Tag: Middle English

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Richard II’s P.R. Disaster: Depictions and Characterizations of the King

King Richard II would not be considered a widely popular king. Coming to power in 1377 when he was ten years old, advised by councils though influenced most notably by his uncle John of Gaunt with whom he later had a falling out, the king’s power and ability to rule remained suspect throughout his reign. What power he did wield was often put to the test by such events as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the threat of plague, and political upheaval, all of which led to frequent characterizations as a boy hampered by his youth and unfit to rule effectively.[1] Medieval depictions and illustrations of the king demonstrate how many people after his reign may have seen him: young, naïve, unmanly, and stupid. And after Richard II was eventually deposed in 1399 when he was 32 years old, a certain amount of relish and schadenfreude seeped into illustrated post facto portrayals of the king.

A quick survey of these depictions reflects the king’s public image as it was held after his deposition. Images of a young Richard II characterized him in keeping with the knowledge of the coming debacles that England was to experience during his reign.

Historiated initial ‘R’ with Richard II, combined with a full foliate bar border, at the beginning of his statutes; England, c. 1436; BL, Harley 5233, f. 141r

Seen here, the king peers over his own statutes with droopy, disinterested eyes, perhaps with a hint of uncertainty. A large forehead, exaggerated ears, a sallow face, and a weak chin each underlines the not-so-subtle caveat to these statutes: take them with a grain of salt, and proceed with caution.

Detail of a miniature of King Richard II of England banishing the Earl Marshall and the Earl of Derby; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Bruges, c. 1470-1472; BL, Harley 4380, f. 148r

The second image portrays the young king banishing two earls, and we observe his features – a round face, slight frame, dull eyes – set against the prominent features of the earls, seen here to have more pronounced jawlines and chins. Though the eyes of the court are fixed on the king, the faces register blank expressions; the scribes, on the other hand, look dreadfully miserable.

Such characterizations carry over to scenes of the king in action as well.

Detail of a miniature of Richard II knighting Henry of Monmouth in Ireland; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 5r

As Richard knights Henry of Monmouth of Ireland, the king’s regal attire and armor dwarf his frame, his protruding lips frown, and though the new knight leans respectfully over his horse, the horse itself glares obstinately at Richard’s horse, who has adopted a pose of weakness or subservience with eyes closed and knee bowed.

Miniature of Richard II giving instruction to the earl Marshal and another man, with a partial border; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, the Netherlands, last quarter of the 15th century; BL, Royal 14 D VI, f. 303r

We see the king’s slight frame again when he instructs an earl and another man, two figures who side with one another, one firmly clutching a staff between them and the king, and the other with hands raised in a possible protest or confrontation.

The next three images depict Richard II in disguise and captivity, his power wrenched away from him.

Detail of a miniature of Richard II at Conway, disguised in a priest’s cowl; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 19v
Miniature of Richard II being delivered to the citizens of London; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 53v
Detail of a miniature of Richard II being placed in the Tower of London; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Bruges, c. 1470 – 1472; BL, Harley 4380, f. 181v

In each scene here, the king’s head is hanging low, bowed down and resigned to the fate that had befallen him. Though every illustration in this post date after Richard II’s deposition, these last three portrayals of the king carry a hint of gravitas to color these images. Although the king’s poor reputation held a long legacy, the images of his fall from the throne perhaps indicate that, regardless of his disastrous reign, public opinion of what befell him took into account his misfortune with at least a small amount of empathy–not as a king but as another mere mortal, subject to the same bad strokes of chance or fate as those he ruled, incompetence and all.

[1] Christopher Fletcher. Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377-99. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 2.

Jacob Schepers
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

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Walking at Night: Scribal Variants, Poverty, and Prostitution in a Piers Plowman Manuscript

In one of the most moving additions to the C-text of Piers Plowman, Langland highlights the plight of impoverished mothers, who are some of the most vulnerable and underrepresented figures of his society:

And hemsulue also soffre muche hunger
And wo in wynter-tymes and wakynge on nyhtes
To rise to the reule to rokke the cradel,
Bothe to carde and to kembe, to cloute and to wasche. [1] (77-80)

Mary of Egypt
Saint Mary of Egypt, a reformed prostitute saint, is depicted outside the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris. Photo credit © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

Though these lines form only a part of Langland’s snapshot of working-class women, they poignantly convey the life of a working mother as she sacrifices her own well-being to feed her children, obeys the regulation of an infant’s nocturnal feeding schedule, and takes in domestic labour to make ends meet.

The passage excerpted above has been passed down through the Pearsall edition of the C-Text, but a little digging into the scribal variants across different manuscripts opens up a realm of possibilities for additional layers of meaning that could be added to the text. The scribe of the Cambridge University Library Dd. 3. 13 manuscript invokes a particularly intriguing possibility when he writes that these women were not “wakynge on nyhtes,” but “walkynge on nyhtes.”

‘Walking at night’ was associated with all sorts of immorality in medieval England, summed up in Chester Mystery Cycle when Jesus declares that “whosoever walketh abowte in night, hee tresspasseth all agaynst the right.”[2] Night-walking is specifically associated with sexual immorality by the Wife of Bath when she excuses her own desire to walk at night by saying that she is doing so to see the “wenches”[3] that her husband sleeps with (III l.397-398). Religious and secular legal discourses indicate that there was little distinction made in medieval England between women of “loose morals” and those who were involved in prostitution.[4]

In the Cambridge manuscript, then, there is a possibility that at least one scribe allowed for a moving portrayal of women forced by economic necessity into prostitution, even if he retain associations of immorality. Canon law made no allowances for such a thing, as the church viewed extreme poverty as a condition that led a woman into a life of prostitution, but not a mitigating factor.[5] On the level of the particular scribe, however, the addition of a single letter pushes us to consider the possibility that at least some readers could understand shades of complexity in a practice that is otherwise condemned, even by Langland himself.

When it comes to a poem with such a complex and enigmatic textual tradition as Piers Plowman, each manuscript bears an important witness to the text. Each scribal variant might get us a little closer to an authorial reading, but it also might give us insight into the ways the text could be misread or misunderstood by scribes and readers. Even if the reading in the manuscript bears little or no resemblance to Langland’s poetry, it may be the product of a scribe “elucidating the sense and significance in a text according to the priorities of their own period and culture.”[6] Even when a misreading is simply an error on the scribe’s part, it provides an example of how some medieval readers might have encountered and interpreted the text in ways that complement or contradict the authorial sense of a passage.

Leanne MacDonald
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

References:

[1] William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008)

[2] “The Glovers Playe” from The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 244.

[3] From The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987). Ruth Mazo Karras argues that though Alysoun is not a prostitute per se, she uses language of commerce to talk about her sexuality and the practicalities of marriage. See Karras, “Sex, Money, and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 202.

[4] Karras, “Sex, Money, and Prostitution,” 211.

[5] James Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 836.

[6] M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 68.

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Reading Chaucer in the Tower

Last week, I surveyed Chaucer’s representations of prison spaces throughout his corpus. Today, I consider one reader of Chaucer, for whom those images of imprisonment would have particularly resonated.

In January of 1549, John Harington of Stepney and Kelston was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.[1] Harington remained in the Tower with his master, Thomas Seymour (the brother of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane) for more than a year.[2] What was a literary-minded gentleman/prisoner to do with all of that time? Harington may have read Chaucer. 

Harington was in the Tower following suspicion about the nature of Seymour’s relationship with the very young Princess Elizabeth. He was also questioned regarding his own role in setting up a marriage between Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days queen, and the young King Edward VI.[3] 

While in the Tower, Harington would have had access to books and illustrious, scholarly-minded company. The imprisoned Harington used this time to learn French, and he wrote a translation of Cicero’s De Amicitia.[4]  As he told Lady Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, in the dedication to his translation:

Wherby I tried prisonment of the body, to be the libertee of spirite … and in the ende quietnes of mind, the occasion of study. [5]

Though the 1550 date on the front of Harington’s copy of Chaucer is not definitive evidence that he held the book while he was in the Tower, the long and idle days of imprisonment would haven given Harington the time he needed to thoroughly annotate his copy of William Thynne’s 1542 edition of Chaucer’s complete works. Harington’s copy is now housed at the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.[6]  

John Harington’s dated signature on the opening plate of William Thynne’s 1542 edition of Chaucer’s complete works. The inscription reads “non Amo’ chi non Ama.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542.

Nearly every page of the 1542 book shows evidence of Harington’s attentive reading. This post, of course, cannot cover everything involved in Harington’s copious marginal writing, but if readers are interested, they can consult my more detailed article — “Reading Chaucer in the Tower: The Person Behind the Pen in an Early-Modern Copy of Chaucer’s Works” — forthcoming in The Journal of the Early Book Society, volume 18.

One of Harington’s key concerns throughout was correcting ‘errors’ where he saw them in his book. He ‘corrects,’ or modernizes, spelling and adds commas or other marks of punctuation where he finds them appropriate.

Updating spelling in “The Knight’s Tale.” Harrington deletes “layde” and supplies “laid.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. xi.r

Though these meticulous changes may make Harington seem a bit finicky, they reveal how closely he paid attention to every word on the page. He desired to improve his book, certainly an indication that he valued Chaucer.

At times, even Harington’s annotations received meticulous corrections. Here, Harington marginally notes “a gate of ^whit^ marble in a description of the arena in “The Knight’s Tale.” University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. vi.r

However, his annotations are much more extensive than simple summary notes and spelling changes. Of particular interest to Harington was Chaucer’s Boece, a translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. A full-page table of contents and summary precedes Boece on a blank verso page, and Harington marginally marks the translation throughout.

The table of contents and summary for Chaucer’s Boece. University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. ccxxxi.v

That Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy while in prison might have resonated with the imprisoned Harington.[7]   The imprisoned gentleman may have found Boethius’s discussions of free will, predestination, and changeable fortunes particularly relevant as he lamented the downturn of his own fortunes in court. Certainly this was the case for the imprisoned King James I of Scotland when he wrote his prison poem The Kingis Quair, which drew on Boethius.[8]

Harington draws a manicule next to a passage concerning freewill in Chaucer’s Boece. University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library, XLarge PR 1850 1542, f. cclxi.v

Overall, Harington, who also occasionally wrote his own poetry, was an attentive reader, finding solace in careful study. He was meticulous, academic, and thorough in his annotations, but, it would seem, he was also attentive to the book’s correspondences with his own life and experience.

Mimi Ensley
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

Footnotes

1. Ruth Willard Hughey, John Harington of Stepney: Tudor gentleman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1971), 28.
2. Ibid., 29-30.
3. Ibid., 22-4. See also Harington’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12325
4. Ibid., 31-2.
5. John Harington, “The booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero,” in Hughey, John Harington, 137.
6. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes, Newlye Printed: Wyth Dyuers Workes Whych Were Neuer in Print Before, ed. William Thynne (London, 1542).
7. For a similar suggestion, see the brief description of Notre Dame’s 1542 Thynne edition here: http://rarebooks.library.nd.edu/exhibits/fructus/middle_english/1542chaucer.html
8. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/mooney-and-arn-kingis-quair-and-other-prison-poems-kingis-quair-introduction