Abstract
Using T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “auditory imagination” as a frame, this chapter examines three interconnected treatments of song and chant to show how authors across time have explored the capacity of the voice to facilitate both social cohesion and mob mentality. The so-called rebel letters associated with the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 highlight how embodied textual engagement was a key aspect of lay literacy in late-medieval England—one that the rebels employed as part of their efforts to build resistance to established power structures. William Langland’s treatment of song in the Prologue to Piers Plowman is more ambivalent, warning that an embodied experience of language can overtake conscious thought even as he suggests that such engagement is a crucial means to make sense of his own poetry. Finally, in his utopian novella, A Dream of John Ball, the late nineteenth-century scholar and craftsman William Morris, who was familiar with both the rebel letters and Piers Plowman, found an idealized understanding of the communal elements of song was well-suited to his socialist ideology.
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- 1.
John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David Carlson, trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2011) at l. 681, 709–12. Further quotation of Gower’s Vox Clamantis will be cited parenthetically from this edition by line number.
- 2.
T.S. Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1961) 111. Eliot’s articulation of the auditory imagination, in my view, anticipates the thinking of later poststructuralist scholars interested in destabilizing the conceptual element of language by attending to the visceral and material qualities of the voice. See, for example, Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 179–89.
- 3.
William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA, 1995) 2–3.
- 4.
Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1968), 170; emphasis added.
- 5.
CT, I. 3367. All quotations of Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987); all subsequent quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text from this edition.
- 6.
See OED, s.v. “chant” (v.) and “chant” (n.).
- 7.
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA, 1994), especially pp. 13–66 at 29. See also Clementine Oliver, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2010), especially 1–29. Justice’s influential study builds a larger argument about the influence of lay forms of literacy in the rebellion around an extended interpretation of the texts and historical and literary contexts of the Rebel Letters. Oliver’s focus is primarily on the pamphlets circulated among Thomas Fovent and other minor bureaucrats of the period, which renounced the corruption of high-ranking officials and called for reform. She links this impulse with the peasant broadsides at 14.
- 8.
In many ways, recent work in ethnomusicology has begun to model facets of this approach by highlighting the uses of popular song in contemporary political contexts, such as pre-revolutionary Iran and Haiti. See, for example, Farzaneh Hemmasi, “Intimating Dissent: Popular Song, Poetry, and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran” Ethnomusicology 57.1 Winter, 2013, 57–87. See also Gage Averill, A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Pretty: Popular Music and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 1997).
- 9.
For many years, the pre-eminent view espoused by scholars like Steven Justice was that Piers Plowman B influenced the rebels. More recently, scholars have suggested that it was the A-text that influenced the revolt, while the B-text responded to it. In his monograph, The Lost History of Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner supports this later view, highlighting how manuscript evidence suggests wide circulation of the A-text and minimal circulation of the B-text’s earliest attestations before 1395. See Lawrence Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman (Philadelphia, 2010). For other readings that make the case for the influence of the A-text on the Peasant’s Revolt see Anne Hudson, “Piers Plowman and the Peasant’s Revolt: A Problem Revisited” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994) 85–106. See also David C. Fowler “Star Gazing: Piers Plowman and the Peasant’s Revolt” Review 18 (1996): 1–30.
- 10.
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA, 1994). For more on the significance of the media of the Rebel Letters as well as their connection to Piers Plowman, see Emily Steiner Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, UK, 2003) 143–90, especially 171–77.
- 11.
Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 29.
- 12.
Justice , Writing and Rebellion, 25; emphasis original. Justice is building on the influential work of Marshall McLuhan, who first proposed that “the medium is the message” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, first published in 1964. For a more recent scholarly edition see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
- 13.
Richard Firth Green, “John Ball’s Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature” in Chaucer’s England ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, MN, 1992), 176–200.
- 14.
Justice reproduces each of the letters in the opening to Writing and Rebellion, 13–15, with this letter at 14.
- 15.
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996) 2. Since Huizinga, other medieval scholars have worked to excavate the social and religious significance of bells in medieval culture. See, for example, John H. Arnold and Elizabeth Goodson, “Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells,” Viator 43 no. 1 (2012) 99–130.
- 16.
For more on the evidence linking these lines to the Wife of Bath, see Joseph Dane, “The Wife of Bath’s Shipman’s Tale and the Invention of Chaucerian Fabliaux” The Modern Language Review 99.2 (April, 2004) 287–300. For a fuller discussion of the history of editorial assignments of tales, see Benson, Riverside, 5. The Wife’s destruction of Jankin’s “book of wicked wives” offers a suggestive point of resonance with the rebels’ destruction of documents. For more on this connection, see Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381” in Chaucer’s England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, MN, 1992) 201–21.
- 17.
Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 13.
- 18.
Ibid., 14–15.
- 19.
Anne Hudson, “Piers Plowman and the Peasant’s Revolt: A Problem Revisited” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8: 85–106 at 87.
- 20.
For more on the chronicler’s treatments of the rebels’ voices as noise see Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 205–208 and Adin Lears, “Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016) 165–200 at 184.
- 21.
William Langland, A Norton Critical Edition: William Langland Piers Plowman, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York, 2006). B. Prol. 146. All citations from the B-text will be included parenthetically in-text from this edition.
- 22.
The link between John of Gaunt and the “cat of court” began with Bernard Huppé, “The date of the B text of Piers Plowman” Studies in Philology 38 (1941) 34–44. See also Andrew Galloway, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman v. 1 of 4. (Philadelphia, 2006), 137. For more on John of Gaunt’s reputation in late-medieval England, see Andrew Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to ‘Kyndnesse’” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994) 365–83.
- 23.
MED s.v. “renable” (adj.) and “renabli” (adv.)
- 24.
Beast fables narrating a similarly moralized account of “belling of the cat” appear in several sources prior to Langland. In each version the lesson remains relatively consistent: plans are easy but execution difficult. The fable highlights the dangers of empty sound when it foregrounds a gap between words and deeds in the political sphere. Aside from Bozon, other versions of the fable appear in a mid-thirteenth-century Latin collection by Odo of Cheriton, in a speech by Bishop Thomas Brinton to the Good Parliament of 1376, and in a sermon by the Dominican friar Johannes Bromyard, likely given in the 1380s. For more on these sources and analogues see Galloway, Penn Commentary, 133.
- 25.
Nicolas Bozon, Les contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, frère mineur (Paris, 1889), 144–45.
- 26.
Because of ambiguities around the dates of these poems, it is difficult to pin down the order of these references, though current opinion suggests that if there was a line of influence between the two authors, it was Langland who influenced Chaucer with this allusion. A rough chronology of Langland’s revisions to Piers Plowman—which Ralph Hanna calls “at best, a gross statement”—can be established based on the poem’s allusions to contemporary events. This chronology dates the B-text between 1377 and 1381 and C is around 1388. Chaucer’s Boethian ballades—including “Fortune”—are very tentatively dated between 1380 and 1387. For the dating of Piers Plowman, see Ralph Hanna, “The Versions and Revisions of Piers Plowman” in Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 33–49, 38. For chronologies of Chaucer’s work see Riverside, xxv.
- 27.
Riverside, “Fortune,” ll. 5–8.
- 28.
The earliest musical representation of street songs occurs in thirteenth-century French motets in praise of Paris, while their peak in the English musical tradition is arguably in Thomas Weelkes’ choral composition “Cries of London” (c. 1600). See Galloway, Penn Commentary, 145.
- 29.
Ibid., 26.
- 30.
See MED “sweien” (v. 1) and (v. 2)
- 31.
See, for example, Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008) and Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007).
- 32.
Morris also demonstrates what David Matthews has called the “civic Middle Ages,” a stance that marshaled a romantic reverence for the vitality of the Middle Ages into a revolutionary impulse toward social change. For more on these and other taxonomies of medievalism see David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge, 2015), 13–41. This chapter discusses the “romantic Middle Ages” at 24–35 and the “civic Middle Ages” at 27–29.
- 33.
For a catalogue of Morris’s extensive library, see Peterson, William S. and Sylvia Holton Peterson, “Langland—Piers the Plowman (1886)” williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com. https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/%C2%B6-langland-piers-the-plowman-1886/ (accessed August 14, 2018)
- 34.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974). See also Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia, 2007).
- 35.
Elizabeth Emery, “Le Berceau de la litérature française: Medieval Literature as Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century France” in Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, and Laurie Postlewate, eds. Telling the Story in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz (Woodbridge, 2015) 219–35.
- 36.
For a fuller treatment of nineteenth-century romantic philology see Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1992). For more on Morris’s relationship to romantic philology, see Will Abberley, “‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris” Journal of Victorian Culture (December, 2012) 397–412, especially 402–3.
- 37.
Anthony Brundage, ‘Green, John Richard (1837–1883)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11391, accessed 5 Dec 2016]
- 38.
J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (New York, 1892) v. 1, 124.
- 39.
Ibid., 123.
- 40.
Green, Short History, v. 2, 257.
- 41.
Ibid., 265
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the early days of the socialist movement: being reminiscences on Morris’ work as a propagandist, and observations on his character (New York, 1921) 40.
- 44.
William Morris, Chants for Socialists (London: Socialist League Office, 1885).
- 45.
William Morris, “A Dream of John Ball” in Three Works by William Morris: News from Nowhere, The Pilgrims of Hope, and A Dream of John Ball (New York, 1986), 35–113 at 40, emphasis original.
- 46.
Ibid., 44.
- 47.
Ibid., 45.
- 48.
Ibid., 45.
- 49.
Ibid., 46.
- 50.
Ibid., 47.
- 51.
Ibid., 48
- 52.
William Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, v. 3 of 4, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton, 1987–96) 252.
- 53.
Michelle Weinroth, “Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball” Victorian Studies 53 no. 1 (2010), 37–53.
- 54.
T. S. Eliot. “The Waste Land” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York, 2006) ll. 279–91.
- 55.
Augustine, Confessions, v. 1 of 2 trans. William Watts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912).
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Lears, A.E. (2019). On Bells and Rebellion: The Auditory Imagination and Social Reform, Medieval and Modern. 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_4
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