The Account Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld's Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature

Abstract

Gilbert Maghfeld, ironmonger, credit broker, and (65), is already known to literary scholars for his financial dealings with both Chaucer and Gower. He was also cited by Manly as possible model for Chaucer's satiric portrait of Merchant. Galloway takes a broader view, using Maghfeld's surviving account book (which records his transactions with two poets) as starting point for an investigation of ways in which mercantile practices and (69) inform late fourteenth-century English poetry, even when poets are not directly discussing either merchants or commerce. After summarizing Maghfeld's career, pointing out many connections between his and Chaucer's worlds, Galloway discusses metaphors of credit, debt, and accounting in Piers Plowman, suggesting that Langland had a more sophisticated understanding of mercantile commerce than he has been given credit for, and he examines Chaucer's of vocabulary of accounting and moneylending, particularly in Wife of Bath's and Shipman's Tales. points of intersection between Maghfeld and Gower are provided by Maghfeld's 1392 loan to Gower to purchase a cheste and Maghfeld's acceptance of a copy of Brunetto Latini's Tresor as security on a loan to a certain Francis Winchester in 1393. Only in Mirour de l'Omme, Galloway notes, might Gower have directly addressed members of merchant class regarding their profession. Confessio Amantis contains little direct reference either to London or to commerce, and its references to money and contracts, the basic technologies of mercantilism (106), are not marked by satire or even by direct connection to mercantile class in which they arose. poem participates more dynamically in such technology, Galloway asserts (106), in its repeated references to chestes or cofres, basic tool for both security and shipment at that time. In discussion of Avarice, cheste becomes focus for meditation on use versus hoarding. In tale of The Two Coffers, grumbling courtiers are cast as nervous merchant venturers, equally concerned with making correct choice and with profit that they might thereafter win. And in Apollonius of Tyre, cheste is a coffin, but it becomes means of transporting treasure that it contains, not without regard to risk that is entailed. Gower may have viewed his own poem as a type of treasure, imitating form and purpose of Latini's Tresor. It is also a type of account book, of love's winnings (110); and in its of rhetoric, it demonstrates a power of language analogous to a merchant's, to commute and transform experience with which it is concerned. In his final section, Galloway discovers an important biographical connection between Maghfeld and Thomas Usk, who in his previously undocumented role as sheriff's clerk served four writs upon moneylender in 1383. [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 31.2]