york medieval press parliament and political pamphleteering in 14th-century england (2010)

spine 23mm A6 May 2010

A timely and significant book ... changing the landscape of political history and culture... a vindication of a striking argument about the ability of the medieval chattering classes to write, read, and hear pamphlets long before the arrival of printing. Persuasive and compelling. W. Mark OrMrOd, Professor of History, University of York.

Some sixty years before the advent of the printing press, the first political pamphlets about parliament circulated in the city of London. Often vitriolic and satirical, these handwritten pamphlets reported on a trilogy of parliamentary victories against the crown known as the Good, the Wonderful, and the Merciless Parliaments. The first pamphlets point to the existence of a market of readers hungry for news of parliament as well as to the emergence of public opinion as a political force. This book reconstructs the lives of the political pamphleteers as well as the political landscape of late fourteenth-century England, giving particular emphasis to the large group of bureaucrats living in London to which Geoffrey Chaucer belonged.

dr CLEMEnTinE OLivEr is associate Professor of History at California State University, northridge.

Cover: The execution of Chief Justice Robert Tresilian in 1388 by order of the Merciless Parliament. Miniature c. 1475 by Matre dAntoine de Bourgogne from a Flemish illuminated manuscript of Jean Froissarts Chronicles, MS Fr. 2645 f. 238 v (Bibliothque nationale de France).

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

BOYDELL & BREwER LtdPO Box 9, woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US)www.boydellandbrewer.com

PA R L I A M E N TA N D P O L I T I C A L

PA M P H L E T E E R I N GIN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Clementine Oliver

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YORKMEDIEVALPRESS

Parliament and

Political Pamphleteering

in Fourteenth-Century England

Some sixty years before the advent of the printing press, the first political pamphlets about parliament circulated in the city of London. Often vitriolic and satirical, these handwritten pamphlets reported on a trilogy of parliamentary victories against the crown known as the Good, the Wonderful, and the Merciless parliaments. The first pamphlets point to the existence of a market of readers hungry for news of parliament as well as to the emergence of public opinion as a political force. This book reconstructs the lives of the political pamphleteers as well as the political landscape of late fourteenth century England, giving particular emphasis to the large group of bureaucrats living in London to which Geoffrey Chaucer belonged.

Dr Clementine Oliver is Associate Professor of History at California State University.

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

York Medieval Press is published by the University of Yorks Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promo-tion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centres belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (20052010):

Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (Dept of English and Related Literature)Dr T. Ayers (Dept of History of Art)Professor P. P. A. Biller (Dept of History)Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English and Related Literature)Dr Gabriella Corona (Dept of English and Related Literature)Professor W. M. Ormrod (Chair, Dept of History)Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology)

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Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

Parliament and

Political Pamphleteering

in Fourteenth-Century England

Clementine Oliver

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Clementine Oliver 2010

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislationno part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,

published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The right of Clementine Oliver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2010

A York Medieval Press publicationin association with The Boydell Pressan imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

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and with theCentre for Medieval Studies, University of York

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Printed in Great Britain byCPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viAcknowledgments ixAbbreviations xi

1 Where Do Pamphlets Come From? 1

2 The Good Parliament and the First Political Pamphlet 29

3 The Making of a Political Pamphleteer 56

4 Reading and Writing about the Wonderful Parliament 84

5 Conspiracy Theories 117

6 From Londons Streets, 1388 142

7 The End of the Merciless Parliament 174

8 Afterword 185

Appendix: A comparison of the Historia mirabilis parliamenti and the 196Parliament Rolls

Bibliography 209Index 225

vi

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. MS Bodl. Rolls 9, first sheet. Reproduced by kind permission of 58 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

2. Detail of Gordan MS, including title. Reproduced by kind 190 permission of John Gordan III.

rhText BoxDisclaimer:Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

For my parents

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book began at Berkeley, in a history department that now lingers primarily in memory. My strongest memory is of Robert Brentano, and I am fortunate to be able to share the pleasure of his memory with Jason Glenn and Jay Rubenstein. At this Berkeley of times past I sat in on Steven Justices first (and always riveting) lectures on Chaucer, and was allowed to read Writing and Rebellion before it was in print. It is little wonder that the story I tell here takes place in the late fourteenth century.

This book is about the birth of political pamphleteering before print. But at its heart, it is really the story of several scholars taking an interest in a minor figure who wrote a minor text (which I believe has large implications) about a dramatic but ultimately overshadowed event that took place during the troubled reign of Richard II. Thomas Fovent will likely never be a household name (and the author of the account of the Good Parliament still has no name at all), but Caroline Barrons unwavering interest and generous assistance in Fovents world and work made it possible to put together the pieces of the puzzle that was his life, and perhaps help to give him a place alongside other late fourteenth century London authors. There would be no book at all about parliament and the origins of political pamphlets were it not for W. M. Ormrod. Though I had not yet made his acquaintance when I first sent him my research in rough form, he was kind enough to read it and offer sugges-tions. And he has been kind enough with his time and extensive knowledge of political life in the fourteenth century to see this project through to the end. I wish to thank my editor at York Medieval Press, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, for her kind assistance and patience with my many questions.

I wrote chapters one and two while a joint post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library. At Caltech, John Brewer gave encouragement at a critical juncture in my research, and he has remained caring to the projects conclusion. Preliminary drafts of chap-ters one and three were presented at the California Medieval History Seminar at the Huntington Library, and I am grateful to the participants for their comments. Earlier versions of chapters two and three have been published in New Medieval Literatures 6 and Viator 38, no. 1, respectively. Some of the information on Thomas Fovent included in chapters three and eight will be published in a forthcoming issue of Historical Research. I would like to thank the editors of these journals for their permission.

All of my colleagues at California State University, Northridge, offered their support, and several took the time to read and comment on chapter

xone. Merry Ovnicks generosity however goes far beyond this, for she is the benefactor of the index for this book.

Many other scholars have helped a great deal along the way. Gwilym Dodd, Matthew Giancarlo, Robert Hanning, Pamela Robinson, Christopher Whittick offered their expertise and their time. John Gordan III kindly allowed me to view and photograph his manuscript of the Historia, and further shared all of the information he could find on the manuscripts provenance. I would like to thank Andrew Galloway for making Fovents text accessible, particularly to me, in a beautifully rendered translation. I have relied on it a great deal in writing this book, as on his willingness to answer questions and exchange research via email. I also came to rely on the emails of a Carolingianist. Courtney Booker read and responded at the drop of a hat, and I am grateful for his willingness to be pulled centuries from his home, as well as for his occasional incensement.

Robert Stein suggested the possibility of including the work of Walter Benjamin in the conclusion. Rael Lewis helped with this section in particular, but he also endured the writing of this book these many years.

I am appreciative of the patience of my husband, Chase Rummonds, and the impatience of our son, Sebastian Rummonds. They have provided the very two best reasons to finish. This book is dedicated to my parents, Fggie R. Oliver and Curtis F. Oliver. Few are fortunate to have parents both of whom, in their own ways, understand the importance of the pasts role in shaping the present. This book is far more the result of their work than it is my own, and I am grateful for their continued and unconditional support.

Acknowledgments

xi

ABBREVIATIONS

CCR Calendar of Close RollsCFR Calendar of Fine RollsCPR Calendar of Patent RollsEETS Early English Text SocietyEHR English Historical ReviewKC Knightons Chronicle 13371396ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National BiographyPROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval EnglandRP Rotuli ParliamentorumSR Statutes of the RealmTNA The National Archives (Public Record Office)TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical SocietyWC The Westminster Chronicle 13811394YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies

1CHAPTER ONE

Where do Pamphlets Come From?

In the year 1641, pamphlets flew off the London presses like a flurry of snow. Some pamphlets were pro-Puritan tracts attacking the authority of the church, while others countered with satirical sermons intended by their Royalist authors to portray their adversaries as buffoons. Several used porno-graphic or scatological imagery to slander public figures. Scores of pamphlets reported on the massacres and atrocities of the Irish rebellion with a sensa-tionalist flair, telling tales of rape and murder committed by the papists in Ireland. Many more advocated for the cause of the Long Parliament against Charles Is personal rule.1 And in so doing, some brought the past to bear on the present. One pamphlet in particular recounted the ruthless proceedings of another parliament in opposition to another king centuries before. First printed as An Historical Narration of the Manner and Forme of that Memorable Parliament, which Wrought Wonders. Begun at Westminster 1386 in the Tenth Year of the Reigne of King Richard the Second, it was rapidly reprinted with a supple-mentary account of Richard IIs life and death under a slightly different title, and once more in a much abridged form in the yeare of much feare, 1643.2

1 On the sudden increase of printed pamphlets in 1641, see J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 20275; and D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000), pp. 174217. See also T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, 1991); and A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 15001700 (Oxford, 2000). Examples of pamphlets published in 1641 can be found in the collection of George Thomason; see Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, News-papers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 16401661, 2 vols. (London, 1908).

2 The first printing from 1641 is entitled An Historical Narration of the Manner and Forme of that Memorable Parliament, which Wrought Wonders. Begun at Westminster 1386 in the Tenth Yeare of the Reign of King Richard the Second, and attributes author-ship to Thomas Fannant. There survive twenty-eight copies in library archives. The second printing with a supplementary account of the life and death of Richard the Second is entitled A True Declaration of that Memorable Parliament which Wrought Wonders, and twenty-one copies survive. This version contains a reproduction of Renold Elstracks engraved portrait of Richard II, originally produced for Henry Hollands Basiliwlogia (1618). The 1643 printing is entitled A True Declaration of

Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England

2

It was an acerbic, vitriolic, and satirical text in keeping with the tastes of the day, and by all appearances it seemed to be a contemporary work as the prose made ample use of the vocabulary of seventeenth-century politics words like commonwealth, public affairs, confederates, citizens and conspira-tors are peppered throughout.

Despite the tone of its language it was not a seventeenth-century text, for its author had been dead for some 237 years. It was a ghost of parlia-ments past come to rally support for John Pym and the parliamentarians. The pamphlets title page attributes authorship to Thomas Fannant, but there was no such person the writers real name was Thomas Fovent, and he wrote his pamphlet in Latin sometime shortly after 3 June 1388. Unsurprisingly, he wrote it for much the same reason as those later pamphleteers who backed the cause of the Long Parliament, for he believed parliament was the most effective way to expose and correct the rampant corruption of Richard IIs administration.

Originally titled Historia siue narracio de modo et forma mirabilis parliamenti apud Westmonasterium anno domini millesimo CCCLXXXVJ, regni vero regis Ricardi secundi post conquestum anno decimo, Fovents pamphlet is a scathing narrative of the treason trials of 1388. These trials, better known to history as the Merciless Parliament, were the ruthless conclusion of the greatest political scandal of Richard IIs reign, culminating in a purge of the administration and the execution of eight prominent government officials, thereby setting in motion a power struggle that would result in the unravelling of the young kings rule by the centurys close. Fovents narrative begins with an account of the many acts of fraud and treachery committed by the Ricardian faction from late 1386 to late 1387, when they are formally accused of treason by a coalition of magnates known as the Appellants, the name earned by their introduction of a procedural novelty the first parliamentary appeal of trea-son.3 Next follows one of the most enthralling accounts of this or any parlia-mentary trial, for Fovent paints a dramatic picture of the proceedings as they unfold inside parliament, where the accused desperately maintain their inno-cence before a house packed with spectators. He then follows the action onto Londons streets, there watching the prisoners plead for their lives as they are dragged through the mob to the place of their execution, and reporting that the citys neighbourhoods became littered with the flesh of the condemned.

that Memorable Parliament which Wrought Wonders, and only three copies have been catalogued. All three versions are available in their entirety on Early English Books Online.

3 A. Rogers, Parliamentary Appeals of Treason in the Reign of Richard II, The American Journal of Legal History 8 (1964), 95124; J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970); and A. Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics, and Society in the Fourteenth Century (New York, 1999), 1079. For a discussion of the Appellants legal strategy, see chapter six below and the references cited therein.


3

This book is only partly about Fovents pamphlet it is far more about the nascent political sphere of late fourteenth century England.4 It considers how individuals such as Fovent navigated the political landscape, and how politics did (and did not) affect the seemingly ordinary lives of those who lived and worked in the capital city of London. It discusses why certain indi-viduals opted to participate in the rather extraordinary political debates of the day, the ambitions of and opportunities for those who were determined to eviscerate in writing corrupt government officials, as well as the audience for their political texts. While I trace the interplay between London and national politics in this period through a trilogy of parliamentary trials, all of which took place at Westminster, and the texts produced in London reporting on these trials, this book inevitably is also about the intersections between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. To phrase it another way, I suggest here that the time is now long past due for a reassessment of the established boundaries between the late medieval and early modern worlds.5

Political life after the Black Death

As in the seventeenth century, English people in the late fourteenth century experienced rapid, successive, and often violent changes to the structure of their local and extended society, and many of these changes had a profound impact on the shape of politics. The Black Death of 13489, together with successive outbreaks of the plague in the subsequent two decades, killed at least one third and perhaps as much as one half of Englands population it is nearly impossible to overstate the impact of this disease on the lives of those who survived as well as on the next several generations, though not all of the consequences were categorically negative.6 After the Black Death and

4 On the development of the political sphere in the late fourteenth century, see my discussion of the Habermasian public sphere below, p. 24.

5 Such a reevaluation is already taking place from across the traditional early modern divide, often with the intention of examining lingering medieval literary prac-tices in the age of print. See for example the essays in The Uses of Script and Print, 13001700, ed. J. Crick and A. Walsham (Cambridge, 2003); D. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 14501830 (Cambridge, 2003); and W. Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (Notre Dame, 2008).

6 The effect of the dramatic population decline after the Black Death on the economic and social structure of England has long been the subject of debate. See J. Hatcher, England in the Aftermath of the Black Death, Past & Present 144 (1994), 335; The Black Death in England, ed. W. M. Ormrod and P. Lindley (Stamford, 1996); C. Platt, King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late Medieval England (London, 1996); S. J. Payling, Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England, Economic History Review 45 (1992), 5173; and D. Aers, Justice and Wage-Labor after the Black Death: Some Perplexities for William Lang-land, in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, ed.


4

along with the dramatic decrease in population, labour became scarce, and as a consequence wages rose steadily. When the landholding classes could no longer afford to manage their vast estates directly, land became readily available for lease by tenants, many of whom were of peasant origin, and the rural economy shifted from the more traditional manorial system to a market-place characterized by wage labour. With this economic shift there emerged several newly affluent social groups as well as a more complex and certainly more flexible system of social relations. Perhaps the most striking example of this new type of flexible social arrangement was the development of the affinity, a not strictly hierarchical association of followers attached to the king or to a magnate that radically changed the way individuals participated in political society in late fourteenth century England.7 I discuss the impact of the Ricardian affinity on politics and political consciousness in chapter five.

To talk about the emergence of the political sphere in late fourteenth century England is neither an anachronism nor does it deny the importance of developments in later periods. While direct involvement in the governance of the realm and in the formulation of government policy was restricted to a privileged few, nevertheless politics mattered to a great many outside the ranks of the nobility. English people were keenly aware of the impact of this highly centralized administration on their daily lives, and they watched the governments activities with great interest.8 Many were quick to criticize the crown and the administration if either should overreach the limits of their jurisdiction or act counter to the welfare of the realm. The articulation of the governments responsibility to the polity was sharpest during moments of crisis and confrontation with the crown, such as the Good Parliament of 1376, and this and comparable expressions of dissatisfaction with the administra-tion had their roots in the Hundred Years War and the expectations built up by the spectacular military successes in the early years of Edward IIIs reign.

The Hundred Years War greatly influenced the shape of politics from its very beginning, although many of the domestic consequences were surely unforeseen by a king who succeeded in uniting the nobility as never before and propelled England onto the European stage with victories against the French at Crcy and Poitiers. It is a commonplace if not a clich to observe that

A. J. Frantzen and D. Moffat (Glasgow, 1994), pp. 16990. Also, more generally, see C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, 12001520 (Cambridge, 1998); and J. Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy 13481530 (London, 1977).

7 On the affinity in late medieval England, see C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven, 1986), p. 203; C. Carpenter, The Beauchamp Affinity: A Study of Bastard Feudalism at Work, EHR 95 (1980), 51318; P. Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge MA, 1989), p. 25; W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medi-eval England, 13001450 (New York, 1995), pp. 516; and S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity (Oxford, 1990), pp. 412.

8 Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, pp. 117.


5

Edwards wars contributed to the centralization of the state and to the forma-tion of Englands national identity. These wars cost a great deal of money that could only be raised via taxation, and with the increase of direct (and often regressive) taxes, in addition to the indirect subsidies levied on the lucrative wool trade, there came a further expansion of the administration that had been put in place in the time of Edward I. Furthermore, as these wars were fought with the claim of expanding the kings territorial rights abroad, and not in response to foreign military aggression, they required justification to the large number of men recruited into military service from the ranks of the yeomen and gentry.9 Beginning in the late 1340s, the crown boosted interest in the wars by showing them in the enchanting light of chivalric culture, most notably through the foundation of the Order of the Garter.10 Around this same time rumours began to circulate throughout the country about impending coastal attacks by French fleets and a plot to eradicate the English language. All of these factors contributed to a new discourse of national identity that involved a collective notion of the governments responsibility to the polity.

For the purposes of the present discussion, it is enough to keep in mind that Edwards wars helped to reinforce parliament as a regular, indispen-sable and central part of the machinery of government, though very soon it would be recast as a forum for exposing to the public the failings of this very same government as well as that of his successor, Richard II. By the onset of the Hundred Years War, the parliamentary Commons played a central and undisputed role in any grant of taxation to the crown. G. L. Harriss framed his landmark study of the origins of national taxation in terms of public finance and parliament, thereby emphasizing the notion of consent granted by the polity through this representative institution.11 However, parliament was much more than the body responsible for granting or withholding tax revenue, for the Commons submitted or adopted petitions on matters of public concern or pertaining to special interests from all corners of the realm. (While it is generally thought that private or singular petitions as such fell into disuse in the late fourteenth century in preference to common petitions, Gwilym Dodd has argued that this simply was not the case, particularly as

9 G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 31420; and Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, pp. 958. On the Hundred Years War and the formation of English national identity, see M. McKisack, The Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1959), pp. 14751; and M. Prestwich, Why did Englishmen Fight in the Hundred Years War? Medieval History 2:1 (1992), 5865.

10 H. E. L. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 13481461: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medi-eval England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 86106; J. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (Woodbridge, 1982), pp. 4294; M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984); and C. Oliver, The Order of the Garter and the Development of Englands Cultural Identity (unpublished paper, University of California at Berkeley, 1991).

11 Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance.


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receivers and triers for handling private petitions still were being appointed in the fifteenth century. Interestingly enough, David Zaret has looked to the practice of private petitioning in the seventeenth century for the origins of the public sphere.12) In this as in all matters of business, parliament depended on the staff of chancery clerks who were responsible for drafting the writs of summons for the convening of parliament, as well as the writs of expense for the knights and burgesses at the close of the session. These clerks received and enrolled the petitions, and forwarded them on for hearing before the king and council in the case of common petitions, or to the judges and law officers appointed as triers in the case of singular petitions. The clerk of parliament (always a chancery clerk) compiled the official record of the proceedings, drafted the statutes that resulted from the petitions, and occasionally left some trace of his own political sympathies in the composition of these (and perhaps other) records.13

By the 1340s, parliament routinely (though not exclusively) convened at Westminster, situated on the outskirts of London, three miles west from the city centre travel between the two places was typically via a short barge trip along the Thames for the fixed price of two pence. With a post-plague population of approximately 35,000 residents, London was the largest metro-politan area in the country and the centre of much of the nations commer-cial activity in the wool trade.14 While most parliamentary historians do not much emphasize locale, the city had a great influence on the character of parliamentary politics and on the political culture of the many bureaucrats and civil servants who worked in the departments of the state located at or near Westminster. As of 1339, the exchequer and the central judicial court of the common bench were a permanent fixture of Westminster, and soon there-after followed the chancery, the privy seal, the court of the kings bench, and

12 G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), pp. 15687; and D. Zaret, Petitions and the Invention of Public Opinion in the English Revolution, American Journal of Sociology 6 (1996), 1497555.

13 T. F. Tout calculates the number of the chancery staff at 120 clerks in this period (Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England: the Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seals, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1928), III, 445). See also Touts Household of the Chancery and its Disintegration, in Essays in History Presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. H. W. C. Davis (London, 1927), pp. 4685; A. F. Pollard, Evolution of Parliament (London, 1926), pp. 734; and B. Wilkinson, The Chancery under Edward III (Manchester, 1929), pp. 81, 84.

14 Population estimates for post-plague London are based on the poll tax returns of 1377. Cited in B. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London (Oxford, 1993), p. 24; also D. M. Palliser, Urban Society, in Fifteenth Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Horrox (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 13249 (p. 133). See also B. Megson, Mortality among London Citizens in the Black Death, Medieval Prosopography 19 (1998), 12533. On London in this period, see C. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 12001500 (Oxford, 2004).


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the office of works. Many other government jobs were located at the eastern edge of London, at the custom house or the Tower of London.15 Between the city walls and Westminster, in the area known as Farringdon Without, was the Temple where the lawyers took up their residence (some four hundred common lawyers practised their trade at Westminster each year), near to the households of the chancery clerks with whom they occasionally competed in sports at Ficketts field.16 By the late 1370s, this neighbourhood at the western edge of the city would also include the residence of the clerks of the privy seal located on the Strand. Within the city walls, just north of St Pauls Cathedral on Paternoster Row, were located the craftsmen who laboured in the citys early manuscript-book trade and the legal scriveners who drafted bills, deeds or wills in exchange for a fee (undoubtedly some of these scriveners moon-lighted as lawyers).17 Lastly, there were the city clerks employed at the Guild-hall, the centre of the citys government, who may have felt some kinship with the clerks who worked for the crown.18

Civil servants and the literary underground of late medieval London

Though their exact functions differed one from another just as their employers and patrons differed, this extended professional and clerical class to a man made their living by their ability to write. Some achieved enduring recognition through their writing, often of a literary sort, such as Geoffrey Chaucer (customs officer at the port of London from 1374 to 1386), Thomas Usk (onetime scrivener for a prominent London political party) and William Langland (also thought to be a scrivener), and later Thomas Hoccleve (life-

15 On the history of the office of works, see J. H. Harvey, The Medieval Office of Works, The Journal of the British Archaeological Association 6 (1941), 2087.

16 A. G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 12001540 (Oxford, 1989), p. 37; and T. F. Tout, The Beginnings of a Modern Capital: London and Westminster in the Fourteenth Century, Proceedings of the British Academy 11 (London, 1923), p. 20.

17 N. Ramsay, Scriveners and Notaries as Legal Intermediaries in Later Medieval England, in Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. J. Kermode (Gloucester, 1991), pp. 11831; C. P. Christianson, Evidence for the Study of Londons Late Medieval Manuscript-Book Trade, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 13751475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 87108; C. P. Christianson, A Community of Book Artisans in Chaucers London, Viator 20 (1989), 20718; and K. Kerby-Fulton and S. Justice, Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 13801427, New Medieval Literatures 1 (1998), 5983 (p. 66).

18 R. Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949), p. 32; C. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London, 1974); and Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 17398.


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long clerk of the privy seal).19 Other members of this bureaucratic class made up a significant part of the audience for these authors, though perhaps only informally they were not the wealthy individuals who in the early fifteenth century commissioned costly manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales or Gowers Confessio amantis, but the earliest listeners who gathered to hear recitations of Chaucers Troilus, and the initial readers of the many revisions of Langlands Piers Plowman.20 More anonymous than the members of a coterie or a circle because of their number (already in this period there were 120 clerks and lesser personnel employed in the chancery alone), all the members of this audience of civil servants and bureaucrats could hardly know one another by face, though perhaps they could be linked by fewer than six degrees of separation.21 While they were not consumers in the strict sense of the word, for they did not have the income needed to acquire the finished manuscripts, they were nevertheless the informal literary market of late medieval England. They lived, learned and worked near one another, they frequented the same taverns along King Street in Westminster, they were granted first access to the writing of their fellow civil servants, and they understood the legalese and the inside jokes in Langlands work as well as the allusions to the chancery in the anonymous Richard the Redeless.22 They were subject to the daily turbu-lence of city life and city politics, but their jobs kept them sharply focused on

19 K. Kerby-Fulton, Langland and the Bibliographic Ego, in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. S. Justice and K. Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 11317; T. F. Tout, The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester 3 (1917), 185214; and T. F. Tout, Literature and Learning in the English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century, Speculum 4 (1929), 36589.

20 On book manuscripts and their owners, see D. Pearsall, Introduction, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 13751475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), p. 7; and M. Richardson, The Earliest Known Owners of Canter-bury Tales MSS and Chaucers Secondary Audience, Chaucer Review 25 (1990), 1732. On public readings of Chaucers work, see J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996), chapter 6. On Langlands audience, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, Langlandian Reading Circles, 5983; and A. Middleton, The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. D. Lawton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 10123.

21 In Langlandian Reading Circles, p. 78, Kerby-Fulton and Justice refer to Lang-lands audience as a coterie, though they suggest that this group was geographi-cally defined but too large for face-to-face intimacy . In Langland and the Bibliographic Ego, pp. 11617, Kerby-Fulton conversely describes Langlands audi-ence as very small indeed and suggests that the members of this circle were likely to be acquainted.

22 On Westminster taverns, see Rosser, Medieval Westminster, pp. 1235. On the educa-tion of chancery clerks, see Tout, The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century; Richardson, The Earliest Known Owners of Canterbury Tales MSS and Chaucers Secondary Audience, pp. 1821; and Kerby-Fulton and Justice, Lang-landian Reading Circles, p. 66.


9

events at the national level.23 While these civil servants have been established as an enthusiastic audience for vernacular literature, there can be little doubt that they were just as eager to read the more ephemeral accounts of parlia-mentary politics.

To emphasize the importance of the bureaucrats and civil servants who worked in the central administration and watched the political events of the day unfold around them has the unintended consequence of making late medi-eval government at the centre seem clean and sanitized, and almost woefully modern, unless of course one reads Hoccleves complaints about life at the privy seal, and then it seems all too woefully human.24 Nevertheless it is little wonder that at the turn of the twentieth century, constitutional historians, among the foremost of whom was William Stubbs, proposed that the central importance of parliament in the English government was the outcome of the progressive development of the institution during the medieval period and beyond.25 T. F. Touts definitive study of the history of the medieval adminis-tration gave focus to the Stubbsian constitutionalist narrative by his detailed examination of the everyday workings of the household offices, the chancery, exchequer and privy seal, and their role in the political developments and crises of the period.26 Tout proposed specifically that the great departments of state located at Westminster were responsible for instituting both baronial and constitutional limits on the crown and the household.

Beginning about the mid-twentieth century, however, K. B. McFarlane and his students abandoned entirely the older Stubbsian view in favour of an examination of how politics worked at the level of the nobility, the most powerful members of medieval society. The result was a preoccupation with what McFarlane described as bastard feudalism the personal contractual relationship between a lord and his followers that specified paid service, as

23 P. Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 319; D. Pearsall, Langlands London, in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. S. Justice and K. Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 185207; and C. Barron, William Langland: A London Poet, in Chaucers England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. B. A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 91109.

24 Hoccleve, La male regle, in Hoccleves Works: The Minor Poems, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS ES 61 (Oxford, 1892); E. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, 2001); and M. Richardson, Hoccleve in his Social Context, Chaucer Review 4 (1986), 31322. On the lives of clerks in the privy seal, see A. L. Brown, The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century, in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Story (Oxford, 1971), pp. 26081.

25 W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols. (Oxford, 18871891). For a thoughtful commentary on Stubbss work, see R. Bren-tano, The Sound of Stubbs, Journal of British Studies 6:2 (1967), 114.

26 Tout, Chapters.


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opposed to the traditional tenurial bond.27 McFarlane repeatedly called atten-tion to the use and influence of political power at the very top of the social hierarchy to build the networks of indentured retainers indispensable to warfare, local rule and estate management. The work of McFarlanes students subsequently dimmed the spotlight on the history of the representative insti-tution and de-emphasized the role played by the Commons in national poli-tics in favour of an inquiry into how politics operated in the localities where the landholders held their bases of power. The flight of inquiry from West-minster and the surrounding city of London to the countryside dismissed the importance of parliament and the great influence of urban social and intel-lectual networks on the broader (and enduring) political culture.28

While it would be a fools errand to resurrect the older Whiggish interpre-tation of parliaments history as the steady march of progress, there remain important and revealing connections between late medieval and early modern parliaments, and it would be equally foolish to ignore them. These connec-tions do not lie in the development of the institution per se, but in the shared imagination of the institutions potential and in the way that later generations reused the articulation of this potential to make the case for parliaments authority. This shared imagination necessarily revolves around some of parliaments most exceptional moments, such as the spectacular but fleeting and ultimately failed attempts to place a check on the cronyism habitually practised by the crown in its collusion with the London merchant capitalists in the later Middle Ages. From this perspective, it is not nearly as important that in 1376 the Commons in parliament triumphed over the crown as it is that someone wrote about it, for here is the kindling to fuel the imagination that burned brightly during the 1380s, and to re-ignite it again in the 1640s.

27 The term was coined by Charles Plummer in 1885, but rehabilitated by McFar-lane in the 1940s. For a summary of the historiographical debate regarding Bastard Feudalism, see M. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995).

28 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford, 1973); and K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London, 1981). The study of lordship and patronage in the later Middle Ages has undergone considerable revision in recent decades. See C. Richmond, After McFarlane, History 68 (1983), 4660; R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard, The McFarlane Legacy (New York, 1995); and R. Horrox, Service, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Horrox (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 6178. For a critical assessment of McFarlanes influence, see E. Powell, After After McFarlane: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. D. J. Clayton, R. G. Davies and P. McNiven (London, 1994), pp. 116.


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Reformist dreams and the Modus tenendi parliamentum

One of the best examples of a parliamentary text that captured the imagi-nation of reformers in both the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries is the Modus tenendi parliamentum.29 Much like the anonymous account of the Good Parliament of 1376 contained in the Anonimalle Chronicle, after decades of scrutiny the Modus still puzzles scholars. It is a daringly reformist treatise that outlines parliamentary procedure along an egalitarian scheme and provides that the acts and records of the institution should be made accessible to the public. It has no official credibility as a manual or handbook, and neither the authorship nor the exact date of Modus are known for certain. It may have been composed in the early part of the fourteenth century around the time of Edward IIs deposition, or in the later fourteenth century around the time of the Good Parliament.30 In striking parallel with the Anonimalle account of the Good Parliament, scholars concur that it is likely the work of a chancery clerk. Yet as the Modus contains only an idealized description of parliamen-tary procedure, and not an accurate one, it remains difficult to determine why it was written in the first place or whether it was actually intended for use in the pursuit of parliamentary reform.

Most recently Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, building on the work of Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor, have argued that the Modus was a strategic text to be consulted in moments of crisis or conflict such as the parliaments of 1376, 1386 and 1388.31 (Whether or not the Modus was actually composed in the later fourteenth century, as Kerby-Fulton and Justice argue, is somewhat beside the point, for the manuscript evidence demonstrates that it was circulated and read at this time.) Kerby-Fulton and Justice empha-

29 For the text and translation of the Modus tenendi parliamentum, see Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. N. Pronay and J. Taylor (Oxford, 1980).

30 On the difficult question of dating the Modus and the origins of the text, consult the citations in n. 32 below.

31 K. Kerby-Fulton and S. Justice, Reformist Intellectual Culture in the English and Irish Civil Service: The Modus tenendi parliamentum and its Literary Relations, Traditio 53 (1998), 149203; and Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Pronay and Taylor. See also W. C. Weber, The Purpose of the English Modus tenendi parliamentum, Parliamentary History 17 (1998), 14977; J. Taylor, The Manuscripts of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum , EHR 83 (1968), 67388; N. Pronay and J. Taylor, The Use of the Modus tenendi parliamentum in the Middle Ages, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 47 (1974), 1123; G. O. Sayles, Modus tenendi parlia-mentum: Irish or English? in England and Ireland in the Later Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin, 1981), pp. 12252; V. H. Galbraith, The Modus tenendi parliamentum, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 16 (1953), 8199; J. S. Roskell, A Consideration of Certain Aspects and Problems of the English Modus tenendi parliamentum, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 50 (1968), 41142; and M. V. Clarke, Medieval Representation and Consent (London, 1936).


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size precisely those clauses of the text that most clearly articulate consti-tutional principles, such as chapter thirteen, where the line of reasoning is put forth that the king is obligated to attend parliament, but that his refusal to do so should have no effect on the validity of the assemblys proceed-ings.32 They suggest that these principles might be invoked in the case of a stalemate between the crown and parliament, and they take into account the ownership of the Modus by key players in parliamentary crises, such as Thomas Mowbray. Mowbray was one of the junior Appellants involved in the Merciless Parliament, and there is strong evidence to suggest that the Appellants consulted the Modus when they composed the famous statement regarding the superiority of the law of parliament over all other laws, for their argument bears a striking resemblance to chapter fifteen in the Modus, which states that no English justice has the authority to judge in parliament unless he is explicitly directed to do so by the king together with the peers of the realm.33 Similarly, they endorse G. H. Martins analysis that the duke of Gloucester and Bishop Arundel cited the Modus during the course of the Wonderful Parliament in an attempt to force Richard IIs attendance.34 Kerby-Fulton and Justice furthermore argue the probability that the Appellants were introduced to the Modus by Geoffrey Martin, a prominent chancery clerk noted by Thomas Fovent for his role in the Merciless Parliament. Thus these scholars see the Modus as an integral part, if not a product, of a community of civil servants interested in promoting parliaments authority. They make a convincing case for tying the Modus to the political interests of this particular milieu, and I would only add that, as with Fovents Historia on the eve of the English Revolution, late sixteenth and early seventeenth century parliamen-tarians such as Sir Edward Coke found the Modus compelling because it did such a very good job of historicizing their claims of an ancient constitution which challenged the encroaching sovereignty of the crown, so compelling in fact that it was published under parliaments authority in 1641.35

32 For the text of Chapter XIII of the Modus along with an English translation, see Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Pronay and Taylor, pp. 72, 85.

33 Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Pronay and Taylor, pp. 73, 86. On the statement regarding the superiority of the law of parliament, see below, chapter two, p. 46, n. 45.

34 H. Knighton, Knightons Chronicle, 13371396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1995), pp. 3567, nn. 1, 2.

35 C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958); Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Pronay and Taylor, pp. 519.


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Good, Wonderful and Merciless

But it was not the articulation of reformist ideals alone that captured the hearts and minds of writers and readers in the later fourteenth century, for the Good, the Wonderful and the Merciless parliaments were three acts in a political drama that gripped contemporaries because it threatened to topple those opportunists who had climbed to power primarily by their wealth and on the backs of the third estate, and who made no shortage of enemies in the process. Beginning in 1376, parliament put some of the most notorious public figures of the period on trial, individuals infamous for their influence, their capital and their close relationship with the crown. These men were either merchant capitalists themselves or agents who fostered ties between the government and Londons mercantile elite, often to the exclusion of the nobility and at the expense of the Commons. The commercial world played by its own set of rules, and these rules were designed to maximize the profits enjoyed by the privileged few who controlled the lucrative wool and wine trades.36 The revenue generated by these merchant capitalists proved irresist-ible to the crown, and both Edward III and Richard II did all they could to ensure their continued access to the money, promoting the interests of this group over the traditional concerns of the nobility and without regard for the principles of sound fiscal policy.

The Good, the Wonderful and the Merciless parliaments exposed the avariciousness of the commercial world for all to see and threatened state-sanctioned violence as a final recourse against corrupt officials who believed that somehow they would not be held accountable for their actions. It was the very spectacle of corruption put on view that captured the imagination of those writers who recorded the events of these three parliaments, and as a consequence their reports encouraged the perception of parliament as the institution best capable of guarding against government malfeasance through regulation and oversight. The criticisms of the government voiced in these accounts fall outside the inherited historical framework which views all oppo-sition to the crown as either Lancastrian or baronial. They point instead to a reform movement located in Westminster itself to the army of bureaucrats, civil servants and government functionaries who looked to parliament as the centre of their world and whose experience of the political demimonde of

36 S. L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval England (Ann Arbor, 1948); P. Night-ingale, Capitalists, Crafts, and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth-Century London, Past & Present 124 (1989), 335; P. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community (New Haven, 1995); Bird, Turbulent London; E. M. Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, Englands Export Trade, 12751547 (Oxford, 1963); T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1977); and W. M. Ormrod, Finance and Trade under Richard II, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. A. Goodman and J. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999).


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London fuelled their hostility towards Londons powerful merchant oligar-chy.37 Believing that parliament was the only means to restore good govern-ment to England, Thomas Fovent was one of several conspicuous voices advocating reform and decrying corruption. This voice in turn encouraged seventeenth-century parliamentarians to contextualize their case against Charles I in order to show that it was the king himself who was outside the law because of his suppression of this representative institution, and so they unearthed the relics of their own reformist legacy. The republication of these first parliamentary reports bridges one of the great divides between these two worlds the world before print, and the world after a distinction that has assisted in obscuring for us the objectives of these writers in a way that it did not for seventeenth-century parliamentarians.

Bills and broadsides, pamphlets and poems

Already by the last quarter of the fourteenth century, London seemed to Langland a chaotic and relentlessly commercial environment where greed ruled and where one always had to be on guard against hucksters and cheats. Purveyors of all sorts routinely indulged in petty fraud brewers watered down their ale, victuallers used false weights, drapers stretched cloth for sale to customers, and moneylenders loaned counterfeit or clipped coins to their borrowers.38 But money was not the only thing exchanged between denizens of the city, for information was also available on the level of the street itself or in comparably social spaces such as taverns.39 Much of this information was oral, some was symbolic, but as scholars recently have demonstrated, a surprising amount of it was offered in writing. Most of this writing was in English, in the form of bills, libels and schedules posted on the doors of St Pauls or Westminster, in the letters written to the rebels of 1381 under the pseudonyms of Jack Miller, Jack Carter and Jack Trewman, and in the numerous Lollard tracts circulated during the heresy trials of Wyclifs most prominent followers in 1382 (not to mention official government statutes and ordinances which were proclaimed by the sheriff and subsequently posted in a public place for all to see).40 The examples grow ever more numerous by the

37 See below in chapter three, p. 80, n. 61.38 William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, 1994),

6.21545; Barron, William Langland, a London Poet, pp. 967; and Pearsall, Lang-lands London, pp. 18797.

39 Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 10.40 For a discussion of bills, libels and schedules, see W. Scase, Strange and Wonderful

Bills: Bill-Casting and Political Discourse in Late Medieval England, New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998), 22547 (p. 237). On the broadside campaign supporting Wyclifs followers, see S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), p.


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late fifteenth century when both Yorkist and Lancastrian supporters waged a war of negative publicity against one another through leafleting campaigns, the most notorious instance involving five severed dogs heads left on Fleet Street, each of their mouths holding a bill of complaint against the duke of York.41

Of course evidence for the dissemination of such short texts comes to us merely by chance they were never intended to last forever, and we know about them only because they were expressly prohibited by law and occa-sionally copied by chroniclers into longer histories.42 That we know about them at all should correct a longstanding misperception about the commu-nicative practices of late medieval dissidents, reformers and inquiring city dwellers alike. We typically do not think of the city before print as making great use of ephemeral texts, but such ephemera were an effective way to reach an urban audience. Just one copy could be circulated among a loose-knit group of likeminded civil servants, political sympathizers or religious nonconformists scattered across the square mile of the city. And a satirical or out-and-out spiteful broadside posted on the gates of the city or the doors of a church would surely catch the attention of readers who passed by.43

29. On Lollard texts, see A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988).

41 In Bales Chronicle, as printed in Flenley, Six Town Chronicles, p. 144; cited in V. G. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), pp. 256 and Scase Strange and Wonderful Bills , p. 236. For the text of the poem The Five Dogs of London (1465), see R. H. Robbins, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), pp. 18990.

42 Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century, p. 30; Scase, Strange and Wonderful Bills ; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 29; and R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London, 1952), pp. 198202. On the prohibition of libels, see W. Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 12721553 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1334, 143.

43 In Merchant Class of Medieval London, Sylvia Thrupp estimates the rate of English literacy at a remarkable 50 per cent in this period (pp. 1558). The consensus among scholars is somewhat more conservative, though medievalists generally make the case for a high rate of literacy during this period. See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 10661307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993); N. Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London, 1973); J. W. Adamson, The Extent of Literacy in England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Notes and Conjectures, The Library 4th s. 10 (1929), 16393; M. B. Parkes, The Literacy of the Laity, in The Medieval World, ed. D. Daiches and A. Thorlby (London, 1973), pp. 55577; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 1366; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 2808; M. Aston, Lollardy and Literacy, in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 193217; Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 180208; and J. A. Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling 13401588: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, 1985). Early modernists tend to offer conservative estimates of literacy through the sixteenth century see in particular D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tutor and


16

However, conceiving of any discrete and handwritten text specifically as a pamphlet (and not just as a bill or tract) is problematic if for no other reason than it is hard to reconcile pamphleteering with the technological limitations of the late fourteenth century publishing trade. Until very recently, it was thought that there survived only one manuscript of Fovents Historia, MS Bodleian 9, acquired by the Bodleian Library about 1607.44 While its unan-notated appearance indicates that it was unlikely to be the original manu-script (hinting that there must have existed at least one other autograph copy if not other copies), one manuscript alone fails to conjure the image of a text intended for widespread dissemination, no matter how short it may be. However, as I will discuss at the books end, the probability of the Histo-rias circulation now seems somewhat greater with the recent discovery of an unknown manuscript dating from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and found in the private collection of John Gordan III in Manhattan, New York.45

Nevertheless one might wonder about the size of the audience for a work composed in Latin the Historia would have a more limited readership than something written in English, such as the letters written to the rebels of 1381, or even Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde. Here it is important to note that Fovent too belonged to the world of bureaucrats, civil servants and government functionaries who lived and worked in London (as I shall demonstrate in chapter three). This was not just his world, but his audience for the Historia, and such men were trilingual, and could certainly read Latin. (For example, John Gower wrote in all three languages, Latin, French and English.) In the late fourteenth century, English would have been an odd choice for writing an account of the events of 1388. English was the language of rebels, Lollards and poets. Anglo-Norman was for keeping government records such as the parliament rolls, and might well have been a tempting linguistic choice for writing about parliament indeed this is the language of the account of the Good Parliament contained in the Anonimalle Chronicle. Latin however was still the predominant language for recording history, and this was certainly one of Fovents intentions.46 His readers would have understood his choice of

Stuart England (Cambridge, 2006). Fox however describes early modern England as a literate culture in Oral and Literate Culture in England, pp. 1150.

44 See also F. Madan and H. H. E. Craster, Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 7 vols. (Oxford, 18951953), II, pt 1, p. 557 where the manuscript is listed as Bodleian Miscellaneous MSS 2963, though it is the same manuscript.

45 On the identification and provenance of this manuscript, see C. Oliver, New Light on the Life and Manuscripts of a Political Pamphleteer: Thomas Fovent, Historical Research 83: 219 (2010), 608.

46 Of course there are many important exceptions to this linguistic division, such as the chronicles written in Anglo-Norman in this period (including the Anoni-malle Chronicle). As Given-Wilson explains: Most of the chronicles of this period were written in Latin, although a substantial (and growing) minority were written


17

language, and this perhaps makes the Historia a learned or insider text of sorts (as is also true of many texts written in English in this period). But as I have already suggested, these civil servants formed an important part of the broad literary market of late medieval London, particularly when it came to parliamentary politics. As Gwilym Dodd observes, they too were the primary audience for poems about parliament written in English and composed in the early fifteenth century, such as Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger and the poems in the Digby 102 manuscript.47

In one sense, the case for calling the Historia a pamphlet is based on its republication some 250 years later as a pamphlet the Historia was on the cutting edge of a movement that spanned the centuries. But in another sense, the Historia itself makes the case for its status as a pamphlet, and not just by its brief format. The text itself is not addressed to a patron or to a circle of friends, but to readers wishing to avoid adversities, scandals and the dangers and burning torments of death, a warning to all those who believed they were exempt from obeying the ordinances and statutes enacted by parlia-ment.48 It was, like many later printed pamphlets, both topical and some-what scurrilous. Furthermore there is some indication that Thomas Fovents readership may well have been familiar with the genre, for when Usk wrote the Testament of Love (13851387), he thought to describe his work as a leud pamflet, though here Usk elected to swathe his politics in a thin veil of florid

in the vernacular. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this usually meant Anglo-Norman (the informal written language of the upper classes), but by the mid-fifteenth century it almost invariably meant Middle English. C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004), pp. xiv, 13752. See also W. M. Ormrod, The Use of English: Language, Law and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, Speculum 78:3 (2003), 75087. See also the French of England Project website: www.fordham.edu/frenchofengland/.

47 G. Dodd, Changing Perspectives: Parliament, Poetry and the Civil Service under Richard II and Henry IV, Parliamentary History 25:3 (2006), 299322.

48 The first two sentences of the Historia are as follows: Ex quo more diurnitates longeue a labili humanorum memoria presencia fataliter absorbeant, de quibusdam dudum fortuniis in Anglia de miro motis posteribus scripto redigere instans me racio monet, licet pueriliter, aggrediar in processu. Nec meminisse pigeat talia memorie committere que quisquis si diligens perlector animaduerterit speculum in parte habere poterit aduersitates et scandala, mortisque pericula et torrida cruci-acula facilius euitandi. He soon gets to the heart of the matter: Tandem quid, inquit, accidit? Predicti inprouidi consiliarii cum ceteris eorum commilitonibus propter predicta parliamenti patefacta et ordinata iracundie facibus inflammantur. Thomas Favent, Historia siue narracio de modo et forma mirabilis parliamenti apud West-monasterium anno domini millesimo CCCLXXXVJ, regni vero regis Ricardi secundi post conquestum anno decimo, per Thomam Favent clericum indictat. Edited from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, in Camden Miscellany 14, ed. M. McKisack (London, 1926), pp. 12.


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art-prose.49 Anne Middleton has made the case that Usk wrote the Testament first and foremost for an audience of clerks or textworkers, those who, like Usk himself, were highly literate and who were employed by the government or by select private parties as record keepers or to write up documents.50 As I shall discuss in greater detail, such textworkers were writers and readers of pamphlets and alliterative poetry alike.

Interestingly, Joel Fredell argues that many of the first pamphlets in Middle English were in fact poems, though by Caxtons time the term pamphlet will come to be the standard name for a small book.51 The word pamphlet comes from a popular twelfth-century Latin poem entitled Pamphilus, seu de amore, which tells the love story of Pamphilus and Galatea. The poem was familiarly referred to by a diminutive form of the name of the protago-nist, Pamphi-let, perhaps because of its small size. Pamphilet thus became a generic term for a short book or a work of modest size, and it is used this way as early as 1344 in Richard de Burys Philobiblon. However, Fredell raises the enchanting possibility that the designation pamphlet carried traces of its amatory origins into the later fourteenth century, and was associated with the circulation of love lyrics and other secular poems, not altogether unlike Orlandos bills suspended from trees in As You Like It. Fredell observes that the term pamphlet is broadly used in Middle English not only do we find it in Usks Testament of Love (where the word seems to retain its amorous connotations), but also in the early fifteenth century poem Mum and the Soth-segger (1370: Yit is there a paire of pamphilettz of prelatz of the royaulme/ Yn the bottume of the bagge), in Hoccleves Balade to the Duke of York (49: Go, little pamfilet, and straight thee dresse) and Regement of Princes (2060: ough

49 For Usks use of leud pamflet, see The Testament of Love, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1897), VII, bk 3, ch. 9, ln. 54, as cited as the second entry in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. pamphlet. Strohms description of the Testament of Love as florid art-prose is in Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s, in Literary Practice and Social Change, ed. L. Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 83112 (p. 98). For a more complete view of Usks politics as a writer, see P. Strohm, Hochons Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 14560; M. Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford, 2007), pp. 93126.

50 A. Middleton, Thomas Usks Perdurable Letters: The Testament of Love from Script to Print, Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998), 63116 (pp. 689).

51 For what follows, see J. Fredell, Go litel quaier: Lydgates Pamphlet Poetry, The Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2006), 5173. In this article and in notes 312, Fredell contrasts pamphlets with the better-known booklets of the period as discussed by P. Robinson, The Booklet: A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts, Codicologica 3 (1980), 4669; R. Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stanford, 1996), pp. 2134; and J. Boffey and J. Thompson, Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts, in Book-Production and Publishing in Britain, 13751475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 279315.


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at is pamflit/ Non ordre holde I can do no bet), and in Lydgates Churl and Bird, where the poet uses the term pamphlet and little quire interchange-ably. Like Fovents Historia, some of these poems still survive as discrete works in their original pamphlet form, such as Mum, as well as poems with distinctly Lollard themes such as Jack Upland, and Friar Daws Reply found with Uplands Rejoinder written in the margins.52 Fredell further suggests that the responses to Piers Plowman Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, the Plowmans Tale and Richard the Redeless first circulated as pamphlets, as did Richard Maidstones Concordia, a souvenir programme commemorating Richard IIs reconciliation with London. And while the idea remains controversial, perhaps Chaucer envisioned the Canterbury Tales as a series of pamphlets come together in an edited collection, for several of the tales appear in isola-tion throughout the fifteenth century.53

However while these various kinds of ephemeral writing bear some rela-tionship to one another, Fovents pamphlet was not an alliterative poem, or a letter meant to foment a rebellion, or an anonymous bill posted at West-minster ridiculing Archbishop Neville of York, or a statement of Lollard theology advocating the disendowment of the church.54 His pamphlet was about parliament. By 1641 pamphlets about parliament were everywhere. But before 1376, no parliament had attracted such widespread interest or had been written about with such urgency. These writings were issued in the hope of building on the relatively new role played by this institution in redressing the escalating corruption of highly placed officials and hangers-on with close ties to the crown. Some accounts were the work of chroniclers so captivated with the novelty of the proceedings that they (or their rubricators) named the parliaments according to their outcome, one de parliamento facto Londoniis quod bonum pluribus vocabatur (the parliament held at London which is called good by many), and another parliamentum sine misericordia (the Merciless Parliament), filling the leaves of their histories with impassioned narratives of the trials and transcriptions of the official parliamentary records side by side.55 But a few reports of the trials were written as discrete texts by design pamphlets that endorsed the proceedings as the only means to

52 The single manuscript of Mum is British Library, MS Additional 41666, fols. 1a19b; Jack Upland is British Library, MS Harley 6641 (fifteenth century); Friar Daws Reply and Uplands Rejoinder exist only in Bodleian Library, MS Digby 41. See Fredell, Go litel quaier , p. 55, nn. 21, 23, 24.

53 On this controversial point Fredell cites D. Silva, Some Fifteenth-Century Manu-scripts of the Canterbury Tales, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland and L. A. Duchemin (London, 1974), pp. 15363.

54 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 83.55 T. Walsingham, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham,

volume 1, 13761394, ed. and trans. J. Taylor, W. Childs and L. Watkiss, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 2003), p. 2; and KC, p. 414. Fovents pamphlet however


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restore good government, no matter how vigorously the accused maintained their innocence or how desperately the condemned pleaded for their lives. The institution itself seemed to invite this sort of impassioned response not only by its newfound power to expose the governments backroom deals to the public, but by the release of the official records of the proceedings by the very clerks who kept them.56 These records are themselves discrete texts, and both the official and unofficial reports often seem in dialogue with one another, each one informing and influencing the next. Surely this is because civil servants for whom parliament was the centre of their world wrote them both.

Parliament and the man in the street

Much of the inspiration for this book comes from T. F. Touts 1926 article, The English Parliament and Public Opinion, 13761388.57 Tout isolates these twelve years as a vital period in the history of the institution precisely because they are bounded by the Good and Merciless parliaments at either end. In his view, these two parliaments make up the most significant chal-lenges to the crowns autocratic tendencies before the advent of the Lancas-trian dynasty. Though the successes were fleeting in the immediate context of both Edwards and Richards reigns, they expounded precedents relied on by future generations of parliamentarians and at the same time proved instru-mental in establishing a permanent place for the institution in the governance of the realm. If nothing else, the lack of pity showed by parliament in 1388 in the execution of Richards closest confidant and mentor, Sir Simon Burley, knight of the garter, effectively demonstrated that the king could no longer afford to disregard the law of parliament. It was a painful lesson, but one not lost on Richard, for in the very next parliament he strove to win over the Commons in the hopes of currying favour against his adversaries.

However it is not simply as chapters in the history of the English consti-tution that Tout emphasizes the importance of the Good, the Wonderful and the Merciless parliaments. It is because 1376 marked the first occasion when chroniclers recorded the proceedings at length, signifying that parliament was at last the centre of the publics attention as Tout himself phrased it,

seems to be the origin of the name Mirabilis parliamenti or Wonderful Parliament. On this see below, chapter four, p. 87, n. 11.

56 On the accessibility of official government records, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, Modus tenendi parliamentum, pp. 1545, and Langlandian Reading Circles, p. 79.

57 T. F. Tout, The English Parliament and Public Opinion, 137688, in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, ed. E. B. Fryde and E. Miller (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 299317 (pp. 31112).


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Parliament was beginning to interest the man in the street.58 Indeed the very names these writers attached to these three parliaments attest to their newsworthiness, for the designations Good, Wonderful and Merciless likely were common currency among the chattering classes before they were written in ink. This certainly seems to have been the case in 1376, for Wals-ingham specifically describes this parliament as that which is called good by many, suggesting the appellation Good was already in widespread use at the time.59 Thus for these twelve years parliament was news, the trials capturing the interest of the public as never before and compelling chroniclers (but not chroniclers alone) to break their longstanding silence and report on the proceedings for their readers. Tout regards Fovents Historia as one of the most important tracts written about parliament from this period, remarking that it paints in turgid colour scenes that are hard to imagine from the cold records.60 He views such reports as evidence that parliament and public opinion were closely aligned in this period, believing that the true strength of the institution depended upon its ability to tap into the widespread indigna-tion at the collusion and misconduct perpetrated by government officials. He proposes that without the support of public opinion parliament was power-less, riddled by factionalism and therefore subject to easy manipulation by the crown.61

The many publics and the imagined community of late fourteenth century England

In all of Touts work, the phrase public opinion denotes the shared or popular response of the public to the government scandals of Edwards and Richards reigns.62 Here then it is important to consider the nature of the public of late fourteenth century England. When Tout uses the word public, it seems to include as its base those with at least some degree of economic

58 Tout, Parliament and Public Opinion, p. 301.59 Walsingham, St Albans Chronicle, 13761394, p. 2.60 Tout, Parliament and Public Opinion, p. 322.61 For a different interpretation of the origins of public opinion in fourteenth-century

England, see J. R. Maddicott, The County Community and the Making of Public Opinion in Fourteenth-Century England, TRHS 5th s. 28 (1977), 2743 (p. 42).

62 D. McCulloch and E. D. Jones offer a traditionalist assessment of the rise of popular and public opinion in Lancastrian Politics, the French War, and the Rise of the Popular Element, Speculum 58 (1983), 95138. See also I. M. W. Harvey, Was there Popular Politics in Fifteenth-Century England? in The McFarlane Legacy, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (New York, 1995), pp. 15575; and C. Ross, Rumour, Propaganda and Popular Opinion during the Wars of the Roses, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, ed. R. A. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), pp. 1532.


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standing in their community, perhaps yeomen, who presumably have some ability to read. At its broadest, he means it to refer to the middle strata of society. However in the course of a book-length discussion about the expres-sion and circulation of ideas about parliament in post-Black Death England, it is necessary to be more specific than this. Parliamentary politics was of central importance to several different groups mentioned in this book the population of civil servants and government functionaries who lived and worked in London; the London mercantile community; the urban crowds. These are the publics of the political pamphlets studied here they are the groups to which the authors of these texts either belonged or which they addressed (civil servants and government functionaries), opposed (merchant capitalists), and observed in the course of their daily lives (urban crowds). To this list of publics one might add both the county communities and the lower clergy who were becoming politically active in this period, though neither of these groups is particularly visible in the London-centred texts and docu-ments examined in this book. All of these groups had a stake in parliamen-tary politics and participated in political action and discourse in the space of the city (even if only as an audience for the trials and executions of 1388). All had different and often conflicting agendas. But all imagined themselves belonging to the community or public of late medieval England, in part because the available political language of the day made it possible to do so.

The articulation of a common or public interest is prevalent in political documents and texts of the later fourteenth century, and community has long been a preoccupation of political historians who discuss the theory and practice of representation and consent in this period, especially as it relates to taxation.63 The idea of the community of the realm had become much more inclusive over the course of the later Middle Ages in 1311 when the Ordinances restraining Edward IIs rule were passed, the community of the realm still meant the barons alone, but within a short time this was no longer the case.64 The claim to speak on behalf of the whole community was made both by those with a great deal of political power and by those who wished to resist this power, such as the rebels of 1381 who declared themselves the trew communes.65 It is also found in Anglo-Norman political poems such as

63 Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, pp. 126; Ormrod, Political Life in Medi-eval England, p. 33; M. Prestwich, Parliament and Community, in English Politics in the Thirteenth Century, ed. M. Prestwich (New York, 1990), pp. 12945, and his Parliament and the Community of the Realm in Fourteenth-Century England, in Parliament and Community: Papers Read before the Irish Conference of Historians, Dublin, 2730, May 1981, ed. A. Cosgrove and J. I. McGuire (Belfast, 1983), pp. 524.

64 J. Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 1521.

65 The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), p. 139. On this point see Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 1723. On the idea of common profit, see also K. Robertson, The Laborers Two Bodies: Labor and the Work of the


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Against the Kings Taxes (dating from about 1340), where the king is advised not to go to war unless the community of his realm consent to it.66 This asser-tion of commonalty often relied on something akin to smoke and mirrors, or as Emily Steiner describes it, the blurring of the particular to convey a larger agency, a peculiar tendency to designate and obscure.67 Importantly for the association between parliament and the public, commonalty was specifically linked to the representative function of parliament, and we find it asserted in parliamentary texts like the Modus, which states that the Commons speaks for the whole community of England and not the magnates because each of these is at parliament for his own individual person, and for no one else.68 Commonalty is heard in Peter de la Mares famous assertion that he would not speak before the lords in parliament until all of his colleagues who had been shut out were present.69

Nevertheless the assertion made by a particular group in parliament, or even by the parliamentary Commons as a whole, to speak for the commu-nity of the realm was understood to be a political fiction of sorts.70 This was because the parliamentary Commons itself was not a homogeneous group it was made up of various constituencies, such as the knights of the shire, who represented the interests of the landowning gentry, as well as burgesses and citizens from towns who often acted in the interests of the mercantile commu-nity. Furthermore, some historians argue that members of the Commons

Text in Medieval Britain, 13501500 (New York, 2006), pp. 78118. On the idea of complaint and clamour in this period, see Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, pp. 54110.

66 Anglo-Norman Political Songs, Anglo-Norman Texts XI (Oxford, 1953), pp. 10515. Discussed in Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 18. On the dating of the poem, see C. Revard, Scribe and Provenance and J. Scattergood, Authority and Resistance: The Political Verse, both in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. S. Fein (Kalamazoo, 2000), pp. 21110, 163201.

67 E. Steiner, Commonalty and Literary Form in the 1370s and 1380s, New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003), 199221. See also A. Middleton, The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II, Speculum 53 (1978), 94114 (p. 112); M. Giancarlo, Piers Plowman, Parliament, and the Public Voice, in YLS 17 (2003), 13574; J. Watts The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics, The Fifteenth Century 4: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 15980, and most recently his Public or Plebs: The Changing Meaning of The Commons, 13811549, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007), pp. 24260; and M. Nolan, Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005).

68 Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Pronay and Taylor, p. 90. W. M. Ormrod shows that the Commons made important steps in this direction in the 1320s and accordingly dates the Modus to these years. See Ormrods Agenda for Legislation, 1322c.1340, EHR 105 (1990), 133.

69 Anonimalle, pp. 834; discussed in chapter two below.70 Middleton, The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II.


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often acted as mouthpieces for the lords, and so their agenda was not always their own.71 Various factional interests threatened to undermine parliaments potential to act as a check on the crown. Accordingly the reformist agenda was often cast in terms of the intertwinedness of parliament and the public good, and this union was reinforced by other discursive sites, such as those parliamentary reports that both shaped and gave voice to public opinion.

The Habermasian public sphere

However our understanding of public opinion has changed from the one employed by Touts generation, primarily because of the impact of the theo-rist Jrgen Habermass The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere on the study of political society. Habermas offers a very different definition of public opinion, one that is circumscribed by socio-economic class, print technology and historical epoch, and one that has very little to do with the public per se it is the critical-rational debate between private individuals about the nature of political governance. As Habermas himself makes clear, public opinion is not concomitant with an outraged or informed public. Instead, it is the opinion of private individuals expressed publicly. Additionally, the develop-ment of public opinion depends upon the emergence of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, which he describes as the sphere of private people come together as a public.72 Thus the public sphere often seems more of an abstract concept than a cluster of identifiable physical spaces. It is the realm where the critical-rational debate takes place among bourgeois citizens that mediates between the authority of the state and society.

Of course the great frustration expressed by the countless scholars wishing to apply this theory to their own fields of study is the classification of the public sphere as an exclusively bourgeois development of the modern period. Nevertheless it is useful to reconsider the Habermasian model of public opinion in the context of a discussion of late fourteenth century pamphlet-eering, for in many ways it accurately describes

york medieval press parliament and political pamphleteering in 14th-century england (2010)

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