorant about much song-school history, and oral language usage in these schools is unclear,150 “Choristers’,” I would note, revealingly shows us an actively trilingual oral environment in a cathedral song school: Qwan ilke note til oþer lepes and makes hem asawt, Þat we calles a moyson [measure] in gesolreutȝ en hawt [the note “sol,” sung high]. Il hayl were þu boren ȝif þu make defawt Þanne sais oure mayster “Que vos ren ne vawt” [“My, but you are worthless”]. (49–52)151 Here, with its bravado use of French musical terms, some of the alliterative style fades, and rhyme is heightened (all rhyme words here are French). From the last line, we also learn that the boys are being instructed in French to sing Latin

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chant yet complaining to one another in English. Here is a rare window on the language of song-school pedagogy: the default pedagogical language is apparently French, though the master himself interacts with individual boys in English. We do know that language could be a regulated part of chorister life: as Nicholas Orme shows, at Wells Cathedral, choristers were required to speak Latin, not English, at meals.152 So our poem showcases the linguistic versatility of choral communities, and its default French reminds us that scribe of Harley 2253, dated not long before, is likely more comfortable in French than English.153 As an early witness to the nascent cathedral grapevine for English, composed in a York-area dialect,154 but copied at Norwich in an East Anglian one (as the “qw” spellings indicate), the language and literacy issues that dominate the poem are classic feature of all types of clerical ser vice class writing. Is “Choristers’ ” meant to question chorister training, or is it just meant as good satirical fun in a society that accepted corporal punishment as normal? Of course, we cannot know, but other relevant texts do bear witness to treatment of schoolchildren. Though the poem is not composed in Norwich,155 the scribe must have thought it entertaining or relevant there. Norwich Cathedral Priory owned Arundel 292,156 and the Norfolk area scribe who lightly adapted its dialect chose to copy it onto a blank page.157 We do know that Norwich Cathedral had an almonry school, and Nicholas Orme helpfully summarizes its customary directions, which, though not the same as its song school, give some idea of the organization, social assumptions (some unsettling), and pedagogy there: It was to consist of a master and thirteen “clerks” (meaning boys) appointed and approved by the subprior and almoner, both monks, who had general responsibility for the institution. The master (an outsider, not a monk) was to teach the boys literature (signifying Latin) and behavior. The boys were poor but “of elegant stature” (without physical defects). They were to live in the almonry, receive a daily ration of bread, and have first call on the food left over from meals in the monastery before it was given to the poor at the priory gate. A servant was to be kept to look after them. On Sundays and festivals, they were to attend worship not in the monastery, but in the parish church of St. Mary-in-the-Marsh nearby. There they were to contribute to the ser vices “according to the capability that God has given them.” One group (who could sing or be taught to do so) was to help with the plainsong of the services, while others, (less able to sing) read and chanted psalms. (my emphasis)158

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Aspects of this description are obviously, to modern eyes, indicative of a deplorable abuse of power over these boys, but I would also note that nearly everyone involved, apart from the monastic subprior and almoner, inhabited a proletarian status. The choirmaster, an outsider, would be someone local and almost certainly an unbeneficed hire.159 Most disturbingly, in order to be chosen for this charity school, the boys are required to be “of elegant stature,” meaning that they can have no physical defects—in fact, a medieval requirement for ordination to the priesthood (and a subject important to scholars of disabilities studies).160 Surely the mention of this here, however, suggests that the almonry boys were also (just like the song-school boys) thought of as altar boys and potentially, depending on aptitude, seminary material. Of course, there are records of sexual abuse in medieval choir settings, which were, after all, quartered in homosocial ecclesiastical environments. Katherine Zieman has recently uncovered an explicit case of just such abuse of choristers at a college, detailed in the Bishop of Lincoln’s records.161 Fortunately, “Choristers’ ” gives no indication of sexual abuse, but it does pretty clearly suggest routine physical punishment, as Holsinger first noted. Most relevant to “Choristers’ ” is the distinction in the Norwich customary between those “who could sing or be taught to do so” and those “less able to sing,” so therefore relegated to Psalm study, is illuminating. This was song-school curriculum essentially and also precisely the kind of difference in level portrayed in “Choristers’ ” between “Walter” and “William.” Barrie Dobson lamented that cathedral choristers were always destined to be the group about which historians would know the least.162 This makes “Choristers’ Lament” an important poem from several angles, and one way we can tell it was truly intended for a specialized audience is how markedly it differs from other schoolboy poems in Middle English. The cruelty of medieval school disciplinary practices generally is often referred to in contemporary written texts and in visual art (for instance, in the illustrated Douce 104 Piers Plowman [see Figure 5.10]). As we’ve noted, in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” the prospect of being beaten is part of the young boy’s broader acceptance of martyrdom, but from earlier in the Middle Ages, in Guibert de Nogent’s Monodies (Songs for One Voice), the extent of the master’s corporal punishment shocks Guibert’s mother, though it is ultimately defended a form of sacrifice for knowledge.163 A much less subtle treatment than “Choristers’” but more typical of the medieval schoolboy genre poem, is one in which the boys imagine revenge for schoolroom beatings against the master and his usher, who are always “at assent . . . to yiven us strokes grete” (lines 22–24). Instead, the boys dream of a place where

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Figure 5.10. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 52r, of a schoolmaster (in biretta, red cowl, and skull cap) beating a child, illustrating Piers Plowman, C.XII.123–24. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

they would have agency: if only they could meet him at the mill or by the crab tree. The poet even inserts some legal language (“probait”)—a bit out of place down at the mill but threatening in a different register, suggesting another author educated beyond the setting he creates:

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But wolde God that we might ones Cache thee at the milne-stones [mill], Or at the crabbe-tree! We shuld leve in thee such a probait [testimony], For that thou hast us don and said, That all thy kin shuld rewe thee! (lines 7–12)164 Yet another of the schoolboy genre poems, “The Schoolboy’s Lament,” portrays a schoolboy who offers a flippant excuse for being late and a graphic description of his birching in which the master “wold not leve till it did blede [did not stop till it bled] / Myche sorrow have he for his dede!” (lines 20–21).165 What is remarkable by contrast about “Choristers’ Lament,” a much more sophisticated instance of this genre, is that it manages to almost skirt or slightly downplay the brutality of punishment, always making it metaphorical, and the boys themselves—counterintuitively—willing to admit their own ineffectiveness. This, by comparison with the norm in this genre, is a more ambiguous treatment, perhaps because it comes from an author who identifies with both sides of the desk. Even cathedral almonry schools present ambiguities: yes, some boys were poor and dependent; others from better-off families, however, saw the almonry schools as opportunities to be upwardly mobile, so social complexities abound.166 How much of the schoolboy genre is the stuff of tropes and how much reality remains unclear, but the culture of medieval corporal punishment could only have been worse among those teachers chronically underemployed and perhaps feeling “stuck” without hope of upward mobility. Surely not all song-school masters and chorister directors were bullies; many were no doubt exemplary and humane. But some were undereducated themselves, and many, many others were chronically underemployed. Written down c. 1350, as the paleography indicates, “Choristers’” was copied during a period of change (perhaps another clue to the scribe’s interest): the role of boys of varying ages at Norwich Cathedral was to be increasingly expanded. Orme notes that as more monks celebrated masses on behalf of donors, and each mass required an altar boy, a steady supply of trained boys was needed, a scenario that encouraged the growth of song-school training generally across the later fourteenth century and beyond, even as choirs created more jobs for the unbeneficed.167 Bruce Holsinger’s study of “Choristers’ Lament” also draws attention to the fact that the “final decades of the 14th  century initiated a period of great musical expansion at the priory, during which the Lady Chapel

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enlisted the labour of more and more secular boys (probably from the institution’s almonry) as well as monks to sing in the choir. . . . Norwich was the exception to the rule [that boys did not sing with monks].”168 Moreover, he notes, thirteenth-century records give explicit direction for the singing of the complex polyphony that the poem playfully bemoans, a type of music that would increase in popularity in the centuries that followed—and which also itself created more jobs for the choral proletariat.169 “Choristers’ ” comes from the imagination of an author who genuinely appreciates polyphony and its difficulties: we saw in the previous section about the motets that survive in Insular sources, some subtly incorporating English on festive occasions, just how difficult and ambitious cathedral music could be. But what has not been appreciated fully, at least among literary scholars generally, is what a spur this type of liturgy was to the writing of English lyrics, especially for singing in halls that housed vicars choral, singing clerks, and those responsible for choristers or song schools. Whether they regarded themselves as vocationally “stuck” or, in other cases, vocationally fulfilled, fortunately some left high-quality poetry that articulates that complexity. Arundel 292 was treasured, in part as an archive of the native letter forms and verse forms, in part as a clerics’—perhaps a schoolmaster’s, choirmaster’s, or choral community’s—book.170 Made in part of misshapen parchment, like the many informal productions of the choral ser vice class during the period, this was paradoxically a book shared in-house among many clerks over a long stretch of time. And despite its archaic orthography (did readers c. 1450 even know how to read ð or ƿ?), the EME poems were kept, treasured, and built upon, with ever more vigorous examples of native verse. Arundel 292 opens up an intimate window on cathedral contexts for us, especially when it is set alongside Harley 2253’s most prominent cathedral production, “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” and the legal proletariat attached to cathedrals, to which we now turn.

chapter 6

Satire, Drama, and Censorship Submerged Literary Circles at the Cathedral

When Margery Kempe visited York, she was guided by a member of the York Minister vicars choral, John Kendale, one of three “good frendys of the spiritualté” she particularly chose to name. But who exactly were the vicars choral? As we have just seen in Chapter 5, the vicars choral comprised this amorphous, trilingual, musically and liturgically talented group, some with considerable lyric gifts. Socially, the vicars occupied an “in-between” space, gathered into cathedral housing in or near the cathedral close, dining, reading and singing in their communal halls, yet frequently moonlighting in other trades (often book production, but also artisanal), whether out of entrepreneurial spirit or serious economic need.1 Generally, they lived lives as permeable to the laity as they were to the clergy. The daily singing of the Divine Office in cathedrals fell mostly to these unbeneficed vicarii de choro, standing in for absentee canons.2 Normally originating as local boys and trained first as choristers, they lived increasingly under regulation as cathedral chapters grew anxious about sporadic unruly behaviour, and only relatively rarely achieving upward mobility. Not all vicars choral were fully ordained: at London’s St. Paul’s, for instance, ordination to the priesthood was not required of vicars choral, while at York, vicars were to become ordained within a year.3 To hold a vicars choral position required only the order of subdeacon or deacon, with later ordination to the priesthood if appointed to a chantry.4 But upward mobility was so rare we can confidently speak of a choral “glass ceiling.”5 The fourteenth century saw burgeoning cathedral foundations aimed at gathering the vicars choral into respectable cathedral housing and under a regulated life. The moment of one such founding is captured in a rare painting of

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Figure 6.1. A sixteenth-century historical painting, showing in the top left a fourteenth-century scene (likely augmented or copied from a medieval original): the vicars choral of Wells in white surplices and hoods, receiving a sealed charter of their privileges from the beneficent medieval bishop, Ralph of Shrewsbury. In black gowns with white ruffs, rather awkwardly added around them, are their Elizabethan lay colleagues. By kind permission of the Chapter of Wells Cathedral.

this class from the vicars’ hall at Wells Cathedral: dating from the sixteenth century, in fragile condition, and likely augmented post-Reformation from a smaller medieval original (see Figure  6.1), it shows a much-loved bishopbenefactor, Ralph of Shrewsbury, bestowing communal housing on his vicars choral. The Latin inscription reads, “We are lodged in the streets of the town, but beseech you, dear father, that if you give us houses, we may be able to live together [Ut simul uniti, te dante domos, maneamus].” And Ralph replies, “Your merits plead for you [Vestra petunt merita] that what you ask should be granted; we have built permanent lodgings [loca fecimus hic stabilita] so that you can live as you ask.”6 Ralph (d. 1363) was known, in fact, as “extremely liberal,”

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but these inscriptions capture the culture of most writings of the vicars choral, which are nearly always mendicant in tone, nearly always seeking patronage, but also arguably reflect one of the most effective “trade guilds” of the period.7 Since historians of cathedrals have been mostly interested only in the upper clergy, only sporadically noticing the Latin writings of the lower clergy (in-house chronicles and liturgical songs), and literary scholars have mostly not yet noticed the vicars choral at all (see Chapter 5), their literary productions have been nearly invisible to everyone. But this chapter will begin to build a picture of their literary cultural world by looking more broadly at their English texts, especially (1) Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” (2) a love lyric in York Minster’s consistory records, (3) one of the York Cycle plays for which the vicars choral were responsible (Second Trial Before Pilate), and (4) a passage in the Book of Margery Kempe involving one of them. We will also look at their culture via some of their Latin productions, especially their chronicles—crucial, for instance, for understanding St.  Erkenwald (Chapter 7), composed by a clerk with an intimate, insider’s knowledge of St. Paul’s. And we will look at evidence of book ownership among these “submerged” literary circles of the bishop’s familia in cathedrals at York, with comparisons to St. Paul’s and Hereford.

1. Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts” and Love Amidst Cathedral Fornication Records Having just looked at some cathedral lyrics of remarkable poetic sophistication, such as Arundel 292’s “Blacksmiths’ ” and “Choristers’ Lament,” we turn now to the compiler of the famous Harley 2253 manuscript and its “Satire on the Consistory Courts.” As we saw (Chapter  5.1), the Harley compiler was likely at some point associated with Hereford’s cathedral, and so “Courts” makes a great companion piece to “Choristers’ ” because both poets have a strikingly similar methodology. This, I will suggest, is not accidental. Both are concerned with issues of lay literacy in relation to some arcane field of cathedral knowledge. Both have the ability to create reader empathy with I-speaker victims while simultaneously evoking doubt about their character. In “Choristers’ Lament,” we have seen an example of this ambiguous voicing, allowing us to feel for the two chorister I-speakers, and yet also for the exasperated master (unlike other schoolboy lyrics of the period). “Courts” is yet another poem os-

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tensibly aimed at an audience like its chief victim, but not quite, as we are also meant to see through the victim’s bravado and complaint. “Courts” survives (like the Arundel 292 poems from Norwich Cathedral) only in a single manuscript, this time the Harley 2253 collection, the most important extant lyric collection before Chaucer. As we saw in the last chapter, Carter Revard, Susanna Fein, and Daniel Birkholz have offered evidence for Harley 2253’s connections to Hereford Cathedral, suggesting that its compiler was perhaps at some stage part of the Hereford bishop’s familia—the path to which, as Birkholz noted, “ran through the Hereford Cathedral School.” Here, training in “basic Latin literacy (‘song’) and in the bureaucratic genres necessary for an ecclesiastical career occurred simultaneously with students’ inculcation with a professional clerical ethos.”8 The Harley Lyrics were compiled in an Anglicana “charter hand” by someone whose day (or night) job for many years was to copy charters in the Ludlow area of the West Midlands near Hereford.9 But since there are also indications that this scribe-compiler had at some time been associated with Hereford Cathedral, the collection, I would suggest, bears the marks of choral service-class employment patterns—in other words, there is no reason that he might not have done both jobs. The poem variously called by modern editors either “Satire on the Consistory Courts” or “In the Ecclesiastical Court”10 gives voice to the plight of an illiterate young man called in to answer charges of fornication. Consistory courts dealt in the ecclesiastical equivalent of both criminal and civil cases, including a wide range: “moral offences, absence from church, failure to follow official doctrine, unlicensed teaching, performance of illegal marriages, . . . defamation, tithe, pew, matrimonial and testamentary disputes.”11 Ostensibly a harsh satire of clerical corruption and maltreatment of the working poor, the main drama of “Courts” portrays an illiterate man up on charges of fornication, forced to marry his accuser, and metaphorically skewered by the pens of the learned: “Heo pynkes wiþ heore penne on heore parchemyn” (They stab with their pens on their parchment” [line 25]). In terse lines jammed with wordplay, alliteration and rhyme, it portrays legal process gone awry in a cathedral’s consistory court, at least from his standpoint. In the end, not only forced to marry a woman he alleges is in cahoots with the court (whatever we make of his story, such cases are in fact in the historical record),12 he is flogged around the church and marketplace to his shame and that of his kin: “At chirche ant þourh cheping ase dogge y am dryue” (82). In fact, this was a harsh but all-too-common form of

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punishment for fornication meted out at consistory courts in medieval England. This line (like one about the much-hated summoners in Figure 6.3) is foregrounded by the Harley scribe with elaborated top-line ascenders in documentarystyle, apparently not by accident:13 At chirche ant thourh cheping [market] ase dogge Y am dryve That me were levere of lyve [be dead] then so forte lyue To care of al my kynne [kin]. Atte constorie [consistory] heo kenneth us care . . . For wymmene ware [women’s wares, or women’s private parts]! (“Satire on the Consistory Courts,” 82–end, with omissions) At consistory court, he says, they teach us to know sorrow. But this ending also highlights the speaker’s tendency toward rather unpleasant self-justification, in this case via misogyny, as he warns using a double-edged, crude pun on “women’s wares” (“wymmene ware”). The author of this poem obviously is not a social peer of the illiterate young man he portrays so minutely; he was perhaps someone who had worked as a writing clerk in the cathedral’s consistory court, the kind of bureaucratic work often done by vicars choral at York or by chantry priests at St. Paul’s.14 Or he might have been a proctor in the consistory court—in fact, one such proctor has been identified as a producer and possible author of a York Cycle play (discussed in Section 2 below). As we will see shortly, the author knows court practices and personnel intimately, and this could be why the Harley 2253 compiler found the poem intriguing for his collection. Of course, we cannot tell from the Harley manuscript’s extraordinary trilingual range of genres, including love songs, historical and biblical works, and blinding satire on matters of church and state, whether it emanates from a secular or an ecclesiastical establishment, suggesting that this compiler, too, had one foot in the ecclesiastical world and the other in the secular one. In “Courts,” the author satirically portrays the inner workings of the cathedral court, as if through the eyes of the ostensibly unlearned I-speaker. He shows exactly which cathedral officials are present, where and how they sit, and what types of legal materials they have before them. Looking at Figure 6.2, showing the oldest surviving consistory court in England (in Chester Cathedral), we can see why it might be an intimidating experience to have a large number of officials staring down an alleged offender in a such a small space.

Figure 6.2. The Chester Consistory Court (established 1541) met in the southwest corner of the cathedral, now considered the oldest surviving ecclesiastical courtroom in the United Kingdom. See the National Archives, Cheshire, online: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r /83e4bd55-f44b-4581-b35c-6bfb512f6957. Image source: https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Consistory _court#/media/File:Chester_Cathedral _Consistory _court.jpg. Photo credit: Joopercoopers.

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The speaker describes the top officials with their expensively bound and clasped books (“Heo wendeth bokes unbrad”)15 and those of lesser status, like summoners, with rolls, the staple of utility bureaucratic records. Six or seven summoners, he says, all false accusers, sit by at his trial, Yet ther sitteth somenours, syexe other sevene, Mysmotinde [falsely accusing] men alle, by here evene, Hyrdmen [retainers] hem hatieth [hate], ant uch mones hyne [servant], For everuch a parosshe [parish] heo polketh in pyne [they deprive of goods painfully] (“Satire on the Consistory Courts,” 39–41) The Harley scribe arranged his page so that line 40 (“Hyrdmen hem hatieth . . .”) is one of the only two lines provided with stark top-line flourishing in red (along with the one noted above about the flogging), as if to emphasize this hatred of summoners (see Figure 6.3), later familiar to all readers of Chaucer. The poet has a strong sense of what we might call “estates formalism”: each type of official, including the court crier, is given a stanza opening. First is the judge, presented in an official black cap, but his dignity is nonetheless undercut by the description of him lounging around with sprawled legs, a physical posture that medieval poets usually invoke to portray those who, as we would say today, could not care less: Furst ther sit an old cherl in a blake hure; Of alle that ther sitteth, semeth best syre, Ant leyth ys leg o lonke. (“Courts,” 19–21)16 Also described in detail is the army of more than forty clerks arranged before the speaker to write up briefs of his case (“Ant mo then fourti him byfore my bales to breven” [23]), a hyperbolic number gesturing satirically perhaps—to the layman’s eye—at the “over-staffing” of cathedral bureaucracy. But then showing a surprising degree of insider knowledge, the speaker later describes this surfeit of clerks as including many a “fol-clerc” or failed clerk (“fayly”), that is, someone who only got his position because he went to the bishop and bought off a court bailiff (“Wende to the bysshop ant bugge bayly” [44]).17 Literacy is a common theme in clerical proletarian verse generally, but the I-speaker betrays more insider knowledge when he slips readily into legal terminology (e.g., “breven” above), making for a complex persona. Such dubiously appointed officials, he continues, now

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Figure 6.3. London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, fol. 71, showing (top left) one of two lines in “Satire on the Consistory Courts” with elaborated ascenders highlighted in red, in this case emphasizing hatred of summoners (in the second case, line 82, in which the speaker is whipped around the church as punishment for fornication). © The British Library Board.

“cower” in a cope (“couren in a cope” [46]), the very same verb used in “Choristers’ Lament” to describe someone who does not belong,18 in this case someone who can only pretend that he has papal privileges to be there (“Ant suggen he hath privilegie proud of the pope” [47]). These crabbed but sophisticated lines, aimed at least in part at those who understand internal cathedral politics, constitute a barbed satirical attack upon the many hopeful, black-robed “hangers-on” that might surround or inhabit a bishop’s familia (“Swart ant al toswolle” [48]), hoping for a real appointment. The next stanza opening shifts the camera lens to where at least six or seven summoners sit ostentatiously with their rolls, as we have seen.19 Following it, the next stanza opens with the court crier, another official, bearing a rod of office, who calls in the accuser(s): the woman (or women)20 with whom the narrator is charged with having committed fornication:

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Ther stont up a yeolumon [court crier] (yeyeth with a yerde [rod]) Ant hat out an heh (that al the hyrt herde), Ant cleopeth “Magge!” ant “Malle!” (55–57) This offender portrayed in “Courts” as charged with fornication both is and is not a figure of sympathy as such, since he sports his own fair share of cavalier bravado.21 He shows no remorse for his behaviour here or elsewhere, nor, however, does he show affection for the woman in question, and initially imagines he can clear himself and jilt his female companion without difficulty: “Of scathe Y wol me skere, / Ant fleo from my fere” (14–15). It is never actually implied that he is innocent (so too with the boys in “Choristers’ ”), only that an all-powerful, literacy-wielding institution, aided by a corrupt court open to bribery at every level,22 is prepared to make him suffer for it and even sadistically (in both poems, the protagonists are actually physically beaten in an uneven power struggle). This, like many proletarian productions, takes a profoundly shrewd and complex view of social reality, big-heartedness notwithstanding. It often was the vicars choral who were the main record-keepers in many consistory courts (the cathedral’s factotum secretaries), and a stunning amount of the court’s business involved charges for fornication or adultery. Such charges also mandated certain types of punishments, including public shaming or sometimes, depending on the severity, being driven or flogged around the local church, market, or school—as we saw described in the traumatic line near the end of “Courts” (“At chirche ant þourh cheping ase dogge y am dryue” [82]).23 The poet of “Courts” walks an incredibly fine line, balancing sympathy for the accused while simultaneously sharing experienced courtroom observation of rogue defendants, just like the complicated narrator of this poem. And, as we will see next, at least one real-life York Minster consistory scribe copying fornication and adultery records into the Acta capitularia was sufficiently moved by the poignancy of these situations to add a love lyric to them. This scribe copied a unique lyric, “Under a law as I me lay,” amidst York Minster fornication and adultery records that contain at least one real-life rogue defendant (actually, a repeat offender) and many more souls about whom we know little. This clerk, busy about his daily job of Latin record-keeping, found occasion to write or compose a Middle English lyric into the Acta capitularia, much as St. Paul’s John Tyckhill did in his rent roll. Although we have other records of Middle English lyrics appearing among books owned or annotated by the York Minster clergy,24 the inclusion of a quatrain on love copied or composed into a scruffy, parchment-covered notebook of the Chapter House Acta is likely the

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most intriguing in context. The Acta capitularia 1410–1429, York Minster Library, MS H 2 (1) was meant only for in-house eyes, records were usually kept by the vicars choral, the “secretarial pool” of the cathedral. Virtually unnoticed apart from a brief note by A. C. Cawley in 1951 (which mostly ignored its context), is DIMEV #6099, “Under a law.”25 Rhyming abab, and lineated as rhymed poetry in the manuscript, it nonetheless has two alliterative lines. I provide a new transcription of the poem below from the Acta capitularia (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).26 As transcribed from the Acta, the quatrain, technically a song, reads: Vnder a law I me lay——| I herd amay makand hyr mone—| And euer sche sayd welg [wela] hay——| Ffor faute of loue I stande a lone—| Cawley labeled the genre as a species of chanson d’aventure, that is, a chanson dramatique: the narrator, lying “Vnder a law,” overhears a maiden lamenting that “Ffor faute of loue I stande a lone.” This is described in DIMEV as a “one cross-rhymed quatrain, possibly a religious parody of a secular lyric.”27 But I doubt very much that this is a parody (any more than Tyckhill’s poem was), nor did Cawley think so. Cawley’s best guess was that the scribe copied the poem out of “boredom” (for some reason modern scholars always make this assumption when a cleric copies something secular!), but its context is in fact much more interesting than he realized. Cawley had made passing reference to a brief probate testament copied above it and gestured vaguely to the Latin verses beside it as “moral.” In fact, “Dum diues fatur Vox pauperis aduatur,” invoking the rich man and the poor man (“diues” and “pauper”), also has a distinctly sociopolitical and obliquely foreboding allegorical tone; in fact, the scribe was sufficiently impressed with the Latin verses to try his hand at copying lines from them with variants and in some different levels of script formality (followed by pen trials below).28 But by far the most interesting facet of the English quatrain’s context, and one that Cawley did not mention, is that it is copied mostly amidst records of punishment in the consistory court for fornication and adultery (e.g., especially on 12v, top of 13r itself, and 13v, for instance). In fact, reading the Acta capitularia, one suddenly realizes that an enormous volume of the court’s daily business was to punish and ritually shame fornicators. In these records, the names of the individual man and woman being charged are always incorporated into a formulaic Latin description of the punishment imposed. On the pages surrounding our poem, for instance, one apparently undaunted chap (Johannes

Figure 6.4. “Vnder a law I me lay” (DIMEV #6099), a Middle English quatrain copied into the Acta capitularia 1410–1429, York Minster Library, MS H 2 (1), fol. 13, on a page that includes various records: a consistory court case of fornication, a will, and Latin verses on dives and pauper, repeated as pen trials. © Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission.

Figure 6.5. Detail of Figure 6.4, showing the quatrain.

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Ellys de Bysschophyll) was a regular in the court, repeatedly being caught for affairs with different women.29 Most names or couples appear only once, and there is above all a sadness to these records, as each couple is normally punished by being “driven” as a fugitive (apparently with a whip or by force—the word is always heavily abbreviated) usually “around the church” (“circa ecclesiam suo”) or sometimes the school (“circa scolia sua”) a specified number of times in the town in which they live (e.g., “sub pena vj fue’is”).30 We just met this punishment in Harley 2253’s “Satire on the Consistory Courts.” Glossing the line in which the speaker is driven about the church and market (“ase dogge Y am dryue” [82]), Turville-Petre noted “a case where the offender in a matrimonial suit was sentenced to be whipped seven times round the market-place and the church.”31 The multiple formulaic records in the York Acta shed powerful light on just this practice, a practice of public shaming that continued in some form through the early modern period and well into the eighteenth century: York Minster Library Collections Assistant, Dominique Triggs kindly drew to my attention to the fact that in the era of print, this legal formula came to be produced on singleton “forms” with blank spaces left for the names of the accused individuals and the date of the ritual shaming (see Figure 6.6). By then it was modified to something more like the “white shift” humiliation that the Lestrange household and John Audelay endured at the hands of the Bishop of London’s consistory court for the different crime of sacrilege.32 But in late medieval cases of adultery or fornication, the punishment was harsher. In fact, reading such records today, one suddenly even sympathizes with Langland’s Lady Mede’s view that money and easy penance should be able to sort out the punishments for such matters of frailty of the flesh (“but frelete of fleysche” [Piers Plowman, C.III.59])—and no doubt, there was often a brisk trade in cash to summoners and other cathedral officials on this very point. However, while retaining every possible sympathy for those so charged, one can also imagine, once again, the view “from the other side of the desk” of court recorders who might repeatedly see the same man booked—is the narrator of “Satire on the Consistory Courts” a fictional version of some local character like Johannes Ellys? The York Acta records open a window on the complexity of attitudes and feelings in such a text. Going back to the quatrain itself, the words “faute” and “law” are potentially full of suggestive ambiguity. The word “law” in the first line Cawley understood as a type of tree, a meaning not found in the MED, but the MED does list “law(e)” meaning “a hill or mountain,” stemming from OE “hlaw.”33 As such, any formal lexical analysis of the poem, therefore, must consider the inevitable possibility of a pun on MED “laue” (meaning “any body of rules,” our modern

Figure 6.6. Singleton form dated 1753, York Minster Library, Historical Collections. One of many printed singleton “Penance” forms for fornicators or adulterers with blank spaces left for their names: “Penance enjoined to be done by ___”, with the date of the ritual shaming, signed by the vicar and two church wardens (on dorse). The need for convenient forms suggests the regularity of such charges well beyond the Middle Ages. Accessed by Collections Assistant Dominique Triggs. © Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission.

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“law”),34 or even MED “lau” (meaning “a violent stroke”).35 The multivalent reading possibilities increase further with the word “faute” in the fourth line (the maiden lamenting that “Ffor faute of loue I stande a lone”), for which the MED gives the following relevant meanings: faute (n.) 1. (a) Lack, want, scarcity, deficiency; . . . (c) lack of strength; (d) for (the) faute of, thorgh faute of, for want of; . . . 2. (a) A blemish, flaw; (b) a fault or mistake; (c) error with reference to belief. 3. Failure to perform an obligation; neglect in duty; default . . . 4. (a) Moral defect or imperfection; (b) wrong-doing; a misdeed, offence, transgression, sin, crime.36 Whether the maiden is simply alone for lack of love, or whether she has failed to deliver on some obligation to love, or belief in love, or is guilty of a crime or transgression (or all of the above), the lyric offers a host of possibilities. Rather than boredom, it seems to me that the scribe, immersed in pages of records about public punishment and shaming for adultery and fornication, was possibly taken with the idea of the loneliness or remorse of these painful extramarital situations. In fact, as Goldberg shows, in York consistory records, such marital cases were much more likely to be initiated by women, both gentry and working class.37 Of course, it is possible that the scribe himself is the lonely party and found the love lament attractive for that reason. Or he simply enjoyed the little song or its ambiguities. But as we have seen, even in the case of John Tyckhill’s St. Paul’s rent-roll poem, love poetry, especially poetry about solitariness and loneliness, was of intense interest to proletarians, caught as they were “in-between” the lay and secular worlds—and likely, at least early in their careers, not knowing as yet whether celibacy or marriage would be their lot. But since Goldberg even discusses a 1402 York case of forced marriage in which a clerk ordained subdeacon had his orders annulled,38 whatever our scribe’s interest, boredom, I’m sure, won’t cover it.

2. Drama at the Cathedral: The Vicars Choral and the Ecclesiastical Court in the York Cycle’s Second Trial Before Pilate A. C. Cawley noted many years ago that the ingenious playwright known to modern critics as the Wakefield Master was likely someone in minor orders, perhaps at the rank of “sub-deacon, or chantry priest.”39 As it happens, it looks

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like, as J. W. Robinson said, “the other genius working in the medieval English theatre,” the writer known to critics today as the York Realist, was also from this demographic.40 Various theories of the York Realist’s identity have been mooted, including the possibility that he was a York Minster vicar choral or a married clerk of the cathedral’s consistory court.41 Though his precise identity remains unknown, thanks to the survival of extensive York records of early English drama, we do know that at least one of the Realist’s most important plays was sponsored and produced by the cathedral’s vicars choral: the Tilemakers’ Pageant, because the vicars corporately owned two city tileworks. As Albert Chambers noted, prior to 1423, “the vicars choral appear to have strongly associated themselves with the pageant,” and entries in their accounts “provide interesting insight into the involvement of the vicars choral of York Minster, a corporation usually considered in relation to the cathedral and not to the town, in the major annual and cultural event of medieval York, the Corpus Christi procession. Unlike the superiors, the dean and chapter, whose involvement with the pageant procession was as spectators, the vicars choral had a close association with one particular pageant involving a financial contribution and perhaps even participation.”42 As I have argued throughout this book, unbeneficed members of the lower clergy, whether ordained or in minor orders, often lived and worked in such spaces “in-between” the lay and clerical worlds, and it is exactly here that they often created or participated in vernacular literary culture. And here we have, as York Minster muniment records show, a particularly well-defined example. The York Cycle, of course, consists of forty-seven plays tracing salvation history from the Creation to Judgment Day, pageants produced annually by the civic council and its guilds on Corpus Christi Day from at least 1376 until 1560. Each play was mounted on a pageant wagon and performed at stopping points “on a pre-determined route through the city’s centre, thus emphasizing the important economic, social and religious spaces of the city.”43 The pageant characters in the plays served a dual role, representing both biblical characters and “also late medieval workmen. . . . Such purposeful anachronism . . . seeks to make Biblical narratives resonate for late medieval audiences.” And as I will suggest here, there is also another type of “purposeful anachronism” at work, one that similarly— and more daringly—blurs the lines between the biblical High Priests of Judaism and high-ranking medieval ecclesiastics. Moreover, as I will also argue, it is not accidental that the Tilemakers’ Pageant is one of the most ecclesiastical plays of the cycle, heavily inflected with the language of both common law and canon law in anglicized form. Most strikingly, the vicars regard the play as their own, referring in 1420 to expenses for the play in their accounts as “pro ludo nostro.”44

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The play, number “XXXIII. The Tyllemakers” in the cycle, is called “Condempnatio Cristi per Pilatum” in the 1420 entry of the Ordo Paginarum Gathering.45 In modern editions, it is often called The Second Trial Before Pilate: The Judgment of Jesus, a play considered one of the gems of the York Realist’s oeuvre. In addition to funding play expenses, the records show the Minster’s vicars choral entertaining the magister ludi with drinks, apparently a duty of hospitality for official sponsors, and in one case, the magister was one of their own, Thomas Tanfeld. Since the Tilemakers’ Guild was a very small one (only eight known to have taken up the freedom of the city, not numerous enough to fill the cast of fourteen the play requires), scholars believe that members of the vicars choral would have not only advised, but played some of the roles, since other guilds routinely engaged clerks similarly for their own pageants.46 What seems beyond doubt is that the vicars choral themselves, especially Thomas Tanfeld (or Tanfield) and William Welwyk,47 were involved with the play via their tileworks, as was a third named member of the Minister’s lower clergy, a notary and proctor in the consistory court, Robert Skurueton (or Skorton). Independently, Tanfeld comes up in various Bedern records as a responsible citizen and at least once in relation to a fellow vicar choral who advised Margery Kempe (John Kendale). Welwyk served as chamberlain for the vicars, and Harrison names him among those who were lenient in rent collecting with poor tenants. Welwyk was also knowledgeable about book scripts: he describes his porteforium in his will as being in “bastard,” the new Burgundian script (bâtarde).48 Both Tanfeld and Skurueton, then, both cathedral men, served consecutively as magistri ludi for the pageant.49 Records from 1420, 1421, and 1427 refer to payments the vicars choral made to support production of the play first as “pro ludo nostro” and then “pro interludio corporis Christi,” an interlude being the term often used for plays performed in the banqueting halls of the great.50 As Albert Chambers showed, the vicars choral rather dominated the city’s small tile industry, and when the Minster itself had to purchase tiles for the fabric of the cathedral, they were ordered from the vicars’ own tileworks—and since the vicars were in charge of the fabric of the cathedral, this was a tidy arrangement. One of their three payments for the pageant went to a tilemaker, but two payments went to Skurueton, who apparently “moonlighted” as an agent for the tilemakers. Master Robert Skurueton is listed in the Freemen’s Register in 1407–8 as a clericus,51 first appearing in the records of the Dean and Chapter of the Minster in 1401, by 1408, as a notary in the Minster’s consistory court, and by 1416, as a proctor in the court.52 A classic under-promoted legal proletarian, he always remained a relatively junior

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proctor, fifth out of eight in seniority, nearly up to his death. But he cuts an interesting figure in the Guild of Corpus Christi, where he and his wife (being in minor orders he could marry) were the first “secular” members of the guild, as Chambers puts it—though I’d add that, as so often, “secular” is a misleading binary here.53 Skurueton was the magister ludi in 1426–27 of the Tilemaker’s Pageant, following upon vicar choral Tanfeld’s term. The magister would be “responsible for producing the pageant, maintaining and storing the properties and pageant-wagon, and for collecting the ‘pageant silver’ ” from every member of the guild.54 The job required, then, practical, social, and interpretive skills, and looking at the depth and literary complexity of the York Realist’s Second Trial Before Pilate, directing it could not have been easy. And certain roles in this extended trial narrative, especially those with heavy legal language, were likely played by one or more of the clerks, and certainly coached by them. Turning now to the play itself, scholars believe that the York Realist wrote at least eight plays in total (XXVI, XXVIII–XXXIII, and XXXVI).55 These plays have various features in common: the “realist” style for which this anonymous poet is famous, his particular alliterative mode,56 and his fascination with psychological “process,” as seen in his tendency to want to dramatize, often minutely, a given character’s change of heart. All this is well known to scholars, but what the plays also share, I would note, is an interest not only in legal but in ecclesiastical matters—and in Second Trial, this appears as a marked interest in the quite tricky business of showing the High Priests as an “episcopacy,” which during Christ’s lifetime ruthlessly pressed the secular authorities to bring about his crucifixion. Pilate, of course, is sketched as reluctant, or indifferent at best to such a project. Whoever the York Realist was, I would suggest that this complicity is the single most preoccupying challenge he faced—and that his firsthand knowledge of clerical hierarchies and their shortcomings drove it. Like “Choristers’ Lament,” Wynnere and Wastoure, the Pearl Poet’s works, St. Erkenwald, and our short “Bird in Bishopswood,” the York Realist’s Second Trial is lexically rich in northern dialect, with heavy and sometimes ornate alliteration and strategic use of rhyme. Like Tyckhill’s “A Bird,” for instance, this fellow Yorkshireman uses “lymett” in a sinister way, while in the same line he introduces “lare” (law), a multivalent word in the play, as in another Yorkshire poem, “Choristers’.”57 In the play’s opening line Pilate brags: “Lordyngis that are lymett [bound] to the lare [law] of my liaunce, . . . / . . . loke to youre lord here and lere at my lawe” (lines 1 and 4). Here “lymett” means not only bound but trapped, literally stuck, and “lare” (law, speech, lesson) re-echoes in line 4’s pun (“lere at my

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lawe”) and soon again in a warning (“list noght as a lord for to lowte me, / I sall lere [teach] hym” [6–9]). Pilate’s initial speech creates a bridge from the previous cycle play by using a soldier to report Christ’s silence before Herod with shocking flippancy (“domme as a dore gon he dwell” [64]). This northern poet also makes striking use of the bob, as did his fellow northerner, the Gawain Poet: Moreover, sirs, he [Herod] spake, and noght spared, Full gentilly to Jesu, this Jewe, And sithen to ther knyghtis declared How fawtes in hym fande he but fewe To dye. (76–80, Second Trial, bob italicized) Whether or not this poet was a vicar choral, he was, like most vicars choral, a local boy.58 The verbally complex parts are those of the High Priests, Caiphas (Caiaphas) and Anna (Annas): they are main characters, but their only actions are verbal, with long, obsequious speeches, riddled with ecclesiastical issues and heavily alliterative. We cannot know for certain which roles vicars choral likely played, but given the tiny number in the Tilemakers’ Guild, the availability of several cathedral proletarians from choir and consistory, and the ecclesiastical density of the language, we can make an educated guess. The two High Priests “are consistently seen as bishops ‘of the hoold lawe,’ ” as Davidson says59—a theme, I would add, rather irony laden in a play sponsored by the York bishop’s own vicars choral. Though historically the loyalties of the vicars are complex (discussed in their chronicles below), we have seen that many clerical proletarian writers express resentment about undeserved clerical promotion to the upper ranks, so it is entirely possible that this irony was relished in performance. York Minster, by chance, was also one of the cathedrals that preserved the controversial “Episcopus Innocentum” (boy bishop) tradition, in which the choristers took over the entire cathedral, and roles were merrily reversed during the Feast of the Holy Innocents for boys and lower clergy, involving mock sermons, mock episcopal visitations, mock masses, and more.60 So these two complex, at times semi-satirical “bishops” roles may well have been taken by vicars choral. The High Priests are subtly distinguished, however. Caiphas [Caiaphas] insists that Jesus be brought “to barre” and that he speaks for both prelates (“we prelatis”): CAIPHAS Sir Pilate, oure prince, we prelatis nowe pray you, Sen Herowde fraysted no ferther this faitour to flaye, . . . Late bryng hym to barre and at his berde sall we baye. (84–85, 87)

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Anna [Annas] is more cynical, but also shrewder, protesting on behalf of all priests (“Oure menye he [Jesus] marres”), using vocabulary and bob-and-wheel structure almost recalling the Gawain Poet’s: ANNA With his seggynges he settes tham in sondre With synne. With his blure he bredis mekill blondre; Whills ye have hym, nowe haldes hym undir, We sall wery hym away yf he wynne. (91–95) The courtroom action intensifies, constituting, with one important exception, the whole action of the play—in this sense, if not in others, structured just like “Satire on the Consistory Courts.” Caiphas’s rather desperate, certainly twisted accusation that Jesus speaks against Cesar, “Agayne Ser Cesar hymselfe he segges and saies” (97), and that he calls himself the Son of God (101) provoke Pilate’s resistance (105). But the two High Priests muster every legal loophole: they suggest “witnesses” be rounded up, in much the same way, disturbingly, as for medieval heresy trials. Caiphas says, “I can reken a rable of renkes full right . . . / That will witnesse, I warande, the wordis of this wight,” (108 and 110), offering a long list of recruitable (!) witnesses with Hebrew or biblical names (adapted from the Gospel of Nicodemus). He even casually includes “Judas”: “Simon, Yarus, and Judas” (112). However, Pilate instantly sees that these will be false witnesses: PILATUS Ya, tussch, for youre tales, thai touche not entente; Ther witnesse I warande that to witnesse ye wage [bribe] Some hatred in ther hartis agaynes hym have hent And purpose be this processe to putt doun this page. (120–23, legal words italicized) The language throughout this section is strikingly legal,61 and the debate believable and informed as court procedure, as critics have noted. And given that two prelates are arguing for the prosecution, there are echoes of consistory court (one is reminded of Harley 2233’s “Courts,” which also traffics in false accusers). This, I’d suggest, is intriguing given that Robert Skurueton, a magister ludi for this play, was actually a proctor in the York consistory, where he would have worked with the vicars choral (often court record-keepers). The legal stakes are heightened as Pilate actually accuses the high priests of creating a case of “malicious prosecution”62 and threatens them himself: “If ye feyne slike [such]

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frawdis, I sall felle you, / For me likis noght youre langage so large [excessive]” (130–31). In other words, their claims are extravagant, but their response subtly puts the onus back on Pilate to rectify those claims. This is the first clue that Pilate will not ultimately have his way, as the audience already knows from the Bible, but the York Realist, a great “process” poet, is intent on showing in legal terms exactly why: CAIPHAS Oure langage is to large, but youre lordshipp releve us Yitt we both beseke you, late brynge hym to barre; What poyntes that we putte forth, latt your presence appreve us (132–34, my italics). Caiphas’s first line actually means: “Our language is excessive unless your lordship assist us,” reinforced by a flood of anglicized legal language, including approbatio (“latt your presence appreve us”). Pilate relents. The soldiers delivering Jesus then taunt him in harsh, short, rapid-paced rhyming lines suggesting a social-class contrast with the rhetorical alliterative long lines of the High Priests. Famously in this play, as soon as Jesus appears, Caiphas and Anna cry out in pain: Caiphas’s “stande may I noght” (160) is both metaphorical and literal. The miraculous bowing of the banners held by knights follows, with the semi-comic episode in which Pilate makes a show of finding stronger knights to replace them. When these fail, too, Pilate’s tyrannical indignation is emphasized in the clever three-syllable bob (“How dar ye”) and then undercut by puns amidst thick northern dialect: How dar ye [how dare you] Ther baners on brede that her blawe [where banners blow on all sides] Lat lowte to this lurdan so lawe [let them bow to this rascal so low]? (176–78) As the knights confess their helplessness (184), the High Priest offers technical language of long-standing inter-clerical debate, explaining that Jesus has seized them to his “seett [sect]”—the English word for “order” or religious “sect” common in early anti-mendicant polemic, later in Wycliffite controversy, and in satire (even amusingly used of the Wife of Bath and like-minded women by the Clerk of Oxenford the Canterbury Tales):63 “CAIPHAS A, unfrendly faytours, full fals is youre fable; / This segge with his suttelté to his seett hath you sesid”

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(192–93, my italics). With Pilate’s first surrender to the will of the High Priests, significantly, we have moved increasingly from the language of the courtroom (when Pilate dominated earlier on with his “lare”) to the language of the ecclesiastical judiciary, most pronounced here. Also significant in this lexis are the two other words that collocate with “sett”: faytours (used of false beggars and, by extension, religious deceivers quite regularly, e.g., in Langland)64 and suttelté (from Latin and, like “sett,” also from French), epitomizing the rhetorical persuasion in law and belief that is the key action of the play. When read against the backdrop of cathedral court culture especially then, the ecclesiastical dimensions of this sophisticated pageant play emerge: virtually the entire play, with the exception of the horrifically brutal beating of Christ, can be read as a set of courtroom speech acts gone wrong—a nightmare of the triumph of false testimony over the silent truth emblematized by the near absence of Christ’s own speech from this Second Trial. So, too, false testimony routinely prevails against the illiterate in “Satire on the Consistory Courts” (as the narrator alleges). The York Realist, in writing (or more probably revising)65 this biblical drama, employed his own characteristic palette of subtleties for performance possibilities. It would have been the job of the magister ludi to choose among them: for example, would he play the scene in which stronger men try to hold the banners for laughs or for solemnity? This scene’s outrageous vows of Pilate, Caiphas, and Anna mark the first moment in which they are joined in one infernal trio, as they threaten to have the strong men “drawn” if they do not keep the banners aloft against Christ’s mysterious and mysteriously silent powers. But as no human strength can hold the banners aloft, Pilate himself is forced to rise “To wirschip hym [Christ] in wark and in witte” (273–75). When ridiculed by Caiphas (277), Pilate admits to being “past all my power” (278) and decides, in an admission of fear, that Jesus should go free. The poet signals this climatic moment in poetic form via an alliterative tour de force spoken by Pilate down to the bob, but dramatically finished off by Anna, who gets—or, better, takes—the wheel: PILATUS I was past all my powre, thogh I payned me and pynd; I wrought not as I wolde in no maner of wise. Bot syrs, my spech wele aspise, Wightly his wayes late hym wende; Thus my dome will dewly devyse, For I am ferde hym in faith to offende In sightes [publicly].

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ANNA Than oure lawe were laght till an ende To his tales if ye treuly attende. He enchaunted and charmed oure knyghtis. (278–87) The poet has exploited his rhyme scheme (linking Pilate’s “offende” with Anna’s “ende” and “attende”) and his bob-and-wheel to juxtapose Pilate’s sudden admission of powerlessness with Anna’s dire prophecy. Pilate is now afraid to offend Christ publicly (“In sightes”), with the bob’s own splendid metrical isolation epitomizing the reason. The high priests’ retort, however, trumps Pilate theologically: “Than oure lawe were laght till an ende”—their law (translating “lex,” i.e., their religion, their practice, and Judaism itself) would be brought (literally “snatched”) to its end if Pilate “attendes” to Christ’s charms (289). Eerily, this, of course, was the same argument that the medieval Church used, not only against perceived heresies, but also against secular leaders who threatened the Church’s powers. Any of York Minster’s clergy hearing, directing, or performing this would recall the stand that their Archbishop Scrope and Canterbury’s Archbishop Arundel had made at the Coventry Parliament in 1404 against Henry IV’s attempt to confiscate church temporalities.66 (A stand they believed resulted in Scrope’s 1405 martyrdom at Henry’s hands, as we’ll see.) This insistence on the law (here Hebrew religious law), in fact, is the turning point of the play, from which Pilate would never recover. The high priests hasten to offer Pilate, who is still doubtful (“I kenne to convyk hym no cause” [293]), a veneer of just cause: “ANNA To all gomes he God Son hym graunted, / And liste not to leve on oure lawes” (294–95). Pilate’s response shows that he instantly understands the second, not the first, charge as the key one, and what he says prompts Christ himself to speak for the only time in this entire play— Christ’s presence onstage through prior scenes must have been keenly felt in the performances, but he has been silent so far. Pilate asks Christ whether he understands the serious legal matter (“comberous clause”) of which he is accused, and prompts him, urgently, to excuse himself: Say, man, Consayves thou noght what comberous clause That this clargye accusyng thee knawse? Speke, and excuse thee if thou can. (296–99) In a period in which clergy, with the assistance of the secular arm, could indeed sentence a man to death for aberrant religious views, these lines are chilling.

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Christ’s response is surprisingly reminiscent of the mysterious Pardon in Piers Plowman: “Dowel and . . . god shal haue thy soule / . . . Bote he that euel lyueth euel shal ende.”67 (Langland’s poem was actually well known at York Minster and in York, as we will see below.) Here, Christ says, each man has a mouth, If he governe it gudly like as God wolde For his spirituale speche hym not to spill. And what gome so governe it ill, Full unhendly and ill sall he happe. (302–5) But he says, “ilk tale” you accuse me of, you shall have to account for: “Thou accounte sall, thou cannot escappe” (307), invoking here that favourite passage of proletarian writers from the Parable of the Unjust Steward, as we saw in Chapter 2. Having turned the tables, Christ again falls silent; Pilate tries again to say that he can find no legal point upon which to condemn him (“no poynte to putt hym to pyne” [311]). But Pilate suddenly sees a way out, if only for himself: since he can find no law to convict Christ, but the Hebrew priests claim their law is at stake, and will not give up until Christ “be . . . demed to dye” (315), let them pronounce the judgment accordingly: But takes hym unto you forthe And like as youre lawe will you lere, Deme [judge] ye his body to abye [pay]. (317–19) His solution turns once again on one of the play’s key words, “lere,” but little does Pilate realize that he is now trapped, just as Christ prophesied he would be: like contemporary English clergy, the High Priests cannot put a man to death without the aid of the “secular arm.” The actor playing Anna would feign horror, possibly even a bit effeminately, as he protests, using the same colloquialism (“do way!”) associated with female speakers protesting unwanted advances (famously, Alisoun in the “Miller’s Tale”, and elsewhere, as we saw, even saucily set as the tenor line of a Latin motet):68 ANNA O, Sir Pilate, withouten any pere, Do way; Ye wate wele withouten any were Us falles not, nor oure felowes in feere [i.e., nor to other priests], To slo no man, yourself the soth say. (319–23)

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After 1401, the Church had used the same arguments when the death penalty was invoked for Wycliffism as for other earlier types of Insular heresy, the kinds of doctrinal issues in fact brought before episcopal consistory courts, as this team of cathedral directors would be acutely aware.69 Though still Pilate protests that Christ is “ fautles, in faith” (326), Caiphas delivers the coup de grâce (“Nought so, ser, . . .”), now alleging that Christ has claimed to be king “with croune” (330). Cornered now by the first real legal challenge to royal power of the play, Pilate desperately orders the flogging in some vague hope that such a punishment might suffice. The barbaric scene that follows of the mocking, whipping, and the crowning with thorns, so well known to medieval audiences, ends only when the soldiers begin to fear that Christ might be dead. Rhetorically, the mockery is an “anti-hail” burlesque70 of common hymn form (beginning “Hayle!”). Christ is hailed as a king who has lost his kingdom, a lord without a land, a strong man without the strength to stand, written in both short rhymed and alliterating English lines to accentuate shrillness in performance (409–20). The scene is surely intended as an action scene to compensate for the cerebral “inaction” of a play that is mostly a dense, dark, legal-ecclesiastical trial of words. When the soldiers deliver Christ back to Pilate, they do so with the type of macaronic wordplay this poet uses to mark watershed moments: “II MILES We ar combered his corpus for to cary” (429). The lines capture Christ’s full weight in body, spirit, and Eucharist, while subtly re-echoing Pilate’s “comberous clause” (297) of an earlier solemn legal moment. Visibly moved, Pilate ventures to assert that Christ will never preach again, unwittingly pronouncing the famous “ecce homo”: “Sirs, beholde upon hight and ecce homoo” (435). A missing leaf from the manuscript deprives modern audiences of seeing how the York Realist’s characteristic portrayal of thought process worked to move Pilate, a complex character, finally to relent. But washing his hands, symbolically, of Christ’s crucifixion, Pilate says, For propirly by this processe will I preve I had no force fro this felawshippe this freke for to fende. PRECO Here is all, ser, that ye for sende; Wille ye wasshe whill the water is hote? (440–43) Tunc lavat manus suas. Fittingly for a proletarian writer, it is a servant who pushes this weak governour through the last vestige of perennial but empty hesitation, simply by reminding him that the water is hot. This is the kind of moment that earned the York Real-

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ist his “realist” sobriquet. The presence of the stage directions in Latin71 further underlines that the producer of the play would have been clerically trained, and we now know exactly who some of these directors were: a York Minster vicar choral, Thomas Tanfeld, followed by the consistory notary and proctor, Robert Skurueton, as magistri ludi. We do not yet know, of course, precisely who the York Realist was, but we know which fellow proletarians funded, advised, and produced this masterpiece of his for several years—and for all we know, the Realist was indeed one of them.

3. Suppression at the Cathedral: Margery Kempe, the York Vicars Choral, and Vernacular Reading Circles Having seen that cathedral ministri inferiores were actively involved in the York Cycle play production, we turn now to evidence of vicars choral as “submerged” in-house authors, chroniclers, and literary readers.72 Historians have traditionally tended to look higher up the food chain for possible cathedral chronicle authors, but in his 2005 essay, Barrie Dobson astutely observed that an in-house chronicle, the Chronica Archiepiscoporum Eboracensium (CAE), “seems to have been compiled by one or more vicars choral. The several internal references to the York vicars within the text make that hypothesis likely, not least the revelation that it was four vicars choral who carried the decapitated corpse of Archbishop Richard Scrope into the east end of the Minster choir on the day after his summary execution in Clementhorpe on 8th June 1405. This slender and somewhat jejune chronicle seems to have been addressed primarily to the pilgrim or visitor to the cathedral.”73 There is a lot to unpack here, and if one looks closely at authorial attitudes in the CAE, Dobson’s hunch proves right. In fact, hosting pilgrims and visitors was a particular duty of the vicars choral—and intriguingly for Middle English scholars, one such pilgrim was Margery Kempe. Though paid considerably less than the absentee canons they represented, the vicars did have advantages of job security, housing, and “communal selfassurance.”74 From 1200 onwards, Dobson notes, liturgical routines blossomed into complexity that made their ser vices indispensable; in addition, an “obedientiary” system evolved requiring the vicars to hold office as bursars, chamberlains, keepers of the fabric, secretaries, and scribes (jobs often parallel to those carried by chantry priests like Tyckhill at St. Paul’s). At York, “Although the cantarists [chantry priests] enjoyed ceremonial precedence over the vicars

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choral, in practice it would be hard to distinguish between these two groups of clergy in terms of social status.” 75 From the thirteenth century onwards, residential vicars choral colleges grew in cathedral towns, with their halls in which, as we saw in Chapter 5, songs and lyrics in all three of England’s languages flourished. By the fifteenth century, York chantry priests, too, acquired such a college (St. William’s College; see Figure 5.8), but the vicars choral had the much older communal tradition, centred on York’s Bedern Hall (see Figure 5.5 and 5.6), with its name derived from the Old English word for prayer.76 The vicars had income from many sources: a stipend from their canons, obits, chantry masses, and corporate tenement and business holdings (such as their tileworks). Their communal table was often very well supplied. As Sarah Rees Jones has established through her extensive research, by 1304, they were the “largest landowners in the city of York with about 80 properties,” but a system of perpetual rents to free tenants and issues of city and royal taxation left them, in today’s idiom, “land-poor,” or as Harrison says, “poor as the proverbial church mice.”77 So began decades of collective bargaining and self-advocacy, a trait we will see in their writings. As Katherine Zieman notes, “The vicars choral of York . . . wanted their own collegiate status and bargained for it by supplicating Richard II—in exchange for the privilege, they promised to sing the antiphon of John the Baptist (Richard II’s patron saint) every day.”78 Archaeological work on the Bedern reveals a complex living situation in which the religious and secular worlds did not so much collide as coexist. Nigel Tringham’s study portrays an ordered communal life with fines imposed on those who broke the rules, for example, by abusing college servants, playing chess, or betting in the hall, or those who “persisted in asking vain questions” (the rebuke of which is familiar to readers of Piers Plowman).79 By 1346, the Bedern even had its own chapel, albeit modest, and vicars began slowly to acquire small, private camerae, or houses, no longer surviving, but eventually taking on comforts like those extant at Chichester (see Figures 5.7a and 5.7b).80 By the fifteenth century, there were some attempts to create a “ ‘ family life’ that approximated to that enjoyed by the laity.”81 These comforts could at times include concubines (some of these women themselves literate or learned, some even occasionally bearing children at the Bedern),82 the comparative tolerance of which in the medieval records speaks volumes about marital alternatives in the Middle Ages, as Ruth Karras argues, and more recently, Amanda Bohne.83 It also tells us a great deal about social tolerance of deviation from strict clerical norms of those living “inbetween” the clerical and lay worlds, and might just illuminate why vicars choral were so interested, as we just saw, in lyrics associated with fornication records.84

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With one foot in each world, collectively the vicars were politically wellconnected, yet, with the exception of the choristers, they were the lowest of the ministri inferiori. As we will see, they strove to protect their endowments, rights, and privileges through all legal means possible, and through the writing of histories or other forms of what I have called “cathedral publicity.” Here, we will think about histories likely authored by the vicars choral, and in Chapter 7, we will look at histories used by them (a separate category), as I will argue, in their duties of guiding pilgrims and visitors to the cathedral, especially those on the York Tabulae. These two sets of boards contain Latin histories of York Minster itself, demonstrating its place in British history and asserting its rights and privileges (see Figures 6.7 and 7.1). They were originally hung in the Minster for the information of visitors and pilgrims—and this is why, I would note, lay pilgrims such as Margery Kempe were wholly dependent on vicars choral guides for any translation. We turn now then to the Middle English source that proves unexpectedly rich—indeed, counterintuitively—as a route into the Latin cultural and political context of York Minster, The Book of Margery Kempe. When Margery Kempe visited York in 1417, she was befriended there by a doctor of divinity, a member of the York vicars choral, and by an unnamed chantry priest: “And owr Lord of hys mercy evyr he mad sum men to lovyn hir and supportyn hir. And so in this cité of Yorke ther was a doctowr of divinyté, Maistyr John Aclom, also a Chanown of the Mynstyr, Syr John Kendale, and another preste whech song be the bischopys grave; thes wer hir good frendys of the spiritualté” (Ch. 51, 2848–51).85 She gives us a lot of information here. Anthony Bale identifies “Maistyr John Alcom” as John Acomb, a local rector and chapel “canon prebendary,” citing Jonathan Hughes’s note that he was a “member of a Cambridge circle of Northerners who were students of contemplative literature.”86 John Kendale was, in fact, not a canon but rather one of the vicars choral of the Minster. Margery’s mistake is telling: either she did not know the difference or she sought to augment his authority by silently promoting him. Kendale was apparently an associate of John Newton, a residentiary canon (rare, since most were absentee), treasurer of the Minster since 1393. Newton was a Cambridge doctor of canon law, and as Friedman shows, a phenomenal book collector, responsible for the York Minster Library and “at the centre of a circle of gentry and clerks with a strong interest in northern devotional writings.”87 Widely read in these circles was the famous Richard Rolle, a favourite, of course, of Kempe’s. So it is no accident that of Acomb, Kendale, and Newton, as Hughes writes, “These men and the other cathedral clergy who were students of Rolle’s works approved of Margery’s piety, and they were able to do so

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Figure 6.7. York Minster Library, Add. 533, a triptych tabula containing cathedral and British histories, copied on parchment and mounted on boards for posting in York Minster (c.1400). The central panel contains the Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE). An image of the other tabula, York Minster Library, Add. 534, can be seen in Figure 7.1. © Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission.

because they had the necessary experience in adapting eremitic teaching for laymen to establish her orthodoxy and to give her protection.”88 We can now add more to this helpful sketch: officially, it would have been Kendale’s job to guide Margery through the Minster and to St.  William’s shrine. We know from other sources that Kendale lived in the Bedern, the communal home of the vicarii de choro. Kendale, then, was an educated man and carried real responsibilities at the Minster,89 but it is difficult to know his social

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status or income. Generally speaking, York Minster vicars lived fairly well compared to many in their society, but there are also records of poorer ones.90 In fact, Bedern records show Kendale twice in trouble about stealing bread: he was disciplined in 1420 for stealing loaves of bread by night from the communal pantry, and on a different occasion, he falsely accused another vicar of doing so; he was also accused of stealing fuel and a small key—so perhaps his means were more humble.91 He also falsely accused Thomas Tanfeld (whom we have just met as magister ludi of the York Cycle pageant) of an unstipulated offense. Of course, Bedern records are full of such minor infractions, but these suggest need. Kendale also had literary interests, and in this particular passage, not only was he counseling Kempe as one of her “frendys of the spiritualté” (line 2851) but, I would suggest, informing her as a pilgrim and visitor about the Minster’s history and saints’ cults—part of his job. So formalized was this role that the vicars could even be fined for not attending “to the wants of the pilgrims.”92 Equally interesting is that Kendale’s unnamed companion in Kempe’s text is identified as “another preste whech song be the bischopys grave.”93 This reference has puzzled editors, but the historical context suggests to me that she means the grave of the current archbishop’s predecessor, Richard Scrope, who died in 1405, executed under controversial orders from Henry IV, after which Scrope’s cult was for a time heavily suppressed. In fact, Margery was visiting in 1417 at a time of renewal for Scrope’s cult, since Henry V had lifted some restrictions on it in 1415, resulting in new attention and massive donation, with the later appointment of an official Keeper of the tomb.94 Moreover, the lower clergy had an intensely loyal connection to Scrope, but the semi-suppressed cult was still a matter of delicacy—despite Henry V’s positive move, for instance, even Scrope’s relatives apparently did not feel safe putting up a stained glass window in his memory until 1440. As Sarah Brown shows, for many years after Scrope’s execution, the choices of iconography made for the extensive new stained glass representing York Minster’s history became “safely remote,” emphasizing famous figures of the early Middle Ages, not of the recent past.95 Some of this unresolved delicacy or ambiguity is perhaps mirrored here in the obliqueness of Kempe’s reference to “the bischopys grave.” This delicacy may shed light on another perplexing dimension of Kempe’s visit. We know that Kempe traveled to York (and elsewhere) to seek out sympathetic clergy with whom she would share her religious experiences (“her feelings”)—she explicitly says, of course, of Kendale and the others that “thes wer hir good frendys of the spiritualté,” highlighting this circle of eager Rollereading northerners. As we know, her travels were always prompted by a kind of

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restless quest for validation that her religious experiences were authentic. And as I showed in more detail in Books Under Suspicion, the clergy of York Minster were especially alert during the post-Scrope years to issues of discretio spirituum (i.e., discernment of spirits, that is, discernment as to the validity of any claim to extraordinary spiritual experience or any kind of miraculous event on their premises).96 Just to recap these momentous years briefly: the unprecedented judicial murder of a sitting archbishop, beside which, as Stubbs noted, even the murder of Thomas Becket pales, gave rise to anger in the North of England and the spontaneous local saint’s cult of Scrope that brought attention and wealth to York Minster.97 When Henry IV’s administration had tried to suppress the cult, and especially the reports of miracles emanating from the archbishop’s tomb, riots ensued. On behalf of Henry, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, issued a letter with constitutions98 attempting to police the processes of discretio spirituum, that is, professional clerical examination of claims to miraculous or revelatory experience of pilgrims flocking to Scrope’s grave. In so doing, Arundel implicated York Minster’s clergy in the contentious business of enforcing a ban on public claims to miracles and visions at the tomb. Judging by the loyalty to Scrope they expressed in their in-house chronicles, this would have been not just awkward but painful for the lower clergy. Arundel outlined in a 1405 letter to the Chapter the measures he wanted taken in “discerning” whether the Scrope-inspired miracles and visions were valid (indeed, his language tends toward skepticism).99 Since Arundel had been an effective archbishop of York (actually, much admired by the vicars choral, as we will see), this must have been, as their editor James Raine noted, an awkward letter to write to his recent familia.100 This letter is followed by a series of five injunctions, reinforced in a separate letter by King Henry IV himself, aimed at stopping the cult. Henry mentions these injunctions were listed “en une cedule” (i.e., in a bill for posting); they specifically ask (1) that the Dean, Chapter, canons, and all “ministri” abstain from making public any claims to miraculous events (“a quacumque publicatione miraculorum”); and (2) that no one invite or in any way “lead in” (“invitent quoquomodo vel inducant”) worshippers to adoration (“ad adorandum”) of the Archbishop.101 Next it (3) stipulates that the only allowable prayers were to be for his soul (“pro anima”), and (4) names three individuals in authority who were to oversee the diversion of all donations meant for Scrope’s cult, directing them instead toward the tomb of the politically harmless, much earlier St. William of York. Among the three people the king named in his letter to oversee the diversion of Scrope donations to St. William was a contemporary of Kendale’s, Robert Ferriby (subchanter of the vicars, who

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also presided, later controversially, over the Bedern).102 It was of course, the job of the vicars choral to conduct visitors and pilgrims. Raine notes that the “orders issued . . . could not, evidently, be trifled with. They could not, however, allay the feeling that had been aroused. Offerings and prayers were still made at the tomb . . . and the treasures of St. Stephen’s chapel [where Scrope’s tomb is] held a conspicuous place among the magnificent furniture” of the Minster.103 Though by the time Kempe visited, these restrictions had somewhat relaxed, it is against this backdrop that Kempe was interrogated in the Chapter House after one of her violent devotional outbursts in York Minster, she is asked why she has come, and she replies with the safest possible answer, perhaps at Kendale’s suggestion: “Syr, I come on pilgrimage to offyr her at Seynt William” (Ch. 51, lines 2873–74). Kempe’s interrogation in the Chapter House that followed and later at Cawood, the archbishop’s residence, is interesting in this light, though too often treated only as prompted by fears of Lollardy. But in addition to the tensions over Scrope, there was also apparently a faction in the Minster somewhat suspicious of Rolle and ecstatic contemplatives, and Margery’s circle of friends would have been sensitive to this issue as well. She seems to prompt various concerns: she is even asked the test question for Free Spirit heresy at York.104 But she can hardly have looked like a Wycliffite, since they were not known for violent ecstatic outbursts or visionary experience (which, in fact, Wyclif had deplored).105 Nor were they known for offering at saints’ shrines or, indeed, for going out of their way to receive frequent communion. Indeed, Margery would have cut a strange figure as a Wycliffite. In fact, I’d suggest it was her ecstatic outbursts during communion in the Minster that prompted her interrogation: “So sche dwellyd stille in that cité fourteen days, . . . and on the Sundays sche was howseld in the Mynster wyth gret wepyng, boistows sobbyng, and lowde crying that many man merveyled ful meche what hir eyled. So aftyrward ther cam a preste, a worschepful clerke he semyd, and seyd unto hir, ‘Damsel, thu seydest whan thu come first hedyr that thu woldyst abydyn her but fourteen days.’ ‘Ya, ser, wyth yowr leve, . . . , but . . . ser, I telle yow trewly I go not yet.’ Than he sett hir a day, comawndyng hir for to aperyn beforn hym in the chapelhows” (Ch.51, lines 2851–59, with omissions). Hoping initially to hear that she would soon be leaving, and being disappointed in that, the interrogation is scheduled immediately after her disturbance during communion in the Minster.106 It is worth remembering that after Scrope’s death, Arundel had exhorted the Minster’s clergy that “you by no means [“minime”] invite or solicit” any such gatherings or spectacles and to suppress any

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such displays, “until it be known whether such a thing may originate from God [“donec sciatur an hec res a Deo proveniat”] . . . or whether it proceeds from violent, vain, or superstitious things, by the invention of man [“ex violenta, vana, et supersticiosa hominum invencione procedit”].”107 Though Kempe is visiting a decade later and explicitly offering at the shrine of the very acceptable St. William, it is entirely possible that at least some Minster clergy found Kempe’s responses to be suspiciously violent and quite possibly “vain.” Fortunately for her, all pilgrims offering at the shrine of St. William would have been supervised by a Minster cleric like Kendale, a circumstance even immortalized in the Minster’s stained glass (see Figure 6.8). It is in this context, I believe, that Kempe foregrounds John Kendale and her other “good frendys of the spiritualté” from the outset of her York Minster narrative. There are other reasons to be interested in Kendale: the fact that Kempe, author of the first extant autobiography in English, specifically names him may also suggest his interest in English writing. We know Kendale traveled in Rolle reading circles, and that he lived (if not always cheerfully) in the Bedern alongside Thomas Tanfeld, a magister ludi of the York Cycle Second Trial pageant. Kendale would also have known the other magister ludi, Robert Skurueton, who also produced the vicars play and was also a Minster consistory court notary. And there may be still another connection: Langland scholars have long known that among the Yorkshire owners of Piers Plowman were John Wyndhyll, a rector of Arncliffe, Yorkshire, who bequeathed to one John Kendale (then perpetual vicar of Grimston) a copy of Piers Plowman, “librum meum Anglicanum de Piers Plughman,” in 1431.108 As the wording suggests, English books in wills are still rare enough that the language is marked, even by 1431. Some scholars believe this is the same Kendale who met Kempe, though we cannot say, since a John Kendale also died as a vicar choral in 1427. But either is possible since John Wyndhyll had strong York connections,109 especially with the Carmelite convent at Hungate, just a few blocks from the Bedern,110 making the likelihood of his interactions with Minster vicars choral like Kendale a good one, especially in this circle of Cambridge-trained northerners. So as a vicar choral and literary enthusiast, Kendale represents, I would suggest, the tip of an iceberg, with or without a copy of Piers. York was rich in copies of Piers: another was owned by the York Austin friars, Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.1.17, whose library has been discussed as a resource for the creation of the York Cycle plays.111 And there was, in fact, another copy of Piers with a York Minster connection, though higher up the clerical ladder: a canon of York Minster, Walter de Brugges, owned the ear-

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Figure 6.8. Pilgrims visiting the shrine of St. William, York Minster, under the supervision of a cleric, one of the ninety-five panels of the St. William Window (north choir aisle), likely designed by the great glazier, John Thornton. © Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission.

liest known copy of the poem. Though he would often have been absent as a high-profile king’s clerk, it was his York Minster identity he was most proud of and chose to foreground in his will, in which he, too, bequeathed his copy of Piers.112 Interestingly, all three of the earliest known wills bequeathing Piers Plowman have cathedral connections, notable during a time when even most members of lower clergy still bequeathed books in Latin.113 As we saw in Chapter 2.1, among the St. Paul’s chantry priests, Rousseau documents a man also known to Langland scholars as among the earliest identifiable owner of any copy of Piers Plowman, William Palmer (d. 1400), who, at least while working at St. Paul’s, had not yet received a benefice with cure of souls. However, he died as rector of a London parish, bequeathing his copy of Piers to a woman, Agnes Eggesfield.114 So, it is quite possible that Palmer even owned Piers when he was

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a colleague of Tyckhill: as we saw, in this tight-knit group of chantry priests, booksharing and bequeathals were common. But whenever he acquired it, Palmer would eventually bequeath his own Piers copy to a woman—remarkably, here then is a one-time St. Paul’s chantry chaplain who, like York’s John Kendale, was also encouraging a lay woman reader and, in Kendale’s case, encouraging a woman writer. (In fact, there are several accounts of proletarian men bequeathing books to women.)115 This kind of pattern has not really been noticed before, but it suggests, along with the evidence that our St. Paul’s rent-roll poet, Tyckhill, apparently associated with reading circles for Langland, Chaucer, and Hoccleve,116 that vicars choral and cathedral chantry priests might very well represent still under-appreciated vernacular literary reading circles.

4. The Vicars Choral as In-House Authors: Trauma, Censorship, and Cathedral Publicity There is also another likely York Minster association with Piers Plowman, and this one involves a Latin poem about Scrope appearing in Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851—a poem so explosive that it survives complete in only one uncensored copy. I first discussed this Latin poem as a censorship case in Books Under Suspicion, without then realizing the significance of the fact that it could only have come from York Minster and the archbishop’s familia.117 Copied into Bodley 851, a Benedictine manuscript associated with Ramsey Abbey in East Anglia, the poem’s York Minster connection is not at first obvious. Bodley also contains the only surviving copy of the Z-text of Piers Plowman and our very heavily liturgical lament for Archbishop Richard Scrope in Latin, Quis meo capiti. Though this poem survives in other copies, only in the Bodley 851 version does it have eight extra, otherwise suppressed, stanzas of virulent critique against the negligence of bishops and the tyranny of Henry IV that led to Scrope’s execution. I will not revisit its many stanzas here but suggests rather its cathedral origins. The incipit, “Quis meo capiti,” is an allusion to Jeremiah 9:1 (“Who will give water to my head and a fountain of tears to my eyes”),118 and despite its formal, liturgical language, its use of York Minster chronicle resources is evident in its scathing account of Scrope’s death—though safely in anonymity. Like the CAE, which Dobson attributed to the York Minster vicars choral (discussed below), it provides a window into the attitudes and emotions of Scrope’s “orphaned” familia. The first suppressed cluster of stanzas, for instance, deals with the terrible dismemberment— limb from limb (“membratim”)—of the body of the young earl marshal, Mowbray,

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Scrope’s companion, and his dignity and constancy, like Scrope’s, in the face of death.119 Quis is a shock to anyone used to reading the milder Middle English accounts, such as the carol on these same dramatic events:120 When he was broght vnto the hyll, he held hym both mylde and styll; he toke his deth with full gode wyll, As I haue herde full trewe men say. (lines 5–8, my emphasis) Even the anonymous Middle English poet instinctively distances himself from the scene (“As I haue herde . . .”), and from the graphic execution descriptions given in the Minster’s in-house Latin chronicle accounts, while still capturing something of the anxiety of supporters present at the executions of Scrope and Mowbray. While it may have choral or hall origins, the simpler Middle English carol refrain parallels some of the audacious “sound poetry” tenor settings we saw in Chapter 5, and it, too, has a forthright liturgical orientation: “Hay, hay, hay, hay, / thynke on Whitson monday!”121 In the more graphic “Quis,” however, Scrope is referred to as the “Cultor ecclesie” (cultivator or husbandman of the church), perhaps the reason it was collected into a manuscript also containing Piers Plowman. And the epithet is used elsewhere in the uncensored portions of the poem, suggesting its originality. Some of its minute detail on the brutality surely arises in part out of what we might call post-traumatic stress, which is easier to see in the Latin chronicles like the CAE (discussed below),122 since many of Scrope’s familia in 1405 had witnessed his beheading firsthand. In one of the defining moments of Quis, Scrope’s death is set in the tradition of the deaths of two earlier archbishops, Becket and Simon Sudbury (during the Rising of 1381): Ast Thomam militum audax atrocitas, Symonem plebium furens ferocitas, Ricardum callide saeva crudelitas, Obtruncant christos Domini.123 (And [in the case of] Thomas, the bold atrocity of knights, Simon, the raging ferocity of commoners, Richard, fierce cruelty cunningly Cut off the Lord’s anointed.)

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The stanza, in fact, lends credibility to William Stubbs’s view that the judicial murder of the primate of northern England was more significant than the murder of Becket, which he thought was “thrown into the shade” by it.124 The Quis poet blames a handful of knights for Becket’s death, a mob of commoners (“plebium”) for Simon Sudbury’s, but (in the next stanzas) the king himself for Scrope’s. Having thus grimly covered the laity in all three estates, the poem goes on to cover ecclesiastical politics as well, for example, Scrope’s important stand in 1404 against the confiscation of church temporalities, along with Archbishop Arundel, against a royal threat of disendowment. The author of Quis meo capiti knew that this stand precipitated Scrope’s act of rebellion, taking up arms on behalf of the church against what he saw as oppressive taxation, resulting in his execution—this the poet got from sophisticated pro-Scrope accounts and his own ecclesiology, suggesting it was certainly an in-house job. Despite its formality and use of biblical, liturgical, and legal allusion, it draws on much the same kind of intimate detail and polemical sensibility that other York Minster chronicles of the archbishops do. But even some York Minster’s own chronicles, especially those written by officials higher in the chain, or those intended or copied for a wider audience, were more circumspect. As we saw, much material on Scrope came under official censorship, most especially, of course, the accounts of miracles and visions at his tomb. Even though by April 1406 the king’s council had ordered the York clergy to abstain from publishing accounts of miracles worked at the tomb and in the field where Scrope was beheaded, they continued to be published and the command had to be frequently repeated.125 The five injunctions in the letter from Archbishop Arundel, buttressed by ones from King Henry and Prince John, continued to be relevant and were recorded again in the same Acta capitularia volume for 1410–29, which also contains our Middle English lyric “Under a law,” and more than covers the years of Kempe’s visit.126 One of the best windows on how this whole episode affected the morale of the cathedral is the series of accounts in multiple informal York Minster chronicles, some written by the vicars choral— the “secretarial pool” at the Minster.127 It is to the most intimate of these we turn next. As Dobson noted, the Continuation (Part III) of the Chronica Archiepiscoporum Eboracensium (CAE) “seems to have been compiled by one or more vicars choral.” In fact, if we look more closely, I’d say it was composed over generations of vicars choral.128 The kind of miscellaneous chronicles (“jejune” or other wise) all cathedrals kept in the Middle Ages had multiple purposes, sometimes as a record of local and institutional history, sometimes in part as a

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resource for educating pilgrims and visitors, and sometimes as political or ecclesiastical propaganda to promote the interests of the cathedral or the rights of the episcopal familia. So, too, the author of another medieval chronicle (which its editor James Raine amusingly called just that, the Aliud Chronicon Metricum [ACM]) was apparently written by one of the vicars choral of nearby Ripon Minster, a suffragan bishopric to York Minster, who apparently had access, however, to York Minster archival material. We will have a look at these two chronicles as instances of the vicars choral “getting their message out,” and as great background to a cathedral text like St. Erkenwald (Chapter 7). The CAE teaches us a lot about the worldview and literary culture of the cathedral and the vicars choral in particular. It is certainly the work of choir insiders, most obviously (but not only) in its long and empathetic treatment of Scrope’s execution (five vicars choral and one chaplain of the Minster had also joined the rebellion).129 It contains, as Dobson noted, a kind of intimacy and specificity in detail, for example, about who retrieved Scrope’s body and head on the day following the execution: four York vicars choral, with very few companions, “sub silentio” and “not without fear and trembling” (“quatuor vicarii de choro ecclesiae cathedralis Eboracensis ad eandem ecclesiam paucis aut nullis concomitantibus sub silentio, non absque timore et tremor, deportaverunt”).130 Given the peril of supporting a traitor to the king, this was daring, certainly as traumatic and loyal a rescue of a fallen hero’s remains as one finds in any wartime account or modern battlefield memoir. Writing about the moving of the body to the East End, that is, a place safely behind the rood screen and close to St. William’s shrine behind the high altar (an area more controlled by the clergy than the nave, as Figure 6.8 reminds us), the author is very precise about where they carried it: into the “new work” of the East End (“ubi in orientali fine novi operis dictae ecclesiae”). He is also apologetic about the rudimentary burial prompted by hostile circumstances. So, too, the writer had been just as passionate about how inhumanely and roughly Scrope was handled by his captors and his companions (“tam ipse quam sui complices inhumaniter apponentes” [432]). For example, when led to his death, he was seated backwards on the horse in humiliation (“facie ad caudam equi versa”), and, though entitled to clerical trial, he was summarily beheaded against ancient legal doctrine (“contra antiquae legis praeceptum” [433]). The writer is clearly laser-focused on Scrope: unlike other accounts (e.g., Quis meo capiti in Bodley 851), no attention is given in the CAE to Mowbray, the earl marshal executed alongside him, so nothing detracts from the saintly image of Scrope as the father figure of an intimate familia, repeatedly called the “athlete of God,” as if invoking the martyrs of the

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Early Church. Mention is made in good northern fashion of the five wounds Scrope requested in honour of Christ (“quinta vice collo percussus”) in the course of the beheading.131 Moreover, the writer’s dating of Scrope’s death, like so much else in the chronicle, I’d note, is meticulously liturgical (“ubi feria secunda in septimana Pentecostes, accedente octava die Junii, anno Domini MCCCCV”). The centrality of the vicars choral as agents in the Scrope episode is matched in other CAE passages, surely contributed by various vicars, since it stretches from Archbishop Neville in 1374 to Thomas Wolsey’s appointment in 1519. Importantly, despite their communal comforts and endowments, the vicars saw themselves at the bottom of the familia clerical earning ladder: for example, Archbishop Booth is said to have been a great “lover and protector to the poor” (“pauperum amator et protectore”)—and “the poor” turn out to be, in the next paragraph, the vicars themselves (!) for whose support Booth appropriated the revenues of churches in the diocese (436).132 What had given the vicarii of the York Bedern their comparative financial independence over the years was the appropriation of parish church incomes on their behalf, for which Richard II, too, is fondly remembered (425). So, too, is Thomas Arundel, who dedicated and consecrated the altar in the Bedern Chapel in 1393 (again precisely liturgically dated to the feast of St. Laurence [“in capella Bedernae vicariorum . . . in festo Sancti Laurentii”]). What is striking about this is, simply put, the gratitude (which brings us full circle to the parallel inscriptions of gratitude in Figure  6.1): whichever vicar contributed this passage was clearly not jaded with worship, nor “alienated” in any recognizable Marxist sense. Though now much damaged, this chapel still stands today. Arundel’s gifts of liturgical vestments and silver to the cathedral are lovingly detailed, as are those given to the Bedern Chapel (426). The same is true for other archbishops’ donations—in fact, the chronicle really deserves a modern liturgist’s attention, as it epitomizes a liturgical worldview above all. Revealingly, the measure of each new archbishop is taken almost entirely by his generosity or other wise to the cathedral’s vicars choral, rather like a “trade unionist” mentality today—or, better, like Audelay’s many pleas in Marcolf for the endowment of monastic chantries like his own. These men, like all men in the clerical ser vice class, all knew what it was to depend on donations. Meanwhile, archbishops who treat the vicars badly come in for severe commentary (the revenge of the pen), and these cases smack of what we might call workers’ rights. Most fascinating of the hostile accounts is the one of Alexander Neville’s cruel Palm Sunday expulsion of six vicars choral to Beverley in 1381—

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left implicit for an insider audience is that they were expelled on the busiest liturgical day of the year, as if for pure malice. It finally took the authority of Richard II and Parliament to restore them in 1388 (when Archbishop Neville is banished from England).133 In fact, I would wager that the indignation with Neville was what prompted the Part III Continuation in the first place, since it starts with Neville. (As we will see below not all Minster chronicles were so forthright on this.) Though the chronicle rarely reaches to national affairs (the one exception is the landing of Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, back on English shores and his [false] promises to Archbishop Scrope not to harm Richard II), the outlines of larger affairs are just visible: Richard II had had his own powers restored by summer of 1388, thus his reversal of Neville’s expulsion of the vicars then. And even more significantly, the chronicle complains of this archbishop’s tendency to infringe on the “liberties and ancient customs” (“libertates et antiquas consuetudines, quamvis laudabiles, infringere”) of York Minster and the suffragan bishoprics, Beverley and Ripon. Neville ruled by terror via needless suspensions and excommunications and bad behaviour toward the dean, the chapter, “et aliis ministris ecclesiae suae cathedralis metropoliticae” (424), so when Richard takes control of the archbishop’s temporalia and confiscates all his goods as punishment, the CAE authors rejoice. This type of disendowment of a delinquent cleric lay within royal power (this is what Langland, for instance, is thinking of in his own disendowment prophecies about a coming king).134 It is a measure of their fury against Archbishop Neville that the vicar(s) choral who wrote this celebrate this disendowment—an event rarely advocated by those who, like the vicars, live on endowments. Of course, their love of Richard II frames Scrope’s own stand against Henry IV when threatened, always read as heroic. Scrope is rendered as the most charismatic of all archbishops, and by good fortune, the vicars choral authors cared so much about composition of songs that they elaborate on how Scrope composed liturgical sequences, sung in Use of York masses (“plurimas Sequentias, quae in Missis canuntur in usu Eboracensi”). Known for the sweetness of their style (“ad laudem Dei et Sanctorum formose stylo compilavit” [429]), Scrope’s listed compositions appear to range widely, and include the Continental cult of the “Eleven Thousand Virgins” (“Undecim milibus Virginum”), Thomas Becket and more (“de Sancto Thoma Martyre Undecim . . . cum diveris aliis”). Considering how Scrope’s life was to end, the fact that he composed his own sequence on Becket is a significant insight into one who was willing to speak truth to royal power at any price. The text invokes Becket just like the Latin lament, Quis meo capiti, and lionizes

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Richard II, suggesting a shared common in-house political culture. The CAE also alludes to Scrope’s prayer compilations concerning the name of Jesus (“et orationes devotas compilavit de hoc nomine Jhesu”)—a reference to a popular cult of the name of Jesus still visible in many Yorkshire books.135 Most interestingly, the vicar-chronicler writes that Scrope was often wont to cry out “Jhesu mercy” (429)—so amidst this sea of Latin, we learn that he called upon Christ in English (“vulgariter”)—a convincing detail (429). Given the dozens of Middle English religious lyrics begin with these two words, this, like much else in the CAE, suggests lyric sensitivities. The CAE is a vintage proletarian text, with its primary concern for the underemployed and for clerical corruption (this time, at the top), as well as passion for liturgical dignity—enthusiasm all the more remarkable when one realizes how many ser vices a day these vicars sang. The CAE is not the only chronicle that bears the marks of the vicars’ pens. The Aliud Chronicon Metricum (ACM)136 was authored (according to its anonymous continuator) by John de Allhallowgate, who was by 1374 one of the vicars choral of Ripon Minster, one of York Minster’s nearby suffragan bishoprics.137 But he must have served or spent time at York Minster during the period of writing, since he had access to the York archives for compiling his history, which reminds us of the permeability of lower clergy among these cathedrals.138 The continuator calls him Johanne de Allhallowgate (“praedecessore nostro”), and self-identifies modestly and anonymously as a simple priest of the same church (“simplex in eadem ecclesia presbyter succedendo”), or as Raine puts it, as some “other chantry priest or vicar of the same minster.” He says that he will now carry the chronicle to the York Minster archiepiscopate of William Booth (d. 1464), who is now living, Allhallowgate having written during the time of Archbishop Thoresby (d. 1373).139 But I would suggest that unless one sees the manuscripts of these chronicles, it is difficult to appreciate how haphazardly they were constructed, which is not evident from Raine’s edition (where the cracks are papered over). But in British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, I would note that the scribe has left deliberate gaps in some spots, as if awaiting information, suggesting that these chronicles were constructed either as information came available or sometimes with an eye to censorship worries. This is evident from spots in Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, especially with Scrope’s biography (see Figure 6.9), which is minute and deliberately truncated: it begins and ends abruptly with an innocuous couplet about Scrope coming from noble parentage140—and that is all! The other dramatic gap is left at the end of the biography of Archbishop Neville’s (lines 535–42), who, as we saw, was York’s most internally disliked bishop, having ended his career with full loss of his

Figure 6.9. London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, fol. 13v, showing part of the Aliud Chronicon Metricum (ACM) in which some gaps have been left, above and below what would have been Scrope’s biography, which was clearly truncated, ending abruptly after an innocuous couplet about his parentage (lines 548–49). The only other such gap is left at the end of the biography of Archbishop Neville (lines 535–42), whose term ended in banishment from England. © The British Library Board.

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temporalities and banishment from the realm. This continuator apparently did not know how to handle these embarrassments and was far more conservative, I would observe, than the CAE continuator(s)—clearly this one was not meant for in-house eyes alone, one of the features that makes the CAE, by contrast, so intimate and valuable. Such sources tip us off to the number of informal cathedral productions among this too often submerged socio-ecclesiastical caste. Indeed, Dobson’s hunch about the authorship of the prose CAE stands up to close scrutiny and proves to have been brilliantly counterintuitive, since earlier editors of the various York Minster histories often sought the most learned possible candidates for their sometimes quite speculative authorial attributions,141 and later scholars have been taught to imagine proletarians are nearly illiterate. The ACM, the continuator tells us, was, like our next two examples, originally written by John de Allhallowgate, a vicar choral, for mounting on tables (“Reserante nobis in scriptis suis tabulatis quadam predecessor nostro, Johanne de Allhallowgate”). It is to the role of the historical tabula in cathedral life that we turn next, guides for pilgrims whom (like Kempe) the vicars choral led and repositories of pragmatic writings aimed at, as we are about to see, cathedral publicity. It is from just such sources at St. Paul’s that the St. Erkenwald poet drew.

chapter 7

The Clerical Proletariat and Public Genres of the Cathedral World St. Erkenwald as a St. Paul’s Text

St. Erkenwald1 is most often studied in relation to tantalizing questions about the possibility of the Pearl Poet’s authorship of the poem (both poets had Cheshire roots),2 or to determine the poet’s views, radical or other wise, on doctrine regarding the salvation of non-Christians. And it is also often studied for its complex tapestry of hagiographical and semi-legendary matter, both typical and yet not typical among the alliterative history poems.3 These preoccupations, compelling and important as they are, have nonetheless also distracted us somewhat from the trail of clues the poet left us about his professional identity. Whoever wrote the poem, for instance, was intimately familiar with its setting in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London and with its clerical hierarchy, architecture, history (real and imagined), and foundational polemics. So I will suggest here, by way of a concluding case study that applies all we have learned about late medieval English proletarian literary culture, that there is every likelihood the Erkenwald poet was on staff at St. Paul’s for at least some period in his career, most likely as a proletarian member of the Bishop of London’s familia. Prior scholarship has offered us some superb clues as to the unknown poet’s keen sense of local geography and history. Thorlac Turville-Petre, for instance, noted in his edition of Erkenwald: “Clearly the poet had an interest in and knowledge of London and St. Paul’s, and was quite possibly connected with the cathedral.”4 Marie Boroff, perhaps the closest student of the poem’s poetic style and language, noted that the poet speaks glowingly and in the present tense about the cathedral: for example, his comment to the effect that “the finest

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folk of the realm often” attend ser vices there (“As þe rekenest of þe reame repairen þider ofte” [135]).5 Elizabeth Salter emphasized the poet’s nearly tactile sense of St.  Paul’s (something elaborated upon by more recent scholarship on the senses)6 and the many cathedral connections traceable in the ownership of the manuscript: The whole poem is redolent of the City, but especially the area about St. Paul’s Churchyard (88) and the Bishop’s Palace (113ff.). It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the poet and the intended audience were not only interested in, but intimately acquainted with London. We know that the unique manuscript of the poem—British Library, Harley 2250—was in the hands of western owners in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that one of those families, the Booths of Lancashire and Cheshire, had strong connections to London and St. Paul’s: Lawrence Booth himself the dean of St. Paul’s in 1456.7 Indeed, the manuscript’s history is especially rich in cathedral-network connections. As Michael Bennett says, “It is appropriate that the sole surviving manuscript of St. Erkenwald was owned by one of the Booths of Dunham Massey, the most remarkable dynasty of bishops and lawyers in fifteenth-century England.”8 John Scattergood, in a piece sorting out the complications of the Massey family’s literary connections, notes that an early owner of this unpretentious manuscript (Harley 2250) was Thomas Bowker, cantarist in 1535 of a chantry founded by William Booth, Archbishop of York.9 Thomas Bowker and a second chantry priest appear together as witnesses to the will of his brother, John Booth (a bishop of Exeter).10 Given the modesty of Harley 2250, however, the chantry priest circles in which Bowker traveled seem about the right social and clerical class among which to imagine its owners.11 Indeed, one does not need to look too far into the manuscript to see possible connections with a chantry priest’s or proletarian’s cultural world: for example, one of its rarely noticed texts is an official ecclesiastical oath of obedience for rectors or vicars concerning their parochial chaplains (fol. 94r).12 Harley 2250 is largely a collection of saints’ legends, prayers, and other items of use for priests. Most movingly, and directly relevant to our poem, I would suggest, are six lovely lines in English citing John Chrysostom and affirming that the “myght” of the “teere” that is “mekely” shed in prayer is so great that it goes “to heuen vp to goddis trone” (fol. 49v). St.  Erkenwald

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appears on fol. 72v, followed, appropriately, by the legend of Saint John the Baptist. The power of the tear and the power of baptism, both so relevant, mingle with other pertinent themes in the collection, for example, works to do with non-Christians, especially stories of Judaism and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Salter, Boroff, Peterson, and others have suggested that the poem itself was perhaps originally written for someone associated with St. Paul’s, and likely for a special occasion there. The most cited piece of evidence for such a special occasion is the 1386 record of St. Paul’s Bishop Braybrooke’s elevation of the cathedral’s two feasts of St. Erkenwald (the feasts of the Deposition [April 30] and the Translation [November 14]) to a special sacred dominical status (“sicut sacrum diem dominicum”): “Braybrooke issued a Monition to the Archdeacon of London in which he laments the disuse into which the solemn observance of the days of S. Erkenwald and of S. Paul had fallen throughout the Diocese, and even (apparently) in the Cathedral itself.”13 These changes for these days were to affect not only the masses said but the matins and prayers (“tam ad matutinas quam ad missas, cum orationibus in ipsis missis dicendis”). As we saw earlier, this is just the kind of change in a cathedral’s daily liturgy that would loom large among a bishop’s familia, especially those in the choral community tasked with producing specialized liturgy for these feasts, or its chantry priests, who might even receive new bequests for their ser vices. Bishop Braybrooke also ordered a new annual procession to honour St. Erkenwald, a massive affair to include all cathedral and diocesan clergy in ceremonial dress.14 As A. K. McHardy has pointed out, special liturgies and liturgical processions generally proved to be a bonanza for unbeneficed clergy.15 And as we saw in Chapter 6, the York Minster CAE, likely composed by members of the York’s vicars choral, lovingly records just such internal activities and bequests, detailing, for instance, donations of ceremonial vestments and plates by individual bishops. And although some other options for dating the poem exist, scholars also generally consider Braybrooke’s time as most plausible for the original composition of the poem (i.e., in the high Ricardian period), even though our sole surviving copy was made nearly a century later.16 As for the poet himself, still more evidence for his unique skill set can be gleaned internally. Taken together, the evidence points to someone with liturgical, historical, legal, and local architectural knowledge, stretching even to an understanding of the builders’ trade and of the whims of cathedral administrators. As Clifford Peterson, another of the poem’s editors, notes:

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Attention should be drawn . . . to the casual mention in Erkenwald of tools such as prises (l. 70) and crowbars (l. 71)—the only poetic reference to that class of tool recorded in the Middle English Dictionary. There are references to footings, groundwork, and the business of construction (ll. 39–42), and to the proper dress of judges (ll. 78ff. and notes to ll. 80–83) . . . [and] to the appropriate use of the liturgy . . . [and] in connection with the poem’s sources and structure, to the poet’s knowledge of the historical Erkenwald’s biography, and to the poet’s acquaintance with the conditions of work for English stonemasons during the fourteenth century. . . . [Also] the poet of Erkenwald uses legal terms with knowledge and design.17 . . . [And there are] lines that undercut pompous ecclesiasts who overstate the obvious (ll. 159ff.), that expose without malice the bureaucratic mind, chronically concerned with fears of public disorder and with its own importance (ll. 65–6, 109–10, and 143), or that with easy precision describe a town taken with curiosity (ll. 57–64) . . . not unworthy of the author of Gawain.18 At first sight these apparently disparate details cut multiple ways: What kind of person could encompass all these interests and skills? I think, especially given what we learned in Chapters 5 and 6, we may have the answer: the lower clergy of cathedrals (often the vicars choral, as at York, and at St. Paul’s, very often chantry priests) were in fact the keepers of the fabric—so they would be quite used to dealing with stonemasons and workmen on the premises, and they were also the keepers of the fabric rolls. And the poet’s familiarity with London civic and legal matters is also much less puzzling when we remember how actively engaged lower cathedral clergy were with the lay world around them, especially in practical tasks of management, for example, collecting rents from locals living in all the cathedral’s diverse city properties, as we saw with Middle English poet John Tyckhill, chantry priest of St. Paul’s. Other St. Paul’s chantry priests were engaged, for instance, in running schools endowed by their chantry founders’ bequests or distributing founders’ alms.19 The lower clergy also recorded the cathedral’s and consistory court’s legal affairs in Latin (as we saw with the York Minster Acta capitularia records) and kept archival records of all kinds, often writing the kinds of informal in-house chronicles we have observed. They were also required to know enough of the cathedral history and architecture to guide visitors and pilgrims (as we saw in Kempe’s visit to York Minster, where she was apparently advised by both a vicar choral and a chantry priest). So many of these jobs fell to a cathedral’s proletarians that Peterson’s skill sets, I would suggest, are a perfect

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match for someone inhabiting exactly this stratum of a cathedral life. Though we do not know the name of the poet, the evidence would certainly support a proletarian member of the Bishop of London’s familia as the author of St. Erkenwald. Although this suggestion has sometimes been vaguely mooted (e.g., Gollancz, the poem’s first modern editor, briefly wondered whether the author was a St. Paul’s chantry priest before moving on to a different theory), no one has consistently assessed this evidence before.20 To evidence like Peterson’s, we can now add circumstantial evidence of local book production: the poet’s familiarity with different professions of Londoners living around the cathedral and his awareness of the role of the mayor and guilds are intriguing in relation to the important role that civic officials played in funding and maintaining some of the chantries as well as in the proximity of St. Paul’s to the Guildhall. We saw in Chapter 2 that the business entries on John Tyckhill’s rent roll contained, among other city clients of the cathedral, several names of nearby London Guildhall officials and scribes, some of whom were active in the dissemination of Middle English texts themselves c. 1400 (though it was certainly not the only London locale for such production).21 As they show, among these was John Carpenter, the city’s common clerk, but Carpenter was also a significant figure at St. Paul’s where he subsidized the painting of the Danse Macabre on thirtysix boards for mounting in the cloister, with dialogue in Middle English translated by Lydgate).22 So there was a selective community of literate people in and around St. Paul’s interested in the production of Middle English texts, though English was, still in the 1390s, a relatively specialized literary interest. The Erkenwald poet’s Cheshire dialect would not have been entirely uncommon in London, a city of migrants. Many St. Paul’s chantry chaplains were not Londoners by birth, since clergy came from all over, seeking their fortune, Dick Whittington-style (Langland and Chaucer both complained of parish priests deserting their posts abroad for London chantry positions). Tyckhill himself was not a Londoner by birth, but rather from Yorkshire, and yet he authored an alliterative poem in his native dialect while resident at St. Paul’s. So the idea that someone might do so in a Cheshire dialect is entirely plausible: as Ralph Hanna astutely noted in his study of alliterative poetry, Tyckhill’s poem is “provocative” in relation to the St.  Paul’s associations of St.  Erkenwald.23 These two survivals, then, taken together, are witnesses to a late fourteenthcentury cathedral literary culture in the vernacular. If we add to this mix the frequent sojourns of Cheshire magnates and their entourages on London bureaucratic, government, or royal business and the London houses of northern episcopates and their courts, we realize this was

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quite a community. Northern bishops, too, had courts in London (e.g., Hoccleve and his fellow scribes lived in Chester’s Inn, owned by the Bishop of Chester). So it is entirely believable that the Erkenwald poet could know St. Paul’s and London so well yet write in a Cheshire dialect, perhaps with an eye to dual audiences.24 Any apparent disjunction also disappears when we realize the central role St. Paul’s played in national and political life and how its massive structure dominated the city.25 As the archaeologist of medieval London John Schofield notes, “In the 14th  and 15th  centuries, St.  Paul’s was a place where significant events for the whole kingdom were publicized; illustrated most potently perhaps by its use for displaying the bodies of kings, or defeated rivals for the throne or prominent rebels. . . . This was already evident by the reign of Henry III in the middle of the 13th century.”26 It is also significant that St. Paul’s itself was at the very epicentre of London’s largest book production area, with people working especially in bookshops and illuminators’ and stationers’ shops in and around Paternoster Row, in the churchyard immediately adjacent to the cathedral, and even in the porches of Old St. Paul’s itself, where scribes would often await clientele and lawyers would consult with clients.27 In fact, there were constant complaints about the amount of commerce generally going on not only around but inside the nave of St. Paul’s. Records abound of various bishops attempting to control local foot traffic through the nave and gates. Here is one St. Paul’s historian’s account: This great building dominated London from the top of the slight hill on which it was built. . . . Its extensive precincts were enclosed by a high wall, and rather than walk around the perimeter of this, people on errands found that, by entering the precincts by one of the six gates and walking through the nave or transepts of the cathedral, they were provided with a short-cut. The traffic soon developed so that people carrying merchandise passed through the building. . . . The profanation increased when those with goods to sell brought them into St. Paul’s and even set up stalls.28 Our poet shows a deep knowledge of the lay world in and around St.  Paul’s Churchyard (home also to the famous preaching cross, St. Paul’s cross). It is not difficult to see how someone working inside the cathedral could feel quite connected with the world immediately outside it and often, apparently, invading it. And this, as we will see, is also a clue to the poet’s obsessive reference to keys and restricted areas in the choir and Close.

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Though it is not impossible that a dean or bishop might compose a vernacular poem like this, the evidence for vernacular composition among lower clergy is much stronger.29 There is, in fact, a kind of “ecology” of clerical and lay issues in the poem that leads one to suspect that our poet inhabited that (now familiar) liminal space between the two. We saw that Peterson observed the poet’s skill at tactfully puncturing the remarks of grand and overbearing ecclesiasts. So, while various ranks of clergy lived or moved in and out of liminal spaces in the ecclesiastical and bureaucratic worlds of cathedrals, from king’s clerks (which might include bishops, canons, and other top officials in government)30 to proletarians (the main work horses of the secular cathedrals), we have much more evidence of vernacular composition associated with the lower cathedral clergy.31 We have already seen cathedral proletarians using or composing vernacular verse, songs, carols, and local Latin histories of the kind the Erkenwald poet knows well, and proletarians composing or staging vernacular cycle plays (a natural extension of their guild or liturgical duties).32 We have also seen their interest in encouraging the saints’ cults of their cathedral—whether the shrines of cathedral saints that drew pilgrims and their care for visitors more generally or even the protection of their most controversial saints (in York’s case, the popularly “canonized” political martyr, Richard Scrope). My suggestion is that Erkenwald comes out of this type of very rich cathedral culture, with its internal concerns and its complex interactions with the city of London and all levels of government. Here, I shall draw upon three types of evidence suggesting the social and ecclesiastical orientation of the Erkenwald poet: (1) connections between the poem and standard or popular genres of cathedral histories; (2) the poet’s apparently precise knowledge of the fabric and layout of the medieval Old St. Paul’s and its liturgical ser vices; and (3) his unusually vivid dramatization of the dean and his frazzled search in the library and archival holdings—not at first the likeliest of poetic topics, but by now we are not surprised that proletarian poets choose arcane subjects or voice job-related strug gles (as in “Choristers’ Lament” or “Satire on the Consistory Courts”). And the St. Paul’s library was no ordinary library, as generations of scholars have shown.33 Of course, it is important to remember that though the author may have spent time as a proletarian (the majority of clergy did), he may not have always remained a proletarian. Like some lower cathedral clergy—including his contemporaries, John Tyckhill and his fellow chantry priest, William Palmer (the latter an early owner of Piers Plowman and also at St. Paul’s in the 1390s)34—our poet, too, might have later gone on to a benefice elsewhere, or gone off into bureaucratic work (joining the

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ranks of scribes like Hoccleve), or into the household ser vice of a regional magnate (as did Audelay). But that he had some first-hand, inside knowledge of St. Paul’s and a great loyalty to it seems the most reasonable explanation for the poem as we now have it.35 This set of circumstances offers, I think, a fitting kind of case study with which to end this book, as it draws evidence together in new ways—ways that I hope can be imitated by other scholars with other literary works of “ambidextrous” origin.

1. St. Erkenwald and In-house Public Histories: Cathedral Tabulae for Visitors in York and St. Paul’s When one has been immersed in the kinds of “in-house” history productions common in medieval cathedrals generally, such as we have just seen in York, suddenly the Erkenwald poet’s complex orientation to the world, ecclesiastical history, and St. Paul’s role in it makes a new kind of sense. By “cathedral histories,” I mean the kinds of local histories constructed—often with a partisan slant favouring the home team—to showcase the cathedral as its apologists hope it will be seen by the public and by posterity. Such histories specialized in weaving an unlikely number of strands, some slender, into a strangely hybrid kind of whole cloth, often by mixing generic treatments of four kinds of material: (1) salvation history (the highlights of biblical history); (2) “national” or British history, in part legendary (of the early Britons, Saxons, and Normans especially); (3) ecclesiastical history, such as the (re)conversion of England by St. Augustine of Canterbury after the departure of the Romans and depredations of the Saxons and other foundational moments; and finally (4) local history specific to one’s own cathedral, its saints, and its great bishops.36 In this latter category, for instance, we can cite York Minster histories ranging from their imagined pre-Christian “episcopal foundation” as one of the three legendary Triapolitanes (complete with imaginary pagan archiflammines [archpriests]), to its actual foundation by Paulinus in Anglo-Saxon times, and on through each attempt to retain or expand the cathedral’s liberties, endowments, and sovereignty over other bishoprics (willing or not) in northern England and Scotland. St.  Paul’s cathedral histories participate in exactly this tradition: St. Paul’s also proudly claimed to be one of the three Triapolitanes, a claim the Erkenwald poet repeats. Such histories especially feature a cathedral’s own saints and saintly archbishops (e.g., York’s early St. William and later political martyr, Richard Scrope; at St. Paul’s, Erkenwald). Depending on the skill of the writer and the state of the cathedral

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archives and libraries, the results ranged from naïve (“jejune,” as Dobson said of York’s CAE) to narratives of affect, conviction, and genuine rhetorical strength. How might a cathedral like St. Paul’s frame its sense of history for public and publicity purposes? Bishop Braybrooke was forced to consolidate many of the cathedral’s underfinanced chantries in 1391, not long after he had lamented the decline of interest in St. Erkenwald and St. Paul and taken steps to rectify that. The desirability for outreach and publicity for the cathedral was, then, quite real at this point.37 That versions of such histories were made available to the (Latin-) reading public is clear from the evidence of tabulae posted in the cathedral. As we saw in the case of York, where two such sets of tabulae actually survive (see Chapter 6, Figure 6.7; and Figure 7.1 below), St. Paul’s, too, once had tabulae (according to Dugdale’s seventeenth-century History of St. Pauls), though these do not survive, and their contents have to be reconstructed from various sources. Such tabulae have recently been discussed by Michael Van Dussen in his “Tourists and Tabulae in Late-Medieval England,” where he notes several medieval churches for which some evidence of Latin tabulae survive—Durham, Lichfield, Lincoln, Winchester, Ripon, York, St. Paul’s38—while other scholars have noted those at Bury St. Edmund’s; St. George’s, Windsor; and Christ Church, Canterbury.39 What is striking about these lists—and so far unnoticed as such— is that most of the known Latin tabulae were in cathedral settings or in secular colleges (St. George’s), which, as we saw, also had vicars choral.40 The tabulae acted as prologues to the visitor’s experience of the church, prologues, however, that required Latin literacy or interpretive guides, most often the vicars choral. And like all prologues, they were necessarily brief but “hit the high points,” using history to succinctly promote the greater glory of God and the cathedral itself.41 So, too, as we will see, does the history component of St. Erkenwald. We begin first with the tabulae of York Minster, since they have the good fortune to survive, and will then turn to those of St. Paul’s in relation to our poem. One of York Minster’s in-house metrical Latin chronicles, the Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE),42 was physically affixed to the middle panel of a still extant, much damaged parchment triptych mounted on boards and created for public display in the Minster (York Minster Library, Add. 533 [Figure  6.7]). We know these tabulae were displayed because a second, contemporary history triptych on boards that also survives, even more severely damaged (incipit “De etatibus mundi”), now York Minster Library, Add. 534, was seen on display in the Minister—and not only seen, but crudely censored there during the reign of Henry VIII. In 1534, George Lawson wrote rather proudly to Thomas Cromwell “that he had cut and razed out the passages referring to King

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Figure 7.1. York Minster Library, Add. 534, tabula containing historical material cata logued by N. R. Ker as De Etatibus Mundi, etc. The razed section visible in the third panel contained an account of King John’s surrendering of the kingdom to the pope, an idea intolerable in 1534 during Henry VIII’s reign. © Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission.

John’s surrender of the kingdom to the pope”—clearly what had been positive, pro-ecclesiastical polemic for the Church was anathema to anti-papal forces in Henry’s government.43 Indeed, the razed section is still visible today (see Figure 7.1). The boards were in part for the use of pilgrims and visitors and useful for reference by vicars choral deputed to guide and explain (as in Kempe’s case). The CMEE makes direct mention, tantalizingly, of the author himself having used the Minster’s archives44 for compiling the materials (“ex archivis”) and then mounting the verses on the boards, lest they remain hidden:

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Haec ex archivis de multis paucula scripsi; Ne lateat latebris, tabula sic publice fixi.45 (From the archives I have written just these small things, Not to forget the hidden, and affixed them on a board for the public.) (CMEE, lines 13–14; shown in Figure 6.7 of York Minster Add. 533) The “archives” here could refer to York Minster’s muniments room or chests, as well as to the cathedral library, large enough to be held in a dedicated room at least by 1410.46 (Even the Bedern, a much humbler establishment, had a muniments room and its own library.)47 The compiler-poet actually tells us (lines 15–16) that he is writing many historical songs down in order to recognize the rights of the church, more fully described in what he calls the tabula’s history (“plenius in tabula scribatur historia”) during the time of the fourth Thomas (“en quartus Thomas”)—that is, he was composing when Thomas Arundel was Archbishop of York, 1388–97.48 Rigg notes that the text of the tabula’s verses (or “songs”) in Add. 533 contains “512 lines of elegiacs and hexameters, with occasional rhyme, in no fixed pattern.” It draws on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, and later histories such as the Vita Thurstani (Archbishop Thurstan, elected 1114, fought the Archbishop of Canterbury’s attempts to assert primacy over York). The goal of the CMEE, in short, is always to give a York twist to English history.49 It begins with Brutus and builds itself up from early legendary British history much like, as we will see, St. Erkenwald does, using St. Paul’s sources.50 In line with several English chronicles, the CMEE also teaches that “moral degeneracy of the English led to the Norman Conquest,” as Rigg puts it, which here includes the moralization of the burning of York and the loss of its possessions. Of course, this is utilitarian verse at best: as Rigg says, “the poem is testimony to civic pride rather than literary talent,” though it “demonstrates the monumental function of Latin verse.”51 Perhaps the versification of the tabula poem suggests it was designed for easy memorization, especially to aid the vicars as guides to the cathedral’s shrines or antiquities. But in order to be guides, they would have to know, at least in broad outline, their cathedral’s histories—and, indeed, the histories (or “histories”) of many aspects of a cathedral are also found in the liturgical readings for a church’s patron saints and local saints. When one also takes into account the amazing complexity of the extensive historical and historio-hagiographic iconographic programmes in, for instance, the stained glass at York (especially

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surrounding the choir in the East End), it seems likely that vicars choral guides might be expected to explain these images to enquiring visitors. All in all, I would suggest, knowing their cathedral’s histories was part of their job.52 How or whether these potted histories, as represented on the extant boards (surviving as York Minster Library, Add. 533 and Add. 534), relate to the injunction that the York vicars choral had to know “their histories” by the end of their first year on the job or face expulsion53 is a question that has vexed several scholars, especially as to the Minster’s two sets of tabulae.54 We do not know exactly where the boards were placed in the Minster (actually, we have more information on placement for the St. Paul’s tabulae), just that one set on display was censored in 1534.55 But the number of laity who could read their Latin unaided would not be large. No matter where they were placed, I suspect they acted as “cribs” for the vicars as guides, and for literate visitors. But it is not surprising that these display boards would be historically and polemically oriented: York had had to defend its freedoms against Canterbury’s domination for centuries and negotiate the strength and independence of Durham’s cathedral on the one hand, the so-called disobedience of multiple Scots cathedrals on the other, all of which resisted paying homage to York’s archbishop. The Add. 533 tabula, in fact, addresses these ecclesiastical and ecclesiological issues somewhat more heavily—and I would suggest that there are two sets of tabulae for this very reason: one (Add. 533) is more ecclesiological, and the other (Add. 534) is more biblical and “political” in its history. Add. 533 has (or had) clear headings with gold initials to aid reading “at a glance,” for example, the heading “Galfridus in historiam britonum” (referring to material from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, top left panel) and continuing with headings from other historian luminaries such as Bede, Henry of Huntington, and William of Malmesbury.56 It then moves (panel 2) to the supposed ancient and pagan origins of York Minster, for example, “De creatione templi metropolis et creatione archeflaminis,” a section, given the damage to the tabula, one can read more easily in an extant manuscript copy, now London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xix (see Figure 7.2a). At the third and fourth verse paragraphs on this folio, the story of York as one of the supposed pre-Christian “Triapolitan” cities that would become the major archbishoprics appears, but above that is the passage describing the founding of the first temple at York, supposedly 1,200  years before Christ, accompanied by a delightful very late fifteenthcentury scribe’s marginal sketch of York Minster, perhaps attempting even to show its three towers (see Figure 7.2b for a close-up). In the next verse paragraph

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is the passage attributing the founding of York to a mythical figure conveniently named “Ebraucus.” In the tabula version, the CMEE then sweeps succinctly across Arthur’s reign, the defeat of the Britons, and eventually on to the various claims for the liberties of the Church, ending finally on the last panel with the Scottish bishops and their vexing disobedience. York Minster’s clergy were well trained in the historical and ecclesiastical polemics most often mustered for these causes. This is a form of cathedral publicity we saw in Chapter 6, with the execution of Scrope simply adding fuel to the fire of a literary tradition that had burned long and hard in the cause of the liberties of the Minster—and the liberties of the Church (over/against the state). Since Scrope had been a celebrated defender of those liberties, it is no wonder that he was so lauded by the ministri inferiori of the cathedral and lamented for the way his death changed the course of their history. Seeing the visual sweep of salvation history and Minster history summarized in the Add. 533 tabula is moving, given that it was once posted there as witness and guide. Though cathedral histories share the fascination with early British history generally characteristic of the alliterative poetic tradition, they tend to sharply emphasize its role in salvation history. And certainly, in Erkenwald, this is highly relevant. Of alliterative “revival” poetry generally, Derek Pearsall once wrote, “It is difficult . . . to abandon completely the sense of ‘differentness’ that clings to these poets,” the thematic hallmarks of this differentness being “the prominence of serious historical writing, . . . British History and Arthur,” and the near “total absence of the theme of love.”57 These characteristics he attributed broadly to “a provincial household culture, inheriting the conservative . . . tastes of provincial Anglo-Norman society and closely associated with the local clergy and local religious houses.” His interest here is in the type of provincial culture that impacted alliterative poets and the role of “local clergy,” including chaplains, in this process. More recently, Rosalind Field showed that thirteenthcentury Anglo-Norman historical romances, in fact, were often written by “clerical” authors, a word used in “Clanchy’s wide sense . . . of clericus”58—that is, clerks operating in liminal social spaces. What is striking about Erkenwald is that it participates visibly in this larger alliterative history tradition but much more selectively and with a focus on “evangelical” history closer to the types of selectivity one also finds in cathedral histories of Britain. Unlike, say, the famous opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight detailing the legendary history of Trojan founders of European countries, and Brutus as England’s, the Erkenwald poet is much more interested

Figure 7.2a

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Figures 7.2a and 7.2b. London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xix, fol. 6r. The York Minster Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE), here describing the erection of the first temple at York 1200 years before Christ, with a very late fifteenth-century scribe’s marginal image perhaps mimicking York Minster’s towers (see Figure 7.2b for detail). Also described are the founding of York by the mythical “Ebraucus,” and York’s history as one of three pre-Christian “Triapolitan” cities that would later become archbishoprics. This text was originally composed for mounting on a tabula (now York Minster Library, Add. 533; see Figure 6.7). © The British Library Board.

in telling the ecclesiastical side of the story (as was the York Realist in his play). Take, for instance, these early lines of the poem: Saynt Erkenwolde as I hope þat holy mon hatte In his tyme in þat toun þe temple alder-grattyst [greatest of all] Was drawen doun, þat one dole [part], to dedifie [dedicate] new, For hit hethen had bene in Hengyst dawes Þat þe Saxones vnsaȝt [in hostility] haden sende hyder. Þat bete oute þe Bretons and broȝt hom into Wales And preuertyd all þe pepul þat in þat place dwelled;

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Þen wos this reame renaide [apostate] mony ronke [rebellious] ȝeres, Til Saynt Austyn into Sandewich was send fro þe pope. (St. Erkenwald, 4–12)59 The diocese of London, the poet later tells us, was created by St. Augustine of Canterbury on his mission from Pope Gregory: Now of þis Augustynes art is Erkenwolde bishop At loue London toun and the lagh teches Syttes seemly in þe sege of Saynt Paule mynster. (32–34) This type of local pride is by now familiar to us in cathedral productions and even more marked here if the reader knows (as our poet assumed) that Augustine had hoped to make London, not Canterbury, his bishopric, an intention fondly remembered at St.  Paul’s. The story about the destructiveness of the Saxon invasions that Erkenwald is now masterfully repairing comes from Bede’s Historia, which says that Hengst and Horsa invaded Britain and destroyed its buildings, priests, and people.60 But the poet is much more interested in the tragedy of the heathen legacy of “þe Saxones vnsaȝt” than in “Hengyst.” This is first and foremost a cathedral saint’s life (a specific subgenre of saints’ lives, I would note) of its most prominent bishop. Erkenwald, by far the most famous of St. Paul’s saints and bishops, was seen ecclesiastically as a pivotal restorative figure, leading a resurgence of the cathedral (rebuilding it, as one of the St. Paul’s tabula posted in the cathedral said) and early Christianity more generally as Bishop of London (c. 675–93).61 Erkenwald was also famous for having invested much of his own wealth in the fabric of the cathedral and so, just like the archbishops of York praised for their personal generosity by the Minster vicars choral historians, he was especially internally revered.62 In the lines just quoted, the poet, with a powerful sense of cathedral pride and, I would note, assuming in his audience a knowledge of Erkenwald’s material efforts on behalf of the fabric, strongly associates the saint with the rebuilding: “In his [Erkenwald’s] tyme in þat toun þe temple alder-grattyst [the greatest temple of all] / Was drawen doun, þat one dole [that one part], to dedifie new [rededicate].” This ends the first of the translatio imperii movements the poet describes, common in the types of broad-brush chronicles displayed on cathedral tabulae. According to Dugdale’s History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London, and various extant manuscript records, as Michael Van Dussen notes,63 fourteenth-

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century visitors could learn about the cathedral’s architecture and history (though, as we have seen, only the Latin literate). Three tabulae were affixed near or between John of Gaunt’s tomb64 and the tomb of Roger, a thirteenthcentury bishop of London. The first deals with the architectural dimensions and structure of St. Paul’s; the second of these, dealing with “events of significance to the history of St. Paul’s to the time of Richard II,”65 is somewhat comparable to the surviving York tabula recording events significant to the ecclesiastical history of that cathedral, though the St. Paul’s one is more abbreviated and more given to exemplifying the miraculous.66 And the third tabula (the “magna tabula”)67 also parallels York’s other tabula, with perhaps more emphasis on royalty (consistent with the London location), listing, as Van Dussen notes, “the major kings of England from its foundation to Henry VI. It devotes special attention to the founding role of Brutus, and even a verse dialogue between Brutus and the goddess Diana (derived from a famous passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia).”68 But I would add that even the magna tabula is quite concerned with salvation history and, as such, is illuminating for our poem, for instance in the poet’s strange and specific use of numerical calculations to understand the ages of the world. If he is connected with St. Paul’s, he certainly knew these tabulae. And he also used, as we will see, more bookish sources. So, too, in keeping with his ecclesiastical trajectory, he describes Augustine’s reclaiming of Saxon pagan temples, likely following Bede: He turnyd temples þat tyme þat temyd to þe deuell. And clansyd hom in Cristes nome and kyrkes hom callid. . . . Þat ere was of Appolyn is now of Saynt Petre Mahoun to Saynt Margrete oþir to Maudelayne, Þe Synagoge of þe Sonne was sett to oure Lady, . . . Þat ere wos sett of Sathanas in Saxones tyme. (15–16, 19–21, and 24) In fact, as Gollancz showed, the poet refers here to the claim in some ecclesiastical histories that Westminster Abbey had been built upon a temple dedicated to Apollo, as was its parish church, St. Margaret’s.69 Indeed, he goes to some length to describe the casting out of temple gods and idols, “Þat ere wos sett of Sathanas in Saxones tyme,” likely spun from Bede’s famous account of Gregory’s instructions to Augustine, with some riffs of his own upon this well-known genre of “potted” cathedral histories (24).70 Though the correspondences are not one for one, they are in the ballpark, and this section of the poem is very like the kind of history found on cathedral tabulae, such as the tradition in many early

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histories that St. Paul’s was built upon the site of a temple of Diana.71 The poet’s strange reference to the “Synagoge” of the “Sonne” has never been solved, both perhaps just convenient to alliteration, though other legends in Harley 2250 itself frequently deal in issues of Jewish history and conversion. And the poet goes on to describe at some length an unnamed temple given to “a mighty deuel,” also puzzlingly unnamed, which editors have naturally assumed to be Woden (29–30). But the magna tabula, interestingly, refers to Brutus as the forerunner of the Saxons and as having killed all the giants of England, especially the mightiest, Gogmagog (“inter qos erat quidam fortissimus nomino Geogagoge”).72 So our poet is definitely playing upon a known genre and set of tropes, and though there are many other written sources, deeper ones, from which he likely drew (some nearby in the St. Paul’s library, as we will see), the tabulae are potentially an intriguing structural model. They tell British history wherever possible from the standpoint of St. Paul’s itself, always, as the cathedral history genre demands.

2. The Poet’s Knowledge of the Fabric, Layout and Liturgy of Old St. Paul’s I would also note that these Latin tabulae were posted in an area of the church much more carefully watched or controlled by the clergy than the nave: according to Dugdale, all three were hanging on pillars that surrounded the choir of the church (the choir itself, unlike the nave and transepts, would certainly be restricted only to clergy and its aisles monitored). A visual image of the heavy stone rood screen and walls dividing the nave from the entire chancel area in Old St.  Paul’s (the choir and both its aisles) reinforces this point vividly (see Figure 7.3), as does an architectural map from Dugdale’s History (see #12, “Gradus ad Chorum,” Figure 7.4). Erkenwald’s shrine itself (Figure 7.5), the glory of Old St. Paul’s, was above the high altar of the choir (#31), but facing into the East End, and visitors would have been carefully monitored by the lower clergy. Access to shrines was always carefully controlled and watched against theft of relics or ornamentation, as we saw with York Minster’s holiest shrine, St. William’s (Figure  6.8), and St.  Erkenwald’s shrine had been refurbished by three goldsmiths early in the fourteenth century.73 Symbolically significant is the fact that the shrine was designed as a miniature church itself, complete with stained glass windows, with a chantry attached to it in 1323, and with chaplains and a guild or fraternity attending the altar.

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Figure 7.3. The “New Werke” with rood screen and aisle doors dividing the nave from the chancel of Old St. Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar, from William Dugdale, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London From its Foundation until these Times (London: Thomas Warren [printer], 1658). Image source: https://books.google.ca/books?id =92ZZAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ ge _ summary _r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

John Schofield’s invaluable archaeological evidence for recovering medieval Old St. Paul’s, destroyed, of course, by the Great Fire of London in 1666 and overbuilt by Sir Christopher Wren’s design, tells us much that can be suggestive about the Erkenwald poet’s awareness. We saw earlier that the poet referred to St. Erkenwald as overseeing the “drawing down” and reconstruction of “þat one dole [part], to dedifie new.” This is a direct reference to the rebuilding of the

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Figure 7.4. Floor plan of Old St. Paul’s. William Dugdale, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London From its Foundation until these Times (London: Thomas Warren [printer], 1658), 164–65.

St. Paul’s choir, which the poet shortly afterward and accurately calls the “New Werke” (38). The Erkenwald poet devotes no less than five lines of description to the technicalities of breaking down the old masonry (in real life, these had been Norman pillars) and the process of ensuring that the “fundament” rests on the “grounde” upon which the “fote” (“footings of the building”) are laid (37–42). As archaeologist John Schofield writes, “St.  Paul’s kept its 12th-century nave but expanded the choir in the 13th  century, to make it a glorious setting for a saint’s shrine, in this case St. Erkenwald. The rose window in the east gable, the largest in Britain, bore a close resemblance to the rose in the south transept of Notre Dame, the cathedral of Paris. This new choir was called the New Work, right up to the 17th  century, and the shrine was a holy attraction of tombs of

Figure 7.5. St. Erkenwald’s shrine, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar, Old St. Paul’s. William Dugdale, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London From its Foundation until these Times (London: Thomas Warren [printer], 1658).

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bishops and nobles such as John of Gaunt.”74 So, when the poet distinguishes it, first as “þat one dole, to dedifie new” and later as the “New Werke,” he assumes the reader knows which part it is. The poet is, of course, conflating at least two historical times (and likely three, as we will see): the seventh-century (Erkenwald’s time) and the grand thirteenth-century restorations. The historical Bishop Erkenwald had famously restored the fabric in the wake of pagan invasions, while the thirteenth-century “New Werke” had restored to elegance the cathedral’s centerpiece (from a clerical standpoint), the choir. And the fact that the “New Werke” was built to glorify Erkenwald’s own shrine, in fact, makes perfect sense of the poet’s skilled conflation: in the spiritual sense at least, Erkenwald did “oversee” the thirteenth-century rebuilding.75 Also highly relevant to our poem is that each new tomb would entail the digging up of masonry, and—no doubt on a site that had been actively in use for at least seven hundred years—old graves were routinely uncovered, especially in the cloister and in the crypt (in the latter, Dugdale’s records mention several early medieval graves and memorials).76 Moreover, as Schofield notes, other works followed, including from 1332, the building of the new doublefloored cloister and chapter house, “and like other cathedrals St. Paul’s would have been surrounded by stone houses of the dean and the canons; the close had a crenellated wall round it, with gates and posterns. Like the present cathedrals in Canterbury, Lincoln, Norwich and York, the cathedral dominated the city physically, spiritually and symbolically.” 77 Gollancz also noted the positioning of the old bishop’s palace to the north of the nave, which the bishop could enter via a private door in our poet’s time, an explicit detail the poet uses.78 A map of Old St. Paul’s reconstructed by Schofield indeed puts the entrance to the bishop’s palace directly north of the “Porticus” (as labeled in Dugdale, see Figure  7.4; and in Schofield’s reconstruction of Old St.  Paul’s Churchyard, Figure 7.6).79 The extraordinary sense of enclosure the poem exudes, of various areas being explicitly said to be under lock and key, then, would have been quite real. One look at Hollar’s 1656 engraving of the view from the nave toward the secured doors of the choir and its aisles in the “New Werke” confirms this point (see Figure 7.3). The very real security consciousness of St. Paul’s is everywhere evident in the poem and seems to be what prompted one recent critic, Karl Steel, to ruminate upon the idea of “claustrophilia,”80 but in fact the poet is usually describing, from a clerical standpoint, the safe, quiet, non-public places of the chancel, cloister, chapter, and bishop’s palace areas for very good reason (we

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belfry

Paul’s Cross

Figure 7.6. Diagram of Old St. Paul’s Churchyard c. 1450, showing the position of the bishop’s palace, the cloister, halls of the vicars choral, the chantry chaplains (Peter’s College), and the minor canons. Kindly provided by John Schofield, Cathedral Archaeologist for St. Paul’s Cathedral. See the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/churchyard/resources.

saw this same sensibility dramatized in a more heightened way in the York vicars choral’s retreat to the East End of York Minster to bury Scrope), since the cathedral precincts, in fact, enclosed a vast area. The poet’s constant reference to the “clos” (meaning simply the Cathedral Close, the generic way of referring to the properties and schools within any cathedral’s precincts even to this day) may compound or confuse this sense for modern readers. But for medieval Londoners and visitors, this was a big area: as one of the Latin tabulae in Old St.  Paul’s noted,81 the cathedral contained within its limits (“continent infra limites suos”) three and one-half acres of land (“tres acras terre et dimidiam”), reporting a cathedral length of 690 feet and a dome height of 102 feet. To the medieval visitor, this denoted an awesome space, not a “claustrophilic” one. And the poet’s persistent reference to still verifiable local spaces of Old St. Paul’s

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signals that it is through the real geography of these acres that we are to visualize Erkenwald and the poem’s other actors moving. Whatever geographical realism he is striving for (and was assuming his first audience already knew), like most medieval poets, the Erkenwald poet is not interested in temporal historical realism. This would just get in the way of the intersections of the timeless and the transcendent his miracle demands. Like the “purposeful anachronism” of the York Cycle’s Second Trial Before Pilate produced by the vicars choral, our poet, in describing the building of the “New Werke,” reaches for a third layer of historical conflation to connect both the remote time of Erkenwald and the thirteenth-century rebuilding with the present. He does this by imagining the original (pagan) “Triapolitan” temple being “beten doun” (35–37)—even though it was the Norman’s workmanship in the way by then! He does so in order to be able to proudly invoke St. Paul’s membership in an elite club, that is, among the three ancient temple cities in Britain, stressing that there were only ever two others (“By all Bretayenes bonkes were bot othire twayne”). The legend of the Triapolitanes (according to Geoffrey of Monmouth: London, York, and the “City of Legions” [“Caerleon” in Wales]) is widely used in public histories at both St. Paul’s and York Minster to explain their cathedral’s origins: King Lucius, England’s first baptized king (see Figure 7.7), features prominently, among other places, in Ralph de Diceto’s Abbreviationes chronicorum, written at St.  Paul’s in the twelfth century.82 Ralph’s chronicle (a copy of which would have been in the St. Paul’s library at the time our poet wrote, as we will see) is especially interesting on this point: King Lucius was believed to have converted the three pagan “arch-priests” (“tres archiflammines”) of each “Triapolitan” city, each having had separate jurisdictions covering all of Britain. The London one was especially impressive and has a distinctly Arthurian ring (“Loegria et Cornubia”), while York had the more outlying regions (“Diera et Albania”), and “urbi Legionum” had “Kambria.”83 The York Minster metrical CMEE also describes this event, apparently written for its tabula, where the founding of this first temple at York was later memorialized, as we saw, by a fifteenth-century scribe’s delightful marginal image of an “ur-York Minster” (Figures 7.2a and 7.2b). The St. Paul’s magna tabula, apparently preferring to emphasize Brutus and Diana (to whom the temple preceding St. Paul’s was supposedly dedicated), gives the parallel New Troy legend of “Trinovans” (“vocans eam Trinovantem”), as does a second surviving York tabula.84 Our Erkenwald poet offers a kind of conflation of both, focusing closely on Erkenwald’s own heritage as St.  Paul’s bishop: “Now þat London is neuenyd

Figure 7.7. London, British Library, MS Royal 13 E VI, fol. 11 (c. 1199/1200– 1209). Image of King Lucius in a baptismal font, with a caption reading “Rex lucius primus in Anglia” and flagging a passage on Lucius’s role in bringing Christianity to England. From an early copy of Ralph de Diceto’s Abbreviationes chronicorum, likely copied directly from Lambeth Palace, MS 8 (considered to be Ralph’s own copy). The Royal manuscript includes Ralph’s pictorial indexing system, imitated by Matthew Paris; a note in the bottom margin by Matthew Paris asserts that Lucius was the first English king to be baptized. Described: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues /illuminatedmanuscripts/Results.asp. © The British Library Board.

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hatte þe New Troie, / Þe metropol and þe mayster-toun hit euermore has bene” (25–26), which he then links to its “temple” (ur-cathedral’s) “Triapolitan” status: Þe third temple hit wos tolde of Triapolitanes; By all Bretayenes bonkes were bot othire twayne. Now of þis Augustynes art is Erkenwolde bishop At loue London toun and the lagh teches Syttes seemly in þe sege of Saynt Paule mynster Þat was þe temple Triapolitan as I tolde are. Þen was hit abatyd and beten doun and buggyd efte new, A noble note for þe nones and New Werke hit hatte. (31–38) So, he takes the reader from pre-Christian “Triapolitan” to Brutus’s New Troy to Augustine of Canterbury to Erkenwald to the late medieval “New Werke” in one vast conflated sweep—an almost indigestible, multi-tiered sandwich of once linear local histories laid on top of each other in one big bite. Note, too, the poet’s intimacy with London itself, underlined in his term of endearment (“At loue London toun” [34]), both here and elsewhere. Figure 7.8, the medieval seal of St. Paul’s from the Museum of London showing St. Paul himself embracing and protecting the entire city of London, perhaps conveys better than words that this type of endearment was part of the cathedral’s ethos. And it is especially intriguing in relation to Bishop Braybrooke’s need to boost both Paul and Erkenwald in the 1380s. As if inheriting Augustine’s mantle directly (in fact, there were other bishops intervening chronologically), our poet stresses that Bishop Erkenwald teaches “lagh”—a powerful key word in the poem (as in the York vicars choral’s Second Trial play), used here in the technical sense of teaching correct Christian doctrine. The poet is here more interested in ecclesiastical history and its “law,” and though secular law figures in relation to the just pagan judge discovered in the tomb (London lawyers, of course, met clients on the porch of St. Paul’s), the poet assumes his audience knows that the real hero, St. Erkenwald, was also famous for contributing to the development of Anglo-Saxon law codes and charters.85 But London cannot escape its pagan past even yet, and with many earlier translatio imperii histories still left to explain, he emphasizes the ancient quality of the discovered body (the event on which the whole poem turns) and the impenetrability of the tomb’s “roynyshe” lettering. This adjective, which is most heavily attested, by the way, in the MED in works by the Gawain Poet, means strange, curious, mysterious (MED: from OE rȳnisc). The root stems originally

Figure 7.8. City of London Common Seal, obverse matrix, Museum of London. The original die, made in 1219, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, when a replica was made, which was continuously in use until 1957: “The silver seal die or matrix shows the figure of St Paul, patron saint of London’s cathedral, holding his sword, and a banner with the three lions . . . [and] a panorama of city buildings and churches, with the city wall and the river in front. The Latin inscription reads ‘SIGILLVM BARONVM LONDONIARVM’—‘seal of the Barons of London.’ ” © Museum of London.

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from the sense of “rune-like” and perhaps more than coincidentally here casts a backwards glance to pre-Norman culture, since it is actually describing now unreadable figures (“vigures”): Bot roynyshe were þe resones þat þer on row stoden. Full verray were þe vigures þer auisyd hom mony, Bot all muset hit to mouth and quat hit mene shuld, Mony clerk in þat clos with crownes ful brode Þer besiet hom about noȝt to bring hom in wordes. (52–56) No matter how many tonsured clerks (“with crownes ful brode”) puzzle over these letters, they remain a mystery. And even though the clerks are in the “clos,” a privileged space, they cannot solve it. But they are in the “clos” not just for reasons of alliteration. The St. Paul’s Close was a space set apart in the poet’s period and, as we just saw, a crenelated one. In the later Middle Ages, the contrast between the Close and the nave (at St. Paul’s especially an object of persistent complaint as being too open to lay traffic) was particularly pronounced. Fighting the pressures of the city traffic through the precincts, recently Bishop Braybrooke himself (the very bishop who was pressing the cult of St. Erkenwald during the Ricardian period) had issued a proclamation against the public crowds’ misuse and overuse of St. Paul’s nave.86 As Peterson rightly notes, the control of sacred space is of repeated concern to cathedral officials in the poem (as the poet gently points out, perhaps with a hint of insider’s tedium). When all the different estates come to see the wonder of the pagan’s uncorrupted body, issues of crowd control are smoothly handled, and the poet delights in offering a rich sense of the city’s professions. This would not be odd for a member of the cathedral’s familia, especially among the lower clergy; as we saw earlier, the vast cadre of St.  Paul’s chantry-priests related daily to a wide range of the city’s estates. And as Rousseau has shown, there were even chantries at St. Paul’s, such as the Charnel House Chapel in the cloister, a chantry offering intercessory prayer for both the cathedral and the civic community (with the right of chantry appointments inherited by the mayor).87 The Charnel House was so named when the bones from large numbers of graves disturbed during renovations were moved there, and it became popular with London laity as a burial site—all of which suggests that the presence of the mayor and community in our poem was not necessarily unusual. But the cathedral and Close is still a place of privilege: when even the mayor wants to enter the cathedral precincts, he must apply to the sexton, who would be the keeper of the keys for the

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cathedral: “Quen þe maire with his meynye þat meruaile aspied, / By assent of þe sextene þe sayntuare þai kepten” (65–66). This is not “claustrophilia” but, for our poet, orderly and dignified management of sacred space. Even the learned cannot identify the strange man whose body has been uncovered, but the poet’s treatment of this circumstance is not just a casual rebuke to the “learned,” as some historical context reveals. William Courtenay and other scholars have stressed that St. Paul’s was a renowned centre of intellectual learning, with a song school, a grammar school, and an internationally known school for theological study in the “Latin Quarter” of London.88 Men like the chronicler Ralph de Diceto had been trained there in the twelfth century and, closer to our poet’s time, Bishop Ralph Baldock, Gilbert de Seagrave, and other distinguished “scholar patrons” and masters within a bishop’s familia, as Courtenay notes.89 St. Paul’s was also the site of one of the kingdom’s important consistory courts (the Bishop of London’s, as we remember from John Audelay’s and his noble employer’s brush with that court). The poet, in fact, banks on his audience’s awareness of St. Paul’s formidable reputation as such (as mentioned in relation to Hoccleve, its library was already rich in canon law and theology even before Bishop Baldock’s massive donation of 1313 and many more, including likely donations made by the famous Chancellor of London, Thomas Bradwardine).90 We miss much if we are not aware of its prominence as we read St. Erkenwald today. This reality heightens the drama of the fact that in the poem, no record survives in the library, archives, or court records (the latter would contain many records of wills, bequeathals, and burials)91 of any such figure as the strangely preserved man in the coffin. These records, of course, would be kept by the lower clergy (often the vicars choral or chantry priests) of the cathedral, with oversight for them ultimately the dean’s responsibility—a point vividly dramatized by the poet. So, the poet’s specificity here suggests an insider’s perspective. He even uses legal language such as “breuyt” and “in boke notyd” (the same vocabulary used in “Satire on the Consistory Courts”)—the verb “breuen” means to put on record or report. But no reference to the strange burial can be found: Noþir by title ne token ne by tale noþir, Þat euer wos breuyt in burgh ne in boke notyd Þat euer mynnyd such a mon, more ne lasse. (102–4) The pagan past is not easy to recover. However, with a little help from the Almighty (who will allow the corpse to speak), the poet eventually reveals what he

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learned from books: that the stranger hails at least from a known period recorded in cathedral histories—even if the burial is not in their “martilage” (154). When the crisis occurs, the bishop is away in Essex (line 108), where, in fact historically, Erkenwald had built a famous abbey for his sister—Barking.92 And again, the poet assumes his audience needs no explanation about Essex.93 Many of the in-house texts, in fact, refer directly to Barking and his sister—both chronicles and liturgy (even the “Office of Erkenwald”).94 He returns to St. Paul’s in haste upon hearing the news, but when he arrives, he merely disappears into his own palace, which as we saw was historically accessible via a private door off the nave: “Mony him metten on þat meere [boundary]95 þe merualye to tell, / He passyd into his palais and pes he comaundit” (114–15). Line 114 seems to refer to that boundary or entrance; he next bars the door and does not reemerge until dawn, after a night of vigil and preparatory prayer (the St. Paul’s bishop’s palace did have its own chapel). Again, the poet seems to have a precise knowledge of the Close layout, the location of the palace, and even the routine of the choir and vestry: he refers directly to the polyphony sung by the choir (polyphony was most heavily the domain of cathedrals), the robing of the bishop in his pontificals, and most tellingly, he even knows exactly what time the doors of the cathedral first open for the day: Mynster-dores were makyd opon quen matens were songen, Þe byschop hym shope solemply to synge þe high masse. Þe prelate in pontifical was prestly atyrid, Manerly with his ministres þe masse he begynnes Of Spiritus Domini for his spede on sutile wise, With queme [skilled] questis of þe quere with ful quaynt [very ingenious] notes. Mony a gay grete lord was gedrid to herken hit. (128–34) Like the Gawain Poet describing Bertilak’s castle, our poet stresses the “mannerly” quality of all that is done in the cathedral, the orderliness of the Divine Office, the meaningfulness of the preparation and delivery of it—even as the reader, like those inside and outside the Close, wait in palpable suspense. Only a clerical author would think to create suspense by using an account of private prayer, preparations for mass, and the mass itself as a delaying tactic for a narrative, and likely only a cleric would further delay a narrative by a report on a library search, of all things. But, as we have seen, the proletarian writers are intellectual mavericks.

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The only sign of haste that Erkenwald ever offers is to go straight from mass (line 139), still in his vestments (literally vestiges of his high work at the altar as if to fortify him), and on to the work of dealing with the strange new discovery of the body. Most tellingly, the poet refers to the mass by its Latin incipit, not its English name (the “masse . . . / Of Spiritus Domini” instead of, for instance, Pentecost), suggesting someone inside a liturgical tradition. And it is not just any mass, but a high mass of the Holy Spirit that Erkenwald chose to help aid him (“for his spede on sutile wise”); moreover, if Peterson is correct, the miracle may be timed to fall on the day that celebrates the most important of these masses, Pentecost. In this case, Erkenwald is to be read as having deliberately delayed his encounter with the uncorrupted body to garner some truly solemn liturgical aid first.96 But either way, the poet must have had professional liturgical knowledge as well as genuine belief. There are even references to the choir’s polyphony: “With queme questis [skilled sounds] of þe quere [choir] with ful quaynt notes [very ingenious notes]”—these adjectives, like those in “Choristers’ Lament,” stress the skill and ingenuity, but also the clever and arcane qualities (“quaynt” is a multi-resonant word) of the polyphonic styles—the increased usage of these styles still somewhat new and, as we saw in Chapter 5, a boon to the extra hiring of skilled choristers and vicars choral.97 (Cathedrals, of course, would be “cutting edge” in musical as in other ecclesiastical trends.) The words “queme” and “quaynt” also perhaps help suggest a Christian counterbalance to the “rounish” curiousness that stumps even the learned—the difficult music has its own mysteries, but these are sanctifying ones. In wording at least verbally reminiscent of the early scene of Arthur’s court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet dramatizes the entrance of St. Erkenwald as bishop with “all þe high gynge,” here referring specifically to all who serve at the high altar—in a very clerical way of thinking about privilege, they apparently have pride of first place alongside the bishop as he makes his way to the tomb. The secular lords at mass are second: Þen heldyt [went] from þe autere all þe high gynge [company]98 Þe prelate passidon þe playn þer plied to hym lordes, As riche reuestid as he was he rayked to þe toumbe, Men vnclosid hym þe cloyster with clustred keies. (137–40) With a precise sense of the cathedral’s geography, the prelate “passidon þe playn [paved area]”99 as lords who had been at mass bow (or make way or gather to him—all readings are possible)100 as he passes, and the cloister is unlocked by

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another cluster of keys (140). Though there have been different ways of reading “Men vnclosid hym þe cloyster,”101 the definite article here signals a specific destination. Gollancz had suggested that “cloyster” here meant “crypt” (which did require unlocking [see Figure 7.3 of the “New Werke”]). But more intriguingly, in fact, modern archaeology of Old St. Paul’s indicates that the Pardon Cloister, according to Schofield, was a popular late medieval place of burial “for the civic elite,” and as such, it would have been a place under the physical control of the sexton (the official in charge of burials) or the chaplain in charge of (for example) the Charnel House Chantry.102

3. The Poet as Public Intellectual: Dramatizing the Dean’s Search of the St. Paul’s Library Next in the poet’s apparent strategies for delay is the arrival of the dean, and here, too, there is an orderliness of rank to what follows, as the dean is the first person Erkenwald consults: “Þe dene of þe dere place deuysit al on fyrst” (144). The dean explains to the bishop what he has tried to find out: this is appropriate, since the dean is the highest ranking clergyman, next in rank to the bishop and in charge of the cathedral, the chapter, and its estates. The dean has been in the St. Paul’s library (and this is not just any library) for a week, ransacking the chronicles, archives, and burial registers. We now know from Chapter 6 that these chronicles were often in-house affairs, concerned with local histories, but also yoked to the large universal salvation histories that gave them grandeur (sometimes, as on York Minster and St. Paul’s tabulae, rolled together as one great narrative). It is also perhaps not an accident that Erkenwald sees the dean at this point: by the fifteenth century at least, there was a dedicated library over the cloister on the west side of the north transept.103 The dean explains that no one can discover who the illustrious buried stranger was, even though many a poorer man’s records are “merkid is in oure martilage [burial register],” but this man is unaccounted for: mony porer in þis place is putte into graue Þat merkid is in oure martilage his mynde foreuer; And we haue our librarie latid [searched] þes long seuen dayes, Bot one chronicle of þis kyng con we neuer fynde. (153–56) Famously, of course, Erkenwald tells him rather brusquely (159ff.) that this miracle is a matter for God, not for human books, not even for the cathedral “mar-

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tilage”—an unusually specific word referring to a burial register in a cathedral (whoever wrote the poem was an aficionado of cathedral terminology).104 The great St. Paul’s library, historically a major scholarly resource for Londoners, has nothing to offer about this person. But human books do play a large role in the poet’s writing of the poem behind the scenes and just the kind of histories the cathedral would hold. At lines 206–10, the mysterious body, revealing himself to have been a high court judge, does a version of the complex historical math of salvation history for the onlookers, echoing the “legendary arithmetic”105 of many cathedral chronicles that claimed to know, for instance, the exact date of Brutus’s foundation or to calculate by how much certain events of pagan history pre-dated Christ. In fact, at least one of the extant in-house chronicles of St. Paul’s does just that, and although the judge’s arithmetic rightly confounds modern editors, so does the parallel arithmetic in a chronicle also used for one of the tabulae (edited as the Chroniculi S. Pauli).106 The dead judge explains: After Brutus þis burgh had buggid on fyrste Noȝt bot fife hundred ȝere þer aghtene wontyd [500 − 18 = 482] Before þat kynned ȝour Criste by christen acounte; A þousand ȝere and þritty mo and ȝet threne aght [1000 + 30 + (3 × 8) = 1054]. (lines 207–10, with Turville-Petre’s math)107 Not unlike the 1,200 years of pre-Christian history claimed by the York Minster tabula’s CMEE (see Figure 6.7), the St. Paul’s tabula chronicle contains a stream of such calculations, among which two numbers at least come close to those in our poem: from the destruction of Troy to the construction by Brutus of the New Troy (“novae Trogae, quae nunc London dicitur”) is calculated as 1,064 years, and the fourth (of the biblical six ages), from David to the transmigration of Babylon (“secundum Ebaeos”) is calculated as 472 years. Though not exactly the same (482, not 472; 1,054, not 1,064), they are arithmetically close to what the judge is trying to explain: that he comes from a period long before Christ, measurable historically, however. (The Chroniculi S. Pauli tries to relate Brutus to Eli’s time, just as the CMEE tries to relate York’s supposed founder, “Ebrauc” [whence “Eboracum”], to the time of David.)108 Brutus and the building of New Troy are key benchmarks for placing it. Turville-Petre noted that there is no way to make the poet’s calculations work (though we have at least come close here with the help of the tabulae), but it is clear that

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the judge “is a pre-Christian Breton.”109 But such calculations, too, are part of the system of “potted” cathedral histories as the Chroniculi S. Pauli indicates in abundance. The judge’s period of life on earth makes the judge “an heire of anoye [one who inherits suffering]110 in þe New Troie”: “In þe regne of þe riche kyng þat rewlit vs þen / The bold Breton Sir Belyn—Sir Berynge was his brothire” (211– 13). The source is likely once again Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, another staple of cathedral chronicles and tabulae, who described how Belinus, King of Britain, and his brother, Brennius, quarreled before they were reconciled and joined forces to conquer Rome.111 Belinus was a great builder of London, supposedly constructing Billingsgate, which is supposedly named after him. The St.  Paul’s Chroniculi also gives the same explanation for “Rex Lud” of New Troy, after whom it says Ludgate was named, the revered king’s body having been buried by the gate, another reference to a pagan body—pagan bodies, it seemed, littered mythic London history (just as disturbed early graves from at least the Roman period would have been common in medieval building sites).112 Turville-Petre draws attention to a passage in Matthew Paris in which ruined temples, idols, and other items from the Roman period are turned up, and John Scattergood and Monika Otter have both also drawn special attention to Matthew Paris’s account of earlier excavation of a casket containing indecipherable books and rolls, requiring an old man who spoke the British tongue to translate.113 In Geoffrey’s Historia Arthur refers to Belinus as “that most glorious king of the Britons,”114 and as Turville-Petre aptly glosses these lines in Erkenwald (211–13): “To be a judge in the reign of Belinus was therefore to represent the summit of pagan justice.” But like so many other allusions we have seen, the poem does not explicitly spell this out, so what kind of audience could be counted upon to know such details or follow such subtle riffs on a genre? An audience, I would suggest, accustomed to the outlines of these legendary histories that were written in cathedrals, either in the abbreviated forms often posted on tabulae or from actual books in the cathedral library—and in the poet’s day, St. Paul’s would have been an ideal resource. In addition to the Chroniculi S. Pauli mentioned above, we might briefly look at two survivals of the kind that the poet could have consulted when creating the poem. Sadly, owing to the destruction of Old St. Paul’s and most of its library in the Great Fire, we have less to work with here than at York. But in a recent study of the lost library of Old St. Paul’s,115 Peter Nowell traces some of its books, not-

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ing that it had, among other things, a small, working copy of Anglo-Saxon laws made for the use of the officials of the cathedral and showing, he notes, that even in the early twelfth century, scribes were still actively writing Old English in or for the cathedral.116 I would add that officials of the cathedral may well have been consulting this book of Anglo-Saxon laws (though likely with increasing linguistic difficulty and via Latin glosses) even in the later Middle Ages: Stephen Yeager has argued that some kind of literacy of Old English texts survived in the later medieval period precisely because of these laws.117 The fictional dean of St. Paul’s in our poem is portrayed as ransacking the cathedral library for clues about the ancient burial they have uncovered, and given Erkenwald’s real-life reputation for fostering law codes and the poem’s heavy emphasis on the judge’s upholding of ancient law, it is at least intriguing to know that the historical library did preserve some Anglo-Saxon law. As Nowell also notes, the library had a copy of Ralph de Diceto’s Chronicon. By coincidence, Ralph (d. 1202) was himself a highly learned dean of St. Paul’s, well-connected in government and informed on the affairs of state. Ralph was the author of the Abbreviationes chronicorum and the Ymagines historiarum,118 and as J. W. Thompson pointed out, “the Chronicle quotes from forty-seven sources,” many of which were “likely in the cathedral library.”119 Figure 7.7, as we have seen, shows a page of Ralph’s treatment of King Lucius, whose great achievement (the “Triapolitan” cathedrals) our poet mentions. And as Reginald Lane Poole mentions in his DNB entry on Ralph,120 “Of all his historical writings we have the rare advantage of possessing manuscripts not merely contemporaneous, but written at St. Paul’s and under the author’s direct supervision.”121 Surviving St. Paul’s chapter records indicate that Ralph was an industrious dean in building up the library, among other initiatives, and was justly celebrated by the canons of St. Paul’s throughout our poet’s time, as Poole notes, in the cathedral’s liturgy on his anniversary as “decanus bonus.”122 The historical and liturgical in-house portrait of Ralph as a famous and scholarly dean of St. Paul’s matches the type of archival and library fervour in the poet’s portrait of the dean in St. Erkenwald. And anniversaries of cathedral worthies such as Ralph, alongside Erkenwald himself, were honoured in the in-house liturgies and are also types of such sources. Certainly, the book of Anglo-Saxon laws and Ralph’s Chronicon are exactly the kind of record a poet as familiar with St. Paul’s as ours must have known. Fittingly, after the judge has been saved by Erkenwald’s tears and his soul taken up to Heaven, the mixed emotions of the poem’s climactic day are

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channeled in a liturgical procession. Whether this relates to the 1386 attempt to create new processional liturgies for St. Erkenwald or not,123 the last image of the poem is a procession, accompanied by a feast for the senses, with all the bells of the cathedral and the town spontaneously and miraculously ringing together: Meche mourning and myrthe was mellyd togeder; Þai passyd forthe in procession and all þe pepul folowid. And all þe belles in þe burgh beryd at ones. (350–52) Only a member of the cathedral’s familia would, I think, celebrate (in both senses) this particular way. This is a poem written out of cathedral culture or deep knowledge of it (whether that knowledge was acquired in the poet’s past or is part of his present, it is hard to say, though as Boroff notes, his use of the present tense to describe St. Paul’s is suggestive). St. Erkenwald was St. Paul’s most important saint, and the poem could have been written for an in-house celebration, for instance, the 1386 liturgies, or a cathedral chantry, or lay shrine donor—Dugdale recorded several such moved by dedication to Erkenwald. Or, I would strongly suggest, it could have been written for recreation in either the halls of the vicars choral or of the chantry priests (both located adjacent to the cathedral in the Close; see Figure 7.6).124 The survival of the lovely wood-beamed medieval hall of the York chantry priests, St. William’s College in York (see Figure 5.8), and of the York vicars choral dining hall at the Bedern (see Figures 5.5 and 5.6) perhaps gives us a visual image of a type of venue in which the poem’s complex poetic and historical allusiveness, deep spirituality, and “home team” partiality could be appreciated and regularly performed. And none of this, of course, would rule out its simultaneous usage in a wealthy patron’s household—the vicars and the chantry priests were heavily indebted to their lay donors and patrons and might very likely recite or compose for them. Given the importance of the enormous cadre of chantry priests at St. Paul’s and the learning of many of them (to judge from their book bequeathals),125 as well as the vernacular literary interests still traceable today of some, possibilities abound. My goal here has not been to make St. Erkenwald an exercise in historical realism despite its locational alertness—in fact, as I have shown, it is the very opposite of realism in its free treatment of history and the miraculous—but rather to show that the poet was likely a cathedral local and that he expected some key part of his audience to be as well. Though the literary creations of the vicars or chantry priests often fall into Rigg’s category of testimony to civic pride rather than literary talent, I hope we

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can now look at cathedrals anew as buzzing with creative writers, active archivists, and loyal editors, some of whom were such good vernacular poets that their works anonymously adorn our anthologies of Middle English classics, and their Latin works, however “jejune,” still move us today in spots with authentic accounts of personalities, trauma, and praise of famous, sometimes sensitive, literary men. I have ended this book with this case study of a poem we thought we knew but that can now be read with more attentiveness, I hope, to local history, culture, class, and geographical and liturgical alertness, and with more thought to the underemployed clerical labourers in the vineyard, many of whom came early, and bore the full heat of the entire day, but never received more than their penny.

Conclusion

The Poet as Public Intellectual Achievements and Characteristics of Proletarian Writers

This study has explored the role of what W. A. Pantin once called the “submerged” clerical proletarian class in writing Middle English poetry. We began with his 1955 quotation about Langland: “There was a very large clerical proletariat of priests working for a salary. . . . Socially and economically, this class must have been poles apart from the ‘sublime and literate persons’, though the case of Langland shows us that a more or less submerged cleric might be the intellectual equal of anybody.”1 We have attempted to recover what twentieth-century historians already knew, but literary scholars have mostly ignored. Not all, of course: prominent among those I’ve cited is Derek Pearsall, who reminded us in 1982, echoing Hamilton Thompson, “The unbeneficed chaplain, ready to take payment for casual duty, was a familiar figure in medieval society.”2 Pantin described this class of clerks as the “ecclesiastical equivalent of landless labourers,” invoking, like many after him, Marxist terminology that does not always fit. But what does fit, as we saw, is that these clerics, at least those who wielded pens on their own behalf (“ready to take payment for casual duty”), regarded themselves as economically and institutionally disadvantaged. Even the York vicars choral, at best the petites bourgeois of the lot, regarded themselves as “the poor.” And it turns out they were right: as Sarah Rees Jones has shown, by the reign of Richard II, they were indeed land-poor.3 However, there are so many other aspects of these writers that social history or literary criticism, Marxist or otherwise, simply cannot capture: (1) their ability to wield the pen on their own behalf and on behalf of others; (2) their passion for all types of systemic church

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reform, which they consistently wrote and worked for, despite career failure; and, consequently, (3) their apparent lack of “alienation” where we expect most to find it: that is, from enthusiasm for their faith in God,4 or from the hope that each human may embrace the good. Who knew that generosity, hope, and passionate faith would prove to be surprisingly resilient proletarian virtues? Though they may have written in part with a desire for patronage (we saw this impulse even in the authorial self-portraits in the Early Middle English texts of Chapter 1), they were surprisingly generous with written copies of their work. John Audelay, for example, apparently blind at the end of his life, still expresses his passion for saving souls via his pen, even in his “Conclusion,” Yef ye wil have any copi, Askus leeve and ye shul have, To pray for hym specialy That hyt made your soules to save, Jon the Blynde Awdelay. (lines 44–48)5 This is “open access” before its time, and although Marxism justly objects to the way capitalism “relentlessly commodif[ies] value,” it has no way to capture these vital aspects of clerical proletarians. As Marx wrote, “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”6 But Marx, apparently, never read our Middle English clerical proletarians. Frederic Jameson, one of Marxism’s most thoughtful critics, explains that its best literary interpretative practitioners do ensure that “apparently external content (political attitudes, ideological materials, juridical categories, the raw material of history, the economic processes)” are “then at length drawn back into the process of reading.”7 This much certainly we have tried to do here, but Jameson’s “process” does not ultimately illuminate or explain the spirit that buoyed Audelay and others through disabling (perhaps literally in Hoccleve’s case) career disappointment. To solve this kind of theoretical conundrum, newer studies of literary theory and theology are likely needed, such as Denys Turner’s attention to the “implications of a moderate realist account of theological knowledge as distinct from a . . . post-modernist epistemology.”8 In the meantime, as literary critics, we can at least not bracket out the beliefs that so passionately motivated Middle English proletarian writers—whether as “moderate realists” or postmodernists.

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As I noted in the Introduction to this book, what makes the study of unand underemployed writers crucial for literary scholars, and not simply a matter for social historians, is that in the attitudes of this proletariat, we see many of the key characteristics for which we value some of the best of Middle English literature itself. We also see them as significant contributors to the resurgence of Middle English authorship and book production, which increased only slowly, as we saw in Chapter 1, over the course of the “long” thirteenth century and even “longer” fourteenth century (even in London, c. 1400, book production in English is still a niche market). Throughout this study, we have seen several attitudes or characteristics shared by these writers, a group by no means homogeneous, but showing several of these tendencies: 1) Since they were trained in the Church but were not properly employed by it, often leaving them dependent on lay patronage, proletarian works tend to show disgruntlement with both church and state. At the same time, however, they can show passion for justice in both (as we saw, for instance, in Wynnere and Wastoure, Langland, Hoccleve, and Audelay). 2) The border therefore between the secular and religious is blurred in proletarian works, making for literature that is to modern eyes full of “strange-bedfellows.”9 Our sharp divide between the secular and the religious, then, is anachronistic for reading such poetry. So, too, is our vague modern concept of “anticlericalism”—since proletarians do not offer critique from “outside,” but from within, their critiques are not “anticlerical” but inter-clerical.10 So, for instance, The Owl and the Nightingale poet, Langland, Audelay, and the York Realist all engage in inter-clerical critique, and even as the young narrators of “Choristers’ Lament” bemoan their cloistered fate, they revel in its arcane terminology, affirming that they, too, belong in the clerical “club.” 3) Proletarian critiques, as we have seen, take many forms, from gentle satire to outright radicalism, but one unifying factor is that they create works with strong voices of compassion for the poor (nicely epitomized, for instance, by Figure 0.2, showing one of Langland’s “Lunatic Lollars” from MS Douce 104, whose empathetic creator was a priestly civil servant). That said, proletarians can also have a tendency to include themselves among the poor, as we saw most overtly in the chronicles of the vicars choral of York Minster. But their interest in the marginalized also often extends to the doctrinally marginalized (e.g., the unbaptized pagan in St. Erkenwald) or those

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other wise marginalized by the canon law of the church (e.g., lawyers, merchants, and beggars, whom Langland foregrounds in his Pardon episode). Though semi-literate or even illiterate protagonists often articulate these concerns, the proletarian poet’s target audience includes sophisticated “insiders” as well as apparently victimized laity (e.g., “Satire on the Consistory Courts”). Proletarian writers also tend to show an unusual concern to provide information to the public, positioning themselves as public intellectuals. One leitmotif here, as we just saw in Audelay, is the offer to make copies freely available (reflected earlier, e.g., in the rules of the thirteenth-century London Puy). This habit of mind, as I suggested, was likely learned from legal proletarians, as it appears in certain civil ser vice or government treatises (like the widely disseminated Modus tenendi parliamentum, whose drafter so believed in its good government procedures that he included not only a scribal price per copy of the text, but even the promise of free copies to those unable to pay). This kind of “democratic socialism” (to use an anachronistic but handy descriptor) is also evident, as we saw, among the academic proletariat with official provisions at Oxford, as T. A. R. Evans showed,11 to provide free lectures to the poor students while others had to pay fees.12 4) Another tendency among proletarians, and one that deserves much more study, is their encouragement and counsel to women (as we saw with Margery Kempe’s visit to York Minster or their bequeathal of books to women). Proletarians were capable of creating works sympathetic to women, though sometimes complicated by the assumptions of a homosocial world (evident in Hoccleve).13 Many proletarians lived with women, and marriage was allowed to clerics in minor orders (ordination to full orders of the priesthood normally only occurred upon the granting of a benefice, as we saw in Hoccleve, and could not occur without a patron’s guaranteed financial support [titulum]). A striking image of the married clerk as father to a child from James le Palmer’s Omne bonum captures tonsured clerks living in just such a liminal social space between lay and religious worlds (Figure 8.1).14 Langland portrays his poet-speaker in the C.V “autobiographical” passage with both a wife and daughter, and whether merely a “type” or not, historical cases abound, for example, Robert Skurueton, consistory court notary and magister ludi of some York Cycle performances. Many other members of proletarian groups were

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Figure 8.1. London, British Library, MS Royal 6.E.VI, fol. 296v, image from the Omne bonum of James le Palmer (d. 1375) with a marginal section title reading “Clericus coniugatus” (the married clerk), and introducing the entry on the topic. © The British Library Board.

also known to have had concubines, such as members of the York vicars choral discussed in Chapter 6 (whether this made them more empathetic to some of the fornication cases they recorded or not, it might explain their recording of love lyrics). Proletarians also participated, probably in higher numbers than beneficed clergy, in what Ruth Karras has called “unmarriages.”15

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5) Despite their uncertain economic status and despite the “glass ceiling” that prevented most from ecclesiastical mobility, many did become established or move up in alternative jobs, for example, in government ranks (Hoccleve and Shirley), or in the households of noblemen where they provided both religious and secretarial skills (Audelay), or in more communal comfort as vicars choral in a cathedral or college setting. In all such cases, they did have, as we saw, access to what Marxists call “the means of production” via book production supplies. York city ordinances dealt explicitly with the role of the unbeneficed in book production,16 which we know, for instance, the York vicars choral took part in, too. One of Thomas Hoccleve’s office tasks, for instance, was to buy parchment for the Privy Seal office, some of which found its way into his manuscripts.17 Proletarians, as we saw, also used an array of multiple writing supports from the utilitarian to the lavish, sometimes even procuring the ser vices of illuminators (as did James le Palmer and Hoccleve). In government, municipal, and ecclesiastical offices, they wrote poetry on rolls or other private records18 (as we saw with Thedmar and Tyckhill) and in hidden spots on records not seen by the public, using documents as “private” space for marginalia and poetic compositions (as the York Acta capitularia scribe did with a love lyric).19 6) As we saw, proletarians can create marvelously complex poetic speakers, morally compromised but still morally arresting (as in “Courts” and “Choristers’ Lament”), closer to the complexities of daily life than the stereotypical figures of some other literary genres. These can certainly go beyond the standard types of “I-speakers” modeled on the French dit.20 Discussed here are such complex figures as found in The Owl and the Nightingale, the Prologue to Laȝamon’s Brut, Wynnere and Wastoure, Langland, Hoccleve, and sometimes Audelay. 7) Multilingualism and even literacy itself, their uses and their controversial social or class dimensions, are key topics for proletarian writers. Clerical proletarians regularly handled two or three languages in their day jobs (not only those in government, but also many in ecclesiastical settings).21 As copyists and editors, they are often professional readers, those whose job it is to prepare, correct, edit, embellish, or “filter” material for the reading public.22 Their interventions (modern editors would say meddling) can be so skillful that it can be hard to distinguish authors and editors (e.g., as in case of the

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Piers Plowman Z-text, redacted, as I have argued here, by a proletarian), thereby raising difficult questions for scholarship.23 8) In short, it is the influence of this group that gives English literature in this period at least some of its most endearing and intriguing elements: nascent meritocracy, sophisticated self-deprecation, minutely observed social class tensions, and a sense that, against all odds, intellectual or ecclesiastical material can be the stuf of great poetry: whether ecclesiology (Audelay), canon law (Hoccleve, the York Realist’s Second Trial), government legislation (Wynnere and Wastoure), or technical musical notation (“Choristers’ ”). In St.  Erkenwald, the poet even delays the action for a search of library archives. Not every poem or chronicle or treatise or song written by a proletarian reveals all these characteristics, but many show some or several. Nor—and this bears repeating—does every Middle English text with one or more of these characteristics originate with a proletarian. But there is a dramatic enough collocation of these characteristics in a significant swath of Middle English writing to suggest that clerical underemployment is a factor we ought not to neglect. When we add in the historically indisputable cases of proletarians who wrote “on the record” as such (men such as Thomas Hoccleve, John Audelay, or John Shirley), the larger pattern becomes very clear. The emphasis of this book has been on poets, not prose writers, so future studies could and should take in authors of prose such as scrivener Thomas Usk, civil servant and political propagandist Thomas Fovent, John Trevisa, chaplain to the Berkeley family in Gloucestershire and champion of religious reformist thought (with parallels to Audelay), or James Yonge, Dublin notary and author of the Middle Hiberno-English translation of the Secreta secretorum, which advocates strongly for civil ser vice meritocracy.24 Future studies could also build on the rich evidence uncovered by Rosalind Field for clerical (in “Clanchy’s wide sense . . . of clericus”) authorship of Anglo-Norman romances.25 Moreover, many of these are major Middle English texts: in this book alone, we have had discussions of The Owl and the Nightingale, Laȝamon’s Brut, Wynnere and Wastoure, Piers Plowman, Hoccleve’s Prologue to the Regement of Princes, the plays of the York Realist (here the Second Trial), St. Erkenwald, and several oft-anthologized lyrics such as “The Prisoner’s Lament,” or poems from Arundel 292, Harley 2253, and other “canonical manuscripts,” to use Susanna Fein’s term. And of course, proletarian authors in England also contributed texts in French and Latin, as we saw in Chapters 1, 5, and 6 especially, though the focus of this book has been resurgent English poetry.

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Their contribution was such that we can now, in retrospect, see some of them as public intellectuals, pioneers in making accessible to English readers or listeners vital knowledge and even the arcane. Clerical proletarians (with a few notable exceptions) mostly do not “talk down” to their audiences. Living as they did in a liminal space between church and state, they enhanced both, and became mavericks on behalf of new audiences in a way they likely never would have if they had been beneficed. The underemployment of large numbers of proletarians in Ricardian England especially, I suggest, became a kind of “fortunate fall” that created a “paradise regained,” via a legacy of major literature still appreciated today. Even as the deeds of their beneficed and promoted colleagues more often lie buried in obscurity.

notes

List of Abbreviations Works frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations (see General Index for further details): ACM CAE CMEE DIMEV EETS eME EME LAEME LALME LME MED O&N RP WW

Aliud Chronicon Metricum Chronica Archiepiscoporum Eboracensium Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis Digital Index of Middle English Verse Early English Text Society early Middle English (language) Early Middle English (literature) Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English Late Middle English (literature) Middle English Dictionary The Owl and the Nightingale Regement of Princes Wynnere and Wastoure

preface 1. For this quote and epigraph above: Matthieu Boyd, “Not an Island unto Itself: Celtic Literatures and Multilingualism in an Early Middle English Context,” Early Middle English 1.1 (2019): 3, also quoting Simon Gaunt in a review of Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby, Medieval Multilingualism, for French Studies 65, no. 24 (2011): 516–17. 2. “Some Facts on the Canadian Francophonie” (Government of Canada, Canadian Heritage, 2019), noting that about one-third of Canadians can carry on a conversation in French, https:// www . canada . ca /en /canadian - heritage /services /official - languages - bilingualism /publications/facts-canadian-francophonie.html. 3. I thank Andy Kelly for this information; I quote here from H. Ansgar Kelly, “Sacraments, Sacramentals, and Lay Piety in Chaucer’s England,” Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 5–22: 6. 4. Lines I.3323 and 3315, respectively. 5. Ralph Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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6. Boyd, “Not an Island,” 3. 7. Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?” ELH 82 (2015) 319–42: 339. 8. Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. 9. Maura Nolan, “The Fortunes of Piers Plowman and Its Readers,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2007): 1–41; Ralph Hanna, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), vol. 2, 22. 10. Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric,” 335. 11. Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 17–18. 12. Jeffrey Wilson, “Historicizing Presentism: Toward the Creation of a Journal of the Public Humanities,” MLA Profession (Spring 2019), https://profession . mla .org /historicizing -presentism-toward-the-creation-of-a-journal-of-the-public-humanities/. 13. Cited in Hanna, Penn Commentary, xx. 14. Wilson, “Historicizing Presentism.” 15. Lee Patterson, “Historicism and the Claims of Humanism,” in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 41–76: 45–46. 16. But see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Taking Early Women Intellectuals and Leaders Seriously,” Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. K. Kerby-Fulton, Katie Bugyis, and John Van Engen (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020), 1–20.

introduction 1. W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (1955; Toronto: Medieval Academy of America, 1980), 28–29; see also J. F. Goodridge, introduction to Piers the Ploughman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 9. 2. On John Ball, and on Wycliffism, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: The Rising of 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); on the Provisors and the Great Schism, see Pantin, The English Church, 47–74, 84–97; and William Courtenay, “The Effect of Papal Provisions to Oxford and Paris Scholars on the Pastorate and Care of Souls,” in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. David Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 358–86. 3. Classic studies include: Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208– 317; John Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988); Bruce Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 99–141; Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 5 on Langland and the liturgy. Throughout this study I follow the scholarly tradition of referring to the poet as Langland, as do the volumes of the Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman; on the various “autobiographical” issues, see Ralph Hanna’s masterful summary in volume 2 of the Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 8–9, especially for the issues surrounding the poet’s likely ordination to minor orders. See Chapter 2 below on recent scholarship attempting to identify Langland historically.

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4. See MED, benef5ce (n.), definition 4 (a) An ecclesiastical living, an office or position in the Church. 5. Tim Haskett, “Country Lawyers? The Composers of English Chancery Bills,” in The Life of the Law, ed. Peter Birks (London: Hambledon, 1991), 9–23. 6. Janet Coleman, English Literature in History, 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 33–34 on the academic proletariat. 7. Zieman, Singing the New Song. 8. Pantin, The English Church, 28. 9. The key terms “rector,” “vicar,” and “chaplain” are defined below in more detail, with their Latin equivalents. 10. Certain lucrative chantries could also be exchangeable for benefices; see A. K. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments in the Late Medieval Church,” Studies in Church History 26 (1989): 111–30; and Chapter 2, Case Study 2, on John Tyckhill’s unsuccessful attempt to save his Bukerell chantry at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which failed for lack of funds; Chapter 6 below on the property income challenges of the York vicars choral. 11. I use here Malcolm Parkes’s terminology (discussed in more detail below). 12. Beverly Gilbert, “ ‘Civil’ and the Notaries in Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 50 (1981): 49–65: 59, explains, “The ‘poor provisors’ of the poem are those who obtained provisions in forma pauperum, ‘poor clerks’ who were graduates of universities and, lacking patronage by local bishops or lay providers, applied to the papal court for provision. . . . Since the preparation and copying of the citations . . . would have been properly notarial work, it is easy to see why the notaries in Piers Plowman ride to London on provisors.” 13. The C.V apologia is discussed at length in Chapter 2, but note that at C.V.12, the narrator is asked by Reason, “Can thow seruen,” he sayde, “or syngen in a churche”—i.e., serve as an acolyte. These are the only two options for clerical work that Reason gives him, so he must be only in minor orders and, therefore, certainly unbeneficed. 14. The  C.V apologia is discussed in Chapter  2; on merchants, beggars, and hermits, see C.IX.70–280. 15. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “The Clerical Proletariat: The Underemployed Scribe and Vocational Crisis,” Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2014): 1–34. 16. Pantin’s definition, The English Church, 35. 17. Malcolm Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Our Scribes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 34. 18. Unless other wise indicated, quotations and gloss references to the C-Text of Piers Plowman are to Derek Pearsall, ed., William Langland: Piers Plowman. A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 24–25. I also cite Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1977) on textual matters. 19. See Derek Pearsall and Kathleen Scott, Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992), lxxvi. On Langland’s use of the apocalyptic genre of the Last World Emperor in this passage, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 187–92. 20. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 61–62 on the Lewed Vicary; 31–32 for the Lunatic Lollar. 21. Riverside, Explanatory Notes to I.291–92, p. 810, which also makes the point that the Clerk might have been waiting for an academic benefice, but that if so, he had taken the wrong course of study (Aristotle and logic) instead of qualifying for a doctorate of divinity or canon law.

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Also mentioned is William Courtenay’s “The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education,” Speculum 55 [1980]: 696–714: 712, showing that “the pattern of distributing ecclesiastical livings worsened for university graduates” after the Black Death. See Courtenay’s more recent piece, “The Effect of Papal Provisions.” 22. Pantin, The English Church, 28. 23. On Godstow Abbey and its challenges to retain chaplains, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Oxford,” in Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe: 1348–1418, vol. 1, ed. David Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 208–26. 24. Kerby-Fulton, “Oxford,” on MS Bodley 851; and for the many Latin sources, see Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), 351–404. 25. See Preface above, and note 3, on Absolon’s clerical status; on the Oxford dictamen schools, Kerby-Fulton, “Oxford.” 26. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 27. See Chapter 2, Case Study 1; and Chapter 3. 28. Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author (Oxford: Clarendon, 2019), 85. 29. For discussion of multilingualism issues, see the cluster of essays by Christopher Baswell, Christopher Cannon, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, collectively titled “Competing Archives, Competing Histories: French and Its Cultural Locations in Late Medieval England and Ireland,” Speculum 90 (2015): 635–700. 30. See Chapter  2, Case Study 1; and Chapter  3 for details on Hoccleve’s knowledge of canon law; and Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1999), Introduction, “The Glosses and Other Sources,” http://d.lib.rochester.edu /teams/publication/blyth-hoccleve-the-regiment-of-princes. 31. See Chapter 2; and Allen Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk: The Testament of Love (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1998), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/shoaf-usk-testament-of-love-introduction #sources. 32. Each of these cases is discussed in this study, Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 respectively. 33. Chris Wickham, Marxist History Writing for the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2, and 3 for next quote, available at http://britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.58. 34. For a meticulous history of the complexities of the study of medieval song schools, see Zieman, Singing the New Song, and on professional issues especially, 62–64; on the post-Black Death period, 100–113. 35. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 66, emphasis mine. 36. “Alienation” was not always negative for Marx but an aspect of historical process. See Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), xi–xiii, especially on alienated labour. 37. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 66. 38. Bishops’ visitation records, for instance, are full of material about self-interested lower clergy; see Chapter 6. 39. In addition to Pantin, The English Church, see the more recent studies of Tim Cooper, The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999); T. A. R. Evans, “The Number, Origin and Careers of Scholars,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),

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485–538; McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” I use the term “proletariat” not in the pejorative sense of older scholars, but in the “reclaimed” sense fostered by certain Marxist scholarship and in more recent histories such as Cooper’s. 40. Many of these men were trilingual and also served new audiences in French, such as the unidentified Ludlow scrivener who produced Harley 2253, including some of his own compositions in French; see Susanna Fein, ed., Studies in the Harley Lyrics (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2000). 41. Also, for the little-studied role of proletarians in promoting the translation of works already in English into regional dialects of English, see, for instance, the Douce 104 Piers Plowman, whose scribe (apparently a member of the Dublin civil ser vice) translated the poem into Middle Hiberno-English. See Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography. 42. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 113. 43. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 118. 44. For this new development in the C-Text, see Pearsall, A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, 24–25. 45. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127. 46. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary: The Z Text, Writing Office Redaction and Oxford Reading Circles,” in New Directions in Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 489–515; and Karrie Fuller, “The Craft of the ‘Z-Maker’: Reading the Z Text’s Unique Lines in Context,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 27 (2013): 15–43. 47. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman,” in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 103–29. 48. Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1982), 101–23: 104. 49. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 119. 50. For the use of Parable of the Unjust Steward among proletarians, see Chapter 2; and for Usk, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 31, line 90ff., and 30 for Usk. 51. For various writing-office profiles, see Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York: York Medieval Press, 2013). For university and educational professional careers, see Evans, “The Number.” On careers as vicars choral, see Barrie Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Richard Hall and David Stocker (Oxford: Oxbow Press, 2005), 1–10. 52. See Evans, “The Number,” 534–35, on late careers, Hoccleve, and Audelay; for Audelay’s career disappointments, see Chapter 4; and McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127–28. On Audelay’s biography, see Susanna Fein’s Introduction to her edition, John the Blind Audelay, Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302) (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2009): https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/poems-and-carols-introduction. On the strong connection between Audelay’s poetic collection and those of minstrels (his manuscript was at one point owned by a minstrel), see Andrew Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” Speculum 66 (1991): 43–73, esp. 73. On God’s minstrels, see Piers Plowman, C.IX.136 and elsewhere.

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53. See Fein, Introduction; and Chapter 4. 54. See Linne R. Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 293–340, for an account of records in Hoccleve’s hand, showing him to have been influential in key ways, including his oversight of Henry IV’s payment of Chaucer’s annuity. John Burrow made the point some time ago that it was Hoccleve who created the Office of the Privy Seal’s official formulary; see Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1994); but most recently see Sobecki, Last Words, 77–86, for a different view Hoccleve being responsible for the formulary. 55. “This trend grew more pronounced after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, which left in its wake a period of deep economic stagnation that still persists in large parts of the global economy. Most scholars define precariousness by reference to what workers lack, including such factors as: ready access to paid employment, protection from arbitrary firing, possibility for advancement, long-term job stability, adequate safety, development of new skills, living wages, and union representation.” R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of WorkingClass Precariousness,” Monthly Review 67 (2013), issue 11 online, https://monthlyreview.org /author/jamil/. 56. “[In] Bourdieu’s own mature reflections on the concept, . . . he connected the notion directly to Karl Marx’s analysis of the reserve army of labor. ‘Precariousness,’ for Bourdieu, is present when the existence of a large reserve army . . . helps to give all those in work the sense that they are in no way irreplaceable.” Jonna and Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness.” See Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, trans. Richard Nice (New York: New Press, 1999), 81–87. 57. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 173–74. 58. Robert Swanson, Church and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 62. 59. Cooper, The Last Generation, 127. 60. Cooper, The Last Generation, 127. 61. Evans, “The Number,” 516. 62. See Gilbert on Langland’s treatment of the “poor provisors” in her “ ‘Civil’ and the Notaries,” and see Courtenay, “The Effect of Papal Provisions.” 63. Evans, “The Number,” 533. 64. Evans, “The Number,” 535. 65. Philip Daileader, “Local Experiences of the Great Western Schism,” in A Companion to the Great Western Schism, 1378–1417, ed. Joelle Rollo-Koster and Thomas Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 89–122: 104. 66. William Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 139, summarizing R. N. Swanson’s, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices in Late Medieval England, Past and Present, 106 (February 1985), 28–61. 67. See Kathryn Veeman, “John Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 255–63. 68. For statistics, see H. S. Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists in the English Episcopal Registers,” in Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 20–34. 69. Norman Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 50–51; Cooper, The Last Generation; and for parallel statistics for clergy in Cheshire and Lancashire, see Michael  J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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70. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 50. 71. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 50. 72. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 50. 73. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 51. 74. See Pantin, The English Church, 28. 75. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 137–38 for this quote and the next. 76. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 77. Swanson, Church and Society, 62. 78. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 92–94. 79. Parkes, Their Hands, chap. 3, and especially 33–34. 80. Parkes, Their Hands, 33; by the thirteenth century, “clericuli” (clergioun in Middle English) denotes, as Zieman says, a pre-clerical state (Singing the New Song, 190). 81. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture in the English and Irish Civil Ser vice: The Modus Tenendi Parliamentum and Its Literary Relations,” Traditio 53 (1998): 149–202. 82. Parkes, Their Hands, 34. Virginia Davis, Clerics and the King’s Service in Late Medieval England, Église et État, Église ou État ? Les clercs et la genèse de l’État modern (Paris-Rome: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2014), online http://books.openedition.org /psorbonne/3524. 83. Sobecki, Last Words, 67, on the extra-curricular scribal and literary work of Hoccleve’s colleagues in the Privy Seal. 84. Parkes, Their Hands, 35. 85. Emilie Amt, ed., Medieval English, 1000–1500: A Reader (Toronto: Broadview, 2001), 318–19. 86. See the comment by Thomas More quoted in Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists,” 32. 87. See, e.g., Figure 1.2; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland,” forthcoming in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne Mooney, ed. Margaret Connolly, Holly JamesMaddocks and Derek Pearsall (York: York Medieval Press, 2021); on several friars’ lyric collections, see Marjorie Harrington, “Bilingual Form: Paired Latin and Vernacular Translations in Trilingual English Miscellanies, c. 1250–c. 1350” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017). 88. On Cok, see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, 70–75, figure 68, showing a portrait of Cok in London, MS St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Cartulary, fol. 94; and on Cok’s life, Nicole Eddy, “Marginal Annotation in Medieval Romance Manuscripts: Understanding the Contemporary Reception of the Genre” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2012), chap. 3. 89. For the former, see Eddy, “Marginal Annotation in Medieval Romance,” chap. 3; for Turk, see Taylor, “Myth of Minstrel Manuscript,” 66–67, and Chapter 5. 90. Linne Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 183–204. 91. Parkes, Their Hands, 43. 92. Now British Library, MS Royal 6 E.VI–VII; see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge: British Library MSS Royal 6 E VI–6 E VII, vol. 1 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 26. 93. Sandler, Omne bonum, 1:111. 94. Parkes, Their Hands, 44; Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, 61–62. 95. Parkes, Their Hands, 47, cited the example of the hugely prolific Scribe D (so named for his role in the Trinity Gower); however, Linne Mooney identified this scribe as John Marchaunt, in fact

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a Guildhall scribe (and therefore a professional, not commercial, scribe). See Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, chap. 3, devoted to Marchaunt’s career, but also Chapter 3, note 74 below. 96. See Parkes, Their Hands, 44, discussion of one from fourteenth-century Oxford who created a sheet of specimens of scripts, showing different levels of formality of textura hands, weathered from display. Commercial scribes apparently did a brisk trade in Latin and some French books, connections with Middle English literary texts seem rarer. 97. E. W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England, Thomas Kebell: A Case Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. See also E.  W. Ives, “The Common Lawyers in Pre-Reformation England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (1968): 145–73; and Haskett, “Country Lawyers?” 98. Ives, The Common Lawyers, 12, cited in Haskett, “Country Lawyers?” 21–22. 99. Susanna Fein, “Reading Dreams, Casting the Future and Other Learned Mirths: The Harley Scribe as Proto-Chaucerian Clerk,” Writers, Editors and Exemplar in Medieval English Texts, ed. Sharon Rowley (New York: Palgrave McMillan, forthcoming 2020), 24–57; Marjorie Harrington, “ ’That swevene hath Daniel unloke’: Interpreting Dreams with Chaucer and the Harley Scribe,” Chaucer Review 50 (2015): 315–67. 100. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 134. 101. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 134–35, for this and next quote, my emphasis. 102. Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 4. 103. Jürgen Habermas, Technology and Science as Ideology (1968), cited in “Petite Bourgeoisie”: https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Petite _bourgeoisie. 104. On “Marxism,” see Patterson, “Historicism.” 105. On the many lower clergy of non-gentry birth, see Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 141. 106. Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 4, my emphasis. 107. Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” 104. 108. In 1237, as the plaque says, “The Advowson passed from Westminster Abbey to Henry III, when the Rector became the Master of the Rolls (Custos Rotulorum)”; ten rectors then served the king successively until 1316, when “Richard, bishop of London, with the consent of Edward II, severed the connection with the Rolls, and restored the Rectoral status.” 109. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches Series: High Medieval Literary Cultures in England, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Elizabeth Tyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 110. John of Langton, made Master of the Rolls in 1286, held several ecclesiastical appointments and rectorships of parishes, but as an influential courtier clerk he became chancellor of the realm in 1292 and eventually even one of the Lords Ordainers, who sought to diminish Edward II’s powers, a strug gle ending in the king’s deposition. See the online Dictionary of National Biography, https://en.wikisource.org /wiki/Langton,_ John_de _%28DNB00%29. 111. Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists,” 28. 112. Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists,” 28–29; see also Evans, “The Number,” 533–38. 113. See, e.g., Evans, “The Number,” 533–38. 114. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Bugyis, and Melissa Mayus, “ ‘Anticlericalism,’ Interclerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer, ed. James Simpson and Suzanne Akbari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020), 494–526. 115. See Samuel Rostad, “Heirs of Augustine: Benedictine Popu lar Preaching in Late Medieval England, c. 1350–1500” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017). For the issues surrounding the claim that the 1407–9 Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel caused, in effect, a

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suppression of creative writing in fifteenth-century England, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), esp. Appendix I; and Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh, eds., After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 116. See “The Faces of Precarity,” Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers 64 (2017): 4–15.

chapter 1 1. For the quote above, see Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Iain McCleod Higgins, Dorothy Kim and Meg Worley, “Making Early Middle English,” Early Middle English 1.1 (2019): 1–2. 2. On major trilingual Franciscan lyric collections, see Deborah L. Moore, Medieval AngloIrish Troubles: A Cultural Study of BL Harley 913 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017); and Marjorie Harrington, “Bilingual Form: Paired Latin and Vernacular Translations in Trilingual English Miscellanies, c. 1250–c. 1350” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017). 3. Throughout this study I use EME to refer to Early Middle English literature, and eME to refer to the language; for Late Middle English I use LME. See Early Middle English, https://arc -humanities.org /our-series/journals/eme/; and LAEME, the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, by Margaret Laing et  al., version 3.2 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2013), covering 1150–1325, http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html. For the electronic version of  A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (eLALME), a revised on-line edition of A Linguistic Atlas of Mediaeval English (LALME), by Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), see http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page _id=490. 4. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 178–79. 5. Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6. James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch” (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2009), 1. See also Ardis Butterfield, “Chaucerian Vernaculars,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 25–51. The London Puy is discussed in what follows. 7. On London literary production, see Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Auchinleck was made between c. 1331 and 1340, based on The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle’s reference to the death of Edward II and the “young King Edward.” See the online facsimile, http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/editorial /physical.html. 8. Scribe 3 has a cursive bookhand showing some evidence of Chancery training: “Bliss comments that ‘. . . the length of f, r and long s (all of which run well below the line), shows the influence of Chancery hand,’ ” http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/editorial/physical.html#scribes. 9. Hannah Zdansky, “Converting Romance: The Spiritual Significance of a Secular Genre in Medieval France, England, Wales, and Ireland” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017). See also Linda Olson, “Romancing the Book,” on the Auchinleck Manuscript in Kathryn KerbyFulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 99–116.

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10. Rosalind Field, “ ‘Pur les francs homes amender’: Clerical Authors and the ThirteenthCentury Context of Historical Romance,” in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 175–88: 180, referring to Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), 226–30. 11. Field, “ ‘Pur les francs homes amender,’ ” 188. 12. See John Scahill, “Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literatures,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 18–32. University-trained hands also abound, especially among the friars’ collections; see Harrington, “Bilingual Form.” 13. John  J. Thompson, “ ‘Frankis rimes here i redd, / Communlik in ilk[a] sted . . .’: The French Bible Stories in Harley 2253,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2000), 271–87; more recently, see also Fein, “Reading Dreams.” 14. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 2–5. See also the Pater Noster and Creed in EME. 15. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, plate T1. 16. I thank Marjorie Harrington for her helpful advice on this; see her “Bilingual Form.” 17. Scahill, “Trilingualism in Middle English Miscellanies,” 20. 18. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Andrew Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise-enpage Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity,” in The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, ed. Robert Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 87–118. 19. See Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles. 20. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, plate 1. Signs of strain show in this early textura of Harley 913, where the scribe was more at home in a university cursive; see Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writing up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2009), 169. For more evidence of difficulty code-switching between languages, see the documentary hand c. 1325 of an English macaronic poem from the Brothers of St. John’s Hospitallers house in Waterford, now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 405, fol. 10v. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Making Early Middle Hiberno-English: Mysteries, Experiments and Lyric Survivals Before 1330,” Early Middle English 2.2 (2020), 1–26. This poem has not been edited. 21. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, plate 2. 22. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, plate 2. That he was influenced by some kind of archaism is clear in his subsequent treatment of the Latin in a text by William of Rimington, a fourteenth-century author copied in a twelfth-century type of hand. 23. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 210–20. 24. Throughout this discussion, I cite Eric Stanley’s edition of the The Owl and the Nightingale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972). Its rubric in Jesus College 29, Altercacio inter filomenam et bubonem (The argument between the owl and the nightingale) is discussed below. On its two manuscripts, both s.xiii3, and dating, see below, and N. R. Ker, The Owl and the Nightingale: Facsimile of the Jesus and Cotton Manuscripts, EETS o.s. 251 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). A third manuscript, now lost, is mentioned in the medieval library cata logue of Titchfield Abbey, Hampshire, a house of Premonstratensian canons. On the dating see note 27 below. 25. Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 40, and note 55; see Peter Dronke, “Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II,” Mediaeval Studies 38 (1976): 185–235: 213.

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26. The question of authorship is unresolved. Candidates for authorship proposed (see Neil Cartlidge, ed., The Owl and the Nightingale [Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008], 101–2, for a full list) include the priest Nicholas of Guildford (see below), an anonymous clerical friend of Nicholas, and the nuns of Shaftesbury Abbey. See Alexandra Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition: A New View of The Owl and the Nightingale,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987): 471–85. 27. The poem was for many years dated to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, based on a reading of lines 1091–92, “That underyat the king Henri—/ Jesus his soule do merci!” (“King Henry discovered what had happened—may Jesus have mercy on his soul!”), as referring to Henry II (d. 1189). If the lines imply that Henry is dead, this would place the poem between 1189 and 1216 (the accession of Henry III, when a second King Henry would be very much alive). Neil Cartlidge (“The Date of The Owl and the Nightingale,” Medium Aevum 65 [1996]: 230–47), however, argued that the later thirteenth-century dating of both manuscripts by Ker opens the possibility that the reference (if it is indeed to a historical king who has passed away) is to Henry III (d. 1272). Though several scholars now lean to the later dating, the question still remains unresolved: see, e.g., the note to line 729 in the Wessex Parallel Web Texts: “Clerics, monks, and canons: i.e., cathedral clergy, monks, and regular canons . . . , who would follow a more elaborate devotional routine than parish priests [line 733]. If the poem is to be dated to the late thirteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that there is no mention of the friars in this list,” http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/owl/owlintro.htm. To this I would add that since good philologists such as its modern editor, E. G. Stanley, assumed the earlier dating (presumably because of the closeness of some aspects of O&N’s language to earlier rather than later thirteenth-century verse), an older date seems at least still plausible. The historical linguist Margaret Laing, however, dates it to the thirteenth century in “ ‘Owl and the Nightingale’: Five New Readings and Further Notes,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 108.3 (2007): 445–77. 28. Linguistically, C (Cotton) has been localized to Worcestershire, and J (Jesus College) to Herefordshire, both in the South West Midlands (see Cartlidge, ed., Owl and Nightingale, p.  XL). The original dialect is unknown, and older theories about a Southeastern origin were likely influenced by place names in the poem. On law, see Bruce Holsinger, “Vernacular Legality: The English Jurisdictions of The Owl and the Nightingale,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 165. 29. On the French and Latin contents of the two manuscripts, see Ker, Facsimile. 30. Salter, English and International, 37. 31. Salter, English and International, 39. 32. This would have translated into Middle English in much the same way; see MED, altercāciǒun (n.) 1. (a) Verbal controversy or strife; quarreling, wrangling. 33. See Ker, Facsimile, x–xi, for the list of contents of both MSS and the lengthy subset shared between them. On the Titchfield MS, see ix, n. 4. 34. Holsinger, “Vernacular Legality,” 165. 35. Domestic violence was also a pastoral care issue. But the audience may also have extended to nuns; see Bella Millett, Wessex Parallel Web Texts online, http://www.southampton .ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/owl/owlintro.htm. 36. Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” 79. 37. Throughout this book I use “Old English” for the literature of the period, and, following interdisciplinary practices, I have reserved the use of “Anglo-Saxon” (Medieval Latin “Anglisaxones”) for the fields of history, legal history and reference to multilingual contexts. I am very

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grateful to Richard Fahey, Elizabeth Tyler, and Christopher Abram for advice. For a balanced account of differences between American and British perspectives, and among disciplines, see Michael Wood, BBC History Magazine, https://www.historyextra .com/period/anglo-saxon /professor-michael-wood-anglo-saxon-name-debate-is-term-racist/. 38. See the discussion in Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures,” for Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches Series: High Medieval Literary Cultures in England, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Elizabeth Tyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, forthcoming). 39. The phrase comes from Christina of Markyate’s Vita, ed. C. H. Talbot, 40–41; see Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures.” 40. Stanley mentions Alexander Neckham and Giraldus Cambrensis (note to 905), the latter intriguing because Giraldus also visibly praised Irish music. 41. Note Bella Millett’s comments in the Wessex Parallel Web Texts cited in note 27 in this chapter. 42. See Stanley’s notes to these lines, pointing out that canons could be in minor orders. 43. See notes to lines 190–95 about Nicholas (Wessex Parallel Web Texts), http://www .southampton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/owl/owltrans.htm. 44. British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. 45. In British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, it is spelled “Laȝamon,” while in the other (and less archaic) extant manuscript, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii, it is spelled “Laweman” or “Loweman.” (The two extant manuscript forms each stem from a derivative of the two Old English forms of the root: “lah-” and “lag-”.) 46. Holsinger, “Vernacular Legality,” 161–62. 47. Based on the work of Lindy Brady and Andrew Rabin, it is clear from Old English texts such as the “Dunsæte Ordinance” (articles for regulating Anglo-Saxon disputes with the Welsh in border areas) that the term “lahmen” had already emerged in the period. See Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures.” 48. I thank Andrew Rabin for advice about this; see also his work with Stefan Jurasinski and Lisi Oliver, English Law Before Magna Carta: Felix Liebermann and Die Gesetze Der Angelsachsen (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 49. Even by 1400, legal garb was still quite priest-like. See Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Catholic University, 1989), fig. 4, p. 102 of a lawyer’s dress with coif and mantle in 1400. 50. Laȝamon’s Brut quoted here from the Caligula version of the Prologue (facing-page edition with Otho version) in Bruce Dickins and R. M. Wilson, Early Middle English Texts (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1951), 20–21. I have also consulted G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie’s facing edition, Laȝamon’s Brut, EETS o.s. 250 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), vol. 1. 51. Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Icons, Images & English Literary Texts: A Study of Illustrated Works from the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003), 102–7. 52. Laurence de Looze, “Signing Off in the Middle Ages: Medieval Textuality and the Strategies of Self-Naming,” in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 162–78. 53. Daniel Donoghue, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum 65 (1990): 543. Of course, we have no idea whether other such poems have not survived. More recently, see Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 54. E. G. Stanley, “Laʒamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments,” Medium Ævum 38.1 (1969): 23–37; among Tiller’s many studies, see Kenneth Tiller, “Romancing History: Masculine Identity and

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Historical Authority in Laʒamon’s Prologue (Cotton MS Caligula A. ix ll. 1–35),” in Laʒamon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation, ed. Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry, and Jane Roberts (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2002), 371–83. 55. See Stephen Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 133. 56. Albin was actually the abbot of Augustine’s monastery and uncanonized. Alcuin may be intended here. 57. Citing Nicole Nyffenegger, Authorising History: Gestures of Authorship in FourteenthCentury English (Cambridge: Scholars Publishing, 2013), 122. 58. Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen, 133. 59. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 182–83. The Otho text is quoted here from Dickins and Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, 21. 60. See note 45 in this chapter. 61. Christopher Cannon, “The Style and Authorship of the Otho Revision of Layamon’s Brut,” Medium Ævum 62.2 (1993): 187–209. Cannon suggests that the Otho reviser “implemented a revisionary programme throughout his entire text” (188), making it incline more to romance. 62. On liturgical issues, see Holsinger, “Vernacular Legality.” 63. Dickins and Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, 1–2, 151–52. See also G. Younge, “Monks, Money, and the End of Old English,” New Medieval Literatures 16 (2015): 39–82. 64. See Dickins and Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, note to line 3. 65. Donoghue, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence,” 543. 66. See Kerby-Fulton, “Bibliographic Ego,” for instances of monastic authors struggling to get the abbot to finance parchment. 67. On questions of medieval publication and patronage, see de Looze, “Signing Off.” 68. On issues of nationalism, see Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 69. Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 70. Paul Hyams, “Thinking English Law in French: The Angevins and the Common Law,” in Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White, ed. Belle Tuten and Tracey Billado (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 175–79. 71. Salter, English and International, 48. 72. See Ralph Hanna’s helpful list of extant London manuscripts in all languages, London Literature, 5–7. “Prisoner’s Lament,” IMEV 322, is now held at the London Metropolitan Archives, for the Corporation of London Records Office, Guildhall, Liber de antiquis legibus, fols. 160v–161r. 73. I have primarily used the superb new edition in Monika Otter, “Contrafacture and Translation: The Prisoner’s Lament,” in The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed. Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 55–81. 74. Thedmar’s chronicle was edited as De Antiquis Legibus Liber, Cronica Maiorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum, ed. Thomas Stapleton, Camden Soc., xxxiv (1846); I have cited the translation in “Additions to the Chronicles: The History of Arnald Fitz-themar,” in Chronicles of the Mayors and Sherifs of London, 1188–1274, ed. H. T. Riley (London: Trübner, 1863), 201–8, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-mayors-sheriffs/1188 -1274/pp201-208.

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75. See Ian Stone, “Arnold Fitz Thedmar: Identity, Politics and the City of London in the Thirteenth Century,” London Journal 40.2 (2015): 106–22, https://doi.org /10.1179/1749632215Y .0000000001. At note 9, Stone helpfully summarizes, “The two documents are found on fols. 157r–158r and 163r–v with a continuation on fols. 1r–2r”; intervening are “a list of city charters in Arnold’s possession (fol. 159r), two songs (160v–161v and 162v) and five lines of verse on the deaths of SS Peter and Paul (fol. 162r).” 76. E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison, English Medieval Songs (London: Faber, 1979), 111. 77. Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” 79. On the high emotions in Thedmar’s Cronica Maiorum, see Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), 42, 306. 78. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, General Introduction to Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England, Texts and Translations c. 1120–c. 1450, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrowne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 1–6. 79. Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, 77; for the later period 1375–1425, see Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City. 80. Hanna, London Literature, 67–79; Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, “London Frenches,” especially “La Feste royale du Pui,” 81. 81. Hanna, London Literature, 63–73, for instances of the personalizing of both texts. 82. Stone, “Arnold Fitz Thedmar,” 115. 83. Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), i, 517. 84. Stone, “Arnold Fitz Thedmar,” 116. 85. See Stone, “Arnold Fitz Thedmar,” 111; for the full story, see “Additions to the Chronicles,” note 1. 86. I thank the London Metropolitan Archives for access to the manuscript. 87. Dobson and Harrison, English Medieval Songs, 112. 88. See http://archive.ling.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2_ scripts/find _msdescriptor.php?idno =138. 89. Otter, “Contrafacture and Translation,” 76. I reproduce here Otter’s spacing since, as she notes, real concern of the author-translator was “matching text to musical phrases” (68). 90. Dobson and Harrison, English Medieval Song, 297. 91. Dobson and Harrison, English Medieval Song, 296. 92. See Otter, “Contrafacture and Translation,” 71–72, for these remarks. 93. Compare these two sung versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = S1OFejRGXzo and https://www.youtube.com/watch? v =X _ k-741NQUI. 94. Hanna, London Literature, 67. 95. Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 111. 96. “Additions to the Chronicles,” notes 5 and 6. 97. See Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, “London Frenches,” 77; Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), chap. 3 on Marguerite Porete’s erotic mysticism and the extreme avowals of love in puy poetry. 98. Anne F. Sutton, “The Tumbling Bear and Patrons: A Venue for the London Puy and Mercery,” in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995), 85–110: 86. 99. On the civil ser vice penchant towards meritocratic values, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Ser vice in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59–83.

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100. See Hanna, London Literature, 67–79, on Horn and on early London civic cultural productions. 101. Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, “La Feste royale du Pui,” 80–81, with line numbers. 102. Quotes from the La Feste royale du Pui are cited from the excellent French edition plus English translation in Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, “La Feste royale du Pui,” 80–82. 103. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Afterword: Social History of the Book and Beyond: Originalia, Medieval Literary Theory and the Aesthetics of Paleography,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 243–54, including reference to this practice with Richard Rolle’s manuscripts, among others. 104. Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor, “Modus tenendi parliamentum, Recension A, ‘XXV. Concerning Transcripts of Records,’ ” in Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 78 (Latin text), 91; see also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 23, on scribal fees for requested copies of Guildhall records. 105. Trans. Wogan-Browne, lines 89–96, with French inserted. 106. Anglo-Norman Dictionary, “point,” meaning #4, “small dot, mark on a surface,” plural: “poynz” (and variants), http://www.anglo-norman.net/gate/index.shtml?session= SSGB4929. 107. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 63–64. 108. Harrington, “Bilingual Form.” 109. See Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 163–212. 110. A 1351 account of France’s top poets, for instance, based on puy competitions lists, in order: Phillipe de Vitry (a bishop), Guillaume de Machaut (a canon), Jean de la Mote, a documentary clerk at court, and Colard Aubert, an unlettered townsman (“ne letrés”), apparently a minstrel: James Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 275. 111. See Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries; Butterfield, “Chaucerian Vernaculars”; Helen Cooper, “London and Southwark Poetic Companies,” in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield, Chaucer Studies 37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109–24. 112. Hanna, London Literature, 36; Sutton, “The Tumbling Bear.” 113. Sutton, “The Tumbling Bear,” 89. 114. Butterfield, “Chaucerian Vernaculars.” See also Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory, “London Frenches,” on Gower’s early ballades in French. 115. See Sebastian Sobecki, “A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 92.3 (2017): 631–60. 116. See J.  A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 28–29 on Hoccleve’s poetry for a Temple dining club of which he was a member, the “Court of Good Company”; and for John Shirley’s many gossiping “rubrics” describing the venues at which particu lar poems by Chaucer, Lydgate, or others were read, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 117. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston, eds., Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts (Cambridge: York Medieval Press, 2014) and see note 154 below; as Bella Millet notes, WW is “immediately preceded in the MS by another allegorical

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debate poem, The Parliament of the Three Ages.” See her introduction for the Wessex Parallel Web Texts, http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/winner/winner.htm. 118. The text is quoted here from the online TEAMS edition by Warren Ginsberg, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/ginsberg-wynnere-and-wastoure#1. However, I have also made use of Turville-Petre’s edition of “Wynnere and Wastoure” in Alliterative Poetry, 38–66, and Stephanie Trigg’s edition, Wynnere and Wastoure, EETS 297 (London: Oxford University Press, 1990). 119. Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, xxii; Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 233. 120. Most recent scholars agree on this dating. See the introduction to Trigg’s edition, Wynnere and Wastoure, xxiv–xxv, especially in relation to the Treasons Statute of 1352; on the historical context, see also Susan Powell, “Wings, Wingfields, and Wynnere and Wastoure,” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 99–118. 121. Emended in Turville-Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” to “three.” 122. Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure transcribes this as “lenede” in the sense of “listened to, attended to” or “given permission, allowed to (read)” or “rewarded” (MED “lenen”). 123. For parallels in the prologues to chansons de geste and elsewhere, perhaps going back to the Rhetorica ad Herennium, see Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, note to lines 24–30, p. 19. The WW poet, however, offers a twist on several conventions in his Prologue (Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, 18, note to lines 1–2). For J. A. Burrow’s suggestion, see “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 75 (1957): 382. 124. See E. Hammond, ed., English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey (New York: Octagon Books, repr. 1965), 194–96. 125. See John Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve,” Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 389–412; Sobecki, Last Words, 85; A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” and more generally de Looze, “Signing Off.” 126. See Ginsberg, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” note to line 19, particularly citing the Chandos Herald’s Prologue to his Life and Deeds of the Black Prince. 127. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008), 24–25, for a detailed list of references to minstrels. 128. Helen Barr tries to reconcile these and becomes understandably exasperated in her Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–15. 129. Thomas Bestul, Satire and Allegory in Wynnere and Wastoure (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 58. 130. Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, 38; Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 233. 131. Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, xxii. 132. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 233. 133. Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 11, building upon work by Paul Strohm. 134. More generally, see also the superb new study by Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 135. Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, 39. 136. Some scholars have even argued, though without evidence, that these were inserted by a later editor.

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137. Pantin, The English Church, 29. 138. William Dohar, The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership: The Diocese of Hereford in the 14th Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 78–79, 106. 139. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 59–61, 87–89; on the genre, see Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism. See also Victoria Flood, “Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy,” The Chaucer Review 49.4 (2015): 427–48. 140. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 36. 141. See Ginsberg, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” note to 149. 142. See http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/winner/winner.htm. 143. See Powell, “Wings”; see Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, note to line 317 for detailed analysis of the complexities of Shareshull’s reputation. 144. Waster would appear to oppose state interference. 145. Shareshull’s courts of “trailbaston” in Chester became much maligned for overuse of tax penalties, perhaps explaining Waster’s anger. The Anglo-Norman poem in Harley 2253, Trailbaston, narrated supposedly by an outlaw forced to live in the woods because of the “trailbaston” legislation, takes up such issues in more detail and in a tone similar to Waster’s. See Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures.” 146. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 139–40. 147. For a history of real papal banners, all religious, see https://fotw.info/flags/va _ hist .html#over. In England, Archbishop Scrope of York (d. 1405), actually did go to war under his own banner, which showed the Five Wounds of Christ (see Chapter 6.3); and for an image, http://www .luminarium.org /encyclopedia/richardscrope.htm. 148. See MED; and Ginsberg, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” note to 144, further mentioning that “Holinshed (Chronicles) reports that in 1343, one challenger in a tournament held at Smithfield came dressed as the pope and brought twelve others with him who were dressed as cardinals (Bestul, 103). During the 1340s and 50s, feelings in England ran high against the Pope.” 149. For the actual banner of the Franciscans, see https://www.franciscanmedia .org /friar-s -e-spirations-the-franciscan-coat-of-arms/; for the real Dominican banner, see https://www .heraldry-wiki.com/heraldrywiki/index.php?title =Dominican _Order There is a long history of Franciscan apocalyptic thought; see Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, chapter 2. 150. Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture in the English and Irish Civil Ser vice: The Modus tenendi parliamentum and Its Literary Relations,” Traditio 53 (1998): 149–203. 151. He will knight Winner at the “proude pales of Parys” (498), i.e. the “Palais de la Cité” where, as Turville-Petre notes, after 1346, the victorious English campaign reached the outskirts of Paris (note to line 498). See Ginsberg, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” note to 498. 152. See, e.g., Piers Plowman C.XXII.424–27, and Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 178–79. 153. Matthew Clifton Brown, “Radical History and Sacral Kingship in Late Medieval England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2010), 91–92; see also Brown’s “The Three Kings of Cologne and Plantagenet Political Theology,”Mediaevistik 30 (2017): 61–85. 154. Three Kings is copied at fols. 111r–119v of the Thornton MS (in Booklet IIb), WW at 176v–181vb (in Booklet IV); I follow here the booklet structure in Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, xv; but see also Fein and Johnston, eds. Robert Thornton and His Books, for detailed analysis of the booklet structure; for Piers traveling with Three Kings, see, e.g., San Marino, Huntington Library HM 114.

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155. Brown, “The Three Kings of Cologne,” 72. 156. “Caspar Malchior Balthazar Consumatum”; see the British Museum’s description of the Glenlyon Brooch online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection _object_details.aspx?objectId= 63345&partId=1. 157. See Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson  D. 939, part 6, for the almanac; Metropolitan Museum of Art 27.162.I for the velvet chasuble.

chapter 2 1. W.  A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 29 for this and next quote. I am grateful to Derek Pearsall, Martha Driver, Linne Mooney, Estelle Stubbs, and Katherine Zieman for advice on earlier sections of this chapter published in Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2014): 1–34, and more recently Karrie Fuller, Hannah Zdansky, Arvind Thomas, and Sebastian Sobecki. 2. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127–28. 3. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127. 4. See Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy”: The ‘C’ Version Autobiography and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and K. KerbyFulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 67–143. Robert Adams has made the case that Langland can be identified as a specific William de Rokele: R. Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013); see also Michael Johnston, “William Langland and John Ball,” Yearbook of Langland Studies (2016): 29–74; Sebastian Sobecki, “Hares, Rabbits, Pheasants: Piers Plowman and William Longewille, a Norfolk Rebel in 1381,” Review of English Studies 69 (April  2018): 216–36 (I thank Professor Sobecki for sharing his prepublication work with me); and Andrew Galloway, “Parallel Lives: William Rokele and the Satirical Literacies of Piers Plowman,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 40 (2018): 43–111. Galloway candidly characterizes his own case as “speculative,” and equally candidly sums up current Rokele scholarship this way, “None of this confirms that William, son of Eustace Rokele was the Worcester-and-Essex William Rokele or the author of Piers Plowman, but none rules it out,” 51. 5. For a summary of recent codicological scholarship on Hoccleve’s likely role in the posthumous preservation of Chaucer’s works, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 87– 94; see also note 42 below on recent work by Sebastian Sobecki. 6. See Chapters 5 and 6 on the liturgical economy; the universities are discussed below and also in relation to Audelay in Chapter 4; on the effect of the Great Schism, the patronage, and papal provisions, see Pantin, The English Church, chaps. I.III and I.IV; Evans, “The Number”; and William Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1987). 7. For the arguments of McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” see the Introduction. 8. T. A. R. Evans, “The Number, Origins and Careers of Scholars,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. II, Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J.  I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford, 1992), 485–538. 9. Evans, “The Number,” 538. 10. Cited from Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008). All C-Text quotations are from this edition, unless other wise noted.

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11. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman, note to C.V.36; MED, fr2nd (n.), definition “1(b) one who befriends a person or an institution, a benefactor, a patron” and “4. A kinsman; a blood relative, a kinsman by marriage; also, a foster parent [quot.: a1375].” 12. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, note to C.V.36; MED, sc3le (n. (2)), definition “2(a) A center for higher studies; a university; also, a school or faculty of a university.” 13. See Chapters 5 and 6; and Zieman, Singing the New Song, especially for her discussion of “contractual liturgy,” 92. 14. For a summary of scholarship on C.V, see Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, 21 and his notes to V, lines 1–108. 15. Evans, “The Number,” 509–11, 511n84, citing Registrum cancellarii Oxoniensis 1434–69, ed. H. E. Salter, O. H. S., xciii–iv (Oxford, 1932), ii.40, as an example in which the chancellor provided the letters authorizing begging. 16. Evans, “The Number,” 509. 17. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 12, quoting Guy Little. 18. See also Sobecki, “Hares, Rabbits, Pheasants.” 19. For the memorandum itself, see George Kane, The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 26–27; for more recent studies, see also note 4 above. 20. Robert Adams’s identification of one particu lar William de Rokele from a family in Langland and the Rokele Family remains circumstantial; more recently Galloway has also explored a John de Rokele (“Parallel Lives”); see note 4 above. We must all remember that the Trinity College, Dublin memorandum, although likely the most plausible extant account of who Langland was, is itself still uncorroborated. 21. Both will be discussed in detail below. 22. See Evans, “The Number,” 509, citing Alfred B. Emden, An Oxford Hall in Medieval Times (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 210–11; and Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, orig. 1924), iii.405–6. 23. See Evans, “The Number,” 515, who notes that unfree tenants could be more financially secure than free ones, indicating an important distinction between social and economic class. 24. Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists.” 25. See the discussion in Chapter 5 on ordination issues; also Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists”; Evans, “The Number.” 26. See Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy.” 27. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, note to C.V.73–75 regarding the gentry mortgaging their estates to fight for the realm; most recently, see Galloway, “Parallel Lives,” 51–53; McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 128, on Audelay. 28. See Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law; canon law training is further discussed below in relation to Hoccleve’s education. 29. I would note that in Langland and the Rokele Family, Adams’s thesis does not take account of the change in attitude toward benefices and pluralism from the A-text to the C-text. 30. The first three are the same as Langland’s list (which also included “my seuene psalms”: see Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, note to C.III.464 and C.V.46–47). Usk’s choices reflect his status as a clerk in minor orders and, of course, out of devotion (valde devote) in the face of his upcoming death: “dicensque cum traheretur valde devote Placebo et Dirige, vij. Psalmos Penitenciales, Te Deum laudamus, Nunc dimittis, Quicumque vult, et alios in articulo mortis tangents.” L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds. and trans., Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 314–15; see Paul Strohm,

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“Politics and Poetics,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 89; and Strohm, “The Textual Vicissitudes of Usk’s Appeal,” Hochon’s Arrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 145–60: 159–60. For liturgical practices, see Zieman, Singing the New Song. 31. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1999), lines 981–85, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/blyth-hoccleve-the-regiment-of -princes. This passage is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. On Hoccleve and Langland, and the complaints about scribal ailments that pre-date both, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 87–90. 32. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 87–90; more recently, see also Hanna, Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, 2:22; see also Marc Drogin, Anathema: Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (New York: A. Schram, 1983), for instances of this kind of scribal complaint. 33. There is an important sense in which Langland is trying to reclaim and rehabilitate genuine modes of begging (discussed below), perhaps under the influence of Franciscan Spirituals sources. See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 3. See also Derek Pearsall, “Poverty and the Poor in Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. E. D. Kennedy, R. Waldron, and J. H. Wittig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), 167–85. 34. I cite from A.  G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, eds., Piers Plowman: The Z Version (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), retaining their boldface for unique lines. 35. Wogan-Browne et al., The Idea of the Vernacular, 237. 36. See Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists,” 28; and Evans, “The Number,” 527, on rectories being lost in large numbers to monasteries. 37. See Margaret Connolly, “Mapping Manuscripts and Readers of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), 261–78. 38. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127. 39. Melinda Nielsen, “Scholastic Persuasion in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” Viator 42.2 (2011), 183–204: 186. Nielsen traces the pragmatic and theological kinds of learning available to a man like Usk, clearly intellectually ambitious; see Thomas Usk: The Testament of Love, ed. Shoaf, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/shoaf-usk-testament-of-love-introduction#sources. 40. Hoccleve, Regiment, ed. Blyth, 12; see also Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 89–90. 41. See Strohm, “The Textual Vicissitudes of Usk’s Appeal”; and note 30 above; see also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 137–38 on Usk. 42. Most recently on the Formulary, see Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author (Oxford: Clarendon, 2019), 77–86; and S. Sobecki, “The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks,” Review of English Studies, New Series (2020), 1–27, which I thank Professor Sobecki for sharing prior to publication; see also Linne Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 293–340. 43. See Kerby-Fulton, “The Clerical Proletariat and the Underemployed Scribe and Vocational Crisis,” Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2014): 1–34. 44. Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, I.  The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick  J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. LXL (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), xxxv. Building on the work of John Burrow, Ethan Knapp, Sebastian Sobecki, and others who have constructively tackled the impact of Hoccleve’s

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work environment on his poetry, the present study’s goal is to illuminate this one key strand of his clerical orientation that is often missing or unaccented in other accounts. 45. A. C. Spearing refers to the first 2,016 lines as a “preamble” because the Prologue proper is the 140 lines that follow it. Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 133. Here I have stuck with the traditional terminology, “Prologue,” to refer to the whole thing. 46. “Thow seidest th’enchesoun / Why that thow took upon thee marriage / Was unto noon othir entencioun / But love oonly thee sente that corage” (RP 1618–21). 47. See the Complaint and Dialogue, especially in the discussion in the latter about Hoccleve needing to atone for (supposed) ill things he has written about women in the past. The friend advises Thomas that he will not allow him to “suche rule and governaunce” (Hoccleve’s Works, 718) as to take advice from women, since even the serpent had been advised in Genesis that a woman will break its head (Hoccleve’s Works, 725ff.); therefore, to break a man’s head “semeth light” (Hoccleve’s Works, 728). Some scholars have of course understandably registered this type of passage as antifeminist; see, e.g., Catherine Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes,” in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1996), 55–84. Spearing prefers to see the playful banter in this kind of passage as a facet of the “autography” genre, by asking, that is, not what Hoccleve really thought, but rather “what kind of appeal to his first readers he intended” (Medieval Autographies, 134). To me it reads like a man accustomed to homosocial exchange and for whom writing for mixed audiences is still, let’s say, “under adjustment.” For a similar view, see Sobecki, Last Words, 96. 48. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors to Middle English Literary Texts,” in Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 207–44. 49. “Unlike Chaucer, Hoccleve is quite candid about his sources [lines 2038–53], for the Regiment proper. Hoccleve identifies three sources: the apocryphal letter of Aristotle to Alexander the Great known as the Secreta Secretorum, . . . the De regimine principum of Egidius Romanus (c. 1247–1316), also known as Egidius Colonna or Giles of Rome, the work of an intellectual who contributed importantly to political and church theory.” Hoccleve later identifies Jacob de Cessolis’s Chessbook as his third source. See Blyth’s Introduction in Hoccleve, Regiment. I cite Blyth’s edition of the Regiment by line and note number below, from https://d.lib.rochester.edu /teams/text/blyth-hoccleve-regiment-of-princes. 50. Melinda Nielsen, “Impersonating Boethius in Middle English Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2010); and Nielsen, “Emending Oneself: Compilatio and Revisio in William Langland, Ranulph Higden, and Thomas Usk,” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John Thompson, and Sarah Baechle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 573–98. 51. See Blyth’s section titled “Glosses and Other Sources” in Hoccleve, Regiment. Blyth also expresses the view that the glosses do not tell us much about Hoccleve’s sources—his disappointment is understandable if one is looking for large-scale source evidence, since the glosses are piecemeal evidence for local allusions at best. But I do think that as a corpus they tell us something greatly significant about Hoccleve’s learning and training. 52. Blyth, Introduction to Hoccleve, Regiment, 11–12, is careful to note any particu lar instances in which marginalia appear to have been added by a much later hand. 53. “See the notes to lines 2353, 2710, and 3098, as well as citations other wise identified, at lines 4453, 4460, 4509, 4523, and 4528,” cited in Blyth’s note to 1688, in Hoccleve, Regiment. 54. See Blyth’s note to 1688, in Hoccleve, Regiment.

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55. Arvind Thomas, email communication with the author, July 18, 2019. I particularly wish to thank Arvind Thomas for kindly reading the present chapter prior to publication. He is currently undertaking an exciting new study of Hoccleve’s use of canon law, and he has graciously shared some preliminary observations with me, enough to verify beyond doubt that Hoccleve’s knowledge of canon law was genuine. His recent book, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law, sets the stage for these inquiries, stressing both the intellectual and creative use that Langland made of canon law. Clearly Hoccleve shares somehow in this training. 56. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, Introduction, 29–30. 57. See Blyth’s note to 2710, including his translation, in Hoccleve, Regiment. All the translations from Hoccleve’s glosses cited here are Blyth’s. 58. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 210–22 on Chaucer, and 87–94 on Hoccleve. 59. Blyth translates this last line, “The book says, similar [they] be and of one weight they weigh” (Hoccleve, Regiment). 60. “In Canone, Adulterare sponte perjurare et hominem sponte occidere equiparantur” (“In the Canon, To commit adultery, willingly swear falsely, and willingly to kill are regarded as equal”), gloss to 1688. 61. Blyth, Hoccleve, Regiment, explains in his note to 1683: “Jeronimus dicit, Adulterium secundum locum habet in penis (Jerome says, ‘Adultery occupies the second place among punishments’). Not in Jerome, but in the Decretum of Ivo of Chartres, where it is attributed to the letter of Clement to James; in PL 161, col. 604D.” 62. Blyth notes that Hoccleve uses some spurious citations to Seneca; see his Introduction to Hoccleve, Regiment. 63. There are parallels in glosses from canon law, which Hoccleve (or his source) misattributed to Augustine at line 4453ff. and at 4460 on the subject of speaking truth to power. At 4453: “Who that for drede of any lord or sire / Hydeth the trouthe and nat wole it out seye, / He upon him provokith Goddes ire” (“Augustinus: Quisquis metu alicuius potestatis veritatem occultat iram dei super se provocat quia magis timet hominem quam deum”), which Blyth suggests is not Augustine but likely from Gratian, PL 187, col. 868A. And at 4460: “Augustinus: Melius est pro veritate pati [MS: patris] supplicium quam pro adulatione beneficium, et cetera,” which Blyth also notes is “not Augustine; compare Gratian in PL 187, col. 868A” (Hoccleve, Regiment). 64. Quoting Blyth’s note to 1725, who is citing Nicholas of Lyra, Biblia Latina cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra et expositionibus Guillelmi Britonis in omnes prologos S. Hieronymi et additionibus Pauli Burgensis replicisque Matthiae Doering, 4 vols. (Venice: Octavianus Scotus, 1489). Blyth further notes, “Hoccleve’s explicit reference establishes that he had access to a Bible with Nicholas’ commentary” (Hoccleve, Regiment). 65. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 214–21. 66. Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Penn State Press, 2001) 21; Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 2 and note 5. 67. Quoted from “Inns of Chancery,” Gray’s Inn: History, https://www.graysinn.org.uk /the-inn/history/inns-chancery. 68. Malcolm Richardson, “The Earliest Known Owners of the Canterbury Tales MSS,” Chaucer Review 25 (1990): 17–32: 19–20. 69. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 93, my emphasis. 70. Sandler, Omne bonum, 1:29.

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71. Courtenay also lists the remarkable bequests of canon law books given by schoolmasters of the St. Paul’s almonry school and the rich collection on canon law in the St. Paul’s library (Schools and Scholars, 101). 72. Courtenay notes that law professors could earn more as London lawyers. As I have shown elsewhere, Ralph Strode, one of the dedicatees of Chaucer’s Troilus, moved from a Merton College, Oxford teaching position to the world of London law practice (for years scholars doubted that it could be the same person). But medieval university jobs were regarded often as “starter” careers, not career ends. Kerby-Fulton, “Oxford” in Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe: 1348–1418, vol. 1, ed. David Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 208–26. 73. See Somerset House, Archives Exhibitions, “In the Beginning . . .” at https://kingscollections.org /exhibitions/archives/beginning /site/somersethouse. 74. Sobecki, Last Words, 68, discusses the will of Hoccleve’s close friend and Privy Seal colleague, John Bailey, who wished to be buried in the Carmelite convent. See the remarkable map of this area showing the bishops’ palaces, constructed especially for Courtenay’s Schools and Scholars, 96. Online, see the location of the Carmelite Friary, the various Inns and The Strand on the Agas Map of Early Modern London, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm. 75. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, 15, 24–25. His Balade for the mayor and guildsman Robert Chichele, brother of the famous archbishop, is a chanson d’aventure that turns into a devotional work of prayers to Mary and Jesus. This is one of ten religious poems that Burrow treats as a cluster. 76. For some of the great new opportunities to see manuscripts of Hoccleve online, including his holograph HM 111, see the following: (1) for the Regement with glosses (fol. 73v of Huntington Library, MS EL 26 A 13), a manuscript with Shirley associations containing the Middle English Asneth: http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf?Description=&CallNumber =EL+26 +A+13; (2) for images of Huntington Library, MS HM 111, especially fol. 1, “Remonstrance to Oldcastle”: http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf?Description=&CallNumber=HM+111; (3) for Huntington Library, MS HM 135: http://www.digital-scriptorium.org/huntington/HM135 .html; (4) for the full MSS listed in (1) and (2) above: Huntington Digital Library, http://hdl .huntington.org /cdm/search/searchterm/Hoccleve/order/nosort. The first three items belong to the Digital Scriptorium Database, Regents of the University of California, last modified November 12, 2002. 77. Sobecki, Last Words, 85; Spearing, Medieval Autographies 134 and elsewhere, arguing for “autography,” a fictionalized use of the “I” speaker on the model of the French dit style, a genre Hoccleve certainly knew. One complicating factor for the latter is that so much of what Hoccleve tells us about himself can be corroborated by documentary record and, I would stress, by his own autobiographical glosses in places (e.g., as John Burrow points out, in his poetic address to Lord Furnival asking for payment of his annuity, Hoccleve wrote a side note in the Huntington holograph that said “Annus ille fuit annus restrictions annuitatum” [That year was the year of the restriction of the annuities]) (Burrow, Hoccleve, 14–15). 78. See Courtenay’s subchapter “London,” in Schools and Scholars. 79. Quotations are from J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, EETS o.s. 313 (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). 80. A. G. Rigg, “Hoccleve’s Complaint and Isidore of Seville,” Speculum 45 (1970): 564–70. 81. See Burrow’s note to Complaint, line 372, and his appendix, Excursus II, p. 193, with an edition of the epitome of the Isidore text Burrow found in Bodley 110, a manuscript containing a theological collection such as Hoccleve likely knew. There is also evidence, however, that Hoccleve knew the unabridged version Rigg assumed, as Burrow’s note indicates.

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82. Burrow, Hoccleve’s Complaint, lx. And see also, Sobecki, Last Words, chapter 2, “The Series: Thomas Hoccleve’s Year in Mourning.” 83. This is argued in detail by Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 208–32. 84. The exact circumstance of Hoccleve’s allusion Nuttall prefers to interpret politically, relating it to the stereotype of the unsuitable chapel clerk of Richard’s familia, “who places influence at court before liturgical duties.” Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 69. 85. See Burrow, Hoccleve, 24–25. See also Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 40. Like other older studies, it has a separate chapter on Hoccleve’s “Religious Verse” (chap. 5). 86. On Hoccleve’s important use of the ars moriendi tradition, see Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); and Appleford, “The Sea Ground and the London Street: The Ascetic Self in Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve,” Chaucer Review 51.1 (2016): 49–67. See also Sobecki, Last Words, 100. 87. Burrow, “Manuscripts of the Series: Extracts List,” in Hoccleve, 51–52. 88. David Watt, “ ‘My Skyn to Turne’: Beholding the Series in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53,” in The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press Scholarship Online, 2014), http://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949 /liverpool/9780859898690.001.0001/upso-9780859898690. 89. Burrow, Hoccleve, 16–17. 90. For this entire discussion and quotations, see Chapter 3. 91. Ruth Kennedy, “ ‘A Bird in Bishopswood’: Some Newly-Discovered Lines of Alliterative Verse from the Late Fourteenth Century,” in Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle, ed. Myra Stokes and T. L. Burton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 71–87. 92. See the MED online for definitions of birdlime: “brid ~ [see brid 5. (a)]; (b) fig. something that entraps [birds]; (c) ? glue; (d) ? mineral pitch, bitumen; (e) mud, slime.” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, last modified April 24, 2013, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi /m/mec/med-idx?size =First+100&type =headword&q1= brid&rgxp = constrained. 93. London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) 25125/34. On the scientific writings, see Kennedy, “A Bird,” 73–74; they are on the face; accounts on the dorse. 94. Parkes, cited in Kennedy, “A Bird,” 74. 95. For this theory, see Marie-Hélène Rousseau, Saving the Souls of Medieval London: Perpetual Chantries at St. Paul’s, c. 1200–1548 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 115–16. 96. Kennedy, “A Bird,” 76–77. 97. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 115–16. 98. I have only had a chance to examine two of those held at the London Metropolitan Archives in any detail: formerly Guildhall Library MS 25125/32 and 25125/34. 99. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 87–90. 100. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 116. On Palmer, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “The Women Readers in Langland’s Earliest Audience: Some Codicological Evidence,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 121–34. 101. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 115–16. 102. See Kerby-Fulton, “The Clerical Proletariat,” figure 3, p. 33, for the image and the caption detailing the Marchaunt encounter in Tyckhill’s roll.

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103. “Item soluitur Johanni Marchaunt pro precepto eiusdem vicecomitis,” in KerbyFulton, “The Clerical Proletariat,” figure 3, p. 33. 104. For the English manuscripts attributed to Scribe D, see Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 38, and for his employment history, 56–57. As with all scribal identifications, some scholars have disagreed or presented alternatives, e.g. Lawrence Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). The jury is still out on Warner’s evidence, as well. Either way, it is not possible to completely dismiss all Mooney and Stubb’s evidence of Middle English literary activity at the London Guildhall, some of which has been long established. 105. See Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 106. Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse,” 329–30; Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2005), xiii, for the types of punctuation. And see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 45, for their use in “Blacksmiths.” 107. See Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, eds., Young Choristers, 650–1700 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 44ff., on Norwich’s almonry school for boys of all ages and choirmasters appointed from outside the monastery. On “Blacksmiths” and “Choristers,” see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 42–43. 108. For a summary of the editorial arguments, pro and con, as to the authenticity of the Z-text, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Piers Plowman,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 513–38, esp. 518–20. And for a very detailed analysis of the textual evidence, see A. V. C. Schmidt, William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 2:211–30. See also Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary: The Case of the Z Text of Piers Plowman and the Evidence of London Reading Circles,” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, co-edited with John Thompson and Sarah Baechle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 489–515. 109. See also Z.II.99ff. and 119ff.; and see Fuller, “The Craft of the Z-Maker.” 110. Also quoted above Introduction, note 11, from Beverly Gilbert, “ ‘Civil’ and the Notaries,” Medium Aevum 50 (1981): 49–65: 59. 111. See Simony and Civil in Z.II.40–42 and 160–70. 112. The London scribe who made the copy of Piers Plowman in Huntington Library, MS HM 114 similarly had access to all three versions of the poem. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 70. For Mooney and Stubbs’s identification of him as Richard Osbarn, see Scribes and the City, 17ff. See also Karrie Fuller, “Repurposing Piers Plowman: Literary Geography and the Codicological Remaking of Langland’s Work” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2016). 113. See Chapter 1 on the importance of merchants, lawyers, and scribes in the London Puy. 114. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. A. G. Kane (London: Athlone, 1960), variants to A.V.241. Three manuscripts read “redde” at 240. 115. Here “caucyon” means “surety, bond” given against a loan. See Rigg and Brewer, Piers Plowman: The Z Version, note to Z.V.142. 116. See Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. Ione Kemp Knight (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1967). Among the three or four clerks named Thomas Wimbledon scholars have identified, all are chaplains or in minor orders.

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117. The exegetical interpretations of the passage, too complex for discussion here, enrich interpretations of Z, as redactors and imitators of Langland knew well. See Stephen Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 245ff. As Augustine argued, “not all aspects of the steward praised by the lord are to be imitated” (247). The inability to dig signified the inability to do penance, which clarifies Langland’s invocation of the parable in relation to Sloth and unrestituted robbery. 118. Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” 312. 119. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, note to C.V.86– 87. The “et in pabulo” is added. 120. Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” 312. 121. The Gospel parable of the treasure hidden in the field (Matthew 13:44) and the parable of the woman who found a silver coin (Luke 15:10). 122. See Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary”; also Kerby-Fulton, “Piers Plowman,” Cambridge History, esp. 518–20 on Z. See also Fuller, “The Craft of the Z-Maker.” 123. See Fuller, “The Craft of the Z-Maker,” on Z as more generous toward the ecclesiastical hierarchy than Langland. 124. Pearsall, “Poverty and the Poor in Piers Plowman.” 125. See Burrow, Hoccleve, 13, for references to Hoccleve receiving gifts of clothing for his scribal work. 126. And even, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, members of the clerical proletariat who earned their living as liturgical singers. 127. For a brilliant new study of Langland’s deep understanding of canon law, see Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Canon Law, on pardons and the Pardon episode (156–63), concluding that in the C-text, “no one is above the law pertaining to restitution” (i.e., Redde quod debes). 128. See Fuller, “The Craft of the Z-Maker.” 129. See Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary.” And also on the role of the suppression of the Pardon scene in C, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “The Pedagogy of an Oppressed Text: The C Version of Piers Plowman,” in Approaches to Teaching Piers Plowman, ed. Thomas A. Goodman (New York: Publications of the MLA, 2019), 217–22. 130. On the Puy, see Chapter 1; Hanna, London Literature, 126–29; Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City; Kathryn Veeman, “ ‘Sende þis booke ageyne hoome to Shirley’: John Shirley and the Circulation of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2010).

chapter 3 1. See above, Chapter  2, Case Study 1, on Hoccleve’s oeuvre and sources. On his manuscripts, see especially J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, EETS e.s. 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001). For a full listing, see Oxford Bibliographies Online: Hoccleve, ed. Andrew Galloway, http://www.oxfordbibliographies .com.proxy.library.nd.edu/view/. 2. See especially Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 107–28. Knapp’s study informs several aspects of this book, e.g., regarding the bureaucratic identity and con-

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structions of the self, scribal labour, and his refreshingly nuanced views of Hoccleve on heresy. Building on Burrow’s important scholarship, and paralleling Perkins’s fine Hoccleve’s Regiment, Knapp also treats the autobiographicality issues of Hoccleve’s work in relation to bureaucratic genres (e.g., petitions, model formulary letters, etc.). A. C. Spearing has a good account of these issues, though arguing mostly against them in his Medieval Autographies, 133–37 (discussed below). Most recently, as discussed above, see Sebastian Sobecki, Last Words, chap. 2, for new archival discoveries regarding Hoccleve’s life and their implications. Much classic scholarship of the 1990s covered Hoccleve’s Lancastrian politics (e.g., Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal SelfRepresentation,” Speculum 69 [1994]: 386–410; Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998]. Other items will be cited below. This chapter (on Hoccleve’s Langlandianism, interest in the priesthood, and ultimate career disappointment) is a narrower, more specialized topic. See also Chapter 2 above, note 76, on autobiography, and note 47 on Hoccleve’s relations with women. 3. For a fascinating look at the question of intertextualities that may go both ways between contemporaries, see Anne Middleton, “Thomas Usk’s ‘Perdurable Letters’: The Testament of Love from Script to Print,” Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998): 63–116; Melinda Nielsen, “Emending Oneself ”: Compilatio and Revisio in William Langland, Ranulph Higden, and Thomas Usk,” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices, ed. Kathryn KerbyFulton, Thompson and Baechle, 573–98. 4. See Chapter 1. 5. See Derek Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 138–52. 6. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles  R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1999), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/blyth-hoccleve-the-regiment-of -princes. On Hoccleve and Langland, the tradition of scribal complaints about the body that predate both, and discussion of manuscript variants with more alliteration (e.g., the more Langlandian variant “swynk” in line 985), see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo and Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 87–90. 7. In Langland’s parallel passage, as we saw (chap. 2), Reason interrogated the I-speaker about his alleged laziness, offering a list of such jobs, including duties suggesting he was still in minor orders: “ ‘Can thow seruen’ he sayde, ‘or syngen in a churche, / Or koke [pile hay] for my cokeres [haycock makers] or to the cart piche’ ” (C.V.12–13), followed by a longer list of agricultural tasks. 8. This passage is discussed below in Section 2. 9. On the legal proletariat, see the Introduction. 10. See Zieman, Singing the New Song, 92–100, on contractual liturgy, which she argues reached its “greatest formalization in the perpetual chantry” (94). See also A.  K. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments in the Late Medieval Church: Some English Evidence,” Studies in Church History 26 (1989): 122, on the mobility of the unbeneficed in search of new opportunities, especially those with liturgical skills. 11. On Langland’s account of being a university student and the academic proletariat: see Janet Coleman, English Literature in History, 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 33–35. 12. See the next chapter on Audelay for discussion of these; and see Chapter 5 for a discussion of “Choristers’ Lament” and Langland’s comparison of clerical error in a charter to clerical mistakes or omissions in the Divine Office or mass. Like the Choristers’ author, Langland also uses a kind of “choir slang,” e.g., Piers, B.III.312.

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13. Hoccleve likely hailed from Hockliffe, Bedfordshire: see Sobecki, Last Words, 71ff.; Mooney, “Some New Light on Hoccleve.” Mooney also discusses several key documents illuminating Hoccleve’s work life and relationship with Chaucer; see also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 123–31. 14. See Derek Pearsall, Introduction to Piers Plowman by William Langland, an Edition of the C-Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); and see Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work: Langland, Labour, and Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 15. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest: 100 Favorite Songs of American Workers Complete with Music and Historical Notes (New York: Dover, 1973). 16. E.g., “riot,” “fauel” in La Male Regle. A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119, commented on this un-Chaucerian habit of Hoccleve’s as the “persistent use of small-scale personification. . . . This is one of the hallmarks of his style throughout his work, and may conceivably indicate the influence of Piers Plowman, a poem that was certainly widely read in the London area in the early fifteenth century,” which Blyth cites (202n7); see the discussion of this problem below in Section 2. 17. Compare Langland’s C.V apologia pro vita sua, discussed in Chapter 2. 18. In this passage, Langland is excoriating monastic houses that do not bother to keep up the growing number of parishes in their charge, as well as those they appoint to benefices. For the rise in monasteries overseeing parishes and their benefices, see Introduction above, and in relation to Audelay, Chapter 4. 19. On the A-text and later texts in relation to pluralism, see Kerby-Fulton, “Piers Plowman,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 513–38. 20. Barrie Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 4, quoted in the Introduction, Section 3 above, and noting Wyclif ’s early tolerance of absentee appointments. 21. R. L. Storey, “Gentleman Bureaucrats,” in Profession Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of A. B. Myers, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), 94–129: 103. Storey goes on to discuss the dramatic laicization of the civil ser vice starting in the early fifteenth century—interestingly, Hoccleve positions himself as swimming against this tide. 22. Blyth’s note to this passage at line 1408 indicates that there is a marginal note in a later hand: “Nota de curatis [Take note concerning curates].” 23. See Sobecki, Last Words, chap. 2, devoted to the evidence of Bailey’s will. 24. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 14, referring to both the Oldcastle poem and Hoccleve’s Marian lyrics. 25. See Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2:110. 26. See the evidence and discussion of Thomas Fovent (Favent) on this point below. 27. Storey, “Gentleman Bureaucrats,” 103–4. 28. See Veeman, “John Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” discussed below. 29. Some exceptions were known. See Storey, “Gentleman Bureaucrats.” 30. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, plate 8, pp. 26–28, and discussion of iconographic parallels; see Chapter 4 on Audelay’s “Sir John” satire in Marcolf and Solomon and Figure 4.3, illustrating William of Pagula’s Oculus. 31. Thomas Fovent or Favent (d. 1404) is the author of a brief political chronicle in Latin from the period of the Appellants, briefly described as: “Clerk and civil servant in London. Re-

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ceived a clerical living at Berwick St. Leonard (Wilts.) 1390 . . . [and] later clerical livings in Wiltshire; his will was sealed at St. Mary Bishopsgate, London. He was the author of a short Latin chronicle of the anti-Ricardian parliaments of 1386–88, Historia siue narracio de modo et forma mirabilis parliamenti.” For this and a list of the extant manuscripts, see Brill Online Reference Works, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-the-medieval-chronicle /favent-thomas-SIM _000560. 32. John Shirley was an enthusiastic fifteenth-century compiler of works by Chaucer and other Middle English poets, plus the author of versified prefaces to his collections. See the excellent article by Kathryn Veeman, “John Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2016): 255–63, and the discussion below. 33. See Clementine Oliver, “A Political Pamphleteer in Late Medieval England: Thomas Fovent, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and the Merciless Parliament of 1388,” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2003): 167–98; and her Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in FourteenthCentury England (York: York Medieval Press, 2010). I am grateful to Clementine Oliver for generously sharing her work with me. 34. Interestingly, “nepotism” of an unusual sort may also lie behind one of his benefices, as Oliver shows: apparently he was related to the abbess of Shaftesbury, in whose gift at least one of his benefices lay. See Oliver, “A Political Pamphleteer.” 35. Translated by Andrew Galloway, Appendix to The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 231–52: 246–47 for notes on religious drama and Psalm allusions. 36. See the discussion in Chapter 4 about the meritocratic ideals of the civil ser vice (both royal and civic), and see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture.” 37. “Shirley was first instituted as rector on May 3, 1398, and a proxy, the clerk John Whytewaye, carried out his duties” (Veeman, “Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” 256). Shirley had a long career in the Exchequer and then (like John Audelay) in the ser vice of a magnate’s household. On Shirley’s compiling activities, see Kathryn Veeman, “ ‘Sende this booke ageyne hoome to Shirley’: John Shirley and the Circulation of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2011). 38. Veeman, “Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” 257. 39. Veeman, “Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career,” 257. She adds: “Shirley likely was granted his initial benefice in 1398 in reward for administrative ser vice to the Crown in the mid-to-late 1390s, while Richard II was still in power. He continued his ser vice to the Crown after Henry IV’s ascent to the throne” (257–58). 40. See Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, Introduction, which traces this as well. Also discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to Audelay’s career. 41. For multiple discussions of Shirley and his oeuvre, see the cluster of essays on his work in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016), which includes Veeman, “Shirley’s Early Bureaucratic Career.” 42. Blyth’s note to line 1487 summarizes James Simpson’s interesting thesis: “Nemo [i.e.,] ‘No one,’ or ‘Nobody,’ is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus identifies himself with that name as a ruse and defense against the giant Poliphemus. The Odyssey was of course unavailable to Hoccleve, but the matter of the epic was available.” See James Simpson, “Nobody’s Man: Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of London, 1995), 149–80. I would add here that the tendency in scholarship on this pas-

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sage is to elide or conflate the contents of this stanza with the contents of lines 1499–1505 (on those in the ser vice of great lords who use their position to cheat the scribes of the Privy Seal by eluding payment). These are, however, two diferent problems: in the present stanza, the Old Man unmistakably asks whether Hoccleve’s colleagues are not indeed well beneficed: “Been they nat wel ybeneficed?” (1486), to which he responds, “yis,” but as the next stanza makes clear (1492–98), it is not courtier clients of the Privy Seal who have helped; rather, they are unreliable advocates, refusing to put in a good word when they could. Also, “Nemo” is a common locution in a variety of homiletic and reformist religious writings, used for instance, in a variety of jokes and riddles: e.g., the one in Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS Lit. D.14 (DIMEV, Number 1981–86), fol. 77: “Here is comen that no man wot: A dialogue in a Latin nemo joke with a Latin line between the two English lines—a couplet tag in the Fasciculus morum,” http://www.dimev .net/Records.php?MSS = CantLitD14. 43. See “Thomas Hoccleve,” in H. S. Bennett, Six Medieval Men and Women (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 80–81, from which the quotes in the next paragraph come. In addition to Bennett’s discussion, see Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121, on Hoccleve’s former Privy Seal colleague, William Donne, who held a canonry (prebend) in the King’s Chapel. And see J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 11n43, on the preferment of Hoccleve’s colleague, John Bailey, on which see also the lengthy discussion in Sobecki, Last Words, chap. 2, and 66 on the careers of two more Privy Seal colleagues, Hethe and Offord. 44. So many a man as they this many a yeer Han writen fore, fynde can they noon So gentil or of hir estat so cheer That ones list for hem to ryde or goon, Ne for hem speke a word, but doumb as stoon They standen where hir speeche hem mighte availle, For swich folk is unlusty to travaille. (1492–98) 45. Trans. Burrow, Hoccleve, 11. For the full Latin text, see Appendix, #6. 46. Nuttall, The Creation, 121. 47. Bennett, Six Medieval Men, 81 48. On Donne, see Nuttall, The Creation, 121. 49. Bennett, Six Medieval Men, 81. 50. Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), chap. 5; see also Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1968), discussed below. More recently, see Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, chap. 5 (devoted to Hoccleve’s religious poetry); Katherine Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 112–31, on the John Badby section of RP and penitential practices, though rather too rigid in its treatment of heresy; and the very helpful study of Hoccleve’s use of ars moriendi traditions and the Office of the Dead by Amy Appleford, “The Sea Ground and the London Street: The Ascetic Self in Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve,” Chaucer Review 51 (2016): 49–67. 51. C.V.46–47, and Pearsall’s note to line 46 on the Penitential Psalms. 52. See Mitchell, Hoccleve, 34, for discussion of Hoccleve’s religious canon. As we saw in Chapter 2, this “canon” should be expanded. See also Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, chap. 5.

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53. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 331–32, on Hoccleve. 54. Mitchell, Hoccleve, 37. 55. Mitchell, Hoccleve, 38, 40. 56. M. C. Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), Introduction. 57. Appleford, “The Sea Ground,” 19. 58. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 14–15. 59. See A.  C. Spearing’s succinct summary of the scholarship of Derek Pearsall, Paul Strohm, and James Simpson on the issue of Hoccleve’s relationship with the Lancastrians in Medieval Autographies (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 133. 60. On these jokes, see Paul Strohm, “What Can We Know About Chaucer That He Didn’t Know About Himself?” in Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 165–89. 61. Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve, 130. See R. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Lydgate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 88–124. 62. N. Perkins, “ ‘Heer Y die in thy presence’: The Rewriting of Martyrs in and after Hoccleve,” Review of English Studies 69.288 (2018): 13–31. 63. See the discussion of Audelay’s colophon to Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302 in the next chapter. 64. “Lege Nemo. Nemo Clericus vel militaris, vel cuiuslibet alterius condicionis de fide christiana publice turbis coadunatis & audientibus tractare conetur in posterum ex hoc tumultus & perfidie occasionem requirens &c. & ibi expressatur pena in huiusmodi causis exequendis,” Huntington Library, MS HM 111, fol. 9v (see Figure  3.2), marginal note transcribed (like the other Latin glosses) in Hoccleve’s Works: I. The Minor Poems, EETS e.s. 61 and 73, ed. Frederick Furnivall and I. Gollancz, rev. Jerome Mitchell and A.  I. Doyle (London: Oxford University Press, 1892 and 1925), “To Sir John Oldcastle,” 14. 65. Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve, Explanatory Notes to Balades to Henry V. 66. See, for instance, studies of the library of Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, executed under Richard II. For the library inventory done after his death, with the inventory of the books from Pleshy College, see Susan Hagen Cavanaugh, “A Study of Books Privately Owned in England: 1300–1450” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980), 844–51. John Scattergood notes that of Woodstock’s own books, 48 were certainly in French, 25 in Latin, and only 3 in English, including his splendid Wycliffite Bible, now British Library, MS Egerton 617 and 618. See V. J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983), 34–35. At least 9 of the 25 Latin texts deal with church history or jurisdictional matters. On Woodstock, see Jeremy Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 45. 67. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 218–20, on the “tiers” of readers implied by the Chaucer glosses. 68. “De admirabili honore quem Constantinus Imperator exhibuit ecclesie Ministris ita scribitur / ‘Deus vos constituit sacerdotes, & potestatem dedit vobis iudicandi, & ideo nos a vobis iudicamur; vos autem non potestis ab hominibus iudicari,’ &c.,” transcribed from MS HM 111, fol. 10v, in Hoccleve’s Works, ed. Furnivall and Gollancz, rev. Mitchell and Doyle, 15. 69. Religion is heavi ly represented in the Minor Poems, in Hoccleve’s Works, ed. Furnivall and Gollancz, rev. Mitchell and Doyle, 271–312.

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70. See, for instance, the historical and autobiographical marginalia that sometimes accompany Hoccleve’s poetry in his holograph manuscripts. J. A. Burrow gives this example when discussing Hoccleve’s La Male Regle and his playful address to the god Health and to the Trea surer Lord Furnival, asking for payment of his late annuity: Hoccleve writes in the margin “annus ille fuit annus restrictionis annuitatum [that was the year of the restriction of the annuities].” See Burrow, Hoccleve (1994), 15–16. Although one can imagine possible instances of autography at work elsewhere, it is improbable in passages like these. See Sobecki, Last Words, 85. 71. Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” 65–141. 72. Appleford, “The Sea Ground,” discusses this in relation to the Dialogue especially. 73. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Ser vice in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59–83; Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, chap. 1, especially sections IV, V, and VI on the circulation of Langland, Chaucer, and Hoccleve. 74. See Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 123–31; see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 1, sections IV and V, on Scribe B’s copying of Hengwrt and Ellesmere, the controversy over Mooney’s identification of him as Adam Pinkhurst, and B’s copying of Cambridge, Trinity College B.15.17 manuscript of Piers Plowman. Doyle and Parkes established that Scribe B and their Scribe D worked alongside Hoccleve on the Cambridge, Trinity College Gower manuscript (R.3.2), in “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 163–212. Ralph Hanna, Introducing Medieval Book History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) devotes chapter 5 to Scribe B, accepting Mooney’s Pinkhurst identification, though offering nuance. Lawrence Warner, in a recent much-debated book, claims to “assent entirely to the identifications . . . while taking strong issue with the interpretation of their evidence” (Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018], 141). While several scholars prior to Warner had noted Mooney and Stubbs’s enthusiastic overemphasis of the Guildhall’s role in London book production, and individual identifications are always a subjective matter, their book should not be undervalued (see, e.g., Kerby-Fulton, review of Scribes and the City, in Medium Aevum 84.1 [2015]: 154–56). 75. Even Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes, accepts the latter identification. On Hoccleve’s scribal work in Middle English manuscripts beyond his own and editorial involvement with Chaucer (involving a body of evidence long pre-dating Mooney and Stubbs), see A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “Palaeographical Introduction,” in The Canterbury Tales. A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. Paul A. Ruggiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), xlvi; and, most recently, Sobecki, “The Handwriting,” notes 86 and 88; and Misty Schieberle, “A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library Harley 219,” RES, 1 (2019), 1 -24: 4n12. 76. On John Marchaunt, see Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 38–59, and issues of dissent, note 74 above, and Chapter 2, Case Study 2 above. 77. On these three manuscripts, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, chap. 1, section IV; Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 123–31; and Simon Horobin, “The Scribe of Bodleian Library MS Digby 102 and the Circulation of the C Text of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 24 (2010): 89–112. 78. See note 73 above, and Kerby-Fulton, “Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad”; Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture”; Kerby-Fulton, “Confronting the Scribe-Poet Binary.”

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79. These, of course, include French and Latin sources, as well as English ones. See Burrow, Hoccleve (1994). 80. Note to lines 1–7. 81. Discussed above in Chapter 2, Case Study 1, with reference to maps and recent scholarship. 82. See Blyth, note to lines 1–7. 83. Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall, Introduction to Selections from the C-Text of Piers Plowman (London: Arnold, 1967). 84. Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, 13. 85. See Erica Machulak, “ ‘Is he a clerk, or noon?’: Arabic Sources, Aristotelianism, and Perceptions of Knowledge in Middle English Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017), with its innovative discussion in chapter 4 on how Hoccleve raises and then dashes dream vision conventions. 86. Kerby-Fulton, “ ‘Who has written this book?’: Visionary Autobiography in Langland’s C Text,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 101–16. 87. Sobecki, Last Words, chap. 2, on John Bailey’s will. 88. See Machulak, “ ‘Is he a clerk, or noon?’ ”259–70. 89. But not without first having his narrator indulge in a bit more resistive folly. In the next lines, he borrows cleverly from the mistreatment of the mysterious, prescient Old Man at the hands Chaucer’s young rioters in “The Pardoner’s Tale” (lines 161–75); see Melinda Nielsen, “Translating Lady Philosophy: Chaucer and the Boethian Corpus of Cambridge University Library, MS. Ii.3.21,” Chaucer Review 51 (2016): 209–26. And while Hoccleve portrays himself rather like the rioters in that tale, his Old Man preaches as transformatively as the old woman in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” whose sermon on gentilesse, age, and poverty wins over the sceptical knight; so too the self-deprecating “nobyll prechour” (404) to Hoccleve defends his own age and poverty in a lengthy passage (407ff.). Lines 624–30 draw heavi ly on “The Pardoner’s Tale” as well. 90. Several lines in this stanza are also reminiscent of some lines in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, as Amanda Bohne notes. See her article, “Networks of Influence: Widows, Sole Administration, and Unconventional Relationships in Thirteenth-Century London,” in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, and John Van Engen (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 239–52. 91. Blyth, note to line 801. 92. Blyth, note to line 820, and see Burrow, Hoccleve (1994). See Linne R. Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 303–4 on issues of delayed payments. 93. Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, 22–23. 94. While scholars are often confused by this in relation to the Chester’s Inn reference at the outset, there is no need for confusion: Hoccleve speaks in the future tense.

chapter 4 1. Discussed in more detail in Section 6 of this chapter. See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 35. 2. This passage is discussed in detail below, Section 2. See also Susan Powell’s excellent essay on Audelay’s self-positioning, “John Audelay and John Mirk: Comparisons and Contrasts,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. Susanna Greer Fein (Kalamazoo,

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MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 86–111: 96–97, citing some parallel passages in which Audelay reiterates this sense that he has received a prophetic commission (e.g., The Remedy of Nine Virtues, 77–84). The titles of Audelay’s poems used here are those in Poems and Carols, ed. Fein, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), http://d.lib.rochester.edu /teams/publication/fein-audelay-poems-and-carols-oxford-bodleian-library-ms-douce-302. This link leads to the table of contents, with active links to each subsection (e.g. Carols, section XXXV) and individual poem. 3. The question of Langland’s influence on Audelay and recent scholarship is discussed throughout this chapter. I would add that some of Audelay’s texts seem to show a knowledge of Franciscan Spirituals thought, a type of literature that Langland certainly knew and that carried alternative apocalypticism to England (e.g., Audelay’s extraordinary Carol 25, St. Francis). This aspect of Audelay’s thought is beyond the scope of the present chapter, but, on Langland’s awareness of it, see Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, especially chap. 4; and Kerby-Fulton, “English Joachimism and Its Codicological Context, with a List of Known Joachite Manuscripts of English Origin or Provenance Before 1600,” in Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905–2003), ed. Julia Eva Wannenmacher (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2013), 183–230. 4. Ian Johnson, “Legendys of Hooly Wummen: Prologus, Osbern Bokenham,” in Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrowne et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 64–65, sees “corrective imitation” active in Chaucerian writers such as Walton, Lydgate, Metham, and Bokenham; see 65 and cross-references there. 5. Ella Keats Whiting, ed., The Poems of John Audelay, EETS o.s. 184  (London: Oxford University Press, 1931; rpt. Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1971). 6. Fein, Poems and Carols. 7. Fein, My Wyl and My Wrytyng. 8. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, 335–36. 9. Katy Wright-Bushman, “Reading Lyric Before Lyric: English Religious Poetry Among Its Late Medieval Readers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2015); Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106; and Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (2008): 201–6. 10. See most recently David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 11. Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). My thanks to Marjorie Harrington for her advice on lyric issues. 12. Spearing, Medieval Autographies. 13. This is Derek Pearsall’s adjective; the passage is quoted in full in note 60 below. Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 138–52: 146. 14. See Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf ”; and Richard Firth Green, “Langland and Audelay,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 153–69; and on Audelay’s alliterative vocabulary and dialect, Eric Stanley, “The Alliterative Three Dead Kings in John Audelay’s MS Douce 302,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 249–93. Pearsall’s article has a long and (to my mind) convincing list of specific parallels. Pearsall tries to connect Audelay’s prophetic tendencies with populist political or (so-called) “anticlerical” prophetic ephemera, but the parallels are much easier to see, as I argue here, in their ecclesiological reformist prophecy. Green is entirely convinced of Langland’s influence and offers new parallels, as well as an appendix of alliterative phrases in Audelay, Lang-

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land, and the alliterative corpus. He notes that “the proportion of such phases that Audelay shares with Langland seem to me more than coincidence” (157). 15. Susanna Greer Fein, “John Audelay and His Book: Critical Overview and Major Issues,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 3–29; and Fein, “The Early Thirteen-Line Stanza: Style and Metrics Reconsidered,” Parergon 18 (2000): 97–126. 16. On Audelay’s dialect and the challenges of his verse, see Whiting, “Dialect,” in the introduction to the Poems of John Audelay, xxviii–xxxvii; Stanley, “The Alliterative Three Dead Kings,” 249–93; and Stanley, “The True Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven: In Defense of John Audelay’s Unlyrical Lyrics,” in Expedition nach der Wahrheit: Poems, Essays, and Papers in Honour of Theo Stemmler, ed. Stefan Horlacher and Marion Islinger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), 131–59. 17. Fein, “Carol 12,” Poems and Carols. See her headnote on the extensive historical and political background and similar texts in his corpus. 18. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 222, 296, 335; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, “The Vatic Penitent: John Audelay’s Self-Representation,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 54–85 (among others in Fein’s collection); and Fein, “Death and the Colophon in the Audelay Manuscript,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 294–306. 19. Julia Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 218–29; Martha Driver, “John Audelay and the Bridgettines,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 191–217. 20. See James Simpson, “Saving Satire After Arundel’s Constitutions: John Audelay’s ‘Marcol and Solomon,’ ” in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchinson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 387–404, published at the height of scholarly interest in Wycliffite issues and the Arundel paradigm, subsequently the subject of correctives by Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf ”; Green, “Langland and Audelay”; and others (discussed below). 21. Now the parish church of St.  Mary, originally founded by Ralph Le Strange (or Lestrange) between 1182 and 1195 as a chapel for the castle. The church has a Norman chancel, nave, and north aisle, but in 1846 it underwent heavy restoration. 22. In 1342, Baron Roger Lestrange of Knockin arranged for a perpetual chantry at Haughmond Abbey, but it was not until about 1426 that practical and legal difficulties were overcome. Audelay was its first incumbent. 23. See McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” and the discussion of Langland’s attitudes toward chantries below. 24. See Fein, “Death and the Colophon”; this passage discussed below. Michael Bennett notes that Audelay is one of two chaplains in the Lestrange records; see his “John Audelay: Life Records and Heaven’s Ladder,” in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. Fein, 30–53, esp. 33. 25. The Penitential Psalms provided “bread and butter” work for proletarians, as we noted earlier (see Chapter 2 on Langland, Usk, and others). For the centrality of their influence in Hoccleve, see Chapter 3; and Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, chap. 5. 26. See Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” for the most recent, detailed account. 27. This church was heavi ly bombed during World War II and is now a public garden, though the outlines of its medieval structure are quite visible. 28. Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” 36–37; Bennett suggests that Audelay may have been in the custody of the Bishop of London, but those of lower rank in Newgate. 29. Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” 36. 30. Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” also makes the case, based on a satirical passage in Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon, that Audelay was a much more secularized priest prior to the ritual penance imposed on the Lestrange entourage, though we cannot know.

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31. Fein, “Audelay’s Conclusion,” Poems and Carols. 32. See Marc Drogin, Anathema!: Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Totowa, NJ: Allenheld, 1983). 33. See Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles”; Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture in the English and Irish Civil Ser vice,” Traditio 53 (1998): 149–203; Kerby-Fulton, “Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad,” 101–37. 34. Pronay and Taylor, “Modus tenendi parliamentum,” 78 (Latin text) and 91; on the Modus, see also Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Reformist Intellectual Culture.” 35. Evans, “The Number,” 501. 36. See Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 23, on scribal fees for requested copies of Guildhall records. See Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Feste du Puy,” in Vernacular Literary Theory, ed. Wogan-Browne, Fenseter, and Russell, 81; and Chapter 1 above. 37. See also the fictional parish clerk, Absolon, in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” On schools that taught such skills, including the London Inns of Chancery, see the discussion of Hoccleve’s education in Chapters 2.1 and 3, and Kerby-Fulton, “Oxford” in Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe: 1348–1418, vol. 1, ed. David Wallace, 208–26, on Chaucer’s Absolon and Oxford. 38. If by “blindness” he means something like macular degeneration or cataract issues, some kind of scribal or editorial or correction participation would be possible, if limited. Audelay gives only very limited information about these disabilities, presumably related to aging. 39. John A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and Their Work, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, repr. 2008), 38. 40. On Audelay’s instructions for the preservation of his book, see Fein, “Audelay’s Conclusion,” Poems and Carols, ll. 40–47; and see Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” 46, on Lady Lestrange’s will and a devotional book (“meum bonum librum anglicanum”) very like Audelay’s that is to be kept chained in the chapel where she is buried. As Bennett rightly notes, this is different from the “common profit” book tradition. 41. Kerby-Fulton, “Afterword: Social History of the Book and Beyond: Originalia, Medieval Literary Theory and the Aesthetics of Paleography,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 243–54, citing the work of Katherine Zieman on Richard Rolle’s chained book. 42. Even Lydgate includes Rolle among the canonical “greats” of English, along with Chaucer and Gower, in his Epilogue to the Fall of Princes, ed. Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 399–402, from Fall of Princes, lines 3387–42. Audelay provides extracts from Rolle, though unacknowledged (discussed below), into which he embedded a piece of his own poetry. 43. Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1982), 101–2. 44. Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 218–29, and on carols more generally as a genre often employed by proletarians, see Chapter 5 below. 45. See Introduction above, and see H. S. Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists,” 28, for evidence of the rise in monastic “titles” (guarantees of financial support for prospective ordinands) from, e.g., 26  percent in 1326–27 to 55  percent by 1417–27, and to a staggering 84  percent for 1427–74; see also Evans, “The Number,” 533. 46. I would suggest that “Council” better translates the word Concilium here, as the more common meaning, but used metaphorically to suggest a gathering of advisors to conscience or

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the conscious mind (Concilium conciencie) in the form of his poems. The allegory comes naturally to a Langlandian thinker. 47. The colophon ends with the date and usual scribal prayer: “Anno Domini millesimo cccc visecimo vj. Cuius anime propicietur Deus,” ed. and trans. Fein, “Latin Prose Colophon Finito libro,” Poems and Carols, from MS Douce 302, fol. 22vb, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text /fein-audelay-poems-and-carols-counsel-of-conscience#cf. 48. The abbey had a dedicated library: Abbot Richard Pontesbury complained in 1518 that the bybliotheca was in need of repair. See M. J. Angold, G. C. Baugh, Marjorie M. Chibnall, et al., “Houses of Augustinian Canons: Abbey of Haughmond,” in A History of the County of Shropshire: Volume 2, ed. A. T. Gaydon and R. B. Pugh (London: Victoria County History, 1973), 62–70. See also British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vol2/pp62-70. 49. Haughmond was fined by the general chapter in 1511 for not maintaining at least one canon at Oxford. See H. E. Salter, ed., Chapters of the Augustinian Canons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 187. 50. Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego.” 51. For this list, see Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” 78–79. 52. Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” gives good reason to believe that not all the carols in MS Douce 302 are his. 53. See Christopher Cannon, From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), which argues that Ricardian English writers began to apply their schoolroom Latin grammar lessons to their own mother tongue. In Audelay’s English, Susanna Fein’s efficient edition strives to smooth out the difficulties with added accent marks, punctuation, and extensive glossing. See her “Audelay and His Book,” 15–21, on his metrics and his wide range of knowledge of the alliterative tradition. See also Stanley, “The True Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven.” 54. Whiting, Poems of John Audelay, xxii. 55. A. C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), xxx–xxxi, gives good reason for thinking the playwright was a subdeacon (therefore in minor orders). On the Wakefield playwright’s skilled poetics, see also Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 56. It can be difficult to know what is his and what might have been one of the scribe’s, but we do know that he supervised (in some sense of the word) the production of the manuscript. 57. On this sense of mission, see Fein, “John Audelay and His Book.” For the Epilogue itself, see Fein’s edition, section XXVII. 58. Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 59. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 66. 60. “Marcolf is a flimsy mask, soon discarded, and only momentarily reassumed. The voice of the poem is his own voice, critical of the faults of priests and friars, but in the context of a repeated and explicit admiration for what they do.” Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf,” 146, with my italics. Audelay can confound even the most dedicated believer in purely impersonalized poetry. 61. “Fore Mede the maydyn mantens hem therin,” l. 705, and see Fein’s note to this line. The passage is about priests colluding in the granting of annulments (for divorce) for money. A few critics have tried to explain this away, but the Ockham’s razor test points logically to Langlandian influence. 62. E.g., in Lydgate’s Prologue to the Siege of Thebes or other imitators; see John Bowers, Fifteenth-Century Additions and Continuations to the Canterbury Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992). 63. On coterie writing, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles.”

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64. See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, chap. 4, on antimendicant history and polemic, beginning with William of St. Amour; and Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Most recently see KerbyFulton, Katie Bugyis and Melissa Mayus, “ ‘Anticlericalism,’ Inter-clerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars,” The Oxford Chaucer Handbook, ed. James Simpson and Suzanne Akbari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chap. 23, 494–596. 65. Trulé, I trow this rewme where chamyd and chent Nere the foretheryng of the frerys and here prechyng, Fore the seculars prestis take non entent Bot to here leudnes and her lust and here lykyng; Thai beth nothyng covetese to lerne no conyng. (Marcolf, 599–603) 66. Langland and Audelay both share some features of their concerns about the friars orders, of course. See Simpson, “Saving Satire,” 402, on which, however, see note 20 above; and especially Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf,” 133–34 on lay vs. clerical issues. 67. See John A. Alford, “The Design of the Poem,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 68. In biblical commentaries, Latin quotes to be commented upon are normally set off in red or via a different script and so, too, usually in Langland manuscripts. 69. Summarized in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–9 and Vernacular Literature,” Appendix A in Books Under Suspicion, 397–401. These scholars include Ralph Hanna, Christopher de Hamel, Fiona Somerset, and others. At issue generally is the overstated claim that Arundel’s 1407–9 Constitutions had the sweeping impact on fifteenth-century literature often claimed during the rediscovery of Wycliffism in the 1990s. 70. The “stanza is unquestionably an attack on the broad brush and draconian punishment of anyone who dares to criticize the Church.” Simpson, “Saving Satire,” 399. 71. Simpson, “Saving Satire,” 402; see also Fein’s note to 664, “Compare Piers Plowman C.9.107–14.” 72. I have removed the capital “L,” which is not in Whiting’s edition. See Whiting, Poems of John Audelay, 15. 73. Norman Tanner makes the point, however, that the unbeneficed were not necessarily living below the poverty line, depending on how much lay support and employment they had, e.g., in “bequests for chantry ser vices.” On such “free-lancing,” see Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 51, and discussions of Langland’s describes in the C.V apologia, Chapter 2 above. 74. See Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 296–97; and Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader, 80–81. See also MED, s.v. “līken (v. (2))”: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. 75. See “Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). CT II[B1]1173 and Fein’s note to 131, also listing extensive citations of critics who have commented on the passage. See especially Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf,” 133–34. 76. The term was still used in the fifteenth-century Low Countries (without any hint of a reference to heresy) to denigrate members of the Devotio Moderna. See John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 271–72; and see Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, note to C.V.2. 77. See also Green, “Langland and Audelay,” 154–55.

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78. See Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 79. Fein notes here: “Compare Ezechiel 18:20; Galatians 6:5.” 80. I have restored Whiting’s punctuation to this and the next line (580–81): it seems to make more sense that God’s will would be invoked on matters of salvation than on matters of residency for curates (as desirable as Audelay thinks that is, too). 81. On probatio, see the discussion of Margery Kempe in Chapter 6. 82. Fein notes here: “Compare Psalm 118:36.” 83. Fein suggests “compare Piers Plowman B.5.321 (Green, ‘Langland and Audelay,’ 154–55) and C.6.377 (Pearsall, ‘Audelay’s Marcolf,’ 146).” 84. This, too, like the last passage, is from the long section on the secular clergy (lines 547–857). 85. Like all the Latin translations cited here from Marcolf, this is Fein’s translation of the Latin quote above line 547; she notes “see Hebrews 9:7.” 86. Medieval males wore small sack-like purses hanging from their belts, and these were often the object of lewd commentary because of their shape, most famously in Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse.” 87. Fein notes: “Compare Psalm 118:21.” 88. Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon,” 142. 89. Whiting, Poems of John Audelay, 227. 90. E.g., Derek Pearsall and James Simpson, quoted in Fein’s note to line 157; and Michael Bennett argues that this is a portrait of pre-conversion Audelay (i.e., before 1417). See Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” 30–53. 91. Compare Audelay’s opening Latin quotation for this stanza. For the illustration of Langland’s Proud Priest, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 26–28, front plate 8; and Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, figure 56, for a full discussion of the Hatfield House illustrated manuscript of William of Pagula’s Oculus. For James le Palmer’s iconography in exactly the same vein, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum, 109. 92. See Barrie Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 8; the vicars choral are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. 93. Cited in Green, “Langland and Audelay,” 156, from The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978), 180, with Green’s emendation to 123. 94. Several singing clerks would not necessarily have had to be ordained as yet. See Chapter 5. 95. See Chapter 6, note 114, citing Marie Rousseau’s Saving the Souls for evidence that the “porthors” books were heavi ly bequeathed among chantry priests at St. Paul’s, usually called a “portiforium” in Latin wills. 96. MED, “sal4rī(e (n.)”: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size =First+100 &type =headword&q1= salar*&rgxp = constrained. 97. MED, “persǒun(e (n.(2)”: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type =id&id =MED33111. 98. MED, “vic4r(e (n.)”: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type =id&id =MED51091. The definition in 2(a) goes on to note that with the addition of the word “perpetual,” the designation is permanent: “~ perpetuelle, a parish vicar appointed permanently to his position.” Note also definition 2(b): “an official of a cathedral or collegiate church; specif., one charged with the singing of a portion of the ser vices, a choral vicar.” 99. MED, “chapelein (n.), 1. A priest officiating in a chapel (whether public or private); kinges ~, ~ of houshold, chaplain of the royal household; ~ confessor.” Or “2. (a) Any clergyman

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who assists a cleric of higher rank in performing his administrative and religious duties”: https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type =id&id=MED7223. 100. Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records,” 42–44; McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 127. 101. Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection.” See Fein’s list of carols on which his reputation rests in “John Audelay and His Book: Critical Overview,” 20. 102. Fein notes: “Compare Psalm 2:11.” 103. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 63–64. 104. See Zieman, Singing the New Song, 63–65, on clerical critique of skipping sections of the liturgy. 105. Fein’s note to line 23. 106. Chapter 5 examines punctuation and performance in choir settings in more detail. 107. See Malcom Parkes, Pause and Efect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (London: Routledge, 2016). 108. This section of the “Meditative Close” derived from Richard Rolle is called “The Sins of the Heart.” 109. There are many of these, but this one is quoted from Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS Lit. D.14, fol. 116v, in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), ed. Linne Mooney et al. (no. 3167–69). For this one and other English lyrics in the same manuscript, see http://www .dimev.net/Records.php?MSS = CantLitD14 for the entire DIMEV listing. For Langland’s usage, see C.17.188, and also C.17.118, discussed by Zieman, Singing the New Song, 64; see also Zieman’s other sources, 63–64. 110. It is also common in Franciscan manuscripts. The modern tendency to associate this and other kinds of complaints with Wycliffism often obscures the real cultural contexts of this type of complaint. See DIMEV listings cited in the note above. 111. DIMEV: http://www.dimev.net/record.php?recID =3167#wit-3167-9. A version of the poem is printed in Medieval English Lyrics, ed. Theodore Silverstein, York Medieval Texts (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), from Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 640, fol. 90. Note, however, that he takes “over lepars” to mean “dancing clerics”—an attractive idea, but not at all semantically accurate to this poem. 112. As Fein’s introductory note says, “If borrowed, its appearance in Audelay’s favorite thirteen-line stanza form argues for his ‘translation’ of it to his own idiom. [Fol. 32vb. NIMEV 2736.11 . . . Meter: One alliterative 13-line stanza, ababbcbc4d3eee4d3 (compare Marcolf and Solomon)].” While, as we have just seen, the kernel of it is pretty clearly borrowed, Audelay has rewritten and expanded it in an exciting alliterative style, adding much more by way of style and content. 113. In her note to lines 1–3 of the stanza, Fein mentions “a longstanding vernacular tradition in sermon exempla (see n116 below and Jennings, ‘Tutivillus,’ 11–20; and Fein, ‘ThirteenLine Alliterative Stanza,’ 64–65).” 114. There is a macaronic English and Latin poem about Tutivillus copied into the end of the Douce 104 Piers Plowman, fol. 112v, incipit “Tutiuillus the deuyyl of hell” (IMEV 3819); see Derek Pearsall and Kathleen Scott, Piers Plowman, A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992), x. 115. “Ragamoffyn” and other semi-comical demons also come up in Piers Plowman (C.XX.280) in the Harrowing scene. 116. Fein, note to line 5 on Rofyn, points out “the occurrence of the same devil-name in Audelay’s Virtues of the Mass, line 299, within the amusing story of Saint Augustine.” See also Margaret Jennings, Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon (Chapel Hill: Univer-

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sity of North Carolina Press, 1977), 1–95, and further details in Fein. See Zieman, Singing the New Song, 87, on Tutivillus as the demon who collects choir stumbles and oversights. 117. See Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 7, for visitation records regarding performance faults and the vicars choral themselves gossiping during the ser vice. 118. Fein, note to 559. 119. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 114–49. 120. See Evans, “The Number.” 121. One actual documented example would be Thomas Fovent (Favent), discussed in Chapter 3, Section 1 above. 122. See Chapter 3, Section 1 on the problem of gauging sincerity of interest in pastoral care among career civil servants. 123. Fein’s gloss to this line (566) is: “And assign the farming of their property to a bailiff,” and see her note: “personache. See MED personage, n. (2), ‘A benefice or maintenance granted to a parson; property or residence associated with a parson’s benefice; parsonage.’ ” 124. See Green, “Langland and Audelay,” for a list of relevant alliterative poems. 125. Langland speaks of priests getting leave to go to London and sing for simony, since “seluer is so swete” (C.Prol.84). 126. See the discussion of Piers, B.15.123–27, in relation to the “porthors.” 127. Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 4. Fein notes at line 255 that “Pearsall, ‘Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon,’ pp. 145–46, notes that this exhortation—to continue to endow the Church as one’s fathers did (found also at Marcolf and Solomon, line 274)—contrasts directly to Langland’s position not to break up estates to give to wealthy clergy (Piers Plowman C.5.163, C.17.56–58).” 128. See Ian Johnson, “Legendys of Hooly Wummen,” in Idea of the Vernacular, ed. WoganBrowne et al., 64–65, and related entries on “corrective imitation.” 129. Piers C.V.173–74, part of a prophecy in which friars will miraculously find in their refectory “Bred without beggynge,” after a stringent disendowment of the monasteries. On Audelay and the friars, see Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf ”; and Green, “Langland and Audelay.” 130. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, 3–5; Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, repr. 1964), 291–92. 131. Powell understandably comments on the audaciousness of Audelay’s self-positioning here in “John Audelay and John Mirk,” 86–111. Audelay’s stance is, however, acceptable in the religious prophetic or visionary tradition.

chapter 5 1. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 2. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 66. 3. Encyclopedia of Marxism: https://www.marxists.org /glossary/terms/a/l.htm. For details on the types of alienation, see Introduction above. 4. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 63–64. 5. J. Boffey, “What to Call a Lyric? Middle English Lyrics and their Manuscript Titles,” Revue belge de philologie et d’ histoire, 83 (2005): 671–83: 674; Anne Klinck, “What’s in a Name? Pinning Down the Middle English Lyric,” Leeds Studies in English, New Series 43 (2012): 21– 50: 49; see also Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?,” English Literary History 82.2 (2015): 319–43.

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6. On the poem’s meticulous punctuation, see Kennedy, “A Bird in Bishop’s Wood.” On the tradition of writing alliterative verse in prose, see Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise-en-page Transition.” 7. Arundel 292, “Choristers’ Lament,” and “Blacksmiths” are discussed in relation to EME book production in Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 40–45; Roberts, Guide to Scripts, xiii, for the types of punctuation. 8. Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Efect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 104, for this quote and the following two. 9. Elizabeth Salter, “Blacksmiths,” in English and International, ed. Pearsall and Zeeman, 329–30. 10. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 41–42, and the various front plates. 11. Harrington, “Bilingual Form.” 12. For a description of the manuscript and the quire structure, see Hanneke Wirtjes, ed., The Middle English Physiologus, EETS o.s. 299 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 13. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 2–5, and figure T1; Roberts, Guide to Scripts, “The Bestiary.” 14. On the dating, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 44–45. 15. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments”; Barrie Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages, 1215–1500,” in A History of York Minster, ed. G. E. Aylmer and Reginald Cant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 44–110, esp. 67–71. See also Zieman’s lengthy and careful discussion of song schools and grammar schools in Singing the New Song, chap. 1. 16. Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” 67, with references to the York Minster Statutes. 17. York Minster claimed a monopoly on song-school education in the city. See Barrie Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” in History of York Minster, 67–69. See also John  B. Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), summarizing the evidence of historians that the diocese of York had about eighty-five grammar schools, all needing basic books, but that the song school of the cathedral required as well “the specialized ser vices of flourishers,” i.e., the specialized rubrication of liturgical books (p. xviii). 18. On the dialect of “Choristers’,” see Ralph Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” in David Wallace, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 488–512. “Choristers’ ” is discussed in more detail in Section 3 below. 19. See Chapter 6. 20. N. R. Ker, ed., Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253, EETS o.s. 255 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), Introduction. 21. Both Susanna Fein and Carter Revard have looked at the codicological and historical possibilities for connections between the scribe of Harley 2253 and Hereford. See Fein, ed., Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2000); Revard, “Scribe and Provenance,” in Studies, ed. Fein, 21–109. See also Revard, “Oppositional Thematics and Metanarrative in MS Harley 2253, Quires 1–6,” in Wendy Scase, Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 95–112. And see Fein, “The Harley Scribe’s Early Career: New Evidence of a Scribal Partnership in MS Harley 273,” in Journal of the Early Book Society 19 (2016): 1–30. For more speculative suggestions, see also Daniel Birkholz, “Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics: The Implications of Mobility, c. 1300–1351,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 175–230. “Satire on the Consistory Courts” is discussed in Chapter 6. 22. Revard, “Scribe and Provenance.” 23. Daniel Birkholz, “Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics,” 195.

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24. For this quotation, see Piers B.15.123–27, discussed in Chapter 4. 25. See Nicholas Perkins and Alison Wiggins, The Romance of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2012), 64–66, on this draft of Sir Firumbras, showing “the words in paler ink but in the same hand as the main text,” in Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33, fol. 61v., image available at: http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/A _rough _draft _ and _fair_copy _of_ Sir _ Firumbras. Composed in Exeter c. 1380 (LALME: vol. 1. 145. “Language of Exeter.” LP 5110. Devon) on scrap parchment of papal documents relating to the diocese of Exeter and Sherborne Abbey. Perkins and Wiggins note “other examples of the participation of the clergy and professional religious in the translation and composition of romances,” including one in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 216 by a “vicary at wymborne minster,” i.e., Wimborne Minster in Dorset, 66–67. I thank Hannah Zdansky for advice on this. 26. Simon Horobin, “The Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” in The Making of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Wendy Scase (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 39. I would like to thank Leanne MacDonald for sharing her work on Vernon. 27. For evidence of a scribe living temporarily at a cathedral in order to complete a large, impressive order for the cathedral, see the expense records for the making of the Litlington Missal for Westminster Abbey in The Westminster Missal (Missale ad usum Ecclesie Westmonasteriensis), ed. J. Wickham Legg (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999). 28. Bookmaking tools were found in the archaeological digs excavating the medieval hall of the York vicars choral, known as the Bedern; see Richard Hall, Bedern Hall and the Vicars Choral of York Minster (York: York Archaeological Trust, 2004), 22–23. See also Friedman, Northern English Books, 36–27 and notes, on the issues with chaplains moonlighting in book production. 29. On the making and illuminating of the Vernon Manuscript, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 165–71. 30. See Friedman, Northern English Books, 36–37, for the York guild evidence. As we saw in the Introduction, the Scrivener’s Guild in London complained that “chaplains (capellanes)”—in other words, unbeneficed clergy—were spoiling their trade by moonlighting as scribes. 31. Though the dialect of the poem, like the dialect of the famous poems by the Pearl Poet in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript (thought by some scholars to be the same author), is a northwestern dialect, we now know that even the Pearl Poet himself had strong London connections. See the discussion of St. Erkenwald in Chapter 7. 32. Endowments for particu lar chantries could run out, e.g., John Tyckhill, a few years after his appointment to the Bukerell chantry, lobbied unsuccessfully to keep it, writing to the king in French and to the Bishop of London in Latin to get financial aid; see Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 96–97. Rousseau notes “when chantry tenements were in poor condition, another option open to the Dean and Chapter was to leave the chantry vacant and invest the chaplains’ wages in the repair” (96). In short, the question of wage security even for chantry priests was real. On the livelihood of the York vicars choral, see Nigel Tringham, “At Home in the Bedern: The Domestic Life of the Vicars Choral of York Minster,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Richard Hall and David Stocker (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), 188–91. 33. The statistics and facts in this paragraph are reproduced from John Harper, “The Vicars Choral in Choir,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 17–22, esp. 19–20. 34. Harper is basing these statistics on the widely used Salisbury Gradual. On the (relatively minor though specific) liturgical differences between the Use of Sarum and Use of York, see Matthew Cheung Salisbury, The Use of York: Characteristics of the Medieval Liturgies Office in York (York: Borthwick Institute, 2008).

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35. Based on the Salisbury Processional. 36. See Chapter 4.5 on Audelay’s “Ouerhippers” fragment, on the ubiquitous problem of skipping parts of the liturgy in order to finish more quickly. 37. Carter Revard sees the “Blacksmiths” as a song about music, noting the punctuation: see his “The Papelard Priest and the Black Prince’s Men: Audiences of an Alliterative Poem, ca. 1350– 1370,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 359–406, kindly shared pre-publication. 38. Marie Helene Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 121. Regarding Langland’s complaint that priests were deserting their flocks to go to London and serve as chantry priests, see Rousseau’s statistics showing that for 1300–1349, 70 chantry chaplains are identifiable at St. Paul’s, but in 1350–1400, there were 157. 39. For the series of tests in grammar, Latin, and singing required to become a chantry priest, see Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 98, and 99–107 on discipline and punishments. On the testing of the York vicars choral, see Frederick Harrison, Life in a Medieval College: The Story of the Vicars Choral of York Minster (London: J. Murray, 1952), 62–65. 40. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, chap. 3, on John Marchaunt. 41. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, esp. 419, for the Index of Latin Poems, Hymns and Antiphons; Rossell Hope Robbins, “Middle English Carols as Processional Hymns,” Studies in Philology 56.4 (1959): 559–82; more recently, Harrington, “Bilingual Form,” and Nelson, Lyric Tactics. 42. Though not Audelay’s. This suggests that Audelay and/or his scribes were not trained to write formal musical notation, though no doubt Audelay was musical himself. On the specialized task of copying music, the manuscript of “Sumer is icomen in” was likely sent to Oxford from Reading Abbey for the musical notation, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~wpwt/harl978/sumerms . htm. 43. Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 223–24. 44. See the lucid description in E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison, Medieval English Songs (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 62–63. Growing, too, from this period, were the nascent university colleges and the private chapel choirs of wealthy nobility. 45. As owners of two tile-works, the vicars were involved with the production of the Tilemakers Pageant, “The Condemnation of Christ by Pilate.” See Hall, Bedern Hall, 36, and Chapter 6. The Bedern also functioned rather like a guild hall in various ways, on which see Hall, Bedern Hall, 35. 46. The examples given here are meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. 47. MS Egerton 3307 has been associated with the Cistercian abbey of Meaux, Yorkshire, near Beverly (Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 224), but John Stevens gave detailed, convincing liturgical reasons for preferring the St. George provenance (Stevens, ed., Musica Britannica: IV, Mediaeval Carols [London: Stainer and Bell, 1958], 125). Other contents of these manuscripts reveal vintage choral cathedral materials, e.g., Egerton 3307 and Add. 5665; see Stevens, Mediaeval Carols, 125. 48. Robert Fayrfax of the Chapel Royal (d. 1529), Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 224. 49. Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 224. 50. Ledrede was only interested in “rebranding” but he does preserve marginal MiddleEnglish tune-name cues. See Edmund Colledge, ed., The Latin Poems of Richard Ledrede, O.F.M., Bishop of Ossory, 1317–1360 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), xxxvi–xlii (xxxvi for the Middle English cues); see also Ardis Butterfield, “Poems Without Form? Maiden in the Mor Lay Revisited,” in Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Cervone and D. Vance Smith (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 169–94; Unfortunately, Ledrede is also infamous for his vicious witch hunts for heretics:

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see Colledge, Introduction to Latin Poems of Richard Ledrede; and Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, xxvii–xxix, 164–73. 51. “Nota: attende lector quod episcopus Ossoriencsis fecit istas cantilenas pro vicariis ecclesie cathedralis sacerdotibus et clericis suis ad cantandum in magnis festis et solatiis ne guttura eorum et ora deo sanctificata polluantur cantilenis teatralibus turpibus et secularibus: et cum sint cantatories prouideant sibi de notis conuenientibus secundum dictamina requirunt.” Colledge, Latin Poems of Richard Ledrede, xl. For the English translation, which I have slightly adjusted here, see an online facsimile of the Red Book, Archives of the Church of Ireland, RBC website, December 4, 2017, Adrian Empey, “Celebrating Christmas with the Red Book of Ossory,” https://www.ireland.anglican.org /news/7609/celebrating-christmas-with-the-red. For Ledrede’s note in the lower margin, see fol. 70  in the online facsimile, https://issuu .com/churchofireland/docs/redbookossory/152. 52. Colledge, Latin Poems of Richard Ledrede, xl. Audelay uses the word, e.g., in the rubric for Carol 14, “Cantalena de puericia”; see http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/fein-audelay -poems-and-carols-carol-sequence#12c73. 53. None of the lists offered in this chapter is intended to be exhaustive. 54. To get this information, one has to follow the explanatory notes of individual texts in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs. There is no manuscript index. 55. See Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005); Linne Mooney et al., The DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse, https://www.dimev.net/. See also Harrington, “Bilingual Form,” for a very recent bibliography of the field of religious lyrics and manuscript studies. 56. See McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 57. See the map of the cathedral close of St. Paul’s in Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 71. 58. Richard Hall, Bedern Hall, 18. 59. On Keats’s visit to Chichester and the Vicars Hall, see http://www.thehistoryguide.co.uk /john-keats-in-chichester/. On the two medieval lectern windows, see http://www.alamy.com/stock -photo-two-windows-in-the-twelfth-century-vicars-hall-and-crypt-said-to-have-47727508.html. 60. E. Dobson, “Introduction to the Texts,” in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 25–26. 61. Including an entirely secular piece in praise of the city of Winchester; see Dobson, “Introduction to the Texts,” 26; and more recently, on Turk and C.U.L., MS Add. 5943, see Thomas Gibson Duncan, A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), 15. 62. Dobson, “Introduction to the Texts,” 25, who derives his information from Emden, BRUO, iii, 1917. On the underemployed and reformist tendencies, see the discussion of Langland (Chapter 2), and Audelay (Chapter 4); McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 63. Numbers 20 and 28  in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs; see DIMEV, http://www.dimev.net/Records.php?MSS = CULAdd5943. 64. Ed. Dobson, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 215. 65. After Turk’s ownership, the manuscript passed to someone keeping records for the diocese of Salisbury and eventually to a minstrel; see Dobson, “Introduction to the Texts,” 23, 26. 66. See Tim Tatton Brown, “The Vicars Hall and Close at Chichester Cathedral,” 23–28; and Philip Dixon, “The Vicars Choral at Ripon, Beverley and Southwell,” 138–46, both in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker. 67. Nikolaus Pevsner and David Neave, The Buildings of England: Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 208–20. In 1457, Henry VI granted York Minster a license to establish a college of chantry priests there, built in 1465 by

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Henry’s Yorkist successor, Edward IV. It housed twenty-three priests and includes a great hall to the north, with a chapel to its east, and an intact medieval kitchen. See http://www .yorkshireguides.com/st_williams _college.html. 68. See Chapter 2 on chantry priest John Tyckhill as St. Paul’s rent collector; on the duties and properties of the vicars choral, see Sarah Rees Jones, “God and Mammon: The Role of the City Estate of the Vicars Choral in the Religious Life of York Minster,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 192–99. Sarah Rees Jones has also kindly advised me on the vicars choral responsibilities for record keeping at York Minster. 69. See Chapter 6. 70. Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” in Dobson and Harrison, English Medieval Songs, 56. 71. Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 56, for all the quotes in this paragraph. 72. The cantus firmus could also be instrumentalized. 73. See Barbara Newman’s study of instances from the pui of Picardy and of Valenciennes, convincingly argued in relation to Marguerite Porete: Medieval Crossover, chap. 3. 74. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 46–47. 75. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 76. For an important recent new study, see Harrington, “Bilingual Form.” 77. For the music to this carol, see Stevens, Mediaeval Carols, #18. Compare the balladmetre carol (four stresses and three stresses) #20, “Lullay, lulay: Als I lay on Yoolis night,” from the Winchester College manuscript discussed above, in Dobson and Harrison, English Medieval Songs, with musical analysis by Harrison on page 97. 78. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 26 (SC 3340), fol. 8. 79. Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise-en-page Transition.” 80. See this audio excerpt from the CD Medieval Christmas sung by Pro Cantione Antiqua, now online, http://www.luminarium.org /medlit/medlyric/goday.php. The link also includes the lyrics, beginning, as traditional, with the two-line refrain. 81. Eric Stanley, “The Use of Bob Lines in Sir Thopas,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972): 417–26, with a helpful chart listing bobbed poems, including our carol. See also KerbyFulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise-en-page Transition.” 82. Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 97. 83. See Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 96–97; and Cawley, The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, Introduction, particularly “The Author.” On the York Cycle, see Hall, Bedern Hall, 36. I thank Sarah Rees Jones for her advice on this. 84. For Grandisson’s directions in 1337 for using choristers on the feast day of the Holy Innocents, see Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 96–97. 85. Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, eds., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 102–3. 86. Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 57. For this lyric and others, I have also used the more recent study of Thomas  G. Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols (Cambridge: Brewer, 2013). 87. Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, 352–53. Happily, it, too, is available in original-language sung performance online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdJbXmEgSqc. 88. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 89. The numbers 547, 548, 557, and 558 survive on the leaves; “Worldes blisse” appears on 547; Harrison, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 306. 90. Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 56, transcribes this two-part song fragment.

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91. Harrison discusses the “hall-repertories” of “British cathedrals after the Norman Conquest,” noting how “dissimilar” they were from those in French cathedrals (“Introduction to the Music,” 57). This, then, indicates a specific culture. 92. See Brown’s notes to lyric number 58. 93. See Dobson, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 194, on the difficulty of knowing whether the text or music preceded. 94. Ed. Dobson, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs 194, omitting Eric Dobson’s diacritics to mark spoken final “e.” 95. Harrison, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 307. 96. See Megan Hall, “Learning and Literacy Outside the Convent: Early Middle English Women Readers and the Ancrene Wisse” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2016). 97. For these passages, see the edition of Ancrene Wisse, Part 7, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, in Medieval English Prose for Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. 116. 98. Harrison, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 306–7. 99. On the entertaining and instruction of choristers, see Dobson, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 26. 100. Dobson: “a charming snatch from some popu lar song” (Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 197). 101. Dobson, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 197, notes that “ ‘Dou way’ means ‘be off, get on with you, stop it’ . . . and the words are obviously addressed by a woman to an importunate or interfering husband or lover.” He notes that the Princeton copy (MS Garrett 119) is unlikely to have been copied before 1280. 102. For Alisoun, see Riverside Chaucer, I.3287. 103. Harrison, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, 308. 104. According to K. J. Levy, “New Material on the Early Motet in England: A Report on Princeton MS Garrett 119,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 4 (1951): 220–39. The other copy, British Library, MS Cotton Fragments, xxix, fol. 36, was heavi ly damaged in the Cotton Library fire, but this copy has no tenor text, presumably leaving it open to church usage. 105. For these and the next example, see Harrison, “Introduction to the Music,” 57. 106. In addition to Dobson, 23, in Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, see Boffey, “Audelay’s Carol Collection,” 224. 107. In addition to Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, see Taylor, “Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript.” 108. For discussion of recent and ongoing work, see Ardis Butterfield and Helen Deeming, “Editing Insular Song Across the Disciplines: Worldes blis” [on a diferent lyric with the same incipit], in Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the 21st  Century, ed. Vincent Gillespie (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 151–66. 109. See John Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1992), 45–46, on education at the Inns of Chancery, citing Sir John Fortescue on the full curriculum, which included to “learn to sing and to exercise themselves in every kind of harmonics.” 110. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 40–45; and Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 99–141. 111. Noting the importance of Worcestershire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, and Lincolnshire prior to the rise of the London book trade, Ralph Hanna notes: “Rather than the ‘provincial’ identifying the backwater, ample evidence implies that the developed London book-trade Doyle

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and Parkes discuss had been preceded by a discontinuous series of robust indigenous literary cultures” (London Literature, 1300–1380, 2). To his list of regions for early book production, AngloIreland (Dublin-Pale) should be added. 112. It is written into Arundel 292 on fol. 71v, just after a text on what to do if, as a priest, one has an accident with the host (“Si aperta quod absit neglicencia de corpore aut sanguine Christi acciderit” [fol. 68]). 113. See the 1558 Cunningham Map of Norwich online at http://www.norwich-heritage.co .uk/norwich _maps/1558_Cuningham _zoomify.htm. 114. Hall, Bedern Hall, 24–25. 115. Salter, English and International, 211–13. 116. Sisam and Sisam, Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, 372. 117. Viewable online at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome .htm (choose Arundel 292, fol. 114v). 118. On the language of classroom instruction in the fourteenth century, as evidenced from grammar manuscripts, see Cannon, From Literacy to Literature. 119. I will be examining these prayers in a separate study, Medieval Interiorities and Modern Readers, along with a transcription. 120. See Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader.” 121. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader,” argues for a later date for the copying of “Choristers’ ” than I think possible paleographically. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 44; I agree with Hanna’s dating: “as early as c. 1350” in his “Alliterative Poetry,” in Wallace, 509–10. “Choristers’,” then, likely pre-dates Langland. 122. See, however, Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, front plate 2. 123. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 42–44. 124. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 62–63; Cannon, “Vernacular Latin”; and his From Literacy to Literature. 125. See Wirtjes, The Middle English Physiologus, for the contents of the manuscript. 126. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 43–45. 127. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 128. As noted earlier, York’s cathedral had a monopoly, or tried to have a monopoly, on song-school training. See Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages.” 129. This line is transcribed from the manuscript, but elsewhere, unless other wise noted, I cite the poem from Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader.” For some slight corrections to Holsinger, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 40–43. 130. Zieman, Singing the New Song, chap. 1. 131. See Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” 67 for the York precentor’s comment during the period of Archbishop Thoresby. 132. See Sisam and Sisam, Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, 184, notes to Poem 80. 133. Susan Boynton, “Monasteries and Cathedrals,” in Young Choristers, 650–1700, ed. Boynton and Eric Rice (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 44; see also Joan Greatrex, “The Almonry Schools of Norwich Cathedral Priory,” in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 169–81. 134. Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” 67. 135. Correcting Holsinger’s reading “it.” 136. Rebecca West, “ ‘Ȝet þer is a streinant witȝ two longe tailes’: English Musical Terminology in the ‘Choristers’ Lament,’ ” JEBS 19 (2016): 175–86.

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137. MED, “daun,” meaning 1: “(a) A lord; (b) a cleric or monk;” 2: “Used as a title (a) of secular and religious dignitaries and of scholars.” 138. MED, “talme” (n.), “a state of sickness or incapacitation,” from Old Norse or Old Icelandic “talmen,” “hindering” or “obstruction.” 139. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader,” noted that a version of the phrase also comes up in this context in Piers Plowman. But “Choristers’” shares with Piers—anticipating not mimicking it—clerical proletarian colloquialisms; see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 40–43. 140. A feast day actually that gave rise to a lot of para-liturgical writing of songs and liturgical drama. 141. Although medieval manuscripts do not normally punctuate speaker voices, Sisam and Sisam’s assigning of quotation marks is accurate. 142. See below on singing levels at Norwich Cathedral Priory’s almonry school; and on Chaucer’s clergeoun and song-schools, Zieman, Singing the New Song, chaps. 1 and 6. 143. MED, “dailes,” “(b) without a hearing, unheeded; without effect.” 144. So used by Chaucer’s Summoner “Ful hard it is with fleshhook . . . to ben yclawed” (III.1730–31). 145. This line appears in another poem, see DIMEV, #1407, with the first lines, “For þi self man þou may see / How Iudicare come in crede . . . ,” from London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491, Part II, fol. 295; Francis Lee Utley, “How Judicare Came in the Creed,” Mediaeval Studies 8 (1946): 303–9: 304–5. 146. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader.” 147. See West, “English Musical Terminology.” 148. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, chap. 4.I, on tiers of readers in the glossing of Chaucer. 149. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, chap. 4.I, on Latin glosses to the Prioress’s Tale and Chaucer’s dark choice of ending. 150. See Orme, Medieval Schools, 148–49, for evidence that children were rebuked or punished for not speaking Latin. 151. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader,” note to line 52. Sisam and Sisam, Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, 187, translate the stanza: “When every note leaps at the other and they clash together, that we call a melody in high G. You would be unlucky to be born if you make a mistake: then our master says that you’re no good.” 152. Orme, Medieval Schools, 148–49. 153. See John Thompson, “The French Bible Stories,” 281–87, in Fein, Studies in Harley 2253; and Fein, “Reading Dreams.” 154. Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” 310, suggests York or Beverly Minster. 155. It originated in York or Beverly Minster, see Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry.” 156. See the entry in the DIMEV, #6097, on London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, fols. 70v–71; and on “Choristers’ Lament,” see http://www.dimev.net/record.php?recID = 6097. For the other poems in the manuscript, see http://www.dimev.net/Records.php?MSS =BLAru292. See also Utley, “The Choristers’ Lament.” 157. For Norfolk Middle English manuscripts, see the eLALME, http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk /ihd/elalme/elalme _frames.html. 158. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools. 159. See B. Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” 67. 160. I would like to thank Chris Baswell for his advice about this; see Bennett, “Medieval Ordination Lists.”

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161. Katherine Zieman, “Minding the Rod: Sodomy and Clerical Masculinity in FifteenthCentury Leicester,” Gender and History 31 (2019): 60–77. 162. Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” 88. 163. See also “The Schoolboy’s Lament,” in From Chaucer to Spenser, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 389, quoted below; and John Benton, ed., Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 164. Sisam and Sisam, Oxford Book of Medieval Verse, 489. 165. “The Schoolboy’s Lament,” in From Chaucer to Spenser, ed. Pearsall, 389. 166. Orme, Medieval Schools, 278–79. 167. Orme, Medieval Schools, 279; McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 168. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader,” 133. 169. Holsinger, “Langland’s Musical Reader”; McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 170. See also the discussion above of the lyric “Yool” attributed to “Edmund,” the informator choristarum. The beautiful and justly famous Middle English lyric “Edi be thu” was also likely composed by a schoolmaster, as Dobson suggests in his notes to the text; see Dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs.

chapter 6 1. As Barrie Dobson wrote, “the Bedern suffered severely from the lack of a sufficiently substantial initial endowment,” noting that Richard II intervened in 1394 “to revive their common life in the Bedern” after “financial stringency had compelled many vicars to dispers into separate homes,” “The Later Middle Ages,” A History of York Minster, 92–93. For evidence of their book production, see Richard Hall, Bedern Hall and the Vicars Choral of York Minster (York: York Archeological Trust, 2004), 23; and Friedman, Northern English Books, 36, noting, e.g. a breviary bequeathed in 1404 written by a vicar choral: “scripto de manu domini William de Feriby,” 27; Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 154. 2. The standard term “vicars choral” translates the Latin vicarii de choro, distinguishing choral singers standing in for absentee canons at cathedrals from other vicarii or capellani (stipendary unbeneficed clergy). See Barrie Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” in A History of York Minster, ed. Aylmer and Cant, 67–70. 3. See Frederick Harrison, Life in a Medieval College: The Story of the Vicars Choral of York Minster (London: J. Murray, 1952), 45–47. 4. Though exceptions to this rule of full ordination chantry appointments are not scarce: Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 121–22, cites some, but for many more, see T. A. R. Evans, “The Number, Origins, and Careers of Students,” in Late Medieval Oxford. 5. I am grateful to Nigel Tringham for confirming this based on his archival work (personal communication, August  1, 2020); see N. Tringham, ed., Charters of the Vicars Choral of York Minster City of York and Its Suburbs to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For a clear discussion, see Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 121–22. But see also Nicholas Orme, The Minor Clergy of Exeter Cathedral: Biographies, 1250–1548, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, n.s., 54 (2013), which traces more movement out into Exeter diocesan parish churches. 6. I have restored the sixteenth-century word-spacing of the inscriptions for easier reading; for full inscriptions and translations see the Church Monuments Society website for Ralph of Shrewsbury (d. 1363), https://churchmonumentssociety.org /monument-of-the-month/ralph-of -shrewsbury-bishop-of-bath-and-wells-d-1363.

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7. See Warwick Rodwell, “‘Begun While the Black Death Raged’: The Vicars Choral at Wells,” in Vicars Choral in English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 112–37. On Ralph, see also Dictionary of National Biography Online, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ralph of Shrewsbury_(DNB00). 8. Birkholz, “Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics,” 195. 9. Revard, “Scribe and Provenance,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript, ed. Fein, 21–109. 10. Susanna Fein’s edition titles her translation “Satire on the Consistory Courts” in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, volume 2, and cites the Middle English original by its incipit, as “Ne mai no lewed lued libben in londe” (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015), Art. 40. All citations are from Fein’s edition unless other wise noted. G.  L. Brook, The Harley Lyrics: The Middle-English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2253 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948) also used this title, but Thorlac Turville-Petre used “In the Ecclesiastical Court,” in his Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages, Poem VI. 11. See the National Archives online, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r /83e4bd55-f44b-4581-b35c-6bfb512f6957. See also P.  J.  P. Goldberg, “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation in the Church Courts in the Later Middle Ages: The Evidence of the Court of York,” Gender & History 19.1 (2007): 43–59. 12. See Goldberg, “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation,” 52. 13. On this rubrication, see Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 52–53. 14. See Caroline Barron and M. H. Rousseau, “Cathedral, City and State, 1300–1450,” in St. Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004, ed. Derek Keene et al. (London: Dean and Chapter, St. Paul’s, 2004), 17–32. 15. Line 13 in Fein’s edition, The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2, Art. 40. 16. Compare line 21 with Piers Plowman C.VIII.129, where the lazy who refuse to work in the plowing of the half-acre episode “leyde here legges alery.” “Alery” survived at least into the twentieth century in oral children’s rhymes. 17. Nou wol uch fol-clerc that is fayly Wende to the bysshop ant bugge bayly (Nys no wyt in is nolle!), Come to countene court, couren in a cope, Ant suggen he hath privilegie proud of the pope, Swart ant al toswolle. (43–48) 18. Line 1 of “Choristers’” is “Uncomly in cloystre . i coure ful of care”; see Chapter 5, Section 3. 19. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 52–53, for an image of this page and discussion. 20. There is disagreement among scholars as to whether one or two women are involved. See Fein’s note to line 55. On historical women, see Goldberg, “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation.” 21. This balancing act is clear right from the start, e.g. “Yef Ich on molde mote with a mai, / Y shal falle hem byfore ant lurnen huere lay” (4–5). 22. “Ther Y mot ‘for menske munte sum mede’ ” (29) and elsewhere. 23. See Turville-Petre’s notes to the final line of the poem, Alliterative Poetry, Poem VI, a passage discussed in more detail for its manuscript placement in Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, 52–53. 24. For one further example among several, see York Minster Library, MS XVI.K.16, which belonged to a string of York clerics, including chaplains, and one vicar choral at York’s dependent minster, Beverley. See John B. Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners and Makers in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 28–29.

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25. Also, IMEV 3820.5; NIMEV 3820.5. See A. C. Cawley, “A York Fragment of Middle English Secular Lyric,” Speculum 26 (1951): 142–44. 26. From York Minster, Acta capitularia 1410–1429, fol. 13, shelf mark H 2 (1). I would like to thank Dominique Triggs of the York Minster Library Collections staff for supplying me with this shelf mark and much other advice, and for access to this and other manuscripts. 27. See Cawley, “A York Fragment of Middle English Secular Lyric,” 142–43. 28. See Figure 6.4 showing the Latin verses just above the lyric, and the scribe’s attempt to recopy it in different scripts and with variants in the left column (incipit: “Dum diues fatur vox pauperis”). 29. “Johannes Ellys de Bysschophyll” is frequently cited between 12v and 13v with several different women involved. 30. E.g., in Johannes Ellys’s record on fol. 13 and ubiquitous elsewhere. On 12v, Ellys appears, e.g., “cum Agnetis ffauconberg” and also there “cum Emmeta Sargant.” I have made no attempt to gather all of these names. The abbreviation “fue’is” or “fuo’is” appears in all these records with a roman numeral before it, apparently indicating a stipulated number of “driven flights,” presumably with a whip around the church or market or school. The MED records another related word: “fūiaunt (n.)” for “fugitive”: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type = byte&byte = 63626595&egdisplay = open&egs = 63627028. The Latin word “fuga” for pursuit, chase, with the variant “fugatio” for driving away, e.g., animals, is recorded in Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist (see “fuga”). 31. Turville-Petre’s edition, Alliterative Poetry, 31, note to line 82. 32. Described in Chapter 4.1 above. 33. I thank the press’s reader for this suggestion. A dialect variant on “loue (n.) (1)” as “chiefly early or Northern.” See the MED: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx ?type =id&id=MED26182. 34. MED “laue (n.),” for the multiple means of the concept of law: https://quod.lib.umich .edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type =id&id=MED24815. 35. MED “lau (n.),” see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type =id&id =MED24800. 36. From the Old French “faute” or “faulte.” See https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec /med-idx?size =First+100&type =headword&q1= faute&rgxp = constrained. 37. Goldberg, “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation,” 44–45. 38. “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation,” 53. 39. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageant in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), xxx, and notes 5 and 6. 40. J. W. Robinson, “The Art of the York Realist,” Modern Philology 60.4 (1963): 241–51: 251; see also Clifford Davidson, “The Realism of the York Realist and York Passion,” Speculum 50 (1975): 270–83, on issues of “realism” in medieval philosophy and art. 41. A. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral of York Minster and the Tilemakers’ Corpus Christi Pageant,” Records of Early English Drama 2.1 (1977): 2–9: 7–8; see also A. F. Johnston, “The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play,” Speculum 50 (1975): 55–90. 42. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 7–8. 43. Joseph Black et al., eds., British Literature: The Medieval Period, vol. 1 (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2014), 726, and 726–27 for the next quotation. 44. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Robinson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 36, for this entry; xxxv–xxxvii for manuscript descriptions; and 41, 44 for the other two entries, all three from the York Vicars Choral Accounts, Box XII (a roll).

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45. See M. Stevens and M. Dorrell, “The Ordo Paginarum Gathering of the York A/Y Memorandum Book,” Modern Philology 72 (1974): 45–59, cited in Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” along with the 1415 entry (4–5). See Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290: Together with a Facsimile of the Ordo Paginarum Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1983). I have used Clifford Davidson’s accessible online edition here for citation to The York Corpus Christi Plays, including Introduction, Notes, and Play 33, The Second Trial Before Pilate (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/davidson-the -york-corpus-christi-plays. At the head of the Textual Notes Davidson clarifies that “The base text for this edition is London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290, called the ‘Register’ in the York civic records. . . . see Beadle and Meredith’s The York Play: A Facsimile.” Among the scribes active in the manuscript is John Clerke, who supplies some Latin stage directions, on which see Davidson, Introduction and note 10, “Notations in the margins, many of them by the John Clerke, ‘under clerk’ to the ‘common Clerk of this city’ between the 1530s and the suppression of the pageants in 1569.” 46. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 7. 47. Both can be traced in other records; see Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, for Tanfeld: 61 (twice), 141, 172; for Welwyk, 173, on making remissions of rent to the vicars’ tenants, apparently the poor and disabled. 48. On Welwyk’s “portous bastard,” see Friedman, Northern English Books, 22. 49. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 2. 50. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 2–3. 51. One payment was made to someone named Heron, a tilemaker (traceable in other city records, Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 3). 52. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 3. 53. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 4. 54. Chambers, “The Vicars Choral,” 6. 55. For recent analysis that confirms the linguistic coherence of these plays, see Paul  A. Johnson’s 2011 study, “Notes on the Dialect of the York Corpus Christi Plays,” Appendix to Davidson’s edition, The York Corpus Christi Plays, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/davidson -appendix-notes-on-the-dialect-of-the-york-corpus-christi-plays#f10. 56. Paul Johnson, “Notes on the Dialect of the York Corpus Christi Plays,” and on York Cycle alliterative metrics, see Jessica Brantley, “Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas,” Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 416–38: 427–29, figure  5; on the Wakefield Master’s alliterative metrics, see Kerby-Fulton and Klein, “Rhymed Alliterative Verse.” 57. For analysis of these words in “A Bird,” see Chapter 2; on “Choristers’,” see Chapter 5. 58. Nicholas Orme, The History of England’s Cathedrals (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2017), 66–68. 59. Davidson’s note to line 37, York Corpus Christi Plays, the phrase comes from the NTown writer who describes them succinctly in this way (Play 26, line 164 s.d.). 60. For York Minster’s Feast of Fools, see Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages,” ed. Alymer and Cant, 88. 61. Many of these words can be found in John Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988). 62. See Davidson’s note to line 131, York Corpus Christi Plays, with legal analysis. 63. “Whos lyf and al hire secte God mayntene,” Clerk’s Tale, Riverside Chaucer, IV.1170; see MED “sect(e).”

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64. See Pearsall, ed., C-text, Introduction, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, 25. 65. Scholars believe the York Realist revised earlier texts by c. 1425. See Davidson, “The Realism.” 66. Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religious and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 1988), 310–11; also mentioned in York Minster chronicles. 67. C.IX.290–92; on Yorkshire circulation of Piers, see the next section. 68. The motet, “Sancta mater gracie,” is discussed above in Chapter 5.2; see Riverside Chaucer, I.3287. 69. See Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, Chronology Chart for 1401, xlvii. 70. Robinson, “The Art of the York Realist,” 245. 71. These particular Latin instructions were added after 1530 by John Clerke; see above note 45; and Davidson’s note to line 443, York Corpus Christi Plays, and his initial Textual Note for Second Trial. 72. Occasionally, we even have the name of a writing vicar, e.g., the chronicler John de Allhallowgate (discussed below); and see James Raine, The Historians of the Church of York and Its Archbishops, vol. 2, Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1886), xxix. 73. Barrie Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 10. 74. Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 4. 75. Dobson, in Aylmer and Cant, “The Later Middle Ages,” 96–97, my italics. 76. The vicars choral residences at Ripon and Beverley Minsters were also called the “Bedern” as well. Although much more of the vicars choral housing survives at Wells, Chichester, and elsewhere, York’s Bedern has extensive surviving written records. See Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction.” 77. Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 154–55; Sarah Rees Jones, “God and Mammon: The Role of the City Estate of the Vicars Choral in the Religious Life of York Minster,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 192–99: 193. See also Rees Jones, “A Short History of the College of the Vicars Choral,” in The Vicars Choral of York Minster: The College at Bedern, The Archaeology of York 10/5, ed. J.  D. Richards (York: York Archaeological Trust, 2001), 380–96, 538–40, 575–82. Sarah Rees Jones has also kindly written to me (private correspondence, March 29, 2019), “By 1400, I think their poverty was actually caused by falling rents due to falling demand for their property and at the same time having committed themselves to pay for more ser vices than their estate (much bigger though it was by then) could bear. . . . Eventually they had to reduce the size of the college as a result.” She adds, “c. 1390–1410, the rebuilding of the college and provision with a new dining hall, . . . new statutes, [and] the acquisition of new endowments from Richard II [were] all in support of a reform of their common life,” paralleled in other colleges. On the urban landlord dimensions, see Tringham, “At Home in the Bedern”; Tringham, ed., Charters of the Vicars Choral of York; and Rees Jones, York: The Making of a City, 1068–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 78. Katherine Zieman, private communication with the author, September  23, 2013. See also Zieman, Singing the New Song, 99 and 239n. See also Rees Jones, “God and Mammon.” 79. Tringham, “At Home in the Bedern,”190. 80. York’s vicars choral housing does not survive, but see Tringham, “At Home in the Bedern”; Sarah Rees Jones, “A Short History of the College of the Vicars Choral.” 81. Tringham, “At Home in the Bedern,” 191.

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82. Veronica O’Mara, “The Late Medieval English Nun and Her Scribal Activity: A Complicated Quest,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 72, discusses the case of Agnes Smith, concubine to a York vicar choral. See also Nicola Rogers, “ ‘Wine, Women and Song’: Artefacts from the Excavations at the College of Vicars Choral at the Bedern, York,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 164–87. 83. See Ruth Karras, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); and Amanda Bohne, “Networks of Influence: Widows, Sole Administration, and Unconventional Relationships in Thirteenth-Century London,” in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. Kerby-Fulton, Bugyis, and Van Engen. 84. On the semireligious living in civic communities in the Low Countries, see John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 85. I have consulted the text and notes in S. B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), but I cite by chapter number from Lynn Staley’s online edition (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/staley-the-book-of-margery-kempe. 86. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 239, cited in Anthony Bale, The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 255n110. 87. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 239; Friedman, Northern English Books, 205. 88. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 239. 89. On the exact duties of vicars choral, see Warwick Rodwell, “ ‘A Small Quadrangle of Old Low-Built Houses’: The Vicars’ Close at Lichfield,” in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 61–75, esp. 63–64. 90. As Dobson notes in “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” disputes most often arose about food and food rights. Rodwell mentions records relating to the Lichfield Cathedral vicars choral in which “poorer vicars” had to be subsidized to help them meet basic standards of upkeep to their housing. See Rodwell, “ ‘A Small Quadrangle,’ ” 66. 91. See Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 61–62, on the records for these rather minor offenses. 92. Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 72. 93. Scholars do not know whether this refers to a chaplain hired after 1413 by Archbishop Bowet for a chantry where he would be buried or to one singing at the recently deceased Archbishop Scrope’s tomb (see Meech and Allen, Book of Margery Kempe, note to 313, note to 121/14– 15). But since Bowet had not yet died (Margery herself was interviewed by him on this trip), a reference to his “grave” seems rather odd. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 239, suggests either is plausible. 94. See J. W. McKenna, “Popu lar Canonization as Political Propaganda: The Cult of Archbishop Scrope,” Speculum 45 (1970): 608–23: 614–15. 95. Sarah Brown, The Stained Glass of York Minster (London: Scala Arts and Heritage Publishers, 2017), 80–81; see also Christopher Norton, “Richard Scrope and York Minster,” on Scrope’s influence on the minster before and after his death in Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, ed. by P. J. P. Goldberg. (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas Press. 2007), 138–213. 96. Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late Medieval Women Visionaries (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999). 97. William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), 51; McKenna, “Popu lar Canonization.”

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98. I have discussed these as “Arundel’s Other Constitutions” in Books Under Suspicion, Case Study 3. 99. James Raine, Historians of the Church of York, vol. 3, 291–92, or his The Fabric Rolls of York Minster, Surtees Society, vol. 35 (Durham: St. Andrews, 1859), 193–95, for the letter; 195 for the king’s letter (in French) ordering that the five injunctions in Arundel’s letter be obeyed; 196 for Prince John’s letter about further reinforcing the tomb against the crowds. See Brown, Stained Glass of York Minster, 81, on the Lancastrian attempt to move out Scrope loyalists among the higher clerical ranks in subsequent years. 100. Raine, Fabric Rolls, 196. 101. Raine, Historians, 3:292–93, for the king’s orders. 102. See Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 72 (Ferriby mentioned in a 1403 list of misdemeanours), 100. Raine, Fabric Rolls, 195, notes that he was later removed from office after the vicars choral clashed violently with the Chapter. 103. Raine, Fabric Rolls, 194n. For a recent account of the complex politics surrounding donations and Scrope’s cult, see Brown, Stained Glass of York Minster, 80–81. In time, these diverted donations would result in several of the astoundingly beautiful features of East End of York Minster, including the vast stained-glass cycles in its East Window dedicated to St. Willliam. 104. See Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 239; Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 247– 48, 256–60. 105. See Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, chap. 4, on Wyclif ’s condemnation visions. 106. Book of Margery Kempe, chap. 51, ed. Staley, but note that Staley’s gloss to line 2851 “the spiritualté” as “the churchmen” is incorrect for this context, and either the MED’s first meaning, “1.(a) Immateriality, purely intellectual nature,” or its second, “(b) piety” is required to make sense of the passage. 107. Raine, Historians, 3:292. 108. See Ralph Hanna, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 35, for the three wills discussed here; Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 469n1. Grimston is about fifty miles west of York, but Wyndhyll, obviously, knew Kendale from some previous period: see Stacey Gee, “ ‘At the Sygne of the Cardynalles Hat’: The Book Trade and the Market for Books in Yorkshire, c. 1450–1550” (D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 1999), 259–60, who sees the two Kendales as one man; see also Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 187, 239. Anthony Bale just repeats Meech’s information (Book of Margery Kempe, 255n110). 109. Nigel Tringham very helpfully informs me that he has no evidence of John Kendale, the vicars choral, moving to Grimston (personal email communication, August  1, 2020); see Tringham, ed., Charters of the Vicars Choral of York. Grimston is near Beverley, one of York Minster’s suffragan bishoprics, and vicars choral were known to move between the two, but as Tringham says, vicars choral did not often get promotions; Gee, “ ‘At the Sygne,’ ” 259, has offered important evidence about John Wyndhyll’s own York connections: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 131, a York manuscript (written on paper with the same watermark as the York Chamberlain’s account book), contains a 1396 letter recommending the young John Wyndhyll and his family to the spiritual care of the York Carmelites. 110. See “Map of York at Close of the Middle Ages,” location “U” for Carmelite Priory, http:// users.trytel.com/tristan/towns/yorkmap1.html. I sincerely thank Sarah Rees Jones for her advice. 111. On MS Dd.1.17, see Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, Case Study 1, 109–24; and see Johnston, “The Plays of the Religious Guilds.” 112. Rees Davies, “The Life, Travels, and Library of an Early Reader of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999): 61. 113. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 115–99.

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114. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 116. 115. William Revetour, a contemporary proletarian York clerk and chaplain and likely author of vernacular guild plays, also bequeathed books to women; see Gee, “ ‘At the Signe,” 98. 116. Discussed above in Chapter 2, Section 2. 117. Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, Case Study 3. 118. The poem, as printed by Wright from British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.ix, emphasizes more predictable themes, especially Scrope’s nobility in the face of death and his encouragement of his young companion, Thomas Mowbray, earl marshal, to face death with the certainty that he would obtain the heavenly feast (“Solatur comitem adolescentulum, . . . Certus obtineat coeli coenaculum” [115]), ed. Thomas Wright, Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, Rolls Series (London, 1859–61), vol. 2, 114–18. See also A.  G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 294–95. 119. See Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, Case Study 3, for more analysis. 120. Rossell Hope Robbins, Historical Poems of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 90. 121. Available online from the Catholic University of America, from where I have quoted it: https://english . catholic . edu /faculty - and -research /faculty -profiles /wright- stephen /scrope .html#archive. 122. Compare the interesting study by Serene Jones of the Reformation theologian John Calvin as holding views consistent with trauma: Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). 123. Political Poems, ed. Wright, 116, and see Rigg, A History, 294–95. 124. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 3:51; McKenna, “Popu lar Canonization.” 125. McKenna, “Popu lar Canonization.” 126. Acta capitularia 1410–29, fol. 43, edited in Raine, Fabric Rolls, 193–96. 127. E.g., Rodwell notes of the Lichfield Cathedral vicars choral that “other duties performed by the vicars included being Keepers of the Fabric of the cathedral, . . . [since] 1283 when the task was shared by two vicars. Vicars also variously fulfilled the tasks of chapter clerk, communar, and scribe, and even represented the chapter at papal courts (e.g. in 1325)” (“ ‘A Small Quadrangle,’ ” 63–64). Similarly, as noted in Section 1 of this chapter, a York Minster vicar choral would have kept the records of the chapter (Acta capitularia). 128. Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” 10. In fact, it looks like it was written in increments over generations. If one of the clergy of higher rank, often with a university education, had set out to do this, the style would be more pretentious or classicized. 129. Brown, Stained Glass of York Minster, 81. 130. Raine, Historians, 2:433. 131. Devotion to the five wounds is common in Yorkshire books; see Friedman, Northern English Books, 149–50. 132. He appropriated the incomes of churches for the vicars choral of the Cathedral of York (“vicariis ecclesiae cathedralis Eboracensis”) and Southwell (“Suthwell”), which was in the diocese of York. See Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 281–82, for a discussion of the varying duties of vicars in Southwell, Ripon, and Beverley, all foundations dependent on York’s archbishop. 133. “Et circa festum Sancti Willelmi in aestate ad Eboracum reverse sunt, antedictisque vicariis Beverlacensibus auctoritate domini regis Richardi Secundi et Parliamenti ad loca sua restitutes” (Raine, Historians, 2:423). See also the Beverley Minster account for 1381 at https:// beverleyminster.org.uk/visit-us-2/a-brief-history/. “A visitation imposed by Archbishop Neville

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on the canons led to a clerical strike when . . . the vicars choral [removed themselves] to Lincoln,” leaving Neville to move clerks from York to Beverley to take their place. 134. On Langland’s disendowment prophecies, see Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalyticism. Disendowment is something we tend, wrongly, to associate just with Wycliffism, but the king’s power to disendow long preceded the rise of Wycliffism. See, e.g., Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, 330–31, on Ockham and disendowment. 135. Friedman, Northern English Books, 187–91. 136. Raine, Historians, 2:446ff. for the two metrical Minster chronicles. 137. Raine also notes the emphasis in the chronicle on Ripon Minster’s St. Wilfrid, though he was also revered at York (Raine, Historians, 2:xxix–xxx). 138. Raine, Historians, 2:xxx. 139. Raine, Historians, 2:xxx. For the opening of ACM, see Raine, Historians, 2:464, “Reserante nobis in scriptis suis tabulatis quadam predecessor nostro, Johanne de Allhallowgate” (on the tabula, see Chapter 7 below). 140. See Raine, Historians, 2:485, lines 549–50. 141. See Raine, Introduction to Historians of York, vol. 2, for such guesswork, often attributing chronicle authorship to learned university graduates.

chapter 7 1. I cite the edition of the poem by Thorlac Turville-Petre in Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages, 101–19; I have also consulted Clifford Peterson’s edition, Saint Erkenwald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). 2. For a recent assessment, see Marie Boroff, The Gawain Poet: Complete Works (New York: Norton, 2011), Introduction to St. Erkenwald, 167–74, and her appendix, “The Authorship of St. Erkenwald,” 265–75, arguing that the Cotton Nero A.x poems and St. Erkenwald are by the same author, a problem outside the scope of the present study. 3. Frank Grady, “Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 63–88; Grady, “St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 179–211; Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Ruth Nissé, “ ‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St.  Erkenwald,” ELH 65 (1998): 277–95; Monika Otter, “ ‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 387–414; John Scattergood, “St.  Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past,” in The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry, ed. John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 179–99; Scattergood, “St. Erkenwald and Its Literary Relations,” in Saints and Cults in Medieval England, ed. Susan Powell (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2017); Thorlac Turville-Petre, “St. Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles,” in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: “The Key of All Good Remembrance,” ed. Anne D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 362–74. 4. Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, 102. 5. On his habit of present tense usage in relation to St. Paul’s, see Boroff, Gawain Poet, 170. 6. John Bugbee, “Sight and Sound in St. Erkenwald: On Theodicy and the Senses,” Medium Aevum 77 (2008): 202–21; Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

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7. Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 75. Lawrence Booth died in 1480; see Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, 101. 8. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 223. 9. John Scattergood, “ ‘Iste liber constat Johanni Mascy’: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 155,” in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. J. Minnis, York Medieval Press (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 91–101, see 95. 10. Scattergood, “ ‘Iste liber constat Johanni Mascy,’ ” 95. 11. For the manuscript description, see Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 1–4. 12. Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, item 40, p. 6. 13. Braybrooke also elevated the feasts of the Conversion and Commemoration of St. Paul: see Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 11, and for the Latin text of Braybrooke’s Monition, see W. Sparrow Simpson, ed., Documents Illustrating the History of S. Paul’s Cathedral (Westminster: Camden Society, 1880), xxiv–xxv. 14. Simpson, Documents; and see Boroff, Gawain Poet, 173; and for the CAE, see, e.g., its meticulous account of various donations of liturgical garb or vessels made by Archbishop Arundel and other archbishops (see Chapter 6). 15. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments,” 111–30. 16. The Harley 2250 manuscript is dated in 1477 in a colophon on fol. 64v; Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 2, notes that there is no reason to doubt the colophon since Briquet cites a date of 1472 for the paper stock. I would add that the little-noticed Office of St. Erkenwald (discussed below) survives in a manuscript of the period of Edward IV (i.e., between 1460–83)—which, taken together with the 1477 date of Harley 2250, indicates interest at that time, too, in the poem and the saint. 17. Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 19, adding these cross-references: “See the notes to ll. 15, 18, 62, 66, 80–83, 143, 202, 211, and 267 for instances.” 18. Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 19. 19. Marie-Helene Rousseau, Saving the Souls, chap. 1, gives an overview of the duties of chantry priests in cathedral management and charitable work, and discusses instances of chantry chaplains responsible for the repair of their own chantries, 75. 20. Gollancz himself preferred the theory that the author was Ralph Strode, the lawyer friend of Chaucer, though there is no evidence for his assumption. See Sir Israel Gollancz, St. Erkenwald (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), Introduction. 21. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City; but for London more generally, see Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connelly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 183–204. 22. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 74. 23. See Ralph Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” in Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 488–512, see 510. 24. Scholars such as Michael Bennett, Malcolm Andrew, Ad Putter, and Jill Mann have discussed the possibility that the Gawain Poet was connected with the large circles of cosmopolitan Cheshire men (military and bureaucratic) that Richard II maintained at his court (Richard II was an earl of Chester), so large and powerful that resentments over it appear in the articles for his deposition: for a recent summary and full bibliography, see Jill Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Mann’s Life in Words: Essays on

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Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory, ed. with Mark David Rasmussen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 194–95. Whether the Erkenwald poet is the same author or not, clearly he was a contributor to the remarkable surge of alliterative poetic texts written in the Cheshire dialect in this period. On this, see Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 223–25. 25. See the online Map of Early Modern London (Agas Map, 1633) showing the dominance of the St. Paul’s spire and Close, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm. 26. John Schofield, London, 1100–1600: The Archaeology of a Capital City (Sheffield: Equinox Press, 2011), 161. 27. C. Paul Christianson, “Evidence for London’s Late Medieval Book Trade,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87–108. 28. E. T. Floyd Ewin, The Splendour of St. Paul’s (Norwich: Jarrold Publications, 1973), 3. 29. As we saw in Chapter 2 with the case of John Tyckhill and in Chapters 5 and 6 with lyrics, plays and more. 30. See the discussion (Chapter 6.3 above) of Walter de Brugges, a powerful king’s clerk and canon at York Minster, also an early owner of a copy of Piers Plowman. 31. See Chapter 5 above. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who wrote the Chasteau d’Amour in the thirteenth century, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule (writing in French). Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, as we saw, converted vernacular song tunes into Latin hymns, but never vice versa (see Chapter 5.2 above). On Grosseteste, see Nicholas Watson, “William Langland Reads Robert Grosseteste, in The French of England, ed. Fenster and Collette, 140–56; and Kerby-Fulton, “Administrative and Professional Cultures,” for Oxford Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Wogan-Browne and Tyler, forthcoming. 32. See above, Chapters 5 and 6, on the vicars choral York Cycle play Second Trial Before Pilate. 33. For a guide to the holdings of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library (before the transfer of the archives to Guildhall Library), see W. Sparrow Simpson, St. Paul’s Cathedral Library: A Catalogue [of] . . . Works Relating to London and Especially to St. Paul’s Cathedral (1893). For the surviving medieval St.  Paul’s library and archive materials, see “St.  Paul’s Cathedral Archives at Guildhall Library,” https://www.history.ac.uk/gh/stp.htm, which notes “the cathedral Library continues to hold the St. Paul’s volumes of medieval manuscript religious or literary texts numbered ‘St Paul’s Mss 1–4’ and ‘6–20’ . . . [described in] N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 1: London (1969), 240–62. The Cathedral Librarian also retains custody of . . . the surviving archives of the Vicars Choral [and] collections of music manuscripts.” 34. See Chapter 2.2 and 6.3. 35. Although the authorship debates are beyond the scope of this study, if indeed our poet is also the Pearl Poet, he might have written St. Erkenwald early in his career (cf. Peterson’s remark, “not unworthy of the author of Gawain” [Saint Erkenwald, 19]), since he exhibits the same delicacy of feeling. One could compare the Chaucer of the Book of the Duchess with his range in The Canterbury Tales. 36. Orme, The History of England’s Cathedrals, 91–92. 37. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 18. 38. Michael Van Dussen, “Tourists and Tabulae in Late-Medieval England,” in Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 238–54, see 242. 39. Antonia Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Late Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 1992), 331–32.

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40. See Katherine Zieman, “Tabulae and Pre-Modern Modes of Media,” forthcoming. 41. Van Dussen, “Tourists,” cites from antiquarian sources, so it does not discuss the literacy issues; nor does the author note the role of the vicars choral. 42. Raine, Historians, 2:446–63. These boards are now York Minster Library, Add. 533 and 534. On in-house York historical writing, see Barrie Dobson, “Contrasting Chronicles: Historical Writing at York and Durham at the Close of the Middle Ages,” in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor, ed. Ian Wood and Graham Loud (London: Hambledon, 1991), 201–18: 281n59 for detailed bibliography on the York tabulae. 43. See N. R. Ker and A. J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 4: PaisleyYork (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 824–26, for description of Add. 534 and letter to Cromwell, and 823–24 for Add. 533. 44. Rigg, Anglo-Latin Literature, 293. 45. Ed. in Raine, Historians, 2: 446. And see Rigg, Anglo-Latin Literature, 293 and notes. 46. See Dobson, “The Later Middle Ages.” 47. For evidence that there was a Bedern library and muniments room, see Rogers, “Wine, Women and Song,” 168; see also Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction.” 48. “Ecclesiae jura noscase ut carmine plura, / Plenius in Tabula scribitur historia” (17–18). 49. A text Rigg briefly discusses in Anglo-Latin Literature, 52–53. 50. For a summary of the histories on both, see Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 65–67. 51. Rigg, Anglo-Latin Literature, 294. 52. Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 65–67; see also Sarah Brown, The Stained Glass of York Minster on the historical and hagiographic glass programmes in York Minster. 53. See Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 65, on the rules for the vicars choral, noting, “It was also enjoined on the succentor vicariorum that, at his admission, ‘every vicar shall repeat his histories, and that any vicar who shall not fulfill this requirement shall be accused before the chapter and, if found guilty, shall be expelled.’ What were these histories? Happily at York, it is possible to answer this question.” Harrison believes that what was meant here was the two surviving tabulae: “at the end of his first year of office, a vicar was expected to know by heart not only the psalms in Latin, but also what were called tabula or history tables.” Recent scholars have disagreed, but I would note that whether or not the vicars actually memorized these tables (as Harrison himself believed unlikely), since they were posted in the Minster, I suggest they were likely used in part as a “crib” for the vicars, so to speak, as they guided visitors and as signage for Latinliterate travelers interested in Minster history. For a parallel view, see Dobson, “The English Vicars Choral: An Introduction,” discussion of figure 1.3 showing tabulae. 54. Katherine Zieman, in correspondence with the author, July  3, 2015, notes that these might be “the ‘histories’ (Old Testament passages) that are read at matins during the summer months,” though, if so, why we don’t know. Though there is no evidence the tables were in the Bedern (see Ker and Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 4, 824), the vicars choral worked and sang in the Minster daily where we know they were posted. 55. Ker and Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 4:825, description of York Minster Library, Add. 534, mentions Bale’s Index ascription of De etatibus mundi texts to Richard Garsdale, a vicar of Rudstane, Yorkshire by 1413 and a university graduate. Add. 534’s text was partially copied by a Yorkshire cleric in 1408; see John Friedman, John de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae (1408): An Edition and Codicological Study, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill,1988), xxxi, noting that Foxton copied sections 99–104. For Add. 533, Ker repeats the evidence noted in British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xix for John de Allhallowgate’s authorship (“auctore Johanne de Allhallowgate”), likely a member of the vicars choral originating

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in Ripon. Parts, as Ker notes, are also in MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv. See Dobson, “Contrasting Chronicles.” 56. I am grateful to York Minster Library for allowing me to see the boards and for access to a microfilm and photography of them as well. Only the central panel is printed in Raine, Historians of the Church of York; see Ker’s description of Add. 533, cited in note 55 in this chapter. See Harrison, Life in a Medieval College, 65–67, for a summary of each set of histories, and Raine, Historians. 57. Derek Pearsall, “The Alliterative Revival: Origins and Social Background,” in The Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: Brewer, 1982), 34–53: quotations from 47 and 51 for this quote and the next. 58. Field, “ ‘Pur les francs homes amender,’ ” 175–88. Most recently, see Hannah Zdansky, “Converting Romance: The Spiritual Significance of a Secular Genre in Medieval France, England, Wales, and Ireland” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2017), which discusses particu lar romances as tools for spiritual conversion. 59. All quotations from St. Erkenwald are from Turville-Petre’s edition in Alliterative Poetry. 60. See Turville-Petre’s notes, especially to lines 1–24 of the poem. 61. Ewin, The Splendour of St. Paul’s, 3: “after the death of King Ethelbert the church was destroyed in the pagan reaction which swept through southern England. After about forty years Christianity returned to London and from c. 675–93 Erkenwald was bishop of London.” The medieval tabula stressed that Erkenwald “S. Pauli templum, nouis edificiis auxit.” William Dugdale, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London From its Foundation until these Times (London: Thomas Warren [printer], 1658), 115. 62. Gollancz, Erkenwald, xxvi. 63. See Van Dussen, “Tourists,” 246–47, among other sources, citing Dugdale, History. 64. Van Dussen, “Tourists,” 246–47, among other sources, recorded in British Library, MS Harley 565; see Edward Tyrell, ed., A Chronicle of London from 1089–1483 (London: Longman, 1837). 65. Van Dussen, “Tourists,” 247–48. 66. See Chapter 6; above and Van Dussen, “Tourists.” 67. See Tyrell, A Chronicle, 176–80 for the “magna tabula”; and 174–75 for the “alterius tabula” (i.e., the one more concerned with ecclesiastical and miraculous incidents, though both cover salvation history in some more or less abbreviated form). 68. Van Dussen, “Tourists,” 247–48, and for a discussion of their proximity to tombs, especially in the second and third cases, the tomb of a thirteenth-century bishop of London. 69. See Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, note to line 19 and Gollancz, Erkenwald, xv, and xx–xxi, on Diana. 70. See Bede: Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. J.  E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), chap. 30, 162–63, on cleansing British temples of idols and devils. 71. Gollancz, Erkenwald, xx–xxi. 72. Tyrell, A Chronicle, 223. 73. Dugdale, History, 23 (which also gives an account of Braybrooke’s Monition). Major cathedral shrines were watched, e.g., from nearby lofts, of which one survives at St. Albans Cathedral: “On the north side of the chapel, the watching loft allowed for easy surveillance of pilgrims approaching or praying at the shrine. It was constructed around 1400 and is thought to be the only surviving wooden watching loft in the U.K.” The shrine of St. Alban is located behind the main altar of the choir in the East End, like Erkenwald’s shrine at St. Paul’s, and the St. William shrine at York. See St. Albans Cathedral Guide (St. Albans: Trail Publishing, n.d.), 18–19. 74. Schofield, London, 1100–1600, 160.

n ot es to pages 282 – 291

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75. In the poet’s own time, even newer work would have been underway (from 1332 onwards), constructing a new chapter house and a double-floored cloister (the paving stones of which are still visible thanks to modern excavation south of the nave). Schofield, London, 1100– 1600, 160. 76. See Dugdale, History, especially the fourth section on the graves and monuments. 77. Schofield, London, 1100–1600, 161–62. 78. Gollancz, Erkenwald, xxviii. 79. For Schofield’s map, see Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 71. 80. Karl Steel, “Will Wonders Never Cease: St.  Erkenwald with Claustrophilia,” In the Middle, November  17, 2009, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/11/will-wonders -never-cease-st-erkenwald _17.html. 81. Van Dussen, “Tourists,” 246–47. Neither Schofield nor Van Dussen makes a connection to St. Erkenwald. 82. See Turville-Petre’s note to line 31. Hannah Zdansky informs me that this likely means Caerleon, on the banks of the River Usk (i.e., Cair Legeion guar Uisc). Lucius, as the first Christian king of England, having applied to the pope in the year 171 for baptism, is also pictured in the early fifteenth-century glass of York Minster’s South Transept (window S11). See Sarah Brown, Stained Glass at York Minster, 76; and David J. Knight, King Lucius of Britain (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008). 83. Abbreviationes chronicorum, 1:66 for this passage. He advertises Bede as his source, but Stubbs noted that most of it derives from Geoffrey of Monmouth. See William Stubbs, ed., Radulfi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis opera historica: The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, 2 vols., Rolls Series 68 (1876), vol. 1 for the Abbreviationes chronicorum; vol. 2, Capitula ymaginum historiarum and the Ymagines historiarum. 84. On York Minster Library, Add. 534, see above; and Tyrell, A Chronicle, 223; and see Gollancz, Erkenwald, xxi, on Diana and St. Paul’s. 85. D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (New York: Routledge, 2000), 103. 86. Bishop Braybrooke, in the ninth year of Richard II, issued a special Mandate upon pain of excommunication against buying or selling in the cathedral, with various injunctions against misbehavior in the Churchyard: see Dugdale, History, 22. 87. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 75. 88. See Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 65–66, and the map of intellectual sites in fourteenth-century London on 66. 89. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 66; Dugdale, History, 15. 90. See Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 101. 91. A number of these records were made available to Dugdale, History. 92. See Turville-Petre’s note to line 108, Alliterative Poetry; and see Dugdale, History, 115. 93. See Dugdale, History, 115, and his full-page engraving of the shrine (page unnumbered). 94. Simpson, Documents, “Office of St. Erkenwald,” 19 (for detailed reference to his sister in the liturgy), and his “Chronicle from 1140–1341,” 57 (for an entry on Erkenwald and Barking). 95. See MED definition 1.b) “a boundary marker; a landmark; also, a place near a boundary.” Peterson chooses “landmark,” perhaps the cathedral itself; it may also mean the boundary of the Close or at the entry to his palace (see next line). 96. Peterson, Saint Erkenwald, 45–50, argues that it is Pentecost itself and gives a detailed account of the liturgy of Pentecost and how it might illuminate the poem. 97. McHardy, “Careers and Disappointments.” 98. Compare Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 225.

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99. The paving of the “New Werke” was paid for in 1313. 100. See Turville-Petre, note to line 138 “assembled around,” and compare Peterson’s gloss: “bowed, yielded.” 101. Turville-Petre, with Gawain line 804  in mind, reads, more vaguely, “enclosed area, tomb”; and Gollancz, Erkenwald, xxxvii reads it as the crypt, a place of many tombs (extensively listed in Dugdale, History). 102. Schofield, London, 1100–1600, 160; Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 75, on the duties of the chantry chaplain to open up the Charnel House chapel. 103. Discussed in Peter B. Nowell, “Two Lost Libraries in London,” https://www.academia .edu/7883114/Two_ Lost_ Libraries_in_ London; W. Dugdale, The History of St.  Pauls, 276–83, for the 1458 St. Paul’s library inventory (9 volumes of ecclesiastical law listed 282-3); for the twentyeight survivals listed in N. R. Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd ed. (London, 1964), http://mlgb3 .bodleian .ox . ac .uk /mlgb/?search _ term = London,%20Cathedral%20church%20 of%20St%20Paul&field _to_ search=medieval _ library&page _ size =500. 104. See MED “martiloǧe,” definition 2.b) “a burial register for a cathedral.” 105. Gollancz, Erkenwald, xxiv. 106. The earlier portion of this chronicle Simpson, Documents, edited as Appendix M, Chroniculi S. Pauli London ad Annum 1399; see especially 222–23 for the numerical calculations. 107. For these math calculations, see Turville-Petre’s note to lines 206–10. 108. Simpson, Documents, 223; Raine, Historians 2:447. 109. Turville-Petre’s note to lines 206–10. 110. A phrase that gives editors trouble, but I follow here Turville-Petre’s sensible suggestion (see his note to 211). According to Peterson’s note to line 211, perhaps relating to the Court of Eyre, and or possibly commissions of oyer et terminer, or perhaps a scribal corruption referring to both. 111. See Turville-Petre’s note to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, iii, 1–10. Geoffrey also figures significantly in the York Minster CMEE tabula. 112. For the Roman site underlying the medieval Guildhall, see Schofield, London, 1100– 1600, 24–25. 113. See Turville-Petre, “St.  Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles,” 372; Scattergood, “St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past,” 186–88; and Otter, “ ‘New Werke,’ ” 403–4. 114. Historia, iii, 1–10; Turville-Petre, note to 213ff., 114. 115. Nowell, “Two Lost Libraries,” i.e., St. Paul’s and the Dominican library of the black friars (Blackfriars). 116. See Nowell, “Two Lost Libraries,” note 13, who is citing work from J. T. Gobbitt, “The Production and Use of MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383  in the Late Eleventh and First Half of the Twelfth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 2010), 21–22 (description); 29–33 (dating); 237 (concludes dating to 1100–1110). Part of the manuscript is available online at http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/manuscripts/B/?tp = ob. 117. Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen. 118. William Stubbs, ed., Radulfi de Diceto, vol. 1, Abbreviationes chronicorum. 119. Cited in note 18 of Nowell’s “Two Lost Libraries,” from J. W. Thompson, The Medieval Library (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 299. 120. DNBoo: https://en.wikisource.org /wiki/Diceto,_ Ralph _de _(DNB00). 121. Ralph is famous for his early and innovative system of marginal images that act as an indexing system to his history, aimed at allowing the reader to quickly access (and, by the way, more easily memorize) historical data about key events or topics. For online images, see those of

n ot es to pages 295–301

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British Library, MS Royal 13.E.VI, a late twelfth-century St. Albans copy, showing, e.g., fol. 1, the Table of Signs, https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID =5569& CollID =16&NStart =130506. 122. Poole writes: “In 1180 he was elected dean of St. Paul’s. . . . His activity in his new position is attested by . . . a variety of charters and other official documents, many of which are still preserved among the chapter muniments. The cathedral statute-book also contains abundant evidence of the dean’s work (Registrum Statutorum Ecclesiæ Sancti Pauli, pp. 33 n. 2, 63, 109, 124, 125, &c., ed. W. Sparrow Simpson, 1873).” He bequeathed books “to his successors in office (see the bishop’s confirmation, Opera, ii. pref. p. lxxiii). To the cathedral itself he gave a rich collection of precious reliques, as well as some books (Dugdale, History of St. Pauls Cathedral, pp. 337, 320, 322, 324–8, ed. H. Ellis, 1818).” 123. See W. Sparrow Simpson’s account of these liturgies and when they were written, discussed above. 124. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 71, for map of Close. 125. Rousseau, Saving the Souls, 116–17.

conclusion 1. Pantin, The English Church, 28–29. 2. Quoted by Derek Pearsall, “The Alliterative Revival: Origins and Social Background,” The Middle English Alliterative Poetry, ed. Lawton, 52. 3. See Chapter 6, especially note 74. 4. Just to clarify, my point here is not that these writers did not experience religious doubt, but rather that they express such striking enthusiasm for spreading belief—far beyond the mere dutiful. On medieval doubt more generally, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Skepticism, Agnosticism and Belief: The Spectrum of Attitudes Toward Vision in Late Medieval England,” in Women and the Divine in Literature Before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, ed. KerbyFulton (Victoria: E.L.S., 2009), 1–18. 5. Audelay’s “Conclusion,” ed. Fein. 6. Karl Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, cited in Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 52. 7. Cited in Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 48–49. 8. Denys Turner, God, Mystery, and Mystification (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), see https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268105990/god-mystery-and-mystification/. 9. See, too, Barbara Newman’s excellent Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred, which explores literary and philosophical instances of “crossover” between these worlds, though hers is an entirely different topic than the present study. 10. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Bugyis, and Melissa Mayus, “ ‘Anticlericalism,’ Interclerical Polemic, and Theological Vernaculars,” in The Oxford Chaucer Handbook, ed. James Simpson and Suzanne Akbari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chap. 27, 494–596. 11. Evans, “The Number,” 510. 12. On civil service meritocracy, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles.” 13. See above, Chapter 2, note 46. 14. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, British Library, MSS Royal 6.E.VI–6.E.VII (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2:110.

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15. Karras, Unmarriages, see above Chapter 6, and note 78. 16. See Friedman, Northern English Books, 36, on the case of a chaplain, “capellanus and tyxtwriter,” admitted to the freedom of the city of York to “writte, make, bynd, note and florysche bokez.” An ordinance of 1476 stipulates that “priests with benefices worth more than seven marks a year could not practice any of the crafts controlled by that guild but that a priest earning less could” (36–37), translating from Raine, Fabric Rolls of York Minster, 165–66. Friedman also mentions a dispute with the York textwriters guild on this perennial issue of the unbeneficed supplementing their incomes via the book trade. 17. See Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening Up, front plate 7 and discussion, on Hoccleve. 18. See, e.g., the discussions of John Tyckhill’s poem “A Bird in Bishopswood” in Chapter 2. 19. On Tyckhill’s roll, see discussion in Chapter 2; on the York Minster Acta capitularia poem, see Chapter 6.1. Thomas Favent used a roll, beautifully illuminated in fashionable style, for his political treatise against Richard II’s faction: see Chapter 3.1, n29. On the London Puy regulations, see Chapter 1.4. 20. A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text, discussed in Chapter 3. 21. On issues of French, Latin and English multilingualism, see Baswell, Cannon, WoganBrowne, and Kerby-Fulton, “Competing Archives.” 22. On the “professional reader,” see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, Introduction. 23. See the discussion of the Z-text in Chapter 2. 24. For Fovent, see Chapter 3.1, notes 29–31; for Trevisa, see Ralph Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage,” Speculum 64 (1989): 878–916; for Yonge, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles”; and several studies by Theresa O’Byrne, including “Notarial Signs and Scribal Training in the Fifteenth Century: The Case of James Yonge and Thomas Baghill,” Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012): 305–18. 25. Field, “ ‘Pur les francs homes amender,’ ” 180.

Index

Index of Manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 392D, 132, 337n74, 338n75 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 5943, 196, 351n61, 351n63 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.1.17, 250, 362n111 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6, xvi Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 8, 203 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 405, 316n20 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 323 (B.14.39), 38–40 Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17, 337n74 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, 101, 338n74 Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS Lit. D.14, 335n42, 346n109 Chicago, Newberry Library MS 31, 41, 43, 184 Dublin, Church of Ireland, RBC (Representative Church Body) Library, D11/1.2, 192, 350n50, 350n51, 366n31 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1, 37 Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, MS Cecil Papers 290, 162, 334n30, 345n91 London, British Library, MS Additional 5465, 192 London, British Library, MS Additional 5665, 191, 350n47

London, British Library, MS Additional 31042, 66 London, British Library, MS Additional 35290, 358n45 London, British Library, MS Arundel 292, xvi, 38 London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, 45, 49–51, 317n44–49, 318n50, 318n54 London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, 258, 259, 367n55 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B. ix, 362n118 London, British Library, MS Cotton Fragments, xxix, 353n104 London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, 349n31, 364n2 London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C. xiii, 51–52, 317n45, 318n50, 318n59, 318n61 London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A. xix, 272, 275, 367n55 London, British Library, MS Egerton 617, 337n66 London, British Library, MS Egerton 618, 337n66 London, British Library, MS Egerton 3307, 192, 350n47 London, British Library MS Harley 913, 41, 42, 314n2, 316n20 London, British Library, MS Harley 2250, 262, 278, 365n16 London, British Library MS Harley 2253, 61, 70, 184, 185, 186–87, 193, 200, 206, 209, 213, 217, 220–22, 225, 230, 304, 310n40, 315n13, 322n145, 348nn20–21, 355n153, 356n10, 357n15

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London, British Library, MS Royal 6 E VI, 118 London, British Library, MS Royal 6 E VI–VII, 24, 302, 313n92, 371n14 London, British Library, MS Royal 13 E VI, 285, 370n121 London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593, 193 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, 285 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491, 355n145 London, London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) MS 25125/32, 98, 181, 330n98 London, London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall Library) MS 25125/34, 330n93, 330n98 London, London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London Records Office, Liber de antiquis legibus, 57, 59, 319n72, 319n74 London, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives and Museum, MS St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Cartulary 22, 313n88 London, University of London Library, MS [S L.] V.88, 132 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 26, 192, 201, 202, 352n78 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33, 348n25 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 131, 362n109 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851, 252, 255, 309n24 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102, 132, 338n77 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, 5, 7, 23, 71, 72, 161, 214, 215, 300, 309n119, 310n41, 346n114

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, 141, 143, 144, 151, 311n52, 337n63, 340n14, 342n47, 343n52 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e. 1, 191 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 640, 346n111 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 939, 323n157 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, 97, 329n88 Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, 45, 316n24, 317n28 Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 753, 55 Princeton, Princeton Library, MS Garrett 119, 205, 353n101, 353n104 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 A 13, 91, 329n76 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9, 132, 337n74, 338n75 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111, 127, 329n76, 337n64, 337n68 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114, 323n154, 331n112 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 143, 132 York, York Minster Library, MS XVI.K.16, 357n24 York, York Minster Library, MS Add. 533, 246, 269–73, 275, 366n42, 366n43, 367n55, 367n56 York, York Minster Library, MS Add. 534, 246, 269, 270, 272, 366n42, 366n43, 367n55, 369n84, York, York Minster Library, MS H 2 (1), 227, 228 York, York Minster Library, Historical Collections, Singleton form dated 1753, 230, 231

Gener al Index In addition to significant texts, themes and authors, this index covers primary sources and secondary sources referred to in the text fully at their first mention, but only afterward where they are significantly discussed. Acomb, John, 245 Acta capitularia, 226–27, 228, 254, 264, 303, 357n26, 363n126, 363n127, 371n19 Adams, Robert, 78, 324n4, 325n20, 325n29

Akbari, Suzanne, 314n114, 343n64, 371n10 Alcock, John, bishop, 192, 201 Alcuin, 148, 318n56 Alexandreis, 205 Alford, John, 308n3, 344n67, 359n61

i n d ex Allegory, 47–48, 66, 70, 123, 126, 131, 133–35, 137, 342n46 Allen, Hope Emily, 361n85 Allen, Judson Boyce, 155, 344n74 Allen, Rosamund, 318n54 alliterative poetry, xv, 36, 45, 52, 53, 54, 66–68, 70, 98, 100–101, 102, 111–12, 113, 141, 142, 150, 152, 155, 156, 158, 206, 333n6, 346n124, 347n6; in Audelay, 165, 167–68, 170, 340n14, 343n53, 346n112; in “The Blacksmiths,” 180, 207; in “Choristers’ Lament,” 182–84, 207, 208, 212; in “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” 221; in St. Erkenwald, 188, 261, 273, 278, 288, 365n24; in Tyckhill, 180–81, 207; in “Under a Law,” 227; in the York Realist, 235–36, 238, 239, 242, 359n56 Alexander the Great, 91, 205, 327n49 Alnwick Abbey, 29 “Als I lay on Yoolis night,” 198, 352n77 Althusser, Louis, 11 Aliud Chronicon Metricum (ACM), 255, 259, 260, 363n139 Amt, Emilie, 313n85 Ancrene Wisse, 56, 204, 352nn96–97 Andrew, Malcolm, 365n24 Angold, M. J., 342n48 Anselm: De Concordia, 11, 85 Appleford, Amy, 124, 125, 329n86, 336n50, 337n72 Aristotle, 71, 91, 309n21, 327n49 Ars Moriendi, 96, 329n86, 336n50 Arthur, King, 45, 50–51, 52, 54, 273, 291, 294 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop Aubert, Colard, 321n110 Audelay, John, xvi, xix, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16–17, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29, 37, 44, 63, 67, 78, 79, 81, 83, 86, 95, 113, 117, 119–20, 123, 124, 126, 133, 139, 140–74, 179, 187, 190–91, 192–93, 196, 201, 206, 230, 256, 268, 289, 299, 300, 301, 303, 304, 311n52, 324n6, 325n27; blindness, 148, 299, 342n38; “Childhood,” 141, 152; church reform, 140; Counsel of Conscience, The, 140, 148, 150, 151;dialect, 142, 150, 340n16; “Dread of Death,” 141, 142, 171; “Henry VI,” 142; Langland, 140–41, 148, 152–54, 156–59, 166, 171–74, 339n3, 343n66, 345n91, 350n42; Lestrange household, 143–44, 146, 151; Marcolf and Solomon, 111, 148, 152–59, 160–64, 168–71, 334n30, 335n37, 335n40, 337n63, 339n2, 340n14; metrical forms, 149–51, 156; music, 164, 350n42; underem-

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ployment, 140, 143, 151–52, 156, 158; Wycliffism, 154 Augustine of Canterbury, St., 51, 268, 276–78, 286, 318 Augustine of Hippo, St., 71, 88, 167, 331n117 Aylmer, G. E., 348n15 Baechle, Sarah, 327n50, 331n108 Bailey, John, 95, 116, 122, 124, 136, 328n74, 334n23, 336n43, 338n87 Baldock, Ralph, bishop, 289 Bale, Anthony, 361n86 Ball, John, 2, 308n2 Barking Abbey, 290, 369n94 Barr, Helen, 341n20 Barratt, Alexandra, 316n26 Barrington, Candace, 317n28, 335n35 Barron, Caroline, 319n77, 357n14 Baswell, Christopher, 309n29 Batt, Catherine, 326n47 Baugh, G. C., 342n48 Beadle, Richard, 358n45 Becket, Thomas, 28, 29, 58, 248, 253, 254, 257 Bede: Historia ecclesiastica, 51, 54, 271, 272, 276, 277, 368n70, 369n83 beggars, 3, 15, 103, 107, 137, 239, 301, 309n14 benefices, 1–4, 12–23, 28–31, 173, 178–79, 190, 197, 251, 267–68, 298, 301–3, 305, 308n10, 312n66, 335n39, 344n73, 349n30, 356n2, 371n16; in Audelay, 140, 143, 147, 153, 155, 157–60, 163–64, 168–70, 172, 346n123; in Chaucer, 6, 8–10, 309n21; in Hoccleve, 86–87, 89, 94, 96, 111–24, 129–30, 139, 334n34, 335n42; lack of, xiv–xv, 12–23, 26, 35, 201, 203, 209, 214, 216, 218, 233, 263; in Langland, 77–79, 80–81, 83–85, 309n13, 325n29, 333n10, 333n18; in Laȝamon, 54; and the London Puy, 62; in The Owl and the Nightingale, 41, 44–47; and Tyckhill, 100–101, Bennett, H. S., 29, 31, 123, 312n68, 335n43, 342n45 Bennett, Michael, 20, 25, 66, 69, 124, 143, 164, 262, 312n69, 314n105, 321n119, 341n24, 341n26, 341n28, 341n30, 342n40, 345n90, 345n100, 365n24 Benson, Larry D., 344n75 Beowulf, 50 Benskin, Michael, 315n3 Benton, John, 355n163 Bernard of Clairvaux, 88 Bestul, Thomas, 68, 70, 322n129, 322n139, 322n140, 323n148

376

i n d ex

Beverly Minster, 184, 191, 209, 350n47, 355n154 Bible, 88, 90, 92, 126, 128, 148, 238, 315n13, 328n64, 337n66; Old Testament, 128 Billado, Tracey, 319n70 Biller, Peter, 374 binding fragments, 184 Birkholz, Daniel, 186, 221, 348n21 Black Death, 18, 69, 71, 309n21, 310n34, 322n138, 357n7 Black, Joseph, 358n43 “Blacksmiths, The” 15, 102, 113, 180–82, 184, 190, 206, 207–9, 220, 330nn106–7, 347n7, 347n9, 349n37 Blanton, Virginia, 360n82 Blyth, Charles, 88–90, 92, 94, 133, 138, 310n30, 325n31, 327n49, 327nn51–54, 327n57, 327n59, 327nn61–64, 333n6, 333n16, 334n22, 335n42 bob and wheel forms, 158, 201, 202, 236–39, 240, 352 Boethius, 85, 88, 327n50 Boffey, Julia, 179, 190, 191, 192, 193, 320n98, 335n42, 341n19, 343n52, 347n5, 351n55 Bohne, Amanda, 244, 339n90, 360n83 Bokenham, Osbern, 31, 340n4 Booth family, 256, 258, 262 Boroff, Marie, 261, 263, 296, 364n2, 364n5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 17, 311n56 Bowker, Thomas, 262 Boyarin, Adrienne Williams, 35, 314n1 Boyd, Matthieu, xiii, 307n1 Boynton, Susan, 330n107, 354n133 Brady, Lindy, 318n47 Braybrooke, bishop, 263, 269, 286, 288, 364n13, 368n73, 369n86 Brewer, Charlotte, 84, 103, 104, 326n34, 331n115 British Museum, 76, 323n156 Brook, G. L., 318n50, 356n10 Brown, Matthew Clifton, 75, 204, 323n153 Brown, Sarah, 247, 361n95, 361n99, 362n103, 367n52, 369n82 Brown, Tim Tatton, 351n66 Brutus of Troy, 51, 70, 271, 273, 277, 278, 284, 286, 293 Bugbee, John, 364n6 Bugyis, Katie, 307n16, 314n114, 339n90, 343n64, 371n10 Burrow, John (also J. A.), 10, 67, 68, 92, 95, 96, 113, 147, 311n54, 321n116, 322n123, 322n125, 326n44, 328n66, 328n75, 329n77, 329n79, 329n81, 331n125, 332nn1–2, 335n43, 337n70, 338n79, 342n39

Bury St. Edmunds, 193 Burton, T. L., 330n91 Busby, Keith, 307n1 Butterfield, Ardis, xv, xvi, xvii, 36, 64, 307n7, 315nn5–6, 321n111, 347n5, 350n50, 353n108 Caedmon, 50 Caerleon, 284, 369n82 Calvin, John, 363n122 Cambridge, 22, 79, 81, 99, 245, 250 Canada, xiii–xiv, 307n2 Cannon, Christopher, xvi, xvii, 52, 208, 307n8, 309n29, 318n61, 343n53, 353n118 canon law, 2, 11, 23, 46, 69, 83, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93–94, 96, 107, 108, 121, 124, 126, 131, 233, 245, 289, 301, 304, 309n21, 310n30, 325n28, 327n55, 328n63, 328n71, 332n127 Canterbury Cathedral, 205, 269, 282 Cant, Reginald, 348n15, 356n2, 359n60, 360n75 carols, 15, 141, 142, 144, 147, 152, 164, 171, 188, 190, 191–93, 198, 201–3, 205, 253, 267, 339n2, 340n17, 341n19, 341n31, 342n40, 342n44, 342n47, 343n52, 345n101, 350n41, 350n43, 350n47, 350n48, 350n52, 352n77, 352n81, 352n86, 352n87, 353n106 Carpenter, John, 101, 265 Carthusian order, 84, 197 Cartlidge, Neil, 316nn26–27, 317n28 “Cathedral lyrics.” See music Catherine of Siena, 84 Catto, J. I., 310n39, 324n8, 337n66 Cavanaugh, Susan Hagen, 337n66 Cawley, A. C., 150, 227, 230, 232, 343n55, 352n83, 357n25, 358n39 Cervone, Cristina, 350n50 Chaganti, Seeta, 364n6 Chambers, Albert, 233, 234, 235, 358n41, 359n51 Chancery, 21, 37, 65, 88, 93, 99, 133, 170, 206, 315n8, 341n37, 353n109 Chanson d’aventure, 70, 98, 100, 134, 150, 227, 328n75 chantries, xiii, 4, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 20, 148, 178–79, 188, 218, 308n10, 333n10, 344n73, 349n32, 348n38, 356n4, 365n19; in Audeley 143, 144, 171, 172–73, 256, 341n22; John Tyckhill, 98–100, 351n68; in Langland, 107, 108, 341n23; in St. Paul’s, 26, 78, 98, 190, 251–52, 264, 265, 269, 278, 283, 288–89, 292, 296, 330n95, 345n95; in York, 244, 245, 258, 262, 351n67, 361n93

i n d ex Chaucer, Geoffrey, xii, 311n54; Clerk, 6, 9, 10, 21, 27, 37, 173, 238; “Complaint to His Purse,” 106; Friar’s Tale, 10; General Prologue, 3, 4, 6–9, 10, 117; glossing in, 87, 90, 92, 129, 337n67; and Hoccleve, 110–11, 113, 124, 131–32, 324n5, 333n13; Miller’s Tale, xiv, 9, 25, 159, 205, 341n37, 344n86; Nun’s Priest, 8, 10; Pardoner, 10; Pardoner’s Tale, 137, 339n89; Parson, 27, 28, 155; Prioress’s Tale, 184, 211–12; scribes, 101; Troilus and Criseyde, 93, 328n72; Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 9, 92, 137; Wife of Bath’s Tale, 339n89 Cheshire, 20, 69, 223, 261, 262, 265, 266, 312n69, 365n24 Chester’s Inn, 93, 110, 133, 266, 339n94 Chibnall, Marjorie, 342n48 Chichester Cathedral, 194, 196, 244, 351n59, 351n65, 360n76 Chichele, Robert, 328n75 children, xix, 17, 44, 81, 105, 141, 208, 210, 213, 215, 244, 354n133, 355n150, 357n16 Chism, Christine, 364n3, 374 choristers, xvi, xix, 11, 12, 15, 16, 21, 178, 182, 184, 189, 190, 193, 198, 202–3, 206, 208, 209, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 236, 245, 291, 330n107, 333n12, 347n7, 352n84, 353n99 “Choristers’ Lament,” xix, 21, 182, 184, 185, 189–90, 198, 206–9, 212–14, 216–17, 220, 225, 226, 235, 267, 291, 300, 303, 304, 330n107, 333n12, 347n7, 348n18, 354n121, 354n136, 354n139, 355n156, 357n18, 359n57 Christianson, C. Paul, 365n27 Christina of Markyate, 317n39 Christopher de Hamel, 344n69 Chronica Archiepiscoporum Eboracensium (CAE), 243, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 263, 269, 365n14 Chronicon Metricum Ecclesiae Eboracensis (CMEE), 246, 269, 270–71, 273, 275, 295, 370n111 Chrysostom, John, 262 Clanchy, Michael, 37, 273, 304, 315n10 Clement V, pope, 193, 328n61 Clementhorpe, 243 Clerical manuals, 6, 17 Clerke, John, 359n45, 360n71 Clough, Cecil H., 334 Cochelin, Isabelle, 374 codicology, 11, 94, 110, 190, 193, 324n5, 348n21 Cok, John, 22, 313n88

377

Coleman, Janet, 308n6, 333n11 Colledge, Edmund, 192–93, 350nn50–52 Collette, Carolyn P., 319n73 Comestor, Peter, 88, 148 Connolly, Margaret, 313n87, 313n90, 321n116, 326n37 consistory courts, 178, 186, 289, 301 Cooper, Helen, 321n111 Cooper, Tim, 17, 18, 20, 79, 310n39 Correale, Robert, 309n24 Cotton Library, 353n104 Courtenay, William, 19, 31, 81, 93, 112, 289, 308n2, 309n21, 312n66, 324n6, 328nn71–72, 328n74, 329n78, 369n88 Coventry, 18, 20, 240 Cromwell, Thomas, 269, 366n43 Cronica Maiorum, 36, 56, 319n74, 319n77 Culler, Jonathan, 141, 340n9 Cynewulf, 50 Daileader, Philip, 312n65 Danse Macabre, 265 D’Arcy, Anne, 364n3 Davidson, Clifford, 254, 358n40, 358n45, 359n55, 359n59, 359n62, 359n65, 360n71 Davies, J. Conway, 312n68 Davies, Rees, 362n112 Davis, Virginia, 22, 312n82 debate, 44, 45, 46, 71, 75, 96, 179, 209, 237, 238, 321n117 Deeming, Helen, 353n108 Derrida, Jacques, xviii, 11 Despres, Denise, 309n20, 310n41, 313n88, 344n74, 345n91 Dickins, Bruce, 53, 318n50 disendowment, 171, 173, 174, 254, 257, 357n129, 363n134 Dissolution of the Monasteries, 18 Distichs of Cato, 209 Divine Office, 12, 179, 193, 218, 290, 333n12 Dixon, Philip, 351n66 Doane, A. N., 318n52 Dobson, Barrie, 26–29, 60, 61, 114, 173, 184, 210, 214, 243, 252, 254–55, 260, 269, 311n51, 334n20, 345n92, 346n117, 348nn15–16, 350n44, 354n131, 356nn1–2, 359n60, 360n73, 360n76, 361n90, 363n128, 366n42 Dobson, Eric (E. J.), 193, 196, 198, 319n76, 351n54, 351nn62–63, 351n65, 352n77, 352n89, 352nn93–94, 353nn99–101, 356n170 Dohar, William, 322n138

378

i n d ex

Dominican order, 74, 323n149, 370n115 Donne, William, 123, 124, 335n43, 336n48 Donoghue, Daniel, 50, 53, 318n53 Doob, Penelope, 124, 329n83, 336n50 Dorrell, M., 358n45 Dorset, 44, 47, 197, 348n25 Doyle, Ian (also A. I.), 101, 132, 321n109, 332n1, 337n64, 337n68, 337n69, 337n74, 338n75, 353n111 Driver, Martha 323n1, 341n19, 373 Drogin, Marc, 325n32, 341n32 Dronke, Peter, 44, 316n25 Dugdale, William, 269, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 296, 368n61, 368n63, 368n73, 368n76, 369n86, 369n89, 369nn91–93, 369n101, 369n103, 370n122 Dunbar, William, 141 Duncan, Thomas Gibson, 203, 351n61, 352nn86–n87 Durham Cathedral, 206, 269, 272, 366n42 Eagleton, Terry, 17, 312n57 early Middle English (eME, language), xviii, 35, 38, 56, 58, 60, 64 Early Middle English (EME, literature), xv, xvi, 16, 25, 35, 38, 41, 46, 48, 54, 56, 57, 61, 76, 77, 133, 182, 183, 206, 208, 212, 217, 299, 307n1, 314n1, 314n3, 315n12, 315n14, 316n20, 347n7 East Anglia, 184, 207, 208, 213, 252, 353n111 Eddy, Nicole, 313nn88–89 Edmund, Winchester chapel clerk, 198, 356n170 Edward I, 62 Edward II, 29, 186, 314n108, 314n110, 315n7 Edward III, xv, 18, 65, 68, 70, 71, 75 Edward IV, 351n67, 365n16 Edward, the Black Prince, 68, 71, 322n126, 349n37 Edwards, A. S. G., 351n55 Eggesfield, Agnes, 101, 251 Eleanor, queen, 51, 56 Ely Cathedral, 168 Emden, Alfred B., 325n22, 351n62 Empey, Adrian, 350n51 “Erþ,” 42 Ethelbert, 368n61 Evans, T. A. R., 16, 18, 31, 78, 79, 301, 310n39, 311nn51–52, 324n8, 324n115, 325n23, Ewin, E. T. Floyd, 365n28, 368n61 Exchequer, 22, 23, 28, 30, 31, 95, 105, 106, 117, 120, 121, 335 Exeter, 187, 191, 203, 262, 348, 356

Fahey, Richard, 317n37 Fayrfax, Robert, 350n48 Field, Rosalind, 37, 273, 304, 315n10 Fein, Susanna, xvii, 17, 25, 141, 146, 147, 164, 165, 169, 221, 304, 310n40, 311n52, 313n99, 315n13, 321n117, 323n154, 333n5, 339n2, 340n15, 340nn17–18, 341n19, 341n24, 342n47, 343n53, 343n57, 343n61, 344n85, 345n90, 345n101, 346nn112–13, 346n116, 346n123, 347n126, 348n21, 356n10, 357n20 Fenster, Thelma, 319n73, 319n78, 319n79, 319n80, 320n97 Ferriby, Robert, 248, 361n102 Fischer, Matthew, 374 Fisher, John, 353n109 Fletcher, Alan J., 364n3 Flood, Victoria, 322n139 Formalism, xviii, xix, 224 Foster, John Bellamy, 311nn55–56 Foucault, Michel, 11 Fovent (or Favent), Thomas, 120, 123, 304, 334n26, 334n31, 334n33, 346n121, 372n24 France, 36, 64, 70, 315, 321 Franciscan order, 35, 74, 192, 201, 314n2, 323n149, 325n33, 339n3, 346n110 friars, 13, 21, 73, 75, 143, 149, 153, 174, 250, 313n87, 315n12, 316n27, 343n60, 343n64, 347n129, 370n115 Friedman, John B., 245, 348n17, 349n28, 349n30, 356n1, 357n24, 367n55, 371n16 Fuller, Karrie, 103, 108, 310n46, 323n1, 331n112 funerals, 21, 173 Furnivall, Frederick J., 86, 326n44, 337n64, 337n68 Galloway, Andrew, 78, 120, 324n4, 325n20, 332n1, 335n35 Garsdale, Richard, 367n55 Gaunt, Simon, 307n1 Gawain-poet. See Pearl-Poet Gaydon, A. T., 342n48 Gee, Stacey, 362nn108–9 Genesis, Book of, 88, 92, 326n47; Old English, 50 Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Regum Britanniae, 45, 51, 271, 272, 277, 284, 294, 369n83, 370n111 Ghosh, Kantik, 314n115 Gilbert, Beverly, 103, 308n12, 312n62, 331n112 Gilbert de Seagrave, 289 Gillespie, Alexandra, 374 Gillespie, Vincent, 314n115, 353n108

i n d ex Ginsberg, Warren, 321n118, 322n126, 323n148 Giraldus Cambrensis, 317n40 Glenlyon Brooch, 323n156 Godefroid de Saint-Victor, 60 Godstow Abbey, 309n23 Goldberg, P. J. P., 232, 357n11, 357n20, 361n95 Gollancz, Israel, 265, 277, 282, 292, 337n64, 337nn68–69, 365n20, 368n62, 368n69, 369n101 Goodridge, J. F., 308n1 Gospel of Luke, 84, 103, 106, 111, 331n121 Gospel of Matthew, 88, 106, 331n121 Gower, John, 87, 101, 132, 313n95, 321n114, 321n115, 338n74, 342n42 graduals, 189, 191, 211, 349n34 Grady, Frank, 364n3 Grail, 22 Gransden, Antonia, 58, 319n83, 366n39 Gratian, 88, 89, 328n63 Great Fire of London, 279, 294 Greatrex, Joan, 354n133 Great Schism, xv, 2, 3, 18, 19, 31, 69, 77, 78, 178, 308n2, 312n65, 324n6 Green, Richard Firth, 161, 340n14, 345n93, 346n124 Gregory IX, pope, 27, 276, 277 Griffiths, Jeremy, 365n27 Grimston, 250, 362n108, 362n109 Grosseteste, Robert, 192, 366n31 Guibert de Nogent: Monodies, 214 Guillaume de Machaut, 321n110 Guy de Roucliff, 92 Habermas, Jürgen, 27, 313n103 Hall, Megan, 352n96, Hall, Richard, 311n51, 349n28, 349n32, 356n1, 360n73 Hamel, Mary, 309n24 Hammond, E., 322n124 Hanna, Ralph, xv, xvi, 61, 131, 184, 265, 307n5, 307n9, 308n3, 309n24, 315n7, 319n72, 319n81, 320n100, 325n32, 338n74, 344n69, 348n18, 353n111, 354n121, 362n108, 365n23, 372n24 Harper, John, 189, 349n33, 349n34 Harrington, Marjorie, xvii, 25, 38, 64, 313n87, 313n99, 315n16, 340n11, 351n55, 352n76 Harrison, F. Ll. (Frederick), 60, 61, 193, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 234, 244, 319n76, 349n39, 350n44, 351n54, 351n60, 351n63, 351n70, 352n77, 353n101, 356n3, 360n77, 363n132, 367n53

379

Harvey, Barbara F., 325n30 Harvey, Ruth, 374 Haskett, Tim, 308n5 Haughmond Abbey, 143, 147, 148, 151, 174, 341n22, 360n48, 342n49 Hector, L. C., 325n30 Hegel, Georg, 12 Henry II, 28, 29, 44, 45, 46, 316n27 Henry III, 45, 266, 314n108, 316n27 Henry IV, 19, 138, 139, 186, 240, 247, 248, 252, 257, 311n54, 335n39 Henry V, 96, 128, 247, 337n65 Henry VI, 142, 277, 351n67 Henry VIII, 173, 269, 270 Henri de Waleys, 58, 62 Henry of Huntington, 272 Hereford Cathedral, 43, 186, 187, 189, 193, 200, 220, 221, 348n21 heresy, 31, 32, 128, 154, 156, 197, 237, 242, 249, 332n2, 336n50, 344n76 Higgins, Iain McCleod, 35, 314n1 Hildegard of Bingen, 174 Hilmo, Maidie, 50, 315n9, 316n20, 318n51, 324n5, 325n31, 333n6, 334n30, 337n67, 337nn73–74, 345n91, 355nn148–49 Hoccleve, Thomas, xvi, xix, 3, 10, 14, 17, 110–11, 289, 301, 304, 310n30, 321n116, 328n74; career, 13, 17, 22–23, 28, 31, 78, 83, 87, 92–94, 105, 117, 121–24, 138–39, 303, 311n54, 325n28, 326n44, 327n55; Complaint and Dialogue, 94–95, 125, 131, 326n47; Lerne to Die, 96, 97, 125; La Male Regle, 95, 106, 133, 337n70; Regiment of Princes, 10, 11, 62, 83–84, 85, 86–92, 96, 111–13, 114–17, 119–20, 123, 129–31, 132–39, 155, 158, 170, 328n63, 332n2, 333n6, 335n42, 339n89; Remonstrance Against Oldcastle, 96, 125–29, 148; scribal relationships, 131–32, 312n83, Hollar, Wenceslaus, 279, 281, 282 Holsinger, Bruce, xvii, 46, 48, 214, 216, 308n3, 317n28, 353n110, 354n121, 354n129, 354n139, 355n151 Horace, 207 Horlacher, Stefan, 340n16 Horn, Andrew, 57, 62, 65, 320n100 Horobin, Simon, 132, 187, 338n77, 348n26 Hughes, Jonathan, 245, 359n66, 361n86, 361n93 Hugh of Fouilloy, 148 Hundred Years’ War, 36, 68 Hutchinson, Ann M., 341n20 Hyams, Paul, 54, 319n70

380

i n d ex

indulgences, 173 Inns of Chancery, 88, 93, 133, 206, 328n67, 341n37, 353n109 Inns of Court, 93, 133 Isidore of Seville: Synonyma, 95, 148 Islinger, Marion, 340n16 I-speaker, 65, 68, 111, 142, 167, 210, 220, 222, 224, 303, 333n7 Ives, E. W., 25, 313n97 Ivo of Chartres: Decretum, 90, 328n61 Izbicki, Thomas, 312n65 James-Maddocks, Holly, 313n87 Jameson, Fredric, 299 Jean de la Mote, 321n110 Jennings, Margaret, 346n113, 346n116 Jerome, 88, 90, 92, 327n61 Joachim of Fiore, 174, 339n3 Johannes de Grocheo, 199 Johannes Ellys de Bysschophyll, 230, 357n29 John de Allhallowgate, 258, 260, 360n72, 363n139, 367n55 John of Gaunt, 277, 282 John of Hildesheim: Historia trium regum, 75 John of Langton, 29, 314n110 John (Prince), 254, 361n99 Johnson, Ian, 141, 174, 340n4, 347n128 Johnson, Paul A., 359n55 Johnston, A. F. (Alexandra), 358n41, 358n44 Johnston, Michael, 320n103, 321n117, 323n154, 324n4, 342n41 Jones, Sarah Rees, 244, 298, 330n100, 351n68, 360n77 Jones, Serene, 363n122 Jonna, R. Jamil, 311n55 Jurasinski, Stefan, 318n48 Justice, Steven, 308nn2–3, 312n81, 315n4, 320n99, 323n150, 323n4, 324n4, 333n14, 337n73, 341n33, Justinian, 96, 126, 127 Juvenal, 207 Kane, George, 108, 309n18, 324n19, 331n114 Karras, Ruth, 244, 302, 360n83 Keats, John, 194, 197, 351n59 Kelly, H. Ansgar, 307n3 Kempe, Margery: Book of Margery Kempe, xix, 156, 218, 220, 234, 243, 245, 247, 249, 250, 264, 270, 301, 344n81, 361nn85–86, 361n93, 362n106, 362n108 Kendale, John, 234, 245–50, 252, 362nn108–9 Kennedy, E. D., 326n33

Kennedy, Ruth, 98, 100, 102, 180, 330n91, 330n93, 347n6 Ker, N. R., 184, 270, 316n27, 317n33, 348n20, 367nn55–56, 369n103 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 307n16, 308n3, 309n15, 309nn19–20, 309nn23–24, 309n29, 310n46, 311n47, 312n81, 313n87, 314n109, 314nn114–15, 315n4, 315n9, 315n18, 316n20, 316n22, 317n38, 320n99, 320n103, 322n146, 323n150, 324n4, 325n33, 326n43, 327n48, 327n50, 328n72, 330n100, 330n102, 330n108, 333n6, 333n14, 334n19, 334n30, 337n73, 341n33, 341n37, 342n41, 343n64, 344n69, 366n31, 371n4, 371n10 Kim, Dorothy, 35, 314n1 King, J. E., 368n70 King, Pamela, 320n98, 335n42 Kirby, D. P., 369n85 Klein, Andrew, 315n18, 343n55, 347n6, 359n56 Kleinhenz, Christopher, 307n1 Knapp, Ethan, 92, 116, 124, 125, 139, 326n44, 328n66, 332n2, 334n24, 335n40, 336n50 Knight, David J., 369n82 Knight, Ione Kemp, 331n116 Knockin Church, 145 Koopmans, Rachel, 374 Laing, Margaret, 314n3, 317n27 Lancashire, 20, 69, 262, 312n69 Langland, William, xvi, xvii, 2, 10, 19, 308n3; A-text, 108; and Audelay, 140–43, 148, 149, 151, 152–59, 161, 163, 171–74, 339n3, 340n14; “autobiographical” passage, 78, 79–82, 104, 106, 124, 139, 169, 173, 301, 333n17; C-text, 3–4, 15, 89, 230; career, 11, 298, 333n11; and Hoccleve, 83–84, 110–14, 117–20, 131–37, 332n2, 333n7; identity and background, 83, 324n4, 325n20, 325n29; Parable of the Unjust Steward, 84, 103, 105; Pardon scene, 107–9, 301; Piers Plowman, 3, 36, 69, 201–2, 241, 300, 345n91, 363n134; readers, 101–2, 250–51; scribes, 101, 131–32; Vicar, 3–6, 20; Z-text, 15, 84, 102–9, 331n117 Late Middle English, xv, 20, 35–36, 314n3 Laurence de Looze, 50, 318n52, 319n67 Lavezzo, Kathy, 319n68 law, 3, 45, 46–47, 50, 54, 61, 69, 71, 82, 93, 94, 105, 112, 122, 230, 233, 239–41, 286, 295, 317n28, 358n34; canon, 2, 11, 23, 46, 69, 83, 85, 88–90, 92, 94, 96, 107, 108, 121, 124, 126, 131, 233, 245, 289, 295, 301, 304, 309n21, 310n30, 325n28, 327n55, 328n63, 328n71, 332n27 Lawler, Traugott, 309n24

i n d ex Lawmen, 35, 48, 52, 71 Lawson, George, 269 Lawton, David, 311n48, 340n10, 342n43, 367n57 lawyers, 2, 15, 25, 57, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 93, 103, 107, 108, 262, 266, 286, 301, 328n72, 331n113 laymen, 21, 22, 23, 24, 148, 160, 161, 170, 173, 246 Laȝamon, 48, 50, 56; Brut, xiii, 14, 16, 25, 28, 36, 37, 46, 48–56, 66, 67, 76, 149, 303, 304, 317n45, 318n50 Ledrede, Richard, bishop, 192, 202, 350nn50–52, 366n31 Lee, Roger, 374 Le Palmer, James 23, 117, 161, 301, 303; Omne bonum, 23, 24, 117, 301, 302, 345n91 Leslie, R. F., 318n50 Lestrange, Lady (wife of Richard), 143, 144, 342n40 Lestrange, Lord Ralph, 341n21 Lestrange, Lord Richard, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 164, 172, 174, 230, 341n22, 341n24 Levy, K. J., 353n104 Lichfield Cathedral, 18, 20, 187, 269, 361n90, 363n127 Lincoln, 15, 27, 269, 282 Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), 60, 314n3, 320n88 Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (LALME), 315n3, 348n25, 355n157 Little, Katherine, 336n50 liturgy, 3, 12, 60, 78, 80, 85, 94, 95, 107, 112, 165, 171, 173, 190, 198, 201, 205, 211, 217, 263, 264, 290 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 337n66 Lollards, 155. See also Wycliffism London, xv, 2, 15, 22, 85, 101, 113, 122, 132, 172, 180, 251, 369n103, 276, 284, 313n88, 315n7, 320n100, 353n111, 368n61; and Audeley, 144; Guildhall, 57, 63, 101, 109, 132, 146, 190, 265; and Hoccleve, 86, 93, 94, 131, 133–34, 139, 266; and Piers Plowman, 80, 103, 139, 347n125, 349n38; and St. Erkenwald, 261–62, 264, 265, 266, 286; and St. Paul’s Cathedral, 186, 188, 218, 261, 265, 289; and Tyckhill, 100, 101, 178; and Wynnere and Wastoure, 66, 69; Xenophobia in, 56, 60. See also St. Paul’s Cathedral; Thedmar, Arnold Fitz London Puy (or Pui), xv, 37, 57, 58, 61–65, 107, 109, 146, 165, 301, 315n6, 371n19 Loud, Graham, 366n42 Lucius, King, 284, 285, 295, 369n82 Ludlow, 25, 186, 221, 310n40

381

Luke, Book of, 84, 103, 106, 111, 331n121 Lydgate, John, 31, 124, 125, 265, 321n116, 340n4, 342n42, 343n62; A Defence of Holy Church, 125 Lyrics. See music MacDonald, Leanne, 348n26 Machulak, Erica, 135, 136, 338n85 Magdalene, Mary, 193 Mann, Jill, 365n24 Marchaunt, John, 101, 132, 313n95, 330nn102–3, 338n76, 349n40. See also Scribes, Scribe D marriage, 15, 46, 87, 221, 232, 301, 302, 360n83, 371n15 Martial, 88, 207 Marxism, xix, 27, 63, 77, 112, 152, 178, 179, 256, 298, 299, 314n104, 347n3 Matthew, Book of, 88, 106, 331n121 Mayus, Melissa, 314n114, 343n64, 371n10 McHardy, A. K., 9, 15–16, 21, 77–79, 81, 109, 143, 164, 203, 209, 263, 308n10, 309n26, 310n39, 310nn42–43, 310n45, 311n49, 311n52, 312n76, 323nn2–3, 325n27, 326n38, 333n10, 341n23, 345n100, 347n1, 348n15, 351n56, 352n75, 352n88, 354n127 McIntosh, Angus, 315n3 McKenna, J. W., 361n94 Meech, S. B., 361n85, 361n93, 362n108 Mengel, David, 308n2 merchants, 15, 27, 57–58, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 103, 107–9, 301, 309n14, 331n113 Meredith, Peter, 358n45 Meyer-Lee, Robert, 125, 315n18, 336n61, 340n18 Middle English Dictionary, 74, 80, 163, 230, 232, 264, 286, 308n4, 317n32, 321n122, 323n148, 324nn11–12, 330n92 Middleton, Anne, 15, 29, 147, 308n3, 311n48, 332n3, 342n43 Millett, Bella, 71, 317n35, 317n41, 352n97 Minnis, A. J., 364n9 Minstrels, 15, 17, 64, 68, 206, 311n52, 321n110, 322n127, 351n65 Mitchell, Jerome, 124, 329n85, 336n50, 337n64 Mooney, Linne, 22, 101, 105, 132, 311n51, 311n54, 313n90, 313n95, 323n1, 326n37, 326n42, 330n104, 331n112, 333n13, 337n74, 338n75, 338n76, 339n92, 346n109, 351n55, 365n21 Moore, Deborah L., 314n2 motets, 188, 190, 199, 201, 203 359n68 Mowbray, Thomas, 252–53, 255, 362n118 multilingualism, xiii, xiv, xvii, 45, 51, 57, 61, 77, 205, 303, 307n1, 309n29, 317n37, 372n21

382

i n d ex

music, xvii, 12, 14, 21, 28, 36, 179, 187–88, 317n40, 320n89, 351n70, 352n86, 352n93; in Audelay, 144, 149, 160–64, 164–65, 350n42; “The Blacksmiths,” 182, 349n37; “cathedral lyrics,” 179, 188–93; cathedral music, 196, 198–206, 210–14, 291, 352n77, 366n33; “The Choristers’ Lament,” 182–84, 216–17, 304; in “The Prisoner’s Lament,” 56–61, 63–64 Neave, David, 351n67 Neckham, Alexander, 317n40 Nelson, Ingrid, 142, 340n11 Neville, archbishop, 256–57, 258, 363n133 New Historicism, xvii, xix Newman, Barbara, 320n97, 351n73, 371n9 Newton, John, 245 Nicholas of Guildford, xv, 28, 44–45, 46–47, 48, 316n26, 317n43, Nicholas of Lyra, 88–89, 90, 92, 328n64; Postilla, 92 Nielsen, Melinda, 85, 88, 137, 326n39, 327n50, 332n3, 339n89 Nissé, Ruth, 364n3 Nolan, Maura, xvi, 307n9 Norton, Christopher, 361n95 Norwich Cathedral, 15, 20, 38, 102, 182, 184, 186, 189, 205, 206–10, 221 notaries, 3, 15, 25, 73, 103, 119, 234, 243, 250, 301, 304, 308n12, 372n24 Nowell, Peter, 294, 295, 369n103, 370nn115–16 Nuttall, Jenni, 95, 328n84, 335n43 Nyffenegger, Nicole, 318n57 obits, 21, 163, 173, 190, 244 O’Byrne, Theresa, 372n24 Odyssey, The, 122–23, 335n42 Office for the Dead, 80, 83 Old English, xv, 21, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 102, 244, 295, 317n37, 317n45, 318n47 Oliver, Clementine, 120, 334n34 Oliver, Lisi, 318n48 Olson, Linda, 315n9, 316n20, 333n6 O’Mara, Veronica, 360n82 Orchard of Syon, 84, 105 ordination, xix, 16, 19, 22, 29, 31, 81, 82, 100, 118, 121, 184, 193, 214, 218, 301, 308n3, 325n25, 356n4 Orleton of Hereford, Bishop, 186, 193 Orme, Nicholas, 208, 210, 213, 216, 354n124, 355n150, 356n5, 359n58 Ormulum, 50, 53 Osbarn, Richard, 331n112 Otter, Monika, 61, 294, 319n73, 320n89, 364n3

Owl and the Nightingale, The, xv, 14, 16, 25, 28, 29, 36, 41, 44–48, 300, 303, 304, 316n24, 316nn26–27, 317n28 Oxford, 6, 9, 16, 22, 79, 81–82, 93, 99, 148, 159, 168, 169–70, 301, 309n23, 309n24, 309n25, 341n37 Palmer, William, 101, 251–52, 267, 330n100 Pantin, W. A., 2, 3, 14, 18, 20, 77, 298, 308nn1–2, 323n1, 324n6 Parable of the Unjust Steward, 16, 84, 103, 104–6, 111, 167, 241, 311n50, 331n117 Paris, Matthew, 285, 294 Parkes, Malcolm, 3, 21–24, 99, 101, 132, 165, 181, 308n11, 309n17, 313n95, 321n109, 337n74, 338n75, 345n107, 347n8, 353n111 Parliament, 68, 73, 120, 128, 240, 257, 334n31, 334n33 The Parlement of Three Ages, 68 Pasternack, Carol Braun, 318n52 patronage, 14, 18, 45, 77, 78–79, 114, 115, 120, 123, 125, 129, 139, 149, 155, 220, 299, 300; in Laȝamon’s Brut, 48, 50, 51, 52–53, 54; in Wynnere and Wastoure, 62, 65, 66–68, 76; loss of, 19, 85, 103, 308n12, Patterson, Lee, xix, 307n15 Pearl Poet, xiv, 235, 261, 349n31, 366n35; as Gawain poet, 70, 150, 170, 236, 237, 264, 286, 290, 364n2, 365n24 Pearsall, Derek, 113, 132, 133–34, 142, 152, 156, 161, 273, 298, 309nn18–19, 311n47, 313n87, 316n25, 322n127, 324n10, 325n27, 325n33, 333n5, 333n14, 336n59, 338n83, 340n13, 340n14, 346n114, 355n163, 365n27, 367n57 peasants, 27, 69, 169 Pentecost, 291, 369n96 Perkins, Nicholas, 124, 125, 126–27, 131, 187, 332nn1–2, 336n62, 348n25 Perry, Lucy, 318n54 Peterson, Clifford, 263, 264, 265, 267, 288, 291, 364n1, 365nn16–17, 366n35, 369nn95–96, 370n110 Petits bourgeois, 12, 26–28, 178, 298, 313n103 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 351n67 Phillippe de Vitry, 321n110 pilgrimage, 9, 10, 58, 137, 249 Pinkhurst, Adam (Scribe B), 132, 337n74 Piper, A. J., 366n43 Plague, 18 polyphony, 21, 96, 184, 189, 201, 203, 217, 290, 291 Porete, Marguerite, 320n97, 351n73 Powell, Susan, 71, 321n120, 339n2, 347n131, 364n3

i n d ex prebend, 23, 27, 115, 141, 124, 245, 353n43 precarity, economic, xix, 314n116 “Prisoner’s Lament, The,” xv, xviii, 16, 36, 37, 56–57, 58–61, 63–64, 65, 76, 85, 102, 190, 200, 203, 206, 304, 319nn72–73 Privy Seal office, 13, 17, 22, 85–86, 92–93, 95, 105, 115–16, 123, 130, 133, 137–139, 303, 311n54, 312n83, 326n42, 328n74, 335nn42–43 Pronay, Nicholas, 320n104 Proverbs of Alfred, 38, 39 Psalms, 120, 128, 165, 171, 181, 211, 213, 325n30, 367n53; Penitential, 80, 83, 95, 124, 143, 336n51, 341n25 Pugh, R. B., 342n48 punctuation, 54, 64, 102, 165, 177, 180–82, 189, 207, 208, 330n106, 343n53, 345n106, 347n6, 347nn7–8, 349n37 Putter, Ad, 365n24 Quebec, xiii–xiv Quis meo capiti, 252–54, 255, 257 Rabin, Andrew, 49, 318nn47–48 Raine, James, 248–49, 255, 258, 360n72, 361n99, 361nn102–3, 363n133, 363nn136–37, 363n139, 367n56, 371n16 Ralph, bishop of Shrewsbury, 219, 356nn6–7 Ralph de Diceto, 284, 285, 289, 295, 369n83, 370n118 Rashdall, Hastings, 325n22 Rasmussen, Mark David, 365n24 Reading Abbey, 350n42 Reformation, the, 18, 219, 363n122 Revard, Carter, 186, 221, 348n21 Revetour, William, 362n115 Rice, Eric, 330n107, 354n133 Richard II, xiv, 36, 77, 85, 98, 181, 244, 256, 257–58, 277, 298, 335n39, 355n66, 356n1, 360n77, 365n24, 369n86, 371n19 Richardson, Malcolm, 31, 328n68 Rigg, A. G., 84, 95, 103, 104, 271, 296, 326n34, 329nn80–81, 362n118 Ripon Minster, 255, 258, 269, 360n76, 363n132, 363n137, 367n55 Rising of 1381, 2, 82, 253 Robbins, Rossell Hope 350n41, 363n120 Roberts, Jane, 182, 316n20, 318n54, 330n106 Robinson, J. W., 233, 358n40 Robinson, Margaret, 358n44 Roche, Cornwall, 121 Rodwell, Warwick, 361nn89–90, 363n127, 356n7

383

Rogers, Nicola, 360n82 Rolle, Richard, 147, 165, 245, 247, 249, 250, 320n103, 342n41, 345n108 Rollo-Koster, Joelle, 312n65 romances, 37, 53, 54, 66, 68, 187, 205, 211, 348n25, 367n58; Anglo-Norman, 37, 273, 304, 318n61 Rome, xii, 4, 294 Rostad, Samuel, 314n115 Rousseau, Marie-Hélène, 190, 251, 288, 330n95, 345n95, 349n32, 349nn38–39, 357n14, 365n19 Rowley, Sharon, 313n99 Ruggiers, Paul A., 338n75 Russell, Delbert, 319n78, 320n97 Russell, George, 309n18 Salisbury, 351n65 Salisbury, Matthew Cheung, 349n34 Salter, Elizabeth, 44, 46, 133, 182, 207, 208, 262, 263, 316n25, 338n83, 364n7 Salter, H. E. 324n15, 342n49 Samuels, M. L., 315n3 Sandler, Lucy Freeman, 23, 93, 313n92, 334n25, 371n14 Sanok, Catherine, 315n18 “Satire on Sinful Townsfolk,” 15 “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” xix, 10, 13, 31, 70, 186, 206, 209, 217, 220–26, 230, 237, 239, 267, 289, 301, 356n10 Sayers, Sean, 310n36 Scahill, John, 38, 315n12 Scase, Wendy, 348n21, 348n26 Scattergood, John (V. J.), 262, 294, 337n66, 364n3, 364n9 Schieberle, Misty, 338n75 Schmidt, A. V. C., 331n108, 345n93 Schofield, John, 266, 279, 280, 282, 283, 292, 365n26, 368n75, 370n112 “The Schoolboy’s Lament,” 216, 355n163 Scott, Kathleen, 4, 309n19, 346n114 scribes, 21, 86, 108, 112, 186–87, 206, 208, 212, 226, 343n56, 349n27, 358n45; commercial, 3, 24, 25, 38, 102, 188, 313n96; difficulty with English, 38–43, 184, 185; government, 10, 13, 21–23, 37, 65, 88, 139, 146, 243, 268, 315n8, 335n42; Guildhall, 101, 132, 265, 313n95; legal, 25, 49; in London, 22, 101, 131, 132, 266, 331n112, 331n113, 349n30; in Piers Plowman, 108, 131, 173, 310n41, 331n112; as proletarians, 108, 113; Scribe D, 101, 132, 313n95, 330nn102–3, 338n76, 349n40. See also Hoccleve, Thomas; Marchaunt, John; Pinkhurst, Adam; Thornton, Robert

384

i n d ex

Scrope, Richard, archbishop, 186, 240, 243, 247, 248, 249, 252–59, 267, 268, 273, 283, 323n147, 361n93, 362n103, 362n118 Second Trial before Pilate, 13, 220, 232–43, 250, 284, 286, 304, 358n45, 360n71, 366n32. See also York Cycle Secreta Secretorum, 91, 304, 327n49 “Seinte Mari” lyric, 40 Seymour, M. C., 125, 128, 336n56 Shaftesbury Abbey, 316n26, 334n34 Shareshull, Sir William, 71, 73, 322n143, 322n145 Shirley, John, 11, 19, 21, 30, 31, 65, 67, 109, 120, 121–23, 152, 303, 304, 321n116, 329n76, 334n32, 335n37, 335n39, 335n41 Shoaf, Allen, 310n31 Shropshire, 142, 143, 150 Silverstein, Theodore, 346n111 Simpson, James, 122, 154, 314n114, 335n42, 336n59, 341n20, 343n64, 371n10, Simpson, W. Sparrow, 364n13, 366n33, 370n123 Sir Firumbras, 187, 348n25 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 66, 70, 158, 264, 273, 290, 291 Sisam, Celia, 211, 342n42, 352n85, 354n141, 355n151 Sisam, Kenneth, 211, 342n42, 352n85, 354n141, 355n151 Skurueton (Skorton), Robert, 234–35, 237, 243, 250, 301 Smalley, Beryl, 174, 347n130 Smith, Agnes, 360n82 Smith, D. Vance, 350n50 Smith, Jeremy, 132 Sobecki, Sebastian, 22, 68, 94, 95, 96, 115–16, 124, 125, 131, 136, 309n28, 311n54, 312n83, 321n115, 324n4, 326n42, 326n44 Somerset, Fiona, 344n69, 366n38, Spearing, A. C., 68, 130, 133, 142, 322n125, 326n45, 326n47, 329n77, 332n2, 333n16, 336n59 stained glass, 247, 250, 271, 278, 362n103 Stanley, Eric (E. G.), 50, 53, 201, 316n24, 316n27, 317n40, 318n54, 340n14, 340n16, 352n81 Stapleton, Thomas, 319n74 St. Albans Cathedral, 368n73 St. Albin, 51, 54, 318n56 Staley, Lynn, 361n85, 362n106 St. Anselm: De Concordia, 11, 85 St. Augustine of Canterbury, 51, 167, 268, 276, 277, 286, 318n56 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 22 St. Dunstan-in-the-East, 144

St. Dunstan-in-the-West, 29, 30 Steel, Karl, 282, 368n80 St. Erkenwald, 13, 15, 21, 54, 66, 188, 220, 235, 255, 261–66, 267–69, 271, 273, 276, 279–80, 284, 289, 291–96, 300, 304, 365n24, 366n35 St. Erkenwald, bishop, 188, 263, 264, 269, 276, 278, 280, 281–82, 284, 286, 288, 290, 291, 292, 295, 368n61 Steiner, Emily, 317n28, 335n35 Stevens, John, 350n47 Stevens, M., 358n45 Stone, Ian, 58, 79, 319n75 St. Patrick’s Purgatory, 209 St. Paul’s, London, 263, 264–66, 267–69, 271–72, 276–84, 288–90, 292–96, 308n10, 328n71, 345n95, 349n38, 351n57, 351n68, 364n5, 366n33, 368n73, 369n103 St. William of York, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 255, 268, 278, 368n73 Stocker, David, 311n51, 349n32 Stokes, Myra, 330n91 Stone, Ian, 58, 61, 319n75 Storey, R. L., 31, 114–15, 118, 123, 334n21 Strode, Ralph, 93, 328n72, 365n20 Strohm, Paul, 83, 125, 322n133, 325n30, 332n2, 336n60 Stubbs, Estelle, 101, 132, 311n51, 323n1, 331n112, 338nn74–75 Stubbs, William, 254, 361n97, 369n83 Sudbury, Simon, 253, 254 Summoners, 10, 222, 224, 225, 230 Sutton, Anne, 62, 320n98 Swanson, Robert (R. N.), 17, 19, 21, 80, 312n58, 312n66 Syon Abbey, 84 Szittya, Penn, 343n64 Tabulae, 245, 246, 260, 268–73, 275, 276–78, 283–84, 292–94, 366n42, 367n53, 368n61, 370n111 Tanfeld, Thomas, 234, 235, 243, 247, 250 Tanner, Norman, 20, 210, 312n69, 344n73 Taylor, Andrew, 311n52 Taylor, John, 320n104 Temple Inn, 133, 321n116 Thedmar, Arnold Fitz: Liber de antiquis legibus, xiii, xvi, 36, 56–62, 319n74, 319n75, 319n77. See also “The Prisoner’s Lament” “This Yool,” 198, 356n170 Thomas, Arvind, xv, 83, 89, 107, 307n11, 323n1, 327n55, 332n127

i n d ex “Thomas of Erceldoune,” 70 Thompson, Hamilton, 298 Thompson, John J., 38, 315n13, 327n50, 331n108, 355n153 Thompson, J. W., 295, 370n119 Thoresby, Archbishop, 184, 258, 354n131 Thornton, John, 251 Thornton, Robert, 66, 68, 70, 73, 74, 75 Three Kings of Cologne, 75–76 Tilemakers’ Pageant. See Second Trial before Pilate Tiller, Kenneth, 50, 51, 318n54 Titchfield, Abbey, 45–46, 316n24 Treasons Statute, 71, 73, 321n120 Trevisa, John, 11, 85, 304, 372n24 Trigg, Stephanie, 66, 69, 321n118, 321n120, 321n122, 322n143 Triggs, Dominique, 230, 231, 357n26 trilingualism, 186 Tringham, Nigel, 244, 349n32, 356n5, 360n77, 360n80, 362n109 Troy, 51, 70, 293 Trussell, Sir John, 144 Turk, Thomas, 22, 196–98, 203, 313n89, 351n61, 351n65 Turner, Denys, 299, 371n8 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 51, 69, 230, 261, 293, 294, 318n49, 318n59, 321n118, 323n151, 356n10, 357n23, 364n1, 364n3, 369n82 Tuten, Belle, 319n70 Tutivillus, 166, 167, 168, 346n114, 346n116 Tyckhill, John, 17, 78, 100, 102, 178, 180, 188, 190, 206, 243, 252, 264, 265, 267, 308n10, 330n102, 349n32, 351n68, 371n19; “A Bird of Bishopswood,” 13, 97–100, 102, 180, 181, 182, 187, 199, 207, 226, 227, 232, 235, 303; and John Marchaunt, 101, 132 Tyler, Elizabeth, 314n109, 317n38 Tyrell, Edward, 368n64, 368n67 “Under a law,” 226–27, 254 Usk, Thomas, 11, 83, 101, 304, 311n50, 325n30, 341n25; Testament of Love, 11, 16, 85 Utley, Francis Lee, 355n145 Van Dussen, Michael, 269, 276, 277, 320n103, 342n41, 366n38, 366n41, 368n68 Van Engen, John, 195, 196, 197, 307n16, 339n90, 344n76, 360n84 Veeman, Kathryn, 121, 312n67, 332n130, 334n32, 335n37

385

vicars choral, 3, 11–13, 21, 26–28, 48, 102, 144, 161, 166–68, 178, 186, 187, 188–94, 196, 198–200, 202–3, 205, 207, 209–10, 217, 218–20, 222, 226–27, 232–37, 243–52, 252, 254–60, 263–64, 269–72, 276, 283–84, 286, 289, 291, 296, 298, 300, 302, 303, 308n10, 311n51, 349n28, 349n32, 351n68, 356n2, 357n24, 360n76, 361nn89–90, 361n102, 362n109, 363n127, 367nn53–54 Voaden, Rosalynn, 361n96 Wace: Roman de Brut, 50, 51, 56 Wailes, Stephen, 331n117 Wakefield dramatist, 11, 150, 203, 232, 343n55 Waldron, R., 326n33 Wallace, David, 309n23, 328n72, 331n108, 334n19, 348n18, 365n23 Walter de Brugges, 28, 250, 366n30 Wannenmacher, Julia Eva, 339n3 Warner, Lawrence, 330n104, 338nn74–75 Watt, David, 96, 329n88 Watson, Andrew G., 321n109, 338n74 Watson, Nicholas, xv, 366n31, 366n38 Wellingborough, John, 124 Wells Cathedral, 213, 219, 360n76 West Midlands, 37, 41, 46, 56, 66, 113, 207, 221, 317n28 West, Rebecca, 354n136 Welwyk, William, 234 Westminster, court of, 69, 117, 120 Westminster Abbey, 277, 314n108, 349n27 Westminster Hall, 25 Whitchurch, Hampshire, 41 Whiting, Ella Keats, 141, 150, 161, 163, 340n5, 344n80 Whyteway, John, 335n37 Wickham, Chris, 11, 310n33 Wiggins, Alison, 187, 348n25 William de Rokele. See Langland, William William of St. Amour, 343n64 William of Malmesbury, 272 William of Pagula, 6, 16; Oculus Sacerdotis, 162, 334n30, 345n91 William of Rimington, 316n22 William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, 191, 194 wills, 17, 20, 234, 250, 251, 262, 289, 328n74, 334n23, 334n31, 342n40, 345n95 Wilson, Jeffrey, xvii, 307n12 Wilson, R. M., 53, 318n50 Wiltshire, 120, 197, 334n31

386

i n d ex

Wimbledon, Thomas, 105, 331n116 Wimsatt, James, 64, 315n6, 321n110 Winchester College, 191, 194, 197, 203, 352n77 Windsor, 191, 192, 269 Wingfield family, 71 Wirtjes, Hanneke, 347n12 Wittig, J. H., 326n33 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, xvii, 57, 64, 309n29, 311n50, 314n109, 317n38, 319n78, 320n97, 340n4, 352n97 Wolverton, Lisa, 308n2 Wood, Diana, 354n133 Wood, Ian, 366n42 Wood, Michael, 317n37 Woodstock, Thomas, 337n66 Woolf, Rosemary, 124, 141–42, 151, 336n53, 350n41 Worcester, 76, 192 Worcester Cathedral, 201 Wolsey, Thomas, 256 Worley, Meg, 35, 314n1 Wren, Christopher, 279 Wright-Bushman, Katy, 340n9 Wycliffism, 2, 31, 116, 124, 143, 154, 156, 173, 238, 242, 249, 308n2, 337n66, 341n29, 344n69, 346n110, 363n134 Wyndhyll, John, 250, 362n108, 362n109 Wynnere and Wastour, xviii–xix, 16, 36, 65–76, 77, 85, 107, 208, 235, 300, 304

Yeager, Stephen, 50, 51, 295, 318n55 Yonge, James, 304, 372n24 York, 15, 26, 167, 178, 189, 203, 218, 220, 232, 303, 367n53, 371n16; St. William’s College, 199–200, 244, 296; vicars choral, 21, 186, 187, 193–94, 207, 210, 222, 233, 243–47, 250, 252, 254, 255, 256, 263, 272, 276, 283, 298, 302, 303, 308n10, 349n28, 349n32, 349n39, 360n82, 363n127. See also Bedern York Cycle, xvi, 13, 15, 28, 150, 220, 222, 232–43, 247, 250, 284, 286, 301. See also Second Trial before Pilate York Minster, 3, 28, 161, 184, 186, 190, 191, 226–27, 233, 236, 240, 241, 245, 248–51, 252, 254–55, 257, 258, 260, 264, 268–73, 284, 300, 348n17, 351n67, 362n109, 369n82 York mystery plays. See York Cycle York Realist, xvi, 233, 234–35, 239, 300 Yorkshire, 206, 235, 250, 258, 363; Dialect 180, 209, 265 Younge, G., 318n63 Zdansky, Hannah, 37, 315n9, 323n1, 348n25, 367n58, 369n82 Zeeman, Nicolette, 316n25 Zieman, Katherine, 11–12, 13, 21, 64, 78, 112, 152, 165, 178–79, 210, 214, 244, 308n3, 324n13, 333n10, 348n15, 355n161, 366n40

acknowledgments

During the writing of this book, I’ve been blessed to have engaged friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Among those who have read chapters or the entire manuscript, I am grateful to the two anonymous readers for the Press (especially as they had entirely different areas of expertise), Sebastian Sobecki (for meticulous reading of the Hoccleve and introductory chapters), Susanna Fein (for her heroic reading of the final version, and unparalleled wisdom on lyrics, Audelay, and more), Sara Rees Jones (for valiantly reading my York Minster chapters, not once but twice), Nigel Tringham (for reading the York vicars choral chapter and offering me new archival evidence), Arvind Thomas (for reading the whole first half of the book, and offering invaluable expertise and even new research on canon law), both Derek Pearsall and Heather Reid (for advice on the Audelay chapter), Katherine Zieman (for invaluable help on Langland, liturgical questions and on the historical tabulae in Chapter 7), Richard Fahey (for enthusiastic advice on the entire book, and all things Old English). I am also grateful to Ralph Hanna (for early invaluable advice on Langlandian biography and London scribes); Marjorie Harrington (for learned guidance on the Early Middle English lyrics chapter and multilingualism), Karrie Fuller (for wisdom on the Langland chapter), and Christopher Cannon, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Christopher Baswell for vibrant intellectual engagement with the schoolroom and trilingual literacy sections that later became Chapters 1 and 5. An initial version of Chapter 2 was first given as a plenary for the Early Book Society at St. Andrews, and published under the title “The Clerical Proletariat: The Underemployed Scribe and Vocational Crisis,” Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2014): 1–34, for which I am warmly grateful to Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, Linne Mooney, and Estelle Stubbs. For deep engagement with the Cathedral Lyrics chapter, given as a guest lecture for an annual meeting of Medium Aevum at University of Nottingham, I’m deeply grateful to Julia Boffey, Jane Roberts, Nigel Palmer, and Thorlac Turville-Petre. The York vicars choral chapter was given as a guest lecture at ground zero for York’s Centre for Medieval Studies, and I thank

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Elizabeth Tyler, Linne Mooney, Sara Rees Jones, Christopher Norton, and Peter Biller. UCLA graciously invited me to give a week of lectures that encompassed the Introduction, Langlandian and Hoccleve chapters, for wide-ranging advice on which I thank Andy Kelly, Matthew Fischer, Christine Chism, and Arvind Thomas. Finally, I was privileged to give the choral proletarians chapter as a guest lecture to a lively audience at University of Toronto, for which I warmly thank Ann Hutchinson, James Carley, Isabelle Cochelin, Suzanne Akbari, Alexandra Gillespie, Ruth Harvey, Michele Mulchahey, and Rachel Koopmans. Among the many colleagues who have shared pre-publication work with me, I grateful to Susanna Fein, Sebastain Sobecki, Katherine Zieman, Clementine Oliver, Misty Schieberle, Theresa O’Byrne, Deborah Moore, and Matthew Clifton Brown. Librarians and curators have been a godsend throughout. John Schofield, Cathedral Archeologist of St. Paul’s, graciously shared his specially designed map of Old St. Paul’s for publication (Figure 7.6). The York Minster Library Collections Assistant, Dominique Triggs, provided archival materials on the Acta capitularia and kindly drew my attention to the singleton (reproduced Figure 6.6). I offer heartfelt thanks to the staff at the following libraries and museums for free image permissions: Vanessa Bell, St Paul’s Cathedral; Sarah Whale, Hatfield House; Lesley Ann Thompson, Ely Cathedral; Roger Lee, Bedern Hall, York; Sandy Paul, University of Cambridge, Trinity College Library; and Morex Arai of the Huntington Library. I would also like to thank the following good-natured souls for making the permission process so humane, sometimes even while working from home during the pandemic: Veronica Howe, Wells Cathedral; Natalie Toy, York Minster; Céline Leroux, Bibliothèque Mazarine; Richard Wiltshire, London Metropolitan Archive, Nikki Braunton and Yiquing An, Museum of London; Bruna Lago-Fazolo, British Library; Jen Burford and Samantha Sherbourne, Bodleian Library. At University of Pennsylvania Press, I am grateful for Jerry Singerman’s experience and friendship during the pre-contract process, and for the earnest work of Zoe Kovacs, Erica Ginsburg, and Jennifer Backer during the copyediting and production stage, and Lily Palladino’s watchful oversight during the last inning. I have enjoyed access to research funding from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the ACLS, and logistical support for years from University of Notre Dame, and the careful help and attention of Lynn McCormack. Finally, I am indebted to Hannah Zdansky, who meticulously copyedited the manuscript and inserted its many images for final submission, and to Amanda Bohne, who has been my dedicated post-doc research assistant and indexer to the end, taking every 911 call with great good cheer. My deepest debt is to my ever patient, ever encouraging husband, John, for being such a good listener and scholar of great integrity.