Abstract
This chapter examines the ways by which two of the Rebel Letters, the Miller lyrics from the Littera Johannis Balle (BL Royal MS 13 E ix fol 287r.) and the Addresses of the Commons (BL Cotton Tiberius C. VII fols 174v–174r), represent vernacular poetry as a performative political medium. Brief, multimodal lyrics, the Rebel Letters are preserved in several historiographic chronicles, and thus have been primarily read by their contemporaries and by later critics through an evidentiary, material lens. Historicist approaches to the Letters have perceived them as actual letters or as mass-produced broadsides, yet the Letters themselves corral the sonic, metrical effects of lyric to make clear their political aims. This chapter deploys, therefore, an approach that Marjorie Levinson has described as “activist new formalist,” a critical method that considers the production of aesthetics and literary forms as inseparable from the historical moments in which they were made. It argues the Miller lyrics are performative representations of noise designed to produce a community of men who might “stonde manlyche togedyr in trewthe.”
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Notes
- 1.
Andrew Prescott has noted that “despite the enormous scholarly literature on the Peasants’ revolt, much still remains unclear about the events of 1381;” see his “The Hand of God,” in Nigel Morgan, ed., Prophecy, Apocalypse and Doom (Donington, Shaun Tyas: 2004) 321. The earliest scholarship can be found in Andre Reville, Le Soulement des Travailleurs d’Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898.). For the history of the Rebellion, R.H. Dobson’s The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 has usefully compiled primary documents, while R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston, The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1977), each carefully discuss the context of the uprising. On medieval English peasant societies and conflict see R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Hambledon Press, 1985). Also valuable are Andrew Prescott, “London in the Peasants’ Revolt: A Portrait Gallery,” London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present 7 no. 2 (1981): 125–143, and Juliet R.V. Barker’s popular history, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 2.
On the general problematics of labor and political control specific to the late medieval period, see Kellie Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). See also the preface to The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg, and W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), vii-viii; and Allen Frantzen’s introduction “The Work of Work,” in Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat, ed. The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery and Labor in Medieval England (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1994), 1–15.
- 3.
The most recent edition of these texts is James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). The Digital Index of Middle English Verse also catalogues them: “Jack Miller” is DIMEV 2779; “Jack Shep Trench Sovereign” is DIMEV 2781; “Jack Trueman Doth You To Understand” is DIMEV 2782; “John Ball Greteth Well You All” is DIMEV 2956; “John Bal Seint Mary Prest” is DIMEV 2957; “Johan the Miller hath i-grounden small small small” is DIMEV 2953. It is important to note that there are additional Middle English texts produced by rebels beyond the Rebel Letters , such as the petition of John Preston, contained in massive writ files and court rolls. These are chronically understudied; see Andrew Prescott, “Writing About Rebellion: Using the Records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.” History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 1–27 at 15. The Preston case can be found in the unnumbered membranes of the King’s Bench recorda file KB 145/3/6/1 (Prescott “Writing” n. 116).
- 4.
The Prima epistola Johannis Balle was originally (and erroneously) ascribed to Stow’s Annales and it continues to be labeled as “Stow” by Dean. For a discussion of the archival and historical difficulties in cataloguing the Letters, see Richard Firth Green’s excellent “John Ball’s Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 176–200.
- 5.
The Chronicon Henrici Knighton ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, RS 92 (London, 1895) 2:138, presents the preceding Latin explanation: “In illa misera multitudine recensebatur xx. mille. Isti fuerunt ductores eorum, Thomas Baker primus motor sed postea principalis doctor, Jakke Strawe, Jakke Mylner, Jakke Carter, Jakke Trewman. Jakke Mylner alloquitor socios sic.”
- 6.
Thomas of Walsingham says: “Miserat insuper ductoribus communium in Estsexia quondam literam aenigmatibus plenam, ad hortandum eos ut incepta perficerent; quae ex post inventa est in manica cujusdam suspendendi pro turbatione praefata, cujus tenor talis est.” See his Chronicon Angliae, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, RS 64 (London, 1874) at 322. [My translation.]
- 7.
Historicist and New Historicist critics understand the Letters as evidence of peasant vernacular consciousness, but rarely examine the Letters as formal literature. See, for instance, Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David Aers, “Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381,” in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 432–454; Larry Scanlon, “Langland’s England—King, Commons and Kind Wit,” in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 191–233; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), particularly Chapter Five, “The Miller’s Tale and the Politics of Laughter,” 244–79; and Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), particularly Chapter 2, “A Reveille!,” 42–51.
- 8.
I take as my point of departure Seth Lerer’s idea that “A study of the forms of Middle English lyric (like the forms of all medieval writing) is a study of its formats: of the ways in which texts take on physical form and how the choices made by scribes, compilers, readers, and booksellers are choices about the literary nature of vernacular production.” See his, “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies.” Literature Compass: Medieval 1 (2003): 1–15 at 10.
- 9.
Green situates the Letters, what he calls “scraps of verse,” within the context of “a minor literary genre, variously categorized as estates satire, complaint literature, or the literature of popular protest,” and attributes the Letters to Ball, after whom the chronicles titled them. “John Ball’s Letters,” 180. He carefully demonstrated that the Letters operate along the same discursive lines as so much didactic sermon literature: they “reflect the words of the popular preacher, their proverbs and scraps of vernacular verse turning up in sermons, sermon notes and preaching manuals throughout the fourteenth century.” (“John Ball,” 187).
- 10.
See specifically Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre and Practice in Late Medieval England, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press: 2016); Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?” ELH 82 no.2 (2015): 319–343, and “The Construction of Textual Form: Cross-Lingual Citation in some Medieval Lyrics,” in Yolanda Plumley, Stefano Jossa and Giuliano Di Bacco, eds., Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, vol. 1. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2011. 41–57; Nicollette Zeeman, “Imaginative Theory” in Paul Strohm, ed., Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 222–40; Julia Boffey, “Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts,” in Thomas G. Duncan. ed., A Companion to the Middle English Lyric Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005, 1–18, and “Forms of Standardization in Terms for Middle English Lyrics in the Fourteenth Century,” in Ursula Schaefer, Andrew Johnston and Claudia Lange, eds., The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006, 61–70; Kathleen Palti, “Representations of Voices in Middle English Lyrics,” in Plumley, et al., eds., Citation, 141–158. The so-called lyric turn begins ostensibly with Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 no. 1 (2008): 201–6, and “Lyric, History and Genre,” NLH 40 no. 4 (2009): 879–99.
- 11.
Nelson, Lyric, 4.
- 12.
Ibid, 14–15.
- 13.
On the role of beauty more generally in humanities scholarship, see Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Nelson argues that the medieval lyric in particular complicates the usual critical associations between beauty and lyric, Lyric, “Introduction.”
- 14.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003) at 2. Bruce Holsinger cogently observes that Phelan’s approach in Unmarked is decidedly presentist and does not accommodate the ways that medievalists have noted “the performativity of the book itself, the various modes of excitation that the codex enjoined, inspired and reconstituted for individual readers and diverse reading communities” (282). See his essay “Analytical Survey 6: Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance,” in David Lawton, Rita Copeland and Wendy Scase, eds. New Medieval Literatures 6 (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2003) 217–312.
- 15.
See his Writing and Rebellion, particularly the first chapter, “Insurgent Literacy” 13–66.
- 16.
Justice, Writing 20–3.
- 17.
Justice, Writing 41.
- 18.
Justice, Writing 45–6.
- 19.
Justice, Writing 24.
- 20.
Justice, Writing, 29.
- 21.
Justice, Writing, 30.
- 22.
Nelson, Lyric, 19.
- 23.
See Butterfield, “Why.”
- 24.
On auditory communities and oral–aural forms of textuality in the Middle Ages, see Brian Stock, The Implication of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88–240; for “textual communities” see 522; also M.T. Clanchy, “Hearing and Seeing,” in his From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 253–93; and Janet Coleman, “Vernacular Literacy and Lay Education,” in her Medieval Readers and Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 18–57.
- 25.
The other Miller figure can be found in “The Addresses of the Commons” (Chronicon Henrici Knighton: Jakke Mylner). The text reads, in part, “Jakke Mylner alloquitur socios sic: Jakke Mylner asket help to turne hys mylne aright. He hath grounden smal, smal; the Kings sone of heven he schal pay for alle. Loke thi mylne go aright, with the foure sayles, and the post stande in steddefastnesse,” Dean, 136.
- 26.
Michael Mullet argues that this poem might be a parody of a summons ordering a sheriff to compile a posse comitatus. See his Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (London: Croon Helm, 1987), 100.
- 27.
R.H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 214–15.
- 28.
In his essay on the compositional practice of Thomas Wyatt, twentieth century English poet Basil Bunting has noted that English poetry rarely fits neatly into the imported French stress pattern of iambic pentameter, arguing that, “in practise it is continually reverting to the four stresses of Old English.” See his Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Malkin (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1999), 30.
- 29.
See, for instance, Thomas Duncan, “Middle English Lyrics: Meter and Editorial Practice,” in Companion to the Middle English Lyric, 19–38.
- 30.
Nelson, Lyric, 9.
- 31.
Bunting has argued that the critical blind spot to rhythm often prevents the recognition of what it is a poet is actually doing, in time, with language. He notes that the analysis of Wyatt’s seemingly failed attempts at iambic pentameter is essentially flawed, despite several hundred years of editorial tinkering with the manuscripts of Wyatt’s poems, because it does not take into account the fact that Wyatt likely sang his lyrics. Bunting argues, although literary historians had long claimed that Wyatt simply couldn’t count syllables correctly, “I prefer the evidence of my own ears, which tell me that Wyat [sic] wrote by the spoken sound or the sung sound of the words, not by their numbers, the number of syllables: words as they are spoken or sung, words arranged in swoops and loops of sound, not measured with a foot-rule or counted out like coins,” 43. The same can be applied to the poem of Schep.
- 32.
Butterfield, “Why,” 337.
- 33.
Nelson, Lyric, 21.
- 34.
As Lee Patterson argues, “the agrarian economy was thoroughly monetized and exchange oriented throughout the middle ages, that peasant society had been for many centuries highly stratified and differentiated, and that there existed since at least the twelfth century, a vigorous, monetized, and even credit-based peasant land market, a market for agricultural wage labor, and small-scale but essential rural industry and commodity production,” Chaucer and the Subject of History, 249. In a similar vein, in his “Work Ethics in the 14th Century,” in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth Century England, Dyer points out that in Essex, “the weavers, tailors, carpenters and other craft workers listed in the poll tax accounts of 1381 are found from other documents to have held just under seven acres of land on average. At planting and harvest they suspended their work as artisans; in the slacker periods of the farming year they returned to their crafts,” 31.
- 35.
Firth Green notes that a similar Latin expression about the mills of God, “sera deum mola sed tenues molit undique partes” can be found in Walther’s Proverbia 4:805 (no. 28057); cf. 4:815 (no. 28109) and 5:551–52 (nos. 32568a/b). See his note 52, “John Ball,” 198.
- 36.
See Dean, note 7.
- 37.
Aston, Margaret. “Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt.” Past and Present 43 (1994): 3–47. See also Justice, “The Idiom of Rural Politics,” in Writing and Rebellion, 140–192.
- 38.
Ben Parsons has recently noted that by the end of the medieval period, “the mill had developed into an insistent and pervasive symbol of disorder, registering equally in urban misrule and in the fancy nonsense of marginalia,” 15. See his “Trouble at the Mill: Madness, Merrymaking and Milling,” The Chaucer Review 53 no. 1 (2018): 3–35.
- 39.
The world-turned-upside-down content of the poem is echoed in the Speculum Christiani, and in the Auchinleck manuscript, according to Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Political Lyrics,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas G. Duncan DS Brewer 2005, 171–188 at 180. Rossell Hope Robbins lists the text in his Historical Poems at no. 54:Verse
Verse For might is right, the lond is laweless; for night is light, the lond is loreles; for fight is flight, the lond is nameless Nu on is two, Wel is wo, And frend is fo. Nu lust haveth leve, Thef is reve, And pride hathe sleve. Nu wille is red, Wit is qued And God is dede.
See also V.J. Scattergood, “Political Context, Date and Composition of The Sayings of the Four Philosophers.” Medium Aevum Four Philosophers 37 37 (1968): 157–65. - 40.
Thomas Pettitt notes that the “do well” imperative as well as the “wo/foe/ho” rhyme can also be found in a similar poem from BL MS Harley 116, found in BJ and HW Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1968, under W 45, “If Ware is ere ye am woe” (“Folk Allegory” 60). See his “‘Folk Allegory’ in the Idiom of John Ball,” in “Divers toyes mengled”: essays on medieval and Renaissance culture = Etudes sur la culture européenne au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance: en hommage à André Lascombes. Michel Bitot, Roberta Mullini, and Peter Happé, eds. (Tours: Publication de l’Université François Rabelais, 1996): 55–68.
- 41.
Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric,” 328.
- 42.
Butterfield, “Construction,” 51.
- 43.
See his Towards a Medieval Poetics, transl. Peter Bennett (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1992) 41–49. See also Seeta Chaganti, “Choreographing Mouvance: The Case of the English Carol.” Philological Quarterly 87 no. 1–2 (2008): 77–103.
- 44.
Chaganti, “Choreographing,” 79.
- 45.
Butterfield, “Why,” 334. She notes that “stability is almost accidental, rather than the norm,” 335.
- 46.
See his Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press: 2002), 22.
- 47.
Butterfield, “Why,” 322.
- 48.
Julia Boffey notes “these poems were recorded unsystematically and often simply accidentally,” “Middle English Lyrics” 1. See also Julia Boffey and Paula Simpson, “A Middle English Poem on a Binding Fragment: An Early Valentine?” The Review of English Studies. 67 no. 282 (2015): 844–54.
- 49.
See for instance Jessica Brantley, “Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas,” The Chaucer Review 47 no. 4 (2013): 416–438.
- 50.
See his “The Layout and Punctuation of Verse,” in Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. (Berkeley, University of California Press: 1993) 97–114 at 98.
- 51.
Bruce Holsinger notes that medieval lyric “bears a fluid relation to the music that it describes and to which it was (imaginatively or actually) performed,” “Cultures of Performance,” 290.
- 52.
Butterfield, “Why,” 322. See also Nelson, Lyric, who argues that lyric manuscript presentation tends to be “plain and unadorned by comparison with the lavishly illuminated chansonniers” of the Continent, 8–9.
- 53.
Chaganti, “Choreographing,” 77–8.
- 54.
Butterfield “Why,” 339.
- 55.
The Letters’ reference to Piers Plowman is the only fourteenth century mention of the poem. In particular, Anne Middleton has focused on the relationships between Piers Plowman and the Letters, particularly viewing the Letters’ use of pseudonyms as a response to the Statutes of Laborers. See both her essays, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 206–45, and “Acts of Vagrancy: the C-Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor and Authorship, eds. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208–318. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has also argued that the events of 1381 occurred within a larger context of clerical resistance; see her “The Clerical Proletariat: The Underemployed Scribe and Vocational Crisis.” The Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 17 (2014): 1–34. See also Michael Johnston, “William Langland and John Ball,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 30 (2016): 29–74; and Andrew Galloway, “Making History Legal: Piers Plowman and the Rebels of 14th Century England,” in Kathleen Hewlitt, ed., William Langland’s Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays (New York, Routledge: 2001), 7–39. Most recently, Sebastian Sobecki has analyzed legal records for evidence of Langland’s own pseudonym; see his “Hares, Rabbits, Pheasants: Piers Plowman and William Longewille, a Norfolk Rebel in 1381.” The Review of English Studies 69 no. 281 (2018): 216–236.
- 56.
See, for instance, Thomas Pettitt, “‘Here Comes I, Jack Straw;’ English Folk Drama and Social Revolt.” Folklore 95 no.1 (1984): 3–20.
- 57.
Middleton, “‘Kynde Name,’” 35.
- 58.
Contrary to popular conception, the Rebellion was not primarily composed of disgruntled peasant serfs. Indeed, Dean notes, “the third estate was by the mid to late 14th century a congeries of arriviste gentry, prosperous (and not so prosperous) merchants, craftsmen, burgesses, yeomen, villains and serfs. Simply put, the peasant class consisted of all those who were not noble and not clerics; and many of the middle strata of the third estate—those who did not take an active role in governance—participated in the misnamed ‘Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,’” xii. The Revolt’s demographic includes large proportions of high-ranking craftsmen who were highly involved in the daily operations of their manors and villages. Lynn Arner calls this group “the upper strata of the nonruling classes” (see her Chaucer, Gower and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381, (Penn State University Press: 2013), 19,) while Christopher Dyer points out, using records from Essex, the county at the heart of the Rebellion, “the most striking common characteristic of our sample of rebels is their prominence in the government of their manor, village or hundred, either at the time of the revolt or within a few years of 1381. No less that 53 of them, out of 70 where we might expect to find evidence, are known to have served as reeves, chief pledges, affeerers, ale-tasters, bailiffs, jurors, constables, or in other positions of responsibility,” 17. See his “The Social and Economic Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381,” in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston, eds., The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 9–42.
- 59.
Nelson, Lyric, 11.
- 60.
Dean, 136.
- 61.
Dean, 139.
- 62.
Palti, “Voices,” 156.
- 63.
A fifteenth century manuscript from Bury St. Edmunds (MS Sloane 2593, for 5b.) also refers to “gyle” roving through the town (Green, “John Ball,” 185).
- 64.
Green notes that the “flokke/lokke” rhyme as well as the phrase “no man may come 3er to,/but yef he singge si dedero,” can also be found in BL MS Harley 2316 for 26v (“John Ball,” 183).
- 65.
Tison Pugh notes that “anger is a justifiable response to the spread of falseness throughout the land”;+ see his “‘Falseness Reigns in Every Flock’: Literacy and Eschatological Discourse in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 21 (2000): 79–104 at 96.
- 66.
“Si didero” evokes Psalms 132:4 “si dedero somnum oculis meis et palpebris dormitationem” [I will allow no sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids]. In the context of Trewman, the phrase seems to be more satirical, referring to clerical labor and false counsel.
- 67.
See Green, “John Ball,” 184. Dean, note 28, observes that “si didero,” or its alternate spelling, “si dedero,” can also be found in a Latin song that begins “Si dedero decus accipiam flatumque favoris: / Ni dedero, nil percipiam, spem perdo laboris.” See H. Walther, Initia carminum ac versuum medii aevi posterioris latinorum § 17697; Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell (New York: Pickering, 1843), 2:6. Dean also notes that as well that “a fourteenth-century quatrain contains a reference to the Latin song:Verse
Verse Now goot falshed in everi flok, And trewthe is sperd under a lok; Now no man may comen er to But yef he singge si dedero.
(Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright and Halliwell, 2:121; Index § 2319, Contra falsos iudices).”
- 68.
Butterfield, “Construction,” 49.
- 69.
“Banthon” could also form a half or near rhyme with to/didero. I thank Steven F. Kruger for his assistance in scanning out the rhyme of this section.
- 70.
Green observes that the image of true love being absent from the land can be found in a BL MS Harley 7322, fold 145r–146v, as well as in several other sources. “John Ball,” 184.
- 71.
Dean, 138.
- 72.
In his contribution to the Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, “Lollardy,” Steven Justice presents the case of the Lollard John Aston, who in 1382 published broadsides in both Latin and English. Brought to trial for heresy, Aston would only respond to the court using English, although he was directly instructed to use Latin due to the presence of lay people. Consequently, archbishop Courtenay refused to allow the trial to proceed—and thus prevented theological disputes from being revealed to the laity. Courtenay convicted Aston of contumacy and sent him to secular court, 667.
- 73.
Phelan notes that “performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonproductive,” Unmarked, 27.
- 74.
Jonathan Culler notes that “the power to embed bits of language in your mind, to invade and occupy it, is a salient feature of lyrics: poems seek to inscribe themselves in mechanical memory, Gedachtnis, ask to be learned by heart, taken in, introjected, or housed as bits of alterity that can be repeated, considered, treasured or ironically cited. The force of poetry is linked to its ability to get itself remembered, like those bits of song that stick in your mind, you don’t know why” (“Why Lyric,” 205).
- 75.
See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Strategies in Post-Structural Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
- 76.
French lyric poets as early as the thirteenth century were digressively using the authorial narrative voice. See Michel Zink, Monique Briand Walker, transl., “Time and Representation of the Self in 13th Century French Poetry,” Poetics Today 5 no. 3, Medieval and Renaissance Representation: New Reflections (1984): 611–627; and Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). For examinations of self-referentiality in late medieval English verse composition, see J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), who argues that the late fourteenth century, which he organizes around the rule of Richard II, was a “period dominated by the narrative voice,” 47. Additional analyses of Ricardian poetic identity can be found in Lois Ebin, ed., Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), particularly her essay, “Poetics and Style in Late Medieval Literature,” 263–93; and A.C. Spearing, “A Ricardian ‘I’: The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honor of J.A. Burrow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–22.
- 77.
See Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 35. See also Nelson, who notes that “tactics are above all modes of relation,” Lyric, 26.
- 78.
See his A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), particularly his first chapter.
- 79.
Green, Crisis, 40.
- 80.
Pursuing History, 12, qtd in Chaganti, “Choreographing,” 92.
- 81.
Northrop Frye has argued that “…traditionally the lyric is primarily addressed to the ear.” See his “Approaching Lyric” in Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds. Beyond the New Criticism (Cornell, Cornell University Press: 1985): 31–37 at 34. Jessica Brantley also observes in her reading of devotional lyrics that lyric poetry “is an art of sound,” 122. See her Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2008), particularly her chapter “Lyric Imaginings and Painted Prayers,” 121–66.
- 82.
Rossell Hope Robbins points out that The Letter of John Ball (Stow, Annales) and a similar poem that also uses the seven deadly sins, Index, No. 2356, use almost identical language in their criticism of society. The final encomium, “God doe bote for nowe is time,” of Ball’s text marks a decisive shift, away from the general criticism of 2356, to open subversion. See his Historical Poems, xlii.
- 83.
As Dobson argues, “such letters and verses may well provide only fragile evidence from which to prove the existence of a powerful radical tradition in late medieval England, but at least they remind us that the king’s low-born subjects were not always and inevitably inarticulate,” 380.
- 84.
Palti, “Voices,” 141.
- 85.
Tiffany, “Fugitive Lyric: The Rhymes of the Canting Crew.” PMLA 120 no.1 (2005): 82–96 at 83.
- 86.
Tiffany, “Fugitive,” 85.
- 87.
Nelson, Lyric, 6.
- 88.
Dobson, 188.
- 89.
Qtd. in Aston, 8.
- 90.
Tiffany, “Fugitive,” 83–4.
- 91.
M.T. Clanchy. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993) 185.
- 92.
The Essex portion of the Revolt began in the town of Fobbing. Dobson, 136.
- 93.
For discussion of orality and the oral transmission of information and literature in the later middle ages, see, for instance, Colin Richmond, “Hand and Mouth: Information Gathering and Use in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 no. 3(1988): 232–252; and Nancy Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998). For more general discussion of orality, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).
- 94.
Qtd. in David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), 1.
- 95.
Green, Crisis, 47.
- 96.
See her essay, “Household, Work, and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The Regulation of Labour in Medieval English Towns,” in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England ed. James B. Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg, and W.M. Ormrod (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 141.
- 97.
Sarah Rees-Jones, “Household,” 141. According to Phillipp R. Schofield, the frankpledge was an oral system of “mutual responsibility” which like other similar systems “also found their expressions in legal institutions such as the hue and cry, which required that individuals call forth the community against malefactors and through which the role of peacekeeper was extended beyond the office-holders and the worthies of village society to include all villagers,” 167.
- 98.
Shannon McSheffrey notes that “Men were the public actors in medieval society; it was they who participated formally in government, served on juries, operated in the most visible roles in the world of commerce. Public activity of the right kind in many ways defined the respectable male.” See her “Men and Masculinity in Late Medieval London Civic Culture: Governance, Patriarchy and Reputation,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1991), 259.
- 99.
See Douglas Kibbee, For to Speke French Trewely: The French Language in England, 1000–1600 (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991), 58.
- 100.
Middleton, “Kynde Name,” 68.
- 101.
See their Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xx.
- 102.
See his “New Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen, ed., Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 1–14 at 1.
- 103.
Levinson, 565.
- 104.
I am mindful of Chuck D’s 1996 statement that the oral poetries of hip hop act as a “black CNN.” The verbal performance of hip hop is a means of disseminating vital information. See his Autobiography of MistaChuck (Mercury Records, PolyGram, Philips) 1996. For a critical analysis of the possible links between the study of late medieval vernacularity and of twentieth century African-American modes of vernacular use, see Larry Scanlon, “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer and Langston Hughes,” in Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2003), 220–66.
- 105.
There are nineteenth and twentieth century examples of poetry being used by protesting laborers in Great Britain. On the Peterloo massacre in early nineteenth century Manchester and the songs published in response to those events, see for instance, Alison Morgan, Ballads and Songs of Peterloo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). During the 1984–5 miners’ strike, British miners and their families produced and published poetry in support of their cause; the anthology was sold by the NUM to raise funds for those on the picket line. See Maurice Jones, foreword. Against All the Odds. (National Union Mineworkers, 1984).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to gratefully acknowledge Glenn Burger, Steven F. Kruger, Pamela Sheingorn, David Greetham, Anne Stone, Steven Justice, Chuck Jackson, Jack Shuler, and Emily Houlik-Ritchey for generously and productively reading earlier iterations of this chapter.
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Jager, K.W. (2019). “Stonde Manlyche Togedyr in Trewthe”: Lyric and Rebellion Among Late Medieval Men. In: Jager, K. (eds) Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18334-9_3
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