Pearl: 'God's Law' and 'Man's Law'

Abstract

Pearl is generally assigned to a date of composition in the 1380s; this study argues that the poem engages in debates on legal and political theory consonant with a date in the late 1380s, and that the standpoint taken would have been congenial to a noble, but probably not royal, audience, one bilingual in French as well as English. The poet engages with political and theological arguments persistently couched in legal terms: there may have been a general cultural trend among vernacular writers, orthodox as well as radical, to pursue such discussion within a legal context. Legal language and theology cannot be kept apart. Much of the vocabulary is susceptible of legal senses and nuances, even while it relates to everyday legal transactions, and does not require extended technical knowledge of the law. His evident fondness for exploiting the rich inheritance of theocratic symbolism establishes the strangeness of the Lamb's court, while not necessarily endorsing Richard II's tendencies towards absolute rule. The poet's concern with lawful possession affirms that, though an absolute ruler, God is no ‘tyrant’. The principles of equity and the rigour of the law are wholly consonant in his realm. Ulpian's famous dictum of Roman law, that ‘What pleases the prince has the force of law’, to which the poet alludes, could, in an English context, be reconciled with a more ‘constitutional’ model in which what pleased the king was Law, authorized by his magnates, and not just his personal will. It is argued that the synthesis of legal ideas in the poem makes Pearl a very ‘English’ poem, in which God's monarchy is described in terms deriving from Roman law, as found in Giles of Rome or John of Salisbury, but also in terms derived from the law of the land. Although it is possible to read the poem as a veiled criticism of Richard II's actions from around 1388 onwards, this is to diminish the poem and compromise its ‘plot’: the transfiguration of the pearl-maiden. But it is intimately grounded in fourteenth-century developments in doctrine, expressed in contemporary legal and political terms.