Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod

Abstract

Reviewed by: Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod Jennifer Goodman Wollock w. mark ormrod, Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. xi, 189. isbn: 978-1-84384-581-2. $99. This posthumous book presents a long-term project of the late W. Mark Ormrod (1957–2020), Professor of History at the University of York, one of the preeminent medieval historians of our generation. He should be familiar to Arthurian scholars, for much essential work, especially his magisterial biography of Edward III (Yale, 2012). The present volume was delivered to its publisher shortly before the author's death in August 2020. It is a privilege to review it here. [End Page 108] The fourteenth-century alliterative debate poem Winner and Waster survives in BL Additional MS 31042, one of two collections assembled by Robert Thornton (fl. 1418–56), gentleman of Yorkshire. Winner and Waster resonates with other alliterative Arthurian texts, especially the Alliterative Morte Darthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose opening lines are notably similar, as well as with Piers Plowman. Its dating and significance challenge its interpreters. It has a good deal of intrinsic charm and deserves to be better known. Professor Ormrod's painstaking account of this puzzling text began in a research seminar discussion and developed into this book, which took form during his retirement. Winner and Waster's theme preoccupies many Arthurian texts. The conflict between the royal virtue of magnificence—conspicuous consumption and largesse, the old 'treasure giving'—and the principle that the king should be a prudent manager of his own assets is ancient. In 'Culhwch and Olwen' Arthur manifests lavish generosity and Cei speaks up for rigor, law and order, gatekeeping, and stricter self-control. The theme resurfaces in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal; Wolfram endorses Cei's viewpoint. If there were more Ceis, the courts of thirteenth-century Europe would not contain so much riff-raff. Even Malory's Merlin is dryly critical of Arthur's excessive generosity. Outside of Arthuriana, winners and wasters are a primary theme in Piers Plowman. Under that famous connoisseur Richard II the topic continued to be of great interest. It runs throughout English history, down to the present. Ormrod's study begins by describing Winner and Waster and its manuscript context. It ends with a timeline, a modernized version of the text, bibliography and index. In the introduction to his 'traditionally historicist' study, Ormrod discusses previous efforts to localize the poem. He makes a case for a date in the 1360s—certainly after 1363, rather than earlier or later. Supporting this thesis, Ormrod's central chapters reconsider the poem's references to the Garter Feast of 1358 and English diplomacy during the 1350s and 1360s, the Statute of Treasons of 1352 and royal arbitration, the short-lived sumptuary Laws of 1363, and the royal household and finances under Edward III. Ormrod then reassesses Winner and Waster against other poems of the Alliterative Revival. He rejects established views of the poem as contrasting mercantile and courtly perspectives. Instead, he sees it as a debate involving 'that large portion of the lay elite that participated actively in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War' (p. 15). This project complements existing literary studies. Ormrod focuses on Winner and Waster as a single poem. His expert work sheds light on social, economic, and institutional history, bringing many highly technical elements together. Its analysis of the historical record, decade by decade, illuminates the fourteenth century as a whole. It adds significant contextual information to localize this example of alliterative poetry in relation to late medieval Arthurian literature. I recommend it to my own graduate students, colleagues, and all readers interested in seeing history and literature collaborating effectively with one another. In the race between life and death that we all run, Professor Ormrod continues to guide us in this painstaking, clearly written study, and leaves us, his colleagues, with a gift of great value. This work (to be supplemented by an upcoming volume of essays, and by the concurrent work of other...