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MAINTAINING INJUSTICE: LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE LEGAL SYSTEM C1400 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Kathleen Erin Kennedy, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Professor Richard Firth Green, Advisor Approved by Professor Lisa Kiser Professor Ethan Knapp ________________________ Professor Karen Winstead Department of English Copyright by Kathleen E. Kennedy 2004 ABSTRACT Medieval English authors often regard aspects of the legal system to be in conflict with an endemic cultural practice, maintenance. Simply put, maintenance was the payment of a form of salary to a high-level servant by a lord. The salary this servant (or affine) might receive could consist of cash-payments, gifts, or access to lucrative official positions, including the proxy enjoyment of some portion of the lord’s judicial rights. The more lavish the assistance, the more the lord honored the retainer. Obviously, the mutual ties of aid and loyalty between a lord and an affine threatened impartial justice at every level, and medieval authors strove both to bring its abuses to light, and to offer alternatives. Each of my chapters sheds light on how late fourteenth-century authors articulated the relationship between different legal institutions and maintenance. I begin by showing how the events in one of the more obscure Canterbury Tales, the Tale of Melibee, resemble a popular out-of-court settlement practice called accord. Chaucer blamed a contemporary practice called maintenance, the exchange of money and influence between a lord and a high-level servant, kinsman, or friend, for corrupting accords. In Piers Plowman, William Langland lamented the damage that maintenance could do to legal process, even in high courts such as the Council and Court of Chancery, a concern that I also examine. John Gower spends a considerable amount of time writing ii about the legal profession, especially lawyers and other legal officials. I claim that Gower argues that if the king allowed maintenance and other personal considerations to influence his judgement, then legal officials would do the same; moreover, legal officials tarnish the king’s reputation since they receive their legal powers by delegation from the king. Finally, I explore Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes as presenting a solution to the problem of legal personnel’s attraction to maintenance. I argue that while Hoccleve’s explicit goal for the work is to have his annuity paid regularly for his work in the Office of the Privy Seal, he bases his right to advise the prince on his experience as a bureaucrat in a royal legal office. In sum, late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century authors demonstrated detailed knowledge of the law and used literature as a forum in which to discuss inadequacies of the system. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Richard Firth Green, and the rest of my committee for the depth of their engagement in my project; they were always ready to give both critique and encouragement. I thank the readers at Chaucer Review for their comments that resulted in a portion of Chapter 2 being published as a short forthcoming article, “Maintaining Love Through Accord in the Tale of Melibee,” in that journal. Andrew Galloway, editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies, deserves special thanks for his thoughtful recommendations while I was editing a portion of Chapter 3 that will appear in YLS as “Retaining a Court of Chancery in Piers Plowman.” iv VITA September 19, 1975............................... Born - Elgin, IL 1997 ...................................................... B.A. History - University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign 1999 ...................................................... M. A. History - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 1999 - 2004 ........................................... Graduate Teaching Associate and Research Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. Kathleen E. Kennedy, "Le Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth." Medieval Literature for Children. Ed. Daniel Kline. New York: Routledge, 2003. 131-142. 2. Kathleen E. Kennedy and Geoffrey Smith. The Stanley J. Kahrl Renaissance and Restoration Drama Collection. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Libraries, 2002. 3. Kathleen E. Kennedy, "A, B, C is for Chantry? Fifteenth-Century Provincial Merchant Education." Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999): 125-139. 4. Kathleen E. Kennedy. "Changes in Society and Language Acquisition: The French Language in England 1215-1480." English Language Notes 35 (1998): 1-19. v FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ........................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ iv Vita .............................................................................................................................. v Chapters: 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 2. Maintaining Love Through Accord in the Tale of Melibee ........................................ 23 2.1. Maintaining a Grudge: Elizabeth Clere v. William Stewardson ................... 29 2.2. Introduction to the Melibee ....................................................................... 35 2.3. Offense, Counsel-Taking, & Accord .......................................................... 40 3. Maintenance & the Discretionary Courts in Piers Plowman ...................................... 55 3.1. Of Ratons & Renkes .................................................................................. 57 3.2. Retaining a Court of Chancery in Piers Plowman ....................................... 73 4. Peddling the Law in Gower’s Speculum causidicorum ............................................. 97 4.1. A Place for Lawyers .................................................................................. 98 4.2. The Commercialization of the Law ........................................................... 104 4.3. “The sword is seen to make known the badge of justice” (Vox 697) ......... 125 vii 5. Teaching Discretionary Spending in the Regiment of Princes .................................. 141 5.1. A Penney for your Thoght: the Dialogue with the Old Man ...................... 145 5.2. Wisdom from the Pen of a Pawn: De ludo scaccorum .............................. 155 5.3. Hoccleve Does His Job ............................................................................ 169 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 187 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION MAINTENANCE, A DECIDING FACTOR IN THE LAW? When asked about the birth of modern legal culture, legal historians point to the sixteenth century; however, medievalists are quick assert that most of the elements of this culture developed in the fifteenth century. Moreover, a closer look at the historical record reveals that many of these purportedly fifteenth-century institutions actually had their genesis in the last decades of the fourteenth century, but these origins are obscured by irregular documentation. The new institutions that developed between the last quarter of the fourteenth and first quarter of the fifteenth century may not have utilized documentary culture as systematically as they would later in the fifteenth century, but they were by no means ignored by contemporaries. Ricardians and early Lancastrians recorded many observations about legal development in a venue modern legal historians often overlook: literature. Needless to say, literary critics have been aware of the historical importance of literary works for some time, but legal history and literary studies have been little synthesized until recently, due in large part to the patterns they have followed in their 1 developments as specializations. Scholars began developing modern editions of literary texts and employing a range of critical practices to analyze medieval works in the mid- nineteenth century, with a relatively broad audience in mind for their work. The subscription insert in the first volume of the Early English Text Society (1864) makes clear both the scholarly rigor the founders of the society intended, as well as the audience they hoped to reach, voicing their concern that “more than half our early printed literature...is still inaccessible to the student of modest means.” For this audience, composed of both experts and novices inside and outside the academy, the Society endeavored to provide modern editions of works limited to manuscript or rare early printed editions. From the first to the current volume, each E.E.T.S. text included a critical introduction, often a glossary, and other apparati. Frederick James Furnivall, Walter W. Skeat, and others edited texts for E.E.T.S that they understood to be located inside a cultural and historical context that was only just beginning to be revealed in detail by the antiquarians working in late nineteenth century history departments.1 The modern practice of legal history, and its tendency to shroud itself away from nonspecialist eyes, dates back to William Stubbs. In 1873, when writing his preface to The Constitutional History of England, he might assert that “without some knowledge of 1 Furnivall’s and Skeat’s works