Abstract
The commonest way of describing the structure of society in medieval literature was to divide it into three ‘estates’ or social groupings: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. In the words of the Dominican preacher John Bromyard:
God has ordained three classes of men, namely labourers such as husbandmen and craftsmen to support the whole body of the Church after the manner of feet, knights to defend it in the fashion of hands, clergy to rule and lead it after the manner of eyes. And all the aforesaid who maintain their own status are of the family of God.1
Women, if a writer deigned to consider them at all, were grouped by themselves as a fourth estate, determined by gender rather than social status, and usually positioned last in any list.2 Writers, themselves most commonly male and members of the clergy, like Bromyard, treated this structure as though it were a God-given necessity, a moral dictum rather than a sociological observation. Chaucer’s Parson, despite the fact that he is part of a work that elsewhere questions this approach, agrees with Bromyard: ‘God ordeyned that som folk sholde be moore heigh in estaat and in degree, and som folk moore lough, and that everich sholde be served in his estaat and in his degree’ (x.770). Sovereignty, according to the Parson, was ordained to force human beings to follow this command, since without degree ‘the commune profit myghte nat han be kept, ne pees and rest in erthe’ (772).
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Notes
Cited by G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) p. 554.
Devlin ed., Sermon 44; trans. J. Krochalis and E. Peters, World of Piers Plowman (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975) p. 116.
See Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London [1300–1500] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) p. 239.
See Michael Powicke, Military Obligation in Medieval England: A Study in Liberty and Duty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 173.
R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, 2nd edn. (Gloucester and Wolfeboro, NH: Alan Sutton, 1989) p. 82.
See Thrupp, The Merchant Class, pp. 275–7; T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920–33) vol. III, pp. 479–81; and
Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Quarrel of Richard II with London 1392–7’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London: Athlone Press, 1971) pp. 173–201.
Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 72–3. The gap between Chaucer’s and Langland’s conceptions of the ploughman can be illustrated with reference to John Ball’s letters, which used the name of Piers Plowman for political ends, in an attempt to incite rebellion — see R. B. Dobson (ed.), The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 379–83.
Chaucer’s Ploughman could never have been perceived as a political figure. For different views on the set of meanings associated with the figure of the ploughman before and during the fourteenth century see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) pp. 549ff;
Morton W. Bloomfield (Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961) pp. 106–7;
Pamela Gradon, ‘Langland and the Ideology of Dissent’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 66 (1980) pp. 179–205, esp. pp. 198–9; and
Elizabeth D. Kirk, ‘Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, vol. 2 (1988) pp. 1–21.
Trans. R. P. Miller (ed.), Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 138.
See V. J. Scattergood, ‘Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee’, in Court and Poet, ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981) pp. 287–96 and
G. Stillwell, ‘The Political Meaning of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee’, Speculum, vol. 19 (1944) pp. 433–44, both of whom speculate about a possible link between the tale and Richard’s peace initiatives.
The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Norman Davis, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 24.
Accounts of the Beguine movement may be found in Fiona Bowie (ed.), Beguine Spirituality: An Anthology (London: SPCK, 1989) and
R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) pp. 319–31.
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS, OS, 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) p. 38.
See, for example, G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, pp. 388–9; D. W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962) pp. 317–31;
Robert P. Miller, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale and Mediaeval Exempla’, ELH, vol. 32 (1965) pp. 442–56. Since then it has become a critical commonplace.
Quoted by Anne Hudson, ‘Old Author, New Work: The Sermons of Ms Longleat 4’, Medium Aevum, vol. 53 (1984) p. 232.
See, for example, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, ES, 77, 83, 92 (1899–1904) vol. I, p. 184, 11. 7029–36.
J. A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre (eds), A Book of Middle English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p. 216.
See further Ralph Hanna III, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage’, Speculum, vol. 64 (1989) pp. 878–916.
The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington, 2 vols, RS, 19 (1860) vol. I, p. 123.
V. H. H. Green (Bishop Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945] p. 87) believes that the Repressor was probably written c. 1449, but not published until five or six years later.
Pecock was himself tried for heresy in 1457, and a contemporary, Thomas Gascoigne, believed that he was singled out for prosecution at least partly because he chose to write in English (Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. James E. Thorold Rogers [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881] p. 160).
Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 9 vols (London, 1810–24) vol. II, pp. 126–7;
cited by Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and Literacy’, in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984) p. 198.
See, for example, Alcuin Blamires, ‘The Wife of Bath and Lollardy’, Medium Aevum, vol. 58 (1989) pp. 225–39.
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© 1993 Janette Dillon
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Dillon, J. (1993). Four Estates. In: Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers in their Time. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22713-6_3
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