Abstract
When Caxton translated Jacobus de Cessolis’s Game and Play of Chesse (c. 1474), he saw in the individual chess pieces the natural divisions of society: from the king and queen down to the pawns who represented the whole range of the third estate (from carters and plowmen to merchants). For Caxton, as for most medieval moralists, the idea of a natural and divinely ordained comyn prouffit—the mutually beneficial work performed by each of the three estates—licensed the division of labor that underwrote society. But the common profit was also always already in the past: for Caxton, as for most medieval moralists, no social class now performs their obligations as they were wont. This nostalgia for a lost, golden age of common profit (a happy time from which we are always on the downward slope) is just as conspicuous in the writings of modern economists and sociologists as it was in the writings of medieval theologians. Herein lies the paradox of the common profit: even as it purports to offer a Utopian vision of society—communally affirmed obligations that produce not just enough to eat but also spiritual and social stability—it is most often articulated in, and so contrasted to, dystopic (even apocalyptic) predictions of the dire state of contemporary society.
According to the economists, the division of labor is caused by the need for increasing our happiness. This supposes that we are really becoming happier. Nothing is less certain.
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society
And here in ought we to folowe nature/ for she shewed to us that we shold do comyn prouffit one to an other/ and the first fondement of Iustice is that no man shold noye or greue other but that they ought doo the comyn prouffit/ For men saye in reproche that I see of thyn I hope hit shall be myn/ But who is he in thyse dayes that entendeth more to the comyn prouffit than to his owne/ Certaynly none/ But all way a man ought to haue drede and feere of this owne hows/ Whan he seeth his neyghbours hous a fyre/ And therfore ought men gladly helpe the comyn prouffit/ For men otherwhile sette not be a lityll fyre/ And might quenche hit in the begynnyng/ that afterward makyth a grete blasyng fyree.
William Caxton, The Game and Playe of the Chesse
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Notes
M.S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 2.
D.W. Robertson, “Chaucer and the ‘Commune profit’: the Manor,” Mediaevalia (1980) 6: 239–59, argues on the basis of manorial records that the “communal spirit” of the manor was breaking down at this time and that this breakdown can be read in the General Prologue depiction of manorial servants like the Yeoman and the Miller.
For these categories, see the 1349 ordinance, c. 2–5, in SR, vol. 1, pp. 307–308. We see similar enumerative strategies in lists of fines against labourers artificers and servants, see Calendar of Letter-Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guild Hall. Letter-Book G, Circa A.D. 1352–1374, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: Corporation of the City of London, 1907), p. 115–18.
For a discussion of how this enumeration works in writers like Langland, see Andrew Cole, “Scribal Hermeneutics and the Genres of Social Organization in Piers Plowman,” in The Middle Ages at Work, eds. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Maria A. Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor: Class or Status Group?” in Culture, Ideology and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Jones (London: Routledge, 1982), pp. 160–75, esp. p. 162;
and Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 5–15.
For a cogent, recent discussion of the lineage of the term, see Kempshall, Common Good, pp. 5–25; and Michael A. Smith, Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition (Lewiston, NY: Meilen University Press, 1995).
For the reception of the term from late antiquity through the European Middle Ages, see The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The phrase is perhaps most familiar in England from controversy over Ricardian rule in the 1380s and 1390s where it became a rallying call for modifying (and, later, opposing) Richard’s purportedly tyrannical behavior.
On questions of rulership in fourteenth-century England, see Richard H. Jones, “Absolutism and the Common Good,” Chapter 11 in The Royal Policy of Richard II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), pp. 145–63. Interpolations in John of Trevisa’s English translation of Aegidius Romanus’s De regimine principum (ca. 1388–92) emphasized a king’s obligation to the common profit as a way of limiting royal power;
see The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley, Garland Medieval Texts 19 (New York: Garland, 1997).
On this aspect of Trevisa’s translation practice, see Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 69–78;
and Ralph Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage,” Speculum 64 (1989): 878–916. More overt criticism of Ricardian rule from the topos of common profit can be found in the later version of Gower’s Confessio Amantis;
see Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
Discussions of this political topos in Chaucer include David Wallace, “‘Whan She Translated Was’: Humanism, Tyranny, and the Petrarchan Academy,” in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 261–98;
and Carol Falvo Heffernan, “Tyranny and Commune Profit in the Clerk’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 332–40.
Augustine discusses Cicero’s definition of political community in Book 19 of De civitate dei; see De Civitate Dei (CCSL 48), XIX. 21, pp. 687–89, and XIX. 24, pp. 695–96. On Augustinian notions of the good society, see Janet Coleman, “St. Augustine: Christian Political Thought at the End of the Roman Empire,” in B. Redhead, ed., Political Thought from Plato to Nato (London: Ariel, BBC, 1984), pp. 45–60.
On this political context, see D.L. Douie, The Conflict between the Seculars and the Mendicants at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century, Aquinas Papers, vol. 3, no. 23 (London: Aquin Press, 1954);
and Yves M. Congar, “Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et séculiers dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècles et le début du XIVe,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 28 (1961): 35–161.
For a discussion of these embodied tropes, see G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 552.
G.C. Macaulay, ed., The Complete Works of John Gower: The French Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 296, ll. 26758–60: “Dieu, q’ ad tous les biens crée, sont les estoilles ordiné/ Pour nostre bien communement.” Subsequent references in the text refer to this edition.
“Ly labourer qui sont truant/ Voiont le siecle busoignant/ De leur service et leur labour, / Et que poy sont le remenant, / Pour ce s’en vont en orguillant; / Ne font sicome leur ancessour, / Car j’ay bien mesmes veu le jour,/ Q’au servir souffrirent plusour / Qui font danger du meintenant./ Mais certes c’est un grant errour / Veoir Testat superiour / El danger d’un vilein estant” (11. 26473–84). Gower uses the common profit as a yardstick most frequently with those members of the third estate who regularly fail le bien commun: merchants (11. 25249–60), artisans and craftsmen (11. 25501–12), victuallers (11.26209–20), as well as agricultural workers. Gower also discusses the duties of agricultural laborers in Book V, chaps. 9–10 of his Vox Clamantis; see G.C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 400–401. Subsequent references refer to this edition.
Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 72.
See RP, vol. 2, pp. 340–41. While the invocation of the common profit in statutory preambles was not unique to the labor legislation, its ubiquitous presence is notable in the rolls and statutes appertaining to labor (the only other place the phrase appears with similarly conspicuous frequency is in heresy regulation, a coincidence discussed below). Helen Cam, Law-Finders and Law-Makers in Medieval England: Collected Studies in Legal and Constitutional History (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), pp. 143–44, has found sporadic instances of the phrase used as early as the reign of Edward I, citing instances in statutory preambles dating to 1275 and 1293, but argues that the phrase does not begin to appear regularly until the 1340s. The phrase is also found in fourteenth-century civic regulations aimed at controlling wages and prices in London; see, for instance, Letter Book-F, fol. clxxxi, reprinted in Riley’s Memorials, pp. 253–58.
See A Book of London English, 1384–1425, ed. R.W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 107.
Registrum Hamonis Hethe diocesis Roffensis, ed. Charles Johnson, Canterbury and York Society 48, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1948), vol. 2, pp. 884–85.
Putnam, Enforcement, p. 3. In a more recent assessment, W.M. Ormrod similarly finds that the role of the central government (particularly in the 1350s) was of the utmost importance to the success of the laws (“English Government,” pp. 179–80). L.R. Poos, while agreeing that the labor legislation was enacted in a national context, reconsiders the role of local officials in the statutes’ enforcement, concluding that their activities led to a certain degree of “social control within rural communities” (“Social Context,” esp. p. 50). Chris Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500,” in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge UK: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 22, on the other hand, argues that, beginning with the 1351 statute, “manorial and local courts were by-passed” in favor of “the public authority of centrally appointed justices” like the justices of labourers. Anthony Musson argues that the standardization of weights and measures in the late twelfth century could constitute one country-wide precedent (“New Labour Laws,” p. 75); however, this previous legislation had nowhere near the same social impact as the 1349 economic legislation had (nor was its enforcement so controversial).
Putnam, Enforcement, pp. 98–120. The 1349 ordinance was not innovative in this regard but rather a statutory expression of practices declared in earlier writs and letters patent in relation to the 1348 subsidy. For a cogent summary of how the labor fines were used to subidize fifteenths and tenths, see E.B. Fryde, “The Statutes of Labourers,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales III, 1348–1500, ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 483–90. According to Poos, “Social Context,” p. 44, the labor fines in Essex in 1352 made up £615 out of the assessment of £1235. According to Fryde, this 58 percent of the royal subsidy was a much higher percentage than in most other shires (p. 757).
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature 33 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 11.
Aaron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G.L. Campbell (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 273 and p. 277, respectively. That Gurevich sees the notion of common profit as a solely theological rather than a more multifaceted concept subject also to environmental, governmental or economic pressures becomes clear when he states that problems of labor “were taken up by theologians in so far as such matters had a bearing on loftier and ultimate problems of existence. So it is inaccurate to speak of politico-economics or of economic doctrine in the Middle Ages” (p. 275).
Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 23.
For these accounts, see respectively Knighton, pp. 208–209; The Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), p. 134;
and The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 2–3.
The other major 1381 chronicler, Thomas Walsingham is not particularly interested in the early stages of the rebellion in Kent and Essex, as he concentrates most of his narrative on events occuring in and around St. Alban’s; see Historia Anglicana, 2 vols., ed. H.T. Riley, Rolls Series, no. 28, pt. 1 (London: Longmans, 1863–64), vol. 1, pp. 454–84 and vol. 2, pp. 1–41;
and Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, 3 vols., ed. H.T. Riley, Rolls Series, no. 28, pt. 4 (London: Longmans, 1869), vol. 3, pp. 285–359.
See Jean Foissart, Chroniques, ed. Siméon Luce, 15 vols. (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1869–1975), vol. 10, Book 2, §217, [p. 108].
See Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London: Longmans, Green 1949), esp. pp. 114–19. According to Bird, Northampton’s followers were “principally small masters of various non-victualling misteries, notably the mercers, the tailors, the goldsmiths, the drapers, the cordwainers and the armourers” (p. 75).
For a different view of these same years, see Pamela Nightingale, “Capitalists, Crafts and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth-Century London,” Past and Present 124 (1989): 3–35, who prefers to see Northampton as part of the merchant oligarchy rather than a member of its opposition. Bird’s older analysis still appears (to my mind) to offer the most persuasive explanation of the municipal crisis of the 1370s and 1380s.
Thomas Usk, “Testament of Love,” in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 7, ed. W.W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 28, 11. 121–22. Hereafter cited as “Testament.”
Consulting the Letter-Books G and H (covering the years 1352 to 1399) shows that the phrase only occurs in these notices sporadically before this time. I have found no uses of the phrase in regulation of commodities before 1320; three uses between 1320–49; and five uses between the years 1350 and 1370. Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith, English Gilds, EETS o.s. 40 (London, 1870); reprint guild ordinances from various parts of England that were elicited in reponse to the 1388 legislation that demanded all guilds document their histories and by-laws. These returns only rarely use the language of common profit. For a discussion of these guild returns, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 83–103 and Caroline Barron and Laura Wright, “The London Middle English Guild Certificates of 1388–9,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 108–45.
On the relation of guilds to the common profit, see Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984), esp. pp. 24–28 and 70–71.
The foundational scholarship in this area includes Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wydiffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988),
and Margaret Deanesley, The Lollard Bible (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1920).
More recently, Kantik Gosh, The Wydiffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), has discussed Wyclif and Lollardy in the context of late-medieval intellectual history.
Deanesley reprints one such tract; see Lollard Bible, pp. 399–437. On the academic determinationes against vernacular translation, see Anne Hudson, “The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401,” English Historical Review 90 (1975): 1–18, and Kantik Ghosh, “Vernacular translations of the Bible and ‘authority’,” chapter 3 in Wydiffite Heresy, pp. 86–111.
Anne Hudson, Selections from English Wydiffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), “Prologue to the Wydiffite Bible, chapter 15,” p. 70, 11. 122–30. Subsequent references to the Prologue refer to this edition.
The connection between Lollardy and the vernacular was also strengthened since the determining characteristic of Lollardy at this time was its insistence on the availability of an English Bible. Orthodox suspicions about theological and sacred texts in English would gradually grow into broader suspicions about the subversive potential of English texts more generally as the fifteenth century progressed. Anne Hudson explores the connection between language and religious dissent in “Wyclif and the English Language,” in Wyclif in his Times, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). According to Hudson, during the fifteenth century, “use or defense of vernacular Scriptures had evidently become the most obvious social mark of the Wydiffite heresy, and was seen as the key to all the other errors of its adherents” (p. 94). See also Anne Hudson, “‘Laicus litteratus’: the paradox of Lollardy,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 222–36;
and Margaret Aston, “Wyclif and the Vernacular,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History Subsidia vol. 5 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 281–330. Nicholas Watson describes not only the politics of the prohibition of English scriptural translation but its wider effects on vernacular textual production in “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64.
See Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 238–47; on the debate over literal translation more generally, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
MED, s.v. “loller” n. defn. 1. In discussing any possible distinctions made between the terms “Lollard” and “Wycliffite” in medieval sources, Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 2–3, notes that the term was first used to refer to the English dissenting sect in 1382. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 36–37, traces another of the term’s etymons, the Latin “lollium,” menaing “tares” or weeds. Thomas Netter used this etymology in the Fasciculus zizaniorum to suggest that the Lollards were the metaphorical tares sown in Christ’s vineyard.
Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 125–37.
Chris Given-Wilson, “The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, ca. 1350–1450,” in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg and W.M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 85–100, esp. 94. On the social compositions
of the Lollards, see Lollards and the Gentry in Medieval England, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1996).
On this consolidation, see Given-Wilson, “Labour,” pp. 95–97, and H.G. Richardson, “Heresy and the Lay Power under Richard II,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 1–38.
A Lollard treatise on the deadly sins makes this point: “Mon in state of inno-cense schulde be kept fro ydelnes, ffor, as Gods lawe seis, he schulde have kept Paradis; and myche more in state of synne schulde mon wake in Gods servise”; see Select English Works of John Wyclif ed. Thomas Arnold, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869–71), vol. 3, p. 143. Similarly, the Lollard “Vita Sacerdotum,” a treatise advocating clerical disendowment in order to restore the church to apostolic poverty, condemns the begging of the friars: “O Lord! sith God putte mon to wirke in state of innocense, why schulde he not so nowe? Will I wot that tho Psalme seis of fendis childer, In mennis travel ben thei not, and hefore are thei proude. Also in iche lawe is ydelness forfended, and no state of monnis lif, ungroundid in resoun, schulde be taken of ony mon, for drede of tho fende, bot if hit be fully groundid in servise of God. But sith bisynes of beggynge may not be groundid in tho lawe of God, how schulde hit then grounde freris?” (Select English Works of John Wyclif, vol. 3, p. 235).
On the question of mendicancy and work in the sermon of William Taylor, see Kate Crassons, “‘The Workman is Worth his Mede’: Poverty, Labor, and Charity in the Sermon of William Taylor,” in The Middle Ages at Work, eds. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
Works of a Lollard Preacher, ed. Anne Hudson, EETS 317 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 134 ll. 2766–67. London statutes also sometimes conflated the categories of able-bodied, lay begging with mendicant begging as seen in the 1419 compilation of city memoranda known as the Liber Albus, which lists statutory references to both under the same rubric; see Liber Albus, trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1861), p. 509.
Hudson, English Wycliffite Writings, p. 135. On the context of the Disendowment Bill more generally, see Margaret Aston, “‘Cairn’s Castles:’ Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment,” in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R.B. Dobson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 46–81.
See Michael Sargent, “Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection: the London Manuscript Group Reconsidered,” Medium Aevum 52 (1983): 205–206;
and Wendy Scase, “Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s ‘Common-Profit’ Books: Aspects of Book Ownership and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century London,” Medium Aevum 61 (1992): 261–74. On Pecock’s response to this type of circulation in his Repressor of Overmuch Blaming, see Scase, p. 267.
On Richard Collop, see C. Paul Christianson, A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans, 1300–1500 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1990), pp. 91–93; Doyle, “Survey,” vol. 2, pp. 209–11; and Sargent, “Walter Hilton,” 206. Sargent quotes the addendum to the Killum common profit book: “Memorandum that this boke be deliuered to Richard Colop Parchemanere of Londonn after my discesse. And in caas he die or I, then I wol it be take to some deuowte persone to haue it vnder the forme and condicioun wrteyn in the ende of this boke heere tofore. Mordon,” and identifies ‘Mordon’ with the mid-fifteenth-century attorney and notary of the bishop of London by that name (205–206).
In this recent interest, see, for instance, Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22;
and Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63.
See Fasciculus morum, p. 559. Later Wycliffite writers also denounced merchants’ guile, as in the treatise entitled, “Three things destroy this world,” where the triumvirate are made up of the greed of false confessors, lawyers and merchants (in Matthew, English Works of Wyclif, pp. 185–86). For further images of merchant greed, see Owst, Literature and Pulpit, esp. 123–24, 182. For the changing concept of the merchant’s contribution to the public good in the earlier Middle Ages, see Lester K. Little, “Pride Goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 16–49.
The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 201–203, ll. 71–72.
The full text of Whittington’s will appears in the Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, vol. 2, ed. E.F. Jacob, Canterbury and York Society, no. 42 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. 240–44.
On its testamentary provisions, see Jean Imray, The Charity of Richard Whittington (London: Athlone Press, 1968).
See Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, “A ‘Common Profit’ Library in Fifteenth-Century England and other Books for Chaplains,” Manuscripta 28 (1984): 17–25.
On Whittington, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 301 [284–309]. For relations between merchants and the gentry more generally, see Thrupp, Merchant Class, pp. 247–56.
A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 311. See also A.E. Johnson, The History of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers of London (London, 1914), vol. 1, pp. 204–208;
and Eileen Power, “The Wool Trade in the Fifteenth Century,” in Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Eileen Power and M.M. Postan (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), pp. 39–90.
On Killum’s pardon, see CPR, Richard II, vol 4, 1388–1392, p. 384. Dorothy Jones, Minor Works of Walter Hilton (London, 1929), p. xxxiii, cites the Hustings Roll references that describe Collop as “the servant and executor of John Killum.” Killum’s property dealings also associated him with John Carpenter, the author of the Liber Albus: in 1404, “John Kyllam, citizen and grocer” is granted the rent, along with several others, including Richard Clere, citizen, of a plot of land in the parish of St. Mary Colechurch next to St. Thomas of Acre Church. In 1429, the rent on this same property was granted to John Carpenter, who in turn granted it to Robert Chichele in 1439;
see Historical Gazetteer of London Before the Great Fire, Vol 1: Cheapside, ed. Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 1987), p. 211, 105/17; p. 206, 105/17.
Doyle, “Survey,” p. 210, states that Holland died in 1436 (though the administration of the estate was not granted to Collop until 1441). Holland was sworn in on August 6, 1421 as master of the shearmen along with William Holland and John Hoo (elected an alderman in 1378); see Calendar of the Letter-Books I, 1400–1422, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: John Edward Francis, 1909), p. 254. On his brother Ralph’s career, see Thrupp, Merchant Class, p. 350;
and Caroline Barron, “Ralph Holland and the London Radicals, 1438–1444,” in The Medieval Town, 1200–1540, ed. Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser (New York: Longman, 1990), pp. 160–83.
On the tendency of craft guilds to fall into such groups, see George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 4th ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1963), esp. p. 87.
Expression of the costs of this alliance on the lower tradesmen can be found in the fifteenth-century poem known as “A Trade Policy” that discusses working conditions in the cloth industry, lamenting the underemployment and insufficient pay brought about by current trade policy; see Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 168.
The common profit books seem to be evidence of a nuclei of so-called Adventurers: in the course of the first half of the fifteenth century, separate groups who dealt in cloth export to the low countries were formed within various guilds including the Mercers, Grocers, and Skinners. These were the nascent Merchant Adventurers who, at first individually and later collectively, were to control the cloth trade. Later in the century, we find a “courte of felishippes aventerers” assembled from members of the Drapers, Grocers, Skinners and Mercers in 1489, but as early as 1468 merchant adventurers of more than one company were gathering at the Mercer’s Hall to make joint decisions. On these fifteenth century developments, see E.M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. 151–56.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 192.
Lindenbaum, “London Texts,” p. 296, remarks on the likeness of civic ordinance books to chronicle and poetic compilatio (particularly Chaucer’s works) that were undertaken at this time. On the connection between John Carpenter and the common profit books, see Scase, “Reginald Pecock,” pp. 268–69; and William Kellaway, “John Carpenter’s Liber Albus,” Guildhall Studies in London History 3 (1978): 67–84.
In “A Mumming at London,” Lydgate frames Henry V as a follower of “Magnyfysence” (or Fortitude) whose most conspicuous trait is “For comune profit also she, / Of verray magnanymyte, /Thinges gret doothe vnderfonge, / Taking enpreyses, wheeche beon stronge”; see The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1934), p. 688, U. 231–34. Lindenbaum, “London Texts,” p. 297, discusses Lydgate as a Lancastrian propogandist who actively pumped for London as a centre of virtuous mercantile activity.
The 1442 ordinances are reproduced as an appendix to Imray, Charity of Richard Whittington, p. 117. For comparison, earlier fourteenth-century guild ordinances use the phrase “almesse box” or “comone box” when they refering to the place where the material assets of the guild (in the form of members’ dues) are housed. For examples of this usage, see Caroline Barron and Laura Wright, “The London Middle English Guild Certificates of 1388–89,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 108–45. Interestingly, the construction of almshouses echoed the impetus to social order found in the labor laws: it stipulated that residents be chosen from among the truly needy and not just common beggars. It also prohibited residents from begging once in the almshouse.
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, I. 276–77. All quotations from Chaucer refer to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ed. George Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 25–26, ll. 486–503. The good of the “publique thinge” is also invoked in a chronicle exemplum describing the incomparable virtue of King Edgar who both prevented the people from being oppressed by his nobles and who kept the sea coasts around England safe for trade (p. 44–46, ll. 852–913).
See Michael A. Smith, Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition (Lewiston, NY: Meilen University Press, 1995).
See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; repr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998).
For the medieval interest in Aristotle, see Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On Renaissance neo-Platonism,
see, for instance, Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1999), and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
De regno Christi in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Pauck, Library of Christian Classics 19 (London: SCM Press, 1969); see, respectively, Book I, chap. 2, p. 183; and Book II, chap. 53, p. 346.
Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 22.
Nicholas Udall, Respublica, ed. W.W. Greg, EETS o.s. 226 (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1952), p. 16, 11. 454–56.
See, for instance, David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
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© 2006 Kellie Robertson
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Robertson, K. (2006). The Ideology of Common Profit: Rebels, Heretics, Merchants. In: The Laborer’s Two Bodies. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06784-5_4
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