Introduction

Abstract

In Dives and Pauper, a Middle English moral treatise written between 1405 and 1410, the figure of Dives inquires, while discussing the First Commandment: ‘Why are there no martyrs these days, as there used to be?’ Pauper, his partner in dialogue, assures his friend that ‘We have these days all too many martyrs in this land’. When Dives still fails to understand, Pauper further explains:

For the more martyrs the more murder, the more manslaughter and the more shedding of the blood of innocents…the English nation has now made many martyrs, they [the English] spare neither their own king nor their own bishops, no dignity, no rank, no status, no degree.¹