Middle English Literature

particular events. Because meaning was not given but produced, it followed
that different kinds of meaning could be ascribed to the same events. Thus,
in order for one meaning to be regularly produced, it had to win a kind
of credibility, legitimacy or taken-for-grantedness for itself. That involved mar-
ginalizing, down-grading or de-legitimating alternative constructions. Indeed,
there were certain kinds of explanation which, given the power of and credibility
required by the preferred range of meanings, were literally unthinkable and
unsayable.
So questions might include:
First, how did a dominant discourse warrant itself as the account, and sustain
a limit, ban or proscription over alternative or competing definitions? Second,
how did the institutions which were responsible for describing and explaining
events of the world . . . succeed in maintaining a preferred or delimited range

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Introduction
xxxiii
of meanings in the dominant systems of communication? How was the active
work of privileging or giving preference accomplished?
2
Literary historians are well-suited to analyzing what might be characterized
as the rhetorical aspects of historical writings and even images, the conven-
tions, modes, and strategies writers and artists employ in representing events
and why they might employ these devices. Such skills are also essential in
examining what are essentially and invariably interpretations of historical
events and cultural features in order to consider the diversity, “credibility,”
and “marginalizing” power of their representations.
3
The final service the book is intended to provide is simply to make the
documents, many of them key acts, laws, statements, and observations,
available to readers. It is remarkable how difficult it remains for the student
to put his or her hands on printed versions of texts such as the 1349
Ordinance of Laborers or Archbishop Arundel’s anti-Wycliffite and anti-
vernacular 1409 Constitutions, documents now frequently referred to even
in the most condensed introduction to literary texts and historical periods.
This situation continues to demand not only some fairly advanced research
skills to track down and make sense of the documents, but also a compre-
hensive library collection with aggressive collecting begun at least in the
nineteenth century. Readers will therefore perhaps find several of the docu-
ments familiar and now more readily available, while others will be new, but
all will resonate with the literature in interesting and (hopefully) currently
unimagined ways.
A very brief overview of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historical writ-
ings, cultural texts, and art works should give some orientation to these
materials. Historical writing during the period may be classified into two
major types, the universal chronicle and the contemporary, local history.
4
The universal chronicle, more so than the other histories, expressly sought
to encourage the reader to comprehend God’s divine purpose and to learn,
from examples from the past, how the virtuous are rewarded and the evil
punished. More (what we might consider today) encyclopedic than histor-
ical in scope, universal chronicles usually begin with Creation and continue
in linear chronological sequence up until the present, which points towards
Judgment. They discuss many countries, rulers, and kinds of events, and the
sources for these histories are usually documentary in form, frequently other
earlier chroniclers. Developing alongside this more traditional type of uni-
versal history were records of contemporary and local events. These are new
forms of historical writing in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.
The intentions behind these focused histories tend to be more diverse:

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Introduction
almost in legal fashion to record events for future use, to provide news of
current circumstances and incidents, and more explicitly to entertain. Rather
than geographically and temporally large in scope, these histories treat
only royal and other political happenings or provincially specific events the
writer has observed or learned from during his lifetime (and from what we
know, the writers were exclusively male). Sources are first-hand observation,
local documents, and word-of-mouth. Although historical accuracy was not
of principal concern to the universal or more localized chronicle writers,
they both valued reliable and authoritative sources; they are willing to dis-
pute claims, and overall they astutely judge sources that vary in their facts or
interpretations of circumstances. An overarching change in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries concerns the authors of both kinds of histories, who
are overwhelmingly clerical at the start of the period but gradually change
from religious clerics to secular clerics and finally to educated laymen as the
decades progress. Correspondingly, chronicles come to be written not only
in Latin and Anglo-Norman French, but also in English, along with increas-
ing numbers of translations into the vernacular.
The diverse cultural documents of the period – the legal texts, religious
discussions, and observations about the social and natural world – also seek
to edify. They form a continuum from more explicitly purposeful and di-
dactic texts at one end to descriptive and analytical reports at the other. The
more purposeful documents may have the force of statutes, ordinances, or
other laws, or are merely warnings or advice, but in this period a law could
be more an expression of a wish that something be done rather than being
enforced, while a less institutional articulation of a desire that people act in
a certain manner may express already popular codes of thinking and behavior.
The other cultural texts, which are more descriptive than overtly pedago-
gical, predominantly employ different rhetorical modes. They seek to engage
their audiences with animated depictions of the contemporary world, mak-
ing diverse phenomena immediate and relevant to their readers. Religious
writers are responsible for the majority of both kinds of cultural text, but
again throughout the centuries we increasingly hear the voices of the nobles
or gentry and the new middle class, people such as the wealthy landowners
the Pastons or William Caxton, whose first employment was apprenticing
for the merchant guild in London.
The images may be classed under both kinds of documentary form, his-
torical and cultural. Surviving art works from the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries include panel and wall paintings, stained glass, embroideries, and
illuminations, as well as more everyday objects. While medieval art works
are often described in the context of specifically art-historical developments,

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xxxv
it is not so strange that all but one of the images included here is or was
originally part of a book. Even the exception, the Wilton Diptych, is a
hinged art work, made to be packed up and carried along with a royal
household, which is more than can be said for the colossal Vernon manu-
script. Medieval art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, so often
associated with books, offers a unique opportunity for another form of
interdisciplinary work and with it, another set of issues. For instance, as
Michael Camille has shown most forcefully, the literary historian needs to
resist the tendency to see marginal borders and images as merely decorative
or illustrative.
5
Art works can work alone or in combination with texts to,
in Stuart Hall’s words, “legitimate” the “social construction of meaning,”
certainly to develop it. What was Lord Lovell memorializing when he com-
missioned the particular image we see in the lectionary, an unusual donor
image which accompanies a traditional collection of readings? What kinds of
ideas is Richard II projecting in the Wilton Diptych? What impression of
Chaucer’s works do the various artists as well as scribes involved in pro-
ducing his books have? How are these interpretations of Chaucer’s works
similar to and different from other contemporary responses such as Thomas
Hoccleve’s?
During this period, in areas and centers such as East Anglia, the Mid-
lands, Essex, and London around St. Paul’s Cathedral (which becomes
dominant), as well as in households (administered by men and women),
skilled lay workers made the majority of illuminated luxury books. At least
two different craftspeople – writers and limners – worked in two distinct
stages. A scribe might buy the parchment, rule the page layout, and copy
the text. This “writer” or “stationer” might then pass the book on to the
limner, who would then outline or sketch images in graphite, then gild,
paint, and finally edge the figures and the jagged borders of gold leaf. In
this illumination stage, this “lightening” of pages, the limner employed
colored ink line drawing, painting with dark and bright colors, and the
pressing on and burnishing of gold leaf. Unlike less lavish books, illuminated
texts were luxury items and therefore, as with much poetry produced for
England’s courts and wealthy landowners, such cultural products need to be
considered in light of their restricted audiences. Lay owners of illuminated
manuscripts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries far outnumbered reli-
gious buyers. Such books were kept within the owner’s manor, household,
college, or chapel, to remain out in some suitable place for looking at and
reading. In terms of changes throughout the period, Lucy Sandler notes
that of the 158 surviving illuminated books she examined that were pro-
duced between 1285 and 1385, none was in English, whereas in Kathleen

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Introduction
Scott’s very useful study of the following century, 1390–1490, these figures
are very different. Of 140 surviving illuminated books from the later period,
11 are in French, 88 in Latin, and 54 in English.
6
The documents in this collection are grouped together into six thematic
chapters (seven including the images), as the table of contents makes clear.
Although the chapters overlap in important ways, they represent perhaps a
more preferable form of organizing the selections than “hap or fortune,” or
simple chronological order, especially because the texts are roughly contem-
porary with each other. I chose these six categories because they seem to
correspond to six general current topics in literary criticism on Chaucer and
Middle English literature. Where a selection seems to the reader to belong
in another place, I simply beg for the understanding that I too considered
where to put it. The one outstanding example is the literature of the revolt,
which I choose to include in Labor and Capital rather than Force and
Order because it corresponds more closely to other selections in that cat-
egory than texts elsewhere, an indication of its principally economic causes.
Each individual selection’s descriptive title is designed to help direct readers
to desired subject matter. Cross-references throughout the volume, plus
the index, should also assist in finding requisite texts. On page viii and
following I have provided a list that suggestively keys selected literary
works to the documents contained within this anthology, based on critical
discussions of the literary works and with the understanding that other
possibilities for literary-historical analysis exist. On page xvi I have also
included a chronology of historical and literary events side by side to en-
courage thinking about the moments texts were composed or circulated.
Within each chapter, concise introductions to the selections place them,
where possible, in historical, authorial, and manuscript contexts. These intro-
ductions also provide brief select bibliographies of other related medieval
works and the most helpful and important secondary studies, which are
oriented more towards historical studies than literary ones, again to help the
student of Middle English literature who might be less familiar with the
historical material. Anyone wishing to pursue further study should keep in
mind that the introductions and notes to the editions of the texts are often
the best places to start. At the risk of redundancy, some bibliographical
works are listed in more than one introduction because they contain ma-
terial that seems especially valuable to more than one topic. I have included
the manuscript or book date (where known) of each selection also to en-
courage the reader to consider the period of a text’s circulation. English
dialects are noted also in order to indicate each document’s geographic area
of origin. I have provided a glossary at the back of the book for commonly

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xxxvii
occurring words. Glossarial notes within the texts provide the meaning for
the first occurrence of less common words. The select bibliography at the
back of the book will also help direct the student of medieval English
literature. The appendix of currency and measures explains the medieval
systems and their terminologies, and provides metric conversions. It also
includes (despite the care with which they must be treated) tables of sample
incomes and prices from the period.
The idea for this collection has evolved out of my own and many others’
experiences teaching Chaucer and late-medieval English literature, where
instructors have wanted to couple each of the literary selections with one or
more primary historical documents. While readers may immediately think of
Robert Miller’s Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, Miller’s book, like the
more comprehensive Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
and other collections of “sources,” is almost entirely literary in focus, con-
taining what medieval readers understood as fables and “worldy enditynges,”
stories and poems that Chaucer drew on directly for his writings. More
strictly historical anthologies of primary documents that exist invariably
cover a wide range of periods and primarily continental items, and they are
designed as general introductions to medieval history. Still others are out of
print or too unwieldy despite the extremely useful role they play in making
frequently out-of-the-way selections available to a wider public, the English