Recent scholarship on medieval English law and literature emphasizes their generic affinities and discusses law and literature as equally fluid “parallel discourses” that illuminate a common culture.1 The preponderance of legal vocabulary in Gower's Anglo-Norman poem Mirour de l'Omme (finished in the 1370s) has attracted the attention of many literary critics, who have noted the paradoxical juxtaposition of a bitter satire of the legal profession and a heavy reliance on allegorized legal devices for the purpose of moral didacticism. Among his references to legal devices, Gower's diversification of the concept of “property ownership” is the most noteworthy. At the beginning of Mirour in the devils’ parliament, “the whole metaphoric complex of property ownership is split between the initial presentation of Man as having lost property (Paradise) and his more extensive role as lost property.”2 After losing Paradise, Man is in danger of losing his soul to the devil. Gower's allegory expands the narrative of mankind's fall by continually glossing “ownership” and “property rights” throughout the poem, which creates a tension between Man as property at the mercy of external forces and Man as a free creature capable of effecting contracts of his own choice. Thus Gower remakes a legal concept into a poetic structure that gives form to the Mirour.Abundant critical attention has been paid to the relationship between the legal mechanism of property ownership and moral allegory in this text. Matthew Giancarlo in particular has established the connection between the devils’ parliament and the satire of lawyers in the Mirour with Gower's own scandalous acquisition of the manor of Aldington, his major property in Kent, in 1365. The crux of the drawn-out legal dispute is that Gower purchased the manor from William Septvauns when the latter was underage.3 William's sworn assertion that he was of age, which was backed up by his governess, took place when he was a couple of months short of his birthday. If the property had not been sold to Gower, it could have gone to the king.4 The accusation of Gower's unlawful alienation of the Crown's property was presented to the parliament in 1366.5 Due to these shady actions and all the ensuing troubles, Gower's criticism of legal maneuvers found its way into the Mirour. In the Mirour, all of the legal devices concerning property ownership are potentially demonic, especially when the titular hero, Man, is treated as property.This essay extends this line of criticism but shifts the focus from the Mirour's metaphors and moral implications deriving from Gower's acquisition of property to those related to Gower's use and disposal of the manor. Gower's early biographer John Fisher noted the sale of the manor of Aldington in 1373, but recently Michael Bennett has challenged the widely accepted assumption that a simple sale occurred at that time. Bennett has argued that instead of making a direct sale, Gower enacted an “enfeoffment to use” in the local chancery court.6 After this legal action took place, the new owners held the property but let Gower use it. Bennett presents new archival evidence to show that in 1381 Gower still resided at Aldington and directs attention to Gower's circle of friends in Kent. Records show that Gower was familiar with the device of “enfeoffment to use,” as he himself received feoffment and held a property to the use of Sir Nicholas de Loveyne.7 Because the enfeoffment of Gower's Kent property took place about three years before or possibly during the composition of the Mirour, this legal device could have found its way into the poem.8Recognizing Gower's references to the legal device of “enfeoffment to use” can deepen our understanding of Man as “lost property.” When Man enacts an enfeoffment to use with the World and lets the World hold his soul, Man betrays God, the only Lord with true allodial title to Man's soul. By creating a trust with the World, Man breaks faith with God and dooms himself to hell. The process of “enfeoffment to use” thus becomes Gower's eschatological metaphor for Mankind.Throughout the poem, however, Gower constantly hints at Man's ability to avoid this trap. By reading Gower's use of legal knowledge into the moral allegories in the Mirour, this essay aims to illuminate the poet's humanistic accentuation of free will and intentionality, that is, Man's control of himself and his choice between spiritual and material property in the face of demonic influences.In sequence, this essay addresses three issues in the Mirour. First, it shows how Gower recasts enfeoffment to use as a metaphor for Man's Fall. Second, it discusses how this legal device gives form and structure to the poem. Third, it demonstrates that the Mirour explores the tension between legalism, defined as “strict adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of law,” and humanism, defined broadly as belief in the legibility of God and the constructive powers of human nature.9Enfeoffment to use had been popular since the first half of the fourteenth century. Employed by the lower orders of feudal society at first, it became more common among the magnate class and gentry after 1340, and this popularity lasted well into the sixteenth century.10 By 1489 “the greater part of the land of England was in feoffments upon trust.”11 The legal utility of “enfeoffment to use” lies in its separation of the property's ownership and the right to use it, or in modern terms, the “bare legal title to property” and “beneficial ownership under a trust.”12 In the legal device of “use,” the previous owner, the feoffor, designated a group of individuals as feoffees to hold the land for a period of time (sometimes for life) as nominal owners in common law. Though common law no longer recognized the feoffor as the owner after the conveyance of land, he still was able to occupy, alienate, lease, and draw benefits from the lands. The feoffor could even dictate the bequeathing of the property to a succession of people. To some extent, the transferal of the property from one owner to another was merely a “legal fiction,” because the ownership registered on paper did not generate real benefits from the property in practice.13If these legal maneuvers made no difference in reality, one may wonder what purpose they served. One major goal was to deliberately evade the incidents of tenure. Beyond the “services” paid to a superior lord, including rent, military, and nonmilitary obligations, the lord (usually the Crown) enjoyed “incidents,” or privileges over the tenant's land that arose in certain circumstances, most commonly on the tenant's death. An important incident was that of escheat, whereby the land of the tenant would be transferred to the Crown or state if the tenant died without heirs. As early as 1339, the tenants of mesne lords evaded the incidents of tenure through uses, and such practices compelled mesne lords to mount appeals for redress in parliament.14 A more common concern was the disposition of land after the previous owner's death in the face of the rule prohibiting wills of land.15 The feoffor could instruct his feoffees to transmit the uses of the land to the offspring of the feoffor, especially younger sons or daughters, or reconvey the land to the designated inheritors, especially the eldest sons, the feoffor's heirs.16 This happened when a direct transferal of land to a feoffor's son or wife was impossible. An underage heir could not hold the land independently, nor could the landowner grant lands to himself and his wife jointly in common law, but the feoffor could restrict the sale or inheritance of an estate and instruct that it pass by operation of law to his heir.17 In this scenario, the feoffees were instrumentalized as the new owners of the lands to give the lands back based on proposed settlements devised by the feoffor's will.18 The arrangements were to take effect after his death. In sum, the feoffor granted the property to the feoffee but for the “use” of another, in the form of a trust. In this way, the beneficiaries and heirs could enjoy the benefits of the property without the burden of traditional feudal incidents or other procedural complications. This arrangement created a situation of good-faith possession by the feoffees. At the same time, it carried the risk that possession could be abusively conflated with actual ownership. As the following two paragraphs explain, the feoffees could pervert the process to serve their own ends.Because temporary or contractual possession is still a form of ownership, there had to be ways to ensure that the feoffees dealt with the estates according to the feoffor's wishes after his death; the feoffor could achieve this end through verbal instructions or by issuing directions to his feoffees in his testaments.19 Either way, moral obligation was at the root of the flourishing of enfeoffments to use. As J. M. W. Bean writes, “the development of functions of this kind could not occur on any substantial scale until it was recognized that such feoffees were morally bound to abide by the wishes of their feoffor.”20 It was the feoffees’ moral obligation—but not a legally enforceable requirement—to handle the properties and revenues and to perform the settlements according to the grantor's instructions after his death. In Baker's words, “the estate rested on another person's conscience.”21 This is where problems could arise, because the conveyance of land was not a legal “fiction” but a legal reality that gave the feoffees the chance to betray the feoffor's trust. Having been granted the enfeoffment, the feoffees could delay their removal from the land, commit deliberate fraud, or even claim that the land belonged to their own heirs. Such violations often happened, and common law, which recognized only the feoffee's ownership, did not recognize the feoffor's rights after death.22 Property ownership thus overrode these murky contractual agreements, and the attempt to circumvent feudal incidents by enfeoffment to use could lead to the complete loss of the property through the machinations of fraudulent feoffees.At the time of Gower's writing, enfeoffment to use had become an important but ambiguous legal maneuver that could be abused by unscrupulous actors; therefore, parliament and church courts began acting upon these instruments, which eventually led to their regularized enforcement and to the gradual supersession of contractual agreements over feudal bonds by Tudor times. Parliament and the courts of the Church had to intervene when the feoffees failed to uphold their obligations undertaken under oath, as the common law courts could neither enforce nor interpret the use, and the Chancery's legal sanction of uses did not come into full effect until the fifteenth century.23 In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the ecclesiastical enforcement of uses became more regularized. For instance, in 1375 the ecclesiastical courts excommunicated a group of feoffees for conveying land contrary to the feoffor's will.24 During the last quarter of the fourteenth century, Parliament began to pay attention to uses in its legislative activities.25 On the one hand, the fraudulent acts of the feoffees forced the feoffor to appeal for justice to Parliament. In the face of these tenurial complications, the mesne lords started parliamentary petitions in 1339, and their social superiors subsequently mounted appeals of the same kind.26 On the other hand, the need arose for legislation to prevent the feoffor's creation of uses for deliberately fraudulent purposes, especially after the Good Parliament in 1376, in which Alice Perrers's lands held by her feoffees were tracked down and confiscated. Because the machinery of the use often deprived the Crown of feudal revenues, Henry VIII drastically ended uses by the Statute of Uses in 1536, which was one of the factors that led to the Pilgrimage of Grace, one of the most serious popular rebellions in Tudor times.27Notably, religious cooperation also benefited greatly from enfeoffment to use.28 Some uses were invented to circumvent the Statute of Mortmain, promulgated in 1279, which prohibited donation of lands to religious houses without royal assent.29 Franciscan friars were among the earliest beneficiaries of the English use, because their vows of poverty forbade them to hold property as a corporate body as other monasteries and abbeys did. The device of enfeoffment to use, which allowed friars to occupy lands without owning them, was commonly employed to reconcile the friars’ immediate need for shelter with their proclaimed antimaterialism. From a legal perspective, beneficiaries such as friars relied on charity instead of the law, though the friars’ property enjoyment nonetheless involved them in legal disputes and made them vulnerable to moral judgment.30 In spite of the controversies, lands were often held to the use of a corporation of monks or an unincorporated body of friars from the early thirteenth to the late fourteenth centuries, until in 1391 a statute banned feoffments to the use of religious corporations designed “by subtle imagination, art, and scheming.”31In sum, enfeoffment to use gave rise to numerous controversies because common law did not recognize personal obligations between the feoffor and feoffee. These obligations were considered to involve contractual rights undertaken under oath, which were categorized as rights in personam; common law protected only property rights, which were rights in rem. For the owner of the rights in rem, these rights “are progressively less connected with his proper personality, and are more connected with the control which he is allowed to exercise over the actions of others, and with the advantages he is allowed to derive from the world in which he lives.”32 Rights in personam corresponded to obligations established by a contract and involved only certain individuals.33 In other words, rights in rem, such as an owner's proprietary right to a house, were valid against the whole world; rights in personam were applicable only to a definite individual, just as the right of a landlord to his rent is valid only against his tenant.34 Strictly speaking, the validity of enfeoffment to use was based on rights in personam, but the feoffee could use his rights in rem to betray the feoffor.The upsurge in the popularity of uses and the acceptance of the device as a legal maneuver found their way into Gower's Mirour, enriching Gower's representation of Man's ownership of worldly property and the devil's ownership of Man. To show Gower's use of the concept of enfeoffment in Mirour, this section traces and discusses specific legal terminology in the Mirour before delving into the poet's metaphorical recasting in what follows. Through an examination of Gower's flexible adaptation of the legal vocabulary of land ownership, this section lays the ground for the following reading of the human soul as the equivalent of a tenement that can be owned, disowned, and enfeoffed to use in the Mirour. Notably, these key words are loaded with demonic connotations, and Gower uses words of possession to paradoxically indicate the impossibility of full ownership in the postlapsarian state.My philological inquiry into the Anglo-French vocabulary of the law revolves around the lexis of property possession, especially the different forms of use and saisine in the Mirour. In fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman French, use means the trust and holding of land to another's profit. Saisine, from which the modern English word seisin originates, refers to the king's and lord's possession of lands or persons.35 In the Mirour, Gower often uses the verb form saisir, which is defined by J. H. Baker as “to seise, to put in seisin” in Manual of Law French.36 To an Anglo-Norman audience, the words saisine and saisir would have immediately evoked land ownership.First, saisine and land ownership metaphors appear frequently in Gower's account of Man's Fall and the devil's action in the Garden of Eden. When the devil tries to persuade Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, he says: “Si dist, ‘He, femme, pren sesine / Du fruit qui tant perest benoit’” (ll. 137–38) (O woman, take possession of the fruit that seems so blessed [Wilson, p. 5]).37 Then the land ownership metaphor continues: “Au mors du pomme tant amer / Mort et pecche tout au primer / Dedeinz Adam pristront demure” (ll. 157–59) (At the bite of the apple so bitter, death and sin first took up their residence inside Adam [Wilson, p. 5]). Acquiring the forbidden fruit is like taking possession of a new territory (knowledge); Death's and Sin's control of Adam is compared to holding residence on a piece of land. Here “residence,” demure, and “possession,” sesine, are only twenty lines apart. They so resonate with each other that the metaphors of property possession permeate Gower's account of the Fall. Human beings are thereby turned into property once their possession of the forbidden fruit is complete.Gower reverses the relationship between Man and knowledge in order to emphasize Man's inability to own even knowledge after the Fall: human beings think they have taken possession of the fruit, but it is sin and death that use Man. Notably, death and sin can use Man but cannot own him. Gower does not say that Sin and Death take seisine, or “possession,” of man; rather, he says that they take demure, or “residence,” in him. The rights of residence and use must be separated from the rights of ownership. Here Gower solidifies the metaphor of the soul as a tenement that can be easily used but is difficult to own.Second, in the postlapsarian world, Gower repeatedly uses the verb saisir to generalize the impossibility of straightforward ownership of worldly riches. The dream in its image shows the joys of human flesh, but “Quant l'en meulx quide ester saisy; / De l'un ou l'autre en son demeine, / Sicomme la chose q'est foreine, / Semblablement sont esvany” (ll. 11709–12) (just as soon as one is convinced of being in possession of something, it vanishes like an alien thing [Wilson, p. 160]). Etymologically, demeine has the same origin as demesne (land held for a lord's own use), from which its meaning “one's own” also derives.38 However, ester saisy and demeine echo each other only to emphasize the impossibility of fully owning land or any worldly riches. After the Fall, one may possess something, but possession is never equivalent to ownership.Along the same lines, Gower's familiarity with the concept of the Latin usus, particularly as a concept related to the postlapsarian world, can be readily ascertained. Contracts for using but not owning the world can be found in any number of places in Gower's works. For instance, in the account of the creation in the headnote to chapter six of Vox Clamantis, Gower refers to Man's use of the world, which is premised on his obedience to God: “Hic loquitur de principio creacionis humane. Declarat eciam qualiter mundus ad vsum hominis, et homo ad cultum dei creatus extitit; ita quod, si homo deum suum debite non colat, mundus que sua sunt homini debita officia vlterius reddere non teneatur” (Here he talks about the beginning of human creation. He also clarifies how the world was created to man's use, and man to God's worship; therefore, if man does not worship his God as obligated, the world is not held any longer to bestow the obligations that are owed to man.)39 God gives the world to man in trust, as a usufruct. He may use and enjoy but not deplete it, and the trust goes upon his death to his heirs, who will hold it in the same way. In Roman law, this was called possessio sine re, as opposed to ownership, which was possessio cum re, a distinction Gower shows elsewhere that he is aware of. The headnote to Chapter 7 of the Vox's 7th book contains a similar configuration of Man's use of the world: “Hic loquitur quod, exquo creator omnium deus singulas huius mundi delicias vsui subdidit humano, dignum est quod, sicut homo deliciis secundum corpus fruitur, ita secundum spiritum deo creatori suo gratum obsequium cum graciarum accione toto corde rependat” (Here he says that, since God the creator of all things subjoined all the pleasures of this world to man for his use, it is proper that, just as man enjoys pleasures in accordance with the flesh, so in accordance with the spirit he should repay, by his grateful suit, his wholehearted allegiance to God his creator.)40 The above quotes from the Vox indicate the default position on usus in Gower's works. In the Vox, the place of the world can be used but not owned by Man, with the precondition of Man's allegiance to God. Its theological connotations are clear: the world is only the temporary dwelling place for Man, a place Man should not aim to possess.A philological inquiry into the French word use, the counterpart of the Latin usus, reveals some hidden negative implications of use idioms related to the sense of “trust” in the postlapsarian world, especially in terms of human enslavement and thralldom. In the Mirour, the phrase proper use (own use) appears in l. 1661, “Q'en tenant de les Hebrus / Tenoiont a leur propres us” (1660–61) (They held the Hebrews in servitude for their own uses [Wilson, p. 26]). This line refers to the narrative of Exodus in which the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews. According to Baker, the phrase en proper use, meaning “to one's own use, for his own benefit,” is a legal term in which the conception of trust is at the basis of use.41 A similar use of the word us appears in the rolls of parliament in 1305 to indicate the church's possession of properties in the trust form.42Use as “benefit” in the sense of exploitation in l. 1661 of the Mirour does not literally mean “trust,” but its metaphorical implications enrich our understanding of Gower's poetic device of yoking the legal to the theological.Gower emphasizes the negative “trust” implication poetically by rhyming us with Hebrus, as if human beings were equivalent to property ready to be exploited. The reader, however, is aware that the Egyptians can only temporarily use but never fully own the Hebrews, as the Hebrews are the chosen people of God. In other words, the Egyptians did not realize that as earthly masters, they could act only as temporary trustees of the Hebrews until God helped the Hebrews to rebel against the Egyptians and venture out of Egypt. In the thirteenth-century Biblical exegesis of Psalm 113, Egypt, in its moral sense, represents this world of darkness and the prison of sin: “Cum homo Deum habens prae oculis, cui timor Dei est ante oculos eius, exire vult de tenebris, et ergastulo peccatorum, de Mundo ad claustrum” (When that God-worshipping man who has the fear of God before his eyes, wishes to go forth out of the shadows, and out of the prison of sinners, from the World into the cloister). Similarly, the Exodus represents emerging from the state of darkness and struggling against the devil: “Cum illi, qui volunt resistere, et luctari contra vitia, et Diabolum supplantare, volunt exire” (When those who desire to resist, to struggle against vices, and to overthrow the devil, wish to escape).43 According to St. Gregory's Moralia, “Iam peccata praeterita velut extinctos Aegyptios post terga relinquimus” (We leave already our past sins behind us, as the Egyptians dead on the shore).44 If Egypt is equivalent to the corrupted world and the Egyptians are diabolical forces, Gower's depiction of the Egyptians’ holding of the Hebrews to their use echoes the devils’ and the World's possession of Man in the devils’ parliament. This is one of the proofs that property possession and ownership of human beings are often juxtaposed through the sense of trust in the Mirour.Third, the above-mentioned examples of use and saisine illustrate the general human condition during and after the Fall, but Gower's targeted criticism of the religious houses through the metaphor of enfeoffment to use exposes the fatal consequence of the Fall: even the clergy, who are in charge of spirituality in the corrupted world, are denied access to God. In a retold anecdote, Gower makes his criticism of the religious houses in the light of enfeoffment to use plain through the word saisine: a rich man built a church with wealth that he had stolen from another, but just as it was about to be dedicated, the devil took possession of it and seated himself there: “Mais qant l'evesque vint au plit / Del dedier, le deable y vist / Seoir et avoit pris saisine” (But when the bishop came to the point of dedicating it, he saw that the devil had taken possession of it and was seated there [Wilson, p. 213]) (ll. 15556–58). After declaring ownership, the devil precipitated himself from his place and flew away, and all the walls fell down (ll. 15553–64). This anecdote refers in particular to corruption in the Church through the possession of land and manors, as is implied in the literally demonic reversal of saisine. Gower holds the worldly wealth, especially lands, accumulated by the Church to be the cause of the latter's downfall, which alludes to the Donation of Constantine.45 In spite of the builder's intention to worship God through this property, the devil managed to own it. When the means is corrupted, the end does not count. The devil is the ultimate beneficiary, and Man holds wealth to the devil's use.In Gower's criticism of the monks who disown their cloister and own worldly property, he again obliquely refers to enfeoffment to use through the word seisine. This word is used in the context of Gower's estate satire, which targets the monks as possessors of worldly wealth. Gower launches a bitter criticism of the members of the Church, from bishops to parish priests to monks. Because of their incontinence and greed, they are endowed with all forms of wealth. Among them, the monk comes close to apostasy when he repossesses the world: “Si vait bien pres d'apostazie, / Qant il le siècle ad resaisi / Et s'est du cloister dissaisi” ( [The monk] comes close to apostasy when he repossesses the world and divests himself of the cloister [Wilson, p. 280]) (ll. 20979–81). Gower rarely rhymes two forms of the same verb, but he repeats saisi in dissaisi and resaisi. This criticism of repossessing the world obliquely alludes to the Franciscan friars’ betrayal of their vows of poverty by using lands held by laymen. The rhyme also produces the effect of simultaneous owning and disowning, which resonates with the paradoxical beneficiary mode of enfeoffment to use—that is, owning the benefits of land by disowning it. This effect further accentuates the religious houses’ indulgences in owning the world, which bars even the monks, supposedly the most spiritual of all human beings, from reclaiming Paradise or connecting with God.In the Mirour, almost all of the uses of use and saisine are negative, with an emphasis on the impossibility of fully owning anything in the postlapsarian world. Among these uses, many forms of use and saisine establish the metaphor that the human soul is a piece of property that is easy to use but hard to own. In Gower's metaphors, use redefines humans as property; different forms of saisine, though meaning “possession,” are directly related to Man's Fall and paradoxically indicate the impossibility of full ownership of anything in this world. The following section will examine how the enfeoffment to use metaphor gives rise to the personification of the World as an unreliable feoffee in the devils’ parliament.Because there is no full, straightforward ownership in the postlapsarian state, there is room for legal strategizing and manipulative striving towards unjust but not illegal acquisition of property. To show how this manipulation occurs, the difference between possession and ownership needs to be clarified. Two points are critical here. First, possession is included in ownership but may also exist apart from it. The owner of an object has the right to possess that object. But a person who is in possession, merely as a matter of fact, may sometimes use possession against the object's true owner. In other words, possession is not ownership, though ownership is a higher form of possession. Second, possession involves not only physical possession but also mental power: “The highest degree of intention is a denial of the right of any other than the possessor himself; inasmuch as the possessor means to pay no regard to any other right than his own.”46 A possessor can be a usurper, just like the disloyal feoffee.For Gower, the mechanism of enfeoffment to use falls into the category of unjust but not illegal possession and, thus understood, can be adapted metaphorically to illuminate the relationship between Man and the World. Notably, Gower's parliament of the devils does not aim at lofty experiences such as the temptation of Christ, but schemes against the ordinary everyman with the aim of acquiring his soul: “Gower's poem uniquely employs the parliament as an allegorical expression of the everyday temptations of the post-lapsarian secular world.”47 Before the Fall, Man knows that God is the only one with true allodial title to man's soul. After the Fall, Man is tempted by the devils to submit his soul to many overlords. This section focuses on the World as an unreliable feoffee and the inability of a deluded Man to effect and sustain a binding contract.A plot summary is necessary here: the devils summon the World to their parliament and bribe the World into assisting with acquiring Man's soul. The World's strategy is to strike a contract with Man to temporarily possess his soul, hold it to Man's use while he is alive, and hand his soul over to the Devil after Man's death. The crucial point is that Man's misguidance through the enfeoffment to use is an attempt to rob God, his true feudal Lord, of God's proper rights and incidents. God owns the soul and g