Fourteenth-century London Research Articles

Un]Licensed Riot: Prodigality, Hypocrisy, and Guild Discourse in Chaucer s Cook s Tale

Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale demonstrates the characterization of a riotous apprentice, the narrative depiction of conflict between that apprentice and his master, and that master’s issuing of a questionable “papir” of “acquitance” (4404 & 4411) to suggest provocatively linked definitions of class and depictions of order and transgression specific to the guild-oriented mercantile culture of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century London. Considered within the context of the General Prologue’s depiction of Roger the Cook who tells the tale, and the description of the Four Guildsmen who employ him, the narrative suggests the emergence of the binary pairing of prodigality and hypocrisy, both of which contribute to the breakdown of the social cohesion and concept of “degree” so important to Chaucer’s Canterbury frame tale. Considered against the backdrop of what William Woods’ (1996) analysis of The Cook’s Tale describes as a “social structure defined by commerce” (190), and in relation to general work on Chaucer’s use of language (Cannon 1998) and terminology specific to The Cook’s Tale (Blenner-Hassett 1942; Call 1943), it becomes clear that Chaucer’s fragment indicts both the laterally mobile prodigal apprentice and the decadent hypocrisy of the Master through the linked subversion of license and guild authority.

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

<i>Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London</i>. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, by Arthur Bahr

Medieval manuscripts, Arthur Bahr argues on the first page of his exciting, adventurous study of late medieval compilations, ‘expose as false the long-implied opposition between form and history’. He argues that compilations, assemblages ‘of multiple discrete works into a larger structure’ (p. 10), problematise—and destabilise—existing narratives of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, and should thus compel scholars to rethink not only the texts contained in them but also their contexts. By analysing four sets of compilations produced in London, Bahr aims to produce a ‘richer perspective on the life of the City that produced them’ (p. 17). He chooses London compilations because that city was one of the likeliest places for texts to co-exist with the scribes who produced them and the patrons who bought them, and also because the social and textual identity of fourteenth-century London were ‘sufficiently strong’ that we can read its ‘textual assemblages as ways of engaging with the social imaginary’ (p. 18). By the late Middle Ages, London’s lived reality and idealised self were increasingly textual. Guild, mercantile and civic bureaucracy ensured that much of the daily life of the City was registered in textual form and, indeed, in order for it to preserve its political and economic freedoms in the face of a shaky relationship with the Crown, London increasingly relied on the ‘scrupulous maintenance of their various documentary bases’ (p. 19).

Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London

AbstractThis article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English crown, its subjects and the kingdom's immigrant population. It links the murder of about forty Flemings in London during the Peasants’ Revolt in June 1381 to the capital's native cloth workers’ dissatisfaction with the government's economic immigration policy. We argue that, in the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad. Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, the crown remained deaf to the concerns of London's native weavers, who claimed that the work of exiled Flemish cloth workers in the city encroached on their privileges. Confronted for more than twenty-five years with political obstruction, the native weavers increasingly resorted to physical aggression against their Flemish counterparts, which came to a dramatic conclusion in 1381. The dissatisfaction of London's cloth workers and the massacre of the Flemings thus had much in common with the frustrations over the royal government's policy that had been fermenting for decades among many other groups in society: all came to the surface during the Peasants’ Revolt.

Archival blindness: Peter Ackroyd’s The Clerkenwell Tales

Peter Ackroyd’s The Clerkenwell Tales received mixed reviews; nevertheless, reviewers accepted it as a work of historical fiction closer to ‘history’ than to ‘fiction,’ a position quickly undermined by some simple (but seldom made) verifications that inaccuracies saturate the novel. Relying on Arlette Farge’s reflections on archival research, this essay examines the novel’s use of archival tropes, which imaginatively recreate the troublesome dynamic between the archive’s documentary ‘facts’ and the ‘fictional’ narrative required to hold them in place. Ackroyd uses this trope to seduce his readers into thinking the merest daub of fiction holds together the novel’s historical facts of late fourteenth-century London.

Piers Plowmanand the Durable Alliterative Tradition

This essay draws on new research in alliterative metrics in order to locate Langland’s verse techniques in metrical history and cultural history. The first section summarizes progress in the study of Middle English alliterative metre, with emphasis on the observable metrical development that justifies reference to a durable alliterative tradition spanning the seventh through the sixteenth centuries. The second section compares the metre of Piers Plowman with the emergent metrical model, identifying major similarities and minor differences between Piers Plowman and other fourteenth-century alliterative poems. The third section explores the cultural implications of the similarities and differences, thereby situating Langland’s formal choices in the metrical landscape of late fourteenth-century London. Ultimately, I argue that the metre of Piers Plowman reflects the interaction of a major diachronic and a major synchronic force, the durable alliterative tradition and Langland’s metrical landscape.

Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature by Jonathan Hsy (review)

Reviewed by: Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature by Jonathan Hsy Craig E. Bertolet Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 237. isbn: 13–978– 0–8142–1229–5. $59.95. Trading Tongues joins the growing field of studies examining the commercial language, practices, and culture of late medieval England. Hsy’s book ‘examines how multilingualism and medieval commerce shape texts written in medieval contact zones’ (4). In Hsy’s case, the principal ‘contact zone’ is the commercial world of late medieval London, and his book focuses on how commerce shapes the language used by writers in late medieval London and also how these writers ‘engaged in linguistic exchange’ (5) moved across languages and combined them in their texts. In his Introduction, Hsy reads two short poems through the lens of the linguistic diversity of fourteenth-century London as a way to illustrate the city as a ‘contact zone.’ The Latin poem ‘Stores of the City’ catalogues the sites of London in a mixture of Latin and Latinized English names, and the English poem ‘London Lickpenny’ describes how a speaker from outside of London negotiates streets filled with speakers of different languages and ‘how people deploy languages and adapt, often abruptly, to the different types of social interactions that city life requires’ (14). London-based writers are the focus of most of the chapters. The first chapter, for instance, concerns Geoffrey Chaucer’s relationship with two London locations: his dwelling over Aldgate and his workplace in the customs house near the Thames. Hsy reads the House of Fame and the Shipman’s Tale through the lens of these spaces reconstructed within Chaucer’s poetry. Chaucer, John Gower, and Charles d’Orleans are the subjects of the second chapter, which argues that the mediating space of the sea through maritime trade invites multilingual perspectives in poetic texts. Gower and Chaucer tell the tale of Constance to describe a character who becomes a commodity shared between different spaces. Charles d’Orleans’ poetry in English and in French shows rigid linguistic hierarchies with ‘high-prestige French [being] portable, but humble English’ not as portable (87). In the third chapter, Hsy pairs Gower with William Caxton because both the poet and the printer ‘crafted polyglot literary personas’ in order to produce ‘texts across many languages’ (91). Hsy writes that Caxton’s career and his translations show that England’s first printer was comfortable in many languages while he marketed his printed books to his ‘merchant class readers’ (128). The fourth chapter moves out of London to address how the Book of Margery Kempe ‘employs fictional geography to depict scenes of cross-linguistic communication both at home and overseas’ (154). While Margery is from Lynn rather than London, she demonstrates how her commercial background makes her attuned to code-switching into different languages and registers. It also problematizes how an orientation toward a native tongue ‘can shift through the social dynamics of travel’ (156). The fifth chapter moves the focus back to London by examining collections written by three London merchants in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in which the men compiled texts of letters, ordinances, and chronicles in more than one language. In constructing these books, Hsy asserts, the merchants [End Page 117] create ‘dynamic textual contact zones’ (193) and ask the reader to think in different languages, places, and times. In a Coda, Hsy suggests that Charles d’Orleans is a prime example of the writer who works on land and sea, close to the ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ of medieval culture’ (209). Trading Tongues is a fine analysis of how commerce and the nexus of trading languages it creates affected the production of literary texts at a key moment in English history when the cash-based system was beginning to replace the feudal system. Scholars have always known that understanding medieval texts requires the understanding of many languages. But Hsy challenges us to accept that the writers of this period inhabited many languages at once. This behavior affected not just the texts they produced, but also caused them to respond to the environment in which they worked. Asking us...

Trading tongues: merchants, multilingualism, and medieval literature

The locus of Hsy's study is London, which he, like David Wallace, Ardis Butterfield, and others of late, casts as city of many languages, kind of crucible for code-switching--the kind of shifting between different languages (or identifiable registers of any given language) . . . not only for pragmatic purposes but also for deliberately artistic ends: using different languages to develop distinct expressive registers, to stylize certain types of speech, or to evoke vivid sense of place (5-6). London's status as city of languages rests on its prominence as commercial hub; hence much of Hsy's focus like many of his examples derives from or connects with merchants and mercantile-driven enterprise (lawyers, guildsmen, the printer William with emphasis on his commercial associations through the staple, etc.). In this regard, Hsy's book is good companion to Craig Bertolet's Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London (London: Ashgate, 2013)--a study Hsy acknowledges in footnote (7-8, n. 12) that was at press simultaneous with his own. Indeed, Hsy and Bertolet discuss many of the same passages, especially from the M), where Gower's sharpster Triche (Fraud) receives commentary from both, but importantly to different ends. Hsy's concern is invariably linguistic: he wants to show how Gower's (and Chaucer's, Caxton's, etc.) language works, where it comes from, who its target audience might have been: e.g., Hsy concludes comparison of the Constance story in his second chapter, Overseas Travel and Languages in Motion, as told Trevet, Chaucer and Gower, noting that by transforming Constance's story from cleric's narrative into merchant's tale, both poets find new literary mode that exploits the transitory and fluid potential of language transversal (73). In his third chapter, Translingual Identities in John and William Caxton, Hsy brings the poet and his first printer--also polylingual--together in enlightening ways, as he sees them as similar spirits. He offers, he says, a sustained assessment of Gower's polyglot and Caxton's literary ambitions . . . . Through first-person prologues and autobiographical excurses, and Caxton develop innovative discourses for discussing cross-linguistic exchange and literary production, and each invests considerable amount of thought into how his own translingualism informs an ever-shifting literary persona (92). This chapter contains the extended discussion of the merchant section of the MO noted previously, and draws occasional examples from the CA, stressing the interplay of the Latin with the Middle English in both the verses and the commentaries, and helpfully reminding us that the great majority of manuscripts (and none of those thought to devolve from his own likely oversight of an exemplar) are trilingual. Of particular interest also in this chapter is Hsy's close reading of Cinkante Balade XVII, pointing out the multiple valences achieves with the shift from the lover's French to the lady's rejection of his suit in Middle English: nay (113). The example in many ways is good one to stand for Hsy's larger purpose for the book--to change our views of medieval writing (209) from monolingual and nationalist to polylingual and transcultural. He writes of nay: Gower foregrounds the alterity of the lone English word spoken fictive French speaker, and he dramatizes this word's increasing estrangement from its original moment of utterance. Through this ensuing narrative, the poet suggests the corresponding unease an English speaker experiences when acquiring (and using) second language like French, tongue that is at once very close to the speaker but perpetually eluding his grasp (113). [RFY. Copyright. The John Society. JGN 32.2]

Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London by Craig Bertolet (review)

Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London by Craig Bertolet (review)

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London by Arthur Bahr (review)

Arthur bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 296. isbn: 978-0-22692-491-5. $45.Central to this study of fourteenth-century London's manuscript culture is a series of what might at first appear to be antithetical relationships-between physical and literary form, between past and present experiences of reading, and among rich but often fragmentary codicological evidence. Illuminating the generative potential of these unlikely bedfellows is the task of Arthur Bahr's introduction which, at forty-nine pages, is about as long as each of his subsequent chapters. That none of the analytic categories he sets up here come across as over (or under) developed is one of the first indications of the complexity of the scholarly undertaking being introduced, as well as the skill with which Bahr rises to meet the many challenges associated with such an undertaking.Drawing on a diverse range of disciplinary approaches, Bahr advances a hybrid methodology for regarding medieval manuscripts 'as at once formal shapes and historical occurrences' that 'expose as false the long-implied opposition between form and history (1). He unites recent work on the physical attributes of manuscripts and the nature of literariness with Walter Benjamin's theory of constellations to produce a definition of compilation that is more subjective than objective, encouraging interpretation of the larger structure of manuscripts as 'more than the sum of [their] parts' (3). To develop this argument in detail, the book examines four compilations that collectively span the fourteenth century: the corpus of Edwardian lawyer Andrew Horn; booklet three of the now famous Auchinleck Manuscript; Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales-, and the Trentham Manuscript of works of John Gower.While the forms of these compilations vary substantively, Bahr argues that they all reward compilational reading as both assemblages and fragments. In other words, they all exhibit evidence of being purposely amassed to explore specific concerns, but they all also exist intentionally and/or accidentally as fragments. As assemblages, they are products of fourteenth-century London that reflect similar thematic interests, particularly the extent to which textual compilations of disparate works can fruitfully manifest and perhaps even work through the sociopolitical tensions associated with London life. As fragments, they defy restrictive readings, inviting instead ongoing engagement, and opening up avenues of exploration not necessarily intended by their medieval compilers. These similarities, not despite but because of the manuscripts' many differences, suggest that there was more of a precedent for interpreting later fourteenth-century texts as compilations with local predecessors than is commonly recognized. …

Medieval English lyrics and carols

Lyrics and carols are two of the most important types of medieval literature. This anthology provides a generous and wide-ranging selection, beginning with the first lyrics in English to celebrate love as romantic devotion to a woman, and including all pre-Chaucerian love lyrics (other than a few brief snatches). Poems by Chaucer and his successors present the courtly game of love in its sophisticated later medieval form, while devotional lyrics portray the tenderness of the later medieval response to Christ as lover and beloved and to the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, Mary as sorrowing mother and as Queen of Heaven. Fully represented also are lyrics on characteristically medieval moral and penitential themes, alongside miscellaneous lyrics such as drinking and dancing songs, ballads, satires, poems of wit, humour and sexual innuendo, accounts of lecherous priests, minstrels mocking their audiences, and women vividly listing their lovers' inadequacies. The texts are edited anew, accompanied with a textual apparatus detailing manuscript readings where emendations have been made to restore sense, metre and rhyme. The language of pre-Chaucerian poems has been normalised to accord with the dialect of late fourteenth-century London (Chaucerian English), and unfamiliar spellings in later lyrics have been regularized. Readability is further aided by line-by-line glosses. An extensive introduction offers an appraisal of the forms, themes and contexts of the lyrics and a full discussion of their language and metre, while a comprehensive commentary gives further essential information. Thomas G. Duncan is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of English at St Andrews University.

Fragments and assemblages: forming compilations of medieval London

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city's literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London's literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.

Famine, the Black Death, and health in fourteenth-century London

In the first half of the fourteenth century two catastrophes struck the population of Europe: the Great Famine and the Black Death. The latter has been extensively studied, but much less is known about the biological effects of the Great Famine. A large assemblage of skeletal remains from one of the Black Death burial grounds, the Royal Mint cemetery in London, provides a unique opportunity to investigate these effects by analyzing the teeth of individuals who survived the famine but died during the Black Death.

Thomas Usk and John Arderne

Thomas Usk and John Arderne

Was Thomas Favent a political pamphleteer? Faction and politics in later fourteenth-century London

Thomas Favent’s Historia has long been recognised as an important source for the turbulent middle years of Richard II’s reign, in particular for its praise of the actions of the Lords Appellant in the Merciless Parliament of 1388. But why did Favent write the Historia and for whom was it written? In recent years the Historia has for the first time been subjected to detailed scrutiny and a case has made for regarding it as a political pamphlet written for a community of reform-minded civil servants eager to celebrate the achievements of parliament. This study offers an alternative explanation. It seeks to place the Historia more squarely within the turbulent environment of London’s factional politics. Favent’s factional affiliations are easily discerned, but his motivations for writing the Historia were complex and multi-faceted. A new reading of this text suggests, in fact, that it was written not to perpetuate divisions within London, but to draw a line underneath them. The article highlights the use of textual representation to shape and ultimately control memories of political conflict.

Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London. Marion Turner

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsChaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London. Marion Turner Maura NolanMaura Nolan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 83, Number 3Jul., 2008 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400015347 Views: 11Total views on this site Copyright 2008 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (review)

Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (review)

"Oure Citee": Illegality and Criminality in Fourteenth-Century London

"Oure Citee": Illegality and Criminality in Fourteenth-Century London

Reading Chaucer's Words to Adam

This essay is about the poem Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn and Linn? R. Mooney's discussion of it in her 2006 Speculum arti cle, Scribe. In this article, Mooney identifies the scribe who copied most of the Hengwrt and all of the Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Hengwrt 392 D; and San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C9).1 The work of the Hengwrt-Ellesmere scribe has long been a matter of interest to scholars of late medieval English literature. A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes identify him as Scribe B of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 (a copy of the Confessio Amantis) and as the scribe of a fragmentary copy of Chaucer's Troilus (Hertfordshire, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, Box S/1). Estelle Stubbs describes his hand as that in an incomplete Boece (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 393 D). Simon Horobin and Mooney argue that he copied a Piers Plowman manuscript too (Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17).2 In her 2006 article Mooney confirms that, as Doyle and Parkes suggest more tentatively, it is his hand that appears in another Chaucer manuscript: a fragment of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, University Library MS K. 1.3/20). And Mooney finds more evidence of his scribal work in documents that enable her to name him. He was Adam Pinkhurst. He was a Londoner; he signed the Common Paper of the London Company of Scriveners in about 1392. In this sense, he was, as Doyle and Parkes first suggested, a professional: he made his living from scribal work, by taking on the sort of jobs that might fall to a writer of the court letter or a similarly skilled literate?the copying of writs, deeds, accounts, petitions, and the odd book of poems.3 He appears to have worked as a scribe for the Mercers' Company in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Mooney argues that it was he who copied the famous 1387/8 petition of the Mercers to the King's Council (Kew, The National Archives, SC 8/20/997), the first petition of this sort to be presented in English. Mooney turns up some fascinating life-records for Pinkhurst (possible evidence of his father's role at the court of Edward III, for instance),4 and speculates about his involvement in fourteenth-century London political and economic life in circumstances that might have brought

Famine, the Black Death, and health in fourteenth-century London

Famine, the Black Death, and health in fourteenth-century London